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Hey there listeners.
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Before we get started, I wanted to give you a heads up that our paid subscriber discount ends this weekend. So for first time subscribers it's 20% off. That's just five bucks a month with an annual subscription for twice as many episodes Mondays and Thursdays access to the paid subscriber chat. And importantly, you ensure that we can keep making an independent podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor and a sense of humor. Head to GDPolitics.com for 20% off, just five bucks a month. Again GDPolitics.com hope to see you there.
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I did Washington Journal yesterday morning and a woman called in ostensibly on the Democratic line from Sewell, New Jersey. And she was first she talked about the 500,000 illegal voters in Georgia and then she was talking about how she gets all these Spencer Pratt ads on her TikTok and that everyone should be taking tips from Spencer Pratt about how to run a campaign because he's, he's so great.
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Are you familiar with the times that Cher has call into C Span?
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Galen the reason why I do Washington Journal whenever they ask me to do it, no matter what time of day is on the off chance that I will be on when Cher happens to call in. It hasn't happened yet, but I maintain hope that one day we'll get the call and it'll be Cher. And I hope when that happens, I
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hope that they have oh Jacob.
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Worst Cher impression ever.
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Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drouke and we've got a jam packed election update episode for you today. In Tuesday night's primaries, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie lost to Trump backed Chinese challenger Ed Gallerain. Massie did much better than other Republicans
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who have crossed Trump but still went
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down by 10 percentage points.
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Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Democratic primary for Georgia governor outright. While Republicans will head to a runoff, Republicans are also heading to a runoff to determine who will take on Jon Ossoff this fall.
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Looking ahead to next week, Trump has
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finally endorsed in the Texas Senate runoff backing Ken Paxton. And after seemingly being ready to endorse John Cornyn months ago, the betting markets now have that general election against James Talarico looking like a pure toss up. We're also going to dig into some of the June 2 primaries.
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We see you California and Iowa and New Jersey. And let's not even forget New Mexico.
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Lastly, we'll do a quick update on where the redistricting war stand after the
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Supreme Court's decision in Calais.
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And here with me to do all of that is Jacob Robashkin, deputy editor of Inside Elections.
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Welcome, Jacob.
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Are you ready to cover a lot of ground today?
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You know, I wouldn't expect anything less on the GD Politics podcast.
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Oh, we'd love to hear it. So let's start in Kentucky.
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Massie went down to Gallrain. Am I saying that name correctly?
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I think it's Gowrine.
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Massie went down to go rhein, 45% to 55%. A loss is a loss. But does 45% of Republicans voting for the person who Trump called the worst congressman in the history of the country say something?
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Maybe. But like you said, a loss is a loss. And I think for a couple of reasons, I don't read too much into the high share of the vote that Massie got relative to where some of these other Trump targets have ended up. The first is Trump's animosity toward Thomas Massie is. Is not new. You go back to 2020, and Trump was recruiting primary challengers to run against Massie that year. In fact, in a funny twist of fate, the guy that they recruited to run against Massie that year turned out to be kind of a scoundrel. And he either dropped out or everyone pulled their support from him, including Liz Cheney, who also wanted to beat Thomas Massie when Trump was trying to kick him out of the party. So it's nothing new that Trump and Massie have this kind of fractious relationship that has been baked in to a certain extent among voters in the district. And the other thing that I'll say is that Massie was not actually running as a Trump critic. If you watch his ads, if you watched how he ran on the campaign trail, he was not in this Liz Cheney mold of, yeah, I did it, so what? This is who I am now, and take it or leave it, but, you know, I'm no longer on board with Trump. His ads featured Trump. His ads often ended with old photos of Massie and Trump standing together, smiling. His campaign was highlighting Trump's endorsement of him in 2020. And so, yeah, I think that there's probably part of the district that is like, I like Trump and I like Massie. I don't know who this other guy is. So why not continue to vote for Massie? I think that's how you get to 45%. You cobble that section together with the libertarian wing of the party in that district that liked Massie because he was a bit of a iconoclast. And you, you get to a healthy number. But again, Not a number that's sufficient to win reelection. And as an incumbent, you know, that's. That's a pretty disappointing outcome.
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Yeah. I'll add to that that unlike some of these statewide races, which ultimately, Liz Cheney's in Wyoming was statewide and Bill Cassidy's in Louisiana was statewide, this is just the 4th congressional district that we're talking about. It's the wealthiest district in the state of Kentucky and is centered around some of the wealthier suburbs of Cincinnati. And when we talk, you know, how ideology breaks down according to demographic groups. Wealthier, more college educated voters tend to be some of the most ideological people in the electorate. And so they could have been drawn to this sort of capital C conservative brand that Massie had developed for over a decade in the district. The sort of libertarian bent that people may also be used to from voting for the Rands for a period of time or, sorry, voting for the polls. Ron the Paul's rant and Rand and Ron. And so this is a particular district. It's not the whole Republican electorate within the state of Kentucky. But I do want to flip things on their head for a second and give you the critique of your take on it, which is this race happened at a time when Trump is facing a lot of difficulty. On Monday's podcast this week, we talked about how he's hitting record lows for his second term, at least, if not both terms altogether. The New York Times also put out more polling showing that over a third of Republican and Republican aligned voters suggest the party needs to take a new direction from Trump, as opposed to 55% who said that the party should stick with Trump's direction. You know, it's a difficult moment for Trump politically, at least with the broader electorate. And some, it seems like pieces of even the Republican coalition chipping away. So I just want to give you that data and ask, is there more to it? Is it more than just, you know, people know Thomas Massie as a crank and they like their crank, but they also really like Trump.
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Maybe. But remember, we're talking about not just Republicans writ large. We're not even talking about Republican registered Republican voters. We're not talking about likely Republican voters. We're not even talking about Republican primary voters on a nationwide level. We're talking about Republican primary voters in the 4th district of Kentucky, which is just, it's a very, very small sample size. And I think that if you put this race in the context of the other races that we've seen play out over the last couple of weeks that Trump has involved himself in Louisiana race that you mentioned with Bill Cassidy, but also those Indiana state Senate races that happened a couple of weeks ago where Trump went on a bit of a retribution tour following the redistricting. You can't explain away the fact that this guy still has a tremendous amount of power and weight within the Republican Party. I think we can talk about what it means for the larger political landscape, but the people who are going to show up to a Republican Party in Kentucky as a closed primary state, so these are all registered Republicans. Those people still really like Trump. And, you know, yeah, there's a disconnect between his standing on a national level and his standing among those kinds of voters. But, you know, the polling in this district. Right. I mean, Trump's approval rating, according to, there was a poll from Gray House, which is a respected Republican pollster, that came out with a survey just a couple days before the election. It had Gowrine up 51:44. So they got it fairly close and they pegged Trump's approval in this district at 84% to 16% among Republican primary voters. So that means that at least 30% of the 45% who voted for Thomas Massie approved of Trump. Right. Most of them probably strongly approved of Trump. They just also happen to like Massie.
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Yeah, no, I think that's, that's important to keep in mind and a good level setting when looking at the results in this district. We mentioned some of the other parts of the revenge tour that Trump has gone on overall, but, like, not every time Trump endorses is he trying to exact revenge. You know, he'll endorse in competitive primaries around the country based on whatever relationships. It's not necessarily because he hates the other person, but because he wants to support this or that person. How are his endorsements faring overall? If we look beyond just the kind of high profile instances along the revenge
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tour, Trump's track record this cycle is pretty good. He remains the most coveted endorser within the Republican primary. And, and when you look at the people that he's endorsed across House races, Senate races, and even these state legislative races, his record is very, very good. I don't believe that there's anyone who has run in a Senate or a House race primary so far who he has endorsed, who has lost. There were a couple people in those Indiana state Senate races that he endorsed who lost, but the majority of them won. There are a couple who are facing headwinds right now. Right. So we can talk about Bert Jones in Georgia, who, in a runoff for the gubernatorial race. We can talk about Barry Moore in Alabama, who's in a runoff for the Senate race. And then maybe the most prominent loss on Trump's record right now is Sid Miller, the Texas state Commissioner of Agriculture, who he endorsed and lost in his primary. I mean, if, if that's the biggest blemish on your record, I think that's a pretty good track record for Trump at this moment when it comes to primaries.
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Coming out of Tuesday's primaries, you saw a lot of articles along the lines of, I'm just going to read this headline from Politico. It says, Trump completed his revenge tour. Allies wonder at what cost. And they talk about what this all means going into November and whether he's endorsed the strongest candidates for the party. This was a big through line in some of the past midterms where Republicans ended up nominating particularly Senate candidates who didn't do as well as they could have probably in 2022 with an unpopular Joe Biden in the white. Is there a sense that the candidates that he has thrown his endorsement behind so far are low quality general election candidates?
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Well, if you asked that question before yesterday, I think most people would have told you no, that he has actually been much more prudent in the types of candidates that he's endorsing, and he has been much more receptive to the conversations with Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson and has been adjusting the way that he goes about doing the endorsements to make things more straightforward for Republicans looking to maintain their majorities in Congress. That's how you end up with him backing Mike Rogers in Michigan in that Senate race very early on, clearing that race of a primary, backing the former Senator Sununu in New Hampshire in his primary against Scott Brown, clearing the way for John Husted and Vivek Ramaswamy to win their respective primaries without any trouble in Ohio for Senate and governor. But then you get to Ken Paxton, and this is the first instance it feels like of the old Trump peeking through here, that Paxton almost certainly is a weaker general election candidate than John Cornyn. And Trump's decision to back Paxton over the wishes of pretty much every Republican leader, I don't think that's helpful for their chances of holding the House or the Senate.
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Couldn't you look at that and just say Trump is trying to notch another endorsement win? He saw the writing on the wall. It didn't look like John Cornyn was going to win the runoff and so he wanted to endorse the winner as opposed to really Try to throw his weight behind the underdog and risk losing in a high profile way, or, like, risk it looking like his endorsement doesn't matter so much to Republican primary voters.
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Yeah, I mean, that's a risk that the President makes every time that he makes an endorsement, you know, more than a week or two ahead of the election. Right. I mean, and clearly in some cases, he's more than happy to do it. I mean, endorsing Barrymore in Alabama kind of came out of the blue. And I don't think if Barry Moore loses to Jared Hudson in the runoff, everyone is going to say, oh, Trump's.
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But there's a reason, because even listeners to this podcast, probably most of them have never heard those names before. Whereas, like, everyone has heard Ken Paxton and John Cornyn.
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Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. I don't want to say that Texas, you know, matters any more than Alabama and the grand scheme of, like, value judgments about states.
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Okay, fine, then I'll say it. Texas matters more than Alabama.
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I think that if Trump had endorsed John Cornyn the day after the election, when Cornyn came ahead of Paxton, which was a surprise on the first Tuesday in March, if Trump had endorsed Cornyn when all that reporting first came out, when the Atlantic wrote the story, Trump to endorse Cornyn imminently, if he had actually done it, I think Cornyn would have won. I think that it would have taken a little bit more juice to get there, but I think that Cornyn would have been able to turn that into a victory. I don't know why Trump didn't do it. I have my suspicions. I've had people try to explain it to me in ways that I don't necessarily think make a ton of sense. But what are your suspicions? My suspicions are that he was going to do it, and then somebody leaked it to the Atlantic, which he is a publication he does not like, and he said, screw you. I don't like people tipping my hand on these decisions, so I'm not going to do what people want me to do. And then that created a window for Paxton and his allies, many of whom are well represented in the President's inner circle, to kind of rush in and ask him to hold off, essentially. And they used the SAVE act and things like this that, you know, were tools in their arsenal, to try and persuade the President why Cornyn was not on his side. But ultimately, I think that Trump felt probably burned by people getting ahead of him, and he also got a little
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distracted by the war in Iran.
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That's true.
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Yeah.
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Within a day of that week. Sure.
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Yeah, Exactly. And I. And I think that it just, it kind of fell by the wayside. The other thing that I think happen, and ultimately the reason why I think that he ended up endorsing Paxton instead of Cornyn is I think there are three things going on. One he likes.
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That's the end of today's preview for the full episode. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and right now get 20% off. That's just five bucks a month. Jacob and I talked for about an hour. We got into the specifics of Trump's Paxton endorsement and why these endorsements are so important to Trump at a time when he's struggling nationally. We also talked about Tuesday's primaries in Georgia and what they mean for the general elections this fall. We talked about California's governor's race. We also talked about the drama that's swirling around Montana's Senate race and an effort there to winnow the race to an independent versus a Republican. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to catch the whole thing and get 20% off before the discount ends. You'll get twice the number of episodes and will help ensure that we can keep making this independent podcast again. That's GDPolitics. Com.
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See you there.