Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! I’m excited for our first ever Media Offender Mailbag. Every Friday, paid subscribers will be able to send questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.
With the midterms just four days away, let’s get cracking.
Jenny asks:
How do you and your colleagues look at polling? Which polls hold more weight with you?
Answer: I can only speak for myself. The first piece I wrote for The Political Spectrum focused on this specific subject. It holds special weight after the scandals with SoCal Strategies and Wedgewood literally making up their polls, which may have tanked races like Mallory McMorrow’s Senate race in Michigan.
But, to borrow from G. Elliott Morris, as imperfect as polling may be, polling is still the best gauge of public opinion. Nate Silver gets a bad rap, but he’s still the GOAT, and his criteria for weighting polls is a good North Star.
As a reporter, I also try to be conscientious about how I talk about polls since if I overhype them, it might have a real impact on an election.
Typically, I give more weight to non-partisan polls, polls that have been accurate in the past and ones that use live phone calls. After Labor Day, I focus more on polls with likely voters than registered voters. But even then, I try to see if the polling reflects the electorate. Some of you saw me go on a tirade on Bluesky about Marist’s poll about Maine and the fact that its survey of likely voters showed a dead-heat race not for Senate, but for governor. It looked if to me because judging by previous elections in Maine, the national environment and how Kamala Harris won the state easily in 2024, this didn’t reflect the makeup of the state’s politics.
Long short of it, to borrow from Churchill, polling might be the worst form of measuring elections, except for all others have been tried.
Here’s a two-fer: Michael Petrick asks:
Hopefully this works! What Senate race, way off everyone’s radar, like Montana, Idaho, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi etc. should we keep an eye on for a mega upset on Election night
While John Simpsen asks:
eric - what is the one plausible race out there that if the Democrat pulls it out will absolutely blow your mind. Like, what race is the data point that will make you lose it.
Answer: I always love a good wildcard race. There are always races that tell you whether an election will be a blow-out or just a normal-sized midterm backlash. In 2010, Sen. Russ Feingold losing in Wisconsin showed Democrats were about to get battered. In 2018, Kendra Horn winning in Oklahoma’s 5th district showed Democrats were about to have a pretty good night, but Republicans flipped four Senate seats, giving them a net of two Senate seats.
I am mostly keeping my eyes on the South on Election Night. As I wrote in The Independent right after Angie Nixon won her primary, Black voters are furious after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act and Black voter turnout spiked afterward. Votehub showed a significant spike in Black voter turnout in Southern primaries after the decision.
To answer John, the Senate race that would make me fall out of my chair and know Democrats pulled off a wave would be if Annie Andrews somehow flips South Carolina’s Senate seat. Yes, Darline Graham is a weak candidate who many conservatives don’t trust. Yes, Black voters are furious. But still, it’s South Carolina, a state nobody expected to flip. If somehow Andrews pulls it off, that means Republicans are in for a bloodbath.
I am also focused on the South because it’s not just about who wins or loses. It’s about the margins of those victories. If Jamie Davis gets within single digits of the Trump-endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow in Louisiana’s Senate race, then it’s a sign of a bad night, especially since Sen. Bill Cassidy won re-election in 2020 with 59.3 percent of the vote.
Zach asks:
How do you cover politics and cope with the fact that depending on the outcomes of elections communities or issues you deeply care about may be either positively or negatively impacted? Thinking about RFK and all the HHS stuff
Answer: The hand-on-Bible answer is Donald Trump nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Health and Human Services secretary gave me a ton of purpose. After Trump won re-election, I genuinely wondered if I wanted to cover his second presidency since covering Trump 1.0 was a slog.
But when Trump nominated Kennedy, I knew I needed to stay. Not because I wanted to provide a biased opinion or “take him down.” Rather, I knew Kennedy would throw out tons of disinformation about autism. It almost felt like a moral imperative. Not only had I spent the last decade writing about autism and writing books about it, but I had been interviwing autistic people for years specifically about how bad ideas about autism hurt autistic people.
To me, it was not just enough to say that Kennedy is spreading dangerous information about public health. Plenty of journalists do a better job than I do. It was a matter of writing how his actions would hurt autistic people. To me, I felt almost like a duty for me to be in those rooms and ask those questions.
What gave me joy this week: I went to my friend’s wedding in Greensboro and it felt so refreshing to spend time with some of my oldest friends. Tim Duncan standing in line to vote. I went to see Rush with my friend Kris Guin. If you want to know why Rush means so much to me, here’s an essay I wrote in The Washington Post about Neil Peart and my dad.
What I’m reading: I grew up listening to Raffi, so this Associated Press interview was a delight. Asawin Suebsaeng and Jacqueline Sweet’s coverage of Vivek Ramaswamy and the fallout from his ad featuring Amy Acton’s mom in Zeteo has been excellent. (I have a piece in Zeteo coming out this weekend). Trump’s politics
Finally, a note from the late Sir Patrick Stewart, who spoke out bravely against domestic abuse.
Godspeed, Sir.
And Chuck, Kenny and Shaq’s tribute to the one and only Ernie Johnson on Inside The NBA made my eyes well.
That’s it for The Political Spectrum. If you like what you read, subscribe down below. If you want to support a travel budget, you can also send money to Ko-Fi.com/EricMGarcia.
Correction: A previous version of this piece said that Cal Matters conducted fake polls. The name of the firm was SoCal Strategies.
Great stuff as always, Eric.
Thanks for answering my question!