Morning Wire XX
[0] The last few presidential elections came down to the votes cast in just 25 counties in a handful of states.
[1] The Daily Wire has just published an exclusive poll with Signal polling that gauges where those Bellwether counties stand now just over three months till the election.
[2] In this episode, we sit down with the founder of Signal polling to break down the results and what it means for Trump and Biden come November.
[3] I'm Daily Wire editor -in -chief John Bickley.
[4] It's Thursday, July 18th, and this is an R &Sy, extra edition of Morning Wire.
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[13] Joining us now at our Morning Wire booth at the RNC is Brent Buchanan, president and founder of Signal polling.
[14] So great to have you here.
[15] Thank you so much for sitting down with us.
[16] Now, the New York Times has designated you as one of the more accurate pollsters.
[17] It's one of the reasons we've turned to you for some important results.
[18] You've done a major bellwether county study.
[19] First, can you explain to our audience what that means?
[20] Well, yeah.
[21] So, most polling you see is national polling, which is almost irrelevant, yet we do it, because we don't have national elections.
[22] We have the electoral college.
[23] But within the electoral college, you have really important counties.
[24] And then even outside of the states that matter from an electoral college perspective, you have counties that if you look at, they voted for Obama in 2008, Obama and 12, Trump in 16, and then flip back to Biden in 2020.
[25] And so these were only 25 counties in the entire United States out of 3 ,142 counties.
[26] So we're talking 0 .008 % of the counties in the United States mark themselves as Bellwether counties where they flipped.
[27] So that's really the difference in what this population is.
[28] I mean, we're talking about a really, really small group of people that are really, really influential because they got it right for all those elections.
[29] Right.
[30] And how narrow that is, is remarkable.
[31] This is a razor -thin margin that ends up deciding these races.
[32] So what did we find?
[33] You looked at these in key counties.
[34] What have we learned?
[35] Where are things trending in these counties?
[36] Yeah, so Biden won these counties by about two points.
[37] If you put them all together, you want them by two points.
[38] And this poll, which is exclusive to the Daily Wire, this is the first time it's been talked about.
[39] Right now, Trump is leading by two points on the two -way ballot.
[40] And then on the full ballot, he's leading by three points.
[41] Now, these margins are smaller than the national margins.
[42] But you have to remember back in In 2020, Biden was leading nationally by five and only won these by two.
[43] Right now, we kind of have the inverse where Trump is leading by five nationally and winning these by two.
[44] So you can see how tight and narrow these counties are, but a lot of it is driven by economic factors of the anxiety around cost of living and where are we headed as a country and how can people make ends meet.
[45] And is there an economic future for their kids?
[46] And that's really, was to me, the driving factor in the data of these Bellwether County.
[47] where are they located what states oh gosh they're literally all over the place i mean you've got some in in the battleground states but you even have a couple in uh new hampshire which i would not consider a battleground state new york state so it's not they're really all over the place which i think makes them even more unique yeah and what about the rust belt how much is that going to factor into who wins or loses this election well if if joe biden loses any one of the Rust Belt states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, there's almost no path for him.
[48] And many of these Bellwether counties are located within those three Rust Belt states because Trump's going to win Arizona and Georgia.
[49] That's off the map for the Biden campaign.
[50] And so it really comes down to those three states.
[51] And this is almost a microcosm of what you're seeing within those those Rust Belt states.
[52] You bring up Arizona and Georgia, those were considered potentially battleground.
[53] You're saying they're not anymore.
[54] North Carolina was also on the list months ago.
[55] You're saying that's off the table too.
[56] That's going Trump.
[57] It's hard to see how Biden could compete in that state right now.
[58] So then it does come down to these three states.
[59] If Trump wins Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan, he wins.
[60] That's it.
[61] Game over.
[62] What if he, what if this is a true landslide and he takes something like a Virginia, how does that change the equation?
[63] Well, I would advise Republicans to not get distracted by potential fools gold.
[64] Yes, maybe we get close in those states, but I'd rather win one of these rest -belt states and just put it away.
[65] I mean, landslides are great, but a W is a W. Now, you mentioned the full ticket versus just the head -to -head Trump versus Biden polling.
[66] RFK, when he has entered into the equation, helps Trump more or Biden, just to be clear.
[67] Well, it honestly depends on the state.
[68] And in this instance, it actually helps Trump more.
[69] But we're talking one point.
[70] This is very small numbers.
[71] that we're dealing with, but when you look at this Bellwether survey, you've got about 20 % of the folks that fall into the double haters category, which are people who don't like Trump and they don't like Biden.
[72] And what we see nationally is that Biden actually leads that group somewhat on a national perspective, but not here with these double haters.
[73] And that is the group that tends to make up the difference between a two -way ballot and the full ballot.
[74] And in reality, we are going to end up with a full ballot because it's not just going to have two names on it in the presidential column.
[75] Mm -hmm.
[76] Now, we don't have any modern historical precedent, but what sort of polling bump, if any, do you expect President Trump to receive following the attempt on his life?
[77] Well, the national polls I've seen come out since then have not really shown anything.
[78] I mean, it's actually odd and where you've seen Biden's ballot share come up a little bit.
[79] But I personally believe that Trump has somewhat of a ceiling and that has nothing to do with him.
[80] That just has to do with the partisan nature of politics and how intense that is right now.
[81] And you even see that partisanship within.
[82] this bellwether survey that we conducted with y 'all and and democrats if you go back and look at say the last 10 years of elections as the republicans of democrats have swapped their bases to where republicans were the more educated suburban party and now those people have gone democratic and the working class vote was democratic and now they've gone republican it's amazing but a lot of this you see within the rust belt states and that's why i think you know demographically give it 15 years and we're going to have a different map that Democrats have to go win to win the presidency because even non -white working class folks are starting to come over to the Republican Party.
[83] And I think you see it here at the convention and who's up on the podium speaking and what they're talking about.
[84] Republicans have been saying that they're seeing momentum among basically every demographic.
[85] Do you think that's actually a fair assessment of what's happened in the last few months.
[86] It's been an odd last few months.
[87] It's been a fascinating last couple weeks.
[88] Yeah.
[89] And, you know, six months ago when our clients were saying, should I even jump in and run if Trump's on the ballot?
[90] And I said, you know, get in, run your race, because there's going to be multiple black swan events between now and November 5th.
[91] And I had many of them that have occurred this far were not on my dance card.
[92] On no ones, I'm sure.
[93] You found that 13 % of Biden 2020 voters are not committed to him this election.
[94] Who are they going for?
[95] Is it Trump or is it RFK?
[96] Well, currently it's just undecided.
[97] And what's really interesting when you look at these Bellwether counties is Trump is winning 93 % of people who voted for him in 2020 in these counties.
[98] And as you said, Biden's only winning 87 % of his voters.
[99] And so when you go look at the multi -way ballot, that is when you're able to to see some of these voters move.
[100] And when we look at the full ballot, you can actually see that Trump does 10 points better holding on to his 2020 voters than Biden does.
[101] And then when we're looking at, you know, where is RFK pulling these votes from?
[102] It's actually younger women, which is fascinating, women under the age of 55 women without a college degree.
[103] He's getting 13 % of independence.
[104] And, you know, this is one of the reasons.
[105] that we have been telling Republicans, like non -college -educated women, are not nearly as strong for Republicans as non -college -educated men.
[106] So we need to make the whole campaign, regardless of what level you're running at as a Republican, you've got to spend 80 % of your time and money and message on non -college educated women.
[107] Fascinating.
[108] The mom vote has been a big factor in recent elections.
[109] And I'm very curious to see how that plays out this year.
[110] Now, we have an overwhelming number of Americans that feel like the country is going in the wrong direction, one in four voters, that's it, say that the country is moving in the right direction.
[111] Have we ever seen an incumbent president actually win with that kind of polling?
[112] Well, I think we could look at 2022 and almost use that as a proxy to where I think we've decoupled from direction of the country being an almost one -to -one indicative of who's going to win.
[113] So where if, you know, the Republicans are in charge and everybody says the country's in the wrong directions, the Republicans lose.
[114] I really think we have decoupled past that.
[115] We've also decoupled past where image, which is favorability and unfavorability, is a very predictive factor, at least at the top of the ticket, because we can have two guys who are underwater significantly.
[116] One of them has to win, which means there are going to have to be people who say, I don't like that guy and I'm voting for him.
[117] And so it's just this new direction that we find ourselves in.
[118] And I was conducting a focus group of these double haters, of folks who were working class, they're younger, they're more diverse, and they're just ticked off about everything, which is why they're double haters.
[119] And when I said, what's the number one issue?
[120] And I was thinking, okay, we're going down the economic rabbit hole.
[121] We're going to talk about inflation, cost of living.
[122] It was crickets.
[123] I had 20 minutes in the guide to talk to these folks about their issues, and they didn't say anything.
[124] So I said, can I take my moderator hat off and just put a statement out there and you tell me if you agree or disagree with it?
[125] And I I said, here's the statement.
[126] Everything is so bad, I don't even know where to start.
[127] And all the heads started nodding, and that got the conversation going.
[128] And it made me realize that this is not the inflation election.
[129] This is the frustration election.
[130] And I think that changes the whole game and narrative.
[131] And it goes to what you were saying about direction of the country, where you've got three -fourths of folks, basically, who are saying, we're not going the right way, but many of them are still going to vote for Democrats.
[132] And so it is not just about inflation, It's about frustration.
[133] It's about that feeling of nothing seems to be going right.
[134] Final question.
[135] In your view from your many studies and your expertise on all the polling, all the trends, what do you think in the end this election comes down to?
[136] I think it comes down to, as everybody says, turnout.
[137] And that might seem like a cop -out, but really there is a group of folks that are lower propensity voters.
[138] They don't show up in mid -terms.
[139] They don't pay attention as much to what they're.
[140] going on in the news.
[141] They're not hyper -focused on politics because they're just trying to get by.
[142] And that is the group of voters who has been trending hardest towards Donald Trump.
[143] That's the group of voters that you can tell at this convention that they're trying to speak to, assuming that they're paying attention.
[144] And them deciding on November 5th or an early voting to actually participate is going to be the difference.
[145] I don't think that persuasion is going to define this election.
[146] It's going to be, can Donald Trump get these people actually out to the polls.
[147] And particularly in the counties that you deeply studied.
[148] Yep.
[149] Again, razor sin margins in the end often decide this.
[150] Brent Buchanan, thank you so much for joining us.
[151] My pleasure.
[152] That was Brent Buchanan, founder of Signal Polling Group, and this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.