What We Get Wrong When We Talk About Trump’s Electability With Kristen Soltis Anderson
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm the senior political correspondent at Puck. Welcome back to my show, Somebody's Gotta Win. Last episode, we talked about the debates. This episode, we're going to talk about the two frontrunners in the election. They weren't at the debates, but what really matters is who is the most electable. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Trump is the least electable. Nikki Haley said so on the debate stage.

And for good reason. He's got 91 indictments and he's already lost once to Joe Biden. But that didn't really go over so well. She was met with some booze.

And that same argument was used against Trump back in 2016 by both Democrats and Republicans. Republican primary voters just aren't buying it. No amount of op-eds from Mitt Romney or Chris Sununu make them think that they need to coalesce around another candidate other than Trump to beat Joe Biden. They think that Joe Biden can be beaten by Trump and they like Trump. He's a known quantity. He's their guy.

So maybe the conventional wisdom in Washington is wrong. How they choose electability is based on polling focus groups and just gut feelings about how swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are going to feel about these candidates. They tend to not like very extreme candidates. They don't like unknowns to inexperience. And so that's why these parties try to choose a candidate they think will win a general election.

It's how they were able to sort of squash the whole Bernie Sanders movement in favor of Hillary Clinton, who didn't actually win in 2016, and how they were able to get the whole party to coalesce around Joe Biden, even though Pete Buttigieg was surging after a win in Iowa. You know, I hear Republicans groan about this, that Democrats are better at this and that Republicans are sort of stuck dealing with the candidate that the grassroots chooses. But, you know, it's a real thing, electability. And maybe...

maybe we're all wrong again. Maybe Trump is more electable than Biden. I can tell you that there was mass panic in DC when a New York Times-Siena poll came out last month showing Trump and Biden basically neck and neck. And then you hear that Barack Obama has a lunch with Biden warning him, hey, don't dismiss Trump. He's more electable than you think. So conventional wisdom is shifting. It's

And when this happens, there tend to be people who are on the ground who sort of wave the red flag and say, hey, hold the phone. You dismiss Trump. You think he's the easiest guy to beat. He's the best person for Joe Biden to run against. But that's not what I'm hearing. And that person right now is Republican pollster Kristen Solstice Anderson, who has a very interesting op ed in The New York Times.

She wrote, Kristen, thank you.

Thank you so much for joining me. First of all, can you tell me a little bit about the information that you use to come up with this theory? So there's a couple different data sources for this. Some of them are quantitative, you know, hard numbers. The CBS News poll, they're one of the best in the business. And they get a really big sample of Republican likely primary voters. Their data is the freshest. The other poll that I cite is my own poll, which is, again, conducted online, but we match it back to the voter file, which is the like,

kind of wonky pollster way of saying like, we know these people are real registered voters. They're not bots. They're not bots. We know who they are. We know what state they're in. We know how often they vote and all of those things. And we can factor that into our assumptions about who will or won't turn out.

But then the other thing I used is focus groups. I know that talking to 11 people is not the same as talking to 1,100 people, but those in-depth conversations can shine a lot of light on how people's thought process is working. And so from that, it was a focus group for the New York Times opinion section, and it was with 11 voters who said they were likely to participate in the Republican primary in an early state. So they were from

Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada. And all 11 were in agreement that Trump is the most electable Republican. They weren't necessarily all in agreement that Trump was the most electable, but they were all in agreement that he was electable, that they did not have any doubt that he would be able to beat Joe Biden, even if he was in prison running for office.

We didn't pose that hypothetical. And that's why, again, I think I believe there's a little bit of a yet around all of this. Republican voters don't believe Trump is unelectable yet. Yet. And that's saying that any sort of information that comes out in the many court cases or possibly just knowing that he's been convicted behind bars, that could change their opinion. Yeah.

But do they know that it could be too late, that they could pick a president, that they could pick a nominee that ends up becoming unelectable later? I don't think that's calculated. I don't think that's being factored into most people's kind of calculations right now. And that's, again, why I say yet, right? Right now, they just think Donald Trump is under siege. He's got these unfair things coming his way. But we think he's a tough guy. We think he'll be able to handle it. He'll probably be able to deal with it. If you get to January or February and it's

starts looking less and less like he's able to deal with it or he's looking less and less capable as a nominee, anything could change. But for right now, there's a reason why Republican voters are

kind of half booing Nikki Haley when she gets on stage and says, we can't have Donald Trump as the nominee. He'll lose the general election. They don't buy it. Yeah. And they're not crazy for not buying it. But they still aren't thinking that far down the line. They aren't thinking that perhaps we're voting for a nominee that could end up in prison and he can't win down the line. They're not worried about that. They don't feel personal responsibility for picking the wrong candidate. I think in their mind,

They're not picking the candidate today. And right now, Donald Trump seems like the strongest bet. Wow. Okay.

What do you think, Kristen? Is this about Biden or is this about Trump? It's about both of them. And it's about each party's perception that there is no way a sane, rational swing voter could ever possibly vote for the candidate on the other side. When I talk to Democratic voters, the idea that someone who has seen Trump's presidency and seen Biden's presidency would ever vote

ever choose to go back to Donald Trump seems completely unfathomable to them. They cannot figure out how someone would ever come to the conclusion that Trump is better, especially now that he's facing four criminal indictments. But Republicans, they look at that same situation and they say, how could a swing voter looking at Donald Trump's four years as president and Joe Biden's four years as president ever choose to

Joe Biden, don't you want to go back to the economy of Donald Trump, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's each side's perception that the other side is totally weak and that there's no possible reason someone would ever vote for them that leads them to think, look, even though my candidate's not perfect, I have a pretty good feeling that they're going to win. And the thing with Republican voters is they could choose

a candidate that doesn't have all the baggage, but they still think that Trump with all the baggage is stronger than Biden because Biden's economy or Biden's presidency is such a nightmare. Well, and also Donald Trump is a known quantity to them. So I think that's the other thing that you see pop up in these polls. So there was a CBS News poll that came out like a week and a half ago, and they asked Republican voters,

how likely do you think it is that each of these candidates, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, you name them, each of them, how likely would each one be to defeat Joe Biden? And you had three options you could choose from. You could say, he's a long shot to beat Biden, he or she. You could say,

they might beat Biden or they would definitely beat Biden. And Donald Trump is the only one that gets a majority saying, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, he would definitely beat Biden. Even Ron DeSantis, who comes in second place on that question, is only 35% of Republican voters think

He's a sure bet to beat Biden. A lot of that is because your average Republican primary voter is still getting to know all of these people. Folks like you and I, we're like junkies for this, right? We live for this. We know every time Ron DeSantis sneezes at an event in Iowa, like we know about it.

Your average Republican primary voter has maybe thought about Nikki Haley once in the last three years. And that's not anything that she's done wrong. It is totally rational for a Republican primary voter to say, I am voting in March of 2024. You know what I have to do between now and March of 2024? I have a lot of things to do living my life. So wake me up when it's down to like

Donald Trump plus two candidates and then I'll decide. So it's totally rational that most of these Republicans have not taken a step back and thoroughly assessed the field. But at the same time, it means that Donald Trump's the name that they know. He's the name brand. They like him and they think,

Yeah. Given the contrast between Trump and Biden, clearly all voters think like I think, right? Surely they would make the choice I would make. And that's a big problem in our politics is when people just assume, oh, everyone must think like me. Anyone rational must think the way I do. That's how you wind up getting surprised on Election Day. Okay. But here's the thing. The facts are that Trump actually lost against Biden in 2020. How do you reconcile that? They think that he still won.

even though he lost, right? I think that's part of it. I think some of it is Republicans believing what I call in my piece, the pernicious fantasy that actually Donald Trump didn't really win in 2020. But I think even if you set that aside, you'll hear from Republicans in focus groups that like Biden has faded.

since 2020, right? That in the 2020 election, they'll say, oh, he was able to hide in his basement, but he won't be able to do that this time. That they feel like America has now gotten a look at Joe Biden and where in 2020 they may have said, well, I just don't like Trump, so let's try something different. They now know what they're getting. And Joe Biden's mediocre job approval suggests they're not crazy for thinking this.

that Americans will go, oh, well, I don't want four more years of that. Now, I believe they are wrong to say that America will go, well, let's go back to Trump. But it's not hard to understand how they would get from point A to point B. You're not really talking about early state primary voters. You're just talking about primary voters in general. Right. And I think that's exactly why you see in the early states where voters are paying a little more attention. If you live in Iowa or New Hampshire,

You probably have thought about Nikki Haley more than once in the last three or four years, right? These are folks that are showing up at your diners. They're popping up on your local news. You're seeing ads on TV. So it's already a little more present for you. And I think the best news that Republicans have, if you don't want Donald Trump to be your nominee, is the fact

that he does look more vulnerable in these early state polls. He's still in the lead, but it's not the kind of commanding lead you see in the national polls that I think right now are being driven by Republicans that kind of just default to saying, oh, I know Trump. I like Trump. He can probably beat Biden. Sounds good to me. Got it. But are you saying today that

that Trump can do no wrong and that these people are just, they're invested in Trump at this point. I don't think that it is that he can do no wrong. And so, you know, you take a listen in the Republican primary debate and you had that moment where Nikki Haley was trying to make this electability argument where she said,

Donald Trump is the least popular politician in America. We're going to lose a general election with him. And in what I thought was an otherwise pretty strong debate performance, she kind of got a mixed response from the crowd with that line. But I don't think that it's the case that just because that argument doesn't fly today doesn't mean it will never fly.

He has got a lot of time to spend in courtrooms. He is going to have a lot of legal bills that rack up. And suddenly this notion that, hey, maybe Donald Trump does have a lot of baggage. Maybe he could lose to Joe Biden. There's still a chance it could take root. But right now, the messengers who have been pushing it, uh,

And frankly, the way it's being delivered is just not being believed by Republican voters. Yeah, it does seem like it's turbocharging his campaign. He raised, what, $7 million after his latest indictment? Yeah, for now, it's just kind of rallying Republicans to his side. Now, I don't think that that means that it is, oh, these are

only a net positive for him. I do think that as you get closer to next spring and as he spends more and more time and effort on this legal situation, it wouldn't surprise me if you started to see Republicans become more skeptical of his electability. But if you're trying to figure out why right now Nikki Haley gets like half booed for saying something like that in a debate, it's because Republican voters, they look at Donald Trump and they say,

You know, all these commentators told me he wasn't going to win in 2016. And then he did. So now that they're telling me again, he's not going to win. I don't think I buy it. I mean, he already won once. Why can't he do it again? And you don't think like there's any revelation during these trials? Like you think that eventually maybe the baggage, but do you think a revelation during the trials could hurt Trump and his chances? I mean, it depends entirely on what it is. I think that in general, he's pretty inoculated against the trials themselves, or at least,

What is being alleged being a problem? I think the one of the different indictments he's facing, I actually suspect the Mar-a-Lago documents one is the one where stuff could come out that raises eyebrows, because I think when it comes to the 2020 election stuff.

I feel like a lot of that's already priced in, like that Republican voters already know that Donald Trump really didn't like the results of the 2020 election, that he tried his hardest to get himself kept in as president. Many Republican voters don't think that's such a bad thing or certainly don't think it should be facing criminal charges as a result of it. And they're kind of not interested in hearing more about it. But the Mar-a-Lago document stuff seems a little more open and shut.

You're not having to claim, you know, this counts under conspiracy law or anything. It is anybody, Donald Trump or anybody else in possession of these materials should have to give them back to the government. And if you don't and you lie about it, that's bad. So I think that that's the one where Donald Trump compromising national security because he wants documents that he thinks are cool.

I can see especially more national security focused Republicans as we learn more and more about this going, oh, I don't know. Now, the problem there is that trial may not happen because of the classification of the documents. That trial could happen years from now. I don't know. For me, it does remind me of like, but her emails kind of like killer Clinton emails, stealing secrets, that kind of stuff.

But I also think the fact that Pence had classified documents, Biden has classified documents and he's being investigated for it seems to me like what I got from all of this. And not that I not that it's accurate, but what I could see it being spun as is everyone in Washington just plays around with classified documents nilly willy. And it's really the cover up more than the crime with Trump, the fact that he wouldn't give them back.

I could see primary voters seeing it that way, but maybe you don't see that in your focus groups. Yeah, no, I think you're mostly right. But if your question is, could there be some kind of big blockbuster revelation that changes people? That's the case where if there was going to be something like that, that's the one I'd watch for it in the most. And that comes up in your focus groups, the

classified documents. I don't think at this point most Republican primary voters are differentiating a ton between the indictments. They kind of view it all as one big effort to try to distract Donald Trump, keep him off the campaign trail, and keep him from being in power again. But since the substance of the cases is ultimately going to be pretty different, I can see, for instance, the Georgia case and the federal January 6th case kind of getting muddled together a little bit for a lot of voters. But

But just the pictures of the documents sitting around in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, like that is pretty damn. It's hard to argue that that's OK. You know, so it's the sort of thing where right now it has not taken really any toll in the Republican primary. But I still hope reserve the possibility that it could affect things down the road. Yeah. But then I also think of the picture of the documents next to Joe Biden's Mustang and his, you know, the conventional wisdom in Washington is that

Primary voters do not care about electability.

But you're really saying that they do and that they care about electability and they think that Trump is the most electable. And maybe they are right. I mean, maybe they're not wrong. Perhaps Trump is the most electable up next to Biden. The fact that he lost doesn't really help that theory. The fact that the candidates he picked in 2022 and endorsed in the midterms didn't win because they were too extreme doesn't help that theory. And the fact that he has all these indictments and could be running from prison doesn't really help that theory either. But maybe he still beats Biden. I

I mean, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. I mean, I think for your average Republican primary voter as well, there was a moment shortly after the midterms where they were going, ooh, I thought we were supposed to have a red wave. I was told there would be a red tsunami. It seems like that didn't happen. Maybe we need to change course. And so a question that I've asked in my polling is if it was a head-to-head between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, who has long been thought of as kind of the top alternator

alternative, just asked a head-to-head between the two of them. And they were actually pretty neck and neck back during the winter, shortly after the midterms. I mean, it wasn't as though Republicans had thrown Trump overboard, but there was this growing appetite for, hey, let's turn the page. But DeSantis didn't announce his run for a couple of months. You then had

the Alvin Bragg indictment, and then others come down the pipeline. And I think the memory of 2022 kind of faded from people's minds. They stopped thinking of it as, oh, wow, maybe we need to go a different direction. We can't keep losing like this. And as that memory faded, the electability argument kind of lost its salience for Trump's opponents. Perhaps they're going through a bit of like euphoric amnesia.

And they only remember the good times with Trump and they don't remember losing and the bad times. They're missing Trump like an old lover. I don't know. Is there any other candidate that could pick up steam? I think the polls coming out of the debate suggest Nikki Haley is the one who's getting a second look. Now, she'll have some real vulnerabilities there because she is on record being very critical of Donald Trump. And that's not something that I think your median Republican candidate

likely primary voter, is thinking of or has very top of mind right now. They have not necessarily read Tim Alberta's big piece about Nikki Haley, where she kind of takes different, you know. She waffles, yeah. Yeah, so I think there's plenty of fodder that Haley's opponents will be able to throw her way. And certainly if she becomes a threat, Donald Trump will

come up with a nickname. I mean, you know the playbook. But for now, if you look at polls that were taken pre-debate and post-debate, Haley is the one that seems to have gotten the most bump. In the Washington Post 538 poll, she's the one that has the biggest jump in percentage of Republican primary voters considering her as a candidate. It was like four or five points, right? But she's still below 10. So that's for...

She's my candidate. But then there's the question of who are you considering? And people can choose a number of different options. She grew by at least, I think, 20. I mean, it's a large amount of the percentage of Republicans who checked that box for her as, oh, yeah, I'm considering her. She's an option that I might think about picking.

Which kind of brings me also to the thought about how do GOP women feel about Trump when you're talking to them? So I'm not seeing a huge gender gap within the party on the question of Trump. Someone like DeSantis tends to do a bit better than Trump with, say, the college-educated dad demographic. Like, there are a couple of candidates who have these, like,

pockets of, oh, this is the type of voter that really likes them. Interestingly, I have seen a handful of polls that Vivek Ramaswamy, at least up until prior to last week, was doing somewhat well among older Republicans, like especially older Republican women. I had heard that pop up in a couple of focus groups having nothing to do with 2024, but like older Republican women having seen him pop up on Fox and like, oh, he's so interesting.

So there are different demographic lanes that candidates have occupied. But Trump is... Is this like the Pete Buttigieg thing where they're like, oh, he kind of reminds me of my grandson. Completely, completely. There's this big debate online about is Vivek Ramaswamy, is he the Andrew Yang or is he the Pete Buttigieg of 2024? And I think he's much more like the Pete Buttigieg in that

He's fashioning himself to be quite similar in many ways to the front runner, almost to the point where it doesn't seem like he's running for president. He's running for cabinet. And he's someone who tries to put a like, I'm the fresh face future of the party vibe out there. But it doesn't actually necessarily work with younger voters. Even though you think, oh, he's the millennial who's going to.

Like it's younger voters that are like, I don't know about this guy, but it's older voters that say, oh, I love him. Oh, I love him. I love him. Interesting. Interesting. Maybe it is the grandson thing. Well, we will see. Now that Republican primary voters have seen him on stage, it seems like the data suggests he's very polarizing. I have started calling it like the salt and vinegar chips phenomenon where like some people really love salt and vinegar potato chips and other people are like,

They smell disgusting. How could you possibly eat that? And like, I feel like it's that kind of polarizing, like you either love him or you're like, I remember that guy from high school debate. No, thank you. Yeah, he's full of shit. Which is interesting because he's really getting the media look over now that he had that

as my editor, John Kelly called the Vivek quake, which I thought was very smart pun on his part. But there's some shockwaves going on after that. And there was an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal about how he's been all wrong on foreign policy. And he's getting a real look by the media and starting to be taken more seriously. And I was wondering, who do you think Vivek pulls from? Is it

Ron DeSantis and Trump? Like, does that give room for someone like Nikki Haley? Or should Trump start coming up with names for the guy who's praising him on the stage saying he's the greatest president of the 21st century? And how soon does that happen? I mean, who should be worried about Vivek's rise? Probably, I would say Ron DeSantis most likely, insofar as DeSantis tried very hard to fashion himself as

I'm Trump, but I know how to win. I'm a better salesman. I'm without that baggage. To the extent that Vivek has also hewed very closely to Donald Trump's issue positions on just about everything, I would think that they are fighting over the most similar ideological turf. So essentially, at some point, Trump's going to have to attack Vivek. Oh, I don't know if Donald Trump ever will because I'm not...

certain that the Vivek thing will make it all the way to Iowa. I think actually if Vivek stays in it and you get close to an Iowa caucus, and it seems like actually Trump is at risk of maybe not winning and he needs whatever 5% Vivek is still holding on to at that point, maybe. But I think for right now, Donald Trump does not feel the need to engage with

I think any of them besides Ron DeSantis at this point, I think he's going to wait for the field to narrow down. Since this is on the rigor, I know there's a lot of sports interest. I mean, the way I think I heard Republican primary voters describing the process at this point is like Trump gets a first round by that. They're actually not interested in like Trump versus every single person that's in the field right now. They want the field to winnow itself down. And then when it becomes Trump versus say two or three big contenders,

then they'll pay attention and then maybe Trump needs to take them seriously. But right now, him coming after anybody who's polling below 10% would be kind of silly and probably not worth it at this point. But he's still doing it with Ron. I guess Ron was polling at 30 and that's why he had to. Yeah. Okay. And now Ron's basically dead, but he's just having so much fun beating up Ron. I mean, Ron's not really dead though. He's going to keep going. No, I mean, I,

The polls that I've done, at least in a place like Iowa, he has enormous potential. And somewhere like Iowa, again, they're not just letting Donald Trump coast on his kind of name ID. Oh, he's the former president. Incumbency type advantage. They are taking a look. Now, I don't know how much utility that has when presidents Santorum, Huckabee and so on and so forth. You know, Iowa has not always picked

winners in this contest. But if you're Donald Trump and your whole brand is winning, losing in Iowa would not be a good look to start this contest. That's for sure. No, definitely not. You need the momentum for sure. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. You know, for me, fitness has always been about finding that groove, whether it's hitting the pavement outside, which I've done a lot of, or dialing up a sweat session indoors.

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So just to go back to your op-ed really quick, basically what you're saying is Republican voters are more confident. That's what I got from that. But does that mean that anyone with an R next to their name, they think they can win? In the focus group I did for the New York Times about a week and a half ago, the consensus was yes. At the end of the group, and this included people, by the way, who used words like train wreck, arrogant,

uh they were not all uniformly big trump fans but we ended the group with the question okay show of hands how many of you think that no matter who republicans nominate donald trump or someone else whoever that person is they will beat joe biden and everybody said yeah i think whoever republicans nominate they will beat joe biden so it's not to say that they think

Nikki Haley would lose or what have you. But it's that in their mind, the people who they realistically think have a shot at winning the Republican nomination, for most of them, that's like Trump and maybe only Trump. They're not worried about electability, really. They think that Trump is perfectly electable. They care about it. They just don't think that it's

a Trump problem. Right. So Chris Sununu, Mitt Romney, the Republican, you know, the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages warning that Trump is not electable. They're just like, that's just the elites in Washington. They're nuts. Trump's electable. Biden is so weak. It doesn't matter. We can stick with our guy. We like him the most. We know it's a it's a known quantity, like you said, and that's what they want to go with. When I was watching the debate, there was a moment when

I about halfway through, I thought, gosh, I bet you my friends who are Democratic consultants have to be watching someone like Nikki Haley and thinking, I really hope she doesn't win the nomination because she would be really formidable, especially against an aging Joe Biden where Americans aren't that crazy about the economy. You know, Nikki Haley would be so hard to beat. And then I paused and I was like,

how much of this is like 2015 brain? How much of this is like my brain reverting back to like an era before Donald Trump went down the golden escalator, right? That's a very conventional, oh gosh, you know, Republicans are going to be well positioned to win this election after Barack Obama. Look, Marco Rubio can win. Like it's very much, I feel my brain doing those things that it did eight years ago. And I'm trying to police against it because I...

the world has changed a lot. A lot of the old rules no longer exist. And so while my instinct is to say, oh my gosh, Nikki Haley would be so formidable in a general election, how can Republicans possibly think that they would rather go with Donald Trump? Well, she could possibly win swing voting women in the suburbs. For sure. I think it's important to note that they would each have a different coalition, right? So Donald Trump alienates swing voters. He alienates college educated voters. He alienates the suburbs. But

there is a particular brand of American voter that loves Donald Trump, only turns out when Donald Trump is on the ballot, and would probably look at Nikki Haley with the same level of enthusiasm that they looked at Mitt Romney in 2012 with. And that's what makes the Trump electability question so complicated, is that, yes, we know that Donald Trump repels large portions of the electorate that really do turn out to vote a lot. But he also does

overperform with certain demographic groups and voters who don't participate at all unless Donald Trump brings them to the table. I think in general, it's a net negative for Republicans, but I don't think people are crazy for assuming that he brings more advantages than drawbacks to the table and saying, yeah, he could beat Joe Biden, no problem. Right. I think we all sort of think about subconsciously, even though we both weren't alive for this, obviously, the 1960 debate and

And we think, oh, if you only put a young person up next to Joe Biden, him being Nixon, sweating under the stage, but obviously different issues, light soup, but just being older and not as agile. He's definitely not as agile as he was during the first debate or second debate with Trump, right? Having someone younger, a little quicker, just having a different, fresher look from a different party. And I mean, the truth is, I think that a lot of people just aren't that happy with Joe Biden, even on the Democratic side.

And this is why you're seeing Republicans reflecting that back. And you're seeing Democrats reflect that back. I mean, his coalition is shaky with young people, African-American men. Republicans are just more confident. But I don't know, like maybe maybe we're wrong. Maybe it doesn't have to be some young person. Maybe Trump's good enough, I guess. But you would just think that logic would tell you that someone who's already lost their

wouldn't be the best person to put up again. But maybe you've gotten the bill of goods that Joe Biden gave you and you don't like it. And that's enough of a reason not to go out and vote again. I don't know. I wonder if a way to amend this electability argument, to make it actually salient, is to make it about stability. So...

Even Republican voters who love Donald Trump would never accuse him of being sort of a purveyor of calm and stability, right? They picked him because he was there to bust things up and there to cause chaos like that. That was a feature, not a bug. But if you look at the last couple of elections, the 2020 election, I firmly believe that this was voters' choice.

trying to turn the page from the chaos of Trump and say, oh, Biden is like, let's put an adult back in charge. And then some of that got shaken. If you look, it corresponds perfectly. The day that Joe Biden's job approval drops below 50% is the day that the Taliban took back Kabul. And I don't think that's a coincidence that suddenly this illusion of like, oh, there are adults running things becomes shattered. And then voters go, okay, well now nobody is in charge who seems like they know what they're doing. This is how you wind up with

vast majorities of Americans saying that they don't want a Trump or Biden rematch. They think it's a terrible choice. But at the same time, in the 2022 midterms, the pattern of where did Republicans do all right and where did Republicans get crushed was, were you putting forward a candidate...

that said, I'm going to be an agent of calm and stability and responsibility. Got to be a check on the crazy that's happening in Washington. Or were you somebody that was running on a message of like, I'm here to turn the crazy up to 11. I'm here to add more chaos. I'm going to go there to make a mess. If you ran on that, I'm here to make a mess kind of message, you lost. And so I feel like Joe Biden no longer has the luxury of people just assuming that he is the candidate of calm, of steady, of...

Don't worry. Old reliable. I think that if nothing else, his age and that kind of fragility makes him no longer the candidate of...

stable. I don't have to worry about this anymore. You do have to worry about Joe Biden. That's a good point. I haven't heard that articulated that way. But yeah, he's not a safe pair of hands anymore, mainly because of his age is the thinking. Yeah. And so I think to the extent that Republicans who are not Donald Trump want to unseat him, they have not been successful yet at prosecuting the case that he's actually unelectable. But

But you could prosecute the case that maybe he's not as safe a bet as you think, that there are lots of unknowns out there. Even if you don't think the criminal cases against him are fair, they are still going to be a distraction for him. And this is an election where we need to go with a really safe bet. Someone who can be that strong contrast against Joe Biden.

Again, I can't guarantee that it'll work, but whatever they've been doing right now hasn't been working. So they've got to try something different. And the other thing to point out is that it's really hard to run again as an incumbent, right? You're basically blamed for everything that's happening. The economy, national security, how people feel about what they're paying for their grocery bills most of the time feel like...

they're being gouged at the, you know, the pump at the supermarket, et cetera. So you're basically being blamed for whatever is happening at the time in that country. Like you could have a natural disaster. You could have something really terrible happening and you're the one who's the caretaker. You are, you know, in charge of the country. So that,

is reflected in your electability. And I think, you know, Obama suffered with it when he ran again in 2012. He barely beat Mitt Romney was well, not barely, but it was a much closer race. So it's like the unknown is always more exciting. And that's why this is kind of interesting, because like, Trump is a known that Republican voters want back. But he's also a known that a lot of independents don't want back. I think it's just going to be tougher for Joe Biden. Like,

what he's selling, people see it and they might not be happy. And I don't know. What do you think? I think that it's fascinating that when I first saw articles saying like, oh, Biden is going to start running on Bidenomics, I thought that almost feels like something that like a Republican ad consultant would have have cooked up, right? That like, actually, Biden wants to run on his economic record and Republicans think they're super excited to run against Biden's economic record. But the reality is, even though the economy to a lot of Americans,

feels bad right now and how the economy feels to people matters a lot more than what any economists are saying about the unemployment rate or any of this but it's also true that even though incumbents get blamed for everything that's going on in general american voters give incumbents an advantage there's a reason why do they yeah we i mean if you look back over the last

during our lifetimes, Americans have generally reelected presidents much more often than they have changed and turned the page. This moment that we're in now where they like continuity then. Well, and being the incumbent president comes with it a lot of advantages about your ability to kind of set the agenda and drive the conversation. So even though, yes, you are blamed for things, it's,

In general, it has not been a drawback to be the incumbent. Now, the reason why I think this might be fading is that it used to be when you came in as the incumbent president, there was some segment of the opposition party that would still give you a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, right? Like,

there were points in time where Bill Clinton's job approval rating was really high and it was really high because he was getting 30, 40 some percent of Republicans to say, yeah, I think he's actually doing a good job as president. George W. Bush, slightly less so, like setting aside the anomalous year or two after 9-11, he didn't generally have that many Republicans saying or that many Democrats saying he was doing a good job, but it wasn't zero.

And then you got to Barack Obama. Very few Republicans ever gave Obama the benefit of the doubt or ever, no matter what he did, said they approved of him. And then Trump never did any Democrats say that they liked what he was doing. And then Biden never ever. And so you see this trend where like,

the highest job approval possible for an incumbent president has just been ticking down and down and down. And we are miles away from a world where John F. Kennedy gets elected president and a majority of Republicans say they approve the job he's doing. Like that's just not the world we live in. So I hear your argument that the incumbency advantage we traditionally think of might be eroding. Which actually kind of makes me think

that when in Washington, Trump was blamed for the midterms, perhaps he wasn't blamed outside of Washington for the losses. I think initially...

there was some sense that something's not quite right here. Let's do things differently. The analogy that I have used, and this is like a video game dork kind of thing, but I play video games. So this is the language I know is that occasionally in a video game, you'll be playing and you will fight like a really big boss at the end of a level and they'll be hard to beat and you can't defeat them. And then all of a sudden the shields come down for a minute. And that's suddenly when you can really hurt them and you can try to like beat the level.

There was a moment after the midterms when the shields were down for Trump, when people were going, ooh, all of his candidates lost in Pennsylvania and...

Arizona, I don't know about this. And people really knew that they were his candidates. They were that informed. Well, I think some did, but I think others, even if they weren't that kind of deep in the weeds on a race-by-race basis, just thought, I thought we were supposed to do really well. And I thought all these people said things were going to go great. And maybe we just need a change in direction. Like less about Donald Trump,

specifically as this like poison agent for the party, but more we need to turn the page and try a different strategy. But in the absence of a coherent alternative being presented in those early couple of weeks post-2022,

The alternative became, well, let's try Donald Trump 2.0 again. And until one of these Republican opponents present something better and more appealing and that they can actually persuade Republican voters is more likely to take on Joe Biden, they're going to have a hard time unseating Donald Trump as the front runner. Okay. And speaking of Trump, Emma,

Emerson has a new poll out that shows that Trump dropped by six points in the polls for not attending the debate. Does that even matter? I think that's pretty temporary. I wouldn't put too much stock in it, but...

But I would keep an eye on early state polls where you are more likely to have voters who are in Iowa, voters who are in New Hampshire, voters who are going to be making that initial choice and may not be saying, wake me up once the field's down to two. Those are the folks who I think are the most likely to move out.

as a result of the debate. So these national polls, yeah, he takes a six point hit, but that's almost small enough where I say, maybe that's just statistical noise, right? You know, that's not a huge number. He's still at 50%, by the way. Exactly, exactly.

And no one's even close. But in the early states, that's where you're going to find a higher percentage of the types of people who were actually watching this debate, who are trying to figure out how to sort through their options. And Donald Trump's absence from that stage and the fact that he seated the microphone for a night to other people.

that's where if it was going to actually hurt him, I would expect to see it pop up in the polls first. So do you think he'll be back for the next debate or wait till the third? Probably not for the next one. I suspect he will come back if he begins to see his numbers starting to fall in a serious way.

or if the field really narrows down to like one or two people. I think that he, and probably not incorrectly, views it as almost beneath him to be on stage with people who are polling at like two or 3%. This goes back to that like first round by mentality, right? Like I'm the reigning champion. Why should I have to argue with Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchison about stuff? Right. But if it gets down to two or three, as the RNC ratchets up the stakes for getting on stage, then,

there will come a point where it's just going to be 90 minutes of like Ron DeSantis, maybe Vivek if he's still in the race, and like a Nikki Haley or Tim Scott, you know, somebody like that. At that point, by Trump not showing up, that's conceding a lot of airtime to Trump.

Yeah. Other people. And I also think for all that his supporters have tried to claim that his thing with Tucker Carlson on X got, Oh, 500 million views. Like just, there were these claims that were like mathematically nonsense. Um, the Washington post poll asked people, okay, did you watch the Republican debate? Um,

33% said they had. And then they said, okay, if you didn't, and this was among, I think, Republican likely primary voters. They said, okay, if you're of the 67% who didn't, what did you do on Wednesday night? And the most popular answers were, I watched something else on TV. I slept. I did housework. Like watched Donald Trump's thing with Tucker Carlson was like this, you know, single digits percent. It did not make a mark. Also, it's just like, is it really that interesting to listen to Trump and talk about Trump?

Tucker have like a love fest. It would have been more interesting to watch him on the debate stage actually sparring with other Republicans. Okay, so coming off the debate, Vivek Ramaswamy, do you think he's going to usurp Ron DeSantis or is he just a flash in the pan? I think whether he usurps Ron DeSantis is almost more about

how strong or not strong is the desantis campaign than anything else i think there's a real ceiling on vivek ramaswamy's appeal and again it's because if you like where he stands on issues why wouldn't you just go for donald trump like donald trump is the original formula he's high octane he's he's full calorie he's not the diet version you know just go for donald trump you would only be looking for vivek if you want to change but he's also chaotic and

And he hasn't explained why if he loves Donald Trump so much, he's running against her for president. So that's why I think there's a ceiling on him. I wonder if he starts taking, though, from Trump voters who get more excited about him, because I do think politics is a movement and a feeling. And I wonder if younger Trump voters get excited by him and start if he starts taking from Trump.

Nothing will fascinate me more than if Donald Trump wakes up tomorrow and decides that Vivek Ramaswamy is like a bug he has to squish rather than a voice he wants to amplify as his proxy or a thorn in everyone's side on the debate stage. But I think for the moment, he views Vivek as more helpful than harmful to his own cause, even if he starts to take from Ron DeSantis and then he starts to take from... I mean...

It would be something if he started to actually take from Trump while sounding like Trump. But wasn't that the Ron DeSantis formula?

on the better version well and that has not thus far worked out better again because if you want if you want donald trump you'll just pick donald trump that's what your piece is essentially we're getting back to your story if if you want donald trump you'll vote for donald trump the argument of like i'm donald trump but i'm also electable well they think donald trump's electable so you know if you're vivek ramaswamy if you're like i'm donald trump but i'm

a young biotech billionaire from Harvard who has no experience either. Yeah. I just, I, I, although Trump had no experience, Trump had lots of, uh,

brand ID as someone who is experienced at business and running big organizations, whether that was justifiable or not. Certainly, if you're not a Republican primary voter, you probably laugh at that. But again, from his time on The Apprentice, nobody's coming to the table with the kind of pre-existing brand awareness that Donald Trump did in 2015 when he went down the golden escalator. And anybody else trying to replicate that

has pretty consistently had the hard realization that there is only one Donald Trump. Yeah. And the only way to take him on is to go at him directly, basically. Or to look at somebody like a Brian Kemp in Georgia. I mean, he has taken all kinds of incoming from Donald Trump. You do not have to be Donald Trump's beloved chosen candidate to win even in a state like Georgia. But you can also...

make a case for yourself that is apart from Donald Trump that says, here's why I'm good. And even though Donald Trump is like a fly in your ear telling you that, oh, don't vote for this person. Brian Kemp is a great example that you can still survive all of that. And if you just...

run on a record that you can talk to voters about and they like you can still pull it off that was a real act though for brian kemp and it was in a state that knew him well and had a thriving economy and you're not trying to sell yourself to a bunch of new people and trying to basically fight off you know donald trump essentially and yeah well you do you do have to show why why me and not trump but i think if your candidacy is all about orange man is bad you're

I think that you do have a ceiling among Republican voters, as I think Chris Christie is going to find out. But if your candidacy is Donald Trump is great...

vote for me instead. That's also incoherent enough that I think that's why you're seeing so many of these other folks who have tried to follow the Donald Trump lane discover, no, no, Trump's voters just want Trump. This was fascinating. I'm so happy to have you on and it worked out perfectly with your op-ed. Well, thank you for having me on. I tend not to listen to political podcasts, but like 100% of my podcast consumption is ringer podcasts.

The Fantasy Football Podcast, Ring or Dish. Like, I just, I love it. So...

Such an honor to be on. Thanks for having me. Thank you. No, no. So happy to have you. We'll have you back on, I'm sure. Oh, I'd love that. Thank you so much for joining us. Of course, all of these conversations are subject to change pending new revelations in various legal action against the former president. But this has been a really interesting conversation. Thank you to Kristen for joining. And please come back Thursday when we'll have another episode drop of Somebody's Gotta Win. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.