Still Counting: Trump vs. The BLUE WAVE: A Midterm Extravaganza

Melissa (0:00)

Hey, Stricties, it's Melissa. We wanted to share with you an excerpt from a new series that we are so excited about here at Crooked Media. It's from the folks who brought you the 538 podcast, and it's called Still Counting.

Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Galen Druke have spent their careers breaking down political data, honing their expertise in the numbers behind the numbers, election results, demographic changes, historical trends and the polls. And on their new show, Still Counting, they are going to cover even more, from politics to prediction markets to AI and even sports. Yes, sports. You can listen, Justice Kavanaugh. You'll get rigorous analysis, a few hot takes, but no spin or sense of certainty. Just the numbers and what they tell us about this moment, delivered fresh each Wednesday evening.

We are so excited to share this with all of you. So without further ado, here's a sneak peek of Still Counting.

Galen Druke (0:52)

I think I'm just like a little bit nervous. No, I know. I know. It feels weird. It feels weird.

Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Galen Druke.

Clare Malone (1:03)

I'm Clare Malone.

Nate Silver (1:04)

And I'm Nate Silver. And we're talking too fast because it's the first episode and we're a little nervous.

Clare Malone (1:09)

I also read my name. I was like, I'm Clare Malone.

Galen Druke (1:14)

And this is our first official episode. Yes, we did a Freed Warmer. Yes, we talked to Pod Save America. But this is it, folks. From now on, on Wednesday evening, you're gonna get a Still Counting podcast episode in your feed. And so for, you know, first I'll say, this is what we're gonna do on today's podcast. We're gonna do a midterms extravaganza. We're even gonna kind of play a game. We're also gonna talk about sort of the past year plus in Republican voter sentiment. It's been a pretty topsy turvy year for the Trump coalition. We're gonna talk about the convention and all that jazz, the anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death. Before we get into everything that we have to cover today, though, we should say, welcome back, everybody, to our past listeners.

Spread the word.

Clare Malone (1:59)

Welcome to the new people. Hopefully, if you have no idea who we are, really, welcome to Still Counting.

Galen Druke (2:06)

Well, actually, Clare, who are we?

Clare Malone (2:07)

Who are we?

Galen Druke (2:09)

I'm Clare Malone for the Scripps Eds.

Clare Malone (2:13)

We all worked together at a data site called FiveThirtyEight, and I was hired by Nate to be like the normal magazine reporter. I was hired by Need To Be Normal to be like a magazine reporter person. And then I'm sort of a traditional reporter. I am a writer at The New Yorker. I cover media and politics there, and I am currently on book leave for the year, actually going back in like six months, and I'm writing a book about the maha movement. That's who I am.

Galen Druke (2:43)

Nate, who are you?

Nate Silver (2:44)

I'm Clare Malone.

So, my trajectory into journalism, if that's what you want to call it, is highly non-traditional. Before I ever got into journalism, I was an online poker player. I was building baseball models. Basically, 2008 comes along. I'm living in Chicago. This campus hipster, as I thought of him named Barack Obama, decides to run for president. It was a very exciting time in politics and also a time when there had been in baseball and in sports, a lot of talk about analytics. This was a kind of moneyball revolution, so to speak. I was getting a little burned out with the baseball stuff. The poker was not going super well, to be honest, and so I started trying to build a forecasting model, first for the Democratic primary in 2008 and then general election, and it just kind of improbably took off. But yeah, I try to look at the world. I sometimes do reporting, but I'm looking at this too a little bit.

Clare Malone (3:42)

He's written two books?

Nate Silver (3:42)

I've written two books. For the books, I do actually do real reporting.

Clare Malone (3:45)

For the books, I do.

Galen Druke (3:46)

Which, for the most recent book, involved hanging out in Las Vegas playing poker for a year.

Nate Silver (3:50)

I spent a lot of time in Vegas, yeah. It was a nice excuse. Partially in Silicon Valley, Miami. But I don't do a lot of insider gossip with, what's the scoop about the internal polls in New Hampshire? I think that is actually a waste of time.

You're being spun a lot of time. I think the goal of a model, we talked about this on the Pod Save trailer, it's to force yourself to be more rigorous in analyzing the news.