I'm not going to answer the question because because the question, the question is rational. Left.
Who is on your list?
Joe?
Who is on your right?
Gentlemen, I think this We're not going to We have ended this segment. We're going to move on to the second segment. That was really a productive segment, wasn't it. Keep yapping, man. The people understand, Joe, forty seven years, you've done nothing.
They understand. All right, Remember this final debate of the twenty twenty presidential campaign, and remember all the barbs both Trump and Biden tossed during that campaign. Well, sparks may fly again between these same two candidates if the polls are right and they do indeed become the respective nominees for their parties. Several third party candidates may jump into the race, which would mix it up, But voters don't
seem excited about any of the current options. How did we wind up in this groundhog day election cycle?
Like a lot of people still don't believe that Trump and Biden are going to be the nominee despite all the evidence we have that they probably are going to be.
That's my colleague Josh Green. He and I wrote about how voters and donors are feeling about another Trump Biden matchup. It's a big take from Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. I'm Nancy Cook today. Who's ready for the Biden Trump rematch? Anyone? Hey, Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Always a pleasure to be here with you.
You and I just wrote this piece called the Election No One Wants.
That's right, because it's shapen up to be two of the most unpopular presidential nominees in probably American history, if the polls are to believed, which show Trump and Biden both winning handily, and yet Americans young and old are tired of them, don't like them, want somebody younger, want somebody different, And as we concluded from our reporting, they're probably not.
Going to get it.
So what does the polling show us, Josh, tell me a little bit about you know what you found when we were reporting out the piece.
The polling showed that Biden and Trump are both very unpopular with the opposite party and also pretty unpopular with independent people too. Republicans are still basically okay with Donald Trump. Self identified Democrats are still basically okay with Joe Biden, at least in terms of saying we'll support him in the twenty twenty four election. But if you probe a little deeper, even Democrats say, would you prefer a different nominee?
Would you prefer somebody younger? A majority of those Democratic voters say yes, we would. And I think that gets to the lack of enthusiasm among all American voters. That's kind of the beating heart of our piece, this overwhelming desire for different choices that they're not going to get.
And so what happened to these other choices? I mean, I know on the Democratic side, you know there's Representative Jean Phillips from Minnesota. We have the activist professor of Cornell West who's running as an independent. We have Robert Kennedy Junior, who's a former environmental lawyer turned major anti vaxer. On the Republican side, there's Nicki Haley, Ron de Santis, vivk Ramaswami, Chris Christy. What happened to all these different people?
The thing we kind of concluded that really jumped out to me in the reporting that I hadn't appreciated going in was that the story in each party is kind of different. On the Republican side, what prevented a challenger
to Trump. It was really this kind of bottom up energy that rank and file, grassroots voters who are Republicans still like Trump and they don't really like anybody else you can add up and we did all the supporters for Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswami, and it still doesn't constitute a majority.
And as much as.
Republican donors Wall Street people want somebody other than Trump, they just haven't been able to overcome his popularity with a base. No matter how much money they stuff into super packs for challengers like Haley in DeSantis, nothing is over until we run through the primary season. At least at this point, it doesn't look like Trump is going to have a real serious challenger.
So that's the story with Trump. You know, Republicans just haven't been able to quit him. What did we learn about Biden?
Well, the interesting thing with Democrats is that they've essentially had kind of the opposite dynamic. From the moment Biden got into office, the people at the top of the Democratic establishment, the leaders in the party, basically decided that he is their best shot to win again in twenty
twenty four, and they kind of rallied around him. You didn't have any real blue chip challengers that decided to run in the Democratic primaries, and so you're left with these kind of gadfly candidates like Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who you mentioned, who were you going to run in one or two primaries, but don't constitute a serious challenge to Biden, despite the fact that so many rank and file Democratic voters are unhappy with him, They're unhappy with
the economy, they're unhappy with his age, they like different and better choices. Doesn't look like they're going to get it, and that could be a potential big problem for Democrats.
And I think so much in the reporting that we learned was that really Democrats are sold on this idea that Biden is the only one who has beat Trump and therefore they have to stick with him despite the concerns about his age and the economy. I was so struck by that.
Yeah, I was too.
And you know, when you hear the White House lay it out, or hear kind of pro Biden polsters and strategises lay it out, it isn't crazy if the opponent is Donald Trump. Because Trump, despite the fact that he's sort of subsided a little bit. I think from the news cycle in a way that's made people focus on Biden. Once he comes roaring back, I do think that his negatives are going to rise and people instead of focusing on I don't like Biden, I don't like the economy.
It's going to become more of a choice than a referendum. That's certainly the hope for Democrats.
One of the most interesting phrases in the reporting I found was this idea of double haters. It's voters who actually hate both of them.
Tell me about that, Josh, Yeah, so that was funny.
That was a term I first heard in the twenty sixteen cycle when I was hanging out with the Trump data team Polsters, Me and another BusinessWeek reporter got invited down to their Trump Data headquarters in San Antonio.
They had this sort of category of.
Voters, like ten or fifteen percent of the voters who told Polsters they did not like Donald Trump, but they also did not like Hillary Clinton. And yet if you look at their voting records, like these people are going to vote for one or the other, and so the campaign dubbed them double haters. In the end, the very kind of last week or so, James Comey came out with all the Clinton email stuff, and the double haters moved in mass.
To Donald Trump.
The interesting thing this time arounds you talk to polsters, there's about four times as many double haters who disliked both Trump and Biden then there were back in twenty sixteen. So to me, that was just a wonderful measure of the kind of boiling dissatisfaction that so many people in the American electorate have for the choice of candidates that they're probably going.
To get next fall.
There have been several billionaires and Wall Street types of way in the election in the last few weeks. Josh, what have they been talking about?
This is really interesting.
Bloomberg had a great story on all the kind of Wall Street heavyweights who suddenly have begun to panic and express their own let's call it double hatred toward the two candidates. You have them out publicly casting about for an alternative, despite the fact that we're like a month and a half away from primaries beginning, and that's not
remotely realistic. So you have Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, come out very publicly in support of Nikki Haley and sort of encourage everybody, including liberal Democrats,
to get behind her. The other Wall Street big wig was Mike Novograts, the CEO of the crypto firm Galaxy Digital Holdings, who actually told Bloomberg Television that he'd met with Haley that you also met with Dean Phillips was really excited about Phillips, found him to be amazingly rational, and yet Novograts called him Neil instead of Dean in the Bloomberg interview. So clearly these guys are kind of grasping for anybody who could possibly be an alternative to
Donald Trump or Joe Biden. To me, it's just another striking example of the kind of cycle of denial that I've experienced as a reporter talking to people about how do you think the election shaping up? Who do you think you're going to vote for? Like a lot of people still don't believe that Trump and Biden are going to be the nominee, despite all the evidence we have that they probably are going to be.
And what's so interesting to me is we're basically weeks away from the Iowa caucuses in January, and then the New Hampshire primary comes shortly after that, and Trump is so far ahead of his rivals in pull after poll. He is pulling above fifty percent, close to sixty percent nationally, And it's like, even though you know, Ron de Santas and Nikki Hilly are kind of duking it out for second place, they're still I need a thirty percentage points behind Trump in the polls, and so it's almost like,
you know, who cares if they're duking it out. You know, unless there's some catastrophe or healthcare on the part of Trump, it seems likely that he will be the nominee.
Yeah, And what's happened over the last year or so is, you know, if you go back to January, she had a big cover story on Ron DeSantis, who had just gotten reelected and was super popular and was kind of pulling neck and neck with Trump, and it looked like he might be the guy to kind of knock off Trump and become the nominique.
But what's happened over.
The last year is that his support is diminished in all the non Trump candidates, Desantus, Haley, Chris Christy, you name it, have cannibalized each other's support. So you'll have somebody like DeSantis, who for a while was the clear cut number two, has now fallen in the polls and been replaced by Nikki Haley. You know, but she's, as you say, she's no closer to knocking off Trump than DeSantis was six or eight months ago.
And I also think two things happened for Trump and Biden this year that really led to them being most likely than nominees. With Trump, it was the legal challenges. That first indictment out of New York for him really energized the base. It had like the opposite effect that I think people thought it would. People thought, oh, wow, he's going to be so mired in legal troubles and he won't be able to run. But actually it mobilized voters, Republicans,
primary voters. They coalesced around him and it really gave him this huge boost. And then for Biden, I think a lot of people thought maybe he wasn't a great president, but Democrats had a good showing in the twenty two midterms. Messages about democracy and Republicans trying to restrict abortion rights really resonated with women voters and Democrats and they came to the polls. And I think both of those two events really helped both of these men.
That's a great point.
I mean, they were both the beneficiaries of an odd and unexpected good fortune. Were you surprised as I was, that when Trump was indicted and then reindicted and then reindicted, that it didn't hurt his support more because I've seen Poland going back years talking to Trump's and asking them like, hey, do you support Trump? Like what could cause your support
to waiver? And a lot of those poll questions, like a decent chunk of supporter to say, well, you know, if it turns out he's convicted or and died or something, you know, and then I may rethink my support. I was kind of expecting a drop in support, and yet I feel like kind of a chump for having believed that.
Yes, I was surprised. But I do remember talking with a Republican source the day of that first indictment, and this was someone who was really excited about Ron DeSantis at the time, and the person said, you know, this has just supercharged Trump's candidacy because so many Republicans viewed those charges out of New York as you know, sham or overblown. And Trump also really turned all of the indictments, all of his legal troubles into one big thing where
he is fighting on behalf of people. He is a victim, he is fighting for you. He's taking the legal challenges, so you don't you know, he's been sort of masterful at turning that on a head. I've seen him do it in rallies and events and it really rallies people. And I think that that has really supercharged his candidacy. When we come back with Trump's surprising dominance in the polls, should Democrats look for an alternative candidate?
The twenty twenty four presidential campaign has seen some comings and goings in recent days. While Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips has jumped into the Democratic primary, Phillips is officially challenging President Biden for the party's nomination, and he ended the race because he's concerned about polling numbers and a potential second Trump presidency.
So, Josh, has this ever happened before in US history where basically somebody lost an election, a president lost an election and then came back and ran again.
It's happened once that we're aware of, or an incumbent president lost ran against the same opponent four years later in return to the White House. And of course we all remember that was when Grover Cleveland faced off against Benjamin Harrison.
It's happened before that was and.
That was late late eighteen hundreds, right.
Yeah, that was in eighteen ninety two, so long before the advent of public polling. Who knows if they were double hated. The bigger point is this is this is just extremely unusual. Hasn't happened in America in the last one hundred and thirty years, And so yeah, it's a weird election and a weird election cycle for everybody. I think that's part of the dissatisfaction.
And on the Democratic side, why do you think that Democrats settled on Biden as the nominee despite what we've talked about already. He has a low approval rating. You know, voters have very persistent questions about his age.
In talking to Democrats, both around Biden and just sort of Democrats generally, I think there are two things that happened. One, a good number of Americans really did expect Biden once he was elected to only serve one term and to kind of voluntarily leave at the end of his first term.
He had said During the campaign, there was a rally he had where he described himself as a quote transition figure, and a lot of Democrats took that to me, you know, I'm a transition between Trump and the next generation of Democratic politicians, and they thought that he would sort of pass the baton in twenty twenty four. Well he didn't, and that creates the second problem, And the other reason that Biden is here is that if he were to step down, there would be a very messy Democratic primary.
Kamala Harris, a black woman, is the vice president. You would expect her to be deferred to. A lot of people would, but she isn't a very popular politician. She's less popular than Joe Biden. And there are a lot of other ambitious rising Democrats who would run for that role, whether it's you know, Pete Buda Judge or Gavin Newsom in California, Wes Moore and Maryland Roy Cooper in North Carolina.
There would be a big scrum and a big fight.
And I think that a lot of folks worry that having that kind of intra party family feud would weaken Democrats ahead of what is going to be a very important election in twenty twenty four, where Donald Trump could conceivably come back and win re election. A lot of Democrats don't want to have that fight, and so they kind of bite their tongue and cautiously get behind Joe Biden.
Well, that's sort of what happened in the last election in twenty twenty there was such a crowded Democratic primary. I don't think anyone thought that he would end up as the front runner. Of course, like COVID I think really changed it, and there was some internal party calculus of like wanting to more moderate rather than a very liberal candidate. But they sort of already went through that the last cycle.
That's right.
But there were also, if you're huge, fights over race, gender, the size of government, whether we should triple the federal budget for Medicare for all. All of this stuff played out during the Democratic primaries in a way that I think made a lot of people nervous about rerunning that kind of a race in twenty twenty three twenty twenty four primaries. Democrats are kind of clinging to power, and do think a lot of them. I think that Joe Biden is still ill the guy best able to unify
the Democratic coalition against Donald Trump. It's getting kind of harder to believe that if you look at the polls and you see his declining support on issues like the economy and his age, a portion of black and Latino voters moving over to support Republicans. One of the reasons that he's likely overwhelmingly likely to be a Democratic nominee is that in the end, you know, people just deferred to the idea that we really can't figure out a
way to ast him. He hasn't left voluntarily, and so we're just going to have to go with him one more cycle.
And what I think is also so interesting is that, you know, although he suggested he would be a transitional figure in the twenty twenty election, the thing is is that Joe Biden has wanted to be president for years. He has run for president several times, and I think that, you know, inside the Biden White House, there is a feeling that he is a much better president than he
gets credit for. I think he has a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about that and thinks he's doing a better job, and people thinking that's a great point.
Look, you don't rise to the level of president of the United States without being a wildly ambitious and self confident human being, and especially somebody like Biden who's run and lost and run and lost and run and lost and become almost a punch line and then you ascend to the Oval Office. People like that just don't kind of willingly give up that kind of power. And yeah, I think the fact is Biden has passed a huge stimulust He passed, you know, the IRA, He's kind of
led this. I think what the White House hopes will be this this renaissance in Middle America of reshoring, manufacturing and building out the chip industry, building up the green economy. He has a lot of tangible accomplishments that any president would love to have, you know. So, I think if you're Biden, the thought running through your head has to be why wouldn't.
I run again?
Just on the Republican side, I know we've talked, you know, a little bit about how Trump ended up being such a dominant figure again, but have you been surprised that Josh, given his legal challenges we haven't even talked about January sixth, He had a reputation of having a very chaotic leadership style in the White House, But yet he is still the dominant Republican dating back to twenty sixteen.
Among other things, he completely broke the mold for how a one term president behaves, and as a result, he has a different profile than other one term presidents. You know, historically, if you run for president, win, serve a term, and are then defeated, you know, it's kind of a mark of shame. Trump, you know, by any historical standard, should have expected the same treatment, and yet literally refused to leave.
The White House.
You had him claiming falsely that he'd actually won the election and had him stolen from him. That it became a matter of faith among you a fairly sizable chunk of the Republican activist base, such that the party couldn't move beyond him, and no serious, ambitious presidential alternative really asserted themselves in a way that caused the party to
kind of want to move on. And Trump, who's so good at getting attention and so good at putting himself in the limelight and making himself the center of everything, has just been able to do that NonStop, and as a result, nobody else has broken through. And it sure looks like Trump is going to be the nominee again in twenty twenty four.
After the break, What can we expect to see in twenty twenty four? On the Biden and Trump campaign trail?
Former President Donald Trump holding the first formal rally of his presidential campaign in Waco Tonight's both. President Biden held the first big rally of his reelection.
Campaign today in Philadelphia.
It was before a crowd of hundreds of enthusiastic Union members the table.
So, Josh, if Trump and Biden do end up as the nominees for their party, as people think that they will, what do you expect the campaigns.
To look like.
I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't look a lot like it did last time. That Trump saying like I'm going to come back. I'm going to make America great again. I'm going to avenge my loss, and Biden's saying, you know, I'm the guy who represents the soul of the country and is going to prevent the trumpy and chaos from overtaking us, and everybody who is
good and decent must sort of stand behind me. And I think what you'll have on both sides is a lot of voters grudgingly holding their nose and voting for a candidate they don't really like. And I think the two questions are going to be does anything kind of health or age wise happen with either candidate? And number two would be what kind of an influence in the
end are the independent candidates going to have? Because if one of them comes in and wins five to ten percent of the vote, that's a big factor in a state like Georgia, where Biden only won by a hair.
The other thing that I'm watching for is what the campaigning actually looks like. You know, once we get through the Republican primaries, you know we have Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada Super Tuesday, will we see a lot of Trump? He hasn't been doing a ton of campaign events, and you know Biden last time during COVID also didn't do a ton of campaign events. They're both these older guys. Biden is in his eighties. Trump is
in his late seventies. I don't think we're going to see them both out there every day in the spring and summer. So I also think it will be just a really interesting campaign because I just don't think it'll be as active as past cycles.
Probably right, I mean, I wouldn't expect it to be with Biden. He'll certainly have to do more than he did last time around when there was a COVID lockdown and he could just kind of broadcast from his basement. I'm mostly interested in Trump because he's always been the guy who loves going out to these big rallies with all his supporters and playing his little campaign soundtrack, you know, Tiny Dancer by.
Elton and John, all the kinds of things it's ymca.
I think he wants to kind of be out there touring the country and doing things. But he too has shown signs of age, and so I'll be interested to see whether he has the energy and the enthusiasm them to kind of go out and do that this cycle the way you did last cycle. The other thing I think too that could be a big variable is whether or not these guys debate, you know, how often, and whether they do it at all.
Everybody knows so much about Trump and Biden already, everybody has opinions for the most part, So who are the two of them going to try to actually persuade.
I really do think the most interesting pool of voters will be the double haters, the people who don't like either Trump or Biden, and yet do have histories of voting and presidential elections, so we know they're probably going to pull the lever for one or the other. I think it's convincing those people not if you're Biden that hey, I'm a great president you should like me, not if you're Trump, that I'm a victim and the last election
was stolen from me. I think what they'll be convincing those double haters of is my opponent is a worse guy than I am, and therefore you should hold your nose and vote for me.
I also am really going to be looking to see how both parties try to go after Black voters and Hispanic voters. Black voters are so deeply wedded to the Democratic Party. Last cycle, Biden won like ninety two percent of the Black vote and Trump one eight percent. But I do know that the Trump campaign really sees an opportunity to pick off Hispanic voters and Black voters, and we've seen a softening of support with both groups with Biden.
It's not that anyone thinks like Trump is going to win the black vote, let's say, but if he can, you know, get a few more percentage points in some key swing states that could be helpful for him. If there's you know, seventy five thousand people in these key states that are going to decide the election.
It definitely could be and it's hard to know how to measure that clearly. You know, we can see in election results in twenty twenty two that a certain segment of black Silatinas did shift over to support Republicans. So that's a real trend. But the question of will they for Trump, and will they and key swing states for Trump in a way that matters, I think this would be hard to note. I'm curious to see, you know, will Biden be able to maintain his grip on white
working class voters. He improved over Hillary Clinton in twenty twenty six and that was probably decisive for him in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that decided the election. I'm curious to see will he still be able to hold on to enough of those voters to prevail in those states or have they become so disenchanted with inflation and the economy that they'll drift back into Trump's column?
And so what do you think are going to be the key themes that the Biden campaign hits on and the Trump campaign hits on. What are both campaigns going to emphasize?
You think?
I think with Biden it's going to be that the economy is back, that inflation is diminished, that we're historically low levels of unemployment. I don't think he'll mention the bad parts of the economy like housing prices and mortgage rates, but more the idea that, look, we've gotten through the horrible COVID crisis in return to kind of normal Americans who want jobs have them, Everybody is working, let's kind
of keep this train going. And for Trump, the argument is going to be the country is a hellscape, that inflation is through the roof, that if we could only get Trump back into the White House so we can go back into the booming economy of twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen. And that's a message that, you know, if you read the polls, certainly hasn't appeal to a lot of voters who are unhappy about the economy right now.
Biden really talked a lot about threats to democracy, Republican extremism, and Republicans' efforts to restrict abortion rights. Yeah, and those were very salient messages in the twenty twenty two midterms, particularly since the Supreme Court had just thrown out Roe v.
Wade.
And so I'll be curious, you know, are those messages still as potent and are people still so angry about that that they're motivated, you know, not just to vote for Democrats, but really like turn out in mass like we saw on toy.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think I think Roe is a big factor, a huge maybe the biggest factor that I neglected to mention. I mean, we can see that not only in the midterm elections, but in special elections since that Democrats, Independence and even some Republicans are very upset about this. You can see in state ballot referendums and off your elections.
If that kind of energy carries through to No.
Twenty twenty four, I think that would be a big help to Joe Biden. And it's certainly something that Biden and Democrats are going to try and litigate during the campaign because they know that attention on that issue helps them.
Josh, it's fun writing stories with you, and it's fun talking on podcasts with you. Thanks for coming on the Big Take. I appreciate it.
Always fun to be with you.
Thank you, thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Bloomberg CarPlay, or wherever you listen and we'd love to hear from you. Email us with questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. Our supervising producer is Vicky Virgalina. Our producers are Mo Barrow and Michael Falero Rafael. I'm Si Lee is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidron.
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