TIM ALBERTA: Obviously, we care about the health implications of Covid-19, and we care about the economic implications. But we’re all in the political business. Jeff, why don’t you start: What do you think is the most immediate political implication that Covid-19 will have on the election?
JEFF ROE: I think the best thing that’s happened for Trump is that there’s going to be an evolution here as people slowly migrate from the health crisis to the economic crisis. In a survey this morning, 50 percent of Republicans now view this more through an economic lens than a health care lens. Independents are like 35–55, they’re behind, they care more about the health than the economics. And the Democrats are the last; they care about 70 percent health; 20 percent economics.
But as this clears, and as the health crisis subsides and this becomes an economic crisis, it’s a perfect storm for Trump, because now the central question of the campaign will be: Who can lead us back? Who can rebuild the economy? Before this, about 71 percent of the people said that the economy was great; a stunning 61 percent gave him credit. Even if you hated the guy building your house, your general contractor, but you lived in the house, you loved the house, and you had great experiences in the house, but then it burned to the ground—are you going to go with somebody that you know builds the house even if you don’t like him? Or are you going to go with somebody brand new, that’s untested? And so, I think for Trump this frames the election around, “I’m the one you can trust to bring us back.” It makes his old slogan new again.
BETH HANSEN: I understand the argument Jeff is making, but I would suggest that getting back out of this economic situation is going to be far more difficult than it was in, say, 2008, 2009. There’s going to be concerns about as you open up the economy are you going to have a new spike in [Covid-19] cases? So, I’m not sure that we know right now whether or not things will begin to be trending for the better by the time November comes around. But to your overall question, Tim, I just keep thinking about Vice President Biden. He has completely fallen off the radar. And every single day President Trump has an opportunity to talk about what he and his team are doing; if you’re Vice President Biden, you are having trouble doing what is most important to you, which is energizing your base and getting them to understand what it is that you’re going to be able to do for the Democratic Party in the fall. They’re going to have to come up with new ways of getting their message out because all the things that they might have done before, whether it’s fundraise or rallies or press coverage, they are not able to do. And this hits Vice President Biden far harder right now than it does the president.
TIM ALBERTA: Danny, jump in there. You’ve talked in our previous conversations about a referendum election versus a choice election. Maybe the longer Joe Biden stays in his bunker, the better his chance to make this just a pure referendum on President Trump, who’s out in front of the cameras every single day.
DANNY DIAZ: I’m a firm believer that the less that people see about Joe Biden, the better it is for Joe Biden. This is a guy that almost every day trips over himself, whether he’s in his library or somewhere else. And from my perspective, I think if this race is a race about Trump to some degree, that’s a pretty good day for Joe Biden. And it’s kind of being exemplified right now: It’s about the president every day behind the rostrum, talking about the coronavirus, and to Beth’s point, Biden’s kind of off the grid. And it’s helping him. If you look at polling the last three or four weeks, it’s been beneficial to him.
TIM ALBERTA: Terry, with people going into lockdown, all of these small businesses closing, Congress appropriating historic amounts of money—there are going to be political aftershocks from this. We just don’t know what they are yet. What does your gut tell you?
TERRY SULLIVAN: The list of unknown unknowns is exhausting. Hell, none of us know what next month looks like, much less, what—190 days until the election? So, I think it’s very hard to predict anything. I agree with what Danny said that, look, less Joe Biden is a good thing for Joe Biden. I mean, Trump wanted to be out there decimating him right now and defining him and he’s not able to do that. And it’s something that Trump is very good at, is defining his opponents and then baiting them into making mistakes. He can’t do that right now. And so, that’s an advantage to Biden. I think that, to Jeff’s point, if your house burns down, do you go back to the same person? I think that voters would be upset that the contractor didn’t make their house fireproof and—there’s a lot of irrational stuff. Your house burns to the ground, you’re not thinking rationally. Right now, I don’t know that voters are thinking through this in a logical, rational way, and so I think that they’re not necessarily going to go back to Trump because he presided over it. And the economy is still going to suck by the time we get to the election; even if he’s done amazing things, it’s still not going to be where it was two months ago. And that’s a problem for him.
BETH HANSEN: Danny and Terry, I would argue, though, that the vice president is going to need intensity. He is going to need what Hillary Clinton lacked four years ago: intensity. And most of that intensity will be the referendum on the incumbent, and they certainly have their story there. But I think voters are smarter than just to think, “I will go with somebody I know nothing about, or little about, against an incumbent.” It’s largely a referendum on the incumbent, but I just think [Biden] has got to be able to drive up that intensity and he can’t do it if people can’t see him.
DANNY DIAZ: Well, I agree with you on that front, and polling clearly shows an intensity gap for Biden. Right now, the crisis and the management of the crisis lead me to believe as of today that it’s more of a referendum, less a choice. But to Terry’s point, because [Trump] is not able to get in the ring and punch and counterpunch like he normally would, and use a $200 million cash advantage, right now those dynamics are a negative to the president.
TERRY SULLIVAN: I’m not saying that less Joe Biden in October is a good thing, but right now—I mean, this is a long time to not step on himself. And so, I think this is giving him a chance for a reset, consolidate his base, to act like he’s going to be more of a communist like Bernie. I mean, he’s able to do those things now kind of under the radar without getting pounded by the president every single day. And so, that’s given him a breather.
TIM ALBERTA: Jeff, if you were in charge of running a campaign that’s essentially off the grid, at least for a little while, how are you using this time? And what are the advantages and disadvantages to Biden being off the grid?
JEFF ROE: It’s a huge opportunity for him, in my opinion. He is a damaged vessel. In Democrats’ minds he was the best vessel for them—he had been vetted the most, there was the most known about him, they were convinced that a moderate needed to be the nominee over a riskier choice. And it’s almost a perfect storm: He lost three states, he won one state, and then the entire apparatus fell in behind him. And then he gets through the tough part of the campaign, spending no money, no staff, no nothing—and then he goes underground, and he goes into his basement and he hangs out. It’s a perfect opportunity for him. Trump against Trump is much worse for us than Trump against Biden.
What I’d be doing now is not taking the bait if I’m running this campaign. I’m just going to stay there, consolidate the left. He’s got a decision to make. There’s two schools of thought in presidential politics. I openly subscribe to one of them. You either believe that you win with the middle or you believe that you motivate your base. And when you’re running against an incumbent president, almost always they have a defined electorate, so they motivate their base. Biden has a choice to make. We’re going to see what kind of campaign they’re going to run. And right now, I would be knife-fighting in the campaign to make sure that my side won out. And it’s all going to be defined by the selection of a vice presidential candidate. I think that all of his instincts and all of his senior team, long-term folks, are all centrist campaigners. The new folks, they are simply about the base—crank and turn out the base. It’s the difference between a Stacey Abrams or an Amy Klobuchar.
TIM ALBERTA: Even without the pandemic, this might have gone down as the strangest primary contest in modern presidential history: We have a guy who was beaten soundly in the first three contests and then 2½ weeks later was running away with the nomination. Beth, as you’re watching that unfold in late February through middle of March, what were you thinking? What happened?
BETH HANSEN: That was just a damn miracle. I’m sure there were a million things that were going on behind the scenes, but I honestly think that somehow they watched those debates, they watched the tenor of the campaign, they watched the tone of the language that the progressives were using, and I think that Democrats made a decision that they were going to move to the center, and they were going to nominate the person they thought was most likely to win, and that was Joe Biden. And you saw the immediacy of almost all of those endorsements following very quickly. They drop out and they endorse him. It was stunning to watch them fall in line.
TERRY SULLIVAN: It was the egotistical, self-serving candidates that decided to put their party and the good of their party ahead of their own egos when they had zero path to winning the nomination. They decided to get out. And that didn’t happen in 2016. When people had absolutely no chance, they were too self-centered and egotistical to step aside.
[EVERYONE—except BETH—laughing and nodding. This is a continuation of the group’s assault on John Kasich for refusing to quit the GOP primary in 2016.]
DANNY DIAZ: You could see this coming from a mile away.
TERRY SULLIVAN: I mean, it just came across the plate so slow.
BETH HANSEN: What was Jeff saying about not taking the bait?
JEFF ROE: To be fair, we didn’t have Barack Obama to get everybody in the room and fix it. But I’m not taking away from your point, Terry—at all.
TIM ALBERTA: Danny, how were you making sense of this as you watched it unfold?
DANNY DIAZ: Two words. Inside straight. I don’t know that we’ll ever see it again. I do give him credit for one thing, which Beth pointed to, which is the sequencing of the endorsements subsequent to South Carolina, kind of going into Super Tuesday. He was really able to manufacture a level of momentum building off of South Carolina with no money, no staff, and he used that as a way to drive a narrative that was helpful to him in all of these other states. On Super Tuesday, I think by any estimate he over-performed everybody’s expectations in a lot of these states, so there’s an element of credit, quite obviously, that should go to him in sequencing these announcements. But some of this was just dumb luck.
TIM ALBERTA: Jeff, we all laughed a minute ago at what Terry said. But just as Bernie Sanders appeared to have a head of steam coming off wins in New Hampshire and Nevada, Democrats were able to coalesce around a more traditional party favorite in Joe Biden to stop him. We didn’t see that in the Republican primary in 2016, when some of you were trying to prevent Trump from running away with the nomination. How did you view Biden’s sudden dramatic comeback through that prism of 2016?
JEFF ROE: The Democrats never spilled any blood, and we had spilled plenty of blood. They just ran a 25-person Democrat primary without a single negative ad being run by a campaign. But I think the other advantage is they saw 2016. They saw [what we did to each other]. But Bernie Sanders—this is the thing, this is the lesson—Bernie Sanders could have put Biden away, and he did not do it. These other folks, besides Buttigieg, I think all the Democrats kind of like each other. There wasn’t a big pent-up [rivalry], they hadn’t been running against each other like a lot of our candidates for 10 years, wondering if you’ll be the next one, like we’re probably all going to do again in ’24.
TIM ALBERTA: Danny, jump in on this. I think to the degree that there was bloodshed in this Democratic primary, it wasn’t as much between individuals or campaigns as it was ideological factions. Now that Joe Biden has the nomination, how does he begin to repair that rift between the center-left and the progressive left of the Democratic Party?
DANNY DIAZ: One, he’s not Hillary Clinton. And he gets to learn—like, in ’20 they were learning from ’16. He gets to learn ’16, too. You already see it with the way he’s engaging the Bernie crowd. And I think he has Trump to use as a foil, to get these people superenergized and get them out. That was not the case in ’16. He has an intensity disadvantage, but he has a lot of time between now and Election Day to turn that up. So, from my perspective it’s going to be interesting to see this team he puts together to choose a VP, and ultimately, who he selects. And I think that’s buttressed against one major thing, it’s a key vulnerability—his lack of steadiness. Obama chose him because he needed experience. Biden’s going to need somebody who’s ready to be president. Why? Because there are serious questions about his capability as a candidate, and hence, as president. He needs to thread that needle with the ideological piece that he needs to land to get the intensity level up amongst the left to a degree that he can go mano a mano against the president. I believe it’s just about that simple.
TIM ALBERTA: Terry, the VP selection notwithstanding—because I want to get into the details on that and do some handicapping of specific possibilities—what can Biden do to energize the left, without scaring the hell out of the centrist suburban voters who played such a big role in swinging the House in 2018?
TERRY SULLIVAN: I think he’s a fool if he does anything publicly because at the end of the day, these Bernie supporters—I know you’re talking about intensity—but at the end of the day, Donald Trump provides the intensity to those people as a rationale to get out and vote against him. And he needs to send some smoke signals and he needs to have surrogates out there on his behalf. This goes back to the first point made: If this race is about Donald Trump, Joe Biden has the best shot of winning. And if [Biden] goes out and takes bold policy positions that are to the left, it’s going to be so much easier to make this race about him.
DANNY DIAZ: One other point: A big gift to Biden is that the convention isn’t going to go off the way it was, and the Bernie people are not going to be able to mess with the platform and get the level of attention that they would otherwise.
BETH HANSEN: You can’t become somebody that you’re not, and people know he’s not a progressive. His intensity’s going to have to come from anti-Trump.
TIM ALBERTA: Jeff, back in 2016, Donald Trump felt compelled to release a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. He was overtly courting a section of the Republican electorate that was distrustful of him, and that helped him turn that base out come November. Does Biden have to do something similar?
JEFF ROE: For sure. I think—first of all, to your point, [Trump] released the names, he nominated Mike Pence, he did everything, completely guided by the [theory of] a base election. His team completely got it. They had a choice between Chris Christie and Mike Pence, and you see the results. You’ve got to think about the predicate of the parties: We have to get 60 percent of the 70 percent of the white voters to vote for us, and the Democrats have to get 85 percent of the 30 percent of the nonwhites to vote for them. Joe Biden is not going to get 85 percent of 30 percent, and neither did Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton could have picked Tom Perez, a finalist, Cory Booker or Tim Kaine. And the Clintons, they were middle campaigners—“the middle will get you elected.” They ran ads from Republicans talking about how bad Donald Trump was, thinking they were going to get Republican votes in the last 30 days of the election. The middle is not where the votes are. It’s the base—and Biden doesn’t have them. There’s no surrogate that can fix that for him. He has to fix that. And the biggest and best way for him to fix that is with the VP.
TIM ALBERTA: I’ll put you on the spot then. Who does Biden pick? If this is a base election, who should he pick?
JEFF ROE: I’d likely pick Kamala Harris. I don’t even think a woman’s enough. I think he needs to have a minority woman. But I could tell you who not to pick. What is Amy Klobuchar going to get him? What does the governor of Michigan get him? He has to have a balanced ticket. I understand the need to have somebody that can be president. The Democrats have to believe that; the independents have to believe it, but I think Kamala Harris is his only choice. If you believe in base politics, it’s the only choice.
BETH HANSEN: I would say it goes a little bit beyond base. What it gets him—and you said this just a second ago, Jeff—it gets you enough of the base without freaking people out. And that’s the balance. I would argue that he can’t pick somebody that it’s just going to be so clear it’s not a good fit for who he is. I mean, he does have a reputation of [chuckles] 150 years in politics, and people know who he is, and they know that he is a pragmatic, middle of the road, blue collar, centrist, populist kind of a leader. And so, picking somebody that’s just asynchronous for that, I think will not help him. But he’s got to get enough of that intensity and that base and something different. He’s got to get something going, and for all—because everybody else is disqualified, I think you do end up with Kamala Harris.
TIM ALBERTA: Wow. Two-for-two on Kamala Harris. Danny, what do you say?
DANNY DIAZ: I kind of think to myself, when was the last time that a VP selection really made a seismic impact on a presidential contest? Do I have to go back to Kennedy and LBJ? Once again, opinions are largely formed on the president and [Biden] is going to be able to run against the president. I do think Kamala Harris does a number of things for his candidacy. But ultimately, both sides should be energized because of one thing: the president.
TERRY SULLIVAN: Danny didn’t make a pick, did he?
TIM ALBERTA: Yeah, Danny, you weaseled your way out of that one. Who’s your pick?
DANNY DIAZ: You like that, don’t you? I think there’s an argument for Harris, but at the same time, there’s an argument for Warren.
TERRY SULLIVAN: If you want to make sure that you don’t raise any super PAC money, there’d be an argument for Warren, because there’s not a single big donor that’s going to give any super PAC money unless they’re like some total communist, because they’re all scared shitless of her. But I think that’s why Harris would be—she’s just left of center enough. She checks a lot of boxes. They’ve got to be able to turn that minority vote out. But most importantly, I think she’s just vanilla enough that she doesn’t scare people. And I think their campaign—and Jeff and I will disagree on this—I think their campaign needs to be very careful to not scare middle-of-the-road voters. At the end of the day, they hated Hillary and they just couldn’t get their head around voting for [her]. I think that Joe Biden should become just a shadow of a candidate. If this is about Donald Trump, it is the best shot for Joe Biden to win.
JEFF ROE: Democrats have the same philosophy now that we had in ’16—whoever runs against Hillary can beat her. Half of the party voted for Bernie Sanders last time. He was the market leader with 35, 40 percent this time. They are not going to accept two Joe Bidens. They are not going to do it. Trump doesn’t provide enough—they hate Trump, yeah, but they still have to go vote. And it is shown time and time again that intensity, when we nominate middle-of-the-road candidates and when they nominate middle-of-the-road candidates, they do terrible. Bob Dole was our worst candidate in a generation, and John Kerry was the worst candidate for them. You can’t do a centrist move in this day and age—we have Donald Trump and Barack Obama to prove the point.
TIM ALBERTA: On the eve of the Michigan primary, Biden held this rally at Renaissance High School in Detroit where he had a number of high-profile surrogates come out. You know who stole the show? It wasn’t Cory Booker. It wasn’t Gretchen Whitmer. It wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Kamala Harris. And I said to people there, “Wouldn’t it have been interesting if she had been waging her presidential campaign in high school gyms in Detroit instead of coffee shops in Des Moines?” It’s just a completely different vibe for her. And if you’re looking at where Hillary Clinton struggled—in Wayne County, Michigan, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, in the Philly ring of suburbs and in Philly itself—black voters were not energized. So, when Stacey Abrams comes out says, “It can’t just be a woman; it has to be a woman of color,” isn’t that what she’s speaking to? Does Elizabeth Warren go into a high school gym in Detroit and fire people up? Does Amy Klobuchar?
JEFF ROE: Yeah, I think the answer is very known. There’s nobody else that will do that. Not even Elizabeth Warren; she can get them roused in a way, but not energetic. I think at the end of the deal, [Harris] rallies would be better covered than [Biden] rallies. She would be the Sarah Palin energy that John McCain lacked.
TIM ALBERTA: Speaking of Palin, at this point 12 years ago, somebody would have looked like a genius if they had said, “You know, there’s a real dark horse here. Keep an eye on this sleeper pick, this governor in Alaska.” So, I want to give the four of you an opportunity to look really smart or really dumb. Give me a sleeper pick for VP.
TERRY SULLIVAN: I think I start with the fact that I would assume that no one on Biden’s team is as dumb—[stops himself]. Well, I don’t think anybody’s making the same decision that Steve Schmidt made. I’ll stick with that.
TIM ALBERTA: So, you’re squirming your way out of giving me a sleeper pick?
TERRY SULLIVAN: Picking someone who has been somewhat vetted means a lot. It means a tremendous amount, not just vetted from an oppo-research standpoint but vetted having gone through interviews. There is absolutely nothing better to prepare you to run for president or vice president than having done it and until you’ve done it, you haven’t done it so they are crazy if they pick someone who is untested and a sleeper who is a governor from some damn state. Because it’s a crap shoot and even if they’re the most dynamic individual on the planet Earth, it’s really hard.
Source: politico.com
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