GOP: Knocked Down, Not Out?
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. Tuesday was Election Day in a number of states, so I'll give you my thoughts on what happened and what it means. I'll also be joined by two superb pollsters, Christian Solstice Anderson and Spencer Kimball, and the expert on everything Wisconsin, Craig Gilbert. Let's dive in.

I'm very happy this week to have as a guest on the Republican Rumble segment of this podcast, Kristen Soltis Anderson, the founding partner of Echelon Insights and author of The Selfie Vote, a big look at the millennial generation. Kristen, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, you have probably done more polling than just about anybody I know who has a pollster between your work for private clients and your work that you do at Echelon Insights in the verified omnibus voter poll that you put out on a monthly basis. So you can answer this question. What best predicts support for Donald Trump within the Republican electorate?

A couple of different demographic factors. Education level, the more likely you are to have a bachelor's degree, the more likely you are to opt for a candidate like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis instead. But we find in our data in October that among Republican primary voters with a high school degree or less, eight out of 10 picked Donald Trump. And among those who have some college but

not a bachelor's degree, it was 62 percent, where if you have a bachelor's degree, you're about 50 50 Trump or someone else. So that's factor number one. And that correlates pretty strongly with income level. The higher up the income spectrum you are, the more likely you are to opt for some kind of alternative, whether that is Haley DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, the lower you are down the income spectrum, the more likely you are to go for Trump.

There's also one other factor that I think is a little bit undercovered, and that is age. I think the conventional wisdom is that, oh, young people are the ones who are going to say we need to turn the page and not go for Donald Trump.

But actually, older Republicans and the differences aren't huge, tend to be more likely to opt for, say, a Ron DeSantis. It's more of the kind of younger to middle aged Republicans, those under 50 who lean a little bit more toward Donald Trump. And I just think that's fascinating. Maybe a little bit undercover. Yeah. Well, one other thing I've noted in other polls is that in 2016,

Trump did better among in the Republican electorate, better among men than women and better among moderates than very conservatives. And now it's flipped. He does better among women than men. And he does best among the most conservative elements and worst among the least conservative elements.

Have you found this in your polls? And what do you think explains it if you have? So I don't see the gender gap being as wide or as consistent. So for instance, in our October polling, we found it a little bit flipped, but not in a big enough way that it was even worth me talking about as like a demographic predictor. We do, however, see this ideological change that you talked about.

where now if you think of yourself as conservative in ideology, we found 66% of them said, yes, I think of myself as a Trump supporter. If you were moderate, it was down to say 49%. Oddly enough, we did have of our 40%,

400 and some Republicans in our poll, 11 of them considered themselves liberals and almost all of them also vote for Donald Trump. I don't know if those are just 11 people who are somehow evading our you're randomly clicking buttons protocols in our survey or if they're just like really interesting heterodox people who would be fascinating to sit down to lunch with. But nevertheless, if you are one of the very,

Very, very few people who is a liberal Republican, you also somehow like Donald Trump. But yes, moderates tend to be much more, well, they're partially more likely to just say they're unsure, but also leaning more toward looking for an alternative.

It reminds me of the 2016 exit poll where most people either liked Trump or Clinton. Democrats like Clinton, Republicans like Trump. 18% very famously didn't like either, and that was the deciding group in the election. But 2% liked both. And I've always wanted to meet these 2%. Who's the person who likes Hillary Clinton and likes Donald Trump? It sounds like you might have discovered 11 of them in your poll. The electorate is a fascinating and complex tapestry.

Well, speaking of tapestries, we're still weaving the tapestry of the Republican electorate and campaign. And there's a group of people who tell a lot of pollsters, hey, I like Trump. I'll consider him, but I'll also consider other people. But yet, the more time goes on, the more we see these people exist and the more Trump's lead in national polls and to a lesser degree in state level polls continues to be large. Do these people really exist? Are they really thinking about somebody else?

So they are considering it, but right now they have not yet seen someone else make the case that they ought to go a different direction. So I, the way I've been describing this phenomenon is let's say that you have a favorite restaurant down the street.

You go there frequently. You know when you get there, if you're hungry, you really love the meatloaf. You know it's not for everybody. You know meatloaf's not everybody's top choice, but you really like it. It meets your needs. It's maybe not the healthiest, but whatever. And so you will go there, and occasionally the waiter will say, hey, we've got some specials today. Would you like to hear the specials?

there's a sizable portion of the Republican electorate that's like, I'll hear the specials. Tell me what's going on. But in the end, they're probably going to go for the meatloaf because in the end, they feel like they know the meatloaf. They know what they're getting there. They know they're going to like it. It's not a roll of the dice. How's this going to turn out? What if it tastes weird? What if it doesn't come out well? If you're really hungry, you want to go with something that you know you're going to like.

And Trump is what they know they're gonna like. They know he's not always the healthiest. They know he's not always gonna be the best thing for them, but he's comfortable. And I think that's something a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around. A lot of kind of mainstream pundits, I mean, I don't say that with disdain, but a lot of, I think, mainstream pundits think of Donald Trump as this like,

Risky. Why would Republicans roll the dice on him? You know, we know he's unpredictable. We know he's he's chaotic. We know he's not guaranteed to be reelected. We know he's got his legal challenges and what have you. And yet for many Republican voters, they don't view him as risky. They view him as safe.

Not just him as a candidate, but the world that they inhabited when he was president, they felt safer in that world. They felt economically more secure. They felt like the border was secure. They felt like crime was lower, even though crime began to rise at the end of his presidency. I mean, there were lots of things that

I think his opponents could point to to say, no, things were not as stable and happy as you recall them being under Trump. We deserve better. The overwhelming kind of vibe right now among a lot of Republican voters, even those who are considering other candidates, is but I know I like Donald Trump. I know he's not perfect. I know he's not for everybody, but I kind of want the meatloaf. And so that's why.

This week, I wrote a piece for The New York Times about what I think Trump's adversaries need to do here in the homestretch if they want any kind of a fighting chance. And it is that you can try all day long to make yourself really appealing, right? Oh, gosh, look at this special. It sounds so great.

And that's important. But you also have to make the case that they should maybe move on from the meatloaf. And so far, people have not been calibrating this well. It's either been overkill, Chris Christie being openly hostile to the Republican electorate, relishing getting booed at Republican gatherings. That is not necessarily a recipe for success.

but then on the other hand you have someone like say ron desantis who speaks down at the florida freedom summit this weekend and doesn't even mention trump's name now trump does not give him the same courtesy right trump gets up on the stump and is bashing ron desantis by name so it's not like

But this is just asymmetrical warfare now. And some of these folks have just unilaterally disarmed in the fight against Trump. They just allow him to fight him, fight him, fight him. And they go, well, you know, I just think we need fresh leadership. And like that's getting you 15 percent. That's not getting you 50 percent. You got to try something different. That was my last column in The Washington Post about DeSantis saying that this is a time for choosing.

which is a ripoff of Ronald Reagan's famous speech in 1964. And then he's not giving the Republican voters the only choice that's actually before them, which is him versus Trump. You know, is that he's saying, well, the choice is between Joe Biden and decline. Well, everybody on the stage is going to fight Joe Biden. The question is, is Donald Trump better than you? And nobody's asking the question. Completely agree. So, um,

Let's have a hypothetical world where someone actually decides that getting into the boxing ring and just being a pacifist and getting your teeth knocked out isn't a good idea. And they start to fight back against Donald Trump. Who do you think might emerge as a stronger final challenger if some of these people who would consider Trump other than Trump actually start really considering Trump?

somebody else, who do you think would be a stronger challenger as the final person standing, Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis and why? At the moment, I lean toward Nikki Haley in part because she is able to assemble a broader coalition. Her numbers are a little bit weak in the polling that I have seen among the most conservative parts of the party. And so that's a big challenge. You can't win a Republican nomination

if the sort of very conservative part of the party is looking at you as skepticism. But she has plenty of things in her story from her time at the UN fighting, you know, this international organization that we have seen in the last few weeks to be completely useless. She's got plenty she can talk about there that I think will have a lot of appeal to the

to the very conservative she can talk about a lot of things that she did while she was governor of south carolina it's a little bit old at this point it's less fresh than maybe what somebody like a ron desantis can say but it's not as though she doesn't have that in her in her arsenal the other thing that she has that desantis was never able to fully land was the electability argument

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how, you know, the attempt to defeat Donald Trump by saying he's going to lose to Joe Biden was failing because poll after poll was showing him not losing to Joe Biden. In fact, you've just had this wave of polls, CNN's poll, New York Times, Sienna that really show Biden in very, very weak position. However, when they ask about Ron DeSantis versus, you know, Joe Biden, the numbers actually aren't that different than they are for Trump.

But Nikki Haley does do a bit better. Now, some of this is maybe that she is less known to your average voter than Ron DeSantis. So she's splitting the difference between Donald Trump and generic Republican. But I do think that she has something about her that would make Democrats a lot more nervous and

And I think that's worth something. Republican voters really do want to win. Again, there's this conventional wisdom that Republican voters, they don't care about electability. They just want to follow their hearts. No, they care a lot about electability. They just think Donald Trump is the electable one. And so I think Haley, much more so than DeSantis at this point,

has the ability to talk about that international experience, has the ability to say, I'm genuinely really electable. Like, look at all of these polls from these swing states. And I don't know how much traction that will get. Her big problem is that without a big base of support to start with from within the further right part of the party, she's a little dead in the water in Iowa. And so she and DeSantis are caught in this, like, prisoner's dilemma where, like,

DeSantis definitely has the better chance in Iowa, but he needs her gone in order to make it happen. But she's not going to be gone because he's nowhere to be found in New Hampshire. And if she could, you know, knock out Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy and all

Although I don't know that there's a ton of cross-pollination between the Vivek voter and the Haley voter. A lot of those Vivek voters are going to go to Trump if he drops out, but I digress. But, you know, she, I think that in this debate, I mean, I think she needs to just throw a knockout punch at Trump.

I think she needs to get Chris Christie out of this race as much as possible because he's really drawn voters from her. And then she needs to go into South Carolina with momentum, home state, and really put up a good fight there. So that's the problem between the two of them is I think Haley's probably the better one, but...

Can you be just not in the conversation in Iowa at all and still pull it off? Joe Biden did. So it's not impossible. The last few winners of the Republican caucus in Iowa have not become not only not president, not the Republican nominee. Presidents Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, like the Iowa doesn't have a great track record on this front. But I don't think you can come in.

third or fourth in Iowa and then slingshot your way into a great victory in New Hampshire with Trump looming as large as he is. So last question, Kristen, there you've mentioned everybody name checked everybody in the race that's going to be on the debate stage except one person. Why have you not even mentioned Tim Scott? Does that mean that he is DOA? I think that Tim Scott is

would make an excellent vice presidential choice at this point. But I think barring an absolute miracle, his campaign just hasn't really gone much of anywhere. You know, in the most recent national Echelon Insights omnibus poll, we have Tim Scott at 1%. Three whole people picked Tim Scott in our poll. He is somebody who has very good favorables.

A lot of voters will say, I like him. I think he'd be great. But he hasn't made the case that right now he's the guy for this moment. And I think he has been even more averse than Haley or DeSantis to draw that contrast with Donald Trump. At least Haley has given nods to, hey, we can't have...

you know, this chaos anymore. We can't alienate our friends and, you know, we can't be saying nice things about dictators or Ron DeSantis. He's occasionally gotten feisty. Tim Scott has not put an ounce of daylight in my view, really between himself and Donald Trump. And so if you like Tim Scott and you like Donald Trump,

he just hasn't given you a reason to not go for donald trump at all um so that's why i think you know i think he may still have very much a future in the party i frankly think that donald trump if he is ultimately the nominee would be very wise to consider tim scott as a potential vice president um but ultimately he just hasn't he needed a really good first debate performance to get the kind of momentum that instead haley wound up getting in the

absence of that from the first and then even the second debate, he just hasn't gained traction and you can't sit at 1% nationally in November. It's too late in the game. So where can my listeners follow your work?

you can follow me on cnn i'm a contributor there and in particular start tuning in on saturdays at 10 a.m i'm going to be a fairly regular panelist on the new the chris wallace show we're bringing back the old mclaughlin group vibes it's going to be a fun round table with an interesting cast of characters and you can also follow me on substack my substack is called codebook and i periodically will post my random musings about whatever interesting data has come across my desk

Now, it's wonderful to chat with you, and I hope to have you back on Beyond the Polls. Thanks so much, Henry.

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This week on Polling Barometer, we have a real pollster. Spencer Kimball, the Executive Director of Emerson College Polling and Associate Professor of Communications, is here to talk about polling generally and about the Emerson polls, which we may have a new release from. Spencer, welcome to Beyond the Polls.

Well, Henry, thank you so much for having me. Well, the New York Times Siena series of polls has made a big splash showing Biden behind and most of the swing states. Would you have some comment about that or perhaps something new to add?

Well, Henry, the timing of that couldn't have been more perfect in that we were also in the field in those six swing states at the same time and obviously releasing that data earlier today. We saw a very similar trend in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And we can jump into kind of, you know,

some of the differences between this poll and maybe what Sienna was seeing. But the overall trend was, you know, in the same place where Trump's leading by four or five points in Georgia. He's up in Pennsylvania, very close in Wisconsin and Michigan. Those are very tight, we're

races. Nevada was one where we had it around five or six. I think Siena has it around 10 or 11. So we have it a little bit closer in Nevada at this point. And then the same kind about in Arizona, three, again, a little bit tighter, three, four point lead. And you see there's a varying difference between the registered voters and the likely voters at this time. So we'll obviously keep an eye on that as the election nears.

Just teasing that out, you've got Trump ahead in enough states, presuming that he wins all the others that he carried in 2020. Your poll, like the New York Times Siena poll, would say that Trump gets an electoral college majority. Am I getting that wrong?

No, at this time, you know, we're one year out from the election that he would be in this position that he could win not only the popular vote, which would, you know, be odd for a Republican, but could win these key swing state votes that obviously would give him the edge to 270. With that said, we do see that that younger voter, we see that the minority vote is kind of sitting, you

uh not necessarily with trump but they're more in the undecided camp and so you know to me this is still a long way away to the election and i don't want to get too far ahead and that's what i'm seeing in some of these polls which i'm glad we have a chance to talk about because there is a high number of undecided voters and even like what we saw in kentucky you saw that undecided break for basheer at the end of the day so you're going to see what happens

with this undecided vote over the next 365 days or so.

So, you know, what I've seen in other polls is that the undecided vote is what I'm calling the double doubters and others are calling the double haters, the people who dislike both Biden and Trump. And some of them are partisans, you know, the conservative who doesn't like Trump and hates Biden and the progressive who doesn't like Biden and hates Trump. But most of them are your swing voters. Is Emerson finding a similar phenomenon?

Yeah, that's exactly. Well, we're seeing a bigger problem for Biden on this topic, because when we ask people if they're voting for the candidate because they like them or they dislike them, about 39 percent of Biden voters are voting for Biden because they dislike Trump. Only about 20 percent are voting for Biden because they like Biden. On the flip side, the Trump voter is

30% of them are voting for Trump because they like Trump. And about 20% are voting for Trump because they dislike Biden. And so you can see that the motivation behind both of these voters is different.

The Biden vote is more in line with keeping Trump out of office, while the Trump vote is looking for the Trump policies to be brought into office. So it's an interesting situation. We'll see where that young vote, if they even come out and vote. But what we did see in Ohio and Kentucky yesterday or this week was that that young vote did come out when you had certain issues on the ballot. And we'll see what happens, obviously, in 24. Yeah.

And one of the things the New York Times Siena poll has helped bring to the conversation, as well as other data, in this sense, it was kind of like this is the latest thing roiling the Democratic consultant universes. Biden apparently has four Democrats, weak numbers with minorities that...

Lower numbers, either excitement or support levels with African-Americans, lower numbers overall with Latinos and maybe they're going more to undecided than not turning out. Are you seeing similar weakness among what is called in the press persons of color for Biden when compared to a typical Democratic national candidate?

Yeah, we see it with the black vote, the Hispanic vote, even the Asian vote. Those are the three minority groups that we track. All three of them broke heavily for Biden in 2020. The black vote, 90 to 10. The Hispanic and Asian vote, nearly two to one. And so we started to see that movement. And that, to me, explains the Nevada numbers that you're seeing. It's the Hispanic vote, which is a...

a more volatile group of voters. And we'll see, because that group generally votes Democrat, especially the Mexican-Hispanic. And so right now they're sitting on the sideline. But if you remember that Newsom recall election, those Hispanics were sitting on that sideline. We were polling that race. We're like, wow, this thing is close. This is close. And then in our last poll, that Hispanic vote came back to Newsom and he wins by 20 points.

We're going to see what happens here. Does the Hispanic vote sit on the sideline or do they come back into the fold with the Democrats? Uh, obviously we saw what happened in South Florida, but that's the Cuban Hispanic, which is a slightly different ideology. Um, not slightly, it's a different ideology. And so, uh,

We'll see if they're able to make inroads, the Republicans, let's say up in the Orlando in that area, in Georgia with that group. But overall, Biden has definitely that coalition that he had together in 2020 has definitely been frailed over the last three years. And it's on a lot of different issues. The question will be, can he galvanize it back in the movement that was more about keeping Trump out of office at this time?

Well, certainly that's what he was emphasizing in the midterms, and he was able to turn it around in the sense that historically the people who slightly disapprove or somewhat disapprove of a president's performance in office votes for the opposition party by double digits, and Democrats actually carried that narrowly, and that's the biggest reason why they held the Senate, of course, helped along by what is euphemistically called candidate quality on behalf of the Republicans.

But when you talk about the keep them out versus put them in, I remember the 2020 exit poll. It was like three to one ratio. Put Trump in versus keep Biden out. And Biden was split 50 50. So even in 2020, it was 50.

Now he's got four years behind him and more and more people. You know what? What two years ago was directed as Republican talking points about Biden's age and how that affects his performance as officers now. Common wisdom. You know, I look at polls and it's like large majorities of independents, even large minorities of Democrats say he's too old. Is that underlying the reason?

all of these different issue concerns or if he turns around the issue concerns will the unease with his personal characteristics and age fade which is the chicken and which is the egg

Yeah, so in this poll that we did, you know, in these six state polls that we're putting out, we asked some questions from Professor Judy Trent, the late Judy Trent, and she looked at what's called the ideal candidate. And she had a whole series of questions, and we asked them, and one of the questions we put in there was about age. And only 2% of respondents said that 80s was the ideal age of a candidate.

So the ideal age is somebody between 50 in the 50s and 60s. That's the ideal age of what voters are looking for. So now that's their what they model after. That's what they're looking for. They're looking at Biden like, well, this doesn't fit our ideal candidate. Now, what Biden has going for him is potentially Trump, who's also an older candidate. So you've got that. But the 80 is definitely a number.

that scares voters. And there's nothing you can do about that except to show that you are, you know, you've got vigor and you've got charisma. But those are not what Biden came in on. He came in more of like a grandfatherly type, you know, softer spoken than what Trump was. But that softness and that grandfatherly, that can get miscued as old and

And that's potentially what's happening. And it's really with the younger vote. Biden actually does better with the 70 and older group, the white 70 and older. Biden's doing three, four points better than he was previously. So he's taking that vote away from Trump. What he's giving back, though, is that young vote. And as we mentioned, part of that young vote is also the Hispanic and black vote. And so.

The Democrats, you know, have they won that minority, the young vote two to one, 60-30. Right now, the Times has it plus one. You know, that's the Democrats can't win if even if they pick up three or four points of that older vote, if they don't have that youth vote. So it'll be interesting to see how Biden pivots to get some energy out of that group.

Would another Democrat, David Axelrod, President Obama's political campaign manager, tweeted, and now he's walking it back, but it was clear from the tweet, you know, he was saying maybe Biden should drop out, that Democrats would be better served by another candidate. Does your polling give an indication whether another Democrat would fare significantly better than Biden?

No. And we've had a chance to test out lots of different Democrats against Trump. And what I can tell you is that there'll be regional support. So if, let's say, we did a poll in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro would run better than Biden, or Gretchen Whitmore in Michigan would run better than Biden. But if you put Shapiro in Michigan or Whitmore in Pennsylvania, now you've got name recognition issues, and those numbers are going to drop. So I

probably the clearest alternatives, obviously, Harris, the vice president, but her numbers are, I think, worse than Biden's numbers. So I'm not sure you're moving in the right direction there. The other option, and I don't see them going there, would be a guy like Bernie Sanders. Bernie was the heir apparent to the nomination, loses it in a tight race. But

You know, you're kind of trading an 82-year-old for a 78-year-old at this point. And the Democrats kind of went out of their way back in 2020 to say, we do not want a progressive candidate as our nominee. And they did so on Super Tuesday when

They all back Biden, essentially. So that's where when I saw the Axelrod comment, I said, so where where did the Democrats go? There's not this, you know, as I mentioned, our study is on this ideal candidate. And while we think there's ideal candidates, you know, Gavin Newsom, is he the ideal candidate? There really isn't.

And so I think you've got to go back to what here in Boston, we have old Mayor White's line, don't compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. And so I think when you're looking at Biden right now, you're looking at approval, you're looking at things that you're just comparing him against himself.

When in the ballot test, obviously he's trailing Trump, but I would give this time. I feel like a lot of his group, his coalition is on the sideline. They're upset with him, but it's hard for me to see them swinging over to voting for Trump.

having not voted for him in the past. So, yeah, I don't think there's an easy, it's not like a person you could just plug in and say, hey, here's Ted Kennedy. He's going to replace you. I don't see a national figure yet on the Democratic side for that.

And of course, in 1979, Ted Kennedy was supposed to be the great hope, saving them from the terrible polling, incompetent, bumbling Jimmy Carter. And suddenly he became the alternative and people said, hey, actually, I prefer Mr. Bumbler to to Mr. Chappaquiddick. So even great hopes, people who look like the ideal candidate can prove to wilt under the lights once they're turned on.

And, you know, to some point that was Ron DeSantis this cycle where he was going to come out and be, you know, and Scott Walker had a similar type of persona back in 2016 where he came out. He was the lead, but weren't able to live up to those expectations. And that's going to be a tough thing if you're trying to replace an incumbent president.

And remember, how did Biden get the nomination to begin with in 2020 was that it was a weaker field. And so this is how a two time, you know, candidate was able to win on the third chance or maybe the fourth. But, you know, so, yeah, I don't think that there's an easy answer. And we're getting late in the season to start campaigning to bring people to the forefront of the American voter for them to actually want to vote for somebody. Yeah.

That's the last question. I'd just like to shift gears a little bit. You run a college-based poll. What's the relationship with students to the Emerson College poll? Do they code? Do they do questionnaires? Do they make the calls, data analysis? How do you get your students involved in the polling process?

That's a great question. And that's really about what we would refer to here as the immersive Emerson experience, in that we try to get the students involved in all facets of the data collection process and analysis. So when they take one to two classes in survey research,

with Professor Mumford and others. And then from there, we give them actual jobs in the polling center where they could be setting up surveys, they could be responsible for cleaning up data and then analyzing those results.

And through this immersive experience, we find that a lot of our students walk out with the skill sets to then go work in the field. And remember, we enjoy pre-election polling. We like the elections. We're political animals. But there's a ton more work in the survey research field, public opinion research. And so students go into that.

uh area but what we try to do is give them you know hands-on experience both with the data but sometimes we do client polls and they get that opportunity to work with clients and so we have a little bit of an incubator here at uh with polling university polling university i like that if i was younger maybe i would have gone to emerson

Great location in Boston. Can't beat it. How can my listeners follow your work? Thanks, Henry. Yes, obviously our website, emersonpolling.com, or you can follow us on Twitter at Emerson College Polling.

Well, Spencer, thank you very much for revealing your data to my listeners and going on at length about Biden's strengths and weaknesses. And I hope to have you back on Beyond the Polls. Thank you very much for having me, Henry.

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Well, this week on State of Play, we're going to be going to Wisconsin. And joining me is the expert of all things Wisconsin, Craig Gilbert, who's a fellow at the Marquette Law School and political columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Craig, welcome to Beyond the Poll. It's great to be back. Yes, you were with the previous edition when we called ourselves something that somebody else had already copyrighted. And so hence, it is the title that will not be named.

But we were blessed with a lot of pollsters today. And you're going to tell us all about this new poll of Wisconsin that the Marquette Law School poll has released. Tell us what you found. Yeah. So there's a new poll by Charles Franklin, the pollster at Marquette. You know, if you saw the

and I'm sure you did the stories about the New York Times polls in the battleground states. The Wisconsin numbers look a lot like the New York Times Wisconsin poll. Biden is two points ahead of Trump. He's in a general election matchup. He's two points behind DeSantis and he's nine points behind Nikki Haley. You know, it's really kind of what you'd expect when you consider Wisconsin's history as a toss up state.

When you consider the fact that even though Joe Biden's underwater, Donald Trump is even deeper underwater. And when you consider the fact that even though Republicans have a real opportunity to win the state back, they've really struggled in the Trump era to even get up to 50 percent of the vote in all these statewide elections. Wisconsin is one of these places that's the archetype Midwest nice and beautiful.

The word nice doesn't come to doesn't fit in the same sentence as Donald Trump and his candidates check selections tend to fall into that same pugnacious non Midwest nice set. Is that one of the issues that there's just not a cultural connection with Wisconsin in the way that maybe Nikki Haley being aggressive, but not aggressive.

mean might be able to accomplish? No, I think he brings a lot of baggage. And I think, you know, obviously it didn't prevent him from winning the state by a fraction of the vote in 2016. But that was, you know, with 47 or 48 percent of the vote, it wasn't a resounding victory by any means. So I think he's we've seen in all these intervening elections, the 2020 presidential, the 2018 for governor and Senate, the 2022 presidential.

for a governor, even the Supreme Court elections, which have become huge partisan-style elections in the spring. In the Trump era, Republicans have rarely even reached 50% of the vote, and they've topped out at a fraction above 50% of the vote. They've had a much lower ceiling

with Donald Trump at the helm of the party than they did, you know, in the previous six or seven years when Scott Walker was governor and Obama was in the White House. One of the interesting things for me about Wisconsin is that the Walker victories kind of presaged the Trump realignment, which is that when you look at where Walker did best

in 2010 and the recall on in 2014, he was winning all of these blue collar areas out in Western Wisconsin and down and, you know, Kenosha and Racine that traditionally had not voted as

as strongly Republican or even Republican at all. But he was also holding suburban voters in what I call it, the ring of death, the ring of fire, death, I suppose, if you're on one party's analysis. Well, Walker, really, you know, the rural red tide is

occurred in Wisconsin under Walker before it occurred under Trump. And again, Wisconsin was a state where Democrats did better in rural areas than they did in most other places. And so it made it kind of a more dramatic sea change when suddenly these areas went, some of them went from being purple or mildly red to deep red. So Walker had that going for him, but you're right, he twinned that

With this exceptional performance in these Republican suburbs, the ring of Republican counties around Milwaukee, and those counties were getting redder and redder with every election cycle through the Walker era, at least until through Walker's last election victory in 2014. But in 2016, that all began to change. I mean, you had Trump

kind of underperforming in the suburban areas, even though he won the state. And then in 2018, you had Walker losing his reelection and really eroding in these big suburban counties, which have been kind of the path to victory for Republicans traditionally in Wisconsin. And that's continued as well, that with 2020, you know, for all of the people who want to scream election fraud, anyone who's read my work knows that

on a scale of zero to 10, I give that minus five. But you take a look, and the reason Trump loses Wisconsin is he does pretty well in the areas that would have voted for David Obie back in the day, the Democratic congressman from western Wisconsin, but eroded even more in the suburban areas. And that happened again in 2022. And it happened again even more in the Supreme Court election. Are we getting to the point where there are

a lot of voters in the wow counties washington walk a shot and those are key uh... outside of milwaukee who ten years ago would have said yeah i'm comfortable in the republican party who today are saying i'm not comfortable in the party or some of these voters still uncomfortable with both parties well i think uh... we are getting the point where for some voters uh... in the suburban counties uh...

The Republican brand is not one that pulls them in. I mean, they're being turned off and alienated. And there is a you know, you have a spectrum within these Republican suburban counties of, you know, the outer excerpts, the more blue collar excerpts, the less densely populated communities are still pretty red.

But it's the ones, you know, the more upscale, more densely populated, you know, closer to the city of Milwaukee, where the really dramatic shifts have occurred. And obviously, you know, Trump is a part of that story. I think abortion is a part of that story. Maybe some population trends feed into that. But.

You know, the other way to look at that is that, you know, the national trends we've seen in higher educated suburbs were slow to come to Wisconsin. And it was like these suburbs resisted that trend that you saw earlier in places like outside of Philadelphia or outside of Chicago. And now it's happening. So it's also, you know, part of a national trend.

But it's also happening against a much higher rate of Republican voting that you take a look at Chester County, the most educated and wealthy county in Pennsylvania. And it's now leaning Democrat. When I lived there 20 years ago, it was a Republican bastion. Then you've got places like the state Senate district that was on the ballot this spring with the

Supreme Court race, which contains the upper-income suburbs of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County and some of the ones in Mequon and Deansville and Ozaukee County. And Republicans won. They won with smaller margins than you would have expected. But the Democrat

for Supreme Court is carrying that seat and the Republican with the actual seat, you know, the actual party label on the ballot was winning even as it's narrow. So there's a limit to the, you know, whereas in a place like Chester County, this is now just flipped to being Democrat. So there's still Republican voting propensities

It's just not like super majority the way they were 10 years ago. And I think what you're getting at is there are still some voters who could, who would be more comfortable certainly voting for a different kind of Republican than they are voting for a MAGA Republican or a Trump-style Republican. And that is costing them in these places. So is that?

Why? And again, this is a data question. Is that why Nikki Haley is running 11 points ahead of Trump on the margin in your poll? Is that she's keeping the Trump voters in the outstate, but winning back a lot of these voters in the suburban areas? Is there another explanation? Well, I think the other way to put it is she's doing better.

If you look at the crosstabs of these polls and you compare her performance to Trump, she's doing better with independent voters than Trump is. And she's also uniting the Republican base more than Trump is, believe it or not. I mean, she's got a higher there is still, you know, I think one number in this poll, which wasn't shocking, but it's still striking, is that Trump's.

Negative ratings among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents was, I think, 26% in this poll. So if you think about that, that's a quarter of the potential Republican base that have a negative view of Donald Trump. Now, someone like Nikki Haley, not as well-known, but she doesn't carry that baggage. And so she's actually getting in these matchups a higher share, a more unanimous share of the Republican vote against Joe Biden, whereas Donald Trump is still suffering some defections.

I want to just get a little bit into the state as a whole. You know, we're talking about it's now 50-50. I'd say before the Walker era, it was competitive, but maybe leaned a couple of points Democratic on the whole. If you're...

You're sitting here on Monday night before the election, and you're going to explain to my listeners in a couple of minutes, what should they be looking for? How does the state break down in terms of regions? And how do you look at these areas and say, okay, if Republicans...

Republicans or Democrats do this well here, that's good or bad for them. How would you break Milwaukee, although Milwaukee is one of the regions, break the state down for my listeners? Yeah, so there's obviously a big rural vote. It's a really white state, I should point out, and there's a lot of rural white voters, and they're spread out, so we can't say just point to one county as a barometer, but if you look at the more densely populated parts of the state,

You know, the two, the three population centers are Milwaukee in the southeast, Madison, which is about 80 or 90 miles west of Milwaukee, and then Green Bay to the north. Green Bay is kind of a purple battleground. If you look at the city in the suburbs, it doesn't really change that much.

But if you look at Milwaukee, the Milwaukee metropolitan area has gotten less red. It's gotten bluer principally because of what's happened in the suburbs. I mean, the city has lost some population. It's still pretty blue. It's still very blue, but it's really the inner suburbs in Milwaukee County and the outer suburbs that we've just talked about.

either getting bluer or getting a lot less red. So metropolitan Milwaukee has shifted. And again, that's the most populous part of Wisconsin. And then the other really notable area that we've talked about before is Madison and its suburbs. And everybody, I think most people know that Madison is a very, very blue city. It's a very, very politically engaged and mobilized place. What's really striking about Madison and Dane County is how

dramatically the suburbs of Madison have grown, A, and B, gone from being purple to almost as blue in many cases as the city of Madison itself. And the population growth has altered the electoral calculus in Wisconsin. It's added, you know, effectively a few points to the Democratic statewide vote totals, and it's made it a

It's one reason why Republicans have hit a wall or a ceiling in these statewide races. So one of the things that is going to happen in Wisconsin is you're going to have the party primaries. If Haley emerges as the final challenger to Trump, and that's a big if at this point, one of the things that Wisconsin has that about half of the states have is no partisan registration. Right.

Could you imagine her exciting independents who normally wouldn't participate in party primaries, who, because there's no partisan registration, can just walk up and choose a ballot? Is that...

possibly a hidden reserve for her in a place like Wisconsin? Or is she not getting that level of that they like her, but they don't love her? And so that she still faces the resistance that. Yeah, I just think it's if we get to the point where we're talking about a Wisconsin primary in April of next year and she's still hanging around, it means that she's had some success and she survived some of these early tests. And so I think that would tell you that would suggest a scenario under which

She is better known and has, you know, made up some ground. And then under those circumstances, absolutely. I mean, you have to remember that Trump lost the Wisconsin primary in 2016 badly. He lost it really badly in the suburban southeastern, what was once the most Republican part of the state.

And we've had this pattern in Wisconsin, not just in the Trump primaries, but Republican primaries have followed a pattern of sort of a populist candidate for president or governor for Senate doing much better in the outlying parts of the state, the more rural, you know, north and west, and then a more traditional Republican candidate doing better in the suburban southeast. And that's there's no reason why that wouldn't happen again in a theoretical Haley Trump showdown in Wisconsin.

So quick question. Tammy Baldwin, longtime senator, is running for reelection. Unlike other people, she actually seems to win rather comfortably in a state that's otherwise 50-50. Do you see that changing?

Not if you know, certainly not unless the Republicans field a very strong challenger against her. And that seems unlikely just because of the perception of her strength. And and the secret to her success in terms of the map has been that she's not only mobilized Democrats, she's one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate. But despite all that, she has performed much better in rural Wisconsin than

than any other Wisconsin Democrat in recent times and anybody else really other than Obama in recent in the recent last decade or two where she is losing, you know, these small towns instead of losing them by 25 points, she's losing them by 15 points. And that's a big deal. Yeah, I think there's also a fair number of Baldwin Trump counties. There are.

And she has there's some crossover. I mean, she has campaigned on some Trump like issues like Buy American would be an example. She's she's had a talent for getting really parochial in a very effective way about Wisconsin issues like dairy that are not polarizing the way, you know, the big hot button cultural issues are. And of course, in the southwestern Wisconsin, the third congressional district on the river, that dairy is a big issue.

It's a big deal, and there are still some swing voters in that part of the state. Yes, as Congressman Van Orden found, thinking he would romp home to victory and almost lost when he picked it up from longtime Democratic Representative Ron Kind in the last election. Well, Craig, how can my listeners follow your work these days?

They can follow me on Twitter at at WISVoter, that's W-I-S-V-O-T-E-R. And they can look for my column on JS Online at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Well, Greg, it's great to have you back on the renamed podcast Beyond the Polls. And I'm looking forward to having you back as we continue to travel out to America's dairy land for the foreseeable future. It was great to do this.

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Well, Tuesday was fun day. Yes, Tuesday was the day when nerds like me sat around our computers starting at 6 o'clock when the polls closed in eastern Kentucky. You knew that, didn't you? Of course you did. You listened to this show. And this show is a show for the experts, the wannabe experts, and the people who want to win fast press.

at Bar Trivia Contest. So we're sitting there for hours, listening, watching, trying to figure out what's going on at a granular level. The top line, of course, is what you've been hearing. It's a better day for Democrats than it is for Republicans. And you can't say otherwise when the Republican choice in a Republican state of Kentucky loses for governor, when a Republican choice in a swing state for Supreme Court justice loses in Pennsylvania.

When the Republicans who had been making a big deal out of being able to take control of both chambers of the Virginia state legislature lose both chambers, and when the Republicans identified, rightly so, with the pro-life cause on abortion, lose in Ohio yet again on an abortion referendum on the ballot. So top line results, good for Democrats, not good for Republicans. But there's a silver lining, and that's

What I'm going to talk about today, which is digging deeper into the numbers and saying why what you hear in the top lines may not be everything that the pros are going to take away from it. The first thing you have to note is that, yes, abortion seems to hurt Republicans, but it also doesn't seem to be the silver bullet that kills everything before it. Let's take a look at that Kentucky race.

Andy Beshear, the Democrat, won with about a five-point margin. He won by a little under half a point in 2019, so that's a significant gain, four and a half points or so on the margin. It did tend to be more concentrated in suburbs than in urban areas and in rural areas. Again, consistent with the idea that abortion hurts. But

in the Kentucky race, Daniel Cameron was unusually exposed to that issue because he had been on the record as saying that he opposed abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Those of you who have been listening to this program from the early days know that one of my ads of the week was a Bashir ad featuring a victim of incest staring straight at the camera and saying basically, Daniel Cameron, we can't have you because you don't want people like me to

to escape the awful imperatives that we have to face because of an act of brutality and cruelty. So...

One way we can see that this isn't the killer all before it is take a look at the other races on the ballot. The fact is, Republicans won all the other races on the Kentucky ballot in landslides, 20 points or more, exactly the sort of thing you would expect to see in a normal red state. So yes, a popular incumbent using a popular issue was able to move four and a half points on the margin against a person exposed on abortion. Not good for Republicans.

not the sort of thing that should make you think that every person who says they're pro-life will lose. Mississippi is an example of that. Yes, Mississippi is a conservative state, but it does have its normal group of suburbs, suburbs of Memphis, suburbs of Jackson. And in fact, what you find is that Tate Reeves did pretty much exactly what he did four years ago before abortion had been made

removed from the Constitution by the Dobbs decision. He did a little worse in the suburbs of Memphis. He did better in the suburbs of Jackson, flipping Madison County, which is to the north of Jackson, which he lost to his Democratic opponent in 2019. He carried it yesterday. Did reasonably well in the southern parts. Did a little worse around the areas of University of Mississippi. Again, the sort of thing that you might expect

when young college students were mobilized to vote, but you didn't see that suburban flight

from Kate Reeves in Mississippi. And he wasn't as exposed as somebody like a Daniel Cameron was. So again, abortion doesn't help Republicans right now, but it's not the silver bullet that kills them. And let's take a look at that Virginia race. Yes, the expectations were that Republicans would be winners if they won both chambers. But the fact is,

That simply masks how amazing Glenn Youngkin's victory was in 2021. This is a Biden plus 10 state.

OK, this is not a purple state like Wisconsin. This is not a purple state like Michigan. This is more Democratic than New Hampshire. This is more Democratic than Minnesota. OK, and Glenn Youngkin won by a little bit under two points. So what happened? Well, what happened is that the Republicans won every single state legislative seat that Biden won by nine points or less.

That's right. Republicans did not win control, but they won every single state legislative seat that Biden won by nine points or less. I can assure you if that happens on Election Day 2024 in Congress, we're looking at a red wave.

Now, it didn't happen in 2022. I'm not saying it will happen in 2024, but it's a way of measuring what Glenn Youngkin was able to do, which was he basically got 85% of the gains that he made between Trump in 2020 and Youngkin in 2021. If he had gotten an extra 5% or 10%, they would have controlled the houses. So...

It wasn't a success in measured against expectations. But if you had a similarly strong campaign in a purple state, you would take control of the legislature. That's something that Republican pros will take a look at and they'll say, well, how can we replicate this in more favorable environments? Then you've got the example of local races in New York. You had Republicans winning a city council seat in the Bronx.

When was the last time a Republican won a city council seat in a Dominican-Hispanic district in the Bronx? Oh, kind of like well before my lifetime, probably. No flight against Republicans in the city council of New York. And Republicans won the suburban county of Suffolk, the county executive, for the first time in 20 years. Again, if abortion is the killer issue that is going to destroy the Republican brand, it'll destroy the brand, okay? When New Coke...

was bad, people stopped buying new Coke. They didn't go and say, well, this can looks good and this can looks bad. They said, I don't like the brand. So what's happening is that there's a clear weakness. There's clear momentum at Democratic's backs that clearly abortion helps mobilize people who lean towards the Democratic Party but may not be frequent voters outside of presidential years. It's a plus.

But the silver lining is that it's not a silver bullet. And that means that the message from Tuesday is Republicans took a step back, but they haven't been knocked to the canvas. And that's what happened on Tuesday. Thanks for joining us on Beyond the Polls. We'll be taking a break for Thanksgiving Day, but I'll be back at the end of November with another episode of Jam-Packed Fun. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the polls.

Ryan Seacrest here.

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