The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Race Next Door #3 - Is Trump The TV Star He Thinks He is?

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

The podcast within a podcast tackles the question of whether Trump is a great communicator, and on the issue of polls, which are the ones you should pay attention to?Join me and Bruce Anderson for our weekly look at the election campaign south of the border.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily it's hump day yes wednesday of week 24 we We're halfway home. And hump day around here means the race next door, the podcast within a podcast. Hear that new addition to the music? That's Bella. That's Bella the dog. Bella the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever.

And when Bella barks, that means there's someone at the door. But that's okay. These days, as you know, when there's somebody at the door, they basically just leave it there. They kind of get it. We're into this period of no touch contact or no contact touch or whatever that phrase is. Anyway, moving on. Bella will head back to her dog bed anytime now. And the barking, well, you can hear it's already stopped.

All right, so it is the Race Next Door day, and we're going to it in just a minute. A couple of minutes, actually. Because I want to give you a sense of what we're going to do after the Race Next Door with Bruce Anderson, right? Chair of Abacus Data, one of the country's leading research and polling firms, and Bruce, of course, has been in the business for many years, and is helping us try to take a different kind of perspective than we'd see from the domestic news services in the United States.

We're kind of looking at the race from next door, kind of over the fence. We're looking at it, see what it's like, and talk about a couple of things. And we have a couple of interesting things to talk about today. But when it's finished, I got some really interesting stats for you. It's not a poll, different kind of research, dealing with real numbers.

And it's the amount of money the two parties, the two presidential campaigns, have spent so far on select topics on Facebook. Now remember, we never kind of looked at these things before 2016. It was after 2016, we went, oh my gosh, look what they did on Facebook. So I've got some interesting numbers for you about what the Trump campaign and what the Biden campaign are spending on ads, on Facebook, on different topics. I think you're going to find it interesting.

But first up, we've got the race next door. Here it is. All right, that familiar tune. Hail to the Chief gets us started on another race next door. And we're going to start, Bruce, with this idea of Trump as the great communicator. He thinks he's Ronald Reagan II, where, in fact, as far as I'm concerned, he's nothing like the great communicator in which Reagan was. I mean, Trump believes that he got his big push with the American people with the television program The Apprentice and that he was the star of it and that he created it and et cetera, et cetera,

when in fact it was Mark Burnett who was the executive producer of The Apprentice, just like he was The Survivor and a variety of other reality TV programs, who was the star of The Apprentice. You didn't see him on air, but he created it, and he picked Trump for a reason, and it worked for a number of years. There's no question about that, but then it started to slide off, and when Trump ended up running for the presidency, uh, he had to leave the program. It was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. It didn't work either. And that was going to hit the end of the apprentice, but Trump believed that he could and have shown at times a certain skill and backdrops for television productions as president.

I'm not so sure it's working this week. Some of the things that I've seen in the convention so far look pretty much like amateur hour and some of the things I think have backfired to a degree. But overall, his belief that he's the great communicator, he understands television, He knows how to make television work. Where do you come down on this? Well, you know, Peter, I'm really interested in this subject. I'm looking forward to talking about it with you because you have such great experience in understanding how TV works, how images work. And I've kind of spent a lot of time in the political world trying to figure out how to make TV work for candidates over the years, too. And I do think this is really quite interesting what's going on.

I'm definitely more aware you are. I kind of looked at the last few nights and compared it to what we saw last week at the Democratic Convention. And I'm glad you raised this whole question of Reagan, because for me, one of the things that Ronald Reagan did well, lots of people have lots of take lots of issue with some of the policy choices that he made. But he made conservatism sound hopeful and he used metaphors like mourning in America. And when I looked at the Trump show, it felt angry. It felt dark. It felt like people who were determined to kind of yell out their anger and their rage and so just from the standpoint of is this a show that's going to kind of please and uplift you and rally you around their cause or is it a show that's going to kind of excite you and and anger you and make you uh kind of want to be angry at your neighbor who might vote Democrat. I think it's more the latter.

I think that he is a, you know, he thinks he's good at TV, but he thinks he's good at everything. And when I look at how this TV show come across, you know, his cast is essentially his family and people who are so sycophantic with his message that they're saying things that challenge their own credibility. His set looks like it's mostly the White House. And, you know, I think that some people might look at that and say, well, that really kind of adorns him with a sense of legitimacy and power. And others might look at it and say, it's an abuse. And many people have said that it's an abuse. So I think on balance his show, his reality show,

might be fairly well scripted to appeal to his base audience, but I don't think it's necessarily well designed to reach out to more people, and all of the polling that I'm looking at says he still needs to reach out to more people. To me, you know, when I watch him, especially this week, it just looks all so phony. I mean, that that's set up in the White House with the with the new Americans, the immigrants who had become American citizens yesterday, which is a beautiful ceremony. I mean, we see them in Canada all the time, and yet this made it look somehow, because Trump was kind of standing there looking goofy at the side and saying strange things while it was all going on, just seemed to belittle the whole thing. Now,

on something else that he does, and I'll, you know and I'll make this comment as one who lived by the teleprompter for so many years when I was doing the National, is that this guy, for all his talk, still cannot read a teleprompter. I mean, it's not that challenging an art, quite frankly. You do it a couple of times and you can kind of figure out how to do it. But he hasn't. He always comes off looking like it is the first time he's ever read the words that he's reading off the prompter. Now, I don't believe that's true. I believe he probably has seen the script.

But when he's looking at it, it comes off like he's never seen it before. And he looks like he doesn't believe what he's reading. And sometimes he shouldn't because what's being written is pretty bizarre. But for a guy who claims that this is his vehicle, he hasn't perfected that. He's not bad sometimes ad-libbing in terms of his performance, in terms of what he says gets him in trouble, and that's why he has to go to the prompter and why his aides say, read what's written there. But, you know, when he's ad-libbing, he's kind of,

he can be convincing even if the words aren't. But when he's reading it, to me, it's just like it's a disaster. Yeah, yeah. yeah sorry go ahead but you know i overall i think uh we probably tend to agree it hasn't been a great performance so far this week i mean it's halfway through it as we as we record this podcast and maybe you'll pull something out of the hat um melania trump was much better last better last night than she had been four years ago when she basically read Michelle Obama's speech rewritten for her. She seemed, you know, she showed some sympathy towards those who have died or have suffered through the COVID crisis,

which was a first considering all the rage and raving on the part of other members of that family over the last couple of days. But as a TV epic show, I agree. So far, it doesn't compare with what we witnessed last week. But, you know, people's minds change quickly. You know, something can happen to suddenly turn all that around. Yeah, fair enough. Minds change quickly. You know, something can happen to suddenly turn all that around. Yeah, fair enough. I do think the other thing is that last week there was at least a pretty significant effort to say, what's the future agenda of the country to be?

And I think the Republicans made a pretty clear statement by saying they're not going to have a platform this year. And it really speaks to the instinct, it seems that President Trump has, which is that he does fine if he doesn't prepare. And that the country doesn't really need a plan. It just needs him at the helm making decisions on the fly based on his instincts, based on, you know, what he learned in the real estate business over many years. And so that's why I think he doesn't really work very well with a teleprompter because he doesn't really kind of own the ideas in the same way that politicians do if they kind of dig into this idea of a speech where I'm going to figure out how to find that next 6% of voters

that I really need to close a deal on. When I look at some of the other members of the cast of this show, you mentioned Melania, you know, I felt like some of the coverage of her was a little bit, you know, it's very, there was a lot of praise. And in some instances, there wasn't a lot of, a lot of these words really stack up against how she's kind of conducted herself over the last four years. But that apart, at least she had a script that was meant to reach out to those voters who said, I've been really frustrated. I voted for Trump, but I've been frustrated with the way he conducts himself on these issues of race, for example. And so her message was on point for them. But I felt like he was doing what he does,

which is I'll come, I'll show up, I'll read something. I won't look like I'm really committed to it. It'll seem contrived, but I'll get through it. And pretty soon I'll be able to give these kind of stem winding, meandering, chaotic speeches that I love to give to the base. Okay. You mentioned numbers a couple of times in that. And so let's move to numbers in terms of polls, because we're going to be and already are being inundated with all kinds of facts and figures from the various different polling agencies in the United States that are doing research, whether it's for networks or universities or papers or what have you. And what I need your expertise here for now is to try and help guide us on what we should actually be looking at and paying attention to and what we should perhaps,

maybe not ignore, but give it a lot less weight. And I'll use an example this morning. I was watching one of the morning programs out of the U.S., and there was a whole raft of new numbers to contemplate, and they started off with the national numbers in the U.S. And as they read them with Biden with a fairly healthy lead, I can't remember what it was, 10 or 12 points, it's kind of been that way ever since your poll a month or six weeks ago,

which suggested they were up into double-digit lead. Anyway, the point they were making was ignore the national polls. They don't mean anything because they're weighted so heavily with, you know, Democratic numbers all along the coastlines, especially in California and in New York, that it kind of throws the national number out of whack. In a similar way kind of to what we saw a year ago in the Canadian election where the Conservatives had huge numbers, especially in Saskatchewan and Alberta,

and in the end, in fact, they won the national numbers in terms of popular vote or the you know number of votes cast but it didn't help them in the overall stats in terms of seats uh one and the same kind of thing is happening in the states in the sense that ignore the national numbers focus on the battleground states okay i kind of get that understand that. But let me go to the expert, you. First of all, should we ignore the national numbers? Should we sort of say, okay, that's very interesting, but it really doesn't mean anything right now? No, not necessarily.

I think the comparisons of where Biden is relative to where Hillary Clinton was at the same time in the cycle four years ago. It's useful to look at that. And at this point, at least you'd come away with a sense of, okay, he's doing better than she was at this point. And so that should all things being equal translate into an advantage for him in those swing states that matter. But the general point of don't overload

on those nationwide kind of Biden-Trump horse race numbers is certainly true. The focus really should be on a combination, I guess, of that presidential approval number, which really is a surrogate for, that is a national number, it's a surrogate for how many people are unhappy with Trump right now. And I tend to like to look at the views of independents, because in the American system, as many of our listeners will know, there are people who are registered Democrats, registered Republicans, but also independents. And the level of unhappiness with Trump among independents has been the biggest threat to his reelection and the thing that he needed to work the most on. So I would look at that. But beyond that, absolutely, I would pay attention to the polls in the biggest states in terms of being swing states and also states that

deliver a lot of electoral college votes. And, you know, I was looking at the top six states, I think, in terms of the number of electoral college votes, California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Now, only a couple of those are swing states. Some people think that Texas might be in that category now, but Florida is and Pennsylvania is. California and New York are clearly Democratic states and look like they're going to continue. So the focus really should be on the swing states, including a couple of others beyond those ones that I just mentioned. You know, people tend to say if Trump's going to win re-election, it has to start in Florida. That if he can't win Florida, he can't put together a winning ticket.

Is it that simple? No, I don't think so, actually. There was an interesting piece this morning that I shared on Twitter. I think I saw it on FiveThirtyEight.com. And for our listeners who are interested in digging into the data, there are two sites that I would recommend, 538.com and realclearpolitics.com, which kind of aggregate polling information. 538 does a kind of an analysis of the polling in a little bit more depth. And they were basically saying there are

different kinds of swing states and that, you know, Florida in particular has a few different things that make it kind of unique from the other swing states. One is that it's got a disproportionately older population, which tends to vote more for the Republicans. Another, though, is that it has a high number of Hispanic and people of color voters in its base. And that should normally lead Democratic, but the Cuban American population normally votes Republican. So there are different dynamics in Florida as compared to some of the other swing states where we see effects like in Texas

of more people moving into the state, more urbanization, higher levels of education, high Black and Hispanic or Hispanic voters in significant numbers. Those are the factors that are kind of pushing those states a little bit closer to the Democratic column. Arizona, a little bit like that as well. So I do find that that's interesting. If you sort of said there are six different races that are going on, and sure, Trump will have a problem winning if he can't win Florida, but that's not the same in my mind as saying Florida is just like the other swing states. It's a little bit unique.

We're just over two months away from the election, so we're now into kind of the hardcore part of the election campaign. You know, the tradition is it kind of starts Labor Day and goes full bore right through. Once the conventions are over, once the summer is kind of considered to be over because of Labor Day. Can things move considerably and fast in an election like this? The way we've tended to look at American politics very roughly over time has been sort of each side is somewhere around 45, and it's that other 10 points that make the difference as to

winners and losers um there seem to be a little more spread open than that right now um but can there be in this kind of a campaign a significant movement one way or the other and quickly? Well, I think there can. I think that if I were focused on what are the big factors that could change things, I think President Trump is betting heavily on two things. One is that if he just says stock market keeps going up, pandemic deaths keep going down, that enough of those voters who may be anxious about democratic policies, especially taxation policies, will kind of stay in his column or migrate to his column. But the big bet for him there is that the economy won't actually hit a bump in the road for most people who don't participate in the stock market caused by a second wave of pandemic infections. And

related to that, I would say the big gamble that we feel here in Canada, too, is what's going to happen when kids go back to schools. Because there are a lot of parents, we're putting out a poll in Canada, that shows half of parents with kids who are of age to go to primary, secondary schools don't really want their kids to go back to the classroom next week. They're worried that they're going to get sick. So I think that's a giant factor. I think the other thing is people are going to tune in to the debate between Biden and Trump. I forget if they decided how many they're going to tune in to the debate between Biden and Trump. I forget if they decided how many they're going to have now. I know that Trump said he wanted more. If I was him after watching

Biden last week, I wouldn't want more debates with Biden. But whatever number they're going to be, there's going to be at least one. And I think that that might be a situation where people take the measure of these two people. And Biden has been pitching himself as a better man, in addition to being the better man in this particular case. And Trump has been trying to cast Biden as almost a mental incompetent at this point because of age and dementia and that sort of thing. And I think he's taking a big gamble on that because I don't think that Mr. Biden is probably going to perform that way.

And Mr. Trump might look under pressure to be a little bit less than clear in some moments. So I think those are two factors that could be significant and could move numbers in a fairly rapid way. All right, we're going to leave it at that for this week. Lots to chew on there, lots of interesting thoughts about the state of the campaign for the presidency in the U.S., the race next door. Thanks very much, Bruce. Talk The Race Next Door.

Hope you enjoyed it. And we're always happy to hear your ideas on topics we should discuss. And many of you have sent many ideas in, all of which we look at. So don't be shy. You can reach us at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Now, I did tell you that I wanted to release, it's not me releasing,

Facebook has released this data, on what the two presidential campaigns are spending on Facebook in ads on specific topics. Remember, 2016 and all the talk about how social media was used and how the Trump campaign was using it much more effectively than the Hillary Clinton campaign. And they focused on Facebook

and how they were putting stuff out on Facebook. Some of it was even true, but there was a lot of it, and it circulated and had its desired effect. So who's learned what from that experience? What are the two campaigns spending now? Well, you're going to find this interesting. The topic, this is just Facebook, remember, ads on Facebook. The topic that is generating the most revenue for Facebook

is criminal justice. Who's spending all the money? 100% Trump. $6 million so far. Now, that doesn't sound like much. But this isn't like a television campaign. It actually may be much more effective than a television campaign. It's less expensive, too.

$6 million, 100% from Donald Trump's campaign. Defund the police, 4.8 million, 100%. Donald Trump. Fake news, 4.7 million, 100%. Donald Trump. 4.6 million, socialism, 100%. Donald Trump. Immigration, 2.3 million, 100%. Donald Trump. Immigration, 2.3 million. 100% Donald Trump. 1.3 million on taxes.

100% Donald Trump. So we got all those, the first seven of them, all the money is being spent by the Trump campaign. Now you start to find a little bit elsewhere. On the economy, 1.3 million total. Looks like about 95% of it from the Trump campaign. COVID-19. Aha, this is different. It's just like last night watching that convention. They don't talk about COVID-19, aha, this is different. It's just like last night watching that convention.

You don't talk about COVID-19 if you're a Donald Trump person, with the exception of Melania Trump. But overall, only just under a million dollars is being spent on ads on Facebook about COVID-19, and about three quarters of that comes from the Biden campaign. Big tech. Well, first of all, health care. On health care, 861,000 spent on ads, about threequarters of it from the Trump campaign. Big tech is the only other one where the Democrats,

well, it's not the only other one, but in terms of relatively big spending, three-quarters of it coming from the Biden campaign. Dark money, I guess we're talking corruption within the system well that's all coming from the democrats obviously telling stories about the republicans that's only a hundred thousand dollars they've spent college affordability only 55 000 spent on ads and on facebook targeting you know isn't it supposed to be mostly younger people on Facebook? Well, they're not doing much of a job in buying ads for that. They're only $55,000 spent.

And climate, only $27,000, all by the Democrats. So you look at issues that to some people are really important, like climate, like college affordability, like COVID. The Democrats are spending more than their opponents, but they're not spending much. The big money, if you want to call it that, that's being spent on Facebook is coming from the Republicans, and it's about their issues that they're trying to make everybody think about, right? That their country's falling apart and that there are riots in the streets and they're going to, if the Democrats win, they'll move people into your neighborhood that you should be afraid of.

So they're focusing on criminal justice, defund the police, fake news, socialism, immigration. I don't know. I think those numbers tell an interesting story, and they're ones we're going to look back at when this election's over to see whether it changed in the final two months and how it changed. The Democrats now have a lot of money.

They raised millions and millions of dollars last week on their convention. How are they going to spend it in the next two months? All right, there you go. There's your Bridge Daily for hump day for wednesday of week 24 as i said you can always write the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com i'm peter Mansbridge. This has been The Bridge Daily. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you.