On Wyoming, that wild Florida poll, and homemade sriracha...August's "Ask Away"!
I answer your questions about politics, peppers, and parenthood.
Welcome to Codebook, a newsletter that decodes our world through polling and research.
This edition—"Ask Away!"—is a monthly feature rounding up the best reader questions.
Hello friends! I am nearing the end of "maternity leave" (which I put in quotes because I've still been doing my SiriusXM show each week, going on CNN periodically, writing this newsletter, moderating virtual focus groups and occasionally popping into my polling company's Slack to see what's cooking). The midterms are also approaching, so it is about to be the high season here at Codebook. I'll be back to a normal cadence of writing after Labor Day, so thank you all again for your patience!
As always, thank you to everyone who submitted a question this month, and if you want to get a question in for a future Ask Away, there are a few ways to do it.
1. Comment on Bulletin under any post. I see all the comments!
2. Comment on a post on my Kristen Soltis Anderson writer Facebook page or send a message to that profile. I read your notes!
3. Reply to me on other social media platforms (Instagram and Twitter: @ksoltisanderson).
4. As noted above - send me a Will Buxton Cameo. Or a Chris Medland Cameo! I'm very responsive to this particular medium.
On to your questions!
First up, from Josh G.:
Should we overreact to Liz Cheney's loss?
I'm not sure how you'd define "overreact", but I have a few notes on how I am thinking about it all. They are heavily informed by this focus group I moderated for The New York Times last week along with fantastic co-moderator Katherine Miller. A focus group is not a representative sample, so the goal was not to discern whether Cheney was likely to win or lose (that's a job for polling and analytics) but rather to hear from a wide range of voices.
What stuck out to me was how little Trump himself was mentioned by name prior to me prompting respondents to discuss him.
When we talk about Liz Cheney in national media, it is almost exclusively with regards to her stand against Trump after January 6th, the price she paid in terms of her leadership role (and now her seat in the House), and the fact that she is being punished by Trump and his allied Republicans.
In the focus group, however, a lot of the initial discussion about her from the negative side was about things like: she doesn't even really live in the state, she voted for the gun bill, she's not focused on the right things.
Of course, many of those complaints had very clear and obvious ties to Donald Trump (for example, the person who said Cheney was too focused on a "personal vendetta" was certainly referring to the former president), even if he wasn't named outright.
But given that every national conversation about Cheney starts and ends with Trump, Trump, Trump and frames it what happened in Wyoming as representative of what's going on in the modern GOP, I think it is important to remember a few things.
Cheney had vulnerabilities to begin with, making it easier for the conflict with Trump to torpedo her chances. The complaints from her detractors about whether she truly represented the state or whether she had just used Wyoming as a stepping stone in her political career are not new. She challenged incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) for Senate in 2014 and in 2016 when she was first elected, she only won 39.9% of the primary vote. In those campaigns, she was dogged by criticism that she only moved back to Wyoming in 2012 because it would be easier for her to run for office there. All of which is to say, she had preexisting vulnerabilities that made it even easier for an opponent to drive the message "her focus isn't you, she's focused on herself", and fairly or unfairly that message stuck.
The losses of the other Republicans who voted for impeachment may tell us more about where the GOP primary electorate is at than the Cheney race does. For my own sanity I don't follow many Twitter accounts, but one I do follow is @justkarl, who has had some good comments rebutting the notion that Cheney's loss wasn't about Trump. He noted that other Republicans who have been vanquished in primaries - Jamie Herrera Beutler in Washington, Peter Meijer in Michigan - didn't make impeachment and January 6th a centerpiece of their careers. This is true! Now, in Meijer's case, he only lost by four points, not by almost forty, but a loss is a loss. They tried to thoughtfully explain their votes while focusing on other issues...and yet they paid the price anyway. If you're a Republican officeholder trying to navigate the landscape, I'm guessing the losses of folks like Herrera Beutler make you a lot more nervous about criticizing Trump than the Cheney loss does. It's those losses that show that even if you try to walk the fine line, there's no cavalry coming to save you.
Next, from Tyler K. via Instagram:
Do you see President Biden running for a second term?
Unless there's a health reason why he couldn't, I think it's relatively likely he does. Walking away from power or being in office is not easy (which is why George Washington is the GOAT). I am guessing that his top priority for the next two years, given the high likelihood DC is beset by total gridlock, is to ensure a Democrat wins in 2024 so that his legacy from a policy perspective can be preserved as best as possible. He's the one who beat Trump, and polls don't show other prospective contenders (notably Vice President Kamala Harris) doing better than him against Trump.
And now, one from Sunshine State friend D.J.:
What is your enthusiasm radar showing in Florida's Senate race w/ Rubio-Demings?
This week, a pretty eye-popping poll came out from the University of North Florida that showed Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) leading in the race for Senate against incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio. This race isn't one that gets a lot of discussion in DC media circles compared to other Senate contests, and when political people think of Florida these days it is All DeSantis, All The Time. (There was a Vanity Fair piece on Demings, though that hasn't always been good luck for Democratic aspirants.)
But this poll showing Demings up 48-44 on Rubio made a lot of folks go whoa. While this poll definitely tries to cross its Ts and dot its Is and has a methodology that on paper looks pretty good (it makes prudent use of the voter file in sampling), the researchers also transparently note that the unweighted data is dramatically too college-educated. Smartly, they do what firms like mine do and weight their data to high-quality estimates of what the education mix ought to look like, but there are still questions about whether you can just weight away an underlying sample bias like that. Truly, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night.
If the poll has too many really-mad-about-Dobbs college-educated progressives in it, that's how you wind up with Demings ahead and my freshman year UF student government president Nikki Fried beating Charlie Crist in this survey.
What we also don't know is if a bump in progressive, college-educated Democrats taking polls also corresponds to an increase in Democratic turnout at the ballot box. Something to think about.
From reader Audrey M.:
How has postpartum been?
Thank you very much for asking! Little Eliana arrived seven weeks ago and she is an absolute dream. Seeing her gain new abilities and change each and every day is so fascinating. Newborn cuddles are the best. I wish there was something profound I could write about new parenthood, but this is such well-covered territory by others that surely nothing I could write is going to be some new original revelation. However, there are a few things that I have personally found surprising:
Time is an illusion. People say "the days are long, but the years are short", meaning that it may feel challenging day-by-day but your child will grow up in the blink of an eye. The latter part seems quite true, as I put the newborn clothes in a bin just this week and was quite emotional about it. But I don't find the days to be long at all. Instead, I find them to be very short. As in "I am in Interstellar on that water planet" where what feels like an hour to me is actually seventeen years in Earth time. I knew going in that "maternity leave" is not a vacation (and woe be it to the young man who responded to my out-of-office notification with "enjoy your break"), but I did expect that I'd have more time to fit in a few professional or personal things while the baby naps. Not so! Even now, I start each day with a humble list of a few things I'd like to get accomplished: doing two loads of laundry, going grocery shopping, writing this newsletter, and so on. And then suddenly it is 4:30 pm, the first load of laundry is sitting wet in the washing machine getting stale, the fridge is empty and the newsletter is barely half-written. Where did the day go? Of course, the day went to very important tasks pertaining to feeding and caring for my child, but new parenthood means operating outside the normal space-time continuum in ways I had not anticipated.
You cannot research your way to success. Candidly, this has been hard for me. I am very accustomed to being able to research something, identify good strategies and solutions, and then solve a problem. Before Eliana was born, I read Happiest Baby on the Block and took that Taking Cara Babies class and did some "basics of newborn care" Zoom classes and consumed basically every piece of content Emily Oster has ever produced. I thought I was reasonably well-prepared, and maybe in reality I am, but sometimes in the moment it very much doesn't feel like it. "Why does my baby not sleep more than three hours at a time? Maybe I just need to read another book!" you think. Next thing you know you're halfway through Bringing Up Bébé, trying absorb the strategies of chic French moms who get their children to sleep all night and be polite in restaurants. (This is why parenting books, "mommy blogging" and baby gadgetry are such big money.) But accepting that my baby is an amazing and constantly evolving little person also means accepting that learning to be a good mom is a totally different process than learning to be good at anything else.
There is a ton more I could write, as I have very strong feelings about things like bottle sanitizers and swaddles and integrating your new addition into beloved family routines, but I'll leave it there for now!
Finally, from Kevin C., a question I meant to answer in July - sorry!:
Question for your mailbag: with the impending Sriracha shortage, what's your favorite recipe for a Sriracha-esque hot sauce?
I recommend making your own Sriracha! There is a fantastic recipe in my favorite cookbook, Diana Kuan's Red Hot Kitchen and I have adapted it to be a little hotter and to use my favorite everyday chili: serranos. I grow them every year largely so I can make this sauce, as grocery stores only really sell serranos while green. (Cover photo is mine.)
The basics: chop up a pound of ripe red serranos, smash a few cloves of garlic, and simmer them for a few minutes (I go 6-7 minutes) in a small pot with a 1/3 cup of rice vinegar and 2-3 tablespoons of palm sugar (depending on how sweet you want it to be) plus a healthy pinch of kosher salt. Once you've let everything simmer, puree it in a food processor and press the paste through a fine mesh sieve. My serrano modification means your seed-to-pepper flesh ratio will be high so it is extra important that you take the time to press the paste through the sieve well to extract as much as possible! You might be surprised how little sauce you get from a whole pound of peppers, but you'll also be surprise how little sauce you need to make something taste amazing.
That's all for this month! Don't forget - send in your questions for Ask Away, September Edition! Thanks for your patience during my extremely-not-a-break, I look forward to being back to a normal cadence in September.
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