Why Trump’s Sentencing Is Everything With Kristen Soltis Anderson
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. We are living in some very confusing times for some people in this country, and those people are probably the ones that will determine the outcome of this election in November. I'm talking about independents in the battleground states who still haven't made up their minds about Donald Trump or Joe Biden. If you're listening to this show and you hate Donald Trump,

and there was zero chance you were ever voting for him anyway, then the fact that he's a convicted felon probably just reaffirms your decision not to vote for him and your feelings about him. If you love Donald Trump, then you probably think he's being unfairly persecuted and prosecuted, and you probably think that he's a martyr. And you'll still vote for him anyway. In fact, this conviction has you charged up

It's made you an even more of a Trump evangelist. For some people who are lukewarm on Trump, they've become charged up on him. Others have been turned off completely. And I think a lot of people in the middle haven't fully formed their opinion on all of this. And that's why sentencing may offer some more information to these voters about the severity of the crime and how the sentencing will impact his ability to serve in office. Will he be imprisoned under

under house arrest, or just get a slap on the wrist, like community service or a fine. We know that he'll certainly appeal, but if he's sentenced to jail, will some voters see that as overkill and feel sympathetic for Trump? Could that backfire on Democrats? Will it prove that he is the martyr that he says he is? He seemed to be almost welcoming the idea of jail time when he was on Fox News this past weekend. It's tricky because a prison sentence could supercharge his campaign and

But if there's no real punishment, it could be a sign that the whole thing was petty and politically driven. The timing, too, is interesting of the sentencing hearing. It was Trump's team that asked that it be held on July 11th, just days before the Republican National Convention.

likely around the time that Trump would choose his vice presidential candidate. And there would be the news cycle around the Republican National Convention could perhaps overshadow any negative blowback from the sentencing or could be a way to hype it up. Eli Honig, you know him. He's a friend of the pod and he's a former prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. Well, he texted me that there's a 50-50 chance that Trump goes to jail. He texted me, if not prison, then some combo of probation, maybe house arrests or other restriction.

maybe a fine, community service. He said most but not all similar cases result in no prison, about 70 to 90 percent. But there are some aggravating factors in this case, as with Trump. The open contempt, the gag order violations, and the lack of acceptance of responsibility.

So he said it's a close call. On this show, I have Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, who has a lot of thoughts based on polling and focus groups about how this conviction will impact voters. Sure, we're all in agreement that flash polls are probably not the best indicator. And the things that people have said before the conviction may be different than what they think after. And she too agrees with me that sentencing is a key piece of information for swing voters or underprivileged.

or undecideds. She'll also explain this phenomenon that she's been seeing in focus groups of the Trump-Oprah voter, people who say that if they weren't voting for Trump, they would vote for Oprah, and how the celebrity shield and the idea of success that both of them share may be Trump's saving grace.

Kristen, I'm so glad to have you on the show. Obviously, I asked you to come on after you had this article in the New York Times called the Trump Oprah voter, which we're going to talk about because I think it has a lot of resonance with the recent verdict. But obviously, you're one of the top pollsters. You hold a lot of focus groups. You give your polling to us at Puck. We have a relationship. So that's awesome. And you can read a lot of echelons polling and the kind of work they're doing at Puck.

But obviously, we'll get into what impact do we think the verdict is going to have on Donald Trump. But first of all, you really had this great piece in The New York Times last week preparing us for what kind of political impact the verdict might have.

And the point you make is really interesting that Trump doesn't play by the same rules as any other politician. He never has, he never will, which is how I feel as well. I think there's a lot of things that are baked into who Trump is. There are so many scandals that he got away with. I covered him in the White House. I felt the whiplash every single day. Which one's going to take him out? Trying to fire his, you know, Attorney General, Charlottesville, this, that. It just seems like nothing stuck, even the insurrection. And you make the point that

In fact, it's something that goes back even further. It's something that makes him Teflon Don, as he's called. It's the fact that he is a celebrity.

And celebrities are different than everyone else. So can you kind of explain that? Absolutely. I can't tell you the number of times over the last few years I've been asked that same question. Is this going to be the thing that makes Donald Trump unpopular with enough people that he disappears from public life? And the answer has always been no. And even...

Even something like January 6th, which was so horrible and the images were just seared in the minds of people, we have seen that even in time, the polls sort of rebounded for Donald Trump even after that.

So I was really trying to figure out why is this the case? Why is it that he's Teflon Don? Why is it that he's so different? Because lots of other politicians have tried to run the Trump playbook. They have tried to pretend like they are Donald Trump. Kristi Noem is a great recent example of someone who thinks she can play by Donald Trump rules and

have a horrible scandal where she divulges that she killed her puppy and then is suddenly surprised to discover like no no you don't actually play by Donald Trump rules people think that's horrible and now you're being shunned from public life as a result so I wanted to figure out what's causing this and I was doing a focus group of voters who were women who voted for Donald Trump in the

the 2020 election. And most, if not all of them had also voted for him in 2016. This was a focus group I conducted on behalf of the New York Times. And in this group, look, these women talked about why, you know, they didn't love Donald Trump. They don't think he's perfect. They understand that he's arrogant, et cetera, et cetera. They were willing to say that this idea that every Trump voter is just completely in love with him and doesn't see his faults is wrong. They saw his faults.

But for them, it wasn't enough to rise to I'm not going to vote for him. And then at the end of the group, I said, well, OK, let's assume Donald Trump wasn't running for president. Who would you want to see run? And the first name that got mentioned was Oprah. And then the next respondent said, well, I was going to pick Oprah, but since she already picked Oprah, I'll pick someone else. And I just thought that was so interesting because.

I don't think Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey agree on a whole lot. That's an understatement, I would assume. Although at one time they talked about running together, right? That's right. And so when I went to go do research to write this piece, one of the first things that came up was that in...

Oprah had sent Trump a note saying, hey, you and I would be a good team if we ever ran for something. A fascinating artifact from a completely different timeline, it feels like. He first floated that he wanted to run for president on her show in 1988. It's wild the way that they're

their stories had sort of been intertwined. And it made me realize that, oh, even if Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey are very different in terms of their policy preferences, I mean, you name it, I'm not suggesting that they are the same person, but that there are some threads that connect them. And it is that thread of,

celebrity. And the fact that the women in this focus group, when I said, oh, Oprah, like, tell me more about this. They said, well, she's a good businesswoman. She's not going to be a pushover. It means the same sorts of things you would hear these women say about Donald Trump.

And it made me realize that this kind of celebrity branding, the feeling that you know someone because you've seen them on TV a lot, that's really powerful. And it is fundamentally a different relationship, celebrity and fan, than the relationship between, say, politician and voter. They're just different. They're psychologically different.

And celebrity is something that casts this halo around you. It's why, for instance, at my firm, we have tested things like what if Matthew McConaughey ran for president as an independent? What if Dwayne The Rock Johnson ran as president as an independent? We tested Taylor Swift at one point. We do this because we're curious to see this halo effect around celebrities as

How does it transfer or not to whether somebody thinks, yes, I actually think that person, in addition to putting on a great three-hour concert, would also be great at being president of the United States. And there is a little bit of transference there. Interesting. And it was something kind of special, though, about The Apprentice was and the fact that he was a judge on beauty contests. He was always seen as like decisive in power as someone who had a success story, despite the fact that he had filed for about six bankruptcies by the time he got

the show on The Apprentice. It was the aura. It was the myth of Donald Trump that was more important than anything else. It was the act of watching him in the job. We don't actually see a lot of the politicians in the job. If anything, being a politician has become a job that people don't really respect anymore, right? I mean, Congress has such a low approval rating. But if you're seen as like, maybe Simon Cowell would be considered a great leader just based on the fact that he has such strong opinions, right? People kind of associate

people with strong opinions as being good leaders for the most part. I love this last part. I'm going to read it from your story. It is called the Trump Oprah voter.

And you say, as The Apprentice fades farther into the rearview mirror, it is a mistake to forget that Mr. Trump is a celebrity first and a politician second. Nearly a decade later, he still isn't affected by the same laws of gravity that govern nearly every other political figure, including his Republican imitators and imposters. If Mr. Biden is to win in November, his team will need to get voters thinking about Mr. Trump as a politician once more. For

For now, Mr. Trump is still playing by Oprah's rules. How will that get him to think of Trump as a politician again? So it's possible that some of this will happen for them as we approach November and as the more conventional trappings of a campaign set in, as we do things like presidential debates, as we do more things that look and feel like a traditional presidential campaign.

I wonder to what extent they will, you know, there's going to be a lot of attempts to run ads saying when Donald Trump was president, it actually wasn't as good as you're remembering. Right now, Donald Trump is benefiting from a lot of nostalgia. Voters, and it's not just Donald Trump. This is actually something that happens with

All past presidents, we see that people after they're out of office, suddenly they start thinking back more fondly to, oh, well, actually, maybe things weren't that bad when Obama was president or when George W. Bush was president. Right. I mean, they think fondly of George Bush's poll numbers among Democrats. His numbers are actually like decent. I mean, they're not great, but they're they're different now. So nostalgia in and of itself benefits people. So Trump's benefiting from a little of that.

Amnesia maybe is the word too. That is certainly what I think the Biden folks would say and that they're hoping to use, I mean, there's going to be billions of dollars spent on ads in this race trying to remind voters that,

hey, you think that the stock market was great under Trump, et cetera, et cetera, but here's the way it is. The problem they're going to run into is the way people feel about things is very powerful. Nostalgia is hard to shake. So I suspect that as long as, you know, as Trump has gotten further and further from his own presidency, that nostalgia effect has kicked in. The

of Trump in people's minds from commander-in-chief to that guy who hosted The Apprentice, like he has slid along that spectrum, I suspect, for some voters. And that's why so many of them still talk about him in those kind of pre-presidency terms. And so the more that people are reminded of his actual presidency, which I suspect there's going to be a lot of that in the coming months, will that hold or will people...

begin to think of him more and more as, oh, actually, I didn't like it so much when he was president. Hmm, interesting. I do wonder if you think the guilty verdict will have any impact on him or does the Oprah factor apply? First was my hunch was that it wouldn't. And part of my hunch was because

Simply the label of convicted felon. Again, remembering that Donald Trump plays by a different set of rules. Does the label convicted felon make you feel less positively about a politician or a political figure? The answer is yes.

Does the label convicted felon make you feel less positively about a celebrity? It's not hard for me to make a list of celebrities that are beloved who have felonies on their record. Martha Stewart. Exactly. One who I mentioned in my piece, there's actually this Macy's ad from, I think it was 2007 or 2008. And I link to it in the piece because it is wild. It is a Macy's ad featuring Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Diddy, like as

As just a time capsule, like looking through that through the lens of 2024 is wild. But setting that aside, I mean, Martha Stewart hosted The Apprentice.

has a felony conviction is amazing. I love Martha Stewart. Actually, I think she hosted The Apprentice after her felony conviction to sort of like launder her reputation. And I, look, I should actually add Martha Stewart to my next survey just to see, but I imagine her favorables are quite good. That for celebrities, the fact that you committed, especially if it's like white collar crime, insider trading, falsifying business records, what have you, that's why my hunch initially was,

I don't actually know that simply just yelling the word convicted felon at Donald Trump over and over and over again will change things because people have such an idea in their mind already of who they are. It's hard to think of who the voter is that goes, you know what, I kind of like Donald Trump, but now he's a convicted felon, so I don't know. The brand of Donald Trump is so entrenched, so unique.

That's why my initial instinct was, I don't think this changes much. So then I tried to get data to see, is that accurate or not? So my firm, we went into the field the night of the verdict. And what we were doing was not a survey of just any old voter. We were contacting people we had surveyed within the last couple of months who had already told us at a previous survey, were they voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden? And so we asked them again and we didn't tell them, oh, we're here to like check your work. We just said, who are you voting for?

And I believe it was 97% of people who said originally they were voting for Trump or still voting for Trump. And 98% of those who said they were originally voting for Biden were still voting for Biden. The only real difference was there's this very slim group of people who were undecided previously.

who about 40% of them now said they were leaning more toward Biden. And almost none of those undecideds were now leaning more toward Trump. So you could argue that in that very immediate moment, a very slight on the margins bit of good news for the Biden team. But I

I think these numbers were so tiny that it really only matters in a race where you are assuming 5,000 people in Wisconsin is going to make or break this, right? Which might be this race, though. Which might be this race, but it is not as though we should be expecting the polls to move five points in Biden's direction or anything like that. The other thing that was interesting in our poll is we then asked people,

you know, Donald Trump was recently convicted of a felony. Does this make you, and I hate more or less likely poll questions, but we were able to kind of check these people because we had their past vote history. Does the verdict change whether you're going to vote for Donald Trump or not?

And all of the people who said, yes, this would make me change my vote. None of them had actually had changed their vote. Oh, interesting. There were some people who said this doesn't change my vote, but actually their vote had changed, which makes me wonder, had their vote changed for some other reason? You know, there were people who we were looking at what they told us in December or January about who they were voting for, who have now, you know, they were undecided. They've now said they're going to Biden.

So my hunch was that it wouldn't move things a ton. The data, I think, pretty firmly backs that up. Not perfectly, but...

But there may be some tweaks on the margins. What I think will matter the most is sentencing. That's what I was thinking this morning. I was like, sentencing is going to be everything. It will tell you the gravity of the crime to people who are still unsure. Because if he gets community service, he'll turn that into a circus. He'll try to make that a positive. If he has to call a probation officer a few times to check in, this will not register with voters. If he is actually looking at...

going to prison for three to six months or whatever, whatever the sentence is. I think that one, it takes an already combustible political environment and just throws matches on it, which makes me very concerned. Again, as I noted, the one time the polls did move was January 6th. Like, do we see

And of course, at that point, the polls moving is the least important things. But do we see an outbreak of violence or some horrible escalation of our existing polarization? But two, is that the sort of thing that changes people's views of whether Donald Trump should be president? Again, not changes views of Donald Trump, the person. I think that is super locked in. But does it make people go, no?

Can I actually vote for someone to be in the White House if they are also potentially going to prison? Even if you like Donald Trump a little bit, does that give you pause?

And so that's why I think sentencing, much more so than this verdict, is the thing to watch. I totally agree with you. And I was thinking that this morning. I was like, sentencing is everything. Sentencing also tells a story about the crime. Like if it's a really light sentence, people might think, oh, this isn't that big of a deal. I mean, the guy already has 54 other charges under his belt. And we've already known that.

88 counts against him, right? Or 91 for a while until Georgia dropped a few. There's so much already out there on Trump, but I know convicted felon sounds different.

But it's like convicted felon who pays a fine, convicted felon who does community service, or convicted felon that goes to jail for a few months or has an ankle bracelet or is under house arrest. That will determine the severity of the crime. And actually, I think if the sentencing is too severe, I think it could backfire too. Absolutely. And make Trump look like a martyr. I think sentencing really will be everything and they have to be kind of careful about it. But if the sentencing is too light, it could make the trial look like it was a sham.

Right. I think simply putting the label convicted felon on Donald Trump doesn't change a lot. I think the sentence he is given is the moment where things will change. The issue for pollsters, of course, is that sentencing is coming just a few days before the convention. And we know that political conventions tend to create movement in polls that is often temporary. So that's one other thing to keep in mind is right after sentencing,

which we don't know how that will affect the polls. We have something that we do know typically creates a little bit of movement. So disentangling those two things from one another is going to be really hard. So you should also be skeptical of anyone in my industry who claims immediately after sentencing to know exactly how this is changing the race, because there's going to be a lot of stuff all going on at once. Also, Trump will probably choose his vice president around that time as well. So there'll be so many different factors in the mix at that point, right? Right. Very much so.

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Hey, we're invited to the Johnson Summer Pool Party this Saturday. Oh, Saturday? But that's when the Blinds guys come in to give us a quote. Oh, I already found everything we need at Blinds.com. They're totally online, so we don't have to wait around all day just to get a quote. And they're sending us free samples. Well, Blinds.com sounds like a no-brainer.

So if you were giving Democrats advice, would you tell them to lean into this guilty verdict and beat the drum that he's unworthy of being president? Or would you just continue doing what Biden is doing, which is saying no one is above the law?

and stay kind of muted, I would call it. I think that their smartest strategy is one, to do everything possible to avoid giving credence to Trump's claim that this is Biden coming after him.

It's a political maneuver. He says this repeatedly. This is a political maneuver. And if, you know, when the Biden team had Robert De Niro as like a surrogate showing up outside the courthouse, I thought, oh, they're going to try to lean into this and they're going to try to make it a big deal. And that is going to backfire. And I think you saw them retreat away from that pretty quickly. I suspect I, a Republican pollster who is

not regularly in touch with the Biden campaign team. I suspect I was not alone in telling them that. But the more you lean into it, there is a real risk that you make it so that when Donald Trump says, look, they're just using this to attack me, that that rings true for people. On the other hand, you don't want to say nothing about it. I mean, I think the statement immediately in the wake of the verdict from the White House will

was short, succinct, and probably was the right thing for the moment. Right. The campaign statement was a little bit longer, but of course, campaign and the official office are going to take different postures. And how many people are really reading a campaign statement, by the way? Right. Who are making that distinction, right, between the White House versus the campaign. But however, the thing that's going to keep Donald Trump from winning re-election...

is if voters come to the conclusion that even though they don't like Biden and they feel like things are chaotic and unpredictable and not well run, that a second Trump term would be even more chaotic and less well run. The idea that Donald Trump is going to use a second term as president to enact revenge on his enemies, to settle political scores rather than

Secure the border, improve the economy, all of the things that I'm sure Trump's smart strategists are telling him he needs to be focused on. That's where I do think that the Biden campaign probably has something that they can gravitate toward. Hey, Trump wants to get back in the White House, not because he's going to fix the economy for you. He wants to be in control of the Justice Department so he can prosecute a bunch of people. I mean, those are the sorts of things that I think are more relevant to your average voter's personal life.

Does Donald Trump being a convicted felon and also being president affect my life?

Maybe it doesn't. But does Donald Trump being the president and him being distracted and single-mindedly focused on a campaign of political revenge at the expense of enacting smart policies and doing the sorts of things that he should be campaigning on, that does affect my life as a sort of median voter. So if I was the Biden team, that is where I think the vulnerability lies more for Trump, is that he just focuses all on this. It makes him angry. It makes him ticked off. And he

leans into the idea that his second term will be all about revenge. There's another thing that I've thought about when it comes to this trial. I think six months from now, when people go out to vote, it's going to be a distant memory. Like, can you remember six months ago? Even six weeks ago. Remember when we thought that the Gaza protests were the thing that was going to destroy Biden's chances of winning because he would never be able to win young voters? No.

Suddenly that's something that, you know, it's already wasn't really popping in polls before. I mean, it is so easy for something that is... Well, the kids went back home from school. School is over. You know, they graduated or they finished. They have school break. It's so important to remember that things that really pop in the news, it is not that they don't matter as news stories in and of themselves.

I'll sometimes get pushback from my friends who aren't pollsters. They're like, well, you say this doesn't matter for the election, but this is a really important thing for our world or our culture. And I'm like, yes, I'm not arguing that it's unimportant. I am arguing that in a very, very, very calcified political environment, it is tough for even stuff that feels like a big monumental historic headline to actually move.

move things in a material way. I think that a lot of these independent voters that haven't made up their mind yet, that they probably will factor how they feel in terms of like their economic well-being, migration, crime, democracy, abortion, etc. Like that might be more salient to them than these candidates, because I think people already know who they are.

Yes. Do you find that it's sort of hard to change views on Biden and change views on Trump when everything is so known about both of them? Like, what new could you really come up with about Trump? Like, I know I talked to some of the Trump team and they're like, oh, we're really going to lean into the Biden crime family in the end. Don't worry. And it's like.

really, you guys tried that? Although, you know, it's interesting because the Hunter Biden trial is starting today. And I wrote a piece about how back in 2021, I ended up actually getting the form, the firearm transaction form that he lied on when he said that he was sober or that he was not taking drugs. And when I had gotten this form and a police report connected to this event, I

where he was in a fight with his brother's widow, Haley, who was his girlfriend at the time, and she threw the gun in a garbage can. It's a whole story to story. You can read about it in Puck. But I really just didn't think like, oh, this guy's going to get prosecuted based on this gun form. I thought it was more interesting that the Secret Service may have gotten involved to take the gun form from the gun owner. But the point is, it's like, it's another story about dysfunction around

around Biden. And this outside group for Trump, they did some surveys before the impeachment trials in the House, and they found that showed 60% of respondents, they knew more about Trump's legal issues, and they knew about Biden's issues. It was like 30% thought that there was a Biden crime family as opposed to Trump who had all these issues. But then with the Trump impeachment, it kind of stayed the same, but they changed their views on other things. Like,

and integrity came down from getting the job done, getting the job done, came up, and that somehow helps Trump. I don't know what you think about that and if these Hunter Biden trials or tribulations got a tax trial in September right around the time of early voting. It's weird because you would have thought that Trump would have been on trial again right before the election and said it's Hunter. I don't think Democrats would have ever perceived it that way.

Do you think it'll have any impact on the polls? So my skepticism there is, again, because I think people have such strong views of the men themselves, of Trump and of Biden, that it's unlikely to move people much. I find that folks who work in politics are always looking for that one, like, oh, this is the ad. If I run this ad, this is the thing that's going to change voters' minds.

It's why they think that, you know, there's the kind of like words that work theory. If I find the right words, then magically everyone will switch from thinking A to thinking B. If I call the policy this instead of that, I'll win. Or if everybody in America knew this one factoid about this person, they'd never vote for them. Everybody's like looking for that one thing.

It sometimes does happen though. Like Bashir. Well, I was going to say in 2012 voters were just getting to know Mitt Romney and back. I think it was may of that year. Ads were run against him about his time at Bain and the layoffs of workers. And I remember after that election doing focus groups with some younger voters, the sorts of folks who were like, I'm not paying attention to the news. I don't listen to political ads. I think they're all terrible. And they were like, but I,

remember seeing this thing about Mitt Romney making people build coffins and it was terrible. And I'm like, it's that ad of the guy saying, build the stage to announce the layoffs. And it made me feel like they made us build our own coffin. Like that did stick. And that was because these were people who didn't know much about Mitt Romney and he was able to be defined.

I don't know that you can come into the game at this stage where people know so much about Joe Biden and so much about Donald Trump. Joe Biden's been running for president most of the time that I have been alive on this planet. Yes, same for me. I've been famous the entire time I've been alive on this planet. Like these are not people that Americans are like, I wonder what's going on.

what Joe Biden's like. I wonder what Donald Trump is like. They know the answer to those questions. They have seen both of these men in the White House. There's no question marks here to fill in the blanks for. So that's why I think even though you're right, sometimes it does work. Sometimes the messaging does change people's views on the policy. Sometimes... But it works for people that you don't know about. It

It doesn't work for things that you've already got a solid opinion about. That's why I'm like, I don't understand how people don't know who they're going to vote for at this point. But I will say that Andy Beshear ad in Kentucky with the girl who was raped by her stepfather, it was an abortion ad. I mean, it helped a Democrat win votes.

in Kentucky as governor. And that was like a pretty strong ad. Do you think abortion has that ability to help Biden? Like, could it really, a lot of really provocative abortion ads with really sympathetic characters in it, could that move the election? I am less convinced that it's going to have a huge effect at the very top of the ticket. I think whether people vote for Trump or Biden will be mostly about these questions of,

Who do I think has the character temperament? And who do I think is going to create a more stable, prosperous future? But I think for further down the ballot, I think especially for Senate candidates, I think for statewide candidates, I do think that this becomes a more potent issue in ads. And not as people's quote-unquote top issue, but potentially as a deal-breaker issue. As the sort of thing where you say...

I don't know if I can get over this, even if I like this candidate on other issues. So you'll have a state like Florida, for instance, where there are going to be a lot of people who I think are going to go out and vote for Donald Trump, but at the same time go vote for a statewide constitutional amendment to kind of enshrine Roe into state law. And so that's where I think you'll see some tickets splitting in that sense, where people who are pro-choice will nevertheless pull the lever for Donald Trump.

But further down the ballot, I think that's where you'll see that pop up in more ads and be a little more potent. Okay. Kristen, do you think that this will actually be a close election? I do, or at least I think if the election were held today, it would be fairly close. And the reason I say that is because there are so many signals pointing in different directions.

The polls right now are all leaning slightly towards Trump, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that this could shift. And so because it's not...

Oh, we have we know from historical pattern that incumbents are hard to unseat. This is a weird election because you have an incumbent, but you have a past president running against him. Yeah. So it's basically two incumbents. A little bit. I'm aware that Donald Trump is not the incumbent president, just as a disclaimer for any sort of angry folks on the Internet. But but it is true that he is going to in this election run.

from just a purely analytical perspective, benefit from some of the things that incumbent presidents benefit from.

And so that's why I do think with the polarization we're seeing, this weird quasi-too-incumbent race that we have, it would not surprise me if it doesn't wind up being really close. You also have to remember that the geographic map, because of the Electoral College, there are so, so, so many states where there will be really important Senate elections. There will be really important House elections. But...

I don't think that Montana is likely to vote for Joe Biden. They may send John Tester back to the Senate, but they are probably not going to vote for Joe Biden. So you see a lot of split ticket voters essentially top of ticket. They're the most interesting folks this cycle. It's not the people who right now go, gee, I don't know who I'm going to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden. I don't think there are a ton of those folks.

I think there are folks that are trying to decide, do I even bother voting at all? Do I think that this race actually affects my life or not? And that's something that I've been tracking in my data. The percentage of people who say whether Trump or Biden wins means a lot to me personally or will make a difference to me personally or it won't make a difference to me personally. But that number

has been trending down. More and more people are feeling like there are real stakes in this election. So I still think even though people are kind of disgusted with their choices, that you're still going to see some relatively high turnout. Then the question is just of those people who turn out,

What do you get further down the ballot? And I think we will see a reasonable amount of split ticket voting. Kristen, as always, so happy to have you on the show. I always feel like I learned so much. And I'm always reading you in the New York Times. You write such brilliant opinion articles. I do think you should check this one out. It is the Trump Oprah voter. It came out on May 23rd, you know, perfectly timed right before the verdict. And we'll see if it carries the day for Trump. Thanks again, Kristen.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. I want to thank my producers, Christopher Sutton and Connor Nevins. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, and share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news.com and use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off. I'll be back on Thursday.