Sick, Sad World
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Welcome to this week's horse race. Biden soaring while the economy is tanking. What will this mean for the November election? We'll talk about that and more with The Cook Political Report's Amy Walter. Georgia is a key state for control of the House, Senate, and the White House, and we'll explore the Peach State's intricacies with Greg Blustein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We'll also talk Trump with National Review's Rich Lowry and look at Jeff Sessions' comeback attempt for the ad of the week.

The horses are at the starting gates. They're off!

Joining me on this week's horse race is one of the nation's most perspicacious political observers, Amy Walter, national editor at the Cook Political Report and host of her own show, Public Radio's Politics with Amy Walter on The Takeaway. Amy, welcome to the horse race. Well, thank you. I'm glad to finally make it on. Yeah, well, you know, you've been a traveling lady the last few months. He is an...

That's right. Pretty much everywhere. And now there's nowhere to travel. Yeah, so I guess you got your frequent flyer miles in early, unlike the rest of us. I guess. Well, we'll see. But yes, no, it's, yeah, everything is...

eerie, obviously. So here we are. Well, before we turn to, as one might say, the current unpleasantness, we've written probably the greatest resurrection since Lazarus with Joe Biden. And you were there. You got to watch the decline. You got to watch the rise. How do you explain it? How did he drive a silver stake through the socialist vampire's heart? Yeah.

Wow. There we go. Well, we'll note those are your words, not mine. Yes, we negotiated that I could say this on my podcast before. Exactly. It's your podcast. You can do whatever you want. I would put it like this. You know, the fun of doing...

Analysis after the fact is you can say, well, it was obvious all along. But one thing that all of us had noted all along was Biden's strength on the question of who do you think is best able to beat Donald Trump? Now, it declined immediately.

from where he was at a high when he got in the race at somewhere at 50%. And at times it went down to the high 30s. So it wasn't as if he had cornered the majority on the market of who's most electable. But no one was able to surpass him in that lane. No one else took more than

somewhere in the teens on the question of who's the most electable. And also, the other thing we all had noted throughout this primary, the number one issue for Democrats was not ideology. It wasn't personality. It wasn't even, you know, the race or sex of the candidate. It was

Who can prove they can beat Donald Trump? That was that's it. You tell me who can beat Donald Trump, said Democratic voters. I will vote for that person. I'm not going to be I'm going to vote with my, you know, my head, not my heart. And that looked like it was actually holding on as Biden continued, even though he was

slipping and sliding through the debates, and he wasn't raising much money, and his organization wasn't as crisp and clean and smooth as, say, the Pete Buttigieg or the Elizabeth Warren. He kept hanging on, in large part because of those two factors. But then Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada came, and it looked like, oh, wow, well, I guess his hold on this has slipped. But that's

Not exactly what happened. I think it was that voters, when given a choice to pick a candidate who was the most electable, couldn't decide whether ultimately they wanted to vote with their heart or their head. And so they did split. But at the end of the day, to me, what I think really turned this race around for Joe Biden was Nevada because he

Once we had two things happen. The first was that Bernie Sanders not only had won his second in a row and had an asterisk on Iowa, but he expanded his base. Right. He went from only getting 26 percent to getting almost half of the vote. And suddenly it looked like, oh, this thing's now for real.

Bernie Sanders can win this, especially if the non-Sanders vote keeps splitting. And I think it was at that moment where voters, not just in South Carolina, but kind of across the country, were hearing about this probability of a Sanders nomination. And it's pretty clear that that is...

not something that a majority of Democrats wanted. What they couldn't figure out is who was the best alternative. And when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar told them, you know what, this is what we got. This is our best alternative. Democratic voters were willing to go there. And I've argued that if this were a different president,

This were President Marco Rubio, President Jeb Bush, President Ted Cruz. I don't know. I don't know that you would have gotten the buy-in from voters or from –

Biden's opponents in the way you do with Donald Trump. I mean, he is such an incredibly unifying figure for Democrats and for Republicans, right? I mean, he is really good. We call him incredibly polarizing, but it's really the other piece of it is you could say he's really unifying. And for Democrats who see Donald Trump as an existential threat, they don't have time to fall in love with someone.

And they have to be willing to, they are saying, I'm willing to take somebody I'm not really that excited about over the prospect of losing this race.

Some people have compared this to the sudden resurrection of John Kerry in 2004. And I remember after the Iowa caucus and a little ways after there was either bumper stickers or just a meme floating around among Democrats, data dean married Kerry. That's right. Do you think that's what just happened here? Except that the difference in my mind was Bernie Sanders was never really –

as strong of a front runner as Howard Dean was, you know, like Howard Dean was atop the polls. As I remember for a pretty long time, both the national polls and Iowa versus what we saw going into Iowa was Biden continuing to lead in the national polls. So it was slipping a little bit to Sanders, but over the course of the,

The summer you saw the spike for Elizabeth Warren, you saw a spike for Pete Buttigieg, you know, so it was not as consistent. I think to me, you know, I don't know that there is another comparison, although that one is is about as good as you could get to what happened this time around. You know, there's also the question of is it like John McCain coming back? I mean, that was another campaign that looked.

And like it was never coming back. Right. The very strong front runner in 2007 who had to lay off his entire staff. He basically, you know, went to living off the land in New Hampshire and and came back to win that nomination in 2008.

But again, the forces that got those three candidates to where they are are very different. And it is remarkable to see Joe Biden without money, without infrastructure, pull off that kind of success.

I think it's going to cause a lot of political journalists and political analysts to look back at a presidential race in different terms. This isn't somebody who...

came from the outside on the outside corner and generate a huge momentum and excitement. We've seen that candidate before. This is a person who just kind of showed that in the right circumstances, money, organization, all the things that are usually signals of success don't have to matter that much. Right. When you, A, have the name, ID and brand identity of a Joe Biden. Yes.

And is that's important. And two, when 60 plus percent of voters have told told us from day one, our most important priority is beating Donald Trump. And you put those two things together. And yes, Joe Biden can do that. I don't know if a another candidate would have been able to.

to pull that off. But I do think what we were all expecting, and part of the reason that we saw Sanders would succeed wasn't because he had won over a majority of Democrats on ideology or on the issues or on him for that matter. It was that the vote would continue to get split up

between three or four other non-Bertie Sanders candidates, and he would put together a plurality that was going to be difficult to undermine at a convention. Yeah.

Yeah. I thought Biden could win South Carolina and wrote about that. And I didn't think he'd get as big of a margin as he did, but I thought he could win and that that would keep him in the race. I never in my wildest imagination thought that Buttigieg and Klobuchar would get out of the race. Correct. And endorse him in the span of 48 hours, especially 48 hours. Exactly. Right before. I mean, to do it that night. Yeah.

you know, before the Super Tuesday. Remarkable. And especially with Klobuchar having her home state where she was still leading in the poll. I've never seen candidates...

Either that's self-aware or that's selfless, and it's probably a little bit of a mixture of both. I agree. Literally, I've been watching this for 50 years, and I've never seen anything like it. I absolutely agree. Because you know what? Everyone could have said, post-South Carolina, well, you know, those other candidates could have said, you know what? That's fine, Joe Biden. Yeah, you did well in South Carolina, but you know what?

You got to kind of prove yourself in these other states. I'm not getting out. Yeah. Right. And there was the fact that African-Americans are almost 60 percent of the vote in South Carolina. That was only going to replicate itself in one or two other states. It would have been entirely rational for these candidates to say, let's go to a contested convention. That's right. That's right. Yep. Yep.

But here we are. So if Biden basically won because he's not Sanders and not Trump, that means that he still hasn't made the sale of, yes, Biden. What are his challenges in doing that? Or does he not need to? I mean, can he be not Trump for the next eight months and be President? Well, that's exactly right. I mean, to me, for Democrats...

Their best case scenario has always been make this a referendum on Donald Trump, period. Now, that is what Democrats did in 2018, which, of course, is easy to do in a midterm election. It's harder to do in presidential, of course. So you can't just say I'm not Donald Trump.

You obviously have to have something else to say who I am and what I'm going to do. But Donald Trump does make that easier. Yes. By saying all you have to say is I will do the opposite of what he's doing. You want to know who would abide in presidency is going to look like? Not that. And to keep the focus, it keeps the focus on Trump.

all the time versus the focus on socialism, Medicare for all, right? All of those things that obviously would have been the topic of conversation with a Bernie Sanders. And so he just essentially becomes, yes, the not Trump and a safe place for ambivalent voters to go. Those who say, I don't really like Trump,

but I sure don't want us to, you know, go into socialist land. Now we're in a very different situation now because pre this last couple of weeks, the conversation was, okay, the, the cross pressured voter in 2020 will be the, the economy's doing well, but I don't like Trump personally. Right. Right. Who, how do I make this choice? And, and,

And now that feels like we're not even going to be – who knows where we're going to be in three weeks nonetheless in six months, especially with this economy and what a month of not working is going to do.

to individuals and institutions. But I do think that ultimately it's still this choice between, do you want to do things the way Trump does them? Do you want to keep with this in terms of the way he deals with the crisis, his leadership style? You know, that is on display now. Once again, it's not about Biden right now. It's about Trump. And, you know,

Here we are. You know, if I were going to make the case for Trump, which I'll do right now, I would look at this and say, wow, what a what a terrible thing for America. But what a golden opportunity for Trump.

that the criticism for four years has been, yes, things are coming through, and yes, he's uncouth, but wait until the bleep hits the fan. Then his deficiency will become obvious. Right. And we've started to see a lot of that argument being made now, but even some people have noticed who don't like him, have noticed a change in the last 72 hours.

The case for Trump is he's able to rein it in for the next two months, and we're sitting here on June 15th. And it's a massive dip, but we are coming back, and he hasn't, for all of his obvious deficiencies, put his foot in it. He was able to hold himself in when it mattered most. Does that give him a chance to change some people's minds, or is that like...

You know, I will talk to Trump partisans a lot and Trump partisans always give me basically fantasy scenarios. Oh, he's going to get 35 percent of the black vote. Oh, there are 30 million nonvoters. And it's like, yes. And there are pink unicorns on top of my cupcakes. Is this one of those fantasies or is there a chance that this could be so searing?

And he could be so non-destructive that this is what turns it back into a normal race and not a get this man out of the White House race. I know. Isn't that it's a it's a fascinating question because, again, we have no parallel to Donald Trump. And if you think about where we were.

Let's say going into 9-11 and you think, well, we're pretty polarized that we had a first term president who had, oh, we can say sort of a nontraditional path to the White House. There was a legitimacy question. There was a big legitimacy question. But if you look at his approval rating on the first day in office, he was at 57 percent.

This president has never gotten 50 percent. And I think, you know, the rally around the flag idea becomes very difficult with a president like this who has made.

polarization. I mean, he didn't invent polarization, but he has really leaned into it. It is not a bug of the system. It is his operating mentality. And so it makes it hard to move those partisans. But to your point, I think the next question isn't, well, is he suddenly going to be like George W. Bush and have an 85% approval rating? No. But

Could it be enough to move those independent voters who were saying, yeah, the economy is doing OK. I don't like him as a person. Biden might be better as a right. Does it move those people on the margins? You know, this is really more of a margin call. It moves Trump from a 40. To your point, is he at 40?

42% going into the election or is he at 47% going into the election or 48%, right? And that's, that to me, I just do not see him breaking out of that range. Now, you're right. It's easier to see what the downsides could be, the number of deaths, the recession, et cetera. I also agree with you that, look, for a lot of people, this is not, you know,

Again, if you are a Trump hater or a Trump partisan, it doesn't really matter what is really going on in the real world. Exactly. You're going to have your own views. But look, this is not a – this is the first crisis not of his own making. Right. Right. And this, to me, feels also a lot different from, say, the financial crisis where you could look at the quote-unquote system and say, oh my gosh, this was created by Trump.

Fill in the blanks about the banks and the mortgage system and all of the sort of shenanigans around that. And this is very different. So will there be something of a cushion? And this is where, again, Trump's style really hurts him. I remember sitting in focus groups during the 2012 election.

And, you know, it was in that election where the Romney folks would tell you every single day, look, it's about the economy. People are not happy with the economy. They don't think the president has done a particularly good job with it. Romney's a businessman. They're going to give him, you know, credit for that. They're looking for that sort of economic acumen to get us to the next to the next level. And Obama's not up to it. He was never prepared for this office in the first place.

But you would sit in these focus groups and and voters would definitely say, yeah, I mean, I don't know that I that Obama's doing the best job. But, you know, this really wasn't his fault. You know, he's a good guy. Right. Oh, he's such a nice guy. I love his wife. And, you know, I mean, like people would just randomly bring up things about him that they actually liked. And when you compared his job approval rating, his favorable rating, they looked a lot better than his handling of the economy rating.

And if I remember correctly, his personal ratings were usually higher than his favorability ratings as well. Yeah, exactly. So he had this sort of well of goodwill that was able to transcend the other stuff. So it allowed people to give him, kind of give him the benefit of the doubt. Like, he probably could be doing better on the economy. I don't love that he went to do the health care thing, but...

It's not really his fault that the economy is this bad. Even though you, right, we can all have this intellectual, but we're not allowed to have intellectual arguments anymore. You could have an intellectual argument that, look, this virus is not a fault of his. So how he's responding to it, let's just look at that and try to be rational about it and grade him on that scale. Yes.

we would be having a very different conversation.

that's not where we are um we are in this moment in time where he's going to be graded based on this these very deep and very real perceptions of who he is as a person and they are more negative than positive and deeply negative right i mean when you look at his strong disapproval ratings they've always been one and a half or more times larger than his strong approval ratings and

That to me is where, regardless of what happens, it's hard to see that he gets this big rally around the president bump.

But just to close out the segment, if he gets up to 47 or 48 percent job approval rating, I have to say he's at minimum a coin flip and maybe a slight favor to win the Electoral College. So, you know, that's right. He doesn't need to be. I agree with you that he doesn't need to be at 55 percent to win this election or even 50 or even 50. Yeah. Yeah.

you know, you look at 48% and you say, well, in Wisconsin, that's probably 50. Yep. Right. And that's probably 50 in North Carolina and 50 in Florida. And even 50 in Arizona. Yeah. Arizona was almost 50% according to the exit poll in 2018. Right. So, you know, it takes, that's, that's right. Yeah.

And and then you get into, you know, every other factor here, which is not just how well the economy and Americans, just the public health issue. But how do you conduct a campaign at this moment is also a big question mark.

Well, to be continued, because I think everyone's sailing in uncharted seas. Well, Amy, I'd love to have you back in a couple of months as this has settled and you are able to, well, we hope it's settled. If it's not settled. We'll definitely have more data points to look toward. And to your point that you made earlier, Amy,

to really be able to say, okay, look, Americans have now had two months to look at this president handling a crisis and here's how they see it. You know, right now this is the, the, the early, the only polls we have, the ones that have come out last week or so suggest that it's not really moving people. They are pretty well settled into their, into their silos, but it is potentially again,

Potentially the kind of thing that can move perceptions of the president, but also of what has been just a really rosy optimism about the economy. Yeah. And so in times of crisis, what kind of candidate?

And I would argue Biden really helps in that sense. Yeah. Now, thinking back to the 1984 campaign, then New York Governor Mario Cuomo briefly got in trouble for saying that the Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale, was as exciting as Palenta was.

I mean, I like polenta if you put cheese in it. Well, Biden, the way Cuomo dug himself out of it was by saying he meant polenta was a substance. It was substantive. It was nutritious. Yeah.

But I've thought for a long time that the way to beat Trump was basically to run Palenta, somebody, something that was completely non-offensive and the comfort food of politics. And it's the comfort food. And you just put it all make it all about him. And 2018, those candidates who succeeded made it exactly that.

Well, we'll see how Joe Biden and his erstwhile remains-to-be-selected female running mate do at this task. Right. Well, Amy, thank you for joining me on The Horse Race. Joining me this week on Trump Talk is Rich Lowry, editor of National Review and author of a wonderful book, The Case for Nationalism. Rich, welcome to The Horse Race.

Hey, Henry. Thanks for having me. Well, Donald Trump usually has no problem generating headlines all by his little lonesome, but something else has been generating headlines for him. And maybe for the first time since he entered politics, he's only partially in control of the news cycle as he reacts, as we all do, to the coronavirus pandemic. What are the pluses and what are the minuses of how he's been reacting so far?

Well, I think the early reaction was pretty woeful. There was a lot of denial, a resort to dismissive cliches. If this response goes badly, we have 15 cases and we're going to go to zero, we'll be hung around his neck like mission accomplished.

all the way to November. But, uh, the last couple of days, well, really since his Oval Office address, which, uh, I mean, time is so distorted now, which is, is a, I guess, seven days ago already, although it also feels as though it's from another era. Um, he began to adapt a more sober tone and now, uh, almost seems to enjoy, as you kind of think you would naturally think he would, uh,

invoking these emergency powers

acting. Today it was invoking powers to get manufacturers to kind of on a wartime footing to produce protective gear. So I think he's definitely improved and gotten better. But ultimately, it doesn't matter what his tone is. It doesn't matter what he says.

It's whether people think that the government has responded appropriately to this, effectively to this, and manages to wrestle it to the ground without too many deaths or suffering, although obviously one excess death is too many, and without wanton destruction to the economy. The sort we're going to see over the next two months here, but hopefully won't have to be sustained.

That's a huge if, that we're talking about not just the United States shutting down, basically shutting down whole segments of the economy, but virtually the entire developed world doing the same and doing it all at the same time. The confidence that we'll suddenly be able to start the engine up after turning it off. I mean, the economy isn't a car at a stoplight.

Are you worried that we're going to not overreact because I don't think we're overreacting, but are you worried that it's not going to be so easy or is what you're hearing is that, yeah, we're going to keep enough liquidity flowing through the system that it's not going to be starting a dead engine. It's going to be more revving up a low idling one.

Well, I think people will be shocked. I was talking to a former Trump economic guy just this morning. He was saying his expectation is minus $2 million of 2 million jobs, job report this month on minus 2 million next month and a quarterly GDP that's down 10%, 10%.

And those numbers are going to be like a cold bath thrown into our faces and just aren't sustainable. I mean, we can't do this till September. And we haven't seen, I can't remember when we've seen just so much economic activity vaporize. I mean, before our eyes, the only comparison I think is probably the Great Depression. I mean, the financial crisis, something's ground to a halt, but

not like this. So the nightmare scenario is we do this and it doesn't work and our hospital is still overwhelmed and the virus is still going and we can't just stay shut down. And what do you do then? So hopefully this is, as a cliche goes, I'm kind of already sick of hearing it. What we've done now affects the course of the virus and bends the curve. We get a little relief

in the summer from some seasonality with this virus. And then by the fall, hopefully, you know, I don't think you have a vaccine because the FDA rightfully is really, you

It's not going to cut any corners on something you're going to give a bunch, you know, millions and millions of healthy people. But hopefully we can see some treatments where I think, you know, the rules are a little looser because you're dealing with people who are desperately ill already. And if you can get some treatments that take some of the edge off, you know, hospitalizations aren't as long, the fatality rate for vulnerable people isn't as high, you know, then that could relieve a lot of pressure. But Henry, it kind of reminds me of the, you

You know, we had 20 years of, you know, really good conditions in this country in the 80s and the 90s. Then we had the financial crisis. And you just realize that things

Things can go wrong and you can make wrong choices with devastating consequences. And public policy kind of mattered in a way it felt as though it hadn't in a while because it was impossible to mess things up because things were so benign. And I think we're in one of those periods again that's frightening.

Now, typically, when things get bad and they're really bad, people turn against the party in power. Certainly, that's what happened after the Great Depression, although people in 1930 did basically reelect a Republican Congress very narrowly. Deaths and retirements quickly turned it into a narrow Democratic majority. But after the first year, they were still willing to give Herbert Hoover's party a shot to turn it around.

We're only going to have eight months between now and November. What are the looking at this? What's the worst case scenario for Donald Trump and the Republicans? But also, what's the best case scenario? Well, the worst case scenario is some version of what we were just discussing. It goes it goes poorly. Even even if in the nightmare scenario where the virus keeps on going and the

and we feel as though we have to continue on this sort of lockdown, it doesn't matter whether that's Trump's fault or not. I mean, he's going to be blamed and he's a goner. The best case is that Trump

You know, by July, let's say cases are going down. You get a really robust bounce back in economic activity, which you kind of expect since so much of this is just artificial, right? I mean, we canceled baseball season. We can start it again. You know, we stopped going to our offices and patronizing restaurants. We can do that again, you know, tomorrow if we want. So you have a big bounce back.

And people feel that Trump, with all the downsides and zaniness, actually, when it mattered most, when there's a crisis that wasn't of his making, that wasn't political in nature, that was a real threat to the country, that he was up for it. If that happens, in sheer political terms, he could benefit from this. Well, that's actually the undercurrent of the attacks on the president for the last four years.

has been ultimately this guy's not up to the job, that someday he's going to be tested and his character flaws are going to hurt us bad. Well, we're there. And if he does pull through, whether it's his virtues or the virtues of those around him, doesn't that tend to undercut the most important attack that the anti-Trump and never-Trump forces have been levying for the last four years?

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't, it won't excuse a lot of the things he's said and done, which I think have been unnecessarily divisive and self-defeating for his own purposes. Because before we were here, you know, we kind of had a morning again in America economy with the president with kind of like recession level approval ratings. And some significant portion of that delta was just the way he conducted himself. But, you know, I tend to be

fairly optimistic here. I do think Yvonne Levin of the American Enterprise Institute has a piece in the new issue of National Review on how what we're probably going to see here is like a characteristic American reaction to a crisis, which is the beginning. We tend to bumble around and stumble around, whether it's been in wars or other major challenges. And then we just bring massive resources

to bear, which I think you'll begin to see with the testing really coming online, which you'll begin to see hopefully with the production of protective gears and ventilators and technological innovation, which is people are working that angle as we speak. And we'll get a handle on this and we'll wrestle it to the ground. And even though the president's initial instincts were bad

His initial statements were bad. It wasn't his fault, you know, the testing debacle of the CDC, but he certainly wasn't on top of it the way you would have wanted and kind of riding herd on the bureaucracy. But he very well maybe just kind of carried along by the ship of state here, you know, and political circumstances and sort of stared straight and will end up

a leading and effective effort. So that doesn't mean he doesn't have character flaws. He does. But it could mean that they they're they're not capable of overcoming overwhelming all these other forces that that push in the right direction. Well, for the country's sake, the positive outcome is a outcome devoutly to be wished.

You're the author of a book about nationalism, though, and ultimately this virus originated in a place outside the United States and in a place that increasingly has become clear is the American system's gravest challenger, and that's communist China.

Let's assume for the moment that we have something of a positive outcome. And maybe it's not July and maybe it's not Donald Trump in the White House, but that we're not flat on our back when the new president comes in. How does a prudent nationalist respond to what happened with Revirus and also with the other challenges coming from China?

STEPHAN KINSELLA Yeah, well, one, in this crisis, basically everyone has been a nationalist, right? Even the cosmopolitans at the EU have closed the EU's borders, even countries within the EU led by folks like Angela Merkel, who famously opened borders during the refugee crisis in

several years ago, even they've imposed border restrictions, which they're not supposed to under the EU rules without notifying other countries. So this has just brought home how it's really important to be able to control your border from threats abroad and how the foremost imperative of any government has to be protecting its own people and their interests. Now, China, you know, there's been a lot of talk of kind of punishing China

for this. I'm not sure what that would look like. I mean, certainly they bear massive responsibility. They were hugely behind the curve in a way that reflected the dictatorial nature of their government. You know, they're punishing doctors and making them sign self-confessions for trying to sound the alarm over this. But I'm not sure what specific measures you take in reaction to this that you wouldn't take

anyway, if you have a broader view that China is our geopolitical nemesis and that's going to be a generational challenge.

So that's the way I look at it. Maybe this has been an eye-opener, but we already should have been aware of the challenge that China represents. Well, you're reminding me of the statement that there are no atheists in foxholes, and what you're telling me is that there are no globalists in pandemics. Right, exactly. Right.

Well, yeah, I'm just waiting for Donald Trump to offer or Joe Biden to offer in the first State of the Union address massive tax breaks for companies to move their supply chain back within the USMCA safety zone. And let's just hit Chinese produced goods with a 100 percent tariff so they can reimburse the American taxpayer.

One could almost imagine those sorts of things being said after this, whereas they would have been unthinkable even two months ago. Yeah, those are good points.

So last word here. What does Trump need to do to make the most of this situation? You put yourself in the shoes of the president. Sons personally, his character flaws, but understanding that he's got them. What what does the president need to understand about himself in order to manage this? Or is that even something that we should remotely hope is possible?

Well, he's – as we could have said at any time over the last three and a half years over anything, even the little fake crises and controversies that pale in comparison to this, it's not about him first and most importantly. This is a larger national challenge. And

And, you know, he has to he has to work it. You know, he has to be really down in the weeds on how many test kits are going out and to what parts of the country are they going and what's happening with them. And because if we're not going to stay locked down forever, which we're not, we need to be testing more widely and pursuing more.

rapid isolation of people who test positive and building up surge capacity at hospitals. South Korea, which is the biggest success story worldwide in this crisis so far, has done social distancing. People have been encouraged to work from home and things of that nature, but hasn't done anything

of the severity, say, of the Wuhan lockdown or even what Bill de Blasio is talking about doing in New York City, a shelter-in-place order or what we see in the San Francisco area. And that's because they've been so technologically proficient with the testing and with the tracking of people who have it. So ideally, that would be that sort of social control, even though it's invasive at the kind of individual level,

would be much better than the social control we have now, which is just a blunder of us shut down of our entire society. But he just needs to be focused on this crisis single-mindedly because there's no, if it goes badly,

There's no talking his way out of it. And if it goes really well, there's nothing he can say that can mess it up. So the results are really going to speak for themselves, and he has to be fully aware of that. Well, from your lips to God's ears, Rich. Thank you for taking the time and joining me to talk all things Trump on The Horse Race. Thanks so much, Henry.

We turn down south for this week's ad of the week to the Alabama Republican runoff for the U.S. Senate. Democrats captured this seat in a shocker in 2017 when Republicans nominated Judge Roy Moore, a man whose lack of articulateness and past missteps combined with his religious fundamentalism to cause even Alabama voters in the deep red state to reject him in favor of Democrat Doug Jones.

The candidates here are former Attorney General and former U.S. Senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions, and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville. You'd think that it would take a lot for an outsider to convince Alabama GOPers to reject a man who they once respected and admired and who held Alabama politics in the palm of his hand. This ad is designed to do just that. Let's listen.

You can't fake it. You're either strong or you're not. And Jeff Sessions, he's not. He wasn't man enough to stand with President Trump when things got tough, and now he's telling lies about me to cover it all up. It's time for these weak politicians to go. I'm very proud to be endorsed by President Trump. I'm running to help him drain the swamp and build the wall. I'm Tommy Tuberville, and I approve this message because I won't back down.

Okay, that's one tough ad. It's not just tough in the words it's using. It's tough in the pictures it's using. Tuberville is standing in a gym with lots of people lifting weights all around him. He's obviously quite fit and dressed in a short-sleeved shirt. And the first thing you see on screen as he talks is Coach Tuberville.

Tubberville, reminding people, if they didn't know it already, that this guy's a football coach. And in Alabama, that's something that you respect.

The U.S. flag is in the background for the entirety of the ad, providing a not-so-subtle reminder of patriotism as he starts to launch into former incumbent Jeff Sessions. President Trump had tweeted against Jeff Sessions for years about his recusal in the Russia Mueller investigation. But he held his fire in the initial race when Sessions was competing against U.S. Representative Bradley Moore

Judge Roy Moore and Coach Tuberville to see who would make it to the runoff. But once the runoff was in play, Trump couldn't keep his fingers off of Twitter any longer, and he endorsed Coach Tuberville in no uncertain terms on Twitter. Within 48 hours, this ad was out. And guess what it does? It highlights the endorsement by President Trump.

In fact, as he's highlighting that endorsement, the words endorsed by President Trump appear on screen and hold on screen for the remainder of the ad. Again, this is not rocket science and it's not subtle. It's knocking you over the head. If you like Trump, you like Tuberville. If you don't like Trump, then maybe you should vote for Jeff Sessions. But what does that make you? Well, according to the ad, it makes you and Sessions weak.

The whole point here is that Donald Trump is a strong leader for the values that Alabama Republicans hold dear. Tommy Tuberville shares that energy and strength. Jeff Sessions doesn't.

Doesn't. And in fact, the visual supports that. When he calls Sessions weak, suddenly a picture of Sessions in black and white looking forlorn appears, and the word weak comes across his chest. And just in case you couldn't figure it out, weak is in the color yellow. Yes, they're calling Jeff Sessions, former Attorney General of the United States, yellow. Polls show Tuberville pulling ahead in this race.

winner-take-all runoff. And it looked before this week that Tuberville would take out Sessions in the March 31st runoff. But because of the virus, that runoff has now been postponed to a date in the future.

I don't know whether that means that Sessions is going to drop out and show that he's weak beforehand or if it gives him time to gain some more money and fight back. But Tuberville has come out of the gates fighting, and he's talking about a message that Republicans have been using all year long to great effect.

If you like Trump, you like me. And because of what Sessions is as attorney general, he even gets to point at something that people who like Trump don't like about Sessions. It's going to be hard for Sessions to recover from an ad like this. And that's why it's this week's Ad of the Week. This week's State of Play takes a gander down south to the Peach State, Georgia, where even though it's postponed its

scheduled March 24th primary, it's going to be one of the key states to look at in the fall for control of the House, the Senate, and perhaps even the White House. Joining me to talk all things Georgia is the political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Greg Blustein. Greg, welcome to The Horse Race. Thanks for having me.

Well, Georgia has been thought of as a deep red state now for almost 20 years. But in 2016, the Atlanta suburbs had some of the sharpest swings against the Republican nominee of any place in the country. And in 2018, all the chickens came home to roost as Republicans lost

bundle of seats in the Atlanta suburbs in the state house and a couple in the state senate lost one house seat, almost lost the governor's race, almost lost another U.S. house seat. Are these trends still going on? And how do you see them playing out in 2020?

Battleground Georgia. The biggest cues I get are from state Republicans, including U.S. Senator David Perdue and the head of the Republican Party of Georgia, David Schaefer, who both say that 2018 was a giant wake-up call and that Georgia is indeed a battleground state. So, you know, we used to hear from Republicans all the time who said, oh, don't buy that line of talk, don't buy it. But now they're saying that Georgia is as competitive as ever, and the numbers bear that out.

You know, you had Nathan Deal win by a huge margin in 2014. You had in 2016, President Trump win by five points. And in 2018, Governor Kemp winning by less than a point and a half. So it's getting narrow and narrow here. And there is a deeper bench of Democratic candidates

running for office than we've seen in a long time. We're used to sort of uncontested or lightly contested Democratic primaries here. Now there's all-out battles to compete against Republicans here. Well, one of the things that stands out to me is that in a

cycle that has Republicans on the defensive for the U.S. Senate. You have two U.S. Senate seats up, the normally scheduled one and a special election, one with David Perdue running for his first reelection, and the other, a newly appointed senator, Kelly Loeffler, a political novice, but also a multimillionaire on her own right who comes from, guess what, the Atlanta suburbs, who nevertheless doesn't have a straight path to the Republican nomination.

handicap these two Senate races for us. Yeah, let's talk about the Kelly-Leffler race first, because it is a wild, volatile free-for-all. The way Georgia's rules are set up, there's no primary. So this is a November election where she and 20 other candidates will all share the same ballot.

That means this race is almost certainly headed to a January 2021 runoff where, who knows, but the state of, you know, the control of the U.S. Senate could be up in the air or at the very least it could be seen as a referendum on whatever happened in the presidential election. She's facing not only Republican Doug Collins,

who has his own deep base of support. He's a Gainesville congressman, four-term congressman, who felt like he should have been the one appointed to this open seat by Governor Brian Kemp. But she's also facing a range of Democrats headed by Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is the pastor of Atlanta's famous Ebenezer Baptist Church. That is the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr. So that race is going to be, it already has been just rampant.

all sorts of wildness, lots of interesting shots from candidates from all sides of the aisle. You've got Doug Collins just taking, just ripping Kelly Loeffler every chance he gets. He's trying to paint her as an out-of-touch, rich woman

Rhino conservative who backed Mitt Romney but didn't donate to President Trump. And meanwhile, she has avoided taking any direct shots at him, but she doesn't have to because the NRSC and all

A whole range of other allies have been doing it for her, calling him a faux conservative, saying that he's willing to risk party unity and the Republican Party's chance at keeping the seat for his own selfish interests. So that race is already getting rough and tumble. There's going to be a lot of voter confusion because the second race, the race that's featuring David Perdue running for his second term—

That does have a traditional primary in May. And voters are already constantly emailing me saying, hey, how do I vote for, you know, how do I vote for these races? Why isn't John Ossoff on this ballot or that ballot? That's because there's a lot of voter confusion. That race pits three leading Democrats, but there's a number of other Democrats in that race against David Perdue, who did not draw a Republican challenger. And those Democrats are John Ossoff, who ran and lost the 2017 epic race

U.S. House race that was seen as a referendum on President Trump in the suburbs. It was a $60 million race. And there's two other candidates in there, too, who are giving him a run for his money. Sarah Riggs Amico was the runner up in the 2018 lieutenant governor's race. So she ran a statewide campaign and has a lot of name recognition. And Teresa Tomlinson is a two-term mayor of the West Georgia city of Columbus. So both them are also vying to compete against

David Perdue. It looks like that race might go to a runoff as well. Wow. Well, the African-American primary electorate for the Democratic Party is heavily African, or the Georgia Democratic primary electorate is heavily African-American. With respect to this primary, do any of those candidates start with a strong base in the African-American community? It's a great question because all three of those leading candidates are white Democrats, which

Years ago, even African-American leaders would have batted an eye, but in this era of Georgia politics, after Stacey Abrams became so close to becoming Georgia's first African-American governor and one of the first –

black female governors in the nation, a lot of people kind of raised a lot of eyebrows that no prominent black leaders were stepping up to run for this race. Now, they have Reverend Warnock as African-American running in the other Senate race. So there will be likely an African-American at the top of the ticket from Georgia in the other race. But in this one,

It is an all out battle to attract African-American voters, because, as you mentioned, they make up the bulk, the backbone of the Georgia Democratic electorate. And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution came out with a poll.

A few days ago, they showed Ossoff is leading the field with about 31 percent of the vote. He's also leading among black voters. But 42 percent of black voters, by far the plurality, are still undecided. So it really shows to me that this race is completely up for grabs. It's still wide open. Ossoff's camp might collapse.

might disagree with that because he is doubling his closest competitor. Theresa Tomlinson and Amico both have about 15% of the vote. But still, when you're in this stage of the race two months out and there's still 40%, 42% of African-Americans are undecided, but 40% of the overall electorate is undecided, then it shows you that any strong move

any strong marketing push, whatever it might take, could put another candidate right in the mix with John Ossoff. Yeah, it sounds to me like Ossoff is writing name ID from his 40 million plus of television advertisements from three years ago in the Atlanta media market.

Yeah, in interviews with voters, they kind of said the same thing. A lot of Metro Atlanta voters, you couldn't avoid those ads. Every time you turn your car on, your car radio on, every time you turn your TV on, you would see either an anti-Ossoff ad or a pro-Ossoff ad from that 2017 race. So it has a tremendous lingering effect. Really, it also helped Amiko because Amiko was sort of in the shadow of Stacey Abrams in 2018. So she got a lot of residual effect.

Her name recognition is fairly high out there too still. So to me, one of the surprising parts of our poll is that she was neck and neck with Teresa Tomlinson, even though Teresa Tomlinson has more endorsements and she's had more events and that kind of thing than Sarah Riggs Miko. Name rec matters.

Well, one of the things that I think Georgia Democrats are acutely concerned about is that the general election coalition for them to win is combination of traditional Democrats, large turnout among African-Americans, and getting those moderate Republican people who loved Mitt Romney and Nathan Deal but disliked Donald Trump to cast ballots for traditional Democrats.

How do they think they are going to be able to do that? Or do they think that like in 2018, the focus on Donald Trump is all they need?

Yeah, and that helped a lot, right? They're either moderate Republicans or, in Georgia, a lot of them call themselves independents, but they end up voting overwhelmingly Republicans. Nathan Deal won in 2010 and 2014 on the backs of those voters that by 60% voted for him over his Democratic competitors. 2018, we started to see that shift. Even though Stacey Abrams did not make her campaign about President Trump,

I think it still helped her a tremendous amount. Also, issues that Democrats used to run away from because they thought that it would alienate the electorate and especially alienate the moderate suburban voters didn't seem to have that effect this year. You know, that year, I should say. Moderate voters didn't care that she called for gun control.

They weren't concerned to a great degree that she owed $50,000 in taxes to the IRS. Things like that that you could say in 2010 or 2012 would have sunk a campaign didn't. I mean, look, in 2014, the gubernatorial nominee, Jason Carter, President Jimmy Carter's grandson, called himself an NRA Democrat.

And it wasn't some outlandish move. He had to in order to in order to have any chance of winning. That shows you how quickly Georgia's policies, Georgia's electorate has shifted because in 2018, you couldn't call yourself an inter-democrat and think about having any sort of support in a statewide election. So the issue shifted in Stacey Abrams favor to a lot of those moderate Democrats. But at the same time,

A lot of rural Georgia, these counties where Trump won 60, 70 percent of the vote, Kemp ended up outdoing him at some of these counties, winning 80 or 90 percent of the vote even, an astronomical figure. So those are also more sparsely populated. Republicans can't rely on those counties in the long term because they're just not growing as fast as the metro Atlanta suburbs. But for now, that formula has worked for Republicans.

Well, let's turn our attention to the U.S. House. John Ossoff didn't win that race in Georgia 6th, but the woman who beat him, Karen Handel, did to a woman named Lucy McBath, and it looks like they are coming back for a rematch. And then you've got the neighboring seat, Georgia 7, that was extremely close, and the incumbent, Rob Woodall, is stepping down, and there's a multi-way Republican primary to try and hold that seat.

Walk my listeners through both of those races and what's at play here. They're both suburban Atlanta seats, by the way. Yeah, these are both North Metro Atlanta suburban seats. The 6th District covers basically the northern, kind of the northern little arc of Metro Atlanta. It's very fluent, very well educated. That was where Ossoff came within four points of becoming the first Democratic representative of that district since 1910.

Newt Gingrich's days. Newt Gingrich used to represent the district. So did Tom Price and so did Johnny Isakson. So that, and Tom Price in 2016 won that seat by 20 plus points. So that's how quickly it swung. It swung from a 20 plus point report

Republican victor to a four-point Republican win with Karen Handel to a very narrow Democratic win in 2018 when Lucy McMath, a former flight attendant who has also emerged as one of the nation's foremost gun control advocates, died.

after her teenage son died in a violent shooting, she wins the seat. That was kind of the crown jewel of Democratic Georgia's gains in 2018. As close as Stacey Abrams got, she didn't win, but Lucy McBath did. So that was sort of the biggest prize that Democrats won in 2018.

Now, Karen Handel is back for a rematch. She thinks that with President Trump on the ballot, it will energize a lot of those conservatives who might have stayed home in 2018 doing a midterm. At the same time,

I'm losing. McBath is betting that her stances, her position on not just gun control, but also the economy, minimum wage, a whole range of issues will help get her base back to the polls and end up overwhelming Karen Handel's comeback attempt next door in the 7th District.

This was the home of the tightest U.S. House race in all of 2018. It was a very, very narrow victory for Rob Woodall over Carolyn Bordeaux, a policy, public policy professor and kind of a policy wonk. He decided...

not to run again. He kind of saw that it was a very, very close race and decided to spend more time with his with his loved ones. There is a there are a range of Republicans running to face him again. And Carolyn Bordeaux is also in the race again. But this time she faces a lot of well-known Democrats, too, who say that if she couldn't do it the first time, that she shouldn't be the one to run a second time. So some of these have some of these are state lawmakers or activists.

same thing on the Republican side. You're seeing kind of the same trends playing out all throughout the nation. The Republicans are running towards Trump. Democrats are running as far as they can away from each other. So it's a very polarized field. It's not your traditional Georgia race where Democrats try to avoid

whoever's at the top of the ticket. In Georgia, you see in presidential elections, a lot of times Democrats didn't want to talk about George W. Bush, didn't want to insult whoever, or didn't want to run close to Barack Obama. And now they can't stop

Talking about how bad President Trump is to them. So that's kind of the defining characteristic of the 7th District race. And it's a muddle. You've just got you've got more than a dozen candidates who are lined up to run. And yet again, another runoff in the making. So July is going to be a very busy month for us, whether or not we have conventions because of so many runoffs. Wow.

I will definitely be keeping my eye on Georgia, and so I hope will my listeners. And, Greg, I'd love to have you back closer to those runoffs, assuming that, as we expect, many of them happen, to walk everyone through what's happened in the meantime. But thank you for joining me on the horse race. Glad to help. Anytime. ♪

That's it for this week's Horse Race. Next week, we'll speak with Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Case for Trump, about how the president is handling the coronavirus crisis. And we'll also talk with Inside Elections' Nathan Gonzalez about the state of play for the control of the United States Senate. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll be seeing you in the Winner's Circle. ♪