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Welcome to The Horse Race. This week, we're speaking with columnist E.J. Dionne about President Trump's election chances and his pandemic performance, and also with legendary political handicapper Stu Rothenberg, who'll walk us through how to think about analyzing races. The horses are at the starting gate. They're off!
Joining me this week on Trump Talk is one of my favorite people and one of my favorite progressives. That is E.J. Dionne. He is many things, not least a eminent sage of all things political, but he is the author of the newly published Code Red, How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country, while also being a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a columnist at the Washington Post, and a professor at Georgetown University. How are you doing, such busy man, E.J.?
I'm lucky to be able to work in this period, I got to tell you. And it's really good to be with you. I return that compliment. And I want your listeners to know that you more than almost anyone else, I guess you and Ross Douthat and Raihan Salam are
understood the importance of the working class to the Republican Party far longer than most Republicans have. And I argue from watching that we still understand it far more than most Republicans do. Yes, I think that's right, including President Trump at this moment. But we can get into that. Let's get into that right now. Is it about President Trump in the midst of this global crisis that stands out most to you?
Well, I think that his, shall we say, Clorox chewables moment is really going to be something that voters do not forget. And Trump critics, and I'm obviously one of them,
have argued for a long time that he didn't care about details, didn't care about the substance of governing, and that that actually mattered. And for a lot of people for a long time, people who were either inclined his way already or people who were probably not that political, did not follow the news closely,
rabidly felt, well, you know, the economy's okay. We're not at war. Maybe it's not so bad. I think the coronavirus crisis in general, and that moment in particular, have underscored for an awful lot of people who might've been on the fence, that this approach to the presidency, this style of governing, this indifference to fact,
is actually really dangerous when you're facing a big set of problems. And so, and I'm sure you've talked about this a lot over the last couple of weeks,
Two things were striking about the polling during all of this from the beginning. One is that even when Trump had his mini bump, it wasn't a very large bump in the polls upward compared to what other presidents of both parties have gotten during moments of crisis. He was tended to be running way behind governors in various states where they poll both Trump and the governors.
in the bump he got. And then it rather quickly fell away because people simply watched him and his incessant focus on himself, the enormous difficulty he has in showing empathy for people who are suffering. That is what one of the things people look for from presidents. He hasn't even tried to fake that.
And I think that people have watched as the crisis has deepened, as he's contradicted himself. And I think he's done himself a lot of immediate damage. And I have a hunch that,
that it's long-term damage. Well, that's immediate damage is pretty clear from the polls is that you mentioned the mini bump. He was over for the first time in his presidency, he was over 47% job approval rating, nothing to write home about, but better to be moving up than moving down. And now he's down in the low 45s. And the most recent poll that I saw was the Emerson poll that had his job approval only 41. And it had it at 50 not so long ago.
I do want to challenge you, though, on the long lasting nature is that I've been hearing this from the media and particularly people like yourself who are not favorable to the president before. And maybe not you before, but others who have said this is the moment, this is the time when it's going to stick. And it never does that again. It's not that he's ever been over 50 percent, but.
It never does that dislodging effect that people who are opposed to them think it might. Why is this time different?
First of all, in a funny way, I agree with your point because I myself a number of times said, well, this is the moment. And I realized, well, no, that's wrong. And I stopped saying this is the moment for quite a while. I mean, somebody out there may find some time I said it, but I've tried to edit that out of my discourse.
because you're right, it never seemed to grab people. I think there are two differences here, one substantive and one stylistic. The substantive difference is he never had to deal with a really hard and dangerous crisis. And he never had to deal with any of these problems in the context of anything except a good economy.
And now he does not have the ballast of a good economy to give him support. And he has been flailing, I think it's fair to say, in dealing with a problem that everybody, no matter what their politics are, that everybody cares about, that everybody knows is serious. And that in particular, by the way, the health problem is especially threatening to the people who are his base, older voters, right?
And I think the period in which there was discussion among some on the right that he is engaged in off and on in a very inconsistent way, that maybe we should just let the economy rip. And if some people fall by the wayside, so be it.
That's a real problem and it's a particular problem for people over 65 years old and we can talk about that. But secondly, I think that there were particular moments in the briefings where people just stopped and said, "Are you serious?" And when he started talking about sunlight and even more about injecting disinfectants, there are a lot of words between the word injecting and the word disinfectants, but it was there.
I just think that is one of those things that you just don't forget. It's, you know, this is very unfair to John Kerry, but we'll all remember when he went windsurfing and his aide said, please don't do that. That was an image that stuck with voters. And the Bush campaign, George W. Bush campaign used it against him in a flip-flopping ad, you know, going with the winds. I think that the Lysol campaign
Clorox moment will stick with voters all year long. It could very well be.
I certainly remember with Senator Kerry, the phrase, I was for it before I was, I voted for it before I voted against it with, I think, respect to- Yes, no, and that is, yes, that's a good example. Again, in defense of Kerry, it is nowhere, I mean, what he was actually describing a real thing, using disinfectants to fight the virus is not even a real thing, but that is one of those things that stuck out.
and was usable again and again by the Bush campaign. And I know that there will be an awful lot of mention of Clorox and Lysol between now and election day. Yeah, that's one thing I was going to say. People don't actually have to have watched it to remember it because-
They will be told and show those moments in campaign ads, on media and viral things. So it could be like a lot of people, only 50,000 people saw Don Larson's perfect game, but 20 million people were there.
many people will remember this, you know, in air quotes because they've been told about it so many times. I think that way about every Red Sox World Series victory, you know. And as a Yankees fan, isn't it fortunate that there are so many fewer of them than there are for us? Well, you had the last century, we got this one. Yeah.
Let's just both of us agree that we should be praying for the return of our national pastime. I agree with that. I was walking around the neighborhood recently with my wife and there was a dad playing baseball with his two daughters, I think, or his son and daughter. And I just looked at him and I said, I just love that somebody is playing baseball.
I yelled it from afar, properly social distanced, of course. It's certainly true that the polls are beginning to show weakness among older voters for the president. And it wouldn't surprise me if part of it is because of, hey, wait a minute, this guy's not 100% on behalf of health first. And I'm the people who are likeliest to die here.
But the polls have also been showing. Oh, I was just going to say that the polls have also been showing that Joe Biden, I know this is a topic he wanted to discuss, is doing better among his than Hillary Clinton among Trump's base of white working class voters. I wanted to ask you why you thought that might be.
Right. And that's what I wanted to jump to, because I think it's very it's particularly alarming to Trump first that he started falling behind in margin of error, only marginally, only some polls, but even in states like North Carolina and Ohio.
Where if Biden carries those two, he's going to be carrying a whole lot more on election day. That's going to be disturbing. But the Florida numbers were particularly, I think, should be particularly disturbing to Republicans. I suspect they are because.
because what they show in particular, and there is a new poll out today somewhere that showed the same thing, Biden is running much, much stronger with whites over the age of 65 than Democrats had been running against Trump in any matchups really for since 2016. If Trump cannot overwhelm Biden among whites over 65,
He's going to lose the election by a very big margin. And I think there may be something very particular going on here, which is the virus poses its, and I alluded to this, I think, already, that the virus poses its biggest health threat to older people. There was that whole conversation, well, maybe we should get the economy moving, even if that means
Some of these folks, and by you didn't have to fill in the blank, it wasn't hard to fill in the blank. Some of these older folks don't make it if some of them die. And I think that this messaging, putting aside all of the other problems with it, we're only talking about politics here today or mostly, a lot of older people heard that. And I think that's very problematic. Secondly, I think Biden has already shown in the primaries that
that he has a real appeal to the working class voters that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. And I'd like to flip it to you as somebody who pays so much attention to the white working class vote. In the primaries before they were suspended, one of the things that really struck me is in those counties that were both rural and more working class voters,
In the Midwest, in Illinois, for example, or in Michigan or in Wisconsin, counties where Bernie had beaten Hillary Clinton and Trump had then carried those counties, Joe Biden was carrying those counties by an overwhelming margin, which
I think showed two things. One is a lot of the Bernie vote in 2016 was not a vote for democratic socialism. It was a vote against Hillary Clinton. But secondly, that Joe Biden has a real opportunity to win back
enough of those voters, maybe way more than enough of those voters to win the states he needs to win. I'm curious how you look at that now and how you look at the primaries. Yeah, well, with respect to Biden and the working class, I think the primary thing we've learned is that Democrats who are still white working class
are overwhelmingly moderate, not socialist. And they also saw for good reason, Biden as being somebody who was more like them. It does appear that those people in 2016 were against Clinton much more than they were for Sanders.
And even in the Ohio primary that was completed Tuesday, if you look at the classic white working class counties along the Ohio, West Virginia, or the Ohio, Pennsylvania border, those were Biden's best. That Sanders tended to get 10%, 12%, one county below 10%. Whereas pretty much everywhere else, he was getting 15 to 20%. And I think that just shows that Biden does have some appeal.
The question for me is going to be how much of that translates over to the group as a whole, that so many whites without a college degree, white working class voters now think of themselves as Republican, perhaps Trump Republican rather than classic Republican.
but certainly Republican, that I think that's going to limit Biden's appeal. But he doesn't have to have much more of an appeal than Clinton in order to win. I think that if...
If he pulls only four or five points better than Clinton, that's 10 points on the margin. And that's enough to swing every one of the three big states that carry Trump in the presidency, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And it could very well be that Biden has that level of positive appeal that makes Trump's job even that much harder.
Right. A number I am evangelical about because it's a number that you can recapitulate. It's not exactly the same number in those three states, but the one that sticks in my head.
is in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, Barack Obama got 45% of the white non-college vote. According to the exit poll, Hillary Clinton got 34%, ballgame, that difference between 45 and 34. So that Trump could indeed carry 50, 55% of the white non-college vote in Wisconsin and get clobbered in the state. It'll lose the state just as Mitt Romney did.
And those are the kinds of numbers you're seeing. I was also very intrigued by the result, as I'm sure you were, of the state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin that was run under the horrible conditions of the virus. And it wasn't just that the liberal candidate, it was nonpartisan, as you know, in name only, of that the liberal candidate,
not only did really well and turned out a real Democratic, really strong Democratic vote in Milwaukee and in Madison,
But that candidate both cut into the Republican margins in the solid Republican counties and also did very well in the rural counties in southwestern Wisconsin that are really the swing counties. Now, I accept you would say back to me, well, there was no Republican presidential primary and that probably helped Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout. Nonetheless,
She won that race, if I recall, by about 160,000 votes. That compares with the race a year ago for another Supreme Court seat that the Republican-backed candidate won by 5,000 votes. It does look like something is going on out there. What do you make of that, Henry? Yeah, yeah.
I think that there are two things going on. One is, yes, the fact that Bernie Sanders was still in the race, was still contesting, trying to find a rationale for his sinking candidacy, did increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout. But that doesn't explain the 10-point victory margin. When I look at Wisconsin, I tend to look at
a set of counties that were carried by Kerry in 2004, Walker in 2010, and which were almost exclusively carried by Trump in 2016. A lot of those counties, and it wasn't just the dairy counties along the Mississippi River in Ron Kine's district, the Southwest counties that you were talking about. But that typical type of county went for the liberal candidate Karofsky in this.
At the same time that she was making serious inroads into the conservative margins in the Milwaukee suburbs, which are the heartland of the Republican Party in Wisconsin. And that suggested to me that something is going on there, that Walker in 2018.
Did pretty well in white working class areas, not as well as he needed to, but still pretty well, but got a significant fall off in the suburbs. The fact that in 2020, this progressive candidate could do both at the same time and get a high Democratic turnout.
I mean, Joe Biden is probably not going to win Wisconsin by 10 percentage points, but I think the Supreme Court race makes it much likelier that he can win by two as opposed to losing by half or one, which is Trump's likely best case scenario. Right. And that and I think.
If Wisconsin, if he loses Wisconsin, it is highly likely that he is going to lose Michigan and Pennsylvania. There is a lot of debate about how to read Pennsylvania. But the other thing that sticks in my mind that I think is important for Democrats is
to bear in mind is the Trump vote is nothing like a monolith. The Trump vote includes a lot of just core Republicans. He got 90% of Republicans, 80% of conservatives. He got 59% of college educated white men. He did get that increment in the white working class that was important.
But by my math, about 9% of his 46% was primarily anti-Clinton. So I tend to view the full Trump base as closer to 35%. And that there are a lot of Trump voters who are genuine swing voters so that it's
In 2018, Democrats carried the Senate races. I talk about this some in my book. I should mention it at least once, Code Red, that Democrats won both the governor and the Senate races in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by picking up, their candidates picked up somewhere between 10 and 15% of the Trump voter. There was no guarantee that that 10 or 15% was going automatically to Biden.
But I think it shows that there is the real possibility of movement in the Trump vote. And that's before you even get to the notion that the Democratic vote is likely to be highly mobilized.
in a way that it wasn't in 2016. But just the Trump vote, my guess is 10 to 15% of that vote is in play and that Biden probably has a better chance at it than a lot of other Democrats would. I think both of those things are true. I think some of the Clinton vote theoretically would have been in play, but Trump has not done very much.
to attract those voters back to his or the Republican standard. I think he has picked up a fair number of the people who voted for Gary Johnson or Evan McMullin because he's been much more of an orthodox Republican than many of them had been thinking. But that's not enough. You take a look and you say,
The president needs to be at around 47% job approval rating nationally to have a decent shot of winning a majority of the electoral college, which is, say, repeating his stupendous feat of four years ago of losing the popular vote by millions of votes, but still winning the electoral college.
He's never been there except for a brief shining moment before he started doing the daily briefings on the pandemic. And now he's back well short of that, that he may very well find that getting a rabidly loyal 40 to 45% base is not the ticket to victory that it would be in the business world because in politics, if you're not close to or over 50, you're a loser.
Right. No, that's it. It's not market share and it's not ratings. And that's the odd thing about the way Trump thinks is that he is not does not think in, you know, a percentage of the two party vote. That's what matters. And, you know, I think we can agree that it's very hard for a candidate of either party right now to get below 40. Maybe it's hard to get below 42 or something like that.
And my hunch is that at the moment, and again, it's only a moment, it's the end of April that we're talking, you know, I think that Trump would be lucky to get that core base vote at this moment. What would be your putting on your counseling cap?
As a last comment here, how would you tell Joe Biden to conduct his campaign in the fall against the president? I think that his announcement speech is still a pretty good guide to what he's going to do. And I think it is a good argument, you know,
to begin with, which is reelecting Donald Trump is different than electing him. One election is a fluke. A reelected Donald Trump could do enormous damage to the country. And if anybody doubted that before the coronavirus pandemic, it's an argument that really resonates now. I think secondly, I would...
emphasize the kinds of things Trump has done that have actually been damaging to the white working class base as well, by the way, as to Latino and African American working class voters. After all, they're a huge part of the working class.
um i think this issue that's just been raised by the executive order uh forcing all the packinghouse and slaughterhouse workers back to work despite the dangers they might face that is not the action of somebody who's a friend of the working class that's the action of someone whose friends are the people who own uh all of these uh companies
Thirdly, I think I would take a look at the Sanders program and take those proposals of Sanders that are actually quite popular. For example, I thought it was a very good move by Biden to endorse moving down the Medicare age, eligibility age to 60, A, that targets a group of voters that he needs to win over.
It's a movement towards Bernie Sanders on single payer without carrying the baggage of endorsing the entire shift. Biden's made moves like that on free college and post-secondary job training. And again, I think there are positions that Bernie Sanders holds that are majoritarian positions. And so I think Biden can win both ways by
You know, picking up the Sanders constituency by embracing some of Sanders ideas, but picking the ones that are popular with everyone. Lastly, I think he should do what I always thought Hillary Clinton should do and just remind people that he's a fairly traditionally religious guy.
And, you know, yes, right wing Catholics are going to be going at it because of abortion. But for an awful lot of fairly traditional older people, Joe Biden looks like somebody, you know, he looks like somebody you trust.
And I think just occasionally reminding people of what is formative to him. The irony here, again, is I think this can appeal both to progressives and to more traditional people because his commitments to labor unions, which he mentions a lot, which I think is smart, to working people generally to social justice grow right out of traditional Catholic social thought.
And I think that kind of appeal can be both unifying for the country, but also help him pick off some of the voters he needs from the other side.
What's your critique of my plan? I think that's pretty sound. I think that keeping the focus on Trump personally unites his coalition. Having a weak policy platform, but one that is broadly popular prevents Trump from really going at him in a way that can carve out away swing voters.
If I were Trump, what I would do is I would make this campaign not a referendum on him, but a referendum on nationalism and use Biden's.
longtime support for multinationalism and openness to China against him. That allows him to bring the Hunter Biden situation back in because of Hunter Biden's incredibly lucrative and still not fully explained deal with Chinese investment companies. I'm not saying that would win. It would certainly get under Joe's skin. And sometimes winning means getting your opponent off of his game and changing the conversation.
But as far as your advice to Joe Biden, I think it's pretty sound and I wouldn't be surprised if he takes it.
And on the China thing, here's a reply to what I think will happen if that issue is joined. You've already seen it in what was a very effective Biden ad with Trump saying he trusts the Chinese, the Chinese are doing a great job on the virus. There's a lot of footage about Trump and President Xi that is not helpful to Trump if you want to run a nationalist campaign
against China. Secondly, if I can go back to my book for a sec, I argue that the thing that internationalists like Joe Biden can learn from Sanders and Warren is when they talked about foreign policy, they talked about an American foreign policy that also stood up for the standard of living of the average American. Interestingly, I think that is what
The voters back in the 40s felt about the internationalism of Harry Truman and FDR. They knew that these two guys had their backs, people on Main Street, people on the factory floor, these days people in the service industry they would be.
And I think Biden needs to sort of make very clear that to support alliances doesn't mean it does not mean weakening, but could mean strengthening the position of American workers. And I really think it's going to be hard to hang China around Biden's neck. But I agree with you, Trump is going to try. Well, E.J., it's always wonderful to talk with you. And thank you very much for joining me on the horse race.
Great to be with you. Always. Thanks. Well, this weekend for the next week, I'll be doing something a little bit different here on The Horse Race. Instead of doing our usual retrospective of what's going on today, well, we know what's going on today. It's called a pandemic. It's called responding to a global crisis. And politics is kind of frozen. So we're not just going to
take a look at the present. We're going to take a look at the foundations of the political analysis business by talking with two of the great founders of that. And it's my honor and pleasure this week to talk to one of those, Stu Rothenberg. In the interest of full disclosure, I first worked for Stu back in 1982 when I was a college student and did some stringer reports on California congressional races for a publication he edited at the time called The Political Report.
and wrote a longer piece for a magazine that he was writing on elections and campaigns, talking about direct mail campaigning for not just fundraising, but campaigning for voters in California at the time. He has now retired largely from the daily campaign.
run of political prognostication, but he was one of the founders of the field by creating the Rothenberg Political Report. And Stu, it is wonderful to have you here on The Horse Race. Thanks, Henry. I think that magazine was called Election Politics, was it not? Thank you. Thank you for reminding me. I still have the copy of the piece I wrote for you, but I haven't looked at the cover in quite a long time. Yeah.
Well, I'm still, I'm still, I still keep up with the stuff and I still write almost weekly for roll call. And, um,
Try to stay active. But yeah, you know, we're in a very different era now than when I started and players, some of the players are the same, are the same frighteningly. But the way we cover politics is just totally different now in terms of the internet and, and the kind of time crunch that reporters feel. It's amazing.
How has that since you got started with Free Congress Foundation in the early 80s, how has that changed dramatically? And is it really a function of the Internet and television? And it's so much different now than it was 10 years ago. It's been more of a gradual thing.
Well, when I started in 1980 here, I had no, I, I really didn't know the group I was going to work for. I didn't, I had never heard of Paul Wyrick who ran the free Congress foundation, who was one of the fathers of the new right. I did not know the guy when I went, I drove from, um, I drove from, from Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, when I was teaching at Bucknell to Washington, DC. Uh, and I interviewed with them and I talked to them and, um,
When I started working with them, we used to get physical clips of newspapers from a clipping service. Every few days, the clips would arrive in the mail. There was no... We didn't have the hotline at that point, which has been superseded by other things recently. We did...
It was hard to get information about races. It was all done entirely on the phone. And you'd call, you'd call consultants, you'd call the candidates and campaign managers, but you didn't have the context. You didn't have the mass amount of information. So I just wrote an article just yesterday.
It's in roll call on the importance of Maricopa County. I go on the website to the Arizona Secretary of State's office. I look at how the Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and surrounding communities, how they voted in 2016 and 2018. And I can go back and look at the Romney's vote in Maricopa County and McCain's.
This is something we didn't have access. You had to physically go to a library. You had to call somebody up in the secretary of state's office and hope they were really generous with their time and would be willing to talk to you and be willing to look up stuff for you. Boy, it's a, it's a huge difference. And it's just a huge difference in terms of the coverage, Henry. And, and I don't want to go on forever. So I'll just give you 30 seconds more. Um,
When I started, nobody followed House and Senate races. The national media didn't spend time. And now you turn on CNN and they might have profiles of an individual House race or a Senate race. And New York Times and Washington Post, as you go into a cycle, spends more time on individual races. That never happened.
Well, I was in Australia a few years ago when I was doing on my own speaking tour, and I was also writing my book on Reagan and I needed some data. So I went on the Internet, went to the California Secretary of State's Web site.
And found the supplement to the statement of vote for the 1966 gubernatorial election so that I could look up and for 1962 so I could look up the swings from Richard Nixon running against Pat Brown in 62 to Ronald Reagan and I could do it in a hotel room in Sydney.
And that would not have been possible 30 years ago. Great anecdote. Great story. No, exactly. And that's how things have changed. The amount of information, the speed at which you can get the information, the extent of the coverage, and the way that people are invested in politics these days. I'm not talking about secretaries of state. They've always been involved in politics. But kind of real people and real reporters are, you know, this is a 24-7 job now for them.
Well, tell us how the Rothenberg Political Report got started and when you started it. So I came to Washington in 1980 from Bucknell for this think tank, sort of think tank foundation. They had a newsletter that they were writing on House and Senate races. It was straight reporting, even though the foundation itself was very mission, ideological, conservative driven. It was social conservative, actually.
And I wrote about races and I learned about U.S. House and Senate campaigns. I had in graduate school, I had a roommate a couple of years who was getting a Ph.D. in psychology, but he had a copy of the Almanac of American Politics. And it was sitting there in the living room.
When we were watching reruns of Star Trek, or maybe it was actually the original runnings of Star Trek and whatever TV show, he would pick up or I would pick up this almanac. And to us, it was just great. It had all these numbers, all this data in it, and then this analysis of congressional districts and the states and who the people were.
I'm a big baseball fan, and I'm also interested in the stock market and business. It struck me then, and it continues to strike me, that all these things are related. There were numbers. There were winners and losers. Each day, you're up or you're down. That almanac kind of perked my interest, even though my field was small.
I shouldn't admit this. My field was not American politics in graduate school. My field was international politics and U.S. foreign policy, but I had an American field. And I read the almanac and I became interested in American politics. And so I ended up, I never got a tenure track slot.
So I had to look for something else, and I found a position as an editor of this obscure, tiny newsletter, conservative group doing a nonpartisan newsletter in 1980. And I stayed with them for about nine years until 1989.
kind of learning about races and learning about consultants and listening to the consultants talk about their candidates and trying to understand what was going on. And that eventually led me to
I would say purchase the newsletter, but that sounds as if I had to pay for it. I went to Paul and I said that the newsletter is really not in your sweet spot anymore. You're going to spend all your resources on your kind of ideological agenda, which is fine, but that's not what I do. That's not what the newsletter does. And I'd like to go off on my own. Give me the newsletter. Crazy idea for a number of reasons. And Paul said, okay,
we worked out a way where he would reimburse me for subscriptions that I hadn't yet gotten that had renewed before I got it. And so he was very generous. And I rented a place in his building for a couple of years before I was able to go out on my own. And so that's how the political report turned into the Rothenberg political report and then turned into the empire that became...
this is the interesting thing is because for most of my listeners, they will have come of political age during a period when you really can't just access data, access information. But back then what you were providing in a weekly physical newsletter was state of the art and path breaking. How was it initially received? Well, yeah,
You mean going all the way back to 1980 or 89? No, no. When you set off on your own to be doing this on your own with the Rothenberg political report, even then, I think Charlie Cook, who's now in the U.S., was the only other person doing it. Right.
Yeah, Charlie had started in the mid to late 80s. We had talked about it and I had told him to go right ahead. I have no idea how you could make money. Somehow, a few years later, I decided to do the same thing without any idea of how to make money. My wife and I had saved some money when we were teaching where we tend to be kind of fiscally conservative, personally conservative on this.
And I thought I could make it work. When the newsletter was published by Paul Weirich, it was a weekly and I made it in every other week. And I got rid of all the subscriptions that Paul just had for PR and marketing and tried to live on the paid subscriptions. And they were fewer than I would have liked.
And I staggered along for a while, you know, making, having a, making a profit, but not one that would support a family on a growing family. I had a child in 80, we had a, we had a son in 82 and a daughter in 84 and,
So we were kind of staggered. I was kind of staggering along and I started looking, interviewing for the GWK school of campaign management. Could I take the newsletter there? And would they, could I, would they let me do the newsletter, but also pay me to teach or something or do, do something. And I looked for a variety of other publications and, uh,
I don't know. I'm starting to get a little worried. But then suddenly the 94 elections came upon us. And for, it seemed like 35, 45 years, 40 years, nobody seemed to think the House was in place. So nobody really cared about House races.
although every once in a while the Republicans would win the Senate briefly. It didn't last long. But suddenly in 94, things changed. A Republican surge was occurring. It was clear that races matter, that control of the House was in play, that control of the Senate was important. And suddenly the early work that I had done for CNN, I had been lucky enough to get on CNN through somebody who previously worked with
for me who went over to CNN and then started to do speaking through Charlie's Charlie's speakers bureau. Suddenly, um, the entire outlook changed through, through, as, as they say, through no fault of my own circumstances, circumstances occurred, uh, that tended out to work to my advantage.
Well, I know by the time I arrived in D.C. in 2006, you and Charlie were the go-to sources. PACs, businesses, anyone who was interested in serious political analysis had to read you guys because you were the ones who understood what was going at a granular race-by-race level. So I presume you stopped being a struggling vendor and somebody who was able to actually help support that growing family.
Yeah. How how do you how did you do you have a particular way that you look at races? Because clearly you have made a go of something that didn't exist. You're an entrepreneur of of a real stripe and created an industry, helped create an industry where that didn't exist before. How do you look at races and how do you feel comfortable that you know a direction a race is going to move?
So there are actually two separate points there. First answer, and it's a quick answer if you want to discuss it more, we can, is we were at the right place at the right time, but something could have occurred when we launched our newsletters and became what we were ultimately to become. Something could have short-circuited that. It didn't. And if we were starting now, we would be in a much more
much more disadvantaged position than we were then. It was just a right, when I say right place at the right time, I mean it was a fluky kind of situation. As to the particulars, you know, I was trained as a political scientist. So my approach was always trying to be dispassionate and analytic and look at the data and offer a hypothesis and kind of disprove the hypothesis and
So what I've come to look at over the past 40 years is a combination of the national situation and the impact of state races. And at various times, my assessment of the weight of those two things have changed. Some cycles, the national cycle is all that matters. I mean, when you flip over 60 states,
60 house seats, something big is going on that, that affects, uh, uh, voters more than individual candidates do. And at other times it matters, a particular district in Texas or North Carolina or Florida or Indiana, uh,
when you don't have a huge national dynamic, but the local matters. So you really have to have a feel on what's the cycle like, and is there kind of some fundamental change at play, or is this race by race, district by district, candidate by candidate? I've always felt that candidates mattered and the kind of campaigns that mattered. As I get older, and as we as a country become more polarized,
To be honest, party and ideology is more important than the individual candidates. But you get these ebb and flows change in American culture and American politics. And we just happen to be in a kind of neo-parliamentary system right now of polarization and party. That's not the way it was in 1980.
No, not at all. I mean, again, for the younger listeners, I mean, in the 1980s, you had lots of places where Democrats of varying ideologies, usually center-right, but varying ideologies, could win seats that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were carrying comfortably, and vice versa. You had Republicans tending to be center-left, and with sometimes going farther to left, carrying seats that
Democrats were carrying. And that started to fade after 1994, but it was still kind of the case until really the last 10 to 15 years. I think you're right. I think 2006, 2008 were a decisive period where people like Chris Shays, a moderate liberal Republican in Connecticut, or Jim Leach, a moderate liberal Republican in Iowa, were
couldn't survive in those kinds of districts anymore because a fundamental change had taken place in American politics and how people viewed culture and the courts and just fundamental values of politics.
And then in 2010, 2014, you saw that come home to roost for the Southern Democrats that the modern Democratic Party was founded in the South with Andrew Jackson. And by 2010, they pretty much wiped out. And then 2014, the senators were wiped out, you know, Mary Landrieu and so
prior, losing by large margin when just 10 years before you would have thought they were pretty much safe because there was still a swing state. Go ahead. No, no, you go. I was going to say exactly. And now the first question we ask, it's kind of depressing actually to be a political analyst. The first question I ask is, did Trump carry the state or not when you're looking at a Senate race?
That is a strong indicator. It doesn't mean that Joe Manchin can't win very, very narrowly, running a very, very good race and having himself, having been a long-term officeholder in the state, but
Yeah, you know, did Trump win it or did not? And that seems to define a lot of the statewide choices and all defines the congressional districts as well. Still, you can have a we do have a handful of competitive districts. But Henry, it's not the way it was in the 80s or early 90s, was it? No, no, it's it is a totally different political environment. You were unique in my view in.
In that not only did you look at races when you were and look at the data that you talked about, but you interviewed the candidates. And I don't remember Charlie or your competitors doing that. Certainly not to the extent that you did sitting down face to face with people who wanted to run for office.
And not always just the targeted people, you know, that you seem to be willing to give people who may not be the favorite a chance to make a name for themselves by impressing you. Why did you do that? And how did you interpret this to determine your meeting, whether or not the person was serious and had a chance? Well,
I think you're being unfair to Charlie. We really did this at the same time, and we often did it together. We both had offices in the basement of roll call at the time, and so we would meet candidates together. But you're right, very few people did that.
Well, I apologize in advance to Charlie. I didn't realize that he was your partner in interviewing as well. Yeah, yes. He and his people, he always had a larger staff than I did. I would have one person and he would have three people. But yeah, we did it and we often did it together. And we would, boy, those were some of the most interesting meetings. I still remember the Peter Navarro meeting yesterday.
when he was running in the San Diego area. That was when he was green, right? Or a Democrat? No, he was a Democrat. He was running in the San Diego area as a Democrat. And he was angry. Back then, he was angry. But we would interview candidates. Why? Because we thought it was a unique insight on the district. And because we thought...
And again, this may be less important. We thought candidates really mattered. Good candidates who run good campaigns, who could raise money, who could talk articulately to the voters. God, who knew that we have a president, Donald Trump, who talks the way he talks, you know, whether you like him or don't like him. Kind of putting together full sentences is not his greatest skill. But we always thought that interviewing candidates was
gave us insights to who had the best chance to win, who could raise the money, who was the most articulate, who could put together coalitions. And I still believe it's
I mean, at the end of the day, Henry, isn't it the case that if they win, they go to the hill and then they're going to behave as they want to behave? And the district is important, but also their personal styles and their values and their assumptions about the elite and insurgents and outsiders are also really important how they behave. Well, like today, you are reading about Justin Amash running for the Libertarian Party,
presidential nominee. I don't know whether he was one of the people you met back when he was running for Congress in 2010, but it doesn't strike me that he's changed very much, that if you met him as a 30-year-old back then, you would have gotten this sense of clear, strong ideology and aggressive anti-establishment outlook that seems to be typifying his presidential campaign.
I think most of the candidates we interviewed showed who they were and, and didn't try to trick us. Uh, I mean, I can think of a handful of people who tried to trick me and I, um, or maybe, maybe I deluded myself, but yeah, I don't, I don't think they tried to trick me. They just weren't as forthcoming. We had a, we had a surprisingly combative meeting with Martha McSally who otherwise had a reputation as a pragmatic conservative Republican from Arizona. Uh,
A woman who was an Air Force pilot. And I asked her how she would have voted on shutting down the government. And she refused to answer. She said, well, that's the past. Let's talk about the future. And I said, fine, let's talk about the future. How would you have voted if it had been Congress shutting down the government? So I continued to ask the same question three or four times. And she got angry because I thought it was an important question. Just tell me. I don't care what your answer is. I'll pass along your answer, whatever it is.
And I remember, and I, with so many other memorable meetings, I met Ted Cruz in a speaking event, and he came up to me and expressed unhappiness with the rating of his race. And I said, well, we're just starting to write about the Senate race. Why don't you come in and we'll
We'll talk about it. I don't... You know, a two-year cycle is a long time, and you start writing about races early on, and then you meet the candidates, and then the cycle changes. The cycles can change completely. I remember 2009, 2010, 2009, we were looking to see, is there an Obama backlash? Have people turned against Obama? He's coming out of the gate pretty fast. But it wasn't until...
much later, early in 2010, that we started to see significant movement. So if you look at what I wrote in 2009, no, we don't see a Republican surge yet. Then you look at the middle of 2010 and we're writing there was a Republican surge. So you have to be nimble and you have to not be wedded to an assessment of a candidate or a cycle because the cycle and the candidate might change. Yeah.
Where do you see, how do you see the general political situation right now? I mean, we're a little more than six months out. And my experience is that things can and do often change, but
Within a certain parameter that we have, there's a sense of where this is going by this point, absent some epochal event or something. How do you see the dynamics right now? I often refer to the trajectory of an election cycle and talk about how one side or the other needs to change the trajectory.
The current trajectory, I think, is the president's supporters are holding white evangelicals, rural voters, self-described conservatives and self-described Republicans. I don't see huge numbers of Trump voters leaving Trump.
even though times are tough, they don't blame him. He has plenty of other people he can say are responsible for the situation, whether it's China or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or the news media or the establishment. So I don't see a lot of defections. And I think the Democrats are holding their base, which is urban, urban,
Voters of color, self-described liberals, self-identified Democrats. So really, I look for two things. I look for changes in enthusiasm, which will produce changes in turnout. And I look for any and all swing groups.
And I have only found one swing group, and that was identified between 2016 and 2018. And that's white women with a college degree or whites generally with a college degree, less so for men, but still a factor.
And they moved significantly from 2016 to 2018 from Trump, who was offering change from Barack Obama after eight years and Obama's liberalism and his agenda and spending and taxes and things like that. They were tired of that. And then in 28, they voted Republican then. And then two years later in the midterm, 2018 midterm elections, they
They clearly expressed some dissatisfaction with the president, his style, his language, his agenda, his behavior. So that's the one swing group that clearly has moved. And on the other, the other thing I looked at, as I told you, was enthusiasm and turnout. And it seems Democrats who three and a half years ago could say, well, I don't like Trump, but I don't like Hillary either.
Most of them are not saying that now. They say, I don't like Trump. They're going to vote for an alternative. I think if the Democrats had nominated Bernie Sanders, it would have been a gigantic mistake.
It's not that he couldn't win. I don't, I'm not sure that he couldn't win. I, but I am sure it would be harder for him to, to win. Could something still happen to Joe Biden about Joe Biden, you know, controversies, charges of inappropriate behavior, of course, but he is at least the kind of the potentially broadly appealing Democrat who can, who can get all kinds of Democrats out to vote. So I,
I think the president lost the popular vote by 2.1 million. The key was three states of 77,000 votes or so. I think it's going to be harder for the president to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, and Florida even.
But, you know, he's surprised before. And so I think all all handicappers are what's it called? Once burned, twice shy. All of us are a little cautious about this. So I have written a column. I wrote a column a few weeks ago saying that I think the race moved from toss up tilting Democratic to lean Biden when Biden became the nominee. But.
But I don't dismiss the president's chances. And I think I can come up with a scenario where he loses the popular vote but squeezes by the electoral college again. It's harder. But at this point, there's a long way to go. I wouldn't dismiss it. In our partisan times, does a Biden victory mean continued Democratic control of the House and Democratic elections?
regain Democrats regaining control of the Senate? Or is it possible that you could see him win, but one or both of those things not happen? Well, if he won, the House would would most likely stay a Democratic. The Senate is, you know, the Senate's on knife's edge. You got four races. You know, it could be more. But really, Cory Gardner in Colorado was in serious trouble because of the way the state is moving and the fact that Democrats are
Finally got probably an ideal candidate, a businessman to run against him, former two-term governor Hickenlooper. The polling in Arizona is looking increasingly difficult for Martha McSally, the Republican, but the race is certainly not over. I mean, it's a mid-single-digit race.
And that leaves Maine and North Carolina, which seem to be toss-ups. If you told me the Democrats are a point or two ahead in each state or a point or two behind in each state, I wouldn't argue much. So...
you know, I think the Tillis and Susan Collins to kind of personalize their, their races enough to particularly Susan, because it's a small state with only two members of Congress. When Tillis in North Carolina, it's a bigger state. It's hard, hard to personalize that. And North Carolina has a history of not knowing who their Senator is anyway, until we get close to the election. It's funny. There are some States that early on, there's a big undecided North Carolina, New Jersey and the like. Um,
So I think the Senate is up for grabs. I think if Biden ends up winning the presidential by, you know, five, six, seven points, the Democrats have a good chance of taking over the Senate. But when I say taking over the Senate, you know what I mean? I mean, 50-50. That's taking over the Senate. Yeah, because Alabama is pretty much a deadlock. Great uncertainty here still. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, Stu, is there any final advice that you would want to give to somebody who either would like to get into the field of political analysis or would like to be a talented amateur who follows it and actually is able, you know, not just to follow polls and repeat what the averages are, but be able to get down and make some judgments independently on their own?
So for the first group of people who want to do this for a business, I say, find another job. There must be another job that is more stable and produces steady income and that won't drive you crazy with the negativity and the attacks and the tweets and the attacks from Twitter.
I just happen to be a political junkie. You know, I can remember watching the 1960 presidential election night race and I had my score sheet and I had the states all lined up. And I was a political junkie and loved politics starting back then. But journalism is a hard business now for the for the amateurs.
I could be more encouraging because, but remember, it is a show now. I mean, it is politics as theater. And I watch way too much politics on television. I need to stop it immediately. I should limit my viewing to like BBC and NPR or something. But, you know, I'll watch CNN and then I'll watch MSNBC
MSNBC and I'll switch over to Fox to see what they're covering. And it's, it's, it's not, it's not as much journalism now as it, as it is. I hate to say this as it is kind of producing an agenda. It's just, it's, but, but if you're an amateur, you can take some time and,
read the kind of original documents and see who the candidates are, read the bios, look at the numbers. And you can enjoy politics that way if you don't just get, if you're not totally committed ideologically or partisan wise. But what I've seen is
A deterioration in the quality of life of political handicappers. It is just, it's a hard time to do this because there's so much negativity and so many attacks and criticisms. It must be an easier way to make a living, Henry.
Well, I don't do it full time like you do, but when I write a political column for the Washington Post or make a political tweet, if I don't fit somebody's prior on the right, I'm an idiot. And if I don't fit somebody's prior on the left, I'm evil. And it does take its toll after a while. But anyway.
You were a role model of mine when I was beginning to take this seriously. I was a political junkie a little younger than you. So 1968, when I was six, is my first memory staying up and getting up at six in the morning, California time to see Nixon win Illinois and clinch the presidency.
But it's been wonderful getting to know you as grown up. And for people who want to follow your work as you continue to produce it, there's the column and roll call. And what is your Twitter? I think it's at Stu Politics, S-T-U Politics, P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S.
Yeah, I tweet enough to get myself in trouble. My tweeting tends to be more personal feelings and my column in Roll Call, I strive to be dispassionate, analytic and kind of the academic side of me as I look at who's winning and who's losing and what you should look at in the future.
Okay. I think you succeed in that. And I look forward to continuing to chat and read you. And thank you for coming on the Bush. This week's ad of the week takes us to Northeastern Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania's eighth congressional district to be specific. Pennsylvania's
Pennsylvania 8 is what's known in the lingo as an Obama-Trump district, a district that President Obama carried rather handily, but then was carried by President Trump. Indeed, it saw some of the biggest swings in the country from the Democratic Obama to the Republican Trump. And it is a classic example of the white working class dominated district that made Trump president and which Republicans have to win more of if they have any chance of retaking the House.
This week's ad is to the Republican challenger, to the Democratic incumbent, Jim Bognett. And let's take a listen. Three weeks ago here in Hazleton, my family's construction business was booming. Now it's empty. We're tough. We'll get through this. But we need to make some big changes. I'm Jim Bognett.
The Chinese lied to us. They tried to cover up coronavirus. When I'm your congressman, we'll make China pay for the lies they told, the jobs they stole, and the lives we've lost. I'm with President Donald Trump. We will make America great again. I'm Jim Bognett, and I approve this message.
This is a very simple ad. It's a simple ad in its production values. The entire ad is Jim Bognett in a collared shirt with no coat and no tie standing in front of his truck that his construction business apparently uses trucks and he is in front of one while he's delivering the entire message direct to camera. The one time the camera moves away from him is after he says the word empty. That
when he says that the current crisis has changed his business from booming to empty, the camera swings and you see an entirely empty business yard. Nobody's walking, nobody's moving, no trucks are moving. And then you swing back to Bognet. So that immediately,
gives Bognet the opportunity to create empathy that there are a lot of people in his district are in similar circumstances, whether they're business owners or the people laid off by business owners because of the pandemic. So it's a good move to immediately create that bond between a person, a candidate, and the voter that is essential to making yourself well-liked and well-known.
Another thing that's good about this ad is that his name is on the screen for the entire time. I talk about this a lot, and this is one ad that does it perfectly. He is on one side of the screen, whereas the rest of the screen is the words Jim Bognett in red on white. No logo, no fancy graphics. This is as simple as it can possibly be, and it stays up for the entire time.
If you don't know Jim Bognet's name by the end of seeing this ad a couple of times, I don't know what's wrong with you because they make it as simple as possible. As he's saying his various things, those words pop up on screen too. So when he's attacking China and says China lied, those pop up. Those pop up in black. Again,
Very simple. No fancy font. No graphics. This is about as low tech of a campaign commercial as you're going to see in the modern era. But that doesn't make it less effective. In fact, I think it makes it more effective. There's only one message. A lot of introductory ads try and run the gamut. They say they name check this and they name check that. He's saying one thing.
China lied. China needs to pay. I stand with Trump. This is a very simple message delivered directly in simple language with the visuals that back it up. And it appeals presumably to the swing voter.
and the Republican voter. The Republican voter is going to come out and vote anyway for the Republican candidate. And he certainly, by tying himself to Trump and identifying himself as a Republican in the visual, though not in the audio, that's going to be something that works for him. But the sort of person who moved from Obama to Trump, the blue collar Democrat, is somebody who typically cares a lot about trade,
cares a lot about nationalism, a lot about patriotism, and moved to Donald Trump for exactly those reasons. There's a reason Trump used the phrase "Make America Great Again." By focusing on the nationalist issue, the U.S. versus China, by identifying himself with Trump, the avatar of that issue, Bognet does what very few candidates are able to do in 30 seconds,
which is make a simple, comprehensible message that resonates exactly with his core constituency and the people who he needs to attract away from his Democratic opponent. It's way too early to forecast this race. If the Republicans have any chance of retaking the House, it's going to be by winning seats like Pennsylvania 8. And Jim Bognet's introductory ad to his district gives him the opportunity to make people think that that's possible. And that's why it's this week's Ad of the Week.
That's it for this week's Horse Race. Next week, I'll be speaking with another star of political analysis, Charlie Cook, and take a deep dive into the upcoming special election in California's 25th congressional district. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you next week in the Winter Circus.
