CLAY: Buck, I’m gonna hit you, ’cause I don’t think you’ve seen drilled down and looked at some of these questions. The 38% approval is what’s getting all the attention. But they break it down by ethnic group, by age way and a bunch of different questions. And some of these data points have to be terrifying to the Biden White House.

BUCK: I never like… I hate whenever we on the right start to get a little complacent like, “Ha-ha! Look at how bad the other side is doing” and everything else, because I think we’re approaching, Clay, for Biden… It can’t get much worse for him, ’cause there are people for whom it doesn’t matter. There are people for whom China could invade and take over three states on the West Coast tomorrow and they’d be like, “Hey, Biden’s a peaceful guy,” you know what I mean?

It doesn’t matter. They would be with him no matter what. But I worry — remember Trump in 2019 before — before the pandemic hit? Undefeatable, right? Impossible to be beaten. And then you had the pandemic hit. I worry that with Biden, things — and we should get into this data for everybody.

But it’s so bad now, people think in terms of momentum. I guess my thinking is, “Can it really continue to be so bad for the Biden administration going into the election year when the midterms, obviously, will have a huge impact on the last two years of Biden’s term?” I worry about that there’s nowhere to go but up (laughing) is basically what I’m saying.

CLAY: I mean that he’s hit rock bottom.

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: It’s equivalent of coming out and being down 28 nothing at the end of the first quarter in a football game.

BUCK: I don’t want to be complacent about it like, “Oh, Biden in the midterms…” There’s so many lies they will tell, folks. There is such a machinery and apparatus of dishonesty at their disposal. And, you know, it’s early. It’s early. So, I don’t know. I just want us to keep the pressure on, Clay, that’s all. Keep the pressure on.

CLAY: No doubt. And, by the way, the pressure is gonna be ratcheted up, it seems like, in a big way on a lot of parents out there. I got a call over the weekend the Buck from a buddy of mine who has several kids in California, and you said the covid vaccine mandate that Governor Newsom had announced was the tipping point for he and his family.

They just said, “Hey, we don’t trust things in California anymore.” He’s calling me ’cause they’re trying to decide to decide whether they’re gonna move to Nashville, and he’s asking about neighborhoods, schooling, all these different things. Frankly, I’ve taken a lot of these different calls. And I guarantee you if people that live in Florida or Texas, they’ve taken a lot of calls, if they have friends and family on the coast. This is a call that’s become very common.

BUCK: I can also say this. I’m somebody who’s… I’m a red state guy living in a blue state, born and raised in a blue state. But I have a brother that’s already moved to Florida, another brother that’s trying to be more permanent in Florida. My family talks moving down there, too. My parents, everybody.

I have yet to speak to a person who is right-of-center in their belief who has left New York or California — those are the two states that, really, people have just had enough — for a red state and regretted it. Not a single person that I’ve talked to. Not one. Which is pretty remarkable. I will say at a at a that. That’s… I figure there’s some people like, “Oh, the lattes aren’t frothy enough here or —

CLAY: The Italian food is not as good.

BUCK: — I miss the takeout options from the East Village or something. But every I know is moved had to — and the states are Tennessee, Texas, Florida. I know couple of people that are now in Georgia, actually, which is not red but it’s redder, certainly, than New York.

CLAY: Well, we need more red people moving to Georgia.

BUCK: We need red people to move to Georgia, actually. It would be a great thing. So that’s one thing for me is, I just feel like everyone that I’ve talk to so far who has made that decision has felt good about it — and the red state people are very welcoming of the blue state refugees who know how to vote. (laughing)

CLAY: Yes. That’s the key. We don’t want you moving here and trying to change our lifestyle.

BUCK: Don’t California my Texas. Don’t New York my Tennessee. This is the reality.

CLAY: What we don’t want is you to become like locusts where you destroyed the state that you used to live in and now you spread to ours.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: The big story that is out there is Joe Biden’s overall approval rating. Despite the fact that, at least according to the official tallies, he is the most popular president in the history of the United States, Buck Sexton: 81 million votes, we are told.

BUCK: How could he not be? It’s not like Democrats had repudiated him and thought he was a joke for decades until five minutes ago.

CLAY: And his approval rating according to the most recent poll — and this is a big deal — from Quinnipiac University, which does, really, pretty regular polls. And look, I understand all polls have flaws. We certainly know that. But in general, Buck, I don’t think of Quinnipiac as being one that is associated with one political party or the other.

Is that fair to say? It tends to middle-of-the-roadish polls as these things go. It’s not as it if regularly, wildly overvalued Donald Trump support or anything during his tenure as president or during the last couple of presidential campaigns.

BUCK: Eh. Yeah. Quinnipiac, it’s all right.

CLAY: All right. There you go. Solid endorsement of the university as a whole. All right. I’m looking at the poll numbers, Buck. And if I’m in the Biden White House, I’m in terror of these. Okay. Joe Biden’s overall approval rating right now: 38% among all voters. For independents, 32% approval of Joe Biden, 60% disapproval. All right?

That is the persuadable middle. I thought this was interesting for men: 38% of men disapprove of Joe Biden; 48% of disapprove of Joe Biden. The only people right now — this is crazy — that approve of Joe Biden are four-year college graduates, and even that group is a tiny number. I thought this was interesting, Buck.

Even among young people, 36% approval rating for Joe Biden among those 18 to 34. The high watermark for approval for Joe Biden is actually people who are 65 and up. He has a 1% approval rating there. The least approving of Joe Biden, interestingly, though, are people ages 50 to 64.

So seniors are strongly in approval. Here’s some of these specifics. The majority of the population now disapproves of the way Joe Biden is handling the coronavirus, which is pretty strong, including substantial numbers of young people, which would explain the “F— Joe Biden” chants that we may be hearing so frequently out there.

BUCK: Clay, this is just putting numbers to the perception that anybody who’s living in America and being honest has right now, which is the country is not doing well. It doesn’t feel like it should at this stage, given we had this mass vaccination campaign. We should have had an economy that felt like a rocket ship.

And instead, we’ve had a lot of excuse making and actually a lot of scapegoating of people who have resisted vaccine mandates or haven’t gone along with every aspect of Fauciism. If the Biden administration right now was tasked with coming up with — which they are, right, in different ways. But if you read the talking points or you heard the talking points about their best case as to how they’ve done a good job so far?

It would be a laughable list. It wouldn’t actually pass the laugh test. People would hear this stuff; they’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry, we’re supposed to be the economy is so great?” Right now, nobody feels like the economy is so great. And really, Clay, what I think they’re hoping on, they’re banking on, which is why there’s so much at stake with the reconciliation bill, which we still know is gonna get through at some level.

It will be probably be 1.5 or maybe $2 trillion, is that they’re gonna turn on the money gun, and they’re gonna try to anesthetize the American people. They’re gonna try to buy us off with our own money to turn the numbers around that you are citing from this polling. That’s the whole game. They gotta redistribute that wealth around.

They gotta take an even bigger debt that will affect future generations and make people feel like things for them are a little bit better, or at least — by going after “the super rich” or whatever — they’re gonna say they’ll make it seem worse for other people and make those feel good by comparison who have a bit of social justice and really class warfare feeling.

CLAY: What do you think the worst of all of these categories is Joe Biden approval-wise? Where are people most furious with Joe Biden right now? The border. This is crazy. Listen to these numbers on the border. Right now, Joe Biden, do you approve or disapprove of the way he’s handling the situation at the Mexican border: 23% approval; 76% disapproval.

Buck, for independent voters, 73% of them disapprove of the way Joe Biden is handling the border. And even those white, four-year college degree owners, 66% of them disapprove of Joe Biden at the border. And, by the way, all ages. Young people are even more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden than the overall percentages. I can’t remember seeing any particular subject where a president was this underwater on his job.

BUCK: It’s worth noting that what catapulted President Trump to the front of the pack of Republicans was the border. I remember that election very well. I was covering it very closely. It was the border issue, folks. Yeah, Trump was a showman; Trump was engaging, entertaining. He was an extended middle finger to the class of elites from which he came.

But he had repudiated on behalf of the working men and women of America, right? There was a lot. But the border was the issue that separated him from the rest, the build-the-wall chants. We all remember this. This is… If you’re looking at him, Clay, the numbers bear it out. By the way, the border’s the worst it’s ever been.

If this polling has any merit whatsoever — or rather, if it’s possible for people to have their opinions changed on the border — they would have to think that it is worse now than it’s ever been because that is what the data actually reflects when you’re looking at illegal crossings, the general lawlessness. Let’s not forget the highest ever overdose rate in this country last year: Over 90,000 people died.

The vast majority of that fentanyl, those opioids coming across the U.S.-Mexico border were brought here by the cartels that are also doing the human smuggling operation. And it’s not gonna get my better, Clay. This is a part of it that as a counterpoint, almost, to my expense that, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t want us to get complacent,” the one area where I think they have no chance of spin, no chance of turning the narrative around is the border.

Because they won’t go to the Trump policies that secured the border and therefore their best hope is going to be call everybody who points out what’s happening at the border racist, and/or ignore it entirely as a national press matter. They’ve been they’re gonna tried to do.

CLAY: We’ve been talking how low can things go to your point that you’re afraid it just can’t get any worse. Biden’s approval rating among Democrats is still 80%, but that’s the lowest approval rating I can remember for a president of either the Republican or the Democratic Party because we talk about, “Hey, you got 40% of people that are basically gonna be ride or die with you.”

And even now Biden is losing them.By the way, Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, speaking of the immigration disaster that is going on right now… I can’t remember ever seeing a president polling this low in terms of any issue, much less one of such integral importance as the border. Ron Johnson’s talking about how Biden is just letting everybody into the country even though it’s absolute insanity. Listen to the numbers here from Ron Johnson.

JOHNSON: The border crisis, I finally got the numbers out of the DHS in terms of how many people they dispersed so far in the first nine months. About a half a million. You add on to that Rodney Scott, the recently retired border chief: 400,000 known got-aways. That’s 900,000 people! Extrapolate that for the year, that’s 1.2 million people. That’s a larger number than the populations of nine states.

It’s not just sheer incompetence. This is what he intended to do! This what Democrats want: Open borders, weak America, a weakened military, higher energy prices, penalizing low-income individuals. And they purport to be for low-income Americans, but they’re not. Their policies harm poor people.

BUCK: Republicans, Clay, have to make this case. The data is very compelling, and it cannot be refuted. But they have to also explain, “Why is this a problem?” I know right now there are a whole lot of legal immigrants who are listening to this who would say, for one thing, it is a total slap in the face to the people who came here and went through the process.

In some cases, they had to get visas and then renewed visas and pay immigration attorneys and had to get their sponsor, all these different things. They could have just shown up, been told by the cartels what to say, lied — because they’re not actually fleeing oppression or violence, they’re just saying it — and then disappear in the interior of the United States. And what does it do?

What does it actually do to wages in different parts of the country when there’s a large surge of illegal aliens who will be competing for those wages? They always say, “Oh, it doesn’t bring down national wages.” Yeah, of course. It’s not necessarily gonna bring it down all across the country at the same time. But in areas where you had large illegal migrants flow in recent months, you are going to see an effect on the wage scale.

You are also gonna see an effect on emergency rooms, on the school systems, on all these resources that are paid for by people’s tax dollars — and also, there’s the notion of sovereignty. America is supposed to be able to determine who comes and he doesn’t. At some point, you ask, “How do we have a country if we can’t actually determine who comes and who goes and under what circumstances?”

CLAY: I think that is something. I mean, 70% of independents agree with that, Buck. Biden is underwater on an unbelievable level on the border. So, if I were right now advising Republicans on areas to attack Joe Biden, I’d go after the places where he is weakest and where people are gonna respond the most aggressively.

BUCK: I doubt that there are many shows that spend more time talking about the border crisis than this one —

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: — as a part of their three hours on the air, even shows that are out there that are closer to the border. I’m just telling you, Clay, I think you’re right. I think this is where the Democrats could see huge problems going forward.