POLICY COUNSEL
OCTOBER 2026 POLICY COUNSEL SPEECHES
Riley Gaines
Host
The Riley Gaines Show
Thank you. It is so good to be here. Oh my gosh, I’m thrilled to be back. Although they told me that I’m keeping everyone from lunch. That’s always a dangerous spot to be in.
I have been coming to CNP for several years now. Actually, I wasn’t here last year because I was about to pop at this point. I was about ten months pregnant. They lie to you, by the way. Maybe some other women know this. They say you’re pregnant for nine months. A lie. I was pregnant for ten months.
So a lot has changed since the last time I was on this stage. Obviously, the fact that now we have a little baby girl. She’s the best. It’s the most purposeful and rewarding and fulfilling thing I believe you could possibly do as a woman, if you have the ability to do that: wearing the title of mom. I really believe that.
Joe Biden was still president the last time I was on this stage. Charlie Kirk was still alive the last time I was on this stage. So a lot has changed in the past few years.
Of course, now we have President Trump back in the Oval Office. I love being in rooms like this because you all understand policy and legislation and the importance of winning legislatively and how that influences our culture. We’ve seen lots of wins and success and victories under President Trump when it comes to free speech, when it comes to parental rights, and when it comes to protecting women in our sports and beyond.
I was right beside the president as he signed his executive order barring men from participating in women’s sports within any educational program that receives federal funds. Isn’t it crazy that you guys are applauding for that? It’s so entry level. Whoever in their time here on this earth would have imagined, number one, that this would be necessary, and two, that we would celebrate it when it happens? But nonetheless, it’s a big victory.
Just a little context for that day. It was pretty special because, as some of you may remember, you have President Trump surrounded by a sea of young girls, five, six, seven, eight years old, and they’ve got their jerseys on, or the uniforms they wear on the soccer field, and they’ve got their big bows in their hair. That visual means more to me than I could possibly put into words.
I’ll give you a little background, though. Prior to the executive order signing, we’re back there having this little briefing, and the Secret Service comes in and says, “Look, there’s going to be a bunch of people behind you. Whatever you do, Mr. President, do not invite them to swarm you.” There are all sorts of security risks that come with that. “Just don’t do that.” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” And so he’s signing it, and he looks back and says, “Everyone, come on, come around me.” So that just speaks to President Trump and who he is.
We saw on day one where he signed an executive order declaring that there are only two sexes, male and female. How wild. We have a sitting Supreme Court justice who can’t tell you what a woman is because she says she’s not a biologist. Guess what? I’m not a veterinarian, but I know what a dog is. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.
There’s one more policy win that I can speak to that my husband and my family have been able to personally benefit from. My husband came over to the States from England in 2018. He was a swimmer at the University of Kentucky as well. That’s where we met. Of course, we started dating, and we got married back in 2022, in my senior year of college.
And so, of course, when you marry an alien, which is what I call him all of the time, by the way. An alien, especially on July 4th. I remind him every single Fourth of July that he was born on the wrong side of the Revolution, which he happily concedes, by the way, especially with the way things are going in England.
Anyway, when you marry a legal immigrant (legal, not illegal), of course you have to go through the immigration process. This was not a shock to either of us. Get married, apply for a green card. Again, this was back in 2022, so President Biden was still in the Oval Office. We meet with our immigration lawyer, and he tells us, “Look, it’ll take six months, maybe eight months max, before you get your green card. No big deal.”
We wait six months. We wait a year. We wait two years. We wait three years. We had heard nothing from USCIS under the previous administration. And so that’s when we began to reach out, to inquire, right? Of course, these things are on timelines. They have expiration dates. We’re reaching out to every agency, every department. No one could point us in the right direction under President Biden.
Thank God that Donald Trump was elected. He won in 2024, and he was inaugurated in January of 2025. Now, a little more context here. We hadn’t heard anything until that January of 2025, when we got a letter in the mail. We open it, and it says, “Confidential information. We actually cannot give you your green card because your medical records aren’t complete.” What medical record isn’t complete? It says, well, you don’t have your COVID vaccine. Therefore, you don’t get a green card. I’m sure they checked everyone at the other border to see if they had their COVID vaccine, right?
So I give it about 24 hours after the president was inaugurated before I pick up the phone. And I say, “Hey, did you know there’s this mandate in place, this mandate that I would deem illegal?” He said, “No, give me two hours.” Literally within two hours, and it was not a phone call, it was not a text, I got one of the Fox News breaking alerts, and it said, “President Trump vacates nationwide mandate requiring legal immigrants to get the COVID vaccine.”
So it wasn’t too long ago that we got this little green card in the mail. Spoiler alert: it’s literally a green card. So I figured we would celebrate this, right? There’s a Publix near us. I don’t know if you guys have Publix. It’s our grocery store of choice at home. They have a little cake decorator in the back of the bakery. So I go to the cake decorator, and I say, “Look, I need you to make me a cake that says, ‘Congrats on not getting deported.’” And the cake decorator, this young, probably high school-aged kid, is looking at me, and he’s like, “Uh, I need to go talk to my boss in the back really quick.” He runs back, comes back, and says, “I can do it.” So they give us this cake, and they forgot the R in congrats. So it definitely said “Con-gats on not getting deported.” But nonetheless, we celebrated.
So a lot has changed on the legislative front. Of course, that’s speaking at the national level. At the state level, we have now seen 27 states pass some sort of fairness in women’s sports bill. We’ve seen 18 states pass some sort of legislation defining the word woman. These are good things, of course. So great things have been done there.
To speak to the second thing that has really changed, at least in my personal life, and that I know the nation has felt, and the world has felt: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I know Erika was here yesterday. Isn’t she just the embodiment of a Christ-like sense of forgiveness and strength and serenity? You have to imagine this is the hardest season of her life. She has found the strength to continue forward, to carry on her husband’s mission, which has now become his legacy. She’s faced some of the most slanderous attacks online from people who are chronically online. I’m not even going to go there, actually. She has been an inspiration to me. It has convicted me to want to be a better wife, a better Christian, a better human being, and a better American, for sure.
It’s October 10th today, isn’t it? So it’s 13 months to the day since the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Being 26 years old, I don’t have too many moments in my life where I’ll never forget where I was when I heard the news. The first one that I can think of was when President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. Not knowing in the immediate what this really meant. You just saw him go down and then stick his fist in the air, and you heard “Fight, fight, fight.” But there was a lot of confusion and chaos, of course. Praise God it ended the way that it did, in the sense that President Trump is alive and well and here to tell the story. There, of course, was tragedy that day, with Corey, a father and a husband, losing his life prematurely, being taken from this world. So that’s one instance where I’ll never forget where I was.
The second one was when Charlie Kirk was shot. I was about 38 or 39 weeks pregnant at the time. It was really hard for me to live between these two truths. On one hand, you’re in the most joyous time of your life, engaged in the physical act of creation. You’re bringing life into this world, probably the most miraculous thing. But then, on the other hand, you’re witnessing life being prematurely taken from this world, and the chaos and the darkness and immorality and the evil that surrounds it.
I really struggled with feelings of, in the immediate, just total shock and disbelief and confusion, right? You watch the news, and there’s that obituary-style black-and-white photo, and it’s got the year he was born through 2025, and the Fox News hosts are talking about Charlie in the past tense. It didn’t feel real to me. And then it turns into grief and tearfulness. And then, I’m not proud to say it, but the feeling of grief turned into anger. I was so mad.
I was so mad that something like this could happen on a college campus: a place you should be able to go to have your thoughts and your beliefs and your perspectives on the world and policy challenged, where civil discourse should be encouraged, and where independent thought should be rewarded. No, that’s not what college campuses are anymore. They’re hotbeds for this cultural chaos that’s plaguing this country.
I was so mad watching people celebrate this. Whether it was school teachers, which is pretty concerning, isn’t it? These are people who are supposed to be entrusted with educating the next generation, your kids, your grandkids, and they’re celebrating an innocent man’s death. Murder. Death is far too passive a word to describe what happened to him. Murder.
Then you saw healthcare workers celebrating this. Again, deeply concerning. What if you were on the operating table? What if they found out that you were here at this conference, that you were affiliated with CNP, or that you were a Christian believer, or that you were a Trump supporter? God forbid you’re a triple-Trumper, that you voted for Trump three times. Maybe they wouldn’t try as hard to save you if that were you on the table. Watching government employees celebrate this, people whose salaries you and I pay. I was so mad.
But I’ll tell you, in the past few months and since the birth of our daughter, things have changed. There was a lull of a couple of weeks where I did not feel hopeful. I did not feel optimistic about the future of this country. Maybe all of you felt it too. It felt so dark, didn’t it?
Charlie was, of course, a mentor to me, a dear friend to me, someone I went to if I needed advice on anything. He was amazing, wasn’t he? It didn’t matter if it was relational advice or spiritual advice, or, of course, advice in the political realm. He knew everything on every topic. In those few weeks, I didn’t feel hopeful. I’d sat right there at that tent with him. I’d done the “Prove Me Wrong”-style debates right beside him. It could have just as easily been me, or any of us, for having the same beliefs that Charlie does. Did.
And so I vowed to myself when Charlie Kirk was assassinated that I was never going to do this ever again. It just wasn’t my priority anymore. My priority, of course, was the daughter who was soon to be born. I wanted to be the best mom that I could be for her. I quite literally wanted to be here on this earth for her. I didn’t want to put myself at risk anymore.
But then my daughter was born, and your perspective involuntarily changes. You don’t even think about it. It subconsciously shifts. You hold her, and you shift your perspective immediately, and you realize then that being the best mom for her looks exactly like this, at least with the platform that I have and the position that I’ve found myself in. This is how I am the best mom for her.
I’ve said none of the things that I actually wanted to say, and I have about 18 seconds left. So I’ll just wrap it up with this: becoming a mom makes you radically pro-life. I’ve always been pro-life because I’ve always been a believer, understanding that we have a God who condemns the shedding of innocent blood, who breathes value and purpose into every single life inside of the womb, and then outside of the womb. I’ve never struggled to understand that. I opposed abortion, of course. I thought I understood it intellectually, I believed it morally, and I thought I could argue it politically.
But then you go to that first ultrasound appointment at eight weeks, and you hear a little heartbeat. And guess what? That heart beats just like yours does and just like mine does. And then you go to the 20-week anatomy scan, and you see this little tiny human. A perfect side profile with a perfect little nose, fully formed hands, and little feet. Actually, she has big feet. I think she’s going to be a swimmer, by the way. She’s in the 99th percentile for height. She’s this tall, skinny little string bean. They were able to tell me at the 20-week scan that she has a head full of hair. I thought that was crazy. You hear the words, “It’s a girl.”
And then you go through labor and delivery, again, the most ethereal experience, which sounds weird. I loved labor. I loved it. I don’t know if it’s the athlete in me. There was a competitive edge about it. I wanted to just push this baby out as fast as I could. Maybe TMI, but my legs are still in the stirrups, and I’m like, “I’m ready to do this again.” And my doctor, who still has his mask on, looks up and says, “I’ve never heard someone in your current state say that.”
I loved it. And I’ve loved every minute of motherhood since. It changes you. It shifts the question I’ve asked myself for the past few years prior to my daughter. That question was centered around the experience that I faced. Naturally, maybe selfishly, you relate things to the experiences that you’ve had. Now I am so secondary. I don’t care about me, per se. I care about my daughter. And the question is: What kind of country are we leaving behind for her? What sort of nation will she inherit? At least for me, it reinforces the necessity and the urgency with which we combat some of the cultural issues that we are seeing plague this country.
I’m excited. Nate is going to come up here for some Q&A. Nate is with Brave for Good, affiliated with Brave Books, which is amazing, by the way. They are a fantastic alternative to Scholastic. Think of the standard book fair that your kids or your grandkids may have gone to growing up, especially if they’re in the public education system. Scholastic has gone full-blown communist. They just have. Brave Books is a fantastic alternative to that, and it’s something that I’m really proud to be affiliated with.
I actually now have two children’s books out with Brave Books. The first one is called Happy No Snakes Day, which kind of feels like a double entendre, if you will. It’s about speaking the truth even when there are risks, even when there are consequences, even when you’re fearful and scared, and how it is worth it. And the second one is 1, 2, 3, We Are Free. This was done prior to America’s 250th birthday, and it was really special because this was a book I got to dedicate to our sweet little baby girl, Margo. So thanks, Nate, for joining me.
Scott Rasmussen
President
RMG Research
Good afternoon. I’m going to start with something that’s not about the things that might depress you in a few weeks in the midterm elections. We are actually in the midst of a much larger battle. It’s in the title of my book, Out of Touch: The Elite One Percent and the Battle for America’s Soul. It’s a battle for the kind of nation that we’re going to leave our children and grandchildren. Are we going to pass on the great heritage of our founding ideals, of a nation based on the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance? Or are we going to stick them with a government by unelected bureaucrats? That’s really the choice. Do voters rule, or does the administrative state rule?
I am very confident we’re going to win that battle, because I see more polling data than just about anybody, and I know that the American people still embrace those founding ideals. Now, some of you may say, “I don’t believe Democrats embrace that.” And you’re wrong. By the way, Democrats don’t think Republicans embrace it either. When you talk to voters (not candidates, not activists, not academics), when you talk to Democratic voters and Republican voters, they share a tremendous amount of common ground.
In my book, I talk about two Midwestern women who’ve known each other for more than 50 years. They share common values and common beliefs, but they can’t talk politics, because one has moved into a Democratic media ecosystem and the other into a Republican ecosystem. They can talk about everything else under the sun, but not this. So I am optimistic, because that base is there.
And yet, in this larger battle, we’re also going to have these midterm elections. Some of you may think that when the results come in, we’ve already lost the battle for America’s soul. That’s not the case at all.
And look, I don’t want to sugarcoat it. We put out a prediction every day on Scott’s Scoreboard of what the odds are of how things will turn out. Right now, there’s a 78 percent chance the Democrats will control the House of Representatives. We currently rate 217 individual races as either safe or likely Democratic. That means they need to win just one more seat to win control. It’s not preordained. We can change that. There are a lot of close races, and if there’s a great turnout effort, maybe it won’t happen. Or maybe we just hold down the margin a little bit. But it is very likely that the Democrats will have the House. And the Senate right now is a pure toss-up. We give the Republicans just a 51 percent chance of holding it.
Now, how can I reconcile my optimism about the future with those election results? The answer is, despite the rhetoric, elections are not a vehicle for expressing voters’ policy preferences. Elections turn on fundamentals.
I’ll just share quickly a lesson I learned back in the ESPN era, a business lesson that has helped me throughout my political career. I see a couple of you remember the ‘70s. Most of you were a little too young for that. But back in the ‘70s, there was hardly any sports on television. We had this crazy idea for an all-sports network, and we were going to transmit it via satellite. We went to eight broadcast companies, and they all laughed us out of the room and said it would never work.
So then we went to Getty Oil, and we said, “We’ve got this great idea. It’s going to change the world. It’s going to make you a lot of money. And, oh, by the way, we need $5 million to tide us over while you evaluate us.” And they told us they would not consider a proposal for less than $10 million. So, of course, you know what we did. We went back and did the proposal: “We’ve got a great idea, it’s going to change the world, and we need $10 million to tide us over while you evaluate us.” And they gave us $5 million. I don’t know why, but that was their logic.
About seven or eight months later, we had spent about $4.9 million of the $5 million, and Getty had to make a decision about putting $100 million in. They brought us into a room in the Getty executive suite with a boomerang-shaped table. My father and I were on the inside of it, and Getty lawyers and officials were all around the outside, firing questions at us from every direction. I was sitting across from Sid Petersen, the brand-new CEO of Getty. My father was sitting across from Harold Berg, the chairman of the board.
And somebody asked me about the projections for 1988. Now, just to make sure you appreciate this, there were no PCs. There were no computers in the late ‘70s to do this. I did all the projections by hand on a 13-column analysis pad. This was 1979. There was no cable industry like we know it today, and I was being asked to make projections nine years into the future.
But I was cocky. I was good with numbers. I gave them a very precise answer: There are 12 million cable households in the country at this time. If cable grows at this rate, and if this percentage of them takes satellite programming, and this percentage of that percentage takes ESPN, and if this percentage are watching in this daypart, and we sell ads for this, the answer is obvious.
At which point Sid Petersen, the CEO, looked right at me and said, “He has no more of an idea what the revenue will be in 1988 than we do.” And then he went on to say, “We need to look at the fundamentals. Will cable grow? Will they use programming like this? Will people watch sports 24 hours a day? And most important of all, will advertisers sponsor what in those days we called narrowcasting?” And he said, “If those fundamentals prove true, it’s a big win for all of us, and if not, it’s a dry hole. We make decisions like this all the time.” They threw us out of the room, and about an hour later they came back and said they were going to fund ESPN.
That analysis of the fundamentals was really important. In the political world, in elections, the fundamentals define every election. Candidates matter. Campaigns matter. Getting out the vote matters. But they only matter on the margins.
Why are we in a difficult electoral environment? It’s not because Democrats have given up on America’s founding ideals. It’s because of what James Carville said in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” People are not feeling good about the economy. It’s the same reason they voted against Joe Biden in 2024. There’s a frustration that everyday Americans are feeling.
And the people who are making these decisions are not caught up in the kinds of discussions that we have in this room. These are people who rarely talk politics. They don’t like politics. They don’t trust politicians. They don’t believe the messaging from either team. What they know is that right now, when the price of gas goes up, it’s harder to buy groceries. That’s what you’re competing with. And because Donald Trump was elected in large part to make the economy work for all Americans, there’s been a pushback right now.
I’ll give you a sense of scale. In March of 2025, the president had just gotten back in, and he had a great start. People were feeling better about the economy. The Republicans had a five-point advantage in party identification: 46 percent of voters said they were Republicans, and 41 percent said Democrats. Today, the numbers have flipped. Now the Democrats have a five-point edge, 47 to 42. That’s a ten-point change. That’s the reason we’re seeing close races in places like Texas. It’s the reason we’re seeing a close race in Michigan. In a neutral environment, Mike Rogers would be winning that race going away. The economy, the fundamentals, are creating a drag that we are going to find difficult to overcome.
However, the day after the election, we need to start working again on that next battle. So I want to talk about how you do that.
The first thing is, we need to learn to talk to people in their language, not in our language. The way you talk to each other in this place, you should never talk like that to a normal person.
Here’s the way it works. We live in what I call a 10-10-80 nation. It’s not 50-50. There’s 10 percent on the left who are at war with 10 percent of voters on the right. And by the way, by definition, being in this room, you’re 10-percenters. You’re part of that world. You’re caught up in those battles. The 80 percent are just trying to keep their heads down and avoid getting caught in the crossfire. They don’t talk politics. They don’t want to hear from you. And the reason they don’t want to hear from you is the way we talk to them.
Now, imagine a high school boy who sees a cute girl and wants to ask her out and take her to the movies, and she says, “I don’t like movies.” Most high school boys at that point would assume they had been turned down and slink away. A smart high school boy would figure, “She doesn’t like movies. Maybe there’s something else we could do. Maybe I should learn what she wants to do, and we can do that.” But if that boy behaved like a political activist talking to a normal person, he would have told the girl how stupid she is for not liking movies and tried to talk her into agreeing with him that this was a great first date. It probably wouldn’t go over too well.
We need to listen to people where they are. Talk about what they want to talk about. Understand their concerns. And then we need to realize that their language is different.
In this campaign season, we’ve heard a lot about socialism. What I can tell you with great confidence is that there is absolutely no increase in support for socialism in America. Thirty-one percent of voters say they like socialism. That’s the same as it was ten years ago. And that might sound like a scary number until you realize that they don’t think it means what you think it means. Among people who like socialism, three-quarters favor a free-market economy. Only one-third of people who like socialism think it has anything to do with giving more power and money to government.
Now, you can say they’re wrong, that they need to study more. That’s like arguing with the girl about going to the movies. Or you could listen to what they think it means. And for the most part, it means decision-making closer to home. So what does this mean in a campaign setting? If you go off complaining about socialism, you’re not connecting with those voters in any way, shape, or form. Even if you still believe that they’re wrong in what they understand, you need to take a step back and recognize that the meanings of words change. My definition of middle-aged is fundamentally different than it was 20 years ago. Words do change, and we have to keep up with that.
So if we start to listen a little bit and address ourselves to their needs, and if we start to talk in the language of everyday Americans, then we have a chance to win over a lot of these people who are disengaged and help them see why they should support the team that is fighting for America’s founding ideals.
I would like to suggest, and I do this in my book, that there are three numbers that should guide your understanding of politics. The numbers are 1, 80, and 519,000.
The number one: in our research, and I talk a lot about it in the book, we found there’s an elite 1 percent of people who have a postgraduate degree, live in a densely populated urban area, and make a lot of money. These people drive a lot of the political narrative in America, and their views are distinctly out of touch with the American people and with the American political tradition.
Just to give you a couple of highlights, half of them don’t think you should be allowed to vote unless you have a college degree. They think if a bureaucrat decides something should be done, even though the voters strongly oppose it, the bureaucrat should ignore the voters and do what they think is right. They happen to think, by the way, that most Americans share their view that private ownership of guns should be outlawed. They are a little delusional as well as being important.
So the elite 1 percent is sowing a lot of the discontent in politics today. They are the ones out here pushing the limits on issues like, “What do you mean boys shouldn’t be allowed to play girls’ sports?” Because that’s a controversial issue inside the elite 1 percent. Among the 80-percenters, it’s common sense that boys should play boys’ sports and girls should play girls’ sports.
So we’ve got this 1 percent. And then, as I’ve already mentioned, we’ve got these political armies out there. Neither one of them is talking to the 80-percenters. And quite frankly, this happens on the right in addition to the left. Sometimes we get so caught up in wanting to beat the other side that we lose sight of the fact that we’re supposed to have a government of, by, and for the people, that voters are supposed to be in charge, and that we’re supposed to represent this 80 percent. So we need to think about ways to connect with them. We need to think about ways, again, to listen, to speak their language, and to address their concerns. And they might not be ours. We need to form alliances every chance we get.
And that leads me to the 519,000. There are 519,000 state and local elected officials in America. This is the group that is the backbone of a self-governing society. This is the group that can connect those 80 percent of voters with political leadership.
Cory Gardner, when he was in the U.S. Senate, told me that if a local elected official reached out to him, he wanted to see every letter and every communication they sent in. For the rest of the voters, he got a summary. If you’re elected to a school board somewhere, you are by definition a thought leader with some followers. So we want to reach out to these people, partly because they are heard by officials in Washington, and partly because they are heard by constituents. They run into their constituents in the grocery store. They are in a different world of politics.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that local elected officials are saints. The father of our country, George Washington, ran his first race ever for the House of Burgesses, and he lost in 1755. But he learned something from that loss, because his opponent bought a lot of liquor for voters on Election Day. So if you go to his ledger on Election Day three years later, George Washington outspent his opponent on beer, wine, rum, and a few other spirits. And that’s how the father of our country got started on his path. I’m not saying local politics are pure and noble, but they are closely in touch with voters.
That’s what we need to do. If we can begin to work through those elected officials and help them recognize the importance of the 10-10-80 nation, and build a broader coalition of people who share our founding ideals, we’ll pretty quickly see for ourselves the common ground that exists.
About two years ago, I had the opportunity to start a project with Jigsaw, which is a tech incubator inside of Google. It’s a long story how we got there, but we built a platform and hosted a national conversation with five people from every congressional district in America. Because we were tying it into America 250, we focused it on the ideals of freedom and equality. What do those things mean in America today? What does it mean to be an American in the 21st century?
We went through this process. We heard what the people had to say, and we let them see what others said. It was a thorough process. We ended up collecting, I think, 1.6 million words of conversation. At the end of it, we put together a series of statements, summarized with the help of AI, by the way, that we thought reflected a consensus among all these participants. And we had them vote on it. We did not include a statement in our report unless at least two-thirds of the congressional districts represented supported the idea. When we got through all of that, we put it into what we called a Declaration of American Ideals for the 21st Century.
When you look at those statements, you will see common ground that reflects the traditions we grew up with. Now, there were some changes. We put in a Lincoln quote to see how it did, talking about how all men are created equal, and it was changed to “all men and women.” It’s the 21st century. That’s not a bad change.
We had some other things that really surprised me. Overwhelmingly, people in red and blue districts alike supported a statement saying that we were all born with certain rights that no government gave us and no government can take away. That sounds pretty much like the Declaration of Independence, phrased a little bit differently.
Those values are still there. We just don’t know how to tap into them. That’s our challenge. We need to find ways to lift that up and to recognize that we’re not really fighting the other 10 percent. We’re fighting on behalf of the 80 percent against that elitist 1 percent group, the people who think we should all accept the fact that bureaucrats know best. That’s the battle for America’s soul. That’s the battle that we are going to continue to fight, and it’s something that we have to do even when we have discouraging election results along the way.
I’m going to be around for a little bit later, and I’m happy to talk more about some of these ideas. But what I would be really happy for you to do is to think about how you can have a conversation with somebody who is outside the political bubble. Take time to listen to what they’re really saying, and don’t even try to sell them on your ideas. Just listen for a little bit. Do that a few times, and you’ll be better equipped for the next conversation.
If we can do this, if we can represent the 80 percent, if we can engage the 519,000 state and local elected officials, we will have done our part to ensure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. Thank you very much.