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Welcome to the first edition of The Horse Race with Henry Olson. This is a new podcast, and each week I will go through with a series of guests and talk about the horse race of politics, who's up, who's down, presidentially, congressionally, senatorially, and any other race that might be of interest. Today's guests are Deborah J. Saunders, White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who will discuss all things Trump.
Craig Gilbert, the Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who will discuss the country's most politically important state, Wisconsin, and Carlin Bowman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who will go around the horn and talk about all things political and maybe a little bit about love and Valentine's Day. I'll also go over the ad of the week, the most effective political ad running on television today, and the undercard, where I'll discuss non-presidential races, in this case,
the House of Representatives control race. The horses are in their gates. They're off.
And I'm here with one of the best observers of all things Trump that I know of, Deborah J. Saunders, the Las Vegas Review-Journal's White House correspondent. Deborah, welcome to The Horse Race with Henry Olson. Henry, it's a pleasure to be here, and I'm honored to be your inaugural guest. You are my inaugural guest. An inaugural guest only 363 days before the next inauguration. How fitting. Please be kinder to me than President Donald Trump was to many of the inaugural guests gathered. Ha ha ha!
Well, speaking of the kindness of President Trump, what is it like to be covering him in the White House and get to watch he and the operations close up? It's exhausting. I do not know how the man does it. The energy that he has and the way that he just doesn't let things go and he keeps on going, it's amazing. So I am in awe of his ability to just never stop.
Well, when he never stops, does it also mean that he gets everything done or is it the never stopping of somebody who's constantly throwing, juggling things in the air and then people coming up and pick up the things that get dropped behind him? Both.
I mean, in other words, he's always moving on something. But you'll see, for example, there'll be an initiative that he's working on, and they'll have an event and then another event and another event, and it really hasn't necessarily progressed. But look at the things that he's done in the last year. I mean, he did get phase one of the China deal.
It may not be as much as people want, but it did put a cessation to the trade wars, right? He did get the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement through, and that was a big thing. And, of course, there are the, what, 187 federal judges that have been approved while he has been president. I think Mitch McConnell deserves a lot of credit for that, the Senate majority leader, but...
Trump foresaw that and he made sure that that happened. So, you know, he's done a lot and there are other things that he hasn't. And he's actually had impeachment aside a pretty substantive first couple of weeks of January, hasn't he? He certainly has. And right now he's in Davos.
And so he woke up this morning in Switzerland. And let me see, what has he done so far? I thought I'd check this for you, Henry. He had breakfast with American chief executive officers, officers and business leaders. He had a bilat with the Kurdistan regional government, had a bilat with the president of Iraq. And for our non-DC speak friends, bilat means bilateral discussion between him and a single principal.
That's correct, or otherwise known as a meeting, right? But we have to use these really technical terms like that. And what else did he do? He was on CNBC this morning. He gave an interview to Maria Bartiromo at Fox Business, and he gave a press conference all before he took off on Air Force One to come back to Washington, and he will get here later today.
So he's pretty busy. And at the press conference, of course, I'll go back to what you said about people having to pick up after him at times. There are a few things that the president said at the press conference today. We have all the material. They don't have the materials, Trump said, of the House impeachment managers versus his legal team. And that's the sort of thing that I think the House impeachment managers noticed. Yeah.
And probably will remind us of a number of times, if not, that they're doing so as they are giving their pronouncements before the Senate as we're talking today. As we speak. So this is the sort of thing that, you know, he does sometimes say things that
the White House wishes or his team wishes he would not say. And I would venture to guess that that is one of them. So just looking at the last week, let's think about the helpful advancing the ball forward for Trump in the country, Trump. And let's think about the I can't believe he just said did that and problematic Trump. What would be an example of one of each? And how do you think they have played out?
Well, one of the things that he did in Davos this morning was he threatened Europe with auto tariffs. That's another typically Trumpian move. And blindsided everybody by doing so. So that's another typical Trumpian move. And I think one could argue that it advances the ball in that he's put Europe on notice that they better really try to come to the table for a deal. Now, I don't think that Donald Trump is quite the great dealmaker he thinks he is.
but I'm sure he would at least view that as advancing the ball, and maybe it did. I mean, the New York Times had a great story about how he's a hero in Davos now, and whoever would have thought that would happen? I mean, here you see this. I mean, he's a real estate developer. Davos is full of visionaries in Western European leaders. Self-appointed visionary. Self-appointed visionary is the best kind, right? And they've looked down the nose at him as this, you know,
bull in a china shop and now he's coming in there and they're liking him and he's liking it back you know one of the I think myths about Trump is that he hates to travel I think he loves it I really think he loves traveling why do you think he loves it because he gets treated so well
And he gets away from certain things. Of course, then what does he do to not help himself? Well, he goes on Twitter and he tweets a lot of things that I don't think necessarily advance his position. And he says things in his press conference that I don't think advance his position either. So some of them do, but...
Looking forward, we're going to go through a very rough week, a rough couple of weeks, but particularly the next week is going to be arguments back and forth where the House managers are going to be making their case why he is the devil incarnate and why his lawyers are going to be making the case why he's done nothing absolutely wrong.
What can the good Trump do to help himself, and what do you think might be the sort of thing that the guy who just can't help himself will do to divert attention from his lawyer's best cases? Well, let me just say, when Trump said in Davos, we have all the material they have available,
We have all the material. They don't have the materials. What he was doing was helping House Democrats who have been saying that they need to get witnesses, right? So that was just not a good thing. That makes it harder for his legal team to argue against –
And they're trying to make sure that the so-called moderate Republicans don't venture off the farm and vote for witnesses. So that was a bad thing. I think, I mean, I personally think it would be nice if he or his team actually sat down and went through stuff with the press, took questions, and really talked. You know, we get all these sound bites. It was a perfect phone call.
And as we all know, it was not a perfect phone call, right? And witch hunt, hoax, and all that stuff. And it would be nice to sort of hear a more thoughtful version of what he's saying. He was asked today if he thought of going to the Senate trial. And he said he would love to go and just sit in the front seat and stare at those creepy people as they spoke. So...
But I think actually maybe sort of going through the nuts and bolts of this case himself, that he actually might do it. And perhaps with a lawyer or two at his side might actually do a pretty good job of that. But I do not see that happening. He's used to communicating a certain way. And I mean, it's sort of like barking.
Barking. A bark because it's, you know, sound bites and it's tweets and it's stuff like that. It's – and I mean – now, I have to say this because I know that there are people who are listening who are thinking, but wait a minute, he talks to the press all the time and that is so true. He takes pool sprays a lot. Okay. Pool sprays means? I have to tell you. Thank you for that. Well, so the pool is – you can't have every person from the press following the president. So you get a pool of people from different media like I –
I am at the White House. I'm a print reporter and I cover him in the Oval about once a month. Right. And then there'll be people from radio and there will be people from TV. And so and so he'll answer those questions. But it's a very small pool and it's the same people over and over again. And then you report on that back to the whole press that they can take what you and your colleagues have said. You produce a uniform report and then that becomes the basis for things that other reporters can file. That's correct.
That's right. So I was in London when he was at the NATO meetings. And you may recall, Henry, I certainly do vividly, that he had a few pool sprays with other leaders and people shouted out questions. And he was criticized for doing that because, of course, he made other leaders wait while he indulged himself. And so then he decided...
that he was just going to cut the press conference, which is something where a much wider group of people would have been able to field questions and do follow-ups. They're hard to do when you're in a pool spray. And that did not happen. So you wrote a wonderful article. You also get to be a columnist once a week and provide your commentary as opposed to your reporting. Donald Trump and the company he keeps. Tell us about the company he keeps and why that's a problem for him.
Well, I look at January as a highly successful month in the first half for Trump because of China and because of the USMCA. And now we're about to see the less successful side of that month as the Senate trial goes on. And one of the problems that you see with Trump are some of the people he has around him.
A big name, if you turn on cable news, you cannot get away from the name Lev Parnas, right? And he is a Ukrainian-born, naturalized citizen who was involved with Rudy Giuliani and worked hard to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce that he was investigating Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who was working and paid handsomely by a Ukrainian energy company.
So, but he's, I mean, you look at the guy and he looks like a debt collector for a not nice loan person, right? Yeah. Right? Nice card there. We'll say something happened to it. That's right. And so there's just this part of you. And he has, there's video of him being near Trump. There are pictures of, he has selfies taken with Ivanka Trump and with other people. And so there's a part of you that thinks, wow.
why did Rudy Giuliani, who worked with this guy, why do you get somebody like that in the Trump orbit? And it sort of takes you back to the Bill Clinton days when there were a number of people who were just...
just not, you know, sort of shady types. And they had very good access to the Clinton White House. And I think we're seeing that with the Trump White House. And it doesn't serve Trump well. I don't think he's going to be convicted. But people seeing the visuals here, they get a picture of Trump.
Of a president who's not careful enough about who he has around him. And this isn't started with the White House. This goes back to Roger Stone, who's not exactly the most reputable figure, being his chief political guru going back decades. And who did Roger Stone bring into the Trump formal campaign apparatus sometime in early 2016 but his former partner? Paul Manafort.
That's right. Not exactly. Another problem, somebody who couldn't last as a campaign chairman because of his ties with Ukraine. So there's this sort of circular thing. And, you know, but I know that readers, when they call up and they say, but you can't expect him to have, you know, a bunch of academics and senior statesmen around him all the time. He's a businessman. Well, he's been president for three years. And who want to expect a change in his orbit to reflect that?
Yeah, it's kind of like in the Shakespearean play Henry V when Prince Hal is just a youth who's not in the throne. He keeps the rowdy guy Falstaff around. But when he becomes king, he knows Falstaff not because it's not an acquaintanceship which befits a person who's going to rule the realm.
Yes. Excellent example, Henry. My favorite line from a wonderful column, which you can all get by looking at the ReviewJournal.com, is the one you conclude with. He didn't take the swamp out of Washington. He brought his own swamp with him.
Do you see that swamp receding? And you're there, obviously, people who were close to him, like Corey Lewandowski or Paul Manafort's now in federal prison. Roger Stone is either in federal prison or away in the States. Do you see the swamp receding at all? Or is this whole Ukrainian Giuliani thing kind of an idea that the waters may change, but he's attracted to the swamp creature?
Well, and I think that you're more likely to see that sort of thing at Mar-a-Lago than you are at the White House. And it's not as if
It's not as if we get to see everybody who sees the president. They do release a schedule, but it's very sparse, as happens with other politicians. And so it's not like you get to see everybody. Sometimes you'll see somebody walking into the EEOB, the executive office building. And sometimes you'll see people. But as a rule, they go in through back doors. Sure.
So two questions, and then I'm going to ask you a final concluding thumbs up or thumbs down for assessment of the week. Question one, your least favorite moment in or around the president during the three plus years that you've been the White House correspondent?
Well, I think that moment in London while I'm waiting for the press conference was not a great moment. You know, the fact that we don't have – I mean, I'm not going to give you a moment. But you had a shout-out with Sebastian Gorka as well in or around the president and the Rose Garden, which couldn't have been one of your favorite moments. Exactly.
Again, talking about the swamp creatures that seem to roll in and out of the oval. Yeah, and those, I would call those more kiss-ups than swamp creatures. Ah. Okay, and there was an exchange in the Rose Garden between Brian Karam, who writes for Playboy, and Sebastian Gorka, and this is awful, I actually missed it.
I sort of was – I was trying to get out of there and file. So it happened afterward, but Sebastian Gork and I did get involved in a little Twitter war because I thought that he was – That included only a little bit of defamatory content. Relatively little.
He has a way of unfollowing people. What's your favorite, most endearing moment where you were in or around the president during your three years? The one that made you see the good Trump or Grandpa Trump or compassionate Trump or something that would say, wow, there's really something to this guy. That's a great question. And I will tell you, there was a – I forget the name of it, but there was a day at the White House when they had different athletic teams in the South Lawn.
and there was a flag. I'm horrible at this. Flag football, is that what you call it? Yeah, the thing where they got the flags on the hips. There was a flag football team from Las Vegas, the kids, their parents, and they spent hours back there, and so did I. And we don't get to see Donald Trump enjoy the White House much. There was one
Christmas party for the media that he attended and he gave a speech and left. He didn't do what all the other presidents do, which is have their photos taken and do a little bit of glad-handing, right? He just didn't... And I had been... I had gone to those and I had seen...
For example, the Bush White House, they really wanted to show off the White House. They knew how exciting it was for people to be there who weren't used to being there. And that's what I saw that day. And I saw Sarah Sanders was the press secretary then. And there are all sorts of different members of the cabinet. And they talked to everybody. They shook people's hands. They did selfies. And it was just so wonderful to see them together.
enjoying the White House with people who enjoyed being there with them because they don't seem to enjoy it enough. So it's a week from today. We've had the impeachment hearing that has gone on. All six days allotted to the opening arguments are finished. We're about ready to move to the vote. Are we talking about the trial or are we talking about something that Trump said, did or tweeted that's non-policy related that distracts from the trial?
We'll be talking about both, but the trial will be front and center because obviously the situation as to whether or not the Senate votes for witnesses will be what's on everyone's mind. Everyone wants to know, is John Bolton going to speak? And of course, there's a fight over whether or not Republicans can get Hunter Biden in exchange. So I think that we'll be talking about it for that very reason. Nobody expects the Senate to remove the president, but there is definitely...
potential for drama. Well, Deborah, this might be the first time when we'll have gone through two weeks in Washington since the beginning of the Trump administration where somebody other than Donald Trump's words are making headlines on a consistent basis. Thank you very much for joining me on the Trump Talk segment of The Horse Race with Henry Olson. Thank you, Henry. My pleasure.
This week on State of Play, we're going to be taking a look at what I think is perhaps the most single marginal state in America, the Badger State of Wisconsin. And it's my great honor to be with the state's preeminent political journalist and political analyst, Craig Gilbert, the Washington Bureau Chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Craig, welcome to The Horse Race with Henry Olson. It's great to be with you.
Could you describe for our audience what Wisconsin is like politically today and why some people have called it the most marginal or the most important state to look at in this year's 2020 race? Well, it has a pretty rich history now as a battleground, both at the state level and in federal races. I mean, Wisconsin has been decided at the presidential level by less than a percentage point in three of the last five years.
presidential elections. That's 2000, 2004 and 2016. Furious political combat waged the state level, including over Scott Walker when he was governor.
But it's just a state that despite a lot of, I would say, internal political change has remained very purple in the aggregate and has been just at the front lines of our national politics for that reason.
So Trump was the first Republican to win as a presidential candidate since 1984, although obviously Scott Walker and before him, Tommy Thompson was able to carry the state a number of times at the gubernatorial level. Could you describe how he was able to do that and how that plays into what the state's political regions might be? Yeah.
A lot of people think of Wisconsin and they think of Milwaukee and don't know much out beyond that. But Milwaukee is actually a very small part of the state's voting electorate. What are the state's regions and how did that division help Trump do what no Republican had done since Ronald Reagan? Yeah, he really rewrote the blueprint for a Republican victory in Wisconsin and obviously did something that
George W. Bush came very close to doing, but followed a very different path in getting there. I mean, he did worse than Republicans typically do in sort of metropolitan areas of Wisconsin, both red and blue, southeastern Wisconsin, the city of Milwaukee, but also the Republican suburbs, which have always been considered like the Republican bedrock areas.
of the Wisconsin political map. I've heard them described as either the wow counties or the ring of death, depending on what party it's held. Yeah, and Waukesha is sort of, like, symbolic. That's kind of the best known. They're called the wow counties because the other two counties are Ozaukee and Washington, and they're just...
Really remarkable. They they not only have been historically very Republican, but they just turn out at amazing levels. And they're really I mean, you could argue that they're among, if not the best performing Republican counties or have been historically.
In recent times, I would say until the last two cycles. And so you think of if Republicans going to win Wisconsin and the Scott Walker did this, he really he or she really runs up the score in these in these, you know, these bedrock Republican suburban counties, right?
suburban areas that typically have been more Republican than suburban areas in other states and some rural areas that typically have been actually less Republican than rural areas in other states. So you have some Republican, you know, small towns, but you also have some purple and very Democratic small towns in western Wisconsin. I remember a
following Al Gore down the Mississippi River on a houseboat after the 2000 convention and him hitting all these little towns along the river and winning all these counties along the Mississippi River. These are the kinds of places that swung heavily to Trump. And so his victory is
came despite underperforming in the most populous part of the state, but the swings were so dramatic in these small towns in northern and western Wisconsin, places that in some cases had voted for Obama by 20 points and then voted for Trump by 20 points. That was his path to victory.
And so in that sense, it's kind of like the nation on steroids. Even Republicans who would normally get 70 percent in Waukesha County, Trump might carry it with whatever it was. It was the low 60s. Yeah. So the suburbs move sharply against him and the rural areas move sharply in his favor. Did that continue? Did that basic trend continue in 2018? And how is this shift changing?
changing the state ever so slightly with degree to its shade of purple. Yeah, so the trend did continue. And here's how I would put it.
The kinds of communities where Trump underperformed Romney at the presidential level were the same places that Scott Walker of 2018 underperformed Scott Walker of 2014. And the kinds of places where Trump really, really overperformed Romney, which again, smaller towns, northern Wisconsin, western Wisconsin, other kinds of places underperformed.
where Scott Walker, despite losing statewide, did even better in many cases than he did in 2014 when he won the state by five or six points. So that trend did continue in a really striking way. And, you know, you had asked me earlier about the composition of the state. The reason this has all been so consequential is that Wisconsin is a pretty white state. It's a pretty blue-collar state. I think of all the presidential battlegrounds, I think white non-college voters make up
maybe with the exception of Maine, if you consider it a battleground, maybe New Hampshire, I'm not sure, make up the largest percentage of the electorate. It's well over half the electorate. But this is a group that Obama performed pretty well with in his presidential elections in Wisconsin, much better than the same demographic in a lot of other states. But Trump just...
really killed Hillary Clinton with rural whites, rural and blue-collar whites, particularly men. And there are a lot of them in Wisconsin, so they really matter. And that overcame his weakness with college-educated voters and with kind of
the metropolitan voters in southeastern Wisconsin. As you pointed out, it's not just Trump, that Scott Walker had done well among these communities and the recall in 2010 and 2014. And you're saying is in 2018, the same guy, Scott Walker, does better in the same areas, presumably because Trump, even though he isn't on the ballot, has
created a shift in partisan identity. What I'm hearing is, well, if this is the biggest white, blue-collar state of any in the country that is a purple state and these trends are still moving, maybe the state's moving slightly in the Republican direction. Is that an overstatement? Well, I think there's some evidence, and, you know, the way to – I mean, I –
You could say that if there was a structural advantage for Democrats in Wisconsin in the past, and, you know, the voting history has been, had been seven presidential victories in a row for Democrats, that structural advantage has kind of disappeared. And in the polling, in the quality and very consistent polling by Marquette Law School in Wisconsin, which goes back to the beginning of 2012,
has picked up a sort of methodical increase in Republican identification among white non-college men. And it's pretty striking. And while there's been some of a move in the opposite direction, for example, among white college women, that group is a lot smaller than the first group, and the move hasn't been as dramatic. So
So Wisconsin in that in the polling that Charles Franklin at Marquette Law School has done has gone from being a state where there was a two or three or four point advantage in Democratic affiliation to a state where it's pretty much a toss up.
And I'm looking at the poll that was just released either yesterday or earlier this week, which is from Charles Franklin. And that poll shows a cumulative Republican advantage once you take leaners into effect so that Republicans were a couple of points ahead. Right.
Obviously, that's within a polling range of error. Yes. But that would also be consistent with the sort of trend that you say he's been seeing and that you're seeing reflected in the actual voting demographics. Yeah. And I don't know whether we're going to see kind of a 50-50 split in November of 2020, whether it'll be R plus one in terms of party identification or D plus one.
But it's not going to be D plus three or four or five, I don't think, unless somehow Democrats just really turn out at significantly higher rates than Republicans. I think most of the signs we're seeing is that both sides are going to be really, really mobilized. So that is a difference. And that makes – that really puts Wisconsin on a knife edge. And demographics is certainly working better.
in Donald Trump's favor. I mean, there's some other, obviously some real challenges he has, and we can talk about those, but that's, you know, this is one of the reasons why Wisconsin did flip and one of the reasons why a lot of people think it's, you know, it's not going to be an easy state for Democrats to win back. And let's make, you know, one of the things the Marquette poll has is that
This is taken at a time when Trump's average in the real clear politics of job approval was roughly 44.5%. Mr. Franklin's poll has Trump at 48 approved, 49 disapproved, which is about three and a half points ahead of his national average, which is not dissimilar from what the exit poll showed that Wisconsin was about, I believe, three points more Trump favorable. But yet, despite that,
Trump is still down. He's losing to Joe Biden in the Marquette poll by four points. He's losing to Bernie Sanders by one point, and he's still upside down in his job approval. What kind of accounts for all of these demographic factors and the composition of the electorate that might tilt in his favor? Yet he's still behind in this marginal state at the moment, taking this poll at face value. Yeah. And I think there, you know, the short answer is there are a lot of people, um,
conservative-leaning, including some conservative-leaning or Republican-leaning voters who have, who are conflicted still about Donald Trump. And so, you know,
He obviously won the votes of many people in Wisconsin and other places in 2016 who had qualms about him. In fact, Wisconsin was sort of the classic case in 2016 of a place where this large chunk of voters who disliked both candidates really broke for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. He kind of has to do that again if you look at the polling because, you know, there's the discrepancy.
The Democrats aren't conflicted about Donald Trump. They all pretty much hate him. But Republicans, you know, even though we're used to seeing, you know, 90 percent approval among Republicans, if you dig down into the numbers, a lot of those people do have reservations. They're not all strong approvers. Some of them are kind of weak approvers. Mm-hmm.
And so and he talked to them and they they express, you know, there's a there's a spectrum of people where some of them have really minor reservations about his style and personality and behavior. And some of them have more significant reservations and some of them have major reservations. So that's I think one of his challenges is, you know, he really needs almost all those people to vote for him. One of the things that stuck out to me about the Marquette poll is Trump's at 48 percent job approval.
nationally, historically, a president tends to get roughly around his job approval if he's running for reelection. But yet in the Marquette poll, he's running three points behind his job approval against Joe Biden, and he's running a point or two behind against Bernie Sanders. So there are people who will tell pollsters they approve of the job that he's doing, but will not tell pollsters they will vote for him. Is this an indication, a quantification of that reservation factor? I think so, because again, I've
I spent a lot of time kind of roaming around Wisconsin. I was just there a week ago. And you just everywhere you go, you do run into people who who are, like I said, Republican leaning, conservative leaning. They like the way the economy is going. They like some or a lot of Trump's policies. They just don't necessarily like the way.
He goes about it and they really don't want to vote for Democrats again. So I think that does explain why it explains partly why Joe Biden is doing a little bit better than some of the other Democrats in the polling in Wisconsin. You look, you dig down, you see the kinds of voters where Joe Biden is outperforming Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in head to heads with Trump. And it's moderates, suburbanites, independents. It's what you would expect. Yeah.
So both sides know what we've talked about. The Democratic professional elite know this. The Trump people privately know this, no matter what they might be saying for public opinion.
What's the what if you were a Democratic strategist, what would you advise them to do to communicate to the Wisconsin electorate? Forget the rest of the country. You want to win. What do you do to do that? And the same thing for Donald Trump. Put yourself in the president's shoes. What can he do to communicate and just get that over the 50 percent line from the 48 percent where he's polling at right now?
Well, I think, you know, yeah, I mean, in the case of Donald Trump, I mean, he's he's definitely underperforming the economy. And, you know, if you go back and look at, again, the polling in Wisconsin under President Obama, you know, more or less, you know, his his rate, his rating with the voters was similar to the percentage of people that rated the economy positively. I mean, it was the same. They kind of track together. They weren't always identical, but they weren't disconnected the way they are under Donald Trump. I mean, he, you know,
Compared to Obama, more people see the economy in a positive light, but fewer people see him in a positive light. So he needs to do something about that. And certainly the economy is an asset, a political asset for him. But you could say he's just not getting...
And obviously, partly that's because people see the economy now through a partisan filter. And so people are very polarized and they're very polarized along party lines. But still, I think he needs to make the economy work for him more than it is now. And maybe, I don't know, I mean, he doesn't seem inclined to do this, but, you know, maybe he might want to try to speak to those voters who...
have personal qualms about him and send them, you know, some signals that he understands that and maybe address that. On the Democratic side, I mean, it was interesting. So we went through these midterms where obviously Trump wasn't on the ballot, but you had a big race for governor and a big race for senator in Wisconsin. Now the
Senator Tammy Baldwin won a double-digit, very impressive double-digit victory. She had a geographically broad performance. She did well in some of these areas where Trump did well. She ran a really good campaign. Now, again, she didn't have the strongest opponent, and she had a big financial advantage. She had a lot of things going for her, but she ran a very disciplined campaign where she talked not only about health care, but she talked about economic bread-and-butter issues. She talked about...
manufacturing and buy American. And so she certainly didn't run on cultural issues and she didn't run a Trump-centric campaign. So I think some people kind of look to her as a little bit of a model in that respect. I think Democrats, a lot of Democrats will say they need to obviously go beyond just, you know, we think Donald Trump is a terrible human being and run a broader campaign
And obviously, they also need to just go into these areas where...
where they were so weak in 2016. I mean, I go back to the 2000 to 2004 campaign in Wisconsin when people had the same perceptions of Al Gore and John Kerry as they did of Hillary Clinton, that they were somehow, you know, didn't resonate with regular people, didn't resonate with rural voters, et cetera, et cetera. But what they did, and they had issues, but what they did was they actually went into these communities and
And they went to the farms. You know, John Kerry shot skeet. You know, they went down the Mississippi River, went
Occasionally showed up at a fish fry. They crisscrossed, you know, western Wisconsin and buses, particularly Carrie. So they really put the work in and they eked out a victory. So that is a big part of the equation. I think Democrats in Wisconsin certainly understand that, especially after the trauma of 2016. Yeah. The question is whether the national party or the national candidate will. So it's election night 2020. The exit polls are in, but everyone knows the exit polls. Right.
What's the one thing that you... Yeah, exactly. What's the one thing... The returns start coming in. What is Craig Gilbert going to be looking at? What communities are you going to be looking at that will say, this will let me know who's going to really win? So I think on paper, it looks to me like when you look at, again, like the Obama-Trump communities, you look at these kinds of places we've been talking about where Donald Trump...
you know, kind of built his victory, which had huge swings from 2012 to 2016. They're not all doing the same thing. They didn't all do the same thing in the midterms. I mean, the midterms, some of these places bounce back sharply to the Democrats. Some of them
kind of split their tickets and some of them became a little bit more Republican. So I think you have to differentiate between among these counties and among these cities, towns and villages that are all kind of sort of rural and pretty white and pretty blue collar. And I'm going to look, you know, at, for example, it's at Western and Southwestern Wisconsin, which have more of a Democratic voting history than Northern Wisconsin in some cases or Central Wisconsin. And
I'm going to look to see whether some of these communities swing back and whether, you know, some of them may not be delivering the same margins for Donald Trump that they did. Some of them have a history of just voting against the party in power, and some of them have a history of swinging. And then there are probably going to be places where he's going to do better than he did in 2016. And certainly the suburbs, the Republican suburbs of Milwaukee that we've been talking about, which have now gone through two cycles of kind of
and slippage for Republicans, that's a critical factor. I mean, there's so many pieces to the puzzle. We haven't talked about the city of Milwaukee and what happened to turnout in 2016, but, you know, Democrats will do everything they can to kind of correct what was a turnout deficit for Hillary Clinton. I don't think, as some people do, that it was by any means the leading reason for her defeat, but...
But clearly, Democrats can do better in terms of the vote in the city of Milwaukee. So those are just some of the X factors. Well, I know whose Twitter feed I'm going to be looking at on election night, Craig.
Thank you very much for your insight. I'd love to have you back. And thanks for being on The Horse Race with Henry Olson. It's always fun to talk. And this week on Round the Horn, it is my great honor to have with me a political expert and longtime friend, Carlin Bowman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of their flagship political publication, The Political Report. Welcome to The Horse Race with Henry Olson. Thank you so much, Henry. Delighted to be here.
Well, you know, we are hearing a lot about impeachment and we're hearing a lot about the Democratic presidential race, which after nearly a year of back and forth, we're actually going to have some votes cast in 12 days. I'd like to analogize this to the team of time baseball where we've been through the hot stove season. We've been through spring, all the warm ups and everyone's in the greatest shape of the career. But the spring training games and the regular season are about ready to start.
So how does the Democratic race look to you right now? And particularly, how does Iowa look to you?
I've been looking very closely at the Iowa polls. We had a number of new ones in January, and I think what strikes me about the polls in Iowa is the number of people who say that their minds are not made up. In several of these polls, it's above 50 percent, 52, 53 percent, people saying they could possibly change their mind, they could be persuaded to vote for another candidate. So the polls that we're seeing out of Iowa could be wrong. They could be right. I wrote a column recently.
a couple of weeks ago, talking about what I call the Iowa cyclone, that Iowa State University's mascot is the cyclone. And every four years, it seems that somebody takes off and twirls through the Hawkeye State like a cyclone and wipes out their political opponents. It
was Rick Santorum on the Republican side in 2012. John Kerry and John Edwards both did that to Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt in 2004. What you're telling me is that there's enough indecision that we could have another cyclone that it's not too late for a cyclone to pop up
and just rip apart all the expectations. Absolutely. We've seen a few ripples based on something that Hillary Clinton said in a documentary about Bernie Sanders. Don't know whether that's influencing the Iowa polls. In one of the polls this morning, it was suggested that Bernie Sanders' favorables among Democrats had declined slightly. So it's possible that something big could still happen in Iowa. Does Hillary have credibility with Democrats? I think she has credibility with Democrats and particularly many Democratic women, but...
Looking at what she said and looking at her national standing, I think gives us some indication of how unpopular Hillary Clinton is. I looked at the December Harvard-Harris poll. This is an online poll, well-regarded poll.
And the numbers for Hillary Clinton, she had a 36% favorable rating, a 56% unfavorable rating. The numbers for Donald Trump were 42% favorable, slightly higher, and 54% unfavorable, slightly lower. So the unfavorability that dogged Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 campaign remains. Yeah, so it wasn't about Russia. It wasn't about nefariousness. Hillary, it was about you.
It was about Hillary. There's no question about it. So looking at Iowa, that in Iowa you've got weird rules that are unique even among caucus states.
That could sow some uncertainty over who wins, and I'd love it to get your reaction to that. But you've also got the weird rule that normally applies, which is that the question of viability, that candidates who are polling in 3% and 4% and 2%, unlike a primary where those votes get recorded and kind of just go off into the netherland of the dustbin of political trivia...
Those people get asked to vote a second time in the caucus, and that can completely upend expectations. How do you think these things might actually make the polls look silly when the polls are, in fact, not really that silly?
Well, the polls are a snapshot in time, and I think all the pollsters have been very careful in talking about the results in that way, saying that they don't predict what's going to happen in the Iowa caucuses. This is the best judgment that we have today. But, of course, we know the polls have had problems in 2016, particularly state-level polling, and that is, I think, it's particularly difficult to know who's going to turn up
at those caucuses on cold, snowy nights. And the way the results are going to be reported this year is different from the past. The very first vote as people enter their caucuses is going to be reported, and so is the final vote when people have decided where they go after some candidates drop out in the early stages overall. So it's
A lot of different things could happen in Iowa, and I'm not in the prediction business and very happy for it. Yeah, prediction, any time before 48 hours of an election is, I think, a mug's game, and too many people try to play it. But let me ask you, if you had to be one candidate going into Iowa, who would you be and why? If you had to be one candidate that says...
Hey, I've got momentum or hey, I think I've got the best shot or who would you want to be going into Iowa? Again, I'm not going to make a prediction, but I would say that a lot of Democrats want to win Iowa.
They want to beat Donald Trump. And so I might bet on the candidate that Iowans have said is the safest candidate. Now, that happens to be Joe Biden. That was one of the questions asked by the CBS News Battleground Tracker YouGov poll. This is an online survey. They asked a lot about different adjectives that applied to different candidates.
and Biden was thought to be both the safe candidate and also the boring candidate. So that would argue against him sort of emerging as a strong frontrunner. But Democrats want to win, and I don't know how many, I don't know as you walk into that caucus whether that's going to be what they're thinking about or whether they're going to vote their heart. And then, though, we've got the weird thing of where our worlds intersect, that when we're not talking about Democrats in politics, we're talking about impeachment, and in a week,
There's going to be a Senate vote on witnesses. Increasingly, we're hearing that, hey, maybe there'll be a deal. We'll give you Bolton if you give us Hunter and Joe. That could make the whole question of whether or not Joe's the winning safe candidate up for grabs if he's suddenly put in the middle of the impeachment hairs five days before the Iowa caucus. What do you think, Carl?
I think that it's difficult for all the candidates, for the ones sitting in Washington and not being able to campaign in Iowa. But I want to say one thing about impeachment. And again, this comes from the Iowa poll, the highly regarded Des Moines Register Iowa poll. And they asked likely Democratic caucus goers in Iowa, as they evaluated the candidates, what was going to be the most important issue to them. Health care topped the list. It tops the list in most polls. It's a hardy perennial. We always see it. Climate change, ECG.
equally highly regarded as an extremely important issue overall. Sixty-eight percent gave that response, both about health care and climate change. The gap between the rich and the poor, 59 percent. But the lowest, least important issue in the Iowa poll was impeachment. Only 25 percent of Iowa, likely Democratic caucus voters, said that that was going to be extremely important to their vote. So I think there is an exhaustion factor.
With impeachment, it's not clear to me how much attention Americans, Iowans are paying to the day-to-day developments, particularly since they're not able to see them in a way on TV that they see other things. So it is – I'm not sure how important impeachment is going to be, but it's certainly going to have an effect on the candidates being able to get back and forth, those who are staying in Washington, and Biden, who may be, as you said, in the center of it.
My fantasy is that sometime over the weekend, you've got everyone in Iowa, at least on Sunday, because it's the one day the Senate won't be sitting. And then with a week to go, somebody decides to make this a political triathlon and say, you know, I can afford a private jet. And now we're only sitting for eight hours. We've been through most of the... We're not going to be sitting through the marathon next week. I'm going to get a private jet out of Reagan at 7 o'clock. I'm going to show up and have a 9.30...
I'm going to have five hours of sleep. I'm going to do a 630 a.m. pancake breakfast. I'm going to be back, and it's going to be, can this senator keep on going?
If somebody were to do that and actually break out of the mold of sitting around Washington and actually say, I can bring home the bacon and cook it up in a pan, to use an old ad, do you think that that might be an excitement factor? Or are people just so jaded that it's something that if
that they would just, it would not be a newsmaker in and of itself. Well, the stamina issue has been important for both Biden and for Bernie Sanders. And I think both of them have shown in recent debates that they're able to stand up to some of the younger candidates. I mean, you've got quite a few who are over the age of 70.
So in that sense, I suppose it could be important. I enjoyed the suggestion in one of your recent columns that they charter a private plane and all go back to Iowa together. You know, that could be pretty interesting, I think, overall. But I think the stamina factor is always important when you have candidates that age. Yeah.
So impeachment. Is this a kabuki theater? Is this the most important thing ever to happen to American government as we're constantly being reminded or told on cable television? Or is it really something in between? I think people are simply exhausted by impeachment, just as they were exhausted by the Mueller investigation. They want it to be over. They want to move on. They're tired of deep partisan polarization in America.
in the House, and we see that through many, many different indicators. E.J. Dionne and several others have suggested that Americans want to see more witnesses, that they want to hear John Bolton, they want to hear some of the other's
Americans always want more. And so that's not a surprising finding in public opinion, but it's not at all clear to me that impeachment is really a top-tier issue right now or that American minds will be changed. The great sociologist Dan Yankovic made a point in a wonderful short column many, many years ago when he argued that Americans do not draw their conclusions by the accumulation of factual information.
Facts are important. We need them, of course. But Americans usually consult their values. That's where they start about things like that. They've already consulted their values about whether or not they think Donald Trump is innocent or guilty. And so in that sense, I think the opinions are very hard. I don't expect them to change absent some extraordinary, extraordinary bit of evidence that we haven't seen yet. But again, I think that Yanklowich was right. Journalists.
arrive at their opinions by the accumulation of factual information, more facts and the like, but publics rarely do. They start with values, they end with values, and that's what I think has already happened about Donald Trump. I actually agree 100%. I think that...
We saw a pattern right after the Ukrainian revelations that we saw that was nearly identical to what happened after the Access Hollywood tape, which was that there was no...
three to five point drop in the Trump support, just as there was right after Access Hollywood. People let it blow over. Trump didn't die. Trump didn't drop out of the race. Trump didn't start conceding. And then people consulted their values and said, OK, wish it didn't happen.
But I'd rather have him for all of his flaws than the other person. And just like with Access Hollywood, he was back up to his previous standing about a week to 10 days after that blew over. He's already been back up to roughly where he was pre-Ukraine for the last month or so. And people see the facts through red or blue tinted glasses. And there are very few people looking through bifocals.
Most of the pollsters are asking a new question now about whether he should be removed. Prior to that time, they asked a question about the House's deliberations. And in a couple of polls...
You have 51 percent saying that he should be removed in another new poll this morning. Support for removing him was the lowest it's been in quite a while. So, again, the polls are moving in such a narrow range and they just go back and forth in this very narrow range. And again, I just don't sense that many Americans are changing their mind, nor do I sense that their minds were changed by the Ukrainian revelations. I think people knew what
they were getting with Donald Trump very early on, and they have been pretty steadfast. He's got about a 40, 43 percent approval rating overall. That's not enough if he wants to be reelected. But at the same time... Well, not enough if he wants to be reelected short of... A third party candidate. Right. Exactly. But...
Those numbers are just hard as a rock, I think, right now. So I don't expect anything to change. Yes. In other words, this new evidence is much ado about nothing.
They may trot it out, but to the American people, it's been there, seen that. Let's get on with the game we care about. I think that's definitely true. And I think what could possibly change the dynamic a little is what the president decides to say if he delivers a State of the Union message in person. He may decide to deliver one the way they were done historically, by letter, by
But Donald Trump has been known to go off script if there ever is a script indeed. And I suppose that that might have an effect.
one way or another, if he looks presidential and sticks to the economy's doing pretty well, I deserve some credit for this. I was delighted to work with the House and Senate on phase one of the China deal on USMCA. I mean, Americans, and I was very surprised in the CNN poll in December, people were asked about USMCA, the U.S.-Mexican-Canadian Free Trade Agreement. And
55% said they approved of it and only 13% disapproved. And I thought to myself, what's that about? Have Americans become free traders? No. Uh,
I think what people were saying in that question was Congress finally and the president finally got something done. And we're going to give him a little credit for that. So if he sticks to that, it could be a plus for him. But again, absent that event where he will be a central player, I'm not sure I see much that moves the needle on impeachment. Yeah.
No, I agree with that. I have to say, as a child of the 70s, every time I hear the name of that trade agreement, the village people YMCA goes through my mind. And I'm glad that I won't have to have the village people running through my mind anymore because it's ratified and it's a done deal. But looking ahead at the State of the Union, my fantasy, since I really can't stand dealing with all of this
impeachment stuff because again it's everyone's view we know what's going to happen in the trial we know it's a matter of raw partisan politics on full display that bismarck said you shouldn't see how sausages and laws are made and basically impeachment is a 24 7 365 tour through a political sausage factory but um yeah my my my fantasy is that trump suddenly discovers being presidential with the state of the union address and he goes the full harry truman
You've done nothing but impeach me.
and you haven't taken me down. And now I'm going to call your bluff. This is my agenda for the American people. This is what I want to do for the American people. And despite all of your unfair and scurrilous attacks, I'm going to reach my hand across the aisle. What can we do by June 30th to work for the American people? Here's my four points. And if they predictably don't go ahead with it, he does what Truman did and calls him in for special session in August and says,
Let's do it again. The American people said that we wanted to have work together. You've tried. You failed. Let's work together and put this behind us. I don't think he can do it. But what if he could? It would be quite extraordinary if we saw Donald Trump do that, if he stuck to the script in the way that you described. I think it would be very, very popular. I think the Democrats would be baffled by that.
It's hard to imagine it happening. But he has... Like I said, it's a fantasy. He has been known to stick to the script, so we'll see. Yeah, and sometimes he even writes the scripts that he sticks to. Yeah, so we look and Donald Rumsfeld liked to talk about
Known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And we've been talking a lot about the known unknowns. What's the unknown unknown? If I've been fantasizing here about the unknown unknown, like Donald Trump channeling his in-ear Truman or Elizabeth Warren deciding to challenge Bernie Sanders to a stamina contest on, you know, by flying back to Iowa every day for the next week and a half. What's your unknown unknown? What would be the wild ass but not highly implausible unknown?
event that could change this really narrow, bitter, partisan dynamic and get people thinking anew about something. Before Iowa or before November? Let's say before November. I mean, before, and if they're two different things, before Iowa and before November.
I suppose foreign policy is always on the back burner in terms of something that Americans are paying close attention to. But should something erupt, that could perhaps change the dynamic. Or get solved, that Nixon went to China in an election. Exactly, exactly. While opinion was split, as you might have expected, on killing Soleimani,
I think Americans, they want a president who's assertive. They fear one who's too strong and too weak. And if Trump could come up with that assertive posture, that I think would be effective in those situations. But we've got a lot of danger spots around the globe. Americans certainly don't trust Iran. They don't trust North Korea. They don't trust China. And so there are danger spots around the world that could erupt at any time. And then, of course, there are
Always the concerns that we all have about how the economy is doing and how long this extraordinary recovery can continue. Yeah. No, a war and a recession. Those are kind of the unknowns that could, just like the financial collapse happening two months before 2008, just completely destroyed the economy.
ability of the continuity candidate, McCain, to be able to make any serious case. Absolutely, because the way he handled that was not effective, and the way Obama responded was. Yeah. So it was, McCain wanted to bring everyone back to Washington, and Obama seemed much calmer in the face of something that Americans really thought was extraordinarily serious. They thought the financial system was going to collapse. They were afraid, and you had to have the right personality in that, and I think Obama did better than McCain.
And what I've read about people who are behind the scenes in that is that McCain does that, calls these meetings together. People say, OK, Senator, what's your plan? And he had nothing besides that grant. And that's like the moment everyone knew the air was out of this balloon.
Whenever I think about politics, I get depressed. So let's think about happy things, that politics has been breaking our hearts for the last few years, and we're going to have the holiday of healing and hearts coming up Valentine's Day. What can you tell us that makes us feel good as we go into the couple's favorite day of the year?
Well, in addition to the topics we've been talking about in this issue of AEI's new political report, we're doing a new feature on ordinary life, what Americans say about their daily lives. And so I decided in February that we would look at love, at soulmates, at what's most important to you in a valentine. And we hear so much about political divisions, but one of the posters, Fox News, asked in February of 2018, which would be more important to you in choosing a valentine? Would it be political views? Would it be a sense of humor? Would it be both?
And 67% said a sense of humor was the most important thing to them in choosing a Valentine. Only 15% said political views. So I think you get a sense of what's really important to people overall. Another place where Twitter is not real life. Absolutely.
About half of Americans believe in love at first sight, and 56% of Americans believe in soulmates in a new Economist YouGov online poll. So we'll see a lot of polls about Valentine's Day and what people really want. We've found that young people are less likely than older people when thinking about being young to say they'd want to have a first date on Valentine's Day. That I can understand completely.
Overall, but I think love will be in the air and we will be able to think about some happy things. Oh, gosh. Love will be in the air. I believe Ronald Reagan's first movie was Love in the Air as a B actor back in 1937. Mm-hmm.
And look how far that got him. Absolutely. Got him a wonderful marriage and the presidency of the United States. So there we've unified our two topics, love and politics, in the figure who is still the president who is most beloved by the American people 40 years after his first race, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Absolutely. Well, Carlin, I really appreciate you coming in and joining me for this segment. And please do, for all of you who are listening, Carlin's political report comes out monthly. You can get it at the AEI website free of charge. It really is the best place to not only get the headline poll information that you hear, but really get into the interesting stuff behind the headlines to learn what
Americans really think about a host of topics, not just about who's up and who's down. Karlyn, thank you for joining me on The Horse Race with Henry Olson. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Now we turn to a regular segment, Ad of the Week.
Each week, I'll play a TV, radio, or digital ad that I think is especially well done and effective, and then dissect the ad's parts to explain why it works so well. This week's ad is one Joe Biden is running in Iowa. It's called Talking About, and let's take a listen. Donald Trump has made it clear...
Joe Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, and Biden. He's got Joe Biden on his mind because Trump knows Biden will beat him in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the states we need to take back the presidency. Joe Biden stood on the world stage, helped make Obamacare the law of the land, and can step in on day one. It's why Trump can't stop talking about Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, Joe Biden. I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
Let's take a look at each of these ads' primary features. The first thing it starts out with is focusing that Joe Biden is on Trump's mind. Polls show that the number one thing Democrats want more than a liberal or a progressive or a moderate is somebody who can beat Donald Trump.
The ad drives that home visually and audially with Donald Trump saying Joe Biden's name and then turns to the main point that the reason Joe Biden is on his mind and has gotten under his skin is because Joe Biden is the man who can beat him. They make that argument and then they include making the argument not just nationally, but making it in the three Midwestern states that every Democrat knows were the ones that
turned the country from blue to red. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which not coincidentally are the sort of Midwestern states that Iowa is, which was also a blue to red state.
For people watching at home, they see the ad visually reinforce the audio narrative. There are pictures of the state. There are pictures of the polling results that recently were taken that showed Joe Biden beating Donald Trump in each of these states. This is an ad that's focused. This is an ad that drives home its points with pictures, and it drives home its points with results.
They then turn to brief, feel-good narratives about Joe Biden. Why should you feel good about Joe Biden? Well, he was President Obama's vice president, and they show a picture of Joe Biden with President Obama. That cross-cuts every Democratic faction. Everybody likes Barack Obama.
Then they touch on the issue of health care. Polls show that health care is the number one Democratic issue among all ideological factions. And again, you like Joe Biden. You can feel good about voting for Joe Biden. He's a unifier for all of the Democratic factions. And they show it with pictures and they show it with words.
And then they bring it back like any good ad to the main point. Here comes the orange man. He's got something on his mind, and that something is Joe Biden, Joe Biden, Joe Biden. Why is he talking about Joe Biden? Like they say, every good speaker tells you what they're going to tell you. They tell you, and then they tell you what they just told you. The ad concludes by saying Donald Trump is talking about Joe Biden because he's
He knows Joe Biden is the person who can win. That's why this ad is effective. And that's why this ad is this week's ad of the week.
Every horse race has its main event, the Kentucky Derby, the Santa Anita Derby, the race that attracts television attention and brings the people to sit in the stands. But it's never the only race that's on the card. There's an undercard. The races beforehand where lesser-known horses compete for stakes that matter a whole lot both to the racing public but especially to the horse's owners.
This segment of the show is the undercard. We won't be looking at the presidential race, but we'll be looking at the congressional races, the Senate races, the gubernatorial races, in some cases even state legislative races, races that matter to people's lives but won't get as much national attention.
This week, I want to focus on the race for the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives is controlled right now by the Democrats with a 234 to 200 margin with former Republican Justin Amash sitting as an independent.
That means with 218 votes needed for control, the Republicans need to pick up 18 seats in order to regain control of the House. Now, that's theoretically possible. Lots of people and lots of parties have gained more than 18 seats in the election. But it's actually rather difficult when your president is sitting at only 44 percent job approval as the president is right now.
In 2018, the Democrats picked up 40 seats in what was called a blue wave, not a landslide of epic proportions like the Republicans had in 2010 or 1994 when they took control of the House during periods controlled by unpopular Democratic presidents, but certainly strong enough to propel Nancy Pelosi into the Speaker's chair. They did that when they took a lead of about seven, seven and a half points from
on the national House vote. Now, the national House vote is simply adding up the candidates' totals with Democrats and Republicans from all 435 House seats. Now, there were a number of seats where neither Democrats nor Republicans ran a candidate, so this is a little bit projected. If you impute the totals to each party, that they likely would have gotten had somebody been on the ballot, usually the sort of totals that the presidential candidate received two years before.
This is very close to what polls showed the Democrat lead would be on the eve of the election, what's called the generic ballot, where voters are asked in polls, which party's candidate do you support, the Republicans or the Democrats? On the eve of the 2018 vote, Democrats had a 7.3% lead. So in order for the Republicans to pick up 18 seats, they need to pretty much eliminate that lead. How much do they have to eliminate? Well, let's take a look.
The generic ballot right now, according to Real Clear Politics Average, has Democrats ahead by 4.7%. That's roughly a two and a half point narrowing of the margin. We can take a look at how many seats fall within that margin. How many seats did the Democrats win by less than two and a half points? And that gives us a very rough estimate of how many seats the Republicans would pick up if the election were held today.
That total is 12. There are 12 seats that the Democrats picked up and won by less than two and a half points in 2018 that if we had a uniform national swing, Republicans would pick those seats up. And that has to be added, the seat of Justin Amash, that Republicans will likely pick that seat up because very few independents win elections.
And this is a highly Republican area. But it also has to be balanced against changes in the North Carolina congressional district map that since the 2018 election, a court has ordered a new map. And that map will cost Republicans two seats. So we're talking at the current stand.
Plus 11. Republicans need plus 18. And that's not even taking into account inevitably that even when parties gain seats, somebody is a losing candidate somewhere. So you're talking about the expected net gain of the Republicans right now being in the 8 to 10 margin. That's not enough to unseat Nancy Pelosi.
where does the margin start to shift in their favor? Well, if we go down the list of races and we go down the list of margins, we find that control shifts very narrowly to the Republicans when the Democratic lead on the generic ballot drops to about a point and a half. So if the
If Democrats lead by a point and a half going into the 2020 election, then control of the House is going to be a toss-up. We can't say for certain which side is going to win. We just know that the state of the game is in play. But when we look at the undercard right now, despite some natural erosion in the Democratic lead, despite some recovery of President Trump since the 2018 election, the odds are overwhelming that unless things move further in the president's direction and the Republican direction, how
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be sitting in that gavel and in that chair wielding that gavel with a slimmer but still strong enough Democratic majority and that the House undercard is looking definitely, if not deep blue, solid blue, looking at the polling data as we have today.
Thanks for joining me this week on The Horse Race with Henry Olson. Next week, I'll be discussing the Iowa caucuses, Maine Senate race, and much, much more. So join me next week in the winner's circle with The Horse Race with Henry Olson. Ricochet. Join the conversation.