The Dispatch Podcast - Kamala vs. The Media | Roundtable

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Sarah, Jonah, and Declan are joined by Megan McArdle, a columnist for The Washington Post, to discuss Kamala Harris’ recent media blitz culminating in her interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. They also dive into the latest vibe shift and close with a conversation about the purpose of “steelmanning.” The Agenda: —Kamala Harris’ media blitz —Is Harris prepared for tough questions? —Avoidance of Biden slander —Sexism or partisanship? —Analysis of the evolving polls —Trump and male voters —Trump’s exaggeration —Mommy Party vs. Daddy Party —What is steelmanning? Show Notes: —Harris’ Fox News interview —J.D. Vance discussing Venezuela on ABC News —Noah Smith's post on steelmanning The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, the Declan Garvey, and Megan McCartle. Hey, Megan. Hey, Sarah. Okay, well, Megan, we have many things to talk about, and we have many things to talk about, and we have. two other people who may, I don't know, we have to hear from them from time to time, so be it. All right. I want to start with the campaign strategies. We have the Harris campaign on quite the media blitz for the last week after being the candidate who didn't do

interviews when she took over this campaign from President Biden all the way through the convention. And afterward, it looked very, you know, sticking toe in water. Too cold. Ah, now she's everywhere. She's doing podcast. She's on with Charlemagne the God. And of course, rounding out this whole media blitz was a 30-minute sit-down interview with Rep Bear on Fox News. Before we get into what any of you think about the media blitz, about how all of that's going, etc. I just want to talk about why you think she was going on Fox News, what the metric of success was for that campaign before we talk about whether it was successful or not successful. So, Jonah, what was the metric of success?

What was the purpose of this media blitz and Fox News in particular? I'm not sure, except insofar as to say, I was talking to a prominent Democratic strategist type person recently. And they said when they heard that she was going to do Brett Bear, she said, okay, they think they're losing. And when you think you're losing, you've got to take risks, you've got to shake things up, you've got to change the narrative. So I kind of think that that's part of it. It seems to me that the Harris people, you can just pretty much figure out what voters they're going for

based upon the places they go. I mean, like, they didn't go to get the, they didn't do Charlemagne the God show, which I hate having to say that name. I despise it. They didn't do that to go pick up the ethnic Polish Catholic vote, right? I mean, like, you know what they were going for there.

And the thing that's more interesting and you know what they're going for with the view. The thing that's interesting about the Brett Bear thing is I think that that was less about going after persuadable Republicans, although that's probably some of it, but also as I sort of get out the vote effort for their own base. She went into the lines then. It gives them the sense that it reassures them that she's not scared, that she's tough, it gives them a talking point against Trump and that kind of thing.

And I think their risk reward on it was that even if it went badly, negative partisanship would rally around her. And I think it has a little bit. But beyond that, I don't know. I mean, I think the TikTok, after the election of what the thinking inside the campaign was on various things is going to be fascinating. So, Declan, there were plenty of conversations that she's going on Fox News to reach, you know, basically dispatchian conservatives, people who are Fox News consumers, but who feel

deeply uncomfortable with Trump and are open to voting for her. Was that her audience? I think Jonah is correct that it's much more of a process argument that she was hoping to make. For weeks now, Harris and Harris allies in the Harris campaign has been trying to make the case that we need another debate. We need to press Trump on his policies more. And this is a way you can't really call Trump a chicken or a coward for not doing another debate if you're not willing to answer tough questions yourself. And so it's more of a box check. I can exercise. I went on Fox. I answered tough questions. Why won't Donald Trump? Now she

can make that case a little bit more rigorously. I was interested to see and listening to this interview. She went on Fox and theoretically is talking to those voters, potential disaffected Republican crossovers. She did not mention by name Liz Cheney, you know, the types of people because even though they are, quote, unquote, Republicans who are supporting her, they are kind of persona non grata with most Fox viewers at this point. So you have to, I think she used Mark Millie as kind of a proxy for that kind of, you know, even Trump's defense secretary or his joint chiefs of staff aren't supporting him. But she's not actually talking, she can't be like, well, Adam Kinzinger is supporting me because that's not going to do anything for Fox voters who have kind of been led. to view those kinds of Republicans in certain ways. And so it's a difficult tightrope for her to walk

where she has the support of nominally called Republicans who Fox viewers do not view as Republicans, including the former vice president of the United States. And he has not endorsed her. But she did mention. Yes. She did mention him in the interview. Okay, Megan, there's a reverse version of this,

which is actually the reason that you go on Fox News is a base play. You're trying to make your base defensive of you. So you go on the most aggressive interview you can find and it will anger your base that you're treated, hostily, that these horrible people dare to question you type thing. Now, that comes with a bit of a risk when you do that because, of course, the reverse is also true if you make a base play

that Trump supporters will see you on their home turf. and it will remind them how much they hate you and motivate them to turn out as well. So a bit of a high wire act, but basically the idea is you go on Fox News because it's a get out the vote mechanism for your own team. Yeah, I think that that's right. But first of all, I will say,

I think the whole like get out the base, base service, theory of winning elections that Democrats have been endorsing for more than a decade now is just wrong. It has objectively failed. I mean, I'm not saying that they don't win when their base turns out. I think abortion is a really good example of this. An external event turned their base out. And I think Trump is a great base motivator. But I don't think that seeing Kamala answer hard questions is in fact something. First of all, because how many people who are not already ready to pull themselves by their tongue over a flaming lake that is then surrounded

by a high wall of broken glass to vote for Kamala Harris. How many of those people are ever going to see more than a clip or two from this interview? And they're not necessarily, I mean, this is the tragedy of social media for campaigns, right? They're not necessarily going to see the clip you want. Right. You know, like 10 years ago, you would, you could count on that like the networks were pretty much going to run stuff that made a Democrat look pretty good. And that's not true anymore. And so I think if that was the strategy, it is a bad strategy. I am really not sure why she did that interview.

All right. So let's stick with you, Megan, on the substance. It was an aggressive interview. Yeah. How did she do? My overall impression watching this was, first of all, that Kamala Harris, for the first time, found out what it's like to be a conservative being interviewed by the mainstream media

and she did not like it and her supporters did not like it they did not think that was fair they did not think that this is like good hard hitting journalism they thought that was an ambush and the second thing is that I don't think she handled it particularly well

I actually think that in the beginning she did when I was watching her in like the first few minutes I was like yeah Brett Bear is going too hard and she is, she's holding up. She's doing okay. But I think towards the end, it was bad. And it was bad for a couple reasons. First of all, Kamala Harris got asked questions. She never has to answer because, again, she's not a conservative going on the mainstream media. She is mostly in friendly

outlets. So she got asked questions that I think a lot of people have been wanting to hear ask for a long time. Like, when did you start to know that Joe Biden was having cognitive of problems. The number one question I said when she took over his campaign and yet she had not been asked. She took over his campaign in mid-July and she had not been asked that question. And also clearly had not prepared an answer for that question. Let me ask you this. You told many interviewers that Joe Biden was on his game that ran around circles on his staff. When did you first notice that President Biden's mental faculties appeared diminished? Joe Biden, I have watched from the Oval Office to the Situation Room, and he has the judgment

and the experience to do exactly what he has done in making very important decisions on behalf of the American people. There were no concerns raised. Joe Biden is not on the ballot. I understand. And Donald Trump is. But you talked about it. And Donald Trump is.

And Donald Trump is. And if you watched Donald Trump. fundraiser that he thought this was not the same Joe Biden that we saw on the debate stage. Donald Trump is on the balance. I understand. She doesn't listen to this podcast because I've been saying the question for however long that's been, four months. Yeah, I like actually, I falsely predicted that this was going to be a problem for her.

And it wasn't because all of her interviewers just politely failed to ask the obvious question. That was a bad one. Why did you want to provide sex reassignment surgery for, illegal immigrants held in federal detention. Under Donald Trump's administration, these surgeries were available to on a medical necessity basis to people in the federal prison system.

And I think, frankly, that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of like throwing, you know, stones when you're living in a glasshouse. The Trump aide say that he never advocated for that prison policy and no gender transition. Well, you know, you've got to take responsible for what happened in your administration. Yeah, no surgeries happened in this pregnancy.

So would you still advocate for using taxpayer dollars for gender reassignment surgeries? I will follow the law, just as I think Donald Trump would say he did. There were a lot of bad questions. Well, good questions that she didn't want. Yes, sorry. They were bad for her. They were bad questions for her. And I think, look, here's the thing.

She's in a bad spot. First of all, when everyone had a terminal case of Twitter brain in 2019, she took a lot of really just totally, even if you think they are like philosophically defensible, they are politically indefensible. There is no universe in which the American public wants to talk about why we should be providing, you know, surgeries that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and are not like saving anyone's life in the next 10 minutes. For illegal immigrants. For illegal immigrants held in federal detention, right? That is just not like a big political winner. She has the problem that her administration is unpopular

and she, my personal opinion on this is just throw him under the bus. He's already kind of going out there and being difficult. It's not helping you. Just be like, yeah, you know, we made a lot of mistakes, but I'm going to fix them. But also, it was funny, I was actually watching it

while chatting with a friend who's an economist and who just started feeding the questions into chat GPT. And chat GPT was doing way better than Kamal Harris. It was coming up with like deflecting, positive answers that like changed the subject but didn't just come off as like I am extremely angry that you have dared to ask me a hard question. And so I don't think it went great,

which I think feeds back into my question of why did you do this? Why did you do this and then not prepare for the questions that were likely to be asked? Like did no one on the media team see this coming? Can I hijack on this? Is second and sorry, I'll ask you the question. I'm I'm less harsh on the interview than Megan is. I think it's kind of an ink block test. But I think under conventional normal rules of politics, it was about it. She did badly. I just don't think it did badly in the way that reflected on Twitter.

But that said. Oh, I don't think it was a disaster. Yeah. I just think it like didn't help her. Wasn't great. Well, we don't know who she's trying to help herself with. So that's my point is like I don't know. But Sarah, the question I have is I put it to you.

She's now been asked in three prominent places, including last night, what are her differences with Joe Biden. Last night, and so far she's given two Fs, and last night, I don't know, great of a anywhere from a D to C minus answer.

What is your theory about why she can't? Because I could come up with an answer that wouldn't be too insulting to Joe Biden, but would still signal real breaks. Why can't she do it? Why won't she do it? It's not like David Pluff couldn't

do it in a heartbeat if you asked them to. I mean, it'd be even better than chat GPT. So like, why, why, why? Why? I praise indeed. And we should just, we should just say for listeners what she actually said. This time it was, she's a new generation of leadership. You're not Joe Biden.

You're not Donald Trump, but, but nothing comes to mind that you would do differently. Let me be very clear. My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden's presidency. And like every new president that comes in. to office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership. I'm someone who has not spent the majority of my career in Washington, D.C. And her first two answers were, there are no differences. Nothing comes to mind, which is even worse, right? Because it's a deer and a headline answer.

So, Sarah, why? Why? Why? So let's start with what she can't do. She can't give specifics. And she can't get anywhere near a specific. Like, not only can she not, say I would not have pulled out of Afghanistan, you know, that specific way. You can't say we have foreign policy differences because then you just, okay, what are the foreign policy differences? So you can't even start down any path because then you have to go all the way down the path. You're basically like, it's the scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum like uses the flares to try to attract the T-Rex. And then the T-Rex comes after him and throws him around. It's not good.

So you can't do any of that. So you're going to have to give sort of these vague answers anyway. So then I would argue that you give the sort of most generic do no harm answer and just get out of it quickly. I agree with you that I don't think she gave the best version of that when she said none come to mind. I think the reason for that answer is that she wanted to leave herself wiggle room in case that didn't work, right? None come to mind is different than there are none, right? None come to mind allows you to say,

oh, I've thought about it more, and now some come to mind if you need to. That's why you give that first. Again, I don't think I would not have suggested to do that first. Like, stop leaving yourself out. I was listening to Leon Nefax Bush v. Gore podcast where you listen to Gore, answer questions about Ilyan Gonzalez and answer questions about this military base down,

in Florida and like, whof, politicians leaving themselves out and making sure that they don't actually get pinned down wasn't successful 20 years ago. And that was before social media and the sort of crowdsourcing of how bad your answer is stuff. So I don't think she's as bad as Al Gore on that type of stuff. But yeah, I don't think it was good. You know, like, I was watching her do the economy answer where Brett Baer said, you know, why do people trust Trump more than you on the economy? And like, I am writing an answer in my head that is vague and moves on, which is something like, you know, I think people are still really hurting from the pandemic. And I think we haven't done as good a job at getting out the message of the good things that are happening in the economy

right now. We've got low unemployment. We've got steady growth. And I also don't think that we have, we have communicated all of the ways in which we have set. the economy up for growth going forward. And I am so excited to build on that and let me tell you why. Like, why doesn't she give what seems like the obvious boilerplate banal boring deflection answer that any politician should be able to deliver if you wake them up at three in the morning after a legendary bender in Vegas? Like, why can't she do that?

The actual answer that she gave there was, I think, a perfect distillation of the Republican-Democrat divide right now, which was basically the expert. think that my economic plans are better was her response to why Americans don't view her. She's like, well, yeah, but if you actually talk to Goldman Sachs and I think Moody's was who she cited, that's, that's it right there. Don't forget, don't forget the 16 Nobel Prize winners. Yes, correct. Correct. She's running for, she's, think she's running for election in the Harvard faculty lounge.

And she's winning that election, but like, there's not that many of them. This gets back to, Megan, your point on why they seemed unprepared for Brett Baer's questions. And I've said this many, many times before. And this is really pre-2016 or pre-2020 thinking, let's call it, which is Republican comms and campaign operatives always used to speak fluent liberal because they came up through liberal institutions. And Democratic campaign operatives did not speak fluent conservative. they never experienced conservatives in their lives or conservative thoughts or arguments and they certainly weren't watching Fox News

and so they were always at a disadvantage I thought prepping their principles for any type of conservative conversation because they couldn't murder board it. And so I think a lot of that obviously still shows on the left. I just think it now shows on the right because conservative Republican operatives

no longer come up through liberal institutions or if they do, they intentionally lock themselves in closets and stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la i don't have to listen to you megan i do have one question before i leave you though which is can you put on your uh lady pundit hat for a second as a woman watching the interview between harris and bear i felt like bear interrupted harris a lot more than he did when he was interviewing donald trump that he was a lot more deferential interviewing Trump and respectful interviewing Trump.

He seemed to personally respect Trump in just the way he phrased things. And I think part of it, like, it did come off a little gendery to me. I am going to disagree on that. Yeah, good. Because I think if you watch a mainstream media interview of Trump and you compare it to the tongue bath

that Harris is going to get, right? That's just the reality of partisan media these days. It was partisan, not gender. I think it was partisan. I think it was he was playing to his audience and had that been Joe Biden, had it been Pete Buttigieg, had it been Josh Shapiro, had it been anyone else sitting in that seat who was running for president of the United States, they would have gotten the same treatment. I do think, though, that it reads differently because it's gender, right? I think there is a fundamental thing where we don't like to see men getting super aggressive on women. that, you know, there are real gender disadvantages of running for office and doing many things because if you are aggressive, you are perceived differently from a man, and it's a really hard tightrope to walk often. But I think that there are also advantages.

And one of them is that if your male interviewer starts getting super aggressive, people just get a little like, why are you just attacking that woman? And so I think, you know, and that is, I guess, the argument for it, right? You do Brett Baer rather than Harris Faulkner or someone else. You do, you ask for a male interviewer so that the clips will play and you can enrage your audience. And I think the problem with that, though, is that she didn't generate any good moments of handling that well. And that's what you need for a clip to go viral is where you are like actually saying something that your audience. audience is going to want to hear.

What about her moment when Bears asking her about Trump's comments on the enemies within? And she says, that is not the clip. You're playing only the part of the clip where he's getting to respond to the outrageous thing he said. You didn't play the clip where he actually said the outrageous thing. And Brett kind of like flim flams around. And then she's like, nope, you didn't play it.

I thought that was pretty good. It's not that it's not good. It's way too inside baseball. Right. And look, this is my theory of politics, which is any. where you were trying to get a movable voter at this point in the election, which is someone who's not paying a ton of attention to politics, right? The minute, it's, you know, it's like Democrats just love process stuff. And I actually think this is why I am voting on didn't steal

the election, right? Didn't try to steal the election, I should say. But it just seems empirically obvious to me that most people are not going to dive into the deep weeds of your statistical arguments about why there weren't vote anomalies or any of the rest of it. Once you're making a process argument, you're losing. And I think this is similar. Once you are like trying to adjudicate between different clips of Trump talking about this, like you've already gone one level beyond anything that is going to help you on social media. It's too complicated. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important.

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10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So, Declan, want to broaden this out here. There has been a palpable vibe shift in the pundit world. And it goes something like this. Harris takes over the nomination from Biden and OMG, Harris, her approval ratings shoot up, the poll number shift. This looks really good for Harris. this is Harris is to lose now.

Let's see if she can hold on to it. I mean, it's a tight race, obviously, yada, yada. Oh, she's losing some altitude. She's losing some altitude. Trump keeps holding on, but he's got a 47% ceiling. Oh, maybe his ceiling isn't exactly 47%. And then in the last week, pretty abruptly, it's this race is over. Trump has won.

The real, like, question is whether it's an electoral college landslide, i.e. he wins Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and maybe even Wisconsin? Maybe closely in all of those, but he wins all of them. Or he just wins Pennsylvania,

North Carolina, and Georgia, and he just wins. What's with the vibes shift among the reporting class? Is it actually based on something real, or is it group think? Explain everyone, Declan. we have the attention span of like a little kitten and telling the same story for more than

a week at a time gets boring and I think particularly if the same story is it's a coin flip and either person can win and we are no more able to predict it than you are our listener and viewer the past two election cycles what 80,000 boats in 2016 and 180,000 boats in three States in 2020. There's no real world in which anything that we're doing now is, and please don't turn off the podcast, this is valuable use of your time and continue to support your local news outlets. But we're kind of in the dead zone at this point where the fundamentals have happened, barring some sort of real, real dramatic October surprise, which, again, could very well happen. We are 19 days away out at this point, that it is kind of just a, you know, what are the people

who are not paying attention to any of this stuff going to decide to do. And it's, I did think that because Harris, you know, we only had this 90-day campaign, that it could be some sort of, all right, we can, we can sustain, you know, one, one narrative for 90 days. But, but. But, but, But I think people kind of got bored of that thing and we're just going to kind of, this will flip three or four more times before November and we could ask the same question next week. But, Sarah, I did have one question for you. We, I think it was either July or early August, we were talking. And you said something along the lines of if I were the Harris campaign,

I would try to make it to November without doing a single interview and see how long you could make it. Do you still think that would have been the best approach or what kind of shifted their calculus? They did make it about three weeks, four weeks from that point. Yeah, I think they did the worst of all possibilities. If you're going to cave, it was better to cave earlier. The last thing you want to do is have your candidate out for the first time giving hard interviews right when people are voting.

You want to do that where the gaffs don't matter. You still have lots of time left. It's what primaries are really all about in some sense. So either you got to stick with the strategy, come what may, or you got to decide ahead of time, you know what, we could try this strategy, but chances are we're going to cave. I think that a few things happen here.

One, I'm sure that they did say, if we do this strategy, we have to stick with it. And someone said, okay, but we can't cave. The problem, I think, is, A, you have a new staff with a new principle. So, yeah, she had some people who'd been, with her, but not really and not in these circumstances. Generally, you know whether you're a candidate, someone who's going to revisit decisions or not.

And maybe in this case, they didn't really have that type of deep knowledge of their candidate because they hadn't gone through a primary with her. You know, when you're down, all of the options look better than status quo. And so if that vibe shift that we're talking about, they sense to, and I will tell you, I think some of the vibe shift came

because folks are, reading into what the Harris campaign was doing. And like, I remember the Friday before election day in 2016, Hillary Clinton went to Michigan. And I said, Rutt Row, the most valuable thing you have in the last, well, maybe the whole time you're in a campaign, but certainly in the last few weeks of a campaign is your candidate's time. You're not trying to raise money anymore. It's just their time at that point. And so if you're taking your candidate's time to go to a state that we all think is a dead lock for that candidate, it means internally they have such bad polling. Not only did I say it probably doesn't even show that she's up by one or two points, it might show that

she's down. And that that, because if we're up by one or two points, you'd be like, well, that's just sort of a weird poll. But if you're consistently showing that it's tied or she's down, you're going to send her to Michigan. So similarly, at the point that you see them changing strategies, doing this media blitz, going to states like Michigan, and there's, you know, there's a chance that you just read a lot into that, which is they think they're losing this race if it were held today. And let's just say, Michigan, this time looks a lot like 2016. If you assume that these states kind of rise and fall together and that Pennsylvania is the like middle one, so it's like a tug-of-war game

and whoever gets Pennsylvania across their side wins but all these other states are stacked up behind Pennsylvania on either side. So if she's fighting over Michigan, Pennsylvania's already gone by that tug-of-war metaphor. And same, by the way, with Trump and like a state like, you know, North Carolina, let's say, or probably even Georgia. He's going to win those states before he wins a state like Pennsylvania. But

when the Harris campaign made such, I think, an abrupt strategic change, everyone was like, Rett Row, she's losing. Boy, it's really a pity that Pennsylvania doesn't have a popular Democratic governor who could have been chosen as his VP. It's just, I mean, just think of the alternative universe in which that had been an available choice to the Harris campaign. That was probably like, Harris had a lot of moments where she would, Bayer would ask her a question or he'd play a clip and she'd kind of like,

look like Matthew McConaughey and Interstellar banging on the window how could you be saying this thing in 2019? No, no, don't give transgender's text but the one in particular when he asked you said all this stuff in 2019 do you still support it and she's like I think her answer was I followed the law

and I didn't do it as vice president and then he goes then why did you pick Tim Walls who did all of these things in Minnesota, and she was like, he did? When it comes to immigration, you supported allowing immigrants in the country illegally to apply for driver's license to qualify for free tuition at universities, to be enrolled in free health care. Do you still support those things? Listen, that was five years ago, and I'm very clear that I will follow the law.

I have made that statement over and over again, and as vice president of the United States, that's exactly what I've done, not to mention before. If that's the case, you chose a running mate, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, who signed those very things into state law. So do you support that? We are very clear, and I am very clear, as is Tim Walz, that we must support and enforce federal law. She didn't say that, but that was what her face, and that's what happens when you vet for a week and a half. That, I just want to say, that follow the law thing was the weird. He asked her what she would do, and she was like, I will follow the law. It's like, you are going to be trying to make the laws. Could you tell us what they will be? I mean, like, I think that one of the big problems with the media strategy that you outlined, Sarah, is that voters don't necessarily need believe everything you say, but they do want to have like a mental model of who you are and how you're going to make decisions. And Trump has a people have a really good mental model of Trump. They don't know what the decision.

will be. I think that is part of having a good mental model of Trump. Could be anything. But they kind of know, like, who he likes, who he doesn't like, how he thinks. And they don't know that about Harris. And Harris deliberately denied them the opportunity to find out. And I understand the reason she did that. But I think that at the moment, it seems like that strategy has failed her. And I will say, I always thought that strategy was going to fail her. So just two quick points. One, I mean, I agree with Declan, that some of this just has to do with the fact that you got to, got to come up with a new storyline on a fresh week, right? And there's some of that.

But also, I think legitimately, like, you can follow the polls too much in all of this, but it looked like she was making incremental, sometimes statistically, utterly irrelevant, momentum, positive momentum, right? It was like another poll comes out, and she's 0.5 ahead where she was in the last one. And people could overread that in thinking that it was more momentum than it really was, but at least it wasn't momentum in the other direction. And then all of a sudden, it looked in the polls like she was stalling, and this coincided with a change.

And who knows what they're leaking, you know, what people are hearing on the scenes about her polling, but it coincided with a change in her media strategy. And people are like, holy crap, if we're seeing this stalling in the public polls, imagine what they're seeing in their own polls. That's why she's doing this media strategy. And then they invested more importance in the media strategy

than it should have had because their media strategy from the beginning put, and Sarah, you've made this point before. It's like if you do 100 interviews, one bad interview just gets averaged out into the interview average. If you wait until 19 days, 20 days to go before the election

to give your first hostile interview, I mean, people cover it and pay attention to it. I've done, I did post-interview analysis on CNN last night and prime time and again this morning because CNN is covering this, interview like it was essentially a mini debate. And that is not a sign of that the strategy has worked. But I do think I appreciate that I'm more of a feminist ally of Kamala Harris than Megan here is self-hating. Always have that. I do think that it's those right brain libertarian

feminists. They're just so sui generis. But no, I think one of the things that interview proved was that she's actually better, that aggressive interviews are better for her than softball interviews. Her worst statements are when the interviewer is trying to help, which in turn, it amplifies another headwind for her, which is the idea that the establishment is just trying to like, you know,

anoint her and sneak her into the office, and then they see that, you know, she gets these incredibly softball interviews from people, and then she gets bad answers. and if she had done more hostile interviews earlier, she'd be better practiced at it. But also, she's actually better when she's angry, when you get the little angry chick prosecutor out of her,

that's more compelling than the successories poster copywriter. It's also, it's easier to explain giving a bad answer in a hostile interview than it is giving a bad answer when the moderator or the interviewer is leading the horse to water and you just refuse to drink. All right. So let's turn the tables here on Trump for just a few minutes. Donald Trump has said that the greatest threat to America is the enemy within.

And this, we've already referenced it. It was brought up in Harris's interview. He has doubled down it in some sense, softened it in another sense. Even like, yeah, look, these people are, you know, doing lawfare. You know, they ruined the first two years of my presidency. So, yes, they are a threat to America. But Declan, they've also meant, he's also mentioned using the military.

Now again, you can say like, well, in context, it sounded like he meant against violent protests that have the capacity to, you know, destroy businesses and hurt people, that basically he's saying he would have called out the military in the summer of 2020, potentially. I checked to his president in the summer of 2020, by the

way. So that was interesting. It wasn't. You want to share with the class? Yeah, no, it was Donald Trump if you were wondering. And yet, as we've talked about with this vibe shift, nobody seems to care very much. And what I find very interesting, of course, is that an interview after interview with, you know, man on the street voters, they say Trump is a man of his word. And they use that to draw contrast for Harris. In particular, I've seen this comment now come from multiple black male voters who people are interviewing, Trump does what he says. And I think to myself, well, wait a second,

isn't part of this that Trump doesn't do what he says, and that's why it's okay that he says crazy stuff sometimes? Because if it's always Trump does what he says, like, well, that should be a little scarier for people. So, Jonah, since you were Harris's feminist ally, let's turn to the man, you know, campaign. This is a campaign by men and four men.

Uh, by men. Susie Wiles erasure. Yeah, I mean, Donald Trump seems to be doing quite well with male voters. Yeah. So is the question about the men thing or the enemy within stuff? Both. I mean, the enemy within stuff seems to be helping him with male voters. I don't mean that specifically, but the overall sense of like, we're going to be tough.

Part of being tough is, you know, dealing with the bad guys over there. It's also dealing with the bad guys here. Screw them all. Yeah. Like, I think the advantage that Trump has in all of this is confidence and authenticity. Now, I think he's a confident whack job and an authentic jackass most of the time. But people forgive him for that because he's like a celebrity. And so I get so, like, whatever criticism.

Let's stipulate and add 10% to all the criticisms we have, including Megan's viciously anti-woman attacks on Kamala Harris. Let's just credit all of them. If you take the standards that generate those criticisms and you apply them to interviews that Donald Trump routinely gives, evasive answers, can you believe Kamala was evasive or that she didn't know something? It's not even, it's, it, we need a better word than double standard, right? It's just simply a Trump standard and then other standards in a galaxy far, far away.

But I think that for a lot of people who just see them through the prism of celebrity stuff, the authenticity and the confidence thing just carries an enormous amount of weight for them. And, you know, it's the turn the election on mute and see, you know, which one is more reassuring kind of thing. And I find it, I mean, I think his comments about, about the enemy within are appalling and indefensible. And the rush to splice sentences, to parse sentences, to take out the finest shammie cloth, the polished turds on this stuff leaves me completely cold. he gives this impression that's very deliberate that he is going to

play smacky face with American citizens, put people in jail, use the armed forces to show what a manly man he is. And then when called on it, everyone retreats to the Bailey and says, no, no, no, he just meant if Antifa

tries to do something, you have to respond to it. It's the same thing with tariff stuff. I mean, it is infuriating. I mean, I'm surprised, you know, Megan isn't cutting herself on the tariff stuff because, like... How do you know I'm not, Jonah? Fair, fair. He wants super tariffs on everything at all times in every single way. And across-the-board tariffs on this and across-the-board tariffs is the greatest word in the English language.

Tariffs, it's not just a dessert topping. It's a floor wax. I mean, the whole thing, right? And then you ask his defenders, yes, Steve Moore, I saw him on TV the other night. Oh, this is just about leverage. This is about, you know, strategically putting pressure on China. And it's like, he's never said anything remotely like that. It's just people asserting it as a way to clean up behind the elephant.

And the amount of motivated reasoning in all of this makes it really hard to do normal punditry about Trump. So the ABC News interview that J.D. Vance did last week, I think was a really great distillation of this. In particular, the exchange. I think it was Martha Raditz and Vance, about this town in Aurora, Colorado, and Venezuelan gangs. Trump has been saying for months, Venezuelan gangs took over this entire city and they're running it and ravaging it

and Raddett's Asked Vance. That's not actually happening. It's limited to a handful of buildings, something like that. And Vance's turd polishing is, did you hear yourself, Martha? You just said they, Venezuelan gangs took over a couple of buildings in America. and you're nitpicking Trump's words to describe it.

And I think that's kind of a good Roershock test of the people who like Trump know that he's exaggerating, using hyperbole to make somewhat of a valid point. And they choose to listen to the valid point rather than the rhetoric. And the people who don't like Trump focus on the rhetoric and ignore the valid point. And like you could see Vance come on a Sunday show this week. and be like, well, what he meant by the enemy within was actually something like a house divided against itself cannot stand.

And, you know, that's a great Republican mantra of blah, blah, blah. And it just is a matter of what you choose to focus on. TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more

or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Megan, I want to run a Jonah idea by you. Well, actually, let's call it a joint Jonah Sarah production. Ooh, excitement. Laser, space, space, laser. is Lansing Volcanoes? It's close. So Jonah has this best case scenario idea, and I want to build on it.

And it goes something like this. For a lot of Republicans who are going to vote for Trump, they're considering the best case scenario under Trump and Harris. And under the best case scenario, if you're a conservative, if you're a longtime Republican, Trump. Trump's best case scenario is better than Harris's. best case scenario by a lot. But if you're a long-time conservative or a long-time Republican who's not going to vote for Trump, you're looking at worst-case scenarios. And the

worst-case scenario for Trump is worse than the worst-case scenario for Harris. And you're, you know, you have to use your own math and all of this and you're, you know, judging how likely the worst-case scenario is versus how likely the best-case scenario is. So there's a all of that in there. And the median scenario, I think, for Harris is pretty easily discernible and guessable. The median case, the most likely case for Trump, I think is much harder to guess, actually. What do you think of this best case, worst case voter prediction system? I think for people like us, that is 100% right. And I think that that is a really smart way that I had not thought about before to divide the people who are mad at me because I am voting

for Harris from the people who are mad at me because I'm not just spending all of my time talking about how Harris is the best future president ever in American history. And like it's just going to be lollipops and trips to Disneyland for everyone as soon as she's elected, is that, like, yes, my fear about Trump is the worst case scenario. My fear about Trump is the downside. But look, it is also true that I think I know I am going to dislike Harris's policies. That is baked in, right? I am voting for Harris despite the fact that I am then going to spend the next four years

complaining about virtually everything she does because we have deep policy disagreements. And I think a lot of Republicans who are just astonished that I could feel this way. And I will also say they are worried about some worst case scenarios on the Harris side that I'm not. Right. I don't actually think there's going to be a sweep of the universities and no one like me will ever be able to speak again. Right. But I kind of understand how they got there. But I think from ordinary voters, it's a little less complicated, right?

especially for the people who are now deciding. I think for a lot of voters on both sides, this is team. This is just like, I like, these are my people. I vote for my people. I am loyal to my people. Only bad people are disloyal to their people. And if you are being disloyaled, if you are a people who is being disloyal to my people, you are a bad people.

And on the other hand, right, they are voting on, well, the economy was better under Trump. And I've seen a lot of, you know, in focus groups and so forth, I've seen swing voters say stuff like this. I see it all the time in interviews. I was better off under Trump. And I think, look, I could go out to those people, give them a seminar on how the president doesn't really control the economy and the pandemic kind of sucked and that wasn't really anyone's fault. But that's, they're not going to sit still for it. They're doing like really, really blunt heuristics. And I think the two important blunt heuristics that Harris has to contend with are, number one, the economy was better for me under Trump.

And I think, like, look, total factor productivity peaked in 2019. Very exciting news for anyone who knows what that is, right? I don't think voters know that, but they did know what that felt like. And on the other hand, I think they are really worried. They are really worried, actually, about the people like Harris having too much power in liberal-leaning institutions and using that power in ways that are not transparent, not accountable, opaque and overbearing.

And then I think for people on the other side, you know, that that worst case scenario, the broad heuristic is like Trump, Trump seems like he's crazy, right? Like he, I mean, I do think that the fact that Trump is crazy matters, and I think that if he didn't do that stuff, he would be trouncing Harris. And similarly, I think that if Harris were better at answering questions,

better at taking the fight, better at talking about anything other than like Trump as a fascist, that is not a winning message. No one cares about that who is not already voting for you. If she were better at talking about other stuff and not just going off into these vague reveries about how much she loves America, then she would be trouncing Trump handling. But we have kind of two bad candidates. And so these heuristics are like flipping back and forth wildly. People, they're actually, it's hard to know how that all cashes out as an election. Jonah, I want to try another broad strokes situation with you.

Well, we look back on 2024 and say, this was really easy. You know, we can talk about the individual candidates or this week or this interview or he said this. But by and large, this campaign, when we look back on it, is going to be seen as the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the American people do not like the direction of the country. They don't like where the economy is. The masculine party nominated a strong man that, as you said, is sounds confident, is confident, blah, blah, blah. And the more feminine party nominated a woman that fed into their perceived weaknesses as the more feminine party. And by the way, here I'm not using literal male versus female.

I'm using the sort of long-term, you know, Democrats are the mommy party. and Republicans are the Daddy Party stuff, and that this is slightly more nuanced than the country is too sexist to elect a woman. Because I think if the masculine party nominated a woman, that would be fine, because it's not feeding into the narrative that already exists.

And it'd be a different type of woman, right? I mean, it would be a different. That's right. The cultural cues would just be different. Yeah. And so we'll look back on this and say it was never going to turn out otherwise. if Trump wins.

And in fact, Harris winning would be the like, wait, what? Huh. I guess Trump's just the worst candidate ever and he just always loses.

And like all this other stuff that we talk about week to week. Like once Trump wins, that narrative's already solidified. If Harris wins, that narrative's already solidified and nothing else is going to matter. Jonah.

So what I think is kind of funny is, you know, there's this, there's this K Street slogan for like a certain breed of consultant like they call them rainmakers and the slogan is

the first rule is when it rains dance so that you can take credit for the rain right and the funny thing about this election if it turns out to be as tied as it looks right which it could be I mean we could have done an hour another hour about bad polling

is it bad poll all that kind of stuff or the thousand things we could have done if the election ends and is really tight every interest group on the left and the right every constituency on the left and the right is going to say see this proves you should have paid more attention to us the arab and muslim crowd michigan and say see you lost michigan because of us the free traders are going to say see all i talk about protectionism you lost because you know everyone is going to take credit or assign blame because when an election

boils down to a few thousand votes in a handful of states all those arguments are superficially plausible right i mean people blame trump for not if he loses because he didn't have a ground game or whatever it'd be a thousand things this this cuban american guy from this telemundo uh town hall thing that we didn't really talk about for all i know they're already sewing his uniform to make him the Latino Joe the plumber of the Harris campaign, and we could say that he won the election for Harris. It's just, when it's that tight, every factor matters so much, or at least you can claim it. That said, if Trump wins, I think people, I think the story will be even easier and I have less to do with this masculine, you know, the Luca Brazzi party versus, you know,

the Lillian Pulitzer Party or whatever. It'll have more to do with like, wow, there was really high inflation and it turns out people forgot inflation sucks and pisses off everybody and um and that's it right i mean i think that that story you know kind of works and you could do a second layer of analysis is that both parties picked sufficiently unpopular candidates that they had a chance to lose to their opponent for the third time in the friggin row um and i think everybody would agree that if you had a better Democratic candidate, the Democrats would win. And if you had a better Republican candidate, the Republicans would win. Because all of this analysis is possible when you have really tight, close elections. So much of what's going on now does not fit past trends. Because you've

never, we haven't had a former president running in this way. Social media, all these new factors make a lot of the rules of thumb meaningless. All right. We're going to do a little not worth your time. question mark. And this was sent to us by dear friend Toby Stock. Noah Smith wrote a little substack post called Against Steel Manning. It's usually not a good idea to try to make arguments look stronger than they really are. And I'll just give you a few of his thoughts here. Basically, a critic of an idea is inherently an unreliable guide to the best version of an idea. Personally, I don't think mass deportation is a good policy. I've considered it. I won't say it has zero appealed me, law and order is important.

I know it's popular, but overall, I just think it's a bad idea. It wouldn't really have any economic benefits. It would be disruptive and distasteful. Some legal residents would probably get deported by accidents. And we know better, less disruptive ways to get illegal immigrants to leave the country. That's why I'm an opponent of mass deportation. So if I tried to write an argument in favor of mass deportation, and if I kept it intellectually honest, I probably wouldn't do a very good job of it.

Alternatively, there's another way you can steal in an argument you don't agree with. you can make an intellectually dishonest case in favor of it. In other words, you can act like your opponent's lawyer pleading their case to the best of your rhetorical abilities, even if deep down you think it's wrong. A third problem with steel manning is that it can distract people from thinking about real policy proposals by making them think too much about ideal policy proposals.

Fourth, all arguments ultimately rest on assumptions. Some of those assumptions are things we could test if we had the time and money. Others are things we just can't really know. I could steal man Trump's mass deportation plan by assuming that the kind of people he would deport have negative effects on American culture and getting rid of them would make us a more functional nation. I could steal a man Trump's promise for a huge tax cut by assuming that interest rates will

fall back to zero without any negative consequences, therefore allowing us to finance the vast amounts of new debt his tax cuts would release. So, Declan, I wanted to open this up to you. Is steel manning worth our time? I think it depends entirely on what. the goals are of the conversation. Is it to have a more interesting discussion, then sure. I think it's definitely worth considering the alternative viewpoint a little bit more than I agree. I agree. I agree. Good point. I agree. That's not. And Sarah, I know that sometimes that when we're talking about steel manning, we're talking about your role on some of these podcasts. So, but that's one reason

to consider it. Is it to convince your ideological opponents? that you're taking them seriously? Is it a persuasive measure? Then I think Smith has a little bit more of an argument there. If it's to strengthen your own argument, I think we should all be steel manning internally, particularly people who are doing opinion writing. I mean, we do this in written stuff all the time of somebody just today

published a piece with us or a portion of a piece criticizing actually mass deportation. and the Trump plan. And I said, well, so J.D. Vance talked about this in an interview last weekend. He's said that the labor force participation rate would rise if we increase. Have you considered that perspective? And he said, oh, I hadn't considered it, but he's wrong about that. And he added a couple sentences to address that critique preemptively. I think it's better writing, better arguing if you're doing that constantly.

But even better than steel manning per se is just to talk to the people who, hold these beliefs. I mean, if you're listening on the Dispatch podcast feed on Wednesday, we had Ahmed al-Khqqtib talking to Adam about his experience growing up in Gaza and approach to the Israeli-Gaza conflict, that's a much more interesting conversation than us hypothesizing or projecting what somebody in that position might think. Let's just have the conversations. Yeah, so Megan, the subline to this was it's usually not a good idea to try to make arguments look stronger than they really are. I guess part of it is they take issue with that. The point isn't to try to make the arguments look stronger. The point is to make arguments you don't agree with look as strong as they

actually are instead of as weak as you think they are because you disagree with them because you've already decided they're not good. And for me, I think I use steel manning in two respects. one, when someone is sure of what they think about an issue, I use it as a way to test their sureness, if you will, and to test their arguments. So I'm going to steal me on the other side, whether I agree with it or not, to test you. The other reason that I steal man things

is to test them out for myself, meaning I'll steal man the argument in a conversation with you when you're sure of what you believe, but I'm not sure what I believe. I'll just try it on. I'll try it on like a little suit. I mean, like, does this feel comfy? And I'll give the best arguments I can think of and be like, huh, do I believe that? Did that work? Where does that argument lead? And so Noah doesn't seem with Noah is very, very smart. And I like his writing and I always enjoy reading it. I'm not sure he knows what Steel Manning is or how to do it right. Yeah, look, I think it's, I should disclose. He was asked apparently by an editor at my paper to write this piece. So, um, to

make it for what it's worth. So I think one challenge for the mainstream media is that it's hard to steal man Trump positions because it's hard to find writers who will do a good, honest, full-throated, passionate defense of most writers are not Trump voters. And so I think that is partly why he was asked, although I should say, I have no internal knowledge of what happened there. So do not take this as like, he said, he said, an editor at the Washington Post called me up made a proposal, she wanted me to write a series of articles steel manning Donald Trump's economic policy proposals. In other words, making the strongest case I could possibly make for Trump's ideas. Her rationale, like that of many proponents of steel manning, was that if people

are going to be persuaded that Trump's ideas are bad, it will be more persuasive to first present the very strongest version of those ideas so that people know Trump's opponents are arguing in good faith and would therefore find the criticisms more persuasive. You're right, and I should have actually started with that, Megan, because that's a different context of steel manning and a different purpose of steel manning, then I think, like, I would never write an op-ed steel manning something, because that's not how I would ever think of using steel manning. I use it in conversation with someone else. He was talking specifically about his role as a pundit, and like, does he want to influence the national conversation in a certain way? But again, I think your role as a pundit,

yes, you should be steel manning arguments all the time in conversations with other people who agree with you or disagree with you. That is different than these specific ask to write basically a policy paper steal manning an argument, which is not in some conversation with others? So, again, I don't have any internal knowledge. I do not want this to be reported as, you know, Washington Post columnist explains. But I wonder if there wasn't some miscommunication there. I don't think you need, I steal man. I try to, I try to steal man, at least when I read a column. I am always trying to put forward the best possible argument for the people who disagree with me. And I do that for credibility. I do that because if I can't answer their best possible

argument, then there's something wrong with my argument. And so I don't think to steal man in a column, you necessarily need to just be like, here is my full-throated defense of a policy I completely do not support. I rather think here is the best possible argument. Okay? I have laid out the like the economist is saying

here is how I would write this if I were doing a policy paper here are all of the best arguments for it. Now here's why I don't think those arguments were. Yes. Here's what's wrong with those arguments, right? And so I do wonder if what they asked for was could you just write some

policy papers for the Trump campaign, or if what the intention was and did not get communicated clearly in some way, was, can you write this? Can you tell me what the best arguments are? And then can you discuss the drawbacks? I don't think you need to do a like, this is the worst policy ever. But like, okay, but here are some issues with that, right? And I actually think that would be a super valuable service, you know, not just because this is my employer. I actually think This is something that is really missing in mainstream spaces. And I will say, like, I don't know if anyone saw the experience of there was a guest on CNN who kind of offhandedly mentioned the Ferguson effect, the George Floyd effect, which is for those who don't know, this is the effect that basically when you get these big viral policing incidents, police tend to pull back from stopping citizens, making arrests and so forth because they are afraid of becoming the next viral incident. and also because there's often like institutional crackdown inside the department and so forth.

And then what happens is that homicide goes up. And so he mentions this is like, look, you can argue with this, but there is a very good paper by Roland Fryer from Harvard on this. Jim Comey talked about it as director of the FBI. Yeah, it seems like this is a real effect. The evidence is pretty decent. But this wasn't an argument. The guests were just like, what is that?

And then when he explained what it was, you can't know that. You can't say that. And like, this is bad. This makes, this makes the left. This makes mainstream media weaker when we don't have those good arguments out there. And so I will say, I am disappointed that Noah didn't do it. Jonah, yes, it seems to me that a great way to write any time that you're going to say, I believe thing X is the right thing, to lay up. the best arguments on the other side of why it's the wrong thing, and then say, here's why I come out the other way. You know, I think we teach persuasive writing to students sort of all wrong. I remember in junior high, it's like, lay out your best three arguments and then summarize them at the end, basically. I find an adulthood that is the worst possible way to have persuasive writing. It should actually be either lay out their best three arguments and why you come out the other way or lay out your three weakest, you know, the three biggest drawbacks to your

proposal and why those are okay. It's the, it's going back to the best case, worst case scenario. Either give their best case or your worst case and then say why it's okay. That's actually how you persuade people at best to the extent we believe in persuasion. So I think Steelman's really helpful for that. Yeah. I mean, I come down on the side that this is not worth our time because no is just wrong. And I mean, he might be right in the narrative. He might be right in the narrow context of his experience, like being asked to write to defend positions you don't hold, if that's exactly what happened, which is kind of skeptical about two, then that's weird and I don't blame him for like pushing back on that. But like as a general matter, while I appreciate

anybody who essentially, you know, shadow trolls Sarah for attacking steel manning, like I look at this, you know, you said earlier about the experience of political consultants, conservatives grew up inside liberal institutions so that they could speak, they could pass an effect, a Turing test. about liberalism in a way that liberals can't pass about conservatism. That made conservative political consultants better at dealing with politics because they actually understood

things outside of their bubble. You know, Ramesh Pnuru, 25 years ago, you know, told me, you know, look, I want to deal with the left's best arguments, not their worst ones. And he was talking about there's a certain kind of punitry that just looks for the weakest link in the chain of someone else's argument and then makes the

whole thing about that. They're so stupid because they argue this, when this, when this was like number 15 of their top arguments, right? I have enormous respect from Michael Kinsley, but he did a lot of that in his analysis. He took one statement and then logic dropped it to this blistering conclusion. I've been saying forever, the best journalism is opinion journal, good opinionism, because it's about making arguments. It's adversarial in the way a court of law is a discovery of truth by being adversarial. And this idea, like, maybe it's just my conservative eggheadery showing, but when I hear people say steel manning is bad,

I just think of Chesterden's fence, right? And like the whole point of the parable of Chesterden's fence is that there are reformers who find a fence in the woods. They have no idea why it's there. They have no idea what the Ferguson effect is. They're just freaking outraged by it. And we should get rid of this because my incredibly robust cognitive powers with no evidence and no experience and no education immediately instinctually include the fence bad so therefore we should tear it down and chesterton's whole point is maybe we should tear down the fence maybe we shouldn't but before you even think about it you should probably find out why they built the fence in the first place and that's what steel manning is properly understood is like why are these people taking this position i think is so

crazy? Well, let's think it through. The Catholic Church figured this out with the devil's advocate like 1500 years ago. You know, the Israelis have the 10th man thing, which taught them to take the zombie threat seriously in World War Z. This is not hard. You're supposed to try to understand what the people who disagree with you think and why they think it. And a very close cousin of this is, I think this is a David Frenchism, but nutpicking, where, and this is more on the news side of our operation here at the dispatch is if multiple, if Marjorie Taylor Green is making an argument and Michael McCall is making an argument, for example, and they're arguing the same thing, choose the McCall version because it's going to be more serious,

be more substantive, and give a better reflection of what the argument actually is than the conspiracy-ed-up MTG version. The same thing goes on. But it's so much less fun. Exactly. It is so much less fun than like just talking about what lunatics your opponents are. And with that, thus concludeeth another episode of the Dispatch podcast. Megan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. You know what I'm going to do.