Jeffrey Anderson of the American Main Street Initiative dissects the 2024 election as a clash between establishment priorities and grassroots concerns, with polls showing only 33% trust Biden’s mental fitness while Trump’s threat to democracy remains divisive. He proposes scrapping primaries for delegate conventions to sidestep media influence, criticizing Haley’s insider status and DeSantis’ miscalculated strategy. On abortion, he urges a Lincoln-style moral stance over extremism, blaming biased moderators for polarizing debates. Citing 16 RCTs, he dismisses mask mandates as harmful and vaccines as unproven, framing COVID policies as expert overreach. With Trump favored in the Midwest but legal risks looming, Anderson warns the race could hinge on debates, health crises, or third-party disruptions, exposing deep fractures in America’s political fabric. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Jeffrey Anderson.
Jeffrey Anderson runs a think tank for real people called the American Main Street Initiative.
They call it a think tank for everyday Americans.
You can find it at AmericanMainStreet.org.
And he was also Donald Trump's director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
He's a numbers guy.
And the reason I like talking to numbers guys is because this is a time of transition.
Things are ending and things are going to be beginning.
And it's really, really hard to know where reality is.
At this point, we're getting this, we're kind of in this information crisis.
We have this information flooding through us, but we just don't know whether to believe that Taylor Swift is a psyop or Donald Trump is a god.
We have no idea.
And so numbers matter, and especially having honest people read numbers matter.
So I want to talk about Jeffrey about where we are and where he thinks we're going.
Again, that's the American Main Street Initiative.
Jeff, it's good to see you.
Thank you, Drew.
It's good to see you.
So first of all, let's talk just for a minute.
Why the American Main Street Initiative?
I mean, it's kind of, I'm amazed you actually got that, that you got the title, AmericanMainStreet.org.
It's like nobody else was using that.
So obviously you're filling a need.
But what exactly is that?
Right.
It shows how much people care about Main Street these days, I guess.
And when we speak of Main Street Americans, we mean everyday Americans from coast to coast.
And we focus on the issues that everyday Americans care about rather than the issues that people in New York and Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley care about.
We focus a lot on crime and immigration and the national debt and COVID mandates, separation of powers.
I mean, in short, we're basically trying to stand up for everyday Americans, the Constitution, and the American way of life.
Yeah, you know, I have to say, I should have pointed out when I was introducing you that your stuff on masks was, they were game changers.
You were actually way ahead of the curve on the fact that these were useless and you had all the numbers.
Your stuff was incredible.
By the way, you could find yourself in City Journal, Claremont Review, and all the good places.
Now, you've written a lot about this election, and obviously nobody expects anybody to be able to call anything because things are, I mean, you wrote a piece called An Election Like No Other, and I think that is absolutely true.
Right this minute, we seem to be looking at the replay of Biden v. Trump.
And there may be things unexpected coming.
There almost certainly are things unexpected coming.
But not just the media, but a lot of ordinary people wish that it were otherwise.
They wish that there were other choices that they could make.
Why can't we get there?
I mean, if more people want this not to be the race than want it to be the race, why can't we get to a place where we have a bigger choice?
Well, I guess, you know, even though a lot of people, as you say, aren't seemingly very happy with this choice.
And to back that up, I was looking at a Harris poll that just came out and only about a third of all Americans are confident that Biden has the mental faculties for the job.
Two-thirds are not.
I'm not going to beat that third.
I have no idea what they're thinking.
And yet it's split right down the middle of how many people think Trump is a threat to democracy.
So, you know, that's kind of where we are right now.
But Republican voters clearly are very enthusiastic about Trump.
And despite the fact that a lot of independents vote in Republican primaries, Republican voters mostly get to pick.
And then on the Democratic side, it just seems like Biden's, he's occupying the White House.
He's not at all interested in leaving and nobody has the power to kind of push him out at this point.
So here we are.
And it's going to be a very interesting race, I think, with independent candidates have probably a better opportunity than normal this time around by far.
And especially given that there's a Kennedy running, who knows?
You've talked about changing the nomination process.
In a way that I can understand, what would that look like?
Well, this is a proposal Jay Cost and I have put forward that we've been frustrated by.
A lot of times I think voters, especially on the Republican side, ever since after the 1968 election, the Democrats changed the system from a convention-based system to a primary-based system.
And they designed that system and Republicans just sort of thoughtlessly went along.
So Republicans have been pretty much playing by the Democrats' rules now for a half century.
And Republicans have done quite poorly in presidential elections over that period of time.
And a lot of it, I think, is that the system empowers the press.
It empowers the consultant class.
These are not entities that are friendly generally to Republican or conservative candidates.
It also is a system that does not lend itself to consensus candidates.
The old convention system was designed to make sure that most people in the party were happy with the choice.
Lincoln didn't win on the first ballot.
He was second on the first ballot in 1860, but he was the consensus choice.
And as subsequent ballots played out, he won.
So we sought to kind of combine the best of old and new.
And while keeping the general primary system as the final part of the process, we looked back to how the Constitution was ratified.
And the Constitution was ratified by everyday Americans picking delegates who lived right near them to go represent them at ratifying conventions.
And so we proposed that everyday grassroots Republicans, because we're talking about revitalizing the Republican side of the process, Democrats could do it too, but that they select delegates to go serve at a nomination convention in advance of the primaries.
It would meet in like January, probably right after New Year's.
And over a series of days, those people representing who would be regular grassroots Republicans or representing them would deliberate and they would discuss candidates and they would come up with a list after several votes of the five finalists for the nomination.
And then those would be the people who would get on the debate stage going forward and everything would pretty much play out the same way as now from there, but it'd be a shorter race and it'd be a lot less driven by ability to raise money from the donor class, which is not generally friendly to conservatives, and probably would end up with more of a consensus field to choose from.
So I think it would probably produce better candidates and ones the whole party could get behind.
You know, you were talking about the donor class and there was an article, I can't remember where I saw it, of how much Ron DeSantis spent on his campaign.
I think it was in the New York Times.
He spent a tremendous amount of money on his campaign, his very brief, very unfortunate campaign, and essentially walked away with nothing.
I mean, he didn't really even raise his ratings.
If anything, I think some people were kind of disappointed in him.
Now, I've said this.
I thought that DeSantis, I didn't think DeSantis ran a good campaign, but I did think he's, I do think he's a great governor.
And I think he was actually better able to cash the check that Donald Trump wrote than Trump might be himself.
But I understand that.
Did he bow out too soon, do you think?
Should DeSantis have stayed in?
I think DeSantis' timing on bowing out was actually perfect.
I think he was in a tough spot after Iowa, where he was going to get clobbered in New Hampshire, given how many independent voters and actual Democrats vote in the Republican primary in New Hampshire.
And then after that, you'd have to wait around a month or so for a primary in Nikki Haley's home state, which also is a good place for Donald Trump.
I think he was smart to just, you know, to cash in his chips when he did.
He finished second in Iowa.
He can now, you know, plausibly claim he was really the number two candidate.
And at the point he bowed out, the race was effectively over.
I think that's actually true.
So I think his timing was good.
I think, you know, it was interesting.
I saw a similar headline about his spending.
And it was in the Wall Street Journal, which, of course, their news section is leftist, like just about everywhere else.
And it talked about how DeSantis wastes $150 million or something and gets no votes.
And then they show a graph down below and it shows that in Iowa, Trump actually spent a lot more than DeSantis per vote.
But that wasn't the headline because, I mean, the mainstream media has had it out for DeSantis from the very beginning.
They clearly did not want Biden to have to run against this next generation Republican.
And I think that's part of why DeSantis struggled.
You know, I look at Nikki Haley as we're speaking.
She's still in the race.
I cannot believe she's going to walk into that buzzsaw in South Carolina, but maybe, who knows?
Maybe she's got motives that I don't understand.
One of the things that has been driving me a little bit crazy, because I still love newspapers and I still read them, is this thing on the establishment right that Nikki Haley is a thing.
Nikki Haley to me is Mitt Romney in a skirt.
I mean, she's that typical character that the Republicans love to put up, who is part of this monoculture in Washington, who really is not listening to the American mainstream in the least.
And I sometimes wonder, I know a lot of the Wall Street Journal writers, I sometimes want to write to them and think, this is not a thing.
This is not happening.
But okay.
So what we have is we have Donald Trump who broke the mold and who really did bring a hidden Republican Party into being.
I mean, these people were dissatisfied.
They were angry.
They were insulted.
Trump was their spokesman and still is to a large degree.
The only answer the Republican Party has to that is let's go back to Mitt and John McCain and people that nobody wants.
Is there a third thing that's missing?
I mean, when you look at the numbers, when you read the polls, I know this, I'm asking you to prophecy a little bit, but like to prophesy a little bit, but like is there, is there a candidate in outline who is missing that the Republicans want that we can't get to?
Well, it has kind of come down to a typical just establishment versus Trump race, right?
Like you said.
And it is amazing how the establishment just cannot accept when they're losing or when they've taken a beating.
I mean, in 2016, Donald Trump beats, what, 16 other candidates, many slash most of them establishment candidates, prevails with the nomination, even though he had none of the resume requirements that had always been in place for everybody previously had always, who'd ever been elected president, had always either been a vice president, a cabinet secretary, a senator, a commanding general, a governor, or in one case, Abraham Lincoln, the foremost spokesman on the foremost issue of his day, merely a congressman.
And Trump won despite all of that.
And yet, and he beat the establishment leftist candidate in Clinton in the general election.
But the establishment doesn't act like they've really noticed this yet.
They haven't quite figured it out.
And late in 2016, in the spring, after more than 30 contests had happened and John Kasich had won exactly one, his home state of Ohio, the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote an editorial saying, Kasich, please stay in the race.
You can win at a contested convention.
It's almost unbelievable.
And this time around, it's just more of the same.
They want to believe that there's this silent majority out there for Nikki Haley that's going to emerge.
I think she's going to be lucky to match Kasich's result of one win.
But, you know, I think that, again, the process doesn't lend itself to consensus candidates.
I would suspect that most Haley supporters and certainly most Trump supporters, their second choice would have been DeSantis.
And I think he's probably close to the sort of third option you're talking about.
But I don't know.
I mean, one of the things that I think I underestimated in this race and a lot of people is Republicans, just Republican voters will never go for new blood.
They always want the tried and true.
You go back more than 50 years and they essentially always will take the next in line candidate, as I call them, the person who was second place in the last competitive race.
This was true for Reagan, had been runner-up to Ford, then Bush, then Dole, McCain, Romney.
All of these folks had been the runner-up the last time there was a competitive race, and then they get it the next time.
And this time, it wasn't so much a next-in-line candidate as an already at the front of the line candidate because Trump never left.
And so that's who Republicans went with.
And, you know, next time around, DeSantis could be perceived as the next in line candidate.
Again, he was in second when the race effectively ended when he failed to win in Iowa.
So who knows?
I mean, I think DeSantis has benefited from running this campaign because he started off kind of slowly, like you noted, but I think he hit his stride a lot more later.
And I do think he made one key strategic mistake, which is that early on, I think it was obvious from the start, this was a Trump versus DeSantis race.
It was a two-horse race.
Again, the establishment is always reluctant to admit these things, but it was true.
And DeSantis early on, for some strange reason, decided to kind of try to outflank Trump on the right, almost run a Ted Cruz campaign in the early days.
And it left open a lane on the left for Haley, and she took it.
And when she had a decent performance in that first debate in late August, the establishment said, oh, one of us can win.
And so they joined the Trump campaign and the mainstream media in taking shots at DeSantis.
And that, you know, taking fire from three sides, I think, proved to be too much for DeSantis to take.
DeSantis's Strategic Mistake00:02:48
That is interesting.
When you say that Republicans will always vote for the next in line, are you talking about the establishment?
Are you talking about the actual base?
The actual voters.
I mean, I don't know if it's so much the true base, the movement conservatives, but I mean, as Henry Olson, who you've had on your show, I know he talks about how the people who tend to dominate the process are the so-called, are the people who describe themselves as somewhat conservative.
The somewhat conservative voters tend to prevail and they love the person who's kind of they're familiar with.
It's tried and true.
I doubt that's as much true with the more movement conservatives, but they're not the ones who tend to control the election, which is part of the reason it's so important to get the actual if the winner is going to be chosen by somewhat conservatives, the real conservatives better figure out at least how to get the right people on the stage.
That's kind of the essence of the proposal we talked about to have a nomination convention, because at least you want to have the right people to choose from.
And then I don't think that was, I mean, this time around, our proposal would have lent itself to pretty much the same result.
It would have been Trump, DeSantis, presumably Haley and a couple other people who would have gotten the nod as the finalists.
But in other races, there's certainly been a lot of people who have stayed out because they don't want to go through the long slog of two years of raising money and appealing to the donor class and the consultant class.
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Abortion, Morality, and Politics00:10:21
So one thing that is motivating Democrats now is abortion.
And, you know, I hate clichés, but still, it's like the Republicans are the dogs that caught the car.
You know, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think one of the great moments in American history.
You know, I've been just praying that God would forgive us for Roe v. Wade so we could get better leadership.
But, you know, there's just no question about it that Democrats have, who are incredibly radical about abortion.
I mean, they're really in favor of abortion up to the age of 15 at this point.
They have managed to sell the idea that it is Republicans who are radical and Republicans don't know what to do about it for the simple reasons is they don't want to say what I think Nikki Haley, to be fair to her, has said.
It's like we can't win that in the political class.
You've written about Lincoln on abortion.
I thought that was one of your really interesting pieces, writing about what Lincoln teaches us about abortion.
What's the path forward for Republicans here?
Well, Republicans, of course, were a party formed as a single issue party to prevent the expansion of slavery into the Western territories.
And Lincoln was the first Republican president.
And in many respects, I think abortion is, there's a lot of parallels between abortion and slavery.
These are core fundamental moral questions about right and wrong.
They pit competing claims of rights, property rights versus liberty in the case of slavery and life versus liberty in the case of abortion.
And so I think there is much to be learned from Lincoln.
He didn't shy away from, I mean, Lincoln wasn't a radical abolitionist.
If he had been, and he certainly wasn't willing to trash the Constitution like a lot of the abolitionists actually were willing to do to get to the end of the just end of ending slavery.
And so, you know, he would not have been nearly as successful if he had been.
But he was very principled.
He made clear in a number of speeches, he said flat out, slavery is wrong.
He called it a moral evil.
I think Republicans shouldn't shy away from making the moral case and saying abortion is wrong.
It's a moral evil.
But at the same time, Lincoln didn't push for more than the citizenry was remotely willing to accept at that time.
He didn't push to end slavery in the South, even though he thought it was an evil or wrong.
Likewise, I don't think Republicans can win politically by pushing for like outright bans or close to it on abortion when that's just not where the citizenry is.
I mean, Lincoln realized that public opinion is everything in a republic.
You've got to actually win people over and then pass the laws rather than vice versa.
But I think you're totally right.
And the polling shows that most Americans are in the middle on abortion, which is a little odd because it's not an issue that lends itself in the middle a whole lot.
But nevertheless, most either want there to be abortion with some limits or something along those lines.
They don't want the extreme abortion till birth or beyond, kind of abortion after the fact.
They don't want a complete ban on abortion.
And so the party that gets pegged as the extremist is probably going to lose.
And Republicans have actually won in the last couple of elections among the people in the center on this, but they've been very outnumbered.
There are far more radical voters who embrace the abortion up to birth position than there are people who want an outright ban.
I think part of that's because Republicans aren't making the case on the issue.
But I think they have to push for things that seem sensible to people.
Ask the kind of questions that help form public judgments.
Like ask ask the pro-abortion candidates, when does life begin?
They hate to address that question.
Does it really only begin at birth?
I mean, how can it be a core women's right when about half the time it results in the violent death of an unborn female?
You know, these are the sorts of questions that are uncomfortable for the left.
And I think Republicans, I mean, we're clearly caught flat-footed, but need to make the moral case without seeming to be extremists.
And they can say, look, I think it's wrong, but I'm not going to, here's what we're pushing for, reasonable limits, make people look at ultrasounds.
Maybe heartbeat.
Once there's a heartbeat, there's not going to be an abortion.
It depends state to state as well.
They have to show some political prudence on the issue as well as some moral courage.
You know, it's really interesting to give Republicans, to be fair to Republicans, when I watch debates, how many times have we heard a moderator at a debate ask a Republican if he believes in abortion after rape or incest?
A million times.
And how many times have we heard that same moderator ask a Democrat, when does life begin or when do you think there should be a cutoff, which is never.
They never ask.
I mean, so, you know, Republicans have got to learn to do that.
And I personally would like to see moderators taken out of debates altogether.
I have no idea why the press should be setting the standard for what questions are asked.
Yeah, Lincoln and Douglas didn't have moderators.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Why do we need them?
It's funny.
I saw a Saturday Night Live skit recently, an old one with, it was Dukakis After Dark.
You remember that one where Dukakis is admitting, as John Lovitz, I guess, as Dukakis, and he's admitting that he's lost.
So he's just going to spend a half hour of time he's bought on TV to welcome people into a party of Democrats and Ted Kennedy is there and everything.
And they start singing this song about all the crazy leftist things they want.
And one of them is abortion up until birth.
And I was thinking, they almost don't even try to hide it now.
They don't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They only hide it when you bring it up.
When you say you want abortion until birth, you say nobody wants that.
But then when you ask them when they want to stop, they have no answer.
But that, you know, it's like, it's right.
They won't say they want to stop it before then.
Yeah.
You know, you did some of the best work I mentioned before on masks.
And the issue is kind of passing away, but I still see a lot of people.
I travel on planes all the time.
I still see people wearing masks.
You talked about two things, and I'd like to just address them both just for a couple of seconds.
One about their efficacy, which you had studied really deeply.
But the other, you also talked about the spiritual effect of them, which I thought was really interesting.
Could you just run through that briefly?
I mean, I know on my audience, I'm probably with many people wearing masks, but I still thought it was really interesting, especially, well, both things.
What did you find out?
Well, it's important that we be well armed on this issue because it's coming back.
I mean, the next time there's a slightly worse than normal seasonal flu, you could bet the public health officials will say everybody has to wear a mask.
And the truth is they don't work.
The best scientific evidence suggests that there have been 16 randomized controlled trials so far conducted on masks, most before COVID, when the whole issue hadn't been so politicized.
Randomized controlled trials or RCTs are trials where you give one group a treatment, in this case, masks, and you give another group nothing.
They're the control group, and you see how did they fare?
Did one do better than the other?
It's very hard to politicize those results to get what you want.
And in all the common 16 RCTs have shown no compelling evidence that masks work.
There's actually been some statistically significant evidence that they make things worse as far as the spread of viruses because they're nasty and dirty and wet and all that.
So we know they don't, that there's no evidence they work.
There's all kinds of evidence of side effects.
One study from Germany said that people who have masks on for more than five minutes breathe in between 35 and 80 times normal levels of carbon dioxide, which is far worse than what's allowed on a Navy sub.
So, you know, you've got like pregnant women who'd never be allowed in a Navy sub being forced to wear these masks and suck in even more CO2.
And then on top of that, you have the whole, like you say, that the more spiritual qualities, the more philosophical that what is lost from this?
I mean, even if they did work, in the West, we don't cover the face.
I mean, this is what helps us identify each other primarily the way we identify each other as unique individuals.
We're not just a bunch of faceless stormtroopers walking around.
We have God-given inalienable rights.
And if you're wearing a mask, it's easy to kind of forget that.
It severely compromises human social interaction.
I mean, people who think that there's nothing lost when you can't see somebody's smile, their facial expressions, it's just such an impoverished view of human interaction.
And so, I mean, even if they did work, it would be a high price to pay, but there's no evidence they do.
And they should, I mean, it really is a core issue of freedom, I think.
We, like you say, we got very involved in it at the American Main Street Initiative because I thought like this is one of the classic assaults on freedom from the so-called expert class that we've ever encountered in my lifetime.
You know, whenever I explained this after reading your stuff, I was explaining this to people on the left who were wearing masks.
And they, A, they didn't care, which was interesting.
One of them actually said to me, I don't care what the numbers are.
I'm wearing a mask because I don't want to get sick.
I thought that was great.
It doesn't work.
Yeah.
But one thing they all said to me is, oh, yeah, well, then why do surgeons wear masks?
What's the difference?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So surgeons have always worn masks because when they're operating on somebody, they don't want their saliva or whatever to get into a patient's open wound.
That's the purpose of the surgical masks.
It's not to prevent the spread of viruses.
And then the N95s that the left has started to migrate toward, which are even worse, by the way, for breathing in your own carbon dioxide.
They're designed to protect workers from smoke, dust.
If you're working in a fire zone or something like that, they're again not designed to stop the spread of viruses.
Masks were worn in hospitals to protect against tuberculosis bacteria, but bacteria are much larger than viruses.
And again, there's no compelling evidence across all these randomized controlled trials that the N95s work either.
So it's really just, it's a classic case of the expert class, you know, so-called experts wanting to impose their will on people, just loving that power.
And Americans should just not put up with it.
It's been really, it's been great to see the pushback at least on, you know, from half the country on this.
Vaccines And The Future00:05:33
I think more than half.
I mean, a lot of people hate masks, but there's still a lot of people who have been duped.
Have you studied the vaccine effects at all?
Not nearly so much.
I mean, I think, you know, they're clearly experimental vaccines.
You know, the mRNA vaccine, there'd never been one.
They had never figured out how to make one work.
And all of a sudden, in rapid fashion, I mean, and to the credit of those who worked on that, Operation Warp Speed.
I mean, I think it was probably very useful to get these vaccines to market so quickly and give them to people who are like 80 or 90 and were really at risk from COVID.
But to pretend that like somebody in their 20s or 30s, let alone a child, should be taking an experimental vaccine for a virus that affects them about like the flu is just crazy.
I mean, I can't even imagine letting my child take one of these experimental vaccines.
I mean, we know that the likelihood of ill effects from them for the young are much greater than the benefit.
And we don't even probably know all the ill effects.
But again, you know, there was a nice alliance there between Big Pharma and the Biden administration.
And plenty of money to be made.
Yeah.
Well, let's end with this.
And again, we're talking to Jeffrey Anderson of the American Main Street Initiative, a think tank for everyday Americans.
You can find it at AmericanMainStreet.org, AmericanMainStreet.org.
And its Twitter handle is at American under, what do they call it, underscore Main ST. Nobody is going to hold you to any prop, you know, any prophecies.
Nobody knows the future.
It doesn't matter how many numbers you control or look at.
Nobody knows what's going to happen.
That's what makes it the future.
What do you think?
But just for fun, since you do look at all the numbers and far more than I do, what are you thinking about this election going forward?
I think it's really hard to say.
I mean, that's kind of the sexiest answer, I guess.
But you really do have a kind of like, it's a something's got to give moment where it doesn't seem possible that, you know, Trump's sitting at about 40% approval ratings.
He's got all these court cases that are, you know, they're clearly politically motivated.
They're an abuse of the law, the legal system.
But nevertheless, independent voters are probably not going to be too thrilled to see these.
I mean, it could be convictions coming down.
I mean, it's plausible he could end up in jail after being convicted by a very left-leaning jury in Atlanta or New York or D.C.
The Supreme Court might have to come in and rule on whether the Republican nominee can be forced to conduct his campaign from a jail cell or not.
I mean, this could really get messy from a constitutional standpoint.
You know, so it doesn't seem like Trump is easy.
You know, it's hard to say he looks like he's on a clear glide path to victory.
On the other hand, you have an incumbent who's, again, like only a third of Americans are confident he's mentally, has the mental faculties for the office.
He's been a policy disaster.
I think inflation and increasingly immigration are just massive issues.
The issue set really does favor Republicans.
You have third-party candidates like, you know, when you have a Kennedy running, who I think is probably going to end up taking more votes from Biden than Trump because ultimately he is a Democrat.
But that could get interesting, especially if he could ever get on the debate stage, especially if there actually are debates in this race, which remains to be seen.
So I don't know, there's a lot of things that could happen.
I mean, you always have the chance that Biden could just decide last minute.
I've decided to, Jill's convinced me not to run, or he has some major health event.
And he just hands off the nomination to somebody like Michelle Obama, who probably never would have been willing to enter the primary process and have to interact with voters, but might be more than happy to be coronated.
And then it becomes a question: will this be portrayed as a threat to democracy that the Democrats have skirted the whole primary process and just handed somebody the nomination?
It could get very interesting.
I sort of vacillate day to day on who I think is the most likely to win.
I guess this week I'm feeling more like Trump is most likely to win.
I was kind of reminded looking at some stuff that historically, about five out of six times, going all the way back to Lincoln, the winner of the presidential election is the one who can win the majority of the five connected states in the Midwest, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
And it's pretty much a given that Trump's going to win Iowa and Ohio.
So, you know, if this trend holds, Biden would have to run the table on the other three.
You know, the trend doesn't always hold.
And if Biden wins, say, in Georgia, that could swing things.
Arizona is obviously very much in play.
So who knows?
I mean, fasten your seatbelts.
But I guess right now I'm feeling like Trump is probably the slight favorite.
You know, it's an answer that actually fits this situation.
Jeffrey Anderson, the AmericanMainStreet.org, AmericanMainStreet.org, and a think tank for everyday Americans.
It's good talking to you.
And let's do it again as we get closer to the election.
Sounds great, Drew.
Thank you.
Thanks a lot.
Love talking to number guys because they always just give you what they're seeing on the page.
And obviously, it's all up in the air right now.
I think that is an absolutely fair answer.
Not up in the air is next Friday, this coming Friday, when the Andrew Clavin show will be back.