Talking (Again) With G. Elliott Morris

What polls are and aren't telling us right now

I’ve become an avid consumer of G. Elliott Morris’s Strength in Numbers. Morris is doing data journalism really well, not just putting the numbers together but giving them context. So I checked in with him on the eve of a likely shutdown. Transcript follows:

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with G. Elliott Morris

(recorded 9/26/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone, Paul Krugman again, talking for the second time with G. Elliott Morris whose Strength in Numbers Substack has become my go-to pretty much every time there’s a new post, trying to keep track of public opinion. Stuff keeps happening and so we’ll talk about a bunch of issues. This is being recorded on Friday morning, so we’ll see what happens between now and when this thing goes up tomorrow morning. So wow. Hi Elliott. Welcome to the room again.

G. Elliott Morris: Hi Paul. Nice to hear all those nice things you say about me. Hopefully I can live up to them.

Krugman: Yeah, so, I just read your post about a potential shutdown. So why don’t we talk about that? Because from the way it looks, I can’t see a way that we avoid a government shutdown next week. It’s just a question of how the politics will play out. Why don’t you summarize what you found and then I have a couple of questions.

Morris: Yeah. Probabilistically, I also don’t think that they will avoid the shutdown. The markets have this at about an 85% chance, as of this morning. So it seems like pretty safe ground to talk about this as if a shutdown is going to happen by this time next Wednesday. Look, Democrats are pretty convinced that they have the upper hand here. That’s the information they’re playing off of, and this is what the post says.

The One Big Beautiful Bill’s healthcare provisions—which strip a lot of direct Medicaid funding and ACA Obamacare subsidies—are very unpopular provisions, underwater by 20-30 points, depending on how you poll it. So that’s their starting position. And then the direct polling on this says if they force a government shutdown on the basis of trying to force Republicans to restore some of that funding, then they have a slightly upper hand.

In our polling, which Strength in Numbers does with Verasight, the online pollster, about a third of the country says that they would blame Republicans for a shutdown in the case that Democrats forced their hand by withholding support until there is more healthcare funding. 24% in that scenario say they would blame Democrats for that shutdown, and the remainder say that they would blame both parties equally. So look, no one necessarily wants a shutdown. In the case that it’s going to happen, Democrats think that they’ll have the upper hand by withholding that support for healthcare funding. In particular, the polls seem to suggest that that’s true.

Krugman: So, a couple questions. First, how much do you think people would even be aware of what the basis of the shutdown is? I always wonder because the extent to which most normal people don’t actually follow politics is always stunning. Do you think that people would, in fact, get that message?

Morris: Yeah, at least in our survey, we give them the information. So luckily, the survey is probably valid. But in terms of the actual reaction in the country, most people do not follow the news. About 50% of the country gets news on a weekly basis. It’s less than that on a daily basis. And of course, it depends on where you get your news. A lot of people get their news from cable TV and some of these channels are perhaps not giving them a full picture of what the negotiations are. So I think it’s reasonable to think that the reaction might be a little bit different than the polls are indicating. But look, given how well known the OBBB healthcare provisions are, and how unpopular they are, it seems reasonable to me to expect that a government shutdown would provide some basis for Democrats to succeed.

Krugman: I’m going to derail myself slightly. Are those provisions well known? How many people are aware of the coming sort of premium apocalypse?

Morris: Well, I haven’t looked at this since July, but in July, I believe YouGov asked people, “Are you aware of the upcoming funding cuts in the OBBA?” This is before it passed. And about half the country said that they had heard something, somewhat, or a lot about that. I imagine that that number is higher now. So again, it’s not the case that everyone’s paying attention. That would be bizarre, but it’s more than nothing, right? It’s more than just the people watching this probably.

Krugman: That’s huge. It’s almost as if Republicans, at least, have been sleepwalking towards this moment because this is such a huge hit to millions of people.

Morris: Yeah, and the other point to make is maybe not everyone knows about it, but probably the people who are going to be hit by the funding provisions know about it. Certainly the politically active people going to town halls, calling the representatives know about it. There’s been quite a big stink at these town halls. So in terms of political impacts, you don’t necessarily need every American to know what’s going on in Washington, just the people who are voting or causing a fuss.

Krugman: My normal presumption is that most people just think that the president is in charge of everything and when bad stuff happens they blame him. That would not have been necessarily the lesson from the Newt Gingrich shutdowns back in the 90s. So am I wrong about that or is that sort of a generic reason to think that Democrats win?

Morris: It’s a good question. With shutdowns in general, the blame tends to fall onto the party that controls the White House. But as we see in our polling, it’s not an overwhelming majority. There’s a lot of people who don’t really know who to blame and just blame Washington in general. After the 2013 shutdown, which until the previous Trump shutdown was the longest ever, there was an increase in general anti-Washington sentiment. And by that, I mean anti-incumbent sentiment towards incumbents in general. But also, approval ratings for all congressional leaders fell after the 2013 shutdown and measurements of economic anxiety, like the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index fell. There’s the general feeling that people aren’t being looked out for when the government shuts down. And fair enough, it’s really stupid that we have government shutdowns in general. It’s just sort of a bad government policy in my opinion, but maybe we’ll save the opinions for later.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s kind of incredible that this may be about to happen, but then a lot of incredible things are happening. So what you’ve been providing with data analysis, probably the most distinctive thing that really nobody else is doing, is what I think of as the fan chart, which shows Trump approval rating—or net approval / disapproval—on a range of issues. First of all, I think I understand why no one else is doing that but do you want to tell us about that chart and and what goes into it?

Morris: Sure. I do believe some other people are doing this chart, but I’ll claim credit because I think our publication was the first place this existed. (And I say “our” because there are some people behind the scenes helping carry the data. So they deserve some credit too.) But the thinking here is, everyone’s got a presidential approval poll. “Do you approve of the president overall?” And that may be of decreasing utility in the modern era for two reasons, the big one being polarization. How you feel about the president is mostly a function of what your partisanship is and if you voted for him. And the general question, “How do you feel about Trump” really comes from that place of identity with your party much more (at least this theory goes) than how you feel about the president’s handling of certain issues.

So the thinking goes, if with a poll you prompt people about certain issues, you may get a better reading of how they’re feeling on them than if you’re just asking about presidential approval overall. And the second reason that it’s more useful perhaps than just a straight presidential approval ask is because if we only had presidential approval asks, people would be inferring how Americans felt about the president’s handling of different issues. And, you know, we can offer more nuance with polls, especially with some modern aggregation technology, than we can if we just use those straight approval asks. So, for example, I can tell you 25 percentage points more Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation and the cost of living. But overall, his net disapproval is only 12. Now that’s still bad, but it is a very significant narrative difference. So just being able to distinguish that I think is important.

Krugman: Yeah. There’s a lot more that goes into this than just, “let’s find the latest poll on presidential approval on immigration,” because there aren’t enough of those. You’re using some modeling to produce a continuous report, right?

Morris: Yes, that’s true, yes.

Krugman: And the really striking thing here is that there are no positive issues.

Morris: Yeah, at least not the ones we are aggregating. Trump is sometimes positive on border security in particular, if you ask how he’s handling border security, but he’s not popular on related issues like immigration overall or on deportations. And it really depends on the pollster as well. It’s one of those issues where there’s a pretty wide spread between the pollsters. And look, I don’t know how much credit a president gets for having one issue above water when the things that people tell us they care most about—jobs and the economy and prices—are 20-30 points under.

Krugman: Well, I think the utility, at least conceivably, would be for guidance on political strategy, guidance for Democrats and for Republicans on what to emphasize. But what you’re saying is, there’s basically no issue that’s a plus for Trump.

Morris: Yeah, at this point, anything Democrats are hitting the president on are going to produce negative electoral consequences, I guess, maybe except for border security, if you really want to get technical about it. But you definitely see them making some cognizant choices. I mean, I don’t think they’re looking at my graph. Maybe they are, that would be great. But they have their own polling about these issue differences anyway. They’re focusing on health care. Health care is a minus 17 issue for the president.

I’m curious why they’re not focusing on trade and tariffs, but hey, for what it’s worth, it’s also minus 18. So if you thought Democrats should be withholding support for tariff reform instead of healthcare, maybe there’s more utility there, but at least according to President Trump’s approval rating, they’re both gonna play the same.

Krugman: Alternatively, there’s a lot of punditry out there with narratives that are based more on a gut feeling about what must be strong issues. And a lot of what you’re doing just calls those impressions into question.

Morris: Yeah, I’ll just share an anecdote here. There was a big conversation in early April or May about this very question: what should Democrats be hitting the president on? At the time, the theory was they should just really be talking about jobs and inflation because those are the weakest issues. I think a decent counter argument is, like, “Look. You can spend 80 percent of your time talking about jobs in the economy, or maybe you can spend 100% of your time. Do you actually get returns on spending that extra 20% of the time talking about jobs and inflation and therefore ignoring the other issues?” At the time I said Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time. Now, I don’t know if a lot of them actually can physically do that, but at least in this case, I think this was proven right. Trump’s immigration approval fell after Democrats started talking about the sort of kidnapping of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, for example. His immigration approval went underwater for the first time ever two weeks after that. So I think that there’s some proof in the pudding there.

Krugman: Okay. Now, I’m seeing lots of “Democrats haven’t faced up to why they lost last year.” And there’s a little bit of a contradiction in some people’s minds between these extremely negative approval numbers and the fact that Trump won. So what’s your theory? I think I know what it is, but what’s your theory about what actually happened?

Morris: I’ll give you two theories, one in one word and two in two words. Inflation would be the first theory with “inflation and immigration” being the second. But the big thing is inflation. We know from historical studies of presidential voting behavior that retrospective economic evaluations drive the majority of swing in presidential vote totals, like 85 to 90 percent of them.

If you go back retrospectively and you only swing the 2024 election 90% of the way towards Trump, relative to what actually swung, he still wins the election. He still wins all the swing states. So, I think inflation is most of it. You still get the same outcome if there’s the same inflation, but there’s other factors too. Immigration increased in the share of Americans who said that it was their most important issue. And Donald Trump’s edge on the issue increased from 2020 to 2024. That was a pretty big policy blunder for the Democratic Party in the eyes of the voters.

Actually, I’ll give you three theories. And the third thing is just Joe Biden, right? I mean, for four years, Democrats said Joe Biden was a capable, functioning, coherent president with a sharp mind—they would say often—and Americans didn’t see it. They said, “Well, I think this is probably crap.” And the White House filmed videos of him challenging Donald Trump to a debate, really setting these expectations super high that he would be able to perform like the president he claimed he was. And then we all saw on that debate stage that everything that they had been saying was wrong. It took three weeks for him to drop out. And then they just pushed Kamala Harris, who’s associated with Joe Biden, into the race without having a primary. So there are some political strategy tactics there that I think went wrong as well. Those are the three big factors.

Krugman: I don’t know how much you look at cross-country stuff, but basically, incumbent parties lost everywhere in 2024. And we all had basically the same inflation story.

Morris: Yeah, so just one point on that. The average swing against incumbent parties in elections held between 2020 and 2024 was about seven points. The swing against Kamala Harris was six points. So you might be able to say, hey, she did better than expected. Fair enough. I mean, there’s a margin of error, some standard deviation on this stuff. So maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. But certainly she didn’t do significantly worse than expectations based off change in economic growth or inflation in particular.

Krugman: The thing that really surprised me is how quickly people turned on Trump over the economy, because we had this paradox, which was the vibecession thing, that we went through a period where we had a lot of inflation, but that was basically two years, and it was already fairly far in the past by the 2024 elections and fading further into the past. And we had near full employment, but people were very negative on the economy. And I thought that that was largely hyper-partisanship on the part of Republicans. I thought that the economic sentiment numbers would jump after the election, which maybe they did for a couple of weeks, but really have not. So, what’s your theory about what’s happening there?

Morris: What I would say is, there’s definitely a period of time in early 2024 when the economy is recovering, and late 2023 to be more accurate. The rate of inflation was decreasing from 10% to closer to 3 or 4%. I think the way we perceive it is positive for the economy. Things are moving back towards where they should be, with the Fed’s target inflation, et cetera. People are going to see smaller changes in prices. That should be good for them, right? Actually, if we had just done all of our models with two or three year changes in prices instead of one year…. In other words, there’s a stickiness to these price increases in voters’ heads and they just feel the economic pain and it gets stuck with them. It doesn’t matter if inflation goes back down. It has already gone up. Then you would have had maybe slightly better predictions of the electoral outcome. And maybe that offers us a clearer lens into voters’ minds. And that’s something that maybe we can try out for our next election forecasts.

What’s going on now is probably just a reaction to tariffs, but at the beginning of every presidency, you see a huge change in partisan views of the economy and I expect that was driving a lot of negative reactions to Joe Biden’s presidency as well, pulling his University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index down relative to where it should be. And the director of the U. Mich survey has said as much, that there’s more partisanship going into their metric now than there has ever been before.

Krugman: Yeah, but the other people I talked to, the guys at Briefing Book and whatever, say that historically, basically Republicans both cheer and boo louder than Democrats.

Morris: That’s right.

Krugman: But here we are. We’re basically back down to consumer sentiment close to the trough under Biden. And so that’s kind of not fitting that story. Is there something else? I mean, I’ll offer you a hypothesis in a second, but just let me get your reaction here to Trump’s rating on the economy being so low. It’s still not a terrible economy by standard metrics.

Morris: So, one thing we do with our survey is we ask people in their own words to tell us what Trump is doing best and what he’s doing worst. And that’s a lot of data to go through because it’s just words from 1,500 people. But it’s great data. It’s fascinating. And for the most part, people including Trump voters tell us that he promised to bring prices down and they haven’t decreased. And so I think there’s a broken promise dynamic to his economic approval numbers today that is dragging him down.

Krugman: Yeah.

Morris: And in particular, he’s lower than you’d expect based off of rate of inflation, which is actually pretty close to that target, certainly concerning in his upwards trajectory, but definitely lower than where you’d expect it to be for a consumer sentiment index as low as it is. But I’d love to hear your take on this to turn the tables here a little bit. How much the average consumer—exempting especially the top tercil—are just like permanently more negative from COVID and inflation. I don’t know the answer but it seems like a good hypothesis.

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, I’m personally fluctuating between two views, both of which could be true. One is that we just feel lousy on a sustained basis, that COVID was a really demoralizing event and we’ve never really come back from that. The other is what you said about how Democrats suffered because there was all this Biden denial, and then that’s not what people saw. And Trump promised the world during the campaign. He said inflation will stop on day one. Grocery prices will come down, energy prices will be cut in half. I wonder whether there’s some of that, “Hey, this is not what we were told.”

Morris: Yeah, I think that’s something for us to look into. But I imagine that’s a lot of it.

Krugman: I wasn’t aware that you were taking these unstructured, anecdotal responses and processing them. It sounds like that’s what a lot of people are saying.

Morris: The respondents come from a sample, from people being called, texted, or sometimes sent physical mailers, and then they come into the online panel and respond.

Krugman: So, we have Trump approval ratings. We have special elections in which Democrats have performed by, I don’t know what the number is, something like 15% or more. But then you have a generic congressional ballot, which does show Democrats ahead, but not by nearly as much as I would have expected from those numbers. Is that your sense as well?

Morris: There are a lot of people who are unhappy about Trump, but that doesn’t necessarily make them Democrats. And that’s how I would reconcile the Trump approval and the generic ballot polls in isolation. The special elections are a slightly more complicated story to explain. I think what’s going on here is that the type of voter who casts a ballot in a special election is not representative of the country as a whole.

Remember, special election turnout is a lot lower than turnout in a presidential election or a midterm. It’s a much smaller subset of voters that’s driving this supposed 15% change. So maybe there’s a 15 percentage point change in voting behavior among this smaller subset of voters. But among the rest of the people who show up in the generic ballot polls but aren’t voting in special elections, their voting behavior is more stable. That would be the theory to reconcile these numbers. And in the past, we have seen special elections overestimate backlash to the president. In 2024, special elections forecast a five or six percentage point democratic victory in the popular vote, and they lost by 1.5 to two points. So there is a disconnect between these two things. And I call this a “two electorates theory.” There’s the type of people who are really high turnout and are much more favorable to Democrats than the average adult, the average voter. Doesn’t mean that Democrats aren’t going to do well, it just means that the special elections probably exaggerate the swing against Trump that we’ll see in the midterms.

Krugman: Probably the gubernatorial elections that are coming up will be probably closer to revealing something with probably a higher turnout.

Morris: They will be somewhere between the special elections and the midterms next year. Probably 45-50% of people might cast ballots.

Krugman: And in terms of issue salience, there’s a tendency for political consultants and pundits to say, “these are the issues.” One thing you’ve argued is that you can’t just take where people are in the polls and assume that that’s a good guide to electoral strategy.

Morris: That’s a good characterization. On that point, and maybe this opens a can of worms or a Pandora’s box even, but there is a tendency in Washington to view voters as responding to policy preferences expressed by their legislators sort of above everything else. This is called “spatial analysis” in political science. That voters imagine politicians on some sort of two dimensional grid of conservatism and anti-system thinking, or social conservatism or whatever. They pick the politician that’s closest to their ideal point on this graph. And they’re doing all these calculations and making the most rational decision about who to vote for.

And that just doesn’t seem true. Maybe you and I do that. I mean, certainly I don’t do that in local elections, there’s too much information for me to gather and process. And most people don’t engage in that sort of thinking about politics. Maybe to get back to the popularism thing, it just sort of yields the theory of this type of politics invalid. There’s certainly a lot less leverage to this than I think the funders in Washington believe.

If you had Kamala Harris take a far right position on guns, for example, do you think that that would have increased her vote total by, you know, half a percentage point even? I don’t think so. Because that view of her ideology is based on a lot of other things like her group attachment and most importantly, the letter next to her name.

Krugman: Right. Meaning R or D. Also, we talk as if people have well-formed and relatively stable positions on issues. And that’s often not the case, right?

Morris: That’s right. In March, a lot of this backlash I was referencing against Democrats talking about immigration, especially Kumar Abrego Garcia, was predicated on this idea that Trump was doing well in his immigration net approval. So don’t talk about that. You don’t want to raise this issue of immigration because he does well on it. The counter argument was like, look, you’re never going to change how people feel about the president if you don’t engage with him.

if you don’t fight him on this. And as soon as we saw Democratic representatives and senators start fighting him on Abrego Garcia, on deportations in general, especially after the events in LA in, gosh, June, I believe, you saw his immigration numbers fall. And again, this is just sort of old political science wisdom. Public opinion is not static. It’s referred to as latent sometimes in the literature. It changes over time and it’s unpredictable what it will be in the future. You don’t want to base all of your political strategy over what the polls say today, because there’s no election today. The election is going to be a year and a half from now. Or I guess, in our case, a year and two months from now. You want to base all of your political calculus on what you think opinion will be a year and two months from now. Or also maybe on your values, beliefs.

Krugman: Well, heaven forbid. But also, on some of these issues, when people say the Democrats should just be running on the economy and not on healthcare or something, the world changes. What if the economy gets better?

Morris: Right. And what kind of argument is that? What’s the utility of that argument? Two weeks before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passes and two weeks after. And this salience of health care has changed. And you kind of want to be ahead of the curve on these things. It’s seen as fighting for voters access to health care before everyone else was doing it. Before that was the most important thing on everyone’s mind. So you have some sort of authenticity to bring to the fight.

This is what resonates so much with Democratic voters about Bernie Sanders. He’s been fighting for the working class, he says, since he was elected mayor of Burlington. 46 years ago? So he has some authenticity that’s hard to replicate. And so yeah, you don’t want to be seen as always chasing public opinion. It just kind of makes you seem like a poser.

Krugman: You also talk about how Democrats are constantly being taken to task for being too woke for emphasizing LGBTQ or something and that that’s really costing them with voters. And you’re really skeptical about that, or at least have a different take.

Morris: I’ll clarify my position on this. I do think that Democrats lose votes for being perceived as too woke. This isn’t meant as scare quotes. But on LGBTQ and especially trans issues, the woman’s sports thing has probably lost them a lot of moderate voters. But crucially, Democrats are not taking those positions. This is not the position of the Democratic Party. If you go look at the Democratic Party platform, in 2024, it talks about transgender people, I think, 19 times. It talks about affordability and prices hundreds of times. And when the Democratic Party—the Capital P party—is talking about these issues, it’s talking about civil rights protections, not about sports. Kamala Harris got hit for allegedly supporting trans surgeries for inmates. That’s not the position of the Democratic Party.

My criticism here of these takes is that people just get the mechanism wrong. They say that Democratic politicians should “talk about LGBTQ issues less.” They’re not talking about them at all. They’re getting this mechanism entirely wrong. The mechanism is not the Democratic Party has signaled they’re in favor of these things. It’s that the critics, media networks, especially Fox News have said the Democratic Party holds these positions. And certainly with advertising. And Democrats’ partisan opponents—Donald Trump and JD Vance, etc.—say that the party supports these things. So you’re not going to change voters’ minds by talking about these issues less. If you’re a Democratic politician, you know, you need to maybe take the opposite stance or find a better way to communicate. Or, I don’t know, find a way to get Fox News off the air would probably be the best way to change voters’ minds on these things. That’s not going to happen. So it’s just important that we get the mechanism right here, the causality correct, so that people can make the right strategic decisions.

Krugman: So this is what people perceive, and this is actually very much manufactured perception. This is an engineered perception of what they talk about. It’s not so much what you really do and you can’t change that. I think there’s vastly more talking about Democrats allegedly talking about these things than there is actual Democrats talking about these things.

Morris: That’s right. How is the Democratic Party supposed to change its perceptions among voters on these issues if all it’s ever doing is in fighting? If all the groups inside the party are ever doing is shouting at each other, blaming each other for Kamala Harris’ loss and not actually communicating about the things that people want the capital P party to stand for? This is just kind of a problem with the Democratic Party in general. It’s a big tent. It’s got a lot of disparate groups and it’s hard to get them to unify and to sort of speak with one voice, and that’s exactly what voters are seeking from their party. So that’s a bigger strategic problem that I don’t think anyone has a great answer to right now.

Krugman: And Republicans talk a lot about things that voters don’t care about or don’t support. And there’s just talking about the wrong things, right? I mean, you had a chart, which showed a variety of issues and the extent to which the party talks about it versus the voters care about it. And it sort of showed how for Republicans, there’s a lot more in the space where they seem obsessed with it and voters don’t care, right?

Morris: Yeah. For context, if you ask American voters in battleground states, what issue do you think Republicans are focused most on? 85% of them will say immigration. It might be like 82% or whatever. But let’s say around 85% say immigration. And if you ask them what issues should Republicans be most focused on, only about 35% say immigration. So, there’s a 50 percentage point difference there. That’s huge.

For context, it is about twice as large, or about 25% larger than the gap for the Democratic Party on LGBTQ or climate. Disproportionately, people say that the Republican Party is the most out of step and on immigration in particular. And just to sort of riff here off your point, voters also say Republicans don’t talk enough about prices and jobs and healthcare, the three issues that Americans say are most important to them. So if we’re trying to look for partisan mismatch here, all this endless debating about the Democrats’ position on LGBTQ is just sort of not identifying the correct problem, not looking in the right place.

Krugman: Right, and part of it is basically Democrats themselves amplifying their own disparities because of the infighting within the party.

Morris: Right. If all these Democratic think tanks sort of stopped shooting the other members—I guess I shouldn’t use shooting as a metaphor these days—then it wouldn’t be as newsy, right? I mean, there’s a lot of New York Times articles about centrist groups saying progressives cost Kamala Harris the election and a lot less actual analysis that comes to that conclusion.

Krugman: It is actually amazing to me how many pundits are going after Democrats for these alleged sins and how the Democrats (or public intellectuals, whatever) don’t fall in line the way Republicans do. That becomes an issue.

Morris: Yeah, I think there’s a tendency for pundits like us, especially those who are left-leaning or center left or wherever they are on the spectrum, to try to distinguish themselves from the other voices in our ideological space by targeting the voices of the farther left groups. There’s some sense, I think, that there’s a value that comes with this heterodoxy.

Morris: It makes you seem more rational, the thinking goes. It makes you seem not like a member of the tribe, which is what pundits are often after. They want to be seen as above the partisan fray or what have you. And there’s also just this tendency for people who spend way too much time on social media—which is something I don’t do anymore, but used to do—to really react negatively to the people calling them out. And I think this causes some ideological movement among pundits who are told too much that their disinterest by the far left even causes them to look in the wrong places in their political diagnoses. So yeah, another good reason to not spend any time on social media.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s not the most important thing out there. But the thing that annoys me most is the sheer pettiness of a lot of people in this political commentary business.

With the Charlie Kirk assasination, you know, it doesn’t matter what exactly were the motives of the shooter. America has all kinds of people out there with guns. But before we had any information, there was this immediate, attempt to turn it into a political cudgel and attempt to canonize Charlie Kirk and to come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who said, “Well, he was not a saint.” What’s your impression of how that effort is going?

Morris: My on the record reaction to the Charlie Kirk shooting is that it’s a tragedy. People shouldn’t be killed for their beliefs. And that attempts by Trump and the far right—at this point Trump and the far right are indistinguishable—to use Kirk’s murder as an excuse to pull a Reichstag fire and essentially crack down on the left, on political opponents is a much bigger threat to democracy than political violence. I explained this in a blog post about just sort of the evolving friendliness of the right to authoritarianism in America. It’s fueled by a lot of ethnic antagonism, the political scientists call it. But look, hours before we knew anything, after Charlie Kirk’s murder, the members of the far right on Twitter were saying, this should be our Reichstag fire movement. We should do a complete crackdown on the left. And Trump did it.

Krugman: Yeah. But my impression is that it’s not actually working very well. That the attempt to put a statue of Charlie Kirk in front of every school and so on is actually kind of faltering.

Morris: Sure. In terms of canonizing him in particular, maybe that got off track a little. Trump’s approval rating is worse than it has ever been at this point, or at least equal. His disapproval rating has gone up a point or two since Kirk was murdered according to our average. That’s a signal to me, though, that what he’s trying to do here, whether or not we’re talking about a crackdown on the left or canonization of the sainting process of Charlie Kirk, that process is not going well. But the actual crackdown and the flood of right-wing praise for Kirk has had an effect on the right and on mass opinion among the Republican Party. Republicans are more favorable toward Charlie Kirk now than they’ve ever been, even if his net rating among everyone is still negative where it was before. And the consequences of that are not necessarily seen in opinion, but in politics, as I’m sure you would agree.

Krugman: You did write about how powerful people overestimate Trump. They don’t realize how unpopular he is. They particularly don’t appreciate the sort of intensity of dislike, and that includes corporations. We’re just a few days after Jimmy Kimmel got back on the air and that is quite a story.

Morris: Yeah, and it’s quite a turnaround as well for Disney, which owns ABC, and ABC News. My actual thinking on this company and my former employer may have changed a little. But I think this is mostly about profit and about the audience that they figured out was there for Jimmy Kimmel. But before that, there was this big backlash to Disney, which manifested itself in an all-time high of interest in canceling Disney+, boycotting the Disney parks, et cetera. The apparent thinking was that it just wasn’t worth the backlash. That backlash could have been regulatory and political. It was definitely coming from Twitter. And I think lots of executives probably spend a lot more time on social media than they do interrogating the political polling data.

ABC News does not have anyone doing that anymore since 538 is gone, but neither do other networks.

Krugman: Listeners may not know that 538 was your former organization, owned by ABC, until they shut it down.

Morris: Yeah. So maybe that’s a little bit of lost utility internally for them. But the general point is just that people actually see Trump as the figure he is trying to cast himself as, which is the dominant strong man with a mandate for whatever political change he wants as an individual, this is all about him. And certainly the big tech corporations feel that way, maybe not about public opinion, but just about regulatory power and the power of the government and that they have to kowtow to him to make money. But when they are presented the opportunity to make money by not being complicit—in Disney’s case, it’s more advertising on Jimmy Kimmel—then they will stand up to the president. Maybe Apple’s Tim Cook needs to come up with a left hooded iPhone, and then he could also stand up to the president.

Krugman: Well, and there’s a TV show that I was looking forward to watching that Apple just canceled. But because it wasn’t yet on air, most people won’t know about it and there won’t be a Kimmel-style backlash. But it does seem as if the Disney executives were completely caught aback by the backlash. I guess maybe they were just looking at Twitter and not at your polling average and not at what happened at the market, which was a sort of dry run for this.

Morris: Yeah, that’s right. I think everyone spends too much time on social media and we should probably get off it. But I think the failure to see Trump as, you know, a president that’s subject to normal cycles of political backlash has led executives at corporations, corporations themselves, and lots of politicians to be a lot more kowtowing to the president than they’d otherwise be if they looked at the data.

Krugman: Yeah. But we were talking about pundits wanting to position themselves as a sensible centrist and not “on the left.” That strikes me as a marketing strategy for an earlier era. It’s people who are actually taking strong political views and who are doing data analysis that are getting a lot of subscribers. But that old strategy of “I am centrist, non-left, counterintuitive, not Trump derangement syndrome,” is actually not a good way to get yourself subscribers on your Substack or whatever. It’s kind of catering to a world that doesn’t exist anymore.

Morris: Sure, I have thought a lot about this from my experience in network media. The old model here is that you appeal to as broad an audience as possible because everyone is equally likely to be of high news interest and therefore to watch your show. This is true of independent publications like the New York Times. In this case, they’re independent because they have subscriber revenue, not ads. That’s the distinction here.

I guess when they’re the sole owner of their output, whereas corporate media networks are all owned by mega corporations at this point, so they’re not independent. The old model is that you just cast a wide net and everyone comes along and they watch your programming and you could add dollars and you can do your journalism. And yeah, that has been dying for a long time, accelerating 10 years ago, and died two or three years ago. There’s been 30% year over year declines in cable subscriptions, which is responsible for a lot of cutbacks at these organizations. So it’s just obvious that this business model does not work anymore.

And the reason this is important for what I do is because if you want to stay true to the values of electoral liberalism and participatory democracy, then you’re going to take some positions against parties every once in a while. And then you’re going to marginalize part of your audience. So if you’re one of these big companies and you need the widest net possible, you just can’t take those positions. You can’t be the Kimmel calling out FCC Chairman Brendan Carr two days ago. So I actually think this is a point in their favor. Maybe they’re coming around to this again. It could just be profit mode if they see the audience for Kimmel is growing. Great, but hopefully corporate media owners (in this case) come around to the idea that new media lets you take high value positions that are coded as partisan, but not necessarily partisan themselves. There’s a whole audience of people out there that you can cater to if you make the implicit calculus that some people just aren’t gonna pay you for news anymore. And that’s all right, because there’s all these other people who will.

Krugman: And one of the reasons I’m enjoying Strength in Numbers aside from the numbers is that you’re not afraid to actually say what your values are. I mean, here are the numbers, but there’s not a whole lot of bending over backwards to make it even-handed.

Elliott: Yeah, the line I think I’ve written this, I don’t know, four or five times now, and I’m gonna keep writing it, I suspect, is that I’m not a partisan for any party. I’m not a partisan Democrat. I’m not a partisan Republican, a partisan Green Party member, whatever. I am a partisan for democracy and for voting rights and for electoral participation. And you have to have that position if you are a member of the fourth estate, if you’re a journalist, and especially if you study elections. I mean, look, if there’s no free and fair elections, why am I even doing this? Why do we even have a political media at all?

So you have to have values that align with democracy. And you can’t endlessly be bending over backwards to avoid offending people, if you want those values to persist. I certainly am very grateful that there are opportunities in the new media for people who hold those views and also want to be pretty rational about political analysis, like you are on economics. And yes, it is going very well. I think the proof is in the pudding. There’s more traffic to Strength in Numbers now than there was at 538 six months before the election. I think the proof is right there.

Krugman: Okay, well, thank you for what you’re doing and we’ll probably talk again in a few months. I think there’s enough chaos out there to generate plenty of business for our respective enterprises.

Morris: Thanks for having me back, Paul. Talk to you again soon.