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Campaigning is being shut down just as we're shutting down all of our lives, but that doesn't mean that there's no political news to report. I'll be going round the horn with the Saboteau Crystal Balls Kyle Conduct, talking about the U.S. House with Cook Political Reports' Dave Wasserman, and doing a deep dive into Wisconsin, which will be holding a regularly scheduled election and a presidential primary next Tuesday with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Craig Gilbert.

The horses are at the starting gate. They're off. Joining me on this week's Round the Horn is Kyle Condick, managing editor of Saboteau's Crystal Ball, a must-read political analysis sheet. And Saboteau's Crystal Ball is published by the University of Virginia Center of Politics. Kyle, welcome to the horse race. Hey, Henry. Good to be here.

Well, normally when you and I get together, we share notes about who's up, who's down, and literally which horses should be rated as the favorites. But today, the only horse we're talking about is the pandemic. So how do you think the pandemic is or is not shaping American politics?

It's very common for people in my position, people who are analysts, and we end up writing a lot ourselves about the election, but also talking to reporters or going on TV or being on podcasts like your podcast.

talking about, you know, what's going on in elections. And a lot of times we'll get asked, hey, does X development matter for the election or does Y development matter? And many times we end up saying no, because particularly I'd say in this era, there's just so much going on that it's almost like there's one big news story and then it immediately gets eclipsed. And I've sort of made that argument even about things that

really seemed very noteworthy at the time, like impeachment. I thought it was sort of an open question as to how important impeachment would be in November. And I think maybe it still is an open question. But boy, this coronavirus story is one of the things you really can say, hey, this really has the potential to be very important for the election because it's something that really is affecting every person's life. And this is probably sort of the most important moment

news event of the Trump presidency. I would also say that for all the state governors, even the ones who were elected in 2018 and aren't up again until 2022, this is probably the most important thing that will happen during their governorships, and they may very well be judged disproportionately on how they react to it.

And so from that standpoint, I do think that this is potentially very impactful. And yet, if you just look at sort of what the numbers are now, the sort of early polling that we're getting on people's response to the government's response on coronavirus, you know, a lot of state governors are getting very high marks.

The president's numbers on it have been mixed as they typically are with him, but his approval on coronavirus is typically higher than his overall approval and his overall approval is up a little bit. Although, Henry, as you yourself pointed out earlier this week.

The sort of rally around the flag effect that Trump has gotten has been certainly less than many state governors and also many other world leaders. And then the worry, if you're a Trump supporter, is that, well, maybe things will deflate here as we move on, depending on how people react to how the government has dealt with this.

So I think we have to say that it's important, that it is definitely a hurdle for the president's reelection. But I don't think I could sit here and tell you, oh, well, the president is now for sure going to lose in November or something like that. That seems like a leap, even though if Trump were to lose and to lose badly, it would be easy to figure out why, in that he's got dealt a really bad hand during his reelection year. Yeah. Yeah.

But then the converse is if you look and he ends up winning, perhaps even winning the popular vote, you can pretty much say that there's no other explanation for it than a successful handling of this. That's right. Because he's been underwater for the entire presidency, that we've never had a president who has never received 50% job approval at any time. He's still below that, but if he successfully handles this...

Even with polarization, it's not inconceivable to think he could just get up to that margin where it becomes pretty clear he'll win a narrow victory.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And if you believe that this is the most important and impactful development that's happened during his presidency, and again, I think that's probably true, at least as of this point, then it would sort of make sense that he might be judge-based a lot on this, although so many people's impressions of the president are already so locked in. And that

that may limit this, this kind of rally around the flag effect he might get, but it might also mitigate a potential fallout. If in fact, um, people's perceptions of the economy get worse, the economic numbers get bad. Even if people's perceptions of how the government and Trump have responded to the crisis, it may be that a different president would sink a lot, but this president might not because again, people's,

opinions of him seem so locked in. But then again, the people on the margins are the ones who decide the elections. And the people on the margins, to me, are still kind of up for grabs by both parties. Yeah, I think that's something really to zoom in on here is that you've heard a lot of talk about

that there's no independent voter anymore. There's no person on the margin. It's all about turnout and base mobilization. And I think you and I disagree with that, that there may be small, but the bases are so evenly or pretty close to evenly matched, particularly in the electoral college, that moving from 45% job approval to 48%,

If he could get there and if he could keep it up, might be the difference between winning and losing, even though the number of people who changed is dramatically small. Yeah. I mean, as we're speaking right now, I think the president's approval rating in the real clear politics average is about 47.5%.

Frankly, I think if he was there on election day, he'd probably be in decent shape. Although I do have to say that typically approval rating is a pretty good proxy for vote share in a given poll and in the election. But Trump has sometimes been – actually often been running behind his approval in horse race polls.

And so you've got this group of voters who actually say they approve of the president's job performance, but aren't willing to say that they're going to vote for him. Now, I think the positive thing for the president, you could say is that, well, if his approval stays up, you would think that those people would come home to him in the end. Although if the president's approval is more like 44, 45% around the election, he's not just going to need all of the approvers, but he's probably going to need

some small sliver of the Trump disapprovers as well. And it calls into question his ability to get those voters if, in fact, right now, he's not necessarily even converting all of the approvers into people saying that they're going to vote for him right now. I mean, one of the statistics I cite all the time is in the 2016 exit poll, about a fifth of the whole electorate said they had an unfavorable view of both Clinton and Trump. Trump ended up winning that group of voters 47 to 30.

And so there were people who kind of gave the benefit of the doubt back then. You know, those are the kinds of voters who maybe feel conflicted about their choice and maybe they don't even like Trump and Biden if in fact he's the nominee. And they're going to have to sort of hold their nose and vote for one of the two in all likelihood. And we'll have to see if Trump would get the benefit of the doubt in that situation again.

Yeah. And I wrote a piece about that for the New York Times before I joined the Washington Post. And there was only one poll that I found that had that same crosstab before the election, and it was the GW Battleground poll. And it also found in September and in October, 18% didn't like both candidates. But at those polls, over half were saying they were either undecided or

or were voting third party. So the break to Trump was very late. And I think that's one reason why you have the misperception that the polls were off because of a late break that could have been predicted or accounted for, but which polls by their nature can't do because they're snapshots in time. They're not predictions.

Yeah.

group of people or percentage of voters who said they were voting third party. And often people who say they're going to vote third party ultimately end up voting for one of the major party candidates anyway. I mean, you had, I don't remember the specific numbers, but certainly Jill Stein and Gary Johnson were often polling combined for

higher than the 6% of the vote that third party candidates ultimately got. I think Johnson only got about three and Stein only got 1% and then there were scattered other votes. So, you know, one of the things that will help make the polls accurate or maybe less accurate is

is whether there are credible third-party options and whether there's a sizable number of people who say they're going to have to select those options. Because a lot of those people who end up parked in the third-party column in, say, August, September, October, they may end up coming home and voting major party when the election actually happens. Ross Perot was one candidate who, at the end, I think, was polling about, or he polled about what he was polling, although he was polling higher than the 19% he got at various points

of the 1992 election, but other third party candidates, they tend to deflate on election day. And that happens in, you know, sub-national races too, in some state races as well. So that's something to watch too. It doesn't seem like, I mean, you know, I think we will have a libertarian and a green party candidate, but maybe there won't be as much juice behind their candidacies because, you know, in a re-election race, it may be, you know,

the voters a little bit more on the two-party choices and the referendum on the incumbent. You mean Amash Massey 2020 isn't going to excite Libertarians? Well, we shall see about that. Tom Massey seems like he has a pretty credible primary challenge now. And Amash, of course, is trying to win, as of right now, trying to win re-election as a third-party candidate in Michigan's third district. But there has been some thought that maybe he would try to run for president. Yeah.

So are there any winners? You know, one of the things that you keep hearing about is people saying, wow, Andrew Cuomo sure looks good. Maybe we wish he were the nominee instead of Joe Biden. A, does Andrew Cuomo's polling bear out that sort of crunch assessment? And B, is there any chance at all that Andrew Cuomo will be the nominee instead of Joe Biden?

Look, I think that that would only happen if something happened to Joe Biden or if Joe Biden decided he was going to step aside for some reason. If Joe Biden wants to be the Democratic presidential nominee, I think he's basically got a hammerlock on it at this point. Yeah.

And so even if Cuomo was sort of started to make it known that he would like to get drafted at a convention, that could happen so long as Biden didn't win on the first ballot. But as we're moving along here, it seems like Biden is eventually going to get to the magic number of 1,991 delegates by the end of the nominating season, whenever that ends up being, seems like

It was previously June 9th was kind of the cutoff point for the primaries, according to the DNC rules, but some states have moved back all the way to June 23rd. So, you know, again, that's kind of an open question. But again, I think so long as Biden is –

and able to be the nominee, he likely will be. Cuomo's numbers have really, really improved. Siena College has tracked his favorables and unfavorables ever since he became governor nearly a decade ago.

And they had had his most recent favorable, I think it was something like 45%. And then they found it was about 70% in their most recent polling. And so he's a governor who's made a huge jump. Marquette poll in Wisconsin showed that Tony Evers, the Democratic governor there, got a big

bump in approval. So too did Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Mike DeWine in Ohio, according to some recent polling of those states. And one thing I think about, and again, this is

I think a lot of people who maybe just care about 2020 in the presidential race won't really care about this. But I do think about all of the governors who are going to be up for reelection in 2022, the ones who got elected in 2018, including people like DeWine and Gretchen Whitmer, assuming she's not the running mate or something or becomes vice president or something like that.

If these governors are making good names for themselves in what is sort of the crucible of their four-year term, which again, we probably are in the midst of right now, that probably speaks well of their ability to get reelected in 2022. Now, obviously, midterm dynamics will play a role. Whichever party holds the White House, that's usually a liability in that midterm year. But again, this may be the thing that people...

People remember about their governors, even certainly in 2020, but in 2022 as well. Well, mentioning Gretchen Whitmer and vice president makes me then turn to the question of assuming Biden is the nominee. Who do you think he will select as his running mate?

I got this sort of sense, and this was just in me sort of watching them interact, and this is not based on anything, so I'm probably wrong about it, but I got the sense that Amy Klobuchar was a real life possibility for Biden to select. And who knows what conversations they may have had when Klobuchar ultimately got out of the race. I'm not making any sort of... Again, we have no idea what maybe they talked about, but she really seemed like

Seems like someone that Biden could potentially pick. And, you know, he's obviously said that he's going to select a woman to be the VP nominee. Get to Smoothie King today and try the new blueberry, raspberry or watermelon lemonade smoothies. They're all made with real fruit, real juice and no bad stuff. Just check out the no-no list at SmoothieKing.com. Try the new lemonade smoothies at Smoothie King today.

This is Scott Campbell from the Stupid Things for Love podcast. I have a seven-year-old son and the biggest mountain I climb every day is trying to put shoes on this child.

And I'm so grateful to Skechers for making the only shoes my son will willingly put on by himself. Their slip-ons are amazing and he doesn't have to deal with laces, he doesn't have to deal with anything. They come in the perfect color blue. Thank you Skechers, the comfort technology company. And you can find Skechers everywhere. Skechers.com, a Skechers store, or wherever stylish footwear is sold.

Interestingly, and I don't necessarily know why this is, but it's a longstanding trend. Democratic running mates are almost always senators for whatever reason. 15 of the last 18 have been senators or people with backgrounds in the Senate. Obviously, Biden himself was a senator for a very long time.

But if in fact it's a woman and it's a senator, there are a number of folks to choose from. You naturally think of someone like Kamala Harris. You think of Amy Klobuchar. There are a number of other potential women running mates who are in the US Senate. Obviously, he doesn't have to pick a senator. And frankly, it might be wise for him not to select a senator because depending on the state, you could end up endangering a Senate seat. Now,

You wouldn't say that about California, I don't think. But if he were to select Klobuchar, that seat could hypothetically be competitive. And the Senate is very likely to be kind of on the razor's edge, whether the Republicans or the Democrats have a small majority. And you can't risk a Senate seat. Now, granted, I guess if you think that the running mate is such a good choice that you can't pass that person up, then...

you'll pick that person, but there is a price to be paid in Congress that you would not have to pay if you picked, say, a sitting governor or someone who wasn't actually in office right now, but who otherwise was qualified. You know, again, I think Klobuchar is sort of...

I've looked at her as a decent possibility. But I do think you may also have new people kind of entering this contest. And I mean, Whitmer, I think maybe one of them in that she's been pretty prominent through this crisis. And if you want to make a case against the president on coronavirus, maybe one of his critics from the States would be a person you could select to try to do that. Well...

Normally, I would say that we'll see at the end of the campaign and they'll have a big rally and then they'll jointly appear before the convention. But maybe there won't be rallies going on in June. And there's a lot of talk that the Democrats are going to have a virtual convention because their convention is scheduled for mid-July. And who knows if Milwaukee will be open for business then. What do you say the odds are of that?

the Democrats not having a physical convention? And if they don't, do you think it'll matter in the campaign's outcome?

I think the odds are pretty high that they will have to modify it in some way. We actually, in our Crystal Ball newsletter, we just ran a piece from Lou Jacobson who writes for PolitiFact, but he writes for a lot of different publications and he kind of investigated not just the possibility of virtual convention, but also what that would look like. And I thought one of the people he interviewed made a great point in the story. Leah Daughtry, who ran the 2008 and 2016 Democratic Conventions,

She said, hey, the Olympics got postponed to 2021 and the Olympics were supposed to start a week after the DNC was supposed to happen. How do you justify –

bringing 50,000 people to Milwaukee when the Olympics have already been canceled. You know, it's just, it would seem kind of odd to do that. And, you know, then there's the possibility of maybe just having the delegates go to Milwaukee, but that's still on the Democratic side, that's like 5,000 people once you account for the pledge delegates awarded

through the state primaries and caucuses, and then also the superdelegates, all of the elected officials. Historically, there is a convention bump that pops up in polling, and often the candidate who leads after the conventions ends up winning the election. That's not always the case, but that's a regularly documented part of the

of the presidential election cycle. And, you know, if, if the Democrats were not to have a regular convention and the Republicans were, you might say that that's an advantage for, you know, for the Republicans and they're not supposed to meet until, uh, late August in Charlotte. Um, but boy, I just wonder if anyone is going to really want to travel and go to some big event with tons of people going on in an enclosed arena as would be happening in Milwaukee. Um,

And in Charlotte, particularly because there seems to be some thought that maybe the coronavirus will kind of subside in the summer, but then maybe roar back in the fall. And it may be that even if governments give the thumbs up to holding these conventions, that people just may not want to go. I mean, look, I've personally gone to the last two series of conventions. I don't...

I'd be worried about going even in the summertime if this crisis has seemingly passed. And I'm sure there are a lot of people who also feel that way. So yeah, I think that the virtual convention is certainly a possibility. I guess one positive outcome for Biden, if that was the case, is that there were pretty loud kind of –

protests and disruptions at the 2016 DNC for delegates and folks who are supportive of Sanders. If there's no floor, basically, then there are no protests to be had, I guess. But there is a certain kind of spectacle with these conventions that parties have historically wanted to have. It's essentially a

a four-day kind of infomercial for the parties. And, you know, you don't want to give up on that sort of positive publicity if you're a political party. I would be shocked if Donald Trump

agreed to postpone the last week of August Republican convention. I agree. Yeah. And I would also at this point be surprised if the Democrats went forward with theirs. I mean, I could imagine if they were willing, if they had the money to pay off whatever commitments they've made to Milwaukee to,

pushing it back a month or moving it to some sort of outdoor location, but I just can't imagine. Think about the potential contrast too in terms of the

the image you put out to the country, you know, you could have the Democrats. I mean, I don't know, Biden could give his acceptance address, I don't know, at his house or, or, you know, at some neutral location. And then the Republicans are able to have this, this triumphant convention in late August, at which point maybe the, the, the COVID-19 crisis will have subsided. I mean, that,

That's a pretty big advantage in terms of campaign events for the Republicans. I can't sit here and tell you that it would make a huge difference in the campaign, but it might.

And one thing that's been the case, again, you can look these up. These are polling data I'm citing, not opinion, that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama saw noticeable increases in their job approval rating in the week after the convention that largely held for the remainder of the campaign. And if Trump is able to say,

met the crisis. They always said, I couldn't do it. And look at the country now and have cheering thousands of people in late August. Two or three points, as we've talked about, could be all the difference to his reelection. Yeah. And, you know, I think also one of the things we're seeing, and I think we saw this during impeachment too, to some degree, is that

There isn't necessarily a hard ceiling on Trump's approval. Now, maybe you could say the ceiling is 50% or something, which again is in the grand scheme of things, kind of a low ceiling, but it's not like his ceiling is like 43 or 44 or 45 because he has started to exceed that at times. Now, again, maybe it's artificial, but...

But, you know, it's – again, there's not necessarily a ceiling and – or at least there's not a ceiling that would prevent him from getting enough support to win re-election. So if he can show the possibility of getting to 46%, 47% as he's showing now, maybe he could also do that after the convention and maybe he could also do that right before the election depending on how the campaign goes.

I mean, again, I think that if you just like if you told me, you know, I don't know, a couple of years ago that, oh, well, second quarter GDP growth in 2020 is going to be minus 20 percent or something like it's going to be the worst, the worst quarterly GDP growth quarter in post-World War II history. The lowest ever is minus 10 percent, which is the first quarter of 1958. If you were to tell me that, I would have said, oh, man, Trump's a goner.

And yet that might happen, and we still have to allow ourselves the possibility that the president could overcome that. It's just that the difficulty for him is that he really benefited, I think, from most of his presidency of not having that rocky of a road in that the economy was pretty good. There weren't major issues of war and peace. Yes, there were all sorts of controversies, many of them of the president's own making, but he had been dealt a pretty decent hand there.

that hand has gotten a lot worse now. And how does he play it? That doesn't rule out re-election by any means, but it is a challenge that he has to overcome that obviously wasn't in place as of a couple months ago. Well, as with so many other things in this time of woe and uncertainty, to be continued. Kyle, thank you for joining me on The Horse Race. Good to talk to you as always. Thank you.

Well, there aren't very many states voting now as state after state have been postponing their primaries. But Wisconsin, the Badger State, is not one of them. Although a court hearing is going on as we record this.

It is still scheduled to be going off next Tuesday on April 7th. So that means I've got the person who knows everything there is to know about Wisconsin state politics back on the show for State of Play. That's Craig Gilbert, the Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal-Seminole. Welcome back to the horse race, Craig.

It's great to be with you. It's been an eventful day. Well, particularly for Wisconsin politicos and residents, walk us through what's going on as we speak. So we have, you know, just mounting questions day after day about the status of the Democratic Convention in July in Milwaukee. We have an April 7th election, not just a presidential primary, but a state and local election that

is immersed in a certain amount of chaos and uncertainty. Uh, there's a federal court court hearing as we speak, um, about the status of that primary. So there's litigation, there's, um, quite, there's, you know, massive burdens on the election system, trying to basically convert a traditional primary into a vote by mail election overnight. Um,

And we have a new poll out in Wisconsin, which has a lot of interesting numbers about the pandemic, about Donald Trump, about Joe Biden, about Bernie Sanders. So there's a lot to talk about.

Well, let's start with the traditional good news. Let's talk about poll data. That's kind of the bread and butter of modern political reporting. What does the poll, the Marquette Law School poll, have to say about Wisconsinites' thoughts about the Sanders-Biden race and about the coronavirus response?

So I think the headlines are a lot of support across political lines for all the steps the government has taken for the social distancing, for the shutdowns, including a big bump in approval for the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, and his handling of the pandemic. Yeah.

Democratic primary, which the last time Marquette University, who published today's poll, their last poll was a month ago. It was just before the South Carolina primary, which, of course, changed the Democratic race. And Bernie Sanders was leading and Joe Biden was in third place in the Wisconsin Democratic primary today.

Joe Biden is plus 60 percent. Bernie Sanders is in the 20s, I believe, maybe 30. So that's a massive turnaround in that race. And in the head to head general election matchups, Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump by three points in the latest poll in Wisconsin. They were 50 50. There was I think it was 48 48 votes.

in the previous poll in February. And finally, while Donald Trump has a 51% rating for his handling of the pandemic, his job approval, which never changes amid impeachment and pandemics, didn't change. It's still 48%. Wow.

Well, when I look at that Democratic primary race, I just think this is a state that traditionally does better for progressive candidates than the nation as a whole. It's one that Sanders carried decisively against Hillary Clinton in 2016. And yet the poll has him down by 28 points. No wonder Sanders said today he thought the election should be postponed. Well, yeah, and he did say that actually before the poll came out, but-

You know, it is pretty striking. This was, you know, Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary in Wisconsin against Hillary Clinton by double digits four years ago. He carried all but one of Wisconsin's 72 counties. So on paper, this had the potential to be a decent state for him. Wisconsin hasn't always gone in for the most progressive candidate in the history of its Democratic primary, but it does have a strong progressive streak. So I think it does say a lot.

Yeah, I mean, you got to think that if this poll is going to be a big one, it's going to be a big one.

reflects what's actually going to happen on election day. While Bernie Sanders the other day said that he saw a narrow but viable path. If he's going to lose Wisconsin by 28 points, that path exists only in his mind and not in the world that you and I inhabit.

Yeah, and then get to Smoothie King today and try the new blueberry, raspberry or watermelon lemonade smoothies. They're all made with real fruit, real juice and no bad stuff. Just check out the no no list at SmoothieKing.com. Try the new lemonade smoothies at Smoothie King today. The other thing I would add is in in the Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump general election matchup.

Sanders was actually trailing Trump by a few points, whereas Biden was leading Trump by a few points. So you've got that difference as well. And that's also a change, isn't it? That usually Sanders had been leading Trump in the Marquette poll, just not by as much as Biden, but now he's behind. Yeah. And these differences haven't been big in previous polls, but there's been, you know, he certainly has been ahead in some of the polling and, you know,

just maybe not quite performing as well as Biden in some of the past polling, but not a big difference there. I mean, the most dramatic change again is among Democratic primary voters. The thing that gets me about this poll and other polls is that time and time again, you see Trump's job approval

at one level. And then you ask the ballot question and he's getting less, which means there is a non-trivial number of people who say, yeah, I approve of the job he's doing, but they're not willing to say, I want to reelect him. What do you think is going on with that? Yeah, I think, you know, we've talked about this. I mean, there is a spectrum of conflicted voters about President Trump, people that have

No qualms, people that have minor qualms, people that have significant qualms, people that have big qualms. And some of those people are Republican or Republican leaning voters. Some of them are independent voters. So there are clearly people who...

who don't necessarily disapprove of the job he's doing, but they have qualms about his personality, his conduct, his behavior, and that that might keep them from voting for him. We've certainly seen a huge gap between perceptions of the economy and even perceptions of President Trump's handling of the economy and their perceptions of him and their approval, overall approval of his presidency.

And then you have the massive gap that exists between his approval of the pandemic and Governor Evers, which is not dissimilar to the sort of gaps you see in other states where governors are getting 70 or 80 percent approval of their handling, whereas Trump at best is getting a bare majority.

Yeah, and he's getting a better bear majority in this poll. He did not get a bump in his overall approval, which had happened in some of the some of the national polling. And when you break down those numbers, I mean, I was looking at it, you know, in the case of Democratic Governor Tony Evers in Wisconsin.

His approval went up among Republicans from basically 20% to 40% amidst the pandemic. It went up among independents and it went up among Democrats. But the striking thing was how much it went up among Republicans because he's a Democratic governor. In the case of Donald Trump, it actually, you know, very high approval among Republicans, but it actually went down a little bit in Wisconsin. I don't want to make too much of that, but it certainly went

It certainly was was was no improvement there. It went up a little bit among independents and then it it stayed kind of, you know, as you know, bottom, bottom, bottom among Democratic voters at six percent. So, you know, obviously people are more polarized. They're more entrenched in their divisions over President Trump.

But he is one example of something that kind of resists change because of how polarized people are about him. Whereas we saw elsewhere in the poll that, you know, Democrats, the gaps between Democrats and Republicans were not nearly as big over their perceptions of the pandemic and what should be done about the pandemic.

So where do you stand right now with respect to Trump in the general election? Is he a toss up to win Wisconsin? Is he kind of a slight underdog? I don't think you can really say he's a slight favorite based on the data that we've got.

I would say, you know, in this poll, he doesn't look like a slight favorite, but there have been times over the past many months when he has. And so I think what we're looking at is an extremely competitive landscape in Wisconsin. And there are going to be moments when...

President Trump looks like he has the upper hand marginally and moments when he looks like he doesn't. And I think I think we're in one of those moments when he looks like he doesn't. But I think we have to be careful that.

Because these shifts are really on the margins. And as, you know, as unchanging and unyielding as his approval ratings are, he's kind of on a knife's edge here. And so, you know, the future, if the future is as unpredictable as the past few months have been,

You know, he could we could find him going into November in competitive shape. If the national landscape worsens for him significantly, it's going to worsen for him in Wisconsin. Well, that just means that we're going to be continuing to be on the edge of our seats. It's he was talking the other day, one of the.

pandemic briefings about his ratings, which of course struck a lot of people as completely weird. But the fact is we're glued to the Trump show and we don't know what the outcome is going to be.

We don't. I mean, if if Wisconsin is is as pivotal as pivotal as some people think it's going to be, then the fact that there's this much uncertainty about how Wisconsin is going to vote tells you there's a lot of uncertainty right now about the Electoral College.

Well, assuming that the election does take place as scheduled next Tuesday, what's the most important race for our listeners to watch with respect to non-presidential contests? They're really the big race. And again, this is a nonpartisan state and local election that Wisconsin has every April. And in this case, there's

a race, a nonpartisan statewide race for the state's highest court on the ballot.

That's a pretty significant race for Wisconsin, and some people sometimes have read this race or tried to read this race as kind of a signal because these races have become so partisanized, even though they are nonpartisan. There's always a liberal candidate. There's always a conservative candidate. It's been thought that the liberal candidate was favored in this race partly because we were going to have a Democratic presidential primary driving up Democratic turnout.

That's all so uncertain right now because of the pandemic. And we can talk some more about this, but just the confusion and chaos surrounding the Wisconsin election, which again is heavily shifted toward a mail-in vote. That's kind of the headline. There are some local races, the biggest one of which is Mayor of Milwaukee.

Well, how is the election going to be handled? Is it going to be handled as an all-male-in election? And if so, I was reading that there's already over a million absentee ballot requests, which is a record for Wisconsin. What's going on? And how confusing is it for people? So just to put things in perspective, Wisconsin is a state in which

Male voting is accounted for about five or six percent of the votes cast. In-person early voting, which is included in which is technically absentee voting, which is included in those absentee ballot requests, you know, has climbed up toward, you know, 15 percent, 20 percent. But the vast majority of votes are cast in person on Election Day. So what we're seeing happen in Wisconsin is an effort to.

overnight to convert to a mail vote in a state that is not set up for mail voting very well. So here we see, you know, more than a million people requesting an absentee ballot. Most of those are to vote by mail. That's not something people are habituated to do in Wisconsin. They've been urged to do it, and a lot of them have done it. We don't know how many of those million people are going to actually cast a ballot.

For a variety of reasons, but one is that they're overwhelming the system because when they request an absentee ballot, it has to be sent. That request has to be processed and they have to be sent a ballot and then they have to return that ballot and they have to return it according to.

A kind of complicated set of requirements, including when you vote by mail, you have to have somebody witness your vote and provide a signature and an address on the envelope certificate in which your vote is contained. So there's a lot of there's a lot of cumbersome aspects to this. And a lot of this is being litigated as we speak.

Not to mention the fact that when all this, when the dust settles, you know, the count, the absentee vote count, if most of the ballots have been made through the mail, it's going to take a long time to count them. Again, in a state where we're not used to doing this. And so the results may take a while to process as well. Well, yeah.

if the results take a while to process i guess that just means we'll learn a little bit later uh at the presidential level how many delegates joe biden leads bernie sanders by because it's pretty clear from the marquette poll that he's going to win the only question will be the margin but then there's the question whether or not those delegates are ever going to actually assemble anywhere tell us what the current state of play is on whether the democrats are going to meet in milwaukee in july or whether this will be some sort of virtual convention

Yeah, so people are increasingly asking that question. The organizers of the convention have gone on the record in recent days saying, you know, we're exploring everything. We realize this is

These are not normal circumstances. Joe Biden said, just said that he cannot envision everything happening as planned. And whether that means delaying the convention, whether it means trying to have a virtual convention in which all the delegates are

Somehow vote remotely and all the speeches are delivered, you know, to your television set or whether as one former DNC chair suggested me today, you know, you could have an in-person gather much smaller in-person gathering of.

you know, the DNC membership and nominate a candidate that way. So we're just kind of awash in uncertainty over this right now. And you've also got, you know, local officials in Milwaukee wondering about the convention and whether they want the convention, whether they can have the convention.

Everything is uncertain right now, and none of us know what this is going to look like.

Well, I have to say, everything that's happening in the country seems to be happening on steroids in Wisconsin right now. So I wish you and everyone else in Wisconsin to have a stable of a ride through this roller coaster of politics and life as possible. And I look forward to having you back on the horse race, maybe when things settle down a little. I will look forward to that, too.

The pandemic has put a lot of campaigning on hold, but Wisconsin is holding its regularly scheduled elections next week. And in addition to the presidential primary, they have a hotly contested race for the Supreme Court.

Progressives and conservatives have been battling over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for most of the last decade, and there's no difference in that pattern on Tuesday's ballot. Justice Dan Kelly, the conservative, is running for re-election to the Supreme Court, and he's got an ad up that is this week's ad of the week. Let's listen. What can I get to? A judge that protects the public and stands up for our freedoms.

So you want Justice Dan Kelly on the Supreme Court? I'll also take Dan Kelly on the Supreme Court. Kelly follows the law instead of making it up. Tough, fair, honors the Constitution. So two for keeping Dan Kelly on the Court. How about you? Sounds good to me. Justice Dan Kelly for Supreme Court. Order up! This ad is simple. It's simple in its presentation, it's simple in its visuals, and it's simple in its message.

The ad takes place with two white guys ordering from a white waitress at a diner. Wisconsin is a very white state, and for Republican voters, clearly over 95% of the people who are likely to vote for Dan Kelly are white. It's also a very rural state. This sort of diner motif and setting is something that

They experience a lot in their daily life. Again, the ads setting of guys at a diner ordering up the Supreme Court justice that they would like is meant to convey ordinariness and a feel for Wisconsin that will seem natural to the people who are likely to be voting for Kelly.

His name is on the screen as his name is being mentioned by the diners and by the waitress. So again, as is often the case with my ads of the week, the visuals reinforce the audios. And then you have the things that they're saying. They're talking about themes that will appeal to conservative and Republican voters. Law and order. Fairness.

following the law, not making it up in the words of one of the diners, and honoring the Constitution. These are themes that appeal to conservatives and Republicans, whereas a progressive or a Democrat who would be running would be talking about a very different way of judging on the Supreme Court. At the end, you have a little humorous note where the last diner who is asked who says, sounds fine to me, is actually Justice Kelly himself.

Maybe people won't recognize him, but again, when he comes and he's the only person in a suit and his name is on the screen, most people will get the idea.

Supreme Court races in Wisconsin run on a nonpartisan basis, but break on ideological lines. Voters know who the progressive is, they know who the conservative is, and they come out and vote for their team. I don't know if Dan Kelly is going to win next week, but with an ad like this, you know that his team is going to know who the player they should be backing is. And that's why it's this week's Ad of the Week.

Well, with the pandemic, we've been talking a lot about national and international politics. But as the stimulus bill showed, it's not just the presidency that's important. It's also the House of Representatives. And the control of the House of Representatives is going to be up for grabs again this time. And there's no better person in the country to talk with us about the state of play in the House of Representatives than my guest now, Dave Wasserman, the House editor for Cook Political Report. Dave, welcome to the Horse Race.

Thanks for having me, Henry. Well, let's kind of start with the basics. I mean, you and I get into the real nerdy details, but most of our listeners don't. So what's the state of play with respect to how many seats each party has and what are the Republicans need to do to take the speaker's gavel away from Nancy Pelosi?

Well, at the moment, there are a handful of vacancies, but fundamentally, the House count is 234 Democrats, 200 Republicans, and one Independent. That's Justin Amash from Michigan who defected from the Republicans and voted for impeachment. And so, Republicans would need a net gain of 18 seats to get to 218 and win the majority back. And it's really remarkable what a difference a month makes the House landscape.

Looks a lot different today Thanks to world events than it did a month ago Do you think the world events favor the demo the Democrats or favor the Republicans? Well, let's put it this way back before the South Carolina primary Republicans were

chomping at the bit. They couldn't contain themselves because they were excited at the prospect of tying all of these House Democrats in swing districts to a Democratic Socialist at the top of the ticket. And they were also enjoying a strong economy that they thought would provide some tailwinds for the president.

And now, of course, Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, which is the presumptive Democratic nominee, which makes that more difficult for Republicans to run against socialism. But also, COVID-19 has essentially frozen the House recruitment landscape in time, and it's curtailed fundraising.

to the point where it really does give an advantage to incumbents, candidates who had already built up

large campaign war chests and strong campaigns. And Republicans still have a number of recruitment holes on their chart. Out of the 30 Democrats who represent districts Trump carried in 2016, I count 11 where Republicans have either no strong opponent or a suboptimal opponent who doesn't have much cash on hand. And

What that means is that now Republicans are going to find it a whole lot harder to convince fence-sitting would-be candidates to get into races at a time when, of course, many of them are quarantined or just not in the mood to ask their friends for money.

when they've lost a lot of value in their 401ks, when some of them have even lost jobs.

This could very well mean that rich donors have even more power or more influence in the fall elections because, as Bernie Sanders likes to remind us, millionaires and billionaires have lots of excess cash even after their stocks have dropped. And one could easily imagine groups on the outside coming in and buying the time that a candidate would have bought in a normal race.

That's possible. And in fact, we're likely to see an even greater share of the ads run at the committee level, at the outside group level run by groups that can raise unlimited sums rather than those that are tethered to contribution limits.

Well, so you said that the Republicans start with 200 seats, but because of redistricting in North Carolina, they're actually expected to lose two of those seats. So they kind of start from a baseline of 198 for political purposes.

Where does the Cook Political Report see it right now? Are there enough seats that there is that strong Republican challenger and the underlying favorable demographics to think that gaining the 18 overall, which would mean gaining 20, including the expected redistricting laws, can happen? Or are they falling short? It's not impossible, but it's improbable. Look, I think the odds still slightly favor Republicans gaining seats rather than Democrats gaining seats.

But gaining 18 is really hard from today's vantage point. And I think one of the biggest reasons is what you just mentioned, the Democrats' offensive opportunities, which start with North Carolina, where they're guaranteed to pick up two seats. The second district was redrawn in the Raleigh area to include North

The city of Raleigh, and that's now a safe Democratic seat. Republican George Holding is not running for reelection. And then the 6th District in Greensboro, where Mark Walker is not running for reelection, and that seat will fall to Democrats. But Democrats' offensive opportunities don't end there. There are now 27 Republican open seats in the House.

Out of which I think there are four really good pickup opportunities for Democrats, three in the state of Texas and one in Georgia. And so if Democrats are able to pick up those four open seats, which are all majority minority by population, then they could conceivably pick up six Republican seats off the bat, which means that Republicans would need to gross 24 seats net 18. And that's a very hard decision.

to see them following, particularly since the polls still have Republicans trailing Democrats in the national generic ballot by a fair amount. That's true. And we are also looking at a situation where Democrats still

are likely to win a higher share of votes than their eventual share of seats because of the way that votes are distributed on the map. Democrats have more districts that are 80 or 90% Democratic than vice versa. But still, Republicans would need to win

the House vote, in my opinion, the popular vote to be able to win control of the House back. And given Democrats' strength in a lot of these swing districts where their incumbents have a lot of money, Republicans have a long way to go to be competitive on the airwaves this fall.

So let's take a look at those seats that are Democratic pickup opportunities. We talked about the two in North Carolina that are gimme's. What are the four in Texas that you've got your eyes on? So there are three races in Texas, three open seats on the Republican side that we're looking at closely. The best opportunity for Democrats is the 23rd district.

which is one of the largest districts in the country. That's Will Hurd's open seat. It goes from the outskirts of San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso and includes a lot of smaller counties along the border in between.

And Gina Ortiz Jones came within 1,000 votes of beating Will Hurd in 2018. She's going to be the Democratic nominee. Republicans have a runoff that has actually been pushed back from May to July, I believe.

And Democrats are the favorites for that district. And then there's the 24th district outside of Dallas where Kenny Marchant is retiring. It's Democrats who are headed for a runoff there.

And then the 22nd district outside Houston, this is the old Tom DeLay seat where Pete Olson is retiring. And that's headed to a Republican runoff. The Democrat Sri Preston Kulkarni came within about four points of beating Olson in 2018. And that district is undergoing a pretty rapid demographic transformation. This is a situation where

Republicans drew the map

in 2011, thinking that these would be safe Republican seats for the rest of the decade. But the rate of demographic change in these Texas suburbs has overtaken those plans. And so we're seeing Democrats with a real opportunity in those seats. The same thing is happening in Georgia's 7th District, which is essentially Gwinnett County, Georgia, outside of Atlanta, where Rob Woodall is retiring.

And Democrats and Republicans have very competitive primaries there. Now, three of those four seats that you mentioned, the Woodall seat and Texas 22 and 24 are suburban seats. How much of what we're seeing is not just demographic change, but also the flight of educated Republicans away from the party in the age of Trump?

That's certainly contributing to what we're seeing. And it's not just attitudinal change, it's generational turnover. It's a transient electorate in those districts. It's kind of a combination of all of the above that is rapidly moving these districts away from their Republican roots.

So where are some of the Republican pickup opportunities that you see? And if the state of play changed such so that Republicans had a realistic shot of coming close in the popular vote, what are the sorts of seats that we should be looking at to see if they could translate that into a majority in the House?

So right now we have 16 Democratic seats in the toss-up column. These are seats that are kind of on the front lines where Republicans really need to win in order to have any chance of winning control. And notably, those 16 seats include three in Iowa, where Republicans

You've got two highly vulnerable Democratic freshmen, Abby Finkenauer in the first district, Cindy Axne in the third district. And then you've got an open seat in the second district, Dave Loebsack's district in the southeastern corner of the state. And so Republicans need to do really well in Iowa to win the House back. Some of the other districts are places where

Democrats would not have won without the huge wave that we saw in 2018. And even then, they won by very small margins. People like Kendra Horn in Oklahoma City or Joe Cunningham in South Carolina's 1st District or Lucy McBath in Georgia's 6th District. There's also Staten Island, New York, Max Rose, Pennsylvania.

Upstate New York, Anthony Brindisi, and then two seats in Virginia, Elaine Luria in Virginia Beach and Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond. And these are the kinds of races that Republicans need to win to have any chance. So there's going to be a House special election in California in May. Mike Garcia is running against Christy Smith.

And this is one of those seats that got flipped from red to blue in the wave of 2018. But it's the seat that Katie Hill resigned over her sex, I guess, revenge porn scandal. How are you rating that race? And what are you looking for to see if it's going to be something that turns into a real barn burner?

So this race has been moved to an all-male election. The date for the special election, May 12th, has not been changed.

But because about two-thirds of the voters in California's 25th district, which is Northern LA County, the Santa Clarita Valley, the Antelope Valley, and Simi Valley, because two-thirds of the voters are on the permanent absentee ballot list already, it's not that drastic a change to shift to an election that's entirely conducted by mail. But it's unclear which party will benefit from that. This district voted...

50 to 43% for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And Republicans don't hold a single district in the House where Clinton got 50% or more of the vote. They also haven't flipped a seat in California from blue to red since 1998. So the historical precedent in this race really does...

favor Christy Smith, the Democratic Assemblywoman, who has a really good biography for the seat as someone who chaired the Emergency Management Committee in the State Assembly, used to be the head of a school board in the district. But the Republican arguably has an even better biography for the seat. He came up through

former House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon's organization. McKeon had held this seat for decades and was a strong advocate for the aerospace and defense industry in this part of LA County. Garcia

You know, broke records as a combat pilot in the Navy and is running ads touting that. He's also young. He's Hispanic. He...

appeals beyond his party label, and he comes across as fairly moderate. So this is a race that we have in lean Democratic right now, but it could be inching closer into the toss-up category. Because every voter is automatically sent a ballot, Democrats are enthusiastic that that higher turnout

if that's what it generates, will benefit them. But even in the March Super Tuesday election, when the primary for this seat was held, the Republican candidates

on the ballot added up to roughly 50% of the vote. It was pretty even between the Democrats and Republicans in the jungle primary. So that's a pretty favorable sign for Republicans that even with a competitive Democratic presidential race on the ballot, they were still able to win about half of the overall vote in the initial round.

Well, I know where you and I are going to be on that evening, even though California takes forever to count its ballots. We'll be on Twitter following the Secretary of State's results. And you can follow Dave on Twitter and you should follow Dave on Twitter if you want everything on election night or everything on politics at redistrict is his Twitter handle.

Well, Dave, I really appreciate your giving the horse race audience a rundown of the house and would love to have you back again. All right. Thanks for having me. That's it for this week's horse race. Next week, we'll look at Trump's job performance and take a close look at the Tar Heel State, North Carolina. So join me, Henry Olson, again, and I'll see you in the winner's circle. ♪♪♪