The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Race Next Door (#12) With Bruce Anderson And Special Guest Gerry Butts.

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Gerry Butts brings his insider analysis to the pod today to set up tomorrow's final presidential debate. It's a master class in watching from this side of the border.

You've got to love that. I love Hail to the Chief. We play a little more of it every week. Because people wrote in and said, hey, we want to hear more Hail to the Chief. We want to hear more Bruce. We want to hear more, perhaps, of a special guest. Well, we got all of that for you today.

On the race next door, Hail to the Chief will play for somebody in the next few weeks when the Americans make their decision about who the next president of the United States will be. Will it keep on being Donald Trump or will it be Joe Biden? Well, we're going to find out. November 3rd is election day. And if you believe a lot of people, it's going to take a few days before we really know who won. I'm still of a belief that we're going to know on November 3rd,

or at least the night of November 3rd, early morning of November 4th, but who knows. Let me quickly set the scene. We're 24 hours roughly away from the final debate between the two contenders for the presidency, Trump and Biden. That will take place tomorrow night. In the meantime, Biden has been kind of holed up at his place in Delaware prepping for the debate. That's normal actually for most presidential years where the election

takes place and the contenders kind of huddle up in their homes or their offices and they work over with their staff how they're going to do in the debate, how they'll try to challenge the other person, how they'll answer the other person's challenges. So Biden has been doing what's kind of expected in these days before a debate, especially the final one. Donald Trump, well, you know, he never does quite what's expected. He's been tromping around the country, swearing and staggering from one rally to another, whipping up his troops. You know, these rallies, hardly any masks,

little if any social distancing, super spreader events, a lot of people call them, and there's been evidence that in fact that is exactly what's happened, spreading the virus around. But it hasn't stopped Trump. He's still out there with his outrageous comments every day, capturing headlines with them. Yesterday, the last 24 hours, and who knows, it'll probably be old by the time we talk about it, but in the last 24 hours, he's demanded that his Attorney General, Bill Barr, basically throw him in jail, the Biden family, all of them.

They're corrupt. They're the most corrupt family in the history of the United States, something like that. That's the kind of thing Trump has been saying. But don't stop there. Throw Hillary Clinton in jail. Throw Barack Obama in jail. Throw them all in jail.

This is unheard of, you know, for the United States, for anywhere in the kind of free world, the demanding that you place my opposition, who just happens to be leading in all the polls, throw them in jail. But that's what Trump's been saying. Now, the other thing that is kind of out there in terms of the lay of the land are the polls.

And all the polls, as just indicated, seem to favor Biden right now. Don't seem to favor. They do favor Biden. There's been a little tightening up in some of the battleground states, but not a lot. The national lead, for whatever it's worth, is still around double digits, around 10 points, which is huge. That's a huge lead.

So that's kind of the state of the play. Let's bring in Bruce from Ottawa, the Race Next Door's co-host. And Bruce last week was out there saying, hey, this is all over. You know, it's all over but the counting. It's done deal. Trump is cooked. You couldn't be any more out on the limb than Bruce was last week. There was no walking back from there.

Kind of like Lindsey Graham. Way out there. So here we are less than two weeks away from the election, Bruce. Are you just a tiny bit nervous? Well, Peter, look, we're all way out on a limb. The world is out on a limb. So if you're not, if you're watching this election and you're not nervous, I don't know what classes you're using to watch it. Cause I'm looking at it every day and i wake up nervous and i go to bed nervous but it doesn't mean that i think that the outlook that i provided last week is wrong i just feel

like i want this to be over i want the world to return to some greater sense of normalcy i want to believe that america is is what America has always presented itself to be. So I'm going to be nervous. And you can ask me every week, and you should. But I still don't think that this looks like an election that Donald Trump is positioned to win. And I say that in part because at every juncture in the election campaign, and certainly at every juncture in the last week, whenever Donald Trump has run into something hard and found that people resist what he's saying, instead of doing what people normally do, who are sitting on top of, you will buy billion-dollar campaigns with plenty of smart advisors around them, which

is to say, hey, that didn't work. What do you think would work better? Why don't we try something else? Instead, he does one of either two things. He goes, I think I better say that again, and I better say it in front of a bunch of people who are going to react to it with just so much enthusiasm that the rest of the country can look at that and go, these people are nutty. Or I'm going to change the channel and say something even crazier than the thing that got me into trouble yesterday, like, why doesn't my

attorney general arrest my opponent? And why hasn't he done it by lunchtime today? And so that's the campaign that Trump has been running. And every day I turn on the news like you do and all the panels, and I hear people say, well, here's what he should do, or here's what he might do, or here's what he could do that would be a little bit better than that. And at the end of those panels, what does everybody say? But he probably won't, because he's never shown any interest whatsoever in taking the route that looks like it more might be more successful because usually that has some sort

of vague implication that he did something wrong or that something that came out of his mouth was less than perfect and I don't think he's able to say that I don't think he's able to say that. I don't think he's necessarily able to think that. So I kind of look at the debate tomorrow and the rest of the campaign and say, look, Trump is most likely to beat Trump. And if Trump can't beat Trump, nobody else or nothing else can. And so I'm still kind of confident but nervous as a cat. the capital. Okay, well, let's get another professional opinion in on this as we bring in our special guest for tonight's race next door, and it's Jerry Butts. And if you know the name Jerry Butts, as you should if you follow politics at all in Canada, Jerry was, of course, the principal secretary to Prime Minister Justin Tr trudeau did two campaigns with with prime minister trudeau did a number of provincial elections in ontario has seen many

debates over the his time and has held brief different debate contenders over the years so he's great on two things one the debate which we'll get to in a second. Two, the kind of lay of the land right now. With less than two weeks to go, Jerry, should Bruce continue to be nervous? Well, I think that people who care about our neighbors to the south are going to be nervous until this thing is over, let's be honest. All that said, I think having seen close campaigns and campaigns that are not so close from the inside, this does not feel like a close campaign to me. Had you told me six months ago, Peter, that the states we would be talking about, whether they were going to be red or blue at the end of the campaign were states like Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia,

even Texas. Some would dare to dream, as I know Bruce, who has a special affection for Texas, is no doubt dreaming. I would have said that's a campaign that hasn't gone very well for Donald Trump. So I think it's really easy. And a lot of people who were embarrassed last time, a lot of really, really smart people who watch politics very closely and are normally right and accustomed to being right about things were proven wrong in the last campaign. And that sense of embarrassment has, I think, prevented a lot of people from seeing this campaign really clearly. And it's a very different campaign than the last campaign. Democrats are very different candidates than they had in the last campaign. It's very different to run as an incumbent than it is as a challenger in the campaign. And of course, Trump drew an inside straight to win the presidency in the first place.

He won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a grand total of about 77,000 votes. And he won Pennsylvania by the smallest margin of any presidential candidate for either party in 175 years. So you put all that together and then stir in 210, 220,000 people dead of the pandemic in an election year with a cratering economy. And you got to believe that the incumbents chances are not off. And that's what you're seeing reflected in the polls, which have not moved very much at all since the beginning of the pandemic.

You know, it's interesting because so many journalists and analysts have been doing backflips to by throwing in the caveats of 2016 and saying, you know, we can't call this over because it's not over and anything could happen. And all, you know, all those, you know, phrases that pop up at a time like this. But Tim Alberta, who writes for Politico in the United States and is, you know, a pretty well-respected analyst, had a piece yesterday that was headlined, are we overthinking this? He's done a lot of traveling around the country. He's watched what's been happening. He's listened to Trump. He's listened to Biden. He's seen a lot of traveling around the country. He's watched what's been happening. He's listened to Trump.

He's listened to Biden. He's seen the pandemic figures. Basically, running down the list of things you just mentioned, Jerry. And he says, we're overthinking this. It's pretty clear what's going to happen and why it's going to happen. Yeah, I think, look, I think in general, people do overthink politics, Peter. I'm from what I call the people are not stupid version of school of politics. And I think that people are not stupid. I don citizens in this pandemic and comparing it to how it's gone in other places has not reflected well on the president. And you can talk till the cows come home on CNN about what the ad strategy is in North Carolina. It's not going to change that basic macro truth of the campaign.

So I am one who believes in big things, not small things in politics. And I think if you get the big things right, the small things usually take care of themselves. Biden's run a pretty good campaign, really good campaign. In fact, I think he's getting his people are getting too little credit for the campaigning they're running in what is a very chaotic environment. And I don't think Trump has run a very good one. So we are where we are. One of the things I like about Jerry, I like a lot of things about Jerry, but one of the things I like about Jerry is his kindness towards people.

And when he says, I think people aren't stupid, I kind of tell myself, you know, I should be that kind. I should be always in that zone of people are not stupid and then i gotta tell you i look sometimes at the data that tell me that there are people who despite all of the evidence of what kind of a human being donald trump is still say give me that donald trump sign take off this awful mask uh free me from the shackles of science that can protect my life it's hard for me to be as generous in handing out the smart not stupid uh thought it says jerry was and i admire him for it i've been trying to do better but there is a certain part of me that

wonders like some people maybe aren't as smart as other people are and i know that probably we're going to hear from people who think that that's obnoxious and arrogant and i don't really care but as i think about how i would prosecute this last little bit i think one of the biggest challenges for uh for biden is that i've been in campaigns where, you know, if you're running against an incumbent and they've done a pretty good job or they're not very obnoxious to voters and there's really not that many things you can stick them with. And one of the problems that Biden's got is like, well, do I go in and say, you know, hey, this week we found that he paid, Donald Trump paid more in taxes to China than he did to the United States.

Or do I say he stood by and said, hey, let's lock some kids up in cages and now we can't find their parents? Or do I say he drove the deficit up to $3 trillion? Or do I say he told us that the COVID pandemic was going to go away on its own and then 200 000 people died because he didn't do anything or do i say yesterday he told his attorney general to get on with locking up his opponent and he wanted the last opponent that he had to be locked up too this is kind of a a litany of opportunity from a debate standpoint the likes of which i don't think any of us have ever seen before and one of the challenges i think for biden do i use any of that or do it just do i just kind of brush over those items and sort of remind people so that they go on their way and go

yeah yeah there's really nothing else to see here but a disastrous term of office. And we just have to get on with what we need to get on with. So apologies to people who didn't like me saying maybe not everybody is smart. But I felt like I had to kind of say that. First correction. I think it's an interesting point in the context of the debate because you've prepared people for debates. Bruce, I've helped on that front in different campaigns with different people as well and it's always a particular

challenge right that if there's more than one debate each each of those debates has their own particular challenge to it and usually their own discrete objective objectives. In this debate, I don't think it's Biden's job to prosecute a case against Donald Trump. I think it's his job to try as much as possible, and it may be more possible given the muting capacity of the host, which I'm sure lots of people used on their couches in the United States in the last debate, it may be that easier for him to get a word in edgewise. But his role is to speak directly to people. You know, one of the common misconceptions I find in the way politics is covered, between the way, the differences between the way politics is covered and the way it's practiced is the way debates are perceived, right?

That reporters, journalists, analysts, pundits look at debates and they've got a checklist of things that the candidate needs to do to be seen to win the debate. And the most common is the knockout punch. Who's going to have the knockout punch? It didn't draw blood. Exactly. knockout punch, who's going to have to knockout punch. Pull over, didn't draw blood. Exactly, exactly. And it's different from the way, at least in my experience,

citizens watch debates, which is one of the few unfiltered attempts they get to evaluate these candidates, these men and women, without a script in front of them, without a prerecrecorded message, that they actually have to sit, stand there and convince them to vote for them. What am I going to do for you? Why should you vote for this guy or this gal and not the other one? And there's something, even in this day and age of social media and prepackaged politics, there's something about the crackle of that live interaction

that can be decisive for people. And I don't think it's Biden's job to sound like Jake Tepper on CNN or any other pundit. I think it's his job to look into the living rooms of the United States of America and say we can do something about this if we pull together. On behalf of journalists everywhere, let me enter this discussion.

That's one who, of course, never in all the debates I covered ever used the phrase knockout punch much. For sure, that is something that journalists look for. There's no doubt about it. They're looking for the clip. They're looking for the moment in a debate or the series of moments. But, you know, I will agree with you in the sense that in most debates, those things never happen. And so you're left with what else does

happen. And some of it's a lot more interesting than as journalists, we tend to give it credit. Now, in terms of tomorrow night, I would say I totally agree with you and Biden. He's got to stay. He's not looking. He doesn't need a knockout punch. He needs to come away from that at worst tide. You know, at best, he wins the debate. He doesn't want to lose the debate. He doesn't want to give any sense of momentum, I would argue, to the other side at this point. But he doesn't need a knockout punch. Trump actually needs a knockout punch, or a series of knockout punches, or a debate where it looks like he clearly has won through the skill of his mind.

So let's set that aside for a moment. And or a knockout punch of some sort where he catches Biden totally off guard or Biden falls for the trap of saying something wrong or stupid or something's going to get him into trouble. And I raise all that because some of the people closest to Trump in terms of debate prep, people like Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, have been arguing that Trump needs to take the advice that Joe Biden gave him in the first debate,

which was shut up, man, but for a different reason. He should shut up to allow Biden to talk, which could promote some kind of gaffe on the part of Biden. That's their argument to Trump. Now, whether he'll ever listen to them or not, I don't know, because he seems to be his own best advisor, according to him. But that advice is lay back let the guy talk because if he talks the more he talks the more likely it is he's going to get himself in trouble

you both as you say prepped people for debates is that a is that a strategy that should be considered this moment or because it's the last gas, this could be the last big thing of the campaign, barring some other October surprise? Go ahead. I'm really keen to hear what else that I've seen before. And here's why. himself which is usually the advice that you want to give to a politician because you want what Jerry was alluding to that moment of authenticity where people say I got a glimpse into the soul of this person so do you say be yourself where do you say be somebody else and every iota of evidence is saying be somebody

else he's not yourself but he doesn't do that and he doesn't seem to be on receive for that message and he seems to have fired all the people who might have sat around him and said you know maybe don't be that version of yourself or find some other nice way of saying you are not working with those middle ground voters who are saying there's too much chaos. You're too reckless. You're too disruptive. You're too mean. You're too nasty.

You're too all of that. And so I don't know, frankly, what you would do with a situation where be yourself is so obviously the wrong answer strategically and be somebody else is so obviously not available as a conversation starter i do know that um if i'm joe biden i would have to make a gap a minute and they would have to be way bigger gaps than the gaps that we've seen from trump uh in order to make people go you know the way he said that kind of, you know, it annoyed me or it wasn't that clear. It seemed like he was a little bit slower off the uptake. And so I'm going to overlook all of the things that I won't run through that a couple of

minutes ago. And I'm going to go back to Trump because, you know, Joe just seemed like he lost his step or something like that and so i think that question going into the room if you're on the trump side is how do you organize it so it doesn't become a worse disaster than the last one and a worse disaster than it than it could be and if you can get to a place that's better than that great but the starting point is everybody's going to want to be in the room because they're going to see this as the last showdown in the center of town. The big event that is going to help define the last chapter of their political career if they think they're going to lose this election. And I think most of the people around them believe that Trump is going to lose that election, this election.

But as many people as want to be in the room almost nobody should be in the room it really works better when there aren't five people deciding that they have to kind of disagree and kind of agree with each other so that the candidate hears too many different sounds and ends up not being sure that you see at that point you're talking about people who are pretty articulate who are pretty good at marshalling an argument and who know that the nature of the thing is if you just say oh i agree entirely with what that other person said that next time maybe you're not going to be invited into the room so there is that dynamic it's better if there's almost nobody in the room and then there's two other things to avoid. Well, there's many other things,

but two that come to mind for me. One is that the person who said, Mr. President, I brought the stacks of binders of policy information so that we could just kind of go through them and refresh ourselves and what our position is on testing for COVID and what our jobs plan is and where we're at with that nuclear arms deal that we said two weeks ago that we were going to negotiate with Russia before the end of the election. That's a terrible idea. Trump is not going to be any good at talking about policy at that level. But there are often people who say that that's what we should do. And then the other one, I'm going to use a golf metaphor here because I know that both of you guys like golf, as do I, is that you don't want a caddy in the room saying, here is a 7-iron.

I know you can hit it 220 yards. You don't want an advisor telling you to try to do something that you cannot do. You want people to recognize what your range of motion, your skill range is, and to work within that. And often you will have people who say, I thought of a great line, and you should use it, and it feels good when I say it to myself. And you can deliver it really well. And sometimes you just need to know that, no, you probably can't deliver that. That's not in your wheelhouse. So those are some thoughts that I have.

But as I say, I'm really keen to hear what jerry has to say i'd uh i'd see your golf analogy and raise you one of my favorite ones which is that it's easier to make corrections from the tee than the wood and um at this point in the campaign one of the can one of the campaigns has hit a pretty straightforward, long drive right down the middle of the fairway. And the other one has shanked it into the woods. And we're not really sure that they've found their ball yet. So I think that they have to, you know, situational awareness is always an important thing in politics and in life. It's certainly important in debate. And I think that, you know, one of the common mistakes that I've encountered in politics

is people overestimating how much regular folks dislike their opponents, right? and Chris Christie's advice to President Trump to just hand Joe Biden the microphone and let him talk and people will see the person we know, the incompetent person we know Joe Biden to be. Sounds like the crappiest advice I've ever heard in my entire life. I remember in the 2015 campaign, someone joking that all Trudeau had to do in the first debate was show up with his pants on, probably the wrong week to make that joke on a podcast, and he'd win the debate. And a lot of this is about expectations management going into the debate i think that people um you know ironically i think because of trump's performance in the first state the bar is a lot lower for him coming into this one than it was going into the first one and sometimes these things create their own weather and they can have their own momentum attached to them. So I think it's going to be

pretty easy for Trump to be seen to have done a lot better in this debate than he did in the first debate. So what was his problem in the first debate? In my view, he was kind of rude. He was super rude. And a lot of these people who we can argue over their relative intelligence sometime over a beer of Bruce. But, you know, I've seen this in focus groups over the years. The last thing that people like to see is their candidate being a jerk to the other person. It's one thing to stick it to them on issues. It's another thing to you know criticize the guy's son for having a drug addiction and talk over him while he's trying to tell the story of his war hero other child who is no longer with us and you forget that again getting back to the point that the folks at home look at these

things a little differently than animals do who does? If you're sitting at home thinking about whether you're going to support this guy again and you see him run down the other guy's kid, I don't know, man. So, Peter, your turn. What do you think, Peter? After 50 years of studiously remaining neutral and unbiased, what do you think is going on in our – I will definitely try to answer that. But I first want to thank you both for the analogies you threw on the table,

especially the golf ones. And as the guy who's been in the woods after shanking it off the tee, I know how hard that can be to recover from that position. It's not like I was my old friend, my good friend, Ray Nutition, the former governor general, who often used to shank it into the woods. But as GG, he had an RCMP escort, and I can't believe the number of times we went

into the woods and we found the ball, and not only did we find it, it was sitting up pretty with a clear shot to the green. And that's the kind of thing that helps to be the GG and have an RCMP escort. The other image that struck me with a sense of a smile was Bruce's image of somebody walking into Trump's room with an armful of binders of briefing notes on all the various topics. Because that'll never happen, right? Of course it'll never happen, because he doesn't read binders of briefing notes on any subject.

I mean, at least Ronald Reagan was clear about his position. He wanted everything on one page and no more than one page. And it worked for him. He would actually study that page and he'd know what to say for a page's worth of comments. This guy doesn't read. I heard somebody the other day say, what are they going to do for the Trump library? You know, each president has a library. After they've been in office, they get to build a library with their name on it.

You know, then this will be the Donald J. Trump library. But what will be in it? You know, like will there be any books in the library? I mean, what does he read? You know, there have been some famous interviews where he's been trapped on what he allegedly, or what he was claiming that he'd read, and it turned out, of course, that he hadn't. Anyway, I digress. What was your question? Who's going to win? Oh, you're in a fight. What will you tell Donald Trump and Joe Biden to question? Who's going to win? Oh, you're in fight. What would you tell Donald

Trump and Joe Biden to do? You've got to kind of step into that role of political advice. Well, look, it's very different than it was at the first debate, whenever that was. What was that? About three weeks ago, three or four weeks ago? Then everything was possible for Trump.

But he ended up doing what most incumbent presidents have done in recent memory. He kind of bombed on the first debate. Obama bombed, George Bush bombed, Ronald Reagan bombed in his 84 debate, first debate. But he was able to recover by the second debate. Now, this guy cancels the second debate. He basically chickens out of the second debate. Now it's just the third debate, and everything is resting on it, and there's only 10 days to go by the time this thing happens, 10, 12 days. So you're not going to change a 73 year old guy who's got his back to the wall and he's got

less than two weeks to go. I think you say to him, pick the topics you're most comfortable with. We'll give you any information you want and you you've got to go out there and you've got to deliver the moment of your life. At this point, you have nothing more to lose because you're going to lose. You have everything to gain if you perform well. So perform on the ground that you know best. It's too late to teach this guy something. He's going to be, he is what he is, right?

And that's a very different approach than I would have taken a month ago going into that debate. But on this one, tomorrow night, he's got to be on ground that he's comfortable with. And if he wants to go crazy, then he's going to go crazy. He's gone crazy throughout this campaign, and he still has 40% of the vote, right? Which is perhaps the most remarkable thing about this campaign, that he still has his base,

who he's been catering to and sucking up to for four years. He still has them. He's not going to lose them tomorrow night. If he's going to gain some votes, he's going to have to figure out how he does that. Stop catering to the base. Start catering to those, especially those Republicans who've abandoned you.

So hit on the key areas that brought them on your side initially. But I think, you know, I think that's the best I could offer advice. I'm not the kind of pros that you guys are, but I just think it's too late in the game to suddenly change the score. What do you tell Joe Biden? I tell Joe Biden that I see the biggest problem for Joe Biden.

I actually do have some sense of agreement with Chris Christie, who I've occasionally been a fan of and occasionally not been a fan of. But here's why I would say that argument works. This debate, like the first one, has these two-minute holes that the candidates are supposed to fill themselves. Now, two minutes, as you both know, is not 10 seconds. Longer than a sentence.

Yeah, it's longer than a sentence. It's a complete thought. It's a couple of thoughts. And if you're put on the spot about whatever it may be, health insurance or the pandemic or negotiations with Russia or whatever the issue may be, you've actually got to think that through, how you're going to spend those two minutes. negotiations with Russia, or whatever the issue may be.

You've actually got to think that through, how you're going to spend those two minutes, and you've got to pull it off, or you could sound like a blubbering fool. And that's what Trump didn't allow him to do last time. We'll see if he does this time because of, you know, maybe he'll have a different strategy. The microphones are going to be muted for whatever that's worth. That's not going to stop Trump from shouting at him

if that's what he wants to do. But I think those two-minute holes in the debate, and there'll be a dozen of them, are pretty important for Biden. And I bet you that's what they're drilling him on. They know all the subject areas. So you'll know what he needs to say. Well, there's an interesting, another golf analogy.

We'll turn this into the golf channel. Bump the listeners. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's one thing to hit an eight foot putt on the practice screen right but joe biden's standing over one to uh win the masters right now yeah and you can get the yips at those moments so bruce does that bruce does that all the time remember him getting the yips over a two-foot putt in scotland a couple of years ago that would have won him the Scotland Cup? But he got the yips, and he was way wide on the putt.

It was embarrassing. We felt bad for him. I can three-putt that eight-footer to win at 5.05. It's kind of how I see the numbers right now. And I am good at three-putting that eight-footer. Boy, itise of experience. But, you know, I think there's just a couple of other things that I just wanted to mention that are occurring to me here. in the last 72 hours that his party, not to say Fox News, but his party is fed up with him, and they're worried that his behavior is putting more of them in jeopardy, and that they need to survive him if they can, and he needs to not be allowed to do more damage to their candidacies than he already

has and this is particularly relevant in the senate where there are maybe eight senate seats which are uh republican held seats now and words are in varying degrees uncertain uh in terms of how they're going to fall and these people have had had to stand by, they haven't had to, they've chosen to, I should say, stand by Trump, not criticize Trump, accept his threats, accept the intimidation that they would be primarizing within their own party. And the deal that they were making was, what, they would remain kind of unattacked by Fox News, on the inside somewhat, riding the coattails of Donald Trump. But those coattails look pretty shabby right now. And these people have to think about themselves, or they will think about themselves.

And I think that how Trump performs tomorrow, if he's not better than he was. And I kind of, I'm with you, Peter, like if being a jerk is what won him 2016 and what has kept him able to do what he's been doing for four years, then he's going to go in tomorrow night and he's going to be a jerk again because it's kind of the natural emotion that he's got and it's kind of, he doesn't really know that it's a losing formula he sees evidence that he's not winning but he blames it on everybody else and so i kind of feel like those people are just standing by looking at this the senate candidates and they're going i may have to put more distance between myself and him uh if he continues to act like this.

Chris, before you go on to your next point, can I just make a point about that? Because, you know, there's a special place in political health for people who do that sort of thing. that the scales have fallen from your eyes about Donald Trump, that these Republicans who have supported him through thick and thin, every step of the way while they were, you know, putting kids in cages and they were doing all of the things that you listed earlier. What has changed in the last two weeks? The only thing that has changed in the last two weeks is that they now have grave doubts about his impact on their own electoral portion, right? So there are a lot of reasons that people are turned off by politics. One of them is this kind of unseemly, you know, flag of convenience flying that you see. Wasn't there a senator from Texas just this week who said, well, I broke with Trump on the deficit and this and that and the other thing, but I did it privately? Well, because I'm a gentleman.

I don't wonder whether or not that's of any particular value to them. I take your point. I agree with you completely on that. Yeah, I mean, politics is a team sport. You're either on that team or you're not, and you don't get to go out and say, well, I didn't agree with that play call six games ago when we lost to the Patriots.

Nobody loses to the Patriots anymore. They lost their best player and let him go to a city that will now win the Super Bowl and host the Super Bowl at the same time. Oh, you're not another Patriots fan, Peter. Please tell me. No, I'm a Tom Brady fan. So I'm a Buccaneers guy now. Picking the underdog.

Well, I do think that Biden has to go into Martinite and just has to stick with the basic message of a better human being with a better plan, and I think that's what he wants. And that seems to be one of his closing arguments in the ad that he took. I don't know whether you were watching the World Series last night, but the ad, the 60-second ad that the Democrats obviously spent a lot of money on putting together and buying time on the World Series

was terrific. Sam Elliott doing the voiceover. I had to tell him no, I couldn't do it because I was obligated to the Bridge Daily here, but Sam did it and I'm sure he did it for free. But anyway, it's a great ad and I'm sure

they've got to parade more of them coming out. I mean, we're going to wrap this up, and Jerry, you've been terrific on this and given us lots of things to think about and lots of challenges to Bruce, which is great. You know, we like that. But I want you to close this out by pointing us in a in a different direction

uh on a topic that we're going to try and spend some time on uh next week but um because we just talked about the sam elliott ad uh have you ever seen a campaign like this with the kind of um tv influence that that third parties have had. And I'm thinking especially of the Lincoln Project, but they're not alone, but their ads have been, you know, the turnaround time on them has been incredible. I guess that helps when you don't have to get the approval of everybody in the hierarchy of a campaign. You just do it the way you want to do it and put it out there.

But have you ever seen anything like this before? No, and in my work, we track this stuff very closely, and the numbers are simply eye-popping. I think that the last estimate I saw that at all levels, because Americans are, of course, electing everyone from president to mayor to all levels and orders of government, there's going to be $6.7 billion spent on advertising in this election cycle, including almost a quarter of a billion dollars on the North Carolina Senate seat alone. So those who lament in our own country the influence of money on politics, man, these numbers are just astonishing.

To give you a frame of reference, in the 2015 campaign, which was extraordinarily long, as you'll all remember, 78 days in Canada, we spent $42 million on the entire campaign. Everything. narrowly long, as you'll all remember, 78 days in Canada. We spent $42 million on the entire campaign, everything, from advertising to the leaders tour to the modest wages we paid staff, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in the United States this time, man,

it is just beyond belief how much money is being spent. And impact-wise? Especially the kind of third-party ads. Well, I think it's a great question. Of course, we obviously won't know the final answer to that until the election is over. But I think at a certain level, the airwaves are so saturated with political messaging, in particular in swing states, almost comical, self-satire, that it's hard to believe that any of it has... The law of diminishing returns probably kicks in fairly quickly. But I do

think that there are some particular groups, there are lots who've made fortunes in California in the attention economy who know how to get our attention because they develop companies like Twitter who are investing a lot of money. There are a couple in particular that are being funded by California billionaires that I'm looking at really closely because they claim to have split the atom in how to move votes in the last two weeks of the campaign. One of them is on the Democratic side and one's on the Republican side. I won't give them the free advertising, Peter, but any of your listeners can look them up. I'm skeptical. I think the campaign's overall messaging, discipline, consistency,

and prosecuting that message and finding a way to freshen it up to describe in a memorable way momentum toward the end of the campaign is a way to close the deal. Well, as I said, and I know Bruce joins me in this, it's been great to have you with us, Jerry, on this. Good to be here, Peter. And we look forward to touching base with you again. I got a feeling this story, no matter what happens on November 3rd,

ain't going away anytime soon. It's going to be a very interesting next few months, if not next few years. And Bruce, as always, great to talk to you. And we look forward to talking to you again. I really appreciate it. If I could just say, guys, both of you stay healthy and well, and I hope your families are very well.

Absolutely. And the same to yours. And for Bridge Daily listeners, the race next door, we'll have a special edition on Friday, so the day after the debate, and with another special guest to kind of talk about what happened and what difference, if any, that it will make. But for now, that's the race next door on the Bridge Daily, the podcast within a podcast.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.