The Press Box - Trump-Biden Debate No. 2 Instant Reaction. Plus, Snapchat’s Peter Hamby

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker react to the second and final Trump-Biden presidential debate. They offer first impressions, discuss each candidate's effectiveness, and predict how the election might unfold moving forward. Plus, journalist Peter Hamby joins to discuss campaign advertising, media coverage, and much more! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box's instant reaction to the second Donald Trump Joe Biden debate. We'll talk about Biden's anti-malarkey strategy, whether Trump is in fact Abraham Lincoln, plus a talk with Snapchat's Peter Hamby. But David, let us jump right in. Your first impression of tonight. On the rewatchables, we always start by saying, what's your tweet-length review of this episode? Or the recapable, sorry. And my tweet-length review of this debate is if a conspiracy theorist, conspiracy theorizes in civilized tones, does anybody hear it?

I don't, I honestly, it's like I was so expecting to have my opening statement gift wrapped for me by Donald Trump that I don't know exactly what to say right now. It was a relatively, I don't know, conventional. debate. It felt like exactly what kind of like a computer algorithm would have generated going into this campaign. And I'm not, I mean, honestly, I think it was, if we

want to get to the, you know, the silly horse racey stuff. I mean, I think it was sort of a toss-up. To use a phrase, we love here at the press box, I think that's right. I think this was what a semi-normal Donald Trump debate would look like.

By which I mean, he still lied like crazy. He was still identifiably Donald Trump, but he just let Joe Biden talk more, right? Yeah. That was essentially what tonight's debate was. It's funny because we heard all week, or read all week that Donald Trump's advisors were saying,

let Biden talk. Because if you let him talk, he'll tie himself in knots verbally. And he won't be able to just talk for 90 minutes without making a big gaffe. And you, Donald Trump, will not be disqualified immediately because you're interrupting him all the time.

Donald Trump basically tried to execute that strategy tonight. And as we get into this, we'll sort of, we can debate whether Joe Biden gave him enough to work with. But that was a strategy and that's what Donald Trump did tonight.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you can understand the strategy. I think what the real thing, and it's a smart strategy, I think the real thing that it misses is that, that one of Trump, low-key, Trump's real advantage in the first debate wasn't just that he was being the bullying person or anything else like that. It was that he didn't have to pay attention, right? Like, he was just sort of working, doing everything on his own terms.

And I thought Trump's, Trump having to sort of engage with Joe Biden silently or otherwise, you know, it didn't really work with his benefit at all. I mean, you can tell just by sitting there and staring at his face throughout the debate, I think, was probably did more damage to the Trump campaign than anything Biden said. The reaction shots were incredible, weren't they? Donald Trump kind of doing that thing with his lips and kind of looking constantly at the moderator to say, you know, oh, I want to jump in right here, but I know I'm not supposed to jump in right here. So I just, you know, I think we're all very familiar with that face. that's that we're on a Zoom. We're doing a podcast on Zoom, and I want to say the next thing.

That's what that, that's the reaction I think that Trump was giving during the debate. You were just giving it to me right there, actually. I know. I realize I'm doing the Trump right before my very, what is amazing to me, and a couple people brought this up on Twitter this week, is that Donald Trump basically has one single mode as a politician.

I'm not talking about any of these, like, fantasy pivots that he's going to do. He just has one mode. and the mode is you're the incumbent and I'm the challenger. You heard him saying this to Biden at the end of the debate. You're all talking to action. You've been a politician for 40 years. Not I'm the president.

I'm in charge, right? It's all about I'm the insurgent here. And I'm going to take your record. I'm going to put it into the spin machine and I'm going to pick at you, right? Just pick at you and try to come up with doubts about you. while never owning the office of the presidency. Yeah. Never saying I'm the guy.

I'm in charge. This is my responsibility. He has one mode. Yeah. And he was doing it tonight. Yeah. I mean, he was repeatedly, deliberately, he organized the entire night around why didn't you do it when you had the chance

four years ago or eight years ago or over the past 47 years, right? That was his organizing principle. And I thought it was a fairly, I mean, on its face, it's a pretty good attack line against Joe, Biden. But the underlying truth there, which I think you get at, is that this is the same campaign that he ran four years ago, right? I mean, and we can get into the fact that, you know, there's like Pizza Gate smears going on, I mean, going on right now attacking Hunter Biden that are literally word for word smears that people were made up about Hillary Clinton four years ago. But, I mean, he's running the exact same game plan. But mode wise is, the mode is sort of a separate thing.

He only has the mode of, you know, drain the swamp and build the wall and lock her up. And he's trying to run that game throughout the debate tonight, although, you know, more low-key than in previous night. Could I just say, because I saw some some pundits, especially right-leaning ones, saluting the you're all talk and no action, Joe line as perhaps an effective attack tonight? Can we just say how colossally stupid that idea is? Yeah. Just incredibly stupid.

If you want to call it a smart, you know, debating point or whatever it is, Donald Trump is the same president of the United States who has done. basically nothing during the coronavirus. Yeah. He is all talk and no action. In some ways, Trump has actually run a kid. Hold on one second. As I get into this, this is the ceremonial popping of the beer.

Here we go. Trump's presidency in some ways is perfectly suited for a debate. He has one small thing to say about every subject, you know, but even though he hasn't actually done barely anything over the past four years or anything that he would be proud, he would say out loud during a debate, I guess I should say. Um, you know, Obama and other people have called him, you know, the crazy uncle or whatever because of the way he tweets and, and, and embrace the conspiracy theories. But he is just, he's also just sort of just like you're just like, you're irritating uncle who has like, who has like, who has

experienced like everything in a small way, but is just like just massively overconfident in answering every single question, right? Like, he can tell you exactly the kind of tires to buy for your car or insulation you to buy for your wall, even though he's only, had one small, he's only dealt with that like one day of his life, but he could just talk about it for five hours, you know? And, and, yeah, I mean, he just, he just went on and on about, but then to say that Joe Biden is all talking no action, I mean, that's, listen, everything that Trump says is, is unintentionally an attack on himself, right? I mean, that's, he's, he's, it's insecurity manifesting. I mean, I don't think it takes any, uh, great wisdom to say that.

But the all talk and no action thing, and I think is sort of a new frontier in that, right? I mean, because he's, I mean, he really is running like, like he's not the incumbent. He's running against the ghost of the Obama administration as if he has, he needs the next four years to do the first thing that he said he was going to do. And what underlies the all talk part is that Joe Biden has plans to fix various parts of American life. And you just want to say to Trump, no, no, you're supposed to have plans. You know how you don't have a plan to contain the coronavirus?

That's a problem. You know, you don't have a plan about racial tensions in the United States, about police brutality. That's a problem. Aha, my opponent over here, he has a plan. He is talking about what he's going to do. Yeah, that's the whole point of running for president, dude. Yeah. I just, that is just wild.

Let's break down a few parts of the debate. we started off with the coronavirus. I thought this was one of Joe Biden's best parts of the debate. What's funny about Donald Trump playing by the rules is that not only did it probably helped Trump on the margins, it definitely helped Joe Biden because Joe Biden was much better able to go through his talking points and say what he wanted to say, don't you think, when he knew Trump wasn't going to dive in and interrupt him every time. Yeah.

I mean, he didn't do, I mean, to be totally frank, I thought he could have done better given that reality. And again, we're grading on, I'm grading on a curve that he set during his town hall. You know, I mean, you would think that he would be able to, you know, hew a little bit more closer, closely to that style, given that he was going to get more time. But he was, he had time constraints. I mean, that was more of the, I mean, that was more of his opponent tonight than, than Trump at times. especially during the first, those two-minute segments, right? I mean, he had to get all these ideas out or he thought he did. And I said the same thing, I think, during their first debate, it's like, you can see,

he starts off every answer, and it looks like he, like, it seems like the first two words out of his mouth are going to be just like the knockout punch that the answer, you know, that the debate format deserves, and then he just cuts himself off and starts digressing. And it's all important stuff that he's digressing into. It's all, it's all good information. It shows that he has years and years of experience on just but every issue. an endless well of knowledge about it. But it did seem like as soon as he went,

as soon as he digresses once, he sees the game clock on the horizon, counting down, and he just, you know, he has trouble. I mean, you can tell that he's feeling rushed by the, by the time.

Agree with all that, though. I did think he got out more bumper sticker lines tonight than he did in the first debate. He had that line early on where he said, anybody who is responsible for that many deaths because of the coronavirus, that is, should not remain president of the United States of America. Can I say one thing about it real quick? Because I might forget to interject this later.

Sure. I was shocked at Trump. Trump didn't do a good enough job in his conspiracy theorizing in making the exact point that Biden made right then, right? Trump said a lot of crazy stuff that's going to get a lot of attention. But he didn't actually have the guts or the gusto to say this is disqualifying, right, in the way that Joe Biden did. When Joe Biden said that, you're right, that made a big impression, I think.

And that was just in the opening minutes. He also held up that mask, right, and said, if we just wore these masks, again, a very, very simple and I thought effective prop. When Trump said something about learning to live with the coronavirus, that Biden comes back and says he says we're learning to live with it. We're also learning to die with it. And again, that first section of debate now, the coronavirus is Donald Trump's absolute worst. subject, or at least in a tie for number one. But I thought Joe Biden did a great job. And then when Trump tried to pivot, right, and said, no, no, no, he's going to, he's going to say all these things. Biden had his line, I'm going to shut down the virus, not the country. And again, I thought,

I thought Joe Biden in that section of the debate was, was ACEs. He really was. Well, and this is the part where Trump also, I thought was, I mean, it wasn't a great subject for him. I mean, he, he, His canned response about swine flu that Pence workshop formed during the vice president's debate. Well, I mean, you can see the intent, you know. I mean, you can see the value if that lands for anybody. But I thought Trump, for all his self-restraint and actual, I mean, in times, his delivery was, you know, he was striking a good tone.

I thought for all that. For Trump. It wasn't just a conspiracy theory. He just didn't make the case. He was speaking too much in Trumpese. right and not a he wasn't making the case to undecided voters there was a line right here at the moment that you're talking about where they're talking he's talking for the 10th time in this in this section about about closing about shutting china out from the united states so commercial flights from

china people from china and he said when i closed he said i shouldn't have closed and he just sort of repeated that vague line over and over again when i closed he said i shouldn't have closed and it's like who are you talking to right now like this is it's like such a bizarre way of framing things. I mean, a way of stating a thing that it's like not even that compelling anyway. I don't know. I mean, it wasn't a strong subject for him. But, you know, if we're going to pivot, we're going to talk about pivoting.

And the last question I think in that section, Trump pivoted straight from COVID to fundraising on Wall Street. That was unbelievable. And that, and I, we can all trace how we got there. But I don't think there, I don't think anything, again, that happened before in that section was nearly as damning. the fact that like they were talking about people dying from coronavirus and Trump's mind was actually preoccupied with his fundraising disadvantage to the Biden campaign.

And Trump's very wacky argument was Joe Biden is out fundraising me, something a lot of people probably including the two of us did not think would happen in this campaign. And the reason he's doing it is because I don't want to compromise myself by going to Wall Street and asking for the money. See, Joe is over there compromising himself. but I don't want to do it. That's why I'm being out fundraised. Okay. I mean, I think, we're looking at you as a successful CEO, right?

I mean, I think the best use of your time would probably be calling somebody who could give you $100 million. You know, I mean, the best, the most efficient use of your time as a leader is probably not doing like $10,000 a plate fundraisers with two weeks ago in the election in states that aren't up for grabs. you know like it's this is this is just bad decision making from our seat from our national CEO right here the second section of the debate was about national security and trump comes right in with his big dump of things about hunter Biden the awful emails the laptop everything right that that's what when he was given that look about like you have on the zoom call like ah i got to go next i got to go next that's what he was clearly waiting for was it not that was his set piece of My line, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my first

I think, if I can take the temperature of resistance, Twitter, that everyone was a little freaked out about. Not because the story's necessarily real or even 10% real. It's just because that's what evokes 2016. That there is going to be this. weird scandal-like substance that just comes out of the woodwork late in the campaign. And that is what Trump uses to muddy the waters and squeak out a narrow win in this election. Biden, though, had a really good response, right? He pivoted immediately to Trump's tax returns and used the phrase, what are you hiding? And again, when it came back to Biden, two questions later, he said, just show us, stop playing

around. I thought that was the, I thought that was the best thing. And again, it's part of the strategy, right? Are you going to follow? Trump down the rabbit hole and actually discuss a ton of what happened with your son and you in Ukraine in this almost certainly imaginary story? Or are you just going to be like, actually, you are the one who is hiding lots and lots of things about money? Yeah, I thought that the Perry was good. I'm not quite sure by the end of it that Biden did enough to deny the conspiracy theories. I'm not sure what he should have said. By the time he got to the thing about it being Russian propaganda, I think he was sort of like, you know,

he was losing his voice a little bit. I mean, or I mean, metaphorically and maybe literally, it didn't seem, he didn't, he didn't quite, I mean,

listen, these stories are scary for a reason, like you said. And they're, and they're catching hold with some portion of the electorate. I think that we're seeing more and more people writing about that every day.

Well, I mean, when you do Google searches for, like, Joe Biden, think that, like, when you do Google search for Hunter Biden,

like, the third thing that comes up is child trafficking. You know, I mean, like, I see these stories all the time about how Pete,

like, just, just an odd number of people canvassing on the street just people for Joe Biden are hearing that he's a that he's like, you know, a child molester or something. I mean, there's people these are, it's nonsense, but there's some audience for this, right? And I guess, I guess I don't know what he should have said. I don't think he did a bad job. I think that by the end of it, well, I think he was really benefited by the structure of the debate that this stuff kind of got out of the way on the early end. But, but, but he did a great job of parrying it. And I, and I wish that every single time Trump

said something crazy about Hunter Biden or about $3.5 million from Russia or whatever, he had parried that effectively, right? I mean, I wish there had been, I wish he'd just looked eager to go at every single moment. Maybe that would have probably been enough. He eventually came around to the line that this is not about his family. It's not about my family. It's about your family. Right. Which, by the way, trailed, it was right on the heels of Trump saying, making an accusation by saying, there's a very strong email talking about your family, which again, I don't know. Does anybody I guess you just have to do the Google search. You have to check his website to find out what the fuck that means.

But yes, that not my family or his family is your family, I will say this about Joe Biden. There is nobody this side of Barack Obama, and maybe not even Barack Obama, who can make these like cloying catchphrases land. Joe Biden can just make something that looks like it's going to sound silly on paper. It's like Frank Capra material.

and he makes it, he makes it legit. Totally. That is, it is impressive. He can sell it. He can absolutely sell it. If I told you like a politician in his 70s

would point at the screen and say a line like that, you're right, it would seem like Capra. It would be like, please advise the politician not to do that. Yes. Because everybody who's online is going to be like, this is so silly.

But when Joe Biden does it, there is something about, his uncle Jonas that makes him able to pull off lines like that. And by the way, those are some of his most effective parts of the debate today. Absolutely. When he was talking about that. I don't have tons of notes about health care other than Trump's mic seems to have been muted for the first time during that section. Trump also turned to Kristen Welker, who he insulted gratuitously for a week and said,

I respect very much the way you're handling this about the debate, which might be a good time for us to talk about. How do we think Welker handled the debate tonight? I thought she was great. I thought, I've seen a good bit of her on NBC News, on MSNBC as the White House correspondent. I have not seen a ton of her on weekend today, although I have seen enough. And I recognize that's sort of how she's identified by probably the vast majority of viewers. But this was, I mean, I don't know if there's a list of people who find their true calling moderating debate. rates, you know, Chris Wallace may be one of those people. I don't know, but Kristen Welker was,

I mean, just in, we just started in stride and just did an incredible job throughout the entire night, both in terms of controlling the debate. The second half, Trump was feeling it a little bit. I think everybody was getting a little bit tired. She wasn't, you know, didn't have, like, the strong arm technique she did in the first half throughout the entire thing. But Just also in terms of like just asking the exact right questions being you could you could see every time at Winterger you'd see she was reading her notes and but she was also just like a hundred percent cognizant of every word that was being said. And she was, I mean, it was just a really, really, really impressive performance. It felt so prepared but fully reactive to the moment, which was just really not not the kind of thing you always see. I thought the questions were incredibly sharp. I totally agree with that. Jack Schaefer, I thought made a good point on Twitter. He said, Welker's doing a good job, but this isn't the same Trump Wallace had to wrestle. And that's a good point, right? It's it's not that she, you know, sort of made Trump submit to the rules. Donald Trump clearly decided to do that before this debate. So it was a little bit of a, just a kind of smoother, you know, wall of sound to kind of get through. But I agree. I thought she did a really good job. I might have taken a few fewer follow-ups that were allowed. Because with the debate, you can't allow every candidate to follow up on every single remark. Two, I mean, two things. One, I thought it was sort of poignant or powerful to watch the follow-ups actually trail off a couple of times. Biden had the, at one point, it was just like, now I'm done.

And that was, I thought was a great moment for him. But just letting them go back and forth was just, it had a certain sort of, I don't know, I enjoyed watching that happen, watching them actually reach their logical conclusion, which it turns out is about 30 seconds beyond the point where we're used to seeing them cut off and people who are complaining that they didn't have enough to say. But yeah, Kristen Walker had one tool in a toolbox, which felt sort of novel to me, which was every time somebody wanted to keep going, she was like, no, I was about to ask you that.

And then she, like, got her quite, then she was able to continue the questioning, kind of on pace. Exactly, right? Kind of make them think, oh, I was going there anyway, actually. So let me go ahead and ask this. Meanwhile, getting them out of their in this list. And that's the best way to cut Trump or anybody else off.

I was like, no, you're going to get to say that. Let me say my thing. The health care section was where Donald Trump raised his strangest conspiracy theory yet, David, that Joe Biden is not from Scranton, Pennsylvania. we were we were fact-checking that on my couch because it was like this is just not there is no way that he's just making this up right yeah i mean that that is in the elvis is still a live category of claims i mean can you imagine if joe biden who has one thing that is in every joe biden speech ever it's that he was raised in scranton pennsylvania that if that were not true but donald trump raised that tonight It was only there for a short period. Welker then transitioned to the American to Families section of the debate.

I thought this was really interesting because she actually talked about immigration. Finally, we mentioned this to Jacob Soberoff this week when we had him on the press box. The word immigration was not mentioned in the first two debates at all. The word border was mentioned one time when Mike Pence made a point about NAFTA. it has been completely gone from this election. And more to the point, not just immigration, but Trump's family separation policy has been completely gone from this debate.

And from these debates, and I was so glad to see her bring it around to that. Because I just one of those things, and when we were talking to Jacob this week, I just kept thinking that's like, how is this of all the many horrifying moments of the last four years? How is that particular horror just deleted from the campaign?

It can't be, right? There was news about it this week, which may have given her an opening to ask about it, but I just, I'm so glad she went there with that. I am too. I mean, I thought that that was a, it helped ground the debate. I thought, and I think that subject, I mean, like you said, it was a subject that we can't just forget about. Trump was, I mean, seemed to be prepared to have the discussion, although it was, you. you know, again, a very odd sort of deflection.

Who built the cages, Joe, like, whatever. I mean, which, again, he didn't even have the conviction to look Joe, Biden in the face when he said it. He was just doing, he was performing. And I think that most people watching can tell the difference between moral outrage and just like silly what aboutism, you know? But, uh, but, uh, but yeah, I mean,

I think that, you know, I mean, these silly lines from Trump, we can just sort of laugh at and roll our eyes at and forget about tomorrow. I mean, when he talks about wanting brand new, beautiful health care, like the cleanest water, the cleanest air, like all this kind of stuff. But when he said, when he was talking about the facilities that these children have been stripped of their family, have been taken away from their parents, they're being housed in. He's saying, like, they're so clean, they're so awake and well, well taken care of these facilities. Like, that's a sort of Trumpism that should just hang over his head for the rest of his life.

You know, I mean, it's just, it's really, it's like, that is just like such a, it just sort of it's such a damningly like cruel thing to say like that's where that's your defense that's where your head is like it's just it's nuts or when Trump was referring to

only those immigrants with the lowest IQ remember that whole that whole riff there at the end of the section yeah when he says maybe I shouldn't say this out loud you can that I mean that's that is the that's the when Trump actually has a second of you know moral circumspection

in real time. Yeah, maybe you shouldn't say that. Maybe you're, I mean, it's just, it's, yeah, that's a, it was a truly terrible thing. The second to last section of the debate was race in America. I thought, by the way, Kristen Welker did some of her best work here. There was obviously emotion in her voice as she asked that first question about parents having the talk with their kids, being afraid. Their kids would be in danger, even targeted by the police when they leave the house. That was great. And it's something I think we're not used to maybe seeing in a debate where questions are asked in in an emotional fashion and a very personal fashion, more of that, please, right? To be a debate moderator, you don't

have to go up there and just forswear any, you know, emotional content. That's okay, right? And I thought that was a really interesting section of the debate. I agree. I don't even have a lot of notes here because I was sort of, I mean, some of it from the candidates, we'd heard before. I agree that Welker was asked a question really well and got a sort of new level of humanity out of them, out of both of them. I mean, I thought you saw something really unique, both from Biden who, you know, we've seen this from him before, but he, but he strikes a really, I think a really appropriate tone. And he does seem to be like honestly carrying an understanding on the subject. And like I said before, I thought that he really shown, maybe in comparison,

but really shown in this section of the debate and everything that followed, I mean, climate change and even crime, I thought the structure of the debate was really helpful for Joe Biden because at this point, he just gets to rise above everything else, right? He does get to rise above everything else, but it was an hour in, and I felt his energy did begin to flag

a little bit at this point. Absolutely true, absolutely true, but I think the big thing is we're not left thinking about Hunter Biden's laptop at the end or whatever. I mean, that stuff gets to be, is buried not just by Biden's performance, but by Trump's at that point. And Trump, talk about personal. I mean, I said this before, that he's like the uncle that has one little story on every subject.

All of his stories about race, I mean, saying he's the least racist person in the room and then trying to inspect the people in the room as if maybe he's wrong, right? That was amazing, looking out at the audience. It's so bizarre. But all of his stories are, include the. line I said like 15 times, right? If you do something really significant for this country, there's probably very little of eye, there's very little, very few I saids in the retelling of the passing of this legislation, right? You know, I mean, it's just like, we did this thing. Here it is.

They're all, it's just all these, like, really tiny stories of people that he interacted with. And of course, if you're like a kind of person who's, you know, thinks he's the least racist person in the world, but probably is pretty racist. Yeah, it's a, it's a whole lot of, I have a, I had a black friend in elementary school, right? That whole line of rhetoric also led to the really amazing moment of the debate where Joe Biden says Abe Lincoln over here or Abraham Lincoln. And he's kind of, yeah, he was kind of being a little stiff in the delivery of the line. So even, even you and I probably took a second to track what he was saying.

Right. And then it comes back to Trump. Trump is then forced to argue the point that he didn't say he will, he was. Abraham Lincoln. He said he was the best president for black Americans since Abraham. See, I didn't say I was Abraham Lincoln. I just want to make sure I get this straight. It felt like a very small point of order. No, but it's significant because you can mark in in Sharpie on the transcript like the three times in this debate where Trump was actually engaged. And one of them was bizarrely Joe Biden saying Abraham Lincoln over here. Like that like that, that, that, that,

I don't know if Trump thought that he saw an opening. Just like, oh, this is when this is when Biden makes his mental lapse and I get to point it out. Or if Trump was actually perplexed or offended by being called Abraham Lincoln. I think he's just used that other line so many times. But it's one of those, that's one of those things like, no, no, no. I actually know this line. I have said this line 100,000 times. And you cannot, you cannot say that I'm saying I'm Abraham Lincoln.

just the best since Abraham Lincoln. This was also, by the way, a point of the debate where Joe Biden looked at his watch, and I saw a lot of people on Twitter say, aha, it's like that time George H.W. Bush looked at his watch, and he looked like he was bored at the debate. I don't think that's going to be a game changer. We can replay this if I'm totally wrong, but I don't think that is going to be the game change. Everybody's looking for it. Finally, we got to climate change, David.

And we did talk about this idea that if you're Joe Biden, you do not want to put any succulent red meat out on the table that will give an easy opening for conservative allies of the president, even those conservative allies who are trying to distance themselves from the president to snap up. And if Joe Biden did that at all tonight is when he talked about transitioning away from oil. Yeah, because, I mean, this is basically the point you just made. Of all the people, the people that are inching away

are a very interesting category right now because even as some talking heads are trying to kind of hedge their bets going into the home stretch of the election, everybody in the, you know, the Fox expanded universe that's on television, aha, they can, nobody has, no one's going to have a second of trepidation

about getting up in front of a camera and screaming about Joe Biden's stance on transitioning away from oil. And so that just, that allows the volume to be turned up. I guess the counterpoint, which I felt at the time, is at this point in the debate, it was really compelling to see somebody say something sort of surprising with vigor. You know, I mean, it was like he had that that was a, that was a, that was a, he took a stand at this point in the debate.

And I think there's some value in just seeming like a leader, a decisive leader, you know, when you're standing next to Donald Trump. but content wise, I mean, I don't know. I mean, maybe it'll, maybe it will shore up some of the liberal base. I mean, I think that it's, I think that it's going to be looked at as a flaw. I'm not sure if it'll actually bear out as one. I think it's one of those things where Joe Biden's staff would have would have said, please don't say that in this exact way.

Of course, just about every Democrat wants to transition away from oil toward renewable energy, as Joe Biden then said a little bit later. Like that everybody, everybody, just about everybody thinks that. But the whole question is, are you saying it in such a way that makes it sound like it's going to happen

tomorrow, which of course Joe Biden doesn't want it to happen like all to Mike tomorrow. We have to turn in our cars to the cities of Los Angeles and Princeton respectively. That's not going to happen. So it's just a pure little semantic thing. that as you say, the Trump and Fox universes will try to blow up into a big thing.

But I also think it's something that if Joe Biden had to go over and do that again, he would not have said it in exactly that way. No, I don't think so either. But there is a sort of Bidenism that you saw over and over again where he would sort of accept the accusation but not the premise, sort of. Or you know, you're sort of like, damn right or order the code red, I guess. That's not exactly the right comparison. He wants to start taxing the oil companies.

And he's like, yes, I want to tax the oil companies. Now let me explain to you why that's a good idea. you know, but like, it doesn't always work. And I think this is one of those times where you're right. He might not a phrase in it exactly the same way. Yeah, I don't want to follow the, a few good men metaphor too far because that ends with Trump's fantasy of Bill Barr coming and taking Joe Biden to jail.

We don't we don't want that. Speaking of semantics, before we get out of the subject, I believe it was in this section where Trump referring to the Obama administration or Obama and Biden said the two of the, he sort of second, it didn't quite say the words he wanted to say. He said the two of them to put it nicely? What was the not putting it nicely version of that? Was he like was he like going to like drop a racial epithet in there or something? Like what was the two of them to put it nicely?

He was just identifying the people who did the thing. I don't know. I really, I really don't know. How do we think this debate affects or doesn't affect the election, which is 12 days away? this is going to be a hindsight is 2020 debate I think if Trump wins everyone will point to this debate is it being the moment as the moment when he turned things around

game change game change 2020 and I think if if Trump doesn't win people will say he he did fine but not you know he didn't have a knockout punch and that he needed that this was his last chance to get one yeah that's that

that's like the pundit playbook right let us then go back over everything that we weren't sure about in the moment. This was Manor from Heaven for the Pundit Playbook, because I think you can read this sort of any way you want. I mean, listen, Trump gave the presentation that he wanted to give. Even when we've talked to this before, he went into a little bit of the, his tendency to sort of actualize instead of argue

when he was saying, like, talking about, in the race part, it was like, take a look what's happening with the voting Joe. Like, you'll see that they, you know, they remember what you did with the crime bill, all that kind of stuff. He a couple of times went to that tactic where he was just like the presumption of getting, of winning, of doing well in state. So Pennsylvania knows you're not that whatever. That's part of his playbook consciously or unconsciously, that he just sort of will point at

a thing and say it's happening and you know it's not, and we all know it's not actually happening. He's hoping that it will happen and he's going to make it happen by saying it's happening or whatever. But this is a long way of saying, I think Trump did what he set out to do. And I think that he saw some, you know, some specific places, some specific things, some specific voting groups he wanted to go after. And I think he did it somewhat effectively. I think that if there was anybody who was sitting at home waiting to be convinced by Donald Trump. And this is not the undecided voter voting block at large. It's just like the people who are, who voted for Trump four years ago and are just like enough disheartened, they might not cast a ballot. But they're

waiting for Trump to talk them into it. This probably did that. and but I, but I don't know if that bears any real consequence. I thought Joe Biden's performance, we saw how Joe Biden got to bounce up from the last, from the last debate, got a, you know, I mean, he's, he's on an upward trajectory after all of these kind of head to head, these big moments in the, in the campaign. And I think we might see another Biden bounce, another small Biden bounce again, just because more people are being exposed to somebody who's not Donald Trump. Yes. And, and again, we have Donald, if Joe Biden's job at some point is to just go out there and be a plausible president of the United States,

when you have a big lead like this, nights like this help him right in the aggregate. Even if you can pull a few things, they're going to be, you know, on the team Trump tweets tomorrow. And, you know, you're going to get your, you know, rent a Republican politician to go out on Fox News and say that that's not, that's, I mean, I just think if we can torture a football metaphor a little bit, Joe Biden came into this debate up, two touchdowns or four touchdown. Right. And when you're in that position, it's not, the idea is not to be disastrous. And I think also the Hunter Biden part of this is like,

that is again, this weird, weird thing that the mainstream press cannot confirm. The mainstream press does not have access to those alleged emails. So it just sort of hangs weirdly in the ether. I did think, I forgot to mention this earlier, but I did think it was so weird that Donald Trump and company

just kept saying they were going to spring that on Joe Biden tonight. Didn't you find that funny? You know, like weird, like a football team said, ha ha, I hope my opponent's defense will be ready for my secret flea flicker play right before the game starts. You're not supposed to tell them. If you had said Statue of Liberty,

the metaphor of it too confusing, I think. The, um, the, yeah, it was very weird. It seemed, it did seem like there was a lot, there were a lot more,

leaks from the Trump debate prep. I mean, probably because Trump, I think, spent a total of like one or two hours in debate prep. Everybody who was like on the debate prep team just had a lot of time to be leaking stories to the press or whatever. But like it did seem like there was an inordinate number of Trump debate prep leaks getting out there. Not leaks, you know what I mean?

I mean, the stories getting out there. Sure. And I'm sure that the Hunter Biden stuff just was put out there at some level just to make Biden go in on a, his heels, right? But I think you're right. I mean, I think that what you started off by saying that, you know, Biden was up, you know, a couple of touchdowns and, and was playing defense. I mean, that's, listen, I don't know how. Now we sound like professional pundits. I regret the football. Do you really? Kind of. Here, let me contribute to the problem. Clean it up for me,

David. I'm not sure that Joe, I mean, listen, Joe Biden's in a great position for Joe Biden, because Joe Biden, like, runs the option, right? I mean, it's not like he's going to hit a knockout blow in any debate. He's running off tackle a lot. Yeah, exactly. And he, and, but, but he, he did, I felt like he, I don't think anyone can say that Joe Biden came out with the intention of doing just enough. He, he, he, he, he put his best foot forward time after time tonight.

And I think that that'll bear out in his favor. I don't know that, uh, you know, I mean, I, I don't, like I said, you can't, you can't say he was just, just trying to get by. but the end result is that he probably did just enough, right? I mean, and go ahead. Well, just one more question. If Donald Trump came out and more or less did what he wanted to do tonight, speaking of hindsight, if you're Donald Trump and you executed a sort of plan tonight,

aren't you going to look back at last week's missed opportunity and say, why didn't I just agree to do a remote debate and have two shots at this instead? of just one shot at this after so many people in this country have already voted? Yeah, I mean, obviously there's just a sort of backdoor play of trying to delegitimize the election or trying to have an excuse when the election doesn't go your way. But I'm sure he honestly, I mean, he probably believed that the opposing town halls would work out in his favor, right?

This would be some sort of rating of extravaganza, be a new thing. He could take credit for creating it, blah, blah, blah. But, but yeah, I mean, honestly, I don't know how much ground Trump can make up by seeming, it's not even presidential, by seeming like, like, passable. Semi-normal. But he did accomplish that tonight, and it feels like, I think if we had seen a passable, a semi-normal, a not disqualifyingly unpresidential Trump, for the past couple of months, or even for the past, I mean, heaven forbid the past six months or

something like that, I think the Biden campaign would be a lot more nervous right now. So you're right. I mean, why not give, I just don't think he's, I don't think he's constitutionally capable of being this person. And I mean, I don't mean that as necessarily as an insult, but I don't think he can be this person night after night. And I don't think he wants to. And I think that, you know, that's not, that's not this guy. I'm going to agree with you, David. I don't think Donald Trump is constitutionally capable of being president, capital or smaller case

C. Special bonus press box listeners, I called up Peter Hamby earlier today. You know Peter Hamby, Snapchat, Vanity Fair. We had a great discussion on how 2020 is covered from cable news to newspapers. Listen up. All right, Peter Hamby's here.

He's the host of Snapchat's Good Luck America, writer at Vanity Fair. First off, Peter, with anyone covering this campaign, I feel I need to start with a journalistic wellness check two weeks until election day how is your sanity holding up i literally texted my college friends the other day on our group chat and they keep sending through just like hair on fire outrage tweets and links and i was just like stop texting me about trump i do it all day long i don't need it from you guys too so i'm just like exhausted by informationally um but

on my previous elections like i'm absolutely not traveling as much as i would have in a previous campaign. So my, you know, my back ache from sitting on airplanes is not here. I feel everybody

was kind of doing well and then we got to the week that included both Leslie Stahl and Borat and it sort of pushed everybody into kind of a more

apocalyptic phase on Twitter, just a tan. Did you notice this? Yeah. And I like, again, I woke up this morning

and watched the Trump version at least of the 60 minutes interview. And I gave it like five minutes. I'm like, I know the

I know what you're doing here. I know you're trying to troll the media and gin up the tension and outrage in any way you can. And I was just like, I'm going to wait until Sunday. I'm fine with this. I'm waiting for linear television. Think about that. Yeah, I believe that. Shocking.

I still watch 60 minutes, though. I do like 60 minutes after football. I like that little tick, tick while I'm cooking dinner or something. That's a nice little tradition I have. Same here. Same here. Yeah. So many things I want to ask you about.

Let's start with cable news because you came up in this business as a producer and then a reporter at CNN. What sticks out to you about the way cable news has covered this election? Yeah, I think there's been this drift in the Trump era that hasn't really been called out or paid attention to enough, which is that there have always been panels and fighting on cable news. I mean, John Stewart famously called out Tucker Carlson and Paul Bagelon crossfire back in 2004. And that was like a big deal basically saying they, you know, peddle in outrage and false equivalencies, et cetera. that's really become the standard operating procedure for cable. And that's even before the pandemic when you had to do sort of interviews over Zoom and Google Hangouts or Cisco or whatever.

But this story jumps out of me. I was in South Carolina this time covering the South Carolina primary. And I used to work at CNN. And I went on John King's show and did a stand-up from the corner of Jervais in Maine and Columbia, South Carolina, right in front of the South Carolina Statehouse. with a CNN photographer that I've known forever. And I was like, hey, man, what's going on? I'm great to see you.

And I was, like, out filming with my Snapchat crew. And then those guys were, like, swapping tips about their cameras. And I was like, I feel like there's not as many CNN reporters here on the ground as there were four years prior, eight years prior, you know, covering these primaries. And this photographer, who I don't name was just like, yeah, man, like our game right now is, you know, do at big town hall like they did to their crumeration. Credit CNN did a bunch of town halls with candidates like Mayor Pete and Biden and Warren. And then go back to the studio for some analysis, you know.

And I noticed that on election night in 2018, too. In previous midterm elections, you would have reporters all over the country. And they did, but they didn't go to them. They mostly stuck to programming in the studio, you know, to John King's great credit. And Steve Kornacki does this on MSNBC. Those guys are nerd and sponsored the map. And that stuff is extremely useful. but there just feels like the heat of cable is based in studios at this point where you have panelists and contributors

sort of chewing over the day's news or fighting over the day's news and I think that seems obvious, but that's a pretty significant change from maybe eight years ago. It is interesting, and especially on big nights, like after a debate or after a night of the convention on CNN, we have like the A panel and you kind of get it worked out and everybody gets their opinion and then we go to the B panel. and then at some point we get to the Rick Santorum panel, you know, just we keep cycling through. And it's not just panels dominating.

It's different panels dominating, right? Like panels competing with other panels to weigh in. It is very strange. Yeah, my last election I did there at CNN at least was 2014. And the main panel during the sort of like primetime poll closing hours, 7, 8, 9 p.m. was, you know, like your David Axelrods and like the big, big shots, Anderson or whatever. And then I remember I went on at like, you know, 11 p.m.

Which is so cool. I mean, like, you know, half the country is still awake watching and like hungry for this stuff. But it was like, you know, I was surrounded by Jake Tapper and Kevin Madden and, you know, I think Bacari Sellers was on there with me and we were riffing. And it was great. And a lot of people were watching. And I was like really hopped up on caffeine. I think did pretty well.

But yeah, at some point in the night, then they go to like CNN International. So, you know, the people on the East Coast can go to bed and then they'll let the Australian anchor take over for the rest of the night. Do you think cable news has gotten smarter about covering Trump over four years? I do. Look, I mean, if you're a casual viewer tuning into CNN or MSNBC right now, it's hard to walk away thinking. these are just outwardly hostile networks to Donald Trump. And I only say that because, you know, you look at the lower thirds that pop up on the screen at some points and they're doing live fact-checking.

But sometimes it's just like pure snark. And look, Trump is, you know, could be out of bounds and aberrant 90% of the time. But, you know, the rest of the time he's a standard issue Republican despite his performance every day. And, you know, I do think that I watched the sort of the vice documentary enemies of the state the other night, which I thought I wouldn't want to watch because we've all rehashed and lived through and shoot over the 2016 campaign over and over again. But it was pretty well done. And, you know, I had some colleagues on there and some friends on there. And we forgot that, you know, CNN gave like a full two hours of air time to like waiting for Trump to arrive at a rally in Indiana.

you know, they allowed Trump to call in to CNN after, I think, the Cleveland debate and just rant for half an hour unfiltered without ad breaks about Megan Kelly. So, you know, in some ways it feels like the Trump presidency for CNN has been a little bit of an overcorrection, you know, making up for some of the earned media attention they gave Donald Trump. And, you know, on the flip side, I do think that the idea of, it's impossible to be. real-time fact-checking, but I think the post facto fact-checking has been good. I, you know, think that, you know, they've really thrown some really good reporting muscle at the Trump administration, all the networks have. But look, I mean, cable just is what it is. It thrives on ratings, attention, conflict, and that stuff hasn't really changed. And, you know, the, even before we social media sort of took over.

over our politics and became the culprit for polarization or whatever, cable news was doing this stuff, well before social media came along. Social media accelerated, but Fox News was obviously, you know, the worst offender for a long time. But I'm interested, Brian, and what happens, you know, if and when Trump loses, how does cable respond?

Do people start to tune out cable? I mean, ratings were already going down before Trump came along. Or do they just see, out loud voices even if Trump's not in office, right? Do you get the Maga person, you know, who's the state party chairman in Texas to come on and fight with, you know, the Democrat that they booked from the progressive left? I mean, that doesn't feel like it's going to go away, even if Trump does. So I'm mentioning that question, too, and beyond just cable, but also print,

because I feel the media spent the last four years building this huge apparatus to cover Trump. They were like one billion political reporters right now at the Times and the post. And then over on CNN, right, we got Daniel Dale, as you say, walking the battlements, you know, just ready, ready to fact check at a moment's notice. But if President Biden is not tweeting all the time, if he's not providing round the clock content, right, if he's fibbing rather than lying on a world historical scale like Trump does, what are all these people going to do all day? Like, what does a 24-7 news cycle look like with President Joe Biden? Yeah, I mean, I think that, look, I think there is a level of political exhaustion,

and I think intentionally eyeballs will move elsewhere in some respects, but it would be naive to say that cable will just, you know, move into this new placid era. We all watched cable before Donald Trump, you know, it was. There were lots of really great reporters on these channels. But, you know, in primetime, the name of the game is the sort of debate panel. And then, you know, even during the day, it's bookers and producers harvesting outrageous videos or tweets from the internet and then booking ex person to come on so they can roast them. You know, it's not, it's kind of like the Ben Shapiro, like owning the liberals thing, like, buy another name. You are there to, you know, in some cases, interview people combatively and hope that it becomes explosive.

And then you shift that content to your various properties. What I'm interested, though, is also there's this progressive left that became politically sentient in the Trump era. that they sort of, there's a lot of people, especially on Twitter, who discovered politics when Trump won and became activated and engaged. And, you know, some of them are super earnest. Some are really dumb. And when they started reading the newer times or subscribing to the Newer Times and reading the Washington Post, I think a lot of people understood the press to be on their side.

Right? I think a lot of liberals understand that the press needs to be a check on Donald Trump. Trump. And you see this on Twitter all the time. The minute a reporter utters something vaguely critical about Joe Biden. They're like, do better. Like, he's not the bad guy. Like, in other words, I think the resistance left is in for a bit of a rude awakening when, you know, they turn on the Brian Williams show at 11 p.m. in July of 2022. And they're talking about some New York Times investigation into, you know, the Biden Pentagon, you know? And like, it's just like the press isn't on the side of the left, at least in my mind.

And that's going to be an interesting schism, I think, that might happen in the Biden years. I want to ask you about print, too, because way back in 2013, which now feels like, you know, a thousand years ago, you wrote this paper about how Twitter had basically changed campaign reporting, change the whole idea of what Timothy Krause called the boys on the bus. Let us fast forward to 2020. Because of the coronavirus, there really is no campaign bus, much less travel for political correspondence, president company included.

How do you think that has changed the way this campaign was covered? Yeah, I, in a few ways, I think. First of all, the first presidential campaign I covered was 2008. So this is my fourth presidential. So I'm not like Dan Balls or like Johnny Apple or whatever. Not yet. Not Johnny Apple yet. Not yet.

But when I covered the 2008 campaign, I was on press charters and staying in hotels with the bunch of campaigns in the primaries, but Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and John McCain in the end. When you were out on the road, the whole senior brass was out. So like you could be at the bar, you could be at the steakhouse, you could be, you know, in the hotel lobby and bump into a campaign manager who was out for a few days or bump into a senior advisor or it was a great way to get and harvest news and tips and send that back to high command in Washington. That began to diminish in 2012. Like they're just the senior staff didn't really go out on the road with Mitt Romney, you know, by Obama was president. So there was like a larger protected bubble around him. you know, it was true to some extent in 2016, but like if we're talking general elections,

there's just a diminishing utility already to going out on the road as a reporter because you're just in this bubble. You land in a city, you go to the rally, you know, you leave the rally, you get in the motorcade, you go back to the airport, you fly to Raleigh, and then you do it all over again. And like, we can watch that stuff from home on our live streams. The stuff that I miss traveling for is, I know this sounds corny, but just talk. talking to voters and then talking to local activists and sort of state party chairman, the kind of stuff that happens away from the big rallies, that's where you pick up a lot of important texture about campaigns. So with coronavirus, because despite the best efforts of the media and think the Trump campaign to make this more of a volatile, interesting race than it actually is, like there hasn't been that much change in the campaign. So the stuff that I'm missing right now is, is again, that sort of texture of. you know, just talking to regular people. And I would love to be in some of these interesting

red state Senate races, frankly, like talking to those folks. Like in Kansas, South Carolina, you know, I'm probably not going to travel to Alaska, but like that would be interesting rather than going to like a Joe Biden rally where or Donald Trump rally, which is like you kind of can cover that stuff from home. So the idea is we're not on the bus, but the bus was not yielding a ton of stuff anyway.

So losing it entirely, you don't lose 100% of coverage. You lose something on the margins. Yeah. Look, here's and here's, this is the core of the whole Twitter isn't real life argument that there needs to be a distinction made. You can be like Tim Cross wrote about someone on the bus in the bubble. I firmly believe that the best political reporters travel nonstop and spend time not just covering the presidential race, but House and Senate race is down. ballot races. Interesting, mayor's races or special elections that tell us something about the electorate. If you have spent a good amount of time on the road in the last few years, you

have a healthy perspective about not just like what Republicans, Democrats, care about, but what the difference is between the sort of high information political obsessives that dominate the Twitter conversation versus people who just have lives and kind of don't care about politics or maybe tune in when there's two weeks left, right? Those are called quote-unquote low-information voters. That sounds pejorative, but that's like most people. You know, like Pew has done two or three studies on this stuff, like something like the bottom, but like 10% of Twitter users create 80% of its content. And most of that content is about politics. Like Twitter is this like niche comment section for political dorts that somehow dominates the national conversation.

Most people aren't on it. I work at Snapchat. and we have like 100 million more users than Twitter. Like Snapchat is significantly larger than Twitter, but you wouldn't know that from the national political conversation. So again, the bubble stuff is diminishing in value. It's a great way to learn about a campaign if you're a young reporter. I did my first campaign. But once you get beyond that,

I think it's important to sort of hit the road and travel outside of the bubble and check yourself against the kind of stuff you see on Twitter and cable news. Speaking of the Twitter bubble and the niche tweets of let us say a handful of people. You had this really interesting piece the last month in Vanity Fair

where you got into the weeds of Democratic campaign ads. And you had this line about the Lincoln Project, which I love. He said the Lincoln Project, quote, unleashed an avalanche of clap emojis on social media and won praise from the likes

of Joy Behar and Share. By the way, not on a CNN panel. Yes. Somehow they They didn't make even the, even the C-Team CNN panel. As we get to the end of this campaign, what was the value of the Lincoln project or lack of value, do you think of it? If you talk to anyone who is opposed to Donald Trump, whether they're never a Trump person or someone on the left, they will say anyone who's on our team and getting Donald Trump out of the office, we are fine with. privately, Democratic operatives and other, you know, folks in the sort of, you know, maybe moderate ecosystem who aren't like in project people, see it as a grift, you know,

to put it bluntly. I mean, you have a lot of very serious veteran Republican consultants who, and I tweeted this earlier in the year, are very good at those like nut cutting, skin appealing negative ads that Republican consultants have been good at for so long. At the same time, those consultants are also good at ingratiating themselves with big donors and figuring out ways to make money. And there are a lot of talented people that work over there, but the piece you're alluding to that I wrote for Vanity Fair was about this new sort of strategy called creative testing where Democrats can use a variety of technological.

tools at scale to figure out which ads persuade people and which don't. And ads, I know this sounds crazy to people who may maybe inhabit the left or retweet the Lincoln Project or live on Twitter, ads that directly attack Donald Trump. And quite frankly, ads that just include a lot of politicians and sort of Washington debates really turn people off. Like people are sort of over saturated with this stuff anyway and don't want to see any more of it. Ads that are actually, I know it sounds boring, but about issues that are positive, that are colorful, that are diverse, that aren't about politicians specifically, perform really well. And so the Lincoln Projects adds, again, their mission is to get under Donald Trump's skin. That's working. But they've raised a lot of

money that could go to building long-term democratic infrastructure. Are these Republican consultants going to turn around and invest their money in the Democratic State Party in Tennessee, Virginia, Alaska? probably not but they are investing in some of these Senate races against Republican incumbents so that's good I'm just interested to see what they do with it there's just a whole grift on the internet where you know even Republican consultants like Steve Schmidt who enabled Sarah Palin and gave her talking points attacking President Obama can now go on MSNBC and like make tortured World War II illusions and get again resistance clap emojis but is that changing the narrative.

I don't know. It's funny because the ad you allude to the sort of anti-Lincoln project ad, the one that has, that is about Joe Biden or is about, you know, things other than tearing down Donald Trump. That seems to be the Biden campaign's actual closing ad barrage here. I saw that one with the Star-Spangled Banner sort of playing underneath it. They had one during the Monday night football the other night with this linebacker and I think it was Northern Arizona University talking about how he'd lost his season and talking. and talking about, I mean, they seem to have figured that out and seem to be leaning absolutely in the other direction, are they not? Absolutely. I mean, the group I mentioned fellow Americans, they've been doing testing, Priorities USA, the Democratic SuperPact has been doing a lot of this testing.

The Biden campaign has been doing a lot of this testing. They understand, again, Twitter isn't real life, that politics isn't fun for most people, right? Politics is actually stupid and broken for most people, and people don't like politician. So the Biden campaign needs validators. In some cases, weren't politicians. Steph Curry during the Democratic Convention is a good example. The kid who was stuttering. Another great example.

Sam Elliott narrating that ad, great example. And then, again, this is boring in D.C. because D.C. cares about conflict and horse race. But, you know, people care about coronavirus right now. People want to go to concerts and games. People want to see their grandparents. And, like, they don't give a shit about, like, the associate. at Attorney General that Trump fired or like some Leslie Stahl interview.

Like that is just such, it's not even background noise. It's like, it's just radio silence. Like most people just like don't pay attention to that stuff. So the Biden campaign is leaning in very heavily to that, those kinds of messages in the final days. And, you know, Fox actually had a great piece up this week saying that the Trump campaign was too online. Like they're the ones focusing on these like just niche magas.

things that like most people have no knowledge of. And I think that's true. Let's say Joe Biden winds up winning this election by a healthy margin in the electoral college. And you had to a portion credit here to Joe Biden's campaign being smart, Donald Trump's campaign being hapless, and then external events like the coronavirus, unemployment, all these kinds of things. How much credit do you think?

Joe Biden's campaign should get? I think the number one issue in the election is Donald Trump. Coronavirus is a corollary issue to Donald Trump. Even before coronavirus, I was of the opinion that Donald, or that Joe Biden would be in the poll position in this race. Donald Trump is polling at, you know, levels that Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter accomplished on Election Day when they got wiped out. I think H.W. Bush was at 32% approval rating heading into the election. He lost in 92.

And, you know, Donald Trump is running closely behind. He's an unpopular president. Like, I, polls are showing Biden with a huge lead, but I like to go back to fundamentals. Like, what do we know? All of the energy is on the Democratic side, the fund. raising. Every election, special election, gubernatorial race going back to 2017 has favored Democrats. Democrats won more votes in the 2018 midterms. A lot of the competitive House seats in 2018, where Democrats won by a couple points, are now being marked as safe Democrat. Like, you know,

I wrote in Vanity Fair this week that a district outside of Kansas City, on the Kansas side of Kansas city, has internal polling, has Trump losing there to Biden by 15 points. Like, if Trump is losing districts like that in eastern Kansas, it's very hard to see how it went. So to answer your question, coronavirus accelerated, I think, what was already happening, which was just a popular revolt against Donald Trump. And then the one thing I'll say about Biden, because this campaign, especially now that they have so much money and can afford to experiment and do interesting things and be everywhere, has been good in the general election for the most part. They weren't that good for, a good bit of the primaries.

But this is always about the candidate. Joe Biden, you know, maybe Bernie Sanders is the only other person in the Democratic primary who had a consistent message from day one. And this is very simplistic and very boring. All of the Democrats who lost a Democratic primary lost in one way or another because they didn't have a message that was both consistent and connected with the American electorate. And Joe Biden has been saying the same effing thing since. It's day one of his primary campaign that he's saying today.

And that's what winning campaigns do. So I was texting with some Democratic friends the other day. And they were like, I was like, man, thank God you guys didn't nominate anyone other than Joe Biden. You know, of all people, like imagine if Trump was running against Bernie or Warren or Kamala or Pete right now. Like, would the race be a 10-point lead and possibly heading to 400 electoral vote blowout? hard to see that. So, you know,

credit to Biden on that front. Yeah. And I think that's, that it really goes to why maybe it is hard for reporters to give a ton of credit to Joe Biden. I mean, part of this goes back to the whole bumbling Uncle Joe character that merged way back when his other presidential campaigns, which went nowhere.

There's the fact that he's not very online, you know, which sort of is weird for political reporters who are extremely online. But I think part of it is what you're saying is that it's it was boring, right? I mean, it was, you know, every time there was something, something happened on resistance Twitter, Joe Biden looked at it and goes, eh, I'm just going to force that down the toilet. And that's not going to be part of my campaign. I just not going to do it.

I fully agree with you. I mean, there was a whole week of a new cycle during the Democratic primaries about Pete Buttichich raising money in a wine cave and, you know, Elizabeth Warren attacking him for. it although she also raised money from rich private it was just like this is this is stuff that political hobbyists care about um but joe biden his north star is a voter in duke or tampa or obviously scranton and they don't care about that kind of thing at all um so uh great credit to him on that front politically yeah and he just seems he just seems like a different creature than most political reporters you know he totally yeah yeah no no that's the thing most most political

reporters are young, you know, in their 20s. They are extremely online. And look, the incentive structure, if you're a reporter these days on the internet is clicks and attention. That doesn't mean you can't be a smart reporter or writer, but, you know, that's nudging you in a direction where you want to create content for, you know, Twitter and for the algorithms and for search that gets shared. And, and like Biden just didn't come up in that world. And most, you know, I'm not saying that the world is an analog world. There are no online and offline lives anymore. Like, we all have our screen experiences and our phones with us constantly.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the political obsessives on the internet aren't necessarily talking about the same things that everyone else on the internet is talking about. You can watch Peter Hamby on Snapchat's Good Luck America. You read his political pieces in Vanity Fair. follow him on Twitter where he's living his best online and offline lives simultaneously. Peter, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you so much, Brian. That's awesome. All right, thanks to Peter Hamby. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis, researched by Chris Almeida, production magic by Erica Cervantes. David, we're back Monday with something very special.

Kind of a long seven months here in the media podcast business. Oh, yeah. So now that the debates are over, and before we finish off the 2020 election, we're thought we were due for a special mental health break episode of the press box in which we don't mention Donald Trump. We don't mention Joe Biden. Not even in jokes or in passing. Not even in passing. And we don't mention the coronavirus. All right. We'll do a bunch of fun stuff, including having Agent Sonia author Ben McIntyre.

Honest Abe tells you to join us on Monday for more lukewarm takes about the media. Yeah, see you then, David. See you later, Brian.