The GOP Meltdown Over Hunter's Conviction

And we're going to talk about where we see the presidential race just two weeks after Trump's conviction. With me to discuss all this is the incredible Sarah Longwell, host of the amazing focus group podcast, publisher of the bulwark. Sarah is going to share with us some of what she's seeing in our focus groups with Trump photos. Sarah, welcome back to positive America.

In fact, maybe no prison at all. Hunter still faces another federal trial in California for allegedly failing to pay taxes. President Biden released a statement saying, I am the president, but I am also a dad. Jill, and I love our son and we're so proud of the man he is today. The statement also said Biden will quote, accept the outcome of the case and will continue to respect the judicial process.

Look, in normal times, the first child of a sitting president being convicted of a crime would be a seismic event. But in a campaign where the other guy just happens to be the first former president convicted of a crime, the Hunter verdict may not make much of a splash. Sarah, first of all, what's your reaction to the verdict?

Why, you know, do they deny that the laptop was real? Especially on the right, people are very invested in the Hunter Biden saga. And so I think the conviction probably for, look, there's still, and I just did a focus group yesterday with two-time Trump voters in Utah. So I know that not everybody's taking this and saying, oh boy, now I really believe in the justice system. Many of them are saying, boy, Hunter must have been really guilty in order to have our crooked legal system still convict him.

But I think for swing voters, for people for whom they're just getting a whiff of the Hunter stuff, the fact that he was convicted sort of puts to rest the idea that Joe Biden is running some big conspiracy to convict Donald Trump and, like, you know, use the DOJ to just wield it for his own political purposes.

And the reason that he is unlikely to get up to the 25 years in prison is because he's a first-time offender. And, most importantly, I think, because he did not use the gun in a crime or in any sort of violent way, but still he could face some time in prison. And it is going to just, I can already see the Twitter explosion among people on the left, if Hunter Biden gets sent to prison for this crime and Donald Trump does not get sent to prison for his crime. But I think it is, you know, I'm going to be curious to hear a little more of your thoughts on how people process, how voters are processing it, but I just don't know that this, people are going to think a lot about what this says about Joe Biden. Because it is one, and this is an important point to make, for all of what I find largely to be the bullshit, you know, subject of all the Hunter Biden investigations, the Burisma payments and China and all these other things that have to do on the right, this has nothing to do with any of those things, right?

This is simply the story of someone going through addiction who purchased a gun and the jury found that he was, contrary to what Hunter and his attorneys argued, that he was on drugs when he did so, so therefore, he lied on a form. It does not suggest any sort of broader corruption or any other of the stuff you hear from the right,

You know, here's where.

Like, that's why there's an impeachment trial, despite the fact that they clearly don't have any evidence, and they are finding themselves now up against a wall, sort of without having evidence, but they're willing to embarrass themselves on that front in order to just kick up enough smoke around Hunter Biden and Biden to try to offset Trump's obvious criminality with what I think is a pre-existing thing in voters, where they're kind of like, yeah, all these guys are corrupt. And that way it like negates Trump's, or at least ameliorates Trump's obvious criminal deficiencies.

But it, you know, you do see, I see it in some of the polling, which is people think Donald Trump is more corrupt than Joe Biden, but a very unfair number of voters think Joe Biden is corrupt. Someone who has conducted himself, not just better than Donald Trump, but with, you know, decorum and ethics, and, you know, his president, you know, there are not real investigations into his presidency. He has not, there has not been scandals in his presidency, right? And he was part of the Obama administration, which was, as we always like to say, very famously scandal-free, if you don't count the tan suit situation. And, but you, it just, like he, Joe Biden has been in politics a long time.

He sort of is a walking, talking avatar for a political, you know, this is one of his challenges, a walking, talking avatar for a political system that voters inherently find corrupt. And so I totally understand what the Trump folks are doing. Now I will get that there is some cognitive dissonance between Joe Biden, head of crime family, and Joe Biden dementia. It's like, you know, you can't be both. And I, and I've never seen them really pay a real price for that sort of logical inconsistency, but it's not really the hunter stuff.

I think it's the, just this idea that people think that politicians are corrupt. People in politics for a long time are inherently corrupt. Like, how could you not be? It's a dirty system. And that does give Trump some advantage, right?

This is why he is, you know, I think he announced with some fanfare a few weeks ago that he was shifting to calling him Crooked Joe. And so I think that's probably, that's probably why. Yeah, I think that's.

And they recognized that this was a clear-cut case and that clearly no one's above the law. This is a very political.

Now, there's also an emerging consensus that the verdict could actually be helpful to Joe Biden, in the sense that Joe Biden's own DOJ going after his son shows that Biden is in fact not weaponizing the justice system. And I was really struck by how, all over the map, Republicans were in the response to the verdict. The Trump campaign put out a statement calling the verdict a distraction from the real crimes of the Biden family.

Trump advisor Stephen Miller tweeted, DOJ is running election interference for Joe Biden, apparently by trying to send his own son to prison. And oversight chairman James Comer, he, of the famously and laughably unsuccessful impeachment effort, called on DOJ to investigate the whole Biden family and said if they don't, they're quote-unquote, covering for the big guy. All right, Sarah, let's unpack this. What do you make of the Republican response? Could they really have been caught off guard by a guilty verdict?

Whoops. Now we need a new talking point. And so you could see them, sort of because, and you could see how different it was from Trump's conviction, right, where they were incredibly locked up, had the exact same talking points. Here they're scrambling a little bit. But they do seem to be settling on the idea that what is happening is that Joe Biden is hanging out his son to dry on this conviction or on this case in order to distract people from the bigger crimes so that they don't get prosecuted.

That's where people.

It reminds me a lot of the Republican response to Joe Biden's State of the Union, right, where they went in, you know, the morning of the State of the Union, the Trump campaign or one of his super PACs, I can't remember which, put out an ad. They ran in on morning, Joe, to try to get in Joe Biden's head with, you know, basically alleging he had dementia and a bunch of out of context clips. And then Joe Biden goes out there and gives a very good speech. And they're just like flabbergasted. Like they can't even imagine that Joe Biden could give such a speech, so much so that they then reverse engineered the story that he must've been on drugs, potentially cocaine, when he gave the speech.

So it's just like, it's like, it is, it is something is hard for Democrats to understand. It's just like how much, particularly in the Trump era, of their professional Republican political class has moved fully inside of the hermetically sealed MAGA media bubble, right? It's just, they're not getting, you know, it wasn't like that when I worked in the White House, right? There were people who there certainly were members of Congress like that and former people like that, but you know, the leadership on the Hill and certainly people who made the ads and wrote the emails and stuff, they were. re, you know, they might've watched a lot of Fox and maybe they didn't, they probably didn't watch Rachel Maddow, but they also read the news, right?

They watched, they read the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And so they wouldn't be caught so off guard. They weren't so detached from reality that they couldn't be ready for such an obvious and easy eventuality like this guilty verdict. Like you would have been planning ahead, right? You would have been like, we know Trump's verdict is today.

We know Hunter's trial starts this day. We know that Trump, there's at least a 50% chance that Hunter will be found guilty. And how are we going to craft a narrative arc to account for both of those things? And they?

no, it is not linear. Like Joe Biden is on drugs and they can hold these thoughts in their heads. Like he's on drugs and also needs to be spoonfed oatmeal in the morning by somebody else because he can't, you know, get out of bed. Um, he's running a crime family, but also he's being puppeteered by Kamala Harris and the radical left. And it was like this too, with the, the election being stolen, right?

Like they have now, it's like the election was definitely stolen in 2020.

. Everything is rigged. Um, and then, in races that they win, it's not rigged. Uh, this is, this is just how it works now.

They find a way to back themselves and to walk themselves into a rationalization that comports with their long held belief of grievance or that whatever institution, uh, is rigged against them. But, yeah, no, if they, if Hunter had been acquitted, they would have been able to send out a ton of fundraising emails. Um, and, uh, and also sort of really played into the narrative they've set. That's the thing. This disrupts the narrative that they were hoping to set.

So we had done recently a Mormon group, uh, of two-time Trump voters and then, just like Republican, two-time Trump voters in Utah. And these voters were tough, man. They did not like Spencer Cox. Uh, they, you know, they were very Biden crime family. They had sort of already, it had filtered down to them.

Some of these talking points around, this is a distraction to distract from Joe Biden, uh, and his more serious crimes. Um, and so no, this, this, these ones are deep, deep in the Madagascar cinematic universe.

This is incredibly hard. This is his, uh, this is his son. He's worried about his son for decades now. Um, and so this takes a caution on him. I will be very curious to see what Trump does in the debate about this.

You know, he really tried in 2020, he went after a hundred very hard and tried to, to use it to knock Joe Biden off of his game and to try to rattle him. And I think he's probably going to do that again, but I guess it just really says how bizarre a world we're living in, where I always do this thing, where I, you know, it's like the poli-sci 101 test, where you just like take Trump out of it. You write a question down and you kind of see what grade you would get if this question was on a midterm for political science 101.. And it's like, would the president's son being convicted of gun charges five months before the election be good or bad for the incumbent? And to the fact that the conviction is good for the president and the acquittal is bad for the, his opponent, just, this does seem wild, right?

Like if you had written that down as your answer in college, you would have gotten an F on the test, right? But that is how, that's where we are right now.

Joe Biden should expect that from Trump. I'm sure, yeah. And so there's no way that Joe, I mean, this is actually, I mean, the reason that the counterfactual doesn't work and it can actually be good for Joe Biden is, this is where Joe Biden shines, right? As a decent person. And when he is able to remind people that he is a good person.

and also, it's not just that is DOJ indicted Hunter. It's also, he says, will he pardon Hunter? No. You know, he is following the rule of law. He is respecting the jury.

He is doing everything, Donald Trump is not. And so it is presenting a contrast that, in this bizarre world, works for Joe Biden. And he should expect that and he should not get rattled. and he should say, I love my son. Families understand, like many millions of people in this country, understand what it's like to battle addiction.

And, you know, but I will not get in the way of the justice system. And I think that'll provide a good contrast.

that's obviously the differences between the two people. But do you worry, as I do a bit, that Biden and Democrats are setting themselves up a little bit as the defenders of a system that most voters don't trust, right? Where we sort of becoming the defenders of the FBI, the defenders of judges, the defendants of juries, and whether that is problematic, given historically high levels of cynicism and distrust.

If it's the FBI, it's the deep state. If it's an election, it's rigged. If it's the F, if it's cops, who prosecute on January 6, they're corrupt. And, you know, these institutions, ultimately, that is what liberal democracies is like. these institutions make up liberal democracy.

And so, to the extent that Democrats have now become the keepers of democracy, the keepers of liberal democracy, they find themselves defending our institutions and norms in ways that they might not have otherwise, because they felt like those institutions often applied themselves unequally to certain types of people. But I think in this particular moment, a lot of Democrats and part of the center-right coalition agrees that the defense of these institutions, however imperfect, is better than not having them at all.

And the interesting thing is just about how different people view the verdicts. I heard from someone who was doing focus groups with Black voters after the verdict, and one of the things they heard is sort of the inverse of what you heard about. how Hunter Biden could be convicted in a rigged justice system is sort of the equivalent of, man, Donald Trump must be really guilty if a rich, white, politically connected man got convicted on 34 felonies, right? That he's like, it's like, the system should be rigged in his favor, and he's such a blatant bad criminal that he got convicted anyway, right? And so I think there is this, like, we do in this conversation, particularly Democrats, with some of the very voters that we are losing, have to, I don't buy the, you know, Donald Trump can make common cause with Black voters because he was indicted.

I think that's a bunch of bullshit. You don't hear a lot of, you know, I haven't heard a lot of that from voters, but I think there is that we just have to be very careful about how we talk about the systems in a way that can thread the needle between defending them, which is important, and becoming the defenders of the status quo, right? And that's the challenge. Okay, let's talk about the results from yesterday's primaries. In Nevada, Sam Brown, a former Army captain, won the Senate nomination.

He'll take on Senator Jackie Rosen in which will almost undoubtedly be a very close race that could determine Senate control. Rosen immediately released an ad attacking Brown as a carpet bagger and an extremist on abortion. Let's listen. I was excited to learn that I was going to have a boy, but I got devastating news. The baby would not survive.

Before Sam Brown ran for office in.

Brown told NBC News that he is, quote, personally pro-life and that he supports the state law which allows abortion for up to 24 weeks. Sarah, what do you think about this approach from Rosen? Do you think opening the general?

What matters to you? Nobody says abortion. They talk about the economy, inflation, crime, immigration, but they don't talk about abortion. Swing voters, and Republicans especially, but even a lot of Democrats. Now, when you ask them about abortion, though, they get incredibly animated, and it is one of those issues that unites people immediately and, I think, centers their focus on something that Republicans have taken away from them.

And many of the folks that are swing voters identify themselves the way that Brown does, which is that they are personally pro-life, but they still believe in a woman's right to choose. And so I think that when you raise the salience of abortion, like this happened in 2022, very effectively. The first way that Gretchen Whitmer tagged Tudor Dixon was an extremist on abortion. Tudor Dixon was, in fact, a tremendous extremist on abortion. Like the only thing that anybody remembered about Tudor Dixon was that she thought a 14-year-old or a 12-year-old who was raped should have to carry the baby to term.

And that was it. Whitmer's going to win by 10 points. It worked the same for Laxalt, for Unabomber guy. It's Blake Masters, Unabomber guy. Yeah, Blake Masters.

People viewed them as extreme on abortion and that, coupled together with their extremism on election denialism and just other issues like liking the Unabomber, kind of fused together into a picture of a candidate that was extreme to vote for. So I think this is a perfectly fine opening salvo. My only advice to Democrats is that abortion is not all. It cannot be everything. And so fine for an opener,

And I think that if you could flood the zone with surrogates, talking not about the economy being amazing and why doesn't everybody appreciate how amazing it is, but saying, hey, Donald Trump cratered this economy by mishandling the pandemic and causing all that supply chain disruption. That was all from Donald Trump's mishandling of COVID. And Joe Biden has been putting this thing back together to the point where we are recovering better than every industrialized country on the planet. It is not done yet. We.

it's still too painful on rent, still too painful at the grocery store, but we have made a ton of headway. Inflation is cooling. I just think there is an offense message that helps. If you told me that the economy was in the toilet, I'd be like, well, there's not much to do about that. But when you tell me voters just don't appreciate it, then I'm like, okay, well, that's a narrative problem.

Narrative problems can be solved, and they can be solved with intensity and with volume and with a push forward. And Democrats seem, I think you guys, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I just think there's a consensus among a lot of you that you got to be really careful and you got to say, no, no, no, we feel your pain. And I'm not sure to me, basically, I come from a Republican school of communications, which is, and you're watching it right now, where they create their own reality. And so when Donald Trump gets his economy, he's like best economy for women, best economy for black people. How's your 401k, buddy?

And it is energetic and it is something that everybody repeats. And it becomes, I mean, he was given, the reason that he has such, it's so sticky. that Trump had such a good economy is because they hammered it so hard that it was a great economy, much better than an ultimate. I mean, he was running the economy hot. He was racking up the debt.

But this is why they have a good impression. And I'm sorry, I just think Democrats would really benefit from, yeah, taking some, going on offense a little bit here. Yeah, I don't want to.

inflation is their number one issue. And very specifically, when you ask them, what's the issue most likely to decide your vote? They, you know, three times as many people say the economy, inflation as immigration or abortion, at least in the New York Times poll in May. And Donald Trump has a 20 point advantage on that issue, right? It's like, that's, that's the whole thing.

And you're 100% right, particularly for Senate Democrats, they have to keep abortion front of mind. And it's very critical for Jackie Rosen to do it because, unlike some of the other Senate Republican Senate candidates, Sam Brown here has gone on offense a little bit and is trying to avoid falling into the exact same trap that countless Republicans have fallen into by just endorsing a 15 week ban, or endorse or having been for this or that unpopular, but he's trying to, so she's got to go on offense and define him before we can define ourselves. So that makes sense to me. More broadly, on the economy, I think the story is, I do think we have to be careful, right? I think that's probably where the disagreement with Axne Gibbs came in is we can't oversell it.

But we shouldn't undersell it either, right, is? Donald Trump messed this thing up. Joe Biden's been putting it together. He's done a lot of really good things. And you and then you get to Donald Trump will make it worse.

He's gonna cut Social Security, Medicare, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. Like that's the off, I think we should be on offense. on the economy. I'm confident that Rosen, I'm hopeful Rosen will get there. I think it's particularly important in Nevada, given what the electorate looks like there, right?

It's obviously a very diverse state. It's a state where, with a large working class population. And so you and those voters have tended to tell pollsters that the economy is even more important for them than others. But I think that's right. But let's go back to Nevada for a sec.

Could you envision Brown, because I think his strategy is interesting here, right? He is trying to be the first Republican, not to just, just to let a Democrat beat him over the head on their abortion position. Could you envision him cutting an ad sharing his wife's story? Or is that a bridge too far for a Republican candidate?

And there have been a number of things that still surprised me about voters as I talked to them. And one of them has been how often in a two time Trump voting group, the majority of the group is pro choice. And in fact, when you get voters criticizing the Republican Party, like they're more Trump voters over the Republican Party, one of the main reasons they give is that they don't like the social positions of the Republican Party, by which I think they mean gay marriage and abortion, like they just don't like the Mike Pence of it all, you know, the judginess, they like Trump's secular approach to these social issues. And I think that in a state like Nevada, you can get away with. and, in fact, because it's his biggest liability, and because they do have a personal story to tell, I think that they could do that without suffering too much from, like the far right pro-life flank of the party there.

I know, I hope he doesn't. And there will certainly be blowback, like there will be noise, you know, maybe from this group or that group. But are there gonna be a lot of voters who are going to turn out for Trump and then not vote for Sam Brown because he ran this ad? No, right? Like, that's not how it works, right?

Like any candidate in a presidential year has more wiggle room than in a midterm, because the main reason that voters are turning out is not them, it's the top of the ticket. And so he could do it. I hope he doesn't. And if there's noise and division about it, I hope Democrats exploit it. But I could certainly see him running this ad.

The Republicans want the Senate, right? That is very clear in how they got Trump to kind of sort of endorse Sam Brown the day before the primary, as opposed to, like the more maggot, his own ambassador to Finland or wherever that guy was from. And so, you know, I think they will, after losing a bunch of Senate races in a row, that there tends to be a little less orthodoxy and a little more focus on winning.

Trump. being on the ballot versus not being on the ballot is a big problem. Like in 2022, Trump wasn't on the ballot. Like he sort of spiritually was, because he had a bunch of these super maggot candidates that a lot of these swing voters rejected. But he wasn't literally on the ballot in the way that people who turn out just for Trump help Republicans in a general election.

And so, like, these voters this time around, these Senate candidates will have the benefit of Trump actually being on the ballot, which is where I think you see a much bigger juice and turnout, because there just really is now a set of voters who are not Republicans,

in a district Trump won by 29 points in 2020.

. Last night, the Republican beat the Democrat by only 10 points. Dems are, of course, seizing on this as a sign that there is momentum for Democrats that the polls aren't showing, similar to the 2022 midterms. Sarah, do you buy that? Do you think these special elections tell?

I just don't think that's what happened in this race. I don't think Democrats can read anything good into this race. In fact, I think it's the reason that I just said before, like, because the Republican, like, did better in the Youngstown area actually than in the rural areas, right? So why is that? To me, that reads that this is the area where Trump does the best, right?

Trump won that by some insane margin and then Vance won it by a less but still quite large margin. And then this replacement level Republican wins it by a much narrower margin. And I think that is a lack of turnout in the rural areas for people who are MAGA first and just don't really care to show up for Republicans. I'll also say, I don't know this for a fact, this is new, really new, but I do wonder if, because Trump has become the entire Republican party, that the local Republican apparatus, like the turnout, whatever, that it's all getting pretty sclerotic because now it's also Trump dependent. And so I'm not sure they're doing the like nuts and bolts turnout work in a lot of these places that they used to do, just because, like, Trump, sucks up all the money, all the attention, all the energy.

And, like, the state parties are starting to wither and just, they're run by cranks and sycophants and not anybody who knows how to win.

I 100% agree, this doesn't tell us a lot. This doesn't tell me that Ohio is going to be competitive or that Sherrod Brown is going to cruise the re-election. It basically tells me that two things. One, your point about the shift in who our base is, that we now just have more high-frequency voters who make up our base. It also tells me that our campaign machinery is up and running, right?

We are, this is not a race that there's a ton of investment in, but just in general, at the local level, this is one of the byproducts of all of the organizing mobilization after Trump won in 2016,. is that we just have people on the ground everywhere who can do these things. And that is helpful on the margins in a close race. And so it's not decisive, but to me, it's kind of interesting. One quick thing before we get a break, we are two weeks out from the release of Democracy or Else, Jon Jonatomi's incredibly useful, funny, timely book.

And let me tell you how this works, because, as many people have listened to me pitch my own books on this podcast for years now, the most important thing you can do to ensure the success of a book is to pre-order it. If you order it now, you will get it the day it comes out, whether it's crooked.com slash books, whether it's your local bookstore, bookshop.org, Amazon, wherever you get your books, make sure you go pre-order it right now. And the reason why that matters is every order you have now goes immediately into the metric by which the New York Times calculates their bestseller list. All the publishers are watching that. The people who make decisions about what kind of press coverage a book is going to get.

watch those pre-order numbers. And so, if you want to get this book on the list and you want to help Jon and Jonatomi, you want to make sure as many people read this book as possible, because that's what we need. We need as many people to read Democracy or Else and then go, take those lessons and go help beat Donald Trump. Then we got to get this book on the bestseller list so that people see it. People know about it.

Books on the bestseller list get put in the front of bookstores, right? More of them get sold. It is a virtuous cycle. So put aside all of that. You cannot possibly let Jon and Jonatomi live in a world where I made the bestseller list and they did not.

Like. that would be cruel and unusual punishment. So let's not do that. And if that's not enough for you, all of Crooked's profits from the book are going to support Vote Save America and 2024 campaigns. So each book is actually helping save democracy.

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We are now less than five months from the election, which makes me want to puke. And we're just about two weeks from the first scheduled debate on June 27th in Atlanta, which also makes me want to puke. And since you talk to actual voters more often just about anyone, I thought it would make sense to take a step back and have a broader conversation about where we stand. I want to start with how voters are reacting to Trump's conviction. You recently conducted a focus group with two-time Trump voters who have soured on the former president.

Let's take a.

I don't blame you. I would stand up and sell Bible for sixty dollars when they put me all over the news for exactly what we saw on the news yesterday. So I can't vote for him. I think nothing is moving.

This is not appropriate. Knock it off, Republicans. Find somebody else.

We often screen for this type of voter in order to understand our persuadable universe. We run Republican voters against Trump. These are the kinds of people that we want to get, not just to not vote for Trump, but to affirmatively vote for Biden. We talk to them a lot, trying to understand them. It didn't surprise me to hear them say things like, I'm already out on this guy.

There are a lot of voters, like a meaningful number of voters, who held their nose and voted for Trump both times because they were tribally Republican, but they didn't like him. Who, January 6th, they were like, I am out. Now, there's a bunch of those voters who slowly found their way back and rationalized it over time, but there are plenty of people who are still out. We hear from them all the time. They are part of our campaign now, which is all made up of people who previously voted for Trump, explaining why they won't vote for him again.

It's like the election lies, the whining, and a lot of these people were DeSantis people. They were the move on from Trumpers. They're not never Trumpers. They're move on from Trumpers. I want somebody else, and they just won't vote for the dude again.

The thing that surprised me was not how they sounded. The thing that surprised me was that five out of nine of them said that they would affirmatively vote for Biden. I think that this is where the conviction makes a bit of a difference, is that to win this election, people, when we talk about double haters, one of the things I always try to make clear to people is that double haters are just people who don't want to vote for either person, but it's a little bit of a misnomer, because they don't hate Biden. They don't want to vote for him, but they don't hate him. They do hate Trump.

The feeling is stronger. What happens is, is you get something like a conviction, and also, when Trump is more central to the conversation. When Biden's central to the conversation, these voters that are center right, they think about what they don't like about Joe Biden. When Donald Trump is central to the conversation, they think about what they don't like about Trump, and they start to be like, I'll vote for whatever, the tomato can that is going to stand between Trump and the White House. I'm not calling Joe Biden a tomato can.

I'm just saying it doesn't matter who it is. They just are like, you can't let this guy back in the White House. That is how you get people, when they start to focus on Trump, and when they start to think about how unfit he is, that's when they make the transition like, well, I'll vote for the other guy, even though I don't want to.

There are the more traditional members of the Democratic coalition, Black voters, Hispanic voters, younger voters that have soured on Biden, and then there are the more right-leaning folks who have soured on Trump. They're either two-time Trump voters or they are Trump-Biden voters who may vote for a Republican in the congressional race, who aren't soured on Biden. Do you think it's possible that Trump's criminality and his conviction is a better argument with the right-leaning voters? The argument for those people is that Trump is bad, and the argument for our people is Biden is better than you think. Does that make sense?

They voted for Mitt Romney. They voted for John McCain. They don't hate those votes. They were happy to vote for those people, unlike the new Trump voters who held their nose and voted for those people. I feel encouraged that, as Trump comes into the picture, these center-right voters who really hate Trump vote for other Republicans who aren't Trump.

if they're in the vein of normal, that they will get there on Biden out of their sheer hatred of Trump. I worry, because I listen. I do focus groups with the young progressive voters. I do them with the Democrat. When they say, like, genocide, Joe, and there's no difference between Trump and Biden, I'm like, ooh, that I don't know what to do about.

Yeah.

. There's this fascinating blueprint poll that asks younger voters what they remembered about Trump, what they knew about Trump. If you're under 30, Trump has not been a huge part of your life, right? If you're under 25, and they ask them if they knew or remembered, find people on both sides and all these other things, and they didn't. There is an education effort on Trump.

It is a real challenge. All right. Let's pivot to the debate. According to reports, the Biden campaign is already in the process of preparing the president and they're game-planning how to deal with all of Trump's insanity. My first question is, do you think Trump is really going to show up?

I wonder if my Bulwark family think that Trump's looking for a reason to get out of it. This is another one where I would just say, high on our own supply. The Republicans think that Joe Biden is going to fall asleep at the podium, and that where Trump really has, Biden is, on his big lunatic energy, coming off as much stronger or whatever. I think he wants the opportunity to dominate Biden, so I don't know why he wouldn't show up.

and so he's doing one of two things, and I think the most likely is the former, which he's just trying to set up expectations, where it's just like, I went in there, these guys, the press was against me, Joe Biden was on drugs, and I still did pretty well or explained away any failures, or the other one is to get out of it. I think he would probably show up. He thinks he's winning by a lot, and his philosophy in the primaries was, if you're winning, you shouldn't debate, so that's the only thing that gives me applause, so I don't really know, but either way, what advice would you give the Biden folks about how to conduct the debate? Anything you should say or do that would work with the voters that you talk to all the time?

Donald Trump is in this for himself. He's only doing it to stay out of jail and to get people's money to support his keeping him out of jail. I think that he should go on offense on those things, but none of that is going to be as important as voters being like, remember how you felt after the State of the Union? Just remember how you felt after being like, look at that guy. We need that.

That moment has to happen. People just have to feel like Joe Biden stood in there with Trump, gave as good as he got, seems like he could do the job, and that's the bar he's got to clear.

But it really, you know, and they're going to spend all this time, as they should, you know, like here are the words you can say, here's the moments, right? He's going to practice lines in a mirror. He's going to do it. And that 90% of it's going to be how he says the line, right? That's right.

99% of it, really. And that's just sort of a wild thing. And it's, you know, and it'll be interesting to see, like what the threshold is, right? Because the State of the Union was Joe Biden being judged against. the character of Joe Biden and the debate is being judged against Donald Trump.

Yes. Which comes with good and bad, right? Good, because he might seem sane and rational and like a normal human being worthy of being a president, while Trump is acting like his energy during debates, dating back to 2016, is quite crazy. And Trump could be in his sort of feral state, reminding some voters of what they don't like about the guy and why they were concerned about him in 2020.. So he doesn't, and this is important, he doesn't have to out-energy Trump.

He just has to beat his own threshold. And that's a hard thing, particularly for someone who's as competitive as Biden, right? I'm just going to be fascinated to see, and I'm going to, I certainly hope, to watch some dial groups, as it's happening, of how voters are interpreting it in real time, right? And then afterwards at how voters are going to interpret the clips they see, right? Now it's going to matter a ton.

what will be the clips people see. And that benefited Biden a lot in the State of the Union, and we'll see what happens in the debate, whether people try to push out less favorable clips.

She got a bunch of endorsements. She was running way behind Trump, and he had all the name, idea, whatever, but when push came to shove, people broke for her, I think because of endorsements, because of other things, and also because they just didn't like him that much. And so the late breaking thing is real. And I think if the double haters, if Biden can clear certain thresholds of like, he's up to the job, he seems good, he seems normal, I believe he wants to do the right thing for the country. And I think Donald Trump wants to burn it all down.

I think that you can get there. I just think these moments for Biden, there's like pressure so high, like he can't crater in this debate. He just can't.

Do any of these folks scare you more than others? Is there someone that you secretly hope Trump will pick?

And so they seem like ways to sort of signal that they want to do more of that, number one. But the thing about Marco Rubio that freaks me out, and Tim Scott to a slightly lesser degree, is that the Republican establishment that hates Trump will wet their pants over Marco Rubio. They will be like, see, it was a weird secludist route, but we got our Marco Rubio that we always wanted, and Trump's gonna eat a cheeseburger and die, and we're gonna get Rubio, and we're all back, baby. Wall Street Journal editorial page, we're back. And I do not want that for them.

And I have a- Tim Miller, my colleague at the Bulwark, has a little- he disagrees with me where he's sort of like, wouldn't it be- don't you kind of want there to be like a semi-normie behind Trump that like, if it is Trump that, you know- and I'm like, forget- no, Marco Rubio- and this is a weird one, because I'm usually kind of the institutionalist, but there is no part of me that wants to give either Marco Rubio or the Republican establishment that's accommodated Trump an inch on this. I don't want them to get this. I want him to do his true id self and bring Kerry Lake or Marjorie Taylor Greene with him and lose the election on all their crazy. Not another-. this would be a major calibration, and it would help him a lot, because, man, these guys are old.

Their VPs are gonna matter more than they ever have before, which still is not a lot, but still like more than ever.

I am much more worried- I'm worried about everything, but much more worried about Biden's performance among Hispanic voters than black voters, although, I would just note again, I'm worried about both. Tim Scott, I am less worried about. I think Tim Scott just is bad. He just comes off. I think the lesson of Tim Scott's miserable failure of a Republican primary campaign is not that he can't relate to the Trump megabase, it's that he can't relate to humans.

. I just don't see him really relating to a lot of voters in a way that is helpful.

He's not good. You're right, he's not good. But in a way that Trump is kind of like, I just need him for optics and I'm running this show. And so there's a part of me, I don't know, I still can see that the case for Tim Scott.

And Byron Donalds, I think, would have energy. And I could see Byron Donalds going on to the Breakfast Club and like mixing it up in a way that Tim Scott would never be able to do. Right. Just Tim Scott just has weird politician energy. And that's sort of how he is.

Byron Donalds has full MAGA energy, but he's just better. He's much better on TV and in the press than Scott is. I think you also nailed why Trump would not pick Rubio. Like he'd have to be really convinced that Rubio was necessary for victory.

Right. The John Bolton's, the Gary Cohn's, you know, the Rex Tillerson's, the sort of the former establishment people who didn't go along with all of his crimes. But it's going to be, it's going to be fascinating to watch. I think it's pretty interesting that Trump is going to, or at least is suggesting he's going to announce during the convention, who his VP is, which is probably pretty smart.

You give them a good VP that, like, takes those double haters and gives them something to be like, okay, this is my thing that gets me over the hump.

I think these are all fine, right? I mean, Doug Burgum's, a nothing burger. J.D. Vance is kind of a nothing burger to most people. Tom Cotton, kind of a nothing burger.

But, and then maybe some upsides to some of them. Sarah, thanks for doing this.