Morning Wire XX
[0] The presidential race was shaken up again this week as another candidate, Tim Walls, was added to the ticket along with newly minted Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
[1] The unprecedented last -minute swap -in of Harris and now the addition of her largely unknown VP has resulted in movement in the polls and experts projecting a very tight race come November.
[2] In this episode, we sit down with pollster Brent Buchanan to crunch the numbers and make sense of this volatile presidential race.
[3] I'm Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.
[4] It's August 11th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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[13] Joining us now to discuss the state of the race, including the impact of Tim Walls being added to the ticket, is Brent Buchanan, president and founder of Signal Polling Group.
[14] First of all, thank you so much for coming on.
[15] My pleasure.
[16] So look, there's a new poll out this week by CNBC that has Trump up by two nationally.
[17] He actually pointed to that poll in his press conference on Thursday.
[18] What do you make of the poll's findings?
[19] First off, it's a bipartisan poll of two firms, one Democrat, one Republican, that both have a profit motive to be correct because they don't make their money.
[20] They're not being funded to do a bunch of public polls.
[21] They do mostly private work for campaigns and businesses.
[22] So, you know, I tend to put a lot more stock in those type of polls.
[23] And what we really pay attention to in polling is not where is it now, but where is it come from and why did it get there?
[24] And the bigger narrative that I think is being totally missed in the media right now is that Trump's actually still holding his own and doing well.
[25] Kamala just appears to be doing better compared to Biden because his floor was so low.
[26] It was unrealistically, artificially low in the sense that there were going to be plenty of voters who did not like the guy showed up, held their nose and voted for Biden anyways.
[27] And it just wasn't showing up in polling.
[28] But there's, There's been no degradation of Trump's ballot share in these polls since they pulled in a swap -a -roo at the top of the ticket.
[29] Now, you and I have talked about this before, but for those who don't follow polling as much, how important are these national polls overall?
[30] They're helpful directionally, and we do one every month for ourselves that we release every other month, but we track it internally just for ourselves and our clients, because not that it's going to direct you and say, here's who's going to win the president.
[31] election since we do not use a national popular vote for that.
[32] But it does help you see what's changing under the surface and be able to compare what's happening and maybe your state level polling of, you know, younger voters are more engaged and more likely to say that they would vote for Harris than Biden as an example.
[33] So it helps directionally know what's going on because of the shifts within the demographic groups, but it's not going to be predictive at all.
[34] I mean, And if anything, even a Trump -Harris tie nationally is bad for Harris.
[35] When you go look at 2020, you know, I think our last poll for Biden had him up five nationally and he ended up at 4 .5 national lead over Trump by about 7 million votes and then barely won.
[36] So Democrats have to get to a 5, 6, 7 point advantage nationally on a poll for them to do well.
[37] So any narrative where we're looking at a poll saying, well, look, Trump's drop nationally, but he's still ahead or tied, is significantly better than 2020.
[38] Yeah.
[39] Can you unpack why that's the case?
[40] Why do Republicans seem to have an electoral advantage when it comes to these national polls?
[41] Well, I think it's when you look at population concentration.
[42] So, you know, your New York, California, Illinois, that are super blue, progressive states have very big populations.
[43] and then you look at, you know, a Texas and a Florida that are the biggest Republican states, well, the margin that those two states are maximum 8%, maybe 10 % for Republicans, but a margin in California is 30%, 40 % for Democrats.
[44] So when you start to think about, you know, how many people are answering a national poll from these given states, you have a lot more vote and concentration on these survey responses coming from blue states.
[45] So if they can't use their might in those responses to get a national poll to be 5, 6, 7 percent Democratic advantage, then you can start to see where there are structural issues with voters that have to be persuaded in the middle, that the Democrats, that if they're not persuading them nationally, they're probably also struggling to persuade them in state or district -specific polling.
[46] Now, I put a finer point on what you mentioned earlier.
[47] You said that Trump's ballot share has actually not diminished, despite the switch at the top.
[48] Are you saying that Trump is in just as strong a position now, or is it that while the Harris support is higher than Biden's, Trump has just not lost any support?
[49] Yeah, it's the latter there.
[50] I think this is a more realistic view of the presidential election.
[51] And I'm convinced that it would have ended up close to this had Biden stayed the nominee, because at the end of the day, a voter's going to walk in and either be willing to or not willing to vote for Trump.
[52] Like the elections about Trump more than it is about Biden.
[53] Now, Harris changes that calculus sum because she's just a new entity that's completely untested and has been able to avoid for 18 days even talking to the press.
[54] But she's essentially a generic Democrat is the way I look at her.
[55] If you're willing to vote for a Democratic candidate, you can put all your hopes and dreams on her that she is that or those things because we don't really know a whole lot else about her.
[56] Now, when it comes down to defining her, which is going to happen, I would say by mid -September, you know, if we have this conversation five or six weeks from now, it's going to be a different conversation because she won't be in that honeymoon hopes and dreams phase.
[57] She will be a defined candidate in and of herself.
[58] She can't avoid it forever.
[59] But I think a two -point national race is a more believable number in where we would have ended up even with Biden.
[60] It just didn't.
[61] It was never going to look that way because people were embarrassed to say they would vote for Joe Biden.
[62] Well, this really historic sequence of events gives us maybe the shortest amount of time we'll ever see for defining a candidate ahead of an election.
[63] Now, Harris has picked Tim Walls.
[64] There's been a lot of focus on him this week.
[65] There's excitement from Democrats.
[66] There's also some excitement from Republicans for various reasons.
[67] As far as the polling goes, what does Walls bring to the table?
[68] Well, he does not bring name identification to the ticket in the same way that J .D. Vance did not bring name identification.
[69] So it's not like you're picking somebody who, who is already defined, you're making a choice.
[70] When I saw the JD Vance choice, it looked like a selection being made to dive further into opportunities within Rust Belt states, but also kind of cast a vision towards legacy of Trump's movement and his ideology and the things he believes in and wants to advance in policy.
[71] When you look at walls, it doesn't appear to be the same choice by Kamala Harris.
[72] And, you know, I was the pollster on Dr. Scott Jensen's race, who was the Republican nominee against Walls in 22.
[73] So I'm very familiar with Governor Walls because I've seen the opposition research book on him two years ago when I was involved in the campaign against him.
[74] And he is one of the most progressive and liberal governors in the country.
[75] So if you're Kamala Harris, and I don't want to put myself in her shoes or mine because that'd be a scary place.
[76] but I think she really liked his sharp tongue.
[77] Like if I had to distill it down to why did she pick him, he looks like a Midwesterner, he talks like a Midwesterner, but he has a really sharp tongue, and he can be an attack dog for you on Donald Trump and J .D. Vance.
[78] And I think they just set aside the very left of center, not even center, just left views and policies that he has, and they're now going to have to defend that.
[79] But if you're the Kamala Harris campaign, She's already the most liberal senator, so what do you have to lose in that sense?
[80] So you've seen the APO research on walls.
[81] What are his weaknesses?
[82] Well, he may be an affable person, but from a policy standpoint, he is very far left.
[83] He has gone so far as to change the definition of sexual orientation to include pedophilia.
[84] And there's just a lot of things that normal Americans would look at and say that is really out there.
[85] I think he opens up the door for culture wars in the sense of some of the things that he's done around abortion.
[86] I mean, allowing it up to and after the point of birth, where even people who would say, you know, I'm not for no abortion, but I'm definitely not for abortion any in all times.
[87] And I think that's just an example of whatever the center view is on a policy topic, he is much further from that center.
[88] than say Trump or Vance would be to the right of that given issue.
[89] And he's been able to get away with it because he has a complicit media in Minnesota that's never really called him to account on anything.
[90] And I saw that in the 22 campaign.
[91] And he also is getting a free pass from the media this go around.
[92] But it doesn't take a whole lot to look into the guy's record, especially once he was able to take over the legislature.
[93] So in 22, Republicans lost control of the legislature.
[94] And he has a lot of issues around gun control and his management of COVID.
[95] I mean, he set up a hotline where you could call and rat out your neighbor if they went outside during the COVID lockdowns.
[96] And I could go on and on the things that are just complete nonsense that he believes that are very much out of the norm of probably 90 % of America.
[97] Do you believe the stolen valor accusations against walls will have an impact?
[98] Have we seen in the past where that's really done damage to a candidate?
[99] It went to a Republican because the media would pile on.
[100] I don't think it's going to have the same impact on Governor Walls, simply because it takes a little bit of nuance to explain the issue.
[101] And also, Republicans right now have all the policy points on their side.
[102] They're running against the most progressive leftist ticket that has ever existed in American history.
[103] And we don't have to go label and name people when we can use their own.
[104] words and beliefs to expose them to America.
[105] And Americans will look at them and say, yeah, that's not even close to what I believe.
[106] Trump was well positioned in his race against Biden, but has done some shifting in terms of his message against Harris now.
[107] Do you think that Trump campaign has taken the right approach so far to attacking this new opponent?
[108] Anytime you have a shift in your North Star, it's going to take some calibration to get to the new destination.
[109] And you can tell that the Trump campaign was prepared for the swapout.
[110] I'm not sure her coming out with the messaging she did was exactly what they thought she would do.
[111] She's cast an eye for the future and tried to build consensus and tried to ignore the last 50 -something years of her life as if it didn't exist and she didn't believe any of those things.
[112] So that definitely throws you off kilter.
[113] But it was almost getting too easy with the Biden campaign because poor guy is just so inept and it almost makes Trump's job easy.
[114] And now it's going to be a fight.
[115] And hopefully it gets to a fight on policy and past beliefs on policy points because that's to Trump's benefit.
[116] Right.
[117] There's been some criticism about Trump attacking her from the identity perspective.
[118] Final question, Trump brought this up in the press conference.
[119] He's thrown the gauntlet down to debate Harris.
[120] She's agreed to at least one of these debates.
[121] How important are debate?
[122] and helping to find these particular candidates.
[123] There's nothing Donald Trump can do or say that is going to change somebody's opinion of him because if he says something that is perceived as kind of off the wall, it's like, well, that is Donald Trump.
[124] If he has a zinger or comes strong in a policy position, people say, yeah, I already knew that.
[125] I always tell clients that debates are an opportunity to walk out the same way you walked in.
[126] That's the best case scenario.
[127] debates essentially create risk opportunities, especially for the less undefined individuals.
[128] So I think it's great that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed to September 10th ABC debate because I don't think Kamala can do well without a script or a teleprompter in front of her.
[129] All the videos that you see with her babbling on about nonsense are when she was allowed a microphone without a script or a teleprompter.
[130] So it's kind of hard to believe that she's going to be able to work.
[131] walk out of that debate viewed the same way she walked in because Trump cannot make unforced errors in that, like, it's just not possible.
[132] Nobody's going to view him differently if he does make what is perceived as an error.
[133] But she has a lot of risk walking into that scenario to say something that will be used against her or make people view her differently.
[134] So, you know, I think if Trump stays on his trajectory and really holds to message on policy and contrast this of here's the America that you'll get to live in if she is in charge and here's the America you'll get to live in and you already got to experience under me before COVID if I'm in charge, that that choice becomes very easy for the American public.
[135] Great.
[136] Well, thank you so much for talking with us.
[137] We'll talk again soon.
[138] Thank you, John.
[139] That was Brent Buchanan from Signal Polling Group and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.