Tag Archives: David Plouffe

The High(est) Anxiety Debate Ever.

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Debate questions they'll never ask Biden, Trump | Will Bunch Newsletter

Quite frankly, it is unsettling when someone like David Plouffe says he’s never felt a higher level of personal anxiety for a presidential debate than the one tonight. Plouffe, if you follow the news, is the man who led Barack Obama’s two campaigns and has been through more debate prep and spin than he cares to remember.

Plouffe was talking with his fellow Obama team colleague David Axelrod and long time Republican campaign operator turned ardent Never Trumper, Mike Murphy on their “Hacks on Tap” podcast yesterday.

To summarize his key points of concern/anxiety and strategy for Biden:

1: Biden has to be not just “ok” or “passable” in the eyes of the general, largely disinterested public. He has to be surprisingly good. While expectations for him are low, despite Team Trump lately trying to re-imagine sleepy and senile a veteran, polished debater jacked up on coke or Mountain Dew, the TV audience — a much larger audience than has paid attention to this race until now — has to leave the night nigh-on-to-startled by the Joe Biden they’ve just seen. Anything less and the balance of the race remains static or, given a Biden flop, collapses to a point of no return.

2: Biden has to attack early and often on the abortion/reproductive rights issue and the threat of more like that to come given that Trump will likely have two more Supreme Court seats to fill next term. (He also believes CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have to press that issue.)

3: On the economy, Biden has to have a deft pivot on Trump’s assertions that inflation and the world in general is out of control and things were much cheaper and calmer when he was in office.

4: If Trump comes out of the debate perceived as the victor, largely as a result of Biden fitting the perception that he is too old and feeble, Plouffe expects Trump to pass on the second debate in late September. He’ll have made his point and see no reason to risk a re-match. Likewise, Plouffe thinks Biden should consider something similar if he far exceeds expectations. In other words, this could be the one and only face-to-face we see … in a race where the country is unequivocally exchanging competence for chaos and personal retribution.

5: There has never been a debate remotely comparable to this one. No debate ever with so stark a contrast between the two candidates. Biden has to make that contrast indelible in the minds of viewers. And he has to do it while maintaining the image and tenor of the adult in the room.

Good luck, Joe.

Good Lord! Why Would Any of Us Ever Believe a Pollster Again?

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There is your basic “wrong”. Like last week, when all the sports guys predicted the Packers would beat the Vikings by two touchdowns. Ha! What a botch! But then there’s World Class, Never to be Forgiven-or-Forgotten-Etched-in-Granite-for-All-the-School-Children-to-See-Wrong … like, for example, America’s professional pollsters’ and pundits’ whiplash-inducing botch of last night’s election.

Holy Jesus, most of these boys and girls are going to need new identities and applications for the lunch shift at Chick-fil-A.

As someone who consumed waay too much pollster/pundit blather over the past year, I have no problem telling you that no one I heard — not your Nate Silvers, your David Plouffes, your David Axelrods, your Nate Cohns, your John Heilemans, your Rick Wilsons, your Steve Schmidts, your Amy Walters or your Dave Wassermans laid out a scenario remotely resembling what we’re looking at today. (All of them will be spinning the meaning of the word, “remotely” in the weeks, months and years to come.)

All along, the key ingredient for 2020 was what was described as your “shy Trump voter”, basically another, previously untapped layer of under-educated white males (and some females) that Trump could both find and fire up enough for them to show up and vote, maybe for the first time ever. And — what I kept hearing from “the experts” — was that that voter was a myth. They didn’t exist. Word was that the new, modern, far more sophisticated post-2016 polling, weighted to properly account for hard-to-get ahold of under-educated white males had their non-existence covered.

Well, obviously not, as those voters poured out of wherever they were hiding and voted in record numbers to reelect Donald Trump, the man who has ended the pandemic and got everybody back to work and drinking at their favorite bar.

My old “Same Rowdy Crowd” compadre, Jon Austin, (i.e. “The Great and Powerful”), has done lots of homework on the last pre-election polling data. Here I cut and paste from him unapologetically.

” … much of my thinking [says Austin] is driven by the assessments of the three election-prediction sites that use polling and other factors to assign a percentage probability of which way each state will vote. Again, those sites are:

• DecisionDesk (https://forecast.decisiondeskhq.com/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden an 87 percent chance of winning the election.

• The Economist (https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden a 96 percent chance of winning.

• FiveThirtyEight (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/). As of October 29th, it gives Biden an 89 percent chance of winning.”

Now obviously, as of Wednesday afternoon Biden may still win, in which all of these particular sites will no doubt claim they “got it right”. But the picture they painted in their live cable TV interviews and in quotes to reporters was of something far different. And beyond them, in state polls, the product emits an even worse smell.

I eagerly await hearing from the professional pollster who had Lindsey Graham beating Jaime Harrison by 12%. Or Susan Collins over Sara Gideon by 9%. Or Joni Ernst over Theresa Greenfield in Iowa by 7% Or even Trump in Ohio by a fat 8%.

Conventional wisdom and pervasive chatter in veteran-operative liberal circles, after inhaling double secret probation “internal polling” and the junk above was that Biden had it comfortably in the bag, with a Democratic Senate “leaning” to “likely.” Hell, remember all that fantasizing about Texas? 5.5% may be better than the 9% Hillary lost by, but it’s nobody’s idea of “in the hunt.”

What we’re left with, while the pro pollsters scurry off to get emergency collagen injections for their reputations, is one very stark reality.

Far … far … from Donald Trump and the election of 2020 marking the death knell of the Republican party, supposedly destroyed by Trump’s malignant incompetence and vulgarity, the oppooisite is true. The astonishing, previously undetected number of votes Trump pulled out of the hills, hollers and exurbs of America, means that with or without him, Trumpism — grievance-driven, anti-science and fully isolated from reality by “alternative facts” — is now more powerful than ever. More powerful than any expert data geek or veteran pundit ever imagined.

To put a blunt point on it, that means no Republican candidate at any level, much less anyone running for national office, will dare step a rat’s whisker away from authoritarian/racist Trumpist messaging. Or in other words, things are looking good for Donny Jr. and Tucker Carlson in 2024.

Or hell, even my gal the QAnon Queen, freshly-elected Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Greene.

The Hour of Repudiation Is at Hand.

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Because of all the consternation and anxiety in the air, I think, from a mental health perspective alone, it may be useful to look at present events and see light breaking over the horizon.

The standard disclaimer for everyone still reeling from 2016 is that polls and fund-raising are not votes and nothing is certain until all the votes have been counted. But even with every imaginable nefarious scenario — voter suppression, fake ballot drop boxes, $200 checks to every senior, “miracle cure” vaccine announcements, armed “poll watchers”, and on and on — Donald Trump is poised to suffer one of the most decisive repudiations of any elected leader anywhere, certainly in our lifetimes and arguably over the entire past century.

The remarkable thing about polling for this race is that given the epic events of the past year — impeachment, pandemic, economic collapse (among lower income groups), racial protests both peaceful and violent — Trump’s “favorabilitty” numbers have barely budged. He’s still at roughly 42% with absolutely no indication that he has attracted any new support to him, or peeled anything away from Joe Biden.

In fact, since the one-two-three punch of court-packing with Amy Barrett, his boorish debate performance and his hospitalization for the virus he dismissed as a “hoax”, Biden’s numbers have pushed up virtually everywhere that matters. The “undecideds” (and who, good god are those people, and can we require them to have identifying license plates?) have goosed his numbers by three to six points across the country.

Moreover, Trump is out of money. Big donors smell a losing, bad investment. His campaign has been forced to pull TV advertising from a half dozen “must win” Midwestern states and devote what they have left to playing defense in the normally reliable Sun Belt and on social media, which means they’re preaching to the same toxic choir — and almost no one else — even more than usual.

Making things worse for himself is that every hour of every day, with his FoxNews/Rush Limbaugh call-ins, Trump looks and sounds evermore like an absurd, delusional, mentally unstable loser. (“A spray-tanned, doped-up, TV pitchman,” to quote Obama strategist David Plouffe.) Utterly ridiculous, in other words. A look underlined, highlighted and garlanded with flashing red neon by the revelation of his squalid personal finances and jaw-dropping indebtedness.

To this we must add Vladimir the Puppetmaster’s recent comment hedging his bets on the election and making understated conciliatory noises to Joe Biden … just in case his troll farms fail to excite America’s patriotic militias like they did before. I’m sure Donald in his steroid fever loved hearing that. (Did you call Vlad to complain, Donald?)

Most of all in my view is … women. Since the trifecta of the Barrett/debate/hospitalization fiascos Biden has opened a … wait for it … 23-point lead among women, a lead even greater among college-educated women. Frankly I don’t know or spend time with any women who don’t see Trump as the emodiment of everything they’ve endured and despised in, excuse my language, asshole bosses, co-workers, ex-husbands and bad boyfriends. Meanwhile, by contrast, Joe Biden seems like everyone’s genial, polite uncle.

So yes, while we should be prepared for election chaos, with Bill Barr-led court challenges to “voting irregularities”, cos-playing storm troopers (i.e. armed ex-husbands and bad boyfriends) haunting polling stations, and FoxNews pushing an early “call”, right now Donald Trump is set up to lose in a deafening defeat. A well-earned, humiliating repudiation.

All I’m saying is this: while we all keep our foot on the gas, sharpen our wooden stakes and load up the silver bullets, I think we’re entitled to allow ourselves a moment for the psychic equivalent of a reinvigorating lungful of fresh air.

If only to buoy our spirits for the bullshit coming from election to inauguration day.