Title: Do Moderates Win More Elections?

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Well, it's official. Last night, Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 New York City mayoral race.

Zohran Mamdani: The future is in our hands.

[applause]

Zohran Mamdani: My friends, we have toppled a political dynasty.

Brooke Gladstone: This local race has captured the attention of the national media since June, when he won the Democratic primary, partly because he is young, energetic, and a candidate who mobilized voters, partly because he's a dual citizen of Uganda and the United States, is Muslim, and supports Palestinian rights. I think mostly because he comes with a heap of progressive policy proposals, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and darn charismatic to boot.

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Brooke Gladstone: New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand didn't back Mamdani, and the top-ranking House Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, waited until the day before early voting began to endorse the Democratic nominee. Mamdani's divided party support reflects an intensifying argument over whether Democratic candidates must move closer to the political center or further away to win. It's a debate that stretches back decades. Remember Bill Clinton and the New Democrats? This current iteration, which picked up steam after Kamala Harris was roundly defeated in the 2024 election, has come to seem increasingly existential.

Late last month, The New York Times weighed in with an editorial that looked at the Democratic House candidates who won in districts that also went for Donald Trump, and it concluded, "Candidates closer to the political center from both parties continue to fare better in most elections than those further to the right or to the left. The Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party." Elliott Morris is a journalist, statistician, and author of the data-driven news website Strength in Numbers.

This past summer, he and data scientist Mark Rieke came out with a model that analyzed the same data cited by The New York Times editorial board, comparing how Democratic congressional candidates fared in their districts to how Kamala Harris fared in the same districts in 2024. They found that moderation was not the silver bullet Democratic strategists seem to be looking for. Elliott, welcome to the show.

Elliott Morris: Thanks, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: You've been embroiled in a debate that's been playing out for a long time in Substack newsletters and Bluesky posts, and recently in the editorial pages of The New York Times about whether Democratic candidates should move closer to the political center in order to win. Give me the contours of the debate as it stands now.

Elliott Morris: The New York Times and the people on the side of The New York Times editorial board, these are some bloggers and some Democratic party consultants, they analyze the difference between how congressional Democrats performed in 2024 and how the presidential candidate Kamala Harris performed. Their claims, based on that analysis, is that the people that they call moderates, people with moderate ideological voting records in Congress, or in The New York Times case, candidates who received money from the Blue Dog PAC and other moderate super PACs, that those people outperform Kamala Harris more than progressive candidates do. People who are endorsed by the Justice Democrats.

That is essentially the entirety of The New York Times' analytical framework here.

Brooke Gladstone: Kamala Harris was viewed by a lot of people as a moderate candidate. Too moderate after the Biden political operatives infested her campaign and put her vice presidential candidate into a box and didn't let him out. If we're comparing what The New York Times seems to be positioning as a progressive candidate against moderate candidates, is that even accurate?

Elliott Morris: Yes, there are some problems with this grouping based on what super PAC endorsed you. For example, there are some, what I would consider moderate Democrats, like Rubén Gallego in Arizona, who did not receive money from the super PACs, that The New York Times say makes you a moderate. There's definitely some messiness with this categorization.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. Let's also dig into this data that they were talking about. What they were examining were the differences between how a moderate congressional Democratic candidate did in their district compared to how Kamala Harris did in the same district, but these were mostly purple districts where there would be, it seems to me, a built-in preference for a moderate.

Elliott Morris: Yes, this is one criticism of their metric. They're using the Kamala Harris campaign as their stand-in for a replacement-level progressive, what in baseball is called a wins above replacement candidate. I think this is wrong because, as you know, these purple districts would not have nominated Kamala Harris as their congressional candidate, and so the metric is inherently biased toward the moderates that they claim do so much better in elections.

Brooke Gladstone: How many of these moderates that did so much better than Kamala Harris in their own districts were incumbents?

Elliott Morris: The New York Times's analysis is biased for a few reasons, in my opinion. One is their selection of baseline. Two is many of the Democrats that The New York Times call moderates that overperformed were already elected by the people in their district, and that tends to give them a built-in advantage. The New York Times does not distinguish between moderate candidates who are funded very well and progressives who are not, which tends to bias this metric, as well, towards the candidates who just raised more money, and they attribute that falsely to their moderation.

Brooke Gladstone: What were the other factors that predicted elections better?

Elliott Morris: Well, there's some fundraising problems for some of these people. Now, the critics will say that's because they're not moderate, but if you actually look only at moderates, then candidates who fundraise better do better. The moderates that lost didn't have as many resources. This suggests that there's something else about the candidates that makes voters not like them as much, and they lose.

You can call it candidate quality or district fit, but the point of our analysis is that to suck up all of those extra reasons and call them moderation is a dramatic oversimplification of how elections work and leads us to make conclusions about the direction that the party should go that are not actually warranted by a deeper analysis of the data.

Brooke Gladstone: You were mentioning the conditions in the district, why it wasn't a good fit, which leads us to policy. In 2024, there was inflation.

Elliott Morris: Yes, that's right. Here's a little fact for you, Brooke. Nowhere in The New York Times' editorial about moderation and why Democrats lost in 2024 do they talk about inflation. That seems to me to be egregious omission in their narrative about why Democrats underperformed that year.

Brooke Gladstone: You're saying they need to create more relevant baselines than moderation?

Elliott Morris: That's right. You don't want to just stand in Kamala Harris for a competitive congressional candidate in a moderate district.

Brooke Gladstone: You published your own model with data scientist Mark Rieke last summer. Didn't you also find that moderate Democrats outperformed progressives only by a much smaller margin?

Elliott Morris: Yes, we say that the moderation bonus is about a point, maybe a point and a half if you really stretch it. Again, I'm not claiming that progressives do better. My big claim here is that the existing empirical models overstate the value of moderation for a few reasons. Then I also say this one percentage point advantage is smaller than a lot of the other factors that predict elections that we're talking about. Incumbency, fundraising experience, general vibe of district fit, you might call it in 2025. That therefore, pushing the Democratic Party to adopt the policy that should only nominate moderates is missing the forest for the trees.

Picking out one thing that you can explain the election with and say, "This explains all of elections."

Brooke Gladstone: Right. This idea that capturing a moderate majority of Americans will win elections goes back to Richard Nixon's so-called "Silent Majority," a term that he used in a speech back in 1969. It once was conventional wisdom that a decisive slice of the electorate is really centrist, moderate, and if you could just pull them in, you can win. That's not true anymore. You found that, and I quote, "The premium that voters place on ideological moderation has declined by 80% since the 2000 election."

Elliott Morris: Yes, the thing that has really changed about politics since 1969 is the rise of partisan sorting and a polarized public. There are a lot of moderates out there, but they are not as willing to be swing voters to change the side of the aisle that they typically vote on because of their other identities. In the most pressing case, the identity that they have with a political party. You are a Republican or a Democrat first before you are a moderate.

Brooke Gladstone: I've read that in some polls, you are a Republican or a Democrat before you're a man, a woman, a Christian. That this is a much more potent personal identifier than you would imagine.

Elliott Morris: In every case where political scientists empirically have looked at the value of issue positions versus your group attachment or your identity at predicting how people would vote, they have come to the conclusion that group attachments and your identity matters much, much more. Orders of magnitude more now than the issue positions you hold. A good 2018 paper by Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope found that you could take conservative Trump voters and tell them that Trump supported a liberal policy, and they would become 20% points likelier to support that liberal policy.

What matters here is not issue positions and what people want their government to do. It's essentially who they want to control their government.

Brooke Gladstone: I was fascinated by the fact that you've said that-- there was a paper by Andy Hall at Stanford that had previously come to the conclusion that moderates do do better. Then that changed.

Elliott Morris: Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, two political scientists in California, had previously analyzed whether or not more ideologically extreme House primary candidates performed better than ideologically moderate candidates for the House. They looked at this on the Democratic and Republican side. Their analysis previously had found a large advantage, about 6% to 12% points for the moderates. In March this year, they published a retraction in which they say that their original case is "Far weaker than they previously thought," and that the earlier analysis "Should not be relied on." This is not just a debate that's been happening in the practitioner space.

In fact, the most rigorous peer-reviewed empirical analysis has come to the conclusion that moderation is not worth as much as The New York Times et al think it's worth.

Brooke Gladstone: One reason why I found it so interesting is that anybody who's been paying any attention to politics at all would see that that would have to be the case because we are so much more balkanized in our extreme positions. Otherwise, how could Trump have been elected to begin with?

Elliott Morris: Yes, we found that if you were a moderate and a high performer, you could do 20% points better than the presidential nominee in your district in the year 2000 compared to a progressive. Now, that bonus has decreased substantially to maybe 1% point. Again, that depends on what data you look at and what things you control for. At the very least, we can say the value of moderation has decreased by at least 10 times and maybe closer to 20 times over the last 20 years.

Brooke Gladstone: About a week after that New York Times editorial, there was a center-left group, the Welcome PAC, which published a big report called Deciding to Win, and it looked at a lot of polling data. Then, like The Times, concluded that the Democrats can win by going more moderate, noting that recent polling data found that and that 70% of voters think that the Democratic Party is out of touch. Thoughts?

Elliott Morris: Well, first off, many voters also think the Republican Party is out of touch.

Brooke Gladstone: How many Republicans think that the Republican Party's out of touch?

Elliott Morris: I think one relevant point, just about the context of the report, is that they didn't really bother to give us that number, and they don't publicly release it. A comparative number from the Associated Press-NORC, they recently asked, "Do you view either the Republicans or the Democratic Party as unfavorable or favorable?" In their polling, 58% of the public says they view the Democratic Party unfavorably, and 51% of the public says they view the Republican Party unfavorably. We're not talking about one party here that's dramatically out of step with the American public and another one that's the popular mandate serving savior of democracy. We're talking about two parties that people are deeply unhappy with.

Brooke Gladstone: With regard to the Deciding to Win conclusions, you had two critiques, an empirical one and a strategic one.

Elliott Morris: Yes. First, I think they present a pretty biased list of policies. Just for an example, expanding drug price negotiation, that is a Democratic policy, and it's very popular, according to the Welcome PAC Deciding to Win research effort, something Joe Biden pushed in Congress. We can say that's a Democratic policy, but the unpopular policies that they ascribe to Democrats are things like abolishing the police, abolishing prisons, lowering the voting age to 16, or getting rid of AP courses in public schools. What's called tracking. These are actually not Democratic policies. They appear nowhere in the Democratic Party's manifesto in 2024. These are not things that Kamala Harris was running on.

Again, the data that these people are presenting does not actually speak to reality and yields itself to conclusions that are nonsensical. Because the advice would be Kamala Harris shouldn't have said "Abolish the police." Well, she didn't say that on the 2024 campaign. What are we actually talking about here when we're talking about moderating our issue positions? When you start really digging into it, the advice isn't very actionable.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Right. They say, though, that the Democrats have perception issues, that voters perceive the Democrats to be further on the left, perhaps than they are. You coined a term called "The strategist's fallacy" to illustrate what's really going on here.

Elliott Morris: This fallacy refers to the thinking among elites or strategists in the Democratic Party that voters make decisions about voting the same way they do, which is to match up the ideological issue preferences of themselves and the candidates and pick a candidate that is closest to them on all of their issues. If you just take all of the positions that the average person has, then they'll vote for you. I think this is a fallacy as issue positions are not the only thing that contribute to voting behavior. In fact, as I've pointed out, the predominant factor is your social ties, how your family and your friends feel towards the candidates, and what sort of identity groups you are a member of, and how you feel the parties are standing up for those identity groups.

Brooke Gladstone: You found that only about 20% of voters can reasonably define the parties as liberal or conservative or tell us what policy issues are liberal or conservative.

Elliott Morris: In 1964, Philip Converse found that about 10% of the public could place policy positions into ideologically liberal or conservative bucket, and that they could describe what those things meant when you asked them. This has been updated. A 2007, this great book by Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe. The book's called Neither Liberal nor Conservative, finds the same thing, that people just don't think about politics in the same ideological terms that the strategists do.

That if you're mapping that ideological thinking on the American public, you're leading yourself down a rabbit hole, I guess, that they won't follow. Bastardized metaphor. [chuckles]

Brooke Gladstone: I think that maybe Donald Trump's candidacy also pokes a hole in the argument that moderates necessarily run better than extremists in today's political environment, or is he the exception that proves the rule? There's never been anyone like him in my lifetime. He won in 2016 on policies that were very different from the ones he ran on in 2024.

Elliott Morris: I think we can learn a couple of things from Donald Trump here. In 2016, he wins the primary for the Republicans, probably because he takes heterodox, moderate positions on entitlement.

Brooke Gladstone: Meaning some of them are right and some of them are left?

Elliott Morris: Yes, he says free trade is bad for you, regardless of what Republicans have been saying. Also, that, "Privatizing Social Security and decreasing Medicare would be bad for you, so don't vote for Paul Ryan," or that wing of the party. In 2016, Trump is actually the proof of the pro-moderation crowd. Republicans were able to come back from a crushing defeat for conservatism under Mitt Romney because they take these conflicting, heterodox views. That's not the campaign he runs in 2020, or in 2024, which spins the wheel successively further to the right and ends up winning, because of what you raised earlier.

There are other factors explaining election outcomes, then your ideological issue preferences, like, for example, inflation that caused the decline of every incumbent party and every democracy in 2024.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned that many of Trump's policies, both proposed and enacted, are unpopular. Tell me whether the unpopularity of these policies actually affect his overall popularity.

Elliott Morris: I think the most salient example will be on immigration. Polls conducted between January and February of this year, the beginning of Trump's term, deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived here for more than 10 years is a policy underwater, with the average person by 37% points. Deporting undocumented immigrants who are parents of US citizens, that policy is underwater by 36% points. Actually, the only popular policy in Trump's immigration deportation scheme is to deport undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing violent crimes. That is a popular policy. Basically, everyone else he's deporting is unpopular with the American public.

Brooke Gladstone: That was back in January. It's gotten worse, I'd assume. People can now see it playing out in their own communities. People that they liked, workers that they know. However, you want to judge somebody who contributes to the community, they're getting picked up and swept away.

Elliott Morris: There was a case of a 20-year unauthorized immigrant resident of Kennett, Missouri, earlier this year, who was deported by ICE. Her name was Carol Hui. She was taken by ICE and deported without much contact. There were a lot of interviews with her and with the people in Kennett, Missouri, a small, dramatically pro-Trump town, in which her neighbor said, "I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here, but no one voted to deport moms." That does speak to the unpopularity of these policies when they're happening in the street or to your neighbor next door.

To characterize this with a number, deporting someone like Carol, who had been here for more than 10 years, is underwater with the public by 37% points.

Brooke Gladstone: What are some of the others? What about cutting Medicaid?

Elliott Morris: The Big Beautiful Bill, Trump calls it, may as well be called the big unpopular bill. Cutting Medicaid and food stamps, and SNAP assistance is something that's more relevant now, given the government funding shutdown. That bill's underwater by about 25% or 30% points. It's the most unpopular spending bill passed by Congress since polling began. The specific provisions in it are also some of the things that the Welcome PAC, in their report, points out as the most unpopular parts of the Republican Party agenda. Stuff like extending the 2017 tax cuts. That's unpopular by 30% points.

Cutting the subsidies that the federal government gives to people to buy healthcare on the ACA, the Obamacare exchange. That's unpopular by 20% points.

Brooke Gladstone: When you say underwater by 30% points or 20% points, you're not saying that 80% like it or 70% like it. Right?

Elliott Morris: In this case, if it's 20% points underwater, 60% of people would oppose the policy and 40% would support it, yes. YouGov did a great recent study there, a pollster earlier this year, where they asked about pretty much every Trump policy under the sun and things you can characterize as the economy. 36% of the public supported Trump on those policies. The numbers are similarly dire if you look at the other policies of the Trump administration. Early on, his health care policy supported by 27% of the public. I have found that the deploying of troops to help with immigration enforcement, what Trump's doing in Chicago, what he did in LA and Oregon, is opposed by at least 60% of the public.

If you ask about Marines in particular, it's a policy opposed by 65%. The question would be, how did someone with this mix of unpopular issue positions become President of the United States? That would be the question that I'd ask the pro-moderation crowd right now.

Brooke Gladstone: The Republicans don't have this debate about moderation, do they?

Elliott Morris: After the 2012 defeat of Mitt Romney, there was an autopsy of the campaign, and its conclusions were not about moderation versus conservatism. They were all about group appeal. In the 12 years since then, the Republican Party has increased its vote share with minorities, with non-college-educated white people, and with low-income earners. Not by taking moderate issue positions, but by increasing their group appeal towards those voting blocs. By painting the Democrats as out-of-touch elitists who are out to run transgender kids in every single sports league or whatever the advertisements say.

The point is that they waged a war in politics that's predicated on group voting, not on issue positions, and that has paid dividends for them. I don't think Democrats will see dividends trying the other strategy.

Brooke Gladstone: How are Democrats using polls compared to how the Republicans do?

Elliott Morris: Democrats are trying to fix a perceptions problem with issue positions and with polling, and that leads them down the road of, "Oh, let's just adopt this position, let's disavow this group or this cause, and that will make people think that we're moderate." The other way they could do this is to position themselves closer to the median voter in terms of their group attachments or really against the groups that they don't like. Which, in the polling, is Democratic officials. Chuck Schumer, just for an example, Brooke, has a -33% favorability rating. 65% of the public tells us they don't like Chuck Schumer, and 30 % of the public tells us that they do.

One idea for Democrats would be to get rid of Chuck Schumer, signaling to the American voter that the Democratic Party is not about its long-term leadership and who's associated with policy and the left behind decline of the working class, and signaling that they're trying to do something new to help the working class.

Brooke Gladstone: Is this the authenticity problem that the Democrats are just trying to manipulate, whereas Trump, for all his faults, seems to believe what he says, even though he'll say opposite things on different days?

Elliott Morris: Trump definitely has an authenticity advantage, that the average working-class voter in America thinks that Donald Trump looks out for them. In part, because they don't think that the Democrats look out for them. Fixing that problem, the "Do you care about us" problem would drive a lot more votes towards the Democratic Party than I think this endless debate about 1%, maybe 2% in close districts based on which issue positions you take.

Brooke Gladstone: There is something, though, that it's hard for me to get my brain around. You're talking about getting people to identify with the party, to believe that the party is on their side. You wrote a newsletter in July called What Can Zohran Mamdani Teach Democrats? His campaign has been held up as an example that progressive candidates can win. You wrote that this was less about moderation and progressivism and more about issue prioritization in the candidates themselves. Here, we are talking about policies and less about identification as a progressive or whatever. How do you square that?

Elliott Morris: My question would be to someone looking at the campaigns that Abigail Spanberger, the candidate for governor in Virginia, the Democratic candidate, the campaign that she's running, versus Zohran Mamdani's campaign in New York City. I've been paying attention to both of these, partly because I live in Virginia and partly because the media's obsessed with Zohran Mamdani. The answer is, I can't find a whole lot of differences. They're both running a campaign based on affordability and lowering prices. In polls, what the voters say is that they want a Democratic Party that cares about the conditions of the working class, about prices, affordability.

Now, you have two candidates in the Democratic Party approaching that with a very different set of issue positions ideologically, but they're both doing well because what the voters care about is that the candidates care about them. It's a smart strategy to attach yourself, as Zohran Mamdani, to the working class rather than the actual elite Democratic socialists in New York City to say, "look, my group identity, actually my group attachment is with you, the working people of New York." in the same way that Abigail Spanberger is saying, "my attachment is to the working people of Virginia."

Brooke Gladstone: The policies are part of creating an identity, even though he may not be able to pull off everything he proposes?

Elliott Morris: Zohran Mamdani cannot unilaterally change the price of buses in New York City, for example, or build grocery stores like he wants that are run by the city. What he can do is talk about prices every single day on the campaign trail and emphasize how people like the former governor Andrew Cuomo, according to Zohran Mamdani, have left the working-class people of New York behind. The more that he can talk about that, the more he seems like he's on the side of the working-class median voter in America. It's really not the policies themselves. It's really all about focus and group attachment here.

Brooke Gladstone: Is this an ideological debate or a debate about identity? How do you separate one from the other?

Elliott Morris: The relevant point is that you have a mix of Democratic politicians today, all running successful campaigns with dramatically different issue positions. They're successful because they're talking about the things that voters want them to talk about, economics and affordability. That's what people know. The average person is not watching four hours of television programming or reading the news every day. Only about 30% of the public reads the news every week. What they see is coverage of these people based on what they're talking about, the issues that they're talking about. The average person doesn't really know the policies that these people are talking about. It's just the issue focus.

Brooke Gladstone: You've written that there are currently two factions battling for the soul of the Democratic Party. On the one side, centrists arguing that moving toward moderate positions will attract swing voters. On the other, progressives insist that bold, transformative policies are essential for energizing the base and defining what the party stands for. Are the moderates arguing over perception while progressives make their stand on ideology?

Elliott Morris: You do have this very outspoken group saying Democrats need to move to the center on their issue positions. The louder group on the left, if you want to make it ideological, is not really saying you need to take progressive issue positions on X, Y, or Z to win. They're saying elections are determined by other factors, like media coverage, and that the perception of the Democratic Party is not based off of its issue positions. It's based on other factors, namely the ads that Trump runs against the Democrats, that the moderates, they're trying to put a Band-Aid over a bullet hole. That the solution that they're marketing is not up to helping the Democrats in the way that they need help.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you have any broader thoughts about the communication strategies of the Democrats drawn from what you've observed and what seems to succeed?

Elliott Morris: It seems to me that there's a campaign being waged by elite strategists in the Democratic Party to move the party to the right based off of their belief that issue positions can save their Democratic Party. Then there's some of us opposed to this, that's saying, "Actually, your obsession with issue positions empirically is unfounded. There's only very small returns and is also built on a fallacy." A strategist's fallacy, I've called it, about how voters make their decisions. I keep coming back to this old H.L. Mencken quote, "In this whole debate, there's always a well-known solution to every problem, neat, plausible, and wrong."

It seems to me that these people are pushing a very neat solution to the deep, deep problems of the Democratic Party.

Brooke Gladstone: One possibility is that it would render an entire class of political strategists and analysts irrelevant.

Elliott Morris: There is a large infrastructure in Democratic Party politics that is devoted to testing advertisements that can be algorithmically generated using polling data, and then picking those messages that poll the best and having the party use those messages. You can really tell when Chuck Schumer is giving a speech that everything in his speech is poll-tested. This might feed into the Democratic Party's perceptions issue that they're out of touch. Hillary Clinton's campaign was very similar. It seemed very rigid and poll-tested in what Donald Trump offers and what some Democratic candidates who are coded as progressive are offering. Bernie Sanders being one of them, is more authenticity and less poll testing. [chuckles]

Maybe that's right or maybe that's wrong, but in the Democratic Party today, you don't get to have that debate. The only debate is over what issue positions you want to take. I just think that this is not up to the task.

Brooke Gladstone: You are from a small town in Texas, right? It had 1,500 permanent residents, and your parents live in Hill Country now in Texas, with about 3,000 residents. If you had $40 million, how would you use it to win voters in places like where you grew up?

Elliott Morris: Well, the decline of local media is certainly a problem. Local newspapers help distinguish party identities across geographies. The Democrats have a more rural identity in rural areas. You can get really creative here. I'm not sure how plausible this is, but pro-Democratic groups could just go out and start buying up third spaces. Your rundown coffee shop. Where I'm from, where my parents live now, there's a perpetually dying and reviving movie theater. That would be a good pick. That's pretty cheap compared to a television ad in New York City, and run community organization out of there. Do food pantry drives when SNAP benefits expire.

Another pitch here might be to have regional party conventions where you just get the most prominent local officials from four or five states in the Midwest. Maybe like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, they get their own party convention. Maybe it's not associated with the nominating process at all, but then there's a lot of local news coverage about that regional party convention that's really focused on the issues of that region and highlighting the voices of the best politicians for that region rather than for the country as a whole.

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Brooke Gladstone: Wow, what an idea, diverting money from political advertising to actual on-the-ground benefits.

Elliott Morris: Yes, you wouldn't have thought about that in America, would you?

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Thank you very much.

Elliott Morris: Thanks, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Elliott Morris is a journalist, statistician, and he writes the newsletter Strength in Numbers. Thanks for checking out our midweek podcast. The big show comes out on Friday with the second episode of Season 2 of The Harvard Plan.

 

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