Episode 587: Ctrl-Alt-Del

Zain 0:03

This is The Strategist, episode 587. My name is Zain Velji. With me, as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, how are

Corey 0:10

are you? Very good, Zain. It is a beautiful summer day in Calgary, the cultural capital of Canada.

Carter 0:17

I brought Corey in helping me build an ark.

Carter 0:21

It's raining so much. Oh, it's ridiculous.

Zain 0:24

also bought a mouse. I feel like that's more important. Listen,

Carter 0:26

Listen, my MacBook Air, its touchpad has decided that it doesn't want my touch anymore.

Zain 0:32

MacBook Air and women

Corey 0:34

women everywhere have something in

Zain 0:37

Well done, Corey. Well done. It's like 30 seconds in and we got the first Carter burn.

Zain 0:42

What else do we need to talk about? It seems like

Corey 0:44

like this has been a while since we've done this. It hasn't. It's only been a week, but a week in American politics right now is literally forever. This is true. There's also stuff going on locally here at home. I don't know if we're going to touch on that today. We might quickly.

Corey 0:57

this is, you know, you're supposed to have like a sleepy August. Like August is not supposed to be politically interesting. The last two years in a row now, last year we had a federal election in August.

Corey 1:06

So exciting. This year we have the dumpster fire election in the United States. Well,

Zain 1:11

Well, Carter and I just came back from Chicago. That was exciting times. And we talked to a lot of our counterparts in Chicago about this American election. And let's say no one is taking vacation, it seems like, in the political class. No,

Carter 1:21

No, I mean, everybody's working really hard. I mean, the most interesting conversations I had in Chicago were with Republicans trying to explain to us how

Carter 1:29

how you can distance yourself from Trump just

Carter 1:34

to keep his supporters.

Carter 1:36

But, you know, we're very clear that you're far enough away that you can get people or Republican voters who don't support Trump to support your candidate. This was the tightrope walk that they were trying to figure out. And it was fascinating to listen to. Do

Corey 1:53

Do these guys think they're breaking new ground here with these mental contortions? This is like the definition of cognitive dissonance. I'm not a horrible man for supporting Donald Trump because I also don't really support him. Like, this is such bullshit.

Carter 2:06

Oh, you should have seen the contortions they were going. Trying

Corey 2:08

Trying to explain how they could do this. I guarantee you I know what it is. I mean, this is, okay. No, no, no, that's fine.

Corey 2:14

They're going to say, let me guess, let me guess. Because this seems to be the talking point the Republicans have settled on. it's yeah

Corey 2:21

yeah donald trump has said bad things but hillary clinton she's she's

Corey 2:26

done bad things yeah

Carter 2:27

but these guys aren't doing that right now what

Carter 2:29

what they're literally trying to do like that's almost tacit support of donald trump what

Carter 2:34

what they're trying to do is actually walk away from donald trump like he is toxic at this moment like toxic uh

Corey 2:42

uh kurt are you running your chain song Is it finally gotten to the point where

Corey 2:47

going to end it?

Carter 2:48

Guys, as you know, we pay a lot of money for this studio. Yeah.

Zain 2:51

Yeah. This is a very expensive luxury studio. Now, this was a premium luxury version. This

Carter 2:56

This is the premium luxury version of the studio. Wooden chairs. And there's been a little bit of work done on the studio today.

Carter 3:03

I'm not allowed to say why. This

Zain 3:05

This is like getting the 11 p.m. ice time. They wouldn't fucking want the 11 p.m. ice time.

Carter 3:11

I'm told it's going to end shortly. And we will again be the point of focus And you know what, we're going to power through We're

Zain 3:15

We're going to power through into our first segment

Zain 3:22

so we decided not to power through Felt like that was the wiser decision No, we did

Zain 3:27

not You make it sound like it was our

Carter 3:29

our decision Corey literally stopped recording He said,

Zain 3:32

you know what He's

Carter 3:33

no, we're done He's

Zain 3:33

He's the host behind the host He really

Zain 3:35

really likes to control this That should surprise no one, by the way There should be no one who's listened to more than one episode so I'd be like, oh yeah, Corey controls shit.

Carter 3:42

We've never actually gone through and done the technical credits. That's true. Corey is, in fact, the producer.

Zain 3:50

The de facto producer. That

Zain 3:51

I am the producer. I

Carter 3:52

I am the technical producer. That's true.

Zain 3:55

And best boy. Key grip. Okay, I was going to give myself that role. Never mind. Our first segment, Control-Alt-Delete. Guys, we're talking about the Donald Trump reboot.

Zain 4:05

Okay, horrible week. Can we agree on that for Donald Trump or Corey? Here we go. Rejecting the premise is Corey Hogan's thing. But let me just list a few of the things that have happened in the past week just to set the table in the context. So the Stephanopoulos interview, he goes after, he confuses the Ukraine and Russia issue, not endorsing Paul Ryan, asks why we have nuclear weapons if we're not using them, goes after the Khan family, re-invokes the incidents of the disabled reporter and Megyn Kelly on stage, and finally calls Hillary Clinton mentally unstable or potentially mentally ill. That's just a small selection of Donald Trump's last week. Stephen Carter, I'll start with you. Is this over for him? Like, that's a broad, big question, but is this over?

Carter 4:47

Well, no. Okay. Because the only way that you can accurately predict the future is to reflect back at the past, right? And say, how has this particular person behaved in the past?

Carter 4:58

And that past behavior indicates that he will continue to behave that way in the future. What

Carter 5:03

I think is interesting is from the RNC till

Carter 5:07

he's had people who have come in to try and moderate him. Yes,

Carter 5:10

he has. Everybody knows that the only way that Trump can make this happen and actually win is if he modestly changes his behavior and

Carter 5:18

makes it about Hillary Clinton. Corey, you're

Carter 5:21

He's got to make this about Hillary Clinton, and he is not. He can't. So he can't do this. Right.

Carter 5:29

Right. Like, I've had candidates. you can guess who they are right you go in and and you you change their behavior and they change their behavior for a period of time and

Carter 5:38

and then afterwards maybe you get them elected and

Carter 5:41

and they start behaving like lunatics that

Carter 5:43

that happens this guy isn't even getting to the after i get elected i behave like a lunatic stage he's just behaving like a lunatic well of course it

Corey 5:51

it should surprise nobody that a man who puts his name in gold letters on all his buildings can't stop talking about himself that that is his problem though this was an election where if he can keep the republican party together and if he can keep the focus squarely on hillary clinton the second least popular candidate in u.s electoral history and even you know continue along that republican line i was just talking about where they say listen yeah i may be a little rough around the edges but i hillary clinton's a bad person you know that's his line of attack that has an awful lot of currency with an awful lot of americans he could have won this election and i shouldn't write him off entirely now god knows he surprised us surprised us a lot but the polls right now and the the poll of polls is showing hillary clinton leading by about eight points uh the conventions are earlier than they usually were this year usually they were in august but the rio olympics got in the way of that so they're hmm i

Corey 6:47

i mean it's tough to say but normally about a week out of convention two weeks out of convention i should say the polls start to look a lot a lot more more predictive than they do before the convention because that's everyone's made their case right but this is not i mean this is not a normal timeline it's hard to say like does that mean start of september the polls are predictive or does that mean two weeks after convention if it means start of september they're predictive he's still got some time to turn this around carter not this might be when we start seeing republicans run away this

Carter 7:15

this is fascinating to me normally we see large on undecided uh in polls yes we have we we are accustomed to dealing with With 18, 20, 25% undecided. Welcome to Canada. Right up to the last minute. Yeah.

Carter 7:28

I'm seeing 2%, 3% undecideds going on these poll sets. And that, to me, is a massive indication. Now, this is likely voter poll sets. Right. So likely voters, people who are identifying as likely voter, we could discuss whether or not that's an accurate metric, are saying, 98

Carter 7:48

98% of them are saying, I have made up my mind and this is who I'm voting for. Well,

Corey 7:52

Well, but we should say that most of those polls in the United States, the standard convention there, two things. One is they've just decided their whole lives whether they're Democrats, Republicans or independents.

Corey 8:03

But the second thing is that on undecideds, they do push them and say like, OK, is there anybody you're leaning to? And it's the true undecideds who are that percent you're talking about among likely voters. Yeah,

Carter 8:13

Yeah, I mean, it's still pretty small. It's tough. Very small.

Corey 8:17

I'm saying it's not apples to oranges, though. It would be, you know, Canadian system is a lot more fluid. We jump back

Carter 8:21

back and forth. My point is that we don't, we're not fluid. We don't jump back and forth. We are going, I think if you look back, once you lock in in American politics, you lock in. Yeah,

Carter 8:32

right. And there's, you know, we can see massive 72-hour shifts before an election.

Zain 8:38

Here in Canada, you

Carter 8:39

you know. Right, right.

Carter 8:40

I don't think we're going to see a massive 72-hour shift. We might see a

Carter 8:44

a trend line of momentum that shifts in

Carter 8:47

in mid-September if Donald Trump was able to modify his behavior.

Carter 8:51

If he was able to change the election about what the primary questions are about, he could begin a trend line in September that would take him through to November that would win.

Zain 9:03

can't shut up. He can't get out of his own way. Okay, so let's get into the larger notion of what the Trump campaign is calling a campaign reboot. This is effectively part of an intervention that Giuliani and Newt Gingrich have had with Donald Trump. These are two close supporters. They both spoke at the convention. They have now gone out in media. They've effectively publicized the fact that the campaign is going into a reboot. Corey, I'll go to you. Just let's first broadly talk about this concept of a campaign reboot, what goes into it, and then we'll talk about the success factor and how it works. But give me your one-on-one on what a campaign reboot is.

Corey 9:41

Why do you reboot your computer? Because it's locked up, because it's not working, and something needs to change. And you hope just by going back to that fresh state and declaring to the world this is a fresh state moving forward. And that's

Zain 9:51

that's important, declaring to the world, right?

Corey 9:52

Well, I think that in this case it is, right? Because there's been so much talk. There is a more subtle reboot where you just shuffle things around behind the scenes. All of a sudden, the campaign manager is out of day-to-day operations,

Corey 10:05

maybe even still maintaining the role, but somebody else is doing the actual campaign managing. And that's more about organizationally rebooting. This is about a communications reboot, optically rebooting. and to reboot in that sense you really need to let people know what's happening and make a big show out of it which is exactly what the trump campaign is trying to do even donald trump had i mean as far as donald trump goes uh

Corey 10:27

uh you know i don't know if you could call it a maya call but that would be wrong because god knows he's never apologized for anything but he said like hey yeah no i'm gonna take this you

Corey 10:37

you know i'm gonna act more like the candidate you want me to act like carter

Zain 10:40

carter tell me about what a campaign reboot is what constitutes a campaign reboot cory makes a a very good analogy or metaphor about rebooting your computer because it's locked up well

Corey 10:48

well it's where it came from i can't take too much credit

Zain 10:50

i hear you i hear you but at the same time what are you expecting to see and and what have you gone through personally in terms of a campaign reboot on the campaign trail well

Carter 11:00

well i think the your campaign reboot uh is when you've got the wrong question being asked right and so uh 2012 uh with the nomi committee in in in alberta we We were being asked, can you trust the progressive conservatives anymore? And when we were asking that question, we obviously couldn't. We then began, you know, so we were dropping the polls. We were in desperate trouble.

Carter 11:25

We then began a reboot where we tried to focus on the

Carter 11:30

Rose. Did you publicize that? You did

Zain 11:32

did not, right? No, that was more the first time. That's right. That's organizational. Right.

Carter 11:36

Right. Right. And then Corey caught on to it and saw what we were trying to do and publishes Tory or Wild Rose, which is a set of quotes between our far right ministers and the Wild Rose far right. And you couldn't tell them apart. That was the point of your page. No,

Corey 11:50

but to be well, well

Corey 11:51

constructed, my little friend. Well, thank you. But, you know, I mean, this this was something you could see coming from where I was. We just couldn't stop it. it um i had candidates saying that the pcs were the lesser of two evils and i would i was on the daily calls the hell man what

Carter 12:05

what the fuck are

Corey 12:06

are you doing this is exactly the opposite of what you should be saying what they want you to believe yeah yeah i mean you've got to be saying this is like let them fight over which one is worse candidly it's time for a change um we didn't obviously manage to succeed with that message beyond our our core which is pretty much all we could realistically hope to get that election i think we had like a hundred grand to spend but But the most

Carter 12:27

most successful reboots in my mind aren't

Carter 12:31

They just happen, right? So you go in, you reboot the campaign, meaning you change the question or you change your behavior. Do you have an example of

Corey 12:40

of one of those? I mean, we have some. Some are successful, some are not. But, for example, the campaign

Corey 12:47

campaign that we just had federally, there was a reboot partway through where the management, the day-to-day management was essentially shuffled out, right? Right. There was the whole dust up with Jenny Byrne. And obviously, again,

Carter 12:58

again, though, that became public. That's

Carter 13:00

Right. Which is one of the reasons one could argue it was not a very successful reboot. Right. They changed their direction. They changed their management and they changed the they changed

Carter 13:09

changed the outcome. They lost. Right.

Carter 13:14

I would argue, I mean, if you remember about a year ago, we did our liberal strategy episode. That's

Carter 13:20

liberal strategy episode. Yeah, because liberal strategists, you know, we said there's a path to victory. And at that time, it wasn't a given that the Liberals were going to win this election. And

Carter 13:30

I think that there was a reboot. It wasn't a reboot in terms of changing the personnel or changing the behavior of

Carter 13:36

of the candidate necessarily, although

Carter 13:37

although they did bring out a lot of hitters. They did change. They changed some things. They changed the way that they were doing things.

Zain 13:43

But do you think they financially changed the question?

Carter 13:46

They were fundamentally different questions by the time. Because at the beginning, it was, is Thomas Mulcair ready to govern? Now, that could have been the same question, and the answer was just no.

Corey 13:57

Well, I would say that the liberals ultimately changed or embraced the fact that there was a big undercurrent of change. Right.

Corey 14:03

And that's when you saw them give up the balanced budget pledge and just say, yeah, we're going to run the biggest deficit, putting Mulcair in that box. At the time, we discussed it, and we kind of hemmed and hawed whether we thought it was a particularly deft strategy. And certainly to this day, I understand why Mulcair couldn't follow him there because of what the NDP is. I mean, all these parties bring their baggage. And in this context, I also mean Donald Trump brings his baggage in. So let me

Corey 14:28

me segue back to the question at hand here. And I think one of the reasons why this was a public reboot was because one of the things they were rebooting was this notion that Donald Trump can never admit that he was wrong. Right. Right. That was so much part of the brand that people were having difficulties with and were acting like this. This guy is not in an adult state of mind. Oh,

Corey 14:50

You know what? We're going to power

Zain 14:51

power through this side. But

Zain 14:53

you hear another break, you know who made the decision. Go ahead, Corey.

Corey 14:57

Well, the challenge is just like most

Corey 15:01

most of the time when we talk about reboots, we are going to be talking about failures. There are very few successful reboots. By definition, you reboot when things are going bad. Right. Right. You're already behind the script entirely. Reboots like that are the exception. They are not the rule. You don't often see success coming from reboots. They're the Hail Mary of the political world. Stephen Carter, on that

Zain 15:22

that same vein that Corey was talking about, on this particular campaign issue for Donald Trump, was a reboot or is a reboot necessary?

Zain 15:35

Yes. Is this Hail Mary time is what I'm asking? Well,

Carter 15:41

he did fine heading into the Republican National Convention, right? When he had the convention. And you think he did

Zain 15:47

did fine heading out of it as well?

Carter 15:49

I mean, he was doing great right up until the moment when the Democrats got to set the stage. And

Carter 15:55

And as soon as they set the stage, Hillary is a trained professional politician. There is no question that this is what she does. And she listens to advisors and she does the work that needs to be done. Right.

Carter 16:07

as advertised. traumatized and she took she was able to reset everything um after trump and trump doesn't have that ability right

Carter 16:14

right uh there's a question there was an open question and we were we were worried about it could trump win this election and

Carter 16:20

and i don't know that we ever fell into the trump's going to win category i think we had a moment of right

Corey 16:25

right well it could happen it

Carter 16:26

it could happen and uh all he needed to do was was keep pushing that agenda and he doesn't have the ability to do that so does he need to do a reboot absolutely will

Carter 16:35

will he do a reboot can he do a reboot those are the open questions to

Zain 16:39

to you same question is you called it a hail mary is this the time for the hail mary well

Corey 16:44

well um the thing is these are these are hard to move these campaign opinions when they're set so you can't exactly throw your hail mary on november 1st and hope that it's going to succeed that's

Corey 16:56

that's just not how politics works in the states in particular it is uh the polls have been been very predictive the last couple of elections there in part because they've been so stable right everybody sort of sticks to where they are this has been um

Corey 17:09

the exception i guess with some of the back and forth but even that hasn't been pretty dramatic relative to the canadian system right like you see people move up and down a couple of points we had swings in our election of what 20 points to the liberals more i mean yeah that that is just like three months system right Right.

Corey 17:26

guess it's the time, really the time, the fact that you just had what should have been not even a reset, but you're set your convention and

Corey 17:35

two weeks later you're in a reset. Yeah. Is a grim fucking statement. Sure. About the about the Trump campaign and the fact that they feel they need to make it public because there is so much acrimony and animosity digging out.

Carter 17:47

I think that part of the other reason they're making it public is they want public pressure on Trump.

Zain 17:52

It's an accountability mechanism, I

Carter 17:55

I can't control him.

Carter 17:57

Maybe the general population. Well, that's a mistake if

Corey 18:01

if that's their plan.

Carter 18:02

Yes, I don't think that there's any other explanation for going public like they have.

Corey 18:05

There are situations in the world where you double down stakes like that and you do that totally

Corey 18:11

totally to your detriment because all you've done is you've raised the ante and you cannot win because Donald Trump is not going to moderate his behavior and change his behavior. here and if your hope is that just external pressure is going to do that donald trump has shown no evidence that he changes because of external pressure correct

Corey 18:27

right i mean if there's going to be a change it's going to happen because he himself doesn't want to be perceived in that fashion so if this pressure is coming from outside of trump himself and

Corey 18:35

and not like a conscious buy-in by trump like okay we're going to show the public we're resetting there is a zero percent chance okay

Zain 18:41

okay so back at you then cory you know this about donald trump you know how he reacts you know his his tendencies if you were given the keys at this moment in time and you knew that you had to do a reboot what would you advise what would be your pathway forward in terms of let's say the next 30 days in rebooting this thing i don't know yeah

Corey 18:59

gave them yesterday or not yesterday last week when we did this which is just stop talking i mean literally every time he does something crazy he goes down in the polls and when we forget about trump for a while yeah the polls tighten up best

Carter 19:12

best Best tweet ever, and I retweeted it earlier this week. If this election is about Trump, he loses. If this election is about Hillary, she loses.

Carter 19:21

both candidates want this to be about Trump.

Carter 19:24

Right? So if Trump is the topic, he's going to lose. But if he can get out of the way and let the RNC, so the Republicans and the experts in negative campaigning that they are, do their work, they will tear her down. And people are predisposed not to like her, but

Carter 19:43

but they can't get there because they are even more predisposed not to like Trump. So

Zain 19:46

So let me clarify this. You're telling me that your strategy would be to have the campaign, the Republican campaign machinery do the negatives on Clinton. You have Donald Trump's talking solely about Hillary Clinton and her negative record. Is that is that what the baseline for the reboot in your mind looks

Corey 20:02

looks like? Well, look, I think that Donald Trump's path to victory is pretty obvious, and it's to run the generic Republican campaign. Literally, if we never saw Donald Trump again between now and November 8th, I think their odds would be better. Go

Carter 20:14

Go up 10 points. Because Hillary

Corey 20:15

Hillary Clinton is a very polarizing figure. And the Republican Party is not as unpopular as you would imagine based on how we respond to it. And there

Corey 20:26

there is certainly something in the water right now in the United States. But

Corey 20:31

But the problem is Donald Trump, that

Corey 20:35

that is so not his character. I just can't believe for a minute he's going to do that. So the next best thing is going to be how do you make Donald Trump the

Corey 20:42

the vessel for that? And he could do that. I mean, he is proven to be a pretty, like,

Corey 20:48

like, I guess when I start thinking about practical strategies, right? Like, that would be the best strategy. Just, Donald, just calm down, disappear, be very bland, just make this about Clinton. Let's just run a shit ton of ads. And we'll do the knife fight against her, yeah. Yeah, all over the place. Really drag her down, and hopefully there'll

Corey 21:06

there'll be another WikiLeaks thing in September or October, and that'll be it. And we'll manage to eke out a victory here, although more

Corey 21:12

more on that, I'm sure, in a minute.

Carter 21:15

He's shown that he has the ability to read from a prompter.

Zain 21:18

He did in Detroit at the economic speech that he gave.

Carter 21:22

And he did at the RNC. He added a few lines, but he can read from a prompter.

Carter 21:28

If he read from a prompter for the rest of this campaign, he'd

Carter 21:32

So that's practical strategy. You

Zain 21:34

You were going to get into practical strategy

Corey 21:35

strategy as well, yeah. Well, so I don't know if that's a practical strategy with Donald Trump. I think all evidence that we have the past year of him being a politician suggests the opposite. So I guess that you have to steer into the skin would be my best advice on that. And you're just going to have to make him the insult machine about Hillary Clinton. And the parameters you put on him are, Donald, you

Corey 21:56

you can say as much outrageous mean stuff as you want, as long as it's directed towards Hillary Clinton. No more picking on the little guy who supports Hillary Clinton. It is on her and her alone. And every speech you do is going to be the meanest, nastiest, shit-kicking speech you have ever given. And that's fine. That's why people loved you in the Republican primary. Because, you know, and Zane, I don't think that's as good as the other strategy, but I think that's the only realistic strategy. That's the realistic, viable strategy

Carter 22:22

Carter, anything to add to that before we move on? No, but I'm just hoping they're not listening.

Carter 22:26

Right? Please. It could

Zain 22:28

get vitriolic. Yeah, absolutely.

Carter 22:30

Because this is already

Carter 22:33

already one of the most negative campaigns I

Carter 22:35

think we've seen. Although

Carter 22:38

Although there's some interesting historical

Carter 22:41

historical parallels. People keep going back in history and saying, you know, is politics worse today than it was 100 years ago? And it probably isn't. The difference is the mediums that are available to us. A negative that is set in front of a crowd In 1896 It's probably

Corey 22:57

not going to be Picked up by somebody across the country Five minutes later Yeah,

Carter 23:00

Yeah, it's not amplified the same way that it's amplified now Keep

Zain 23:03

Keep your Trump hat on for a second I want to talk about this last week As it relates to Hillary Clinton Now she objectively had a better week But not a great week herself The short circuit thing

Zain 23:12

Right, there was also this Iran story That came out while she was Secretary of State The $400 million ransom However, it is It is, and we'll talk about other stupid things that the other side could use. But I actually want to get into maybe a theoretical point before I get into the specifics of this, which is if you have a story against your opponent, in this case you're the Trump campaign, and you yourself are having a bad week, how do you leverage that later on? If you don't leverage it as soon as it comes out, is it dead? Why

Zain 23:39

wouldn't you leverage it as soon as it comes out?

Corey 23:40

out? They were playing defense the whole time. If you're having a bad week, well, the best defense is a good offense. okay yeah and uh and you'll see like twitter's uh or trump's twitter feed last week i made a comment about this became at one point during his darkest days just like almost a bot that's like great to be in jacksonville great to be in orlando like it just became nothing right but the minute that there was that uh hillary clinton short circuit when she said oh i short circuited on that answer right right right all trump was on that and he had like a million tweets on that right and then the iran stuff became a million tweets on that because that was the way that he could kind of turn and say like look at this person look at them what a piece of shit they are which is um which was not you know everybody had told him you got to shut up about the cons yeah i

Corey 24:25

i guarantee you yeah that's a losing battle i will break your fucking thumbs if you tweet about the cons when we will take your

Carter 24:30

your absurdly small fingers and break them off if you continue to talk about the cons that's

Corey 24:35

that's right but there

Carter 24:35

there was no way out there was no

Corey 24:37

no way out of that and you You know what? I mean, it's funny how the Republicans even were like, no Gold Star family. Untouchable. Right. The Americans have some interesting shibboleths to me. And the military families is certainly one of them. You cannot cross that line. That's clear. So even Republicans were running away.

Corey 24:55

That was interesting. That was interesting. But that

Corey 24:58

that was the only time he got off defense all week was when he got to talk about those things. So, no, he wouldn't wait for it.

Zain 25:04

But the party themselves did not make this a big deal as much as it could have been, right? In any other election, these two stories would have probably been like their own media cycle. But because Donald Trump was having a bad

Corey 25:16

bad week, they did not turn out to be. I feel like you're just hanging out on MSNBC and FiveThirtyEight because when you start looking at the Fox News and like the Breitbart and stuff of the world, that's all they were talking about. Oh, I understand

Carter 25:26

understand that this was a thing. I mean, for those that are core looking for Republican messaging, they found them. They

Corey 25:33

They found it. And that helped stabilize Donald Trump, I think, near the end of the week. There was a point probably around Wednesday last week where I truly believed like one more Trump catastrophe. I'm not even saying something he hasn't done before, but like the equivalent of the attack on the judge or the attack on the reporter or even an attack on the cons.

Corey 25:52

One more of those. And I think literally his campaign would have been over. I think that the Republican leadership would have just abandoned him, dropped him cold. OK, so let's

Zain 26:01

let's move on to another component of this week, which seems to be institutional

Zain 26:05

institutional Republicans backing away from Donald Trump. Right. We saw it with Meg Whitman. We saw it with the Harvard Republican Association. And yesterday, more specifically, we saw it with Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, who wrote a Washington Post op ed last night, which got into print this morning saying, I can't support Donald Trump. And then she listed a core reasons as to why she couldn't. Now, she also did not endorse Hillary Clinton. She said

Zain 26:30

wouldn't support Hillary Clinton, and she didn't say where she'd be going, but she said, I will not be voting for Donald Trump. Corey, how big of a deal is this for the Trump campaign?

Corey 26:39

I think it's a big

Corey 26:41

big deal. I think that this is one of those – there tends to be tipping points when your party starts to go away from you. I think anybody familiar with the Canadian system, it's the first knife in the leader's back that's the hardest, and then everybody else who's been waiting to do it pulls it out. Now, that said, Collins is a pretty moderate Republican. She's from Maine, and she's often been fairly moderate. I'm not necessarily sure that this is the—well, it's not the end. Let's put it that way. It would be a huge deal if we were talking about a more conservative Republican from, you know, I was going to say a state like Texas, but there is a senator from the state of Texas who has already not endorsed Donald Trump, and that's Ted Cruz. But, you know, if somebody just looked at it as an uninvested party, you know, maybe they're not even up for re-election this year, and they're like, no way, this is too much. That would be really bad. I think that the nature of the U.S. system is some people are given a bit of latitude to step away from

Corey 27:34

from the leader. Yeah.

Corey 27:36

And this is not the end of the world for them. This is baked in. This

Carter 27:40

This is the nature of a two-party system. You've got a two-party system with incredible regional differences. It's not that different than when we talk about Canadian politics and you have these regional differences and you have to step outside. The difference is we have multiple parties. Yeah.

Carter 27:56

They don't have multiple parties there. They have two parties. So you can be – you

Carter 28:01

you have to sometimes step out of your party structure. Corey? Well,

Corey 28:06

Well, the American parties are very factional. I mean there's factions in our parties, but those – they've essentially – I've often argued that the Americans have more like a six-party system that funnels into two parties before the general. Right.

Zain 28:19

They have multiple splinters within each

Corey 28:20

each party. I mean, there are wings of the parties that are strong and, you know, mutually exclusive and hate each other. Carter,

Zain 28:26

Carter, you're Donald Trump. How and if do you respond to this? What do you do? First of all, two questions because I think I'll piece it up. What do you think he will do and what should he do?

Carter 28:39

Well, eventually he's going to make this about him again. He's going to say the only person who can stop this is me. And he's going to use things like the 400 million to Iran. Right. Right. Which we could factually debate because it's bullshit. But that's fine. He doesn't give a shit if it's factually correct. He's going to take it and he's going to say, the only one who can stop this is me. And then, so the problem is... Just

Zain 28:59

Just a weird pivot to himself. It

Carter 29:01

It pivots back, right? So he holds up a mirror and instead of pointing the mirror at Hillary Clinton and saying, why would anybody vote for this woman? He turns

Carter 29:11

turns it right back on himself and in his narcissistic fashion makes it about himself. So someone,

Zain 29:16

someone, this Republican senator from Maine, says she's not endorsing him. What should his campaign do, Carter?

Carter 29:26

Ignore it 100% and it didn't even happen. I mean, a nameless senator that no one knows. You don't

Carter 29:33

don't even say that. You don't even say a nameless, you don't even get

Carter 29:35

get into that, right? You just let the fact that no one's going to remember her or her statement in two days, you let that happen.

Carter 29:42

But he won't. He'll name the 50, you know, he'll focus on the 50 senators or the 50 people, the 50 senior RNC officials. He'll be baited into potentially saying something. He will attack them because he doesn't know any other means. Yeah,

Corey 29:55

Yeah, I mean, I think that,

Corey 29:57

that, again, in the world of practical options, he's going to say something. And what he should say is something along the lines of, look, I'm not for everybody. And I'm certainly not for establishment people who are unwilling to change Washington. And they're going to find a lot of excuses not to support me because I threaten their very way of life. And that way of life is entitlement, pork barrel politics, just screwing you over, little guy. And I'm not worried that I don't have her endorsement. I'm much more interested in the endorsement of the American people. That would be the approach he should take if he's going to say anything at all. But he shouldn't say anything at all. Right. Yeah. Right. He's just going to kick it another day if he does. What

Zain 30:33

What does this mean for Hillary Clinton? Because there's been reports out last week that she was out soliciting some of these, you know, endorsements, hopefully trying to get some of these Republicans to come over. Yet, how does this affect her? Because this senator particularly comes out and says, OK, I'm not with Trump, but I'm also not with you, Hillary Clinton. Well,

Corey 30:54

still a win for Hillary Clinton. You still

Zain 30:55

believe it's a W. Yeah,

Corey 30:56

Yeah, I mean, at this point, a W for her is an L for Trump. and there

Corey 31:01

there is that old the enemy of my enemy is my friend mantra right what i do think is interesting though is with the week that donald trump had last week i kind of had assumed for a while that the clinton campaign is probably lining up people who as a steady drip can say all right i'm not with trump trump's too far and you've certainly seen a lot of republicans more on the operative side come forward and say well i'm going to support hillary clinton and you saw an op-ed last week from a former head of the cia you've seen a lot of people with that prominence come out but i kind of think if

Corey 31:33

if i was the hillary clinton campaign last week is when i would have brought out my big guns and i think we saw the big guns the question why is that sorry because you had your foot on his throat and you were just hoping to destroy the man last week you think there was an opportunity for a knockout blow last i think so i think there i mean i'm not necessarily convinced it's entirely gone given that she's still up by eight points in the in in the poll of polls right now, and I think if you're around 10, everybody's going to start panicking, right? Especially anybody up for re-election in a tighter race. Carter, you're Hillary Clinton.

Zain 32:04

Clinton. You have been reported to be out soliciting these endorsements. One comes out, it's not for you, it's against your opponent. Is this still a W, like Corey says? Still a win for you?

Carter 32:15

Yeah, I mean, anything that hurts Trump helps you. There's a significant shift, I think, happening right now with the Republicans moving to the Libertarian Party. Yeah,

Zain 32:26

about Gary Johnson in a second, for

Carter 32:27

for sure. We are seeing that shift, and that shift is real, and that shift only helps Clinton. So, you know, the same way that Bill Clinton wins when the Republicans splinter into Perot and Bush, this still is the same way that Clinton

Carter 32:45

Clinton can win. Now, she's reaching the 50th percentile in terms of overall support. So I'd

Carter 32:52

I'd be really careful if I was her from seeking this too much, too long. I would, you know, I'd use the Olympics here as your last opportunity to try and push moderate Republicans to disavow Trump.

Carter 33:05

And then after the Olympics, I'd just focus on my own positive messaging and trying to figure out what will get my voters to the polls. Because the second problem that happens is when you're going to win, when

Carter 33:17

when you've got the lead and you're going to win, your voters stay home.

Corey 33:21

Corey, do you agree with that strategy and that premise? I think that it's a pretty complicated situation that her organizers have to deal with, not least of which because of the Republican, or sorry, the Libertarian ticket having two Republican governors. There is not a likelihood, but a possibility if Trump completely collapses, if everybody runs away, the Republican or the Libertarians are on the ballot in all 50 states. They are. Right. I mean, what if she just replaces a very unpopular opponent in Donald Trump with a an unknown and potentially impactful candidate and gary johnson right i mean if people just make that flip and they're like okay this is the new republican ticket for this election as far as we're concerned now i don't know that that's practical or likely but i i

Corey 34:04

i think you have to be careful that if you kill somebody you don't you know you don't leave their son ready to avenge them i'm

Zain 34:10

i'm going to take a quick detour here you know when we finished our episode on the rnc we We said one of the best speakers there was Ivanka Trump and how well she had kind of introduced her father, how articulate she was. Why do you think the Trump campaign didn't bring her out this week in the midst of this chaos?

Carter 34:27

I honestly think that the Trump campaign doesn't bring out any surrogates because it's about Trump.

Corey 34:33

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think in some ways, what was the opportunity? What was the hook? You would have to find a situation where you could have responded to something where you could have brought it in without selling her brand because then she's not useful in the future. You know, they have a very good point. They have people who can go around and start kicking asses and defending Trump. That's not Ivanka's role. Ivanka's role is to humanize Donald Trump. And unfortunately, there was not a really good hook to do that this week for them. Fair point. OK, let's let me

Zain 35:01

me move on to the Republican or what I should call the Trump grassroots. So, Corey, you know, you and I were chatting about this, this whole concept of Hillary's health that's been going on, Donald Trump, and this includes Breitbart and Drudge Report and all the grassroots, no, I shouldn't say all the grassroots, but a substantial amount of Donald Trump's grassroots now putting out what are objectively false claims about Hillary Clinton's health online as a way of talking about how unfit she is as a potential president going forward. First of all, what do you make of the current state of the Trump grassroots? This is layered on top of the fact that Donald Trump, for the last week and a half, has been saying, you know, I think this election might be rigged. He's really trying to inflame this base. Talk to me about what you feel like the mental state of this, it's quite substantial in raw numbers, these 12, 15 million base that Donald Trump has. What do you think their mental state is right now? I think

Corey 35:59

Republican Party in particular, conservatism perhaps across the board right now, people feel free to disagree. But there

Corey 36:06

there has always been a – let's be positive about it before I'm negative about it. But one of the tenets of republicanism is this do-it-yourself, pick-yourself-up, get-it-done, bootstrap stuff. And part of that means you have this delusion that you can get it done, that you are an expert enough to get these things done. and in the republican party you have started to see this manifest in a number of different ways all of which are fascinating all of which could be conversations in their own right i'm going to just mention a couple of them what is this this notion that they're better pollsters than the pollsters right so they go in and they're like well hold on i think that you should weigh these things very differently and if you do that then my guy wins right i think there's a combination of incompetence and wishful thinking that goes into that there's this notion that they can do government better than government we don't need experts we need just to get in there and i'll bet you if i'm in there with my pocket calculator and a few good hours with the budget i'll just strike out lines and i'll get us back to balance right i mean that's also absurd in its own right and then of course there's now we're

Corey 37:07

we're better doctors than the doctors we can look at this zapruder style look at this film look at these photographs and we can determine exactly what the state of hillary clinton's health is notwithstanding

Corey 37:19

notwithstanding we weren't even there like we're not even talking like the The reporters follow her around every day, every day, and not just the left-wing reporters, but also the right-wing reporters. To

Zain 37:27

To contextualize this for people a little bit, right, this was a picture, or was it a video, one of the things, both, that had Hillary Clinton just slipping somewhere,

Corey 37:35

right? Right, she slipped on the stairs and two aides helped her up was one of the videos. But it's like, people, come on, I slip on the stairs every now and then, right? I mean, if somebody has the camera on you 24-7, you're going to have some inelegant trips. trips and uh wasn't

Carter 37:49

wasn't that whole gerald ford's whole problem was that he kept

Corey 37:52

kept falling down and there was the head bobbing she was bobbing her head and in like an exaggerated fashion in one

Corey 37:59

that's right yeah i mean this is all ridiculous i think there's

Corey 38:04

i i you know if i were the clinton campaign i would probably well it's tough right if you don't want to validate it by saying here's my doctor's report oh yeah the other one was totally insane a secret service agent came up to her uh when like a protester was rushing the stage and she just sort of stood still and like watched the protester and the secret service agent uh purportedly said it's fine continue your speech we've got us under control and they're like no no she was stabbed with a needle it was because she was having a seizure of some sort that's why she sort of stopped i

Corey 38:34

i mean these things are crazy and it's not like we don't know who the secret service these

Zain 38:37

these things are crazy these things are ridiculous steven carter but let's talk about how they could be potentially dangerous if Donald Trump does indeed lose this thing?

Carter 38:45

Well, this is my fear, right? There is a base audience, and I watched another video on it yesterday, of,

Carter 38:51

of, you know, all of Trump's, let's

Carter 38:53

let's call them lies, or flip-flops. If I'm going to be generous, I'll call them flip-flops. You know, he says one thing one time, and then he says another thing another time.

Carter 39:03

And then at the very end, there's

Carter 39:05

there's a Republican voter who says, all

Carter 39:08

all these politicians are liars. All of them are liars. The only one I can trust is Donald Trump. And

Carter 39:14

And it's like, how do you trust Donald Trump? Right? And there is a palpable anger amongst

Carter 39:21

amongst certain groups. And, I

Carter 39:24

mean, you don't want to get all excited about it. You don't want to get them, you know, the United States is facing a revolution, blah, blah, blah.

Carter 39:31

But there is a palpable anger. And you have to ask yourself, when Hillary wins, what will happen? Right? Right. This was the same type of thing when Obama won. Right. Your first black man is going to be a president. And there were a group of people, a very large group of people who were very opposed to that. Yes.

Carter 39:49

Eight years later, I

Carter 39:51

I think Obama's been a good president. Those people who didn't think he would be a good president, surprise, surprise, thought he wasn't a good president.

Carter 39:57

So maybe they just put up with it. Maybe these things. But I feel like this

Carter 40:03

this isn't hyperbole to say that there is a growing simmering of anger.

Carter 40:09

And it is incumbent upon our political class to figure out how to inoculate

Carter 40:15

inoculate against that anger or to make that anger dissipate.

Carter 40:20

not just the United States.

Carter 40:23

Social media has given us the ability to find other people who are as angry as us and to find facts that support our anger. Regardless

Carter 40:32

And it doesn't matter if I'm protesting for or against something. If I'm angry

Carter 40:37

angry enough to pick up a placard and

Carter 40:40

and to stand out and to scream about how bad the government is, that

Carter 40:43

that anger is relatively new.

Carter 40:47

new. I mean, it is and it isn't new. It did its thing in the 1960s with civil rights, and we think it moved it. I think any reasonable person thinks that that was a very positive outcome. I'm not sure that the placards that are being waived today are

Carter 41:01

are necessarily as positive. Corey,

Zain 41:03

Corey, I don't want to go too broad with this, but do you feel like this manifestation of this grassroots emergence within the Trump supporters is part of this whole notion of facts versus facts that feel right? This concept that we've discussed before. Do you think this is

Zain 41:18

new reality for us in American politics?

Corey 41:20

Well, and it's not just on the Republican side. There are certainly people on the Democrat side who ignore facts willfully because they don't fit their worldview. I'm looking at you anti-vaxxers. I'm looking at you anti-GMO activists. Hang on. Oh,

Carter 41:32

Oh, yeah, I agree with

Corey 41:33

with you. Yeah, no, I mean, the problem is we

Corey 41:36

we all create these hypocrisies that we build our lives on. Hypocrisy is the human condition. There's not much we can do about that, and this is not a new revelation. The challenge is one that's more fundamental, in my opinion. You now have people talking about – so

Corey 41:52

so from the polls being rigged to the election being rigged was not a far step, but it was another incremental step down the road. i think that we we're

Corey 42:01

we're in some very troubling areas and i guess what i would want to

Corey 42:07

do you think a democracy dies how do you know i think people have this caricature in their minds that one day like all of a sudden somebody just stands up and says this is the death of democracy i'm now in charge and everyone's like yeah okay fine system changed but it doesn't die like that it fundamentally does not die like that democracy at its core is not about voting although

Corey 42:27

although voting is is a very important component it's a system where we govern together and to govern together you have to trust each other and there is absolutely no trust between these two sides and even within those two sides trust is eroding rather rapidly and so it

Corey 42:40

it doesn't die when um somebody stands up and says democracy is over it dies when somebody says the

Corey 42:48

the will of the people is no longer being reflected properly by our system the will of the people can only be properly reflected by me Which is exactly where Donald Trump is going with these things. And as soon as you stand up and you have politicians saying that and you cannot trust the fundamental systems that underpin democracy, you

Corey 43:06

you are opening a pretty horrible can of worms. And I think that all Republicans who are still supporting this guy need to take a step back. I think every Republican who has not condemned the notion this election may be rigged, irrespective of the fact that elections in the United States are not run by a central authority. They are run by the 50 states, most of which have Republican officials overlooking the results.

Corey 43:30

Everybody should be very concerned. And it may seem incremental from where we were, but we've had too many incremental steps in

Carter 43:36

in the past 20 years. My problem is, Corey, you and I sound like alarmists when we do this. We're

Carter 43:39

not. We sound like alarmists, and I

Carter 43:43

I agree completely with you, right? Right. The system is ripe for

Carter 43:49

the downfall of democracy because no one no one takes. You're not you guys

Zain 43:53

guys are not speaking about this hyperbolically. I'm looking at your faces and you're dead serious about this. I just want to ensure that listeners understand that.

Carter 44:00

I don't think people understand how fragile democracy is at the first. Right. And we have seen democracies, fledgling democracies, in some cases established democracies. One doesn't have to go too far to look at Turkey and

Carter 44:13

the way that they're moving their democracy away

Carter 44:16

from the Ataturk style of constitution. Sure.

Carter 44:21

Sure. It's only that the constitution is less than 100 years old. It's a totally different thing. Blah, blah, blah.

Carter 44:27

Except when you're the longest democracy, which

Carter 44:31

which is the American democracy, you

Carter 44:33

you have to also recognize that all of these great democracies go through cycles. cycles and we have not seen anything that is infinite nothing

Carter 44:40

is infinite and so if you go with that expect expectation that at some point it falls what

Carter 44:46

what conditions need to be present for it to fall and the conditions that you need for it to fall are being developed right now wow

Zain 44:53

wow okay i did not expect that to go so broadly but yeah point well taken carter end on this put your darkest of dark hats on okay you are inside the trump campaign doing doing

Zain 45:04

doing the dark arts okay OK, you see this groundswell, these multiple what Corey would call it. I think we all would agree. Ridiculous sort of campaigns within the grassroots starting to emerge. Clinton's health, Clinton's whatever. How do you as a campaign? I hate to even say this. Leverage this for the for the greater good of your candidate and your campaign.

Carter 45:25

You know, it'd be interesting. I mean, so if I was doing this right now, I'd be calling if I was in Donald Trump's campaign, I'd be calling every congressman in every swing state.

Carter 45:34

And I'd be saying, you've

Carter 45:35

you've got to make sure this is going out.

Carter 45:38

If I touch this right now, it's

Carter 45:40

it's going to explode beyond what I need. I, as

Zain 45:42

central campaign, cannot do this.

Carter 45:44

this. I can't do this, but you can.

Carter 45:46

You're in North Carolina, my friend. You're sitting in a fantastic riding. You're currently at 52.3% in the polls. Yeah, I just did a poll for you. That's where you're sitting.

Carter 45:55

You're sitting at 52.4% in the polls. I need you to go negative on Hillary Clinton. With

Carter 46:00

With this sort of stuff. Because if you do, you're going to win. in and

Carter 46:03

i'm going to elevate right

Carter 46:05

right and i and i would use a decentralized model of really negative campaigning in the swing states because currently my problem is if

Carter 46:15

if i do a massive campaign and

Carter 46:16

and i try to do it at the top level first of all i don't have the money right

Carter 46:21

right right if i'm donald trump's campaign i'm raising half of what i should be raising so

Carter 46:25

so i don't have the money to do what i need to do and

Carter 46:27

and secondly i don't have the talent but

Carter 46:29

but i know that in these congressional offices They do have the talent. And if I pick up the phone and I call them and I'm the national campaign director or

Carter 46:37

or I'm, fuck, go

Carter 46:39

go crazy, man. I'm Trump.

Carter 46:42

is making phone calls to 100 congressmen in swing

Carter 46:45

swing states and saying, I need you. You're my guy. I need you on my team.

Carter 46:53

This could be a methodology by which he can take those swing states. And right now, I

Carter 46:58

I mean, he is really behind the eight ball. Him winning this thing, I

Carter 47:02

I mean, first of all, he has to stop from losing this thing massively. And

Carter 47:05

And the only way to do that is to stop the swing state.

Carter 47:07

And I would call and do a decentralized ultra-negative campaign. Very

Zain 47:11

Very interesting. Corey, I was going to let Carter end on this, but I need to get your response on this. What do you think of both what what he should do, but also what Carter said here as as the strategy that Carter would would point out? Well,

Corey 47:23

Well, the I wouldn't push too hard on it, although Donald Trump came to prominence in politics with his birther stuff. Right. With the problem is that he could hit a tipping point himself. So Stephen's suggestion isn't a bad one. I'm not sure that a local surrogate like that is necessarily what's called for. I do think you need a national surrogate, and I think it should be somebody who you

Corey 47:48

you can send from coast to coast, who can speak with some authority and almost act as like, look, I'm actually very concerned about Hillary Clinton in this fashion, and she's showing some erratic behavior. Start to pepper in words like erratic, she didn't seem well, things that are just –

Carter 48:04

doesn't want to share the spotlight at the national level. I don't think he'd mind sharing it in District 4 in North Carolina. line as

Corey 48:11

as like a co but i'm nationally that's interesting well

Corey 48:13

well i think you need somebody who's gonna have some sort of national chops on this ideally even a doctor or something along those lines but i

Corey 48:21

i don't know i mean that that is such dark art stuff it is if i were him i would just i

Corey 48:26

i would step real hard back from that because it could backfire pretty badly the problem is he's also a very old guy and if they want to start playing tit for tat for when you and in fact In fact, he's older

Corey 48:38

Well, when you start looking like – if you want to start cataloging what looks like seniors' moments or doing kind of armchair health assessments, I'm not sure how well Donald Trump is going to do on that. So maybe just tread a bit carefully. And

Carter 48:49

And look at the doctor you're going to throw up, right?

Carter 48:52

right? Like if you really wanted to throw a doctor up, you know which one you're using? It's Ben Carson, who's a lunatic in his own right. So, I mean, I appreciate your strategy, Corey, but I think in this particular case, I'm going to go with mine. She's got such bad health.

Zain 49:08

Guys, on to our next segment, 1012 versus 2. We are going to talk about electoral pathways. Stephen Carter, this number, 1012, according to both Slate and the upshot from the New York Times, is the amount of pathways or is the number of pathways Hillary Clinton has to the White House electorally on the map. Two is the number that Donald Trump currently has.

Corey 49:32

Well, I think we should probably be clear that's with the upshot looking at it and saying what are currently based on the polls swing states. Exactly.

Zain 49:40

So swing states, depending on which way they go and the ones that are already solidly in the corner of the Republicans and the Democrats, according to both these publications, and I think real clear as well, these are the pathways

Zain 49:52

that are available to each candidate.

Corey 49:53

Basically, Donald Trump, based on the state of polls and how some of them have now moved into the safe Hillary Clinton camp that should have been swing states in the past. either has to win all of the swing states or all but one of the swing states. Stephen

Zain 50:06

Stephen Carter, if you're the Trump campaign right now, what are you trying to do? Do you take this as religion, these two pathways, and say, I'm going to just try to focus on these two and nail it? Or are you trying to expand pathways? What are you doing if you're in the Trump campaign right now?

Carter 50:21

I mean, it's interesting when you really dig into the polls. Because everybody looks at the national poll, and I guarantee you that the campaign, campaign uh the campaign senior campaign leadership of the republicans and the senior campaign leadership of the democrats give not one fuck about the national polls yeah

Carter 50:38

they are embedded in the statewide polls trying to figure this out and when you look at

Carter 50:47

where is clinton right now she's at 246 electoral college votes pretty

Carter 50:56

much not going to move right

Carter 50:57

right and that's where you

Carter 51:00

could try and take some of that vote

Carter 51:03

or you have to deal like like normally she'd be at 180 right the democrats kind of have baked in about 180 electoral college votes uh that's their baked in base they could probably drop a little bit i mean you go back 40 years and you see reagan just crushing it right yeah but

Carter 51:20

but you're not seeing Seeing that in

Carter 51:22

in the last 20 years or so, it's really the Republicans have to dig in and find those those swing states. They're they're baked in. He's about 150.

Carter 51:32

Right. So they're there. Trump is at his baked in minimum.

Carter 51:36

There is nothing left to swing. I mean, so some people are saying South Carolina, South Carolina swings. I mean, you're looking at Georgia, Arizona already swinging. Like if so, if South Carolina swings like this thing is done, Texas is only within a few points. Yeah. So but

Carter 51:50

but you you now as the campaign are going to focus in and figure out those states. And that's why there's two paths to victory for Trump right now. Correct.

Carter 51:58

He has to actually go in because all it takes for Hillary to win. in like cory and i were playing this little game on real clear politics where you actually get to go in and select the states that you think are going to go in directions right so we went in and we took the baselines and we said okay of the 246 that are there we

Carter 52:16

we know those are going to go and

Carter 52:17

and then we immediately clicked on wisconsin and michigan because those are going to go to to the democrats we we believe that and it's over it's done it's

Corey 52:25

it's over i mean his his path is so narrow at this point and his challenge is um you know what is i'm stealing steven's point because he brought it up yesterday but his challenge is the swing states such as they are are fairly disparate as well right i mean what is going to appeal to free traders in the midwest and what is going to appeal to the bible belt and and now that some of those are in swing states i mean yes hold on to your butts right um florida

Corey 52:53

florida has a very different view of the world yeah

Carter 52:57

yeah so do you start start in the rust belt right

Carter 52:59

so let's say we start in the rust belt and we try and incorporate michigan and wisconsin into the rust belt which really they're not they're they're different

Carter 53:07

in the michigan michigan is but wisconsin is not so how do you bring them all in let's say that we started there we went pennsylvania ohio michigan

Carter 53:15

michigan wisconsin and we were really going to dig that in i

Carter 53:18

i could conceivably lose georgia south carolina and uh arizona because

Carter 53:23

because we're i'm talking issues that don't play in those areas so well

Carter 53:30

well and in fact in

Corey 53:30

in in areas like arizona in particular you start talking about locking down the borders and arizona has a pretty high immigrant population you could really be imperiling arizona so the problem that he has i mean not to put too fine a point on it is that his trap trump is playing rock paper scissors with himself he's going to lose in one way shape or form one policy is going to trump another policy and vice versa so

Carter 53:55

so yeah i mean this

Carter 53:57

this is why i would go i mean hyper local you can't do hyper local at the federal level as a candidate right

Carter 54:03

uh the same way that you can't go to quebec and make a policy announcement and not have it heard in alberta if

Carter 54:08

if you're justin trudeau you still can't you can't do that same thing in

Carter 54:13

in the united states so if trump does these things he is going to hurt himself. And that's why he's really in a difficult spot. His only opportunity is to bring down Hillary Clinton across the board. Let's

Zain 54:25

Let's talk a little bit more granularly about the voters that Trump is trying to appeal to. So during the primary, Trump's M.O. or his strategy was ultimately to try to get these low propensity voters to come out and vote for him. That was the strategy, quote unquote. Now, it didn't actually turn out as such because you probably had a lot of institutional Democrats or, you know, registered Democrats come out. But in a leaked memo that came out from the Trump campaign, I'm going to quote this because I love a few of the words in here. Quote, based on internal analysis of our own modeling data and third party research, and considering the exceptionalism of our candidate, I advise that we put 100% of our organizational effort into enfranchising the conventionally low propensity voters that support our candidate.

Zain 55:08

Stephen Carter, let's talk first, top line, academically, academically theoretically however you want to talk about it in terms of what it takes to get low propensity voters to come out and then we'll talk specifically about if this is a good strategy for donald trump mathematically

Carter 55:19

mathematically speaking the number one indicator of whether or not you will vote in the next election is whether you voted in the last election right

Carter 55:26

right period full stop period so if you are a voter in an election then the chances of you voting in the next election are directly correlated to whether or not you did or did not vote so

Carter 55:36

so when they say we are going to go So after those disenfranchised or those people who did not vote, you were putting yourself into a losing category.

Carter 55:46

I like to run campaigns that increase voter turnout, right? Redford increased voter turnout. Nenshi increased voter turnout. If you change the metric of who is voting and how many people are voting, you do change outcomes. But you can't win on I need to bring out a whole new group of voters. That's not a winning strategy. If I get 8% of

Carter 56:10

of the people who didn't vote last time to come out, then

Carter 56:14

then they're going to vote for me 6-1.

Carter 56:17

Then you've got a chance to add a margin of victory. But

Carter 56:24

you're relying on that as your primary strategy, that strategy is a losing strategy. Corey,

Zain 56:30

Corey, what do you think? Do you agree with Carter's premise that you're either a voter or not a voter effectively, and you kind of fall into these camps? Well, I

Corey 56:38

I don't know if I do. I think that on the main, he's correct, but the problem is when you go after non-voters, you have to

Corey 56:47

to do twice the work. You have to make them do two decisions. You have to turn them into a voter, and you have to turn them into your voter, or the other way around. Two conversions you're looking for. You're looking for two conversions instead of one conversion, and that's difficult. Well,

Carter 56:58

Well, and the reason why a person doesn't vote, you know, what is it that they are feeling?

Carter 57:03

feeling? You know, like the enlightened non-voter will tell you that the reason that they didn't vote is because none of the parties reflect their point of view. Completely bespoke

Zain 57:11

bespoke to what they believe. Yeah, right.

Carter 57:13

The reason they're not voting is

Carter 57:18

because they really, they're gaffed. They're give a fuck factor. They

Carter 57:21

They don't care who wins. They literally don't care who wins. So how are you supposed to bring them on board when they don't care if it's Donald Trump or if it's Hillary Clinton? Their

Zain 57:32

Their threshold is so low. Your gaffe is

Carter 57:33

is so low that you don't care.

Zain 57:36

Corey, let's talk very quickly about Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party right now. They had their televised town hall on CNN. They're starting to get a little bit more momentum. They've registered in all 50 states. They've got a leader who's effectively an unknown, sure, nationally, but has some Republican credentials. credentials. What do you make of the libertarians right now? And more specifically, I want to ask you, what should they be doing right now to take advantage of this clusterfuck?

Corey 58:02

Well, as far as third parties go, they're doing pretty well. I mean, I think they're still only at six or seven percent. I think they went

Carter 58:08

went to seven yesterday. But

Corey 58:11

doesn't mean an awful lot. I have to go back and look, but I think it's probably among the highest that a third party has polled since Perot, which

Corey 58:20

which of course was the notorious one. But I don't know that But it's going to be enough to make a difference, particularly since it seems unlikely they're going to get to the 15 percent they need to get into the debates. Yeah,

Carter 58:31

Yeah, I mean, it makes a difference insofar as it is sucking potential vote away from Trump.

Carter 58:37

I would imagine that you'll see some of the Bernie supporters also wind up there. But as long as the as

Carter 58:42

long as people when they're choosing, like

Carter 58:44

like if they're switching parties or if they're switching their vote allegiance, as long as they don't choose the other guy, you don't really you know, it's good for Clinton. Right. It's it's when it's not good for Trump. But but as long as it's not, you

Carter 58:59

you know, like really hurting you, this isn't a big deal for Clinton. So

Corey 59:03

So here's my new like fantasy for what happens in the next month. It's not going to happen. But wouldn't it be cool? This is my wouldn't it be cool moment. Total collapse of Trump. He goes below 15 percent. And then lo and behold, Gary Johnson's above. And the debate doesn't even include Donald Trump. That's

Zain 59:20

That's my new dream. That's a new segment. Wouldn't be cool by Corey Hogan.

Carter 59:23

After the first couple of debates, I think that we could see another drop on Trump. Well,

Zain 59:28

Well, I want to reserve a future episode to talk about Trump debates, but Corey, back at you on libertarian side. Let's say I give you a two or three election strategy as a libertarian movement, right? Yeah. What are you looking to do in this election? What does impact look like? This

Corey 59:42

This election is all about building the profile of the Libertarian Party. It's making it seem like it's got a national presence and that things are happening. I think concurrently to the national strategy, you want to treat this almost like eating

Corey 59:53

eating both sides of the whale. So you're building your profile on the national side. You're doing as much as you can to put Gary Johnson in the spotlight, the Libertarian Party in the spotlight. And at the same time, you're trying to win as many local contests as possible. Now, I'm not sure they're going to win very many. I think you're going to be able to count them on your fingers and toes, at least of any significance. But I'm talking about, you got to keep in mind in the United States, the party system filters all the way down, right? Here in Canada, you know, our municipalities either have no parties or those parties tend to be unique creations. The provincial parties are not generally aligned with the federal parties except for the NDP.

Corey 1:00:28

there you know a republican is a republican is a republican a democrat and so on if

Corey 1:00:33

if the libertarians can start winning council seats if they can start showing their competency on the local level start moving up to uh like the state senate and the state uh house and so on and so forth that's got to be your strategy really victory for the libertarians will not be coming for multiple elections if ever but victory would be you start electing congressmen you start electing senators carter

Zain 1:00:54

carter what does victory look like for the libertarians if you give them a longer runway than just this election well

Carter 1:00:58

well in this election victory looks like you have to get uh more than eight percent somewhere right there has to be a basis by which you can now build your support from so 15 20 in a location in a state um

Carter 1:01:12

um that may be viable to them i've just started glancing through the polls it appears they're getting eight percent kind

Carter 1:01:19

kind of across the board which is almost the worst case scenario uh because what do you do from eight percent you're not anywhere you're the green party the green party changed a little bit when they got elizabeth may elected to the legislature to the house of commons um it

Carter 1:01:33

it didn't change a lot because it's elizabeth may so

Carter 1:01:35

so how do you get you

Carter 1:01:39

know like these these candidates that they put at the top of their ticket they're legit candidates these are former governors yeah these

Carter 1:01:44

these are guys who are who could actually become

Carter 1:01:48

become a big deal and and if they were able to you

Carter 1:01:52

consolidate their their support and then grow from it i mean every major party in the united states does one and done you run a you run a candidate you win you

Carter 1:02:01

you you get to go another one see you lose and you're done

Carter 1:02:05

these guys may want to you know the libertarians may want to build off of these guys for three election cycles i'd

Zain 1:02:10

i'd love to do an episode later on about where we talk about how do you start up a political party i think that would be fascinating for for listeners at least for me i'd love to do it okay let's move it on to our final segment are over under our lightning round and cory hogan i more of an expanded lightning round because give me your take let's just go back to kenny watch it's a it's a term we've still i don't know where which website i've stolen that term from but kenny watch we're back on jason kenny

Zain 1:02:34

okay so back on jason kenny this last couple of weeks the bus tour is alive and well he's tweeting like crazy give me your update on what you think of jason kenny's campaign so far for the pc leadership here in alberta well

Corey 1:02:47

i don't know it's the middle of the summer uh attention is elsewhere i think the stakes are pretty low i I know there's a lot of people who are saying, why isn't he working? I don't really care about that, personally. I mean, it's the dead of August. I was going to ask you about that specifically, yeah. He's going around. He's meeting with the people he needs to meet with. He's putting the foundational pieces in place that you would want to put in place. This is what everybody who runs for leader does. And I think it would be disingenuous of me to have a great, like, angry reaction to it, frankly. He is still holding his federal seat, which I'm sure is annoying to some people. But, again, that's never bothered me as much as it bothers some people.

Corey 1:03:22

There are many ways you can serve your constituents. And at the end of the day, you get to pass judgment on them and election regardless. So Kenny Walsh is going fine.

Corey 1:03:33

Going fine. I don't really have a big problem with how he's going around. I think where he has to run into trouble is that I'm starting to see more and more connections in his campaign inner circle to very right-wing causes, which feeds into a kind

Corey 1:03:48

of a view of Jason Kenney that will not be helpful to him. Carter,

Zain 1:03:51

Carter, that was my segue to you. How troubling is it that his most recent campaign manager's profile shows that he's connected to very, very right-wing causes while Jason Kenney runs for the leadership of the PC party? Jason

Carter 1:04:03

Jason Kenney is not running for the leadership of the PC party. Jason Kenney is running to eliminate the PC party and move everybody to a right-wing alternative. So

Carter 1:04:10

So he is a right-wing guy. This is what he

Carter 1:04:13

he wants. He wants a right – and he surrounded himself with right-wingers. It should come as absolutely no surprise that that is his model, and that's what he wants to actually achieve. I'm not surprised. Jason Kenney's group of people is Jason Kenney's group of people, and they're some Harper people, and they're some Kenney people, and they believe

Carter 1:04:35

right-wing things, and I don't believe those right-wing things. Corey doesn't believe those right-wing things, but

Carter 1:04:40

but they do, and that's okay. okay right

Carter 1:04:43

jason kenney though confuses

Carter 1:04:45

confuses me when he when he tweets out root cause and then puts a picture of of two i'm assuming palestinian children child soldiers

Carter 1:04:53

with a with a with guns pointed at a quote-unquote jew jewish soldier i mean i'm sure it's staged i don't think it's actually a jewish child um but it's it you know it makes me wonder if he understands what the words root cause mean i mean that to me is symptomatic of the hatred not necessarily the root cause of the hatred that exists in the middle east um

Carter 1:05:17

know some people were calling it dog whistle politics i don't think it's dog whistle politics at all it is the right-wing agenda to take up the jewish question on the side of the jews and really dig in and say this you know the only good people that come from the middle east are the jewish people pump

Corey 1:05:32

pump your brakes a bit i I don't think anybody is saying that, regardless of what you think about Jason Kenney.

Zain 1:05:38

It's good. You just got a Muslim sitting here, so I'm not going to comment on anything

Corey 1:05:42

anything about the Jewish community. No, it's got—I really am confused

Corey 1:05:47

confused as to what his constituency for that tweet was, and I agree with you, Stephen. Who the audience was, yeah. That's not a root cause. I mean, that is clearly a symptom of a long, strife-ridden—I

Corey 1:06:00

-ridden—I don't even know what you call it at this point. it's just a total morass of of misery right you know it's one side hits the other side hits back one side is totally irrational the other side is totally irrational it just goes on and on and i i can apportion an awful lot of blame and i don't want to get into middle east politics because god knows we

Corey 1:06:20

don't i've antagonized enough well

Corey 1:06:22

well yeah we're not going to get there

Corey 1:06:24

frankly i would probably just antagonize both sides if we started talking about it but But it

Corey 1:06:28

it seems a very weird move for a provincial politician. Can I say that? Yes. What does it have to do with provincial politics? What does it have to do with

Corey 1:06:37

with somebody who wants to unite the right? And

Carter 1:06:40

And I would say a good 50% of his tweets have

Carter 1:06:43

have nothing to do with provincial issues. And to be fair,

Corey 1:06:45

he's still an MP. Right.

Carter 1:06:46

Right. But he's taking issues, and they're federal issues. They're things he cares about. Forget about what the general population cares about. They are things that he cares about. and we're

Carter 1:06:58

we're not seeing tweets on health care we're not seeing tweets on education we're not seeing tweets on post-secondary and i don't think you can win a leadership in alberta without talking to those issues i think you can win a provincial issue or campaign anywhere without talking to those issues let's

Zain 1:07:11

let's go back let's go back to our over under cory over under on 10 okay over under on 10 the number of republicans that will come out against donald trump if you mean elected like congressman elected officials yes i should that specify elected officials at any level that

Zain 1:07:26

that will We'll come out. Oh, over. Over. I mean, we might be over now. Yeah,

Carter 1:07:29

Yeah, I think we are over. Okay,

Zain 1:07:31

Okay, we're going over.

Zain 1:07:36

Carter, the damage that Donald Trump caused over, under, on six by not endorsing Paul Ryan.

Zain 1:07:42

Initially endorsing Paul Ryan. He eventually did later in the week last year.

Carter 1:07:46

year. Yeah, it was barely, though. I mean, he did it during the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. So it's not like anybody noticed. But I'm going to go with under because at the end of the day, the damage that's being inflicted is so much bigger than that. People like to say that the reason he was falling so dramatically was because he didn't endorse Ryan, but that wasn't true. You're

Corey 1:08:05

You're going under, Corey?

Corey 1:08:06

I think it was over because I think that for him, his only path to victory, you talk about two versus, what, 1,000?

Corey 1:08:13

That's bullshit. Just put that aside. His path to victory is one, and that's keeping his party together. Your

Zain 1:08:18

Your one-word strategy for Hillary Clinton heading into this week, Carter?

Corey 1:08:24

Focus Corey I'm not sure that her strategy can be one word I think her strategy

Zain 1:08:31

Well I don't think it can

Corey 1:08:32

can be Ignoring the premise of the question I

Corey 1:08:34

I should have done that It's fine Very west wing of you Go ahead

Corey 1:08:37

It's my own fault I

Corey 1:08:38

I know Carter never listens

Zain 1:08:38

listens to the rules But go ahead Corey

Corey 1:08:40

Corey I think that this is where you throw everything at him Kitchen sink time

Zain 1:08:43

time Kitchen sink I like it Your one word strategy for Trump Carter

Carter 1:08:52

Shut up. He's going to attack

Zain 1:08:53

attack and shut up. And finally, which sport are you most looking forward to watching this Olympic season, Stephen Carter? I'm

Zain 1:08:59

I'm actually really looking forward to mountain biking.

Zain 1:09:02

God damn it. Corey,

Corey 1:09:03

Corey, do you got anything better? Oh, I think you know my answer. You're going to talk

Zain 1:09:05

talk about your home renos?

Corey 1:09:07

Is there a home reno? No, the U.S. basketball team. I want to see just how badly they beat every other basketball team. That's going to be amazing. Are they going to win by

Carter 1:09:16

by 70 or are they going to win by 50? Listen, for the

Zain 1:09:20

the two listeners who are still listening to this podcast that's a wrap on episode 587 of The Strategist, my name is Zane Velji with me as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter and we'll see you next time

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