S4 Ep56: Senate GOP Vote Desert (with Jon Ralston and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez)
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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 taking you out west to Nevada and Arizona. Both are prime targets for Donald Trump to flip in the presidential race, and both of them have Democratic Senate candidates who are faring much better than Kamala Harris is.

So we're going to hear how Trump to Biden voters in both states are thinking about things. Obviously, these are the voters we affectionately refer to on this podcast as flippers. So first up is Nevada.

Nevada. I think I said it wrong in the opening. Where Democratic incumbent Senator Jackie Rosen is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican Sam Brown. And I couldn't think of a better person to talk to than John Ralston, who is editor and CEO of the Nevada Independent and knower of all things Nevada, including its pronunciation, which I admit up front I did wrong. How you doing, man? I'm doing well and I'm going to let it go because of the immediate corrections.

Yeah, I know. You know, I was just out there. I was just out there doing these focus groups and I practiced, but I don't know what it is about my East Coast. Like, I just have a problem. I like want to like make it fancier somehow. Yeah.

It does sound somehow fancier. That's how Steve Wynn used to say it when he lived out here. I had to correct him on air. Imagine how much fun that was. Yeah, yeah. It's not like correcting me. You can correct me all day long. You know, when I was out there, just as an aside, I saw you tweeted, we should have hung out while I was out there. I went and saw Garth Brooks. Have you seen that show? It's a great show.

I have not, but I've heard only great things about it. I don't know if you're a 90s country fan, as I am, being from central Pennsylvania. I am from western New York originally and not a country fan, but I have heard that Garth Brooks is worth seeing even if you're not a country fan. Yeah, it was a fun show. Okay, next time. Next time, you and me hitting the blackjack tables.

So, conventional wisdom is that Nevada is one of Trump's best opportunities to flip a state that he lost in 2020, but Harris' polling has held up reasonably well there. So, tell me how you see the state of play right now. Well, I've been saying this a lot, Sarah, and you know, I...

I've been pretty good at predicting outcomes in Nevada right before the election. And I kind of had a sense in 2016 and in 2020 in the run-up that the Democratic machine would pull Hillary through and would pull Biden through.

I am really at sea this time. I am really not sure. Not because the Democratic machine isn't still effective. I think they are. The same people are running it. Rebecca Lamb is one of the best operatives in the country, and she has run that machine since 2008. But the demographics have changed. Registration has changed. And there are so many new nonpartisan voters.

that are very hard to read. A lot of them were put through an automatic voter registration bill, so they are auto-registered as nonpartisan. I don't know if any of them are going to vote or most of them are going to vote or some of them. So which campaign gets to them can figure out that conundrum, I think, wins.

So I was on location, right? That's why I was out there. And I was with PBS and I was moderating these focus groups. Judy Woodruff's got a show that it will air on eventually. So first of all, I normally do these on Zoom. I don't often do them IRL with people. We did two groups of these swing voters. One of the questions she asked me as we were breaking them down afterwards is, you know, do these sound like swing voters like you hear all the rest of the time from other states?

But one of the things that really jumped out at me in a Nevada-specific way was how much these Trump-divided voters felt the residual effects of the state's economy since COVID. COVID never comes up anymore. Just doesn't come up. Every now and then somebody might reflect back on something maybe and talk about like COVID times. But like COVID as a way that it was handled just doesn't come up anymore with voters. But man, did it come up in these Nevada groups. Let's listen.

I love to cook, anything to do with music, love to travel, bar hop, the old Vegas lifestyle. Hope it gets back to 24/7 here. Oh, yeah? Has it changed? Yes, after COVID, it's not going to 24/7 how it used to be. I'm still enjoying it, though. Really what you miss is just being able to go all-- just all night long. Yes, I miss my 2 o'clock in the morning Walmart shopping. OK. A lot of people came to this state from California.

And what they brought with them from California were California price tags. And that hit Las Vegas and it's never left. If you go into Los Angeles or San Francisco or San Diego, it's very expensive.

But when you come to Las Vegas, you save some money here and there. But it's not – the savings now is nowhere near what it was. And Las Vegas is not a city that's equipped to charge the type of money now that it costs to live here. There are different industries in California that people can get into that are high paying and can cover the cost of –

you know, what's over there. Las Vegas does not have that. And the one thing that I think has put this city and this state behind the eight ball is that there really is only one city and county to this entire state. As Las Vegas and Clark County go, so goes the rest of the state. So if we're not doing well, the

The rest of the state is probably catching pneumonia at this point. I got here shortly after the housing bubble, and there was a lot of foreclosures going on. It was just starting to recover. And, you know, you could get a house for $150,000. Now that same house is going to cost you about $1,000.

Almost $600,000. And what I've noticed the most, there isn't the resources, like Pierre said, as far as steady industry, except for the hospitality. There's just not enough businesses. I've seen the homeless population escalate.

tenfold in the last 13 years. And a lot of states have the same problem, but, you know, people flock here because of, there's a lot of places that will help people off the street, but still there's no way out.

unemployment. It seems like everywhere I go, they're struggling to keep places staffed. And despite the fact that they're saying it's the lowest unemployment in a long time, I don't think that's true just based on how everywhere is like being understaffed and not being able to take care of your own business. And

Because I don't think that the people are taking the jobs. Maybe they're stuck on getting free money from the government. And I don't know if they're just taking the easy way out. But yeah, despite the fact that there are jobs available, it doesn't seem like the businesses are doing well. And when COVID happened, it was like a ghost town on the strip. And then now it's not a 24-hour town here anymore.

After the COVID, it's not. And I just wonder why casinos are pulling all this money and they have like the worst school districts in the United States here just about, and money problems with that when these casinos are bringing in a lot of money.

You do need two or three jobs. Like I'm working two or three jobs now just to survive before five or six years ago, I had one job. So it's like, you have to go out there and do what you have to do to just to survive and make it. And again, it was just free money giving out to different countries and different people. It's crazy because it all falls back on us who's actually paying the taxes and stuff each year. I think that the initial giving away of the money

that was intended for people who were no longer working just completely went off the rails.

And we have added to that all of the non-citizens that have come into the country from wherever. That has put a debt burden on the citizens who in some cases are just now getting back on their feet. And I don't think that Washington, D.C. or some of the state houses are listening enough

to what's going on and what's coming out of the mouths of the citizens of the U.S. Something mentioned about COVID that some people didn't think it was real. I mean, I was going to say that I personally know it is real because I was intubated for COVID. I almost lost my life. I was there for six months. I'm still trying to recover for that and kind of blame Trump a little bit for the things that he says, you know, comments like use chlorine doesn't really help, you know, things like that. But yeah, it was just something that came to my mind because to me, it was something that really impacted me.

Okay, so there's a lot in there, but this was a different conversation in Nevada than I've heard everywhere else. People are talking about inflation, talking about costs, but there's something specific about Nevada and its industry that

When the guy said they're bringing California prices and somebody else then brought up the fact that the industry, retail, you know, hospitality, it's not like a tech sector moved in. And so that everybody suddenly got a pay increase that allowed them to keep pace with the new prices. You and I have talked about this before, the Californianization of Nevada. How much do you think that looms over this election? Economics just

So top of mind for people. Is that your experience out there?

It is. And there was so much in there that was interesting, Sarah. And as you know better than anybody, you know, focus groups aren't necessarily a scientific representation of what's going on. But there can be things that are said that open a window into things that are going on at a broader level, which is why. And I don't just say this to flatter you. I watch those and you do such a good job of eliciting some of these real feelings.

But can I go over a few things besides what you referred to? Because, listen, there is going on across this country a perception of the economy and a reality of the economy. And you saw both in that clip that you just played from the focus groups. Las Vegas and Nevada, the person who said, you know, Clark County,

sneezes and the entire state gets a cold. That's very true. There's two-thirds plus of the population down here in the electorate. The Las Vegas Strip is the economic engine of this state. It went dark for two months. That was a cataclysm. The second cataclysm, by the way, within 12 years, also alluded to in that conversation, was the housing bubble that burst in 2008, which had a huge effect

on people. Unemployment here during COVID went up to like 30% or some insane number, and it has come way down. Sarah, it's about 5% now, but even 5% is one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

So people are still feeling it here. It's a service economy. So a lot of people either don't have the same jobs or they have diminished pay, perhaps had to get other jobs. You know, 90 percent of the casino workers were laid off during COVID. So I'm not surprised it's still top of mind four years later and that the reverberations are still occurring.

The California in-migration is kind of a double-edged sword in the sense that you do have people who don't like the high taxes in California moving to Nevada where we don't have a state income tax, and that's clearly better. So I think that's helped some Democrats, some Republicans. I don't think it's clear which party has been helped or hurt by that. I

I was really interested by the guy who said it's not a 24-7 town anymore that that's changed. Of course, it still is. But does it have a different vibe? I mean, this may shock you, Sarah, but I'm not usually out in casinos at 3 and 4 in the morning. And so I'm not sure if that's true or not.

But they're still 24-7. And by the way, the casinos are making record amounts of revenue every month. We track that. I have the best gaming reporter in the state. So they are doing quite well. They have bounced back. But I'm sure that there is a lack of trickle-down effect for some people. And that, I think, was evident in the focus groups.

So having just been there, I was staying at Caesar's Palace. The place was bumping. Now, I will say at 44 years old and I was, you know, I'm on East Coast time, I didn't make it past, you know, certainly didn't make it past midnight. And I was staying up late. It was brutal. But...

I like to gamble at 6 a.m. with a coffee and just me and the dealer and one guy chain smoking who's been up all night. But I was struck by how crowded it was and how alive it was. And it didn't feel like it jived with what I was hearing in the focus groups. You heard me say to that guy, like, really? It's not 24-7. It also felt like

a lot of people hadn't been there that long. Like, what is the new population there? Because it sounds like maybe during COVID, a lot of people left and it's already, you know, a lot of people who are in the hospitality industry or that can be a transient kind of industry in a lot of ways. So what do you make of the makeup of the voters in Nevada now?

Yeah, so that's the real conundrum, because as I mentioned, that if you look at the registration figures, they've changed a lot since 2020. It's not just that the Democratic advantage has dropped, and it has substantially, but

but it's because they've lost more voters than the Republicans. The Republicans have not gained voters, they've just lost fewer voters, and there are many more nonpartisans here. They're 40% of the electorate in Nevada now. They're a plurality. But it's very difficult to tell who these people are. I like to cite this quote because

I think he was right. The great pollster Mark Melman once said to me, John, there's no such thing as an independent voter. They're either Democrats or Republicans in disguise. And so I don't know who these people are. I do think that, and this came up in the focus group too, not just the economy, but something tied to the economy, which is housing, is what comes up in polling that people are most concerned about.

And if people are just going to vote on economic interests and they think that things are worse now than they were under Trump, they may just vote for Trump for that reason. How many of them? I don't know the answer to that, Sarah, but I also don't know yet who's going to be voting. And again, I have many problems, as you and I have discussed with Nevada polling. I never think it's that great. I think it's especially bad this time because they're overestimating the number of

of those nonpartisan voters that are going to cast ballots. But they're still going to make the difference since the Democrats and the Republicans are essentially even now. One of the reasons that the Republicans are so optimistic is they always have a turnout advantage. But in the past, the Democrats have been able to blunt that because they have many more voters.

That's just not true now. And so Kamala Harris is going to have to win independence probably by three to five points to win the state. Okay.

Can she do that? Of course she can. And I'll say something else that I've been saying a lot. It's tied now in Nevada, essentially. And in Nevada, generally, since 2008, ties go to the Democrats because they have the better machine, because the Republicans are relying on Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk online.

I don't think that's necessarily a fair fight. And so I think that's why Democrats have reason for optimism, despite the shifting demographics away from that. Yeah. You know, one of the things that both candidates are doing to try to win over Nevada voters is this no tax on tips thing. How's that playing in the state?

It's hard to tell. I don't want to speculate too much, and I haven't seen much good polling on it, but here's what I think. Whether this waitress actually exists or she's mythical that Trump came to his table and said, you should do this, who knows with Trump, right? But I do think that someone in his campaign or in his orbit is very smart and said, listen, the key to winning Nevada is

It's the culinary union, the most populous union. It's got 50,000 to 60,000 members. It's the driver of Democratic turnout. It's also the driver of Hispanic turnout. Even if the leadership is going to endorse Harris, which they did, if you can peel off enough of the rank and file

with this campaign, and Trump has made a much bigger deal out of it than Harris, then that may be just enough to cut the margin in Clark County down enough to win the state. Remember, it used to be an article of faith that Democrats were going to win Clark County by 10 points or so, and then hold off the losses in the very red rural counties and be even in Reno or Washoe County.

But Joe Biden was the first presidential candidate since the Reed machine era to win Clark County by less than 10 points. He only won it by nine points. He ended up winning the state by two and a half points. So there is just not that much margin for error. And now the Democratic advantage in Clark County has fallen under seven points.

Sarah. So that is why there's skittishness among the Democrats. And that is why the Republicans are optimistic about Nevada. But until I see the early voting data start to pour in, which will happen this weekend, I can't really say what's happening on the ground. Oh, you got to text me when that stuff starts coming in. Ready for the next level of cybersecurity. October is Cybersecurity Month and Gartner is building cybersecurity resilience in a complex world.

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So I did the focus groups with the two groups. Then I also obviously talked to every Uber driver, every server, every dealer at the blackjack table. And I just asked them all not who they were voting for, because that can be kind of an intense question, but who they thought was going to win.

And man, was it all over the map. There was absolutely no consensus. And I got the sense that, I mean, I guess this is pretty much how it goes. People who were voting for Trump or seemed like they were voting for Trump and liked him thought that Trump was going to win. And people who liked Kamala Harris thought that she was going to win. And normally I would say in other groups, I get lots of people who are like, well, I'm voting for Harris, but I think Trump's going to win Pennsylvania, you know, or whatever people say. Anyway, it was all over the map, no consensus. And in the groups,

On vote share, what was interesting to me, this was pretty consistent, though. I would say this has been the theme that I have been seeing across swing voting groups is the majority of the group in both groups was going to stay with Kamala because it was for TV. We had seven people, a slightly smaller group than we normally do. And so we had seven people and it was 5-2 in both groups. And there were two people going back to Trump.

One man and one woman in each group. And everybody who was doing it, it was all about economics. Although I will say one of them was the woman who in the sound you heard her say, I don't believe them that unemployment is low because there's so many jobs available. And at the table, I tried to push back a little bit, but isn't it a good sign of the economy that there's so many available jobs? And that is not how she saw it. And it made me wonder,

that people can interpret a bad economy from the fact that they're going to places and they feel like they can't get good service because there aren't enough people working there. And they think this is a sign of a bad economy as opposed to a sign of an incredible economy where jobs can't be filled because there's more jobs than people willing to do them. Before I move on to the Senate race, though, I just want to put a quarter in the machine because you know everything about Nevada. And I've been deeply curious about

how it's going to go this time, because it does feel like such a coin toss. And I know you're loathe to, you know, give a ruling or make a prediction. Just like, tell me what we don't know about what's happening on the ground in Nevada. Tell me the things that I might not be asking it, or it might not come up in the groups, but like, what is shaping the political environment that people might be missing? What are the things you know that the rest of us don't?

Well, first of all, I am the crazy person who does actually make public predictions every cycle. But I wait till three days before the election. I should have done the mic drop in 2022 when I picked the Republican for governor and the Democrat for Senate. On this podcast, you did that. Indeed. Indeed. And so I'm really worried about my crystal ball this time. But here is the really interesting wild card.

Remember, during COVID, Nevada became an out state with mail ballots. Everyone gets a mail ballot. It's been that way ever since. And so that creates a situation where you have Republicans who are still skeptical about mail ballots. In fact, just today I saw something.

Sarah, where the Washoe County Republican Party, that's Reno, the swing county and the swing state, is telling people not to mail their ballots in, to only bring them into Republican headquarters or the registrar's office. Don't trust the post office. So,

So essentially that's a way to potentially depress their own turnout. It's genius, yes? So I don't know how that is going to go, but I do know this. I do know that in 2022, which this is a little bit apples to oranges because it's an off year, that because of what the Culinary Union and other groups did on the ground for the Democrats with mail ballots,

they were able to turn around the Senate race, and Catherine Cortez Masto eked it out because of the coloring union. And what people don't understand about Nevada, and you mentioned this earlier, that a Republican won the governor's race. He won by 15,000 votes, one and a half points. And I believe

that the Democratic governor was so damaged by COVID and by a scandal that the Republicans played up, they got that close. He should have lost by five points or so, Sarah. So the machine's still there, mail ballots,

help Democrats, even though they've tried to turn that around. But as I just showed you with the Washoe County example, the messaging is not always taken. And even Trump, you know, he'll say, go vote now, send your mail ballot. And the next rally, he's saying, I don't trust those mail ballots. So, you know, that's another wild card. But

Again, I want to see some actual voting data before and who's turning in these ballots and who's going to early voting, which starts on Saturday and lasts two weeks before I make any concrete predictions. Okay. I want to get into the Senate race because this was another thing that just shocked me in the groups. So I went into these groups being like, okay, well, I'm going to spend this much time on the presidential race and I'm going to spend this much time on the Senate race. And when I turned from the presidential to the Senate,

Everybody was like, who's running? Like, what's happening? I mean, how little attention was being paid to the Senate race to me was like very surprising. And so the polling looks like Jackie Rosen is up by nine points. And that's in the 538 average. And Harris is up by only half a point in the same average. And that led me to say, how

I wonder if Jackie Rosen is skating on name ID right now in the polling and that people just aren't that focused on it. So I asked about Rosen and voters like still didn't know that much about her. These are swing voters. They're people who pay enough attention. They've changed their mind about something. Let's listen to how they talked about Jackie Rosen and the Senate race more broadly.

I contacted her office like a year ago about the child tax credit because I was really interested in that. I have two children and it helped my family a lot. And I didn't like that it went back to being lower. So I was interested in what the government has to say about that. Was she good? Well, her office sent me an email and left me a voicemail and I thought it was really responsive and I can appreciate that. But I haven't done enough research on what she actually votes on.

to be honest. How many of you guys are following the Senate race closely? It's on TV all the time during the sports commercials. The poor voters in swing states. You guys just really, really get a lot of it. Yeah. She's been in Washington for a while, but what she's done, I have no idea.

I think more people should actually know about their local than the national because I think it affects you so much more, in my opinion. I've been trying to look up stuff and then I've also tried to honestly take notes on the candidates that have stayed in because I've been in Nevada since 1999. So I've tried to take notes, but I'm going to tell you, I used to live in Oregon. It was a lot easier to find out what people believed. It's way harder here. Right now, there are commercials that

for elect me, elect me, elect me. And I find it hilarious that five different politicians are all taking credit for dropping insulin down to $35. I appreciate that, but did everybody do it? And is that the only problem in the state? We've got far more things going on than just what they're talking about.

OK, so the thing that's in here that I don't know what to do about is that it was a hand raised question when I was like, how many people are following? And nobody put up their hand. There was like a couple of people that did that like Habsie thing. Like, I know who it is because their commercials are on TV all the time. Tell me why nobody knows what's happening in the Senate race that like a gajillion dollars is being spent on.

I was just thankful, Sarah, as I was watching that, those focus groups that you did not ask people to raise their hands if they read the Nevada Independent, because I don't think because we've done a lot on the Senate race. But again, most people are not insane like you and me and follow this stuff 24-7 and at a granular level. But there are plenty of ads on the air in the Rosen-Brown race. I mean, I was watching my beloved Buffalo Bills just last night on YouTube and

And every break there was a Senate ad. And so they're out there. But I think there's a few things going on here. First of all, Jackie Rosen has only been in politics since 2018. She was plucked from obscurity by Harry Reid to run for Congress.

then she immediately ran for the US Senate and won. And she is not a flamboyant personality. She is the consummate workhorse, not show horse. In fact, my great DC reporter, Gabby Birnbaum, wrote a profile of her and she couldn't even find Republicans to say bad things about her. And imagine in Washington these days how that is because that's who she is. But that also means she's not that well-known and she hasn't done a lot until this campaign.

to get her name ID out there. But the reason that she's consistently ahead in the polls, some double digits, which is nuts. No one's going to win a Nevada Senate race by double digits. And even the National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a poll showing their internals show her up. I think it was five. It might have been six.

is that she has run a great campaign, and Sam Brown is a product of what the Democrats have done here for many, many cycles. They've destroyed the bench, so the best that the Republicans could do, his incredible war hero story notwithstanding, is a guy who just moved here six years ago and has never won a race.

And this is another wild card in Nevada. The dovetails was what we were talking about earlier. Jackie Rosen started early and has not stopped pounding Sam Brown on abortion.

This is a very pro-choice state. Two-thirds voted for a pro-choice initiative as long ago as 34 years. It has remained consistent. There's a ballot initiative this time. Sam Brown, to be generous, has evolved on the issue of abortion, and they put him on his heels right away. She raised the

ton of money and he hasn't been able to recover. I mean, I find this humorous, Sarah. I know I'm going on too long. The bottom line is, the best they got is Sam Brown calling Jackie Rosen a multimillionaire. I thought Republicans thought it was a good thing to be rich. And that's the best they got.

That's funny. Okay, I want to just listen because it's very short because really people knew nothing about Sam Brown. Only a couple people did in the group. So let's listen to what the swing voters thought of Sam Brown since we're talking about him.

I think Sam Brown obviously is in the military. Obviously he got damages, physical damages to himself. So obviously I respect him because he was serving in the military. That's essentially what I really know. Not a lot of his policies, but I will look it up today or tomorrow. Everybody loves a war hero. I just think he'd be good, Sam Brown. He's standing up for himself and look what happened to him. Burned victim and yeah.

Okay, so he ran against Adam Laxalt in the primary in 2022. Do you think he's a good candidate? I mean, they literally, you said this, like he's a war hero. That was it. People knew that he had been hurt in the war. They knew nothing else about him. So basically you have to rely on an anti-incumbency bias to carry him through, right? Yeah.

Listen, in case people listening don't know, it's not just that Sam Brown was burned. He bears the scars on his face. He's disfigured. But he's a very articulate guy, and he can do fine. But he's not an overwhelmingly great candidate. And really, all they've had from the beginning, because I told you about Jackie Rosen being low profile and a workhorse, not a show horse, and all the rest of it, is to tie her

to Biden and Harris. She's voted 90%, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that's been drowned out because the Democrats have spent so much more money on the Sam Brown and abortion and a few other things. I think the race is going to close. I think both sides think it is. But I don't think the Republicans believe that Sam Brown can beat Jackie Rosen in the end.

So since you won't make a presidential prediction, are you predicting a Jackie Rosen win in the Senate race? I'd be very surprised if she lost. Now, again, I want to see votes actually being cast, Sarah. But if there is a big Trump wave here, which I think is very unlikely, it's possible that Sam Brown could win. But right now, I don't know any Republicans nationally who talk candidly or in this state who know what's going on and think Sam Brown is going to win.

Okay, well then let me ask you as sort of a closing question, why is Harris pulling so far behind Jackie Rosen?

This is the conundrum that I've been trying to figure out the entire election. I've asked a lot of people, who are these mysterious Trump-Rosen voters, right? Like, who's going to vote for Trump and then vote for Jackie Rosen? I think there are some of those. But here's something else that a lot of people forget, Sarah, is that we in Nevada have this weird thing on the ballot called none of these candidates. Hmm.

in all statewide races. And I think that may fill up with some people who don't want to vote for either candidate in the presidential race, which is astonishing to me, but I think they exist. And then they'll vote for Jackie Rosen. So I think there are some of none of these candidates, Jackie Rosen voters, as opposed to Trump Rosen voters. But

she has consistently run four, five, six points ahead of Harris in this state. And whether Harris is up by one or two or Trump is ahead by one or two, Jackie Rosen is going to run far ahead of Harris, I think.

Okay, John Ralston, you are one of my absolute favorites to talk to. Thank you so much for coming on the Focus Group podcast. And I hope you will text me when you decide to make your prediction as you see these early votes come in. And I will share them with our audience. Of course, I am not among the privileged few who have Sarah Longwell's phone number, but I will make sure that you know. And I'm going to hold you to next time you come to Vegas, we're gambling and drinking.

I love it. I love it. I'll see you there. Great. Bye, John. Okay, now I want to turn to Arizona. So longtime listeners of this podcast will remember Republican candidate for Senate, Carrie Lake, and her acrimonious relationship with swing voters and quote unquote McCain Republicans.

Swing voters don't like her for the same reasons they don't like Donald Trump. So why is Trump's polling so much better than hers? Lake trails by 7.5 points in the current 538 average, while Trump leads in Arizona by 1.8%. To break down the state of play in Arizona, I'm bringing back Yvonne Winget Sanchez, democracy reporter for The Washington Post based in Arizona. Yvonne, thanks for coming back. Thanks for having me.

God, I love talking about Arizona because Arizona has been a real mystery to me this cycle. It's got an abortion ballot initiative. It's got insane Carrie Lake. And yet Trump has been doing great. And I just want to know what's going on there. Maybe you can tell me. Can we just start there? What's happening? We got a lot going on. We really do have democracy on the ballot in

in so many different ways from the top of the ticket down to the abortion initiative, a lot of other initiatives, judges, county offices, people who do elections, like you name it, it's on the ballot. Everyone gets to pick their own adventure.

Trump does still seem to be leading here in Arizona, according to the polling. It does seem to be a very tied race. Remember that Joe Biden only won by 10,457 votes. It is going to be a knife fight all the way to the end. Look, I will say that Republicans continue to have an advantage here in Arizona. They have a registration advantage.

A lot of independents are still Republican. People are feeling a certain way about the economy, about the border, about their lives generally. And it

It feels as though in some ways at the top of the ticket, Republicans seem to have an advantage that very quickly starts to erode when you get to the Senate race and Carrie Lake. There's a lot of reasons why we can get into them, but they're pretty basic. When you get down to the abortion initiative that is overwhelmingly supported by voters and most people here just seem to take that sort of freedom approach.

you know, libertarian sort of point of view, just like hands off my body, don't tell me what to do. That's where we're at. Okay. So one major hiccup in Arizona has been the 218,000 people who are on the voter rolls in Arizona without proof of citizenship. How did this come to be? How did it feed into the MAGA conspiracy theories around the election? And how is this legal battle playing out?

So legal battle for now is over. The Supreme Court has decided, look, this last minute glitch that you guys found where the motor vehicle division records were not speaking properly with voter registration records, there's nothing we can do about that now. These people are going to go ahead and going to be able to vote on the full ballots. We can have a fight down the road if you want to. But

It plays into this narrative pressed by former President Donald Trump and his allies that hordes of non-citizens are voting and are preparing to rig the election against him. It is exceedingly rare that this even happens. But this is a really complicated issue. And

It's really hard to explain to people the complexities and the nuances of this. And so the easiest thing for a lot of people to do is to weaponize it, to show up on people's doors, to take videos, put them on social media and accuse people of being non-citizen voters. That's what we're seeing here in Arizona. And special interest groups around the country are also doing this. It's something that election officials in the state are going to have to figure out how to work through after the election. But as of now, these people can vote.

Okay. So I want to talk about the salience of abortion in Arizona. Yvonne, you were on the show back in April when the Arizona Supreme Court was reinstating some abortion restrictions there. And that was like a really insane, it was like going back to the, I don't know, 1762, 1843. I don't know, sometime a really long time ago, women couldn't even vote yet. So it seemed like a bad

bill. The Dems actually bailed them out, as I recall. And now there's a referendum on the ballot, Prop 139, which would protect the right to an abortion up until viability. So I want to play how voters are thinking about abortion in terms of their votes for president and on the referendum.

I'm absolutely voting yes on 139. There's absolutely no reason why my daughter or my future granddaughters or my nieces should have less rights than I do. Government should not be in control of a woman's body. It's between the woman and her doctor or her family and her doctor, but it's not the government's role to tell a woman what they should do with their body.

If this had been a man, there would never have been a question. So because of my vote for Trump in 2016, my daughter now has less rights than I do. I would never, ever vote for that guy again. I really want Kamala because I think we need to have a new direction in our country. The hate and the division that he has caused, he goes after people's lowest denominator because he wants hate.

because that's what he goes after. There is no way I could support him. And I really like her. So I'm not voting against two evils. I'm voting for the person I think is good as opposed to the evil. They undid Roe versus Wade, and that just blew me away. There's precedent for that. You know, it's just it's wildly dangerous now. You know, if any of you have read about Project 2025, we can't put Republicans in power. I don't know which one of you said it earlier, but they need to clean house.

I think it definitely is affecting my vote. Absolutely. And anything that has to do with women's body issues are definitely going to influence my vote. I think it's really important as well. And I also think it's a gateway drug to additional restrictions. So like if we don't fight back on this, then there's going to be other rights that have been given that are going to be taken away. So I think it's really important to have like a strong stance in this specifically so that it sets a precedent to.

I like Trump for his foreign policy, for some of his economic policy, but I cannot get over the difference where they stand with

women's rights to choose what they did with their body. That is going to drive my vote. I am concerned about Harris in a lot of policies and her experience makes me nervous in some aspects. But again, I just don't think we can do Trump again. We've seen that and his ripping apart of every other human that doesn't look like him or act like him is just not presidential. You know,

One of the things I think about a lot, I mean, I do focus groups now, and again, especially right now, this close to the election, we're doing, you know, three or four a week. So I've watched a lot of them. But the one that we did in Arizona, the last time you were on, is seared into my brain. It stands out because in those women, they were all Trump-voting women, not the people we just heard, but this old group, which you should go back and listen to. It's a wild episode. As I recall, three women in the group had had abortions, and one had had, like, a catastrophic health issue.

issue that had made her very sensitive on this and they all started talking about it. It was all women and they were all Trump voters, but at the end they were all, they weren't going to vote for Trump because of this issue, but they were all leaning RFK. And there was like this through line too, because they were sort of anti-vaccine, but also anti the abortion restrictions. And it was like the bodily autonomy, that libertarian instinct that

I wonder what you think those women, I wish I could reconvene them and ask, now that RFK is not on the ballot, what do you think those women would do now? Because this group, and you're going to hear more of this, they were really anti-Carrie Lake, which we'll get into. But it feels, I guess I'm like surprised Trump is up by so much when the sentiment feels so clear on these issues.

People can feel super passionate about this issue, which they very clearly do. They have an opportunity down ballot to vote for that issue separate and apart from the presidency. This issue of abortion and reproductive rights, health care, freedom for my child, not taking us back into ancient times, pre-Roe v. Wade, 1864 territorial days, all that stuff.

It can be viewed separately. And we're one of, I don't know how many states, a few states where voters have an option to not completely reconcile themselves just down to one race on this issue. They're going to disaggregate. They're going to disaggregate. And Arizonans are used to doing this. We are a state of ticketed.

Ticket splitters. This is how we get so many statewide Democratic candidates and so many, you know, statewide Republicans. We split tickets and we do it for decades and we do it pretty well. And so I suspect that's what a lot of these voters are going to be doing. This is the sentiment that's driving Trump, too, right? Like this is why he's like, OK, it's a state's rights issue. I'm sure they're hearing the same sort of sentiments that you are.

Well, I guess that's what I was going to ask next is just do you feel like Republicans and Carrie Lake in particular, I guess, but other Republicans are starting to distance themselves from this issue? Because she was back back in the day. She was a big like, no, let's go back to the 1600s law. I'm just going to keep picking different centuries for when that actually was because I don't remember the year. But she was fine with that incredible restriction. And now not so much.

Yeah, I mean, we started to see a huge separation of Arizona Republicans on this issue back during the spring when we taped that last issue and when they really had to grapple with what their position was going to be on this. And we saw Carrie Lake.

flip-flop completely. As soon as Trump said, you know, this is a state's rights issue and he had a change of heart, she did. And so I suspect in just my own conversations with voters that flip-flopping is contributing to some of the polling numbers that we're seeing with her. Yeah, interesting. The referendum has at least 60% support, I think, in the last poll I looked at. All

All right, let's switch gears to the Senate race because I want to get into Lake because this kind of stuff just makes me happy when I hear this. This group of swing voters has made up a lot of the lapsed, you know, McCain Republicans because they're flippers. They're people who voted for Trump 16, Biden in 20. And these are the people that Carrie Lake said in her race for governor two years that she did not need. Turns out she did need them because she lost. So let's listen to how these voters think about her.

It's hard for me to act like an adult when I talk about Carrie Lake because I find her to be a disgusting individual. And quite honestly, I'm in the camp. I will not vote for a Republican until they clean their damn house. You know, they had a chance to do away with Trump after January 6th and they've got a clean house. You know, Carrie Lake is a disgusting individual. But she just kept trying to tie herself to Trump.

making it a point to say that he was a mentor of hers, that they have a close friendship, that she really values him and he values her. It was just kind of honestly a little disgusting. She didn't really outline any policies like I kind of knew she wouldn't. And she was incredibly rude. And her conduct was unbecoming of somebody who would be elected to office. I did catch a little bit.

of the debate and most of what I caught was her like just interrupting and being rude but I actually really like Ruben I agree with a lot of his stuff so it's finally nice to see somebody who kind of

kind of has my values in mind versus somebody like Carrie Lake who's kind of just crazy. I don't love either one of them, but I definitely don't like Carrie Lake. Same as everybody else is saying. She's rude. She's condescending. I did catch a little bit of it, just a little bit, but I couldn't deal with it. She talks over everybody, thinks she's better than everybody else. But I'm not crazy about him either. So they need to find a more moderate person that represents Arizona. Arizona is purple.

We're not this far right wing thing. And she does not represent Arizona. And I don't care who is on the left side, but I could never vote for her ever. I don't necessarily believe everything that she says, but I do believe that, especially because of a little bit of crazy side,

the fact that she'd be doing things on a national basis wouldn't affect Arizona so much. I think if there's going to have someone, a place for her in politics, it's far, far away from Arizona, where I prefer things to be more limited in terms of national government and having another Republican voice there as opposed to the Democrat voice, I believe is a better option in terms of national politics. But if it were more local or state government, I'd want nothing to do with Cherry Lake.

This is my favorite. The only guy in the group who was going to vote for Carrie Lake was like, I will vote for her for the Senate because it means she won't be in Arizona. We're going to send her far, far away to Washington, D.C. I mean, I'm not a neutral observer in this. I also despise Carrie Lake and also find it difficult to be an adult when talking about her. But I was surprised at the ferocity with which they loathe her at this point. And it feels different than it did in 22 when people were like, eh, maybe.

maybe, and you know, she does, she's too much Trumpy, but so what's going on here? What, what do you think's changed? Okay. She had the magic in 2022, completely had the magic, the magic. Even when you go to some of her events, it is not there. There are two big things happening. Maybe three. The first one, let's all remember that she taped and then secretly posted

like leaked a recording of the former state party chair who came to her and said, hey, I don't think it's going to be a good idea for you to run for Senate. Here's what we think that you should do. Like take a beat. What sort of job do you want? There's powerful people on the East Coast and they also like don't think that you should do this. And, you know, we want to make sure Republicans can win the seat. That state party chair was a big ally of Donald Trump's.

Very big ally. She leaks the tape. These people felt burned because it felt as though she had turned on one of their own to her own benefit. I don't think that we can underestimate that moment. That was a big moment. People began to say,

I just can't trust her. We did a big whole story about it. People can Google it. That was like the foundation for where we're at now. Then you had the switcheroo on abortion. That was a big moment because

She so convincingly looked you dead in the eye and, you know, with the soft lighting and the whole thing and said, I believe so deeply in this thing. And then the next moment she said, well, now I believe so deeply in this thing. So a lot of Christian Republican voters, a lot of Mormon voters, independent women, Republican women started to think that.

We can't trust her. And she doesn't have the benefit that Trump has. Trump can go and do and say whatever he wants because at least he's given them a bunch of federal judges. He's enacted a bunch of policies. She has not done anything.

Then we have a third thing. She admitted that she defamed the county recorder over her 2022 loss. There's going to be a bunch of evidence that we will see at some point that is gathered as part of this defamation case against Republican recorder Stephen Richer.

People know who Stephen Richer is. People who vote in Maricopa County, the biggest, swingiest county in the country, who delivered the last presidency, they know who Stephen Richer is. They know who Carrie Lake is. The defamation accusations go straight to this sort of behavior, this rude behavior, her activity on social media, just this feeling that she's

too much and needs to be sent far away to Washington, D.C. That's how we should handle her. You know, I think it's those three things. And then sort of a sentiment that, you know, she's continuing to say that she's the governor of Arizona and that she like rightfully was. Yeah, right. How is she running for Senate right now when she's the sitting governor? It really does. It's a shot. How does one do it? I mean, she still has active litigation going over that law.

and has not recognized that she's actually lost that race. So I think at some point, like that also starts to feel like kind of weird to people. You know, people don't really understand how she could do it. And so then that leads, you talk to them long enough and then that leads them to say, you know, and what is she doing with all of this money? Is she doing this for herself? How is she getting paid? What about her political action committee? There's just a lot of questions there and people,

don't really necessarily know the answers to it, but there's like a vibe now for a lot of voters. And I think that's reflected in this focus group. Love the vibes here about the vibes. Okay. I got to ask you, you sort of hit this in your last answer, but I want to drill down on it. Now, granted, these were Trump to Biden voters. And so, you know, they were, it's not like they were all going to be Trump voters. And in fact, most were not, but it's,

It does surprise me that people have this sense of her like, well, she's rude and she interrupts and she denied the election results and she does these stupid lawsuits. And yet those all could be used to describe Donald Trump. And I think and she runs like a person who is running in Trump's image, like explicitly, like this is what she wants to ride his coattails with.

Why doesn't she drag him down at all? Why do voters tolerate from him what they are unwilling to tolerate from her?

she's not done anything. She's not done anything in office. She talks a lot about what she wants to do and what she thinks should be done. That's because she hasn't won any races. She has not won any races. And so you don't have that benefit. And then one thing that I hear time and time again, and we wrote Josh Dossi and Liz Goodwin, and I wrote a story about this. She's seen by some of these people as a hanger on her. And she,

She spent so much time in Mar-a-Lago, so much that Trump was concerned about it and made a lot of comments about it, told her he thought she needed to go back home to Arizona and campaign.

People consume that relationship between Carrie Lake and Donald Trump. Yeah, he'll give you a kiss on stage when you're here in Prescott Valley. But what is happening behind the scenes is a lot of concern about whether or not she will drag him down. And he has expressed concern about that. And the Lake campaign has sought to

you know, sort of downplay those concerns, but it is a very real concern. I mean, there's a reason why some of the billboards here in town don't feature Trump and Carrie Lake. They feature Trump and other big characters. And, you know, my big question is,

If she loses by a pretty big margin, how does she rationalize that? We've seen what she's done with the 17,000 vote margin. What happens if it's as big as these polls suggest it could be? Yeah.

One of the things you didn't mention as a reason why Carrie Lake is doing so poorly is her opposition candidate, Ruben Gallego, right? Even though some of these swing voters in the group, they were hot on him. Some of them were more like he is too liberal, whatever. But I've got more sound on him. So let's listen to how these swing voters talked about Gallego.

I don't know a whole lot about him. I was very disappointed that Sinema chose not to run because I kind of liked her middle-of-the-road approach. But I honestly can't say I know a whole lot about Gallego and I'm doing that. You know, I could say it was a childish thing, but, you know, I won't vote for a Republican. So, you know, it could have been Mickey Mouse running and he would have gotten my vote over Carrie Lake.

It's the lesser of two evils, really, for me. Not that he is evil, but she just like everyone else. She's just it's amazing. She's gotten as far as she has. Although I would prefer someone that was more middle of the road. He's going to be my guy.

When I was starting my ballot preparation to know what I was voting on, when I looked her up, the very first thing was endorsed by Trump. So I was kind of just immediately like, okay, I'm going Ruben Gallego. And I've looked a little bit into him, like very briefly. And he seems very focused on veterans issues, which is good, but also seems like I would want somebody who has more broader... Every time I look information up about him, it seems to be focused somehow on...

on veterans, which is great. And I think it's important, but I think there's a lot of people who are not veterans. So I'd like to see a little bit more broadness there. I really like his history of working across the aisle.

The people throughout this interaction here have mentioned McCain, have mentioned Flake. You know, we have some weird politicians here in the state, a couple of governors, too, on both sides that we tend to try to elect people who get things done at the end of the day. And I think he fits within that mold. He's a little more liberal than I'd like on certain things. But I mean, there's no way I'm voting for Kerry Lake.

Honestly, I don't like either candidate. One leans to the left too much for me, and the other one is a little bit to the right, a little bit more to the right for me. So as of right now, I'm undecided. Would love a third option. I would have preferred someone besides Ruben, but I could never vote for Carrie Lake. I think he's a little bit too liberal for Arizona. There's no comparison. I mean, I'd rather have him than her. Arizona is purple.

And she's way over here to the right. And he's more, obviously he's more to the center left than I would prefer. But I mean, she's just, she's not serious. So I just, I like Jeff Blake. I voted for Jeff Blake. I worked on his campaign. I worked on John McCain's campaign. So I, you know, but she is just, come on.

Come on. So that last woman captures the McCain Republican in a nutshell. She's the same voter that said she mentioned her daughter having fewer rights than she did because she voted for Trump. So there's been this ongoing legal battle over Gallego's divorce records. His ex-wife, Kate Gallego, is the mayor of Phoenix and supported him in this race. But now courts ruled those records must be unsealed. So walk us through that saga.

I think there will not be anything in there that will fundamentally change what we know about Ruben Gallego or Kate Gallego, for that matter. I think, however, if there are redactions, if there are portions of these records that are for some reason withheld or not fully released, that will fuel the

all sorts of narratives, all sorts of news cycles about what has been hidden. Why was it hidden? What's underneath the black marks? So I think that that certainly prolongs the story. I don't know that it will matter. I don't know how much people care about

why he got a divorce or what the post-divorce situation sort of looked like, especially when it comes to dealing with very specific issues about how their son should be raised and, you know, what that schedule might look like, his care schedule. So I don't know. It remains to be seen. It doesn't really feel like it will move the needle in a fundamental way. I heard from a lot of Republicans, even Republican candidates, that

after that court ruling who feel as though this is just a bridge too far. Like, what do we need to know from this? You know, that it's too personal, deeply personal, and that the court shouldn't have done this. And these are people who are in the law, in the criminal justice system, and they are on the ballot, and they felt like this. And what incentive do people have to run for office if this is the way you're going to be treated? Now, I will say,

If there were Carrie Lake divorce records or Martha McSally divorce records or Kirsten Sinema divorce records or Mark Kelly divorce records, we would go for them. I've looked at some of those records, right? So I will say there could be value. We just don't know. Remains to be seen.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It reminds me of some of the Hunter Biden stuff. Like, we asked a lot of voters, swing voters, even Republican voters. And, you know, people who are deep in MAGA world, you know, had a lot of conspiracies about Hunter Biden. But, like, for swing voters, they were a lot more like, I don't know. Everybody's got a black sheep in their family and feels kind of gross. And I do think that one of the things that Trump has done, he's obviously poisoned our politics, but he's also—

Like I find much less interest from voters now around sort of the personal lives of candidates. Things that people see like is in bounds, you know, like Mark Robinson in North Carolina who has like all the porn stuff, all the paid for the abortion, all the like black Nazi stuff on the porn sites, you know, that gets people's attention because that's pretty far out there. But if it was just

a divorce or even like infidelity. Like, it just doesn't seem like people are that wound up about that stuff anymore. If it was like abuse or something like that. But even like Warnock had that like abuse accusation that's basically not cost him anything as he's run in Georgia. And so it wasn't like people in these groups were in love with Ruben Gallego. They thought he was

It was more a, like, what did she say? It was Mickey Mouse. People do this, right? I've heard people say like, I'd vote for a tomato can over that game. And I'm like, once people get to the, I'd vote for an inanimate object or like a cartoon over this person, eh, the,

eh, the personal peccadillos of the other side probably don't matter that much. I think they're most concerned about his progressive record. And he's very progressive, very, very, very progressive. Kyrsten Sinema was very, very progressive, right? And then she wasn't. Like, they've all done the thing to look more moderate or to have a more moderate voting record, not in Rubin's case yet, but in hers. So I think that that's the most concerning thing

for people is it's like less the personal stuff, more the progressiveness that they can work with. Right. Like that's what you hear from voters. Like I can work with that. Like I think that guy will like eventually like figure it out. You can't work with someone that you are describing as disgusting, crazy, lesser of two evils.

Okay, Yvonne, thank you so much for joining us. This was great. It's great to have you back on. And thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the Focus Group podcast. Remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube. We will see you next week. Bye. Bye.