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Almost, 20 years ago, two political pollsters published a book that sounded like a romantic comedy, “What Women Really Want.” It was written by Kellyanne Conway, a Republican, and Celinda Lake, a Democrat.

And it had a simple premise. That political parties needed to take seriously the particular concerns of women, who make up more than 50 percent of the electorate and were poised to become the country’s dominant voting block. Part of taking them seriously, they argued, was recognizing that women voters value integrity, much more than male voters.

But this week, as a jury in Manhattan deliberates about whether Donald Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to silence an adult film star’s account of a sexual encounter that he feared would cost him the 2016 election, I found myself wanting to return to the authors of that book and to its assumptions. Because a lot has changed since 2005.

For instance, news of Trump’s conduct with women like the Access Hollywood tape did not cost him the election. In fact, he outperformed with white women. Also, Roe was overturned. And in the years since they teamed up to write that book, Kellyanne Conway and Celinda Lake have become leading figures within their respective political parties. Conway played a major role in getting Trump elected in 2016, and Lake was one of Biden’s lead pollsters in 2020.

So this week I wanted to bring Lake and Conway back together for an updated book talk of sorts and ask, has their understanding of female voters changed since 2005? And do they still agree on what women really want in 2024? From The New York Times, I’m Astead Herndon. This is The Run Up.

Can you both introduce yourselves? And we’ll start with Celinda.

I’m Celinda Lake. I’m a Democratic pollster working on the Biden team and worked on the Biden team in 2020. And I had the great privilege and fun of writing a book with Kellyanne Conway on what women really want.

And I’m Kellyanne Conway, Republican pollster, head of KA Consulting LLC. My long time friend and colleague Celinda Lake and I wrote a book in 2005 called “What Women Really Want,” hoping men would think it was a book about sex and run out and buy it and be super disappointed.

Two female pollsters talking about different kinds of figures.

Yeah, I guess I wanted the origin story. Kellyanne, can you tell me how this came together and what you were trying to accomplish?

Celinda and I knew each other in an industry, polling, which at the time, and I think even still, has relatively few women. But we kept running into each other on the set of television or in speeches that we were asked to give, and we found that we clicked personally. I always like to say I hope that Celinda succeeds wildly and everything she works on doesn’t.

[LAUGHS]:

And that she also, in terms of women in my life, has always been complaining less and working harder than most of the rest of us. And so I’ve always respected her work. And the idea for a book came to be because we found ourselves discussing data affecting women and being affected by women, particularly in the political arena again and again.

And of course, we can agree on the data. We just disagree on the strategy about how to message it or how to compel different voter cohorts to support, in my case, the Republican Party and eventually Donald Trump in 2016, and in Celinda’s case, of course, the Democratic Party and the many candidates that she has worked for. I think most recently and most robustly, President Biden. I think President Biden won in large part in 2020 because of Celinda’s advice and the decades that brought her to do that.

Last point I’ll make on this. I think Celinda and I are seen as political pollsters, but I think our gift is really that we’re cultural anthropologists. We look at women not just through the prism of politics, but we look at women through the prism that they look at their own lives. And so people wake up in the morning, they may say, I’m worried about money or security, everyday affordability, maybe a rise in crime. They don’t wake up and say, I’m a Republican or a Democrat, I’m a liberal or I’m a conservative necessarily. So it’s our job to reflect what they’re telling us and bring that to the policymakers and the political candidates as well.

I mean, Celinda, can help me put the book in the context of 2005? When you all were coming together to write this and on this topic, how unique was that and what was the motivating factor for you to get involved?

It was very unique. And I mean, first of all, again, as Kellyanne said, there weren’t that many women in their field who owned their own companies. Both of us had started and owned our own companies. And everybody wanted us to write a book. And it prefaced where the future has gone with the media. Everybody wanted to write a book on disagreements.

And we said, no, no, no. This is a book about agreements. Any three women in America can agree on more than Congress does even then, and it’s certainly true now. And we found that the agreements far outnumbered the disagreements. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen is women’s voices and women’s agreements have been more polarized and our politics has become a lot more polarized. And I think women in particular today yearn for the time when people could work together to get things done and try to find compromises and solutions.

Yeah, yeah. Well, before we get to kind of the substance of the book, I just wanted to ask, obviously politics has changed a lot since 2005. I hear that you all maintain that mutual respect. Have you all kept in contact since then, since the book?

We have. And thanks to Kellyanne, we’ve been on Fox together and done some other things. So we have, and not as much as I would have liked. So this was a great opportunity.

Awesome. I’m glad to bring it together. I mean, I would love to go through what you all just took generally as things from the book that you think really stick through to now.

It seems at the time that women were more, I think, pigeonholed into what we call the she cluster of issues, social issues like Social Security or other social issues, health care, education, all incredibly, congenitally, perennially important to America’s women and sometimes not talked about in the polls where everybody now is discussing inflation, economy, border, and immigration and some foreign policy. But men were seen as the we cluster of issues, war and economy. And I think we broke through that by saying, well, guess what? Women are not single issue thinkers, so not single issue voters.

Fast forward to 2024, I see abortion as a vote motivator and turnout intensifier for the Democrats this time, but it’s also one of the only issues, if not in some of the swing state polling, including The New York Times swing state polling, it is the only issue where President Biden has a significant advantage over President Trump and Democrats have an advantage over Republicans right now down ballot.

And what we found in the book and we know from all of our work before and since that if you were narrowcasting to any group, particularly women, who are naturally multitaskers, we’re multi-issue thinkers, multi-issue voters, there’s a risk in any one party doing that. There was a risk for the Republicans in 2022 not finishing their sentences, saying inflation, crime, Putin, Ukraine, Biden, Kamala, border.

Those aren’t sentences. They’re barely words. And so you have to finish your sentences. We know women can take it. That not only will they accept it, but they expect full blown solutions. They already know what the problems are. They want solutions, not these shopworn soundbites.

And I will say this. We have about 10 million more voters that are female than male. So women literally decide who our presidents are. And people may say, well, then why are they voting for Donald Trump? Why are they picking Republicans? For any number of reasons. I think what’s different in 2024 that we could not have predicted in 2005 is that younger voters and younger female voters and younger voters of color are right now fraying away from in everybody’s polling, including The New York Times poll, they’re migrating away a little bit from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And that’s really the wild card to me. Will they stick with Donald Trump where they’re giving him higher poll numbers now? Will they return home to Joe Biden? Or will they stay home at all? And I’m a big democratic, participatory kind of gal, but I am detecting from some of these voters that the question for them is not for whom to vote, but the threshold question is whether to bother at all.

And years ago, I know Celinda and I grew up and I think she’d probably agree that when we were growing up, the idea that you would not vote, the idea that a woman would not vote when we just got the right in 1920, the idea that we wouldn’t vote would have been a little bit shameful and embarrassing, I think, to say. And now people use it as a point of pride. Why would I encourage them?

But you see surprise issues like the handling of Israel, Hamas, Gaza, et cetera, creeping up on the Democratic party, particularly among younger people. You see voters of color migrating toward Donald Trump in these head to head ballots, mainly based on the economy and border security. So all of these are wild cards that simply didn’t exist in 2005.

I will pose a similar question — I’m just going to basically pose the same question to you, so go jump in.

Thank you. I think there are three things that really stand out to me from the book that carried forward. One is in the book, we really emphasized that women were focused on kitchen table economics. They were very focused on what affected their families. And we really see that on steroids in 2024.

And I think it’s been hard for the Democrats to grapple with, that the aggregate statistics, the GDP may look good, but women who go to the grocery store on average three times a week see the price of eggs and milk and have cardiac arrest. Prices have gone up 25 percent on food since 2019, and women really notice it. So the focus of women on everyday economics, kitchen table economics, how issues affect them and their families was something that really was emerging in 2004 and is really true on steroids right now and makes the vote of women uncertain.

The second thing we emphasized in the book was that women are not monolithic. There is a gender gap in every group of women, but women are not monolithic. And we have lost white women, even though we’ve lost them by less than white men as Democrats. And it is women of color and younger women, as Kellyanne was saying, that have really produced the margins of victory. And the formula for Democratic victories in almost every close race is to win women by more than you lose men. And that’s the real battleground.

Wait, can you underscore that last point? You’re saying for democrats, the numerical goal, the electoral goal is to win women by more than they lose men.

That’s right. You’re going to lose men. And you can’t lose men by too much, or women can’t make up for it. But under Kellyanne’s leadership, honestly, and the 2016 Trump campaign was triumphant in this, the Republican Party has gotten a lot better at targeting women voters than they were before. And I think that’s something that has caught Democrats a little flat footed.

And then the last thing the book showed was that women had the capacity to worry about lots of things at once. And Kellyanne was referring to this. And it’s really funny, because we asked in another study that we did on women’s leadership, does multitasking make you a leader? And the voters said no, multitasking makes you a woman. It doesn’t make you a leader necessarily.

And women have the capacity to worry about lots of things at once, and they are definitely doing that. And that’s hard for politicians. And I think both of us have emphasized that to our respective parties. I get asked the question all the time, are women going to get tired of the abortion issue? And it’s like, not unless people get tired of sex. I don’t think people are going to get tired of the abortion issue. But people have the ability to be worried about kitchen table economics and the abortion issue as well.

One of the most telling questions for the 2024 election is we find that we have a serious deficit as Democrats on the economy. But when we ask who will be better for the economic well-being of you and your family, those numbers are tied. And it’s women voters that switch from the aggregate economy to the micro economy. So a very, very important lesson there for Democrats.

I want to go back to Kellyanne specifically on something that you just said, that you think that partially due to her advocacy, Republicans have gotten better at targeting women. Can you take us through the specifics of what you have pushed either Trump campaign in 2016 or the party broadly to do that improves that targeting?

And I appreciate her saying that. Look, let’s go back to 2016. I felt like with President Obama, his gender gap was so significant as well over Mitt Romney, for example, and certainly John McCain that I thought, well, maybe women are looking for outsiders. We are a majority of the voters, but we are nowhere close to being a majority of the candidates, officeholders, and donors in politics. And so in this political system, we still feel, many women feel, that they are on the outside of the glass with their nose pressed against it, looking in, saying, well, what’s in it for me?

But what I said to Mr. Trump at the time was, you don’t need to win a majority of women. You just need to do less poorly than other Republican candidates have. And you need to run up the totals among men. And he was seen as an outsider, not unlike the way Senator Obama was seen as an outsider and both times to Hillary Clinton’s insider status. The irony is the woman, the first woman who would have made history, was seen as the insider. So that was important.

The other thing is you have to be consistent with women. We are a great barometers and not thermometers of inconsistency, of hypocrisy, of a lack of genuineness. And whether you like it or not, many women in this country saw Donald Trump as authentic to himself and as consistent on the issues. So we were very intentional.

And we also were trying to reach into not just non-college educated women and white women, so to speak, or evangelical women. Those were all very important. But to also reach out and try to close the gap a little bit among other women, college educated women, women in the suburbs, urban women. I told President Trump from the beginning, you’re not going to win them, but you also should not cede them. And the other thing, even when President Trump is saying, he’s talking to different people about his Vice Presidential pick and he and he alone will make that choice. Let me make that very clear. But does he, quote, need a woman? That’s a terrible way of looking at it. If he feels that a woman who’s qualified happens to help him win, help him govern, and would be ready on day one, terrific.

But if you think Joe Biden is unpopular in these polls, take a look at Kamala Harris’s numbers. And I think we are paying the cost and consequence, sadly, every day of Joe Biden choosing her. I think she hasn’t found her footing in any major portfolio issue, perhaps abortion at last. And that’s really, I think that’s costing the Democratic Party, because they probably thought they could lean on the first female Vice President of color to help them shore up the deficits among some women and voters of color and young people particularly, and need to win those back.

And I want to come back to some of that, particularly your characterization about Trump and his consistency. But I would love to get Celinda to respond to the characterization about Hillary in 2016. What lessons did you take from that election that may have updated what you were kind of understanding about the electorate and specifically women from 2005? I would want to start there and I have some follow ups after.

Yeah. And I also want to follow up on Vice President Harris.

Yeah, that’s where I was going after that.

OK. Let me start with that, because I think she’s been a huge asset to the ticket. Vice President is the worst role out there other than maybe First Lady, and we have a stellar one of both. But the images of presidents and vice presidents merge together in most cases. And Vice President Harris has been a big asset actually with younger voters, huge asset on the abortion issue, huge asset on the student loan issue. And I think it took a while for the administration to understand how to utilize her.

They had as a model in their head the Obama Biden presidency, and that was one of the most spectacular teams we’ve ever had in history. They really worked together, really respected each other, really complimented each other. But in general, the VP doesn’t have an independent image of the president, and that’s true for Republicans or Democrats. But I think that Vice President Harris has been a huge asset in articulating, as Kellyanne said, the strongest issue for us out there, which is the abortion issue.

But the question that I think that she brought up about representation and the idea that choosing someone would inherently help in these groups. I mean, I do remember some Democrats in 2020 kind of positioning her as someone who could exist outside of the president’s individual identity. What about that piece? Because it doesn’t seem as if she’s broken out of that.

Well, I would say two things about that. First of all, vice presidents usually create enthusiasm when they’re first nominated. And she unquestionably did that. It’s hard to remember back to then, but she really mobilized young people. She really mobilized women of color. She created enthusiasm in the base. So she was very successful in that, very much in the way that Vice President Pence increased or sealed the deal for Trump with evangelical Christians. And I think it was a very, very smart pick. And I credit Kellyanne with that choice from what I read.

The second thing I would say, though, is I do think the vice presidents are going to be different this year. And I think it’s a new terrain for both parties. Voters, frankly, and God willing this doesn’t happen no matter who’s nominated, but voters are not convinced that either Trump or Biden will last four years. So they are paying more attention to the vice presidential pick than they have in the past. So I think everyone is struggling with what is the role of vice president? I think you see Donald Trump struggling with who’s the best pick, because it is a little bit different this time than before.

One of the things I will say about lessons from the Hillary campaign, and I think Kellyanne had some really astute analysis of that. I think Hillary paid some price for being perceived as an insider. On the one hand, people always say, I’ll vote for a woman if she’s qualified. People never say I’ll vote for a man if he’s qualified. And since they’ve been doing such a bang up job, we can understand why nobody questions their qualifications. I’m being facetious, of course.

I got you.

But I think that on the one hand, we needed a really qualified nominee. And I think what was depressing for a lot of Democratic women was we’ll never have a woman as qualified as Hillary Clinton was for president. But that did make her less of a change agent.

But it was also two things that were challenging. One was women don’t just vote for a woman, whether it’s a vice president or a presidential nominee. The second is Hillary Clinton had a lot of trouble with men. It’s like whack a mole, right? You have to keep men in range for women to take you over the top. And men really had trouble with Hillary Clinton.

My own view of it is I desperately want a woman president. And my own view of it is in 2028, I think we should vow right now on this podcast, let’s both parties nominate a woman and then the voters will have no choice but to give us a woman president.

Interesting. Yeah. You know, Kellyanne, you wrote in your 2005 book that more than 65 percent of women across party lines say the integrity of a candidate is more important than his or her intelligence or abilities. I was wondering, could you put that in the context specifically of Donald Trump?

Obviously, we know that this is someone who back from 2016 up until now has been accused of sexual assault, caught on tape saying vulgar things about women, saddled with allegations of affairs. And it doesn’t seem as if for at least a segment of conservative women that has been seen as invalidating. How should I understand that in the context of the book, which makes a kind of clear data case that integrity or kind of personal convictions of a candidate matter more than intelligence or abilities?

Well, they’re both important, there’s no question. And I just have to fact check you a little bit on he might have been accused of sexual assault, but he’s never been convicted of that or charged with that, as far as I know.

Civil court there was a finding of liability about sexual abuse and defamation.

Yeah, let’s not do that. Yeah, you’re changing the word, so let’s not do that. Because, by the way, the voters look past snarky comments like that from the media. And look, the idea, the obsession with Donald Trump over the last 10 full years now is confounding to me. And I’m very close to him. Don’t work on his campaign this time. We talk frequently enough.

The fact is that if everybody had spent a fraction, I mean, a fraction, a scintilla of the time focused on the Trump voter that they obsessed over Trump himself, things may be a little bit different. The fact is that people saw him as coming up with plans and talking about issues that no other, quote, “politician” had the courage to do.

And let me tell you, I’m going to say to you now, in 2024 what I said in 2016 after the Access Hollywood tape. Take it to the bank. There is a huge difference in this country between what offends us and what affects us. We like to complain, kvetch, and converse all day long about what offends us, and we vote mostly according to what affects us. And why wouldn’t you vote according to what affects you? Why wouldn’t you vote to improve the cost of living, everyday affordability, and the feeling of security and some other issues that are very important?

And these two candidates will be judged mainly on the binary choice that you have on how was your life with this one or how was your life with that one? Not since 1892 have we as a country, and certainly in all of our lifetimes, it’s the first time, have we been able to just put these presidents side by side and strip away everything else and take a look at them.

I hear that distinction between what offends folks versus what affects them. I will pose the same question to you, Celinda. The book says issues of integrity are morality are essential to women in choosing a candidate. Has your understanding of that shifted in terms of seeing how many women are coming back or conservative women are coming back and supporting Donald Trump even amid all of said scandal?

I think there’s a distinction between personal integrity and public integrity.

Interesting.

And I think that people processed — it’s inconceivable to me, but I think it’s disqualifying. But people processed the Hollywood tape, they processed some of the court cases that have happened, and people think of this as, I don’t want to be married to the guy, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

I think the case that the Democrats need to make is how this affects you and your family. And Kellyanne is right about that. And I think in this latest trial, it’s actually problematic that it’s getting characterized as the hush money trial rather than the election integrity trial, the election interference trial. The strongest court cases were the court cases where there was interference in the election.

I will also say this, that I think the strongest case for the Democrats is to play forward. What does four more years of Joe Biden look like and what does four more years of Donald Trump look like? And people are not particularly enthusiastic, honestly, about either one, but they really worry about the character, the public character of the person. Will it be the solutions presidency or will it be a vindication and revenge presidency? Who’s going to be the more chaotic leader? And you see that being a real debate in the voters’ minds.

So I think that the modification I would make is character still matters, but it’s character in the way it affects your life publicly, affects solutions, affects the focus, affects the style of leadership, affects the respect, affects division and polarization. Not, unfortunately, personal integrity, where voters think a pox on most of their houses.

More after the break.

You know, Kellyanne, there seems to be an open conversation among the Republican Party, specifically on the issue of abortion since the fall of Roe v Wade and the Dobbs decision, we’ve seen conservatives from Donald Trump to Kari Lake kind of back away from certain pro-life positions, and we’ve seen the kind of open debate in the party about where to fall on this issue. Can you just take me through how you think that discussion among Republicans is going to affect them specifically with the electorate and with women?

Sure. So if it took 50 years to overturn Roe versus Wade, folks should recognize it’s going to take more than 50 minutes or 50 hours or even 50 weeks to explain what that means, and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean. I am 100 percent pro-life, but I respect and understand why people are pro-choice.

And knowing that, how do we build towards a culture of life? I think that we should have a more science based conversation now. I think the conversations around religion and morality are always important, and women’s health, quote unquote, are always important. So what I would say is 15 weeks. The 15 week national minimum standard, I think, would do two things.

One is it would really dial back some of these states that as we sit here now, have abortion on the books long after viability, frankly, long after babies in those states are being born prematurely and not just surviving, they’re thriving. So abortion, anyone, anytime, anywhere, should not be a position, in my view, of a major political party in 2024 in our country. That is essentially the position. I challenge anyone to show me differently. I’ve read the abortion platform for the Democratic Party. I’ve memorized the first part of it.

And so I think we have to have both parties weighing in on this conversation. But I tell you, I’ve never seen the parties more divided on any issue. I think there is an argument that the Democrats will overplay on this, not because it’s not important, but because it’s eclipsing inflation, security, all these other nagging concerns that America’s women have as they go to the polls. We are not single-issue thinkers. We are not single-issue voters.

Last point, same for the Republicans. If they think they don’t need to address abortion because they’re only going to talk about inflation and crime and the border and Ukraine and the Middle East and Biden’s mental and physical agility, ability, acuity, that’s a mistake, too. So everybody, I think, ignores the fullness of all these issues at their peril.

Celinda, I would love for you to respond to that. I mean, to Kellyanne’s point, in polling, it would say that abortion access is one of the few areas in which the electorate prefers Biden over Trump. Is there any risk of the Democrats limiting their pitch to women, specifically to an issue and overplaying that hand?

No. I think it’s a very salient issue. And if anybody has overplayed their hands, it’s been a lot of Republican legislatures in these states. I mean, states have gone in for bans. Republican elected officials and candidates have called for bans, no exceptions, even for rape and incest.

When we talk about so-called late term abortions, every pregnancy is unique. At any point in a pregnancy, something can go terribly wrong. These abortions are only 1 percent of abortions, and they are usually of wanted children where something has gone terribly wrong. In that situation, the last thing you need is some unknown politician interfering. That is a decision that needs to be made by the family and their health care provider, and politicians should stay out of it.

So I think the states have gone way too far. I think the proof of the pudding was Donald Trump tried to come out for states rights. And 48 hours after Donald Trump said, let’s leave it to the states, Arizona goes back to not 1960, but 1860. And the voters concluded, some of these states are absolutely insane. We’re not going to leave it up to the states.

So I think public opinion overwhelmingly on our side. The number of voters who are pro-abortion, pro personal decision making, pro-freedom in making these difficult personal decisions has increased dramatically. And we have the ability as Democrats, as President Obama said, we got to walk and chew gum at the same time. We’re able to do that to talk about the economy and to talk about abortion. And those are two major thrusts of the Democratic campaigns.

OK. Then one question I’ll pose to both of you is what should each candidate be doing in 2024 to better appeal to women?

I think that Joe Biden should be talking about kitchen table economics. Really, really emphasize price gouging, really emphasize rising cost of living, not say that things are good. Say we’ve worked hard, we fought hard to make them better. We’ve got lots of work to do and we’re going to keep on fighting until families can thrive and prosper.

And that there are important freedoms and rights and questions of control that should not be decided by politicians. And we have a Supreme Court that has overturned a law that was in practice and we had no problems with for 50 years. We should not be going backwards.

And Kellyanne, I would pose the same question to you about Trump. How does he keep that margin with women down?

President Trump needs to remind America’s women of what the economic situation and the security situation was when he was president. So this is a binary choice. Yes, it’s a referendum on Joe Biden’s three and a half years as president, but it’s also a binary choice. Did you like your life with Trump or under Biden? And you can look at any series of issues and make that decision for yourself.

Whether you like Donald Trump or not, a lot of people in this country do not like the over prosecution that they see of him. If he’s so harmful to the body politic, then why is he still there? And they feel that attention and resources are being diverted away from the very obvious, clear, and present needs of America’s women away into these court cases. Go and beat him. Let the judge and jury be we the people in November.

And I think the, again, I’ll say it again, for women, I mean, President Trump should be consistent with his policies, remind them of the economy, the energy independence, that we had more security in our cities, certainly abroad, foreign policy, national security wise, and in their pocketbooks, their everyday lives. And he should stick with his position on abortion, that he’s leaving it to the states.

And then I think the question for both candidates is how much does the energy, enthusiasm that each of them get carry down ballot? Republicans did not do well in 2022. We didn’t see a red wave. I think they missed great opportunities. So the question for women who are going to decide who the next president and next Senate is, do you want divided government to continue where not enough gets done? Or do you want there to be one party control where at least you feel there’s an opportunity to have more things passed that affect your everyday life?

Is there a slice of the electorate of women that you think is the target area for the Trump campaign? I mean, there was so much discussion in 2016 about white women, about white suburban women, and the numbers that went to Trump. Is it about holding that together and minimizing losses among women of color? Do you think the Trump campaign has new opportunities with a certain slice of women of color? I would love to get more specific.

Is Celinda there?

She stepped away. And so this is just my last question to you.

OK. Well, I just, I didn’t want to hog it. No, absolutely. President Trump has pockets of opportunity among female voters that did not exist in 2016 when he was running against a woman who many people saw would be the first female president of the United States and that weren’t available to him in 2020. These include younger women, women of color, politically independent women, some of whom are lapsed Democrats, and many of whom are just independent. Why? Well, it has to do with everyday affordability, feeling of security, and also it has to do with the mishandling by President Biden, Vice President Harris, and the Democratic Party on this situation in the Middle East. And President Trump has a tremendous opportunity among non-college educated women of all races, all socioeconomic backgrounds, whether they’re married, not married, children in the house, no children in the house, because that is the biggest demarcation.

I was doing a panel recently with Van Jones, CNN commentator, who worked briefly for President Obama, obviously wants President Biden to win. And he made an excellent point that I wanted to reflect here. I hadn’t thought about it quite this way. He said, every time the Democrats talk about suburban women, suburban women, suburban women, they’re missing an opportunity to talk to young Black men and young men of color who feel, my words now, somewhat disenfranchised from the Democratic Party. There’s something to that.

Politics and resources are finite. And so if you’re overly talking to, quote, suburban women, many of whom are white, then you’re not talking to men and I would say women of color. This election is very important as it goes, college educated, non-college educated. And when you see many of these constituents, particularly Hispanic men, non-college educated Hispanic men, and I’ll throw in there to a lesser extent, but very measurable in the data, non-college educated African American men, you see that the core coalition that Biden Harris scaffolded together to eke it out in 2020 is fraying and straying in a way that should cause them more concern and alarm than they seem to have.

The question remains, will they go all the way over to President Trump? And he needs to earn that. And he is earning that by his messaging, but also his delivery, meaning showing up in places and spaces that make him unafraid to court them. He famously said in Detroit in 2016, what did you have to lose? You’ve been voting for Democrats forever. It worked a little bit then. It can work a lot more in 2024.

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and we’ll be back in contact.

Thank you, Astead. Celinda’s the best. Thank you so much for having both of us. It really means a lot.

But thanks again for your time. We really appreciate it.

So the reason that Celinda got quiet at the end there was that our conversation got started a bit late and she had to jump to another call. But I still had a couple questions for her. I wanted to know whether there are particular demographic groups of female voters that Biden should be targeting. And also, I wanted to know more about her friendship with Kellyanne Conway.

Hey. Let me just get in a separate room. Hi. How are you?

I’m doing good. So on Tuesday night, I called her back. You know, one of the things that stuck out to us is that when you go through kind of what you all were talking about, every Democratic nominee from Obama and Clinton to Biden has won the majority of women’s votes, but every Republican nominee has won more white women. Do you think Democrats have a problem with or a messaging mismatch with specifically white women?

No, I think that we do remarkably well with white women. White women are more conservative. They’re more likely to be married. We do better with unmarried voters than married voters. So we do quite well with white women compared to white men. Obviously, we ultimately would love to win them, but we’re doing very well with white women.

And I think it’s actually improved over the years, right?

Yes, yes. Particularly as more white women have gotten a college education and the marriage rate has gone down among white women.

On the flip side, I wanted to ask about Biden’s standing with some women of color. I know that those are a non-monolithic group. But we’ve seen in polling, as I’m sure you’ve seen, that Biden is particularly having kind of approval problems around young people, non-white voters, non-college voters, all groups that presumably, of course, include a lot of women.

Outside of the solutions you outlined for Biden already, like focusing on abortion rights or kitchen table economics, is there anything the campaign needs specifically to do to speak to these more marginalized groups of young women or non-college women? Are we sure that a broader message to women voters will also appeal to these more specific groups who he seems to be having more trouble with?

Well, I think that the blue collar women will be very, very appealed to by kitchen table economics and getting rising costs down. And the way we need to talk about the economy is not in millions of jobs created or GDP, but what bills you had to pay, what coupons you had to clip, who price gouged you today, and what we did about it, how that credit card rate is going to come down when you’re trying to buy your nephew’s graduation present. It needs to be translated into how real people live their lives and how it affects real people.

In terms of young people, they are very pro-abortion. They are also pro birth control. They are very solidly in support of medication abortion. They are the ones who are contemplating IVF if they’re having issues having a child. So this agenda is very, very central to them. So for the non-college women, I think it’s the economy. And of course, abortion is part of it. And for the younger women, abortion is really, really salient.

I hear that. When we look ahead, do we think that’s what we’ve been hearing from Biden campaign messages that focus on kitchen table economics? Does the campaign have a problem when we look at non-college women or other groups that the numbers would tell us are less hot on Biden than some others?

Well, I think Democrats have had a problem for some time, and we’ve been increasing our vote with college educated women and declining with non-college educated women. And I think we’ll see the same focus and we need to see the same focus reiterated. And right now, college educated America is just feeling that they’re doing a lot better than non-college educated America, who are really pressed with rising prices, really looking for a side hustle to add to that job to try to make ends meet, really feel that they’re falling behind. And we need to be in touch with that. We as Democrats, not just the administration, but we as Democrats need to do something about it.

The last question I wanted to ask you is about something that really jumped out to me as you all were talking, which is just that how close you all seem to be. It took me back to the time in politics where those kind of cross-party relationships seemed to happen more often. But also I was reminded of some of the criticisms people have made about Washington politics, saying it’s kind of too chummy between D’s and R’s. I wanted to pose that question to you. What do you think are the values of those cross-party relationships and being friends with someone who is also your maybe political rival?

Well, first of all, as a pollster, I think it’s a lot easier, because the data is the data. And if our data really differs, then we would be worried about that. We would want to compare notes. Now, we might want to do different things with the data, but the data is the data. I think also both of us started when there weren’t that many women in our respective fields, and so we balanced family and work and caregiving responsibilities. And so we just had a very, very deep respect. And I think one of the beginnings of ending the polarization is we have to listen to each other. We have to respect each other. We have to look for common ground.

Yeah. I wonder, has that gotten any harder in the Trump era? I mean, I hear President Biden, I hear Democrats kind of making a clear argument that the other side represents more than the kind of existential threat to the political system, but also to the lives of women. Obviously, Kellyanne Conway is one of the chief architects of Trump’s rise and message. I guess I wanted to ask, why should Americans outside the beltway take seriously the idea that MAGA Republicans are a danger to the country’s core if Democrats inside of the beltway seem to be friends with them?

That’s an interesting question. Well, I don’t see myself as a friend of MAGA Republicans. In fact, I work very, very hard to beat them every day. And by the way, I don’t think MAGA Republicans are the same thing as Republicans. I was born and raised a Republican on a ranch in Montana. I was a teenage Republican officeholder. I have a lot of family that are still Republicans, but this is a new game in town.

But that’s different than an individualized working relationship. And I think that we can recognize that. And I think if there were more of that and less of the polarization, we’d be better off.

I hear you. But it has gotten harder in the Trump era.

Oh, it’s definitely gotten harder in the Trump era.

I think it’s intuitive, but is there a why? Is there a moment you remember? Is there an example of that?

I think that we always knew we disagreed on the abortion issue, and that’s why we didn’t put it in the book. But obviously, the Dobbs decision was a very hard moment, because I am old enough to remember when abortion wasn’t legal. And so that was very sobering. And I think that, ironically, the Biden vote and the Trump vote are all about Trump.

And I think that for Democrats, Trump is just such a different kind of candidate, different than any Republican we’ve ever had, different than any candidate we’ve ever had. And he tests the boundaries of our system. He tests the very basis of our democracy. And it makes it harder to be friends with one of the key advisors for him. But I still respect Kellyanne very much as a mother, as a woman, as a strategist, as a pollster, and as someone who’s been a woman in a tough field.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you following up on our questions and taking some time out. Thank you again for your time.

OK. Thank you so much. And thanks for doing it in bits and pieces.

No, no problem. You have a great rest of your day.

Talk to you soon.

Bye.

That’s The Run Up for Thursday, May 30, 2024. Now, the rundown. This week.

Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan is coming to a close. As a refresher, he’s charged with falsifying business records related to a hush money deal as part of a scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. On Tuesday, the lawyers gave their closing arguments, and now the case is in the hands of 12 New Yorkers. That same day, the Biden campaign held a press conference outside the courthouse.

Where actor Robert de Niro spoke out against Trump. Elsewhere this week, major runoff elections took place in Texas on Tuesday, which saw a number of GOP establishment candidates face right wing challengers. Largely, the establishment wing came out on top.

Incumbent Republican Tony Gonzalez narrowly beat YouTube gun enthusiast Brandon Herrera, who was endorsed by Matt Gaetz. And Texas speaker of the House Dade Phelan, beat the Trump backed candidate in what was likely one of the most expensive races ever for a Texas House seat. There are 46 days until the Republican National Convention, 81 days until the Democratic National Convention, and 159 days until the general election. See you next week.

The Run Up is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O’Keefe, and Anna Foley. It’s edited by Rachel Dry and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Sophia Lanmon and Elisheba Ittoop. It was mixed by Sophia Lanman and fact checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, Larissa Anderson, David Halbfinger, Maddy Masiello, Mahima Chablani, Nick Pittman, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Do you have questions about the 2024 election? Email us at therunup@nytimes.com. Or better yet, record your question using the voice memo app on your phone, and then send us the file. That email, again, is therunup@nytimes.com. And finally, if you like the show and want to get updates on latest episodes, follow our feed wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening, y’all.