The Biden Stalemate Continues
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It's hard to even imagine next week talking about the RNC with this drama still playing out in the background, right? Oh, is Trump going to pick a VP? Huh. Interesting. Oh, that's like a one day story. Like what? Right. I'm getting on a plane to Milwaukee on Sunday being like, actually, the only story in the world is still Joe Biden.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and the purgatory continues. The number of lawmakers saying that President Biden should not run for re-election, or at least expressing concern about him running for re-election, continues to tick up, while Biden's answer that he's staying in the race remains the same.

Today, we're going to take a look at some of the most recent data we have on both who the lawmakers calling on Biden to step aside are and how this is all shaping the race for the White House in this moment.

And then in the background of all of this, Republicans are gearing up for their big show in Milwaukee next week, the Republican National Convention. And by the way, I'll just say for a housekeeping note here that I will be in Milwaukee all next week and we'll be doing nightly podcasts from the convention. That means that the podcasts are going to be coming out quite a bit later in the evening or maybe even early morning. But you will get four episodes next week in exchange.

In any case, the RNC released its proposed platform this week, and we've got a good or bad use of polling example that will help us better understand if Trump's policies are popular and Biden's policies as well, for that matter. So here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Galen. And also here with us is senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome. Hi, Galen. Great to be here.

Always great to have you. So let's begin with the whip count of where lawmakers stand on Biden. Just to pull back the curtain, Mary and I were having difficulty even counting up the lawmakers exactly who had said that Biden should get out of the race versus expressing concern and where the border is between calling for somebody to get out versus expressing concern. But this is the whip count.

These are the numbers we have landed on as of almost noon on Thursday. Twelve House Democrats and one senator have called on Biden to step aside. At least another 37 have expressed concern without explicitly saying get out.

And then since the debate, according to our count, 89 Democratic lawmakers have expressed support for Biden continuing as the nominee. And there are some maybe key noteworthy lawmakers in there that have

said some things around the edges that we will get to. But let's start here. Our colleague Nathaniel Rakich broke down who these lawmakers are according to an ideological rubric that Mary, you created. So is there anything notable about who is sticking with Biden versus who is breaking with him?

If you look at the ideological breakdown that we produced earlier this year, the lawmakers that are breaking with Biden tend to be more moderate. Those that we identified as progressive or voting more like progressives are generally sticking with him. So that seems to be where the dividing lines are right now.

Is there any rationale behind that? I mean, you might think, OK, progressives have the least in common with Joe Biden. He was probably the most moderate candidate who ran in 2020 and he was not progressive.

progressive choice in the primary. So what is going on now? I saw some reporting this morning from Notice. Specifically, they were looking at the Congressional Black Caucus, but there's significant overlap there with the progressive cluster. And it sounds like the CBC really kind of wants to stick together. If they're going to move, they want to move as a block and not have individual members out on a limb. So those conversations are ongoing, but I think that may be part of

The story here is that, you know, some of these blocs want to maintain solidarity within themselves, not just within the party as a whole. Jeff, is that how you're understanding this as well?

I mean, that's certainly one interpretation that I think makes sense, especially when it's something sort of on this scale. But the idea of moving away from the presumptive nominee of a presidential party, you probably want to move together a fair amount. And so the fact that we do see at least a handful of members who have more openly called for Biden to suspend his campaign or step aside or however you want to phrase it,

You see a lot of people saying they have concerns. And then you have this group that says that they're supporting Biden or they want him to stay in the race. But we also are hearing that it may be sort of your classic – they're saying one thing publicly, but they might be saying something else behind closed doors, some of those people who have expressed support.

And so that would, I think, point to what Mary's getting at, which is if we're going to jump off of the Biden ship, we're not going to do it until we're kind of all together on it. So in the meantime, we'll keep expressing support and see, you know, like our fingers, see how the winds blow and, you know, one way or the other as things kind of continue from there. A suicide pack. If we all go down, if one goes down, we all go down together. Yeah.

I mean, to be clear, pretty much all these members are in safe seats in the Congressional Black Caucus. Not all, but a lot of them are. I think the pattern's a little mixed. I mean, the fact that you have maybe more moderates saying that they'd like Biden to step aside. At the end of the day, you have a somewhat less, I guess, blue group. Although it's honestly kind of a mess if you kind of look at the district breakdown in terms of how blue or how purple a seat is.

But you tend to have somewhat more moderate members in somewhat less blue districts. So basically the idea is that these frontliners are afraid that if they are seen as close to Biden, that will hurt their reelection chances in November.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the thought, though, to be clear, there are members from safe seats who have called for Biden to step aside. So that so it's a little it's a little bit garbled. Yeah, I mean, I've been surprised that we haven't seen more frontliners come out calling for Biden to step aside. I mean, Hillary Scholten did just this morning. She's a freshman who flipped a seat in Grand Rapids area in 2022. And so she, you know, could be endangered if Biden drags down the ticket. Yeah.

But I mean, other than Hillary Shultz and I think what we've had, Angie Craig and Pat Ryan, and that's it in terms of the more vulnerable members that have stepped forward and called for Biden to step aside. So that's been a little surprising to me.

It does seem like there's a fair bit of the expressing concern group that might also fall into that category. Susan Wild in Pennsylvania. I mean, Jared Golden, who basically in Maine, who holds like the second reddest seat that Democrats control right now in the House that's running for reelection. He he basically has said recently he thinks Trump's going to win anyway. And also he said that he doesn't think he can vote for Biden. Which is quite a statement for a sitting member of a party to make.

Recent history would suggest that would get you in a lot of trouble in a future primary. Uh, but it doesn't seem to be quite, maybe not quite the case, uh, remains to be seen on the democratic side. Maine has shown us that frontline politics get really interesting and that there's a lot of concern that gets expressed. Um, of course I think Susan Collins, Susan Collins has become a meme over the past decade or so. Uh,

But Jared Golden joining the crew as well. Up until last night, not a single senator had said publicly that Joe Biden should step aside. Now, Peter Welch, senator from Vermont, has said the same. Is that like a significant threshold to cross? Like why? Why would senators hold back more? And why would Peter Welch be the first one?

We've certainly seen a number of senators in the expressing concern category. As of Nathaniel's publication, I think we had 17 on the expressing concern train. But I think, you know, it's the same sort of issue that you see in the House. There could be a significant, like, first mover disadvantage here to climb out on a limb and be the only one out there. If Biden doesn't step aside, there's a significant political disadvantage there.

And lastly, before we move on to the next data set that we have to consider, Nancy Pelosi was the news of the day on Wednesday because she went on Morning Joe and said, quote, I want him to do whatever he decides to do to the question of whether Biden should stay in the race. Now, of course, Biden has said again and again and again that he's staying in the race. So just leaving the door open suggests like, OK.

I hear that you've come to a decision. I would encourage you to consider continuing to think about your decision and maybe coming to a different decision is sort of the message that you're hearing from some other Democrats. And in a way, Nancy Pelosi here, she is no longer Democrats leader in the House and neither Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries, who are the party leaders in the Senate and House respectively, are.

have come out to say something similar, anything other than we're supporting Biden, basically. What's Nancy Pelosi's role here? Well, I think she's got a little bit more wiggle room, perhaps, but still a lot of influence as sort of like the Speaker Emerita or whatever, Leader Emerita on the Democratic side. People still look at her as like a vital force for things like fundraising, for keeping the party in order.

She still has, I guess, a lot of gravitas within the Democratic Party, but she's also not formally a leader anymore. And so that might give her more wiggle room to make statements about how she understands things and maybe even serve as a potential indicator of where things are going. And of course, what she said was not the most –

It was like damning with faint praise or something, you know, like not not exact. Oh, you know, I'll support the decision Biden makes. But as you said, Galen, just just keep thinking about it. I heard. Yeah. Keep pondering that decision that you've claimed you've already made. Yeah. Yeah. Just keep pondering it. You know, it's kind of telling, actually, some of these statements, you know, Tim Kaine, the U.S. senator from Virginia said.

said something kind of similar. He's like, I have complete confidence that Joe Biden will do the patriotic thing for the country. And he's going to make that decision. He's never disappointed me. And I'm like, let me just read between the lines real quick on what you might think the patriotic decision is in these circumstances. So that's like expressing concern, but

Or deferring to Biden, but like, come on, we could tell which way you're sort of pointing with that statement. Yeah, it sounds like so much of what we're hearing is ego management. Like we want Joe Biden to come to this decision on his own so he can make a big patriotic legacy defining speech if he is going to step aside, which is the thing that we hope that he does. But if we say so explicitly, he'll have to come to the podium tail between his legs after being sort of browbeat by the party into doing it.

Okay, next data set. This comes from Morning Consult, which tracks what it calls candidate buzz. They ask voters if they've heard anything positive or negative about a candidate in the past week, and they subtract the number who've heard something negative from the number who've heard something positive. For the duration of this presidential cycle, both candidates, Trump and Biden, have been underwater on this metric.

But the past two weeks have been the first time in the entire cycle when Biden's net buzz rating has dropped below Trump's and in a really big way. So Biden's net buzz rating right now is negative 45, while Trump's is negative 20.

I don't think anybody would be surprised by hearing that if they are listening to this podcast. That means they consume political news. And if you consume political news, you know, you can see with your eyes what probably the balance of coverage has been like over the past two weeks. But is that telling us something more? Is that telling us something about this race?

I mean, I guess what they're trying to measure is like, is this a good news cycle for these candidates? Because this is a weekly survey, right? So you can think like, is this particular news cycle beneficial? And the thing is, it's been negative for both of them throughout. But people have been hearing more positive news about Biden than about Trump throughout the campaign. And he still has been behind throughout most of the campaign, right?

I mean, it certainly shows that this is not a good news cycle for Biden. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be like race defining, right? Like because it's been negative for both of them the whole time. Biden's been behind the whole time. And he hasn't really slipped all that much in the polls so far. Just a couple of points. So I don't know if this is necessarily going to define the contours of the race, this sort of buzz measurement. Yeah.

if you're looking at the line chart that they have for this, Trump is at about the least negative point roughly over the last week or so than he had been throughout most of the campaign. And I think that speaks to the fact that most of what people are hearing about right now is Joe Biden. And most of it is negative because it's in the context of whether he should stay in the race or not. And that at the end of the day is sucking up all the oxygen. And so while people might still hear negative things about Donald Trump,

Most of the coverage is on Biden. It's centered on Biden. Trump's got to be thrilled with this, right? Like this is a great situation, all this coverage. And the thing is, if Biden stays in the race, what is going to happen is that the rest of the campaign is going to be about this. And if he has another stumble of any kind, it will bring it right back up to the top if it's even slipped at all. And I just think that that's just like a fundamental challenge that his campaign faces now. And it takes eyes off of Trump and the whole strategy for Democrats is

has been to make the election about Trump. And right now they are not able to do that at all. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to even imagine next week talking about the RNC with this drama still playing out in the background. Right. Oh, is Trump going to pick a VP? Huh? Interesting. Oh, that's like a one day story. Like what? Right. I'm getting on a plane to Milwaukee on Sunday being like, actually, the only story in the world is still Joe Biden.

And we will talk about the platform in a second. Don't worry. But just taking note here, for basically the past nine years of coverage, we've had unpopular people vying for the presidency. And it's basically been a rule that you want to make the campaign about the other person. And to the extent that you can, you might win, right? Like...

In 2016, when Trump was underwater to historic levels as a candidate for president, and Hillary Clinton was also underwater, but a little bit less, like if you could make the story about Hillary Clinton's emails or the FBI investigation, like that was a good cycle for Trump. And if the reverse, you could make the cycle about, you know, Donald Trump's Access Hollywood tape or any of the many different scandals that surrounded him during that election, you were in a good place. Joe Biden effectively made the...

the 2020 race, a referendum on an unpopular Trump presidency. And now, you know, they're again vying to be the person who's not in the spotlight. It's such a different dynamic than maybe elections in the past and even the way a primary works.

Right. Usually the way that you get support is by being out in front of the American people looking like a big shot, looking good. You know, this moment during the 2008 campaign. Right. Barack Obama was going to Berlin and giving these massive speeches and he was becoming a celebrity. And all of that media attention redounded ultimately to his benefit. Right.

And now we're in such a different place politically. It's hard to imagine what Biden can really do to change this because Jeff is right. Anytime he goes out to the podium and has one little flub, everyone's going to be scrutinizing every moment of what he does. I mean, I think Jeff is right that if Biden stays in the race, we're going to be talking about this until November and beyond. All right. As I promised, let's move on and talk about the party platforms. But first, a break.

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Today's good or bad use of polling example comes from YouGov. They recently published an article titled, Who Wins on Policy? American Support for Biden's and Trump's Proposals. And they asked Americans about 56 different policy proposals, 28 made by Biden and 28 made by Trump. Respondents were not told which candidate proposed a particular policy. And as a side note, this survey was released two weeks ago, so before the RNC's platform was released. So,

The survey found that Biden's policies are more popular than Trump's. Almost all of Biden's policies polled, 27 out of 28, were supported by more people than not. By contrast, only nine of Trump's 28 policies have net positive support. If you look at proposals that have a raw majority, so 51% or greater, Biden leads Trump 24 to 6 that have an absolute majority support. None of the Trump policies...

polled enjoyed support greater than 60%, while 14 or half of Bidens did. Now, YouGov acknowledged that its word choice could have shaped the results, but it adds, quote, the contrast between 27 of 28 and 9 of 28 is so big that it would be unlikely to change with small revisions to the survey. So, Jeffrey, is this a good or bad use of polling? I mean, I think it's a good use of polling. What it might connect to is something that some political scientists have talked about, which is that

Americans are symbolically conservative, but operationally liberal. And essentially what that means is that if you ask about sort of overall values, say, you know, should government be bigger or smaller? Americans might be more likely to pick the conservative option. They might say we'd like less government. But if you ask them about specific policies, say, like creating a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants, they might say, well, we'd like less government.

They actually might be more likely to pick the liberal, the more liberal option, the option we would view as being more of a democratic type option. And there's like a lot that goes into that, but it's just – it's like a thing that we've seen time and time again in U.S. politics. So there is a connection clearly between politics and policy, but it's sometimes a bit more complicated. And also the issues that are most important to voters are going to differ in some cases from those policy questions, right?

And for instance, like right now, inflation and immigration are like the top two issues. And those probably favor the GOP is like an issue portfolio. And also-

The people in question, the candidates matter. Biden's unpopular. Trump's not popular either, but Biden is a particularly unpopular president right now, and he's the incumbent. And also I thought what was interesting with that poll was that Americans were more likely to say they had a clearer picture of what Trump's plans were than Biden's. So even if the things that Trump is proposing, if you really dig down into them, aren't necessarily that popular –

I think it just shows an interesting disconnect between sort of a policy by policy poll and the way people are thinking about them and then the actual reality of what's going on in politics. So I think it's a good use for just having that information and being able to make that comparison. All right. One good use of polling. Mary, where do you come down? I think it depends on what you're using it for. All right. Okay. I mean, this is a fine...

use of polling if you're interested in finding out, do voters support various policy proposals? But I don't think it's a good use of polling if you're trying to decide, like, do voters prefer Biden or Trump? That's not what this shows. You know, one of the things I noticed here, if you look at the policies proposed by Trump, you know, Galen, you mentioned in the intro that there were six of those that were above 50% support. And

And of those six, three are about immigration, which is like his biggest issue in the campaign. Right. So the policies that Trump does have that are popular with the American public are the ones he's running on. Whereas if you look at the top policies, you know, the ones that proposed by Joe Biden that got the highest levels of support, you see stuff like requiring presidential candidates to publicly disclose their income tax returns for the last 10 years. Right.

Sure, people support that. That is also not an issue on which they are going to determine their vote for president. So I think it's a fine use of polling if you want to know, do people support these policies? It's not so good in terms of determining voting behavior.

Yeah, I thought that was really important that we could have sort of done a meta analysis and ranked all of these according to salience. Because you go in and you see that if you sort of first look at Gallup's most important problem polling for the American public, and then you look at this, you see, oh, actually, Donald Trump has...

the most popular policies on the things that Americans say are most important to them with some caveats around the economy. I mean, so a position that Biden holds is increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Sixty six percent of Americans support that. I'm not saying that that would solve inflation, which is what Americans chief concern is. But you don't hear Biden talk about that all that much anyway. Like,

in that George Stephanopoulos interview, the main message that he had was that he had kept NATO together and that he was going toe to toe with authoritarians around the globe. Okay, that might actually also be popular, keeping NATO together, but it is not something that Americans care very much about literally at all, like actually at all. The salience piece here is important when you're analyzing this. And just to hit it home on this, I'll give you some numbers. So

You said of the six Trump policies that enjoyed more than more than 50 percent, three were related to immigration. So that was remain in Mexico, mass deportations and building a wall. So raw majority of Americans support those things. The other two relate to gender identity. So banning treatment for trans minors and establishing that there are only two genders. And then the last one is phasing out imports of essential goods from China.

The least popular things for Trump are giving the president control over regulatory agencies such as Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, changing the law to allow presidents to fire civil service workers for any reason, and abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Least popular for Trump. Okay, most popular for Biden, requiring criminal and mental background checks for all gun purchases. One, funding two years of free community college for all Americans. Two,

And as you said, the income tax return release requirement. His least popular are pledging 10 years of U.S. military support for Ukraine, only 30% support, 47% oppose, increasing grants for students going to historically black colleges and incentivizing states to restore voting rights to convicted felons. Having heard all of that, most popular and least popular, what does that tell you about

This campaign and also sort of cross checking that with what you hear the candidates talk about.

Yeah, I mean, when it comes to what you hear the candidates talk about, you know, I mentioned the popular policies on immigration from Trump. When I was looking through this data, I was trying to pick out, you know, what are the messages that I've heard from Biden on the campaign trail that are mentioned in this data? And I actually had kind of a hard time identifying any of these things as being something that we've heard from Biden on the campaign trail. Now, I don't know if that means that maybe Yougev could have asked some different stuff, stuff he's talking more about on the campaign trail. But I think

You know, it seems to me that the policy landscape coming out of the Biden campaign is a little bit muddled. So this is the kind of data that the campaign honestly could be looking at to determine how to craft a message that's really going to appeal to people, understanding what is and is not going to be popular with the public, because I think there is something of a muddled message there.

Yeah, that gets back to the finding in the poll that I think 62% of American adults said that they had a very clear, somewhat clear idea about what Donald Trump's policies were or what he would pursue if he were elected president, but only 47% said the same of Biden.

And maybe that gets back to the fact that the issues that are most on Americans' minds are ones that, for at least Trump with immigration, tend to be more popular. And there's just like a stronger connection between higher salience issues and

with Trump, whereas with Biden, the higher salience issues connected to him are frustration with inflation and potentially frustration with immigration. And inflation's more broadly across the board in terms of partisanship. Immigration's more Republican heavy, but still a lot of independents are worried about immigration as well. So if you're Joe Biden and you're trying to win over voters-

These are not necessarily winning issues for you right now. And that's a tough spot to be in, especially when the main thing that people are thinking about with you now is, well, they were already thinking about your age and now they're thinking about it even more. Yeah. And if you look at Biden on the stump, I think he spends a lot of time talking about his record rather than his future policies. So I think that may be part of the of the disconnect in terms of understanding what the Biden administration or what a second Biden administration would want to do.

So notably in this, Biden's position on abortion is popular, legalizing abortion in most cases throughout the U.S., 58% support. The RNC released its proposed platform this week. It was a unique document. It was a sort of bold-faced list of... Caps lock. Caps lock list of, I think, absenteeism.

I think aspirations may be more than policies. So, for example, point one is seal the border and stop the migrant invasion to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. Three, end inflation and make America affordable again. Easy, easy. Just end inflation. Four, make America the dominant energy producer in the world by far, exclamation point. And other things like unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success.

That's part of the platform. So what's notably not in this document is...

Specifics? Well, there's specifics in the larger document, sort of. I meant like there's no sub-bullet point with like, we'll take this step and this step to accomplish said aspiration. Also not explicitly endorsing a ban on abortion. What they say is Republicans, quote, will oppose late-term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care access to birth control and IVF.

And the documents also make statements that apply with Trump's views that the issue should be determined at the state level. So it seems like Trump is doing something to mitigate his party's least popular positions. Is that fair to say? Like, how should we what should we make? How should we make sense of this document?

I mean, it sounds like there were a lot of conservatives who were not necessarily happy about the wording or the lack of mention and the we'll just leave it to the states. I mean, you have people out there like Tim Scott from South Carolina, who at one point was discussed in the VP conversation, seems to have slipped at this point, but who favored a 15 week federal ban. And so there is support among conservatives.

some Republicans to have some sort of federal action limiting access to abortion, limiting the right to abortion. But here's Trump saying, no, no, leave it to the states, which means that liberal states, a lot of liberal states are going to keep abortion access where it is or even expand it in response to what's going on. And I think that

That is not what a lot of conservatives want. But Trump is trying to say, hey, look, I'm not that extreme. Vote for me. And in an environment where a lot of people actually think that Biden is like too liberal, like we've seen polling on that.

And this is maybe the one area where Republicans are guaranteed to be viewed as too conservative. Trump is trying to find a way to moderate on that front. But do you think he really can? Like, don't you think that the opinions are pretty baked in, in terms of what voters think the two parties think about abortion? Well, I think it would be easier for Biden to paint Trump with the most extreme brush if Trump just...

just continued to say, what was the thing he was quoted a while back? He's like, well, I appointed three justices and they got rid of Roe or whatever. If you were just leading with that all the time, it would probably make it even easier. At the same time, like obviously all Democrats have to say is Trump appointed three justices to the court who all voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. So I do think things are pretty baked in, but I think it's just a question of the voters who are most maybe up for grabs, who are less engaged and

and are frustrated with like the state of the economy, the ones who actually could be winnable, like you could actually win them over, or the people who say they don't like either candidate, which we know is a significant chunk of the electorate. If you want them to show up and maybe they don't like Trump or Biden, maybe they'll be like, eh, things were better under Trump, I guess. It was a little crazy, but it was better economically. So you're taking away something that Democrats are trying at least to take away something that Democrats can just slam you on continuously.

I just don't know that that will be successful, right? Like, I was looking at some data on this. And in June, Data for Progress did a survey where they actually asked voters...

If they thought that Trump or Biden supported various abortion policies. I mean, that was obviously before the platform came out. So but it's it was June. Right. So Trump's already been trying to soften his message a little bit on this issue. And even then, 50 percent of voters said that they believed Trump supports a total ban on abortion with exceptions for rape and incest.

50%. And that was across the board, not just like Democrats bumping up those numbers. 22% said they thought he opposed it and 28% weren't sure. So you've already got half the electorate basically believing that Trump sits at the most extreme end of this conversation. I don't think most of those people are going to hear about the RNC platform. I think that this...

Attitude is probably pretty well baked in. And I don't know that there's anything that Trump could do to shift that, especially because he spent so much time taking credit for overturning Roe.

And it's underpinned by 50 years of the parties defining themselves on this issue. But it does strike me that it seems a lot easier to jettison your party's unpopular positions when you basically control the entire party apparatus. And lawmakers have learned from basically a decade of experience that if they break with you, they'll find themselves on the end of the stick. I mean, to that point, Galen,

didn't even really have a platform in 2020. Yeah, they just didn't do it. They just didn't do it. And now they do. They do have one this time, but it's, you know, 14 caps lock numbered list. It's not exactly like the

the traditional party platform document where you lay out a whole bunch of detail and lengthy, lengthy things about each issue that sort of like the historical, like when, when political scientists or historians go back and try to understand how party politics evolved over time, they look at like the platforms are super important documents for that analysis. And,

And like the 2021 didn't exist for the Republicans and the 2024 one would give you some limited information, but maybe not too much in the way of specifics. And so I just think that it's telling and it does speak maybe to the power that Trump has over the Republican Party as its head and in a way that is not the same on the other side. And to that point, you know, there are plenty of folks in Trump's broader orbit that support unpopular positions. And Democrats have been trying to

hit home on this point by emphasizing Project 2025. And sort of for folks who don't know what it is, because according to the polling, the vast majority of Americans don't know what it is. It is basically a presidential transition project from the Heritage Foundation aimed at providing policy and staffing resources in the event of a Trump win in

And so a little bit more background. Several key former members of the Trump administration and Trump's PAC funds are involved with the project. The leaders are Paul Danz and Spencer Kratian, who both served in Trump's administration. And the main objectives of Project 2025, it's going to be to build a new government.

It seems like it's a 900 page document. So I did not read the entire thing. And I couldn't in good conscience ask the producers to read the entire thing either. But broadly, it is to expand presidential power, making more federal bureaucratic jobs, political appointees.

drastically cut federal agencies, including the Education Department and even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And then maybe most notably to what we were just talking about, it supports limiting access to birth control, the birth control pill Mifepristone.

Now, Trump has some awareness of what is popular and what is unpopular amongst the American public. And he has, in response to talk about Project 2025, said that he doesn't know anything about it. He wishes the folks well. He doesn't know anything about it, has maybe even dissed some of the proposals. But at the end of the day, that's...

This is still coming from folks who are not just within the conservative ecosystem, because there are a lot of people within the conservative ecosystem who have at this point almost no ties to President Trump, but are very closely tied to Trump's former administration and seemingly are getting ready for his next. How are you all processing Project 2025 and sort of what it's become as a talking point for Democrats and the role it could play in the campaign?

I haven't read the document, the whole 900 pages either, Caitlin. So, but some of this stuff that's been thrown around is the scary stuff in here, like getting rid of cabinet departments and things like that. We've been hearing that kind of talk from Republicans for a really long time. Famously Rick Perry during one of the Republican debates. Yeah. He wants to get rid of some of the departments. We'll find out what they are. Yeah. Still waiting for the third one. Right. So, I mean,

I think there's a lot here that is sort of standard issue, very conservative positioning. The thing that's new here is these sort of ideas about reshaping the executive branch, its relationship to justice, the relationship between the White House and appointees in different departments. That stuff is sort of new. And so I think that's perhaps the bit of this that people are looking at.

Kind of wide eyed. I would be interested to know really how much of this is practically doable versus just, you know, things you might talk about aspirationally. Yeah. And to come back to the polling on this, changing the law to allow presidents to fire civil service workers for any reason is underwater in that YouGov poll.

by, let me quickly do the math, 37 percentage points and about the same for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. So less than a quarter of Americans support both of those things. What's interesting there is if you ask the question about firing civil service folks in a slightly different way, I suspect that the Republican support would be much, much higher. If you wanted to clean up the deep state...

The support is probably through the roof among Republicans and obviously among some Republican-leaning independents. So that might be one where the wording matters because I think that there would be plenty of conservatives who would essentially be fine with reinstituting a spoil system where the party controls appointees to a number of important positions.

bureaucratic offices. In doing so, they could eliminate what they claim are liberal bureaucrats who are the deep state running things kind of attitude, and they can undo that. And also in the meantime, get people who are more closely aligned with Trump, making it easier for him to carry out

his various goals, even if they run even run counter to like the purposes of the departments as they were set up or or even potentially law. I mean, you have to remember it right at the end of his his time in office before the 2020 election. He issued an executive order that tried to create a new job category dubbed Schedule F that would exempt employees and policy related positions from civil service protections and make them easier to remove. So like

They've already kind of tried to do this. And if he had stayed in office, obviously, maybe he would have been able to pursue that more openly in a second term that he didn't get. So in some ways, like we have heard this, it's just that it was right at the end that

of his time in the White House. And so we were distracted by some other stuff. They were a little distracted. So it would seem, though, and understandably, that a second Trump administration would pursue such a goal because they already tried once. There is a more maybe even political science question here, which is what do politicians run on versus what do they do when they're in office? So, for example,

Donald Trump didn't run on Paul Ryan's tax plan when he was campaigning for office in 2016, but that ended up being...

the biggest legislative change during his presidency. I don't know, maybe at least pre-COVID, there was some pretty big stimulus laws passed during COVID, but we never really heard about that. There were other things, you know, the things that he talked about a lot, he tried to do, he was not so effective at building a wall or deportations and whatnot. But,

What do we know about the relationship between what politicians campaign on and what they actually do when they're in office? Because maybe the underlying thing that Democrats are trying to say about Project 2025 is Trump is going to jettison it today, but he's going to embrace it in January of 2025. So it's a little dated now, but there was a 538 article back in 2016 by Timothy Hill that took a look at sort of the share of promises that presidents kept and whether they kept them.

And for the most part, what the studies showed was that more than half of their promises were kept. But this, to be clear, only ran up into the early 2000s. It's a little harder, I think, to say now, but I think my thinking with Trump and the way people perceive maybe the gap between what it's perceived and what he actually might do as president, I think it's important to remember that when he took office the first time, the Republican Party was

Right.

And now the difference is that the Republican Party in Congress is much Trumpier, much more in line with him in general. Most of those who have even openly opposed Trump have been pushed to the wayside. And so at this point, I would imagine that.

that a Republican-controlled Congress in a new Trump presidency would be much more pliable to do what Trump wants than it was back in, say, 2017. Yeah, I mean, you see the same thing in the Senate too, right? The voices that have been critical of Trump, you know, your Jeff Flakes, your Mitt Romneys, they're gone. I'm curious to see, because we don't really have enough data yet, but I'm curious to see what our forecast looks like for the House when that's ready, which will be later this summer. Yeah.

Because if the margins remain as thin as they are for the Republicans right now, they can only lose, what, three, four votes in order to pass legislation. And I suspect that there are still going to be at least three or four institutionalists left in the Republican Party, even as the party has hewed more closely to Trump. So I think part of this is going to depend a lot on margins. All right. Interesting. Well, we're going to leave it there. Thank you, Mary and Jeff.

Thank you, Galen. Thank you very much, Galen. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon. Whenever news breaks...

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