We're going to want, we thought it was a huge success.
It produced more revenue than less.
And I'm sure virtually all of us would like to see most of that extended.
Okay, I think I think we're through.
Good luck to you all.
I enjoyed talking to you, and it was a hell of a good day.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Since 1979, in partnership with the cable industry, C-SPAN has provided complete coverage of the halls of Congress.
From the House and Senate floors to congressional hearings, party briefings, and committee meetings, C-SPAN gives you a front-row seat to how issues are debated and decided with no commentary, no interruptions, and completely unfiltered.
C-SPAN, your unfiltered view of government.
On Thursday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell holds a news conference to talk about interest rates and monetary policy actions.
That'll be live at 2.30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, and online at c-SPAN.org.
C-SPAN Now is a free mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of what's happening in Washington, live and on demand.
Keep up with the day's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the U.S. Congress, White House events, the courts, campaigns, and more from the world of politics, all at your fingertips.
You can also stay current with the latest episodes of Washington Journal and find scheduling information for C-SPAN's TV networks and C-SPAN radio, plus a variety of compelling podcasts.
C-SPAN Now is available at the Apple Store and Google Play.
Scan the QR code to download it for free today or visit our website c-span.org/slash c-SPAN now.
C-SPAN Now, your front-row seat to Washington anytime, anywhere.
The founder and chair of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Ralph Reed, held a press conference on the 2024 presidential election results, looking at polling, minority outreach, and the perceived failures of the Democrats' campaign.
From the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., it's about an hour.
Well, I want to thank everybody for coming.
Glad you can pick up the audio.
And my name is Ralph Reed.
I'm the founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which is a public policy organization that works on behalf of stronger families, protecting innocent human life, limiting government, reducing the crushing tax burden on families, and defending the state of Israel, as well as a whole host of other public policy issues.
We have 3 million members and supporters.
And in the last election cycle, we undertook the largest ground game operation by a conservative or Christian public policy organization outside the Republican Party in the history of modern American politics.
We knocked on approximately 9.7 million doors in the battleground states.
We sent out 28 million AI-driven get-out-the-vote text messages, which actually engaged faith-based voters in a conversation about developing a plan to vote and encouraging them to vote early with historic results, which I'll get to in a minute.
And we also conducted millions of get-out-the-vote calls and distributed 30 million voter guides in approximately 130,000 churches nationwide.
We tracked the votes of these voters as they took place during the early vote.
And while we're not going to give out all of the information because it's clearly proprietary, I can tell you that a majority and in some battleground states, approaching 60% of all the registered evangelical Christians in that state, in four of the seven battleground states, voted before Election Day.
That has never happened in any of our lifetimes, with one exception, and that is in the state of Florida, which has a long and cherished history of early voting.
Those voters are used to voting early, but we've never seen these kinds of numbers.
Between 55 and 60 percent of all the modeled registered evangelical Christians in four of the seven battleground states voted before Election Day.
We were absolutely, and by the way, I should also mention as a subgroup of those voters, there were hundreds of thousands of evangelical voters in every one of these battleground states who voted in 2016, did not even show up in 2020, and voted early.
We don't even have the total yet for how many voted yesterday.
We're not going to give out the specific numbers.
It's hundreds of thousands of faith-based voters.
We're talking about a number that in the state of Georgia would be 20 to 30 times Biden's margin of victory in 2020.
In Arizona, it would be 20 to 30 times Biden's margin.
And this happened everywhere.
And we know it happened because of multiple door knocks, multiple text messages.
That was our push.
And then we had the poll of Donald J. Trump, superior U.S. Senate candidates where they were on the ballot, superior congressional candidates where those voters lived in a battleground congressional district, and an issue mix that greatly benefited our turnout operation.
You know, you don't need me to tell you, you've been looking at it either on TV or you've looked at the exit polls yourself.
Glenn will talk about it in a minute.
That the issue mix was a combustible and lethal combination for the Harris-Waltz campaign.
These voters were overwhelmingly voting on the economy, on inflation, on the border, on crime, and on foreign policy.
Abortion, and Glenn, maybe you'll talk about this.
I'd be curious to have your view.
Glenn and I have not even talked about this, but I think it's pretty clear that they thought that they could just take the playbook from 2022, abortion, abortion, abortion, and, you know, just run with it.
And it got to a point that was candidly comical, where you would see a Democratic Senate candidate or a Harris Waltz surrogate being interviewed, and they would be asked about the border or they would be asked about inflation, and they would say, well, let me tell you why that's likely to be impacted by Trump bringing about a national abortion ban.
The voters didn't buy it.
We believe that the only voters who were motivated by that issue were voters she already had.
So, you know, it's up to them as to whether or not they want to continue with that playbook.
But we're confident that we're going to be able to go to both the strategists and the candidates on the Republican side of the aisle going forward.
And to paraphrase Winston Churchill, there is nothing quite as exhilarating as being shot at to no effect.
And they shot at these candidates, and they dropped a half a billion dollars in abortion ads on their heads.
And every other sentence out of Kamala Harris's mouth at every rally in her closing argument was that Trump was against women's health and she lost by a landslide.
She's losing every single Battleground state.
I would also like to underscore that approximately 20% of these nearly 10 million doors that we knocked on in the Battleground states were minority households.
And those, by the way, were overwhelmingly Hispanic.
In states where the African American vote plays a critical strategic role, like for example, Georgia, we had a strong ground game in the black community, but in general, it was Hispanic, and we had Hispanic teams that were organized by our Hispanic division working very closely and collaborating with John Harbison, our director of voter education, in Arizona, in Nevada, in Georgia, in Florida,
where we were involved in trying to defeat Amendments 3 and 4.
You know, Rick Scott, that Senate race close to about two points at a certain point.
We wanted to make sure we were there for him.
But we were primarily there to defeat Amendments 3 and 4, and we're absolutely thrilled that we were successful with that.
And you guys saw how the Hispanic vote turned out not only nationally, but in Florida.
And that was driven not exclusively, but primarily by Trump's overperformance among faith-based Hispanic voters.
We were in Hispanic churches registering Hispanic voters to vote going all the way back to January.
We had Hispanic door knocking teams in Pennsylvania, I believe in Wisconsin.
And John, I don't know if you want to come up and talk about that aspect or any other aspect of the ground game that you think people would find interesting.
Thanks, Ralph.
As Ralph said, John Harbison, Director of Voter Education, when you know, this year we changed our focus a little bit, as Ralph talked about, with the lower propensity voters and really made a concerted effort to really motivate those voters.
And quite frankly, we were going to annoy them.
Once they early voted, that was part of our scripts.
Once you early vote, we're going to leave you alone.
So we're going to send you text messages.
We're going to continue knocking on your door.
And we were able to do that with great results.
We didn't know how those voters were going to break, but we knew that they were voting early.
When we would run our nightly, we deduct our early vote from our database so we're not expending resources on people that have already voted.
And those universes just kept shrinking every night.
So as we went out across the country across the swing states and continued on to hit these low-propensity voters and then engaging with our Hispanic groups and Hispanic pockets across the Rust Belt as well, of course, Nevada and Arizona, and North Carolina as well.
We had really great output with our teams there.
So thank you.
Great.
Thanks, John.
John, you did an extraordinary job.
All we asked him to do was knock on 10 million doors.
Yeah, we had a few hurricanes that slowed us down a little bit.
But anyway, I want to give credit to Tim Head, our very able executive director, John Harbison.
Just an unbelievable team.
I mean, we had almost as many paid staff on the ground in Pennsylvania as the Harris Waltz campaign had.
And in states where we didn't have as many paid staff, where we might not have had 200, 250, 300 paid staff, in Georgia, I think we had about 185, but then we had 600 volunteers that were knocking on doors for free.
So we were knocking on doors.
We're not going to give that number out publicly.
But our cost per home reached was about 30 percent of the industry standard.
And there were some organizations out there that were paying three, four, and five times more for a door knock than we were because of the volunteer infrastructure that has been built in the last 15 years.
And I think the results really speak for themselves.
Donald Trump, Glenn will talk about this.
He carried the evangelical vote 81 to 16 percent, which is within the margin of error of the 84 percent that he got four years ago.
Pew Research will come out with data later with a much larger universe of surveyed respondents that may give us another look at that picture.
But we think we can say Trump roughly matched where he was four years ago.
But that really understates the effect of this ground game, okay?
Because if you look at the states where we were actually knocking on doors and distributing voter guides in churches and sending text messages, the numbers were historic.
They were without precedent.
Let me just give you two examples.
In Georgia, Donald Trump carried the evangelical vote 92 to 6 percent.
It's about a third of the entire vote, and that means that he won, he did, he performed better among evangelical voters than an African American presidential candidate did among black voters.
That's extraordinary.
And by the way, that's the largest number ever recorded in an exit poll by any candidate, statewide, congressional, or presidential.
The previous high was 91 percent, which was what Brian Kemp got in 2022 against Stacey Abrams.
And the next one below that was the 89 percent that Glenn Young got in Virginia.
In North Carolina, Donald Trump won 86 percent of the evangelical vote to Harris's 13 percent.
So, you know, we would argue, particularly the way both we and the Republican Party have put such a priority and such an emphasis on building a movement that looks more like America, with more young people, more Hispanics, more African Americans, more Asians.
While we have done that, they have a serious faith problem.
They have a faith problem and they have an intact family problem.
And if they don't do something to address this, and it isn't just evangelicals, look at the Catholic vote.
Donald Trump, after losing the Catholic vote, I believe by 8%, I think it was by 8% four years ago, winning it by 6% eight years ago.
Yesterday, Donald Trump won the Catholic vote by 15%.
And among Catholics who frequently attend Mass, maybe you've got a slide on this.
Yeah, but I think it's over two to one, okay?
So I just don't see arithmetically, we don't know what's going to happen in 26 or 28.
You know, this is Donald Trump's last time on the ballot.
There's no guarantee that future presidential candidates are going to be able to have the kind of appeal with these voters of color that Donald Trump has had.
But if the Republican Party's candidates continue to make a real effort to get those minority votes, and if organizers, and if organizations like ours, to whom I would argue in the future, it is highly likely the ground game will be outsourced to, because it clearly worked, and you can use so-called soft money.
So why would you use the hard money, the much more precious hard money of a federal campaign to knock on doors, canvass voters and chase ballots, and where it is legal, harvest ballots?
Why would you ever use hard money again of a federal campaign when organizations like Faith and Freedom, what Elon Musk was doing, what Charlie Kirk was doing and others?
So I think this is the future.
And if we're out there seriously going into Hispanic and black and Asian neighborhoods and knocking on doors and circulating voter guides that are bilingual and trilingual and where it's legal harvesting ballots in Hispanic and Asian churches.
I didn't get the final count, John, but I believe we harvested between 40 and 50,000 ballots in Asian churches in Orange County.
And if we end up picking up those congressional districts out there, you know, 47 and the others, that will be the margin.
If we're out there doing that and they're underperforming among those minorities, while they're losing the evangelical vote, 8 to 2 or worse, and while they're losing the Catholic vote by 15 or 20 points, the math doesn't add up.
So we know that many news organizations were reporting that the Trump campaign had engaged in political malpractice by outsourcing its ground game.
I can tell you that I think the evidence is in.
We thought the evidence was in the early vote.
If they had such a superior ground game, why were we ahead of the 2020 baseline in every battleground state in the early vote?
And why were we leading the early vote in three of the seven battlegrounds, which had never happened before in any of those states?
But we were being told their ground game was better than ours.
So we're going to continue to work on this.
We're going to continue to innovate.
We've got a very good team.
If you could see some of the technology that these canvassers are using, you wouldn't believe it.
They not only can track every house and every voter as they're walking through a neighborhood based on their ideological score, their partisan score, and their propensity score, but they can also watch other canvassers on the block next to them and which doors they are knocking to and which ones they're leaving door hangers with versus engaging in a conversation so they know, oh, well, that guy's got that block.
I don't need to go over there.
I can leave this gated community and go to the one on the other side.
We think this is the future of American politics.
I would like to call Penny Nance up, my very good friend at Concerned Women for America, who partnered with us on this exit poll and who has had CWA activists partner with us on the ground game for multiple cycles.
She's also a dear friend of mine.
So, Penny, talk a little bit about what you guys did and how you saw that.
Ralph, thank you so much.
And in case we didn't remember, Ralph Reed is a political genius, just for the record.
And thank you for allowing us to be part of what you're doing.
We have Concerned Women for America is the nation's largest public policy women's organization.
We have about a half a million members.
We have over 300 young Women for America chapters and leaders around the country on college campuses who've been very involved this cycle.
And I just want to say we're very grateful to partner with you, Ralph, and our volunteers door knocking alongside with the great technology that you were able to share and provide.
We're really grateful for that.
In addition to that, we did 10,000 miles on a bright pink She Prays She Votes bus in eight battleground states with $17.5 million of earned media.
We recruited 5,000 poll watchers and poll workers, again, additive to what Ralph and others have did.
We're very proud of the fact that we did 110 billboards in Pennsylvania in the last three weeks before the election saying, and we place these specifically by churches so that when church people, evangelicals come into church on a Sunday, they saw for three Sundays, God created male and female, stand up for your daughters and vote.
We did 32.5 million voter contacts, contacted, and in the very last month, contacted 68,000 women in eight battleground states in 18 counties, seven touches.
And what I wanted to really share is that we were a part of Ralph's exit poll and specifically asking about the question of men and women's sports, men and women's safe spaces, the unique dignity of women.
And what we knew would happen happened.
And that is 70% of voters said that this was a very or a very important or important issue for them.
I was last night on the set of Fox News sitting with some Democrat friends, and they were completely stunned by the enthusiasm on this issue.
How many people came out to vote on this issue?
We weren't surprised at all.
They weren't paying attention.
We were telling them in every way that we possibly could that women's sports are for women, that women deserve our safe spaces, that Title IX still matters, and that the women who now have passed on people, women like Patsy Mink, who is a Democrat woman member of Congress, she's turning over in her grave now that she sees what's happened to Title IX.
And so we will keep that message going on strong.
President Trump was the first to sign our presidential pledge to American women.
You can find that on our website.
And that will be a top issue for us in this next year.
So thank you all so much.
Thank you, Ralph, for allowing me to be part of your event.
Yeah, you bet, Penny.
Thank you so much for what you do.
And your women out there are just amazing.
You know, they just have an amazing spirit.
They love this country.
They love the Lord.
And it's always a pleasure to work with your folks.
Well, Glenn Bolger probably doesn't need a big introduction for those of you who are political reporters and follow this business.
He, I guess, either you personally or the firm pull in more House races than any other firm, I think, on either side of the aisle.
I have made it my business for about 20 years to call Glenn on Election Day and ask him what's going to happen.
And I don't want to embarrass him, but it's been a little scary.
You know, he's called the number of House seats to be picked up either on the number or within one every single time because he's looking at those overnights every night, you know, in dozens of districts.
He knows what's going on.
He's been our pollster in one form or another for many, many years and has conducted this post-election survey that we've worked with public opinion strategies on.
So, Glenn, the floor is yours.
Great.
Thank you.
And by the way, maybe you already had gotten the notification, but apparently Michigan has been called for Trump as well.
And there we go.
Well, let me get back to the beginning.
We do the whoa.
Oh, there we go.
Okay.
I don't know how to get rid of that because it's not on here.
See, yeah, I'll end it.
Okay.
Could we maybe create a Netflix film?
Yeah.
I hate to see what the press club has in its watch list.
Yeah.
There we go.
Thanks.
So we did the election night survey with 800 actual voters.
They didn't have to vote on Election Day.
Obviously, a lot of voters vote early, either by mail or in person.
800 actual voters nationwide.
There's a margin of error plus or minus 3.46%, 95 out of 100 cases.
Let's get right into the data.
Do you think things in the country are going in the right direction?
You think they're pretty seriously off on the wrong track?
Look, in the last elections where wrong track is over 60%, the incumbent party loses.
It was true in 2020.
It was true in 2016.
The only time the incumbent party lost where wrong track wasn't over 60% was in 2000 when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush, very close election.
But when you look at the historical data, It doesn't say nice things about Al Gore because anybody else in a similar situation wins that election.
But anyhow, so voters wanted change.
So what happened is not that surprising.
President Biden's approval rating, I know he's sort of yesterday's news, but he's still hanging over the political environment and hanging over politics to make people think about, you know, do I want to continue this or change this?
And when you only have 41% approve, but also only 18% strongly approve, and you've got, sorry, I can't remember 45% strongly disapprove.
The intensity matters a lot in politics.
And a significant number for intensity, either strong approve or strong disapprove, is 30%.
Well, he doesn't get come close on the strong approve at 18%, and he's well over it on the 45%.
I'm not here to bury President Biden.
He was not on the ballot, but it just shows you the political environment as you're looking for what are some of the reasons that President Trump won.
Political environment's always a big factor.
Turning to images, this is wild.
This is the first time, well, I shouldn't say first time since, because the last time we had candidates running with both having more negatives than positives, was 2016.
Before that, we don't have a record of that.
You know, either Ronald Reagan was really liked, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush again, and then when it wasn't, and then in Barack Obama, of course, but here both more negatively perceived than positively.
Harris was one to one, so not quite as negative as Trump.
And when you look at this, and by the way, the difference in 2016 between Trump and Hillary Clinton was even more significant in terms of image.
So there are a bunch of voters who said, yeah, I might not like the guy, but I'm voting for him because I think he's going to do the right thing.
When you look at it by religion, I'm actually going to – can you hear me in the back without the microphone?
Yeah, maybe I can't get the audio off the voting.
Can I carry it?
Oh.
Sorry, it's just easier if I'm right because the way that's angled.
So up top we have Trump's image by religion, and down on the bottom we have Kamala Harris's image.
So those who are either Catholic or Protestant overall, Trump was plus 10, 54, 44, she was minus 15.
So you had a 25-point delta, and that's three out of every four voters.
Protestants, the gap's even bigger.
Trump plus 19, she's minus 23.
And then among Catholics, he's plus 14, she's minus 17.
So even then, it's a 31-point difference between the two.
And then those who say, no, I'm not religious, you have Trump minus 57 and her plus 44.
And when you look at data like that, you understand why Democrats have problems with religious people, voters.
They just don't have much of that in their coalition.
Not saying they don't have any.
They do.
But they don't have that much of it.
So they don't talk to those people that often.
They don't hear from them that often.
And that makes it really hard for them to connect with them.
And then by church attendance, those who attend church weekly or even more frequently, Trump was a plus 19.
She's a minus 25, so 44-point difference.
47-point difference among those who go monthly, not much of a difference between the two differences, 44 and 47.
That's statistically within the margin of error.
And then those who either go yearly or never, the numbers flip.
She's got a plus 15 image and Trump is at a minus 24 image.
And then among white born again evangelical Christians, which we have 19 percent of the sample, you see just how big a gap there is.
Trump is a plus 51.
She's a minus 61.
There's not too many groups where there's a 112-point difference in the image.
So Harris just was not trusted, not well-liked among white evangelical Christians.
And Trump, no, you know, 24% unfavorable is not a small number, but the 75 number is very powerful.
And then how about if they're a supporter of the conservative Christian movement, 24% of the sample say yes, they are.
And again, he's a rock star, 8713.
And she is not.
She's only 11 favorable, 89 unfavorable.
If you say no, then she's positively perceived, and he's negatively perceived.
So what it shows you is just how important his high numbers are with those yes, because 71% say no.
That does not describe me.
I'm not a member of the conservative, of the conservative Christian movement.
Turning now to the ballot, overall, our survey found 4646 said that voting for president.
And by the way, I know Trump is up by more, but when you project out the votes that have not been counted and added in, it looks like President Trump will win that, the popular vote by about one to one and a half percent.
And then for Congress, the Republican, 47, 46.
Keep in mind, that's a tie as well.
1% on an 800-sample survey is not like a statistically significant number.
And when you look at it by religion, I'm going to skip this first column for a second.
Protestants, they voted for Trump by 22 points.
They voted Republican for Congress by 22 points.
Catholics, 19 points for Trump, 22 points for the Republican for Congress.
And then no religion, you can see not much difference there as well.
72% for Harris, 72% for the Democrat for Congress.
So overall, among religious voters, you've got 5841 for Congress, 5641 for the presidency for Trump.
One difference could be, by the way, on these Catholic numbers, while the Republican House candidate runs a few points ahead, could be that could be some districts where you have Catholic candidates running, and that may give a little shot in the arm among the Catholic vote.
I can't.
By the way, I don't have any proof of that.
That's just me speculating.
Also, it could be incumbent.
Yeah, that's a good point.
How about by church attendance?
If you go weekly or more often, very similar numbers again, and you'll see that across the board.
The results track pretty closely between presidency, senate races.
We didn't ask about the senate races because ours was a national survey, and then House races as well.
But in terms of how a candidate did compared to Trump above him, there wasn't big spaces.
There are a few exceptions.
But if you go weekly or more, a little better than six out of ten voted for the Republican.
If you go monthly, it's similar numbers.
No real difference between this crosstab and this crosstab.
Just a handful of points.
That's not statistically significant.
If you go nearly yearly or never, you can see that Harris won those voters by 16, 17, and the Democrat, I'm sorry, by 17 points.
Democrat for Congress won them by 16 points.
And then near the end here, presidentially, white evangelical Christians, 78% for Trump, 81% for Congress, for the Republican.
Ralph alluded to the exit poll data showing that 81% of white evangelical Christians just voted for Trump.
Just so you know, again, statistically, there is no difference between a 78 and an 81.
It's margin of error, so it's essentially the same thing.
And if you prefer not that level of precision, you can safely say that around 8 out of 10 white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump.
And then finally, if you consider yourself a supporter of the conservative Christian movement, and that's 24 percent again, 88 percent voted for Trump and for the congressional Republican.
About those who say no, about a third voted for Trump and the congressional Republican, and over 60 percent voted for Kamala Harris and the congressional Democrat.
And that's overall.
I'd be happy to take questions about the survey with one caveat, and that excuse is that I don't have anywhere near as much energy as Ralph.
So I got two hours of sleep last night when he got none.
And I haven't looked at everything that you might be asking about.
So I apologize for that.
And the other thing about our energy difference is people don't realize it.
When Ralph said they knocked on 9.7 million doors, he himself knocked on 2.1 million.
Or I just ask Ralph to come back up with any questions.
Yeah, any questions?
Yeah.
For Glenn or me?
Yeah.
Hey, Jack Jenkins, Religion News Service.
You, you know, obviously we saw last night that there were people who voted in favor of abortion rights on ballot initiatives and then also voted for Republicans and for Donald Trump.
You've postulated in the past that that might be a counterintuitive effect of these ballot initiatives where Democrats thought they would drive up support for Democrats, but they might do the opposite.
Do you see evidence of that last night, that that counterintuitive effect happened?
And I'm curious what you think happens next for the anti-abortion movement.
Is it more ballot initiatives?
Is it pushing for a national ban?
Curious what do you think comes next?
Yeah, we, you know, we're not big fans of these abortion on demand ballot initiatives, obviously.
From a public policy standpoint, we don't agree with them.
But as a raw political and analytical matter, we have never really considered them to be the liability for the party that I think the media and the Democrats have argued that they were.
And we based that on the exit polling that we saw in Kansas and in Ohio, I guess last year, I can't remember.
Everything's kind of a blur when you got 10 minutes of sleep last night.
But everybody remembers those referenda.
And I believe it's a CNN exit poll.
You can just pull it up on their website.
One out of every five Trump voters in Ohio voted for the pro-abortion referendum, similar number in Kansas.
And they seem to think that if they qualify a pro-abortion initiative or referendum in a state, that somehow or another it's going to draw their voters to the polls and it's going to hurt Trump or some other candidate.
We've kind of seen the opposite where voters, again, this is not our view.
Okay, I'm just saying as a matter of political strategy where people go, oh, Trump gave me the right to vote on this issue.
I'm pro-choice.
I'm going to vote for that.
He gave me that right.
I'm also going to vote for him because he's going to secure the border.
He's going to bring inflation under control.
He's going to make America, he's going to bring down the price of gas.
He's going to make America a leading energy producer again, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So it may have actually backfired in the sense that, I mean, look at Florida.
Trump, and I don't have it right in front of me, but I think Trump carried Florida by like 14 points.
I mean, I think it was a margin of between 800,000 and 900,000 votes.
So, and we'll just say for sakes of argument, you can look it up.
I don't have it right in front of me.
56% of Florida voters went in and voted for Trump.
And then 57% voted for Amendment 4, which seems to me makes my argument.
You know, it wasn't a weapon that harmed Trump at all.
Not only did they not buy Kamala's argument and the Democratic argument that he was going to pass a national abortion ban, I don't even think they believe that.
I don't think there are very many voters who believe that.
First of all, in order to pass such a ban, you would either have to repeal the filibuster in the U.S. Senate and pass it with 51 votes, or you would have to get 60 votes.
You're not going to get 60 votes for a national abortion ban.
We control the House of Representatives today.
We haven't even brought a late-term abortion ban to the floor to be voted on.
So it isn't likely to pass the House.
It isn't likely to pass the Senate.
And then on top of that, he said he would veto it.
And they continue to run around and claim that if he gets elected, there's going to be a national abortion ban.
I just, I don't think there are any voters out there who really believe that.
And I think they, again, counterintuitively, this issue that everybody thought, you know, everybody's always generals refighting the last war, right?
Everybody's refighting the 2022 elections.
Well, it's not the 2022 elections.
You don't have the same shock to the system.
The election isn't taking place 90 days after the Dobbs decision or 120 days after Dobbs.
Republican candidates who were caught totally flat-footed in the aftermath of Dobbs have at least been able to get a little bit of sea legs, you know, to where they actually had an answer.
I wouldn't argue that anybody's on the verge of an Academy Award-winning performance, by the way, but they're at least able to string three sentences together now on the abortion issue, which for a Republican candidate gets you a gold star.
So, you know, I just don't think it landed.
Hi.
Hi, Jaron Carlson with Daily Caller.
I'm hoping you can speak a bit more about this massive realignment we saw of the Catholic vote with the GOP.
As you mentioned, the majority of the Catholic vote in 2020 went to Biden.
And in the 2020 election and this election, A lot of the same issues were on the ballot.
So could you just talk a bit more about why maybe we saw this major realignment?
Well, I think I don't want to suggest that it's all driven by identity politics because I don't think it is, but I do think whatever you think of Biden's social or domestic policies or his stands on the issues,
he is a frequently mass attending Catholic, you know, from Pennsylvania, you know, who knows the language, you know, and is able to develop an affinity with Catholic voters based on that shared experience, that shared faith experience.
And we thought that while there were many good things for the Democrats that came out of the switch, you know, not the least of which was having somebody who could make it through a 90-minute debate, that that was one area where they were really going to hurt.
They were hurting themselves in Pennsylvania.
They could have partially fixed that by picking Shapiro.
They took a pass on that.
They could have potentially fixed it by picking a similarly faithful and serious Catholic as a running mate.
They took a pass on that.
And so you traded a frequently mass attending kind of union household type, I'm talking culturally, not vocation, you know, kind of hard hat Catholic voter from the Mid-Atlantic or the upper Midwest, and you traded it for a woman of color from San Francisco, you know, who didn't really have that kind of affinity with Catholic voters.
And then when you added to that the very extreme position that she was taking on abortion to try and run up her numbers among single women and younger women, but there was a price to be paid for that.
It meant that every time she got up at a rally and looked into a camera and said, when Congress passes a law to restore Roe v. Wade, I will proudly sign it.
In politics as in marriage, it doesn't matter what you say.
It matters what the other person hears.
And what frequently mass attending and faithful Catholics heard when she said that was you are going to pass a national pro-abortion statute that is going to wipe off the books in every state, including,
by the way, Pennsylvania, that had restrictions on abortion that were passed going back to when Casey's dad was governor, and they were all going to be wiped off the books by her national pro-abortion law, which was extreme and radical.
And then there were lots of other issues, including the gender issues that Penny talked about.
So, you know, we'll see whether or not they ever decide they need to do something to fix this problem.
You know, this is not the first time we've had a post-election survey news conference where we have said yet again, the Democrats have a religion problem, and it is serious, and it is lethal.
And, you know, will they fix it?
I don't know.
You know?
I mean, the problem is it's going to create all kinds of cross pressures on their, you know, on their existing coalition.
Now, Biden was able to square that circle by personally talking about the seriousness of his faith and being seen frequently attending Mass and, you know, meeting the Pope or leaving a service and talking to the father and the priest and so forth.
You know, those visual images really matter.
Meanwhile, he was going to the progressive left and saying, you have my entire domestic policy brief, whatever you want to do.
So he tried to kind of square that circle.
You know, we'll never know whether that would have worked had he been on the ballot.
We'll never know that.
But I'm dubious.
Good morning.
John Hines, One American News.
And this is a question, I don't know, maybe for Glenn or you, Ralph, but talk about the, I guess, the support in the Democratic Party of Hamas, the lack of support for Israel.
Conventional thinking, I guess, is that maybe it made a difference in Michigan.
Did it make a difference anywhere else?
Did you pick up on that?
Was that something that people were thinking about?
Because it seemed pretty obvious that the Democrats are trying to play both sides of that, and I'm not sure it worked for them.
No, I don't think it worked.
You know, I don't envy their situation because they were in a I mean, I think it actually in the closing days of the campaign, it sort of became a bit of a meme, and I think on social media, people were posting the ads that they were running in Philly and Detroit back to back.
I never really even looked at it because we were kind of busy doing our stuff.
But I think in Philly, they were running an ad saying we stand with the Jewish people in Israel.
And then in Detroit, they were running an ad about how they were for, you know, supporting the Palestinians in Gaza.
I think I've got that right.
So, yeah, it was a problem because, you know, you had the blue wall, but you had the Arab and Muslim vote in Dearborn and Detroit area, you know, broadly defined.
And then in, you know, Pennsylvania, I think Philly, you know, it's, I think I've got this right.
It's somewhere between 300 and 350,000 Jewish voters.
So it was a pretty serious math problem.
But in terms of our vote, I think that this has been devastating to the Democrats.
You know, when I came to Washington longer ago than I care to mention, the Democrats were the pro-Israel party.
And the Republicans were the ones who were perceived as leaning Arab.
You know, when I was here, Reagan was doing the AWACS sale to the Saudis.
And remember that was when the Reagan White House went toe-to-toe with APAC?
Remember that?
I mean, it was a huge fight.
And the Democrats were far more pro-Israel than the Republicans were.
As the Republican Party has become more of a socially conservative party and more of a, I don't want to say an evangelical party, but a party for whom evangelical Christians are a critical, if not the most critical, part of their base and now under Trump become more of a working class party, it's become very pro-Israel.
And I believe that the Israel issue and support for Israel rivals the life issue in the hierarchy of priorities and the cosmology of evangelical voters.
And, you know, Penny and CWA, I can't remember what year you guys did this, but you added Israel.
When CWA was founded in the 80s, support for Israel was not one of the core pillars of the organization.
And then you guys added that 2013.
So there is no way to underscore enough how much this issue resonates with church-going Protestants and especially evangelicals.
And if you went to any of the Ballots and Believers or any of the Evangelical for Trump events in 1620 or 24, any statement about moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over Golan or any number of other things, turning the screws on Iran, the roar and the applause for that line was often louder than a pro-life line.
So, yeah, it's a really big deal, and I think it's helping us.
And I, you know, we'll see.
We're not doing it for political reasons.
We're doing it because we think it is in the United States' legitimate national security interests.
We think it's good for American national security.
And we also think it's a compassionate and a moral position in terms of ensuring that something like the Holocaust never happens again and that the Jews can be safe and have their own homeland.
So that's why we're for it.
But I do think that there's a political benefit that flows out of it.
I do have one piece of data that you have.
Yeah, go ahead, Glenn.
Ralph talked about the ad, for example, that tried to have it both ways.
And this certainly isn't the only reason it was like that.
But we ask a time of decision-making question.
Did you decide before September?
And in the presidential, those voters, which are to the lion's share, 71%, it was tied.
49 for Trump, 48 for her.
Then in September, she won that handily.
He won early October, she won late October.
But then we asked in the last few days or today, and that's just 7%, being very late deciders.
Despite what the Harris campaign was saying about them having the momentum for an MSG rally and all that stuff, Trump won those who say they decided in the last few days or on Election Day, 54 to 33.
And I have to think, Given how much play the kind of two-faced ads got, that had something to do with that margin.
You know, that is amazing to me.
I wasn't aware of that.
I don't think I'd seen that in the exits or in your slides.
Yeah, because we're both sleep deprived.
And frankly, the slides are really just kind of fuzzy to me.
But that's the opposite of what the Harris campaign, you know, I'm not trying to take shots at David Pluff.
He's a very smart guy.
But he was going on all the TV shows and giving interviews and saying, we've looked at these undecided, we've looked at these late deciders, we've looked at the people who are going to break late, and they look like our voters, they act like our voters, they're modeled as our voters, and that's what's going to put us over the top.
And I mean, that's 5433 in the final few days, including the day of, which I don't think any of us would have thought was the case.
And it would be interesting to see why that was.
Yeah, my argument, or my supposition would be it's a multitude of factors, but I do believe that Gaza and Harris trying to have it both ways was a factor.
Yeah.
And I think he's a fascist, you know, I want to bring us all together.
You know, it causes whiplash when one minute you're giving a speech at the ellipse or at the Naval Observatory and you're saying, my opponent is Hitler and, you know, he's going to be bringing, you know, Durst Uber Salley, you know, to the White House.
And then you go to your final rallies and it's all, you know, pink clouds and unicorns and we're going to bring everybody together.
And I promise I'm not, you know, I'm going to find compromise.
I'm going to find common ground.
I'm going to bring everybody together.
And you're like, wait a minute.
Didn't you just three days ago?
And I just think the disaggregation of the media universe, the rise of social media, you know, a guy like Glenn, you know, when he was doing polls 20, 30 years ago, you would ask voters, where did you get most of your information about the candidates?
And it would overwhelmingly be, I mean, I don't know, you would know better than me, 85, 90% or more TV or newspaper.
Now you start looking at how much of their stuff is online or social media, you can't get away with this level of inauthenticity anymore.
And I think one of the things the media never got about Trump was that some of these tangents that he went on, you know, whether it was about Arnold Palmer, that's as far as I'm going to go with that one, or whether I understand that he went on a four-minute riff in Grand Rapids, the final rally of the campaign about the new NFL kickoff rule.
You know, and everybody was like, you know, that's not how you run a disciplined professional campaign.
You do not have a synapse fire, and you start talking about your grandmother's blueberry pie recipe.
But what I don't think the media has ever fully understood about why he works is because when he's doing that, he's really being who he really is.
And when she got up and was airing ads saying the opposite things in two battleground states, and then it kind of got out there in the water, it just showed that everything was canned, everything was focus grouped, everything was a line, you know?
And they just didn't believe her.
And I think you're...
Sorry, but not that there's anything wrong with focus.
All right, maybe one more question if there is one.
Yes, ma'am.
This will be the last one, and Glenn and I will stay around afterwards if there are any more.
Hi, Ralph.
I'm Madeline Wynn from Arizona PBS Cronkite News.
It was highlighted earlier that there were several states last night where state abortion measures passed, but they voted for Trump, such as Missouri, Montana.
I cover Arizona.
A state abortion measure passed there last night, but Trump is currently leading in the race there right now.
I wanted to ask: how heavy of a role did abortion play in motivating faith-based voters in these states to vote for Donald Trump last night and this year?
Look, I think it was a factor.
You know, I definitely think it was a factor.
I mean, he is the most pro-life president in American history.
You know, he's the first president to appear in person at the March for Life.
He's the first president to defund Planned Parenthood.
You know, he's the first president who not only reinstated Ronald Reagan's Mexico City policy, but strengthened it and made it stronger so that our tax dollars are not used to promote or perform abortions overseas.
And most importantly, of course, contrary to the claims of his critics, he kept his promise, not just to us, but to the American people, that he would appoint conservative and pro-life judges, including to the Supreme Court.
And when he did that, Roe v. Wade was overturned.
And it was overturned not to usher in the promised land that we might have wanted, which was to see that every child was protected in its mother's womb from conception to birth.
That is the policy that we support.
That's what we're for.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade did not usher in that policy.
What it did do was give the states the opportunity for the first time since 1973 to enact policy that reflects the values and the beliefs and the policy views of their citizens, whether through initiative and referendum, through direct democracy, or through the actions of their legislators and their elected officials.
And so, since then, sadly, we've lost a lot more than we've won.
So, we've found out the hard way that Roe v. Wade being overturned isn't everything we hoped it would be.
But, you know, we're going to learn from this.
We're going to get better.
And the truth is, the dirty little secret is that initiative and referendum has never been a favorable environment for the pro-life movement.
We've virtually never been able to win an initiative and referendum.
And you may remember when Arnold Schwerzeneger qualified all those initiatives when he was trying to bypass the legislature when he was governor of California.
One of the initiatives that he qualified, I think it was either parental notification or parental consent.
Now, I can go out and do a survey in almost any state, including California, and 70 to 80 percent of voters will say, yeah, a minor child, a minor, should not be able to get an abortion without at least their parents being notified.
That's a 70 to 80 percent versus 25 percent issue, okay?
Put it on the ballot, it loses every time.
Why?
For the same reason why school choice tests well in polls and then loses on the ballot.
Because once you take on either the pro-abortion lobby or the teachers' unions, you're not going to get a free and fair fight.
It's not like a poll where you just ask people where they stand.
They're going to drop 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollars on your head.
You're going to be able to spend maybe $3 to $5 million.
You're going to get outspent $5 to $1 at a minimum, maybe $10 to $1.
Planned Parenthood will spend unlimited amount of money on this stuff, and they're going to beat you.
So that's what's going on.
So the legislative environment is our strength.
The initiative and referendum is their strength.
They're running out of states to do this.
At a certain point, like in Georgia, you can't qualify such an amendment to the Constitution without the legislature passing it, which we control.
So they're never going to be able to do that in Georgia as long as we have the legislature.
So at some point, fairly soon, they're going to run out of states where they can do this, and then it's going to be our turn.
And we're also, through our legislative strength, we're going to be chipping away at their INR victories, and we already are.
And there's nothing that prevents us from doing that.
So this is going to kind of go on for a while.
But I don't, as I said earlier, I don't think it's really hurt Trump.
And I, with few exceptions, I don't think it hurt many of our congressional or Senate candidates in 2024.
And I think, you know, I wouldn't welcome another half billion dollars in abortion ads.
That's not something I would want to invite or welcome.
But I think they're going to have to come up with another strategy because they just lost every battleground state and they're either losing or nearly losing every battleground Senate race.
So when you have candidates like Tammy Baldwin who up until now has won pretty easily and all you're running on is abortion, abortion, abortion, and you nearly lose, you may want to reexamine your, you know, your strategy.
But that'll be up to them.
Well anyway, thank you all very much for coming.
We will be sending out a news release on this survey.
We can certainly get you a copy of the slide deck if that would be helpful to you in doing your stories.
And we look forward to talking to you in the future.