FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Auditor Andrew Sorrell - Jeff Poor Show - Tuesday 10-01-24
[Music] Welcome back to the Jet Force Show at Epip Talk. 106-5, thanks for staying with us on this Tuesday morning. 25-1-34-3-0-1-0-6, that's how you get in touch with the program. So, the couple of programs, John Wall, our Tuesday regular guest with the Alabama Republican Party, joining us now on the line, however, he is our state auditor. We get to talk to him about once a month, always appreciative of his time, but Andrew Sorrell is on with us. Andrew, good morning, how are you? Good morning, Jeff. I'm doing well. It's great to talk with you. Hey, thanks for coming on. This will be probably our second to the last time before people go to vote for President, but how you feel about November? I was in Alaska two weeks ago at a state financial officer's foundation. We held our conference in Anchorage. And one of our speakers was Scott Rasmussen, who you know is the guy who started ESPN. He also owns the Rasmussen Polling Company. And I talked to him and I was getting some tips on polling. You know, Jeff, I'm an amateur pollster. You know that. We talked about it before. And I said, who's going to win a presidential election? He said, let me tell you something. He said, if anybody out there, any pollster out there says they know who's going to win this election, they are lying to you, that this election is absolutely too close to call. There's no way anyone can know who would win at the race for today, and there's no way anyone can know who's going to win next month. So anyway, I thought that was very interesting. So my personal guess is that we're going to be OK. We're going to pull it out. I think if you look at the real clear politics average, Trump is ahead slightly in the swing states that are important. When I say slightly, I mean, less than a half percentage point, so a lot of this has to do with turnout. Hopefully, we don't have the problems with all the mail-in balloting and everything that we have back in 2020 that remains to be seen, hopefully some of these states have cleaned up their election laws like we've been able to do here in Alabama to worry about that as much. But the truth is, nobody can actually predict it, but I feel pretty good. Well, I mean, looking at it, the candidate's a very top of the ticket. I don't think it's a very good candidate. I think she could be, if she so chose to be, but she does it, it's just kind of a strange phenomenon. But what I think Democrats are going to really make hay is that they just have a better ground game. It's just they dare out registering voters or they're out registering dead voters, even or whatever you want to say the Democrats do, they got to do the win. That's what makes, that's where their strength lies. It's really more of a grassroots thing, and it's why I thought Joe Biden wouldn't necessarily add of it when he dropped out, but that's my area of concern as far as this election goes. Yeah, you know, Democrats wrote the election rules and Republicans are unwilling to play by. The Democrats came out with this idea of early voting. They came out ballot harvesting India, which is still legal in many states. Thankfully, not in Alabama, thanks to the efforts of our Secretary of State and two good legislators. They got that bill pushed through, but they wrote all these rules and then they know how to exploit the rules. They know how to harvest the ballots way better than Republicans. They know how to get the early vote, you know, they bank a million votes in swing states before election day ever occurs, and if there's a snowstorm on election day, they've already got their votes in the back. So Republicans have not been good at the ground game, and it's frustrating. I think Democrats have beaten it to the digital game and the ground game for the last 20 years, and we are very fortunate to have pulled off some of the wins that we had. I think back to the 2000 election when we lost the popular vote and won the presidency. Everyone remembers the 2016 election where we lost the popular vote and won the presidency. So even when we are winning, we're winning by getting fewer votes than our opponents overall. And there's an element of luck there. We can thank the Electoral College for being set up that way. But yeah, it's concerning, Jeff. I hope the Republicans have learned from our losses in the last three election cycles. And by that, I mean, 2018, 2020, and 2022, we've been losing ground and 2022 is supposed to be the big ground. It's well a year. It didn't really transpire. We limped back to control in the House. We've got to get better at actually running races. Sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with the issues, how much money you raise. Sometimes it has to do with your level of effort and the Democrats out effort us in a lot of these swing states. And I think we could perform two to three points better if we put in the same level of effort. Yeah. And I guess what you look back at 16 and 20. And I think on election day, what called a lot of Democrats or a lot of maybe not Democrats but media types off guard was the level of enthusiasm. And, you know, because Republicans show up to vote on election day. And I think they always underestimate that they always look at like early voting or absentee balloting or any of that is like a there's a bell weather for what turnout will be like on election day. But I don't think you could do that anymore. I just think there's a philosophical thing where Republicans, you know, maybe to their detriment reject all of this election season stuff and they show up on election day. But I don't know that necessarily the pollsters or the powers that be that watch this stuff have called up with that notion. So back in 2016, I was running a race for Lauderdale County Commission chairman. I was I was the consultant kind of mentioned that right. And I remember getting a phone call from a local party official. He said, Andrew, I just learned something. This was probably three weeks in advance of the general election. All right. We're very, very close. And Lauderdale at the time is truly a swing county. Nobody knew which way any of these rates were going to go. He said, Andrew, 6,000 people have registered to vote in Lauderdale County since the primary and I almost dropped my phone and I said, there's only 93,000 people in the county. You're telling me 6,000 of them went and registered to vote in the last six months? He said, yes. And I thought they're going to vote for Trump. That's the only reason. Nobody's going to register to vote for Hillary Clinton in Lauderdale County, Alabama. All right. They're going to vote for Trump. So we came up with a strategy, let's mail them and let's tie Donald Trump to the rest of the ticket and say, you support Trump, vote straight, take a Republican. So we did spend a lot of county party money doing that incredibly successful. We swept every race in 2016. It was very high enthusiasm and that enthusiasm was missed by the pollsters because pollsters a lot of times, I don't know if they poll the people who registered to vote two weeks ago. Those people may not show up on the poll. 2020, the level of enthusiasm was also very high. Remember Donald Trump got millions more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016. The problem was that the Democrat level of enthusiasm was also through the roof in 2020. So where's the momentum going to be? Who's going to have the enthusiasm? Does Kamala turn out as many people as Joe Biden in 2020? Look, who knows? I think Republicans are tired of losing. We're ready to win again. And I do think we have probably an enthusiasm edge to your point. Yeah. Well, and I don't think that these pollsters, maybe they're finally starting to get it. But I thought for at least two cycles, they were anticipating like Barack Obama level turnout for their candidate, especially I thought with Hillary Clinton. They way over exaggerated what they thought would be the turnout, especially in African American community for Hillary. And then like, you know, these elections and the polls would indicate, yeah, maybe they get them right, but the margins are so off that there's something wrong with their methodology. Well, let's look, let's zoom out for a minute and talk about presidential race since Ronald Reagan in 1984. So we're talking about the last 40 years, you know, there's not been a single presidential candidate who has received more than 53% of the vote. In other words, the polls are always within that 53 to 47 range at six points. Well, if you shrink that to 52, 48, that's your margin of error. That's four points. Most of the presidential races fall within a four point margin of error, very few candidates have even achieved a 53%. So it's incredibly hard for the pollsters to predict who's going to win when every presidential race in the last 40 years has been so close. And most of them are within the margin of error. And then, you know, you drill that down to specific states and say, who's going to win a specific state? Okay. Well, trumps up, let's say, point four in a swing state like Pennsylvania, point four means means nothing that could literally go either way. It's a statistical impossibility to figure out who's going to win that state. And if you're, if you don't look at it, I, I, like I said, I think they under poll, they under poll Republicans always gives Republicans, even when they're down in the polls, like this sort of optimism or hope or whatever. But right now you look at it, Democrats with the Democrats, not pulling real well versus the Republican, I think there ought to be some more concern there. But it's almost like it's just like nothing to see here. We're in good shape. And I think Democrats, maybe they are behind the scenes and talk radio boy isn't aware of it here, but I would be panicked if I were them a little bit about this election. It may be behind the scenes, but, you know, back in 2016, Hillary Clinton's up eight to 10 and all the polls. And then we end up winning. And I think that, as you said, it always gives Republican hope that we still have, even if we're down the poll, still have a chance to win. Well, yeah, you do have a chance. We were down to polls in 2020 and we didn't plan. I'm not saying there was an election fraud. I think there was in a lot of the swing space, but we didn't end up, I mean, Joe Biden is the president today, right? So who knows, Jeff, it's really hard to figure out, I'll tell you my polling strategy on a statewide level. I download the high frequency and I'm going to use a primary, for example, I download the high frequency Republican primary voter list. I scramble the numbers and I upload them to my polling software so that they are randomized, because if you have a candidate in North Alabama versus South Alabama, you don't want to be oversampling one area, because, you know, I mean, you remember this from my auditor's race. One of my opponents was from Mobile. He did an incredibly well in Mobile. I'm from North Alabama. I carried North Alabama by large markets. So you got to scramble the phone numbers and I asked people, are you planning to vote? I let them tell me if they're going to vote. I don't assume who's going to vote. I asked them to tell me. The problem is, and then I call through thousands of phone numbers. Yeah, I may call 100,000 phone numbers and get a thousand responses. I found it's a very accurate way. I'm usually within a couple of points on predicting these statewide races. You can't do that on a nationwide level, because you can't call, you know, 80 million people and ask them if they're going to vote. It's just too expensive to do. Well, when you look at some of these polls, what I mean, what I notice, the trend here for me, if it's a likely voter poll, it's more favorable for the Republican, but I've seen a lot of just adults surveyed or registered voters surveyed. And the methodology of trying to get to that likely voter sample doesn't, I mean, you really see a big difference. You know, can NBC News poll where they survey these registered voters like, well, Kamala Harris is up in whatever battleground state, but then you look at like another poll where they get like a Quinnipiac or whatever, where they do try to go target likely voters, whatever their definition is. And it's a much, much closer race, at least more favorable for the Republican when they do that. Yeah. And who knows what their definition is. You got a question. What about the polls are trying to give an actor a poll or whether they're trying to push an narrative. And a lot of times this far out, the polls are trying to push an narrative that a certain candidate is winning. And then they tighten the polls up by election day. If they know their budget numbers, two or three points, they want to take that back out by the week before the election. So then I can tell everybody how accurate the poll was compared with election day. We have to rely on to us for the last six weeks and you're polling, you know, and we may never know that. But another important thing is to look at the trend, not just the raw number, but what is the trend? Because a lot of times what we see in polling carries through election day. So I remember my primary in 2018, we were polling. I was a 62. I was a 66. I was a 72. The night before the primary, I was a 72, but my trend was sharply, sharply up just in the last 10 days before the election, my trend was up 14 points. That trend carried through election day. I got 77%. Whereas if you see more static polling, if you see 53, 54, 52, then you can expect to race the land about there. But the trends oftentimes carry through. So who is trending right at the end? That's another good question is, is Donald Trump, does he move up one and a half points in the national polls in the last 10 days? I think that would speak well to his turnout on election day that he's actually going to win. I would say about this, and this is, I think barring some sort of just seismic October surprise or some kind of event, I mean, natural disaster, terror attack or whatever, things kind of stay where they are. The way it looks to me is like people are just going to vote, or sort of their feeling on the ground, the conditions on the ground, and in this race, it seems like I think it's going to be less about the personalities. Now, whatever something does happen, you see the numbers shift, but what is sort of the gravity or whatever is bringing everything back down is people's perception of what's going on in their little corner of the world. And if that holds, that's going to favor Trump in these battleground states. Yeah. Well, people vote their pocketbooks into the day, and they're going to go in there and they're going to view Kamala as part of the Biden administration. She is a part of it. They're going to link those two together. And I can say I'm a better off than I was four years ago. And you know, I think the answer for most people is going to be no. So by the way, we're numbed October surprises. I mean, how many October surprises have we had just in this campaign? We had a debate, historically early debate, where Trump goes up against Joe Biden at the end of June, and Joe Biden forgets what he's talking about in the middle of it and declares that he's feet Medicaid. That was seismic. Then we have the Trump assassination attempt, then we have the Democrat swapping a nominee out. Then we have another combination and we are almost so numb to the big news stories. This election cycle has been so crazy. I don't know what could possibly happen. Maybe I'm going to jinx the saying this, but I don't know what could possibly happen this month that would drastically alter the presidential race because so many big things have already happened. Well, I'll say this. I think with Trump, I mean, he's a no commodity. And if you haven't played the October surprise card against him at this point, what do they have left? But I think Harris is a relative unknown to a lot of Americans. And I do think that there's the possibility for something there that's meaningful and impactful. It's not like Biden and showing up on stage and just totally laying an egg. I mean, people didn't expect that to happen, but I think there's still a ceiling there for something to happen to her, at least. Yeah, good point. And I'm going to throw you a question. I run a versionals here. But if I got you think that the VP debate is going to have any effect on this race, normally I would say they don't. But I mean, what do you think about tonight? Not really. I don't think so. My opinion on that is really, I didn't think the presidential debates matter. I think we'll talk about them. And maybe even for like a historic reference point or whatever, we'll remember them. But what I would say, I don't know that they make a meaningful, they ship the needle in a meaningful way or not. Now, obviously, what about the June debate with Biden? Obviously, that was one that mattered, but like that's the exception and not the rule. Yeah, I agree. And I think even more so with the VP debates, we all kind of watch them, we're entertained by them. I don't. I'm looking forward to the VP debate. Actually, I thought that Kamala probably got the better of Donald Trump in the last debate, not on substance, but on style. I thought she outperformed me. No, she spent five days prepping for that debate in her basement. And I think it paid off for. And I'm looking forward to seeing what JD Vance can do tonight. There's so much good stuff there to expose about governor walls and the crazy radical leftist stuff that he's done, you know, but you know, whether or not this VP debate affects the race. Point four and a couple of swing states. That could be huge. There's no way to know it doesn't have to move the numbers much to matter. Andrew always appreciate your insights around the time, but thanks for coming on again. Yeah. Good talking with you. Feel there. Andrew Sorrell, our state auditor there talking a little polling and presidential politics. Let's get a break here. I'll be right back. This is a jet pour shoulder from talk one oh six five.