Does America Want Chaos?

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I'm Hannah Rosen, and this is a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic.

We're recording the Monday before Election Day. The candidates are furiously campaigning in swing states.
At some point, their planes were on the same tarmac in North Carolina. Over the weekend, Donald Trump mused about shooting reporters.
Kamala Harris said normal campaign things. And yet, this race is still one of the closest in American history.
Anyway, I want to get the inside view of both political campaigns in their last days. So I have with me two seasoned political reporters.
Mark Leibovich. Hi, Mark.
Hi, Hannah. And Tim Alberta.
Hi, Tim. Hi, Hannah.
Hi, Mark. Hi, Tim.
Isn't it good to be seasoned today? I'm feeling very seasoned. I'm feeling very seasoned.
Yeah, that's a cliche word. It doesn't mean old.
What's a more flattering word than seasoned? Like experienced or... Long time.
Long time. That's flatter, I think.
Yeah, it's definitely flatter. We don't use veteran.
No, veteran is old. How about active? Atlantic house rule.
Active. Yeah, we're very active.
Yeah. Can you tell by our voices?

Anyway, Mark, I understand you're writing up a pre-election guide on how to get through Tuesday night. Basically, I'm trying to collect a helpful toolkit to how to approach election day from sort of a practical standpoint as far as what information you can ignore, but also a habit or even mindfulness standpoint about how to not drive yourself needlessly crazy, how not to be triggered by the kinds of things that election night coverage will probably overload you with.
And that includes Donald Trump probably declaring victory wildly prematurely or erroneously, which, I mean, will be news because he's one of the candidates, but it's also

should surprise no one. And there are ways to kind of condition yourself or try to going

in to what tomorrow night will be like, which will be obviously very anxious for a lot of

people.

I see. So instead of, we know it's going to be like that.
Like we know that we don't

have enough information. We know that there probably isn't going to be sort of instant early clarity.
So you're going into it eyes wide open doing what? Like what? Because maybe Tim needs this advice. Well, I think we all need this advice, Hannah.
I mean, I think it is an approach to how we consume information, how we get information. I talked to a couple of Democratic consultants who said that one of the

first things they do is turn off all their text notifications because any kind of text notification

is designed to trigger you on election night. There is a lot of manipulation of your emotions

before the actual only information that is necessary, which the most valuable information

is going to come in probably after 11 o'clock or quite late. It could be days later.
The idea is the news will find you. Turn off your phone if you can.
Information is coming in haphazardly from a million different directions out of order in no particular sequence whatsoever about something that has already happened, meaning the voting has already happened. So no control is there.
This is basically just people throwing information out in no order, and it is not necessarily... It's not cumulative, and it's not adding up to anything.
Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. So anyway, that's one reason you can skip that part.
Interesting. Tim, do you think you could do that? I fear that in the attempt to not drive myself crazy, I would drive myself crazy.
In other words, you would find your brain stacking up with all of the things that you know that other people don't,

excuse me,

all the things that other people know that you don't,

because in that moment you have decided to sequester yourself,

or at least to sort of rigidly compartmentalize your emotions and your,

your brainwaves and your political intake.

And therefore the exit polling showing the number of non-college whites in Maricopa County breaking away from Trump is lost on you in that pivotal moment when that could be the little parcel of information that is necessary for you to believe that you have finally figured out this electoral equation and that you have a beat on it in this moment. It's a game of inches and the inches are everywhere around us, Hannah.
So how could I give up any of those inches when we are so close to the end of the game? I want the Zen that Mark is offering, but I just, I don't find it realistic. You know how sometimes you start with the moment of meditation? We'll consider that our moment of meditation.
And now we're going to go into the stressful part of this conversation. So, Tim, you've been covering the Republican side closely, and you recently spent a lot of time talking to Trump's advisors.

How would you describe the state of the campaign in the weeks before the election? I would describe it as something slightly removed from the serenity that Mark has described for us. Yes.
OK. Yeah.
Yeah. Look, Hannah, I think the context here is really important that this Trump campaign, unlike the previous two, was for the majority of its time in operation, really pretty disciplined, pretty smart.
The people running the campaign had done a pretty good job of keeping Trump out of his own way and talking him out of bad ideas and sort of curbing some of his most self-destructive impulses. And what we've seen in the last couple of months is basically Trump going full Trump and an inability among those senior advisors to really do anything to stop it.
This has been kind of the proverbial slow motion car wreck. And, you know, it's not just Trump himself, although, of course, he is the inspiration for the chaos.
He is the generator of all of the turmoil that you see. He is at the center of this chaos, but then the chaos ripples out away from him.
And so when you ask yourself the question of how could it be that at the most important public event of the campaign with 20,000 plus jammed into Madison Square Garden in prime time, the whole world watching, and you pay a million dollars to put on this event, and the guy who kicks it off is a vulgar shock jock insult roast comedian who was dropped by his own talent agency for using racial slurs on stage. How could this person possibly be booked into that position to open for Trump in that environment? It's exactly the sort of thing

that the people around him had been really successful in avoiding for most of the campaign.

But ultimately, in the key home stretch here in the sort of the witching hours of this campaign,

it's all fallen apart. Mark, I want to ask you the same question, but for the Democrats.

How do you describe the mood of their campaign? I would say I've talked to a fair number of Democrats on the campaign the last few days. It feels like something approaching the general area of the ballpark of confidence.
I will say. Anomalous for Democrats.
Well, they are so incredibly quick to embrace bad news and to go right from bad news to deep levels of doomsaying. I've not seen that in the last few days.
I mean, look, I think their numbers internally seem a little better. I think a lot of the external polls have been encouraging.
And I think you can't underestimate how much of a train wreck Trump's last 10 days have been in a way that if he loses, I think people will very much point to. So, Mark, I remember we sat here in the spring and discussed how absolutely stagnant this race would be.
Like you had nothing. We were just sleepwalking into a repeat.
It was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it again.
But it was very, you know, we didn't have much to say. And then for everybody, the reset button got pressed in July.
Tim, the full Trump, who we've seen on the campaign trail for the last few months, started actually, according to your account, before Harris entered the race. So what happened? I think that maybe the proper visual here, Hannah, is like the wild animal that has chased down its prey and has mauled it mostly to death and is now just sort of pawing at it, toying with it, unsure of really what to do because, well, what's left to do? Donald Trump really found himself, according to all the reporting I did, sort of over it, sort of bored with running against Joe Biden because here is, in his view, this sort of hapless old man who can't even string together sentences, much less really defend himself or go on offense in a meaningful way against Trump.
And so I think that he's looking at Joe Biden, thinking, gosh, this is sort of a bore. And around this time, of course, in the, you know, late June, early July, you know, Trump's polling is better than it's ever been in any of his three campaigns for the presidency.
The battleground polling is showing him consistently pulling ahead five, six, seven points across all of these states. The national polling is up.
His favorability is up. Democrats are preparing for a bloodbath, not just to lose the presidency, but to lose the House and

the Senate. And it's, you know, the sky is falling.
And everyone around Trump is sort of giddy and gleeful. They're looking around like nothing can stop us.
And around this time is when you started to see Trump talking a little bit differently, behaving a little bit differently, according to people close to him, almost looking for some disorder and some mayhem to inject into the campaign. He starts talking to people on the outside.
And when Kamala Harris gets in the race, he was angry on the one hand, because he thought he had it sort of sewn up against Biden, and he liked running against Biden in the sense that Biden really, you know, couldn't punch back. But I think also, he's sort of excited in the sense that with Harris, he's got this live target, he's able to channel some of the base instincts that brought him to power in the first place.
You know, Trump, I think, viewed the Harris switcheroo as a new lease on life in the sense that he was going to be able to go whole hog again. But the people around him were saying, no, no, no, no, that's exactly what we don't want you to do.
And frankly, the reason you're in this position is because you've listened to us and because you haven't been going rogue and running the kind of, you know, totally undisciplined YOLO 2016 campaign that you would like to run and that you would run if you were left to your own devices. And around that time is when Trump started to lose confidence in those people who were giving him that advice.
And he brought in other people to help with the campaign. And from there, things really started to spiral.
So, Mark, how are Democrats responding as Trump is reasserting this peak Trump version of himself? I think in a kind of measured way. I mean, I think, look, the peak Trump pretty much speaks for itself.
It's not like you need people to amplify it. I mean, to some degree you do because outlets that a lot of Republicans watch, like say Fox are going to be insulated from a lot of this because just Fox doesn't show it.
I mean, that's just not their point of emphasis, but I think they've been very deft. I mean, they've made a lot of ads around the kind of changing abortion messaging.
I mean, even Melania Trump saying that she believes in a woman's right to choose, things like that. To some degree, they're trying to highlight it, I think.
But to another degree, I mean, this is a big political operative cliche, but they are running their race. And I think the Democrats, beginning when Biden stepped aside, I think Harris has performed much better than a lot of people thought she would.
And I think her campaign has made a lot of good decisions and she herself has made a lot of good decisions. It does, from an outside, seem exactly the opposite of the chaos inside the Trump campaign that Tim described.
Because if you think back to when Biden dropped out, there was some worry that the transition might not be smooth. Oh, 100 percent.
I mean, Tim and I remember we were at the Republican convention together, and that was such a moment because Trump was really kind of at his peak then, which is kind of ironic to say, because the assassination attempt had taken place two days before the convention started. But I mean, he his popularity, I mean, there was a sense of confidence at that convention, which was just off the charts

to a degree to which you could almost sense the boredom creeping into Trump when he's giving this

acceptance speech on, I guess it was Thursday night. And then about halfway through, he just

kind of went off the rails and, and he just sort of, I mean, it became just a very, I mean,

unhinged acceptance speech went from kind of a gripping one where he's describing the assassination

attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the

I don't know. I mean, unhinged acceptance speech went from kind of a gripping one where he's describing the assassination attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the campaign would unfurl for him.

And of course, three days later, Biden got out and then the world changed again.

All right. Up next, I asked him and Mark whether these chaotic final months of the Trump campaign could end up costing him the election.

That's after the break. So from a campaign manager's perspective, the chaos is disturbing.
But what we actually care about is whether it has any impact on voting day. Tim, so what are the ways the drama you describe could affect the election? Like, say, turnout or whatever it is that we're worried about.
Well, look, if these episodes were contained to just Trump being a little bit goofy or going off message and sort of ranting and raving about the latest person who said something very nasty about him on cable news. I don't think it would have much real world effect.
But I think that some of what we're unpacking here over these past 10, 11, 12 weeks, Hanna, is something that actually gets to a fundamental weakness, which is a failure of the Trump team to expand its coalition.

Or at the very least, what we're seeing is the way in which the potential of expanding the Trump coalition has been undermined by Trump's own actions or by the people close

to him.

So for example, we know based on six months of really solid, consistent data, that Trump is likely to perform better with Latino voters as a whole, and particularly with Latino men under 40 than any Republican nominee in modern history. And yet, when the dominant headline coming out of your rally at Madison Square Garden the week before the election is that one of your speakers calls the island of Puerto Rico a floating trash in the ocean, this is self-sabotage.
Another core component of this Trump campaign from the beginning has been how do we keep our margins tight in the suburbs outside of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Vegas and elsewhere? How do we keep our margins tight with these college-educated suburban women? We're not going to win them, right? But how do we manage to keep it close? How do we lose them by just seven

or eight points instead of by 16, 17, 18, 20 points, right? And when you look at, for example, the selection of J.D. Vance, and, you know, his old greatest hits reel around childless cat ladies, and he thinks abortion should be illegal nationwide, right? And there's just something that sort of went fundamentally awry over the summer.

I think Mark is right.

Both of us were remarking at the convention about how it was effectively an early election night victory party. I mean, they weren't even, Republicans in Milwaukee weren't even talking about the campaign as if it were going to be competitive.
It was already over.

The fat lady was singing on stage in primetime in Milwaukee. And yet, I remember corresponding with several smart Republicans, Trump supporters, while I was there, and they were a little bit

nervous about the Vance selection. And then on Thursday night, to Mark's point, Trump gives this

sort of weird, meandering speech that seems to squander a lot of the goodwill that he had coming into that event because of the assassination attempt. And it felt like between those two things, the advance selection and then the speech, and then, you know, 24 hours after leaving Milwaukee, Biden gets out, Harris takes over the ticket, and suddenly those dominoes started to fall.
And what we saw was all of the best laid plans of the Trump operation go awry. And it wasn't just surface level things where we say, oh, that was sort of silly he said that, or oh, this was an unforced error, but it'll be a quick news cycle and blow over.
Some of what we've seen, I think, will have a real impact at the ballot box. So what you're describing is a campaign strategy that is fairly traditional that they were following fairly successfully, which is try and win over, you know, some middle of the road voters or at least not massively alienate those people.
But Trump has been running a very different kind of campaign, like going to Madison Square Garden, and fewer on the ground resources. And that seems like a pattern across swing states, which for me raises the question whether what these managers are calling chaos, like that is the strategy.
The strategy was always just get a lot of attention. I think it depends on the type of attention you're talking about.
So when Trump goes to the southern border and has, you know, hundreds of cameras following him around there and talks about the lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants committing crimes, you know, that is a tension, and it can even be a tension that is rooted in some hyperbole, some demagoguing, some bombast, and yet it is productive attention politically for the Trump people, right? They look at this sort of cost-benefit analysis, and they recognize that, sure, we might antagonize some people with this rhetoric, we might alienate some people with our focus on these issues. And yet, we think that the reward is far greater than the risk.
So there is, I think, plenty of good attention that the Trump people do want. I think what they've tried to avoid is a lot of the sideshow that is appealing to some of the very online right-wing MAGA troll base but does nothing to add to the coalition that I was describing a minute ago.
And ultimately, at the end of the day, politics is a math equation. It's multiplication and addition.
Right. And I mean, I think immigration, I mean, to sort of to Tim's point, immigration was an incredibly effective issue for Trump.
When you tip that into people eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and just how that took over the narrative of the Trump campaign. I mean, one, they look like fools.
Two, it insults the intelligence of so many people and it turns a very serious and effective issue for the Trump campaign, immigration, into a joke and into just something really, really problematic and gross. So the art of running a Trump campaign then is to siphon and manage and titrate the chaos exactly right.
Like you want the right kind of chaos, the right kind of attention. But if you lose control of it, it just comes back to you.
Is that basically what's happened? Yeah, and it's always going to be a high wire act, right? These people aren't stupid. They knew what they were getting themselves into.
In fact, Chris Lasavita, who is one of the two people managing the Trump presidential campaign here in 2024, within a few weeks of his decision to join the operation back in the fall of 2022, you have Trump saying that he wants to terminate parts of the Constitution. You have Trump saying and doing these sort of crazy, self-destructive things.
And Lasavita is sort of looking around saying, you know, what have I gotten myself into? And of course, people who are friends with him are saying, come on, dude, you knew exactly what you were signing up for, you know, exactly what you were getting yourselves into. So I think whatever degree of self-delusion may exist at the outset, when some of these folks ally themselves with Donald Trump.
You know, it dissolves pretty quickly and they become clear-eyed about who they're working for and what the challenges are. And to your point, Hannah, yes, there's inevitably going to be some chaos, some attention-seeking behavior, some stuff that is vulgar and inappropriate and racist and misogynistic and whatever else, their job is to try to turn things that are kind of potentially toxic into productivity.
They're trying to mine coals out of manure here. And again, I can't stress this enough, for most of the campaign, they were actually doing a pretty good job of it.
But at a certain point, I think it just becomes too much to manage. Mark, do you get the sense that the Harris campaigns, you described it as like little dose of confidence? Is that because of everything that Tim has described? Yeah, I mean, I think Trump has given them so much to work with.
And not just like, oh, look, he said this and sort of like, putting that out there. I mean, the early indications about the revulsion that women are having, women voters are having for Trump, even more so than usual, and the degree to which they seem to be voting, and maybe even lying to their husbands about to kind of use a new ad that the Harris campaign has used, which is basically saying, you know, a lot of Republican women, you know, are secretly going into the ballot and behind their husband's back, they are voting for Kamala Harris.
So again, Trump made their job easier, but I think they have, you know, taken what has been given to them. And I do feel, again, from talking to a bunch of them and levels of very, very cautious optimism, which I would say, you know, I think it would probably be an absolute verboten thing for anyone anywhere near the Harris campaign to show anything more than just a tiny bit of confidence, because that's going to hearken back to the overconfidence of 2016 or the overconfidence of 2020.
You know, Biden was supposed to win by a lot more than he did. And I think what freaks everyone out is the idea that Trump in the two times he's been on a general election ballot has massively overperformed his polls.
And now there's a sense that perhaps that's been accounted for in these

polls and they're undercounting African-American voters, women voters, and so forth. So anyway, I think all of that is sort of baked into this.
But look, I don't want to suggest that anything other than massive anxiety is the default for everyone around this campaign. And I assume both campaigns.

Yeah.

Okay, let's leave the listeners with thoughts about election night.

There's the Zen option, and hopefully many of our listeners will take advantage of the Zen option, take a long 12-hour walk, be home by 11 p.m., and then turn on the television. Short of that, the map is really wide and open.
I mean, seven open states. It's a lot.
So for those who are not spiritually built for the Zen option, how literally will you guys be watching? Like give a listener a guide of what to watch out for on the night. Well, I mean, I think, yes, there are seven battleground states.
But I think there's a lot you can learn if you can get information from other states. You know, there's a poll that everyone has been talking to, a lot of insiders have been talking to over the last few days from Iowa.
Iowa, no one considered a swing state. Safely read, certainly has been in the last few elections, certainly for Trump.
Ann Seltzer, a deeply respected pollster, came up with this Des Moines Register poll on Saturday night, having Harris ahead by three. Now, putting aside whether I was now a battleground state, I mean, the fact, I mean, that is obviously, if it's even in the ballpark of accurate, I mean, is a euphoric result for people on Team Harris.
So look for an outlier. I mean, look, if there are some early numbers from, say, South Carolina, Florida, that, you know, maybe show Trump's margins a little lower than you would expect, possibly that's something that you can learn from.
So, again, it's not just the seven battlegrounds, which will probably take a while to count, especially in some of the states with laws that make it harder to count early votes. But yeah, I mean, like the whole country does vote.
I mean, it's like margins do matter. And I think we can learn from a lot of people.
And look, even like Massachusetts, Vermont, like Kentucky, I mean, they're these early states that you know exactly who is going to win, but you can learn from. Because if the margins are smaller than they are expected to be, then that's a bit of data that's interesting.
Tim, what about you? So there's a known known and a known unknown. The known known is that Democrats are continuing to see erosion in their coalition specific to African-American men, Latino men, and to some degree, young voters.
And I think specifically, if we're looking at Detroit, at Milwaukee, at Philly, at Atlanta, at Maricopa County, there are places where we should be paying attention to this, right? I think the known unknown here is, does Donald Trump get beaten up among suburban women or does he get demolished among suburban women? And I think that the answer to that question is probably determinative to who is sworn into office on January 20th. So I'm really paying very close attention to the collar counties outside of Philadelphia, to the wow counties outside of Milwaukee.
You have to look at Vegas and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Some of these places, I don't want to be reductive, but I really do feel like ultimately that's where the

election is going to be won or lost. Both of you are saying, look for signs.
It's not just big, broad swing states, but there are meaningful signs in smaller election results that you'll be looking for. That's right.
It's again, it's just a numbers game. And it so happens that the most dense vote rich areas of persuadable voters are just consistently found in these once red, then purple, now pretty blue suburbs.
And so whether you're watching the presidential race, or even if you're looking for a potential upset in a Senate race, like in Texas, where Ted Cruz, on paper, looks like he's going to win, and maybe even win comfortably. But pay attention to Harris County, Texas, which on election night in 2012, Obama and Romney fought Harris County to basically a draw.
I think it was a matter of a few hundred votes that separated them. Fast forward, you know, a decade, Democrats are carrying Harris County, which is the Houston suburbs.
They're carrying it by a quarter million votes, 300,000 votes reliably, and that number's only going up. So those are the parts of the country where I think if you're paying close attention, you'll start to get a pretty good idea.
Okay, I think we have options for the meditators and options for those who cannot bring themselves to meditate. Thank you both for joining me on this day before the election.
Thank you, Hannah. Thank you, Tim.
Thank you, Hannah. Mark, I'll call you tomorrow.
We can meditate together. I look forward to it.
Yeah, we'll join figurative hands. This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Bade.
It was engineered by Rob Smersiak. Claudina Bade is

the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I'm Hannah Rosen, and we'll be back later this week to cover the election,

though possibly earlier than our usual Thursday release, depending on the results.

Thanks for listening. music music music

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