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Hey there, listeners. Galen here. I just wanted to let you know that we are off for the Juneteenth holiday and I'll also be off for the first half of this week. So we recorded this podcast last Friday. So if you hear any data or information that says today, we're talking about Friday, June 16th. Hope you enjoy and we will see you soon.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. There's been a lot thrown at Republican voters over the past few weeks. The field of primary candidates has doubled with the addition of Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Doug Burgum, and most recently, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. The leading contender in the primary was federally indicted on 37 counts related to his handling of national secrets and alleged obstruction of justice.
And a contest that had remained largely deferential to Trump has gotten more testy, with attacks coming from some of Trump's formerly close allies. So today, we're going to look at how Republican primary voters are processing all of this. And candidate names aside, what are they telling pollsters that they want from a presidential nominee?
We're also going to ask the timeless question, what is up with the kids these days? Various analyses have come to conflicting conclusions about whether millennials and younger voters in general are bucking a generations-long trend of growing more conservative with age.
Are those conclusions a good or bad use of polling? And we're going to play a new game called Which Candidate Said This? Hang around and you will learn more details as we go. But here with me to do all of this is Kristen Soltis Anderson. She's the founder of polling firm Echelon Insights and is the author of the book The Selfie Vote, where millennials are leading America and how Republicans can keep up. Welcome back to the podcast, Kristen. Thank you so much for having me, Galen.
Also here with us is Washington Post data columnist David Beiler. He recently wrote a piece titled Your Teenage Memories Left a Political Imprint. Welcome back to the podcast, David. Thanks for having me. Let's dive in because the good or bad use of polling segment that we have planned for today is something that I have been thinking about for months and wanting to do
for months because it matters for American politics, the future of American politics. And it seems like there are smart people on both sides of this data-based argument that are coming to different conclusions. So,
After the midterms, John Byrne Murdoch at the Financial Times came out with a piece suggesting that millennials were in fact, quote, shattering the oldest rule in politics and not getting more conservative as they age. Compared to the national average, as millennials have aged from their late teens to their 30s, the analysis shows millennials have actually grown more liberal.
But Nate Cohn at the upshot wrote a piece titled Millennials are not an exception. They have moved to the right. So also using data, the exact opposite conclusion, it uses pre-election polling to suggest that the group of 18 to 29 year olds that went so decisively for Obama in 2008 voted for Biden by just a 55 to 43 split in 2020. Kristen, let's start with you. Is either of these
a good or bad use of polling? And do you have conclusions that you have come to separate from this about
how young people or millennials are voting. And there's a lot in there and we're going to untangle it all. But from a starting place, where do you stand on this? I put myself more in the former camp that says millennials are an increasingly important piece of the Democratic coalition because as they have aged, they have held on to a lot of their Obama era, more progressive leanings and behaviors, even as they have begun approaching their midlife crises.
Interesting. So you would say that financial times analysis is the better use of polling. I would put myself more in that camp, although I think there is...
I don't want to completely dismiss what Nate Cohn did. And again, we can untangle it all. But I think there are a lot of different data points that study different angles to this question. So are we talking about – in Nate Cohn's example, for instance, he's looking at the same cohort of people over time. So yesterday's 18 to 29-year-olds are today's 30-year-olds.
Other analysis looks at how do 18 to 29-year-olds today compare to 18 to 29-year-olds of 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. That's piece number one. So you're not looking at the same group of people, but you're looking at the same type of people. There's also the question of what are we measuring here? So Nate's piece was measuring –
pre-election polls about presidential preference, would we say that someone who liked Barack Obama but then didn't really like Hillary Clinton has moved to the right? I don't know that I would say that. And so I think the use of presidential polling as your primary lens through which you view this question is
OK, yes. There's a lot to unpack there. Good points. David, where's your starting position? I think I'm a little bit more of a both and on this one. I would say yes and yes to—
It's what I genuinely think. So the way that I process this is that when we talk about age, we're sort of talking about three different things that
all rolled into one, right? One is your sort of numerical phase of life. You know, if you're in your twenties, maybe you're less likely to be married or have kids and that changes as you get older. And, you know, maybe you just get personally in terms of your mental state, more crusty and grizzled as you get older or whatever. There's the age number, right?
The second thing we talk about is generational memory, right? It's the things that sort of left an impact on you from when you were young. So for millennials and Gen Z, a lot of the generational memories are really pretty favorable for Democrats and unfavorable for Republicans, right?
We sort of have these memories of George W. Bush kind of crashing his presidency, Barack Obama being really popular with young people and, you know, Donald Trump being Donald Trump. And then the third thing we're talking about is also composition. So if we're thinking about the Republicans' problems with young voters, we're also simultaneously thinking about their problem with unaffiliated voters, with Latino voters, with these other groups that are disproportionately young.
So I think that it's right for the FT analysis to point out
Wow. This is a very Democratic leaning group for a lot of different reasons. They're not quite, you know, aging fast enough for Republicans comfort. But I don't think that Cohn is wrong to say, OK, in the extreme short term, I think his initial chart had an eight year window in the extreme short term. Republicans have kind of made enough ground up to stay competitive and.
2012, 2020, these were both elections that beforehand, you know, you didn't exactly know which way they were going to go. So, yeah, that's that's my politician-y both and of I think there's something something to both trends.
Okay, so let's break it down. And let's first address the Nate Cohn piece, which is his criticism is we need to stop talking about millennials or Gen Z as just a full cohort and look at, you know, people who were aged 18 to 29 in 2008, when they overwhelmingly voted for Obama.
How old are they now? You know, 15 years later, they're 15 years older. So let's look at that exact age group now and see how they're voting and have they moved right. Can we say conclusively that
They have moved right. And if they have, how much have they moved right? I think looking at just the presidential election data alone is not enough. At the same time, it would 0% surprise me if you did a study where you were asking individuals who are 18 to 29,
How they felt about the Republican and Democratic parties back in 2008 or back in 2012. And then you ask them now if anybody changed their answer, it wouldn't surprise me that some people who may have thought of themselves as Democrats in 2012 have moved to be more independent or at least on net. There are more that went that direction than the other. But I think that sometimes that like the piece that Nate wrote.
can get used to say, well, look, we're look at this. Millennials are just like other generations where as they aged, they became more conservative. So Republicans actually don't have anything to worry about because all of these millennials are going to get old and they'll be conservative when they get there. And I to me, that is not persuasive. You also have the fact that the starting point from which they are moving rightward supposedly is really far to the left that for Democrats,
decades and decades, younger voters were kind of a swing constituency. They kind of just behaved the way other voters of other age groups did. There was not big generational polarization. So it may be that millennials used to be D plus 30 and now they're D plus 20. But to me, that's not a huge win for the right. I think that makes a lot of sense. I have
One instinct that I think pushes back a little bit, and I try to keep very few sort of like, you know, precious, closely held beliefs about American politics. But one of them is that American politics is,
tends to remain competitive, often so in surprising ways. So even after major, major earth-shattering geopolitical global events that have seemed to give one party a massive advantage, it doesn't take that long for the other party to make some form of a
power come back to them. So I think I don't disagree with any of the numbers that Kristen has brought up. I think the tension I'm feeling a little bit is that usually parties figure it out. And when I say that, I don't necessarily mean the Republicans will figure out
it figure it out by figuring out how to get to millennials specifically. Maybe they'll figure out a strategy that works better for gaining the more Latino voters. And by virtue of that, they'll gain some millennials on the way. Maybe they'll figure out a way to grab more unaffiliated voters. But basically, losing is so unfun for a party that
they just, they tend to adapt. So I'm a little bit less of a generational doomer because not, not to say that Kristen is, but I'm a little bit of a, less of a generational doomer because that's one of my sort of fundamental baseline beliefs about politics is that it doesn't stay uncompetitive for long because someone will do something to change that. Does that make sense? Let me jump in and say that I think you've raised a great point, which is
to ask kind of what are we measuring here? So are we measuring, are people moving to the right as they age? And if so, like, what are we defining that as? Republican identification, voting for Republican candidates, identifying as a conservative, adopting conservative issue positions. Those are four different ways you can view this. And I would say- We love having a pollster on the podcast. I would love, I would suggest that, for instance, if you're asking, have-
millennials move to the right on social or cultural issues as they have aged? I would say emphatically, no. If anything, it's actually older voters have moved to the left on some of the questions relative to where they stood in, say, 2012. I was just looking at the data, I think Gallup's data around things like support for same-sex marriage.
And it's like a majority of Republicans now or about half say that they are supportive of same sex marriage. Like it's it's just the world is very different. And so is it that millennials move to the right or is it that the what constitutes a conservative position on some of these issues is actually what's moved? The person hasn't moved. The world has moved around them. I think that's a good point. I think I think for the purposes of this debate, I.
people are mostly focusing on how people are voting in presidential elections right
So maybe we'll focus on that for a second. There's other data that you can use to try to get to the point that Nate is making in his piece. He looks at the election survey. You could also look at voter verified surveys after the fact, which might be a little more reliable in terms of trying to get to the bottom of that. So, you know, if you squint, you can definitely see that that cohort of 18 to 29 year olds that, you know, overwhelmingly voted for Obama has has shifted right now.
The argument that even if they've shifted right a bit from a very leftward position, that's not necessarily a win for Republicans. But I guess I'm not even thinking about the future. I'm just thinking about describing the world as it has already been or is today. And so let's look at the other piece that you brought up, Kristen, which is 18 to 29 year olds today. So put aside like whether we're talking about millennials or Gen Z or whichever generation, but in recent years and today,
How much more liberal are 18 to 29 year olds than they have been historically? I think somebody mentioned that they've historically been something even of a swing group. They are, in my view, significantly more liberal.
Democratic leaning than young people have been in the past. This notion that young voters are always a heavily progressive group that then kind of wakes up around their 40th birthday and changes their mind isn't necessarily borne out by a ton of data. Back in the 2000 election, the exit polls showed young voters voting between George W. Bush and Al Gore about the same way that their grandparents would have voted.
Ronald Reagan won young voters by about a 20-point margin in his reelection in 1984. So it is not the case that younger voters are always this
progressive constituency who can be reliably counted on to vote for Democrats. But they have been ever since actually a little bit pre-Obama. 2006 is when I looked at exit polls, the first time that you see this big generational break of young people leaning very far to the left. And there have been a handful of midterms since then. Take, for instance, the 2010 kind of Tea Party midterm.
where you see young voters go back to something closer to split, but it doesn't persist. And this sort of gravitational pull of the left on young voters is still very strong. And in my view, it is still pulling millennials even as they approach middle age. I think all those numbers make sense. Look, Republicans have a significant problem with
the youngest set of voters. And honestly, in this moment, in the 2024 election, I don't know that they've cracked the solution, right? I don't look at that, you know, field of candidates and think like, oh man, they figured out how to get the young ones, right? I don't think they figured out the solution yet. I'm not sure in this election they need to have figured it out. But
I mean, demographic change happens sort of one year at a time. It happens at this glacial sort of pace. So
Yes, millennials are very liberal. I imagine there are going to be issues that Republicans have to sort of leave behind and leave off the table in future elections that they haven't had before. I think that, you know, probably in four, eight, 12, 16 years, the Republican Party is going to look pretty different because it's going to need to appeal to this, you know,
other block of voters in order to compensate for some of its reliables, leaving the electorate. But, you know, the Republican Party has always looked different for eight years, 12, 16 into the future. The question is just of how. One other thing to just point out is we when we talk about voter groups like men or women or millennials or Gen Z, I mean, these are huge groups of people with millions of voters in
within them. And so it's almost cliche to say, oh, this group is not a monolith. But it really is the case that young voters are not a monolith, right? And just yesterday, Daniel Cox at the Survey Center for American Life at AEI, they posted some data taking a look at young men versus young women on a lot of kind of cultural questions. So it's, again, not necessarily are you voting Republican or Democratic
But there was a really big difference between how young men and young women looked at issues like
Is abortion a critical issue? Are women mistreated in society? And so that's not the first time that I've seen evidence that among young people there is a really huge generation gap and that a lot of the leftward lean of younger voter cohorts is almost exclusively driven by young women really walking away from the right. But that's just, I think, another wrinkle in all of this. You can't disentangle women.
All of these demographic factors from one another, as David said, you know, if young people are delaying marriage or delaying childbearing longer, if they're getting college degrees at a higher rate and we know college education is tied to political affiliation, we know these things will all continue.
come together and interact. And so I just think the difference between young men and young women is also fascinating to watch as we unpack where does Gen Z stand? Yeah, you're getting into this a little bit now. But so we've tried to describe the situation as it stands. But why? Why are younger voters...
today more liberal than they have been historically? And why aren't millennials shifting to the right perhaps as quickly as past generations would have? I have 700,000 hours of thoughts on this question. So I want to let David take it first before I just derail this whole podcast.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a number of reasons. So a couple of different data points that I have kind of stuck in my head about this. One is, so there's a Pew study that has the most common age for every racial group, something like 2018, this was done, so it should be pretty accurate. It was 58 years old for white voters, 11 years old, or sorry, for white Americans,
11 years old for Hispanic Americans, 27 years old for Black Americans, 29 years old for Asian Americans. So if you have an explanation for why Latino voters are more democratic, you have one piece of the puzzle for why millennials are more democratic. The composition of younger generations is fundamentally different. The same goes for unaffiliated voters.
This one says that about half of Americans in their 20s are Christian compared with 80% of the oldest Americans. So some of what we're talking about here with Miles is that they have other things
features that also push them to the left. It's not just that, oh, they have this numerical age. It's that they have these other traits that matter as well. Some of it is life experience. This is one of the things that I talked about in my piece recently and that Kristen also mentioned. It's not a coincidence that 2006 was this first sort of break point where younger voters are starting to be less of a swing group and more of a more of a Democratic group.
2006 was a terrible year for Republicans. That was when everyone was sort of deciding that the Iraq War was a big mistake, the economy would crash soon afterwards, so on and so forth. So you have sort of the life history of millennials kind of playing a role here in an interesting way. And you do have sort of some of the things that the right claims will push millennials to the left,
That claim may be right or wrong, but some of those things were also delayed by the onset of the Great Recession, right? So a lot of young voters who would have gotten married, would have, you know, owned a home, would have had kids earlier, had their entire lives sort of set back by this massive financial crash. And then, you know, we're still disentangling the data from COVID. But you have sort of these life events that are supposed to make people more conservative coming later on. So you have this kind of
mesh of a lot of different things happening at once when we're talking about this neat label of generation.
And to build on what David said about the life experiences playing a role, the more often that you vote for a particular party, the more likely you are to keep doing that, right? It doesn't mean that somebody who's voted Republican six times can't then suddenly decide, nope, I'm out and I vote Democratic. At the individual level, I'm sure we all know people who have been on some kind of political journey like that. But in the aggregate –
If you are someone who has voted Democratic three or four times and then you get married and have kids, you've still got that –
habit forming behavior of you voted Democratic a couple of times, it's a lot harder to dislodge that from your identity and say, nope, now actually I'm a Republican than if, say, you had only voted one time Democratic before you had kids. So that's another, the delay of things like childbearing, marriage, et cetera, that we know those life things kind of correlate a little bit with
being more conservative. It just means you've got more elections under your belt before you even get there where you've been voting as a single person without children. Yeah, you previewed 7000 pages of thoughts. Is there anything else you want to add to this? I mean, David laid out some really good points. And that's
Also, sort of like the routinization of becoming a partisan is important as well. Obviously, you've written a whole book about this stuff. Are there any other factors here that we're leaving out? Yeah, I mean, we'll think about the three-legged stool of the Republican Party, or at least the way it was constituted in, say,
2012, the Romney era, right? You've got social conservatism. And I don't need to spend more than 20, 30 seconds on why social conservatism is struggling with millennials and Gen Z, lack of religious participation, etc. That's a no-brainer. But I always used to say that for Republicans who were open to trying to win back young voters, that simply...
coming out in support of same-sex marriage isn't enough because there were two other legs of the stool that were problematic with younger voters. On foreign policy, if your first big memory is the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's all you've really known in terms of what is America's role in the world, sure doesn't make it seem like America can do a lot of good in the world, right? Where if you're Gen X or you're older, you remember things like the Cold War, and you have more of a frame of reference for what does American global leadership look like that could be positive.
So granted, Republicans have now also sort of changed their posture writ large on what their beliefs are about the positives and negatives of American global leadership.
But that like old leg of the Republican stool, that's kind of gone. And you find young people very dismissive of the idea that America is a particularly great country or better than others or that the world is better off when we're leading. And then on economics, if you came of age in the wake of the financial crisis, this idea that like free markets are great and if we only let capitalism solve things, everything will be wonderful. Like that is just not something that you buy.
And I think Republicans for a long time just kind of assumed, oh, people will figure all of this out once they start paying taxes. Actually, that's not necessarily the case. Just because somebody doesn't like that they pay taxes doesn't mean they don't want the billionaire that they see on TV to pay more in taxes. And so there I think whether it's the social, cultural, foreign policy or economic issue.
Republicans really dropped the ball when it came to millennials and Gen Z and understanding why the world they grew up in meant corporations.
questioning a lot of things that Republicans just took for granted. Do you think that as the Republican Party has gone through, I mean, Donald Trump came in in 2015 and challenged basically every leg of that stool. He's not what we would traditionally think of as a religious individual, at least not in line with the evangelical Christianity that like sort of Reagan,
channeling when this three-legged stool became sort of like common in our imagination of the Republican Party. He obviously criticized the Iraq war and, you know, talked a lot about not wanting to get involved in foreign entanglements, criticized NATO, all of that stuff. So that's two legs of the stool. And then the third leg of the stool, which is fiscal conservatism, you know,
spent up the debt and deficit massively, has still been vocal about not wanting to cut Social Security or Medicare. I mean, he's basically abandoned the stool. So if that was kind of what was holding back millennials, do we see any correlation or relationship between
the onset of, I mean, maybe this is almost a crazy question to ask, but the onset of Trump and young voters changing their minds at all? So when it comes to foreign policy, that is the one area where I will concede that Donald Trump's worldview is more aligned with where young people are at. And you actually, if I ask questions about things like, should we defend Taiwan if it's invaded? Or what should we do about Russia? Or those sorts of questions,
Democrats are pretty united, young and old, on what things should look like. Republicans are hugely divided by generation, and it is younger Republicans. And this kind of predates Trump. This is even Ron Paul-ism, if you will, just lean much more toward that kind of isolationist worldview. So on that, I will concede that. But also remember, Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. I mean, that's a big deal.
This idea that Donald Trump was somehow like a fiscal progressive. I think progressives would probably push back against that. And on social issues, I have always found Donald Trump to be really fascinating on this because I remember, I swear, in the 2016 convention, there's a line in his speech about like bringing LGBTQ people.
Yeah.
Nevertheless, I mean, Donald Trump was somebody who stood up and talked about bringing LGBTQ voters into the party at the convention. And I thought, like, if you had actually gone back in time and told me that there would be a really social media savvy candidate talking about LGBTQ voters at the Republican convention, I would have told you, like, wow, we're fixing our youth vote problem, except that it was Donald Trump. So we weren't fixing our youth vote problem. But so the Donald Trump question is fascinating.
has a number of different complexities to it. I don't think he's the one that's going to save the Republican Party from its problem with young voters. And I frankly think he exacerbates it and makes it harder and harder and harder with every passing day for Republicans to fix the damage. But there are some things like foreign policy that you identified where he may be more in line with young people than the Republican Party of old.
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think one sort of piece to add to the story that you guys have here is that Donald Trump, you know, ran against a lot of elements of the stool.
But he didn't necessarily replace them with anything coherent. Right. It's not like he reconstituted a conservatism that is consistent in all of its different beliefs and has some sort of underlying philosophy that other people can easily and readily replicate. I mean, we are years and years into this thing and everyone is still guessing what it means to be like a Trumpian Republican candidate.
party. It's still trial and error when the man who's supposed to have authored the ideology is currently running for president and politically active. So I think it makes sense that sort of throwing out the stool would be a first step to helping Republicans figure out what to do with young voters. But if you replace that with Donald Trump's personality as the central feature of the
I don't think that gets you where you'd want to go. All right. Well, I think we've gone longer on this than I even intended to. But this was a great look into the relationship between young voters and the Republican Party and whether or not they're growing more conservative. But let's move on and talk about Republican voters in general and how they're handling this primary so far.
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So after everything that's happened over the past month, like the things that I mentioned at the top of the show, the doubling of the primary field size and Trump's indictment,
In mid-May, Trump was at 53% in our Republican primary polling averages. DeSantis was at 21%, and everyone else was in the low to mid single digits. Those numbers are virtually exactly the same today. Like, the decimal points are different, but the whole numbers are exactly the same a month later. So what are we to make of...
of that? Have the events of the past month simply not mattered to Republican voters? It seems to me that no candidates yet have really laid a glove on Donald Trump and their strategy of just stand back and let him fall apart on his own, let him say something that
insults pro-life Republicans or maybe Republicans won't like that he gets arrested. Like none of that has worked. And so I think we're now at the point where these candidates have all had somewhat of a chance to introduce themselves to Republican voters, maybe not in great detail. And because we're still not at the first debate yet, I'm still reserved, like holding judgment on a lot of this stuff.
But right now you have a lot of people that would like to be the nominee instead of Donald Trump who have not really focused on explaining why not Donald Trump, why me? And they'll do so oftentimes in very elliptical terms, right? We need new generation of leadership. We need to move on from the chaos and so on and so forth. But Republican voters really like Donald Trump and they
And in the quest to not tick off voters who like Donald Trump, there's been no effort to create fewer Republican voters who like Donald Trump. And I think that's increasingly a problem for Trump's opponents because –
Time is the one thing that you cannot create more of in a political campaign. Yeah. And it's such a dance, right? So I have a couple sort of polling numbers and trends in my head that I think are relevant. Because if you insult Trump too much,
you sort of run the danger of getting cast into outer darkness, right? So think about-- CHRIS CHRISTIE: Like Chris Christie. MATTHEW WALKER: Yeah, Chris Christie is a perfect example, right? He has-- God knows he's had a complicated long-term relationship with Donald Trump. His favorable and favorable numbers are terrible. You also look at Mike Pence. When he certifies Biden's election, he, according to the civics trend at least, loses a lot of favorability among Republican voters.
And so you have other candidates who, you know, have some Trumpian credibility, some establishment credibility who don't want to fall into the Chris Christie, Mike Pence zone, but also know that there is some need to attack him. And so, yeah, that's why we're in this weird phase where people are kind of like trying
trying a little bit of like a soft attack, but, you know, kind of backing off. I think Kristen's right that you have to wait until the debates to see. But I think that's that's the central dynamic of needing to differentiate yourself from Trump, but not getting coded by Republican voters as sort of like the enemy. How has the primary electorate processed
the indictment is it sort of as simple as one more notch on the witch hunt belt and we'll leave it at that or is a federal indictment pretty detailed indictment hitting hard i mean because if it is hitting harder like i'm not seeing it or it might take more time than the one week that we've had um but what are you seeing kristen
So it's a little too soon to tell, but I suspect based on the little tiny bits and pieces of data I've seen so far that there is an antibody response being provoked, meaning a lot of Republicans will candidly tell you behind closed doors, Donald Trump, his mouth. Why doesn't he listen to his lawyers? You know, those sorts of things. But when it comes to Donald Trump versus Trump,
And so when Donald Trump comes under attack from someone that they like less than Donald Trump – and that's a lot of people in a lot of institutions – this response to defend their guy from what they view as hostile outside forces kicks in. And so when Donald Trump comes under attack from someone that they like less than Donald Trump, this response to defend their guy from what they view as hostile outside forces kicks in.
And so if the question is, who do I pick in a fight between Donald Trump versus Ron DeSantis? Well, if you like both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, maybe we don't know who you pick in that fight. That's kind of interesting. I'm excited to see how that plays out. But in a fight for Republican voters' hearts?
And between Donald Trump and Biden's Department of Justice, like I know who wins that fight. That's not a surprise to me. And if that's the story that dominates the news, that is a gift to Donald Trump. And really only he could be someone who like getting indicted on –
massively horrible federal charges would potentially be beneficial to their short term political interests. But that may be what we're seeing here. Yeah. Although we are in a primary environment, so Republican voters don't have to make a choice between Biden and Trump. As you mentioned, they can make a choice between Trump and DeSantis or Scott or Haley or whatever. The less likely of the long shot candidates as well.
So what do we know about why we haven't seen more of movement from Trump to those candidates as things have become more complicated for Trump? There's a lot of different ways to think about a primary. But one way to think about it is voters are kind of putting two considerations up. One is,
can this person win? And one is, does this person reflect my values? Right. So if a voter believes that Trump is innocent or also just like knows that Trump has already been in a lot of legal jeopardy, this, you know, may or may not immediately
immediately change their can this person win calculation. That calculation might change if other Republicans sort of center it, ground it, start attacking, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I think that stays in stasis. And does this person agree with my values? Is this person the right representative of me? Is this kind of my favorite person in the field? I don't think that's
changed tremendously either. So honestly, part of the way that I'm processing this Republican primary is asking, you know, it's, I think the current state maybe is sort of the natural state and the steady state. And, you know, we're getting information about what knocks people away and what doesn't knock people away. And I think, you know, right now we're just kind of staying at steady state.
So wait, so if we're getting information about what knocks people away and what doesn't, it seems like we've gotten a lot of information about what doesn't knock people away. And I write to say that the piece of information we got about what knocks people away is Donald Trump being cast as a loser and DeSantis being cast as a winner. Because like, as far as I can tell, that's the only real time that the polls have moved significantly was in the immediate aftermath of the midterm elections when that exact dynamic was the case.
Yeah, I think that's a really insightful comment. I think that the idea that either Trump couldn't win or some or he, you know, nominated all these candidates that did terribly across America or that, you know, DeSantis, you know, had a better chance of winning or something like that. I think that sort of thing matters. And I think this sort of two year interregnum in between Trump leaving office and the midterm elections,
also mattered because in that stretch, Trump didn't do a lot of campaigning. He just kind of did a lot of sitting there and stewing. And a lot of the things that people liked about Trump weren't sort of
readily apparent. All that happened was that he lost and he was gone. And I think that left sort of an open space. So I think Trump being able to continue campaigning, focus Republicans on some of the things that they liked about him and, you know, have those events happen. I think that's been helpful for him.
I think this message of Donald Trump is not the winner you think he is, is the only thing that has a chance of sticking. So think back to after the midterms, right? If you look at the
polling. That's the only time that DeSantis comes close. And I, so confessions, I play like World of Warcraft or this applies to really any kind of video game where you have to like go and fight a boss, right? There will come a moment when you are fighting the boss where like the shields are down and suddenly now the spells you are casting or the things you are throwing at the boss like actually start to hurt. There was a moment after the midterms when the shields were down and
No one took a swing at him. No one took a swing at him. And so the shields are back up now. And like they're stronger than ever because now the shields are there because he's fighting the Department of Justice and all of this. And so there was a moment and I think a lot of Republicans kind of missed it. They thought that they took the oh, when your opponent is falling, just let them fall on their own. That was not the dynamic. And so now I think this moment of, well, Donald Trump's not the winner you think he is. It's harder to make that argument. One, the midterms are further in people's rearview.
Maybe Republican voters are not feeling that sense of loss like they did in the immediate shock of the midterms not turning out the way they wanted them to. But I have not yet seen any Republican opponents stitch together an argument that confronts the contradictions Trump makes. Trump says.
I'm going to be a fighter. I'm going to put up points on the board for you. I'm going to win. And then anytime anybody points out that he actually didn't, right? You didn't actually win in 2020. You didn't actually get the whole wall built. You didn't actually do X, Y, and Z. If you're DeSantis, you say you didn't actually fire Fauci or whatever it is. His response is always like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like the deep state stopped me. Well, if you're such a winner, how come the deep state keeps beating you, buddy? Like I
I'm waiting for someone and gosh, it might just only be Chris Christie, but to like get up on a debate stage and make the case that Donald Trump is not actually a winner and that all these people, these forces that are constantly coming after him. Why does he keep losing to them so often? That's kind of weird, right? Nobody's made that argument yet. And I feel like that may be the only thing that actually can break through.
I want to take a step back for a second and ask, like, who are Republican primary voters? Because, you know, a primary electorate can be a very, a very small, very interesting thing that may behave quite differently or may have preferences that are quite different from a general electorate. So who are we even talking about?
Depends a lot state to state. Talk about a lot of different groups. Yeah, I was going to say it really depends on what state you're looking at. Like this is not a single unified electorate. There is –
voters in Iowa who look a lot different than who might turn out in New Hampshire, not merely because of the different rules that govern each state's process. Of course, Iowa being a caucus, you're only going to get the hardest of the hardcore. It's often dominated by evangelicals, those who are very plugged in and easy to organize, where in New Hampshire, anyone could theoretically show up if there's no interesting Democratic primary, if Joe Biden's just taking it and running with it.
Maybe you get some people crossing over. So it is hard for me to concretely nail down who that audience is because it is going to change a lot from state to state. But it's what in broad terms, like how big is a Republican primary electorate versus a Republican general electorate?
Pretty small. Pretty small. It's going to be different depending on caucus versus primary and what the level of excitement is affects the level of turnout and so on and so forth. But I think when we're talking about the groups that make up the Republican electorate as a whole, a lot of them have kind of mini versions in the primary electorate that you can see. So you have things like, you know, a chunk of weekly or more church attending groups
Republicans who really care about the socialist views. You have business conservatives, you have sort of, you know, blue collar conservatives, which is an increasingly important constituency within the party. You have, you know, a growing segment of voters of color that are Republicans that have, you know, kind of a wide variety of, you know, different
motives ideologically and, and, and ideas within that. Um, but I think a lot of the things that probably the listeners are used to hearing about, about the composition of the general Republican electorate also sort of filter down, um,
And oftentimes the early states historically have done a pretty good job on the Republican side of kind of giving different groups a different sort of bite at the apple, right? You have a lot of activists
Um, and, uh, even, you know, even in specific geographic corners of Iowa, uh, a lot of evangelicals there in New Hampshire, you have sort of wild card, moderate business-y types. Uh, South Carolina has some of both, but also has the regional character of the South. You just have the same sort of power centers. Um,
there. And, you know, if you map them all out, when Donald Trump is at 50 percent and and Rhonda Sanders is at 20 something percent, Donald Trump is dominating most of the power centers. He's winning most of the sort of major groups, as you could define them. But yeah, I mean, all the candidates are sort of thinking through their roadmap in, so to speak.
Historically, and I'll say in 2016, we did this and we on the Republican side. And in 2020, we did it on the Democratic side. We look at all of the different interest groups and constituencies within the parties and think about what motivates them and what kind of policies do they want? And do those policies align with whatever, you know, candidate A is saying?
I mean, is it worth doing that in this election? Like, can you discern the intricacies of what different types of Republican voters want and who is potentially, like, serving that? Or is it really just...
Trump is still the subject du jour. And unless that changes, it's hard to discern what is motivating Republican primary voters. So is the question, is it issues or is it vibes? Like what is what is actually driving things here? I mean, because the answer is probably my editor, please. Can you be my editor, please? Because I need some practice with concision. But yes. No, no, no. But basically, I think that's an interesting way to think about it, because
Do you think that any of the Republicans who have announced so far have a markedly different approach to economic policy? Like it wouldn't surprise me if some of them are a little more pro free trade than Donald Trump or maybe Ron DeSantis. Certainly there is disagreement among the candidates about the virtues of going after corporations on the grounds that they are engaged in.
stuff that's too progressive. Like, so there, I don't want to say they're all the same on all the issues, but like the big ones, immigration, crime, those are ones where it seems to me like they're all pretty similar to one another with just, so, so to say, ah, you know, you've, if you want to win over Republican primary voters, you've got to win on the issue of immigration. Yes. But that doesn't actually give me information about like which of those candidates in the race are
might potentially be winning. So instead, I think a lot of it comes down to this broader question that goes beyond the traditional, what's your top issue in this election or which two or three issues most influence your vote? It's more, who do I think is going to be best at fighting for someone like me against the forces that I think are hostile to people like me? And whether you think those forces are
Foreign countries, corporations, the deep state, the media, whatever you want to call it, that I think is the overarching umbrella over all of this, which is hard to ask in a polling question, right? Like our top issue question normally looks like, which of the following issues is most important to you in this election? The economy, abortion, guns, immigration, not like –
fighting my enemies and hearing them, the lamentation of their, you know, what's the line? I'm like botching it horribly, but you know what I mean? I actually looked up this line earlier because I thought that it might come up in this discussion, like legitimately. If I remember right, it's like, crush my enemies, see them driven before me and hear the lamentation of their women. And then it was like, no, David, it's not going to come up. You don't need to actually like know this. I'm so glad that you did. Here we are.
Wait, wait, wait. Hold on, hold on. Can someone explain to me what this is from? I feel very much like Conan the Barbarian. It's an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. I've never actually seen it, but I think the line outlives the movie. Great assist, David. Thank you. It's really what I'm here for. It's why Galen invited me on the podcast. Unknowingly. I mean, I'm very impressed by what just happened.
Kristen, in 2000, I want to say it was like...
Was it right after Biden won or was it before Biden won? We it was like you, Ramesh and Henry Olson at The Washington Post. We all chatted and we had a similar conversation, like what's motivating Republicans? What do Republican voters want? And your immediate answer was a fighter in all of the different polls that we that you kind of put out in the field. Like that was the that was the number one message.
Is that still the case? You know, the context has changed a little bit here. And some of the issues that Republican voters care about have changed a little bit as well. Like, yes, immigration, immigration, immigration has been the topic for the past eight years. But now a lot of people are talking about woke this, woke that, you know, like gender ideology, COVIDism, like things that have come to the fore that weren't here, at least in 2016. Yeah.
But is it so have things changed? Is it all kind of still the same? I would still say that Republican voters are looking for a fighter. But my amendment to that answer is that they don't just want someone who's going to fight and lose.
And that, I think, is a little bit of a difference that they want someone who's going to stand up and fight for them. But they they are interested in someone who will prevail and actually put points on the board. And that goes back to where I think Trump is potentially the most vulnerable. Trump is going to argue that he's a winner. Right. That goes back to his whole narrative claiming that he won the 2020 election because the idea of Trump letting himself be branded as someone who can't win is like fatal. That is the kill shot to his whole brand. Right.
Republican voters want a fighter, but they want a winner. And so that is how I would amend my previous answer. Yeah. And I think this goes back to some things that we've talked about throughout the podcast, which is that, you know, just at a baseline, like losing is the least important.
fun thing in American politics. It doesn't matter how pure your candidate is or how much you love their personality or what it is. If you believe that they are destined to lose, it is simply not worth it. And so, yeah, a lot of what we talk about around issues plays sort of a secondary role to that, I think. Is any of this different from Democratic voters?
I think so. I don't think that the parties work in the exact same way. I think Republican voters like to talk a lot about conservatism and like to talk a lot about ideology and conservatism, you know, has shifted from that Reagan era stool that we've talked about into something that's more congruent with just Trump and his sort of approach and his
Right. And Democrats have like a growing ideological block. I think an increasingly powerful sort of progressive block that, you know, isn't the mirror image of conservatives, but think tankers.
thinks about politics ideologically in a little bit of that similar way. But that progressive block, I think, competes with a lot of voters who are more transactional on the Democratic side and are more sort of openly pragmatic, right? And you can see this in the 2020 Democratic primary and sort of
you know, progressives taking the side of maybe a Sanders or a Warren type and African-American voters who, you know, in broad terms tend to vote more pragmatically, taking the side of someone more like Biden because he seems more electable and more able to win. So I don't think that the Democratic and Republican primary electorates work in exactly the same way. And I think the presence of Trump also throws all of it off
off. One more nugget sort of back to that question of issues in the Republican primary. One thing that I've noticed is that, you know, Ron DeSantis, if memory serves, over indexes on moderate voters. Right. That makes no sense because Ron DeSantis is running to Trump's right. But that's because part of the issue is that the moderate voters are the ones who are the most likely to dislike Trump. So it's not so much about issues. It's about
who you love and who you hate. So, yeah, I don't think this dynamic plays out exactly the same way in Democratic and Republican sides. And I think that, you know, the next Democratic primary is going to be wildly informative for how they've changed, too.
Reporters have paid close attention to what all of the candidates are saying about abortion in a post-Dobbs world. And Trump has been reticent to say really all that much other than, "I did it. I told you I was going to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I did." And as you mentioned, DeSantis is running to his right. He signed into law himself a six-week abortion ban in Florida.
Do we see that playing out at all as meaningful in this race? I mean, it was such such a big calling card for so long for socially conservative Republicans. You know, is it just not that important anymore to Republican voters? So Republican voters are like.
less likely than Democrats to report that the issue of abortion is important to their vote. And it's also the case that I think the types of issues that really animate Republicans in the kind of social and cultural issues bucket has changed.
So I say changed. We asked a question in a survey that we did of Republican voters back in March. I don't actually have trend data on this, so it's probably irresponsible of me to say things have changed because I don't actually have the data point from before. But what we did was we said, which of the following statements do you agree with more, even if neither is exactly right?
Issues like abortion and religious liberty are the biggest social challenges we face today or – and again, we're trying to use the language you would hear in a Republican primary. Issues like radical gender and racial ideologies from the left are the biggest social challenges we face today. Almost kind of pitting what are the things that Mike Pence would say or Mike Pence 10 years ago would have said these are the biggest issues that we're facing culturally and abortion would have been a big, big, big piece of that.
versus this more we've got to fight the woke left type language that you hear from, say, Ron DeSantis. And on that question, when we asked Republican voters, we found that a plurality of them, 48 percent, said it was the racial and gender ideologies question. Only 38 percent chose the option about abortion and religious liberty. So this idea that, you know, abortion is kind of the main thing that –
voters who are motivated by social and cultural issues are thinking about, I don't necessarily think that's the case. And I also think that the right feels very much on defense about this, because even if you are pro-life, you can't have escaped the message that abortion and the right's mishandling of it is a piece of why the Republican Party did not perform very well in the midterms. And if you're worried about losing, that's
a worry. And so that's why you're going to see Donald Trump claim that Ron DeSantis is actually the one that's going to be a big loser because he's the one that's got this albatross of the, you know, the six week ban that was passed in Florida. That's why Donald Trump is actually, I think, trying to not fight DeSantis from the right on this issue.
Yeah. And I think one other, um, factor to throw into how this is all, uh, playing out on the right. So recently just as sort of a ballpark, you know, what is the state of the Republican party? Who, who is the electorate? Uh,
exercise, I divided Republicans into three groups based on church attendance, weekly plus, never to seldom, and then somewhere in the middle. And I used some of these large, publicly available academic surveys to figure it out. And essentially, what you see is that in the late 2000s, weekly plus church attenders were the plurality of those three groups.
Now, seldom to never is the plurality of those three groups. And if you break that down further, the, uh, more pious Republicans or more practicing or however you want to say it are the most likely to be far right on abortion. And then, uh, the never attending group is the most likely to say maybe abortion should not be illegal in every single circumstance. So you have a situation where, um,
If you're talking about secular culture wars versus sort of traditionally religious culture wars, a growing set of Republicans are not necessarily going to sign up for every religious cultural war. But I think a lot of the religious conservatives might sign up for the secular culture wars. So I think that's part of what's shaping this landscape, if that makes sense. Yeah, you read my mind. I was about to ask, like, why? Yeah.
why are the secular culture wars preceding the religious culture wars in this poll? And as you mentioned, Gallup polling just showed, I think it came out this morning, showing that
last year a majority of Republicans had said that they found same-sex relationships to be morally acceptable. It was something like, I'm going to get the exact numbers wrong, but I think it was like 56%, 57% said it was morally acceptable. This year it's 41% say that it's morally acceptable. So a significant drop there in just the span of one year. We've also seen a big focus on
critical race theory and that sort of thing. You know, the same-sex relationship piece doesn't really get at the debate over trans participation in sports or bathrooms or healthcare or things like that, which I think might be, like, more at the top of people's minds than same-sex relationships. Like, how has... Why did this shift happen? I mean, I think the, you know, decline in connection to institutional religion is...
part of the story for why secular culture war issues have overtaken the religious ones. You know, demographic change, a lot of it has been captured on the left, right? A lot of the secularization and diversification of America has happened sort of within, you know, Democrat...
the Democrats have changed a lot faster than the Republicans, but you know, in terms of disconnection from church, that's been a big theme for the GOP. I think part of it is also figuring out what,
what issue portfolio can win a general election and what issue portfolio can't. I think that if your entire set of social issues is abortion, where the public has recently taken a turn away from the Republican position as the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs, and plus, you know,
marriage equality where public opinion is increasingly increasingly increasingly settled. I think if that's your entire issue portfolio on social issues, that doesn't go well. I think the Republican Party does better electorally when immigration or maybe a focus on trans issues or when there's just other stuff
in the mix, too. And, you know, these parties don't think in the same way that individual people think. They kind of, you know, have all these different power centers and test things out and act in complicated ways. But sort of on a very high level, you know, I think the Republican Party knows that the secular culture wars are both what more of the base wants and also what's
better if they have to choose between secular plus religious culture wars and just religious ones, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think there are issues like, say, marriage equality, where public opinion is largely settled and social conservatives lost that battle. Or one like abortion, where at least at the moment, social conservatives are on the back foot. But at the same time, you see data around things like, for instance, trans participation in sports, where...
It depends on how you ask the question, but actually those who would say no, sports should actually be divided by sex at birth, they actually do have the majority. So there are – I think it's also that some of these kind of secular –
culture war issues are the ones where Republicans are more likely to find the political middle is with them than on the ones that are more explicitly religious. All right. I know we're running long here, but I promised that we were going to play a game. So we're still going to do it. So let's play which candidate said this.
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David and Kristen, this game is pretty simple. Basically, I am going to read a quote from a candidate announcement speech or article or video or Twitter space. And you just have to guess who...
Senate. Does that need any more explanation than what I've given you? And to make this a little more tricky, it's not necessarily one per candidate. And I can't even guarantee you whether or not all the candidates have been included. So this isn't going to get easier as you go along. Like if Chris Christie is the only one remaining, okay, it's obviously Chris Christie. I'm trying to make it more complicated than that.
that so uh and we'll do we'll do we'll alternate back and forth because i realized that there might be some advantage to going second um in this so we are going to begin with david we must recognize the real threat to america and strengthen national security our enemies aren't our neighbors down the street our enemies are countries that want to see our way of life destroyed
Nikki Haley. Kristen? I concur. Nikki Haley. Doug Burgum. Oh! Burgum. I started you all with a difficult one. How
How could I have missed that one? It sounds like a Haley thing. I mean, yeah. So now we're starting with it's zero zero. We're starting with Kristen. We'll end corporate welfare and bailouts for big business and we'll end the earmarks and pork that fueled big government. And when it comes to our politicians, we'll light a fire under them. Their job is not to say things on TV. Their job is to do things in D.C. like solve problems instead of ignoring or creating them.
Vivek Ramaswamy. Yeah, I think that's right. Wow, you guys are really just going along with the other person's idea here. So that was Nikki Haley. Oh, gosh. I kind of trolled you with that one. It would have been ironic. Anyway, because it's complaining about like, all you do is go on TV. It would have been a little bit whatever. I digress.
Um, yeah, yeah. David, you're starting off this one. Our country is in a horrible state. We're in grave trouble. This is not a task for a politician or a conventional candidate. This is a task for a great movement that embodies the courage, confidence, and the spirit of the American people. This is a movement. This is not for any one individual. This is a job for tens of millions of proud people working together from across all the land and from all walks of life.
I don't know. The not not a typical politician thing makes me want to go from Swami again, but it also is like nicer than he is. But yeah, I'll go for it. Sure. Well, I thought you were going to say Trump and I was going to have to pick Ramaswamy because I was definitely going to pick a different person than who you picked just to keep it interesting. So I'm gonna take Donald Trump. It is Donald Trump. Kristen, you're on the board. One point.
I wasn't going to play. I swore, David, you were going to pick Trump. And I was like, oh, then I'm going to have to pick someone different. All right. Kristen, you have one. David, you have zero. Let's continue on.
Francis Suarez? Okay, well, if you're taking Suarez, then I'll take Christie. Okay. It's Chris Christie! No! No!
Okay, so David, now you're also on the board. It's 1-1. For those of you who wonder if America is a racist country, take a look at how people come together. All of God's people come together, black ones and white ones, the red ones and brown ones working together because love, unconditional love, binds hearts together. We are not defined by the color of our skin. We are defined by the content of our character. And if anyone tells you anything different, they're lying. Tim Scott, and we're both on two points. Yeah.
Tim Scott. Okay. All right. I guess that one was easy. We must resist the politics of personality and the siren song of populism. We must stand firm on a traditional Republican agenda of strong national defense, fiscal responsibility, and traditional values, speaking of the three-legged stool, that led us to victory in the past and will lead us to victory again. Mike Pence. That's a good one. I'm going to pick something different if I'm
I'm going to go with Hutchinson. That was a good guess, but it was Mike Pence. So, Kristen, you have three. David, you have two. Okay. There's no substitute for victory. We must end the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years. The tired dogmas of the past are inadequate for a vibrant future. We must look forward, not backwards. We need the courage to lead, and we must have the strength to win. You know who we haven't had yet?
It's a Ron DeSantis. Yeah. So I'm going to go there. Same. Okay. It is Ron DeSantis. It is. I guess that one was kind of easy. See, notice how many times you said the word win there. Yeah. I pulled a bunch of quotes. And so I've...
I'm now leaning into some of the ones that are more identifiable. Okay, here's a good one. America is in the midst of a national identity crisis. We hunger for purpose at a moment when faith, patriotism, and hard work are on the decline. We embrace secular religions like climatism, COVIDism, and gender ideology to satisfy our need for meaning, yet we can't answer what it means to be an American. Somebody who's interested in appealing to religious voters...
I'm going to go DeSantis again. Well, I mean, the game theory is I got to pick something different if I have any chance. Okay. I'm going to go Haley. It's Vivek Ramaswamy. Now that I say that, does it seem more obvious? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right, right, right. He says COVIDism a lot. It's still 4-3. Another one. The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crimes which are being watched all over the world as leadership of other countries explain that this is what America and democracy is really about. I'm gonna go with Trump. I'm gonna go Nikki Haley. The range of things that Nikki Haley is being guessed for is pretty broad here. It was Trump. Okay. So you are 4-4. Um...
Basically, like, she doesn't really use the words like blood soaked streets that much. But I thought it was the like other countries looking at us. And that was what got me right. But it makes the words right. But the construction seemed wrong for Trump. Anyways. Yeah.
But it also makes sense because Nikki Haley has tried to straddle both the like, I'm going to pick up the moderate anti-Trump vote, but also like, hey, I can fight the culture wars just as hard as you can when I need to, when I'm in front of the right crowd. So I understand why people are getting so tripped up on Nikki Haley. Okay. It's tied. Should we do a tiebreaker here and then call it quits? Does that sound good? Okay. Okay.
When Dr. Benjamin Franklin walked out of that convention, he was asked, did you deliver a republic or a monarchy? He said, a republic, if you can keep it.
They knew freedom didn't run on autopilot. They knew each generation would have a responsibility to safeguard freedom. And it's our responsibility to do so at this important juncture in our nation's history. And in case you're wondering, yes, I did pick this one because this was Nancy Pelosi's message all throughout Trump's presidency. I'm going to go Christy, but I'm going to be real ticked if it's Nikki Haley. I'm going to...
Going to bet on, I don't think he's actually been picked yet. And so I'm doing the process of elimination, even though you said people can get used twice. I'm going to go Hutchinson. Guys, it was Ron DeSantis. Oh!
We remain tied. Because he talks about freedom a lot as well. So you remain tied. Okay, we're going to – that's for the best. It means we're going to have to have another one. Okay. I don't want to know how many questions you actually ask because I don't want to know what my failure rate for this game is. Yeah, this fail rate is bad, but I will say this just proves the point I made earlier in the podcast, which is that on substance, it is hard to differentiate –
who has what position on immigration or like everybody's really aligned. And that is making this game very hard.
Hopefully this will break the tie. America's so-called leaders confuse being loud with actual leading. All Washington wants to do is fight with each other instead of fighting for the people that put them in office. My dad taught me that you get to choose your battles, and I am choosing the biggest one of my life. I'm going to run for president. I want to pick Nikki Haley so bad. I want to pick Nikki Haley so bad. Just do it. Nikki Haley.
All right. In an effort to end this game, I'm going to pick somebody different. Frances Suarez. Oh, yes. It is Frances Suarez. It is. It is. It is. Oh, gosh. As soon as you said it. Oh, you win. I deserve to lose. Kristen, especially being from Florida. Come on. I know. I think I was just on CNN talking about this video like 12 hours ago. It's okay. There's like five candidates. It's fine. Good grief.
You are all winners in my heart. Hopefully you enjoyed that. I certainly did. But David, congratulations as the winner of the first ever round of which candidate said this on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. Your award will be in the mail as soon as I figure out what it is. Anyway, I know we have gone long here, but I think we've...
talked about some very interesting points. I hope listeners feel the same way. And I just want to say thank you to both of you for sharing your time with me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having us.
Thanks so much. Chris Insulti-Sanderson is the founder of the polling firm Echelon Insights and the author of the book, The Selfie Vote, where millennials are leading America and how Republicans can keep up. David Beiler is a Washington Post data columnist. He recently wrote a piece, as I mentioned, Your Teenage Memories Left a Political Imprint.
My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room and on video editing. Today, you can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.
