Pollercoaster with Dan Pfeiffer - Preview | Trump leading Biden?
Here’s a holiday sneak peek of Crooked's new exclusive series for Friends of the Pod, POLLERCOASTER. In this preview, host Dan Pfeiffer and guest Cornell Belcher (Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies and former pollster for Obama) analyze the latest polls, unpack what it means for Trump to be leading Biden, and explore where former incumbent Presidents Obama, Clinton, and others were at this point in their presidencies. New episodes of Pollercoaster drop every other week, so if you want to hear the rest of the episode (or future ones), be sure to sign up for Friends of the Pod at crooked.com/friends.
- Duration
- 16m
- Broadcast on
- 28 Dec 2023
- Audio Format
- other
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Hey, it's Dan Fyfer. The Kirkhead staff has often joined their last moments of rest before 2024 hits. So today we're bringing you a special preview of my brand new Kirkhead subscriber exclusive podcast series, Polarcoaster. Polarcoaster is my chance to sit down with expert guests who break down the latest polls, unpack what they actually mean, decide whether it's time to completely freak out. The full first episode is already available to a subscriber community, but if this preview piquedure interest, head over to crooked.com/friends to learn more and sign up. Happy Holidays, everyone. Welcome to Polarcoaster. Today I'm joined by Cornell Belcher, the founder and president of Brilliant Corners Research and Strategies, an NBC political analyst, a pollster for President Obama, and the author of the book A Black Man in the White House, Cornell Belcher. Welcome to the Polarcoaster. Thanks for having me on the Polarcoaster, I think. Well, you know where a polar coaster comes from. It's when it is in 2011, 12 when people like our mutual friend, John Favreau, would be freaking out about every individual Gallup poll, David Plough, our campaign manager in '08 and senior White House senior advisor in 2011, 2012 would sell him to get, he would say, get off the fucking Polarcoaster. And so we have taken that brand because it is a wild and nauseating ride. And we've applied it to this brand new podcast here at Crooked Media. So I love that, by the way. I remember Plough used to say, we're not going to play the polling game. That's right. That's right. And had this back and forth with all the reporters about every single poll, which is exactly what they continue to do now. Which is why he's probably deeply disappointed in me for starting a podcast entirely about the polls. So here we are. All right, we are less than one year out from the 2024 election, and every day seems to bring another incredibly alarming poll showing Donald Trump surging and Joe Biden sinking. Just this weekend, we woke up to a new Wall Street Journal poll showing Trump leading Biden by six points. This is the first time Trump has ever led Biden in a single Wall Street Journal poll, and at 38% the president now has his lowest approval rating to date. All really fun stuff. In this first ever episode of Polarcoaster, I just want to take a moment to put the polls this far out from the election in perspective and give people a sense of how to think about him. Crenel, how do you think about polls this far out? Do they matter at all? How do you think? What do you, how do you use them? There's a couple, there's a couple different ways, right? Polling is a really insider thing. My, my big is, uh, right about, uh, the mainstream media right now is they're using polls to drive stories and narrative. Um, and it's lazy. Uh, you know, I was, I was doing, uh, meet the press this past weekend and, and you know, we spend all this time talking about polls and what's missing in the conversation is, you know, and it's, and it's not beating up on, on just the television media, but newspapers as well. But my criticism here is more broad because every story that we run about a poll where we're like, you know, making polling and the horse race, something enticing, it's like what we've done with cooking, like we have all these cooking competitions and all of a sudden cooking has become like a spectator sport. Uh, we'd be doing a, we'd be doing that much better service to our, to our, our listeners and our readers. If in fact, we told them what the difference is is between the candidates on, on issues that it matters. As opposed to saying, you know, Donald heads, uh, ahead in the state or Biden's ahead in this state, why not talk to them about what the implications of a Trump or Biden presidency, what mean to them on a number of issues. So that's my broad complaint about so many pollings. I think it's become lazy. The other part here is and why the average person shouldn't be paying attention to polling because the least important number on a poll Dan is a horse race. And we always, we want the polls to predict the future. They're not. Uh, if you take the polling at 2011 at the same time in 2011, and you know this well, Dan, because I, because we spent a lot of time beating up reporters on this, Barack Obama was behind in the New York Times polling. Uh, and, and they were, and they were writing articles about is Barack Obama toast. Right. And we, there's op as literally saying Barack Obama shouldn't run again because, um, because he's, he's showing so, so poorly in the polls. Well, fast forward, you know, he run, he won back to back majorities. What polling for us from a campaign standpoint is polling identifies what our problems and our
Transcription truncated.
Here’s a holiday sneak peek of Crooked's new exclusive series for Friends of the Pod, POLLERCOASTER. In this preview, host Dan Pfeiffer and guest Cornell Belcher (Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies and former pollster for Obama) analyze the latest polls, unpack what it means for Trump to be leading Biden, and explore where former incumbent Presidents Obama, Clinton, and others were at this point in their presidencies. New episodes of Pollercoaster drop every other week, so if you want to hear the rest of the episode (or future ones), be sure to sign up for Friends of the Pod at crooked.com/friends.