As the GOP presidential field thins out, three candidates remain.

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today is the honorable Carl wrote he was deputy chief of Staff through George W. Bush and one smart guy in politics, Carl, Welcome to the show and tell me what’s on your mind today.

0:17 Speaker 2 What’s on my mind is the upcoming primary season and how it’s shaping up. I’m uh, there’s going to be one of the more unpredictable elections, perhaps the most unpredictable election of our lifetime. And it ain’t going to just be the general election. It’s going to be the primaries.

0:31 Primaries on both sides as well. There are lots of twists and turns that.

0:34 Speaker 1 Are available, and well, nobody really knows what’s happening with President Trump and how many people are left in the UH in the primaries.

0:49 Speaker 2 Yeah, well, we’ve got two tiers of of people in the primaries. We’ve got President Trump and then Nikki Haley, Ronda Santis, Chris Christie and ec Rama Sawami, all of whom have qualified. Those all five of those have qualified to be in the next debate. Now, President Trump is not going to participate in the debates like he hasn’t

1:10 participated in the others, but we have at least four people in that debate. Then there are other candidates like you know, Doug Bergham and Asa Hutchison and others who are still theoretically candidates, but having lost the ability to be on the debate stage, they’ve lost the principal way with which they can communicate nationally between now and the

1:30 Iowa caucuses, so it’s unclear that how big a presence they will be at the polling places. When on January fifteenth, Iowa’s turned out to caucus and eight days later New Hampshire Heites turned out, the.

1:41 Speaker 1 Polls understood and the Democratic primaries, is there a primary or is it just runaway Biden?

1:55 Speaker 2 Well, it’s runaway Biden right now, but it remains run away by And because look, we’re going to be really interesting is is first of all, what happens in New Hampshire there now the Democrats are going to come out and vote on the on the twenty third, and what’s what’s going to happen. Because you got Dean Phillips, the

2:18 congressman from Minnesota, the protest candidate, and he’s away, he’s a convenient way for New Hampshire Democrats to say, mister President, we’re upset, We’re upset either with your low ratings. We’re upset that you know you’re going to be our candidate and the general election, and you’re you know, it looks like you could lose it to Donald Trump if he’s

2:36 the Republican nominee, and absolutely will lose to the Republican nominee if it’s somebody else, and we’re we want to send a message, sir that it’s as much as we may love and respect you and appreciate you, we think that somebody other than you ought to be the nominee of our party. Eighty two is too old, and this

2:53 is their chance to do it. And we don’t know exactly. You know, we saw how these polls went. We had some national polls that showed that he was losing in the battleground states to Donald Trump and losing to Nicky Hayley and Ron DeSantis by a lot in those early battleground states. We now have national polls showing that he

3:13 that he either is tied, tied, or slightly you know, one or point two points ahead or one or two points behind Donald Trump, but losing badly to other Republicans. So Democrats are nervous, and we’ve seen it play out.

3:26 Over the last couple of weeks. So to me, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens if twenty five or thirty percent of New Hampshire Democrats say I’m voting for Dean Phillips because I want to send a message to the White House we can do better. Will will people feel compelled to jump ship.

3:44 Speaker 1 And then we’ve got Robert Kennedy and Joe.

3:47 Speaker 2 Manchin well exactly, and we got don’t hey, it’s it’s not too it’s not a duo. We got a we got a quartet because we’ve got Robert Kennedy, Cornell West, Jill Stein, and Joe Mansion, or if not Joe Manson, then another candidate of the No Labels Party. And that could be a problem because think about this. In twenty sixteen,

4:13 only six percent of the electorate voted for a third party candidate. But in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the number of votes that Jill Stein, as the Green Party candidate, got was bigger than Hillary Clinton’s losing margin. Jill Stein pulled from the left of the political spectrum. If she hadn’t been on the ballot, in all likelihood, most if

4:35 not all, of those votes who would have gone to Hillary Clinton. And in those three states which helped decide the election, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, more Jill Stein voters than Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump by twenty twenty only two percent, only two percent of the electorate votes for a third party candidate. Guess what though, in Arizona, Wisconsin,

4:58 and Georgia, the liberty hearing candidate got more votes than the margin by which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, and with it lost the election. Wow yes, ah, yeah, Cornell West and Jill Stein are likely to pull from Biden the libertarian whom we don’t know who it is, but it is there likely to pull from the from

5:23 the Republican nominee. And the question is that it is a small amount with a non Trump or a big amount with Trump. But then, you know, we don’t know where Robert Kennedy’s going to pull from. Robert Kennedy could pull from, you know, the left on the issue of the environment and climate and from the right on the

5:41 issue of vaccines. And he’s not going to necessarily be on the ballots. It’s hard to get on the ballots. No Labels has spent tens of millions of dollars to guarantee that they can put a candidate on every ballot in the country. They may get knocked off one or two of them, but they put together an effort that

5:57 should get them on fifty state ballots and the district of Columbia. But you know how many ballots, how many states ballots are Robert Kennedy and Cornell West who are running his true independence, how many are they going to get on? And as the new label’s party picked Joe Manchin, who would tend to be maybe a little bit more

6:16 centrist Democrats, he would pull or do they name a Republican which would pull more from the Republican ranks? We don’t know, but it’s going to be. This is why this election is going to be so crazy. And starting with that, the majority of the American people don’t want it to be Biden versus Trump.

6:32 Speaker 1 That is getting complicated. And why aren’t they giving Robert Kennedy. I feel sorry for the guy. They’re not giving him Secret Service protection.

6:45 Speaker 2 Well, I don’t know, he does have private security, but you’re right, but look, he’s got to be you know, he’s not a candidate of the Democratic or Republican parties. He’s an independent candidate, and again that kicks in a certain set of rules for jen R elections, not primaries.

7:02 And you know there there are there are rules that have been set in place for decades. And by by pulling out of the Democratic primary and saying I’m going to run as an independent, uh, you know, he he’s going to have to meet that higher test, which is going to apply to the general election, not to this

7:17 primary season.

7:18 Speaker 1 Understood. Uh, anything else you want to tell the American people?

7:23 Speaker 2 Well, I wrote a piece this week in the Wall Street Journal. I hate to sound self aggrandizing or self promoting, but I thought it was an interesting point I wanted to make, and that is all of this hubbub about the November elections was, Oh, look at all the abortions swept the elections for the Democrats. You know, whether it’s

7:41 you know, the left wing publications like Vox or the Warship Post, you know, look at abortion. It swept the Democrats into into victory and the elections in Virginia. And I’m thinking, look that the general theory is abortion wins independence and some Republicans to unite with Democrats and supportive abortion.

8:00 That’s the fundamental theory. If that’s the case, then then if you look at Virginia, you should find that the Democrats carried some red districts. That is to say that by getting independents and Republican defections, they carried some districts that Donald Trump had carried. That didn’t happen. There’s not a single state House or state Senate district in Virginia

8:20 that the Democrats carried in the races for the legislature. Instead, what happened is, look, that’s a blue state and it was recently redistricted. And if you’re a blue state, you know Donald Trump lost it to Joe Biden by more than ten points. The last time I think the Republicans carried the state was two thousand and four under Bush.

8:40 It’s gone left and gotten more blue each election. The Republican candidates for the state Senate came up twenty one to nineteen, the nineteen Republicans twenty one Democrats. But the Republicans won four districts that Joe Biden won by between one and nine points, and no Democrat Senate candidate won a district carried by Donald Trump. In the House of Delegates,

9:05 it’s fifty one forty nine and the Republicans won seven seats. Every district that Joe Biden won by ten points or less the Republicans carried. So my point was to say, you know, look in politics, we’d like to simplify things, and sometimes there’s a complexity that that overrides. I don’t think that the abortion issue played that critical role in

9:25 the outcome in Virginia. I think two things did. One is the state is a blue state, so when they redistricted the state, there are far more solidly Democratic seats than Republican seats, and the Republicans had to win a lot of Democrat territory in order to take control of the legislature. And the second thing is Governor Younkin was

9:42 very popular and outlined a positive agenda for the state, So the Republicans were able. If you think about it ten if you want to, if Biden carried your district House of Delegates district by ten points or less, you elected a Republican, think about what would happen if in TWE twenty twenty four, every congressional district in America that

10:03 Joe Biden won by between you know, one percent and ten percent went Republican. We’d had fifty Republicans into the US House of Representatives, so Youngkin’s popularity almost overcame the difficulty of winning in a blue state and pretty strong performance by Republican candidates there despite all the talk that abortion was killing. Same thing happened in Kentucky. Think about it.

10:27 Kentucky re elected a governor, Democratic governor who did a couple of good things. One is, he had a good record in office, and second of all, he campaigned in a rural part of the state, Southeast Kentucky. The Democrat used to be Democrat years ago, but had been ignored by Democrats, very rural, lot of coal and had voted Republican.

10:46 He went down there in campaign and got reelected, and people said, well, it was all because of abortion. Well, the rest of the Republican statewide ticket, all of them strongly pro life, including the attorney general candidate’s going to be filing lawsuits on these issues. They won by between fifty seven and sixty one percent. The average winning margin

11:05 for the rest of the Republican down ballot ticket was eighteen points. So if this magic abortion coalition emerged of Democrats’ independence and defecting Republicans in order to defend abortion rights, why didn’t it take down the rest of the Republican ticket that won and one handily. So again, the issue has an impact, don’t get me wrong, and it’s important

11:26 to a lot of people on both the pro life and pro abortion sides. But my point was you shouldn’t give it credit for things that it didn’t deserve credit for.

11:36 Speaker 1 Well, Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff, President George W. Bush, thank you so much for bringing us in all Americans up to date and we’ll catch up again real soon.

11:45 Speaker 2 Thank you appreciate it.