The Year Ahead in Politics with David Chalian - The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Podcast on CNN Audio (2024)

Episode Transcript

Happy New Year and welcome back to The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. And there's going to be a lot going on this year in politics.

We have breaking news this hour as Maine's top election official has now disqualified Donald Trump from the ballot.

If you think about it, of all the forms of disqualification we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it's the one where people choose, themselves, to be disqualified.

Thank you, Ambassador. Please, what was the cause of the United States Civil War?

Well, don't come with an easy question or anything. I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn't do.

As someone who is a descendant of Robert E. Lee, and grew up hearing about the War of Northern Aggression, it sounded exactly like what I heard from my grandmother, who was trying to convince me...

Wait, who is a descendant of Robert E. Lee?

Me!

What?

He is my great, great, great, great grandfather on my mom's side.

Did you know that?

Right now, we're talking about New York City and Chicago. But next year we're going to be talking about Denver and L.A. and Philadelphia. There is no end to this border crisis until there are real, tangible solutions. If you thought the politics in 2023 were fun, just wait until 2024. It's going to be nonstop.

They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done.

He is effectively quoting Mussolini and Hitler. These tactics have been effective at getting people to want to give up democracy.

They're coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They're pouring into our country.

It's recognizing that this stuff isn't just offensive. It works. And it's not history. It's now.

Here with me is CNN political director and host of the CNN Political Briefing podcast, David Chalian. David, thank you for joining me.

My pleasure. Happy New Year, Audie.

The holidays weren't exactly light on political news, even though I want them to be. I wished it to be.

The calendar doesn't allow for that, right? When you have the kickoff contest on January 15th, the holidays are still part of the heat of the moment.

So this an election year is a big deal for you, right? Like this is your Super Bowl year.

Yes.

Every four years.

This is it. So as much as I enjoyed the holidays, I also was building up an immense amount of stress for the onslaught that is to come because, yes, this is this is my Super Bowl.

'So let's rattle some of that off, which includes some of CNN's own projects. Right. So there's going to be back-to-back town halls hosted by CNN anchors. And I think that's going to be Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.

Correct. They're not the CNN anchors, though, the candidates, obviously, but they are. Kaitlan Collins and Erin Burnett will be hosting.

Give it time. Okay. But there's also an Iowa caucus, New Hampshire primaries. I think there are some debates.

Yes.

And also Congress comes back. Am I getting any of that right?

'You got it. All right. And Joe Biden ends his vacation as well to welcome the election year in. Listen, this is going to be a very busy time. And if you add in to the calendar, you were just sort of piecing together all the Trump legal components as well. It is going to be chock-full every day of things that actually will be consequential in this election. We are we are now not in "the year before," Audie. Now voters are going to weigh in in this process. Juries and judges are going to start weighing in on the Trump process. These things are going to have consequence in a way that a lot of the bloviating about politics that now cedes to the background a bit and actual decisions get made and those will have impact.

All right. I want to talk about all of our straight political events coming up. But first, this issue of Donald Trump, the political candidate versus Donald Trump, the legal defendant. There are big questions before the various courts, but a lot of it comes down, It seems to be, what kind of power or immunity should a president have for things he did while he was in office?

Donald Trump and his legal team seem to think they should have blanket immunity for anything he did while he's in office. At least that's the core of the arguments that they're putting forward. And now we will see. Clearly, this is going to be an issue that the Supreme Court will eventually have to weigh in on, though not as quickly as Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the January 6th case here in Washington would have liked.

And the timing can be confusing for people, right? Because there are so many various cases.

Yes.

And some of them could advance in that way and some of them probably won't.

Although I would imagine much of the Jack Smith case, which I put sort of first among equals right now, just in terms of timing, the case against Donald Trump related to January 6th, because that is the one that is first up currently scheduled to begin a trial on March 4th, the day before Super Tuesday, and has a lot of the pretrial action happening right now, whether it is in the court of appeals or in the Supreme Court, that action is important to pay attention to. And then you have the stuff over the holidays that will get resolved probably more quickly, which is this notion of whether Donald Trump can actually appear on the ballot or not in terms of that 14th Amendment cases in both Colorao and Maine.

Right. So both Colorado and Maine have both taken up this issue of whether there is a 14th Amendment argument to disqualify Donald Trump from holding federal office again. Is there any confidence, as you said, that this will actually be heard by the Supreme Court?

I mean, all the legal scholars, and I am not one of them, but that I have read and talked to indicate the court is going to have to weigh in. The question is, is the court going to weigh in in some way that finds a workaround or is the court actually going to weigh in in some way that says Donald Trump was or was not an insurrectionist and therefore the 14th Amendment doesn't apply? I think most legal scholars think the latter is unlikely. And the former trying to find a consensus on the court, maybe among all nine justices to keep Donald Trump on the ballot seems to be where at least my reading of the tea leaves seems to be where the smart money is at the moment of how Roberts will try to navigate this.

'I want to talk about Trump's challengers on the Republican side. When people were probably last paying attention, I'll just say mid-December, Nikki Haley was, "on the rise," at least in terms of earned media, so-to-speak, attention on TV, also fundraising and donors. And Ron DeSantis was experiencing a slide, certainly in good press, if not those other things. So where are these candidates now between Iowa and New Hampshire? Meaning, what is the message they've been trying to convey, kicking off the new year?

That last question of yours, I think, is a really important thing for people to pay attention to because it's closing argument time for these initial contests for the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. And I think it's important to see how DeSantis and Haley are trying to close out this race now. I mentioned just the two of them. The way you captured the dynamics of the race, I think are largely the same. I think Donald Trump...

Good, I felt a little guilty saying that.

No, Donald Trump is a dominant front runner and Haley and DeSantis are in this battle for what appears to be second place. And sort of you question, well, what is the battle for second place amount to in a nomination race? But I am a firm believer that we gotta wait for voters to actually use their power at the, well, in Iowa, at the caucus site or at the ballot box in New Hampshire, and actually start shaping this race with real votes and votes that will have consequence. You know, you noted Trump, the defendant versus Trump, the candidate. We have to remember they are one and the same Donald Trump. I mean, those two things are not to be separated. They are actually, I think, in the minds of voters for a lot of his voters, they are very much combined. I think the fact that he is a defendant in these trials.

You mean, also, explicitly in way he...

Utilizes...

Promotes himself and utilizes.

And I would argue successfully does so with his voters, right? So part of his appeal and certainly part of his message has been that he's being persecuted here. And that seems to rally many Republican caucusgoers, primary voters to his cause. And in fact, Audie, just today, as we're recording this podcast, Ron DeSantis released a closing ad or one of his closing ads in Iowa. And the whole lead argument is Ron DeSantis parroting that very line of Donald Trump talking about the weaponization of the Federal Government, showing pictures of the Department of Justice. You would think a guy running 30 points behind trying to overtake the frontrunner who has clear potential vulnerabilities because of these legal trials. You think you would go at that at some point? But Ron DeSantis, this has been his conundrum, the entire contest. He's trying to appeal to the very voters who are outraged by these legal problems.

But they all have that problem. Christie has that problem. Nikki Haley has that problem. I mean, fundamentally, you have a cast of characters who won't criticize the former president for the reasons you're talking about.

Well, that's not true of Chris Christie, right? Chris Christie is It's just that what he finds is there's very little market share for it. So he is actually taking the approach of going at and criticizing Donald Trump on a daily basis frontally on these issues. What he's finding is there's just a very small slice of the Republican electorate who finds that appealing.

I am here with CNN's David Chalian. We'll have more after the break.

'We're back with David Chalian, CNN's Political Director, host of the CNN Political Briefing podcast. I want to ask you some behind-the-scenes questions. So there's going to be these back-to-back town halls, one with Ron DeSantis and one with Nikki Haley. And then six days later, CNN is going to host a final GOP debate from Iowa before the caucuses. So talk to me a little bit about like, how do you prepare for any of this.

'For the town halls, because they are mostly focused on voter generated questions. These are going to be Iowa voters who get to pose the questions to DeSantis and Haley directly, making sure you're reaching out to a wide swath of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers to get as much input as possible of the questions they want to ask. And then you can quickly see what issues are really top of mind right now for Iowa voters as those questions come in and making sure that the candidates have an opportunity to hear from voters about their concerns or their questions directly and being able to answer those to - on display to a national audience, obviously. But doing so in Iowa where the focus is, that is different than the debate, which...

I was just going to say. Yeah, very different approach.

'We obviously don't - yeah, we don't go out and ask voters for questions, but we as journalists gather around the table, do a ton of research. Obviously, we spent all year covering everything these candidates have said, and this is an opportunity to test and poke and prod and make sure that their stances on issues, their words, to be held accountable for their differences and ideas get hashed out before the voters to the voters can actually make a side-by-side comparison or side-by-side-by-side comparison.

Now, Donald Trump won't be at this debate.

At least as far as I know, he has not accepted the debate invitation, but he has qualified for it.

Exactly. So that is actually my next question about qualifications, especially in this very strange race where people are so far behind this frontrunner who has been just kind of looming over them the entire time. How do you decide who gets on the stage and how are you guys thinking about that?

Yeah, So we had set out when we announced the debate back in December, what the qualifications would be. Now, I just want to remind your listeners, Audie, in 2023, there were four Republican debates. They were put on and organized by the Republican National Committee. So the RNC, the party itself was the arbiter of the qualifications to get on the debate stage and what...

Their party, their rules.

And what the RNC did is that with each successive debate, they kept raising the threshold along the way. And that, by the way, we've seen cycle after cycle that is the norm, because the whole theory of the case is, as the campaign is going forward, when you're getting closer to the voting, you really should be presenting voters with candidates who have proven viable, robust candidacies.

And for civilians, that means your polling numbers reach a certain point, your money and fundraising numbers reach a certain point.

Certainly those were the pieces, polling and money, in the RNC. For us, it was a polling threshold that we set a qualification of that you needed 10% support in three polls, a mix of national or Iowa polls. But at least one of the three polls had to be an Iowa poll. And we made clear to everyone when we announced it what those polls are. And the qualification window was from October 15th to January 2nd. So lots of time in there for people to hit 10%. As I'm talking to you today, the only people to hit the threshold for our Iowa debate on January 10th are Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. So assuming Trump follows his course and doesn't show up to debate, this would likely be a debate stage with two people on it, DeSantis and Haley. And that clearly would be the smallest debate stage that we've seen thus far.

This is an existential question, not a CNN question. But to you, in this day and age, what's the point of either town halls or debates? Which, I think, for the viewer can feel very choreographed, right? Or that the candidate is deploying talking points that they just use everywhere all the time.

'Yeah, but that's - what we call talking points? That's their message. That's what they are selling to voters as to why voters should support them. So the fact that they say it every day on the stump, the fact that they say it in media interviews all day long, I think there is value for voters in a debate to size up candidates running against each other in a moment where they're hashing out a difference, let's say, in Social Security policy. I think there's value for voters to see their candidates hash that out in real time.

It's often a discussion, also, that exposes where does this party think it is? What does it think it represents based on how they're presenting themselves?

Totally. And then as we discussed, I think the value in the town hall is seeing voters interact directly with candidates. We get to see it all the time, covering candidates on the campaign trail and going to all these events and seeing them interact with voters. But for a national, international television audience to be able to watch candidates interact with voters and how they take their issues and questions of concern and transform that into an answer that yes, they believe serves their candidacy, but also actually answers the question when they do that. I think there's great value in that.

So as it's said: there are known knowns and known unknowns? Unknown unknowns? I don't remember the quote.

As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know.

I did not expect Donald Rumsfeld to make an appearance in this podcast today, but there you go, the late Donald Rumsfeld.

Still good. It's still a good one. But what are the things out there that you think are still question marks? So you know, what's going on with the Joe Manchin, what's going on with third party candidates? What's going on with Hunter Biden, what's going on with international news to you? What are the things that can sort of disrupt this very focused flow on primary season?

'You didn't even know that I have just been working on a piece for CNN digital where I was talking - where I was writing a lot about these.

Oh, really?

So you've teed me up perfectly.

Oh, my God. Is the headline just, like, "Chalian's Brain Dump." Like what? What is this going to...yeah, tell me more.

Oh, no. This is a piece we're going to roll out looking at our initial outlook at what the road to 270 looks like for Trump and Biden.

Ah, for the Electoral College.

For the Electoral College map. But you have identified some of the biggest unknowns. I think the impact of third party candidates on this race is something we're not going to know for quite some time. And it is obviously more of a general election impact than it is a nomination season impact. But I think by March through November, it's going to be a constant storyline for us to follow in some of those critical battleground states. I think we, at our peril, dismiss the notion that these Trump trials, if any, do take place before Election Day, could have impact, because a lot of the polling indicates that voters mindset on Trump may shift if he is convicted. So if there is a conviction in one of these cases before the election, I don't rule out the notion that that could be an actual impact. I think, again, it's a total unknown right now. And I would argue that one of the biggest unknowns of the primary season, so in the immediate future right now is if Donald Trump's dominance shows up with voters the way it has in the polls, I'm not suggesting he somehow is going to crumble out of nowhere and somebody else is just going to start rolling up victory after victory. But I do wonder if these margins that we're seeing the polling play out differently when people show up to cast their vote. And then that will clearly impact the narrative and the coverage.

So let me translate. What you're saying is if he wins by 30 points or wins by five points or loses by six points, that those numbers are going to be the thing people will talk about. Like, that that will have significance.

Margins matter in politics. They do. And I do think that will have impact on the race if the margins are far closer than people are expecting.

'The last thing I want to throw in the pile it's probably in your story is the economy, because if we think back to the Bill Clinton era, "It's the Economy, Stupid" kind of argument. This economy by a lot of numbers is good, but we all feel stupid about it. Like, it doesn't - we don't, like, we don't understand how to talk about it. We can't tell if it's good/bad or good/ugly. People don't feel good about it and it just feels like such a wild card.

Yeah, the last piece there, the "people don't feel good about it" is the thing I'm going to watch in the months ahead here, because it seems pretty clear when you talk to economists, the Biden administration, I guess, and the Fed kind of stuck the soft landing here and was able to avoid recession that many people feared. And you would think that that would in some other universe that would just translate into positive political effect for the president.

'So for context here, in the past, in even, let's say the 80s, for example, when they wanted to avoid a recession, they would raise interest rates. Interest rates were supposed to make us all go, "Gah, let's stop spending money!" But what happened then was, like, high unemployment, right? It really hurt and it halted the economy. That hasn't happened yet. But a lot of things, especially prices, haven't come down. And so it just feels like, you know, I was in a conversation with the White House spokeswoman, Karine Jean-Pierre, and it just felt like them trying to say, look, this is good, this is good, this is good. And then me asking, but what about the things people still think aren't good.

'And they don't have an answer for it. It's a very difficult position for them to be in because they do have positive information to share. And as you said, it's going up against what people are experiencing, which is just a bit more of a squeeze financially for them in their daily lives than they have before now. Prices go up. I mean, that's just like the - what has happened. So I don't expect we're going to see prices come down dramatically in a lot of these various categories that have impacted people. And so the question is, do Americans get adjusted to that psychologically in some way that they're no longer expressing frustration or does that not happen? And I think the answer to that...

Or they adjust to it and blame the current president.

Well, exactly. Exactly.

David Chalian, political director of CNN and host of CNN's Political Briefing podcast, thank you so much for being back on the show.

Thank you, Audie.

That's all for today. We'll be back with new episodes on Thursday, and our political episodes will actually move to Mondays starting on January 8th because we realize it's a month full of Tuesdays and we're terrified. The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Thanks, as always, to Katie Hinman. I'm Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.