Loading summary
Transcript22 lines
- [00:00]
Josh Dossey
Trump got a polling presentation. In fact, I have a copy of it right here. It says how a national abortion policy will cost Trump the election. Right. He gets his presentation, they talk on the plane about it, and you know what happens? He soon takes a video that says he's leaving it up to the states a few days later. Right. So would he have gotten to that place himself? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe he would have. But it certainly came from data and from a presentation his team gave him.
- [00:32]
Tyler Pager
Foreign.
- [00:38]
Galen Drook
Hello and welcome to the GD Politics podcast. I'm Galen Drook. Happy anniversary to the week that turned the 2024 election upside down. A year ago this week began with Joe Biden announcing that he was withdrawing from the 2024 election. The decision came about three weeks after his mess of a debate performance that set off a revolt within the Democratic Party. And by this time Last year, on July 23, Kamala Harris had secured endorsements from enough delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination herself. We all know how the story ended, and looking at the data after the fact, the result doesn't seem particularly surprising. No incumbent had ever won reelection with an approval rating as bad as Biden's. The number of Americans saying that the country was headed in the wrong direction was around all time highs. And on the two biggest issues Americans were concerned about inflation and immigration. Americans preferred Donald Trump. That gives us some sense of why the election shook out the way that it did. But those numbers don't explain everything. For example, why did Joe Biden decide to run for reelection in the first place? Or frankly, why did Donald Trump decide to run for a rare non consecutive term himself? And how did Joe Biden and Kamala Harris decide how to address Americans biggest concerns? And then why the lack of daylight once Harris took the reins? Today, with the help of reporters Josh Dossey and Tyler Pager, we're going to go behind the scenes of the 2024 campaign. Josh is a political investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal and Tyler is a White House correspondent for the New York Times. Their new book is called Twitter 2024 How Trump Retook the White House and Democrats Lost America. Josh and Tyler, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:31]
Tyler Pager
Thanks so much for having us.
- [02:32]
Josh Dossey
Thanks for having us.
- [02:33]
Galen Drook
It's great to have you two. So just to set the stage a little bit, Tyler, you mostly focused on covering the Biden Harris campaign. And Josh, you mostly focused on the Trump campaign. So this means that, Tyler, we're going to start with you and we're going to start with a pretty blunt question. Why Did Joe Biden run for reelection in 2024?
- [02:55]
Tyler Pager
Yeah, I mean, to take a really step back, when Joe Biden was a teenager and he first met the parents of his first wife, there was a conversation, and this is recounted in the book, where they sort of asked him what he wanted to do, and he said, be president. And he had to clarify of the United States. So I think it's important context here to note that Joe Biden, for his entire life has wanted to serve as President of the United States. And so when he won in 2020, he was obviously thrilled and felt vind all the naysayers that say he could never do it, shouldn't have run again. He had this chip on his shoulder that he's had for much of his life, you know, bragging that he was the poorest member of the Senate and, you know, not Ivy League educated like many of his colleagues. So I think it's important to understand the Biden ego as part of this conversation. And then when you look at the 2022 midterms, I think there's another crucial turning point here. The polling punditry had it that Democrats, following conventional wisdom, but also polling and data, were likely to perform quite poorly. The first midterm of a president, the incumbent's party often does not do well. And so all of the sort of energy was behind Republicans. And when that didn't happen, when Democrats expanded their majority in the Senate and only narrowly lost their majority in the House, Biden once again felt vindicated based on his governing style. And that all of the punditry and the. The doubters were wrong. And so that is sort of the mentality that Biden is in as he's thinking about running for reelection. But one other thing I'll just add is that there was never a conversation about whether he should or should not run. Biden basically just thought he was doing a good job, like being president, and so decided he was going to run until he said he wasn't going to. And as we know, that didn't happen until just a few months before the election.
- [04:41]
Galen Drook
Wait, so was there pressure on him that he could perceive from anyone in his orbit to potentially not run for reelection? Or was everyone around him just like, yeah, let's do this.
- [04:55]
Tyler Pager
In terms of the people closest to him, some of them had private reservations, but nobody ever said to him, don't run, don't do it again? The closest they did was they would discuss some of the challenges that he would face, mostly on the family front, between his brother and his son. Hunter. But, yeah, there was no one that was really inside the White House or inside the Biden political operation saying, hey, we don't think this is a great idea. In fact, there were most people saying, you should do this again, including those types like Mike Donlan, Steve Ruschetti, those, those close aides to the president.
- [05:30]
Galen Drook
All right, we're going to talk a little bit more about this, but, Josh, get in here. Was Trump set on running for a second term the minute he left the White House in January of 2021, or was there a longer process there?
- [05:45]
Josh Dossey
No, he was not set on running for a second term. In fact, when he left the White House in 2021, he was quite, he was sullen and screaming at AIDS. He was not a happy version of himself. And he starts meeting with Susie Wiles, who became his campaign manager now as his chief White House chief of staff early in 2021, and began talking about putting together something of an office or an operation. But it's not clear that it's going to be a presidential campaign. It could be a pac, a sort of political group basically to preserve his options. And if you talk to folks in 2021 and 2020 from a lot of people who said they had been with him, had golfed with him, had had dinner with him, and he was sort of actively toying with the idea of whether he should run or not, I think it really crystallized his decision to run. And we write about this a lot in the book, you know, the Raid of Mar a Lago, where the FBI comes and takes the documents. He's under investigation in New York and some of his closest advisors and associates are getting subpoenaed. He's under investigation for his role in January 6th. He ends up getting charged there and in Georgia. Right. And he sort of realizes at some point that one of getting out of all of this is to be president again.
- [07:02]
Galen Drook
So it's easy to say that after the fact, right? Be like, oh, you know, everyone was after me and I, you know, it was like, win and claim my freedom or lose and be persecuted by activist judges and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But like, from the outside looking in, it seemed like this guy's running from three to four years before the actual election. Like, sort of when he says, oh, it wasn't until I was charged. Do you believe him or do you think there was something going on there from the minute he left?
- [07:33]
Josh Dossey
I think he was considering running and he was publicly preserving his options because he wanted to have power in the Republican Party. He wanted to have leverage over endorsements. He wanted to have control of the party. I don't think he had fully decided to run again really until sometime in 2022, before the midterms and long before he was charged. But the reporting of 2021 would indicate he was in a pretty sullen, dark, sad place. And this was from some of the accounts we were hearing at the time that we would put in the Washington Post. This was not someone he was, you know, ebullient and ready to run again for president. He was someone who was pretty stung. He felt like most of his friends had abandoned him. A lot of Republicans had abandoned him in that moment. I think it's now easy, Galen, in this sort of minute to see him as a sort of triumphant Republican who came back and won. And, you know, everyone's with him and he's whipping senators into voting for his bill even though they don't want to. And he's scaring these House members and he's attacking people and he has all this power. But in 2021, it really wasn't so. When he announced in 2022 his campaign for the presidency, he did it at Mar a Lago. He could not get one single senator to show up. There was like two of several fringe House members. No one from leadership. Sean Hannity was supposed to interview him that night. Sean Hannity canceled the interview. All the networks cut away. The New York Post the next day said, Florida man makes announcement and put it on a 17. Right. I mean, there was not the enthusiasm that there is now for him in that moment.
- [09:10]
Galen Drook
Yeah, no, I think it is quite a walk down memory lane. I want to jump to perhaps the next most important moment in the campaign. We're going to go out of order a little bit here. But the Biden campaign's decision to pitch doing the first presidential debate at the end of June as opposed to sometime in September when they're usually done. Tyler, whose idea was that and why did they pitch that, the Biden camp, to the Trump people?
- [09:39]
Tyler Pager
Yeah, so we actually have the original memo that Joe Biden's senior advisors wrote to the President outlining their case for, for an early debate. And it captures the recommendation, which is that they say, you know, it's really important that the Americans see this as a two man race between Biden or Trump and that a lot of early voting starts in the fall and the debates would be too late to influence some of the people that were already going to be casting their ballots before them. I think, you know, Privately, what they recognized was that Biden's numbers were not going up and Trump's numbers were not going down. So they felt they needed something to reset the narrative. Narrative. The Biden argument throughout the entire campaign was that once it's a two man race, once Americans have a clear choice between Biden and Trump, then Biden will start to be doing better. The polling will reflect that. But Americans weren't grappling with that reality. In part, Americans weren't grappling with that reality, Galen, as you know well, because they kept saying they did not want Joe Biden to run for president. The majority of Democrats polled throughout his presidency kept saying, we want somebody else. So that's part of the, the data there that the Biden people were ignoring. But they felt they really needed nominal event to shake up the race. And also privately, another thing they, they said was, you know, if Biden did really bad at the debate, it would give him enough time to recover for the next one and it wouldn't be so close to election Day.
- [11:03]
Galen Drook
You mentioned all of this data, and I mentioned plenty of it in the intro. Was Biden fully insulated from that bad news? Who was looking at this data in the White House, if anyone?
- [11:17]
Tyler Pager
So, great question about polling. One of the interesting findings that I learned as I was reporting the book, when Biden launched his campaign through him dropping out, he never once met officially with his campaign pollsters. So the campaign hired three main pollsters, Molly Murphy, Jeff Guerin, Jeff Pollack, who have worked for Democratic candidates for years. And they were sort of running the polling, doing the polling, but it all sort of funneled up through Mike Donlon. Mike Donlon, longtime Biden aide and strategist, has worked with him for decades. And he had a less conventional view of polling. He didn't love pollsters, to put it simply. And so Biden was not someone that was, you know, really ingesting a lot of polling and diving into the cross tabs and understanding that. And also, the Biden campaign itself did way less polling than any conventional presidential campaign. So much so that at a meeting after the debate, when the three pollsters were briefing Biden's senior advisors, they had to pull data from Real Clear Politics and also other clients that they were doing state races for because they didn't have enough of their own data because the campaign wasn't paying for as much polling as a traditional presidential campaign would.
- [12:31]
Galen Drook
Interesting. So does this mean that the Biden White House throughout its tenure was unfamiliar with the fact that plenty of its policies or the way that it was handling the issues that Americans cared about were unpopular. Because, I mean, right, the Biden campaign made such an argument for, like, democracy, right. And representing the wishes of the people. And polls aren't elections, but polls can tell you what people care about or what people hope for or want from their elected officials. But if they're not paying attention at all, then how. How do they argue that they're being responsive to the public?
- [13:07]
Tyler Pager
It's a great question. And I think they tried to spin it a different way. They felt Americans just didn't know what Biden was doing and that they needed to spend more time and energy and money to message to the American people. I mean, there's a scene in the book where Biden is barking at his advisors just before leaving for Thanksgiving in Nantucket in the end of 2023, where he's complaining, why is my approval so low? And Mike Donilon says, you know, we just gotta keep working on it as the American people learn what you're doing and it'll go up. And so it's just this belief that they had utmost confidence that what they were doing was right. And it just was that Americans weren't. The Americans didn't know about all the policies he had passed or that he had put in place. But one of the interesting things that, you know, we found through the reporting process is that the DNC was finding that Americans didn't give Biden credit for some of his policies because of his age, basically thinking that he was too old, and so he couldn't get credit. So age is obviously a through line through all of this, but particularly as it relates to a question about his popularity and his policies, that's another way that he was affected by this perception that he was too old to be doing the job.
- [14:22]
Galen Drook
Josh, I want to get back to the Trump campaign in a second, but I think this is an important point, so I want to belabor this just a little bit. What we just heard, there was DNC spin. And look, there is a case to be made that Biden was dealt a difficult hand. Every incumbent government in an advanced democracy in the world in 2024 lost vote share. That's a. That's a historic achievement worldwide. And the post pandemic inflation, the migrant crisis, stubborn Covid cases, those are things that may have been at least partially outside of Biden's control. But there's also a story to be told about the decisions that the administration made in the face of all of those challenges. An American rescue plan that was too large and inflationary in its own right, a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, a lack of response to the migrant crisis, and then inflation once it became clear it was not transitory. Previous books have detailed Biden's meaningful decline, and some have even suggested he wasn't in full control of his own White House. Who was making these decisions that ultimately helped make Joe Biden so unpopular with the American people?
- [15:33]
Tyler Pager
I think it's a really complicated question because it depends on what issue we're talking about.
- [15:37]
Galen Drook
So all right, that's the end of today's preview. Head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber and hear the full episode. We continued the conversation for another half hour and talked about the role that polling played in Trump's campaign, why there was such limited daylight between Harris and Biden, and where both parties go from here. Like I said, head over to GDPolitics.com to become a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes, can join in the paid subscriber chat, and most importantly, keep this podcast going. When you become a subscriber, you can connect your account to wherever you listen to podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. There's a link in the show notes explaining how. Again, head over to GDPolitics.com and see you soon.