CNN Political Briefing

Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalian, CNN's Political Director, and welcome to the CNN political briefing. We are a little over three weeks out from Election Day and there is still no clear leader in this race. The latest CNN poll of polls nationally shows Vice President Kamala Harris had 49% support and former President Donald Trump at 47%. A source close to Harris's campaign told CNN this week that these razor thin margins are making Democrats nervous. While Harris and Trump could have multiple paths to victory, those paths appear very tight. And all eyes are on those critical seven battleground states Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, across the Sunbelt in the South and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, across the Rust Belt through the upper tier of the country. This week I'm joined by Doug Sosnik. He's a longtime Democratic strategist and he was a senior adviser and political director to President Bill Clinton. We're talking about the state of the race as we enter its final stretch.

Doug, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

Great. David Thank you for having me.

You have become this go to gold standard of a political professional where both Republicans and Democrats sort of absorb your regular updates, which are just so smartly framed and brought together about where we are in terms of the almost the predicate upon which these voters will cast their ballots. And I want to start there with you. How do you assess the environment right now, the political environment in which this election is taking place?

I think that what I tell people is I don't think you can understand the 2024 election tree without understanding the forrest that it's sitting in. And the forrest that we're in is since the beginning of this century and the causes that led to this. This is a country that feels like we're headed in the wrong direction regardless of who's in power. So for now, over 20 years in a row, regardless of who's in power, a majority of people in America think we're headed in the wrong direction. And in ten of the last 12 election cycles, the country has voted for change. And that means a change in the White House, the Senate or the House. And I'm pretty confident if we're back here a couple months from now to be 11 out of 13. So I think you have to take the context of where we are. I understand the election itself. So we started this election is the longest general election cycle in history. And we're ending this campaign with the shortest general election in history. So while on the one hand, we've seen an unbelievably profound change in the race since Biden got added, Harris got in. On the other hand, in a lot of ways, nothing's really changed. If you go back to the beginning of last year, up until the run up of the debate, Trump was ahead of Biden by a point or two nationally pointed to in battleground states. And that's despite the fact that Biden had a 35% job approval rating and 70% of the people in this country thought were headed in the wrong direction. Harris gets in July 21st. She's won almost every news cycle since then. She's raised now over $1 billion. She won the debate by most people's reckoning, around 25 points. And she's only up a point or two nationally, if that, and a point or two in the battleground states. So in a sense, the swing states are the same now as they were at the beginning of the election. The key voting groups are the same now since the beginning of the election. We have these big tectonic plates, tribal politics that transcends whether a former president gets in line. It transcends whether a former president gets convicted, transcends whether a sitting president, 70% of the people don't think he has the mental capacity to serve. Certainly not another term in a sense. And nothing matters because what matters are these divisions in our country that are based on tribe.

How would you describe those tribal tectonic plates right now? What is that division?

Well, the biggest single best predictor of how someone's going to vote in American politics now is education level. That is now the new fault line in American politics.

Has been for has been for a couple of cycles now. Right.

'Well, what happened was, remember, politics is a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator of how people feel in America. So the first signs of this were in the 1992 election where Ross Perot got almost 20 million votes. And as I tell people, Donald Trump did not cause what's going on in America. He's a reaction to it or a symptom of it. And you're right. His campaign in '16 in his presidency, it accelerated and completed this political realignment based on. Education that have been forming informally since the early 70s was the beginning of the decline of the middle class. But first showed up, as I said, in the early 90s and essentially is transitioning to a 21st digital and global economy away from a 20th century top down manufacturing run. We have winners and we have losers and the winners are people with a college education and that's become the base of the Democratic Party. And the people feel they've being left behind. Felt that Trump was speaking to them. And that is now that group of voters is now the modern Republican Party base. And by the way, so we have 40 out of 50 states that are controlled by one political party. At the state level, governor and state legislatures. And the single best predictor is whether it's a controlled by a Democrat or Republican is basically education levels in those states. So for the seven battleground states, it largely differentiates them from the rest of the country, which is why they're battleground states, is that they tend to be right in the middle on education levels, not skewing too much to college educated voters and that too much non-college. And that's the only reason they're different than the rest of the country.

'That's such a small point. Just to put some numbers from the 2020 exit polls on this for our listeners. So overall, when you look at college versus non-college in the electorate, four years ago it was 59% non-college, 41% college educated. And then when you look specifically at white college and white non-college voters, 35% of the electorate was white, non-college, 32% of the electorate was white college. And what you're saying about how college educated voters now being the base of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden won college educated voters of all races overall by 12 points, and Donald Trump won the non-college vote just by two points overall. When you look at whites by education, Donald Trump won by 35 points. The white non-college his core base and Joe Biden won white college educated voters, the suburbs and all of that by just three points. I would imagine, as you say, it becomes the base of the Democratic Party. We're going to see Kamala Harris improve on those numbers from Joe Biden.

'I agree with and I'll give you a couple of data points, but I want to mention one other factor, which I think is going to drive voting, the first being the education levels. And the second is gender. For three reasons. I think we're going to have the biggest gender gap in the history of American politics. The gender gap first surfaced in the 1980 presidential election, and every election since then, there's been a gap of women supported Democrats in bed, supporting Republicans to varying degrees of levels for three reasons. I think we have the biggest gender gap in American history. What is the nature of the Harris candidacy? Second is the nature of the Trump Vance candidacy. And the third is this is the first presidential election since the overturning Roe versus Wade. The education and gender are going to be the two drivers. And just to reinforce, to put a finer point on your your statistics, just to give you an idea how things have changed. Romney in 2012 carried white college women in the most recent NBC poll that just came out. Harris is carrying that group by 40 points, 40 points, white, non-college women. This is where I think the road decision comes in. In the NBC poll, Trump is running nine points lower with those voters now than he did based on the exit polls in 2020. The last thing that I'll say is that while America continues to trend towards a majority minority country in 2020, non-college white voters for the first time constitute less than 40% of eligible voters. However, in the 2024 elections, in the three battleground states in the Rust Belt, non-college whites constitute over half the voters. I think looking at national polls is informative increasingly as we move towards Election Day. All that matters are these battleground states. And there's quite a difference between the Rust Belt battleground states and the Sanders once.

'You know, for much of I say, for much of the Harris candidacy, which of course, as I record this with you, is only 81 days old. But there was the sense that she was performing better in these Rust Belt states than she was performing against Trump in these Sunbelt states, even though that the Sunbelt states have perhaps a more natural constituencies, you know, a higher percentage of voters of color, younger voters not as dominated with white non-college as those Rust Belt states are. And yet she had been performing better with those Rust Belt states. I'm not sure that that is the case any more where we stand today. But but that had sort of been the story up until now. And you are right to note the shape of the electorate in those battleground states may be more important in telling to us then the president's approval rating than the wrong track number. All. These things that we, you and I, have spent our careers looking at as Guideposts just may simply not be the Guideposts anymore.

'Well, yes and no. I think and look, if we have a close selection and by the way, at the end of this, we may not have a close selection of words. I think it's unlikely one of the candidates is going to win four battleground states. The other is going to win three. I mean, it's more likely one to win five and the other two are six and one, but they'll be narrow probably. So in a sense, everything matters because it's so close. Having said that, though, to thread the needle of where I think you're right about things have changed, but in some ways things still, the old rules still apply. The above is the two groups of swing voters in this election, I think. Why don't we talk a lot about and is traditional the other we don't talk enough about and it's not traditional. So the first group of swing voters, the traditional lines, our political independents. I think since Trump came on the scene there, you know, like Nikki Haley, Republicans, I think now because of education, they the new fault line, which is becoming more important than race and ethnicity, they are non-college Hispanic voters. So you have that kind of traditional basket of swing voters that haven't made their minds up that both candidates need to appeal to. The last four election cycles. Whoever carried the independent voters won the election. The second group of swing voters, which I think is actually probably more important in spite of the new rules in which I think both campaigns are spending more time on and it's got virtually no coverage in the press. Are swing voters who it's not they're not swing voters because we don't know how they're going to vote. We know how they're all going to vote, but they're swing voters because it's not clear if they're going to vote. And so that is where increasingly both campaigns are spending their time. And so for Trump, these are non-college white voters in general, particularly men, where if they vote, you know, they're going to vote for Trump and for Harris, I think there's there is a hidden or a potential group of voters that she might not normally be able to get since post-Roe, where you get people who don't traditionally vote who might vote because of the overturning of Roe.

Wait, so what group would that be?

Probably it would be downscale white women, but maybe downscale women of all races, people that definitely would vote for her if they vote, but are not, you know, frequent voters or they're infrequent voters. And I suspect on that, there's certainly a correlation of income and probably education levels. But those are all for her. If they'll vote in any other group, which is traditional, is the young voters who tend to not vote at the same levels as older voters. And the ABC poll that came out a couple of weeks ago, I think it was around a 15 point drop with those young voters compared to older voters about likelihood of voting. So the swing to voters is really where the Lion's Survey, all of Trump's campaign is geared for that. He's not. And he never, by the way, in 2016 really worried about the quote unquote, traditional swing voters. And that's why he won the election by increasing the turnout in 2016 in the Rust Belt. And he got 7 million more votes in 2020 compared to 16, even though he lost. And that was, again, not converting people, you know, who voted for Clinton. They're now going to vote for Trump. They didn't worry about that. It was getting people who aren't traditional.

Voters but are very aligned with him and his supporters. And they just kept mining that to turn them into voters.

Absolutely right. And one of the things that you and I have seen in our lifetimes is due to this realignment of American politics based on education, that to tell Trump Democrats always did better in presidential years because infrequent voters are Democratic and Republicans always do better off years because the high propensity voters were Republican. That's completely flipped on its side now.

No doubt about that. We're going to take a very quick break. We're going to a lot more with Doug Sosnik in just a moment.

Welcome back. We're here with Doug Sosnik, a longtime Democratic strategist, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, talking about the state of the presidential campaign with just over three weeks until we count the votes. So, Doug, let's go through the battleground map. I recall you in the waning days of Biden's candidacy writing a piece that said he basically had no path to 270 electoral votes. And with Harris replacing him, I recall you writing how she had totally reinvigorated Democratic paths to 270 electoral votes. You and I are recording this 26 days out. Where do the viable paths for Trump and Harris exist? And do you see this race as a in terms of getting to 270? Is that a coin flip toss up to you right now, or do you see one candidate having an edge over the other?

Well, what I have found and I've spent a lot of time looking at data and I spend a lot of time around Democrats who have data they share with me. And I've spent a lot of time in the run up to the elections, Republicans giving speeches around the country. I was in Dallas yesterday with a prominent Republican pollster who went through all the polling for a select group of executives. So I've seen data from both sides in real time, and I talked to people in real time. So let me just first of all summarize where I think the race stands. And I think, by the way, there's a consensus. I think it's largely a 50/50 race. I think if you'd asked me ten days ago, I'd say it's a 50/50 race. I think I'd rather be Harris than Trump. I thought, you know, she had the momentum and Trump has the advantage in the Electoral College. I would say in the last ten days, there's been a plateauing of Harris and I think an increasing sense that the race, while still close to 50/50 right now, Trump may be picking up a little ground. I think the election is going to boil down to only a couple of things to watch and remember, this is the most issueless campaign in American history. Neither side is really making any commitments about anything that's meaningful. I think the first is which candidate wins the battle of who is the change candidate. And the most recent polling that comes out. Harris is winning right now of the change candidate, but that's far from resolved. The second thing to watch, it's not Trump. Trump is at 47%, at 47% when he won in 16 over 47%. When he lost in 28, never had a job approval, 50%. So he's topped out at 47. The only way that he can win is to get a piece out of Harris. To get those last couple of points is what he did in 2016. And so I think the campaign is really going to boil down to Harris and whether she can stand up to the pressure and the scrutiny and whether she can create a permission structure for people who don't want to vote for Trump but are concerned about Harris, They don't feel like she's given them enough reason to vote for her. And a lot of these people are not Democrats and they are concerned about what the Democrats will do to the economy. And Trump is a completely hardened, done deal. But one of the things he has going for him is that people have fond memories of his handling of the economy and why they don't want to vote for Trump. They will vote for Trump if they don't like the alternative like Biden in the past. But Harris has to close the sale of giving them the confidence and, as I say, the permission stretch to do that for her. And she is not doing that right now. And I think that the extent she's stalled in the last few weeks. It's because she hasn't advanced that.

I just want to go back to your two groups of swing voters that you described, the traditional swing voter and the swing voter. That is, whether or not they will vote. You believe that mission? What you're describing now that she has to do has to be to both of those target audiences. Or you're describing what she just has to do to that first one, .

No for the first one, I think that the turnout mechanism is much more effective by just going negative on Trump. And think about it like a duck where one of the white duck is very calm and in the line of water, the duck is paddling like hell, but you can't see it. The traditional group of swing voters, that first group.

Yeah, which is called Nikki Haley. Republicans.

Right. Any political independents, they need could be convinced that she's up to the job.

Okay.

And then she can send the signals of moderation. And she's not going to be a big spending Democrat. But for the second group, the nontraditional swing voters, which is below the water, that's totally a negative Trump narrative. And that's where you narrowcast that and you use Trump as the motivation for that. It's a false choice we've had in America about whether or not you just go for the swing, you go for the base. And most people say you have to pick sides. And I think that's a mistake.

I agree with you. I think politics is a both end proposition, not either or.

Particularly if the election is close. And just to finish with your question, though, I had several conversations this week with Democrats and Republicans where the current state of the race is and they all they both said the same thing to me. They think she's ahead in Wisconsin, in Nevada, and they think that Trump is ahead in the five other states. Both Democrats and Republicans have said that.

Let me just end with this. Why? And you're not the only person I've heard say this. Why do you believe the seven states don't split evenly, but instead collapse one way or the other to someone's advantage? Why is that your working theory?

They could, by the way. Generally, we have close elections. Remember, a presidential election is a national vote of 53 to 47 or whatever, a House race or a Senate race, that's pretty close election. You know, a six point presidential outcome, that's a kind of a big win.

Right.

And so people tend to break one way or the other at the end of an election. Back when we had, you know, multiple competitive Senate races. We don't anymore because it's all based on all politics is national. And all you need to know is the politics of a state to know which party is going to win. Back in the old days though if you have like 12 competitive Senate races, they tend at the end of the cycle to break for one party or the other. And elections tend to break for one party or the other. As I said earlier, Trump is a done deal. People, for better or for worse, and there is some for better with him with people who don't like him, which is to say with the economy, he is a given. So again, it goes back to what I said earlier. It's really going to be up to Harris whether she can step up and close the deal. If she can, I think you'll see a big break for her because people don't want to vote for Trump. But if she cannot do that and most of the gains that she's made compared to Biden was just getting back the Democratic vote, the power in the 2020 victory. But she hasn't made inroads with most any swing groups of voters. So the burden is really they want her to produce and do that. And if she does, I think the election will swing for her.

But does that mean, Doug, that, you know, when you say he's a done deal, that Trump doesn't have a deal to close, that he could just be standing there in case she doesn't close the deal?

You know, it's his job to close the deal like he did in 16, which broke late. It's his job to close the deal of winning the battle of defining Harris. So he has a lot of work to do, and he's been doing it. But it's a battle of whether or not she can convince people that she's up to the job and reassuring them to vote for her Or, you know, in 2016, as you remember, 18% of the voters had a negative opinion of both Trump and Clinton. He won those voters by 17 points. And so that wasn't an immaculate conception. That was his making the campaign about her and defining her on his terms. So Trump has a lot to do now to win the election. But what is what he has to do to do that is win the battle, as I said earlier, he has to win the battle, that he's the change candidate and he has to win the battle defining hers.

And then my final question for you is why? Why do you think what are you seeing in the way Harris is operating or what she's done in these last ten days? What changed in these last ten days to cause the plateau?

'I don't know. Didn't change so much for what she's done, as much as what she hasn't done, which is she's had a tremendous wave of momentum. And remember, now, you know, she's probably outspent Trump 2 to 1 in 3 to 1 every month. But we don't know who's going to vote. It could be kind of an historic turnout, as I said, because of Roe. Or we could or, you know, Trump could have historic turnout of driving up that non-college white voters. But putting that aside, the only one of these people that are undecided between these candidates, she hasn't advanced the argument in the last ten days or so of why it's okay to vote for her. I don't think she's done anything to say I'm not voting for her because she said that she did that. But the burden is going to be on her to close the sale. And those are the hardest people to get because they're not that they're not by inclination, gonna vote for a Democrat. And they're disproportionately dissatisfied with how the country has gone for the last three and a half years.

Doug, thank you so much for your time. I can't wait to check in with you again as we learn the results of this election. I really appreciate your time.

Right. Thank you. Nice to be with you, David.

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