Hey everybody. It is Glenn Thrush with Politico's off message podcast. The days are getting

very, very short. It seems like it's dark at three o'clock in the afternoon. A perfect segue

to our guest, who I will tell you about later, darkness.

I just finished a long story, a very, very long story, 10 decision points that really kind of decided the fate of the 2016 campaign.

And one of the most interesting things, tidbits that I came across, and I recommend you guys, I'm going

to plug myself here, that you check it out on Politico.com. It's for the magazine. One of the

things that really blew me away is that the internal focus groups the Clinton campaign had

were finding that swing state voters were responding really, really well to Trump's darkest, most pessimistic messages.

It's sort of the opposite of the assumption you make about American politics, that everybody wants a mourning in America, Ronald Reagan, message.

In political parlance, there's a talk, there's a definition of this as the diagnosis and then the medicine. Well, Donald Trump

campaign, particularly his big speeches, were all about diagnosis and very little bit about

prescription. Hillary Clinton's campaign was all about prescription with very little bit

about diagnosis. What Donald Trump intuitively picked up, and I mean intuitively because he didn't do any

polling for the first, I don't know, seven, eight months of his campaign, was that people

wanted to hear about the darkness.

People wanted someone to articulate their grievances.

I remember early on in this campaign seeing Donald Trump's book at a Costco,

crippled America with his face. And his face looked like an orange fist. He wanted to look as

mean and as tough as possible. And I, you know, I forgot who was with me, probably my kids. And I said,

who the hell wants to see that? I mean, like, that is not the image that an American politician

is looking to project. Look at a John Kennedy poster, for God's sakes, right? Even Richard Nixon,

who, you know, didn't exactly look like the smiley face, uh, went out of his way to try to,

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