South Carolina, with Jennifer Palmieri

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Secretary Clinton storming through the South after her resounding victory in South Carolina.

Well, we got decimated.

That's what happened.

I just don't see a path for Bernie Sanders.

I really don't.

Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

Four years ago, the South Carolina primary was a turning point for the Democratic nomination.

Bernie Sanders put up an unexpectedly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton in the first few states.

But his blowout loss was the beginning of the end.

He'd hold on through the end of the primaries, but South Carolina showed he couldn't break through to a big section of the party.

South Carolina was also a turning point in 2008.

Barack Obama was the unexpected challenger that year, and after his win in Iowa, South Carolina voters saw the chance to elect the nation's first black president.

And after polls had initially showed Clinton doing well, the state gave Obama a huge victory, and he went on to become the nominee.

All that's to say, Iowa and New Hampshire get the attention, but South Carolina has been crucial for the last two nominees.

So this week I spoke with someone who lived through South Carolina in Super Tuesday last time.

Jennifer Palmary was the communications director for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.

She was also communications director in the Obama White House before that.

Now, she's a co-host on Showtime's the Circus, and we should also note that she's an advisor to the Emerson Collective, which owns a majority stake in the Atlantic.

I sat down with Palmerie Friday morning at the Planters Inn.

It's right across the street from the old market in Charleston, and we talked about why she thinks this crazy race isn't over.

We talked sexism and politics and what a former Clinton aide like her now thinks of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Take a listen.

Jennifer Palmeri, thanks for joining me here on the ticket.

Happy to be with you, Isaac.

So you had something that you said a couple days ago that in an off-the-record conversation, Isaac.

No,

at another event with Dan Pfeiffer, your former colleague in the White House, that it turns out that it wasn't so easy to beat Bernie Sanders.

You guys got a lot of guff for that in 2016 on the Clinton campaign.

Yeah, it turns out it's not so easy.

And

we, I think when Sanders first got in the race in 15, I thought, oh, okay, wow, somebody on the far left, very different from her, probably there'll be some measure of support for him, but it won't be a big threat.

And then we got deeper into him by the summer of 15, you realized, wow, this is like a very different election.

And there's a lot of energy for somebody who is that different from her.

It was a very hard race to run, and it's tricky trying to run against him and also have in mind about eventually getting the nomination and trying to hold the party together.

Honestly, I think we probably fussed about that too much because, in the end, you know, some of Senator Sanders' supporters are so committed to him, believe the argument against establishment Democratic candidates, I think, wrongly, that they were just never going to be for her.

The arguments that

might work with more moderate voters are not going to work on Sanders supporters.

And you're not really sure who are you speaking to when you're trying to attack Bernie Sanders.

You're not talking to his supporters.

They're already there.

So you're talking to a small number of people that you think might go, if they're open to Sanders, you have to consider, I'm talking to a voter who is open to voting for Bernie Sanders, and I'm trying to tell that person things about Sanders that they might not like.

If they're open to voting for Bernie Sanders, a lot of the things that you think are opposition that are like effective APPA research against him probably are not going to be very meaningful to that person.

So it is not easy.

Attacks from the establishment just don't work on an anti-establishment candidate.

And in some ways, they just make the anti-establishment candidate stronger.

And I think a lot of people were like, why aren't you guys going after him harder?

Or where's all the APPO on him?

And you have to

understand

that you're not running a traditional race when you're running against somebody like him.

Do you remember the moment that it really clicked in for you on the Clinton campaign that Sanders was going to be more than just the sort of gadfly pushing you to the left presence that a lot of people thought he was?

And I think he kind of thought he would be coming into the race.

I remember very distinctly, it was July of 2015.

And Saturday morning, we were in a meeting and our Brooklyn headquarters going over polling.

And I remember I said, wait a minute, are you telling me we are three weeks away from public polling that shows us tied with Sanders in New Hampshire?

And I was told, yes.

And, you know, it was hard.

I did not do 2008 for Hillary, but it was hard being with her during that time because,

you know, the same things happened to her again, as happened during Obama.

And you're telling her, oh, he has big crowds, but big crowds don't matter.

And, you know, he has a lot of enthusiasm, but that's going to die down.

And you're looking at her face and you know, she's thinking, this is the same thing that people told me in 08.

I remember very distinctly in 2016, a couple days after Sanders won the New Hampshire primary.

So by that point, it was clear that this was a big deal.

I was in the first trip that Bernie Sanders had a campaign plan and Secret Service protection and a pool of reporters following him.

And we were in Minnesota at the Democratic Farm Labor Party dinner.

And everybody was speaking.

And Sanders spoke first.

After he spoke, they were leading us backstage.

And we were walking out as Clinton was walking in.

And the look on her face when she realized that Bernie Sanders had a pool of reporters and Secret Service agents at that point, that's of course after Iowa, after New Hampshire that year, was

such a rage, confusion,

annoyance mix.

I could picture it in my head.

And she kind of smiled at us like in that frozen smile that she does.

She nods.

Yes, I know.

She said, hi.

She's just trying to hold it all in and together.

Yeah.

You know, it was the 2008 experience that made me as a staff person just feel so helpless and impotent in talking to her because she's just looking at you like, this is this, you know, you're thinking, God, this is the same bullshit she heard in 2008 from people.

And,

you know, I think all during that time, she

had a lot of doubts.

She had a lot of doubts about whether she was actually going to be the nominee.

I mean, I think she went into the race.

You know, I think that she thought very seriously about not running, making the decision to run was a big deal.

People don't appreciate that.

And then once she was in, I think

believed for a lot of the primary that she was likely to lose.

Which is not the way that she presented it, of course.

Well, I don't know.

You saw it on her face when you walked by her, right?

I don't know that I would call that expression feeling likely to lose.

It was sort of, I can't believe this.

Well, it's happening that

it, you know, that coming into a race, expected to do well.

You know, you have to wonder like why we continue to believe conventional wisdom at all when all, you know, when it, when almost always the frontrunner falls and that, you know, that it never ends up being who wins in the end.

And I think we saw like that all unfolding again, you know, losing Michigan by 10 points after Super Tuesday.

And it just felt like,

you know,

we had a debate in Wisconsin shortly after that.

And I remember whom Abedine, John Podesta, and I just having a drink afterwards.

And the three of us are like, we're going to lose.

We are losing this.

This is this, he's going to be the nominee.

That was, again, not the public messaging that you were putting out at that moment yourself.

It's generally

generally not.

But it wasn't even, you know, generally it's not a great idea to put that, to put out a notion notion that you feel like you're going to lose.

But also,

all the math showed that that wasn't.

We were wrong, you know, that ultimately, you know, after Super Tuesday, she was on a certain kind of path, then she would probably.

But

what that sort of sentiment reflected was an appreciation on our part that we were in a very different, that some, you know, that politics had changed a great deal from even 2012 to 2016 in America.

And we saw Trump rising on the right and understood that that had, you know, our party was not immune to a real roiling of, you know, people wanting to test convention and

huge amounts of dissatisfaction and frustration that were just all had come to the surface.

Yeah.

You're a communications director for her in that race, so you were in the mix of all that.

I want to take you back to that night in South Carolina that was a big win and was a relief for the campaign and sort of at that moment seemed like exposing the problems that Sanders had with African-American voters and

reaching out beyond the base of people that he had.

It seems like that's going to prove a similar moment for Joe Biden,

at least for a couple of days.

What was that night like when you won, South Carolina?

Do you remember it?

Was it a relief?

It was, well, it was an initial really big relief, but then something really scary happened later that night that I'll tell you about.

So I remember doing a meeting with Robbie right ahead of

the campaign manager.

Yeah, Robbie Mooker campaign manager, right ahead of South Carolina, where he was talking about what we are going to need to get in the African-American vote in South Carolina and Super Tuesday in order to stay on path to get the nomination.

And the number was over 85% of the African-American vote.

And I just wanted to pass out.

Because in some places, that meant more of the African-American vote than Barack Obama had gotten in primaries.

And this is when you just want to pass out.

But

we did that.

We did end up doing that.

I mean,

as it turned out, and the Biden campaign is finding the same thing, is that our theory was right, that once you got to this state and African-American voters started voting, even in Nevada, I remember going to, when we went to Nevada, I remember watching a town hall that Bernie Sanders did in Nevada and seeing that his lines were not landing with the audience in the audience the same way.

Now, four years later, they did.

They landed really big in Nevada.

But, you know, and so I had, I thought maybe Sanders would win here too.

It doesn't feel like he's going to.

If he does, it'll be a very big deal.

But here, it does feel like that the African-American vote is not

still skeptical.

And,

you know, so when we won here by 47 points and it was,

you know, sometimes when we win by that big, you're like, wow, did that mean anything?

Because we didn't have to fight for it, right?

And you're like,

then you're wondering if that was just an apparition, but saw on Super Tuesday that it was not, that it did mean that African-American voters had a lot of doubts about him.

So that was a great, you know, we won here, we were really excited, and we went to Memphis, Tennessee, as it is now, Super Tuesday State, touched down in Memphis, and we were in a really great mood.

And we showed up at the Peabody Hotel.

And normally Hillary will go in through the back entrance, right?

Peabody

Hotel is not set up that way.

And we walked into the lobby and there were about 400 young white men in that hotel lobby.

They were there for this thing called the Cotton Gin, which is like a farm expo meeting that meets there every year.

And they were all and they're like, you know, they're, you know, they're mostly salespeople.

They're mostly professional men, but they're in their, like, the trucker hats and the sleeveless vests and the plaid shirts.

And they started chanting locker up.

And it was just this,

you know, we had just gotten this like huge win.

And then you walk into that.

And it was like, you know, because in the Democratic primary, you're sort of shielded from seeing a lot of Republican voters.

And it was really unnerving.

And then they saw Huma and they're screaming things at Huma.

Maya Harris, who's Kamala Harris's sister, was traveling with us or screaming, you know, like racist stuff at her.

It was really,

they had to put special security in both of our floors beyond Hillary's security because there was just not like threats, but just like a lot of, you know, yelling.

Usually, the Peabody Hotel is just for the ducks and the fountain.

The ducks, I didn't, I never saw the ducks.

And then, actually, it was funny, we got into the elevator, and the Bellman was helping us.

He looks at me and he's like,

every year, these people come here every year.

So it was, you know,

on the one hand, we had this elation from a big win that also sort of suggested to us Sanders

was going to run into a wall, but you had a little, we had a taste of, you know, what was to come.

We're going to take a quick break.

We'll be back with more with Jennifer Plumery in a moment.

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President Obama launched his re-election bid today.

Officially announced he's running again.

President kicked off his 2012 re-election run.

The Atlantic reports that Bernie Sanders told fellow senators he'd take on Obama.

And Obama's team was, quote, absolutely panicked.

Obama's campaign.

So I wrote an article that came out last week that was about Bernie Sanders and his nose and around a primary challenge to Barack Obama, which put me in a spot that I don't really love to be in, which is that it got turned into a campaign commercial by Joe Biden.

It was, it should be noted,

a commercial that he did not have the money to put on the air, but that went around on the internet.

What was interesting to me about this was that it reflects how the views of Obama have changed over the years, right?

In 2014, when I was covering him then in the midterms, nobody even wanted him around to any Democratic race anywhere.

Oh, that was, yes, I was there for that.

You were terrible.

Right.

So I want to, I want to go through this

transition with you because you lived it in different circumstances.

You were in the White House in 2014 then.

And then in 2016, he was more popular by then, but still not the same.

You were on the Clinton campaign then.

And now by 2020, he has achieved this status that last year I wrote something that he is more popular than Jesus in the Democratic Party.

And I used his popularity ratings and the level in pew polls of committed Christians among Democrats.

And he is literally more popular than Jesus in the Democratic Party.

And so what you see is every candidate saying how wonderful he is, many of them using him in in ads.

Mike Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders now has a shot of him in an ad.

It's anybody who can get anything.

And of course, Joe Biden spending a lot of time with Obama.

Is it,

from your experience over these years, weird to see this happen to Barack Obama?

It's not because I know that that's, it's just, it's the, it's sort of the life cycle of what happens to an American president.

They're not popular in midterms.

That's just, that is universal.

The primary, think about primary and Barack Obama, it can seem like a small issue.

It is not a small issue in the state of South Carolina.

It's a big deal, you know, for black voters that they, you know, if they perhaps weren't sure of what to make of Sanders,

they recognize a politician deciding that a black politician probably isn't quite up to the job or isn't quite doing it as well as he should.

And I think that that actually, you know, you see the Biden campaign, I mean, yeah, they didn't have a lot of money put behind that ad, but they talk about it all the time.

And Biden talks about it.

It's not, he's not not the most disciplined messenger ever, but he definitely says it every place he goes in South Carolina.

It's a big deal.

Yeah, it was not

written for his purposes or any other purposes other than it's what happened.

And it struck me because it was.

I remember it.

I mean, I remember it not, I don't, I don't remember specifics, I do remember in 12 being nervous, you know, like Pluff and people like that.

Jim Messina, who was the campaign manager at the time, being nervous about like, it just, it means, you know, you don't survive those, those, it's just an early warning sign of a tough re-elect.

Yeah.

And that summer of 2011, when this was happening and Sanders was popping up in New Hampshire,

it was making a lot of people on the Obama campaign really, really uncomfortable.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And Obama staff don't like to be uncomfortable.

They like everything to be smooth.

It's been a weird race in a lot of ways because you see the Democratic Party changing and the Obama part of it.

is reflective of that to me.

You had a line in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago that said that that the obsession with concocting a Frankenstein confounded us all.

That's a good quote.

So

why don't you explain what you meant by that?

So that particularly, I felt this really intensely in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In Iowa, voters just felt paralyzed.

I mean, I talked, I think this is why turnout was low in Iowa, was because people were so scared of making the wrong choice about the person who was best able to beat Trump that they didn't know, they didn't know what to do.

You know, I would talk to people on Sunday who were like, well, I'm going to caucus tomorrow night, but i don't know who i'm going to caucus for and i think in the end those people just didn't show up and um you know i think to sanders credit

you know bernie beats trump is like with their hashtag and they talk about that but that is not the motivating factor for sanders supporters sanders supporters they are for bernie and bernie has Bernie describes America as their, you know, that reflects their experience, and he has dramatic big proposals that are going to like really upend the way the like power systems that keep these people's lives and you know from being what they want and

I would say that Warren makes the same kind of argument

and the rest of the field is really a version of I can be Trump I'm the person that beat Trump and I think and like bring it back to and also I can beat Trump and and and you know and the Biden message is kind of like I'm gonna restore things to normal

which yeah um go back to the thing way things were And that's hard for two reasons.

One,

this may be the election where voters actually do want that because they are so traumatized by Trump and there's enough people just like, I just want him to go away.

I want him to just be a memory and I want things just to go back to normal.

That's never what voters normally do.

This may be the time they do that.

But the other problem, particularly in a Democratic primary, is, hey, going back to the way things were isn't so great for a lot of people who consider themselves to be Democrats.

Yeah, it's sort of like the flip of the way a lot of Democrats responded to Trump's message, which was, you know, make America great again.

Well, again, like when

I don't remember it being great for me.

And so

Biden trying to get people to say, like, let's go back to when it was better and things were calmer.

It does seem like there's a chance that a lot of voters will say.

better was not better for me like

and and agree with the

what is i think you're right that the

there are a lot lot of other differences but the core similarity of trump warren and sanders saying like it was not working we got to change it up yeah i mean there's certain there's i think you i think biden could do it but there's definitely a tension you have to acknowledge that it's not just everything was great in 2016 that there's

and he has been trying to do that but i i think that you know what i've learned in politics is that you're not winning when you're just trying to beat somebody else you're winning when you have your own argument you have your own agenda, and it can stand independent of whoever your opponent is.

And then that's when you can really galvanize people to your side.

And then I do credit Sanders and his campaign for building that kind of campaign that stands.

You know, obviously Trump is like shaping the atmosphere, but they're not shaping their race to beat him.

You know, that's not their origin story.

And it's everyone else's origin story.

The next couple of years.

Except for Warren.

And I have a lot of views about why, why is it that Elizabeth Warren isn't doing as well as Bernie Sanders?

Which are what?

Which are gender.

I just, you know, she is, I think she's the best communicator in the field, bar none.

I think she's a master at it.

I think she, her stump speech is, I could recite it from word, and yet she's such a good

presenter that she makes it fresh every time.

It's super accessible.

You know, she has a plan for everything.

But I think that her life story is is just as compelling as Sanders in terms of being somebody who's always been on the side of fighting for change and trying to,

you know, make things more fair for the people that don't do as well in the country.

And, you know, still he's considered to be the one who's more sincere, who's more authentic, right?

I heard that from a voter at an

age.

Yeah, why?

Why is that?

Why is Elizabeth Warren's story, you know, a school, some, you know, mom, a school teacher, worked really hard to become a bankruptcy lawyer and like has worked for decades to fight banks to make rules more fair and been pretty successful at doing it and getting some results.

You know, why?

Why is she?

A woman in her 30s told me in East Las Vegas after she finished caucusing for Sanders that she said that she didn't think Warren was authentic.

And I said, why?

And she said, I just don't think

she's been co-opted by the establishment.

And I said, what makes you think that?

And she said, it's it's that she had been covered so much by the mainstream press over the course of 2019 that that made her suspect that the establishment was for Warren.

That is going through some somersaults to convince yourself you have a good reason for why you don't like somebody.

It was a woman in her early 30s, a mother.

And I said, well, what about the coverage that Sanders is getting?

She said, well, no, it's very different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is, I mean, and it doesn't mean people, it doesn't mean this woman you're talking about are voters that are skeptical of Warners or of Warren or

sexists.

It's certainly not overt sexism, but it's just like what I've come to understand is just how deep these models we hold in our head of what leaders look and sound like.

And we just default to the men.

We just do.

This field started with a lot of strong female candidates that people expected would be

serious contenders.

And it does seem like, and we don't know exactly how the next couple of weeks are going to go, but it does seem like when we get to the final round, we might not have any women at all.

Right.

What does that do for you?

I mean, this is something that you're.

I have crossed over and I'm never going back.

So

I now see the world very differently than I did before.

I used to think, I used to bristle, like I had, you know, colleagues in the Obama White House who would say, oh, it's still a man's world.

And they would, and I would, like, I didn't like to hear that because I said, That diminishes what I've accomplished.

This is not a man's world.

I'm doing great in this man, in this world.

And now I realize I wasn't doing great in a man's world.

I was doing great making the man's world run well.

I was doing great perpetuating the power cycles that kept women and people of color out of power.

That's what I was doing.

Even as someone who rose to be the White House Communications Director,

I was 10 years older than the guy that had it before me.

You know, Dan Pfeiffer, who's, you know,

who is a good friend of mine, and I was really grateful.

He brought me into the White House to be his deputy.

I was 10 years older than him.

And then I got the job after he was promoted to be the president's senior advisor, and I was the communications director.

So I was junior to him again, 10 years older than him.

You know, and I, the way I've sort of lived my life is to be like, well, don't be, understand, yes, there are different standards for women.

So don't hold yourself,

don't be disappointed that you're not,

that you didn't get to become the community, that you were, you know, 45 when you you became the communications director and dan was 35

because that don't you know don't be disappointed understand just be proud of your of the effort that you put in to get there and now i'm like no stop expecting to do worse than the men right

so when i see women and it's a gut punch every time i see a woman candidate not do well because i know i see the like she's shrill or she can't win or the you know these these things that like remain in from a patriarchal system that keep them out.

And I think that you just have to keep talking about it.

You know, and like Warren, I credit her because she talks about electability.

She talks about how women win and how she's won every race.

And but you also talk about, which is interesting to me, is that one of the things that you think she does successfully is

neutralize the sexist arguments.

in part at least by in her speech she tells this story the way every event ends is with

uh She's telling about how the CFPB, her consumer protection agency, was created and that it was

like the banks needed to have a watchdog.

The toasters needed to have a watchdog from

how they were when she was growing up.

And they used to catch fire all the time.

And she says, how do I know they caught fire?

Well, you know, my.

Because she wanted to hurt fire.

Right.

And that her father bought her a fire extinguisher.

Yeah.

And the way you talk about this is that she is saying to women,

look, this is a relatable story, but also like, I needed men to help me and protect me, which is itself saying, like, yeah, this is kind of like the sad story.

I think she's trying to meet, I think that this is why her

stump speech is, I find it so genius.

She's trying to meet voters where they are.

And in the toaster story, what she says is, My daddy was so upset, because her toaster armor kept stuck, cut it on fire.

My daddy was so upset that he bought me a fire extinguisher for Christmas.

Okay.

There's a lot in that sentence.

So it's like, she is a woman who's loved and adored by her daddy, not just her father, her daddy.

She needs looking after.

She wants that.

She, you know, welcomes that.

And she didn't come from a family that could just like afford to run out and get an extinguisher.

It was a Christmas gift.

Okay.

So she is, she's presenting her, you know, like a lot of women can relate to that.

A lot of men can relate to that.

I can relate to that.

My husband does a lot of, I'm, you know, my husband does a lot of things to take care of me.

And I think she, that makes us a little more comfortable.

The other thing that she says that's so remarkable

is she says, I've had my dream job.

I was a special education teacher.

So she, so in case we're thinking her dream job was to be the first woman president, she's letting us know that was not her job.

A teacher is a position we're very comfortable seeing women in.

And she puts her ambition in the past.

It's funny because she says, I never expected to to be standing here running for president, which actually does make sense because before 10 years ago, it was not ever a possibility.

Whereas I remember when Hillary Clinton said that in one of the town halls she did in New Hampshire.

And she said, you know, in 2016, she said it.

I never expected to be up here asking you to vote for me for president.

And I remember watching it and saying, like, come on.

Right.

You did.

Right.

And I think that,

so what's interesting to me about Warren's bio, as opposed to Clinton or Kamala Harris or Amy Klobuchar is

Hillary and some of these other female candidates followed a male and what was considered to be a traditional male path, like lawyer, get into government that way, then run for office.

And so I think in our minds, we're thinking she's always followed a path.

that men do.

She must have planned to run for president all along, which is not fair to any of them, because I actually think Hillary never did expect to be a politician or run for office and, you know, then ended up deciding to run for Senate and that put her on a different path.

But,

you know, although there's been an apocryphal story about Clinton that she and she and Bill pull into a gas station at some point in Arkansas.

Apparently, this isn't true, but it's a good story anyway.

And

the gas station attendant used to be her boyfriend.

I never even remember that.

You've never heard the story.

It's an apocryphal story from everything, but some people insist it must be true.

And they're pulling out,

and

Bill says to Hillary, so just think about that.

If you'd married him,

you would have been married to a gas station attendant instead of the governor.

And Hillary says to him, no, no, if I'd married him, he would have been the governor.

It's pretty good.

It's pretty good.

Also, maybe, maybe, it may be true.

But

what's super interesting to me about Warren's candidacy is she's someone who is a very different path, right?

But she was a teacher, which is

one of the most traditional professions for women.

If she became the first woman president, it's like very interesting.

That is a very different path than what most women who are in politics thought they had to do.

They thought they needed to be a lawyer and follow that kind of prosecutor.

Both Cloba Sharp and Harris followed that route.

Jennifer Palmer, thanks for being here on The Ticket.

It was a real pleasure, Isaac.

That'll do it for this week of The Ticket, Politics from the Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcast.

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For articles and transcripts of the episodes, go to theatlantic.com slash the ticket.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next week.