Ronald Brownstein on Harris v. Trump: What to Look For in the Home Stretch

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2024

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Where does the race stand two weeks before Election Day? To discuss, we are joined by Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst at CNN. According to Brownstein, the election is “closely balanced on the knife’s edge” and very subtle shifts among coalitions in the swing states easily could change the outcome. Brownstein shares his perspective on possible paths to victory for each candidate based on the current data, and what we ought to look for on the campaign trail and in the polling during the last days of the campaign. Following the election, Brownstein will rejoin us for a special Conversation to analyze and reflect on what the 2024 returns reveal about the electorate—and what we can learn from these trends about how our politics might play out in the years ahead.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be
0:18.9	joined again today by my old friend Ron Brownstein, senior political analysts for CNN, we've done a few of these
0:26.8	conversations.
0:27.8	And just to summarize, one of the best political analysts, I won't say the best, we have too many other friends, one of the very best political analysts in America today, electoral analysts, and we're, what are we, two weeks exactly before the election?
0:41.0	You're going to explain everything to us, right?
0:43.0	Yeah, that's, you know, as best you can explain a race that is close enough that you're probably not going to know going into election day who's going to win.
0:56.0	By the way, you know, we've done a few of these conversations, but our conversations about presidential politics began before the 1988 race with you know, Michael Zukakis. political And one of the things that makes this so, well, fraught is obviously the stakes in the election in terms of the divergence in the pathways forward for the country.
1:21.0	But also this kind of, you know, the number of swing
1:24.8	states has shrunk so much since those earlier days. The campaigns are fighting out
1:29.9	in really half as many or possibly a third as many states as they used to but what's left is really
1:37.4	closely balanced on the knife's edge and is just nerve-racking for them all the way across, you know, each.
1:44.8	I saw yesterday in the events that Vice President Harris did with Liz Cheney,
1:50.0	which we're very good and we'll talk about.
1:52.0	At one point, she said, said yeah she kind of acknowledged yeah I do wake up in the middle of the night pretty much every night and I'm so I'm guessing she is not alone in in having that sentiment two weeks out.
2:04.0	There's so much to talk about it, so close, and so what's the landscape that creates that
2:08.1	it being so close, it both looks so much like 2016 and 2020, so much like the
2:13.5	the elections we first when we first met in 1988 and
2:16.8	92 and 96 and so forth and it's both so something totally new an ex president running for the third time
2:26.0	something that hasn't happened in way over a century and then the first
2:30.1	black woman candidates for president's
2:33.0	so it's both like an amazing mixture of total novelty and no
2:36.8	novelty at all it seems to me.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Bill Kristol, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Bill Kristol and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.