Election Hangover With Mosheh Oinounou and Peter Hamby
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Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. Guys, I'm Tara Palmieri.

Guys, first I want to thank you for all of the emails that I've received in the past few days, feedback on the show and what you want to hear more about now that somebody's won. And I want to let you know that we're going to keep going, at least for the next few months. It's been a wild election cycle and I hope you'll stick with me as we learn more about what happened and we figure out what's going to happen next. I'll be offering my reporting every single week and we'll break it all down as we try to figure out what changed in the electorate, what worked.

what didn't, what the new Trump administration is going to look like. It will be a wild time for sure. So I hope you'll stick with me on this show. On the last episode, I spoke to Steve Schmidt on the day after the election about how the Democrats in D.C. really botched the inside game with their great switcheroo. And it was apparent to everyone

everyone in the country, which is part of the reason why they had such a great rebuke at the ballot box. This episode is a collaboration with Mosh Winunu of Mo News. It's a conversation with my colleague, Peter Hamby of Puck and myself and Mosh. And we just

go into greater depth into what the voters really wanted and how the Democrats seem to miss that mark. We also talk about how the fundamentals of the race just weren't in Harris's favor. And Peter talks about how he thinks the media got it wrong.

Since recording the podcast on Friday, though, I learned that Trump is leaning towards appointing Scott Pesent to be the Treasury Secretary. He's a prominent investor who donated $2 million to Trump's campaign. That's what we know so far.

I heard that they were together on Friday night at Mar-a-Lago. Trump loves him and thinks he fits the central casting requirement. Besson's team offered me an interview before the election, so we're going to try to get him on this week. He's got a lot to deal with. First of all, Trump has promised tariffs across the board, and that's going to be a difficult thing to enact without shaking the world economy. Trump has also talked about lowering the value of the dollar to improve exports.

We'll see if the Senate can pull this off. So far, Trump has appointed his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. She is the first female chief of staff in history. She was his campaign manager, and she's been able to manage Trump since 2021. And that is saying something, let me tell you. And I think Susie Wiles has been a survivor because she knows when to push back. She's extremely savvy.

She knows really not to play the typical role of gatekeeper. Trump likes to have his comfort creatures around him, like Corey Lewandowski. He likes his kitchen cabinet. And she knows if she's going to survive around the quote-unquote team of vipers, as they've been called, that she's got to pick and choose her times to push back. She clearly let Laura Loomer come around during the campaign.

We'll see what happens in the White House. But most people have a number to trump or a way to get to him. So, you know, she won't have that typical role of gatekeeper that the chief of staff has. I'll be keeping you posted throughout the next month with more transition news. So stick around here. You can also go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri. I'll be posting the transition news there.

As for Secretary of State, another key role, Rick Grenell, the former ambassador to Germany and the former director of national intelligence, is up for Secretary of State. So is Marco Rubio. Rubio, though, is seen as a bit of a neocon among the Don Jr. Tucker Carlson crowd, but he's got an ally in Susie Wiles. He's one of her former clients. I've also got a wild story up at puck.news that you should check out about how Harris's campaign is in debt.

Yes, that's right. After raising a billion dollars, they're selling off their email lists to make up some cash. It's not completely novel. President Obama did the same thing. And it's common, you could say, for candidates to go into debt. But this was a historical amount of money to be raised, a billion dollars. And I'm sure if you've donated, you've been contacted. There's still fun

fundraising, trying to make up for their losses. The Washington Examiner reported that her team spent six figures trying to replicate the Call Her Daddy set in a hotel room because Harris couldn't make it to the set in Los Angeles. So yeah, there's that. There's a lot of finger pointing going on right now, a lot of recriminations within the Democratic Party. There'll be a lot to talk about that during the next few months. So I hope you'll stick with me. Okay, onward to the show.

Given that we've all been living and breathing this election, I'm curious to know, as you now look back at the results and we continue to sort of take it all in, what's the thing that's most surprised you about what happened on Tuesday? You know, as people have covered multiple presidential elections. Peter, I want to start with you. I was thinking that there's obviously been some.

interesting shifts in all the different voting subgroups away from Kamala or away from Joe Biden and the Democrats, like in all these discussions about like slicing and dicing the electorate, like Latinos and young voters or whatever, two things worth keeping in mind. One, the overall issue of,

is, and was, the economy and inflation and prices. And so when you hear somebody like me talking about Gen Z voters, I'm going deep and that's my beat, or you hear someone over here talking about Latinos, et cetera, we have to remember that the downward pressure on Americans of

post-COVID inflation was the issue, and other people have written about this, but incumbent governments of all parties and political persuasions around the world have just been wiped out. Yeah, there was an interesting Financial Times graphic. This year, 10 major elections, the party in power, UK, India, Japan, France, Germany, basically zero for 10 this year in elections, regardless of their politics, right or left.

Yes. And so, you know, there's only so much Kamala Harris could have done in that situation. I think she was probably the best candidate Democrats could have put forward. But Joe Biden presiding over inflation that was or was not his fault, but also being unable to kind of explain what he had done for the economy and for working people. Joe Biden famously can't explain things in words.

speak very well. That was a problem. People didn't know what Democrats were for and what they were about. The other thing that I think is interesting is we talk about Kamala Harris underperforming Biden in certain groups among different kinds of voters. There's two ways to slice that. One, as a percentage, like margins, she underperformed Biden. But in most of these states, Kamala Harris got more votes than Joe Biden did.

So more people showed up in the competitive states where the campaigns were waged, but Donald Trump just got more. More people showed up. And that's what Democrats are going to have to face, not just what Trump is going to do in office, but the fact that he could get a popular vote majority, could get three votes, the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, the popular vote, and Trump.

would have it already does have a mandate you know and so unlike 2017 when you had the resistance and the the pink hats and like the the vows to fight john trump at all costs i'm just very interested to see how democrats both the professional ranks of the party and also just normal people how they deal with this do they look inward and change or do they keep doing what

You know, people on The View and what Joy Reid has been doing and Joe Scarborough and yelling at voters for voting the wrong way, for being racist and sexist. There are certain elements of that out there, I'm sure. But, you know, I think the party has to face the fact that they lost and Donald Trump won for real this time.

Tara, you know, we knew going into this that the polls were 50-50. There's a 50% chance that each of them could have won. It wasn't surprising. You know, we each could have laid out and we did lay out 10 reasons why each of them could win the election. So what has surprised you about what unfolded on Tuesday? I was just surprised that Trump outperformed his own internal models and polling. Like he did better than...

Even what his pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin came up with.

like some of their polls just had him up by like a point in Pennsylvania. He ended up being up by like a point and a half in the end. Right. And, and, and typically the internal polls, you know, give you the most favorable numbers. Well, for him, not for a typical candidate, but for him when they're trying to moderate him and like everyone sort of, you know, they love to kind of make fun of John McLaughlin and say, Oh, he always has the most rosy picture for Trump. But like, actually, and he said on my podcast, he,

A few weeks ago, Trump's going to win all seven swing states. He did, Tara. You're right. He did say that. And that's what's going to happen. Yeah. It was such a remarkable comment that the New York Times picked up that line and used it because they're like, are they really saying that? And he actually was right. And so...

I think they actually outperformed their own models. And he told me he's like Jersey. He's like, watch Jersey. He kept saying that over and over again. And I'm like, oh, come on. Like I'm from Jersey. Although like I did grow up in a red district that turned blue, Mikey Sherrill's district. But like, it's just, I just think that they were not, they'd not think they were going to win like that. I actually think that the sloppy finish is,

The way that he landed the plane that final week had them really nervous about his chances and if they were sabotaged.

One thing on that point, Tara, is like someone texted me the other day. We talked about early voting so much like the press, but we also simultaneously forgot that while Trump was having that really terrible off message finished to his campaign, while Democrats were running on Puerto Ricans, we're going to win on Puerto Ricans. 50, 60 million people had already voted or were in the process of voting. So, you know,

When he was having a really good October. The first weeks of October were great for him. Exactly. And when Trump was airing all those ads, started to ramp up his spending in the swing states, starting October 1, drilling Kamala Harris, the trans ads, the crime ads, the can't separate herself from Biden ads. That's when people were starting to vote. And so even in 2024, when early voting has been around for so many cycles now, like we in the press and the political establishment continue to be like,

Got to finish strong. Election Day is coming. Election Day is like a month long process at this point. That's worth keeping in mind, too. Yeah. Actually, though, I do remember reporting two weeks before the election, right when early voting had started in Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina and Arizona. I had talked to some of the reporters and data analysts on the ground there.

And these are like, you know, solid guys like Greg Blustein at the Atlantic Journal, Constitution Journal or Nevada. Sorry, John Ralston at the Nevada Independent and Garrett Archer. Yeah.

at the ABC affiliate in Arizona. And, and then I spoke to, I'm blanking on his name, but another analyst in North Carolina and every single one of them said to me, Tara, I know we're not supposed to look at the tea leaves of early voting and maybe Republicans are just coming out early because that's what they were taught.

over the past few years swamped the vote. And maybe they took the directive from Trump, but it feels different this time and it feels like Trump could win this. And they all said that across, they just felt the enthusiasm on the ground. And, you know,

Early voting started in Pennsylvania a week later, in Michigan. And you got more of a vibe that there was a gender gap, right? That there was, especially among these younger voters, but it didn't carry her ultimately. But there was certainly a vibe and a sunbelt that like, sure, you're not supposed to look into early voting, but it's hard not to see the enthusiasm. Particularly in the rural counties in Nevada, the suburbs of Georgia, right?

The Republicans for the first time outvoted Democrats in North Carolina by 3,000 votes in the early votes by the time, I think after like four or five days, that was really significant. Like, you know, Democrats for so long had machines that would get people out to early vote and they just...

It was it was not it didn't match up. And in Arizona, GOP voters were back to voting early and they were outnumbering Democrats. So, right. GOP was back to voting early and Election Day has always been advantage Republicans anyway. And yet, you know, if you listen to most of the media coverage, right.

and some members of the media, they were still surprised. I mean, and it's wild because, you know, we've all been covering Trump for a decade now. You know, it's like next June marks 10 years. Two decades for me, Mosh, okay? Sorry, you're two decades. The national media minus, you know, a couple blips with Apprentice, et cetera. No, at the New York Post. Right, no, but...

Right, right. No, of course, I'm saying as far as the Washington media and the national, you know, sort of the day-to-day coverage, you know, June will mark 10 years since he came down the escalator. Right.

What does the media still miss about him and his appeal and his voters? Is it just that his voters aren't talking? Is it the inherent bias of who's in the media? Why did it still feel like on election night and you could see the networks, you know, Peter, like slow walking the calls like till 6 a.m.? That was insane, by the way.

msmbc did they ever announce it like they still had kornacki at the wall two hours after the victory speech part of that has to be like donald wisconsin look cnn uh we saw what happened in 2020 when fox went early on arizona and and that was that was maybe the wrong decision it was ultimately right but they called it a little too early and i think the networks are a little spooked by that you gotta think there's a little bit of like

Keep them coming back for Kornacki and John King just for a little bit longer, you know? And by the way, I love the map stuff, so I'm guilty of that. But yeah, it's, I mean, by the way, this happened in 2022. What? 2020, I mean, 2020 also. Most, like you worked at a TV, both, all three of us worked at TV networks. Yeah. We knew after Tuesday that,

of shit no wednesday thursday probably of 2020 that by the end one the patterns were there yeah and they were all so afraid to call the race they had to wait till sunday and by the way it created this terrible vacuum where all the conspiracy theories and stop the steel stuff flourished because all the tv networks were so scared of mr trump to call the call call the race when anyone with a brain who'd covered elections before could see it anyway um i think the thing

This is going to be a big rant for me that you'll hear on Media Monday as well, Moshe. And I texted Brian Stelter this morning. You love to trash the media, Peter. It's just... Because I care about it so much. I'm sorry. Yeah. Like, I grew up on this stuff. Like...

Anyone who spent time, if you look at, if you watch TV news, this is like different from print, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, national papers send people out there. Obviously, lots of local papers and TV networks were talking to voters all the time. The sort of national media conversation, which is basically narrowed still to Twitter and cable news and TV news, you just don't see voices from out in the country saying,

other than in these like focus groups that CNN does. Every now and then, like Elle Reeve would go out and interview voters for CNN. Right, John King goes to Kenosha, Wisconsin or whatever. Sure, but like...

Here's a good example. CBS, your former employer. This cycle, they sent a reporter to Penn State to talk to young people. What did they do at Penn State? They got the head of the college Republicans and the head of the college Democrats to come together and talk about it for a two-minute package. Those are highly engaged voters who are not emblematic of normal voters. And so...

I am waving my own flag because I did spend most of October traveling and talking to people on the street, people on college campuses, not people who were like had a MAGA hat on, not people who had a Harris wall sign in their yard, just listening. That's the thing. That's why the media keeps missing this stuff is they don't listen to people. And one of the big things that I heard was in my interviews were mostly with Gen Z, you know, and they don't remember the Trump years very well actually is they're

You know, they don't really care about the character stuff.

At the same time Kamala Harris was talking about John Kelly and fascism, that never came up. No one talked about Liz Cheney. People did talk about the thing that the election was about. Rent, cost of groceries, gas, and not just like white dudes. It was young black women that I interviewed constantly who were voting for Kamala Harris, saying I can't make ends meet, the math doesn't add up, like rent, gas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And abortion came up a little bit.

but not organically a lot. And the other thing that happened with young people, especially young women, and this was proved out by the election, was a lot of them were fine with Kamala Harris. Some loved her, but others were like, she's fine. Some young progressive women went out of their way to say she's cringe, that they didn't like the TikToks actually. All the TikTok stuff was lame because there was nothing in it

Like she wasn't saying anything. And so all of these things, I can say I told you so, but the bigger picture is we would hear if we heard more from just normal people in the media out there. And if executives sent reporters out there to talk to regular people and highlighted their work, maybe we would have some clues as to why Donald Trump isn't the boogeyman that the panel at The View thinks he is. Okay. Can I just say, can I just counter Peter for a minute? Cause I like...

Go for it. I understand what he's saying. Like sometimes people go out there and they're like scared chickens talking to people like, what do you feel? What's it like? Oh,

Like they've never interacted a real person before and asked them their political views. I like to go Nellie Bly when I'm trying to figure out how people feel. And I just talk to people like cab drivers, bouncers at the club. Yeah, yeah, totally. I do the same thing, Tara. I like to talk to just family. I'll go get my hair cut in the town I'm in and talk to the hairdressers. They'll always keep it real with you. And like, you don't have to be like as...

formal about it. And I will say, when I was living in Brussels, I was covering Brexit, right? And I would talk to all these Brits, a lot of them former labor. And they didn't know that I was Polish, had a Polish passport, and that's how I was living there, which was a really big issue for them. They were very against migration, just like we were in this past election. I'm just...

casual American girl at the UKIP conference with Nigel Farage. And I'm like, you know, talking to these old generals, asking them what's up. And they're like, Oh, the polls are taking our jobs. And it's like, you really let people let their guard down. They're going to show you how xenophobic they are. They're going to tell you what really matters to them. And most of the time it's about issues that directly impact them. It's not usually about some bigger moral, you know,

even, even for people like, you know, even for people who want to play identity politics, a lot of the people that fit into that, like minorities that I would talk to about Trump or about, um, or, you know, uh, yeah. First, for example, about Trump, like,

They didn't care about what he said as long as it helped them be a stronger provider at home. Like they could tune off this Trump show. They don't need to listen to him on TV. Right. Well, you have to have a certain amount of privilege, first of all, to care about the fate of our democracy. Right. Which is what's so interesting. When you look at the when you look at the breakdown of voters, she gained among people make making more than 100K a year who can think about the fate of our democracy. And he did much better among those who make less than one hundred thousand dollars a year.

And then Peter to the character thing. And I'm curious if, you know, you were talking about Gen Zers. I mean, Gen Zers are, you know, like for many of them, Trump comes on the scene when they're in middle school or junior high. Right. And so they've always sort of I mean, for them, they don't remember a pre Donald Trump politics. And so the character stuff is sort of baked in. Right. Right.

Yeah, well, there's two ways to slice it. One, the folks at Blueprint, the Democratic polling firm that Tara and I have both talked to throughout the year, they did some really good work.

messaging, sorry, polling to sort of drive democratic messaging. And it was smart. And it was like, focus on the economy. There's a lot of conversation in the media, for example, about Trump bros. It's not just about Zinn and it's not just about Joe Rogan and podcasts or whatever. You have to talk about salient issues to their lives, like the economy, their anxiety about foreign wars, by the way. That came up all the time when I talked to young people, but that's something that really wasn't

being talked about in the press as much, even though Donald Trump talked about it. Like larger than just Gaza. The idea that there's this instability. Yeah. Like they're uneasy about, there's so many, and so many other places and podcasts and writers have talked about

the plight of young men in this country and questions about masculinity and the declining role of men in the workplace and on campuses and suicide rates among young men. But, you know, anxiety about the state of the world that they're growing up into with wars in Ukraine, Israel, and Lebanon, not to mention the economy. That came up a lot, actually, among young men. But anyway, Blueprint called what you're talking about

Trump-nesia, where a lot of first-time voters might have been in middle school or high school when Trump came down the escalator. And as engaged as the three of us are, I followed politics a little bit in high school, but it was just all kind of background noise. And so there's the Trump-nesia thing. But then there's the other side of it, which is the world survived the first Trump administration. And to a young person, all of the

you know screaming and hair on fire analysis you hear in the media about donald trump about him being a fascist or this or that doesn't ring true it sounds little boy who cried wolf and i'm going to give you a real world example of this i interviewed a a young woman at clemson this is on my twitter account we have the video of it go watch it um clemson university

Republican campus, we found one Kamala Harris voter, a young black woman. And she said this on camera. She was sort of wondering as she was talking and she said, quote, when Trump was first elected, everyone made it seem like the world was going to end.

And then she paused and goes, but I'm still here, right? And so that sentiment that Trump can't be that bad, and you layer on top of that, prices are still higher than they were in 2020. As much as inflation is coming down on a macro level, prices are still high for most goods in this country, higher than they were in 2020. They probably will stay that high.

and he can help me with my bank account, my pocketbook, and my rent, maybe, hopefully. I'll take a flyer on that guy. That was a prevailing sentiment I heard.

Yeah, I have to agree with Peter. I don't know that their democracy argument was salient enough when people saw the country survive. Although January 6th was a pretty strong counter argument for people who didn't want chaos. Listen, like people didn't seem to care. I mean, that's why I was sort of surprised that she went back to it, that she gives that speech on the ellipse with a week to go in the election, that she sort of goes back to the Joe Biden theory of the case. Actually, though, we know that back when Biden was still running, you know,

Everyone was mocking them for thinking that they could run on democracy. I mean, seriously. And then they changed direction. I remember that there was a New Yorker article in which Mike Donilon said they were going to run on democracy and the whole town was aghast. They were like, are you kidding? Democracy didn't come up at the top of, you know, concerns for voters when they were being pulled back.

Like people are complicated. You know what I mean? They may want to do the right thing, but they can also, you know, they can also make they can also sorry. You know, they can just they can justify why they want to vote for Trump. Like,

Most of the people in my family voted for Trump. Seriously, like almost all of them did, except maybe my mom. And that was after I had a conversation with her because she was undecided. Most of mine did too. Yeah, exactly. And it's like,

It's not that they admire him. Like they think the way that he acts is gross and the porn stars and this and that. But they were thinking about their own lives and they thought that sounds like Bill Clinton. Right. Exactly. Two time presidential winner, Bill Clinton. Character issues. But he cared about the kitchen table. We've learned is like a moral leader. People aren't necessarily looking for a moral leader anymore. Maybe that's just not what they want.

And there's so much distrust in politics. And like she had a flawless campaign. Everyone likes to use that word to describe it. But flawless. Well, that's just that's just Joy Reid and Sonny Hostin. And I mean, the whole resistance crew, they keep saying flawless. How can they say that?

But it's just like flawless also translates into politician. Like flawless translates into insincerity. I think she had an insincerity issue because like when she wasn't on the stump reading from a teleprompter, when she was asked very pointed questions from people who were not antagonistic, she had a hard time answering that. And I still go back to the view and...

that question, what would you do different? And she said, not a thing that comes to mind. And I remember talking to my editors after that came out and I was like, I think this really matters. Like, I think this is going to be a problem. I think this is going to be an ad. I've been told from the Trump people, they're going to pump it up. And

And I even they put some of the people on the team were like, are you sure, Tara? Are you sure? And I was like, it it disqualifies her position. It disqualifies her case that she's a change candidate. She went when three out of four Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction. Right. And you're in you cannot and you're basically 100 percent.

you know, behind the wrong direction. Is that just because she inherited Biden's campaign team and she was scared to, you know... I actually have some questions. Yeah, partially that. And partially, like, they should have made a decisive decision that they had to, like, that they had to attack, not attack Biden, but they had to draw a harder line, even if it meant offending him. I think...

I think the team in Wilmington, Biden's team, did the best they could. They didn't have her prepared for that question, though. They didn't have her prepared either to talk about what she would do on day one. I mean, there's some basic things. At the Anderson Cooper Town Hall, I was astounded by her lack of, you know, two weeks to go.

Guys, back up. A lot of this stuff comes down to candidate talent and performance and instincts, okay? There's only so much a campaign can do to prepare Kamala Harris for some of these things. It has to come down to Kamala Harris, who has always been, and by the way, I think she has improved greatly as a political talent since she became vice president compared to when she ran for president in 2020. But your instincts have to be good. That Anderson Cooper town hall,

Great example, Moshe. You can be over-briefed or under-briefed or whatever. Someone in the audience gave her the biggest layup and they said, going back to your time as Attorney General, what are you most proud of? Kamala Harris paused on stage for a minute. She sort of said, huh? And then she gave some garble about how she stood up for children, women.

She should have said, I negotiated and fought for the biggest settlement against the banks after the mortgage crisis in the country. The biggest...

legal victory over the big banks, possibly in American history at the time. She just forgot about it or didn't bring it up. And every single Democrat I talked to was like, that was a huge miss. And so again, the view answer, she also said that to a few other people. She just didn't have a good answer. That part, I think you can lay on the campaign staff because that was the biggest part of

The campaign, she had to separate herself from Biden while also embracing some things of his that were either popular with Democrats or maybe issue-wise popular generally. But like, there's only so much you can do. I will say, I do think there will be an ongoing question, speaking of that mortgage settlement. The last few weeks of the campaign were about...

democracy and fascism and Liz Cheney. And I know that David Plouffe and the sort of, you know, centrist dem Obama dem instincts to go toward the moderate dads in Philadelphia. And by the way, the moderate dads were the Trump Biden voters in 2020 that helped Biden win. So you got to go at them. And at the same time,

She was forfeiting her previous message about fighting for the middle class, getting in-home care covered by Medicare, things that are very...

popular, the message was all over the place. It was, it was joy. It was change. It was fighting for the people in the middle class. Then it was joy. Then it was democracy. Then it was fascism and like not a clear and consistent message. Abortion, getting back to fundamentals. Yes. Yes. But that, that was coursing through the whole thing. I'm just talking about the sloganeering stuff at the end of the day, like,

The candidate has to rise to the occasion. I think she did as well as she possibly could have in this in that situation. And to like the fundamentals just really weren't there for for for Democrats. That's my take. I do think the campaign did the best job they could. They raise a shitload of money, like a billion dollars. I mean, Tara, you're like they're in debt. They spent a billion dollars in one hundred and seven days.

Is it crazy? More than that, it looks like, because they're, you know, Tim Walz is still texting for cash. 70 bucks. Yeah, did he ask you for 70 bucks last night? He asked me for 70 bucks last night. I was like, Tim, give it up. Oh, Tim Walz. So, I mean, it sounds like in retrospect here, like the loss was inevitable. Is there anything that like in... No, I don't think it was inevitable. In a different scenario where Joe Biden still, you know, leaves in the context that he leaves on July 21st and she has 107 days. Is...

is there a winning route given Kamala Harris's political skills or lack thereof at times? Message, you know, like what could she have done in 107 days that actually would have catapulted her to the White House? Sometimes there were moments where I would watch her and I would just feel like there was a part of me that just felt like she needed to find her voice and her message like in a way that was authentic to her. I felt that a lot of it was,

package lines and quotes ready for Instagram and TikTok and just sort of she was speaking in these soundbites and

that like she like kind of like how Maya Rudolph will kind of mock her she'd like look into the camera and then say a line then look aside and it just wasn't authentic enough um she definitely had a great glow about her towards the end and and she seemed more comfortable in the space that she was in but like Peter said she's not you know an all-star political athlete in the same way that Obama was and I think ultimately the Democratic Party did themselves a huge disservice by not having a

primary. And even though it would have been so late by the time Joe Biden dropped out. And that's on Biden. That's on Joe Biden for not stepping aside. And Joe Biden picked her. He did this. No, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying if Joe Biden had actually said, I'm going to pass the torch if

people around Joe Biden said, dude, you're too old. This was coming up in focus groups and polls in 2022. Like if you just, if he had stepped aside and then allowed for a competitive primary where these candidates could have road tested their messages, improve their skills over time and won a primary, like,

I think they would have been better served and would have been better able to distance themselves as well from Joe Biden and his administration, which was a huge drag on. This was this was a referendum on the Biden economy, like it or not. Yeah.

Yeah, that's it's very tough for someone who truly say that they were different from Biden would maybe have had even if Kamala won the primary, she would have done it on the merits of figuring out a way to say how she was different than Biden and not different than Biden. OK, like they're just and I'm not. By the way, I don't buy the right wing criticism that like there was no primary. She wasn't vetted like she's the most vetted Democrat that possibly could have run. Like, give me a break. Like Gretchen Whitmer, Josh, here are these governors. Come on.

Like she had been on the international stage for several years. You don't think that Josh Shapiro would have done it? No, no governor stepping in motion. I have covered these primaries. You've covered these primaries. Think about all of the highly rated rising star governors, Scott Walker, Rhonda, Santa, Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney. And so in 2028, like a small press corps that falls. Exactly. You're not used to the big leagues. You're just not. And so you step into the limelight. It immediately gets harder. And,

And I just don't buy the fact that like you could maybe people argue that Josh could have been a decent running mate for Kamala Harris. But the idea that he could have been at the top of the ticket. I saw Gretchen Whitmer on CNN over the summer asked asked a layup question about abortion that she muffed. Like, I just think Kamala Harris was the best choice. But like this all goes back to what Tara and I are agreeing on, I think, which is like Joe Biden.

Joe Biden really bears the weight of this. And Democrats also need to get back to figure out how to not sound like

Just they just keep going back to the well on the Obama era feel good vibes like wheeling out John Legend and Bruce Springsteen. John Bon Jovi. Talking about identity, talking about democracy, talking about values. It's the economy, stupid. James Carville has been right this whole cycle again, like man in the economy, man in the economy. He's been saying it all year.

Sorry, I know he's an old coot, but it's true. I also think like these celebrities might not have transference because you don't really know what they stand for, right? Like, you know them as entertainers, but you don't know their worldview. You don't know their philosophy. Like I can enjoy a Taylor Swift song, but not necessarily agree with her worldview, right?

And that's sort of why it's interesting to see like podcasters be more influential and be bigger, you know, be bigger endorsements than politicians who obviously people just don't trust politicians generally and celebrities. And like getting that endorsement from Joe Rogan at the end, I think that was huge for Trump.

Right. I mean, one could argue that the Rogan endorsement probably did more for him than all these, you know, Beyonce. He's been doing this podcast for years. Men were moving to Trump years ago. It wasn't just the final push. No, but at the last minute to have Joe Rogan push, I feel like that was a big thing.

Don't you think? The day before to have Joe Rogan. I think it helped. I think it absolutely helped. But like the last minute endorsement stuff, like the final week, we talked about early vote. I think people assumed Joe Rogan was for Donald Trump, you know? Yeah. But Peter, I got to tell you, they were still nervous about the young voters coming out, even as the early vote was coming, especially those young men. They really needed to get them out. Like you saw, you saw. Well, we did see that. You're right. Yeah.

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Some models, trims, and features may not be available or may be subject to change. Check with your local retailer for current information. Lincoln and Aviator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. So Democrats after Dobbs, Kamala Harris, like that's when she found her voice as vice president. Like she started to travel. Right, right. The first ever, I think she's the first ever president or VP to visit an abortion clinic. Yeah, yeah. And she was really good at rallying women. The...

Either the gas ran out on that as an issue that could motivate Democrats alone. Right. It did help them clearly in 2022. An uncomfortable thing, I think, that Democrats and the abortion rights movement has to reckon with is I've heard young women say this on college campuses and probably some of them were, you know, Trump voters. People are a lot of people are OK with.

With this being decided by the states, you know, I guarantee you the people who aren't OK are the women who have died or suffered long term health issues because of it being banned in their states. But as a national political issue, like it or not, I mean, Trump made an effort to sound moderate.

notionally on abortion. And people have mixed opinions about abortion once you get into second trimester. And people are like, it's okay. It's like settled at the States. I'm not saying that's the right move, but a lot, I talked to two young women voting for Kamala Harris who were like, there's no way that,

like we can, like abortion can be fixed at the national level right now in this election. Right. Right. You would have to get right. The whole abortion discussion. Oh, the whole abortion question was oversimplified. Right. You know, the whole thing, well, Trump's going to do a national ban. Well, no, he's not going to have 60 votes in the Senate and he's not going to be able to do, uh,

national ban there. And he's, I said explicitly, he's not going to sign that. I mean, we can go into details there. And at the same time, you know, Kamala Harris can't save a boy. She can't bring Roe v. Wade back with a snap of her fingers. And in many of the key States here, like in Pennsylvania, you can hold two thoughts. You can be pro-choice and, and, and that came up in the exit polls, right? Of all the people who said that abortion should be legal in all cases, 30% of them voted for Donald Trump. Right. And the abortion measure, for example, in Arizona, like enshrining it in Arizona as a law, uh,

protecting abortion rights passed and Arizona is going to vote for Donald Trump. So it's like, like you said, Moshe, like you can bounce your thoughts You can hold multiple thoughts in your head. Tara said this earlier. Tara said this earlier, by the way. Voters are smart people. But it's also, some voters are morons, but that's like not the point. There's some smart, some, but Tara said this earlier. It's important to hammer this home. People have complicated, complicated

conflicting, simplistic political views that just don't compute with we highly educated media elites. Like I met ticket splitters in Ohio. I met somebody voting on like, like, like you meet people voting on weed. Like, it's just like every crypto mixed opinions. Yeah.

Yeah. Listen, I've got friends who have MBAs from Columbia that are voting that voted for Trump. A lot of them are mothers, by the way, who believe in the RFK message. Yeah. This make America healthy again. They think the airwaves. Yeah. They follow us on Instagram. A lot of them follow me. And a lot of them were very offended by the fact that she did not even give him the time of day that she did not even take RFK's phone call.

Like, and, and, and who else she didn't give the time of day to were the, uh, and by the way, uh, we can, this is a whole separate podcast. Talk about Israel and Palestine, but the young Arab and Muslim voters I talked to in Detroit from Metro Detroit, who were almost all of them voting for not almost all of them. I should say almost none of them voted for Kamala Harris. I met three, uh,

Kamala Harris voters very reluctantly in this group, plenty of them voting for Jill Stein. The Democrats kind of pretended the Gaza issue had gone away after the DNC. It was still very much there. And you can look at the Dearborn precincts in Michigan, and Trump won some of those precincts. Jill Stein got like 30% of the vote. She would have lost Michigan anyway, looking at the raw numbers, but-

There were just issues that were papered over. Well, I think they were in a very difficult spot because, I mean, as a Jew, I know a lot of Jews. I know a lot of people. I know a lot of Jews who voted for him because of that issue. And so, you know, I think Democrats and Kamala Harris were stuck between a rock and a rock. He was very vague about it, right? You know, like everyone sort of knows, everyone knows where he stands on the issue, but he wasn't explicit about it.

In fact, you'd have to struggle to find an interview where he actually would bring it up. He didn't discuss it to leave open the idea that maybe he's different on this. But I think Democrats really struggled. And I think it's incredible that the same candidate who Netanyahu wanted to win, Donald Trump,

is the same candidate who many Jews moved to, is the same candidate who many Arabs and people on the Palestinian, you know, pro-Palestinian side also didn't mind becoming president. And it just, it's incredible when you think about it. And it speaks to just, she didn't know, I mean, she did different ads for Jews and different ads for Muslim and Arab audience because she was trying to play both sides, which speaks to the larger issue you brought up earlier, which is like, you didn't quite know where she stood on things and she didn't quite know either.

And Tara probably has better reporting on this than I do, but the Arab and Muslim people in Michigan were getting targeted for

on social media with ads from like Elon Musk's group saying Kamala is a Zionist. And her husband's literally in the ads married to a Zionist. And then they would target Jews with other ads saying that Kamala Harris stands with the Gaza protesters, you know, and those would hit the Jewish moms in Philly. And so like the amount of rat fucking that was going on outside of our field of view as reporters was probably immense. And we might never know.

That's been going on for a long time. Like really low key on social media, especially when they were trying to target African-American voters. They've been doing that for years now. I mean, that goes back to like the Reagan days. Yeah. Nixon days, you know, with pamphleting and that sort of thing. But, you know, can I ask a question real quick? This is for Peter, actually. Lee Atwater. Peter's holding up right now a book.

About Lee Atwater, who invented some of the most dirtiest, the dirtiest campaigning of the modern era. Yeah. OK, my question for Peter. What the pluff? David Plouffe went around calming everyone's nerves, telling everyone, don't be a bedwetter. It's going to be great. We can win all seven states. What to make of that? And well, one, you've got to project confidence at the end. So I get the political tactic.

He said, and General Mallee Dillon both said, we're winning late deciders. Exit polls, everyone listening, they'll be revised later. We don't know. Some of these exit polls had Trump winning late deciders, people who decided in the last weekend or the last week. And, you know, by the way, at the end, it was in hindsight, again, kind of a good tell that the Harris campaign was actually losing Trump.

because they were focusing so much on a goddamn comedian and talking about Puerto Ricans. It's like big messages win campaigns, big currents win campaigns, like slicing and dicing the electorate. Talk about, oh, there's all these Puerto Ricans in Reading and they're going to move our direction. Like, yikes. That means you're not winning. That was in hindsight. But Plouffe is interesting. Like, obviously hailed

as you know the greatest political genius of the modern era when he came on to the harris campaign uh it really soothed a lot of nerves in the democratic party like okay we pushed the biden people aside we got this um

I assume he was behind the decision to go in late on the democracy messaging. He deleted his Twitter account the other day. He is dark. I just noticed this. He's just deleted it. And it's like, why good? I mean, like for your own mental health, like get the fuck off social media, but also like,

uh man like he he could be scapegoated in certain ways again this all goes back democrats are still kind of trying to like run on the obama playbook which is now like 12 16 years old i don't know it's very interesting but what's going how he will be remembered that's a question because i mean i know you're close to a bunch of those guys just like the did are the obama guys successful the whole crew you know that one two straight you know i guess now you look back at it in the past

40 years, there's been two Democrats who've won a reelection, you know, Clinton and Obama. But the Obama folks, were they good because they were also, they had one of the most talented politicians in modern American history? Yeah, that's, yeah, yes. That's sort of what I was talking about, about candidate instincts and whatever. And by the way,

like Donald Trump, the most off message candidate ever, but you know, unique. Yeah. Like look at all the Senate races, um, in some of these battleground States, like Democrats, like Jackie Rosen and Nevada, she's going to win Tammy Baldwin, whatever. Um, Ruben Gallego, like the Senate candidates are running behind Donald Trump. And that's been a consistent thing in recent cycles where he's just Trump is Trump. Like

Like Trump is Trump. Republicans can try to be Trump. They might win sometimes. They might not. Obama was just like a supernova talent. I mean, speaking to, you know, your Gen Zers who, you know, value authenticity. Like when you at the end of the day, I mean, the old thing was like, you know, which candidate would you rather have a beer with? But like Clinton won because he was more authentic. W was authentic to himself. You kind of got checked. Obama felt authentic. Trump feels authentic.

And the rest of these folks, like, you know, whether it's Harris or Clinton or Kerry or, you know, these various Democrats who've gone down, they sort of all have a similar issue. Yeah, that's right, Moshe. That's probably the big thing. We all fetishize authenticity in politics and talk about it, but

you know, someone taking a victory lap right now is Marie Lusenkamp Perez out in Washington. She's a Democrat moderate from the state of Washington, wears flannel shirts, probably like the one I'm wearing actually. And like she's, she's did an interview with the New York times on Friday saying like, you

you know, here's what I learned. Here's how I won in a Trump district and won big, you know, and it was authenticity was a big part of it and staying true to her district and dealing with the thing. Again, going back to the thing people care about the economy. She says in this New York times interview that everyone should read, like I do a lot of casework and constituent services, like helping people figure out like,

like passport and will not her district necessarily but like uh you know tax issues um things that the federal government can help with that are very salient to their their kitchen table their lives their backyard um but authenticity is key for her jared golden is another example he's a democrat up in maine who's got tattoos and he that that district was a big trump district and he

And he's going to win. And this, this reminds me, like we're all old enough to remember 2004, like after John Kerry lost in 2004 and Bush won, um, Democrats were in the wilderness and Howard Dean was the DNC chairman. And he's like the 50 state strategy. We've got to remember how to talk to Bubba and put bumper stickers on pickup trucks. And, you know, Mark Warner was the savior because he could talk to NASCAR dads in Southwest Virginia or John Edwards at the time.

Yeah. And John Edwards, right. So the, the, I can see the Democrats kind of lurching back toward, okay, we have to get away from the identity politics, sort of the group blame, a lot of the sort of boutique liberal issues that define the democratic party over the last five years and get back to our roots. And, and whether you're posturing or not talk to Bubba and there's that, but you know, then again,

They won in 2006 with Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown and Jim Webb and all these red state Democrats. And then two years later, Barack Obama comes along. He's like a college professor from Chicago. With the middle name Hussein. Yeah, yeah. So it's like you never know where things are going to go. And the other thing to keep in mind there, I have questions about whether we're going to have a resistance like we did in 2017, 2018, because Trump won a popular mandate. But George Bush...

just started stepping on a bunch of landmines after he won, you know, like there was Katrina, um, things went to shit in Iraq. Uh, it was just like there, there were, there were car bombings and civil war all over, all over Iraq. And so, you know, Bush wins popular thinks he has a mandate. I don't know if he did. And then like by his own, by events and his own actions, and we might see this with Trump,

Things go sideways and Democrats come back. Like a lot of this stuff is cyclical. Oh, totally. And you bring up like the 04 Democrats needing to talk to Bubba. Well, fast forward to 2012, Republicans lost with McCain, Republicans lose with Romney. Their whole thing is we have to be more appealing to Latino voters, et cetera. And who comes on the scene four years later and has now expanded their party, remade their party? Donald Trump.

Right. Because Marco Rubio was going to be the savior. Right. The autopsy report. There was a right. The parties both have this right. The Democrats had to know for and Barack Obama. Yeah, you would not have scripted him, but there you had it. And then same thing with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the opposite of the autopsy report Republicans did. So it's very interesting. Democrats are going to have this huge discussion and then we'll be surprised in the primaries in four years.

who comes out of that, I guess, you know, in the, I'm imagining debates right now between like AOC and Pete Buttigieg on like CNN in 2027. Yeah. I mean, if they go far to the left, which they probably will, I'm already, you're already seeing that muds. I don't think I'll go far to the left.

Oh, well, people are. I think, sorry, Tara, I think there'll be a fight in the primary as to what the party will be. But I think right now. The whole Bernie, Liz Warren, AOC wing is going to say you're not being progressive enough. That's what they're already saying. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why we lost the upper Midwest. Right. Like we closed on democracy or whatever we did, which they care about. But we didn't close on. And Bernie put out a statement on this. The Democratic Party has forgot the.

This goes back to my Biden point, though, by the way. Joe Biden was the first president to walk a picket line. Joe Biden's name is scribbled all over those building projects, like when you see signs for them across the country. Like he did a lot for the middle class. He just didn't communicate any of it very well. But yeah, there's like a style.

this is the whole thing with the left versus the neolibs. It's style versus substance. Like the left will come out and say, we need to be more, get back to our working class populist roots. And then you'll have people like Josh Shapiro who are going to go to Iowa and like put on a flannel shirt and some boots and like pretend that they like understand middle America, even though he went to Georgetown law and he's from Philadelphia. Right. I was going to say, you must have a speech in like Sioux city or Cedar Rapids coming up. Yeah. Yeah.

So one big question I have, you know, we talked a bit about media earlier, is just like we saw what Trump won did to the media, the opposition press. Democracy dies in the darkness becomes the theme of The Washington Post. It's gone now. No, The Washington Post, that's a whole separate conversation. But, you know, ultimately...

it also became a situation where for the first four years of Trump, everything was a crisis. Everything was the worst thing ever. And I think that speaks to some of the issue people have, which is like the media told me that everything was the worst. And so you had a president who was impeached twice and people don't care. And the media is just like, Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. This one. How do we think the media, you know, as much as we all hate that expression, how do we think what lessons are to be learned here for the media and how they cover Trump two versus Trump one?

Yeah, I guess like the outrage machine from the media is just not something people trust anymore, right? To take every one of his lines and then do a cable news roundtable to dissect that and what it means. And it's probably just not going to work. I don't know. You're going to have to get back down to real reporting, frankly. Is that so crazy? Yeah.

Yeah, I think, by the way, everyone should go read our Taranized colleague, Dylan Byers, who wrote a really good piece about this very question for Puck. Like, is the resistance going to happen this time within the media? Like when Trump won in 2015, so 2016 rather, or when he was running in 2015, 2016, a lot of these media companies were,

CNN among them were still making money. Their audience was starting to pivot downward, but like still had larger audiences. Like now these places are losing money. They don't have audience. By the way, the Washington Post non-endorsement scandal is a really good microcosm of a lot of dynamics we were talking about here. So in the Trump era, a lot of left-leaning people, the right removed itself from the news ecosystem and

the left subscribed and get like gangbusters to the New York times and the Washington post and the Atlantic dies in darkness and the Atlantic, all these places. And we're standing up for journalism and they're going to tell the truth. Trusted media actually went up according to Gallup, I think in the first couple of years of Trump after going down for a few years and, you know, fast forward to today, uh,

The Washington Post a few weeks ago declines to endorse Donald Trump. I have a whole other rant about endorsements and why I don't think they should endorse candidates' newspapers, but...

Then you have this liberal reader base canceling their subscriptions, almost a quarter million subscriptions to the Washington Post, thereby removing the ability of what Tara is talking about for reporters to go out and do reporting and help us and the readers understand the country. And it's so self-defeating, the scolding, the smugness, the...

the arrogance of the left to yell at the media and yell at people who disagree with them, whether sometimes it's merited, sometimes it's not. And it's hurting journalists and it's hurting the Democratic Party and it's hurting the left. I was calling these people like the MAGA left over the summer. I mean, I was like, I've

July, I just remember on social media getting incoming in a way that I hadn't gotten. I'd gotten it from the right around like 2020 and January 6th, et cetera. And I was getting it from the left around the like questioning of Biden. And why aren't you focusing on Trump's lies? And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you people, but like there's an actual story developing here around the president of the United States. And so it's, it's fascinating. The thing that they're so opposed to is the same, some of the same, they're doing the same things as the right.

Oh, they're worse privately. They're really good at it, actually. They're really good at dividing and conquering newsrooms in ways that even the Democrat, the Republicans aren't. They're just way more savvier in in in managing the press. Like they know how to make you feel like you're lost in the wilderness. And they were able to, like, use access to pretty much hide Biden. Right. Right.

We if you question, you know, his mental acuity, if you question his fitness, you'll never get access to him. Everybody was fighting for access, only like Franklin Foyer and maybe one other person had any time. Maybe Bob Woodward sat down with them. They never gave access to The New York Times. Even Wall Street Journal did a very thorough piece on his health before the debate. And they started a whole campaign against The Wall Street Journal. Yeah.

Behind the scenes, the team would call up producers and complain about people who didn't... The party lines, you know, they... They were incredibly argumentative. Very difficult to work with. It's like...

They yeah, they're no different than like, OK, so Trump's calling you fake news up front. They're doing it behind the scenes in much more sophisticated kind of Washington ways. All right. So we look back, but I want to look ahead. Tara, I know you're totally immersed in the transition right now. What are the...

things you're most closely following as he selects his cabinet here that will give us a sense of what the first hundred days, what the new Trump term is going to look like and to what extent he can prevent the mistakes of his first attempt back in 2017. I guess the mistakes would be people who didn't agree with him on his policy, right? Also, just the chaos, right? The chaos of the Muslim ban and what unfolded there.

Yeah. And just like making sure that the people that he hires are ideologically in line with him, not just central casting. Although I do think that that will have a role in it, but I don't think it will be as big of a role in the sense that like people had to audition on television during the first season.

People have also spent a lot of time with Trump knowing that he would end up being a big political player again. You know, you've got like Bill Hagerty, who is the secretary, who was the ambassador to Japan, who's up for secretary of state. Rick Brunel was the former director of national intelligence. He's being considered for secretary of state.

got the AG job. I mean, that person has to know they can't be like Jeff Sessions. There's no recusals. There's no not following the orders no matter where they go, even if that means prosecuting Trump's enemies or anyone he chooses for whatever reason. You're going to have to be in charge of also the largest deportation in history, possibly pardoning all these January 6th rioters. It's like

kind of know what you're signing up for. Whereas I think there were a lot of question marks the first time around and whether Trump's really meant what he was saying, if you could take him at his word. And I think if anything, we've learned that you can, and trying to be the adult in the room to save the country is probably pretty futile. But I also think that there are a lot of big names on wall street and the banking industry that are

have a role inside of the administration and they might end up bumping up out some people who are lesser known, like perhaps Bob Lighthouser. Right. And maybe, you know, you might, I already heard that Gary Cohn wants to come back into the administration, right? He left and he kind of left in a way after tax reform, finishing the tax reform bill, but,

He made it very clear that he was unhappy about what happened at Charlottesville, right? Yeah. But I've already heard that, yeah, he wants to come back in. And I do think that even though Jamie Dimon and Steve Schwarzman wouldn't endorse Trump, I think if a big name on Wall Street like that came back, he would want to have them in his cabinet because of the prestige, because of the brand. Yeah.

And if there's anything we know about Trump is he loves to convert. Right. Well, and I was going to say, but these are serious people. And, you know, the big concern was that he would have a bunch of loyalists, no guardrails, et cetera. But some of the names that you state here are not, you know, these are serious people who know what they're doing. Right. They are serious people. So it depends on, you know, do they understand Trump?

It seems like they do and they think they can work within it and they're happy to carry out his tasks. I mean, at least for now, it's totally different thing when you get the job. Job always looks different from the outside. Right. But Hagerty has really formed a close relationship with Trump. He's been traveling around with him on his plane. John Polson, who's who may be up for treasury secretary, has raised money.

tons of money for Trump billions, like not a billion, obviously, but hundreds of millions of dollars. But he himself is a billionaire hedge fund manager and a very serious operator on wall street. I expect like a lot of people from big business to be filling out the administration, a lot of white men. Um, and you know,

The titans of industry. I think that's the new Trump administration rather than, say, the generals that he once had before. Like I could see even business people with business backgrounds being put in national security type roles. And so those are the big jobs right now. And Secretary of State, everyone's fighting for that.

And whoever doesn't get it will probably get national security advisor. And confirmation is not as big of a deal anymore because the Senate looks pretty healthy for the Republicans. It looks like 53 seats. I mean, they can even lose like a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski. And still so, I mean, even the sort of more moderate Republicans and he'll be able to push through some of his picks. Right. Any sense on what RFK is going to end up getting?

Are they still not sure about that? I mean, he wanted HHS, although, you know, weeks ago, my sources had told me they didn't think he was confirmable, but they also didn't expect a blowout in the Senate at that point. So maybe that means he has a chance to get the fluoride out of our water. A lot of leeway now for Trump with the majorities that he's earned there. Anyway, much more to discuss. Tara, thank you. And we'll be in touch.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta 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. See you again this week.