Let's Find Common Ground - Election 2024: What Mattered Most?

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

CPF Director Bob Shrum joins Tad Devine (Chief Strategist, Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign) and Steve Grand (Republican political consultant) to discuss the 2024 presidential election results and which issues mattered the most for Democrats and Republicans and third party voters. In partnership with the USC Capital Campus and USC Price Center for Inclusive Democracy.   Featuring: · Tad Devine: President, Devine Mulvey Longabaugh Media; Chief Strategist, Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign · Steve Grand: Republican political consultant; Cofounder and President of Wilson Grand Communications · 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 evening. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Bob Stroum, the director of the Center for the Political Future here at USC. Doran Seif, welcome to our panel on Election 2024, What Just Happened?

We're going to explore that question in greater depth at our annual Warshaw Conference on Practical Politics, along with discussing an extraordinary transition and what is likely to be no ordinary administration on January 30th of the town and down. But it seems sensible to take a first cut at this not long after the Trump plenary. Let me introduce our guest.

Had to behind has been a major force in democratic politics since 1980 when he was involved at a young age in the first of many presidential campaigns. He was senior advisor to both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, and his firm produced many of the DNC ads for Joe Biden in 2020.

He has extensive experience in Senate gubernatorial and congressional contests. He's been a strategist for winning campaigns for prime minister and president overseas and has also been a frequent commentator on politics, on television, and in the print press. Finally, don't hold it against him, but he's my former business partner. Steve Grand has an equally storied career on the other side of the partisan divide, providing strategic advice and producing media for presidential campaigns and for statewide candidates in 42 states, including the super PAC that played a critical role in JD Vance's

set up a tree in Ohio in 2022. Like Tad's, his work has won major awards in the consulting community and overseas, he's conducted research, shaped strategy, media, and messaging and campaigns to president and prime minister. He all earned both his master's degree and his PhD from the Annenberg School. So Steve, welcome home.

Thank you for being home. Thank you. Thank you. It's really a beer. Three of us will talk for about 45 minutes and then take questions from the audience. John F. Kennedy once said, the victory has a hundred fathers and defeaters in order. In a way, the aftermath of 2024 reminds me of, with seemingly dozens of different explanations for the outcome and a wide span of different groups, each riding their favorite ideological hobby horses as they try to explain what happened.

So let me start with this. Kamala Harris will have lost by, I think, approximately 1.5% of the popular vote when all the ballots are counted. The third lowest margin in 136 years for Donald Trump, which will fall below the 50% threshold for a major victory. So I'll start with Tad and then move to Steve. Is this really a mandate for Trump, as people are saying? And why do Democrats seem so despondent? Well, it's great to be with you. I don't believe it was a mandate for Trump, but I

think that particularly for us as Democrats, we need to recognize that it was a decisive victory. And the scope of that victory, it wasn't just that the red areas got more red in the election this year. There was movement in 90% of the counties all across America towards Tom from the last election. He won all seven battleground states. And for people like us, where we pitched those battles, we're there to win. When you lose them all, that's like a strike in bowling. The House and the Senate are now going to be controlled by Republicans. Now, I do not agree with what the president said in the early morning hours after the election day was over, that this was, quote, the greatest political movement of all time.

Okay, I will borrow one of Joe Biden's words, that that definitely was, I herba-leaf. But the truth is, there was a great victory for him personally, which I think is something that's characteristic of Trump, but it didn't necessarily help a lot of other people. Like for example, the incumbent Democratic senators in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada. A real mandate looks something like what happened in 1972 when Nixon won by 18 points, okay, and 18 million, or rather 18 million popular votes, okay, in the election and a sweeping electoral college victory. When Reagan, I worked for Walter Mondale, he won 49 states.

And I'll tell you, I remember when we went on TV in Minnesota, okay, because we didn't want to lose it. And that's what we had to do just to keep that. And the most sweeping victory, I think, of all time was when Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 won every state except Vermont and Maine, which were really foldouts in those days. From what I was talking last night, it reminded me of how the guys at Dartmouth went on the bridge that went from New Hampshire into Vermont and said, well, into America, okay, to that neighboring state next door. So, and said, welcome to America, okay, to that neighboring state next door. So, you know, so I think it was definitely not a mandate, but a real victory. And I'll quickly say,

why are we so despondent, the Democrats? Well, the other thing I learned from being part of this with Bob for so many years was if you want to communicate a message, particularly if you only get 30 seconds, do three things. Okay, three, that's all. Don't do four. Don't do two. Do three. So I'll tell you three things why I think we're so despondent at this moment. One, we view Trump as an existential threat, okay, not just to our party, but to our nation and the world. And I don't have to get into the regions. I think you understand it very clearly. Number two, not only do we view him as a threat in terms of politics, we, you know, I'm just going to be frank about this, we're repuls of politics, we, you know, I'm just going

to be frank about this, we're repulsed by his conduct, you know, whether it's the conduct that resulted in his felony convictions or the conduct that resulted in the decision he had last year for sexual abuse by a court. And finally, I think many of us feel deeply disappointed right now because we had convinced ourselves that maybe something was happening. We could see the polls, you know, the polls were not that far off. I mean, frankly, you know, that he was leading in many of these states. But when Anne Seltzer, who we thought, you know, knew Iowa better than anybody, you know,

and I was thinking, but what really put me over the top at the end, and the reason, you know, I think I got sick election night and went to bed, I thought it was food poisoning, but then I realized maybe it was just what I was watching on TV. What problem poisoning? Yes, it's just that Dartmouth had a poll in New Hampshire and she was up by double digits in New Hampshire. So I said, well, if Delta's got this and New Hampshire's double digit, we're going to win a big victory tomorrow.

But of course we did not. So I think that expectations really led to our current state of mental health. So, Steve, most elections I don't think are really mandates. I mean, even if you win by 10 points, 10 points, oh, 55, 45. Well, 45% of the people, which is a lot of people, didn't vote for you, didn't say we wanted you. So I think when you look at this election, and here's the other thing, though.

Trump was not able to win the presidency with just a bunch of redneck sexists and racists. That wouldn't have been enough to have won both how much he did in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote. So literally there were targets of racism and sexism who actually voted for Trump, had to have to get to the numbers that he got to. So there were other things going on.

There were other issues people cared about. And I think it was, and I think we'll probably get to some of this anyway, but just to foreshadow, I think certainly the economy, where people felt the economy was, they just weren't happy with their lives and their ability to pay for food and pay for gasoline and feel like they had security in their homes for their family.

I think, excuse the pun, trumped the issues of democracy or abortion that were bigger picture issues. So I think there was a sizable chunk of people that voted for Trump because they thought he would push back on certain things. And again, I saw some of the later questions, so I'm not gonna go to the rest of the point I was about to make, but I will simply say that basically the bottom line is he won. So he's gonna say he has a mandate and he has the House and the Senate

and he's gonna try to do whatever he can do. Now, will he have complete control? Will he be able to do everything? I don't think so. I think the US Senate is gonna step in even though it's majority Republican. And I think they're gonna stop some of it. I think the US Senate is going to step in, even though it's majority Republican, and I think they're going to stop some of it. I think there will be other legal means that he won't get everything he wants, but I think

he will try to do what he wants to do. Let me follow up on what you said and give you a chance to go where I think you want to go. Because there's been a lot of conversation about Trump's gains among working class voters, and not just white men, but Latino men, and to a lesser extent, black men. President Biden actually passed landmark policies that were designed to help and appeal directly to those demographics. And Vice President Harris, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, emphasized economic

issues more than anything else in her campaign. Neither the policy nor the politics appears to have connected. Why not? I think several things. I think, first of all, remember who these undecided voters are. The undecided voters are not the most sophisticated voters. They don't watch CNN every day. They don't watch Fox News every day. They don't watch MSNBC every day. They don't read the paper. They just don't pay very much attention.

And so even though the Biden administration had great successes, I'm not sure people realized it. And they looked at their own pocketbooks and said, I am not doing as well now as I was when Trump was president. And it was that simple a calculation. Can I interrupt for a moment? Sure. Because fascinating to me, real wages have gone up.

But when your wages go up, you don't say, well, that was because of President Biden. But inflation has actually kind of flatlined. But you say, wait a minute, things are a lot more expensive than they were in 2019. Yeah. And I think that, I think it's that it literally that trip to the grocery store that now I get one bag of groceries for what I used to pay for two bags of groceries. And so I think, I think there was that. I think just the fact that she, and plus, you know, Biden's popularity was so low, again, it didn't reflect his accomplishments perhaps, but it reflected just the view of him as a leader and that he was not capable

of leading anymore. And she was so closely tied to him. And in fact, you know, that at The View where she made that comment, where they asked, what would you do differently than President Biden? She said, I can't think of a thing. I thought that was a seminal moment in the campaign. And I knew that was gonna show up on the air in television ads. So I think that was part of it.

And then I think the other thing is, I just think that there has been this cultural pushback on this view that the Democrat Party has become coastal elites and kind of almost condescends to the voters. And so I think there's gotta be a change in the voters. And so I think there's, there's got to be a change in the messaging. I, I, somebody told me about a focus group they saw where they said they had this, you know, working class guy sitting there, had been a Democrat, but was really thinking about voting for Trump. And he said, you know, I, I get it that the Democrats and Harris and

Biden are supposed to be helping me and maybe they are. But he said, I don't think they'd want to have dinner with me. And that, that I think was kind of this tone. So I think all of that together took us to where we went in the campaign. Give me a sec. I want to welcome Christina Belham-Tony, my colleague, who was also a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard with both of these folks a few years ago.

And I want to forewarn you when I get to audience questions, I'm going to ask you to ask the first swan. Okay. So, Ted. Yeah. Well, listen, I don't want to sound like Bernie Sanders who I worked for through 2016, but 60% of the people that's not being listed is going to take the page out of Congress. And that's why they were concerned about going to the grocery store and it was really

effective. I think Biden and his team really didn't work hard enough to get credit for what they did. But if you look at what they did, substantively, they passed a massive infrastructure plan that has done a really tremendous good for the country, I think, over the course of the next decade and generation. They passed the CHIPS Act, which is going to bring a tremendous amount of business for something that's a future industry into this country. Those are not things that you will see results about on election day. I mean, I'm from Rhode Island, so we would have had a sign on every road saying, Joe Biden is building this right here,

you know, because that's kind of the way politics is done at the local level. If you look into the exit polls too, you can see the question about inflation, you know, the pain that it costs your family, it was profound. I mean, people who said that it caused severe pain to their family, which is over a fifth of the electorate, Trump won 73 to 25. People who said it was moderate hardship, he won as well. That group of people who said inflation had caught hardship to them was 75% of the electorate. They were hurting. They were feeling it. The gains

that Biden was proclaiming from his work will not be seen and felt really for years and years to come. And also, I think there were these cultural wedge issues that the Republicans moved in on, and they were very effective. Here's Harris who comes in at the end. Hubert Humphrey came in at a similar time frame. He didn't run in a primary. He was a nominee in 1968, although people knew him much better. He ran for president, but he knew it worse. But she drops in, they don't know a lot about her. She gets defined by Trump and his people as someone out of the mainstream of American politics. And then, you know, and one last thing, you know, voters don't say, okay, well, let me look back objectively

on the four years of Trump in the four years of Biden. They asked this question, I think, what have you done for Mealy? And what they felt was nothing when it came to the biggest issue that was affecting their life, which was the cost of living and inflation. So I'm going to turn to something you just alluded to, to something called identity politics. Harris didn't campaign heavily on abortion, and hardly at all on breaking the glass ceiling unlike Hillary Clinton. In fact, in her advertising, reproductive rights ranked a very distant fourth throughout the month of October. Was that a mistake? And on the other side, the Trump campaign used identity politics to attack her, especially on trans issues in swing states like North

Carolina. Pat, how do you assess the call for Democrats to quote unquote moderate, to quote unquote move to the middle? And what exactly does that mean? Well, first, I don't think it was a mistake, you know, not to talk more about the issue of abortion. 2022, when that decision came out, it was a very powerful force. And it really, I think more than anything else, affected the outcome of that midterm

election to the Democrats advantage. But I think this time, this was an election about economic issues. And you know, our responsibility on the Democratic side was to convince voters that our candidate was going to focus on other issues like Elijah Zbim was going to talk about and work on those issues that affected their lives all the time. And these other fights, which matter and are important, no, that was not going to be there. But in terms of the sort of cultural issue, what happened was I think they very effectively exploited that opening. I've read that the Trump campaign spent $123 million on that one ad. There were many versions

of the one ad, the trans ad as they call it, many versions of it. But just to put it in perspective, when Bob and I worked for John Kerry in 2004, we got a check from the federal government to pay for the entire campaign, 13-week campaign. It was $74.6 million. They spent more on that one ad, a lot more than we spent on that entire campaign, just in terms of resources. And I think the ad, we can talk about the ad, but it really, I think, was meant to convince people that she was out of the mainstream of politics. This was something that people didn't really know. And by the way, and I did a little, I did some work in the convention that made a bunch of ads there, a goodie, that Beyonce ad, which was a thrill to make.

But it was, people didn't know her. It just didn't know her. And I think the only way home for them was not, okay, abortion, mobilize the electorate, was to convince people that in the fights, and this is the line I'm stealing from Bob, or as we did for Senator Kennedy in 1994, then the fights that lie ahead, she's on your side, okay, President Harris. That was really what we had to convince people of. And I don't think the campaign did it. So Steve, I want to follow up on that. Were cultural issues and trans issues in particular that important a wedge?

And why, and you talked about this earlier, why did Harris, who in her closing speech emphasized the threat to democracy that Trump supposedly presented. Why didn't that have a bigger impact? Well, Republicans never worried about it. I mean, again, I think in my mind as an admaker in these tight races, I'm thinking about these undecided voters. And so I'm sure there were some hardcore Republicans that cared about democracy and hardcore Democrats that cared about democracy and hardcore Democrats that cared about democracy.

But for those in between voters, I just don't think it was top of mind. It was too, I hate to use the word, but it was too intellectual of a concept versus putting food on the table and figuring out how I'm gonna retire and if I'm gonna have a roof over my head. And so I think that was a big part of it.

I think, you know, we ended up, and I was in the Ohio Senate race again this time against Sherrod Brown. Brown started with 54% of the vote. The Republican candidate was not a great candidate. He made a lot of flubs. He did a lot of wrong turns in his campaign. He did a lot of wrong turns in his campaign. But we must have made eight ads probably out of the 15 that we did for that entire campaign

that were on the transition. Now it wasn't because, and the ads were not, we don't like trans people, there shouldn't be trans people. It was, they have taken the issue too far. It's this extreme, you know, she's not only out of the mainstream, she is extreme liberal. And, you know, men and girls sports,

that's too extreme. That's pushing the envelope just too far. And so I think that was why that issue. And I'll tell you, we did all, you know, we do a lot of research in these campaigns, and we just kept testing messages. And with those undecided, movable voters, the message that just kept working in surveys and in focus groups and in ad testing was the trans issue.

And again, I think it's just because it showed her as being so far out of the mainstream that she's not going to be able to help people like me because she's got a different agenda. So Ted, how can Democrats continue to stand up or should they, for example, for LGBT people and still moderate, move to the middle, convince people that they're on your side. Well, listen, first of all, I believe that the way to live in the republic is not to become more like them. Okay, we have to recognize that the heart of our party is the cause of civil rights, economic and social justice, and not be afraid of those words or that attack. And I think there is a way to do it. And again, I'll refer back to my experience with Bernie. I

remember when we started that campaign in 2016, I mean, listen, the press was treating us like we were a joke. And he went on an announcement he was going to run for president in front of the United States Capitol in a select area called the Swamp. And basically he said, I'm running for president. I'll do this all the way. Okay, I'm done. I got to go back and vote. And everybody was like, are you guys serious?

I said, no, no, we're serious. We're going to launch this campaign in a month. And then a month later in Vermont, he's put together a big event. And I spent about three hours interviewing him in his backyard. And I made a five minute film that basically we call progress that talked about why he was running for president, what he wanted to do. And a lot of it was biographical and talked about his growing up and talked about being involved in civil rights at the University of Chicago and the place. And while I was talking to him, he said something that was very popular.

He said, we talked about civil rights and he said, you know, you know, we have to stand up for people, whether they're gay, whether they're transgender, they're human beings, you know, and, and I don't think anyone had ever made an ad before in a presidential campaign that said transgender in it. Okay. This was like not territory, but we put it in and it didn't, you know, what it did was express exactly where he was. What the whole ad was about, what the five minutes was about, was the economic fight against powerful interests, particularly the moneyed interests that were taking over America. And also, you know, the fact that, and I remember testing this in Iowa and in Hampton, the poll, you know, he was was talking about America has a rigged economy. He was talking about a corrupt system of campaign finance.

And I suggest the pollster, we were doing the Iowa and New Hampshire benchmark, that we take those two things, put it together. So we came up with a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance. Okay, we had it in the census. It was the highest testing message in both programs. Okay, and the caucus in the primary. And we went to that as the heart of our message from you know, from the beginning. And that's what we have to do. We can't back away from our commitment to, you know, people in terms of equality

and rights and all of the things that we think represent the progress that we want to stand for. But at the same time, we must convince them that this parity in our movement is not centrally about that. It's about improving the economic life of people, particularly people who are left behind. I'm really intrigued. I'd like both of you to respond with a whole notion of get out the vote. Democrats spend hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, they had so much money, by the way, the Harris campaign, that they hired the sphere in Las Vegas for $9 million for the last week,

but add hundreds of millions of dollars on get out the vote activities. But a lot of potential Harris voters just didn't show up. How important is the door knocking, postcarding, and telephone banking celebrated by many grassroots activists in determining the outcome of a presidential election? Well, I had either... That's a video consultant. Not at all. It's all about television.

I understand that it may bring a kind of occupational bias to this, but somebody called me from Pennsylvania and said, you know, I'm voting for Harris. They've knocked on my door seven times. If they knock on my door an eighth time, I'm not going to do it. Well, listen, you know, in 1980, I was the field director for Michael Cox's private campaign, you know, and the delegate director too. And so it's not that I don't believe in organizing and going and talking to people and understand how powerful those conversations can be at a doorstep, particularly if it's from neighbors or people they trust, or even union members who are visited by representatives of their organizations or others. But when you're in a presidential blush, and the turnout is, you know, in the last two

presidential elections, two-thirds of the eligible voters in the country actually turned out, which for America is a big number. It's like a 1960 level turn. Yeah, it's been, you know, I believe that if you have, even if you have seemingly unlimited resources, okay, Harris campaign, what, a billion and a half dollars, relatively short period of time to communicate with people, you have to make choices about that communication. I believe that it would have been better for them to use less money on like the dome in Las Vegas and more money trying to get two to one on television over Trump.

And it's true, she lost all the battleground states, but she did better in every battleground state than she did outside the battleground states. The loss of margins in those outside states where there was no battleground was greater. And the Democratic victories and almost all the Senate races in those battleground states, are there, I mean, they're still counting in Pennsylvania. I don't think Bobby Casey, who we both worked for, and he worked for his dad too, is going to win. But I do think that it was the demonstration that there was an effective campaign on ground. And I think it could have been a winning campaign if the right message had been delivered more powerfully to more people. Well, and the

other thing is I do think it depends on how that program is done. I think strangers coming to the door, and particularly people from out of state who you might realize are from out of state, are one thing. I think it's about using the actual networks of those people. Bob, to your point, it's like your friend or maybe Teddy said, your friend or your neighbor, somebody who you really listen to and trust and would do this for them. I think that's the better way to do it. We've seen in some of these state races where a door program, yes, could make a difference in a short campaign, in a tight race.

The other thing is, I think the Obama campaign did this well. The Obama campaign would assign someone to that door, and that same person would come back time and time again. So they would establish a relationship with that person. And you know, the third time they're there, they're like, oh, they're sparking the dog, and what's Billy doing, and how did the painting go? And you know, so they formed a more complicated

and rich relationship, which I think helped. The other thing about door knocking, and again, as media consultants, of course I'm gonna say this, but I really do believe the best way to get message to the door is to bring real message to the door and bring produced televisual message to the door.

We have the technology. You show up with the iPad, you stand there, and once you get the door open, you say, and then you engage. So you say, and then you engage. So you say, look at this iPad, there's five issues here. Give me 30 seconds, touch the issue you're most concerned about. And they literally connect with you, touch the ad, it pops up, and they watch the 30 second ad.

They are a captive viewer. It's not like when they're sitting at home and they go to the bathroom and they go get a snack. They have to watch the ad because there's somebody standing there holding it. We have such a hard time now getting the ads to all the voters anymore. I mean, a lot of places, you know, with legacy television, and we're lucky to get 60% of the voters who even see our ads. So the notion of expanding that televisual messaging by going to the doorstep I think is another way that it could be improved. That's fascinating. Door knocking is a way to convey message, in essence, to broadcast commercials. Yes. You know, when you said the thing about about out of state, I'm reminded that in 2004 in the Iowa primary, Howard Dean imported

like 5,000 people to go knocking on doors in Iowa and they all wore orange beanies, and literally every one of them. And the reaction of voters in Iowa was, who are you to come here and tell me how I'm supposed to vote in this caucus? I think it actually occurred to me. So next question is for Steve. Donald Trump is a unique figure in the history of presidential politics. I think we'd all agree with that.

In the exit polls this year, 59% of respondents said he was too extreme, but he nonetheless prevailed. How did he sufficiently normalize himself for enough voters, or did that even matter? I mean, there is a one-word answer, which is McDonald's. I mean, the guy, he eats at McDonald's, and again, those voters go, he's like me. And then they probably would say Kamala Harris would never eat at McDonald's. And so I just think, I mean, even though I think they probably, they've heard the narrative so much that he's extreme that I think a lot would answer the poll that he's extreme, but they still think he's going to be more like them

and understand them better than they felt Kamala Harris was going to be. Yeah. And I also think, you know, I've spent, you know, over 40 years working on political campaigns, you know, across the country and around the world. And you know, the more time you spend, the more you realize how complicated it is, the whole sort of Bode equation, what's going on. And the concept of cognitive dissonance, the idea to hold simultaneously conflicting views on issues, it's something you have to learn to live with voters.

They can not like somebody, but vote for them. They can have all these different feelings. But you've got to try to figure out the whole challenge of the election, I think, from my perspective as someone doing the sort of message side of it, is to figure out what message moves them to you. And if you can get into that space, I think, when I was a kid, there used to be this TV ad called The Twilight Zone. It was a very interesting, spooky show that talked about this strange place that people went to. Well, I think this is a place called the voter zone out there. And if you can find the voter zone in the election, and

that's why I think research is so important, listening to voters and not the, you know, I happen to be personally, and Don Delavope, I mentioned, we're talking to Schoenbrodter, who works at Harvard, we know, you know, and then actually I gave his be personally in Godindale of Opium, I mentioned we're talking to Schoenbrenner, who works at Harvard, we know. And actually I gave his first job in politics on the Dukakis game many years ago when he was a kid out of college. Wrote a great piece in the New York Times about the fact that many of our presidential campaigns

now are becoming so reliant on analytics in terms of how they're going to diagnose what's happening with voters. They'll go out, they'll do 10,000 interviews, they'll create a model. They take the model of these people, they oppose the model on the voter file, and now they know what everybody's going to do. I don't think that's really the best way to find out. I think the best way to find out is to go and to listen.

And I remember being in Bolivia doing a campaign and they made a movie out of Brander's Crisis and Carvel and myself, Stan Greenberg, a bunch of us were down there. And when we were going to do a focus group in one of the poorest places in the country, and you know, and the guys running the campaign were like, why are you going there? These people are completely ignorant. They don't know anything. And I said, well, we're going there to listen to them. That's why we're going there.

Because you want to know something? They're going to decide the election. And we'd like to know what they think and how our media affects them. And I think that's what we have to do as Democrats too is step away. I mean, the technology is great and this place is for all of this, but there's also a place for listening to people, whether it's listening to them in a poll where you get a large sample of people, whether it's moving to tech, the kind of polling that we used to do many years ago, which is tracking polls and campaigns that do a couple hundred interviews a night and then throw off the, you know, five nights ago

and just keep a running track, or sitting in focus groups and listening to what people have to say. And then when you hear them really picking up on it and let their language guide you to connect with them in that voter zone. Well, and I would add one quick thing on the focus groups is there are issues with focus

group methodology. You bring the people into the sterile room and there's the two-way glass mirror and all the scientists are back there taking notes. And so the people perform in a way that may not be them. So we've actually started doing focus groups like at somebody's house and they just bring some neighbors by or at a local restaurant. And we just put them in a more relaxed atmosphere where they don't feel like they're being studied like lab rats.

And the quality of the information is a lot different because, again, we do want to hear their words, but part of it is how do we pull those words out of them? And I think that methodology can make a big difference in what you get. And that's Africa. Let me say one thing. That's absolutely fascinating to me because 30 years ago in Britain for the British Labour Party, we didn't have those sterile rooms and the two-way glass. So we did them in living rooms.

And you're right, people much more forthcoming. The only thing that I was not allowed to ever ask the question, because it would have given away immediately, it was a yank in the way, and it would have thrown the whole thing off. Yeah, and I just want to follow up and say, you know, that's a similar experience for me. I've worked in Ireland, you know, from beginning in 1997, done many elections over there. And when we do focus groups over there, it's usually in a room in a hotel. And so there's no two way mirror. And I would sit in the room and just, you know, sometimes they told him I was an American professor, which I was. I was teaching at

the time. I was also working. And, you know, the focus group would start and the pints of Guinness would come in and we'd say, hey, does anyone want a pint? And sure enough, everybody did. And we'd have, and the next thing you know, we're having a real chat and we're really getting to people. And they're telling us stuff that's really important about what we need to know to try to win that election. So I believe in creating those environments where people, you know, feel more comfortable and will say what they really need. Steve, what one thing was most important that Trump did right? One thing. I mean, I think he just took the environment and ran with it. I think it was smart of him, and him being the campaign, to stay on these issues that

pushed Harris way out, way out. I got to say, it was very hard to know where this was going to go. And there was just this under—and the polls just didn't seem to be there. And that Seltzer poll came out, I was like, oh, it's over. It's going to be Harris. And I always try to do a prediction. I predicted Trump in 16. I predicted Biden in 20, which was easier. In 24, my prediction was 312 electoral votes. But I know I didn't know who to pick. But I said there's something going on in the country and it's either all going to go one way or all going to go the other.

And Tab Wood, is something that Harris campaign should have done differently? Well, I think, you know, yes. I mean, high scientist 2020 though, let me just say that I've been in their shoes, you know, losing a close election and it really hurts and And, you know, even win a close election. Yeah. Well, like in 2000, because I think more won and you still don't get an argument. Well, as we said that at Harvard, but we weren't sitting there with the White House passes when we were telling them that.

But yeah, I do think, I mean, listen, if it were me and they said, you know, I would have said, listen, I think we have to spend the whole campaign reassuring people about who she is as a person and using her biography and all aspects of it to move to a solid economic terrain. When you have somebody new, and you know, Bob and I, again, in the years we worked together, we got to do a lot of great campaigns. We worked for this young trial lawyer in North Carolina. His name was John Edwards. He'd never run into her office before.

He's running against an incumbent Republican in North Carolina. Nobody thought we had any chance whatsoever. And we had a very powerful biographical ad that talked about him coming from a small town in the middle of North Carolina, his whole story, and then had him in front of the water tower, in front of his town at the end of it. We put that ad on when we started in March and we kept it on until November. The only change we made in that ad is when they had a child in the middle of the campaign, we had a new scene with the baby in it. I think she needed that kind of campaign.

I think she needed a bio ad that really connected her to the issues of the wages that people need to earn to live, the housing policies that need to improve in the United States, the childcare that people need in their lives, the core economic issues, the fact that she was going to fight on inflation like no one ever fought before because she understood what it was like to grow up in an environment that Donald Trump could never understand because of his background. And there's also natural push off against the other side if you move that to a biographical exchange. So that's what I would have preferred to do is to make it about her because they were going to make it about her. And in Edward's race, we knew they

were going to make it about him. So we went into it. And in the end, we reassured people enough about it. And we were able to get them over the finish line to a place where they didn't expect to go, which took over a Democrat in North Carolina. 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 Visible wherever you listen to podcasts. Mylan asked a question, and we're going to turn this over to Christina for a question in the audience. How do you both respond, and we'll start with Steve, to the critique that the country is simply not ready to elect a black woman as commander in chief? I actually don't think that's the case. In January of this year, I said, I predicted that they were going to figure out a way to get Biden off the table, and he was not going to be the nominee.

But my recommendation for who should have been the nominee was not Kamala Harris. Frankly, I think Michelle Obama could have won this campaign. So I think the country, if the right candidate is there, I think the country even this year could have elected an African American woman. Well, I too believe that, you know, the African American woman could certainly become the nominee again in a nominating process where 60% of the voters are female, okay, in the Democratic nominee process. And I also believe that, you know, you just have to be there at the right moment in time. You know, people, you know, we did again way, way back when, 1995, Charmy and I did a little

sheriff's race in Jacksonville, Florida, for a guy who was a great police officer named Nat Glover. No one thought he had a job. They said, well, his predecessor, a sheriff said, well, he said, why aren't you endorsing Glover? He's the top guy in the apartment. He's won all these awards. He said, well, Jacksonville's not ready to be like a sheriff.

And we went out and in three weeks, we told his story, three weeks of TV. We told his story, we connected him to what people were concerned about, which was juvenile gangs violence. We convinced them that Trump wrote a great line, a tough cop who earned the job. And we convinced them that people should vote for him in the merits. We didn't ask for anything but a vote because he deserved it. And the flood came in and people moved to it. And I think the same thing happened in many ways in 2008.

People were demanding change as much as they were this year. And they saw in Obama someone who could deliver on it, change, we can, I mean, that was the push off of his primary campaign. So I think yes, that if somebody comes along and it's the right person, I mean, last thing, not only that we did, I did Jerry Demings campaigns when he got elected sheriff of Orange County, and when he got elected mayor. His wife Val, who was a member of Congress, let me tell you something.

Great. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Okay. And I believe if we had a nominating process and she had won it, I think she would have won the election too. And they would not have run a trans ad about her and she would have gone after him on being a tough guy. I totally agree with that. I think Val Demings would have been a phenomenal nominee. She was here at one of our conferences. She was absolutely fabulous. Christina.

Thank you so much. Hello, friends. Nice to see you both. So I have a nice question and I have a nasty real question. But you only get one. No, ask both. Ask both. So one of the things, obviously, we did at Harvard's Institute of Politics together. And one of the ways they designed that program

is they have people who are from different parties or represent different parties. And I guess as students, as people approach the Thanksgiving holidays, we even had Thanksgiving together all at Harvard, a group of six from a bunch of different backgrounds to, you know, we ended up becoming really close friends. What kind of advice would you give people for coming together and just breaking past

this to sort of brave the fever of the temperature being so high that people can't be friends anymore. For this Thanksgiving, don't talk about politics. I mean, really, I think it's that bad. I mean, I've seen it among, and I have a lot of good friends who are Democrats. And it is lit, and they know I'm not like extreme, but it is just raw right now. And I think focus on family, focus on sports, focus on the turkey, but don't focus on, don't, I mean, I really, I think it would not be unwise to just say, you know what, everybody's coming together for Thanksgiving, let's leave politics off the table this year. Yeah, I agree with that.

Now, in my family, there's not a lot of expansion amongst our ranks, so we're not going to have a lot of problems. But I certainly, I mean, I have friends who are estranged from one another because of the election. And I think, you know, having gone through, and nothing like this, I mean, because what I said before, man, we really feel bad about what happened on our side. But after Gore and even after Kerry,

but really after Gore, which is a killer, I moved to Nashville for six months and tried to run a campaign and left my family behind. They'd asked me to do Sunday shows and I would always volunteer to go to Washington so I could see my wife and children for like a night and then go back to Nashville. But I felt really bad. And what I did was I watched the Travel Channel and I watched the cooking shows. And it's interesting that my

children now like Travel Channel and cooking shows as they grow up because that's all we watch. And I just couldn't really engage with the news. And time does heal the wounds though. And, you know, after about six months of that, I was like, okay, well, let's say now the election's coming up, things come and you start moving to your ground. But I think, as I said at the beginning, I think we as Democrats have to, you know, we can't say this was a rigged election stolen from us. Okay, we have to recognize what happened. A lot of people move in the other direction.

We have to ask ourselves why. I believe the answer is we've got to deliver on these fundamental economic issues and talk about them and make them part of our story that we tell about our candidates. And if we do, I think we can connect again with people. Time does heal. I mean, Karl Rove and I get along very well now. We didn't back then. We'll see whether that prevails in this utterly extraordinary circumstance. Go ahead. All the staff that we had our legendary event that many just paid it in. And we had Dr. Kelli Grego from USC Student Health who reminded everybody that she's always available and

student health resources are out there too to kind of help think about we that that didn't heal deep talks and medians talking somebody who had a dress. So might it not necessarily an ask question. I just need to locate when people ask this, but you touched on it a little bit like Trump's not going to be on the ballot again. And the 2028 race has already started. And I took students this year to battleground state. And so we went shrub rallies, we went to dance rallies and watching, or even in the primary, we were at South Carolina and Iowa caucuses watching like DeSantis and Haley and, and now watching JD Vance. Like, they are nothing like, right, you even watch JD Vance's debate performance, like, what is the Republican Party going to do? Like,

who is next? How do they position that? I think we've also just seen that a vice president is actually kind of a hard position to stake any claim of accomplishment on. So where do you see the Republican Party heading beyond Trump? It's going to be a food fight. I mean, there are a lot. You know, because people always say,

what are the Republicans going to do? Like, there's this back room where these secret people are back there, and they are the Republican Party making all the decisions. That doesn't exist. There are all these little enclaves of and fiefdoms of groups that are going to vie to get there. And they're gonna watch and they're gonna see where they can fit in. I am fairly convinced, and it was particularly from the vice presidential debate actually, that I don't think it's a winning strategy

to try to beat Trump 2.0. I think Donald Trump was an anomaly. And I think, I just don't think anybody else can pull it off, certainly not one of his sons. I mean, you saw JD Vance. He took a very different demeanor. He did not try to be like Donald Trump. So I think there is some, I think some will try to be,

but I think they just won't be the real deal and they will fall flat. So hopefully, I think there will be hopefully a moderating to some degree. And I think that these various people, whether it's Haley, whether it's the Sansons, I mean, there's going to be a big group that tries to get there, and they will follow the world as it goes and see where they need to pivot to. And most of them will be willing to do that kind of pivot. Jeff, what about the Democrats?

And do you think that the changes in the primary system make sense? I do not think the changes in the primary system make sense. I believe the primary system was, you know, to borrow a Bernie phrase, rigged. Okay, just like he says the economy is, it was rigged by the White House to make sure that Biden was unopposed in the nominating process. The nominating process, and I've spent a lot of time, all the entire decade of the 80s, I worked with delegates in the nominating process. And so I've spent a lot of time on it over the years.

The nominating process should be a place that tests candidates, that first of all, it gives a lot of people an opportunity to get into that front end because it's not so massive that you'd need all kinds of money, outside money to get through that can be tested and then can emerge and produce the strongest candidate to win the general election. And I think the changes that we've made in the nominating process will not help us to do that. Listen, I was in Iowa in 2016 with Bernie and I saw it from a distance in 2020. And the Iowa caucuses in both instances would not run the way that they should have been run in order for us to have confidence in that process. So that's a separate issue. The New Hampshire primary, on the other hand, I think is a tremendous

test of strength. And I've been with people who won it, you know, like Mike Dukakis and, you know, Bernie Sanders, who got more votes in that primary than anybody in the 100 plus year history of Gore and Al Gore and John Kerry, you know, and I've been with people who have lost there too. Like, and I was there in 1984 when Walter Mondale and Gary Parton streaked past Mondale. But that's the beauty of that state in that process is that it gives somebody like that an opportunity. I mean, when Obama won in Iowa and then Hillary beat him in New Hampshire, I mean, to me, New Hampshire is a tremendous place to prove yourself in that primary.

And I hope that the Democratic Party steps back, looks at the nominating process that has been constructed, really was constructed by the president and the people around him for his advantage. And you know, and understands that that's not the way for us to produce the strongest candidate for president. We need to get back to some of the other stuff. We need to make it easier to enter and to succeed. And we need to make it easier for the party to coalesce around someone who demonstrates

that the voters are with them. And this was part of the problem with Harris is that she didn't go through that process. She wasn't tested by fire at all. She just got the pass in. So we have like six minutes left and we have to stop at five. So we're going to see if we can get in a few quick questions. Yeah. Sorry. So you mentioned the Uncited Border doesn't typically watch traditional

videos, CNN, read the New York Times. And I wanted to ask, what role do you think Alfredo Villa played in his election? I feel like I was the pimp, saw Trump on the jewelry ring by dad, Paris on the club JJ Podcast. I thought it played a much bigger role than it has in the past. I thought it played a much bigger role than it has in the past. Now again, people are like, oh, TikTok and Kamala's going to win because of TikTok. Well, didn't happen. Those young voters are just so hard to get to the polls and they just always have been. We had the one blip in 2008, but after that, they've just come back down and it's just almost impossible to get them out.

But I think Joe Rogan's a great example where those followers are listening to him there. They're not paying attention to the newspaper. They're not watching him on the news, but they hear an interview there because they believe Joe Rogan's a smart guy and they're gonna get energized because they have the tie to Joe Rogan already.

And now Trump's there, okay, Yeah, he seems like a good guy. Yeah. And I agree with that. And I also think it's not just the existence of alternative media, these podcasts and all the other things, social media. It's also the fragmentation of media in terms of delivery. When we started, when I started a long time ago in the Stone Age, 630, we'd go out in the Mondale campaign into the research

room, there'd be three small television sets and we would watch three anchors on the networks tell us what the news was in America all in a half hour. Okay, that's the way people got information. And you could go in and you could roadblock advertising and talk to almost everybody. You know, that's not happening anymore because you've got 350 channels instead of three, you know, what I think we have to do on our side is recognize that and get into it. And there shouldn't be a place that we're afraid to go to.

You know, in 2020, I wanted to make an ad for Andrew Yang when he was running for president because Bernie and I sort of had enough of each other and went our way. And you know, and Andrew Yang was nobody until he went on Joe Rogan. And after he went on Joe Rogan, he suddenly made a million dollars, you know, and then the campaign came alive. And he had enough money, even though nobody really took him seriously enough. You know, we did, we had 10 million dollar media buy in Iowa and New Hampshire, okay. And we actually moved the underneath numbers internally on him, not only on him, but, you know, his central issue was to give people an alternative income and to supply that.

We moved that from a totally negative issue to a totally positive issue to the power of him and that advertising. And so I think that's the way you do it. You engage in all these places and you're trying to move these people. How important do you think Elon Musk was in how some Trump win the election? He gave a lot of money. That's election? He gave a lot of money. That's right. He gave a lot of money. This leads into an even bigger point, which is, what did he do? Well, we don't really know yet about how, I mean, we know he's given a million

dollars a day away to some people in Pennsylvania, okay, where he was focusing, and that was getting some attention and things like that. But a lot of money gets spent outside the parameters of spending money. And it's going to take them a while to figure out what happened and how much was spent. I suspect that the amount of money that was spent outside the campaigns was massive. And I think he was a big part of it. And so I think in that respect, he was helpful. And he was also on brand for Trump in terms of, In that respect, he was helpful and he was also on brand for Trump in terms of, you know, all icon, iconalists are welcome here, you know, break more dishes in front of us, that will help the cause. So, so I think, I think he helped them with his resources and also with his presence that

reinforced the Trump, you know, central message that we're going to shake things. Yeah. I mean, those unhappy voters wanted to see change and And Kamala Harris, and they also, I personally, I loved the joyful campaign. But I think those 75% of the people who felt like things are going in the wrong direction in this country, weren't feeling joy. And so there was a disconnect, whereas Musk brought doom and gloom. And that's how people felt. Okay, one quick last question we're gonna have to stop. So apart from campaign, the gangs and all that so it stopped the messaging and my bias is go come out here. Why does a character matter? Well, you know even though I said all those terrible things about Trump before

you know I do think you think people care about character, but they also care about how they feel in their lives more than the character of the people who are running for president. And in this election, if you look at it, okay, that's an attribute. So we look at issues and attributes when we do all this research.

The two biggest attributes in the exit poll were leadership that Trump won by a sizable margin, and change, and bring me to change, which he won by a sizable margin. Character may have mattered to those people, but what mattered to them more was having a strong leader who they thought could do something about the economic anxiety they were facing in their daily life, and to bring change to the economic environment that they were living with. And even though they saw fault in Trump, they nevertheless saw in him someone who could do something about the things that they cared most about.

We used to see this in 90s with Bill Clinton's. People would say, well, why doesn't honesty matter? Well, you know, and they would do a poll, Bob Dole's honesty numbers would be much bigger than Bill Clinton's. Well, because they thought Clinton, to really get the job done for them, would be focused on the issues they cared about and was doing a good job as president. So even though they may not have liked him personally, or had a problem with his character, they didn't have a problem with the job he was doing for them. And that's what we voted for.

Steve, you have 30 seconds to... Great. We've tracked over years kind of three dimensions that we look at in these elections. This kind of strength, leadership dimension, honesty, and this kind of cares about people and empathy. And I think over time it has changed in different elections, which was most important. Used to be honesty. If you lied on your resume, you were out. Donald Trump changed that. We don't have that one anymore, or at least not as much as we used to. And I think it was this strength dimension that he's going to be strong and bring back the economy. He's going to make groceries and gas cheaper.

He's going to be strong internationally. He's going to call these threats. He's going to take those on. And I just think that was the tipping point in the bounce. I want to thank Ted and Steve and Christina for a remarkably incisive civil discussion. Thank all of you in the audience here today with us on Zoom or Facebook. After the holiday break, and I can't believe it's almost upon us, and the semester is almost over. Please join us on January 30th at the pounding gala for our all-day Warshaw Concerts. Thank you again. And next week, have a great Thanksgiving.

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. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.