There is a maxim in politics that you never ask a crowd a question if you don’t already know the answer in advance.
And while there are times a politician may want to take a risk by breaking that rule, they better have a good feel for what the answer will be even if they are not 100% sure.
I memorably did that once and - luckily - got away with it.
Story:
In one of my congressional races, I was attending a gathering of small businesspeople (my state’s Restaurant and Lodging Association conference). My opponent had run a sleazy TV ad about me that my then 13-year-old son had seen. He called me hysterically crying and after running through a list of reason why (Got hurt? Fight at school? Something with mom?) I finally calmed him down enough for him to tell me he had seen the TV commercial. I told him that what the ad said was not true and one of the main reasons I was running was to change what my opponent was doing.
The next day when I spoke in front of the conference, I gave my speech on the issues, and then at the end, brought up the previous night’s call from my son. My goal was to help the audience see that the people they were sending to Washington simply because of the party they belonged to were, well, the kind of people they didn’t really like in real life. So, impulsively, I asked the crowd, “How many of you here hate Washington, D.C.?”.
I mean, it was a Republican crowd in a western state that famously hated the feds telling them how to live and what to do (in their view).
Serendipitously, I scored! Nearly every hand in the crowd went up. Phew! Which allowed me to reply with the words, “Then why do you keep sending the same people back there? The way they campaign is the way they are going to govern, because we’ve all let it work for them back here at home. It’s all they know.”
After my speech, I had more people come up to me and thank me for saying that than pretty much any other talk I gave over the course of that campaign.
Now, to paraphrase the immortal words of former TV sportscaster Warner Wolf, “Let’s go to the [CPAC] videotape”:
Matt didn’t know the answer to that question, did he? And then he compounds it by telling the crowd they’re wrong?! Major f*^k=up.
In that same vein, Steve Bannon tried asked CPAC attendees if they were willing to accept higher gas prices for the Iran War. The answer was 4 raised hands and otherwise, utter silence.
Not smart politics.
The bigger story may be that CPAC attendance is way down, Trump and family are skipping CPAC for the first time on over a decade and even potential 2028 GOP frontrunner JD Vance couldn’t bring himself to attend.
It may be a small data point, but the fact that the CPAC organizers and speakers were clearly so out of touch with the sentiments of the attendees at their showcase “conservative” gathering that they didn’t get the answer they wanted from softball questions lobbed at the crowd is not a positive sign for their movement.
