The Chris Cuomo Project - 3 Campaign Chess Moves That Could Win 2024

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Chris Cuomo analyzes the three “chess moves” that he argues could tip the scales between the Harris/Walz and Trump/Vance tickets in the 2024 presidential election. He highlights these moves — defining the narrative, waging the war of ideas, and rallying key voter groups — as pivotal in determining which campaign gains the upper hand. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Need a great reason to get up in the morning? Well, what about two? Right now, get a small, organic Fair Trade coffee and a tasty bacon and egg or breakfast sandwich for only $5 at A&W's in Ontario. Now that the teams are set and the game is afoot, the question is what are the next three chess moves in the presidential election that Harrison Walz has to make ahead of or better than Trump and Vance? I know what they are. Do you?

AI might be the most important new computer technology ever, storming every industry, literally billions of dollars of being invested. So buckle up. The problem is AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure,

database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, Databricks, Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash ccp.

That's oracle.com slash ccp. Oracle.com slash ccp. Support for the Crispwomo project comes from Cozy Earth. Is your house a home? Is it a sanctuary? Is it where you can feel and be your best? Well, if not, check out Cozy Earth and their products because they have helped me and my wife do exactly that. Create a sanctuary. How? Cozy Earth's best-selling bamboo sheet set. 100%

premium viscose from bamboo. Why bamboo? Sustainable, not killing the trees we need. For me it's about what makes Cozy Earth different. And that's the temperature regulation in addition to the green factor, the sustainability. But the temperature regulation works. When it's hot, you feel cooler in the sheets. I don't know how, but it works. And when it's cold out, you feel warm. Enhanced fabric, durable weave, doesn't pill, guaranteed for 10 years.

I mean, how do you beat it? If you don't like it, you send it back. You have 10 years. Who has sheets for 10 years? Superior softness. Upgrade your nights. Transform your days. Cozy Earth.

40% off. Get up to 40% off at CozyEarth.com slash Chris. Use Chris. Don't forget to tell them I sent you when you go there. If you do that and you fill out the post-purchase survey, you get free socks and you hook me up. Let's get after it. Support for the Chris Cuomo project comes from Shopify. You know when you think of great duos, Batman and Robin, Jordan and Pippin and the perfect pairing when it comes to growing

your business, you and Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business development. Why do I like it? Because I like people who are the best at what they do. And I also love that Shopify is there from the beginning. They just don't want to cherry pick businesses that are already most of the way there

and just want to help them maximize. Shopify gives you everything you need to go from seed to big old forest. And I like it. So if you want to take your business to the next level, Shopify is the choice. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. Now that's market share.

Sign up for a $1 a month trial period at Shopify.com slash Chris C, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Chris C, grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash Chris C. Check it out. I'm Chris Cuomo, welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. There are three moves between now and let's say October,

okay, that have to be made by the team that wants to win. What are they? The first one, defining the narrative. Now that the teams are set, what you see is a desperate attempt to define, right? What's Walls' story? Who is he? There's a plus minus on a compressed timeframe.

What does that mean? Harris has not been campaigning for a year and a half, right? Not on her own. Walls is a brand new name. You never heard of them 15 minutes ago. So the plus is they're going to be able to get a fresh whack at defining them and you don't have any other real history.

Now Harris does, but as a ticket and what they mean, they haven't been scrutinized for as long, certainly as Trump has. The minus is they don't have as much time if they get it wrong and they don't have as much time to deal with bad narratives. Okay, so we see the first move is defining the narrative. Who is Walls?

Who are they? What are they about? And if the Democrats want to win, my belief at this point is the ABT vote is not enough, anyone but Trump. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's got her a pop because people were worried that Biden wasn't going to be able to deliver and now they do.

So they have renewed enthusiasm in their rancor and in their lack of respect and complete contempt for Trump. So you see a little bit of a pop, right? Harris is shiny and new in a way with Waltz, there'll be a little bit more of that pop, but that'll settle away. Those are just polls, they're snapshots of a moment. Defining the narrative is key and for Democrats, it's going to have to involve what Harris-Walz are for. What are they for? What can they do? Remember, the reason I say that this is Trump's race to lose is because even though of the incumbency effect, it usually gives you the advantage

because incumbents rarely lose. Well, now you don't really have the incumbent, you got the VP. Secondly, till you lose incumbency effect, as far as Professor Alan Lichtman is concerned with his 13 keys. But also I believe the mood in the country of what's driving this election isn't hope,

isn't anticipation of the mood in the country of what's driving this election isn't hope, isn't anticipation of the next or the new. It's negativity, it's toxicity, it's grievance. And that's bad for the status quo. And the status quo is the party that's in power and the party that's in power are the Democrats. So I think it's Trump's race to lose because he'd lose it. Hell yeah, he could lose it.

Hell yeah, this is anybody's race. But I think it's his to lose. And for Harris to win, she's going to have to show not just that he sucks the ABT vote, but that she is for something that captures the imagination of enough of the independent voters and the people in the suburbs and the people in the cities who need to overperform for the Democrats, that they have reason to believe in better, defining the narrative. What does that mean for Trump and Vance? Well, they seem pretty locked in to a campaign of fear. Radical left, radical left, radical left, walls is radical. Not easy to paint a guy who looks like

Santa as radical, but they'll look at his policies. If the media does their job, I think the Republicans have a tough job. I don't think that this guy is a radical. I don't think that the ideas that they're calling a radical are that radical. You may not like them. You may not want to vote for them. I totally get that. But I don't think they're like, everybody has to drive an EV. Everybody has to have a transgender kid.

You know, any of this boogeyman shit that's going on, I think is a mistake for them. I think Trump and mistake for them. I think Trump and Vance can do better. And I think they're going to have to do better. But they seem pretty tied into the grievance campaign and going ugly early and going negative as often as they can. And if that's the narrative they're going to tell, I think they're going to have a hard time expanding their base.

Why? Because fear demagoguery works in creating a following and a base, but it is not great at building consensus. Again, demagoguery is very effective at concentrating a base. It is not great for building consensus. That takes positivity and ideas and galvanizing and coalescing and bringing people together. Unity is consensus, right? Demagoguery is not as adept in achieving that. Second, war of ideas. The war of ideas is the second chess move. What is this election about?

Good, bad, right, wrong, bad, worse, battle to the bottom, fear, danger. Those are themes more than ideas. What are the issues that we're gonna fight about most? Economics, which part? Immigration, how so? Bad for Democrats, by the way, that issue. Bad for Democrats.

Walls does not help. Harris in that regard. National security, foreign entanglements. What is the battle of ideas? What are the issues? And then, secondarily, once we lock those down, and this is what we seem to be talking about most, and you'll arrive at that by mid-September, what are your ideas about them? How do you make them better? How do you understand what the problem is?

How do you explain the blame or responsibility or accountability for those problems? What are your fixes? How reasonable and rational do they sound? There is a challenge on both sides for this. Trump was in there before. Didn't do any of the things except deliver the judges that he said he would. We were never a wall away from being safe. It was always an oversimplification. And it was better in terms of flow, but there are a lot of reasons for that that have nothing to do with the wall. And there are even reasons that don't

have to do with Trump. But I give him credit for having a better security environment and atmosphere and flow of illegal entrance when he was in power than Biden Harris. No question. Why? Well, that's what the election is about. What do you do about it to make it even better? That's what the election is about. Trump has an advantage on that issue, but what are the other ones?

That's the war of ideas. And remember, it has two parts. What are the issues that are going to become the primary state of play? And the candidates dictate that. The reality dictates that. What's happening in our country at that time? What's going on with the stock market? How does that reverberate throughout the economy? What's happening with foreign entanglements? Do these scumbags in Iran find somebody or somebodies to do some stupid shit in our country that hurts people? You know, you don't know. You don't know what is going to come up. That will help shape the issues.

And then the third piece is, you know, the watchdogs. What do the people in the media decide to hold the campaign's feet to the fire about, hold them accountable about. So what do the candidates want to talk about the most? What's happening in the country? And what does the media do with the first two? So that is going to be the setting of the issues, what we're talking about, but then the ideas about them or the chess move. How do you discuss immigration? For Trump, it's going to be, it's terrible, it's terrible, it's terrible, it's their fault, I can fix it. Okay, he didn't change the rules on asylum, he didn't beef up the requirements that we needed for resources on the border for processing,

holding, and returning people. So why do we think he would do it the second time? He can't do it by himself, you need Congress, and as long as voters reward people for opposition as a legitimate posture and position, they are not going to pass any bills. Not real ones. Not ones that seem to benefit a sitting administration or benefit their opposition or whatever the perceived leverage is. So that's that issue.

The economy, I think, is really much more interesting a discussion. I think that any reasonable person could make the situation on the southern border better with about 10 minutes worth of dialogue. I really do. You need all kinds of security measures, right? Not just physical. You need sensors. You need manpower.

You need everything. Fences, walls, sensors, drones, you need all this shit. You need a whole matrix of security. Then you need staff. Then you need to change the rules of what asylum is. That's going to be a sticky wicket, but that's what you need. What qualifies as asylum?

What is economic asylum? Is that a thing? If it isn't, then okay. How do you deal with the home countries? What deals do you make there? What do you set up in those countries that have people processed there that you pay for? What carrot and stick approach do you use with them? How do you get them to start slowing down fentanyl?

When do you start killing cartel members? And when do you start blowing those things up like they were terror organizations? Those are the kinds of things that if you did and double the amount of processing facilities and courts and adjudicators and ways to return people, you do all that, everything's gonna get better there. Then you have to deal with the things on the home country side that I discussed. Then you have to deal with it on this, our home

country. You gotta take care of the dreamers and make them full citizens. Make them full citizens. They're living right by every metric that we can use. These people are doing the right thing and they're being punished for where they were born. And it's not fair. And nobody thinks it's fair. Trump said he wanted to take care of the dreamers and didn't do shit. Why? Because his party won't let him do a standalone on dreamers. Cause if you give the left the dreamers

and you don't get anything back, you lose. That's how they see it. So the dreamers are held hostage by this inaction. What else? Well, what do you do with all the people working here? Well, look, the obvious reasonable thing is that anyone you have in this country who can fill a job should fill a job and pay taxes. So the services they use and the communities that they're in benefit from their involvement.

See, but we don't want to do this because we don't want to legitimize them. The problems are easy to fix when it comes to this. There's just no will for the fixing. Economy, much harder. Why? Because you've got to pick winners and losers. Right now, we let the rich and the corporations win. It's not even a close call. The top 1% has more money than the bottom 99.

I mean, that's what we've allowed. And they say it's capitalism, except when the corporations are in trouble and then you bail them out and then it's socialism. Bankruptcy laws are a socialistic mechanism. Bankruptcy laws are socialism. Corporate bailouts, corporate welfare, all of the different adjustments and advantages they get is a form of society rewarding industry. Okay, that's what it is. Why? Because they do the hiring. But what about the reality that most of the jobs in our economy now are small businesses and they do not get the same rights and remedies and privileges that corporations get under the law.

Why don't we fix that when they're the engine of the economy? Because they don't give the money. They don't have the leverage that the corporations do. Tough conversation. What are your ideas on these? What are your ideas? How do you deal with homeless? How you deal with criminality? How do you deal with these? What are your ideas? Okay? That's two.

Psst. Want to get in on the best savings hack ever? Only KUDO saves you up to 40% on a sweet phone plan, reliable home internet, and all the streaming you could ever need with Netflix, Disney Plus, and Amazon Prime. That's right. When you bundle with the Happy Stack, you can spend up to 40% less a month, every month, all year long, as long as you're with KUDO. Dare I say saving this much money

has never been this easy? Stack more, spend less, like way less. The HappyStack, only at KUDO. Now with internet. Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision

with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Three, the third chess move. Who will find their people and give the suggestion of a movement, Trump wins, MAGA is a movement, not with enough of the country to win the election. He has to find his people. Who are his people? Well, Mike, bro, they seem to be peeling off, they were trying to peel off black and brown folks. I think they'll have success with Latinos. I think that NABJ thing was such a dog whistle, was so obvious that Trump believes that he can play to whites by playing to bigotry that I don't know what it's going to mean

for the black vote, but I'm sure Harris ain't going to let him forget it. And he's now running against a black woman. So I think they're also trying to peel off Jews. And I understand why Jewish people are pissed off at elements of the Democratic Party right now and elements of all of us of what's happening in this country vis-a-vis anti-Semitism and how they've been mistreated. Are they gonna vote Republican?

Maybe some. Someone sent me a poll the other day from New York that had Trump and Harris tied with the Jewish vote in New York. That was an eye-popper to me. Just a moment in time. Just a moment in time. I don't invest any more in it than that. If Jews go bad on the Democrats, that would be really weird.

I don't know what it would mean because I don't know that there are enough of them, but influential, they're a huge influence. So that's interesting to watch, but I don't think it's enough to create a coalition that looks like a movement that Trump wins. So it's gonna be a battle of the independence on both sides of who gets more independence. Now on the left, that's gonna be more the suburban women. Independence, suburban women,

college educated men, independence. And for the left, finding their people for the Democrats means living in the population centers in the swing states for the duration. Walls should not leave the swing states for the duration of this election. And he should spend his time there, sure, canvassing, but, you know, meaning everywhere, but population centers. You need to overperform in the population centers in the swing states.

That's how the Democrats find their people. And yes, women, women, women, women, but women are everywhere. If women decide to make their witness in this election, Trump is done. They are the first group to have a right taken from them in my lifetime. That's what happened with Dobbs decision. No, it was returned to the states. It removed a federal right and returned it to the states. Something was taken away. It

wasn't merely shifted. If they decide to make their witness on that, now I don't see it in polls, It wasn't merely shifted. If they decide to make their witness on that, now I don't see it in polls, but you don't see everything in those types of measures and metrics. And you also don't know how the dialogue between these two candidates is gonna affect the resonance of that issue.

Harris is very good on this issue. This is one of the only places where the administration was really exercising her. And Walls has an interesting story on this because he and his wife conceived both of their kids through IVF. And IVF is kind of the boogeyman of the reproductive rights issue. Not that it should be, but it is because you see how Trump was like, no, no, no, IVF is okay.

IVF is okay. But is it okay? Because different states want to fuck with it because you've taken away a federal standard. And people have some messed up notions about what we should be allowed to do and not be allowed to do because of their faith, even though we're in a secular society. This issue is savaged and ravaged by religiosity. So if people start thinking, well, hold on a second. This is a slippery slope because now it's not just women's bodies.

It's me too as a man and you having a say in how I'm able to make a family. That could be something. So the three chess moves. One defining the narrative. Who is going to do better at defining who they are and who they are not? You see a real scrumaging on that right now, right? Trying to define walls, radical lefty, radical lefty, radical lefty. And the Democrats are trying to tell a very different story about him, right?

That he's as homespun Midwest midwestern male as you get. And then it's the war of ideas. How do you shape what issues, what problems we're talking about here and what are your ideas about those problems? Two stages on that one. And how does the tickets, the parties deal with it? How does the society, the reality reflect on their choices, right? What's happening in the country that they have to deal with? And three, how the media deals with those first two imbalances them. And then the third one, find your people. Who are the voters, the communities, the constituencies that Trump vans can put together that will

look like a movement because people are joiners and we like to be with a winner in this country. And if it looks like someone's going to win, there's a better chance if you're undecided that you'll go with them. For Harris, it is different. It is suburbs, it is women, women, women, and it is population centers in swing states. Those are the three chess moves that we will have to watch now that the game is afoot. Who makes them first? Who makes them better?

That set of criteria will define who is in position to win this race as we get deeper into the fall, September into the beginning of October, then you're gonna have to reassess and there's gonna be a new set of criteria that are gonna lead us through election day. But for now, this is what you need to watch. ["The News Nation Theme"] Agree, disagree, why? I'm Chris Cuomo, Thank you for subscribing and following.

Thank you for checking me out on NewsNation. 8p and 11p every week, day, night. Want the podcast but not the commercials? Go to my sub stack. It's only five bucks a month. And you get all of the long COVID expertise from my long COVID doctor, who's also dovetailing her understanding of how to treat long COVID with all of her longevity medicine practice. And you'll see what I'm doing for my own treatment and my own fitness, and you'll get my walk-in talks, which are philosophical discussions and also self-help stuff that I continue to fail at.

And you get all of it for five bucks a month and we're using that money to help people get treated for long COVID who can't afford it. Not a bad deal. My friends, you can see the chess moves but never forget they are playing a game. Let's get after it.