NTK: Can You Believe the Polls?

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Hello, and welcome to DSR's Need to Know.

I'm David Ross Coff. This week is every week. We're going to talk to somebody who's going to help us make some sense of the news. And today we're fortunate to have with us in old friend Tom Bonnier. He is a veteran, democratic political strategist

and the CEO of the Tara Group and Senior Advisor at Target. Smart. How are you doing today, Tom? I'm good. It's great to be back with you. It's good to be with you.

Hey, Tom, do you like sports? Do you follow sports at all? I do. I hate to admit that I'm a Boston sports fan, which I know will now alienate me to most of the people listening. Well, you know, you can't help that.

It's probably. I grew up there.

Yeah, I was just thinking about it.

Because last night I was watching a football game and, you know, it was the Rams versus the 49ers. And I'd spent the preceding three months listening to sports commentators going. The Rams are the greatest team in history

and they're going to win.

“And then I remember that sports commentators are always wrong”

and the Rams got their ass kicked by the 49ers. And then I thought to myself, you know, sports commentators are the worst because they just, they like get it wrong all year long, every, you know, on everything.

And then they come back the next year and do it again and we believe them. Now why you may ask am I bringing this up? Well, I have a similar reaction to pollsters. You know, and I'm trying to figure out,

and you know, you, you're deeply immersed in this world. Who's worse at predicting the future? Is it Steven A Smith and the sports commentators that are ESPN or the poster? That's a great question.

It's someone who has been very much biased against sports commentators for a long time. I would be generally predisposed to point the finger at them. That said, this has been a banner year so far for bad polling.

Not just bad polling. Fake polling. So it would be hard to argue that the broader polling community hasn't taken more of a hit this year than the sports commentators. That's my hot take.

Well, you know, I agree with you, but my question, I think the question and everybody's mind is will that continue. You know, because we went through the primaries and there was poll after poll that was wrong.

And then the next day, inevitably, there were articles by former pollsters or current pollsters saying, well, you know, it's hard to predict primaries. Because we don't know who's going to show up. And now we're looking at a general election in the United States,

midterm elections in November, that are a really big deal. Like the future of the United States and by extension, the free world could turn on these elections. And the polls say one thing, Democrats are in a good position. They've got to lead in generic polls.

They've got to lead in staples. They could take the house. They could take the Senate. And I really, really, I just be honest with you. I really, really want to believe them.

Just like I, you know, when sports commentators says my team is going to win, I'm like, yeah, that's good. He's right. That's a smart guy. But if we, they were wrong before.

“How are we to know whether they're being wrong again?”

Well, here's the issue. And I, and I do have a constructive way to look at this, that in, and we talked about about this going back to 2022. But the issue is number one, yes, we know that there is some level of inherent error in the polls.

Number two, problem. We don't know which direction that's pointed. We've had elections. We go back to since Trump came down that golden elevator escalator

Since then entered this era where polling has just been not great

to put it mildly.

“And so, so this is not, this is not the golden age of polling.”

This is the, I don't know what metal you would choose. It's not gold or platinum. Maybe brass. Yeah. Copper.

Yeah. And so, you know, the issue has been that we've had fairly consistent existence of, of error, but not consistent in terms of which direction. And so we have some years where the polls have been badly off over representing Democratic support going back to 2016, 2020 to some extent, 2024.

And then we've had years where the polling has been over estimated in Republican support.

We certainly saw that in 2022.

We saw that to some extent in 2018. So it's tempting to look at this and say, well, okay, when Trump's on the ballot, polls underestimate Trump's support. And when Trump isn't on the ballot in midterm elections, as we're headed into now in a handful of weeks,

that polls over estimate Republican support. I don't think it's quite that tidy because we have to look at, when I say the polls are when you're talking about quote, the polls, we have to consider what's actually included in that. Because if we remember, there were conclusions after these elections

from some of the poll aggregators and data journalists, the Nates of the World, where they said, look, sure, there were some very bad polls,

but when you look at the average, when you look at the aggregate,

they didn't miss by much. And so there was this tourism that came out of that, where when a questionable poll or a seemingly questionable poll was released, they would say, just throw it in the averages. An idea was, sure, you throw them all in,

and if you just have enough of them in there, they'll average out the bad ones in one direction, with the bad ones in another direction, and in the end the average will do pretty well.

“Well, I think this is the first year that we are likely to break that notion”

as well, because of what I mentioned before. Number one, it relies on the idea that there's an even number of polls that are skewed one way or another. And, you know, our mutual friend Simon Rosenberg has done a better job than anyone in really exposing the fallacy in that notion and showing it.

Look, Republicans, they have an actual strategy here to release polls that are more favorable than reality for their candidates to define and twist media coverage and a sense of momentum towards their candidates. So we're seeing more and more of that.

So I will say, even these red wave pollsters just this week are releasing some polls that look pretty good for Democrats. And then, you know, I alluded to this a moment ago, but we have seen literally at this point two different pollsters who have been caught faking polls in the primaries.

One who came out and said that the polling data they released was, quote, a social experiment to see how this sort of thing spread and then another pollster who admitted that they actually changed responses from people who supposedly took their polls, questionable in my mind, whether or not people actually took this poll.

They changed responses from one candidate to the candidate who the pollsters were supporting. So actually literally faked results. So this notion that we can just throw them in and the average will magically heal all the the hills of of of of these individual polls.

I think it's something we have to leave behind. So I would say a long story short, we should have less confidence in these polling averages now than we have had before to the extent that we have. And so should that make you nervous given that the polls show a pretty good

picture for Democrats at this point, not necessarily. It means look that the actual electoral outcome could be better for Democrats than what the polls are depicting, but we should also live with the reality that it could be worse. Yeah, I mean, polls are being used by everybody,

not just to gain insight, but as kind of cudgils or motivators in the election, as you say, and Republicans think they can use it to shape the narrative, Democrats also are using them to say they can shape the narrative. I'm getting all, you know, there are all these stories that have been all these stories. Oh, this progressive can't possibly win in the general election.

“And the establishment does, but that's why you can't vote for them,”

because here's a poll that shows they can't win in the general election. And then two days after they win, there's a new poll out, and it shows that they can actually win in the general election.

I just like, who do I believe?

Yeah, well, you mentioned these primaries, and you mentioned the agenda driven polling on both sides,

“and I think that's a good cautionary tale.”

You know, we heard this in Michigan, certainly around that primary. There was a lot of that going back and forth, in terms of who was the stronger general election candidate. And you've also heard it in Florida, for example. That's right. There's a certain fallacy in that anyhow,

in terms of the hypothetical tests of the general elections before the primaries are decided. I wouldn't put much weight in those type of poll results anyhow. But again, to your point, when the actual primary polls were missing

by double digits in both of those states.

And those weren't the only ones Wisconsin. You had something similar happen as well. Again, where you had double digit misses. And this is the poll average. This isn't just individual polls. We should put less weight in those, certainly.

So the notion of being able to define at that point, who's the stronger general election candidate. Now, thankfully, we're past that moment of hypotheticals. And when we're past the primaries now with Rhode Island, having had their primary just recently.

And so we're in the general election. We'll get more useful polling at this point. If I can, as a quick aside, in those primary elections, the one interesting thing.

“And I think, to me, we've talked about this a lot in previous conversations.”

And to get back to your initial conversation about how we should feel about this and how we should take the polling.

What we've always been successful in doing is not looking at just the polling.

Let's look at all of the other indicators we have available. Let's look at voter registration data. Let's look at primary turnout data. Let's look at special elections. And so speaking of these primaries and the surprises in turnout,

because you said quite accurately, the lot of the pollster said, "Well, don't blame us for getting these polls wrong. It's really hard to predict who's going to turn out these primaries." And that's fair. That is fair. I think there was a sense from a lot of people when you saw these DSA candidates

and other candidates who maybe people didn't expect to win when or do very well in these elections that it was because of some surge. Of some surge of younger voters, maybe who came out. And maybe that wasn't something that would be transferable to a general election. And so maybe it wasn't a sign that they would be as strong in the general election.

What we've actually seen as we look at the primary turnout in vote history is there actually hasn't been a big increase in younger voters voting in these primaries. It's been a fairly typical primary electorate in that most primary elections have older electorates voting. It hasn't been that different. You just had more turnout. You've had much higher turnout in these damn primaries than you have generally had.

But again, it's not as if you've had a surge of new voters coming into these primaries who have been electing these candidates who maybe therefore won't have as much of a general election appeal. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack. The DSR Network sub-stack is the absolute best way to follow deep state radio. The DSR Daily Words Matter need to know silicaciousness, AI energy and climate and the daily blast.

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That's DSR Network.substack.com. Thank you and back to the show. You're not allowed to do this. You're allowed to do this. You're allowed to do this. You're allowed to do this. I'm not allowed to do this. You're allowed to do this.

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Okay, that's a great deal. More comfort, craft and dynamic. All of the steps are allowed to do this. I'm 5. I'll try to stay out there. Well, you know, we came out of the 2024 election and again, it's like sports. You know, this morning, I turned on ESPN and they were like, well, of course,

the 49ers won and the Rams were overstated and how did they, you know, they made a mistake of, you know, getting to Australia to earlier.

“You know, they came up with all this bullshit, right?”

And we get the same kind of thing with elections and following Trump's, you know, mysterious contra a poll election in 2024.

And if you don't get the young male voters, if you don't get on the Joe Rogan show,

you're a dead in American politics and what American needs. So Democrats could win is Democratic Joe Rogans. Of course, now, you know, they have,

“they have a Democratic Joe Rogan and they're like, no, you have to stay.”

And so for the average person, it's not just super confusing, but it's easy to get real cynical. Yeah, no, no question. And in your right about this sort of hindsight being 2020, though it's funny. In this case, I would argue that the hindsight is actually generally wrong, right?

As I think you mentioned quite well there all of the fallacies in our takes. There are some elements of that that were correct, right? Like Trump did overperform with younger voters, especially younger men, including younger men of color,

who did swing more towards some, especially young Latino men.

Okay, that's fair, but when you look at the polling now, no demographic has swung back more away from Trump at this point. Then these exact same voters, so, you know, in terms of the conclusion around Joe Rogans. You're right in pointing that out too. Joe would be crazy at the time, by the way, when people were saying that Democrats need our own Joe Rogan.

And that if the vice president only went on Joe Rogan, she would have won. I think it seemed absurd at the time. It seems even more absurd. Now, and certainly, in terms of, of course, now we're running in one direction

and then running right back in the other direction. Well, part of that thing's interesting. Well, part of this, there is a generational issue. And we know that in the 2028 elections, the majority of voters will have been born since 1990.

And that means the majority of voters are, you know, 40, they have completely different attitudes. They don't remember 9/11. They don't remember the Cold War.

“They don't remember the things that led a lot of the, you know,”

the people who they're hearing on TV come to their, you know, they hear James Garvel or David Axelrod. And those guys are not from their era. They do not share their points of view. And, and so, you know, one of the things that I, you know,

we have to wonder about is whether the polling and so forth is good at taking into consideration things like generational shift. Now, you're saying the older voters, you know, they've, they vote more in primaries and I accept that. But there is a generational shift that takes younger voters

and makes them older. You know, so, you know, there's, there's something going on here where, you know, the, the, the, uh, Gen Z voter has a completely different set of metrics. And they are starting it seems to influence politics. They don't like AI very much.

They don't like data centers very much. They do like the environment very much. They, you know, they, et cetera, et cetera. I'm, I'm just wondering how, you know, polls are early warning system. Are they sensitive to this or are they deaf to it?

They, they can be sensitive to this. And I actually have some data to share on that front. And in, in a moment here, but to, to remember going back to 2024, there was one question in terms of the, the exit polls and the post election surveys that did a better job of predicting who someone would vote for

without asking them for whom they were voting.

“And it was how much political information do you consume?”

And there was a straight line correlation where the people who said, yeah, I consume a lot of political information. We're overwhelmingly voting for Vice President Harris. And the people who said, I don't consume any political information at all. We're overwhelmingly voting for Trump.

And then they had shades of grayed between. But it was this sort of perfect correlation. And I think it led to a little bit of a fallacy where a lot of folks looked at that and said, well, we have these quote low information voters, which were overwhelmingly younger voters.

And, you know, the reality is of anyone is around that generation.

At any amount of time and I've got a 20 year old daughter and a 16 year old daughter. So I have at least that perspective. They're overwhelmed with information. They're inundated with information. They're swiping through information every second of the day.

They just don't see it as explicitly political. And so you mentioned the generational differences. One of the big generational differences is just how and where they are consuming information and what type of information is being consumed. But the other element of this is just, they call it the thermostatic opinion,

about politics and who they're blaming for what.

And what we know is thermostatic opinion almost always goes against the party in power.

And so in 2024, especially the younger generation who didn't have other information. And frankly, didn't even have that memory of Trump, even though it was not that long ago that he was in the White House. The thermostatic opinion pointed everything at Democrats. Anything that was wrong was Democrats fault.

And so the issue for Trump and Republicans right now is that the thermostatic opinion is so solidly against them. And would be solidly against them just in a sort of quote normal political environment, which I don't even know what that means anymore. It's been so long since we've experienced it.

But you look at what Trump and the Republicans are doing now and how loudly they are out. They're talking about all the bad things they're doing.

“I think what we're seeing is that that thermostatic opinion is hurting Trump”

and the Republicans much more than it generally would have. If we look back and say, okay, midterm elections are usually bad for the party in power. That's true. It's overwhelmingly true. I think there's a strong chance it will be even more true this time around.

Just because of the lack of any nuance or any attempt to mitigate against it all, you look at what they've been doing with the Republican midterm convention earlier in the week.

You look at the fact that you have basically no Republicans trying to separate themselves from this or

or offer any sort of policy agenda to do anything about it. It would suggest that they could and likely will be in more trouble than the average midterm electorate would predict. But I promise some data just very quickly. Our team just came out of the field with a poll where we pulled exclusively these harder to reach voters. So it was voters of color, black Latino and Asian American voters and just younger voters.

These were the voters who swung overwhelmingly for Trump and helped deliver the election. They are the harder to reach voters. These are the, again, lower information voters. So we just wanted to check in and see where they are in this election and what's interesting to me, maybe this isn't, you know, all that revelatory, you would, you would predict this.

But they, they are very unhappy with Trump at this point now. But the cautionary tale is Democrats have an entirely sealed deal with them. So while the Republican numbers have dropped off precipitously, there's still just a huge undecided chunk where they say, well, we're not in love with Democrats either. Again, Democrats are poised to win massive margins with these voters.

“I think enough to take back the house and have a good shot in the Senate.”

But for Democrats to take a good election into a great election is going to take Democrats actually close in strong and making that positive proactive case with these voters. While also continuing to hammer Trump and Republicans on the fascism and their record. [Sigh] My 10 is not on. This is a 4-0.

The lyrics are always the same.

I think I'm not all in love, so I'm crazy. No, you're just a little bit older. Older. Older. They're just like their own party with a few more votes. A lot of votes.

That's why they're talking with Heinz. Okay, that's great. More comfort. Craft and dynamic. All right, the passport. Older. The one is just a little bit older.

All right, stay out there. Well, let me ask you a leading question. You know, I watched a lot of crime dramas too, and you're not supposed to ask leading questions. But I'm warning you. I won't object.

It's a, yeah, thank you. It's a leading question. Am I leading question as this?

“You know, what is the answer for the Democrats to engage?”

Is it as a establishment Democrats have said to find a kind of soft middle of American politics and talk about working with the other side and talk about compromises and talk about. You know, what we can all do together. And, or is it to say, we're going to fight back. We're going to hold the accountable for corruption. We're going to, you know, sort of break away from the politics of the past 15 20 years and try to do something new and provide solutions.

I mean, to me, one of the interesting things is that other candidates who are seen as radical have chosen the radical path of saying, I'm going to fix your problems. You know, they're chosen the path of I'm going to make your life better because the main issue that I perceive that a lot of the voters you're talking about have is they think the system is rigged. They don't think the system works for them.

I do think that last part is what we've found missing for Democrats so far. And this is not universally the case. And I'm not saying Democrats are doing a bad job of this. I'm just saying, this is instructive in terms of how Democrats need to close now that we're post labor day. And that's the magical point at which everyone starts paying attention to politics and campaigns.

So again, I think we live in a world now where it's always there.

But certainly there's going to be more focus on this. So that last part in terms of making the positive cases incredibly important.

“But that said, I think if we look at the elections last year, New Jersey and Virginia, where you had two now Democratic governors who ran well ahead of the polls, right?”

The polls falsely showed Republicans closing strong in both of those states. And what we saw is both of our gubernatorial candidates dramatically overperforming the polls. If we want to have that sort of election, I think we should look at what they did.

And you mentioned mom Donnie as I think another great example, where, yes, they very much made the positive case in terms of how they are going to make people's lives better.

Because in the end, that is what people want. They are not happy. We saw in our poll, especially younger people, they're saying that they are buying fewer groceries. They are spending less money. They don't have the money. They're very concerned about what is going on right now. And they want to believe that their vote will have an impact for the better and so they're looking for someone to make that case. Republicans are aggressively not making that case to be clear. They're saying everything's great. Everything's already great.

We've done the job. We're going to write you some checks. Everything will be fine.

“Democrats, I think, are making that case and we just need to be louder about it and more forceful in the closing.”

That said, if you look at what our Democratic candidates didn't those racist, they weren't afraid to call out Republicans and Trump specifically for being fascist. Maybe not using those words, but making it clear that they are distracted, that they're focused on all the wrong things, that they are running these brutal campaigns of deportation, that they're focused on these culture war issues. Instead of focusing on those issues that people are focused on in their day-to-day lives every moment. And so I do think that's the path. And you know, I think it's interesting with Mombani, a lot of people said,

and I don't think this was wrong at the time, they said, well, look, we can't learn too many lessons from what he did because it's New York City. And the rest of America is New York City. Fair enough. But when now you look at El Siyad and Michigan and how successful he was. And I think some of that has been downplayed because the expectation was from the bad polling that he was going to win by 20 points. And so then when he went narrowly, they say it's an underperformance, realistically based on the kind of money that was spent and just who he is.

And in terms of his lack of political experience, the fact that he won it all, I think is remarkable, would suggest that this isn't just the New York City thing, right? Here is a candidate who was talking about these issues, but also talking about what Republicans have done wrong.

“I think he thread the needle there. I think that's what our candidates will need to do in general.”

And just above all that, they need to be likable. Our candidates need to be likable. I think it's something that Mom Donnie has done incredibly well. When Republicans are saying that these are fascists, that they're socialists, that we're going to, you know, ruin the world and so on and so forth. And then you see someone who just comes across is just kind of a nice, likable person those attacks fall flat. Well, you know, what are the things, just listening to talk about it? And I agree, you know, this, the, the, the, the misinterpretation of Mom Donnie, I think was pretty broad in the reality is it's not just Michigan. You can look at Florida, you can look at Wisconsin sheet that hung didn't win, but, but there have been some shifts there. You can look and see at all.

You know, the mayor Boston is, is Michelle Boos, been there for a long time is a progressive who's doing great. That this is a national phenomenon. But it's a phenomenon where it depends on what you're looking at to determine the phenomenon. You know, they're James Saloreco and Zora Mom Donnie don't have the same approaches to every policy issue, but no or John Asso for that matter. But here's their all young, they're all accessible and they're all more comfortable and modern media and one of the things that I hear in what you're talking about is, you know, a lot of the old school.

Political, you know, consultants class think of things in terms of the 60 second ad that they were going to run in the middle of, you know, prime time.

Which is irrelevant because prime time isn't even a thing anymore. People don't even watch that stuff anymore.

You've got to sort of reveal something yourself and the other thing is that they have to be likable, but you also have to believe they're going to fight for you.

“Because if you don't believe that, you got a problem and we've seen and wrap up this kind of question search for a response here.”

One of the interesting things that I think we've seen since the last set of elections was that Abigail Spanberger in Virginia has been struggling a bit as a governor because she has been sort of a little bit taking a little bit more of the middle of the road.

Thank you Cheryl in New Jersey is seen as somebody who'll stand up and fight and take a path of her own and she's been doing better. So even those kind of candidates aren't exactly the same.

And I think part of it has to do with them adapting to a new media environment. Because Kamala Harris got screwed by a bunch of consultants who said, let's put a lot of money into network TV. And that wasn't where it should have gone, but I at least that's my view. No, that's right. And I think there was also a calculus there where the Harris campaign, you know, and we've talked about this before, but about saving our all their communication till late, not going negative on Trump, just doing contrasts.

“That was a mistake. I think, you know, one of the most important points you made there was the notion about they need to see candidates and and their elected officials fighting for them.”

And what that looks like and and people are so wasn't a good idea for the Harris campaign to tell table alts to shut up.

No, I don't think so. Right. I mean, he was someone out there who's just kind of very openly and then his own likable way going out there saying what I think a lot of people were thinking. And that's why they picked him and then as soon as they picked him, they said, you know something dial it back and it's like what what? Well, you know, you ask about the consultants and what's changed. And I think unfortunately not enough has changed and in the one thing I've used this word too many times already, but the fallacy of persuasion versus mobilization that's that's been as long as I've been around campaigns, which is too long.

We've had these two sort of buckets. You have the persuadable voters who could vote for either side and then you have the mobilization or get out the vote voters. The voters are going to vote for us. But we just need to persuade them to reality. It's all some type of persuasion. It's all some type of mobilization, but the fallacy down under lines of that is the notion that the way someone voted in a previous election is some deeply held important thing that they think about every day. There is a portion of this country, the mega core of America who does do that. It's how they define themselves and they have the bumper stickers and that this and the that and the social media profiles and that's everything to them.

But those aren't the voters who we're trying to appeal to. It's the larger chunk in the middle where it's actually not that important to them. They're not thinking that much about how they voted two years ago.

“But I think we need to lose that mindset where we get to narrow cast and just focused on what they did last time around and how do we change it when in reality they moved past it probably five minutes after they walked out the polling place.”

We need to make the case now, how are we fighting for them now, how are we going to address their concerns now and also calling things as we see them and when and when you see a ridiculous Republican party. Like we have today, you know, that is as they say a very target right environment. There are plenty of things to point out there that I think would resonate with people and we shouldn't be afraid to do that. No doubt that's true. I mean, there is a question about whether, you know, the prime voters to persuade our voters in the middle or their voters in the base that didn't vote the last time.

And, you know, this is a conversation we have a lot and frankly, the largest group of American voters didn't vote. And so, you know, there's, there's a lot of potential minds to explore here. That's right. But even the definition of what the middle is these days is less clear than it was for generations, right.

I'm starting into movement, which you can be a member of if you like, because I'm super progressive on a lot of things and on some things, I think I'm a little bit more pragmatic.

I'm just an anti-labelist. And I think we should just start the anti-labelist movement. Perfect. I like that. I'm glad you appreciate that. But in any event, you know, the other way these sports shows all work is that they talk for an hour and then, you know, there are all these guys sitting around who have CTE or whatever, but it doesn't matter. We listen to them and they go, they should have done this, so they should have done that, they should have done the other thing.

“And then you get to the very end of the show and they say, "Okay, so what are your predictions?" And after spending, you know, a good 33 minutes and 29 seconds talking about why some of the predictions you need to tune out.”

But are you still net fairly optimistic on the dams? You did say a little bit ago that you felt pretty good about them in the house and that there's a possibility in the Senate. Is that really, is that kind of where you are? It is, you know, I think if we go back to, again, the last midterm election in 2022 when overwhelmingly, folks in the media were predicting a red wave and we were talking about this saying that we didn't see it coming.

It wasn't based on any level of magic. Again, it was just taking the indicators that are available to us, above and beyond the polling, like I said a few minutes ago.

And same look, it doesn't look like a red wave. We've seen red wave elections before and based on all this, it doesn't look like that. So similarly in this election, when we look at all of those indicators beyond the polling, which is generally quite good for Democrats, when we look at who is registering as a Democrat versus a Republican in the relative numbers in these key states, when we look at special election results when we look at primary turnout.

“They fairly universally look quite good for Democrats, so does that mean it's often, of course, not offer the caveat that we have to offer that.”

Again, by the way, the sports commentators generally don't do, right? It pays to be bold.

Things could change. These indicators are likely going to be off by some measure. You know, we aren't talking about so many, I think if you look at the different prognosticators, they generally say there's somewhere in the low 20s in terms of true toss-up districts, which is not a ton. And that's due to the gerrymandering. So they're smaller margins. There will be surprises one way or the other, but the indicators that we have available to us look fairly universally good for Democrats. Right, which is another way of saying that the Republicans are likely to cheat more. And that's, you know, going to offset all of this. Well, they're trying, right, in terms of the executive order and then the Supreme Court decision and a lot of this is still pending in terms of mail voting. They know that Democrats have dominated mail voting since 2020 when Trump told his supporters that's fraud and they shouldn't do it.

“So they will double down on that. There's a lot more work to be done on that front from our perspective to make sure that every vote is protected and counted. And I would take nothing for granted here that does worry me.”

You know, not to the point why would suggest that people should not have confidence that their vote will be counted. I know there will be substantial efforts there to protect the vote, but that's something that, you know, I think we need to keep talking about focusing on because I have that same concern. I think the more desperation we see, the more likely it is that they will try any means to hold on to power. Well, I mean, even had the president last night, we're recording this on a Friday. We had the president last night asked the audience at the Trump of Palooza festival in Dallas to take a pledge with him to cheat.

I wasn't that that I was going to say the craziest thing I've seen, but it's not because it's just another day in Trump's America, but but seen him make everyone raise their hands and repeat after him and this is he slowly went off the rails and they eventually couldn't repeat after him anymore because he would go on for several minutes. Right, right, right, you right, either was part of the the the pledge was you know vote vote vote that that you can cheat because the other side will do it. It's and it's a wild place to be I'm glad for elections because it enables us to talk to you again. I hope we can talk to you again in the run up to the election.

I think what you say is super valuable and we'll talk to you again soon and we'll follow these issues again soon and for those of you who are listening to us.

My 10th is not to be the one who's been to this school for so long. I'm not all alone so I'm so happy. No, you're just a little bit. All right, what are you doing? We're going to have a party with a football meeting scene box. A lot of comments. Let's sing your love with Heinzzi. Okay, that's great. I'm coming forward. Craft and dynamic. All right, the pass form. All right, let's go. All right, stay out there.