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Running until the final general election results come in, are counted, verified, & certified the Deadline ElectionLine podcast spotlights the 2024 campaign and the often blurred lines between politics and entertainment in modern America. Hosted by Deadline political editor Ted Johnson and executive editor Dominic Patten, the podcast features commentary and interviews with top lawmakers and entertainment figures. With less than a month to go in a race to close for anyone to call, follow all the campaign news on the ElectionLine hub on Deadline.
There’s just over two weeks until what may truly be one of the most important elections in American history, and the campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are in the final sprint in a race that is terrifyingly too close to call. In the second longest (The Charlamagne Tha God episode is still #1) and one of the most engaging Deadline ElectionLine podcast ever, we get the historical, the strategic and the international POV from this week’s guests Stuart Stevens and Danai Gurira – take a listen above.
“If I was inside the Harris campaign, as someone who wants Harris to win, I look at her considerably better, favorable, unfavorable versus Trump, and I think that’s a very encouraging sign,” veteran GOP operative Stevens says of the data to pay attention to in these last days. “That was not the case in ‘16 where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both just had faves, unfaves, that were just atrocious.”
An alumnus of the presidential runs of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney and a member of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, Stevens added on a more personal note: “the great memory I have at this stage in the campaign is tiredness, is fatigue.”
At this stage, with Trump increasingly more off the rails and more threatening than ever, and Harris hitting the battleground states and media outlets hard in search of pockets of undecideds and wavering Republicans, almost everyone in American is feeling some form of fatigue over what has seemed at times to be both a never ending and entirely unpredictable election.
In a wide-ranging discussion on the podcast (which you can hear above) The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Democracy to Autocracy author Stevens warned that the fascism we are seeing and hearing on the campaign trail from the former POTUS is tapping into a deep and dark well of American reality.
“Donald Trump is popular in the Republican Party overwhelmingly because he is giving Republicans what they want,” Stevens states. “No one makes anybody vote for Donald Trump.”
“I said this before. I don’t think he hijacked the party: I think he revealed it,” Stevens continues. “And you know, there were those of us who worked for George Bush, this idea of compassion and conservatism, like me, Nicole Wallace, Matthew Dowd, I think it’s fair to say we saw this dark side of the party,” he adds. “But we thought it was the recessive gene, and that we, on the compassionate conservatives are the dominant gene. And I don’t know any conclusion to come to honestly, except we were wrong.”
With that chilling admission hanging there, today’s podcast also gets a bit comical and very personal.
Right from the start of its 50th season last month, Saturday Night Live has been going full in on the last weeks of the presidential race. To that, the still Lorne Michaels run show has brought in former cast members including Maya Rudolph as her Emmy winning Kamala Harris, Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff and, after perfecting George H.W. Bush over 30 years ago, Dana Carvey as Joe Biden.
With a long tradition of satire that has helped shape public perceptions of figures like Sarah Palin, Al Gore and Gerald Ford over the decades, SNL may be commanding center stage in this media frenzy race. What with Trump’s propensity to “weave” and Harris’ singular focus on sticking to her talking points in real life and on the NBC late nightery, Ted and Dominic look at the power and risk of SNL’s platform, its history, this season’s political breakout so far, and the possibility of a certain cameo.
Additionally, Danai Gurira joins the podcast to tell us about her new Instagram interview series with immigrant women now living in America. Part of her Love Our Girls campaign, the Walking Dead and Black Panther star’s initiative aims to spotlight how events in the United States are impacting the safety of women in other countries. Gurira details her plans in the remaining days of the presidential campaign as a surrogate for Harris, as well as her work for the nonpartisan Hometown Project/Headcount to boost voter turnout.
If you haven’t already, take a listen.
Stick with ElectionLine all the way to Election Day, & maybe beyond. Subscribe to the Deadline ElectionLine podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeart and all podcast platforms.
