Walking Into trap?

David Axelrod: Democrats Are Walking Into Trump’s Trap

David Axelrod on 2020, his prediction for the midterms and whether he sees any politician who can recapture the Obama magic.

By TIM ALBERTA

David Axelrod doesn’t like the path the country—or the Democratic Party—is on.

The chief strategist who steered Barack Obama’s winning White House campaigns worries that President Donald Trump has laid a trap—and that his party is walking right into it. “Escalation breeds escalation,” Axelrod said in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “And within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries. He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so, there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.”

Stressing that “civility actually is a really important element of politics,” Axelrod criticized Hillary Clinton and former Attorney General Eric Holder for recent comments they’ve made, and described the backlash he has faced for urging Democrats to avoid confrontation. The best way to defeat Trump, Axelrod argued, is by nominating someone who can appeal to an exhausted electorate.

“I don’t think people will be looking for a Democratic version of Trump,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll be looking for people who can go jibe for jibe and low blow for low blow. I think people are going to be looking for someone who can pull this country out of this hothouse that we’re in.”

At his offices in Chicago, where he directs the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, we discussed Axelrod’s predictions for the midterm elections, the risk of overreach with a new House majority, and the strengths and vulnerabilities of the top-tier 2020 Democratic hopefuls.

This transcript has been edited for length, readability and clarity.

ALBERTA: We had a string of bomb threats [last] week. Your former boss, President Obama, was one target, and your current employer, CNN, was another one. I just wonder where you see the country now in terms of the escalating polarization that we’ve been witnessing, and if there’s any way to bring the temperature down?

AXELROD: I think that what we’ve discovered is that there is political capital in polarization; there’s political capital in incitement. The president’s a master at it. But there are also consequences to that. We’re a country of 330 million people, and there are people out there whose violent inclinations are going to be activated by what they hear. And so, the question is whether the country itself demands something different.

I know it is unpopular to say this among some of my own friends, but escalation breeds escalation, and one of the things that troubles me—civility actually is a really important element of politics. We’ve had uncivil times before. We’ve had civil war, so it’s not like this is new to American politics, but we need to somehow find some common qualities in each other, common concerns that join us as Americans and we have to stop this mad cycle. I’ve been very critical of the president because I think he has incited and encouraged violence through his rhetoric. You know, people tweeted back to me and said, “Well, do you still think we should be civil?” and I’m trying to understand what that means. Does that mean that if they send out bombs, we should send out bombs? That, to me, is a mad cycle that leads only to really dark places.

ALBERTA: To your point about escalation begetting escalation, Hillary Clinton came under fire recently for her comment that Democrats cannot be civil with Republicans right now.

AXELROD: I think she rightly came out after she and President Clinton were the target of this attempted bombing, and said, ‘We need to come together as a country.’ But you know, you can’t say in one week, ‘We should be uncivil,’ and then the next week say, ‘Come together.’ We need to have a consistent commitment to that. And within the Democratic Party, I think there is a big debate about how to deal with Trump because he has no boundaries. He’s willing to do anything and say anything to promote his interests. It’s a values-free politics; it’s an amoral politics. And so there is this body of thought that you have to fight fire with fire and so on. But I worry that we’ll all be consumed in the conflagration.

ALBERTA: So, here we are on the doorstep of the midterm elections, and for first-term presidents, the first midterm historically is always a little bit rocky. You lived through one of those back in 2010. Sorry to remind you.

AXELROD: Yes, rocky would be an understatement. I was completely drowned by the wave in 2010.

ALBERTA: You knew that it was going to be a rough year; you knew Democrats were probably going to lose the House. But how surprised were you and the president at just how big that wave wound up being?

AXELROD: I told President-elect Obama—we had a briefing on December 16, it was so searing, I’ll never forget the date—at our transition office, where we got briefed on the state of the economy. And it wasn’t pervasively known just how severe the crisis was at that moment; it really was in the next few weeks and months that the depths of it became completely clear. And I walked out of that briefing and I said, 'We are going to get our asses kicked in the midterms.' It was just unavoidable. The depths of it were—I wouldn’t say surprising, but depressing. Clearly, the margin was. I always say, we lost 63, but Roosevelt lost 78 in 1938, so we did better than Roosevelt.

ALBERTA: 2018 has been a roller coaster of an election cycle—Democrats are poised to take back the House, but Republicans are playing on such a favorable Senate map. From 30,000 feet, fill in this blank: The smartest thing Democrats have done in this cycle, strategically, is what?

AXELROD: I think the smartest thing has been to generally talk about issues that actually touch people’s lives, like health care, which I think has been a really galvanic issue for a lot of candidates out there. Back in 2010, Republicans ran against the Affordable Care Act, and that was central to everything they did. Now, they’re trying to run toward at least the principle of it, and even though they don’t have a plausible plan to protect people with pre-existing conditions, I think they now understand that the Affordable Care Act has spoken to real-life concerns of people.

ALBERTA: And from a strategic standpoint, what is the smartest thing you have seen Republicans do in this cycle?

AXELROD: I’ve thought one of the most interesting hinge moments in this race has been around the Kavanaugh hearings. Midday after Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford testified, it looked like a disaster for Republicans, and they made a decision—and I think it was a decision the president was involved in, and McConnell and others—that they were going to go tribal on the thing, and by the afternoon, that’s when they started talking about Democratic mobs, Democratic tactics, and making it a test of sort of party loyalty. They needed to light a tribal fire. What happens in midterm elections often is that the party in power—the voters of the party in power become complacent. And I think the president, by blowing out that issue in ways that I think were unfortunate—this caravan arrived at just the perfect time for him, because immigration is a hot-button issue for his voters. So, I think that’s why, as we sit here today, they’re sending troops to the border. They’re doing everything they can.

ALBERTA: So, look into your crystal ball. You feel as though the Senate is probably out of reach, but do Democrats take back the House? And if so, by what margin?

AXELROD: I’ve always thought that Democrats will take the House back. I’ve always thought that 30 seats would be a good showing. On the average, the party out of power wins 32 seats. Given everything—all of the sort of structural obstacles because of redistricting—30 seats would be an accomplishment. I still think they’re going to land in that zone, and I don’t think it’s likely to go much higher. I think the Senate—I’ve said from the beginning that if Democrats could hold the margin at 51-49, given the historic obstacles they face, that would be an accomplishment. It may be that Republicans add a seat or two.

There are a couple of other storylines I’d watch on election night. One is governorships. I think Democrats are going to take a significant number of statehouses, which is not inconsequential going into both the presidential election and redistricting. So, you look at states—including Florida and a crescent from Kansas to Iowa across the Midwest all the way to Pennsylvania—and I think Democrats are going to make some significant gains in governorships. And the last part of that storyline is, when you consider the states that delivered the presidency to Trump—Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania—you’ve got incumbent Democratic senators up in all of those states. I think it’s more likely than not that every one of those senators is going to be reelected, and that you’re going to see governorship[s] shift in several of those states.

So, I think that should be a sobering result for the White House and for Republicans, and it has some augurings for 2020.

ALBERTA: There are two big questions looming, and they’re interconnected, if in fact Democrats take back the House. The first pertains to the danger of Democratic overreach; the second pertains to who is the leader of the Democratic Party. Take the second part first: Many Democrats across the country have said they will not vote for Nancy Pelosi. But if Democrats do take control of the House, do you think Pelosi becomes speaker?

AXELROD: I worked with Nancy Pelosi when I was in the White House. Much of what was accomplished would not have been accomplished without her, because she is a tough, canny, effective leader of the caucus. I think she will have a strong sense of where she is, and I would never bet against her in an internal vote. I also don’t think that Democratic members are going to deliver the leadership of the House to the Republican Party. That said, I think it’s not entirely clear what’s going to happen, and it’s not clear who the alternative is going to be. A secret ballot is a treacherous path. So, we’ll see. That will certainly be an interesting story. One thing I would say is that there’s no doubt that if Pelosi survives, she’s going to have to make accommodations to these younger members who are restive. You’ve got three leaders who are all in their upper-70s, and there’s a restlessness among members to shake up the dynamic there and advance some of the younger members.

ALBERTA: And what about the risk of overreach? Do you see any danger for Democrats if they take back the House and there’s a push toward impeachment, or they go too far with their oversight? How do they thread that needle?

AXELROD: Well, look, there was talk of impeachment almost after Trump got elected. I’ve been opposed to that. Every political norm that you break, process norm that you break, it’s very hard to put that genie back in the bottle. And my argument was that impeachment can’t be a political tool, even though it is to some degree. But it hasn’t been invoked very often, and it ought to be on solid grounds, and there’s a probe going on that will yield some information and judgments, and people ought to act on the basis of that.

I have to tell you, Bob Mueller was the FBI director when I was in the White House. I was in a couple of meetings with him, and I never said a word in those, frankly, because he scared the shit out of me. I mean, he is the portrait of rectitude. And I’ve told Democrats, 'Look, if Bob Mueller comes back and says there’s nothing there, then I’m willing to say I believe that, because I know that he’ll have been thorough in his investigation. But if he comes back with something that is damning, then I think Democrats have an obligation to act.'

And likewise, I think that the complete absence of oversight in the first two years of the Trump administration has been a dereliction on the part of Republicans; they simply won’t do it. Oversight is necessary, it’s part of the job of Congress, and there are egregious things that are happening that need to be looked into. But in each and every case, it ought to be done on the premise of sound evidence, and not just for malicious purposes or malicious mischief—like the sort we saw under the Obama administration when the Republicans took control of the Congress. The real danger for the country is this sense of a kind of bloodless coup, or that the system isn’t legitimate, and so on. As people who believe in government and the importance of government, Democrats need to proceed in a way that is respectful of the process, even if the president is not.

ALBERTA: Looking to 2020, it’s very possible that Trump has maxed-out his base. You were referencing in the Midwest earlier, for all the talk of how Trump may have redrawn the electoral map in some sort of a durable way, the fact is that Mitt Romney won more votes in Wisconsin in 2012 than Trump did in 2016. So if the Democratic base is mobilized—and we’re certainly seeing that in this election cycle—then you would have to think the president would need to do something to expand upon his existing coalition, if he’s going to be reelected.

AXELROD: You would think so. You know, you’re always tenuous in betting on things relative to Trump because he’s so audacious that you just don’t know, but, yes, I mean, I think that he pulled an inside straight in 2016, and he hasn’t done that much to change his cards, so he may have to pull another inside straight. And when you look at how competitive the races are in the states in which he won the election and how Democrats—you know, we’ll see. We could be sitting here on November 7, having a different conversation. But if the results are what they look to be, I think it’s an important harbinger for him that Republicans just didn’t do well in those states that delivered the presidency to him.

ALBERTA: Before we get deeper into 2020, let’s clear the air first: Could you see yourself working for any of these prospective 2020 candidates? Are you informally advising anyone?

AXELROD: Well, people come to me for advice all the time. I think I’ve talked to, you know, a dozen people who are running for president, and, you know, Republicans come under the dark of night and talk to me as well. But look, I said when the 2012 campaign was over that that was my last campaign. I run the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. It is a joy, and it’s a thing that keeps me hopeful every day. I have my duties at CNN, I have my podcast, and that’s what I expect I’ll be doing throughout 2020. I can see no set of circumstances under which I’d be working for any candidate. So consider the air cleared.

ALBERTA: And you reached the mountaintop twice with Barack Obama. When you look at the potential class of 2020 Democratic candidates, are there people you look at in whom you see that same flicker, that same raw political potential that could be harnessed in the way that you saw it in Obama all those years ago?

AXELROD: That’s unfair. That’s like saying, 'Well, which of these horses reminds you of Secretariat?' People should forget about that. There’s not going to be a Barack Obama every four years. But there are talented people out there and formidable people.

There are the obvious. I mean, the vice president is out there, very seasoned, very talented, but then there are people who are less known. Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans, has political chops that are really prodigious, and we saw that when he spoke to the removal of the monuments in New Orleans. He’s a very talented person. It’s been written and it’s no secret that Deval Patrick was a client of mine; he’s a friend of mine. And I saw him in Massachusetts go from an asterisk to kind of storm the Democratic field when he got elected governor of Massachusetts. And he has formidable skills that I don’t think people recognize because they haven’t observed him as closely as I have, but if he were to spend a year in Iowa, I suspect he’d make a lot of friends there, as he did in Massachusetts. And then you have this bevy of senators. And someone we’re not thinking about may emerge.

But I don’t think people will be looking for a Democratic version of Trump. I don’t think they’ll be looking for people who can go jibe for jibe and low blow for low blow. I think people are going to be looking for someone who can pull this country out of this hothouse that we’re in.

ALBERTA: So Michael Avenatti is not your personal choice for the Democratic nomination?

AXELROD: No. I know Avenatti. I’ve met him in greenrooms, and we’ve had conversations and so on, so, but I disagree with him. And I disagree with my friend Eric Holder when he said, “When they go low, we kick them.” I think we should challenge them, but I think the country is not looking for a continuation of the rancor that we’ve seen with Trump every single day. I mean, and there are a lot of people who voted for Trump or a significant number of people who voted for Trump because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton, because they thought Washington needed a kick in the ass and that he could deliver that. But it’s also true that he’s exhausting.

I mean, this constant state of churning and combat and insults and so on, they’re exhausting. I think one mistake the Democrats should not make is to, in combatting Trump, assume that everybody who voted for him should be disqualified as well.

ALBERTA: What you’re saying is that a Democrat in 2020 should not just be looking at this as a base-mobilization campaign, but that there should be persuasion involved?

AXELROD: I believe that. And this is a big debate. And I understand the debate, because the demographics are such that they would argue that if Hillary Clinton had just mobilized, for example, African-American voters in [Detroit] or Milwaukee, that she would have won those states. And, you know, I think that the two are not mutually exclusive. First of all, I think Donald Trump is going to mobilize base voters all by himself. I don’t think you need to gild the lily; I don’t think you need to help that process along. But there are voters who are going to be important in some of these swing states who are open to voting for a Democrat, but aren’t necessarily eager to continue this kind of poisonous politics we’ve seen. And they need to be given something more.

ALBERTA: One person who’s drawn comparison to Barack Obama is Beto O’Rourke, and there’s an emerging narrative that even if he loses the Texas Senate race, he would be positioned as a top-tier Democratic candidate in 2020. How difficult is it, in your view, to come off of a losing campaign and yet still launch into a viable campaign for the presidency?

AXELROD: You know, I don’t know, because he has a national following among young people. I sat with a group of young people the other day, really well-connected, smart, young people who said, 'Well, if he comes close, he’s got to turn around and run for president.' I mean, he has touched a lot of people, so I’m sure there will be a lot of pressure on him to think about it, if in fact that race is close in Texas. If he gets blown out, I think it’s much harder, but he’s raised a prodigious amount of money.

ALBERTA: Let’s talk about another progressive hero, Elizabeth Warren, who’s been in the news quite a bit recently with the release of the DNA findings. What do you make of that?

AXELROD: Yeah, let me say that of all the people who are running that I can see from my perspective—and I don’t have visibility into everything everybody is doing—there isn’t anybody who had done more to position themselves for 2020 than she had up to that point. You know, I’ve talked to a bunch of candidates who said, 'You wouldn’t believe who called me on election night. Like, the first call I got was from Elizabeth Warren,' winners and losers. And she has a full staff going just to service 2018 candidates and provide assistance in whatever way they need it. That’s shrewd. I mean, she’s laid out some policy positions on reform, for example, that are shrewd positions, important positions. I’ve been impressed by that.

That [DNA test release] was a head-scratcher. I mean, it was a gamble. First of all, the timing of it was odd: Why intrude on this midterm process that way? Secondly, it was instructive for everyone. It’s hard to get the upper hand with Trump in a kind of skunk fight. And I think she was trying to push back because she didn’t want to have him continue on what is another version of, like, birtherism, and she thought she could end that discussion. But what she mostly did was elevate the issue, and that was the gamble. And I would say they lost that gamble.

ALBERTA: Let’s close with a lightning round. I will name a prospective Democratic presidential candidate, and I want you to concisely analyze their greatest strength and greatest vulnerability. First: Kamala Harris.

AXELROD: Well, she’s very, very bright, and I think she makes a really great presentation. Her disadvantage is she can be cautious, and she comes from California, which is not a great training ground for presidential candidates because you never really have to meet a voter; it’s just too big a state, so it’s all TV. And you don’t really have a genuine general election, so adjusting to a national context is going to be hard for her, and she’s briefly on the national scene. But she is promising.

ALBERTA: Bernie Sanders.

AXELROD: Well, Bernie is what Bernie is. His strength is that he’s been saying the same thing for 50 years; he’s utterly authentic; he’s fearless. The downside is that he’s been saying the same thing for 50 years, that he’s been around 50 years to say the same things, and that he can be a little brittle and unyielding. But, you know, he is kind of a remarkable figure in our politics.

ALBERTA: Julián Castro.

AXELROD: Yeah, Julián Castro is someone I know. Full disclosure: he’s been on the board of my Institute of Politics. I like him a lot. He is smart; he is earnest, very thoughtful, and a fresh face. Obviously, he is Hispanic and he has a base, potentially, among those voters but not limited to it. The downside is he has run for mayor of San Antonio, he’s been in the cabinet, but never been exposed to the national scene. And I’ll leave it there, but I think highly of him.

ALBERTA: A dark horse for me: Amy Klobuchar.

AXELROD: Yeah, well, she is also very, very bright. She can be more nuanced than some of the candidates. I mean, she knows—she has a range, so she doesn’t get to 11 on a scale of 10 on every issue, but is thoughtful about them. And she’s got a great sense of humor, which is useful. And she’s from Minnesota, which borders on Iowa, which is, I think, very helpful. The downside is she hasn’t made herself as well-known as some of her Senate colleagues. Sometimes being more vituperative is also a benefit, at least in the short run, in terms of raising money online and doing those kinds of things. So the question is—and it’s true of Castro as well—is she too low key? But certainly someone to watch.

ALBERTA: Pete Buttigieg.

AXELROD: Yeah, also a friend of mine, so more full disclosure. And, look, I know all these folks and like them. But, look, Pete is a remarkable guy, incredible story, you know, elected mayor of South Bend at 27, went to Afghanistan while he was mayor to do a tour of duty because he was in the reserves, came back. He disclosed to his constituents that he’s gay, you know, in South Bend, Indiana—the home of Notre Dame, in the center of the Rust Belt—got 80 percent of the vote and in his reelect. And as mayor, has had a real vision for how you rebuild an economy in the digital age in a Rust Belt city. He’s got a lot of upside. I thought that he would be a great chairman of the Democratic Party when he ran for that. The downside is he’s in his 30s and he’s not at all well-known—raising the money, that’s an issue. I mean, I think it’s going to take $100 [million] to $150 million to get through the first four contests and beyond in this cycle, and so that would be challenging for him. But he’s one of the most promising young leaders in the Democratic Party.

ALBERTA: Kirsten Gillibrand.

AXELROD: Well, she has an instinct for issues that motivate, and on the whole #MeToo issue she has been very much identified with it, both in terms of the dealing with assaults on women within the military and on the issue more broadly. I think the downside of her is that there are some people who feel that she has been exploitative at times on that issue, and there’s some rancor, I think, among some Democrats about how she handled the Franken issue, and she’d have to deal with that.

ALBERTA: Who else should we be talking about?

AXELROD: Terry McAuliffe. He is relentless. He is uncowed. And he could probably strike a tone that would be interesting against Trump, you know, pairing him with kind of humor. And he’s got a pretty good story to tell from Virginia. The downside is he’s been so thoroughly identified with the Clinton Project for so long, and I don’t know that that would be viewed as advantageous. And he is avowedly a centrist, and he would be testing that premise that the party is not going to nominate a white, male centrist.

You know, Governor Hickenlooper from Colorado. He’s an interesting guy. He’s a quirky communicator. And whether he can conform to an environment in which one has to express oneself more pithily than I am right now, I don’t know, but he’s an interesting guy.

There are others. Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington has talked about running. Steve Bullock appears to be running, the governor of Montana. And then there are the outsiders. You know, the Howard Schultzes, for example. We haven’t talked about Mike Bloomberg, you know, people who can bring great resources to this. So I think this is a wide-open situation.

ALBERTA: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, after mentioning all those names, about Joe Biden. What does your gut tell you? Do you think he runs?

AXELROD: He sure seems to be headed in that direction. You know, I think two things. One is I think he’s genuinely offended by the way Trump is governing and not governing, the way he is dividing the country. That seems clear. It’s also true that this is a guy who has been talked about as a presidential nominee since the time he arrived in the Senate in 1973. He has run twice before. He knows the job as well as anybody. He really was an important counselor to President Obama, and he had 35—whatever number of years in the Senate.

And so it’s hard to say, “No, I don’t think so. I’m going to pass on this one.” I think he feels he would have won last time if he had been the nominee. I think there are a lot of things that are pulling him in that direction. There may be personal things that are pulling him in the other. That’s a commitment, and the question is whether, at the end of the day, he wants to make it, but right now, I would guess he is running.