Affordability, DOGE, and Podcasts

Democrats racked up wins all across the country this month. Highlights included Mamdani’s New York City Mayoral win, statewide victories in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia and Pennsylvania, along with California’s Proposition 50 to redraw California’s congressional districts in response to the Republican’s attempted gerrymander in Texas.

Then last night, Democrat Aftyn Behn ran a stronger than expected race in a special election for Congress in Tennessee. While she did not win, Behn held the republican to a single digit margin in a district that had favored Trump by 22% in 2024.

We looked at the county-level change in Democratic performance between the 2024 presidential election and the 2025 races in NJ, VA and TN. We then calculated the correlation between those results to the more than 300 issue and media consumption scores Haystaq has for every individual in the country.

Any statistician will remind you that “correlation isn’t causation”. When a score has a strong correlation with the shift in Democratic vote, that doesn’t mean that attitudes or behaviors reflected in that score drove the shift, but does give us insights into the types of voters who shifted.

Prefer female candidates

Haystaq has surveyed thousands of voters, asking if, other things being equal, would they prefer to vote for a female candidate. We then built a model predicting responses to that question and applied those modeled scores to every voter in the country. The Democratic candidates were female in NJ, TN and VA, so it’s not surprising that the prefer female candidates score was strongly correlated with a shift toward the Democrat in all three states. The correlation was the weakest in VA, which may be because the Republican candidate was also female.

Affordability

Affordability has become one of the most talked about issues of 2025. Zohran Mamdami highlighted affordability in his race for Mayor of New York City. Mamdami’s decisive win likely drove Trump’s brief attempt to coopt the issue. Shortly after Mamdami’s election, Trump promised to address affordability, before pivoting back saying on Tuesday “Look, affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats”

So, how did concerns about affordability correlate with Democratic performance in the recent elections? While we have not surveyed specifically about affordability, we do have issue scores about economic anxiety, and about inflation. Higher economic anxiety scores correlated with improved Democratic performance in NJ, TN and VA, as did the score predicting the likelihood of voters blaming Trump for inflation.

DOGE

Our DOGE issue score predicts the likelihood of voters saying that they opposed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s reckless firing of government workers. Opposition to DOGE was positively correlated with improved Democratic performance. This impact may well have been boosted because of the NJ and VA gubernatorial elections happened against the backdrop of the government shutdown which led to many federal employees being furloughed.

While the shutdown was over by the time of last night’s special election in TN, opposition to DOGE was still strongly correlated with improvement in Democratic performance.

Media consumption

Affordability and opposition to DOGE were two of the many motivating issues for Democrats. Another shift was not so much in what messages were motivating voters, but rather in how those messages were delivered. More and more voters are shifting away from watching traditional broadcast TV. The score predicting if voters would say that they do not watch broadcast television was strongly correlated with increased Democratic performance. So, if those voters are not watching TV, where are they getting their information? The scores for podcast listeners and for frequent social media users were both strongly correlated with increased Democratic performance.

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