The Dispatch Podcast - A Tale of Two Conventions

Episode Date: August 29, 2020

The Democratic and Republican conventions are finally over but most of the major credible pollsters are waiting for the dust to settle before tracking public opinion of both presidential candidates. The critical message pushed by the RNC this week was that Trump kept the promises he made to voters, but is that a real policy agenda moving into his second term? Is Biden’s “nice guy,” “Build Back Better” strategy winning over wobbly Republican voters? Do conventions even affect voters’ perceptions of candidates all that much? “I don’t know that anything unexpected or dramatic came out of the last two weeks, and I doubt that to the extent there are persuadable voters, a lot of them are spending eight hours of their life in front of the tv each week watching this,” said Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson on today’s episode. “I would highly suspect you had more hardcore Democrats hate-watching the Republican Convention than you did genuinely persuadable voters in the middle.” Tune in to hear Sarah and Steve chat with Anderson—co-founder of Echelon Insights and columnist at the Washington Examiner—for a conversation about the historical importance of conventions in moving the needle for presidential candidates in the polls. Show Notes: -Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, Alice Johnson’s speech at the Republican National Convention, “The ‘Rage Moms’ Democrats Are Counting On” by Lisa Lerer and Jennifer Medina in the New York Times, Donald Trump’s  RNC acceptance speech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our special Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isker, joined by Steve Hayes. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit The Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. And make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. We'll hear a little later from our sponsors today, Gabby and the Bradley Foundation. Joining us today is Kristen Soldes-Anderson, pollster, speaker, commentator, author of the selfie vote, and co-founder of Eschelon Insights. But more importantly than all of that, she is one of my very best friends. And since we have these conversations all the time without calling them a podcast, we thought it would be fun to record today's. This is so much fun to get to hang out with you in like a professional setting. I'm so excited to be on this podcast. Thank you for having me. Is Wally nearby? Yes. He is about three feet away. He's awake. And hopefully he doesn't fall asleep because that's when he starts making lots of noise. And for those who don't follow your daily Wally on Kristen's Twitter account, highly recommend it brightens my day every day.

Thank you for sharing Wally with the world. Of course. The internet is dark and full of terrors. I tried it. a little bit of sunshine and lightness every day. He's an old golden retriever who doesn't love them. Speaking of Full of Terror's, what is the most interesting, surprising polling data that you're seeing right now about the race? Well, there's not a lot of fresh data. This is a totally unsatisfying answer. But most of the major highly credible pollsters have taken a pause during the conventions,

You know, sometimes there will be a couple of weeks in between the Democrat or Republican conventions where pollsters can go in and say, oh, who got a bounce? Who didn't get a bounce? But this year, everything is so strange and compressed that I am expecting next week, late next week, like if you talk to me one week from now, we're going to have a ton of data that's going to tell us, did anything move, did the Trump campaign get the bounce they wanted, did wobbly Republicans come home, is what's happening in Wisconsin moving people? we'll have a much clearer sense of that in a week. But right now, it's a totally unsatisfying moment because most of the big polls are just waiting for the dust to settle. They will go into the field on Monday.

We'll have data late next week. We saw a couple polls about the Biden bounce or lack of bounce. Basically, the polls didn't move at all, but Biden's favorability increased in both of those data sets that I saw. Do you think that's because people just aren't going to be changing their minds anymore at this point?

Like, they know the two candidates. they know where they are? Or is it that the convention did not give him a bounce? It may be that there were Democrats who were like, look, they were the ones who said, if my party nominates a bag of potato chips,

I will vote for that bag of potato chips instead of Donald Trump. And they came to the conclusion during the Democratic convention that Joe Biden is better than a bag of potato chips. So that could explain it, that these were folks

who were going to hold their nose and vote for Joe Biden and maybe after the week of the convention of hearing the stories about, hey, Joe Biden's a good guy. He's endured all the suffering. This is what I've experienced from knowing him. They've come around to liking him a little bit more. And you kind of heard Republicans attempt to do the same thing in their convention as well with the kind of repeated messaging of, yes, he might be a jerk on Twitter, but I promise when the cameras aren't there, he's a nice guy. You know, you heard that a little bit

on the Republican side, too, this acknowledgement that there may be some reluctant Republicans who they're never going to vote for a Democrat, but they're not thrilled with Trump using the convention to say, ah, don't you dare think about not voting? Don't you dare think about going anywhere else? It's time to come home and it's time to vote for your party. This was my theory that both conventions actually

weren't trying to move voters from one side to the other. This was about increasing turnout among their wobblier voters, the ones who were thinking of staying home. So my expectation when we get that data dump next week that you're talking about is the campaigns themselves are measuring success by something more like those likeability numbers on the Democratic side that measure enthusiasm and something more like

the economy numbers on the Republican side. He had a 10-point lead on that and maybe a little bit on like fear of Joe Biden winning. They certainly would like to see those numbers, I think, move on their side because that was certainly helpful in 2016 on the Clinton side. Steve, you've been diving into some data this week

Yeah, well, I have about a million questions. Very happy to have you on, Kristen, and to talk to you about this stuff, as always. So I guess my first question is, how much have conventions mattered historically? What should we, if this were a normal year, a normal presidential election year, what should we have expected to see for each of the candidates coming out of a convention in terms of polling bounces? And how, um, we have expected to see for each of the candidates coming out of a convention in terms of polling bounces? And how, um, long-lasting are those things? How much do they really affect the outcome? So I think it varies from year to year. It varies based on whether there's an incumbent or not. It varies whether people have a pretty good sense of who these candidates are. I mean, there are not a lot of Americans who don't have a strong sense of who Joe Biden and who Donald Trump are. Joe Biden's been running for president since I was alive. Donald Trump is an extremely well-known name. So it's not as though we like needed the conventions to introduce these people to Americans who may have been zoned out during the primary in the way that someone like a Mitt Romney was less defined what he was running

for president. And in fact, that's how Democrats were able to sort of jump in and define him before he could even go to his convention and get defined in the first place. But these have been becoming less and less of a thing that people watch. You know, I've I've joked with Sarah before last four years ago, I was a contributor at ABC News. And during the conventions, our lead-in program on ABC was The Bachelorette. And sure enough, more people were watching The Bachelorette on ABC than we're watching the convention. Now, it's not a totally fair comparison because you could go watch the convention on a bunch of channels and you could only watch The Bachelorette on ABC. But nonetheless, I mean, I think the fact that our campaign cycle has just gotten extended and extended and extended so

much that unlike most normal functioning democracies where you declare that there's going to be an election and then like two months later there's an election and here it's our never-ending constant spiral that I think because of that insanely prolonged timeline it's not like when you get to the convention like what there no stone is left unturned I'm thinking of the the only contemporary examples I can think of where a convention may have really mattered was think about the introduction of Sarah Palin. Her surprise choices, John McCain's VP, nobody really knew her. I remember I was interviewing various members of Congress for some web show I was doing back then, and like there were high-ranking Republican members of Congress calling her Governor Palin.

I mean, like, they just didn't know who she was. And this was in Minneapolis at the convention. So that was important, you know, and she gave that rousing speech to just energize people. it did not wind up lasting and ultimately leading to them winning the election, obviously. But, you know, I think if you have a moment where somebody is being introduced to the country or something unexpected and dramatic happens, certainly that is a chance to break through. I don't know that anything unexpected or dramatic came out of the last two weeks. And I doubt that to the extent there are persuadable voters, a lot of them were spending eight hours of their life in front of the TV each week watching this.

Yeah, let me push a little deeper on exactly that question because it's something that Sarah and I have talked about before there was a poll. I believe it was a CBS poll. Sarah, correct me if I was wrong. If I'm wrong, that's so that 96% of American likely voters had more or less made up their mind on what they were going to do, which doing my elementary school level math suggests that, you know, there might be 4% of getable voters. Setting aside that there are complicating issues that would affect that. the turnout question, all this stuff. Does that sound right to you? I mean, you said the country knows who Donald Trump is. The country has been watching Joe Biden for years and years and years. If you're talking about, you know, voters who are likely to go to the polls, voters who have been consistent voters in presidential years over the past, let's say, four cycles, is it really the case that maybe only 4% of them are getable?

I would say it's a little bit. higher than that, but maybe not that much higher. So there are, there are also two axes on which people have to make a decision, right? There's a decision of, do I vote for? Who do I vote for? And then there's the decision of do I vote at all? People wildly overreport their likelihood to vote in polls, which makes the, are you likely to vote question a little bit useless to pollsters? But there are those two different questions. So there, to say the point Sarah made, you know, some of this convention stuff may not have been about finding that 4% and persuading them to go on one side of the fence or the other, but it was about taking that other chunk of people who might be thinking, oh, I don't

know. Voting by mail might not matter, and I don't want to go to COVID at the polls and whatever, it doesn't really matter and saying, no, no, no, here's why this matters. But there was an interesting study that Pew Research Center did. They've been doing it over the last two years where they have a panel of people. It's called their American Trends panel. And it's the same group of people that they survey over and over and over again, which is really cool. It makes it very different than most of these media polls where they're just going, grabbing a random sample

of 1,000 people and saying, here you go. So they ask the same group of people repeatedly, which party do you identify with? And Pew, I think wisely, if you say you're independent, they say, okay, well, like, but really what are you?

Like, which way do you actually lean? Because a lot of people that say they're independent are functionally Republicans, but occasionally they'll vote for Democrats because they like them or it makes them, you know, feel more independent and vice versa.

But most voters, even those who say they're independent, they have some kind of a lien. And they found that between September of 2018 and July of 2020, so we're not talking, we're talking about less than a two-year time span, that about 9% of people who are Republican at the beginning wound up identifying themselves as Democratic at the end. And another 3% had just left and just said they don't have any lien at all. So you had about 12% of people fall away from the GOP and become Dems or Independence. But you saw a mirror image thing happen for Democrats that like 9% of them became Republicans and another 3% became independence. So even though at the top level,

you may say, well, wow, Joe Biden has been seven points ahead of Donald Trump for the last couple of months. Nobody in this race is budging. That doesn't necessarily mean there isn't churn happening under the surface where some news story that turns somebody off of Joe Biden isn't necessarily also recruiting him somebody new out of that, that mushy camp. It's a small camp, but it does in fact exist. But I will also say what we know about independent voters, and this is not intended as an insult to any of your wonderful listeners who may identify themselves as independent. But we know that just generally independent voters are less tuned into the news. They're less likely to sit down and spend time watching something like a convention

than committed partisans are. I would highly suspect, You had more hardcore Democrats hate watching the Republican convention than you did genuinely persuadable voters in the middle. I was just going to ask about the ratings. So, you know, we have the initial Nielsen ratings from the GOP convention at this point, lower than the Democratic convention. So let me break down some numbers overall. There's about 158 registered voters.

And about 138 of those. registered voters voted in 2016, for instance. For the number of people who watched Donald Trump last night, we're talking probably even when they adjust the numbers closer to 17 million. So obviously, there's just this huge gap of the number of people who actually watch the conventions versus the number of people who are going to vote. And then if you're talking about that mushy middle, they're probably the least likely to have watched the convention. But how much does the convention, I don't know, marinate around even if you didn't watch it? Like, are these conventions at this point not being watched that much on television to begin with? And more

about the social media share aspect, Facebook clips, Twitter highlights, et cetera, are they getting out there at all past the people who actually watch them in the Nielsen ratings? I do think that this is why, like having powerful individual moments like Alice Johnson giving her. her speech, you know, those sorts of things, I think, do have the potential to resonate and go a little further and make people question what they may have thought or had a preconceived notion about when it came to either Joe Biden or the GOP. I don't think it's a surprise again with the Republicans and Donald Trump, think about the money they spent on that Super Bowl ad back when we had live sports. You know, they spent that time focusing on that criminal justice reform message with

an eye toward, hey, this is a broader audience than we normally talk to. So let's try to get that out there. I don't know yet what like the big viral moments from this convention are necessarily going to be. Because it just, it struck me that while relatively well produced, both of these conventions, I think were, I think the reason why you probably saw more people watching Joe Biden than you saw watching Donald Trump, it could have just been convention fatigue by the second week, or it could have been that Donald Trump is very overexposed. There's no doubt what Donald Trump is thinking, because usually he tells us in 280 characters the moment the thought has formed in his mind, where Joe Biden, whereas Joe Biden has been

so absent that it's almost like you tune in to see like, how's he doing? I keep hearing that Joe Biden's, you know, like, what's his story? that almost as though there was more mystery on the Democratic side, even though Joe Biden's a very well-known quantity, because of his relative absence, that could be why you saw more people watching Joe Biden than Donald Trump.

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about rage moms? No. I'm cringing, though, just hearing that term. So here's the theory, right? Bill Clinton comes up with soccer moms, post-9-11,

you have security moms, and that now we have these suburban, mostly white women who are pissed off. In coronavirus, they are now... I thought they were called Karen's. I thought we had a name for them. Sorry. God, that's terrible. Go ahead.

These women are mad that they are now the caretakers, whether of their children, their elderly parents, and they're more likely to be the ones losing their jobs in the economy because of all of these things falling on them. And then you added protests and unrest in the cities that they live outside of, and they're just fed up. and what direction the fed-up suburban moms are going to go? We were seeing a gender gap increase and increase and increase over the last three and a half years, and it was big in 2016. Will it continue to move towards the Democrats,

or are you seeing that some of this is actually going to creep back towards the Republicans potentially? Well, fed up is normally not a signifier for someone who is going to, vote to re-elect the incumbent, right? And this was, I remember back in 2016, there being so much criticism of the Republican Convention on the grounds that people said, oh, it's so dark. It's so dark and gloomy and fearful. And actually a lot of Americans were not feeling very upbeat about things that, you know, in a way, the Democratic Convention may have been to sunshine and

roses. It just, maybe it wasn't hitting the mood of the nation right. And then I believe it was Lara Trump, who criticized the Democratic convention this year by saying, you know, it just seems so dark. It just seems like they don't have any uplifting message. And I thought, man, the right track, wrong track numbers, only a quarter of the country thinks that we're on the right track. This is not a very sunshine and roses America right now. We have 180,000 people that have died of this pandemic and it's not going anywhere. This is, there's plenty of reasons for people to be fed up. So that's why you're now seeing the Trump team try to convert their message, I think, less from like, keep America great. I don't think you really actually,

maybe I missed it, but did you hear the phrase keep America great a ton at the convention? Instead, it seemed to be more like, you know, the message, let's take, for instance, law and order. The idea of like, make Donald Trump president and you won't see riots in the streets is kind of a tough sell because Donald Trump is president and there are riots in the streets. However, if the argument is if you think this is bad, just imagine what happens when Joe Biden is in charge, suddenly that becomes the really dower message to someone who is fed up and who maybe doesn't want to hear, oh, sunshine and roses and everything is fine. They don't feel like things are fine. But what they really can't handle is things getting worse. And so even though, you know, devil you know

versus devil you don't, Joe Biden is hard to paint as some kind of wild-eyed radical who's going to upend American society. That's why you've seen, I think, so much of an effort to focus on things instead like socialism and AOC and look, he's going to be a puppet of all of these forces that are going to make it harder for you to continue living your life and are going to make it harder for us to crawl out of this, uh, crawl out of the situation. We, we did see a slight adjustment. I mean, if you think of the way that Mike Pence ended his speech on Wednesday night, rather than saying keep America great again, which is what we had heard repeatedly as, as we pushed into kind of a serious presidential campaign season. Instead, Mike Pence said, make America

great again, again, um, which should sort of implicitly recognizes that things, aren't going well, as you say. My question is on some of the numbers that, you know, people in your world look at to really help understand where these races are going. And I think of the right track, wrong track number. If you look at that number in particular and a variety of other numbers, you would think Donald Trump doesn't have a prayer in this election. Is the reason that he does purely a function of our polarization? I think polarization is a part of it. I also think, you know, we have a lot of questions that get asked about issues.

Do you approve or disapprove of the job Trump is doing on the economy? 48 to 49% say yes. Do you approve or disapprove of the job he's doing on COVID? Only 40% say yes. But then I think there is the question, you know, there's always, that broader question of who's fighting for people like you. And that was a really consistent message in both conventions was this candidate is going to fight for people like you, which is a message that works quite well in a polarized world where it is a, there is a lot of us versus

them feeling. And you can imagine being, you know, Sarah called them wobbly Republicans, being someone who is perhaps a wobbly Republican and you don't love the way Trump has handled COVID. You don't think saying, hey, I shut down travel in February is an adequate answer to what are you doing now that it's almost September and the pandemic's still here. You know, you may not love the tweets or what have you. But then you see a clip of somebody in a restaurant being screamed at and told you have to put your hand in the air and, you know, say a slogan. And I think it's the sort of thing where, you know, cancel culture gets talked about a lot in conservative media and talk radio and online. but actually don't think that it's just, you know, and it was brought up a ton at the Republican convention.

But the sense of that people who are either Trump supporters or wobbly Republicans feel like they are under siege by the culture overall, you know, even their professional sports are no longer a place where somebody with their views could feel safe. You'd have to be quiet. There was a lot of talk in 2016 about was there a shy Trump effect and it's debatable whether that actually affected the polls. But there is tons of evidence now

that people who do hold conservative views feel very much so like culture is not with them, like they are under siege. And you can imagine someone saying, look, I don't think Joe Biden is a wide-eyed radical, but I do think that if someone like Donald Trump isn't president, that suddenly that's one of the last bastions holding back the title wave

that's going to wipe out the ability of someone like me to exist in polite society and hold my views. So that for me is, you know, part of what may be driving this, is it's not as simple as saying, well, do you like Donald Trump's policy on health care? People may go, I don't really like Donald Trump's policy on health care, but I feel like if someone like him isn't fighting for me,

then I don't know who will be. What message at this point, understanding that polling average-wise, the Biden campaign is still well ahead, outside the margin of error in, you know, the vast majority of the national polls, what advice would you give to the Biden campaign in terms of messaging or reaching those voters? Well, I think that they need to continue this kind of do-no harm, continue as much as possible to resist the pull of the far left.

I mean, there's a lot of debate. I know this week in conservative land about did Joe Biden take too long to disavow the violence, or did he not do it vehemently enough? But he did, you know, and it's, gosh, it is controversial in progressive activist circles to even acknowledge that there might be a political cost to things like violent riots. I mean, I think it was Don Lemon this week,

like made headlines because he said, they're seeing it in the focus groups. And this was like a big thing. Like, wow, you're surprised that voters don't like footage of car dealerships and furniture stores aflame? Surprise. But so I think, but Joe Biden, for the most part, has been trying to be very cautious about not being pulled too far away so that any of those voters who don't really like Trump, but they might be caught, you know, Biden curious, that there's no reason for them to get pulled away. That to me, you know, is how you sort of just play it safe. Don't let, don't feel like you've got to do the latest thing that the last.

people on Twitter tell you you have to do, just keep doing what you've been doing all along. It's been working. And especially since a big piece of Joe Biden's advantage over Donald Trump is his standing with seniors, which is not something that Hillary Clinton had, you know, just trying to preserve that. Keep your favorables in reasonably good territory. Don't let yourself get dragged into Hillary Clinton, Toxicville. And you'll be in a much safer position than Hillary Clinton was four years ago. Steve? Yeah, can I, let me push a little bit deeper on the policy messaging that you referred to earlier.

What struck me, and it's certainly not just me, this has been part of the commentary that's emerged, particularly from the Republican convention, is that politicians, I mean, maybe not politicians, Donald Trump, doesn't seem to be punished for what would appear to be contradictory positions on big issues. in a way that a traditional politician would. I mean, you think about interviews that politicians gave to Tim Russer. You know, Tim Russer would point to a video from five years ago showing that a politician had a different answer, and there would be kind of an unstated accusation

of hypocrisy, and the politician would be, she would be, you know, in a tough spot having to explain the discrepancy or the change. It doesn't seem like that's a problem for Donald Trump. I mean, you think about things like criminal justice reform in the Alice Johnson speech versus the broader law and order message. Or you think about the constant calls to end the wars and bring our troops home with the aggressive calls to defeat jihadists and defeat the enemies and take out ISIS and continue to fight al-Qaeda. Or you think about the president saying, you know, coronavirus is a once-in-a-century crisis. And then making fun a reporter who's wearing a mask or, you know, calling for immediate opening, pews in the churches should be filled by Easter.

There was a lot of that, I thought, at the Republican Convention this week. There was some of it I thought in the president's 70-minute remarks. Does that matter anymore? I mean, is there, it's a, I guess the hard question, it's probably not a lot of data on that. But it seems to me that he's sort of bulletproof on that question. And maybe it's the case that it could almost be an advantage for him because voters can kind of pick and choose what they like from Donald Trump to justify or explain their support for him. So I think the uncharitable view is that it's incoherence. And frankly, even if you take the view that it is incoherence, the reality is that most voters are not thinking about politics and policy.

through some, you know, ideological lens where they're like, man, all this stuff has to line up perfectly. That a lot of people are making decisions about where they stand on issues that, you know, in focus groups, you know, the consultants behind the glass are like, oh, these people are so inconsistent. Don't they realize they just contradicted themselves? I'm like, no. And that's, I don't think that's a bad thing. I don't think we should be expecting everyone to be like, hmm, I checked every single policy position against exactly how I feel. I just, It's expecting this, like, level of ideological consistency that most voters don't have. I don't say that as a bad thing.

I'm not insulting voters when I say that. That's just how people live. And Donald Trump came in and remember, the Republican primary in 2016, everyone else was fighting over who is the most ideologically pure. Donald Trump didn't care about ideology, and it turned out neither did a lot of voters. So, you know, you could say, well, wow, is it incoherence? I would argue it's actually kind of reflective of the sort of stuff you would would likely hear in focus groups. But then there's another even more charitable viewing of it,

which is you can say, I don't want us to be in endless wars either, but I sure want America to be able to defend her interests when the time is right. You can say, I don't want us to have people sitting in jail cells for nonviolent offenses for which they are spending life sentences behind bars. That seems wrong to me, but I also don't want to see our cities burning. That's to me, that's not necessarily incoherence. That's nuance. Now, when it comes to things like Joe Biden is simultaneously too tough on crime and not tough enough on crime, yes, that does get into silly incoherence territory. But I also think that there's an element of this that actually sounds a lot like what I would hear in a focus group where somebody might say, I just think

it's so sad that we've been in Iraq and Afghanistan for so long. I just don't understand what trying to achieve there. But at the same time, when you hear the story of, you know, hey, we just took out Qasem Soleimani, we took out this terrorist who's got American blood on his hands, they go, heck yes, we did. I don't necessarily view that as incoherence. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, the Bradley Foundation. Making sense of the current events during this extraordinary time can be trying. Conceived in Liberty, the Bradley speaker series, is a new video series that offers meaningful perspectives through engaging 15-minute interviews. Visit bradleyfdn.org slash liberty to watch their most recent episode

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So at the convention, and this is not scientific, I have not run the data on this. This was my own impression. At the Republican convention, I thought that there were more people of color speaking in prime time than we had seen

in any past conventions of late. Republican conventions. can the Republican Party under Trump make headway with people of color or is this to help wobbly Republicans feel like they are not the party of racist? I think that it is both. I think that it is, you know,

again, to the extent that there are wobbly Republicans who have really internalized a great deal of the public or a great deal of the criticism of the Republican Party, in particular the Republican Party under Trump, reminding them, hey, even if you don't love being in the party of Trump, don't you love being in the party of Nikki Haley and Dan Crenshaw and Tim Scott, I think is valuable and important. And I also think, though, that if you look at some of the data, there is some softness there for Joe Biden among Latinos and young African-American voters. Joe Biden absolutely

crushes it with older black voters. It is how he won the Democratic primary. That's not really a group that's that significantly up for grabs, but for younger voters of color, whether because they just feel like Joe Biden's maybe a relic of an older time, or maybe they're still skeptical of where he stood on, you know, the crime bill back in the day. Clearly there's some polling that the Trump campaign is seeing that suggests this is a factor because they mentioned it a couple of times. If you don't think that there's any softness there, you don't bring up the fact that Joe Biden had a really tough on crime bill back in their early 90s. So they must be sensing, you know, Whether it's that they think they're going to be able to pull some of these voters to actively turn out and vote for Trump, or it's just a strategy to say, look, you know, this guy is not worth your time and your vote. I'm not sure. But there is a little bit of softness there when it comes to Biden's support among young voters of color.

Again, which is not to say Donald Trump is winning them. It means that maybe he's losing them by 80 instead of 19. Right, right. Along the same lines, thinking of the messaging that came out of the Republican convention and then sort of pulling the camera back and looking at the broader messaging that we've gotten from the Trump campaign, what in your view is the message?

What's his reelection case in a sentence or two, number one? And number two, when you conduct focus groups, is that what you hear from voters when they characterize why they support the president? So I think the why do you support the president is he's fighting for us. I think that's, it's as simple as that. And I do think that there were repeated attempts during the convention to convey that message. However, I also think the fact that the president has been asked repeatedly, what's your message?

What would you do with a second term from friendly reporters? And he's whiffed on the question both times and just rambled. And then he had his speech last night where you could have put that to bed. And instead it was like a state of the uniony, really long, you know, kind of speech that I think still left that unclear. It's very odd for a guy who I think in his first run really understood, make America great again, build the wall. Like, he was all about the simplicity and the clarity, love it or hate it. And it just, you don't have that this time around. I keep thinking of, there's a story my old boss used to tell.

There's like a Paul Begala clip where he's being interviewed and he's asked about the Kerry campaign in 2004 and the moment he knew they were going to lose. And he said it was because he went and he asked people, what's the campaign's message? And they said, Jayhose. And he said, what is Jayhose? And it was like, jobs, housing, opportunity, and security. And he was like, oh, great. So we lost.

Cool. Cool. Like, that's not a – Jay Hose is not a message. And while I don't necessarily – I mean, I think the Biden team has this problem as well. They are lucky in that the message that is sort of filled in for them is Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and that may be all they need.

But I do think, again, it was keep America great. and you couldn't say that anymore because the right track, wrong track number. Most Americans didn't think things were so great. Make America great again, again. It's just so strange. It's awkward. That I think this emotional message of

this is the guy that's going to keep fighting for people like you. He's been a disruptor. He's been ticking off all the people that you don't like for four years and he's going to keep ticking them off for another four. He's only just getting started bringing about the change you promise last time. Like, that's the closest I can think of to a message for them.

But that's not a policy agenda. And I think that's a little bit, that's potentially a little bit of a problem. You know, what is Donald Trump going to do to combat COVID-19 or make us more resilient against pandemic with four more years? What's he going to do to get the economy back on track with four more years? you know, they kept talking about he's kept a lot of his promises. That was a big message from the campaign. But that's a little bit backwards looking.

Okay, he kept his promises. What are his new promises? We still don't really know what that is beyond he's going to fight for you. And that it's true on the flip side of Biden. I mean, I think you're right when you characterize it as sort of, I'm not Donald Trump. And whatever happens between now and November 3rd, I think that is going to be the de facto message from the campaign. And we've seen it reflected in polling that that's the main reason people who are supporting him are supporting him. Am I hearing you between the lines suggest that you don't

think the Biden campaign slogan of build back better is really compelling? I think it could be fine. I haven't tested it. So this is pure gut. Alliteration, always good. It's like a Frank Lunds thing. Shouldn't that be alliteration always awesome? You know, is it implying infrastructure? I mean, sure. I think that's fine. I also think it's relatively irrelevant.

I think the overarching message is I'm not Donald Trump with a subtext of, don't you want to stop thinking about the president every day? By the way, can I just have like a footnoted camera? campaign operative thing for those who read the sweep, my newsletter each week, or have listened to this podcast often. Something I am very fond of being annoyed about is the idea that winning campaigns did everything right and losing campaigns did everything wrong at the end of these elections. And this, so far, things could change in 67 days. So far will be maybe one of my best examples of one of these campaigns will win, even though I think both of them have made just wildly non-strategic

choices throughout the campaign season so far. And yet when one wins, just wait for it. I will be so annoyed. It'll be like, these are all the brilliant things this campaign did. And the losing campaign was so stupid in all of these ways. And it will annoy me to no end, Kristen. And I will call you and I will vent. You're triggering me to think about all of the like hype stories about Cambridge Analytica, like brainwashing millions of voters. And I'm like, if you know how any of this stuff actually were, It's not that sexy. It's just, well, there's also always this,

this sort of retrospective sense of inevitability. Yes. That the way things ended up were always the way things were going to end up. And that's frustrating to hear, particularly from people who claim to have known it all along. I knew all along this was going to happen. Guys, I think that we know what our post-election podcast needs to be.

Kristen, I think you might need to come back just so we can all vent about things that we're annoyed about that people are saying in the week after the election. All right. Final question, Kristen, which is, I don't know that a lot of your fans know what a huge football person you are. You're big into college football. You and I do a fantasy league together with our males.

And here's my question to you and Steve, because I'm very curious. I mean, everyone knows Steve and the Packers, and that love relationship, the affair that has been ongoing. I think your whole life, right, Steve? Correct. Which of the XFL rules

or any other rule change? Do you wish that the NFL would adopt because COVID has offered maybe an opportunity to try some new things out? I know next to nothing about XFL rules beyond the fact that the Rock now owns the XFL. So, what rule would you change in the NFL? I am always frustrated by the NFL's overtime rules.

If I'm not mistaken, and again, it's been a long time since I watched an actual football game. And I'm frankly unconvinced I'm going to get to watch a football game in this fall. So I've started to block it out. But I always just think it's insane that like the coin flip really determines who wins a lot of these games. Like, yes, they tried to make it a little better by saying, oh, if you only score a field goal and you're the first team, then the other team gets a chance. But like, if you get the coin flip and you score a touchdown, it's done. It just, it puts way too much importance on the coin flip. I think that's dumb. That's the right answer. There's actually not another, that is the right answer. It's 100% correct. And the changes that they made to the overtime rules, whenever it was five years ago, I think have hurt the game in a pretty significant way. Because, you go to overtime and so much rides on the coin flip, it's not good.

Y'all are both incorrect. The correct answer is all of the XFL rule changes should have been brought into the NFL for this season. If nothing else, then just to try them out. But two most important ones are the one, two and three point conversion rules from the XFL and the no time stoppage until the last two minutes of the game, both of which I think would make a big difference to watchability and excitability even in otherwise, you know, blowout games potentially.

It would make them go faster? Although, would that in some ways almost be the soccerification of football? Like if the clock doesn't stop no matter what? And some of us, given the fact that there's going to be questionable college football on or partial college football on, some of us don't want the NFL games to be shorter. Like, I just as soon have five-hour NFL games. There's more time to sit on the couch and hang with the family and maybe I am currently like the thing that if 2020 takes from me, Scott Hanson on the NFL Red Zone channel at one o'clock on Sunday saying seven hours of, I mean like, because it just makes me feel so decadent and guilty inside that I'm like, yes, I'm going to watch all seven hours of this. That's a horrifying amount of time. How many times could I watch that, the Irishman?

Like, during that window. This is wild. And yet, and yet, I'm in for it. And I'm, but I'm totally unconvinced that football's going to happen. So, Sarah, I'm not planning to study ahead of our fantasy football draft because I'm convinced this season is going to be pointless. It would work out really well for my family because we currently have the trophy in our house.

So if there's no fantasy football season this year, we get to keep the trophy another year. And I believe we get to put our names down as the first. de facto winners as the incumbents this year as well. Have you altered the trophy yet? No, because COVID happened. We were going to. So it's not, it is not full of the league style yet,

but it will be. Okay. So just so people know, and I'm doing this as not even a humble brag, just a straight up brag. The trophy that we have for our fantasy football league is my gaudy, absolutely ostentatious trophy

that I got for being a Florida State debate champion. back in high school. It's this huge, like, two foot tall. It's got this massive gold eagle on it. It's totally ridiculous. But I was not so emotionally attached to my Florida State Championship that I could not offer this up as something to be abused and amended to become our league's trophy. That's pretty good.

Well, if there is a fantasy football season, and if any of you want a part-time consultant, I'm cheap and easy. Give me free beer, and I'd be happy to consult with you. you because I become, as my wife can attest, overly consumed with fantasy football and statistics and start sits and all of those questions. It's speaking of straight up brags and not humble braggs, you are talking to the repeat back-to-back champion

of the Chesapeake Bay Fantasy Football League. Three out of the last four years, thank you very much, which includes Chuck Todd, for Meet the Press and some other folks that you probably would know. So if you need some advice, I'm happy to kick around ideas with you anytime. Do you or Chuck or does anybody in your league draft emotionally? Like I feel like isn't Chuck a big Packers fan? Chuck and I are both Packers fans and my brother's in the league too.

So like any sneaky Packers people that we think we're going to get on our teams without, you know, being noticed by the rest of league because there are a fair number of Washington football team fans in the league. We've lost that advantage. So, for instance, a late-round sleeper, Alan Lazard, the number two wide receiver for the Packers, sort of stood out last year and I think has a pretty good chance of doing something interesting this year. He'll be picked early.

Like, he'll be picked in maybe the single-digit rounds for rounds like 10 to 12 in our league. There's a tip. There's a tip right there. Steve, I could really use your help, because last year my first round draft pick was Antonio Brown. Oh, sorry. Sorry about that.

Yeah, I had, well, nobody's really interested in your fantasy football team, so there's not much point in talking about it. But just let me just add this. I had Christian McCaffrey, Lamar Jackson, Derek Henry, Chris Godwin, Calvin Ridley. Oh, my God. It was crazy. It was crazy.

They should have sent a poet. It's like when Jody Foster is looking at the planet in contact. and it's just so beautiful. She can't even behold it with her eyes. Let's be clear, it was all luck. I had done a fair amount of research before the draft, and I knew I liked Lamar Jackson in particular, but it was pretty lucky.

And I still needed a come behind victory in our Super Bowl, too. Well, to any listeners who are remaining after our political podcasts geared into not just football, but fantasy football, thanks for sticking with us. We so appreciate you guys and we'll be back next week. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and talk to you soon. You know,