Hello everyone and welcome to the focus group podcast I'm Sarah Longwell publisher of the

bull work and this week we're assessing the first and possibly

only debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and boy what a difference two

months has made since the June debate between Trump and Biden.

Here's what you're going to hear today.

Harris eased the concerns of a lot of voters who didn't like Trump,

but weren't sure what to make of her.

She reassured them that she's ready to be

president and Donald Trump looked every day of his 78 years of age. My guess

this week, oh and I'm very excited about it, is Dana Bash, host of CNN's inside

politics and state of the union, and she was the co-moderator of one of the most consequential

presidential debates in American history back on June 27.

She's also the author of a new book, America's Deadliest Election, The Cautionary Tale of the most violent election in American history.

Dana, thanks so much for being here.

Hi, Sarah, I'm so excited.

You know, what's amazing about this is I was on your show the day of the debate.

The day of, yeah, the morning of.

And so you got to ask me about my predictions then

or you know what I thought she should do.

And now I'm going to get to ask you a bunch of questions

about how you thought she did and the moderators

did. But first, I do want to talk about your book because you wrote about the reconstruction

...