The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - The Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt: Election Special

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

Steve Schmidt, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and a communications and public affairs strategist, joins Scott for a special episode of The Prof G Show. Steve and Scott bust into everything you need to know ahead of the election, predictions, campaign strategies, and what’s in store for the Lincoln Project post-election. Follow Steve on Twitter, @SteveSchmidtSES Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to a special episode of The Prof G Show. In today's episode, we speak with Steve Schmidt. Steve is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and a communications and public affairs strategist. He was portrayed most importantly by Woody Harrelson in the original scripted drama Game Change, starring Juliet Moore. Julianne Moore? She was literally born to play Sarah Palin. He's also a very nice man. I got invited to one of these fancy Washington dinners where it was me and a bunch of impressive

people. Notice how I distinguish the two talking about the election, and they had invited the guy who was running the Democratic National Committee convention, or running the convention, and we were there to brainstorm ideas. And Stephen took me aside and said that he had just read my book, Algebra of Happiness, and how meaningful it was for him at his stage of life. So he's a very, so obviously I like the guy. But he strikes me as a very, not only a very smart guy, but a very soulful person.

Anyways, here's our conversation with Steve Schmidt. Steven, where does this podcast find you? Park City, Utah. Park City, you're one of those guys. Right. Nice. So state of play. Give us a state of play. Let's start with the presidential race. What do you think is going to happen? What are the key

levers or dynamics? Well, let me say, I was on a podcast last week with my friend James Carville, and we were talking about this. David Plouffe was on the podcast and Stuart Stevens, and James just articulated perfectly how I feel about this. And I'm going to try to divide how I feel about something and then analyze it intellectually. But every concept that I have, and I just turned 50 about the country is on the line here. And as James pointed out, that anybody who has ever bet against the country, bet against America, would have lost money ultimately in the bet. This will be repudiated on Tuesday. And Donald Trump is going to be humiliated. And I say that because I believe in my country. And despite all of our flaws, there are more of us than there are of them. And we're

not going to live under a minority rule of a Trumpist regime that's inimically hostile to American democracy. And so what I see is the walls tumbling in. What I smell is this stench and decay of defeat, the musk of panic in the air. If you look at the body language of the Republican senators and you look at the district by district polling. So right now, both emotionally, but also intellectually, analyzing the numbers. Donald Trump's in a lot of trouble. There's a chance he could win. But overwhelmingly, there's a greater likelihood that this will be a very significant victory for the vice president. And it was before my time, but historically, it looks more and more like the 80 Reagan-Carter race,

where the bottom just started falling out for Jimmy Carter in that race, about two weeks to go. And that's what's happening to Trump. And lastly, people are really disconcerted by seeing the rallies, right? And television provides to some degree this optical illusion, right? We're all home. Everybody's provides to some degree this optical illusion. Right. You know, we're all home. Everybody's trying to be cautious and mitigate risk. And you see these maskless rallies of tens of thousands of people. It's jarring. Right. But it's a big country. There's 300 million people in the country. Right. The 10 the 10,000 doesn't speak to a rising movement. Instead, it speaks to a declining one. But everywhere Trump goes in these states, he's putting downward pressure on his own numbers

because people don't like it. They don't like the rallies. They don't like the recklessness. They don't like the exposure. And so it's just we're coming to the end of this. And soon we'll be in the space where we can ponder the catastrophe that Donald Trump has wrought. So first off, word, amen, right on, brother. I think all of us, though, who believe you're right, recognize we desperately want you to be right, and we're scared because we're like a dog that was hit by a car in 2016, where the polls showed Hillary was up at one point double digit pretty late in the game, and then we saw what happened. What's different this time? Why does this look like an actual landslide with a capital L? Well, I think that there's, you know, I think that there's mythology

around the errancy of the polling from four years ago. I mean, the reality is, is if you were looking at the polling averages coming into the election, Hillary was up 2.8. She won by 2.1. You know, what isn't widely known, but is, you know, to people involved in politics, is the Clinton campaign suspended its polling operation in the beginning of September. They had a real lack of imagination that they could be susceptible to a Donald Trump candidate in Michigan and Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. And so the reality of 2016 was whomever that race was about was the person who was losing. And the race was about Donald Trump for 99% of it until we got to the very end. James Comey made it enough about Hillary Clinton in that last week that by

78,000 votes in three states, she loses. And we can look back and you can examine in great detail the 2016 and the 2020 race. But in the end, and my friend and colleague Stuart Stevens says this all the time, in the end, the most inescapable conclusion of any in-depth analysis is the only thing that 2016 and 2020 have in common is they both have a two and a zero in front of them. Looking back, where were the fatal, the kind of the unforced errors? What did Biden do right? What did the Trump campaign do wrong? Assuming it does turn out the way we think it's going to turn out.

Well, this is in a race where a candidate made a mistake here and was tripped up here or had a wrong approach to the race. I mean, what this race is about, it has always been about, is one thing, and that's Donald Trump and his manifest on fitness to be president of the United States. In the end of the second decade of the 21st century, in a time of peace and prosperity, relatively, certainly against the whole of history, the American people, by 78,000 votes across three states, elected a man with no redeeming qualities, a reality television host, to be the president of the United States. And there was a real lack of imagination about the magnitude of a type of catastrophe that someone like Trump could cause.

And so what this race at the core about is this, is that Donald Trump told the most lethal lie in American history. Every Republican senator knew how deadly this was. And they all sat back and watched Donald Trump lie to the country. They all knew that he knew how deadly it was. Did any of them go to the floor of the Senate and do what Margaret Chase Smith did and rise up and deliver a statement of conscience like she did against Joseph McCarthy and say, end this madness? Nope, none of them did. Anyone go pound on a table in the Oval Office? None of them did.

Donald Trump is overwhelmed by history, by events. He's drowned by his incapabilities. What this election is about is the massive damage he's done to the country, but also to the spirit and the soul of the country. His racial incitements and divisions and antagonisms, his incitement of extremists that are heavily armed, his assaults on the rule of law, our institutions, and the unpardonable sin of speculating over and over and over again that the great miracle of this country, which is the peaceful transition of power that's been uninterrupted

since 1797, is dependent on whether he wins or not. This is an illiberal man with an autocratic fetish who is ignorant and hostile to the ideas and the ideals in the country in a way that no president has ever been. And that's what this election is about. I thought that was powerful. You should do this for a living, Steve Schmidt. Oh, wait, you do. You do. So, OK, so let's assume that this has been, I don't know, an American crime scene, if you will. But it feels as if there's 53 people who are complicit in this crime or accomplices, and that is Republican senators. How do you think this impacts them? Let's go down to the Senate. What do you think happens

in these Senate races? Well, I think Republicans are going to lose the Senate majority. And I think that Susan Collins is likely to lose. We've spent a lot of money, a lot of resources on the Lincoln Project and are and are rooting hard for Dr. Al Gross in Alaska, for Governor Bullock in Montana. Cory Gardner and Martha McSally are both going to lose. The North Carolina race with Tom Tillis is, if you hold a gun to my head today, I bet Cunningham narrowly. And South Carolina is going to be close. I think there's an outstanding chance

that Lindsey Graham loses to a much better man. But regardless, if you look at Kansas, you look where Mike Espy is in Mississippi, you look at Iowa, where Greenfield is ahead of Ernst, it's going to be a bad night for Republicans in the Senate. And I think that they're almost certain to lose their majority. And they expect that they'll lose it. It's not outside the realm of possibility that if the wave is big enough and Biden wins Texas, that Cornyn could go down in Texas. So it's going to be a it's going to be a historic night, I suspect. We'll be right back. investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea. Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. So let's talk a little bit about the Lincoln Project. I'm fascinated with brands, especially brands that kind of go from zero to 60 in record time. We've seen TikTok go from being an interesting niche brand two years ago to a global brand. It strikes me that in terms of American brands, they've gone from zero to 60 in about 12 months. The Lincoln Project was right up there. People seem fascinated with the brand and what you guys are doing. Give us a little, can you give us a little behind the music here? How did this thing come together? And what do you find that is working really well? Why I think America is so fascinated with it. And

then post November, kind of November the 4th, what is, where does the Lincoln Project go? It strikes me as a brand that you guys can and will monetize to great effect post-November 3rd? What are you guys going to do? Well, so I think a couple of things. We started this because we were in the fall of 19, we were watching the Democratic debates. I was really worried. The name that I never heard in the debate was Trump. And I thought the race was about one thing. Like we said earlier, I thought it was about Trump. And we had a bunch of us who went out and communicated that in an op-ed. And the result of that op-ed was we raised a million dollars. And when people ask questions about what the Lincoln Project is going to do, we always say, well, we stated it very, very clearly in that origination document,

and we meant it. And that this organization, which now is followed by millions of people, that's accumulated 500,000 different donors, that has some real affinity, was born out of a conviction and a belief. The belief is about a concept in the country that we have more in common than in disagreement, that Trump is an existential threat to the country, and that we're going to take the fight to him. And so we have fought as hard as we can to engage him. And he runs a billion dollar campaign. And we'll, by the time this is over, have raised $80 million. But to mount an insurgent campaign that would make us one of his principal antagonists and

be able to be at the tip of the spear and attacking him, defining him, setting a narrative, disrupting his campaign, disrupting him psychologically, unsteadying him, make him be responding to attacks as opposed to making them, and to fight Trump the way that Trump needed to be fought. And so the mission hopefully will be coming to a positive end in what's the first round. Trumpism isn't going away. The Republican Party, we believe, will be defeated in this election, but the result of its defeat will not be to do what a consumer brand would do, which is to make itself or the product more palatable to the marketplace. It's going to become more extreme. If there's 180 QAnon candidates running in this cycle, there'll be three times as many in the next cycle.

And there's a roadmap and a case study for how all of this goes. And that's the California Republican Party, which was the citadel of the National Party. And now the California Party is smaller than independent registrations in the state. And so you will see a more extreme party with a very early starting presidential race where the Trumpist agenda will be polished in advance by a new crew. Now, I talk to people in Washington and will say, well, Tom Cotton's probably the front runner. And, you know, my reaction to that is that's delusional. I think the Republican front runner at 24 is Tucker Carlson. Really? You don't think that you don't think the immunities will kick in and they'll go, OK, reality, SARS don't work. This far left weirdness doesn't work.

We've got to find a moderate. You don't think the Republican Party will try and pivot to the middle to reinvent itself? No. So first off, if you think about political power such as it is inside the Republican Party, think about it like a balloon, right? Squeezing part of the balloon and displacing air into one chamber or another does not change the composition of the air in the balloon. When Republicans are in the minority in the House and the Senate, where does power aggregate within that movement? And the people who will be running the party are Fox News, Sinclair, OAN, the talk radio hosts. Who's more powerful in that firmament, Laura Ingraham or Kevin McCarthy?

It's Laura Ingraham. And so let's say you're going to run for president. You're a Democratic candidate. What do you do, right? You go to New Hampshire, you go to Iowa, you go somewhere and you give a speech establishing your liberal bona fides, right? You used to be the Republican candidate, we go do the same thing, right? If it was a George W. Bush, right? And in 2000, the party had been tarnished by the Gingrich brand, right? You go out and you try to change the brand, right? And so compassionate conservatism was his mechanism to do so. And he went out and he talked about his bona fides as a compassionate conservative. Every one of these candidates, the first bona fides they're going

to have to demonstrate to a majority of the base of the Republican Party is their conspiracy theory bona fides. And the conspiracy will be that the election was stolen, stolen by the deep state. There was a coup. 30 percent of the country will never accept the legitimacy of this. And those people are a majority of the Republican Party. Right. And so. Well, you have majority, the party that believes that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim infiltrator and believes in the central tenets of QAnon theory. is in a continual motion as if a leaf afloat a river being swept away right to the crazy lake, which it will empty out into. The Lincoln Project is going to fight that. So our top targets in the 22 cycle are Marco Rubio and Ron Johnson, and will certainly be involved in the Florida and the Texas governor's races. But we are going to be an organization that's a pro-democracy organization. And so what we're going to fight for, and I think when people look back on the race, we've done a lot of work with allies in this race that will surprise people in the Puerto Rican community, in the Latino community, in the black community.

We have some great stuff going on, but we're going to be advocates for a renewed Civil Rights Act, a renewed Voting Rights Act, and a foreign national and nation election security act, civil service reform, ethics reform. So none of this can ever, ever happen again. And I think that there's a dividing line in American politics that's now clear. And all of us who came out of the Republican Party lost a fight within the party that we now take and put before the country. And we're not going to lose this fight. And the fight's over this. Here's the dividing line now in American politics. You got a majority of the country, and we count ourselves as part of this coalition, that believes the American idea and ideals for everybody. Everybody, Black, Latino, Asian American, gay Americans, everybody should get a shot at the American dream and have an equal chance to participate in the opportunities of American society,

including voting, most importantly. And then there's people who want to make those things more difficult. And one of the things that's been exposed in this Trump era is how broad that fault line is, how visible it is. And so we're going to be on the fight of democratic expansion. So talk a little bit more about the Lincoln Project. What was the Lincoln Project's superpower? Why were you guys so successful, whereas others have failed? And then, again, moving forward, you become, it sounds like you're picking your own issues as opposed to constituencies hiring you guys. Are you a media company? What's your superpower and what's the business model moving forward? Well, we've done, you know, we've done an experiment, you know, with streaming over the course of this, you know, we, we've stood up LPTV and the numbers on it are big. We have,

you know, six figure numbers of viewership accumulations in the millions. We're doing two shows a day. Point of view, we're interested in expanding that. And we have a very successful podcast. So we see ourselves moving in that direction. We've been approached by a lot of different people who have ideas. So first thing is, what's the nature of the fight? What is it that we're trying to do? What's the, and so our conception of what a political organization could be was this, is that what we have to do is to, we got to produce great content. Then we have to distribute the content, which means we have to target the content. which means we have to target the content.

And then we have to measure and assess the impact of the content. And we have to do those things as fast as possible. So in the 1950s, after the Korean War, there was a misanthropic Air Force colonel named John Boyd, who was considered to be the best fighter pilot in the Air Force, a brilliant engineer. And he was given the job of trying to see if there was a predictive decision-making loop that could be institutionalized that would lower the air combat losses that were deemed unacceptably high after the Korean War. And so he studied decision-making. And what came out of that is something called the OODA loop. And it stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And there's an exception to every rule, but there's really not one when it comes to the OODA loop. Whomever has the fastest OODA loop wins the contest, whether it's golf

or basketball, baseball, football, politics, business, whatever. And so we primed ourselves to be fast in our decision-making. Speed was important because size was a disadvantage. How does a small organization fight fight a billion-dollar political campaign. And so the person at a strategic level from a military history perspective that had the most resonance with us was the North Vietnamese commander, General Giap, who had to deal with the question of how do you fight the American army? Mm-hmm. How do you fight the air power? How do you fight the naval power, the technology, the artillery, and the targeting? And with General Giap, his strategy was called grab them by the belt, was to strike close enough at night on familiar terrain where the Americans cannot use any of those advantages to fight back. And so when outmatched, as Sun Tzu says, bring the tiger to the cave.

And our cave was Fox News. We knew where Trump was. We knew what he was doing at night. So what we attempted to do was to frame a narrative, to take the fight, to make him respond, to make him waste time, where other bigger groups could ultimately come in behind us, seeing that taking the fight to him was effective and collectively overwhelm him on the question of his deficiencies as president by making this race what it has always been about, which is about Trump. And so we had that approach. And then lastly, we were really influenced by the book that General Stanley McChrystal wrote with a couple of his colleagues from the McChrystal group, who are, one's a Harvard Business School professor, a couple of

them were Navy SEALs, but it's a case study of how they combated successfully the insurgency in Iraq against business organizations and decision-making and how, because of technology, decision-making has become so disaggregated. And so what we wanted to do was to create a movement that was able to aggregate the talents and the skills of the people who wanted to join, And everybody was welcome to be part of this. So many people sent us content and we assessed it. We used it with no pride of ego or authorship for a cause. And the cause was to defeat something that we all view as terribly bad. And so like in the end, I think it's a combination of conviction applied with the

experience of running political campaigns, hopefully, to make a difference in shaping a narrative that presented a choice that is stark and profoundly important for the American people. Yeah, it strikes me as really unusual and there's a certain genius to it. And in hindsight, you always think that, oh, that makes sense. But you don't realize how novel the idea was that you guys decided that your target audience was Trump as opposed to voters, that if you could poke the bear and the bear would lash out and waste energy and become distracted. It strikes me that putting that at the top of your list in terms of your target audience is a pretty novel way to go about it.

I also got the sense that you guys did a great job of kind of leveraging new, new mediums. The world does belong to the fast. It doesn't, it doesn't belong to the big. So let's, let's just, let's assume we're sitting here November the 4th and things have played out the way that both of us think they do. What happens immediately? I think a couple of things happen. One, I think people begin thinking about who is the Democratic president in 2024, just

by virtue of biology, and that is Joe Biden's age. The notion that there's a non-zero probability he may not run again in 2024. What dynamic do you think plays out there? And then you mentioned Tucker Carlson, but who do you think are some of the other more viable candidates? Nikki Haley, how do you think those two dynamics play out? Look, there's so much work to be done. And the Democratic Party is going to be in charge of the government. The grassroots of the party is further to the left than the Biden administration will be as a Democratic Senate majority will be when you look at the Democratic senators who would be coming in.

None of them are from the AOC wing of the AOC wing of the party. But I think there's going to be so much focus on economic recovery and on getting COVID under control that it's going to suppress a lot of that politics that plays out. Right. And keep it underground. I don't think you'll see a lot of it. The Marco Rubio, for example, is already making donor calls, right, you know, lining up people, you know, as he goes forward in 2024. And the Republican side is just going to start incredibly early. And, you know, I think that Biden's run a brilliant campaign. And I think he's entirely sincere when he talks about the need to bring the country together, right, to calm it down, to take it back down. And I think that's what we're going to see play out,

right, over the, you know, over the first 18 months. I think there's going to be a lot of legislation that happens. And there needs to be a resetting of the power dynamic between a formerly overzealous majority under Mitch McConnell and an ascendant one, whomever the Democratic leader is going to be. I mean, the Barrett confirmation was such an affront for the reasons that are specified by James Madison in Federalist 10, where he talks about the danger of faction over zealous majorities infringing on minority rights. And so there has to be a rebalancing of institutional power and a reckoning for Republicans in a democratic Washington that isn't manifested

by being punitive or disrespectful to the 45% of the people who voted against Biden or voted against Democrats in total. Do you think things get, I mean, you painted a fairly optimistic picture. Do you think things get better? Do you think there is a recognition that, okay, whatever the approach was here, I don't know if it's mandatory conscription. You mentioned something around national service where the great legislation in the 60s that was passed was somewhat of a function of the people. A lot of the people in Washington saw country first because they'd all served, or many of them had

served in uniform. Do you think that maybe we're maturing a generation of leadership that sees cooperation, that sees bipartisanship, or am I just smoking my own supply here? Well, before Trump, the worst president in the history of the country was Buchanan, and he was succeeded by the greatest president in the history of the country. I've always loved this story. It's William Tecumseh Sherman, the great Union battle captain of the Civil War, was a colonel in the army when Lincoln was elected. And he wrote a letter to a friend of his from the army, and he talked about his pessimism. He said, country is doomed. We've elected basically a backwards barbarian who's uneducated and has no capacity to deal with any of those issues. His friend was down on his luck and was selling firewood on a

street corner in Ohio. His name is Ulysses Grant. And the two of them last saw Lincoln together at City Point at the headwater of the James River near the end of the war, where Lincoln gave them final instructions for accepting the military surrender of Confederate forces. But he talked about his vision for reconciliation and healing in a country that North and South was 34 million souls and 600,000 had been killed in one of the bloodiest per capita civil wars in history, including up until this moment. And when he was assassinated, Sherman reflected on Lincoln's life when he was asked. And he said, I've met all the great men of the world, the emperors, the kings, the industrialists,

but I never met any man who possessed more of the qualities of greatness and goodness than Abraham Lincoln. And what's always been true about the country, almost providentially, is that it has produced the right leaders in the right moments. And I believe that Joe Biden at 77, a man whose life has been shaped by unspeakable tragedy, who has shown us his resiliency and his decency, who we know, someone who has sought the presidency and failed on two other occasions, is meeting his destiny, his moment, 77 years of age and a moment of profound crisis for the country. And I think what we're going to find is that the American idea and the ideal, combined with competency and calmness, is going to start to lower the temperature. And we have to understand as a country that we can't be each other's enemies. We don't want to be in a cold civil war against each other. You can't have 40% of the country with $400 cash available to them and succeed as a country.

Can't succeed as a country when 50% of Black and Latino kids in some major cities don't get to a high school diploma. Can't succeed as a country when everyone in the country, except the top 20%, are one medical illness away from financial calamity. We have to have conversations that break the cycle of short-termism, short-term thinking, and start talking about what do we want to build for the next generation. And I'll tell you another quick story, and this is a consequence of the Trump era. Franklin Roosevelt was the most important person who lived in the 20th century for the good. He saved capitalism, he saved democracy, and he saved the world. And FDR is the architect of the world we lived in until January 20th, 2017.

And he talked about his vision for the U.S.-led liberal global order at length and manifested it really for the first time through the Atlantic Charter in 1940. But one of his close confidants was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King. And Mackenzie King recollected what Roosevelt had said as he architected, through his vision, what this world would look like, this US-led liberal global order, the world that came to be, that lifted in time billions of people out of poverty, that spread democracy all over the world, that set rules and values and established a functioning United Nations. And what Roosevelt said was that he had no aspiration that this would last forever. He only wanted it to last

for as long and hoped that it could last for as long as every person who was alive on the day the war was won was still alive. And a child born on that day is 75 years old today. We're at a hinge in history where the most important events that took place in the last century will fade from living memory to the pages of history. The world order that FDR conceived of that was built by Harry Truman in maintenance from presidents from Eisenhower through Obama, this American era is at its end because of Donald Trump. We head into a new world past the boundaries of that old era. And we have so much work to do to repair our relationships and our alliances to be secure and safe in this century and prosperous.

And that's the work of this next presidency. But Trump has been a consequential president, a profoundly failed one, the worst in our history, a vile, low and mean man, but consequential because of the damage he has done and because of how precipitously he has pitched the future of the nation into a direction of decline. Steve Schmidt is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and a communications and public affairs strategist. He's also an MSNBC political analyst and has worked on numerous Republican campaigns, including President George W. Bush, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Senator John McCain. He joins us from his home in Park City. Thank you, Scott. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard,

please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Prop G Show from Section 4 and the Westwood One Podcast Network.