David Chalian
00:00:02
Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalian, CNN's political director, and welcome to the CNN Political Briefing. We've reached a critical point in the 2024 presidential race. Election Day is now just a little more than eight weeks away, and former President Trump and Vice President Harris are set to face off in their first debate in just a few days in Philadelphia. It still looks to be a very tight race. New battleground state polls put out by CNN this week showed Harris and Trump well within the margin of error in key states like Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Harris having a slight lead in Michigan and Wisconsin, while Trump has a slight lead in Arizona. The race to 2070 is quite tight. This week we're talking about the state of the race with Stuart Stevens. He's a former Republican consultant who's worked on many campaigns, including George W. Bush and Mitt Romney's runs for president. He's also an adviser to the Lincoln Project.
00:01:02
Stuart, thank you so much for joining me. Appreciate it.
Stuart Stevens
00:01:05
Thank you for asking me to the party, David.
David Chalian
00:01:07
'So, as somebody who has been a practitioner in presidential politics and run a presidential campaign, here we are 60 days out. We're post that Labor Day turn. What does a campaign have to think about as it heads into this sort of final eight-week-plus stretch?
Stuart Stevens
00:01:28
'Yeah, I think it really goes to what is your theory of winning? At this point, both campaigns ought to have voter models for what they need to turn out, and to be able to focus on those models and getting them out. This is a lot easier to do if you're in the Harris-Walz campaign, because you have normal candidates. Inside Donald Trump, you know, it's a little bit about like trying to coach Godzilla. Go over here. No he's not; he's going to breathe fire over here. And I think that makes it very difficult for him. You know, there's clearly three issues that the Trump campaign thinks that they can win on: immigration, crime and inflation. But they can't get Donald Trump to talk about that, which is sort of a problem.
David Chalian
00:02:06
He's going to try today. We're recording this on Thursday. In New York City, he's going to address the Economic Club. And I saw this morning a Wall Street Journal story previewing his remarks. He's going to adopt sort of Elon Musk's reforming government strategy, talk about getting rid of regulation, extending his tax cuts. But as you said, we have heard time and again from the Trump campaign, here he comes. He's going to roll out some policy. And that's not what he ends up doing. But it is clearly his strongest advantage in this race.
Stuart Stevens
00:02:38
Yeah. You know, I'm sort of a contrarian on this. Republicans usually win who's best on the economy. I mean, I think Romney won it by like 15 points when we lost. The stat that I think is, or number, is more important here is cares about people like me, cares about problems that I have, and I haven't seen any numbers on that recently from Harris, but I'm sure that they're winning it in large numbers.
David Chalian
00:03:04
They are. She definitely — we had six battleground state polls out this week, and she is definitely ahead of Trump in that category.
Stuart Stevens
00:03:10
Yeah I'm not sure that when you get asked about the economy, what you're supposed to say about it. I mean, very few people will say, well, the economy's great, even though, you know, we do have record stock market, record unemployment. You know, my theory of the case is that this race is not about the economy. It's not about inflation. It's not about gas prices. It is about Donald Trump. And just as '22 was about Donald Trump more than anything else. And I think that there is this great hydraulic pressure to view the race as a normal race, because that's kind of how humans like to see the world. We need to see it normal. It's not that the Harris campaign shouldn't keep rolling out these plans. It's not that they couldn't keep talking about that. But, ultimately, to get away from the reality that you have a criminal running for president of the United States. That is what this race should be about. And I think more than anything else, it is about.
David Chalian
00:04:02
So, Stuart, would you use the opportunity of next week's debate if you were advising Harris to do that, to not spend much of the 90 minutes doing the sort of, court for the middle, but actually, like, do the prosecutor versus the felon thing.
Stuart Stevens
00:04:20
Where it to me, I would say in their opening statement, this has never happened before in American history. A criminal is running for president. But it has happened a lot in my history, because I'm a prosecutor and I'm used to standing up here with criminals. And then I would prosecute Donald Trump. I mean, not just for his crimes, but for his failed presidency. He had a spectacularly failed presidency, the only president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs. Someone who was so ashamed he couldn't even show up at his own transference of power. I would just go after Trump, boom, boom, boom on all of these things. What he's done to America, the way he attacks veterans. I would keep him constantly on the defensive.
David Chalian
00:05:01
That's really interesting, because, I don't know if you saw her interview that she did with Dana Bash on CNN last week, but that was not her approach. She was not trying to take every question and turn her answer into an attack on Trump as unacceptable, failed. That was not it. She was in some other lane of trying to appear as somebody who could appeal to as wide a swath of the middle as possible and moderate some of her views and past positions. And it was not sort of like a Trump attack kind of candidate that I saw in that interview. So do you think that was a mistake of an approach?
Stuart Stevens
00:05:40
No, no, I think that you do things when you campaign. You do things when you debate. Usually the most aggressive candidate wins the debate. The key to winning debates is to have a strategy of how to win and not meander through a debate. I would look upon this if I was him — one of us is going to walk off the stage alive. And I'm going to make sure it's not Donald Trump. And I think that that works particularly well with Donald Trump when he's standing there. He is terrified of women, particularly powerful Black women. And I think that it will pull on that thread of Donald Trump that causes him to be just a completely unlikable person. So if you're in an interview and you do that, you don't get that reaction. You don't get that benefit.
David Chalian
00:06:24
I think that's probably why her campaign was trying to renegotiate the rules around the microphones. They wanted — they wanted the microphones open for a more sort of free exchange, because I think they do want to pull that thread and have him exposed in that way. And that's not where the rules ended up, even though this was something Biden had initially called for. Trump now sees benefit in it for himself to have these mics muted.
Stuart Stevens
00:06:46
Yeah, you know, I've been in a lot of these debate negotiations. And sometimes when the other person doesn't want it, you decide you do want it just because you don't want the other person to have it. You know, in 2000, there was a big thing that the Gore campaign where they didn't want reverse cameras, and we never could figure that out. Why? And we were like, well, they don't want it, we want it, we want it. And then finally someone realized that it was because he didn't want his bald spot to show. And Bush was like, fine, give the guy a break. We don't care. We don't need cameras in the back. So, that to me would be the greatest percentage to have a very positive debate — if you went into it with that attitude.
David Chalian
00:07:24
I mean, we saw I know it's hard to do, but if you think about the June debate and put Biden's debacle of a performance aside for a moment, we definitely saw Trump come into that with a clear strategy to not repeat that meltdown debate that we saw in 2020. He came in with an approach to try to stay calm through it, and I'm guessing he thinks that served him well, and so, perhaps, we are likely not going to get this heated — I don't know that he can do anything to make himself necessarily likable. His numbers are pretty solid in the unlikable category, but not in a way that sort of rips open a whole new version of Donald Trump to be disliked by the public. He seems that he's going to come in here with a similar approach to try to keep it steady.
Stuart Stevens
00:08:13
Yeah, I thought he had a terrible debate. I mean, it was overshadowed by the fact that the president, had a worse debate. When you're up there claiming that overwhelmingly people wanted to repeal Roe v Wade, that's a bad debate. And he deteriorated as the debate went on. And I think he's going to enter this debate in a very negative mindset. He resents the fact that Joe Biden isn't standing across from him. He resents the fact that she's raising more money and that she's getting all this positive press and that he's not. He's angry at his own campaign, which is why he brought in Lewandowski, which is so incredible — a guy has never been involved in a winning race in his life. And I don't think that's a good place to enter this debate. But Trump has never been a good debater. I think he lost every debate against Clinton. He had one good debate, which was only good because the other guy was worse. One of the reasons that Vice President Harris is the nominee of the party is because of the skills that she showed in Senate committee hearings with witnesses. So to me and these situations, you take your best player, you take your best play and you just run it. People generally like to do what they do well. That puts them in a comfort zone.
David Chalian
00:09:28
There's no doubt that is her comfort zone. There's no there's no doubt about that.
Stuart Stevens
00:09:32
Yeah, I think that she doesn't need anything more to win the debate.
David Chalian
00:09:37
We're going to take a quick break. We'll have a lot more with Stuart Stevens in just a moment.
00:09:51
Welcome back. We're here with Stuart Stevens, a former Republican political consultant, author and advisor to the Lincoln Project. We're talking about the state of the 2024 presidential race with just a couple of months to go here. Stuart, talk to me about the timing of this debate, the fact that it is earlier in the cycle than we have seen in previous cycles, and there isn't yet another one on the books. What does that do for a campaign to potentially try to clear this out of the way, and then what — will it have as big of an impact on voters if it doesn't happen closer in proximity to when most voters are voting?
Stuart Stevens
00:10:30
In the olden days, when we had a debate commission, and you would have these three debates, when you looked at the calendar, there was what we would always refer to as a debate season. And your entire campaign schedule had to be organized, if you were going to do it right, around those debates, because you don't want to go into debate tired, you don't want to — all this stuff. It paralyzes campaigns. This has gotten worse since we did away with federal funding for campaigns. The impact of that we never talk about, but it is profound. You know, it used to be after you received the nomination, there was somebody there from the Treasury Department. They gave you a check for like 82 million. We were always like, can you wire this? They go, no, we do checks.
David Chalian
00:11:13
And then you are done as a candidate with most of your fundraising responsibilities.
Stuart Stevens
00:11:16
You could not raise money. That was the deal. So, on the back of an envelope, you know, I did Bush and then I did Romney. Bush was under federal funding. Romney wasn't. Back of an envelope one day in Romney world, I figured we were spending 40 to 50% of our time raising money after the convention. That's just a profound difference in it. So, campaigns hate debates because, well, one, they're uncertainty, and you hate uncertainties in debate. But just the scheduling of it and the way it ties you up, and it means that you're not going to be in this state, you're not going to be in that market. So I suspect that both campaigns will breathe a sigh of relief after this and move on. It probably will not have a major impact. It's very difficult to find debates that have had major impact. I guess you have to say the one between Biden and Trump was the most consequential because one candidate got out afterwards. But that's not going to happen again.
David Chalian
00:12:12
Just a stunning summer of events, no doubt. You had said when we were talking a little earlier that you believe this race is fundamentally about Donald Trump. And if that's your theory of the case, does that mean that you don't think this will be a close race when we look at the battle for 270 electoral votes, that you're more confident that it's not as tight? Because if it is about Donald Trump, we've seen what elections about Donald Trump look like — '18, '20, '22, as you noted, they don't go well for him. So does that give you a greater level of confidence about Harris' position in this race?
Stuart Stevens
00:12:52
I don't think the race is going to be close.
David Chalian
00:12:54
That's fascinating, stuart.
Stuart Stevens
00:12:55
To me, this is more likely to be like Carter/Reagan. It'll be close up to a certain point, and then it won't because there's this fundamental structure to this race. I mean, I think Joe Biden would have won this race had he stayed in the race.
David Chalian
00:13:07
You do, really?
00:13:08
I do, yeah, because Donald Trump's never been able to get over 47%. And that's not enough to win. He won with 46.1%. Romney lost with 47.2. He then got 46.9%. So he lost by 7 million votes. So, at face value, he needs more customers. And what are they doing to attract more customers? I just don't see it. At the up upper age limit, you know, more people have died. Older voters were one of his strong suits. More younger voters have entered the electorate. Biden won under 30 by 12 points.
David Chalian
00:13:48
But he found more customers between '16 and '20, didn't he? He was able to. He has a proven appeal to dig deep into the well of his allied voters out in the country and find new ones to come into the process. Is that not true?
Stuart Stevens
00:14:06
Also, there were fewer people voting for third party.
David Chalian
00:14:09
Right.
Stuart Stevens
00:14:09
So the universe itself was greater. You know, he keeps talking about that. He got more votes than anybody else had in presidential history, which is sort of hysterical. It's like saying, well, I scored more points in the Super Bowl than anybody else except the other team.
David Chalian
00:14:22
Yes, of course.
Stuart Stevens
00:14:23
Yeah, that's what counts. Look at what he's done with the alienation of Haley voters. And J.D. Vance was a terrible pick. It's someone who reminds you of everything you don't like about Donald Trump. He's sort of Ted Cruz without the personality.
David Chalian
00:14:41
Oh, man.
Stuart Stevens
00:14:41
I don't think that helps him. They don't have any policy that appeals to people. That's what I think is really going to kill Republicans down ballot here. What is the bargain? If you're voting for a Republican, what is it you get? And there is nothing there that they've been able to fill. Most people are not terrified of immigrants, roaming gangs around the middle of America. You know, it's not a big issue. Most people aren't worried about crime to that degree.
David Chalian
00:15:10
But I think they are worried about like, fentanyl and their kids and coming into their community. Right? And they are worried about taxes. I think that's one part of the bargain, right, is that you would have somebody who would still fight to keep your taxes low. Is that not — do not Americans rally around those pieces?
Stuart Stevens
00:15:25
Taxes, you know, the dirty little secret in my experience in Republican campaigns is that nobody was ever willing to believe that we would cut taxes. They were willing to believe that we wouldn't raise taxes. And I actually think that the Harris campaign will win this tax argument. Trump's tax cuts are for billionaires and for people that make over $400,000 a year. And every time I've ever seen this tested, I mean, shockingly, it's test like, you know, 80/20.
David Chalian
00:15:53
Right. I mean, his tax cut in 2017 was probably his biggest legislative accomplishment, and it is clearly unpopular with the American people.
Stuart Stevens
00:16:00
Exactly. And probably his greatest achievement was helping develop a vaccine. And he can't talk about that either.
David Chalian
00:16:08
So if this race collapses on itself, as you imagine, that it's not close to the end. What does that look like in the electoral map to you with these sort of seven battleground states where this will be decided?
Stuart Stevens
00:16:19
I think Harris is going to win Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona. I'm less confident about Nevada, but I really don't know that much about Nevada. I never worked there.
David Chalian
00:16:33
And what about Georgia and North Carolina, those states?
Stuart Stevens
00:16:36
I think Harris will win one of the two at least.
David Chalian
00:16:39
Interesting, okay.
Stuart Stevens
00:16:40
At a certain point, you go, okay, say, if you're winning this state, pick a state, say probably if the Harris campaign is winning North Carolina, they're not going to win because they won North Carolina. It's going to mean they're winning a bunch of other stuff as well.
David Chalian
00:16:54
That'll be a gravy state, yeah.
Stuart Stevens
00:16:56
'Yeah. And they're extending the map. Trump is running ads in Mar-A-Lago. You know, in part this is respond to the Lincoln Project because we put these ads up, and it drives him crazy. So they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make their own boss feel better when he turns on the Golf Channel, which this is just sort of hysterical. It's like hiring mourners at your own funeral. I don't know, I just don't think — we haven't even gotten into the structure of these campaigns in their state-by-state appearances.
David Chalian
00:17:26
I mean, one campaign actually has a structure and a ground operation, the Harris campaign, and one does not. One is outsourcing it. Yeah.
Stuart Stevens
00:17:34
The Trump campaign came in and gutted the RNC, which is extraordinarily dispiriting to these state parties. Nobody ever talks about this. But when I talk to people, I still have friends there. You know, they were working on this and working on this, and all of a sudden they just came in and now they're like, okay, you know, this is very human reaction. Alright, you think you can win this way? Have at it. Good luck.
David Chalian
00:17:52
And just so our listeners understand, that is not insignificant. These are the people on campaigns that are getting signs out to yards, that are still, you know, making phone calls, that are putting lists together. When that infrastructure gets decimated, that means fewer meaningful voter contacts from people you know in your communities, right?
Stuart Stevens
00:18:13
And underlying all of this is, the single most successful element of Republican campaigning was early voting. You know, then we called it absentee voting, but it was early voting. I mean, we developed a system, my old partner developed this system, and you had a certain number of touches for every absentee voter. You tracked it. And when you came up as a political operative in the Republican Party, you worked in this sort of like working in the mail room.
David Chalian
00:18:37
Right.
Stuart Stevens
00:18:37
And you learned a lot about campaigns doing that. Now Trump is out there saying, don't vote early, which is like, you know, having Tom Brady on your team and going like this pass thing, we're not gonna do it. You know, we're going to run a lot. You know, this is probably, as much as anything, what cost him Georgia.
David Chalian
00:18:55
And cost Republicans the Senate.
Stuart Stevens
00:18:57
And cost Republicans the Senate. Yeah, it's crazy. And Trump himself votes early. So, I don't know. You know, I tend to think, David, that Trump won one race, and the Republican Party decided that the world as we know it has changed forever. I don't think it changed forever. I think if you run that race in '16, 100 times, she wins 95, and it didn't change politics. You pick up a Tylenol bottle, there's a lot of side effects. I know most people don't get those side effects. They take a lot of Tylenol. And I think it was sort of a side effect election. And Republicans have gone insane trying to think that this changed the rules of our politics.
David Chalian
00:19:33
Stuart, I can't wait to check in with you as we get close to Election Day or look at the results afterwards, because you definitely have a rosier view for Harris in what I'm hearing from you — from a lot of Democratic and Republican operatives who I trust and admire, like you. But I am, as the rest of the country will be, eager to see how it all plays out. Thank you, Stuart Stevens, for your time. Really appreciate it.
Stuart Stevens
00:19:55
Thank you, David.
David Chalian
00:19:57
'That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. We want to hear from you. Is there a question you'd like answered about this election cycle? Is there a guest you really want to hear from? Give us a call at (202) 618-9460, or send us an email at
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