Mind The Gap
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week I rant about the root of all evil, look at an ad in the Indiana governor's race, and talk about what the polls tell us women want with public opinions guru, Carlin Bowman. Let's dive in.

You may have been hearing a lot about money in politics recently, and that's because Joe Biden has a lot more of it than Donald Trump. Not only has Donald Trump been spending tens of millions of dollars of campaign money on his legal fees, but he hasn't been raising as much as Biden to begin with. Meanwhile, Biden's been raising record amounts of money, and he's using it to fuel operations. He's got ground operations in all the key swing states.

He's now in week two of what was said to be a $35 million media buy across television, radio, digital, with many ads targeted to talk to the various ethnic groups whose support for him is much lower than it was in 2020.

On Thursday, Biden is supposedly going to be bringing in the single biggest haul of any candidate at a single event ever, $25 million at a New York fundraiser with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. So does that mean that Donald Trump is toast? Does that mean that money is going to trump the field, ha ha, and is going to propel Biden to victory? Well, no.

Doesn't mean that Trump shouldn't have money. It's very hard to run a national campaign, particularly a competent one, without cash.

But what we know is that you don't need to have the most money in order to prevail in a presidential campaign. That's certainly something that Trump showed in the 2016 primary when he had a very haphazard campaign, did not raise lots of money on his own, did not spend lots of money on his own behalf, unlike other wealthy candidates who have run for president, and yet trumped the field again. Ha ha ha.

He did so because of a feature of the presidential race that is not present in any other race in American politics, and that is wall-to-wall free media coverage. Because it's the most important job in America, because it's arguably the most important job in the world, media cover you relentlessly. You get newspaper articles. You get mentioned on radio. You get spots on television. All you have to do is talk.

That means that there are millions of dollars spent on your behalf by the people who are covering it. And then you have all the sort of specialty media, the sort of ideological or niche things that will talk about the campaign regularly, as opposed to even something like a gubernatorial race or senatorial race, where a single-issue niche organization is not going to talk about this on a regular basis.

So then you get the third thing, which is that because it's the presidency, people talk to people about it. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody's politically obsessed. We know that the sort of person who listens to this podcast is not the median swing voter. The median swing voter is more interested today in opening day than they have Major League Baseball than they are in the ins and outs of the minutia of political maneuvering. But that doesn't mean they're immune to it.

because they can't escape it. So they may not seek it out. They may even try and avoid it. But this is the sort of race where you might be talking with a friend, and the one political conversation you're going to have with your friend this week is going to be about this race.

So what do we need to look at as we're going forward? First of all, you need to take a look at where the money is being spent and how it's being spent. Everything seems to be that the Biden campaign understands its weaknesses properly and is deploying its resources appropriately. So you're not seeing a case where somebody is blind to their challenges. That's not the case of the Biden campaign.

Then what you have to do is see whether or not it's moving the needle. Now, we had some polls out this week that suggested Biden is coming back in some swing states. But the fact is Biden is still in trouble. The fact is that this could be a statistical anomaly or could be the result of a very strong campaign. It's just too early to tell. And the fact is that Donald Trump is still ahead.

in the four most recent national polls when he only needs to lose the popular vote by a couple of points, probably, in order to win the electoral college. So what you need to think about if you're Trump is how to counter that. Now, one way to counter that, obviously, is going to be to try and raise enough money so that you can get your message out. And that's going to be a challenge as long as he is unable or unwilling to put his legal bills on his own.

And this is where something that's normally outside of politics could come into play. And that is Donald Trump's Truth Social Network. That for all of the money Joe Biden has raised, Donald Trump as a candidate can spend every dollar he has on his own behalf. And the public valuation of the Truth Social Network that did just become publicly traded recently is over $3 billion. And Donald Trump can't cash in on that. He can't sell the shares yet.

Can he use them as collateral for loans? Can he use other assets as collateral for loans expecting to sell the true social network? Some way or another, $3 billion just got injected into Donald Trump. And if Trump wants to, he can find ways to tap that indirectly in order to counter Biden's call. $25 million may be a record amount to raise in one day. $25 million is...

Less than 1% of the $3 billion Donald Trump added. It's a rounding error. So what we're talking about is, first of all, Donald Trump has to make the decision he's avoided so far. He has not wanted to put significant amounts of his own wealth behind his election campaign. He may have to do that. And thanks to the True Social Network,

He now can both meet his obligations in court, whether you think they're justly applied or not, he still has to have cash reserves in order to potentially meet them, and

fund part of a presidential campaign. Secondly, then you have to take a look at the Trump campaign's operations. And they ran a very competent primary campaign. Unlike his other efforts, this was professionally done, professionally targeted. They knew where to spend money. They knew where not to spend money, i.e. don't fight Nikki Haley dollar for dollar in South Carolina, because you don't have to fight Ron DeSantis with dollar for dollar or more so in Iowa to keep his challenge down.

That was really smart, and they used the right issues to do it. So the indications are this campaign knows what it's doing if it can get the cash to fund it. The jury's out. If Biden has a $300 million cash ad, much as Obama did against John McCain in 2008, that's a potentially strong factor in his favor. But a stronger factor is Biden.

The media that is used and is implemented every day to cover these people. The fact is these are well-known people. These are not people establishing themselves. Both have records. Both have strong public feelings. Both are now the nominees, and partisanship can overcome a lot of personal deficiencies. So you have to say at this point, cash edge and potential campaign edge

decisively for Biden, but not overwhelmingly so. Not a factor that means that he's overcome his own deficiencies to become the favorite and one that Trump can easily now cut that his lead or even eliminate it if he chooses to put his personal resources behind the campaign. And if he does that, starting in the summertime, we may be hearing a very different story about the influence of money in politics.

So join me in the

Well, it's been Women's History Month, as you might have been hearing about. And of course, we have been hearing a lot about the role of women in politics and how important they've been as a force in the Trump administration.

And now post-Trump and perhaps re-Trump years. And here to talk about that and a whole host of other things interesting about politics and gender gaps and other gaps is Karlyn Bowman, the Senior Fellow Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute and a polling expert extraordinaire. Karlyn, welcome back to Beyond the Polls. Thank you so much, Henry. Delighted to be with you.

Well, let's start with these recent polls that we've been hearing about with Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They're all over the map, aren't they?

They are all over the map. We had both a Fox poll and a Quinnipiac poll, both of registered voters this week, taken at about the same time on the Biden v. Trump question. They included leaners, but still they had different results. I mean, the Quinnipiac folks said it was too close to call in their race at 48 Biden, 45 Trump. But the Fox News poll was 50 Trump, 45 Biden. So some differences there.

In an electorate that's very much unsettled at this point, a lot of people have made up their minds, but they're clearly a small group that may be moving back and forth or changing their mind and moving to a different camp every other week. Who knows?

And was there anything when they asked about third party candidates? The third party results in both polls were very confusing. It's not clear to me that Trump benefits by the third party candidates. It's true in probably more of the polls than not.

But that said, I think it's premature because most people in these two polls showed it don't really know a lot about Cornel West or Robert Kennedy or Jill Stein. But I think Robert Kennedy is probably better known than the other two. But still, the addition of Robert Kennedy, the numbers were different in both polls. So I don't quite know where he is overall.

Is it still true that he, to the extent we can determine it, largely benefits from the people who dislike both of the major candidates? Or is he beginning to eat into one or either candidate's favorable base?

I think he mainly draws from people who dislike both of the candidates at this particular point. But as a third party candidate is with a very prominent name, it's quite possible he'll be drawing in others. And with a very prominent position on an issue like vaccines, it could be drawing a lot of people to the polls that haven't been there in a while.

And it'll be very interesting to see as this evolves that with the exception of Ross Perot, third-party candidates in the last 40 years, going back to John Anderson in 1980, tend to do much better in the spring and early summer and then fade as people decide to return to their pre-third-party inclinations, whether it be partisan or anti-incumbent or something else.

Do you think that Kennedy might be able to be more like Perot and have an independent base of support? Or do you think he's likely to end up like Gary Johnson and John Anderson and others who started in the high single or low double digits and then faded into relative obscurity? To put the issue in perspective, Americans like to have a lot of choices. But you're right, party ties are important. And in the final analysis, most people go back to their party

in the fall. I think Kennedy, because of the distinctive name, because of the fact he's carved out particular positions on a couple of very high-profile issues, has the chance that he can get on ballots in a lot of states, and that's not at all clear. I understand he's sort of flirting with the libertarians in terms of an alliance there. They're on the ballot in many states, and so that could be very important in terms of a third-person candidacy overall, but that remains to be seen. He's got to get on the ballot.

Yes. And certainly his out-of-the-box appointment of Nicole Shanahan. You know, she's wealthy because of her marriage, former marriage to... Sergey Brin. Yes. And like in 1980, when the Libertarian candidate Ed Clark put wealthy David Koch on as a vice president so that he could self-fund the campaign, that's what people are expecting Nicole Shanahan can do.

Is that something that you expect might be decisive in getting him out? She's already been very generous, and she may have very deep coffers, though no one knows what the divorce settlement was. There was some speculation that it was around a billion dollars. That's a lot of money that one could potentially invest in a campaign. But you're right, that's probably certainly a very strong element of the strategy. Will she help him in particular with voters? Hard to know at this point. We've seen very little of her in the

The number two on the ticket doesn't usually matter that much. Yeah, even Sarah Palin, who was widely derided for her post-acceptance speech follies and foibles, did not really drag down John McCain. I mean, John McCain dragged down John McCain. Absolutely, yes.

So one of the things you mentioned to me about these polls is not only are they all over the map in terms of Biden versus Trump, they're all over the map in terms of the gender gap. Tell us a little bit about that.

The gender gap is one of those things we've been watching for quite a long time. We first saw it in the 1980 election, where men voted for Ronald Reagan by very substantial numbers, and women voted for him too, but only by a single percentage point. And at that point, we had several exit polls, and they all showed basically the same thing, a gap between men and women that we really hadn't seen before. It's been present in every presidential election since and in many other lower-level elections. So

Something we've watched very carefully. I looked up the numbers this morning in terms of, we had a very high turnout in 2020, and women are a larger share of the electorate, and they cast more votes than men did in 2020. And so in that sense, women have disproportionate clout in the electorate. In the past, it's been seven to eight million more votes than men, but that's not something to sneeze at in a very close election. So

We pay attention to the women's vote. It looks pretty democratic these days. The gender gap in the two new polls I mentioned, the Fox and the Quinnipiac poll, calculated on the net. One was a very large gap of about 46 points. That would be outside of the range of what we've seen historically. And the other poll, the Fox poll, was 13 points, which would be a little lower than what we've seen in the last two polls.

in the last two presidential elections overall when it's been in the low 20s. And so we'll have to see what happens this fall, but it's something that we need to watch because women will have a disproportionate effect on the campaign. We're particularly looking at a couple of groups of women, and the polls that I mentioned this morning can't really

dive too deep down to, let's say, white women and white men. The gender gap is very pronounced there. We also see a big difference between women who have a college degree and those who have less formal education. So it's one of many gaps in our politics. The gender gap isn't by far the largest gap. We have a race gap, a black-white gap that's very, very large. We have a partisan gap. Democrats and Republicans differ pretty strongly.

obviously, about candidates overall. So there are a lot of gaps in our politics, but the gender gap, by virtue of the fact that women are more than half of the electorate, gets disproportionate attention. But I also think there are other reasons for it. If you look back to the 1980 campaign,

The women covering that campaign had been pretty much on the back of the bus. If they were on the bus at all, they weren't allowed to be members of the National Press Club until the early 1970s. So I think they wanted this story of the importance of a new vote, of the women's vote, of a very different vote overall. So that carried the issue for a long time, and it's still getting an enormous amount of attention. And

you're right, it's Women's History Month this month, and I've been sort of watching the coverage of Women's History Month. And I've yet to find a good news story, except perhaps in the census data. The census data released a lot of data on women in the United States today. And look, for example, at the fact that women are getting more bachelor's degrees, more master's degrees, and I think they're pretty close in the PhD realm overall. And

There was a little bit of good news on the census data, but in all the rest of the press coverage, we heard, you know, the media's constant stream of negativity about the way things are going in the United States, and particularly about, when you think about it, women, the abortion issue has been a very big issue, and we certainly should talk about that. It's traditionally not divided the sexes, but it really is dividing the sexes now, and particularly abortion.

among younger women who also apparently are becoming a lot more liberal. That's one of the interesting new trends we've seen in the data. So let's pick up on the abortion question for a minute. You know, that's the data that I've seen for years is that for all of the talk about abortion being something that's of particular import to women, and one can understand certainly why that would be from an intensity reason, the views on abortion do not differ statistically among sex.

over the last 20 or so years. That's changing, Henry. That's what I was going to ask you, is that changing? It's definitely changing, particularly driven by young women overall. Kaiser asked, and it has the most recent question, though Gallup asked this question periodically, they asked voters, or they asked, I believe it was registered voters in their latest poll that came out about two weeks ago, is abortion the most important issue to you? And 12% of women said it was the most important issue

to them in terms of casting their vote this fall. That's a big single-issue vote. Now, of course, many of those women were Democrats already. They were probably conceivably in states like California and New York where attitudes about abortion are much more liberal than they are, for example, in Alabama. To take one recent state that's been in the news on women's related issues on the IVF issue,

overall. But still, it's possible that women in the suburbs who tended to be Republican could be moving away from the Republican candidate from Trump for many reasons, because they don't like Trump, because they're worried about abortion, lots of other reasons. So it's possible. And again, the exit posters haven't been consistent over the last 20 or 30 years, and including the same set of issues

from which they ask people what's most important. They usually include the economy, but we haven't seen abortion included in that most important issue battery in a long time in a presidential election. And it still was a big single-issue vote years ago, but it tended to benefit the conservatives and Republicans. That's not the case anymore. Now, Gallup asks a different kind of question. Instead of asking what's the most important issue to you in casting your vote, they ask

How important will abortion be to you in casting your vote? Is it the most important issue to you when you can't vote for any candidate who doesn't share your opinion? And that number is in the 20 to 25% range. And that's a very big vote overall. Again, a lot of those people are Democrats overall, but it's something that I think we do have to watch very carefully. And of course, the IVF case,

has been in the news. It looks, it's hard to know, to read the arguments that happened earlier this week. And if the court rejects it on standing issues, which I expect to be the case, perhaps it won't be the kind of issue that the pro-choice folks are hoping for in the election. But it's possible, Henry, that we could have 13 ballot measures on abortion.

And as we know, between the end of, I mean, between Dobbs and this election, in every single case, pro-choice forces have won ballot measures and won by a significant amount, including many Republican voters overall. So in those states that have significant abortion ballot measures this fall, the issue could be very significant.

Yeah, that's one of the things that obviously Democrats are banking on. And yes, clear for well before Dobbs is that the center of public opinion in America was what I called weakly pro-choice in the sense that they support.

access to abortion at some point, at least through the first trimester and depending on your state or demographic into the second trimester, but weakly in the sense that it wasn't motivational in their vote choice, which is why you could have consistently 25 or 33 percent of Republicans say that they were pro-choice, even in pre-Dubbs era.

Democrats are clearly trying to turn the weak pro-choice voter into a strong pro-choice voter. Are you seeing, and that gets to the question about these data,

Is this a case where pre-existing partisan Democrats are doubling down on a pre-existing issue and raising their intensity? Or is it one where the weak pro-choice voters are saying, actually, this now matters now that this is no longer, now that my position is not the law of the land, and that they are moving their intensity up? One is...

not really important for a partisan standpoint, because much as you can ask any partisan what's your important issue, they'll find one reason that aligns with their side. The other is potentially devastating for Republicans. And you're right, it's the latter, not the former. If you

There's always been a lot of ambivalence about abortion, as you said, focusing on the trimesters. But it is also true that many Americans still believe in their own hearts that

It's a life, and it should be protected. And they also believe in the power of individual choice. And right now, the power of individual choice is what's really driving voters. I mean, Americans want to make decisions on their own, whether it's COVID vaccines. I'll never forget about Gallup poll a long time ago where everybody believed smoking was harmful. But people thought Americans should be able to make the decision themselves.

about whether or not to smoke. And I mean, it's hard to compare that to abortion. But at the same time, the animating principle, I think, is the same because women want to be able to make that choice on their own. And so the Dobbs decision was really a kind of tsunami in the world of thinking about how abortion is perceived.

One of the things you were alluding to the Alabama special election in suburban Huntsville, which was a Trump won it by one point, according to the data in 2020. And there was a special election and the Democrat won by 25 points. Yeah. On the one hand,

Shore looks and she ran a campaign based on access to abortion and IVF. The Republican male candidate didn't talk about it at all. They supposedly, he supposedly cut an ad and decided to run on local issues. You know, on the one hand, you look and say 26 point shift, that's a disaster. On the other hand,

Only 6,000 people cast their ballot. 15,000 people cast a ballot in the 2022 general election, and many more will cast a ballot in a presidential year. So we're talking about super low turnout compared to a presidential general election.

How do you interpret this? Is it a question of this shows a salience of an issue? Is it a question of... I think it certainly does. The super low turnout and high motivation, that combination. So it's the high motivation voters who probably turned out. I mean, we obviously don't have an exit poll, and so we're just reading into the tea leaves of past elections. I hadn't looked at the numbers of people who actually voted yet, so that's helpful. But I'm sure a lot of those people were motivated by the IVF issue

and perhaps by abortion more broadly. But it's been such, it's gotten wall-to-wall coverage in Alabama. So I expect that that did play a role. And again, it's being able to make personal choices. And these are children with IVF who are wanted children. I mean, it's very, it's, I think it's a very treacherous issue. And that gets back to your larger point about how Republicans should talk about it. I'm glad I'm not a political strategist. But I noticed that the

one of the big Republican groups recently has been saying, you know, state your position, tell people what you're for, try to talk about it, for example, in the way that you discussed it earlier in a trimester context. But, you know, let people know what you think. You can't run away from this issue overall. And I tend to believe that that's true in many places. I mean, California and Vermont, if they have ballot measures this fall, it's not going to matter. I mean, we know what's going to happen in California and Vermont. But, you know,

Yeah, I think stating your position and then moving on if you can, if you're in the pro-life camp, acknowledging that, acknowledging the complexity of the issue might be a better way to go. That's certainly how people like Marco Rubio, who...

One over going away in Florida, you know, he had a relatively extreme position, has before been opposed to rape and incest exceptions. Brian Kemp had signed a six-week ban facing Stacey Abrams in a state ban. And in Ohio, the governor is strongly pro-life and actually ran ads in that campaign on the referenda there, which he lost. But still, he was able to state his position, and he's very popular. Right.

So let me get to something you were mentioning earlier about younger women. Surveys seem to be showing that younger women are moving to the left. And it's not just in the United States. You know, that South Korea's last election was called the incel election, which, of course, tells you who's doing the framing. But what it showed was that young women are moving towards the left and young men are moving to the right.

Are we seeing some of that in the United States or is it more the young women moving right now? And if so, why? Well, I've been thinking a great deal about this and I hope this doesn't sound too radical. But first of all, the data are not consistent in the United States. Certainly the new Gallup trend shows women looking a lot more liberal than they have been in the past.

and showing men not really moving at all. The UCLA data of entering college freshmen, which is a very big sample of a group that's going to be important in voting going forward, they showed, interestingly, in their very long trend, which I believe starts in 1964, they showed that young men from the early days when they started measuring it through the 1980s were more liberal than young women. And now things have

flipped and young women look very, very liberal on ideological identification. So you've got those two very big data sets, but the GSS, the General Social Survey of NORC, doesn't seem to comport with these other data sources. So we need a lot more data at this point, but certainly the work that my colleague Dan Cox has done at AEI, looking particularly at that cohort of women. We wrote about it together a while back before the Dobbs decision. And

I would argue, I mean, some people saying it's me too. Some people are saying that it's the abortion issue. Some people are saying that it's the fact that you can't find a good news story about women's progress, that it's the media negativity overall. I mean, heck, there was a story in one of the papers last week about how few women are sitting in the first chair of orchestras around the globe. I mean, what? I mean, they've made so much progress in so many areas. So that's what the media chose to focus on.

But I think it might be something else. And tell me if I'm going to get in trouble by saying this. I think if you're told over and over again by the national media that you're a victim, you're a victim of the patriarchy, you're a victim of the gender wage gap, you're a victim of sexual harassment, and there's truth to a lot of these things, pretty soon you're going to think about what that means for your politics. Whereas if you are the victimizer, i.e. men,

You don't move. You're not part of this. Certainly, it's one explanation, and I think it includes all of those things like Me Too, harassment, the patriarchy, the Barbie movie. I mean, it could even go back to Anita Hill. It's hard to date this, you know, to that confirmation hearing. Was that 91? Anyway, whatever that was. Yeah, 91. 91. So...

I think if you're told over and over again you're the victim, you're going to feel that way, and you want the government to sort of step in in a lot of areas, whether it's student loans or whatever. But anyway, that's just my two cents worth on why it may be happening, though it may not.

I mean, because the movement has been gradual among young women. It didn't happen after Dobbs. It didn't happen after Me Too. It's just been, the numbers have just been moving up. And I think the number of young women in the latest Aston, which is available publicly, was in the 40s. And the same thing was true in the Gallup data in terms of liberalism. So that's pretty significant. Whereas men were about half that or even less. I can't quite remember. But anyway.

So that's my explanation. What do you think? Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, I teach a course on Franklin Roosevelt. Well, I include Roosevelt. And one of the things that's clear when you read Roosevelt versus Hoover back in 1932 is that Hoover emphasizes agency and Roosevelt emphasizes what we would now call victimhood. He doesn't use that word. But the point is,

The whole critique of the Republican-led economy is that the many are powerless in the face of the few and need the government to give them the agency that they deserve by right.

That remains a leitmotif of the Democratic Party, and indeed of the left worldwide, is that the many are powerless in the face of the few, and only a powerful government working in their interest can establish and provide their agency. So with respect to how you've described the descriptions of women, that is very consistent with how left-leaning forces and thinkers have defined

social relations going back into the 19th century, but particularly in the 20th century. So it would not surprise me at all if the focus, what used to be the focus on the laborer as the victim, now the focus is maybe on gender or race categories or sexual identity categories as powerless in the face of

a omnipresent majority. That would be very consistent with the approach of looking at social relations that helps to divide the left and the right, you know, the right tending not necessarily to be opposed to government action, but to view the individual's ability to improve oneself even in the face of

and adversity much more positively, giving much more agency to the individual than people. Even though American women are making these incredible strides using their own agency, it's just an interesting thought to try to figure out what's behind it all. But it's something that really bears watching because it's clearly affecting our politics.

Well, tell me something positive to end up our discussion as opposed to vitriol and Trump versus Biden and women thinking that they're victims. Well, Congress is away. It's very quiet here in Washington. You're not here this today, Henry, but it's a cold, nasty day with a little bit of rain, but apparently it will be nicer on the weekend. So we can look forward to spring and the flowers here are spectacular, though the wind's blowing a lot of them down.

Well, I am in California, which today is sunny, but we're in the midst of a few days of rain. But I think by Easter, we'll have the beginnings of sunshine. I saw a rather funny video that is being put out by the Babylon Bee about the Roman guards who think that thought they got a really cushy assignment guarding some dead Jewish guy's grave.

So anyone wants a chuckle on the run-up to, if you drive by In-N-Out Burger, which I've done every day, thanks to my college-age children who are CFOs. Yes, indeed. Yes.

And you go up and there's a sticker that says, Happy Resurrection Day. We're giving our people off Sunday and so forth. And I thought, I've never heard it called that before. And I thought that, I thought Kathy Truitt and Chick-fil-A were the ones who'd get in trouble for that stuff. Exactly. Well, Carlin, where can my listeners follow your work?

They can follow me at www.aei.org. Just go to my bio and you'll see the latest things I've written. And is there a subscription list? No, no, I've never been smart enough to get that all done, Henry. So people just have to bump into my work. Okay, well, I encourage all my listeners to go out of their way to bump into Karlyn Bowman's work. And as always, a delight and a pleasure, and I look forward to having you back. Thanks so much, Henry.

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Any competitive primary is going to involve positive bio ads and attack ads. But usually the attack ads come at the end of the race after both candidates have established name identification. That's not the case in Indiana's Republican primary for governor. Let's listen. Mike Braun sold out Indiana's police.

It gets worse. Here's Republican Senator Braun going all the way in endorsing Black Lives Matter. Do you support the Black Lives Matter movement? I support that movement. Black Lives Matter has, of course, called for the murder of police officers. And yet Mike Braun went even further. Would you join a protest march in Indiana or anywhere else? I would ask. I probably would. We can't trust Mike Braun.

Well, this ad's been airing now in Indiana for over a week, and it is one of many ads that is attacking Senator Mike Braun. So yes, you heard that right, Senator Mike Braun. Mike Braun is the sitting United States Senator, a Republican from Indiana, who is leaving that seat after one term to run for the open seat of Indiana governor.

Why then is that an important fact? Well, it's an important fact because he has statewide name identification. He spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to win the seat in 2020, and as a senator...

He is somebody who is known by voters statewide. That means he's overwhelmingly the frontrunner. If his name identification stays positive, even the bio ads that his competitors will run won't do enough to close the gap. People will know Braun and they'll like the name they know rather than the competitor who they're getting to know.

So what that means is that the normal sequence is being inverted. The attack ads are going first to make people dislike Mike Braun, then the positive ads are going. So now that you understand why this is airing over five weeks before the primary, let's take a look at what they're talking about.

This is aimed at conservative Republicans. Polls over and over show that conservative Republicans are opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, are opposed to the idea of suing the police, and strongly, as they say, back the blue.

The visuals on this are meant to reinforce the overall message as they say, "We can't trust Mike Braun." It uses Braun's own words, it uses Braun's own voice, and it has pictures of Braun doing the interviews with Tucker Carlson where he uttered many of those statements. Most of the time Braun's name is on the screen. So for example, when you hear Tucker's voice,

The chyron that Fox had during that broadcast says, Mike Braun supports suing the police or something like that. So you've got Tucker's words and you've got

from Fox, the visual that reinforces it. And every time Mike Braun is talking, they'll put words with the word Mike Braun to show you visually what he's saying. Again, the thing that I always like about ads, when the visuals support the audio, because some people pay attention to ads closely, some kind of hear them, some kind of see them.

So you don't want to require people to actually pay attention. You want them to get the message if they're the casual listener. And again, what we're talking about is a simple message that on core issues that you as a conservative Republican care about, the name you know isn't on your side. And the fact that they can use Tucker Carlson, who is a figure who is known by people on the right and is trusted by people on the right,

reinforces the message that you're making. A credible source who you trust is making the arguments that elicit the answers that Mike Braun gives. We don't yet have public polling since these ads came out. We don't know if they're actually working. But we can see why a campaign would do this when we see the objective has to be to bring on Mike Braun.

We know that Mike Braun has said things and there is video of these things that are in strong disagreement with the views of conservative Republicans and particularly of the most conservative Republicans who are likeliest to vote in a primary.

Put A together with B and you'll see whether C, the desired result, the decline in Mike Braun's favorability and hence his going down from a frontrunner to being a competitor, happened. We'll know in a couple of weeks if the public polls show that Mike Braun's favorabilities have changed and that we've actually got a race in this multi-way candidate contest. Then we'll know that this ad, among the other ads that are doing similar things, will have worked.

And that's why it's this week's Out of the Week. That's it for this week. Join me again next week as we reach for the stars together and journey beyond the colds.

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