While both candidates continue to crisscross the nation’s battlegrounds, Vice President Harris is also doing something former President Trump is not: interviews in traditional and new media. This week, Republican communications veteran Brendan Buck joins former Senator Claire McCaskill to look at the media strategies of both campaigns, and why Trump continues to derail GOP efforts to embrace early voting. Then, former Border Czar, Alan Bersin, speaks to an 80% reduction in border crossings since the peak last December, why the failed bipartisan border bill was smart legislation and what a second Trump term would look like in practice for immigration reform. And Claire and Brendan end by batting around whether Coach Tim Walz is flipping the script on decades of Republicans decrying that Democrats are Ivy League elites, forming a new voting coalition in the process.
Further Reading: Here is the POLITICO Magazine piece Claire and Brendan were talking about:The Overlooked Demographic That Is a Huge Opportunity for Democrats
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Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Claire McCaskill: Hello, and welcome to “How to Win 2024.” It’s Thursday morning, October 10th. I’m Claire McCaskill and I’m here. In fact, I’m tickled pink to be here with my guest co-pilot today. He’s a veteran Republican strategist and communications pro, Brendan Buck. He served two consecutive House Speakers and ran Communications for the House Ways and Means Committee, among many other posts. And he is my colleague as an MSNBC political analyst. Hey, Brendan.
Brendan Buck: Hey, Claire. Treat to be with you here. We’re in crunch time now.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah, this is when I start getting texts from Senate candidates that are very nervous, and I think they communicate with me more in the closing weeks of the campaign because they know I understand how gut-wrenching, anxiety-filled and hard the last four or five days are. Although I always thought the last week was pretty easy because you’ve done everything you can do, right? Everything is in place.
Brendan Buck: Yeah. It’s just nerves. It’s very nervy right now.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah.
Brendan Buck: I think, at least for me, I’m not even involved in the campaign, but it’s starting to get very nervy for me right now.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. I said this yesterday in a speech I gave, I do think this particular election has more anxiety attached to it than typically. For people who are paying close attention, I think there is a tremendous amount of anxiety, and I feel it and I think most people do.
But less than four weeks ago, both Trump and Harris are crisscrossing the battlegrounds with almost constant presence in Pennsylvania. I mean, they’re just camping out there. And the Harris campaign’s focus in this final month is to cut into Trump’s edge on the economy while Trump seems to be, frankly, doubling down on nasty. He is really just pumping his base. It doesn’t feel like he’s trying to get crossover voters, but maybe you can shed some light on that. And he’s, of course, making up lies about FEMA and the recovery efforts after these tragic hurricanes.
We’ll look at some media strategies of both campaigns and also some interesting voting dynamics as early voting has begun in some states.
Brendan Buck: And later in the show, Alan Bersin, the former Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President Obama, and the first border czar, joins us to drill down on both candidates’ plans for reforming our immigration system and what a second Trump term would actually look like in practice.
Claire McCaskill: Before we end today, Brendan and I will also take a beat to think through a recent Politico magazine article about a big idea that seems to be emerging, and that is, is Tim Walz really focusing on trying to bring in a new block of voters, which this article called the state college voter. It’s interesting. We’ll take a look at it later.
But first, let’s not go any further without acknowledging the continued fallout from Hurricane Helene and now Milton. I don’t think we still know the extent of lives that might have been lost, but our hearts go out to all the people who have been impacted by these natural disasters, both in Florida and along the southern coast.
And now, my favorite part of the podcast which is if we were in the room. Brendan has been in these rooms. He has been advising candidates in the very last moments of a campaign. I certainly have been in these rooms. And so let’s talk about what we would be telling these campaigns if we were in the room.
First, I think it is definitely worth noting that we may have some voting issues around these hurricanes. And what would you be talking to the campaigns, Brendan, about trying to get the votes in these areas that have been impacted by the storms, in both areas, North Carolina, just by a whisker, and in Georgia, by much more? Trump won the areas that have been impacted by this disaster. So what would you be telling them to do on the ground?
Brendan Buck: Yeah. I mean, you hate to make this a political issue, but if you’re giving advice, I think the first principle is there is no danger in ever overresponding, and all of the danger is in under-responding. And I think the Biden/Harris team clearly get that. They had a lengthy public briefing this week, where they were with all of the emergency response officials and making sure that, you know, everybody understands that they are doing what they need to do.
And you know, for the way that Republicans have handled this, who even left room for the president to take a few shots at people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, which is the kind of thing you don’t usually see in an emergency briefing like that. Now, I think what Donald Trump is doing, it has very little to do about winning voters and all of the nonsense about blocking aid and all of the misinformation he’s putting out.
I see this entirely as setting a pretext to blame the hurricane for a reason why he may potentially lose North Carolina or Georgia. I don’t think you can trust on his face that he’s thinking through a political strategy to win people. It’s all about who’s he going to blame? What’s the excuse I’m going to come up with later? And it’s what he’s done many times before, and I’m just convinced that’s what this is all about.
Claire McCaskill: I would tell the campaigns, though, to have some eyes on the ground, but not in a visible way. I would put some folks in there to just observe how they’re going to allow people to vote, because it’s not clear they’re going to have the normal processes available in some of these hardest hit areas, especially in parts of North Carolina, where the mountainous region is difficult to get the roads repaired and do some of the things that might be necessary to restore normalcy when we have literally just weeks left.
And I would tell the campaigns, let the local people do this. Let the local people figure out how to get into shelters, and allow folks to vote in the shelters if they still are not in their homes. Don’t have a heavy hand in there because there will be eyes and lots of cameras. And the worst thing that could happen for the Harris-Walz campaign is to look like they were in there, trying to get votes that were not somehow legitimate. That’s exactly what Trump would be hoping for.
Brendan Buck: And that’s why you got to work closely, I think, with some of these members of Congress out there in the area affected, in North Carolina. In particular, Asheville is blue, but those are all Republican districts out there. And there have been Republican Congress members trying to shoot down a lot of this information.
I think if you work closely with them and they have eyes on what’s going on down there, you could find yourself having some advocates. Because there’s going to be a lot of people who just simply don’t trust whatever happens because you’re going to have Donald Trump claiming that the election was stolen down there. And we have, so far, seen some relatively responsible responses from the House delegation out there. So I think working closely with them might be a good idea as well.
Claire McCaskill: So early voting, I think we ought to hit that quickly before we move on to another topic that they may be discussing in the room. It is hysterical to me to watch the Republican operatives. I mean, Elise Stefanik is a good example in New York. She’s busy spending a lot of money, trying to convince people to early vote. Meanwhile, Trump can’t even bring himself to say it. I mean, in one rally, he said in one part of the speech, he said, you know, early voting is okay. And then the other part he said, it’s fraudulent and the mail carriers can throw away all the ballots. And you know, it’s just a fixed deal, don’t early vote. I think, frankly, the Republicans are screwed on early voting. Thanks to him.
Brendan Buck: It’s teleprompter Trump versus real Trump. The campaign wants him to promote early voting and mail in voting, but he can’t just get out of his own way. He’s done so many self-destructive things over the years. We could spend literally hours talking about them. But this is one of the most practically self-destructive things that he does.
Claire, you run a bunch of campaigns. I’ve been involved in campaigns. The first thing I learned on the very first House campaign I worked on was the importance of chasing down mail-in ballots. You get that vote in counted. You don’t have to get that person to show up on the election. It is such a fundamental basic thing of campaigns these days.
Everybody else in the party wants him to back off of this, but he just won’t let it go. And they’re costing themselves votes. They simply are costing themselves votes. Maybe he’s okay with that because it gives him something to blame later on. But it’s incredibly self-destructive and I don’t think anybody is going to be able to convince him otherwise.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. So what do you think about the media strategies?
Brendan Buck: Yeah. So I think we should dive in. This is, obviously, the big change this week. Kamala Harris is going everywhere. She’s trying to reach people in new and non-traditional places, you know, stalwarts as well. “60 Minutes,” it’s hard to turn down a 60-minute interview unless I guess you’re Donald Trump. And he’s sitting these out, while she is out all over the place. She was on “The View.” She was on Stephen Colbert, Howard Stern, the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, which just demonstrates they are trying to reach people in different ways, not the normal media outlets that we’re all used to talking about, which is how politics works these days.
Those people that don’t pay much attention to politics every day, this is where they’re getting their news these days. These influencers are huge, and so they’re showing up there. I think it’s really smart. What do you think?
Claire McCaskill: I think it’s really smart. She’s clearly trying to find voters. If I were in the room, I’d be telling them to try to get to some of the podcasts that are more dominated by male listeners. I’d take a shot at Joe Rogan. I would do some of the BravBoys podcasts because, clearly, she needs to eat into his margin on the economy. But more importantly, she needs to grab more men. And we can circle back to that with Walz at the end, when we highlight his strategy.
You know, one thing that’s interesting that I wanted to mention, did you see where Trump is going to go to rallies? Did you see that that broke yesterday, the last four or five days, where he’s going?
Brendan Buck: I saw he’s going to be in New York.
Claire McCaskill: He’s going to do New York, California, Colorado. He’s going to places that he has no chance of winning, to do rallies. Now, what in the world, can you explain to me why he would not be spending the last moments of his campaign in the states that are going to decide the election, instead of the states where he doesn’t have a chance? What in the world are they thinking?
Brendan Buck: I don’t know. The only plausible explanation, I don’t think this is the explanation, is that control of the House is largely going to be decided in districts in New York and California. There are nine toss-up races just in those two states alone that could decide the election. And if somehow he thought that he was going to win and he needed to make sure he carried the House along with him, you’d do something like that.
But he is certainly not in any position to be able to be having, you know, that kind of luxury and doing that kind of thing. I have no idea. I think he just thinks that he deserves to be on stage at Madison Square Garden. It’s probably something, as a New Yorker, he’s always wanted to do. And so, he probably directed his campaign that we’re going to have a big rally at MSG. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Do you have any theories?
Claire McCaskill: The only thing I can think of is he’s trying to force media to cover him. His rallies have become pretty boring. Fox News doesn’t even take them all. Not only are people walking out after about 45 minutes, so are the folks that carry him many times. So I think he’s trying to get the traditional media to pay more attention to him in the closing days.
But I got to tell you, they’re going to be covering her. It will definitely be a side by side. It’s not like he’s going to dominate the coverage because he’s doing rallies in places that he’s not going to win. I don’t get it. It’s another thing about him I don’t get. Probably the least offensive thing about him I don’t get, but I still don’t get it.
Brendan Buck: Yeah. Obviously, this is all about, you know, the attention economy and who’s getting attention. I want to go back to the Harris media blitz. So this is something that I’ve been saying for weeks is that, and I think you as well, like she’s good at interviews. She should do more interviews.
Do you have a sense that she is now doing these because they feel like they were not breaking through? Like, they had that amazing, you know, rush of six weeks and then things sort of leveled off a little bit. Is it, in some ways, a recognition that, gosh, we’re really not just shaking loose from this guy, we got to do something else?
Claire McCaskill: I’m not sure about that. I think they probably blocked this out in the beginning. Let’s do the first, you know, four to six weeks introducing her to the country, visuals with lots and lots of people cheering. The convention was really well done. And then I think they probably figured in the two weeks to four weeks before the election, do as many interviews as we think makes sense, and then go back and close with more of the rallies at the end. That’s what I think the strategy was.
Brendan Buck: Yeah. I’m just sort of the belief that doing an interview successfully is like net good. And there was a lot of spin from the campaign that like, oh, nobody pays attention to interviews anymore. I don’t know. That’s just part of campaigning, and she’s good enough at doing it. I just don’t understand what the hesitance was. And maybe it’s all part of a big plan. I just hope that they realize that there’s a lot of value in doing this kind of thing and reaching the people they need to reach. So I just hope that they keep it up.
Claire McCaskill: So I don’t want to leave this segment without touching on the surrogate stuff. I do think the permission structure has worked somewhat. When I’m traveling, I just saw an ad, you know, that really talks about all this National Security people that have endorsed her, all the Republicans that have endorsed her.
You get the sense from this ad that there are a whole lot of people that you wouldn’t expect to be supporting Kamala Harris that are supporting Kamala Harris. And these guys as surrogates, whether it’s Liz Cheney, or whether it’s Barack Obama, or whether it’s Cassidy Hutchinson.
And frankly, if you look on the other side, I mean, WTF, Elon Musk. I mean, I had a conversation with a very high profile Republican yesterday who thinks Elon Musk is the key to the kingdom, that Elon Musk is going to deliver Pennsylvania for Trump. And I said to him, a lot of people just can’t stand the guy. I mean, I just think he’s a jerk and not well. I don’t know. Do you think he’s an effective surrogate?
Brendan Buck: I think it is a window into how this campaign thinks, and they are not at all interested in winning over those swing votes, those that we call the Nikki Haley voters. They don’t care about that. There was never going to be a moment when they pivoted to worrying about what the middle thinks. Their entire game plan is just cranking out. It’s not even just base voters, but it is Trump-loving voters. And one of those big demographics that are increasingly Trump-loving is that young, white, male, bro voter.
Most people don’t like Elon Musk anymore. People who still like Elon Musk are the very online bros. And so, if you live in that world all day long, you think this is a great thing and you’re going to try to juice the numbers. It’s very risky. I don’t know that the online bro voter is a very high propensity. I don’t know that we have a lot of good data on that. But my sense is those are probably not people you can bank too much on showing up. It’s just the bubble that they live in. They have no interest in getting outside of it.
Claire McCaskill: Okay, let’s pause here. When we’re back, Alan Bersin, former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, joins us for an inside look at two starkly different visions for immigration reform. Back with him in a moment.
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Claire McCaskill: Welcome back. My co-host, GOP communications veteran, Brendan Buck is still with me. So Brendan, as we’re talking about this campaign and this election, what we’re going to do right now is talk about one of the issues that is really front and center in this campaign, frankly, because the Republicans want it to be, a very divisive, difficult problem in this country and that’s the problem concerning illegal and legal immigration. So we wanted to drill down on where things stand at our southern border and what a Harris versus a Trump term would look like for immigration reform.
Brendan Buck: Yeah, it’s a complex issue and one that obviously really resonates with voters. And so, to help us understand that a little better, we have Alan Bersin joining us now. He is the former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under President Obama. During his tenure, he oversaw the operations of CBP’s workforce and guided its efforts to secure the nation’s border. He also served as the Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for International Affairs and Special Representative for Border Affairs. That’s a bit of a long title, so he was informally known as the border czar.
Claire McCaskill: Welcome Commissioner Bersin. So let’s clarify, you were a border czar. Was Kamala Harris ever a border czar? What is that?
Alan Bersin: I was first the border czar in the Clinton administration as the Attorney General’s Southwest Border Representative for Janet Reno, and then called back into government in order to coordinate the migration management and border security efforts.
As I told people who have asked before, Senator, Kamala Harris was not the border czar. She was never assigned the task of coordinating enforcement efforts on the Southwest border. What she was assigned was the same job that Joe Biden had been given by Barack Obama, with regard to communications with Central American countries and efforts to try to deal with the root causes of migration, which I think is now recognized as a 40-year process, not something that gets done within a number of years, let alone overnight.
Brendan Buck: Well, let’s talk about the state of border crossings currently. The Biden executive action restricted asylum access, and we’ve seen the number of migrants trying to enter the country drop significantly. And just last week, the Biden administration actually toughened rules even further with a new version of this policy that sets out that the daily numbers have to be below 1,500 for nearly a month before these restrictions can be lifted.
Can you give us a sense of where we are at the border right now? And what do you attribute, is it that policy? Is Biden to credit for the drop in migrant crossings?
Alan Bersin: There’s no question, Brendan, but that the implementation of that portion of the bipartisan bill that had been negotiated last March by Senators Lankford and Murphy accounts for the decrease in the border crossings and the encounters now taking place at the Southwest border. They’re down 40% since June when the order was implemented, and more than 80% from December of 2023 when we hit the high point of 10,000 border encounters every day.
What had been happening before the implementation of that was frankly unsustainable and not acceptable to, I think, the large majority of the American people, regardless of party affiliation.
Claire McCaskill: Well, I’d like to spend a little bit of time talking about, first of all, I think, frankly, Commissioner, a lot of people don’t understand what goes on at the border. The vast majority of the people who have crossed into our country, quote, unquote, “turned themselves in.” They weren’t trying to evade detection coming across the border.
I think in a lot of Americans’ minds, these are all people that are slipping through and if we only had a wall, this wouldn’t happen. But unlike that, this is really more that people are saying, “Hey, we’re here, we want asylum,” and the system just can’t handle it.
What are the things that are in the negotiated bill that would have addressed that problem, that people are being released on the idea that they will have to come back to the authorities? And why is this asylum piece of this so important?
Alan Bersin: Yeah. So you’re exactly right that because of the overwhelmed asylum system, this is no longer a question of migrants trying to sneak by border patrol agents, but rather seeking them out so that they can initiate the asylum process.
Because we have not had the capacity to process those claims in a timely fashion, the backlog has grown to well over 1.2 million cases, which means that when you come to the border and claim asylum and you’re subjected to a low threshold test, the credibility test, you’re then permitted to come into the country. But you do, as you suggest, Senator, have to then appear before an immigration judge who will decide whether you are granted asylum.
Because of the backlog in the system, those hearings are delayed three or four years now, which leads to a complete failure, frankly, of the asylum system. That’s why what the second portion of the bipartisan bill was intended to accomplish was to generate the resources to hire many more immigration judges and court personnel so that these cases could be processed within a matter of months rather than years. That part of the bill has not been implemented because it requires Congress, unlike the portion that President Biden implemented by executive order.
Brendan Buck: Well, let’s talk about what Trump would do in a second term, what he’s promising and what that would look like in practice. We know Harris has talked about reviving that bill and getting the Senate to pass it.
Trump, on the other hand, has talked about the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, which would involve bringing the U.S. military to the border, authorizing ICE raids of workplaces, delaying due process for unauthorized immigrants, obviously also re-implementing a lot of his policies from his first term in office, with the “Remain in Mexico” policy, Safe Third Country Agreements, and subjecting visa applicants to pretty extreme vetting among some other things and, of course, rebuilding the wall.
My question is how practical is some of these things to actually implement, and how effective would they be if you were able to actually do them?
Alan Bersin: Some of these actions were implemented and had a positive effect in terms of border control and management. So for example, the wait in Mexico policy, the so-called Migration Protection Protocols, that’s in effect when you scrape away some of the differences. That’s exactly what’s going on now in the context of President Biden’s executive order.
When you get above 1,500, the border is closed down and people who are waiting to be processed either by the CBP One app to come in and apply for asylum, they are remaining in Mexico. And the Mexicans are actually doing most of the enforcement that accounts for the decrease in the number of encounters and the number of people crossing into the country.
Having said that, President Trump’s planned mass deportations, which is architected by Stephen Miller, is an anathema from my point of view, both to a proper border management, but also to American values. This is the old Palmer raids of the 1920s, but on steroids.
And the notion that we can take 11 million people and start to identify them and put them in detention, and then deport them, I think is something that would fundamentally change the way in which we have looked at our country in the past. We’re totally imperfect when it comes to border management, but we are not engaged in mass deportations on the scale that Stephen Miller is talking about.
So I think it’s not practically doable, but people with that point of view can try and you can have hundreds of thousands of people disrupted, communities disrupted, because among the 10 or 11 million undocumented people in the country, you have completely different family circumstances. And the idea that you can select and send ICE out to round these people up and keep them on military bases, as I say, I think is not doable in a decent way and completely inconsistent with American values.
Claire McCaskill: So what he’s really talking about doing is activating our military for domestic law enforcement, which is startling because it would take more resources, frankly, than I think Congress would be willing to give to Homeland Security for the CBP to do all of this or ICE to do all this. So we’re talking about having lots of military, hundreds, maybe thousands of members of our active military, and they would then try to target areas to find these immigrants. And I’m assuming that would involve sweeps in Hispanic neighborhoods?
I mean, talk about what were the Palmer raids in ‘20? What was that? What did that look like?
Alan Bersin: This was the attorney general, at that time, sending out agents, federal agents, to make raids on workplaces and in communities, seeking people who couldn’t document their entitlement to be in the country, and they would be deported. But the scale at which Miller and Trump are talking about conducting those raids this time around goes way beyond what had taken place in the 1920s, Senator.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. And so, I really think, frankly, if I were in the room, I would recommend the Harris campaign cut an ad that would simulate what that would look like, a bunch of active military showing up at a workplace and, you know, roaming through the workplace, confronting people. You know, the fear, first of all, how disruptive it would be to the businesses. And we all know how dependent American economy is on a lot of workers that have come across our border, many of whom are legal, but many of whom are, quote-unquote, “going to look like they .”
When you put it in context of what this would actually look like, I don’t think most Americans would be down with that. I think the businesses would be horrified, and all of the millions and millions of people that are here legally, I just don’t think that people understand that this would look very un-American, right?
Alan Bersin: I believe so. And it’s not clear that the military has the authority under our laws or the Constitution to actually be engaged in this. They could be used to help people brought to military bases. But the idea of soldiers going out on our streets and into our communities, I think is something that would pose a significant problem for our federal courts.
Claire McCaskill: So let me follow up on that, because the prosecutor in me wants to pull this thread. Let’s assume that the Commander-in-Chief orders the military to do this, and let’s assume that the military does it. And then someone tries to prosecute the president for violating the Constitution or tries to take action against him for violating the Constitution. If there’s a crime involved, I’m pretty sure he has immunity, right? Hasn’t the Supreme Court said that if it’s part of his official duties, no harm, no foul, he gets to do whatever the hell he wants?
Alan Bersin: Yeah. I think the issue, though, would be whether or not a court would block the implementation of the plan. But you’re right that the immunity doctrine certainly would be tested in a context of the kind you portray.
Brendan Buck: So it’s obviously great news that the crossings are down and things seem to be getting better there. But the reality is this is a resonant political issue for a lot of people, and that’s because there was a period of time where there was a real humanitarian crisis going on in the border.
And Kamala Harris was actually asked about this on “60 Minutes.” She’s asked whether she regretted any of the initial border policy during the Biden administration, and she said something along the lines of, you know, this has been a longstanding problem and people have been trying to figure this out for a while.
As you look back, are there things that the Biden administration could have done better or you would have urged them to do that could have maybe kept some of this more under control for a number of years? And going forward, what does she need to do to sort of get people to understand that she’s working to solve this problem?
Alan Bersin: No question, Brendan, that what we saw at the beginning of the Biden administration was really the effort to undo everything that had been perceived as pernicious and unhumanitarian. And the drive in the Biden administration and the people who were then advising Biden and were in control of immigration policy, basically, I think it’s fair to say, opened the border a lot more than they should have.
What Vice President Harris is doing now, if it were me, I would acknowledge that that was a problem. I wouldn’t fight that and say then was then, now is now. We take responsibility for the millions of people that were permitted into the country under a broken asylum system, which we had no control over fixing. But we’re now into a new era, into this new phase in which Biden implemented the limitation part of the bipartisan bill that would limit the number of people who could be admitted every day to no more than 1,500.
Biden took that action through executive authority, which probably is going to be challenged in the federal courts, but it was taken as a matter of executive power. And that’s something that the Harris administration would continue to maintain in effect and that we would have a limit now on the flows of migrants coming across the Southwest border, but that we would also be working on the two other elements that would turn this into a permanent solution.
One is we need to have Congress act on immigration reform. We’ve got to fix the asylum system. There’s no question about that. And the second thing is we’ve got to take a regional approach with Mexico to see to it that the enforcement activity that really underlies the, quote, “peace at the border” that we’re seeing today is really dependent on Mexican activity in concert with the United States. Those two things will take a lot of work, but the limiting of the numbers so that our system is not overwhelmed is the first step, and that step has been taken.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think when she was asked, is there anything she would do differently or that she differs from, I think she can say, I watched and learned that we cannot allow the border to be as open as it was earlier in the Biden administration, but I have learned from that. We took action, and I can assure you as President of the United States, I would never allow that to happen again.
I think if she said that, I think it would cure a lot of the ills, especially emphasizing that they are ready to sign. You can confirm or deny this, Alan, but I think the bill that was negotiated is a much tougher bill than the Congress I served in would have ever accepted. Do you agree with that?
Alan Bersin: Yes, there’s no question that this was the first bipartisan action in almost a decade, and it was a very direct action to deal with the problems that we confront at the border. This asylum system has to be fixed.
When the Trump people had control of the three branches of government, no effort was made because of the filibuster to actually reform the system. When the Biden administration had control of the three branches, again, no effort was put forward, ostensibly again because of the filibuster problem. But this is an issue that requires an American approach, and the kind of bipartisan spirit that was demonstrated last March could solve this problem, but we’ve got to get set out to do this.
Claire McCaskill: Alan, thank you so much. Alan Bersin is the former Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under President Clinton and President Obama. Thank you again for your time today. We really appreciate you joining us.
Brendan Buck: Really good stuff.
Alan Bersin: For sure. Thank you.
Claire McCaskill: Okay. After the break, Brendan and I are going to ask whether Governor Tim Walz is courting a new block of voter, which Politico is calling the state college voter. Back with that.
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Claire McCaskill: Welcome back. My co-host, Brendan Buck, and I want to take a moment to look at a funny thing that’s been happening as both parties have laid claim to certain aspects of our political culture. Things like the American flag, blue-collar workers and unions, small town living, libertarianism, freedom, the concept of freedom, and even having a college degree.
Brendan Buck: Yeah. So this recent Politico piece looked at how Governor Tim Walz is courting a new block of voter, which they call the state college voter, as he’s painting J.D. Vance as an out-of-touch Ivy League venture capitalist. The argument here being that Tim Walz may be flipping the script on decades of Republicans painting Democrats as these Ivy League elites, forming a new coalition in the process.
So this piece, which is interesting, is exploring who these voters actually are. They’re not talking about college educated folks who went to Harvard or Yale, or even some of the big sort of flagship state universities where I went, University of Georgia, go dawgs. I know, Claire, you went to the University of Missouri. But they’re talking about these regional public universities, folks who graduated and they don’t go off to coastal big cities. They’re staying in their own communities, but they are college graduates and playing a little bit more to middle America.
So Tim Walz as the antidote to what Republicans have been painting Democrats as sort of this elitist, out-of-touch, anti-American, sometimes they say about Democrats, that I think has been part of our talking points for a long time. And the big, I think, dynamic shift of this campaign is Democrats trying to take back patriotism and, frankly, Republicans allowing them to do it. And I think it has been a really powerful shift in our politics.
I frankly love it when both parties can compete over patriotism. But, you know, as someone from the middle of the country, Claire, I’m curious your take on Tim Walz as the everyman and how effective that is, and whether he’s actually what we really need to change that perception.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah, I think that’s why he was selected as vice president. I think Shapiro mirrored Kamala Harris’s resume in many ways, and Tim Walz didn’t. Shapiro is very polished, very professional. Tim Walz is, you know, as he would say, kind of a knucklehead.
But I think there’s another piece of this that the Politico article didn’t touch on. I think Kamala Harris is going to get the majority of the women in the country that went to, you know, Missouri State, or went to Georgia Tech, or went to various state schools around the country. I think she’s going to get a good huge, not a huge majority of them, but I think she’ll win the women that are college educated that went to these state schools. It’s the men.
So I was disappointed in the debate that Tim didn’t lean in to how comfortable he is with guns. Frankly, Kamala Harris has done more with her Glock on guns than Tim Walz has. And you know, I think he’s a really good shot and he’s an avid hunter. And he is someone who understands that you can own guns and enjoy using guns for hunting, without being all down with AR-15s and bump stocks and massive slaughter of our children sitting in classrooms. And he’s so comfortable with so many of the things that the state college voters are comfortable with.
And by the way, their tax policy is all about these people. These people are middle class to upper middle class. They are making less than $400,000 a year and they feel pinched. Even though they’re making good money, but it feels like they’re not getting ahead, and inflation has hit them because they’re not making progress. It’s interesting to me that they are spending a lot of time talking about his tax stuff. And I have seen an ad in a swing state where it is all about Donald Trump talking about the rich people in the room and how he’s going to take care of them. He is going to take care of the billionaires.
J.D. Vance is in the Senate because of a billionaire. J.D. Vance who got to the Senate because a billionaire loved him and gave him $15 million to win his Republican primary. So I think it’s a really good thing to do. And I think he can really double down on fixing his car, going hunting, teaching high school, coaching football. And by God, I get it, we’ve got to give you a tax break, but not the billionaires. I think if he just hammers that hard, I think he can eat away at that gaping hole of men right now that are going for Trump.
Brendan Buck: I think the risk or the problem that Democrats had with this group of voters was this perception of wokeness among Democrats.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah.
Brendan Buck: And that’s obviously what Tim Walz is trying to rebut. Now, I don’t know how much a VP candidate is ever going to really change a whole lot of that. But if there is a recognition by the Democratic Party that this is an issue that they need to deal with and confront, and Tim Walz can be the start of that effort, I think that’s great.
From a Republican perspective, something that is sort of driving me crazy is elections and campaigns are about being additive, right? And the new era of Republican Party says it wants to all be about the working class, unions, you know, demographics that have not been a focus for a long time. And that’s nice and fine and all, but they’re doing it in a way that basically says, well, we don’t want you if you’re an educated person or if you went to college. And that’s what I don’t get. Be additive, but don’t do it by saying, you know, if you went to college, we’re not the party for you anymore. That’s a losing strategy in the long term, particularly given more and more people go to college these days.
So I understand the power of, you know, calling a party elite, and I see the Democrats understand that that is something they need to contend with. I just think the Republicans are, again, being a bit self-defeating where they’re so anti-elite, so anti-intellectual that you end up having a party dominated by, you know, a bunch of online influencers spreading misinformation. And that’s where somebody who went to college is just like, look, this is too crazy for me. Like, I can’t be part of something like this.
And so, in an effort to get new voters, I think they’re losing a lot and that’s why they keep losing in suburbs, but also in a lot of these, you know, Middle America towns that do have people who went to college. And they probably agree with a lot of Republicans on a lot of issues, but they just see them as so crazy sometimes. It’s hard to get excited by them.
Claire McCaskill: It’s interesting to me, the populism, and it’ll be interesting to me to see what the Republican Party does with this going forward. Trump is trying to be a populist. J.D. Vance has tried to be a populist. Josh Hawley is trying to pretend to be a populist. Other Republicans, I mean, you know, a la Rand Paul, which is part of the libertarian thing. But for a party that has steadfastly opposed increasing the minimum wage, for a party that has steadfastly not been pro-union, has been anti-union, and has pushed right to work in many states, many successfully, that’s the Republican Party I know.
I mean, Brendan, look on your crystal ball. Let’s assume that Trump doesn’t win for purposes of this prediction. Where does this populism go in the Republican Party? Because it’s so funny, this high-profile Republican that I talked to yesterday, he said, well, it won’t stick around. The populism will wane. We’ll go back to making sure that we get government out of business’s way. We’ll make sure that we continue to shrink the government, be more fiscally conservative, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I’m thinking, I don’t know how you spend 10 years, you know, trying to noodle up to the working folks and union members and rank and file, and appealing to their grievance, and then say, never mind, we didn’t mean it. What happens with that populism stuff?
Brendan Buck: I think it’s going to be a total train wreck because all of these people have looked at Trump and said, okay, well, this is what sells. And I don’t think that they understand what’s going on here. People are not attracted to Donald Trump on a policy basis. I mean, that’s a joke. But all of them are going to try to trot out this populist policy and they will learn that it doesn’t work because people were attracted to Donald Trump because it was Trump, because he was this fighter, because he was this different person.
And we have seen plenty of examples of other candidates trying to act like Donald Trump and it rarely works out. You know, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, you name it, Mastriano.
Claire McCaskill: Kari Lake.
Brendan Buck: Kari Lake. They’ve all tried this and it has failed every single time. And so, I think they’ve all learned this lesson that they need to be populist. It’s not a natural fit. As you said, eventually, rubber hits the road, they’re not going to support a lot of these populist things and we’re going to start losing even more than we have been. We’re going to have to find some way to get it out of our system.
The reality is Donald Trump is still going to be hovering above everything that happens, even if he loses. Who knows, you know, what he says about running again or whatever. He’s not going away. His influence is not going to go away. But unless you are Donald Trump, this type of politics doesn’t really work and I think we’re going to learn that the hard way.
Claire McCaskill: And you know, the thing is, the Democratic Party kind of really believes in this stuff. They really believe in, you know, a robust health care system that is available and accessible, and making sure Social Security is really protected, and really believe in union workers and really believe in unionizing the workplace.
And to me, it doesn’t really feel like the Republican Party really believes it. They just see it as a path to power a la Donald Trump. Am I wrong about that?
Brendan Buck: No, I think that’s right. I don’t think the Republican Party is ever going to be pro-union, and I think Donald Trump is probably just using unions at the moment for his own good.
Claire McCaskill: Yep. Well, it’s getting closer and closer. We will know before too long and we’ll see how all this works out for Donald Trump and his rabid followers. And we’ll see how it all works for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who are doing their best to provide another option that frankly is more normal, sane and less chaotic. Any closing thoughts from you, Brendan?
Brendan Buck: Yeah. No, I’ll just try to keep my nerves in check as we get closer. This is crunch time and every day counts. So hopefully, we can get focused on the issues, get past hurricane recovery, and have a really focused choice for the last few weeks.
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Claire McCaskill: Thank you for joining us for today. I really appreciate Brendan being here. If you haven’t watched him on MSNBC, when he’s on, tune in. He does a really good job. He is a good communicator, which is what this is all about.
Brendan Buck: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Claire McCaskill: Yeah. Thanks for joining us today. A big thanks to you.
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