How are you . Nice to see you again. I will shake your hand. Of course. Excellent. [inaudible] i do not think gilbert can pull it off better than uribe. I like that one. Look at that. Thanks so much. You are very welcome. Anymore deals . I think they have one left in them. You yeah. Thanks, man. Governor christie will be one of 14 republican president ial candidates attending the Voters First Forum at st. Vincent college. Cspan is partnering with media organizations from primary states for the event. We will have it live at 7 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. We look at the latest developments in the president ial race with political strategists from this mornings washington journal. Host joining us, Stefan Hankin a democratic pollster and david winston, republican strategist. How much attention should people be paying to as far as pulling when it comes to the president ial race . Guest it is the only thing they should be watching. For most americans, a little early. For those of us in the beltway and people who are political junkies, obviously, this is what we live and die by. We are still five months away from the first primaries. A long way to go before the general. It is early. Want to talk about, fun to look at. But what you are seeing now is not necessarily indicative of what we will be seeing in 2016. Guest i do not necessarily disagreeguest . There are a lot of things that will change. On the republican side, pulling is critical given that is how fox will select who they support in the debate. It is important for the candidates to be on that stage. The role survey research is playing is critical. Host when it comes to the fox debate and polls will be the deciding factor, what polls are they looking at . What numbers are they looking at . What things have to factor into making those decisions . Guest it is not clear at this point. All the polls have a margin of error. If you look at the 10 spots that will be allowed on stage with 15 candidates, when you look from the eighth to the 13th or 14th, they are in the margin of error the range of accuracy. There is a certain amount of error. A person could be. 8 behind another person. That is well within the margin of error. So i am not sure which pulls they are using at this point. And the other element, what is the methodology . What percentage of the poll will be independence versus republicans . How will they work through that . It has not been clear. Guest i agree completely. As a democrat, i am sitting back and getting the popcorn ready. What polls are you using . National polls, staples . With primary elections you do not win a primary statebystate. With the top candidates, probably top three or four, you have this big group in the middle. Why should this person be in and not this person . Just because you are at five and you are at four, is that a meaningful difference . I am glad i do not have to deal with this one. Host are these typically done in the usual manner as far as calling people, asking them a series of questions . Are they robo calls . How does that affect the poll being considered . Host i will defer to my colleague. Guest my understanding is that they will pick three or four major polls and take the average. Guest there are five. Major network polls, wall street journal, nbc. They will be national. What is unclear is, will that be a survey of primary voters which represents the universe of 1000 or a subset of a National Poll of 500 . Because the margin of error increases significantly as the sample size gets smaller. Host our guests are here to talk campaigns and politics from different perspectives. If you have questions, call the numbers on the screens. Republicans, 202 7488001. Democrats, 202 7488000. Independents, 202 7488002. Cspan is participating in a voters first oram Forum Tomorrow at 7 00 in the evening. Lets take a call. Mike from montana, democrat line. Go ahead with a question or comment. Caller i want to talk a little about the arrangement fox is having. I think it would make sense to extend the time for the debate and have everybody on kind of scramble or rotate on the stage. They do not ask the same question to all the same candidates anyway. So extend the debate, with everybody on the stage for three hours instead of two. Then just ask questions of all the different candidates over three hours and have them all on. That is basically all i have to say. Host mr. Winston . Guest obviously, the debates last time were a central piece. It is important for all the candidates to be on stage. I agree there should be a way to get everybody on stage. You are looking at some people who may not get in who are twice elected governors, not minor players. These are people with standing and stature. They should be on stage. There should be some arrangement applied to make sure everybody has a chance in terms of participating. Host could governor kasich not make the prime time slot . Guest he is on the bubble. I feel like we are doing the ncaa. Is one of the candidates on the bubble. When you think about kasich, here is a person who won a state that republicans have to carry did very well last time. The fact that there is a chance he may not be on stage is not a positive sense in terms of what the debate should be trying to capture. Host your ideas on what the caller talked about . Guest it is incredibly tough. If you said, there is going to be some subset of candidates for an hour, how you are picking candidates completely throws things off. Clearly, there are some personalities, so to speak. If you are in a group with donald trump, it will be completely different. Do you mix people at the top polling under zero . Do you tier it . I do not know if there is a perfect answer, but it is a little ridiculous that john kasich, governor of ohio, who ran very well there, is very popular according to polls, he may not be on the stage. It is a little strange. Host brick from ohio on the independent line. Caller i live in ohio. The people of ohio think kasich is rotten as can be. Here is the truth we are a police state. We are a police state, a military state, where funds are taken from the good of the people and given to the military so they can go on with illegal wars. You have a military state. The witness breaks down, i am, ohio from ohio. The last three wars were started by texans. This is my freedom of speech. Host to the point of pulling or the topic of what is going on . Can you direct a question . Caller polling is taking place out of texas. This is my freedom of speech you are going to hang up on me. All of the media is controlled out of texas, georgia, florida. The other part is the jews and the billionaires on the east coast. Host lets take the point of where polls are taken from. Guest the polling companies are based in dce, new york, california. All over the place. The methodology is flawless. It is getting a representative sample regionally, demographically. If you do not like the results that is your right. But in general, these are tried and true methods. When you are seeing similar results out of major polls, it says something. Guest i agree. There are call centers around the country. What you are trying to do is get a neutral voice so nobody can identify where the call is coming from and that does not become an issue. Host you mean accent . Guest yes, so the person on the phone has no sense of where that person is calling from, where they are from. Because there may be a perceived bias in that part of the conversation. They are all over the country. You are trying to make sure you get the best response from the individual you are calling. Host from pennsylvania chuck. Caller in terms of the polling 17 republican candidates if i had to select one, i would have great difficulty doing so. There are eight or 10 i would support. Why do you not poll in a rating of one to 10, so you do not get the skewing with one candidate . Guest that is not an unreasonable view. At this point, there are a lot of folks that are looking at potentially having four or five people they are interested in. The idea of potential he giving ratings is not unreasonable. Host what do you thinkhost . Guest agree completely. With media polls i do not want to disparage, but a lot of it is forgetting attention, clicks on websites. They do not tend to go into depth. Internal polls, i can guarantee you all these campaigns are factoring in what if this person drops out, leaves, what does that mean . There is a big difference between internal polls and media campaigns. Host questions for all caps, 202 7488001 for republicans 202 7488000 for democrats 202 7488002 for independent. S. When it comes to hillary clinton, likability, 57 of voters said she was not honest or trustworthy. 52 said she did not care about major problems. Is this a problem for her . Guest i do not think it is great. Good points to what they need to work on as a campaign. In the big picture what is happening on the president ial level is the way demographics have shifted in the country, democrats have an advantage. It is hillarys race to lose. If she does, it will go down as one of the worst campaigns possible. This is a smaller story to the big picture. They need to address this. If you have 57 saying you are not trustworthy, they need to do something about that number. But i do not look at that and say she is in trouble. Host what do you think they will change . Caller probably not a ton. She is a wellknown commodity from 1992. She has been a senator from new york, secretary of state. This is not a new person for the american public. Once people make up their minds, numbers do not shift dramatically. Would you like to see the number seeing closer to 50 overtime . Host would you question the source in terms of methodology . Guest they had somewhat strange state polls in colorado showing 36 of voters was undecided which is not true. Not that people were not saying that, but 36 of people in any state are not undecided on a president ial race, regardless of the candidates. There are not that many people up in the air. Host what about these people putting donald trump on top consistently . Guest i do not want to suggest there is a mindset, and this exists across the spectrum there are a group of people unhappy about the direction of the country and have been that way for a while. They look at political discourse as addressing those concerns. The people supporting donald trump are people willing to play 52card pickup. They just want to make a statement that they are unhappy the discourse is not addressing our concerns. Theyre just trying to shake things up. On the next washington journal, former officials of the center for medicare and Medicaid Services marked the medicare 50th anniversary. Robert egge from Alzheimers Association talks about how spending will be impacted by the expected rise in alzheimers by 2050. You can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Washington journal, 7 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. Monday night on the communicators, democratic representatives on internet privacy and how to combat data breaches. We have seen attack after attack. The most recent, of course, on the office of Personnel Management and private industry. Target, home depot, private corporations that have had customer information stolen. What we have realized is we can try very hard to keep ahead of the hackers, but what we need to do is think about how we minimize the need for customers to put their private information on websites. Right now, there are legal organizations from the government sharing information with the private sector and the private sector sharing information back with government termed to be acting as agents of the government. What we want to do is allow the barriers to be removed so you can share information on threat features, narrowly defined, very technical conversations. Of the various hacks. We can broadly share that information, when there is one hack one place, hopefully we can widely share the vulnerability to protect everyone. Monday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan two. Tonight on cspan, q a with Robert Kurson, followed by president ial candidates speaking this last week at the urban leagues National Conference in fort lauderdale. This week on q a, Robert Kurson discusses his book pirate hunters and the search for the ship the Golden Fleece sunk off the Dominican Republic in the 1680s. The captain, joseph bannister, was a respected merchant captain but became a pirate. Robert kurson also talked about his work as a journalist and author. Brian Robert Kurson, author of pirate