Hour 3 - The GOP Tea Starts Spilling 

Buck Sexton (0:00)

All right, third hour, Clay and Buck gets going right now. We're joined by the Numbers guy, Ryan Girdusky. In fact, It's a Numbers Game is his, I was gonna say, it's not a best selling podcast. Best listening podcast is what I guess you would call it. Huge, huge numbers. Ryan, congrats on that. Last month or so, it has been doing phenomenally, which we knew it would, which is why we brought you onto the team. Clay and I, kind of great talent spotters, just gonna say it.

But tell us this, man, that was fun. This is gonna be less fun. Tuesday, you had been telling me it is bad. You had been telling me this is not going to go well.

Were you surprised by how bad and why did it get, like what are the numbers that we need to know? This isn't about like woes me and oh my god. No, it's all gonna, we're all gonna move forward. But what do we need to know about what the data told us because someone like Ted Cruz sitting there, he's a man on an island now and the island is called being a Republican in Texas. How'd this happen?

Ryan Girdusky (1:03)

Yeah, so I figured we'd be at 50 We'd probably be in the minority, like 51 Senate seats.

I was hopeful that Kansas, Maine and Ohio would go the other way and they were all fairly close. Like they weren't blowouts the way like Texas was. But I knew Texas was done going in.

James Taylor Rico had more votes in the early votes than Ken Paxson had total. The signs were showing there like this election was actually over before it even began on election day. If there's one lesson Republicans can learn, there is nothing special about voting on election day. Don't wait. That's why Democrats beat us in Texas. That's one of the reasons so early.

There's many reasons. There is activism and there's persuasion. Those are two different things. One, you're seeing a lot of numbers come out. This is my episode on Friday for The Numbers Game Podcast. You're seeing a lot of numbers come out among the Latino vote. We're saying massive shifts and the youth vote, massive shifts.

Part of that is because people slipped from Democrat to Republican. A lot of that is because Democrats showed up and Republicans didn't. I don't have data on Texas because they don't vote registered by party, but I have tons of data on Florida because they count the votes in one day, and they all registered by party. I'm going to use Florida as the example. In Florida, among Latinos between the ages of 18 to 34, the early vote, which is almost 80 percent of all votes in Florida before the election day, the early vote, Latino Democrats were outvoting Republicans by more than 2 to 1, 2.5 to 1 about. The only group of Republicans that outvoted Latino Democrats were senior citizens. Everyone else was outvoting, young Latinos were outvoting Latino Democrats, young Latino Democrats were outvoting young Latino Republicans, 2.5 to 1 before election day. That is part of the swing. That was even worse in Texas and even worse in other states. It's probably 3 to 1 or maybe even 4 to 1 in Texas. That is part of the shift. It's just the intense amount of movement. The other part of the shift is persuasion. Republicans lost their persuasion argument on the economy, on tariffs, on corruption, and in part on immigration. That is really where we're seeing this gigantic swing among Hispanics. Remember, Hispanics are working class people.

Working class people spend more of their income on food and energy than anyone else in the economy, in the overall American economic sector. What were the two things you saw the highest spikes because of the Iran War? Energy and food. That means everyone's cost of living on their basic needs that they need to absolutely have was rising because of the Iran War. That's why you saw West Virginia shift 25 points. You saw all of Appalachia shift. It wasn't just alone in the Latino numbers. It was everywhere because of the Iran War. And lastly, Black turnout was near presidential level in almost every single state. Five Democrats running for US Senate had more votes than Kamala Harris in 2024 in a presidential year, including the Democrat who was running in Kentucky where we didn't even lose Kentucky and they still voted super high. They're 20,000 votes short in Mississippi of presidential numbers. Marsha Blackburn barely won in Tennessee because Democrats had a 95% turnout and Republicans had a 48% turnout. Those are the big arguments. We lost persuasion on those things and we also lost the turnout models.