Obama Rescue Plan, Jeff Roe Déjà Vu & Tonight’s Faux Debate

Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Tara Palmeri. I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving with your family. This edition is all about the thing keeping the Democrats up at night: how to win back young, Black, and Hispanic voters. There’s also some dish on the increasingly fractured DeSantis world. 🎧 Plus: Listen to my latest podcast with Florida whisperer Peter Schorsch, if you want even more DeSantis tea, or to my very newsy interview with N.H. Gov. Chris Sununu on Somebody’s Gotta Win. But first…

Newsom vs. DeSantis: Tonight’s debate between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, televised on Fox, may be the most desperate, shrill cry for help yet in this already interminable election cycle. Newsom, for his part, seems to be quietly attempting to keep his name in the second-stringer swirl in case Joe Biden suddenly has a surprising change of heart or polls eventually reach DEFCON 1. DeSantis, however, is trying to flaunt his street cred as the most conservative conservative… by juxtaposing himself with a liberal governor from a liberal state who has already become a Republican bogeyman. Absent the gangbusters ratings of the 2016 and 2020 cycles, Fox seemed here for it.DeSantis has had a challenging time underscoring his conservative bona fides from the debate stage, where his stiff posture and shouty style gets trampled by better performers, such as Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. Perhaps the contrast with Newsom might work if it wasn’t reeking of desperation, and at least proffer him the earned media to win a news cycle on Fox News and X/Twitter? Well, it’s worth a flier. DeSantis heads into the Iowa caucus in less than seven weeks polling at 17.5 percent, compared to Trump’s 44.7 percent, according to 538’s average of polls. The risk, of course, is that he will be further exposed as a less-than-stellar debater, this time up against a Democrat. Regardless, there will be clips for X and other socials. For Newsom, however, there’s very little risk. “There is nothing to lose for Gavin Newsom,” said a Republican strategist associated with another campaign. “He can run an amazing shadow campaign while also having the ability to ruin the DeSantis campaign, which would be a huge coup.”

And now for a news roundup on the Hill by my inimitable partner Abby Livingston…

McCarthy Math & Frontliners Economics

The Kevin Math Problem: Kevin McCarthy might be considering an exit from Congress ahead of the new year, as he insinuated at Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook conference. While it didn’t get nearly as much media heat as Elon Musk’s expletive-laden meltdown, the possibility is potentially much more disruptive. Political observers have Dec. 8 circled on their calendars, the California filing deadline that will determine whether he will run.Among other things, it helps explain why the movement to oust George Santos has been a ground-up effort, led in part by the New York Republican freshmen who clearly think sharing a media market with a fabulist is an existential threat to their re-elections. House members are on track to vote again on Friday for a Santos expulsion, and it appears his detractors may at last have the two-thirds of the chamber they need to toss him. But for Speaker Mike Johnson and the House leadership team, this next month could offer one step forward and two steps back. Republicans finally filled the vacant seat in Utah this week by swearing in Celeste Maloy. But if McCarthy and Santos exit the House, the Republican majority will diminish by two, reducing the current margin from 222-213 to 220-213. If it gets to that point, Republicans will have such a small majority that a stomach flu or delayed flight could upend a vote schedule. And that’s not even taking into consideration unforeseen illnesses, family crises, deaths, and, increasingly, the lure of jumping early to a lobbying career.

Hakeem’s Haul: The D.C.C.C. just released its monthly tabulation of each member’s financial support toward the 2024 House campaigns, and it appears that Hakeem Jeffries was the caucus’s top fundraiser, bringing in just under $84 million to the Democrats’ campaign arm. Additionally, committee records show he has donated about $5.4 million to the individual campaigns of “Frontliners” (vulnerable incumbents) and “Red-to-Blue candidates” (challengers to Republican incumbents). Those are big numbers for the House minority leader as he looks to step out of Nancy Pelosi’s shadow.

A Freshman’s Largesse: But one other thing that caught my eye: Freshman Jasmine Crockett holds a leadership slot and seems to be embracing the D.C.C.C.’s ideal of a member representing a safe Democratic seat—i.e., she’s magnanimously raising money for her colleagues even if her own job isn’t on the line.Barely into her first year in congress, the Dallas congresswoman has raised $440,000 for the D.C.C.C., just shy of the committee’s $500,000 assigned goal for her. But what especially caught my eye is how much she has donated from her own campaign toward Frontliners and Red-to-Blue. She also ranks high in the document’s tabulation column known as “member points,” which means she gives non-monetary help to colleagues’ campaigns (like appearing at fundraisers.) When looking at the goals proportionally, she is outpacing many of her more senior members of leadership. This is a freshman with situational awareness.

The Obama-Biden Thing & Jeff Roe Déjà Vu

As the White House confronts a Gen Z backlash, calls for an Obama intervention have been tempered by fresh anxiety over the party’s generational deficit and the president’s messaging strategy.

TARA PALMERI

As an incumbent president running for re-election against a twice-impeached, multi-indicted Florida Man, Joe Biden will have plenty of surrogate support. Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Maxwell Frost, Victor Shi, and other young voter advocates will be actively stumping on the ground and airwaves. The campaign will also enlist celebrities like LeBron James and Taylor Swift. But the most important surrogate may be his old boss, Barack Obama.Of course, Obama and Biden have a multilayered relationship that contains elements of profound trust (being the “last in the room,” Obamacare history, the Beau bereavement process) and complexity (the Hillary of it all, Obama’s refusal to back Biden in the early days of 2020, etcetera). Meanwhile, ever since Obama left the White House, his political posture has been calibrated to optimize scarcity for maximum impact. In a typical campaign cycle, after all, Obama will parachute in during the final weeks of the election, hold a half-dozen rallies, record a bunch of robocalls, collaborate with influencers, and usually sit for several broadcast TV and podcast interviews. This post-presidential strategy, as everyone knows, has been a source of occasional frustration and even resentment among Democrats, who still get chills recalling his eloquent vivisection of Herschel Walker heading into the 2022 midterms. While Obama didn’t have the best track record of endorsements as a sitting president, he remains a generational political icon to millennials and the younger Gen X crowd—a singular figure whose command of the Black, Hispanic, and college-aged vote fueled his historic election victory. But it’s not clear whether Obama—the party’s go-to get-out-the-vote pinch hitter—has similar sway over Gen Z, a cohort that has rapidly soured on Biden. In the recent, panic-inducing Times/Siena battleground state poll, Biden led Trump by only a single point among voters aged 18 to 29—a shocking historical aberration that, even if corrected by Election Day, suggests a deep well of animosity toward the president. In 2020, according to a survey out of Tufts, Biden won 61 percent of the voters between 18 and 29 (nationally, not in the same battleground states that the Times and Siena polled, but still an alarming discrepancy). Alas, Obama is now 62 years old, and the college students revolting against Biden for siding with Israel, among other issues, might not have the same warm-and-fuzzies for Obama that their parents did. “People don’t understand why these tepid nonwhite under-30s are so dangerous, and the harder you look at it, the worse the problem, because the solution is, ‘Oh they’ll come around by Election Day,’” said James Carville, who often consults with the people closest to Biden. Obama is likely to barnstorm the Democratic National Convention in August and hit battleground states. But he also has other legacy-adjacent priorities—in Chicago, Hollywood, and Washington. He and Michelle Obama are raising money for their endowment and have commitments to various Democratic committees. (“Just as he always has, President Obama looks forward to supporting Democrats up and down the ballot next fall, and no race has bigger stakes than President Biden’s re-election,” Obama spokesman Eric Schultz told me in a statement. “We are deliberate in picking our moments because our objective is to move the needle.”) If Obama were to be brought in early, it would likely have to be orchestrated by Anita Dunn, Biden’s top aide who remains close to the former first family. And yet Biden’s team, for their part, doesn’t want to be seen as too reliant on Obama. It’s bad enough that there’s a right-wing conspiracy promoted by Trump and other Republicans that the Obamas are pulling the strings. (“If only,” one Democratic strategist laughed. “Way to juice Black, young, and progressive turnout!”) One related problem that keeps emerging in quiet conversations is that Biden doesn’t exactly elicit a tribal spirit at a time when tribalism has superseded politics. “Trump was a grievance tribe, Obama was a hope tribe. We don’t have anything like that,” said one Democrat working to get celebrities engaged. Even Union Joe’s tribe has sort of been co-opted by Trump. “The thinking is that Democrats really need a tribe right now,” this person continued. Obama, at the very least, should be able to help Biden secure support among Black men, a critical area of need. “Black turnout has been awful since the 2020 election,” Carville sighed. “It is bad everywhere: it’s bad in Georgia, it was bad in Wisconsin, consultants call me all the time, ‘What’s up with Black turnout? What can I do?’ That’s the big problem.”

A MESSAGE FROM INSTAGRAM

Parents should be able to decide which apps are right for their teens.Apps can teach teens skills or ignite their creativity. But with access to so many apps, parents should have a say in which ones their teens download. That’s why Instagram wants to work with Congress to require parental approval wherever teens under 16 download apps. Learn more.

Biden’s Not-Listening Tour

While there’s no doubt in Washington that 2024 will be all about messaging and winning back the youth and nonwhite vote, some Democratic-aligned political groups—nonprofits like the National Action Network, Human Rights Campaign, Voto Latino, the NAACP and occasionally Planned Parenthood, etcetera—seem befuddled with how the White House is managing their involvement.During the Obama years, these groups were typically brought into the West Wing for quarterly strategy sessions with the president and his top advisers, including David Axelrod and David Plouffe, during which staff would talk through both pregame and postgame election analysis. These days, however, I’m told the most senior person in the room is Jen O’Malley Dillon, and that President Biden does not attend. Indeed, the last time Biden had an open conversation with Hispanic groups like National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, Mi Familia Vota, Latino Victory, Unidos, and Voto Latino was in August 2021. While other groups met with Biden’s team after the 2022 midterms, one attendee told me that it felt like more of a “high five” than a chance for real feedback. “The meetings feel prescriptive,” said the attendee, who represents one of the groups. “Before you felt like you were in an actual war room.” (Spokespeople for the White House and the Biden campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.) The Biden White House still reaches out to these groups individually, and of course, every administration has their own organizational and communications style. The president’s re-election campaign has invested $25 million in paid Black and Latino media, where they’ll point to their historic slate of legislation. The Biden campaign is also considering getting on TikTok and has been looking for unconventional outlets to reach out to younger people. (I hear they plan to utilize an army of influencers to connect with this demographic, and they’re considering giving White House access to these young media influencers.) But when it comes to more traditional political groups, the manner of the Biden team’s outreach has made these organizations feel siloed—reminiscent of an older, less collaborative mode of politics. And the stakes feel particularly heightened when poll after poll shows Biden struggling with his messaging to these very interest groups and their constituents. “It used to be a two-way conversion, it would be what worked, what didn’t work,” said the person who attended these White House meetings. “There’s no feedback loop [now]. It’s very different.”

Cruz Flashbacks in DeSantis Land

Meanwhile, the failure of Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential run continues to loom over Ron DeSantis. The two campaigns, after all, share copious DNA: The DeSantis team is stacked with Cruz alumni like Ken Cuccinelli, David Polyansky, and especially Jeff Roe—who is leading the primary DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down—to run a variation on the Cruz presidential playbook: a go-big-or-go-home strategy in Iowa; an aversion to attacking Trump head-on; and managing the candidate’s logistics—travel, ground operations, door knocks, etcetera—through the PAC, rather than the campaign.Now, with the launch of a new super PAC, Fight Right, alumni are experiencing yet another wave of flashbacks. The creation of the second PAC—which is connected to DeSantis allies Jeff Aaron, David Dewhirst, and Scott Ross—is being presented as a way for DeSantis allies to more aggressively attack opponents like Nikki Haley without the negativity ricocheting back on the candidate, who is now so closely associated with Never Back Down. In a memo to supporters, it was pitched that Fight Right will handle all TV ads and Never Back Down will handle the ground operations. Having DeSantis bless another, competing PAC, filled with loyalists from Tallahassee, is bound to cause divisions—as if there weren’t enough internally. Just last week, after all, Never Back Down C.E.O. Chris Jankowski publicly resigned, saying his disagreements with the organization went “well beyond a difference of strategic opinion.” The day before, NBC News had reported that PAC board member Scott Wagner, a longtime friend of DeSantis, almost came to blows with Roe and had to be restrained. During the Cruz campaign, money flowed between his three competing super PACs—all controlled by different donors—depending on whether they were in or out of favor with the campaign. “We didn’t trust everyone in super PAC 1, and then we shifted the money to super PAC 2,” recalled a Cruz campaign alum. “Having a number of super PACs caused the problems in the end.” One of the PACs had $10 million in the bank that it somehow never spent. History may repeat itself, again: If DeSantis is unhappy with Never Back Down at this point, it would seem almost impossible to neuter the once $130 million behemoth since it’s become so integral to all the campaign’s operations. It’s not like DeSantis can rely on his own team, which burned through too much money too early. Alas, Fight Right also has the disadvantage of locking in ads later, which means paying a higher rate. And it’ll be hard to shift gears, strategically, when DeSantis has already outsourced so much of his campaign. Jeff Roe built the ship, and it isn’t going anywhere.

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

Zucker’s U.K. Circuit

Can Jeff Zucker placate the Telegraph skeptics?

DYLAN BYERS

Telegraph Deal Structure

Notes from the finance-media-tech votex.

WILLIAM D. COHAN

Johnson’s Biological Clock

The latest rumblings from Capitol Hill.

TINA NGUYEN

Bezos’s NFL Gambit

Why did Amazon pay $100M for a single NFL game?

JULIA ALEXANDER

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