To watch an interview I did with Stuart Varney on this topic, please click on this link: http://tinyurl.com/qjjjehn. Read on to get some additional context.
On Monday, I had the opportunity to talk with Fox Business host Stuart Varney about three of my favorite subjects: burgers, our ads and politics. Stuart kicks off a segment entitled, CKE Restaurants CEO: Trump would make a better president than Obama, by asking me how I reconcile our provocative ads with my conservative politics. I told Stuart that, in order to sell a product, every business needs a target demographic. For Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, that target is 18-34 year old men, a target we call young hungry guys. Because they watch and remember our ads, they are more likely to walk into our restaurants and buy our burgers.
As for politics, I told Stuart that it is important for business leaders to speak up on the impact of economic policies, particularly as we are heading into the 2016 presidential race. Stuart then referenced some polling that indicates that “outsiders” are doing better than “establishment” candidates and asked me what I thought about this. I told him that if we want to win next year’s election, we can’t nominate a candidate whose focus is solely on winning the primary. Republicans will lose this election if our candidates confirm the Democrats’ narrative of Republicans as the bigoted, anti-woman, anti-immigrant party. We should be looking at the national polls for our candidate, not the Republican primary polls. We need to win. It doesn’t matter who wins the Republican nomination if we lose the presidency.