The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - How To Read Polls Versus Election Results

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on November 8th 2023. A very strange couple of days for Joe Biden.  Weekend polling was disastrous for the Democrats, but last night's voting results were anything but. What to make of that is the topic for SMT today with Bruce Anderson.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. It's Wednesday, an encore Wednesday for you, and we go back into the files, back to last year, early November of 2023, back when we used to do Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. That's right, we're going back to the November 8th, 2023 episode of The Bridge, episode 888, if you follow these things. And on episode 888, we were discussing polling and how much it relates to reality in terms of polling versus election results. It's an interesting discussion. It was based primarily on what had just happened

in the United States, but there are Canadian influences as well. So here we go, our encore episode for this Wednesday, and it was titled, How to Read Polls vs. Election Results. yeah the thumbs up for our viewers on our youtube channel so if you're watching us there uh good for you you can also be listening to us on sirius xm channel 167 canada talks or on your favorite podcast platform uh p Mansbridge here, Bruce Anderson there. We're going to start, you know, you always tease me that I love to talk about polls at the same time as I'm saying, you know, polls, what are polls worth anyway? They're, you know, they're this, they're that. But I love talking about them anyway. And so I want to start off with that and the American example, because I think this is interesting, kind of crosses,

it crosses a number of themes on the discussion about polls and favorability for parties and people. Joe Biden had a horrible weekend. You saw, I'm sure, the New York Times data that came out over the weekend, which is kind of a one-on-one him versus Trump in the six battleground states, the acknowledged six battleground states. And in five of them, Trump was not only ahead of Biden, but he was basically thumping Biden.

It was, I think, four-plus points in each one, so beyond the margin of error. There was one, Wisconsin, where Biden was ahead of Trump. Look at you with all of the numbers. That's really impressive. Are you impressed? Carry on. I try my darndest to do the right thing and to get the data for you so you can think about how you want to respond

here's the other half of the story though last night it's kind of the you know the off-year elections that take place in the in the u.s and there's everything there's some governors there's some congress people there's some um data points in different states on issues like abortion. So last night, the results come trickling out well into the evening and into the early morning hours, and hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? The Democrats were winning a lot of the key battles last night, some in red states. In other words, Republican-controlled states or states that are usually Republican. Let me just, I know you're anxious to get in on this, but just to remind everybody,

here's what happened last night. Democrats notched two wins in Kentucky and Ohio. Both states had voted for Trump in 2020. In both states, abortion was the main issue. In Ohio, a ballot preserving abortion rights passed. Virginia Democrats retook full control of the General Assembly after two years of divided power. In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear was re-elected. That was a race

where Trump came out heavily for the Republican opponent, and the Democrat was supposedly in trouble. He ends up winning by more than he won last time. And here's the last one. Former Biden White House aide Gabe Amo will become the first black member of Congress from Rhode Island after winning the special election in that state's first congressional district. So, I mean, not everything went the Democrats' way last night, but in a lot of the key races, they did go the Democrats' way. And they're trumpeting it the same way they trumpeted the last off-year election, where the Democrats did extremely well, once again, in a lot of cases,

because of the abortion issue. So I know it's different things. The weekend was Biden versus Trump. Last night was a lot of different issues at stake, and it wasn't a Biden versus Trump thing. But nevertheless, they look like kind of polar opposites, the results. When you look at it, what does it say to you? Well, I'm delighted that you're asking the question,

even though I know that because we've had this conversation so many times, you know the answer to this, or at least one of the answers to this, Peter. The most obvious answer is that the polls before an election, unless they can accurately predict who's going to turn out, like what kinds of voters are going to turn out, motivated by what kinds of things, they really only give you a snapshot of what the potential outcome will be. And seasoned participants in politics, campaign managers, know that turnout is the most important factor at the end of the day, especially in US politics, where you have these races where there's two parties, and the difference between 50.1 and 49.9 is night and day. So what we saw in these results in a number of cases, as you

mentioned, is the potentially galvanizing effect of what's been happening in the abortion issue in the United States with the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. But following on that, increasingly, I would say, aggressive moves by leading voices in the Republican Party to further move the yardsticks away from women having the right to have an abortion. And so what we saw is that, well, these polls that measure kind of hypothetical outcomes can describe a contest that has been moving away from Joe Biden and towards Trump. Underneath the surface of that, we know that when it comes time to actually go to a voting booth and mark a ballot, the abortion issue has shown us a number of times already that

it can be a very important predictor of who's going to turn out and why. The second and the other thing I think it bears mentioning is that Biden is suffering from this kind of incumbency malaise where people are saying, I don't know exactly what I think he's done wrong, but things seem bad right now. And so I don't feel very motivated to support the incumbent. Add to that, that for many people, he looks too old to handle that job. So those things are both part of the framework for him. Donald Trump is not the president right now, but he's pretty visible to people. When he becomes more visible, I think what these numbers, what happened yesterday in the election results tell us is that then it becomes less hypothetical. Then it really becomes a question of whether or not Americans who who've seen Trump in action for a number of years now are really going to mark a ballot to put him back in the White House. Because marking that ballot is different from answering

that polling question. In effect, what I'm saying is that for a lot of people answering that polling question right now is that how do you feel about Joe Biden, not how do you feel about Donald Trump. On voting day, it is a question of do you want Trump in the White House or do you want Biden? And those are really the two choices available to you. There might be some other names on the ballot as there often is, but that's a different test. So it's encouraging for the Democrats, but it's also encouraging within the context. They shouldn't ignore all of those other results that show notwithstanding all of the reasons not to vote for Donald Trump, Biden is still trailing Trump in many of those swing states that were crucial to the outcome

last time. But would last night make you feel if you're a Biden supporter or if you're Biden yourself, would it make you feel more comfortable than you were feeling, you know, two days ago. Yeah, it would. It would. I think that question for me is among the people like our, well, he's your friend. I know him a little bit. David Axelrod, who we had on the show a while back. My friend.

I met him once. Acquaintance. Our acquaintance. Okay. He's a seasoned expert campaign manager in these presidential elections and other elections too, for that matter. And he came out the other day,

despite being a proud, loyal, longstanding Democrat and said, it's time for Joe Biden to do the right thing for the party and the country and to consider stepping back and letting somebody else carry the torch. That would have been an enormously difficult thing for him to say, just because of the way parties work and the number of relationships that would have been bruised or dented by him doing that. Now, he's been hinting that that is his point of view on his podcast, Hacks on Tap, a very good podcast for listeners if they're interested in a good podcast on U.S. politics. He's been hinting at that for some time, but he went out of his way to say,

this is what I think needs to happen, and if it's going to happen, it needs to happen now. So last night was a bit of a reprieve of that kind of pressure for Joe Biden, but it won't end the pressure. The pressure will probably end within a month or so, after which it's really logistically, I think, impossible for people to get on the ballot in enough places to be a viable alternative to Biden. But in the meantime, Biden still faces a lot of raised eyebrows within his own party about whether he's up to the job of running against and beating Donald Trump. Yeah, I got to say that I've heard this, not excuse, but this reasoning before about the time's almost up. If he's going to drop out, he has to drop out now because of deadlines for this, that, or the other thing.

I don't buy that. If he decides in February, for whatever reason, you can say it's his health, it's whatever, he's dropping out. They're still going to have a race. It's not like nobody's going to run against the Republicans. So, you know, something can always happen. I mean, remember, I think it was like, I know rules have changed since then, but it was March or April when LBJ dropped out in 68 and everybody had started the steamroll of everything, including RFK, the real RFK, to run.

I can be wrong about this, though, but I do think that the rules have changed and become more restrictive in terms of how many states you need to be on ballots in order for there to be delegates from those states. I mean, I think that's right. But, I mean, let's face it, if the guy dropped dead in February, it's not like he's going to – they're not going to have a presidential race. They'll figure something out.

Or if he says, you know, I can't. You know, I've got a debilitating disease or whatever. Anyway, I hear what you're saying. And I've heard the same thing and I've read the same thing that the rules are pretty clear about when you'd have to vacate the position of running and when you'd have to enter to be considered. One last question on this and it's about the age thing you referenced. And, you know, everybody references all the time now. I've been trying to remember the last time in any election, it could be in Canada, it could be in the States,

it could be in the UK, where age has played a factor. I mean, it was to an extent with Reagan, but Reagan was like spring chicken compared with Biden. He was like more than 10 years younger than him at these different stages in his political life. Have you seen it? Can you recount anywhere where the age has been such a dominant factor in people's considerations?

No, I can't. And I think that it's been a fact pattern that's become increasingly important in understanding U.S. politics, because we've got not just I mean, Nancy Pelosi was quite late in her years when she was still holding on to that job. Mitch McConnell, similarly, it has been quite an older cadre of leaders in U.S. politics for some time. And from my standpoint, going back to, I think, the first presidential election I was kind of paying any attention to, you know, in the Kennedy era, there have been older politicians, but there was always a little bit of a premium put on a younger person coming into the role and kind of having that energy and everything else. So it's quite remarkable from my standpoint to see the level of what's

really been happening in terms of older people kind of growing into roles of power and then not getting out of those roles very quickly. There does seem to be a cadre of candidates on the Republican side and on the Democratic side who are quite a bit younger, but Trump and Biden really do seem to have strangleholds on the nominations of their parties at this point. I want to ask one other question, not about this, not about what we've just been talking about,

but another one that kind of relates to American politics, but it relates more to the media, and therefore, it's as much a Canadian issue as it is an American one. On the weekend, on the Sunday morning shows, which I don't know about you, but the weekend, on the Sunday morning shows, which I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy the Sunday morning shows the way I used to in a different era not that long ago. But nevertheless, I watch them because Sunday morning shows in the States because they at least give you a sense

of what's at play um george stephanopoulos hosts the abc sunday morning program um and you know it's a one hour it's the traditional format you know there's a couple of guests a panel some thoughts and boom they're out of there now step Stephanopoulos is an interesting guy. His background is more, well, it's more like yours than it is like mine. I mean, he's an ABC News host now, but he came out of the political world. He was a top aide to Bill Clinton. I think he was the press secretary or director of communications, someone like that. And so he has a lot of backing in high-level, high-stakes politics.

But for the last, well, at least 10 years, maybe longer, he's been a reporter, a journalist, a host. Now, two days ago or three days ago on his Sunday morning show, he interviewed Steve Scalise, who is a leading Republican, was almost Speaker of the House in this whole speaker debacle. He's an interesting guy because he of people, especially in Congress, not just Republicans, partly because he damn near died in that shooting that took place at the congressional baseball teams. They were practicing one night, and some shooter came by and started taking pot shots, and Scalise was one of those who was severely wounded. Anyway, he's managed to struggle through that.

He was the guest on Sunday morning, and the question that Stephanopoulos wanted to get to, I'm sorry to drag this out so long, but the question Stephanopoulos wanted to get to was whether Scalise believed the 2020 election was legitimate or not. Now, Scalise is basically aligned with the Trump, the MAGA wing, and who don't feel that's legitimate. But Stephanopoulos kept asking. I think he asked him seven times, never got a straight answer. And he finally gave up and basically ended the interview. So my interest in that moment is not about Scalise,

not about Stephanopoulos really, but about this issue of how far you press when you can't get an answer. And I've been up and down on this in my own career. I used to feel there was a limit to how many times you keep pursuing the same question because if they wouldn't answer it, people could figure out why they wouldn't answer it and almost certainly what their answer truly was. And the people get upset.

You know, the audience goes, okay, give it a rest, move on. But then I watched this the other day and I thought, you know what? Good for him. He kept pursuing it. He kept getting a non-answer, and he finally said, I'm out of here. That's Stephanopoulos. So as I said, I've gone back and forth on this. I'd be fascinated to know what you thought of it. Well, I'm going to help you settle this in your own mind.

Your most recent view of it is I think the correct one in that case. I think that Stephanopoulos did the right thing. I think that other journalists should continue to, should take the same approach when you're talking about something as fundamental as whether or not the person that you're interviewing is willing to tell the truth about how the democracy works. This isn't, do you support carbon pricing or not? It is more fundamental in my view than that. I happen to agree with people like James Carville who say the Constitution of the United States is at stake in the outcome of the next presidential election.

And part of why he says that is this idea that you can deny the legitimacy of an election result. And if you allow people to do that, even when all of the evidence says the election result was legitimate, if you give up pressing people to come clean on whether they believe the election systems are legitimate, then you basically allowed it to be a matter of opinion rather than a question of fact. And I think that at that point, the people who want to pretend that an election was stolen, when in fact they lost it, then they win. And what we've seen over the last several years is that the repetition of the stop the steal argument has been so powerful, so potent in US politics that there's far, far,

far too many people for the available evidence, which is zero, who believe that Biden is not the legitimate president of the United States. And so I don't think there's really any more important topics for journalism to push back on or push hard on than the legitimacy of the democratic outcomes. And the one other thing I think about Scalise is that he didn't want to tell the lie that Trump wants him to tell. And by the lie, I mean, I'm quite certain that Steve Scalise, just like Donald Trump, who said it privately and has been reported as saying it privately, knew that he had lost the election. Steve Scalise knew, Scalise knows that Biden won that election. But he doesn't want to say that and he doesn't want to say the lie that Trump wants him to say, which is that it was stolen.

And in choosing not to say that, he didn't affirm the truth. He basically reinforced the idea of the lie without putting his own words to it. And I think that's an act of political cowardice. And I think it was an act of, I don't call it courageous for Stephanopoulos. Good for him that he did it. And good for him to halt the interview when he couldn't get an answer to as fundamental a question of right or wrong as that. Yeah, I think we're in the same position. The issue becomes the issue itself.

That's the determining factor on how far you pursue. Yep, to, it is. So if it was not about the state of the democracy or the impact of the Constitution on the question, like an election day, you punt after a couple of attempts, make it clear, well, you're obviously not going to answer the question. I think so. I think that is a, you know, I think it is more acceptable for politicians to say there are certain questions that are, you know, not ones that I really want to get into. There might be reasons for that that have to do with things they're working on or party organization or, you know, a variety of concerns, all of which are part of the messy business of politics. Everybody, in theory, would like something where a journalist gets to ask a question

and the politician is required to answer, but the world doesn't work that way. However, in this particular case, I think the subject matter and the evident risk to the Constitution of the American democracy, I think is so great that it would be a mistake for politicians to let some of these MAGA advocates escape without answering basic questions of, do you trust that our elections are run in a fair and free manner. And I think the courts are making decisions about that. But I think public opinion has to be more convinced. And it doesn't help if people like Steve Scalise dodge those questions.

And it does potentially help if people like George Stephanopoulos keep pressing for clarity on that. Don't want to put you on the spot, but can you imagine a scenario in Canada? I'm not talking about the people being interviewed or who's doing the interview. I'm talking about that issue,

an issue where, you know what, you've got to answer this question. You can't pass on this. You have to give us an answer. Can you think of something that would be, you know, the Canadian equivalent, if you will? Well, I do think that back in the days when Quebec was holding referendums on whether or not the province should remain in Canada,

I think that would have been one of those questions where you have to come down for a yes or no. I don't think there have been that many of them in Canada. I think by and large, our parties have all kind of worked close to being unwilling to answer a particularly pertinent question. I, in my own mind, am concerned about a potential prime minister, whether they were a liberal, green, NDP, or conservative, committing themselves to a course of action that means, in effect, if there was a public health emergency, they would not take certain measures. I'm talking about vaccinations here. I think that is a pretty important question because it does go to the issue of what would you do in a crisis. And I guess what I'm saying relative to the American situation is I think they're in a crisis.

Their democracy is in a crisis. Now, I don't think we're there in Canada, including on that issue. But there could be scenarios where in pursuit of this populist advantage, politicians take a stance that denies logic, that denies fact, that in some cases might deny the law. I just don't know that I've seen a case of that here. Okay. All right. We're going to take our break and come back on another sort of one that crosses the border.

It's back and forth, but it involves the Premier of Alberta and a right-wing commentator in the United States. We'll talk about that when we come right back. and welcome back you're listening to uh the bridge's wednesday edition which is smoke mirrors and the truth bruce anderson is with us you're listening on sirius xm, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Okay, it came out yesterday that Premier Daniel Smith from Alberta and the former Fox host Tucker Carlson now, I think he, where's he working now? Twitter or something?

Doesn't he have some arrangement with Twitter or somebody else that broadcasts his show? His audience is vastly diminished. I was sure you were bringing the facts to this discussion, and I was just going to bring the opinion. You are. You are going to bring the opinion while I. I don't know what his platform is, but he does have one that's internet-based. Right. And he's, listen, to say he's controversial is, you know, you can't overstate that fact.

He was too controversial for Rupert Murdoch. Exactly. And too costly for Rupert Murdoch. He was part of the reason that they had to come up with that huge settlement in the case of Dominion voting machines. He's also controversial because there are many people who claim and many organizations who claim and many other news organizations who claim, and they back it up with facts, that he's a racist and that he's done,

he's involved himself in racist pronouncements, especially around immigrants, for years now, saying they're coming into the country and they're bringing, they're dirty and they're this and they're that, and it's pretty ugly stuff that Carlson talks about. So the issue becomes, okay, he was invited to come up to some conference in Alberta and the premier has decided she's going to share a stage with him and be interviewed with him. Now that's got a few noses out of joint. Should it? She says, listen, I'm interviewed by lots lots of people lots of people i don't like or

agree with should she have drawn the line on this one well i think so i think that what she does by agreeing to be interviewed by him is give him a measure of standing uh in the public discourse that a lot of people quite for quite legitimate reasons, feel he should not have. So that's a choice she's entitled to make. But it's kind of a strange choice. I mean, she did just win an election. She's not really in campaign mode. And why she would feel that there's some value for her in being in that situation with him is a bit of a mystery. It sort of probably suggests that there is still more pressure within her party to pull further to the right, to pull further towards some sort of

isolationist tendencies than she might want to admit. And there's been some discussion about, I guess, some policy resolutions coming out of the United Conservative Party in the last little while in Alberta. So I think it's fair to say that she's dealing with internal pressures that might be the kind of thing that would make on her credibility as a premier who governs for all Albertans, and as a participant in the kind of the broader Canadian dialogue, I think it casts her in an unfavorable light, let me put it that way. I wouldn't have done it if I was her, I wouldn't have advised her to do was her. I wouldn't have advised her to do it if I were an advisor to her. In fact, I would have been pretty pretty aggressive in offering the contrary advice. And so I'm surprised she's doing it.

And I think she'll probably come to regret it. Well, she might also come to change her mind about doing it. But let me put it this way. She's not the first Canadian politician to appear on Fox, right? And on Carlson's show when he was at Fox. The charges against Carlson have existed, didn't suddenly pop up overnight. They've been around for years, some of them.

And questioning his, you know, whether he's a white supremacist, his meetings with the prime minister of Hungary, he's been over there to Budapest, spoken to the Hungarian, the party that's led by Orbán, the prime minister. So these issues have kind of come up before, but I'm not sure whether Justin Trudeau has ever been interviewed by Tucker Carlson, but he's been on Fox. I mean, there is that argument, you know,

go to the den of your opposition to make your case. And you might get some respect for that from, you know, from voters, from whomever. Yeah, I think the thing that occurs to me about this, Peter, is that I don't think of Tucker Carlson as being an interviewer. He's effectively a politician for all intents and purposes. He campaigns for his point of view, and sometimes he does it with somebody sitting across from him, and sometimes that involves him asking them questions. But he's not there to ask questions of Daniel Smith.

He's there to offer his perspective on whatever he has to say about Canada, which I'm sure will probably please the people who are in attendance and shock others because I think he's a shock jock. I think that's who he is. I think that's who he is. I think that's what he does. I think that if we look back over his career, I think he started MSNBC. So he's been in some sort of an evolution. He was on the old Crossfire show years ago, like 25 years ago.

But he was at CNN. Then you're right, he was at MSNBC. And then he went to Fox. So he's been a champion of a lot of things that would not be considered palatable, which doesn't mean he's not entitled to think those things or say those things, but not palatable to many Albertans, to many of the people who voted for Danielle Smith, and certainly to many Canadians in other parts of the country. So all I'm saying is that I think she's giving him a platform that is bigger than the one that he would have had if he wasn't sitting down with her. I don't think he's giving her a platform unless she has some reason to want to be heard

by the crowd of people that follow Tucker Carlson on whatever platform he's on. Although I can't figure out for the life of me what that would be, what that would be of value to her. So I think of it as her deciding to give him a platform. And I don't understand why, I don't understand the political math that says that that's a good idea for her. Here's one thing I will give Danielle Smith. She's not afraid of doing interviews, right? She does put herself open to interviews

from all kinds of different news organizations. You know, for all the fuss about the CBC that's made by, you know, a number of conservatives from both the federal and the provincial scene, she's been interviewed by the CBC more than a few times. When I was at the CBC, I had her on my show when she was running to be Premier of Alberta. But, you know, as opposed to some people who don't do interviews on the major news networks, I'm thinking Canada, I'm thinking obviously Polyev has chosen his strategy is not to do them.

He does apple orchard interviews with a local reporter. I'm not sure that he's done since he's been leader. I could be wrong on this, but I don't think he's done a major television interview and that's part of their strategy, I guess, not to do them. We'll see how long that lasts as we get closer to an election or in an election campaign. Trudeau still gives them, not a lot of them,

and I'm kind of wondering that at this point, if he doesn't know what his game plan is for the next few months, whether it would be a wise decision for him to sit down and have a very straightforward interview about the state of things for him, for his party, for the country. I'm talking Trudeau here. Do you think he should? I don't think he should, unless he has a clearer message, unless he has a different way of

expressing what it is that he's trying to do. I did write a little piece that we, you and I talked about the other day about that kind of showed that not that many people dislike him, but a lot of people are tired of him. And I think part of that is they're, they're tired of hearing something that sounds the same, uh, as he's been saying for eight years in the same way. Um, it's a little bit of, um, kind of an affectation that liberals have adopted. I think this notion of kind of moral leadership, um, and it kind of creeps into a lot of what they say, whether the issue is climate change or or anything else. And there's nothing wrong with being moral leaders, but politically there is something corrosive.

If too much of what you say sounds as though it implies that you're morally superior to the audience that you're communicating with. And I've always felt that Trudeau is at his best when he's more direct, where there's more humility, where there's less of a sense of I'm the kind of leader that's going to point the way for everybody to follow in terms of living their lives. And I'm not saying he's done that deliberately or that when he's done it, it's been wrong to do it. I'm just saying the cumulative effect of that is such that it is pushing people away, I think. And the liberals need to replace it either with him or with another leader, if that's ultimately the choice that

they make, with somebody who's a little bit more oriented towards or significantly more oriented towards being the voice of people on the issues that they care about today without that sense of, I'm here from Ottawa and I'm going to tell you how it should be. That problem has existed for other governments before him. So it's not a mystery how it kind of creeps into the way that you present. But if I hesitate to say, yes, he should go and prosecute his case, it's because I think that he needs to do that differently if he would expect to have a different outcome from the one that we've seen showing up in the polls over the last several months, which is people saying, in effect, I keep hearing things that sound the same.

They're a little bit stressful for me. I'm going to tune out. I'm going to listen to somebody else who's got a different sound, a different message, even if it's not everything I'm looking for. It feels fresher. It feels more aligned with what I'm thinking about every day. And it doesn't feel scary. Now, part of that problem is, and I want to go back to one of the criticisms that I was hearing about Joe Biden this morning, I think Joe Scarborough was making this, is that advisors around Biden are telling him not to attack Trump. And Joe Scarborough, this Republican or former Republican, was saying this is exactly the wrong advice, that Biden has to go after Trump, has to remind people what the contrast is, has to remind people of everything that they didn't like about the chaos

that was the Trump presidency. And similarly, I think Trudeau has to take it upon himself if he wants to compete successfully with Pierre Polyev to define Pierre Polyev. And I don't think he's done very much of that. I don't know whether it's not whether people are telling him something that made more sense closer to 2015 than it does in 2023. Because I think that the choice of Trudeau will be more about defining his opponent in this election rather than supporting his agenda. That's, I think, a function of that many years of incumbency. And also, I think the agenda isn't that clear going forward. It's like, problems come up, we'll manage them, we'll have your back. Okay, but it's defensive. It's not easy for people to listen to that and say, well, I know where we're going now if we elect this guy again. Well, they may not have convinced Trudeau of doing that, taking that approach yet, but

they seem to have convinced their behind-the-scenes people because they're brain testing some ads that way from what we've seen and already seen actually on social media. Yeah, definitely they're gearing up to do more of it. Um, and I see evidence of the cabinet and caucus members being more aggressive, uh, in doing this. So there's, there's a, at least the beginnings of the execution of a strategy to do that. Um, what part the prime minister plays in it, because ads that's, that's going to be important. What part the prime minister plays in it? Because ads, that's going to be important. But you asked the question, should the PM do more interviews? And I would say emphatically, yes, if he's going to be more aligned with those points that I was making, and if he's going to do more to define his opponent.

All right, we're going to leave it at that. Good discussion. As always, always a pleasure to hear from Bruce Anderson. Well, thanks for listening to our Encore Wednesday edition. Going back to last November on the old segment we used to call Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. Stay with us for tomorrow. Tomorrow it's your turn, the special Your Turn edition,

with Housing Minister Sean Fraser and your questions. Should be interesting. Hope you'll join us for that. Thank you.