The inside story of Doug Jones’s win in Alabama

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2017

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by one point, 46 to 45,” says Joe Trippi. “And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by two points. We ended up winning by 1.8.” This, Trippi says, was the reality of the Alabama Senate election. It was a dead heat when it started. It was a dead heat on the day it ended. And a lot of what the media thinks they know about it is wrong. Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, was the chief media strategist on the Jones campaign. And in this conversation, he tells the inside story of that effort, and what people don’t know about it. The sexual abuse allegations against Roy Moore, for instance, played a more complex role than many realize — the Jones campaign found that they often re-tribalized a race that they were desperately trying de-tribalize, and would occasionally boost Roy Moore’s numbers. Trippi says the central insight of the Jones campaign was that many voters, including many Trump-friendly Republicans, are already exhausted by the chaos and hostility of Trump’s Washington, and they're open to alternatives. That was the opportunity Jones exploited, and it’s a lesson Trippi thinks other Democrats could learn in 2018. Here's how the Jones campaign did it. Books! What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson Grant by Ron Chernow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The thing I still wonder about was when Trump went in on Friday in Pensacola
0:06.1	Man, thank you for not going in Sunday because
0:10.3	Friday night
0:11.8	More went ahead four points again
0:14.4	Saturday it was three points Sunday it was two points
0:18.2	We're sitting there Monday night going like keep drifting, but Monday night we were up by two
0:30.0	I
0:35.4	Hello, welcome to the Ezra Clanchon the box media podcast network. I am excited about this episode
0:40.8	So I've got Joe Trippi on the show this week and Joe is I've known him for a long time
0:46.6	I knew him back on the Howard Dean campaign when he was a campaign manager
0:50.7	He was an early reader of my earliest blog. I had like 32 readers and one of them turned out to be Joe Trippi
0:57.8	Who invited me to intern for the campaign for a couple months, which I did so I've known him a long time
1:02.7	He's not just a great political consultant, but one of the real early theorists and practitioners of how the internet would change media
1:10.4	He's worked for a lot of folks type Kennedy Walter Mondo Gary Hart de Gepard Jerry Brown John Edwards
1:16.1	But pretty importantly right now. He was a chief media strategist on the Doug Jones campaign
1:20.7	So he was there from the beginning from the early discussions with Doug Jones about whether he should run through the entire campaign
1:26.6	The runoff between Luther Strange and Roy Moore the eventual win the the construction of the ads the reading of the polls all of it
1:33.4	And this is a really fun discussion where he really does give the inside story of that campaign
1:38.6	including a lot of things that I
1:41.0	Did it know or had assumed the opposite?
1:44.1	Trippi talks in here about their ways in which the sexual predation allegations against Roy Moore actually helped his campaign
1:51.0	Donald Trump was a lot more useful to the more campaign than I have thought he was in my understanding of how things had gone
	...

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