FILMED JULY 22, 2024
BILL KRISTOL:
Hi, I’m Bill Kristol. Welcome back to Conversations. I’m very pleased to be joined again today, I guess for the third time in a year, by Doug Sosnik. And it’s the third time because the first two conversations were so illuminating, I think, and stand up very well. So, Doug was a Senior Advisor in the Bill Clinton White House for six years. Really the main, I think, strategist for his 1996 reelection campaign. Very prominent subsequently in Democratic circles, as well as other things that you’ve done. Very well respected for the memos you sent around. So, Doug, thank you so much for joining me again.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Great to be here, Bill.
BILL KRISTOL:
We’re speaking on July 22nd, the day after Joe Biden dropped out. I told him I wanted him to drop out, if he could just hold the dropping out until Sunday afternoon so our Monday conversation could be fresh. That was good of him to do. So, I’m grateful to the president for that. So where do we stand? We’ve never seen this before, obviously, but you had a very comprehensive, I think it’s fair to say, analysis of where the race stood before he dropped out. I don’t know, say a word about that, but maybe say a word first about how… Well, and also, how much does it change everything? Does it not change things much? Does it change everything? How do we think about this?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, first of all, I think it’s maybe the third time I’m doing this, because this is the third race we’ve talked about in the last 12 months. It’s unbelievable how much things have changed. Well, the fact is really, if you just take a step back, the Democrats are 14 weeks out from an election in which we don’t have a nominee, and that’s going to make it really difficult. We don’t have a nominee 14 weeks out and going into these 14 weeks, the Democrats have been behind. So it’s a difficult but not impossible situation, I think, for what appears to be Vice President Harris to be the Democratic nominee. But I think the deck was stacked against her before as she launches her campaign. And I also think, putting myself in the Trump campaign’s shoes for a moment, and thinking back to what we did in the ’96 reelect and what Bush did beginning of 2004 against Kerry, I think there’s going to be a race to define Harris.
And I think the Trump guys, who incidentally, have spent virtually no money in the last month, they just got out of the way. They let Democrats feed on each other and they’re sitting on a pile of cash. And I suspect you’re going to see them dump tens of millions of dollars on Harris in the next few weeks when we have essentially a race to define who she is because she’s not really well-defined in the public. But she does, I think, inject a whole set of energy and enthusiasm that the Democratic Party has been sorely missing.
And the last thing I’ll say is, well, I think it’s certainly fair to say that the Republicans had a wildly successful Convention last week. I do think Trump’s speech was a reminder to a lot of people about why they don’t want him to get elected to a second term of office. So I think that there was a real desire to put some energy behind someone who can beat him. And clearly, I think we got to a point where Biden wasn’t the person. And I think there is a lot of hope on the Democratic side with Harris, if for another example, then she raised 50 million bucks in less than 24 hours after the announcement.
BILL KRISTOL:
There’s so much there, but it’s extremely helpful actually as a top line and set of top line. So let’s just unpack maybe each of them or several of them in sequence. So on this one, I think fairly briefly, because you published on it and we discussed it last time, but where was the race on Saturday, July 20th? How far behind was Biden and therefore was the Democratic Party?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, let’s start with how you elect presidents. The Electoral College currently favors Republicans. The last two Republicans to be elected president for the first time lost the popular vote. The Electoral College in this election is six points more favorable to Republicans than the 2020 election because of reapportionment and redistricting.
BILL KRISTOL:
Six points in the sense of total electoral votes of the Republican states.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Right.
BILL KRISTOL:
[inaudible].
DOUG SOSNIK:
From Democratic-leaning states to Republican-leaning states. So you start out with the Republicans having an inherent advantage in the Electoral College, and the sort of rule of thumb—rough rule of thumb—now has been that Democrats need to win a national vote by around four points, four and a half points in order to win the Electoral College. So you start with the Electoral College that currently favors Republicans. To answer your specific question, where the race stood when Biden was running, and at least for now stands with probably Harris as the nominee, is that Trump has 268 electoral votes in the bank, unless Harris can get some of these Sun Belt states back in play. So that’s only two short of the 270 needed to win.
And in addition to that, there are five states that have traditionally voted for Democrats, totaling 35 electoral votes, that the last set of polling when Biden was the nominee has Trump either ahead or tied or narrowly behind. So Harris does start out in a hole, but her path to winning is the same as Biden’s, which is to win the three Midwestern swing states, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And she also needs to win Nebraska too, and that would give her 270 electoral votes.
BILL KRISTOL:
And hold those five smaller states that you mentioned that are teetering.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Yes.
BILL KRISTOL:
Okay. So it was pretty bad for the incumbent president, one would have to say.
DOUG SOSNIK:
For the incumbent president’s Party.
BILL KRISTOL:
For the Democrats as a Party, it would have down ballot effects. Right? It was striking how much some of these Democratic Senate candidates were running ahead of Biden. So I guess that’s one question which is relevant to the question which I’m now going to ask about how much Harris might change things or not? But also, how much of this was a Biden problem and how much of this was a Democratic problem? And how much of the Biden problem was an age problem as opposed to a set of policies and incumbency problem?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, it’s probably both, but clearly, it was a Biden problem and it was an age problem. But to give you how bad the age problem was, Trump and the Republicans didn’t even bother attacking Biden on the economy and inflation or immigration. They just stayed parked on age for now.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yes.
DOUG SOSNIK:
But I think what we may foreshadow if the race doesn’t fundamentally change is something I was very familiar with, which is in 1996, by end of September, early October, it became very clear that Clinton was going to win the election. And the Republicans and the Senate House candidates essentially ran the last 30 days as a vote for Republican as a check on a second Clinton term. So I think that we’re not there now. I think Harris is going to have a chance to step up, to reset the race. I do think she has the potential to really create more energy for the Democratic base voters, which would be really important for these candidates. But if the fundamentals of the race don’t change, I think you’re going to look at a reprise this October of what we saw at the end of the ’96 campaign.
BILL KRISTOL:
Wow. You’re a fundamentals guy, I think, in these races often, and you don’t get distracted, which is wisely so, I think. You don’t buy the day-to-day, this headline today and that headline tomorrow. But I guess how different should one assume as one’s baseline that at the end of the day, the vice president succeeds the president? You take a little bit of the age issue away, but basically, we’re looking at the same race, you would guess, a week from now that we’re looking at today, or do you think unprecedented, unchartered waters, we don’t know the surge of interest and excitement could really change the parameters of the race? Which of those two polls do you think we’re likely to be closer to?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think probably in the short-term, you’re going to see a boost for Harris and the Democrats. What is different from this election than most elections is the majority of the country doesn’t want to vote for Donald Trump. That’s a pure fact.
BILL KRISTOL:
And that’s sticking, right? There’s little change in that?
DOUG SOSNIK:
There’s little change in that. And again, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, for the last three weeks at least, the whole campaign’s been consumed by Joe Biden and his age. And as I mentioned a minute ago, the Convention and Trump’s speech was a reminder of why the majority of the country dislikes Trump. So I think in the short-term, I think the Democrats will get a boost. However, in a sense, we are a divided country in which both sides have a high floor and a low ceiling, which is to say it’s because of these divisions that are very narrow, there’s a limit to how far a candidate can fall because they’re not going to vote for the other side, but there’s also a ceiling at how high up they can go.
And so there’s a structure to the race, and there has been a structure to the race since the, I would say end of October, early November of last year until now, which is that Trump has had a narrow but durable lead nationally now, but more importantly in the battleground states. And so while there may be a little zigging and zagging with Biden leaving the scene and Harris coming in, I think fundamentally, the tectonic plates of the race probably haven’t changed, which is to say it’s a narrowly divided country, it’s a fairly even race, but that Trump has the advantage on the margins in the polling in a system, Electoral College system, that favors Republicans.
The real question is going to be whether Harris is able to energize the swing states in the Sun Belt, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, which disproportionately have younger voters, disproportionately have non-white voters, which is what not only drove Biden’s success in carrying those states in 2020, but Biden’s drop with those voters is why those states have become, at least from a leaning standpoint, firmly in Trump’s column. So the question is going to be whether Harris can change that dynamic, particularly in those states to open up more options for her to get to 270 electoral votes.
BILL KRISTOL:
So her as a candidate might suggest a more Sun Belt strategy as opposed to, or at least in addition to, a maniacal focus on those three Midwestern states as the path to 270?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Right. Well, I think as a party, we have to try to create more options of viability to 270. If I were to guess in terms of the plus-minus side of the ledger with her candidacy compared to Biden’s, I think that she has the potential to really increase not only energy and enthusiasm for the ticket with base voters, but also turnout. I think where she’ll be more challenged are with swing voters and with independent voters. And as I mentioned a few minutes ago, I think that’s going to be job one for the Trump campaign, is to define her with those voters.
BILL KRISTOL:
And Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, you’ve argued many times in real detail, are demographically whiter, older and less well-educated basically. Right? And those are the voters presumably that Kamala Harris would’ve a slightly tougher time getting to than Biden or—
DOUG SOSNIK:
Yeah, it’s a little—
BILL KRISTOL:
Or not?
DOUG SOSNIK:
…puzzling to me, Bill. These older voters aren’t the same older voters we’re used to.
BILL KRISTOL:
Right.
DOUG SOSNIK:
And they have a different background. I think they come from a different world of what they consider normal. And I do think their sensibilities about how Trump behaves, how Trump talks is one of the reasons that he’s having more trouble with them than you might’ve expected. But as I’ve said several times that we’re an evenly, narrowly divided country and I think for Harris and the Democrats, we’ve got to open up more options in the Electoral College map and we can’t go with a false choice of either we’re going to do better with this group or better with that group. And that was part of Biden’s success in 2020 in his narrow victory. He was able to narrowly improve… Narrowly, but nevertheless narrowly improved his performance with non-college whites, for instance, and other groups, didn’t win them, but he was able to narrow the lopsided margins and he still barely won. So I think that the burden on Harris and the Democrats is going to be across the board, we need to improve our performances with these voters and we just can’t focus on one set and think we’re going to win.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, you pick up 2% from a group you’re running with 26% with. If that group’s the same size as the group you’re running 76% with, it’s just as valuable. Right? It depends within a state, obviously. I understand that people do forget that sometimes. You don’t get credit for getting 34% instead of 31% for some massive group like white working class non-college or something like that.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, and you saw that and you saw Biden making marginal but measurable improvements with college whites men for instance. But I think one of the potentially big factors that could change the race is… Let’s call it pre-Harris, the Biden-Trump campaign versus now the presumably Harris-Trump campaign. A real question in this cycle had been, and probably still will be, is who’s actually going to vote? And I don’t think we should make the assumptions that we’ve had in the last three election cycles that we’re moving towards maintaining this historic turnout. People were so turned off by both candidates that all the polling showed two things. One was a lot less enthusiasm about the election, paying attention to the election, which suggests lower turnout.
And then the second piece, and this is where the Harris candidacy can make a difference, there’s been a consistent and wide enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats, with Republicans much more likely to turn out based on the polling than Democrats. And that has been a real challenge for Democrats. It’s not only the persuasion side of this, but the turnout side, which has been really, for the last year, there’s been a huge enthusiasm gap.
BILL KRISTOL:
I want to come back to Harris, I think that’s the more dynamic side of the campaign, and ask you in a few minutes what you would do if she called you up and said, “Okay, how do I make these things happen?” But let’s just take a minute on the Republicans and the Trump campaign because I think they’ve been under-covered in some… Obviously, you should say they’ve been happy to have the Democrats in disarray for the last three plus weeks and so forth, and they had their Convention. A, what do you think of their campaign so far just as a campaign matter, Trump’s relative self-discipline, sort of, despite maybe some things in the speech the other night, and just to get you [inaudible] a little bit, but what… You wouldn’t want to advise them, but if they called you in and somehow they drugged you and made you advise them, what should they do for the next month and for the next three months?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, first of all, they’ve run an excellent campaign. And the dirty little secret is Trump really didn’t campaign for the nomination. He hardly did any events. I bet he didn’t go to Iowa 10 times in the whole campaign or New Hampshire. And at least grading on the curve, they have done an exceptional job of imposing some discipline on him. Now he’s still Trump and he still lacks that discipline, but they run a really excellent, focused campaign and they’re, I think really loaded for bear right now getting ready to drop probably hundreds of millions of dollars on Harris and to define this race. And as we’ve seen, going back to, we did in ’96 against Dole where we defined the race at the end of ’95 and early ’96, you saw in 2004 in March when Bush spent $100 million defining Kerry as he was getting the nomination, you saw how Obama defined Romney before the nomination was wrapped up in 2012. So as we always say in politics, he who defines first defines last. So the couple things that Trump should do is, one, I think they’ve done a pretty good job of having him not talk about the 2000 election, not talking about the “Big Steal.”
BILL KRISTOL:
2020.
DOUG SOSNIK:
We want to have a forward-looking candidacy and not a retro because that retro, the grievances just turns off everyone. And the second is I think they’re going to have to really figure out how to handle how he, and they, talk about Harris. He’s really demonstrated a profound insensitivity in how he talks about women, how he talks about Blacks. So I think that’s going to be a real challenge for them, which is how do you manage to lay the case against her in a way that’s not offensive to people, which it’s unclear to me if Trump’s personally capable of that. They are fully capable as a campaign to run ads in any other kind of controlled media or controlled environment. They can drive that message.
But the question is, how’s the candidate I’m going to… And so the last thing I would just say is I think that the lessons from those elections I just discussed in the past about defining candidate early on is really important here. And remember, they’re sitting there in a very well-developed campaign. They’ve been at this for two years. They’re prepared at every aspect. They have all the money in the world now, they haven’t been spending money and you’ve got an opponent who’s trying to wrap up the nomination. It’s trying to figure out what’s the campaign structure going to be.
And it’s a tremendous, tremendous, we as a party, Democrat, we are at an enormous disadvantage to be sitting here 14 weeks before an election and we don’t know who our nominee is going to be and we as Democrats deserve it because it’s not like there was this wild card we didn’t know about that popped up in July about Biden and his health. And this was a bet that the Democrats made that it was less risky to go with Biden to take out Trump than it was to open it up. The last thing I’ll say on that, and Bill you’re old enough to remember this, if you asked me as a Democrat looking back over the sweep of history in the last half a century, if I could redo one election, what would it be? And what I would redo is an election that we won.
If Carter had lost to Ford in 1976, that would’ve been the best thing that ever could have happened to the Democratic Party. And I think that probably the worst thing that happened to Democrats recently was success in the 2022 midterms. And if we had had the kind of results in the 2022 midterms that history suggested that we would, and that most people predicted that we would, Biden would never have had a clear path to the nomination. The last thing I’ll say it is instructive in 2022… One of the reasons that people like me underestimated the Democrat’s viability was you had Democratic candidates far outseating in the battleground states, how people felt about Biden. And so you had I think 7 or 8% of the people who gave Biden a negative job approval rating who voted for the Democrats. So I think that that could give some solace to Democratic candidates in these purple states. But I do think in the Senate races, for instance in Ohio and Montana, which will probably overwhelmingly vote for Trump, it gets really hard when you’re down ticket to overcome that kind of wind to your face.
BILL KRISTOL:
I think it’s so important that you focused, and we discussed a little bit the Republicans here because all the coverage—and this is natural and I’m sure it’s even true with The Bulwark—has been of Biden and the drama there and psychodrama and political choices, and now Harris and then she’ll have the VP pick, assuming it is Harris, and she’ll lock it up. And then how quickly and VP pick and themes of her campaign, people do forget the other side has a vote while this is all going on. And as you said, it was so key to define Romney and Dole while they were getting the nomination before they had it. And even if Harris has it virtually locked up in 48 hours, it still is this three week period or so, four weeks I guess, until the convention, which is weirdly because it’s such a compressed campaign now, the equivalent of what, March of 2012 or even late 1995 in a way.
So I think your notion— I just, people haven’t focused on that, I don’t think, you know, it’s not as if Harris gets unencumbered sailing for the next three weeks to introduce herself in a nice and gentle and polite way or reintroduce herself to the American people. The Trump people will be up in a massive way to introduce her as they wish to it. Which leads to my question, what do you think they’ll focus on? She’s an incumbent, she’s part of a failed Biden administration. She was in charge of the border. She’s a lefty. I don’t know. I mean—
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think the first thing they’re going to do is try to drive the narrative about how she aided and abed Biden being president when he clearly wasn’t qualified to be based on his health. And I think they’re going to try to make her own that as the first out of the gate. The second thing I think they’re going to do is pin immigration around her neck. And then I think they’re going to want to create the best of both worlds in the sense that they’ll be able to define her through the negative parts of the Biden Harris administration, which gets not only into immigration but also into the economy. And lastly, I think they’re going to make her an unconstructive California liberal, which I think will be important for these swing voters. I do want to mention two things that you mentioned in the beginning of your question.
I do think she’ll get a bump in the polls if for no other reason that as I’ve said several times, the majority of the country doesn’t want to vote for Trump and they really want a viable alternative and she does take age off the table. The second thing though is there used to be a rule of thumb that I would say, which is you tell me what the campaign’s about in October, and I’ll tell you who’s going to win. Because in politics really the only three things that matter, who defines what the campaign’s about, which candidate, how do they define themselves and now they define their opponents.
So the campaign I worked on in the White House in ’96 going into 2000, we defined the campaign in a sense, the job description, which was which candidates prepared to take the country into the next century. That’s what we wanted the job description to be. And then we highlighted Clinton’s relative youth, and we focused on how old Bob Dole was. So that was an example of defining the race, defining your opponent and yourself in a way that’s mutually reinforced and reinforcing. I think the rule of thumb in this election is not going to be that, it’s going to be you tell me which candidate is the focus of the debate that day and I’ll tell you the candidate who’s going to lose.
So if the campaign for the last three weeks has been solely about Joe Biden, you could see that with the sound off and know that’s bad for the Democrats. So the question is going to be, I think really who’s the focus of the campaign more even than what the debate’s about. If you tell me what that is, I could watch the evening news. I mean, I use that as a proxy even though most people don’t watch the evening news anymore. But if I see what the coverage is, just seeing who’s the focus, whoever’s the focus is probably losing the election.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. It does sort of suggest now to flip back to Harris and her agency in what she does, that there’ll be such a temptation for them to reintroduce her and correct the misperceptions, some of which I think probably are actually misperceptions of her background and that she’s some big lefty from San Francisco and all this when she was a pretty tough prosecutor. But in a way, what you’re saying might be that you have to do some of that I’m sure, but maybe they should just get right to work attacking Trump. Honestly, I mean, she’s a pretty good prosecutor and she’s doesn’t have Biden, I think limitations in that respect.
And maybe the first, and this would be so unconventional, I suppose the first three big speeches shouldn’t be, “I’m Kamala Harris and I did this and I am proud of having done this with Joe Biden.” It should be, “Here’s Donald Trump and he’s responsible for January 6th and he’s terrible in the following other couple of ways, he’ll destroy the relatively peaceful world we have. And he’s an authoritarian…” I mean whatever, whichever part you want… “And he’s going to have tariffs. If you want to go to the Midwest and talk about that and do much more of that, I think it would be a little contrarian, but maybe that would make sense. I don’t know.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, they put out a really excellent ad this morning, which if you haven’t seen it, I can send it to you. But they put out an ad that essentially does both at the same time. They kind of put her positive and then contrast it with the Trump negative. So I think they can do a version of what you’re suggesting. And we so far, and I should say by the way, there are a lot of questions and doubts about Harris’s ability to run for president to pull this off based on her campaign in 2020, which she didn’t make it all the way until the first ballot was cast and most of her run as vice president was somewhat wobbly. But you have to say in the last 24 hours, I think they’ve done an excellent job of consolidating the race and how she’s handled herself. So I think for Democrats, they should feel heartened by that.
And I think you can do a truncated version of the normal sort of two-step process, but she’s got to consolidate the base first, and you can multitask here, but she’s got to pull together the party so we’re unified. We got to give people a sense that this is doable and reassure people that she’s up to the task. Now, part of that, you can do that by taking the contrast to Trump, but she’s really, to me, if I’m looking at this from the Harris standpoint, I want to wrap up as quickly as possible the notion that there’s going to be an open convention or a primary, and they’ve gone a long way in 24 hours to do that.
I want to create a really positive first impression for the country because most people really don’t know her and also for kind of lapsed Democrats, but I view the target here is to try to neutralize the inherent advantages Trump has in the short term based on the fact that she’s trying to, as you say, it’s kind of March-ish, kind of wrapping up the nomination, trying to get her or— she didn’t even have a team in place, so she’s going to inherit that team, I guess, and figure out what to do with all that.
So I think if I were in her shoes, I’d want to neutralize this period where Trump has an advantage. I’d want to really work as quickly as possible to secure the de facto nomination. I want to be out there as fast as I can to try to define her. But the tipping point for me about how to win this election is how the party leaves Chicago at the end of the convention if she can’t accelerate all these challenges that she’s stuck with having the president announce in middle of July 106 days before the election that he’s not running. If she can figure out how to get all that done and leave Chicago as sort of a normal candidate who’s been running for president for a while, which I think is doable, but damn hard, that to me would be the goal of our running the Harris operation is win is when and what’s my strategic sort of imperative and not tactical in terms of what I need to do by when.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, I mean exactly what I was going to ask you. The conventions I guess begins four weeks from today. So if you just think about it the way you do, I know on campaigns, and you did this very well in a previous conversation, the kind of periodization or something of campaigns. I mean, they have a four-week window until the convention. Let’s just assume that this week she wraps it up and President Biden gives his longer version of his why I’m not running speech on, I don’t know, Thursday night or something like that. And so probably kills most of the week, all that stuff.
So she has what, three, three plus weeks to do some work before the convention. And I guess it sounds what you’re saying that the key would be to sort of capitalize whatever little bounce you get and stabilize and pull the party together. So people go into Chicago with a united sense of unity and excitement. I mean, is that the most important thing? But also she’s going to be hammered by Trump, so does she hammer back in these three weeks or is that worth the convention or how does that work?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think there’s a race to the courthouse defining her. So I think she has to multitask.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, you can’t wait on that, right?
DOUG SOSNIK:
But they raised 50 million bucks in 24 hours, so they’ll have the money. And the last 30 days before Biden got out, the Democrats were outspending Trump six to one, six to one, right? So as we say in politics, the public, they’re not eating the dog food anymore. So she will have the financial resources, but I think you got to get out there. You can’t wait for Chicago to define her. So you’re going to have to multitask. Which you can do, and I think, as I said, the first ad I saw was it really did a nice job of defining who she is and part of defining who she is is who she’s not in bringing Trump to the conversation.
BILL KRISTOL:
I’m normally a skeptic, I think maybe of maniacal travel and presidential campaigns because they just wear the people out and it’s for nothing. They get one day of press and it dissipates, and it’s maybe plus 0.1% in one media market. Maybe it is much more important what your big themes are, obviously and so forth. I actually wonder, in this case, because of the implicit contrast with Biden, though, maybe she just needs to be on the road and just kind of super energy for the next three plus weeks because a lot of it… Well, how much of this is issues? How much of this is she has to deal with the border, she has to deal with the economy, she has to define Trump in certain ways on row and the Supreme Court and on January 6th, and how much of this is almost just persona and energy and not being 81 years old?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think most importantly, she has to look like she’s a winner. She has to look like she’s capable of being president, and she has to come off as someone who can take on the bully, Trump. And in the old days, I don’t think the travel mattered very much except at the very end of the campaign. If presidential candidate goes into, say, 72 hours before the election, really could make a difference, I don’t think that’s the case anymore. What Trump was very effective at doing in 2020, was using travel as an organizing tool so that they would primarily organize a visit around an all-day organizing activity to get their people out there, get them trained. So I think that in modern politics, I think bringing a candidate in can be important, but you need to do multiple things when you do that. And generally, the events, frankly, not that important.
What’s happened though, and you talk to any reporter who covered this election in the primaries will tell you that nothing mattered. And we go through an election in which former president running for president gets indicted, gets convicted. Polls didn’t really move. Biden had a disastrous debate. Polls didn’t move that much. As I said earlier, Trump barely campaigned. So really, all politics [inaudible]—
BILL KRISTOL:
Assassination attempts, and the polls don’t seem to have moved very much.
DOUG SOSNIK:
These are like these tectonic plates that are set in the stone for the vast majority of the country. And then you have this kind of middle group of people that are sort of agnostic in all this, because every event that happens, if you say… I’m just throwing around numbers, if you say it’s like 46% hate Trump, 46% love Trump, so for that 82, 84%, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter really what happens, they’re not changing. And then you have that handful in the middle that really are agnostic and think politics sucks, both these guys suck, they don’t want to vote and they don’t pay attention to anything.
Now, Biden suffered a dual decline in the polling with… The Democratic hard anti-Trump group was softening, and his job approval was high 30s or low 40s, and Trump was doing overwhelmingly well with those sort of agnostic people that it really aren’t pro-Trump or anti-Trump, we call them civilians. And so that goes back to Harris’s job. One is to re-energize and get that democratic floor up back to 46 or whatever it is, roughly. And I think she’s in a very good position to do that. And then the second challenge though is that those swing voters who really think it’s a pox on both of our houses, both of our parties, and that’s where I think she could have a bigger challenge and that’s where I think Trump is going to go to try to define her. And largely around the liberals, big spending, Trump, Biden, Harris, inflation and the border.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, the border strikes, they didn’t do her any favor by nominally putting her in charge of immigration on the border—not really putting her in charge as far as I can tell—of the immigration of the border, not doing anything much about the immigration at the border for three years. And now I feel, boy, I mean that ad writes itself for the Trump people, right?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Yeah, it really… There are a lot of things that puzzled me about the Biden administration. One of the things that puzzled me most was how the Biden team handled Harris. Biden was vice president for eight years, while I think that the personal relationship between Biden and Obama became much more real in the second term, I think in the first term, they weren’t very close, but the Obama staff was pretty much openly contemptuous of Biden and didn’t fake it and pretty much indicated with the press they did polling in 2011 about possibly taking Biden off the ticket. So they really showed him no respect, and he bristled at that, which I don’t blame him.
So you’d think a vice president who spent eight years under those conditions would’ve been sensitive to creating an environment where his vice president could succeed. And they did everything in the opposite direction. They didn’t give her a chance to succeed. They gave her impossible can’t win portfolios. The press from the West Wing was trashing her for several years. So it’s just a great puzzle to me why they treated her this way. And she, by the way, doesn’t really get the credit she deserves. I mean, look, when you win an election as closely as Biden did in 2020, you could describe a million different factors that made the difference. But I think she really helped him win in 2020. She was a real political asset. She got no credit for that. But it’s a great puzzle to me, which is really the party’s going to pay for it now of why they didn’t invest time and energy to help her succeed and become an asset in the administration.
BILL KRISTOL:
How much do you think she has to separate from Biden in order to be her own person? I mean, obviously there’s a line, there’s a gray zone of she’s not going to be disrespectful and she’s not going to, I assume, criticize him particularly. But I don’t know if a draft speech cane to her… If you were working with her and a draft speech came in and it had, the first speech, 27 references to the successes of the Biden Harris administration would you cut that down to 21 or 15 or two? I mean, how much should she go in the other direction, so to speak?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, this business about how do you split the difference here as a candidate running, having been part of a existing ticket, it’s tricky. And if you look at how Gore tried to manage that in 2000 with Clinton, and this was on the heels of the Lewinsky impeachment, in some ways, Gore did the worst of both worlds, which was he in a sense separated himself from Clinton in a way that he didn’t get any of the benefits of the administration. So in the sense he walked away from taking credit for a lot of… And Gore was an influential vice president, he had a real impact on our policies out of the White House. But he ended up with the worst of both worlds where he was doing the separation from Clinton, which I think a lot of people thought was disingenuous, but not getting any of the positives.
BILL KRISTOL:
And Clinton was at 58 or something percent approval. So all he needed was the Clinton approval vote, he didn’t need to get fancy the way Harris does.
DOUG SOSNIK:
So then you go back to 1988 when George H.W. Bush was essentially elected for a Reagan third term. Now Reagan’s popularity was far greater, obviously, going into that election than Biden’s is currently. But back to your question, so how would I manage that if I were Harris? I would fully embrace the Biden-Harris administration. I would not pretend like I’m walking away from it. I would embrace the best of it, and I would do it in a way that clears up any doubts about whether or not she’s trying to take a walk on Biden. And then I’d make the pivot saying I’m my own person and pointing to the future, and then I’d go on my way.
BILL KRISTOL:
I do think the change, it sounds kind of crazy, she’s the incumbent, but I feel like with Trump as both 78 years old and an ex-president, there’s a little bit of, are we going back to that? And Harris could be, I think maybe, the candidate of change, I mean somewhat paradoxically to you.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think want to… I mean, there is a lot of failures in the Biden presidency as it relates to driving a narrative. I mean, I don’t think there was a narrative and at least talking about the economy, it was the wrong narrative. We just can’t yell at people and tell them how great things are. But I do think that Harris has the possibility of framing the election about the fact that we’ve made progress, we have a lot more work to do, we’re not satisfied, but the last thing we should do as a country right now is to go backwards. Go backwards to old leaders thinking about the world in old ways and undoing the progress that we’ve made. So you have to figure out, and it’s just really hard for Democratic, for any president to, when you’re going through challenges of you’re making real progress and you want to tout that, but you have to talk about people’s lives in a way they can relate to and you can’t talk about how wonderful things are if they don’t feel that.
And Clinton, we had a real challenge of that in the first term about trying to figure out how to talk to people about making progress, but he had more work to do. Obama had a huge problem in ’11 and ’12, figuring that out. In fact, he never figured it out. The way he defined who he was was defining who he wasn’t by making Romney the issue. So I think she should embrace what the administration has done, should talk about the progress, but fully say that we’re not satisfied, we have a lot more work to do. Yes, inflation’s going down, but people are still trying to recover from it, but the last thing we can do is go backwards.
BILL KRISTOL:
I like the “go backwards.” I think that’s a good formulation. It captures two or three things at once with Trump, both his reactionary politics and views of the world, and his actually being 78 years old and actually being a former president, and she gets to be new change, forward looking and so forth. I mean, I guess this has all been very… I’m sure the Harris people are watching this intently and will learn a lot, but what do you think, just as a more tactical level, the next three, four weeks, I guess two things, VP pick, if you have any strong opinions about that. And secondly, where would you want, as a Democrat, where would you want Harris to be in the polling of the key swing states two weeks from now, three weeks from now? And then where sort of after the convention, what makes it plausible that she could pull it off? And what would tell you this is just dead in the water, it was a good effort, the switch of candidates, but nothing much has changed. I mean, how much progress is it reasonable to expect her to make in the short term?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, I think I’m repeating myself, but the first thing, job one is wrapping up the nomination. And as I said earlier, I think they’ve done a really excellent job, it’s not even 24 hours. Well, depending on when this goes. But anyway, so they did an excellent job of making her the de facto nominee, is the first thing. And the second thing is, I think you can’t wait a day to win the race on the narrative. She’s got to define who she is on her terms and can’t wait. I think the VP thing matters more as a signal as usual who she is and what the… It’s so interesting, by the way. So I’ve never seen a person shrink in stature than Vance since he’s been nominated to be Trump’s VP. I mean, just watching them in the convention hall, he just looked like he was shrinking in stature. Trump barely… It’s the first time in history I’ve ever seen a president pick a running mate and not put their hands in the air together as a ticket. So I think—
BILL KRISTOL:
That’s a good point. I wasn’t watching after Trump’s speech. I did a podcast, it was enough already, it was midnight, but was Vance even up… I guess he and Mrs. Vance must’ve been up there on the stage with Trump?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, yeah, but I mean, he sat next to him throughout the convention [inaudible] —
BILL KRISTOL:
But at the end, when they go and the balloons and all that? Every photo—
DOUG SOSNIK:
[inaudible]
BILL KRISTOL:
Every photo I’ve seen is Trump, or sometimes Trump and Mrs. Trump, but never the Vances, right?
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, you had the Trump family up there around them, and you had Vance and his wife hanging on the side. They were hanging on the side with Ivanka and Kushner who are kind of interlopers, they had to show up because it would’ve been a bigger deal if they hadn’t. But they basically cut and ran on this guy three years ago. So if you watched them on the stage and they were isolated sort of on the side just standing there, and the Vances were kind of off on the side, it was really the Trump family.
So it’s really been remarkable watching Vance shrink in stature. And by the way, just a dirty little secret. I remember Mitch McConnell told all who could hear in the 2022 cycle how angry he was that he had to spend 35 million in Ohio to prop up Vance as a candidate, couldn’t believe the amount of money he had to spend to get that guy across the finish line, and he ran well behind the ticket.
Anyway, going back to Harris though. So, I think the VP choice is a way to send a signal about her narrative. And I do think that there’ll be more of a traditional president/vice presidential ticket in terms of the visual together. And I think Mark Kelly would probably be the strongest person potentially helping put Arizona in play, but I think it’s more important on the narrative, and I think there’s a nice counterbalance there, or Shapiro, I think in Pennsylvania would be another good choice. But back to sort of—
BILL KRISTOL:
And would you make that pick on the earlier side so people could get used to sequence with them before the convention? Or would you do the normal just the weekend before the convention? [inaudible]
DOUG SOSNIK:
The campaigns that are strategic usually when, the campaigns that are tactical usually loose. So if you’re just taking a list of stuff I need to do and check off the box, that’s how you lose. So to me, as I said earlier, you need to be strategic here. So to me, being strategic, you have to think about where you want to be when you pull out of Chicago towards the general and then work your way backwards and then make decisions in that sequence. So as I’ve said several times now, job one is the plumbing of solidifying the nomination and wrapping that up and creating the sense of inevitability, which based on the pace of the last 24 hours, they may have gotten that done 24 hours from now. But I think it’s going to be really important for people to feel ownership in this endeavor.
And what does that mean? That means that if I were running her operation, and they’ve done a terrific job of this in the last 24 hours, I mean, there just aren’t enough phone calls for her to make. She’s got to just sit on the phone and it’s got to call state chairs and bundlers, it’s an unbelievable amount of work that has to be done in a compressed period of time. So I’d be far more interested in solidifying the race, getting the money fixed, which is kind of taking care of itself, touching these donors, touching the political class. And then I would off the sequencing is, you got to figure out the nomination process, if they’re going to do the ballot, they’re going to do it in Chicago. I’d be spending a lot of time right now focusing on what that convention’s going to look like. And one of the most important issues is going to be how do you treat and deal with Biden at the convention?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, talk about that for a minute. That’s interesting, yeah.
DOUG SOSNIK:
And in a four-night convention, I would… So back in the past, if you do a four-night convention, the dog night is Tuesday night, that’s where you kind of take out all the stuff you got to do. That’s where if you got to have Jimmy Carter, in the old days, you can’t not invite him. So first night’s your first impression, you got to have a good night. It’s like the beginning of a movie or something, you don’t want to lose people. And then the Wednesday night’s, the VP and the Thursday night’s, the crescendo where you’re really moving towards the general and feeling a lot of enthusiasm. It’s all forward-looking. So I would want to embrace Biden if I were running the convention. The people like Biden, they feel enormous amount of gratitude of what he’s done for the country beating Trump. I don’t think you want to have any ambiguity or questions about where does she stand relative to Biden. So I would want to focus on that convention and how to leave Chicago with that momentum and I would probably focus on Biden on Tuesday night to make that sort of the ‘salute to Biden’ night. And where I’d want to leave Chicago with is that she’s in the margin of error… I mean, well within the margin of error in the three Midwestern states where maybe she’s up one in one place and down two, whatever. But it’s a toss-up essentially of those places. And it would be nice to be able to pull some of these Sun Belt states into a much closer race. And if you were to pick a Kelly, then you have to look at whether you can move some numbers in Arizona. And one of the advantages to such a divided country with these tectonic plates is they’re there and they’re almost immovable objects.
So I think she does have the opportunity to narrow this race in a way that it’s truly a toss-up, even though the deck is in a sense stacked against Harris and the Democrats if for no other reason because of the way Electoral College votes. But I think if you could leave Chicago with those three states fully in play, unequivocally in play, and make these Sun Belt states a little more competitive, I think that’ll sort of reset the race in a way that’s much more winnable. And I think that there are a lot of Democrats, particularly in the Sun Belt states that have been drifting away from Biden and the Democrats that Harris can get back.
BILL KRISTOL:
Interesting. And this is also the tactical level, but not unimportant I suppose since the debate. Weirdly, we had the first early pre-convention debate, general election debate in history, I guess, and out to be quite consequential though not the way the Biden people proposed and expected. What do you think about debate? Should Harris be pro-debates and insisting on debates and challenging Trump to more of them and will Trump do them?
DOUG SOSNIK:
One of the joys of working in high-profile positions in politics is you have to make a series of close calls. It’s 60/40, 40/60. You don’t know. It’s somewhere you do best you can. And then if it’s say it’s a 60/40 call, it means four out of 10 times you made the wrong call. And after you do a 60/40 call and you make the wrong call, everyone buries you and calls you a moron. So that’s what’s happened with the Biden people about the calling for an early debate. It’s like, “How can you do that? What idiots?” Look at whatever. It was a 60/40, 40/60 call. And I think they felt like they were on a trajectory to lose the election and they needed to take the risk and the bet that they could change the trajectory by having an early debate. And it was a close call, I think.
Probably whether it’s a good idea or bad idea, obviously it proved to be the beginning of the end. So in the case of the fall campaign with Harris, I think she will want a debate. I think she’ll need a debate. Part of the job description is she’s up to the job, but the other part of it is can she take on and manage Trump? I think the flip side is though, I suspect that Trump will sit there and say, ” I’m not going to do a debate unless I need to.” And I think he will set out terms for the debate. Where I think the general assumption, regardless of the outcome, was that the Democrats set the terms for the first debate. When it was, who was the host, no audience, turn off the mics, all the things the Democrats wanted. And I think that if Trump agrees to a debate with Harris in the fall, it’ll be because he thinks he needs it. But I think in the interim, he’s going to be the one that’s going to demand what the terms are or he says he’s not going to debate.
BILL KRISTOL:
I assume he won’t agree to anything until after he sees where things stand after the Democratic Convention.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Right. And why would he?
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, [inaudible]. So this next month actually, I think this has been very interesting. I’ll let you go, but because it does call… This next month is very, very important. And in a way people are viewing it as some people, understandably in a way as a kind of warm up to the real campaign because we just got Harris and now she needs a week to get organized. And is Jen O’Malley-Dillon still going to be the campaign manager and how do they do all the mechanics of the transfer? And then of course the VP speculation starts the moment she wraps it up tomorrow or Wednesday, whatever. And then Biden’s role, if he speaks Thursday.
And I think people haven’t focused as much as you have. And this is one reason this is so interesting, I think on… This is really crucial. I mean this next four weeks, how she comes out of Chicago and you can’t just snap your fingers and make Chicago success if four weeks in the run-up to Chicago aren’t reasonably successful. So these four and a half weeks are really important in laying the groundwork for honestly whether it’s really a competitive election or not.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well look, first of all, success always begets more success in politics. So the more successful she is at consolidating the party, demonstrating her capacity to be the nominee, the more successful she is on the run-up to the convention, the more likely the convention is to be a success. So that’s just a rule of thumb. But I think what you said earlier is really the way to look at this, which is unlike any election we’ve ever had, but there are equivalents. And this equivalent is that period where a challenger is wrapping up the nomination and making the pivot to the general election. And what I mentioned earlier, I’ll say it again because I think that’s the period we’re in now, but even it’s even more important now than it was even in these preceding campaigns is because of how compressed and odd this thing is.
But I’ll just talk in general for a second. If you look at any sporting event, there are always one or two moments in the event, the game. There’s always one or two moments that determine the outcome. And sometimes when you’re watching it in real time, you say, “Okay, that was the tipping point. That’s the turning point. That’s going to decide the game.” And sometimes it’s after and you look back at the game and say, “Well, these are the two most important points.” Well, elections have that as well. And if you go back to the last three incumbent presidents, and in a sense Trump is incumbent now, right? In the sense that he’s organized, he’s been at this for a while, Harris just showed up. If you look at the… As I mentioned again, Clinton’s re-election in ’96 was really in that consequential period where Dole was trying to wrap up the nomination and stand up a campaign. And that’s where we flatten him.
And as I said earlier, in 2004 in March is when Bush beat Kerry. And the same thing happened in 2012 in the spring when Obama basically took out and defined Romney. And those were the pivotal moments in those campaigns, period. And so I think this next three week period is analogous to that, but even more true because of how odd and compressed the time is for Harris to be able to come out of this as the nominee and be able to stand up a campaign and to win the race of defining who she is, at the same time she’s building the plane while she’s flying it. So I think this period is critical.
BILL KRISTOL:
It’s so interesting and we should probably get together after the Democratic Convention again, and then we can decide looking backwards what’s happened and what will happen in that final sprint, which will also be very interesting.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Bill, if you look back at… If you take the longer view for a moment and if Trump were to win, let’s say Trump wins for a minute. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. Let’s say Trump wins. If you said to me, “Okay, Doug, well you always say there are these defining moments in a campaign. When was the defining moment in this election?” I would say the defining moment was in the summer of 2021. That was the defining moment in the four-year Biden presidency. So Trump four years as president, never for a day had a job approval of over 50%, never for a day. And Biden had job approval from the mid to high fifties from January 20th taking office until the beginning of July 2021. But there was a confluence of events that occurred in the summer of 2021 that really sort of define the Biden presidency, politically. Substantively, I think he’s going to be in great shape 40 years from now when people look back at what he accomplished, but we’re talking about the politics of getting reelected.
Starting with the 4th of July where essentially Biden declared victory over COVID and told the country we’d be back to normal Labor Day. August, you had the withdrawal of Afghanistan. September was the first month that we had over 6% inflation, probably the first month in like 40 years. And then at the end of September, early October was the beginning of the supply chain problems, which created really one of the main reasons for the inflation. So then if you look back at by say November, early November of 2021, Biden went underwater in those 90 days and essentially never recovered. And if you take the swath of his entire presidency with a step back and look at his job approval and his ratings, you would see that that 90-day period was by far the most critical period and set the arc for his four years as president politically.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. And Dobbs and these other huge decisions just didn’t fundamentally… They helped at the state level in some key states in 2022, no question, but didn’t fundamentally change the judgment of Biden, I guess.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, but that gets back to the fact that Harris has the potential to do things politically that Biden couldn’t do. Certainly, as I mentioned earlier, was demonstrated in the 2022 midterms when Democrats statewide candidates, both Senate and governor outperformed Republicans and outperformed how people felt about Biden across all the battleground states. That’s how Democrats were able to maintain control of the Senate and they swept all these state houses. So the majority country doesn’t support Trump as president. The majority of the country doesn’t agree with the policy positions of the Republican Party.
So there’s ample proof of, despite Biden’s unpopularity, that Democrats excelled in the ballot box. And so the question is whether Harris is able to not be shackled by the Biden-Harris presidency in the way they drove Biden’s numbers down and be her own person. So she’s got to thread that needle, I think of not for a moment appearing to distance herself from Biden in any shape or form, but at the same point after, I think really establishing that, making the pivot, pointing to the future, and talking about she’s her own person. And then she probably needs to carve out a few places where she’s manifestly different than Biden, and that’s okay. And she owes Biden. And Biden is well-liked, beloved by Democrats. And she shouldn’t for a moment end up with the worst of both worlds, where she walks from them and then she saddled with them. So I think that she should embrace them and then make the pivot.
BILL KRISTOL:
Let’s see if she can pull that off. She has a pretty busy and daunting four weeks ahead, but very exciting four weeks for America [inaudible].
DOUG SOSNIK:
Well, as I said earlier, it’s not easy. And that was certainly something that Gore was unsuccessful in doing.
BILL KRISTOL:
Yeah. Doug Sosnik, thank you for taking the time to join me today. Very interesting and informative conversation and we’ll see what happens in this crucial next month really up to and through the Democratic Convention, and then maybe reconvene. Doug, thanks a lot.
DOUG SOSNIK:
Great. Thank you, Bill.
BILL KRISTOL:
And thank you all for joining us on Conversations.
