We have some very exciting news: Next week, G. Elliott Morris and David Nir will record the Strength In Numbers podcast live and in-person in Washington, DC—and we’d love it if you’d join us!
Our session will take place on Thursday, April 23, at 11:15 AM at the America Votes Summit, which is being held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center (the address and directions can be found here).
Elliott and David will dive deep into the hard data they’re relying on to make sense of the 2026 midterms, from special elections to rigorous polling. We’ll also be releasing an exclusive new poll explaining why voters are down on Democrats—and how to win them back. Plus, we’ll be taking your questions in an extended Q&A session!
The first 75 listeners who RSVP can attend free of charge. Just click below:
We really hope to see you there, and we’d love to chat with you after the show, too!
In this week’s live recording of the Strength in Numbers podcast, G. Elliott Morris and David Nir preview new results from the April Strength in Numbers/Verasight survey and dive deep into the big economic debate of the moment: Why do Americans feel so terrible about the economy when unemployment is near historic lows? Elliott walks through his new analysis of “excess prices” and what it means for the political environment heading into 2026.
Here are the big takeaways:
Trump’s numbers hit new lows across the board. A sneak preview of our new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds Trump hitting his worst approval overall, and on prices in particular. The generic ballot sits at Democrats plus 8, consistent with a D+7 average over the past year. That’s a margin large enough to flip the House and potentially put the Senate in play. More to come next week!
Low economic sentiment is not just a social media problem — it’s an excess prices problem. Consumer sentiment just hit its lowest level ever recorded, and a popular theory holds that the news and social media have simply broken people’s brains about the economy. Elliott’s analysis points to a different culprit: Prices are roughly 10% above where they’d be if pre-COVID inflation trends had continued, and traditional economic models fail to account for this because they use year-over-year inflation rather than cumulative price shocks. When you swap in a measure of “excess prices” (adjusted for how accustomed people were to inflation beforehand), the models predict current consumer sentiment far more accurately, including in the high-inflation 1970s.
There’s no quick fix for low sentiment, and that spells trouble for both parties. Actual deflation — bringing prices back down — is essentially impossible without triggering a recession, as Paul Krugman and others have argued. Even in the best-case scenario where inflation returns to 2%, Elliott estimates it would take six to seven years for excess prices to normalize and consumer sentiment to recover — and with tariffs, the Iran war, and mass deportations pushing inflation higher, the realistic timeline is closer to a decade. Until then, voters will likely keep punishing whichever party is in power, fueling what Elliott has called “an era of one-term presidencies.”
If you missed our video livestream, you can watch it by clicking play on the web version of this post at gelliottmorris.com. We record the podcast live every Thursday at 2:00 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned topics and then answer questions submitted live by viewers.
You can also subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app to listen on your own time. And if you do listen via one of those apps, please drop us a five-star rating and review if you feel we’ve earned it — it really helps people discover the show!
A reminder that paid subscribers to Strength In Numbers get to participate in our live Q&A!
You can also read the transcript of our conversation by clicking the headline of this article to take you to the web version of the podcast, then clicking the button just below the byline that looks either like a piece of paper or is labeled “Transcript,” like so:
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