All right, I'm already recording so let's get to it. You know you know you're part right?

No

Hello and welcome to the 538 politics podcast. I'm Galen Druke. I'm Nate Silver and

This is a mail-man or something like it

This is we don't have a model as listeners are probably very aware. We're just gonna answer listener questions and the last time we did this we asked listeners for ideas of what to call this show where we answer your questions. I think the best suggestion we got was going postal although I don't really know if we should call this show like going postal. I don't know that's a little aggressive unless you feel like it suits you Nate. It's a little

Triggering isn't it? Yeah, I know you can get away with these days. Okay, so this is model talk or mailbag talk or going postal whatever you want to call it but anyway we're going to answer some questions from listeners. We got a lot of questions excited to dig into them some about the New York City mayoral race but lots of others about national politics and all kinds of interesting hypotheticals that listeners thought up before we get to this question is Nate how's it going how's book rating or should I say

I'm playing poker as a full-time job again. So what we're in now is the research phase so starting to line up interviews trying to do some background reading this is the fun part the research

Interim phase is fun the actual writing is much harder so yeah I'm going to Las Vegas tomorrow for two weeks which is a long time wait what yeah I would say that I'm jealous except that I don't actually think that I am it's going to be hot as hell out there.

I'm not planning to be outdoors too much but now it's going to be extremely hot it's hard to go running and stuff like that I mean I have a very love hate religion more love than hate I like Vegas but like two weeks is going to be a long time but trying to line stuff up I was telling you offline like you know you try to set up interviews with like gamblers you poker players and they're often very friendly and happy to talk but like in that world you schedule things very spontaneously like part of the charm of being a poker player professional gamblers like you're not going to be a good guy.

You're not dictating some nine to five schedule right also people play in poker tournaments. This is inside baseball again thinking about tournaments is you don't know how long you're going to play in theory you can be playing for five straight days which is what you want if you make the final table but often you bust out in the first couple of hours so lots of lots of people on my to meet up with lists and very little organized plan to do it but it's going to be a fun trip I think.

Hey now you know what it's like to be me as somebody who's trying to schedule podcast recordings with you while you're in the middle of a poker tournament I am very aware of how difficult it is to get poker players to schedule at a specific time well it's part of like a karma thing like because I can say like there's a 98% chance that I'll be available on Monday morning but it seems like that karma because then you're

competing that 2% chance that you'll make the final table probably won't happen or whatever so it's kind of a super decision thing it comes with the territory. All right well I hope you enjoy Vegas but for now let's get into some of the questions that listeners had for us and I will say we're going to start with the New York City mayoral race but for people who are sick of that contest we're going to move on relatively quickly so just bear with us the first question we got was are there any major takeaways from the New York City mayoral race with the information available.

Can we tell anything from the polls and results or is it too soon so one thing is that in a race that looked as though it was going to be I thought it'd be quite hard to pull it looks like the polls are going to have done a pretty good job.

Not all polls had Yang fading quite to the extent he did and not all polls showed quite as largely for Adams but like it's pretty good pretty close for a race that all these candidates lots of last minute developments that was going to be hard race to survey.

I guess I haven't had even on Twitter very many hot takes about the mayoral race because I think I can mention a wisdom is probably pretty right and pretty straightforward that Adams was seen as the most reliable candidate on crime and even Democrats in New York are concerned about crime that doesn't mean Adams necessarily has some like extremely draconian.

The stance on crime but he's not a defund the police guy like my the wildy wasn't there wasn't again he is next cop talks about the need for both reform and security there are some comparisons to the 2020 democratic primary I think where Adams has some analogy to Joe Biden he had a lot of support among.

Black voters a lot of support among working class voters in electric in New York is like a lot of people of color who are families and working class it's fun to like do the stonk where you're like oh you know no one gave Adams a chance I think it's not true I mean people kind of recognize that Adams was the front runner email Yang I think is more comparable to like.

People to church or something from the primary where for him he didn't have this established base of support except Asian American communities where did quite well but he didn't have this established base of support and so he was more subject to media controversy is like is kind of gambit of let's just stay in the news stay in people's minds somewhere in their top five and we don't know the right choice results get so there are lots of caveats all around here and style and certain.

The Adams going to win but it's a strategy that seemed like it was worth trying but it obviously came up pretty thin at the end.

We got a question from may hold that specifically address that saying can you talk about the media hype of Andrew Yang's campaign relative to his performance so I would say with regards to hype I think the media in New York were pretty critical of.

Andrew Yang he got a lot of attention but he also got a lot of scrutiny so I don't know that it's necessarily hype in the sense of like wow look at this amazing newcomer who's yeah leading in the polls as much as who is Andrew Yang what does he stand for and what kind of mayor were you be.

I think that's right it was largely negative media attention and I think at first again that suited Yang just fine because he's like again you're paying attention to me other candidates can't really get.

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