Campaign Throwback: 'The Beer Question'

FiveThirtyEight Politics

ABC News

News, Politics

4.6 • 20.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the third installment of the 538 Politics podcast mini-series, “Campaign Throwback.” Across three episodes, we're taking a look back at campaign tropes from past elections such as, “it’s the economy, stupid,” or “soccer moms” or that question about which candidate you’d rather share a beer with. We’ll ask where those tropes came from, whether they were actually true at the time and if they still hold up today. In our third installment: "the beer question." After the 2000 and 2004 elections, political observers remarked that Republican George W. Bush defeated his Democratic opponents in part because he was the candidate who voters would rather "have a beer with." The phrase quickly became a cliche for evaluating a candidate's likability or relatability. But is it really how voters choose their presidents? This episode originally aired in May 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	911. What is the address to emergency?
0:04.2	This 911 call began an investigation that would turn the town of Ashland, Ohio, into a crime scene.
0:11.9	We've got something big going on here.
0:13.8	The first thing you hit my mind is a monster.
0:16.7	A new series from ABC Audio in 2020.
0:20.7	The Hand in the Window.
0:23.6	Out now, wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:29.5	I mean, he seemed like a guy that you'd want to have a beer with,
0:32.4	and you would entrust with nuclear weapons,
0:34.0	which is a difficult balance to strike.
0:45.7	Hello and welcome to the 538 politics podcast.
0:49.2	I'm Gailen Druk.
0:50.8	Today on the show, we're re-airing the third and final installment of our campaign
0:55.1	throwback series that we originally aired last spring. Today's throwback, the beer question.
1:01.7	In other words, is it true that a winning candidate is the one you'd rather have a beer with?
1:07.5	How much do voters really value likeability or relateability? I don't want to spoil the
1:13.0	answer, but I'll give you one piece of the data from 2024. A poll from UMass Amherst and
1:18.2	U-Gov this past October asked adult whether they'd rather have a drink with Kamala Harris or
1:23.7	Donald Trump. Harris won 40% to Trump's 35%. Another poll from August found a similar result.
1:32.4	So Harris won the beer question, but lost the election. Was this a one-time fluke, or is the beer
1:38.9	question not all it's chalked up to be? For the answer, we have to go back to the year 2000 and the contest between
1:45.5	George W. Bush and Al Gore. Here is our third and final campaign throwback.
	...

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