Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - A peek into a Trumpless election, or just a mirage? With Kristen Soltis Anderson

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

Kristen Soltis Anderson is a GOP pollster, messaging strategist, and Founding Partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm that serves brands, trade associations, nonprofits, and political clients. Through her work at Echelon, she regularly advises corporate and government leaders. Kristen also leads focus groups for The New York Times’ opinion section “America in Focus” series. Items discussed in this episode: “Republican Voters Aren’t Looking to Be Rescued From Trump” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/opinion/donald-trump-presidential-campaign.html [nytimes.com] “These 11 Republican Voters Can’t Say Who Will Win in 2024, but They Know Who Will Lose” https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/22/opinion/republican-debate-focus-group.html [nytimes.com] Codebook by Kristen Soltis Anderson: https://kristensoltisanderson.substack.com/p/i-was-wrong-high-school-debate-might

Did that debate happen in an alternate dimension on like Earth 3, where Donald Trump never comes down the escalator, but it actually doesn't have a lot of impact or resonance in Earth 1, the timeline that we're all in? Or does it actually have an impact? Is there like a, you know, the empire strikes back kind of moment where when Republicans get to see these other options, maybe what felt stale eight years ago feels new again. I don't know. 2016, the conventional wisdom was that there was no way Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination. And then it was there was no way that Donald Trump could become president.

Both predictions were wrong. It seems that in 2024, the conventional wisdom is there's no way that Donald Trump will not be the Republican nominee for president. Will the conventional wisdom be wrong again? I tend to think that it is more fluid than the conventional wisdom would lead us to believe and that is why today we are turning to a pollster now why are we turning to a pollster one polling as we've discussed on this podcast before is not really predictive it doesn't tell you really where things are going but it is a snapshot in time and this is a pretty important snapshot because we just had the first Republican debate and

we have a whole slew of news on the Trump candidacy and Donald Trump and his various indictments. And so we wanted to bring on an expert to unpack all of this and try to analyze this moment we're in. We did go to a pollster, but not any pollster. We're going to Chris Soltis Anderson, who is a pollster and a commentator and author of a terrific book called The Selfie Vote, where millennials are leading America and how Republicans keep up, as well as a Substack newsletter called Codebook. Now, Kristen is the founding partner of Echelon Insights, which is a polling firm, an opinion

research firm, and data analytics firm that works with brands and trade associations and political clients. And she also, interestingly, leads focus groups for the New York Times opinion section, the America in Focus series. She led one such focus group that she wrote about in the New York Times last week. And then she has another piece up right now that just popped that we're going to talk a little bit about in the New York Times. And both pieces address an issue that I've been focused on, which is whether or not concerns about electability of Donald Trump in a general election are shared beyond just me or the people I spend time with. That is to say, if we assume, and this may be a sweeping assumption, that there's no way Trump can beat Joe Biden or another Democrat in 2024.

Do other Republican voters feel that way? More importantly, do Republican voters who say they're going to vote for Donald Trump and support Donald Trump and want Donald Trump to be president worry that nominating Donald Trump could result in President Biden or Vice President Harris becoming the next president? So these are some of the questions we wanted to bounce off Kristen, including is it too late for new candidates to enter the race? And finally, was it a good idea or a bad idea for Donald Trump to skip the debate? These are just some of the topics we try to decode at this particular moment in the Republican nominating process, just after the first debate, just after Donald Trump's fourth arraignment. And as for decoding, how do you even decode

something as weird as a presidential debate in which the frontrunner for the presidential race didn't even show up to the debate? Kristen Soltis Anderson will help us figure it out. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time, first time guest, someone I've been wanting to have on for some time, Kristen Soltis Anderson, well-known authoritative figure in the world of polling and messaging and political strategy and the founder of the firm Echelon Insights. Kristen, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me, Dan. There's a lot I want to talk to you about. And as I mentioned in the introduction, this focus group

you just did is extremely timely, as is this piece you have popping right now in the New York Times. But before we do that, that pivots off some of the insights from your focus group. But before we do that, I just, since it's the first time we're having this conversation, at least on a podcast, can you just describe for our listeners what a day in the life of the work of Kristen Soltis Anderson is. What is Echelon Insights doing? And then we'll get into kind of a more granular discussion about what you're working on right now as it relates to these focus groups. For sure.

So at Echelon Insights, our job is to help leaders listen. Nowadays, there are lots of ways to try to hear what your voters, your customers, your employees, et cetera, are all saying, whether that's doing really high quality opinion research, focus groups, the more traditional tools of the trade, things like digital insights. We think that in order to lead well, you have to listen and learn first. And so we at Echelon do tons of pieces of research to try to understand where people are really at. And it's important for leaders, especially who can sometimes get caught up in a bubble where they spend all day talking

to other people like them, other people in their industry. But at the end of the day, the voters in Iowa are going to have an outsized influence on what happens on their business, on their policy idea, et cetera. So that's what we do. A lot of our clients have political interests in some way, shape, or form. When we work for political clients, they tend to be on the Republican side of the aisle, but we work for mostly nonpartisan type folks. And this is the real high season for us because everybody wants to know what are voters thinking. Okay.

So the key point there, I think, is most people live in a bubble, and they are in this loop of hearing what they believe from other people, reflecting onto them what they all believe, and it's like this ping-pong going back and forth among people who are just trying to help each other score, to mix a bunch of metaphors there. And the loop I'm in right now, which is one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation, is the conversation about the Republican primaries and this notion about the inevitability

of Trump being the Republican nominee. And I personally have a view that it is not inevitable that he will be the nominee. We can get into why that is. But he's definitely a frontrunner. The question is, is he a durable frontrunner? And the polling certainly would suggest that he is a frontrunner, if not a durable frontrunner. And I guess what I keep thinking is, but he is going to be in so much trouble if he's the nominee. And but he is going to be in so much trouble if he's the nominee. The Republicans are going to be in so much trouble in the general election because Donald Trump may be the only Republican on the on the stage these days, or at least among most of the candidates who could lose to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And isn't that so obvious that Trump is not a viable candidate against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And isn't that so obvious that Trump is not a viable candidate

against Joe Biden? And then I see this focus group that you did. And I did this. I saw this poll that CBS did that said that that may be what I believe, but Republican voters don't believe that he is unelectable. So what is the disconnect? What are you seeing? What did your focus group find? So there's this really fascinating contradiction where on the one hand, most voters think that their own side is much less powerful than the other side, right? You have Democrats that look at Republicans and they say, you guys control dark money and you have the gerrymandering and the filibuster and you have all these things going in your and you have, you know, Mitch McConnell's super crazy political

smarts and ability to do whatever it takes. And on our side, we're all a bunch of wimps and we don't know how to wield power. And then Republicans will say the same thing. They'll be like, you guys, you guys are the ones who are ruthless. You all control, you know, the media, entertainment. You control the levers of the federal government and the deep state or whatever it is. Increasingly, Republicans view C-suites as being kind of a lever of progressive power. And so both sides feel very under siege, while at the same time feeling supremely confident about their party's ability to win in November of next year.

So Democrats look at someone like Donald Trump and they're like, America's never going to do that again. There's no way. But then Republicans look at Joe Biden and they think people cannot possibly vote for this guy. He's too old. He stumbles over his words. He's increasingly frail. Americans must be seeing what I see, right? And so there's no way Joe Biden can win. And so in our focus group for The New York Times, we brought in 11 Republican primary voters from across four of the early states, right? Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada. And we asked, okay, at the end of this focus group, and plenty of them had criticism of Donald Trump.

They did not all love him. One described him as a train wreck. But we asked, show of hands, how many of you think that no matter who Republicans nominate, they will beat Joe Biden? Every hand went up. So it is in part not necessarily that they all love Donald Trump or think he's perfect, but it's that they just view Joe Biden as so frail and so weak a candidate. They just can't fathom. This goes back to that, you know, thinking outside your bubble problem. They talk to people all day who think

Joe Biden is terrible, that the last few years have been awful. Wouldn't you rather go back to the Trump years? And they just think it's a given that swing voters will feel the same. And frankly, if you look at general election polling, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are running neck and neck. Like for all that these voters are being told, there's no way Donald Trump can win. That's not actually what national polls are telling us right now. Now, Donald Trump's unfavorables are sky high. You had Nikki Haley say this in last week's debate. You know, she made the case, Donald Trump's the most unpopular politician in America. We have to go a different direction. But there's a reason that statement got kind of a mixed reaction from the audience. And it's that people go, yeah, I get that Donald Trump's not

everybody's flavor, but he's better than Joe Biden hiding in his basement, right? And that's why this electability argument just has not stuck yet. OK, so if you look at the 2020 election, Joe Biden got 306 electoral college votes to Donald Trump's 232, but on the popular vote, you have Biden with over 81 million votes and Trump with just slightly over 74 million votes. So call it seven plus million popular votes. Now, obviously, those are not evenly distributed. So it's important not to read too much into the difference between Biden and Trump last time.

However, some subset of that of those seven million votes were independent voters meaning voters who voted for brock obama potentially in 2012 and then voted for donald trump in 2016 and voted again for um for joe biden or for the democrat in 2020 the republicans you're talking to assume that those voters i mean if those independent voters aren't in play i mean i just think this is a math issue if those independent voters aren't in play i mean i just think this is a math issue if those independent voters aren't in play especially given where they're concentrated and how close the margins are in some of these battleground states in the general election there's no way trump can win so those independent voters have to be in play and these people in the focus group you're talking to these republican primary voters in these four early states, you're saying they believe that those independent voters who voted for Obama and Joe Biden are going to vote for Donald Trump this

time. You're right. That's what they think. Now, I don't think that's correct. We did another Times focus group prior to the Republican one where we actually talked to exactly those voters you're describing, people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but have since become disappointed in his presidency. They reported not approving of the job he's doing as president. So I did a 90 minute focus group with these folks, and they had plenty of criticism of Biden. When I asked how many of you think he's a strong leader, no hands went up. When I asked how many of you think Joe Biden has what it takes to be the president until the year 2028? No hands went up. And yet at the end of that focus group, the question I asked was,

how many of you regret your vote for Joe Biden and in 2024 would switch your vote to Donald Trump or a Republican candidate? And none of them raised their hand. They were all too terrified of the prospect of what another Trump presidency might look like. There were one or two that said, I might just not vote if my choice is between Biden and Trump. And that's where I think Biden's potential vulnerability is, is not necessarily someone who voted for Biden in 2020 switching, but someone who voted for Biden in 2020 going, this is the rematch from hell. I'm out. No, thank you. And staying home. But that's a big gamble for Republicans to take. And so I remain in some ways baffled when I see numbers like this CBS poll where they asked people, you know, for each of these candidates, do you think each of

them is a long shot to beat Biden, might beat Biden or would definitely beat Biden? And the only Republican candidate that Republican voters, a majority think would definitely beat Biden. And the only Republican candidate that Republican voters, a majority think would definitely beat Biden is Donald Trump. And it's not even close. Even Ron DeSantis, only 35% of Republican voters think that DeSantis would be a sure bet against Biden. So this notion that I kind of believe and that I think, Dan, you and the people you talk to believe that, gosh, if we could just get rid of Trump, any of those other folks who were up on that debate stage last week would probably fare really well against Joe Biden if only we could get there. Republican voters have not yet internalized that message. And do they are these people you're talking to? Are they separate from the being all bought in on Trump's electability? Are they also passionate

about Trump? Do you think they'd walk on hot coals for Trump whether or not they thought he was electable? I think about half of Trump's voters are the kind who would walk on hot coals for him. They are the kind who, for instance, in that CBS poll say that one of the reasons they're considering Trump is they want payback for 2020, that they want to show support for him in the face of these attacks on him from the legal system. You know, those kinds of folks, I think, make up about half of the people in our polls today who say I'm a Trump voter. But I do think that I mean, that puts him at a ceiling of between 30 and 35 percent, depending on which poll you're looking at. So I don't think he's inevitable, but it will take peeling off all of those other folks who right now they're with Trump because they like him personally.

They know more about him. He feels like a safer bet because he's not an unknown quantity to them. And frankly, he's won before. That's the other thing that's important to point out here and why these electability messages haven't stuck with Republican voters yet is a lot of the people making them also said in 2016, there's no way this guy can win. And he won. And so it's almost as though it was that the message now falls on deaf ears because they've heard it before. You know, it's interesting. In 2016, all the smartsets said there's no way Trump can win the nomination. If he did win the nomination, there's no way he would win the general election. And I feel like the smartset now, the conventional wisdom is there's no way Trump cannot win the party right now that there's really no stopping him? You and I and everyone else who does what we do in one form or another should just basically take the next 15 months off and just wait for this inevitable rematch? Or do you think it's more fluid than that? So while I'm not going to Vegas to put money down on any of Trump's opponents, I don't think it's inevitable.

And the reason why I don't think it's inevitable is that you still have a lot of Republican voters who have not tuned in yet, that you have a lot of Republicans who are not as in the weeds. They're not junkies about this stuff like you and I are. For many of them, last week's debate was the first time they've really got to hear someone like a Tim Scott or even, frankly, someone like a Ron DeSantis or a Nikki Haley, people that we think of as having been ubiquitous on the political scene for some time. Your average voter is really only just kind of beginning to pay attention to an election that's going to be decided months from now. So I think that's important to point out. As voters get to know some of these other candidates, they could prove appealing enough to pull Trump back. The other thing that I think is important is right

now there's this rally around Trump effect, right? He posts his mugshot and people are like, this is iconic and all of this nonsense around the legal side. But as he has to spend more and more time in courtrooms and spend more and more money on lawyers, does, it's justified, they begin viewing him as more electorally risky as he spends more time off the campaign trail dealing with this distraction. So let's stay on that for a moment, because I don't think people always really internalize in a concrete way what that means. It means his bandwidth and his mind space, a considerable part of it is going to have to be dedicated to his legal defenses. And it's not just one legal defense, which would be very taxing. It's like multiple legal defenses in multiple jurisdictions, in some cases happening at the same time. It is considerable financial expense, as we're seeing. Just the bail in Fulton

County alone was $200,000, not to mention tens of millions of dollars of legal fees. And then the fear concern that some of the co-conspirators may flip because, well, for a variety of reasons as to why they may flip. So he may have, it's kind of like a snakes on a plane situation. You don't know who's with you and who's working against you. And not so and not to mention running for office and as you said images of being in the courtroom in fulton county in georgia they do allow cameras in the courtroom so we may have a situation which we haven't seen yet before of just days and days and days of footage of donald trump sitting there and his lawyers boxing him in terms of how he can perform in the courtroom and how he behaves because he has to behave like a normal human being,

a normal defendant, because there are legal implications that may not be the same calculus as his political calculations. So I guess while we've seen no evidence that all these factors may weigh in on electability, you're saying it's just like that part is inevitable. It is going to have an effect one way or the other on on his ability to focus on getting elected. I think just because he has not dropped in the polls with these indictments coming down does not mean that they can't take a toll over time on his standing with these voters. OK, so now let's talk. So assuming you're you're right and I my bias is I hope that you are. And again, you you you get into this in the in the New York Times piece that's that's just up. And you got into this in the piece in the Times piece you wrote last week.

Assuming some of these other candidates are getting a look, a new look, a second look, or you're saying a first time look. Let's talk about some of those candidates and specifically with the now in the rearview mirror, we have the perspective of the of the debate of the Republican presidential debate. Who jumped out at you at this debate as having done particularly well? I think Nikki Haley jumps out as having done particularly well. And this is backed up a little bit by the 538 Washington Post Ipsos poll of debate watchers that came out afterwards. I normally don't put very much stock in these post-debate polls, especially the ones that claim to be snap polls the night of. I think sometimes it's a little bit silly, and I don't really know who they're capturing. So this is important just as a methodology matter,

matter of methodology, because I know you care a lot about polling methodology. So, because I get this all the time from friends and colleagues where there's a big event whether it's a big convention speech or big debate and then some snap poll comes out overnight and they're like oh my gosh so and so crushed it in his convention speech or oh my gosh it transformed the race oh my gosh that moment in the debate turned the race upside down just can you as a method methodological matter, can you explain why those overnight polls tend to be pointless? I think they tend to be pointless for two reasons. One, it's very hard to sample the right people. There's a very small, even though we

see these ratings, oh, 13 million, however many it was, say that, you know, that they vote, they watched this debate. You know, how many people sat down and watched it intensely for all two hours, etc. It's hard to know that. And so I feel like just the sampling matter alone is very hard. But also think about who are the types of people to tune in and watch something like that for two hours. They're usually the most diehard of diehard. You find this after State of the Unions as well. Who are the people that tune in to watch a full State of the Union? They're the people who really, really like the president. And so that's why you always see these polls after the fact say, oh, look, everybody who watched the speech liked the speech. Well, no kidding. People who don't want to watch Joe Biden talk for two hours

don't turn on their television. What I like about the poll from FiveThirtyEight and the Washington Post is that they surveyed likely Republican primary voters before the debate. And then after the debate, they asked people, like, did you watch it? So not everybody's going to say yes, or some people may say they saw clips, things like that. And then they just asked, who are you considering voting for? So they didn't ask, did the debate change your mind? They didn't say who won the debate. They're just asking a simple question about preference. Who are you considering or not considering? And on that metric, Nikki Haley was the clear winner. Initially, she starts off with only 30 percent of Republican likely voters saying that they're considering her. Post-debate, it shoots up to almost 47 percent. And that was

absolutely the biggest jump you saw of anybody else on that stage. Doug Burgum got a jump from about 5% to 12%, so good for him. And then Vivek Ramaswamy, he got a little bit of a bump. He went from 41% considering him to 46%. But nobody got a bounce even as close to as large as Haley in terms of consideration. Now, that doesn't mean that they're now locked in as Haley voters, but it means she got a lot of people to give her a second look. And so that's the best you can hope for in a first debate like this. And the other, it seems to me, the other reason that polls the first night

don't necessarily matter as much in addition to the reasons you said is that the importance of these debates is not exactly, I mean, sure, it's what happens that night of the debate where you have 10 or 15 million people given Trump was in this debate as opposed to the 30 million that watched it in 2015, that first debate. But still, a lot of people. So it's important that a lot of people watch it. Your point is fair when it's somewhat self-selecting who sticks it out. But it's not just the debate.

It's all the blanketed press coverage that happens after the debate. So there's the debate. So you said, for instance, Nikki Haley did well just the debate. It's the, it's the, all the blanketed press coverage that happens after the debate. So there's the debate. So you said, for instance, Nikki Haley had, you know, did well in this debate. And then there's a couple of days of press coverage of Nikki Haley nationally, and certainly in the early States. And you, you want to wait to see what the coverage is like, because that also shapes some of the polling, right? Exactly. That's why these viral moments when they happen are such a big deal. That's why the incentive is to be someone who, you know, throws a punch on stage metaphorically. I mean, there was that memo that supposedly came out from the DeSantis super PAC. He claimed, oh, I didn't read it. I there was one thing in it that I think is a political truism, which is this sort of adapted statement from Roger Ailes, the orchestra pit theory, the idea that at the end of the day, if one person gives a statement about foreign policy and the other person falls into the orchestra pit in front of the stage, all the clips are going to be the guy falling

into the orchestra pit. Unfortunately, that's true. Now, I don't believe we had an orchestra pit moment. I think this was a very substantive debate in general. But to the extent that any clips kind of went viral, I think maybe Nikki Haley versus Vivek Ramaswamy was one of the spicier moments. And that was on foreign policy, not to underpin Rodger Ailes. You can fall into the orchestra pit while making a point about foreign policy. No, no, I actually thought that was a fantastic moment, partly because I agree with the policies that Governor Haley was advocating in that exchange and how irresponsible I think some of the things that Vivek Ramaswamy, who I know, has been saying.

So actually for me, I not only thought she came off well, but the substance was quite strong. On the national polls where it shows Trump so far ahead, you do see this discrepancy. Again, I don't think people following the race tend to focus on this. While the national polls show Trump ahead considerably by high double digits from the second and third best performers, generally, this is pre-debate, but I assume it's close to generally this is pre-debate but i assume it's close to uh consistent for this post-debate what these polls don't always capture is what's happening in the early states and what the early states show is trump still ahead but some of these

other candidates much stronger than they would otherwise appeal nationally what is the reason can you explain the discrepancy why some of the it's like a poll in Iowa, New Hampshire like this and Stelzer? There's this legendary pollster, the Des Moines Register poll, like why those polls will show such a such a big difference from what is shown nationally. Sure. So I've seen this in my own polling. I did some polling last week that came out kind of on the eve of the Republican debate. And we found, you know, Donald Trump in our national poll, clear frontrunner. I believe we had about 57 percent. Everybody else was distantly trailing. We had Vivek Ramaswamy at, I think, 15 and then DeSantis at 12.

So huge gap there. But then we also did polls in Iowa and New Hampshire. And instead of being at 57%, we find in New Hampshire, Trump is at 34%. That's a huge difference. In Iowa, we had Trump at 33% among likely GOP caucus goers. And I think part of this is that Donald Trump is very well known nationally. There is no sentient Republican. I mean, I would be stunned if you could find a sentient American who does not know who Donald Trump is. But in these early states, that's where these candidates have been spending time, meeting people in diners, going to the state

fairs, showing up at town halls, et cetera, and getting their name out there. And so I think this to me is the best sign that maybe Donald Trump is not inevitable, not because I think he's on track to lose Iowa or New Hampshire, but I think those types of states are an example of what happens when you have an electorate that is tuned in a little bit more than your average voter who's maybe waiting. OK, I'll wait until April when the field thins down and then I'll start caring and paying attention. New Hampshire and Iowa voters, they don't have the luxury of waiting for the field to thin down. They've got to just take everybody as they are and make a decision. So the fact that you have candidates in Iowa, we showed Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott doing very well in our poll.

In New Hampshire, we saw Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy doing very well. This could all change, of course, post-debate. Do we see a Nikki Haley bounce? I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a couple points added to her numbers in both those states. But it's where voters are paying more attention. Donald Trump's just name brand with Republican status doesn't buy him as much in the ballot. And to your point, and it's where these candidates are, if you look at the, I mean, it's where the candidates are spending most of their time. So if you look at the number of times each of these top non-Trump candidates have spent time in the early states, this one's been there 15 times. This one's been there 20 times this year.

This one's been there 30 times. So they're touching many more voters. The national poll dilutes the impact of those visits because it's taking a snapshot nationally. In many parts of the country, voters are having very little interaction with these candidates so they default as you're saying but in the early states they're getting so if you have a poll of just an early state just iowa just new hampshire these are voters who are getting access to a lot and exposure to these candidates in a higher degree of concentration than than the pool nationally. So maybe it overweights the importance of how these candidates are doing in those early states. However, if one of those candidates does

break out in an early state and wins Iowa or wins New Hampshire, unlike any other electoral process in the United States and unlike any other electoral process I know of in the world, the way we choose our presidents is very dynamic. And if a candidate has a breakout moment in early state, the momentum and the impact and the fundraising and the press attention and the energy that that candidate gets as they go into subsequent contests is like unlike anything elsewhere in politics. You can get a bounce from an Iowa, New Hampshire, and that could be like jet fuel. It could, although I think President Rick Santorum, President Mike Huckabee, you know, there are some, but certainly you'd rather win Iowa than not win Iowa, right? I mean, it can't hurt. And I think the fact that we have this process that allows someone to say, look, Donald Trump's

got all this money, all this name ID, but he's not going to be able to spend as much time hanging out in Cedar Rapids as I will. I'll be able to hit all 99 counties in Iowa. And Donald Trump probably won't. He maybe can fly over it in his plane that says Trump on it, but I'm going to be able to do more on the ground. In a state like Iowa, that really matters. You have to drag people to the caucuses.

And while Donald Trump certainly has a core of people who would crawl across broken glass or hot coals, as you put it earlier, you know, to get there, a lot of these other candidates, if they're able to build up infrastructure, if they're able to really win those hearts and minds on the ground, I think they'll have a chance. There's another finding from that CBS poll that kind of supports this. When they ask people who were they supporting for the Republican nomination or who were they considering, among those who said that they were voting for Donald Trump but considering other candidates, the reasons why they said they were considering other candidates was that they were they said they were considering other candidates was that they were keeping options open. It was still early. Some of them did have concerns about Trump being too controversial,

but most of them, that wasn't the impetus. It wasn't, I'm begrudgingly picking Trump because I know him, but I think he's going to lose. It was, I'm picking him now because he's what I know. Think of it, I've been describing this to people like a menu. You go into a restaurant that you go into all the time, and you've got the thing that you know you're going to like. And so you order it every time. But every once in a while, maybe you look around and you see like, well, what are the specials today? And that's where I think a lot of Republican voters are. They know they like the

meatloaf, but they kind of wonder what the specials might be. And if something sounds good, they could do it. Right. Which is important that I often try to explain to watchers of politics who aren't living and breathing it, but watching it, observing it, that these polls are just snapshots. They're moments in time. They're not, they do not, they are not as predictive as the media treats them. And they are not as predictive as donors treat them. And as I mean, it's a and as you know, some political junkies treat them. They are a snapshot moment in time and a moment in time can change with the next moment in time. So I want to come back to Nikki Haley. I want to talk a little about the other candidates with Nikki. I I watched her in that debate and I watched her at her CNN town hall meeting that she had with Jake Tapper two or three months ago. Both times I thought watching Nikki as, I mean, I served in the Bush administration. There are a lot of things that she worked on in the Trump administration on

foreign policy that I agreed with. And listening to her talk about issues, it was like taking a warm bath for me. It was like a, it was like, it was like, it was like, you know, high school reunion. It was like, it was going back to a safe, comfortable place. She was talking about issues like entitlement reform and tort reform and things you never spending. I mean, she got into this very powerful exchange in the debate about spending. I was like, wow, do Republicans these days even care about spending? And so she was talking about issues that resonate with me and I think resonate with Republicans who may think like me. But I have been increasingly wonder how how many are there?

How many are there of us left? And I think what you're saying, but tell me I'm wrong, is that range between issues that range from issues that resonate with me and also in some cases may resonate with some mega types like they don't care that she's a more traditional conventional Republican. They'll they'll rally to her and they may be her. You know, some of these voters second choice after Donald Trump. It's not like it's only Trump or Vivek or it's only Trump or DeSantis. It's like they they are much more ambidextrous, if you will, than we tend to assume. I think you are right that most voters are less rigidly in any particular ideological camp or wing of the party. So to try to say, well, let's bifurcate the GOP into establishment or maybe Bush era or what have you type Republicans and then MAGA Republicans is a little bit challenging because

there are some people that may say, look, I'm glad we're supporting Ukraine. I want to fight the Russians and dictators around the world. Let's have a strong American foreign policy. But I think we've been getting our clock cleaned on trade and we need to clamp down and we need to make more things in our country. You can have a mix of different sorts of views. And I think a lot of voters do. I did worry a little about 20 or 30 minutes into the debate. I tweeted something and then I deleted it because I thought, I don't know who else is going to understand this reference.

First of all, I just want to pause there because that is an incredible amount of discipline. I do not know a lot of people who in these political moments tweet and then pause and delete it. So I just want to bottle that up. That's noted. I wish more people did that.

So Peggy Noonan once told me her rule is she writes the tweet and then she waits 24 hours. And then if she still feels good about it 24 hours later, she hits the tweet button, but usually she actually pulls it. But anyway. That's very smart. And in my case, it wasn't necessarily deleting it because I thought I had said something unintentionally offensive so much as I had made a reference that I wasn't sure people were going to get. But it was from Back to the Future. There's this screenshot that went around a couple of years ago of them setting the destination time to October of 2015.

And that's kind of what I felt. I just tweeted that out like current mood destination, October 2015. In response to Haley? Well, in response to just the entire first kind of 20 minutes of the debate. But in particular, it was when Haley was saying, kind of taking that almost Tea Party-ish, hey, in Washington, even Republicans are the ones that the establishment spending too much money. It's not even that I necessarily disagreed.

I just thought, oh, this feels like it's from a different era. And I wonder if we can go back there. I wonder if we can go half there. I wonder if we can go half back there. I don't know. And so I think that's a big question as I watch polls come out over this week is like, did that debate happen in an alternate dimension on like Earth 3, where Donald Trump never comes down the escalator, but it actually doesn't have a lot of impact or resonance in Earth 1, the timeline that we're all in? Or does it actually doesn't have a lot of impact or resonance in Earth One, the timeline that we're all in. Or does it actually have an impact? Is there like a, you know, the empire

strikes back kind of moment where when Republicans get to see these other options, maybe what felt stale eight years ago feels new again? I don't know. Let's talk for a moment about mike pence i thought so looking at the numbers i think he got one of if not the most or top two number of minutes of kind of airtime during the debate so he he was on a lot i thought he came off very well i think he um he was quite clever in kind of getting all the other candidates to concede slash back him up on what he did on January 6th. So I think he did the Mike Pence legacy very well. The question is, did he do much for the Mike Pence candidacy? I don't believe that he made himself significantly more likely to be the Republican nominee, but I already had those odds at zero before the debate.

So you really only could go up from there. And I think to the extent that he is clear eyed and got into this race, knowing that his odds of ultimately prevailing were pretty low. For me, I in a piece I wrote for CNN.com the night of the debate, I wrote that I thought of him as one of the winners, not because I think he's going to get some big bounce in the polls in Iowa or New Hampshire. He could, but I'm not betting on it. But rather, I imagine he got into this race to say what he wanted to say. And the victory comes not only in the kind of monologue he delivered, defending his actions on January 6th and his conduct since then, but the fact that you got a sizable number of people on that stage

to also raise their hands and say, yeah, I think Mike Pence did the right thing. That's potentially a tough position to take if you assume that the Republican Party is completely enthralled to Donald Trump and thinks that what happened on January 6th is no big deal. There were a lot of people on that stage taking a principled stand and kind of having faith in Republican voters that they won't face huge backlash for saying that, yes, I thought he followed the Constitution and I think he did the right thing. I also thought, I mean, Pence is the kind of person, look, he's an experienced politician. I've always thought he's a very good debater, and the way he handled the issue of abortion, you know, I think could serve him well in early states like Iowa, possibly South Carolina.

So who knows? I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but I thought he handled himself well. Vivek Ramaswamy, what is he playing for here just walking into the debate but before we get to his performance in the debate what what is what is the vivek strategy i think his strategy is to be someone who channels trumpism but with a fresh millennial face and a different kind of eloquence and persuasiveness than perhaps Donald Trump brings to the table. I wonder if it's going to work. I mean, this was it struck me that he was very much like the salt and vinegar potato chips of this debate. You either were like, yes, he was awesome. He got all the attention. He was the only one making big moments. He nailed it. Or you said,

this guy reminds me of everyone I debated against in high school debate. And I cannot believe that it's happening on a Republican debate stage. I think everything he's saying is phony and untethered to actual beliefs. Please tell me no one is buying this. Now, I'm a former high school debater. So you may infer from that which side I am on of the Vivek. What side of the salt and vinegar potato chips debate are you on there? He's no doubt a very effective communicator for... Then I say his ideas, and I feel like his ideas kind of change audience to audience. You may have have a debate next week and he may suddenly take a totally different position on things. And I just wonder, I mean, Donald Trump is able to be this showman and people like love

it when he puts on a show. Other people trying to be Donald Trump has never really worked. And I'm just not sure, one, can it work for Vivek Ramaswamy in the long haul? Or is he going to follow in the path of the Andrew Yangs or Herman Cain's or people who in these debates have these pizzazz moments, everybody kind of like loves them for a second, and then they fade into obscurity? Or does he kind of stick around and become someone who is maybe leaves the race but becomes a very powerful surrogate for donald trump out on the campaign trail but i don't see him winning the primary yeah i i think he's he's somewhere between you know yang and and um and carson or yang and alan

keys or yang and all you know these these folks who you know somewhere the who are the gadflies and um i can't remember there was there was carson in 2016 i'm trying to remember in 2012 it was it was it was herman cain and then uh anyways so so i think he's somewhere with you know these these sort of mischief makers who in the low single digits but never kind of emerge but you yourself just said earlier he gained a little bit from this debate i do think he speaks he communicates well generally he speaks with these very sort of short clear action-oriented sentences um so you know i i do think he's effective um i fall into the camp of the kind of person who watches that debate like you and it's like oh my my gosh, unacceptable. But, you know, you're saying he gained or you

think he gained? I think he may have gained a little, at least that Washington Post 538 poll had him gaining a slight bit more consideration. His big problem is if you like Donald Trump and you like Vivek Ramaswamy, you're picking Donald Trump, right? You go for the original formula. And so by hewing so closely to Donald Trump's issue positions on everything, he's positioning himself to be vice president or cabinet secretary or, you know, primetime speaking slot at the convention. He's not carved out his own lane for himself. Where were Tim Scott and ron desantis during this debate i mean i think they're still very much in this race but i was just struck

by the fact that very few people were talking about them during or after the debate i went into this debate with very high hopes for Tim Scott because I've seen him speak before and found him to be very compelling. He has, you have to have that cheerful warrior energy. And I just feel like it didn't necessarily come across enough during the debate for that to catch on. He still could have another shot at it for sure. But to the extent that I jokingly after the debate, I set it up as a bracket, right? Okay, so who do people think did best out of the my views are pretty similar to Donald Trump bracket. Ron DeSantis or Vivek Ramaswamy? Who did best of the governor? What's your name bracket? Hesa Hutchison or Doug Burgum?

And I think in the South Carolina bracket, my informal Twitter poll like Nikki Haley cleaned Tim Scott's clock. She won the Palmetto State Bowl there big time. And so I think that's that's tough for him because they're fighting over the same piece of real estate. Now, Ron DeSantis, I think, I actually think he kind of stopped the bleeding, right? I think he especially had a strong moment when he told the moderators, we're not school children. I'm not putting my hand up for this exercise about Donald Trump and his legal stuff. You know, fighting the media, even if the media is Fox News, perhaps especially if the media is Fox News, is like not never been a losing proposition in a Republican primary.

I seem to recall, I think Newt Gingrich wound up shooting up in the polls in the Republican primary in 2012 because he took a swing at it. It was a CNN debate. He went after John King. It was after some article had come out about one of his failed marriages and how he handled some relationship with his family. And he just opened the debate coming out swinging. And it was, I got to say, whether you agree with the substance or not, it was quite powerful to your point. And then I believe he won the South Carolina primary. I mean, it's—so I thought DeSantis probably did himself some favors.

But if you are the sort of person who says, I don't want Donald Trump to be the nominee, please let it be someone else. And DeSantis has kind of been your default. OK, it's probably going to be him. You are probably giving Nikki Haley a second look as like, maybe she's actually the better bet here. So I think, if anything, he probably stopped the bleeding, but didn't do himself a ton of favors. He didn't command the debate. He wasn't the star. And if you want to say, this field needs to consolidate around me, and it needs to do that pronto, I don't think he achieved that in the debate last week. Okay, I've got two or three other political questions, and I want to ask

you something completely unrelated to politics, but related to something you recently wrote in your Substack newsletter. Do you think it was a mistake for... Do you think Trump and the people around Trump, and I think he's a much better team this time around, I think he's running, I mean, I don't agree on the substance with a lot of his message, but I do think it's a more serious, more disciplined operation politically. Do you think they are regretting him not participating or relieved that he didn't participate in the debate? I think they probably don't care too much either way. The poll that I've been referencing also asked about consideration for Trump. And those who watched the debate are

slightly less likely to be considering Trump now, but it's not a huge drop off. Certainly, the numbers that his supporters have been touting about the views of this Tucker Carlson thing are wildly inflated that the actual numbers of people who watched it for more than two seconds as it was scrolling through their Twitter feed is like extremely small. So I don't think Trump necessarily did himself. And we know that, that's really interesting. So that's from the polling that we know that about,

or we have a window into that through. Yes, so there was another interesting poll that basically asked people, did you watch the debate or not? And then for those who said they did not watch the debate, then asked them like, what did you spend your night doing? And of those people, only like a teeny tiny fraction of them said that they watched the Donald Trump Tucker thing.

Like more people said they were folding laundry, I believe, in that poll. So he did not get more eyeballs, which I'm sure is grating on him. On the other hand, there was this question that we asked in that New York Times focus group of GOP primary voters where we said, are you going to hold it against Trump if he doesn't show up? And by and large, they said no. As somebody who likes football, you'll appreciate this, Dan. They basically were giving Trump a first round bye.

As the reigning champion, he won the regular season. He does not have to play the first week of the playoffs. Let's let this field shrink down. Maybe we'd like him to come in for the second or third debates later on. Maybe we don't want him to avoid it forever, but they're certainly fine with him not sharing a stage with all eight of the people, it would have been nine if it was him, up there. So I think he'll be fine for now, but I don't think he can evade it forever, especially if the field does begin to narrow as more people begin to give the DeSantis's and Haley's a look. And if you think about someone like Chris Christie, who's polling, depending on what part of the country, somewhere between five or nine percent, I mean, he views himself as having a role in this race, which is to be the prosecutor of Trump.

At the same time, he's taking votes away from a candidate who may wind up in a position to be head to head with Trump and could perform well in a head to head against Trump. So so at what point do you think candidates who are grabbing single digits but can still stay in it and still raising money. I think a lot of them are still raising money from Democratic donors, ironically. At some point, some of those candidates, as fun as it is to watch them perform, it really is fracturing and fragmenting a field that needs to consolidate. We find Chris Christie performing very well in our New Hampshire poll. And I guess kind of the problem is if you're coming in second in New Hampshire polls, even if you're only at 10 or 15 percent, you don't really have an incentive to drop out. And I thought it was fascinating that at least for the first maybe half hour, 45 minutes of the Republican debate, it almost seemed as though Chris Christie's strategy was I need to remind Republican voters why they loved me. That he kind of realizes that in order to be an effective prosecutor of Donald Trump in a

Republican primary, you can't have a net unfavorable brand image with those voters. So I think he'll stick around at least for a little while, if only to continue to have a microphone to try to rehabilitate his image with some Republican voters to remind them of the reasons why they were so dazzled by him back in, say, 2016, before he tries to drive the knife in and try to be that voice against Donald Trump. But if I were him, I mean, this is a real kind of a game theory problem, right? Everybody's incentive personally is to stay in as long as possible, even if what's good for kind of the collective objective, if you want to get rid of Trump, is to consolidate faster. That clash of incentives is going to be really interesting to watch. party in the past for instance in 20 in the 2020 primaries kamala harris people forget pulled out of the race before the iowa caucus she never actually was on the ballot anywhere in the

presidential primaries marion williamson lasted longer than than kamala harris and one of the reasons why in addition to dysfunction in her campaign organization she was running out of money candidates tend to run out of money and that's when they pull out uh that's where they withdraw their candidacies what what is disconcerting about this process is there are some candidates that the democrats like in i have friends who are democratic donors who are funding independent expenditures for certain republican candidates that they think are good at making the case against trump and as enjoyable and entertaining as that may be um it's going to probably keep these candidates in the race longer than they otherwise should be.

And that is worrisome. I want to ask you one final political question, then one non-political question. Do you think it's possible, feasible for another candidate to get in this race sometime between, say, now and Thanksgiving? People talk about Glenn Young and people talk about Governor Brian Kemp from Georgia? I think it's possible, but it would also require the problem being that Republican voters are looking at Trump versus the other options and are finding the other options wanting. And right now, that's not necessarily the case. It's more that they see Donald Trump, they know Donald Trump, they think Donald Trump

is a safe bet, and they still have more to learn about the rest of the candidates. So I think it's too soon to say, oh, gosh, the field of folks we have now isn't going to do it. It's time for someone new to jump in. The other problem is in politics, you can always try to work hard to raise more money, but you can never raise more time. And since name ID and brand image is going to be so important to being able to fight against the most recognizable name on the planet at this point, waiting until November. I mean, I would argue that Ron DeSantis probably waited too long by getting in at the end of the spring when he did.

You know, my data showed that actually right after the 2022 elections, that was a moment when you asked Republicans, who do you, who would you vote for if it was a head to head between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis? They were neck and neck. You had that consolidation in this faux question of mine, and it showed that Trump could actually be beat by a single standalone good candidate. But that all faded as DeSantis kind of faded from people's memories. So I think staying out of the race is a bad choice. And that's why I'm kind of bearish on anybody who says, oh, I'm going to wait until, you know, three or four weeks before the Iowa, not three or four weeks, three or four months before the Iowa caucuses to really jump in.

I think that might just be too late. Okay. I want to pivot. I didn't warn you that I was going to ask you a nonpolitical question, but I remember when this piece came out, I was moved by it, and I made a mental note to talk to you about it at some point, whether in a podcast or in another forum, and here we are, and you just made reference to the fact that you are a former high school debater, and I remember this piece you penned for Substack,

which I just pulled up while we are sitting here talking, which was titled, I was wrong. High school debate might not save America after all. And your subtitle is, is there any institution left that can bring us all together? You wrote this piece late May of this year. It's fantastic. I am going to put this one in the show notes, too. Can you just explain why you wrote this piece?

So I wrote this piece because for years and years and years, I have been a huge advocate for things like high school debate or model student governments. You know, like the American Legion auxiliaries, Girls State, Girls Nation programs were hugely influential to me. And I have long believed that if you teach young people how to think critically about the issues that matter to our country, to begin to develop a sense of the values

that matter to them, and to begin to figure out how to listen to other people, to realize that not everybody thinks one way, but that actually there are lots of different conclusions you can come to on any particular issue, that that kind of ability to think in that manner was going to be crucial for reducing the polarization we're facing. There's all kinds of data that suggests that teenagers today are significantly more likely than teenagers were in the 1980s to have strong political views and have like very negative views of people who disagree with them. And that worries me a lot. And so my hope was, you know, from my experience during high school debate back in like the early 2000s, was that the sort of thing that, you know, I now know when I talk to my Democratic friends,

I don't assume that they're coming from a bad place, even on issues where I disagree with them. I know if I had to on the spot argue for the very best reason why their policy is right, I could probably come up with two or three reasons, even if ultimately I don't think they win out. The problem is that there are now a number of stories that have come out in a couple of different news outlets. The big one was a story by James Fishback, I believe is his name, in the Free Press, kind of doing a little bit of an investigation into how things have changed. And to the extent that no longer are kids in some of these high school debate programs being encouraged to explore the conservative and progressive sides of issues, but that there are a handful of these judges that are basically telling kids, if you do so much as, you know, if you are to the right of Karl Marx, I'm going to give you the loss in this round. That made me really nervous. Now, I tried to write my piece to give a little context to explain to people how does debate judging work

and all of that. But I think the biggest problem is that if these issues that have been highlighted in these either independent or kind of right of center publications about the problems happening in high school debate world, if these don't get resolved, a lot of these are dependent upon like state education funding. And it's easy to imagine red state governors reading these pieces and going, well, we're going to cut this out of the budget, which would break my heart because I think debate is so valuable. But the institutions that are doing this for kids really need to put first and foremost, these values that they proclaim to have of open and free debate and make sure that it's actually living up to it on the ground, not just saying, well, it's what's on our website. You really have to make sure the kids are experiencing

the ability to think for themselves, to defend whatever idea they want to defend and be judged on the merits, not on what the judge's personal preferences are. And I think when I read your piece, I was thinking it also has the effect of just, it's not just young people saying it's not worth having these debates. It's young people saying, I'm just going to live back to our earlier conversation in my own little bubble. I'm just not going to have, I'm not going to have life experiences with people I disagree with. I'm particularly sensitive to this point because I have a book coming out in a couple months about israel and about israeli society and as as divided and polarized as its politics uh uh would lead you to believe um the society

is right now i still am more optimistic because people are still even when they strongly disagree with one another are still very much in each other's lives and they're still forced to um whether it's serving the military together whether it's sitting around a shabbat dinner table together on a friday night whether it's i mean it's just for a variety of reasons i'm not gonna get into now but people are very much in each other's lives and it's hard to get that real that that true separation that you're describing in this piece which i know it's not your i mean it just makes me think of that larger point is once you start thinking, I don't, I don't have to have a debate with this person. It's not worth having a debate with this person. I don't even have to try to understand how they're thinking. In fact, I don't have to have anything to do with

them. That's scary. I am forever grateful for the friendships and connections that I made during my time in high school debate, because it meant that when we watched the debate last week, I had a bunch of friends who were very progressive but were watching nevertheless, and we could all text each other about Vivek Ramaswamy and how much he reminded us of our high school selves. Right, right. All right, Kristen, thank you for doing this.

I know we went a little bit longer than I said we would, but you just reminded me of this high school debate piece, and I pulled it up, and I just was also reminded that I got to plug your sub stack, which I think is terrific. So thank you for joining, and I hope to have you back on soon. Thank you for having me on, Dan. That's our show for today. To keep up with Kristen Soltis Anderson's work, you can track her down on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it, at KSoltisAnderson.

And you can also follow her sub stack, which I highly recommend. And we will post in the show notes her sub stack and her most recent New York Times pieces that we talked about today. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.