Top Dem Strategist on the 2024 Race: ‘I Would Much Rather Be Us Than Them’

You may not know Simon Rosenberg by name. But if you listened to Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention, you have a sense of his influence. "You're gonna have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it," Clinton told a raucous crowd in Chicago. "Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs — about 50 million under Democrats, 1 million under Republicans. 50 to 1! Coach Walz will tell ya, if you're up 50 to 1 — you're winning!"

That statistical analysis came from Rosenberg , who is well known to Clinton's speechwriter, and a longtime party strategist. Rosenberg bears the experience and battle-scars of two presidential campaigns, senior roles at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well having run the progressive think tank New Democrat Network. Rosenberg now runs his own hub for political analysis, commentary and engagement called Hopium Chronicles .

Rosenberg is one of the few prominent political voices to have called bullshit on the 2022 "Red Wave" election, before it fizzled out — identifying a campaign of deceptive partisan Republican polling that fed and sustained a skewed media narrative of impending Democratic doom.

Rolling Stone spoke with Rosenberg on Thursday last week to get his take on the state of the 2024 election. With voting now beginning, Vice President Kamala Harris on a roll after a dominant debate , Donald Trump retreating to his safety blanket of bigotry , and key state-wide candidates like Mark "Black Nazi" Robinson in North Carolina creating a drag on the ticket, the strategist is bullish on Democratic prospects. But only if party activists commit to the hard work of the home stretch.

The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

What's your view of the 2024 contest from 10,000 feet?

The debate did change the election. The contrast of the campaign — between our strong candidate and their ugly candidate — did what Democrats wanted. Kamala Harris has picked up a point or two in national polls, and there's been a big spike in enthusiasm. The Trump campaign has looked lost and wandering. We've had a really good week. And then we had the interest rate cut , which is going to have an immediate impact on many consumers. With the voting season beginning in earnest, with Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia starting to vote in person, I would much rather be us than them.

We've got a modest lead — sort of around Biden 2020 numbers right now. And it's far more likely over the next 40-plus days, that we push the election a little bit toward us, rather than that they push the election toward them. We have more money — we are dramatically outraising. We have far more volunteers. We have far greater enthusiasm. The voter registration numbers have now started shifting toward us in ways that were not true eight weeks ago. We're all of a sudden in a superior position on social media. And we have a far better ticket than they do — just measured by data. Our candidates are much more popular than theirs. We're running on an agenda that is geared toward the concerns that American people have, while they're talking about sharks and batteries and dogs and cats .

There are also structural things that will start to come into play: The weak performance of their Senate and gubernatorial candidates will continue to be a drag on them. The abortion ballot initiatives will give us a little bit of a boost in a few critical places. Our party is also very unified in effort, while their party is divided, and Trump is facing unprecedented and growing opposition from Republicans . We enter this home stretch in a far stronger position. And so I'm very optimistic.

You were bullish on 2022, when it was far from a popular take. And you were correct — the mythical Red Wave did not materialize to create big GOP majorities. But you were also bullish on Joe Biden's chances back in the spring, before he dropped out.

To take things back a bit, I believe that Dobbs [the Supreme Court decision that abolished federal abortion rights] was a before-and-after moment in our politics. And that Trump in 2024 — whether it was against Joe Biden or Kamala Harris — was going to be facing enormous headwinds. Because in between 2020 and this election, he had tried to overturn the American democracy. And he stripped the rights and freedoms away of the women of America.

What happened in 2022 is that the midterm did not behave like a normal midterm. It was the reaction to Dobbs, and the manifest extremism of MAGA. And also because our financial and volunteer advantages, we were able to push our performance in many of these swing districts to the upper end of what was possible.

I've always believed that the fundamental structure of this 2024 election was favorable to us. Prior to the debate, it was my view that Joe Biden would have the opportunity to tell his story about how he'd made things better for people, and then remind people about who Trump was. On the day of the debate, he was ahead in national polling. He was ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin on the 538 averages.

Whatever opportunity Biden had to regain the initiative was lost after his debate performance . But Kamala Harris has done an extraordinary job, and we're starting to see the structural advantages materialize. By Biden stepping out of the race, it became far harder for Trump to hide his extremism and his ugliness. It became very exposed in the debate.

There's a received wisdom among many election watchers that Trump is likely to overperform his polling. What's your take on that?

Since Dobbs, there's been one consistent dynamic, which is that Democrats have been overperforming polls and Republicans have been underperforming. Something broke inside the Republican Party with Dobbs. For a lot of the non-MAGA Republicans in the GOP coalition it was just a bridge too far. When polled they said, I'm going to go vote for Donald Trump or for a Senate candidate. But when it came to actually pulling the lever they couldn't do it. And that's part of what happened in Europe — in the French elections, where the fascists did far worse in actual voting than they did in polling. When it came to actually pulling the lever, they couldn't do it, and they look for other options, right?

Look at what happened with Nikki Haley. Trump, in the first 20 primaries in the Republican primary season, underperformed public polling in 19 states. It's amazing that something of this significance is still not baked into our understanding of this election. If you believe that Trump is going to overperform his polls and has some kind of hidden secret superpower, it's making it difficult for you to see data that says that's actually not happening anymore.

You've been sounding an alarm about junk Republican polling, and how it can skew public perception about the state of the race.

What happened toward the end of 2022 was that the Republicans flooded the battleground states with very Republican-heavy polling that pushed all the polling averages to much more favorable positions for the Republicans. So RealClearPolitics had its final map with the Republicans getting to 54 seats in the Senate, and there being a big Red Wave.

The reason that happened is that there was an organized effort by the Republican Party to actually shape the understanding of the election by flooding the polling averages and pushing them more Republican. We have seen some of those same Red Wave pollsters, who were active in 2022 starting to produce state-based polls. What's the justification for all this public Republican polling? They're not doing this as a public service. So what could be the rationale, or the theory of the case? Here's the reality: All late money goes to winning the election. They have to view the shaping of the information environment as one of the ways they win the election.

This may be relevant to what's happening in North Carolina. In the last two weeks, there have been five independent polls in North Carolina. Four of them have Harris ahead of Trump. One has her tied. But there have also been five Republican polls since the debate, and they all have Trump ahead, and they're all these same Red Wave pollsters. It could be that they knew this Mark Robinson story would be breaking, and they wanted to try to soften the blow.

If you look at Pennsylvania, there were probably eight Republican polls taken there in the last three weeks — it's like 35 or 40 percent of all the polls. Regular people can't trust polling averages that have that much Republican input.

What happens is that the right-wing ecosystem can then seize on those Republican-leaning polls and say: See, Trump is still winning. Because they need to have it. It isn't really possible for Donald Trump to be losing this election, in their world. His whole campaign is built upon the foundation that he is winning in the polls and he is strong, and she is losing and she is weak. It's like the brand architecture of the 2024 Trump campaign.

But that is no longer true, and it's a big problem, because if you take away that he's winning and he's strong, what's left is that he's extreme and he's a rapist and a fraudster and a traitor and a felon. All that's left when you pull the curtain back from the Wizard, is something that's hugely ugly.

And the notion that he could be losing to this woman, who is biracial, the child of immigrants, creates an even bigger psychic disturbance in their entire ecosystem, right? And so they're going to be spending enormous time and energy and money to try to construct some kind of plausible story that he's not losing.

The other reason this matters is that if he's going to contest the election, he needs to have some way of arguing that he was actually leading — and then the election was stolen from him. So one of the central projects of MAGA in the next 40-something days is going to be to continue to create a data construct that allows him to say that he's winning.

You brought up Mark Robinson, and you also talked about sort of the bad candidate problem. How is that going to play in key states?

It's a serious problem for them. It's going to be really unhelpful having Senate candidates who are losing by seven, eight points in these battleground states, who are bad candidates, who are generating bad media, that are hurting the entire Republican brand, that are causing more heightened defections from the ticket. We're learning today with Mark Robinson that it can be really bad . It's very possible that Kari Lake and Mark Robinson are going to make Kamala Harris president.

At the convention, Bill Clinton riffed on a statistic you'd introduced into Democratic circles, which is that since the end of the Cold War, Democratic presidents have overseen something like 50 million jobs created, while Republican presidents have created 1 million. Why don't Democrats lead and end with that?

When Democrats are in power, things get better, and when Republicans have power things get worse. I look at 1989 as the beginning of a new era of American politics — post the Cold War and entering an age of globalization. We've now had three consecutive Democratic presidents who have seen robust job growth and economic growth and rising wages. And now, also, Biden's had a very strong stock market, as Clinton and Obama did. The last three Republican presidents have seen recessions, and the struggle of the middle class, and higher deficits. The Republican Party has continually been flummoxed and struggled to find a way of making America work in a more complicated global age.

That contrast between our success and their failure is the most important, least understood story in our politics today. When you look at all of this data, and you look at American politics, and you reduce all this down to a left and a right that is equally virtuous and equally full of vice, you're creating a distortion about what's actually happened in the country. There's no symmetry. There's sort of a wild — what's the right word — Olympian level of asymmetry in our politics.

Because there's been one good political party in America and another really bad political party. And they're nothing like one another. The truth is, there's only one party in America that's good at this capitalism thing, and it's us. It's not them. There's been one successful party in an age of globalization, and another one that has repeatedly failed and let us down — and that failure has now led to the radicalization and the takeover by extremists.

It's interesting to me that the Republican failure has persisted even as the GOP has contorted itself from Bush-era neoconservatism to Trumpy populism.

This all goes back to the Southern Strategy. In the mid-1960s, the Democratic Party made a decision to join the Republicans as being the party of racial reconciliation in America — after having been a party that was opposed to that for much of its history. It embraced the Civil Rights movement. [Lyndon] Johnson, after Kennedy was killed, passed the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act.

The Republican Party had a decision to make. Do they welcome the Democrats into the place they had historically been? The Party of Lincoln. Or do they become the [former] Democratic Party? And in what was a tragic decision for America and the world, the Republican Party of the mid-1960s made a decision to abandon its historic mission, and became a party, through the Southern Strategy, fully committed to a politics of exploitation and racial fear.

The Southern Strategy ended up "working." Because it broke the hammer lock the Democratic Party had on the presidency and eventually the Congress. The Republicans won five out of six elections from 1968 to 1988. They had a very dominant run after adopting this exploitation of racial fear as their central organizing principle.

But what it meant was that the modern Republican Party never really had an economic policy. Its economic strategy was to cut taxes for their people and to have less money go to those "other people," right? That's not an economic strategy, that's a social policy strategy, that's a racial strategy. It was grounded in tribalism. Exploitation of racial fear was central to their domestic offering. Willie Horton — you can go down the list.

What kept them in check under Reagan, because of the Cold War, was their anti-communism. The commitment to democracy that was at the core of anti-communism. Therefore, the aspirational goals of democracy were still central to who Republicans were.

But when the Cold War ended, there was no break on the illiberal impulses and the tribal impulses of what was left of the party of Reagan. That part of the Republican story faded, and all that was left was this naked Southern Strategy, this tribal domestic offering, which has now reached its apogee under Donald Trump. It has descended into this proto-fascistic mess that it is now.

What's amazing is that, in a moment of extraordinary crisis for Trump's candidacy, where do they go? What's their comfort zone. He went back to Mexican rapists. This time it's in the form of Haitians. This is the core and the engine of the Republican Party, which is exploitation of racial fear. What's happened in Springfield, Ohio, is tragic. It's terrible. But there's also something deeply ludicrous and pathetic and ridiculous. You have Donald Trump threatening to deport Haitians to Venezuela, right? He's got all these racial boogeymen, like, all confused in his head.

Connect this tribalism to the threat that Trump and his MAGA movement pose to democracy.

The last four presidential elections, Democrats have averaged 51 percent of the vote; Republicans have averaged 46.5 percent of the vote. That's our best showing as a political party since FDRs four elections in the 1930s and 1940s. And it is a sign that this is actually a center-left country.

They're aware they've lost the demographic battle. Violating the rules and norms and laws of our democracy is now a central organizing strategy of the Republican Party, because they do not believe they can really compete in an open election, demographically, any longer. So It's okay for them to now try to change the electoral college rules in Nebraska , for instance, weeks before the election.

With their descent into becoming a fascist party, the strongman becomes justified in bending the rules, bending discourse, bending truth to their will — because of some higher purpose. And in this case, it's defending the white tribe from the "hordes" that are literally, if you listen to Trump's language, despoiling the gene pool in America, "poisoning" our blood , all this stuff.

This isn't just rhetoric. This is what they really believe. It is why [former Trump White House aide] Stephen Miller is talking about "denaturalization," and about stripping citizenship from people, and the deportation of people who are citizens of the United States. This is now a central part of what they think they're going to go do.

Is the 2024 election a chance to deliver that racist project a deeper setback?

It would be fitting that a biracial woman from Northern California, whose two parents were immigrants to the United States, would be the one that would end Trump's political career. If you could have written a script about how this comes to an end, this is about as good as it gets.

We have a lot of work to do. We can have the election that we all want to have, but we have to go to work. We have to seize it. And what makes me confident is that millions of Americans have been going to work on behalf of democracy for many years now, and they're experienced and capable. And now they've got one big job to do — it's to go win this thing.

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