Elle Edwards's father, Tim, says releasing Thomas Waring to ease prison overcrowding is a "kick in the teeth".

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In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

One thing tomorrow’s election will test is Americans’ appetite for chaos, particularly the kind that Donald Trump has been exhibiting in the last few months of his campaign. After weeks of running a disciplined campaign, Trump’s advisers lost control of their candidate, the Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta reported this week. Trump grew restless and bored and drifted off script in his campaign appearances. During a summer interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, for example, he mused aloud about Kamala Harris, “I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” From the perspective of his advisers, Trump’s string of offensive public statements needlessly alienated potential voters. Members of Trump’s campaign staff told Alberta that they became disillusioned about their ability to rein in their candidate and left the campaign.

Will this unleashed version of Trump affect the election outcome? In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Alberta and another Atlantic staff writer, Mark Leibovich, about how candidate Trump transformed over the summer, how Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted, where each campaign stands now, and what it means for the election. Alberta and Leibovich also offer tips on how to manage your inner chaos while watching the election results.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We are recording the Monday before Election Day. The candidates are furiously campaigning in the swing states. At some point, their planes were on the same tarmac in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump mused about shooting reporters; Kamala Harris said normal campaign things. And yet the race is still one of the closest in American history.

Anyway, in this episode, I want to get the inside view of both political campaigns in their last days. So I have with me today two seasoned political reporters, Mark Leibovich. Hi, Mark.

Mark Leibovich: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: And Tim Alberta. Hi, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Hi, Hanna. Hi, Mark.

Leibovich: Hi, Tim. Isn’t it good to be seasoned today?

Alberta: I’m feeling very seasoned.

Rosin: Yeah, that’s a cliché word. It doesn’t mean old. What’s a more flattering word than seasoned? Like, experienced? Or longtime? Longtime: that’s flattering, I think.

Leibovich: It’s definitely flattering.

Alberta: We don’t use veteran.

Rosin: No, veteran is old. How about active?

Leibovich: Yeah, we’re very active. Yeah. Can you tell by our voices?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Anyway, Mark, I understand you’re writing up a preelection guide to how to approach Tuesday night.

Leibovich: Basically, I’m trying to collect a helpful toolkit to how to approach Election Day from sort of a practical standpoint as far as what information you can ignore, but also a habit or even mindfulness standpoint about how to not drive yourself needlessly crazy, how not to be triggered by the kinds of things that Election Night coverage will probably overload you with.

And that includes Donald Trump probably declaring victory wildly prematurely or erroneously, which, I mean, will be news because he’s one of the candidates, but it also should surprise no one. And there are ways to kind of condition yourself, or try to, going into what tomorrow night will be like—which will be obviously very anxious for a lot of people.

Rosin: I see. So instead of “We know it’s going to be like that,” like, “We know that we don’t have enough information.”

We know that there probably isn’t going to be, sort of, instant early clarity. So you’re going into it eyes wide open, doing what? Like, what? Because maybe Tim needs this advice.

Leibovich: Well, I’m trying. Well, I think we all need this advice, Hanna. I mean, I think it’s an approach to how we consume information, how we get information.

I talked to a couple of Democratic consultants who said that one of the first things they do is turn off all their text notifications, because any kind of text notification is designed to trigger you on Election Night.

There is a lot of manipulation of your emotions before the actual only information that is necessary, which, the most valuable information is going to come in probably after 11 o’clock, or quite late. It could be days later. The idea is the news will find you. Turn off your phone if you can. Information is coming in haphazardly from a million different directions, out of order, in no particular sequence whatsoever, about something that has already happened—meaning the voting has already happened. So no control is there. This is basically just people throwing information out in no order, and it is not necessarily—

Rosin: It’s not cumulative and it’s not adding up to—

Leibovich: —Not cumulative.

Rosin: Exactly. Exactly.

Leibovich: So anyway, that’s one reason you can skip that part.

Rosin: Interesting. Tim, do you think you could do that?

Alberta: I fear that in the attempt to not drive myself crazy, I would drive myself crazy. In other words, you would find your brain stacking up with all of the things that other people know that you don’t, because in that moment you have decided to sequester yourself or at least to sort of rigidly compartmentalize your emotions and your brain waves and your political intake.

And therefore the exit polling showing the number of non-college whites in Maricopa County breaking away from Trump is lost on you in that pivotal moment, when that could be the little parcel of information that is necessary for you to believe that you have finally figured out this electoral equation and that you have a bead on it in this moment.

It’s a game of inches, and the inches are everywhere around us, Hanna. So how could I give up any of those inches when we are so close to the end of the game? I want the zen that Mark is offering, but I just don’t find it realistic.

Rosin: Hmm. You know how sometimes you start with the moment of meditation? We’ll consider that our moment of meditation, and now we’re gonna go into the stressful part of this conversation. So, Tim, you’ve been covering the Republican side closely, and you recently spent a lot of time talking to Trump’s advisers.

How would you describe the state of the campaign in the weeks before the election?

Alberta: I would describe it as something slightly removed from the serenity that Mark has described for us.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Alberta: Yeah, look, Hanna, I think the context here is really important: that this Trump campaign, unlike the previous two, was for the majority of its time in operation, really pretty disciplined, pretty smart.

The people running the campaign had done a pretty good job of keeping Trump out of his own way and talking him out of bad ideas and sort of curbing some of his most self-destructive impulses. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is basically Trump going full Trump, and an inability among those senior advisers to really do anything to stop it.

This has been kind of the proverbial slow-motion car wreck. And, you know, it’s not just Trump himself, although of course he is the inspiration for the chaos. He is the generator of all of the turmoil that you see.

He is at the center of this chaos, but the chaos ripples out away from him. And so when you ask yourself the question of how could it be that at the most important public event of the campaign, with 20,000-plus jammed into Madison Square Garden in prime time, the whole world watching, and you pay a million dollars to put on this event, and the guy who kicks it off is a vulgar, shock jock, insult-roast comedian who was dropped by his own talent agency for using racial slurs onstage—how could this person possibly be booked into that position to open for Trump in that environment? It’s exactly the sort of thing that the people around him had been really successful in avoiding for most of the campaign. But ultimately, in the key home stretch here, in the sort of the witching hours of this campaign, it’s all fallen apart.

Rosin: Mark, same for the Democrats. How would you describe where they are?

Leibovich: I would say I’ve talked to a fair number of Democrats on the campaign in the last few days.

It feels like something approaching the general area of the ballpark of confidence.

Rosin: Interesting! Anomalous for Democrats.

Leibovich: Well, they are so incredibly quick to embrace bad news and to go right from bad news to deep levels of doomsaying. I’ve not seen that in the last few days.

I mean, look, I think their numbers internally seem a little better. I think a lot of the external polls have been encouraging. And I think you can’t underestimate how much of a train wreck Trump’s last 10 days have been, in a way that, if he loses, I think people will very much point to.

Rosin: So, Mark, I remember we sat here in the spring and discussed how absolutely stagnant this race would be. Like, we were just sleepwalking into a repeat.

Leibovich: But it was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it again. (Laughs.)

Rosin: But it was very, you know—we didn’t have much to say. And then for everybody, the reset button got pressed in July.

Tim, the full Trump who we’ve seen on the campaign trail for the last few months started, actually, according to your account, before Harris entered the race. So what happened?

Alberta: I think that maybe the proper visual here, Hanna, is like the wild animal that has chased down its prey and has mauled it mostly to death and is now just sort of pawing at it, toying with it, unsure of really what to do because, well, what’s left to do?

Donald Trump really found himself, according to all the reporting I did, sort of over it. Sort of bored with running against Joe Biden. Because here is, in his view, this sort of hapless old man who can’t even string together sentences, much less really defend himself or go on offense in a meaningful way against Trump. And so I think that he’s looking at Joe Biden thinking, Gosh this is sort of a bore, and around this time, of course, in late June, early July, Trump’s polling is better than it’s ever been in any of his three campaigns for the presidency.

The battleground polling is showing him consistently pulling ahead five, six, seven points across all of these states. The national polling is up. His favorability is up. Democrats are preparing for a bloodbath not just to lose the presidency but to lose the House and the Senate, and it’s, you know, The sky is falling. And everyone around Trump is sort of giddy and gleeful. They’re looking around like, Nothing can stop us.

And around this time is when you started to see Trump talking a little bit differently, behaving a little bit differently, according to people close to him—almost looking for some disorder and some mayhem to inject into the campaign. He starts talking to people on the outside. And when Kamala Harris gets in the race, he was angry, on the one hand, because he thought he had it sort of sewn up against Biden, and he liked running against Biden in the sense that Biden really, you know, couldn’t punch back.

But I think also he’s sort of excited in the sense that with Harris, he’s got this live target. He’s able to channel some of the base instincts that brought him to power in the first place. You know, Trump, I think, viewed the Harris switcheroo as a new lease on life in the sense that he was going to be able to go whole hog again.

But the people around him were saying, No, no, no, no. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. And frankly, the reason you’re in this position is because you’ve listened to us and because you haven’t been going rogue and running the kind of, you know, totally undisciplined #YOLO 2016 campaign that you would like to run and that you would run if you were left to your own devices. And around that time is when Trump started to lose confidence in those people who were giving him that advice, and he brought in other people to help with the campaign, and from there things really started to spiral.

Rosin: So, Mark, how are Democrats responding as Trump is reasserting this peak-Trump version of himself?

Leibovich: I think in a kind of measured way. I mean, I think, look, the peak Trump pretty much speaks for itself. It’s not like you need people to amplify. I mean, to some degree you do, because outlets that a lot of Republicans watch—like, say, Fox—are going to be insulated from a lot of this, because just Fox doesn’t show it.

I mean, that’s just not their point of emphasis, But I think they’ve been very deft—they’ve made a lot of ads around the kind of changing abortion messaging. I mean, even Melania Trump saying that she believes in a woman’s right to choose, things like that, to some degree, they’re trying to highlight it, but to another degree—this is a big political-operative cliché, but they are running their race.

And I think the Democrats, beginning when Biden stepped aside, I think Harris has performed much better than a lot of people thought she would, and I think her campaign has made a lot of good decisions, and she herself has made a lot of good decisions.

Rosin: It does, from the outside, seem exactly the opposite of the chaos inside the Trump campaign that Tim described, because if you think back to when Biden dropped out, there was some worry that the transition might not be smooth.

Leibovich: Oh, 100 percent. I mean, Tim and I, remember, we were at the Republican convention together, and that was such a moment, because Trump was really kind of at his peak then, which is kind of ironic to say, because the assassination attempt had taken place two days before the convention started. But his popularity, I mean—there was a sense of confidence at that convention which was just off the charts to a degree to which you could almost sense the boredom creeping into Trump when he’s giving this acceptance speech, and I guess it was Thursday night, and then about halfway through, he just kind of went off the rails, and he just sort of—it became just a very unhinged acceptance speech, went from kind of a gripping one where he’s describing the assassination attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the campaign would unfurl for him.

And of course, three days later, Biden got out and then the world changed again.

Rosin: All right, up next, I ask Tim and Mark whether the chaotic final months of the Trump campaign could end up costing him the election. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So from a campaign manager’s perspective, the chaos is disturbing, but what we actually care about is whether it has any impact on voting day. Tim, so what are the ways the drama you describe could affect the election? Like, say, turnout or whatever it is that we’re worried about?

Alberta: Well, look, if these episodes were contained to just Trump being a little bit goofy or going off message and sort of ranting and raving about the latest person who said something very nasty about him on cable news, I don’t think it would have much real-world effect. But I think that some of what we’re unpacking here over these past 10, 11, 12 weeks, Hanna, is something that actually gets to a fundamental weakness, which is a failure of the Trump team to expand its coalition.

Or at the very least what we’re seeing is the way in which the potential of expanding the Trump coalition has been undermined by Trump’s own actions or by the people close to him. So, for example, we know based on six months of really solid, consistent data that Trump is likely to perform better with Latino voters as a whole and particularly with Latino men under 40 than any Republican nominee in modern history.

And yet, when the dominant headline coming out of your rally at Madison Square Garden the week before the election is that one of your speakers calls the island of Puerto Rico floating trash in the ocean, this is self-sabotage.

Another core component of this Trump campaign, from the beginning, has been How do we keep our margins tight in the suburbs outside of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Vegas and elsewhere? How do we keep our margins tight with these college-educated, suburban women? We’re not going to win them, right? But how do we manage to keep it close? How do we lose them by just seven or eight points instead of by 16, 17, 18, 20 points?

And when you look at, for example, the selection of J. D. Vance and, you know, his old, greatest-hits reel around childless cat ladies, and he thinks abortion should be illegal nationwide, right?

And there’s just something that sort of went fundamentally awry over the summer. I think Mark is right. Both of us were remarking at the convention about how it was effectively an early Election Night victory party. I mean, they weren’t even—Republicans in Milwaukee weren’t even talking about the campaign as if it were going to be competitive. It was already over. The fat lady was singing onstage in prime time in Milwaukee. And yet, I remember corresponding with several smart Republicans—Trump supporters—while I was there, and they were a little bit nervous about the Vance selection. And then on Thursday night, to Mark’s point, Trump gives this sort of weird, meandering speech that seems to squander a lot of the goodwill that he had coming into that event because of the assassination attempt. And it felt like between those two things—the Vance selection and then the speech—and then, you know, 24 hours after leaving Milwaukee, Biden gets out, Harris takes over the ticket, and suddenly, those dominoes started to fall.

And what we saw was all of the best-laid plans of the Trump operation go awry. And it wasn’t just surface-level things where we say, Oh, that was sort of silly he said that. Or Oh, this was an unforced error, but it’ll be a quick news cycle and blow over. Some of what we’ve seen, I think, will have a real impact at the ballot box.

Rosin: So what you’re describing is a campaign strategy that is fairly traditional that they were following fairly successfully, which is: try and win over, you know, some middle-of-the-road voters, or at least not massively alienate those people.

But, Trump has been running a very different kind of campaign—like going to Madison Square Garden—and fewer on-the-ground resources. And that seems like a pattern across swing states, which for me raises the question whether what these managers are calling chaos, like, that is the strategy.

The strategy was always just: get a lot of attention.

Alberta: I think it depends on the type of attention you’re talking about. So when Trump goes to the southern border and has, you know, hundreds of cameras following him around there and talks about the lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants committing crimes—you know, that is attention, and it can even be attention that is rooted in some hyperbole, some demagoguing, some bombast. And yet it is productive attention politically for the Trump people, right? They look at this sort of cost-benefit analysis and they recognize that, sure, we might antagonize some people with this rhetoric. We might alienate some people with our focus on these issues, but we think that the reward is far greater than the risk.

So there is, I think, plenty of good attention that the Trump people do want. I think what they’ve tried to avoid is a lot of the sideshow that is appealing to some of the very online, right-wing, MAGA troll base but does nothing to add to the coalition that I was describing a minute ago. And ultimately at the end of the day, politics is a math equation. It’s multiplication and addition.

Leibovich: Right, and I think, to Tim’s point, immigration was an incredibly effective issue for Trump. When you tip that into people eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and just how that took over the narrative of the Trump campaign—I mean, one, they look like fools; two, it insults the intelligence of so many people, and it turns a very serious and effective issue for the Trump campaign, immigration, into a joke and into just something really, really problematic and gross.

Rosin: So the art of running a Trump campaign, then, is to siphon and manage and titrate the chaos exactly right. Like, you want the right kind of chaos, the right kind of attention, but if you lose control of it, it just comes back to bite you. Is that basically what’s happened?

Alberta: Yeah, and it’s always gonna be a high-wire act, right? These people aren’t stupid. They knew what they were getting themselves into. In fact, Chris LaCivita—who is one of the two people managing the Trump presidential campaign here in 2024—within a few weeks of his decision to join the operation back in the fall of 2022, you have Trump saying that he wants to terminate parts of the Constitution. You have Trump saying and doing these sort of crazy, self-destructive things. And LaCivita is sort of looking around saying, What have I gotten myself into?

And of course people who are friends with him are saying, Come on, dude, you knew exactly what you were signing up for. You know exactly what you were getting yourself into. So I think whatever degree of self-delusion may exist at the outset, when some of these folks ally themselves with Donald Trump, you know, it dissolves pretty quickly and they become clear-eyed about who they’re working for and what the challenges are.

And to your point, Hanna, yes, there’s inevitably going to be some chaos, some attention-seeking behavior, some stuff that is vulgar and inappropriate and racist and misogynistic and whatever else. Their job is to try to turn things that are kind of potentially toxic into productivity. They’re trying to mine coals out of manure here, and again, I can’t stress this enough: For most of the campaign, they were actually doing a pretty good job of it. But at a certain point I think it just becomes too much to manage.

Rosin: Mark, do you get the sense that the Harris campaign’s—you described it as, like, a little dose of confidence. Is that because of everything that Tim has described?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, I think Trump has given them so much to work with. And not just like, Oh, look, he said this and sort of putting that out there. I mean, early indications about the revulsion that women are having—women voters are having for Trump—even more so than usual. And the degree to which they seem to be voting and maybe even lying to their husbands about—to kind of use a new ad that the Harris campaign is using which is basically saying, you know, a lot of Republican women are secretly going into the ballot, and behind their husband’s back, they’re voting for Kamala Harris. So again, Trump made their job easier, but I think they have taken what has been given to them. And I do feel hopeful. Yeah. Again, from talking to a bunch of them, and levels of very, very cautious optimism—which I would say, you know, it would probably be an absolute verboten thing for anyone anywhere near the Harris campaign to show anything more than just a tiny bit of confidence. Because that’s going to harken back to the overconfidence of 2016 or the overconfidence of 2020, you know—Biden was supposed to win by a lot more than he did.

And I think what freaks everyone out is the idea that Trump, in the two times he’s been on a general-election ballot, has massively overperformed his polls. And now there’s a sense that perhaps that’s been accounted for in these polls and they’re undercounting African American voters, women voters, and so forth.

So anyway, I think all of that is kind of baked into this, but look, I don’t want to suggest that anything other than massive anxiety is the default for everyone around this campaign. And I assume both campaigns.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s leave the listeners with thoughts about Election Night. There’s the zen option, and hopefully many of our listeners will take advantage of the zen option.

Take a long, 12-hour walk. Be home by 11 p.m. and then turn on the television. Short of that, the map is really wide and open. I mean, seven open states. It’s a lot. So for those who are not spiritually built for the zen option, how—literally—will you guys be watching? Like, give a listener a guide of what to watch out for on the night.

Leibovich: Well, yes, there are seven battleground states. But I think there’s a lot you can learn if you can get information from other states. You know, there’s a poll that everyone has been talking about—a lot of insiders have been talking about over the last few days—from Iowa. Iowa, no one considered a swing state. Safely red, certainly has been in the last few elections, certainly for Trump. Ann Selzer, a deeply respected pollster, came up with this Des Moines Register poll on Saturday night, having Harris ahead by three.

Now, putting aside whether Iowa’s now a battleground state—I mean, if it’s even in the ballpark of accurate, I mean, as a euphoric result for people on Team Harris. I mean, look, if there are some early numbers from, say, South Carolina, Florida, that, you know, maybe show Trump’s margins a little lower than you would expect, possibly that’s something that you can learn from.

So again, it’s not just the seven battlegrounds, which will probably take a while to count, especially in some of the states with laws that make it harder to count early votes. But, yeah, I mean, like, the whole country does vote. It’s like, margins do matter, and I think we can learn from a lot of people.

And look, even, like, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky—I mean there are these early states that you know exactly who is going to win, but you can learn from.

Rosin: Because if the margins are smaller than they are expected to be, then that’s a bit of data that’s interesting. Tim, what about you?

Alberta: So there’s a known known, and a known unknown. The known known is that Democrats are continuing to see erosion in their coalition, specific to African American men, Latino men, and to some degree young voters.

And I think specifically if we’re looking at Detroit, at Milwaukee, at Philly, at Atlanta, at Maricopa County—there are places where we should be paying attention to this, right? I think the known unknown here is: Does Donald Trump get beaten up among suburban women, or does he get demolished among suburban women?

And I think that the answer to that question is probably determinative to who is sworn into office on January 20.

So I’m really paying very close attention to the collar counties outside of Philadelphia, to the WOW counties outside of Milwaukee. You have to look at Vegas and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Some of these places—I don’t want to be reductive, but I really do feel like, ultimately, that’s where the election is going to be won or lost.

Rosin: Both of you are saying: Look for signs. It’s not just big, broad swing states, but there are meaningful signs in smaller election results that you’ll be looking for.

Alberta: That’s right. It’s, again, it’s just a numbers game. And it so happens that the most dense, vote-rich areas of persuadable voters are just consistently found in these once re,d then purple, now pretty blue suburbs. And so whether you’re watching the presidential race or even if you’re looking for a potential upset in a Senate race, like in Texas, where Ted Cruz on paper looks like he’s going to win and maybe even win comfortably. But pay attention to Harris County, Texas, which, on Election Night in 2012, Obama and Romney fought Harris County to basically a draw. I think it was a matter of a few hundred votes that separated them. Fast-forward, you know, a decade. Democrats are carrying Harris County, which is the Houston suburbs—they’re carrying it by a quarter-million votes, 300,000 votes reliably, and that number’s only going up.

So those are the parts of the country where I think if you’re paying close attention, you’ll start to get a pretty good idea.

Rosin: Okay. I think we have options for the meditators and options for those who cannot bring themselves to meditate. Thank you both for joining me on this day before the election.

Leibovich: Thank you, Hanna. Thank you, Tim.

Alberta: Mark, I’ll call you tomorrow. We can meditate together.

Leibovich: I look forward to it. Yep, we’ll join figurative hands.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back later this week to cover the election, though possibly earlier than our usual Thursday release, depending on the results.

Thanks for listening.

Contrary to what Lorne Michaels said about not having political candidates guest on Saturday Night Live before the polls close Tuesday, the biggest surprise of the show’s final preelection episode was … a cameo by the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. Appearing in the final minutes of the cold open, using an oft-trodden mirror premise, Harris sat opposite Maya Rudolph (who has been portraying the vice president since 2019) and exchanged a winking dialogue that added “-ala” to the ends of words. “The American people want to stop the chaos,” Rudolph began, before Harris rejoined “and end the dram-ala.”

The light—and relatively straightforward—moment contrasted James Austin Johnson’s burned-out take on Donald Trump that kicked off the cold open. Satirizing the former president’s speech from his Wednesday rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Johnson briefly cast aside his impersonation, which regularly consists of Trump leaping topic to topic without any firm footing. He instead seemed to break the fourth wall: “Get me out of here,” he said, slumping over the podium. “Make it stop.” It was hard to tell how much of the sentiment was coming from the comedian’s Trump character and how much from Johnson himself.

But another sketch last night more crisply underscored the exhaustion of the current political moment—and the way high-stakes rhetoric can repeat from election cycle to election cycle. The recurring game-show segment “What’s That Name?,” which derides contestants’ ability to remember minor celebrities’ names but not those of the people they encounter daily, returned for an election edition. Airing not long after Harris stopped by, the bit felt culturally savvier and came with an unexpected political guest star of its own.

The episode’s host, John Mulaney, played a news junkie who was quizzed about the more obscure 2024 general-election players, such as Special Counsel Jack Smith. The contestant was well informed about the goings-on—and clearly quite proud of it—because, as he put it preachily, “This is the most important election in American history. Democracy is on the line.” In contrast to the roaring excitement that Harris’s guest turn provoked among the audience mere moments earlier—cheering that lasted nearly 30 seconds and kept Harris and Rudolph from launching into the scene—Mulaney’s character’s line elicited a weak smattering of applause that barely registered as “clapter.”

The sketch coyly upped the ante of such all-or-nothing verbiage—important, but also familiar— when the game’s host (played by Michael Longfellow, following Bill Hader’s original turn) brought out Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. Recalling his time as Hillary Clinton’s running mate during the 2016 campaign, Kaine recited a fine-tuned setup: “At the time, you said it was the most important election in American history, and that democracy was on the line. It’s been less than eight years. What’s my name?” Mulaney’s contestant stretched to find a response that would allow him to save face, finally landing on a chance to blame Kaine for not being as memorable as the current vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz. Longfellow’s game-show host, taking joy in watching Mulaney’s in-the-know smugness crumble, placed a photo of Kaine side by side with Walz to demonstrate how they not only look alike but also share the same name. “Really? His name was Tim?” Mulaney asked, to which Kaine delivered the pitch-perfect retort: “My name is still Tim. I exist.”

The sketch seemed to be SNL’s attempt to balance the cold open’s levity with a more biting tone about the wearying stakes of deciding the nation’s leadership. The show appears to understand those stakes more clearly than it did in 2016, when, in a widely criticized move, it invited Trump to host an episode. (Hillary Clinton cameoed one month before Trump, playing a bartender named Val who listened as Kate McKinnon’s caricature of Clinton shared her concerns about the upcoming election.) In having Harris but not Trump on the show (albeit for a much smaller guest spot than her competitor once received), SNL seems to be staking at least a slightly larger political claim than it’s made in the past—and in a way that has already drawn flak from one of the Republican commissioners of the FCC for possibly violating the equal-time rule. But with its longer view, “What’s That Name?” landed the evening’s subtler, more stringent point.

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