 Did you know that just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Joe Biden and Donald Trump from an electoral college tie in 2020? My guest is Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster at Echelon Insights and author of Party of the People inside the Multiracial Coalition Remaking the GOP. We talk about why the major parties continue to leak market share, why 2024 is going to be another super close presidential race, and whether small L-libertarian voters will make the difference in November. Here is the reason interview with Patrick Ruffini. Patrick Ruffini, thanks for talking to me. Thanks, Nick. It's great to be here. Okay, so a party of the people inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, what's the elevator pitch for it? Yeah, I mean, I think that it's no secret to anyone that there have been quite a few changes in our politics over the last decade or so. And, you know, specifically, a lot of those involve changes in who's voting for the parties, and fundamentally, who the parties are for. What do they seem to stand for? So I go back to my early days in politics, which were at the tail end of an era in which, you know, Democrats were primarily pitching themselves to voters and to, you know, and receiving the votes of people who were in the working class. And they really seemed to hold the moral high ground when it came to issues of who's really going to care about someone like me, an average person, you know, in this country. And, you know, with routinely, Hillary Republicans as the party of the rich, as the party of the well to do of the disconnected elite. And I think what we've seen is that has largely flipped, right? And specifically, it's flipped after 2016, where Democrats, we seem to have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees. 64% of voters do not have college degrees. We obviously saw in 2016, how they lost some of those blue wall states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, largely because Trump was able to appeal to this electorate in a way that no Republican had before in flip states that no Republican had won since 1988. Not much of that. Yeah, if I may, to just bring it, you know, a lot of the book is about the Republican Party and the Republican Party is changing. But it's really, you know, can we disentangle this from Trump himself? And, you know, before we get to specific election results, let me ask you early on in the book, as you're, you know, kind of easing into the topic, you talk about how in 2016, and I'm quoting, I had egg on my face in 2016. Can you talk a little bit about why you had egg on your face? And of course, it wasn't just you as virtually all kind of pollsters and strategists and activists. Right. So the presumption, I think heading into the 2016 election, is that Trump is a short loser in the election, if not in the Republican primary, then he's a short loser in the general election. Right. There was always a question, right? Oh, well, you know, will he succeed in this hostile takeover of the Republican Party? And initially I was skeptical, but not long after, you know, it was very clear he was the odds on favorite, because he'd really captured a chunk of large chunk of the electorate, everyone else was squabbling for scraps at the table, right, even though if only at 35%, I mean, no one else was higher than 10%, right, practically speaking at the time. But the idea was, okay, maybe if he can win the Republican nomination, he's a short loser in the general election, based on just his off-color commentary, his, you know, unhinged rally speeches, his, you know, everything that was really conventional wisdom, really, among political observers in 2016, that, you know, a Trump victory, victory of somebody who just flouted political norms, as he did, was just being considered flat out unthinkable in 2016. And so, you know, I was part of that conventional wisdom. I didn't completely discount, Hillary Clinton seemed to be doing herself no favors, I didn't completely discount that. But, you know, it turns out, I think a lesson that I learned after that is that voters also don't really care about the integrity of political norms, as a whole. There's some segment of voters that absolutely deeply care about. But in terms of the center of the electorate, I don't think, you know, most voters are saying, well, politics is this noble thing that Donald Trump is degrading, right? I mean, I think they see politics as something that's down and dirty, dishonest, corrupt, right, in large measure. Lots of people see it that way. And that, of course, was part of Trump's selling point, right, that he was going to drain his swamp. But is it, can I ask, it's an interesting kind of issue, because one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton was so vulnerable was because she was seen as almost uniquely corrupt, right? And in bed with all sorts of bad interests. Right. I mean, so the idea is that, you know, for people like me, who work in politics, right, and particularly for a political class that, you know, sees the people we work with or just trying to see the people we work with as basically well-intentioned people who are trying to make a positive difference for the country, it turns out just very few people actually see it that way. And, you know, Hillary Clinton was absolutely somebody who was paint, your right painted that way. Now, it's, it's funny that, you know, to me, I write about the parallels between Trump and Bill Clinton. Because Bill Clinton, too, was kind of viewed as this unsavory, seedy type of figure, right, during his campaigns and during his presidency, he was slick willy, he could get away with anything. And, you know, in the same way, Trump was somebody who, you know, maybe had disreputable things that he had said and that he had done in his past and always seemed to evade accountability and I think that, you know, there's something to the idea of you can succeed in this environment. If you're, you know, kind of people view you as sort of being authentically, you know, being kind of that rascally scoundrel, like that you're who, you know, is kind of in some way honest about what, you know, with voters about what they're getting. It's when, you know, you've got people who are trying to portray themselves as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and, you know, then don't live up to that image that they get in trouble. And you, of course, also talk about how, particularly for the president, we're kind of in an era or in a world of symbolic messaging because people don't seem to be motivated specifically by policy as much as what the candidates say they stand for and then I guess if they're incredible about that. So Trump, you know, the billionaire, you know, who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and is a TV star was talking about he cared about the forgotten man. He spoke for the forgotten man and enough people bought that, you know, whereas Biden does not say Biden who is working or he's not working class and he wasn't working class, but talks about that incessantly and coming from Scranton, Pennsylvania, etc. He does not seem like his policies. He's dumped a ton of money into the country, but that doesn't seem to be resonating with voters, does it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's ultimately kind of who does the working class and, you know, really the vast majority of voters in the country that really consider themselves ordinary people in middle class, right? And you frankly also got a number of people who are objectively upper middle class or wealthy that will always say they're in the middle class that are looking for a politician who kind of identifies with the day to day struggles of people like them. So this is kind of something that is universal. But who do they identify with, right? It is somebody who is not fundamentally a creature of Washington DC and not fundamentally a creature of this dirty unsavory political game. And, you know, I think that's what they saw in Trump. They saw a certain authenticity and they saw, you know, somebody who spoke like them, somebody who was angry at the same people they were angry at. And I think that carried the day ultimately. And he did squeak in. It's worth pointing out that he squeaked into office with a historically low popular vote. You know, actually, Clinton in 92 got in with a smaller amount and about the same amount or a little bit more in 96, which is interesting. But, you know, to talk about, I want to zero in on what working class means because you mentioned, you know, that people who are upper middle class, you know, I know nobody who says they're upper middle class, including I know, you know, double income, no kids, people who are making $500,000 a year and they'll earnestly say I'm working class or something. But Biden carried voters who made less than 50,000. He carried people who made households between 50,000 to 100,000. Trump took over 100,000. But what you say in the book is that the key, the key now, the key divide is education and maybe also rural like geography. Can you talk about why and I think early on in the book you say, you know, we used to politics used to, you know, be more wage along class lines. But now it seems it's not economic class. It's this it's socioeconomic status or education level. How is that functioning differently than, you know, just the amount of money that a household is bringing in? You know, it's true that at some level, right, the amount of money that you have in your bank account, right, does actually that should, you know, kind of really dictate a lot about the way you view the world. So that's, you know, there may be there may still be some truth to that. You know, the label of being the identity of being working class is still something that in some ways that should, you know, that is determined by income. But the point I'm making is that in terms of how that what manifests politically and what we're seeing actually happen politically in the country, is that education is far the better variable that predicts everything that's happened. And particularly what's happened among white voters. So I put in the book and, you know, caveat that non white voters don't necessarily act the same way, right, in terms of where they're not being a class divide. There's more of, you know, just uniform, I wouldn't say uniform voting patterns, but just a different pattern of behavior. Yeah, I get to have a different ethnic groups. What percentage of the electorate is white still? It's still a majority of vast majority, right? Master, I would say in 2024, it's 70%. Yeah. So it's, I mean, the white vote, I hate even using these kinds of terms, it creeps me out, but like votes by white Americans are going to comprise the vast majority of ballots cast. So I would say whatever 70% is, if it's vast majority, but it's still a pretty strong majority. But increasingly, that white vote does not really, it does not really behave as a unit, does not really matter in terms of anything politically. You're really talking about white non-college voters, white voters without a college degree and white voters with a college degree. That used to be back in the 90s, very similar in how they voted. So you could kind of talk about there being a quote unquote white vote in the 1990s. Today, you can't talk about it that way. You have to talk about it. You know, the 40% of voters are going to be white non-college and the 30% of voters are going to be white with a college degree. And those are used to vote very similarly and are 40 points apart on the margin and where they're voting for. And then you talk about the distinction between cosmopolitan and traditionalist. What does that mean? Well, I think that, you know, it maps pretty cleanly onto this idea of white college, white non-college. But, you know, one of the things that I talk, you know, to an extent about like, I'm really interested in, like, where things are moving, right? Because you didn't know, as you cited some statistics, yeah, Biden is still winning some of those lower-income voters. But what's happening there is that you still have quite a few low-income minority voters, right, in that pool of people. And so, yeah, Biden wins. But that gap between sort of the low-income high-income voters, it is nowhere near where it was in, I think, 1996, 2000. I mean, it is just completely, it's just a completely different ballgame there. But when I say that, it means, really, what is, who is a group of voters that is uniquely motivated by these sort of more abstract ideals of, let's say, protecting democratic norms? And those are the same groups of voters who, you know, live in cities, embrace, you know, kind of ideas, these ideas about diversity that are, you know, ideals of diversity, you know, are just generally more progressive or liberal in their outlook, but are uniquely motivated by, let's say, these questions of social equality. Then you've got, you know, a large group of voters that are maybe, okay, you know, I would say are not motivated by those issues. They're either motivated on the other side by a more traditional cosmopolitan view. But when it comes to some of these minority voter communities that still vote democratic, what you find is, you know, they are very much the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in terms of their views on social issues. And they don't really place any sort of prioritization, you know, on these animating issues behind the Democratic Coalition today on this Dobbs and Democracy message, that they, you know, their allegiance to the Democratic Party is more historic. And it was rooted in this identity of the Democratic Party as the party of the working class of the, you know, marginalized minority communities. And that identity really has the Democrats are really kind of given what I would argue just in their emphasis on this new set of issues that are really the, you know, the issues of those are, yeah, those are like identity politics, particularly. And so weirdly, as the Democratic Party, maybe the face of it or the faces of it become more of a multiracial coalition or a rainbow coalition, they're actually losing touch with the very people they claim to be representing more directly. Yeah, and I do think that this idea of in the revealed preferences of voters, like what you actually don't find is that either Hispanic or Latino voters being motivated by identity politics. In 2016, you had Trump throw every insult in the book at Mexicans, saying they're rapists bringing crime drugs over the border. And he did say famously, he did say some of them, I'm sure are nice. Yeah, that saved the day for him. He didn't really, really seem to lose a whole lot of Latino support. I mean, you would think he would. But similarly, you had Trump after, you know, the BLM protests in 2020 seemed sort of behaving badly in that context, saying you police should shoot looters and saying all those things. And he gained support among black voters in 2020. The revealed preferences of these voters are not that they are uniquely motivated by this kind of racial identity rhetoric that is coming from the West. So how I, you know, this is probably an impossible question. But how much of the swing from Democrats to Republicans, how much of it is Trump appealing to people or how much of it is Democrats just not addressing people who they are taking for granted, whose votes they're taking for granted. So I think absolutely, likely you can't write Donald Trump out of the story completely. So he's a catalyst for the shifts we've seen. And I think, you know, it appears that, you know, he's obviously very, very highly likely to be the Republican nominee. And in real life polling in 2024, we're seeing a further shift of African American and Latino voters in his direction. In fact, that's most of the gains that he's been getting in the polls. So it's the extent that those materialize or partly materialize in 2024. What I think we're going to see is, you know, this realignment that he helped bring into being. So the question is what happens, you know, when, if and when, if and when Donald Trump fades from the scene and whether or not we will, we actually believe we will see some sort of return to the old coalition line, let's say to a more Romney 2012 style coalition. And the entire history of, I think the entire history of our politics suggests that that's not going to happen, right? I think you'll see some mean version. I think if Nikki Haley were to be the nominee or were the nominee, very unlikely to happen. You certainly see her do better in the suburbs. You probably see her, but frankly, do better overall in the election, not quite as polarized. But, but I don't think you would ever see a return back to. And that's because, and I think there's a good reason for that. That's because this kind of thing is happening throughout Western democracies, where, you know, you're really seeing more other countries where the working class sort of is aligning itself more and more with the parties of the right, more highly educated voters are aligning themselves more and more with parties of the left. Those countries don't necessarily have a Donald Trump. But this does seem to be, you know, something that is naturally occurring was kind of to some extent occurring before Donald Trump. So I don't think it's exclusively on him, but he was a catalyst for accelerating. Is any of this generational in nature, because the baby boomer and silent generation and there really aren't that many silent generation people left or, you know, boomers plus dropped from what was it? It was like, I think it was a slim majority of voters in 2016 to 45% of the electorate in 2020. That's going to be smaller this time. And millennials and Gen Z will continue to grow as a factor, you know, and overwhelmingly younger people voted for Democrats, at least in presidential elections. But is that, you know, does as people age out or grow up, I guess, or get older, let's say, maybe not grow up, but get older, you know, are they going to stay in Democratic precincts or are they going to start crossing and voting Republican? Yes, this is a big issue. This is a big eight right now, right? You know, do we actually, you know, are you actually to see people, you know, kind of grow in gold or as a girl, they're becoming more conservative. And that's what we've seen in generations past. But there's a lot of discussion that millennials are quite following that same trajectory. And so a lot of thoughts on that. I think that partly the big generational divide that I really talked about is that basically we now have an electorate that is entirely passed through the education sorting machine in terms of the, you know, when they were coming up and they were young, they had the opportunity to go to college or not go to college. And that was a legitimate choice as opposed to maybe for those in the silent generation, where most people just, you just didn't go to college. As a result, you just got much more education polarization because more people have made the decision, right? I mean, if you have made that decision to, yeah, I'm going to leave my hometown and pursue kind of not pursue knowledge and, you know, maybe move to a big city after, after college and really be part of this knowledge economy. That's just fundamentally a different kind of person than the person who, you know, kind of stays closer to the people in places they knew growing up. So I think that's part of the generational story. I also think the generational story can't be separated from the question of race, because you just have a younger generation that is just much, much more diverse than the people in the older, you know, the older silent generation boomers are just much more white. And so you actually do see, yeah, they are more liberal and traditionally have been much more liberal as a result, right? In the younger generation, but it's really a function of race that, you know, I think that that's true. And I read about the ways that's changing. I don't really tackle this question of generations directly, because I do think it's downstream of race. And I think that to the extent that younger Hispanics are not tied to the voting patterns of their parents, younger Americans are not tied to the same voting patterns of their parents. What you're actually going to see is more than voting Republican. And you see it as a whole, is that diverse younger generation is going to be more politically balanced, right? One of the, you know, one of the things that you comment on it bears points in the book, which, you know, flies in the face of the way that most people or at least people on the coast. And, you know, I think we're both in coastal enclaves as we're talking. But, you know, that America has become more, you know, racist, sexist, homophobic, or, you know, where, you know, these are more front and center issues. But you point out that in fact, you know, the country is more mixed than ever. And there is a huge amount of, you know, what would count, you know, by various measures as desegregation going on. And younger generations, millennials, Gen Z are more, you know, they're multi-ethnic. Or, you know, what do you do? Like, how do you consider yourself if you're a third generation Puerto Rican who married an Asian woman and you, you know, then you divorce them and marry a black person? Like, what are your kids? These old categories that I think we're seeing an attempt to kind of keep two or three, you know, categories intact when social reality is just vastly outstripping that. Yeah. I mean, as of today, the number of voters who are genuinely, let's say, more than one race. It's actually a pretty small number. But when you look at the big, the children born in the United States, that you're really looking at one in five children being born today are of some kind of mixed racial background. And that doesn't even count Hispanics because we don't have a really good way of actually accounting for Hispanics because of the way the census, you know, that a so-called Hispanic white person is very hard to actually distinguish and census records from, you know, somebody who's purely Hispanic because those are two different questions. Side issue there. But I do think that this idea of, okay, this assumption that we've had about, let's say, non-white groups being a loyal Democratic bloc, especially within the African-American community was predicated on the idea that, yeah, this was a marginalized, discriminated against group that needed to organize under the banner of one political party to advance their interests. Now, what happens when that identity doesn't, is no longer a salient, right? That identity of, you know, either I don't view myself as a victim. I don't view myself as somebody who, you know, is going to be discriminated against as a result of my skin color. And that's just fundamentally not who I am. I am many different things. I'm potentially many different races. But I also live in a suburb where, with people of all different sorts of racial and ethnic backgrounds. So I think that's fundamentally whichever way, you know, in one way or the other, that is just going to change voting patterns over time. Can you talk a bit about, because you do, you know, you insist on the multiracial populist coalition that's remaking the GOP, and you talk, and this blows people's minds, or at least many of the types of people we end up talking with who, you know, whether you're conservative or liberal, libertarian progressive, like the idea that Trump actually was getting more minority votes, you know, then somebody like Amit Romney or John McCain, George W. Bush was actually pretty good, particularly with Hispanics. But, you know, the idea that Trump of all people was actually increasing percentages. What was the swing in black support for Trump? I mean, it's still low, you know, even historically going back to somebody like Eisenhower, but what's the swing? And what are the issues that it seems that black voters, if we can talk about a medium black voter, what do they care about? So there's different data sources on this. I mean, if you look at bracing data, there's looks something like a five to six point swing on the margin from a very low base. But that means in some cases, you have precincts where there were like literally zero voters and they go to, all right, maybe Trump gets five voters, you're 10 voters in 2016 or 2020. But he did particularly well among black men, right? Yeah. So in general, like you've seen a little bit of recovery and some other data sources have it as much as 10 or 12 points among black voters. From 2016 to 2020, you had an S-wing of about 18 points among Hispanic voters. And so you're right that it was something that kind of blew my mind too early on. And then I kind of, you know, and then, but when you kind of start to see that, oh, this is actually part of the same trend. It's part of the same trend of white working class voters. You know, the vast majority of Hispanic and African American people in this country are working class in terms of not having a college degree. So it's a part of a working class shift more broadly, even as a college educated shift to the Democrats, the working, the non-college educated are shifting Republican. So I do think that that has been the shift. And look, I think that, you know, particularly Trump was, you know, just in his manner of, I think it goes back and a lot of it goes back to his personal demeanor, which I think if you talk to people along the coast, people like us would say that's a liability. But it turns out that's not a liability, right, to a lot of people in the country. And in fact, it's something that attracts a lot of people to him, including some unexpected voters. So, you know, I think when it comes to again, these younger minority men, who I think are a key group kind of heading into this, this election cycle, who themselves I think speak pretty bluntly and forthrightly. And so this idea of somebody who does not necessarily adhere to the gentile mannerisms of political discourse, you know, is unbalanced more appealing than somebody who does. What about you? Well, you're at a pains to point out that the Black experience, the African American experience in the United States is completely unique. And so that what is true for Black voters may not hold true for Hispanic or Asian American and Pacific Islander votes in all of these categories, even as I say them, it's like Hispanic, like God, that covers so many different types of people from different destinations. And Asian American and Pacific Islanders, it's already like this is, you know, a third of the globe is being compressed into one, you know, supposedly, you know, identical category. But if Trump's appeal to Blacks is growing, and that's partly Black men, or it's powered by an appeal to non-college educated Black men who like blunt speaking, what is it with Hispanics? Because this was also when the early results came in, and you talk about how, you know, especially along the border in Texas, Trump did exceptionally well. And the Republican Party is making kind of gains there more broadly. Everybody was like, well, you know, when he came down the steps, he said, you know, I'm not going to be politically correct. And by the way, Mexicans are rapists and drug addicts, you know, and, you know, and yet you see Latinos voting for him in larger numbers. What what is what's his appeal to the Latino vote? I think number one is the economy. I think number one, this is an upward-lead, mobile, striving community. And, you know, it's a community where that old, actually, that old historic pattern of if you have more money, if you've made it in the country, you actually are voting more Republican. And it just turns out there's a pretty good upward trajectory and upward trend in Hispanic incomes over the last few generations. And so you actually do see, you know, a lot more loyalty to the Democratic Party in the sort of lower income first generation communities. And as you move to second and third generation communities. And I'll point out, as you do in the book, your name ends in a vowel. It is Italian. I am Italian on my mother's side who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, not far from where you grew up in a world away from Greenwich, Connecticut, but in the same state. This, you know, Michael Barone 25 years ago wrote a book about the new immigrants and like in the Mexican American experience to the Italian American experience. And part of that was two or three generations in, they are indistinguishable from native-born people. Part of the distraction, I guess, or the noise in us understanding that is because Latino or Hispanic immigrants keep coming. We keep thinking everybody is here, you know, for six months or a couple years and we don't recognize that for the really since Reagan's second administration, if not longer Latinos, particularly Mexicans have been here and now they're on their second or third generation. So they're really as American as Italians, right? Which turns out to be pretty American at this point. That's right. I mean, so I think there's a big divide by generation, generation in terms of partisanship. But I think, you know, you mentioned that group is not a monolith. And so there's no, there's no like shared unique experience among Latinos in America. You've got Mexican Americans, got Puerto Ricans, got Cuban Americans. I mean, all different came from entirely different contexts. But I think when you, when you look at the issue of why does, why does Trump actually make gains after he is elevates the issue of insult? I mean, not just, yeah, okay. So why does he do that? It's because do Hispanics who are already in the voting public, do they see the people coming across the border today as people like them? Or do they see them as fundamentally different from them? And I think they see them as more different than they do similar, particularly for people. Again, if you're voting, and if you show up in these election statistics that I talk about, you've probably been here for a while, you're a citizen of the United States, you are a legal immigrant to the United States, if you have immigrated at all to the United States. And so it's just a fundamentally different experience. And, you know, in particularly like, you know, in the polling and the work I've done on the Southern border, it's very clear that the people down there do not see the people crossing as being one of them, especially in the current wave. What you see also increasingly is, I mean, first of all, the people here in those communities tend to be more Mexican-American, and what you're seeing is people from Venezuela, but you're also seeing non-Latino people crossing, you're seeing people from Haiti, the Caribbean, and further afield who are part of this migrant crisis. So it's just fundamentally different. And I think that they are as far apart, you know, from a typical Latino voter is as far apart from the people crossing today than, say, a typical wife, and that's, I think, the reality in a lot of cases. Do people, you know, whether Latino or not along the border in your research, do they make, I mean, is immigration being defined by the chaos at the border or the inability, apparently, to control the border? Because at the same time, and this happened under Trump, according to Gallup, the number of Americans who agreed with the statement that immigration has been good for the country went to historic levels. It was something like 75% of all Americans, 85% of Democrats, something like 55% of Republicans. So is there, I mean, are people near the border, are they seeing immigration only in light of illegal immigration as it's taking place on the southern border? Or are they now kind of denouncing all immigration? Because that was part of Trump, unlike a lot of Republicans, although obviously, Mitt Romney was terrible on this, but somebody like George W. Bush was very welcoming to immigration. His father, Ronald Reagan, they were all not, you know, they all talked about how immigration was, you know, one of the main elements of American society. And then you got to deal with illegals. Increasingly now, we don't seem to talk about legal immigration, we just fret and focus on illegal immigration. There is no question that this question that the situation on the southern border has overshadowed and dominated the whole entire question of immigration, such that when you even bring up the question of immigration in the survey, I mean, people see it as an issue that is a liability for the Biden administration and people want to go back to something like the Trump administration policies. But you did see increasingly, right, post 2016, there was a backlash among Democrats, right, to what was seen as Trump's xenophobia and tolerance of immigrants. And so they, as a result, putting on their jerseys to some extent, decided to, you know, be a party that was openly, right, openly advocating for immigration. Whereas you wouldn't have seen that in the Democratic Party of yesteryear, which where big labor was a big factor and labor in and of itself through the 1990s was very skeptical of open immigration said that they brought down wages. You saw traces of this and what Bernie Sanders said about immigration saying it's a Koch brothers plot. Yeah. Yeah, the Koch brothers policy, right. So I think that that old populist Democratic Party went away and that as a result, Biden had to commit right to a much more open set of border policies that has invited political disaster for him. And at the same time, Bill Clinton, in 1996, Bill Clinton spent a huge chunk of his renomination speech saying that promising he was going to get rid of illegal immigrants, he was going to remove them from the country, which people kind of have memory hold. But by the same token, somebody like Bill Clinton would have triangulated probably, right, like he wouldn't have, he wouldn't have said Republicans say, A, we're going with Z. He would have been like, Hey, maybe we're going to do something kind like co-op part of the Republican agenda there, right. I mean, that that just doesn't seem to happen very much at all anymore. That is, that is a really good point. And just like I was saying, like, I mean, I think there's a world of difference between the Bill Clinton and what Joe Biden is willing to do. Whereas, you know, Joe Biden actually, you know, in theory should be reaping. I mean, you know, it seems like Republicans have had an own goal on this immigration issue in terms of not moving forward on a border compromise. And yet, you don't really see Biden touting like, Oh, that the fact that he is now tough on the border, like he's the one who's tough and wants to get something done on the border in such a way that it would register with voters, right. And I think something, you know, along the lines of, I mean, I, the other day on, on Twitter, I kind of imagined like, what would Bill Clinton's style ad look like about the current border crisis? And you'd be, you'd be talking about the Biden border plan to crack down on illegals. And if you were, if you were rerunning the Bill Clinton 1996 playbook, which by the way, I think that would work. I would think that's would still work today, but you won't see him do it because, you know, the climate within his own party has just dramatically changed when it comes to any kind, anything, anything, you know, that's adjacent to diversity or anything like that. I mean, it's just unimaginable that he would do something. So let's talk about Asian Americans. How do they factor into the multiracial, you know, coalition that might remake the GOP? What, you know, how I guess the first question is like, how bad is it to characterize all Asian Americans as, you know, as peas in a pot or something like that? But then what are, what, what is the highest salience set of issues for them? Right. I mean, so I think in particular, this is, this is a very bifurcated community, I would say, because you have about half of the Asian electorate is college educated and votes in many ways, similar to, you know, the white college educated electorate, you have a large number of Asians in California, which is a very blue state. And you have as a result, I think they start out from a very democratic baseline. But if you look at the Asian American professional in the, one of the major metro areas, you know, they're pretty indistinguishable actually from a white educated professional. But, you know, in terms of these places where you have an identifiably Asian voting block, so places like Little Saigon in Orange County or in San Jose, California or places in Queens that have received a lot of attention over the last couple of election cycle. And those are more immigrant communities, right? Those are first, oftentimes first generation immigrant communities where a lot of people speak the original language that is a very different than this professional class that you've seen a shift right. So you actually start to see a more of a class divide in the Asian community. But you look at, you know, places like in New York City, you know, and particularly this realignment kind of gained steam in 2022. Lee's Elbin won a lot of those voters. You had three Asian American Republicans, I think it was, get elected as assembly people in Brooklyn when no one was really expecting that. So it's just a very different, again, it is a very different community. You really see it particularly, I mean, you see it particularly among Koreans, among Vietnamese, to some extent Chinese Americans to less so among Indian Americans. I don't think you see it as much there. But there's a huge divide by education. And with groups like, you know, the Chinese, Japanese, who I guess are a very small population, but Koreans, Vietnamese, do you see the same kind of pattern where if they've been here for three generations or more, they kind of become indistinguishable from, you know, a kind of white voter or a native born American? Yeah, it really depends on the context of like, what are they moving to? So I think to some extent, right, the Hispanic working class voter is essentially this generation's version of the white working class voter of of yesteryear of in, you know, they're actually moving into places like Northeast Philly, which were, you know, was a traditionally more conservative place. We had a pretty conservative white electorate. And, but they're living a solidly middle class existence. This is not like, Oh, we're living in the barrier. Right, we all be we're living a solidly middle class existence. And there's a pathway, right, where you kind of can see how they became they're becoming more. I think the Asian American voter, it's a little bit more complicated because you mentioned the new Americans by Michael Moran, which is, you know, he drew these parallels. And the parallel he draw with Asians, you know, if Hispanics were the new Italians, Asians are the new Jews, right, in terms of they seem to be actually, you know, a very highly educated group, very high levels of educational attainment, very high levels of rising up the income ladder, almost in a very steep pattern where they're leapfrogging, right, every other group. And so that has kind of led, I mean, I think there there is a sense, right, that that has kind of led to a more democratic outlook, right, among a newer generation or a more, you know, again, as those people enter entering the professional class. So you see that more and more among Asian voters. But, you know, I do wonder about this question of, you know, some extent, the Democratic Party has spurned that the Asian American voter or the progressive movement has spurned the Asian American voter in in sort of in the push for diversity, ironically, in higher education, where it's really Asian Americans are the users, if you deemphasize merit in higher education. I'd love to see your Republicans actually do more to seize upon that issue in Asian communities. I want to talk a bit as we move out of that or out of these questions of like, you know, how the GOP is picking up, you know, ethnic votes that, you know, people didn't think that, you know, they were going to do even a couple of decades ago. I want to talk a little bit about the 2024 election and ask you to handicap it. I mean, you're a Republican pollster, so you want Trump and the Republicans to win or you want the Republican Party to win. I get all of that. First off, tell me, like, how close what we all know that the 2016 election was unbelievably close. It was, you know, as tight as it could get, basically. Although, you know, even as I say that, I'm like, oh, well, then there was the 2000 election, which was unbelievably close as well. But 2020, Joe Biden won, you know, he won overwhelmingly in the popular vote as a percentage and in the Electoral College. But how close was that election? Was it a blowout or was it actually pretty close to 2016 when you factor in things? I'm smiling because actually the perception that it wasn't a close election is just completely wrong. It's actually technically speaking closer than 2016 when you look at the number of votes that would need to have needed to have flipped in the Electoral College, right? So Trump, you know, people, I mean, forget how close Trump came to winning that election. And just a shift of 0.7% in the popular vote spread uniformly across the country would have won. And that means he would have been the president, squeaking by with a 6 million fewer popular votes than Biden. And why is that, right? And partly it's due to this working class coalition, right? Because, you know, the working class is concentrated in states that are more just electorally significant, right, to the outcome of the election. So part of the reason why I write that this realignment really is the best really avenue and bet for Republicans move to win elections moving forward is because, you know, you do see, you know, frankly, they're overrepresented in the Electoral College. Now, we'll see if that happens in 2024. But it was a very, very close election and particularly compared to the polls going into the election, which I think was up by eight points in the last polling average. And he only wins by four and barely squeaks by, by the way, barely squeaks by in a way that allows Trump, I think, to make an argument to his voters that it was stolen from him. That, you know, and people, do you believe that? Or are you saying that Trump make that argument? No, I don't. I don't believe that it was stolen from him. But I do think that, you know, had we see, had we had we seen if we saw Biden actually win the election by as much as he should have won the election, as much as all polls were saying and was expected to win the election, that I think Trump would have just had a much harder time of convincing people. Yeah, because and from what I've read, I was researching a little bit about this, but it's that, you know, in 2016, generally speaking, people agree that it was about 80,000 votes difference in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, like, you know, allowed Trump to win. And in 2020, it was 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin, that if they had gone the other way would have caused a tie, at least in the in the Electoral College. So that is amazing. And I don't think, you know, it's interesting, because I know, you know, I fucking have to do this for a living. And until reading your book, and then kind of going through the numbers again, I was like, wow, that's really close. And that makes me terrified about 2024, because, you know, this I, you know, I became editor of Reason in 2000. And the, you know, that that election, I thought it was going to be like a two week story because Bush and Gore were kind of the same, really, when you go back and look at their platforms, there wasn't that much difference between them on almost any issue. It was kind of like it seemed like we had gone into an era like a Clinton had ushered in an era of a kind of baby boomer consensus, you know, with surplus budget surpluses, the era of big government being dead. And you know, that came down to a few hundred or a few thousand votes. And I don't know that we've recovered. But do you I mean, going into 2024, then, is it legitimate at this point, assuming it's Trump and Biden, assuming each of them is brain damaged in their own unique special ways? It's totally up for grabs, right? This election. Well, I think that it would be, I think that's a fair assumption, right? I think it's a fair assumption, bro. Like really about any election, right? No matter what the polls say at this point, like, I think you really start from the prior that it's a jump ball. But it's a very different election right now. I mean, right now, Trump is pulling ahead. And that's been pretty consistent. And no matter how, you know, that no matter what the economic numbers seem to do. And so I don't think you're getting more that it should have fundamentally different election from the standpoint of, let's say, pre-election polling than it was in 2020. That said, I mean, I think we will likely still see a very, very close election. But right now, it's Trump seems to be doing a lot better than he was at this point in 2020. And, you know, you stress in the book that, you know, it's kind of these large kind of character messages that are being sent or not identity of the voters, but identity of the presidential candidates that really carry the day more than specific economic policies or policies in general. You know, the economy compared to 2020 is doing relatively well. You know, we've had, you know, obviously inflation was a big issue and I could go on and on about how Biden is terrible on the economy and things like that. But things, you know, for most people are doing pretty well. Is that, you know, it's because voters don't really care about actual reality that that's not going to help us. I think that, you know, the perception, I wouldn't say that results or reality in the ground doesn't matter. I think that, you know, it should be, if the economic situation kind of quiets down, you know, I think he would rather have that than the alternative. But I do think that a perception has set in, you know, particularly as it relates to Biden's fitness in his age that is very hard to recover from. That unless something dramatic happens either in the form of a Trump conviction or in the form of Trump has his own health crisis, that that does seem to be something that is weighing down Biden pretty heavily independently of the state of the economy. But also it's just a pretty deep-seated perception, you know, again, that the grass was greener on the other side of the street. So, you know, again, even if Biden is able to somehow recover, right, on the economy and maybe make it a little bit more of a draw, does he still win the debate with Trump over who best is able to manage the economy, right? He still win that retrospective look back. I was better off. The perception, I think, that set in that things were at least under control on the global stage when Trump was president. I seem to be making more money. Except for COVID, right? I mean, and this, I guess, partly nobody, nobody really, nobody really actually assigns Trump any blame for what the even though he's the one who engineered lockdowns, right? I mean, this is part of the problem is that he tried to argue that not very successfully, right? Yeah. But I think, I think you're right. You know, Biden is trying to use the COVID statistics, but you know, it was primarily the left and the Democrats and the blue states that really pushed the lockdowns for as long as they did. And, you know, Trump was identified as somebody who was trying to reopen the economy faster. And that's how I think people remember it. Yeah. And it's, I mean, it's all like, it's like being in a crazy person's head because Trump ordered the lockdowns at the national level the two weeks, just, you know, to slow the curve. And then he also was pushing vaccines, but then it's somehow anti-vaccine. But most importantly, Biden can't be anti-vaccine and he can't be anti-lockdown because that's his concern. I mean, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. I want to ask though, now, also in your book in Party of the People, and you know, I say this as somebody who has never been a partisan. I've never, if I've registered for a party, it was the Libertarian Party in like 1988. I usually vote Libertarian or third party or my colleague, Matt Welch, because I want him to be investigated by the FBI. But it is like, I'm not a partisan. So I don't care who wins. I care about policy. But you, towards the end of the book, you say, I come to tell the younger me that the Libertarian dream of smaller government is dead. And you talk a fair amount when you're looking at the future of politics about a quadrant chart that Lee Drummond put together, which it basically shows that, you know, in the, what used to be called the Libertarian Quadrant, or it's, you know, the shorthand is fiscally conservative, socially liberal. There are no voters there. How do you justify that? Yeah, so it's a very interesting question. That's something actually your colleagues, Stephanie Slade, having tackled very aptly in a feature piece recently, because I, you know, I grew, growing up, I was, I very much drunk the Kool-Aid, right, supply-side economics, and a lot of not just, you know, maybe a more Libertarian economics, but the whole Reagan view of, let's say, limited government, right? And I think just the reality is that not a lot of voters are motivated by those sorts of questions, like in the real world, right? That you see a party and both parties increasingly motivated on cultural questions and activated on cultural questions. And I think that's particularly true of Republican voters and particularly around the issue of immigration. We saw that very clearly with Trump in 2016. I also, by the way, don't think that a whole lot of voters are motivated by a left-wing ideological critique of the Reagan era or support for social democracy, right? I think that the questions that actually motivate voters on a real level are fundamentally different than the ones that motivate activists and the ones that motivate, you know, people like me growing up and, you know, who are very invested in these economic ideologies. And so I think that Trump really, really kind of pulled that back and really realized that this isn't, hey, this isn't really at a fundamental gut level what's moving people, even though they do have, right? They do have, and I write this in the book, that it's not like Republicans should just become a party that supports social programs, right? And that's how you win working class voters. They do have this gut level identification with, let's say, capitalists or free enterprise, right? Or business and hard work is a way of working your way up. But they're just not quite as invested in reading Milton Friedman as maybe, you know, that younger version of me was thinking. So let me ask about the libertarian vote. If, you know, the, if the Republican Party is no longer, no longer seems to be courting libertarians in a way that they were at the beginning of the, you know, at the end of the aughts, the beginning of the 2000 teens, it doesn't mean that libertarian voters have disappeared. Emily Eakins at the Cato Institute, David Bose, using various measures that are alternative to some of the ones that you use, and people like Lee Drummond used, hypothesize that there's 10 to 20% of voters who pretty reliably vote, you know, socially, liberal, fiscally, conservative. My question is, where do those voters go? Like, you know, assuming they're not completely just making that up. And I like to think not. But in an election like the one that we're going to have now, in an election like in 2022 or 2016, in 2016, 6% of voters cast ballots for third party candidates, the majority of those were for the libertarian party candidate. In 2020, only 2% did. But it's not clear how, you know, if RFK Jr. is going to actually matter or any other third party candidate. But that libertarian vote, we're talking about an election where, you know, a few thousand votes really could be determinative. You know, where are those libertarian voters? And who do you think they would be going for in something like this? Yeah, so I think it's a good, I mean, and you're right that, you know, even if a group is smaller in the electorate, that they it turns out they matter quite a lot. And I think, you know, Joe Biden doesn't win in 2020 without all the third party voters from 2016, who primarily backed him. But when you talk about how we define, right, that socially let's say that socially more moderate or liberal and physically conservative voter, which I agree that that measure that that big scatter plot doesn't necessarily capture it exactly the right way. So regardless of how bigger, you know, I think, you know, I accept the premise that it could be bigger. I think we've we are used to viewing that libertarian vote again as adjacent to the Republican vote, right, is something that belongs to Republicans. And I think what we actually seen more and more is more of a crossover between libertarians and Democrats recently, because those cultural issues seem to be the tiebreaker, right, they seem to matter more. Number one, Trump isn't fiscally conservative, so he's not really standing up for that side of the argument. And but you also just see just social issues and cultural issues kind of mattering more. Now, I'm not talking about the say the hardcore LP voter, right, but I am talking about that sort of that voter, let's say in the northeast corridor, that a sella corridor that is that likes to say they're socially more moderate and fiscally conservative. What you've I think seen more recently in a more recent election cycle is that voter go more democratic, whereas that popular quadrant voter again, that's the Obama Trump voter, that's the voter in Michigan, that's the old auto worker, that's pro life. But yeah, they see a role for government in the economy. And I think those voters have been moving in completely the opposite directions. Do you, you know, how will we, I guess we'll know, you know, if not on, you know, in November, then, you know, by next January, we'll have a pretty good sense of who has been declared president. What are the signs to look for, you know, going into the election then after that there is a long lived realignment of the parties as opposed to this is fundamentally and God help me up too old for this shit, but, you know, that we've been living through a decade or an era of Trump and that it's, it's really about Trump defining things as an individual, not as the avatar of a new framework or a new political theory. I mean, is, is, and I guess, yeah, well, let me ask you that. Like, how do we know that things have changed? Because, you know, we saw Ron DeSantis in a, in a, in a kind of basic way, with a better record on the ground, try to be Trumpism without Trump. And people are like, no, I don't like that. Go back to Florida. You know, is, you know, how will we know that Trumpism survives Trump? I mean, potentially very different questions, right? But, but I do think that the answer is we don't necessarily know after 2024, if this new coalition has arrived. I think certainly there's a case for the shifts that we've seen over, particularly as it relates to non white voters continuing, you're seeing that in the polls right now. There's also a case for it to be made that like, this is more of a long-term process. And so in the book, I kind of write about, you know, really looking ahead, let's actually like conduct a thought experiment that if this actually happens, what does 2036 look like? What would the election of 2036 look like? And, you know, overwhelmingly, because we have a pretty good idea of what the demographics are going to be, right? In, in that, that year, we know the country's just getting more non white. And so what would the election needs, you know, kind of the breakdown needs to look like? And it would need to look something like, you know, Republicans draw pretty even among Hispanics. They're winning about maybe 40% of Asian voters and they're winning almost a quarter of the African American vote. Now, what's interesting is there are polls out there that show that's happening in 2024. So it could be that like, I'm way too conservative. But I think you really have to review this over a long term trajectory and not, you know, election to election, which is very noisy, right? I mean, I think that subject to all sorts of, you know, the economy, you know, the all sorts of factors that are specific to the cycle. As far as it relates to, I think right now, right, in terms of the change in the type of Republican candidates who can win, you know, I mean, I think, in the same way, I think we're just it really how it's defined is changing. And what I mean by that is, right now, we have this tendency, right, to view Ronald Reagan as this golden era of Republican normalcy, right? As somebody who is moderate on immigration and for free trade and for internationalism and global leadership. And certainly that's certainly true. But I think it understates the extent to which Reagan himself was a disruptive figure in the Republican party in the 70s and 80s, where he was fundamentally in the same way Trump is disrupting the existing Republican order. Reagan was also disrupting challenge Gerald Ford from the right. As a result, the party moves, right? The party shifts and it becomes a really unambiguously conservative party after Reagan. And I think in some way, you know, I think the party will become an unambiguously more let's say populist party. Now, whether or not, you know, we have somebody who is quite as much of an avatar of that as Donald Trump in the future, I'm not sure. I think he is somewhat sweet generous. I don't think I think you will by default have somebody more quote unquote normal in the future, particularly someone who can get elected president. But but I think that just the baseline has shifted. And I think it's shift with Reagan. And I think it's it's now shifted with Trump again. Where do you think the Democratic Party is shifting to? Are they undergoing a similar process of you know, while they are right, if they are now appealing to educated, educated kind of cosmopolitan voters? Yeah, right. I mean, it's a it's a coalition that is shifted in terms of the voters it's appealed to significantly. And it's really making openly making the case right on cultural issues, openly making the case for, let's say, a more open society, really talking up these sort of more abstract concepts of democracy, as opposed to the kind of campaign we saw as recently as 2012 and Obama was railing against Mitt Romney as the scion of private equity. And you didn't care about people like you, you just don't seem to see that kind of rhetoric anymore. You know, and even though that remains a part of the party policy commitment. So I don't say I think they're going to go conservative on economic issues. But I do think like this, this, I do this question of like, say the salt deduction. Yeah, right. The state and local tax deduction, which Democrats are pushing for despite it being transparently a giveaway, or rather, it's in the interest of wealthy people who can actually deduct state and local taxes when they file their federal. That's right. And so I think that's that's that's probably a sign of things to come. You know, where at some point, they're going to have to do certain things that tend to the constituency of voters that are shifting in their direction. The last point about kind of the future of politics and as a libertarian, a small old libertarian this and although somebody old enough where I might actually gain some from this, you talk about how entitled old age entitlements, particularly Medicare and Social Security appear to be completely inviolate at this point that that is one of the broad topics. It is beyond the third rail of American politics. Now it's like to even invoke it other than to say you are going to keep forever and maybe make it shinier is complete political death. Do you see any is there any way that that's going to change because most bean counters and budget watchers, you know, talk about how Medicare and Social Security are the reason why America is rapidly moving into an era where we won't be able to afford the government that we have grown to be accustomed to. Well, it's going to change if nothing else for add the actuarial realities of these programs are going to impose upon everybody's very, you know, tidy political notions and ideas. And so I think what you would say now is that look, I mean, it is absolute political death for anybody to kind of touch that entitlement, you know, really touch entitlement reform. And, you know, particularly from the, you know, particularly when you frame the question as cuts to entitlement programs, I mean, that is and can be framed. You know, but I think absolutely passing that Rubicon of well, we're no longer and you'll be able to pay out benefits at the same level. You know, I think it's going to fundamentally, it's going to be another, frankly, major disruption akin to somewhat, I think, you know, much greater than what we saw in the last three years with inflation, 20% inflation, I think that that is going to be in and of itself it's going to upend. I think a lot of our politics, but Trump intuited not incorrectly that the, that this was not a political winner for Republicans. And he was willing to, and I think probably others had intuited that beforehand, but he was actually willing to make the argument, which had made it, you know, overall, just very much more difficult for there be any, any political party that is calling out for some kind of solution. So until, until it's upon us, it seems like that's a not sorry, you know, it's fascinating to think about Reagan, when he was stumping for Barry Goldwater in the early 60s would talk about why can't Social Security at least be voluntary to naming as one of his chief accomplishments when he was leaving the White House in the late 80s, saving Social Security for another generation, as well as Medicare. I hope that you're wrong. And I hope, you know, in a sense, you talked a lot about how part of the appeal of Republicans to this multiracial coalition of non-college educated working class people, you know, we can use quotes around working class or not, but is that they don't like the idea of people getting something for not working? And I wonder if there aren't maybe new ways to talk about entitlement spending that cast it in a more populist sensibility. I mean, especially along generational lines, because it's clear that Social Security and Medicare both take money from relatively young people and relatively poor people and give it to relatively old and relatively rich people. But so that Paul Ryan, you know, basically fell because he didn't make the commercial throwing grandma off a cliff. You know, he should have owned that and said, you know, we need to do this and she wants that for us anyway. Well, I think that it's fundamentally different for a lot of people. And I think that in the same breath as, you know, you'll have specifically Hispanic voters really voicing the sentiment around, oh, we want to, you know, well, you know, we don't want welfare cheats. And, you know, frankly, that is, that's, that's a real palpable sentiment. They completely exclude Social Security, Medicare from that calculation. Whereas for a lot of people, you know, when, you know, people take offense to the idea that these are quote unquote entitlements, AKA welfare programs, when the technical definition of an entitlement is, you're entitled to it, because you, you know, theoretically paid into it. Right. So fundamentally, this is, you know, this is actually the political consensus in the working class is anti welfare and pro Social Security. And they're not making, they are making distinction based on the fact that, you know, they believe they paid into these programs. And they're just paying in, you know, they're just getting out what they have already paid in, which is not the reality, but that's a very strongly held belief. Well, that is maybe that is the one reason that Al Gore should have won in 2000, because he was talking about the lockbox and about, you know, clawing back Social Security surpluses being used to fund other parts of government. We're going to leave it there. I've been talking with Patrick Ruffini, who works at Echelon Insights, is a Republican pollster and party campaign guy, and is the author of Party of the People inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition, remaking the GOP. Patrick, thanks for talking to me. Thanks so much, Nick.