An Election Day Special With Nate Silver

00:00:02 Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios. 00:00:04 Speaker 2: Podcasts. 00:00:05 Speaker 3: Radio. 00:00:06 Speaker 2: News. 00:00:18 Speaker 4: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Laws Podcast. I'm Joe Wiesenthal. 00:00:23 Speaker 1: And I'm Tracy Alloway. 00:00:24 Speaker 4: Tracy, I often say, I'm really glad we're not political reporters. 00:00:29 Speaker 1: Oh, I know. 00:00:29 Speaker 2: I know. 00:00:32 Speaker 1: I'm glad that I wake up every morning and thank God that we didn't. 00:00:35 Speaker 4: Go down that path. But here's the problem. I've said this many times. Here's the problem. And we've been writing about this. 00:00:42 Speaker 3: We didn't. 00:00:42 Speaker 4: We were in Chicago. We had that conversation with James Robinson and stuff like that. I sort of think politics, unfortunately, does matter. And actually, even if we wanted to say like, no, look, I just cover markets. I just cover the economy. Unfortunately, I'm coming to the conclusion that not only do politics matter, they're probably going to keep mattering more and more. 00:01:02 Speaker 1: Everything is politics now. You can't get away from it. 00:01:04 Speaker 3: It feels like it, yeah. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: And certainly this week. So we're recording this on October 29th. The episode is going to come out on November 3rd. 00:01:12 Speaker 4: It's Election Day special. 00:01:13 Speaker 1: That's right. 00:01:14 Speaker 4: You're listening to our Election Day special. 00:01:16 Speaker 1: It's a pretty big week for politics. So we should talk, to put it mildly. To put it mildly. I know, I know. 00:01:22 Speaker 4: Anyway, let's just jump right to it. Joining us here on our Election Day special, Nate Silver. Everyone knows him. Founder of the Silver Bulletin newsletter, famous for 538, modeling elections, knowing a lot about polling and data and all that stuff. Nate, thank you for joining our Election Day special. 00:01:39 Speaker 3: Of course. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Tracy. 00:01:40 Speaker 4: Let's just talk about like how unpopular is President Trump right now as of October 29th or Election Day and to what degree? I mean, midterms historically pretty bad for the party and power, but just get a big picture. How historically unpopular is President Trump and what is the knock-on effects for various Republican candidates in competitive races? 00:02:00 Speaker 3: Yeah. So Trump's approval rating is at about 37 percent. By some measures, that's the worst approval rating for a president at a midterm since Harry Truman, I think, in 1946. I'm getting that right. And remember we had a midterm in 2018 where Trump and Republicans lost 41 House seats when he was somewhat less unpopular and where gas didn't cost $ 4. 30 a gallon or whatever it is. So look. I kind of call this the rock versus the hard place election, right? The background conditions couldn't be better for Democrats, right? The historical trends …