Megyn Kelly Breaks Down All the Ridiculous Excuses From Kamala's Top Campaign Staff For Her Loss ｜ Ep. 956
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Summary
Today we had to take a moment to go through the recent Pod Save America episode with the Kamala Harris campaign team. It was an unbelievable exercise in self-delusion. They spoke with Dan Pfeiffer, formerly of the Obama team, who is now one of the hosts of this podcast.
Transcript
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Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at noon east.
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Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's AM special episode.
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Today, we had to take a moment to go through the recent Pod Save America episode with the Kamala
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It was an unbelievable exercise in self-delusion. These top campaign officials went on there and spoke
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with Dan Pfeiffer, formerly of the Obama team, who's now one of the hosts of this Democrat podcast.
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You know how they're always saying, we need to infiltrate the podcast lane. How come we don't have any
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Joe Rogans? This is one of the most popular podcasts. Stop fucking whining. Sorry. Stop whining.
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You have podcasts. You had Joe Rogan until you drove him to the other side.
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Pod Save America is a big podcast. If you're a liberal, you'll love it. So quit your whining.
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And that's what this entire interview was. A big, long whine. That's about so hard,
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the conditions that we inherited. Not one word about Kamala Harris. Not one. Not even like in a nice way
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where it's like, you know, our Canada had some issues in communicating in a pithy way.
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So that's something we combated by doing X. No, nothing. She was exquisite, according to these
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losers. And the way they exonerate themselves and take, and I do mean zero responsibility for that
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disaster of a campaign should have Democrats nationwide, nevermind those who donated,
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in a fury, in a true fury. They don't understand what went wrong at all. And they'll be asking for
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Democrat donations soon again to spend it on more folly. We're going to go through it, and I will
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try to move quickly with my comments, but I think you might find it interesting. I've got some sound
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bites, but I'm just going to kind of read some of it so you'll know what they're saying. All right.
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There are three people here. Jen O'Malley-Dillon, who is the campaign chair. Quentin Fulks,
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who was, I think, the comms guy, like messaging, or Stephanie Cutter, she was messaging, and Quentin
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Fulks, who's high up in the campaign. Also, David Plouffe is there. He was brought in as a campaign
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consultant. Yeah, Fulks is the deputy campaign manager. Stephanie Cutter oversaw messaging.
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Okay. So it's those four. Jen O'Malley-Dillon, Quentin Fulks, Stephanie Cutter, David Plouffe.
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Let's just kick it off at the top. Was there a moment when you understood on election night how it
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was going to end? Jen O'Malley-Dillon, who's the most dishonest of the ones who are here? She's by far
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the most dishonest, and she was the one at the top of the campaign. She will not admit to any mistakes.
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You had a billion dollars, and you wasted it, and you lost an election, and nationally humiliated
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yourself, but I guess you're not going to take any responsibility. She should never run a campaign
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again. It's fine by me. I mean, I'm not going to vote for her candidate, but if you're a Democrat,
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you don't want this person. The truth is, we thought it was close race all along. We knew we'd have to
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have a strong turnout on election day. It really took us into the wee hours of polls closing for us to know
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for sure that things were just not tightening. They were tight, but they weren't tightening
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in the direction we needed them to be. That's not an honest answer. For sure, they knew earlier in
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the evening. Everyone on Team Trump knew earlier in the evening. Elon knew. We knew earlier in the
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evening. You could see the turnout was very high in the rural areas and much lower in some urban
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centers that they were relying on. You could see that red areas were turning out. Okay, so already
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we're not kicking it off on a good note. She says, we saw Trump turn out high in early vote,
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but we just believe that to be mode shifting, meaning people who otherwise would have voted
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on election day just turning out earlier by mail. We saw turnout was as expected in rural areas.
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That's not true either. We saw some lighter turnout in some of the areas we had hoped, yes,
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but difference of a point, just a point here or there. A little bit of a drop in support in a few
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areas for us. A little bit of a drop in support in a few areas for us. Okay. You lost 312 electoral
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votes to 226. You lost the popular vote by 2.4 million. It was not a little bit of a drop in
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support in a few areas for you. Hello, madam, you got crushed. I don't know whether anybody really told
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you the truth, but you were eviscerated. It was not a little bit of a drop in support in a few
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areas for you. Okay. This is the big come to Jesus interview in which they're really going to get
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into the truth and honesty about what went wrong. Question. What did your polls tell you about the
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race heading into election day? David Plouffe. Now this is, he's like the number one spinner in this
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whole thing. Spin, spin. General Malley Dillon just doesn't admit anything. Like nothing, nothing went
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wrong. Basically we won. We won except for just a few little areas where we didn't win. And that's
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what stole it from us, but we kind of won. David Plouffe is like, well, we lost, but it wasn't our
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fault. Conditions, terrible conditions, political environment. Uh, who created the political
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environment again, again, who, who created the conditions to which you refer keeps hitting the
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economy. You did, you did, sir, your party, your candidate and her boss, Joe Biden. None of that is
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addressed. It was like, why would the voters return to office? The very people who had caused these
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conditions for them in the first place, that's not addressed. And therefore they will continue to
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lose. That's like the overall theme of what we're going to go through. Here's what he says. Uh, okay.
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What did your polls tell you? Well, they're bad, but we climbed back from the hole that Joe Biden
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created and even post debate, we still had showed ourselves down, but, um, very close. And by the
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end it was to jump ball race. We needed some things to break our way. Uh, we did have some progress
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with undecideds in late October, but it was a dead heat race. Uh, but at the end of the day, he says,
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excuse me, the political atmosphere was pretty brutal. The political atmosphere. That's not an excuse.
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He says this throughout, not an excuse, not an excuse, but, but everything was not our fault.
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It was not an excuse, but we did nothing wrong. It's not an excuse, but political environment.
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Again, who created that, uh, political atmosphere, right track, wrong track, 2872, right? What,
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who is in power, sir? Who is creating the track? You are your party. And by the way, those are the
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same numbers during the midterms in which you did rather well. So what explains that? Could your
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candidate have anything to do with this? Could it be her total ineptitude and stupidity? I guess
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we're not going to acknowledge that. And the Democrats are talking about nominating her
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again to run against the Republican at the end of Trump's second term. So, okay, fine. 70% of the
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country saying they're angry and dissatisfied. Why again? You had Trump's approval rating on his first
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term, frustratingly high, 48 to 51. They're so upset that people were looking with fondness on
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Trump's first term. Why was that? Like Afghanistan, 19% inflation between 10 and 20 million illegals.
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Did that, it is frustrating. I know when voters see and feel all that and then hold the party in power
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to account. Then he goes back again. I think given that we had a challenging political environment
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and the fact that we got the race to a dead heat was positive, but boy, it was slow moving. This is
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what he says throughout started in a hole. We got it to a dead heat and we did better in the swing
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states where we actually campaigned versus, you know, the rest of the union. This is loser talk.
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This is loser talk. You know, I mean, you talk to a football team after it loses a game. If they want
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to win the next game, they say, I fucked up. I dropped the pass. I had buttery fingers today. Well, no
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man would say that, but that would be how I would describe it. And butter fingers. Anyway, they'd be
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honest about what went wrong. It wouldn't be like, it was snowy. It was a tough environment. The fans
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booed a lot, tough environment. They really, they hated us. They jeered a lot. Why did, you know,
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that's, this is not the kind of self-assessment that leads to better results in the future.
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Then he points out, as I say, so where Kamala Harris campaigned, we were able to keep the tide
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down a little. They keep talking about the right word shift in the country and how it went eight points
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to the right, six points to the right on average, something like that. But they kept it relatively,
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you know, less than that three points. They said in the swing States, congratulations.
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You, you're, you're a loser by a little less. That's what they want their party to celebrate.
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We're losers, but we lost by a little less where we spent our billion dollars,
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where we spent our billion dollars. Believe it or not, we will get to the point in this interview
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in which they bitch about the money, about Republican super PACs. You had a billion dollars
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that you raised in two months. Would you stop your disgusting whinging as our friends over
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in Australia say, um, okay. Margin of error race. He says again, where we inherited a deficit,
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we got it to even, but the thing never moved. So, you know, that's, that's where we were hopeful
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margin of error. These people are never winning again. Trump did not close. Well, he says,
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I thought Kamala Harris closed. Well, Trump was reminding people some of the things they don't
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like about him. How, how was it? What did Trump do specifically? He didn't close. Well, I mean,
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again, he crushed you three 12 to two 26. What, what should he have done differently in the close?
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Um, that we thought that might give us what we needed, but in the end, I think the political
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atmosphere, the desire for change and all those fundamentals, um, that you spent some time
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talking about really presented huge challenges for us. And we just didn't get the breaks we needed
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on election day, passive voice. Like we didn't get the breaks we needed kind of hope things would
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break for us. What do you, you didn't earn the trust, the affection, the admiration, or the desire
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to spend more time with you of the voters. You failed because your candidate sucked. And by the way,
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no message guru could have fixed it. Um, but you certainly failed now that I get to know you for
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my God. I mean, like I'm truly, like I said the other day, I'm starting to feel sorry for her
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because she's an Nimrod. And then she had a bunch of no, nothing advisors around her trying to affirm
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these empty messages as though they were brilliant. And you'll hear Stephanie cutter actually get into
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this. It's actually quite fascinating. David Plouffe goes on in response to the question from Dan
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Pfeiffer, how deep was that hole that she had to climb out of? Well, here he gets really honest.
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He said on Twitter, right after the loss, we, we climbed out of a hole and he got so much negative
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feedback from the Dems. He had to delete his account. Well, now, now he's loosening up.
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He's leaning into wasn't our fault. And I've got my new narrative deep hole. I got us out of it.
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Guy got us to even, but things didn't quite break our way in a few districts. No, David, no, that's not
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it. So what he says now though, is he's making it even worse. His heroic behavior. It's even
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bigger and better than you knew. Now we've gone from just, we were in a hole that we dug out of
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to, it was obviously pretty catastrophic, catastrophic in terms of where the race stood
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when we got in catastrophic. You say when we were behind, he says, uh, we were surprised that
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these public polls came out late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw
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in a hole. I tell you all the digging we had to do. And we were the ones to do it. Um,
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it wasn't a race that moved a lot. You got to have the undecideds break your way more than your
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opponents. And you've got to get a little benefit from turnout. I mean, he's talking about this,
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like it was razor. You like we had what? 10 million Democrats who didn't show up this time,
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who showed up last time for Joe Biden. Like this was not a nail biter, sir. It was,
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it was not the polls may have showed prior to the, uh, the polls may have shown prior to the race that
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it looked tight. We saw that too, but your internal polls should have done you one better.
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Uh, Trump's internal polls reportedly were showing the momentum that ultimately showed up on election
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day. Okay. Were you able to do any thinking or planning in the one month period between the
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debate? And when Joe Biden ultimately got out, none, there's no planning. We didn't know what
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he would do. We were, we were in crisis management mode of keeping Biden in the race. This is Quentin
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folks. Um, okay. Then she gets in. That's when we begin to say, how can we define her? And also
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Trump's favorability numbers were creeping up and we had to do something about that as well.
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Okay. They go on to get into it now. Stephanie cutter, the messaging guru.
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The first thing we had to do was put on a convention and we had about three weeks to
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flip a convention that had been for him to her. Okay. We had to fit this very new character of
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ask yourself if this sounds familiar, a different generation with different experience and a
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different background. And looking at the data at that time, uh, there was, she had a huge deficit
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and favorability because people either didn't know about her or what they did know about her
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was based off of negative media. You mean like the, the interview she gave with to NBC news with
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Lester Holt, where she said, I've been to the border. You haven't been to the border and I've
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never been to Europe like that. Is that the negative? Like she was negative herself in her media
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because she was not unfairly treated by the press at all, at all. To the contrary,
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she was made into some heroic figure during the race. And prior to that, there had been some
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negative reporting about her bad behavior, but she was not the victim of negative media spin like
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Trump has been since he came on the national political scene. So I don't know what you're
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referring to, Stephanie. Um, we already knew how to do the negative on Trump. And we knew that there
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was a lot of Trump-nesia out there. People needed to be reminded. Okay. And she goes on to say
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the second imperative was to remind them of what Trump was like. Okay. So define her,
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remind them of how terrible Trump is. And the third is what's the choice. The convention demonstrated
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a lot of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, a lot of freshness, future oriented, bringing a variety of
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coalitions together. We had independents, Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, sports figures at no
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place in this entire interview. Do they mention the word celebrity, not a word about celebrity,
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which was one of their biggest crutches. And it was an utter fail and no post-mortem. My dear will
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be complete until you do that until you realize we can't stand them. Meryl Streep is fine when she's up
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there in her movies, but she's less than appealing as a political advocate. And we all felt it. Why did
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you parade her out? Why do you keep parading out people like Taylor Swift, people like Julia Roberts,
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people like George Clooney? We don't like them and we know that they hate us. So the people you're
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trying to get like the you say you need Republican voters, you make this point repeatedly, you need moderate
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Republican voters. They know that Julia Roberts can't stand them. That's not your girl. OK, Julia Roberts is
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not your girl. You may now want to talk about bringing out sports figures who are more universally loved than
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celebrities, but you're missing the sin that you committed. Everybody coming together around a new way forward
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and finally turning the page. This is the moronic messaging idiot behind Kamala Harris. They actually
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convinced themselves that these phrases were going to persuade people to vote for her. A new way forward,
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turning the page, the freshness, the new generation of media. OK, different generation. We hear this over
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and over. These two morons sat down together, Stephanie Cutter and Kamala Harris, and convinced themselves
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that that that was a campaign message, that that was a like a promise voters could sink their teeth
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into and hold on to and get themselves out on like a cold November day to vote for. She goes on,
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more ass covering. So in 107 days, you know, what typically takes us a year and a half, two years
00:20:04.360
in a presidential campaign, we were defining someone who was wholly undefined from the start.
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She was the vice president for four years. She was totally undefined, a totally unknown quantity.
00:20:17.420
All these presidential races used to be the summer before the November vote,
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like recently, like within the past 15 years. That's how the campaigns, this two-year campaign
00:20:29.100
thing is a very recent development. Used to be like, even with Hillary, she wrested that nomination
00:20:36.700
away from Bernie. It was June prior to the November vote, June. And then bang, we were off to the
00:20:41.920
races that summer. That's the time you had, Stephanie Cutter. What's so hard about coming
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up with a campaign message over the couple of months before the campaign and then going with
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it into November? She asked like nobody's ever done it before. Never much less with somebody who's
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been a national quantity for four years as our vice president. Trying to remind people about the
00:21:02.540
opponent what life was like underneath him. Um, okay. They go on Dan, David Plouffe. Um, okay.
00:21:12.040
The question was, you felt the need to at least knock his numbers. Oh, okay. No, the question is,
00:21:18.340
you guys disagreed with the analysis that there was a need to knock his numbers down a little bit.
00:21:23.920
And David Plouffe says, of course, that's nonsense. First of all, back to where this specific
00:21:28.260
question you were asking. Okay. To Stephanie about Kamala Harris started this race. If I recall
00:21:33.120
with two favorables, uh, or with favorables, 33 to 35, she ended it at 48. She actually ended the
00:21:41.460
election with a higher approval rating than Donald Trump. I'm not sure that someone has won the
00:21:48.600
presidency with a lower approval rating. I mean, wrap yourself in your little blankie as much as you
00:21:53.380
want, David. They're like, right. They liked her so much more than they liked him. Sure. Sure. They
00:21:59.200
did. That's why he won. Uh, so I think people got to know her as they got to know her. They liked her.
00:22:06.140
I think her approval rating post-election is north of 50, not quite right, but it is higher, uh, than 33.
00:22:13.240
That was really hard work. Uh, that was really hard work. He says now, how did that happen?
00:22:21.360
It happened thanks to $1 billion and all of the mainstream media telling us that she was the
00:22:26.400
second coming, that she was brat, that she was joyful, that Trump was Hitler. They want us to
00:22:32.120
pat them on the back for getting her approval rating up to 48 with the help of a billion dollars,
00:22:41.000
all of sports, all of celebrity, all of media, not inside the digital lane, uh, and all of the
00:22:50.560
advertising that you could buy with all that money. And they're like, see, we're hot. We're,
00:22:55.080
we're hot stuff. See what we did. And like, we did that in the swing States, which shows,
00:22:59.700
cause we kept things tighter there that we're actually winners, even though we lost all seven of
00:23:04.880
them. What kind of a post-mortem? Like, yes, you got her approval rating up. Not enough. Why is that?
00:23:15.400
Because she is unlikable. She is a moron. She has upper limited herself people. You can see that very
00:23:24.180
clearly on Trump. You can see Trump has high negatives. Nobody on this side of the aisle would
00:23:28.060
deny that. We all see it. We accept reality. You won't accept that you had a fundamentally
00:23:33.500
flawed character who did not resonate with voters because yes, she had no message whatsoever. And
00:23:40.580
she's dumb and she's inauthentic. We're going to win. We're going to win. Come on, man. What do you
00:23:47.940
mean, man? I have no decency. She's inauthentic that none of that winds up anywhere on these pages.
00:23:55.700
Again. So we had a little more than two months to do bio contrast on the economy, healthcare,
00:24:03.560
raising the stakes of Trump. Never in history have we had this before. Since Grover Cleveland,
00:24:09.920
we spent much more time trying to raise the stakes of a second term than re-arbitrating the first
00:24:15.900
because voters just weren't open to that. They were not open to being told that Trump had a shitty
00:24:21.360
first term, which is just amazing, right? Because he didn't because unemployment was at record lows.
00:24:29.520
Minority groups were experiencing truly historic low, historically low levels of unemployment.
00:24:34.960
The stock market was booming. We had opened up the oil reserves. There were no wars. We knew wars.
00:24:42.340
We were winding down Afghanistan. All like, yeah, it was actually a great four years in many,
00:24:47.080
many ways. The Middle East was not a powder keg at the time. We had the Abraham Accords. Yeah,
00:24:52.200
you're right. You did the right thing, not reminding people of Trump's first term. And
00:24:56.960
there's a reason, quote, voters just weren't open to this. We wanted to lean into the fact that he's
00:25:01.900
more unhinged, that he wants unchecked power. Project 2025 ended up being about as popular as the
00:25:08.100
Ebola virus. So we did good work there. And now, of course, that son of a bitch lied about it. He's
00:25:13.520
hiring everybody who authored it. No, he's not. No, he's not. We looked it up today just to see,
00:25:19.640
like, who is he hired? Affiliated with 2025. The examples are, I think, his White House spokesperson,
00:25:25.820
right? Is that who it is, Deb? Who, like, yeah, yeah, who, like, offered an opening prayer or something
00:25:33.820
like this. Like, she was not a critical part of 2025. J.D. Vance, they cite. Oh, God, the vice
00:25:40.640
president. OK. Who is it? Who's the other one? Oh, Tom Homan. Tom Homan. The border czar guy,
00:25:50.140
the guy who's going to kick everybody out of the country, the deportation guy. Yes, it was a big
00:25:54.320
secret what Trump planned to do along the southern border. At last, he's his protestations that he
00:26:00.460
wouldn't be implementing border crackdowns have been proven wrong. What? Like, Tom Homan was not
00:26:05.840
some architect of 2025. Anyway, more dishonesty. OK. La, la, la, la, la. Tried to make her a change
00:26:15.740
candidate. OK, now it's getting interesting. General Malley Dillon, I do think that we were really
00:26:22.140
focused from the get go on how she was different than everyone else, different than Joe Biden,
00:26:30.060
different than Donald Trump. She was very clear that she was a new generation. Like, it wasn't just
00:26:39.500
a statement. She really meant it. This. This is. Like, this inanity that we watched on Colbert
00:26:51.400
was planned. That's what I'm starting. Like, this whole, like, I'm not Donald Trump. Like,
00:26:59.860
she's she's different from everyone else, different than Joe Biden, different than Donald Trump.
00:27:12.260
Polling shows that a lot of people, especially independent voters, really want this to be a
00:27:17.760
change election and that they tend to break for you in terms of thinking about change. You are a
00:27:24.060
member of the president administration under a Harris administration. What would the major changes be
00:27:31.080
and what would stay the same? Sure. Well, I mean, I'm obviously not Joe Biden.
00:27:36.360
And so that would be one change in terms of. But also, I think it's important to say with,
00:27:50.880
And so when we think about the significance of what this next generation of leadership looks like,
00:27:54.500
were I to be elected president. Directly out of her mouth.
00:27:56.460
It is about, frankly, I, I, I, I love the American people and I, I believe in our country.
00:28:05.700
I love that it is our character and nature to be an ambitious people.
00:28:10.920
Oh God. And back to her pablum. All right. We've heard enough. We know, we know, get out.
00:28:16.400
We know what she does from there. But this, that, that nanity at the top was directly from
00:28:20.440
Jen O'Malley Dillon. They actually thought that was a message. My God, that wasn't her just fumbling
00:28:25.940
for an answer. They actually thought we were going to relate to that, that empty pablum of I'm not
00:28:34.320
Donald Trump and I'm not Joe Biden. I'm a new generation of leadership. And now they're wondering
00:28:40.800
why it didn't work. Then, then this Jen O'Malley Dillon goes on to like, try to pat Kamala Harris
00:28:46.180
on the back. It, that like, it wasn't just a statement, right? She brought her own point of
00:28:52.480
view to thinking about things like housing, sandwich generation. That was probably her biggest applause
00:29:00.120
line. That was about her life and also understanding what people in the country were really needing.
00:29:06.700
That's it. That, that was her contribution to your campaign messaging, the sandwich generation
00:29:13.460
thing. Um, no one's going to say it. Like we had an effective candidate. And so I hope you keep
00:29:22.520
nominating her because maybe we'll get sandwich generation in four years from now. And that will
00:29:26.820
appeal to a very small sliver of Americans. I'm one of them. Hey, don't get me wrong. I like the focus
00:29:31.520
on us, but good luck making all of the social security, um, you know, all, all, all of the,
00:29:36.800
uh, expenses that we pay to take care of our aging relatives tax deductible without Congress,
00:29:41.020
something she never explained how she would do. Um, okay. She goes on, this is about her life
00:29:45.560
and understanding what the people in the country really need. I think whatever, whenever we had an
00:29:50.040
opportunity, the vice president did put her own stamp on this and did it in a deeper way, uh,
00:29:56.440
than I think probably we got the kind of full breadth of coverage on it. What she really leaned
00:30:03.000
in to her own vision, but the headwinds were tough. We lost. I'm not here to say that didn't
00:30:11.640
happen, but where she campaigned, we did way better than the rest of the country. And Donald Trump did
00:30:19.100
worse. So where you spent ads on negative money on negative ads against Trump, you did better.
00:30:25.540
And she, where she campaigned, she did better than in States where she didn't. And for this,
00:30:33.060
you're some kind of genius for this. People keep hiring you to run campaigns. So my plan is we're
00:30:39.060
going to spend money in the swing States. That's what we're going to do. And we are going to drive
00:30:46.140
your numbers up in the States where you choose to campaign. You see, that's, that's the golden plan.
00:30:53.640
But then she goes on to see some say something very revealing inadvertently. She says this idea
00:31:01.180
that people have, um, just a well-constructed, already baked in idea about Trump. Okay. She's
00:31:08.780
trying to say that, like that people already understood Trump, this idea that people have
00:31:13.640
just a well-constructed, already baked in idea about Trump and that they don't need to learn
00:31:18.980
anymore. It's just complete fallacy. I mean, his numbers are stronger today than they have ever
00:31:27.540
been. So what she's trying to say folks is you see people do need to be told more about how terrible
00:31:35.660
Donald Trump is. Otherwise his numbers wouldn't be higher today than they've ever been. They needed
00:31:43.360
to be told how awful he was. So we did the right thing in reviving Hitler and fascist. We had to do
00:31:52.480
it because they needed to be told how bad he was because today his numbers are stronger than they have
00:31:58.800
ever been. She doesn't understand that no amount of messaging in the world about Trump being Hitler
00:32:07.300
would have won them this race. They had it on magazine covers. They had it coming out of the
00:32:13.880
mouths of CNN anchors, not to mention what happened over on NBC and the other nets.
00:32:20.480
They are no longer credible and they are no longer believed. So Jen O'Malley Dillon is just gazing at
00:32:28.240
the navel. She's playing with the navel. Look at my pretty navel or my navel. What? My navel.
00:32:34.560
I'm just going to gaze at my navel. And she somehow thinks that's going to change things between now
00:32:40.640
and four years from now without admitting that they've lost all credibility. They are the boys
00:32:47.420
who cried wolf. We no longer believe them that the wolf is coming to town. Fascist Hitler wolf
00:32:55.180
is not believable, but she doesn't get it. She just thinks, you know, with a few more billion,
00:33:01.240
they could have gotten that ball into the end zone. Uh, okay. Then she goes on to pat herself
00:33:07.040
on the back about how they, they limited the bleeding, uh, in every other state, but the
00:33:12.420
battlegrounds, there was a negative eight point shift to the right in the battlegrounds. It was
00:33:16.160
only three good job losing by less. Uh, again, we are, we were never going to satisfy everybody on
00:33:26.180
how we handled our messaging, but we did talk about things like she's a different generation.
00:33:32.680
Most of her career is from outside Washington. Uh, her career has been about reaching across the
00:33:37.640
aisle. It's not been about ideological politics. This is all. I never asked a victim, whether they
00:33:45.000
were a Democrat or a Republican, you know, I spent my life not in Washington, right. But in government,
00:33:50.460
all of these things, we were trying to tell a story and give the impression that she was different
00:33:55.760
without pointing to a specific issue. There it is. There's the reveal, all of that empty rhetoric
00:34:06.560
about her time as a prosecutor, blah, blah, blah, blah, transnational criminal organizations that
00:34:13.960
she prosecuted. It was them just trying to stay totally amorphous. So she did not have to distance
00:34:21.660
herself from policies enacted by an administration of which she was a part and with which she had no
00:34:27.380
disagreement, no disagreement. And they make that clear in the next few lines. Dan Pfeiffer follows
00:34:32.180
up. Why not a specific issue? Stephanie cutter, because she felt she was a part of the administration.
00:34:38.220
So why should she look back and pick out, cherry pick some things that she would have done
00:34:43.440
differently when she was a part of it? And she also had tremendous loyalty to president Biden.
00:34:49.500
And, you know, if we had just said, imagine this, you've, I mean, you've been on plenty of campaigns.
00:34:54.180
Imagine if we said, well, we would have taken this approach on the border. Imagine the round of stories
00:34:58.960
coming out after that of people saying, well, she never said that in a meeting or what meeting was it
00:35:05.020
when she said this, or I remember when she did that. And it just, it wasn't going to give us what we
00:35:11.140
needed because it wouldn't be a clean break. This is them admitting that she agreed with Joe Biden
00:35:18.800
on all of it, on the inflationary policies, on the open border, on the trans insanity.
00:35:26.780
And so she was afraid to come out and criticize any of those things because they knew that Joe Biden
00:35:33.440
insiders would have leaked to the press. Here's exactly what she said when we debated the open border.
00:35:39.200
Here's exactly what she said when we talked about trans stuff. Here's what she said when we talked
00:35:44.680
about the spending packages, trillions of dollars and the risk of inflation. Do it. She said, do it.
00:35:52.480
Pedal to the metal. Spend more. Let's have more trans insanity. She knew they had her. They had her.
00:35:59.700
So she did not feel able to distance herself from anything Joe Biden did because she was a true
00:36:06.480
believer in all of it. And therefore they came up with these empty phrases that we all heard of,
00:36:12.960
which meant nothing different generation and reaching across the aisle and outside of Washington.
00:36:21.820
It's amazing to hear like the sausage. We saw the sausage and we were like, Oh, the sausage tastes
00:36:27.160
terrible. I hate this sausage. This is no Bob and Evans. It doesn't have like the nice honey coating.
00:36:32.240
It's disgusting. It does not taste good. Don't want it. But now we're seeing how it was made.
00:36:37.240
And it's perfectly consistent with how the sausage turned out. Again, our focus was let's look to the
00:36:42.900
future. Uh, let's describe her and her approach to things. Let's use policies. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:36:50.220
Um, they go on about how they needed to define her. She was at negative 20 on immigration, but we got
00:36:58.600
that down to negative 10. We lost by less. Trump had a positive 22 point advantage on the economy.
00:37:06.620
We got that down to seven. And when he sort of looked at the core issues aside from the attacks
00:37:10.560
like trans issues, um, well, those are just at the bottom for voters, the economy, inflation, crime,
00:37:15.600
immigration at the top. This is one of the major flaws in this whole postmortem. He's saying trans
00:37:22.000
issues were at the bottom for voters. No one gave a shit. Now I'm going to come back to that in a
00:37:27.120
minute. Just put a pin in that. Uh, Quentin goes on a lot of the stuff that we did. So she's talking
00:37:31.880
about her prosecutorial background and then saying that she went after transnational gangs, cartels,
00:37:36.820
you guys can say it by heart. It was to push back on, to push back pseudo Lee on the immigration
00:37:43.040
attacks that were coming at her. Duh Quentin. We know as well as credentialing her, her background
00:37:49.720
on things that were absent and standalone of the Biden administration, her John Wayne routine.
00:37:54.800
We know that's not no big insight. We all saw what you're trying to do and it did not work on any of
00:37:59.400
us. Um, let's see on the trans attack on the trans attack. One, obviously it was a, it was a very
00:38:07.460
effective ad that they unleashed. You know, the one like he's for, she's for they, them, he's for
00:38:12.900
you. I ultimately do not believe it was about the issue of trans. I think it made her seem out of
00:38:20.660
touch and it was sort of a pseudo economic ad underneath it too, because he was saying you're
00:38:25.800
going to pay for it with taxpayer money. And it was in her own words and that's something, but we tested
00:38:30.800
a ton of responses to this and none of them ever tested as well as basically her talking about what
00:38:35.680
she would do like for the American public on, on the economy, et cetera. The trans ad team read,
00:38:42.380
meaning Trump and all of his super PACs. Now they spent this money on it. Trump spent 37% of his
00:38:47.420
money on this trans ad. Um, but Trump wasn't the only spender. We were getting hit across the board
00:38:53.620
by it. They spent a lot of time talking about this. He says, and it's easy to say with the kind of
00:38:57.360
resources that we raised, we should have been able to do everything, but that's not the case. You have to
00:39:00.720
make decisions. We had to choose. He's saying between messaging on the economy and what she would do.
00:39:05.720
Defining Trump as Hitler and trying to run defense on some of the most effective messaging messaging.
00:39:11.240
Trump was unleashing. We had to choose, and we chose to focus more of our attention on one driving down
00:39:17.160
Trump. Um, and that was incredibly important that we did as well as on defining her. So if we spent this
00:39:25.080
entire race and not to be defensive about it, but if we spent this entire race pushing back on
00:39:29.400
immigration attacks or crime attacks or on trans attacks, at what point are we bringing Trump
00:39:35.500
down? All of our testing, all of our testing told us that the approach we were taking of her being
00:39:42.600
more positive and talking about the economy and what she would do was a better tactic in response to that
00:39:49.360
trans assault. You were wrong. Your testing was wrong. You should have listened to someone else like me
00:39:59.380
or anybody right of center who was telling you in many ways and forms that this actually was a big
00:40:06.220
issue. And that voters did care, including Democrat voters, which you chose to find out the hard way.
00:40:13.700
Quentin, how will you listen? Doesn't look like that. Um, Jen O'Malley, Dylan, if we looked at this
00:40:22.040
a lot and she points out, she never got directly asked about it. Oh, we know, Jen, we know we waited
00:40:30.300
for a single interviewer to raise this issue with her. And Brett bear was the only person to do it.
00:40:37.940
He raised the trans prisoners thing, did not get into boys playing in girl sports, but he did raise
00:40:46.220
the, that's it. And she was given a pass in every other interview, but it was obviously something we
00:40:53.580
looked at responding to. And then they, they admit that they spent David Plouffe chimes in that they
00:41:00.180
spent, he says, where is it? Maybe hundreds of hours on how to respond to that ad hundreds. So we took
00:41:09.300
it very seriously, he says, but it wasn't something at the end of the day, it wasn't something
00:41:15.720
at the end of the day, what matters in an election is something causing someone to behave
00:41:22.200
differently. And our sense was in the battleground States, this was not driving vote behavior to the
00:41:29.480
same extent as the economy was generally, or even immigration. He did not think this mattered. I think
00:41:38.800
we have some of this on tape. Yeah. Listen to David Plouffe on this. And I would just add to
00:41:45.540
both campaigns, super PACs, there was a lot of national ads. So I think if you're sitting in
00:41:50.980
California or Texas or Florida, you see this ad, you don't see any of our responses, right? So in
00:41:56.320
the battleground States, you know, her talking, you know, in a very common sense way, in a very
00:42:03.900
practical way, whether it be about immigration, whether it be about the economy was our best defense
00:42:09.320
to, because this was less about trans than it was about priorities and being out of the mainstream.
00:42:13.680
So I think these voters in the battleground States, both through ads and through seeing her
00:42:17.760
doing local interviews. And I think that's one of the reasons you had such a difference between the
00:42:22.540
battleground States and the non-battleground States is people knew her better. Number one. Number two,
00:42:27.000
as Jen said, you know, it's very easy these days to understand who has experience in ads. So we were
00:42:33.200
feeding a lot of digital ads to people who might've saw that spot. But, you know, at the end of the day,
00:42:38.760
we were spending a lot of time with voters in these battleground States, both quantitatively
00:42:42.420
and quantitatively. And this trans ad was not driving vote. So let me tell you what he's doing
00:42:48.840
there. Trans ad was not driving votes in the swing States. And in the swing States, we did respond to
00:42:52.840
the ad. We just didn't waste money in States like New York and California. And therefore we didn't do
00:42:57.580
anything dumb or wrong because even the Democrats have responded and said time and time again, why didn't
00:43:02.460
you respond to that ad, which we all know did play a major role and the trans issue in general. And
00:43:07.840
this is him trying to say, Oh no, in the swing States, we did. You just didn't see it. You media
00:43:11.240
people in Washington DC and New York, you people in California who are all Democrats and mad at us.
00:43:15.420
You just didn't see it. You see, we neutralized this in the swing States and the voters didn't care.
00:43:21.820
This is amazing. This is just amazing to me. It wasn't a Republican group that did this survey.
00:43:27.340
It was a democratic group called blueprint 2024. They didn't survey 200 people. They surveyed
00:43:34.980
3,200 people, 3,262 people, national and swing state voters, um, right after the vote, November 6th
00:43:45.840
and 7th. And what they found is not Megan Kelly. This is a Democrat group trying to figure out what
00:43:51.580
went wrong surveying 3000 plus voters. The top issue for swing state voters was, and I quote,
00:44:01.660
Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle
00:44:08.840
class. She is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle
00:44:16.760
class. That was the number one issue for swing state voters, David. So you might want to reassess
00:44:25.380
your, the trans ad was not driving the vote. Indeed, sir, the trans issue did drive the vote and it drove
00:44:33.540
your candidate right off a cliff. It's amazing how they just don't want to admit it. They can admit it.
00:44:40.600
I guess their identity politics are so part of their, their own identity as Democrats. They must hold onto it.
00:44:46.160
Great. Keep losing. Doesn't hurt me at all, but just FYI, you're completely misreading this
00:44:50.780
completely. You saw what happened to Seth Moulton. We talked about this the other day,
00:44:54.860
that, that, uh, Democrat from Massachusetts who signed all the bills and the legislative proposals
00:45:01.620
that would crack down on any attempt to keep boys out of girls sports to that would mandate
00:45:08.200
allowing them in. He loves boys and girls sports. Then after they lost, he came out and he said,
00:45:12.180
no, I don't, I don't think it should be that. I should have to worry about my girl's safety
00:45:15.280
with boys coming into their sports. And I shouldn't be allowed to say anything about it.
00:45:18.540
Now he's had so many people like try to cancel him and threaten him with a campaign against him
00:45:23.420
and so on that he's backtracking. Now he's, I'm not saying that's how I feel just saying we should
00:45:27.880
have been able to talk about it. That's where the Democrat party is right now. Even in the postmortem,
00:45:31.920
you can't be honest about this issue. You guys should get used to losing because you're going to
00:45:38.200
remain losers for a very long time. Um, okay, we go on. Oh, he did raise one point, which I thought
00:45:47.960
was very interesting and true. He says, uh, look, uh, okay. If we could have just said, that's a lie.
00:46:01.040
It's not anything she's ever believed, but you know, she was on tape here. You kind of feel for
00:46:08.660
him. Yeah. That's a tough one. Surgery for people who want to transition in prison was part of the
00:46:15.620
Biden Harris platform in 2020. It was part of what the administration did, right? We also saw Colin
00:46:23.800
Allred. That was Ted Cruz's opponent in Texas and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Uh, both of whom ran good races,
00:46:30.360
kind of directly responded to the trans attacks. And in our view, you're playing on your opponent's
00:46:35.880
side of the field. So they chose not to do it. Okay. Well, um, let's see how that goes. They
00:46:43.380
had, they had to try to disavow their earlier positions in order to have any hope in those
00:46:49.860
races. Colin Allred just completely lied in his race, but his position on that we, we, we went into
00:46:55.520
that with the audience. He did that to try to save his neck. The fact that it didn't work doesn't
00:47:00.620
mean he shouldn't have disavowed it. Doesn't mean you shouldn't have disavowed it. The voters want
00:47:05.160
to be told you disavow it. Some 66, 70% of the American public, at least that's according to the
00:47:11.680
Democrat polls say they don't want boys and girls sports. I believe the number is much higher.
00:47:16.660
And there's also a number in there that's just telling the pollsters what they think is politically
00:47:19.880
correct. But those are not examples for you on why you shouldn't have tried to disavow it,
00:47:25.300
disavow it. Those are examples to you of the penalties of leaning in on this. And by the way,
00:47:29.860
so is your candidate Kamala Harris. The more you lean in, the more you're going to lose losers.
00:47:34.440
That's what's going to happen there. Um, okay. Okay. Then, then this is Quentin folks.
00:47:42.940
I think that the trans, the trans ad is one of those, uh, okay. He says, if you look at how Trump
00:47:46.880
was targeting it, it didn't move those voters he was targeting, but it did make our job of sort of
00:47:51.280
trying to get in front of them and making us seem like we knew what they were going through.
00:47:56.540
And we were focused on their problems, much more difficult. That's right. Quentin. And so that's
00:48:01.520
how I sort of see it. So he's kind of onto it, right? Like those swing state voters saying,
00:48:06.140
we think that she cares more about transit voter issues and cultural issues like that. Then she does
00:48:09.940
about inflation and things that actually matter to us. And then Quentin finishes with, but I don't think
00:48:15.520
it was moving the vote wrong. So close, so close, so close and yet no. Um, okay. Let's see. They go
00:48:24.040
into some of the spending. They a hundred days had to define her all the nonsense. Um, they bitch about
00:48:33.640
Trump's super PACs, which they outraised, but they're still mad. I, okay. Um, they go on with the
00:48:40.500
finance. It's really amazing. They defend putting her image up and, and spending on an advertisement
00:48:47.940
at the sphere in Las Vegas. Take a listen to Jen O'Malley, Dylan, the campaign manager on that.
00:48:54.840
You know, you, you mentioned the sphere, of course, as you well know, to, to do something like that,
00:48:59.720
we had to make some bets pretty early on, but we believed as we were closing the race
00:49:04.560
that it was really important for people to feel like they were part of something bigger and that
00:49:09.640
we were trying to identify opportunities to culturally reach people. It's why in Philadelphia
00:49:15.600
we spent, and in all of our urban markets, real resources on out of home. Yes. Billboards,
00:49:21.060
but also murals and other ways that people could walk down a street and they see something that's
00:49:26.840
cultural and cool. She was never cultural and cool. That failed your murals, which were,
00:49:40.140
it was fun to watch them get painted over on November 6th, appealed to no one. Your sphere
00:49:46.040
campaign appealed to no one. You wasted your donors money. That's what you did. And you would you,
00:49:53.880
I mean, honestly, like look at yourself, Jen O'Malley, Dylan, you're not cool. Nobody looks
00:49:59.020
at you and thinks you're cool. No, no, but you needed somebody who is actually cool to help advise
00:50:04.500
you on what is cool and what might actually resonate with the voters, but murals on random city streets
00:50:11.200
and the sphere just trying to make her look like a superhero didn't get it done. And that was pretty
00:50:18.060
obvious even before November 5th. Um, okay, let's see. Moving on. Oh, why she didn't go on Joe
00:50:30.620
Rogan. Here's the messenger, uh, manager, Stephanie Cutter on that. So, um, we had discussions with Joe
00:50:40.640
Rogan's team. They were great. Uh, they wanted us to come on. We wanted to come on. We tried to get a
00:50:46.100
date to, to make it work. And ultimately we were just weren't able to find a date. We did go to
00:50:51.080
Houston. Um, and she gave a great speech at a, an amazing event. Um, the Beyonce event. The, yes.
00:50:58.540
Well, I'm going to call it reproductive freedom. She was ready, willing to, to go on Joe Rogan. Um,
00:51:04.360
will she do it sometime in the future? Maybe who knows?
00:51:09.360
Who the F cares who gives two shits, whether she's going to go on to the future. She lost.
00:51:13.340
The only freaking point was to do it before the election. What do you mean? Who cares if she's
00:51:19.940
going to go on in the future? Literally no one, including Joe Rogan. She's probably like, who
00:51:25.780
knows whether you have her on now or not, but they just try to make it sound like it was very busy
00:51:30.140
schedule. And like, we, we had to choose where we're going to use their campaign resources and
00:51:33.420
she couldn't leave the campaign trail, like the swing state. She couldn't leave for a day. Yeah. But
00:51:37.400
she went to Houston, Texas, which is not a swing state. And that was for the Beyonce event where she
00:51:42.200
didn't sing. Remember she showed up in for literally three minutes, gave a bunch of campaign
00:51:46.540
nonsense, and then went away without performing a song. Even Hillary got some songs in Houston where
00:51:52.700
they were never competitive in Texas. Okay. Utter waste of time. She flew to Texas. She blew it.
00:51:58.000
She clearly didn't want to sit with Rogan because she couldn't. But here again, the campaign won't
00:52:01.660
be honest about the ineptitude of their candidate, their exquisite candidate. Okay. We'll look forward
00:52:09.020
to whether she does it in the future. They just couldn't find a date for Rogan. Um, they do talk
00:52:16.100
a lot about how they, they tried to do podcasts and apparently they, they had some other list of
00:52:22.280
podcasts that they were interested in involving athletes and others. But Jen O'Malley Dillon says,
00:52:28.360
um, a number of these athletes and others were just not super interested in getting their brand
00:52:33.980
caught up in the politics of this campaign. Right. And for that, we thank them. Uh, she says now
00:52:41.780
Trump wasn't talking to the kind of folks, you know, that, that we were trying to get.
00:52:47.520
And these are big names that their reputations would be tied into, but he certainly was able to
00:52:53.360
tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn't. She's basically saying our stars are bigger
00:52:57.460
than his. And so they didn't want to take the risks of getting political or associated with Kamala
00:53:02.560
Harris. So he just went on a loser podcast. You see, he was associated with the losers who nobody
00:53:06.860
knows, like losers, like what, like, like Sean Ryan, right. Is that like Theo Vaughn, like those
00:53:11.800
losers, the ones with millions and millions of followers who actually helped deliver the vote
00:53:15.880
to Trump. Are those like the no name losers who he went on, who like, they're not your people who
00:53:21.580
are just too famous and rich to spend time with politics. It's really sad because she had so much to
00:53:27.980
say, like how she's a new generation of leadership and she's not Joe Biden and also not Donald
00:53:32.420
Trump. Um, and then they lament that when Trump would go on these podcasts, the conversation
00:53:37.900
wasn't even political, wasn't even political. Right. Maybe if Kamala Harris had tried like
00:53:43.080
making herself into a real person, I mean, she did go on Howard Stern and talk about her
00:53:47.560
love of Doritos and naps, but you know, there's risky for that campaign because Trump is actually
00:53:52.500
quite charming, very funny and knows how to entertain Kamala Harris. Let's just leave it
00:53:57.780
that isn't and doesn't. So yeah. Then they, then they sing the praises of Tim Walsh. He was,
00:54:04.840
he, Tim Walsh was a huge podcast person and was on podcasts all the time. Okay. Uh, then they talk
00:54:14.540
about young men and how Trump was appealing to them. Pfeiffer, uh, point says, well, she did more
00:54:20.680
traditional media than Trump did. And Trump did basically none. Stephanie Cutter, Trump did none.
00:54:25.760
Dan Pfeiffer, literally none. Jen O'Malley Dillon and got no shit for that. No shit. We got tons of
00:54:32.880
shit says Stephanie Cutter that she wasn't doing enough media. And then we get into Stephanie Cutter
00:54:38.620
suggesting there's a double standard. There's a double standard here, but we women don't get far
00:54:45.580
in life talking about double standards, but it was a double standard to criticize Kamala for not doing
00:54:51.760
any interviews for a month, six, five weeks after she launched. I think she launched what September
00:54:59.400
or July 26th. And her interview with CNN was not until September. Remember it was after Labor Day. So
00:55:05.060
it was at least six weeks, nothing. Remember she did nothing. Remember what a big deal it was when they
00:55:10.560
finally sat down with Dana Bash, she and her emotional support governor, nothing. That's when
00:55:15.140
they were getting the shit of her not doing media. It wasn't forever. It was when they had her in the
00:55:19.720
presidential protection program and, and Tim wall same, nothing. They didn't speak. Uh, so now
00:55:26.340
it's a double standard you see. And Trump was holding pressers. I don't know, Steve Krakauer,
00:55:31.000
we ran the numbers at some point, but he was doing pressers like every week and multiple per month
00:55:36.460
and giving tons of interviews. Um, so yes, he wasn't doing long sit downs, rewarding the mainstream
00:55:41.380
media that was calling him Hitler with one-on-ones, but he was holding gaggles and holding press
00:55:46.380
conferences where all of those media outlets that they're talking about here could and did ask him
00:55:51.840
any number of questions. Not to mention JD Vance was everywhere, everywhere. This is just revisionist
00:55:59.760
history. Um, okay. So then poor, poor Jen O'Malley Dillon and poor Kamala Harris, O'Malley Dillon,
00:56:08.140
107 days, two weeks fucked up because of the hurricane. Okay. Now it's the hurricane's fault too.
00:56:13.320
Two weeks talking about how she didn't do interviews, which, you know, she was doing plenty,
00:56:17.900
but we were doing in our own way, like the silent way where no one actually asked any questions or
00:56:22.160
hears it. That way it doesn't work. I can tell you as a professional interviewer,
00:56:27.360
it's not a good way. You, you should think of different ways, like in front of a microphone.
00:56:34.800
That's tip number one, pro tip number one camera, even better. Um, doing in their own way. Um, we
00:56:43.620
had to, you know, be the nominee, had to find a running mate, had to do a rollout. Like all of that
00:56:49.480
made it impossible for her to sit in front of a camera. Maybe it did knowing Kamala Harris could
00:56:54.620
have actually been a problem. Real people heard in some way that we were not going to have
00:56:59.400
interviews, which is both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on
00:57:05.520
Trump that I think it was a problem. It was a problem. Uh, and then she goes on to say,
00:57:11.460
then we would do an interview. And to Stephanie's point, the questions were small and processy and
00:57:18.260
about like Stephanie cutter, dumb, just dumb. That's because you chose dumb people to sit
00:57:23.940
with. You had, you have dumb people. Uh, Oh yeah. Okay. Let's listen. Real people heard in some way
00:57:31.920
that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind
00:57:40.180
of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem. And then on top of that,
00:57:44.080
we would do an interview. And to Stephanie's point, the questions were small and processy and about
00:57:52.220
like dumb, they weren't, they were not informing a voter who was trying to listen, to learn more
00:57:58.860
or to understand. Um, do you mean, uh, 65? Have you served to all beef patties, special sauce,
00:58:13.020
lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and a sesame seed bun working out of McDonald's? Yes or no?
00:58:17.980
That's it. I have. Okay. Because I will give you that point. We are in agreement. You sat with
00:58:23.800
dumb people who asked dumb questions. We're simpatico on that. You should have made better
00:58:28.160
choices. Uh, then they actually try to say that she made herself available to anyone who asked like
00:58:33.600
every, everyone. Okay. Not Joe Rogan, as we've discussed and not the Megyn Kelly show, which would
00:58:39.620
have been really, really interesting. Now you guys know, I don't like her and I've been very critical
00:58:44.100
of her, but you also know that if she came into the studio and I was sitting across from the sitting
00:58:49.880
vice president and the democratic nominee for president, I would comport myself very nicely.
00:58:55.760
I would be respectful and I would not show my personal bias against her in the interview. I just
00:59:01.060
wouldn't. I don't. Did I show my personal bias in favor of Trump when I sat with him? No,
00:59:06.920
I didn't because that's not the job. Um, so she should have done it because I'm exactly the
00:59:12.760
audience that she wants, wanted to get. And she blew it because she was afraid. Uh, okay.
00:59:19.280
Again, we go back to Dan Pfeiffer, uh, and then David Plouffe, you know, it can sound like making
00:59:24.520
excuses, but the political environment sucked. Okay. We were dealing with ferocious headwinds.
00:59:30.000
Um, and then he laments how the country's gotten more Republican. It's gotten more and more Republican.
00:59:34.960
We saw it in 2020, maybe a percent more Republican voters for us. It's going to,
00:59:40.480
okay, it's going on about, that's why they, that's why they use Liz Cheney. I mean,
00:59:46.640
okay. They try to justify that. We had to raise people's concern and the threat level of a Trump
00:59:53.740
second term. And we did a lot of, we did a lot of that. We just didn't get, get it to the extent
00:59:59.480
that we needed it to win. I mean, what else could we have said? Like Hitler and Mussolini. Oh,
01:00:06.460
wait, there actually did do that. That was in the media reports that we played for you here on this
01:00:11.520
show. Um, fascist. Oh, wait, no, that we tried that. Um, maybe like Goebbels that was tried to,
01:00:18.540
what we just, you know, we did a lot. We did a lot of raising concern and the threat level around
01:00:26.060
Trump. We just didn't get it to the extent that we needed to, to win. Okay. Uh, all righty. Let's
01:00:34.400
see. Okay. Back to Liz Cheney. Well, you see, to win, you need more moderate Republicans and
01:00:41.320
progressives of all ages. And they say, uh, when your opponent is trying to make you more extreme
01:00:49.200
and to make you dangerously liberal, the ways you can push back on that, um, you know, we talked about
01:00:53.620
the trans ad earlier is by having people stand with you that don't agree with you on everything,
01:00:57.340
but do see you. It wasn't just that the Republicans that stood with us, literally Adam Kinzinger and Liz
01:01:03.680
Cheney were saying that they were against Trump. They were also saying that they were for the vice
01:01:08.360
president and why. And I think that had real impact. It did in driving people to Trump.
01:01:15.220
They don't understand. Like, I know they don't like Republicans and I know they don't like Trump,
01:01:20.820
but like, don't they get paid to try to understand everybody, all the voters and what motivates them
01:01:25.160
that don't, why don't they understand that we don't like Liz Cheney and we don't like Adam
01:01:29.120
Kinzinger and seeing them go out there and rally for Liz Cheney. I mean, sorry for, uh, Kamala Harris
01:01:34.480
only makes us want to vote for Trump more. Like, I don't understand why smart people don't get that.
01:01:40.260
Why didn't somebody say, why would we touch Liz Cheney with a 10 foot pole?
01:01:44.500
This is not like having a moderate Republican. That's kind of well-liked by Republicans who hasn't
01:01:51.320
been voting for all the Trump impeachments come out and say something against Trump. This is picking
01:01:56.840
someone who is Lincoln project D and putting her on the stump and trying to say, see, she accepts
01:02:02.380
Liz Cheney. She is a walking case of Trump derangement syndrome. And we all know that. Like, I,
01:02:07.120
I truly don't understand it. I don't, I don't need to. Um, yeah, they talk about Latino men
01:02:14.980
and African-American men. They try to say that they didn't lose any ground with African-American
01:02:20.280
men. They did. They lost two percentage points from 2020. Trump had 19 percentage points with them,
01:02:26.160
with men in particular, African-American men in, um, 2020. And this time it was 21. It was really
01:02:32.160
Latino men who swung hugely to Trump by 18 percentage points. Um, and they did accurately say
01:02:40.740
that it was largely to do with the economy. And then they did spend some time on Trump being like
01:02:49.220
a masculine man. And how does that show up for people? They say, how does that show up? Well,
01:02:54.460
it shows up at UFC fights. It shows up with Dana White speaking at the convention. It shows up with
01:02:59.140
the kind of podcast he's doing. It shows up in his rhetoric. He's constantly picking a fight and
01:03:04.000
showing that he's going to take something on. I'm not saying we mimic that. We don't want to mimic
01:03:07.420
that, but we have to pay attention to why people find that appealing. And his use of TikTok in reaching
01:03:12.100
younger men, they don't really know what to do. They, as you know, during the actual campaign,
01:03:18.140
their solution was to trot out Tim Walls. It was like the man's man, the hunter, everyone,
01:03:24.340
knows how that went total disaster. And again, inauthentic, not real, totally fake. Um, and
01:03:31.020
they don't seem to understand, like they're worried. They're too worried about seeming like
01:03:34.380
Trump. The one guy, Quentin later says, we have to stop apologizing. Trump never apologizes. So we
01:03:39.380
shouldn't apologize. And then he says, we're the victims of a circular firing squad. Like the
01:03:43.540
Democrats eat their own and they have to stop eating their own. Hello. Do you know anything about
01:03:47.860
the Republican party? It's famous or infamous for eating its own. That's all they do. It's so divided
01:03:53.300
MAGA and the establishment types and the neocons and the America first crowd and the, um, you know,
01:04:00.660
Christian nationalists, whatever. Like there's so many different factions of the Republican party.
01:04:05.740
The Republican party, most of them didn't want Trump for the, it's nominee, but okay. But because
01:04:11.540
they got a little blowback on their campaign strategy, which is what he's talking about. He's mad that
01:04:15.860
people said you should have responded to the transit. He's like, we have to stop eating our
01:04:18.680
own. It's very funny to hear them talk about, you know, their takeaways here. Um, any, okay. Is
01:04:27.920
there anything that makes you question how we have traditionally done field operations in the
01:04:32.780
Democratic party? They don't seem to have much question about that. And let me see if I have missed
01:04:39.320
anything in here at all. Um, no, I haven't. I've covered the landscape. You're now up to speed.
01:04:49.820
And so the takeaways are they've learned nothing. They have accurately deduced one thing about Trump
01:04:57.820
that appeals to young men, but they have no idea how to counter it. They are deluding themselves about
01:05:04.280
the new turnout amongst minority men for Trump and have no idea how to counter it. They are trying
01:05:11.900
to make excuses for not responding to probably the most effective campaign ad we've ever seen
01:05:17.580
that they knew was a threat that they'd been warned by Bill Clinton. They don't mention that here was a
01:05:22.160
serious threat that they needed to respond to, but they chose not to trying to say what we were told
01:05:26.560
is just to respond with positive economic messages and that this actually wasn't an issue in the swing
01:05:31.840
states. But I, again, show you as a Democrat chart, it's not a Megan Kelly chart, 3,200 voters in the
01:05:37.720
swing states polled immediately after the election say it was their number one issue. And of course,
01:05:43.820
immigration, the economy were right there too, but this was number one. It beat that. So, uh,
01:05:48.460
the Democrat party is in shambles today. Uh, the people responsible for the massive loss
01:05:54.540
and the blowing of a billion dollars are not taking responsibility for it. No one is getting honest
01:06:00.520
about Kamala Harris and her immense weaknesses. There never was the in-depth article that was
01:06:05.900
honest about that. The closest thing we've had is our retrospective, which I'll get you the episode
01:06:11.580
of just in case you missed it. Steve, look that up. Please. Thank you. Um, and they're now writing
01:06:16.960
piece after piece about how she's the front runner for, uh, 2028, how she's in the forties, uh, episode
01:06:23.340
945 for our retrospective on which, what was so wrong with her, um, how she's in the forties and
01:06:28.640
everybody else is in single digits. So this is how it's going. Not well, not well, we're about a
01:06:34.220
month post the loss. They've learned nothing. And so if you are a Republican, a fan of Donald Trump,
01:06:40.720
or let's say JD Vance, if we're on a forward looking basis, you have reason to celebrate
01:06:46.140
this holiday season. And it's not all related to Santa. Thank you for tuning in. And we'll be
01:06:52.880
back later this morning with a new episode. See you then. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly