Trump Wins New Hampshire, Rages at Haley

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I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Tommy Vitor.
Gang's all here. Here we are.
Big night. Huge night.
Donald Trump has won the New Hampshire primary, though his margin over Nikki Haley looks like it'll end up being smaller than the polls suggested, somewhere between 8 and 12 points. We're recording this Tuesday night, so we're still counting some vote.
But it was apparently enough for Haley to decide that she's staying in the race. Here's what she said shortly after they called it for Trump.
Now you've all heard the chatter among the political class.

They're falling all over themselves saying this race is over. Well, I have news for all of them.

New Hampshire is first in the nation.

It is not the last in the nation.

This race is far from over.

There are dozens of states left to go. I love the yelling guy.
I love that guy. Go Nikki.
I mean, are we political class? Because this member of the political class does not think it's over. I want her to go, stay all the way in.
Go to the convention, Nikki. 12 points?

That's fucking, that's this big.

Some people might say that in any other election on earth, that that's a landslide.

Not me.

This razor thin margin.

11 points.

All the way to Milwaukee.

Come on, Nikki.

I wonder what the last primary is.

I'll Google it.

Yeah, you Google that.

Why do you guys think she decided to stay in?

Dan?

I don't think she did.

What are you talking about?

Wait, hold on a second, Dan.

We watched this whole thing.

She got dressed up.

She went down there.

She said, here we go.

Okay, I'm going to flash you back to eight days ago.

We sat in your office.

Eight days ago, we watched Ron DeSantis give a speech.

That was not a stay in the race speech.

That was absolutely a stay in the race.

Four minutes, no message. That was pathetic.
Maybe she will stay in the race. Maybe she will.
But I don't think that matters one iota. I find myself rooting so hard for her to stay in the race.
I don't think it matters. Nikki Healy is not going to win the Republican nomination.
Not with that fucking attitude. What are we doing here? Unless we get the hamburger from heaven.
But I think the longer she's in this race, attacking Donald Trump, pissing him off, absolutely. I'll take it.
I mean, maybe she will stay in. The month between New Hampshire and South Carolina is traditionally a death march in Republican politics.
George W. Bush and some of the dirtiest politics of that time seems like, frankly, nothing now.
Quaint. Quaint.
Destroyed John McCain in that period to then essentially lock up that nomination in South Carolina. Nikki Haley is going to be under a brutal salt for a month to go to her home state where she's pulling in the single digits and losing to Trump by about 30 points in an electorate that is so, and we can talk about how it's so unfabled her, maybe she will want to go through that humiliating process.
I would be surprised. What has she got to lose? Well, I think the big question is how much money she can raise in the next 24, 48 hours.
If she can't raise money, she's got to get out. There's just no tools about it.
Her campaign is billionaire dependent. She has no grassroots fundraising base.
And there's this fund, these billionaires are holding this fundraiser for her in a week. And we'll see if they're still holding it a few days from now.
Apparently she's going to campaign in the Virgin Islands tomorrow. Tomorrow, yeah.
For their February 8th caucus and there's Nevada. I figured it out.
The last primary is the June 4th, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota primary. So that's how long this could last.
June 4th. Oh, please.
Tell me when is the Virginia primary? That Sure can, yeah. That is the one primary she has a legitimate chance to win.
Well, so they, she, their argument, the Haley team, they put out a memo this morning sort of signaling that they were not going, she was not going to drop out. If it was the 20 or 30 point blowout that the poll suggested, maybe that wouldn't have been an operative memo.
But their argument is basically, so we got South Carolina, our home state, is on February 24th. And Democrats can also vote.
Anyone can vote in that primary. Unless you're a Democrat that votes in the February 3rd primary, the Democratic primary for Joe Biden, then obviously you can't vote again.
But if you don't vote in that, you can vote. So that's an open primary in South Carolina.
And then they go to Michigan. Michigan is open.
And then D.C., good district for her. Then the caucuses in Idaho and North Dakota.
And then Super Tuesday on March 5th. And 11 of the 16 states on Super Tuesday have open or semi-open primaries.
That is true, but it's far less important than the fact that the Trump team has completely rigged the rules so that now if he gets 51% of the vote in some of these states, he will take all the delegates, including states like California. It is true that some of these states have open primaries, but none of them have open primaries with the tradition of independent participation like New Hampshire.
Half of the voters in this election were either independents or Democrats who re-registered as independents to participate in this process right it almost sounds like independents and democrats infiltrated to to take a clean victory away from donald trump who to manage to stop this deal yeah it does it does seem as though like if your a whole if your campaign memo is about how don't worry the republican primary has lots of opportunities for people who aren't Republicans to vote. You do have a deeper problem that can't be overcome by the calendar.
That would be the memo written by the campaign that lost Republicans by 50 points in this election tonight. So you would say.
She didn't do so well with Republican voters. She's running for the Republican.
Which is tough when you're running for the Republican. At some point, presumably she has to, at some point she has to win Republicans to win the Republican primary.
That would be sort of, I don't know. I'm not listening.
This is what you guys pay the big bucks for. Yeah, like I'm a speechwriter.
I'm not a data guy. I'm not a data.
There's more poetry than Pose. But I have to say, I also was a math person.
And I do think at some point she has to win Republicans.

I'm just trying to get inside their, the campaigns, her head, the campaigns. I think what they might be thinking is, as Tommy said, Trump has rigged the rules.
So a lot of these are like either winner take all or you hit a 50 percent threshold in the primary and then you take all the delegates. But maybe she's thinking, if I can just keep picking up a few delegates here and there, and then March 5th comes along, or whenever Trump is tried in D.C., then Trump is convicted.
Suddenly the polls start shifting. We go to the convention.
She's the only other one with delegates, except I guess Ronnie D. has a couple from Iowa.
He's got six from Iowa. No one else is going to get delegates except Trump and maybe her now.

So maybe she thinks then, you know, who knows what might happen? It's all crazy, but I'm thinking that's what must be going through their heads. I think what's going through their heads is everyone gets up in a campaign and they care passionately about it.
And they can't make the decision to drop out between when the votes are counted and when she speaks. So they do this and then, this is exactly what happened with DeSantis, then over the course of time, the checks stopped coming in, starting to lay staff off, people start, your endorsers start calling and saying, you know what? How many does she have? Like Sununu.
It's just like stuck to her. Sununu and Ralph Norman.
Yeah, not even, I guess that's right. I guess that's right they start calling and saying you know I'm kind of thinking or the billionaires who are funding this thing say it's time to get on board with Trump and then you drop out like this is the process they all go through yeah I think that that would help explain why she spoke so early it's like you know what let's just go out there get it over with give the speech we need to give for tonight get get to tomorrow, do some thinking, spend time with your family, and then really decide.
I also think they must have seen the numbers and said, your lead is never- Never going to get better. Trump's lead is never going to get smaller than it is right now.
Get out there before there's a one in front of that number. That's right.
Trump noticed that too. He's furious.
We'll get to it. The speech hit different when she was down seven, I suppose, now she's down 14 or whatever it is at this moment i think she's gonna stay in all the way to south carolina i'm pulling for her look like i hope it happens it's total wish cast what we want and what we think again again we all light a candle to saint isidore of content but i look i want her to stay in too i think i think dan look obviously you're making the right like that's sensible, obvious path.
But hey, we got to put something

before the Helix mattress ads.

And I feel like-

I just also think that people on campaigns

and people when you're in it,

you don't make sensible decisions.

Like I don't, I just don't.

Well, every campaign manager has to go tell their boss

to drop out is saying, lay me off, right?

That's not a message people deliver that easily.

And all these other people who've been in the trench with us for a year now, we're all gonna become unemployed. And possibly unemployable in Trump's Republican Party.
If you are someone who is spending a ton of money, if you would put money behind Nikki Haley, you are a person who has deluded yourself into believing that at some point, the Republican Party is gonna come to its senses. That is like the core, that is core to your being, that you believe that something is going to shift, the fever is going to break.
A year ago, it wasn't true. What's to say these people won't keep believing that for another three or four months? You know, that like the trials are coming.
She's also, she's just, she's bored. She likes running for president.
She's, you know, she's getting some attention. She likes it now in New Hampshire where 48% of the voters are independent and Democrats.
I don't know what she's going to be able to talk to. People wonder if she can't fill a event in South Carolina.
I mean, just one proof point. I mean, one of her big donors was the CEO of Home Depot, Ken Langone, I think is his name.
He said that his financial support for Haley would be contingent on New Hampshire results. So you're going to have guys like that deciding whether they're going to light 10 million more on fire and give it to a super PAC or not.
And I think that's going to make the decision for her. Yeah.
I believe he said at some point you stop throwing money down a rat hole, which begs the question why you ever start throwing money down a rat hole. And what's a rat hole? And these guys also know that the longer they wait,

the longer they support Nikki Haley,

the more expensive it's going to be

to get back in Trump's good graces.

Yeah.

I will say,

it's her home state.

She can run a pretty lean campaign

in South Carolina.

She doesn't have to go anywhere.

You know, she makes a point in that.

She's down 50.

In her victory speech,

she's given two victory speeches

and she hasn't won the thing.

It's amazing.

That's incredible.

This is what I'm saying. I love it.
I love it. We're acting like this is on the level and she's going to be like, oh, look at my, look at the data.
John, I'm on your side of this fucking table. But in her speech, she makes this point like, you know, I'm from, she speaks, she's really, we were talking about this before the pod that like, she really is just like, she is just a quintessential politician.
She's very, she's good at it, but she's such a quintessential politician, but she gets up there and she says, now they can't come down to South Carolina and lie about me or whatever they can say about me because- Sure they can. Well, but also she's like, they know me in South Carolina.
South Carolina is my home state. Where you're polling at 6%? That, you know, the argument goes both ways.
If they know you know you they've already decided on you right like what what story can you tell a south carolina voter to convince them from go to go from donald trump to nikki haley when you were the governor for eight years she's gonna she's gonna wake up tomorrow and figure out all right and you know what and she can do it and nikki i believe you can do it so trump was none too happy about uh Haley's decision to stay in the race gone was the low energy somewhat gracious trump we saw during his iowa victory speech thank god instead we got our guy back i can go up and i can say to everybody oh thank you for the victory it's wonderful it's what or i can go up and say who the hell was the imposter that went up on the stage before and claimed a victory? She did very poorly, actually. We won in 2016.
And if you really remember, and if you want to play it straight, we also won in 2020. By Moore.
Ron beat her also. You know, Ron came in second and he left.
She came in third and she's still hanging around. And just a little note to Nikki.
She's not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes.
And I could tell you five reasons why already. Not big reasons, a little stuff that she doesn't want to talk about.
But she will be under investigation within minutes. And so would Ron have been.
But he decided to get out. He decided to get out.
Now, Vivek, I don't think, would be at all because he's perfect, right? I find in life you can't let people get away with bullshit. Okay? You can't.
You just can't do that. And when I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn't so fancy come up, I said, what's she doing? We won.
Just classic. Classic Trump.
Can we just talk about one, before we get to all of it, can we just talk about one piece of it, which is, did he forget that Ronda Sanders endorsed him for one second? He just got mad and kept going? Or is it, what's going on there? He was supposed to be nice to Ron. Ron's emotionally on that stage with him now.
Did he forget? There are some legislators in Florida who are trying to pass a bill to give Donald Trump $5 million in taxpayer money to pay for his legal bills. And Ron DeSantis declared on Twitter that he would veto that bill.
And that was that. He also gave his, in his first interview, I think with Steve Deese, he said that Trump's got a real problem with swing voters and he's going to have to fix it.
Like he kind of went after Trump today in his interview. They don't like each other.
Yeah. I think it's, I don't know if he forgot.
I think he fucking hates Ron DeSantis. He was in, he was in no respect for Ron DeSantis.
He was in flow. He was in his flow.
He was trying to play that like, oh, I'm going to be gracious and okay for Ron DeSantis. He fucking hates him.
Ron DeSantis offers him nothing. Like Tim Scott could be a valuable asset in his campaign.
Right. Nikki Haley would actually, I don't think he's going to take advantage of this, but it would be a potential asset in his campaign.
Ron DeSantis brings nothing to the table. He needs him for nothing.
Especially now that $5 million in taxpayer money is off the table. What'd you guys think of the speech? What'd you guys think of Trump's big victory speech? He was pissed.
I mean, that came through loud and clear. Yeah, he suggested Haley be investigated.
He also suggested that Governor Sununu is on drugs. Yeah, he did.
You guys catch that part? He's got to be on something. He said this guy has he's gotta be on something there was the mocking of the dress which was just petty dickish stuff then he said to Tim Scott you must really hate her about Nikki Haley because Tim Scott endorsed him so yeah it was old school raging Trump he also yeah he led all of his new supplicants give a quick little speech.
Vivek did a tight two minutes.

60 seconds.

Yeah, Vivek did a tight 60.

And then Tim Scott was clearly not prepared that he was going to be asked to say something.

And he got up there and sort of mumbled through.

And then when Trump said, you must really hate her, he came up and he goes, no, I just really love you.

That's your guy. That's Lovett Scott.
And you know what? What do you think? Here's what I think. Here's what I think.
Here's what I think. Do you want to live in a world where you don't open up your heart to somebody even if you know there's a chance you might get fucking disappointed? Yes.
Am I disappointed that Tim Scott is not just a fucking failed presidential candidate, but a sniveling little fucking worm that Trump is now going to take out of the gimp box to march down to South Carolina. The gimp box.
It's from a film called Pulp Fiction. Learn film.
Go to cinema. Tim Scott is out of the gimp box.
That's what we're talking about. Yeah, I'm pissed about it.
Yeah, it's frustrating to me to have Tim Scott there. But just like, he didn't.
Obviously obviously the Tim Scott thing was humiliating, embarrassing. But even the Vivek thing, he's like, I told Vivek he could speak, but no more than a minute.
No more than a minute. Like, he's got these guys on a leash.
But you know what? I was like, and I know MSNBC and CNN, after we complained about this, they did take Trump's speech tonight. Although then they cut away and they were like, see, this is the problem with taking Trump's speech because he lies so often.
It's like, yeah, there's definitely a lot of lies, crazy lies. They had to fact check it.
But I'm happy for all the voters in America to see the Trump that we saw tonight. More of it.
This is why I want Nikki Haley to stay in so badly because Donald Trump talked about this. Dan, you've written a message box about this like he is a strong man he wants to appear strong he's he he made himself appear weak tonight because he was so pissed even though we fucking won he was so pissed at nikki hayley that he seemed like he was just angry he was agitated like it was great i also i just i also i i was thinking about this too because, look, we've gone through so many fucking endless conversations about platforming and, you know, you can't show Trump because it spreads misinformation.
But if you don't show Trump, people forget how threatening is. And I do think like what I was taking away from because I heard you guys talking about it.
And I agree. We talked about this before, but that it's like, yes, Trump is a vehicle for spreading misinformation and that can be dangerous.
But also the lies that Trump spews, especially the ones that are just like not plausible that most people don't believe they are a vehicle for exposing Trump. Right.
Like we do, you do need to like, and I, and I don't know what's like, you know, I don't

know what the best thing is.

I don't think there's an easy decision there, but man, is it better to have people seeing

Trump being at his most unhinged. And I don't know what the best thing is.
I don't think there's an easy decision there.

But man, is it better to have people seeing Trump being at his most unhinged and angry and all the rest? I think we might be in a different place politically if Trump had not been essentially exiled from public view on January 7th, 2021. Yeah.
Because if he had been rage tweeting about being improperly persecuted for this and how the election in that moment is supposed to just disappearing for a few months and then being slowly welcomed back in to be a very different world. And for a whole host of reasons that you've talked about offline, the information environment has changed so much since that time that now people just never see Trump.
Yeah. And now the one nights or the few nights when they might see him, we're like, don't show him.
I think that, I just think that. Because he has been rage truthing and also doing these rallies the whole time, but the rallies aren't being covered and that no one sees the truth really.
So. And as viewership of cable declines, we're an increasing share of the audience.
So we want to see it. So just give the people what they want.
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Let's talk about the results in the primary. You guys see anything notable in the results of the exits or anything that might tell us something about the general election we talked about in iowa how trump's uh win there might have showed some weakness since it wasn't a commanding win obviously this was even less of a uh big win in new hampshire what do you guys think tommy thought it was interesting that Trump did best among the 18 to 29-year-old cohort.
He got 61% versus 52 or 53% of the older voters. That was interesting and I think does say something about his superfans and the people who like him.
And also it says something about the self-selecting sample of young Republican voters too.

Yeah.

That they're the more radical, they're the sort of the TPUSA types.

Also the most important issues were the economy, 36%, immigration, 31%.

Trump mopped up with immigration voters.

77% of that cohort went for him.

No surprise there, but it does tell you what issues are really driving this primary and

then the general election for Republicans.

I think you can sum up how Trump won by these numbers. Is Haley won moderates by 50 points and Trump won conservatives by 42 points, but conservatives made up two-thirds of the electorate and moderates one-third.
Do you think that portends anything for the general election? I mean, I thought if you're going to look for numbers that might say that Trump is a weaker candidate, they again asked in the exits, is Trump fit to be president if he's convicted? 52% said yes. 44% said no.
Your feelings if Trump wins the nomination? Again, this is just the Republican primary. 59% said satisfied.
40% said dissatisfied. So for someone who's running as basically an incumbent, probably not the numbers you want.
There are many, many flaws in our presidential nomination process. One may be the fact that Trump is going to receive about 200,000 votes and basically be the nominee by tomorrow.
We're a country with 80 million Republicans. Yeah.
That's something more about the Republican Party. But one thing where the New Hampshire primary is useful for at least projecting forward for the general election is you do get a pretty significant sample of prototypical swing voters participating in this, right? It is suburban, college-educated, moderate.

The largest group of voters in the state by far are undeclared voters.

And those are the exact voters that Trump lost ground with from 2016 to 2020. Those voters are overrepresented in some of the states he lost, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.
And if he is going to win, and we talk all the time about all the things Biden has to do, Trump has to do better with college-educated, suburban voters. And nothing that happened tonight suggests that he is doing not even better, anywhere near as well as he did in 2020.
That is a big flashing light with a segment of voters that he has to improve with, and there's no evidence he has done so. Yeah.
And we don't know if any of these Haley voters, we don't know how many of them are going to, if Trump's the nominee, vote for Trump or vote for Biden or not vote for either of them. But certainly it doesn't show a lot of strength.
Yeah. I feel like there's two things that I took from this.
One is actually just how strong and dangerous a general election candidate Nikki Haley would be. That's one.
But two, Trump, in his rambling, infuriated speech, he didn't want to say it exactly like, don't worry. Yeah, sure, Nikki Haley is doing better against Biden than I am, but anybody can beat Joe Biden.
But he basically got there. And, you know, Nikki Haley is making like, it's like a vaguely sophisticated point about how Trump cost people the House and cost people the Senate.
Like it's a coattails thing. But Republicans want to win.
And he made a point of saying, hey, don't worry, we got this thing. You nominate me, we're going to win.
And he's clearly like, there is an argument that Nikki Haley is making that he's not totally unconcerned by, right? Like he is responding to it and making a point that's like, oh, Joe Biden is so frail and weak. Don't you worry about that.
I'm going to beat Joe Biden, Nikki Haley. Any of us could beat Joe Biden.
That's not important. That's not important.
It's also notable that they asked in the exits, would you favor or oppose a federal law banning most or all abortions nationwide? And only 27% of voters favor banning most or all abortions nationwide. So.
A couple, one concerning point in that number is that Trump only lost the people who opposed a nationwide ban by 10%. 55, 44.
Yep. And then, but here's one other thing on the electability number.
Yes, I do think it gets under Trump's skin because down deep in his very dark soul, he knows he lost the 2020 election and that haunts him. But only 15% of voters in the exit poll listed defeating Joe Biden as their top quality, the quality they cared most about in a candidate.
Yeah. And Trump won those voters overwhelmingly.
Yeah. So there is, this is Nikki Haley's argument.
There is zero audience for that argument in New Hampshire. And nationally, we talked about this the other day, is that they asked Republicans in this YouGov poll, who do you think is going to, regardless of who you support, who do you think is going to win? 84% of Republicans think that Donald Trump is going to win the election.
But then what's strange- Tells everything about why he's walking away with it. Yeah, but there is this sort of like, you know, voters aren't good at telling you how they're going to feel about something in the future.

I think and that could be a double edged sword.

But we are in this strange scenario where a bunch of Republicans voted for Donald Trump today and also told a pollster that if he's convicted of a crime, he's unfit and they won't vote for him again.

And he is on track, you know, to our minds to be convicted, hopefully before the election.

But we don't know.

And so it's like we don't know. We know they think you wouldn't be election, but we don't know.
And so it's like-

We don't know.

We know they think you wouldn't be fit,

but we don't know if they wouldn't vote for him

because they didn't ask,

would you vote for him?

Which they did ask in-

Which they should have.

In CNN's poll, right?

No, they asked in the Des Moines Register poll.

The Des Moines poll.

But even, I didn't look at it in New Hampshire poll.

And I just got a text from Reid that said,

who we work with,

who said, organic polar coaster pitch, which I think means right now, I'm supposed to mention that we're going to dig deeper into these exit poll numbers in the episode of Polar Coaster that's coming out in two days. Wow, amazing.
That's how the magic happens. Look at that.
It was right there, part of the conversation. All right.
Well, let's talk about the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. There was one.
And Joe Biden won it despite not appearing on the ballot. Again, he did not appear on the ballot since Biden and the DNC decided that South Carolina will be the Democrats' first primary.
New Hampshire went ahead with their primary anyway. So they are not going to have any delegates at stake.
So Joe Biden didn't go on the ballot. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did.
The Biden allies in New Hampshire, Biden supporters in New Hampshire, did not want Joe Biden to be embarrassed. So they organized a write-in campaign and boy did it work.
So he won over, so far right now, he's got over 70% of the votes. The write-in votes, we'll find out the final number when everything's counted and they read all the write-in votes.
Dean Phillips only won around 20% and And Marianne Williamson took four percent.

Oof.

What do you guys think?

But Mercury is in retrograde.

I kind of think that Biden, look, they were hoping to avoid embarrassment, but I think they also demonstrated some enthusiasm.

I don't think it's easy to organize a write-in campaign.

And, like, if you're a Democratic primary voter and you know there's not much of a primary, to get up, walk out of your house, go to the polls, write in Joe Biden's name, that tells you something. Yeah, I think it definitely demonstrates some enthusiasm.
What I think demonstrates even more is organization. And for all of the Democratic complaining and worrying and everything about the state of the Biden campaign, whether Biden can win.
And one thing that the Biden campaign has been very, very good at from the very beginning, right, going back to the primary when they overperformed in the Nevada caucuses is organization. And so this is something that I think that they would be very good at helping engineer is something like this.
Yeah. Dean Phillips and Dean Phillips affiliated Super PAC spent $5 million in New Hampshire for his 20%.
Here's what he said tonight about his loss. What I'm saying is this.
I don't know what my name recognition is. It was zero just 10 weeks ago.
I would imagine in this country right now, it's probably 5% to 10% tops. I was a brand builder before this in the private sector.
It takes recognition of a name or a brand in order to actually test it. I need some months to do that.
And so basically, he said he's going to a few more months and once polls start testing Dean Phillips against Donald Trump, he's going to look at those numbers and then he's going to make a decision. This is just a whole race.
It's a whole campaign based on polls. What a waste of time.
He got in because of polls. He's going to get out because of polls.
He's going to stay in because of polls. Whatever the polls say, that's what Dean Phillips is doing with his life.
I'm going to suggest that perhaps Dean Phillips' strategy to campaign in a state, relentlessly, to move to a state where the president was not on the- Where he did go to summer camp. He did go to summer camp.
That's where he discovered his passion for America in public service, at summer camp, as one does. To base the entirety of his campaign and this $10 million, whatever, spending in a state with no delegates was not the right choice.
Yeah. I will also say, too, like we have worried a lot about Joe Biden as the nominee.
Like, what if another Democrat challenges him? Another Democrat challenges him in New Hampshire. And Joe Biden's not even on the ballot.
And the Democratic voters in New Hampshire went out and said, no, I don't want Dean Phillips. I want Joe Biden.
They had the alternative. They saw his ads, spent five million dollars in the state.
And they just, you know, that's that's part of the reason this primary has turned out the way it is, because Democratic voters, when they get the chance, they wanted to vote for Joe Biden. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know.
It's like I do think like, oh, you know, you know, we look back on this moment.

If a year from now and Donald Trump has won, we look back in this moment, I want to make sure that like, you know, were we too cavalier about this specific challenger? And I actually think the answer is is no. Like there are legitimate and very real concerns about Joe Biden's ability to get reelected.
and the issues that made Dean Phillips so anxious about the polls to get in are not invalid. They are very real concerns that I think we all share.
It's just, this wasn't the candidate. And there was no amount of, I think- He also just did a terrible job.
If you really had these concerns, you had to get in a year earlier. You had to actually run hard.
You had to know when deadlines like getting on the ballots in various states occur. Instead, he waited too long.
He fucked it up. He hired all the wrong people.
And now he's just left with this sort of embittered message where he's complaining about the DNC and the process and trying to whine his way to the White House. And it's just, it's not going to work.
It's not easy running for president. It's not helping.
And perhaps you should not decide to run for president because you get a DM on Twitter from Steve Schmidt, which is how this happened. Yeah.
Good advice, Dan. We cannot keep pretending that Donald Trump is an outlier when everyone else seems to be out there with him.
But instead of feeling paralyzed, our job now is to pull what we've got and see what we can make happen. Here at Assembly Required, we will continue to face each executive order, legislative policy, and news cycle, no matter how terrifying or absurd, by asking, what can we do to learn more about what's happening? What can we do to solve problems, however small? And how can we

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So speaking of Biden, he kicked off the general with a campaign event in Virginia on Tuesday

focused on abortion rights just a day

after the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

He was joined on stage by Vice President Kamala Harris, First Lady Jill Biden, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Here's a clip of Biden in Virginia.
In the United States Congress, extremists are trying to pass a national abortion ban to outlaw abortion in every single state. But what they need to know is that if Congress passes a national abortion ban, President Joe Biden will veto it.
Donald Trump is betting we won't, you won't vote on this issue. But guess what? He's betting we won't hold him responsible either for taking away the rights.
He's betting you're going to stop caring.

By the way, that you'll get distracted and discouraged and stay home.

Well, guess what? I'm betting he's wrong.

The campaign also released a new ad that features Dr. Austin Dennard,

a Texas mother and OBGYN who was forced to travel out of state for an abortion after learning her pregnancy was non-viable and life-threatening. The White House also announced a series of executive actions aimed at protecting reproductive rights.
What did you guys think about the event, the ad, the policies? Dan, we were talking about this, I think, on the last pod. Obviously, this was them trying to get some attention,

especially, you know, counter-programming a New Hampshire primary. Do you think they got the attention they were hoping for? I think they certainly got more.
You never get the attention you're hoping for. But they certainly got more attention than any other.
Just love it. You're right.
It's a daily grind. It's a campaign of inches.
I mean, it got more attention

than your typical White House event, right?

There was, you know,

we don't know what the audience was

for television coverage tonight,

but it's certainly more than

on a typical political night, right?

And even on some of the network stuff

where you're going to see those clips,

you're going to see that message,

you're going to see the Restore Row banner

that was behind them.