Can Tim Walz Out-Debate JD Vance?

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Speaker 13 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm John Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor.
On today's show, Trump says he'll end shoplifting in America with, quote, one really violent day. Tim Walls and J.D.

Speaker 13 Vance head into Tuesday night's VP debate with the race stuck in a dead heat.

Speaker 13 And the rage in Cajun himself, James Carville, stops by to talk about the state of the race and the new documentary about his career in Democratic politics. But first,

Speaker 13 as you all know, the death toll from Hurricane Helene is now north of 100. There is unbelievable devastation across the southeastern states.

Speaker 13 And as we're recording this, thousands of people in western North Carolina are still stranded without power, water, or fuel.

Speaker 13 The normal response to a disaster like this from political leaders would be to pledge support, send relief, figure out how to immediately help people in need. That's what President Biden is doing.

Speaker 13 That's what Vice President Harris did when she spoke at FEMA headquarters in D.C. on Monday.
Here's a clip.

Speaker 14 To everyone who has been impacted by this storm, and to all of those of you who are rightly feeling overwhelmed by the destruction and the loss. Our nation is with you.

Speaker 14 And President Biden and I and all of the folks behind me are with you. We will continue to do everything we can to help you recover and to help you rebuild, no matter how long it takes.

Speaker 14 Over the past 24 hours, I have spoken with Governor Kemp of Georgia, Governor Cooper of North Carolina, and many local officials.

Speaker 14 I have shared with them that we will do everything in our power to help communities respond and recover.

Speaker 14 And I've shared with them that I plan to be on the ground as soon as possible, but as soon as possible without disrupting any emergency response operations, because that must be the highest priority in the first order of business.

Speaker 13 So the Republican nominee for president taking a slightly different path, even though local officials, as the VP just mentioned, have asked both campaigns to temporarily stay away from the affected areas so that resources aren't diverted from the emergency response.

Speaker 13 Trump went to Georgia on Monday to, quote, deliver supplies after he falsely accused the Biden administration and Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of, quote, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.

Speaker 13 Trump also said that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has, quote, been having a very hard time getting the president on the phone, which was a little weird when Governor Kemp then said

Speaker 13 he just spoke to the president on Sunday.

Speaker 13 How shocked were you guys that Trump decided to play politics here? And by play politics, I mean tell the most easily refuted lies.

Speaker 15 I was not surprised at all.

Speaker 13 It is like,

Speaker 15 I was trying to like, you know, Trump like moves your baseline because he's so fucking crazy.

Speaker 13 And I was like trying to remember like, well, things have happened before.

Speaker 15 And I remember when 2004, I was an intern for the Kerry campaign. There happened to have been four hurricanes that hit Florida in that cycle.
And I went back and looked at what happened after that.

Speaker 15 And there were headlines about how there would be politics, but both the Kerry campaign and the Bush campaign were very clear. Like, we're not playing politics with this.

Speaker 15 They both talked about how privately people were worried about what the implications would be. Bush got to go be, as the AP referred to him, comforter in chief.

Speaker 15 John Kerry waited a few days because he was listening to local authorities. And then he went down there to talk to people and meet with people.

Speaker 15 There was a Bill Nelson was a Democratic senator from Florida toured with him saying, we wanted John Kerry to come because if he becomes president, we want to understand the damage damage here.

Speaker 15 Kerry went to great lengths to say this is a bipartisan moment. And so, what you have is two politicians trying to make the most of it politically.
If we're being honest, right?

Speaker 15 It's okay to be cynical about like some aspect of this, but understanding what they were supposed to do to like at least model being somewhat apolitical.

Speaker 15 And like Trump just obliterates that instantly, both by going, despite even the nonpartisan mayor of that town saying we would have liked for him to come on another fucking day, give us a few days to figure out what we can, what we have to do to dig out of this, but also then make up conspiracies, show up in a Make America Great Again hat, have a little wall of bricks built around him to make it,

Speaker 15 it's like a

Speaker 15 disaster photo app, and it's gross.

Speaker 13 Remember, there also was an expectation back in the day that candidates would even pull down attack ads or political ads generally.

Speaker 16 I mean, there used to be so much care and thought put into these things, and now he just makes stuff up.

Speaker 16 Trump also said that no one expected a hurricane like this because it's after hurricane seasons.

Speaker 13 Absolutely not.

Speaker 16 We're dead square in the middle of hurricane season.

Speaker 13 Everyone expected this to happen. It is only Trump, too.
I mean, we remember

Speaker 13 just in 2012, right? After Hurricane Sandy and Barack Obama goes and gives Chris Christie a big hug, which, you know, hurt Chris Christie's career

Speaker 13 in the Trump era.

Speaker 15 But like, worst hug he's ever gotten.

Speaker 13 Like, Governor Kemp, Republican governor, Democratic governor Roy Cooper, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, they're all working together. They're all helping each other out.

Speaker 13 And then there's Donald Trump out there just trying, like, just lying. And here's the problem, too, because the,

Speaker 13 you know, there is the hurricane has disrupted power and Wi-Fi service out in Western North Carolina. There's sort of like a lack of local news coverage.

Speaker 13 There's garbage Twitter accounts on the right and even some on the far left that are just spreading absolute lies, craziness about like Biden not helping.

Speaker 13 Meanwhile, there's like hundreds and hundreds of FEMA responders there helping out.

Speaker 13 The federal government's doing like the federal government signed an emergency declaration that like before the hurricane even even hit, just so that resources would be freed up.

Speaker 13 I mean, it's just crazy.

Speaker 16 There's some sequencing to this, too. I mean, that's why in these times of crisis,

Speaker 16 the governors and the president have to work together because the governor makes a request and then the White House has to grant it, and that unlocks certain authorities.

Speaker 16 And in this case, I think Biden could have gotten either an emergency declaration request or a major disaster declaration request, which unlocks even more federal government resources.

Speaker 16 And he did the major disaster declaration. So Biden literally is doing everything he can in real time.

Speaker 13 Yeah. It's just, it's completely made up.

Speaker 13 Even for Trump, these things used to be based on like a hint of, oh, did he, was he a little slow on something? Did he something?

Speaker 16 There was just nothing.

Speaker 13 Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And there is sort of like a bottom-up, top-down thing, because like the, the, there's a conspiratorial mindset that has taken hold on the right that has spread on social media.

Speaker 15 And I noticed it like as the storm was unfolding, there were already people on social media saying, where's the federal government? They haven't responded. They're abandoning this region.
region.

Speaker 15 And you realize like, okay, so that is the mindset that Trump has sort of, I think, like

Speaker 15 part of what led him to be successful and also what he feeds. And then he's just ready to come right on top and to like sort of feed that worst impulse.

Speaker 13 What do you guys think of Harris's response so far and what she should do?

Speaker 13 Obviously, it happens a lot in these situations that the local officials tell politicians not to come right away, but then the politicians don't want to be accused of looking like they don't care.

Speaker 13 So they want to go.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, I think she's doing everything she should be doing. She got briefed by the head of FEMA.
She's talked to Roy Cooper. She went to FEMA today.

Speaker 16 I think in terms of the visit, I would just be in constant contact with Roy Cooper's office in North Carolina and figure out the earliest possible time that doesn't impede relief operations.

Speaker 16 And you don't have to go to downtown Asheville. You could go to a county over where FEMA is staging relief operations and go there and talk to people, hear directly from folks affected.

Speaker 16 But I think like showing up is really, really important. I think the more complicated political question is going to be, do you go with Joe Biden? Do you go separately?

Speaker 16 Navigating that is going to be, is going to be hard.

Speaker 16 But I also think, you know, if I were the Harris campaign, I would consider finding a bunch of really good local relief organizations and then sending an email to my list fundraising for them and then saying to my field staff in Western North Carolina, like, all right, for the next two weeks, we're not doing campaign stuff.

Speaker 16 You're putting on a Harris Walls shirt and you're going doing whatever relief is happening, sandbagging, cleaning up, helping people get food, like whatever it takes.

Speaker 16 Just be in the community representing the Harris Walls campaign, but do what it takes to help those people.

Speaker 13 I think that would be pretty impactful. Yeah, I think you go.
I thought about that too, Tommy. I think she goes with Biden.
Like, I think she should go with Biden.

Speaker 13 It's like he said he was going to go Thursday, Friday. They're president, vice president.

Speaker 16 He likes two visits if you don't go with him, too.

Speaker 13 Yeah, no, that's why. And like, you know,

Speaker 13 she's not afraid of being. Like, they've done events together since she's been the nominee.
And it's like, it's not a political rally. So I think she's.
You said your name's Joe? Who's it? Right.

Speaker 13 Yeah. Who's this? Who's this guy?

Speaker 15 It's a pronounced. It's Biden.

Speaker 15 Bedin.

Speaker 13 I've heard it said. I wonder if

Speaker 13 Trump keeps this up, or even now that he's already attacked them for it, like, do you at some point take a shot at Trump for doing this?

Speaker 13 Not in a way that's like, now I'm going to go after you, but just sort of like, look, we're trying to work with Republicans, Democrats. We're trying to focus on this.

Speaker 13 And, you know, a disaster just hit people in red areas and blue areas. And we're trying to help everyone

Speaker 13 that we can. And we don't need Donald Trump exploiting people's suffering and trying to divide us so he can pick up a few votes.
Like, people are tired of this shit kind of thing.

Speaker 13 And I don't know if maybe Walls does that tomorrow night in the debate. I don't know if Harris does it like next week sometime.

Speaker 13 I mean, you don't want to do it right now, but like, I kind of think you've got to call out his game at some point if you want it to get.

Speaker 13 traction and to like really stop it from happening or at least stop it from affecting

Speaker 13 the election.

Speaker 15 I think that's right. I think that like, like sort of stepping back, like just she should just be modeling responsibility.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I know you're not saying otherwise, but like she should be modeling responsibility. And what that looks like is not like Trump

Speaker 15 wants to seem responsible and look responsible. So he's being irresponsible.
He cares what it looks like, not what it is. And she should just do the opposite.

Speaker 15 And I think if she's asked a question about why she waited or something like that, I think it's like, I don't know if you like go out of your way to do it, but you respond and say, there are people that want to use this to exploit a tragedy for political gain.

Speaker 15 They're people that are thinking only about how it affects themselves. I'm not going to do that.
We're here. We're all Democrats, Republicans.
We're all here together trying to rebuild.

Speaker 15 And I think she can take a shot at him that way. I think great.
Just as, you know, she's telling the truth.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 It gets annoying for, and I'm sure for President Biden and people in the government too, because it's like you model responsibility.

Speaker 13 And then because no one ever pays attention to anything who's not affected by something,

Speaker 13 your model of responsibility just like doesn't, just goes unnoticed.

Speaker 15 This is why I think sometimes too, it's like, you know, it's, it's about to be October. We're in the final sprint for this election.
So it's not the time to step back and wonder, how did we get here?

Speaker 15 But like, you know, we lay at the feet of Joe Biden, Kamal Harris, of any responsible elected figure, all the sins of the media environment and the crassness of our opponents.

Speaker 15 And it's like, no, like, yeah, sometimes now, because of how social media works, a politician doing everything, like Joe Biden responding exactly the way he should still doesn't stop a Republican leader from North Carolina or from one of these states saying, where's Joe Biden?

Speaker 15 He didn't didn't issue the response when he did exactly as he should have done in response to a request from the government.

Speaker 13 Or did you hear that reporter shouted? He got a shouted question at the White House after he talked about everything the federal government was doing.

Speaker 13 And the reporter's like, why weren't you here commanding the response over the weekend? And Biden was like, I was on the phone for two hours yesterday, like commanding the response. Right.

Speaker 15 So you want something to look like.

Speaker 15 You want the wall of bricks assembled by an advanced state.

Speaker 13 That's right.

Speaker 15 You want the throwing of the chicken nuggets. Like you want that.
That's what you think.

Speaker 16 you want something that looks like that you want better you want you want you want the performance of empathy are we going to bomb the hurricane what are we talking about exactly like you pre-position a bunch of assets and you make sure fema's on top of it like you need a competent team that's what joe biden has put in place like people also make the comparison to uh bush and hurricane katrina and the like air force one photo op over new orleans which was obviously very bad but also came on the heels of a 29-day vacation in crawford texas that's part of why it was so bad and then on top of that like the FEMA administrator was a clown who had run the Arabian Horse Federation.

Speaker 16 Remember Brownie and the state and local response was terrible. And so he was blamed for like the

Speaker 16 most important thing that Joe Biden and Kamal Harris can do is make sure that people get the help they need.

Speaker 13 Yes. And that is also the most important political move, too.
Yes. Like it's the right thing to do.
That's right. That's what I say.
Yeah, first important, but it's also right politics.

Speaker 13 We should note that if Trump had his way, the federal government would be shut down right now.

Speaker 13 Very good point. He did not succeed in his attempt to get Republicans to shut down the government.
Biden signed the continuing resolution, so it'll be funded through the election.

Speaker 13 And as a lot of Democrats have been pointing out, Project 2025 calls for breaking up and privatizing big parts of the National Weather Service, eliminating small business disaster loans, and raising the threshold for disaster declarations.

Speaker 13 Is there a policy case for Harris to make here, or is that too much?

Speaker 15 I don't think you do it right now, but I do think as we talk about this in the next couple of weeks, I think referring to all of that, but also stepping back and saying,

Speaker 15 local officials are saying they're not only just going to have to rebuild, they're going to have to rebuild with an eye towards being ready for future storms that are even more severe because climate change is having such an obvious impact and reminding people of the stakes around climate and the fact that like the investments that like the money to rebuild, the money to invest in infrastructure, like Donald Trump promised he would do it.

Speaker 15 It was Joe Biden that delivered on these things, whether it's through the infrastructure bill or through the Inflation Reduction Act. I feel like those are all points to make.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I mean, I think there's two points I'd make. One is that events like this are why you need a federal government.
It is the only entity in the world that has enough resources to surge the

Speaker 16 assets to a place like Asheville in the near term and then rebuild in the long term.

Speaker 16 And then I also think it's appropriate to talk about how Project 2025 wants to take the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the National Weather Service and fundamentally change them.

Speaker 16 They want to privatize the weather service and commercialize it.

Speaker 16 And really, like the goal here is you have a bunch of anti-climate change ideologues who don't want any government data going towards making the case that climate change is real and man-made, and they want to distort it.

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 you're going to end up with some natural gas lobbyists in charge of like the National Weather Service or something like that.

Speaker 13 They don't like selling people, telling people that is probably worthwhile.

Speaker 15 They don't like our satellites pointed down.

Speaker 13 They're like, oh, it's emission creep. Point it up.

Speaker 13 Miami's underwater today, everyone. But wow, it just must have been a freak storm.

Speaker 15 And great day for kayak rentals.

Speaker 13 Also, so it's funny because you have Project 2025, which is like the brainchild of these extreme right-wing activists who just don't want government at all, right?

Speaker 13 Like they don't think the federal government has a role. Then you have Donald Trump, and his view on these things is you use the federal government to help the people that you like and who like you,

Speaker 13 and you screw over the people who don't support you so everything is politicized the government is politicized government power is politicized right and so sure enough like trump who's like yelling right now about how you know joe biden and is calling governor Kemp or whatever after Hurricane Matthew in 2017 hit North Carolina the Trump administration denied 99% of the aid requested by Democratic governor Roy Cooper for North Carolina.

Speaker 13 One of the last times North Carolina had a big disaster hit, Trump said, no, thanks. I'll set.

Speaker 15 But we all like, and have amnesia, but like there was this sort of like sickening reality after the pandemic began where Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo had to like praise the dear leader because they wanted to make sure they were getting the resources they needed in the middle of an emergency and they knew that the actual stakes, actual empathy for what people were going through was immaterial.

Speaker 13 Yeah. That is something.
That's something to look forward to with the second Trump term. Absolutely.
Disaster hits, and you better hope that you live in a red state. Yeah.

Speaker 16 No atheists in a foxhole, no libertarians in a disaster relief zone.

Speaker 13 That's there you go,

Speaker 13 bumber sticker.

Speaker 16 No Heritage Foundation staff.

Speaker 13 We'll keep

Speaker 13 going.

Speaker 13 Before we move on to other subjects, we wanted to let you know that if you want to help folks affected by the storm and the flooding, you can go to votesaveamerica.com/slash Helene.

Speaker 13 Your donation will go to some organizations that are helping on the ground right now, and they're going to keep updating those orgs as needed.

Speaker 1 what's poppin' listeners?

Speaker 2 I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week, I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.

Speaker 5 Want to know about the fake heirs?

Speaker 6 We got them. What about a career con man?

Speaker 8 We've got them too.

Speaker 9 Guys that will wine and dine you and then steal all your coins.

Speaker 10 Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters.

Speaker 5 I'm joined by guests like Nicole Beyer, Ira Madison III, Conan O'Brien, and more.

Speaker 8 Join the congregation and listen to Scam Goddess wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 13 Over the weekend, while the storm was hitting the southeast, Trump was campaigning in the Midwest where he gave a speech that even he described as dark. And boy, was it.

Speaker 13 Joe Biden became mentally impaired.

Speaker 20 Kamala was born that way.

Speaker 20 She was born that way. You got to do what you got to do.
You got to get these people back where they came from. You have no choice.
You're going to lose your culture.

Speaker 20 You're going to lose your country.

Speaker 21 If we win and when we win,

Speaker 20 we're going to prosecute people that cheat on this election.

Speaker 22 And if we can, we'll go back to the last one, too.

Speaker 20 Oh, there's a fly. Oh, I wonder where the fly came from.

Speaker 22 See, two years ago, I wouldn't have had a fly up here.

Speaker 21 The shelves, they literally, the people walk in, they just take everything they want, they walk out of the store. What the hell is going on? They have to be taught.

Speaker 21 Now, if you had one really violent day, like one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately.

Speaker 13 So, Lovett, you said that you know what he was suggesting with the one violent day thing. Did he think the purge was a documentary?

Speaker 15 So here's what I thought, what he was in his adult brain.

Speaker 15 He's pulling back old things he used to say, but not as clearly as he was able to say before.

Speaker 15 And what I think he's talking about is something that you would hear like from from a from a New Yorker like this would be something like, you know why there's no homeless people in front of Tiffany's or you know what restaurants used to do back in the day if somebody tried to steal from them,

Speaker 15 they would have somebody go out and beat the ever-loving shit out of them. And then that person would tell all their friends, you didn't have to worry about it anymore.

Speaker 15 That's why there's no homeless people over here. That's what you used to have the mob, used to have dirty cop, whatever it is.

Speaker 15 And you would dispatch these people and they would rough somebody up and they would get the word out. That's that's that is what he's talking about there.
That's sort of in his mind.

Speaker 15 He's referencing that kind of way people would talk about

Speaker 15 crime. That like you could fix this by beating somebody up and then they'll tell all their friends.

Speaker 13 You know, the Times wrote this up and just sort of stunning to read it in a straight news story, but it said, Trump has in the past urged law enforcement to be rougher when making arrests and called for the summary execution of shoplifters.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Like, yeah, that is what, that is true. That is what he has said before.

Speaker 16 And then the roughing up suspects thing was in a speech to police in 2017.

Speaker 13 He also wants universal stop and frisk. He wants to deny funding for local police departments that do not implement universal stop and frisk.

Speaker 16 I think he genuinely believes that extreme government violence is a way to prevent crime.

Speaker 16 Because he also, on the international stage, he talks about Rodrigo Duterte all the time, the former president of the Philippines, whose quote-unquote war on drugs was basically just massacring people, innocent, guilty, didn't matter, thousands of them.

Speaker 16 And he would praise him all the time, publicly, privately, in phone calls. And this is just what he thinks is what you should do.

Speaker 13 He has proposed the death penalty for drug dealers. Like, just he wants to execute drug dealers, which is what Duterte did.
Now, do you think of any of what we just heard from Trump?

Speaker 13 in that clip is moving any voters? Should Harris respond to any of it? What do you guys think?

Speaker 16 I don't think so.

Speaker 16 I mean, the most egregious thing in there was Trump referring to Kamala Harris as mentally disabled, which is like disgusting and offensive, but I don't think you want to make it about you.

Speaker 16 So I don't know. I didn't hear anything there that I would jump on.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I just like, I think you got to just put it in the bucket of like, Trump's out here spewing all this nonsense and all this craziness and all this division and all this meanness and all this cruelty.

Speaker 15 Remember why he's doing all this. He's doing this because he's distracting from the fact that he has an incredibly unpopular agenda.

Speaker 15 He wants to cut taxes for corporations. He He wants to do a mass deportation that would disrupt our economy and cause a second Great Depression.

Speaker 15 He wants to overturn abortion rights, even in blue states.

Speaker 15 This is what Donald Trump is promising. So don't let the noise and don't let the bullshit and don't let

Speaker 15 the crazy ramblings fool you.

Speaker 15 He's very dangerous, and these are the things he's going to do.

Speaker 13 I would like to watch a group of undecided voters or persuadable voters who aren't sure watching Trump talk about the one violent day, the one rough hour, the shooting shoplifters, executing.

Speaker 13 Like, I get that Republicans and Trump have an advantage on crime and we don't want to play on their territory.

Speaker 13 I just think that that kind of stuff is so extreme and has to do with what Trump wants to do in a second term. And not, like you said, Tommy, like the names he's calling Kamala Harris.

Speaker 13 I wouldn't talk about that or anything like that. But I don't know.
I think this is, I think

Speaker 13 if you were convincing someone who was going into the voting booth that day that was like a friend of yours who was wavering, you'd be like, hey, this guy's talking about fucking executing people who were arrested for

Speaker 13 dealing drugs or people who are suspected of shoplifting. He wants them to shoot.
Like, I think that's a fair data point.

Speaker 16 I think most people would watch that and think, he doesn't really mean that. He's just kidding around.
He's talking. I think, unfortunately,

Speaker 13 even if you did it with the clips of shoot the shoplifters, execute the drug dealers, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 16 I mean, I think shoot the shoplifters and execute the drug dealers are just different categories. I think some people might be like, yeah, maybe think about death penalty for some drug dealers.

Speaker 16 I don't think, I think they would think he was not serious about shooting shoplifters.

Speaker 16 And I think broadly, people have way more harsh views on crime than I'm probably personally, that we're personally comfortable with. And I don't know.
I just don't know that I'd highlight it.

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 15 I just don't even, like, I feel so unmoored at this point.

Speaker 13 Like, we're at, we're,

Speaker 15 he's been saying shit like this. We're, we're stuck at 48, 48, this tiny group of people.
Is this the thing that finally gets them to understand why Trump is so dangerous?

Speaker 15 I, I really don't feel like I, I know anymore.

Speaker 15 Like, are there a group of people that are leaning towards Trump that could be pilled toward Kamala, not because of something that Kamala does, but because of something at long last that Trump says?

Speaker 15 Maybe you're right. I don't know.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 I was talking to some of our holsters at Focus Group folks we know, and they said, especially young people and young black and brown men, like hearing about universal stop and frisk, it's like incredibly unpopular.

Speaker 13 And that's just police. That's a terrible thing.
That's literally just police stopping and frisking you. That's not shooting suspected shoplifters.

Speaker 13 So actually, I totally agree that in general, probably the views of crime at this table versus like the public's views of crimes are quite different.

Speaker 13 But I think that this is so extreme that it would be, I don't know if it moves people, but it's very unpopular.

Speaker 15 I think if you're talking about pulling out certain parts of this that would be like, like in the would appeal to like a certain segment of young people that seem open to Trump,

Speaker 15 like, sure, like that makes a lot of sense to me. But on the whole, on the main, like, I feel like we are back into a couple of cycles of Trump's crazy in a thousand different fucking directions.

Speaker 15 And I, like, worry about the 2016 effect of like, he's, he's saying, oh, he's saying we didn't used to have flies as if immigrants brought all the flies. He's saying crazy shit about crime again.

Speaker 15 Wait, he's making his drug dealer point again. And like, what was that? He called her mentally disabled.
And then I feel like I'm in a bit of a time warp.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but no, I mean, I think, like, I think that you want to be on the economy. You want to be on abortion.

Speaker 13 The only other category of Trump stuff that I sometimes think we should push a little harder on is the using government for violence.

Speaker 13 And whether it's the mass deportations, whether it's the shooting the shoplifters, like this stuff is just in a category of like, even like libertarian leaning Republicans, like you're going to use the federal government to like, like, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, right?

Speaker 15 Yeah, no, I was trying to articulate that just a second ago, and I don't feel like I was, I'm like struggling to do it.

Speaker 15 But like, I do think that there's a way to kind of I think we like have to get I think that that kind of gets sorted into like the Trump chaos extremism bucket and then there's like the Trump economy bucket and I do think there's like a way to put them together and that we're not being clear enough with people about like talked about this with Tim actually because we were talking about uh Trump's economic speech uh which was kind of glossed over because of all the crazy shit he said but inside of it was an actual economic speech and you look at what he's promising and like It could cause a depression.

Speaker 15 It could cause a massive, massive, massive recession.

Speaker 15 And like, we should like, that's if in the reverse that's what donald trump would be saying why aren't we saying that like donald trump's chaos donald trump is going to when he left office he left the country with a recession he is promising through tariffs and uh mass deportations not only terror for millions of people but an economic calamity if you want to prevent a a a a massive economic crash caused by donald trump's chaos mismanagement and extremism like to protect the economy you have to vote for kamal harris and there's some way to kind of put those things together yeah the tariff thing is

Speaker 13 I've been an advocate for going hard at the tariffs for a while now.

Speaker 13 It is hard for people who like lived through a first Trump term, I think, to imagine like, well, why didn't he do this crazy tariff thing in the first term?

Speaker 13 And what's his motivation for doing it in a second term? And you're going to be like, I don't know. He's kind of fucking crazy.

Speaker 13 It is. That's like the only explanation.

Speaker 16 It is wild. And he also totally misrepresents what a tariff is.

Speaker 16 Although there's some recent Pew polling on immigration that found 56% of registered voters support mass deportations, including 27% of Harris supporters.

Speaker 16 So it just shows you how far people have moved on immigration and why like Trump is only talking about it.

Speaker 16 The other thing that's interesting from Pew on crime is they test people's feelings on crime and whether crime rates are going up or down. And in 23 of the last 27 polls,

Speaker 16 I think that's right,

Speaker 16 people thought that crime was going up even when it was going down. So there's clearly just like so much fear of crime, mostly from the media, that it distorts views.

Speaker 16 And I'm just not sure how it kind of cuts.

Speaker 13 Well, I definitely think you can't try to tell people, much like the economy, you can't tell people that crime is going down if they don't feel that crime is going down. I think that's a mistake.

Speaker 13 So it seems like some of this crap from Trump was a reaction to Harris going to the border on Friday, which Dan and I previewed a bit on Friday's show. How do you guys think she did?

Speaker 13 that event. I think the coverage looked good.

Speaker 16 I mean, I'd like any opportunity to drive the message that there was this border security bill, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wanted to pass it, and Trump tanked it because he wanted to run the issue.

Speaker 16 I think that's just like a great message.

Speaker 16 I also thought it let her highlight her work in California going after drug cartels and drug traffickers, which I bet you 0% of voters know about if you were just to sort of ask them in sort of an open setting.

Speaker 16 She has gained back some ground on immigration as compared to where Biden was, but she's still losing pretty badly on the issue.

Speaker 16 And that similar, that same pew poll last month found that 56% of registered voters are extremely or very concerned about the number of immigrants entering the country illegally, including 27% of her supporters.

Speaker 16 So same numbers as mass deportation.

Speaker 16 And so, you know, I think what I take from all of this is that her campaign has decided that she needs to look like she thinks the border is a crisis and the immediate priority.

Speaker 16 And we're going to solve that first. And then you move to like a broader, more holistic conversation about immigration policy.

Speaker 16 And this visit was a piece of it.

Speaker 16 I think the one criticism you could make is like, maybe do this six months ago, a year ago, you do it a couple times so it doesn't get called just a stunt, as the Chiron on Fox News said as we were walking in, but it's worth doing.

Speaker 13 I just remembered, I can't remember if it was a Sarah Longwell focus group or one of those cable focus groups after the debate or something, but there was an undecided voter or some swing voter who was like, and you know, I heard that she, when she was in California, she prosecuted some of these gangs.

Speaker 13 And I was like, someone knows about that. Thank God.

Speaker 13 Get that woman on TV. I was like, that is great.
That's a mission accomplished there. That's one.
Yeah, I watched.

Speaker 15 I went just, I was like, what does this look like if you're in Phoenix or something? And like, what does the border coverage look like? And

Speaker 13 the images are great.

Speaker 15 It's her walking with like police in front of the wall. It's very kind of like law enforcement, kind of border security.

Speaker 15 I think the like the remarks were great. All that was great.
But you just sort of see the challenge of trying to like make a dent.

Speaker 15 Like it's sort of a, we'll, we'll get to the polling, but just like how challenging this media environment is. Because if you watch a local affiliate, it's images of her at the border.

Speaker 15 Then they go to a Trump surrogate who's basically saying, like, she was the border czar who failed. She hasn't been here since she was elected, which is false.

Speaker 15 And then they say, all right, well, let's cut to Kamala Harris's remarks on the border. It happened to be the part of the speech where she was doing acknowledgements.

Speaker 15 So they cut from a Trump aid going, like, she's never done a thing for the border. And then it's her just applauding and like pointing at people.

Speaker 15 And you're just like, man, it just gets like to Tommy's point about like doing this, where it's like, you just, it's reps. It's going again.

Speaker 15 It's like doing, then going and doing interviews with these affiliates to talk about it more. It's just, you have to hit it over and over and over again.

Speaker 13 Also, if you are making a speech about a policy that your supporters and your voters are excited about, they're going to spread the message and they're going to help you spread that message, which is tough to do in this media environment.

Speaker 13 If you are going to play defense on border security, which is what she's doing, and look, there's a lot of... undecided swing voters are saying like, I'm not sure about her on the border, right?

Speaker 13 I'm not sure about her on immigration. And it's along with the economy, those are the two things holding a lot of these voters back.

Speaker 13 But it's just like you're not going to get a bunch of your supporters to go out and be like, look at her on the border. It was so exciting.
She was really tough on border security.

Speaker 13 Like, it's just a hard thing to get out there. Right.
It's like

Speaker 15 you're trying to beat him on temperament and extremism. You're trying to beat him on abortion.
You're trying to fight to a draw on the economy.

Speaker 15 And you're trying to like mitigate your losses on immigration.

Speaker 15 Like to Tommy's point about why mass deportation polls so well, there's no conversation about whether or not there should be a mass deportation.

Speaker 15 It's people saying, well, yeah, I do do agree that there's a huge problem at the border

Speaker 13 or the impact about it.

Speaker 15 And so

Speaker 13 you show people videos of

Speaker 13 federal agents raiding offices and homes. I think they're not as excited about it.

Speaker 15 Right.

Speaker 15 But then what happens is Donald Trump's out there saying, this is what we need. This is how we'll solve the problem.

Speaker 15 Correctly, the Harris campaign is saying, let's talk about border security. Let's talk about Trump killing the bill.
Let's talk about a better immigration system.

Speaker 15 And then there's no actual debate about this heinous and terrible policy.

Speaker 13 As you said, Lovett, we keep getting more polls. They keep showing showing that the race is more tied than the last polls.

Speaker 13 That's possible. New York Times Sienna, once again, Saturday morning, we all get up and more New York Times Sienna polls.
Harris leads 49.47 in Wisconsin, 48.47 in Michigan.

Speaker 13 There was a Fox News poll out on Friday that had Harris up two in Pennsylvania, but tied among likely voters. Blah, blah, blah.
It's all the same. Are we just stuck here until election day?

Speaker 13 Is this what's going to happen?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 16 Feels like it. In my dark moments, I wonder if we spend years of our lives and billions of dollars on campaigns.

Speaker 16 And in the end, what really matters is like the meta-media narrative at the last week or last week, yeah. You know, and like the late deciders and where they break.

Speaker 13 It's made me worry, Tommy, to that point that like the Trump people know this because that's how they won in 16 and they're just like waiting to just throw some kind of shit at the wall in the last year.

Speaker 16 Come on, Jim Comey.

Speaker 13 What are you up to?

Speaker 13 They don't have to. They don't have to.

Speaker 13 It doesn't have to have a kernel of truth to it. They're just going to throw shit at the wall.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 I will say, like, even if what you're saying is true

Speaker 15 let's that the campaigns create the space for that that like final two weeks to unfold i also like i just i think we don't know that like i think it's very possible that the race is frozen and like the very like no campaign is perfect but like

Speaker 15 Kamala Harris is like doing what she is supposed to do what like her like she has very smart people around her they are running an enthusiastic campaign they are doing everything they're supposed to do Trump is selling fucking watches and careening through disaster news they're tied launching and they're tied.

Speaker 15 And then the question is, like, is that a genuine, like, I think there's the race could be genuinely tied and this politics is all going through like the information mandolin and like ending up as shredded on the bottom.

Speaker 15 That's possible. It's also possible that these polls are accurate, but it's just very hard to measure the like.
shifts between leaners, shifts in enthusiasm, tiny shifts amongst undecided voters.

Speaker 15 That even if the polls are creating an accurate picture of what's happening, they're not able to measure these subtle and qualitative differences, which you do see in focus groups, right?

Speaker 15 There is a difference in the focus groups between how they talked about Biden versus Trump versus how they talk about Harris versus Trump. And that would just be hard to measure.

Speaker 15 The other is that like all of this polling, like we may, we may discover after this election that the ways in which they were trying to correct for errors after 2016 and 2020 created.

Speaker 15 totally weird results because those were weird elections between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, between Joe Biden and Donald Trump during a pandemic.

Speaker 15 And now this election where we finally have a candidate, a lot of people are enthusiastic about.

Speaker 13 Finally, a normal election.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Well, it's like, so between two, between

Speaker 15 a vice president.

Speaker 16 The answer is who knows.

Speaker 15 The answer is who knows. But we just won't know until after.
I know.

Speaker 13 I'm saying, and that was a joke.

Speaker 16 In my dark moments, I think that obviously registering voters matters. Geo TV matters.
But ultimately, we're talking about 10% of the population. It's undecided and trying to convince them.

Speaker 13 And it's just, it sucks. And again,

Speaker 13 I think people, you hear undecided and you think that those people are all torn between the two candidates. And they're just checked out.
They're just checked out. A lot of them are checked out.

Speaker 13 And, you know, I just, Alex wagner did a focus group of michigan voters uh

Speaker 13 last week and just hearing some of them you could it's so funny because you can tell the difference between the voters who've been paying attention to this race and they talk about the convention speech or trump did this and then the other ones are just like i haven't looked enough about kamal harrish i i know she's a new candidate i got to check it out i do remember i had more money in my pocket when trump was president but i don't know he seems kind of crazy i mean you just hear the same shit and they're gonna they are gonna tune in those last couple weeks kind of like michigan numbers or or people are gonna you know knock on their doors and or the campaign's gonna be on the ground you're gonna have an organizer they're gonna hear from a volunteer and again one conversation is not gonna do it but if they're gonna start thinking okay I got some new information from that person that's interesting I do think that because the race has been so static and because it's so close like it's hard to know the difference between are there just a group of people that are very hard to persuade or are they being persuaded and it's just not showing up in the numbers and we just we just don't know it's very hard to measure let's give them a little hot war in Lebanon close this thing out so strong some more uh chaos and death and destruction overseas.

Speaker 16 Maybe shovel some cash over there.

Speaker 13 Can't you fix that? That's supposed to be your other podcast.

Speaker 16 Rhodes is working on it. Rhodes is working on it.
He's doing his thing.

Speaker 15 I'm not doing right, Jones. I know.

Speaker 16 I know the joke and I was going to do it too.

Speaker 13 We didn't. Nope.
There is one more

Speaker 13 quote-unquote big moment left on the calendar. Tuesday night's VP debate.
J.D. Vance and Tim Walls will meet on stage at CBS's studios in New York at 9 p.m.
Eastern.

Speaker 13 Like the Harris-Trump debate, it'll be 90 minutes with no audience. Unlike the Harris Trump debate, both candidates' mics will be on the entire time.

Speaker 13 The moderators are Nora O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan.

Speaker 13 We know that Pete Buttigej has been playing Vance in Walls' debate prep sessions, and that Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer has been playing Walls in Vance's sessions.

Speaker 13 The Walls team has been trying to set expectations with leaks about Walls being nervous and not a great debater.

Speaker 13 The RNC did a preview call about the debate and teased that Vance will call Walls Traitor Tim for allegedly abandoning his National Guard unit when they went to Iraq.

Speaker 13 So So is it going to be Traitor Tampon Tim or Tampon Traitor Tim? Are they going to just drop Tampon? Oh, good question.

Speaker 15 That's tough. Yeah.
Traitor.

Speaker 15 So great. Actually, like, great.
That's good. They should do that.

Speaker 13 What a prick. How are you guys feeling about the expectation setting? Do you buy the expectation setting? Do you not? What do you think? I'm a little nervous.

Speaker 16 I watched some of Tim Walls' Minnesota public radio debate from last year against Scott Jensen. Barnberg.
Scott Jensen.

Speaker 13 It wasn't great.

Speaker 16 He seemed pretty nervous. He was a little gruff, got a little defensive.
The answers weren't always totally smooth or coherent.

Speaker 16 And so, you know, he's probably doing exponentially more prep this time than last time. But, you know, the stakes couldn't are a lot higher.
And Tim Walls hasn't been doing any interviews.

Speaker 16 Like the lack of reps could make him rusty. He's also, he's now defending Kamala Harris's record, something he learned about for the first time two months ago.

Speaker 13 Like, think about how complicated that is. You're not, you're not like,

Speaker 16 defending your own legislative record or time as governor, which you know inside and out. You're talking about this person you barely knew three months ago, as opposed to J.D.

Speaker 16 Vance, who's been doing fucking mop-up duty for Donald Trump for four years publicly while attacking him privately. And so I like J.D.,

Speaker 16 again, he's been out there. He's doing press conferences.
He's doing hostile interviews. They're not always good.

Speaker 16 He's not always helping the cause, but he's got a lot of reps and he's an obnoxious, like slippery little shit who is kind of good at this stuff.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think a Socratic, a Socratic form is a good form for J.D. Vance.
J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance is better in one-on-one interviews that are contentious with a national news reporter than he is on the stump or talking to someone trying to sell him a donut.

Speaker 15 He's better in the green room. He's better in like well-lit environments.

Speaker 15 He's a green room creature, and I do worry about that.

Speaker 15 What I was thinking about about this debate was actually the

Speaker 15 John Edwards. I don't know why it's, it's, it's 2004 for me right now.

Speaker 13 I don't know what

Speaker 15 came out of the fucking time capsule.

Speaker 13 Do you support the surge?

Speaker 15 Yeah. So the reason I was thinking about it.

Speaker 13 Let me tell you about the last time I remember a disaster relief situation in politics. 2004.
I do.

Speaker 15 Well, so this is a coincidence, but the reason I was thinking about 2004 is because,

Speaker 15 you know, Dick Cheney had become like kind of like, was, had this reputation.

Speaker 13 You're a political hero.

Speaker 15 Yeah, sure.

Speaker 15 Became this sort of like, you know, this political Darth Vader. And John Edwards was this charming lawyer.

Speaker 15 And then they had this debate where they kind of folksied it up and had a really kind of mild-mannered good time.

Speaker 15 And I think it redounded to Dick Cheney's benefit because John Edwards made Dick Cheney seem like a normal person in that debate.

Speaker 16 Yeah. And the only thing I remember from it is him kind of really awkwardly being like, your daughter, who is a lesbian.

Speaker 15 Yeah, he just that was a weird moment.

Speaker 16 What are you doing, John?

Speaker 15 But like, John, but Dick Cheney came out well out of that debate.

Speaker 15 And I was a little worried about that, like, that, like, you know, Tim Waltz is going to kind of like end up in this sort of folks-each conversation with J.D. Vance, and J.D.

Speaker 15 Vance comes away looking vaguely normal because he's in conversation with a normal guy. That was my concern.
But the fact that they're previewing this trader thing, I think that's fucking great.

Speaker 15 Like, the more J.D. Vance is coming, coming after Tim Waltz, and Tim Wallace can just be like, I'm proud of my service to my country.
Let's talk about Donald Trump. Let's talk about Kamala Harris.

Speaker 15 I think the better.

Speaker 13 And I think that would be a pretty stupid strategy. Really stupid.
JD Vance, which makes me think it's a head fake, but who knows? Who knows? I do, I buy the spin from the Walls camp.

Speaker 13 Someone in the CNN piece about this recalls Walls saying, I think at a fundraiser, as teachers, we're trained to answer the question and we train our students to answer the questions.

Speaker 13 That's not how this goes. Barack Obama, also a teacher, felt the same way.
He was not always great at debates. Kamala Harris was a prosecutor.

Speaker 13 That's like this debates are more her style, like the way that you prepare for trial, you know.

Speaker 13 So I do, I worry a little bit, you know, about Walls, but I don't know. Maybe he's practiced a bunch and maybe Pete really gave it to him good and now he's he's all ready.

Speaker 15 And then had their debate prepped.

Speaker 13 Okay. Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ. Tommy thought it.
No one couldmmy thought it.

Speaker 15 I can see that Tommy thought it. I don't have the permission structure.

Speaker 16 I also was texting with some people on the Walls team.

Speaker 13 Like, you ready to dominate? And they're like, you know, not quite how we're feeling, but we're making progress.

Speaker 16 So they're playing things down publicly and privately.

Speaker 13 And then there's a piece. Do you guys read the piece in the New York Times about J.D.
Vance and his past debates? That was like an expectations.

Speaker 13 It's like the Walls campaign placed it, but it was like basically all about how great J.D. Vance was like made for debates, just like what you said, you know? And apparently in Hillbilly.

Speaker 13 Elegy, he talked about how he, in the Marines, he did media relations for the Marines. And

Speaker 13 the experience taught me a valuable lesson that I could do it. I I could work 20-hour days when I had to.
I could speak clearly and confidently with TV cameras shoved in my face.

Speaker 13 So this is a guy who's been like practicing doing this for a long time. And you're right.
Like I think interacting with humans, sort of tough, but like a debate stage.

Speaker 16 White nationalist podcasts, great preparation for a debate.

Speaker 13 And I think the smarter strategy for J.D. Vance.

Speaker 13 than the Traitor Tim stuff would be to run the play that Donald Trump was supposed to run at the Harris Trump debate and forget about Tim Walls and make Tim Walls answer for like Kamala Harris and all of the unpopular parts of the Biden-Harris record and her stuff.

Speaker 13 Like that's that's that's what I bet he'll do.

Speaker 15 Yeah, what's confusing though about J.D. Vance is like he seems smart enough to know that and then he goes on social media and like starts bickering with reporters all day.
So

Speaker 15 there's an angel and a devil on his shoulder.

Speaker 15 And they're both assholes.

Speaker 13 Fucking worst angel you'd ever fucking meet. He looks such a weirdo.

Speaker 13 You could see him getting triggered by Nora and Margaret, too, because he's like these, they're just like shouting questions at him, and he just, he already has an antagonistic relationship with every reporter.

Speaker 13 And so I could see him.

Speaker 16 Yeah, I got real mad at Dana Bash.

Speaker 13 Yep, I could see that too. If you were Walls, would you go after him for

Speaker 13 the shitty things he said, or would you keep it all about Trump?

Speaker 16 I was thinking about this over the weekend, and I think the one place I would kind of go after J.D. Vance repeatedly is be like, J.D., I was a teacher for many years.

Speaker 16 I had a lot of students like you, like kids who were in a hurry to make a name for themselves and be someone and they were willing to say and do anything to get there.

Speaker 16 Like that's how you end up being the attack dog for a guy who doesn't care about working people, who in 2020, you said had failed to deliver as president and

Speaker 16 a DM. And now you're running around the country,

Speaker 16 you know, telling lies and trying to divide the country.

Speaker 16 And then you try to like create this narrative around JD that becomes a motive for everything he says and kind of undercuts him and sort of gets at his lack of qualifications for the jobs.

Speaker 16 Maybe you slip in a couple lines about how old Trump is. But yeah, no, I don't think you're going after the greatest Oppo hits.

Speaker 16 Like maybe you're mentioning some of the top ones like childless cat ladies or lying about

Speaker 16 migrants in Ohio. But yeah, I mean, most of this is going to be just the Trump show and making him defend Trump.

Speaker 13 Couldn't agree more, though.

Speaker 13 That's a great strategy to have like one motivation for J.D. Vance and his career and to just like keep coming back to that, right? Which is just trying to do anything to get more power.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I do think using the new stuff about the 2020, like even after Trump's presidency, you were saying these things, which is new and he'll feel obligated to respond. And his response is pretty bad.

Speaker 13 I don't know if we've, do we cover this on this show?

Speaker 13 Just so everyone knows what we're talking about, there was a Washington Post story about this, that J.D.

Speaker 13 Vance was direct messaging on Twitter with someone where he said in 2020 that Trump, quote, thoroughly failed to deliver on economic populism.

Speaker 13 And so I pretty damning. One of the more damning J.D.
Vance quotes.

Speaker 16 Even more damning, that line was followed by a parenthetical, accepting a disjointed China policy. Who says accepting?

Speaker 13 J.D. Vance.
J.D. Vance.

Speaker 13 Back to Yale.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I do think that's

Speaker 15 pretty damning. And his defense is like, I was saying how establishment Republicans let him down, which is sort of embarrassing.

Speaker 13 Okay, buddy.

Speaker 15 But he'll feel obligated because he'll know Trump is watching.

Speaker 13 Oh, God, yeah.

Speaker 15 And so he has to respond. So have to respond.

Speaker 13 The only, if I was Walls, I would look for, I mean, that's one opportunity, but other opportunities to drive a wedge between Trump and Vance

Speaker 13 with either different positions they've had. Or remember when Vance fucked up by saying that Donald Trump would veto a national abortion ban? And Trump said, I never told him that.

Speaker 13 I would look for a... Hammer him on that.
That's for sure. And know that Trump's watching and try to make him be a supplicant for Trump and just embarrass himself.
Like, I think that's a...

Speaker 16 Yeah, this is a real audience of ones situation for

Speaker 13 JD.

Speaker 13 What's a win for Walls look like?

Speaker 16 It's like a relentless message about Trump being in this for himself and not working people and then just getting JD on defense.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 16 I think a draw is a win. Do no harm.

Speaker 13 And yeah, and just saying how great Kamala is and her record and her, you know, her plans and everything like that.

Speaker 13 I mean, because again, she, I would say the only missed opportunity, not really missed because she didn't have the time, but in the last debate, she didn't get to talk as much about her plans, her policies, her values, stuff like that.

Speaker 13 She did, but I think that Walls could could probably do that for her even better because he's essentially a surrogate for her and not just her bragging.

Speaker 15 Yeah, she went back to like aspirations and ambitions, but she didn't go back to the details that much.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I think I think you'll know, I think a win will be a debate in which it felt like Tim Waltz was kind of putting J.D. Advance.
It's very similar.

Speaker 15 It's sort of a mirror image of Trump. Like J.D.

Speaker 15 Advance is going to be a smarter, more sophisticated kind of bulldozer coming at him, but like kind of being able to put that aside and letting him get himself riled up while talking to the camera and like kind of, he comes away kind of seeming kind of non-plussed.

Speaker 15 Is that the right way of using non-plussed?

Speaker 13 Yeah, sure. Sure.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 15 Vance seems rattled, seems angry.

Speaker 13 How much is this going to matter? You think the whole race is going to be upended if Wallace does bad or does well? I wonder, what's the worst VP debate performance?

Speaker 16 It's a good question. I mean, Sarah Palin even did fine, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah. They're usually non-events.
Like, no one cares.

Speaker 13 It is weird that it could be the last big event before voting, but no one will remember it by the time they're actually on election day no um you know it could cost a few news cycles to one side or the other but

Speaker 13 maybe a maybe a i don't i don't even know if the debate between harris and trump didn't say that's what i'm saying i know i know right like i don't know yeah well this is gonna be the thing this will be yeah no i don't know when we come back from the break you're gonna hear my conversation with the one and only james carville uh two quick things before we do that for tonight's vp debate we're gonna be hosting a subscriber live chat starting at 9 p.m.

Speaker 13 eastern 6 p.m pacific on our discord server. You'll be able to watch the debate live, chat with fellow crooked listeners, and vent about J.D.
Vance's awfulness in real time.

Speaker 13 Not a friend of the pod yet? Sign up now at crooked.com slash friends. We'll be doing our own recap show after the debate ends, but also make sure you're subscribed to our daily news pod, What a Day.

Speaker 13 You'll wake up with a 20-minute overview of the highs and lows of the Walls Vance Showdown. Best of all,

Speaker 13 Tommy's going to be joining Jane Kosten for the episode. Oh, yeah, can't wait.
Nice. It's very fun.

Speaker 16 It's a tradition like any other. Me going on wad after debates.

Speaker 13 There you go. When we come back, James Carville.

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Speaker 13 Joining us in studio today, he's the subject of a new CNN documentary coming out this weekend called Carville, Winning Is Everything Stupid, the legendary democratic strategist who inspired a generation of hacks like me to get into politics.

Speaker 13 James Carville, James, welcome to the pod. Well, thank you.
I'm excited to be here. It's

Speaker 13 always good to have a conversation with another hack. That's right.
That's right.

Speaker 13 So since Kamala Harris became the nominee, we've had a convention, a debate, millions in ads, saturated media coverage, and basically non-stop polling that shows a race that is essentially tied with five weeks to go.

Speaker 13 I know the last few elections have been pretty close, so this isn't unusual. I can't remember a race where the polling has been this tight for this long.

Speaker 13 What do you think is going on?

Speaker 13 Well, first of all, in this century, the only candidate that went to woke up election morning knowing they were going to win was Obama 2008.

Speaker 13 We were still a little nervous, but

Speaker 13 you kind of knew it. It was a good movie.

Speaker 13 But everything else, you might have thought you were a little better shape, but you didn't know. Right.
You certainly didn't know in 2012. I mean, Romney was actually shocked that he lost.

Speaker 13 I mean, it was like he went there thinking he was going to win.

Speaker 13 So it's not unusual, and what I will say,

Speaker 13 they're usually breaking in. So if there's seven swing states, the most unlikely result is they break 4-3.

Speaker 13 They're going to break

Speaker 13 altogether.

Speaker 13 More likely than not. And

Speaker 13 my instinct, but it's nothing but instinct, is

Speaker 13 Kentucky windage,

Speaker 13 that it'll break Harris's way. But that's only instinct.
There's no

Speaker 13 evidence to support that. Aaron Ross Powell, were you surprised at how fast the party came together around her candidacy and how fast her favorability ratings went up?

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 No.

Speaker 13 I think it was clear that people just wanted something different. They were like, well, 72% wanted something different.
60% of the Democrats did.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 you know what I would say? The analogy I would use is that

Speaker 13 you have an infected wisdom tooth and they pull it, you feel great. You don't feel any better than you'd have felt if you didn't have the wisdom tooth.

Speaker 13 The fact that the wisdom tooth is gone, you're like, gee, I'm on top of the world now.

Speaker 13 And I think you had some of that effect. Like

Speaker 13 in the way that

Speaker 13 it was 12.45 Central Time, almost sort of minute when I got the first text.

Speaker 13 And by I was listening to

Speaker 13 political radio, I forgot what it was.

Speaker 13 In an hour at 1.45 Central, you knew that it already coalesced, that there was no appetite for anything else. Yeah.
Were you worried at all that?

Speaker 13 Because I know you were initially concerned that it would appear either she was anointed by the party

Speaker 13 or even another Democratic nominee were nominated. And look, she did earn the nomination, but

Speaker 13 there was no other challengers, about 24 hours. Yeah, you know, Simon,

Speaker 13 if President Biden would have dropped out June the 15th, there might have been a lot of...

Speaker 13 One of the things that I do believe that the level of talent in the current Democratic Party is the highest level of talent I've seen in a political party in my lifetime.

Speaker 13 I mean, mean, if you look at the potential presidential candidates we had, they're all like really world-class talent.

Speaker 13 And Harris has kind of proved herself to be a lot better than people

Speaker 13 thought.

Speaker 13 The other thing that I would have people tell me that, you know, she's gotten a lot better, like people working at the White House, is she's become more confident. She has better staff work.

Speaker 13 I think they brought Lorraine in.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I'm gratified I didn't,

Speaker 13 you know, everybody saw her 2000 presidential caffeine. Ooh, man, that thing stunk.
But she's grown. She has.
She really has.

Speaker 13 It feels like Trump and Kamala are in a battle for voters' attention, which is increasingly harder to come by these days, the state of the media.

Speaker 13 I think it's one big reason that the Harris folks really want a second debate. So far, Trump's not giving it to them.
What do you think her campaign can do to break through in these last few weeks?

Speaker 13 Any creative ideas to grab people's attention?

Speaker 13 The answer is yes. Okay.
First of all, what they do is they do big events very well.

Speaker 13 The vice president will roll out. You could say maybe they could see the picture,

Speaker 13 I don't know, but it was very well done. The convention, you couldn't walk away from there and not say it's one of the better conventions you ever had.

Speaker 13 You certainly couldn't walk away from the debate and not say that they

Speaker 13 did a real good job in preparing her. I knew some of the people that were in prep, and I I really was very confident she was going to do well.
What is less certain is

Speaker 13 how aggressive they are day to day

Speaker 13 and how they don't take a story and kick it.

Speaker 13 So Trump says, I don't like to pay people a minimum wage. I just don't pay them.
Then, I mean, overtime, not minimum, overtime. And Project 2025 has this overtime provision.

Speaker 13 I wish they would be kicking the crap out of this all day. I wish they were like flooding TV.
Like, come on, people work overtime. They want to get paid.

Speaker 13 You know, hourly workers, overtime is everything to them.

Speaker 13 So I thought that they could kick that a lot harder. And what I hope that they do coming down the stretch is

Speaker 13 push a story

Speaker 13 every day. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And a lot of it is

Speaker 13 the stuff they're proposing on taxes, people don't like.

Speaker 13 The other one they should be just kicking the crap out of is the tariff stuff.

Speaker 13 You see we're down four in Iowa. That's understandable.
Agrarian people can't stand tariffs. They have a terrible

Speaker 13 industrial people,

Speaker 13 some are naive enough to think this is going to do some good.

Speaker 13 I think they should be pushing the Peterson Institute. which okay, nobody knows what it is, we know,

Speaker 13 but it's all credible people say this is going to be a $2,500, $3,000 owned every family. I wish they would push that hard.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 It seems like, I mean, this has been a problem for years now, but Trump gives you so many different targets every day because he says a bunch of crazy shit all the time.

Speaker 13 She has the added challenge of voters saying, well, I want to know more about her. I want to know what she's going to do as president.

Speaker 13 But then you've got Trump up there saying, he's talking about the tariffs. He's talking about mass deportations, political prosecutions.

Speaker 13 He just talked about going after shoplifting by letting police do whatever they want for one rough hour. How do you think she should balance talking about herself and talking about him?

Speaker 13 How do you handle that? So I think

Speaker 13 that if she ran hard, if they pushed the tariff stuff, people would find out something about her.

Speaker 13 I think if they pushed the overtime stuff, if they push something simple that everybody is for, but they just don't do, the minimum wage. It's time to give America a raise.

Speaker 13 Everybody else in the world has gotten a race,

Speaker 13 but America's not got a race.

Speaker 13 And I read a New York Times story, it's so predictable. She did the interview with, I guess, Stephanie Rule.

Speaker 13 And of course, it's the same pissy thing. Well, she really didn't say anything.
There was a lack of specificity. And hidden in the story

Speaker 13 was the fact that she put out an 81-page economic plan.

Speaker 13 Like, why didn't...

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 we had a, in 92, we had an 85-page economic plan. No one ever read a word of it, including me.
But there's actually well, she lacks specifics. She's not talking about the issues in any depth.

Speaker 13 It's just this bromides and it well, actually,

Speaker 13 she does have an 81-page economic plan. There's no danger that I'm going to read it.

Speaker 13 But if I think if if people knew that,

Speaker 13 you you know, if they said, check out the 81-page economic plan, on page 32, she says

Speaker 13 if we need to increase the minimum wage to twelve $1,285 an hour.

Speaker 13 Pretty good. Or we need to take taxes over, raise taxes on people who make over $400,000 and put it in a first-time home buyer mortgage relief fund to help young people buy houses.

Speaker 13 Anything like that, you know, is going to be massively popular.

Speaker 13 It pointed out, but the New York Times is never going to say that she has economic specificity. Right.

Speaker 13 Because she's just, you always say that, no matter what. Yeah, and when she does interviews, too, she can answer questions by saying, oh, if you want to know more,

Speaker 13 have this whole book out there.

Speaker 13 And by the way, here's what Trump wants to do.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 So there are,

Speaker 13 I do think they can be more aggressive. I think they can fight for the news cycle.

Speaker 13 And I think that, you know, you don't get that back where one day you get a bunch of good stories and you poll that night and you say, well, shit, we didn't move.

Speaker 13 You got to keep building stuff up.

Speaker 13 So polling shows a big gender gap, including it especially between young women and young men, white men, Hispanic men, even black men.

Speaker 13 It's been like the big demographic debate of 2024. Do you think this is a dynamic that is specific to Trump and the current version of the Democratic Party? Or is it bigger than that?

Speaker 13 How do you think about it?

Speaker 13 Well, I've been pretty outspoken. We don't do as well, near as well with males as I think they're going to do.

Speaker 13 And John, you know that every

Speaker 13 election brings about a fashionable demographic. Nice car dads, soccer moms, women of color.

Speaker 13 I think that the demographic in this cycle with the most elasticity is, and they'll get in trouble. saying this in some quarters, but are college-educated white males.
I think we have a lot of ups.

Speaker 13 Why do I say that? First of all, they tend to be more pro-choice

Speaker 13 than non-college white males. You know, I'm sorry, but we have mothers, wives, children, friends.

Speaker 13 And so much of this has become that

Speaker 13 abortion is a women's issue. It's actually somewhat of a male issue, too.

Speaker 13 And the other reason I think that there's upside is,

Speaker 13 you know, because of obvious reasons, they're more invested in the stock market. They have more to lose.
So I do think we have some

Speaker 13 we can't do any better than we're doing in post-bachelor white women. Right.
But we certainly can do better with younger black males.

Speaker 13 That's a problem. I think to a large extent our coaches help create that.

Speaker 13 But I think the trendy demographic

Speaker 13 are college white males. Aaron Trevor Burrus.

Speaker 15 And

Speaker 13 what do you think is the best way to lock down college white males?

Speaker 13 Keep talking about abortion, keep talking about freedom, and say that Trump says,

Speaker 13 the argument is, is it a good economy or a bad economy?

Speaker 13 It's very hard to talk people into something that they don't believe.

Speaker 13 But Trump gave us a tremendous opening. He says, you have nothing to lose.
We're going to try everything because it's all in a toilet. I don't think people look at it that way.

Speaker 13 I think people say, well, I got a job. I think most people, if you say, yeah, I feel pretty good about the next year, a year and a half.

Speaker 13 You know, some people may have a

Speaker 13 savings account. And, you know,

Speaker 13 maybe they're doing a little better.

Speaker 13 And so if the question is, is it good or bad?

Speaker 13 That's not the question we should be asking. Do you have something to lose in this? Can you do better? Yes.
But if we do things like start slapping tariffs on everything,

Speaker 13 we're not going to do very well.

Speaker 13 You have something to lose. And he keeps running these ads.

Speaker 13 What the hell you got to lose?

Speaker 13 Actually,

Speaker 13 a fair amount.

Speaker 13 And it's not just

Speaker 13 people like you and I that have something to lose.

Speaker 13 Pipe fitter has something to lose.

Speaker 13 I mean, that guy, Joshi, is going down to the union hall and at work every day. Yeah.

Speaker 13 I know you've taken your share of shit for warning Democrats about identity politics and woke language and all that.

Speaker 13 I've always wondered about this from the perspective of Democratic politicians, like 99% of whom don't actually talk like that.

Speaker 13 They get tagged as the woke party because of activists and people on social media that they have very little control over. If you're a Democratic politician or working for one,

Speaker 13 what do you do about this issue?

Speaker 13 Well, first of all, no one uses that language.

Speaker 13 I mean, it just don't. Okay.
And

Speaker 13 it started and it was like an idea

Speaker 13 that never caught on.

Speaker 13 So there's no chance that, you know, I tell people, and this is true, I, you saw the film, I've probably had more encounters with black people than any Democratic consultant, just where I grew up and where I live.

Speaker 13 And if I saw like, which I see all the time, let's just say there's three black guys shooting a bull out in front of the supermarket.

Speaker 13 If I walked up and I said, Good morning, fellas, how are things in the community of color today? He said, What's this giant-ass motherfucker talking about? Okay, they wouldn't know what I was saying.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 I think it was

Speaker 13 well-intentioned people that just made a giant mistake and they tried to lead, and no one followed them. And the best thing we can do is just move on.
And we don't need to go

Speaker 13 remind

Speaker 13 NPR that no one talks like that. That everybody knows no one talks like that anymore.
There's no danger

Speaker 13 that Adam Schiff is going to be running for Senate in California and start talking about Blat Necks or something. It's just not going to happen.
There's no value in that. I love the documentary.

Speaker 13 It focuses on your life, your career, your marriage. A good chunk of it is also about your very vocal push to get Biden to step aside, which was a bit of a lonely crusade before the debate.

Speaker 13 I know that you probably weren't too concerned with the criticism you received during that period, but there is a moment in the dock where you worry a lot about becoming one of those people you used to hate, the goddamn carping Democratic pundits who were never satisfied.

Speaker 13 How do you think about giving advice that's still pertinent and persuasive, even though you're not working inside these campaigns like you used to?

Speaker 13 So you and I work in campaigns, and you would see people on television. Some bitch has no idea what he's talking about.

Speaker 13 We're sitting there 16 hours a day trying to, you know, crank out a schedule, trying to get spots written and talking points pushed and, you know, doing vocal TV hits, and

Speaker 13 this asshole's popping off. And I was,

Speaker 13 so here he says, well, yeah, that guy is sitting there and, and, you know, knocking down $35,000 of speech and, you know, sitting on TV.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 I've always hated that kind of person. Yeah.
And

Speaker 13 that's so true that I had become that which I had always detested.

Speaker 13 But

Speaker 13 I just didn't, because I was old, if you see the documentary, it's pretty clear that I'm

Speaker 13 in the midst of the aging process.

Speaker 13 I had, like you,

Speaker 13 I had, maybe you have a better view, but who have an idea of what the job entails. Some

Speaker 16 not,

Speaker 13 it's not easy. No.

Speaker 13 And I had a platform.

Speaker 13 I kept, and I'd thought it out. I'd talked to a lot of people about it.
I

Speaker 13 thought about it myself.

Speaker 13 I just didn't think I had any other choice.

Speaker 13 Just given the unique circumstances,

Speaker 13 you know, if

Speaker 13 maybe if you got, or somebody got really vocal, they would cut guests off from you. If you were lobbying, they'd say you,

Speaker 13 or you've had other campaigns you were working on, or even if you were working on foreign campaigns, they'd say they'd call

Speaker 13 the government of Nigeria and say, you know, if you don't get rid of this son of a bitch, you're not getting something. I mean, but there was no pressure point that could be applied to me.

Speaker 13 And I just thought I was in a unique situation. I'll blame other people.
And I would have people would say, God, I wish I could say that, but I can't. I said, I understand.
It's not, I'm not.

Speaker 13 I couldn't have said this 15 years ago. Right.
All right. But you can do it now.
But I can do it now.

Speaker 13 I'm sure you get asked a lot by young people for advice, especially people who are interested in pursuing a career in politics. I know one of the reasons

Speaker 13 you really wanted to do this doc or what you hoped from this doc was to get young people involved in politics again.

Speaker 13 What do you say to people who ask?

Speaker 13 Well,

Speaker 13 the origins of the doc was Susan McHugh,

Speaker 13 who had been kind of a friend.

Speaker 13 We hadn't done it I think it was post-pandemic.

Speaker 13 And she said, you know, I was a student at Rutgers and I saw the war room and she became Harry Reid's chief of staff at 30 years old. And Susan's just one of these like uber connected people.

Speaker 13 And she said, I want to make another documentary.

Speaker 13 And that was really the kind of origin of what started.

Speaker 13 And, you know, whatever you call this, the profession, the business, the industry, it's taken a lot of hits.

Speaker 13 You know, so a young person says, everybody says it's dirty, it's all negative, it's all polarized, everybody's in it for themselves. And guess what? That message actually broke through.

Speaker 13 I mean, they were actually successful in convincing people that this was a shitty business that shitty people were in.

Speaker 13 And that's just not people like you and I that work in campaigns. It's people who every

Speaker 13 election, Ms. Mabel, who sits there at the card table and checks off the list, that's

Speaker 13 the person that walks the precinct, that goes into the projects to flusher, that goes to get the votes out. It's also the local newscaster that covers politics.

Speaker 13 It's the people that write about politics. And

Speaker 13 the entire business, to the extent that this movie

Speaker 13 lives beyond the cycle, which I hope it does, I hope it gives people like, you know what?

Speaker 13 Those people look like they were having a pretty good time.

Speaker 13 It didn't look like they went to work with a half-shirt.

Speaker 13 They were particularly embarrassed by the way they earned a living.

Speaker 13 And I think, Matt, the advantage we had was our director actually worked, was a gopher in the Mondale campaign, was Susan Estrich's kind of assistant in the 88 Dukakis campaign, and covered politics at Vantifaire.

Speaker 13 So he actually

Speaker 13 had some

Speaker 13 idea,

Speaker 13 because most people think we're kind of carnival balkers, you know, itinerant people, vagabonds,

Speaker 13 that move from one place to another and have a, you know,

Speaker 13 and

Speaker 13 I hope,

Speaker 13 you know, some young John Favreau says, you know,

Speaker 13 or some young Susan McHugh

Speaker 13 says, well, Shed, maybe I want to be chief of staff to asset when I'm 30 years old and be some Irish

Speaker 13 woman from that went to Rutkas. That's fine.
I mean,

Speaker 13 I was a kid when I first saw the war room, and to this day, I can still remember your line that at the end, outside of a person's love, the most sacred thing they can give is their labor.

Speaker 13 And anytime you can combine labor and love, you've made a merger.

Speaker 13 Because that was the moment. That was the first moment I thought about getting into politics.
So thank you for that. Well, thank you for that.

Speaker 13 Actually,

Speaker 13 you know, that's what I hope we're able to do

Speaker 13 with this movie.

Speaker 13 I mean, that's my hope is that.

Speaker 13 you know,

Speaker 13 30 years from now, somebody says, you know, I got out of UCLA and

Speaker 13 I got an offer, but I thought I'd maybe

Speaker 13 run for the Sewage and Water Commission. Who would have thought that one day I would be the governor of California? There you go.
No, yeah.

Speaker 13 The dock is fantastic. It's called Carville, Winning Is Everything Stupid.

Speaker 13 Directed by Matt Turnauer, premieres on CNN on Saturday, October 5th, and in theaters in New York, L.A., and other spots across the country. James Carville, thanks for coming on Pod Save America.

Speaker 13 Thank you, and thank you for your kind words about the war room inspiring you. And

Speaker 13 I hope this will inspire somebody else. Thank you so much.
Thank you.

Speaker 13 That's our show for today. Thanks again to James Carville for coming by.
We'll have our VP Debate Reaction show in your feed tomorrow morning. Bye, everyone.

Speaker 13 If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more, consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at cricket.com slash friends.

Speaker 13 And if you're already doom scrolling, don't forget to follow us at Pod Save America on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more.

Speaker 13 Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review to help boost this episode or spice up the group chat by sharing it with friends, family, or randos you want in on this conversation.

Speaker 13 Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producer is David Toledo.
Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Ferris Safari.

Speaker 13 Reed Cherlin is our executive editor, and Adrian Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 13 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support support from Kyle Seglu and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.
Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Speaker 13 Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant.

Speaker 13 Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Phoebe Bradford, Joseph Dutra, Ben Hefcote, Mia Kelman, Molly Lobel, Kirill Pelavieve, and David Toles.

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Speaker 16 Every morning, Up First takes the three biggest stories of the day and explains why they matter.

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