The Press Box - How Donald Trump Won With Semafor’s David Weigel

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Hello, media consumers. Bryan closes a busy week on 'The Press Box' with Semafor’s David Weigel. They begin the show by reacting to the many reasons Donald Trump won the election (0:52). Then they discuss how Twitter is a pro-Trump app (16:22), the value of podcast appearances (19:59), whether or not this race was winnable for Kamala Harris (33:49), and more. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: David Weigel Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, humanoids. It's the Maskman David Shoemaker. It's a new era in professional wrestling, and that means a new era here at the Ringer Wrestling show. Kaz here, every Monday and Thursday hang out with me and my guys' shoes on the Masked Show. And Ben Cruz here. Come kick it with me, Cal and Brian on Tuesdays for Ringer Wrestling Worldwide, where we hit on the most interesting headlines and even react to some of Maskedmans and even your hottest takes. Don't tap out. Tap in to the Ringer Wrestling show feed now on Spotify. or wherever you get your podcasts. Worldwide. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box.

Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. I want to bring on today's guest, David Weigel. Dave has been covering presidential candidates who say, folks, since the 2008 cycle. You need to go over to Semaphore right now and subscribe to his newsletter, Americana. He came on this pod four years ago to tell us why Joe Biden won. He's here today to tell us. why Donald Trump won. Dave, welcome back to the press box. Oh, it's good to be here. And thanks for telling me who won the election. I totally forgot. I've just been doing podcasts for three days.

And my mind is mush, but my tongue is not. So we're going to have some interesting answers. I got a handful of reasons why Trump won that I want to get your thoughts on. But if you had to pick one reason for the very top of the list, what would it be? The economy and perceptions of the economy driven by the new media ecosystem and by Trump's focus on immigration is the cause of all problems. So the short answer would be the economy, and I just think it needs some couching because it's very easy to imagine a world where Donald Trump was president right now, how he would talk about this economy.

He would not be saying, oh, it still costs too much to get a house. we're on the on the verge of a great depression et cetera, et cetera. He would say, look, we broke the back of inflation and unemployment's way down and nobody thought we could do it. Get into the Trump character

and say talking about strong men who came up to him with her tears and arise about how good the economy was. No, what happened was the economy wasn't as good as people remembered it being four years ago, which helped him a lot. I should say five years ago

because it was pretty bad four years ago. And he had a super structure for discussing this of Democrats made this worse on purpose because they led in a bunch of immigrants and I'm going to kick out the immigrants. And what Trump did is not dissimilar from what right-wing populist parties do across the world. And they do that across the world, often with a diverse coalition of voters. They just say there is a problem. It could be better. You're not getting the benefits that you need. You're not getting ahead like you need.

And if we shrink the number of people in the country illegally, you're going to get it. You were joking on Twitter that Trump ran as president low prices. Yeah. What was the Democrats' best answer to what he was talking about in terms of inflation? The best answer. So the answer that they came up with was there are tools that the president can use to fight price gouging and Kamala Harris would use them. The frustration from Democrats who thought that didn't work was, and this is the thing. you lose election, no, nothing worked, is that she didn't explain well enough what the administration was doing already.

There was a little bit of a disconnect where, and this is part, when I talk about the media ecosystem, I don't want to get too meta, even though this is press box, I don't know how many we can get. But just the things that happen in a given day are not the things that get covered. And to get them, form them into a narrative, a party needs to spend a lot of time doing that and convince the media to do it. So you hear a lot about flight cancellations. You don't hear as much about people to judge transportation policies that are getting your refunded on new cancellations. You hear a lot about Lena Kahn's name. I probably had the Wall Street Journal once her fired.

Do you hear about the things that she delivers that Biden regulations are delivering for people? You might hear that the Supreme, that a court in Texas, it's always a court in Texas, in the Northern District of Texas and Amarillo that stopped a Biden rule that, on that would that would raise wages from going into effect. And you never saw the rule. So they had a bunch of policies that were for various reasons, stimied or not covered very well. And what Harris would do is say,

I've got one that the president can act on right away. She dealt with a little bit of backlash in two levels. One from more business friendly Democrats saying, I don't like it when the government intervenes to control prices. You saw Republicans immediately saying she wants socialist, communist price controls, yada yada and she dealt with people saying why didn't you do that already uh but that that was sort of the the story of the harris campaign is she came up with answers for things but they were not very convincing to the people who they they needed to convince they're just and trump who has never

had a better media environment just there were never as many conservative podcasts as many listeners to conservative podcasts. The media still, but I should say, I really want to be distinct. The cable news, normal political media, still covers everything Trump says and ask why it's working. They did not break through on that.

They did not have the story to tell about how they actually are trying to make things cheaper for people and they got some wins. All right, that's reason number one and one A and one B and one C. Reason number two, I want to hit you with. The marriage of Donald Trump, the eternally off-scrower. candidate with the Susie Wiles' Trump campaign machine.

How'd you see that play out? Yeah, this was, I think objectively, the best run Trump campaign because it was able to create a lot of news cycles and respond quickly to Democrats in a way that 16 Trump did not and that 20, despite the power of the White House. What advantage that in non-income countries you don't need to answer for literally anything happening under power. that they still were a little more reactive to events and unable to get their messaging out. Every president now, this is sort of the paradox of the presidency, is that you have an immense

regal resources at a press corps that follows you around the country, and you can bring that press corps to a place and talk in that place about the money that you redirected to help build this factory, and it might not make news at all, whereas a campaign makes news in an easier way. I'm not trying to isolate myself from this. And in political coverage, I just see what do people click on? What do they not click on? What do they react to? What do they have an immediate take on?

They don't really have a take on. The president cut a ribbon today. They do have a take on. You won't believe what he just said. And so that whole dynamic was extremely helpful to Trump. And Susie Wiles having this sort of campaign operation that no matter what Trump was saying on the stump, which I think was, we can. could argue was helpful to him, right, with certain voters.

Yeah. Coming back and here is your commercial about immigration. Here's your commercial about the economy. Here's your commercial about Kamala Harris is Joe Biden's vice president, a message Trump had struggled to drive in the one debate they had together. Yes. And the debate was the best moment of the Harris campaign. They wanted a second debate for that reason, because the idea that Kamala Harris was an idiot who

couldn't defend herself and couldn't explain the administration positions that was destroyed in that debate. And the idea that Trump had very coherent plans and he was going to be stable and that was heard by that debate too. Getting back to part of the Susie Wiles thing, the campaign was good at changing the storyline and focusing on things that Democrats didn't want to focus on. It was rarely on defense about what it didn't want to focus on, except in that debate where Trump just kept going down rabbit holes and getting annoyed by things Harris was saying.

So for example, when they put tens of millions from the Trump campaign, tens of millions from Senate campaigns, when they put on these ads saying that Kamala is for them, Trump is for you, the Susie Wiles coherent campaign storyline was Democrats are obsessed with giving things to trans people to immigrants and they don't care about you at all. And the overall story here, again, just back up and what is somebody paying attention to if they're only dipping in and out. It is Democrats want to give money to Ukraine. They want to spend money on bombs for Israel. They want to spend money on surgeries for prisoners.

They want to spend money on immigrants. This heuristic that Republicans used a lot of, and this was years of this, ever since Big Greg Abbott in Texas started moving migrants to New York and Chicago, the storyline there was the city can't afford. benefits for you because they're spending all the benefits on these migrants. And they could do that very coherently in the campaign. Trump was often less coherent than that in a debate. And Harris is pretty good at defending that in a debate, but there only was one debate. You touched on reason number three that was on my list there, something you wrote about in early October, anti-trans commercials, which you argued did not break through for Republicans in previous cycles.

Why did they break through this time? Well, there's an old Stephen Sondheim line. I think he used it in multiple interviews because I've seen it twice, where he says he was told that West Side Story, which Leonard Bernstein wrote the music for, and he wrote the lyrics, didn't have any hummable melodies. And then it was adapted to a movie and there was a huge marketing campaign behind it. And all of a sudden, it had humble melodies. Like it turns out there's a reason people, some things go viral because they go viral

tautologically. Some things get popular because you spend a lot of money making them popular. And this is what happened, I would say, without super over simplifying on trans issues. Republicans had been trying for, let's start the clock in 2019, trying to convince voters that there is a threat to not just norms, but the safety of women, the health of your children, because of the idea of gender fluidity and that gender is separate from sex. This will manifest in muscular men playing women's sports and wrecking them. This will manifest in male prisoners going into females' prisons and committing sexual assault. I want to go through the litany.

But if you want to go through the litany, just log on to YouTube and watch any podcaster, any conservative podcaster because there's usually 5,000 episodes about this. And so they tried that first in Kentucky where Andy Bashir won the race for governor despite those ads. He got reelected in 2023 despite those ads. They tried this in a bunch of campaigns and it just did not click. And when Trump was president, he rolled back pro-trans initiatives by Joe Biden, including defining gender separate from sex in the federal code, trans people in the military, et cetera. And those got a backlash because when Trump was president and taking things away from people. A lot of people's reactions. I don't like this Trump guy. Why is he picking on people?

Out of power. They found more, more, I'd say, fertile soil for that argument. And also, I mentioned these podcasts, not to be glib about them, but because this, again, this media ecosystem change. What happens in 2002? Elon Musk buys Twitter. Why does he buy it? Well, lots of reasons. One of them is that the Babylon, if you want to just say, tell the story with a lead. The Babylon B, this right-wayne parody site, makes this joke about Rachel Levine, who's a trans woman

appointed at HHS by Joe Biden in a very high-profile role. And Twitter's policy is that you can't be transphobic, you can't be bigoted, that account is suspended until they get rid of that joke. Elon doesn't like that. Elon

Musk has a very different view, which he has expressed. And the this is something that came up when I talked to conservatives I'd say a year, but really in October, like you say, that changed things. Once you change the flow of information and say that a thing that was censored before is no longer censored,

people hear more about it. I want to get too dovetailed often to me listening to conservative media and how much this comes up. But this really does change things. When this goes from a topic that it seems a little bit offensive to some people. Why are you picking on trans people? It's kind of mean to do that. Changing the

rules of the media that on the town square of Twitter, later X, really had an impact. And Trump talked a lot about it. Trump would say things. He'd make fun of Leah Thomas, the UPenn Swimmer, who won

a competition that really years later, this is driving a lot of these politics. He talked about the Olympic boxing situation. I should point out, in Algeria, not an American, not even boxing an American. But he would seize on these stories in this environment where you can't be told, that's offensive, don't do it.

And all that, I think, frauds the waters for these advertising, these advertising campaigns. Because Democrats might say, well, Kamala Harris, as a California Attorney General, was defending the, California policy, at this point, 10 years old of transgender prisoners. If a prisoner says they need gender surgery, the state will pay for it, partly because they'd be moved to a women's prison. She's on record saying that.

She's on video. Is that the problem? Republicans definitely get momentum from that, but they expand this. And they're running in these ads in Senate races that point out that Democrats co-sponsored the Equality Act. The Equality Act is the priority of LGBT groups that would, in the federal law, define gender identity as separate from sex, among other things. It started as a gay rights bill, and now it's an LGBT rights bill.

And what the ads they run say is that Democrats want sex changes for children. Democrats want boys and girls' sports. Here's the proof. They support this act. And so they used it up and down the ballot. Now, looking at the results, Sherrod Brown loses narrowly in Ohio. not that narrowly, but runs ahead of Harris. And he was hit by that.

Colin Allred in Texas, Augusta, runs ahead of Harris. He's hit by that. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, she wins narrowly. But this was an issue in her campaign. I was there asking her about it. And what really changed was that Republicans felt brazen in talking about this. Six years ago, because Tammy Baldwin's the only gay member of the Senate, six years ago, they did not run ads about LGBT issues.

They did not point out that she was gay. In this campaign, they did. They accused her favoring, again, sex changes for minors. I'm just going to repeat the verbiage in the ad. But also, a lot of their ads, millions of dollars of ads, were attacking her girlfriend. And the ads called her girlfriend because her partner is in finance. And it was, I don't want to get,

that's an interesting story that I probably don't want to get too much into. I just think the overall narrative here is that once the media broke down a bit and nobody could say you're not allowed to talk like this about some people, then Republicans rushed into that gap and we're much more confident in running anti-trans advertising. All right. Let's get into a couple of the meta media things you mentioned there. And this can be reason number four. Musk buys Twitter. Elon Musk did a lot of things for Donald Trump in this campaign from giving money to a super PAC to appearing on the stump to maybe doing a GEOC. a GOTV thing that either worked or didn't work.

What would you say the value to Twitter being a pro-Trump app was in this campaign? Oh, I think incalculable. Because who was on Twitter? Lots of people. Everyone in the media, basically. Unless you've made a kind of monk-like decision not to be on it, you're probably on it. You're probably paying attention to it. You're following election Twitter accounts, for example, election night, but also if you're

covering a campaign, you're seeing stuff they put out on Twitter first. The way that the information pipeline works now is 10 years ago, you might say, I have a question for this campaign, I need to call the spokesman. And they often now, not everything, the stuff that you just need a yes or no answer to, they often just have tweeted it out. So you need to be on this. And I think it does help Republicans across the board that the media is seeing Twitter all the time. They're seeing right-wing content. They're seeing left-wing content usually through the prism of right winger's making fun of it. Lips of TikTok exists.

And Lips of TikTok's another account that I think would have had problems under an old Twitter regime. It doesn't under the Elon regime because a lot of what it does is say, look at this person with blue hair, they're a freak, let's make fun of them. And that just does a fish know what water is? Is the fish recognized that it's swimming in something? I think it's important for the media to recognize we are swimming in in Twitter, in the Black X company, as it is now.

So, yes, it affects a lot of things. And I don't think people credibly say anymore, it's not real life. Oh, it's not. There's stuff that trends on there that is not actually that relevant. But even the way that Harris's message gets through to the press, I think is changed by Twitter. And the point I'll make, which I was making in some pieces at the end of the election, is that the paid messaging, following paid messaging for a campaign is not that hard, but you need to watch a lot of ads, you need to be in touch with the campaigns,

you need to see what they're buying. It helps if you're in a swing state because you're watching TV and you see what they're running all the time. And Harris's paid media was very economy focused. The conversation on social media was often about other stuff. Or the conversation on the things she was asked about by reporters were often responding to things that were going viral online. I was thinking for an example of this I'll give.

that the Harris campaign was not saying Donald Trump is a fascist. However, people on Twitter were Bob Woodward's reporting on Mark Millie, that got around a lot. She's asked about on CNN. She does give a statement at the vice presidential residence about how this is dangerous, and she's been talking about how Trump's former aides are dangerous. But the Harris campaign relatively did not spend as much time talking about Trump and his former aides as it did economic issues. It's paid media was economics.

But it is easier to look at Twitter and see what people are discussing. And Twitter was a much more focused on those sort of hot issues that lots of people have opinions on that Republicans want to yell about and Democrats want to yell about, not what is her economic plan. And I don't think that was a definitive factor for her. It just made it much tougher to message as a normal Democrat. All right. Reason number five, Donald Trump won.

You mentioned the podcast strategy. This is allegedly masterminded, according to Tim Alberta, by an aide named Alex Brusowitz. Late in the campaign, Trump stops going, for the most part, into mainstream media outlets. He starts going on podcasts. You pointed out that podcasts don't have the Marquess of Queensberry rules that an interview on CNN would. What's the other value there?

How does that help Trump win? Well, yeah, you said it up pretty well, because, not just that, but the Trump campaign does a couple things. One, it's going on those podcasts. Two, it is having its cake and eating it where it doesn't go on mainstream media. Vance does some. Trump really doesn't. It doesn't go on mainstream media to, and it really send top surrogates on mainstream media in a way that's notable to get into the mix of the campaign. An example of this is CBS News does its quadrennial election. package of we're going to interview the presidential candidate and the candidate for vice president. We're going to put that together for both parties. They don't let Trump do it, the campaign. So CBS runs one about Harris and walls and it doesn't have a Trump one. It says on air we don't have a Trump one.

What is the next day story there? It is not Trump begged out of this interview. It's that in promoting the interview, CBS uses a clip of Harris answering in a very long-winded way, a question about Israel. It's like comprehensible, but it's sort of rambling. And then in the show itself, the edit is different and she has a different answer. And so as we speak, the Trump campaign is suing CBS for $10 billion for interfering in the election by not releasing the full transcript of an interview, which I repeat, Trump did not do. Trump just got out of that and didn't want to do it.

Trump didn't, he did a CNN town hall last year and they kind of checked that box. He went on CNN again for the debate in June. But he didn't go on CNN again. He didn't need to. And I was talking to conservatives. I remember in 2022, I was talking to for people to mesh lap of C-TAC and a bunch of other conservatives for stories. And they were saying, yeah, 2020 might have been the last election where he feels like you need to go on CNN. He wasn't saying Joe Rogan to replace it.

He was just saying the upside of going on those shows when they're hostile is not really good. Like, what is it? You're not reaching a new audience that might vote for you. Their audience is shrinking. Who cares? And so the Trump campaign goes on outlets, one that are friendlier to him and don't ask, for example, hey, none of your tax plans add up how you pay for them. And they do just want to hang out with him.

If you look at the questions he gets asked on a lot of these shows, they're just factually kind of interesting. It's it's it's it's it's uh you learn things about Trump kind of personally. You also have long boring weird digressions like when he when Dr. Phil's interviewing him, but she does twice as an endorser of Trump. Back of a bit, 10 years ago it was kind of scandalous if a interviewer who once time with with a candidate

also endorses the candidate and appears at the rallies, that happened a ton of with the Trump campaign this cycle. And it didn't with Kamala Harris. Megan Kelly rallies for Trump. Tucker Carlson rallies for Trump across the country. Dr. Phil is rallying for Trump at the Madison Square Garden rally. Rogan doesn't rally for him, but he does. And they have a much friendlier media that pushes his message without any downside.

So that strategy, I talked to Alex about this too when they were launching it. It makes perfect sense. And Democrats can't do, one Democrats can't do the same thing because it doesn't exist. and two, the media, let's say the traditional political media is not there to make the candidates sound great and advance their propaganda, right? It is there to make news, which is different. So you have what in the news business on a podcast with Trump is like a news free interview. A lot of the things he was saying were just not actually, you didn't learn new stuff.

You learned interesting stuff, but he didn't say, okay, now I understand how Trump is going to do this. or he responded to this thing in the news. He'll go on Newsmax and they'll say, the question they're often framed as the media is being unfair to you about this. What's your answer? Whereas Harris is going on traditional media and the questions are like

round seven of can you name a difference between yourself and Joe Biden? Or Tim Walz is going on these traditional media and he's answering what I think in the arc of history are not very interesting questions about whether he was in Hong Kong during Tianmin Square or after it.

the Stammon Square at this point is in Beijing. It's not in Hong Kong. Which part of Asia was the end? That's not how regular podcasts work. Regular podcasts were in saying, hey, J.D. Bans, for the 20th time, can you talk about childless cat ladies? And that really just, the attrition of all that is very helpful to Trump. And your argument would be that Democrats need to find candidates who can go on those podcasts

rather than trying to rebuild Air America as a podcasting network? Yes. But what I mean by that is that these skills are transferable. If you are good at talking and defending your policies on a two-hour podcast, you're probably good at talking to members of Congress or giving a speech or doing a shorter interview. The skills are not the exact same thing, but the medium also matters. If you are able to talk for two hours or three hours and not repeat yourself and ramble and get pissed off, off, it's reasonable for someone to look at that and say, oh, they can handle pressure. Because there are, I mean, the president also has to do some stuff beyond running for president.

There are moments where presidents need to be in a room with a foreign leader for six hours, hammering things out. It's not, I don't think people are naive or silly if they think. I'm more impressed by this person because they talked to a interesting interviewer for a very long time. Bernie Sanders did this in 2019 and 20. They feel very vindicated. They did already. But him and people around him are very vindicated in the idea that you will go on an outlet that is normally just super pro corporate Republican conservative that hates Democrats. And they've not, this is the thing. Most people are not out there to kneecap you and nail you.

And if you're a good politician, you wouldn't be anyway. You can get you can get out of their traps and have an interview. That politician's job, you know, most media hits is to deliver. a message and seem likable. So my point is that whatever the Democratic candidates are in 2020, they will not do what they did in 2019, which is refuse to go on Fox News,

not give a lot of access to conservative media, and shame whoever goes on Joe Rogan's podcast. Andrew Yang did Bernie Sanders. There is a discourse, which you can go back to, the links are still there from 2020, of there were activist groups that were very offended that Sanders would go on Rogan's show and that Rogan had nice things to say about him because Joe Rogan also said the N-word. Joe Reagan said offensive things.

Now he didn't, COVID hadn't happened yet. But now they would, and he also is an anti-vaxer. He's a conspiracy theorist. I don't think they're going to have that conversation again. I think one, the groups and activists making that argument are pretty discredited and people don't trust them anymore. I want to be too definitive, but just there's a lot of boiling anger that you see right now from Democrats about groups that demanded candidates respond to 5,000 left-wing ideas and get them on the record. They just don't want to do that again.

And also, that they, that it turns out you need to reach out to these people. I mean, that's one thing popped up conversations I've had since the election. I was talking to Senator John Fenderman this morning at Park because he went on Rogan. And that's his point. It's just like, it's important to reach that audience. You're a Democrat. You want to win those people. They might disagree with you.

There are voters. And at this point, three, three elections with Trump on the ballot, every Democrat knows they exist who say, oh, I can't stand it almost anything that guy does, but at least he's real. How do you do that? It's not going to be going on MSNBC 10 times. It'd be going on Theo Vaughn one time. And honestly, I'm pretty, this is the one super definitive point. I'm able to make it. Well, I predict the next four years, no.

Except I don't think Democrats who are serious are going to say, I'm not doing right-wing media and podcasts. All right. Last reason I have that Trump won for you. And just so we say this explicitly, Donald Trump was running against an unpopular incumbent in Joe Biden and then the vice president of an unpopular incumbent in Kamala Harris. How much of his victory can we chalk up to that? Well, that's a lot of it. And I, I don't like with the Allen Lickman type of, the type of, let's, average the last few elections or point out what happens, what's the trend?

Each election is very different. There are literally millions and millions of people who didn't vote in the last one and do in this one because some were bored and some die. Just this is like no candidate steps in the same river twice. And so the fact that Trump had been president and people were getting more nostalgic about things that happened during his presidency was powerful. Other presidents have experienced this effect. this afterglow.

Barack Obama was more popular four years after he was president than when he left office. George Bush marginally was more popular. If you remember seeing some red states billboards with a picture of George Bush smiling and the slogan missed me yet, even during the depth of the recession that he was partly responsible for, people were saying, well, at least things were cheaper under him. So he benefited from that and he also benefited from, yes, this is, if you want to get Democrats really frustrated. Talk to them about this because in their minds, twice now,

they've had a Democratic president inherit a crisis, absorb all the blame and damage for that crisis, and then hand the economy off once it's pretty much fixed to not just a Republican to Donald Trump. And they knew that was a risk. They were trying to avoid it. But for all the things we just talked about, all the reasons, it was hard to do and it didn't really work.

They, I do think there's another conversation Democrats are having about their consultant class and what they're missing because they are very cautious about things that Trump is not cautious about. When I think I was saying before, how would Trump have described this economy? He would say it's amazing. And Democrats will do a focus group and the focus group will come back and say, look, 19 out of 20 people say they don't believe you when they say the economy is amazing. Democrats' response is to say, I won't do it then. there were the Trump's responses probably i could sell ice to an eskimo yes like i'm just going to keep doing this uh and so you have trump uh much easier when he when he's not he's not the incumbent just claiming that the economy is in a depression and everything's falling apart and gas is eight

dollars which it's not anywhere uh and that uh egg prices are through the roof when they've been dropping um the i think the the the bruce Rio and the brazenness, Trump has, which is very tough for other Republicans to copy. There is not an easy democratic response. I remember in 2016, one of my Pulp Cochardtakes that I think did be held up as I was comparing, if you've read Foundation, Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, there's a character of the mule who shows up in the second one. And he, everyone has made plans for literally the next thousand years.

but they didn't expect this guy with these psychic powers who could mind control people and destroy entire armies with a thought to show up, and that blows their plans up. And I would joke that Trump was the mule. Democrats had made some plans to deal with a normal Republican who would have to defend his policies and be worried about offending people, and then Trump blew it up. Trump ran on a series of spending and tax cut plans that do not in any way add up. Nate Romney wouldn't have done that. Paul Ryan wouldn't have done that.

Markerubia wouldn't have done that. Trump does that. And so how do you can, if you are a Democratic Party that, again, is going to walk into a room with 60 minutes and try to defend your tax policy and you're running against a guy who's just going to go to a podcast and say, hey, I'm going to cut everyone's taxes and get rid of the deficit. They've had three runs at that. And it's, it's twice they have not been able to convince people. And this is a big frustration for them. If you read Hillary Clinton's a memoir about 2016, what happened. She, she thinks about this.

I don't think she comes up with solutions. but he remembers there were just big ideas the campaign had and they didn't do because they thought we can't defend them in an interview and Trump can Trump can Trump can promise people to moon Trump can be the president presiding over COVID and tell people that it actually happened under Joe Biden Trump can sign a bunch of stimulus checks to people and then say he had nothing to do with inflation Trump can say I would have gotten a set of Afghanistan faster than Joe Biden than when we get out of a guest and say well I would have done that with any without any casualties and I would have kept bag room. how do you compete with someone who will say anything? The answer in this election is you lose. All right, before you go, Dave, I want to ask you about Kamala Harris explicitly. Let's say she gets into the race under the very same circumstances, 107 days to campaign tied to an unpopular incumbent. Was this race winnable for Harris, do you think? Oh, I think it was.

I think there's a world where Joe Biden, frankly, ages more quickly. in 2022 and 3. Because this is the thing, when people want to ask why the media wasn't saying Biden was unfit for another term earlier, you can go at home and compare a video of Biden in 2021, a video 23-3. He was just fading and people could see it.

It happened at a bad time for an incumbent president. But had Biden not run for election and announced, let's say Democrats have good midterms. And Biden comes out and says, I'm happy that my party is going to control the Senate. We have a lot to do. And I'm not going to run for another term. You would have had a Democratic primary contiguous with the Republican primary.

And a lot of things happen when there is a party primary that Democrats will tell you at least from 2012, the example. When Barack Obama is running for reelection and a lot of the media is focused on Republicans out competing each other to say how terrible Barack Obama is, it actually did hurt his approval. When Republicans had a primary that was not in the end very competitive and with Trump dominating it, but Trump being part of the mix every day and attacking Biden, pretty harmful for them. What would have happened if they had a primary with probably Kamala Harris as the favorite? Because remember, they moved South Carolina up to be the first primary.

Maybe some Democrats jumping in, maybe some Democrats jumping in and doing so badly that they just bailed, which is what happened to most of the Republican field, except for Ron DeSantis. and Nikki Haley in the Republican side, you would have had a just a completely different Democratic campaign, a staff that Harris hired, or a staff that maybe whoever wins the upset, like,

had Grega Whitmer decide to jump in the race and beat her, she would have had her own campaign team. And in that climate, you would have had Democrats saying, we've had a competition and we have a new argument that's not just defending Joe Biden. I do think that would have been successful. because look at the examples around the world where this has been done in parliamentary systems where people dump the incumbent and reintroduce and introduce new leadership.

It's been very tough in the age of inflation, but it's often been pretty successful. And I think that, I think given how this will end up being fairly close, I feel some irrational future casting from pundits right now because they are looking at will probably end up for Republicans with a 2000. 2004-style election where the key states flip to Trump definitively but by less than two points and where Republicans have a smaller House and Senate majority than they did 20 years ago. It is being covered as a historic, unbeatable victory for Republicans, the destruction of all Democratic power. They will never come back. And we've seen them come back before. But I, I We've seen the comeback from worse than this with a different coalition. We've,

everything we were just talking about, like the media environment being different, I think makes it hard for them. But I think this Trump coalition that won the election, it is not that hard to imagine Democrats running a different campaign, different candidate, slightly better strategy, less connected to Joe Biden,

running two points better than Harrison winning. We would have, we would have woken up on, Wednesday, I think, with Democrats an early winning Michigan and Wisconsin, perhaps narrowly winning North Carolina, and then Pennsylvania swings the election that's over. I don't think that's a crazy role to imagine.

This is not like 1984 where you can't imagine anyone beating Ronald Reagan. And yeah, that is what Democrats are going to have to live with. That is what Joe Biden is going to have to live with. Had they made hard choices and taken some risks a year before they did, could they have won? I think based on what I covered for four years, they could have. But was there a way Harris could have won in a hundred days, given the hand that she was dealt

and her as the candidate? No, tougher for all those, all those reasons. You also had, I didn't mention Gaza at all, but you also just had a constant problem for Democrats where a section of the left, now I think it was less a problem they expect to be in Michigan. Obviously, Harris was losing Dearborn and Hamtramic. I need to see the final rails from Handtramic. But it's a great example of how Trump could get away with anything. Did Trump bring peace to the Palestinians? He was president. He did not. He had a strategy of isolating Palestine, giving Israel, whatever it wanted, and making peace with other Arab nations, between other Arab nations that were already kind of non-competitive

with Israel. But out of power, Trump said, I'm the peace president. I'm going to bring peace back. Don't worry about it. details to come later, much like Richard Nixon in 1968 saying he had a plan and the Vietnam War details TBD while undermining the peace process in Vietnam. And so just a lot of

things that she inherited in those hundred days, I think, I think she could have, there is no meteor hitting the earth event. There was no Comey letter that changed things. How could she have put all this together? Would more effective ads have done it? Would more interviews with podcasters have done it?

I think it's possible. it's possible. I just think the first scenario where they have a real primary changes things dramatically. I think the tweaks they could have made in this short campaign, you might have flip a coin a hundred times. I think two or three of them, she wins that election. Finally, Dave, do you know how long you've been doing the folks bit on Twitter? Do we have an exact date for the original tweet? I don't know. I think probably 2011 or 2012 because the the origin of this is a very good nature joke about how in my industry, the political reporting in particular,

anytime a politician does something interesting, people would jump in and say, oh, they're jockeying for a presidential campaign. But this was something you just see a Republican give some set of remarks that raised eyebrows. And I would start to joke folks, or he's running, folks with an ellipsis behind. it sort of meaning

what they're doing this because they're about to run for president mostly as a joke sometimes as not as a joke I'm glad people like it but it's really about um because my sort of a self self negating take on on covering politics is that every four years there's a presidential election one of two people wins it uh most of politics is not that so it's kind of funny that the that the preponderance of political media is about who's going to be president. I mean, I think I'm working out my annoyance that when people find out that you cover politics, the first thing they want to know who's going to win the election,

even if they flatter themselves to be people who care about policy and not the horse race. People care about the people lie to themselves about lots of things. One of them is they care about politics other than who's going to be president. But it was always like my joke, but also my little rebellion to the idea that everything is whether someone will be president or not. There are interesting things happening across the country that do not depend on which person wins that election. But easy to say most of the time, but once you have a presidential election and 5,000 things change at once, yeah, it's more important.

The joke is good natured, but it's not meant to tell people to stop caring about the election. That's what I always read is the meta text, that everything's about presidential politics. and also every politician secretly thinks they can be president, whether they admit it or not at some level of their being. That's true. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. That much is true. And look, we all love you, Briss.

It is interesting to watch him, Scott, try to move up from the minors to the majors and be really terrible. It's interesting to see who can ball at that level and who cannot. but it's also good to not be too smug because none of us are running. It's very hard. It's very, it's very easy for the reporter to see what a campaign is doing wrong or what they did wrong in the past. So it's trying, I'm glad so many people in politics think it's fun because they find it they do find a little bit irritating too. Sometimes the governor is just celebrating a ribbon cutting. He's not about to run for president. All right. David Weigel, read him in semaphore. Go subscribe to Americana right now.

Dave, thanks for coming on the press box. Yeah, thanks. Thanks. be back. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic, as always, by my pal Brian Waters. If you missed yesterday's podcast, we had some big news, big, big news folks, right up at the top. Joel Anderson, who is the newest senior staff writer at the Ringer, or actually one of them, because we got a couple. Joel Anderson is going to be the Thursday co-host of the press box. Think about that, man. That's a is such exciting news. I'm sure a bunch of you know Joel's career. He was at Slate before

here, before he came to us. He was at ESPN. There's going to be a lot more college football on the podcast, as you heard from yesterday's show. I'm so excited to have him every Thursday. I already have a list of things I want to talk about. ESPN segments, college game day segments. Cannot wait for that. That's going to be starting right now. So you will hear him next Thursday every week on the press box. It all comes at a convenient time because, you know, post-election, we like to do a little soul searching here at the podcast, maybe not quite as grim a process as the Democrats are going through right now, but it's a good time to sort of look at the pod and think about

where we want to go from here. Those of you who have stuck with us for years and years will notice that the pod really changed the beginning of 2024, the Monday episode with David and I, is and will always be that. I love it. On Thursdays, I tried to bring in people from the media, reporters I liked, people I liked, and do it and have a conversation with them that was a lot more like the Monday show than a 30 to 45 minute interview, which I feel you hear everywhere in podcast land. That was a big change this year. Joel coming on on Thursdays is the next evolution of that. I heard some people on Reddit say,

I loved when you guys had journalists on and this variety of guests, don't worry. As you just heard with Dave there, that's not going away. And I think Joel being on the podcast will actually give us more elbow room or give me more elbow room to chase those guests to have fun people on the podcast. And we will continue to do that. This year, we've had Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal talking about Evan Gershkovich. We've had Bob Costas talking about the legacy of the NBA on NBC. We had Patrick Radden Keyfong. I'm talking about writing crime stories.

I want to have a bunch more of those in 2025. I think you'll see that here. Also, more set visits like I made to Good Morning Football the other day. I just sent out a note to the person whom I hope will be our second victim for that segment. I'll let you know how that goes, but I love more of those. Much, much more to come here on the press box. I'd also love to have an event in Washington, D.C. sometime around the start of the new administration.

I've emailed with a few of you who've hit me up for campaign buttons about that one. If you're in Washington, D.C. and you'd like to come to a press box event. Shoot me a note, Brian.curdistherringer.com or at the press box pod and DMs. I'd love to see out there. We can get our friend Brian Waters maybe to come down from Baltimore for that one as well. All right. That is it for election week from us. Thank you for sticking with us all through this election, all through these many years on the press box.

As I like to say, Shoemaker and I will return on Monday. With more lukewarm takes about the media, have a fantastic week.