Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, This is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: Marie Gleusenkamp Perez is a Democrat who won a House seat in a Trump district two years ago, pointing the way for others.  Marc Cooper will analyze her current reelection campaign in southwestern Washington State, starting from the fact that she’s a working class woman.
But first: the polls – and us.  Rick Perlstein will comment – in a minute.
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Today we need to talk about the polls and us: our reliance on polls, our obsession with polls, how to understand the polls and our relation to them. For that, we turn to Rick Perlstein. He’s the award-winning author of that four-volume series on the history of America’s political and cultural divisions from the fifties to the election of Reagan, including the unforgettable books, Nixonland and Reaganland. He’s written for Mother Jones, Slate, The New York Times and The Nation. Now he writes regularly for the American Prospect. We reached him today at home in Chicago. Rick Perlstein, welcome back.

Rick Perlstein: Hi, Jon. Great to be speaking with you again.

JW: In 2016, just before election day, I published a piece at The Nation headlined, “Relax, Trump Can’t Win.” I was reporting what was basically the conventional wisdom. All the most respected polling experts were saying that, especially Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, four years before in 2012, that was Obama versus Mitt Romney. Nate Silver had accurately predicted the winner in each of the 50 states. So he, and in 2016, a lot of other people were saying Trump couldn’t win. I think you were one of them.

RP: I think so, yeah. I think I didn’t necessarily luckily go as voluminously or strongly on the record as you did, but my wife and I baked a Hillary Clinton logo cake for election night.

JW: Well, that was what the polls told us. But now you say presidential polls are almost always wrong consistently in deeply patterned ways, but how can that be? The science of polling is not complicated. You call people until you have a representative sample of the electorate. You match the main demographic categories, age, ethnicity, gender, education level, urban or rural, and you ask them how they’re going to vote. And if it turns out you were off, you study your mistakes, you correct for them the next time around. That is the scientific method. Pollsters have been doing this for a long time. Let’s start at the beginning. When did scientific opinion polling get started?

RP: It actually has a birthdate. It’s pretty much the 1936 election. There had been prior to that, another very respected poll that was considered to be the gold standard. It was run by a popular magazine called Literary Digest, and they had a method of sending out millions and millions of ballots pretty much to anyone they could get an address for. In 1932, they sent out 20 million, and they included advertisements for subscribing to this magazine, but they took it very seriously and they hired forensic accountants to count everyone. And in 1924 and ’28 and 1932, they got within a few points of the result.

JW: This is not sampling. This is trying to poll the total population.

RP: Right. This is just as many human beings as they could. And they did such a good job that in 1928, someone writing an editorial said they should just jokingly cancel the election and just turn it over to Literary Digest. The next part of the story is actually pretty famous, and I should say that I got this all a book called Lost in a Gallup by a guy named Joseph Campbell, like the Hero with Thousand Faces guy. And it’s wonderful. It came out in 2020, and all this stuff comes from him, but this is a pretty famous part of the story that Literary Digest said that Franklin Roosevelt was going to lose for reelection resoundingly. And these three clowns named George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, all came out with modern methods of opinion poll sampling, in which they do, as you say, kind of come up with what they claim to be a representative sample of the electorate.

JW: And George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, all said Roosevelt was going to defeat Alf Landon.

RP: I mean, they weren’t that spectacular in their performance. They didn’t say he’d win in a landslide with 60% of the popular vote, but they certainly put the Literary Digest poll out of business.

JW: And then the next chapter is that famous picture that’s in every American history textbook. Harry Truman holding up the headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” What went wrong in 1948?

RP: Yeah, the funniest part of that is here in Chicago, the Chicago History Museum used to sell it on a T-shirt. The Tribune complained because it made the paper look too bad. But the trip, they were not alone. In fact, it was so taken for granted that Dewey was going to defeat Truman, that this guy, Joseph Campbell in his book has like a dozen examples. Each one more elaborate than the last. And my favorite one was that a German newspaper literally reported a glorious victory celebration for President Dewey in Times Square. So I mean, it was completely taken for granted that these guys had nailed polling, and it was going to be Dewey.

JW: Then the next great one is 1952, Ike versus Adlai Stevenson.

RP: Fascinating example that really helps explain what the problem is in polling. In 1952, all the poll companies, and this is a business, they’re all companies, had been so humiliated by 1948 that they really pulled in their horns and were as cautious as possible. And they said either it’s going to be a tie, but it might be a landslide, but we can’t tell which one’s going to win a landslide. And of course, Eisenhower did win a landslide. None of these guys predicted it. But here’s the thing. If we want to get into what is the problem with polls, kind of conceptually speaking, and it gets back to that method that you explain in which you have to, quote, unquote, “model the electorate.”
You say this many women, this many men, this many farmers, this many people from cities, and you have to decide what is this group called an electorate, which never existed before. You know the 1952 electorate didn’t exist in 1948. The 2016 electorate didn’t exist in 2012. The 1980 electorate, which is an even better example, didn’t exist in 1976. You have to weigh all these groups. So what happened in 1952 is, George Gallup, who’s the most famous pollster,  the ‘Babe Ruth of pollsters’ they called him—in the 948 election, he said, “Well, there’s a lot of undecided voters,” 13%; we don’t kno how these guys are going to vote, but we do know that in 1948, undecided voters went three to one for the Democrats. So in our model, we will presume that undecided voters will go three to one for the Democrats in 1952. Well, undecided voters went overwhelmingly for the Republican, so they were only able to say, it was going to be a tie. But there are all these places in the process where the person designing polls make subjective decisions, and they can only make these subjective decisions based on the past.

JW: Let’s go to the recent experience of 2016, when Nate Silver and everybody else was so far off. Nate Silver, of course, had to explain why he was so far off. And his explanation is pretty much the one that you’ve said has been around for 30 or 40 years. He said, “There’s not much a pollster can do when a voter hasn’t made up her mind.” But of course, you have to do something, pollsters make estimates like the way you have just said. So what did Nate Silver do to correct the errors of screwing up so badly in 2016?

RP: Nate Silver has this completely different method. He does not model the electorate. He models the polls. So he’s a kind of a meta-pollster, right?

JW: A meta-pollster, yes.

RP: He’s never placed a single call to a voter. He’s never buttonholed anyone on the street. And he only does state polls. He takes all the existing state polls, and he rates them on a quality scale based on their supposed past performance, although that gets a little iffy too. And then he basically throws it all into a formula and spits it out a hundred times. And the number of times one candidate wins in this kind of computer simulation compared to the other one is the percentage chance that person has of winning in the election. So in 2016, I think it was something like a 72.6% that Hillary Clinton has a chance. So you could always say, well, I didn’t say she was going to win. I just said there was a 72.6% chance. Although at other times, his fame was based on calling all 50 states, and his calls of some of these states were, well, one candidate is going to win Florida because they’re 50.1% of the time in the simulation they won Florida.
So he just kind of pushes the problem back and relies on the quality of the state polls. One of those state polls, the benchmark poll in Wisconsin run by the Marquette University Law School, did something that it turns out pollsters have been doing wrong for almost a hundred years, since 1936, which is that they quit polling a long time before the election because it’s a very expensive thing to do. Gallup in 1948 stopped polling in September because he said, well, this is just so overwhelming, unless Christ has a second coming in October, Dewey’s got it.

JW: People have made up their minds —

RP: Yeah, the Marquette polls stopped polling nine days before election day, and it turned out that Wisconsin was a very important state. Trump won it. It was predicted by all these state polls in Wisconsin that he was going to lose it. There were lots of examples like that. They were concentrated in swing states. So he’s not really solving the problem, he’s just kind of outsourcing it.

JW: Let’s talk about right now, two of the top-rated polls, The New York Times poll and the YouGov poll have different results in their latest polls. The Times has Kamala and Trump tied in the national popular vote. YouGov has Kamala ahead by three. Which one is correct?

RP: I don’t care.

JW: I think there’s another way to answer it, which is ‘we’ll never know.’

RP: You’ll never know. There’s usefulness for polls, right? I mean, within each poll with the same method, you can kind of measure trends sometimes, right? You can measure all kinds of things outside of who’s going to be the president. You got to remember that these days only something like – they only have something like a 1% response rate because people don’t answer their phones. One of the very difficult things they have to do is extrapolate from the fact that no one, as you know, Jon, I’m sure with children, under the age of 50 ever answers their phone. You have to reach them by text, if anything. And so I mean, that’s the craziest thing about this hundred year history. They really have not gotten better. Every time someone thinks they’ve licked the problem something happens in the next election to kind of erase all that progress.
So to me, Jon Wiener, the big question is people have been complaining about polls. People have been criticizing polls. People have been criticizing polls as the, quote, unquote, “baby talk of democracy.” People have been trying to sabotage polls for most of this hundred-year history, but even as they get consistently no better, and even as we’ve had these terrible outcomes like in 2016, these kind of traumatizing outcomes, people are more reliant on them than ever. They have become our substitute for civic discussion, and that’s the main thing that fascinates me, and that’s the big mystery for me.

JW: You said you don’t care, and I do want to end up with why you don’t care, but we also said ‘we’ll never know’ which one is correct. And just remind us why we’ll never know which one is correct.

RP: Yes. So Nate Cohn, who’s actually I think a very transparent and interesting writer and thinker on these issues.

JW: Nate Cohn of The New York Times poll.

RP: He’s The New York Times guy. He kind of replaced Nate Silver. By the way, Nate Silver made up 20% of The New York Times website’s traffic in the weeks leading to the 2015 election, which goes to the whole issue that a lot of this is just capitalism and this is business. Nate Cohn did an experiment in, I think it might’ve been in 2020 or 2022, but he gave the same raw numbers, which is just like, here are a thousand people, here are their answers, here are their demographic characteristics. Make a prediction about who’s going to win based on these raw numbers and to a bunch of different pollsters, and they differed from the Democrat plus four to the Republican plus one. So five point swing using again, the same data, which shows, like I say, there’s so many subjective decisions the pollsters make.
I kind of had a little thought experiment. How many evangelical Christians are going to vote? So in 1976, as you know from the history, before 1976 when Jimmy Carter ran as an evangelical and politicized a lot of evangelicals for the first time, because a lot of them theologically believed that participating in politics was worldly and something they should have nothing to do with. So there’s this huge jump in the number of evangelicals in 1976. There’s another huge jump in 1980. In one case, they go overwhelmingly for Democrats. In one case, they go overwhelmingly for Republicans. Well, how many people are you going to project based on your sample, who say they’re evangelicals, you should count in the final results. I mean, someone has to decide how many women are going to vote. And yes, obviously more women are going to vote post Dobbs than pre Dobbs. But how many? It’s all a guess.

JW: Nate Cohn published another really interesting piece pointing to some of the problems that you have talked about here. He published a piece two weeks ago, I think, with three charts. The first one, if the results on election day match the current polling averages, Harris will carry the Electoral College by 46 electoral votes. If the polls are off the way they were in 2020, Trump will win by 86 electoral votes. However, if the polls are off the way they were in 2022, Harris will win by 68 electoral votes.
So the big question is, he says, whether to take the electorate of 2020 as the basis for constructing the sample for this year or the electorate of 2022. The 2020 election was the last one where Trump himself appeared on the ballot. The 2022 election, as you have just alluded to, was the first one after the Supreme Court abolished the national constitutional right to abortion.
So which is the correct model for the electorate of 2024? Which will be more important, Trump on the ballot or abortion rights on the ballot? Please tell us your answer.

RP: I don’t care. The big question is why after all this do people make polling such an important part of their psychological apparatus for getting through the day? Either they read them as masochism, they read them as therapy, as the case may be. To me, this is truly a mystery. Why do we need polling so much? I mean, one hypothesis is political outcomes are potentially scarier than they’ve ever been.

JW: That’s a good theory.

RP: I talk about my dime store of Buddhism, but I’ve always been kind of irritated and anguished by the fact that strangers, friends, relatives, friends of friends, once they find out I’m a political expert, that’s what they always want to say. Who’s going to win? Who’s going to win? Who’s going to win? And I don’t feel like 20, 30, 40 years ago, that’s what you would ask a political expert, because people just kind of understood that polling was a crapshoot, it was not scientific. But suddenly we love it. We need it.

JW: So let me underline the not scientific part: that question, which is more important, Trump on the ballot or abortion rights on the ballot in constructing the sample? Your point is this is not a scientific question. This is a political judgment.

RP: Yes.

JW: It’s an opinion. It’s an opinion. Everyone in the country can say what they think about that, but the result isn’t a scientific poll. It’s a kind of opinion journalism and punditry.

RP: It’s pretty banal. But I mean, as Kierkegaard said, “Life must be lived forwards, but viewed backwards.” All of our investments are made using the legally mandated warning that “past performance is not a guarantee of future results.”

JW: Okay. Polls are not scientific the way they claim to be, but all of us still want to know who’s going to win, and we worry about it every day.

RP: I also want to know what the weather’s going to be like tomorrow.

JW: So here’s my question for you. If reading the latest polls is not a good way to find out what is going to happen, do you have a better idea of how to live through the next couple of weeks?

RP: Yeah. don’t follow polls; organize!
I mean, it’s not that hard. There’s a wonderful book and the name and the author escapes me, that talks about how much political participation we consider politics these days has devolved into political hobbyism. It’s a hobby, right? It’s not the actual attempt to kind of mobilize human beings to achieve power. Do what I did this past Saturday in my old neighborhood, in the suburbs of Milwaukee, where I grew up in the swing state of Wisconsin. I knocked on doors – write your postcards, make your phone calls. Be the change you seek.
As the Berkeley Alternative Radio guy would say in the ’60s. ‘If you don’t like the news, make some of your own.’ And run like your candidate is 30 points behind. And if you want to do political analysis, think about what the different constituencies are and what the different parts of the coalition are, and how some might be attracted, and how to unite your friends and divide your enemies — all these basic classic points of political strategy — then study some history, meet your neighbors, talk to your neighbors.
One of the things I’ve discovered is when people do go up to me and ask this accursed question, “What’s going to happen?” And I say, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” Their jaw kind of drops because that’s what they think political experts are for. But that almost always is the spur to a richer conversation, a richer discussion about what politics is all about.

JW: “Don’t follow polls; organize!” Rick Perlstein. You can read his article, “The Polling Imperilment” at prospect.org. Thank you, Rick. We needed this.

RP: Always a pleasure.
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Jon Wiener: Two years ago, in one of the biggest upset victories of the election, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez flipped a Republican district and got elected to Congress. This is a district in Washington state that the Republican incumbent had carried in 2020 by 16 points. In that election two years ago, Gluesenkamp Perez beat the Trump candidate there by a margin of less than 1%, a little more than 2,600 votes, thereby pointing the way Democrats may be able to win majorities in some red districts.
For starters, she’s not the usual member of Congress. She’s a 34-year-old working-class woman who runs an auto repair shop with her husband. This year, she’s running for reelection against the same proto-fascist Trumper she beat two years ago, and both sides are pouring millions of dollars into this race, which is seen as key for control of the House.
For comment, we turn to Marc Cooper. He’s a journalist who’s worked for everybody from The Nation, to The Guardian, Harper’s and The New Yorker. He’s published three nonfiction books, including Pinochet and Me, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. For 15 years he taught journalism at the USC Annenberg School, and he’s also known for his youthful work as translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende, and for his escape from Chile eight days after the 1973 coup. His terrific column, The Coop Scoop appears at Substack. One more thing, Mark’s representative in Congress is Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Marc Cooper, welcome back.

Marc Cooper: Thanks very much, Jon. She is my representative, and I just came back from picking up a yard sign for her. The town that I’m in, in her district, for 12 years was represented by what I would call a moderate Trumpy, Jaime Herrera Beutler. She got crushed in the primary by the MAGA-base Republicans.

JW: She was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

MC: Right, so that put her on the S list for the Republicans, and they got rid of her. Marie is everything that most candidates say they are, and they are not. She is an authentic working-class person, or at least a small business person, as she owns a small mechanic shop, that she works on cars, with her husband. So she’s not a professional. She was unknown.
Long before the election, I wrote that she had a shot, and this was someplace that the Democrats should take seriously. They didn’t. She got almost no money. I don’t think she got any money from the DNC or the DCCC. She raised money. Now, what’s important to know here is that a lot of her funding and a lot of her support came from the previous moderate Republican who was in power before. Okay? So without the support of Herrera Beutler’s funders and some of her key players, Marie would not have been elected.

JW: In this year’s campaign, the guy running against her is the same guy who won the Republican primary as an Uber Trumper, running against the incumbent Republican, who had voted for the Articles of Impeachment. Tell us about Joe Kent.

MC: Well, you made a slight error in your pronunciation. He’s not an Uber Trumper. He’s an Oberfuhrer-Sturmer. He is closely related to the local militias. He is associated with, whatever that means, the Proud Boys, he has Proud Boys on his staff. He is a fascist, and I don’t use that word lightly. He’s the real thing when it comes to extreme right-wingers. His latest proposal, made public two days ago, is to ban legal immigration for the next 20 years.
In the primary that was held two months ago, it’s a jungle primary in which everybody can run, Marie finished first with about 46% of the vote. I think Kent got about 35, which is too many, and there are a couple other right-wing candidates out there that add up that will put him over the top if they all voted for him. I don’t think they will, and I think Marie will be elected, but I’m not going to bet my life on it.

JW: This year, big picture, the Democrats nationally need to do a couple of big things. They, first of all, obviously need to turn out pro-choice women. They need to shore up their edge with Latinos, who we are told they’ve been losing, and it would help a lot to stop losing rural voters. It seems like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez could do all three.

MC: She could. Marie is a conservative Democrat. She’s only one of eight Blue Dog democrats in Congress, I believe.

JW: Ten. 

MC: Ten. All right, a couple more. She is pro-choice. She’s not big on changing gun laws, and that’s because everybody in this state owns a gun. There are two simple propositions here. One, any Democrat to the left of her would have lost. She only won by a couple hundred votes or a thousand votes, and that was with the support of moderate Republicans. I put a yard sign out for her, because, frankly, I would rather have a Democratic majority in the house than a Republican one, and if she votes with Republicans as she does 30, 40, 50% of the time on some issues, I’d rather that than have a fascist who’s supporting a hundred percent, not to mention the majority.

JW: So, the top of the list of her list is abortion rights.

MC: Right.

JW: Here, it’s a very clear choice, because Joe Kemp, her opponent, has previously advocated a federal abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest.

MC: Oh, absolutely.

JW: The thing that many of our progressive friends are most angry about, of course, is Israel. She takes money from AIPAC, a big contributor to her. I was very sorry to see she was one of 20 Democrats to vote to censure Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian in Congress, after she used the phrase, “from the river to the sea” on social media. She also outraged our progressive friends when she voted against one of Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans.

MC: That’s correct.

JW: Which she said didn’t do much for her district.

MC: Well, that’s true, by the way. I don’t support her vote on that, and in fact, it’s going to cost my son-in-law, who just graduated law school, a couple hundred thousand dollars if that holds up, because that’s what his loans are. Right? Look Jon, it’s a very simple proposal. Everything you said is correct. The reality is, there are two candidates. It’s either her or a fascist. You’ve known me for 40 years.

JW: This is true.

MC: In most cases I would scorn those who say, ‘Oh, I’m just voting for the lesser of two evils.’ That’s not what this election is about. This election is about either the continuation of the American republic or its destruction by a Trump White House and a Trump Congress.
I am voting for the Democrat whose policies I do not like, but are much more civilized, much more acceptable, much more moderate, much more livable, than what would come out of a house dominated by Republicans. I’m not ashamed to say that. I’m proud of it. I’m also going to give her money. I do not like the fact that AIPAC gives her money and that she accepts it. She does not, however, accept donations from corporate PACs, which is to her credit.
Second, she talks a lot about pro-choice, which is good, on her TV commercials. Her other TV commercial would make no sense to somebody who lives in Los Angeles, because it’s about, “We need a federal law that we are allowed to fix our own stuff.”

JW: The right to repair.

MC: The right to repair. Like everybody in West LA wants to fix their iPhone. But if you live in East Cowlitz County, Washington, and the closest Apple Store is a hundred miles away in Portland, you might want to be able to fix your own phone legally. So these things make sense for a lower middle-class area full of people making less the median household income, it is not full of wealthy, rich, educated people. There are some, for sure. We are about 40% Democrat, maybe 45, maybe 50%, but we’re not Portland. If she was running in Portland, she’d be crushed.
This is an interesting experiment for me, having spent most of my life in Southern California and thinking about elections the way a southern Californian does. I now live in America, in one of the more civilized parts, but it’s still America. It’s not West LA, it’s not New York, and it’s not Boston. It’s southwest Washington, and with a lot of rural people, and a lot of retired military vets, etc. It’s the real world.

JW: So you say you live in America. I just want to quote her.

MC: Okay.

JW: Marie says, “The reason I am at the top of the RNC hit list is because if people like me, Democrats like me, can run and hold seats, we break the map on a governing majority. That’s because,” she says, “I am not special. There are a lot of people like me in America.”

MC: I’m on the left, but that is an argument that I am willing to consider. Because you will pardon me if I say this, but I do not believe we are on the cusp of social revolution. We are on the cusp of national socialism and white Christian nationalism. That’s what we’re on the cusp of. We who are Democrats, or to the left of Democrats, need to be in a defensive posture right now to prevent catastrophe. I believe it’s true what she’s saying that there are many districts in this country currently held by Republicans that could be won by moderate Democrats. That would not be a great thing, but it would be better than what we’ve got, for God’s sake.

JW: One of my favorite issues in your district is the bridge on I-95 over the Columbia River. This connects Oregon to Washington. Portland –

MC: Well, we deny that, but go ahead.

JW: One of Marie’s big campaign points is that she got $600 million in federal funding from Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure law to rebuild this bridge, which was built in, I think, 1917.

MC: Yeah.

JW: Her opponent calls the bridge, because it connects Vancouver, Washington, to Portland, he calls it the Antifa Superhighway.

MC: Right, of course. I forgot. The bridge is controversial for three reasons. One, it was built at the time of the Russian Revolution, and it’s not a bad bridge, but we need a bigger one, and we need better ones. It makes it hard to commute. A lot of people on this side of the river love it, because they hate Portland.
There’s still a constituency here that hates the renovation of the bridge for two reasons. One, there might be a $2 toll, God forbid, even though there’s toll bridges all over the place, and they don’t like Portland. We are a suburb of Portland, and even the downtown portion here, to downtown Portland, is maybe 15 minutes if there’s no traffic jam. So we are closer to Portland than Hollywood is to downtown Los Angeles, but we’re in a different state, and there’s a different mentality.

JW: One last word on the election. The first time that Marie ran, as you say, she got no support from the national Democrats. She had to raise all her own money, very low budget campaign.

MC: Yes.

JW: She won by a couple thousand votes. Right now, the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is supporting her enthusiastically. She’s one of the front-line candidates.

MC: They figured it out after two years.

JW: I saw one poll at the beginning of October, I think it’s the only poll recently, since the primaries, that showed the race tied at 46% each, with 8% undecided. Although, a lot of the local commentary, like you, thinks she’s more likely to win.

MC: Well, all the local publications have endorsed her except the ones that are blatantly MAGA-ish, but the major newspaper here, if you want to call it that, The Daily Paper, which acts as a pretty good family-owned paper for a small town like this, has endorsed her. She’s on the air a lot more than he is. I don’t know how much the DCCC gave her. Did you see an amount or not?

JW: I did not see an amount.

MC: I don’t think they disclosed it. But anything will help, and this is not an expensive district to run in, right? Television time is cheap. There aren’t that many TV stations that cover the area. There’s been a lot of mail advertising. But I went to a different neighborhood yesterday to work on one of my computers, and I ran into a forest of Marie signs, which I could not believe, because there’s very few signs anywhere for anybody.
By the way, I have not seen one Trump sign in this town. I’ve seen a lot of pickup trucks flying eighteen-foot-long Trump banners by thirty-year-old men with beards. I’m not a psychologist or a clairvoyant or much of a sociologist, I’m just an old journalist, but from what I can see, I don’t feel a lot of vibes for Trump this time around in this district.
This district went about 50/50. The city council is 50/50. The county council leans center-right but has some Democrats on it that are fine. So we’re not living in deep MAGA country, and that’s the point.
The real point is, forget about Alabama. Forget about Mississippi. Forget about Louisiana. If you’re a Democrat, and you want to help win this election, you better think about the Congress. We’re only five or six seats short of a majority, and we lost those because the New York State Democratic Party is so corrupt and went into such meltdown that they couldn’t hold onto their seats, and they lost a few in California, as well. Those are very, very vulnerable seats. I don’t know what the DCCC is doing, but if they’re not pouring millions of dollars into those seats, they’re making a big mistake, because that’s where the House majority is going to be decided: California, New York, and maybe Washington.

JW: Marc Cooper. You can read his weekly commentary, The Coop Scoop at Substack. He has a yard sign for Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Marc, thanks for talking with us today.

MC: Well, I haven’t put it out yet, and we’ll see how long it lasts.

JW: Okay.