Paul Krugman talks special elections with David Nir and G. Elliott Morris

Paul Krugman is many things: a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a beloved professor, and a former New York Times columnist, among others.

But now he’s also a fellow Substacker, publishing his eponymous must-read newsletter every weekday—and a special video feature on the weekends.

So it was with the utmost pleasure that I joined his weekly video chat, along with G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers, to discuss one of my favorite topics: special elections.

At least, that’s where we started! With a fellow like Paul, I expected a wide-ranging conversation, and that’s exactly what unfolded. We not only talked about why Democrats are racking up massive overperformances in special elections, but we also explored:

* Why polls don’t look quite as strong for the Democrats—or do they?

* What might happen if Trump floods the streets with troops, L.A.-style, just before the midterms

* How legacy media is failing to meet the moment—and why independent outlets are more important than ever

And so much more. My only regret is that we stopped the recording before we chatted about our mutual love for Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels (and why the TV adaptation is no good at all!).

You can watch our entire discussion above, and you can also read a complete transcript below. I hope you enjoy watching this conversation as much as I enjoyed participating in it!

PAUL KRUGMAN: So hi, everyone. As regular viewers know, I try on Saturdays to have a video conversation with interesting people. And this time is going to be a little different because I'm talking with two people, David Nir and G. Elliott Morris, with at least the starting topic suggested by David, being: what can we learn from the special elections that have been taking place? But I think this will probably devolve into a general discussion of the current political scene. And it also, maybe not so unusually, is a subject of which I know nothing. So I'm going to rely on two guys who do know something responding to questions from an ignorant interlocutor.

So let's just see how this all plays out. And I'm going to actually start with David, because it was your idea that we have this conversation and talk about special elections, but I think that we want to get into some broader things. But why is now a good time to talk about special elections?

DAVID NIR: So Paul, interestingly, you were the inspiration for this conversation because recently you published a piece in which you linked to something that Elliott wrote at his Substack, Strength in Numbers, and Elliott's piece relied on work that me and my team have done at our Substack, called The Downballot.

We’ve spent many years looking closely at special elections because they can give us insight into the broader political environment because these are real elections. People are showing up to express their political preferences. And if you look at them the right way, they can actually tell you what people think, what is going on in people's minds, what does the broader political environment look like?

And at this point, in this election cycle, in Trump's second term, we've seen about 30 special elections across the country. And we know that compared to expectations, Democrats are crushing it. They are beating expectations by huge margins. On average, when we look at them collectively, they are running 16 points ahead of where we would expect a normal Democrat to run in these elections. And if these patterns hold true, that would be more than enough for Democrats to take back the House next year.

KRUGMAN: Okay. The thing about special elections, on one hand, they're real votes, and we want to talk a little bit about polling, but the good news is they’re real votes. This is not asking people what they think, which may be what they think you want them to think, or whatever. This is actual votes. But on the other hand, special elections are not a representative sample of the population. So what should we be making of that?

NIR: I think you nailed that question there. It's a really, really important one because we know that the kind of people who show up for a special election, they tend to look different than the folks who show up in a midterm election and certainly from the folks who show up in a presidential election every four years. These folks tend to be much more politically engaged, typically higher educated, typically more affluent. Despite those differences, Paul, the fascinating thing is that if we look back several decades, we see that these special election performances, again, taken in aggregate, have typicall