Transcript
SPEAKER_01
0:02
This is The Strategist, episode 806. My name is Zain Velji. With me, as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, what's going on?
Carter
0:10
It's the end of the world, Zain, as it has been, as it is.
Carter
0:14
End of the world as we know it. We
Corey
0:16
We keep starting episodes with that. I don't know if that's true, but I do think that... You
Carter
0:21
You don't think so?
Carter
0:23
Oh, yeah, you're the optimistic one. Yeah, let's quote Corey Hogan. Here we go. has that rule and
Carter
0:29
it's you who's the optimist i'd forgotten that's good i'll
Corey
0:33
i'll tell you though zane um i got in trouble for last episode i got in trouble for my wife how and why it's
Corey
0:39
it's because i said i don't care
SPEAKER_01
0:40
care about your daughter but
SPEAKER_01
0:42
but you know amazingly
Corey
0:43
actually now that i think about the fact that that is not what got her ire up i maybe i can reverse the the rage here but it was because i said that nobody i was talking to was saying defund the police and she said what what are you talking about? I'm always talking about moving money from the police to public health. You never listen.
Corey
1:00
And I think this is an important lesson in how branding matters because I never heard her say defund the police.
Corey
1:07
I was right, I think, and I think she was wrong.
SPEAKER_01
1:10
And we're analyzing the political strategy of doubling down. That's what Corey Hogan has just done,
SPEAKER_01
1:17
saying he was right, of course. No, I'm glad. I'm glad that when you asked me yesterday, saying, last week, I should say, signaling we had a new podcast and it was also your daughter's birthday i said i don't care about her uh so clearly the hogan household is a very erudite and elevated uh
Corey
1:35
uh group of thinkers well
Corey
1:36
well zane you know yesterday was my son's birthday one of my two sons birthday yeah
SPEAKER_01
1:40
yeah i can't care either no we we
SPEAKER_01
1:43
we first of all don't know how many kids you have nine um and secondly we don't know So we
Carter
1:50
we used to be invited to the birthday parties. We did
Carter
1:54
That's over now. We don't get they doesn't even mention us. We get no pieces. Yeah,
Corey
1:59
Yeah, guys, that's not a COVID thing. That's that's really pretty reflective of, you know, this general air. Our
SPEAKER_01
2:05
Our first segment, race of a different kind. Guys, we've been talking about race.
SPEAKER_01
2:10
We've been talking about discrimination. We've been talking about the protests in the USA. I want to talk about race of a different kind. And of course, that different kind of race is the conservative leadership race. Yes, it is still happening. Yes, it is still going on. And
SPEAKER_01
2:23
And Carter, I want to start with you on this. You know, the conventional wisdom, which
SPEAKER_01
2:27
which has been so right so often in the last half decade, says that this thing is a lock for Peter McKay. Where do you kind of assess the tea leaves zooming out from a 30,000 foot lens right now of whether this thing is a short thing for Peter McKay?
Carter
2:44
Well, I don't think anybody can make any
Carter
2:46
any predictions about this particular race. First of
Carter
2:50
of all, it's not happening under normal circumstances.
Carter
2:53
Normally, this would have been over. We could move on. Everything would be done, or
Carter
2:59
or at least should be done. I'm not a big fan of these long leaderships that just kind of continue on forever anyways, but this one is so messed up because Peter
Carter
3:11
Peter McKay and Aaron O'Toole are pretending to be people that I've never seen before. for. I don't even know who they are. Like, they're not even playing characters in a political soap opera. They're playing caricatures in some sort of political sitcom. And
Carter
3:25
And I can't even understand what's
Carter
3:27
what's happening, why it's happening, and why this
Carter
3:31
this is the race that the
Carter
3:33
the Conservative Party of Canada thinks is going to actually allow them to rebuild their
Carter
3:38
their political machine. machine um
Carter
3:40
um i mean i got called a left winger on
Carter
3:43
on twitter the other day and my answer to that was how
Carter
3:46
how far right has the right wing gone and
Carter
3:49
and the right wing has gone crazy like peter mckay i've known peter mckay since like
Carter
3:53
like 1997 and he
Carter
3:57
gone i don't know who he is i don't know what he stands for anymore he
Carter
4:00
he is uh he's
Carter
4:02
he's playing a different type of politics for a different type of audience and i And I think that that's that's
Carter
4:06
that's a problem because you
Carter
4:08
you can't separate these leaderships now from
Carter
4:11
from the general elections that are going to follow.
Carter
4:13
The brand gets established by the leader and
Carter
4:16
and the leader leader's brand is established during the race.
SPEAKER_01
4:21
Corey, same question to you. I mean, conventional wisdom says this is Peter McKay's to lose. But Carter brings up an interesting point, and it's almost a point around the conservative party pushing this race to the right by their own making, kind of like how they did last time. Do you see the same sort of picture from your lens?
Corey
4:41
The thing that's always difficult about leaderships is gauging where the horses are relative to each other. You only have a couple of real concrete moments and they become less concrete almost with every passing year. And obviously the big one is membership sales. And depending on how the leadership race is structured, you may have a very good idea of what memberships came through a different candidate or you may have no idea whatsoever. so ever. And one of the challenges with measuring leadership membership sales is that it tends to be campaigns that are very well coordinated that turn in membership stamped with the name of that leader. But
Corey
5:16
But campaigns that have a lot of grassroots fire, those people will find the membership form on the Conservative Party website anyhow, and they will buy that membership. And it can really kind of throw things out and up and around and you don't really know who's got those memberships and and who doesn't. And my understanding, and it could be wrong, because I've been following this leadership race with the same interest as every other Canadian, which is to say, not really at all.
Corey
5:43
is that Peter McKay turned in the most memberships, right? He did the he did the bulk things, but that there's an awful lot of memberships outstanding, and it's hard to necessarily see where they are. And the other thing is, the more a candidate acts like the establishment, and
Corey
5:55
and is blasting out to all of the past members, this is how you renew these are the these are the methodologies to do that. Click here to register. Those may be tagged as a McKay membership, but they may not be a McKay membership because you've got to keep in mind that any of those renewals and any of that list is open to everybody. And they're just going to click the link that's most relevant. So, I mean, it's tough to say. And normally how we do try to say is we look at the activity around a leadership campaign. How many people are showing up at the rallies? What do the contributions look like? But as Carter said, this is such a different time.
Corey
6:25
We don't have those rallies. One of the ways we knew Trump was doing well in the Republican race even when polls were not necessarily saying that was everybody was showing up he had a ton of enthusiasm uh
Corey
6:35
uh scary but it was enthusiasm nonetheless we don't have that measure we don't we don't have any idea if leslin lewis is is this you know candidate that's going to come up and win it all somehow or we don't know if aaron o'toole is miles ahead we don't know if peter mckay's got all of the enthusiasm and we just can't see it although i'm pretty confident that last one's not the case we
Corey
6:54
we just don't know carter
SPEAKER_01
6:55
carter i i want to take cory's point uh which i think was was a very good summation of, of how hard it is to read said tea leaves in a race like this. But is this a, a, explain to me, like, I don't even know if I understand, is this a problem that the conservative party invented for themselves to have this race go so far right, some would say, with social conservatives dominating the agenda, so to speak?
Carter
7:18
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's these, there's
Carter
7:21
there's this myth that there's a perfect way to run a leadership.
Carter
7:24
And the myth has it right now that one member, one vote is the perfect way to run a leadership because you get to expand the base of the party. Well, it doesn't actually work that way. You
Carter
7:36
You wind up expanding
Carter
7:37
expanding the base of the party into special interests. And the special interests that Peter McKay and Aaron O'Toole are looking at as
Carter
7:44
as they're running this particular race is
Carter
7:48
of the kind of the social conservative right winger, because that's who always brought brought in in the last leadership.
Carter
7:54
When we ran Alison Redford's leadership campaign, we went out and brought in kind
Carter
8:00
kind of a more middle of the road type of audience, but we still brought them in. They were still outsiders. They
Carter
8:05
They weren't the people who were, you
Carter
8:07
you know, kind of the life
Carter
8:08
life blood of the party. I
Carter
8:10
I mean, I'm still a real big fan of
Carter
8:12
of the delegated convention because
Carter
8:14
because it, you know, the people who go to a delegated convention are
Carter
8:18
are the people who live and
Carter
8:21
either the Conservative Party or the Liberal Party or the New Democratic Party.
Carter
8:26
are the people who will be with you for the long term if
Carter
8:30
if they're going to get elected by their constituency association, travel
Carter
8:34
travel to a leadership convention, and
Carter
8:36
and they'll all fall
Carter
8:37
fall in love with one another when they're there.
Carter
8:40
This one member, one vote is not a perfect system. In fact, I would argue it
Carter
8:44
it is a very unperfect
Carter
8:46
unperfect type of situation. And it's
Carter
8:49
it's going to create real havoc for the the conservatives as long as they continue to use it.
SPEAKER_01
8:54
Corey, same sort of extension of what Carter is saying. Talk about the voting models a bit. Both of you guys have run leadership races, have led candidates and worked on campaigns in that sense. Talk to me about how the one member, one vote strategy here is different than perhaps a delegated convention of sorts.
Corey
9:14
Sure. The thing about delegated is there's a million flavors of of it so maybe we end there but if you want to look at the extremes at least within this country on the most open side you have the Liberal Party of Canada which has the supporter system essentially you just register as a Liberal supporter and you're able to vote in leadership races and nomination
Corey
9:34
nomination contests and by the way that system was created in Alberta when I was the executive director of the Alberta Liberal Party in a past life and it was sort of adopted stoppeded by the federal party at a time when the liberals were quite starved for attention, were the third party. Because one of the benefits of a system that's more open, such as that, or the one member, one vote, which we can talk about in a second here, is that the barrier becomes much lower. You create a larger pool. That pool is incredibly useful for things like fundraising. It's incredibly useful for building that foundation from which you grab those next levels of of supporter that's how you you always want to move them up that pyramid right from you know supporter to member to uh and what's happened over time to activists what's happened over time is we have pushed down the authority of the party to the lowest rungs right uh because that's a pretty quick way to get a quick jolt of adrenaline as you bring in outsiders and make them insiders one member one vote is you spend five dollars ten dollars on a membership and you get one vote and And that vote is either weighted or not based on region, right? It could be no matter where you are, where you show up, you're going to be able to vote equally, or it could be based on your, the number of ridings. So each riding gets a hundred points, for example, which is the most conventional one at the federal level in Canada, uh, or, or some version of that, some blend, some hybrid where it's, you get up
Corey
10:54
up to, you know, a hundred points as a floor and any more members in that you get more votes, some version of that. But the idea is fundamentally that your support is not filtered by a delegate. You vote and that vote either directly or in a weighted sense goes towards that candidate. Very low barriers for entry as
Corey
11:11
as well. Not as low as the supporter system, but pretty close. And then the
Corey
11:16
the delegated system can take on a million different flavors. You can have all sorts of different ways to apportion delegates. But the general one is people get together in a room and
Corey
11:25
and they elect somebody to represent them. And that's really where you can see horse trading and conversations such as, come over to me if your candidate comes off the ballot or whatnot. And there's a lot of different levels you can put between the voter and the delegate, and that tends to make it more about insiders. Or you can make it pretty direct,
Corey
11:44
direct, like I'm voting for a local delegate who shows up. And parties generally in the past have done a version where X percent are voted for locally, X percent are appointed by people who already have party position, and X percent are ex officio, we used to say, right? Because they are an MP or they were the past candidate or they are the party leader for the region, then they are able to just vote.
Corey
12:05
So these have big differences in what the outcomes are. And interestingly, what you find is that when you have a party convention that is more dominated by insiders, you
Corey
12:17
you might think that makes them more extreme because they're, you know, they've drank that Kool-Aid, they're mixing the Kool-Aid, but you find actually the opposite. It's that parties
Corey
12:23
parties get dominated by extremists when the outsiders are in control, when
Corey
12:27
when the interests get in control. And so it's a really fascinating thing. And there is no perfect leadership contest and the parties set up the ones they do in reaction to the moment they're in. Carter,
SPEAKER_01
12:36
Carter, I want to go to you on this because I think you've got a real life parallel to what maybe Aaron O'Toole's facing right now, which is he's not the establishment choice. And he's fighting against the internal sort of system in some ways. And he did something that you, I believe, had done with the Alison Redford campaign, which is he came out today asking, in his case, social conservatives, but saying, please make me your second choice. So you're kind of you're this is a very real life parallel to what you had faced about a decade ago, I'd say, with Alison Redford. So can you kind of point to me what the Aaron O'Toole strategy looks like right now? Because I think you've lived it in a past life.
Carter
13:13
Well, I mean, the challenge for any front runner in any one member,
Carter
13:17
member, one vote type
Carter
13:19
type of campaign where people
Carter
13:21
people fall off the ballot is
Carter
13:23
is that the number of voters will diminish over time. But you really want to pick up the second ballots of
Carter
13:29
of those that are falling off.
Carter
13:31
If they don't choose a second choice, then they're useless. If
Carter
13:35
If they do choose a second choice, then you want it obviously to be you.
Carter
13:39
What happens is the psychology of it is that if you haven't, like if there's a defined front runner, and this is where Peter McKay is really going to find himself in
Carter
13:47
in trouble and should be playing down the front runner status. If there's
Carter
13:50
there's a defined frontrunner, people
Carter
13:52
people have to decide whether and why they're not voting for that frontrunner on their first ballot, right?
Carter
13:57
right? People like to vote for the winner.
Carter
14:00
And so if they haven't chosen the frontrunner on their first ballot, then
Carter
14:04
then they're actually highly unlikely to choose the frontrunner on their second ballot. ballot.
Carter
14:09
It's kind of, why
Carter
14:11
why would I choose him second when
Carter
14:14
I didn't choose him first? So
Carter
14:16
So they actually move to the underdog.
Carter
14:18
And we've seen this over and over again.
Carter
14:20
You know, Ralph Klein, Ed
Carter
14:21
Ed Stelmack, Alison Redford, none of them were leading after
Carter
14:24
after the first ballot.
Carter
14:26
They all were behind here
Carter
14:31
for O'Toole, what he's trying to do is pick up those second ballot ballot choices. The
Carter
14:35
The mistake he's making, in
Carter
14:37
in my opinion, and I will concede we were running a three-person race, so it made it pretty straightforward, but in
Carter
14:43
in the second ballot,
Carter
14:47
asking for a second ballot support weakens
Carter
14:52
We actually offered second
Carter
14:54
second ballot. We said we were definitely marking Doug
Carter
14:57
Doug Horner as our second choice.
Carter
15:00
We clearly indicated uh
Carter
15:02
to the horner supporters we're
Carter
15:04
we're on your side and
Carter
15:06
and they voted for allison redford i
Carter
15:08
i think it was 85 or 86 percent uh
Carter
15:11
uh on the second ballot they they moved en masse because we sent them a clear message we
Carter
15:16
we like you you should like us yeah
SPEAKER_01
15:18
yeah you were you're effectively endorsing them with a wish
SPEAKER_01
15:21
for reciprocity yeah we
Carter
15:23
we were hoping for an endorsement from horner but he wouldn't give it So we just endorsed him like
Carter
15:29
and we got the exact same outcome because
Carter
15:32
the people, the people who were voting were far more important. And we've seen this in the delegated situation, too, like when David
Carter
15:39
David Orchard moved to Peter McKay in
Carter
15:41
in 2004, I was working with Jim Prentice's campaign.
Carter
15:46
mean, we were convinced that there was no way that David Orchard's people would
Carter
15:50
would move to Peter
Carter
15:52
Peter McKay, but we never gave them a reason not to. It happened so quick, the endorsement from Orchard
Carter
15:58
Orchard and the weak-sauced piece of paper that Peter
Carter
16:02
Peter McKay had signed saying that he wouldn't merge with Stephen Harper's party,
Carter
16:13
we weren't able to move them the same way that Aaron O'Toole is trying now. And I don't think that Aaron O'Toole is going to be very successful. Please
Carter
16:20
Please vote for me second. Please, please, please. That's not a
SPEAKER_01
16:25
Corey, same question to you. Do you feel like O'Toole's strategy here to asking social conservatives in particular, I should make mention of that, that he did ask social conservatives in particular to vote for him as their second choice. Do you feel like they'll pay any dividends for him?
Corey
16:39
yeah i do i don't i don't know what carter's talking about here like the big difference between the the redford campaign he's talking about in this one with mckay and horner or sorry mckay and o'toole is o'toole is so clearly the number two he can't throw he can't say hey by the way put you know put leslie lewis as your number three you put derrick sloan as your number or you know two or or whatnot that's that's nuts because it would make him look like it was much more in in doubt. I think that the move that Carter did by basically endorsing Horner as number two was brilliant. It was really inspired and I'll give him credit for that. But I mean, let's, let's be clear. It's not available to Aaron O'Toole. He can't do the same thing. The thing about a
Corey
17:18
a campaign like this always is that everybody is running against the front runner. You may not know who your competition is beyond that, but you're damn sure that you know that you're not the front runner. And that's why front runners don't do well on number two. There's no harm. And I think I think it's smart strategy for Aaron O'Toole to go out and say, make me number two.
SPEAKER_01
17:37
Carter, removing strategy aside, in your mind, is this thing possible for O'Toole? I'm hearing you say the weakness of the front runner. Should we be considering the fact that the conservatives could have their second social conservative in a row as their leader? Is it quite possible for O'Toole?
Carter
17:54
I think if you study the math on these types of things,
Carter
17:57
things, you have to to get over 45% on the first ballot as a frontrunner in
Carter
18:00
order to win the second ballot.
Carter
18:03
And with each successive ballot, the odds of you winning as the frontrunner diminish.
Carter
18:11
can't actually win if you don't
Carter
18:20
person fall off the ballot is going to create momentum against
Carter
18:24
against peter mckay if he's in first um
Carter
18:28
and because everybody perceives that he's going to be in first it won't even matter if aaron o'toole for example is ahead by a percentage so
Carter
18:36
unless peter mckay is at 45 or higher in
Carter
18:39
in in our case gary maher had to be over 43 was
Carter
18:42
was the math that i figured um
Carter
18:45
but 45 it's a good proxy um
Carter
18:49
and i don't think anybody's
Carter
18:50
anybody's thinking that And Peter McKay is winning on the first ballot.
Carter
18:54
And if he's not winning on the first ballot,
Carter
18:56
my money says he's not winning on any.
SPEAKER_01
18:59
Corey, you know, if you're putting on your hat to work for Aaron O'Toole, what
SPEAKER_01
19:03
what are you doing right now? You know, you seem, unlike Carter, to think that his plea for second place among social conservatives could make sense. What else are you doing right now as you try to ramp up momentum, knowing that you're not going to be first? You're not going to win this thing on the first ballot, but to give yourself the best shot on subsequent ballots to win this thing.
Corey
19:22
I mean, the same things you're always doing, right? You're making sure that you have the support, that you're ready to deliver your vote and that you're able to come out strong. Because his doomsday scenario, if you're Aaron O'Toole, is that he slips out of second at any time because this is an instant runoff and it's just going to run away at that point. So you can't get so distracted with sucking up the support behind you that you forget that you've got to deliver the support and be there on that instant runoff ballot next.
Corey
19:51
next. That's that's vitally important. And, you know, it's evident, but it's it's
Corey
19:56
it's important. And you've got to be going out and saying the right things to get those interest groups that you've managed to sign up to actually show up. It's not enough to get them on lists. That, I think, is the lesson we learn time and time and time and time and time and time again in leadership contests, that they really are contests about enthusiasm.
Corey
20:15
It's very, you're not just asking for their vote once, you're asking effectively for the vote twice. It's first when you sign them up and second when they actually cast their ballot. And that's tough. And that requires enthusiasm. There's a couple of gates to get through there.
SPEAKER_01
20:28
Carter, same question to you around O'Toole. Like if you're putting on your strategy hat for him right now, what are you suggesting?
Carter
20:35
be seen as as a very clear second but be very close to to mckay and be
Carter
20:41
be seen to uh
Carter
20:44
then be picking up momentum each each step of the way i mean the trick is you know i think that trying
Carter
20:50
trying to appeal to the uh derrick
Carter
20:52
derrick sloan type of supporters is tricky um
Carter
20:57
lewis is a little more interesting um i'm
Carter
21:00
i'm not sure branding
Carter
21:01
branding people is the right way to go i I think that building
Carter
21:04
building a broad tent and building some sort
Carter
21:09
sort of a slogan that people can get excited about or some sort of a communications
Carter
21:15
model. My problem is right now the communications models coming out of both O'Toole and McKay's campaigns just make me want to put my hand into a meat grinder.
SPEAKER_01
21:30
Corey, to you, if you're advising McKay right now, what are you trying to do? You feel like the momentum might be slipping a bit, that you may not win this thing on the first ballot? Like,
SPEAKER_01
21:39
Like, what are some of the practical, if not strategic things one could do to try to ensure that he retains his first place positioning? positioning uh
Corey
21:48
you know in some ways this is like uh it's all over but the shooting membership deadlines passed uh in
Corey
21:55
many ways the the outcome is known except it's not right it's it's done but but insofar as there is ability to move within that if
Corey
22:04
if you're the front runner i mean because that
Corey
22:06
that that's like everybody knows who their first choice is that's why they signed up for the membership it's a bit more interesting for a tool but if you're peter mckay um
Corey
22:14
you have just got to to run the most optimal campaign at this point you've got to get all of your vote out you've got to grab whatever second chance support is there for you and it's probably pretty minimal but
Corey
22:23
but this is where you got to be tight um because unlike aaron o'toole and i'm like leslie lewis and i'm like derrick sloan there is where there's some ambiguity now who's your second choice there's no real ambiguity for peter mckay he wins this thing as the front runner or he does not win it at all quite
SPEAKER_01
22:38
quite a part i want to go to you a second but quite follow up on that are
SPEAKER_01
22:42
are you if you know that you are slipping and you're in first, right? If you know that you're slipping, but you're still in first, are you trying to play it safe? Or are you going bold right now? Are you trying to do stuff as if you were in third, knowing that it's as just as good as being in third as being a first place guy who's who's slipping?
Corey
23:00
guess what I'm saying is, I think it's unlikely that you're slipping. As soon as you've gotten over that hurdle to purchase for a member. You know, the next hurdle is one of action, but it's probably not likely that you're going to change. So it It really is about getting out the vote and optimization.
Carter
23:16
Yeah, I'm not sure I'm buying that. I've seen a lot of leaderships where people are shifting after they've purchased the membership. I know the DeYoung campaign- And when I say
SPEAKER_01
23:25
say slipping, I think I mean momentum too, right? Not just the fact that the result might be baked in from a quantitative sense, but from the internal momentum of what a first place campaign may need to look like.
Carter
23:36
I mean, I think I sold 30% of Andrew Wilkinson's memberships. you know like we
Carter
23:43
sold way more memberships with young but we didn't capture anybody's attention there's two things i would be doing if i were in the peter mckay camp number
Carter
23:51
number one i'd be coming out like i'm in third place and i'd be trying to come up with something that sounds pretty damned interesting and
Carter
23:56
and number two i'd be trying to make o'toole fuck up i
Carter
23:59
i would be trying i'd be looking for his achilles heel and i would be forcing him into
Carter
24:04
into positions that he doesn't want to take at
Carter
24:06
at times that he doesn't want to take them
Carter
24:08
and i would look at like i only have a couple months months left. I'm not, or a couple of weeks left. I'm not sure how much attention, like you've gotten no attention in the last six weeks. How much attention are you going to get in the next six weeks? It's going to be tough.
Carter
24:21
It's going to be real tough. A big fuck up would be real nice.
SPEAKER_01
24:24
Let me close the bracket on the fact of this race. And let's just assume we're on the day that they elect. Do the conservatives to have a fighting chance have to elect McKay? Even if it's a hobbled, lower enthusiasm version of Peter McKay, to have a chance, do they have to elect them, Corey?
Corey
24:41
No, I mean, I think we've seen time and again that candidates that we are told are just fatal to a party's chances end up in power. They move the Overton window and life goes on. Like the conversation just rebalances around the new candidate.
Carter
24:54
I don't think that I don't think we're electing anyone anymore. I think we unelect people.
Carter
24:58
think we vote against far more than we're voting for.
Carter
25:02
people in a couple of years may decide that they're going to vote against justin trudeau and you
Carter
25:08
lewis or sloan could be the leader and they'll they'll switch over i mean we elected jason kenney let's
SPEAKER_01
25:13
let's move it on to our next segment our next segment baby push my pole guys
SPEAKER_01
25:17
guys i want to talk about just
SPEAKER_01
25:24
juvenile humor that keeps people entertained keeps you guys getting the five stars we know this right every five star review four stars for me you you guys share the final half star.
SPEAKER_01
25:35
I want to talk about something that I think we are all familiar with, but maybe our listeners are not, which is polling in campaigns. And I want to start in a very hyper localized way, because in Calgary here, where the three of us live, the current conversation around the city's Green Line LRT, which if you want to know more about it, just Google it and the bungling of what that looks like in many directions. However, camps have formed. One camp saying we need to build partial version and reimagine what the green line looks like, and the other group saying let's go with the full thing as planned going forward. Both groups have come out with polling.
SPEAKER_01
26:13
polling. And it's not necessarily polling that you would see from, let's say, a reputable pollster per se, although one of them comes from a polling company, but we can talk about that. But it's polling specifically intended to move the needle of public opinion. And this is is something we're familiar with on campaigns. In fact, I say that we've all used it as instruments on campaigns. So Corey, kind of first of all, give us a hyperlocal sense of what you see of these two polls. And I'll ask Carter the same. And then let's zoom out to have this larger strategic conversation of the relationship polls have on campaigns and specifically for the purpose of influence.
Corey
26:47
Yeah, polling has been weaponized, I think it's fair to say. And what I mean by that That is, people realize that especially on what are more low stakes isn't quite the right word, but let's call them low engagement, low intensity issues. That just going with the flow is absolutely something that people do and are willing to do. And so much of it is based on vibe. And on this issue, which is about building an extension of Calgary's mass transit system. First, we had a well-funded group come out against the Green Line. line and what they did is they released a poll that effectively had a thumb on the scale. I'm going to come back to that in about 10 seconds here. And then it was followed up by the pro group putting out a poll that probably had just as bad or worse of a thumb on the scale. And what I mean by thumb on the scale is this. A question is not a question is not a question. An awful lot matters in the construction of a poll. Like let's not even just talk about who the poll is going to. I think that's pretty obvious. But there
Corey
27:47
is a difference between asking asking zane who are you going to vote for and zane the new democrats are a pile of garbage and the conservatives are awesome who are you going to vote for that's that's one version of the push poll another version is uh
Corey
28:03
so i don't know if you've heard this but some people are talking about uh the conservatives having attributes attached to them some of those attributes include slimy duplicitous awful zane who are you going to vote for now
Corey
28:16
is what what we call an order effect bias, right? By asking questions before of a certain nature, we have introduced a doubt in you that is going to lead into it. And you see this all the time, even in well-constructed polls accidentally. Like if you spend the first 10 questions of a poll asking about motorcycle helmets, and then you say on a question 11, what's the most important issue in Alberta? You're going to see motorcycle helmets at 20%, as insane as that is, because that's just people how they answer polls.
Corey
28:43
So all to say, there's an awful lot of tools available to somebody if they're the very same things that reputable pollsters sit and say, okay, am I doing this? I better make sure I'm not doing this. I better consider the order of the questions because that could have an effect. And I want to avoid order effect.
Corey
28:57
Disreputable pollsters can say, all right, I'm going to leverage all of these things that other people try to avoid and try to get the result that I want to get. And
Corey
29:05
And this goes against one of my two axioms on pollsters. Number one is is don't lie about polls. And number two is don't let polls lie to you. And this is some version of both because it is full of lies. At the end of the day, this
Corey
29:18
this is not a clear representation of how people feel about the issue from either side.
SPEAKER_01
29:22
And to be fair to them, if I guess that's the right word, these are advocacy groups. So they're not necessarily here to be brokers of truth. So Carter, do you begrudge
SPEAKER_01
29:35
begrudge this instrument going forward? I mean, to be candid, I think I think all of us have used it in some way, shape or form on advocacy or political campaigns. But do you do you begrudge this instrument or do you feel like if it's available in the toolbox, you need to you need to use it?
Carter
29:49
As long as the media keeps being crack whores for polls, then
Carter
29:53
then I think that we're going to see these polls get published.
Carter
29:56
And they really are. I mean, this is this is a tragically I mean, I thought the anti poll. By the way, did this
SPEAKER_01
30:04
this get published in media? That's something I don't even know.
Carter
30:07
think it did, yeah.
Corey
30:08
I didn't see anything.
Carter
30:09
anything. It was in Livewire, which is a local online
Carter
30:12
online piece, and I think it was on a couple of others as well. I know that the Calgary Herald reported the poll last week, which was tragic because the anti-poll wasn't
Carter
30:23
wasn't as bad as this. Polaro did the anti-poll, and they did do a straight-up clean question at the beginning, and
Carter
30:31
then they put the thumb on the scale,
Carter
30:33
right? Right. The if you if if then this
Carter
30:35
this particular question, the one that was for the pro green line, the
Carter
30:40
city of Calgary estimates estimates construction of the Green Line LRT project will create 20,000 new jobs. Do
Carter
30:48
Do you support the building of the Green Line?
Corey
30:50
just the most nonsensical number to put. It's
Carter
30:53
It's tragic. It's absolutely tragic. And yet it continues. These things continue to get retweeted. they continue to get pushed, and we fall for them.
Carter
31:06
And people have accused me of doing push polls. They say, oh, you do push polls and then you give
Carter
31:10
give them to the media. I've
Carter
31:13
done message testing polls. So if you do, and I think Corey alluded to this a little bit in his Twitter feed today.
Carter
31:21
If you ask a clean question at the beginning, and
Carter
31:24
and then you test a couple of messages and then ask a similar clean question at
Carter
31:28
at the back, you
Carter
31:29
you can see if
Carter
31:30
if a particular message resonates or starts to move people
Carter
31:34
people in the direction that you want them to go.
Carter
31:36
So for example, if we were doing this poll properly, we
Carter
31:39
we would say, do you support the building of the Green Line light rail transit project going
Carter
31:44
going from Northwest or North Calgary into the Southeast Calgary? Something
Carter
31:48
Something very vague, something that gives them enough detail that it's not putting your thumb on the scale, but telling you what the project is. Because even the green light, what the hell is that?
Carter
31:57
Right. You have to give, you know, they have to know what it is you're asking about.
Carter
32:00
Then you could say, if
Carter
32:02
if you knew that there was 20,000 new jobs going to be created, does that, you know, increase or decrease your level of support for the project? project. And you can start to see how additional messaging or things that this Calgary,
Carter
32:16
Calgary, Project Calgary group wants to communicate,
Carter
32:20
how they're actually going to impact the
Carter
32:22
the general population. That's how we use messaging within a poll to determine what will work and what won't work.
Carter
32:29
You know, we did this with Rick McIver. And the joke is that Rick McIver could have done anything, Anything at
Carter
32:35
at all. Run naked down Main Street and
Carter
32:38
and he still would have gotten 43% of the vote of Calgarians. They love him.
Carter
32:43
There was no negative messaging that worked on him.
Carter
32:47
But we found that there was lots of negative messaging that worked on Barb Higgins. And that's what we were testing. We never released the poll. We never gave out the after
Carter
32:58
put our thumb on the scale number because
Carter
33:00
because it's a worthless number. It doesn't exist.
Carter
33:04
It's a guide to guide your messaging. This
Carter
33:07
This is a bad poll.
Carter
33:10
Media shouldn't cover this poll. The people who released this poll should hang their head in shame. and
Carter
33:15
and I hope that it doesn't backfire on them tomorrow when they try and get the green line approved because
Carter
33:21
because it's an important project for Calgary.
SPEAKER_01
33:24
You know this is this this polling question was something I was intimately familiar with on the last Nenshi campaign and Carter I remember talking to you about it intimately because we had that first poll come out not saying that was a push poll first poll come out I'd say six weeks before election day saying we were down 19 points and then we had another poll come out saying we were up 17 points and the the reason I'm mentioning this example is not to point to you guys as to why I have so much gray hair as of recent. It's lasted so long. But it's to say that, is there a strategy here, Corey, that this was perhaps done to neutralize polling? Because I've seen that happen a few times, which is to say, you put out a shitty poll, we put out a shitty poll, all polls are shit, poison. Well, let's move on. And could you think that could be part of the calculus here? I
Corey
34:09
I think that's a really interesting observation. And maybe it was just your bad poll, my bad poll, everything's neutral is pretty tactically savvy. I will give them that. But I do believe that this is one of those things that if the media encourages, we are just going to be lost when it comes to polling entirely. entirely. So, you
Corey
34:30
you know, Carter is absolutely right. Message testing is not polling to be released. And we really do need reporters to have some literacy in this matter. You know, there's some questions you should always ask if you're a reporter covering a poll, right? Okay, explain to me how you got your sample, especially if it's an online poll, because there's some pretty garbage sample out there. Tell me the days that you ran this poll over, it should be a huge red flag if they managed to do it in a day, right? Because that tells you they're just getting the the first respondents, they're not filling out particular sample sizes here. Okay, let me see the entire script, right? I want to see every question you asked before. I want to see that you made all of this, you know, accurately as represented as possible. And then you need to be able to sit back as a reporter and say, what else might I not be aware of here? And for God's sakes, talk to a professional pollster about what other kind of considerations might be coming in here acknowledge your own limitations in this space go into it and say okay this is this is pretty convenient for this side why why might this be problematic on a certain on a certain level because uh
Corey
35:34
uh you know people
Corey
35:35
people have realized that there's a real weaponization of poll or value of weaponizing polling out there uh you that campaign you were talking about that last campaign uh
Corey
35:45
uh where uh i believe it showed nenshi
Corey
35:48
nenshi who is mayor nenshi who won again way to go zane good good work campaign managing that.
Corey
35:54
We're going to upgrade you from junior strategist in no time, if you keep that up.
Corey
36:01
know, there was a third candidate in that race who was a sitting councillor who just got destroyed at the end of the day, because ultimately those polls showed him
Corey
36:09
him in third place. And maybe he wasn't before these very questionable polls came out.
SPEAKER_01
36:14
Yeah, you know, and Corey brings up a good point here, Carter, which is, you know, how around around the media sort of filter as to what this looks like. But, you know, when we have worked on campaigns, all three of us, well, I think the one thing I can say we've noticed is that the casual data person on our campaign
SPEAKER_01
36:33
ends up somehow becoming a pollster at some point. They end up, you know, they do message testing for us, right? So it's like, hey, you know, we don't have much money because this is not a lucrative business. So the person who's interested in doing data, which by the way, a little secret, there's very few of them. So if you get them, keep them close to you, right, end up doing polling and such. And so, you know, one of the observations we had from that last Nenshi election is that some of the same people who are once data people on the other side started running little polling shops. And that's just my way of kind of introducing the question, Carter, because the threshold of polling today has become lower and lower and lower. And those people who've spent their time, resources, getting advanced degrees are now, you know, in a situation where they're competing with former data people that have now just casually started to do polling. But since there is no sort of barrier to entry, we can kind of see this sort of stuff.
Carter
37:23
Well, this is a massive problem. And it's the polling industry itself is working really hard to
Carter
37:29
to set up standards. So standards for the pollsters themselves, so that when
Carter
37:34
when a poll comes from a reputable polling firm, the
Carter
37:38
the media and others can know that
Carter
37:40
that it's at least meeting the standards
Carter
37:42
standards that it should be meeting.
Carter
37:45
These types of polls are death
Carter
37:48
death for the polling industry, right? The polling industry was hurt by Main Street being so wrong in
Carter
37:56
in the last civic
Carter
37:58
civic election in Calgary. And it followed Main Street through the next elections. They got much more back on track. But if
Carter
38:07
if you make one mistake
Carter
38:09
with either your sample size or your question structures, the question itself, you can fundamentally
Carter
38:19
that you're doing. And
Carter
38:20
And again, the media needs to understand what they're actually looking for. I remember one event that we one campaign I did was by election in
Carter
38:28
in 2014. I think we all worked on it, actually. And
Carter
38:30
And there was a poll released by the other side that was two weeks old. The
Carter
38:34
The media called the media picked
Carter
38:38
picked up and ran as though it was recent. If you don't ask the right questions, you run the wrong information and you and it
Carter
38:46
it just kills you. And the poll becomes the leading indicator because
Carter
38:49
the poll will tell everybody how they're supposed to vote.
Carter
38:53
It's one of the reasons I hate these aggregators. The aggregators make me nuts because they're the leading indicator that
Carter
38:59
that dictates part of the result.
SPEAKER_01
39:01
Right. They're part of a persuasion mechanism. Corey.
Corey
39:04
Well, look, I think that the value of a weaponized poll is really higher when you've got weathervane politicians who are trying to decide if they're on the right side of the issue or not. And so that's what we have to be mindful of when we look at votes tomorrow in Calgary City Council. Not that, you know, any of our fine councillors would be weather vanes. And then the other one is on low information elections. So school board for sure, city council, even mayor, where you're not basing it on a
Corey
39:32
a political stripe where you might have some opinions about it that have been informed by decades, but it's a name that's just come out of nowhere. nowhere and you're trying to determine whether that person is actually in the race or not and worthy of your attention, because there might be 10 people in the field. To try to combat, and interestingly enough, to try to combat these things, election laws really do reflect the need to manage polls. And all of the tools are largely there most of the time for reporters who are willing to go and use them. You have to say who sponsored the survey in an election, either federally or provincially in most provinces, who
Corey
40:02
conducted the poll, when the poll was conducted, who the population was you drew from, how many persons were contacted, right? The survey's margin of error, and also the wording of all of the questions in the survey. So make sure that that standard that's set in the federal election, please, I am begging you, media of Calgary and beyond, ask for all of that information. Because if you're not basing your stories on that, you are falling for spin, and you are just essentially giving free media to a very slanted point of view.
SPEAKER_01
40:31
And Carter, a final question to you, and it's kind of taking me back full circle to when I started this segment, which is, suppose you are on one of these campaigns, you see, you know, similar to Peter McKay, Corey thinks it's not a real thing, but you see your momentum slipping, you see like, you know, your popularity for what you're doing, maybe waning a bit.
SPEAKER_01
40:49
You see this as an instrument that's available to you, if you're not out there to sell it to media,
SPEAKER_01
40:54
would you still use it with like, and this is I'm not trying to ask you an ethical question here, But there is something to be said around why campaigns keep doing this. It's because it works in some ways. And partially it works because we discussed the first part, media pick it up. The other part is that, you know, when people see it, they reconsider their behavior. Everyone wants to be part of a tribe that they feel like is winning. So talk
SPEAKER_01
41:15
talk to me about that psychology a bit around its effectiveness and the fact that that's still being used because it works. I
Carter
41:22
I mean, we predicted very closely when the polls were going to be done in
Carter
41:28
in 2010 for Nenshi.
Carter
41:30
And we would step up our advertising to
Carter
41:33
to match what the poll structures would look like.
Carter
41:36
So if we thought the poll was going to be a telephone poll, we did more telephone calls. If
Carter
41:40
If we did, because our theory was, and I see no reason to refute this, if
Carter
41:45
if someone answers the telephone for a poll, they're probably going to answer a telephone for one
Carter
41:49
one of our calls. calls
Carter
41:51
calls so we would call we stepped up our telephone calls if we thought it's going to be an online sample we
Carter
41:56
we did we pushed up our our online advertising and
Carter
41:59
and you can predict predict windows like we knew that there would be a poll in the last week of the campaign so
Carter
42:05
so we moved most of our advertising before the poll when
Carter
42:08
when the poll came out and
Carter
42:10
and it was i think it was ipsos but
Carter
42:12
but i can't remember which one it was came
Carter
42:13
came out the tuesday before the monday election we
Carter
42:16
we were in the game we won um
Carter
42:18
um the poll was the leading indicator we
Carter
42:21
we were ready for the poll we we designed our entire campaign around polls i didn't commission
Carter
42:25
commission that poll but
Carter
42:27
but you know when it's coming you can do anything if
Carter
42:30
if you know when the poll is coming cory
Corey
42:32
cory finishes up here you want to know the real danger of that is you're helping polls lie to you and
Corey
42:37
and so if ultimately you end up in a situation where you have convinced your supporters for that sugar rush of getting a poll that shows you up by two points instead of down by two points. And then you go on and on election day or lose, don't be surprised. Right. And I do think that when you think about that mayoral election you were talking about there, Zane,
Corey
42:56
I wonder if the person who ran against Nancy is Bill Smith. I wonder if Bill Smith didn't maybe let
Corey
43:02
let the polls lie to him at a certain point. You were playing with fire if you were working with push polls or pushing polls in different ways, because ultimately that means that that information is useless to you as well.
SPEAKER_01
43:13
Let's move it on to our next segment. Our next segment, the Alberta shitbag of shit. Guys, I've got a bunch of stuff going on. I really had no creative titles left. I mean, how could I outdo myself after baby pushed my pole? I just want to talk about a few issues happening in Alberta just very quickly. And the first one I want to start off with Carter is a conversation that has been going on forever. And I'm starting with you on this on purpose, around MLAs
SPEAKER_01
43:38
and NMPs, but MLAs and political staffers blocking people. And I'm very curious, especially on social media, I'm very curious to hear your opinion on this, because it is a conversation that's been revived in Alberta politics this week with a press secretary saying he blocked 50 people, best day of his life. I'm paraphrasing, that's not exactly what he said, encouraging political staffers to block people. So I want going to have this conversation on reconciling, quote unquote, democracy with political staffers and in this case, politicians as well, blocking people. What's your take?
Carter
44:12
Block early, block often. And the reason is that
Carter
44:17
person at the other end doesn't need to hear what you want to say back to them.
Carter
44:22
You have other means to get your voices is heard.
Carter
44:26
You can send a letter. You
Carter
44:28
You can send an email to the government. These are easy things to do.
Carter
44:32
You are on Twitter and
Carter
44:34
and you're on Facebook and you're trying to incite
Carter
44:37
incite a riot by
Carter
44:39
by putting your really wittily worded tweet
Carter
44:44
that's going to change people's minds and bring your side, incite your side to love you and incite the other side to hate you.
Carter
44:50
So it is way easier to block people and then not respond to them.
Carter
44:54
And it's not some sort of democratic right. No one has the democratic right to abuse anyone.
Carter
45:00
No one has the democratic right to
Carter
45:03
Twitter. That's just not a thing.
Carter
45:06
And if Brock Harrison wants to block me, and he has, I'm fine with it. If Michelle Rempel has blocked most of Alberta, and she has, I'm fine with it. Because every four years, we get the real chance for our voices to be heard. Every four years, we go to the ballot box, and if we don't like someone, we unelect them. Michelle Rempel is able to maintain a massive majority because most people like her, or
Carter
45:32
or at least most people like her party.
Carter
45:35
you know, block early, block often. I've seen the death threats. I've seen the shit that especially female politicians put up with.
Carter
45:45
anything reasonable that anybody should have to see and scroll
Carter
45:48
scroll through. One time, you're done. And I don't care.
Carter
45:51
I didn't, I wasn't that mean to her. I was just, I don't care.
Carter
45:55
Their account, they can do whatever they want.
SPEAKER_01
45:58
Corey, same question to you. Do you feel like, you know, this blocking is kind of somehow stands in the way of democracy? And would you apply the same lesson to political staffers as you do politicians?
Corey
46:10
You know, Carter threw me for a bit of a curve with his ending there, because I mean, mean i i want to echo that really emphatically people are terrible uh in in downright criminal ways online uh to female politicians i uh you
Corey
46:23
you know i ran communications for the government of alberta and for three of those four years rachel notley was premier and the stuff that got said should never be said under any circumstances you do not have the right to throw that at people you know that is one of those reasonable limits i think that anybody could agree to if i shared some of the comments that we got up and the number of things that had to be forwarded to the rcmp the specificity of the violence in some cases is awful just awful
Corey
46:51
awful uh so if that's what we're talking about block away guys but
Corey
46:55
but if that's not what we're talking about if we're talking about this is somebody who was arguing with me aggressively uh well keep building that bubble guys because all you're doing is creating the the bigger echo chamber and that is ultimately self-defeating and you know i i think that when we talk about blocking i i'd like to contextualize that within social media more generally and just say everybody needs to stop you gotta fucking stop both sides your children you are absolute children the way you argue with each other and what you are doing is just so off-putting to the rest of us take away the keys to the car they are drunk and i don't want anybody to think my previous comments in support of political staff in general in any way move towards their behavior on social media they are fucking losers on social media across the board nobody wants to put up with that nonsense stop our
SPEAKER_01
47:47
next question here okay i'm
Carter
47:50
i'm lost for words no you made me you're like i
SPEAKER_01
47:54
i was like i was like who who uh in using a 2010 very localized political uh phrase who pissed in cory's cornflakes um
Carter
48:01
nice very nicely nicely done.
SPEAKER_01
48:03
Yeah, no, it was both of you. I think that was very insightful, because I thought you guys were both going to go in a different direction on that particular question. Another thing happening here in Alberta was our UCP government just today replacing the judicial government panel that Minister Schweitzer is responsible for. And of course, the media article has kind of stated who he's replaced them with. And perhaps unsurprisingly, some of those folks are past past PC cabinet ministers, donors, etc. Corey, what's the import of this? Is this good politics on their part? Can they get away with it so they should? Or do you have more concerns that this could kind of start creating a fracture for them?
Corey
48:41
You know, honestly, I wish that I had looked at the list with a bit more detail. There's a certain degree of here for me, it always comes down to, are you actually qualified to do the job? And can you do the job? You know, everybody's got got a political view and can you do the job, right? Especially if you're talking about judges and your ability to assess their competency in law. And doing the job also means being able to turn off your partisanship, at least to the degree of figuring all of that out. Ultimately, judges should be interpreting things, you know, throughout the law, which is not to say there's not judicial frameworks that they look at and there's not judicial frameworks that are friendly
Corey
49:14
friendly or more to a left-wing or right-wing view, but they
Corey
49:18
they should be consistent in the application, even when it cuts against a political cause. So I
Corey
49:23
I don't know who's on that list. I will say the idea of a government replacing people with their own appointees is not, it's
Corey
49:30
it's disappointing, but it's not that shocking. I do think they probably should have let terms run out, but they haven't for other things. So I certainly wouldn't have expected it here. And it's certainly not unique behavior.
Corey
49:41
I don't know. I wish I'd looked at the list more because then I could tell you if I'm mad about it or not carter
Carter
49:45
carter good politics one of the names on the list uh we're going back a few decades or a couple decades here former
Carter
49:52
former finance minister under
Carter
49:54
under ralph klein um
Carter
49:55
um my problem is the
Carter
49:57
the dismissals i mean we so
Carter
49:59
so there's a someone
Carter
50:01
someone in government usually winds up having to do the abcs uh
Carter
50:04
uh agencies boards and commissions and
Carter
50:06
and there's a lot of them
Carter
50:08
there's a lot of people getting appointed to these things And frankly,
Carter
50:15
we were struggling with it, just
Carter
50:18
just keeping up with the number of people who needed to be replaced. What
Carter
50:21
What I find particularly interesting about Jason Kenney's government is he's
Carter
50:27
He's firing people and replacing full-scale wholesale boards, not
Carter
50:34
not letting the terms run out. Usually, they're staggered terms, so you're not replacing it. You have some history. This puts more power into the minister's hands, especially when you're putting your own cronies in place. These agencies, boards and commissions are supposed to function a
Carter
50:49
little bit at a government at arm's length. I mean, obviously, when you're appointed by government, you're going to be responsive to government. But
Carter
50:57
this isn't supposed to be the minister's staff
Carter
51:01
staff or the minister's people doing what the minister asks them to do. And
Carter
51:06
when we erode this, we are actually eroding democracy. And the thing that really pisses me off is that the people who were the most opposed to this type of nepotism
Carter
51:19
were the Wild Rose members of the Legislative Assembly who are sitting beside Jason
Carter
51:25
Jason Kenney in the legislature with their mouths taped shut. And those people oppose this shit, and now they can't even bother to raise a peep because they're in power, and God damn it, they're going to get some too.
Corey
51:39
This is – let's
Corey
51:40
let's dial it down a little, old man Carter. Like, look, this
Corey
51:48
court. They are not dealing with constitutional questions here. They're dealing with should my traffic fine be thrown out. I think Carter's talking about a principle, though. No,
Carter
51:57
No, I'm talking about the provincial court. I'm talking about this one. I'm talking about the universities. I'm talking about the
Carter
52:05
the parole board that he wants to establish here in Alberta. I'm talking about old cronies being offered job after Janice Harrington being offered the provincial health advocate role because
Carter
52:18
because she's qualified. I like Janice. Nice person.
Carter
52:25
So hold on, hold on, hold on. Where do they even think that this makes sense? Okay,
SPEAKER_01
52:28
Okay, so bundle this up for me, Carter, because I'm trying to unpack one thing singularly.
SPEAKER_01
52:33
What's the political upside? Outside of the half dozen, two dozen, three dozen people that get these gigs, talk to me about the ripple effects of the political upside. Like, I don't see it. This is what maybe I'm having a hard time understanding. But what benefit do they have from doing this outside of treating these people well?
Carter
52:49
Ideological purity, number one. number
Carter
52:52
number two is that no one will start a revolution when everybody's getting fed
SPEAKER_01
53:00
at that trumping that out of nowhere both had great lines in this segment cory do you want to add anything before i move on no
Corey
53:06
no i think one of the things we didn't do like yeah i say no but obviously yeah one of the things we didn't talk about was that the person who's the chair of this committee did not know they were going to be the chair oh yeah great quote by
Corey
53:18
by this guy oh yeah Yeah, we
Corey
53:19
we don't even have meetings. Can't have meetings. I'm 83 years old. I'm told to stay home. That's the quote. Great work. Great advance work on that one. I
Carter
53:28
he's expected to get that quote.
SPEAKER_01
53:30
right, guys, let's move on to our last segment. Our last segment, our over, under, and our lightning round.
SPEAKER_01
53:35
Are you guys ready?
SPEAKER_01
53:36
I always ask you if you're ready. The question, are you ready, is the only question you really answer in this round. Historically, that is. On a scale of 1 to 10, how many sharpshooters? That's a wrestling move, just so you know. know, but the hitman heart, how many sharpshooters worth is the Ted Cruz and Ron Perlman fight for charity? And I'm going to go to you, Carter, because you told me saying, I never give you notes, but I'm giving you one note, you need to include this. And I had to look it up. And I said, what the actual fuck is going on?
Carter
54:06
This is a real thing.
SPEAKER_01
54:08
This is a real
Carter
54:08
real thing. Our prime minister has actually fought you know
Carter
54:13
know um brazo patrick brazo who is a senator and you know so we've actually seen this before i was thinking you know this is lunacy you can't have people just threatening to wrestle senators you
Carter
54:26
you can the prime minister was okay now it's a boxing boxing match but still i mean it's it's martial arts it's mano and mano it's it's fight to the death or
SPEAKER_01
54:36
or it's ted Ted Cruz. It's Ted Cruz versus the guy. Is it the guy that plays Hellboy? Yeah, it's not even Ted Cruz. It's
Corey
54:43
It's Ted Cruz telling somebody else. No,
Carter
54:46
No, but Hellboy has come back. Ron Perlman has come back and said that
Carter
54:50
that he wants now he wants Ted Cruz and he will he will also take Matt Gaetz, I think. I think both of them get to go in the ring against. So it's actually now it's almost a cage match. it's a cage match the WWE has taken over American politics and it makes me so happy so in general I give it
Corey
55:17
feel like in a week if you're listening to this podcast you're going to have no idea what we're talking about and it's just this is just one of those just
Corey
55:25
normal moments in Trump's America man The McMahons
Carter
55:27
McMahons are going to make this a big part of the WWE. You just watch. It's going to be a big part. It's going to be on Monday Night Raw.
SPEAKER_01
55:35
Yes or no question, Corey. I'm going to you first. Should the Biden campaign lean into the current narrative around Trump's physical health issues? They're talking about Trump walking down the ramp, how he drinks water. Are they playing with fire, or is this something they should lean into? Simple yes and no question, but of course, feel free to elaborate.
Corey
55:54
yeah i'm gonna give this a ranking of pot meat kettle i don't know i obviously trump has got um a lot of chatter around him right now based on how he drinks a glass of water uh which is weird uh how he walks down a ramp which is weird how he stands normally which is weird uh you know the constant sniffing he does which is weird the
SPEAKER_01
56:15
the guy is the coverage around it weird or is it the way he does it it's super weird no
Corey
56:18
no it's the way he does it that's super
Corey
56:20
weird all of this but like it's also not new i guess and and people do point to it and say this seems worse and maybe but i can think of you
Corey
56:27
you know he seemed like an adderall addict in his first debate with hillary clinton i couldn't get past the sniffing it's it's not as though he hasn't always do
Corey
56:34
you remember the the letter he had from his doctor about how he's the greatest physical specimen and like none of it this is all crazy but
Corey
56:41
but it's costed in for trump and if it gets to be a bigger conversation about candidate health that will not help joe biden he he is very old You
SPEAKER_01
56:50
You say no. Carter, same question to you. Is this something they should be leaning into? Or are they, to Corey's point, playing with fire?
Carter
56:56
The official campaign should have nothing to do with this. I mean, this is what the Twitterverse was created for.
Carter
57:01
You know, every Twitter warrior gets to do it.
Carter
57:04
But the campaign just gets to scoot on right, right on past. Shouldn't even come close.
SPEAKER_01
57:09
Carter, over, under on seven, over, under on seven. How smart politically was it for Trudeau to say today that he's thinking of extending and will extend the benefit, the sort of benefit going forward?
Carter
57:21
Yeah, it's a B plus for sure. I think that people are really trying to figure out how they can get
Carter
57:26
when they're going to go back. And some people are being very lucky and they're getting back to work and
Carter
57:31
and their revenues are going up.
Carter
57:33
But there's a lot of other people that will be
Carter
57:35
be left behind on this. And this is not going to be a short term project or
Carter
57:40
or a short term problem.
Carter
57:43
you know, know, the prime minister is doing the right thing by giving
Carter
57:45
giving people confidence that they don't have to worry yet.
SPEAKER_01
57:50
Corey, same question to you on seven for extending the CERB benefit.
Corey
57:54
Yeah, it's a good thing he did it. But this is really underlining that it's going to be near impossible to back out of this thing permanently. This really does feel like we're walking down the road towards a basic minimum income.
SPEAKER_01
58:06
Last question here on a scale of one to to 7.4 on the scale of one point to 7.4 uh how good was it that the dnc tried to convert trump's 74th birthday into obama appreciation day i don't know if you saw this but it went not pretty viral online um smart tactic
SPEAKER_01
58:23
tactic was it silly was it stupid what do you give it who
SPEAKER_01
58:28
who you're talking to i
Carter
58:29
i mean it's a 10 for me because i think that he gets he he actually gets uh
Carter
58:34
uh you know it gets under his skin in i mean we talked before about the the
Carter
58:37
the uh the liberty ads that that are designed for the the audience of one um
Carter
58:42
um i like anything that just makes them more unstable just
Carter
58:45
just go for it make him more and more and more angry and
Carter
58:48
and it's very clear that obama makes him angry cory
SPEAKER_01
58:51
cory you tried to outright reject the question do you want to say anything no
Corey
58:55
no i mean it gets under his skin but so what like
Corey
59:00
like honestly what is like how is this either moving the democrats forward or how is this moving uh trump backwards trump
Carter
59:06
trump more crazy equals
Carter
59:08
equals good for election yeah
Corey
59:10
yeah bad for world i'll
Carter
59:12
i'll explain it to you i'll explain it to you slowly next time i'm
SPEAKER_01
59:15
i'm gonna i'm gonna leave it there on that on that uh on that lead balloon that cory let out in the room that's a wrap on episode 806 of the strategist my name is zane velgey with me as always cory hogan steven carter we may or may not see you next time