Betting it All with Steve Kornacki
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Never win Intel. Well, there you have it. You can get lucky anywhere playing at LuckyLandSlots.com. Play for free right now. Are you feeling lucky? No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Voidware prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. We've got a great show for you this week featuring NBC's lead political analyst, Steve Kornacki. Let's dive in.

Well, Joe Biden, that man of surprises, has surprised us again. Well, he's not really a man of surprises unless making mistakes about things like who's in the room or what day it is or when you were vice president are surprises. But he has a real zinger for us. He challenged Donald Trump to debates outside of the traditional Commission on Presidential Debates format, and he challenged him for a record early debate.

on June 27th and Donald Trump accepted. So we've got record setting early and unprecedented candidate set up debates for the first time in decades. Why did he do it? What does it mean?

Well, first of all, let's think about what the Commission on Presidential Debates does. What they do is that old gray heads of both parties get together and set up a series of debates that have now become formulaic. Three presidential debates, one vice presidential debate, locations all around the country between mid-September and the end of October.

That means that neither candidate can really shape the format according to their liking. They don't really have the ability to influence or even select the people who are going to ask the questions or moderate. And while in times of more comedy, that's not something that either party terribly minded, in this time of extreme acrimony, that is something that both sides wanted to avoid. The

The Commission on Presidential Debates also has another feature that hasn't come into play since 1992, but again, it's in the interest of both candidates to avoid it. And that is a clear measure for the inclusion of non-major party candidates. Ross Perot was on the debate stage in 1992 because he was doing quite well in the polls, and he actually did quite well on the debates.

Neither candidate wants Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be on the debate stage. They fear that he could take voters away from both of them.

But under the CPD format, he would automatically get to go on the stage if he was at 15 percent or more in the polls during a qualifying period. Now, he's not there yet, but he's getting close. In many polls, he's in the high single digits. In other polls, he's in the low double digits. Is it implausible to think that after a few more months of back and forth and nuking each other, that maybe RFK Jr. could have been at the 15 percent?

And if he was at 14%, do we really think the Commission on Presidential Debates would stand on formality when it's only a one-point difference? No other third-party candidate has really been close to the 15% standard since Ross Perot. But if RFK were really close to it, I'll bet they would buckle and put him in.

Bypassing this means he's not going to be on the stage. People are going to see Biden. They're going to see Trump. They're going to see nobody else. And that's something that both candidates want because they want this to be a binary choice. They don't want people to think they have multiple choices.

And that's because they are disliked by majorities of the American people. Now, the people who dislike them are largely different. Republicans dislike Biden. Democrats dislike Trump. But somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of Americans dislike both.

These are the people that RFK and other third-party candidates are drawing from. If RFK had a spot on the debate stage, his share of that voter may grow, and he may even be able to successfully grow the size of the pie. If 33% of Americans, for example, disliked both of them, heaven forbid,

There might even be a third party candidate who could make it close, even if the person didn't end up winning. So by doing this, Biden completely avoids that prospect and Trump, by going along with it, also benefits. So why the early date? Well, some people say it might be because of early voting. But the fact is, no state allows early votes to be cast before September 20th. That's right. September 20th.

This debate is going to be nearly three months before the first state permits anyone to vote early and more than three months before most of the states permit people to vote early. This has nothing to do with early voting. What does it have to do with? It has to do with Biden's dynamics. This guy is behind.

He's behind in the polls. He's behind in the polls nationally. He's behind in the polls in the swing state. He's been trying to change people's opinion of him. His job approval remains mired at 40%.

The situation in the rest of the world doesn't look like it's going to change a lot. Inflation may be moderating, but it does not look like the Fed's going to give him an election year rate cut boost to have a sugar high that would help people feel better. So he has to change the narrative. He has to change the narrative rather quickly. If we go into the summertime,

If we go into the Democratic convention that starts on August 19th and he's still behind, I think the Biden campaign worries that that means that the opinions will be set, that the only question then is going to be, we've decided we don't want Biden. The question is, does Trump look like an acceptable alternative? Well,

People with long memories, and Joe Biden is a little bit older than me, so he's got a long memory, longer than I have, will remember 1980 when Jimmy Carter was unpopular. And the question was, would Ronald Reagan, that man who endorsed Barry Goldwater, that man who played cowboys and starred in movies against chimps, was that man ready to take over the White House? Well,

As late as a week before the election, polls showed it was tied. But one late debate changed the narrative. People said, I can't stand Carter. This guy looks like a human being. Let's give him a shot. And Ronald Reagan won a 10-point victory. This is not what Joe Biden wants. He wants the confrontation, such as it's going to be, to come early. It gives him time to build up on it. It allows him to recover from a mistake if he issues one.

And then you've got the hitherto virtually unmentionable, but not 0% chance, which is what happens if Biden loses ground? Well, if we're going into August and Joe Biden is further behind than he is now,

Don't be surprised if you start hearing Democrats say through their sources, maybe Joe should put country before party. Maybe the risk of electing Mr. January 6th is too high for your ego, which is, as with any person who's ever been president, rather considerable to get in the way. Step aside, Joe. Well, by putting the debate this early, he allows himself to have time to put those rumors, those thoughts to rest.

He needs to show momentum. He gives himself the opportunity to get momentum. It's a gamble. But then again, given where he is, given the fact that the news hasn't moved him, given the fact that tens of millions of dollars in advertising, largely unmatched by Donald Trump, has not moved him, either in job approval or in head-to-head versus Trump, one has to ask whether or not doing more of the same

would produce different results. Now, they're going to do more of something similar because that's what campaigns do. But by putting the debate early, he's putting the gamble in front of the American people. The first debate is typically the most watched. We'll see whether or not one in the summer draws the same sort of numbers that it would be if it were held in the first week of October or the middle of September. But if we have 80 million people tune in on June 27th and watch the debate,

This is Joe Biden's last chance to make a first impression. He knows it. He's going to gamble his future on it. And that's why this debate might be the most important event in the presidential campaign.

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Well, longtime fans of this show know that at one time was called at the races. Well, we've got the best race analyst there is. And I mean that in both sense of the words. And that's Steve Kornacki, the national political correspondent of NBC News, who returns to be on the polls. Steve, welcome back. Henry, always good to be here. Well.

How do you see the race right now? We're looking at Donald Trump has held the lead in the polls pretty consistently for months now. Joe Biden hasn't seemed to be able to improve his job approval rating, although he's ticked up a tiny bit, a little bit in the averages. How do you see the race right now? I guess the thing I keep coming back to is if we fast forwarded to the day after the election or, you know, three days after the election, whenever it's resolved,

And if you just told me, if you landed me there and told me Trump won, I think I could tell you the story right now of what's going to be involved in that. And if you told me Biden won, I think I could tell you the story basically of what's going to be involved in that. So I feel like, you know, we have a pretty good sense of what the variables are, what the scenarios look like.

what each candidate has kind of working for them, what each candidate has to overcome. And to me, it's just, you know, this is not anything we're going to answer between now and the election. So I'm just always interested in hearing the conversation about it. But it just it hinges to me just on, you know, Trump would be putting together a demographic coalition of

that we haven't really seen from a modern Republican. And if he really pulls it off, that we've never seen from a Republican before in terms of non-white votes, in terms of black votes, in terms of young vote, youth votes. And that is a... Polls are suggesting that could be there, but...

But we won't know till Election Day if that actually shows up, turns out or if it's if it's a mirage. And and that that gets the Biden scenario where I think things would just have to, you know, a turnout that starts to fall from 2020 level starts to fall significantly. Then you've got, in my view, that opens the door for what we've been seeing in all these special elections where there is I just think there's more intensity on that on that Trump resistance side.

Yeah, I mean, that is one thing we see in the modern era, modern being like post-2017, is that the lower the turnout, the better the Democrats do on average compared to the Biden baseline. And there was that special election in the Hudson Valley last summer of 2022 where the Democrat won. And I had some Republican people call me on the side and provide actual numbers that said, hey, you know, this is a turnout phenomenon. And of course,

Mark Molinaro, the candidate who ran in that seat, did end up winning in a slightly different seat. And so that was right. It was a turnout phenomenon on the special.

But that also raises the question of who gets depressed, you know, is that if the person who doesn't show up is the white working class voter, which is probably the pro-Biden scenario, obviously that helps them a little bit. But what if the person who doesn't show up is the marginal African-American voter? You know, if you take a look at the data, the

The marginal white working class voter might have a 70 to 75 percent probability of voting for Trump. The marginal Democratic voter, a black voter, historically has had a 90 percent chance of voting for Biden. So not all turnout declines are created equal, are they?

No, and actually the special election that kind of hangs in my mind is the one from this past February, the third district in New York, the George Santos seat, because you had kind of those two, really those three worlds you just laid out demographically. You had the North Shore...

of Long Island, which is, you know, wealthy, you know, educated, you know, it's a, it's great Gatsby country. Then you have the more, you know, Southern part of Nassau County, which is blue collar, white working class. And then you had a component of Queens, sort of the outer part of Queens, but it was much more racially diverse and working class. And what you noticed was two things, at least I noticed two things. Number one, the, and remember the Democrat, you know, won this election.

Tom Swasey won his seat back pretty handily. The first thing I noticed was the if you took the 2020 presidential race and what share of the total vote from the district Queens made up versus Long Island versus Nassau County, and then you compared it to the special election, the Nassau part grew by, I think, three points. The Queens part shrunk by three points. So it tells you, first of all, what you're talking about there in terms of

You know, black turnout is definitely a part of that. It's not just black turnout in Queens there, but it's non-white turnout. Working class non-white turnout was not there for Democrats in this in this special election. Then if you look at the the Nassau County portion of it and Newsday actually did this newspaper on Long Island had this great, you know,

municipal town, you know, level data. And if you just took each town and the percentage of white college educated voters, the highest ones, the North Shore of Long Island, had turnouts that were, you know,

80 percent, 75, 80 percent of their 2020 level. Then you went to more the blue collar part, you know, southern Nassau County, and you were at more like 55, 60 percent of your 2020 level. So, yeah, it's I guess the long way of saying it's about half of the Democratic base, the resistance base there, the well-to-do, educated, you know, generally higher income suburbanites. They're the ones who are on fire to go out and vote against Trump in any and every election you can.

And then there's the variable, that blue-collar portion. This is the part of the district that produced Peter King, basically, if you think of the former congressman. He's a good sort of representation, maybe, of that portion of Nassau County. And they weren't there in a special election. They haven't been there in special elections. But do they turn out for Trump? And if they fully do, and the Democrats can't get the non-white portion of their base energized, then yeah, there isn't as much of an advantage, obviously.

So do you see any evidence that the Trump trial news is sinking in in any way? Obviously, it's sinking. It's kind of like in a baseball season to me. You know, you've got the people who will turn in to watch the Yankees and the Mets every day on cable television, and they know who's up and who's down. And then you've got your marginal baseball fan who may or may not know whether Garrett Cole is going to come back on June 22nd or not.

Is the Trump trial news sinking in beyond the rabid superpartisans? I don't think so, because I looked at the... There's a new Quinnipiac poll that asked a couple interesting things. The first was...

They asked about what's been established about Trump's conduct at the trial, and they gave him three choices. Is it illegal? Is it unethical but not illegal? Or do you think there's just nothing wrong at all? And if you add the two together, I don't have it right in front of me, but it's something along the lines of a majority, a slim majority, 51, 52% shows either nothing wrong or unethical, not illegal.

So it was only a plurality. I'd say I'd say it was 44 percent, 45 percent, something like that, saying, you know, legally guilty here. So, you know, again, that tells me that's I mean, that tracks almost perfectly with the Biden number. And then they also asked, you know,

of people who cited Trump as their first choice when they asked the ballot test. Among those who said Trump was their first choice, they said, does this make you more or less likely or no difference to support Trump? 24% said more likely, 6% said less likely, and the rest said no difference at all. So,

If you take that 6% and say, wow, those are Trump supporters who are definitely going to peel away. And that's a huge, huge ifs involved there that I, you know, but I'm just saying for the sake of argument, even if you took all of those voters away from Trump's total, that's going to take about two points off of his total. And I think that's that's the absolute indicates to me that's kind of the absolute worst case from here. And

Probably not going to even take that much of it, in my view. Yeah. In other words, it's a non-factor that all of this, we're going to find that he's a convicted felon, blah, blah, blah. If you're looking at voting for Trump right now, which is in most polls a plurality, it's not going to matter to you. You're thinking about other things.

And I think it just it gets to, you know, there's the there's the nitty gritty legal aspects. And then there's just the basic question of what's revealed about character, about personal traits, qualities, that sort of thing. And I, I struggle to see how any of this, you know, as tawdry as it all is, is revealed.

Is a surprise to anybody. And I always kind of think back to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And, you know, he survived the Lewinsky scandal. And I think one of the things that as shocking as it was to find out that the president United States had been involved with a former White House intern like that.

I think the public had clearly been primed for it for the preceding six years. Jennifer Flowers during the campaign, the Paula Jones lawsuit, every late night show throughout the 90s is making jokes about Bill. He's a dog. You know, I mean, that's so everybody kind of knew that about him. So it was OK. Yeah, that was shocking. You know, White House intern. But then that seemed to be how the public reacted to it. And I sense there's something similar. So let's.

There's another thing that's, if the trial is unprecedented, a June 27th debate is unprecedented. You know, I talk about that in another segment on the show, but I'm wondering what your take of it is. Is this one of these things that it's a known unknown to channel Donald Rumsfeld? What is your sense of what could happen as a result of that?

I read it as the Biden campaign both wanting to obviously kind of seize as much control over the debate process as they could. And I think in large part they succeeded in that, just given some of the ground rules and moderator selection potentially and that sort of thing here, even the outlets that so far have been picked. I'm a little confused why the Trump folks would have gone along, but I am not confused why the Biden folks would have.

And in terms of the date, look, I mean, it suggests to me that they feel there's an imperative here to make an early statement, not a statement in mid-October, not a statement in September, but a statement now that Biden's up to this. I think standing on a stage with Trump for an extended period of time going back and forth, it's a huge opportunity.

for Biden to prove that he's capable of that. Just, I think, given the very, very basic questions that polling is indicating are there about his fitness for the job and, you know, clips circulate and, you know, all the time of, you know, some of them are out of context or whatever, but some of them aren't. And, you know, I think that they do a great deal of damage. So the more you can see him for an extended period, toe to toe with his opponent and he holds himself, you know, he comports himself well. And that's the that's the question he does. I think there's there's probably some serious upside there for him.

But it is a gamble for him. Oh, yeah. I mean, I sense his campaign knew at some point they have to take that gamble. And so try to get it as best you can on your terms and, you know, try to turn it into, you know, biggest possible payoff if you if you get it right.

But on the flip side, let's say Biden actually stands up, goes 90 minutes, doesn't make a serious fluff, remembers everybody's names and so forth. But Donald Trump is more subdued than normal. He's never going to be a normal candidate. But the first debate in 2020 was over the top, even for him. I've watched him with Caitlin Collins. And this was a guy who

is going to play his game, but as they'd say in baseball, you know, maybe he's adjusted his swing to meet the pitches that are coming in.

What happens if Biden hits his mark, but Trump actually comes across as, heaven forbid, maybe a human being? Well, you know, there is that theory that the reason Donald Trump won in 2016 was that he was off Twitter for the last, I'm going to say, 12 days of the campaign. And, you know, his staff actually succeeded in getting the phone away from him. And he showed up at rallies and he read the script.

And all the sort of elements of the day-to-day Trump roller coaster that had been there the entire time disappeared in those final days when that gap with Hillary Clinton closed and he caught her in all those states. And was it that, you know, the voters were...

didn't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, but couldn't fathom voting for Trump. And he gave them just enough reassurance in 2016. I don't, I don't, not impossible to me when I look at it. And I, yeah, I think you could, you could make, I mean, there's clearly an opportunity for him too. I think definitely what you're saying there, because the polls are showing that

much more a stronger distaste for biden much stronger distaste for biden than there was four years ago um which is an opportunity for the challenger for any challenger even if it's a challenger who's all the baggage that donald trump has and um yeah if he were if if he were able to offer something that's reassuring to those voters who want to vote biden out and want to feel

All right. I, you know, I'm not nuts about this. I got my reservations. I got my doubts, but yeah, I, I, I think so too.

Well, you know, the reference to 2016 brings back, you know, that the exit poll showed that 18% of Americans back then didn't like both candidates. And the only poll I was able to find before the election that had that demographic was the GW Battleground poll. And it too, back in September and in October, showed 18%. And if you take that poll as valid, what you had was

51% in mid-October saying they were third party or undecided and Trump won them by double digits, a late break that confounded the polls.

Most people's polls show 20 to 26 percent this time fall in what's being called the double hater category. That's where RFK and Jill Stein and Cornel West and after this weekend, the Libertarian nominee, whoever that is, maybe Vernon Sucreme will finally make it out of his New Hampshire band box and hit Broadway.

But he did run four years ago and finished third in the Libertarian Convention. What about these double haters? You know, is this the sort of thing where you need your gambling if you're buying that? Maybe you need to go early to either reduce that number or to go in a way so that you get them to say, well, I don't like both of them. But she Biden's not as infirm as I thought he was. Maybe I can trust him.

Yeah, I mean, I think that is, to me, that's one of the biggest, maybe the biggest challenge that the Biden campaign has. And it's a packaged video, a 30-second ad, 60-second ad, whatever. You're not going to answer. The only way to answer those concerns is to prove it to people.

And I can't think of a setting that could more, if he pulls it off, that could more persuasively prove it to people than an unfiltered, long-form, you know, political combat with your opponent, with, you know, members of the media there, you know, grilling you potentially too. So to the extent that's his biggest challenge, this is the biggest way, I think, to blunt that. And the other thing I wonder on this front too is,

This is an inexact comparison, but it dances around in my mind a little bit. I remember the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race. This is when Ted Kennedy was running for re-election. And this was basically the only time Ted Kennedy had a

difficult re-election campaign this was just two years after the william kennedy smith rape trial where you know kennedy ted kennedy had been a witness he'd been out carousing with william kennedy smith in the night this happened ted kennedy had to give this very embarrassing public speech where he grappled with all of his personal demons that had more and more you know the drinking and womanizing all of these all of these things

And I think it was around the time that The Simpsons debuted the character Mayor Quimby, who was pretty clearly inspired by Ted Kennedy. And so Mitt Romney was running against him. And I believe at the end of September that year, I think it was the only poll that Ted Kennedy ever trailed in Massachusetts in almost 40 plus years of running for office. He trailed Romney by two points.

And they had their first debate. And what I remember about it was this image that I'm describing of Kennedy at that point. He was at his absolute low, created unbelievably low expectations for this debate. And then the detail that really nailed it in was it came out a couple days before the debate that the organizers had had to order and ship in special podiums because Kennedy was now too large to fit behind the

the original podiums that they had brought. So it just... And then I remember Romney, who was mid-40s at the time, up and coming, he had, as I recall, a fine performance, but it was, whoa, Kennedy can still string a sentence together here. Kennedy can get a jab in. Kennedy can take something Romney just said and throw it right back at him. And these things were...

You would think basic in a political debate, but they were revelations given everything that had preceded it the last few years with Ted Kennedy. And then, of course, from that debate, he took the lead in the race, ended up not being that close. But a long way of saying, you know, I think of Biden. I think of look, there's just the obvious stuff that everyone can see.

But there's also, I think, you know, his opponents on the right certainly play this up for all it's worth. And I do wonder sometimes if they're setting a bit of a trap for themselves where they overdo it.

it. And they create this expectation that's so low for Biden, he clears the hurdle easily. Yeah, I think that's a real possibility. You know, when I talk to people on the right, the idea that the president is senile or demented or is, you know, basically a marionette that his handlers are, you know, moving the strings.

um, is baked in. And I don't think the middle of America is that far, but you know, the more that becomes the default, when you see somebody who can actually walk and talk and chew gum at the same time, even if he is slower than you might ideally want, well,

If you expect, you know, if you expected a three headed dragon and what walks in is a really angry dog, you're going to say, gee, I got lucky today. And if you're if you're a double hater, that might be what you need. That might tip the scale.

Well, I did something, and we talked about this before the show, so I wasn't catching you blind, is I looked at the changes between the April 2020 and the April 2024 NBC poll, both of them done by the Democrat firm, Hart Research Associates, and the Republican firm, Public Opinion Strategy. So it's always been a bipartisan thing. And I wanted to run by a few of the demographic changes, because this is a situation where

Back then, Biden was up by seven and now Trump is up by two. It's a nine point change. And some of it is because of changes of the views of Biden. But how much is because of changes in America? And the first thing I wanted to mention was partisanship, that Pew partisanship data shows that.

The gap is closer than it's been since the Iraq war. The Gallup data show that and have Republicans, including leaners, ahead for the longest stretch of time, going back in the history of their polling. So two sources that suggest we're either in an unusually Republican period or a historically Republican period.

And your poll has a similar finding, which is in April of 2020, it was Democrats plus four when you included leaners. And now it's even. So that's a four point shift. The Democrats have never run a presidential campaign, I believe, in my lifetime where the partisan balance nationally was even. I think they've always had an edge on the exit poll, even if it's just one or two points.

How much of that is real and how much of that is something that is an underappreciated factor that we're looking at the people, but people seem to be changing their minds about the parties. Well, yeah, part of that is, I mean, you lay it out well with it's bigger picture. You know, it's something that you can look back 20 years and say this stands out, not just over the last five years. But there is an element of it that I think, first of all,

You'll get from presidency to presidency where, you know, in the first few years of the Trump presidency. So a lot of these states, you looked at the voter registration statistics and there were a lot more folks registering as Democrats than registering as Republicans. It was one of the things that made it pretty clear that that wave in 2018 was coming.

um you could think back you know work the other way first two years of obama's presidency you know a democratic president big democratic majorities in the house and the senate and it triggered clearly in the midterm election result and i gotta i'd have to go dig back to dig up the party registration trends in that period but i suspect you probably saw the same thing in a you know 63 seat game for the republicans in the house so i think look coming into the biden presidency the democrats getting you know control of everything at least for the first two years um

All of the sort of, you know, you know, the economic angst we're living through, the post-COVID angst, however you want to define that, international news, you know, in that climate, I think there's just there's a tendency that it's always going to incline people against the governing party. So I think there's there's definitely a component of that. But it aligns, too, with, you know, I think you've seen him, too, that that.

shift in voter registration stats, where, you know, in this first couple years of Trump, they were moving towards the Democrats. And in the first couple years of Biden, they've started moving towards the Republicans. So I do think that's real. And again, when you mention our poll, the number that I always check in our poll, and when I see it elsewhere, I like to see it, I like to look for it as well. And that's the recalled vote, you know, asking people,

How did you vote in 2020? Because that's a good, you know, if you see these changes you're describing, well, did you just happen to get a pool of voters who were, you know, actually, you know, more, you know, for Trump than than the result? No, our recall vote in our poll was Biden plus five. And I believe the popular vote was four point six. So, I mean, it was the pool we got in terms of who they say they voted for in 2020 is right in line with what happened.

Which suggests some sort of a real change, whether it's a I don't like Biden, therefore I'm thinking of myself as a Republican, or if it's I'm now thinking of myself as a Republican for broader reasons or a mixture of both.

Yeah. And again, I think it just it also, you know, our poll has Trump up a little bit. And just the fact that Trump is leading in polls right now, even when it's by small margins. I one thing I try to remind people is that's take a step back and look at every poll from 2020.

take a second step back and look at every poll from 2016. And yes, it's very close right now. And I wouldn't say I'm confident either one of these is going to win. Like I said, I could paint, I think, a compelling scenario for either. But I think it is meaningful. And it's not just random polling noise that Donald Trump now actually has leads of one, two, three points in a lot of polls when he didn't lead a single one in 2020. I think our own NBC poll, I went back and looked

Starting in the beginning of 2019, we had we had 14 Biden versus Trump matchups in 2019, 2020, and then starting again in 2023. In all 14, Biden led Trump never by less than six points. And in at least four instances that I can think of off the top of my head by double digits. And then last summer.

it switched to a tie. That was in our poll. That was the first time. Then Trump actually went ahead by five points. So now you've got Trump ahead. He went two, five, and then it fell back down to two in our most recent. But he's led now in three of our polls. And that's

He'd previously let in none that we'd ever taken. And if you if you go back to pick your favorite poll aggregator and just skim through 2020 and you're going to find it's about 97 percent of the polls had Biden up and not even that close. No, it was not that close. And I'm not getting back then. Trump being within the margin of error behind was an unusually good result for him.

The other thing I wanted to run by you is the economics, is that in 2020, 48% of Americans in your poll said they were middle class. Today, it's 41%. And the increase, the 7%, shifted from middle class to either working class or poor.

And this is a self-description. You know, you read this to the person on the other end of, I think, 90 percent of your respondents are by cell phone and they pick that one.

So when you hear, well, the economy is not that bad. People are, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The self-description of the American people is that six percent of Americans think they are poorer at a minimum because they put themselves in a different class. And clearly people within a middle class would probably be more might say I'm behind where I was, but I'm still middle class. What do you make of that?

In my mind, that's inflation. And it's two things, right? I mean, inflation is inflation. So the prices are going to go up and it's like, whoa. But it's also when inflation starts to cool,

they don't go back down. Right. So you're not, you know, this is not something people just adjust to right away. You know, you know, taking three kids out to eat at a, you know, Applebee's or something and, you know, having a bill that's over 100 bucks, you know, I mean, these are, you know, these are changes in in in everyday expenses that I think add up very quickly. And, you know, even if it's like, OK, it looks like the inflation stopped. Things are cool. Well,

You're still going to be paying what you just started paying a year ago. And I suspect, too, there's a lot of... Now, I can't remember where I saw it, but I believe there was a new poll out either today or in the last couple of days that asked people, you know, are we in a recession? And asked about a series of economic, you know, it's a large, I think it was a majority said they thought we were in a recession. And we're not, you know, by any technical definition in a recession. But, you know, it raises the question, is that because people are just...

misinformed about the definition of a recession or is that because they are feeling something that when you say the word recession to them, you know, they take that to mean gloomy economic conditions and they feel they are amidst gloomy economic conditions. I tend to think it's probably that. And I think, I think inflation and the lingering effects of inflation are, to me, are the most obvious explanation. Yeah. Well, the burst of inflation that most countries in the world had, but, you know, to be fair, but yeah, that certainly we had, uh,

You have to go back to my youth, which is, you know, back when there were three networks and MTV was new and actually played music videos to have something similar. And so for an entire generation of voters.

This not only was shocking, but it was unprecedentedly shocking because they had grown up. And if, you know, basically for 45 or under, you would never as somebody who actually went on bought something ever seen an inflation rate as high as 4%, much less the 9% that you had. So it basically was utterly unsettling. More in the way that the 1971 and 72 bursts of inflation unsettled people who hadn't had inflation since 1948.

And yeah, that's going to stay with you for a while. Just because the pain goes away in your upper shoulder when somebody really punches you hard doesn't mean you forget the punch. That's a good analogy, yeah. Well, you know, you are a cool dude, and the world has caught on to the coolness, and you have not just this political kick.

But you get to go to cool things like the Preakness Stakes. Tell us, since you are into horse racing, are you going to be at the Belmont Stakes? Are you going to do on-air stuff or are you just going to be there as a fan? So sadly, NBC lost the rights to the Belmont Stakes a couple years ago to Fox. So yeah, the Triple Crown is not sold as one package. So we have the Derby. We have the Preakness Stakes.

And then Fox does the Belmont. Now, did I buy tickets to go to the Belmont as a spectator? Probably did. So, yes, I'll be up there, and I don't think I'll be doing any hits for it. But it is, you know, I love horse racing.

Barry into it. And the fact that it's one of these like kind of, you know, pinch myself is this real things that, you know, is NBC really sending me the Kentucky Derby to actually, you know, be on it. I feel so I truly feel lucky to get the chance because it is I just I enjoy it so much. I have such a blast getting to do those things. And the Preakness was was fantastic. I don't know if people follow it too much. I know horse racing's on its way out with a lot of people, but it was such a great story.

trainer whose horse won, D. Wayne Lucas is his name, legendary name in the sport. His glory days were 30 years ago or so, but he's 88 and he's still at it. This guy gets up at 3 a.m. literally every day to go to the barn, still rides a pony at 88 every day, takes his horses out, and he sends a horse out, one of the longest shots in the race, wins it.

wins the Preakness. And I was, I'm a huge admirer of the guy. I, you know, by the end of the race, the horse I bet on is up the track, but I see his, his in for sees the gray is in front. And I'm just screaming my, screaming my eyes out, uh, or whatever the expression is. And then, um, and the whole place, it was, it was magical. Um,

And, you know, somebody, a reporter, Kenny Rice, said afterwards, because he was following Lucas to the winner's circle and he encountered all of the trainers who had lost. He said, I've never seen so many happy losers in my life. Everybody loved the story. Everybody was happy. And it was it was magical to be there.

I'm one of these ultra, ultra casual fans. I've been to one Derby in my life. I was on the infield. And as I like to tell people, the rest of you, you've attended Jim McKay's Derby, you know, with hats and mint juleps. And I'm with 140,000. Let's just say nobody was wearing hats. Um,

But D. Wayne Lucas is the only name I would recognize. There you go. Yeah, I mean, it's but it almost makes me wonder, you know, if the if the Belmont is going to be right before the debate. I'm not sure when it is. But, you know, if I were Donald Trump, I might turn to Biden and say, gee, Wayne Lucas is 88 and he's getting up in three in the morning and you can't show. Well, it's June 8th. So it's a few weeks. It's a few weeks before.

But it was interesting. I don't put too much up on Twitter for various reasons, but it was one of those, I was so grabbed by the excitement of being there for the Preakness, I just started posting everything that came to my mind. And I put something up there about Lucas, and I was looking at the comments, and more than a few made the connection between the 88-year-old trainer and the elderly presidential candidate. So...

Well, it is interesting how many of us who are into political data have other things, you know, like Nate Silver was in the World Series of Poker, did extremely well in the main event last year. But like many people, he's, you know, he's playing different events. You know, I'm a baseball stats fanatic and you're into horse racing.

it's and there's a you know there's numbers there's strategy there's probabilities i think involved that probably link all these things together somehow you know um i i my uncle first took me to the racetrack when i was uh seven years old and um you know i just remember it took me a long time to understand it but looking at the form there's there's and there's a lot more now but there's a ton of information in there and a ton of numbers and you try to make you know find some kind of angle on them i mean i remember kind of taken to that

You know, right away as a kid, I was the, you know, we get the Boston Globe, Massachusetts, we get the Boston Globe in the morning. You know, Bird McHale Parish, this was the glory days of the Celtics. I'd read the box scores every day. I'd watch the scoring race that year between Bird and Alex English with the Nuggets scoring averages. So yeah, there is like, you know, I guess there's some connection to be made there.

Yeah, well, yeah, Sabre, and of course, Nate got his start, not just as a poker player, but he developed prediction algorithms for baseball prospectus back in the day, creating what was known as Pocota, which for those of you who are Parks and Recreation fans, look at the law firm. It's a Easter egg for Sabre Metrics. The name of the law firm is all like wind shares, war, and so forth. It's all these Sabre Metric terms. You can be equanimatrix.

The measurement of horses. And you can, you can have, you know, instead of five 38, two minutes plus or whatever your website is going to be. And you could, you could be the Nate silver of, you could make horses cool against you. I think, I think the problem is his formula led to success. And so far mine leads to tickets to get crumbled up and tossed on the ground. Mostly. Well, aside from staking you out at the Belmont in a couple of weeks, where can my listeners follow your work? Um,

We have a NBC News politics newsletter. People can sign up for for free. I know everybody's good newsletter now. But look, if you're into this election, get this one. It comes in about five o'clock every day in the afternoon. We're not one of the morning one. So, you know, it's sort of your your first kind of look back at the day that just was. And I do a I do a piece for them. We try to do some sort of numbers driven, you know, look at the election every Tuesday, but read it more than just every Tuesday. So I recommend that.

um yes i i am on twitter but i don't recommend that because i think i posted the previous stuff and nothing else in the last three months or so um so forget that and um yeah i mean i'll be on um i have no kind of set schedule for being on the air it's kind of events dictated events driven but um you know daytime during msnbc if there's uh if there's a new poll if there's you know a

election news or something, I'll pop up there. And when we do have new polls, and I don't have anything to announce there, but when we have a new NBC poll, we will debut it at Meet the Press. That will be a Sunday morning, and we always do it there first. And I'll be at the board doing that whenever we have a new one. Yeah, no, my father is a Meet the Press devotee. So whenever I'm out there is when I get my Kristen Welker, Steve Kornacki fix.

There you go. Well, Steve, it's wonderful chatting with you, and I hope to have you back again on Beyond the Polls. Look forward to it. Thanks, Henry. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest. Life comes at you fast, which is why it's important to find some time to relax. A little you time. Enter Chumba Casino. With no download required, you can jump on anytime, anywhere for the chance to redeem some serious prizes. So treat yourself with Chumba Casino and play over 100 online casino-style games all weekend.

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Well, in any campaign, it's never just one television ad. It's multiple ads. It's multiple ads from your campaign. It's multiple ads from outside groups that are backing you. It's ads from your opponents and so forth and so on. Now, you can't look at all of these ads in a show like this. But what I'm going to do is show you two of them. They are in the contested Republican runoff in the Texas presidential

23rd Congressional District, which features incumbent Tony Gonzalez versus challenger Brandon Herrera. Let's listen to the first one, which is by a super PAC that is endorsing Gonzalez.

Brandon Herrera moved from North Carolina to run for Congress in Texas and immediately mocked veteran suicide, saying, I often think about putting a c**t in my mouth, so I'm basically an honorary veteran. Brandon, you're no veteran. Veterans are brave warriors. You're just a fool from North Carolina. I'm basically an honorary veteran.

Fools like Brandon Herrera who mock veterans do not belong in Congress or Texas. The RJC Victory Fund is responsible for the content of this advertising.

So you see what they're doing there. I'll get into that in a minute. But now I want you to hear the second one, which is Gonzalez's campaign himself. Hey, Cookie, who are we voting for Congress? Tony Gonzalez. Tony Gonzalez is taking on them lefty yellow bellies to secure the border. That's why Governor Abbott endorsed Tony Gonzalez. Why not Brandon Herrera? Herrera trashed Trump. Made fun of veteran suicide. Well, lookie here.

Brandon Herrera just moved here from the East Coast. That's a little too close to New York City. I'm Tony Gonzalez, and I approve this message because you deserve a Texas conservative. Okay, so let's go over why these two things exist to begin with.

That under federal law, you can give to a certain amount of money, $3,300 a person for each race. So you can give $3,300 for a primary race. You can give $3,300 for a general election. The funds cannot be commingled. So if you give somebody $6,600 in February, they have to separate it out. But this is the candidate committee.

You can give an unlimited amount to what is known as super PACs. So let's say you're Jane Smith and you're a multi-billionaire and you like Tony Gonzalez. You give his campaign $6,600 and you set up a super PAC, usually with a nice name to it, like Good Texans for Good Texans or something like that, and you can give $4 million. And that allows you to spend a lot more.

What you can't do, though, is coordinate with the campaign. So you cannot have a candidate committee talk with or strategize with or openly collude with the strategist for the super PAC. So what you often find in campaigns is that these two things or multiple things where there's often multiple super PACs are talking across purposes. Yes, they're all for one side, but

But they're talking about different issues. And so you don't get the sort of repetition that you would get if there was coordination. One way to avoid that would be as if one side goes first and the other side says, aha, that's a great idea. And that's apparently what's going on here. Let's take a look at the first one that we're talking about.

We're talking about the Super PAC ad. And the Super PAC ad is a direct hit on Brandon Herrera. And this is done, if it were simply an ad without a comparable campaign ad, it would be a very good ad. What do I like about it? It

It has visuals and audio that support each other. Long-time listeners of the show know that's a big thing of mine. You start with the visual, Brandon Herrera's picture. There's a chyron on the screen that says, moved from North Carolina with his name. Brandon Herrera moved from North Carolina. In the back of it is a map.

where you have North Carolina in red, Texas in red, and an arrow showing the path of Brandon Herrera. It only lasts for five to ten seconds, but the words and the pictures support one another in a way that the message gets across. Then he gets into the mocking the suicide, and again, you've got constantly picture of Brandon Herrera, so you know who this guy is. You have name Brandon Herrera up there, and then you have the quotes that you're hearing here,

Put up on the screen so you can see it again. You're supporting one. This is a guy who's an out of stater and he is, as they say, a fool.

That's the message that the committee wants to get across. And then at the end, there's this silly video of apparently Herrera in combat fatigues with some sort of automatic weapon, kind of like marching and looking goofily over at the camera. And that's when they get into the final thing, talking about that we don't need somebody who mocks veterans from out of state and so forth. I think this is a very good attack ad on Brandon Herrera. It's the sort of thing that Texas 23 is...

A long part of the border along the Rio Grande River with a number of counties inland. It's a huge place, but it's very, very rural. It's very, very Texan. If you're moving to Texas for a job, you are not likely to be moving to Texas 23. You are talking about people who are...

of Texas heritage. And here's a guy who just jumped in from North Carolina to come into a place to run for Congress. Well, to the extent that matters, and this is a place unlike many of the metro areas, it probably does matter. That's a good hit to make.

So then let's talk about the Gonzalez ad. The second one is done by the campaign. And notice it's different. It's a clever way of getting at what we call a contrast ad. A contrast ad typically says something negative about one person and positive about another. This starts with the positive. But again, the visuals are important. For those of us old enough, there were

ads by the salsa maker Picante that ran featuring cowboys who are sitting around talking about salsa and of course they like Picante salsa.

This ad is cowboys sitting around a campfire, and when they're talking about the candidates, they're looking at salsa bottles. Tony Gonzalez's salsa bottle looks like a picante salsa bottle. So you've got that little cute mnemonic device that's helping you to pay attention, as opposed to a typical contrast ad, which is, Joe Smith is the worst thing that you've ever seen, while Jane Smith is a goddess with whom you should be pleased.

They make their point, but they make it in an overbearing, heavy-handed way that maybe you've seen this style so much, you tune out. You haven't seen an ad like this in a while. You may actually think it's a salsa ad. If you remember it, say, hey, it was a salsa.

They're bringing back that. So they start with the positives and the positives are things that Republicans would like endorsed by Governor Abbott. He's good on the border and so forth. So in the 10 seconds or 15 seconds that they're talking about why you should vote for Tony Gonzalez, they're doing what you should do, which is taking themes and taking personalities that have credibility with the people who you're trying to talk to and making sure they know that.

That's basic stuff. Sometimes candidates don't do that. Remember the ad last week with Don Blankenship where he's talking about themes that have no resonance with the Democratic voters in West Virginia he was trying to win. Well, this is the polar opposite. This is a really good thing. And then you get to the switch to where it's going to be the negative. And this is another funny thing. All these guys are cowboys.

Except for the guy who says, but what about Brandon Herrera? He's wearing this kind of flowery shirt with pink flowers and like a beret and wire rim glasses. In other words, he's not a Texan. He's also looking at a salsa bottle, which is not a picante bottle when he says, but what about Brandon Herrera? And then you get into, and this is where you get the repetition, similar attacks that

that the super PAC did. He moved from the East Coast. He's mocked our veterans. And then you get another dig at Brandon Herrera and an appeal to Texas Prize, and that's too close to New York City. And that's so horrible that even the guy with the beret and the pink flowered shirt goes, and he has his fingers up by his mouth and mock terror.

This is really creative. And again, it does what you should do in a contrast ad. 15 seconds devoted to positive things that your target voter group would like. 15 seconds explaining things about the component that the target voter group wouldn't like. So I like both of these ads separately. I like them in tandem. But why do we have this aside from the finance committee finance rules? Well, the fact is you also have different ad rates.

that a candidate gets subsidized rates. According to federal law, if a candidate puts up an ad, the station must give them the lowest available rate at that time. They also cannot remove the ad from the air. Super PAC pays commercial rates, just like your McDonald's, your Apple computer, the RJC committee supporting Brandon Herrera, you pay the same rate. So whenever you see spending, it's not equal.

Candidates' money goes much farther. So the real measure of airtime is gross ratings points. And oftentimes if you see that Republicans spend $50 million and Democrats spend $30 million in a Senate race, a lot of the Republican money will be outside money. So the gross rating points is actually closer to even.

And if they're roughly even in spending, the Democrat may have gross ratings points advantage. And the same is true with any other campaign. So I wanted to do this because the ads are each individually good. They coordinate in a way that's not coordination. They take some obvious things that anybody would say and they both run with it. So that gives them repetition.

And the contrast ad that Gonzalez has is particularly clever, which allows you to break through viewer fatigue and monotony. It's not the same old, same old. So between not the same old, same old and the clever use of visuals and audio to reinforce itself, that's why these two ads are the ads of the week.

That's all for now. Join me next week when I'll be joined by the inestimable Amy Walter. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the polar.

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