Chris Stirewalt: "It’s A Bad Year For Incumbents"
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Okay, this week on Live in the Bream, it is his Super Bowl, his favorite time of year, and it's lasting for months. In fact, this lasts for years when people run for president. We are very excited as we are now in week two of the conventions, really in the home stretch, getting ready for the debates, to have the politics editor for the Fox News channel, the one and only Chris

Christopher Steyer. Well, good to have you, sir. Howdy, ma'am. I, you know, it's funny. I had, I, my joke is always that when you get to campaign season and in the real deal, uh, I say, you know, it's Easter and I'm the bunny. Uh,

I like it. Hopping around. But the Super Bowl maybe is better. And I guess that would make me John Madden. And I'm for it. I can embrace that also. Listen, we need sports. So we're going to use all the sports metaphors we can. That's right. People want some sports in their lives. And there's nothing that's more sporting and sometimes pugilistic than a head-to-head presidential race. We are now there.

We're getting through these conventions. Let me first ask you your impressions of the convention so far as we're talking. We are through with the DNC. We're now on day three of the RNC. What do you make as far as tone, messaging, speakers, what we've seen so far? Well, I think the Democrats had a very successful convention, and they obviously worked hard to reach out to those persuadable suburban voters who

helped him so much in 2018. We heard from former Republicans, current Republicans. We heard about Joe Biden's faith. We heard from Joe Biden, who's a very good spokeswoman for him, all of these things. And the message was pretty clear, was that Joe Biden's no radical and that he is an accessible candidate for those who are concerned about President Trump's leadership. So we didn't know what we were going to see going into the RNC.

So far, can I stop you really quick before we leave the DNC? What do you make of it? And you talk about the fact that he is they had a situation in which they've got to have voices like their progressive voices, like Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and others. You know, Bernie Sanders. I mean, he he's been influential on the platform and what Biden's put together, along with Senator Elizabeth Warren and others.

But again, you said the message was to be he's a moderate guy. He's not a far left guy. But then you have just within a couple of days, former President Obama saying, listen, when it gets down to it and the goals, it may be different in how they want to get there. But Senator Sanders and Vice President Biden really are not that different. What do you make of that? Well, if you look at what Obama said their goals were, which were like to have good educations for students and have economic growth and

and to have a just society. Those are Donald Trump's goals too. Obama's statement was the Democratic left does not trust Barack Obama who was, they believe, failed to deliver the transformational change that they wanted and it's

things like that, statements like that, that caused them to mistrust him. Because what Obama was saying was like, well, it's just tactics. And I was reminded very much of the split among Republicans when Ted Cruz was leading the shutdown effort. And Mitch McConnell said, well, it's tactics, right? We all want the same thing. We all want to defund Obamacare. We're just talking about different tactics. I don't think it will wash for the progressive left that Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are the same person. But for now...

for now, they're willing to be quiet. Democrats fear Donald Trump in a way they did not in 2016. And there is nothing like a healthy dose of fear to cause people to behave. And these people are ready to be quiet and let Joe Biden have his way. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, he snuck up on them. He snuck up on a whole lot of people in 2016. He's not sneaking up on them this time. They're not going to not visit states or campaign in states they think are safe. It's a different playbook, and they're onto it this time. Okay, so RNC, your thoughts? Well, Trump's playbook is different, too. It's interesting you put it that way, because Trump's playbook is different.

I didn't know what we were going to hear. And I would imagine the Republicans, who only had about a month to put this together, didn't know what was going to be said not too far ago. But the pitch from Republicans has been nonstop.

not what we got used to with a lot of Trump, which was build the wall, crack down on immigration, talking about the angry mobs and all of the stuff. Those things, culture war stuff has gotten a lot of attention, but through a different prism. We've heard a united message. Tim Scott's speech is a good example, but I thought back to when President Trump got in huge trouble

for talking about blank hole countries and we don't want immigrants from those blank hole countries. And then in the convention, he stages a naturalization ceremony for residents of countries from who were not, I think he said he, at the time back then, he said he wanted more immigrants from places like Finland.

And there were no fins up there. You had Sudan and Ghana and places that we do not associate with the kind of immigration Trump was talking about before. We saw the pardoning of an African-American felon. We saw a big emphasis on sort of a social justice message. I think that the Republicans are reaching out to the same voters.

When Joe Biden talks about why he's running for president, he always references Trump's remarks about the white supremacists at Charlottesville and how he was sympathetic toward them and that that's what made Biden decide to run. And the Democratic National Convention was devoted in substantial part to pointing out bigotry and their accusations of racism against Trump. We've heard that rebutted. I think Tim Scott has been the star of the show to this point.

he addressed racism and he said it was real. He didn't like pretend that racism wasn't a thing. He just said that the Republican vision, the conservative vision for ameliorating racial differences was better than the democratic one. Well, what do you make of, and we had the Kentucky attorney general, Daniel Cameron, who spoke and got a lot of attention as well.

after undergoing some, you know, real race-based attacks on him during his campaign. So he's being described as a rising star, that kind of thing. But he and Tim Scott and others have been getting this question about whether Republicans are using them as tokens, you know, emphasizing people of color, men and women that they can find to come support the party. It's been an interesting attack to watch from the left, and it seems to only amplify the accusation back at them that,

that if people that they think should think a certain way don't think a certain way, then their thoughts aren't valid. Well, Democrats are going to say that this is fake and that Republicans aren't interested in addressing racial problems and that they're only saying this for the convention. And then just as Republicans said, well, Democrats aren't really moderate. They're only putting forward John Kasich and Mike Bloomberg as tokens, but in reality, they're lunatic socialists.

So we would remember that when it comes to partisan assessments of themselves and each other, it's going to be, as Joe Biden would say, full of malarkey. We love conventions. But we care about these conventions because this is the message that

that these parties want to send to the country. They say, this is who we are. These are the big billboards that they put along the highway to say this is who they are. And what Democrats wanted to say is, we are a moderate party and inclusive of those people who might not agree with us all the time, but are concerned about Donald Trump's leadership. And from Republicans, we heard, this is an inclusive party. This is a party that's concerned about racial justice. And this is a party that has a

for all kinds of people in it. And I think both have made the argument pretty effectively. How do you think that the riots, the protests, the unrest that we're seeing in the streets will or won't factor into voters' decisions going into the fall? It's a tricky one because it cuts both ways. On the one hand, Republicans feel confident that

chaos means white voters in the suburbs will be alarmed and come back to the Republican Party. On the other hand, a couple of things are true. Number one,

when we think about 1968 and how Richard Nixon won in 1968, Richard Nixon won in 1968 because he was not the incumbent and he was promising to calm things down and that he was promising that this, because remember, there were three candidates running in 1968. You had George Wallace,

the segregationist from Alabama, Hubert Humphrey, the sitting vice president, and you had Nixon. And Nixon was saying, I can come in from the outside and calm things down. So Biden, who scores much better on questions of race relation than Trump, has a different pitch, which is Trump is making things worse. I'll make them better. I think it cuts both ways. I think it is true that the Black Lives Matter movement risks dehumanizing

delegitimization by outside violent actors. But as we're seeing in Wisconsin now, you have outside actors on the other side too. So I don't think it's a clear line. I think this one cuts both ways. We'll have more Live in the Bream in a moment. ♪

Okay, so let's talk about, you know, the fact that we are now inching towards conversations, getting more detailed about Senate and House races in seats as well, because

Because while, of course, there's rightly a ton of attention on the presidential race, much of what the president is able or not able to get done has to do with those two houses of Congress. And especially when you think of the Senate, how the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been

through the federal judges, making conservatives very happy. That comes to a grinding halt, even if President Trump is reelected. Now, if the former vice president is elected and Democrats take the Senate, it's going to be turned about as a fair play on a number of key issues, and especially on those judges.

Well, look, first, I think we can dispense almost entirely with the idea that if Trump wins reelection, the Republicans are going to hold the Senate of the opposite. Meaning that they will. It's a package deal. You're saying if he wins, Republicans are not losing the Senate. Yeah, exactly. I got a little tangled up in my underpants there. Here's the deal. There's one Democratic Senate seat, Alabama, that's gone no matter what.

Doug Jones is not going. Tommy Tuberville is going to beat him. And I don't think that's in dispute. Martha McSally in Arizona is going to lose. I don't think that's in much dispute. The Republicans. So then you're and then you're back to even. Cory Gardner looks like he's sunk in Colorado. So that would be the Republicans minus one. They're still ahead. If Trump wins.

you would imagine that Joni Ernst in Iowa, that Susan Collins in Maine, and that Tom Tillis in North Carolina are okay as well, that they're probably going to be okay. Georgia's a disaster. They've had a bad primary. They've had issues. But you would imagine that the Republicans would hold both of those seats.

If Trump loses, and especially if the polls were predictive, if Trump lost by eight points in... If the election were held today and he lost by eight points, you'd imagine Republicans would lose the majority of those seats. Somebody might be able to hold on, but you wouldn't hold out much hope for Tillis or Collins or Ernst, at least. So it gets...

The Senate will probably follow the presidential, which is to say if Biden wins by a lot, the Democrats will probably take the Senate. But if Trump holds on, the Republicans probably keep it. Okay, let's talk about the House. Flipped in the midterms, it is under Democratic control. Democratic leadership predicting that they will grow that number. What did the tea leaves say to you? So the...

The Republicans have really struggled on the House side. They've struggled to raise money. It's always hard to raise money when you're not forecast to win back the House. The big money donors in the PACs come in and want to back winners. So they've really struggled on the fundraising and they've struggled a little bit on the candidate recruitment, too. The really notable thing on the House, and this is interesting, I think this is something that we can extrapolate out into other races. There have been eight

sitting members of the House defeated in primaries.

I have never seen a number like that. I have never seen a number like that. It's been more Republicans than Democrats, but it's been in both parties and it's been, it's, it's been a strong rejection. So first thing we can take away from house races, it's a bad year for incumbents. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, I mean, it's notable for people who are not as inside baseball as we like to be with all of these things. It's been interesting to watch the progressive wing of the democratic party, uh,

take out so many of their incumbents successfully. And these are longtime people like Congressman Elliot Engel, but other, you know, upstarts who are, you know, when it happens on both sides, when extremes to the left or right win the primary, then the party's always worried about how they're going to fare in the general. But it's been an interesting primary season to watch across the board.

Yeah, I mean, everything from knocking off somebody like Eliot Engel to having a QAnon curious candidate unseating Scott Tipton in Colorado on the Republican side. There's been a lot of weird, a lot of weird beardness out there on that side. But for the House in general, the forecast now would say Democrats are very likely to hold.

the House what Republicans would want to do if Trump wins, that some of the seats that the Democrats won in places like Southern California, like New Jersey and elsewhere where they're really in, they're in districts Trump won in 2016, that what the Republicans want to do is grind down that Democratic advantage

grind down the Democratic majority so that it ceases to be useful. Because remember, you're always going to have, no matter who's in charge, you're always going to have a handful of lawmakers from swing districts who are going to say, well, you know, I'm with you, but I can't be with you on this.

And once you get inside that margin where those kinds of lawmakers are in control, it really cuts into things. So that's what Republicans aim would mostly be, would be win back some of those districts and grind down the Democratic majority a little bit so that it's not as useful.

We always have people who love us or hate us when we talk about polls, but I want to talk about one set that's getting a lot of attention over the last 24 hours or so. Some of these key battleground states looking at where the Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump spread stood at the same time four years ago as it does now with a much tighter, albeit leaves, for the former Vice President Biden versus President Trump this time around.

People who are hopeful for the reelection of the president say that's a good sign. But how do you feel about these polls, and really any polls as we go into 2016, and whether there is this sort of, if I support President Trump, I'm not going to talk to pollsters, I'm not going to tell the truth. Is that overblown, this idea of a silent majority, or not? Yes, it is. It's not a thing. And we know it. It's there. The idea that Trump supporters are shy is...

It does not comport with the reality that we see every day. Now, are there undecided voters or people who say now that they are undecided who ultimately are going to vote for Donald Trump? Yes. And are there a lot of them? Sure. Might it make the difference in some of these swing states? Quite certainly.

But as we saw in 2016, and as we see again here, the polls are, in 2016, missed on the state level for a pretty, what is now obvious reason. Getting white people with college degrees, white people with college degrees are the easiest people to get to respond to a poll.

Yes, I'll take your poll. Okay, do tell. And it's harder to get people to respond to a poll who are working class or poor voters or hard to do. So these state polls in places like Wisconsin and elsewhere undercounted the number of these folks because the way a poll works, and I want to bore everybody, but here's the way a poll works. We don't control for

the number of Republicans or Democrats. What we control for are how many white folks, how many black folks, how many women, how many men. And we make those assumptions based on what we think the electorate's going to look like based on what happened last time and based on what's happened in the census. And then we make an estimate. What pollsters did wrong in 2016, and I hate to harp on Wisconsin, but it was the most obvious example

was that there were not enough white voters without college degrees, which happened to be Donald Trump's strongest suit. So the polls missed in that way. And to be fair, Trump closed late. His performance, and that's what Republicans are hoping for again, he closed the gap late in those states. A lot of undecided voters, those same undecided voters we're talking about,

flooded in for Trump at the end. I got to see some tracking polls that were done for a candidate after the fact. And Trump closed the gap three or four points right at the end and in Wisconsin. So he closed late because voters like, yeah, I'll take a chance on this guy.

This time pollsters are doing a better job. They're probably even overcorrecting for those white working class voters, making sure that their numbers are higher in the sample. And the other thing is this. We in 2016, there were a lot of voters who weren't sure because they didn't like either of their choices. And in the end, Trump won a lot of them who said, what the heck, I'll take a chance on this guy.

We are in a totally different space this time. Everybody has an opinion about Donald Trump, and they know what they think about him. And that's good in the sense that he has more reliable support, but it also means that there are fewer of these, what do you got to lose, take a chance voters. So they're fighting over a smaller space.

All right. And lastly, I want to ask you, what do you think we'll know on election night? Because the growing percentage of people do vote absentee and by mail, and that's a whole other debate about the differences and what it means. And, you know, some of the discussion about postal service and all that, we're not going to go there. I just want to know what you think about election night when we know about the Senate and House, when we know about the White House, or is this going to be 2000 all over again? Oh, we should be so lucky to have it in one state. I

My gosh. You're right. That was Florida. If we could just have your home state be the only problem this time, that would be fine. No, I'm only kind of kidding. Here's the thing. If you...

you have a big win, it won't matter, right? We'll know on election night. So if we, let's say this, if we call Florida for Biden early in the evening, or we call North Carolina for Biden early in the evening, you can be pretty confident, or Ohio, you can be pretty confident the way it's going.

Conversely, if we call New Hampshire for Trump and Florida for Trump, if you start to see it coming in the other way in the early returns, then yes, there'll be weeks of ballot counting to figure out different house races and all that stuff. But we'll be able to make a call and say this is the way it's going. On the other hand,

60% of all ballots in 2018 were cast by mail. That number will be substantially higher this time. You could see three quarters of all ballots cast by mail. That could mean that it will take two weeks before everything gets sorted out and everything gets counted out. And I promise you, my friend, that when you and I are doing our election razzle dazzle, the decision desk is equipped with extra beef jerky. Yes.

for a long stay, we'll have lots of candy and beef jerky for an extended stay 'cause we're building our approach around the idea that it won't be decisive. I'd love it if it was decisive, I'd love it if it was a quick end and we could say we've got a clear win 'cause I think it would be good for everybody to not have this drag out and be a lot of partisan acrimony. But we're preparing for the worst

and hoping for the best. Here's my question though, is the beef jerky going to be bacon flavored? Which by the way, Mr. Bream bought some of that, might have been me, but we bought some, we purchased some beef jerky that was bacon flavored a few weeks back and he opens it back and he's like, I don't understand. I think all beef jerky is essentially bacon. I don't understand this concept, but it was delicious. So it was beef jerky that was made to taste like pork?

I'm not Jewish, but I'm pretty certain that's not kosher. I don't think you can do that. Well, listen, we buy this beef jerky that comes in all different. It's tuna. There is pork. There is beef. I mean, they're all different flavors now. And I think if you buy bacon flavored jerky, that's just bacon, right?

I mean, it's pork, it's bacon. If it's, if it's, so there is bacon jerky and the difference is, do you dry it out to the point that it is shelf stable? I think, I think that's what it is. But I also know that Sheldon throws down some pretty mean beef jerky in his own right. I think he does. He makes, he does venison jerky every year. Let me know podcasters, uh, listeners, if you would like some, um,

Just let me know on Twitter and we'll see about getting some of the famous green venison jerky out the door. I'm here to tell you it's good. It's real. All right. I'll make sure you get some this year. Chris Stierwald, thank you so much for lending us your expertise. I love your insights and you always know way more than I do about whatever's happening in the world of politics. So thank you for dropping in on Living the Green. My friend, it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Love to your fam. You too. See you soon.

I'm Guy Benson. Join me weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern as we break down the biggest stories of the day with some of the biggest newsmakers and guests. Listen live on the Fox News app or get the free podcast at Guy Benson show dot com.