Yesterday, American Bridge 21st Century President Pat Dennis joined the National Journal Radio podcast to discuss the state of the 2024 race up and down the ballot and how American Bridge plans to hold Republicans accountable for being extreme, far-right weirdos.
Listen to the full episode here.
Key Quotes:
- “JD Vance, and we had a key part of getting this out there, has supported a national abortion ban. Donald Trump has also supported a national abortion ban… But JD Vance coming on the scene, and then, number one, his previous support for a national abortion ban, but also his weird comments about women and families just brings the conversation back onto this area where Republicans are just so unpopular.”
- “It is malpractice for [Donald Trump’s campaign] to say that, ‘Oh, you know, our campaign is useless now because the top of the opposing ticket has changed.’ Your job as a campaigner is to put forward a positive message for the country so that people want to vote for you and not just vote against the other guy. This is kind of an admission of failure on that front.”
- “I was just thinking about how the Trump campaign has been forced to spend in North Carolina, which is not something we were expecting them to pay for TV ads on at this point in the election if you had been looking at it a couple of months ago. What you see there is, number one, Trump has struggled with the change in the top of our ticket. Number two, the down ballot. The guy they’re running for governor there is named Mark Robinson, current lieutenant governor, and he is just a dumpster fire of a candidate… The media campaign against him on the gubernatorial level is dragging down Trump. And I think the fact that they’re spending money on TV in the state at this point is a recognition of that.”
- “As soon as you get a layer down into these House races, you can find, there’s just a lot of stuff that nobody has ever checked on. There is a layer there that can be dug into and you can come out with information that fundamentally changes the shape of the race. The most frequent one in these, honestly, is abortion. Republicans have tried very hard to run away from their position on abortion, but historically a lot of these folks have been in Republican primaries in the past and just said some pretty extreme things that are now real salient and on the top of people’s minds. And if you can go back, and either we had a tracker there many years ago because we were tracking someone else, or we just had the capacity to go back through the records, and statements, and questionnaires from their past races, we’ve really been able to put out information in these races that can add a few points to the Democratic side.”
Published: Aug 13, 2024