00:00:00.000Hey everybody, on this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, we do a deep dive analysis of the 2020 election, Georgia, the future of the Republican Party with data expert, smart guy, Richard Barris.
00:00:12.000He's smarter than Nate Silver, and I really like him.
00:00:21.000Should the Republican Party become a party of amnesty and open borders or one of the rule of law?
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00:02:47.000I'm glad you finally admitted you're smarter than Nate Silver, because that is something I've been waiting to have you here because you're not sure what you said, agreed to.
00:03:18.000It doesn't mean you should throw some of the post-mortems out when you can read into what happened in Georgia.
00:03:24.000So a lot of money thrown in a district like Georgia 7, typically a Republican district.
00:03:29.000But over time, these areas have gotten more educated, more professional class, and that doesn't work toward to Republicans' favor.
00:03:38.000That's not even the case with just the era of Trump.
00:03:40.000That's going to be the case moving forward.
00:03:43.000And then also, too, there were some working men, for instance, in the state, which went to Trump heavily last time, that kind of decided maybe Joe Biden would be for the work.
00:03:56.000I know some people are going to say this is crazy, but in hindsight, there were men, working men, who thought Joe Biden would be a pro-worker, moderate Democrat.
00:04:07.000And that's just, I mean, of course, we know that's not true, but think back to the campaign, Charlie, and you can see why some people believed it.
00:04:30.000Were there precincts and districts and counties where profiled Trump supporters, meaning more likely to be a Trump supporter than not, did not show up?
00:05:01.000We have to remember this moving forward.
00:05:03.000They are Trump voters and they're in the central part of the state and in the southern part of the state, along even in the coastline.
00:05:09.000This was an ancestral Democratic working area that turned to Trump heavily and kept the state more competitive than we may have thought it to be in the past.
00:05:19.000And then in the northern area of the state, the more Mitt Romney kind of Republican, they turned on Purdue and Loeffler anyway.
00:05:26.000So the focus really should have been defending the president.
00:05:30.000And, you know, make we told them to make the recall, all the recount all about the recall and to basically blend those two into one.
00:05:41.000They thought that Trump actually weighed down Purdue.
00:05:43.000They arrogantly went in there thinking Purdue was going to carry this thing by a few points.
00:05:48.000And it was very clear there was a closer race in the central part of the state than there should have been, but it was not because of voter preference.
00:05:55.000It was because Republican voters were telling us, you know what?
00:07:12.000You need all of it to counteract good showings in the areas we were just talking about.
00:07:17.000And then Gwynnett, DeKalb, these are professional class areas, guys, the tech areas.
00:07:21.000And they're going to get turnout there.
00:07:23.000It's so frustrating because if those two Senate seats would have been won, a lot of the legislative agenda with Joe Biden would have been derailed.
00:07:30.000Trump would have had a lot of power over the party.
00:07:33.000He still does, but it's a completely different set of circumstances.
00:07:36.000And we wouldn't have to be dealing with Chuck Schumer.
00:07:38.000So Fabrizio and Lee, the president's own pollsters, came out with this very long report.
00:08:12.000And then let's get into some of the specifics.
00:08:14.000Yeah, first off, you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
00:08:17.000There is nothing wrong with looking at post-mortem data and learning, living and learning and moving forward.
00:08:23.000And I think there's a couple of things that I would dispute on how they came at this, Charlie.
00:08:28.000But like grouping together states, some things about certain states that the president held are true and they're not in Florida.
00:08:37.000So you can't infer what happened in Georgia necessarily with another state like that.
00:08:42.000So I do take issue with a little bit on how they did that.
00:08:45.000And then also the fact that exit polling has a lot of problems and it's more problematic and has had a longer track record of issues than even traditional polling.
00:08:55.000And couple that with all the mail-in voting, it's very hard to be an exit pollster today.
00:09:00.000But that being said, there are some conclusions that they drew in that report that we even saw in Pennsylvania, that we saw in Michigan moving forward.
00:09:09.000Trump, there was, again, and probably looking deeper, and they don't mention this in the report, but highlighting the men that were working class.
00:09:18.000Trump, there were more of them in the electorate this time than there were in 16.
00:09:22.000And Trump did not win them by as large of a margin as he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
00:09:29.000When you influence, when the electorate gets bloated like that and you don't carry that group by the same number, you're going to suffer for it.
00:09:37.000I think looking deeper into it, when it comes specifically to those working men and based on the investigations we've done, I see union all over this, Charlie.
00:09:48.000And when we polled Joe Biden's approval rating a couple of weeks ago during you want to call it his honeymoon period, he was above water with working union members.
00:10:29.000So the report says that the president lost ground with almost every age group in both state groupings, but he lost most with voters 18 to 29.
00:11:16.000That's one of the issues why I do take issue with him grouping all of these states together because what's true in Pennsylvania is not true about Iowa and Ohio.
00:11:26.000You have to look more individual, more granular at this stuff, and they really lump it together.
00:11:31.000It does a disservice to the overall conclusions we should be drawing.
00:11:38.000And then in Pennsylvania, amazingly, he does somewhat better in a county like Bucks County, even with the mail-in vote.
00:11:45.000He does not slide the way we actually anticipated him to slide, but it's even worse in the other southeastern counties where there are those white educated voters.
00:11:56.000I would say this, Charlie, I don't think they're coming back.
00:11:58.000With or without Trump, those voters are not coming back in droves because we have different experiences that shape our political opinions.
00:12:06.000And over time, you want to call it the education system, whatever you want to call it.
00:12:11.000They're making these white educated voters more liberal than they used to be.
00:12:15.000And then there are also suburbs that aren't as white as they used to be.
00:13:06.000I don't see this repudiation of Donald Trump by the Liz Cheneys of the world and others who are advocating for the party to do that.
00:13:14.000I don't see a move like that making up ground with these voters.
00:13:17.000All that will do is isolate the new voters that Donald Trump did bring in, which will leave them as a grossly minority party.
00:13:28.000I still get excited to get a package in the mail, don't you?
00:13:30.000Well, after spending some time on the phone the other day with Dr. Douglas Howard, the doctor who formulated Balance of Nature's blend of real fruits and veggies, he sent me my first month's supply.
00:13:39.000I'm now taking responsibility for my own health.
00:13:41.000With Balance of Nature, I get 10 servings each day from a proprietary blend of 31 different fruits and veggies.
00:14:40.000Therefore, they think that redistributed economics makes so much sense because they know nothing but abundance and they've been filled with bad ideas at the universities.
00:14:50.000So they have the lifestyle that affords them to be liberal.
00:14:54.000That transitions nicely, Richard, to something I want to talk to you about, which is the people that don't have the lifestyle to be liberal.
00:15:00.000They're actually becoming more conservative.
00:15:03.000I'm talking about white working class voters.
00:15:05.000We know about white working class voters.
00:15:07.000Trump dipped a little bit there, probably because of the virus, probably because of that.
00:15:12.000But I want to focus on something positive, a huge opening for the Republican Party as kind of the smug, arrogant, college-educated, suburban, just kind of archetype, right?
00:15:24.000The people that not exactly are my favorite type of political commentators.
00:15:29.000They just are very nasty, very, you know what I'm talking about?
00:15:32.000Late 20s, early 30s, went to Brown, went to St. Olaf, went to Dartmouth, went to Berkeley, and they have a good job, right?
00:15:39.000A six-figure job at a corporation, but they know nothing except woke left-wing deconstructionism.
00:15:46.000They think that is the, and they think their incomes are always going to keep going up forever.
00:15:51.000They're really, really getting pushed to the left and the liberal side.
00:15:54.000Let them go make a mess of that, right?
00:15:56.000They're going to have a miserable life.
00:15:58.000The opportunity, though, is all of a sudden that's opening nicely.
00:16:02.000And this is what we see in the data: how much better Trump did with Hispanics.
00:16:26.000And that's when they'll typically swing back and forth.
00:16:29.000The positive here for Trumpers and Republicans, if they're smart enough to see this, is that the groups that Donald Trump did better with are growing groups.
00:16:39.000The white change in vote preference, they're not expanding.
00:16:43.000So the professional class isn't getting bigger demographically.
00:16:47.000They're just changing their voter preference.
00:16:50.000If you want to be on the mid to long term winning side, you want to appeal to the groups who are growing in this country.
00:17:34.000So, yeah, I think what it really comes down to, and I've been in, I don't even know now how many I've been counting, but we've been everywhere talking to voters since the election, and really particularly Trump voters who voted Republican.
00:17:47.000There's millions of them that may disappear back into the interior without Donald Trump.
00:17:52.000And we're trying to find out what it is that made them a Trump supporter, even though their demographic or the archetype doesn't fit.
00:18:00.000And it really comes down when it, when we're talking about those voters specifically, Charlie, it comes down to life experience again.
00:18:07.000Either they themselves, their parents, their grandparents, smell the false promise of liberalism a mile away or leftism.
00:18:28.000And when we polled these people too in Florida, South Florida, a lot of the media were really superficial about their analysis of how Southern Florida was going to vote.
00:18:37.000People didn't just agree or like Donald Trump.
00:18:40.000They agreed with him on every single issue.
00:18:43.000They just smelled the false promise of leftism.
00:18:47.000I don't know what else to call it because one gentleman put it to me that way and it's been sticking with me.
00:18:52.000So we know what free health care means.
00:18:55.000We know what they say it's going to promise us, but what we get in the end.
00:18:59.000And a white woman who works for CNN, who went to, like you said, Brown, who whatever it may be, Duke, you know, some Ivory League, they don't have, they have the luxury of making these bad decisions and making these bad policy choices, while these other voters see it as, you know, this, your vote could be life and death.
00:19:19.000I mean, it could be freedom or tyranny, and you have to take that more seriously.
00:19:26.000And now at the same time, a lot of these people didn't particularly like the Republican Party before Donald Trump.
00:19:32.000And there's a real, there, there is a real danger that they could, they could lose them again.
00:19:38.000The gains that we saw in West Texas, the gains that we saw, even in Arizona, by the way, and Nevada, which get overlooked because you lost those two states, Florida, South Florida.
00:19:51.000I mean, the Republicans should not just make the mistake of thinking these voters are going to be Republican and are going to rush to the ballot box for them.
00:19:59.000They're going to have to fight to keep them.
00:20:01.000And we lost Arizona because of Paradise Valley and Scottsdale and East Valley voters and Chandler, Gilbert, and that area, not because of the Hispanic vote, because of Mexican-Americans.
00:20:13.000And so I want to really zero in on this.
00:20:15.000From my conversation with Hispanic voters, they're not as convinced about free markets or tax cuts.
00:20:22.000This is something that the Chamber of Commerce and their establishment Republicans, they're so wrong on this.
00:20:28.000They, they actually, they're very pro-law enforcement.
00:20:31.000A lot of Hispanics go into law enforcement.
00:20:46.000So any party that stands with law enforcement, it gets the attention of a Hispanic voter.
00:20:51.000It really does because they know what happens when crime goes unchecked, when Honduras has one of the highest murder per capita rates in all of Central America or in the world.
00:21:03.000And so when the Democrats were attacking law enforcement, they didn't like that.
00:21:06.000They also didn't like the hyper-racialization of American politics.
00:21:10.000They didn't care for the BLM incorporated nonsense that spread our country for a couple of months.
00:21:15.000If you notice, just from a purely just, if you look at the pictures of those rallies, it's a bunch of white upper middle class activists and black activists.
00:21:24.000There weren't a lot of Hispanic activists that participated in the BLM incorporated riots or nonsense.
00:21:30.000I think that's also an interesting takeaway.
00:21:35.000They are very socially conservative and they don't like the direction the Democrats have taken on faith, family, religion, and social values.
00:23:23.000So if all this civil unrest and then what follows after that, regime instability and the loss of credibility, and it's just a precursor for worse things to follow.
00:23:32.000They want everything calm so they could just work and do their thing and move on.
00:23:37.000And I think there's something to be said about the fighting, right?
00:23:41.000And a lot of times the more traditional Republican will mock some of the Trump voters who say, well, buddy fights, buddy fights.
00:23:49.000There is something about them liking somebody who fights back.
00:23:53.000So I think that's innately human, though.
00:23:56.000Nobody wants to follow anybody who doesn't have the courage of their own convictions, or at least enough to fight for what they believe in.
00:24:03.000And I think they just are more willing to point that.
00:24:05.000They're more honest and are willing to point that out.
00:24:08.000Again, this is a group that's growing.
00:24:11.000So it's, you know, four or eight years ago, Republicans would get criticized for being the party of white people.
00:24:18.000And you would say, you know, a lot of times they would return by saying it's good to be the party of the majority, right?
00:24:24.000But in the end, this group is the growing group.
00:24:27.000Even African Americans are not growing at the rates that these are, even though they participate in elections at higher rates.
00:24:34.000There is a lot of working Hispanic muscle to flex in the electorate.
00:24:51.000So the potential there is infinitely higher.
00:24:55.000I would say that the ceiling to build a large tent is infinitely larger, higher with that group of people than it is to race back to the white liberal and Georgia seven and try to earn back their vote.
00:25:19.000So I agree with you with the white liberals, but there is some evidence to show, Richard, and I'd like you to add some context to this, that there were split ticket voters.
00:25:28.000There were Biden Republican congressional voters, right?
00:25:33.000There were people in the suburbs that voted for Joe Biden, but then voted for maybe Maria Elvira Salazar.
00:25:40.000Maybe Marionette Miller-Meeks in Iowa or Mike Garcia or Burgess Owens.
00:25:46.000Can you talk about how there is some potential in some of these suburban districts of more of the boomer category?
00:25:53.000So the boomers, I think, are looking for reasons to go vote for Republicans.
00:25:58.000I think that the 29 to 35-year-old recent college graduate who think they have the whole world figured out, I don't see a lot of movement in that demo.
00:26:07.000But the 40 to 55-year-old voter that couldn't do Trump, but they voted for a Republican senator and they voted for a Republican House member, there's some movement there.
00:26:18.000But then also, there's a lot of opportunity in the new retirees, the people that are moving to Florida, the people that are moving to Arizona, the people that are moving to Texas for retirement, and they didn't like Trump.
00:26:30.000They didn't like the virus response, but the data shows that they did try to give Kevin McCarthy the speakership and only lost by 32,000 votes.
00:26:40.000Can you talk a little bit about that, about how there were actually more gains for Republicans down the ballot than actually caught the eye initially?
00:27:06.000Aside from the pre-election polling data, which really did show if you were to overlap those voters with their top issue, it was coronavirus.
00:27:15.000And then who did you trust more to handle that issue?
00:27:52.000Media polls that are doing that are either full of it or they're subject to any kind of bias, like a response bias or a social bias.
00:28:00.000We have him generally in the high 40s.
00:28:03.000Biggest was 52, his highest was 52 and after he started to slip.
00:28:08.000And the reason is, uh, some of that is working.
00:28:10.000Unions are not happy with some of the direction he's taking.
00:28:13.000But it's also a suburban, 45 and above, particularly a woman, and what they're telling us is, look, this guy promised to do a better job and now he's talking about, uh, you know, this is going to be a miserable winter and there's not a lot I can do about it.
00:28:29.000And one woman, specifically i'm thinking about her.
00:28:34.000All of the media polls showed he was going to win.
00:28:36.000So you, you really should have been preparing for victory and what you were going to do, making all of these promises that you were going to get a handle on Covid, and they haven't done anything.
00:28:47.000Let's be honest, you know and i'm listening to her chuckling because her vote was a Covet vote I mean, she probably would have voted for Donald Trump had Covet not come around.
00:29:00.000They take it more seriously and they were, you know, thinking maybe Biden's a moderate and the media hypes up how badly Donald Trump handled this virus.
00:29:10.000Maybe there wouldn't have been 400 000 dead.
00:29:12.000Uh, so there people have to understand there's a group of people out there who did believe this and now they're.
00:29:24.000I would definitely separate them from that political class working younger political class voter in the suburb.
00:29:31.000There's just little room to get any of them on board, but there is room in the suburbs for for those people and actually we saw some of them in rural areas too.
00:31:03.000Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't understand why they think like that really has no weight on whether or not you hammer somebody on an issue.
00:31:10.000It didn't have any weight on Donald Trump.
00:31:12.000We found out the CDC was the problem for testing in the beginning, not the administration.
00:31:16.000That did not matter, and they made that issue stick.
00:31:19.000And then also, the way the Democrats are moving on the issues will dictate that.
00:31:25.000But generally speaking, your second job is holding on to those Trump voters because healthcare, unless they do something really stupid, is going to be a difficult issue to overtake Democrats on.
00:31:36.000If they try to make a run towards single payer, a real run, then you may even have an opening there with some of those suburban voters that have good insurance and they don't want a single payer system.
00:31:48.000But for the most part, you have to, your main job is focusing on keeping those Trump voters.
00:31:54.000And again, I don't know if the party's the right party to do that right now, Charlie.
00:32:10.000I'm saying they have to find out who they are because you can't talk about trade and war the way Donald Trump did if half your members don't believe that is true, right?
00:32:22.000So if you're a free trading Republican, you'll do more to hurt the cause for the congressional candidate in Michigan 3 or Michigan 8, which are two districts they absolutely, there's no reason they should not hold and take this time around.
00:32:37.000Texas 15, we were just talking about those working Mexicans in Texas 15.
00:32:42.000That is a district they didn't give any, they didn't pay any mind to barely the resources needed.
00:32:47.000They could have flipped that district.
00:32:49.000So if you have a California Republican who won his district by two or three points talking about free trade and supporting actions in Syria, that's another one, Charlie.
00:33:00.000Joe Biden is all over the map already.
00:33:29.000In the three debates we had, the one presidential and the two presidential, and I thought Trump canceling one of the debates was a mistake.
00:34:05.000You bring up what you want to bring up, especially when you are the president.
00:34:09.000You will answer the question the way you feel like answering it.
00:34:13.000You know, I'm not going to be distracted by that ridiculous question.
00:34:16.000Why don't we tell the American people how I brokered three peace deals in a week?
00:34:21.000I mean, that is what in the opening debate, if Trump just would, if the president would have just repeated, I got peace in the Middle East.
00:36:29.000Okay, in closing here, Richard, what is the Democrat, what is the biggest threat that we have to face from the Democrats in a year that we should take back the House?
00:36:40.000Yeah, if they hold on to the House, what will the story be written?
00:36:45.000They're going to try to make permanent what we saw in November.
00:36:50.000And I really cannot stress this enough.
00:36:52.000They are going to try to, and normally, for those who don't really understand, states control their own elections, and the federal government really does not have a role in elections.
00:37:04.000Now, that being said, the federal government is the bread and butter of the Democratic Party.
00:37:09.000All the solutions to their problems or the problems of the country is a government-centered solution, a federal solution.
00:37:14.000So they want to make, if not through some kind of legislation federally, they want to pressure, use their power to pressure officials back home.
00:37:24.000If this becomes how we conduct elections moving forward, Charlie, we're in deep trouble.
00:37:46.000And if they continue down this road, it's forget about all the other issues.
00:37:51.000If you have a difficult time winning or beating the institution itself, then you can't make any progress on individual policies.
00:37:59.000And if you're a gun rights person, I think you really, at this point, you need to be worried about that.
00:38:04.000There's all sorts of crazy ideas floating around.
00:38:08.000And if they get it through the House, then they're going to put pressure on the Senate to do so.
00:38:12.000And you'll see moderate Republicans cave on some of these ideas, especially if it gets through the House with a pretty large or a large enough margin.
00:38:20.000So, I mean, there's almost nothing, Charlie, that you can't worry about if they continue to keep this majority.