An Election Autopsy With Steve Schmidt
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Well, somebody did win last night. Donald Trump won the election in a way that even his own aides couldn't have predicted earlier in the day. Likely a full sweep of not only the Sun Belt, including North Carolina, but also the United States.

likely the blue wall. I mean, earlier in the night before it was projected, hours before his team was celebrating, telling me that they thought they were going to win 321 electoral college votes. And it looks like he may end up winning Michigan State that literally earlier in the day on Election Day, they thought they had lost. It's a clean sweep, a sign that the American people are not buying what the Democrats are offering.

or at least they were not buying Kamala Harris, and they wanted change. And change in this election was not in the form of the sitting vice president under a very unpopular incumbent president, Joe Biden. It was in the form of Donald Trump going back to the last four years under his presidency.

So much to digest. I wish I had hours, by the way, with you. Unfortunately, I am in Los Angeles after the Amazon election night special with Brian Williams. It's over and I've got to hop on a plane. And so I've only got 25 minutes with the brilliant Steve Schmidt. He's a former campaign manager under John McCain. He is a master in Republican politics, but he's taken a tilt

He is an anti-Trump Republican, one of the founders of the Lincoln Project. He has some of the sharpest, most brilliant insights on all of this, like big picture, 30,000 feet view of what this all means. And obviously, the circular firing squad in the Democratic Party is happening already. Last night, I was getting tweets from progressives saying, she shouldn't have been campaigning with Liz Cheney or billionaires. She should have been out there asking me to retweet them. They're openly fighting with each other on the internet.

which comes again, you're already hearing progressive saying she wasn't progressive enough, which I don't know if that was the right takeaway. And a lot of my democratic friends say, oh my God, if the takeaway is we have to go further to the left, then no one has learned anything from this process. At the same time, like there's going to be so much fire aimed at Joe Biden and his inner circle for the way that they cloistered him off and the way they abused the press and anyone who questioned his mental acuity for so long. Steve,

We've talked about this forever. The fact that there was a consensual lie within the Democratic Party that Biden could run again and how this undermined them to the American people, gaslit them for years and why they weren't able to sell a new product under Joe Biden that he appointed and anointed. You even said it. You cannot anoint the Duchess of San Francisco, Kamala Harris. There should be a primary. You said that the day that Joe Biden dropped out. And I've got to say it was prophetic.

Wow, it's a entirely predictable moment. We talked about this. Our guts were in this space and there's going to be big changes to the country, right? There's enormous consequences that come from elections and the bloodletting, the finger pointing in the Democratic Party is well deserved and it needs to happen. So, for example, Chuck Schumer,

should resign as the Democratic leader of the Senate. And if this is a party that grasps at all, like at any level, what just happened, which is it's complete repudiation. It's repudiation. The question, if you're a Democrat, and they all get in a room, I'm talking the elected leadership of the party. What is it about them that is so repugnant

that a majority of this country said, no, we need Donald Trump to protect us from you. What has gone so profoundly off the rails? So last night was the death of wokeness in America.

Now, it may linger on as a shackle around the ankle, like a wet lead weight right around Democrats to drown their next electoral hopes. But all of this was repudiated last night. Donald Trump has a mandate. His mandate is for revenge and retribution and vengeance. He ran on division. He ran on anger. And it worked.

There are two types of elections at the end of the day, change elections and more of the same elections. And the American people wanted big change.

And it's not just the lie we talked about with Biden that the political class was complicit in. It's the media class was complicit in it as well. So this was the cycle that the old school corporate media, legacy media, where everyone has a different name for it, it imploded like that sub that guy made in his backyard and dove to the Titanic again.

Yeah, I'm going to just play devil's advocate a little bit. Okay, can we also maybe acknowledge that Kamala Harris was probably one of the weakest candidates in the Democratic field? Sure. She came in fourth in the primary, the Democratic primary in 2019. She was basically running to the left of Bernie all the time.

All of her prior stances were used against her. The clips from what she said, calling herself a radical, that made for a fabulous soundbite for the Republicans. I mean, Trump, one of his strongest ads that he pushed everywhere was the transgender ad. Trump made

It's for you. Kamala is for they, them. Exactly. And so that was probably one of their strongest ads, one of the ones they put the most money behind. And this was the idea that, you know, she had supported taxpayer funded transgender operation for criminals. It's the intersection of everything. Crime, immigration, fiscal waste. It's everything. But she had a snap election. Right. It was 100 something days.

Biden did the Democrats no favor by drawing out that nasty fight inside of the party out into the public in which he refused to give up the reins. He then anoints his successor, giving people the feeling that there isn't really a democratic process after the Democrats are criticizing the Republicans for being anti-democratic.

And then you've got Kamala Harris out there, strong start, but she wasn't willing to sit down. She was clearly hiding something. She was clearly hiding her real feelings about why do you want to be president? She really wasn't able to truly answer that for so long. And she also wasn't able to do the thing that was most important. And we've talked about this, separate herself from a very unpopular president, Joe Biden. So there were a lot of different things.

I do think there's probably sexism laced into there. There's racism. She's not the kind of generationally talented president that Barack Obama was, who was able to run as the first, you know, African-American president. She had a lot of hurdles, a lot of glass ceilings to come through, not just one, but two. So I do feel like there are a lot of other factors, but

But she had some of the best hands in the business. She had David Plath and she had a really strong team. I think truly when I look at this, having watched her, I think she did the very best she could do to the absolute utmost of her capabilities. And I think she fell short. And the truth is she would never have been the nominee in an open process.

And Joe Biden prevented the open process with one of the greatest acts of egotism and selfishness in American history. And it's how it's going to be looked at. Joe Biden's legacy is in infrastructure. Joe Biden's legacy is Donald Trump. Joe Biden and his team, and I want to name them, right? Because it's a small number of people who are directly responsible for this. It's Anita Dunn. It's Steve Ruscetti. It's Mike Donilon.

It's Jill Biden. These people clung to power, they gaslit the country, and they orchestrated a catastrophe, the election of Donald Trump. And that is the only thing that anybody will remember about Joe Biden. I wrote two years ago, you should be a one-term president, preside over an open process,

leave office with a 60% approval level. He was never the bridge. He never saw himself as that. Right. Joe Scarborough looking into the camera and saying, F you, if you don't believe this is the best version of Joe Biden mentally, intellectually that there's ever been. John Meacham comparing him to George Washington.

So I guess now Brat Summer is officially over, right? The campaign joy and all of the diluted nonsense. When you look at the campaign, what great idea did Kamala Harris put forward?

What speech did she give that articulated a vision for this country's future for the next 10 to 15 years of history? What address did she give that laid out her personal philosophy, how she sees the world, what makes her tick? She's for the middle class. She's a middle class person like you. She's for the middle class and she went on The View.

And they asked her, by the way, what would you have done differently? And the answer to the question, which is the one that counted in real time, not the cleanup, is not a thing. And so you had an administration that was in an argument with the American people for the last two years. When the poll said the American people didn't like the Biden economy, the Biden White House called it Bidenomics and said it was the best economy that there had ever been.

When the American people said Joe Biden shouldn't run for a second term, the Biden White House said Biden's running for a second term and you better like it. Eat your dog food, essentially. The American people, 67% of people were saying they did not like their options. They did not like the people that were running. Did not like their options. But in the whole, when you look at everything going on in the culture, the American people delivered a message that

to the Democratic Party in the form of President Trump with a Republican Congress. So we're going to see some extraordinary things play out. You're going to see this capitulation in advance as people rush to kowtow to Donald Trump.

We're going to see some people in government that have no business being in government. We're going to see the organizing principle of the government be never tell the president no, because he doesn't like the word. And so a lot of things are going to happen and they were all predictable and they were all stoppable, but they didn't. It's a great moral failure. And,

at some level, the inability to make an argument that gave to the American people something better than what they chose. And to be clear, in the end, I also look at the American people really for the first time in my life with no hyperbole attached, right, at 53. The country is not

quite what I thought it was if the country voted for this. But the answer to that is not to grow angry with the voter, it's to listen. And what it comes down to is that I think there's a lot of people who don't like Trump, who think Trump is a threat, but in the end, they think that the Democrats are a bigger threat to them. And so on a range of social issues,

from the transgender issue on down. This hurt the Democrats very, very badly. The transgender male athletes playing in women's sports in college, devastating issues, devastating ad. Trump is for you, Kamala is for they, them. And the American people have weighed in. And this isn't a fluke.

He didn't pull an inside straight. The FBI director didn't intervene. This was the clearest electoral choice of my lifetime between between two candidates. And the country decisively picked him. And you look at what happened in the Senate. Chuck Schumer's Senate strategy was a disaster as well.

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Terms and more at applecart.com. I want to go back to one thing that you mentioned about the press and like how they were complicit in this. Listen, from my perch in a like new media outlet, I had been writing about Biden and the idea that he couldn't run for a very long time. But I've got to tell you, the bullying from their office was intense.

They bullied so many reporters. One of the top reporters covering the functional and cognitive issues of Joe Biden, Alex Thompson. I just had him on his show and he was talking about how they iced him out in so many ways. They rarely gave the press access to Biden. And that is how they were able to control the story because the television network's

rely on access to the president, right? They need his voice. They need interactions with him. And so they were all holding out for interviews, for any sort of access. And it was so limited. He wouldn't even sit for the New York Times. They would cherry pick people like Franklin Foyer at the Atlantic. And these reporters would come back and say, he's brilliant, he's on it. And then they would bash and actually conduct campaigns against the Wall Street Journal for doing a very thorough piece about

Biden's cognitive level before the debate, by the way. And they had an entire campaign against the New York Times for demanding an interview with Joe Biden, the first president not to sit down with the paper record. And it wasn't like he was sitting down with anyone else. In fact, what they did was they created a war between the press, between the new media, which a lot of it is partisan. A lot of it really, you know, they call them influencers, but a lot of them are really just partisans with followings versus the legacy media and would

only give access to these influencers. I mean, they set them up at the DNC in these suites, took them out on boat rides, food, beverages. These were their messengers who were like, we'll just talk directly to the people through this person who has 3 million TikTok followers rather than sit down and have a conversation with the media. So I think in a lot of ways, they played us in the same way. And I say us in the collective media in the same way that...

Trump actually plays the media. He just says it flat out. They're the enemy. They play the inside game, divide and conquer. And so whereas in a way, Trump's outward war with the media is almost like kabuki theater because truly he actually wants to communicate with the press. He's vain. He wants to have coverage. Trump's point is,

is that none of this is on the level. And so here's what this election comes down to. And we were talking about this the other day, and I said this again to a bunch of people last night. Adult life requires the ability to hold inside your head multiple contradictory thoughts. And so Donald Trump is two things.

He's the most prolific liar that has ever been elected to a political office times 100 in America while being viewed as the most honest president we've ever had because of his authenticity. Now, were Democrats able to run against Trump effectively on honesty and integrity? No, because let's say, for example, the border.

Who was telling the truth about the border? Would that have been Trump or would that have been Biden? It was Trump. Who was telling the truth about Biden's condition? Would that have been Biden's White House team or would it have been Trump's team? It was Trump. And who was telling the truth about the economy?

for working people. And these are things that you cannot tell my lying eyes I'm not seeing. These are things where it's like Trump could very easily lie about things that are difficult to prove. And so the response to that is, we'll burn it down. And Trump played it like a Stradivarius all the way through. I mean, he was never treated like a threat.

after he tried to overthrow the government. He was the convenient, ever-ready rationale. Why does Biden have to break his implicit promise? Well, he's the only guy who can beat Trump. And so they were like two coiled snakes free-falling with the country in their teeth. And when they disentangled, Kamala Harris was there, who did, like I said, I think the best that she could do

but never would have been the nominee of the party. And so you look at the polls, the polls said something about Biden for a long time and Democrats didn't want to hear it. When I wrote about, you should take a one-term pledge, at least in the comment section on my stuff, the reaction is rage and unsubscriptions.

And the Democratic voter, the MSNBC audience, the activist Democrat on X that creates the culture where the reporter is looking at their phone after their interview or on set or the member of Congress or whatever. Anytime there's a deviation,

From the orthodoxy of the talking point, no matter how absurd, a statement of the obvious truth, activists go batshit crazy. And so that's the environment. And it leads...

To delusion. Outrage machines everywhere. And so, you know, the idea, right, to begin, the idea, you know, the takeaway here is, oh, that there wasn't a pure enough progressive vision offered, right, against Trump. We'll get him next time. Well, then we'll have President Vance. But I've never seen, I've never seen a defeat like this in my career. I mean, it is total defeat.

Right. It's a really strong mandate in which Trump will not only go into office with a Senate, a healthy majority in the Senate that will allow him to possibly appoint as many as two Supreme Court justices, maybe more, by the way. He may have a majority in the House. I mean, this is total and complete Trumpian control of the country and Washington. He will be able to do whatever he wants. He will be able to make Robert F.

Kennedy, HHS secretary, Health and Human Services secretary. Who knows? Would he be able to get Marjorie Taylor Greene in? I don't know. Susan Collins is there and Lisa Murkowski. These are moderate Republicans in the Senate. They might be able to backstop some of this and even RFK, but it's really hard to tell. I mean, when you've got someone in there wielding power the way that they do, the way that Trump does, we don't know. But I really, since I only have you for a few more seconds, Steve, I want to get to one thing. What a coulda shouldas, right, in the Democratic Party. Tim Walz,

Mistake. Huge mistake. Too progressive, too liberal. Is he just done? He's like Tim Kaine, like no one will talk about him ever again. Tim Walls is, yeah, he was a Division I AA quarterback who...

is not up for the NFL of national politics. Excellent adventure's over. He's done. Now, should she have chosen Josh Shapiro, the very popular governor of Pennsylvania, who won by, what was the percentage? She won the state by like 60 percentage points when he ran as governor. He had a decisive win running against a nut job. Douglas Mastriano. That's Douglas Mastriano. So many people

to be crazies in Pennsylvania during that cycle. So why, why do you think Josh Shapiro, who I know Democrats were privately worried about stoking the flames of the Gaza war by choosing a Jewish running mate? Why do you think at the end of the day, besides carrying Pennsylvania, do you think he would have ended up helping them win Pennsylvania, but then possibly losing Michigan? I think he probably would have helped them carry Pennsylvania, um,

I'm not ready to say that Gaza was determinative in Michigan against all of these, against all the other trend lines. I think that he was the strongest candidate and probably the best prepared to be president of the United States. He was the best politician. He was the best athlete that she could have picked. And she didn't, you know, for whatever reason. But that pick

did not determine the outcome, right? It's like on a list of 50 things if we were going through and we were ranking them today in the afternoon, that one's going to be somewhere in the 30s. If we're going to do ranking, how would you rank it very quickly? What caused Kamala Harris to lose and how? And we'll talk about fallout of each of them.

One of the things that happens in a political campaign is people look at an outcome and they say, what is the biggest thing that happened closest to the outcome? And ergo, that's the thing that caused the outcome. Kamala Harris had the opportunity to walk in, say thank you to everybody who was working on the Biden campaign, clean house, make it clear that she was different.

make it clear what she would have done differently. She didn't do any of those things. Well, she didn't have people to replace them with, Steve. That was the other knock on Kamala Harris is that throughout her political career, she was unable to keep any really strong loyalists around them. Like a politician often is only as strong as the people they have around them. She didn't even really have any staff from her days in the Senate that she brought into the White House. What was more important was

not offending Biden's ego than winning the election. She could have said, I was a new vice president and I watched how Afghanistan went down. In horror. Trust me, that will never happen on my watch. She may have upset the man who picked her, but that's the cost of winning. So would have upsetting Joe Biden many times have been worth the price of winning.

if you're sitting here today? And to me, the answer to that is yes. But if you look at the campaign, and I agree with you on the sexism as being part of it, a woman president, it's more dynamic, but the campaign was vapid, right? It was empty. It didn't speak in a momentous moment

more than at the most a time or two to anything grand, to anything big, to anything consequential. I grew up in a middle-class family. We had a lawn. You know, as they joked on Saturday Night Live, there was a lot of banality in the campaign and there's a lot of out of touchiness in the Democratic Party. And all of it is reinforced

by this cacophony of media pundits that literally all live within a three square mile block of one another in a small geography within a giant country. And that's why those people collectively are so often wrong and just out of touch. And so this is a big wake up call, obviously.

about where the country is and how Americans see the world, see their country, see each other. It's a pretty astonishing moment. They spent a lot of time trying to show her as a relatable American, like, I have sriracha in my backpack. I love hot sauce. And it's like, who cares at this point? Also, here's my opinion, and maybe we'll be disagreeing with it or not, but she should have been doing press during that month when they hit her. She should have been out there front and center, taking every single opportunity to get better at bat.

When you miss a few times, like she did during that one week of interviews, you

you know, with Stephen Colbert, with The View, not being able to separate herself from Biden. If she had been doing press all along, she would have been able to handle that question. They would have gotten through it. Sure, it would have been an ad. But again, I still think her team should have prepped her for that. But like you said, maybe because the team was all Biden holdovers, they didn't prep her in a way that would divide her from their former boss. They had the loyalty to him as well. I mean, she essentially just inherited his team well with his money as well, which was obviously an advantage. And that's what they'll say.

But why not do press? Like, why did they wait until in August, the weekend before, or the Labor Day weekend to do their first interview after, I think it was like 30 or 40 days into the campaign with CNN? And they got pushed into it, right? They were, they did it under pressure. Yeah, they were forced. The media bullied them. It looked like they broke. Listen, I would have had a...

different media strategy. But like the bottom line is this, you can't, there's no way you can get through a presidential campaign without talking to the media. And if you try to, makes you look weak, makes you look like you're hiding something. And against someone like Trump, it was not the right thing to do. And honestly, Steve, voters are smarter than that. They can feel it when a candidate is

seems unsure of themselves, doesn't really have a good story for why they'll be president or what their vision is. And I think that's what we saw last night was that they were showing, you know, Washington, we're smarter than this. Yeah, like that's, that's, I mean, that's such a big part of this, right? It's such a repudiation of

the arrogance and the smugness of we're going to tell you we're not you're not seeing what you're seeing with your eyes. And then we're going to replace that with someone and we're going to hide them to the maximum extent possible from any scrutiny after shielding the last guy from any scrutiny. And it didn't work.

Didn't work. It's the only playbook they know. And, you know, and the price is the loss. But again, right? Like the, you know, the number one, the number one thing is you sit there, there is a, there's a price that has come due for all the pretend, all the evasions, all the lunacy of this guy was as good as he's ever been. He's ready to go, ready to serve to 86. And so his selfishness,

choked off a process

that could have resulted in a winning candidate and instead resulted in this? Yep. It's always a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We could be talking for hours and I'm sure the listeners here, they want to hear a lot more. I'll be on the show again soon. I'm still processing it all myself and there'll be a lot of different angles and takes. And I hope even though somebody already won, so as we've talked about the name of the show, somebody's got to win. We got to...

you know, understand it all. And there'll be lots of news and development and also be broadcasting for the next few months as well. So I hope you guys will stick in there with me and send me your questions. What do you want to know more about? What are your thoughts about how this all worked out? Love getting listener mail. You can send it to Tara at puck.news. Thanks. Thanks, Tara. Fleshade.

That was another episode of Somebody's Got to Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, the best and the brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off a subscription at Puck. That's uppercase T-A-R-A-20.