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And here's the best part. Your insurance may cover 100% of the cost of your medication. So go to TryLifeMD.com to have your eligibility checked right now. Get started today at TryLifeMD.com. That's T-R-Y-L-I-F-E-M-D.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group Podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we're walking you through the vice presidential debate and how it did or didn't affect this race.
So just to level set, swing voters have generally liked Tim Walz better than J.D. Vance in the focus groups we've done the last couple months. But now I'm interested in how the debate may be changing how people think about these VP candidates. My guest today is one of the great drafters of presidential campaign history in recent decades, John Heilman, co-author of the books Game Change and Double Down, and current host of the Puck News podcast Impolitic with John Heilman. John, thanks for being here. Hi.
Hi, Sarah Longwell. Always so good to see you. Last time I saw you was at Manny's. In real life. Last time I saw you was yesterday on Deadline White House. But the last time I saw you face-to-face was in one of the great culinary institutions of the city with big shoulders, which was very, very fun. Especially with all the corned beef around. They seemed like you were in your element. That's true. I do like a corned beef sandwich. You do well when you're surrounded by pastrami and corned beef. Let's put it that way. Oh.
After my own heart. Yeah. All right. Now, the most consequential VP pick you've probably ever covered from your day was Sarah Palin. Right. And she was widely thought to be a drag on McCain's ticket because, as you said a few weeks ago, the pick is a window into sort of how voters see the judgment and the values, the character of the nominee doing the selecting. So through that lens, how have the Vance and Walsh pick panned out so far as far as you're concerned?
My stone cold contention is that when it comes to actually moving votes, you know, in a demonstrable way, I'm with the political scientists on this. And I rarely like to say that I'm with the academics on anything. But if you look at the history here, you know, you can't really point to many cases, if any cases in the history of presidential politics where there's been a vice president of Canada who's like been like, yep, that guy or lady in a couple of cases.
uh, move votes. So I generally think that the beep stakes is a overblown thing. People go crazy and we spend a lot of time speculating who it'll be. And then the person gets on the, on the ticket and they have one job and it's a really interesting window, right? Because it's the only consequential decision that a nominee will make that will carry over into their presidency if they win, which is who their vice president is going to be. The vice president, it's a high stakes job in the sense that you're first in line of succession and
But unless the president is in some way rendered incapable of performing the functions of the office or dies in office, you are constitutionally meaningless in terms of what you actually do. And politically speaking, you know, you're stuck in a closet basically for four years. Why? Why do people not know much about Kamala Harris? Because like every other vice president ever.
she gets stuck in a closet. She does mostly ceremonial things and they don't get much exposure and they get shitty jobs to do that the president doesn't want to do, et cetera, et cetera. So what does it mean in the context of a campaign? It means that it's important in one respect, which is does the nominee choose someone who clears the bar of
ready to be president from day one. If the voters look at that person and say, this is an important choice in that sense, it's picking a potential successor, someone who could be president. Have they picked someone who voters who the press, which is kind of the filter for this, are they perceived to be, and are they in fact ready to be president from day one? If they clear that bar, 98% of the job has been done because people say, well, the nominee made a responsible choice.
This is why the Palin pick ends up being consequential in some way, because John McCain, who at that point would have been one of the oldest presidents in history, he was relatively young compared to Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but who had had three cancer scares prior to that. The actual aerial tables were not on John McCain's side in terms of making it through a full term, if you looked at his health history and in fact, what ended up happening. So it's kind of like
He picked the former mayor of Wasilla. And then, of course, she demonstrated she knew nothing about the world, nothing about how government worked, nothing about anything. And after the initial burst of excitement around her, because she gave an incredible performance at the convention in Minneapolis, and she was a superstar, a rock star on the road, wildly outdrawing McCain at his rallies.
For about two weeks, she was a superstar. And then she started to have to answer questions from people like Charlie Gibson and particularly Katie Couric. And people realized that she knew nothing, not even her own fault, I would say. She was just not ready for this job. She was someone who had been plucked out of obscurity. She'd been an Alaska governor for less than two years. She was not plausible as a commander-in-chief. And I think that in the end
I'm not that sure that it cost John McCain any votes. It didn't cost him the election. Barack Obama was going to be president almost certainly at that point. But that's an example of how you can fuck up a vice presidential pick. Dan Quayle is another example. But again, did it cost George Herbert Walker Bush the election? It did not. So again, that's a long preamble to the question, which is,
I think that the J.D. Vance pick has been a drag on the Trump effort. Do I think it will cost him the election or gain him the election? No. But I think from the standpoint of, it's a pick that was made clearly not for the reasons that you would normally make a vice presidential pick, which is to say someone who's ready to be president from day one and someone who is designed to reinforce and buttress what you believe in, aimed in particular at persuadable swing voters,
Someone who carries your message forward in a convincing way and appeals to people who are going to determine the election. What has J.D. Vance done? He really did one thing and he did it a long time ago, which was he made a comment about childless ladies with cats.
That was so culturally resonant that it totally escaped the realm of politics and became something that people who pay no attention to politics. Like I guarantee you, if you drove across America and stopped at any gas station and said the words, JD Vance, every single person you met would know the one thing about him, which is that he said this demeaning thing about childless cat ladies. And.
That's a rare thing in our world. Like, you know, most people are not us. They don't pay attention to the presidential race until like the last two weeks before election day. And everyone knows that is who J.D. Vance is. Everyone heard that comment. The cultural resonance of it was kind of incredible. And I think, you know, he has been nothing but a problem for Donald Trump in that sense. Negative associations, negative connotations widen the gender gap. A bad pick made it a moment when Donald Trump thought he was going to cruise to reelection and was thinking about
other than winning this election. He was thinking about his legacy and what would happen to MAGA and what would make Don Jr. and Eric happy and blah, blah, blah. So I think that that has been a pick that I think if Donald Trump had to do it over again, he would go back and make a different choice. I think Tim Walz has been
Strangely, I would say, given how extraordinary his performance was when he launched a campaign to make himself someone who basically no one knew, including most people in the Democratic political class who couldn't have picked him out of a lineup, he decided to campaign for vice president. He went all over media, attacked the Republican ticket, coined the weird thing,
vaulted himself into the national conversation, got himself on the Democratic ticket, gave two widely seen performances when he was first announced and then in the convention on the big stage under the hottest of Klieg lights with everybody paying attention. Very few people make that transition from security to that big stage and do it successfully. And he crushed it in both of those environments. And then basically we haven't heard from him since.
until this vice presidential debate. I think he's done no harm particularly to Harris. And I think he's done not any particular good. Those two speeches made him plausible and got him over the hump of people looked at him and said, okay, fine.
Tick the box, right? He's not had a very vigorous public schedule. He's not done, other than the first interview she did with CBS, he's not done major media interviews. He's not done a lot of campaign events. He was spending a lot of time getting ready for this debate. So he's been kind of someone who hasn't really moved the needle. And the question going forward, of course, is, you know, will Kamala Harris and a lot of other people regret the choice because-
she ends up losing pennsylvania by some narrow margin and people wonder should he should have picked josh shapiro who might have helped her more there that's the outstanding question going forward but i think you know if you measure it from the selection to today jd van's net negative for trump
Tim Wall's neutral for her. Not hurt her, not helped her particularly. We can talk about this debate, which may be that some of the calculations here, we'll see what your focus groups have to say. Maybe this debate, he will have helped her in some way by focusing on the January 6th question. I think that's to play for. But right now, that's where I think the state of play is. Sorry, that's a long answer, but that sets the table for you in terms of my view of the situation.
Not only is a great table setting, but it is a great transition because let's jump in to our groups today. So the groups that we talked to, we talked to two groups immediately the morning after. And so we're going to start with how the Trump to Biden voters talked about the debate the day after. Our audience knows this group. We call them flippers. They voted for Trump in 16, then moved to Biden in 20. Some of these people have been backsliding back towards Trump.
This is the coalition that Harris has to hold together that elected Joe Biden very narrowly in 2020. So let's listen to what these flippers had to say about J.D. Vance. I thought J.D. Vance spoke well, but he's an attorney, so I would expect him to speak well and he had a great education. I got the sense he has three kids, but probably doesn't know their names or ages.
That's kind of the sense I got from him. He doesn't really see like a man of the people as much as he's trying to like rely on his poor upbringing to be like, see, I can relate. I grew up with attorneys. So like, I kind of know how they are. Like seeing that Vance, you know, voted for Hillary and then has said so many negative things about Trump. And then he's like, I kind of flipped so quickly. Like granted, like changing your mind is the best way to know you still have one. But on the other hand, it's like, you were so anti-Trump, like,
There's an ulterior motive there. And, you know, there's so many like attorney jokes about them being slimy and all that stuff. So I'm just always kind of like, I don't trust him as far as I could throw him. And he's not very charismatic. And he is just weird. He is weird.
I thought he did a really good job of coming off as a normal guy. I don't think he's a normal guy at all. I think that Tim Walls is the normal guy. So I think J.D. Vance did a great job. I think he probably does better in sort of like an attorney sort of setting, like where he's speaking to a lot of people. Whereas Tim Walls, I think, probably performs better with small groups or like one on one and out on the campaign trail.
Margaret Brennan and Nora are two of my favorite people to watch on CBS. I think that they're excellent journalists, excellent anchors. And I really love seeing two women up there. I thought that was very empowering. I do think Judy Vance kind of tried to step on them a little bit and maybe a way that you wouldn't have done some male moderators. Do I think that they could have done better? Yes, I do. I think they could have done better. And I, of course, I would have loved to see some live fact-checking.
JD Vance kind of impressed me. I noticed how he started to distance himself from the abortion stance that he had taken before. That kind of caught me off guard because I know that he has supported a nationwide abortion ban in the past, and so it just kind of was weird to see him say that he never has.
I would say Vance is probably the only person that would get me to vote for Trump, honestly. I feel like he came off very eloquent. I don't necessarily agree with his viewpoints and I don't necessarily trust what's coming out of his mouth because we know that Trump has a lot of falsehoods and his party tends to go off of that.
So my concern is, yes, you sound great. You're saying all the right things. But are you truly believable? Can I trust what you're saying? And the fact of the matter is you're also running with somebody who it's his way or the highway. So are you going to be able to stand up to him if he's coming and he's trying to put a policy in place that doesn't work for the American people? Like, I feel like he's more in touch with what the American families need as opposed to Trump is. But
But he still has some way to go. I would say that Vance definitely surprised me. And I liked that they had mutual respect for each other. And I felt like this was an actual debate. This was more of a presidential debate than the presidential debate. I think the entire debate was really about could Vance get up on stage and look like a reasonable, normal person for like 90 minutes or whatever. And by that measure, I think he won because he did come off as relatively reasonable and normal person.
And I think that's going to help Trump because now people can say, well, Trump is a little crazy, but he's got this Vance guy who's more rational, more level-headed and so forth. But I kind of view that as a negative, and that kind of makes Vance more dangerous.
I didn't know a lot about Vance. So I did learn a few things of where he stood. And I did like when they talked about the abortion issue. There was a few things about him I didn't know where he was. You always know with Trump because he's such a loud mouth of where he stands and what he believes in. But this is the first time I really got to hear Vance. And I liked what I heard, a few things. But like I said, overall, it didn't change my opinion of the outcome of my vote.
All right. So I want to point out that Vance's refusal to say Trump lost in 2020 was a big needle mover for folks who already didn't like the Trump-Vance ticket. But it wasn't one of sort of the overarching organic themes. And I have a couple of things I want to ask you, but
Now that I do so many focus groups, my antenna is up super high for the difference between my reaction to any kind of political event and the voters reaction. I try and channel the voters, but I swear to God, I'll never be able to overcome like the political obsessive inside of me. Right. Who watched that debate and thought, oh, my God, Vance is crushing this.
And Walls looks really unsteady, really nervous. And then I listened to the voters and they were like, this guy's slimy. It sounds like a lawyer. Like they thought he was good, too. Like they gave him the points, but they sort of thought that it was an act to sort of overcompensate for the fact that he's actually a weirdo with a bunch of weirdo opinions and didn't move the needle that much. Does that surprise you?
No, just because I think that I've seen this so many times in the past where us, you know, we professional political class members who are either engaged directly in politics or in covering it, we bring a different set of eyes to these things. And I actually think they're both valid perspectives in the sense that
Tim Walz was nervous. And I think there are some moments like, you know, for example, his answer on the Tiananmen Square thing, whether a voter cares about that. I'm not sure a voter cares about that much at all. The political class understands that while it's processing this. But you looked at that answer and said, OK.
That was not a crisp answer. I've never been in a vice presidential debate or a presidential debate, but I can tell you that's not what his debate prep team wanted him to say. He did not answer that in the right way. We're right about that. I think it's also the case that most voters see that and go, I don't give a fuck. Like when he got to- It's like, what are you guys talking about? Why are you talking about Tandem in school?
In Hong Kong, did he get there in the spring of 1989 or did he get there in August of 1989? That feels like very gotcha to a lot of voters. And if you've done this for a long time, you've talked to a lot of voters and you have an antenna for that. I think in real time, the strategies of these two guys was very clear. They both were not behaving like themselves. And the truth is Vance had a lot more cleanup work to do for the reasons we just described. Basically, most voters think of him as...
a guy who said a bunch of dumb shit over the course of his career. The childless cat lady thing was the one that really broke through. But anyone who's a little bit a modest but not obsessive consumer of political news has seen a bunch of things that he said that strike them as, to use Tim Walz's phrase, weird, out of step with modern American life and the way that a lot of people live and think now. And so he had a lot of work to do. So he's trying to be Mr. Genial and trying to be not-
the J.D. Vance we've seen on the campaign trail or that we've seen in the clips from the past. Tim Walz, you know, as I said before, Sarah, he made his way into the conversation to be on the ticket by very effectively kicking the shit out of Republicans. I mean, his attacks on J.D. Vance in his first television appearances on like Morning Joe, where he first started calling them weird and saying, you know, J.D. Vance, I grew up with a lot of hillbillies too, and none of them went to Yale. I mean, he was not slashing in the sense he was unfair, but he was
coming out in the normal vice presidential mode of being someone who was proving that he could take the wood to Republicans. That was how he impressed himself on a lot of people. He didn't do any of that the other night. They were both trying to
create the simulacrum of a civil, agreeable, policy-driven debate. Obviously, they both thought that that was what voters wanted to hear. And I think they're right. I think that is what a lot of voters want. People were very happy to see, and this came up in both groups, people were like, that felt like a more real presidential debate. I liked that they were civil to each other. It was refreshing. Yes. I had that same thought as one of your focus group participants who said, this felt more like a kind of old-fashioned presidential debate than when we see Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, which is
part of the Trump show. Now, there's an interesting question about going forward about what reminding people of normal politics, whether that actually works to Donald Trump's advantage or disadvantage, but they both were clearly trying to do that. And I had a feeling halfway through the debate that
If you're scoring this through the eyes of a political operative or a journalist, that Bantz was winning on points. And that started to shift partway through the debate when Walls found his footing a little bit more and the issues started to be guns, abortion, and then January 6th, that you could see the kind of the momentum and the debate shift. But throughout, I kept thinking, I bet when we get to the end of this, there are going to be a lot of people who are kind of like,
I actually enjoyed that debate. It was, you know, all politicians are a little phony. We all recognize that. Most voters have that attitude, which is that all these guys are a little bit full of shit and they're all putting on a different public face than they really are. And whatever they were doing up there, boy, what a blessed relief it was from watching what we saw within Trump and Harris, where Trump is a lunatic and
And even though Harris, I think, dominated that debate and was really good in it, most Americans do not want politics of perpetual warfare. And certainly not with a median voter, the kind of voters you talk to, those people are not into that. That's not a vision of what they want for governance. So I sort of got this feeling halfway through. I'm like, I bet we're going to see a lot of post-debate
reaction that's going to be contrary to this halfway through the debate thing boy jd vance is kicking tim wallace's ass which was kind of the pundit class's reaction but how sophisticated
Even voters who are not hyper-absorbed in the political dialogue are about kind of decoding what's going on, listening to those voters that you just played, which is that they're all kind of decoding J.D. Vance in a pretty sophisticated way. Not like, yeah, he's a fraud, he's a phony. They're kind of like, well, it's good that he's kind of trying to be a little bit moderate himself here in this setting. But they see what he's doing. They do. They're not taken in by it. And they're not like, well, this is the real J.D. Vance.
The woman who said he probably didn't know the ages or names of his children, I thought was really, she was like the sharpest eyed observer on the panel. But they all had that kind of like, yeah.
I do want to say, I mean, people who listen to this show, we talk about J.D. Vance. We've played a lot of sound of voters on J.D. Vance over the last however many months since he's been picked. The voters hate him. I mean, like they have hated him from the jump. And your point about the cultural nature, I mean, there are signs now, of course, in my neighborhood, you know, just outside of D.C., it's sort of meaningless. But like there's just signs that are cats. Yeah.
because everybody knows what it means. And the voters, it was the first thing that I saw break through when you were listening to voters and you were like, you know, what do you think about him? That was the thing they knew about him. They knew two things about J.D. Vance. He flip-flopped on Donald Trump and he said the thing about childless cat ladies. And like, that's been cemented
It's like the public opinion soft at first and then it hardens and you're not moving it. And so he can have this good debate performance, but it doesn't seem to have really changed people's perceptions other than they think he's talented at the debate.
I want to move on to the second group that we did and how they talked about Vance, because this is a group of actually of people who voted for Trump in 2020. So they're not flippers. They voted for Trump in the last election, but are like, oh, I don't want to vote for this guy again. So we call them down on Trumpers. So let's listen to how they talked about Vance.
I can't stand J.D. Vance. So that scares me because as Trump is aging, you have to be thinking like, yes, he looks good for his age. But at 82, if Vance had a step in there, I would not want him leading the country. And I guess finally, I would add the abortion issue is a deal breaker for me. And I'm very middle of the road with it. I do believe in some limitations.
But more than anything, I think I'm very representative of Gen X with mind your own business. I really feel like the government does not belong in any health care decisions. They can barely run the country. So this is a slippery slope, no matter how you feel about abortion. If they're deciding this today, what are they deciding tomorrow? Stay out of our bedrooms. I think he will say whatever will get him a vote. I
I think he didn't like Trump, but he wasn't going to not take this opportunity to become a major player in national politics. I think he will go whichever way the wind blows. And I don't like that he made up lies about Haitian people. And I think that that was horrible that those children have to go to school and worry about bomb threats and they are legally here. His initial response to abortion kind of blew my mind. It was not...
no, never, never. It was like pretty understanding, especially for this modern Republican party. And I'm just hoping that we can see more of that, like where it's more about personal responsibility. Like you mentioned, like, why would I tell a Catholic hospital to provide abortion? My husband's a teacher, like kindergartners having to do active shooter drills is messed up. And so the fact that like
Trump was in office, Biden's in office, like we cannot figure this out, really bothers me. And so I know Walz has guns, but his party's gonna just drag that away. So yeah, last night I was, I literally said, I was like, I think Vance is a better spokesperson for Trump than Trump is. And I also personally am just really bothered by
The fact that like these big media corporations used to get a ton of money. I haven't watched Norah O'Donnell on CBS in forever, you know, and they come across as really haughty and like, oh, we're going to fact check. And I think they were harder on Vance than Walls too. And I would have loved to see a bit more pushback on him because like when he had that China answer, it was ugly from a PR standpoint. I feel like if you fact checked
J.D. Vance had more flaws than...
I feel like the campaign of the Trump campaign, anyway, would say whatever they have to say in hopes that the American people bite. And I feel like J.D. Vance, to me, he just gives me master manipulator. And he's a very good speaker. And my neighbors across the street are Haitian. And growing up in South Florida, especially growing up in school, we love to say Haitians eat cats. Right.
And it had racist undertones because I'm African-American, you are Haitian, you shouldn't be in my country. You eat cats. And Haitians hated to hear that. So it does give racist undertones. We said it because we were young and stupid and we knew it hurt. It would hurt them to hear that. So for me,
The Republicans to be talking about Haitians eat cats, to me, it just comes off very racist. And it's not too far fetched from how I feel already about Donald Trump. I think I read an article where he planted the story about the Haitian cats. And then you see the after effects, right? Like you see the next day people go and actually kill cats and cook them and then plant the stories and say, oh, look, it's actually happening. He was telling you the truth. Some people are stupid enough to believe that. But, oh, to me, that's kind of scary.
When you remember COVID and you see people running, freaking out over toilet paper, that kind of lets me know that we can't really handle a crisis anymore.
So speaking of cats, the other thing that had broken through with these, and again, these are Trump voters in 2020, but like they're pretty annoyed with Trump. And in the end of the day, I will say seven out of nine in that group were going to go for Harris. These are all Trump voters. And so like the one woman who was being pretty complimentary, she was one of the people who was still going to go for Trump. But like that Haitian cat,
Even the guy who also used to make that racist joke himself was like, but it's not cool for the Republicans to be doing this. This is one of the things that I'll just say from a Vance perspective. One of the things that he does that is, I think, a drag for Trump is that so much of Trump's negatives are baked in. They know he's racist. They know he's sexist. They just sort of
I don't know. It's like cooked. And then Vance comes along and he re-raises the salience of many of these things and like puts him on a new face and gives people a new reason to care about them, which is, I think, one of the ways in which he is hurting Donald Trump. I mean, it's not so much in this group, but here are a lot of people talking about how he's just a Trump mini-me, does everything Trump wants. But people have that impression of him. And even these people who were Trump voters, you know, didn't like J.D. Vance.
Yeah. And it's funny just thinking about it, you know, because of the fact that the Springfield, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets thing is a Trump thing, right? You think of it as a Trump thing because of course he said it in the debate and that was what set off the couple of weeks. The truth is, as we know, if not for JD Vance injecting that into the cultural conversation, Trump would never have seized on it. So when the history of this is all written,
the childless cat ladies and the eating the cats of Springfield are both enormously culturally resonant things that are spawned by him. One directly by him, it was years ago, the childless cat ladies comments. But then the Springfield thing is, is a JD Vance confection for this campaign. And Sarah, the thing you're talking about gets to a very, to me, and this is why your work has been so interesting. It raises this question of,
kind of median voter theory. Like out there, there's a median voter in every election. And that by median, we mean like they're the person who's right in the middle of the electorate. You know, they're not on the far left. They're not on the far right. They're right squarely down the center. And if you think back to 2016,
Having spent, you know, tons of time covering that election, talking to tons of voters and then seeing the results, you can't help but come away with the big following statement, which was that in 2016, the median voter in America and the cluster of voters around the median were basically Trump curious. They were kind of like Trump is crazy and I don't like that he's racist, but Washington is a swamp.
The establishment hasn't delivered. My family's economic prospects and its future prospects have not improved. Hillary Clinton does not signal change. Donald Trump does signal change. I recognize that there are risks with that, but I'm willing to take those risks and see what happens because I'm
30 years of establishment politicians have done shit for me. And so there are things I don't like about Trump. And there's things that I'm worried about about Trump. But this time, I'm going to vote for change rather than voting for more of the same. And obviously, in 2020, the median voter was a Joe Biden voter who looked at what the way Trump had mismanaged COVID in particular, but also the tweets, the tone and tenor, the chaos, et cetera, and was like, I've had enough of this. I'm moving on, right? And the big question for 2024 is...
because all swing motors exist somewhere near the median, is where they are now. And to me, your thing about Vance is...
by reminding people of all the stuff that drove the median voter cluster away from Trump in 2020, by re-raising all of that, which is the racism, the division, the anger, and the chaos, anything that kind of re-raises those things, the features of Trump that were tolerable in 2016, were intolerable in 2020, anything that re-raises those things makes you more like what
willing to do the same thing with Harris that they did in 2016 with Trump, which is there's some things I don't like about her. There's some things I'm uncertain about, but I'm willing to bet on change going forwards better than going backwards. I'm willing to take that risk. If that is the dynamic, that is the dynamic that wins Kamala Harris the election. Whether that will be the case or not, I don't know, but it feels like that's the dynamic that we're kind of zeroing in on in this last four weeks of the election. And J.D. Vance does nothing good for Donald Trump in that regard.
Yeah. So first of all, I think that is an excellent distillation. And I do think this is why right now in the last four weeks, the thing that they are going to try to cement for the American people, right, both of them in some ways are the incumbents. Both of them in some ways represent change, right? Donald Trump is always represents an outsider to people. He always represents more of a chaos agent in which there's still interest in like out
I'll tell you, on foreign policy, for example. For sure. A lot of times people are like, Trump is chaos in foreign policy, and that should be scary. But voters are kind of like,
I don't know, maybe the fact that he's chaotic helps and people are scared of him and they don't know what he's going to do. And so that keeps things at bay. Right. You know, I do think both of them are going to try to say the other one is the incumbent and they're the ones that represent change. And it's going to come down to which one do voters believe really represents that change, this median voter. Right. And I think that that argument that Trump and Vance both make about foreign policy, which is
Yeah, sure. Trump's chaotic. You don't know what he's going to do, et cetera, et cetera. But they correctly say, you know, we didn't start any new wars in Trump's four years. That's a powerful argument to a lot of people. People underestimate, I think, wildly underestimate the extent to which
Again, the middle of America is sick of the forever wars and wants there not to be war. And the extent that Trump plays that anti-war card all the time appeals to those people by saying he says it because he was strong. Forget about the argument, whether it makes any sense. The reality that, hey, these four years were four years of international stability. We did not have foreign conflicts.
And he hangs the messiness of the Afghanistan withdrawal around Biden's neck. I think that's grossly underestimated how salient that is to a lot of people. It does not come through. We talk about so many other things, but it's something you hear everywhere. People are like, man, get us out of these forever wars and keep us out of these forever wars. And Trump has managed to make that an asset for himself with his performance in office and the way he talks about the issue.
You know, this is such a good point. And we talk about this when we do foreign policy episodes, like we talk to voters about Ukraine or something. But I don't bring it up enough just in general in terms of what it is that is driving Trump's continued, I don't know about popularity, but people's willingness to kind of play ball with the Trump thing. It comes down to, I think, two big issues. Now, one is actually people still think of Trump as a businessman because of the stupid television show. And they think he was good at it because he's rich.
And so on the economy, he always gets just like some extra points there. But the two things that drive people to say like they're willing to overlook so many other things is immigration, which Democrats do not spend enough time thinking about. There's a reason John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is a big close the borders guy.
And it is because he hears that not just from Republicans, but from Democrats all the time. I hear it from swing voters all the time. They want immigrants to come here. They're like, they just have to come here legally because we can't just not know who's in the country. Right. Right.
That's why Donald Trump is evil in the way he talks about and dehumanizing. Yes. But like people just are like, OK, but somebody needs to do something about this. And this is one of the tough things that Kamala Harris has to overcome is because like J.D. Vance took that swing on border czar and it went unchecked in the debate. And that's the kind of thing where people are like, OK, she didn't do anything about the border. But the other one is like if you ask me what changed the Republican Party the most, I'm
Like why does half the Republican Party believe that America should have nothing to do with Ukraine? It is because Afghanistan and Iraq went on for such a long time that people just developed a real exhaustion. And a lot of these voters are from communities where people were in these wars. They were overseas. And so they know a lot more people who did it and who came home saying –
I have no idea what we're doing there. I don't know what this is about. And that has had a big, meaningful, lasting change on the electorate, for sure. Look, just to add to that, people forget that part of Barack Obama's power as a Democratic candidate was that Hillary Clinton was seen as the more bellicose of the two and the more interventionist of the two. And Barack Obama would say, I'm not saying that we should have no more wars. I'm saying we should have no more dumb wars. That was an incredibly powerful thing, not just with the Democratic primary electorate, but with the general electorate. That's a stance that...
90% of Americans would embrace if you boil it down to that. And I will say about Biden is that if you took the age thing out, you still would have had a really hard hand to play. Because if you look at countries, not just America, and you look comparatively over the last hundred years, the things that lose elections for incumbents are
is inflation and voters who feel like we don't have control of your own borders. You see it in Europe. You see it in South America. These are like these core things that people look to the government for. It's like if the prices are out of control and the borders are out of control, people will turn on the incumbent, whether they're on the right-leaning party or left-leaning party, it doesn't matter. It gets to these core things of if our country can't control its borders, we're not really a country. And that doesn't mean that, to your point, there are lots of people on the left
especially lots of people of color on the left, whose attitude is, I am happy to see immigrants come here through an orderly, lawful process. I love the melting pot, but what I don't want is a border where when I look at the border, it seems like we do not have our shit together and are doing this in an orderly way. And because so many, particularly Latino voters,
can remember when their parents or grandparents came and what they did, which was they played by the rules. They came in through what was seen as an orderly system. They look back and they go, my grandfather came here and he played by the rules. He did all the things. And now people are coming across the border in an uncontrolled way. It infuriates people across the ideological spectrum and across all races. And for Biden, part of the challenge was going to be the border had seemed like it was out of control. Inflation had been too high.
And there had been one foreign policy thing that anybody thought about, which was a botched exit from Afghanistan, which reminded people of the forever wars. It wasn't his war. He wasn't there when the Afghanistan war started, but it was still a scene as a botched kind of foreign policy thing. I mean, look, Biden's age was the thing that made him
fundamentally, I think, unelectable in this race. But those things would have been really large challenges. And it's another reason, one of the great gifts that Harris has is that she's not going to have to bear the burden of the Afghanistan thing because no one thinks the vice president's in charge of American foreign policy. And she's done a decent job, I think, on the economy.
But this immigration thing still stands out there for the reasons that we said. And I totally agree with you. It's a thing where if you want to have a liberal immigration policy, if you're a Democrat who wants to have a progressive immigration policy, the bedrock of that has to be we have control of the border. And then you can go on and talk about all kinds of the dreamers and all kinds of things about how you want to have a relatively progressive and liberal immigration system.
But if you don't have control of the border and people don't believe you have control of the border, you're going to have such a backlash to that that you'll never get to the progressive policy goal of letting a lot of people through legally to keep America the melting pot that it's been for so long.
Okay. I have a million more things I want to say about this because you're hitting on, this is like very crystallizing in terms of the themes we hear across the board for voters that I think going into this election are critical, but we've got to get to what these voters thought about Tim Walls. This is what happens with you and me, Sarah. We end up having interesting tangents, but they're still tangents. So let's get back to Timbo here.
So one of the things that, you know, was interesting or that I looked at is interesting is they did the CBS, YouGov snap poll right after the debate. And I'm always like, OK, about the snap polls. But it's a little interesting. And 42 percent thought Vance won the debate and 41 percent thought Walls won. And large majorities, so 74 percent for Walls and 65 percent for Vance, said each candidate seemed more reasonable than extreme. So both these candidates kind of they boosted their favorably.
Right.
They didn't see Walls as a natural debater on stage, but it didn't stop them from liking him more. And so let's listen to how the flippers, the Trump to Biden voters talked about him. I think Walls started off very nervous and shaky, especially when they just went right to him. But by the end of it, I think he got his footing and they both dodged a lot of the questions.
I definitely thought Vance was more confident than Waltz, but I mean, like, although it was more substantive, like with any of these debates, like there's not a clear answer ever. So like, you can't really judge in my opinion, like who won based on just confidence alone. Like you want the actual answers. And I didn't feel like I got that. Tim Walls, I guess we don't really know much of him. So I wasn't really sure what to expect, but I feel like he could have done a better job. He could have maybe prepared a little bit more just to kind of
maybe not be so awkward, I guess. On substance, I would say the Tim one, but on performance, I would say the JD Vance one. Waltz, I would say came up as very like, he's like the grandfather that you need, you know, the one that's giving you the advice. He's very down to earth. And I mean, it didn't really change my viewpoint on him. I like him. I think he will be a great backup supporter for Harris.
I very much appreciated the fact that they were civil to each other and respectful. That was my number one takeaway of the whole thing. Their debate and both of their performances kind of made me wish that they were running for president instead of vice president.
When Vance was speaking, Walsh was furiously writing these answers. And in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, he's going to come back with some big facts in response to Vance. And he never did. He just kept writing. So I was kind of like, what was that all about? He was great, though. I mean, I thought he was very level-headed. I thought they both did very well. I thought Vance...
had a little more like backup with some of the policies and stuff like that. But I thought Tim Walz 100% did a good job, for sure. All right. And let's just keep moving. Let's go into what those down on Trump 2020 Trump voters said about Walz. I honestly was expecting Walz to come across a bit more...
I don't know, like he could have leaned into the eccentric professor type thing. And he kind of came across like he's just really intense and like hawkish, like with his looks in the camera. And, you know, he had some fumbles on his talking points, which were interesting. I thought he handled the Tiananmen Square question horribly. I mean, he showed us he was willing to lie about something that we all know is, I don't know, it was just a really weird answer to me.
And I felt more like he was playing a role than Vance was.
I thought Waltz did pretty well. Surprisingly, there was times where he was a little flustered, but his answers seemed a little more in-depth than J.D. Vance's. Vance's answers seemed to be more like a campaign slogan or a lot of the talk points you hear on Fox and these other networks. And it seemed like he lacked a true understanding of the issues, too. When he was trying to challenge Waltz on different things, Waltz would go back and say, no, well, this is how it works with the law.
And I thought, you know, J.D. Vance probably was just surface level understanding what was going on and really just trying to pander votes with his speech. I thought Waltz won as well.
Besides the other debate, I thought there was a lot more respect between the two candidates in this debate. You know, shook hands. And I really liked the comment when Vance came out and said, I'm sorry your child had to witness the shooting at the community center. I thought that was a deep sign of respect. They both dance around the subject on if they support Israel, would they support Israel during the crisis there? Yeah.
And I really like Waltz. He said he served in the National Guard, which reminded me of a former President Bush who also served in the National Guard. So anyway, I enjoyed it very much. But I thought Waltz was more detailed in his answers. So I thought he won.
It seemed as though Vance was on the rebuttal more than he was being asked questions, which I think gave us more time to get to know Walls. I didn't expect to like Walls. And I feel like they gave him the time to show us that he knows what's going on. I didn't feel like they were completely fair to Vance.
You know, you're in sort of an ancestrally Republican group when a Democratic candidate gets favorably compared to George Bush. Right. It's just these are kind of like Republicans from back in the day who don't like the new Republican Party. And it's a funny thing listening to the swing voters vote.
So the biggest thing that's run through the Wall's comments is about how he's sort of grandfatherly and people like the civility that he initiated. My buddy and yours, Tim Miller, we were talking about this on TNL the other day. But again, going to how we are clearly not your median voter is we wanted Walls not to be so nice to J.D. Vance. We're like, this guy said he wouldn't certify an election. This guy has completely changed his personality to do this. He's a sociopath. Like,
Rip his head off, Tim Walz. And the voters are like, love this guy. Love this nice guy being nice to Cheney Vance.
Yes, totally. To me, the biggest takeaway was they both were pursuing this strategy, which was appeal to that median voter. From what we've seen in the numbers and listening to your groups, they both kind of got that done. Does that really move the needle for either one of their nominees? Again, I go back to my no, I don't think it really does. And I don't think it's meaningful. But I'm not sure the other strategy would have done that either. To me, the thing with Walls and Tim Miller and I were texting about this in real time, it was kind of like,
There are lots of opportunities to drive a point without necessarily attacking. But when, for example, when J.D. Vance was talking about abortion, I mean, the reality is the guy has historically been in favor of banning abortion in a demonstrable way in races he's run and things that he said. And Tim Walz had an opportunity to kind of call that out and just sort of say, hold on.
You have a long history here of being clearly on the record for banning abortion and doing a little bit more of what he did on the January 6th answer, because that was just a moment where he directly turned and said, OK, wait, hold on. You're talking about censorship stuff. Forget about all that. Did he win the 2020 election or not? And when J.D. Vance answered that question by saying, I want to talk about the future, Tim, to me, the reason that was an effective as a debate move is that that I
I want to talk about the future, Tim, just codes for your voters, all of them as politicians speak bullshit. Everybody hears that and goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I want to talk about the future here. I asked Mike Murphy on Hack Shester. I said, Mike, ask me how many times I've been arrested for drug possession, the various penitentiaries I've done time in. And he's like, how many times you've been arrested for drug possession, how many penitentiaries? I'm like, I want to talk about the future, Mike.
And I think there were a lot of opportunities that Walls had to do that. Again, do I think that would have dramatically moved the needle? Would it have changed the perception of Donald Trump? Would it have moved any votes? I don't think so. And so it's not a missed opportunity in the larger electoral context. But I stand by, as I said before, both of these interpretations are fine interpretations. The median voter look at these guys and say,
what a relief to have two people who seem to be trying to have a civil conversation and that we all correctly, I think, say, boy, you missed some opportunities there to highlight some of the bullshit that the person across from you was peddling here. And I think he did miss those opportunities, but I do think it was part of a strategy to not care about us and care about the people who sit in your focus groups. Yeah. And I'll just add one sort of
thing that I that I wish I'd thought about during the debate, but I only thought about it after. And you just kind of touched on it. So I want to hammer it, which is if there's one thing that I hear voters say they hate, that they don't like the reason they like Donald Trump, people say the same words over and over again. Donald Trump wasn't a regular politician.
I knew DeSantis was cooked when the voters started saying, I don't know, he seems like a regular politician. He talks like a regular politician. Probably, 100%. In that debate, J.D. Vance looked like a regular politician and Tim Walz looked like a regular guy. And so the weird thing you try to do when you're a candidate, I've come to learn, and I'm going to, when I run for something, I'm just going to remember this. I'm going to hold this particular thing. You have to both be somebody who demonstrates that
That they can clear the presidential bar by being like, no, I know a lot about stuff that you don't know about. Right. Also, you like me and want to have a beer with me because I don't talk down to you or seem like a jackass or seem like I'm so erudite professorial that we can't hang. To even make it a finer point on that, it basically has to be you have to somehow do this very difficult thing, which is I'm one of you.
I also have skills and aptitudes and abilities and knowledge that make me not one of you. Voters want to both feel that you are one of them and also that you can do a job that they know they couldn't do. It's the ultimate difficult balancing act for successful candidates is to come out, manage to be both of those things at the same time. I am both greater than you. And by greater, I mean more knowledge, more competencies, whatever. But also at the human level,
I'm like someone you would, I mean, have a beer with has become like a cliche, but someone who people go, yeah, I see myself in some way in that guy. I get whether it's empathy or they care about me in some way, but there's someone who is essentially human in the way that I'm human and they're not like just a fraud. That's like, I'm part of the key is the authenticity thing is about they see politicians as just frauds. And if you can get around that, you're a lower part of the weight to solving part of that riddle.
Especially because, you know, one of the things listening to so many voters has taught me is just how low trust people are. They're so low trust now in institutions and media and everything else that when the one thing that they do trust is people like them. Right. And so you have to sort of be like them to earn their trust. And this is where I think Tim Walls even being nervous. Like, yes, we look at that as professionals and we're like, bro, you're too nervous. They look at that and they're like, I'd be freaking nervous, too. Right. Yeah.
Exactly. To be up there and they totally get it. Exactly right. And they're forgiving and decent in that way. That's like one of the things about voters. Get on my buddy JBL when he's so down on them because I oftentimes see just how well they do respond to humanity. And I think they responded to that in Walls.
And that forgiving, that tolerance, it actually, you know, one of the other parts that was clearly part of the wall strategy was talk about Minnesota a lot. The number of times he pivoted back to Minnesota off of a national issue. And again, I think, you know, you see someone do that a bunch of times in the debate, like saying you like J.D. Vance a lot or you agree with J.D. Vance a lot. You know, it's part of their strategy. It reminds people he's new to national politics. This is a Minnesota guy. This is not John Kerry. This is not some lifelong politician. He's new to this. Right. And he's new to this.
gets them to be much more forgiving about things like nervousness and all that's kind of like endearing in some weird way. You looked, Mike Murphy said at one point that the optics of the thing was that it looked like J.D. Vance was wearing eyeliner. It looked like Tim Walz has seen a ghost. But those were like, they're basically, they're resting faces.
And I was like, that's sort of true. And Tim Walls looked like he'd seen a ghost through a lot of it. But, you know, I think a lot of voters look at that and go, I'd be looking like that too if I were up there on national television sitting in front of Nora O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan. I enjoy that there are such diverse opinions about Nora and Margaret too in the groups. So one woman's like, I've always really respected them. It was great to see those women up there. This other one's like, I hate those women.
Terrible. Well, you can tell the people who voted for Trump, they hate the mainstream media. Yes. Like your flippers, a lot of times those are people actually who get their news from like the major broadcast networks.
And so there are two different groups that end up ultimately, I think, getting into the same coalition for different reasons. OK, we've got to get close to wrapping here. So I just want to end with one last set because we asked the voters about Kamala Harris. Because one of the things that was interesting, right, is that her debate, she did go hard at Trump. Right. She was prosecutorial. And it was very clear that a lot of swing voters voted.
liked that about her. Like they saw her as a plausible president. She cleared their presidential bar because she could go toe to toe with Trump. But even then, these down on Trump voters, they still had some reservations. Let's listen. I think she has a lot of great soundbites, a lot of great phrases with no substance. So that's a concern. For three years, we heard the border was secure.
And in the election year, all of a sudden, hey, we've got a problem and we need to fix it. There's been a lot of discussion. And frankly, this is my opinion of politicians. They say what they think they need to say to win the election. I don't think this is a Republican issue, a Democrat issue, a Harris issue or Trump issue. This is a politician issue. And I've just got a real problem with that.
What makes me shy away from Kamala Harris is, I don't know, it's just something about that laugh that makes me nervous. I feel like if she was in the war room, I wouldn't know how many giggles we would get. Or if she's meeting with other dignitaries and people from, leaders from different countries, like,
I don't know. She just makes me nervous. She just comes off as a nervous person. I feel like it's a nervous lab. That's the only thing. Her policies, a lot of her policies, I do agree with more than the Republicans. I didn't want to like her. Like I said, I was an independent, but I almost always voted for Democrats more because I felt like the Republicans that I saw in my lifetime were...
too into people's moral decisions. And I didn't want to see that. I strongly supported Obama, but in the end, I was really disappointed with his policy. So moving from that,
I went with Trump twice because if we took his personality out of the mix, his policy made sense to me. I trusted him more on international relations, as crazy as that sounds, because, I mean, let's face it, like the guy or not, he got little Kim to sit down with him. He got Putin to sit down with him in a crisis. What will Kamala do? And I don't know.
what she'll do. I kind of would like to take the mix of some of her domestic policies and his international policies, because he's creating what I feel is a civil war in this country. All right. So I want to note two of these three people said ultimately they were going to vote for Harris. But we may look back on this as telling if she does come up short. And I guess you said something at the top that I really agree with, which is
Walls made this sort of great first impression and then has really gone quiet. And I think the big criticism of her is actually like she has these big moments and they're good, right? She had a great debate. But like she's not out there getting the reps. And anybody who's doing focus groups or polling will tell you that when it comes to like voters who are undecided, which I know most people are like, this isn't a real thing, whatever. They are people who are trying to get there on her.
but they have these reservations. So I hear it all the time. And so from you, what does she need to do to close strong in the last 30 days with these voters who like, they don't love Trump, but they're like, not sure that they can trust her yet.
Well, I'd like to first note that one of your focus group participants, I believe, was referring to Kim Jong-un as Lil' Kim, which I think is like, well, there's actually someone named Lil' Kim out there. And it's just hilarious that Donald Trump sat down with Putin and Lil' Kim, who, you know, I'm not sure who's a more formidable adversary in the room. Lil' Kim would be happy to hear that. So I think, Sarah, if you could do a collective word cloud or thought bubble above the heads of
the political class in America, the Democratic political class, let's put it that way. And probably the Republican one too, if you ask them about Harris. Right now, there is no question in my mind that that thought bubble would say about her, she's not doing enough. That's like the collective view right now. And that is people think to your point, which is forget about what the polls are going to tell us from now until election day, that this race is super, super, super close.
We obsess over Nate Silver's projection or what FiveThirtyEight says or what the RealClearPolitics average is. The thing that everybody has always said from the moment she got elevated in this extraordinary way in July, less than a month before her party convention, she became the nominee. Everybody said the race to define Kamala Harris will take place between now and the convention or immediately after the convention, between the convention, through the debate.
The reality is, to go back to a point we made about vice presidents before, is that they're largely unknown. And she has done some things to make herself better known. But if you listen to your voters and other people, she's not there yet. And she's still largely unknown. People still have these questions about her.
her and what she believes and what about these inconsistencies between where she was in 2019 and 2024? Why did she change her mind in these various things? Just who is she, right? And your point about the reps. I mean, you can do some of that work at a big speech at the convention. You can do some of that work at the debate. And I think the unspoken thing about that debate goes back to in so many ways, they have run a campaign that's been guided by
Hillary Clinton's campaign and not doing those things, not making it of a gender crusade, not making it about identity, not making it those things. But the reality is the reason why she hammered Trump in that debate is that it is the case that the bar for a woman to be commander in chief is still higher. Whether we talk about it or not, we've never had one before. And there are still perceptions, misogynist, gendered perceptions out there in the world that a woman intrinsically is not as tough as the dudes. And so for her- You heard it from that guy, right? Will she be giggling in the war?
Yes, exactly. So for her, the display of dominance of the battlefield over Trump was crucial to helping her get over the commander in chief threshold. But there are still these voters that you're pointing to who need to just know more about her. And the only solution to that in the absence of another of other big stage moments, if she doesn't get another debate with Trump, she's got to do more events. She's got to be on television more. She's got to do untraditional media more. She she's got to campaign like crazy.
her life depends on it. The future of the country depends on it. That is not the vibe you've been getting. It does. It does. And that's not the vibe that is coming off. Political insiders would say this, but I think if you just took the temperature of the country, you're not seeing her out there doing what presidential candidates do, five, six events a day, being ubiquitous, being the wallpaper of
on America where, you know, this is what Obama did. This is what Trump did. This is what Bush did. This is what Clinton did. They were everywhere all the time in the homestretch of the campaign. She has not been so far. The people who are running her campaign are not dumb. And I expect that we are going to see more of her going forward. But right now, as I said, that is the palpable gap right now between the stakes of the election and the pure ubiquity and energy that you would expect to see from her and her being inescapable.
That's what you would expect in an election with these kind of stakes. It's not what you've seen in this period after the debate. And I think to get over the hump with some of the voters you're talking about, in addition to connecting to that other big group of
that I mentioned yesterday when we were on Deadline White House, which is this vast group of not undecided voters, but irregular voters. These people out there where their decision is not between Trump and Harris, but between staying on the couch and voting at all. Those people have the same concerns. Is this woman someone I'm getting ready to get off the couch for? For both those sets of voters, you just got to be in their face more and making them more familiar and more a
through familiarity, more comfortable with, okay, I'm willing to roll the dice on this woman. John Heilman, thank you for being in our faces. Appreciate you joining us. And thanks to all of you for listening to the Focus Group podcast. We are going to be back next week, but remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, subscribe to The Bulwark on YouTube, and become a Bulwark Plus member at thebulwark.com. We will see you next week. Bye, John. Bye. Bye.