A Conversation With G. Elliott Morris

Polling and the current moment

Have you heard of the “pundit’s fallacy”? It’s the all-too-common belief by, well, pundits that whatever is their pet issue is also the issue that will move the electorate. How do you avoid falling into that fallacy? Humility helps, but that’s in short supply. But you can also turn to data rather than relying solely on intuition.

G. Elliott Morris, who ran 538 until ABC killed it (boo) but now has an excellent Substack, Strength in Numbers (yay) has been a leader in data journalism. I talked with him about how to use public opinion data, Trump’s first 80 days, and more.

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with G. Elliott Morris

(recorded 4/7/25)

Paul Krugman
So hi, everyone. Paul Krugman here talking to G. Elliot Morris, who ran 538 for quite a while as a polling expert and public opinion researcher. He’s now doing a Substack, which is really interesting, and I wanted to try and talk to somebody who was neither a politician or an economist for once and Elliot's been really interesting. And so I have some things I want to talk about. We'll see where the conversation goes.

So, but before we get into stuff, many people I know don't really understand what you do, what 538 did. They think of you as a pollster, which is not true. Why don't you talk about what it is that you think you're doing?

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, so FiveThirtyEight was not a polling organization. I used to take part in some polling back when I was at The Economist where I was before 538 and I was briefly an intern at the Pew Research Center. So I do have experience with polling and I am a stalwart defender of polling and the role that information on public opinion plays in democracy and that is a through line in my Substack and in my published writing.

But the stuff people will know me for, and what they know 538 for, is forecasting and analysis by way of forecasting and data-driven prediction modeling analysis of politics. And I think there the idea is that data can unlock, well, what Nate Silver would call “signal in the noise.” What you might also term, in a more journalistic way, some source of objectivity, or at least something that can bring you even a little bit closer to objectivity. And I think has really hooked people on data journalism as we call it, and as Nate Silver especially termed it and popularized it. So yeah. That's the key distinction. But, I mean, I do forecasting but I wouldn't necessarily think of myself as a forecaster. I'm definitely not doing it for the sake of prediction but for the sake of storytelling; figuring out what makes people work and, in doing so, try to get a better signal for readers of journalism than in traditional political journalism.

Paul Krugman

Okay, and so most of what you do involves trying to basically extract a signal from the noise of various polls, trying to somehow do a kind of averaging, weighting.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah. Most of my work involves getting a bunch of data, as much as I can, to answer one narrow question. Say, how much do people care about this thing? And in the very popular cases, that's stuff like how much do people, or what do people think about the president? And in that case, we have a lot of data, so we can be really smart about trying to discern between the good data, the bad data. The data that might be more reputable. That's what I mean by good and bad, not normatively.

Paul Krugman

Okay, before we get to the live political issues, the story of how you got into this I think is a little bit interesting, right? It's not a sort of straight line, professionally speaking. You certainly didn't get a PhD in this and march into it. So you want to talk just a little bit about how you ended up in this business?

G. Elliott Morris

Well, you said it's interesting, not me, just for the record. I have a hard time talking about myself. But, in some ways I ended up doing this in lieu of a PhD because I didn't want to take the amount of time to sit in a basement for however long. I mean, actually I do that now. I'm literally podcasting in a basement right now. But I didn't want to roll the dice on tenure track jobs, especially as those jobs were drying up.

And I'd be a political methodologist if I had a PhD, and those jobs are certainly increasingly hard to get. The market’s really saturated. So I got a job writing for The Economist doing data journalism for them while I was still in college. Because of Brexit, I was not able to move to Britain to do that job. So I've been doing it in America, which makes me more America-oriented than many of my former colleagues there.

And I've just always really been interested in, like, what makes people tick, the math of politics especially. I think there's a lot of commentary in politics that sort of misses why people might have the attitudes that they have, whether or not they come from elites or from their social networks and how dearly held they are. There's lots of attacking the other side as being stupid or what have you, but I just don't think that that's particularly productive most of the time. (Sometimes it is. I'm not trying to be, you know, a virtue signaler or lecturer here.) At The Economist, there was a lot of other data journalism to do, as well, but the polling related stuff and forecasting has gotten the most attention. And FiveThirtyEight sort of got reshaped last year, that was a place for me to go and continue that work. It's a really brutal loss of that now. We've all been fired.

Paul Krugman

Yes, ABC just killed it, right?

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah.

Paul Krugman

Yeah, well, not all destructive firings are caused by DOGE. Some of them are corporate media organizations.

G. Elliott Morris

Or caused by internal efficiency, instead of external government efficiency. Yeah, and look. It's just a really tough market out there for the group of people who say, “We want to sit down with problems for a while and think through them and write about that for a pretty niche audience.” And that's just not a great fit in a major multinational media corporation like Disney, but in a quicker paced broadcast, you know, less nuanced operation like every broadcast outlet inherently is. So there's some tension there. I'm hoping that we can recreate FiveThirtyEight in the aggregate, to use the Moneyball quote.

Paul Krugman

So, we’re obviously on a wild ride now because Donald Trump won the 2024 election. And my inbox is full of confident explanations of what happened and what Democrats must do and so on. So why don't you talk about what you think happened? Why don't you just go freeform and I'll pose maybe some particular hypotheses.

G. Elliott Morris

Okay. Look, what political scientists call ‘fundamental models of the election’ that predicted the result of the election, the margin between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump using just presidential approval rating predicted Trump would win somewhat more handily than he did. If you then account for a pretty good, you know, growing economy across multiple indicators, like we did at 538, then you would have expected the Democrats to do just a hair better, but still really close based on those really unpopular approval ratings for Joe Biden at the time.

So, I think the overall explanation should be pretty easy, pretty apparent, and that is the Democratic Party [represented by] President Joe Biden had bad ratings. And although the economy was growing, there was a buildup of dissatisfaction, mainly from rising prices, and inflation is not very well taken into account by these historical fundamentals models: that’s 20 observations, one election every four years, right? And that dissatisfaction just set Trump up for success. And then I think there's the other stuff. There's young men moving to the right because of cultural backlash to the left, to DEI, to whatever the stuff is that gets captured in the right wing podcast space.

Paul Krugman

Right.

G. Elliott Morris

And there's a broader sense of Republicans doing better on the market. That was more salient because of the previous four years maybe. Maybe not so true anymore. We'll see how that plays out in 2026 and we'll get there.

Paul Krugman

So you're treating Biden's approval or lack thereof as a fundamental, but that came from something. Why was Biden's approval so low?

G. Elliott Morris

I mean, the way we think about this when we're putting together the models is: there are some economic fundamentals that'll be really familiar to the economists. And then there's maybe some other stuff that is not entirely downstream of the objective economic indicators, or the way that we have massaged and formulated them to be predictive of elections in the past that is captured in political fundamentals.

So, you could use presidential approval. You could use favorability between the candidates. They're all capturing something that is in theory, like, not entirely correlated, slightly orthogonal to the economic variables. Are endogenous, as the social scientists say. These are correlated; they're picking up stuff from the same source. I mean, the inflation explanation for Joe Biden's low approval ratings makes a lot of sense.

There's also, you know, politically, he was very old and unpopular from a sense of an inability to handle the country. And, if you think earlier in his presidency—and this was, like, five decades ago in politics—but in 2021, there was some enduring backlash from the withdrawal from Afghanistan that people liked to cite as an incompetency or as illustrating an incompetency on foreign affairs issues. We know from academic literature, voters tend to really over index on foreign affairs when they're thinking about how successful the president is.

Paul Krugman

I didn't know that actually. So, you think that Afghanistan was a big thing.

G. Elliott Morris

It was. I mean, it definitely sunk his approval rating. It's not the only cause. Inflation really hit its peak around the same time, so it's hard to disentangle these. But, we did this at The Economist. If you predict presidential approval ratings as a function of inflation and a bunch of other economic issues, Biden was still around four or five points less popular than he should have been after the Afghanistan withdrawal. And it was very well predicted earlier on. So it's just one case. These models aren't perfect, but I do think it mattered. I think it gave people ammo to attack him and that's basically the one thing you want to avoid in politics is giving excess ammo.

Paul Krugman

I mean, my former employer went all in with an editorial saying, basically, that DEI and wokeness and all that has poisoned the Democratic brand. Did you see that? Do you see that in the data?

G. Elliott Morris

Well, let's talk about the brand for a second. So, YouGov, earlier this year, they asked Americans, “Do you think X is more favorable or unfavorable?” And X would be Democratic Party, Republican Party, and lots of public officials. On average, by about 15 points, Americans said they viewed the Republican Party as more unfavorable than favorable. There's a 15 point net unfavorability there. For Democrats, it's minus 30.

So it's definitely worse. And that is about as historically bad as it's ever been for the Democratic Party. So something is going on. But I do not think it's entirely attributed to wokeness, let's say, or to moving left on cultural issues. That's part of the problem. But if you were to predict ruling party favorability rating around the world in 2024, you would have ended up somewhere pretty similar, around a minus 30 for the ruling party.

Paul Krugman

So what you're saying is that basically everybody, all governing parties were very unpopular in 2024.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, and so maybe my theory for your former employer being willing to go so big on that would be that it's really easy to take big patterns in the world and to distill them into things that are maybe ideologically convenient or, like, really true to you on the ground, true to the journalists, true to the people they're interviewing on the ground, but that may be missing the bigger picture. So I would say it's probably part of it. But the real test of this will be to see where the Democratic party favorability rating goes now that they're in the opposition in America, to use the parliamentary language. And yeah, I mean, they are strategically moderating, they would say on some issues.

I guess the other way to say that is, they've completely dropped the ball on any backlash to immigration politics, which seemed to be way beyond the pale in terms of what the American people are demanding, at least in the particulars. I mean, support for deporting lawful legal residents who have not been convicted of crimes is about 30 percent, 70 percent opposed. And that's what the administration is doing. Well, at least in part what they're doing. So we'll see where Americans think, on balance, which party is more extreme than the other one. It's constantly evolving. But, you know, on the narrow question, I do think people were maybe set up to believe the Democratic Party was only unpopular because of these ideological issues.

But last year was structural.

Paul Krugman

So, I’ll say this more strongly than I think you're willing to, but basically, I think it's John Burns-Murdoch who said 2024 was a bloodbath for incumbents everywhere. Probably because price is still the legacy of inflation, which was global. And essentially, some journalists and some news organizations ignored the fact that it happened everywhere. They just said, “This is the penalty for being excessively woke.” Is that kind of what you say?

G. Elliott Morris (15:00)

Yeah, I'm kind of saying that. I can't tell you like, it's 50% that they're too woke, 50% that they're incumbent. I imagine it's probably more like 70% that they're an incumbent party in a period of high inflation. You know, parties are punished by moving too far away from public opinion. Democrats definitely are to the left of public opinion on some of those key identity issues. The question is whether or not going forward they will continue to be too far to the left on the issues that people care a lot about and are voting on. So, maybe to just build on this a little bit, Democrats should probably avoid over-indexing on this going forward, I would say. And it seems like there's a lot of over-indexing in my inbox, I think probably in yours too.

Paul Krugman

Yeah, mostly it's people saying that it’s Wokness.

G. Elliott Morris

Well, I'll just say it’s to a very, very narrow point. Part of the reason there is this sort of data science revolution in journalism, what’s called data-driven journalism, was because we were trying to convince people that you can approximate truth, which is a little bit more nuanced than the mainstream press might have you believe with their editorials that have one or two pieces of data in them that are very convenient for their ideological viewpoints. That has not been entirely successful, but at least that's what I think the value is. It's just acknowledging that, you know, politics is very over-determined. There's lots of causes for all the things we're observing in the world. And you should probably be suspicious of people who are just narrowing it down to one or two small things.

Paul Krugman

Yeah, I don't know who coined it, but “pundit fallacy” says that the thing that will win elections for you is to do what I always wanted you to do anyway. Yeah, I wasn't looking at that. But let me just say about that Democratic disapproval. You know, I spent ages on Obamacare and other stuff. And there was a period there when Obamacare had relatively low approval, but a significant number of the people who disapproved of it was because it didn't go far enough. They were actually saying, “I'm against Obamacare because it's not single payer” or something. Do you think there's some of that? How much of the Democratic bad approval rating is because people think they're not standing up to Trump enough?

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, it's got to be some of it. I mean, there's a tendency with the disapproval numbers to think of the entire country as reflecting their average opinion. But it's worth noting that the top line number is a product of the individual numbers among groups. And so, yeah, you can have a very low rating because Democrats, let's say, will be really unhappy and Republicans will just be like your average unhappiness with the out party. We saw this during Trump's first term to an extent during the 2017 ACA attempted rollback. Lots of Republicans said they were unhappy because they were trying to figure out some sort of replacement or they just went with the repeal of the individual mandate instead of scrapping the whole system and all the funding for it.

That’s another hard thing to completely break down, but it's a good caveat to the number. I think good stewards of the polling data should be raising these caveats. It's key to understanding the top line.

Paul Krugman

Ok. So then the 2024 election happens. Trump comes in, claiming a mandate and a lot of institutional players fall in behind and then he takes office. But it hasn’t been your typical first 80 days. So, just the sort of approval rating picture, and particularly on economics, has not been what you might expect. Do you want to talk about that? I mean, you've been writing about that, among other things.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, let me just think. There are two big data points people should maybe take away from this. I guess one would be like the stock market. Usually, if you take the average stock market increase or decrease from the start of a president's term to 76 or 80 days in, the average return for the S&P over the first 80 days of the presidency is 4%. Today, I mean, it’s Monday morning [April 7], we're down 15, right? And volatility usually increases. The average change in the VIX [volatility index] is basically the same. We're up 50.

Paul Krugman

For people who don't know, VIX is a measure based on options to buy or sell. It's not what people expect the market to be. It's how volatile they expect it to be, how uncertain they are. And so the VIX gives you a measure of how much people think that, you know, “God knows what stock prices will be in the near future,” and the VIX has just exploded.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah. Am I right in thinking we're at 2008 levels now?

Paul Krugman

I think so. I don't know where things are now because I can't keep my eye on the market while doing this, but we just had a wild ride in the couple of hours before recording this, in which a false report about tariffs caused the doubt to go from minus four percent to plus one percent and then the White House said it's not true and then, you know, it's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.

G. Elliott Morris

Well, yeah, and that's disturbing on a lot of accounts, that like $10 trillion can be wiped out by a fake tweet. That's just crazy. But the thing people know is that the signal from the market about this presidency is much worse than the signal about the market during the average presidency. That’s as a direct result of policies that Donald Trump has enacted and claimed credit for on Truth Social. He's posting memes about how he’s made the stock market crash and ‘look what I did.’

So, the other atypical thing is his approval rating. The average approval rating for a president going back to 1935, 80 days into their term, is like plus 30 points more popular. 30 points more people approve than disapprove. Trump today is at minus four and heading down. The only president that has ever been close to Trump right now is Trump during his first term, if you're counting them as separate terms, where he was at minus 10 by this point in his first term as president in 2017. And just to give you some context, Joe Biden was at plus 15 at this point. 15 points more people approved of him than disapproved of him, which is kind of weird to wrap your head around given where he was when he ended. Trump, the president right now, is starting out less popular than most presidents with a more uncertain market. And that’s sort of direct consequences on the economy from his actions, at least so far.

Paul Krugman

Trump is different, obviously, but also politics is different. I have a sense that partisanship was less locked in 15, 20 years back in the past. I mean, there are just a lot of people out there who will never approve of a Democrat and probably now also a lot of people who will never approve of a Republican. It seems to me that nobody in American politics has a plus 30 approval rating.

G. Elliott Morris

Right, but they can get to minus 30. So yes, polarization increases the floor for a president's approval rating by increasing the supply of partisans who will never oppose their party leader. But it also decreases the ceiling because it increases the out party that will never approve of the current president. So where we might expect approval ratings to change is between 30 percent and 60 percent on the approved category. Maybe we're thinking that's only 40 to 55 percent now. The historical comparisons are fraught for some reasons, but they do serve, you know, a baseline for comparison, historically.

Paul Krugman

Okay, so let’s talk about the market here. It's a funny thing because roughly half of Americans have basically no exposure to the market. And the people who are in it, it's pretty small. Stock ownership is very concentrated and yet the stock market does seem to have a pretty big impact on people's perceptions. You want to talk about that? I have a story I would tell, but I'd like to hear yours first.

G. Elliott Morris

So, I'll pick up a number. You say about 50% of Americans are exposed to stocks. About 30% of Americans consume news daily. So that includes Fox News, MSNBC, the New York Times, just all news, non-social media news.

Paul Krugman

Okay, that's where I want to go now. So, it's only about 30% of the population actually sees any news?

G. Elliott Morris

News from a news outlet on a daily basis. Monthly news share is much higher, it's close to 60 or 70%, according to Pew. But 30% of people are consuming news directly from news outlets daily. It's probably close to 90 % if you count social media. But that sort of underscores the point, which is, if the stock market falls, even if you're not directly exposed to it, you can be exposed to negative news about the stock market. And that’s because of the way that modern, especially network and cable news is set up to really draw you in, to have some sort of number that they can cite and repeat, to have some sort of source of objectivity and the need for it to be fresh.

All those three things make people latch on to stock market numbers. It's also really easy to draw a chart that looks like this inverse hockey stick and it's scary. And so, people watch the news. So, I think, maybe to pick up where you're going, the exposure that people have to news about the stock market is much higher than their direct exposure to the stock market. And it's very easy to tell stories about the president's effect on the stock market, which is usually, you know, zero, but this time probably 100% attributable to the president's actions.

Paul Krugman

So, the stock market becomes kind of like the drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because that's where the light is. It's how people form their view about what's happening to the economy.

Views about the economy were really critical and a lot of people really spent a lot of time trying to figure out why people's views on the economy were so negative. Because, by the sort of standard equation of Inflation + Unemployment or whatever more complex models, people should have been pretty positive on the economy in 2024 and they were not. Do you have a take on that?

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, so there's a modeling weakness and a voter psychological problem here. From the modeling front, you can't predict contemporaneous economic sentiment, for example, based on historical inflation data, historical CPI annual change, because usually it's not 10%. So we are at the point where we are far beyond the domain of normal data, far beyond the limits of the normal data. So it's just hard to draw conclusions from that model.

Paul Krugman

And what you're saying is that the level of inflation that we had was so far outside anything we've seen in a long time…

G. Elliott Morris

…that a model of the training data wouldn't have captured what the reaction should have been on economic sentiment, for example, if you're using that as your dependent variable. So that's a tough modeling problem because there's no obvious alternative.

Paul Krugman

Okay, so we know what it is over the historical range, but since the early 1980s, we haven’t been here. So you're sort of projecting a line far out from the range of observations.

G. Elliott Morris

If there's some relationship, we don't know what it is because we just don't have the training data. And then there's also polarization. If you use 74 to 76 as your benchmark for how people should have reacted, well, polarization is a lot different now, so you would have expected people to have different opinions about the economy because they filter that through their partisan lenses nowadays, more than they did before. And then, secondly, it does seem, however, that economic sentiment was much lower than than you would have expected based on stuff like

sentiment of the news, which the San Francisco Fed tracks. It wasn't as negative as it had been previously, although sentiment was much more negative. People are reacting more negatively than we would have expected.

Paul Krugman (30:00)

Okay, so one of the popular explanations, and I'm probably guilty of it myself for the low sentiment, was that the news reporting was very negative and that was a story in 2022, 2023. But you're saying by 2024, the news was not as negative on the economy and yet people's perceptions remained pretty bad.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, so not expectations and inflation, but current sentiment recorded by University of Michigan and the news where current sentiment lags the news. That could be one possibility. Or social media was a lot more negative than the news and so people were more negative because of some added layer of exposure that the San Francisco Fed or other indicators aren't capturing.

And I think you've done a lot of work here also. Potentially this isn't about annual change at all, but about cumulative change over three or four years in CPI, about the recollection of prices four or five years ago, not just one year ago. In which case, in 2024, the cumulative change in prices over the last four years is close to, like, two and a half standard deviations below the historical average, in which case you would have expected worse sentiment than what we saw. So, there's a lot of different ways to slice the data. I don't think I have a concrete answer for what sentiment should have been, but I think it should have definitely been higher than the historical models, which indicates the historical models are broken. It's probably higher than the news, probably indicating the news or social media was off.

And it makes sense that people would have gone to the grocery store and remembered that milk was $2.95 instead of $4.95 three years ago. That seems sensible.

Paul Krugman

Yeah, if you're pulling numbers out of FRED, it wants to give you the inflation over the past year, but there's no reason to think that that's what sticks in people's minds and maybe it's just longer than that.

G. Elliott Morris

And then if you look at that cumulative rate of inflation over the last presidential term, Biden's presidency is basically the worst in modern history. So it's just like another case where we really don't know what sentiment should have been or how people should have reacted because we have very little historical comparisons. I mean, there's an argument, and I think I believe this, that the cumulative rate of inflation over his presidency shocked some people out of the suspected partisan bubbles we would have expected them to be in. It softened the polarization in the electorate and allowed them to act more rationally, at least based on the information that they actually had. That might not be considered economically rational, depending on the objective measures you're looking at. That's not what I meant, it may be more reactive.

Paul Krugman

No, I mean, I was expecting a sharp positive swing in consumer sentiment with Trump's victory, partly because I thought the news coverage would be different and I also just thought everybody had sort of accepted that Republicans were more partisan than Democrats. But basically, if that happened, it happened very briefly, and we're now back to people being really astonishingly negative about the economy. Are we just miserable people these days? Is there a fundamental shift in sentiment?

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, maybe we can come back on the podcast and talk about our collective loneliness or what have you, whatever people are talking about recently.

But so, I'm going to react to one thing. Republicans are more partisan on their economic sentiment than Democrats. They react more in the positive direction when Republicans come into power, at least since 2015, and more in the negative direction when Democrats come into the presidency than Democrats do in the opposite direction. So that is true.

If you look at the raw data from University of Michigan, or at least the subgroup data, you'll see that Republicans jump a lot more than Democrats go down. And so I suspect, I don't have the chart in front of me, I suspect that the independents are driving a lot of this. And that even if there is this sort of crisscrossing in sentiment, there's an overall decline because of higher expectations for inflation or uncertainty or maybe people are starting to realize the good times they had under Biden in the last year of his presidency were not going to last forever. Maybe. I'm not quite sure why they're changing their minds, but you definitely see that dip for independence.

Paul Krugman

Okay, let’s talk about protests. People have been saying, “where are the anti-Trump protests?” And last weekend we actually got something like five million people. I don't know how solid these numbers are but…

G. Elliott Morris (35:00)

That's the CNN number, right? Yeah, that's a big one. I think that's the number I saw on CNN as well. Yeah, it's a big one.

Paul Krugman

That's right. People are saying, “why isn't the news paying more attention?” Do you think that this is being underplayed by mainstream media? We don't really know, but is this the start of a really big resistance movement? What's your take on what's going on? Because you've written a little bit about it.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, so I looked at the Google search data and the traffic data for the protests on Saturday.

And I guess one reaction to what you're asking me is that they definitely won't get the attention that they deserve because of the market movements today. That'll probably change just off the news cycle. There's like a bunch of news cycle troubles with focusing on one story. So I would say it's not going to get the coverage it deserves. But the coverage I saw was maybe actually a bit too strong in terms of this being a signal about what's going to happen in the midterms.

And that’s just because, you know, it's like one protest. The way that I would frame it, it's one protest that's not going to change policy or whatever immediately. The way that I would frame it is that this is both the first massive—in terms of masses turning out for it—protest during Trump's second administration.

It will likely catalyze donations in a sense of resistance or blue wave—you know, those words got thrown around a lot in 2018—and it will probably catalyze some of that, and give them Dems the momentum going into the Virginia and New Jersey governor elections. (I refuse to say the word “gubernatorial,” by the way. It's just a terrible word, so, “governor elections” and)...

Paul Krugman

Yeah.

G. Elliott Morris

And they're also huge digitally. They've had a big impact digitally, regardless of what their foot traffic numbers were in comparison, to the point where search interest and just the phrase “Trump protest” was as high yesterday as it was during the Women's March protests at the start of Trump's last presidency. So I definitely think there's something here. You should not ignore this. There's going to be a tendency for pundits to say, “It's just a protest.” Like, that's not a comprehensive indicator or objective or what have you. But, actually, I think it's underscoring what we've been seeing in the data rather than countering it, which is that people are mad about potential changes to their entitlements, especially health care, Medicaid, Medicare, social security. And they think the guy in charge is unpopular and the guy that sits next to him every single day is an oligarch who is potentially taking their money. That comes out in the data and now we've seen it in person. So at some point, that becomes more objective than subjective. And we're probably getting there.

Paul Krugman

And if you had to make a guess now, you would guess that the midterms will be a 2018 style Democratic blowout, right?

G. Elliott Morris

I think people are underestimating the swing against Republicans. I think it could be even bigger than in 2018. Though maybe not. Maybe the Democratic brand doesn't recover or what have you, but the reason I think it's very plausible is because the electorate is even more polarized by education now. The people who are turning out for these special elections, for the election we had in Wisconsin last week, are even more educated than they were in 2018.

Paul Krugman

Right.

G. Elliott Morris

And educated people are even more Democratic than they were in 2018. So just by the laws of physics, let's say, about who's turning out in these contests when they're lower turnout, you would expect Democrats to do better, or to do even better. You slap on top of that public backlash, legitimized polling from physical signs in the real world, or what have you in these protests, then you can very convincingly have a 11, 12, 13 point swing against the Republicans next year. That wouldn't surprise me at all. I mean, on average, I would say it'd be like 8 or 9, and in 2018, it was a 10 point swing towards the Democrats. But I wouldn't be shocked at 15.

Paul Krugman

Wow. Okay, we'll find out how this all plays out.

Now let me go check the market and see what's happened while we were talking.

G. Elliott Morris

Yeah, I gotta go check my 401k.

Paul Krugman

Okay, thanks so much for talking with me.

G. Elliott Morris

Alright, thanks Paul. Appreciate it.