Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Mike Murphy on Plan B for 2024

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Each national political party should be thinking about their Plan B for the 2024 presidential election. Mike Murphy returns to the podcast to discuss each party's predicament and where they can go from here. Murphy has worked on a number of presidential campaigns and run 26 gubernatorial and US Senate races across the country. He was a top strategist for John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. He’s co-host of the critically acclaimed "Hacks on Tap" podcast. Mike is also co-director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Political Future. Subscribe to Mike's substack newsletter: https://substack.com/@mikemurphy1

This is Joe Biden looking at the mirror and looking at the Constitution deciding, I've got to make the ultimate sacrifice here for the country. But he's taking a very reckless, reckless risk, and somebody ought to look him in the eye and tell him that. Lots of news this week for the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primaries, Donald Trump, and also the frontrunner, I guess that's what we'd call him, for the Democratic nomination, President Joe Biden. So I think both parties are asking, is there a plan B?

I mean, one party is asking it a little more vocally and publicly than the other, but it's definitely a conversation happening. Is there a plan B for either of these parties and either of these candidates? To pick someone's brain who's been thinking a little bit about this, our old friend Mike Murphy, fan favorite of the Call Me Back podcast. Lots of demand for Murphy. We wanted to check in with him on what he's been thinking about the plan B for either party. Mike, as our listeners know, worked on 26 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races across the country, including 12 wins in blue states, something that's getting harder and harder to do. He was a top strategist for John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Arnold

Schwarzenegger. In fact, you can see him in the new Arnold Schwarzenegger docuseries on Netflix. He's a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC. Mike is co-host of one of my favorite political podcasts, Hacks on Tap, which if you're not a subscriber already, I highly recommend that you become one. He also pens a political newsletter, which you can find on Substack. Just search for Mike Murphy in Substack and you'll find it. A couple of recent interesting posts. And Mike's the co-director of the University of Southern California's Center for the Political Future. Mike Murphy on Plan B 2024. This is Call Call me back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend and a fan favorite on the Call Me Back podcast, Mike Murphy. Murphy.

Hey, Dan. It's good to be here. I always call you back even when my friends and advisors say, you know, this is getting a little stocky. Might be time for the restraining order. It's not me. Dan's been through that before. I don't want to put him through that nightmare. friends and advisors say, you know, this is getting a little stocky. Might be time for the restraining order. And I go, no, no. Dan's been through that before. I don't want to, I don't want to put him

through that nightmare. We won't say the words, Katy Perry. But anyways. It's not me. It's the listeners. It's the listeners. Well, they're my people. They're the stockers.

There's like three or four people that they, that they can't get enough of. And, and you are one of them. So anyways, but really why I wanted to touch base is, um, I would say two or three areas of panic that I hear from my friends. So I'm like a vessel for their anxiety. That's right. That's the old evangelical trick.

You know, how did I, how did I make you walk again? I'm just a vessel for the Almighty. Now, if you happen to have $200 for the prayer fund. Okay. It's Ernest Angelo's old scam. No, but go ahead. Fire away. I'm a vessel for my friend's anxiety.

And so I'm going to tell you some of the things they're anxious about. Well, there's a lot these days. So let's start with the first one. New York Times, Sienna Poll comes out a few days ago you and i did a podcast right before the 22 midterms where you did a kind of master class on why you shouldn't overthink or over interpret or over worry polls especially national polls um in uh in the political campaign season. So having said that, so we kind of strenuously resist the temptation to over-interpret polls, but we are going to kind of suspend that briefly here, at least to address the anxiety of our listeners. What did that poll tell you i mean the headline is biden and trump are tied at 43 percent but

which is which is sort of shocking but what what what is everyone freaking out about this poll well i i saw it and i thought the new york times is sure doing its job of setting the national agenda uh for everybody in politics to immediately uh it's an old Dennis Miller joke. I know it's a bear market because I immediately run outside and crap myself. So I knew all hell would break loose. Now, let me say, my rant about national polls is about primaries. The old milk gordsman rule, who was a Kennedy operative, smart guy, passed away now. We used to always say, don't believe any national primary poll until after the first contest. And I'll talk about that in a minute. The general election data is more telling because one, you are testing two semi-known quantities. They know who Trump is. They've tasted that dog

food. About 100% of them are aware or close to. These are registered voters. And they know Biden. He's the incumbent. So the main number you want to start looking at is, in most situations, you never know when you're going to have the alien election and all the rules go out. But generally, there's a revert to mean and a historical power to all this. You look at Biden's number, because most presidential elections are first and foremost a referendum. Do we keep them or do we go for something new? And so Biden's sitting at 43. And then you got Trump, who's literally a barge load of political baggage, particularly among college-educated white voters. It used to be the backbone of the Republican Party. There's been this weird switch of we now have blue-collar working-class voters, including latinos at a higher rate uh than history would

suggest and then all the suburban you know college educated voters are now doing far more democratic in their voting so blah blah blah that is by the way that the i mean not enough attention has been paid to that and over the last eight to ten years, the Republican Party has been the most multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class political party we've seen. I mean, it's extraordinary, the transformation. Yeah, it turns out the answer to Jack Kemp's great dream is fascism. We didn't get that in the lab. We can thank Trump and resentments and grievance politics. But so 43-43 is a tie between two products more than half the dogs have tasted and don't like.

Now, there's still a lot of time. Biden has a very big microphone as president. They don't use it particularly well, but they may learn. But it points to the fundamental weakness he has as an incumbent. Why? Well, people, and remember in politics, it's not the, hey, the bond market's excited. No, no. It is what people perceive is going on in the economy. And with interest rates creeping up, maybe appropriately to smash inflation, which seems to be happening, people see it in the car payment and the house payment and refinancing things. So there's economic anxiety

out there in perception, even with the low unemployment rate, and they blame the president. And then Biden's got this special problem, which is he's 108, and it's constantly discussed. It's not something, you don't put out a photo op of here's Joe Biden doing his 200th pushup this morning. It doesn't really go away. So the problem they've got is there's a two plus two equation going on. Well, I don't think the economy is that good. By the way, most voters, even though they hate Trump, give him about a 20 plus percent advantage, or even generically the Republicans who have brand problems, they give them the advantage on handling the economy. So they think Biden is so weak on the economy, they actually would rather have Trump, who they hate.

So anyway, that combines with age, which is, you know, grandpa's just not up to running the most complicated control board in the world that affects my car payment and mortgage. You know, we need something new. So Biden's only scraping 43% of the vote together. Why doesn't Trump suffer from the the age issue the way biden does because you know i think over time and that's the last right no you're you're true this is this is like a battle royal in the courtyard of the uh the old old people's home

here you know it's just they're arguing about the korean war hitting each other with canes. The timeline is the other equation. You know, Biden, stuff can happen, you know, it's more than a year to the actual general election. And both of them have a toolbox in front of them. Now, you know, there's the other topic of, is Trump the nominee? So everybody read that poll and said, it's over, Trump's the nominee. You know, my dear friend, longtime friend and podcasting partner, David Axelrod, is trying to quietly have me committed because he sees the national polls. You're out of your mind. It's Trump. And when I say, well, no, you're in a confirmation bubble because you're trying to find a reason to think Biden can win because you guys are going to blow this presidential election, maybe even to Trump. That's how bad the Biden situation is.

So, okay. So now let's, all right. So that's, that's Biden. I just want to come back to Trump for a little bit. Why, I mean, is he, on the one hand, 43% for Biden seems really weak and for Trump, 43% seems really strong. Well, I don't know. When you get the tribal Republicans and everything together, you break 40. You know, a bucket of horseshoes is going to get low 40s against an unpopular Democratic president. So the question is, can Biden grow to 49 or 48? And can Trump ever grow from 43? And there's a lot of junk in front of both of them. But if the economy starts to come back,

if there's a signal, interest rates tick down, the psychology of the economy changes, Biden has the Navy shoot down, you know, a Russian drone somewhere. I mean, there are things that can happen to Biden to move it back up. The age thing doesn't go away,

but the other stuff could. And they have a weapon too. We can't underestimate the cord and row. The American kind of voter market is conditioned to the Supreme Court on big things that penetrate popular culture saying, yes, right, you can do that. This is the first time the court has been the elders and footloose and said, no dancing. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Turn off that crazy beat. And that has electrified a lot of younger voters, particularly younger men who are the most pro choice group, by the way, not women. So we Republicans have decided to shove reducing

perceived abortion rights into the middle of a presidential campaign, which gives the Democrats a way to say, yeah, the economy's turning and this ought to be Biden's message. We've done the hard work. Now it's starting to finally turn rather than let me read you statistics about how great I did, but they've now got this smoke bomb where they can say, well, we're, we're, we've got a great plan in the economy, but look over there, they just arrested your sister, um, you know, for kissing a boy. So the Republicans just keep diving into the woodchipper on this because all the primary incentives, they think, I think there's a lot of misreading going on,

are he's for an eight-week abortion ban? Ha! Squish! I'm for a six-week abortion ban with armed enforcement. Drones monitoring women of ill repute. So it is the usual GOP modern era suicide instinct. The only guy who's not really falling for it, ironically, is the most powerful pro-choice force in the Republican Party, which is Donald Trump, who doesn't believe any of the abortion stuff, and he just adds it to the list of lies. And just to add one more layer of complexity,

the people who are trying to beat Trump think the way to do it is evangelicals in Iowa. Now, last point, the primary data was like 53 Trump, negative 12, everybody else, DeSantis 17. And so we did the thing we always do. You know, we decided we can now see the future. So all the opinions changed. If the election were held tomorrow, it's an absolute fact, and this poll verifies it, Donald Trump would be the Republican

nominee. But the election is not held tomorrow. So the way the process works is Iowa, New Hampshire, and then a certain momentum. So it's Trump's nomination to lose, but if he loses Iowa, New Hampshire, he can collapse quickly. And that vote doesn't move now. In 2016, the last big open Republican primary contest, the summer front runner in the respected Des Moines Register poll, which is the best traditionally anyway, media poll there, was Scott Walker. Coming in number second, eight points behind him, Rand Paul, the unstoppable freight train. And keep an eye on that number three candidate here in Iowa, which will do everything, the great Ben Carson.

So, you know, you've got to be careful because it's very log arithmetic there. If Donald Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire, he's the nominee. If Donald Trump doesn't, he loses both of them, particularly to the same person, then it's better than even money. He'll implode and won't be the nominee. And so that's the argument I've been making. I'd like to wait to have the dog's taste of dog food. In New Hampshire right now, the Republican dogs

that know Trump, because he has about 100% dogs have eaten that dog food rating, he's polling about 37 to 38%. I see a lot of the private polling, even though no candidate will admit to knowing me, I have a fascinating cell phone bill. And so, um, you know, you got one out of three now. So there's an open market. I was a little better for Trump, but it's a little forties. And the other thing is everybody's polling the old caucus, which is heavily Christian. You got 170,000, excuse me, 162,000 Democrats and Democrat leaning independents who now have nothing to do on caucus night in Iowa. And there's no armed guard at the door. You show up, sign a card, yeah, I'm Republican,

and you can vote. So yeah, there'll be some college Republicans, you know, with a case of beer in the car, we're going to vote for Trump. Ha, we're helping Biden. But most of it will be good government Iowans who want to put a dent on Trump. So I think the caucus electorate could be as big as 200,000 instead of the normal 170. And the Delta could be people who hate Trump and want to do the patriotic thing. So, you know, Trump's got to navigate his dirigible, enormous as it is,

through a narrow mountain pass here. And then, yeah, he's the nominee. But I'm not ready to go there right now based on summer noise meter from cable TV national polling among voters who barely know yeah, he's the nominee, but I'm not ready to go there right now based on summer noise meter from cable TV national polling among voters who barely know there's a guy named Decalorius or something who's running against Trump and then a few people I've never heard of. Okay, so Bron DeSantis in that same poll, in the New York Times Santa poll, he's got a net favorable rating of, what is it it's 31 what 3147 versus trump's 4155 so something's happening

with desantis yeah i mean again noisemeter effect i read the table story yeah and he's a lousy candidate that that doesn't help spend a minute on that so what's going on there because because you need an alternative right right so the press decided and a bunch of the donor class who follow this stuff like a hawk, they're really trying to play the futures market of who's going to be president so they can tell their friends at the cocktail party, I knew it. I was on that Vivek Ramachandran thing from the beginning. I could see the future. You know, I've been to some of those parties.

Careful, don't knock over the Ming vase. You know, I went short on plastic coat hangers and well, now I'm that kind of insight is what I brought to the, the presidential thing. So, you know, DeSantis was the guy cause he had the easy real estate to appoint him. The guy's got money in the bank, governor of Florida. Now he became governor of Florida by beating two stiffs. That's the thing people forget a little bit. He didn't ever really have a hard state race.

You can argue because it was close. His first race against the mayor of Tallahassee ran hard left and had all kinds of problems, got jammed up later, and then was acquitted eventually. Gillum. Wow, Gillum, Andrew Gillum. He only won that by a point. Yeah, because he was terrible then too. It was also a horrendous year for Republicans. Right, right, Andrew Gillum. He only won that by a point. Yeah, because he was terrible then too.

It was also a horrendous year for Republicans. Right, right, right, exactly. But he won. You give him points. His new name is governor. And then he beat Charlie Crist, who is kind of the Harold Stassen of Florida. You know, had a few, he's kind of a wily operator, but he never had enough money to get in the race.

And he was a party switcher. He had some problems. So, you know, DeSantis is now as the early front runner, big Florida guy, obviously younger, plays the Trumpian culture war stuff well. He's kind of running as a dime store version of Trump, which is, in my view, not a great strategy because how do you out Trump Trump? But anyway, he was appointed the front runner. He got the cable noise. He went up in the national polls, noise meter. And then it turned out that like, you know, he tries to kiss a baby, the baby pokes him in the eye, you know, smears the ice cream on his face because he's not Mr. Charisma.

Now that said, the media wanted to hate him culturally because, you know, the people who work hard to present impartial news are culturally much more into kale and PBS than they are into Republican primary culture. So he instantly died there. That stuff seeps through. They ran a pretty incompetent campaign out of the box. On the ground in Iowa, he's doing a little better than people are giving him credit for. At the big jamboree the other day, I had a couple old hack buddies there and I talked to them afterward and they'd say, yeah, Sanders was better than Trump on his feet, got huge ovation. So I haven't ruled him out

completely. But he's definitely on the downslide. He was one of the most important political leaders in, you know, 2020, 21, 2022, and certainly other than Donald Trump, you know, one of the most important Republican player because of what he did with COVID and how he led and navigated and governed during COVID, whereas the whole country seemed to be, most of the country seemed to be zigging and he zagged and he was excoriated for his zagging and the public authorities were you know waving you know wagging their fingers at him and you know he was and all these all these people at the time you know at the peak of covid you know tony fauci andrew cuomo gavin newsom they were like gods they were demigods like everyone was listening to every word they say, and they were saying, this guy is, you know, Ron DeSantis is, like, murdering people.

And he stuck to his guns, more or less. And he turns out, at least on COVID, to have been largely vindicated. He opened schools. I would say semi-right, but yes. Now, you don't know if it was inside or just, hey, I can be the contrarian and get the Republican culture right. Whatever the motivation. Yeah, he was the COVID star of the Republican Party. I mean, in September of

2020, he opened schools. Like, and he said, we're going to, that's like a, you know, that was not, I mean, and now in retrospect, it seems like totally logical at that time. He was literally, you know, he was being excoriated. So, I actually think he's got an extraordinary story to tell,

and that obviously was like jet fuel for him. Nobody wants to talk about COVID. Well, there's less news value in it. And he decided, you know, now that I've defeated the virus, at least in perception, I'm going to take on the shareholders of the Walt Disney company, you know, and he starts throwing monkey wrenches, hunting for cultural fights. Hey, I'm going to, it turns out being a slave wasn't so bad. Three squares a day and you learned how to work an ax and a shovel, you know? They didn't even charge him for job training. You know, he goes down that, which he thinks he's trolling the media, but he doesn't understand that it's the old George Lakoff thing.

Don't think of an elephant. So even though, yeah, yeah, we all hate the liberal media and the Republican Party, et cetera, et cetera, the messages still seep in. DeSantis hates people. DeSantis is a lousy candidate. DeSantis is a loser. You see, DeSantis' big kryptonite against Trump should have been, I'm a winner. I handled COVID. I beat every Democrat in Florida. I get Latino votes. I'm the future of culture war conservatism, and I'm younger than those two old fools who are running. Instead, he's gotten off on all these side battles, and the larger narrative has been lost, particularly because all the process coverage, which we're now in an epidemic of, it's all the media really wants to talk about, is about the super PACs at war, the Casey DeSantis behind the scenes, this Lady Macbeth, you know, blah, blah, blah. But it makes them look like he's going to lose. And if you're trying to tell the Republican primary voters,

I'm the guy who can beat Biden, yet your campaign has big red clown shoes, it's self-defeating. So he's doing dime store and New Deal, and he's a loser. So, yeah, oh, the donors can hardly wait to run. Now, the problem is Tim Scott. Okay, before we get to Tim Scott, I just want to mention, so the campaign super PAC issue is interesting. So, and I guess we're, you know, here we are, you know,

complaining about process analysis, but I want to do a little bit of process analysis. No, that's why we're here. I mean, it's our job with our 200 listeners, right? So 220. 200,000. Sorry. Yeah. So. By the way, do you ever do the pod ranking thing? You should, because you find out your podcast is the number two podcast about American politics in Estonia or Kenya or somewhere. We do it with Hacks on Tap for laughs. And we figure out that there are 30 people at the embassy in Romania who listen. that all right the line listen up we got it we got the English language uh Romanian podcast

ranking okay so um the DeSantis I mean DeSantis is running a pretty unconventional campaign structure which is is you know historically um most of the decision making and most of the infrastructure is at the campaign, at the candidate campaign. And then there will be this other vehicle, the Super PAC, that operates quote-unquote independently that is doing the paid media and some of the digital media. And they can take unlimited donations to do that, but they can't coordinate under FEC rules, under federal law, with the campaign.

And they're supposed to sort of follow publicly the campaign's lead they can't speak privately once the once the candidate becomes a candidate and um and they spend this unlimited money unlimited donations to amplify the candidate's message through pay tv desantis has has kind of flipped it where he's moved much more than a lot of the pay tv and digital to the super pack he's moved the ground game he's moved this bus tour he's doing in iowa right now a lot of the paid TV and digital to the Super PAC, he's moved the ground game. He's moved this bus tour he's doing in Iowa right now. A lot of the sort of tactical ground game infrastructure to the Super PAC. So the Super PAC is really the show.

I mean, I guess there's not much precedent for this. I was struck that J.D. Vance, when he ran for Senate in Iowa, did a version of this too, whereas the candidate campaign for Vance and now DeSantis is like this tiny little operation. And most of the action is over at the Super gets a discount on paid media, so they want to be spending most of their money on paid media and let the super PAC kind of do everything else. Yeah, in their case, they like to spend it on aircraft charter. But keep going because their FTC report is a train wreck. So when I was listening to it, I was thinking, okay, I get it in – I get the get the theory but in practice it seems like hell no

there's a lot of ever worked on a campaign yeah i mean i've run a huge super pack i've been i've been to this movie here's the problem super pack money if you've got heat uh is much easier to raise than federal money because it's not limited so yeah you can get 3200 from an individual for your individual campaign super packing and take a can take $100,000 or whatever. So money piles up. So, of course, the campaign is like, well, how do we use all that money effectively? Well, you go to your lawyer and say, we're the Super PAC. We can't coordinate.

But can we rent the hall and have a crowd and the candidate shows up and then we vote our idea. When you say we can't coordinate, what this actually means is the super PAC cannot communicate privately with the campaign and say, hey, given the message you're pushing this week... Why don't we handle the ag radio? You guys do this and on Thursday we're hitting them with an ad so the next day the press is

on the pumpernickel issue and then that's when we pivot. Yeah, yeah. You can't do any of that. It's highly illegal. They all kind of have to operate independently. But here's the problem. The rules are murky. So what you do in the, you go to your lawyer, and you say, hey, can we do this?

And it's like pornography. The lawyer kind of stares at it and says, I don't know. So it's murky law and it hasn't been tested much in court. So you have to decide, do you want a conservative lawyer, or do you want Sidney Powell? So last time in 2016. Rudy Giuliani to decide, do you want a conservative lawyer or do you want Sidney Powell? So last time in 2016, right, right, right. Legal, legal. So last time Kasich pushed it the farthest because the candidates who are broke have the five donors back in Akron who will write a big check to the super PAC. And then they can also have a C4 committee, which is how Marco did it

last time, which is undisclosed money that you can semi-use for politics. Yeah, not as efficient. So not nearly as efficient, but you've got donors who want to give to five candidates. They like it because then nobody can know who they're for because they're trying to be for everybody. So the DeSantis guys have thrown the old, they got Sidney Powell and they're like, we're going to push this thing to the max. Now I've told Jeff Rowe, who's a friend of mine that, you know, you're a little too good looking to go to prison. Uh, but they're trying it. And what they're trying to do is all the Iowa field, they're throwing events that DeSantis shows up in. Um, it, it is,

it, it is the most aggressive ever. And the problem is some, uh, what happens is a clever kid in the campaign shows up and says, Hey, the deputy scheduler of DeSantis has a personal Twitter account with three followers, and I'm one of them. And I have an account with two followers, and I'm one of them. So when I put next Thursday, we're going to have a rally of 1,000 people in Indianola, I'm publicly communicating it. Phony press releases. Campaigns even put out little $200 ads they make with a robot voice on Google hoping the Super PAC will see it on a YouTube

channel with 10 people and then put $2 million behind a professional version of the ad. And it's all very aggressive and the next time Fox... Just for our listeners to understand, that is the way the campaign or the Super PAC basically passes the test of all our strategy. We didn't coordinate.

It's public. It's public. We're throwing up on Twitter. We put out a strategy release, which says, boy, our plan is next week to have a hell of a lot of radio. The campaign put out a memo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They all do it now. Yeah, the campaign basically put out a memo saying that we need to be advertising in the Boston market in order to play New Hampshire, which many in the press interpreted as the hey, hey, super PAC. It was like a bat signal to the super PAC.

But the dementia, you're totally right. So they're trying very aggressive stuff. political prosecution, quote unquote, which apparently has replaced cut taxes in the Republican glossary, is going to be when the Justice Department starts going after DeSantis campaign staff, because they're running wild with this. And maybe it'll work. Maybe it'll pass legal muster. I'll be shocked, because these rules are going to be written by the enforcement attempts after this cycle. And the Dems do all this stuff too, but DeSantis has set on a presidential primary campaign, a much more aggressive standard. The other problem is the super PAC and the campaign apparently hate each other. You know, normally the super PAC watches the campaign and

does two things. Try to hurt the opponents with advertising, try to help the candidate and send out little hints, but really follow the can't like a hawk and try to, as you said earlier, amplify what they're saying. So if we read the campaign, oh yeah, next week is going to be metric system week, then all right, among the key primary electorate of 3 million people in South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Iowa, let's go put out $7 million of, you know, only Ron DeSantis stood up to the French metric system. So, you know, it's, it's, it's still, here's what you can't do. You can't teach the candidate how to debate.

If you're running the super PAC, you can't put the candidate in the ads and candidate driven ads are more effective often. And you can't drive the schedule. So now there's all this backbiting between the two because the donors have lost faith in the campaign. There's been nutty spending in each, each of them. The press is having a field day with the FEC report and it is well known, at least by rumor, because I've never worked for him, but in the political consultant bar room gossip that Governor DeSantis and the first lady, his wife Casey, hate consultants.

So I'm sure they're sitting around thinking those idiots at the Super PAC have blown all this money and DeSantis has even publicly kind of indicated, how come I'm not seeing more TV ads about me and the metric system? So the Super PAC has got the message and said, they're morons, we're doing it our way. So it is yet another part of the process, train wreck, along with candidate tone, that has kind of crippled DeSantis and the national narrative. But he's still selling some culture war tickets in Iowa. So we'll see. Everything is right now a little premature because the media just, and large donors,

everybody wants to be Kreskin and know the future. And it just doesn't work that way. Yeah, it just seems like the structure was a little too clever by half, but whatever. Way too clever, yeah. Okay, so now you mentioned Tim Scott before I derailed this conversation with the process analysis of a super PAC structure. No, it was insightful.

I want to talk about Tim Scott, and I want to talk about Nikki Haley. Yeah, well, look, I kind of like Scott because he's the only opportunity consultant running i don't love him you know the only opportunity candidate uh yeah yeah and i didn't mean consultant i meant conservative yeah but yeah and candidate uh and he knows better and he's interesting the problem is he's doing a lot of what these candidates do they're they're the king of their state and then they go to the show and all of a sudden it's a little more complicated. It's not like talking to the South Carolina press corps of four people, you know, and he's in a safe Republican state. So yeah, it doesn't have a

lot of general election experience. It doesn't really know the national media. So he shows up and he's like, I'm an evangelical. If I crank that all the way up, I can win Iowa. And that, you know, President Huckabee did that, President Santorum. Now, as I said earlier, Iowa might be different this time, but putting that aside, if you win Iowa, you really damage Trump. Again, my equation is Trump lose Iowa and New Hampshire, he's going to lose the nomination. If he wins them, he's a lock. So the only problem is you immediately go lose New Hampshire, which is far more secular a week later. And to kill Trump, you need the one-two punch. The worst thing that can happen is you beat Trump in Iowa, but you're so glow-in-the-dark for a more secular, independent, Republican hybrid primary, which is how New Hampshire works.

And again, you've got a lot of bored Democrats there, too, with the Biden-RFK thing. No enthusiasm for Biden. Anyway, you go out and of bored Democrats there too with the Biden-RFK thing. No enthusiasm for Biden. Anyway, you go out and get clobbered there. I mean, Huckabee, all those guys got 10, 11, 13 points. Cruz, the Iowa winners tend to get slaughtered when they do the pure Christian deal. And then what happens? Trump gets a comeback. Trump, the biggest loser, lost to Biden, lost the House, loses everything, is now a winner.

He will rocket on onto the nomination. Scott is told, it was secondhand reporting to me, Scott pitched a donor because he's doing a good job of poaching disillusioned DeSantis people. I'm going to win Iowa with the Christians just the way, you know, they've done it for years. Again, might be a bad assumption. And then somebody else, quote unquote, is going to win New Hampshire and then all clean up in South Carolina, which is the other bad thinking.

I've got a fortress in South Carolina. No, he doesn't. He's behind Haley right now and she's barely in the race. So if Trump, it's going to be alpha, alpha, alpha. Who beats Trump twice? That's how you kill the old lion. So Scott ought to be borrowing a page from Governor George W. Bush, which was, he did well in 2000 in Iowa, he won the thing, by being Christian friendly with his own story, but running a much wider campaign, which Scott could do. Scott's opportunity and hope thing is his advantage, not a two minute abortion ban, which is going to kill him. And then he'll be a loser after being a winner for a week.

And Trump will get the nomination back. So they're making, in my view, a huge strategic mistake. And then finally, and I had written all this, I was going to post it on this Substack thing I'm playing with, because I like Scott. Some of his people are old, you know, it worked for me in the past. I like them. They're smart. He went out and did the toady thing on the Trump indictment, where it's time for, and Scott's so perfectly positioned to say,

look, Donald Trump has many of the right enemies. I know who they are and they're wrong. But character counts in the Republican Party. It doesn't count with Hunter Biden and the Democrats. It counts with us. And Donald Trump has failed the character test. He can't be president again. It's time to make that play because unless

you out alpha Trump, you're toothpaste. And Scott, of course, put out the wimpy statement of, well, two justice systems, the fake one with all that evidence about subverting democracy and then, you know, the political one. And then there's the special one for Hunter Biden because on Thursday, he talked to a hooker about missiles who then later had a date with the president of Belarus you know it's just and so he's committing suicide he's moved up the polling he's really close to DeSantis now and in Iowa and almost as close to New Hampshire but he is forgetting alpha on alpha he needs to beat Trump twice that means the narrow plan in Iowa is not enough. It is a Pyrrhic victory at best.

And you agree that the only four candidates generally that matter right now are Trump, DeSantis, Scott, and Haley? Well, I'm not sure. I think third is up for grabs. I think there's Vivek Vamaranadan. I'm sorry, I haven't learned his name. Yeah, Vivek. And if I send

all your angry letters to Dan Senior, I'm sorry, I haven't learned his name. Yeah, Vivek. And if I send all your angry letters to Dan Senior, I'm sorry. I will learn his name. He could be the- Ramaswami. Vivek Ramaswami. Ramaswami. Not a swami. I like the swami angle.

Not a sinner, a swami. I got to tell you, I was in a business meeting yesterday with someone who was like, who I, you know, you never, never talked politics with him before. And he's asking about the presidential race. And, and he said, you know, can you believe, I mean, I'm sort of surprised with this. Can you believe what the indictments against Trump, you know, Biden and, you know, his justice department going after his opponent for 2024, I'm sort of like taken aback. He immediately was, was going down this path. And then, uh, I was just listening and I was like, well, if Trump fades,

who would be interesting to you? And I was shocked. He said, well, you've got this guy Vivek. I was really struck. Well, you know, it's time for more vowels in the White House. Oh, I'm going to get canceled. Not on this podcast. You are uncancelable.

Yeah, I am in a safe space here. Well, look, there's always room for a sideshow candidate. Alan Keyes, Herman Cain, Andrew Yang, which they always have a unified field theory. They've always never held public office and you know, he's got enough money to, he could be a little fat, Maury Taylor, you know, there's some room, but no, I think the guy who I thought had real potential on paper and has fizzled sadly is Doug Burgum. Because as a self-funder, he can pay his own

way to Iowa and not have to worry about donors calling up and saying on Fox, they called you a name, you know, oh, we need an emergency panic call. He can just launch. And his first video was great. He was doing Reagan. He's a Western guy ready to lead us on, old school conservative.

But then he's in the race and all, one, he's not prepared for the national media. You know, he's North Dakota. He's never had a fastball real problem with them. And so he doesn't know how to set on a narrative. And all he wants to do is talk about North Dakota energy policy. You know, so he's running for deputy undersecretary of petroleum exports uh which is too bad because i think if they had stage managed it off the video right and done the common sense conservative from the west who's had it with the crap time to move on and beat biden he could have sold some tickets and

he's still he's spent more on tv than anybody and he he's creeping up there. He's got a little motion, particularly in New Hampshire. Haley, she's got a lot of problems. One is she's money-wise, you look at cash on hand, they managed, to their credit, I thought it could have been worse to put $7 million together, but it's nothing like the cash power Scott has, who on campaign cash on hand on the report led everybody. Not just cash, and primary cash on hand, which is important because these candidates play games by raising general election money from their fans, but they can't spend it. And the top line number looks bigger than it is. So the key question in these primaries is to look at what the primary numbers are, dollars.

Right. Now, Haley will have some Super PAC money. They all will. They're all by TV of Super PAC dollars, and that's an auction process. So they bid the TV up where the $300 spot on Cedar Rapids' Wheel of Fortune is now going to be $4,000. So it's a money bonfire.

But on actual hard candidate money, the best money, Scott's well-funded. Haley has one-third the dough. And I don't know what her magic trick is you know um the debate is everything for her she's got to have a star making turn there to you know re-energize her donors or her third quarter is going to be horrible and she could be in the Scott Walker Museum as didn't make it to Christmas um January 15th next year is the big date so it's the fourth quarter cash on hand that really counts.

Cause that's your real spending when Iowa and New Hampshire tune in and the numbers start moving. Last thing is people, you know, people who don't do this. That's when, that's when we'll have the fourth quarter. Iowa caucus night. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the peak there.

And there's no early voting. It's a, it's an old school thing where one day, peek at the right second. Last thing, when people look, a polling point I forgot to make, when people, including half or seven-eighths of the people gabbing around on cable television, repeating cliches, they look at polls, they think of a general election poll and how it moves. General elections in the typical competitive state, maybe 45% are Republican, 47% Democrat, everybody else, whatever's left, eight, nine points, that moves around. And that number is smaller than it used to be. So when you have 20% of that movable 8% changing its mind, you get a two- point movement, which is meaningful

in the general election. In a primary, it's herd animals. There may be different colored spots, slight differences, but fundamentally they're all goats. So when 20% of the goats change their mind, you get a 20 point swing. And so primary numbers at the end, a 15-point swing is not a big deal. And so that's why primary polls are more fluid than general election polls. They're much more untethered, much more of a herd instinct.

So that's why this stuff gets bumpy at the end. You look at the history of primaries, there's not always, but usually something like that in the last four weeks or so, five weeks. Sometimes it happens twice. The herd moves one way, eight weeks out, and then moves another way three weeks out. So, you know, that's the one missing equation we got to get through. And I think this Trump indictment, the conventional wisdom is every time he's indicted, he gets stronger because national polls that, based on his name ID that show him winning, also say, no, we're with our guy.

We're not with the New York Times and the liberals against them with their trumped up charges. But quietly, anybody who's out there in the field, these candidates would tell you the doubts are there. They think Biden could beat them. They think he's old. They think he's crazy. There's fatigue.

So the right shiny object, and I was hoping Tim Scott could get his act together and the times running out yesterday was very bad because it was his opening um uh still could still could have a moment there okay so none of them are exploiting it right which is heartbreaking to uh somebody like me who thinks the number one priority in politics is no trump in the oval okay so before we wrap we just got a couple of minutes one question you wrote a your so your piece is on sub you have a substack newsletter i highly recommend it the former hacks on tap uh newsletter um yeah just go it's like mike murphy one or mike murphy night whatever the computer is but it's there and it'll come up okay so at murphy mike on twitter i promo it there oh there you go and

we'll put all this in the show notes so you have have a piece up that basically Joe Biden needs a friend. And you argue that no one is giving him the straight talk, quote unquote, that it's in his best interest and the country's best interest for him not to run. So isn't it obvious? What do you mean he needs a friend. Well, no, what I write about, and I use the movie The Last Hurrah, which is a great old sentimental John Ford picture about politics, that candidates by nature are consumers of friendships. They want a lot of friends, and then they lean on their friends for things, and then they tend to break their hearts later. Hey, I called him twice. I can't get a call back from the senator. I knew him when he was nobody. They're in that crude business. So often the only true love they get is from long-suffering staff who've been with them forever, who they often treat kind of badly, like a toddler to me. I'll make sure my parents love me.

I'll act badly. So I said, Biden's got people like that, where he gets his real love. They've been through the ups and downs, the humiliations for 30 years. They owe it to him to look him in the eye and say, this is a bad idea, this second term. Now, they're going to get a pair of Ray-Bans bounced off their heads. They're going to get chewed out Irish politician style. But Biden needs to hear it from somebody he trusts. Because once you kill yourself through all the humiliations to get to where he has gotten, you don't want to give it up. Hey, I want to go to California, bring that mansion with wings that I fly around in.

Hey, I want to talk to Spielberg. He's online too. Hey, I rule the world. Hey, they all laughed at me, this pretty boy Joe who plagiarized. Oh, look at me now. That's Mr. President to you. It's a thing you get in because you pay such a price to get there. But from a Democratic point of view, he's been a pretty effective president. You can argue he has more accomplishments than Obama, although that it doesn't go over

so big on hacks on tap. Um, you can say, declare victory, man. Uh, otherwise your reelect numbers are crap and you have a good chance of losing. And by the way, if it was a regular election, we'd be with you, boss. We're giving it the old fight, the last hurrah. You deserve it. If you're governor of Delaware or even a normal presidency, but the threat this time is big. We have a Mussolini madman on our hands who you're so weak.

Even he might be, oh no, I can beat him. Why take the risk? Hedge. You got a bunch of young tigers in the primary. You still have a couple of weeks and the clock is ticking where you can open it up. They can have a savage fight and somebody will rise to the top and the party will be in better shape against if it's Trump, then it will be with you. That's a cold hard fact. And then again, you know, traitor and they're thrown out of the office. But somebody owes it to Biden to make that case. Because if he runs and loses to Trump, it destroys his legacy and it puts the country's democracy at risk.

But you take someone like Governor Shapiro in Pennsylvania or Governor Whitmer in Michigan or Governor Newsom in California or Cory Booker or whomever. Aren't you surprised that one of them, both for the sake of the country and the sake of their career, is being a little entrepreneurial and risk-taking? I think if someone jumped in in the fall, there would suddenly be this quiet, universal sigh of relief among Democratic Party activists and donors. Because every Democrat I talk to, every single one, I say, do you think it's a good idea that Biden's running for re-election? Not a single one says yes.

Nobody. But no one will say it out loud. And I think if someone jumped in and said it out loud who's not Marianne Williamson and is not RFK Jr., who, by the way, are collectively polling at about 30 percent in the Democratic primary, I might add. If someone serious jumped in and said this, you know, this really could be a Eugene McCarthy moment in 68. Yeah, I think you need a bigger catalyst like the Vietnam War. The problem is, I agree that appetite's there, particularly with the donor smart class. And, you know, you're well acquainted with those folks, so am I. The problem is a president, an incumbent president, has such control over the levers and gears of the process. It is hard.

You know, labor doesn't walk. And African-American voters in the South who are now in the new calendar are even more powerful. They're not going to walk. You think the Vietnam War, I mean, you don't think Trump. No body bags are coming back from the kid next door for years. Remember in the 79 primary season, Jimmy Carter beat Ted Kennedy, the strongest brand in the Democratic Party. Now, Kennedy had flaws, but this was still in the shadow of the Jack and Bobby era. So it is hard to uproot an incumbent president in a primary.

This is Joe Biden looking at the mirror and looking at the constitution deciding I've got to make the ultimate sacrifice here for the country. And I doubt he will. Cause I doubt he feels that way. These guys don't have small egos. I can beat them. I did before. They need me to save the country, but he's taking a very reckless, reckless risk.

And somebody ought to look him in the eye and tell him that. Yeah. Okay. Maybe they have, maybe Ron Klain did it or his sister, but they, they owe it to him. That was my argument on Substack. So I'm getting all these calls from donor friends and they're probably listening.

So they know who they are, but I won't say their names who are saying, you know, if you really got to take a look at this, no labels, this third, this third party effort to, the country from Trump or Biden. And given that we're heading into a world in which, you know, I know you disagree, but the conventional wisdom is that those will be the nominees. I know you disagree on the Trump front. And you wrote a sub stackack very skeptical of no labels. And so tell those people listening why. So I get it.

I don't want to vote for Biden. I won't vote for Trump. And I'm not enthusiastic about voting for Biden, though. And I think the Democrats could do far worse. So why not load no labels? I don't get to vote for anybody I don't like, and I get a medal because I'm saving the country with the thoughtful ticket of, you know, Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer. We're going to save the country. Well, here's the problem. In politics, it doesn't matter if your voters are happy or not.

This is one of the great myths. I'll take a grumpy voter who votes for me because he hates the other candidate more. It's worth as much to me arithmetically as a voter who hops and skips to the polls and can hardly wait. So what no labels does is it gives people who hate Trump and just can't abide him, but don't like Biden, an escape valve to go get a halo and essentially escrow and waste their vote. That's very good net-net for Trump because it gives people an escape from, of course they don't like Biden, but when forced, most people who hate both of them break three to one for Biden. And so Biden's given up his dissatisfied voters, particularly his ex-Republican, you know, college educated, thoughtful people voters, so they can all go watch

PBS and congratulate each other. And what a magnificent symphony that all makes them great. A lot of politics now is about self-expression, you know? And I mean, it's so easy to be a Democrat now. Well, we're not the party of destroying democracy. We're pretty excellent. You know, it's such easy virtue signaling and no labels is a virtue signaling escape valve for Republicans and conservative or more center right independents who know Trump is poison, but are not happy with Biden. So this gives them a nice little waiting pool to go waste their vote in

and net-net help Donald Trump. And the mission here is to defeat Donald Trump first at almost any, well, in my view, at any price. No labels. Don't trust any do-good organization run by fundraisers, too, professional fundraisers. Alright, finally before you go, I keep saying before you go you bought an

electric car, you sold out you bought an electric car. Yeah, I got friends back in my home. And then you've got sucked into this, you're telling me you're like you believe now people in the EV world are like the happiest people you know, they're models for like healthy living.

I didn't say that. Come on. I'm not crazy. Yeah, it lured me into Substack because I wanted to write something about an editor saying, you know, we'd really like Trump in the lead. That's how the clicks come. So, yeah, I'm a Detroit motorhead. I grew up and I'm a car guy.

I can tell you all about Holley carburetors. And I've been snorting at EVs. Detroit auto guy. Yeah, yeah. No, no. A lot of UAW in the family. I mean, believe me. I'm the first Murphy in three generations

that hasn't worked in a car plant. So, though my dad, law school, and then on to a great legal career. But that's where he started. Same with my grandfather. Was an elected machine pawn in Detroit. Became an elected probate judge after several attempts to pass the bar. And, you know, the machine said, all right, we got Goldberg, Controller, Smith.

We need Murphy and Cagliano for judges. You know, the old days. We have a great letter from James Farley about Roosevelt's campaign. But anyway, he was, you know, putting Hudson's together, law school at night. So car guy, but the tech is amazing and I've been watching it. I'm obsessive about it. And even though I've constantly been, oh yeah,

hybrids, they run on smugness, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I'm driving around LA with our high gas taxes and our supply issues, looking at $6, $5 and 50 cent gas. And I, you know, cursing the house of sod every time, let alone everything else. And I was driving a gas guzzling Porsche, uh, which I loved GTS. So, you know, I'm getting two miles to the minute, um, uh, a gallon.

So I snapped, I wouldn't buy a Tesla, even though the engineering is often quite elegant. I bought a BMW IX. I love the damn thing. It is magnificent and it makes me happy. So I, of course, dove into the world of charging and all that, because I'm interested in infrastructure and how we do it right. And the charging problems are very tricky to solve. And there's massive revolution.

Basically, Elon built a big network, which is quite good, but it's only for his car, which is one of the reasons it's quite good, easier to engineer. The other network, Volkswagen, built with money they had to spend on this kind of stuff out of the diesel settlement, and their network doesn't work as well because it's got to work with the Kia, Ford, GM, Mercedes, everybody. But it's getting better, and now everybody's going to go to Elon's standard. And of course, Biden is throwing huge subsidy money at it, which is both good and bad. So blah, blah, blah. There are a million YouTube channels of these young engineers and people. And what noticed, and what I wrote the sub stack, but it wasn't a big pitch for EVs. It was how happy they all are.

They're finding purpose in solving really tough technical problems. You figure out how to put overnight charging at low cost into an apartment building, by the way, figure that out and you've solved most of the charging problem. Um, and it just struck me. It's like the Apollo program, you know, they're young, smart kids. I mean, I, I knew a very high ranking engineer at SpaceX who I met at one of the launches and a genius level person, you know, it's like here, I give him a straw instantly. He's, you know, build an atom with it model.

And I said, what, how does this feel? You know, a couple hours before lunch, he goes, yeah, I built this design, this tricky thing. He goes before this, I was at one of the big defense contractors figuring out how to, how to drop a nuclear warhead within a hundred yards of a target. And I'm glad I did it.

Love my country. Defense is important, but this is a lot more fun than, you know, planning nuclear weapons. And it was the same sense there. So it just is a purpose bigger than people than your own self-interest as McCain would say. And I was just impressed by how a sense of mission, solving tough problems for net benefit and in a free market way, they're competing, all this stuff kind of coming together.

I used to know a lot of engineers who worked in the auto companies and were kind of, some were a little downbeat. Yeah, they want to prove the better lock for three years, cost cuts. But now they're all excited. We're going to build an electric, you know, Ram pickup truck, and it's going to be better than

the Ford one and the Ford, oh no, ours is, just the excitement of it. Uh, that sense of purpose really impressed me yeah so i'm telling you it's a purpose and it's it's a purpose and it's a community yeah exactly totally totally it's a real community and i and i just i see this with my kids not to digress but i see this with my kids and i see so many of their peers and the ones that seem the most lost or distraught leaving aside you know some have very serious you know or legitimate issues you know there's that that young people are dealing with these days you know various emotional challenges or whatnot but the ones that don't have those you just if you see kids who don't have a passion

and don't have a community they're the ones who who are like, you know, the most lost and, you know. Totally, totally. We're social animals. You know, normally, all right, we got to build a fence to keep the bears out, you know. Yeah. Who's good at chopping wood? And somebody is going to trip onto the rocket fuel bringing this to politics. I thought it might have been Scott.

By the way, this is for all the complexity in Israel. It is there to be harnessed. For all the complexity in Israel, and there's obviously a lot of tension there right now i keep coming back it's a country with a purpose and it's a country that's based on a real community why are people happy there why do people why are they engaged i mean and you just see this throughout life all over the you know when people have a community and they have a passion that kind of you know undergirds or or you you know unifies that community it's extremely powerful and you're i think i felt like your piece captured the community part as much as the as much as this

kind of sense of purpose part well thank you for the plug they're free i don't charge the monthly yeah so i will encourage our listeners to go to murphy's substack we'll post in the show notes and we will let you go mike because i know you've got many more important things to do than to, you know. Oh, this is always the most fun. I thoroughly enjoy it. You let me bloviate on. Race is getting interesting. Let's talk again in the fourth quarter when it starts to mean something.

All right. Sounds good, Mike. Thanks for doing this. Thank you, pal. That's our show for today. To keep up with Mike, you can follow him on Twitter or X or I don't even know what to call it anymore. But in any event, at Murphy Mike, you know what I mean. And you can also subscribe to his new newsletter at Substack.

Just go to Substack and search for Mike Murphy or the site is substack.com forward slash at Mike Murphy one. A couple ways to find him. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.