As upbeat Democrats ride a wave of Kamalamentum into their convention in Chicago next week, a seasoned strategist explains how almost everything about the presidential race has changed over the last 30 days.
Unlike President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris has multiple pathways to victory in the Electoral College. The gender gap this year may be bigger than ever. And Harris has the rare opportunity to turn what is now just a political campaign into a genuine movement.
These are some of the insights I gleaned from Doug Sosnik, who is best known for being a top adviser to Bill Clinton. He’s been in the private sector for years now, and for much of that time he’s been circulating to friends and colleagues semi-regular memos about the state of American politics. Playbook has featured them for years and recently The New York Times has been adapting them as guest essays as well. Sosnik’s latest memo is out now — you can find it linked in Friday’s Playbook — and it did not disappoint.
In our interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, Sosnik went beyond the fundamentals and also touched on a few ideas about the forthcoming sprint to November that might surprise you: why JD Vance might influence the election more than Tim Walz, which two metrics can tell you the most about the state of the race and and why he thinks Harris has the potential to match the impact of Ronald Reagan.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive producer Kara Tabor and senior producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here: We have a whole new race. So let’s just start with your broad view on how the election has changed and where it’s going.
It is a completely different campaign than it was 30 days ago in virtually every sense of the word. However, what hasn’t changed is that the handful of states, around seven of them, that have been most competitive in the last two presidential elections, are the same seven states that are going to determine the outcome of this election. So while the actual race itself is completely different, the contours of it and the battlegrounds of determining who’s elected president of the United States not only haven’t changed since the beginning of this election, but haven’t changed in the last eight years.
Give me your take on the Kamala Harris campaign so far. Since she jumped into the race, she’s obviously been on an incredible streak.
She’s done really well. I think there are two reasons for it. The first is, she’s not Trump and she’s not Biden. And as you’ve seen throughout the run up to the Trump-Biden campaign, the vast majority of Americans, they’re looking for anyone else to run. If the shoe were on the other foot here and for whatever reason, Trump got out and Nikki Haley got in the race and was running against Biden, I think she would have an overwhelming advantage over him.
So one of the two reasons Harris is doing well is that she’s not Trump and she’s not Biden. But it’s obviously more than that, and I think a lot of it has to do with how she’s performed and how the campaign up to now has managed her performance.
So how she’s performed: She looks joyful. She looks like a happy warrior. And there’s a real ease about her. It’s quite appealing. And the other thing that they’ve done shrewdly, although they can’t do it forever, is they’ve kept her entirely in controlled environments where they were able to set up the event, set up the visual mediums and she hasn’t had to confront a single interview so far. Now, you have to do that at some point. But if I were running that campaign, for now, I’d just keep doing what they’ve been doing.
In my political lifetime, there have been three political movements in presidential politics. And to be clear, a movement in politics is way bigger than a campaign. The first movement in my lifetime was Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, where at some point, it’s just being for him and who cares what the issues are? And the same, I think, happened in 2008 with Obama. And I think the same thing happened when Trump was president.
Now, Harris is not the leader of a movement right now. She’s still the leader of a campaign. But she has been making strides, and she could by the end of the month — particularly if the convention goes well in Chicago — she could be at a point where she’s a head of a movement, which is bigger than a candidate, and that’s pretty much unstoppable. And if you are leading a movement, issues don’t matter, nothing matters.
She’s not there, but she’s not that far from being there. And I think it’s a combination of her circumstances, but also, and probably more importantly, how she’s handled herself as a candidate so far.
Let’s talk about the Democratic National Convention. What do you think Kamala Harris needs to do in Chicago? And what are the pitfalls facing Democrats there?
So there are two things that I would be focused on next week if I were running the Harris campaign. The first thing is, it’s really an opportunity to harden the positive first impression a lot of Americans have about Harris. And you’ve seen in all the polling how much her favorability has gone up. You know, there are only three things I care about when I run a campaign: I want to define what the election is about, I want to define my candidate and I want to define my opponent. So Trump against Biden: Trump defined the election. It’s his four years as president versus Biden’s four years. Which were you better off? He defined himself as strong and he defined Biden as weak. And so he was going to win the election, if that’s what the election was about.
In this case, Trump is defined, but Harris is not defined. And that just addressed the opportunity for her to define herself. But the other thing is to define what the race is about. And next week is an opportunity to really drill it home, to make this an election about the future, not about the past, about people coming together. And to not have a negative view about the past and to be joyful about it. And for her to win the battle of who’s the change candidate.
The big pitfall, obviously, is managing the dissent within the Democratic Party. On the Biden-Harris handling of the war in Israel, in the Mideast. And so I think that is a challenge for Harris, both outside the hall but also inside the hall. That would be the one thing I’d be most worried about.
You’ve been thinking a lot about the gender gap ever since Kamala Harris became the nominee. What’s the history of this issue and how did it change when Harris replaced Biden?
So the gender gap, which is the gap between how men and women vote, first became prominent in American politics in the 1980 presidential campaign. And every presidential election since then, there’s been a gap between how women vote and how men vote. And I would say there is a confluence of events that have come together that suggest to me that it’s going to be historic this year.
The first factor is Donald Trump and the nature of his candidacy. His presidency is a very masculine, kind of aggressive, approach to politics. If you look at the Republican convention a month ago, he had basically a large effort by entertainers and speakers to appeal to men in particular. He was introduced by [Dana White], the head of the UFC fighters. You know, he had a professional wrestler earlier in the evening. Kid Rock. So it’s been a very sort of testosterone-filled candidacy and presidency.
And I think his VP selection is reinforcing that because Vance has had a number of, I guess we’ll call it unusual positions about the role of women in our society.
You then have had the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. You’ve now had seven states — and these are Democratic and Republican states that have all had ballot initiatives since the overturning of Roe — and in all seven states, protecting a woman’s right to choose has overwhelmingly passed, regardless of whether it’s a Republican state like Kansas or a Democratic state like California. So this is the first national election that we’ll have had since Roe v. Wade.
The other element here is young voters, Gen Z voters. There’s a real gap now between how Gen Z women self-identify versus Gen Z men, starting with being self-selected as being liberal.
And then the last and perhaps even most important is the nature of the candidacy of Kamala Harris: a woman, a Black woman, who I think for many people embodies exactly what they’ve been looking for, which is a change of leadership in this country.
So this confluence of events, I think, is why we could be in for a record gender gap in what could, I think, ultimately decide the outcome of the election.
Do have any theories about why Gen Z men and women are so ideologically divided in a way that has not been true historically?
I think there are a couple of reasons.
First of all, this really started at the beginning of the century. Women are now far overachieving compared to men. So you’ve now an entire generation of achievers of women compared to men. So you’ve got the problem for the emerging generation of men who not only feel like they’re being outperformed by women, but I think a lot of them also feel they’ve been somewhat of a target of society and villainized in terms of their behavior.
And then, of course, I think there’s the Trump effect. I think for young people in general, particularly women, in [Trump’s] views, on the issues and how he talks about women, I think he’s really pushed them into the Democratic Party.
Agreed. Is there a single metric that you’ll be watching, whether it’s a voting group or head-to-head in a certain swing state, that you think would be the best predictor of who is ahead, who’s going to win?
I’m going to give you three, but I’ve already given you two of them. One is — if in October I came back from the moon, what I‘d want to know about is: What’s the race about? You tell me what the race is about in terms of how it’s being defined, and I’ll tell you who’s going to win the election.
Interesting. So not even a metric, just like an issue or a theme. What would be the universe of answers to that question: if you came back from the moon? What are the other options there? For example, if the race is still about JD Vance’s cat lady comment.
That would be a tactical win for the Democrats. But I don’t think the race is going to be about that. I think that for Trump to be successful, this is a race about making Harris an incumbent, owning the Biden-Harris presidency. And it’d be the referendum on whose presidency was better, and describing her as a wacky, out-of-touch, left-winger, San Francisco-style liberal.
Trump has struggled to have a message about her — it’s been this sort of kitchen sink strategy. Maybe some of their TV advertising is a little more disciplined. But of all the things Trump’s campaign has thrown at Harris, that’s the one that you think will be the most effective?
Well, let me reinforce your point. I think that the Trump campaign has been extremely well run. Except I’m shocked — and they claim that since May they’ve been preparing for a Harris candidacy with Biden pulling out — I’m shocked that they weren’t prepared to define her the first moment she was announced. But I think that the nexus of the argument is a combination of making her the incumbent, in terms of owning the record, “and that she’s a crazy left winger.”
And I think on the Harris side of the equation, I think it’s about being the change candidate, winning that argument and making it about the future, and not going backwards.
So to me, if I know what the race is about and who is most successful in creating the job description, I know who’s going to win. The Pennsylvania and Georgia results can tell me whether one of these candidates is on the path to a decisive victory or not. And lastly, more specifically, I guess, if I knew the percentage of turnout in the seven battleground [or] six battleground states, if I knew what the percentage of the turnout was based on men versus women; the percentage of the turnout and what the women’s vote was for Harris — I think if I knew those two things — I think if I’m right about that and I could see that metric on Election Day on the exit polls that to me would tell me the outcome of the election.
We should talk a little bit about Harris’ messaging and how it’s changed compared to Biden’s. Biden and his core advisers wanted to make the campaign about Trump’s threat to democracy. Some people disagreed and said that the “democracy” debate left a lot of voters who care more about inflation and the economy a little cold and that Biden should have more of a populist economic message, which does seem like where Harris is going.
But give me your views of that debate and the difference between Biden and Harris on that issue.
First of all, you’re totally right about democracy. I never understood that as an issue to get the president reelected. It’s a process issue. For some people it matters, but you’re going to get their vote anyway. I think one of the big differences so far between Biden and Harris was how Biden talked about the economy versus how Harris talks about the economy. Biden, just to me, was talking about an economic condition in America that 70 percent of the country couldn’t relate to. He kept making an argument to convince people that things are better than they think. That landed flat with people, understandably.
If you look at how Harris talks about the economy, it’s much different than Biden. On the economic issue, there are two sort of overhangs to explain her approach. One is, if you take a lot of her policies and try to bundle them under a heading of like, how does it connect, I would say it’s the family. I think she has a very middle class, family-oriented list of priorities, whether it’s child care, or taking care of older people and everything in between. I think her policies are directed towards that in a future oriented way.
And the other is — let me back up: Biden never really had a clear narrative throughout his presidency, and he never really had a clear narrative about what he was going to do if he got reelected. But she is, I think, developing a clear narrative that’s around the populist message and talking about, you know, passing legislation to go after price gouging of corporations and labor rights and a lot of issues that Bernie Sanders has raised. And he said the other day, you know, “I don’t know why everybody says I’m out of the mainstream” and he lists all these issues and says they’re popular with everybody. And so I think you’re going to see a much more hard edge, consistent populist appeal from Harris than you saw from Biden.
The big issue with Biden was his age, and she doesn’t have to worry about that being an issue for her.
Actually, it’s ironic. And probably no one made a bigger issue about Biden’s age than Trump. And the irony now with Harris, who’s 19 years younger than Trump — and while Trump appears more vigorous than Biden physically — there’s some pretty telltale signs of his aging as well. So the aging issue was front and center in the election, and I think Harris has an opportunity to keep it front and center.
How do you assess the Walz pick? When you were thinking about this, who would you have advised her to pick? And how do you think he’s done so far?
If you’d asked me a week before the pick, I never would have thought he would’ve been picked. I wouldn’t have picked him. And I think he’s been great.
I think that what the campaign put out after they picked him — and it’s clearly the case if you just watched them campaign together — she was really comfortable with him. And you can feel it.
These are arranged marriages, right? And almost all the arranged marriages in our political lifetime ended up with an unhappy ending. The arranged marriage works when you’re lined up for the same goal. But inevitably, in the arranged marriage, at some point down the road, interest veers off. And there’s really not a friendship partnership, it’s a business partnership that goes sideways.
He is authentic. He is a joyful, happy warrior. He can really deliver a punch and not be mean about it.
But I would not have picked him and probably still would not pick him because I would have taken [Josh] Shapiro, for two reasons.
One is, in trying to win the election, I think it’s important for Harris — for Trump or Harris — it’s important that you not only are able to motivate your base but swing voters.
And there are a group of moderate swing voters who are probably not naturally inclined to support Harris — who don’t want to vote for Trump, by the way — but were going to vote for Trump because they just didn’t think Biden had it in him for another four years. But I think by picking [Shapiro], you would have sent a signal, towards the middle in terms of her positions and issues, which I think would have been extremely helpful in getting these swing voters.
The second and obvious reason is if Harris wins Pennsylvania, it really changes the calculus on winning the election. And he would have helped do that.
But these are personal choices. I don’t see any evidence up until now that the Walz pick was a mistake. The only prediction that I feel quite comfortable in making is, to the extent that any of the vice presidential nominees impact the outcome of the election, it’s going to be JD Vance, and that’s all to the negative.
Let’s talk about the Electoral College and the key swing states. We all talk about the four Sun Belt swing states and then the three Midwest battleground states. What’s the smart way to be thinking about these seven states right now?
There are only seven states that have been competitive in the last two presidential elections. They’re the same states that are going to decide this election. And overwhelmingly, what they have in common is — with education as now the new fault line in American politics — if you know the educational level of a state or a district, you know how they’re going to vote, with educated voters voting for Democrats and less educated for Republicans.
For the most part in these seven states, they’re all in the middle on education levels. So they don’t skew towards highly educated or less educated voters, which is why they’re competitive.
They’ve all been close in the last two elections, and if this is a close election, they’ll be close now.
So the secret to winning in these states is a combination of turning your vote out, but also being successful with the swing voters. And they’re demographically different, even though all seven landed in the small pool of competitive states. The four Sun Belt states — North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia — are skewed disproportionately to younger voters and nonwhite voters. Whereas the three Midwestern swing states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — skew much more towards older white voters without college degrees. Over 50 percent of the voters in the three Midwestern states don’t have four-year college degrees, and the national average now is under 40 percent.
So Biden was able to win three of the four Sun Belt states by running up big numbers with these young and nonwhite voters. These are the voters who have abandoned Biden the most during his presidency, which is why they were becoming no longer competitive. When Harris got in to replace Biden, they’re now back to being quite competitive, although there’s a question as to how competitive. And that’s where I think some hard decisions are going to have to be made by both campaigns starting around Labor Day.
What are the decisions and what are the things you’re going to be looking at in terms of, the criteria for making those decisions?
The only two things you need to know about a campaign’s priorities are: where are they sending the candidates and where are they spending their money? And you can’t hide that.
But as an example, North Carolina — there are five media markets. That’s an expensive state. The Democrats claim they’re going to be competitive there. They’ve opened up offices. But come Labor Day, if you’re going to try to win the state of North Carolina, you’re going to have to spend $50-$75 million.
It’s just like if the Democrats are saying that, you know, there’s a poll that came out this week that Democrats are now within a margin of error in Florida, they’re going to win Florida. But if they want to go and try to win Florida, they’re probably going to have to put about $150-$200 million investment in the state. [Michael] Bloomberg put in $100 million in 2020 and they still lost. So I’m going to be looking for how the convention goes and what the polling says at the end of the month. And then these campaigns are going to have to make some hard decisions about how they’re going to get to 270.
So I think the takeaway from that is you have to be ruthless. You can’t be sort of half-in a state like this.
That’s right. Particularly when you get to the end. There’s no question to me in the Sun Belt that Harris is going to be much more competitive than Biden. But the question is — and these are states, I think, that largely still lean slightly Republican — the question is: Is she going to be more competitive, but still a few points away from winning? Or is she going to be competitive and it’s a toss up?
It’s unclear to me what that’ll be. Georgia is another extremely expensive state. Arizona has only got one media market and over 60 percent of the votes in Maricopa County, which is in Phoenix. So these are expensive, expensive bets that they’re going to have to make decisions on.
Let’s talk a little bit about the three voting groups. You write about nonwhite voters, white working class voters and independent voters. And this connects with the changes in Biden and Harris’ ability to compete with Trump in the key swing states.
You write that Trump was able to make inroads with Black and Latino voters, who make up big pieces of the electorate in the Sun Belt. But with Biden out, Harris has been able to retake a lot of ground with Black voters — but may have a hard time hitting Biden’s 65 percent margin with Latinos.
So this seems like this is a big reason why the Sun Belt is more in play for Harris than it was for Biden. But is that really a sure thing? Do you think that she might wind-up following the same path as Biden did — which was to target those three Midwestern states?
So just on the map for a minute: I think it’s a virtual certainty that both campaigns are going to target Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan for the rest of the election.
So in other words, there’s no chance that Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina — in your view — not a single one of those states is going to be more competitive for Harris than Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania?
Well, they might be. That’s why you have to wait and see the polling. But I know for sure that they’re going to be competitive no matter what for both candidates — the three Midwestern states. At some point, I’d like to talk to you a little bit more about Pennsylvania and Georgia. We’ll come back to that. So I’m skeptical how winnable North Carolina is for Harris. But I think in these three other states, I think certainly in Georgia — and you have abortion ballot initiatives in Arizona and Nevada, which is going to really, I think, exaggerate the gender gap — there’s an opportunity for the Democrats. I think they can all be competitive. And so you could end up with six states.
But at the end of this, I don’t see how the three Midwestern states are not going to be in play until Election Day, no matter what.
Before you wanted to make a point about Pennsylvania and Georgia. Let’s talk about those two states. What is it that you want to say about them?
So to me, if I were to see one candidate open up a decisive advantage here, it would be if Trump were to win Pennsylvania or Harris were to win Georgia. And if that were to happen, neither candidate is guaranteed they’re going to win. But it sure changes the math on getting to 270.
It’s like if you are a tennis player, for Trump to win Pennsylvania, it would be breaking serve in tennis. And they say like in professional sports, the playoffs never really begin until the home team loses a game. So to me, watching the direction of this election, I want to look at Georgia and Pennsylvania. And if either of those possibilities happens, I think it’s very likely that that candidate will win the election. Now, she can lose Pennsylvania and he can lose Georgia, and they both have options to get to 270. But it’s a lot harder. And Trump, by the way, it’s just inexplicable. He’s attacking the popular Republican governor and his wife in Georgia. And it’s just not a single rational explanation of a state that’s so critical for him and why he’s indulging in trying to settle a score from the 2020 election.
That brings us to another point that you have been making. And that is the impact of early voting, which Trump frequently criticizes and then on other days, embraces and tells Republicans to take advantage of. How important is early voting in this election and who has an advantage on it?
First of all, one of the things that’s changed in politics since I started was until recently, Republicans always do better in off-year elections and Democrats always did better in presidential elections. Because the occasional voters were Democrats.
Well, that’s now been flipped on its side. Trump does far better with people who occasionally [vote] or don’t vote. If everyone in America voted, Trump would win now, which is the complete opposite of the past. I don’t understand why Trump — his campaign is actually changing — but Trump in particular has discouraged his voters from voting early, which is crazy.
And so a combination of trends in American politics and the 2020 Covid crisis had an explosion of people voting before Election Day, be it by absentee ballot, or in-person early voting. So on Election Day, almost 70 percent of the country had already voted. It was only, I think, 40 percent of the country in 2016. And the early voters overwhelmingly supported Biden. I think by 10 points.
On Election Day, Trump won them by 10 points. But Trump was discouraging his voters from voting early. Now Republicans are all-in on encouraging early voting, although Trump can’t resist himself —
Republicans are, but maybe not at the top of the ticket.
When people say, “There are 81 days until the election,” what they really should say is there are 81 days until Nov. 5 in which, if it’s the same as 2020, 30 percent of the country’s going to vote.
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https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/17/doug-sosnik-q-a-kamala-harris-00174479
