Our guest this week is Jay Walker, Executive Director of the Georgia House Republican Caucus and political consultant. In 2020, Republicans kept their majority for the Georgia House of Representatives with all 180 seats in the chamber up for election in 2020. Ceding only two seats, the Republican Party ended up with a 103-77 majority. Inspired by Ronald Reagan, Jay got into politics to keep the conservative movement and ideals alive and moving forward.
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Our guest this week on the Cygnal Pulse Pod (Ep. 17) is Jay Walker, Executive Director of the Georgia House Republican Caucus and political consultant. In 2020, Republicans kept their majority for the Georgia House of Representatives with all 180 seats in the chamber up for election in 2020. Ceding only two seats, the Republican Party ended up with a 103-77 majority. Inspired by Ronald Reagan, Jay got into politics to keep the conservative movement and ideals alive and moving forward.
Kicking off the episode, Brent Buchanan and Chris Kratzer discuss a new Cygnal service the team has been working on for quite some time that will change the way you get data called District and Issue Tracking (DIT). DIT provides a topline level look at what is happening in each state legislative district without polling each district which would be extremely expensive, time-consuming, and in some cases impossible. Yet again, Cyngal is at the forefront of disrupting the world of polling and data.
Mentioned in this episode: In critical Atlanta counties & Savannah’s Chatham, every single person who moved there from 2012-2020 could have voted Dem…and they’d still be 81k votes short of Biden’s totals.
What you will learn:
- What race put Jay on the map?
- How can people build “political family trees” like the one Sonny Perdue created and Jay is a part of?
- What’s a lesson that he had to learn the hard way?
- What is the biggest mistake Republicans made on a national level?
- Why has Georgia drastically changed in the past 6 years?
- What is the most important political trend that will affect the 2022 cycle?
They said what?
- “I think the democrats are about to help us tremendously even in the next 100 days.” Jay Walker
- Voting is an emotional procedure […] You can’t take emotion out of elections. You can have emotions driving our people or driving the other side.” Jay Walker
- “At the end of the day, we want to keep the American Dream alive.[…] We want to leave room in our laws and constitution for you to do that. Quite simply it’s Freedom. […] That’s still conservatism.” Jay Walker
- “If you are in politics for money, you are in the wrong business.” Jay Walker
- “Sonny has more integrity in his pinky finger than most people have in their whole body and he surrounds himself with good people.” Jay Walker
- “Sonny has always been the rope, that anchor that we could always call. […] He’s always been that political father we could pick up the phone and call. Still is.” Jay Walker
- “When you are in the minority […] there is a certain mindset that comes along with taking the majority. It is a fight. That mentality you have when you come into a fight is much different to the mentality you need after you win. […] The decisions you make are going to tell whether or not you are going to win elections from now on.”
- “We lost the message. […] We stopped telling people what we were going to do for them and we started saying if you vote for the other guys, here’s what they are going to do to you. There is a point where people want to follow you and not be scared of your message.” Jay Walker
- “The 6th congressional district […] is the quintessential suburbs. […] 58% of people in that district are not from the state of Georgia. So When you talk about Georgia ideals, Georgia conservatism, […] a lot of people don’t know what you are talking about.” Jay Walker
- “I think the independents […] are going to come back to us when they see the damage that is about to be done to the United States.” Jay Walker