Let's Find Common Ground - Election 2024: The Last Lap

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

CPF Director Bob Shrum joins Todd Purdum (author; former New York Times Washington Correspondent), David Simas (former CEO of the Obama Foundation), and Carissa Smith (former Senior Public Engagement Advisor in the White House Office of Public Engagement) for a discussion on the 2024 election campaign strategies and what to expect on Election Night. They discuss the candidates' closing messages, how the race looks according to the polling data, and how each candidate will likely close their campaign.   Featuring:  - Todd Purdum: Author; Former New York Times Washington Correspondent; Former National Editor for Vanity Fair; Spring 2022 CPF Fellow  - David Simas: Former CEO of the Obama Foundation; Former Director of the Office of Political Strategy & Outreach under the Obama Administration - Carissa Smith: Former Senior Public Engagement Advisor in the White House Office of Public Engagement; Fall 2024 CPF Fellow - Bob Shrum: Director, Center for the Political Future; Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics, USC Dornsife

Welcome to the Bully Pulpit from the University of Southern California Center for the Political Future. Our podcast brings together America's top politicians, journalists, academics, and strategists from across the political spectrum for discussions on hot button issues where we respect each other and respect the truth. We hope you enjoy these conversations. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Bob Strom, the director of the center. I know a lot of you for the political future at USC Dornsight. Welcome to the second in our conversations on the 2024 election, which we're going to be holding both before and after election day.

Well, let me introduce today's panelists. Todd Purdom is an author, former New York Times Washington correspondent, covered the Clinton White House, was the Bureau Chief here in Los Angeles for the New York Times, former National Editor for Vanity Affair, and a fabulous fellow at the Center for the Political Future in the spring of 2022. David Simas is the former CEO of the Obama Foundation, the former director of the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach under the Obama Administration, and we hope a future fellow at the Center for the Political Future. Carissa Smith is a former senior public engagement advisor in the White House Office of Public

Engagement. During the 2020 election, she served as the National Women's Vote Director for the Biden campaign. She's currently a Fall 2024 CPF Fellow and doing a great job. So what we're going to do, because we don't know when Vice President Harris is going to speak, we're going to just keep it muted and we won't even turn the sound on when she comes out and everybody goes crazy. If she starts speaking, we'll turn it on. And that leads me to my first question, which is, so a lot of us saw, and I think everybody

heard about, the Madison Square Garden rally that Trump ran. That's his closing argument. If you saw him this morning at Mar-a-Lago, the same thing. I mean, you can ask him about health care and he talks about immigration. I mean, so first, what do we think the impact of that event was? Not just what Trump said, but what other people said.

And then my second question is going to be, what do we think her closing argument is? I have a pretty good idea. You want to start, Tom? Well thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Bob. It's a pleasure to be back at USC and I didn't very much enjoy my time at the center. I'm certainly not going to make any predictions because I hung up my predicting cleats at Denver. I had any good ones in 2016. But it is extraordinary to see the kind of pure unadulterated distillation Trumpism at the garden the other night. It remains to be seen, I guess,

whether this will turn off turn offable voters of whom there still are some apparently, as has widely noted by others, there are, you know, there is a significant of Puerto Rican population in a state like Pennsylvania, for example. 500,000 people. And, you know, so who knows what that would do.

I was struck because I guess it was this morning, Bill Kristol, in his Bulwark newsletter, pointed out that in 1884, a coalition of the Protestant ministers supporting James G. Blaine, a Republican candidate, had a service, a gathering in which they said that you couldn't vote for the Democrats because to do so would be to endorse the Roman... Romanism and rebellion. ...the Confederacy and Catholicism and, you know, alcohol. And that so turned off Irish Americans in New York that they voted against Blaine and he lost the presidency to Grover

Cleveland. So I don't know, but we don't often see, do you tell me, Bob, is it a much more standard close of any campaign, of any party, of any strike to have a kind of uplift or the lift of a driving dream? Who was that? Richard Nixon. And it's just extraordinary that he would double down on this kind of negativity.

So my sense is that Harris today is going to have her own sort of negativity, but with a positive coding, which is that if you're for the Constitution, the country, and values of transparency, the rule of law, and all the things we hold dear, you have to vote for me. But it's certainly ending with a bang and not a whimper. David.

So I was looking at some data this morning and just because of the disaggregation of the media and I was in focus groups and watching some last night where there was a very little appreciation or understanding or acknowledgement of anything that happened at Madison Square Garden among the voters there, among the voters there. Among the voters there, at least the men, there was much more of an understanding of the former president's discussion with Jill Rogan that lasted three hours. And so one of the things, again, in the Trump era specifically, but independent of Trump,

is because of the massive disaggregation of the media and virus. Things that would have been an eruption 10, 15, 20 years ago are less so and one of the things that I heard in the group was well it would be something if Trump had said it but he didn't say it was someone else. Now what you will hear among leaning Harris voters will be the reaction, so that's just a reaffirmation of all the reasons why I don't like Trump. What you will hear from the lean Trump voters who are undecided will be, he didn't say it, and here's another example of the neediest fixation on a comment by a comedian that's tearing the country apart. And so you just get this in equal measure.

It has moved like wildfire through the Puerto Rican community. Among the action in Pennsylvania, for example. But one counterpoint on that, Bob, is in 2016 Donald Trump said directly things about Mexican-Americans and his vote chair, at least among Mexican American men, in terms of what you would expect from a drop off, wasn't what we had anticipated and not what the polls after would show. So I'm not saying this will have an effect. I'm just saying that in general, of all the things that I would expect to derail Trump, a comment by a comedian about Puerto Rican voters

at Madison Square Garden, would it rise to the level of the thing that I would expect? Now, having said that, like Todd, my prediction cleats also were hung up in early November 2016. Yeah, my non-prediction cleat says that Trump could have handled this very well by basically getting up on stage and saying, I found that remark repulsive. Well, he himself said enough things that were horrible that night, too. What did his lean voters say about the things he said, which were not new, but pretty bad? Well, they were talking about the Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan has that video has close to 55

million views. The jail Rogan audience is four times as large as 60 minutes. And in terms of consumption, it's exponentially larger. And so the thing about this election, and we talked about this last time, is to think about it as a podcast election,

a social media election where people are gravitating to those channels that are so that that's what I heard Todd was well, here's when he said, oh, really? Yes. Yes. Very timely that I'm here. I am a product of Adesivo Potrico. Actually that is where my folks are from. So it has been a very, I should say, lively conversation amongst group chats and what's

at going on throughout the weekend. I want to honestly just talk about what you brought up related to Madison Square Garden is that what I was looking at was in my class this semester's focus on Gen Z, Gen Alpha voters is that we're seeing that in 2020, the CNN exit polls showed that Gen Z males voted at 52% for Joe Biden and about at 41% for Donald Trump. But now we're seeing that the voter registration is skewing. Speaking of what you're talking about watching and essentially viewing the Joe Rogan interview was that we're seeing

that they are registering Republican. And so I think for me, just throughout the weekend, I think that's gonna be a key data point that maybe we all should be thinking about is where the young Gen Z male voters are skewing towards because I think that they are going to become very critical, especially as voter turnout happens, especially in these key states. Overall, I think that it was a very noisy weekend. I think that there were a lot of commentary that was shared at the Madison Square Garden rally. But overall, we're just in now the less than seven-day mark where it's going to be voter

turnout. The polls are going to continue to shift. We're seeing razor-thin margin, whether it's in Wisconsin, even in the Senate races, Nevada, in Arizona, in Pennsylvania. And overall, I think it's just going to be turnout. What we don't know is who's going to turn out on voter day. Yeah. Well, let's talk about data before we, uh, get to Vice President Harris and her closing message. First of all, I will say to David with all due apologies, I'm skeptical about focus groups at this point, because I think you're now talking with extremely low information voters and

we've had a flood of polls that have come in and had a big impact on the averages because a lot of the aggregators put all the polls together and When you look at them, I mean one of them is a Brazilian entity that worked for Bolsonaro Another is or several of them is a Brazilian entity that worked for Bolsonaro. Another is, or several of them are totally Republican. They work for Republican candidates and then somehow or other they just put this stuff out. What do you think of the argument that a number of people are making? Simon Rosenberg is one good example, that basically the race hasn't changed much if you look at the non-partisan polls. It's about a three or four point race nationally.

It is close in those battleground states, but it's been pretty consistent in those battleground states that she's doing, holding her own in the blue wall, although within the margin of error, but over and over and over and over again and That she's probably going to win one of the At least one of the three Sun Belt states are we living in a hall of mirrors here where we don't actually Wait, we don't know what's going on But where people are actually creating a distorted picture of what's going on David since I attacked you out creating a distorted picture of what's going on. David, since I attacked you, I didn't take it as an attack. I took it with a love for which it was offered. So I think the distortion

fields on the right and on the left are real. When you just look across all of the polls, both in media, some of the right-wing polls, some of the left-wing polls, I think what you see is just this tremendous variation across the board. I tend to look at the averages, but I also rely on other data sets in polling from campaigns, both on the Republican side and the Democratic side. Where I agree is that the race has shifted very little because the post debate bump that the vice president enjoyed began to recede maybe three weeks ago and settled into a status, into essentially a level of lead for me where she's at about 2% a national lead and in the three blue wall states, they are tied. The thing that I'm most worried about is not the polling,

if I'm team Harris. The thing I'm most worried about is in the Sun Belt states, and I'm including Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada. The early vote, there was no baseline for good comparison, but it is true that if I were seeing the numbers as a Democrat of a performance that the Republicans are turning out on my side, I would be crowing that things look

pretty good. But when I look at what the distribution between Republicans and Democrats is right now in Nevada, it bears no relationship to anything we've seen for the past 20 years. If I look at what's happening in Arizona, I see the similar thing. If I look at the composition of the electorate in North Carolina and Georgia among black voters and young voters, that's a significant cause for worry for the Democratic campaign. Now, composition is exemplified by early voting or the... But what do you think of the surveys of the early voters? So I think that when you look at the model support score for the early

voters right now it looks like the electorate so far is about six percent more Republican than what it was at this stage in 2022 or in 2020. Understandably because Republicans are those new voters or are those people transferring from election day to early voting? There's evidence in some of the states that these are new voters, sporadic voters in some of the states. In other states, that isn't the case. But here's an example of where I'm concerned, where I wouldn't be concerned if I were still in the business. Early vote today in New Jersey.

New Jersey, higher turnout with Republicans than Democrats. Now that's not the statement that Republicans are going to win New Jersey. That's an absurd It is a statement though If you look across the battleground is there a latent or hidden enthusiasm gap that's beginning to manifest itself? In a way that folks just haven't anticipated So at least just for me from that perspective Bob, that's what I'm really focusing Well, I definitely agree with all of the sentiments that you said. I mean, I think we are really an unprecedented times, right?

If we take this back, this is an election that we have never seen before where we were handed a new nominee for the Democratic Party. And then essentially it hasn't really shifted much. And I'll even take it a step further, which you talked about after the debate. There was somewhat of a bump. Even after convention, there was not really a bump you saw in the polling for her. It wasn't as if Harris gained supporters or in a sense, she essentially became more favorable. It was overall that she remained kind of at that steady.

They remained at the steady polling as far as where they were within those 0.2, 0.4 margins. And I think overall what is going to come down to and maybe what we hear her speak about tonight is overall, I think, the perception of power. I think this goes back to like, Madison Square Garden and other things is that voters are really, to me, taking, you know, taking the ballot box they share about who's the most powerful. And I think this goes back to some of the polling, especially what we're seeing amongst young male voters and Gen Z voters who are now trending to vote Republican, but then also on the

economy, right? Like that to me is the closing argument here is where does she stand on the economy? Where does he stand on the economy? And how is our future going to get brighter when it comes to rising costs and inflation? So I'm actually really enthusiastic to see in the next couple of days of what that messaging is. And I know you all, first of all, I'm so honored to be on this panel with these esteemed strategists and communicators. Uh, where you all maybe see the messaging shifting in that way. Does she still have time, I think, to sell the message of the economy? Um, and what does that look like, you know, for the party overall?

Cause I think that's where the party may have lacked a little bit in messaging over, over this time. I think we, we, we might pay too much attention to what's being said, and this goes to a point David made earlier, to what's being said rather than what's being advertised. Because a huge percentage of her advertising is on the economy, and a huge percentage of it is on choice. They do believe, and they claim they have data that shows that it's true that this argument about the threat to democracy works. And you know, Biden was ridiculed for it in 2020, Democrats were ridiculed for it in 2022. And then when you saw the exit polls,

it had a real impact. Anyway, Todd. Well, I'm far, far data expert, uh, of the calendar of David or, or a demographic expert like our friend, Ron Brownstein. But the questions I have are basically as follows in 2016 and 2020, it's clear that polling and data science under measured the instead of Trump voters. And I don't know whether it's doing that again and that these early signs are how many more people can be under the rock as it's lifted is the question I have. I just don't know how

many, you know, George W Bush famously said he was gonna make the pie higher. How much higher can Trump make the pie? He has a floor below which he apparently cannot fall but he also seems to have a ceiling above which it's very hard for him to rise. So the question for me is, are there still untapped, latent Trump voters who are afraid to tell pollsters that they're voting for him? Or in this year, people have suggested there might be a phenomenon of people who are quietly going to vote or secretly going to vote against Trump and don't want to tell their neighbors at the country club or the church or their husband. Yeah.

And, you know, actually, I thought one of the great lines that I'm having a senior moment, somebody, some Harris surrogate just said the other day very meaningfully, you don't have to tell anybody who you're voting for. Do you remember who this was? But anyway, was it a big rally with Harrison? This person was saying, oh, it's Liz Cheney. You don't need to tell anyone who you're voting for. You can vote for whomever you believe in.

It's private between you and... So to me, that's the question is like, there are all kinds of level of qualities of polls, but if you're a pollster, how do you really create an accurate, effective screen for likely voters right now? If you could do that, you would have sequenced DNA and solved the riddle of the universe. So I just don't know. Yeah, the polls I'd like to see are actually the campaigns polls, not these public polls, which have all sorts of distorting effects.

Do the campaign polls track largely with the best of the public polls? No, the gyrations that you see in public polls, you do not see internally on campaign or super pack polls. And that's just because the sample sizes are massive. On the Democratic super pack side, they're relying on sample sizes that are based upon 110,000 interviews per month. No one has more data. And when you dig in, now you can go into subgroups with a level of not precision, but with proximity. And confidence. And confidence that...

That's why you gotta have a certain amount of skepticism about media polls, even the New York Times media polls, because to do what David is describing costs an absolutely extraordinary amount of money. I mean, the USC poll that we did in 2020, which on its second experimental question, not its first question, first question, who you're going to vote for was as wrong as everybody else. Second question, who are your friends and neighbors going to vote for was completely accurate. But that involved a panel of 10,000 people constantly rotating in and out. It's

very, very expensive to do. We're not doing it this year because frankly we would have to raise a million and a half or two million dollars. Now the super PAC can do that. Most newspapers are not going to do that. And when you see polls that say sample size of 400, just turn the page as Harris would say. It's worth remembering that media organizations began polling about 60 years ago because campaigns have been polling and selectively leaking the results.

And the big networks of newspapers, Wall Street Journal, NBC, and New York Times, CBS decided they'd better have data of their own. When Max Frankel was still alive and Hale and Hardy in 94 was editor of the New York Times, he used to say that he wished the paper would poll and never publish the horse race results, but use the polls to guide coverage, to inform questioning, to help shape the things about how you think about that. But the truth is they're so expensive that now media organizations and these little colleges and places all over use them as promotional devices to say, you know, look at the Quinnipiac

poll or the so-and-so poll and it's a wild west. Yeah, with all due respect, probably most people here would not have heard of Quinnipiac if they didn't poll. Or Marist College or, you know, East Jabip. Okay, let's shift. We've talked a lot about Badena. What do you think her closing message will be, which we'll hear tonight? I think I have a pretty good idea, but Carissa, you want to start? Yeah, I had said to the gentleman, I was like, oh, it's very interesting that she chose DC, but Carissa, there are some thoughts on that. But overall, I think it is the closing message for her

is that I've been here as vice president, I've served the role, I've been experienced. You know, we've been able to bring our economy into stability. And then of course, you can't talk about the stability of the economy without bringing up Roe versus Wade. I think that overall, she's going to really sell that democracy is under attack. And I think she's going to have this great backdrop of being in DC of, hey, I've been here, I'm experienced, I've done a good job as vice president, so let's bring it on home. So I really think that's going to be like her closing argument in DC, but I'm curious

to hear you all's thoughts, because I think it goes back to what I said earlier, the perception of power, and I think it is a power move to have DC behind her. I think it's a power move to be able to draw a crowd about 50,000 right there, essentially in the backyard of the White House, and to show the support right there. And to do it in the exact same place where Donald Trump gave the speech on January 6th, which is clearly why they chose it, I think. I think so, too. David?

So, I expect it to be working backwards from Trump's greatest straits right now with the electorate. One is the perception that Donald Trump only cares about Donald Trump. And he used that as the predicate to make the economic RD. He is for himself and people like him. I am for you and your aspirations and your dreams and your pocketbook issues. I mean, you just lay them out. That's the first piece.

The second piece of the argument is around, and this is where democracy or at least that style of leadership comes in, where what you hear from voters and you see in the polling is this exhaustion. This even among Trump voters where they say, I wish he would just stop talking, but your strengths are your weaknesses, right? And so the turn the page message, we don't have to do this. We can go forward. We don't have to go back to that thing that we all remember where you couldn't talk to your coworkers, your family, your friend because of what he created. And so it's a mix of that. And then the final piece of the argument is around freedom, with abortion being the key selling point there. And so I expect her closing spots to your point, Bob, about,

you know, what voter legitimacy is a pretty sharp economic contrast. And the Super PAC just announced that their final week by is $ million dollars. To put that in perspective, the total amount spent in the general election by Kerry and Bush in 2004, and I, you know, reason to know this was 83 million dollars. That's from the end of the convention all the way to election day. So think about that. The Harris super PAC will spend half a billion dollars. The four Trump super PACs combined will spend 475 million dollars. So between the super PACs and mostly focused on the battleground States, it's a billion dollars.

And then you add in what she'll spend. And what Trump is spending. And interestingly, for the first time in the two previous Trump races, this week on the air in the Battleground States, Harris and Trump are at parity in a way that's never happened before. At parity in spending. And parity in terms of the the impressions that voters are receiving. For them, it's spending also.

We hear about violence all the time in the news, yet we rarely hear stories about peace. There are so many people who are working hard to promote solutions to violence, toxic polarization, and authoritarianism, often at great personal risk. We never hear about these stories, but at what cost? On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists, storytellers, and peace builders who are on the front lines of both peace and conflict. You can find Making Peace Vis visible wherever you listen to podcasts. What do you think of the closing message? Well, I agree with what Carissa and David have said. I think that hovering all of that is this, to me, the most effective single thing that Harris has done may be that she's managed to make Trump seem small at long last.

And being at the ellipse in front of the White House in the echoing place where he was on January 6th, I think she's able to say that he wants to be the president again. I already am the vice president. I am here as a guardian of your values, as a guardian of the things that we care most about. I thought her speech at the convention was also notable for reclaiming hatred as a democratic value. And you know, you know a little bit about that in 2004 with John Kerry's, you know, was quite successful for a time in that also. So I think that, you know, in the broadest possible sense, I agree with David that the message is freedom in the sense of bodily autonomy and making your own decisions.

And you know, look at what she's not going to get into this granularity, but look at what people like Ron DeSantis did in Florida. You've never seen Republican officials meddle with private enterprise in the way that he did when he said private cruise lines cannot require masks if they want to for the safety of their passengers because I'm making some big performative thing that I'm not going to let them. So I think Harris is saying, we are the heralds and the defenders of freedom, of the values that you hold dear, of the constitution, of rule of law, and he is the tired old he is going to lead you not just backwards but into kind of a dark time and

and you know returning to this this message of hopefulness so i don't know whether she can pull it off but it seems to me that that that is her best shot is i i do think there's just the question i've had all along is there's just there has to be a level of trump fatigue and and to the degree that she can exploit that and anyone who's wavering on Tuesday morning and goes in there like do I really want to have this guy in my living for another four years that's a pretty powerful tool she has at her command I think I think but yeah I I would say that I agree with all of this but I think we need to put the economic piece of it in context.

It's populism in the good sense of that word. It's not populism in we don't like the other, quote unquote, the bad people are coming for you. It is kind of FDR populism. And if you watch when I, you have to look for them because you don't see them here. You got to go online to find him but when i watch the spots on the economy he's going to get tax cuts to

billionaires and the wealthy and then they show a piece of film of them saying you know you give me money i'm gonna give you a big tax cut so it it's got a sharp edge to it. And I suspect we'll hear some of that tonight. We probably won't be here by the time she speaks, but, and some of you will go off and watch the Dodgers. It's totally American thing to do.

So I think it's easy to sum up for me. It's gonna be economy, democracy, freedom. So in essence, I kind of agree with all of this. Do we think that turnout operations matter? You know, everybody's talking about the great Paris turnout operation, right? And some of you may have a self-interest in this but go ahead David Donald Trump has never had got the operation right the 2016 It is in 20. No real and he fired the people at the RNC who were putting one together now 24 in 24 they've got What's happening in Pennsylvania in terms of their?

What's happening in Pennsylvania in terms of their turn out operation is better than they have ever had and it's outsourced to two different groups that are executing very very well. And so look at a presidential level the evidence that I have seen is that the most you can move although this matters in a race is this close is up point on the margin in an effective GOTV operation. But it's better when you've got the win that you're back in enthusiasm, you can't factor that in, and it's a problem when you've got a headwind going into you. Which is why the early signals of early vote in some of these states, for me, is almost like what are the prevailing wins that you're beginning to see for the first time, just in some of these states, for me is almost like what are the prevailing wins that you're beginning to see for the first time, just in terms of actual behavior. Now, the team Harris has put more money in more bodies and just more effort into a massive GITV operation.

And so it's unparalleled what they're about to execute on. But in terms of measuring efficacy of that, it's like the great unknown, but here's what we do know about Trump. He hasn't needed to this point. And so is this added benefit in Pennsylvania, something that's gonna put him over the top in that state? Unclear.

Yes. Carissa, is the Trump of 2024 the Trump of 2016? Honestly, I would answer unequivocally no. I mean, I think what we have seen is a very different, sorry, let me frame this right. I think what we're seeing is an evolved candidate here. I think what we are seeing is- Or devolved. Yes, or devolved.

And when I say evolved, I want to be clear. I'm saying that in a sense of that I think that if anything, that he has really consistently stuck with what he knows to be true about himself. I think that early on when he ran in 2016 and what we all know to be true is that this was kind of something that I would say that no one ever expected. I don't think that he expected for it to take the flight that it did in his political career to become president. And then now I think in 2024, what we are seeing is that if anything, to me, he has just evolved to be consistent in what he knows to be his base, what he knows

to be true, what he knows to be in his message. I think that he has not faltered. I don't think that he's tried any new tactics or any new things. I think if anything, he has just remained consistent with what he knows has worked in the past and what he knew to have worked in 2016 for him. Now, I guess the question becomes in 2020, I think what did he look back and maybe learn from that where I talk about maybe he's evolved in that piece. I think that he feels as though he may have had missteps

and maybe going up against President Biden. And now he went back to the original blueprint that he always knew though he may have had missteps and maybe going up against President Biden. And now he went back to the original blueprint that he always knew to be true about himself and to his base and what people are attracted to him. Todd, potentially the biggest inflection point, aside from the shift in the Democratic nomination from Biden to Harris, was the assassination attempt on Trump. What was fascinating to me was if you watched his acceptance speech or you watch him this morning at Mar-a-Lago, same thing.

In the acceptance speech, about the first 15 minutes was a call to national unity, was doing very well with dial groups around the country but it was doing horribly in the hall because the red meat folks in the hall wanted something else and trump sense that and so he got off his teleprompter basically threw away the speech and went right back to his kinda standard stop

uh... which is what i think we'll see all through the closing weekend of this campaign. If I were working for Donald Trump, which of course I would not, but if I were working for him, I would bang my head against the table constantly saying, why in the world can't we have a message and stick to it? In the contrast, actually, I have to say this for Harris, she has been, she's run a, she flew the plane while putting it together. I mean, it's been,

and she's been extremely disciplined and a much better candidate than she was when she tried to run in 2020. Well, I think that's because this is much more, much closer to the unmetting persona that she really is and much closer to authentic beliefs. And the one think that's because this is much closer to the unmetting persona that she really is and much closer to her authentic beliefs. And the one thing that's probably tripped her up is her difficulty in reconciling some of the positions she took in 2019 with what she's doing now because the uncomfortable thing that she can't quite say is in 2019, I had a bunch of consultants who, as David

Axelrod said, told me to take a left turn wherever I was on the road and it didn't serve her well then and she was trying to out Bernie Bernie and out Warren Warren and it wasn't really who she was as an official in California as essentially kind of a centrist moderate take names prosecutor who would come up, you know, through the system in San Francisco. So yes, but this morning when I was watching Trump in Mar-a-Lago, whenever he is sticking to the prompter, he's like an account reading a litany at the annual media, that is 16 shares of self-preferred. He seems so bored with himself.

Well, and he was bored at the convention. Yes. With stuff that was working. But I have to confess, in those first few minutes of his speech at the convention, I thought, well, he's gonna nail this. He's thought, well, he's going to nail this. He's got this going. He's going to, he's figured it out.

And it's in the list. Okay. I wanted to open this up to audience court. Anybody got a question right away? Yeah. I'm wondering if any of you have any thoughts about what the Republicans may be doing after the election to question the results? Do we have any thoughts about what the Republicans will be doing after the election to question

the results? My answer is if Trump wins, they won't do anything to question the results. If Harris wins, they'll do everything to question the results. And I can't get to this because we don't have time, but both Politico and Axios have written about the possibility, it's, you know, 15, 20% possibility that Harris could lose the popular vote and win the electoral vote, at which point I think you would see an explosion on the Republican side.

So I wanna thank you all for being here. Thank you for joining us on The Bully Pulpit. It helps us a lot when you subscribe and rate the show five stars wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter at USCPOLfuture. That's USCPOLfuture. Follow us on Facebook and YouTube and visit our website for upcoming programs.