The Bulwark Podcast - Jennifer Palmieri: The Making of the First Woman President

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Women candidates get asked different questions than male candidates—that's just a fact. Kamala has a whole team around her ready to handle queries about her ambition and the racist and sexist attacks. But this 100-day sprint also gives Kamala an advantage: an opportunity to show that she is the tougher, stronger, and more prepared leader. Jennifer Palmieri joins Tim Miller. show notes: Jennifer's book, “She Proclaims: Our Declaration of Independence from a Man’s World.” Jennifer's book, "Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World" Bulwark piece on former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Tim's playlist

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Buller Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm just so pumped. We have the very perfect person for this day, this moment in time, my friend Jennifer Palmieri. She was communications director for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign

and during Obama's second term in the White House, she was the co-host of the late Showtime show, The Circus. Emmy nominated again. Emmy nominated again, Tim. Just yesterday. We did it, Joe. She co-hosts the How to Win podcast with Clara McCaskill, my partner in crime on MSNBC and her last book, which is one thing we need to talk about. She proclaims our Declaration of Independence for a Man's World. You've written

the book about how women politicians should deal with this moment. And well, I think that we've got one of those right now. We do. Yeah, right. Before we get to your advice for Kamala on how to kind of combat misogyny and sexism and how to you know come into her power i want to talk about somebody else first can we just have a little can we have a little fun first absolutely how much time have you spent thinking about jd vance lately more than jd hamill more than i expected yeah i just didn't realize there was what is weird you know weird stuff out there about him as there is. It's pretty weird.

I didn't appreciate how bad he was going to be. That was a surprise to me. I did not know that he was terrible on the campaign trail as well. Yeah, you didn't like the please laugh moment? I saw Jeb this morning. We had breakfast, so I can do it. I can make that joke. But his please laugh, where I love you guys, says to nobody, like the old Bud Light commercial.

Who's this weird guy getting drunk telling me he loves me? Yeah, I guess I just didn't watch him on the campaign trail in 2022. I guess he really wasn't on the campaign trail, right? I mean, this is why. They didn't really have him do a lot, like when he was running against Tim Ryan in that Senate race. So, I was a little surprised at just how off the charts and just gnarly the misog like the misogynistic stuff is too yeah well i want to run through some of those i want to do a little jd vance greatest hits for a friday for the weekend pod because i gotta tell you i don't know about you my instagram feed of moms in my life and women in my life who are not i'm not talking about you know the jen palmieres the

marcia i'm not talking about the activists i'm talking about moms from school. They don't like some of these clips. So let's take a listen to JD Vance talking about childless cat ladies. Look, what I was basically saying is that we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it's just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? I just wanted to ask that question.

Huh. Okay. My favorite part of that clip, as I always mention, is that Pete Buttigieg gets thrown in there. Very subtle stuff there. Really subtle. Now, Pete ended up having two kids subsequent. That was an old clip from like a couple years ago. But very subtle homophobia there. The childless cat lady thing, though, that was like a we point and laugh at the crazy MAGA right clip for a while. It's been going around.

But now that he's on the VP ticket and now that Kamala is the one that he's running against, the potency of that, I feel like is different. And it makes people mad. It makes women mad. Anyway, so talk about how that can be a potent as a political thing. It really makes women mad. I'm visiting my parents in Rhode Island right now. And I was at the grocery store yesterday and some woman in the, like one of the aisles recognized me from Morning Joe, I guess. And she had a towering, just like a towering stack of cat food cans.

And she just looked at me with this big mischievous smile on her face and just like threw them into her shopping cart and like struts away, you know, like it just is. I think there's something empowering about putting a woman at the top of the ticket. And we can talk a lot about like why this time there's less fretting about it because it, it happened and, you know, just kind of happens.

And then like thrust upon us, you don't need to fret about whether or not it's a good idea. Oh, was she elected? Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like it's happening, but it's shocking to me because until last week, the Republican ticket was in a strong position, right? That they, you know, instead of choosing somebody who could be appealing to women, which you think they might want to do, right? And instead of having a Thursday night slate of speakers that Trump spoke that could be appealing to women and said they

just like double down on as tim wallace is like my new fave governor tim wallace in minnesota you know i didn't know anything about him until this week but like he calls him like the he-man women's haters club like why he also leaned into something that i've been pushing for a while which is the weird call them fucking weird weird they're weird call them weird like they want to act like they're the normal bros yeah who like hang out at the lacrosse guys table but no no no no they were the weirdos sitting next to the lacrosse bros table trying to be friends with them by like making very strange attacks on the girls that wouldn't sleep with them that That's the table they're at.

They're at the weird guy's table. It's all high school cafeteria for me. It's important to get that in mind. We never evolved beyond high school. I mean, people, you know, and it's really, it's just human nature. We like to think that it's about being young, but really it's just human nature. And I also think that it's like coming at a moment with like Taylor Swift, just like being such a huge phenomenon and Beyonce being such a huge phenomenon

and Taylor Swift being childless and loving cats. And it's like you're just poking all the wrong things. So then on top of making fun of childless cat ladies and saying that childless cat ladies are running the world, which is also the weirdest thing. Have you looked at pictures of who the CEOs are of the companies? It's offensive and weird and false. It's all of them. On top of that, there's some kind of policy implications that are more serious and pretty scary. Let's go through a couple of them. The first one, here's JD talking about how parents should get an extra vote. Let's take a listen. Let's give votes to all children in this country, but let's give control over those votes to the parents

of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power. You should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids. let's face the consequences and the reality if you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice now all right and then jen uh you and i um we were on the road together in arizona we had a pretty hot event uh by hot i mean it was hot, but it also was hostile. It was also hot. With Blake Masters and my friend Rick Grinnell.

Here's Blake. You remember Blake failed Senate candidate, Blake Masters. He was responding to that. You might think that people right now who are currently running would be like, Ooh, J.D. was just joking or whatever. Parents shouldn't get an extra vote. We shouldn't treat women without children as less than human. But no, Blake Masters doubled down.

Political leaders should have children. Certainly, they should at least be married. If you aren't running or you can't run a household of your own, how can you relate to families or govern wisely? So they're just like rolling with this. I remember covering when he was the Senate candidate against Mark Kelly and women at a Carrie Lake event

telling me that they weren't going to vote for him because his ads and his posters were scary and off-putting. Creepy. Creepy. These are women at a Carrie Lake event who are really excited about Carrie Lake and Kristi Noem. She was there too. And they're not going to vote for Blake Masters because they found him off-putting and scary and too intense and having mean looking signs. But also there's just like a lot there like running households. What does it say about them? They must think they can't win women and they can't win swing voters and all they can do is jack up turnout. Sometimes you can explain why something is happening, but I don't, I really don't get this. I really don't get why they continue to

think that that's in their interest or they just may have one speed, right? Like I think that's also what we saw at the Republican convention was they have one speed which is grievance and when they try to go to someplace else they they are then they're just low energy sorry i know you just had breakfast with jeb i know that's okay hey two hits on jeb already in this podcast catching strays left and right i'm floating him for the veep stakes you know try to get a little bit of balance the thing about the masters thing i think that these guys are just a little brain broken. I think that they've been listening to Tucker Carlson's podcast too much. You think they believe it?

Yeah, I don't really think it's a strategy. Yeah, I think that they think that, well, A, I think women are probably mean to them. Yeah, right, right, right. I think that they look at society and they're like, yeah, the problem is that we need to go back. They do think we need to go back. They think we do need to go back. Kamala's like, we're not going back. We need to go back. Women should think we need to go back. They think we do need to go back.

Kamala's like, we're not going back. We need to go back. Women should stay at home. It's good for the family. And they read these weirdo Catholic integralist bloggers, and then they watch Tucker Carlson, and then they tie it into gender transitioning. And I do think their brains have just gotten warped

into this kind of online bro world. And then they say stuff out loud, like, women who are childless should have less voting power than women with children. And it's like, they don't know how that lands with people like maybe women who want to have kids, but couldn't, for example, wonder how it lands with them. There's a lot of us that are like that. I think that having the woman at the top of the ticket, you know, I've always there's like a big thing with the Clinton campaign. Did Hillary, having Hillary as the Democratic nominee, draw out Trump on the Republican side?

There are lots of reasons why Trump and the MAGA world is appealing to a big part of America. But there's also this sort of, you know, almost mystical overlay of people in America coming to terms with the fact that women in charge is no longer an exception, but becoming the norm, you know. You know, I do kind of think that that is what the fierce fighting about taking away women's rights, you know, at some level, that is what it's about. It's like, we need to control these women because they have upended everything. We need to go back, right? And now you have a woman at the top of the ticket, and it's just, it's probably triggering. I think that it's definitely triggering.

And I think that some of these guys are just shit-posting idiots, but some of them are reading people that have very dark views. Megan McCarthy messaged me and sent me something that was... Megan McCarthy? Yeah, she's a Twitter personality slash reporter. She pointed me to the policies in Romania in the 60s to the 80s and Ceausescu. And she finds this.

They banned contraception and abortion and imposed a celibacy tax on families that had fewer than a certain number of children. And then they had state doctors conducting gynecological examinations in the workplace of women of childbearing age. Now, i don't know that we're going all the way there right right but it's on the table and it's certainly like within women's imagination after you take up until you take away row you know and like you look at the southeastern united states and what's not

allowed there like yeah that's on the table that's the thing about the project 2025 that i keep wanting to point out that's the real scariest the Project 2025 that I keep wanting to point out. That's the real scariest, the creepiest, the weirdest. It's like, okay, maybe Donald Trump doesn't want to do that, right? But the weirdest dude that they put in HHS that they vetted, actually into Chichesco. That's the point that everybody needs to really just kind of take in. The types of people that are going to be staffing a trump 2.0 are not and he's going to let them do it right i mean like what we know is that his record is that he always lets the

most mega the most crazy the most extreme elements do what they want to do and then be proud of it until they cause problems for him which might be happening with jd vance right now you know he hates this oh my god there's a lot of second guessing. He hates this, and he's so mad at Don Jr. Is that why Eric spoke? I brought it up every podcast. Is that why Eric spoke instead of Don? Yes. Don Jr. could not be in a bigger doghouse right now.

It is really as warm as my cockles just thinking about it. Okay, one more, J.D. Vance, before we get to the new presidential nominee. Again, on the serious side of things, taking this from shitposting to serious policy, here is Vance on blocking travel for abortion and maybe the need for a federal law on that. Okay, look, here's a situation. Let's say Roe versus Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion in 2022, let's say 2024. And then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity. Health justice is going to be exterminated.

That's right. Black people. Something like that could, I mean, that would be a really weird turn of events that could happen. Yes. And it's like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? Because it's really creepy. And, you know, I'm pretty sympathetic to that, actually. Jen, I mean, that might be the one that's the most damaging politically.

That is, well, because it's very real. You know, it's not just, it's not just offensive. It doesn't, you know, that is like you're truly messing with women's health care. It doesn't stay contained to the states that where these things are, you know, procedures are banned. It's like affecting doctors everywhere. It's affecting people who go to med school. It's like young women are making decisions about where to go to college based on where they have rights and where they may not. That's a very real health risk. And as much as Trump tries to take abortion off the table, I think Democrats will be successful in making him own not just, as Kamala Harris calls them, the Trump abortion bans.

That's what they are. They're Trump abortion bans. The six-week ban in Texas, that's a Trump abortion ban. He made that possible. But when you have the running mate, you know, talking about these kind of measures as well, women will take those very seriously. Something I've been saying for a long time, you've got rich Democratic friends sometimes call you for advice. So the bros might care about this too oh of course i think that there could be a super pack that could make mike johnson and jd vance's views a little famous i think that there's a category of bro out there that is a barstool bro that thinks donald trump is based or whatever and doesn't think he really is going to do anything

but also has their own interests personal, and maybe wanting women to be able to have a choice of their own. I don't know if they want creepy Mike Johnson and weird JD Vance, creating federal rules about what should happen. You know, if they have a big night at the frat house, that's all I'm saying. It's a good micro targeting project. You're right.

Let's do strategy here. Your other book was Dear Madam President, An Open Letter to Women Who Will Run the World. Well, now Kamala Harris is- A letter of advice to the first woman president. That's what it was. So there you go. So let's just start at square one here. Obviously, there's been a ton of incoming attacks on her. Right. Some of them racially coded, gender coded. Some of them just policy. Some of them not even coded, just straight racist and sexist. What kind of advice do you have for her and the team on how to think about all that?

Her team is very deft at this. They spend a lot of time with researchers understanding how people process the kind of questions that people have for women candidates, which are different than male candidates, and also why these kind of attacks come your way and what's the best way to respond but not undermine the candidate, right? So let's go with the DEI candidate. What they're fundamentally trying to do there is say that she is not qualified for the job. And, you know, what I would say in response is, she's not qualified for the job. And then there's an element of grievance, right? That like people are getting promoted that

shouldn't get promoted, and they're getting promoted at your white male expense. I'm getting screwed over. My son's getting screwed over. Right, right, right, right. So there is that element too. And the most effective way to come back there is to talk about the qualifications of Kamala Harris, that she is more qualified than Donald Trump or J.D. Vance and more prepared to do this job than either one of them. Even though Donald Trump had the job, but he did such a bad job, he got impeached twice for doing a bad job, right? Contrast that with what's a bad response to it. A bad response is, this is racist and sexist, and that's a bad response not just for her, that is a bad response for surrogates on the outside

who are trying to help her, because that makes her a victim, and first of all, women candidates cannot be victims. Views on women candidates are always changing, and people do think that women are strong, and they think women are tough, and you have to lean into this and say, you know, if I were on TV and somebody said, you know, oh, Kamala Harris, they said she's a DEI candidate. I say, you know what? Kamala Harris has been a prosecutor, an attorney general, senator, biggest state of the country, vice president, and hopefully now president. She's been hearing this the whole life. It doesn't bother her. She's fine, right? She can handle it. But you know what? I hated that our daughters are hearing this. I hated that young women are hearing this. And you know what? I don't think black voters and female voters are

going to like hearing this very much. We constantly have to remind voters of a woman's qualifications for the job, even when they're in the job. It's not like it's all the world's trying to hold women back. That's not what's happening. But it's still kind of a new thing. And we have to be reminded of that. I never said she's been subject to racist attacks her entire career. I just evoke for you the roles that she's played. And you can imagine if she's the prosecutor in San Francisco 20 years ago, what that was like as DA, what kind of attack she might have gotten. You're getting it. But I'm not saying she's a victim of racist attacks. And also, that's what they want to do. They're trying to keep this in the race and gender space. And what you want to say is they're coming after her because she is qualified. She is prepared to do the job. Neither one of them are. And they see that she's electric on the trail. You know, that is what they're trying to do. When you're not her and you're not her campaign i do think it's important to make you

know like you establish her credibility her credentials but these kinds of attacks like they're going to turn off other brothers because they are racist and they're sexist but you you gotta protect her from that and like she's tough she can handle it but you know it's bad for young women to hear this and it's bad that this side that side is spewing that stuff in the world that young girls are going to hear yeah i do wonder just on this i guess you i always think about and this is a fake person but the the character in the white lotus the mother she's at breakfast you know that show the white lotus on hbl it's like a bunch of rich people out on an island i know and the mother um

the mother britain is a friend of mine so yeah hey connie um there you go I'm sure she's a listener yeah we would love it we love Connie we we just we admire we revere Connie actually here on this podcast yeah it wasn't her character it was you know the other characters that says the mom's like you know my uh my son is just getting screwed over trying to get into colleges right because everybody these days you know because so it's even a mom right but it like, it's kind of the mom that you're going to need on this stuff. So like, is there a way to kind of engage with those kind of concerns? Do you think that's useful or productive? I don't really know that there is other than that she has other than having women feel

like, wow, she's worked really hard to get where she is. And when you're saying she's been at this for she was ag and da for almost 14 years before she was a united states senator also what you're trying to evoke is like a long hard slog of like having done a lot of hard work to earn where she is i mean i know what you're saying but i just don't know if you can get to like there's only so much you can do right there's other reasons why that woman should not vote for Donald Trump, right? That's what you have to do. Seriously.

You know that they're going to do the lightweight thing. I think about the- The lightweight thing? Yeah, that's what they're going to try to do with her. They're going to be like, she's a lightweight. She's a lightweight? J.D. Vance is not a lightweight? J.D. Vance has been a senator for about 10 minutes.

He wrote one book. He's gotten propped up by Peter Thiel his whole career. And she's got a 20 plus year in elected office, like really hard jobs. And she I know, just because I know a lot about this, I'm reaffirming all the things people need to hear about her, even if she wasn't getting attacked, right? So, I mean, they'll do them and all, that's fine. But like, there are ways to deal with this stuff that there was not when Hillary ran in 2016. In what way? Talk about that more. There's just a lot more women leaders, right? It's just become more normal.

There's a generation, you know, I know Harris technically is a baby boomer, but Gen X is a vibe and she's got it, right? Gretchen Whitmer, another Gen X leader, comes under a lot of attacks. And I've talked specifically with Whitmer about this, you know, where she said, I saw Hillary get attacked. I saw Jennifer Granholm when she was the first woman governor of Michigan get attacked. I know it's not on the level, so I'm not going to let it bother me or stop me, right? And I think you kind of saw like a switch go off in Harris about eight months ago where

she's like, oh, people are going to criticize me no matter what. I'm fine, whatever. And she is like taking the field with a lot of confidence. And I think that that's, I think that's why. And we're more used to it. And, you know, Hillary was the before times. Any criticism of her people thought was legitimate criticism of hers and didn't pause to think, maybe she's just a little confounding to me because I haven't seen a woman in this role

before, as opposed to there's just something about her I don't like. I know the difference between Hillary and Kamala is one, Hillary was the target and victim, we could really say, of slander for like two decades. That was just deep in the water table, in addition to the misogyny, right? Like just the personal, which Kamala hasn't really had. On the other hand, Hillary, she was Secretary of State, right? So it was hard to say about Hillary that she isn't up for standing up to Putin or she. You know what I mean?

With Kamala, I do think some people don't exactly know what her foreign policy experience is. Right. And then there's the implicit misogyny. So what do you think about that? Kind of how to handle the toughness on the world stage? Yeah, a couple things about that. I saw Ben Rhodes, I saw both Ben Rhodes and Tony Blinken talk about her. And this is what I feel like the cabinet can be really good surrogates for her because they can talk about working with her in the job that she did. And, you know, Tony went through. Oh, I shouldn't call him Tony.

Secretary Blinken went through. He's Tony on this podcast. He went through a litany of places he's been with her, problems they've dealt with together. And Ben, I have to say, and I have to text him about this, was particularly so effective that one of the women researchers I work with texted me and she was like, Ben Rhodes was perfect. Because what he talked about wasn't just, you know, I've been in these rooms with her. We talked about like, I've been in really tough meetings with her with really hard discussions, you know, and she stands up to, you know, whoever it is, right? So it's not just, it's like evoking for people the context of what that, what is that experience? Okay, she has this, don't just say the litany of the things she's done.

What's the context of what that says about her and the qualities of leadership that she has and reaffirming those. But there's a really big, important structural issue here that I think is going to work in her favor that I want to mention too. But I think that the deeper you and I are in this conversation, you can see how compared to Trump or in Vance, she can emerge as the tougher, stronger, clearly more experienced, more prepared leader. And the big thing going for her though is the 100 days and not having gone through a primary. Why hasica never had a woman yet president it's because one of the reasons is our primary system the way we elect presidents really disadvantages women because

and here look at 2020 six women ran very experienced you know harris gillibrand warren klobuchar oh tulsa gambert okay okay well we're going to set her aside five great women and what was all the coverage Beto Buttigieg Bernie and Biden Beto and Buttigieg not nearly as experienced as any of the women that I just mentioned yeah but we recognize them right away a lot of potential earnest young guy the floppy hair you see RFK you see you know like we get it we see we get excited by them and it just takes women a long time to break that was a little dreamy that was a little dreamy dreaminess is dreamy dreamy is dreamy no matter the gender i mean nice guy nice guy but anyway but uh see you see this is all in your head it's all in your head so you either never break through

or is what happened with clinton is that we had so many attacks that you come into the general election with a lot of baggage and a lot of questions about like why is there something about her i just don't like and harris has been presented to us as the solution the winner she's not someone and also ambition is such a big thing she's not someone who sought this out she was loyally standing by her man, Joe Biden, just being a great number two. And he asked her to do this. He said, she is the person I want to do this. So she is coming forward to us as a clear winner, everyone rallying behind her.

I think we probably don't give enough credit to President Biden and how important it was that he endorsed her, that he said she's the one and everyone rallied around her and now she is coming to us not as someone like oh she's seeking that she wants to be the first one president she's always wanted that it's like she's solving a problem and i think that's partly why some of the memes that used to hurt her like coconut tree people love now but a couple months ago they didn't it was a thing a month ago people didn't love it you know people didn't used to love her laugh and instead everyone is just the response is you know the right price to push something and people were like i love her i got her back and i think it's partly about the scenario by

which she became the the leader and this is often how women break that glass ceiling, by the way, in other countries. It's this situation where something happened to the man. They were a number two. Something happened. They had to take over. And then- We did an article about Jacinda

and the parallels between Jacinda and New Zealand. Jacinda, Julia Gillard in Australia, probably 10 years prior to Jacinda. Same deal, same situation. Yeah. One thing that she has done, which I've liked, you know that this is appealing to the Bulwark crowd, which was yesterday. I mean, on this question of how you balance strength with patriotism with also progressive values,

I thought she was very strong in her statement after a meeting with Bibi. Here's a written statement, though, about the protests. I condemn any individuals associating with the brutal terrorist attack organization Hamas, which has vowed to annihilate the state of Israel. Pro-Hamas graffiti and rhetoric is abhorrent. I condemn the burning of the American flag. That flag is a symptom of our highest ideals as a nation. This is somebody that's in it to win it, Jen.

This is somebody that is in it to win it jen this is somebody that is in it to win it i mean i just i love it oh my god i love it so much she is just like boom boom shutting it down yeah there's no caveats it's just like all declarative said it's just like usa you want to stand up and salute look it's been six days five days five days five days but they have been really deft and also hats off to the biden team because by the way everyone's like oh harris's team is so great it's like it's the biden team mostly with a couple of key cogs that might have been problem people missing but we're not going to do that today we're not going to do that and also brian fallon who i have to say. You know Brian Fallon? Brian Fallon. And Brian Fallon has been in it, man.

He has been through the wars. So, yeah, really good. Yeah. Maybe a couple of the people around Biden, not as involved. Christian Allen, VP's comms person, too. VP's people are doing great. Yeah, they're good. I want to do, just really quick, a fun one.

Did you hear this on Fox yesterday morning? This was Fox and friends doing an accidental ad for Kamala Harris. Let's take a listen. Also, the conviction rate, which we're not going to please many in the minority community, went from 52% to 67%. So that was better for some and not good for others. Well, let's just put that on TV in the Green Bay media market. Can we run that?

Oh, her conviction rate went up. I'm sure black people are going to be so upset that she convicted criminals. What? I know. They're stuck thinking that it's a primary. It's not a primary. She won the primary. She won the primary big, right?

The degree to which it lasted about 12 hours. She won that big. And then also, I think they're thinking the stuff we hit her with before is going to work again really what it's about like all the stuff like kind of memes about her is all about authenticity right that's the thing yeah but she's conquered that now because she's coming into this as the answer the solution that everybody was looking for and having proved herself as three and a half years as biden's vice president it's not going to cause her the problems with, on the Democratic side and some swing voters, that it caused for Clinton. It's just not. Here's what I think could work. We have five

minutes. Let's focus on, we've done a lot of dunking. Let's focus on what could work. She ran way too far to the left in 2019. I don't believe it to be authentic, Kamala, just if you look at the holistic of her record, but the audio and the video, we played the Dave McCormick ad yesterday, decriminalizing the board. It's not an ad, by the way. That thing is 91 seconds long, so obviously it's not an ad. They're going to shorten

it. Why haven't they done that yet? It's kind of lame. Well, they're not exactly firing on all cylinders down there in Mar-a-Lago right now. I don't know if you've noticed that. They're a little bit lost on what to do. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird. Like, I don't know. Some of them are effective. La Civida and Susie. I don't get it really. That's what he's doing. He did the swift boats. That's my

point. He did the swift boats. He's going to be able to dial in on something that works. They'll figure that out. Yeah, for sure. And maybe it's the border. Maybe it's her views of decriminalizing the border. Maybe she did say one time she was supportive of the Defund the Police movement. That's out this morning. She has been against, you know, some of the energy drilling, supportive of Green New Deal. So I guess I just think about when you think of, I mentioned this

yesterday, some of the key voters here are back to our people, Atlanta suburbs, Philly suburbs, the people that voted for Biden, that are Republicans, they voted for Brian Kemp and they voted for Biden. They're really Republicans, but they hate Trump. Can the Republicans effectively turn her into a California far left liberal that turns off the Brian Kemp Biden voter in Georgia? And that's just enough on the margins. That worries me.

I think that is the one thing I've seen that has a little bit of potential effect. Well, how would you handle that if you were them? Yeah, that's legit. That's legit. I would lay down record now, right? Because you're right there are those clips that i've seen they seem to be all from the 2019 democratic primary as opposed to positions that she acted on and the positions that she had i would do a lot of bio now as i you know what's the word i'm looking

for you know to protect yourself prosecutor center pro-capitalism, pro-law and order, American. Here's her record. This is what you can count on Kamala Harris to do. When she was a prosecutor, she did this. When she was a senator, you saw her in these tough situations where she, you know, in the hearing rooms. And as vice president, you know, by the way, United States energy development, domestic energy development, the highest it's ever been.

U.S. oil production, the highest it's ever been. U.S. oil production, the highest it's ever been. So I think you have to come in with what you can count on her to do based on what she's done before. Right? That's different than there was a couple of statements from 2019. And then you can't get too wrapped around the axle about that. Right? Because I don't agree with a lot of the things she said, but I'm going to vote for her. There's millions.

Right? And then you've got to go to contrast but i think you have to lay down the actual record of what she's done and i would make that like here's what she's done be the thing does she have to hippie punch anything a little bit i don't know what that means you don't it's like where you take a gratuitous shot at the left on something to just demonstrate like you know oh actually i think it was really silly that they wanted to do this thing on the border on immigration or on energy or something like you know and i actually or does she have to say she has to change her mind i changed my mind on that no i don't think i like

i don't like you iterate on this stuff right so i would go in strong with like strong bio of what her actual record is and then you kind of iterate on like what you know i don't think for example i think that statement yesterday about the protests was she didn't go out of her way to hit the left but that gives you a pretty strong signal of where she's you know where she's coming from so i don't know that like you know we used to call them sister soldier moments right i like hippie punching better but but yeah, I hear you. Hippie punchy is good. It's more important to be authentic, I think, these days

than look for something contrived. I'm very much not for contrived. Okay, final do and don't. Dear Madam President, advice for all of the white guy operatives out there giving advice on tv do and don't like that like really be wary when you're like you know the like the big there's just something about her or like don't you know when it's like when you have a critique that you can't quite pin down it's a generality you got to check yourself and think about like where it's

really where it is really coming from and then just like i said before understand that it's just different what you need to do to boost women candidates and it's like it's the backing up of the qualifications and doing that not as uh something she has to prove but as a good contrast point to trump advance because she's got more more experience in both of them amen jen palm Palmieri, my friend, Dear Madam President is the book, an open letter to the women who will run the world. Up next, two mailbag questions but also want to cover uh the latest polling news and you know what we've seen here is movement that I think that we expected,

you expected if you were listening to this podcast, which is Kamala Harris, really doing that easy first step of gathering that low hanging fruit of bringing voters who should be Democrats who are double haters back into the fold. The number of double haters is going to go down quite a bit as people consolidate around the two candidates. The New York Times Siena College poll, which has been probably the most negative or one of the most negative towards Democrats out yesterday, but they're very rigorous in their methodology. So I think it's important to just look at them as a baseline. Trump 48, Harris 47 among likely voters, Trump 48, Harris 46 among registered voters. That is a narrowing

of the gap dramatically. Trump was plus six among likely voters, plus nine among registered voters against Biden in the last New York Times poll. A couple of things to note underneath, Trump's favorability is up a little bit since the assassination attempt and the convention. Not that surprising, but worth noting he's up to 48%, which is about his high watermark. Harris's favorability is up to 46%. Harris gets huge bumps among 18 to 29-year-olds. She's doing slightly worse among seniors, something that we talked about with Ron Brownstein. And you see on the multi-candidate ballot, Kennedy really starting to drop. And I think that a lot of that is there were some soft Kennedy supporters who are basically

Democrats that just were unhappy with Biden that are now moving back into the Harris camp. So good news. I mean, not, you know, it's a fight. There's going to be a fight ahead. There's going to be a campaign ahead. It's going to be a close campaign. But the things that were striking about Joe Biden's weakness have been basically resolved within five days. All right, over to the mailbag. On this point, Jessica asked, can the polls be trusted? If not, why, why not? One way to think about this, about the polling is, A, it's a Snapchat in time.

So it's not predictive per se. A, it's a Snapchat in time, so it's not predictive per se. B, there's a margin of error. And I think it is challenging to poll certain groups these days. And when you're basing polling based on weighting things, based on what you expect an electorate to be, that's part of a pollster's methodology. And so that's why you want to look at good pollsters versus bad pollsters. But even good pollsters sometimes are wrong about what they kind of

expect the electorate to look like. So, you know, I don't take them as gospel in that Donald Trump is definitely winning by two points or one point right now based on the Siena poll. What you can learn from it is that directionally, you could see where Kamala Harris is doing better and worse, kind of matched our prior expectations in this case, I think mostly because it was pretty obvious which groups she was going to do better and worse with, but it's good to see data that supports kind of the observable reality out in the world. And, you know, there are other things. One thing I kept talking about before Biden stepped aside was that if you just looked at head-to-head polls of the Senate candidates and the presidential ballot in the same state, there was this huge gap between Biden and say,

Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, you know, and to me that what we know, we don't, maybe the numbers aren't exactly right. Maybe there's a margin of error on, on where they were, but directionally, you know, it's not bias against Democrats if the Democratic Senate candidate is doing well and the Democratic presidential candidate is doing poorly. That's not a sign of bias against a certain party or under sampling or missampling. That's a sign that there are voters out there that are saying, yeah, I will vote for the Democrat for Senate, but I won't vote for Joe Biden. We're going to see that narrow, but those kind of numbers, that comparison between the Senate ballot and the presidential ballot is something that I'm going to be looking

at very closely. So short answer is yes, you can directionally trust them. No, you know, they're not oracles where if the poll says one thing, then it will definitely become that. One more mailbag question from Becky. What do you think the effect would be better or worse if Biden stepped down from office making Kamala Harris president of the United States? Clearly, at this point, that's not going to happen, you know, unless there's a health event or, you know, something extraordinary. And there's been plenty of extraordinary things happening the last three weeks. You know, JVL wrote about this in the triad a while ago, kind of making the argument for letting Harris run as president. I think that there's some compelling points on that side,

you know, going to this conversation we just had with Jen, just kind of being in the role, you know, gives a level of heft and weight that makes all of the arguments that Jen was saying she should be making and her surrogate should be making against J.D. Vance and Donald Trump even more powerful. Having to call her Madam President makes it even more powerful. On the flip side of that, she is campaigning so much harder than Joe Biden was campaigning. One of these huge advantages that you see out there is, you know, there's a New York Times where it said Joe Biden called 20 politicians in 10 days following the debate and Kamala Harris called 100 in one day.

All that stuff matters, right? Her ability to go out and campaign, you know, if you become the president president, there's presidenting things you have to do. And particularly, you have this short turnaround where you're getting briefed up on things. You have to deal with staffing. There's a lot of contingencies. So I think at this point, it worked out in a way that is conspiring to benefit the vice president. And I think that there's not really much sense thinking about the counterfactual at this point. You also have, you know, thinking about going ahead, one other

item I didn't get to with Jay Palm was the coming debate. Donald Trump yesterday starting to back off a little bit of the debate and vice president, the VP, then going and trolling him for that. You might notice she quote tweeted our new colleague, Sam Stein. Sam reported Trump camp says he's backing out of the debates. Kamala retweeted that with what happened to any time, any place, burn. And I think at the end of the day, Trump's going to have to debate her. I just don't think the machismo element will allow him to duck it. I think that they're going to try to get more debate her. I just don't think the machismo element will allow him to duck it. I think that they're going to try to get more favorable rules. I think basically they wanted Biden on the debate stage. And so they were happy to agree to whatever Biden wanted to get to get him on the debate stage. Now, situation's different. And I don't know that they want,

you know, the mute button, all that. So I think there'll be another round of debating and negotiating and we probably end up with a debate around this some more time maybe with some different moderators but we will see how that turns out lastly we didn't get to the couch with uh with jennifer but if you've missed it if you're offline if you're offline and god bless you if you are and this podcast is your lifeline into what's happening in the world i just would recommend googling jd vance couch this weekend and just giving yourself a little bit of injection of joy some troublemaker on the internet did a post about

how jd vance admitted in hillbilly elegy that he made love between couch cushions that was not true we don't want to spread disinformation on this podcast not true but the joke spread like wildfire there were some great memes out there it brought me a lot of joy it brought me some chuckles we all deserve a little bit of joy jd vance the way he demeans and mocks childless cat ladies can probably take a little mocking on his own. And we can do it in good cheer with a clean conscious. So cheers to our sofa king, J.D. Vance. And we'll be back on Monday with Bill Kristol. Have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you all then.

Peace. I can barely lift my eyes. The Holy Ghost should hold your hand for me Curve my flaws to fit the jeans, but as it stands I need someone to drink So if you ever need to find Someone to get along with every time Don't take another chance with me I'm not the man I'm supposed to be

You're so fucking gorgeous You're so funny, gorgeous I need my legs to influence The common sense not fitting in my mind I'm a disgrace, this happened all the time So if you ever need a fire Someone to get along with every time Don't take another chance with me I'm not the man I'm supposed to be You're so fucking gorgeous You're so fucking gorgeous The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.