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Clifford Young, president of polling and societal trends for Ipsos, talks about his organization's recent polling on election integrity and voter attitudes leading up to Election Day.
And then we'll look at efforts to boost voter confidence in the election system with David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
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We're joined now by Charlie Dent.
He's a senior advisor to the group called Our Republican Legacy, also a former U.S. Representative, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
Charlie Dent, welcome to the program.
Thanks, Mimi.
Great to be with you.
So you're an advisor to the group called Our Republican Legacy.
What is it?
What are the mission?
What's the mission, and how are you funded?
Yeah, we're a 501c4 organization.
We are not a lobbying group.
We're not really even advocating for against anyone in a particular election.
What we do, we are a group of, I'll say, dispirited Republicans who want a better direction for the Republican Party.
We want to create an alternative narrative to MAGA.
We think too often that those of us in the party who want a different direction have been far too quiet.
And so what we've done is we've laid out five core principles, five core principles that we think have guided the Republican Party in the past and should guide it going forward.
Those principles being the Constitution.
We believe in the rule of law.
We believe in the peaceful transfer of power.
We think January 6th was an abomination.
We believe in the Union.
Abraham Lincoln was our founder.
And his objective, of course, was to keep this great country together.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump and many of the MAGA movement want to divide it further.
We also believe in a peace through strength of foreign policy that embraces allies, rejects autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.
So we're in a very different place than the MAGA movement.
We think there should be constructive international engagement.
We are also for free markets.
Now, we're not talking about going back to 1850 or 1920s.
We understand you need modern, reasonable regulation, but at the same time, we think things like these absurd across-the-board destructive tariffs would really wreak havoc on the country and our economy and are not in keeping with the tradition of where we as Republicans should be.
And finally, fiscal discipline.
We think we have to start having that conversation once again in this country.
We will talk about tariffs and fiscal discipline.
When was the organization created?
Oh, it was created, I believe, back in April or March.
That's when it was first created.
Our former senators, Jack Danforth, Alan Simpson, and Bill Cohen.
Danforth of Missouri, Simpson of Wyoming, and Cohen of Maine are our original founders.
And we thought it was time to really create a strong voice as an alternative to MAGA.
The Republican Party is divided.
It's not evenly divided, but it is divided.
There are many Republicans who do not like the direction, and we want a different direction.
I mean, what's the ultimate goal?
Are you going to try to run another candidate for president in the next cycle?
I mean, we haven't even gone there.
What we are trying to do is just create a groundswell of support.
We're looking not just at this election, we're looking beyond this election, frankly, about how do we get this Republican Party into a better place.
The principles I just laid out, you know, we believe have sustained the party for 170 years.
You know, MAGA has been around for under 10 years.
Their roots are rather shallow.
Ours are rather deep.
Now, no one's naive here.
We understand that we're not going to go back to where we were.
But we need to get to a better place.
And so we want to help shape this conversation going forward for those of us in the party who have stood for certain principles, that those principles will still be respected and, frankly, driving what should be the Republican Party.
This isolationism, nativism, protectionism, I think many of us think this is a dead end.
But what caused that?
I mean, given the deep roots, as you say, of the Republican Party, what caused it to go in the quote, MAGA direction?