Joe Trippi: The Biden Administration, the Parties, and Looking Ahead to the Midterms

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

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🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Eight months into his presidency, how is Joe Biden doing politically? How should we understand the current dynamics in the Democratic and Republican parties? What key things should we look for as we head toward the midterm elections in 2022? To consider these questions, we are joined by veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, a shrewd and incisive analyst of our politics and our parties. As Trippi sees it, and noting Liz Cheney’s removal from House leadership, the Republican Party is locked in to a series of loyalty tests around Donald Trump, which diminish the party's appeal to independent voters. The Democrats' problem is they are divided, and currently facing quarrels in Congress between the moderate and progressive wings of the party. For the Democrats to succeed in the midterms, in Trippi’s view, Biden must be perceived as generally successful at managing the concrete challenges the country faces, while the Democrats in Congress must grow up and help Biden pass popular legislation. Further, the Democrats need to broader their tent to include more independents and former Republicans. Kristol and Trippi also consider what the primary elections of the Democrats and Republicans between now and the midterms will reveal about the direction of the parties.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. Very pleased to be joined today again for a third
0:20.0	conversation. We do one a year, I guess, with Joe Trippi, the veteran Democratic strategist,
0:25.3	a thoughtful Democratic strategist who's been involved in a range of campaigns, Howard Dean's
0:30.1	presidential campaign, Doug Jones's Alabama Senate campaigns, and many in between. And it's not,
0:35.6	I think, more deeply than your average strategist about, for the parties and their situation and
0:41.2	the challenges that we now face. And I would say just to prove this that Joe in 2019, what was that
0:46.8	a March in 2019, was predicted with pretty high degree of confidence, I think, that Joe Biden
0:53.3	was the most likely Democratic nominee in 2020 when that was not the conventional view among
0:57.6	Washington's sophisticated types. And then in mid 2020, when we did our second conversation,
1:02.5	you were, I'd say, more cautious about the Democratic prospects than a lot of people at the time,
1:08.9	more worried that might have a narrower victory rather than a bigger one. And that turned out
1:13.7	to be the case, certainly, to outtake it. So, Joe, thanks for joining me again today.
1:18.4	It's always good to be with you, Bill. And I do enjoy our annual conversations.
1:22.8	Yeah. So we'll now have to explain, well, where do we stand? We're eight months into the Biden
1:27.7	administration. I think we're talking here on September 20th, so exactly eight months, which is
1:31.5	my math is correct, one six of the way through the Biden administration. So it's not nothing,
1:35.6	right? We're really have a, so how's he, how's he doing? How's, how's the, how's the Democratic
1:40.8	party doing? Just, you know, beyond the day to day, a week to week kind of headlines? Where do
1:45.9	you think things stand compared to what you expected or what one might otherwise expect? And
1:50.4	stipulating that some of this isn't things he couldn't have controlled, you know, the Delta
1:54.3	variants and whatever, but that's politics, right? You do get thrown at you. So how, where do we
1:58.9	stand? Where do we stand? Eight months in. A lot of good things happen that you get credit for
	...

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