Let's Find Common Ground - Election 2024: Where Are We Now?

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Election 2024: Where Are We Now?   CPF Director Bob Shrum joins Jane Coaston, journalist and CNN contributor, and David Simas, former CEO of the Obama Foundation, for a discussion on how the 2024 election looks with less than two weeks to go. They discuss how each candidate is performing in the polls, the importance of the presidential debate, and each campaign's strategy and messaging. Featuring:  - Jane Coaston: Journalist; CNN Contributor; Lead Host of Crooked Media's Daily News Show “What A Day"; Fall 2024 CPF Fellow - David Simas: Former CEO of the Obama Foundation; Former Director of the Office of Political Strategy & Outreach under the Obama Administration - Bob Shrum: Director, Center for the Political Future; Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics, USC Dornsife

Welcome to the Bully Pulpit from the University of Southern California Center for the Political Future. Our podcast brings together America's top politicians, journalists, academics, and strategists from across the political spectrum for discussions on hot button issues where we respect each other and respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations. Let me introduce today's panelists. Jane Costin is a contributing writer for the New York Times. Previously, she was the host of the Opinion Section's podcast, The Argument, and she is, by the way, good at arguing, and senior political reporter at Vox

with a focus on conservatism and the GOP. She's also a terrific fellow at the Center for the Political Future. David Seamus, managing director of Emerson Collective, former president of the Obama Foundation, and White House director of political affairs under President Obama. I'm gonna begin with something pretty simple

and I'll get your take on it and then I'll probably weigh in a little too. Jane, I'll start with you. Where are we now in this election and where are we headed? I know where we are. I do not know where we're headed. I got out of private investigation about nine years ago. I think right now we're in the midst of a very tight race. We're in this weird moment where there hasn't been a lot of good polling coming out of a

lot of swing states. So for example, I think that Virginia actually has only been pulled once this month. Virginia is not a swing state in this election, but that just has the durace of data we're dealing with. So basically we're in an incredibly tight race. I think that for a lot of people this is actually the most quote unquote normal election we've had since 2016 in terms of door knocking, in terms of those normal voter interactions that we didn't have as much in 2020.

So I think we're in the midst of a very tight race where everybody is everywhere all the time. And where we go from here, I have no idea. David, you have any guess? There will be a polling miss. It will be between one and 3%. If it's in the direction of former president Trump, he will have over 300 electoral votes. If it's in the direction of the vice president,

she will have over 300 electoral votes. You can go up and down the seven core battleground states. You can compare it to a multiplicity of averages. And essentially, there are two things which are, for me, truths that are indisputable. 13 days out, Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, has a higher favorability than he has had at any period of time this close to the election. He is doing better in the two way against the Democratic nominee than he has ever done at this point in the election. By contrast, if you just do a comparison of the vice president contra President Biden at this

moment in time in 2020 or Secretary Clinton in 2016, as it applies to favorability, she's lower than Biden was at this point in time and slightly higher than where Clinton was at this period in time. So when I think about essentially, as Jane said, this period of execution being more normal, the midpoint between 2020 and 2016, in all of the metrics is where we find this race today, which is a coin flip in a way that I have never seen.

Bob, do you mind if I jump back just for a second? Of course not. So something I think that's really important to remember is that with elections, past is not prologue. Something may not have happened, but could happen. So we can't, it's so tempting, especially after 2016. It's interesting how 2020, because it was a strange election in a strange year, kind of just like

washes past us. But I think that Republicans have unearned positive feelings about polling because of 2016. And Democrats have unearned anxiety about polls because of 2016. But 2016 was one year in time. Like, my first election I was able to vote in was 2008. And so in my lifetime, I've seen pretty much nonstop, except for 2008, ironically, tight election. It's generally tight, but what has happened in the past will not tell us what is going to happen in the future. We have never had an election like 2024. We just have.

We have never done this before. We have never had everything that has taken place this year take place. We have had a presidential candidate face two assassination attempts. We have had a president decide not to run for reelection and this vice president step up. None of that has happened before. So I think we can take some lessons from past elections. But I also think that it's so important to remember, like, this has not happened before. This has just not happened before.

I remember, like, 2012, there were a host of people who were absolutely positive that Romney was going to win. 2016, lots of people were absolutely positive that Clinton was going to win. They were both wrong. So, like, there's only so much we can take forward. I have to jump forward from elections of the past. Yeah, I guess I should confess the first election I was able to vote in was 1964, which really is the dark ages. Let me ask you a kind of sidebar question for a second because Jane just referred to

2012. Yes. Did you think you were in danger of losing in 2012? We never did. We had three levels of polling. So we had an analytics track that was doing 4,000 interviews and modeling per day. We had battleground polls. And what we saw when you do that much volume and repetition, that as the public polling was showing all of this tremendous gyration, the trend lines on what we had internally were fairly consistent to the point where we were never trailing in any of the state.

Now President Obama had two speeches ready. He had a concession speech and he had an acceptance speech because you can model all you want but at the end of the day as we're seeing now the biggest guess that you can insert into all of your models is what is the electorate going to look like and this to change you can you can learn from the past but the best predictor of future behavior is past voting behavior, but that still leaves the 20% of the electorate in general that's new to an electorate. And so one of the things that for me has been fascinating to watch, contra 2008 and 2012, is whether it is a Trump strength or a democratic weakness or just something that's happening

more broadly. Among voters under the age of 30, men are identifying as conservative at higher levels since the Reagan era. And when you begin to see again in public polling and in some of private polling that I've seen, the gender gap is plus 20 for Trump among young men, plus 20 for Trump among young men plus 20 for Harris among young women. And so when you begin to say, okay, what is the composition of this under 30 group that's about to come into the electorate? What are our previous assumptions? And one thing that's becoming very clear is whatever the previous assumptions were about

what you could say about them, you just can't. White men, black men, Hispanic men, Asian men. And then you have this line right down the middle in terms of college versus non-college, when then you add the overlay of when seven out of 10 of this cohort of 18 to 29 year old are non-college, you begin to see these profound differences in terms of the way they're thinking about voting for former President Trump or for Vice President Harris in a way that

does... That's a long way of answering your question, but no, we didn't think we were going to lose. But Governor Romney, one of the reasons it took him so long to concede that night is because he had one speech. His team came in the day before and said, Governor, congratulations. Tomorrow morning, you're going to be elected president of the United States of America. And so that night when Ohio was called for us very early, it was a classic wolf blitzer, breaking news in a way and it was. Barack Obama wins Ohio, basically all the dramas done by nine and Mitt Romney's got

a speech tray. I want to turn to the issue of the polls because you brought it up, Jane. You brought it up in a different way. I myself am cautiously optimistic about this race. And that's because polls I trust have been remarkably stable for about a month. If you look at the Reuters Ipsos poll, or there are a couple of others that do it nationally that I think do a very good job. There was one today, Monmouth's, I think it's a good poll, shows are winning by three and by five among enthusiastic voters. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but I'm fascinated by the difference between the way Democrats

and Republicans react to all this. That is genuinely one of the most irritating parts of election season. It is a constant, I am constantly thinking about how odd it is. Let's say you have a poll that has Harris up in Michigan by two. Democrats be like, that's not good enough, march in our air, that means we could lose. Republicans, oh my God, we're absolutely winning by five. It is, as far as I could tell, it is going back to, I mean, obviously, my, my, my, my brilliant toe panelists could speak more to this, this. But I keep thinking about how, as far as I can tell, I spent the lunch hour reading conservative media.

As far as I can tell, Republicans have believed that they were going to win every presidential election besides 2008. I actually went back and checked, did some research ahead of this, and pretty much 2008 was the point in year where they were like, I don't know, we're going to do later. But you go back and I remember, you know, Peggy Newton saying in 2012 that she wasn't seeing very many Obama signs, Ergo Bromley was going to win. And then I do remember 2016 that there were, you know, some Republicans who kind of thought it

was a doomed effort, but like, it's just interesting that the ways in which people interpret polls. I think about so much of it is about 2016. It is 2016 PTSD. That means that people look at polls in which if Trump is up by one, that means he's going to win by 3000. And if Herriman says up by one, it means she's going to lose by 3000. And it is gotten to the point now that like, you know, I've got for comedian app was a daily show called what a day. One of my colleagues hosts a show called polar coaster. And so much of this is just like,

you know, don't one how people think about polls is so people think about polls in a way that is like, this is going to tell me what is going to happen, but they also project onto it. Here's what I want to happen. How will the poll tell me how far I am or close I am to that? It's baffling. It's interesting to me because you have to steal David Pluss phrase, the Democratic bedwetters who react instantly to every poll and do exactly what you were talking about. Oh my God, she's only two ahead in Michigan, she's going to lose.

And the unending GOP confidence now that Trump will win. Now I'm not sure that that's a...it may be a real feeling. I think it may be a tactic because what we're seeing are a lot of partisan polls, a little like the Romney unskilling of polls in 2012. A lot of partisan polls are being dumped out there in large numbers, at first in the states, in the battleground states, and now nationally to affect the averages from the poll aggregators like 538. And I wonder whether the theory here is that people will vote for you if they think you're winning or is it a MAGA effort

to set up the argument that if Trump loses the election, the election must have been stolen? Well, I was thinking, I remember in March of 2020, I started seeing conservative influencers basically saying in March, to be clear, that if Trump lost in November, it would be because it was stolen. So I think that there is some effort there. I also think my view, again, this is just me, is that I think Democrats or the people who are running campaigns generally assume that if they say we're doing well, they won't get money, or if they're saying they're doing well, they won't get as much attention. Like, races that people can sell as being close or that you need something or there's

something you can do. Like, there are so many, there was a recent political piece about Harris's campaign in Pennsylvania, and then I spoke to some people on the ground in Pennsylvania and they're like, no, we've got plenty of money. Everything's OK. But sometimes when people talk to our reporters, what they're trying to do is send a message further up, upstream, saying, like, hey, pay attention here.

We need help. So I do think that there's a little bit of all of these things are happening at oil. There is. So in the light most favorable to my Republican friends, Donald Trump has overperformed in general polling both times he's run in a general election, 2016 and 2020. Whether you're looking at RCP, the old 538, in a variety of different measures, that's

just been the case. Jane's point about 2016, look, I was Barack Obama's political director in the West Wing on election night in 2016. My job was to call him when there was some certainty so he could make a phone call. I'm sitting there and Steve Shale, who's this brilliant Florida data person, called me and we're feeling pretty good. At that point, there was an exuberance that we've got this. And Shale calls and he says, hey man, are you sitting down? And I replied, look,

you'd never begin a call on election night by saying, are you sitting down? Just don't do that. And he said, I just saw something and I forget the county in rural Florida where the turnout and I forget the county in rural Florida, where the turnout exploded and the margins were bigger than anything we've ever seen. They just missed everything completely. It cascaded through the night until finally the president had to call the president-elect to tell him. And so I think there is a reaction to the Trump era that when he is on the ballot, that what we saw in 16 and then what we saw in 20 were on this day on October 23rd, 2020, I think the average lead for Joe Biden was between seven and a half and eight percent. There were 430 public polls in the 2020 cycle.

Donald Trump won four of them. But yet, he came within 46,000 votes of winning the presidency of the United States. That's just the fact. And so with him on the ballot again, with the aggregation in individual polls being tighter than they have ever been in the races he's previously won, run in, I think that just provides a lot of the reaction that you're seeing on the Democratic side but also on the Republican side. That's in the light most of it. Yeah, I think they also are trying to set up the

predicate that if he doesn't win somehow or other, the election was fixed or rigged. I myself am now skeptical about the shy Trump voters. In the USC poll that we did in 2020, we had a slightly experimental question. People had used it before, but we wanted to test it. And our poll had a panel of 10,000 people. I mean, you know, very expensive to do, which is why we're not doing it

this year. But if you ask people, you know, are you voting for Biden, you're voting for Trump, 7.7 and a half point margin. If you ask people, who are your friends and neighbors voting for 4.3%? We were basically right on the money with that question. But I don't think they're shy Trump voters anymore. I think there are proud Trump voters. And I also think it's possible that there are some shy Harris voters, may even be shy about approving of Harris. Because when they get a phone call or they get polled

and their husband is sitting there, I think there's gonna be an inclination among a number of women to say Trump. Easier to say than to have a fight. So, and this goes to Jane's point, no election is like any other election. And there were similarities between 2016 and 2020, and then there were similarities between 2018 and 2022.

And the question is, what's this gonna be like? Is it gonna be more like 2018? Is it gonna be more like 2020? Now, if turnout is the key, and that's what a lot of people are now saying, and that's going to decide the election, what matters most here? Because this is a debate I hear all the time. The ground game or message and media? Jane, you want to start?

Well, I think that media wants message and media to be extraordinarily important because like, you know, a host of podcasts, I want to feel important. But I think it's a combination of both. And I think that people have historically with Trump, people started to iterate the ground game. I think the story of how Trump won in 2016 has become one of those just-so stories. Whatever the reason is, it's like, yo, he won because of the exact thing that you're already mad about or glad about. But there became this idea that Trump won because of kind of online

activities or the so-called meme magic. And you saw that trend happen in 2020. I wrote in 2020 that Trump had the most online campaign I'd ever seen, where it's not just a campaign that's taking place the internet, it's taking internet things and taking them offline, which he has done again this campaign. And I think that in contrast, what we see from the Harris campaign is the most the you know, they've raised in the month since July, they've raised more than a billion dollars, they have money to burn in the ground game, and they have a very effective ground game in terms of outreach. I can tell you just from you know, for good media, our affiliate

in both the state of America, we've you know, they Media, our affiliate, Invoke the State of America, we've, you know, they blew past their door knocking goals in a weekend. They door knocked 125,000 doors in a weekend. And now they, we, there's a new goal for 150,000 doors knocked. So I think that that ground game matters, but especially because it is not just about the ground game. It's about the performance of the ground game. People want to see campaigns with capacity, they want to see campaigns with ability, people want to see what other people are seeing. And I think that the efforts that the Harris campaign is going

to, and especially because Trump's campaign has largely outsourced door knocking out, you know, after Trump basically took over the Republican National Committee, kicked everybody out and is a dog in the hall, served as chair, I think that those efforts have been largely siphoned out to either Yale and Musk's organization or to Charlie Kirk's Triniclet USA. And there's already been some controversy

in a public swing state. You hear it in Nevada, you hear it in Arizona, you hear it in Pennsylvania, people who were like, I haven't seen anybody from the Trump campaign, even if I'm looking for information from them. So that's not to say that Trump won't win or because of this, I think that historically, since Obama, the Obama 2008 campaign,

I think kind of that taught everyone how to do ground game. That's what people wanted to do. And if you recall, Romney based his campaign, that was supposed to be or cut back in 2012. It didn't really work. And not only Jane, Jane, Jane, it not only didn't work, the communication system collapsed the day of the election. I mean...

So I think that... But I think media matters, but also let's keep in mind for many people who if there is an ad and you only see it on Twitter, it's not a real ad. TV matters. TV buys matter. They matter a lot. There are so many... And I won't name them, but there are so many efforts that I've seen

in which they are producing ads that will only go on social media. So I mean, I think the idea is that journalists will see them, they'll write about those, and that's how we get out there. But like, if you are not doing ads on streaming services, if you are not doing ads on normal television, like I am so sorry to our swing state friends, but you are being bombarded with more ads than you can possibly imagine right now. But those ads matter. That's what people are seeing because, you know,

people, there's that term low information voter, but it's more so like they have other things to do and are thinking about this. This is when they're thinking about, this is when they're seeing those ads. So I think it's a combination of all these, but again, if you are a journalist on Twitter, you probably don't have a very good idea of what the campaign is actually

doing. By the way, I want to hear from David on this, but for me, Laura Trump at the helm of the RNC embodies one of the greatest delusions of the last half century in American politics, that your relative is Bobby Kennedy. Most of the time, that doesn't turn out to be true, David. So in most of the studies that I've seen at the presidential level, the most you can move, and again, there are RCTs on this, they're not precise, they're not perfect. In a good field operation is maybe a point. On television, in an effective media campaign, you can maybe get up to two points. Both of them are subject to a tremendous amount of latency, where within four to five days,

the effect of the interaction has completely dissipated. And so to Jane's point, you've got to do both. But from a frequency perspective, and this is what you're seeing, I was in Pittsburgh last night observing focus groups. And so the average person, so think about from 5 AM to 8 AM in the morning, the TV's on in the background, every single 30-second spot is a political one, either the presidential race or the Senate race. In what you hear in the focus groups, even though, so first you'll hear this, I don't pay attention to them, they don't sway me, they don't matter. I don't like negative.

I don't like any of it. Well, what have you heard recently? And then it will be a verbatim recitation of what you heard in the medium. And so when you think about what you're trying to do with this remaining 5% to 7% of conflicted voters, who will literally, and perhaps for folks in this room, you just can't understand that this exists. But you will hear people say the following.

I can't stand former presidents behavior. I wish he'd stop tweeting. I wish he'd stop saying the things that he says. I can't, he divides people. I don't want that anymore. But my life was better when he was president. And it offends me when all of a sudden these folks were saying to me, oh no, you must be wrong. And clearly your wife empirically was better. So that's on the one hand. With the vice president, they'll say, I like her.

I think she can begin to bring people together. I think we can turn the page on this era. But she's been the vice president for the past three and a half years in a period of time where I have these list of concerns. I don't know what I'm going to do. And I may decide only when I go into the voting. For them, the constant barrage of the messages that at that moment are meant to tip the scales, it's almost like what is the last thing that can trigger you as you're going in to the booth.

And that is the, you know, that's the piece where, you know, in the Pittsburgh media market, for example, there are 10,000 gross rating points, which means that the average person will see 100 ads per week, not just at the presidential level. So there'll be another 5,000 to 6,000 in Senate races. So you can't escape. It's not just television. It's YouTube. It's wherever you can get skippable television. It's bombarded. And so, yes, that is the life of the conflicted swing voter for the next 13 days. God bless them all. So let's talk about message. And then I'm going to get to demographics.

And let's start with latency, the fact that people tend to forget what happened. When this election's over, people look back on it. How important is that debate between Trump and Harris going to be? I think it'll be pretty important. It is funny though, because I'm not sure if anybody else feels this way. I realized that I had until, let's see, I thought about it, the most memorable debates, two debates that I think of are weirdly enough, the 2012. They are Obama's second debate against Mitt Romney, the please proceed daughter moment,

and the vice presidential debate in 2012. And somehow I had completely forgot about basically every debate that has been there. So debates are great for political media because political media likes to picket the rest of humanity. Many people watch them. But like in terms of how they are remembered, I think that it'll be notable because the media will reference it as being notable. I think that, you know, it's a per se though, because technically the most impactful debates of all time, I

would say, is the debate between President Biden and Donald Trump that took place this year, because that's essentially why President Biden dropped out of the race. But I think that it will be, debates are the kind of thing that we all want to be deeply afforded to interesting, but in general, they aren't. Most people, you watch it

because it's a thing you're supposed to do. But I think that in terms of how people remember it, they might remember pieces from it, but I'm not sure how long the tale that has. And David, as you react to that, how much do other means of reaching people matter now? Like interviews, for example, Harris deciding to do 60 Minutes and Fox. Yeah, so beginning with that, it's I took a look at media consumption among 18 to 29 year olds and

compared it to 2020. And so the average young voter, young person in 2020 was consuming about an hour and 10 minutes a day of social video across the platforms. That number is two hours and 45 minutes per day as of last month. And so just from a consumption pattern, the young voters are not, it's a long way of saying paying attention to any of those traditional means of communication. Unless they see a clip from... So the other way that you can begin to think about debates or speeches is that they are content generating moments because in real time, folks are, except for the junkies,

are not watching it. And so the perception begins to fit in because here's what happens with both sides, right? Both sides in real time during the debates are either dial testing what's happening. So they're seeing what's popping with different voters at a moment in time. They're scraping social media in real time to see what's generating. And as a result of that, then they just start to turbocharge what they're sending out across all of the platforms.

And then spend 24 hours to 48 hours driving essentially a content generation machine because people aren't watching. I remember a focus group after the Trump-Harris debate where you had six men and then six women in the second debate, and you said, how many of you watched it in real time? So out of the 12 people, one of them watched it in real time. Then you say, OK, how many of you heard about the debate? Everyone raised their hand. Where did you get it? And it was just this kind of unbelievable mix

of different platforms. And then what do you remember most from it? For former President Trump, what they remembered most was eating cats and dogs. That's what they remembered most. For the vice president, it was slightly different. It was the expressions that she would give him at different times. There was a reaction to it where she, in their minds, looked strong and confident, which is part of the dynamic when you're a challenger.

And in some ways to think about the Harris versus Trump debate, he's the incumbent in some ways. And people are seeing, can I envision this person as the president of the United States? And in that way, she really answered the mail. But final thing I'll say just on media consumption, and I'm not saying this just because Jane is here, podcasts are enormously influential. The fact that Donald Trump is going on Joe Rogan on Friday is massive. 14 million universe. Now, how many of those are United States versus

global? Put that aside. Long form. And if you think about these things as content generation opportunities, the ability for you, both pro and con, to construct and deliver whatever you want to the audiences, both in real time and afterwards, is pretty extraordinary. And so that's for me a big difference. Yeah. The one thing I would say, Jane, about debates is I can remember a couple that were very consequential. In 1976, Carter and Ford, when Gerald Ford rhetorically freed Poland and Western Europe, and said there is no Soviet domination of Western Europe, he was actually gaining rapidly on Carter at that point, and the gains all stopped.

And he ultimately lost by a couple of points. I think if he hadn't done that, he might have won. Now 1960, which was a whole different media universe, over 100 million people out of 160 million living in the country, watched the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. And the question was, was Kennedy up to the job? And whenever you thought about the points in the debate or anything like that, people came out of the debate saying,

yeah, he's up to the job. Now I can move on to other issues. That I think is what she was hoping she would get out of the first debate. And to some extent she did, but it gets forgotten. After a while, people said, well, the debate, yeah, I kind of remember the debate, cats and dogs. And they don't remember those moments that might have made them at the time, say,

gee, I think I could vote for her. Now let me talk about each candidate's message and messaging challenge. First it's Trump, and that's tough because he has a bifurcated message. What he says on TV versus what he says at rallies, where he comes out with truly outlandish statements, his advertising very different from his rallies. Now, I won't ask either of your reactions to his comments about Arnold Palmer, but is there a method to his alleged madness? You know at the

convention his people had written a speech for him that was supposed to be unifying and he was going to be the new Trump like we had the new Nixon years and years ago and he gave it for about 15-18 minutes. But then he looked out... He didn't look bored. Yeah, no. He looked out at the crowd then he looked out... He was bored. Yeah. No. He looked out at the crowd in the convention hall and they were bored. I mean, he wasn't getting much of a reaction.

In the country, if you were doing dials, he was doing...it was doing well. So suddenly he threw away the script, got off the prompter, and went crazy again. So is there some method to this or is it just him indulging his impulses and his id? I think it is more the latter and I think that one of the challenges that we have is that because Donald Trump won the 2016 election while being underestimated, there are most of people who basically are like, well, now anything he does must be secretly genius. Whatever it is, whatever his statement is, whatever he might say, it must be genius because he won an election once.

And I think that what he said, it's been interesting as I actually was just writing something about how so much of the argument for Trump supporters seems to be that he will not do the things that he talks about constantly. He talks constantly about wanting to arrest his opposition, but wanting to take the licenses away from networks that criticize him about basically like, no, imprisoning his enemies. And then, you know, you were told that, oh oh of course he would never do any of those things But that he apparently will do all these things that he does not discuss at all like make America healthy again But I think that in some ways

Donald Trump believes that he is the best arbiter and judge of what Americans want to hear specifically the Americans He wants to hear that let's keep in mind that Trump's win in 2016 was not a widening, but it was a narrowing and a deepening of base. It was basically, we are going to get every person within this income level who is male to vote for us in a least state. And I think that you're seeing this again, where you have, especially with the selection of J.D. Bans,

you have a real effort to deepen the base, not widen it. And you see how awkward it is whenever Trump has to do anything that appeals to win it, for example. But I think that there is a real sense that he believes that he is the best arbiter of what Americans want to hear, and he will tell it to them. And then other people will tell those same Americans that Donald Trump must be so smart for understanding them so uniquely. And so I think that it's a feedback loop that he appears to be locked into.

David? Yeah. I don't know this. My hypothesis is that his instinct, similar to what you said at the convention, when he's testing out material and if there is this reaction, and I think he said this in 2016 about once he said, we need to lock her up, the crowd went wild. And then he leaned in to it and he repeated that. And so there is that portion of, I'm going to test what's happening with these crowds in terms of just getting them animated. So there is completely a performative aspect to it. From attending some of these, there is a festival-like atmosphere at many of them.

For some people, you're going there for the speech or for...but there is a broad sense of a community and a performance with regular lines. And it's as if like you're going to follow a band that you followed for many years and you want to hear the golden oldies repeatedly. And so there's that kind of feedback loop that you see. Now, the other piece though, is from the marketing perspective to your point, Bob, about paid.

The paid strategy is fascinating to watch and to dissect, because in some ways it's the mirror, as you would expect of what the vice president needed. The vice president is an act in three parts. There's the exuberance and the relief and the joy that people felt when the president said he's not running. Her numbers skyrocket in a way you've not seen. So you capitalize on that, which is mostly about just making sure you're getting Democrats back. Phase two goes from about August 15th to the debate on September 10th. And that's answering the question, who is this person? Because the paradox and the challenge of the vice presidency is you can have 90% name ID, but no one knows anything

about you at all. And your ratings are derivative of the president that you serve. So the biographical piece, which then leads into phase three that we're in, which is, okay, what is your vision and what are you going to do? That's her place. But the opponent has a vote. And so in that phase two, a hundred percent of his ads were all negative and contrastive. And there's a critique that they were just scattershot. But look, you're scattershot for a reason because you don't know what's going to stick. And so by the time you entered phase three, and if you look at essentially advertising on air especially, you go from week 10 through week one, we're in week two right now.

Week 10 through week five was the greatest hits of what tested best. And you began to see them zeroing in on some attacks. Week five through this point in time, now the traffic is changing. Traffic is just what are they putting up on the air? As of this week, 60% of their ads are economic contrast, where you begin with the attack on Harris, you end with what you're going to do.

By week one, the economic contrast will be close to 75% Presumably and the contrast will be closer to 50-50 if not 25-75 in terms of the closing argument there has been a discipline and an execution Across the markets that when I just study 24 versus 20 versus 16 is fundamentally different I utterly agree with that and I think there must be people in his headquarters down in Florida pulling their hair out because his rallies often get in the way of the advertising and what's going to become water cooler conversation the next morning at work is not going to be an ad that they saw, but Arnold Palmer. And, you know, it would drive me nuts

if I were in that campaign. We hear about violence all the time in the news, yet we rarely hear stories about peace. There are so many people who are working hard to promote solutions to violence, toxic polarization, and authoritarianism, often at great personal risk. We never hear about these stories, but at what cost? On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists, storytellers, and peace builders who are on the front lines of both peace and conflict. You can find Making Peace Visible wherever you listen to podcasts. One of the funny things that we see though, is that politics has become increasingly siloed

in this country, in which if you watch like Trump media, like Trump's world of Trump right-leaning media, everything he does is the most brilliant thing that's ever happened. And he is obviously going to win every state if he's going to win New York. And he did win California in 2020 if the votes have been accurately counted.

We just let Jesus count the votes in California and he would have obviously won. And so it's been interesting because I don't think one of the things, I've talked about this before, but one thing that we need to remember is that, try 24, we are dealing with a new online environment in which there are people for whom, and that's, I think, the concern about polling and things like that,

people who operate in a reality in which Trump cannot lose. It can't happen. It would never happen. He's actually the most popular person who's ever lived. Millions of people who engage in these online conversations, then you have this feedback loop, which then gets to the Trump campaign of telling them that basically everything that he does is great and amazing and everybody loves it. They're forgetting that there are fewer, there are more people who don't like Trump than do. And there are lots of people who, if they do like Trump, they wish he would stop talking. And so I think that it's important to remember that we're dealing with, you've got an online

environment here, one that Trump is very enmeshed with, so it's important to remember that we're doing with it you know this is it you've got an online environment here one that Trump is very enmeshed with so it's obviously and then with going around the San Francisco key track throughout the president's but that online and the buyer a bit you know the most people I get it most people are not a part of it so I want to do two more things before and say at least 10 minutes for questions. And David, you mentioned the economy and why they're advertising and that they're advertising heavily on the economy. I know why. If you look at the polling data, it appears that she's kind of caught up with them on the economy. And that was

some of the most startling news of the last few days. What's her greatest need to provide reassurance on the issues, including the economy, and she's doing it on choice as well, or to raise and run on the dangers of Trump, which is what she did today with a speech outside the Naval Observatory where she was invoking General Kelly and his comments about Trump, fascism, unfitness for the presidency. So you can argue, well, obviously this is the debate. Even though in some polls she's caught up, in others it's a significant Trump advantage. And so if that is, my view is you win elections not just by exploiting your opponent's weakness, you win it by taking away their strength. And his fundamental strength right now is people's belief and perception and for

many of them the reality that life was better and therefore I'm gonna discount everything else and give him a chance to continue to do it again. And so, the types of contrasts around not just this policy and that policy and that policy, but a closing argument that essentially has the story around how these different pieces fit for this view of a middle class economy, an opportunity economy with a contrast that Donald Trump only cares for himself and people like him. With abortion as a separate track that takes, I think, a lot of the base and a lot of the enthusiasm driver in a way that no other issue on the Democratic side that we have seen from

a base animating perspective. So if the view then is that Donald Trump is a danger is the most significant weakness. The argument for that is that voters have memory hold throughout this campaign a lot of what they saw on January 6th. In one of the last, this was the Mike Donlon theory, a lot of the images you want to leave them with is that because voters will rise and say, we can't do that again. So I'm skeptical that that is sufficient to overcome what I believe the work that needs to be done on the economic contrast.

Because as I heard a man just a couple of weeks ago, essentially was, look, at the end of the day, I need to take care of my family. And that's what I'm gonna do. Yeah, this is probably gonna be controversial. What's astounding about this is objectively, people were not better off under Trump. And it will be really interesting to see historians and political scientists figure out why voters thought that, even in terms, I

mean I know the inflation thing. They say stuff still costs more than it did in 2019. I get that. Ignoring the fact that real wages are now going up faster than inflation. So relatively speaking, people are going to be able to buy things. But it's utterly fascinating. One last question for Jane, and then I want to turn this over to the audience. There's a lot of conversation about black women and black and Latino men as the critical deciders. What about GOP defectors? Are there going to be any? Aside from my co-director, Mike Murphy. I think so. I think that there are going to be lots of people who don't talk about it.

Most people's politics is actually pretty complicated. Like most people are not like boilerplate Republicans or Democrats. So it's not how that works. I think there are lots of people, I mean, I've been working on a piece for a long time about the politics of annoyance and how people are repelled or pushed towards things, repelled from or pushed towards things in part because of annoyance. And so I think a lot about how people could be repelled

by Trump, especially Republican women. We've seen that like Harris's numbers was white women right now are, you know, she's winning with white women. That was not true. Uh, in, in 2016. Um, and I think like, it's important to remember that there are going to be people who, I mean, I just keep thinking like there are a couple of races, down ballot races, where people are making either going to make decisions that are very strange to me, but, or things are going to come into line in a way that does make more sense.

And you see it in Arizona, for example. Ruben Gallego is currently winning in Arizona over Carrie Lake. I believe Carrie Lake still thinks that she's got her, but I didn't arrest. But currently Trump, I believe, is up what, like one and a half in Arizona? And so you have to imagine that that means that there are going to be people who vote for Donald Trump and then vote for Ruben Gallego. That's ticket splitting, which is a thing that people do. But I think that what we are seeing there is that there's a line for many people. There's

something, you know, people will say like, I was okay with this, I was okay with this, but I'm not okay with this, especially in down ballot races, where it seems more directly impactful to you. Carrie Lake saying that McCain's voters can get the hell out. Like that impacts people, even if you also vote for Trump on a national level. So I think that the GOP defectors, they might not even show up in the presidential race, but they might show up in those down ballot races,

those Senate races, especially because of a phenomenon that has been happening since the rise of Trump, which is that Trumpian candidate. You know, your Royce White, Lake Masters, Kerry Lee, Mark Robinson. Republicans don't like them. Trump likes them. Trump supports them. But Republican voters often don't like them. So even if you don't see those kind of defectors saying like, I'm all in on Harris, you might see people either choosing not to fill out that presidential part of the ticket, which is what we saw in Georgia back in 2020, or you might see people who vote for Trump, but also vote for a Democrat down ballot because they could handle Trump, but Mark Robinson

is too much. I have to note, and then I am turning this over to a few questions from the audience, that a majority of white women have not voted for the Democratic nominee for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. It's been a very, very long time. I mean, suburban women did bleed over and helped make the difference for Biden last time. And Obama had a lot of appeal, but a majority didn't get there. We'll be stunning if it happens this year. I think somebody has an electronic device out there that will enable you to be heard. So go ahead, Bob.

Thank you very much. This has been a great presentation. We're only talking about seven states, seven Manitoba states. That means voters in 43 states, including this one, but red and blue are tumbling diff. And the thing that strikes me about this election is there's no outrage or controversy or discussion about the fact that the election is just being handled vicariously. It's like we have proxy votes that we've given to seven states. Do you think this will ever be at the forefront of the political discussion that we have a system that, and the battleground straight to every election seem to be, keeps shrinking? Yeah.

Awesome. Well, I can label that free state. Sure. So I just wondered if you'd be comment on that. If you ever get any reaction from voters and the rest of the country that it doesn't matter if we vote or not. It has never in hundreds of nights of focus groups all around the country. It has not once come up. It may be a matter of just an acceptance of this is the way things are. I'm going to vote. There's going to be a presidential election, but almost a complete acceptance.

But it is literally never once come up in any... Now I assume that if we were to raise it, and then you would get a reaction to say, yeah, that's not fair. That's not right. We should do something about that. But then from a salience perspective, which is one of the greatest problems I have with message polling or with non-horse race polling in general, is that you can ask people what's important, but if you're not doing a rank stack this or that in terms of salience to

see relatively speaking, what is going to get me animated, which then is going to trigger the political entrepreneurs on both sides to say, oh, there's a market that I need to respond to this. But then what's the incentive for either party who have a pretty good thing going in that type of formulation? Because I know the fight here and you're about to introduce an uncertainty, never mind the constitution and what we have to do or the electoral college compact that is a few states away from getting there, it's just hard for me to see getting to that place directly.

Jane, you have anything to add to that or I can move on too? Well, I think the one thing I'm going to add is that like, silly states change. I do think it's funny because I think that one of the things that we typically forget about is just like politics does shift over time. It does. What is a swing state will not always be a swing state. I remember when both Ohio and Florida were swing states and someday they could be again. There's a chance in a couple of, you know, a couple of elections, Texas could be a swing state. So I think like there actually is not a lot of ongoing stability to our race, to our politics, if you're thinking in the very long term. So I would say that, you know, it just so happens that states shift

and change over time. And what those states look like and how they decide shifts and changes over time. Okay. Another question? We keep to me dancing around the potential, I think, obviously fraud, rig, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's a real possibility. I know other people do in every seminar, every discussion I've participated in, everybody's like, it's a possibility. Let's just be prepared. It could happen. I'm concerned there really like it's a possibility. Let's just you know be prepared it could happen I'm concerned there really could be a real problem where he could announce it ahead of time

He's gonna do recounts and it's just gonna be chaos, but I don't hear that type of Concern and panic but maybe it media work panic that would cause Come back next week. We'll discuss it. But I do think that there's going to be a very chaotic week after the election if it appears that he has lost. There will be many more lawsuits than there were last time. They will have better lawyers instead of having gone to the local strip mall to find somebody, the cases will be better prepared. And we have some new protections under the Electoral Count Act. And you can't have January 6th again, because that's been declared a national security event. So you'll have troops

and police in the streets of Washington. But I think it potentially could be a very fraught period. I'm sorry, I be a very fraught period. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have answered the question. I should have let you guys do it. I will also say, when I've spoken with people who are involved with the Harris campaign, they know that. They 100% know that. Like they are going into this knowing that any victory there,

it's going to get challenged, whatever it is. So I would say that like, the fact that people aren't voicing panic doesn't mean that they aren't panicked. I think that they're just trying to work towards a result that would mean that we don't need to think about this. But when I spoke with people like they are as ready as you possibly can be from a legal standpoint to deal with that. As are the Trump people. And one of the things that Bob just said, but there, I think the number is up to 200 lawsuits have already been filed.

And there's, I think the effort was to have 200,000 poll watchers throughout the country. And so the level of sophistication this time going into this period is exceedingly higher in the preparation, I think on both sides, is much higher than you have ever seen. So anyway, this was a terrific panel. Both of you were fabulous. I know you have a hard out. I'd like to say thank you so much for having me. It's such a wonderful time to be here with you, Bob.

I am so deeply appreciative of the times I've gotten to speak with you. David, thank you so much for your time. I'm very much appreciated. I need to go. Bye, Jane. Thank you so much. Thanks. Appreciate it, Bob.

Thank you for joining us on The Bully Pulpit. It helps us a lot when you subscribe and rate the show 5 stars wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter at USCPOLFuture. That's USCPOLFuture. Follow us on Facebook and YouTube and visit our website for upcoming programs.