Interview Only w/ Rich Thau - What Swing Voters Really Think… And Why That’s BAD For Democrats - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Well, joining me now somebody I've known for a couple
of decades, Rich Taw. He is a message guru, if
you will, a market research tester, makes his living helping
advocacy groups and trade associations test various messages to try
to appeal to certain constituencies where I consume a lot

(00:32):
of his work is for something called the Swing Voter Project.
It's something he does in conjunction with Axios. If you
are a subscriber to those Axios newsletters and you've and
you've seen analysis of the Biden Trump voter, or the
Obama Trump voter, or the Obama Trump Biden Trump voter,
it's all thanks to Rich here and he goes state

(00:53):
by state. Tessed with him. I watch Sheep has a
YouTube channel. It's there. He puts up highlights of his
monthly swing voter groups that he does. There was one
in Michigan that I spent a lot of time. If
you guys will recall those sophisticated listeners of my podcast

(01:14):
have already heard me taut Rich's focus groups of Michigan.
He's got some new ones in Pennsylvania, but he's probably
arguably talked to more Biden Trump voters than anybody in
America and probably has his pulse, his finger on the
pulse of these voters as well as anybody. Rich hod

(01:34):
I do promoting you on this one, and you know what,
am I leaving.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Out ten out of ten? Perfect job, Thank you. It's
an honor to be with you, Chuck. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
And you're also doing a Decider's project which is very similar. Again,
these are it's all qualitative research. It's focus groups, it's
not polling. And I want to get into sort of
those the differences in those techniques and the ability now
that you can focus we have larger and larger focus groups.
At what point does it become quantitative instead of qualitative?
We can talk about that, but you really are you

(02:11):
really are a big You feel like you get a
lot out of focus groups, don't you?

Speaker 3 (02:17):
I do.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
And the reason for that is a lot of people
in research like to count heads.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
I like to see what's inside people's heads.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
And that's the distinction between quant and qual For me
is I want to understand why people believe what they
believe what they know, as opposed to guessing what they know,
as supposed to me only saying well, seventy one percent
believe this, twenty nine percent believe that.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
No, it's it's I always say, the single most important
question I try to answer all the time in political
analysis is the why? Right? Why is at the core
It's the single most important question I think that we
try to answer in the political space. Well, let's just
get Look, you started this. You've gone ten years now
essentially doing these. I feel like you first started doing

(03:01):
the Obama Trump voter focus groups back in the first
Trump term. I did. So you're getting close to ten
years of data now.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
Aren't you? Not quite?

Speaker 2 (03:12):
I'm getting closing in after March of twenty nineteen, So
I again, cause the first month we did it in
person in Appleton, Wisconsin. In fact, for the first thirteen
months from March of twenty nineteen through March of twenty twenty,
we did them in person. I traveled between the East
Coast and the Midwest month after month, and the pandemic
set in. We didn't miss a month. We just kept

(03:32):
going and did them online and became a little bit
easier to recruit because people didn't have to physically go
to a location and we could get people from across
an entire state as opposed to merely one town or
one region in a state. So the pandemic actually tragic
for so many people. Actually for us worked out well
for this particular project.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Has this totally Before we get into sort of the
substance of what you've been finding over the last few
months is the entire focus group world changed to do
in person focus groups matter anymore.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
So, I think they matter.

Speaker 2 (04:07):
A lot of the vendors who had facilities close them
permanently because people were more than willing to do them online.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
So it's a lot of change in that.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Particular to do it online right instead of you know,
hanging out for a couple hours, even though you're getting
paid at some office park, you know, in the suburbs.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, from a respondent perspective, it definitely was less work
for them, although I should say it's more work for
my team because we have to actually, if we want
to do it right, pre qualify people not just in
terms of their demographics and psychographics, but also their Internet connectivity.
You know, literally do they have enough megabits to be

(04:45):
on a zoom call for an hour and a half
without freezing up over and over again. So we actually
literally test every person with a tech check. Well before
you just had to show up and sit in a
seat and you know, eat a turkey sandwich with some
potato chips. So it's a very different type of experience
from my team. But from the response perspective, you know
they're in a comfortable spot. I have to worry about
things like dogs barking and kids bothering people during the

(05:08):
focus group, and I enjoy the experience more in person,
and I can moderate a larger group in person. I
can do ten or twelve people in person, but ten
or twelve boxes on a screen and zoom is impossible.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
My max is like seven.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Well, look, I've conducted focus groups a few times myself.
I've observed quite a few of them in person and
virtually and count me as a skeptic of the in
person focus group. And here's why, Rich, And I'm curious
how you factor this in. I think it's a lot
easier for one person to hijack and in person focus

(05:43):
group than it is a virtual focus group. And that's
always the danger when you're doing this qualitative research, is
it not.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, Well, the hijacking thing, you have to be super
careful about that. So I'll give you away one of
my big secrets, Chuck. I don't think I've ever said
this publicly before. I have been trying to figure out
I had been trying to figure out for years, how
do you get the loudmouth person not to get recruited
into the focus group. And I didn't find a perfect solution,
but I found something that I think anecdotally has worked,

(06:12):
which is, we have a screening question that says, do
you have any bumper stickers on your car that convey
a political message? The idea being if you want the
entire world to know what you believe politically so much
so you're stuck it on the back bumper of your car,
I probably don't want you in my focus group.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Interesting to use that as an eliminator.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
I used that as eliminating.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Absolutely, absolutely love it. I love it. What a great
eliminator question.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, so again, it's not perfect.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
But the other thing is what's the quality of the
moderating right, If you're a decent moderator, you know how
to put the loudmouth person who happens to show up
back in their corner, carefully, respectfully, repeatedly if necessary.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
And I just find it's it takes practice.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
There are techniques doing it, and if you're a crummy moderator,
you can't do it, and the person dominates the conversation,
and that's.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
No, and then you've ruined the focus grip. I've ruined
the focus So I've seen that. Look, it's why frankly
a professional like yourself, Peter. I you know what, I
The person I observed the most over the years was
Peter Hart. Other than yourself. There's there's another prominent person
out there who I think is a bit too leading
in his focus group moderating at times, mister Lunce. And

(07:27):
I'm very friendly with him. You are too. We like Frank.
He is in some ways made focus groups great, right,
made more people aware of them sometimes, I think, and
I actually wonder, can you be an effective focus group
moderator if people know who you are before it starts.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
So I don't want to disparage Frank. I've known him
again thirty plus years.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
No, and he was arguably a pioneer in helping to
make this a mainstream idea to study political habits.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
And dial testing, which he popular which is kind of
key thing I do in my message testing work.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Very important.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
I think One reason why I have generally flown below
the radar is that I want to be anonymous right
to the people who who sit down in a focus group,
and I've I've had focused group respondents come up to
me and say that I'm somehow different from Frank Luntz,
who were had where they had been responded in his
group prior to being in mind and offline.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
I'll tell you a very funny story. I don't want
to repeat it public.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
No, and again I don't I'm not We're not trying
to pick on Frank here. But look, I found this
difficult myself, right I And you know, in the in
the world of network news, you know, they want you know,
you want Chuck Todd and they're talking to voters, right
and you talk to independent voters. It was really hard
sometimes to get them to to you know, not feel

(08:50):
like they were talking to Chuck Todd and feeling like
they were trying to make an answer that I might
have in their own heads that I might quote unquote
approve of or and it's just like no, no, no, no,
It's like you don't you know I'm trying to you know,
I'm trying to, you know, pretend I'm not here type
of mindset, and that's why I asked that. And I've
wondered if Frank, in some ways you can't make the

(09:11):
focus group about the moderator. That's my point, and I
think that's where I have failed, and I'm guessing that
Frank struggles sometimes with that.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah, I think for me, I'm a boring ass, late
middle aged white guy, and I am as vanilla as
I can possibly be in the focus groups.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
I am very good at a failure, not very vanilla.
But yes, you play vanilla well on TV.

Speaker 2 (09:35):
Well, I do, because that's how you get the right answer.
And also that's how you don't get accused of being biased, right,
And I really do everything I can to try to
again throw the pitch straight down the middle of the plate.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
What is how do you verify? You know everybody wants
to say they're a swing voter. Do you go to
the voter file to verify these folks? I know you've
got a recruiting team, is it, Sego? I think, does
your recruiting for all of your focus group projects? Do
you do voter file verification on these people?

Speaker 2 (10:04):
So I do not let me tell you what we
do do. So This is an imperfect process. I am
the first person to admit it. It is impossible to
know who voted for whom or whether they voted. It's
possible to know whether they voted. It' impossible to know
for whom they voted. No one was in the voting
booth or sitting at the kitchen table with them if
they voted at home. Right, So two parts of the
recruiting process. Part one sego recruits them and does not

(10:28):
ask them are you a swing voter? They ask who'd
you vote for in twenty twenty four, and then four
years earlier, who'd you vote for.

Speaker 3 (10:34):
In twenty twenty.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
If they happen to say Trump and twenty four Biden
in twenty, then they immediately make the first cut.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
But that's not enough for me. I have a person
on my team.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
His name is Matt, and one of his jobs is
to personally interview every single one of these swing voters
before the focus group and say, okay, you said you
voted for Trump and twenty four, why did you vote
for Trump and twenty four? Why did you vote for
Biden in twenty twenty? And if they can't give a
plot pausible answer to those questions, they're not invited into
the group.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
We toss them overboard.

Speaker 1 (11:04):
You don't try because another screening question I've heard is
how did you vote in twenty twenty? Not who did
you vote for? But do you remember how you voted
and where you went to vote? I've heard sometimes that
can be an effective screener question to find out if
people are byes and you're not.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
It could be, and maybe we'll start doing it now
that you suggested it.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
I mean, I think it's there's no Again, there's no
perfect way of doing this. And note and what happens
is people's memories fate. I mean, last year we did
focus groups in twenty twenty four we were asking about
their voting patterns in twenty sixteen and twenty twenty. You know,
I don't remember what I had for breakfast two days ago.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
Low and well, especially with COVID brain rich, we've all
liked none. I can't remember anything in twenty nineteen and
twenty fourteen are the same year to me. Sometimes, right,
anything pre COVID is just a blur.

Speaker 3 (11:50):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Absolutely, and so again, no perfect way of doing this.
The thing is people, well I think labels us to
get at least. Something that I think is close to
the most truthful answer that's out there is the fact
that people don't know who or what category we're looking for.
If they knew we were looking for Trump voters, are
looking for consistent Democratic voters, they would answer that way
to get their one hundred and twenty five bucks, But

(12:12):
not knowing what we're looking for, it gives them no
reason to lie to us.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
So one hundred and twenty five bucks a session, right,
and that's what the time commitment is? What three hours?
Two hours? What?

Speaker 2 (12:21):
No? No, no, no, no, it's a total an hour
and forty five minutes, fifteen minutes sort of warm up,
and then ninety minutes of conversation.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Rich, you are going to have a whole bunch of
my listeners are going to really one hundred twenty five
bucks for less than two hours of work? Count me in.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
It's a good deal.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, it's not a bad deal. Eighty bucks an hour?
Huh a right, not quite yeah, pretty close, No, not
quite that. What are we looking at? Sixty bucks an hour?
But so yeah, not been a good money. Yeah, it's good.
All right, let's dig in. You just did Pennsylvania and
you're just doing the seven battleground states and you're literally
going in a rotation every month. Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Quite a rotation, but it's where we were hitting each
state at least once and most of them twice in
the year.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Got it. So Michigan was the one you flagged a
few to me there that was fascinating. And I keep
talking about this one before we get into Pennsylvania, where
we're going to play some clips for you folks, so
get ready for that. The Michigan group from September. What

(13:23):
stood out to me there was there was this one
gentleman who was really concerned about the consolidation of power,
the lack of checks on Trump, all of these things,
thought he was being power hungry and wasn't ready to
change their vote. Has that been a consistent finding? Are
you starting to see that? Was there a consistency between

(13:43):
Michigan and Pennsylvania on that issue?

Speaker 2 (13:46):
So what's consistent is that not every month, but I've
come across a number of those people who are giving
very anti Trump comments but would not take Harris if
they had to redo the vote. And it happened again

(14:06):
this month in Pennsylvania. I send you a clip on
that where I had a woman who said she disapproved
of Trump.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
I don't. Actually I have it here and I want
to get into this a second, and let's let's you
dove into it, but we're going to play the clip
for folks.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
I disapprove because number one, he's a felon. I don't
think a fellon should be president of the United States.
He's a pathological liar. This ice thing is getting out
of control. If is getting out of control. The government
is shut down, and I don't think that he's doing
enough for the people. Prices or sky high like.

Speaker 5 (14:51):
Insurance premiums are going to be going up, and I
think that he could do something about it.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Okay, Brenda, my part of my job is to play
devil's advocate. So if you love me in a second,
to let me ask you a question. So you mentioned
that he's a convicted felon. He was a convicted felon
before the election. What you voted for him knowing he
was a convicted felon? So why are you holding that
against him now?

Speaker 6 (15:17):
I guess, well, he there should have been something in
place in the constitution. I know what you're asking me,
but I don't know it didn't bother me then, but
now it is because there's so many things coming out,
like you know, with the Maxwell files and all these things.
So I think the Constitution should have done a better

(15:38):
job by saying number one, that he had no political
experience at all, and that the other thing is a.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Convicted brend I'm sorry, I'm me to be argumentative at all,
but he had been president for four years. He had
experience when you voted for him again last November.

Speaker 7 (15:57):
Right, yeah, so I'm I'm I'm some a bit confused,
like why did you choose him over Kamala Harris?

Speaker 5 (16:06):
Because I thought the heme was better that I didn't
particularly like her, so between the two, it was like
I had to go with him because I didn't like her.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
You insert yourself and say, you know, he was a
convicted felon before you voted for him in twenty twenty four,
and then Rich she goes through this Hammin and Han
and she basically like, I just couldn't vote for Kamala harr.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah, Now, Brenda was awesome. That was quite an exchange.
She really had a lot of reasons why she didn't
approve and some of them had nothing to do with
her vote. Because she's just complaining. Also, he didn't have experience,
And I said, well, he served for four years as president.
You can't say in twenty twenty four he didn't have experience, right.

(16:53):
So but really, what it came down to for her
was she couldn't vote for Harris. And what I keep
encountering your earlier point is that there are folks who
twist themselves into pretzels to justify not choosing Harris then
and not choosing Harris now if they could revote, they
just for a variety of reasons, cannot abide her and

(17:15):
will take anything from Trump.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Richard, Are we going to talk around the elephant in
the room? Right? I mean, it's hard not to wonder
if this had to do with her being a black woman.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
Well, so you've got multiple issues there, right, You've got
woman of color, person of color, and female. So I've
come across in the course of the last year plus,
people who wouldn't vote for her because she was female,
who told me.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
Explicitly that they wouldn't vote for her because she was.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Female, People who danced around the race issue. But certainly
I suspected from the comments that they that was the reason.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Well, that's funny like, look, Brenda's it's one of those.
She says, I thought he was better than I didn't
particularly like her, so between the two, it was like
I had to go with it because they didn't like
her like she doesn't. She can't can't articulate why she
doesn't like her.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yeah, and keep in mind, Brent is a woman of color,
so super super interesting, and I've got I.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Don't know what to make of that. That's fair.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, well, but I can tell you what to make
of it. To me, it's fractly pretty straightforward. For some
of these folks I spoke to, they are either deeply
religious or deeply conservative socially, they think that men should
be in control, men should be in power, women should not, and.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Biden was somebody they could vote for. But Clinton and
Harris may have been literally simply their gender may have
been the disqualifier for these voters.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
It would have been a large part of the consideration,
along with By the way, a lot of these folks
thought that Biden failed and she was part of a
failed administration, and they didn't want to have their fingerprints
on that for the next four years.

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the twenty twenty four campaign. You know and there's different

(19:56):
ways people want to interpret it. I was actually relieved
to know that voting was normal. It is normal to
me that people simply vote against and vote on the
economy like that has been you know, That's how you
and I were professionally raised in politics, right Rich, Like
that is how it worked in the eighties and the
nineties and the odds, Like, that's just how it worked.

(20:18):
Only recently have we made all these other issues in there,
and you're like, oh, wait a minute, post COVID voters
are starting to behave we're more normally again. It's about finances,
it's about competency.

Speaker 3 (20:31):
It is and I will say on whether you have
E clip on this also.

Speaker 2 (20:34):
But one thing that we uncover month after month is
that the dissatisfaction with Trump among these Biden to Trump voters,
among those who are dissatisfied with him now, it's mostly tied,
not exclusively, but mostly tied to the state of the
economy and how they're struggling, and how they see a
billionaire who doesn't need to have to worry about these things,

(20:55):
not addressing the concern that most matters to them.

Speaker 8 (21:00):
Doesn't affect him. Simple he's not feeling the effects of it.
So when you're not directly impacted by something, even if
it's going on around you, you tend not to worry
about it. He's too busy playing hopscotch in Russia. I
don't know, he's just not worried about anything over here.

Speaker 9 (21:18):
Well, I think that he's more focused overall on the
economy as a whole. He's focused on using tariffs and
carpet bombing with tariffs to try to force deals, which
he hopes eventually will address inflation. But it's not he
thinks he's going to bring jobs back by forcing these tariffs.

(21:39):
It's almost an unforced error. If he was focusing on
one place than another with his tariffs, it wouldn't hurt
as bad. But he just has to hit everybody all once,
all at the same time with them, and it's causing
mayhem with prices of goods and services overall.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
What I find remarkable is how much they're following the
day to day on tariffs like these. Weren't uninformed voters
about the current state of the economy, which if I
were in the Trump white House that would really make
me nervous. They're following this tariff stuff fairly closely.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
So one of the great fascinations I have with the
project now compared to a year ago when I was
doing then Trump to Biden voters as supposed to now
Biden to Trump voters, was that I would ask Biden
voters people vote for him in twenty twenty, please name,
if you could, one thing that President Biden has achieved

(22:35):
in office that he himself would call an achievement. So
I didn't want a snarky answer like, oh, he achieved
high inflation. I didn't want so, okay, So the people
would stop, and about roughly half each time I asked
it could not name a single thing that Biden had
achieved in office that he himself would call an achievement.
And among those who could name something, way disproportionately it

(22:57):
was the same topic student loan relief.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
No kidding, now, infrastructure, which was actually probably the best
to achievement he got.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
You know, chuck It says, though infrastructure never happened, chips
never happened, Relief Act never happened, Inflation Reduction Act never happened.
So for them, I want you imagine the mind of
a swing voter. Now I'll get to the Trump point
about it in a second. The comparison. So you're thinking
about President Biden, you're thinking, okay, so he's basically slept

(23:26):
through the last three and a half years. One time
they came to him with an executive order, he signed
it trying to relieve student debt, and that's all he did.

Speaker 3 (23:36):
And that's your conception of him.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Trump comes in and suddenly he's in the news constantly,
He's in your social media feed constantly, and if you
have voted for him, you're like, finally someone is doing something.
So it's the bias toward action versus the disapproval of inertia,
which is what they associated with Biden. And I can't
tell you how many times this year I've heard about Trump.

(24:01):
At least he's doing something. Whether they like it or not.
They still like the fact that there's action as opposed
to Biden's inertia.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
No, I've always said that what's interesting, there's always motion
with Trump. The question is is their movement. Like I
have always said, I feel like life with Trump, covering
him is literally like being on a roller coaster because
you get on and off in the same place.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
Well, but that's from your perspective, getting as close to
the process as you are.

Speaker 3 (24:31):
You see that. I think that nuance is lost with
the folks that I'm talking to.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
So, you know, Trump's his flair for the dramatic. His
ability to sign his name in huge bowld letters with
a big sharpie and to hold it up. That looks
like action to someone who didn't happen to see Biden
signing these multi trillion dollar bills into law, and Trump's
doing it repeatedly. The image of him in the Oval

(24:56):
Office is him holding up some leather binder with his
big signature on it and then boasting about it.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
And for people I talked to, that's action.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
You know, it's interesting Rich to take a step back here.
Biden really was an outlier of the last thirty years
in how they conducted that presidency. When I think about
the image management of the you know, Michael Deaver and
Ronald Reagan right when when I was you know, and
how you know, I basically we in college we studied

(25:26):
Michael Deaver as image management in my political science classes.
Bill Clinton was clearly always you know, some you know
people say he was. We would borrow some of Reagan's
gestures and stuff, and he had he was always performing
George W. Bush. They were very image conscious. It ended
up biting them in the butt with the mission accomplished

(25:46):
thing at one point. But again, it was about the visuals.
It was about always, you know, showing showing him and
what they wanted to put him in the best possible light.
Barack Obama was really very much engaged that way. Trump too.
Biden was the out liar. And I guess it's a
combination of old COVID, right, you sort of put all

(26:07):
those together, and you know, I wonder if if the
Democrats are overrating their problems. Basically, they just had a
nominee that just wasn't built for the modern media age.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Now, to me, he dealt with the media the way
Jerry Ford dealt with the media, which is seriously, I mean.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
It was make that a Jerry Ford reference. You're probably losing, right.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, exactly that.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
I'll sign a bill, have a ceremonial, We'll invite the
three major networks and everybody will know about it, and
lo and behold, they didn't. And I have a whole
montage I can show it to you someday of swing
voters in during Biden's term having no idea what was
going on in terms of process in Washington, achievements. Did
no idea he worked on climate change, no idea about infrastructure, No,

(26:52):
didn't know it. Who served on the January sixth committee.
I mean, just go down the list of stuff they
just didn't pay attention to. And so the challenge it's
really obviously we're dancing around the term. It's the attention
economy we're living in that Trump has mastered it. Biden
never mastered it. And I would argue if the Democrats
have any chance of winning anything again, they have to

(27:12):
learn how to master it, because that's the world we're
living in where people are distracted constantly and Trump manages
to break through it, and you've got to.

Speaker 1 (27:19):
You know, it's interesting because I'll have my friends in
the left say it's you. People in the media didn't
do enough to showcase Biden, and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
I'm like, you know, if you actually do all your
Google searching up, there's plenty of coverage of everything you did.
What was missing was Biden trying to amplify the coverage himself.
And I think, what you know, what just about everybody

(27:40):
in corporate America is doing I assume you have a
for profit client list these days who are thinking the
same thing, which is you've got to take it. You've
got to do your own communicating. You can't rely on
legacy media, free media anymore. And if you are, you're losing, right,
anybody that does that, whether you're a politician or your
Coca cola right, you've got you know, Bud Light found

(28:01):
out the hard way. Right, You've got to be take advance.
You've got to proactively do your own communicating. This is
not all the media's job, is this or this? We're
all the media now, including the communications shop of the
White House. And I think in that this is where
Biden's entire operation was a relic. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
I mean, you're personally way more entrepreneurial about this than
the entire White House was in the last administration. So
I mean that's the difference, and I think people have
to understand that. And the thing was a lot of
people follow the Swing Voter project, people on the left,
people on the right. There are folks in the Biden
administration I know paid attention to what I was producing

(28:42):
each month, and it was abundantly clear from these highlights
videos I put out that the message wasn't getting through,
and I was always mystified by this. Now it wasn't
just me. Obviously, I'm just one guy out there. I'm
not tied to the administration. I mean, Republicans like what
I do too, But my god, like, really, month after month,
I'm discovering that no one knows about your multi trillion
dollar legislative achievements. How is that not something that you're

(29:05):
solving for? I was, again, just a question I'm asking.
Let's put it that.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Way, all right. I want to do another excerpt here
because this is a little counterintuitive to what I think
conventional wisdom is these days, is whether Trump is exercising
more executive power trying to consolidate the presidency. We've had
the no King's rally, right, is this penetrating? Is this
an issue? So let's play this exchange. You have Kaylana

(29:30):
h Anthony D Jim b All responding here on this
question of the simple question you asked, was you know,
do you see Trump exercising more power than Biden, Obama
and Bush. So let's let's sen know those answers.

Speaker 10 (29:45):
I mean, they've all deported people, They've all, you know,
done different things. But I mean, maybe not in the
same towards the same topic, but I think generally as
a whole, Dave, he's about the same with executive power.

Speaker 3 (30:07):
Okay, Anthony, what about you?

Speaker 11 (30:11):
Similar to what was said that, I think that, but
being in the president, he has ultimate authority similar to
what the other roles were as well with the other
previous presidents. Maybe he's more vocal saying it, but I
think I don't see any difference with what they were
able to do and what they've done.

Speaker 12 (30:27):
Barack Obama and Joe Biden had more executive orders than
any president by numbers.

Speaker 1 (30:35):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 12 (30:36):
George Bush and Barack Obama had more executive orders than
anyone they had. I mean, George Bush used the nine
to eleven bombing to push consolidate power in the presidency.
Barack Obama did it because he had pretty much everyone
behind him for whatever he did. So those two definitely,

(30:59):
if not more the same amount.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
I'll tell you what's interesting here, Rich, is that they
they all think it's no different than Obama or Bush
in particular, and even Biden to an extent. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
So the thirteen people I had in Pennsylvania, about half
of them thought he was exercising more, but about half
of them thought it was the same amount as these
prior presidents. And as just noted in these clips, they're
basically saying, well, you know, Obama did this executive thing,
and Biden did this thing, and they're comparing what they

(31:36):
see Trump doing to what these prior presidents doing, and
they don't detect a qualitative difference. And to me, that
was so fascinating is that the media is constantly talking
about how Trump is breaking all these norms, but they
don't see that. They see Trump as just being part
of a continualum of presidents doing things they shouldn't be doing.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Let me let me posit something here for you to
take in, which is whether it was amplify. Fine, I'm
going to connect something here from the one thing Biden
that you said voters took away from what they thought
Biden accomplished with student loans. What's interesting about that topic
that happens to be a topic that the right also
amplified when he did it. When I look at executive

(32:17):
power with Bush, Obama and Biden, and Trump, the party
out of power would amplify anytime that they thought they
were over using their power. Bush with FISA and all
of that, Obama with his executive orders, Biden with what
he did. You know, it seems as if the only

(32:38):
way these swing voters actually get an idea of what
a president does is not only how they amplify it,
but how the opponents amplify it. And this strikes me
as while maybe we as sort of more neutral Washington
pros and understand how executive power works, and yeah, Trump
really is consolidating power way we haven't seen before, because

(33:02):
that accusation has been out there about, you know, from
the right on Obama and Biden and from the left
on Bush and Trump. It is not unusual to the
average swing voter, is it.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
It's not. I think that's a brilliant observation.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
And having your actions defined by your enemies means that
you don't necessarily have control of that narrative. It's obviously
it's coming from the people who disagree with you. And
it could easily be the case that the people who
I talk to who are unhappy with Trump's executive actions

(33:36):
are getting their news from sources that are amplifying that
in a way that the people who aren't bothered by
his actions.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yeah, yeah, reaction are you seeing. Is that a pattern
that you noticed when you started this back in twenty nineteen,
that in some way what breaks through is not just
what is what the opponents are also talking about, that
that's ultimately what breaks through is when you actually engage,

(34:03):
when you get both positive coverage and negative coverage.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah, it's hard to chuck because the the I ask
people every month where they get their news from traditional media,
whether they get it from social media, and this splintering
and the splintering has been around since the beginning of
the project. People get their news from a variety of sources,
but more and more of them are telling me they're
getting in the news mostly or exclusively from social media sources.

(34:27):
So I'm finding that the universe that they're in is
just totally different from the news consumption that you may
have or I may have. And the idea that someone
never looks at a traditional media outlet ever and they
get their news from TikTok.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
If a war broke out, you know, my first inclination.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
Would be, let's go and see how NBC or CNN
is covering it or Fox. Why How could you just
be looking at TikTok videos? If the United States is attacked.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Well, let me reassure you about something. Actually, I was
involved with a conference called Trust in Media and where
it's more about trust in the entire information ecosystem, working
with a group of folks who come actually from the
national security space, people that worked in the first Trump term,
who were worried about the health of the information ecosystem. Right,
this is bigger than just journalism. And so we had

(35:23):
a presentation John Delavope, who's done a lot of gen
Z and millennial work, one of the notations and Edelman
also did a presentation that when there is breaking news,
when there is a huge story, that there is still
a desire to go to a main, a legacy news source,
and that even among gen Z or millennials, the only

(35:47):
almost the one time that they will check into those
sources is if something big is happening, right, a big moment,
they think, oh, I better go check that out. Right,
there's a shooting or there's a storm or something like that.
So it's not all TikTok yet, right, I mean I was.
I was oddly reassured that younger folks, who are almost

(36:10):
mostly getting their stuff and essentially curating their own media,
is what I call it it's self curation. Some of
it is legacy, but they don't know that it's legacy. Right.
They follow somebody specifically who just happens to work at
a legacy media company. Right. But I was I thought
that was interesting, So I take your point there. But
it does feel like when the chips are down, they think, oh,

(36:33):
those big companies have the resources to do live reporting
right now. Right, there's still that perception out there.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
Yeah, I guess I question is how often does that
happen given their lack of knowledge of all the things
that Biden did for four years that were widely covered
when they happened. That's why, and particularly Chuck, the things
that get missed by my swing voters are process related things,
legislation getting passed in Congress, things being signed into law,
and emotional hearings.

Speaker 3 (36:59):
That's the they never happened for most of these folks.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
All right, Well, here's I'm gonna the last clip we're
going to play here is as a this is this
to me is the probably one of your favorite questions
because you just find out what is breaking through? You
asked us each month, what question would you ask President
Trump if you could ask him anything. So let's play
all the responses here.

Speaker 4 (37:23):
But ask why so many lies.

Speaker 10 (37:28):
About everything?

Speaker 4 (37:29):
I would ask him what he's doing for the economy.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
That was a big part of his campaign promise, and
I don't see any difference steam files.

Speaker 3 (37:38):
What about the Epstein files?

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Would you want to know?

Speaker 4 (37:41):
Why aren't they released?

Speaker 9 (37:42):
I might ask him how much controled donors have over
his decisions.

Speaker 4 (37:46):
I'd ask him how he managed to get the hostages
out of Gaza, But ask.

Speaker 11 (37:51):
What he thinks is the biggest threat to the United
States right now?

Speaker 1 (37:56):
Why do you love Russia so much?

Speaker 4 (37:58):
Are you in the Epstein as I.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
Would ask if you would handle January sixth different if
he had the chance.

Speaker 3 (38:06):
To, do you really care about people and everything we're
going through?

Speaker 12 (38:10):
Will he ever learn to not attack every person that
disagrees with him?

Speaker 8 (38:15):
Is there a way to benefit financially him and his
billionaire buddies without attacking the poor?

Speaker 1 (38:23):
All right, let's see Epstein shows up once twice, three times?
That's interesting? What breaks through that Epstein broke through a
little bit of Russia campaign donor stuff? What shocked you?

Speaker 2 (38:44):
So here's what I take away from this exercise. I've
been this has been happening month over a month. So
I in this group, I think I mentioned six basically
approve of Trump's actions in office, seven disapproved.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
It's about the ratio we're on, right, It's about that right,
It's like a forty five fifty five ratio, depending on
the all you use exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
But among the people who approve of what he is doing,
they still made a number of very negative comments or
ask negative questions when I asked them to come up
with a question for the president, so they could have
asked questions like what makes you such an effective leader?
Or how did you broker such an amazing deal in
the Middle East? Go down all these lists of questions

(39:27):
that would have been indicative of an appreciation.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
And advarratious one. I mean it was one, Carolyn m
I'd ask him how he managed to get the hostages
out of Gaza. Okay, feels like a supportive type of question.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
That's one, But the rest of them are all basically negative.
And to me, what it suggests is that while they
approve of his performance in office, among those who approve,
there are still very significant lingering doubts. And it's it's
almost like making a bee line to their psyche when
it comes to how they feel about Trump, What question

(39:59):
would you ask skip.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
If I were a democratic strategy here trying to figure
out how do I win over these voters. I sit
here and I look at these questions, and I'm sure,
I think I can do this with every one of
your proofs, and I'd be like, oh my god. They
know everything I would use against him. They know he's
kind of in the hands of Russia, they know he's
kind of in the hands of big rich people. They
know all these things, and they vote for him. Anyway,

(40:26):
What would you tell a client that thought, well, these
people must not know these things, and it's like, oh, no,
they do, and they don't approve of them either, but
they still voted for him. What do you take away
from that?

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Well, what I take away from that is that a
lot of their focus is on things that they say
when you ask them about it matters somewhat, but don't
get to the nub of what really is bothering them
and what is bothering them the most right now, if
I had to broadly generalize among those people who are struggling,

(41:04):
is his performance on the economy and the idea that
he is a billionaire who promised to get inflation under
control and they're still struggling to make ends meet. Go
back to the thing we were talking about earlier on
the economy, and how that is sort of the traditional
issue that regulates how people feel the economy comes up

(41:26):
organically in the conversations, Chuck when I ask them, what.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
Issue not the only issue that comes up organically.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
It's not the only one.

Speaker 2 (41:35):
Immigration comes up, mostly in an approving way, but sort
of often the times I like what he's doing, I
don't like how he's doing it.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
That is the theme of most of these groups. For me,
that's what I always take away, and I'm always very careful.
I'm like, you know, what democrats don't understand is voters
like his goals. They don't like his execution.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
Yeah, they don't.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
The way I try to analogize Trump, who have struggled
to understand why.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
People like him or approve of him, I shouldn't.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
I'm just going to say, these people don't like them,
but vote for him. This is different, right, we don't
like them. And yet you know, it's like Aaron Sorkin wrote,
you want me on that wall in deep dark corners
at the parties, you don't want to admit to your friends, right,
Like it's the Jack Nicholson monologue from a few good.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
Men, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
And so the analogy I use is a little bit different,
is like a medical analogy. So the reputation that surgeons have,
for example, of not being warm and fuzzy.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Kind of jerky. Yeah, yeah, I know it all. It's
god complex, et cetera.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
But at the end of the day, if they know
how to take out that infected whatever it's in your body,
and they do that, right, who cares if they're and
you know what, I just I just want to make
sure they can do the job that I hired them
to do, which is in this case, for example, get
illegal aliens out of the country, or push back on
unfair trade practices from other countries. Those are the kinds

(43:01):
of things that they're willing to tolerate a lot of
his behavior in order to get the ends that they want.
And so that's that's why you get this response. But
but to me, you know, for a lot of the
folks I'm talking to, the vote between Trump and Harris
last year, to draw another analogy out was like being
a thirsty person who has to choose between drinking wheat

(43:23):
grass juice and castor oil. You have to drink something
because you're really thirsty, but whatever you choose is going
to be unpleasant. It tastes like ba right blah, and afterwards,
having drunk it, you're going to think, I really have
to drink that.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
And that's how they feel.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
It's not that they one was was highly preferable to
tell he was two unpleasant choices.

Speaker 1 (43:44):
And and the outcome is likely to leave you in
the bathroom. Now, where do we take this? Going all
the way right now?

Speaker 3 (43:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, stop yeah. Let me ask one other
question about these groups this year, and I assume any
Democrats breaking through in a positive way to these voters.

Speaker 3 (44:07):
No.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
And I have to tell you if you if we
were doing a little thesaurus dot com right now and
typed in the word contempt and ask for every synonym
for the word contempt, those are the adjectives these folks
used to describe how they feel about the Democratic Party.
Not only that, to your question directly, there's no Democrat

(44:27):
on the horizon that gets them excited. They're not paying
a lot of attention to the to the presidential race,
in twenty twenty eight, I did show them a Gavin
Newsom social media post mocking the president's style.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
They they thought it was not genuine, not that words.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
They thought it was real, like he had done it,
but they thought he was basically taking.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
The President's style, trying too hard.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
It's trying too hard. But also that only Trump knows
how to do this.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
Well, Newsom is kind of faking it by doing it,
by taking on the Trump style, and they saw right
through it.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
So I think that's a great warning for people. I
think the because I have some sources on the left
to think, hey, I want to find my own Trump.
I'm like, do you are you sure? I don't know
if Americans want Trump light, and I don't know if
they want to. Sometimes you don't want more a derivative
of something you maybe only wanted to have once.

Speaker 2 (45:23):
Anyway, Well, and some would argue that Governor DeSantis found
that out the hard way the Republican primary.

Speaker 1 (45:29):
Right, No, you know it. What people want is Trump's
personality more than the policies. Yeah, And I think that's
the that's the probably the hard the hardest thing for
political strategist to accept in this in this current conversation.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
I got to tell you, Chuck, I've been at the
focus group business now for twenty four years. I've moderated
well more than a thousand focus groups in the course
of my career and going back well before Trump was
ever a nominee ever on the politic will scene at all.
I'm talking about two thousand and eight, twenty twelve whatever.
I kept turing over and over again from people center right.

(46:09):
We want somebody who fights. Republicans don't fight, They give
up too easily. The Democrats are constantly all over them.
The Democrats know how to fight, Republicans don't know how
to fight. And Trump scratched an itch. He scratched the
itch of somebody who's willing to fight for them.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
Well, now are the left that's that? Now it's the
left that's complaining that Democrats don't know how to fight exactly.

Speaker 2 (46:32):
That's the thing I always found hilarious is that Democrats
think that Republicans fight better. Republicans think the Democrats fight better.
And I've heard this in groups, separate groups and over
the course of years, and it's always amazed me that
neither one has an appreciation for their own ability to
fight and an overestimation of the other side's ability to fight.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
That's always so true. And ultimately, you know, it's whichever
side is presiding over a better economy is the better fighter.
It's funny that it works, right, It's it's it's sometimes
that's does anybody else pop positively? Forget Democrats? I mean,
when you you know, you know, is there is there

(47:08):
admiration for Silicon Valley or skepticism? Is there? You know?
Is this rise in sort of you know, Steve Bannon
and I had a I had interviewed Bannon a few
months ago, and you know, so he said, you know,
I was asking him why he and Lena Kahan have
something in common, and his his thesis was, well, we're

(47:30):
both skeptical when of consolidated power. And I thought that
that was a pretty fair that that is what what
we ignites the Sanders voter and the Trump voter. Is that, right,
a bit of skepticism of the powerful institutions. Are these
voters that are they the are they the skeptics or
are they something else?

Speaker 2 (47:50):
I wouldn't describe them as being I mean, they're definitely skeptical,
So yes to that question.

Speaker 1 (47:56):
No doubt that the vote against. They're not vote for us, right,
they vote against there are They feel like people that
decided who not who they couldn't stomach as president, not
necessarily voting for who they preferred.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
I like to describe them as serial presidential monogamous. You
know about the terms, you know, serial date, serial monogamous,
you date one person break.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
I was accused of that over the years. Okay, well
I never could date multiple. I never understood my friends
who could do that. I'm like, I don't know, I
can't do it. So I was a serial monogamous.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, So these are serial presidential monogamous, meaning they dated
George W. Bush, they got sick of him, they chose Obama,
they got sick of Obama, they chose Trump, they got
sick of Trump, they got they chose Biden, and then
they some of them were so sick of Biden they
actually went back to Trump again.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Gave them a second chance. But there they are. There.

Speaker 2 (48:46):
Their loyalty to any presidential candidate or president is a
shallow as a as a tip of a pin.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
And it sounds like they're always looking for something new, always.

Speaker 3 (48:58):
That is, that's absolutely what they want. They are.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
They're easily dissatisfied, easily put off. And the thing that
amazed me back in twenty twenty one was how quickly
they bailed on Biden, you know, And I'd asked them
how they felt about Biden in.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
The first three or four months.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
I feel, I'm feeling relief, I'm feeling proud, I'm feeling calm.
And then within a few months it was like, yeah,
I mean they just one thing, obviously, it is Afghanistan,
the delta variant, and then they were done. And for
three and a half years he could not win them back,
so they were merciless toward him. Some could argue that
that was basically an unforced error on Biden's part, but

(49:33):
these folks did never went back.

Speaker 3 (49:34):
This year very different. Every month.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
The number of people who are approving or disapproving of
Trump is fluctuating endlessly, and there's no consistency from month
to month. And I'll have some higher levels of approval
one month, lower levels the next. There's no seeming pattern
in terms of what direction it's going. I can tell
you roughly, since February, just under sixty percent say they
still approve of the job he's doing. But that's again

(49:59):
February's responds versus aprils versus July versus now, So you
know it's the timing.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
When I asked it. I didn't ask all of.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Them, just in the laste anything consistent about the people
in his orbit. Kennedy, Vance Rubio, and Haig Seth are
arguably the most prominent members in Trump's orbit. Christy Nome,
maybe Stephen Miller. Do any of these folks pop in
these groups?

Speaker 2 (50:25):
Most of these folks are not familiar with most of
these people I asked. I've asked about Robert Kennedy Junior
a couple of times, and healthcare policy. They were split
between approve of Kennedy, disapprove of Kennedy, don't know what
he's doing, so it was kind of shallow For those
who do support. They want to see America be healthier again,

(50:46):
so the MAHA theme is important to them, but they
get very sketchy when you start talking about making it
harder to get vaccinations and those types of things. They're
willing to go along, but just not as far as
Trump is going.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
So if I were watching these focus groups and I
wanted to help Bill McRaven become president, and when the
presidency is an independent, what would I what what what?
What would my advance? What would your advice be to
a I say Bill McRaven, because he's my avatar of
what a what a potential you know sort of uh,

(51:21):
you know, mythical independent figure that that might be able
to break through. I think somebody with a military background. YadA, YadA, YadA.
That's my thesis. Whether it's true or not, it's a
whole nother story. But if you were thinking about trying
to run outside the two party system right now, because
there's such deep sort of distrust of is there something
to glean from these voters or are they are they are?

(51:46):
They just not gonna They're just not gonna be They're
just going to keep picking between the two parties.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
That's a great question.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
I'm not sure necessarily that they are rushing to have
a third party alternative. When I asked about no labels
a couple of years ago, when that was still part
of the conversation, there was a hesitation there to get
involved in those kinds of things, thinking that you'd be
tossing the vote away. But for me, I think they

(52:15):
what I would encourage people who want to break through
center independent like you're describing left or right is I
would try to be raising some issues that I know
matter to people that are not part of the conversation
right now. So, for example, when I asked about Biden's age,
people would tell me, and I asked two questions, what

(52:37):
is the ideal age for someone to be president and
what's the oldest acceptable age for someone to be president?
The ideal age was basically early the mid fifties. The
oldest acceptable age was in the mid sixties on average.

Speaker 3 (52:50):
When I asked that, I.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Rarely do I get an age above seventy as being
oldest acceptable. We now have a president who's almost eighty
years old. We just had one who ended at eighty two.
I would be taught talking about things like setting age
limits for presidents as part of a constitutional amendment. I
think that would be an important thing to do.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
You can break through with these with with you that
actually might connect with voters, I think.

Speaker 3 (53:15):
After having process.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
I asked that skeptically, because as much as ires a
lot of process things I'd like to fix about our democracy,
it's hard to get mass interest in some of these things.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
I would say generally yes in the and in the
absence of having very old presidents for what for us
could easily be twelve years of presidents over the age
of seventy five, seventy or seventy five.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
It's remarkable.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
I think in that context people might be you know,
what I'm done, and I think and the other thing
I would say is, and again I'm going to ask this.
I haven't de gone that deep into it yet, but
I plan to. Is the whole issue of pardons and
having the president have unfettered pardoning power. I can tell
you that the pardons from Biden as he left office

(54:01):
and the part that Trumps has given people since he
took office have enraged a number of these swing voters.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
You know, it's interesting. Corruption is always when you look
at big swings that we've had in midterm elections in particular,
corruption has actually always been one of the through lines.
There's like been an economy and you know, because it's
a way to Hey, they're so worried about their friends.
They're not focused on your bottom line. They're so worried
about this, right, there's this you know, you so a

(54:30):
through line of to me, if you're going to have
a successful midterm, if you're the out party, you need
a little bit of corruption messaging against the party in
power in order to have some success. But I've had
this thesis that the reason it doesn't work against Trump
is these voters already think the whole system is corrupt. Yeah,

(54:51):
he's corrupt, but the entire systems corrupt. Every president does
is a little bit corrupt, So they don't have the
same gag reflects maybe that some of us do watching
what Trump does.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Yeah, I just wonder whether at the end of a
second Trump term, folks who constantly tell me how mistrustful
they are of politicians exactly as you just described, whether
at some point something happens where they say, you know what, this,
what we've just had in the last twelve years has
not worked for us, and they react to it viscerally

(55:31):
to the point where someone who's able to make this
case is able to make it meaningfully and wants to
actually put it at the top of the national agenda.
I don't again, to me, this is going We need
to see the polling on it. We have to see
after the polling shifts and moves more in this direction
of the course of Trump's second term. But to me,
I'm getting a sense that if what Trump has promised

(55:54):
doesn't come to pass for the people who voted for him,
and that what Biden promised didn't come to ask for
them when they voted for him and saw what happened
in his four years. Does that create an opening for
your independent candidate or some reform minded R or D
to say, you know what, it's time for a generational shift.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
I mean, you know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
We're not going to have We're not going to elect
another eighty year old president in twenty eight.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
We may elect our youngest president ever type of mindset.

Speaker 2 (56:23):
Yeah, we have our first millennial president. We'll skip over
gen X altogether. Right, let's start it on that. I know, yeah,
but that's rude, Jenny.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
But that's but the thing.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
But I guess the point is with that comes the
opportunity to make changes and the other thing we're overdue
for if you really know, I just haven't started yet.
Joel Lapor's new book on the Constitution is that you know,
you know, constitutional changes happen in spurts.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
They they're clustered together.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
There are a few short periods of time where you
get three or four amendments all at once, and we
haven't had one of these in a very long time.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
And in fact, I mean this is sort of my people.
You know, people ask me, I'm always say I'm short
term pessimistic, long term optimistic. And this is the reason
if you I think we're loosely in the in you know,
in the in the repeat, you know, sort of repeating
the early twentieth century. And you know, our response to
consolidated power, big business, robber barons getting too close with

(57:27):
government was women's suffrage, giving women the right to vote,
direct election of senators, and the income tax. All of
that was designed essentially to start to tackle this sort
of you know, industrial barons that were sort of dominating
our lives then. And arguably it's the last time we
really did a lot of constitutional maintenance, right. Yeah, we

(57:50):
did the twenty second Amendment, you know, after FDR, and
we gave we lowered the voting aged eighteen, but those
weren't sort of societal ills type of thing, right versus that,
I mean, you're right, we basically we've only really had
three big periods of amending the constitution. This the beginning
the Civil War and essentially right before the New Deal.

Speaker 7 (58:10):
Yeah, and I think if the frustrations that people are
feeling need an outlet, and we can identify the things
that are most angering and frustrating people that we could
easily see another one of those periods coming up.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
And you know, it's funny it, you know, we may
be stumbling upon it. It's like if you're going to
try to run outside the system, right, if you're going
to run against both parties in some form, right, and
you may do it within one of the two parties,
or you run as a third party independent calling for
this constitutional convention so that we can you know, keep
seventy year olds out of the White House, and you
know do campaign you know, you know, put campaign finance

(58:49):
guardrails in here. Maybe undoe presidential pardons. Create a pardon board, right,
so that there isn't you know, essentially we've decided it
turns out that the founders were on this one presidential
pardon was a mistake, and here's a better way to
do it. And you create almost a pardon board where
you still allow for executive pardons, but they actually have

(59:09):
to pass through a committee. It isn't just a singular person,
which many states do. By the way, where we've especially
where there have been scandals. There's a famous Fred Thompson
became an actor because of a pardon scandal in the
state of Tennessee in the seventies. They couldn't find the
guy to play Fred Thompson, so they asked Fred Thompson
to play himself, and his acting career took off from there.

(59:31):
It's one of my favorite little little pieces of Hollywood
political trivia. But boy, you know, talking with you on
this reform and corruption, you know you still got to
talk about the economy, but you might be able to
break through a little bit with reforming and corruption. It
sounds like at least that's what you're thinking.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
I'm thinking that and also tying the two together. Right,
why are people struggling? It's because these vested interests are
holding you back. They're charging you too much, They're making
your life miserable in terms of customer service.

Speaker 3 (01:00:02):
I mean, we haven't Chuck, Chuck, We've talked for an
hour now, we still have having talked about AI, right,
And so.

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
It's so funny. I'm this is and maybe I'm going
to give you a few ideas, or maybe you've already
done this. So one of my favorite when I have
an audience. I'll you know, when I start talking about
people will ask a question about AI. I'll quickly ask is.
I'll say, how many of you would pay extra to
have a human handle customer service? And literally two thirds

(01:00:28):
of the room. Well, I've done this now for the
last few months, and there's always a majority of the
room raises their hand. That a willingness to pay extra
for a human being? It actually is. I am weirdly
optimistic about the AI effication of the Internet because it
may be the thing that gets us outside of our screens.
The more online is artificial, the more we're going to

(01:00:52):
crave humanity. We already are craving it in the customer
service by my anecdotal you know, And I imagine if
you started to ask and all your focus scripts, I
imagine you get the same response. We hate some computer
or robot thinking they know what we're talking about, right
like it just it just drives us nuts, even if
the robot might have the better answer, right it just

(01:01:14):
we're human beings. So no, I'm convinced that you can't
run for president in twenty eight without an answer to
the fear of AI displacement.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Yeah, I read your recent post about this. I thought
it was brilliant in terms of how it's getting politicized.
The analysis was absolutely spot on. Anybody who hasn't read it,
I would ask you to post it with your show
notes here because I think it's a great piece, really important,
and I think whichever party figures this out first is
going to have a huge advantage.

Speaker 3 (01:01:42):
Because the frustration.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
And I gotta tell you, Chuck, I asked Swing voters
about AI couple months ago. Yeah, and the thing that
came up was the loss of humanity exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:01:50):
You're that's the biggest thing that scares.

Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Them it which again, that to me is gives me
hope because we're going to crave in person. I think
it's going to put a premium on in person. Again,
it's going to put a premium on seeing things for yourself.
In fact, I almost wondering, are we going to have

(01:02:12):
retail stores back where you don't necessarily buy the product there,
but you want to see and touch the product before
you order it online and have it delivered to your house. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Well, you're seeing this touch grass movement right, people sing,
getting kids out and outdoors and touching the grass because
touching their screens isn't real. Yeah, there's a lot of
this stuff going on. I just to me, the question
is does how far is it AI able to penetrate
the population because it's so useful to the people that
they give up some of these more tangible things in reality,

(01:02:43):
and that time will tell how.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
That plays out. All right, let me get you out
of here on this. One of my One of the
things I lament is the loss of regionalism, meaning the
suburb of Grand Rapids is no different than a suburb
of Roanoke. Right. You know, people in Atlanta have more
in common with people in Milwaukee than people in Atlanta have,
and north with people in Northwest Georgia et cetera, et cetera.

(01:03:07):
Did world Wisconsin versus Milwaukee, et cetera. You are the
seven swing states, you have the three Midwesterns, you have
the two Western and you have the essentially the two
sun Belt Any regionalism, you're just there anymore? Or are
all these voters in somewhat you know, homogenized American suburbanites.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
Uh, They're mostly homogenized with odd flavors that will come
out at odd moments. So with Arizona swing voters, you'll
still get a little bit of the Barry gold Water Ish.

Speaker 1 (01:03:51):
Arizona's got a little libertarian, a little more libertarian in
them than most of the other states.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Right, Yes, so you have more more of that with
the Pennsylvanians. Part.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
The southeastern Pennsylvanian is just a very low level of
trust and belief in anything that anyone says.

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
I found that over the years. In this region. It's
super super skeptical. I mean even more so. And I
just think the Upper Midwest folks, particularly, you know, the
michigan the Michiganders, there's just more of a salt of
the earth type of conversation with them. They just we
can just well, they were not happy with Trump in

(01:04:29):
March when I spoke to them about trade.

Speaker 3 (01:04:31):
Boy, I was shocked.

Speaker 2 (01:04:33):
At seven weeks into his administration, they were excoriating him
on that topic.

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
But Michigan of all places, right, which when we were
professionally growing up, you'd have thought, well, one state's gonna
like tariffs.

Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
It's FISHI can yeah, But I went back there and
we did those in September and twelve out and thirteen
approved of the job he was doing. So you know, again,
it's it's this odd shift. There's no consistency month to month.
But to answer your question about geography, yeah, it just
you get it's the flavoring that's just a little bits
the seasoning. It's like pizza tastes different in different parts

(01:05:05):
of the country, but it's still basically pizza wherever you go,
and that's kind of the difference.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
Rich, I am such a geek for this stuff. I
could keep going. This is terrific. I where could I know?
You have a YouTube channel? Tell people where they can
find these because you do. You do put up monthly reports.

Speaker 3 (01:05:23):
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:24):
So the easiest place to find us is at Swing
Voter Project dot com. On that page you will find
each month's highlight and that reel is on YouTube, so
if you click it, it'll just play within YouTube, and
I would encourage you to just watch those videos. And
you can also sign up for a monthly update on
the Swing Voter Project dot com page. So just go there,

(01:05:46):
give us your email address. We will not sell you anything,
there's nothing for sale. We don't charge for this stuff,
and just join us on Swing Voter Project dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:05:55):
I'm telling you a whole bunch of them are going
to be like kick I want one hundred and twenty
five bucks to give you my opinion.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
They probably not swing voters though, but if they are,
you know, they can go to Sego by way, go
to sago dot com if you want to register to
participate in focus groups.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
Yeah, oh well that's nice. Do you do you still
do uh, quantitative polling as much? And you know how
much does the focus group influence your questionnaire? Now? Yeah,
I do. I really I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
Personally don't do a huge amount of it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
I'm actually associated with a remarkable company called Alpha Rock.
Do you and I could talk about offline that has
transforming the polling process and looking at longitudinality in questions
in a way that point of time polling doesn't quick
turnaround in polling. They have a tool called Ockham Ockham's
Razor that is just remarkable that a lot of trade

(01:06:46):
associations and others in DC are using. So I've been
working with them to try to get some quant around
some of my focus grouping. But basically, uh, that world
is getting up ended in a way that is well,
deeply needed and well deserved.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
I feel like the best of you know, like my
favorite thing that our polsters at NBC when I was
working with them, used to do was I loved a
good open end right where because to me, what that
was was about helping you formulate a better question down
the road. Absolutely, and that and that to me is
you know I've we've for for for years, would would

(01:07:25):
would reword questions based on stuff we'd see in focus
groups like yours.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Yeah, well, the thing's happening now you're alluded to at
the very beginning so well and where we started, which
is that this OUPHAM tool is able to do quaal
at scale.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Yeah, and so they.

Speaker 2 (01:07:40):
Able to do basically one on one interviews not yet
in a focus group, and one on ones an AI
by yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Yeah, well, well I thought about it, but the I
know somebody who's trying it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
Yeah, No, it's I think it's an important thing to
try to do because there if you can do this
at scale, the insights will be so much richer than
what I can find obviously, which all people.

Speaker 1 (01:08:00):
So much, so much more a thousand that are focus
grouped rather than just you know, multiple choice.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Yeah, it's remarkable and also be able to interpret the answers,
ask meaningful follow ups, categorize the answers, which is what
this tool can do.

Speaker 3 (01:08:16):
So this whole world is getting up ended.

Speaker 2 (01:08:18):
I've been joking that I'll be replaced by a bot,
and my respondents will be replaced by bots, and it'll
be one AI asking other AI questions and kicking out
a report in ten seconds.

Speaker 1 (01:08:27):
And that's going to mean you know what you're gonna
end up doing, create bullshit correct, and then you're going
to be going to an actual event in order to
talk to actual people again. Like we're probably about five
years away from that. Let's go back to shopping malls
and survey people that way, right, like in person with
the clipboard. Everything old will be new again if we're not,

(01:08:49):
if we ai ai it up too much, that's right, exactly, Rich.
This was fantastic. Thank you, my friend, Thank you chucking
honor to do it.

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Interview Only w/ Rich Thau - What Swing Voters Really Think… And Why That’s BAD For Democrats

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Interview Only w/ Rich Thau - What Swing Voters Really Think… And Why That’s BAD For Democrats