Speaker 1: It is eleven days to go, and I'm thrilled today
Speaker 1: to be joined again by Tara Palmieri of Puck News,
Speaker 1: who is one of the very best political reporters in America.
Speaker 1: Has a real handle not just on what's going on
Speaker 1: in the race, but the people in the country that
Speaker 1: will decide the race, which is often an ingredient missing
Speaker 1: in the mix with a lot of the political coverage.
Speaker 2: Welcome Tyr.
Speaker 3: Thank you Steve for that kind intro. It's such a
Speaker 3: pleasure to be on the show. Really honored.
Speaker 1: I was about thirty seconds late dialing in on our
Speaker 1: set time because I got a call from a freaked out,
Speaker 1: freaked out Democrat Wow, very well known in the party
Speaker 1: and bereft, saying she's going to lose. The mood was despair, hopelessness, depression,
Speaker 1: a little bit of anger, and bewilderment about what she
Speaker 1: should be doing, could be doing, talking about the Nevada
Speaker 1: early vote numbers are terrible, real rage towards Biden that
Speaker 1: I think today you know that's just bubbling underneath there.
Speaker 1: But my first question for you, like is that is
Speaker 1: he an outlier? What's the mood as you're talking to people,
Speaker 1: what team thinks they're winning, what team thinks they're losing,
Speaker 1: who's happy?
Speaker 2: Who said?
Speaker 1: What's going on on the campaign trail with these campaigns?
Speaker 3: All right, I'll cut to the chase. Democrats definitely are anxious,
Speaker 3: they feel like they're losing. Republicans are feeling amazing. Perhaps
Speaker 3: it's misguided, but they're really encouraged by these early voting figures.
Speaker 3: Republicans are coming out in stronger numbers than ever before
Speaker 3: for a variety of reasons. You know, Republicans traditionally know
Speaker 3: voted early except for in Arizona, right, and it was
Speaker 3: always Democrats. I'm talking about the battleground states. But now
Speaker 3: you know there's vote by mail. There's early voting in
Speaker 3: these battleground states that some of them started back in
Speaker 3: COVID in twenty twenty or just in the recent election.
Speaker 3: And you know, Trump called it rigged, he called it,
Speaker 3: you know, fraudulent. But the new messaging from the GOP
Speaker 3: and from himself, a convert, is that vote by mail.
Speaker 3: I'm going to do it. Even Marjorie Taylor Green is
Speaker 3: voting early and by mail. So you know the party
Speaker 3: has shifted towards vote by mail, Vote by mail, vote
Speaker 3: by mail, and this is something you've never seen before,
Speaker 3: Republicans voting early, and in the case of North Carolina,
Speaker 3: yesterday they out voted Democrats by three thousand votes. That's
Speaker 3: never happened before. And in fact, like that's always been
Speaker 3: a strength for Democrats, specifically in North Carolina, is getting
Speaker 3: their voters out early. So there's obviously a lot of
Speaker 3: anxiety about these early voting numbers, and I think it's
Speaker 3: translating to both parties because and the Republicans are super happy,
Speaker 3: but you know what, these voters they may have gone
Speaker 3: out on election day and instead they're just banking their
Speaker 3: vote now, and maybe they're just cannibalizing the people that
Speaker 3: were going to show up anyway. And on election Day,
Speaker 3: when Republicans tend to get more voters, they might not
Speaker 3: see that. So this glee could be misguided. But I
Speaker 3: know that, you know, the RNC Coachair Michael Wattley is
Speaker 3: telling all the supporters, like, we're getting these great figures.
Speaker 3: We feel so good about Pennsylvania. You know, Democrats still
Speaker 3: haven't reached five hundred thousand early vote requests yet that's
Speaker 3: what they sort of need to counter on election day.
Speaker 3: And so you know, Republicans, so they always beat their
Speaker 3: chest like it's kind of part of the psychology of
Speaker 3: the party. And perhaps it's because they realize that they're
Speaker 3: voters don't like going out unless they think they're voting
Speaker 3: for a winning team, and Democrats induce anxiety to get
Speaker 3: their voters out. I mean, you can see it in
Speaker 3: Harris's messaging right, It's like, if you don't vote for me,
Speaker 3: it's an ex existential threat to democracy. Trumps of fascist.
Speaker 3: He's a dictator. Think of how dark it can be.
Speaker 3: I just had one of Harris's advisors on my show,
Speaker 3: John Angeloni, and he said, yeah, we're trying to induce PTSD.
Speaker 3: So like the psychology for Democrats right now, it's fear,
Speaker 3: but the fact that they're feeling it themselves is saying something, Right,
Speaker 3: there's one thing to be inducing fear on your on
Speaker 3: your voters to get them out as a way to
Speaker 3: it's not just persuasion. I think it's persuasion for the
Speaker 3: kind of voters who are on the fence, the devils haters,
Speaker 3: the Nicky Haley voters, the independence the lattads. But for
Speaker 3: those like you know, base voters who maybe are just
Speaker 3: like eh, I think she's got it locked up, like
Speaker 3: maybe it's it's a get out the vote mechanism for them,
Speaker 3: and I think the part I actually think her team though,
Speaker 3: truly feels it and fears that future and sees it
Speaker 3: possibly happening in eleven days. And Trump, like I wrote
Speaker 3: about this last week, but he's in a really good move.
Speaker 3: He just has been. And maybe he's overreading the early
Speaker 3: voting figures, like you said in Nevada, where Republicans are
Speaker 3: coming out in rural counties and even urban counties. You know,
Speaker 3: you got John Ralston at the Nevada Independent. He's kind
Speaker 3: of like the election political guru saying, this is a
Speaker 3: shocking like turnabout. We've never seen this before that you know,
Speaker 3: the Red machine, the Harry Reid machine, was supposed to
Speaker 3: get Democrats out early. That's how we did it. We
Speaker 3: banked you know, a third of our voters before election day.
Speaker 3: But you know Democrats now have a quarter of their
Speaker 3: voters out and Republicans have a ton of voters out.
Speaker 3: And he thinks that the no tax on tips and
Speaker 3: the fact that Trump put that out there first may
Speaker 3: have been like it may have been a way to
Speaker 3: sort of like draw wedge in the you know, the
Speaker 3: the hospitality unions out there, the culinary union, you know
Speaker 3: that that really controls like the Vegas area. So Steve,
Speaker 3: I'm hearing the same thing. But like Democrats by nature anxious,
Speaker 3: Republicans by nature, bravado. They said we were going to
Speaker 3: get a red wave in twenty twenty two. It was
Speaker 3: a red trickle. But you know it could be also
Speaker 3: a way to activate voters.
Speaker 1: Let's talk to psychology of it, because I think it's
Speaker 1: so interesting when you take this outside of green room
Speaker 1: theory and apply it to the complexities.
Speaker 2: Of the real world.
Speaker 1: And I want you to call me out if I
Speaker 1: say anything that is remotely imprecise or incorrect about what
Speaker 1: what's going to come out of my mouth. I am
Speaker 1: not wrong right when I say that Donald Trump communicated
Speaker 1: as aggressively as he could that voting by mail was
Speaker 1: a fraudulent, bad thing to do that elected Democrats.
Speaker 3: Correct, Absolutely, it's correct.
Speaker 1: Then one day Trump stopped saying it, yes and already
Speaker 1: starts communicating to that voter base which had been socialized,
Speaker 1: don't do this to you, gotta do this.
Speaker 2: Do I understand that? Right?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? I mean, in Pennsylvania, write that now some of
Speaker 3: the signs you'll see are swamp them with votes, make
Speaker 3: it too big to rig vote early today. So yeah,
Speaker 3: now he's saying, if you don't vote early, they're going
Speaker 3: to steal it from me. It's an extension of his
Speaker 3: they stole my election narrative from twenty twenty. But you know,
Speaker 3: my sources tell me that it was only a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks ago that Trump was truly persuaded that voting
Speaker 3: early was a good thing, Like late early October, he
Speaker 3: still didn't believe it. They had to push him. And
Speaker 3: you know, just like a year ago, he was still
Speaker 3: telling people he thought it was rigged and fraudulent. So
Speaker 3: whatever the Republicans have done is incredible. Now, I know,
Speaker 3: I always go back to my own family. I use
Speaker 3: them as my focus group. But I know my father
Speaker 3: is a Republican and he went out to early vote.
Speaker 3: My brother is a Republican. He went out to early vote.
Speaker 3: At the same time, my mom, who as a swing voter,
Speaker 3: went out to early vote and she's leaning towards Harris,
Speaker 3: and brought out my grandmother who is going to vote
Speaker 3: for Harris. So, like they're in North Carolina, early voting
Speaker 3: has always been a thing in North Carolina, but Republicans
Speaker 3: never really did it. They always were election day voters.
Speaker 3: But I think people are just like, why wouldn't we
Speaker 3: early vote? Now they've made it so much easier. I mean,
Speaker 3: but again, in Pennsylvania, early voting is down across the board.
Speaker 3: But it was like three to one Democrats from Democrats
Speaker 3: to Republicans in terms of early vote mail in ballot requests.
Speaker 3: Now it's two to one. So you know, Republicans have
Speaker 3: made gains and registrations in Pennsylvania. They're still not at
Speaker 3: the same level as Democrats, but there's something to be
Speaker 3: seen in these numbers, Like the trend lines are looking
Speaker 3: good and the momentum it's looking good for Republicans. On
Speaker 3: election night, you got to make sure you hold on
Speaker 3: to that could be, you know, it could be that
Speaker 3: Democrats end up surging in the end. But and a
Speaker 3: lot of women have come out to vote. That's another
Speaker 3: thing there have been there's been more women have come
Speaker 3: out to vote than men. So that's also a good
Speaker 3: indicator for the Democrats. But I think they don't ever
Speaker 3: feel comfortable unless they are surging. And like I mentioned,
Speaker 3: I also talked to Trump's polster John McLaughlin, who said,
Speaker 3: who showed me his figures? He made them public. They
Speaker 3: showed Trump winning within the margin of error, like by
Speaker 3: a point in Pennsylvania, right, And I'm like, why do
Speaker 3: you say this is a victory to me? You have
Speaker 3: a you know, forty nine percent chance of losing. And
Speaker 3: he's like, you just don't understand. We're not ever used
Speaker 3: to being up. Our psychology, even within the campaign, is
Speaker 3: that we're down. He said, you know, something like this
Speaker 3: day in twenty sixteen, Real Clear Politics had Hillary at
Speaker 3: forty eight percent and Trump at forty one. So they're
Speaker 3: not used to feeling as if they've got a shot,
Speaker 3: and so they may be over compensating for But I
Speaker 3: think it's partially the overcompensation from the numbers that show
Speaker 3: them at parody and this belief that there is momentum
Speaker 3: just based on the early voting numbers.
Speaker 1: Well, I think one interesting facet of it is that
Speaker 1: you have to really dig into the psychology of it.
Speaker 1: If I was sitting in the campaign, I'd be really
Speaker 1: curious to know, you know, all of a sudden and
Speaker 1: we say, if you're on the Harris campaign, if I
Speaker 1: was on the Harris campaign that the campaign's position is
Speaker 1: he's a fascist, which I would agree with, and that
Speaker 1: he is a top of cult of personality, which I
Speaker 1: agree with. So if that's true, the cult of personality
Speaker 1: is going to do what the leader tells it to do.
Speaker 2: So if the.
Speaker 1: Leader in all the propaganda vest will say do this,
Speaker 1: people in that cult of personality, if it's real, are
Speaker 1: going to respond.
Speaker 2: They're going to follow the order.
Speaker 1: So we're going to see somewhere north of one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty two million votes. You know, the side that
Speaker 1: is going to be responsive to the order is definitely
Speaker 1: the MAGA side. You know, the liberty loving side is
Speaker 1: going to be a little bit more freewheeling, and so
Speaker 1: we're going to see if that balance is out on
Speaker 1: election day. But if you look at this through the
Speaker 1: prism of past is prologue, or that there's a trend
Speaker 1: line and that you can make certain deductions because the
Speaker 1: next election is always a bit prefaced and foreshadowed by
Speaker 1: the last one, then it's a really ominous. It's a
Speaker 1: really ominous thing. I want to ask you. I want
Speaker 1: to ask you too about like this other kind of
Speaker 1: element of psychology, which I think is so interesting and
Speaker 1: in the formation of the electorate, which is, if I
Speaker 1: hear you correctly, what you're saying is that Democrats, in
Speaker 1: order to be incited and to be instigated to take action,
Speaker 1: have to be approached from the prism of something bad
Speaker 1: is going to happen. Fear that fear. And on the
Speaker 1: Republican side, right, what the stimulant is, right, the.
Speaker 2: Inducement to join is winning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, being on the winning team. That appears to be
Speaker 3: the psychology of the teams. Right. At the same time,
Speaker 3: I think they are both using, well more so the
Speaker 3: Democrats and Republicans. They're both trying to use scare tactics.
Speaker 3: Trump is leaning into immigration, something he leaned into in
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen crime, the idea that we're being invaded. But yeah,
Speaker 3: there's something I think for Republicans, especially these low propensity voters,
Speaker 3: that maybe they want to go out and say that
Speaker 3: they voted for their cult leader, right as you said,
Speaker 3: they want to feel like they're a part of something
Speaker 3: bigger than themselves. The question is, and what we hear
Speaker 3: from people like David Ploff on Harris's side, is oh,
Speaker 3: these are all, you know, first time voters, low propensity voters.
Speaker 3: When you're doing your models, how much are you accounting
Speaker 3: for the fact that a lot of these guys have
Speaker 3: never voted before, Like these like in cells in their basement,
Speaker 3: as they've been referred to by the Harris team. Sure,
Speaker 3: like they've never voted to before. They don't vote in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two when Trump's not on the ballot, right,
Speaker 3: it's all about Trump. But if Trump is really like
Speaker 3: a driver of votes for these specific people that don't
Speaker 3: vote regularly, then like it's really hard to know what's
Speaker 3: going to happen. It maybe even cancels out the fact
Speaker 3: that the Democrats have a much better get out the
Speaker 3: vote operation. You know, Republicans left it to Elon Musk
Speaker 3: and Charlie Kirk who are in way over their head.
Speaker 3: Their canvassers are mess Some of them are actually doing
Speaker 3: fraudulent door knocks, just trying to grift and it's it's
Speaker 3: like the republic Prokland National Committee is no longer a
Speaker 3: ground operation fundraising operation. It's really become an election integrity
Speaker 3: unit or you know, stop to steal unit. A bunch
Speaker 3: of lawyers are in there. Those are the people that
Speaker 3: are focusing on trying to like create law fare around
Speaker 3: the election because no matter what happens, unless Trump sweeps,
Speaker 3: he's gonna, you know, he's gonna claim that, you know,
Speaker 3: he won, and and even if Harris sweeps, he'll still
Speaker 3: claim he wins. So he's got to be ready for that.
Speaker 3: And he also believes that he's going to win, like
Speaker 3: he has said to his he has said to Michael
Speaker 3: Wattley and the RNC and all these people, like, I'm
Speaker 3: going to win this. And the only way i will
Speaker 3: lose this is if you fail me steal it from me.
Speaker 3: This is you know, this is it. So he's fired
Speaker 3: at warning shots already. Everybody knows that. So yeah, I mean, listen,
Speaker 3: is Trump enough of a get up the vote mechanism himself?
Speaker 3: Like between smartphones and the cult of personality, does that
Speaker 3: match a strong operation, a strong, actual ground game of
Speaker 3: canvassers out there getting people out that the Democrats have.
Speaker 3: It's hard to say, but like I can tell you this,
Speaker 3: Harris is not a cult leader. She doesn't have one
Speaker 3: hundred percent name. I D A lot of people say
Speaker 3: they don't really know anything about her. What more can
Speaker 3: you possibly know about Donald Trump? So it's really that
Speaker 3: is the X factor on election day at the same time,
Speaker 3: like all of these, a bunch of battleground state experts
Speaker 3: that I spoke to this past week and said, you know,
Speaker 3: Democrats are registering independence like at high at very high levels,
Speaker 3: and even in Nevada where their alarm belts have been ringing.
Speaker 3: And it's hard to say whether these are these independents
Speaker 3: are just like disguised Democrats, because in twenty twenty, Nevada
Speaker 3: started auto registering voters. It's the same thing in North
Speaker 3: Carolina when you go to get a license register your car,
Speaker 3: you're automatically registered as a voter, or there's just like
Speaker 3: a there's just like a thing you tick off and
Speaker 3: and if you don't pick a party, you're automatically registered
Speaker 3: as a non partnerson independent. So like these and they've
Speaker 3: come out, one hundred thousand of them have already come out,
Speaker 3: these independents. So what is motivating them to come out?
Speaker 3: Maybe it is the no tax on tips and they
Speaker 3: heard it first from Trump, or maybe they're maybe they're Democrats.
Speaker 3: So I think in a lot of these states there's
Speaker 3: there's been a big independent turnout. The psychology of it
Speaker 3: all is hard to say, because like women are also
Speaker 3: super motivated at the same time, like they may be
Speaker 3: more motivated than the in cells, and it might not
Speaker 3: be about Harris but about their own rights.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about the in cells. I
Speaker 1: want to for everybody who is who is watching this.
Speaker 1: David Ploff, who is directing the strategy at the Harris
Speaker 1: campaign Obama campaign strategist. His theory, if I understand it correctly,
Speaker 1: is Trump has a ceiling that he will not get
Speaker 1: a vote total beyond a hard number meaning right. Similarly,
Speaker 1: if you fly an airplane right into a hard object, right,
Speaker 1: because of physics to objects occupy the same space at
Speaker 1: the same time, it's going to explode, right, It's going
Speaker 1: to crash. So what Pluff is saying is, don't listen
Speaker 1: to all the noise, don't listen to all the thunder.
Speaker 1: There's a number that he's going to have to reach
Speaker 1: and he can't reach it.
Speaker 2: Is that about, right?
Speaker 3: Is that? Yeah, he's saying he can't get more than
Speaker 3: forty eight percent, essentially, But the Trump team at the
Speaker 3: same time counters you know, we're getting more first time voters,
Speaker 3: We're getting these young men, We're getting a lot of
Speaker 3: people feeling more comfortable about talking about votings for Trump.
Speaker 3: You know, you have this unique situation where incumbents are
Speaker 3: losing elections across the globe because of inflationary pressure, and
Speaker 3: you have like a unique set of circumstances where the
Speaker 3: fundamentals of the campaign are sort of on Trump's side
Speaker 3: right now. So whether you like him or hate them,
Speaker 3: if you're really voting on the economy and on immigration,
Speaker 3: the two top issues that voters report are important to them,
Speaker 3: Like the fundamentals of a race are on Trump's side.
Speaker 3: It's just like, and does that mean he can break
Speaker 3: his forty eight percent ceiling? I don't know, But does
Speaker 3: that mean that like Harris will get to forty nine
Speaker 3: point five or fifty, Like they both could have a
Speaker 3: ceiling and there could just be you know, who knows
Speaker 3: how the people in Michigan are going to go out
Speaker 3: and vote. Right there's Jill Stein still on the ballot
Speaker 3: with the Democrats right now. They might end up voting
Speaker 3: for Jill Stein. Steve, I'd be curious to see what
Speaker 3: you think. Do you think that forty eight percent is
Speaker 3: Trump's ceiling and he can't reach it?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: I was So there's a theory of the case right,
Speaker 1: and everybody has to have a theory of the case.
Speaker 1: If you watch a football game this weekend, as the
Speaker 1: game gets dound at his end, if it's a close one,
Speaker 1: coach calls the play, quarterback calls the play. That play
Speaker 1: is premised on a theory of the case that we
Speaker 1: line up this way and this player moves in motion,
Speaker 1: then these other players will react to that and be
Speaker 1: somewhere that we can exploit and take advantage of. And
Speaker 1: so I think that I'm not sure that I agree
Speaker 1: with the premise on the theory of the case.
Speaker 2: You know, Chuck.
Speaker 1: Yeger is the is the pilot who broke the sound
Speaker 1: barrier World War two ACE and Chuck Yeger when he
Speaker 1: broke the sound barrier, there was a real belief that
Speaker 1: it was a barrier in the sky that was like
Speaker 1: a wall, that when you hit the sound barrier it
Speaker 1: would be like hitting a wall, and instead he flew
Speaker 1: through it. So I don't sleep soundly as somebody who
Speaker 1: has a real rooting interest here with regard to that
Speaker 1: Trump can't break through that ceiling in the same way
Speaker 1: that the other campaign that David was involved in, Obama's
Speaker 1: campaign twenty twelve, the premise of the Romney campaign was
Speaker 1: that there was no way there could be more black
Speaker 1: people that would vote for Barack Obama in the second
Speaker 1: term than voted for him in the first term. And
Speaker 1: in fact, there were more black people that voted for
Speaker 1: him in the second term in the re election than
Speaker 1: in the first one. So I just think, at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, you have to take a shot.
Speaker 1: I think if you had somebody looking at this the
Speaker 1: best person in the world, Like if I could pick
Speaker 1: somebody if my brother was running for president and I
Speaker 1: had to look at him and say this, listen to
Speaker 1: this guy, I would say, listen to bluff, right as
Speaker 1: somebody who ran a race against David is how much
Speaker 1: was fact I have for them? But that doesn't make
Speaker 1: him an errant. It's not etched in granite. It's a
Speaker 1: gux and and it's a it's a very very close race.
Speaker 1: And all of the intangibles that you talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: is women. And one of the things that you're never
Speaker 1: here talking about on a television show a lot of
Speaker 1: these cable shows is that, well, is that woman responding
Speaker 1: to the immigration message or is she responding to the
Speaker 1: abortion message? What's the I card between those two. And
Speaker 1: so the answer to that tells me a lot about
Speaker 1: that early, that early female vote, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: displacements out across out across the country where we're where
Speaker 1: we're seeing it. I do think that the one thing
Speaker 1: that I find like really incredible about this race, which
Speaker 1: is I've never seen anything like it, is if you're
Speaker 1: working on a campaign. When I worked on campaigns, there
Speaker 1: was no tolerance or space for delusional people because you
Speaker 1: are involved in an effort that doesn't stop seven days
Speaker 1: a week, fifteen hours a day, and nobody wants to
Speaker 1: be with somebody who's telling them that the red chair
Speaker 1: is blue, that the green grass is orange, or whatever
Speaker 1: the case may be.
Speaker 2: For so much of the year, the.
Speaker 1: Position of the party, the Biden White House was so
Speaker 1: oppositional to what voters were saying, which is, we don't
Speaker 1: want this, we don't want this choice, we don't want
Speaker 1: him to run for reelection. Right, the party's position is
Speaker 1: basically like, we don't agree with anything on MAGA, on anything,
Speaker 1: but they agreed on one thing right, which is that
Speaker 1: the choice was the choice.
Speaker 2: Right. It was Biden.
Speaker 1: Versus Trump, until all of a sudden that it isn't now.
Speaker 1: I remember Bush in four o'clock to a bunch of this.
Speaker 1: I think it was like this talk he gave us.
Speaker 1: Always when I tell a story, I say it was
Speaker 1: the smartest piece of political advice that I ever heard
Speaker 1: anybody give. And the basis of it was essentially that
Speaker 1: there's nothing that any of you can do to mitigate
Speaker 1: my weaknesses. They will shine through because that's the nature
Speaker 1: of the process. And there's an accidental genius to the
Speaker 1: American process, which is that you are fully revealed for
Speaker 1: who you are by the fact that it never ends.
Speaker 1: It's not a European election, which you're so familiar with
Speaker 1: that they say in Belgium or France, whatever, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have an election, right and we're gonna have it in
Speaker 1: ninety days, and there's the election, and it goes back on.
Speaker 1: This process is interminable. It never ever stops. Kamala Harris
Speaker 1: took a big shortcut in the process. And what the
Speaker 1: polling has been saying through all of these months is
Speaker 1: we want to know something, we want to know something more.
Speaker 1: I talked to my Democratic friends all the time, and
Speaker 1: when you raise the question of well, the polling is
Speaker 1: saying they want to hear something more. You know, people
Speaker 1: will get enraged at you. They'll be like, what the
Speaker 1: fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 2: Right like.
Speaker 1: That, like what do you like he's talking about people
Speaker 1: eating dogs? And you're like, settle down again, I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm good. Right, she had me at second one, I.
Speaker 4: Would but you're anti Yeah, in a suspended animation tank, right,
Speaker 4: that's being said, right, there's.
Speaker 2: A there's a lot of it was.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of people right out there though, that
Speaker 1: are saying we want to know something more elemental, something
Speaker 1: more philosophical that she just still hasn't touched if you
Speaker 1: go buy the polls, and so you know, the question
Speaker 1: is there transference?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Does Beyonce appear and influence someone in the country and say,
Speaker 1: oh shit, like there's Beyonce right now, I'm with Kamala Harris, right?
Speaker 1: Or is all of that a distraction as we come
Speaker 1: down this stretch where she's got to take it, she's
Speaker 1: got to seize it. And if that's the case, and
Speaker 1: I think it is, like, do people understand in the
Speaker 1: democratic side, is there is there a shared kind of
Speaker 1: conviction about what she needs to say to close it out?
Speaker 1: If you win and you talk to twenty people on
Speaker 1: the campaign, would they all say the same thing about
Speaker 1: this is what we're talking about for last ten days.
Speaker 2: Of this No.
Speaker 3: I think you like hit it on the head in
Speaker 3: the sense that, like the one thing that she has
Speaker 3: not done is actually give a vision for her presentency,
Speaker 3: and she also hasn't been able to show how it
Speaker 3: will be separate from Joe Biden's presidency. People want change.
Speaker 3: They've made that clear when you get you know, thirty
Speaker 3: seventy seventy percent out of the country wants you know,
Speaker 3: it wants change. Once is unhappy with the way things
Speaker 3: are right, then you need to offer that vision of change,
Speaker 3: and she hasn't done that. I think that the prior
Speaker 3: democratic campaigns before them, even if they worked or didn't work,
Speaker 3: they still had like an action of movement, momentum of progression.
Speaker 3: Like I'm with her, We're going to break the glass
Speaker 3: ceiling together, Yes we can. We're going to nominate the
Speaker 3: first black you know, President Joy not really sure. That's
Speaker 3: kind of like a tepid feeling, but it's not like
Speaker 3: moving forward. It's not it doesn't push you anywhere. It's
Speaker 3: like just be happy with the way things are. No,
Speaker 3: tell me how they're going to change how many people
Speaker 3: aren't happy with the way things are. If you can
Speaker 3: answer that, if you can answer that question or you
Speaker 3: can answer that problem, then you win. You're the product
Speaker 3: I'm going to buy. But like, if your product doesn't
Speaker 3: fix my problem, then I'm not going to buy you.
Speaker 3: You're just on the shelf. And like and Trump says,
Speaker 3: I'll fix your problems. We'll go back to the way
Speaker 3: things were when maybe you were actually did feel a
Speaker 3: little better. Maybe you didn't like me, but I made
Speaker 3: it a little bit better. When this other product is
Speaker 3: just not offering me, it's it's saying a lot of
Speaker 3: things that are you know, it cures a headache, it
Speaker 3: cures this, it cares that. But like, no, what I've
Speaker 3: got right now is a stomach ache, and you're not
Speaker 3: saying that you can fix the stomach ache, you know
Speaker 3: what I mean. So I just don't know exactly what
Speaker 3: her I don't think she's offered the vision. What is
Speaker 3: she going to do to fix the problem that Americans have?
Speaker 3: And how is she moving forward? Like they're not happy
Speaker 3: with the state they're in, And I just I just
Speaker 3: don't even really like the messaging out of her campaign.
Speaker 3: What do you think do you think that joy is enough?
Speaker 3: And and now they've kindly like gotten to like fuck Joy,
Speaker 3: that's over with and they're fine weeks because they've got
Speaker 3: to go dark to motivate their voters, to kind of
Speaker 3: scare them into the folds. And I would be nervous too.
Speaker 3: I would be three and a half months is not
Speaker 3: a long time, as you said, to run for presidents
Speaker 3: to snap election, which is a positive or negative. But
Speaker 3: like the more she's out there, her favorabilities are dropping.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's the ads, the transgender ads. I mean, those
Speaker 3: have been really powerful, but they because they know not
Speaker 3: only like create the impression that she's a liberal, but
Speaker 3: they also seem to suggest that to waste tax payer money, right,
Speaker 3: And it hits that immigration, crime, the otherness, all of
Speaker 3: that the worst, like xenophobia of Americans. But also the
Speaker 3: view like that comment that she said, you know, what
Speaker 3: would you do different than Biden? Not a thing that
Speaker 3: comes to mind, like the fact that that was such
Speaker 3: a powerful message, which you you know, alerted me to
Speaker 3: saying like this is this destroys the premise of her
Speaker 3: case that I'm changed. I think that's that's a really
Speaker 3: powerful thing too, and they've never really been able to
Speaker 3: recover from They've never found the right answer to that question.
Speaker 3: I'm different, I'm a different generation. I'm this who cares
Speaker 3: insult Biden. It doesn't matter. Do you guys want to
Speaker 3: win this? Do you want to fight? Like, get your
Speaker 3: fucking knuckles out. And I know it's not like proper protocol.
Speaker 3: But if there's anything that Americans have shown it us
Speaker 3: time after time, is they're really tired of politicians. Don't
Speaker 3: be the politician out there. Sound a little different, be
Speaker 3: a little edgy. But like every time she's out there,
Speaker 3: even that CNN town hall, it's like, just get to
Speaker 3: the point. And like even asked about grief. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's a really tough question. You know, her mother just died,
Speaker 3: but like you can, you can like talk about it
Speaker 3: like a normal person does. You don't have to think
Speaker 3: that hard about talking about grief. It's it's like it's
Speaker 3: like she's going through her role decks of things that
Speaker 3: they prepped her with the lines, and they probably didn't
Speaker 3: prep her on grief, and they it's just maybe I
Speaker 3: think I might be being too hard on her. And
Speaker 3: I think everybody, even Democrats are feeling that way too,
Speaker 3: because of like the anxiety, like she's the one who's
Speaker 3: supposed to save us all from this, you know, from Trump, right,
Speaker 3: and if she's the savior, then you have to be
Speaker 3: perfect and I and again and back to plot. Like
Speaker 3: Pluff is obviously brilliant and amazing, but like Pluff didn't
Speaker 3: make Obama. Obama made Obama. He is a once in
Speaker 3: a generation candidate. He is like Flick, He is smart,
Speaker 3: he is every like only Obama could really pull off
Speaker 3: that first black president thing. And she didn't have to
Speaker 3: go through a primary. She was kind of known as
Speaker 3: like she's an okay politician. Everyone thought she was amazing
Speaker 3: because of the rollout. But the more she's out there
Speaker 3: and the more she's being hit, she doesn't know how
Speaker 3: to respond and so not to like dump on her
Speaker 3: when I could go on for days about Trump and
Speaker 3: all of his problems. But we know what Trump is
Speaker 3: and you know what you're getting.
Speaker 1: So so this is the conversation right now, right, this
Speaker 1: is this is the conversation that I think democrats are have, right,
Speaker 1: it is it is not a measuring the Drave's conversation.
Speaker 1: It's not optimistic, right, so I'm imagining a scenario, right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of roll by.
Speaker 3: The way all of my but way see, just to
Speaker 3: preface this for the listeners, all of my comments have
Speaker 3: nothing to do with how she will be as a president.
Speaker 3: I'm just talking about how she will sell the presidency
Speaker 3: to Americans. She might be a fabulous leader president, et cetera,
Speaker 3: but you don't get there until you sell yourself. And
Speaker 3: I just don't think she sold herself yet.
Speaker 2: No, no question about it.
Speaker 1: And I'm and I'm and I'm just listening to you
Speaker 1: and I and I just want to say to everybody,
Speaker 1: because we're living at a time where there's a lot
Speaker 1: of sensitivity about hearing any news that conflicts with your worldview,
Speaker 1: that this, this is precise, This is this is accurate, right,
Speaker 1: this is you know toward just Tonally is very much
Speaker 1: on the line with where Democrats are. She's reporting that
Speaker 1: in a in a way that I find very real,
Speaker 1: very tangible, because I'm having conversations with actual people that
Speaker 1: are that are very very close, know, on the line
Speaker 1: to what we're to what.
Speaker 2: We're talking about here.
Speaker 1: So I want to kind of set the stage and
Speaker 1: kind of role play this forward. Imagine that we're sitting
Speaker 1: around the table. It's at the Capitol. You got a
Speaker 1: bunch of staffers, you know, senate staffers, house staffers, white
Speaker 1: house staffers. Everybody's nervous. You're sitting in there. There's fifty
Speaker 1: people in the room. Right, everyone is bickering, whining. Somebody
Speaker 1: washed in there, right and says, shut the fuck up, right, stop, stop.
Speaker 2: It's an even race. She could lose. Who knows right?
Speaker 2: What are we going to do?
Speaker 1: Who is the person that Kamala Harris is going to
Speaker 1: look to that Barack Obama's going to look to that
Speaker 1: the core inside who has the most trust accumulated in
Speaker 1: the This person knows what they're doing. We're going to
Speaker 1: listen listening to them. Who is who's that person?
Speaker 3: Or Buff? I mean you were right, it's bluff, Buff.
Speaker 3: What didn't you say?
Speaker 2: I mean I.
Speaker 3: Gave maybe Axel Rod, I mean actual Rod still gets
Speaker 3: a lot of difference. He's seen as someone who sort
Speaker 3: of throws into the tent. But like you know, because
Speaker 3: he has the media job, he's got two podcasts. But
Speaker 3: like I think when it comes to what are we
Speaker 3: going to do for our closing out argument? They look
Speaker 3: at the last people who won the election, and all
Speaker 3: due respect to the Biden team, it was you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's Obama's team that people really really look up
Speaker 3: to it. Don't you think?
Speaker 2: Do they? I do? Do they do? They do? They
Speaker 2: have that shuttled? Do they know what they're going to
Speaker 2: close on?
Speaker 3: The closing is the fascist the fascist stuff? It's dark,
Speaker 3: you know, contrast, it's existential threat to democracy. Someone from
Speaker 3: Blueprint Polls do you know them? They read Hoff group,
Speaker 3: he's funding it. He sent me some of the polling
Speaker 3: and messaging and they found that this h you know,
Speaker 3: kind of threat to democracy language, the danger of the
Speaker 3: chaos around Trump, that it pulls really well with independence
Speaker 3: and the people on the margins, more so than the economy, immigration,
Speaker 3: even reproductive rights. I don't know if that's true, but
Speaker 3: he said by one point eight points that pulls better
Speaker 3: than the rest of the topics when trying to reach independence.
Speaker 3: So that's that's what you're going to hear. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's the it's motivation by fear, activation by fear of Trump.
Speaker 3: So yeah, that's what they're leaning into. What have you
Speaker 3: have you heard something different?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: I mean, but like do you think that's congruent with
Speaker 1: like having Beyonce out there, just Beyonce drive that message
Speaker 1: or arenacy a multi city celebrity fast in the Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton style?
Speaker 3: Oh god, yeah, no, everyone is getting.
Speaker 2: As in the final days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if there's everyone's getting PTSD and flashbacks. It's a
Speaker 3: lot of Hillary staffers to the fact that they did
Speaker 3: this multi city tour, you know, not in the battleground
Speaker 3: states with big celebrities. I mean some of these are
Speaker 3: in the battle ground states. I think Bruce Springsteen was
Speaker 3: in Georgia last week. But yeah, they might be bold.
Speaker 3: They're they're doing their Grand Finale and it's uh, they're
Speaker 3: Encore and it's it's just yeah, brusus Bruce. Maybe it works,
Speaker 3: maybe it doesn't. Trump's doing the same thing. They're indulging
Speaker 3: in their egos right now. He's going to as in
Speaker 3: Square Garden, he was at Coachella. They're trying to prove
Speaker 3: that they're a movement right, that they can go into
Speaker 3: unfriendly territory and uh, Trump wants to be the Obama
Speaker 3: of the right. Let's be serious, right, And I think
Speaker 3: for her that maybe it's the media markets outside of
Speaker 3: Houston that she's looking at But I don't know. I
Speaker 3: would keep my head down and just grind it out.
Speaker 3: But then again, like I'm not pluff, I'm not a
Speaker 3: political I just I just report on what they're doing.
Speaker 3: You would, don't, I mean, you've been on the other
Speaker 3: end of it.
Speaker 1: Is the campaign? Does the campaign have a plan to
Speaker 1: deal with his Madison Square Guardan rally since they're closing
Speaker 1: out on fascism? Is that there they are they going
Speaker 1: to meet them at that spot? Given that that's the
Speaker 1: spot where the German American booned put twenty thousand Nazis
Speaker 1: into the rally in nineteen thirty nine, any talk on
Speaker 1: the campaigns about that at all, Like that's a big moment.
Speaker 3: I know James Carvell has talked a lot about that.
Speaker 3: It's I think you would know this better than me,
Speaker 3: But I think that it might be a hard comparison
Speaker 3: to make, just because it's a difficult. Like, you know,
Speaker 3: some messages are just easier than others. Right, you can
Speaker 3: get your surrogates out there on cable saying that, but like,
Speaker 3: do you how do you put that in an ad
Speaker 3: like Trump Nazis Madison Square Garden. You know, maybe you
Speaker 3: can do that, but you only have a week left,
Speaker 3: so do you want to use that as your final argument?
Speaker 3: It might just be like is that a weird historical
Speaker 3: reference that might be related or not, whereas like we
Speaker 3: know that they are, or would you rather run the
Speaker 3: tape of General Kelly calling him? You know, but maybe
Speaker 3: you put it all on one and like and here
Speaker 3: he is in the same place that you know the
Speaker 3: Nazis can mean it's you're cutting new ads. You've got
Speaker 3: a week. I'm guessing these ads have been tested, and
Speaker 3: this is the final argument that they want. It does
Speaker 3: seem kind of like, you know, you save your I
Speaker 3: guess you save your best for a last right and
Speaker 3: and this is this is this is what they're going with.
Speaker 3: And it makes sense because if you're trying to win
Speaker 3: over people like those those Republicans, soft Republicans, swing voters
Speaker 3: like my mom. I mean, that was the thing that
Speaker 3: she just kept saying over and over again, like she's
Speaker 3: a double hater. I don't really like either of these people.
Speaker 3: But January sixth, like what a nightmare. I don't want
Speaker 3: that to happen again. Like just you know, we're just
Speaker 3: right around the corner from another you know, inaugurate you know,
Speaker 3: we're just around the corner from January sixth. This is
Speaker 3: reminding people of the chaos that could come at anytime.
Speaker 3: That's civil unrest. I think it's interesting too that Trump's
Speaker 3: team isn't really using the assassination attempts in their ads either.
Speaker 3: I think it might suggest to them from their pulling
Speaker 3: that like, actually people don't like civil unrest in either direction,
Speaker 3: Like the images of him being shot at create the
Speaker 3: impression that by electing him there will be more chaos
Speaker 3: as well. It supports Harris's argument.
Speaker 1: Let me let me, let me go in another direction,
Speaker 1: imagining a scenario where she's going to win, and let's
Speaker 1: say I'm like it around eleven forty five pm. Pretty
Speaker 1: confident trajectory wise. You know that she's got it. Most
Speaker 1: people who've done this believe she's got it. The Cornaks
Speaker 1: of the world, Harry Enton on CNN, all the all
Speaker 1: the math prodigies we're going to have, And let me
Speaker 1: just back up and just say that, you know again,
Speaker 1: I have I placed the phone call for John McCain
Speaker 1: to Barack Obama right in the process of the concession
Speaker 1: phone call, and.
Speaker 2: And on that.
Speaker 1: So Trump, let's say, goes out and says, even though
Speaker 1: he's losing or loss, that he's winning and is going
Speaker 1: to win.
Speaker 2: Will Fox call the race?
Speaker 3: M poor Chris Starwalt. You know, he gave me my
Speaker 3: first job the Washington Examiner. He plucked me out of
Speaker 3: the green room at what happened to him was so
Speaker 3: terrible they fired him for calling it in Arizona. I
Speaker 3: think they have to. I think, deep down well based
Speaker 3: on my reporting too, Murdoch is so fucking done with Trump.
Speaker 3: He's really done with him. Like sure, he wanted to
Speaker 3: bluns him by getting him to pick Doug Bergham to
Speaker 3: put an adult in the room rather than JD. Vance.
Speaker 3: But I think Fox would probably be more than happy
Speaker 3: to like call it early. But I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think it's like what I think. I think the
Speaker 3: journalists are going to be nervous. Look what happened last time,
Speaker 3: wouldn't you be I mean, if you were thinking like
Speaker 3: you might get you might get fired for it.
Speaker 1: What about Elon Musk in Twitter? Oh my gosh, if
Speaker 1: you guys talked about that at puck? What does what?
Speaker 1: What does anyone think that that's going to look like?
Speaker 1: When I mean I think that whatever we associate Acts
Speaker 1: or Twitter with regarding misinformation. Right, it like hasn't really
Speaker 1: gotten going yet with regard to what's coming, but that's
Speaker 1: going to be a big factor in the twenty four
Speaker 1: or forty eight hours as a crisis builds.
Speaker 3: No, that's a brilliant question and something probably an assignment
Speaker 3: editor should be on for every single that every network
Speaker 3: should be covering this right now, because, yeah, what are
Speaker 3: his plans? Maybe he doesn't even know, but of course
Speaker 3: he's going to be promoting any sort of data that
Speaker 3: suggests that Trump is winning, even if it's you know,
Speaker 3: you know, it changes throughout the night, and I've got
Speaker 3: to assume that. And if we don't have the results,
Speaker 3: how long is he going to be pushing information that
Speaker 3: suggests that votes are being stolen? Here? I mean, he's
Speaker 3: intimately involved in the process by way of supporting these
Speaker 3: super packs that are get out the vote superpacks, right,
Speaker 3: that are kind of like attached to the RNC, you know,
Speaker 3: part of the election integrity unit. He's going to have
Speaker 3: information and intel and he's going to want to sew
Speaker 3: disinformation and distrust in the process. And we know that
Speaker 3: at least forty seven to forty eight percent of people
Speaker 3: are going to vote for Trump, so they're going to
Speaker 3: be looking at this and wondering if they're vote counted
Speaker 3: or mattered. And where they get their media, it's going
Speaker 3: to likely highlight in their algorithm, you know, information that's
Speaker 3: that shows that they shouldn't they shouldn't trust the results.
Speaker 3: I was just thinking too about TikTok. You know, you've
Speaker 3: got Jeff Yas who's got a lot of money on
Speaker 3: the line with Jet TikTok. It's been banned, right, it's
Speaker 3: coming before the Supreme Court Federal. I think, yeah, that
Speaker 3: there's a case before the Supreme Court. Trump has said
Speaker 3: he would support TikTok. Yas is a donor to Trump.
Speaker 3: It's it's a Chinese health company. What are they going
Speaker 3: to do? I mean, if there's anything about social media,
Speaker 3: it's like counterculture and the fringes that tend to be
Speaker 3: amplified on the social media outlet. So like h I
Speaker 3: could see them really amplifying the noise and the disc
Speaker 3: and the and the information that's not trusted. Now like
Speaker 3: meta has learned its lesson, right, So like this interaction
Speaker 3: that we're having right now probably won't be posted. If
Speaker 3: you posted on on meta on an Instagram or Facebook,
Speaker 3: it probably won't populate high. The algorithm depress it, you
Speaker 3: know there, but if if we but the political content
Speaker 3: does really well on TikTok, it does really well on Twitter,
Speaker 3: and and I think there's a reason for it. And
Speaker 3: I could I could see I could see Musk just
Speaker 3: letting the conspiracy theories go wild, like Twitter could become
Speaker 3: like the back page of the Reddit, which I think
Speaker 3: is a completely unregulated right, which could lead to god
Speaker 3: knows what. I don't want to I don't want to
Speaker 3: be apocalyptic. But in a lot of ways, a close
Speaker 3: race is a terrifying thing because like, without having a
Speaker 3: clear answer, it just like we distrust, it creates conspiracy.
Speaker 3: I mean you people that I've spoken to inside of
Speaker 3: the RNC who are like adjacent to the Election Integrity
Speaker 3: Unit say there are sane people there like Watley who
Speaker 3: are prepared, who is a R and C coach Air
Speaker 3: who are prepared for some of the other lawyers that
Speaker 3: are part of this team, like Christina bob who was
Speaker 3: indicted in the attempt to steal the race in Arizona,
Speaker 3: Kurt Olsen, another election denier, who are prepared to say
Speaker 3: that machines are changing votes. Right, It's like they're they're
Speaker 3: willing to redo the playbook all over again. And it's
Speaker 3: and what are they supposed to do? And they've already
Speaker 3: shot off emails to America. They've been sending letters to Americopa
Speaker 3: County judges who are like, back off, back off. It's crazy.
Speaker 3: They're laying the groundwork. It's going to be law there.
Speaker 3: Let me, there has to be a decisive winner. I
Speaker 3: think for that not to happen, if I.
Speaker 1: Was, if I was on the if I was on
Speaker 1: the campaign sometime this week preserving this has not been
Speaker 1: done yet, you can tell me that this has been done,
Speaker 1: and it will make me feel better because it would
Speaker 1: be late to be having the first conversation about it.
Speaker 1: But I would I would say something like, we have
Speaker 1: to have a meeting this week.
Speaker 2: And I don't like to have the meetings, right, so
Speaker 2: I don't I don't have to mean if I say
Speaker 2: we got to have a meeting, we got to have
Speaker 2: a meeting.
Speaker 1: And what I would want to say in the meeting is,
Speaker 1: let's imagine where winning. We're winning in any normal election year, right,
Speaker 1: we would wait for the phone call. Now, we would
Speaker 1: give some space. There might even be some contact between
Speaker 1: the campaigns. David would be cautious in this moment, responsible, restrained,
Speaker 1: and respectful, as would Stephanie Cutter. Right, they're gonna be like, wait,
Speaker 1: not yet, not yet. So Trump goes out, makes us
Speaker 1: first allegation they're stealing the election. I won, YadA, YadA, YadA,
Speaker 1: whips everybody up. The Harris Walls campaign is going to do.
Speaker 1: What do you think they've had this meeting yet? Is
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris going to walk out? Is the general counsel
Speaker 1: or the campaign going to walk out the moment that
Speaker 1: that happens, Right, there's a game, a deadly one. I
Speaker 1: suspect a foot Do they have this planned.
Speaker 3: App That's a good question. I don't know that. But
Speaker 3: we know just from Pennsylvania and the way that the
Speaker 3: voting works there, you're probably not going to get a
Speaker 3: decisive vote for four and a half days. Right, they
Speaker 3: don't count all their votes, and Pennsylvania has come down
Speaker 3: to a point. So unless the sweep and all the
Speaker 3: rest of the states and we end up back where
Speaker 3: we were in the last two elections, is probably going
Speaker 3: to come down to come Sulania, Right, And so Trump
Speaker 3: will come out and say he won. I fully expect
Speaker 3: that even before the votes are counted, unless for some
Speaker 3: reason it's I don't know, even if it was blatantly
Speaker 3: obvious that he lost, I think he'd still say he won.
Speaker 3: Maybe they do have, you know, Walls and Harris come
Speaker 3: out and say, like, right now, we haven't been able
Speaker 3: to count all the votes. If it's if it's close,
Speaker 3: if it really looks like she's down, I think she
Speaker 3: can sees right, I mean, how could she not do
Speaker 3: the responsible thing? But if it's that close, she's like,
Speaker 3: I want you know, everyone to you know, wait, be
Speaker 3: you know, let's have some patience to get through the votes.
Speaker 3: We're very optimistic, but you know, there are a number
Speaker 3: of apps and tee ballots and we still need to
Speaker 3: count the votes in these crucial states. So please, like,
Speaker 3: have some caution and just and and I think they
Speaker 3: I would hope that they showed some responsibility in terms
Speaker 3: of how they handle this. I think they would, especially
Speaker 3: if they're trying to show contrast with Trump. But they
Speaker 3: should have a plan for this. I don't know. It's Steve.
Speaker 3: I wish I had the answer, but I don't know
Speaker 3: what the plan is. And did you know what you
Speaker 3: were going to do ahead of time?
Speaker 2: Absolutely you did.
Speaker 3: Have you heard what they're going to do?
Speaker 2: No, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously there won't be a concession phone call, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's going to be a misinformation race where the
Speaker 1: chances of all the violence, all the terrible things go
Speaker 1: up if it's not contained. Right, it's going to be
Speaker 1: like a fire, like a big, giant California style inferno.
Speaker 3: Fire which is essentially lit up by it. And we'll
Speaker 3: start with a small truth social tweet in the back
Speaker 3: of the woods, amplified by all the networks, all of
Speaker 3: his surrogates, Elon Musk amplify even go to truth social media.
Speaker 3: He goes on Twitter, maybe he live streams it in
Speaker 3: an interview with Elon Musk, and then the algorithms that
Speaker 3: go crazy.
Speaker 2: I mean, like I would like to aboost.
Speaker 1: I mean, if I was running the campaign, I would
Speaker 1: go see the White House Chief of Staff and I'd say,
Speaker 1: why doesn't the President fire Americ Garland this week and
Speaker 1: say that he doesn't have confidence in him to oversee
Speaker 1: the crisis that will occur in the country if a
Speaker 1: fascist movement tries to claim victory after losing an election,
Speaker 1: and I think Democrat base voters would like it. I
Speaker 1: don't think Independence would be offended. Republicans would be enraged,
Speaker 1: which would help make the race more about them than Harris,
Speaker 1: which is kind of the alchemy that you need, you need.
Speaker 2: At the end on all of those things.
Speaker 1: But no, I do like I would, I would be
Speaker 1: sitting around right now. I mean, there's you know, obviously
Speaker 1: there's this, there's this, you know, part of the rhythm
Speaker 1: of a campaign when there's two hundred and fifty days left, right,
Speaker 1: There's a lot more work to do when there's eleven
Speaker 1: days left, right, because so much of this is in.
Speaker 2: Planning, right you You have now.
Speaker 1: Until next Thursday at about four o'clock Eastern time to
Speaker 1: make your last traffic changes, to get kind of get
Speaker 1: your last ads out, to get the points behind them
Speaker 1: for the final weekend. So there's not a lot more
Speaker 1: to do on the campaign per se, because the conventions
Speaker 1: are behind you, the debates are behind you, everything behind you.
Speaker 3: You have. It's interesting you said that, so really you're
Speaker 3: what you're saying is whatever her vision is, whoever she is,
Speaker 3: whether you want to have a beer with her or not.
Speaker 3: It's too late to make that argument to voters at
Speaker 3: this point. And so really what they are doing is
Speaker 3: the right thing by is by highlighting the publicans, by
Speaker 3: highlighting the you know, the unpredictability of Trump, the fascism,
Speaker 3: the danger, the chaos. So they are doing the right thing,
Speaker 3: and you're remember this race.
Speaker 1: I think whomever this race is about is going to lose.
Speaker 1: And so in the end, right, it's not going to
Speaker 1: be determined by the TV advertising.
Speaker 2: Though his is.
Speaker 1: A lot better than hers, right in terms of the
Speaker 1: power of the message, and it's and it's residence, but
Speaker 1: all of it together.
Speaker 3: Right, is so much better than hers. I don't understand
Speaker 3: that there's so much footage of him.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 1: We've had a nine year conversation, right where what is
Speaker 1: Trump is still unsettled? Right, it's the fascist madam vice president.
Speaker 1: We're thirteen days from the election. I can go on
Speaker 1: for hours about this.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The answer to the question, and historically tangibly ideologically is yes,
Speaker 1: he is. But he has been and it's not hyperbole.
Speaker 1: But should they Democrats be talking about the economy? Does
Speaker 1: the country see Joe Biden is fdr? Is Bidenomics something
Speaker 1: that the middle class was excited by right.
Speaker 2: So all of this goes back to kind.
Speaker 1: Of what we were talking about earlier, which is we
Speaker 1: live in this era where there is a belligerence on
Speaker 1: the part of the campaigns towards the voters that really
Speaker 1: wasn't present I think in either party when I was
Speaker 1: doing this right in my kind of stretch, because there
Speaker 1: is a recognition that no reason antagonize the voter. Right,
Speaker 1: They're trying to tell us something here, and just a
Speaker 1: lot of that doesn't seem to matter in the moment.
Speaker 1: In the end, here, she needs to prosecute the case.
Speaker 1: She has to give a closing argument. If he's a danger,
Speaker 1: then you have to communicate that he's a danger.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If he is a threat, right, then it's a different
Speaker 1: close than the Obama clothes ina against John McCain. So right,
Speaker 1: what she says matters, But she's got to keep the
Speaker 1: race on him. Right, that the great question at hand
Speaker 1: isn't about Kamala Harris. Great question at hand is about
Speaker 1: the country and Donald Trump, right, And that wherever that
Speaker 1: ribbon is on that tug of war rope, it's got
Speaker 1: to be on her side of that line in order
Speaker 1: to be able.
Speaker 3: To so She's basically like, I'm a product. You might
Speaker 3: not like me, but that product is actually toxic and
Speaker 3: it is poison. And I'm warning you that you're about
Speaker 3: to buy poison. And you can buy me on water,
Speaker 3: but that's poisoned next to you.
Speaker 2: You have to talk.
Speaker 3: But you're like, but that's mountain dew. And I like
Speaker 3: mountain dew. I like in the end, in the end,
Speaker 3: like a mountain dew in the end.
Speaker 2: Like Ms.
Speaker 1: Churchill said two things right, he said, people get the
Speaker 1: government they deserve and he was like, in the end,
Speaker 1: Americans always do the right thing after exhausting all the
Speaker 1: other possibilities. So like, we're definitely in that moment, right,
Speaker 1: We're gonna see from my perspective if he's right.
Speaker 2: You know, I like, intellectually I don't have a.
Speaker 1: Great feeling, but faith wise in the country that I'm
Speaker 1: still not across the line where I see Donald Trump
Speaker 1: getting re elected as a as a as a matter
Speaker 1: of faith in who I think we are as a people.
Speaker 2: But there's a lot of us.
Speaker 1: Right, there's three hundred and forty million, one hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty two million people are voting. You know, Joe, When
Speaker 1: someone like Joy Behart goes out and says, I no
Speaker 1: disrespect to her, but she's like, I can't even imagine
Speaker 1: why someone should vote for Trump.
Speaker 2: That's a big problem.
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of people around the Democratic
Speaker 1: campaigns that have no capacity, emotionally or intellectually to understand
Speaker 1: what it is about Trump that people find appealing. Right,
Speaker 1: why that insult in the basement? Finally, Right is part
Speaker 1: of a community.
Speaker 3: Well, he feels strength. He's a guy that has always
Speaker 3: felt like he was a weak person in society, and
Speaker 3: he derived strength from Trump. I think a lot of
Speaker 3: men feel oppressed, which is, you know, despite white privilege
Speaker 3: or whatever, they feel oppressed and they derive strength from
Speaker 3: Donald Trump. I love Trump supporters. You know, they're in
Speaker 3: my family. I love them, and I can't the things
Speaker 3: they say. They may not make any sense, but I
Speaker 3: understand where they're coming from emotionally and psychologically. So a
Speaker 3: feeling of being left out. You know, my father is
Speaker 3: an electrician, is what He's a small business owner. Where
Speaker 3: is his place in the global world replaced by immigrants
Speaker 3: that are coming through? You know, one day automation will
Speaker 3: do what he does.
Speaker 2: Does he like it? When he gets the lecture about
Speaker 2: his white privilege.
Speaker 3: Oh, well, he's not a white person to him because
Speaker 3: he's Italian and Italians weren't allowed to live in certain
Speaker 3: places when he grew up. So you know, that's another thing.
Speaker 3: People don't want to be called white sometimes when they
Speaker 3: know that they weren't really considered they were never allowed
Speaker 3: to be a part of the wasp class either. Right,
Speaker 3: So there's like a whole there's a whole weird psychology
Speaker 3: around it. And like I would be it would be
Speaker 3: an amazing thing to see if young women end up
Speaker 3: carrying the day on election day, they just come out
Speaker 3: and drove and say like just like fuck you, we're
Speaker 3: voting for for for cos it's such a that's the
Speaker 3: antidote to it, right, like.
Speaker 1: It is it is, that is the serum to it. Right,
Speaker 1: It's just a surge of women to say no, you
Speaker 1: say no.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because everybody has like everyone is a victim in
Speaker 3: their mind right, and so like if you can activate that,
Speaker 3: how you can like how whatever you represent gives that
Speaker 3: victim's strength, then like I think you're going to win
Speaker 3: them over in some way. And I do think that
Speaker 3: Kamala Harris is a powerful symbol for women, Like I
Speaker 3: even remember in the last election, like I'm trying to
Speaker 3: make a point of not voting. When I'm covering an election,
Speaker 3: sometimes I don't really cover it. Like last election, I
Speaker 3: didn't really cover it, so I was like, I can vote.
Speaker 3: I was doing Epstein work. But you know, like I
Speaker 3: felt like a real pride when I saw her get
Speaker 3: to the point of vice president and just like not
Speaker 3: I was like, whoa, this is a big moment. Like
Speaker 3: I felt like a woman is in the White House,
Speaker 3: like that was a big deal. It represents a lot
Speaker 3: for women, And I do think a lot of women
Speaker 3: feel victimized right now by the idea that they don't
Speaker 3: have control over their autonomy of their body and they
Speaker 3: and and and her, and that message is really strong.
Speaker 3: But there is a whole other segment of women who
Speaker 3: are past that phase of their life. Maybe they're they've
Speaker 3: already had children. It's on top of lists for them,
Speaker 3: they're worried about. You know, someone like my mother, for example,
Speaker 3: who's like, you know what, I'm past that stage in
Speaker 3: my life. I mean, I'm sixty, I about to do this,
Speaker 3: this and that. It's like much as I care about that,
Speaker 3: I've got another I've got other issues, so but I
Speaker 3: also think she's ultimately going to vote for Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I want to understand the psychology of voters,
Speaker 3: but I don't think they can even really rank their
Speaker 3: positions as what's most important to them in their heads.
Speaker 3: I think it's just a feeling you have and who
Speaker 3: you like and who you relate to, and who you
Speaker 3: think is going to give you more power in the world.
Speaker 3: And it's it's hard to say like and if you
Speaker 3: don't feel like you're going to derive any power from
Speaker 3: that person, maybe you won't go and vote for them.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a great place to leave it. I'll just
Speaker 1: conclude it by saying that this is the sixtieth quadrennial
Speaker 1: presidential election. We've done this as a country sixty times.
Speaker 1: Women have gotten to participate in the last twenty three
Speaker 1: of them, and black people if you lived in an
Speaker 1: apartheid state in the South the last thirteen. There's three
Speaker 1: hundred and forty million people that live in the country.
Speaker 1: There is only seven hundred million of us that have
Speaker 1: ever been in all of history, in all of human existence,
Speaker 1: which means half of us who have ever lived, roughly
Speaker 1: or alive.
Speaker 2: Right now in about.
Speaker 1: One hundred and sixty two million people, roughly about half
Speaker 1: of that are to come out and vote in this election.
Speaker 1: And what you said, I think is a perfect way
Speaker 1: to end it, because nobody really knows in what mix
Speaker 1: voters will turn out. That there's a small geography that
Speaker 1: produces the overwhelming amount of people that go on television
Speaker 1: and opine about who's gonna do what and where, thousands
Speaker 1: of miles from them. But the fact is we just
Speaker 1: don't know. And so in this final week, as you
Speaker 1: come down, I think a couple of things you said
Speaker 1: are just really true. That there's a real sense in
Speaker 1: the electorate that her vision is not yet clear. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of anxiety and worry among Democrats. There's a
Speaker 1: real recognition that there is a surge towards Trump of
Speaker 1: mail vote that will cut into black and Hispanic numbers
Speaker 1: that is material. And there is an un known question
Speaker 1: around how America's women will respond to years of antagonism
Speaker 1: and the loss of a right for the first time
Speaker 1: in history granted by the court now stripped away directly
Speaker 1: because of Donald Trump, who's made clear this is his achievement.
Speaker 1: So I have in all of my you know, I'm
Speaker 1: fifty four now, right, so you know, going back to
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety two when I was twenty two and coming
Speaker 1: out of college, this is the one that is the
Speaker 1: closest and hardest to really tell where it is is
Speaker 1: close to the end.
Speaker 3: If you had to make a prediction today, though, who
Speaker 3: do you think wins?
Speaker 2: I say this, I'm not trying to dodge it.
Speaker 1: Like my intuition, my instinct, my feeling is not good, right,
Speaker 1: it's he wins. My faith, which is as I kind
Speaker 1: of get older and which is tough for me, kind
Speaker 1: of an acceptance of letting go, a serenity almost. I
Speaker 1: have a deep, deep, deep faith in the country, not
Speaker 1: as a Djingo, not as a nationalist, but in the country,
Speaker 1: the idea of it, the people in it. And I
Speaker 1: don't believe the American people are going to elect this
Speaker 1: guy president again. So if you make me pick, she wins.
Speaker 1: But I'm literally taking a leap of faith, and I'm
Speaker 1: taking it with a strong voice in my head telling
Speaker 1: me the parachutes not going to open when.
Speaker 2: I jump out of the door of the of the plane.
Speaker 2: So so there you have it.
Speaker 3: I I don't know Steve, like, I actually think he's
Speaker 3: gonna win, and my sense is like, only he could
Speaker 3: fuck it up because so many of the fundamentals of
Speaker 3: the rates are on his side. But I also just
Speaker 3: and maybe it's because people are unafraid to say that
Speaker 3: they're going to support Trump now, like maybe the stigma
Speaker 3: around Trump is gone. But I just feel that there's
Speaker 3: a more intensity for him. I think there's a lot
Speaker 3: of intensity for her when she first came out, But
Speaker 3: you're seeing her favorability favorables starting to drop, and I
Speaker 3: don't know what to make of that. I mean, why
Speaker 3: do you think her favorables are dropping now? The more
Speaker 3: she's out there and the more people geting to know her,
Speaker 3: her numbers go down.
Speaker 1: When you're aiming at a target, they teach you how
Speaker 1: to shoot a rifle, right, there's this saying, you know,
Speaker 1: aim small, miss.
Speaker 2: Small, right, So.
Speaker 1: You have to be able to evaluate what elevation you
Speaker 1: need to climb to to clear the mountain where you're
Speaker 1: going to fly into it. I don't know a better
Speaker 1: way to explain it. If you were talking to somebody
Speaker 1: associated with the space program, they would tell you that
Speaker 1: the rocket has to hit seventeen thousand miles an hour
Speaker 1: for it to break Earth's orbit and get into space.
Speaker 1: If it doesn't, it'll bounce off and it'll burn up
Speaker 1: and everyone will die. When you saw the polling right
Speaker 1: develop in August, it's September where the elector is saying
Speaker 1: we want more. That was a signal that they wanted more.
Speaker 1: And so like, if she does not win, I've been
Speaker 1: able to for some time, I feel like be able
Speaker 1: to articulate why not. Right, I'll be able to diagnose it,
Speaker 1: so I know why it wouldn't be the things that
Speaker 1: she didn't do that she had to do to win.
Speaker 1: And the question is did she do enough, Because she
Speaker 1: did a lot to get over the line. It is
Speaker 1: to be really close. Look, I think that there has
Speaker 1: not been in our articulation right of a vision about
Speaker 1: where she wants to lead and tough as it may be,
Speaker 1: tough as it may be personally. As you're sitting around
Speaker 1: the table in the campaign, surely to god, somebody sat
Speaker 1: there it had a serious discussion that we're not going
Speaker 1: to lose this race to Donald Trump because we're afraid
Speaker 1: of offending Joe Biden's ego about answering the question on
Speaker 1: what we would do differently, because we need to not
Speaker 1: only say something that we would do differently, probably don't
Speaker 1: need to communicate that we would do a bunch of things.
Speaker 3: Differently and call out maybe some things you could have done.
Speaker 3: What's wrong with saying I didn't that's right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: So that weakness, Well, the concept of accepting accountability, it's
Speaker 1: my fault in meaning it. You know, Afghanistan, for example,
Speaker 1: is reported right as the catastrophic withdrawal in every news
Speaker 1: organization in the country, right from Fox News to the New.
Speaker 2: York Times at a Wall Street Journal. As an objective descriptor.
Speaker 3: You don't even need those papers, just look at the images.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, so you obviously say, right in Republicans, right,
Speaker 1: this was this was an important question, right, And anytime
Speaker 1: when you look at one of these questions, right, that's uh,
Speaker 1: that's in the end. Right is a disqualifying right, You
Speaker 1: could lose the election issue. There's always the oppositional, right,
Speaker 1: there's always the opposite version of it any other party.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So you know, during during the height of the Iraq War, right,
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, Barack Obama comes on the scene
Speaker 1: as an Iraq War opponent, but for years afterward, right,
Speaker 1: the question would be asked in this plate role in
Speaker 1: helping make Trump the nominee was knowing what we know now,
Speaker 1: would we have invaded Iraq again?
Speaker 2: Is the world safer?
Speaker 1: And so all the crazy things that Trump said in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, none of them were crazier than Jeb Bush saying, yet,
Speaker 1: we would have invaded Iraq again? Right, So you had
Speaker 1: an entire party to a position that the entire country
Speaker 1: knew was wrong. And it wasn't like they wanted to
Speaker 1: hear them renounce the Iraq War. They wanted to hear
Speaker 1: that candidate common sensically agree with the proposition that they
Speaker 1: knew to be true, which was, of course not. We
Speaker 1: wouldn't fucking do that again. It was a disaster, Right,
Speaker 1: That was the question. And so when Jeb Bush says
Speaker 1: it politician now, Trump goes, of course not. So the
Speaker 1: version of that question for Democrats, right, that you could
Speaker 1: see coming from a mile away, was Okay, what are
Speaker 1: you gonna do differently than Biden?
Speaker 3: The other hard one is how long did you know
Speaker 3: that Biden couldn't run or really be president? And that's
Speaker 3: just like plain of day to any human being. You
Speaker 3: really have to be a partisan to be able to
Speaker 3: look past that. Yeah, and that's that's that's really what
Speaker 3: it comes down to. Or you have to like really
Speaker 3: hate Trump. That's a hard one and.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a bigger issue with real people in
Speaker 1: the country than is covered, you know, and for sure.
Speaker 3: Because it looks like a scandal. It frankly looks like
Speaker 3: a scandal.
Speaker 2: People.
Speaker 1: Well what it does, right if you say that Biden
Speaker 1: was fine and the border is secure in the end,
Speaker 1: you help make Trump the most prolific liar in American
Speaker 1: history and to the honest candidate in the race. So
Speaker 1: when you're sitting around strategically and you're kind of how
Speaker 1: the fuck did that happen?
Speaker 2: Right, that's how it happened. Right.
Speaker 1: So when you look at this from a political perspective of, hey,
Speaker 1: why did we lose, Well, the most dishonest guy that's
Speaker 1: ever been, a guy who's making up lies about Haitians
Speaker 1: eating cats and dogs. Somehow, because of your dishonesty, was
Speaker 1: able to encircle us neutralize the issue.
Speaker 2: And there you go, right, So, you know, politic top issue.
Speaker 3: I mean, did you see Anderson Cooper in the town
Speaker 3: hall with her when he was like, well, why don't
Speaker 3: you just do the Title nine executive order again? What
Speaker 3: took so long? Why not do it at the same time.
Speaker 3: I mean, that was very insightsive question, but it was
Speaker 3: pretty pretty basic. You don't have to be a rocket
Speaker 3: scientist to know that he could have could have fixed
Speaker 3: the problem along. And it's a hard one. I mean,
Speaker 3: maybe just take accountability. We thought we could fix it
Speaker 3: with Congress. We should have done it this way. But
Speaker 3: is weakness solve something you can't do? And Trump's or
Speaker 3: of never say sorry, you know this is or never
Speaker 3: admit be accountable to anything you're right? I mean, these
Speaker 3: are these are the things that we're going to look
Speaker 3: back on, and I think a lot of the blame
Speaker 3: is going to be on Joe Biden if they lose.
Speaker 3: I think people are going to be furious with Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: Is going to be a brutal, brutal, uh brutal thing
Speaker 1: for Joe Biden, for the people around him. It will
Speaker 1: shatter his legacy and it will it and it's going
Speaker 1: to have it will have a profound impact on the
Speaker 1: media business, right, which is you know, a subject for
Speaker 1: another day.
Speaker 2: In that you know you're in.
Speaker 1: A news organization that is disrupting it. The media business
Speaker 1: is going to be further deeply disrupted by a by
Speaker 1: a Trump win. There's gonna be a lot of soul
Speaker 1: searching about the total disconnect and how he was covered
Speaker 1: over the last nine years. But for sure, that being said,
Speaker 1: I do want to say at this moment, you know
Speaker 1: you heard, you know, it's it's close. You know, for
Speaker 1: those of you who are out there, you got to
Speaker 1: be involved. You know, politics is a uh part of citizenship.
Speaker 1: Be a good citizen, do something, get involved, don't wind,
Speaker 1: don't complain, get in the fight.
Speaker 2: And with that we there.
Speaker 1: This is the warning. Thank you, Tara Palmieri, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for taking time this fleet Friday afternoon from
Speaker 1: the East Coast.
Speaker 3: Have a good one.
Speaker 1: I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning and I invite
Speaker 1: you to join. Subscribe on our sub stack, on our
Speaker 1: YouTube channel, follow us. Welcome to the community.