The Realignment: 414 | Oren Cass: Is the GOP's Pro-Worker Economic Policy Realignment Underway?

Marshall here. Welcome back to The Re-alignment.

Today's guest, Warren Kast, is making a return appearance on the show to discuss what are the issues of the center of the political re-alignment

upending the issues, coalitions, and dynamics of American politics in the 2020s.

That issue of course is the possibility of a GOP shift towards the working class

and the rise of pro-worker economic policies on the right as a consequence.

The story is way more complicated than that though, as is demonstrated by a new poll put out by Orange Organization,

American Compass, alongside YouGov. Together, both organizations surveyed 1,000 Republican voters to get these results.

We'll go through them one at a time throughout the conversation but at a top level, while the poll found that GOP voters

continue to rank socio-cultural issues at the top of their priority list, they've also abandoned the GOP's traditional focus on tax cuts,

deregulation, and free trade. Whether all this matters, especially in a relatively policy vague 2024 GOP primary,

is of course up for debate. At a minimum though, we're presented with the opportunity for a new type of politics

at the other end of this chaotic political moment.

This episode was actually recorded in person, so it was great to be able to do that with him there.

A huge thank you to the Foundation for American Innovation for supporting the work of this podcast.

Hope you all enjoy the conversation.

Orin Kass, welcome back to The Realignment. For some, we're doing this live. We're coming to you all from Bloomberg's

Going to Work conference, but great to chat with you again.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So many things to hit up today. We're going to keep this tight and focused. I think two things I want to start with.

So number one, just sum up for everyone what American Compass does, the work you do, and then we'll get into the new poll

that you all released this past month, which directly relates to what The Realignment does. So American Compass first.

Sure. So what is American Compass? I guess we're a think tank. I've given up trying to come up with another name for it,

but we are trying to develop the next conservative economic agenda.

You know, I think the Trump era has obviously thrown everything into disarray.

There are some who would just like to go back to 2014, and we are trying to figure out what comes next

and how to craft a conservative agenda that is much more focused on workers' interests, on families, communities,

and ultimately the strength of the national economy.

And you've released a big new poll, which has to do with the realignment of Republicans on these labor and work-related issues.

Love you to go into what are the top-line results that are most relevant.

Yeah, I mean, we were really interested, especially as we get into the 2024 primary cycle, to get a handle on what is actually going on

with the GOP voter base and how does, frankly, the conduct of all the politicians out there connect to, you know, what they must be hearing and seeing.

And so we did it in two parts. The first part was just asking, pretty straightforward, you know, list of 12 different challenges,

which of these do you think are the most important, and then how much weight would you give to each of those?

And then the second part was a bunch of kind of issue-specific things, looking at attitudes on tariffs, attitudes on unions,

attitudes on immigration, attitudes on tight labor markets, industrial policy, etc.

And I think it captures just a really fascinating snapshot of the flux that the American right is in right now.

You know, it's interesting. You actually had a bunch of folks who are typically critical of American Compass actually shout out,

y'all publishing the results, and it says that there were some results that were, I think, helpful to your overall thesis.

There were some that were unhelpful. So how about we start with the helpful?

What kind of indicates that the GOP voter base is aligning the direction you'd want?

And then what are some results that are a little discouraging, unhelpful, or neutral at best?

Well, let me just say it's all helpful. I mean, partly in jest, but, you know, ultimately we're not doing polling to figure out

what's popular that we should therefore go do, but to, you know, really focus on what we call response in politics,

which is the idea that conservatism has to start from what people actually value and care about.

It can't be a bunch of economists saying, well, our model says you're well off, so stop complaining.

But no, I mean, it was really interesting. You know, what it reflected on the top line was that the sort of new set of cultural issues

that you see so much attention to in the media around, you know, transgender issues, you know, critical race theory, woke corporations.

Those are front and center, pretty much numbers one, two, and three on the list for Republican voters.

And no matter how you cut it, that remains the case. Old, young, male, female, white, non-white, by class, you can't even pick any other issues.

So like, of those who really care about taxes, what else do they really care about? It's still those things.

And so I think, you know, that's obviously what we're seeing out there when you, you know, say, well, hey, what are the candidates want to talk about?

What's the media focusing on? That's kind of item number one.

For us, what was more interesting, though, was, okay, but you also have all of the economic issues.

And, you know, look, I think politics at the end of the day is always heavily focused on these sort of, you know, hot button issues.

But you do have to have an economic agenda to go with that. You have to have a theory of the case, and you also better be ready to govern if you win.

And so, you know, we presented both, so three of those 12 options with these cultural ones.

Three were what I would kind of call consensus issues, which wherever you are on the right, you probably are on the same page.

Things like immigration, you know, moving away from college for all toward non-college pathways, valuing family, wanting more kids.

But then we had three that I would call new right issues focused on globalization, on worker power, on financialization on Wall Street.

And then three I would call the typical old right issues, taxes too high on job creators, regulation is hamstringing businesses, tariffs are interfering with free trade.

And, you know, those in terms of absolute value get less weight, but it's really interesting that you can see respondents very clearly segmented.

There are some who just don't care about this. You put them in the neutral or neither bucket.

But you get more than 40% who actually give greater weight to these new right economic issues.

And about 29% that are giving greater weight to the old right issues.

And if you think about those as two kind of blocks, the new right block and the old right block, again, going back to that, the initial point about the cultural issues.

Yeah, they're both very focused on the cultural issues.

But if you zoom in on one of those blocks, you know, the old right folks are giving about as much weight to their other substantive economic issues as to the cultural issues.

And the new right folks are giving about as much weight to their economic issues as to the cultural issues.

It's just that when you zoom out and look in the aggregate at the party as a whole, because there's the agreement on the culture and the disagreement on the economic,

you get this spike on whatever is focused on culture. And I think that that actually tells a very coherent story of what we see happening on the right.

I think what's fascinating here is you're thinking about the political dynamic, especially given the way the primary is going.

It seems to me that the critical question for the new right when it comes to economic policy isn't, you know, does industrial policy when you're a Republican primary,

it's could a broader economic agenda push you over the top with independent voters, conservative Democrats, especially in the must win states.

So how do you, I know that's not quite what the poll was pulling, but where does that part of the picture come in if we're thinking about 2024?

Yeah, so this is a super important point and one, as you said, that wasn't the focus here because we were looking at GOP voters.

But there's an incredibly important point here, which is that if you're thinking about a broader coalition and looking beyond just winning a primary to actually being competitive in a general election,

there's actually an extraordinary opportunity here. I mean, typically say, oh, the primaries, you know, poll candidates to the fringes and they have to make their way back to the center.

Here you're seeing a set of issues that is going to be much more attractive to people outside the Republican coalition.

And that will work you exactly where the lack of a conservative message has most hurt conservatives.

And that is both something you can win on within the party and exactly what you would want to have in the general election.

And so, you know, for me, what the punchline was on all of this is it's totally understandable why politicians and in the media and everyone else is behaving the way they are now, right?

There's a set of things you can talk about that everyone's going to love and you're not going to upset anybody with.

So you focus there. Why would you focus on the set of issues where some people are going to love you, but other people are going to hate you no matter what you say.

And that's totally rational. But there's also a huge opportunity here. This is what political leadership is about at the end of the day.

It's having the vision, certainly to see where the momentum is on this stuff, seeing how it connects the actual problems in the country, seeing the contours of the broader, really durable governing coalition that this offers,

and saying, yeah, I'm actually going to have to make an argument.

I mean, one of the amazing things is the new right is as popular as it is, despite no history of that argument sort of resonating on the right.

This is the opportunity to actually make an argument and sort of will this coalition into being.

And I just wish when people look back at Reagan and say, what was so great about Reagan, they would recognize it wasn't a big tax cut.

It was that he did that. That's what the next Reagan will be is not the person who has the next big tax cut.

It will be the person who says there's an actual coalition here that has not been tapped into that brings together at its core is very conservative,

but reaches a lot of conservative folks who have historically been on the left.

At the end of the day is appealing or at least tolerable to pretty much everybody on the right and actually conveys a vision for taking the country forward.

Another poll to consider, I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I'm sure you've seen that Republicans are trusted on the economy to the highest,

I think now it's down to the highest level in the history of that very long running poll.

What is the central takeaway there?

Well, I think it's a poll about Biden really.

I mean, I think we've seen the Republicans are perfectly capable of taking power and then losing on the exact same result.

I think what you're seeing is a very deep dissatisfaction with so-called bidenomics, and it's really interesting to grapple with what is bidenomics and why are people dissatisfied with it?

Because I could tell actually quite positive story about some elements of it.

I mean, if we think back across the past four years and to the end of the Trump administration as well, obviously COVID is initially the central factor.

And we could go four hours on everything that was good or bad about the COVID response.

But especially if you compare to the rest of the world, the US actually did extraordinarily well in providing fiscal support to households in getting the economy growing again.

And if you look at kind of the trend lines, we are way above most of the rest of the developed world.

And so that would be the cause for celebration.

Now, the problem is if you ask, well, what do I associate with Biden and all of that?

It would be when he did yet another $2 trillion stimulus on top of the rest of it.

That wasn't really necessary and that they made a giant deal out of focused on elements of it like unconditional cash grants to families that nothing to do with COVID were not popular.

And so even though you could tell a positive story about the COVID response, the salience that that has with Biden politically I think is overwhelmingly negative and connected to the ensuing inflation.

And then I think likewise when it comes to this sort of broader economic picture, like Biden has carried forward a lot of the Trump-China policies in ways that one could hypothetically celebrate.

But his administration is at war with itself over this.

And most of the vocal folks are talking about how we should be embracing open trade with China and partnering together.

And so he's not getting any of the credit where he could be for actually being a China hawk.

And I think as we've gone along, his policies have gotten weaker and weaker.

They were supposed to do controls on outbound investment into China and they're just a disaster.

They're embarrassingly weak.

And then I think when you think about manufacturing and the domestic economy, again, same thing.

Like they've done some very interesting things on industrial policy, but it's all through the context of green New Deal stuff.

And people are rightly recognizing, wait a minute, the actual sort of core of what you're doing here isn't good for workers.

And why isn't it good for workers?

Well, because at the end of the day, if you think about what a green transition means, it means shutting down an enormous amount of highly productive economic activity in this country that has a lot of very good jobs for blue collar workers.

And then at best, you're sort of trying to claw back and make up some of the gap.

And so Democrats have always, in terms of gross jobs versus net jobs, in gross jobs, they'll talk about their green policies.

Here's all the jobs we're going to create.

And as long as they weren't actually really doing any policy, everyone could just sort of clap, right?

For better or worse, the IRA is the first real climate policy that's biting in the United States in a lot of ways.

And so we're actually seeing the consequences and the trade off of it.

And what you're seeing is, look, when you shift from traditional auto manufacturing to EV manufacturing, that actually turns out not to be very good for auto workers, particularly to the degree that so much of the EV industry is dominated by China.

And so in the abstract, you say, look at all these EV jobs we've created.

But if you actually look at the holistic impact, you're, you know, look, if you're solving climate change and people are excited about that, that's great.

If you're asking about the impact on workers, it's not going to be great.

And so then just the last piece I would add to that is that then if I think about the other sort of two signature things I would associate with Biden administration over the last year, it's the absolute disaster on immigration,

which sort of directly undercuts anything they could be trying to say about worker power, tight labor markets, protecting American workers.

And then the student loan forgiveness, which is this extraordinary targeting of hundreds of billions of dollars, specifically to people who did go to college without even the pretense of trying to do anything to fix the system.

And so if you step back and you say, well, wait a minute, what are Biden's actual priorities on the economy and how does that connect to things I see happening in the economy?

I think it's quite rational to say this, this is just not good.

Something I'm curious about is looking forward.

And this is hard because we're, you know, more of in a year out from the 2024 election.

I'm always ready to look forward.

Yeah, but looking forward, what takeaways would you see a failed Biden administration kind of leading to?

Because I think what's interesting is the most interesting parts of the Biden economic agenda were clearly picking up parts of the Trump project, which were either working or were directionally moving in the right direction.

So that's the China trade policies.

There are those different categories of the Biden agenda, focus areas, etc.

What do you see Republican administration and Trump are not focusing and pulling from?

It's a good question.

I mean, I guess I would say probably not much.

You know, I think one of the interesting things about the way that the Biden administration is going about industrial policy is that I think it's very clearly not the kind of industrial policy that Republicans envision in a lot of respects.

And so, you know, I appreciate, I appreciate the Biden administration's work in that it has made it much easier to explain how what a group like American compass is focused on is not the same as the Democrats agenda.

Right.

We would get that question a lot like, well, you're interested in labor, you're interested, you know, skeptical of financial markets, you talk about industrial policy, like, why aren't you a Democrat?

And it's like, well, you know, like, let me just point you to Joe Biden.

That was the 2012.

I'm sure that was the 2020 conversation you were having.

Yes, that's exactly right.

And so, you know, I think the, to flip the question around a little bit, you know, what does come next for the Republican Party, including hypothetically even a Trump administration, you know, I think it's the one thing I have learned better than to try to look forward to is what Trump will do next.

That I think is hard to predict.

But I do think it's really interesting to think both on the Republican side and the Democratic side about sort of what comes next, one more step down the road, because, you know, Biden was at one point, I think they were talking about him as like a transitional figure, right.

And there's a very important way in which that's true.

I mean, Biden is sort of the last of the old guard labor Democrats.

And if you, if you look behind him and say, well, what comes next, it looks to me like essentially the all the worst parts of what we're seeing right now from the Biden administration, without any really of the positive elements that Biden might have brought to the table.

And on the flip side, if you look at what's going on in the Republican Party, you know, one of the interesting things about Trump is he really is one of one.

There are many Trumps in the sense of there are people trying to be Trump, but there is no heir apparent who is going to be like Trump after Trump.

And the set of folks who is well positioned to come after Trump, you know, folks in the Senate like JD Vance, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, you know, this is exactly the group that is focused on developing this set of ideas.

And doing it, I think a lot more in a much more focused way than you might see in a Trump administration, but certainly also in a way that's going to look very different than what you're seeing from Biden.

This is obviously a good time to talk about the UAW and the realignment debate around conservatives unions, et cetera.

On the one hand, the, you know, left wing critics of this are basically arguing look end of the day, obviously there's been a cultural realignment.

So you're obviously going to see GOP senators elected, et cetera, able to get on the line with workers and have a bunch of residents, especially given the diploma divide.

But at a core level, if we actually look at the individual policies that are being supported, the Democrats are still going to come ahead, even if it's not quite who the union will want to, you know, get a beer with.

What's your commentary on both the like political aesthetics of the dynamic, but then also the actuality of what's happening?

Well, I don't think we should sort of take for granted that you would have Republicans out there, you know, on on the picket line or even talking about this in a positive way.

And because we can see those who aren't right, you have the example of a Tim Scott or Nikki Haley, who are saying frankly someone ludicrous things about that.

You know, I think Tim Scott initially sort of said, you know, well, I do what Ronald Reagan did when he fired their traffic controllers.

So when we like, you understand that like you can't fire.

So the instinct there, the instinct matters there.

In that case, that's revealing at the end.

I think you're Nikki Haley.

I just come and she said she expected, you know, she was concerned that the union was really asking, you know, the companies to do some things that would be difficult for them.

Right.

Like, and so you still see the like zombie Reagan impulse there.

And so I think it's actually quite notable that you also see these Republicans are saying, no, wait a minute, like actually workers having power and asserting it vis-a-vis capital.

That's a healthy part of the capitalist system.

And, you know, I think it's very funny that from the left's point of view, you know, being supportive of this means like going to the mat for the workers.

Right.

And so it's very interesting.

And I think folks like Rubio and Vance have done a very good job for the most part of distinguishing between supporting the labor movement and worker power as a force.

That gives workers the ability to demand whatever they want to demand without getting into whose demands are right or wrong.

Because I think those are just two very different things.

You know, when you have the Democrat model, which is sort of, I'm going to, you know, get out there and sort of tell the company they have to do what the workers want.

That's no better than getting out there and telling the workers they have to do what the company wants.

And again, from the left, that's like, that's an absurd equivocation.

We should want the workers.

It's like, look, I want good outcomes for the workers.

But my interest in a strong labor movement, and I think the reason conservatives ultimately should and will be significant reformers and advocates for a strong labor movement is that it's not about the government adjudicating who's right.

It's about setting up a system where both sides have power and leading it to them to work it out for themselves.

Yeah. And in this last section, I want to run with your point that unlike in 2020, when these conversations were emerging, there's actually a clear ability for you to kind of set up.

Here's how the Biden administration has approached these issues.

Here's ways we're rhetorically interested in their approach, but here's where we actually depart.

So let's kind of go issue by issue, like let's start with education, right?

So education wise, summary of the Biden policy, where does the American compass economic vision depart from that?

Well, I think Biden, like everybody else, talks a good game about apprenticeships and non-college pathways.

But the proof is in what he's actually done, which is let's focus, you know, I think if I don't even know where it is in the courts at the moment.

But the effort was something like half a trillion dollars in student loan forgiveness while doing nothing to actually change the way that we just create open ended subsidies for a totally broken higher education system.

You know, I think what we should be doing is confronting the failure of the higher education system, recognizing it's not the right model for many, probably even most young people.

And so that means two things.

One, really taking an axe to higher education where it's not being effective and saying, yeah, you know, students are going to be able to declare bankruptcy if they can't repay their loans and you're going to be on the hook for it if they do.

And by the way, we're not even doing the subsidized student loan thing anymore.

If you have a useful product that creates value for young people, then the university should finance it and you'll get paid back if you do a good job and you've got a business if you don't.

And then let's take a huge share of those resources and ship them over to actually building non-college pathways that say, you know, we should have at least as much public support for the young person who's coming out of high school and isn't headed on to college.

Because that's where you have so much weakness in the labor market.

How do we connect those people to a first job?

How do we make sure that's one where they are getting invested in, developing skills?

And, you know, the standard I always use is there are people for whom a college degree is exactly the right thing to do and the costs associated with that are worthwhile.

There are an awful lot of people if you tell them, hey, we could get you to age 20 with a couple years of job experience, some industry recognized skills or credentials,

and savings in the bank.

That's just a wildly better deal.

And, you know, other survey research we've done shows exactly that.

U.S. American parents and American young people, would you rather have a free ride at any college you can get into or a three-year apprenticeship that actually leads to a good job?

Most people say they'd rather have the apprenticeship.

That answer kind of highlighted the actual divide here, which is that you aren't just debating the specifics of the college financing system.

You're actually saying, for a lot of folks, higher education is a consumer experience.

There's a product that's being delivered, and if you can't deliver for it, this could be an issue there.

Like, where do you just stand on the broader issue of, like, the purpose of higher education?

I think that's actually where, if you get in the trenches, you see the most actual disagreement with your framework.

Yeah, I think there's a very thin sliver of the population that has the luxury of sort of navel gazing and speculating about the higher value of higher education.

And for the vast, vast majority of people, the answer is it either has negative value because it is years of life, not only that you are paying for,

but the opportunity cost of not earning and not getting years of job, of work experience.

And then there's a large segment for whom higher education can be tremendously valuable if it is economically valuable and actually imparts job skills.

And so I think, you know, in particular, if we shift to a mindset that recognizes that it does not make sense for most people to go to college,

then all of those aspirational things we talk about, about the hypothetical value of higher education, we need to ask,

what of that do we actually believe everybody needs? And if so, how do we deliver that earlier?

So, you know, things like civics education, that has to be part of the actual core public education system,

because talking about the wonderful things higher education is going to impart,

that it's only going to impart to a small segment of the population does not do anything for most of the people who need the most support right now.

I guess where I've always felt a bit of a hiccup, but it's definitely personal is, you know, I come from a upper middle class,

like privileged background, and I got to, you know, get a definitely useless, not useless, because I'm still here,

but like definitely not a great, you know, political science education.

I think it causes a lot of people to, you know, kind of blanch a bit at the idea of like, obviously I'm in that sliver,

but like, what do you say to kind of the vision of like, hey, like a lower middle class kid too,

should be able to kind of like, jerk around for a few years at the University of Oregon and get a poly-side degree?

Like, where does that person fit within the vision you're articulating here?

Yeah, that's just probably not the right pathway for that person.

Now, are there people who come from any background for whom a political science degree and heading into the kind of career you're headed into might be entirely appropriate?

Absolutely. And, you know, especially to the extent that we don't throw things like standardized tests out the window,

you know, we have actually a fairly good ability to identify those folks and provide opportunity to them.

I think the mistake that we make in the discourse is we kind of go the route of the, you know, whichever American founding father said,

you know, better to let a thousand guilty men go free than, you know, put a single innocent man in jail.

We sort of say, you know, better to ruin, you know, a thousand lives with like wasted years of unproductive higher education and debt and even high school education that does not prepare them for anything

than like miss a single diamond in the rough who could have gotten a poly-side degree at Oregon and didn't.

And that's just, that is entirely the wrong calculus.

First of all, just as a utilitarian matter, but also over two other reasons.

One being, it sort of assumes that the person who gets to do the poly-side degree at Oregon is somehow the winner and the person who instead,

if we actually had good alternative pathways and, you know, goes and learns another set of skills and sets off on a good career that allows them to support a family is the loser.

Now in the current system where it's go to Oregon to get a poly-side degree or get nothing.

Yes, saying get nothing is, is unconscionable.

If you actually build good alternative pathways, it's not like, well, we're depriving the person of the poly-side degree because they're instead in this other path to put in good life.

You may find just many people who you rescue from the, from the poly-side degree.

And then the last point I would make, and I think this is, you know, a place where, where conservatives have a lot to offer.

And that it, it in our research connects with what the American really, you know, the American people really care about is the American dream.

I think we should understand much less as sort of getting into the best college you can and then working a finance job in New York and much more.

And, you know, when we ask people even terms like what is the purpose of public education, you know, it's, it's about developing the skills and values to build a decent life.

And if we can do that for people and help them to do that, I should say, then the next generation, they can provide that greater opportunity to their kid.

And I think, you know, is it unsatisfying to say, well, you might not have every opportunity in the world, but we can give you good opportunity and your kid will have every opportunity in the world.

I'm sorry if you find that unsatisfying. The flip side is to do what we've been trying, what we have been doing, which goes in exactly the wrong direction and ends up not providing nearly as much opportunity to anybody.

So let's close with this. We began this episode by talking about your new polls that reveals gaps between a certain realigning GOP voter and one of the economic orthodoxy on the right.

I guess the real question is to what degree does that gap matter?

I kind of remember Grand New Party, you know, Ross and Raihan write it comes out in 2008 and in the opening of the book, they specifically note that even in 2008, which they're writing temporarily, obviously, GOP voters were actually aligned more towards

Democrats when it came to tax policy. The example being, are we going to preface upper income tax cuts? Yes or no, GOP voters were much more leaning towards the Democratic side once you got rid of the D part of that answer.

So you could argue that that was a useful anecdote. It helps explain why Jeb Bush wasn't exactly able to come up with, you know, a strong economic case against Trump's 2015-2016 campaign.

So in the case of today then, to what degree does this gap matter? If at all, especially with the cultural issues, are still the let's say the top line on a voting level?

Well, I think the gap matters for two reasons. One is for building a coalition and then the second is for governing. And, you know, the reality is it has been a long time since, for instance, a Republican presidential candidate won 50% of the national electorate.

And so, you know, there is a way in which there just is no longer a majority to be made, you know, built out of the Reagan message.

And so actually developing a different message that is going to bring in a lot of people who have, I think, been alienated, rightly so by that message has a ton of value.

And I think one thing that's shifted a lot since, you know, 2008 is such an interesting year, that's like the Obama-McCain year.

Like, the people said like Obama was a conservative, I think, totally misunderstanding Obama.

By the standards of where the Democratic Party is in his headed, like Obama was quite conservative.

I mean, the Democratic Party has done a lot. And we were talking about this with what Biden's been doing to really alienate, certainly on cultural and somewhat on economic terms,

a lot of voters who I think are now more up for grabs than they would have been in the past.

I think this is something Trump demonstrated to at least an initial extent.

But you have to be able to pair an economic message that's not going to sort of disqualify yourself on the front end.

And so I think for coalition-building purposes, certainly get to 50%, and even more importantly, if we're actually talking about the future of the country,

you know, we need to get back to an actual durable governing coalition at some point.

I mean, Reagan won 60% in 1984.

If you think you're going to build that with like a Nikki Haley agenda, I don't know what to tell you.

And so that then connects into the second piece, which is at the end of the day, the point here isn't just to win elections 48.1 to 47.9.

It's to be in position to govern and then actually govern in a way that is going to address America's problems.

And so ultimately, that's where the biggest gap is, right?

Is like, are we going to have elected leaders who are taking America in a better direction?

And I think that connects back to what I was talking about, the punchline of the poll and the importance of leadership.

Like, there is no shortage of politicians out there who are just following the polling.

So if the polling says just talk about the cultural stuff, it will take the politician who sees where they where he or she could go and and goes there.

I think to really move us forward.

Yeah, and there's the closing thought on my end is that to the other poll we referenced with the highest voter trust on the economy swinging towards Republicans to an unprecedented amount.

If you take that poll result, assume you win the election because of that, but then just kind of roll around with tax cuts and job sacks.

Part two, you're going to squander that reality.

And that's the thing to understand at a coalitional level.

The Nikki Haley agenda, which, and this is where I think this becomes difficult for folks who stick to the GOB orthodoxy things.

Is this the best economic policy side of the debate?

That's one part.

The other part is, can this actually build a genuine governing coalition?

And that's just the thing which clearly I know that that agenda is capable of doing.

I agree.

Great.

So that's a great place to end it.

Orrin, thank you for joining me again on The Realignment.

This was awesome.

Thank you.

Hope you enjoyed this episode.

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Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.