Episode 405: US Midterm Elections with Alex Tarascio

What happens when voters hear promises about cheaper living — but see their government focused elsewhere? Dominic Bowen puts that question to international pollster Alex Tarascio of Cygnal in episode #405 of The International Risk Podcast. Their conversation examines voter frustration, the US #midterm #elections and the gap between political headlines and the choices people make at the ballot box. They explore shifts in the Republican coalition, the politics of the cost of living and Iran, what interest in socialism tells us about younger voters, and why strong support does not always translate into turnout. Dominic also asks how leaders should judge polling evidence and why data centres have become a source of local political tension. 

What matters more in an election: convincing people to switch sides, or getting your supporters to turn out?

Transcript:

Dominic Bowen: Today on The International Risk Podcast, we’re looking at what the data is telling us about the US midterm elections, and what current shifts could mean for both US politics, but also foreign policy, and maybe even America’s role in the world. I’m Dominic Bowen, host of The International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the topics that really matter. And my guest today is Alex Tarascio. He’s a director of policy and political strategy at Cygnal. He’s also an international pollster and a political strategist and he’s run campaigns across more than two dozen US states. He’s worked for former House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and he spent nine years with the International Republican Institute working across Europe and the Middle East on elections on political parties and against Russian disinformation. And I think this conversation is going to be insightful and a lot of fun. Alex, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.

Alex Tarascio: Thank you so much for having me.

Dominic Bowen: I’m particularly keen, just recently, Cygnal released polling that shows that non-college voters move from Republican to Democrats by about 20 points, a 20-point swing, which is, at least in my world, quite significant. And if I understand the data correctly, women without a degree appear to be moving in a particularly sharp fashion. So what has happened to one of the most important parts of the Republican coalition? And is this primarily about Trump? Is it about the economy or is about something different? Because for Republicans to lose 20 points with one of the most important voter groups in a year, that seems pretty significant to me.

Alex Tarascio: It is significant. I mean, college educated voters in the United States have been moving toward the Democratic Party or moved rather to the Democratic Party for a long time. I think it was Mitt Romney in 2012, that last won college educated voters. And so we’re 14 years out of that. Donald Trump has not won college educated voters at any point when he has been in the White House and that has only worked because non-college educated voters have continued to support him at comparably high rates. We’re not quite a 50–50 country when it comes to college educated versus non-college educated.

Alex Tarascio: And that swing of 20 points is real. We’ve been seeing it show up for quite a while and it is more intense with non-college educated women. And so there’s both an education story and a gender story. I think that both of them are meaningful and they’re both drivers, and it just happens that the non-college educated women are a more intense version of that. Sometimes, as a pollster, when I see a certain effect, it’s really that certain people happen to be women, but that’s not the driver of the story. But in this case, both those things are independently contributing to the lack of support or the drop of support there. The reasons for that? Trump’s been around for a long time, and so I don’t think that Trump has necessarily changed. There’s some people that really dislike Trump, who will point to things that he has done individually, things that he has said, I’m really skeptical of those answers. He’s been around for a long time. He’s not, he’s not really new. But the cost of living crisis in the United States is really painful to people right now.

Alex Tarascio: And the answers are, it’s difficult to get to a place where people are going to be happy because it’s not about fighting inflation. A voter that’s living in, say, rural Texas, who might be inclined to vote Republican, but is paying $9 a gallon for diesel, which is a lot for Americans. They don’t care about inflation or the rate of inflation. They care that their costs are high. And so that’s a huge driver. They want to go back to 2019. And it’s just going to be a while before we get used to the prices that are out right now. I don’t think they’re going to go back. And so it’s probably going to be a painful cycle for Republicans on that score.

Dominic Bowen: And I think a lot of people in the wash up said, yes, it was the economy. The Democrats were focusing on everything except the cost of living. And Donald Trump was speaking, right to it. If that was true, and that’s a common narrative for why Trump won his second term, why has the Trump administration or, you know, why have Republicans allowed that to get sidetracked into several areas that have resulted in the economy by many metrics, not the stock market, but in the cost of living, heading in the wrong direction?

Alex Tarascio: Any particular ones that come to mind?

Dominic Bowen: The war on Iran?

Alex Tarascio: Not the metrics, but that would be the first one that comes to mind for me and for voters that I talked to.

Dominic Bowen: Yeah, I think that seems to be, and I think there’s some data perhaps that I think actually your organisation did that questions around foreign policy and Trump’s originally stated goal of ending what he, I think he called stupid wars, or dumb wars, but clearly starting some that other people have maybe questioned the wisdom of starting. You know, is there logic behind that? Because if your argument sounds valid, and what the voters are saying sounds valid, but then what the government’s done, a government that knows why they won their second term, has then pursued policies that are perhaps headed them in the other direction, this seems confusing.

Alex Tarascio: You’re right. It is confusing to a lot of voters as well, particularly young voters. There’s, depending on how, what question you ask, there is still pretty high support. And by high, I mean, like narrowly divided, maybe a point or two underwater for continued strikes against Iran’s nuclear program. That’s about the high watermark, maybe 47% to what I saw when we polled this in early August, compared to like 49% of people who opposed it. That is different from, if I were to poll this, do you think the Iran war was a good idea, then it’s going to be nowhere near that.

Alex Tarascio: And most people don’t think so at this point. I think that at the beginning, Americans were willing to give the president the benefit of the doubt. It’s hard to know what’s actually happening. It’s hard to judge the facts. It’s not as though you can go to a reliable Iranian regime source and then judge the veracity of what the mullahs are saying. And so you just have to take them at their word, the administration on why they did this, what they want to accomplish. But we had a poll maybe in the first month of the war, and it asked, how long do you think it’ll last?

Alex Tarascio: And then I contrasted the expectations on length to the level of support, and the people that supported the war the most were the ones that thought it was going to be relatively fast, like within three months or so. And I think that was the idea, is that this has just come, what, like a month and a half or so after Venezuela, which was just shocking and wildly successful. Seemingly no consequences. Just come in and pluck this leader who had been a thorn in America’s side out of his country. And so, you know, riding high, perhaps, a little confident going in and trying to do the same thing, but not having that result. I think that Americans have a, we’re impatient. And we don’t mind a good war now and then, but we don’t want it to really be a war, if you really know what I mean. Like, If we just want to read about it, the war in Iran for a lot of people is like the war in Gaza, in that it’s something that matters that’s far away, but Americans, except for 18 that have been killed, aren’t dying in such large numbers that it has a mass effect on the public, it’s like a news item.

Alex Tarascio: But it doesn’t make people happy about it, they’re not happy about it. And they’re mostly not happy about it, because it tells the people who care about those diesel prices and those gas prices and those egg prices, like what the country is actually focusing on instead. And so I see a lot of in my polling about broken promises, and there’s this implicit promise that if you get elected on bringing down cost of living, that you’re going to do things that bring down cost of living. And the Iran war does not seem to be tied at all to doing that, even if it may be important, even if it may be a good policy, even if it may work in a year or two or something. It’s not getting cost under control. And so you’re telling voters that you don’t care about the issue that they care about the most, and they get cranky when you do that, just as they got cranky under the Democrats.

Dominic Bowen: Is it fair to say that even Republicans seem to have fundamentally different ideas about America’s role in the world, especially when it comes to wars right now? Or is there a coherent message amongst all of the candidates going into the midterms?

Alex Tarascio: Well, there’s definitely not a coherent message on that topic. America’s role in the world going into the midterms. And there rarely is foreign policy and what America should be globally is not what voters want to talk about. They will talk about it. They’ll tolerate it. And they’ll even care about it with certain topics if you get specific. If you’re general, then the default is going to be close to, I did a poll in this in like the very end of August, it was foreign policy, trade, tariff focus. And we asked this question, like, do you think America should be more involved in the world or involved in international affairs, less involved in international affairs or about the same as now.

Alex Tarascio: And 44% said less involved. There was about a quarter, 24, 25%, that said we should be more. So there’s a contingent for that. And then the remainder said about the same as we are now. Many Republicans were on that about the same because that’s the status quo answer, that’s the whatever Trump is doing answer. And so there’s the loyal Republicans. But there was a really interesting cross-section of Americans who say less. two to one in Democrats who say less versus more because you could say more involved as a Democrat and those are the people that are going to support more humanitarian aid and USAID and stuff like that.

Alex Tarascio: But the Democrats who say less, you know, what do they mean by that? Do they mean that everything Trump is doing is too much and they want to dial back? Probably. Do they mean that they want to reestablish USAID right when they get a Democrat in the White House? I don’t think so. I doubt it. There’s a lot of priorities Democrats have and there’s a lot of priorities their voters have they want various increases in social programs. They want to raise taxes on the rich. They’re not going to be able to get as much money out of that as they want to We have $40 trillion in debt and so there are choices they have to make and voters don’t want to be second They want to be first and so they’ll tolerate some of this international engagement But it’s a complicated question because if you ask do you support Ukraine you’ll get two-thirds of people to say yes and do you support them with arms, with aid, with help?

Alex Tarascio: Two thirds people will say yes. If you say do you wanna increase the size of the Indo-Pacific fleet, I think it was 70% yes to that. And so if you get specific, people are a lot more willing to go all in on that. Like as a broad general like philosophy and ideology, people wanna be prioritized first and have international things second.

Dominic Bowen: Yep, that’s incredibly interesting. Another really interesting finding that I read was that 29%. So about a third of voters under the age of 45 in the US identify as socialists with almost half the people in the US under 45 expressing some curiosity about socialism, which just makes me think, and I’m wondering if this is over simplistic, that is this just people who are upset with economic insecurity and frustration with housing affordability, or is it actually an ideological shift towards socialism? Because yeah, I think to hear your opinion, Alex, on is America moving towards more of a socialist society or a desire to see America become more socialist? Or is it just simply that people have lost faith in capitalism, a capitalism that won’t even let them buy a house?

Alex Tarascio: I think to an extent it’s both. People, when they think of socialism, they think of like Bernie Sanders, kind of a somewhat kindly, friendly, somewhat angry old man, but ultimately harmless Vermont flannel, harmless, easy, welcoming. Warm fires in a cabin. That’s what they think of with socialism. I don’t think they think of like expropriation of your wealth, your money. They think of maybe taxing other people, maybe, but not like the much higher baseline taxes is on every European, for instance, Americans at a lower income have pretty low tax rates compared to most places in the world that I travel to have real socialist systems.

Alex Tarascio: Some people get it right when we ask them, and we don’t want to dunk on people in any poll. We’re not trying to do a knowledge test. We’re not trying to make people feel like they’re dumb, but we do want to ask people if they actually know what socialism is, so we’ll do that through a combination of open-ended questions where we don’t want them to give some answers and then closed questions we’ll give them some options and there’s a division these that’s why we had socialist-curious those are people who had some idea of what socialism is but they were also wrong on quite a few measures of what it actually is like a social safety net is not socialism it is something that every Western democracy has and if you think that socialism and you say you want more socialism then that means something a little different that doesn’t mean that you want to have Pol Pot come in But then there’s some other folks who, you know, are out there in the streets, you know, with keffiyehs tied around their necks who have a very good idea what socialism means and they’ll articulate that clearly.

Alex Tarascio: And there is a strain of young people who are really intense, you know, they hate the mainstream Democratic Party and they want to elect DSA candidates, they are organisers, and they are pretty intelligent. And that strain exists. I have a hard time seeing that will really catch fire in the US I think that most of this is due to anger. It’s due to anger, it’s dissatisfaction, it’s looking at things going so well with the GDP and so well with all these big companies in the world and this new technology with AI and data centers and people are making money hand over fist but not you. And that is a frustrating thing and that’s not exclusive to the left. I’m seeing that on the right as well. There’s an anti-corporate attitude and I don’t think that translates into a new ideological breakthrough in socialism, but it does translate into just people being angry and wanting to try something new.

Dominic Bowen: So from your polling, because the New York Times has done a few really interesting articles about the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA. And after reading a few of their articles, it certainly left me with the impression that this is a new driving force in America. But what are you? Because I mean, there’s one thing to be angry and to hate corporate America and to hate the uber-rich. that’s fine, I understand that’s not new. But, you know, seeing an increase in DSA candidates, obviously we’ve got Mamdani in New York. What are you seeing in your polling? Is this a force that the Democrats and Republicans have to be considering, or is this just a blip and just angry people?

Alex Tarascio: No, they have to be considering this. Like it’s more than a blip, the anger is not gonna dissipate. And calling it angry people, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna minimize it. They’re angry in a way where like I encounter a subset of voters that we call Trump–Mamdani voters. And these are people who voted for Donald Trump because they wanted to shake the system up and they didn’t think that things were working for them. And they wanted to vote for a populist who’s, you know, the kind of the anti Mitch McConnell, John Thune type, not a polite politician.

Alex Tarascio: They want somebody who’s going to come in and change some real things. And then they turn around and they continue to be unhappy. That unhappiness hasn’t changed. And maybe they’re unhappy specifically at Trump, maybe they’re unhappy at the Senate, who knows. And then they turn around and they see what Mamdani is promising. And he has a diagnosis that is very focused on still cost of living. And the things that he identifies, one of the reasons why he’s effective is that he’s not just railing against millionaires and billionaires. He’s railing against the very specific injustices that bother people in their daily lives.

Alex Tarascio: The cost of permitting for a hot dog vendor in New York City. Why your hot dog costs $13 like that is something that affects individuals at a real level in your wallet. That’s not Elon Musk exists. That’s a conceptual thing. That’s an intellectual thing. And some people might get upset about that, but many more people get upset about the actual injustice in their lives. And so that’s one of the things Mamdani has done really, really well. And he focuses on local government governance and he tries to make things that are often kind of boring when they’re done well.

Alex Tarascio: Into interesting, exciting things, and he’ll be, he’ll continue to be effective if he focuses on that. And the tangible nature of that is one of the reasons why he’s been so effective. Any politician who does that will be effective. He doesn’t always sound like a Democrat to me. He doesn’t always sound like a socialist to me. He sounds like somebody who has a really clear idea of what’s wrong and a good diagnosis of the problem. And I think that’s what he and Trump have in common. And if socialists have a better diagnosis of the problem than Republicans or capitalists, Then they will continue to win if Republicans just say look at look over there It’s a socialist and hope that there’s enough anti socialist attitude in the population that will that’ll be enough They’re dead wrong. That’s absolutely not gonna work It’ll only work maybe for 65 plus people who have something in their head when they think socialist But it will not work for younger people that are like, okay, he’s so what he’s a socialist. Let’s try it out

Dominic Bowen: Very interesting and I think part of this is around voter turnout. We spoke to a Democratic candidate earlier this week and she was talking about in Tennessee that there are more non-voters than voters in Tennessee. If they can get people out to vote, there could be a big shift in Tennessee, at least according to her analysis. I understand that some recent analysis is that 76% of people that voted for Harris are extremely motivated to vote in the upcoming midterms compared to about 59% of Trump voters. So I’m wondering about this is the Republicans going to face a voter turnout problem as well as a motivation problem in the in the midterms other than just the cost of living. Is there actually going to be a turnout problem that the Republicans need to overcome?

Alex Tarascio: Right now, yes, right now that’s a pretty good bet that they will face that turnout problem. that is the whole nature of the campaign. I think that it’s probably right when people say that most people’s minds are pretty much made up in like going into Labor Day, basically now. We’re a little bit past Labor Day, but there’s some persuasion that’s happening. There are some swing voters, but really it’s trying to convince people to turn out to vote. In the presidential election, our turnout rate is like 62, 64, 65%. In a midterm election, it’s like 45%.

Alex Tarascio: And so there’s a pretty big drop. It might be even a little bit lower. In 2022, it was quite high. In 2018, it was quite high. In 2014, it was one of the lowest turnout rates in modern history. And so if the Republican Party turns out like it’s 2014, and the Democratic Party turns out like it’s 2018, that’s the blowout scenario that you’re seeing on some Democrat sides. I don’t think that will happen. I think a post-COVID 2020 was a high watermark for turnout and we’ve sort of been dropping from then ever since, to readjusting to something like a new normal, whatever that looks like.

Alex Tarascio: And so this midterm I expect turnout will be certainly less than 2024. Whether or not it’s higher or lower than 22, I think probably a little lower for a bunch of reasons. And some of that is motivation. But as a pollster, this is why I don’t just poll registered voters. If I just poll registered voters, then I’m going to be looking at a whole lot of voters that are not going to vote, and then I’m going to be wrong. And so when I tell you that Democrats are winning by 10 or something, and then they win by 5, I could say, well, sorry, not all those people showed up.

Alex Tarascio: Well, it’s not a very satisfying answer. That’s why most polls that you should be seeing not all, but most are of likely voters. And likely voters we determined not just by asking people if they’re likely to vote, because people lie, but not in the way that they’re not lying maliciously. They’re lying because there’s a lot of social desirability with saying that you’re going to vote. And it’s like asking polling Christians, and are you going to go to church on Sunday? You know, 100% of them say they are, but they’re actually not.

Alex Tarascio: What’s going on there? They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to tell somebody over the phone or even a text or even an online poll that they’re not going to go to church on Sunday, which for secular United States is not going to go vote. Those two things are about equivalent importance. But what we can do instead is look at a really useful system called the voter file, and that is publicly available. And that data set lets us see how many people voted or if you voted, not for who, but if you voted in the last election and the one before it and the one before it and the one before it.

Alex Tarascio: And so we call people who voted in that regard four-of-four voters. Those are people who are very likely to vote. So the majority of the midterm electorate is going to be four-of-four voters. it’s about 57, 58%. Three-of-four voters, so you’ve missed one election out of the past four, they will vote at higher rates. They’ll make up like 20-ish percent of the electorate. Zero of four voters, so like you’re a new voter or we don’t have any voter history of you, they make up about 0.9% of the midterm electorate. And so for new voters or non-voters, there’s just not many of them turn out. And so for your Tennessee candidate, she’s right that there are a lot of non-voters. They’re going to stay non-voters. Like we just have so much history about what these people are going to do. Can you get them out? Sure. Can you raise the Titanic up from the ocean? Sure. But like, is it going to happen? And so we should be honest with people about the reality of history and if you can deviate from that or not.

Alex Tarascio: We all get to make choices, but statistics don’t tend to lie, and when you look at aggregate, these people are mostly going to stay home.

Dominic Bowen: It’s quite interesting. When you talk about statistics don’t tend to lie, but we’ve seen that the pollsters across Europe, across North America, across Australia, quite often getting some really blowout elections completely wrong, and more and more people talking about the, I’m better off following the odds on Kalshi or Polymarket. Talk to me about that. You’re obviously a professional pollster. You’ve been throwing down numbers very confidently and I think accurately. How can we be confident these predictions have got any merit at all to them?

Alex Tarascio: Now, who’s your sample? Who’s the thousand people? Are they a thousand voters? Okay, are they actual voters? Are they potential voters? If I’m going to survey all Americans, that would include children, but that’s not really who we mean. So it should include adults, but if those are those adults all from one state, one city, are they from the whole country? Are they representative of the country? Do I have the proper balance of race to the extent like is race important in the United States? It’s very important. And so we definitely need to know race.

Alex Tarascio: Do I have the right balance of education? Because we talked in the beginning about how important that is. That’s very predictive. And so I need to have that question there. I need to know ideally who they voted for in 2024, I need to know if they intend to vote. And so there’s a lot of demographic questions that I should ask in assembling what I think the representative sample is of these people. Every pollster makes those assumptions, and some of those pollsters will make those assumptions public. And anybody who consumes polls regularly should check and see if those assumptions have been made public.

Alex Tarascio: And if they’re not, then you should be a little suspicious of whatever poll you’re looking at, because you just don’t know who these pollsters talk to and so you can assess on their own merits every single poll because that’s what I do and you know we do our best to get it right but I’m not a public pollster I’m a private one and if I get it wrong I get fired and so private pollsters have a strong incentive to get it right public pollsters they want to make news and that’s cool but they will still have a job and still be employed if they make news even if they’re wrong my clients will make decisions that cost them votes and time and a ton of money if I lead them astray and so I will not be working for them for long if I get it wrong.

Dominic Bowen: Alex, you know, in the last 48 hours, I’ve had four client meetings with one of Sweden’s largest banks, one of the largest investment companies, a forestry company, and a large media company, I didn’t bring up data centers with any of them. All four brought up data centers with me. It is just a topic that you just cannot escape. And in Sweden, it’s nowhere near as big an issue as it is in America. How much are data centres going to influence the midterms? You talked about tangible issues that people can feel. Can they feel data centers or can they feel the cost of electricity or the noise from them? How much of this is a real issue or just something that’s scary and in the distance?

Alex Tarascio: It’s a really good question. The data centers are mostly not a partisan issue. And they are mostly not a partisan issue because there’s not a clear party that is pro-data center or anti-data center. That is up for grabs right now. I think that the Democratic Party would very much like to be the party of anti-data centers. It’s not clear to me that they are right now. Now, people identify more that who’s in power in that state has more control and influence over data centers, and Trump is also very unapologetically pro-AI and pro-data center. And so, you know, if you had to pick Republican, it’s probably more of a Republican issue, but it’s not settled by any means. And cost of living is the top concern in every single poll I do between 25 and like 32 percent of people. Data centers is a, you could make an argument that’s a manifestation of cost of living, but it doesn’t actually raise your costs, does the opposite. And it is not yet an issue that people are gonna be voting on, except at the local level, at the most local level.

Alex Tarascio: Federal policy, I have lobbyist friends, lobbyists don’t have a ton of use for pollsters, because I’m in the business of public opinion, not like private elite opinion, which I think lobbyists more are, but I have heard from quite a few lobbyists friends that are like, hey, I have data center clients, and there’s nothing that I can do to help them because there’s no federal regulations now that are problematic. The problems that data centers have are all at the local level, at the popular level. And so come and talk to my client because they need help and they need to understand why this community hates them.

Alex Tarascio: And so there is very significant Republican opposition and in most of the states, I’m seeing a little less democratic opposition. That’s partly because of the states where they’re coming in, that’s a US quirk. But if you are coming into like Arizona, Virginia, Texas, the Dakotas, Alaska, like those are all Republican states. Those are Republican communities, especially if you’re going rural, where there’s a lot of room, a lot of land. And so this is mostly like a Republican debate. It’s not something that’s happening in like the suburbs of Cleveland, although there are lots of data centers in places like that. And so it’s not yet a clear partisan issue where I think it’ll manifest this election. And is it going to last until next election? I’m a little skeptical, but that does not mean that it’s not a huge issue.

Dominic Bowen: Interesting. Thanks for unpacking that. And just in the last 60 seconds, Alex, I’d love to hear from you. It’s a question we ask all guests on the international risk podcast. When you look around the world, when you’re speaking with constituents and when you’re speaking with your family and friends and having dinner at night, What are the international risks that concern you the most?

Alex Tarascio: Actually, I’m a lot less concerned about international risks now than I was like 2019 or during the Biden administration. I don’t see an appetite for a fight from China right now. I don’t see the capability of like a real attack that can do damage from the Russians. Although it seems like every European Ministry of Defense would certainly disagree with that and they have reasons for that. I don’t understand those reasons, but, you know, they know what they’re talking about. I think that the Iranians are going to continue to be a problem for a while, but in a way that is like within the bounds that we’ve set. I think that Latin America has a lot of reason for hope. And so biggest risks, you know, politically, it’s the Iran war ending and that it might last a really long time. But if that’s the worst one that’s out there, that’s a pretty good position to be in. And so foreign policy wise right now, I think, is one of the more optimistic that I have been in quite a few years.

Dominic Bowen: That’s very pleasing news, Alex, and certainly, as you said, some of the assessments coming out of the Estonians, the Swedes, the Danish, the UK is very concerning. But alas there’s certainly some things that are looking positive. But thank you very much for that. And thank you very much for coming on the podcast today.

Alex Tarascio: Thank you so much for having me.

Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Alex Tarascio from Cygnal. I really appreciated hearing his thoughts on the upcoming US midterm elections. Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Madeleine Humphrey. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We’ll speak again in the next couple of days.