This Bush and Romney Campaign Vet Is Extremely Bullish on Kamala Harris’s Chances

In a presidential election so tight that no single poll can possibly be predictive—or comforting—experience is a premium. Stuart Stevens, the campaign cowboy who famously left the GOP to turn his fire on Trump as a member of the Lincoln Project, is nothing if not experienced.

I first met Stevens 20 years ago when he was a media consultant on George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, responsible for helping make the GOP convention film featuring footage of Bush throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium after 9/11 that recast the flailing wartime president as a sure-handed Nolan Ryan against a strikeout John Kerry (while fellow Bush adviser Chris LaCivita, now a manager of Trump’s campaign, smeared Kerry with the notorious “swift boat” ads). Later, Stevens ran Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 bid, itself a harbinger of Trumpian things to come, and one of the things that precipitated Stevens’s exit from the party.

Stevens can be relied on to have a forceful opinion, and usually a damned smart one, his sure-handed command of the facts delivered in a barrel-aged Mississippi accent. Witness his artful dismantling of pro-Trump hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, using Ackman’s own words to hog-tie him to Trump’s rankest comments. “The ballot box isn’t a cafeteria where you can go down the line and pick and choose what you like,” wrote Stevens on X. “If you vote for Trump, you are voting for a criminal out on bail who describes non-white immigrants with the same language as National Socialism described Jews.”

Frank Rich, the columnist and executive producer of Veep and Succession, called it “as powerful a moral and political demolition job as I’ve ever read.”

On Trump’s narcissism, Stevens is merciless—“You pet him, he follows you home”—and on his own former party’s retrogression, even more so: “They are selling pagers in an iPhone world.”

Surety is Stevens’s business. And when asked who he believes will win the most important election of our lifetimes on November 5, his answer is a fastball straight down the middle. Read on.

Vanity Fair: I was talking to a former Bush White House official and he said he thought the Harris campaign is operating out of some kind of panic. That the surge of interviews she’s been giving recently signals that the campaign must have seen bad internal polling and is now freaking out. What’s your read?

Stuart Stevens: I would say that’s probably somebody who worked in the White House but didn’t work in campaigns a lot. I think the Harris campaign is running what we’re probably going to look back at as the best presidential campaign ever run.

Really?

The structure of the race is the same. That’s why I also think Joe Biden could have won. Forty-seven percent of the country is MAGA, 53% isn’t. The Harris campaign has a very simple goal: Coalesce as much as they can of the 53%. So how are they doing? Well, we woke up today and Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders are supporting the same candidate for president. Not so bad.

The Harris campaign has done a balance of dealing with these issues you would deal with in a normal race—economy, border—while reminding people that this isn’t remotely a normal race. And they’re doing things that no one’s done before, like showing clips of a Trump rally at a Harris rally, which was brilliant. I wish I was in the room and came up with that idea. They’re showing a lot of composure. It’s like sports. They seem very focused, calm. They have a plan. They have unlimited resources.

And Trump—I mean, do you really think somebody sat in a room and said, “Look, we have a weakness with people who believe that there should be military tribunals, so you need to go out and talk about that to store up the military-tribunal vote”? There is no plan except voter intimidation. These polls, what do they show you? Trump has a really hard time making 47%. He won with 46.1%. Romney lost with 47.2% and this guy, out on bail, has won one election in his life, with 46.1%. You don’t see Trump-like candidates doing well in states like Pennsylvania.

It’s a very chaotic campaign that has no focus. Fundamentally, what is the bargain you get when you vote Republican? This is why the Senate races for Republicans are hurting. What do you get? They say, “Well, you know these thousands of brutal, armed immigrants that you have to deal with every day trying to drive to work? I’ll get rid of those.” Except they aren’t there, right? It’s the festival of imaginary demons.

That’s a good way of putting it.

And all of these polls that show Harris getting under 90% of the Black vote are wrong. Nineteen sixty-four, Barry Goldwater got 7% of the Black vote; 2020, Trump got 8%. That’s one point every 56 years. It’s not going to change. I can’t tell you how many times I sat at Republican campaigns with very good pollsters showing us getting 15 to 20% of the Black vote. But I can tell you how many times it happened: Never.

Trump yesterday is the best day Trump’s going to have. Today, he’s worse. Tomorrow, he’ll be worse. He’s a guy who is in a physical and mental decline and he clearly is not enjoying himself. He saw that article where Chris LaCivita is making $22 million. He’s surrounded by people who just backed up the truck. They don’t care about Trump. Same thing happened last time with Brad Parscale. Trump gets taken to the cleaners by consultants. The entire Trump campaign has been a large criminal enterprise since inception.

LaCivita is known for his infamous swift boating of John Kerry in 2004. Has he come up with a version of swift boating in this election?

Well, the closest would be the trans policy attacks. But that’s a policy that was put in place when Trump was president by his own Bureau of Prisons. We just made an ad about this in the Lincoln Project that we rolled out this morning. They’re throwing huge amounts of money at this issue. And there’s two ways to look at it: One, you can say, well, they’re doing it because it’s working; two, they’re doing it because they don’t know what else to do. I think it’s more the latter than the former. You can just feel in campaigns when they’re flailing around. Campaigns are ultimately arguments. And when you’re in an argument, the other side starts sputtering and then shifts off course and throws out random stuff. And the Trump campaign has never come to grips of how to run against the vice president.

I think Chris LaCivita is a very competent campaign guy who fell into a honeypot. There’s a part of me that has wanted to do this, but for obvious reasons, I can’t. If I went on television two months ago and said, “You know, I’ve really looked at this wrong, I think Donald Trump should be president. You know, he’s learned a lot.” Within 72 hours, I would get an offer from the Trump campaign to come work for him. He’s completely transactional.

Trump lives in a world of people exploiting other people, but he and his campaign are trying to convince people that things are so desperate in America that the solution has to be radical.

Every autocrat does that. That’s Viktor Orbán. “We have to be terrified of immigrants.” There weren’t a lot of immigrants in Hungary, right? And this is why he attacks the media when they show a reality. I mean, what’s the list of media that he’s threatened to sue and try to shut down? ABC, 60 Minutes, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post. What are you going to give a president who stole the White House? Probably a zero favorability.

I would love to see numbers of those who think that we live in a democracy—which is to say that Joe Biden was legally elected. I think you’re going to see numbers that are much closer to reality. There is this very human need to try to normalize this race and make it like Romney-Ryan versus Obama—it’s just not.

What leaps to mind is The New York Times, and many of the mainstream outlets that we depend on—and I hate to say this about my own business—but they’re creating a false equivalence between the two candidates.

I think that this generation of journalists, as has been the case for several generations, were brought up in a system in which objectivity was considered the greatest good. And that completely falls apart when you have one side that cares nothing about the truth. How do you tell both sides of a lie? I think that that’s what journalism has been struggling with in good faith.

I heard this Fresh Air interview with Maggie Haberman, who I think is a superb reporter. She was being asked, “What about those who are criticizing the media or criticizing The New York Times?” She said it was [an industry] that is doing this. And I kind of scratched my head. The classic was a headline they ran about Trump when he went off on his racist, National Socialist nostalgia about genes. And the headline was something like, “He Continues With His Fascination With Genes.” You could have written it about a Nobel Prize laureate. This is “Jeffrey Dahmer and Julia Child: Two Famous Chefs With Different Views Toward Ingredients.” I think it’s a failure. Do I have an easy answer? It took years for the media to grow accustomed to calling Trump a liar, but every article that mentions Trump should refer to him as a felon out on bail.

David French recently pointed out that there are two different kinds of people voting for Trump. There’s MAGA, who wants him to burn the entire government down and who believes everything that he says; and there are old-line Republicans who don’t really believe anything he says and think he’s just going to cut taxes and be normal. And if you’re the Harris campaign, do you even bother with any portion of that side?

There’s never been as much information available, as easily, in the history of American politics. It’s a willful ignorance. And that’s one of the reasons I have little patience or respect for it. I think that there’s a third category: Republicans who actually like a lot of the dark side of Trump but don’t want to admit it. I had this back-and-forth with Bill Ackman. “I’m not for Trump because of the tax cuts.” These are Republicans who [at some point] didn’t know which fork to pick up. They think Trump is crass and sort of a dummy, yeah, but they are afraid of change. They see Trump as performing that classic conservative role, as William Buckley said, of standing in front of history and saying, “Stop.” But people like to forget that Buckley started out as a stone-cold racist. He later recanted—in good faith, I think—but it’s just not patriotic to support Trump.

Maybe the Nikki Haley people are still peelable.

Women are the dividing line—the dividing line in Nikki Haley versus Trump, with whether or not you believe Trump is the legally elected president.

When you think about the strategies of the two camps, the Harris campaign has a much greater focus on ground game. The Trump campaign is playing catch-up now. What’s happening there?

You look at [American Made Media Consultants] in the 2020 race. It had tens of millions of dollars running through it; we have no idea where that went. It was [approved] by Jared Kushner, you know. They’re paying [Trump] family members. They shut down all of this voter outreach. And there isn’t anything out there. And Elon Musk, who suffers from this illusion that he understands politics, is paying consultants to try to put together a ground operation. I can promise you that those operatives think this is a lot more about their next beach house than being able to accomplish it.

The bro culture on the right can seem like a big dick-swinging contest. And if you’re a billionaire, well, gee, there’s a contest I can win just by having money and lots of opinions. With the emotional response of a 12-year-old.

And how’s that working out for Elon Musk? How’s his brand doing?

But you just can’t believe that he would do that to himself.

Well, I mean, a guy who, according to The Wall Street Journal, has an extensive history of drug use, who is clearly unstable, with no filters, who has surrounded himself with people who he’s made vastly wealthy, so they won’t say no to him—like the board of Tesla. It’s a toxic combination. [Editor’s note: In response to the WSJ article, Musk wrote on X, “I agreed, at NASA’s request, to do 3 years of random drug testing. Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol.”] It has the feel of maybe the second-to-last Elvis tour. We’re entering the Fat Elvis phase. Could he save himself? Yeah. Is it likely?

And you know what I always find? Here’s this little group that has this odd South African connection. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks—they became vastly wealthy and it was only possible in a system like America. And they seem determined to change that system.

It’s very odd.

They would rather be oligarchs in Russia.

Every day a new poll comes around and traumatizes Democrats. How do you view polls in this current environment?

You should look at polls the way you look at a scale. You have a bathroom scale, you may not know if it’s exactly right, but probably it’s as accurate today as it was last week, as it’ll be next week. So if you compare polls that have the same methodology, you just want to know, “Am I gaining or losing weight?” The number doesn’t matter. What is the trend? The trend has been that Trump, since his convention, has lost eight points total? Nine points? That’s huge movement. Huge. We haven’t seen movement like that since 1988 with Bush and Dukakis. And it gets muddled because people compare where it was when Harris got in the race to Trump. But that’s not the way to look at it.

Eight years ago, Trump met a moment. He was a freakish historical event.

He couldn’t run as a Democrat, but he could look at those Republicans and say, “These people really don’t believe much of what they say are deeply held beliefs and if I can give them power, they’ll go along with it.” So a guy who talks in public about dating his daughter becomes a Republican nominee, yeah? And he was right. And that’s what led me to write that book [It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump]. It wouldn’t have happened in the Democratic Party.

One of the selling points of the Harris campaign is that if Trump is defeated, that’s it for Trump. I mean, how could the Republican Party continue with him? A guy who lost every election for Republicans since 2018 and probably isn’t going to run again. I’m speculating here, but is there any possibility that the Republican Party reforms or rehabilitates or morphs into anything resembling its previous incarnation?

What historical time are we talking about? Your lifetime?

Let’s say 2028.

Donald Trump is the most popular figure in the Republican Party because he is what the Republican Party wants to be. He didn’t steal the Republican Party—he revealed it. They had plenty of choices. They could have voted for my old client, Asa Hutchinson. They could have voted for my old client, Chris Christie. No, Trump is what they want. This is why they like Russia so much. They look at Russia, they got all white men in power. Don’t deal with women. They’re no gays. They have elections that are performative, but not determinative, and they’re looking pretty good. Yeah, I think all of this over-the-top anger about trans people, which is basically what all these Republican candidates are running on, is because Republicans never came to peace with same-sex marriage. They just shut up about it. And trans rights are a way to kind of try to claw that back.

Listen, we don’t talk enough about race. By far, Trump’s coalition is 85% white in a country that’s 59% white. We talked about how America is becoming a minority majority country. If you are 16 years or younger, the majority of Americans are not white. We’ve already become that. Odds look really, really good to me that they’re still going to be non-white at 18. And that’s what the Republican Party is terrified of and all this absurdity where they’re doing better with Black voters—so instead of 93% of Black men being against you, only 88% are. It’s like somebody that’s losing $5 on every sale but is going to make it up in volume. How’s that work? They made the wrong bet. They’re at war with the future. They’re at war with modern America. They get in a fight with Nike over Colin Kaepernick. What happened? Nike made [$6 billion]. Ron DeSantis gets in a war with Disney, the happiness company. Back in COVID, they got in a fight with NASCAR because NASCAR banned the Confederate flag, or Walmart required masks for a while. “I hate Taylor Swift.” We got a problem with women, so we’re going to fix it by attacking Taylor Swift.

Can this genie be put back in the bottle? Does the Republican Party even mean anything again after Trump?

Well, look, there is a market need for a center-right party eventually. Eventually one will emerge, but I think it’s going to take a long time. You’re going to have to defeat Republicans over and over.

Trump will run for the nomination again and in all likelihood will win if he’s alive. Or Ivanka will run, or one of the dingbat sons. This idea that Trumpism came in and hijacked the Republican Party—on a plane that’s hijacked, people are not happy. The Republican Party is very happy, which means you’re not being hijacked. And that’s just a reality. And it is an excruciatingly painful thing for me to admit it. I spent years building up this party. Go back and read Bush’s 2000 acceptance speech that Michael Gerson wrote. That guy couldn’t get 5% in the Republican Party today. It’s like a document from a lost civilization. It’s all about grace and kindness and service, humility. You get laughed off the stage.

You were the senior strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, which was the last “normal” Republican candidate. Is there anything you could have done differently to change the course of history? Any regrets?

I mean, I don’t think about that any more than about 10 times a day. There seem to be people that go through life with no regrets and then there’s people like me. So, yeah, of course, I think about that all the time. But I thought about it the day after the race and I thought about it every day in the race. You could be doing something differently. I think that’s just how you should run races. What we saw in Romney was that there was a group of these low-frequency white voters that couldn’t have cared less about what we were talking about—Russia, the economy. But if you went out and were going to do the racist stuff Trump did—talking about Muslims ban, Mexicans are rapists—you could get their attention. If you had walked into Mitt Romney’s office and suggested that, you would have left without a job. But just in a political science way, if you did that, the votes you gained you would lose from college-educated Republicans. And this is exactly what was happening up until the [James Comey] letter. Just enough came over to Trump. If you’d held the election two days before, two days afterwards, [Hillary Clinton] probably would have won.

I didn’t initially believe Liz Cheney’s advocacy would have much impact, but seeing them onstage in an Oprah Winfrey–type format this week was more powerful than I’d imagined.

The race is about Donald Trump and they know that. And yes, you have to go out and lay out your policies. These are sort of mandatory. You have to do a triple axel. But they know that that’s not where the race is going to be won or lost. And that’s really smart. Harris executes that very well. Weirdly, I think one of the best moments she’s had is when she was asked, “Would you have done something differently from Biden that you can point to?” And she says, “Nothing comes to mind.” You have to say that. But that’s a hard thing to say.

I’ve been wondering if George W. Bush himself will weigh in on this election. Bush may be taking a pragmatic view that even if he did want Harris to win, coming out and saying so might not be helping her.

The people who would listen to Bush are people who are listening to Liz Cheney. Far be it from me to judge what a former president should do and the role they should play, but in an empirical, political science sense, if a former Republican president, George Bush, announced support for the Democrat, would it help? Yes.

Who do you think is going to win this election?

Harris is going to win fairly comfortably. I think Harris is gonna win by a larger margin than 2020. [Republicans are] gonna say this election was rigged, and the Republican Party is going to fail again. And it’s going to be very, very ugly. And you can look at what these states are doing to protect [vote] counting centers, and take comfort in that, but what [the GOP] is saying is we’re preparing to win a pitched battle over a counting center.

They’re desperate.

I was talking to a friend of mine in France after the elections with [Emmanuel] Macron, and I said, “Is anybody going to challenge this?” And he says, with no irony intended, “This isn’t America.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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