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Welcome back. The temperatures outside are cooling, but our politics remain red hot. This week, my guests and I discuss double doubters, reluctant voters, and disillusioned ex-Reaganites, all leavened by a trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands. No, this is not The Price is Right. We're going to explore their path-breaking rank-choice voting caucuses. All this and more on this episode of Beyond the Polls.
Well, I'm very happy that this week on Polling Barometer, we actually have a real pollster. Charles Franklin, the director of Marquette Law School Poll, one of the most accurate polls both in the nation and for the home state of Wisconsin. Charles, welcome to Beyond the Polls.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here, as ironic as it is to be on Beyond the Polls talking about my poll. Well, let's first, before we go beyond it, let's start with it. What does your most recent national poll say? You only released it a few days ago, so it's still pretty clear. Yes, we just released last week, and it shows a close race no matter how you slice it.
With registered voters, it's Trump 51, Biden 48. But among likely voters, it's Biden 51, Trump 49. And so that shows, first of all, the most important point. We're looking at a close race. And in our polling since March, we've had it close enough.
in each of those polls, with Trump having a slight edge among registered voters. Here in September, it's the first time we've broken out likely voters separately. And you see a slight difference there. I think that what we see in the Republican primary race is a bit of consolidation, but it's consolidation around Trump.
rather than one of the not-Trump candidates. But there are some interesting shifts in the GOP race as well. Well, let's stick with the general election for a minute, which is that that is an unusually high proportion assigned to the top two candidates, which suggests to me that you push people who would initially say undecided or someone else. What do the poll data show that?
Until before you push, and where do the people who initially don't want to make a choice end up drifting towards? Yeah, that's exactly right. I call the people that don't want to choose Trump or Biden as reluctant voters. They're people who, when we give them the option, say they'd vote for someone else or they wouldn't vote.
And that's run about 20 to 25 percent throughout the spring. In this latest September poll, it's down slightly to 16 percent. But let's just call it around 20 percent reluctant with a little bit of variation.
We then do push those people. We say, if you're one of those reluctant voters, well, if you had to choose, would you choose Biden or Trump? And that's why you get close to 100%. We have very few people on that follow-up question who just insist adamantly, I absolutely wouldn't vote for either of those two. Still, there'll certainly be a bigger third-party vote in the fall next year than zero, but
But it's early to have any good idea of how big that'll be. It is striking that around 20% don't want to choose either of these candidates. And when we look at favorability to the candidates, about 22% say they have an unfavorable view of both Biden and of Trump.
And so whether you think of this as about 20 percent reluctant voters or about 20 percent of people who don't like either, I think you call those double doubters, don't you? Yes. Yes. We talked about my the catchphrase I'm trying to popularize for the 2024 cycle. Double doubters. Take it to the bank. And either way you slice it, we're talking about one in five voters that fall into those categories.
Yeah, and there's a high overlap that, you know, your data show that of the double doubters, 62% of them, which would be about 13.5% overall, are reluctant voters. So some people like one candidate and are still kind of reluctant for whatever reason, but the vast majority of the reluctance are also the double doubters, which gets to the question of, is there anything that either candidate can do to get some of these people to like them?
Well, I guess they have almost 13 months to figure that out. I do think there is an element, and this is true of every election, but maybe more so with these two leading candidates, that early on people wish and pine away for their favorite candidate, maybe a unicorn that they can't name, but the ideal alternative for them.
As we get into the primary season, and especially as we get to next summer when the nominees are going to be certain, I think, um,
People will realize that they actually just have those choices and they can't dream of a better candidate. At that point, it's choose one of the two leading ones. Or if you're really disgusted, think about a third party or think about staying home. I think that dynamic really doesn't become meaningful in the polling until next summer. Right now, we have one in five that wish they had somebody else they could support.
But I'm pretty sure we won't have one in five actually voting for someone else next fall. Ross Perot got 19% for the high watermark for third party vote in 1992, for example. And he was one of the very few candidates, in fact, the only one that I'm aware of in the last 75 years, who ended up doing about as well as polling in the last month of the campaign. But even he, before he dropped out,
in the summertime to come back in in the fall. He was over 30 in polls in the early summertime. So even he saw a fall off from the initial flirtation, people going back to the old two-party duopoly.
That's right. And what's far more common is to see someone in state or national races and independent. Maybe get in the teens, conceivably 20, but almost always that falls off to the low to mid single digits. Now, again, this year could be different. Let's not prejudge everything. But to the extent that we can use the past as a guide,
Third-party candidates generally in American elections have struggled to get beyond 4 or 5%.
Yeah, so for people who may have been seeing the RFK Jr. polls that have been touted, and most people wouldn't have, but the listeners to this podcast may have, you know, they tend to have him at 17, 19 percent. I don't think you've polled RFK Jr. as an independent yet, Charles, but I would assume that a lot of those RFKs
would be coming from the double doubters, people who are, that for them, RFK Jr. is the unicorn they know, but doesn't mean that a year from now they'll be the unicorn they vote for.
I think that's right. We've asked about him in a Dem primary with Biden, and he slipped from about 20 percent to about 12 percent in that Democratic primary vote. What we do see is that we've been asking his favorability rating for a long time now.
And with reluctant voters, his favorable is 46, his unfavorable is 19. So he's pretty favorable with the reluctance. But 35% of reluctance say they don't know enough about him to have an opinion.
With the not reluctant voters, it's actually not as different as I would have thought. 37 favorable, 38 unfavorable. And the difference between Trump supporters or even reluctant Trump supporters and reluctant Biden supporters is really very small between the two. So this last week or two, we've heard a lot of discussion about who does Kennedy hurt more, Trump or Biden?
But on this favorable measure that in our data, at least, in this latest poll, for example, among reluctant voters who choose Trump when pushed,
49% favorable for Kennedy, 13% unfavorable. Among reluctant Biden voters, 46% favorable, 23% unfavorable. So that's a fairly modest difference. A little more unfavorability towards him among the Biden voters than among the Trump folks.
But 49 versus 46 favorable is pretty small beans for a difference between the two. Let's hang on again. Sometime next summer, we'll have an idea of whether he's really making an impact. Not that that means I won't be asking about him in the meantime. Well, yeah, so...
One of the nice things I try and shoot for with this podcast is, you know, we're going to have people who have all political viewpoints. I hope I have listeners who consider themselves progressives and others who consider themselves MAGA types or even Democratic socialists and libertarians. You're all welcome to the Beyond the Polls party.
But so you will have people who will look at this tight race and they'll say, how can it be so close? And they'll name the other person that they don't like as how can anyone support him? So let me ask the question from the MAGA standpoint. Then I'll ask the question from the progressive Democratic standpoint. From the MAGA standpoint, why isn't Trump just sweeping the floor? I mean, if you're a MAGA voter, you think that that Biden is incompetent over.
over-liberal and senile. Why isn't Trump just destroying this guy? Yeah, I think we have to start with the very first principle, and that is party polarization, and the fact that we have a reasonably even balance of Democrats and Republicans in the country.
Nationwide, it's a small advantage to Democrats, and in a state like Wisconsin, it's a one-point advantage to Republicans. But either way you slice it, we're not looking at decades ago when the Democrats had a clear majority in, say, the 1950s or 60s. And add the polarization that means...
We see the world, including the candidates, but also the economy, through strongly partisan eyes. And there's little crossover voting among the partisans. So that's the first thing.
If I'm a Democrat, I see almost nothing good about Donald Trump. And if I'm a Republican, I see almost nothing good about Joe Biden. We saw that in our polling this month, that Biden has strengths on a few issues. Trump has strengths on other issues, too.
But the partisan divide in those visions of strength and weakness is really very, very sharp. So that's a recipe for close elections.
So, yeah, I guess you kind of answer this one. The flip side is if you're a Democrat, you'd say, wait a minute, Donald Trump is evil, he's vile, he's misogynist, he's racist, and oh, by the way, he tried to overthrow the Constitution. And I'm just repeating things that they have said. How can he be so close? Is it basically the flip side of the same thing, which is it's mainly partisan polarization that...
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that means you're blinded to the friend's frailties? I think there's a real strong part to that. You know, one of the questions that some pollsters or media have been puzzled by is how big majorities say the threat to democracy is a big issue in the upcoming election.
But that's a lot of Republicans convinced that Democrats stole the 2020 election. And it's a lot of Democrats convinced that January 6th was an effort to steal the 2020 election. And there's something, you know, those messages are so powerfully reinforced within both parties that I think it really is a genuine belief in both parties that the other side
is ready to undermine democracy. And we have such a problem of arguing in good faith and taking for granted that the other side might sincerely believe something we don't believe, and instead we just believe the other side is evil. And I regret to say that I think there's an awful lot of empirical support for that view.
So as a pollster, you have had to deal with doubting of your profession over the last decade or so. But in the professional community, you've had to deal with probably the most profound challenges to the manner in which polling has been conducted since the switch from in-person polling
polling to telephone polling in the late 1960s. Tell me how the Marquette Law School poll has dealt with the, what is it behind the methodology switch? You know, I think I know what it is, but I'd like you to explain it. And then how has the Marquette Law School poll adapted to deal with the facts on the ground of how people respond to the old-fashioned pollster phone call?
Yeah. The industry as a whole has changed tremendously over the last six to eight years and had changed some before that. The Marquette poll, just like everybody else, is adapting to the current world realities. The one that turned out to be the easiest to adapt to was the rise of cell phones.
But by 2010, we were all calling cell phones in proportion to cell phone-only households in the country. And almost every poll that still uses phone would have 75% or 80% cell phones. So that was the easy thing to fix.
But the other was the decline in response rates and more subgroups becoming harder and harder to reach on the phone. Try to get your 18 to 29-year-old to pick up a phone call. Good luck with that. But we have typically had between...
about half the number of 18 to 29 year olds respond that we know are in the registered voter population you could solve that by weighting them up and that's been the historic way to approach that and can you very briefly explain i know what you're talking about could for my listeners can you explain what weighting is sure and this can get complicated but i'll try to keep it easy um
You're waiting for dummies. Yeah, exactly. Well, I'm good at that, having been a dummy myself in many other occasions. We know from the registered voter lists that in Wisconsin, for example, about 16% of registered voters are in the 18 to 29-year-old age group.
But we do a survey, and we actually only get about 8% in the 18 to 29-year-old age group. Well, weighting is to say, well, let's double count those 18 to 29-year-olds. Give them a weight factor of 2. Then in the weighted data...
They will be 16% of our weighted sample, and that's a way to compensate for demographic discrepancies. Throughout the history of polling, young people have been less willing to respond, no matter how we're interviewing them. Older people, more. Less educated people, harder to get.
better educated people easier to get. So we've always weighted data according to these demographic elements. But you do worry that as response rates, especially with young people and sometimes other groups, get lower and lower, maybe the people that are talking to you out of the young group are
aren't really representative of all young people, in which case waiting doesn't really solve the problem. So that's number one. You want to get the most people in each group that you're supposed to get, and then you compensate by waiting.
What became apparent in 2016 with the Trump election is that in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, of 133 polls, only one out of those three states ever had Trump ahead. So that was a systematic failure of all organizations, including mine. I was off by six points on that race.
And what we've come to believe is that there's not a huge segment, but there is a segment of Trump supporters who
that simply won't do polls. And therefore, they are being omitted from the surveys because we just can't get them to respond. And so lots of things have been done in the last few years to try to reach those people, to maybe oversample in hard-to-reach Trump bastions so that we do get supporters for him to represent them correctly. But on the methodology side,
Way back in the dark ages, we did face-to-face interviews in your living room. Then, as you said, in the 60s, we moved to telephones. But now that response rates have gotten so low and many people just never answer their phone, we've moved to everything you can possibly do. And this applies to the Marquette poll, too, which is representative of the industry. So I'll use us as the example.
First, we have a sample that's drawn from
mailing addresses where we draw a random sample of mailing addresses, send a letter and money inviting people to take part in ongoing polling over the next months going forward. If people agree to do that, then we sample them for an individual poll, send them an email or a text saying here's a poll for you to take and
And only the person that gets that can take the poll, and they can only do it one time. So this is not like a TV poll where you can come in and click 20 times or something. But we also draw a sample of registered voters from the registered voter list.
For a good chunk of them, we have email addresses and phone numbers. So we send them an email inviting them to do the poll online. If we don't get them that way, we send them a text inviting them to do the poll online. And if we still don't hear from them, we call them. Ha ha!
And so that's a good example of using every method you can to reach people. But what's critical is it starts with a random sample of the population, a random sample of home addresses or a random sample of people off the registered voter list.
rather than a poll that you put up on the internet or on Twitter and just invite whoever to take it. It's the random sampling that's still the absolute foundation for good quality polling.
Well, Charles, thank you for demystifying the polling industry for my listeners. Where can people follow your work? Well, first of all, I am Polls and Votes, P-O-L-L-S-A-N-D-V-O-T-E-S. And that's my handle on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Blue Sky and Post and pretty much any other social media site.
And for the poll results, you can go to law.marquette.edu slash poll, P-O-L-L. And all of our polls are in reverse chronological order there. And at the top of the page, there's a results and data tab for the folks that want to see the top lines, the cross tabs, the methodology statement, and the complete questionnaire.
Well, Charles, thank you. I'm sure you'll get many hits, maybe even some people telling you why they shouldn't believe you and why you're wrong about the polls, even though you're the only one who knows anything about the polls. I have heard that comment once or twice before, and I welcome that just as I welcome the other kind of comment. Well, thank you, and I'm looking forward to having you back on Beyond the Poll. Look forward to it. Thank you.
Well, at this stage in the 2024 campaign, most of the action is going on on the track of the elephants. So here to talk about the Republican rumble, or maybe the Republican dud of a rumble, is Matt Lewis, senior columnist at the Daily Beast and author of Filthy Rich Politicians. Matt, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Hey, Henry, great to be here.
Well, let me ask you, everyone can see the polls. Donald Trump's ahead 30, 40, 25 points. Why do you think that's the case? And is the race over? I think it is, barring like some major issues.
unforeseen event. So like a health episode or something like that. But assuming that there's nothing crazy that happens, like really, it would have to. And by the way, by today's standards, it would have to be super crazy to fit my classification. It's Trump's race. It's over. And it's been over for months. I had high hopes, actually. I thought that it was going to be a real race. I thought that Ron DeSantis early on, I'm talking
November, December, January, February, I thought that Ron DeSantis would have a real shot. I was pretty bullish on him. But I think it was back in March or April,
Uh, where I, I, you know, and I followed the lead of, of my sparring partner, Bill share, who's a writer at Washington monthly who beat me to the punch, but we both wrote columns saying, uh, don't bother, don't even run. It's over before it starts. So I think we've seen the writing on the wall for, for months now. And, uh, it's all over, but the shouting.
So why is that? You know, is that we could, again, the sort of person who listens to this podcast actually pays attention to the polls. You know, Trump was only ahead of DeSantis by 10 or so points in national polling back in that period of giddiness. And for you, what happened to change it?
Right. So if you'll remember back to last about a year ago, last well, 11 months ago. Right. So like last Thanksgiving, you had Donald Trump had just endorsed a bunch of candidates like Herschel Walker who lost. And then he was like having a.
lunch or dinner or whatever with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, this white white supremacist guy. Meanwhile, you had Ron DeSantis who had just won reelection in Florida by like 19 points. So that was maybe the peak of my bullishness about Ron DeSantis. And I think, though, if we look back at the polling, there were a couple of events that I think really stand out. I
One was when Ron DeSantis, this is before he actually got in the race, but he answered a questionnaire that Tucker Carlson had sent out where he said,
It was about Ukraine and DeSantis. He didn't completely support Russia's invasion. That would be too much. But he was it was less than unequivocal support for Ukraine. And I think it was seen as Ron DeSantis telling Tucker Carlson what Carlson and his audience wanted to hear. So that seems to have been a turning point. Then I think the the first indictment.
handed down really helped Donald Trump. Ironically, the wagon circled around him. And DeSantis didn't do himself any favors at that point either, right? By failing to go after Trump. DeSantis had this kind of
He tried to have it both ways. You know, he criticized Trump saying like, well, I can't speak to what it's like to to pay off a porn star. You know, I'm paraphrasing here, but by the same token, he actually attacked the Manhattan district attorney kind of providing cover for Trump. And so there have probably been 10 data points that I could bring up. But those are two that seem to to make a difference in the polling.
So you are a well-known anti-Trump Republican, still a Republican, unlike others who have switched sides in the last few years. How does this make you feel and what does it make you think about the state of the party?
Well, and look, I mean, I think part of the problem for for Ron DeSantis was he tried to be very Trumpy. He tried to rather than trying to unite the Reagan coalition and the never Trumpers and the in the old school Reagan conservatives and first and then peeling off some of Trump's
He he did this sort of weird thing where he kind of tried to be Trumpy, but he also tried to go after. I don't even know what we would call these voters. It's sort of like the Elon Musk voter. He's Trump.
Right wing intellectual dark web. I don't even know what they would be called, but they're certainly not traditional Reagan conservatives. And so it's not that upsetting to me that Trump is beating the Santas because the Santas wasn't really running as a candidate.
you know, avatar for the things that I believe in. I mean, I think if I had to pick a candidate today as of now who most represented my values, who is a plausible nominee, it would be Nikki Haley. But I think her, you know, although she's performed fairly well, her odds are very long. So this is like saying,
you know, look, I'm a Baltimore Orioles fan and I'm still suffering from what happened in the playoffs, right? We went 101 games. We're the number one team in the American League East for a whole, you know, for a whole season. And then we go down to, you know, we play Texas and we get swept in three games. That has, that, that is, is created turmoil in my life. That's the opposite of what's happened with Trump. Like I've had,
six months to get used to the idea that Trump was going to be the nominee. So maybe I'm, you know, inured to it. Maybe I'm sort of dead inside. Obviously, I wish that I could vote for someone other than Trump. I wish I had that option. But, you know, I've had time to kind of get used to our almost certain fate.
Well, you know, one of the things that I've talked about for a long time, and you may disagree with, and we can have that conversation, is I don't think there's a majority in the Nikki Haley wing of the party. You know, that when I look at the Republican Party, I think that, you know, there's still a few people who are moderates, the Chris Sununu's, the Larry Hogan's in the world who are Republicans. But among the non-moderates, you know,
Maybe 25 to 30 percent of the party are non-Trump Republicans. So if you combine those two and assume Nikki Haley got 100 percent, maybe she could get 40 percent of the vote. I've seen polls that do ranked choice voting that say if it got down to 50,
Trump and Haley, it would be Trump 67-33. So, you know, that's not that far off. So the question is, if 60 to 66 percent of the Republican Party doesn't want the old guard, what does that say about the Republican Party? Yeah, I think that's I think you're pretty much right.
And as Yogi Berra said, if nobody wants to come out to the ballpark, there's nothing you could do to stop them. It is what it is. The Republican Party has changed.
And it is a Trump party now. It is more populist, more nationalist than I prefer. I could I could tolerate a more populist party than we had before Trump came down that escalator. That's not a deal breaker to me. I think trying to overturn elections and.
There are there are things that are deal breakers for me. But your point is well taken. Like, it's not it's not like, you know, if Nikki Haley just had a better advisor or if she just had a better ground game, like they're the voters, you know, we get what we deserve and we get who we want at the end of the day. And that's that happens to be Donald Trump if you're a Republican. Yeah.
Well, I think it was H.L. Mencken said the voters get what they, in a democracy, the voters get what they deserve, and good and hard. Yeah, the bastards. Yeah, that's the other one. The voters have spoken, the bastards. So glad we're not on broadcast so that we can use those words. The FCC won't come in and take me down. So, do you think that
it will be so over that there will be no candidate in the race by Super Tuesday. In other words, I could imagine a world where nobody breaks out, where Trump wins a majority of the vote in the Iowa caucuses, a majority of the vote in New Hampshire, a majority of the vote in Nevada, and a majority of the vote in Nikki Haley's home state of South Carolina.
At which point you ask, why would anybody stay into Super Tuesday? Is that a plausible outcome? That it could be... And we've never had a contested primary that was... Unless you count Gore, Bill Bradley in 2000 as a contested primary. That didn't at least get to Super Tuesday with two people. Even if one person was...
significantly favored, you know, like John Kerry in 2004 against John Edwards. At least there was a contest on Super Tuesday where people were trying to win. Do you think we'll have at least one person who is not a joke candidate trying to win on Super Tuesday? Or do you think this is going to be, you know, that Trump always talks about huge and bigly, that this might be a huge historic bigly win?
It could be. I don't want to, you know, wimp out of the question. I think there is a chance that, you know, Trump loses Iowa, even though he's up bigly at Iowa. You know, these states like Iowa and New Hampshire are contrarian. They take it seriously. And sometimes they like to course correct the other state. So I think it's really hard to predict. And it's it is possible that Trump loses one or both of those states because
Just like Joe Biden did, by the way, right? Joe Biden did not take off until until South Carolina. So but I also think it's entirely plausible that Trump wins both and then it's off to the races and there wouldn't be much reason to stay in.
There may be a reason to get out. You don't want to be embarrassed. You don't want to lose your home state, get drubbed there. On the other hand, you know, maybe maybe there's some weird theory that whoever's the last man standing, that that makes you the heir apparent or, you know, it didn't really work for Ted Cruz in 2016. But maybe that's plays into the calculus. Well, yeah.
On that depressing note, let's talk about the exciting, positive part of the Republican Party, the race for a new House Speaker. Yes. What does that say about the party, that apparently the secret vote has been taken and Scalise...
came on top narrowly over Jim Jordan. It's still pretty close in the conference between an establishment conservative and a little bit more of a non-establishment conservative. What does that say about the state of the institutional Republican Party?
So I should say we're taping this at like two o'clock Wednesday, October 11th. And this is sort of breaking news that they just had this behind closed door vote for
And as you noted, Steve Scalise came out narrowly ahead of of Jim Jordan. And partly that's because I guess Jordan's team wanted to basically pass. You tell me to correct me if I'm wrong about this. They wanted to pass a rule that said internally you had to have I think it was.
217 votes locked down before we would take it to the floor. Correct. Scalise was able to stop that. So as you and I are recording this, I think, you know, we see through a glass darkly. I think there's a scenario where Scalise just becomes the speaker.
And then I think there's a version of this where they go on the House floor and it's like Kevin McCarthy, January 2022 again, where there are defections. It's embarrassing. Republicans can't get to 217, which is what they're going to need right now to have a majority, to have a speaker. And it will take multiple votes and you could end up with somebody else. So, yeah.
It's not a good look, but it will look really chaotic if that latter scenario is what plays out. Well, I guess that's a real question. It's clear that much as the Republican electorate has shifted to a more confrontational type of conservatism that also emphasizes some degree of cultural and international outlook that is not
the George W. Bush era conservatism, that so too the conference has shifted. And so you've got Steve Scalise, who by any measure would probably be the most conservative speaker of the House since before the New Deal, if you take a look at the voting record, who is considered to be insufficiently conservative by nearly 45% of his own conference.
Yeah, he's the establishment moderate in the race. And Jordan is the conservative. So I think that is the shifting of the Overton window that on one hand, you could say,
the moderates are winning, the establishment's winning, but you're like, yeah, but look at who the establishment are. They're not your father's Rockefeller Republicans. Well, they're not even Bob Dole Republicans. That's the thing, is that in 1968, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon run against Nelson Rockefeller, who's an honest-to-God liberal, and that's the Eastern establishment. And then,
By 1988, Bob Dole is the establishment, somebody who just 12 years prior was put on the ticket by Gerald Ford to appeal to the conservative wing. And now you've got somebody who's basically, I'd have to look it up, but probably has a 90 to 100 percent voter rating from the American Conservative Union, who is considered insufficiently conservative.
by a significant number of people. At some point, you have to wonder where this stops. Well, the interesting thing is going to be, I mean, obviously, what does it mean to be a conservative? And the definition in the last decade or so has kind of gone from being about political philosophy to being about toughness or being interested in the fight of
Owning the libs, drinking liberal tears, all that stuff. But, you know, I heard at least and, you know, this is all being kind of leaked out, but that Jordan and Scalise are both agreed that like the first the biggest order of business will be like passing another CR. Yeah.
a continuing resolution. And last time I checked, that's why Kevin McCarthy was ousted is that he passed a continuing resolution, um, to keep the government open. And so I wonder like if Jordan becomes this were to become the speaker, would he, um,
Would he suddenly start governing as more of an establishment figure, but just be given a longer leash, kind of like only Nixon can go to China? Or would Jordan govern like Matt Gaetz? And that, I think, will be an interesting thing to watch if it happens. Well, on that note, where can my listeners follow your work?
Well, obviously, read me at The Daily Beast. Follow me on X at Matt K. Lewis and get my book, Filthy Rich Politicians. And I think it's kind of like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Inside every 10,000th book, there's a gold ticket that allows you to to become a filthy rich politician. We're at our marketing meetings. Yeah. Well, thank you, Matt, for joining me on Beyond the Polls. Thank you.
This week on State of Play, we're actually featuring an entity that's not a state. We're talking about the United States Virgin Islands, and here to talk about their important caucus is Dennis Lennox, the executive director of the Republican Party of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Dennis, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Thanks, Henry. Well, I'm sure some of my listeners who are not uber geeks who can tell you all the history of every state
contested convention going back to 1831 and the anti-Masonics are wondering, wait a minute, they don't vote for president. There's no electoral votes. Why are the Virgin Islands getting involved in the Republican nomination race? So, Dennis, why are the Virgin Islands and the other territories involved?
Yeah, I think that's a good question, Henry. A lot of people don't realize that, well, the five U.S. territories, unlike the District of Columbia, which is part of the Electoral College, the five U.S. territories, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam,
Northern Mariana Islands, of course, Puerto Rico, they don't get electoral college votes. But for purposes of the Democratic and Republican Party nominations, they fully and equally participate in those respective campaigns and they fully and equally participate.
at least on the Republican side of the aisle, have seats on the Republican National Committee. So when you're running for president of the United States, we like to think it's about winning primaries or it's about winning caucuses. It's not. It's actually about winning delegates. And a delegate from the Virgin Islands or American Samoa is equally as important, some would say more important, than a delegate from New Hampshire or Iowa.
And the great trivia question of the 2020 presidential campaign is name the only territorial entity which was won by Michael Bloomberg. And the answer is American Samoa. He won the caucuses there. And, you know, also I would also just add there's also particularly in D.C. There's this perception that, you know, OK, fine, they can kind of participate. But does it really matter for Republicans? Aren't all these territories just Democratic territories?
you know, fiefdoms. And ironically, of the five U.S. territories, three of the five have Republican members of Congress.
Right. And they're non-voting members. All territories have traditionally had non-voting members of Congress. Non-voting comes with a big asterisk because they can vote in committee of the whole, you know, and on the various committees. They can introduce legislation. I believe they get to vote in conference for internal conference positions. Right. So there's a big asterisk on that. But there are Republican parties in all five territories, which I think a lot of people don't realize.
Yeah, and that is the fact that it's not like they're set, you know, American Samoa is Democratic and Guam is Republican or so forth. All five of these territories have pretty vibrant two-party politics. I can't remember one in particular being dominated by one of the two national parties. And Puerto Rico, of course, has its own party structure, which only loosely accords or aligns with Republican versus Democrat.
We're probably the most blue of the five territories right now. And for the last several years, we've had one party Democrat government, or as we like to say, one party rule in the Virgin Islands. Historically, that wasn't always the case. The first elected governor of the Virgin Islands was a Republican. Republicans have had the delegate to Congress seat not that long ago, six out of the 15 seats in the
unicameral territorial legislature were held by Republicans. It's really more a reflection that until this cycle, for about three consecutive election cycles, the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands really was not a political party. It was just more interested in being delegates to national conventions than actually running people for territorial office. But that's all changing under the new party leadership down there. And they're using this presidential caucus as an excuse to build a political party.
Well, tell us about the Presidential Caucus. What is it? When have you scheduled it for and how is it going to operate?
Well, a lot of people are suddenly paying attention, including yourself, Henry, with that column you recently had in the Washington Post. The Virgin Islands has chosen February 8th to have a caucus. It's going to be, you know, one ballot caucus. It's not going to be one of those Iowa things where, you know, the Democrats do where you stand in one corner for this candidate and another corner for that candidate. And uniquely because
It's a territory. The Republican Party in the Virgin Islands can break the RNC calendar because by rule, technically speaking, only four states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, are supposed to go before March 1st.
But the way the rule is written, there's no penalty for a territory because it's only nine delegates. So there's going to be a lot of attention. We like to think at the center of the political universe is going to be in the Virgin Islands for the next few months. And that might be a slight exaggeration, a slight rhetorical flourish, but...
because of the voting system that we're using and because of the dynamics of the Republican presidential campaign, where it's incredibly likely that one candidate is going to win Iowa, probably a different candidate is going to win New Hampshire, and then it goes to the Virgin Islands. And if it's going to be a protracted campaign, we're going to see the first signs of it in the Virgin Islands. Yeah, and just as an aside, of course, the
The reason why there's no penalty is because the penalty is to reduce a state or entity's delegation to nine delegates, but the four small territories of which USVI is one only has nine delegates to start with, so there's none to lose. Correct. So explain ranked choice voting and why that is different and why it might shake up the Republican race.
Well, whether you want to call it preferential voting or rank-choice voting, we thought it would be interesting. And I credit our chairman for this, Gordon Ackley. He's the one that was wholeheartedly committed to not only using rank-choice voting, but going as early as possible to ensure that the voices and votes of Virgin Islanders were heard nationally. But preferential rank-choice voting is...
I think with this many candidates, it just simply makes sense because what it does for those who aren't aware, we get a ballot and you get to rank your preferences. It's that simple. One, two, three, four, five, six, whatever. And if a candidate, uh,
gets a majority straight off, then the election is over. But if no candidate has a majority, then they continue to tabulate those results until one of the preferences has 50 plus 1%. And, you know, unfortunately, I think there's a lot of conservatives because of what we've seen in Alaska, and to a lesser degree, Maine, you know, they're sort of put off by ranked choice voting, I would argue that what Alaska is doing really isn't ranked choice voting, it's really the elimination of party primaries.
But for an internal party election, in a primary, for a convention, ranked-choice voting, preferential voting makes a lot of sense. And you just have to look to Virginia in 2021. They used it in their gubernatorial campaign, and it gave Virginia Glenn Youngkin, who, of course, is Governor Glenn Youngkin now.
And the argument some people make on behalf of ranked choice voting in party primaries, as opposed to in the general election, is that you can only win if you have a majority of the people voting. So you can't have one of these situations where you have 17 people running and the person with 18 percent of the vote becomes the party nominee, which literally has happened in some congressional safe Republican seats.
Well, not quite that extreme. But in 2016, of course, the former president, Donald J. Trump, did not have majority support within the Republican primaries and caucuses. I think it's very important, separating personalities, separating candidates, that a political party nominates a candidate who enjoys majority support from that political party. And ranked choice voting uniquely guarantees that.
Frankly, also, I think from a voter standpoint, it allows a voter to cast a ballot for their candidate that they truly support without being accused of casting a wasted ballot or, you know, why are you voting for Asa Hutchinson? He doesn't matter, right? I mean, that's what a lot of people would say. But ranked choice voting, preferential voting creates a level playing field for each and every candidate in the race, and it allows those candidates
who are being accused of being a spoiler candidate or favorite son candidate to stay in the race longer and contribute. And I would argue they contribute something important to the dialogue.
Obviously, with respect to the Republican race, there's a lot of national polls that have Donald Trump above 50 percent. The early state polls, alas, nobody has polled the Virgin Islands, but they've polled the other four carve out states. And Trump is somewhere in the 40s there. Yeah.
So if Trump gets 50% on the first choices, then there's no ranking to happen because he's already won. Is that correct? Yes, that would be correct. You know, the one thing that I will point out is you're right. The race at the state level is much closer and tighter than what these national polls indicate. But when you look at where February 8th is going to fall, you know, we're
in a position where if there is still a race for president happening, the Virgin Islands could be very well decided. Because, of course, if Trump wins the first three contests, the Virgin Islands included, then it's probably done. But if he splits Iowa and New Hampshire and somebody else wins in the Virgin Islands, then it's a completely different ballgame. And I don't think this is a
pro-Trump or an anti-Trump voting system. In fact, I would note that of the eight candidates who filed to compete in the Virgin Islands, everybody but Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence, and the Pence campaign claims they're still going to file, Donald Trump filed, and the Trump campaign had no objections whatsoever.
to using ranked choice voting, which I think is interesting because again, there's this perception, Henry, you know this, that a lot of people on the conservative base are instinctively for whatever reason against ranked choice voting. And I think that's just misguided.
Well, so let's walk through the possibility if Donald Trump doesn't get 50% of the first choice. You said there were eight candidates. Sounds like all of the major candidates have filed. They're on the ballot. So if you want to vote for Nikki Haley or you want to vote for Chris Christie, you'll have that opportunity. And then you'll have the opportunity to say, well, my second choice is X, my third choice is Y, however many you want to rank going down the ballot.
Even Perry Johnson's on the ballot. So the Perry Johnson supporters out there will get to actually cast a vote for him. Well, there we go. Perry Johnson. If Michael Bloomberg can win American Samoa, Perry Johnson can win the Virgin Islands. But
I'm just imagining what, you know, Donald Trump actually is. Let's say Donald Trump gets 41 percent. Walk our listeners through how each round would actually unfold and how it could be, in theory, that a person who finishes first in the first round with 41 percent could end up losing once all of the preferences are counted.
You know, I really don't want to get into sort of a back and forth, maybe because I'm not the math guy there. And I'm probably the last person in the world who should be talking about that sort of, you know, math part of it. Right. But what I will say is that from my standpoint, I don't see a scenario in which.
you know, there's this perception out there that the person with the least amount of votes on the first round is going to somehow win this, right? That's been some of the criticism out there. I don't think that's actually going to happen. And again, I would point out to Donald Trump himself filed. They didn't object to it. And I think that's because the Trump campaign, at least the candidate, believes that he's the most popular person in the United States. And of course, he would win a majority of votes. So,
With leaving the math out, what we're talking about is it's eight people on the ballot, round one, everyone's got their votes, and then the last person gets eliminated, and those ballots get reallocated according to the preference choice of those voters. And that process continues with one candidate being dropped for each round until somebody gets over 50%. That's my understanding of how the process is going to work.
Is that correct? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Henry, I thought you were asking me more to explain the mathematical part of it. And I'm a politics guy, not a math guy, though I do wish I would have taken some more math in college because surprisingly, there's a lot of math in politics. Yeah, you find...
Oftentimes, political people are numbers people, and they're also baseball stats people. You can just, I'm one of them, George Will is one, Stu Rothenberg, lots of people who just love them numbers. But so the question is, really, who's everyone else's ultimate, you know, assuming that
yes, there's eight candidates, but that there's not a special Virgin Islands favorite. It will probably get down to the same three or four people that are in the top of the polls elsewhere, which really means the question is when the going gets tough, the person who is the second choice of a lot of the also-rans, since I think no one expects Trump to be an also-ran, is
will help determine who the winner is, because they'll say, hey, would I rather have Donald Trump? If I can't have Perry Johnson, would I rather have Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis? If I can't have Chris Christie, would I rather have Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis? This is important in Virgin Islands, whereas it's not important in any other race. Isn't that correct?
Oh, that's absolutely correct. You know, the one beauty of ranked choice or preferential voting is that it requires a candidate to engage with all voters and ensure that they have broad support from all voters. And so, you know, I can't if I'm Ron DeSantis or I'm Nikki Haley or I'm Donald Trump or I'm Tim Scott or I'm Perry Johnson, Doug Burgum, I'm not going to necessarily in a ranked choice system.
drop bombs on my opponents because I may need the votes of my opponents or at least a favorable ranking of my opponents under ranked choice voting. And I think that's the beauty. We've seen that in some of these cities that have tried it. You've seen different type of campaigns run. You've seen more consensus candidates emerge. And I think for party nominations, it makes a lot of sense
that a consensus candidate becomes the nominee of the party with a majority support of that party's voters. The idea that we're going to nominate somebody who, to use your earlier example, I think 18%, right? I mean, that's just crazy. And I would also argue somebody 36% is probably also crazy as well.
The example, by the way, was Diana Harshbarger, who's the congresswoman from eastern Tennessee. That was somewhere like 17, 18, 20 percent in a multi-candidate race. And it was a safe district. She's a nominee. She's now a two or three term congresswoman. So if my listeners wanted to follow all things Virgin Island Republican Party related, where would they look?
So we've got a website, believe it or not, and it's the longest address in the world. It's RepublicanPartyInTheVirginIslands.com. That's a great place to find out all the news on the caucus on February 8th, 2024. So mark your calendar. And then our chairman, Gordon Ackley, is very active on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and that's at X.
Gordon Ackley. That's Ackley, A-C-K-L-E-Y. Well, Dennis, thank you very much. I am glad to have you on and thank you. Hopefully we will have you back on Beyond the Polls. And maybe we'll see you down in the Virgin Islands. Perhaps February 8th, maybe. There's worse places to be in February than the Virgin Islands. That never crossed your mind.
That's it for this week's episode. Join me in two weeks' time as we examine state races in Kentucky and Virginia in addition to our regular topics. So once more, let's reach for the stars together and venture beyond the polls.