You may not know Simon Rosenberg by name.
Coach Walz will tell ya, if youre up 50 to 1 youre winning!
That statistical analysiscame from Rosenberg, who is well known to Clintons speechwriter, and a longtime party strategist.
Vice President Kamala Harris (left). Former President Donald Trump (right).Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Rosenberg now runs his own hub for political analysis, commentary and engagement calledHopium Chronicles.
Rolling Stonespoke with Rosenberg on Thursday last week to get his take on the state of the2024 election.
But only if party activists commit to the hard work of the home stretch.
The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Whats your view of the 2024 contest from 10,000 feet?
The debate did change the election.
The contrast of the campaign between our strong candidate and their ugly candidate did what Democrats wanted.
The Trump campaign has looked lost and wandering.
Weve had a really good week.
And then we had theinterest rate cut, which is going to have an immediate impact on many consumers.
We have more money we are dramatically outraising.
We have far more volunteers.
We have far greater enthusiasm.
The voter registration numbers have now started shifting toward us in ways that were not true eight weeks ago.
Were all of a sudden in a superior position on social media.
And we have a far better ticket than they do just measured by data.
Our candidates are much more popular than theirs.
The abortion ballot initiatives will give us a little bit of a boost in a few critical places.
We enter this home stretch in a far stronger position.
And you were correct the mythical Red Wave did not materialize to create big GOP majorities.
But you were also bullish onJoe Bidens chances back in the spring, before he dropped out.
Because in between 2020 and this election, he had tried to overturn the American democracy.
And he stripped the rights and freedoms away of the women of America.
What happened in 2022 is that the midterm did not behave like a normal midterm.
It was the reaction toDobbs, and the manifest extremism of MAGA.
Ive always believed that the fundamental structure of this 2024 election was favorable to us.
On the day of the debate, he was ahead in national polling.
He was ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin on the 538 averages.
Whatever opportunity Biden had to regain the initiative was lost afterhis debate performance.
But Kamala Harris has done an extraordinary job, and were starting to see the structural advantages materialize.
It became very exposed in the debate.
Theres a received wisdom among many election watchers that Trump is likely to overperform his polling.
Whats your take on that?
Something broke inside the Republican Party withDobbs.
For a lot of the non-MAGA Republicans in the GOP coalition it was just a bridge too far.
When polled they said, Im going to go vote for Donald Trump or for a Senate candidate.
But when it came to actually pulling the lever they couldnt do it.
Look at what happened with Nikki Haley.
Trump, in the first 20 primaries in the Republican primary season, underperformed public polling in 19 states.
Its amazing that something of this significance is still not baked into our understanding of this election.
Whats the justification for all this public Republican polling?
Theyre not doing this as a public service.
So what could be the rationale, or the theory of the case?
Heres the reality: All late money goes to winning the election.
They have to view the shaping of the information environment as one of the ways they win the election.
This may be relevant to whats happening in North Carolina.
In the last two weeks, there have been five independent polls in North Carolina.
Four of them have Harris ahead of Trump.
One has her tied.
Regular people cant trust polling averages that have that much Republican input.
Because theyneedto have it.
It isnt really possible for Donald Trump to be losing this election, in their world.
Its like the brand architecture of the 2024 Trump campaign.
All thats left when you pull the curtain back from the Wizard, is something thats hugely ugly.
You brought up Mark Robinson, and you also talked about sort of the bad candidate problem.
How is that going to play in key states?
Its a serious problem for them.
Were learning today with Mark Robinson that it can bereallybad.
Its very possible that Kari Lake and Mark Robinson are going to make Kamala Harris president.
Why dont Democrats lead and end with that?
When Democrats are in power, things get better, and when Republicans have power things get worse.
Weve now had three consecutive Democratic presidents who have seen robust job growth and economic growth and rising wages.
And now, also, Bidens had a very strong stock market, as Clinton and Obama did.
Theres sort of a wild whats the right word Olympianlevel of asymmetry in our politics.
Because theres been one good political party in America and another really bad political party.
And theyre nothing like one another.
This all goes back to the Southern Strategy.
It embraced the Civil Rights movement.
[Lyndon] Johnson, after Kennedy was killed, passed the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.
The Republican Party had a decision to make.
Do they welcome the Democrats into the place they had historically been?
The Party of Lincoln.
Or do they become the [former] Democratic Party?
The Southern Strategy ended up working.
Because it broke the hammer lock the Democratic Party had on the presidency and eventually the Congress.
The Republicans won five out of six elections from 1968 to 1988.
They had a very dominant run after adopting this exploitation of racial fear as their central organizing principle.
But what it meant was that the modern Republican Party never really had an economic policy.
Thats not an economic strategy, thats a social policy strategy, thats a racial strategy.
It was grounded in tribalism.
What kept them in check under Reagan, because of the Cold War, was their anti-communism.
The commitment to democracy that was at the core of anti-communism.
Therefore, the aspirational goals of democracy were still central to who Republicans were.
It has descended into this proto-fascistic mess that it is now.
Whats amazing is that, in a moment of extraordinary crisis for Trumps candidacy, where do they go?
Whats their comfort zone.
He went back to Mexican rapists.
This time its in the form of Haitians.
This is the core and the engine of the Republican Party, which is exploitation of racial fear.
Whats happened in Springfield, Ohio, is tragic.
But theres also something deeply ludicrous and pathetic and ridiculous.
You have Donald Trump threatening to deport Haitians to Venezuela, right?
Hes got all these racial boogeymen, like, all confused in his head.
Connect this tribalism to the threat that Trump and his MAGA movement pose to democracy.
Thats our best showing as a political party since FDRs four elections in the 1930s and 1940s.
And it is a sign that this is actually a center-left country.
Theyre aware theyve lost the demographic battle.
This isnt just rhetoric.
This is what they really believe.
This is now a central part of what they think theyre going to go do.
We have a lot of work to do.
We can have the election that we all want to have, but we have to go to work.
We have to seize it.
And now theyve got one big job to do its to go win this thing.
