"Lesser of Two Evils" Drinking Game (with Natalie Allison)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we're talking about Arizona, where Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans have a Grand Canyon-sized candidate quality problem.

Now, we recorded this episode before the news broke that Mitch McConnell and the Senate Leadership Fund are pulling all of their money out of the Blake Masters race. So some of the conversation I had with our guest today about Masters fundraising issues doesn't take that into account.

Most of the people in the focus group you're about to hear voted for Joe Biden after voting for Donald Trump in 2016. And that means that they helped put Biden over the top in Arizona by around 10,000 votes. That's not a lot. Arizona is one of the most important states for both 2022 and 2024. Right now, Senator Mark Kelly is trying to win a full term against Masters, who I think is a bit of a MAGA weirdo.

My guest today is Natalie Allison, Senate campaigns reporter at Politico. We have featured her reporting on this podcast before. Natalie, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, Sarah. I'll just say up front, you do not have to subscribe to my way of describing these candidates.

But you, I probably won't do that. Yeah, I believe that. So tell me, have you been able to get out on the trail in Arizona? And if you have sort of what's jumped out at you about these races or even listening to these groups? Well, not to tip my hand too much, but I'm planning a trip out there. Unfortunately, I did not make it out in the primary, but I've been covering that race, both primary and general election, of course, in particular, like

right now is what Blake Masters is going to do in terms of funding. As you may know, the NRSC had to reshuffle a lot of its money. They said that they were in the process of buying back ads, which they are doing, but it really hasn't made up for what

they had initially canceled. And Blake Masters doesn't have any Peter Thiel money coming in so far in the general election. He had about $15 million of that during the primary, which enabled him to be competitive against Jim Lehman, who self-funded about that much money. And without that Thiel money, Blake Masters couldn't have gotten out of the primary. But now he's in this place where a lot of that traditional establishment Republican money has dried up. He

He has had to rely on people like the Heritage Foundation, Sentinel Action Fund, their new super PAC, and some other outside groups to come in and help him along as he's really struggled to raise money. Yeah. So since you watched that primary race really closely and did a lot of coverage on it, what were the essential dynamics there? Like it was just what he had the teal money and then he got the Trump nod and that was kind of the ballgame?

Yeah. So he was running in third place for a lot of the primary. So the primary started with the state attorney general, Mark Brnovich, in the lead because, of course, he had the most name recognition. He had been elected statewide. He was immediately shit on by Trump, who, you know, had at first said, you know, he thought Brnovich needed to prove himself that he was willing to do more to overturn the 2020 election results. And then as the primary unfolded, Trump eventually said,

Brnovich would never get my endorsement. He has failed at this task of proving he's all in to help me get elected. And Jim Lehman, he, you know, he tried to get the Trump endorsement and ultimately they didn't succeed in getting that. And he couldn't compete with the Trump sauce combined with the teal money that sent Masters over the edge. And Masters had a pretty stunning rise from third place to winning by double digits.

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like the J.D. Vance situation in Ohio where he's running back of the pack, but he gets that Trump endorsement, the teal money, and it kind of pulls him over the line. I'll tell you, this podcast is mostly listened to, though, by political nerds. So they are interested in the sort of internecine intrigue of the dollars. Why do you think

So Peter Thiel has just like decided after basically like putting his hands on these candidates, you know, making Trump endorse them or working to get Trump endorse them. And then he just like abandons them in the general. Like, what's that about? Is it just the kind of investment strategy where they do the early side and then they depend on other people to do the other side or what's going on there?

Well, yeah, there could be some degree of cost analysis here where he has put in $15 million. And of course, $15 million to Peter Thiel is not his life savings by any stretch. But the polls have shown that Lake Masters has never had an advantage over Mark Kelly, that he's always falling behind Mark Kelly. And so at what point does someone like Thiel need to accept that maybe his guy isn't going to pull it off? But that being said,

It doesn't mean he's not going to. So Peter Thiel in Ohio said he was done putting money into J.D. Vance's

race and then fans got the Trump endorsement. He saw some momentum and then Teal put in about $5 million more than what he had originally planned. And we could see that happen in Arizona if Masters somehow gets more momentum in the coming weeks. I don't think it would be shocking to see Teal get involved. And there's an idea that even though Teal isn't cutting checks at this point, he is sort of helping facilitate some donations to the super PAC that he was working with before.

Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt Republicans want the Senate seat. So I think that if he starts showing any signs of life, they'll get in. All right, we're going to get to the sort of head-to-head Senate race in a bit, but I want to start by talking about the Inflation Reduction Act. We did this group last week, so, you know, it was kind of top of mind. You know, we're in this big string of legislative wins for the Biden administration, and pundits talk about how wins like this can certainly change the narrative that Biden is stuck in neutral.

But this group was not enthusiastic at all, even though a lot of them voted for Biden. Let's listen. I've been a lifelong Republican, and I will admit some of the Democratic ideas are awesome sounding. Free Medicare, free health care, but again, it's not realistic how you pay for it. I mean, it's a dream world.

They're hiding things in it. We don't get to see it all. They pass all these things where it's, I'm going to pay this to my cousin, this to my niece, this to grandma and grandpa, and make sure that I'm taken care of and the American people be damned. And that's why politics is such a dirty bird right now. And I just don't know how to fix it.

One of the provisions in it is reducing prescription costs, but it's kind of like a hidden way that they're doing it. I forget exactly what it is about it. They're not incentivizing companies. I understand that they're giving them some sort of a subsidy or something to reduce the cost or whatever. So the government's paying for it, but the government is us.

But you're not going to pay for it on your individual bill when you go to CVS or Walgreens. What's the difference where you pay it? You paid it, but it looks good in politics. Hey, your prices went down. Yes, but my taxes went up.

Okay. So the somewhat negative reaction to the Inflation Reduction Act reminds me of a point that I like to make about a lot of these swing voters in these key states that sort of put Biden over the edge. So this group is a mixed group of people who voted for Biden or who went third party or just like wrote somebody in. And so they are...

institutionally still kind of Republicans. And we see this in a lot of the swing road groups. They identify many of them, not all of them, but many of them still as Republicans who just couldn't get over the hump with Trump. They just thought he was a jerk, but they are not fans of democratic policy. Does that sound right to you?

Yeah, well, that's exactly what they were saying. And none of them said that they were enthusiastic about voting for Biden. Maybe one of them did. But yeah, when they were asked about why they had voted for Biden, it was, you know, for the most part, they decided he was a bully or, you know, they decided they could no longer support him. But with Biden, they were essentially holding their nose. And yeah, and the Inflation Reduction Act, I mean, over and over, we heard from them that, you know,

yeah, the federal government is claiming that they're reducing costs for us, but our taxes are going to go up. And as we heard from this one guy, he called it a dream world. The Democrats were living in by passing these plans and they were very much of the idea that, you know, this is not actually going to help them. The Biden administration shouldn't have gone this far. And then in terms of the student loan forgiveness issue,

They were asked who supported it and nobody raised their hand. None of them got behind that either. The policies being passed by the Biden administration are not doing any favors with those people to win them back over. All right, Natalie, hold on one second. We got to do something.

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