The Ricochet Podcast - Meet the Campaign Managers

Episode Date: September 22, 2015

Google, YouTube, and National Review present a discussion with the campaign managers of the 2016 season moderated by Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. Discussion participants include John Brabender (Rick Santorum), Chip Englander (Rand Paul), Terry Sullivan (Marco Rubio), Danny Diaz (Jeb Bush), and Barry Bennett (Ben Carson). You can also watch the video of the event here... Source

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Lending criteria, terms, and conditions apply. Over 18s only. Security and insurance is required. Permanent TSB PLC trading as PTSB is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Good afternoon and welcome to Google. I'm Lee Dunn, and I help run the elections team here. And I wanted to welcome everyone to what should be an interesting afternoon. Behind all the brilliant YouTube ads launched this cycle,

behind most of the creative debate one-liners and the best-staged town hall, there's a brilliant campaign manager. Today, we get to hear from the campaign managers. At Google and YouTube, we're once again proud to partner with National Review to bring a program to awe and inform all Americans about the elections process. And this promises to be an unpredictable and exciting 2016 cycle. Americans are hungry to know more about the candidates, the elections, the campaign managers. We've seen a 60% increase in election searches since 2008 cycle. Over 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every

minute, every day. We're proud to do our part today by live streaming this event with National Review on their YouTube channel. So I hope you go back and watch it again. But we're most proud that now all Americans can watch this event today, even if you're not part of the Beltway elite or living here in town. We're hoping that Kanye West's campaign manager is out there watching today and taking notes for his election on 2020. So now I want to turn it over to our host, the editor for National Review, Rich Lowry.

Thanks, Rich. RICH LOWRY, Thank you very much. Thanks, guys. Thanks for being here. Thank you to Google and YouTube for co-sponsoring this with us. I'd like to say that my logistical suggestion is that we would do all these interviews in keeping with Google's decorum and beanbag chairs separated by a foosball table. But that apparently is too radical for our friends at Google. And I just want to thank all these campaign managers for making the time to come out here. They are truly in the arena. There's nothing easier than being on the outside and

criticizing people for all the things they're supposedly doing wrong, which is what I, John, do for a career. But I've never run a campaign. I've never run for office. I've never had to deal with the press corps every day the way you guys do, although I may have gotten a hint of what it's like because eight weeks ago my wife and I had our first baby, a beautiful little girl. And she's probably, I imagine it's a little bit like dealing with the press corps. She's insatiable. She requires constant care and feeding.

And how's the baby? And if you displease her, she will whine and cry shamelessly. So this might sound familiar, John. So John Brabender is a chief strategist for Rick Santorum. And John, thanks so much for joining us. Glad to be here. So let me start out with what seems to be one of the big questions confronting your campaign as well as some others. It seems from the early indications that people aren't interested in traditional political

experience. They aren't interested in anyone who's been around the block a few times. And your candidate was in the Senate for a while but left in 2006 and has run for president once before and has been around for a while now. How do you make him fresh and new, or is that even necessary? Do you reject that premise? Well, yeah, let me start by doing two things just so we're clear. I feel a little bit like a fraud. I'm not a campaign manager. Our campaign doesn't have a campaign manager by design, which Rick, as you know, ran for president in 2012. We also basically did not have a campaign manager. We structurally have positioned campaigns differently because we feel like this isn't the 1960s anymore.

And number two is what I am is I'm a strategist. I'm the lead strategist in the campaign, and I'm the media consultant in the campaign. And what I really am finding kind of enjoyable, because I do a lot of press for the senator as well going on the air and stuff, is I'm getting asked the exact same questions that I got asked four years ago, where they say, well, you know, you have a candidate who lost his last race by 18 points. I hadn't brought that up yet. I'm there. He lost it by 18 points. You know, he's running last and, you know, all these other things. In fact, I will tell you last time with two weeks to go before Iowa, he was in last place in one poll in Iowa. And the only reason that was so notable is that he was behind John Huntsman,

who had pulled out of Iowa and even said, oh, well, I'm pulling out because in Iowa all they pick is corn. In New Hampshire, they pick presidents. So now, two weeks later, Rick Santorum ends up winning Iowa. And just to refresh everybody's memory, he won 11 out of the 30 states last time and tied two others as far as delegate counts, Michigan and Alaska. And probably the belief was if he would have won Michigan outright, that there's a lot of people believe Romney would

have got out of the race. So to us, understanding the fluidity of these type of races, understanding, you know, I mean, you look at the CNN poll yesterday, Scott Walker's under 1%. I remember sitting and having a lot of questions about three months ago, and people asked me, how are you going to stop Scott Walker? And so if you go back four years ago,

in the lead was Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, Romney was there, Gingrich was there, though. I mean, a lot of people, you know, didn't even, and Perry. And some of them didn't get, most of them didn't get past Iowa. And so you really have to take a look and understand the way these races are. And the first thing you have to understand is there's not one primary right now, or there's not one caucus. There's a lot of mini ones. Different people are running against different people. In other words, sure, Santorum's probably running against Huckabee to some degree, and maybe,

you know, Cruz is running against Chris, you know, whatever it is. So there's multiple primaries going on. Second of all, nobody's going to win this race by getting a bunch of 50% in states. They're going to win by getting a lot of 15% and 18%. And so you start running a race that way in these presidential and it's different. I've been involved in like the last four presidential races. I was with Rudy Giuliani and I can tell you it was the strangest experience of my life because we would sit in our war room and we would see all these places where Rudy was up by 15 points and nationally up by 15 points, yet we knew that he was going to have a lot of trouble because he wasn't going to be conservative enough for Republican primary voters. And so I think everybody's got to take a deep breath and understand this is unlike any other election. It's like those races on steroids. Or if you look,

John McCain probably came this close to getting out of the race when he ends up winning the nomination. And so, you know, again, I feel like I'm answering a lot of the same questions. We run our race. We don't do it on money. We do it on volunteers. You know, there's an interesting statistic. Last time in Iowa, Rick Santorum, I think, in a study spent $22 per caucus vote. Perry spent $768 per caucus vote. And so the other benchmark that I keep noticing everybody's trying to use is money raised. And money raised doesn't mean all that much anymore in Republican primaries because, trust me, when people walk up and vote on primary days, Republicans, they're rarely basing it on ads. And I do ads for a living. At least they aren't when there's 20 candidates or 16 candidates. When you get down to one or two, then they matter a lot more,

in my opinion. Let me press you on my initial question. do you reject the analysis that pretty much everyone has bought into that Carly, Carson, and Trump collectively being above 50 says people want outsiders, they want new and different? Are you reading that more as just an artifact of temporary polling that you've seen before and saw last time and everyone is over-interpreting? Yeah, I think, first of all, I do think there are some exceptions this time compared to any other election every place i go people say are you kidding me donald trump are you serious and the truth of the matter is and i'll be the first day this i went on cnn three weeks ago and said after the first debate that donald trump i believe his 15 minutes of fame will be up i was dead wrong

and the reason i believe i was dead wrong. And the reason I believe I was dead wrong is I didn't misunderstand Donald Trump. I misunderstood the people who were supporting Donald Trump. In fact, the closest I can give you to them is I think a lot of those people probably supported Ron Paul last time. They, you know, because we see where the more outrageous the behavior of Trump, he seems to solidify his base even more. And all that is to them is evidence that he is not going to be like everyone else. And so you start rules of engagement sort of go out the window when that starts happening. So number one, I do think there is this deep desire to be anti-Washington, absolutely without a doubt.

But second of all, you've got to factor into that, too, that in the early stages, that's all they know about some of these candidates is they're anti Washington. Herman Cain was an anti outside Washington candidate who went way to the top because of that. But people could tell you very little about Herman Cain and they didn't know if he should be president or not. And over time, I think it was proved that he shouldn't be president. I'm not telling you that that's necessarily going to be proven about Carly or about Ben Carson or Trump. What I'm telling you is we've gotten nowhere near that period where people have made that determination. Now, if you look at a difference between last time and this time, you mentioned some candidates are running against specific other candidates rather than the rest of the field. You mentioned Mike Huckabee.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I would put Ben Carson in that category. I would put Ted Cruz in that category. Maybe there are a couple I'm missing. But doesn't that make for a much more crowded and competitive playing ground in Iowa than you guys had last time? Absolutely. And I would say a much more credible field than we had last time. I mean, one thing we felt very comfortable last time is we could come in the top three in Iowa.

And once you have in the top three in Iowa, there's like a reset, not the Romney reset, but another reset where, you know, you shuffle the decks and you have a smaller number of candidates. And then we felt we could be the conservative alternative because we felt the other candidates that would move forward would probably not be all that conservative. And so we saw the path. This time, I like to say there's about 16 people running and none of them are probably the front runner. I mean, it's, you know, in fact, my argument with the RNC a little bit that I've been saying about trying to limit these debates, I think this might be the greatest field of any party putting together something in one party running for president in history. I think it's a remarkable field. And I think that you're seeing that when somebody like a Scott Walker is struggling, who, in my opinion, is a very, very credible candidate.

And so I think it's, I think, you know, they're all, they're all well behind in some sense. I mean, you look at the polls in Iowa, if you take the people who are at 1% and the people at 7%, it's the vast majority of the candidates right now. I mean, that just shows how good the field is, not how poor the field is. And I think it's difficult for every, I think in some sense, they're all long shots at this point. Now, there was a suggestion from Sean Spicer in an interview the other day that there won't be an undercard debate next time. Instead, they'll just be interviews. And you can read beneath the surface there. And it sounds like an attempt to sort of rush people off the stage and out of the debate. Do you think that interpretation

is correct? And if so, what would you do to push back against it? You know, I saw the comments, and I think that is how a lot of people interpret it. I think it's a huge mistake at this point to say, okay, we've had two debates, everything's been settled. You know how many debates there were last time? My client, Rick Santorum, participated in 23 debates. And so what the RNC did is said, oh, no, no, we're not doing this time. We're going to narrow it down to maybe 10, 11 debates. Okay, fine. 23 is probably too many.

Everybody got that. But now we're saying not only are we reducing the number of debates, we're going to pick and choose that the person at 3% is in, but the person at 2% is not. That's just ridiculous at this point. I mean, case in point is Carly Fiorina. What if they would have decided that in the first debate, that there was not going to be an undercard? Carly Fiorina would never have made it into the second debate in the higher level. So I just think at this stage, there's nothing advantageous for

anybody to do that. And how would you go about doing it? Because obviously, you know, the 11 on the stage this time around was too many. I agree. I think they shouldn't have done the way they did it. I think they should have done eight and eight or eight and seven. And I think it should have been random because frankly, I think you want a combination of people. I'll guarantee you, I don't know how many of you watched the first debate. It was actually pretty well covered. I'll take Mike Candidate. I'll take Lindsey Graham. They would have done just as well in that second debate. There's no doubt in my mind that, you know, Sam Thorne sat there for 23 debates and did great last time. I mean, right now, to use some of these as a factor to say that somebody at 4% or 3% is in, somebody at 2% isn't, they're first of all statistically tied. But second of all, that makes no sense as a party.

They still have variations. They're still running against different things. The other thing people have to understand is this presidential primary is not about a winner. It's almost more like three-dimensional chess. Who's in and who out will greatly change the field. And so Donald Trump, even if he's not the nominee, has greatly changed this election and will change this election. And so you can take somebody out who you say shouldn't be there, but you're giving somebody an advantage by doing that. And I just think that it's it doesn't make sense when you're talking about people who are two term governors, two term senators, people who have won Iowa, both Huckabee and Santorum last time. It just seems absurd to me. So is Rick basically back, though, to what he did last time,

just pounding the ground in Iowa, visiting pizza ranch after pizza ranch and hoping to catch fire? He was the first one to visit every county, all those type of things. And you have to. First of all, look, I'll do, like right now I'm doing the governor's race in Virginia. I mean, in Louisiana, I'm doing a number of governor races and Senate races next year. Every one of those races is different. Every candidate is different.

Every campaign has to be run different. So in Santorum, you've got to remember, hasn't been an elected official since 2006. So he's not an elected official who can raise money. Believe me, it's a lot easier if you're a governor or senator right now, even if you're running for president, to raise money. He doesn't have a TV show like either Trump or Mike Huckabee did. His last name's not Bush. And so he has to deal with the fact that he is not going to ever have money like they will. On the other hand, what he does have is an asset that he's developed over time, and that is in the Republican primary, the most conservative are most likely to vote, and they see him as a very trusted conservative. And then if you go into the pro-life community, evangelical community, homeschool community,

groups like that, he has a lot of trust. And that's how he ended up winning Iowa last time, is those people, end of the day, wanted to vote for somebody they believed in. And he ended up winning Iowa, not on Iowa caucus night, but eventually he did. So let me hit you with two lightning round style questions right at the end here that I hope to ask everyone. What is the one moment, the one move from another campaign or candidate so far that's made you think, wow, that was good, I wish I thought of that. That was shrewd. And two, what is the most endearing quality of Rick Santorum that all of us on the outside may not be privy to, but you are? Well, first of all, I thought the shrewdest thing was Trump actually signing the pledge to say that he wouldn't run as a third party. Because I think what,

I believe about two weeks ago, there was a shift in the Trump campaign. If you watch it carefully, I think that for the first time they started to believe they could win. And I think they've tried to become more credible. I thought actually in the debate, he tried to be more careful in how he chose his words. And I think he understands that he has popularity, but he has to prove that he can be the standard bearer, that he can represent the party. Do you think he can win? You know, again, I told you before I would have said no, but I will tell you the oddity of what I am seeing out there is incredible. I mean, I'm dealing in a lot of state elections where I'm seeing Trump's popularity. So I think that, you know, let's put it this way.

I never thought Herman Cain was ultimately possible to be the nominee because I thought he had problems. And there's other I never thought Newt Gingrich would probably ultimately be the nominee. I think there are scenarios with this many candidates in the race that Trump has ownership of something. You know, I mean, think about it. Chris Christie was supposed to be the plain talking one, right? Well, Trump stole that from him. You know, I mean, that's, I mean, Trump has stolen something from almost every candidate that has hurt them and helped himself. And so therefore, I think with this many people in the field, I don't know how you can't, how you can rule them out at this point. And in 30, 29, actually 28 seconds, the most endearing quality of Rick Santorum that the rest of us aren't aware of.

Well, my opinion as his media consultant is he doesn't change my ads. So we did one out there real quick. We did an ad against Romney last time where I had Romney chasing, a Romney lookalike chasing Santorum with what looked like an automatic weapon, but he was shooting mud at him. You sure he shouldn't have changed that one? Well, no. And I thought when Santorum saw it, he would think I was crazy. He called me, he said, hey, I have a big change. I don't think the type font's big enough. So I figured if he's not changing that, he's not changing anything. Great. John, thanks so much.

Appreciate it. All right. Take care. Good luck. Chip, welcome. Thanks so much. Chip Englander of the Rand Paul campaign. So, Chip, I'll sort of start at the version of the same question I asked John,

which is that there seems to be this emphasis on candidates who are new and different, who don't represent politics as usual. And I think a year ago or so, a lot of people will say, well, who does that describe who's very likely to be a candidate? Rand Paul. But that doesn't seem to have applied to him yet. What's your thought on that? Well, I think there's no question that there is a tremendous hunger out there for something new. People are sick of the system, you know, and they want to shake things up. And I think that's something that really ultimately does play to the senator's credit. And as you mentioned, you know, and they want to shake things up. And I think that's something that really ultimately does play to the senator's credit.

And as you mentioned, you know, a year ago, that was something that was maybe very strongly associated with him. The reality is, and John talked about it quite a bit, you know, it's a fluid race. I mean, things go up, things go down. You might have seen some of the news just breaking now about Governor Walker. And is he going to get out of the race tonight? And this was a guy who a couple months ago was in first place. And so it's an incredibly fluid race. And that's just how it's historically always been. You look four years ago, he talked about with Rick, if you go four years ago in August in first place, Michelle Bachman was in first in September. Rick Perry was in first

in October. Herman Cain was in first. Then it was Newt Gingrich. And none of those folks even finished in the top two in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Four years before that, you had, right now, Huckabee and McCain were in single digits. They went Iowa and New Hampshire to be the nominee. Four years before that, you had Howard Dean up by a bigger margin than Trump for seven months, up by double digits a week out from Iowa, and he loses by 20. So this is sort of just, this is how these things go, and that's what makes it a lot of fun. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Now, another factor people will raise with you guys that's shaped the environment in a way that's perhaps been difficult to deal with is it seemed with the beheading of James Foley a year ago

that public opinion really shifted in a more hawkish direction, certainly among Republicans. And a lot of people think that's made it harder going for Rand than they would have thought. So, one, do you accept the premise that there's that shift in public sentiment? And two, has it made the sledding tougher for the campaign? Well, you know, Rand, he follows the Ronald Reagan foreign policy doctrine of peace through strength. And so he believes that America should have the greatest military in the world and shouldn't be afraid to protect American interests.

But that also doesn't mean that we should be for intervention for the sake of intervention. He did oppose unnecessary interventions in Libya, and he opposed the arming of ISIS's allies in Syria. And the reality is ISIS fights us with Western arms. And we have to be very careful in our foreign policy approach and have a responsible foreign policy to keep America safe. But did you feel that shift in public opinion? Do you think that's a real thing? Well, I certainly wouldn't want to

talk to the sort of politicization of beheadings. I think that, you know, everybody is concerned about national security, as they should be, and as Rand is. Well, it's not that the beheading itself is politicized. It's just that after people saw that and were appalled by it, you looked at the numbers, and even for ground troops, in theory, to fight ISIS, in some polls you've seen majority support for that, I believe, which seems to be an issue environment that's much different than immediately after the end of the Bush years when there was really a reaction on the right, we were involved too much, these interventions didn't work out, we can't do nation building. Well, Rand thinks, you know, if we need to have boots on the ground, it should be Arab boots on the ground. I mean, that's the area that it most impacts and that we don't want to send sort of our young men and women to go and die.

And the reality is that that's where a lot of Americans are and that's really where the classic sort of Republican foreign policy has been historically. So I hate to do this to you, but let's talk a little bit more about Trump. A few weeks ago, Rand really began to go after him hammer and tongs, and the result of that seemed not to be evident and certainly didn't seem to help Rand. What was the thinking behind that tactic? Are you guys going to keep it up going forward? What's your thought on that? Well, it's interesting. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight about a few weeks ago did an analysis of the media coverage out there, and they found that Trump was getting more coverage than all the other candidates combined.

So that's an extraordinary share of voice in the race. So if you're not engaging Trump, then you just risk sort of completely falling out of the conversation. And if he's going to be the frontrunner, then we need to have a conversation about what that means as a party and where we stand. So I think that's really about jump-starting that conversation. So it wasn't something that Senator Paul particularly expected to gain from. It's just something that you guys considered necessary given Trump's status in the race. Well, I think that Rand speaks from the heart, and he speaks about the things that he cares about, and I think that he worries about having somebody that –

I think there's many parts of Trump's record that are concerning to lots of conservatives out there, and primaries are the time to litigate those things. So there are people who will tell you in Iowa, and to be honest, most of them are associated with Ted Cruz, but they'll tell you that Ted Cruz has been able to eat into Rand Paul's libertarian support out there. Do you think there's any truth to that, and how's Iowa lining up for you? Well, I'm sure Ted Cruz would tell you that Ted Cruz is doing very well, and I wouldn't blame him for that. No, I think things line up very well for us in Iowa.

I mean, the reality is, you take a look at the Iowa caucuses. So caucuses put disproportionate value on passion and organization, which are things that we do very well at. There's 131,000 people who participated in the Iowa caucuses four years ago. There are 120,000 students in Iowa. Four years ago, Ron Paul finished 3,803 votes short of winning the caucuses, and they were January 3rd. Why is that significant? Winter break.

This time it's February 1st. This will be the first time in over a decade the caucuses have occurred when school is in session, when students are going to be around. So you look at that math and you can see how much opportunity there is out there. And so no, caucuses and organization and student strength, those are where we are very well positioned. So in other words, some of those kids who are at CPAC every year and love Rand Paul and make him the winner of the straw poll every year are going to be in school

in Iowa? Yes, absolutely. It's interesting. Iowa has doubled the population of New Hampshire, but half the participants because it's a caucus state. And when you look at how many students are there, Iowa also, it's not one of the bigger states, but yet it's a caucus state. And when you look at how many students are there, Iowa also, it's not one of the bigger states, but yet it's got schools like University of Iowa, Iowa State. Those are big 10, big 12 schools.

Those are two of the biggest schools in the country. And so there's a massive student population there. It's very disproportionate student strength. You were mentioning the CPAC straw poll. Just this past weekend was the Mackinac straw poll, which is the, since they canceled the Iowa straw poll, actually, the Mackinac straw poll, this was the, since they canceled the Iowa straw poll, actually, the Mackinac straw poll, this was the biggest straw poll of the year so far, and just this past weekend, and Rand Paul won that.

He finished just ahead of Carly Fiorina, who Carly obviously was riding away from the debate last week, and yet we still won that. That's indicative of the strength of our organization and the passion felt for us among our supporters. Talk a little bit about a particular aspect of that organization, because something that Ron Paul was kind of pioneer at was the digital, the online, the email organizing. How have you guys followed that up and taken the ball further down the field? Yeah, I mean, the reality is if Republicans are going to be competitive, this isn't as simple as we need to go capture

what Obama did digitally. If Republicans next year do what Obama did, then we're going to lose. There's going to be a whole evolution in digital. And we're running the Savviest Best Digital campaign. It's a crowdsourced digital campaign. We're the only campaign that has released our logo as a vector file.

We're the only campaign that has, we have bumper sticker and t-shirt design contests. We're putting out videos every single week. We're the first candidate to do a Snapchat interview. We did a Periscope interview, doing all these different things. We have millions of followers between Twitter and Facebook. So we have a real emphasis on it. The reality is that Facebook and a lot of

these digital things, they've become the 21st century doorknock. So the other side of the coin in these kind of campaigns is big dollar fundraising. And there have been reports out there that Senator Paul doesn't necessarily like doing that so much, which I wouldn't blame for. I would hate doing myself. But is that true? No, Senator Paul, he's, listen, I've been working on political campaigns. My first cycle was 2000. There's a lot of candidates out there who, you know, this is one of, it's one of the important parts of a little campaign. It's not, and he works at it and he does it. He makes his calls. Those are stories put out by bad guys, but the reality is- Do you want to name names of the bad guys?

No, it's just, that's all just part of the sort of the process stories that people are guys, but the reality is... Do you want to name names of the bad guys? No, it's just that's all just part of the sort of the process stories that people are into. But, no, he does the necessary things to be successful. Now, John, just before you came on, was talking about how everyone is running against a certain set of other candidates and not necessarily the rest of the field. Do you think that's true? And if so, who's Rand Paul running against? I think we are just running against ourselves. I think we've got, I mean, I think the reality is that, you know, the country has nearly intractable problems. And I think people do want,

they want a bold transformational leader. And I think Senator Paul is that person. And that means just getting out there and talking about our flat tax, our plan to balance the budget, his support of term limits and requiring Congress to read the bills. I think if we do those things, then we're in great shape. Now, he is real hell, obviously, on career politicians. Some critics, though, look at the maneuverings that happened in Kentucky so he could run both for president and for Senate by changing from a primary and caucus and say, well, if there's anything that would define a typical career politician type move, that would be it. Well, the reality is, if you look at most, it's been pretty common in presidential elections for things like that to occur.

You look just four years ago, Paul Ryan, when he ran for vice president, he was running for vice president while simultaneously running for reelection to the House four years before that. You had Joe Biden running for ree-election to the Senate. I mean, it's actually a fairly common thing. It's not unusual. But I think that's making my point, something politicians do all the time. Well, I mean, is Paul Ryan a typical politician?

I mean, I think— He doesn't claim not to be a career politician, I don't think. Well, I think that'll be up to the voters to decide. But I don't think anybody would ever classify Rand Paul as a conventional politician. So are you privy to how often he talks to Ron? And does Ron ever give him advice and say, hey, son, this is how it's really done? Well, Ron's been out a few times. I mean, he was at our announcement speech.

They saw each other. Rand was in Texas a month or so ago doing some fundraising, and Ron was there at an event. So just two weekends ago, they saw each other in St. Louis at an event where Ran's mom received an award from Eagle Forum. So they see each other from time to time. So let me ask you the two questions that I want to ask everyone at the end. Is there any moment from another candidate or campaign where you've thought, that was smart, that was shrewd, gosh, we should have thought about that? And what is the most endearing Rand Paul quality that the rest of us might not be aware of? Well, I think there have been several moments. I think that there have been several really good campaigns that are out there. I mean, I think the way Carly handled Trump

and the remark that Trump had made about her appearance, I thought that was well done. Yeah, she really cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon. I thought Carson's, his closing statement from two debates ago, that was well done. I think Rubio's announcement was well done. I think there have been a number of opportunities that people have done well. As for Rand and endearing qualities, I think the fact that for about 20 years he's done three eye surgeries.

As you know, he's an ophthalmologist and he's an eye surgeon, and he's been doing charitable ones. I hear from Donald Trump he's an okay. This year he went to Haiti. Last year he went to Guatemala to do it charitably. And so I think that speaks to his heart and his passion. And how long have you known him? Have I known Rand? I've known him for a few years, and cycles pass. He had supported some candidates that I worked for. But really, working day, known so well, really less than a year. Great. Chip, thanks so much for being with us.

Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're waiting for Danny Diaz of the Bush campaign. He might be too busy reorganizing his strategy in light of the Scott Walker news. I felt a little like Dan Rather when someone handed me the note, AP reporting Scott Walker quitting the race.

Is this true? The New York Times? Well, if the New York Times says it, of course it's true. Ladies and gentlemen, Danny Diaz making his dramatic entrance on the stage. So thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for having me. How shocked are you by this news about Scott Walker? Well, it is surprising. I mean, I think these campaigns, you know, they're tough.

And I think Mr. Scott Walker is a good guy, and we'll see what the news is that's actually coming out of this. I think his press conference is at 5 Central, so I'd like to hear it first. But he's a good man, sure. So let me ask you a couple questions that come from the conventional narrative about your campaign. You're obviously welcome to push back. One narrative is that you guys are coming into this with supposed shock and awe. Maybe you're going to scare people out of the race, but you certainly were going to be in a fairly dominant position from the beginning,

at least where Mitt Romney was, which is a pretty solid second all along, even though people bumped up ahead of him at various times. And instead, we see Bush kind of, you know, 9 percent, but just kind of there. Well, I think when you're running for the presidency of the United States, you can take nothing for granted and you have to work hard every day. And we have a candidate who will not be outworked, who works his staff, outworks his staff each and every day. And we're very confident that our team and our strategy and everything that we've put forward has a long game focus. This isn't about being the president of the United States in September or October. It's about rising in February, being competitive in the March states,

and being able to communicate your message more effectively than anyone else. And I think from our perspective, we're pretty confident once all the cards are dealt on the table that Jeb Bush will be the nominee. So when you say he outworks his staff, tell us what that looks like. I mean, he's putting in 18 hours a day, every day, to be elected president. And anyone that knows him should know that that's not entirely surprising. That's the way he governed for eight years as governor of Florida. So from our perspective, that's what we see each and every day.

So another thing you'll hear often said about the governor is that he famously said, prior to getting in, I'm only going to do it if I can do it joyously. And it seems as though a presidential campaign in this era just sort of inherently is not that joyous for a guy like Jeb, who's a policy wonk, maybe a little bit of an introvert, and especially this time when it's been dominated by a guy, he may not say this, but I'd be almost certain that Jeb Bush considers Donald Trump a clown, and he's losing to him, and he hasn't seemed to particularly enjoy this process very much to those of us looking at him from the outside? Well, as someone who looks at it from the inside, what I can tell you is – I see what you did there. That was good.

He's having a lot of fun running as president. I think the thing is Jeb really enjoys meeting people. He really enjoys hearing their stories. He really likes talking about his ideas and policies and the impact that they'll have on these individuals. So, you know, when the governor rolls out a tax policy, for instance, and he's able to meet with real people and talk about the impact that it will have for them, when he's able to kind of look back on his gubernatorial record and we're able to talk about some of those stories, particularly in the area of education, if you will, I think he enjoys that a lot. So we're having a great time actually running for president. You may see something different, but I actually get to look under the hood.

Now, it's also taken as gospel among journalists that the constant low-energy jibe from Trump has gotten under his skin and gotten in his head because he seems to bring it up all the time himself now. And in fact, his Secret Service codename is going to be a response to this charge. He's going to be Ever Ready because that's high energy. Well, Ever Ready was the term that he used even when he was governor. So there's a consistency there. I think there's a lot of talking in presidential campaigns. I think there needs to be more showing in presidential campaigns. I'm not worried about the blip in September.

I have a candidate who's out there working hard every day, rolling out serious policies, whether it's how to reform Washington, whether it's how to beat ISIS, whether it's how to grow the economy, whether it's regulatory reform tomorrow, and on and on. And those ideas buttressed with a record of performance that is unmatched in the field, unmatched. He has the best conservative record of accomplishment in the field. So I think he has a lot of credibility when he goes out and says, you know, this is what I'm going to do for America. Why? Because this is my record in Florida, 4.4 percent growth, right? 1.3 million jobs, 19 billion in tax cuts, eight years of a balanced budget, eight billion dollars in the bank account,

AAA bond rating. America would be a little better off if we had a record like that and someone with that kind of stewardship of our country. So from our perspective, we know that if we tell the Jeb story, we're really confident that he's going to be the last guy standing in the nomination battle. So you're obviously a real pro, and you've been at this for a while. Did you at any point or do you at any point now worry that Jeb, as someone who hasn't run since 2002, has some rust? No. And you don't think he has – you think his performance right now is as good as it's going to be three months from now?

I think any candidate, every candidate needs to improve every day, as does his team. That's part of the process. And from our perspective, we're working hard every single day. And there are always things that can be done differently or more creatively or whatever else. And so from our perspective, as I said, this is about growing. This is about building on yesterday. This is about getting better. This is about winning.

That's what winners do. It's a long season. We're not going to declare who the winner is of the baseball season halfway through. You need to get to the playoffs. And from our perspective, that's where we're at. So circling back to Trump, a couple of months ago, the governor made a really definitive statement. I am done talking about Donald Trump enough. I'm just going to do my own thing and not address him. And then within another couple of weeks,

he was really deliberately going after him and at war with him. What changed? Well, I think your colleagues in the great fourth estate have a tendency to ask questions that are exclusively focused on one individual. And so there is that. From our perspective, while that may be focused on, I think what needs to be focused on to a greater degree is the policies that he's rolling out, what he's doing each and every day. For instance, today addressed the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a regulatory policy tomorrow. And that's really the crux of this campaign. It's those ideas. It's those policies. And that's what he's talking about day in and day out. Now, you know, in the scrum of the campaign, some things may get kind of heightened kind of attention.

It's the nature of the beast, if you will. But I think if you look at what the candidate talks about in its entirety, in its totality, I think far and away he is focused on what he believes, what his record is, and how he can help people. So there was no moment where people sat down and said, you know what? Everyone thought Trump would be a summer phenomenon. That's not true. We have to wheel and throw some punches. Well, I think, look, no candidate or campaign is going to allow tax to go unresponded to. And so there's an element of that for sure.

But you win the presidency by selling yourself. You win the presidency by selling your ideas. You win the presidency by making sure that you connect with people on how those ideas are going to positively impact their lives in a forward-looking way. I mean, that's what needs to be met. That's the threshold that needs to be crossed. I mean, we're running for the highest office in an incredibly consequential time.

So from our perspective, when I know that I have the candidate with the greatest record of achievement, when I have the candidate with the best vision to move the country forward, and I think has the most credible argument to be a great president, why would I hide that? Why wouldn't I put that front and center and make that argument the crux of what we do each and every day? And that's what we're doing. So how seriously are you guys going to play in Iowa? And can you survive, say, a fifth or sixth place finish there? You know, we play and play to win.

You know, you don't play to lose. So you expect an Iowa? From our perspective, we intend to run a competitive campaign in all the early states, and we intend to do very well. We have a candidate who ran three times in the third most, and I think it's now the third, it was then the fourth most populous state in the country, the most competitive purple state, the largest purple state. And he left office with something near, I think, a 60 percent approval rating. Somebody who got an outsized amount of Hispanic votes, an outsized number of female votes. We believe with that record of success, with the policy ideas, that we can compete anywhere,

and we will. And we happen to have the resources to be able to do it candidly. So you're all in in Iowa. There's not going to be some of this cute footsie that McCain and perhaps Romney played there. You're all in in Iowa, and you expect to win there. I think we're playing to win. In Iowa? We're playing to win in all the four primary states.

We're playing to win in the March states. We're playing to win afterwards. Okay. So New Hampshire, I get it. You're probably playing to win. In the March states, we're planning to win afterwards. Okay. So New Hampshire, I get it. You're probably planning to win there. Is it going to be – Smart man. I learned slowly. How much harder is it going to be in New Hampshire having to deal with a John Kasich that, at least early on here, has shown some potency in New Hampshire.

And Chris Christie, who I think we can conclude from the last debate, may have more life in him than he's shown so far. And at least the conventional wisdom is those are two more establishment, center-right candidates who are in your lane. Yeah, look, I think the Republican Party should feel very kind of proud of the embarrassment of riches that we have on stage. There are a lot of really accomplished guys that are running for the highest office in our land. And, you know, from our perspective, obviously we're going to compete and compete very hard in New Hampshire.

You know, we have visited there frequently. That's going to continue to be the case. I think when you look at, for instance, the issues in New Hampshire, such as the economic and tax issues and the governor's record of accomplishment, it fits very nicely. When you look at some of the concerns with how D.C. is so broken and dysfunctional, and you look at the reforms that he instituted in Tallahassee, you look at the policy that he's put forward with regard to the term limits, the balanced budget amendment, you look at some of these other areas, Lionel Ambito, those are policies that resonate strongly with voters in New Hampshire. So we look forward to a spirited conversation with Governor Christie, with Governor Kasich.

But as I said – Should I read that as a threat, spirited conversation, a threat? I think from our perspective, once again, I think we have the best, you know, most accomplished conservative record on the stage. I think we have the soundest policies, and we look forward to the conversation. So what do you think one of the governor's best moments in the debate last week was when he pushed back against Trump's attack on his brother and said, well, one thing I know my brother, he kept us safe.

And ever since then, you've had liberal columnists in outfits saying, well, that's completely untrue, and showing photos of the World Trade Centers getting attacked on September 11th. What do you think of that pushback against Jeb? I think what the governor stated is fairly apparent and obvious for any kind of objective person that's looking at what transpired and very proud of obviously his family, as he has said repeatedly, his dad and his brother.

So there's that. But, you know, once again, I kind of get back to what I was saying earlier, kind of my core message. When you run, particularly for the presidency, it's the most personal vote that a voter makes. I mean, when you look at the next most personal, it's probably like a governor. And so voters are really going to look at you. They really want to know who you are, what you believe, what you've done, and whether they're going to watch you on that television set in their kitchen for the next four or eight years. And so from our perspective, we need to show our heart.

We need to run hard. We need to tell our story. Luckily, we believe that we have the resources to do that fairly effectively. And we're going to compete everywhere. We're going to build a grassroots organization that's technologically savvy, and we're going to compete to win. So comprehensive immigration reform, some version of which the governor supports, was defeated in 2006, almost sank John McCain's campaign when he supported it. The Gang of Eight bill was defeated this time around, and Marco Rubio took a swoon,

at least immediately after that. Terry's in the link, so you can ask him about that. Yeah, exactly. This is a warning to Terry. It might come up. I'm talking now. You're doing a great job. But even now, you look at the party, and it seems further right on immigration than it was in 2006, than it was a year or two ago. How hard does that make it for the governor to sell his position on immigration, one? And two, are you guys worried that with the talk we've heard about immigration, the well has been poisoned some, and Jeb's entire, not his entire, but an element of his general election campaign of appealing to Hispanics will be much more difficult? I think the polling data clearly demonstrates that people want a solution. There's a problem they want to resolve.

I think the governor's put forward a comprehensive plan with respect to how one addresses the border. He's written a book on the issue of immigration. And, you know, this is one of those big issues. It's one of those big issues. It's been like 30 years since it's been addressed. So, you know, who has the wherewithal to get it done? Maybe the person that, you know, dealt with Medicaid in Florida, maybe the person has big, big achievements. So that would be a key indicator of who has the wherewithal to get it done. And it's an important issue. It's an important issue that we need to debate. When you talk about Governor Bush, as I said earlier, I mean, he's someone that had an outsized performance with Hispanic voters in Florida. He's someone even today who I think is around 35%, 36%, 37% in polls, general election polls with Hispanic voters.

He's someone that can compete. He can win. He's campaigning with his arms wide open. He's campaigning bringing people into the process. And I think, look, conservatives can be confident that he's someone that's going to put forward a solution that's going to secure the border and that's going to put in place the mechanisms to ensure that this is an issue that's addressed and addressed once and for all. And I think the record bears that out. And I think he's going to continue to campaign as someone

who is solution-oriented. So quickly, best moment for another candidate or campaign, most endearing quality. I think the most endearing quality is that he gives out his email address to everybody that he meets. And people email him, and he responds. And a number of the exchangers are like, well, this isn't you. Is it really you? You know, kind of the back and forth. And he's someone that really wants to engage people at a very individual level, at a very personal level. And I think that is a really important quality in a leader.

As far as something one of the other campaigns did that was pretty smart, I thought the response ad from Fiorina's super PAC to the Donald Trump attack was well done. Great. Danny, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Next up is Terry Sullivan of the Marco Rubio campaign. Terry, welcome. Thank you very much. Good to see you. So, since we live in an instant reaction world, any instant reaction to the thing that's not quite happened yet

but that's reported as going to happen, Scott Walker's exit? Right. Yeah, we've actually just nailed down his New Hampshire state co-chair to endorse Marco. So a little bit of news there for you that I got just a minute ago. And we're working hard, and I think we've got

a few other folks, but we're prepared as people move on from the race to kind of capitalize on it and pick up their supporters. How shocked were you to hear the news? Not really. I mean, it's, you know, the people don't stop running for president because they run out of ideas

or they run out of a desire to give speeches. They stop running because they run out of money. And it is why we've run such a lean campaign at times, taking knocks for it. But keeping in control of the budget is such an important thing. And we don't know why exactly, but I would assume that is the case. So tell us a little bit more about how lean the operation are. What are some examples of things you guys aren't doing that other people are doing

that you think is smart in a way to husband your resources? Yeah, I mean, a big thing, staff is so expensive. I mean, it's just, it is extremely expensive to go out and pay someone, especially early staff. Late staff, you know, when you're paying someone for three months, it's not too bad when you're paying them for 12 months, it's a big difference. So we've asked a lot more to people. Actually, everybody on our campaign has taken a pay cut to take the job, myself included, that from whatever job they had, some people came from the official office, other people came from other lines of work or other campaigns.

Everybody who's joined the campaign is making less. And, you know, I want people in the office to be there because they want to be. We also, we never, you know, we don't make staff news. We don't send out news releases. It's not really a money-saving thing, obviously, but it's a state of mind. We're all here for one person. It's for Marco. It's not about us.

We're not writing our own news releases on this. We're not, you know, looking for exorbitant amounts of money. It is really about saving money, staying lean, staying disciplined. Every expense over $500 in the entire campaign, I sign a piece of paper on. It is a giant pain in the ass. There are days that I question why I implemented that policy. I was asked recently by one of the staffers, look, couldn't we bump it up to 1,000? There's some of these county fairs, they want a table, and the table is a little over 500,

and it's become really onerous. And I said, well, do you think that there are cases that we're actually not getting a table at such and such event because of it, because it's such a pain? And she said to me, well, yeah. And I said, perfect. Then it's working. This is great because no one ever won or lost the presidency because they had a table at the Manchester fair. I mean, that's not why you win. We actually hardly give out

anything in the way of bumper stickers or yard signs. You can go on our website and buy them. We've got a county chairman pack. So if you want, and you can actually put in there, if you want to. So people have to pay to be part of the campaign? You know, if they want collateral and tchotchke, absolutely. And you can actually sponsor someone. You can sponsor a county or you can sponsor someone and say, I want it sent here. I want it sent there. We've got a lot of people that said, oh, you know, come on, we just need this or we just need that. And these are volunteers or say, you know, we need it in our area. Well, great. Go on the Web site. We'll send it wherever you want and or find a donor. You know, I get this from from some of our folks.

I'm like, well, go find someone to spend one hundred dollars on the Web site. And and suddenly, you know, and it happens and it works. And so, you know, part of it is, you know, you say, oh, well, that's only $100 here or this. It adds up and it creates a culture and a mindset that's very different. Marco flies 95% commercial, always coached. You know, he gets mileage upgrades. We just booked a Frontier Airlines flight for him today, which is a special kind of hell for anybody. But, you know, we do what we've got to because we're going to put the resources where it matters. I mean, these are the things, when you look at winning campaigns and losing campaigns,

it's all about how much money they've gotten into the direct voter contact. It's not about how many staff they have or anything else. So let me ask you, the way I have everyone else, some hostile questions born directly of the conventional movement. Not as many as you were to Danny, though, right? I'm going to play some quick catch-up here. So one thing you'll hear is, at least prior to the bump that seems to be occurring after the last debate, is one reason Rubio is so low is he needs Bush to collapse or to fizzle on the launch pad. Any truth to that? And whether or not there's truth to that, is Bush fizzling on the launch pad? Yeah.

We need everybody not named Marco to fizzle. I mean, that is bush fizzling on the launch yeah uh we need everybody not named marco to fizzle i mean that's you know that is that is the plan um so yeah i mean look we need we need everybody to slowly uh kind of fizzle out is and we think they will i mean it's no disrespect to them or their candidacy or their campaigns it's just that um uh we're building this for the long haul we've got a candidate we believe um is designed for the long haul. We've got a candidate we believe is designed for the long haul in that he is not going to make headlines every day. He's not going to be the guy at any debate that comes up with the best one-liner of the debate. Just not going to be him.

But he's going to be the guy that over the course of the debates, you're going to say, you know what, I'm kind of comfortable. I mean, look, I believe that voters want to elect a president, someone for president that they can drink a beer with, but they know is responsible enough to not drink too much so they can drive them home afterwards. You know, it's really what it comes down to. It's not just, you know, you want...

And he's paying you a cut rate for this stuff? This is great. I know, I know, I know. He just pays me a beer. No, it is. But just the sense that, look, you want someone that's a little more responsible and frankly, you know, feel like they have a command to control the situation, but you can identify with them still. And so the, you know, and that's where Marco's at. I mean, you feel like you watch him up there on stage and and, you know, just from a personal. This is a guy who can talk East Coast versus West Coast rap and, you know, makes makes jokes about the Chappelle show.

But at the same time, you know, just is amazing on foreign policy in schools, the best of foreign policy experts. So to have someone like that, I think, is a unique candidate, and we're fortunate that way. So to simplify and sum up, I think, what you said, you're kind of making a bet on his talent. Yeah. And you think it's a very good bet. Yeah, but I think every, and this this is, you know, this sounds a little bit like spin or BS, but I think every campaign has successful campaign has to bet on their candidate. Now, every candidate has strengths and every candidate has weaknesses. But you've got to I mean, if you're if you're trying to make your candidate somebody, they're not voters, you can say what you want about voters, and sometimes I do,

but they have this unique ability to sniff out BS. And if you're trying to tell them, look, no, no, no, this is not what our candidate is, look over here, instead of saying, yeah, this is exactly what our candidate is, and you may disagree with him on some stuff, but at the end of the day, this is who our candidate is. And here's why that's a good thing. Our job is only to say why it's a good thing, not to say it is this or it isn't that. And in my belief, in a successful campaign. And when you try to make voters believe that someone is something they're not, it just doesn't work. Speaking of having a dim view of voters, one of my favorite statements of that is the late, great Mo Udall, who ran and I believe lost badly in the New Hampshire primary and came out at the podium that night and said,

the voters have spoken, the bastards. So you're making this bet on his talent. The criticism you'll hear of this strategy is it's much riskier than a candidate who has a clear ideological base the way Ted Cruz does, the way John Kasich at the other wing of the party does, or a clear geographical base the way, again, I think of Cruz would in the South. So I guess you're saying like John McCain, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Bob Dole. I mean, look, none of our nominees have had either of those two things for quite a while. So it's you hear a lot about, well, you know, which is the you know, the three leg, which are the legs of a three legged stool? Are you going to be which is your line in this? And you read these reporters say this.

You know what? Three legged stool for a reason. And Republicans do best when they embrace all three legs. And the and when you're only, you know, a one legged candidate, you can't stand up. And so to that extent, look, we're not a niche candidate where we've only got one lane and we're going to really double down on that lane. But we also don't scare anybody. When you look at these, yes, you have to become the first choice of enough people. But the pathway to do that is to not be scary to any part of the party. There are diehard Ted Cruz supporters who think, yeah, I like Marco Rubio.

And there are diehard Jeb Bush supporters who are like, I like Marco Rubio. That's important because it's not just about, you know, Marco said to me once a long time ago, and this will probably get in trouble when I repeat conversations I had, but I really love this morning. He goes, you know, I would never want to be the nominee of the Whig party. And so to that point, look, if you're not, if you don't have a sustainable party and you're not a sustainable candidate for a general election, what's the point? And so you shouldn't just be about general election. You shouldn't abandon your principles or be about a general election, you know, viability only, but you should absolutely not sacrifice. And we've seen our candidates in the past get hurt by that,

by trying to overcompensate, say things they probably really don't believe in order to win a primary and then have to try to backtrack them in a general. Now, was there ever a moment where you guys sat down, saw Trump's rise and considered what to do about it? Or did Trump's rise fall in the category of everything that you would just consider noise in your long-range plan? Yeah, the – no, because a couple things. Number one, last week I had our research team pause. You know, who – let's look at, historically speaking, who has been in first place at this point.

So in the second week of September, based on public polling, what was available recently, it's been the RealClearPolitics before that. You're looking at Gallup and things like that. Four years ago last week, the frontrunner was Rick Perry by 11 points. Eight years ago, it was Hillary Clinton by 16 points and Rudy Giuliani by 11. And you can kind of go back from there. The point is, I've said a lot, look, early polls don't mean anything. Turns out I was wrong. They mean if you are in first place in the second week of September, you are guaranteed to not be the nominee of your party. So, you know, I wouldn't, I would, there'd be nothing worse in my mind than being in first place right now. It's terrible.

It's, you know, it is, we were there for a short while and that was actually the time we were most concerned because the New York Times writes stories about how big the windows are on your house. I mean, literally, you know, it's, and how well manicured your yard is. So we are very happy with your – you know, ideally, I only want to be in first place on one day. If I have to be a few more than that, I'm okay with it. Comprehensive immigration reform. As I understand it, Senator Rubio supports every single element of that to this day, but just wants to do it on a different timetable and in a different order.

Is that correct? Well, here's why it's called meet the campaign managers and not meet the policy directors. No one has ever paid me for my policy advice, so we won't start today. I'm just not a policy guy, but I can speak to Marco's point. Look, he tried to do something about it. And this is what I go back to about not trying to make your candidate something you're not. Marco, if nothing, is about getting stuff done. He's a bundle of energy and wants to accomplish

things. And he very much did on immigration reform. He just felt like, look, this has to happen. He had a lot of people come to him and say, we need you for the party. You know, this has got to happen. So he took the ball and ran with it. And it failed. And he's the first to admit, look, we did it in the wrong way. So I don't want to put words in his mouth, and I wouldn't do that on any issue, much less this one. But he now believes that, you know, and politics is the one thing, in business or in anything else, if something doesn't work and you continue to do it, you're, you know, you're an idiot. In politics, if something doesn't work, everyone expects you

to continue doing it or you're a sellout. And it's kind of unique. But look, it's, he is, he believes that the only way we're going to get anything done, because the real heart of it was no one believed that we were going to secure the border. No one believed, and probably rightfully so, that the Obama administration was not going to secure the border. And so, look, first let's prove to the American people here's what we're going to do.

And then let's work from there. So, completely, shamelessly superficial question. Do you ever worry he looks too young? No. No, any more than, you know, Bill Clinton's campaign or Barack Obama's campaign or John F. Kennedy's campaign. And I realize I'm talking about only Democrats. But look, I mean, Republicans never nominate the new exciting guy. You know what?

You know, and I got to believe that this time they will. But look, and we get our asses kicked when we don't when we do the retread. And I don't know, disrespect to some of the nominees we've had. But when we do the person whose turn it is, we just get trounced. And there is a reason for it, because when American voters are faced with with the the choice between the past and the future, they pick the future every time. I mean, we've got to stop being Charlie Brown to the Democrats' Lucy. Let's not try to kick that football again. So let me hit you. We're out of time.

But with a couple really quick questions. Was there ever a moment when you knew Jeb was getting in that you thought, no, Marco's not going to get in? Never. Never. I mean, look, never. And so the chatter out there, oh, Jeb's going to cut off the fundraising, he's going to take his base in Florida, he's friends with him. That's worked swimmingly, hasn't it? I mean, like, you know, that was the point is that he was going to clear the entire field and no one would ever consider getting in because there was going to be a juggernaut. That hasn't quite worked out. And so, look, we're, you know, steady wins the race. The, he's just, we were never intimidated. We were unintimidated by the prospect of a Jeb

candidacy. So a personal question, and please be honest about this. Have you ever had a ride on Marco Rubio's luxury speedboat? I have not, actually. Matter of fact, I tried to convince him that we needed to do it for a fundraising gimmick, like enter online to get on, and he's like, absolutely not, man. That's my boat, man. No way. He's not going to let somebody enter and win a contest online. He's sure not going to invite me. So the questions I'm going to ask everyone else right at the end,

best moment for someone else and most endearing quality? You know, the best moment for anybody else is, I think, Ted Cruz, who I think has run a really smart campaign for the candidate he is. They've really been Ted Cruz, to my earlier point, inviting Donald Trump. They really what? They've been Ted Cruz. They've been him? No, been. They've actually been Ted Cruz. They've been him? No, been.

They've actually. They've been Ted Cruz. Yeah, I'm sorry. They are their candidate. They're not trying to make him somebody he's not. And so, you know, but inviting Donald Trump to that press conference is brilliant because none of you people would have covered it. The Iran event?

Yeah, yeah. And no one would have covered it. The Iran event? Yeah, yeah. And no one would have covered it. But instead, they carried Ted Cruz live on all the networks. He never would have gotten that coverage. But he got it because he invited Trump there. I mean, that's pretty damn smart. Ballsy and smart. Motion-dealing quality, you know, it's, like I said,

it's just kind of intriguing to have a candidate who you can talk about music with. I mean, first time he talked with Bono, I met him, I happened to be there, and they started talking about music, and then Marco explains to Bono how that he really believes that U2 was kind of the first Christian rock band, and here's why, and goes into the, why he's, and I thought, oh God, you're embarrassing me, man. No, this is Bono, please don't talk, no. And Bono's like, you know, you're right, we try to have a message that's, oh God, you're embarrassing me, man. Now this is Bono. Please don't talk. And Bono's like, you know, you're right. We try to have a message

that's, you know, and I'm like, so he's just, he's, he's someone of our generation and that's pretty cool. Great.

Terry, thanks so much. Thank you very much. Good luck. Thanks. Not unexpectedly, we have a little change in programming that I'm alerted by in this Post-it note. Rick Wiley from the Walker campaign will not be joining us. And instead, we are going to go straight to Timmy Teeple of the Bobby Jimble campaign.

Timmy. Hey, Rich. How are you doing? Thanks so much for being here. So I've asked everyone, and I'll ask you to react to the news about Governor Walker. It surprised me. Why?

Well, you saw he did get an early rise in the polls. He came out really strong in January. And it's always hard once you take the dip down to come back. But I still didn't expect him to drop out this quickly. Now, if you've been lurking back there, as you might know, I've been asking hostile questions of everyone based on the conventional wisdom. So fair warning. The criticism you'll often hear of Governor Jindal in his campaign is, you know, here's a guy who was running the state's health care system, I don't know what, age 26 or something, who's a wonk's wonk,

who's in almost every room he's in, is the smartest guy in the room, but he seems to be running kind of a bomb-throwing campaign that's not necessarily true to who he is. What's your reaction to that? Well, our most visited page on our website are the policy positions, and he's laid out policies on repealing Obamacare, replacing it. I guess after 6 p.m. tonight, he'll be the only candidate in the race with a plan to replace Obamacare. He's got an energy position. He's got the education position.

He's got a position on national defense. And, you know, you still have to break through the clutter. You know, you still have to – you have 17, 20, 40 candidates in this race. You still have to break through the clutter. And putting out 40-page policy papers doesn't allow you to break through the clutter. The press is not interested in covering that. And so if you're going to break through the clutter, if you're going to make your points,

you have to do it in a way that is going to be reported. If it's not reported, it's not said. And what have been some of those moments where you feel as though he's broken through the clutter? Well, I would say that, you know, he came up here to lay out his case for why he thought Trump would be the wrong nominee for a wrong candidate for America, the wrong candidate for conservatism, that we shouldn't put our trust in somebody who's unproven, who doesn't share our conservative values. I thought that was a week where he was able to cut through the clutter. And talk a little bit about the strategic decision, if it was one, to go after Trump that hard. I think the decision was more of a – this election is monumental.

This election, we're at a crossroads. And you look at the candidacy of Trump. And if we go ahead and invest the presidency in a man like Trump who cares about himself, who doesn't care about freedom, about conservative values, about liberty, about the first principles, we're going to make a big mistake as a country. He doesn't have a problem with big government. His problem is that he's not in charge of it. He's not going to reduce problem with big government. His problem is that he's not in charge of it. He's not going to reduce the size of government. He's not going to get rid of the burden of taxation and get the economy going. He's not going to get the federal government out of education and allow choice to spring up. The things that we need to do as a country to bring back freedom, he's not interested in. And so somebody needs to stand up and say, hey, this isn't the right guy for the Republican Party.

He doesn't represent our principles. Was there any worry that that kind of attack on Trump so far hasn't seemed to work for anyone? Rick Perry, it seemed to hurt, if anything. It seems to have gotten Rand Paul nowhere. So how much of a concern is that? Yeah, absolutely. Definitely a risk involved because he's able to use a megaphone when he responds. But it was important.

At this moment in the campaign, at the time, he was the issue of the campaign. And it was the wrong direction for our party to go, the wrong direction for our country to go. And so regardless of the risk, it was important to say. So plot out for us what you guys see as what Jindal's breakout would be. How is it going to happen? Where is it going to happen? When is it going to happen? Our strategy is an early state strategy. It's Iowa. He's on a 99-county tour. He's halfway through it He's been spending a lot of time in Iowa And he is You know the great thing about

America's presidential elections Is it's not a national primary It's an early state primary And that gives people in Iowa And New Hampshire a chance to get to know the candidates You know on a one on one basis Not just from what they see on TV Not just from what they see in the news,

but to actually visit with them. And these voters are serious. They'll go to every event, every candidate. They'll meet them. They'll ask them questions. They're going to make their own decisions. And so that's key to our strategy for success is spending time in Iowa, getting to know the voters one-on-one,

and allowing them to be able to get a sense of who Governor Jindal is and his experience and his vision. Yeah, I've sometimes told people if Governor Jindal could just campaign in rooms of 12 people at a time, he would win the presidency going away. It sounds a little bit like your strategy in Iowa. Well, you need a little more than 12 in one. But he does have a, and Louisiana is a state that's very retail heavy. You know, it's a state that they expect when you're running for governor that you're going to visit with them. You're going to get, they're going to get a chance

to get to know you. And, you know, he was an unlikely candidate for governor when he ran. But he spent time, voters got to know him, and they elected him twice by historic margins. So are there any harbingers, anything that you guys look at as early indications of Jindal catching on or potentially catching on in Iowa? Well, sure. You see in the polls, you'll see the faves go up, and traditionally your image questions are leading indicators to the ballot movement. And so, you know, we're watching that. As he's traveling around, you can see that, you know, we've got over 662 volunteers signed up in Iowa, so, you know, building out the organization.

So that's what we're looking at, a number of volunteers and our faves, and that moves into ballot, and hopefully it does it right before the election. What does he say or do out there that gets the most reaction? It seems to me, not having been on the trail with him, but just hearing what others say and reading reports that it's the immigration without assimilationism and invasion. Is that the thing that gets people going the most? It has. I tell you, religious liberty is an issue that has a lot of people worried. You know, this idea that we're losing something as a country if, as a Christian businessman, you can't operate a business according to your beliefs and according

to your conscience. If we're going to force people to attend, you know, religious ceremonies against their conscience, that's something that strikes a chord. Most recently, it's been having a frank conversation about what's going on here in D.C., that we have Republicans have control of the House and the Senate, yet it seems like on the big issues we continually surrender. When the Democrats are in charge they have no problem going balls to the wall to get done what they want to get done you look at socialized medicine

Ted Kennedy pushed it, then Hillary pushed it and then Obama came through and rammed it through despite in a lame duck session they just never gave up on it Republicans tend to surrender even before we get a chance to fight on it. You look at the Corker framework. We went ahead and unilaterally said, okay, we'll let you do this. So anyway, there's a lot of anger about Republicans and our inability to fight and accomplish what we campaign on.

So is the governor really and truly more angry at Mitch McConnell than Barack Obama? You might think that McConnell hasn't been too aggressive, hasn't been aggressive enough, is too much of a tactician, but he's basically this inoffensive guy running the Senate, whereas President Obama is trampling on our laws and disgracing our country overseas and going as far as he can towards socializing things. I think that the anger comes in from the fact that President Obama and the Democrats are honest about it, what they want to accomplish, and they go very hard about it, what they want to accomplish. And they go very hard at accomplishing what they want to accomplish. And we are told by Republicans, this is what we hope to accomplish.

This is what we're going to accomplish. And then we're told later that, oh, sorry, we really can't do that. So do you think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are dishonest, that they're just pretending to oppose these things and don't really want to stop them? I just wish that we had the same level of fight on our side that Democrats have on their side. Sean Spicer at the RNC has said there's not going to be an undercard debate next time and seems to want to shove the candidates down in the polls to interviews rather, to a debate stage, even early debate stage. What do you think of that? How would that affect you guys, and how can you push back against it?

Well, I mean, the RNC has a lot of important roles, but I wouldn't think an important role of the RNC is to limit the field, limit the number of candidates that you have on the debate stage prior to anyone actually voting. You know, and I know that a lot of smart people got in a room after the 2012 elections and decided that the reason why Republicans lost that election was we had too many debates. We allowed the frontrunner to get asked too many questions and to be criticized too much and too much conflict. I mean, when as a party did we become afraid of ideas? When did we become afraid of having robust debates about ideas?

I mean, that is a great thing to have in a democracy where you want it to be a meritocracy, you know? And so the idea that you would have folks in D.C. say, well, no, we need to limit the number of debates and we need to limit the number of people who are participating in these debates because we've decided that that's the best thing for you voters to have. I think it's silly. So you think the RNC is trying to shut down the debate and shut down candidates and get them out of the race? Well, I think that their autopsy said that what they wanted to do was have fewer debates, right? And because they felt like that Mitt Romney got beat up too much from going through the debates. And I just don't think that that's healthy.

I think as a party, we shouldn't be afraid of debates. We shouldn't be afraid of ideas. Let's have these debates. So one criticism you'll hear of Governor Jindal, especially from the left, is how is this guy running for president and a plausible presidential candidate when he's so unpopular at home? Is he unpopular at home? And if so, why? I think he right now, from what I can tell from the polls I've seen, he's got about 40 percent approval rating. I think that the reason is he told the people of Louisiana two things, that he was going to shrink government and grow the economy. And in Louisiana, we had a very top-heavy government for a long time.

Huey Long came in and created a government that was outsized, and we couldn't afford it anymore. It was crushing our economy. And so Governor Jindal came in, and over the course of eight years, he cut the budget by $11 billion. That's a lot of money. He fired 30,000 state employees. So in a state where you have 2 million adults, everybody knows somebody who got laid off, a state employee who was laid off. And so, you know, is it popular to, I mean, if you want to be popular,

what you do is you give money away, right? You expand Medicaid so that everyone gets health care. You give, you know give free stuff to people. That's how you're popular as governor. He didn't run to be popular. He ran because our state needed generational change. And that's what he did. He shrunk government substantially.

We had a government-run hospital system in Louisiana, a government-run hospital system that had been there since the 1920s. Now it's all privatized. People said you can't privatize the charity hospital system. It's just too ingrained into the culture of our state. Well, he privatized it. You look at education, statewide school choice. He got rid of tenure for teachers. It's not a popular thing to get rid of tenure for teachers, but he got rid of tenure for teachers. It's not a popular thing to get rid of tenure for teachers, but he got rid of tenure for teachers. He cut, gave the largest tax cut, income tax cut in Louisiana history. And of course, that resulted in fewer revenues. People say, well, we've got these budget problems. No, it's not budget problems. We did it on purpose. We cut revenue so we could cut government. And he cut government. If you look at when he ran,

he won by historic margin the first time, the only non-income governor to ever win in the primary, over 50%, and got a record re-elect rate. But he went in there, he accomplished what he needed to accomplish. And I think that that's what we need. I think I can hear someone

tweeting right now, some journalist tweeting, Jindal's campaign manager, Republican agenda unpopular. And you've seen others. Mitch Daniels took a swoon when he came in and changed things. Scott Walker did in Wisconsin initially. Chris Christie's kind of back down a little bit now, but initially swooned and then came back up when people saw results. So what's different in Louisiana?

Well, you know, we've had to continue to reduce the size of government. And it's not always popular to cut the size of government. I think, though, at the point we're in in America, there's too much government spending. I think our debt is too large and the spending is too much, and it does take somebody with backbone to go in and cut spending. I think that the spending is going to threaten our security, economic security. When you have President Obama say that he didn't have the leverage he needed with Iran vis-a-vis China in negotiating that deal because we owe China a bunch of money.

And when you've got the president saying that, the amount of spending, the amount of debt we have is affecting us as a country, is affecting our security and our strength as a country. So cutting government is important. So the final two questions I ask everyone, what is the best moment for another campaign or candidate where you've thought, gosh, that was really smart? And two, what's the most endearing quality about Bobby Jindal that the rest of us don't know?

I would say definitely the best moment was Trump's hat. That hat is fantastic. And the usual rule in politics, right, is never wear a hat. Here's a guy who wears a hat everywhere. Yeah, it, is never wear a hat. I know. Here's a guy who wears a hat everywhere. Yeah, it really is. It's counterintuitive, but it's great. The most endearing quality, I think, about Governor Jindal is he's a very kind man.

And I think that doesn't always come across because he's got so much intellectual horsepower that you don't get to see it. Can you give us an example? He's a very kind man. You know, there are times where he'll call me on my phone and one of my kids will answer. He'll just talk to the kids. He just takes time with people. You know, he'll

just makes people feel at home and welcome. You know, you go to these Iowa town hall meetings and he won't leave until everyone's had a chance to talk to him. You know, he will sit and talk to every single person. And it's because he's a kind person. Great. Timmy, thanks so much.

Thank you, Rich. That's right. Good luck out there. Thank you. And joining us next will be Christian Ferry with the Lindsey Graham campaign. How are you? How are you doing? Good.

Thanks for doing this. Thanks so much for coming. So your reaction to the big Scott Walker news? Well, I think like everyone else has said, it's kind of a surprise to see that news this early in the race. But the one thing I would say about it is it tells everyone that whatever you're reading today in the polls, whatever you're seeing in terms of conventional wisdom, who's winning, who's losing, who the frontrunner is, it's all nonsense. It's all nonsense today to try to determine what's going to happen next January, next February based on where you see things today.

Scott Walker is a good governor. He's a good man. He's done a good job in Wisconsin. He's done really good for our party. And he was at one point the frontrunner in this race. Today he's gone. Things change quickly. So I don't mean this to be an insulting question,

but I've really been personally curious because Senator Graham is so lively. He loves the game. And in that first debate, was there something a little bit wrong? Was he sick? Was he under the weather? Because it was just night and day, that first debate. I was like, where's Lindsey Graham? To the second debate, where it was the typical peppery, funny, lively Lindsey Graham.

Well, you know, look, that was his first debate as a presidential candidate. It's a big stage. Bright lights. But it was also a very strange debate. They put those candidates in an arena with no people in it. You could hear, you know, a pin drop from behind the back. It was bizarre. It was a very difficult, you know, situation to expect, especially someone like Senator

Graham, who feeds off of people, who loves to interact, who has this great sense of humor to perform in such a stale environment. And I think that that was a really unfortunate way to introduce those candidates in that sort of setting. Were you guys aware beforehand that there'd be not a soul, basically, in the arena, except for, I guess, a few family and friends? I don't want to get too far into what we heard, what we weren't told. That's what we're here for. We're here to get in the weeds. We were told a number of different things beforehand, afterwards.

Things changed, and we knew there wasn't going to be much of an audience. That was not a surprise. And how did you think he did in the second debate? I would say that he was by far the winner of that first forum at the Reagan Library, and I would say – and I'm a little biased I guess – but I would say that he was the only one of anyone on either stage who was ready to be commander-in-chief on day one, who laid out a plan how we're going to defeat radical Islam and is prepared for that task. So I've been asking all the campaign managers negative questions based on the conventional wisdom, because I am a journalist. I'm a conservative journalist, but I'm still a journalist. That's why we love hanging out with you all. So the knock on Senator Graham is this is a one-issue candidate, and maybe even more than a one-issue candidate,

kind of a one-policy candidate, because what he comes back to again, again, and again, in both those debates, you could almost ask him anything, and he would say 10,000 troops in Syria. It's called message discipline. I'm going to try to do the same thing. But let me ask you, and then turn the question back to you, maybe. What's more important than getting this right? These people are trying to destroy our entire way of life. They're wreaking havoc around the world. It doesn't matter what our social security policy is if our citizens aren't safe. And if we don't get this war against radical Islam right, nothing else truly matters.

Our country is at threat. Our citizens are at threat. Our families are a threat. We have to get this right. And that's going to continue to be the major focus of this campaign. So I know that you're not a military expert. At least I assume you're not a military expert. No, I'm not. I'm not. So where does that number 10,000 come from, except for being a nice, round, memorable number? Because my limited understanding of military affairs,

if you have 10,000 guys in the country, when you take logistics, when you take force protection, when you take search and rescue, you probably have about 50 guys who are actually going to be fighting. Look, I'm not running for president of the United States, and Senator Graham has been working in the arena on this for a decade. He's been on the ground, you know, 35 times between his trips as a senator and his deployments as a reservist. He talks to military commanders. He talks to foreign policy and national security experts.

He talks to folks like Jack Keane. These are numbers that I think he's become comfortable with based on those conversations and based on his experience. I couldn't tell you based on my own experience because that's not where I come a political consultant. You don't want me giving military advice. So when does he get his bump, and do you expect any bump from that undercard debate last week? I do. I do expect a little bit of a bump from that debate, and I think that, look, this campaign is a long grinding process, and if it were, if the facts were determined today, we wouldn't bother to run a campaign. Our job, my job as a campaign manager, is to have gradual incremental progress and peak in January before people vote, not trying to win the race in September the year

before, trying to win it next year when folks start going to the polls, when the caucuses start happening. And we're going to have a slow, gradual climb to do that, and that's been our strategy all along. And how does he match up in your mind in Iowa? Because again, the conventional wisdom would be Iowa tends to reward these very conservative, very socially conservative candidates, and Senator Graham has a reputation as a more center-right guy. I think that's a fair point. I also think that we have to see how this race is going to shape out in Iowa. A few weeks ago, we were talking about Scott Walker being the frontrunner in Iowa. He's not in the race today. I don't know how many candidates are going to be in the race come the caucus next year.

And I don't know how the ideological puzzle breaks up in terms of who's dividing up what segment of the vote. But Senator Graham, I think if you look at his schedule, look at where he's been spending his time, a big focus for him has been New Hampshire and will continue to be New Hampshire. So I've asked some of the other guys this question, but Sean Spicer said there's not going to be an undercard debate next time, and that's a policy that seems to be designed to relegate candidates like yours

to some sort of interview format and not let them on any stage whatsoever. Well, I think it's really interesting to hear the RNC say that, because supposedly the RNC has nothing to do with the debate criteria. So I would ask the RNC, I would ask Sean Spicer, how is it that you know what CNBC is going to do if you have no role in what CNBC is planning to do? I think we need to let CNBC, the next moderator of the debate, determine their criteria. And I think the RNC, as any Republican should want, we have a lot of great candidates running for president. Let's find a way to feature as many of them as we can. It's good for our party.

We should be embracing this as a good thing about conservatism, a good thing about our message, rather than having the party play the role of the role that the voters are supposed to play. The voters get to winnow down the race, not the RNC. So if you don't convince the RNC, would you be open to participating in some alternate debate sponsored by some other media organization? I think, you know, I think you had one of the best ideas. I heard it from other people. I suggested it too. Take all the people who are still in the race, divide them in half by random draw and have two forums. That way you can really see in a smaller setting, all these candidates show off their talents and make their case. And I would hope that the RNC,

I hope that CNBC, I hope that others, I don't know how many candidates are going to be left by the time we get to October 28th either. So this may be a moot point. So how would you characterize the Senator's thinking on where the party is on immigration? Because he's been out there and very forthright about his position for a very long time and hammering away at it. Some would say banging his head against a wall over it, and it seems as though the party is only sliding further right. Look, I think that the key thing from Senator Graham's perspective is immigration is a problem. We're not doing anything about it right now. We've got to find a way to fix the problem, or by doing nothing, we're continuing to grant amnesty.

And that's the one thing that I think all Republicans agree on, is that we we got to do something to solve this problem. People have different ideas about how to do it. But I think Senator Graham, as he thinks about most issues, looks at it in a pragmatic way. What's actually doable? And I'm going to be honest, whether it helps me politically or not, but I'm going to be honest with the American people and give them what I think is the straight story. Would you characterize his personal view of Donald Trump as appalled? Well, I don't think he liked it when Donald Trump gave out his cell phone number. That was an interesting day. We couldn't figure out why his phone rings.

You thought it was a Booker for Sunday show. Something has happened that's got to be great. It's always random people. Something has happened. It's got to be great. We're going to hope they're donors. It was not. It was very angry Donald Trump supporters. I think that his personal views about Donald Trump are probably that Donald Trump's not ready to be commander-in-chief of the greatest fighting force in the world. And we should be focusing on candidates who are. So back on the phone, were you secretly relieved that Donald Trump forced the issue

and forced the senator to get a more modern phone? Well, it's a mixed bag because now he knows how to use apps and read polls and read your news articles, and so he's getting a lot of information on his own. But, yes, I think it's great that he has joined all of us in using a smartphone. And as I said to him when it all happened, I said, you know, I'd only been his campaign manager for four or five months. Donald Trump just did something I've been trying to do for five months. I'm a total failure. He's pretty good at it, so it worked out well. So as I read it, basically by the senator's criteria, no one else besides him is fit to be commander in chief

because no one else is necessarily on board the 10,000 troops in Syria. Well, I think that we're waiting to see how this race shapes up and how people feel about that particular issue. From his point of view, there is no debating it anymore, what we need to do in Syria, what we need to do in Iraq, and the mistakes that we made before that he's been very vocal fighting against during the Obama administration. I think that he feels that this is the right path forward. He's going to make his case, and he thinks he is best prepared. Otherwise, he wouldn't be running for president.

So as you plot out your path to a breakout, does it require a number of these other candidates, including Jeb Bush, to fizzle out? I'm not sure it means anyone fizzle out. Any time in politics, you need to have a little bit of luck. To sit here as a political consultant and tell you that it's all the genius in our heads, that's BS. You need to have a little bit of luck. But you need to put your campaign in the position to take advantage of that luck. And I think probably many of you, you know, six months ago would have said, Lindsey Graham's campaign manager isn't going to be on the stage when, you know, Rich and Google and Natural Review have their forum.

But we're still here because we're running a small, disciplined, mobile, you know, flexible campaign that we can afford. And in order to remain in the race and take advantage of the opportunity when they come, you've got to still be sitting there. And that's the campaign we've had planned from day one, and it's the campaign we're going to continue to execute. Can you quantify? I asked this question of Terry as well.

Can you quantify for us, give us some indication of exactly how small, what corners you're cutting, and what it means to be lean and mean in the Lindsey Graham world? Yeah. We have an extremely small national team, you know, dozen people. We sit in one giant room about this size and we all yell at each other all day long. It's a great deal of fun, a fun place to work. And I think that actually reflects a lot of our candidates' personality. I think a good campaign should reflect who your candidate is and where it came from. And our campaign is kind of like that. We are all a small team.

We're there for the right reasons. We're there because we believe in Lindsey Graham. And if we were doing this for the money, if we were doing it because he was a front-runner, if we were doing it because of polls, we would all be there for the wrong reasons, and we're not. And do you buy, I've asked some of the other candidates who – former senators. Do you worry that just the mood is so much in favor of outsiders and people that have no political experience?

The single worst case you can make as a candidate is I've been in the Senate a long time. I know things. I've tried to do things. Give me this job. It's a tough case to make right now, isn't it? But I think at the end of the day, when you get closer to election time, people start thinking about different things. They're going to think about who's ready to take this fight to radical Islam. They're going to think about who's ready to be commander in chief. For military families out there, they're going to

think, who do I want commanding my son or daughter as they go off to do their job? Who do I trust to make sure that our troops have the capacity, the weapons, the support they need to do their job? And I think that when we get down to it, when we get down to crunch time in this, the importance of who our commander-in-chief is going to be is going to be more relevant in people's minds. And that's what Lindsey Graham is truly going to shine. Can you talk to us a little bit about the history of Lindsey Graham as a vote-getter in South Carolina? My understanding, he's the best vote-getter in South Carolina history, eclipsing even Strom Thurmond. He has never lost a race in South

Carolina. He won his last primary against six opponents with an overwhelming majority. He's never, you know, until recently, not necessarily been seen as the frontrunner in those races. But he's a great grassroots politician. What you see is what you get with Lindsey Graham. He can interact with people as good as anyone I've ever worked with. And I think that that sort of talent that helps him so much in South Carolina is perfectly tailored to Iowa and New Hampshire as well. Would you expect him along the line here to begin to pick up endorsements from his fellow senators? I don't know if endorsements are really the name of the game.

I think the key is how you're doing in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and that's going to be more of our focus than worrying about what Washington, D.C. thinks. Do you have a secret weapon in Iowa and the large number of people there in the National Guard? I think that that certainly helps out. Senator Graham is the only candidate in the race today, aside from Jim Gilmore, who has served in the military. He was in the National Guard. He's been a reservist. I think that there's a large population of National Guard and reservists in Iowa that's going to be good for him. There's a strong veterans population in New Hampshire and in South Carolina as well. Does he have a particular strategy or tactic for reaching out to those

people? Well, I think that talking about his national security credentials is important and also talking about how we make sure that our veterans are cared for and taken care of is something that's important to that community. And serving in the Senate on those issues and working on them for a long time, he has a good breadth of experience on it. So the last two questions I've asked everyone, what is the moment that another candidate or campaign has had that you've been most impressed with, that you wish you guys had thought of first or something like that? And what is the most endearing quality of Lindsey Graham that you see on the inside working campaign, and hopefully in the long run it's a good thing, is Donald Trump has truly turned the political consulting conventional wisdom on its head. He's done everything that people like me would tell a candidate not to do.

So maybe that's a good thing for my profession. Maybe we have too many political consultants who are operating out of the same playbook. Wait, that's a good thing for my profession. Maybe we have too many political consultants who are operating out of the same playbook. Wait, that's a good thing for your profession? I think it is. I think it's a good thing for our profession that we have people who are challenging the way things have always been done. I'm not saying Donald Trump is necessarily doing it the right way, but I think it's good for folks like me to have to think differently. And I hope that the whole consulting class is looking at the Trump race and going, you know, are we really – how else can we look at what we do? In terms of Lindsey Graham, I think the one word I would use to describe him is sincere.

What you see with Lindsey Graham is exactly what you get. He's as approachable as anyone I've ever worked with in politics. He is as sincere and caring a person as I've ever been around. And he's also just funny. He is a really funny person to be around. And it's not so much that he has the same kind of jokes that you hear over and over and over again. You know, I worked with John McCain.

I can tell you John McCain's six jokes front and back. If you ask me today what the funniest thing Lindsey Graham has ever said, I'm not sure I could come up with it because every day it's something new. So that creates an environment that's a great deal of fun to work in, and I'm thankful for that opportunity. Great. Christian, thanks so much. Thanks so much. Thank you. Good seeing you.

Good seeing you. So up next is Barry Bennett with the Ben Carson campaign. I'm excited. I've been busy today. How are you doing? Good to see you. Thanks for coming. So we have this breaking news maybe in about ten minutes that Scott Walker is out of the race.

What do you make of that how do you analyze that what does it mean well you know um i'm surprised i knew things weren't going well that was obvious but i'm surprised um i think that the lesson that a lot of folks learned from the palenti getting out too early last time was that, you know, don't give up. You're going to hit rough spots. But apparently he's getting out. So tell us, explain to us, Ben Carson, if you will, because what you'll hear over and over again from the pundit class is I just don't get it.

I don't get the man's appeal. I don't get why he's lighting a fire out there. He's so soft-spoken. He's not a bomb thrower. In this media and political environment that rewards people for saying outrageous things and never apologizing, he took the slightest possible implicit swipe

at Donald Trump's faith and then apologized for it, which is completely the opposite of what Donald would do. So what is the appeal of Ben Carson? Well, like, you know, that incident's just not his character, right? I mean, he really is, well, he's certainly the smartest guy I've ever met, for sure. But he's also probably one of the nicest people I've ever met. And he's got, you start off, he's a physician with a pediatric specialty. It's quite endearing. Then you add world-renowned brain surgeon, 67 honorary PhDs, living legend, presidential medalist.

He's smart. Played by Cupid, Cupid Jr. Made for TV. Yeah, that helps. That helps. And then, so he's caring and he's smart. He's got a TVQ, a likeness ability that is amazing. Sorry, what was that?

A TVQ. People just love him. He's very likable. And then you've got this life story that is astonishingly inspiring. I mean, there's a guy who literally saw his cousins whom he lived with in Boston die on the street. Never thought that he would live to be an adult, let alone, you know, get inspired, start reading, read his way into Yale. He applied to one school because he only had enough money for one application. Never visited Yale's campus until he showed up on the first day.

But applied to Yale and not Harvard because they beat them in Quiz Bowl that year. It's an amazing story. How did you get to know him and become part of the operation? A friend of mine called me and said, hey, would you be interested in doing a presidential? And I said, no, no. I'm way past that. Tell us a little bit about your career prior to that. You know, Mary Chaney and I are business partners in Old Town. We have a corporate political

consulting shop, which is going very well, or was. I'm not there. But, you know, I've always wanted to do this, of course, when I was younger and didn't have kids. So I said, I'll go talk to him. So I went down to Florida, and I spent the day didn't have kids. But so I said, I'll go talk to him. So I went down to Florida, and I spent the day with he and Candy. And I got in the car to go back to the airport, and I called my friend, and I said, I'm in. Let's do it. He's just overwhelmingly nice and likable. Smart.

And you have no doubt that as someone who has all these amazing accomplishments and attributes that you mentioned, I think most people wouldn't dispute that never having run for office before, never having any really significant executive experience, he will win this nomination and be elected president of the United States? Am I telling you 100% that he's going to win the nomination? Of course not. No, that's not. That would be ridiculous. But I am telling you that he has a lot to offer. See, that's endearing honesty right there. But he has a lot to teach and he has a lot to help the Republican Party. And that's why I really became interested. He can make the party bigger,

bolder, and better. And through this, I think he probably will be our nominee. But even if he isn't, I think that it's a mission that is good for everyone. So what are those lessons, to put it in your terms, that he's out teaching the Republican Party? Well, you know, so far this month we we've campaigned or last month, we campaigned in Harlem, Ferguson, Detroit, inner city Chicago. We're going to places where, you know, we didn't see the Romney-Ryan team make a stop. Baltimore.

And he talks about lifting yourself up and ending the cycle of dependency in a way that, frankly, none of our other candidates can do that. So I think he can be very helpful. You don't have to – it's not just the African-American vote that we're going after, right? We're going after those suburban soccer moms that got Barack Obama elected. But he speaks in a compassionate way that is very inspiring. People want their kids to have the same opportunities that he had.

So stupid question. When he's going those kind of places, is he talking to African-American audiences and is he resonating with them? Yeah, I mean, I sat in a room with him in Ferguson where we're around the same table. We had African-American audiences and is he resonating with them? Yeah. I mean, I sat in a room with him in Ferguson where we're around the same table. We had African-American business owners whose businesses were obliterated with protesters and ministers and policemen. And he said something that most politicians never say. I'm here to listen. Tell me your stories. And it was great. So how important is it that he is soft-spoken?

Because if there's inequality you would naturally associate with political success, that would be very far down on the list. Yeah, yeah, I agree. But in a field of 15, maybe 14 candidates looking, sounding, talking, and behaving different is very important. It distinguishes itself from the rest of them. And so at the debate,

I mean, I was here, oh, I wish you were like, you know, yelling and throwing bombs like the rest of them. Well, that's not him. But guess what? I'll take two hours of national TV time of him standing next to Donald Trump any day, anybody that wants to give it to me. So a lot of people missed his standout performance in the first debate, or going back to my initial question, didn't get it.

Did you know, especially those last couple of questions, one about race and the closing statement, did you think in Ben Carson terms, he is killing it and he's going to have a big bounce because of this? Well, we were watching, you know, nowadays everything is, you know, dashboarded, right? I've got 10 dashboards in my office I watch. I can tell you how everything's playing almost to the second, right? So I knew through social media that what he was saying was really resonating with people. The shares of the posts were going through the roof. I mean, I think that first debate, we got 300,000 new Facebook fans during the debate.

300,000? Yeah, but it's nothing compared to what's happened in the last few days. So how many Facebook fans did he have? At that point, I think he had about 1.6, and we went up to almost 2 million. Yesterday alone, we gained 109,000. Since the debate, we've gained almost 900,000. We're at 3.7, 3.8 million right now. And do you know how that compares to the other candidates?

Well, it's three times more than Hillary, 15 times more than Jeb, and we will be above Donald Trump, who accumulated his after three years on The Apprentice. We'll go past him this week. Wow. So how do you take advantage of that? Well, I think that one way to take advantage of it with 14 candidates on the Republican side, how many on the Democrat side? It's not clear yet. Plus all their super PACs, plus all the outside money. You know, if you're counting on winning the election through television advertising in Des Moines in January, you're probably not going to do that.

So we have built a lot of these networks around to talk to the voters, the 70,000 people in Iowa that I want to talk to through social media and through Google and search optimization and all these tools because content is king. And if you can talk to them effectively in a way that they want to be talked to through social media, you can do it at a push of a button. We had, he blew out his candles on his birthday cake on Friday, and he said what his wish was, and I wish I could tell you what it was, but I don't know off the top of my head. But I do know that 19 million people got the post, and five and a half million of them watched the entire thing on television. That would have cost a lot of money.

So I hear you saying that if you happen to be a candidate who's really good in corporate boardrooms and has raised $125 million for your super PAC, we won't name anyone, that that is an asset that may not be as powerful as it was in the past. Well, we know already that issue advertising rates are 10 times more than campaign rates right now in Iowa and New Hampshire. So $100 million instantly turns into $10. Now, I've already raised $30 million, almost $30 million. We're going to do fine. And we're going to have a super PAC that's pretty well funded as well.

But television is not going to be the breakthrough medium with 15 candidates in the race or 14 candidates in the race that you could count on previously. And are you raising that money through phones, direct mail, email? Yes. Overwhelmingly. Car washes, bake sales? Overwhelmingly small donors? $50 is the average donation.

We've had 530,000 donations as of this morning. And these are donors that can come back again and again and again because they're not going to tap out. I love sending out emails and sitting and watching the dashboard. So talk to us a little bit about the actual organization of the campaign because time always runs together. I don't know whether it was a couple months ago or several weeks ago, there was a story about disruption. Complete disarray. Disarray, meltdown, choose your word. Yeah. This all happened because the campaign chairman, Terry Giles, who is one of the people that hired me, who

had been announced at the announcement was leaving to go do other things, left. And like three weeks later, somehow it was a new story. You know, we have 80-some people on staff today. We have all the early states well-staffed. We have regional people, regional finance people. We've got the Heeler Hauler, our campaign boss touring America. The what? Heeler Hauler. The Heeler Hauler. Healer Hauler, our campaign boss touring America. The what? Healer Hauler.

The Healer Hauler. Healer Hauler. Social media named it. I'm not on Facebook enough, clearly. Clearly. I'm going to check the list to make sure you're on there. Yeah, we're doing great. We're doing great.

So talk a little bit about Iowa specifically and ask you the typical question, do you have to win there? One. Two, checking around in Iowa a couple weeks ago, and one thing I was surprised to learn, hearing from multiple people, Ben Carson has a real organization here. He has, I believe, an organizer or chairman in all 99 counties. How are you in terms of infrastructure in Iowa, and how important is the state? We think the state is very important.

We're very well organized. I don't know that we have to win, but there are typically three tickets out of Iowa. I want one of those tickets, and we're going to get one. In a data-driven campaign world that we live in, there were 13,000 people in the month of August that attended one of our events. The surprising thing was 29 percent of them were not Republicans. They were independents or Democrats. So I think the caucus will be expanding this year, or at least that's what we're going to try to do.

Typically, maybe 25,000 votes would win the caucus. We've targeted 70,000 people, and I hope to get at least half of them out. So when those people come to an event, how are you establishing the connection with them that you'll maintain over time? Are you getting phone numbers, emails? Emails, phone numbers, text numbers. Text numbers are so much better than emails. Texts.

Yeah, we get that. We start talking to them, right? The computer starts talking to them. We warm them up. We talk to them. We find out what motivates them. You know, little things like, okay, to lease a campaign bus, we leased Maya Angelou's old bus, right? Good Karma. Maya Angelou had a bus? She did.

She was apparently afraid to fly. Not afraid of anything else, but afraid to fly. So we leased the bus. It cost $130,000 to lease a bus for 10 months. So I said, well, what if we let people put their kids' names on the bus? So that when Dr. Carson got on every day, he could see the reason he's running, all these kids' names. 8,000 people, $50 a day. We paid for the bus in about three hours.

Now, graphically, we took all those names and created pictures of children on the bottom of the bus. It's great. You know, South Carolina filing fee. I'm like, why should I pay for that out of our general treasury account? Let's ask the people of South Carolina to kick in $40 to pay for the $40,000 filing fee. Raise $120,000. There's a real grassroots energy out there. So I would be summarily rejected from the journalistic fraternity if we didn't talk about Muslims up here today.

Why today? believe that it's just not theoretically possible to have any Muslim who is capable of believing enough in the American creed to be president of the United States? No. What he said was that they asked him if he would, if Islam and the Constitution could be put together. He said that if a Muslim ran for president, he couldn't advocate for them until he knew whether or not they supported the central tenets of Islam or not. Do they support religious freedom? Do they support all these things

that are not in the central tenets of Islam as we know them? But if they're willing to not support all those kind of silly things, then that would be fine. So the doctor's plan or the way he's addressed the 11 million illegal immigrants that are already here is to say perhaps many of them can become guest workers. In my mind, that's just another version of amnesty. Am I wrong? I believe so because there's no path to citizenship. You know, the problem with

deporting everybody, as Donald Trump supports, you know, I think first we probably should start with deporting Congress, right? I mean, for 30 years, they haven't fixed the border. Maybe we should start there. But if you're going to deport them, one, you've got to find them. Then you've got to, I guess, waterboard them to find out where they're from. And then we're going to have to waterboard the nation that they're from to get them to accept them. And then we've got to fly them. I mean, it's incredibly impractical and incredibly expensive. If they will come out of the dark, pay their taxes, agree to pay their taxes going forward, then we can give them some kind of worker visa and they

can go about their lives, but they don't get to vote and they don't get to become citizens. So do you care whether Trump inflates, deflates? Does it not matter to you because you guys just are on your own path? You have your unique appeal with this candidate? Well, you know, I think that there's certainly some commonalities in our supporters, but I think Donald Trump is our best contrast. We'll just let him continue to contrast. So I've asked everyone this, and I'll ask you as well. What is the moment during this campaign that any other campaign has had or any candidate has had where you've thought that was really shrewd, that was really smart? And what is the most endearing quality of this endearing man, Ben Carson,

that we might not be aware of as outsiders? I think that I'll take the latter first. Dr. Carson, he's incredibly humble. I've not seen him raise his voice, get angry, or anything else. He is, you know, if I call him and I say, you know, hey, maybe we could talk about this in a slightly different way, he's like, oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. And that's unusual for a politician.

Yeah. I mean, I'm not overly proud of everybody I've ever worked for, but I'm very proud to be associated with them. And as far as what other campaigns have done that I thought was brilliant. Come on, you can think of something. Something. I thought Cruise's announcement at Liberty was pretty good idea. Like going first. Build in audience.

Yeah. Yeah. We're going to speak there next month. But it was certainly a lot cheaper than what I paid to put together an event. It's something that's already put together. Great. Barry, thanks so much. Really appreciate you taking the time. No problem. Good luck. Let's talk in a minute. Thank you, Rich. I want to, like any good campaign manager who's listened to two hours of strategy,

we probably need a cocktail, right? Sounds good. So please join us outside for cocktails. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Rich. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, Rich. Thanks, everyone.