Pod Save America - “Trump’s lost summer.”

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

Trump caps off a lost summer by golfing and rage-tweeting through a hurricane, and a debate begins about which states are most important in 2020. Then political strategists David Axelrod and Mike Murphy, co-hosts of the Hacks On Tap podcast, talk to Jon F. about the Democratic primary and upcoming debate.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. We're back. Hello. Good job, Lovett. Good'm Tommy Vitor. We're back. Hello. Good job, Lovett. Good job in our absence. A lot of pods. Alyssa was fantastic. Good job, Alyssa. I'll tell you over the pod. I haven't told you in person yet.

Yes. The chemistry with you and Dan was electric. Electric. You could boil water on it. I can't pretend I listened. I was on vacation. Welcome back, guys. Great to see you. We missed you. Two pods and a de Blasio.

Oh, yeah. How was Bill? You know, he's very tall. No, we had a great conversation. It'll be out on Wednesday. Out on Wednesday. Great. Later in this pod, my interview with the hosts of the political podcast Hacks on Tap, our

friend David Axelrod and Republican strategist Mike Murphy. Love Hacks on Top. On Top? What did you say? But first, we're going to talk about all the latest news, including Donald Trump's lost summer and a deep dive into what the electoral map will look like in 2020. A few quick housekeeping notes. We already did the de Blasio one.

Remember, that's Wednesday that pod will come out. Also, Pod Save America and Love It or Leave It are on tour this month again. Some tickets are still available for our shows in New York City, San Jose, and Portland. Check out Crooked.com events for details and tickets. How's that Love It or leave it Radio City show? Almost sold out yet?

Almost sold out. And this week we are going to be announcing the guests. And guess what? We finally got some yeses. I don't even know who the guests are. That's exciting. We have some very big guests, so get those tickets. Finally, our good friend Adi Barkin is out with an excellent new video series called Uncovered,

where he interviews the Democratic presidential candidates about health care. No one better to talk to them about health care. Today, he's released interviews with Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, which you can find at crooked.com slash be a hero, all one word, be a hero. And be sure to follow Adi on Twitter for more episodes as they're released in the coming weeks. He'll be on this pod talking about the series and his new book on Thursday, so you don't want to miss that. Check it out. All right, let's get to the news. Over Labor Day weekend, President Trump canceled a trip to Europe with other world leaders to commemorate World War II so he could stay home and monitor Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 storm that's already caused catastrophic damage to the Bahamas and is still threatening the east coast of the United States.

Trump's hurricane monitoring included two rounds of golf and more than 120 tweets where he attacked the media, Jim Comey, Deborah Messing, and others. The Deborah Messing one. What a morning for her to watch. You're just minding your own business. It was a whole news cycle with Debra Messing. Missed that one. What did he say?

She congratulated me when The Apprentice got picked up. I don't even remember. It's just a yawn parody. I saw it on Twitter. Over vacation, I saw two things on Twitter that I was glad I wasn't a part of. Something about bedbugs and Brett Stevens, and then Debra Messing popped up, and then I threw my phone in the ocean and was like, yeah i will say one of my one regret it's a small regret in my life but i was at the upfronts promoting a little show called 1600 pen and

trump was there promoting the apprentice and he was like he was on the other side of the room and i really did at the moment be like i'm gonna walk up to that motherfucker and basically you know launch in because of the birther stuff. And, you know, I just didn't. Cool story about how you're almost a hero. I wasn't even close. Listen, I'll have I'll have conversations at a cocktail party. I'll do it.

I just didn't do it that day. So he was golfing. He sent all these tweets out. Some of Trump's angriest tweets were in response to a Washington Post story about how the president's own advisors and allies characterized these last few months as a lost summer, that was a quote, filled with what they described as, quote, squandered opportunities, self-inflicted

controversies, self-sabotage, and a president who was, quote, crashed through the remaining guardrails. Doesn't sound like the Trump we know, does it, guys? No. I'm trying to think of something like Rot Boy Summer. You know? Something like that. Dumb Trump Summer.

I don't know. Workshop it. See if you can get it sometime during the podcast. Isn't it cuffing time now? Isn't that the new thing everyone's saying? I don't know what that means. Google it. Okay.

So I want to spend some time on the lost summer story. But first, I know that we never liked the media's obsession with optics when Obama was president. But how much should it matter that Trump was playing golf and rage tweeting in the midst of a hurricane threat and, we haven't talked about yet, another mass shooting in Odessa, Texas that left seven people dead? I mean, the old rules of politics said it mattered a lot. You know, I mean, listen, can you monitor the track of a hurricane from a golf cart? Yes, absolutely. But it's also true that when the president in the United States gets all the relevant people in a room and is barking orders at them and is demanding to know like what what's been done to make sure that the people of Florida are taken care of,

things get done faster. And he's obviously not doing that. He also canceled a trip to commemorate World War II and then congratulated the people of Poland for being invaded. Did you guys see this? So it's like the guy's just banging around through the world, screwing things up left and right, and then fucking around on the golf course.

I mean, it does speak to the fact that he just doesn't care about the job. Yeah, and there was him saying that he'd never heard of a Category 5 hurricane before. Like three times. Multiple times, saying like, oh, we've never seen that one before, which is crazy since there's been multiple Category 5 hurricanes since he's been president. category five hurricane since he's been president. And he also threw out false information about the storm when he said that Alabama was in the path, even though Alabama was about 250 miles away. The National Weather Service corrected him. The exact tweet was, look out, look out, Missouri. The storm is coming for you. Don't vaccinate your children. I think that the tweets are probably as bad or worse than the actual golfing.

You know, it's as usual with Trump when he actually, sometimes when he doing nothing is better than doing something. Because when he does something, it's always damaging. Right. I mean, I'm slightly torn here about my own analysis because he could be in a meeting demanding that we nuke the hurricane. I know this is another stupid controversy that happened when we were gone. the hurricane i know this is another stupid controversy that happened when we were gone uh or he could be tweeting classified satellite images of iran's you know missile program i don't know it's yes it made me think and you know ax always talks about this it talks about this during our interview is um it's like the exhaustion theory of trump you know that that at some point a lot of voters are just going to be like, you know, however they however they feel about issues and ideology.

They're just gonna be like, can we just wake up to a president when there's a storm coming and there's a mass shooting who is at least quiet about it, tries to bring the country together, tries to talk like a normal person and doesn't just create 15 other fucking problems, you know, just because he's like angry and tweeting. 15 other fucking problems, you know, just because he's like angry and tweeting. Yeah, it's pretty amazing how not boring he is and how much of this is happening all the time. You know, there was a there's a story and we'll talk about it, but that that that talked about how bad Trump's summer has been. But one thing that was so just surprising to me is it said, you know, it's been a long time since Trump's July 4th military parade. And I just sort of sat back and I realized two years ago, that was July. That was eight weeks ago. That feels like a lifetime ago. There have been so many mini scandals since that mini scandal. Yeah. I mean, the post story captures the fact that when you're elected president,

you have four years to accomplish things and put points on the board. Really, you have about half that amount of time. But, you know, technically you have four years. And not only is he not doing smart strategic things in this summer, this August recess period or any other time, he's actively upsetting people who might otherwise support him. I mean, I was trying to think of like things he could do that would make sense. otherwise support him. I mean, I was trying to think of like things he could do that would make sense. He could go do a whole bunch of events in, you know, like right-leaning states about all the conservative judges he got through. It seems like he would enjoy that. It's something that his base would get behind. Or go to some of these swing districts where Democrats just got elected and

put pressure on them to vote your way on like immigration. There's so many obvious things he could do. And I'm not even trying to like, you know, do the thing where you say President Trump, if he acts like a normal president, these are like basic things that he might even enjoy in his little addled brain because he likes getting adulation. Yeah. So let's get into this piece. I mean, I agree. I thought it was really smart and well reported because, you know, it notes how the summer and fall before an election year is a critical time for a president to notch some legislative and political victories and also build a case for his reelection campaign. Trump has used the time to go on racist tirades against various members of Congress and the city of Baltimore, botch the response to white nationalist

terrorism that was inspired in part by his racist talk of an invasion, flip-flop on gun safety, and continue losing a trade war that is now threatening our entire economy. So the question is, how much does all of this matter? The Post said that according to an average of seven polls that they did, Trump's approval rating slipped from 43% in June to 41% in August. But as you just pointed out, Tommy, it's not just about the things he's done wrong or badly, but it's sort of about missed opportunities. Yeah, it's an opportunity cost question. I mean, I think that people don't like the erratic tweeting and they don't like the unpresidential behavior. And that's just something that we've seen show up in polls for a long time,

even while his approval rating has held pretty steady. The thing that would really worry me if I were in the White House or in Trump's reelection campaign is the trade war, because you're seeing real economic indicators that manufacturing might be down, that the trade war is impacting Germany, for example, and other countries, and that there might be some global repercussions to what's happening. So if I'm Trump and I think a percentage point could get shaved off of GDP because of this trade war that I've launched

for no reason with no end game. That's like an existential threat to his reelection. Yeah. And look, you know, this you can overstate the importance of, you know, this summer before an election year, because, you know, we all remember in 2011, the summer before Obama's reelect in 2012, it was probably Obama's worst summer of his presidency. It was the debt ceiling crisis. The U.S. credit was downgraded partly because of the debt crisis. His fight with the Republicans, his approval rating was at its lowest. And of course, he went on to go win reelection. But one of the reasons Obama went on to win is because he began to lay the case for his reelection. And he basically,

he basically did two things. One, we introduced a jobs bill in the fall. And we knew that that jobs bill probably wouldn't pass Congress because the Republicans were obstructing everything. But it looked like Obama was fighting like hell to fix the economy and to help people. I mean, he had that refrain in the job speech, pass this bill, pass this bill, do something for people, you know. And then we decided to lay out the case for his re-election early and said that the defining issue of the election was going to be economic inequality in an economy that still wasn't working for people.

Even before we knew that Mitt Romney would be the opponent, but we suspected maybe he would be. And Obama sort of set the tone for what that campaign would be like by saying, this is going to be my message. This is the contrast I'm going to draw with the nominee. And you do think that some barely competent set of advisers in the Trump White House and barely competent president would at least be thinking, would at least be thinking, OK, let's use the summer and this fall while all the Democrats are fighting each other in a primary to set up what the message is going to be for the Trump campaign going into 2020. And they just don't seem like they're able to do this. Well, I don't even if they wanted to, they don't have the ability to do it with Trump.

I think there's two things happening. One, you know, this is a flip side of the coin to what happened in 2016 in that Donald Trump takes all the oxygen out of the room. So Hillary Clinton gives a long speech about the economy. But what they take is the fight she had with Trump over whatever the crisis of the week is. You know, Trump does go on these rallies and he gives a very lengthy speech and he does mention judges. He does issue, I think, what is the kind of 30,000 foot message for his campaign, which is love me or hate me. You have to vote for me because of the economy, because of all these things I did, because the other side is crazy. The other side is the squad. Like there is a kind of message he's trying to put out there. But he stands at that podium and speaks for two

hours and five or six of the things he says, whether they're semi-prepared or off the cuff, are so controversial that they become the story for a couple of days. That's the first message never breaks. The message never breaks through. And then the second part is core to his message is the fact that, you know, even if you can't stand me, look how good the economy is doing. But in part because of the trade war, in part because of larger dynamics in the economy, he may not have that. He may not be able to make that argument successfully. So I think those are the two political problems that anyone trying to get Trump to campaign is going to face,

even if they did have some master plan. Tommy, you mentioned a few things he could do, or could have done to make the summer better. What are some other sort of steps that Trump could have taken on some of these issues that would have made us even more nervous than we are heading into 2020? Or what might he still do? I mean, we could go through some of the issues like just on guns, for example. Yeah. Yeah. So guns is, I think, a signal example of what has been kind of a repeated Trump pattern from the beginning. I think that there was a fear a lot of us had in the early days of the administration, which is what happens if he

really does deliver on this idea of an unorthodox populist Republican president, right? What if he comes in and does an infrastructure bill? What if he comes in and does make a grand bargain on immigration? And what's been fascinating is I think he changed the Republican orthodoxy on immigration. He has bucked the Republican orthodoxy on trade, but otherwise he's been pretty lockstep. So what happens is there's a terrible shooting. Trump starts talking about background checks. He starts sounding like he's going to pursue some kind of moderate deal with Democrats that he's going to buck the NRA. But of course that doesn't last and he ends up walking it back, which he's going to buck the NRA. But of course, that doesn't last. And he ends up walking it back, which he's done on a host of issues. I mean, fundamentally, Trump has never been willing to buck the conservative base of the party to get a win. And I think

we are politically, I think that that has been valuable. It's sad for the country on issues like guns, but I think politically it has put him in a box yeah and i think i mean the two issues you just where you just said he has bucked republican party orthodoxy he's bucked the moderate part of the orthodoxy on both immigration and and trade he hasn't bucked it in a way that would lead him towards getting something done with democrats you know on immigration like he's gone further to the right than a lot of the republicans were on immigration during the obama era or at least maybe half the party at that point um and on trade i mean you can see right now he's trying to negotiate with pelosi and the democrats the nafta 2 deal right and like you could see him getting some trade deal and that would help him

out but i don't know that that's gonna happen right i mean the trade is interesting one i mean he he ran around saying that uh nafta was the worst deal ever negotiated and that he alone could fix it. And they they renegotiated some like really minor changes to the bill that might help like dairy farmers or, you know, change the way auto manufacturing standards are in Mexico. But then now he doesn't seem to give a shit about the thing. He's not pushing for it to get passed in Congress. He's not pressuring Democrats to fix it. And the China trade war is the same thing. I mean, the things that I assume we're fighting for when it comes to our trade relations with China are like protecting intellectual property for corporations.

That doesn't help some guy in Wisconsin. That helps like Apple. It helps major corporations and shareholders and other rich people. So the things he's doing are misaligned with the priorities of working people who might have actually been hurt by the policies of the past when it comes to trade, but he's not doing shit for them. Yeah. It feels like we've zoomed past that exit on the highway of the like deal, you know, haggling over intellectual property issues and trade wars. You know, like, I mean, he could, I suppose he could still back down from this trade war with china but i don't

even know if he has the capacity to do that on his own anymore because the chinese are probably thinking well we're we're winning this thing and we're winning the politics in the united states so why would the chinese back down at this point no i i don't think i mean i think that they are i think they've walked away from some of these negotiations and are actively like giving him the finger and making it clear that they're not going to they're not going to do what Mexico did, which is be seen as pliant when it comes to demands. The other thing that I think Matt Iglesias and Ezra Klein pointed out that a lot of the things Trump is fighting for when it comes to rule changes with China would actually are likely to lead to more jobs being outsourced and sent abroad, not fewer, because they're just helping corporations. So in a sense, what he's fighting for would likely harm workers. Yeah, that's, I think, part of it. Yeah, that as long as the trade war is ongoing,

the trade war is the source of all of these ills. It's the source of job losses. It's the source of economic dislocation. It's the source of your misery. It is a scapegoat for him to point to along with immigrants. And if he does back down or achieve any kind of a deal, all of a sudden, that's the victory. And who's the victory for? All of a sudden, the thing you claimed was a solution turns out to not have been one. So he really is stuck in that as long as it's ongoing, he's in his comfort zone, which is attacking China, claiming he's fighting. But to Tommy's point, to others' points, it's not possible for him to win because he's promised a bunch of different things that are actually in contradiction, like, you know, keeping jobs in the United States and then achieving a victory on IP, right? These are things that don't help everybody.

Ultimately, I think his whole goal is just to look tough and look like he's attacking somebody. But when the when looking tough leads to the economy faltering and people actually getting hurt, I don't think that's going to work. And then you're to come around on the back end and say, well, actually, it's Jay Powell, the chairman of the Fed's fault here. Like no one knows what the hell he's talking about. Yeah. So we've talked about this before, but it almost seems like Trump and his campaign have sort of given up on trying to improve the president's political standing. And they're just hoping to win by disqualifying his opponent. And Maggie Haberman reported this weekend that a Trump advisor recently told her that Trump wants voters to feel negatively, not just about his opponents, but about longstanding institutions

like the media. And, you know, most of his rage tweets over the past couple of days have been directed towards the media. What do you think about that strategy? Yeah, I mean, I can't I can't win, but you can lose. The strategy basically is what he's doing. Right. And, you know, I think this is if you're inside a Trump campaign and you're trying to figure out how to be useful, it's not going to be making Trump different. It's not going to be about making Trump more popular.

It's going to be about tearing down your opponents, going to be about dragging everybody down to his level, because that's that's what he did in 2016. It's the only path for him. It's the only way, because the other option is for Trump to become a different person. And that's been promised for a long time. The other option is for Trump to become a different person. And that's been promised for a long time. Yeah, that tweet about attacking institutions rang very true to me, but it also didn't seem particularly new. You know, I mean, they're literally funding organizations, apparently the Trump people, to dig up things journalists said and feed them to fucking Breitbart so they can try to take the Washington Post down a peg. so they can try to take the Washington Post down a peg. And they know this is an asymmetric fight because then you have a bunch of journalists on Twitter

complaining that Beto O'Rourke didn't let Breitbart into one event as if it's sort of like a, you know, as if they're an actual news gathering organization and not just an arm of the Republican Party. Like the Trump people are telling us. I mean, Steve Bannon worked there, right? It doesn't matter. But the broader fight against institutions has basically been what Republicans have done for decades, right? They

want to undercut our faith in government. They want to make it harder to participate in democracy. And in so doing, they can win with a smaller and smaller group of people actually voting for them. Yeah. I do think that within this strategy of trying to disqualify his opponents and the media and saying, don't believe anything bad that you hear about me is basically his strategy. There's a clue for how Democrats need to take him on, which is like, this is not about whether what Trump is saying is true or not, whether the media is lying about him or not. Just forget about what you're hearing believe your own eyes right like what is your life like right you know and this trade war and we you know we saw this when we were testing um messages in wisconsin in our change poll like talking about trump starting

a trade war with china losing it and then trying to bail out big agribusinesses including some in foreign countries because he's fucked up this trade war so badly and hurting dairy farmers in Wisconsin, was one of the most powerful messages because, you know, whatever Trump says, whatever he's lying about, whatever he's yelling about, whatever other people are saying about Trump, he can't avoid what people are feeling in their own lives and what people have seen in their own lives. And so people know that he hasn't gotten anything done on guns, even though, you know, 90% of the country wants background checks. People are going to know if the economy starts turning south because they're going to feel it. Right.

People are going to know when they read stories about some of the more extreme things he's done on immigration, that those things are happening. Right. Like at some point he can keep telling us that everything the media is saying about him is a lie, but he can't fully avoid the effects of his policies on actual people. Yeah. And you can tell he knows that and he's a little bit worried about it. Because he will, for example, tweet a lie about the China negotiations to briefly juice the stock market and try to, you know, fix the general impression about the state of the economy. Right. So like there's little windows

into his psyche here. Yeah. But I think it's incumbent upon Democrats to continue to draw the lines between what Trump is saying and doing with the actual effects on people's lives. We were talking about this before the pod, but that whole situation last week about Trump promising pardons to aides who do whatever it takes to get the border wall built. I mean, my first reaction was, yes, this is another impeachable offense. Yes, the pardons are outrageous.

But I think what's probably most politically effective in talking about this is Trump wants to go steal your land. Illegally. He wants to illegally steal your land and pardon anyone who does the crime. Right, but we sort of get into these like it's impeachable and it's bad conduct and it's the pardons and all this kind of stuff, which is all important, I agree, but we've got to start talking about the real effects on people's lives. Like you live by the border and you're just going about your business. The federal government under Donald Trump might just want to come and steal

your land with no due process, nothing whatsoever. Like those are the connections that I think that Democrats have to keep drawing if we hope to be successful. All right, let's talk about 2020. The Washington Post's Dan Balz had an excellent piece over the weekend about the electoral map and which states matter most. He writes, quote, to the Republicans in 2016, but President Trump won each by only a percentage point or less. The four are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida. Many analysts point to Wisconsin as the single state upon which the election could turn. So the piece quotes former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, who we all worked with, saying, quote, because of the partisanship of the country and the president, we're now looking at the smallest map in modern political history.

First, what is actually, just so people know, when people are talking about the map and which states campaigns are going to play in, what does that mean to sort of play in a state? Just so people know. Oh, like actually go there, spend time, spend money, put up TV ads, have a full field staff in the state. Like, yeah, it's a significant expenditure

of resources, basically. Yeah, I think what people might not realize is, you know, a campaign has finite resources, right? You can't just what people might not realize is, you know, a campaign has finite resources, right? You can't just look at a map and say, oh, yeah, all these states look good. So I want to compete in all these states, you have to decide where we're going to put our organization, where we're going to put our candidate, and then how much money we're going to spend on on television ads. And, you know, in certain states and certain media markets, it's very expensive to run television ads. And in other states, it's relatively inexpensive.

So it's not like you get to choose everything. You do have to make decisions on a campaign about which states you want to bet on to win. So what do you think? Do you agree with Jim's assessment that we are down to these four states? I actually was thinking about it, and I actually just philosophically don't totally understand what it means in this sense. It is true that there will be kind of maximal campaigns in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, probably also Arizona. Right. There will be huge amounts of resources devoted to those. The candidates will go there. And then the question is, well, what what will happen in other states?

And then the question is, well, what will happen in other states? And that will play out in part because the campaigns will do a dance with each other about where they put money, where they match each other. So, you know, if it is quite possible that it will boil down to a very small number of states, but it is also quite possible, depending on what each campaign decides to do, that we will end up with tens, hundreds of millions of dollars spent across 12, 13, 14 states. I think we just don't know. The field of competition will be based on a kind of a game theory, a version of game theory that plays out over the course of the next year, you know, head fakes, trips, things like that. And over time, we will come to see based on polls, where candidates will go and where they won't, where their money will go, where it won't go. Right. I mean, I think it's certainly safe to say that it won't start that narrow, which is why it was surprising to me to see people predicting with such confidence that it will be this tiny map. It's also surprised that that Dan, who's one of the smartest reporters out there, didn't have Arizona higher up in his discussion of what the democratic strategy will

be. Like, you know, I'm also like, it's, it's a tough pill to swallow that Florida is potentially the centerpiece of this whole thing is Florida is where you can see Trump has actually had a pretty clear, concerted and probably smart strategy to peel off democratic voters, right? I mean, they're trying to scare the shit out of older Jewish voters. They're trying to be tough on Maduro to appeal to the Venezuelan population. They're even considering giving Venezuelan voters temporary protected status so they don't get deported. So they're undoing everything Obama did on Cuba to reach the older hardline Cuban population.

So, like, I can see what they're doing in Florida. If you were to tell me what he's done to improve his chances of winning Michigan again, I couldn't tell you really anything. And one other just small point about this, too, is that states move together. You know, Florida, to Tommy's point, if the results are coming in and it looks like the Democrat is winning Florida, I think that augurs really well for a bunch of other states to think, wow, we're performing better than we expected or we're performing well. If it starts to look like we're not winning Florida, that doesn't necessarily mean the election is over.

So I think that it is true that because of geographic polarization over the last several years, there are far fewer states that are decided by just a couple points than there used to be. There used to be a lot more states that were like five points or less or 10 points or less. And now there's fewer of those states. So that I understand. That said, you know, we all remember that at the beginning of the general election in 2008, David Plouffe sat down, Obama's campaign manager, and said, we are not going to be up on election night waiting for one or two states to come in. We're going to have multiple paths to 270 and try to add up as many states as possible, you know, to play in as many

states as possible to get to 270. And I think that's still wise advice right now. And I think partly because, look, there's many different, you know, we've been having this debate in the primary, you know, which demographic groups do Democrats need to win? Do they need to win back the non-college educated white voters in the Midwest and the Obama Trump voters? Do they need to increase African-American turnout in some of these Midwestern states? Or should they look to the Southwest and the Sun Belt and, you know, rely on more college educated white voters and former Republicans and independents and more Latinos. So we've been having this debate about which groups Democrats should go after.

And I think the only way to solve that debate is to try to play in as many states as you can that are still within the realistic scenarios here. So I do think Arizona, which Hillary only lost by three and a half points in uh 2016 and uh kirsten cinema just flipped in 2018 has to be in that map florida like you said which has been has only been within one point over the last maybe three or four elections obviously is still on that map as well but look we were disappointed were disappointed in Florida in 2018. Gillum and Nelson both lost. So I don't think we could be, you know, I think there's a good argument to be made. Dave Wasserman made this argument on Twitter the other day that Democrats win Arizona before they win

Florida. I think North Carolina is another one in there too. Obama won North Carolina in 2008. We know there's more college educated white voters and African-American voters, especially around the research triangle. That state had been trending blue for a while. Democrats should compete in that state as well. Right. And then I think all of this also boils down to resources. And part of what will determine how big the map is for the Democrat and where the Democrat is competing is how much money they have and how much resources they can devote to states outside of the there'll be the, you know, the core few states where everybody will be playing and playing really hard, but then it'll be, you know, can we devote money to North Carolina? Should we devote money to Georgia? What other states people decide to reach out to? And

that'll be based on how people are donating, what outside groups are doing, how much money the billionaires like the Kochs are dropping into states across the country. There's just a lot of things that will determine where Democrats are competing. Yeah. And obviously the candidate, right? I mean, like Castro or Beto O'Rourke, they might have a better chance of competing in Texas than some of the other candidates. But, you know, so that will go into consideration before you drop 20 million to be up on every media market in Texas. So, you know, the article is interesting. It's an important way to think about the challenge we have ahead of us. I do think it's just too early to know the strategy. I do think I mean, my ranking of states in order of states that we could probably flip back would be Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina.

I think the more interesting decisions for Democrats are going to be, do you still play seriously in Ohio and Iowa, which have swung pretty hard against us? And very big questions, do you compete in Texas and Georgia? Now, if Texas and Georgia were smaller states with the populations they have, you'd say, yeah, of course you do. But the Atlanta media market is very expensive and Texas is the most expensive of all. So those are really big bets if you're going to compete seriously there. And then the other interesting thing about that piece is that, you know, Democrats will have to play defense or the Trump campaign is going to try to make them play defense in four states. The Democrats won in 2016, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Nevada and New Mexico. I think New Mexico is a little ridiculous there because Hillary Clinton won it by eight points, but New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Nevada were all decided by a closer margin. So you could see Democrats playing there as well. Yeah. I hope they spent.

I hope the Trump people spend mightily in all those other states because they have a big financial advantage and it makes me worried. Yeah. There was also, by the way, and Dan Pfeiffer brought this up the other day, there is such a nightmare scenario where we win back Michigan and Pennsylvania. We don't win Wisconsin, Arizona or anything else. Trump wins that one district in Maine again to get the electoral vote. We win that one district in Nebraska near Omaha to get that electoral vote and it's 269-269. I can't. Oh, by the way, there's other scenarios. There's other scenarios, too, right, where now the Senate hinges on a on a runoff out of Georgia. Right. Because Isaacson's. Yeah. So there's all there's all kinds of worst case scenarios out there for you to ponder as you're falling asleep. But I think that's I think

it goes back to the answer is, you know, Democrats and the candidate and the party need as many resources as possible to play in as many states as possible and have organizations on the ground in as many of these states as possible. So we are not dependent on one or two states, but at least at the outset, we're playing on a very big map and a big field. Okay. When we come back, my interview with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. Please welcome to the show the host of the excellent and relatively new political podcast, Hacks on Tap, Republican strategist Mike Murphy, and my good friend and former boss, David Axelrod. Thanks for being here, guys. Good to be with you, brother. Thank you.

Welcome back to the USA. It's good to be back. It's good to be back. It doesn't seem like I missed too, too much. So we were just talking about that Trump's lost summer story in the Washington Post from over the weekend. Ax, you remember very well how poorly the summer of 2011 went for Obama. I do. What do you guys think the difference is here with Trump? And what options do you think the Trump campaign has to strengthen the president's position ahead of 2020? You know, back, you remember fast back in the summer of 2011.

I mean, it was the it was the debt ceiling debacle that really pitched Obama to the nadir of his presidency. But even then, his polling number was what is Trump's average, which is basically it was in the low 40s. It was hovering around 40, 42. Trump has never broken 50 percent. So that's one difference, which is that was a low point. This is the average for Trump. The other thing is what Murphy just said, which is, I mean, Trump's, I believe increasingly that the way you beat Trump is the Trump exhaustion thing. You know, everybody talks about martial arts, who's tough enough to take on Trump. But I think it's jujitsu that is going to beat Trump using his own negative

energy against him. Just the sort of exhaustion that comes with a president who divides every day, who, you know, for profit, who sends out these crazy ass tweets and gets into these ridiculous tantrums and gratuitous fights that produce nothing. And, you know, just the utter chaos that reigns around him. And I think that's going to get worse as the election approaches, not better. So the difference is we saw a problem and we developed a strategy to deal with it. And we came out that September and made a job speech and we never looked back. I don't think Trump has that capacity. I don't think he has the capacity to find a remedial strategy and execute it. Yeah, I think I heard you guys talking about this on your podcast, but do you sort of think that Trump and his campaign has sort of given up on improving Trump's political standing and basically they're hoping to just make the campaign all about the Democrat because their only hope is to sort of depress turnout and disqualify the Democratic candidate?

and disqualify the Democratic candidate? That's my best guess. I mean, the problem with being a Trump strategist is, one, Trump hates his own strategist. He just wants to argue about invoices. And two, he won't listen to anybody. So when you're sitting around Trump headquarters watching the cable TV feed, and you're sitting there with a bottle of whiskey and a revolver staring at the screen, knowing you have very little influence to do anything about it, and most of the grown-ups are gone, too. So you do what campaigns always do, and they can't fix the big problem.

You focus on the little stuff. Oh, new refrigerator magnets. What's the new negative ad we're going to run? So I think they're going to do the easy strategy, which is to try to crush the Democrat. And if the Dems go on, at least in my view, a complete joyride to the progressive left to try to win two things, to beat Trump and get a policy agenda that is a lot more to the left than normally we see in presidential elections. They're taking a hell of a lot of risk because they're giving Trump and his campaign something to work with. And one thing Republican campaigns, even ones with no strategy

and an insane president, know to do, is scare the hell out of the working class and the middle class by grinding a liberal Democrat into applesauce. So I think that's exactly what you're going to see. So I wanted to ask you guys about this too, how much, I mean, we know that voters don't choose based purely on a checklist of issue positions or ideology. I think to myself about the you know, Kyrsten Sinema flips Arizona. She's a very moderate candidate. So there's a case there. OK, a moderate Democrat can flip a tough state. But then you see someone like Tammy Baldwin wins in Wisconsin, you know, which Hillary lost in.

And she's Medicare for all, you know, Sherrod Brown's very progressive. He wins in Ohio. So how much do you think in the end in a presidential, the ideology of the Democrat matters to voters? Or do you think the person just, the candidate just needs to sort of present themselves as a candidate who can sort of bring the country together? Well, look, presidential races are different than any other kind of race because you're judged in kind of three-dimensional form. You know, it's the MRI for the soul thing that I said years ago, which is people, you know, judge you not just on the basis of the policies that you espouse, but also on what they see every day. espouse, but also on what they see every day. And so, and I think that's going to be particularly important in this race against Trump. I do think I want to answer your question, but I just want to go back one step and say, if you or I or Murphy were advising Trump, in all fairness, you would say you can't win a referendum. And we would say very few incumbents

do. The fact is, Barack Obama may not have won a referendum in 2012. But we knew it was a comparative race. And we knew Mitt Romney would likely be the nominee. And we knew, given what happened with Wall Street and everything, that we had a comparative advantage and we just went at it relentlessly. And so, you know, it is not it is not unprecedented for Trump to want to demonize the opponent. So, you know, but I do think if my jujitsu theory is right, it is. if my jujitsu theory is right, it is, I don't think people are going to be looking, forget about the ideology, for more pugilism. I think they're going to be looking for someone who will not do what Trump has done. They'll be looking for the remedy, someone who can bring some calm and reason and empathy and humanity to the presidency.

And I think that may trump all the, no pun intended, all the issue stuff. Yeah. And I think this is one of the problems Warren has, who otherwise is quite ascendant and is running the best campaign. Every fifth word of any sentence she'll say in front of a television camera is fighter. And I agree with David that there's going to be a huge market for a huge style contrast to Trump because it's so damn exhausting. But, you know, this is still a fundamental presidential race. The country's been trying to fire Trump since Inauguration Day.

Every special election, we Republicans have either done bad or awful the midterm. So if the Democrats don't get in the way of that and Teflon up rather than going kind of narcissistic and trying to make a big point about identity or progressive policy and get out of the way, the country will fire Trump. But if they get out of the way and give Trump something to work with, it'll be like the Romney campaign. Trump may be able to make it a referendum on a challenger. Yeah, I guess that's... What do you think about this? Because you guys are kind of the voice of restive progressivism.

Yeah. And you've been negative on the, let's pick the least offensive of choices strategy. What do you think about that? Well, because I also, I guess, I think there were two parts of the Obama message, right? There was, you know, he would always talk about bringing people together, and he would try to inspire the country and call them to, you know, try to emphasize unity. But then at the same time, we always made sure that he had an economically populist message, because, you know, that when, you know, the people that we're trying to reach in places in the Midwest and other places are feeling, you know, economically disadvantaged and they respond to a message about, you know, they respond to economic populism. they respond to economic populism. So in that sense, I think Warren's message is giving people something to vote for and to get excited about. But I do, you know, every once in a while, I do

wonder if voters are also going to respond, especially some more of the, you know, suburban voters, some of the independents that have come our way to respond to a message that's, all right, aren't you tired of the division and the bullshit from Donald Trump? Don't you want someone who can bring us together? You know, I don't think it's just suburbanites, but you look at the polling and Trump has a real weakness with some of the non-college educated, and I always hate that phrase, but it's meaningful, I always hate that phrase, but it's meaningful. Women in rural areas, he's barely above water with them now in terms of his approval.

And I think it has a lot to do, his favorable, I think it has a lot to do with that, with just they can't abide him. It's not his policies. They pretty much like his policies, but it is him. It's not his policies. They, they pretty much like his policies, uh, but it is him. And so I think this is a big, is a big thing. And, uh, you, the thing I worry about is, um, Trump is a cultural warrior. Even the economic issues are a surrogate for, you know, for race, for other kinds of cues to people. And so I do think some attention needs to be paid. One of the things, you mentioned Obama, we were very careful about navigating these cultural issues. And he ran better than many Democrats do in some of these areas you wouldn't expect, because he focused on the economy and these larger messages

of community. And he navigated around these hot button cultural issues, which are, you know, very much at the center of a lot of the Democratic debate right now. Yeah, I guess there's like two groups of voters that I worry about and that I think Democrats have to really think about. One group is the Obama-Trump voters, right, who voted for Obama once or twice and then went to Trump. And the other group is some of these Obama voters who stayed home in 2016 or voted third party in sort of larger numbers than people voted third party in eight and 12. And I won. And those those voters tend to be younger. They tend to be people of color. They tend to be poorer. And I wonder if, you know, a Democratic candidate who, you know, has gives

people something to vote for and that is exciting and inspiring helps bring some of those people out. Although I agree with you that it's a balance, right? Like you need to get both groups of voters. So the question is... Don't you think Trump does that, though? That brings them out. Yeah, that would be my argument. I mean, if you got to make a bet, bet on Trump to drive everybody crazy, because we know he's great at that. The question is, how do you sliver away voters from Trump who might be populist, who bought into Obama, but not Hillary Clinton? And one way is not to send the subtext signal that if you voted for Trump, you're a racist,

redneck idiot. Right. Because then you just give Trump something to work with. So that's why the Dems need to get better from even how they think about staffing their campaigns at attracting the voters that they have the lowest contempt for, the voters they need, people who eat fried food and live in Macomb County, Michigan and like Trump. They aren't that woke and aren't that green. They've got to go play on the other sides of the football field in their end zone and shave a few of them.

And they can do that, but not if the campaign message is so internal in the progressive culture that it's off-putting. Yeah, my view on this is I think it's less about the actual issue positions you take, and it's more of a tonal message issue. You know, it's how you speak to the country every single day. Can I just ask you one thing? Sure. We were talking about this earlier on our own podcast. own podcast, Bernie and Elizabeth, who, you know, are very much in contention up here with Biden,

but also in contention with each other for progressive votes and for the votes of young people. How does that sort itself out? And if it doesn't sort itself out, and both of them may have the resources to go deep into this race, if they don't sort it out, doesn't that further strengthen Biden? Yeah, I think it does. I think that's one of the challenges both of them have. And I think that neither one of them wants to blink on this because they both have, you know, Bernie sort of has this base of people who's very, very excited about him. And obviously he's lost some support from 2016. But, you know, that was probably a group of people who were just anti Hillary voters than pro Bernie voters. But he still has this 20 something percent of of voters with him who I don't know will leave him. of voters with him who I don't know will leave him.

And then the challenge that Warren faces is she's competing. People think it's like, oh, she's just competing with Bernie for voters, but it's these college-educated white liberals that she's sort of competing with, with Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg and even others in the race as well. And so I wonder if she can sort of enlarge that pie. And I don't know if they'll, I don't know what the difference, like if they've, you know, if they've talked about the difference between them or they will at this debate. I mean, she doesn't seem like she wants to draw the contrast at the debate. She said yesterday she wasn't, she said yesterday she,

or she hinted that she wasn't going to do that. I think their view is that she doesn't have to bludgeon Bernie. She just has to outperform him. And I suspect they think if she wins Iowa... If you're Bernie, it's time to bludgeon her. She's the better product there. And you're flatlined to going slightly down. She's growing every day with the superior campaign. You cannot let that equation continue on the timeline.

But I think the question, and you guys have talked about this too, I think the question there is not one candidate in this race has drawn a contrast, really, none of the major candidates, with Elizabeth Warren. And I wonder what Bernie's argument against Warren is. I think you can go after her on purity. We've talked about this on Hacks on Tap. after on purity. We've talked about this on Hacks on Tap. She has started to leave breadcrumbs a little bit on Medicare for All and some of that stuff. I think go at her on purity. She used to be a Republican. Then she was kind of a neocon on some social policy in her book. David Brooks had

a good column on this we talked about today. So go at her on the one thing Bernie has, purity. He believes every word of it. Does she? Yeah. on this point, I was in Iowa for my CNN show, and I asked them both about Medicare for All, and she had been roughed up the night before by a questioner who was unhappy about taking the choice of private insurance away. And I said, does that influence your thinking? She says, of course it does. You know, we're going to have to manage this transition carefully.

We need all the stakeholders at the table and so on. I asked Bernie the same sort of question, and he said, you know, I'll tell you what Seismic is. Seismic is 400,000 people going to lose their health care or go bankrupt this year because of health care and so on. go bankrupt this year because of health care and so on. And, you know, and he described his four-year transition to Medicare for all, eliminating private insurance, and he said, I don't think that's radical at all. So, you know, I think that at the end of the day, he's going to try and make the case, if he makes a case, that he's the real deal and she is hedging.

So we'll see. But I think the people who are going to make the contrast with Elizabeth next week potentially is not Bernie, but other candidates, Biden perhaps, but also a Buttigieg, a Harris, people who are looking to carve into the less populated lane that Biden seems to occupy largely by himself, which is this, you know, center left sort of moderate lane. And if those guys don't start carving out some of that turf, I think they're going to get squeezed because there's not a lot of room on the left in this race. So both of you have been in plenty of debate prep. What advice would you be giving to Joe Biden right now if you're on his campaign for what to do in the next debate? Oh, that's a great question. Well, I think the Biden campaign's weakness is sometimes they decide they want to put a wall around Biden because they're afraid of Biden's Biden-ness. They've got nothing else.

They ought to bottle it. It's all they have. He's all heart and he's all normalcy. So they just need to add a little romance to that and make a thing out of the fact that Biden flies a pot in that because he is the most authentic guy in the race. He is the most authentic guy in the race. Elizabeth Warren has a staff of 28 figuring out those clever words. Pete's a McKinsey consultant who's here to explain why replacing him for robots is a good idea in tone. So let Biden sweat, bleed, be Biden, and bottle that and bet on it because it's all you have. And so I think they need to, you know, he needs some discipline in how he speaks and everything.

They need to, you know, he needs some discipline in how he speaks and everything. But I would let Joe do the naked on a rock strategy and just be Joe because it's all they have. So be great at it. Wow. What do you think, Axe? Scary. But he, you know, I think, John, that he has to, he has a theory of the case. And it may be right and it may be wrong. He has a theory of the case, and it may be right and it may be wrong. And that theory is that the thing that unifies Democrats is a fundamental desire to replace Donald Trump and to restore a sense of decency, empathy, humanity to the presidency.

And I think he has to cleave closely to that. You know, last time he needed to kind of spar with every candidate in order to prove that he could after the first debate, but it wasn't a great look. You know, and if he wants to advance his message, that he should lean into his message, and that is his message, that he represents a return to decency. You know, I don't think normalcy is necessarily the word you want to use, because

that has a backward-sounding kind of normal. As Buttigieg points out normal is not necessarily appealing to everybody, but decency is, empathy is. You know, and I would, as much as possible, try and run my debate against Trump less against the others. He may want to have a tete-a-tete with Elizabeth about Medicare for All or with Bernie. But by and large, I think the more he's debating Trump, the better off he is. So on the other side, what advice would you be giving one of the candidates like Warren, who hasn't quite made a real dent in Biden's frontrunner status yet? I mean, like, you know, Kamala Harris, you could argue that she had sort of a short-term gain from going after Biden. The first debate didn't really capitalize. Like, no one has

really sort of found the message against Biden that really works. And then, you know, on Twitter, it's like every gaffe is magnified. And I don't know if that's really worked against him either. So what is the message against Biden for some of these candidates? If you're Elizabeth Warren, you have the formula that's working, because the only thing that's happened in the race really is you've gone up, other than the early blip that kind of put Pete in the race. And she knows her message. She's good at it. And I don't think she has to worry about knocking Biden out in a debate. She has to beat him in Iowa and New Hampshire, which she could be on a trajectory to do. So I would just do more of what I've been doing, which is strength, strength, strength,

fighter, fighter, fighter, and trying to do the pivot from the terror of the Harvard faculty lounge to the fighting grandma from Oklahoma and maybe add a little of that. But I think there's not a lot to fix there. She just tactically has to stay in the center of the debate and not be jolted by all these other people who wish her ill because she is now in the way to any help they have. You might see a death rattle thing going on, too, with some of the Amy Klobuchar's and the Cory Booker's who just haven't gotten any traction, though Cory's done a little better, where they're desperately trying to break out because they know the clock's

ticking. So there could be some bizarro fireworks from that, but I don't think there's a lot she needs to change. I, you know, I agree with that. Although one thing I think she needs to focus on, she's done really well, as you point out, Favs, with, you know, college-educated, very liberal voters. She's done very well with young voters, though she's vying with Bernie for a lot of them. But she hasn't broken through with working class whites, even though her message is very much geared that way. And she hasn't broken through with African-American voters. And I think she needs to be more, you know, Betsy from Norman, Oklahoma, than Professor Warren from Cambridge. Yeah.

And a little more bio, a little more revealing about herself, I think would be really useful here. Yeah, which she does in the stump very well, too. Last question, Axe. You were just in Iowa talking to all the candidates for your Axe Files special on CNN. Who or what surprised you there? You know, I knew that Warren was doing well. I was even more impressed when I got there to see just the degree of organization that she has there. You know, she started very early, even earlier than Obama did in 2007.

You know, she started very early, even earlier than Obama did in 2007. You know, she grabbed Emily Parcell, who's someone you probably remember, was our political director in Iowa in 2007 and 2008, who is an Iowa organizational whiz. And I think she's just doing everything right. I was surprised that I did a focus group with voters, and we spoke for an hour, and Joe Biden's name didn't come up until I introduced it. And what I found in Iowa was that people have a great deal of affection for him, a great deal of respect for him, but there's not a lot of enthusiasm. And I think that's a real problem in a state where you're asking people to come out on a snowy, cold night in February and stand up in northern Iowa, that all the candidates attended, at the amount of visibility for Kamala and Buttigieg, which suggests to me that they're

beginning to develop organizations there. And if they can catch fire, they may ultimately be able to build the infrastructure they need to make a move in Iowa. And, you know, beyond that, I think the top five are the top five, and it's going to be hard for others. Booker has a great infrastructure, hasn't quite caught fire there. Others are lagging behind. I think you're going to see potentially some shifting among those top five. I'd be surprised if-

I'll put one crazy prediction, which is Biden will come down not to Iowa, but New Hampshire. I think he's going to get hurt in Iowa, probably by Warren. A lot can happen in the last few weeks, as you guys know well. But if in those eight days between, or eight or nine days between Iowa and New Hampshire, New Hampshire gives Biden the dramatic comeback. He'll be the nominee. If not, I think it'll be somebody else. He loses too. He's got a real problem. I think Joe Biden in New Hampshire is going to be the moment. Yeah, I was thinking that too. Axe Murphy, thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. Everyone go subscribe and listen to Hacks on Tap. It's fantastic.

Thanks, John. Appreciate that. Good to be with you. Thanks to Axe and Murphy for joining us today. And, you know, we'll see you on Thursday. Bye, guys. Bye. Bye. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The show is produced by Michael Martinez.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Caroline Reston, Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these bad boys every week.