In this week's live recording of the Strength In Numbers podcast, G. Elliott Morris and David Nir, publisher of The Downballot, talked Iran war polling, the chaos of the Texas Senate primaries, and Trump's cratering approval numbers — including a record we really didn't expect to hit this early.
Here are the big takeaways:
The Iran war is historically unpopular — and it’s only going to get worse. Across five high-quality polls, an average of about 38% of Americans support the military strikes in Iran and 50% oppose them. That makes this the most unpopular war at launch in the history of modern polling. For comparison, 92% of Americans backed the war in Afghanistan, and 72% supported the Iraq invasion when those conflicts began. If history is any guide, war polling only moves in one direction from here: down.
We also explore how a few Republican-aligned pollsters have tried to manufacture better numbers with loaded questions, but even their most egregious efforts have barely cracked a majority.Our recap of the Texas Senate primaries. On the Republican side, John Cornyn outperformed his polls and narrowed what was expected to be a wider gap with Ken Paxton, finishing within 2 points and heading into a late-May runoff. The 50+1 average had Paxton up 6 — a 7-point miss, but actually below the 13-point average error for primary polls. James Talarico, meanwhile, won the Democratic nomination and is running a populist, anti-billionaire campaign that could make Texas genuinely competitive — Elliott estimates he has roughly a 50-50 shot against Paxton and a 35-40% chance against Cornyn in the general.
If you missed our livestream, you can watch it by clicking play above. We record the podcast live every Thursday at 2 PM Eastern. We always discuss a few pre-planned newsy topics or deep dives 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!
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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