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Welcome to this week's horse race. Today we'll be looking at what recent fundraising numbers for candidates mean for the fall election with the Washington Post's David Weigel. We'll also examine Pennsylvania's political divisions with political scientist Terry Madonna. So the horses are at the starting gate. They're off. Well, joining me this week on Round the Horn is somebody I've wanted to speak with a long time. I
Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. So we've been talking about the pandemic and Trump's response for, it seems like, every single person in the world.
every hour and every minute for the last six or seven weeks. But something new happened recently, and that's the filing of quarterly fundraising reports. What can we learn about the contours of the 2020 election from the fundraising reports? We learned quite a lot, and we also have a big kind of hanging question mark at the end of these fundraising reports because we got results through March, and some things happened in March that changed everything
politics, that changed how much people are willing to, or not just go out, but whether a fundraiser can be held at all. So you saw Joe Biden raise over $46 million in March. That was unsurprisingly the best month of his campaign, but dramatically so. I mean, this is about half of what he
Yeah.
And so he's doing fine, but we're not sure what's happening next. And then down the ballot, you had a very good quarter for Democrats in the House, very good quarter for Democrats in the Senate, a couple of green shoots for Republicans, but you
It doesn't look like they've changed the dynamic from 2018, which is that Democrats in the Trump era have become conditioned to giving way down the ballot, correcting for a lot of things that they think they failed to do for the 10 years prior.
And Republican donors, there have been some, I think, some smart incentives to Republican small donors to get them to help out down ballot. They have not excited them in the same way about down ballot races. So there's not a Democrats in seats carried by Trump in a close way who got out-raised. The one Democrat in a Trump seat is running for re-election is Colin Peterson. That's like a plus 37 Trump seat.
In the Senate, the only Senate Democrat to get outraised was Gary Peters of Michigan by about $800,000. The kind of thing that emphasizes that that could be a competitive race. But at the same time, Susan Collins is outraised. Cory Gardner in Colorado was outraised. Martha McSally was outraised two to one. The people that Democrats are more confident about beating are
This cycle. Even with a presidential election on top of the ticket. Or because there's a presidential election on top of the ticket. Generally their candidates have been racking this up. I think. It's funny. There are two parallel tracks. The House and Senate Democrats.
I think have built a very impressive machine and kind of a, a machine that each smaller campaign can build, can, can take advantage of. And they're just, it is easier now to be a incumbent member of Congress or a semi long shot, uh, candidate with some buzz and raise the money to run a competitive campaign. Uh,
But at the same time, Joe Biden's campaign had one good month, but they were way behind on total money, obviously more than $170 million behind Trump in terms of what they've got and what they've raised. And in terms of their staffing, they are behind where Hillary Clinton was, behind where Bernie Sanders was. It's
a very unusual circumstance where a campaign that had a far smaller active team just doing the usual blocking and tackling modern politics, videos, speaking to the press,
All that sort of stuff Rally planning That it was probably the third or fourth biggest operation In the primary and it won So it's got money but It does not have the same well-oiled Operation that Mark Kelly, the Democrat running for Senate has I'm sorry, Mark Kelly, the Democrat running for Senate In Arizona I should say Please stop me if I mention 12 names in a row And forget to say what state they're from Because I keep all this in my head And it can get a little bit weedsy
One of the things you touched on there was that despite Biden's excellent fundraising month, Trump is way ahead of him in terms of having cash on hand. When you add in the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee and some of the super PACs, that edge is either the same or even greater. What does that allow Trump to do?
during the next couple of months that Biden can't really do because he's still relatively cash poor.
Well, you laid out some of them. One thing that the Biden campaign has been very slow to do that I think would be looked back on as a big mistake if it doesn't win the election is that he was locking down the nomination in the final weeks of March, effectively, but he still does not have a joint fundraising agreement with the DNC. That is a deal that it
kind of modern campaign law of over the last couple of cycles, a deal where parties as nominee and the national committee have a joint account for Trump. It's Trump victory. And there are much higher caps on what people can give. You know, there's, these are six figure donations as opposed to $5,800. Uh, so there is a ton of money on the sidelines, theoretically for Biden that he cannot access yet because he had, he did not start that joint fundraising committee. And, uh,
There's a lot in that. I think one thing that happened was maybe a sensible reaction that turned into an overreaction to 2016, which was Hillary Clinton had this whole system wired. She was ready to go with the Joint Foreign Relations Committee. The party had offered Sanders one. He didn't use it. That turned into one of the 10,000...
bills of horribles that Sanders supporters would use against Hillary, right? That the DNC had a deal with Hillary. We can't have that again. This time, the DNC was pretty slow to propose it. Biden's been slow to do it. So he's not putting as much money together. And then when it comes to how that money can be spent,
On the one hand, there is no money needed to fly the candidate around the country. There's not anyone needed to build stages and get the mics working, which are actually tons of jobs, pretty expensive.
There are no fundraisers to set up. So they're saving a lot of money, but there is a democratic deficit in terms of their voter file, the organizing they've been able to do. And you can compare from day to day. The Trump campaign has a basically daily video broadcast for supporters, not the president's briefing on the virus, but
But, you know, campaign team, they're going to have one as I speak today with a couple members of Congress. And those do exponentially better than Biden's in terms of viewership. Does that translate to votes? I'm kind of skeptical. I'm not sure who the swing voter is who's turning into any of these broadcasts. But it's an example of how Trump has built a gigantic online following, first as a celebrity and then –
through years of running the party apparatus. And Biden, despite being very well known, and I do think that's one reason he's in a better position now, that he just didn't build that over the years. And just to expand on that, well, that last little parenthetical, I think in the Democratic nominee who is
like a Steve Bullock or one of the more long shot candidates that a lot of people looking at the race said could have been a good general election nominee on paper, even Amy Klobuchar, they would have a gigantic name ID deficit and it'd be hard to recover it. And in these circumstances, Biden doesn't have that. Biden has other weaknesses, but he is so universally known that,
that he doesn't need to do some of the basic introductory stuff. What he can't do is organize his supporters as effectively as Trump can.
One of the things that Trump people talk about, or at least they did when they were holding rallies, is how many of the people who were showing up were not registered to vote or low propensity voters. Is there any indication that they're using this digital effort, the daily or the semi-regular videos, to acquire similar information about low propensity or non-registered voters from people who turn in?
Yeah, well, that's their data. So we can't look under the hood and see how good that data was. I thought it was very smart what Brad Parscale, the campaign manager, would do, which was after a rally, just tweet raw numbers. And I mean, I think there's something in the reptilian brain of a political reporter that sees numbers and gets excited and starts to plug that into his and her analysis.
So the campaign was claiming, and I don't see reason to doubt them, maybe they were a little bit too giddy about it, but it was claiming, yes, that thousands and thousands of people who just were aware of the president and kind of liked him, but maybe weren't motivated to get organized and vote, that they were showing up to the rallies, and that, importantly, the campaign didn't just know who they were, but had data that they could help use to chase them for the rest of the campaign.
And that is something that Trump just can't do at the moment. I think the RNC and the Trump campaign have switched with some effectiveness to digital organizing. So let's say I signed up and campaigns across the country are familiar with this by now. Let's say I signed up two months ago and said, yeah, sure. I'm I want to make Donald Trump president again. I'm willing to go to shopping centers and sign people up to vote again.
Can't do that anymore, but the campaign will have come back to you and said, all right, well, it goes without saying we're not sending you out to get registrations anymore, but we need phone calls to people in Minnesota telling them about this policy today. Can you do that? And people are doing that. Democratic campaigns, the Biden campaign, they're doing the same thing, but the scale of what the Trump campaign can do is a lot larger. One of the things that
Trump is able to do because he's president, but the pandemic gives him a better opportunity to do, which is constantly stay in the news and often to make news. As a challenger, you'd usually use your rallies and your campaign efforts to try and counter that. But of course, Biden doesn't have that. He's got his studio in his basement or in his room. Is Biden doing enough to stay relevant and keeping himself in the news, or does he have some catch up to do?
There's a debate about that because one thing we're all realizing in this crisis is what activities we undertake that may not be that helpful or that useful to us, right? There's things we did that we realize we can live for a couple weeks without them. And I think about that in the campaign context because what was Biden actually getting from having a rally with Democrats
the media taking note of how many fewer people showed up than showed up for Trump or Sanders. He was getting some voter contacts, but generally general election campaigns, uh,
you are not things where you need to go out there and stump in, uh, in April, uh, in swing States. Like you, there, there generally is the period of fundraising. There was a different model of this, which was constant organizing. That was the Bernie Sanders model and he's zero for two in primary. So the utility that's pretty limited, but basically, uh, so Biden can't do something that probably wasn't a huge help for him anyway. Uh, I think that I already talked about all the ways that he's probably limited, uh,
But in terms of the content he's produced, the interviews he's done, you've noticed that in order to make it look like Biden is flailing, sometimes people just go pick in a 10-minute interview and find 30 seconds of him tripping over some words, which is something you could do with Donald Trump if you so wanted to. I mean, I'm watching some of these briefings. I'll read the transcript, and he'll get kind of a bit lost on discussion of one drug or another. But anyway...
The Biden in bite-sized segments recorded from his house, I think, has given him a media profile that is generally pretty good for him. And if you look at polling, it's hard to compare this to 2016 because...
That had nominees in June. We have nominees now in April. But if you compare June to April, that cycle to this cycle, Biden's doing a little bit better. And where he's softest is, and people will tell you this, if there's a poll that could be better for you, look at what you're not winning. He's relatively soft with younger voters. Now, he might have been destined to be softer than Barack Obama because he is a 77-year-old man and not
running to be the first black president endorsed by Will.i.am, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe he's never going to be as exciting to young voters, but there's probably a lot of, you know, cheap real estate to buy when it comes to people inclined to dislike Trump who might vote for him. And a really important number I've been noticing in, in some polling, I'm hoping that it gets studied a bit more so you can pull more out of it is there are, you know,
as every cycle, a bunch of voters who say they don't like either party's nominee. And in the past, in 2016, those voters were by the end, pretty solid Trump voters and that, that mattered. So let's say there was a, and we all lived through this. Let's say there's a poll of Wisconsin that was Hillary 46, Trump 45. And, and,
Republicans looked at that and said, well, it's close, but you need every undecided to break to Trump to win. Well, he got the undecideds to break to him. And a big pool of those undecideds were people who just resented this choice. They didn't like Trump. They didn't like Hillary. Trump was changed. So we'll vote for him. That happened again and again in key states.
Biden's doing very well with people who say they don't like either choice. Some of those people are not enthused about the election. I think the biggest gap in Trump's favor at the moment is when you ask people if they're excited about their nominee, Trump voters are much more excited than Biden voters. But
If the election is fought on the margins, I mean, like the discussions moot if it breaks in one direction, but on the margins, you can keep contacting your base voters again and again. You can find some base voters. But what Biden kept doing in the primary, which is a little risky to scan on a general election, but not not crazy. What he kept doing in the primary was getting enormous turnout from people he never actually contacted.
but people who were determined to vote because they're habitual voters. And Biden is doing better than Hillary did with the sort of person who always votes. So they are always registered. They vote in school board elections. They're middle class, upper middle class. He's improved on that. He's improved with older voters who always vote. He's a little soft with younger voters who, again, to the consternation of Bernie Sanders, just are
like pulling teeth to get out and voting. So we know what Trump does to pull his base out, but we also know he's only had one election. He only could get 46% of the vote in it. He could expand on that. There's people who didn't like him last time. We like him now, but who's that voter who just kind of took a powder, you know, took a risk on him going for, and the evidence right now is that they're not ready to vote for him again.
So Trump is sitting, yeah, he is sitting behind in virtually every poll. He has been underwater, as we say in the business, on his job approval throughout his presidency, where more people disapprove than approve of him. But yet, if I talk to most political experts, they are not yet willing to count him out.
What is it that Trump needs to do, either with respect to how he's handling the pandemic or more generally, to not change it around where it suddenly becomes Mr. Popular? You know, that's not going to happen, but makes those small incremental improvements on the margin that moves him from being maybe a slight underdog to being a slight favorite.
Yeah, in general, it is risky to pronounce an incumbent president an underdog, even when the polls are pretty bad.
I try to go back and read history of previous elections and not just like a history book about it, but I'll occasionally say, I wonder what the coverage is like in October, 1980. And one thing, one thing you found is there've been years when the president went down to defeat and, you know, in retrospect, everybody's a genius and they all knew they were going to lose. But even in 1980, people were not counting out Jimmy Carter. And then they were thought Reagan was probably the best shot he had to,
define negatively his opponent. Democrats had all this and that structural advantage, et cetera, et cetera. There was not a death march for Reagan. I'm sorry, death march for Carter in that race. There was a bit more of one for George H.W. Bush. This does resemble the situation for George W. Bush in 2004, where he was in a close race the whole time with John Kerry and
He was being weakened the entire time by his handling of the Iraq war, but not weakened so much that he could lose. And he actually underperformed the fundamentals. George W. Bush,
won basically by one state by the margin of winning Ohio, lost Wisconsin, lost Michigan, lost Pennsylvania. He actually did better in the three states I just mentioned in terms of the percentage of the vote than Trump did. There was an election with not a lot of third party voting and he'd get 49% and he'd fall short of the line, whereas Trump could win with 46. So we've had pro
presidential underdogs before. The difference with Trump is that even two months ago, when the economy was looking not just good, but probably in great shape all the way through the election, he
he was still not beating Joe Biden. He was still not putting up the kind of numbers you might expect for an incumbent president with a good economy. The economy was very decent in the 2018 midterms. He lost the House in those midterms, lost key governor's races, lost some Senate races. So he already was underperforming what a president with
this and that advantage should be doing. And he now is facing a situation where they're the mood of the country is unpredictable. I'm not, I'm not sure how people are going to feel in a month. I mean, the one thing I, I confident I was right about in the last week or so was even though the, these protests of stay at home conditions resembled tea party activity, there were conservative organizing behind them. Um,
over laughing at the Tea Party, it didn't strike me as a popular thing to do. And it's so far not. The polling has been that it's not popular. But let's take for granted, we don't know how people are going to rate Trump's performance on the pandemic. We don't know if they're going to blame him for the economy being a bit worse. We do know that he was in a tough position, often losing to Biden, when the economy was
unarguably very good. And we know that he's now in the best case scenario of maybe presiding over the beginning of a recovery right before the election. And he'll be, I don't doubt Trump would be very good at accentuating, emphasizing the things that are working in a recovery. But remarkably, when pollsters have asked people, do
Who would do a better job in this crisis at the moment, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Biden has been doing a bit better than Trump. Trump's been doing better in the economy. Biden's doing better on health care and the coronavirus itself. And that's pretty remarkable. There are very few, if you look around the world, look to Canada, look to the UK, to France, you kind of have to go all the way to Brazil to find a place where
a leader is not trusted to handle the crisis the way that Trump's not trusted. So add all that together. He was, he was not in incredible shape, uh,
campaign fundamentals, pretty good, but not very popular when the economy was good. There's now a gigantic world historical X factor introduced, which so far has been bad for him. And so you put those factors together and I think it's, it's a risk you back up and say, why was he not popular? I mean, it's stuff that Trump seems not uninclined to change, which is he is abrasive. He doesn't reach out to Democrats. He, he,
Often he's very interested in delivering, I think, for not just supporters, but sometimes very easy to tell stories of delivering for supporters who have, you know, patronized his hotel. He just has walked into a lot of controversies. And because he remains president after impeachment, there's a sense that he's invincible. But he mean...
It's a lot of risk he's undertaken considering that he never could get a majority of the popular vote. I mean, he's behaving like a president who's up 20 points when he's down by five. Yeah, I've thought throughout the presidency that Trump still thinks of this the way a businessman would, is that if you're in business and you've got 45% of the population who's buying more and more of your product, you're a billionaire. But in politics, if you've got 45% of the population who's really interested in, you're usually a loser.
And he kind of got lucky against Clinton in the sense that he could get 46% of the vote and win because of the unpopularity of Clinton. But he doesn't seem to have changed up, and he still seems to be right there gearing at 45, 46% of the vote and hoping that the lightning will strike twice. I think so. I mean, they often, you sometimes, especially if you listen to these Trump campaign broadcasts, you sometimes hear people
excursions out of reality that describe the president is very popular. And look, I don't think if you turn on the Joe Biden broadcast, it is not going to tell you everything's terrible. Terrible. Joe Biden's not going to win. But I, you'll notice that the Biden, even the Biden broadcast, this is propaganda designed for Biden supporters, right? People who want to see him on their screens. It is not hyper-partisan. It's critical of Trump and,
But it often kind of, it sets the stakes really high. It talks about working with Republicans. He had, you know, he's been having Democrats in the news, especially people who might be in the mix for vice president. He says he's had them on the show. He had Gretchen Whitmer on his show. I think this was actually the podcast, not the video, but another product of Biden thing. And they talked a lot about her bipartisan work. You know, how can you work with Republicans in Michigan, et cetera.
You compare it to the Trump feed. The one I was watching the other night was, there was just a digression about the historic popular victory he won in 2016. And I looked at it and I said, well, look, I mean, he's president. He won. But what is the utility of pretending that he won by a landslide? It's that you keep telling yourself that and you end up thinking, you know, you're just in a stronger position than you are. Some of it, I almost remember, sorry,
Some of it almost resembles the more Pollyannish way some Democrats look to Clinton. You know, well, this is tough. She should be beating Trump by 20 points. It's very close. But at the same time, you know, she's got this strength and this strength, and maybe this year will break to her. It's actually a more confident version of that, which is not based on the reality of these elections. I mean, look at this year. Democrats have actually done pretty middling. Republicans have done pretty well.
in special elections. And then the Wisconsin election comes this month, a Supreme Court race that Republicans really invested in, drove turnout for, and they lost pretty handily. Now, the conditions of that election where there's a Democratic primary the same day, pretty good for Democrats, but they're just not a kind of campaign that is sweeping aside all challenges, but it kind of talks like it is.
Well, Dave, last question here. Conventions have provided significant boosts in presidential job approval ratings for the last two presidents running for reelection. That is George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And Trump by hooker by crook has got the second convention, the last convention.
Is that a moment where he can add that extra two or three points to a job approval rating that moves him from being a slight underdog to being at least a coin flip, if not a slight favorite? Or is that just expecting too much from somebody who's basically run the same playbook for five years? Yeah.
We're not quite sure what the conventions are going to look like. One version of this is things have calmed down enough that people have conventions. They're probably a little bit less boisterous. Maybe there's a little bit of distancing, but there are in-person conventions. The president gives a big speech. He has it within him, and we see this in State of the Union speeches, to deliver something with a lot of
with jabs at Democrats, but also some kind of braggadocio about his record and a couple of reach. I mean, he was actually fairly reluctant about criminal justice reform at first. That's now a huge part of his campaign, right? We're going to emphasize how he got, he signed this bill. If you,
pre-pandemic if you were looking at kind of social media directed to non-white voters that often emphasize that so he can do that um i think the bigger question is what biden can do because biden's the challenger uh the gamut runs from a bad convention where he picks a kind of bland running mate that doesn't move the ball to an exciting convention that kind of solves his youth voter problem um i
I think the risks are a little bit lower and the reward's higher, possibly, for Biden. But Trump can probably have a... I mean, I don't doubt they'll have a good convention if they can have one. I don't doubt they'll have a good speech because they definitely can have one of those. But...
He has to run on a record now. In some ways, it's much better than having to run as the hypothetical businessman. In some ways, it's been getting worse week to week. And so I'm not sure what would dramatically change things for him. I mean, there are policies that could be implemented. Some of them should have been implemented before for maximum effect that could help him. I mean, let's say...
let's say that he got a giant infrastructure bill through Congress. It's become kind of a joke at this point, but let's say one of these package relief packages included a bunch of stuff that you go around the country and promote saying, I built this Democrats couldn't get done. Like I did. I'm describing, frankly, something Democrats worried he would do when he was first put elected. He hasn't done it. I think that kind of behavior. And this is, I guess the classic criticism would be, Oh, well, of course the, the, you know,
Wise guys in the media say he should be more like a Democrat. But no, these were things he said he was going to do in 2016. He and Steve Bannon especially were talking about using our leverage and our borrowing power to just rebuild a bunch of stuff and then run on that. I think if he's doing that, if he was doing that, he'd be in very good shape. But he's not. And if he was doing that, it would be a more concrete effect on his chances than whether he has a good convention or not.
Well, fascinating as ever, David. And thank you very much for Insights. And thank you very much for joining me on the horse race. No, it's great to be here. I always love reading you. So thank you very much.
Normally on Ad of the Week, I look at a single television ad and try and explain why it works for the audience that it's trying to connect to. This week, though, I'm going to do something different. There's an open competitive primary for New Mexico's third congressional district, which is a safe Democratic district and consequently has attracted a lot of different candidates.
Three of them already have ads that have aired before the citizens and the voters of that district. And what I'd like to do is play all of them and tell you a little bit about the district and then go through and try and explain what some of the advantages and disadvantage of each of the ads are. So hang on for a special Land of Enchantment edition of Ad of the Week.
New Mexico's third congressional district comprises basically the northern third to 40% of the state. It is heavily Democratic, and the Republican candidate will have no chance of winning in the fall.
It is the most Latino of the congressional districts in New Mexico. The citizens of voting age population are 47% Latino and 5% Native American. It's a minority white district. And when one accounts for the fact that Latinos are significantly more likely to be Democratic than they are Republican,
it means that probably a majority of the voting population in the Democratic primary is Latino, with a significant Native American component. These Latinos are not necessarily recent immigrants. This part of New Mexico was settled early on by Hispanics from Spain and from Mexico. Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, was also a longtime colonial capital of the New Mexico region.
And so consequently, this area has a Hispanic population that has been in the United States for centuries. It's not necessarily the case that talking about immigration will attract these voters, but rather talking about questions of more recent standing or more local standing.
There are a number of candidates in this race, and the first one that I want to talk about is Valerie Plame. Valerie Plame, if you have a long memory, was involved in a scandal during the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration.
Her husband was someone who was accused of leaking information about the Bush campaign and about the Bush administration, rather. And consequently, it was alleged by Plame and others that she was outed as an undercover CIA operative in retaliation for her husband's activity.
One of her campaign videos, which has not aired for the voters but is available to be watched on her website, talks about this episode in her life and talks about how she and her husband moved to New Mexico to raise their children. Well, now she's running for Congress in the seat that she's lived in, and she's relying heavily both on her national connections and on her past in the CIA.
She's got two ads up and running right now. I'm going to play the shorter of the two ads. And it's one, well, you almost have to listen and see it to believe it. This is Valerie Plame's introductory ad to the voters of New Mexico 3.
Well,
You can't see the visuals, but you can probably imply what it is from what the audio portion says. She is going through an obstacle course. Now, she's not going through an obstacle course in sort of clothes you and I would go through an obstacle course. She's going through an obstacle course with a nice collared shirt and nice longer pants. But she is nonetheless going through an obstacle course where she is crawling under barbed wire.
walking along logs and using a rope climb to get over a wall. It's playing on her CIA background as something that is unique about her and makes her stand out. One thing that one should also note, though, is that while the audio is going over, you almost never hear her name. You hear her brother talk about my sister Valerie, but you never hear him say,
Valerie playing over and over and over again. Nor do the visuals of the ad emphasize that. You see her, and occasionally you'll see something on screen like national security experience when her brother's talking about that, or Trump wall immoral, which conveniently is when she's rope climbing over the wall and her brother is saying that.
But the only time you see her name is at the beginning where you see my sister Valerie when her brother says those words. And at the end when it says Valerie Plame, Democrat for Congress. This is unusual because as we'll see in the next ads, most ads try and keep a candidate's name on screen while the candidate's name is being mentioned. Again, the idea is to create a mnemonic device so that people remember the candidate's name.
But Valerie Plame's chosen not to do that and instead rely on arresting visuals and a voiceover to do the job. She also talks about things that Democrats don't normally mention. Of course, there aren't any other former CIA operatives running in the Democratic primary for New Mexico.
But you don't normally talk about national security experience. Note what's not mentioned in the ad. You're not talking about questions of impeachment. You're not talking about questions of climate change. You're not talking necessarily strongly about questions of health care or Medicare for all. Issues that typically feature in Democratic ads, which are absolute and Valerie's claims ads,
Valerie has so far raised the most amount of money of any of the candidates in this race, and it's actually a staggering amount of money for a first-time candidate. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, she's already raised nearly $1.7 million and spent a million of it.
That still gives her a whopping $690,000 to spend for the last six weeks of the campaign. But to be able to walk into an open primary without having significant prior elective or experience and be able to raise $1.7 million is quite a showing.
That normally might make her the frontrunner, but remember again what I mentioned. This is a district where the majority of people who are voting will likely be Latino or Native American, and there's nothing about her ad or nothing about her issues that directly appeals to them.
But let's turn then to somebody who does try and make that appeal, and that's Teresa Leja Fernandez, as I put on a poor Spanish accent, to try and demonstrate what she demonstrates in her ad. Let's listen to her introductory ad and see if you can see a major difference.
One thing you learn growing up around here, water is life and ASECIA is community. As an ASECIA commissioner, I brought people together to keep our water flowing through the valley, stopping a developer who wanted to take it away. I'm a candidate for Congress because in a time when everything we love is under attack, we need a representative who understands our communities and way of life. I'm Teresa Leger Fernandez and I approve this message.
Right away you can see the difference and you can hear the difference. Teresa Ledger Fernandez is a Latino. She lets you know that by keeping her name, Teresa, on screen with the words Democrat for Congress underneath it throughout the entirety of her ad. She speaks with a noticeable Latino accent when she speaks English, quite good for somebody who went to both Yale and Stanford for her university degrees.
And also has visuals where she is physically working in the field as she's talking about water and life. She's literally digging ditches and water canals, if you will, with people from a working class background who are both Hispanic and white.
She talks about community. She talks about her roots. And this is an ad that I presume is meant to appeal to the Latino voting population. Even the newspaper ad that she talks about when she's talking about her service in the local water committee.
is a service, is a newspaper that's not from the Santa Fe paper or from the Albuquerque paper. It's from a local community paper with a Hispanic city name. This is a ad that clearly is designed to both introduce voters generally, but in this case, the target voter is a Latino working class voter, which her campaign believes is particularly open to her appeal.
She has raised the second most amount of money of anyone in the campaign. She's raised over a million dollars. And while she's only spent $415,000, that means she has $640,000 on hand. Yes, that's right. Even though Valerie Plame has outraised her by nearly three quarters of a million dollars, Teresa Ledger Fernandez has almost as much money going into the final couple of months.
The third candidate is taking a unique approach that is neither like claims nor like Ledger Fernandez. John Blair is the other candidate who has been up on television in this race. And let's hear how he's introducing himself to the voters of this district. I'm John Blair. As a candidate for Congress, I'm giving out my cell number to, well, everyone. Hello, John Blair here. Hey, this is John.
I mean, if lobbyists can call members of Congress, why shouldn't you? Drug companies are gouging us. We could cut prices by forcing them to negotiate. That's why I'm not taking a cent from the drug companies. I'm actually refusing all corporate PAC money. Members of Congress should work for you, not for lobbyists. No, we absolutely need an assault weapons ban and universal background checks, but that's just the beginning.
Yes, ma'am. I work for President Obama. I serve in the Interior Department tackling climate change. Yeah, so before I worked for President Obama, I worked for Martin Heinrich. I worked for Jeff Bingaman. Worked for Maggie Toulouse-Oliver. Worked for Hector Valderas. I'm John Blair, and I approve this ad because as your member of Congress, I'll be on call.
Well, he's neither a former spy who's got herself involved or himself in a national scandal, nor is he a local Latino. What does he have going for him, though? Well, he talks about it. First, he talks about his long service of support and working for local and national Democrats, President Obama, Congressman Heinrich, and other people who he name checks at the end of his ad. That's meant to establish his local bona fides.
But the visuals are also important to this ad and also how he name checks a lot of Democratic priorities. The schtick that he's trying to get you to remember is that he is somebody who wants to be open to you. So he has a phone number and he's continually, when he's talking, talking on the phone. He's talking on the phone to people who have purportedly called him because he's been giving his phone number out.
He meets a couple at the door, a Latino and a white. He's at a swimming pool answering somebody's questions while he's at the side of the swimming pool. He's in the shower talking to somebody. He's fixing his car on the road talking to somebody. He's walking through the supermarket talking to somebody. It
It's meant to grab your attention and get you to notice this guy who's doing something that most political candidates don't do in their ads, which is act both in an ordinary but an out-of-the-ordinary way. Everyone talks on their cell phone, but you're usually not answering questions from people who are calling you randomly to ask where you stand on things like gun control.
The issues he talks about name checks many of the high priorities of Democratic voters. Polls show that health care is the number one concern from Democratic voters. And of course, he talks about prescription drug prices and not taking money from drug companies. Gun control is another big issue. He talks about that.
One good thing about this ad is that as he's talking about these issues, his name and the issue appears on the screen. Again, the visual reinforces the audio so that the person who's watching can see the message, the person who's listening can see the message. Two senses driving the same message home simultaneously. One thing that you can't pick up by listening, but will be rather obvious as you're watching,
John Blair is gay. John Blair features himself both shopping with his husband and also the closing scene in bed as he's name-checking all those Democrats he's worked for is with his husband in bed. To the extent that there is an LGBT community and nationwide somewhere between 8% and 10% of Democratic primary voters are LGBT, he sends that message through the visual. Nothing audio talks about it.
But the visual clearly shows that he is a gay man, and he's also wearing a wedding ring. The fact is, this is his husband. So between the visuals and the audio, and between this, he's creating a different sort of appeal from either of the two candidates. There are a couple of other candidates who have not yet gone up on the air who are worth mentioning, and it'll be interesting to see how they present themselves. One is a local legislator.
who has only $29,000 cash on hand. He represents the 40th district's name is Joseph Sanchez in the state house, but it's a very small portion of the district. Only about 30,000 people live in his state house district. And while people who represent districts tend to do better in primaries in the areas they represent,
30,000 people is only a tiny part of a district that is over 700,000 people in size. Sanchez is going to need a lot more money than $29,000 to introduce himself to the other 670,000 people. And it looks like he, despite his seemingly good pedigree, is falling behind in the race. The other candidate to look for is a young Latino attorney named Marco Serna.
Serna has an interesting video on his website in which he criticizes Plain's ad and also presents a good presentation of himself. He's in his mid-30s and is telegenic and looks good in that spot. It'll be interesting to see how he crafts himself when he introduces himself to voters. He's raised $643,000, spent a little under $400,000, and has a quarter million dollars cash on hand. Not as much as Ledger Fernandez or Plain,
But in a district like this where television advertising isn't going to be as expensive as in a large media market, it might be enough if he can craft a particularly memorable ad. Blair has raised a fair amount of money, but he only has $141,000 cash on hand. He'd better hope that the first poll that comes out of this district shows him competitive and consequently help him raise the sort of money that will allow him to continue the race going in a strong way going through to the finish.
When you're in a multi-candidate competitive race, you'll note that one thing none of these candidates do is attack somebody.
Now, of course, Cerna does contrast himself with Plame in the ad that is showing only on his website, but it's very rare in a multi-candidate race for somebody to create the negative ads that you usually see in a general election. The reason why is simple to understand. When you have a multi-candidate race, you can attack somebody, but people tend to be turned off by the attack.
So that you have a phenomenon known as the third party or what I call the NASCAR effect, which is that just as when you're car racing, you draft behind another car, letting them use up their gasoline plowing through air while you're conserving that little extra bit of fuel by staying behind them. And then you whip out towards the end of the race to put on speed that he can't match.
Candidates who are employing that strategy let other candidates attack each other and go positive and hope to be the beneficiary of people who say a pox on both your houses.
Nobody is employing that tactic, and unless there's going to be a clear frontrunner, it's highly unlikely somebody is going to employ that tactic. Consequently, what you have to do is establish a strong, positive identity that resonates with a large number of voters in your district, and most importantly, lets people remember you. Political ads are a dime a dozen. If they don't remember you, it doesn't matter how wonderful the ad is, it's not going to get you elected.
Some of these ads seem to do a better job than others, but all of them are trying to do that, whether it's through the visual of Valerie Plame crawling through an obstacle course or whether it's through the visual of Valerie Plame crawling through an obstacle course.
or whether it's John Blair talking on his phone, or whether it's Leisure Fernandez digging a ditch and speaking in a strong Latino accent. We won't know for another few weeks until polls start coming out who's ahead, but I'll be watching this race and updating it for you. And as you are looking at ads in your life, looking at competing candidates, keep these principles in mind.
because they're trying to communicate with you, not talk at you. And there's always a subtle strategy behind the message that if you learn the tricks of the trade, you can understand who a candidate is trying to appeal to and conversely, who they're not necessarily emphasizing. And when you can do that, you can look at ads and you can figure out your own ad of the week.
- Well, Pennsylvania has been called the Keystone State for over a century now. And most people think that it may be the key state in the upcoming presidential election. It certainly was extremely important in 2016.
And it is the last of the major states that is profiled on our State of Play segment. Joining me is the expert in Pennsylvania politics, Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Terry, welcome to The Horse Race. Hey, Henry, thanks for having me. My pleasure.
Well, tell my listeners, how did Pennsylvania go from blue to red? It hadn't been carried by a Republican since the Reagan years and trended Democratic compared to the popular vote for all of the intervening elections. But suddenly it went the other way. How did that happen in 2016?
Well, let's say this. You're absolutely right. We've got George Herbert Walker Bush, who's part of the Reagan years for obvious reasons, who won our state in 1988. And then we've had six subsequent elections until 2016 in which Democrats carried the state. And a good bit of that, I think, had to do with
what was going on in Pennsylvania cities that as time rolled on decade after decade became increasingly democratic. And the other factor that played a role was what was going on in the suburbs where they were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party for decades. In fact, you could probably go back to the end of the Civil War
where Pennsylvania was a heavily Republican state until the 1960s, 50s and 60s when we had an evolution and Pennsylvania became a two-party state through the 1960s. And, you know, we alternated electing governors
Every single governor beginning with Milton Shapp when in 1971, Pennsylvania could elect governors. They could succeed themselves. In other words, serve two terms. They alternated governorships until, until Tom Corbett lost to our current governor, Tom Wolf in 2014. So Pennsylvania was, was, was pretty competitive in,
And certainly in state elections, in national elections, it tended to vote, as I indicated earlier, Democratic for six straight elections. But these weren't runaway elections, except for 2008 when Barack Obama won convincingly. They were all pretty close. So our state remained, in a sense, in presidential and most statewide elections, pretty competitive.
Now, James Carville, Bill Clinton's campaign manager, famously described Pennsylvania as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between. But that balance meant that Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in national elections tended to dominate again until 2016. So what happened in that Alabama portion that made Donald Trump finally carry the state for Team Redge?
Yeah, well, Pennsylvania has 67 counties, and the Democrats can win our state by winning 11, 12, 13 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties. But what goes on is that the Democrats, when they win statewide, tend to win the areas where the people live. The way I view Pennsylvania is small town and rural Pennsylvania is
tends to be Republican. Urban areas and suburban areas, particularly the suburban areas in the last decade, they used to be heavily Republican, but there's a huge transition that's going on in the suburbs. And we can talk about 2018 in the midterm election where that really gets emphasized, that's shifted to the Democrats. So basically what's going on is if you take
the southeastern part of the state, go out into the southwest and talk about Allegheny County translation, Pittsburgh, it's heavily Democratic. But in between
In between, you have Center County, that's Center spelled C-E-N-T-R-E, not the conventional way, the home of Penn State University, Democratic, and Dauphin County, where the capital is in Harrisburg, in South Central PA, that's now Democratic. And then you have a couple of counties up in the northeastern part of our state. But in between, and up along the northern tier of
of our state on the border with New York and the Northwest, the state, it's basically small town in rural America. And those voters tend to be, they tend to be conservative, particularly on cultural issues.
like gay rights and transgender issues. They tend to be culturally conservative and they're strong supporters, many of the voters in that region for gun control. So when Carville said, you know,
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between. I'll put it this way. There's a kernel of truth to that, if you get my drift. There's a kernel of truth to that. But Pennsylvania has gotten much more complicated. So tell us what happened in 2018. It was one of the main battlegrounds for the House, and the Democrats did extremely well.
No, you're right. Yeah, well, the problem is that you need, you've got to have
a baby, meaning a baby and it grows up, it gets up. And that is why there are many more Republican, if you will, in most states. So the Republicans control the majority of the states, that's point number one. They have states among rural and in some cases, some suburban countries.
But make no mistake about it, the depth of the outcome for the Republicans really, really grew in until the Democrats earlier had 56% victory. In some states now, it's a lot more down. And they've also had some problems in presidential elections that we can talk about. But right now, the Republicans control control over the Republican Party.
state congressional delegation and they stay in control of both houses of the Pennsylvania legislature. Terry, a lot of the change in 2016 was because of how the different parts of Pennsylvania move big cities in the suburbs more towards the Democrat and rural areas in the small towns more towards President Trump. Can you explain why rural and small town Pennsylvania moved so heavily in President Trump's direction?
Well, there's no doubt about it that, look, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in Allegheny County, they are heavily Democratic areas. But what basically is going on is that there are a lot of working class counties, men and women, that have been shifting in the recent years.
a couple of years to the Republican Party. These voters tend to be culturally conservative. They tend to get concerned about the actions of the federal government at that level and particularly with Democratic presidents. These voters, many of them are
are conservative in their ideology. Many of them favor a lot of outdoor sports, including hunting. Many of them were strong, strong supporters of conservative Republican presidents in the past. And what's basically going on is that the vast majority of Pennsylvania is made up of rural and small town
municipalities and conservative states with a plethora of conservative voters. So the Democrats can carry the state of Pennsylvania
by winning, you know, they don't have to win out of our 67 counties. More, you know, you pick the number. It can be 12, it can be 13, it can be 15, mostly where the people live. But rural and small towns where the voters tend to be in for a lot of outdoor activities,
where they're nervous and concerned about the domination of the federal government over their livelihoods. We can go through a whole bunch of the ideological differences that exist between the folks who live in small town in rural Pennsylvania, for example, and those who live in urban and suburban, whether we're talking about cultural issues like abortion,
or gun control, or a whole variety of economic activities as well. So Joe Biden makes a lot of the fact that he was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is one of those areas that has a lot of those conservative former Democrats. It's moved very far in Trump's direction. How much does Joe Biden's legitimate Pennsylvania roots help him in his campaign against President Trump?
Yeah, that's a great question. Joe Biden lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania through his first 10 years. His dad had financial troubles and ultimately moves to Wilmington, Delaware, where he gets involved in his last stages in the automobile industry. Biden was elected in 1972 to the United States Senate, where
where obviously he represented the state of Delaware, which has three counties. And here's what's really fascinating. Because the state of Delaware gets most of its commercial television from the Philadelphia TV market, and they covered Biden when he spent 36 years in the Senate and obviously eight years as vice president, they covered Biden's activities.
And so Biden had the advantage of the largest of the largest
area television zoning, if you will, in the state of Pennsylvania, which reached Philadelphia, the suburbs, and even up into the Lehigh Valley and out where I live in South Central Pennsylvania. So what I'm trying to say here is that Biden had a great deal of television and other media coverage, even though he was in a state obviously next to Pennsylvania,
Secondly, Biden traveled throughout the state frequently campaigning for Democratic candidates and doing other kinds of activities. Thirdly, in every poll but one over the last couple of months, in the matchup between Biden and Donald J. Trump, President Trump, Biden has held a lead and accepts one where there's a tie. And we haven't had a great many polls
In fact, relatively few. If you get on Real Clear Politics, you'll find that Biden has a 3.8 percentage lead in Pennsylvania. And none of the polls that RCP uses on their website was done in April. They were March and earlier. But it would be, I mean, I would say that Joe, that...
Vice President Biden has a narrow lead in Pennsylvania, but our state is going to be one of the most visited. It's going to be one of the key states on November 3rd for the obvious reason that it's close. The polling is close.
The second reason, and this is particularly important, is it has the fifth largest number of electoral votes tied with Illinois. Illinois and Pennsylvania has 20. And of the states that are really competitive, meaning the states that are going to get a great deal of attention, of which we can argue about it, but there are at least 10 states
Only Florida with 29 electoral votes, another competitive and important state, has more electoral votes than Pennsylvania. So it's going to be a really competitive contest. I say that at least as we chat today.
Well, Terry, for our last question, going forward to election night, what county or counties will you be looking at to figure out as the returns start to come in, who is going to end up carrying the state?
Yeah, that's a great question. And the way to think about this is that the Democrats have about, as I indicated before, 11, 12, 13, 14 counties in which they carry. But what will be interesting will be the size...
of the democratic vote in Philadelphia and the four suburban counties and out in Allegheny County, I would cite those by far as the most important with the, with the state of Pennsylvania, the bulk of the state is, you know, is in that sense Republican. And so, I mean, it's hard to pick a single state or a single County more importantly will be the
The percentage of the vote that comes out of these counties, one of the reasons that Donald J. Trump carried Pennsylvania by a scant 44,000 votes out of 6 million votes that were cast in 2016 is the percentage of the votes that he got in the rural and small towns.
He was getting 65, 70, and 75% of the vote. In other words, these counties tend to be smaller, but his percentage of the vote in 2016 was much, much higher than
than might have been expected, which is why he carried the state by 44,000 votes. So what I'm basically going to look at is what's the percentage of the victory
for Joe Biden in Philadelphia and in the suburbs? What's the percentage compared to a whole bunch of counties out there where Donald Trump swept? There's another aspect of this that's important. If you go out into southwestern Pennsylvania and up into the northeast, where many of those counties are democratic, if we go out into southwestern PA, other than Allegheny County, Pittsburgh is the largest city there,
The rest of the counties back in 2016 had a Democratic voter registration edge, and Donald J. Trump won every one of them, won every single one of them. And the percentage that he won them by was not four or five or 10 percentage points. It was well into the double digits. These are voters. These are the voters who were attracted to Trump. Number one, any establishment. Number two, even though they were Democrats,
These were Democrats who worked in and their ancestors worked in the mines and the mills in coal and iron and steel and in natural gas, for example. Trump campaigned in this state a lot more than Hillary Clinton and focused on what was called the Rust Belt strategy, where he promised to end bad trade agreements, point number one. Point number two, to do what he could to promote these
industries that literally were dominant during the industrial revolution for the most part. And so essentially the Rust Belt strategy was what delivered
Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the Rust Belt states using the Rust Belt strategy that delivered those states. So what we're going to have to look at is what's the relative turnout and the percentage of vote that
that the two candidates, Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump, get in a whole bunch of counties that are going to be relevant. And I think that's the tendency that will likely be truly significant in the state of Pennsylvania. Well, Terry, I look forward to following the campaign with you over the next couple of months, and I appreciate you appearing on The Horse Race. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
That's it for this week's horse race. I'm planning a special surprise for next week, so make sure to return and listen to my special mystery guest. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you in the winner's circle.
