We are 100 days into the second Trump administration and there's no better person to help us understand what voters are making of these first months of Trump 2.0 than Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson.
Kristen is a founding partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm. She's a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and an on air political contributor at CNN.
Quick disclaimer: we taped this conversation on Thursday, April 24th, before the flurry of 100 day polls were released this past weekend. That's why you won't hear us asking her about these polls.
But the reason we wanted to have Kristen on in the first place was that we didn't want to get caught up in the immediate set of data. We wanted Kristen to do what she does best which is to filter the signal from the noise, present a 30,000 view of the political environment rather than focusing on the minutiae or just small movements in data. What we like about Kristen so much is that she's able to to toggle seamlessly between reading cross tabs but also probing voters in focus groups and really listening to what they are saying or not saying, and then explaining it to regular people in a way that is approachable but not condescending.
That's why we were especially excited to talk with her about a presidency as complicated and unprecedented as Trump's.
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