The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 91. DNC Special: The Pollster (John Anzalone)

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

What goes on behind the scenes of campaign polling? When did American campaigns stop focusing on policy and become all about themes? How do parties use polls to change their tactics? Rory and Alastair are joined at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago by John Anzalone to discuss all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Podcast Editor: Alice Horrell Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen + Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispoletics.com. Welcome to The Restis Politics with me, Roy Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. So we've taken a little bit of a risk here. And what we've decided to do is to give you a little bit of a flavor of the convention, not by going for the huge names, but giving you a flavor of the different characters around the convention. And we've tried to get a variety of ages, geographies, and types of persons. So we've gone from a real veteran California attack dog in his 70s to one of the youngest members from the East Coast, so West Coast to East Coast, old to young. We've gone from people who are at the state level to people who are federal congresswoman, real veteran federal congresswoman in the shape of Rosadlora, who's a.

81 and an amazing pollster who's been right in the heart of these conventions since the 80s. So I hope you'll hear all the different voices and all the different tones and approaches to this convention, as well as a little bit of an insight into their individual lives. What did you think about the process, Alastair? No, no, I really enjoyed it. I think they're all interesting in very, very different ways. All, as you say, giving a slightly different feel to why they were here, why they enjoyed it, who didn't enjoy it and so forth.

So yeah, we're going to run these out. We'll carry on doing our leading every Monday, but we're going to run these out over the next few days under the sort of banner of Democratic National Convention special. So we've got the pollster, we've got the attack dog, we've got the veteran, we've got the young buck, and we also found probably the only close friend of Donald Trump who was actually at the convention.

We've got a very, very interesting spat with him. Very good. So I hope you Rory had left me by that. The other four we did together, it was just me and him in a boxing rib. But no, he was a very, very interesting and very, very intelligent guy. But yeah, we tried to disagree agreeably, but he caught very close at times. Well, thank you, Alice very much. And I hope you all enjoy hearing this quite unusual collection of five interviews.

So here we go, the first one, the pollster, John Anzolone. Welcome to the Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart. and me, Alastair Campbell, with a gentleman by the name of John Anzolone, who is one of those people you hear a lot about, a pollster and a pollster who has polled for many Democratic Party leaders going back as far as... Oh, God, you know, Joe Biden, 1987, his first presidential campaign. Now, I wasn't polling for him. I was a young organizer, but that's how I met Joe Biden. Okay. This is something like your seventh convention? Yeah, yeah. And can you give us a bit of a sense? of without telling stories out of school, you did slightly say that you sometimes find this convention a bit of a drag and they were more fun in the past? Well, listen, I'm, you know, security has slowed

everything down, right? And so, you know, when you're young and you have a little more hours in your day, right, without being paralyzed the next morning, I mean, it was all about having fun. Yeah. You first came, you were in your 20s. Yeah, I would have been in my 20s. So my first one was 1988 in Atlanta. And it was a great one. And the best thing about Atlanta, was not Michael Dukakis, who was a technocrat and very dry, but it was Jesse Jackson. Of course. His speech was maybe one of the best speeches. And a matter of fact, one of my sons was in speech and debate, and I made him watch the Jesse

Jackson speech of 1988. But again, that was when we didn't have any security. Everyone was about, you know, again, I think I told you, I'm not afraid to say it, drinking and fucking and having fun and, you know, working hard and getting into the convention, usually with a fake credential. And I'm sure some of that stuff still happens with younger. people, but there used to be a great black market of fake credentials, and that's how we all got in. And there was never a convention where the fire marshal didn't shut down the place on one night

or the other. And then they would, you know, get a little strict. And was it also more exciting because there was less message discipline, less central control. It was more unpredictable in terms of what could happen? Well, I think that the message for the candidate was controlled, without a doubt. I mean, there's no doubt that any of the presidential candidates, once they became the nominee, had a certain amount of time, right? You always have to be. have a certain amount of time to get the message right. I think that, you know, just back then, you know, everyone was just a little bit more riled up. The platform committees, we have a platform committee, which in the back of the day used to get people in trouble because, you know,

there would be certain things that they would vote on that would not be kosher with the nominee. Gotcha. But that no longer happens. They've got more control. I think very rarely happens. I think that nowadays presidential campaigns are about bigger thematics. I mean, you know, Kamala Harris, you're going to, I think, hear her talk about her being for the people. in the middle class and Donald Trump being for himself and those at the top and big corporations. And there will be some policy things that, you know, flow proof points underneath. But I think thematics really drive presidential campaigns. Whereas previously, the platform committees would have tried to drive through very specific policies,

child tax credits or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, President Biden, when he was vice president in 2020, was a little different because we were in a COVID environment and we had a president who really wasn't putting a national strategy together. And so Biden laid out what he was going to do. And voters wanted to know what his agenda was going to be. And so he put his agenda out there about bringing his supply chain back.

So he was actually, I think, a little bit more policy driven than we've seen in a long time. How much polling will be going on in American policies right now? Man, Americans friggin love polls, don't they? I mean, we have, what's crazy is, you know, I would say even back as early as, you know, Clinton Gore and, you know, Gore Bush, etc. there was maybe four or five national public polls. I mean, the Wall Street Journal, NBC had them, Washington Post, things like that. Now there's a poll every day, like literally every day. And I have no idea who the company is.

I mean, they just kind of spring up. And so there's just this, you know, abundance of polls. But what about the pollsters who are working for the candidates? Regardless of whether you're on the Trump campaign or you're on the Harris campaign, it is, you know, a robust part of the campaign, as is analytics, which we call big data. but you can for sure Tony Fabrizio, who's a friend who's the Trump pollster, both Tony and I help co-found the Wall Street Journal poll. You can bet that they're doing a ton of polling and then what does a ton mean? Well, I think that at a regular pace, you know, everyone's different and the research program is different

for every candidate. And, you know, the Harris campaign has a, again, a really great group of pollsters and Jeff Garron and my partner, Molly Murphy and a guy named Jeff Pollock and David Binder, one of the best qualitative researchers in America. So they're going to be well taken care of. So give me a sense of how often a candidate will engage with polls and how it might happen and how does the briefing occur? You know, when I say robust, and I'm not talking specifically about Harris, I'm just saying my experience in past campaigns is that when you're getting post-Labor Day, there's almost

never a week that goes by that you're not going to have some type of poll in the field. And why is that? One is America is electoral college. So you're going to have seven battleground states. So you pull those individually. But a lot of times in American politics, you'll take those seven, combine them for a combined battleground states poll where you'll do message testing. The Republicans do this, the Democrats do this.

So every week. And I'm just, just so I'm the candidate. And somebody like you would come in and do a presentation of roughly how long and what would you show me and what conclusions might I draw from it? That, you know, that differs from campaign to campaign. You know, Hillary Clinton, I, you know, would present to her and our polling team at a regular basis. In 2020, you know, that didn't happen. You know, we weren't physically, you know, with VP Biden at the time.

There was times when we would present over Zoom and things like that. But the candidate would expect once a week to sit down and look at the polls. I don't know about once a week, but the candidate is going to get those summaries, if you will, whether it's by the pollsters or whether it's by other key people, right? I mean, she or he is going to be on the campaign trail. Like, right, I mean, they're moving constantly. So it's not as if, you know, we're no longer in a physical place, you know. So give us a sense of just completely hypothetically, but if you were a presidential candidate running now, what would be an example of something you might look at in a poll, something that might worry you and how it might lead you to change a policy? Maybe if you don't want to put Vice President Harris something, think maybe about something President Obama did or somebody in the past.

where you can think they saw a poll after Labor Day. This was the conclusion they did from, and this is the action they took. Well, first of all, I think, and you can appreciate this because you've both been in politics. Any advice I've given an individual candidate, I wouldn't talk publicly. I think that it's really a little bit less about individual policy. I think that every candidate, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, run for president, usually what do they do? They go a little bit into the center. The Republicans are a little too conservative. The Democrat might be a little too liberal. And you will move, right, and communicate on certain policy issues. But I would think about it a little differently. I think most of the tack, you know, that you would make in a campaign

really has a little bit more to do with message development, right? I mean, at the beginning of the campaign, you had someone like Joe Biden talking a lot about the soul of the nation. But at the end of the day, he was really talking about economic politics, right? And again, you're, you're can, you know, chew gum and walk at the same time, but a lot of time research will help that, you know, what is the electorate wanting to digest? What do they need to know from the candidates? And it's usually economic. The thing I always remember from about when I was working the Labor Party when we wrote in American pollsters, and we had a few at different points, was there was all the number stuff, which I don't think we ever worried too much about. But where I found it very,

very helpful was when they literally would test different versions of the same sentence, almost, different versions of the same message. And some would work better than others. Sure. I mean, listen, I think that, you know, again, we're in the business of message development. And message development is about words, right? And it's what resonates with voters or consumers if you're working for a corporation. You know, nowadays, for example, we use things called.

on the online qualitative side of it where you may have a paragraph and people can, you know, use their cursor to highlight the words that they like or the sentiments that they like, right? And so, you know, none of these tools are quite frankly new. We used to do it in focus groups more often than not. Would you still be doing lots of focus groups? Yeah, focus groups are fantastic. Yeah, I think the bottom line, for me, I think that, you know, focus groups at the beginning, middle, and end of a campaign are really important.

I think that even, you know, showing focus groups like ads are important as well. Listen, sorry, just explain different things to a poll and a focus group. So a focus group is what we call a qualitative tool. So, you know, it's not projective to the, you know, a bigger population, but you really get really great feedback from people. And you literally have eight or ten people in a room and you're just talking to them. And they're voters. What would you be asking them today if you were a Democrat running in the presidential election?

What kind of issues would you be tackling? Well, you know, I love to know what's going on in their lives. It doesn't have to be about politics. Like, I'd love to know their day in life is, right? And I think that is really important. And I'd like to know what their concerns are about life. I'd love to have a conversation with them up front in a focus group that has nothing to do with politics. For example, what would be the conversation?

Well, I think the conversation would be what your biggest financial concern is. Like, what worries you? What keeps you up at night? You know, things like that. If you could buy your kids something that you really can't afford now, what would it be? I mean, and I say that because I remember one guy saying, I'm here tonight because your kid needs a bat for little league. That's really good information.

Like that, you know, okay, what is it that you're not being able to afford? You know, is it necessities? Is it, you know, luxury? Is it something for your kid? Do you tell you, I was always amazing. Philip Gould did our focus groups and he never told them who they were doing it for and they never asked. Do you ever, do you say with the Democratic Party?

No. No. No. No. No. So they tend to. know because a lot of times they take a little questionnaire beforehand. So there might be politicians on the popularity rating things like that. The evolution of focus groups from when I started,

you know, 30 something years ago till now is that they could agree to do a focus group and they heard a name on a little questionnaire and what will they do? Go and Google information about it. So sometimes they come a little too prepared. But all in all, no, it could literally be about picking which light beer you want or it could be picking which president you want. You just touch on something very interesting, which is the relationship between marketing commercial products and marketing a candidate, light beer against politics. And I guess that the polling industry in the US has developed those two things at the same time. Techniques of marketing, techniques of sales, techniques and market research have things in common, right, between commodities and people.

Yeah, I would say that the campaign industry has actually moved in and helped the corporate industry over the last two decades. More and more corporations are hiring people like me because we live in a frenetic world and our world is different in terms of how quick we have to actually have action or reaction. There's a lot of crisis management to what we do, right? There's a lot of minimizing mistakes. I mean, that's really in the nutshell what a campaign is often about. And so a lot of our strategic advice or acumen and techniques in research has actually, I think, been brought over to corporate America to help them move a little faster. How, in your experience, do candidates take bad news from polls? I'll tell you what.

The person in my experience who took bad news the best, like just a total friggin champ. Clinton. Hillary Clinton. I mean, she just synthesized the situation at all times. Not that she wasn't disappointed, but, you know, there just wasn't anyone more smart than Hillary Clinton, but she had been through so much because her husband was present. They had gone through a lot of crises. And it wasn't just president, but it was governor.

It was attorney general, right? Et cetera. And so I think she was able to deal with bad news at a different level than most people. How do you think Trump would be taking? Well, he must be in quite a lot of bad. One, I think that he doesn't believe it. I think Kamala Harris has him totally throttled right now. I don't think he knows how to deal with it.

He is clearly a narcissist, and he's a guy who just expects to be in control. He's a bully, and he can't get at her right now. And he doesn't know how to act, and therefore he's acting out. We've seen this in the last four weeks, rather, in all of his rallies. I mean, here's the irony is that her rallies right now, which are so absolutely electric, I went to that one couple weeks ago in Atlanta. I've been in this for 40 years. I'm not sure I've been to a more exciting electric rally in my life.

Her rallies look like Donald Trump's of 16 and 20, and his rallies look like a carnival barker right now. People aren't excited. People aren't cheering. People are leaving. And he's stumbling around. And he is not a disciplined guy. And you can see that he's not focused and he's rather. What will your opposite numbers be trying to do?

Well, I think that he has a really talented group of people around him. I'm like, no one's going to say that Susie Wiles and Chris Flosavita and Tony Fabrizio aren't really talented people. And for literally seven months, six and a half, seven months, they ran a great campaign. You know, you didn't really hear a whole lot from Donald Trump during that time. And the campaign was focused. I don't know if he was. And then she became the nominee and I think they were just not able to control the wild animal who couldn't believe what was going on. And have they got time to rest it back

or not? Well, we sure hope not. But I mean, you know, the fact is, is that any presidential race in America really begins after the conventions and labor. We always say in politics, the bell rings on Labor Day. And then you have two months and it is a foot race. And I think that the Democratic community right now is compared to where we were a month ago, let's just be honest. Like this is like a defibrillator has been, you know, jolted into the Democratic community. And she has met the moment. They're running a fantastic campaign. And we were down for and now we're up to in national polls. Now I'm not going to, you know, be overconfident here. But right now, you kind of, you kind of rather BS than them and a month ago you would have rather been them than us.

One of the things that I'm picking up from some Democrats is that they feel that everything you've said is true but those of them who tried quite early to say listen we need to get rid of President Biden we're going to do much better if we have a new candidate feel that it's happened their strategy is working it's been terrifically successful but but they're not getting rewarded. And the people who are getting rewarded was the loyalists who went out there and lied on TV all the way.

Not my lane. Not my lane, you know, listen, when you're two months away from election, I don't care what camp you're in or where you're coming from. Shut the fuck up. You wake up and you do everything you can to elect a Democratic president.

And that is Kamala Harris and Tim Walls. They're a fantastic team and everyone else can go fuck themselves. Very good. Now, what is Donald Trump thinking about when he's tweeting this out? So this is his pin tweet at the moment. Gasoline up 51%. This was his latest tweet. Electricity up 32 percent, airfare up 23 percent. And then a previous one was a legal immigration to the U.S. with a graph, a tiny graph that you can't really read. Well, that's because, you know, border crossings are at an historic low. But this is his campaign. And the fact is, is that when his campaign can focus

something and put it on Twitter, which no one will see, because Twitter's not real. right? I mean, no one's going to be persuaded by Twitter. And so, you know, this is them in a vacuum signaling what they wish their candidate would talk about. But instead of their candidate, you don't need to. I mean, he may have done it, but my point is they gave it to him. But he's not doing that in his route. But his team is saying that's what he should be doing. I think that that's what they're signals. So that one is an undisciplined guy who wants to talk about her race, her gender, her smarts, etc. And by the way, the public polling show. shows, people think that she's incredibly intelligent and more intelligent than him and more,

you know, capable to be president. You see when he does something like he did the other day where he said, I'm better looking than her, I'm smarter than her. They say I'd ramble, but I'm really smart. I'm smarter than. Would you go and ask the public what they think of that specifically? Well, listen, there's, you know, whether it's a campaign or whether there's independent expenditures and we spend a lot of money compared to you guys over there.

Remember, you know, there's probably going to be over $2 billion spent just in paid communication in the next two months. I think the estimate was $2.7 billion in paid communication by just the presidential campaign. So some of that has already been spent. She's what raised maybe $400 million since she's gotten in. It's kind of crazy. And so, you know, will each side and the independent expenditures be testing clips of each candidate? Absolutely. I mean, that's just, that's normal practice. And independent expenditures means the PACs, the super PACs, the money going to that? Right. They legally cannot have any coordination with the campaign.

The campaign we call the hard side. Right. And so there's future forward. There's American Bridge. With hundreds of millions of dollars behind. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. Like I would imagine that all the independent expenditures combine just on the Democratic side,

I don't know, three, four, five hundred million dollars. I don't know the number. And the Republicans usually have kind of an open spicket of money as well. And then they'll have their imposter. They'll have their own focus groups? Their own pollsters, their own focus groups, their own media consultants, mail, et cetera, which I think is a huge mistake. And we're going to have a tremendous field operation in every state.

And the Trump campaigns announced that they're not spending any money in the states on offices, field, staff, etc. They're going to leave that to their friends and allies in the independent expenditure world. And they just assume that their people are going to show up. Because guess what? They didn't 16. They didn't 20. But you know what? They might not show up at that level because what the polls are really clear about what Kamal Harris and Tim Wals has done is they have ignited enthusiasm. And so the enthusiasm of a Trump voter and the enthusiasm of a Harris voter are not the same.

How long do you think that can be sustained? I think ours is sustained. I think this is like a great Alabama football season where, you know, we can even have one loss and we're going to still come every week and, you know, kick ass. Yeah, then maybe a bad analogy. Like, yeah, that's where my kids go to college. Alabama football season. Alabama has 18 national champs, Alistair.

Come on, man. It's like Manchester Union. I could have used any one. Manchester Union. Whatever. Whatever. Anyway. So my point is that I don't think that our enthusiasm goes down because one, I think we know it's at stake.

And one of our biggest motivators is to beat Trump. When you add the key motivator of beating Trump to the fact that we have a candidate who is friggin' on fire right now and in herself is motivating people, that combination is deadly. Again, these two months, you know, basically the first step in any campaign consolidate. your base. We've done that. They've done that. The second step post-Labor Day is always that small universe to swing voter. And it's going to be tough. It's going to be competitive in this race in no means over. But I like her message. I like her demeanor and what she is doing to connect with voters and ignite them. This may be unfair, but I suspect you're not exactly an impartial objective observer on this. It sounds like... Except that I'm a holster and I see the numbers. And

And when you see, you know, in one month, the national polls go from minus four to plus two, something's happening. Right. Let's just agree on that. Yeah. And as Brits, we can't understand why he's not minus every number in the world. We don't have time for that. That's psychology.

That's not polling. I mean, you know. What is the psychology, though? Well, I mean, you know, listen, I think he has tapped in, starting in 2015, quite frankly, to the grievances of a certain class of people. And I don't mean socioeconomic. I just mean in general. And, you know, he has done the rare thing in American politics,

which we've seen in other countries, Berlusconi, et cetera, where he has become a cult leader. I think that's fair to say he has become a cult leader. And he is saying the things that were in the bubbles of people's head that they couldn't say. And now, because of social media, those people also have the permission infrastructure to say those things. Go on Twitter, go on Instagram, go on Facebook, and now people feel that they have

the right to say whatever is in their head when in the past people just didn't do that. And I think there was also some accountability. I think there was accountability within their own family framework. I think there was accountability within the workplace and friends, et cetera. And I think that quite frankly has kind of all broken down. Where I was leading to when I was saying that you're not necessarily objective, but I'd like to encourage you to play devil's advocate for a second. We'll think from the other side.

In getting those swing voters on site, those independent voters, what is the big challenge? Just looking at technically as a pollster that Vice President Harris faces to win over the key independent voters. Yeah, I would say that this is not just her problem. This is a problem that the Democratic Party has had for the last 15 years, which is the party has been branded so brilliantly by Republicans as no longer the party of the people, right? Rather, it's the party of, you know, transgender people or it's the party, you know, this is, this is Republicans talking of immigrants, of the party of whatever it may be. And so, yeah,

it's the woke, this is the DEI, et cetera, and that, you know, they care more about these people than they care about us. I mean, that is the branding of Republicans. And some of that has, without a out bitten in. I mean, the fact is, is that again, Biden has had a border policy that has now lowered crossings to historic levels. Trump actually killed a bipartisan bill, but the perception is what? That there's open borders. And so it's perception versus reality. And that's what, quite frankly, I don't want to even call it the brilliance, but that has been the success of a Donald Trump is the big lie. And whether it's the big lie about the election or the big lie of the election, or the big lie about the economy and inflation or the big lie about the border or the big lie about

crime. Crime is down like 50% since the beginning of the year. But what does it say about America that that can work? Well, what does it say about any country? I mean, you know, that you guys pass Brexit. I mean, I think that at the end of the day, countries go through cycles. And I think that this grievance politics started when we passed NAFTA in the 90s. And every small town in rural America had a plant and it could be a furniture plant or a textile plant or it was making washing machines or it was plucking chickens and they all left. And so you got to blame someone. I mean, I think that's just basic psychology. Rural America, small town America has disproportionately voted for Republicans. It's our job to narrow those margins. But I do think it started back then

without a doubt. I think there's racial politics involved. I mean, if you ever, anyone doesn't want to believe that there's racial politics during Obama's term and now that a African-American Asian woman, I mean, we still have plenty of racial politics and dynamics. And it's sad, but it's real. And, you know, there's plenty of that in Europe as well. Final question for me. If you were giving campaign advice to a candidate, what would be the three words that you'd emphasize for them? Be very concise. And I think that Kamal Harris right now is being very concise. And she's doing it on her economic message.

She's doing it on her contrast message, but she's also doing it on the character message with him, right? I mean, if you've heard her start talking about being a prosecutor, all the type of people she put away, and she's describing Donald Trump. So she's being very concise, and that's what you need to be.

My last question, John, thanks for all your time. The attacks that they're mounting upon her at the moment, what are they trying to do? They haven't found a consistent line. No, they haven't. They're testing. They're currently on communist. Yeah, that's to be.

But that's him. That's not the campaign. I would look at the TV ads they're running. You know, they're running TV ads against her on the border. Right. They're running the TV ads on her about being the most liberal senator in the Senate when she was a senator. But does that work? I mean, I don't think it's going to work.

I think that, you know, people are going to look at her and say, wow, she looks like the future and he kind of looks like the past. I think this is a multi-dimensional message chart. Yeah. You know, it used to be, we just had one message and we kind of play. But we're not going back. It felt to me like that almost emerged from a crowd. Yeah.

She was sort of talking about it and they started saying. Now, is that how that evolved? Because it strikes me that is the best. You know what I love about her and I read an article about this is that, you know, I think every candidate test lines, right, in rallies and you see what gets the applause line. You see what gets the laugh. You see what gets the outrage. And she's done that.

I've been in this business a long time. And Kamala Harris in 30 days has met the moment like no one I've ever seen, right? And she is clearly listening. And she has her own gut instincts about the messaging from my understanding. And that's great. I'm a pollster who doesn't want to be handcuffed by polls. I don't want a candidate who needs to be told what to say. I want a candidate who has ideas.

of where he or she wants to go, and then we'll test that, right? And she appears to be that type of person. Do you think polling has made people more cynical about policies? No, I mean, everyone's always polled. I mean, you know, it's been going around forever. I think the problem is media polls. I think the problem is public polls. And there's too many of them and not many of them are very good.

And it kind of tarnishes what we do. It doesn't do any good for me bitching about it. But that's really the truth. I said my final question, but sorry, this is it. You said that Kamala Harris is currently showing two points ahead. Technically, what does that mean for a listener to listen to that? Is that a safe margin? Well, I don't know if we, you know, get comfortable with margins, right?

Because at the end of the day, the rule of thumb is you always, as a Democrat needed to be ahead three or four nationally to win the electoral college because, you know, that includes California and New York and all those type of places. What really matters where the rubber hits the road is the individual seven states. I mean, you have Nevada and Arizona out west, right? You have the blue wall, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And you have the southeast with Georgia in North Carolina. Those seven states, that $3 billion in paid communication, 76 percent of it's going to go to those three states. And they're all individually different. I mean, Michigan is so different from Arizona, right? And so, you know, what you care about is what's going on in those states. And she also, by on average, is ahead or statistically tied in most of them. And, you know, you want the biggest margin that you can. But we've also, if we're being fair, we've also seen that the public polling has always been off a little bit. And so you need a bigger margin than you really, then you see.

So, I mean, in 2020, there was a real trend is that Joe Biden, as the Democrat, got what he polled. So you surely wanted him as close to 50 as possible. And if you take a look at the average of polls in those states, he got what he pulled. but he was also at 50 or above in enough states to win the electoral college. And this year we have third parties, which will totally make polling even much more difficult. Thank you for your time. All right. Good luck.

Great. Hi, it's Dominic here from The Rest is History. And here is that clip that I mentioned earlier. The other thing is something else you get some Grantham, and that's the Methodism. And actually this to me, I think this is one of the absolute defining things of Thatcherism. It's the tone, the moralistic evangelical tone. Yeah, and the low church tone rather than the high church tone. Completely.

Margaret, as a girl, had to say grace before every meal. She had to go to chapel three or four times on Sundays. Her father, as a lay preacher, went on and on and on about hard work, individualism, thrift, clean living, all of this. And this is what I think makes her politics different. There is a moralism to it, a low church moralism, that is totally unlike anything that any other Tory leader says before. So in 1984, an interview with the Times, I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end, good will triumph. I mean,

Ted Heath could have lived to the age of 10,000, and he would never have said anything like that. It's unthinkable. Also, I mean, what's interesting is that it's giving to the left what the left often give to the right. It's casting the left as evil and the right as virtuous. And And usually it's the other way around. Completely it is. I mean, you see this reflected in her archives, which are online at the Thatcher Foundation website, which is brilliant, by the way, this amazing digital archive. You can see all the notes that she would handwrite for her conference speeches.

And they'd be full of all the stuff about, you know, the evils of socialism, good versus evil, what the great religions of the past teach us, what life, you know, life is struggle. Her speechwriters would cut all this. They'd say, God, this is bonkers. but it would find its way in one way or another. And I think you're absolutely right. She thinks socialism is not just wrong.

She thinks it's morally, it's evil. It's corrupting. And people in 70s Britain, you know, they're used to thinking, socialists are well-meaning and idealistic. Maybe they're a bit deluded, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, she doesn't think that. She doesn't think they are well-meaning and idealistic. She thinks that they're doing the devil's work.

And that's what makes for her admirers, it's so invigorating and for her critics. I mean, if you're on the left, right, and you're used to thinking of yourself as the goodies, to be told, actually, you're the bad people. It's insulting. And it's why I think one reason why people take it so personally when she sort of wades into battle. If you want to hear more, search for the rest is history wherever you get your podcasts.