governor. this is the year that women can make history and turn up. >> the co-author of for colored girls who've considered politics. thanks for your time. >> the founder and president of the strategies. good morning.ni >> caller: good to be with you. good morning. >> caller: >> host: with the message you would send to them as they reach out to potential voters? >> cuguest: i would focus as much as possible especially since people are focusing on suburban women voters to keep as much of them as possible in the camp. the reality is we still have a tendency to settle women with a lot of that sort of basic accounting, household accounting

responsibilities so if i were a republican, i would be talking about the implication of tax cuts. i know certainly with my own employees in virginia, when i go to and calculate what their paychecks are, these are not people that are 1% and they are making more as a result of the i ts and focusing on that can be beneficial. the other thing i would try to ofus on is a little bit finessing. it appears to me that the raise in inflation has diminished to some ansome hand of reality as s above the rate of inflation so you have a lot of people

grappling with that. if it were me i would be focusing on the pocketbook issues and kitchen table issues. at the end of the day people understand it's been in reasonably good shape and if you give a reason to believe by keeping you around you going to put more money in your pocket, that will be about the best argument i think republicans can present to this particular point forbl swing voters. the problem with this attack cut message is the voters don't that think about things that have already been done like this, and voters don't go to the polls to say thank you. there's a lot of things we don't agree on that is one thing we do agree on and that is one reason why you see house republicans on the ways and means committee go ahead and get through the house to sort of permanent the tax cuts that were included but which were not made permanent.

they have that as a sort of promise if you put us in we can geand we canget this done for y. hthe fundamental problem that we have in the parties we have the ability to rally around and that is all well and good but within the party, you have about six different camps in terms of who wants to do what and we don't have a unified message. that being said i don't know necessarily that we need a yunified message. we need to have candidates running in a lot of the districts that have their own ideas t about health care that n talk about those persuasively and at the end of the day it will be different and i think that's fine. the point is you can't leave the question unanswered and that is caworry i have that a lot of republicans are leaving the question unanswered and democrats have an answer. i don't think it is a good one but most people will take an answer over no answer.

>> we showed a poll showing women who were voting in november were breaking for democrats. is that something you are seeing and if so, why? >> guest: that seems to be the case. it's a national tendency generally speaking you will see the voters say maybe we need to do a little bit of course correction for the opposite party or they will vote for happily for the opposite party. but a lot of that is the natural gravitational pull in politics. we do have some issues and also in general there's a lot of women who feel congress isn't doing it child.

what is overlooked by the strategists as women are used to juggling different roles had been multitasking like we always joke men can't multitask. the difficulty in the political standpoint is when you see those that are sitting literally up there in the capital and they can't gett stuff done you will automatically have a bunch of people who can't run small businesses or have relatively high power management chomps and who are dealing with their kids activities in soccer and leaving their own life and managing family finances wondering if i can do all this in a given day why can't they pass a bill to make my health care better and i think until people can answer that question they will have a hard time getting them back. >> host: democrats could 202-748-8000, independent, 202-748-8002. the idea of getting the job done what do you think about the

nomination and ho how does that play out among the women voters? just covet >> guest: that's what their particular affiliation is. you have democrats and anybody on the left center pissed off about this and that is going to energize them to go to the polls. i think it does help in that respect into the same time yes, there are a lot of republicans who've been disenchanted with the way that they are o handlinn things and they don't like everything coming out of the administration and for them, but confirmation has been unifying and hasas enabled them to get behind the party more forcefully than they had been two or three weeks ago. i think when you look at the swing voters and the people who are more independent, that's where it gets tricky because it suggests women really don't like the way the republicans handled this process and they probably don't think he should be on the court. he doesn't have high approval ratings. he has better approval ratings

among men so i do think you can see the gender split. itls also suggests they think bh parties handled it poorly. i would tend to agree with that. my personal view imy wouldn't he voted to confirm him if i were on the hill mostly because it displays the motion that we had in the last round of testimony. i don't delete based on that he can don the job of the supreme court justice. it's appropriate to meet him at the court of appeals level but game over, we are done with it now so we will see how that ends up impacting things. it may not have the effect republicans are having because in the era of the donald trump presidency, things that happened two days ago feel like they happened twogo months ago so i don't know that when people are going to the polls right now for anybody that has an absentee ballot he may have been more motivated to check the box and send it back in but for those on election day they may not even

be thinking about him and if they are they arebe the already for him or against him and i think that the tendency is there could be more people who are hard-core against him who are part of that so that is a problem for the republican party. >> we have calls lined up for .ou >> caller: i apologize just came in and i just want to call you buanything from northeast tennessee where the opioids have destroyed this area and our two candidates are olsson and roe. i'm voting for olsson because he was in johnson city and was the only in the area that i know of

who tried to get women who were in recovery off of the medication that they were on. [inaudible] the only doctor in us. that would get women are pregnant off the medications of their babies couldn't be born addicted. >> host: where are you as far as the tennessee senate b race? >> caller: between blackburn -- with the pharmaceutical company i would really like to know where they stand onn the changes to the law.

>> guest: i think that's really important. i think that the crisis continues to be one of these issues congress has not done a good job of addressing. it is ravaging communities. she's absolutely right. i go out to martinsburg and you drive down the main street and see people passed out in their cars with their car door open, and i think that is something that is an issue not many people in washington, d.c. are focused on, particularly when you are looking at a lot of these application states that it's a biis a bigdeal. and it does draw questions about who is receiving support from which pharmaceutical companies in which pharmaceutical companies are on that getting rid of the tendency and addiction sides and which have been part of the problem and i think that that could be an issue people in washington, d.c. are not paying attention to that could affect things. when i go back and look, one of the things that is remarkable stout it is a.

during the primary, you had 17 candidates on the republican side running for president and to my knowledge, donald trump is the only one who spent significant time talking about the crisis when he went into a lot of the states. i do wonder if the effect would have been different in new hampshire if you have more people paying attention to this. so i hope anybody running in tennessee and west virginia and southwestern virginia and the appellation section of ohio, etc., i do hope people from those areas and candidates are listening to what ashley has to say because they do have the cacapacity to pick some boats up on this if they are willing to show political courage and it is a hard issue to tackle. i am not convinced that it can be done entirely through legislation but i think voters will give people a lot of credit if they appear to be trying and that is an important issue

people shouldn't be ignoring. there will be an effect and the problem fundamentally is when you look at a place like west virginia and if you need four times the number of hospital beds and you look at treatment centers, nobody's done in about the economy and that's where the candidates might be able to make inroads wit but what ashley sain her district, you have a candidate that has a record as a noctor in fact something that candidates can successfully pivot off of if they have the record outside of politics. host out on the republican line, good morning to you. >> caller: [inaudible]

[laughter] for the liberals out there acting that wa the way they areg and i saw that debate to me it is like writing and it's just shameful. i don't particularly either one

of them. so i just decided okay. >> guest: there are a lot of republican women going back to the point that they had this response to the hearings. one of the mistakes the democrats made, they could have used the question and ask more probing questions that could t have bought into the same position in terms of establishing the credibility it but instead i have a couple of people on the panel who are going to be running for the political posturing for the campaign ads that would be circulated in the primary. i didn't understand the political utility of that.e

when you talk about voters like this one it is heavily politicized into playing up for the camera it if basic prosecutorial lines of questioning whatever it may be. probably they would have had more mileage with the voter liku thisis voter. host when you hear the strategy by the republicans with testing the angry mob as a strategist yourself what you think of that? >> guest: i'm not sure i would categorize as an angry mob. i don't know if you watched the protests the other day you had one guy dressed up as a dragon and another holding up a sign that seemed to be about circumcision, totally off topic

but certainly a lot of people climbing up on statutes and cheering and yelling and thingsa like that. >> host: >> guest: there is a public general acting out, and for some people that's going to be attractive and for others, they feel it isn't a dignified way of handling things and they feel like it's been turned into a farce. i think it wa was standard thate were talking to and obviously her response is that it's going to be completely ridiculous and liberals are out of control they've gone off the deep end and that's going to be in if she were a voter for the democratic candidates and found she's not. but i think it is a reminder that people want to amp up the acting and the drama because we are in the era of trump and we know that is the way for people to get attention. that's not necessarily the t smartest move for the individual's long-term.

we willma see how it plays out r cory booker when they start a. >> host: i was just saying that there is some things we are divided completely. why are we not thinking for ourselves why do we always have to be divided against each other if there's one thing that you have to keep in mind, there's a lot of women and i'm not saying i'm just going to vote for them.

everybody is forgetting what happened. what if it happened to your mother and sister or daughter. from the president of the united states everybody laughed at us and the whole world would look like clowns. you look like you are not a fair person you try to defend only one type and i on your side.

>> host: i'm trying to ask what you think about the texasd senate race. >> caller: first he insulted the president. >> host: thank you. >> guest: what she's describing is an interesting trend there are voters who like ted cruise when he stands apart from president trump there don't seem to be as many in texas and some other red states who like both and i think that is tricky but a lot of the people don't like ted cruise necessarily because exactly what she just described. i do think that they will pull ilthis out but i don't think tht

he will have as big a win as he would have to because of that dynamic that he's having to deal with and he also does have an opponent that raised a lot of money and it's going to put up the good fight. da the end of the day i don't think that this is going to look quite like wendy davis versus greg abbott. abbott. a lot of people thought it would help set and it will show the democrats are making inroads in texas but part of the reason it's going to look that way is because of the cruise trump dynamics and not necessarily on the lane in texas per se. >> host: is a red state or purple or is it changing? >> guest: it is a deep magenta at this point. there are areas you are going to start seeing changes in some of the demographics you have a large hispanic population is intended to be a more hispanic

collation but with that being said there are things the republican party has done to alienate the voters at large whether they are conservative or not. you have a lot of companieshi tt attract highly educated talent into texas. highly educated voters do seem to be going more towards democrats these days then perhaps in the past so perhaps that is another demographic change that is going to shift but it will be for both parties toe be cautious about those thy are trying to recruit. texas has always been it's one state it's not like anyone else in the country and i think right now that is becoming even more the case and if i were focused on the candidate recruitment i try to ignore every national,

trend going into the clip going on in the states specifically. >> host: democrats line, heidi is m next to a. has he added any new people to the camp and not republicans for the camp. >> guest: that is an interesting question depending on what the approval rating looks like it's variable and i will say i was one of the people who was an early driver of the movement and one of the things i have observed over time is you

have some people have become far more entrenched and would now say they are part of the party and you also have people like me and maybe somebody like eric anderson who still have a lot f issues with the president. i don't think that we could say truth be told that if he were polled and said do you approve of the president he probably wouldn't collectively say. when we start looking at what 2020 matchups might be between the president answered democrat bannethem in the context of 201t it is twice a day with that being in mind the president has are things that i think good. he surprised me a and that is

more impressive than the standard politician but at the the day i think most likely where you've had certain never trump conservatives or libertarians have become warmer to the president my guess is that he also had some of the never hillary voters who supported him in 2016 and now decided they had enough, so i'm not sure that one is greater than the other. the fundamental problem is he doesn't seem to get better than 50% of the population to approve of him and that is going to be an issue. >> you were talking about tennessee marsha blackburn. why would anybody in the state of tennessee vote for her when she went in and put a bill on

go after the dea head honcho to go after these big pharmacies for flooding all these drugs into every state? millions of tennessee people are dying. why would she do that? this man is trying to get it out of control and i know why she did it. she did it because of the money for the big pharmacies. now the american people are paying foran it. >> host: can i ask what you think of claire mccaskill specifically? >> guest: testament is destroying every partt of our government, education, epa, you name it. he is destroying it.

to quickly jump to the point, one interesting thing i will note is that she asks why would anybody support her. one thing i will point out partly because i do some work relevant towo this, one of the reasons marsha blackburn has had strong support in tennessee yalonda but i think some people participated as marsha blackburn is a rare republican who has a decent amount of support from within what we call the heentertainment industry. you obviously have nashville and memphis in n tennessee and a muc industry. marsha blackburn has been by far the most powerful persuasive, vigorous and aggressive defender of the industry against all sorts of interests that are sought to undercut it into one of the things interesting in that fight i really don't know.

this epistle from the other side, it's why people could support her even if that isn't a natural type of publication. with regardsli to missouri senae race is going to be interesting to watch. my theory is that she is one of the luckiest politicians in america. number one is scott walker my former boss who i'm pretty well convinced somewhere in scott walker's body is embedded in magic golden horseshoe. but who seems to have that and no matter barring the presidential race he seems to have the capacity to prevent or matter how badly the own car. i think claire mccaskill is like right in second place. she seems to do a pretty good job of revealing them but that is the strategy on her part in some of those share a lot.

we will see if this proves to be the case again but there is a good chance it might be. there's a lot of people in misery, a lot ofri republicans that have a sneaking suspicion that he's kind of phoning it in and not working as hard as she is. at the end of the day, politics tend to reward the hard workers so we will see. >> host: besides what we talked about, what are we paying attention to from now on to election day? >> guest: the president has for rallies scheduled this week and i will say one of them he's going to say something that will change whatever is being discussed on tv away from what he probably wants discussed if he wants the situation discussed more so that more focus will play two democrats in that context i think that is one thing to watch for in it

.-full-stop overdrive where the voters go. when i was 13, 14 we were thinking of election day as 90% of people that were going to vote. that isn't true any more anymore depending on where youel are looking we are doing work focused on california we've been beating him up quite a bit. that is an electorally driven just having looked at the coverage of the likelihood is that 60% of the voters in the district are going to vote resentee by mail. so when you are looking at a lot of the races but it's true for california as a whole and when you are looking at the contest at races we have been in places like california so that as well and good but the reality is in those states probably five days before election day will have almost all the ballots. i will keep a close eye on what is in the news because it may

not be what is happening on the election day that's when this. on will be what is happening in the next week or two. >> host: the founder of the major strategies.

it's about why we elected trump and i couldn't get past it. i couldn't get past the idea that the country voted for donald trump. it's not an attack on trump. i think that he's right in a certain sense on if unchecked different things, but you wouldn't elect him unless you really wanted to send a message. so what is the message? the people in charge on both sides that hated him screwed up. >> massachusetts voters elect their governor and charlie baker is up