Dan Pfeiffer: A Scared and Seething Trump

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Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Democracy's hot streak at the craps table is continuing. This morning, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gerskovich, dissident politician Vladimir Karamurza, and ex-Marine Paul Whelan were released as part of a prisoner swap with Russia.
The much-hyped, professionalized Trump campaign is unraveling, and Kamala Harris leads in the prediction markets for the first time. Here to discuss, co-host of Pod Save America, author of the Message Box newsletter on Substack, it's great.
You should sign up. Former White House Communications Director and Senior Advisor to Barack Obama.
And most importantly, I just found out this morning, 2008 Communications Director for Evan By's presidential run, Dan Pfeiffer. Welcome to the board podcast.
That role lasted 10 days between the announcement of the Exploratory Committee and then him dropping out 10 days later. You did a nice rollout, I bet.
And I just wanted to welcome you. I didn't realize how centrist-pilled you were.
Between my John Huntsman for president experience and your Evan Bay experience, this is practically a no-labels podcast happening right now. Exactly.
Welcome aboard. Happy to have you.
Much to discuss. I want to read to you a headline.
I know you're a big fan of the work that our friends at politico do the day is july 18th 2024 so 13 days ago politico a change trump question mark some allies detect an existential shift after the shooting here's the change trump yesterday in an interview with three black journalists at the national association of black journalistsists conference in Chicago. Let's take a quick listen.
How do you define DEI? Go ahead. How do you define diversity, equity, inclusion? Okay, yeah, go ahead.
Is that what your definition? That is that that is give me a definition. Would you give me a definition? Give me a definition.
Sir, I'm asking you a question. You have to define it.
Define the define it you would. I just defined it, sir.
Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman? Well, I can say no. I think it's maybe a little bit different.
So I've known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage.
I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? Hmm.
Hmm. Focus like a laser beam message there, Dan.
What was your takeaway from that performance yesterday? I mean, first, like in fairness to the folks at Politico and all the other people who wrote these very credulous stories about how Trump was, put aside even the more disciplined Trump campaign, part of it just that he was this changed man since the assassination attempt. Look, there have been no other previous examples of press writing that Trump had changed and had blowing up in their face spectacularly like it did here.
So, I mean, everyone gets one, right? Exactly. We've only been doing it for 10 years.
Who could have seen it coming? I mean, this is by far Trump's worst public performance of the 2024 campaign, hands down. I mean, he's had plenty of bad moments, right? He was convicted of multiple felonies.
He has promoted political violence, bloodbath, et cetera. But this is the one where it was a just reminder on a huge stage of just what a terrible and very beatable candidate that Donald Trump is, right? And you've watched Donald Trump as closely as anyone over these 10 years.
So apologies to you. But like, my takeaway was, this is scared Trump.
This is when he feels backed into a corner, he doesn't really know what's going and doesn't feel in control. And he is clearly dealing with the fact that 13 days ago, he thought he was cruising for a landslide against Joe Biden.
And now he has no idea what this race is, how to beat Kamala Harris, how to talk about her. And it was actually, frankly, quite gratifying.
Yeah. Your newsletter this morning is on that, about how it shows that he's afraid.
Maybe the word I use maybe is seething. I he's seething at kamala harris and he was seething on stage and and maybe afraid of losing starting to be afraid of losing i do there is a psychological you know there is another podcast that puts trump on the couch full time so you know i defer to the expertise of them but uh the actual psychologist but there is like this element of he is somewhat scared you have to think about going to jail yeah and he lets that slip the mass slip on that sometimes he loses this he may very well go to jail and there was a period of time where that risk started to seem low right and he seemed a little bit you know more lighter in both his speeches and his energies and he hasn't done a lot of hostile interviews like this.
Regardless of what the motivation,

what the actual psychology is,

like dude is acting shook.

Yeah,

exactly.

My question is,

so if we grant that he shook,

I do wonder also,

like there's a strategic element to this.

When I was watching it live,

I thought this was him just blurting this out.

But in the intervening 24 hours now, they had a image at the event on the big screen in Harrisburg last night about how Kamala Harris is Indian American. He put out a multiple bleats on his social media feed, one an interview with Mindy Kaling and Kamala, where they talk about being Indian one this morning.
It's a picture of her and a Bindi with her Indian side of her family. So do you think that was them panicking and the staff panicking and backfilling? Or do you think they're like, no, we're doing this? Probably a little bit of both.
I sort of always view Trump's brain like as you see Homer Simpson thinking. It's like from A to B to C.
In his head, he's like, I was doing well with black voters, relatively, but I was doing well with black voters. They already targeted the campaign.
Joe Biden was white. Conor Harris is black.
She's now doing, according to the polls we've seen, better than Joe Biden was doing with black voters. So my strategy would be to tell people she's not black.
This is how his brain works. I don't think it's not a very effective.
I think there is a, and I use this term very loosely, subtle strategy of trying to make her seem like a phony that they want to do. But he just, you know, he isn't, subtlety is not something that he has capacity for.
And now they're doing a little bit of, we saw, you know, we saw this all the time and he was the white house where he was like, would tweet out some sort of policy and then they would try to create, you know, they would, above it, you used to call these intellectual Zambonis who would go along afterwards trying to explain it and i think there's a little bit of this where they're like oh this wasn't a complete disaster he didn't like melt out on stage this is part of a plan and here's the plan so i think there's like probably a element of strategy buried in there but not to the degree trump did it and some of the stuff they're doing afterwards is to try to make what trump did look more strategic than it was. Yeah I mean the phony part of it J.D.
Vance was asked about this last night now you would think that given the J.D. Vance children are both white and Indian he would understand the concept of how somebody could be both Indian and black or both Indian and white but he did not choose to educate his new boss on that point instead he did the phony attack on Kamala which I think is conceivably more effective where he does the you know Kamala grew up in Canada she lived in Canada with her academic parents and she's doing this fake southern black accent in Georgia how effective is that really again normal people understand that you know when you sometimes go in the South, this happens to me, occasionally my drawl comes out, but still, maybe that phoniness attack is better than you ain't black.
I mean, maybe. This is also when you exist entirely in the right-wing MAGA bubble.
Tens of millions of Americans identify as biracial. That is their identity.
If knows mixed-race families, and particularly younger people. That's even more prominent.
So this idea that this is somehow some foreign concept that you could be both black and Indian or Indian and white in J.D. Vance's kids' case, that isn't mysterious to the vast majority of people, and certainly not the people in the persuadable voter universe.
If you want to do the phony thing, maybe you could. I sort of agree that's not where I would have gone with it, but this is not the way to do it.
This is just leaning in on your worst possible instincts. And it does give some credence to the view that people have that Trump running against a black woman, an Indian woman, would sort of cause him to lash out in some of his most damaging ways and that clearly is what happened on the stage to me it's not it's obvious like that this backfires you know i just think that all of the evidence is that there's a category of swing voter of our of my people you know like college educated former republican voting suburban people that like are not interested in donald trump's you know racism and that that turns them off and you know maybe some of those folks were particularly you know soft on biden for various reasons this could thrust them back in the commas like to me i think it's an obvious loser but just to like challenge our priors and the two pushbacks i've seen on this is one from people on the left saying that like raising the salience of race in this campaign is bad for Kamala.
And, you know, to, you know, maybe there is some line here that could appeal to some segment of younger black men and, you know, in Atlanta or in Detroit or whatever, who are like, yeah, who are like, yeah, she's not one of us. Like, do you think there's any merit to either of those arguments? I think, look, we navigated

throughout both Obama campaigns

the question

of the salience of race.

Is he black enough? Mixed race guy?

There's two questions.

Whenever the conversation was race,

it became messy.

But there's also this thing

is you're kind of overthinking it because

Kamala Harris is black, Barack Obama was black.

No one's going to be surprised by that fact.

There's this big

Thank you. messy, right? But there's also this thing is, you're kind of overthinking it because Kamala Harris is black, Barack Obama was black, no one's gonna be surprised by that fact.
And so you can sort of like, there's this big, sort of infamous debate around the 2008 convention speech,

which was happening around the anniversary of the March on Washington. And there was this debate

among some on our consulting team who are not podcasters, that Obama should not mention it,

because that would be raising the significance of race. And Obama and Favreau and a bunch of

other people were like,

Thank you. consulting team who are not podcasters that Obama should not mention it because that would be

race and race and Obama and uh Favreau and a bunch of other people are like that's absurd right everyone knows he's black right it's like it's not a no one's gonna be surprised by that hot streak for the podcasters for the self-important podcasters being correct they are right in 2008 they're right in July of this year man I don't know do you guys have any misses do you have any misses that you'd like to reflect on?

2016 was probably a miss.

Yes.

I will own that miss. But how you respond when they try to bring up race, how you respond to it matters.
I thought Kamala Harris's response about going at him for division and chaos was the right way to do that. Yeah, actually, we have this audio.
Let's listen to it. Here's how Kamala responded last night.

We all here remember what those four years were like.

And today, we were given yet another reminder.

This afternoon,

Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists. And it was the same old show.
The divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.

The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth.
A leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us.
They are an essential source of our strength. I thought she was going to say we're tired of the same old shit.
I could use that instead of the same old show when she started to say shh. Besides that, I thought that was effective.
What was your take on how she responded to it? Yeah, I thought that was very good, right? I thought it was where you are driving the story and keeping it in the news for another couple hours there. You propel the news cycle forward without really trying to...
Donald Trump wants to pull you into a debate here, and she avoids that, and she pivots back to her message that he's division, he's chaos, he's the past, right? And I think that's actually one of the more damaging parts of how Trump talked about this. He really seems like an old guy who doesn't get it.
You can get away with that running against Joe Biden. You can't really get away with that running against Kamala Harris.
I thought it was a good response. Yeah, we talked to Palmieri on Friday's pod about this.
And just from her Hillary context, I'm interested in your kind of view from the Obama context. And she thought that maybe, I'm putting words in her mouth, maybe at times there was a little bit too much of an instinct to say, oh, that's misogyny, oh, that's sexism, rather than just kind of letting the obvious racism or sexism be there and going back on offense, maybe subliminally hitting on that while sticking on the message.

And that seems to be what she was doing last night.

And I assume you have the same view.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I think the thing you have to do, the way you propel this forward,

and where she did it and how she did it last night was appropriate.

But I think propelling it forward is two things. One is, because he's going to continue going after her.

I think the way she pivots to say, this is not about me. It's about everyone else.
And make it about the people in the country. And then also, this is the thing that Democrats make the mistake with Trump a lot, is we don't explain why he's doing certain things.
So he's dividing people. Why is he dividing people? It's just sort of you lean into what we call the race class narrative about he's dividing us so you can put in place this MAGA agenda that would do X, Y, and Z.
People are pretty comfortable with Trump as a giant asshole, and they're pretty comfortable with him as a racist, misogynistic asshole. But you have to explain to a lot of these people why that matters to them and their lives.
They proved in 2016 they're okay with having an asshole president, but it is like, if you can explain, as I think Biden did to a successful degree in 2020, why that affects people's lives and hurts them. I think that's the next sort of turn of the wheel here.
One more sign that it was good. And then I kind of want to talk about Kamala's broader message.
The Republicans, this is playbook this morning. They spent the evening calling Republicans to find out what they thought.
What happened to the plan of attacking Harris as the border czar wants to end private health insurance, decriminalize border crossings, etc. And he said they said that virtually every Republican they spoke with was flat out distraught.
Indeed, the entire line of attack reeks of desperation. One said they pointed out that the Trump camp is now launching ads in North Carolina.
It's always in these situations, Mike, if I have doubts about my instincts, it's probably a good sign that the Republicans are also panicking about this new line of attack. I just think as a general rule, if Tommy Tuberville thinks your attack was too racist, you've gone too far.
Tuberville is in there going, I'm not going to touch that. I have a free line I'm trying to give out to Mitt Romney, which is that Trump should understand that somebody that is part Oompa Loompa and also part white, that you can be both at the same time.
You can be both orange and white just like you can be both black and brown. All right, let's talk about Kamala's message.
Alex Thompson at Axios this morning has this out. Since you're the message box guru, I want your take.
He wrote, President Biden wanted to make his campaign about democracy in January 6th, but Vice President Harris wants it to be about freedom and the future. In her first two campaign rallies, his likely nominee and in her first ads, Harris and her campaign have not used the word democracy.
And I'm going to add on to that, they've barely used the word Biden. I mean, this is kind of a crazy thing to say, because I do believe that democracy at stake in this election.
But I have been a longtime critic of the idea that we should run on democracy because democracy is this very nebulous thing that for most, particularly the target voters that we need to get are ones who are more cynical about politics than the rest of us, which is saying a lot frankly. So basically you become the status quo party, right? We're going to save democracy.
We're going to save this political system that does not you think does not work for you. And you think is so broken that you're even open to considering voting for someone like Donald Trump.
So freedom is a much more powerful way of getting to the same thing. Future versus past is that is always the message you want in a campaign.
And that was not available to Biden. And it's just it is remarkable just and we'll see how this goes in the coming months.
But just how quickly we went from a referendum on Joe Biden's first four years, and comparing that to Donald Trump's four years, to an actual debate about what's going to happen in the next four years. And Kamala Harris, she embodies that.
That's been the thrust of her campaign. She's not out there litigating the CHIPS Act or passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
She's just out there talking about what she's going to do. She's going to have to add details to that and what he would do that's bad.
And that is just a huge shift. And it's where you want to be because you can make Donald Trump old in the past.
You got a real shot here. Yeah.
It's just so refreshing to not have to be bogged down in all of that defense of everything. And a lot of times Biden was right on the merits.
But if you just felt like you had to defend everything, it just it felt weak. It felt like a losing message.
And I don't know, I've been a lot of folks when I've been doing the rounds have been asking me about the Kamala flip flops or whatever, the move to the center on all these issues and how she should handle that whenever the interviews start. And my point is always just like, I love that her message is future, not past.
It's just like, I'm not getting bogged down and all that. We have a plan for the future.
Donald Trump doesn't. Here's what we're going to do on energy.
Here's what we're going to do on healthcare. Keep pivoting back to that.
We're not going back and we're not going to get bogged down in what happened on the 2019 campaign. What's your sense for that? Do you think that's the right way forward for her? A hundred percent.
And it is just, this is what happens when you run with the United Party. You know, Donald Trump has been able to get away with all kinds of things, right? You know, he can break with Republican orthodoxy on things that he thinks are unpopular.
Party's with him, right? That was the convention. Do whatever you want, United.
Biden did not have that because half of Democratic voters didn't want him to be the nominee. He was basically running this year and a half primary to unite his base as the general election was happening.
And Kamala Harris has a united Democratic Party from an instance. So she can make these decisions that are the right decisions for her campaign to win.
And she's like an eight blowback. People aren't coming after her.
It's easy to do this in a statement to Politico about why you change your position on the federal jobs guarantee. She's going to sit for interviews.
She's going to have to do it. Great switch, by the way, just thumbs up on every switch.
She's just getting totally bulwark filled. You know, I'm getting emails like, are you concerned that she's flip-flopping? I'm like, every flip star has been from a vision.
I didn't like to when I like, so I have no complaints so when she gets to the you know on a in a real an interview a town hall a debate stage she's gonna have to have more than just like i change her position you go forward but there's also this intervening event as she was vice president for four years she like i learned things there and this is where we are now this is what i got to be in every big meeting here's what i know here's what we should do and she also has the, and this is what's so important about the future part of her message, to find ways to chart her own course on issues that Biden has had problems with on inflation and Gaza, etc. We did these things for these four years.
For the next four years, this is what I want to do. And it's going to be slightly different in these ways.
And that's not disrespectful or dismissive of Biden. It's just this future versus past.
What do you think about the fact she hasn't done an interview yet? I mean, I'm just assuming she's just waiting for the right Pod Save America episode to appear on. We have a very busy calendar.
Is it a request in? I'm sure that'd be a really hard-hitting interview. I'm sure you're planning on really, you know, holding her to account.
I mean, if she came on this pod, would she be trying to take her down? Just playing Clipshift 2019 debates? We do have a request in, and we'd love to hear from the Vice President. and i would like to talk to her about all the flip-flops to the correct positions that she's been taking very encouraged by it happy to hear from her on that i guess the more serious version of this question is at some point does like the pressure start to build on it like that's what i worry about a little bit i you know i like that she's had a very clean week and a half it's kind of of like when you're rolling double sixes, why stop? But at some point she's going to have to do it.
I think the question from a planning perspective is when. She's going to announce her VP early next week.
Then she's got two weeks to convention. I would say she probably has to do some sort of high profile sit down.
And honestly, if it's about pressure, doing the Bulwark Pod or Pod State of America is not going to alleviate that pressure. It's not like all of a sudden the New York times could be like, Oh, they were all these two very pro Kamala Harris podcasts.
That's fine. She has met her.
It would help. It helped.
Might as well get some reps in Madam VP. Might as well get a few reps in.
Yeah. I think it would be massively more impactful for the, her actual goal of winning to do those podcasts and do some of those other more traditional interviews.
But if you worry about it, it's just that narrative, she's not doing it, we won't solve that problem. You probably want to try to get one in before the convention so that you can just do that, have your convention, come out of the convention with your tour, and then do some media stuff there.
But probably in the next week or so, I think it's probably just got to do it. Get on the other side of the VP rollout, I think.
What do you think about the worries about Shapiro? Do you share the concerns that it will dampen the vibes with the left, with the progressives at all? Or do you think that's overstated? I don't think so. I think that's overstated.
Everyone comes with pros and cons. I think Kelly, if I was just doing based on pure on paper, Kelly is probably the one I would pick.
He's got gravitas. He's got a great story.
He's an astronaut. Arizona, good border credentials.
But Shapiro would be great. Tim Walls, great.
Brings less in terms of like home state benefit, which I think is probably overstated anyway. But the internet has fallen in love with Tim Walls.
And I think that's kind of cool, which is a very surprising thing. The real strange trend of events is that the governor of Minnesota is now an internet star.
Walls is fine with me.

I'm fine with all of them. There are no's that I don't like.

I'm not as wall-pilled as everybody else. Occasionally, things

happen with my new teammates

on the pro-democracy movement where they

get really excited about something. I'm like, this isn't

giving me the thrill up my leg, but that's okay. I respect

everybody's whatever gets you going.

I respect that. I want to move on to kind of looking

at the polls and talking about

the campaign mechanics. When I initially emailed

you, you did a segment over on

Pod Save America about kind of what a campaign

I mean... I respect that.
I want to move on to kind of looking at the polls and talking about like the campaign mechanics. When I initially emailed you, you did a segment over on Pod Save America about kind of what a campaign is going to look like for the next three months.
I want to do that. But just really quick on the democracy thing.
Let me just push back into the other side of this argument. There were a lot of people in 2022 that said that the Democrats were focused too much on democracy.
It ended up working. Maybe not democracy as a highfalutin principle, but like the idea that these people are crazy they're anti-democracy they're a threat along with their threat to you know your rights for women you know with the overturn of roe like those two paired together worked and so would it be a mistake to completely ignore it and i say this in particular the other clip from the trump event last night where he was talking about January 6th and he was totally dismissive of Officer Sicknick and the other officers that were injured and said he actually cared more about the limestone.
It was like than he did about the injured cops who cared as a builder. He cared about that the limestone was defaced by progressives last week.
And that was more important to him than the dead police officer. That's sick stuff.
And I think there is a certain type of people, if you look at Arizona, the John McCain voter, that that appeals to. So is there an argument that you shouldn't totally abandon that? I think that's conflating two different arguments.
And I think the Democrats learned the wrong lessons from 2022. We've sort of had this retroactive narrative that Biden gave these democracy speeches.

This is a big part of the Biden argument over the last few weeks. Gave these democracy speeches

that they somehow turned the tide in the election.

There's no evidence to support that, and there's no evidence

people actually consume those speeches.

That election was about abortion and extremism.

Your listeners consumed those speeches.

The listeners of the Bullard podcast loved

the blood-red Biden speech.

I do think they were already voting for Democrats in the midterms, probably. Right.
I wasn't going to speak to your listeners. I know our listeners were, they did not need one democracy speech to flip from Dr.
Oz to John Fetterman. That was not where we were.
Okay. But the January 6th of it was about extremism.
Abortion is actually an argument about extremism, right? And I've seen this in your colleagues' focus groups. I've seen this in your colleagues focus groups i've seen this in other private research i've seen that dobbs did unlock a view of republicans as extremists that did not exist before and so that there is a potent combination and election truthing also is a piece of evidence of extremism and that basically what democrats successfully did is they put in a time of high inflation and dissatisfaction with the incumbent president and the economy, they very successfully made an election about abortion, and they painted their opponents as extremism.
Both those things are very available in this election, but that is different than saying, we are doing this to save democracy. It's almost semantics, and I hate getting into like Franklin-Cian word choice here, but freedom is, I think, a much more resonant way of talking about the things that are at risk than this amorphous political system.
I'm basically with you. I also think that there are two groups of voters that are really on the table here.
And one is the least engaged voters that just is going straight over their head, the democracy stuff. I do think that there can be a niche, you know, argument for the, you know, some of my people and the Georgia burbs, the Kemp Warnock voters, where you're talking about just Donald Trump's totally un-American attack on the country's principles and what happened on January 6th.
But I think it's like a big thematic argument. It's hard to argue.
calmness argument of, hey, I'm a younger woman that wants to make sure to protect your freedoms

from this fat old authoritarian.

That feels like a better country. you commas argument of hey i'm a younger woman that wants to make sure to protect your freedoms

from this fat old authoritarian like that feels like a better contrast than you know

quoting the founding father so some people do like hamilton i've heard

swing state polls out this morning from my old colleagues at public opinion strategy it's the

gop polling firm but they're legit pennsylvania kamala 48, Trump 45. Wisconsin, Kamala 48, Donald 46.
Arizona, Trump 48, Harris 43. Nevada, Trump 46, Harris 45, Michigan tied.
What's your thoughts on, I mean, it's just one poll. We've seen kind of some movement.
We're only a week and a half in. Do you expect more movement in her direction? Like, what do you think about the map at this point? It still has to wash itself through the system, right? We are in a, like, just the last, as you said, like the last 13 days of pure tumult here that have gone on.
But what I think you can take away from the polls we've seen is Kamala Harris is in this race in a way that Joe Biden certainly was not. And the Biden map was three states and he was losing in all three, right? And now we are- He was maybe tied in Wisconsin.
Maybe tied in Wisconsin, to be fair. But his ceiling was 270 electoral votes.
I would have given him a ceiling of 281. He could have won Arizona, couldn't he have, maybe? No, it was over 270.
No, I don't think he could have won it have won i mean anything is possible but that seems less likely you know these are toss-up races in all six states now right and i think you mentioned you mentioned this earlier but the fact that trump campaign is on the air in north carolina just says that there has been a fundamental shift in the underlying dynamics of the race doesn't mean that they're in danger of losing north carolina per se but if biden was in the, they'd be on the air in New Mexico, right? That's what's changed, right? They've gone from offense to a modicum of defense there, which makes sense. There was an anti-MAGA majority in every one of these states, right? That was there in 2020 and there in 2022, and Kamala Harris has united that anti-MAGA majority in a way Joe Biden hadn't.
Is that enough to win in all those states? Maybe, maybe not. But it's certainly enough to be incredibly competitive in all of them.
So as you look at the map now, well, I don't want to prejudice you with my thought. Where do you think she's weakest? Probably Nevada, would be my guess.
That's the most pro-Trump demographically, if you believe that he has movement with working-class Latino voters and working-class white voters, obviously, as his base. And Arizona too, right? I mean, I guess this, I guess if you look at the numbers, there, there's been some movement among, among Latino voters in the polls in the national polls, but it feels like still the group that is a little bit dicey for her, right? Like it seems pretty clearly that she has already basically consolidated most of Biden's weakness with young voters and black voters, and hasn't lost a ton, maybe just slightly, there was some evidence that she's moved maybe slightly down among older white voters.
But I guess that's the question, which is that can she do well enough with Latino voters to to carry Arizona and Nevada? With young voters, based on some of the points, she has gotten back to Biden 2020 margins. Black voters, she's still not yet back to Biden 2020 margins.
We need to see more polling. We're looking at some real subsamples here, some smaller polls.
With Latino voters, she has improved, but not yet to. That's probably where the largest delta is between her and the Biden 2020 margins among those three groups is Latino voters.
So that obviously puts the states you mentioned more challenging than the ones where you can get there with young voters, you know, high black support, high black turnout and, you know, suburban college educated whites, right, which Georgia can get you. Okay, I want to move to what what I referenced earlier, what you're talking about on the pod, because I think I was just thinking this morning, with the news of the president release, right? And you're thinking about what behind the scenes, you know, you had those 10 days on the Evan Biden campaign, you've worked on a lot of presidential efforts, you worked at the White House, and the president is running for your life.
The advantage that she has on actual like ability to campaign, I think is pretty understated. Like you have what you had with President Biden, he just wasn't doing that much.
There was that one anecdote that I keep coming back to in the New York Times story. It said that even after the debate, he had only called over 10 days, like 20 members of Congress or something, like two calls a day.
On top of that, he had a real job to do. So, you know, you imagine he's still on the campaign trail today, let's say, had he not dropped out.
There's presidenting you have to do when you're doing a prisoner swap with three people. And just one additional detail in that point showing kind of what Biden was up to while he was still campaigning and deciding what to do.
A new report this morning says that just an hour before he announced he was exiting the race, he was on the phone with his Slovenian counterpart urging them to make the final arrangements for this massive prisoner swap. So she doesn't have to worry about any of that.
She can be fully focused on this in candidate time. So I just for listeners that maybe like haven't like been on campaign, like talk about what that actually means.
Yeah. So I mean, first, it's just we're noting that running for president is a very hard job.
Being president is much harder than that. And running for president while being president is nearly an impossible job.
You have to do all that campaigning and you still have to do all the meetings, all the foreign leader calls, all the sit room meetings, all the stuff that comes with the job. You have to pass bills, sign declarations, all of that.
And Biden obviously was not doing those things, right? He could not, Trump is not campaigning. Like it's so stipulated he's barely campaigning himself, but Biden was being president and then not doing a lot of campaigning.
Well, he's golfing. He's sending out bleats on his social media feed.
And like, you know, he's doing like two or three rallies a week. He's not doing that much.
The advantage of being vice president, I remember this in 2014, Biden visited like, he was vice president at the time in 2014 biden visited like he was vice president time obviously he visited like 60 congressional districts to campaign right i mean he was also the he was quite popular back then and the one who was in demand particularly in the south but he could do it because he was vice president right you have more freedom and so like i guess the question is what does a normal campaign schedule look like like what do you what does the candidate do is that what you're asking yeah sure i just walk just walk through for people like what's Thursday looking like for Kamala? I think Kamala's still in a little bit of a purgatory phase, but once we round the bend of the convention, when her campaign is fully up and running and fully staffed and she has everything she needs, you wake up in a hotel room somewhere in America, probably in one of those six states we've just mentioned. You meet a staffer at the door.
The staffer dials you into six different drive time radio calls over an hour, right? Drive time in Atlanta, drive time in Milwaukee, drive time in Detroit, wherever else. Then you probably do a greet in the hotel lobby on your way out with a bunch of organizers, labor leaders, folks like that who want to say hi, or a big, or precinct captains is something we do a lot with Obama.
Get in the car, you probably got to dial a bunch of donors while you're in the car or some people whose endorsement you're trying to get while you're driving to the rally location. You do a morning rally.
If they're here for an hour, you speak for 30 minutes. You do the rope line leaving.
You probably do a couple of local interviews, particularly this day and age. Campaigns are getting local influencers to be backstage to film a brief interaction with you.
Put that out. Get on the plane.
On the way to the plane, you're doing more calls, maybe another interview, maybe a conference call with your staff to talk about whatever the news of the day is. Another rally, after that rally, probably maybe you sit for an hour and do satellite television interviews, like five-minute interviews back to back to back for the full hour, leave, have dinner, probably not by yourself, probably with a bunch of organizers or local elected officials.
And then you do a late night rally. You're doing three rallies.
Oftentimes in the first restaurant, you're doing three rallies in three cities. And every waking moment is spent doing something other than resting.
You're doing interviews. You're doing donor calls, you're doing local elect official calls, you work your tail off.
And Kamala Harris can do that. And as vice president, she's free to do it in a way that an incumbent president would not be.
And she's young enough and has the energy and stamina to do it in ways that Donald Trump does not. And that was like another thing that was neutralizing, you know, a Trump weakness.
Like that's tired. Like he's an old fucking man.
Like he's an old ass man's an old-ass man. He doesn't want to do all that stuff.
It does take me back to a question I meant to ask at the beginning. Why do you think he did the National Association of Black Journalists interview at all? I think they thought they were running against Joe Biden when he agreed to do it.
They have this theory that Donald Trump can win enough black voters to keep in this case,

Biden from winning the battleground States.

And like,

it's a,

it's a symbolic move,

right?

I remember in 2000,

I was working for Al Gore a hundred years ago and George Bush went to the

NAACP.

Right.

And it was like,

the point was showing up.

He got a ton of coverage for doing it.

Like he got,

we did that.

Yeah.

You get a hundred times more coverage as a Republican going to the NAACP than a Democrat. Right.
like Obama had a version of this going to a megachurch. The idea was he would do it.
I don't think it was particularly well thought out because it was going to be an on-state. If it was a speech, that makes perfect sense, where you can go do your appeal.
The figure Harris Faulkner's there. Probably at the end, they just were like, it's going to look horrible if we back out.
Yeah. They got sort of stuck to it.
I think it was an idea, like on a whiteboard in theory, that was not particularly well thought out. But I understand how they thought it fit with their voter targeting strategy.
Just the execution of it was never going to be great, given he's not good in interviews, and these are going to be tough interviews. And you add on to the fact that he was already sort of reeling and acting like a lunatic because of the change in the race it looked terrible yeah grumpy and seething and like you have these three women who kind of are a stand-in for Kamala and his racist head probably a little bit um what a bad idea uh speaking about outreach to the other side and how that gets your attention one of the other things that was not happening uh this was publicly reported and I can maybe show a little more leg than i was at the time because conversations were private but like biden was not reaching out to top republican types right i mean like chris christie said this publicly you know so i'm not reviewing anything on that like chris christie was like he hasn't he hasn't called me i which is insane to me but again when you go through that schedule that you were talking about the vice president it's just like okay well if you if she's able to do 40 calls in a day a lot more room to do this you know if somebody's doing four you know and you got to call big donors you got to call labor leaders whatever there's not room for chris christie in the schedule sometimes i worry that maybe i'm overstating this how do you think how important do you think it is looking ahead to the convention that the harris campaign gets some validators from either trump administration world never trump world world, former Republicans, that type of thing.
Is that sort of thing that maybe only the pundit class cares about, or do you think that matters? No, I think it matters, right? I mean, look, everything matters in a race that's likely to be as close as this. That was the strangest thing about Biden.
They were very good at that in 2020, right? Kasich spoke at the convention. Sidney McCain spoke at the convention.
There was to show, to create this permission structure for your listeners, your people, to feel okay with Joe Biden in a way they wouldn't with other Democrats, potentially. And there is still this universe of Nikki Haley voters, right, who I don't think most of them can identify Nikki Haley in a lineup.
But are Republicans to satisfy with Trump that you can go get and you can get validators to do that, right? Chris Christie would be good for that. I mean, you know, Liz Cheney, like all of these people, right.
He finally got Adam Kinzinger's endorsement, but having some of that at the convention to mix it up. And I think it's probably even more important for Kamala Harris, who was undefined Joe Biden, at least brought to bear a, you know, multi-decade view of him as a sort of moderate, you know, compromising Democrat.
She's undefined. There's a greater hurdle for a candidate of color.
And so I think it'd be very valuable for her to do that and have one of these people, if she possibly could, speak at the convention in a way that voters would actually see, whether that's Liz Cheney or Chris Christie or someone like that. Mitt Romney? I agree.
National security for me, too. Yeah, Mitt.
Or, you know, you could even, if a politician you're not getting a Mark Esper, a Condoleezza Rice, like somebody to kind of bolster the national security side of things. Any other thoughts about the convention? Something you want to see, what you don't want to see? I think it's going to be a fun convention, and an excited convention, which has been a long time.
We haven't had that in a very long time. 2016 was pretty divided and filled with all kinds of 2016 primary acrimony.
2008 was amazing. 2012 was amazing.
I think this, based on that rally in Atlanta the other night, this is going to be a very, very fun. I'm excited to be there.
I wanted to give the heads one coconut line. Just give us the coconut thing one time at the convention.
I think it would blow the roof off. It'd be like the 1992 Michael Jordan, you know, how the Bulls did the intros.
Maybe they should do that, like the Bulls intro in Chicago. Okay, those are my ideas for you on the convention side.
Final question for Dan. I was in the Crooked Media store today, and I noticed there's a big discount on one item.
It's a hoodie. For YouTube viewers, we'll put it up on screen here.
It's a hoodie that says, Yes, We Dan. Yes, We Dan.
It was $55 down to $22 now as a hoodie. Did you approve that item? Why do you think that's so highly discounted? Well, it's been out for a while now.
I'm surprised it's discounted. But did I approve it? It was made, designed, and basically almost put in the store before someone asked me about it, at which point I felt sort of obligated for it.
And there were t-shirts and mugs as well. We have the mugs in my house because at a later time in life, I want to be able to explain to my children, this very weird period in time when my, when I, not particularly attractive picture of my face was on a mug and why that was.
But look, if, if any, any folks who were particularly moved by this interview, want to go to theoked store and buy some of that, yes, we did merch. I highly recommend it.
Okay, great. This is the moment.
Grab it while it's hot. The shelves might be emptying.
Only $22. Only a couple sizes available.
But give that a check. Dan Pfeiffer, thank you for doing this.
This is your first time, right? You never did, Charlie? No, this is my first time on any Bulwark podcast, frankly. First time on the Bulwark the board podcast it's so good to have you and now that i know you have evan by on your resume

you'll be back soon you're among your people thanks so much we'll be talking to you soon

brother all right bye all right thanks to dan pfeiffer coming tomorrow george conway he explains

it all to me this time we'll see y'all then. Peace.
Am I black enough for ya?

We're gonna move on up one by one We ain't gonna stop until the work is done

Am I black enough black enough for ya?

We're gonna move on up two by two This old world is gonna be brand new Am I black enough for ya We gotta move on up Two by two This old world is gonna be brand new

Am I black enough for ya?

Am I black enough for ya?

Get along

Start marching the time

You better make up your mind

We're gonna leave you behind

We gotta move on up

Three by three

We gotta get rid of gravity

I gotta stay black and black enough for ya I gotta stay black and black enough for ya We gonna move on up, four by four We ain't never gonna suffer, no, no I gotta stay black and black enough for ya I gotta stay black and black enough for ya It ain't love, man

Dark margin of time

You better make up your mind I've got to stay black and black enough for you It ain't long Dark marginal time

You better make up your mind

We're gonna leave you there

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown