FiveThirtyEight Politics ABC News

In this installment of "Model Talk," Nate and Galen discuss a recently published assessment of how our 2022 midterm forecast performed. How did the polling averages and seat-gain projections compare with the actual results? If we said there was a 70 percent chance a candidate would win a race, did that actually happen 70 percent of the time?
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Americans are spending more and more time alone, and more than a third reported experiencing “serious loneliness" in 2021. The director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- the longest study of human life ever conducted -- concluded in a new book that close personal relationships are the "one crucial factor [that] stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity." A lack of those relationships can actually have an impact on political behavior and interest in extreme ideologies. Galen Druke speaks with the director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, about the lessons his findings have for politics in America.
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Although much of our elections-related attention is already trained on 2024, there are consequential elections happening this very calendar year. The crew discusses the races to watch in 2023. They also look at how the Democratic Party's effort to rearrange its presidential primary calendar is going, and ask whether a survey of Republican National Committee members was a good or bad use of polling.
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In his new book "Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America," Washington Post national columnist Philip Bump argues that many of the fissures that the country is facing today — politically, economically, culturally — have to do with the Baby Boomers getting old. Galen speaks with him.
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The crew discusses how debates on both the debt ceiling and the future of Rep. George Santos’s career might unfold. In light of new data showing union membership at its lowest point since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began counting, they also look at how that decline has shaped U.S. politics.
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Over the weekend, the White House announced that five more classified documents from the Obama administration were found at President Biden's Delaware home. The crew asks whether comparisons to former President Donald Trump's own classified document scandal are apt. They also discuss why gas stoves became such a hot topic of debate on the internet and what the 2024 primary for U.S. Senate in California will look like.
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