Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri.
It’s Labor Day weekend, the final respite before the mad dash to November, and Kamala Harris has finally agreed to a joint sit-down interview with Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash on CNN. Sure, many Americans will be checked out or at the beach, but she will most certainly win the news cycle at a time when a new Fox News poll shows her closing in on Trump in the Sunbelt.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing from my Trump sources that they are still bullish on Pennsylvania and are standing by their strategy to double down on male voters. They are particularly confident that they will hold on to their gains with Black and Hispanic men. (That same Fox News poll had Trump winning 19 percent of Black men.) The Trump campaign sees it as a way to expand Trump’s voting base from 2016 and 2020 while blunting any gains Harris is making with women.

You know who else is finally talking? Jeff Roe. The Republican uber-consultant has remained mum during the primary season, trying to protect his clients in red districts from Trump’s wrath. After all, at one point Trump made it his mission to ruin Roe’s firm, Axiom Strategies, the largest political consultancy in the country, after Roe took over running Ron DeSantis’s super PAC. This, of course, came after Trump briefly considered hiring him to be his campaign manager.

I chatted with Roe about the state of the race, Ted Cruz’s odds in Texas, Harris’s biggest vulnerabilities, and many other topics. It was an incredibly candid conversation, with Roe even offering his thoughts on “latte-drinking men,” Colin Allred’s attractiveness, the peculiarity of the immigration issue for the G.O.P., and his regrets on the DeSantis misadventure. If you prefer to listen to the whole thing, check out my latest episode of Somebody’s Gotta Win here.

Now, here’s Jeff…

Jeff Roe: Far be it for me to be outside the tent pissing in. I’m in the tent pissing out. But that could be a criticism of the campaign, yes. There’s about a billion dollars a month of earned media around the presidential race: Trump had this incredible moment after the attempted assassination, where most people would think that everybody would know the shooter’s name—and then it went away so fast. That has to be a whipsaw. You had, by all measurements, a successful convention. Battleground states that have never been on anybody’s bingo card were being put in play—states like Mexico, Virginia, on and on. And then the Democrats switch candidates, and now Harris has the benefit of the clock.

How should Trump define Harris?

That she’s a crazy, extreme, California liberal.

But that hasn’t really worked. Now she’s pro-fracking and supporting a border wall. My partner Peter Hamby pointed out that the convention had this very patriotic theme. They’ve been trying this She’s a San Francisco liberal shtick for the past month, and it hasn’t really landed.

Then you define her as a liar who you can’t trust. You can do a thousand focus groups, you can do ten thousand polls, and if you ask a voter what they want in an executive position, whether governor or president or county executive, they will tell you that it’s authenticity and trust. That’s it.

Trump has flip-flopped on so many issues. How is she any worse than he is?

He’s definitely softening on abortion, but I don’t think he’s flip-flopped. If you go back and watch Oprah Winfrey’s interview with him 30 years ago, he was saying the same things he said at the Republican convention. We’re not talking about just tactical issues. People don’t necessarily vote on that. They vote on whether they trust you or not. And with Trump, voters know what they’re getting, 100 percent.

With Kamala, you don’t know what position you’re going to get. You don’t know what you’re going to get when they’re in office, what they’re going to do, what button they’re going to push. That’s pretty risky. And that’s a risk that’s hard for people to take. I think when this fully gets litigated—and we’ve got plenty of time—she’ll end up in about the same spot as Biden.

Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager, is known for the Swift Boat ads that plagued John Kerry, accusing him of being misleading about his military record. Do you think the Republicans are taking the right approach to go after Tim Walz’s military record?

I think it is well worth litigating the new guy on the stage. There’s something funky there. People in the military know how to talk. They know it pisses people off at the VFW if you say something wrong. And all along, Walz has been saying things that aren’t true. It’s not a twist of words he got wrong one time. It’s a sustainable discussion, that he has some sort of military hero status. I know about when his unit got the orders. Everybody knows who’s getting deployed and knows what theater they’re going to be deployed in—you know that when you sign up.

I joined the Army National Guard when I was 17 years old. I know not to say I joined the Army, I know to say, “I joined the Army National Guard,” because somebody who’s in the regular Army is going to light my ass up, as they should.

Trump’s team believes that they can blunt whatever gains Harris has made with women with inroads they make with men, specifically in Pennsylvania. Do you think that is the right strategy?

Well, you’ve only got so many options. What’s Trump going to do to change a 50-year career in the public light? He’s probably pretty well-defined. But that’s a good strategy.

But he only won in 2016 with the help of suburban women.

No doubt. And he lost in 2020 because of suburban men. And so you’ve got to get ’em back, and they know it now.

Do you think suburban men are going to come back to Trump?

I do. The latte-drinking men got browbeat for supporting Trump, and he lost seven points with them. They’ll come back, because the other side’s risky. Biden was the perfect antidote for Trump in 2020. The basement strategy was the right strategy, as is Kamala’s strategy. You do it as long as you can get away with it, because you have to make it all about the chaos.

The R.N.C. hosting the ground game can turn into a bunch of college boys and girls with khaki pants and blue blazers running around with spreadsheets. And that doesn’t work. So having Trump on the ticket is going to help a lot of Senate campaigns, and Trump not giving up on Arizona, needing Arizona, is going to help Kari Lake and the congressional swing seat there. The overhang and the overlay of the presidential election is going to help in every state where college education is less than 40 percent. And we have the ability to attract crossovers, with the focus on immigration.

Now, I don’t know if I’ve ever said this in an interview, but I guess I’ll say it: The fact about immigration is that it’s actually not a great issue for a right-wing Republican. A right-wing Republican is typically Christian and, through their church, has probably sponsored asylum seekers from war-torn countries. Immigration is a much better issue for crossover voters—it’s the best crossover issue ever. Building the wall is supported by Hispanics as much as non-Hispanics. I mean this is a great, great issue.

So you think Trump will hold on to his gains with Hispanics. What about Black men?

I don’t think it will be as good as it was with Biden, because Harris resets that immediately. And you can see that it’s raised the floor for a Democrat, her intensity. She ain’t Obama, Indiana ain’t in play, but she’s enough of a generational type of change candidate—even though she’s been in the White House the whole time and could have done everything she says she wants to do now. (But Joe just evidently didn’t let her.)

But what I think drives this election is the paradigm of ideology and how much money you make. I don’t look at gas prices a lot, because I don’t drive very much, but I was at a gas station the other day and a gal put eight dollars of gas in her car. Now she wasn’t topping it off, she rolled into the gas station and put in eight dollars. Because that’s what she had. Now Harris gets a little bit of a break because Biden stepped away, but they have to own all of that.

It doesn’t feel like she’s owning it. She’s been able to sort of sidestep Biden. There’s a perception that she wasn’t in the room or she couldn’t do anything about it, that it wasn’t really her administration.

Good luck surviving that for 60 days. She’s not good enough to pull that off. The basement strategy is good, but it’s not normalcy, it’s not stability. So now, what’s her theory of the case? That she’s actually a bipartisan, courageous leader? Democrats aren’t even going to believe that. So it becomes risky, and it’s risky to be part of what’s been going on for four years. And it’s not just that: It’s that when Trump was there, it didn’t happen. To see this election as incumbent versus incumbent is pretty close. If there’s any kind of risk or if we don’t trust her? The giggles ain’t going to kill her, the flip-flopping is going to kill her. And she’s flip-flopping from extreme to moderate, and now she’s just inauthentic.

So five of the top 10 cities in the country are in Texas. So it’s a big suburb, it’s not cactus and tumbleweeds rolling across the desert anymore. We have more money in the bank today than Colin Allred has.

A little fun fact: I worked for a super PAC that helped Beto win his first campaign. He was not an ideologue. He is now; when he ran for president it changed. But Colin Allred… I guess I’m not objective here, but I watched every hour of both conventions. Colin had the worst speech. Now, the bad part was when the chant “Beat Ted Cruz” walked him off the stage, because Democrats are fired up. So, it’s going to be very hard for us to get Democrats to vote for Cruz. Everyone votes in Texas. Republicans win. And Allred is partisan, he’s an ideologue. I actually don’t think Colin’s good-looking, but I’m probably not a great judge of that. I think he’s a pretty basic Democrat congressman who’s not super talented, or he’d be raising way more money.

I’ve got to ask you about Ron DeSantis. A record $130 million was spent by the super PAC, which you ran. It was one of the first times a major campaign ceded so much of its operation to a super PAC. You spent about $6,700 per vote—some would say this is excessive spending. Do you think it was a mistake to think that you could run a campaign through a super PAC, since the entity can’t actually coordinate with the campaign?

Yep. And it was a mistake to run against a four-time indicted former president who was pretty well-liked. It was a mistake to keep running after he got indicted, because it became a difficult race with the indictments. No doubt. Iowa went from Never Trump to Forever Trump. Two weeks before Trump announced, 28 percent of the electorate was ride-or-die Trump. About 23 percent were Never Trump. And the middle—we called them Trump Curious—they liked Trump, but they were curious about other candidates, because of the way things unfolded in 2020 and then the election losses in 2022 that Trump took a lot of blame for, which in some cases, was well-earned and others not well-earned.

Anyway, two weeks after the Bragg indictment, the Forever Trump vote went from 28 percent to 45 percent. I actually don’t like doing super PAC work because I don’t want to be at my house refreshing the New York Times website to see who wins. I’d rather be in the campaign office crafting a statement.

There’s a lot more money, too, in super PACs.

There’s a chance that 0 percent of your readers will believe this, but you don’t do presidential campaigns for money. You do presidential campaigns to make the Hall of Fame, and if you make the Hall of Fame, plenty of money is going to come afterward.

Would you have done anything differently?

Oh, yeah. You only learn from races you lose. When you win, you’re a genius. When you lose, you’re an idiot. And every few months, we get to decide. We had races last night in the Oklahoma runoff, so I can be an idiot in one state and a genius in the next. But yes, I’d do a thousand things differently.

Okay, top five.

Maybe there’s only three. If I’d had a longer runway with the team, I probably would have had a little more comfort communicating publicly the information that we had non-publicly—just send ’em a memo. I don’t need to put it on a website that somebody can find. We started out by advertising Ron’s brand. We knew, theoretically, that the campaign was interested in his record in Florida. That’s what got him in second place. Was his record in Florida pretty well-known? They probably needed to know more about him.

He seems so robotic to me.

Well, presidential races bring things out: There ain’t no secrets about a person and their talent level. On election night, I was pretty proud of what we built there on the turnout, which became low turnout. Ninety percent of polls had him an even third, and he got five points more than the Real Clear average. Trump got precisely 50 percent, which was the Real Clear average, and Nikki got 19.2—I think her Real Clear average was 19.8. I left before game day, but in our last poll Ron was at 14, and he got 21, so five or six points better. And the ground game was an effective organizational tool, not just to invest at the door with a voter, but to invest in infrastructure that gets people to participate.

Last question: If Trump called you and asked you to join his campaign, would you do it?

No. Because I don’t think they need me. And I think I’m one of the best people doing this, but also, he is his theory of the case. And I just don’t think as far off-course as everybody else does. What am I going to bring to the campaign? I’m going to tell Trump what to do? Good luck with that. But most importantly, I’ve got a bunch of employees and I’ve got a bunch of campaigns that we’ve got to win. And I’ve got kids, I’m in the glory years.