Wednesday Morning Politics: A New Poll; Support for Taxing the Rich

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We don't do much with presidential horse race polls on this show, right? They can be so misleading as just a snapshot of the moment. They can therefore mislead people into thinking the outcome of a race is already baked in or predetermined way in advance so people don't vote or pay attention. We also know polls are sometimes embarrassingly wrong, given the decline of landlines and other factors.

They can be misleading because, for example, many presidents or any incumbents are often seen as unpopular. That's just our relationship with politicians. Then they win re-election anyway in so many cases, because ultimately, what? An election is a choice between actual people, not just an approval rating of someone in office. Today, we're going to make an exception and lead with some results from the new Bloomberg Morning Consult poll that came out yesterday, because it changes the narrative of the easy assumptions that people have been making lately.

The top line in the story is that President Biden gained ground on former President Trump in six out of seven key swing states where this poll was conducted. It was a poll of swing states. That it came after five months of mostly consistent Trump leads, as they put it. Another finding that they broke out as a separate article carries the headline, Poll Shows Bipartisan Support for Taxing the Rich. Now, remember, Biden made that a centerpiece of his State of the Union address this month. Remember this part?

President Biden: Look, I'm a capitalist. You want to make or can make a million or millions of bucks, that's great. Just pay your fair share in taxes.

[applause]

A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great: healthcare, education, defense, and so much more. Here's the deal. The last administration enacted a $2 trillion tax cut, overwhelmingly benefit the top 1%, the very wealthy, the biggest corporation-

Audience: Booo.

President Biden: -and exploded the federal deficit.

Brian Lehrer: Biden from the State of the Union. We have one more along these lines that we'll play in a minute. Let's look at these poll results and also not overinterpret them with Laura Davison, Bloomberg Politics Editor, who focuses often on tax policy. Laura, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Laura Davison: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: First, can you describe generally what the poll found that was new in the various swing states?

Laura Davison: Yes. The first time, we've done this poll for about six months. This is the first poll that we've seen Biden gaining significant ground. When we first did this back in October, it was showing Trump had a sizable lead in five of the seven swing states that we surveyed. That's really grown over the past several months. This month, we saw a change. Biden is leaning in Wisconsin. He's essentially neck and neck in both Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Those are what they call the blue wall states, so these upper Midwest, industrial, former Rust Belt type states, where Biden has been spending a lot of time and energy and attention working with people on the ground there, talking with auto workers. He got the endorsement of the UAW, the United Auto Workers. This is not necessarily causal, but we're seeing some of that support and that time and effort show up in the polls. The other swing states that we looked at are North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona.

Biden still trails Trump there in all those states, but only in Georgia was where Trump was able to expand his lead. We have three different groupings, essentially, of swing states. Those blue wall states I mentioned, the Southwest, Arizona and Nevada, and then the South, which is North Carolina and Georgia. Each of those different groupings of states have different constituencies, different concerns, and move together as we have been taking this poll.

Brian Lehrer: Can you break that down any further? If Biden was doing well in what you call the blue wall states, that used to be the blue wall of defense against the Republican getting elected president, Midwestern states primarily, but Trump won some of those in 2016. If Biden is doing better there, but not doing as well in the South and North Carolina and Georgia, also definitely swing states, does the poll give us a hint as to what to attribute that difference to?

Laura Davison: There's a couple things. One is where you see Biden spending time on the campaign trail have been those blue wall states. He's been there, he's been on the ground, he's been meeting with people. We know that this president is very good at these in-person interactions when he meets with people. You could be seeing that show up. Also, a couple of other notable things happened right before this poll went into the field.

One was the State of the Union, which you played a clip of earlier, where people really got to see the president in a long form speech for the first time in a long time. The president's team was very happy with the speech. They thought he did well. There was previously a bunch of concerns about his age, about whether he was up for the task. If you ask Biden allies, they say, "Look, he proved that he is ready for another four years."

The other thing that happened too earlier this month right before people were surveyed was that both Trump and Biden clinched their respective parties' nominations. They got enough delegates to officially be the nominees. We also saw earlier this month people really laser focusing in, okay, these are the candidates. There's not going to be some surprise. It's not going to be Nikki Haley. It's not going to be some other Democrat. This is going to be a 2020 rematch. We found that people are really honing in and crystallizing, "I have two choices here, it's Trump or it's Biden."

Brian Lehrer: Let me go right, actually, to your specific article on the tax issues. That one's called Poll Shows Bipartisan Support for Taxing the Rich. How did you ask the question in these swing states?

Laura Davison: We did what we called, when we talked about it internally, a blind taste test of different tax and tariff policies as well. We asked people to basically, do you support raising taxes on billionaires? Do you support raising taxes on those making more than $400,000? Do you support cutting individual tax rates, raising rates on corporations, as well as asking, do you support or oppose some of the tariff policies that Trump has proposed, including a universal 10% tariff on all imports, as well as higher tariffs? He's floated somewhere between 60% to 100% on Chinese imports.

What we found is that when we asked about raising taxes on billionaires and those making $400,000 or up, so that's a wide swath of the wealthy, of what we would call a 400,000 group is basically the top 5% of income earners, whereas billionaires are a very, very small group in the context of the country. About 70% of people said they wanted to raise taxes on both billionaires and those making more than $400,000. This really shows that there is a lot of support.

This is with Republicans, Democrats, independents, people who identify as conservative, people who identify as liberal. Across the board, this was a popular idea. This is something that will be a very real policy reality in Washington come 2025. No matter who's president, no matter if it's Trump or if it's Biden, no matter who wins the House or Senate, Trump's tax cuts from 2017, large portions of them are set to expire at the end of 2025, which means that Congress faces this tax cliff and will have to decide, do we extend those tax cuts or do we just let them all expire and move on for them?

The most likely scenario is some combination in between of we maybe let some of these things continue, things like the child tax credit, things like some of these lower rates on middle-income households. What do we do in terms of the higher earners? Do we raise taxes on them? Do we impose something like a wealth tax? Do we impose higher taxes on capital gains? What this poll shows is that politicians, there's support behind those ideas, and they shouldn't necessarily be afraid to consider some of these options.

Brian Lehrer: Here's one more clip of Biden on taxing the rich from the State of the Union.

President Biden: There are 1000 billionaires in America. You know what the average federal tax is for those billionaires?

Audience Member: Zero.

President Biden: No. They're making great sacrifices- 8.2%. That's far less than the vast majority of Americans pay. No billionaire should pay a lower federal tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker or a nurse.

[applause]

I propose a minimum tax for billionaires of 25%, just 25%. You know what that would raise? That would raise $500 billion over the next 10 years.

Brian Lehrer: Biden from the State of the Union again. You referred to that piece of it before, but take us a little deeper in if you can, the billionaires piece in particular, because he got really specific there on saying what billionaires tend to pay now and what the minimum tax would be on billionaires going forward if he gets his way.

Laura Davison: The reason he's singling out billionaires in particular because the way that the really, really wealthy people in our country pay taxes are very different from how average people, middle-income people, as well as upper middle-class people pay taxes. If you have a job, you have a certain amount of withholding taken out of your paycheck. Then if you haven't paid your full balance come April 15th, you then need to send an extra check to the IRS. If you've had more than enough taken out, the IRS sends you a check with a refund back.

A lot of people are probably dealing with that this month with the filing deadline coming up. For people who are really, really wealthy, who own businesses, who don't necessarily have a job where they make a salary, but instead have lots of investments and other things, they don't have to pay taxes when their assets go up or down in value. They don't only have to pay when-- A lot of people, they never sell and then they're able to pass on good chunks of that to their children tax-free. So you have a lot of wealth that is growing and is very real wealth, but is able to legally avoid getting taxed.

Because of that, Biden is saying, look, people who are really wealthy need to pay a minimum amount of taxes. The White House has done a bunch of research, it's found that they pay on average about 8%. Biden is saying, look, 25% is what billionaires should be paying in taxes every year. In terms of tax rates that regular people pay, that's about in the middle. The top tax rate right now for people making a little bit more than half $1 million a year is 37%. Even that 25% rate would be a little bit lower than what people are already paying in this country.

Brian Lehrer: You're really talking about a tax on unrealized capital gains, right? If you have money in investments and that money is growing, but you're not withdrawing that money because you don't need it to live on, it's those gains that would be taxed at 25%. Am I understanding that correctly?

Laura Davison: Yes. This is something that has really been popularized in the 2020 presidential campaign. You heard Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders talking about these ideas. There are questions about how this would work, how you would go about valuing these assets, how you would go about doing this. There's other ways to make it a little bit more simple, to administer, but that essentially would be Congress's role of determining, okay, what would this tax look like, what would the design look like, and how would the IRS go about enforcing it?

Brian Lehrer: It all sounds very Elizabeth Warren. She put it a little differently. She called it a wealth tax. Biden is saying a tax on billionaires which might be more appealing to people on-- when Warren put it as a wealth tax, maybe people interpreted that as, well, we're just going to take your wealth or percentage of your wealth, whether you're making money on it or not. This is more like if your stocks or other investments are doing well and you have $1 billion in assets, then you're going to have this minimum tax. It's a different framing of the same thing, would you say?

Laura Davison: Yes. We didn't poll exactly how people thought about a wealth tax, but that would be a really interesting question to pose. Most people know that they're not billionaires. Also, a good chunk of people know that they have at least some, a little bit amount of stored wealth. Whether that's just money in a savings account or in a 401k or a trust or something, even if it's not a lot of money that they have, tens of thousands of dollars maybe put somewhere and that could be a little bit more scary to people versus a billionaire tax, you're like, "Okay, that's not going to apply to me and probably will never apply to me."

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some phone calls and texts, your questions or comments for Laura Davison from Bloomberg News. She's a politics editor there who specializes in tax policy, among other financial things and politics in general. We'll get to some other things as we go, but on this new Bloomberg Morning Consult poll that came out yesterday, that does seem to change the script a little bit for how the political world, in general, might be talking about the Trump-Biden presidential race. Biden gaining in almost all the swing states that this poll measured. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, text or call.

We have some people calling in already. Before we go to the phones, is this a state of the Union bump to some degree? Because I know the commentariat said that he did well, he looked vibrant, he assuaged people's fears to some degree about being too old and a little out of it. Certainly that. Plus he had this populist element that we played the clips from that you're tax-oriented part of the poll focused on. I think historically, there isn't much of a State of the Union bump. I don't know if you looked at this in historic terms compared to other presidents or other presidents in their reelection years. I think history tells us it would be fairly unusual for a State of the Union address to change a president's approval rating very much.

Laura Davison: We have seen in other polls that have looked at his approval rating. He did get a little bump off this. It is not outside of historical norms, but it is on the high side for historical norms, so seeing a couple of point improvement. We also asked in our specific poll, we ask if you have seen positive or negative news about a bunch of candidates, Biden included, over the past several days. We did see an increase in this month's poll compared to last month's poll of more people saying they saw positive news about Biden in recent weeks.

This suggests that they were at least seeing more things that they thought were positive. Also, compared to the previous month is when there was the Hur report and there was a lot of negative news about Biden and his age. We may also be capturing here a bit of the whiplash of having a month of really bad news going to a month of a lot more positive news for the president.

Brian Lehrer: When that special counsel said he would present as a sympathetic old man with memory problems, he didn't look out of it in the state of the Union as that might have indicated to people and so maybe Robert Hur got discredited somewhat by the way Biden obviously appeared. Not just reading off the teleprompter, but also in the way he interacted with people spontaneously when he was being heckled by Marjorie Taylor Greene and others. As he was going down the aisle for a long time and chatting with people on his way to the podium. Let me linger on what you just said because I think this is really significant.

I'm just going to read one line from the article how you put it there. The poll also finds consumers feel better about the national economy with the gradual increase in the number of swing state voters who say it is on the right track. Laura, that has been such a narrative in the political media and the economic media in recent months. The economy is doing, by most measures, really quite well, but people's perception of the economy is that it's really bad. Either with people's experience or maybe with news coverage that points out that discrepancy, it's starting to change?

Laura Davison: This could also be that it just takes a little bit for the several months of positive economic data to really filter down to what people are seeing and feeling in their own lives. Compared to October of when we started this poll to March, in states like Nevada and really across all swing states, you've seen somewhere between a 7% to 10% increase of people who have said that their economy is doing better. There's also this phenomenon that we see as well, where people will say that the national economy is on the wrong track.

Then a slightly higher percentage say that their state economy and then their local economy are more on the right track. There's a little bit of a disconnect where people to see, "Broadly, the national economy is doing poorly, but my personal economy where I live is doing better." We're starting to see those two things come together. We've also had things like inflation has really quite stabilized.

We've seen really strong job numbers for a year now or more. There's been a lot of positive economic indicators. Some of these things are starting to trickle down into how people feel. That's a really important thing for Biden because if people feel like the economy is going poorly, that's a very scary sign traditionally for incumbents. If people feel good about the economy, they are much more likely to give someone a second time.

Brian Lehrer: Janet in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Laura Davison from Bloomberg News. Hi, Janet.

Janet: Good morning. I would like to say that Trump actually told us, in his 2020 campaign, how he was smart and was able to beat his taxes. I think the Biden campaign should play some of his old commentsbecause now we are actually seeing in his recent trials, how he has-- yes, he wasn't lying, he actually had ways of beating it. I just want to remind us, look at some of the things that he told us during his 2020 campaign. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: That's a great point, Janet. He was lying to the banks, but he wasn't lying to the public when he said, "Hey, I'm a really rich guy, and yes, I use every tax loophole to beat taxes. It means I'm really smart." Do you remember that, Laura?

Laura Davison: Yes, I remember that. Then we got a chance to actually see some of Trump's tax returns a couple years ago. House Democrats went through a very long process to obtain those tax records. Talking with a bunch of tax experts and auditors and people who do the tax returns for wealthy individuals, said, "He took some very aggressive positions in this." They weren't necessarily saying, "Yes, he definitely broke the law," but that Trump clearly was using on the aggressive side of taking deductions, claiming credits, all of those kinds of things.

It's important to remember, too, and this is what people talk about a lot when they talk about reforming the tax code, is there really are two different sets of tax rules. If you are a middle-income person, you have one or two jobs, maybe you own a house and you have a couple of kids, you have one narrow set of tax rules that you can use. If you own a business, if you own real estate, if you have a lot of investments, a more complicated financial picture, there are just a lot more credits and deductions and ways for you to minimize your tax bill, including deferring taxes, which is a very key thing in our tax code, particularly for things like capital gains, which really only apply to the wealthiest people.

This is where you see this show up in the poll and show up when people are-- Democrats, in particular, express anger about Donald Trump and his situation of saying, "Look, I'm not available to minimize my tax bill. We should make sure that people on the higher end of the income spectrum and the wealth spectrum are paying a lot more."

Brian Lehrer: Of course, in political campaign terms, the reason that Trump probably said that in the first place about beating the IRS is that he thought people would identify more with him even if they were in ordinary income brackets, and more see the IRS as the common enemy. Maybe that's changing. I don't know if you tested that in any way in this poll or any other poll. Who are you more concerned about, the IRS enforcing the tax laws, or really, really, really, really rich people paying low rates of taxes?

Laura Davison: We didn't ask that specifically, but just looking historically at different tax cuts, Trump's tax cuts in 2017 were very different than some of the George W. Bush tax cuts that came in the early 2000s, or even the Reagan tax cuts in the '80s, in that Trump's tax cuts were the first tax cuts to really be widely unpopular. We've seen a shift in society, where people from the '80s and early 2000s are saying, "Yes, tax cut's good," to people in 2017 saying, "Hey, wait a second. What am I going to benefit from this?"

You saw that these tax cuts when they were passed were highly unpopular, and they've stayed largely unpopular, and that's that same sentiment that we see showing up in the poll here. People are saying, "Look, we should raise taxes on higher income people versus cutting taxes." Trump's tax cuts, to put it in context, they did cut taxes across the board, but those tax cuts were tilted towards higher earners. Someone making $40,000 a year got a much smaller tax cut in terms of a percentage and share of the tax cut than someone making significantly more.

Brian Lehrer: I want to point out what, to my eye, are some confusing and maybe even contradictory results in your poll, and don't necessarily show that they help Biden that much in this area. Would it be fair to say that people also liked Trump's tax cuts on the rich from when he was president, those cuts you were just describing, at the same time as they said they want more taxes on the rich? I'm confused.

Laura Davison: Yes. This was a really surprising finding. A couple things explain this. One, there is not a ton of literacy about how tax cuts work and what you as an individual end up benefiting or not from them. As well as I think people are still inclined to say, "I want tax cuts for me, but I want you to tax some other group. Whether that be billionaires, or corporations, or oil producers, whoever that could be, I want you to tax another group more."

Just to put some numbers on this, 70% of people essentially supported taxing billionaires and those making $400,000 more. 66%, so just slightly below that, said that they wanted to cut individual tax rates across all income groups. You see countervailing forces here of people saying, "Tax increases, but also some tax cuts for me." Probably the way we asked this question, people were seeing themselves in that answer.

Brian Lehrer: Does that make a poll result meaningless in this regard, if people supported tax hikes on the very wealthy, but also said they supported tax cuts for all income groups?

Laura Davison: It does suggest that there's a little bit here. People are not necessarily thinking about what the total responses are here. It's also noteworthy that in this blind test that we did of different tax ideas, people really supported Biden's ideas more than they supported Trump's ideas, but when people were asked, "Who do you trust more on tax policy?" people said, "Trump." There was much more support for Trump than Biden. This goes back to a voter literacy issue, a policy issue. That's part of what we're trying to get at here: how can we, as journalists, talk about what these policies do, so that people could make informed decisions when they vote?

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you to drill down a little bit on that one finding from the poll that you just mentioned, and I was going to ask you about it anyway, because it looks like for all the popularity that you found for Biden's tax-the-rich proposals, you found a majority said they trust Trump more on tax policy, generally. What?

Laura Davison: Yes. Trump got 47% of respondents saying they trust Trump on tax policy, and Biden only got about 35%. What that means here is that basically all Republicans responding to this poll said, "Yes, we trust Trump when it comes to tax policy," but not all Democrats, or folks who considered themselves left-leaning, said they trusted Biden. There was also a portion here of, "Don't know," or, "Not sure," because 47% and 35% leave some uncertainty there. That is a concerning side for Biden of, they have Republicans are all 100% behind their candidate, whereas Democrats are not so sure about theirs.

Brian Lehrer: We have a few minutes left with Laura Davison, political editor for Bloomberg News, on the new, very newsworthy Bloomberg Morning Consult poll, which found Biden gaining on Donald Trump in six of seven swing-states, that they measure very different from all of the last five months in this Bloomberg Morning Consult poll, and also found a lot of support for Biden's tax-on-billionaires proposal and tax-on-corporations proposals from the State of the Union address, which we've been picking apart that tax policy and public opinion on tax being one of Laura's reporting specialties. We're going to change it up just a little bit because Erica in Manhattan is going to relate this, not to the presidential race, but to something that's going on right here, right now, in New York State. Erica, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Erica: Thanks for having me, Brian. Hi, Laura, it's good to sort of meet you. I'm really excited about this poll. I am with a campaign called the Invest in Our New York Campaign, that is fighting to bring more tax equity, and make sure billionaires and very wealthy corporations here in New York State are paying their fair share. We conducted a poll through Siena College back in December that really has a lot of similar results that you saw in your poll.

For instance, 74% of Democrats support a corporate tax on corporations that make more than $2.5 million in revenue every single year. We also see that 77% of Democrats here in New York support progressive income tax restructuring, so making sure that folks who make over $500,000 or more are paying their fair share. We're seeing popularity also with independence, 67% of the independent support the income tax increase, as well as with Republicans.

One of the things we recognize, while looking at swing states is important, that the road to getting the majority for the House really leads through New York. This has been the narrative that we have also seen for two years. State-level representatives,  currently the Senate and the Assembly, have put in their budget proposals that are being negotiated with the governor. Slight increases on millionaires and billionaires and very profitable corporations. They are hearing what the public here in New York is asking for, which is for making sure the wealthy pay their fair share and then using that revenue to invest in things like affordable housing, like universal free school lunches and breakfasts for students. One of the-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Governor Hochul as of now is against that, right?

Erica: Right. That's what I was going to get to is the "democratic leader" here in New York state refuses to even have the discussion with our legislators. She's doing the exact opposite of what the national Democratic leader, President Biden, is calling for. Laura, I would just be curious what you think about someone who is supposed to be a Democratic stalwart and a leader here in New York, helping to make sure that we secure the House, and won't even listen to how popular this is, both in her own state and across the country.

Brian Lehrer: Erica, thank you very much for your call. I don't know if you want to get into as a reporter passing judgment on Kathy Hochul, but you hear what Erica lays out, and I think the facts there are true about what's happening in the state legislature versus what the governor says with respect to these tax hikes on the wealthiest in New York State. This is budget season in New York State. As you probably know, the new fiscal year starts on Monday. This is very salient right now in New York. Anything relevant to the state level that you can glean from your poll or any other reaction to Erica's call?

Laura Davison: One thing that I'll say is that really, we have seen this tension point of whether to really get behind tax increases and how much to do has been a tension point among Democrats. We saw that with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate. We saw that play out as Biden was trying to get his Build Back Better Plan past that eventually ended up passing, but at a very scaled down form. Even Biden himself, when he was running for president for the first time, four years ago, he was not really touting the idea of a wealth tax or a billionaire's tax. Now it's the centerpiece of his economic plan, his project proposal he came out with last week and in his State of the Union.

You've seen this transformation among many Democrats at the national level, going from being scared to talk about these ideas to realizing that they're popular and wanting to get behind them. I think it's a little bit different for state level politicians. One, just because the politics of every state is different. Also at the national level, because Congress moved so slowly, Politicians can get behind ideas that they know don't have a chance of passing any time soon, where at the state level when you're someone like Kathy Hochul, the political calculus is a little bit different. Democrats are still scared in some places to really beat the drum of tax hikes and they're taking a more cautious stance on that.

Brian Lehrer: Hochul would argue, I believe, from having heard her, that somebody can take their money and run to another state, but if you tax at the federal level, it's not so easy to run out of the country with your money, although people do that too. She would probably make that argument at least. Erica also related it to the congressional races, which I also think is very interesting because that is at the national level. We do have very important swing districts, as you know, in New York that did a lot to determine the Republicans getting the majority in Congress in 2022. We'll see what happens in those swing districts in 2024, but maybe your poll finds, even though it was hooked just to Biden versus Trump, a hook for those Democrats to run on in their district.

Laura Davison: This poll obviously didn't look at New York specifically, but Bloomberg is very focused on what's happening in all of these New York districts. We've been doing a ton of reporting talking with the Republican members who represent there and looking at their Democratic challengers. One of the tax issues that is likely to come back in this campaign season is something called SALT, or the state and local tax deduction, which was a feature of Trump's bill that he really reduced this deduction to only a 10,000 cap, where as previously it had fewer restrictions.

This is something that really matters in places like New York, New Jersey, California, higher tax areas because it means that people can write off what they pay in state and city taxes on their federal tax bill. This has proved to be a really big issue in Congress and it has actually divided Democrats some, because Democrats who represent New York say, "Look, this is something that affects my residents and my constituents and we want to make sure that this deduction at the federal level is as big as it can be."

Some particularly more progressive Democrats say, "Okay, that's fine," but when you look at the distribution of this, it's really more wealthy and higher upper middle class people who are able to take this. They're saying, "Look, it's a hypocrisy. If we, as a party, are saying we should raise taxes on the rich, but also then create a bigger tax deduction for the rich to claim."

Brian Lehrer: AOC says she's not for reinstating the full state and local tax deduction on your federal taxes, because the way that it is now does tax the rich more than people with less money, though a lot of the people aren't rich who are paying that extra federal tax the other side would argue. I think it's probably not so much an issue in the swing districts, which tend to be the suburban districts around New York City, because the Democrats and the Republicans run on repealing the SALT tax deduction cap. There's that.

Just one more quick thing from the political news of the last day before you go. I think you're looking at this RFK third party race and that he picked his running mate yesterday, Nicole Shanahan, who also has business world experience, I guess, in the tech sector. I'm not very familiar with her, but I'm curious if you have any observation as a political editor with a finance bent on what that means and any of your latest intelligence there at Bloomberg on whether RFK, if he gets on the ballot in all the states, is more likely to hurt Trump or Biden.

Laura Davison: His vice presidential pick is Nicole Shanahan. She's a 38-year-old tech entrepreneur. She's done a lot of work with AI and also is very interested in criminal justice, environment, reproductive rights issues. What's really interesting here, she is also quite wealthy. She is the former wife of Sergey Brin, who's one of Google founders. They had this really long, extensive launch event for her announcement yesterday as the vice presidential pick. It's this interesting combination of people who are saying, "We don't want regulation, we want the government to back off, but we also want a cleaner environment and we want cleaner food products and we want more exercise"

It's this interesting combination of folks. We've been pulling RFK Jr. for several months now. He's getting around nine to 10% in these swing states. What we're finding is that he's pulling evenly between Trump and Biden. When you look at a matchup that includes RFK Jr. and then a matchup that doesn't, he's pulling equally from both the Republican and the Democrat. This could change a little bit. For the past several months, he hasn't had super high name ID. People recognize that he's a Kennedy, so that has been attracted to some Democrats.

Also his policies don't a 100% align with Trump's, but there's certain threads being very vaccine skeptical, very anti-lockdown, and much more libertarian in certain policies, are more appealing to the Trump side. We're keeping close tabs on that right now, but as you mentioned, he's not on all 50 states at the moment, so that's his campaign's biggest challenge. I'll note that he's raising a lot of money, including from some Silicon Valley tech billionaires. He has the money to continue to try his effort.

Brian Lehrer: You say vaccine skeptical, others say conspiracy theory embracing. I even saw in an interview that he did with Reuters that he didn't think the measles vaccine is effective and now with anti vaccine backlash in this country and fewer people getting the measles vaccine for their kids. There's a measles outbreak beginning in the United States, so it's not just about COVID. That may come back to haunt him, or at least he'll have to defend that because he said that I think a little while ago against the measles vaccine.

A lot of RFK coverage for better or worse to come as we come to the conclusion of this conversation with Laura Davison, political editor for Bloomberg News. Laura, thank you so much.

Laura Davison: Thanks for having.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.