Tom Bonier, Pt. 2 + Doris Kearns Goodwin Rewind

Sea Change Radio

This week on Sea Change Radio, more of our discussion with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier. In this part of the conversation, we talk about the importance of a political campaign’s so-called “ground game,” look at the predictive value of early voting numbers, and examine whether Donald Trump would actually have steamrolled Joe Biden as so many were assuming. Then, we take a peek back at our 2019 interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin to learn a thing or two about leadership.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

TB | 00:17 – And so on one side, Americans were saying, no, we don’t want either of them. And so one side says, okay, we’ll give you someone else. We’ll give you someone who is going to wage a historic candidacy and can break the glass ceiling and, and is running a joyful, hopeful campaign. And on the other side, you’re going to still have that guy.

Narrator | 00:36 – This week on Sea Change Radio, more of our discussion with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier. In this part of the conversation, we talk about the importance of a political campaign’s so-called “ground game,” look at the predictive value of early voting numbers, and examine whether Donald Trump would actually have steamrolled Joe Biden as so many were assuming. Then, we take a peek back at our 2019 interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin to learn a thing or two about leadership.

AW | 01:30 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Bonier. Tom is a Democratic strategist and he’s with the Tara Group and TargetSmart. Tom, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

TB | 01:38 – It’s great to be here.

AW | 01:40 – Tom, any podcast you might listen to or any piece you’re reading, almost always to the t prefaces it with, this is a very close election. You have to say that it seems like a contractual obligation. I was completely wrong in 2016. I, if I owned my home, me too. I would’ve bet my mortgage that Hillary Clinton was going to win. So everybody should take my analysis with a huge grain of salt. And I’m not discouraging anybody from going out and knocking on doors like I’m going to do. We should not take anything lightly. We keep talking about Pennsylvania being the crux of this election, but I think there’s much more to this election than just Pennsylvania. I don’t think this is going to be as razor thin as everybody is assuming.

TB | 02:23 – Well, I think there’s a good amount of evidence pointing in that direction. You know, again, as I said earlier, I, I understand the tendency for some people to talk about it being incredibly close. And let’s not take anything for granted that Donald Trump could win. Don Donald Trump could win. But if we’re going to assign probabilities to that, that’s a much lower probability outcome. Then there’s the probability of Harris winning by a narrow margin, and then there’s a probability of Harris winning by a wider margin. And I’m not going to assign percentages to any of those. But I would say in aggregate there’s a far higher percentage of Vice President Harris winning because of all that data, uh, that, that you mentioned in terms of the intensity and the gate and engagement. We are looking much more like 2008, you know, where you have a candidate who’s inspiring and enthusiasm and energy running against a candidate who is not running a very vigorous campaign and is deeply flawed, which John McCain was, and with Sarah Palin, I’m not saying McCain and Trump are the same, that’s a sacrilegious thing to say at this point, given, especially how Donald Trump has attacked John McCain…

AW | 03:35 – But he was a known quantity.

TB | 03:37 – That’s right. And in terms of the contours of the, the candidates and, and the candid season campaigns, there are similarities there. And so yeah, from that data perspective in 2016, again, everyone was wrong , uh, but, it didn’t lend itself to that type of analysis because we didn’t have a good parallel for a Trump type candidate at that point. Now we have two cycles already under our belt. 16 and 22 compare against. Important thing to remember at this point in the 2016 campaign, uh, Hillary Clinton was in the poll averages somewhere around 43 or 44% of the vote. She was still winning by good margin, but there were huge undecideds. What’s remarkable about the polling in this race is there are almost no decided undecideds, which kind of makes sense, right? Trump is such a known quantity at this point, as is Vice President Harrison. There is such polarization that it’s hard to imagine someone saying which candidate should I support? And then it becomes a question of intensity, enthusiasm, and engagement. If you wanted me to make the argument for Trump having the advantage in that, I don’t know what data point I could point to at this point.

AW | 04:49 – Well, that’s why I think the 2022 midterm is such a valuable lesson to learn from, because we don’t have a lot of similar races historically where a Democrat comes on the ticket in July, right? Usually there’s some exhaustion, there’s candidate exhaustion. There was, particularly in 2016, there were a ton of candidates in the, in the field. And the Democrats picked somebody who had been vilified by the right for two and a half decades. Everybody had an opinion about both Trump and Hillary Clinton, and you still had these undecideds. Kamala Harris has a lot of upside still. There are still people who are getting to know her through things like these debates. She’s campaigning furiously, she’s going into pockets of Northern Pennsylvania and introducing herself while Trump is not, I read that he has three field offices in Pennsylvania while the Harris Walls campaign has over 50. So we’re talking about these measures of intensity. Uh, how do you measure that in your ultimate analysis, Tom?

TB | 05:54 – It’s exactly that element in looking at the field apparatus. It’s the fundraising. It’s asking yourself the question, to what extent does each campaign have the ability to wage the ground game that is necessary to win a close election if it is close? And that is the field offices, it is the money, it is the volunteers, and it’s the number of events they’re having. You know, Hillary Clinton, uh, uh, took a lot of grief after 2016 for not doing enough in Wisconsin at the end.

AW | 06:28 – And then the emails thing came up with Comey. But that, you don’t see something like that coming along. Kamala Harris is so new to people in terms of evaluation. They’re not exhausted from her. I think most people are exhausted by Trump. And you could see during the debate, Harris was, was hammering away. That issue was like, enough of this, we’re not going back to that. We’re turning the page from this.

TB | 06:51 – And keep in mind she’s benefiting not just from the newness, but the newness plus the sort of comparison to the, the preexisting status quo. So you had, you had the Biden Trump rematch and all the polling showed. The one thing that Americans agreed upon is they didn’t want rematch. 2020 was grueling and exhausting, and people just in general didn’t want to see. And I, you know, to be clear, to me, that’s not a criticism of President Biden. I think President Biden has been a incredibly good pre president and that history will smile upon him in many ways, even though he is imperfect like every president. But I think Vice President Harris is benefiting very much from that comparison, . And so on one side, Americans were saying, no, we don’t want either of them. And so one side says, okay, we’ll give you someone else. We’ll give you someone who is going to wage a historic candidacy and can break the gr glass ceiling and, and is running a joyful, hopeful campaign. And on the other side, you’re going to still have that guy. And I think that’s why you’ve seen this big flip in the polls and why you see this asymmetrical distribution of intensity and enthusiasm is they’re still left with the same old guy who is connected to the same old politics. And you know, we’ve seen this happening in North Carolina with the scandal in the governor’s race. It’s just Republicans keep nominating people in statewide competitive races or races that should be competitive, who have molded themselves in the image of Donald Trump. And they keep suffering for it. And I think a lot of Americans are just kind of sick of that.

AW | 08:26 – And Democrats are rightly, I think, in retrospect, looking at this election through a fear-based lens, which was why I think Biden stepped aside. But in retrospect, I really do think that Biden versus Trump was going to be a lot closer than people were assuming. You weren’t seeing Trump over 50% in almost any poll. He was just not becoming more popular. It’s just there were a lot of people on the fence and they weren’t automatically going with the incumbent. And that really worried Democrats, rightly so. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that Trump was going to win in a landslide. It was probably going to be pretty close. Do you agree?

TB | 09:04 – I think so, because when you look at the polling and you look at where President Biden was underperforming, like why he was trailing Donald Trump there, it was largely the same voters who are now reacting with enthusiasm, younger voters, women, voters of color. I think there was a general calculus there at the time that, look, these voters, they are voicing their opinion that they would prefer different candidate, but if it comes down to it in November and they have to choose Biden or Trump, they’re not going to Trump. You know, there was a fear of them coming home, uh, not coming, uh, out to vote. But, um, but in terms of the vote choice, it was incredibly unlikely that they would vote for Trump. So yeah, I, I think there was a case to be made that it would’ve been a very close election, but it was one that President Biden still could have one.

AW | 09:52 – And the downside was so scary that one could see stepping aside as being a heroic act in many ways. We did hit upon just briefly early voting. So, which early states, which early voting states have the most transparency in terms of you getting data? And what are the bellwether early voting states you’ll be looking at moving forward?

TB | 10:15 – Yeah, it’s, it’s the one data set that we haven’t talked about yet. And in the end, probably the most important and predictive, because it’s actual people voting. And to be clear, we have data that we get in basically real time, at least once a day in some states, twice a day, updates on who cast the ballot. And I want to be clear, the data tells us who voted not how they voted, or for whom the secret ballot is a secret ballot, and that is sacred. But we can just see on the file, this is someone who came out to vote today.

AW | 10:42 – And is this uniform state-by-state uniform?

TB | 10:45 – We have to go state by state. The thing that is uniform is every state does provide that type of data to us. Some, again, it’s twice a day. Some it’s once a day, but we’re getting it everywhere. And so, you know, to your question of where we’ll be looking at everywhere, of course we’ll be focusing on the battleground states, and then there’s some of the battleground states where it’s a larger share of the electorate.

AW | 11:06 – But there are some states that start voting like in a week or two while there’s others that don’t start for another four or five weeks.

TB | 11:13 – That’s right. So like, you know, Pennsylvania is a state where people have been able to request their mail ballots for a while, and uh, now they’re able to begin returning them. North Carolina is a state that was supposed to start a little while ago. It’s generally the first battleground state to allow mail balloting. But, uh, they somewhat famously, uh, had, uh, a court challenge because RFK Jr had to get himself off the ballot in fear that he would take votes from Donald Trump. And so the North Carolina, a very conservative state Supreme Court, uh, allowed that and delayed the ballot in there. It will happen, but it’s, it’s later. So, um, you know, yeah, they don’t, they don’t all start at the same time. They don’t all have the same type of ballot. Important to keep in mind. You’ll see a lot of people comparing the early vote numbers to 2020, and what they’ll say is, oh gosh, look, fewer Democrats are voting early than did in 2020 Republicans are winning.

AW | 12:10 – That speaks to what we were talking about with the CNN voter registration, that there’s a lot of Gen Zs who are unaffiliated.

TB | 12:17 – Yeah. And, and there are a lot of younger voters who voted early. I mean, there’s a lot of, everyone who vote over a hundred million votes were cast before election day in 2020 because it was a pandemic and that was over two thirds of ballots cast. It won’t be nearly that high of a share this time around, partially because some states have rolled back the advances they made states like Georgia that four years ago mailed every single voter a ballot. They won’t do that this time. They’ll do it if you request it. So you’ll have fewer people doing that. But also you’re going to have, especially younger voters pivoting back to voting on election day. Whereas remember, if people want to go back there, Donald Trump told his supporters four years ago that voting by mail was fraud.

AW | 13:00 – Now he’s pushing everybody to do it.

TB | 13:02 – Right, I guarantee you that his advisors were furious about that four years ago, because that’s traditionally been a big Republican advantage where they could get their voters, especially seniors out to vote before election day, check them off, get them out to vote. It’s an easier way of voting. And he told them it’s fraud.

AW | 13:19 – And then he was just whining about Louis DeJoy his choice for postmaster general not doing his job and getting in these ballots in time on time.

TB | 13:27 – That’s right. So now he’s telling, you know, he tweeted, Donald Trump tweeted out the other day that people need to vote early. And so they’re trying to get, they’re trying to reverse that misinformation, which is funny that he’s for once battling his own disinformation. But you will see more Republicans voting early. And so what you’re going to see is Republicans will tout stats, I’m sure that say, well, look, more of us are voting early than last time, and fewer of them that won’t concern me. I’ll be looking at some other data points. The 2022 elections, even though the turnout was much lower, looking at the early vote, proportionate proportion of the, the overall final vote will actually be more indicative than the 2020 vote.

AW | 14:06 – What kind of proportions were you looking at?

TB | 14:08 – Well, just in terms of what, what percent of the vote before election day was Democrats versus Republicans looking at those partisan proportions and Yeah. Looking at other demographic indicators. I, I believe whereas look in Pennsylvania in, uh, 2020, the mail voting, which is really the only way of voting early there you can, you can cast an in-person mail ballot in Pennsylvania, but it’s still a mail ballot. Democrats were winning over 70%. Joe Biden won over 70% of mail ballots in 2020 in Pennsylvania in 2022. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was a much smaller share of the electorate. And even though Governor Shapiro and John Fetterman won by bigger margins than Joe Biden did, they want a smaller share of the mail vote because Republicans were beginning to come back to it. So that’s my point. Looking at those proportions, it’ll look more like 2022 than, than it will 2020.

AW | 15:03 – Well, I could talk to you for another few hours and I know we can’t do that, but I really appreciate you taking the time. It’s a very busy time of the year for you, and I hope we can talk again when the election’s over, when you can take a, a deep breath and we can kind of recap and hopefully take a little victory lap together. Democratic strategist, Tom Bonier, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

TB | 15:27 – Thank you.

Music Break | 16:02

Alex Wise (AW) | 16:26 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She is a biographer, historian and political commentator. And her latest book, which just came out in paperback, is entitled “Leadership in Turbulent Times.” Doris, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Doris Kearns Goodwin (DKG) | 16:41 – Thank you. I’m glad to be with you.

AW | 16:43 – Oh, it’s a pleasure. I’m a big fan of your work. Why don’t you first kind of give us the snapshot of what inspired you to reinvestigate or, or look through a different lens at these four presidents?

Doris Kearns Goodwin (DKG) | 16:56 – Sure. I mean, I’ve spent five decades of my life, it seems, living with presidents who are no longer alive, waking up with these dead guys in the morning and producing these big fat biographies about their lives from the time they’re born until they die, and their families and, and a real narrative history. And each time I moved from one president to the next, I sometime would feel guilty like I were leaving an old boyfriend behind. Because I’d have to take all of those books out of my study, bring the new guy in. So when I finally finished Teddy and Taft, the last big book that I wrote, I started to think about who am I going to write about next? And instead I thought, what if I just look at the people I was closest to and knew the best spent the most time with through the lens of leadership? It’s just, it’s something I’ve been interested in since grad school at Harvard, when we’d stay up at night debating the questions, are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? So I ended up going to the two Roosevelts, Abraham Lincoln and LBJ, and really just focusing on how did they become leaders? How did they get to adversity and how did they finally lead and turned out to be so much fun to try and compare them, contrast them, see what they had in common. But these guys, I think, have a lot to teach any current president about what leadership is.

AW | 18:10 – The only person out of those four that you actually knew was LBJ. And, and it sounds like you have fondness for him.

DKG | 18:18 – No, I, it certainly developed it. I mean, he, I was a White House fellow and I was 24. He chose me to come, even though he knew I’d written an article against him, how to remove Lyndon Johnson in 68. Because I’d been against the war in Vietnam and said, oh, bring her down here for a year and if I can’t win her over, no one can. So I did end up working for him and then going to the ranch to help him on his memoirs. And it was a great experience that I think led to my becoming a presidential historian.

AW | 18:42 – And you didn’t know Abraham Lincoln, I believe, but reading your, your depiction of him makes me feel much closer to knowing this, this person who we think of in mythical terms. A lot of times in history, when you read about Abraham Lincoln’s early life, it’s almost in these apocryphal, kind of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree kind of stories. But you actually give us a much clearer picture of the hard scrabble life that this man had. It’s, it was pretty stark. He came from very humble roots, to say the least. But you say that after he walked a hundred miles to get to this town where he had a job as a clerk looking kind of odd in his ill-fitting clothes and being tall and just kind of a funny looking guy in eight months, he was a state senator. And you, you say that he was likable and that, that made me wonder, how much does being a likable person play into a leader being a success?

DKG | 19:46 – You know, it’s a really good question. I mean, I think in Lincoln’s case, when he was, you’re right, he was a clerk in a general store, and people knew that he was reading a book in every spare moment he could find. They brought him books to read, they cared about his upward climb, and they respected this young man who was trying to move so far beyond where he had grown up growing up in a land where he said he had only had probably 12 full months of schooling and never stopped reading. You know, reading for him was like breathing. And then when he runs for office, he delivers this incredible hand bill where he says that every man has this peculiar ambition. Mine is to be esteemed of by my fellow man to be worthy of their esteem. So it wasn’t simply, you know, that he was likable, it was that they somehow felt part of his rise to power and he was good to the people in the town. He would help them out. And they saw early on what the country saw much later on that this was unusual character in their midst.

AW | 20:44 – And I, I think of the likability aspect as a parent, I see my daughter respond much better to positivity than top down leadership parenting style. We always think of these people like General Patton as being these tremendous leaders. But I can’t help but think that somebody like an Abe Lincoln, or even when you look at, uh, I hate to use a sports analogy, but looking at quarterbacks who are, have to be the field generals, the leaders of a team, how much do you think that helps somebody inspire people on a mass level as being a president?

DKG | 21:23 – Oh, it’s really interesting. I mean, I think, you know, when you think about it, you would assume that most of the people that are regarded as great leaders are able to make the team feel that they’re part of something larger than themselves. They treat them well, they share credit, they take blame. Um, and that’s not always true. I mean, general Pat may not have been that way LBJ at times when he was in the, um, in the new National Youth Administration. He was really tough on the people who worked for him. Unlike, it’s sort of going against the grain of what I think is general. I think the positivity that your 12-year-old daughter to respond to is way, the way you would want almost all of the leaders to behave. But every now and then, you can have somebody like a Steve Jobs or maybe a general patent or LBJ in the early days, and even though he could take off the head of somebody in public and yell at them, and then people were asked, why did you stay with him? And he, they felt they were in the presence of somebody who was changing things for the better in the NYA. He was the best national youth director in the country, and they were getting people, jobs, young people, and they felt there was a sense of purpose that combined them. And maybe people who worked for General Patton or Steve Jobs felt the same way. But by and large, that emotional intelligence that involves treating people well, being able to understand them, empathize with them, and being a leader that way is what works most of the time.

AW | 22:46 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking with Pulitzer Prize winning presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. So Doris, there’s two things that throw a wrinkle in my positivity about the future. One is climate change, and there’s really nothing like that that a leader has faced in our country or any other country. And the other is our elections being possibly tampered with. Why don’t we start with climate change? There’s really nothing like that in history. How do you think, uh, a leader like Abe Lincoln or or Teddy Roosevelt might have approached it?

DKG | 23:22 – I mean, you have to hope that what they would’ve understood is that it’s the central issue of the time. I mean, whether or not for Lincoln, it wasn’t there then, but slavery was the issue that had to be dealt with. And he was able to educate the country and to make them understand why this went against the ideals of who America was gradually. And he was able to change public sentiment about it. And so were the anti-slavery movement. I mean, I think the encouraging thing about climate change, um, you know, so much more about this than I do, is that the people are ahead of the government right now. Certainly the government in power, and I mean, I know I have a godchild who cares so much about climate change. It, it determines what she eats. She only wants to have old clothes. Um, and there’s lots of young people like her that, that I think understand this as a, an existential challenge to the country and where we’ve always made the biggest changes in the country, or when it comes from the citizens up with the anti-slavery movement, as Lincoln said, not him as a liberator that made slavery come to an end. It was the progressive movement in the states and the cities. Um, the social gospel movement, the settlement house movement before Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and the Civil Rights Movement before Lyndon Johnson and the women’s movement and the environmental movement, the climate change movement. So we’ve just got to trust that citizen voices will eventually make their way felt. But the timing is what’s scary, and it’s got to happen quicker than not. And the leadership is certainly not there at the moment. On the contrary.

AW | 24:53 – Yes. And having these voices heard is, is key to any democratic process and, and shifting to elections and them being in doubt. How do you think a, a leader, like, I don’t know, let’s say FDR would have dealt with the possible tampering of an election. Would he have tried to rise above it and gotten turnout so high that it would’ve overwhelmed any kind of questions that people have had about it? Or do you think he would’ve made people aware of gerrymandering and, uh, election tampering in terms of access to the ballot box? I mean, this is something that LBJ had to confront during Jim Crow.

DKG | 25:34 – During voting rights. Yes, exactly. No, I think you, you’d have to do both. I mean, you have to make people realize that when people are denied the right to vote, you know, by all sorts of means in various states, when you’ve now got ballots in certain states that passed in the midterms, four states, I believe, to draw non-partisan commissions instead of the Congressional way that their boundary lines are drawn. Bipartisan means you’ve got people arguing about getting money out of politics so that, that there’s so much that has to be done. The political system itself has to be reformed. But at the same time, I think, and, and I remember Teddy Roosevelt right before he was running in 1904, his opponent, the Democratic opponent, came out and accused him of having made some sort of deals with corporations by threatening them to, in order to have them contribute to the Republican party. And everybody said, don’t even count insisting, it’s so stupid. And he said, I have to, I have to deal with. And he calls a group of press together and he says, this is a falsehood. This is a wicked falsehood. This is an atrocious fall hood. I want absolute proof that this has done. Which of course, the Democrat couldn’t provide, and he wins the election big. So sometimes I think you have to confront this, but I think the biggest thing is what you suggested. You just have to call for the biggest turnout possible among the people who care about the issues that you care about, especially with climate change. And you’ve got to get young people aboard who feel it a lot because it’s their generation. Older people who care about what’s going to happen to their children and their grandchildren. And then if it’s big enough, then the election tampering is not going to be, we’ve had these elections that have been decided by 10, 20, 30 5,000 people, and if it’s big enough, then that’s, then they’re not going to be able to have that much power to do it.

AW | 27:18 – I know you’ve got to run, but lastly, which of the four presidents that you profile in this book would you like to see be Speaker of the House during this impeachment proceeding?

DKG | 27:28 – Oh, wow. . Um, well, so you’d want a lawyer, obviously. Probably so. Well, they all, they all work except for LBJ, but I, I think probably Teddy Roosevelt would be the best person to confront this situation today in terms of answering back to what’s going on and being able to fight for the right, as he would say.

AW | 27:49 – The book is out in paperback. It’s called Leadership in Turbulent Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

DKG | 27:58 – Oh, you’re so welcome. I’m so glad I could be part of your show. It’s a really important thing you’re doing.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to See Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Sidewinder and Steve Earle. To read a transcript of this show, go to see change radio.com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability for Sea Change Radio. I’m Alex Wise.