Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby.

Tonight, my conversation with James Carville and Mary Matalin about the state of the presidential race as we head into the final two months of the campaign. Carville, the subject of a buzzy new documentary that debuted at the Telluride Film Festival over the weekend, gets candid about his campaign to get Joe Biden to drop out of the race this summer, whether there are any hurt feelings in Bidenworld, and what Kamala Harris needs to do in next week’s debate against Donald Trump and beyond.

Also, if you need a break from prepping your fantasy football lineup, please check out my appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher from over the weekend, which you can watch on Max. It was a fun one.

But first…

🎧 Kamala Sit-downology: In case you missed yesterday’s Media Monday episode of The Powers That Be, our fearless leader Jon Kelly swung by the pod to chat with me about the optics and real impact of Harris’s sit-down interview with Dana Bash, whether the presence of Tim Walz was an inevitability or a miscalculation, and more. [Listen Here]

And now, here’s Abby Livingston on the latest Capitol Hill chatter…

These transfers do, however, continue a pattern of Democratic behavior that I’ve noticed all cycle: There seems to be newfound sophistication among Democratic officeholders about the collaborative art of party-building, something that certainly did not exist 10 years ago. To wit: At the beginning of this term, House Democratic leadership tasked freshman Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett with raising $500,000 for the D.C.C.C., and a dues sheet from May revealed that Crockett had raised $4 million for the committee; New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand is currently trying to run up the score in her uncompetitive reelection bid to “lift all boats” in the state’s several competitive U.S. House races; Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger is retiring from the House while paying off all her dues, a rarity for a departing incumbent and especially one who’s concurrently building out a statewide operation— i.e., her 2025 gubernatorial campaign; and then there’s A.O.C., who has not only paid off her dues for the first time, but delivered a big-tent speech at her convention debut—a far cry from protesting outside Nancy Pelosi’s office as a congresswoman-elect.

This camaraderie is a course-correction from the Obama years, when the White House, Senate, and House Democratic campaigns operated much more independently. Back in 2010, the tunnel vision was so overwhelming that it took several days after the Republican midterm wipeout for Washington Democrats to even process the damage at the state legislative level, which undermined their own House redistricting maps for the rest of the decade. (The D.L.C.C., the campaign arm that deals with state legislatures, just received $2.5 million from Team Harris, and we are six years away from the next round of redistricting). Of course, with his long experience on Capitol Hill, Biden did much to restore these ties within the party—but this trend also shows that his acolytes are carrying on this instinct for coordination. And yet, it’s also hard not to credit Donald Trump, who has done more to organically unite the Democrats than anyone else.

Earlier this summer, Tyrnauer was putting the finishing touches on his film when Joe Biden’s campaign collapsed amid the debate wreckage in Atlanta. The 79-year-old Carville, in the sunset of his career, was about to play a starring role in the push to get Biden out of the race, and Tyrnauer realized his movie wasn’t finished.

I called Carville to talk about what went down behind-the-scenes during his campaign to dump Biden. I also asked him about the final sprint of the presidential race, and how Harris can finish off Trump and recapture the male voters she needs to win. I didn’t know his wife, the (equally successful) longtime Republican consultant Mary Matalin, was in the car when I called, but luckily for Puck readers, she chimed in, too. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

James Carville: The debate’s going to be huge, because the last one was actually a train wreck. It’s going to be a bigger than normal big event. You can’t predict Trump, but she can go in prepared with four or five lines that she knows she’ll have, and she can have a lot of confidence. He’s going to have his stunts, and she just got to be prepared for that. But I think the public is going to conclude, “You know what? She’s a little better than I thought she was.” She’s a good lawyer, and hopefully, they can use that skill to that effect. I’ve heard some secondhand information out of debate prep, and I think they’re doing pretty good.

She is going to need an answer on her 2020 campaign, what she said back then. Now, Trump, he’s so convoluted and constipated on abortion, he changes his position every half-hour. So it’s going to be harder to say she’s a flip-flopper because she has good retorts when he comes after her, assuming he can stay on message.

What parts of the Biden agenda should she latch on to, and which parts should she try to ignore?

Carville: On economic things, there’s a whole narrative that’s just kind of falling apart right in front of us. People’s views on the economy are not static. We have record employment. We have a record stock market. We have our first interest rate cut in a long time. We have a lot left to go, but she’s gonna say, You want to come in and disrupt all of the things that we made progress on? So she’s got some pretty good answers.

The documentary, from what I understand, was basically wrapped before the Biden debate collapse. Tyrnauer had to pivot, since you played a big role in calling for Biden to drop out.

Carville: The film was actually finished, and Matt was showing it to the first focus group the night of that debate. He knew he had to kind of adjust to that. They had to recut it and send it by courier from Los Angeles to Telluride to get under the deadline. These film festivals are very, the word isn’t “tyrannical,” but they have a set of rules, and you gotta play by the rules. Anyway, I think that whatever you call the industry of political consulting, I think it looks pretty good in this movie. The thing now, where everybody is tuned out of politics and hates it and everything, this film is a refreshing thing. I hope.

One thing that became clear during the punditry of the six-week Biden drama was that it separated the people with long experience doing campaigns, like yourself, from others who didn’t have as much perspective. In the last 15 years or so of politics and journalism, you have people who’ve experienced campaigns in an insular way, mostly online, versus the way you guys came up, working on campaigns out there in different parts of the country.

Mary Matalin: Your chronology is perfect. The day we moved to New Orleans was the day Tim Russert died [in 2008]. And the day Tim Russert died was the day the music died. Tim was an epicenter of the old-school way of politics and journalism, and the integrity and joy in the exercise of it.

Matalin: What do you call that, James? The Nate Silver stuff? The metrics?

Carville: There’s an entire prediction industry. Every minute, you can talk about who is going to win the election. But not enough people are talking about, How can I affect the election? [Democratic pollster] Peter Hart told me that very early. I asked him, “Peter, who do you think’s going to win this?” And he said, “I never predict who’s going to win. I just say, ‘If we do 1, 2, 3, then we can win this.’” That has stuck with me forever. Bill Belichick doesn’t know who’s going to win the next Super Bowl, and he knows more football than any five people put together. I mean, I look at Dave Wasserman, I look at FiveThirtyEight, I’m like anybody else. But if someone says, There’s a 52 percent chance Trump wins Arizona, I really don’t know what the fuck that means.

Matalin: Anybody can read a poll. But there are very few people who are in the business, or covering the business, who can read a poll and also pivot on events. Which is how the old guys, how we all had to learn how to do it. The polls were a tool, not the substance of the thing. You can jump from numbers to numbers, but in a cycle like this, the numbers have barely moved, and they’re not going to move, so you have got to go with your gut.

Carville: A big part of the documentary is the Washington Post and ABC News poll from May 2023. I had just seen so many polls in my life, and with that one, I just knew we were done. People were not going to change their mind. And if you look at where that poll was, and look at the timeline, it never moved after that. I instinctively knew it wasn’t going to move.

Matalin: For that entire year, everybody was going off of every poll and disputing you with a margin of error movement, which doesn’t change the fundamentals at all! But that’s what I mean about analytics not giving you the guts you need to be flexible.

Carville: When you have two really well-known candidates, the numbers are not going to move very much. You can have a candidate like [former Pennsylvania Senator] Harris Wofford, where you come back from 40 points or whatever, but no one knew who he was. But you’re not going to move four points in an election where everybody knows everybody else. And that’s Harris’s big opportunity—or big risk. People still don’t know her. Trump is the most-known entity in American politics—certainly one of them. So she has potential upside and downside depending on the campaign she runs. This is not a preordained election like a lot of them are.

Carville: Three minutes into the debate, I said, I’m taking two gummies and listening to country music. Fuck it. And my phone was just lighting up with texts. I didn’t even have to look.

Matalin: Anybody who’s ever done this knew in five minutes that there was no coming back. Nothing. That’s the difference between guts and numbers. Guts told you what you needed to know. And that was a five-minute gut check.

But who did you call the next day? Who did you strategize with about Biden? How did you ramp up the pressure on him to drop out?

Carville: I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I am a senior advisor to American Bridge, I help them raise some money, and they had a breakfast the day after the debate. These were all big donors—$50,000-and-up kind of people. And there were 50 of them in the room. And they said, We’re just not giving any more money. If Nancy Pelosi calls me, I’m not giving any cash.

Of all the reasons why people got Biden to drop out, the donors were a big, big part of it. The donors would call the Senate committee and the House campaign committee, the D.N.C., and they were like, Fuck this! I’m not funding it!. When the donors called me, I told them, “If the campaign calls, what you should say is, I’m not giving money for this. I am not throwing money down the drain.” And there was almost 100 percent agreement with me. That was the pivot point.

Has anyone from Bidenworld reached out to you since then?

Carville: The answer is no. But you have to understand how well I know people in Bidenworld. Mike Donilon was literally at my wedding, and I was at his wedding. Anita [Dunn], in ’86, she was Bob Edgar’s press secretary in Pennsylvania, and I was doing [Bob Casey Sr.’s] gubernatorial campaign. I love Steve Ricchetti. But they had a different relationship with Biden. They were more employees than consultants. It was a different world for them. I liked them, so I didn’t particularly like doing what I did.

Matalin: Every good candidate, every good politician, has people whose loyalty is the key to the kingdom. It’s not an employer-employee relationship. It was Donilon’s heart. It’s like the Poppy [George H.W. Bush] thing with me. I went down with Poppy. James would’ve gone down with Clinton. You’re not thinking rationally. It’s like your kid or your husband. It’s a completely heartfelt relationship. And my heart still bleeds for Mike. It’s a loyalty thing. People need to understand that.

James, you argued in the New York Times today that it’s crucial right now for Harris to turn the page on the past, and she’s starting to do that. But vibes, energy, excitement, generational change… is that enough to carry her?

Carville: I think the headline on the new ABC poll is that she got no convention bounce. Actually, she did accomplish some things in the numbers. But again, not to keep going back to the upcoming debate, but the debate is going to loom big.

Matalin: She didn’t need to get a bump. She needed to stabilize the race, and she stabilized it. That was the bar.

Carville: There’s another rule in politics. If people want to be for you, they will break your way. Like, in ’92 they said, Well, Clinton has got a lot of issues, but the guy’s really smart. He’s kind of young. He’s got a lot of energy. What you always want in politics is for people to start making excuses for you.

Matalin: That’s true. I love Kamala’s laugh. She’s always so joyful! That’s like jiu-jitsuing your weakness into your strength. And they’re doing that.

Carville: If she gets to the point where people who are kind of skeptical of San Francisco, or some of the 2020 stuff she said, if they also say, You know, maybe she’s a little different, and I like that. That’s what you look for in focus groups. I lived in perpetual fear that people in focus groups would just say, I just can’t go along. And with Biden, you would mention his name, and people would bury their face in their hands, and say, Oh God, he’s old. There was no convincing. He was putting out ideas on this or that, and they didn’t care.

Have you been surprised at the country’s reaction to Harris and that we have a half-Black, half-South Asian woman from the Bay Area, possibly becoming president?

Carville: I mean, no. We saw Obama. But look, in the end, it’s going to be pretty close. There’s a lot left to go here. She has been very clear that she is not running only as a woman, or a Black woman. And that was very heartening.

Obviously, none of us here are Gen Z, but Harris needs to get her numbers up with Gen Z, and that’s about young men, who have been drifting to Trump. How does she capture the Gen Z bros?

Carville: I’ve been very vocal that the message needs to be more attractive to males. I have been pretty clear on that. Look, every election there’s a fashionable demographic. Soccer moms. NASCAR dads. But I think that the demographic that has to make the most difference in this election is our demographic: college-educated white males. That’s the key. It’s a very unfashionable demographic, to say the least. But they are very anti-Dobbs, and most of them are in the stock market. There are very real differences of opinion between people who own stock and those who don’t. I don’t know the exact math, but the number of college-educated white males who own stock is certainly higher than any other demographic. I don’t know if anyone is going to come out and say it, but you always have a demographic that explains the election. Suburban women, etcetera. To me [in 2024], it’s college-educated white males!

Now, the language we were using before was getting us nowhere with males. We were bleeding males. But there’s been a shift in the language. Hillary said at the D.N.C., “We’ve got them on the run.” Harris said our military is lethal. It’s all in the words you use. Words have real power. People hear ’em. Anyway, before this summer, I was trying to draw attention to the fact that we were bleeding males. I actually think I succeeded.