Rachel Scott, ABC
00:00:01
Mic on? Test, test, test. Good afternoon, NABJ, and welcome to a conversation with former President Donald Trump. This discussion...
Publicly, Republicans have been saying that the shift in candidate from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris wouldn't change their strategy in going after the Democratic presidential nominee.
Rachel Scott, ABC
00:00:21
Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.
But obviously, the choice of Vice President Harris has complicated things for Donald Trump, whose campaign had planned to woo more black voters. Trump's visit to the National Association of Black Journalists conference revealed just how much of an uphill climb is ahead.
Rachel Scott, ABC
00:00:41
'I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims. You've attacked black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are "stupid and racist." You've had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you were asking Black supporters to vote for you, why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?
Well, first of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, a first question. You don't even say hello. How are you? Are you with ABC?
For more than half an hour, the former president tried to explain to ABC's political correspondent Rachel Scott and other journalists why Harris wasn't qualified, and he veered off in a lot of directions, spiraling out in ways that echo what we've heard on the campaign trail from all kinds of Republican voices.
Rep. Tim Burchett
00:01:44
When you go down that route, you take mediocrity, and that's what they have right now as a vice president.
Are you suggesting she's she was a DEI hire?
Rep. Tim Burchett
00:01:51
100% she was idea hire. Yeah.
And then there's the DEI press secretary telling you that the DEI vice president is the future of the party here. And so the future looks kind of dim for the Democrats here. But this is no shocker either. Kamala Harris, she's the original "hawk tuah" girl. That's the way she got where she is.
She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?
Rachel Scott, ABC
00:02:21
She has always identified as a Black woman. She went to a Historically Black College.
I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't.
Look, in this age of politics where every applause line and attack ad is a result of data mining and endless strategy sessions, a pivot was necessary. But we're some hundred days out from Election Day.
We talk a lot about, Can Donald Trump pivot? This isn't Donald Trump pivoting. This is the Trump apparatus. And it's a much bigger apparatus than what they had four years ago, or certainly eight years ago, and much more professionalized. Right. So you're not turning a speedboat. This is like trying to turn a cruise liner, and that's a slower process.
That's the perfect analogy.
And that's what we're going to talk about today. How does a campaign effectively turn on a dime? How will Republicans talk about the vice president without walking into a buzzsaw of accusations that they're attacking her race and gender? I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. We're going to hear from two people who know what it's like to make the kinds of decisions that former President Donald Trump and now Vice President Kamala Harris are facing in the next 100 days.
Kevin Madden, I was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney's two campaigns, both the 2012 campaign, which won the Republican nomination, and the 2008 campaign, which fell just short of the nomination, lost in that primary to John McCain, who was the ultimate nominee. And then I was also a deputy, press secretary on the 2004 Bush reelect.
Served as deputy chief of staff for communications to the House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, communications director with the Republican National Committee. And then wherever else he and I were intersecting.
So you guys have crossed paths?
I met him at the Florida recount.
In 2000. And then, Kevin, I think you joined in '01.
What was it called? The Brooks Brothers.
I mean, now that we've actually seen a riot, the whole Brooks Brothers thing seems quite tame and polite.
The Brooks Brothers kerfuffle, compared to what.
Yeah. Now we're in the real riots.
Yeah, you might as well have been wearing top hats in terms of, like, the time period.
Yeah, silent era, 8 millimeter film.
To paraphrase Byron, I laugh so as not to weep. Anyway. Fundamentally, presidential campaigns are stories. Candidates tell a story about who they are and how they see the world. We, the voters, decide if we want to be part of that dream. They also tell a story about their opponent, one that is supposed to sound to voters like a nightmare. But the building of those stories? Well, it takes months, sometimes years. And neither of these candidates has a lot of time. Trump's vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, reportedly told Republican donors that the switch from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris as the likely Democratic Party nominee was "a political sucker punch."
The thing that people who've never worked on a presidential campaign need to know is that they are the fastest growing startups in the world. At this point, with the Trump campaign was a year, multibillion dollar operation all pointed at one frame, which was Trump versus Biden. So that's changed all in the space of a month.
And for messaging, Congress, Senate, etc.. I assume you're building off of those foundations.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, at the RNC, there's a Department of Research which works with the communications department, and they put together what we call "the book," right? Very creatively named. And that's the opposition research on every vote that Joe Biden has made, every decision that he's made as president, personal information and so forth. The same exists for Kamala Harris, though not at that level of detail, because the campaign was focused on all things Biden and even before Trump was, you know, obviously he was clearly the nominee, I think, throughout this process. But even before that point, when the RNC was ostensibly or supposed to be objective, their goal was Joe Biden.
Can you talk about the book a little more because.
Tell them about how it's basically put together over multiple months, close to years.
'Because when you see it on political shows, "the book" seems very clandestine, like ex-spies and ex-detectives and all these people.
'It's 20, 20-year-olds in the basement over at the RNC. They smell bad. They drink Diet Coke all day, right?
It's modernized a little bit with technology. But, you know, I worked at the Senatorial committee, as a, what we called a tracker. And I sat about eight feet away from a guy named Sean Spicer. This was in 1995, and, we had a Senate race going on in North Carolina. That meant that some of us had to spend a week in North Carolina. We were going to college libraries. As a graduate of North Carolina, my benefit was that I knew where to go in the particular library. That's literally what I brought to the table.
Which is funny, that's what reporters do, right? We go, when we're looking, when we have to do our profiles of a candidate, etc.. You're trying to find anyone they ever talked to, anyone they ever dated, anyone who might give you insight into who they are. Obviously, for political candidates, you're looking for a little more than insight.
Sure. And that is also going through every newspaper article. And now that's all sorts of feeds and blogs which are harder to sort of get. AI is certainly now starting to be a part of that for everything that they said, everything that they've done. So I think, you know, one of the interesting things to me is this week, Harris has sort of changed her position on like 4 or 5 things, and I immediately thought of 2004, "I voted for it before I voted against it."
Which is John Kerry, which at the time, I think has always been a tough one. It was tough for Kerry at the time. I say this from Massachusetts. He was my senator for a long time. All senators voted something before they didn't, before they voted for it. Right. Like, that's a part of being in the Senate. You've got to vote against something going to the floor. But maybe for it, once it gets to the floor, it's messy. And it's one of the things that held senators back in general. But the reason why I'm pausing, Doug, on that part of your conversation is because this is explicitly what we mean by messaging. How do you hear what the person is saying and reframe that for the audience in a way that benefits your candidate.
And really is aligned with the context of the political conversation at that point.
What's driving the zeitgeist. Well, the most damning part about "I voted for it before I voted against it" was that at the time, the number one issue that was driving the electorate right then was safety, security related to national security and foreign policy around the globe. We had the Iraq war was raging. We were in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. So to have a commander in chief test between George W. Bush and John Kerry crystallized by one candidate saying, I'm going to do whatever it takes to keep the American people safe and secure. And then John Kerry, we were able to caricature him because he had uttered the phrase himself, I was, "I voted for it before I voted against it," which we believe fell short of the commander in chief test that many swing voters had out there.
'But you're saying it also tapped into something perceived about him, which was the flip-flopping idea.
Which is, we've been talking on this show about how memes work, how the internet works. It's the same thing. If you can tap into something people kind of already might think it makes your job as the messaging person easier, right, Doug?
'Yeah, and that comes from research and that comes with time. So if you look at the senatorial and the congressional committees right now, they work in two year increments, essentially, and they've spent the last year and nine months focused on the Democratic senators who are up for election this time. It's a lot of them. So they've got a lot of work to do. In two years from now, they'll be looking at the next batch of senators who are up for reelection. Same on the House side. The RNC has been focused on Joe Biden with a sort of sub-focus on Kamala Harris, basically, since they became the nominees. And now obviously that's flipped. Pretty much everything about Joe Biden now, except for the not insignificant fact that he still does remain president and does remain a potential issue in the campaign, it all now falls to to Harris, and that's where the Trump campaign has had to pivot. We talk a lot about can Donald Trump pivot? This isn't Donald Trump pivoting. This is the Trump apparatus. And it's a much bigger apparatus than what they had, four years ago or certainly eight years ago.
And much more professionalized.
Right. So you're not turning a speedboat. This is like trying to turn a cruise liner, and that's a slower process.
That's the perfect analogy.
'So let's set this up for people. The Trump campaign is run by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who every time people mention their names, they always go... "and they're really good." Right. So they're kind of well-respected figures. The way that the campaign was going into 2024, the argument was, Joe Biden is infirm, not equipped to run the country, has failed us for a variety of reasons. And Kamala Harris, his weird little sidekick with a strange laugh, can't be the next in line. That was the argument, I would say, all the way up until the last day of the convention in Milwaukee. And then, Joe Biden says he's not going to seek election. For you as people who have been in these positions, what was it like that weekend when you realized what Biden was doing? Did you see it as an earthquake moment? Did you see it as a, Whoa. How do they pivot from this? Like, as Republicans? How did you as - sorry, as people who have been in campaigns, how did that moment hit you?
I was surprised. First of all, I thought that, when the initial surge of, "Hey, we need to get Biden off the top of the ticket" happened. You know, my experience is that usually these things happen in 100 hours or they don't happen. So the fact that Joe Biden had endured past that 100 hours and had seemed to sort of solidify his position, and the more that you moved closer to Election Day, the less likely the chance was that they were going to switch.
So as a strategist. you had gamed it out, you were like, he rode it out.
I thought, like, he's just so stubborn. He really does believe his own message that he's the only one that can win. And it's going to be really hard.
And Doug, for you as a messaging person, were you like, Biden could never come out of this or I'm not shocked or.
Well, first, I think Kevin stole a memo that I wrote for clients. I said 96 hours. Watch Biden over the next 96 hours to see. And whenever a decision like this is made, it's always a shock, even if it's not a total surprise. And what I was looking for was the, sort of two things, so I'll slightly argue against myself. Sunday seemed to be the perfect time for Biden to do it, so if he were going to do it, that would be when I would expect him to. But there was also sort of a push and pull on this. And Nancy Pelosi had essentially said, and I think Kevin would agree, a lot of respect that we have for Nancy Pelosi and her political prowess and skills. She basically was saying, we're going to do this the nice way or if you don't go, Joe, we're going to do this the not nice way. And that was coming on Monday 9 a.m.. It wasn't a surprise that Nancy Pelosi was all over TV more than she usually was. And that told me there might be some movement, but what happened was still essentially unprecedented. So it is still a surprise.
'So that was the part that really also held me up was it was having worked on these things, they are so, so hard. It's not you're not returning a rental car. This is a, again, a multi-year organization with multi-billions of dollars behind it. The idea that you can just take one candidate, switch it out. Like, one of the things that I found annoying was watching all of the punditry and the reporting, like, not really take stock of just how hard that is. And look.
'There was lot of flippant sort-of, "all they have to do is..." "If they only just did this, x."
And it was all coming from people who've never even been close to a presidential campaign. So for me, it was like, I think just people need to take stock of how hard it is. And here's the thing. It's been a really good week, week and a half. The tension and a lot of the challenges that still remain with a campaign, switching candidates as quickly and then having to develop a profile with swing voters over the next three months, they're still coming. That's still going to happen.
Yeah. So someone reached into the desk and found the Kamala "book."
Right. But there, I think what's been, the where they've been fortunate is they had a really good rollout. They seemed to have a plan for making that transition much smoother. And then I also think they caught their opponents flat footed, which is very, very surprising because somebody in that campaign should have spent the last month wargaming for what happens if they do switch.
That's a really important point. When you say flat footed, how did you see it? How did you, how did that manifest itself?
For a few days, it seemed the focus remained on Joe Biden.
From Republicans who came out to speak.
From Republicans. And Biden was slowly going into the rearview mirror, or at least should have been. And yes, I think he still remains an issue. Because he's still the incumbent president, but they were still focused on Biden for several days.
The thing that surprised me was the lack of a very disciplined and uniform message. And you really never get a second chance to make a first impression. So the message that they wanted to send to surrogates, Republican pundits, the activist base, GOP chairs around the country, it was not very clear. And you need it to be really clear. And that's what a good campaign could do. And I just felt that's why they got caught little flat footed.
'And one of the challenges they faced, to use Kevin's analogy about the billion-dollar startup, is then you're also dealing with a series of small businesses. And as Kevin knows, working in House leadership, you know, you try and put a message out there that your members will follow and you send them documents and they may look at them, they may not look at them, they may use them or not use them even if they've looked at them. And so you're talking about 50 state chairs. You're talking about members of Congress who have different incentives in this process. And that makes it messy as well. So when there's not the discipline from the top, it's very easy for that to get lost as you go further down the chain.
And that's one of the most important responsibilities, being senior staff on the campaign is that there may be 10 or 12 of you that are sort of deputized to carry the message of the campaign, including, obviously, the principal and the VP. Everybody takes their cue from those folks. So when they're off message, it does have a.
A it has a diluting effect all the way down the chain.
And we have Republican members who are incentivized to not necessarily be on message, so that compounds on that problem.
Well get to that in a moment. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll have more with Kevin and Doug in a moment.
This is The Assignment. I'm Audie Cornish. I'm talking with former Mitt Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden, and also the former Republican National Committee communications director, Doug Heye. So, one of the things that's interesting about this moment is instead of one person on the national stage getting a kind of rollout and introduction, JD vance, the second on the ticket, you kind of have to because now Kamala Harris, the vice president, is reintroducing herself to the public in this, as you talked about being flat footed, a kind of void. Right? So everyone is getting a chance to whatever, get their memes going or change the direction of their cruise liner, and they take vastly different paths. JD Vance has ventured into a pop culture moment where he is now being called weird, where things he said in the past are being used against him in a different context. And Kamala Harris, the vice president, is in the mirror image of that, things she said in the past, also are being reframed in a new context, just a little more cheerfully by a Democratic base that is excited to talk about something new. What do you see in this split screen, and, Kevin Madden, I'm going to go to you because you've been with a candidate who's had to choose a second on the ticket. So I can't imagine you're looking at this and thinking, it's going great for JD Vance.
'Well, we actually had a number of candidates that we were, that Romney was looking at selecting in the 2012 campaign, and we had research books, we had done our own internal vetting on all of them. So we knew what the strengths and weaknesses were. We also had our own books on our candidates. But one of the things is that we also had a VP communications team set before that candidate was even chosen, so they were going to get assigned to whoever our VP was. And when Paul Ryan was selected, he had a long legislative record. He had statements he'd given how many 15 years worth of interviews that could be picked at and prodded by the Democrats, we knew that he was going to be attacked, right? But what we had was a very aggressive plan to not only actively promote the candidate and how he was going to help, Mitt Romney govern, but we also had a plan to defend him. We knew he was going to be under attack, and so we were not caught flat footed. We were very prepared. And I think that was the big difference here. It seems like you have essentially a new senator who is, in JD Vance who is 39 years old. He has about two years into, a year-and-a-half into his first term as a senator. And so his profile is defined by somewhat limited legislative accomplishments, but a long history of giving interviews and and essentially a book.
And, you know, the congressman, I think it was Richard Hudson, he's the chairman of the National Republican Campaign Committee. He was like, look, I actually think this is going to be great because he has this great personal story. He has a personal story that's been put into a movie, and it involves him serving his country, etc. that is the story they thought they were going to be telling about him.
And they did it very well for about 30 minutes at the convention, and then they pressed pause or they didn't have a two week, 30 day, 60 day, 90 day plan all the way through the end of the election. At least we haven't seen it yet. I'm confident that they can come up. They can reverse the trend here and get back on offense, but that's going to require three events a day, three interviews a day in three different markets a day all around the country, and very focused, like a laser, on bringing to life his story and then focusing that story and making it relatable to the swing voters who have yet to make up their mind. That's the charge.
But he has been spending that time defending past things he's been saying.
'So I was listening to the Megyn Kelly podcast. She's giving him a moment to address the concerns that people might have, that he's made comments that sound like they are anti-woman without kids. I don't know how else to say it.
'Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment. I've got nothing against cats. I've got nothing against dogs. I've got one dog at home and I love him, Megyn. But look, this is not, people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said. In the substance of what I said. Megyn, I'm sorry. It's true. It is true that we become anti-family.
'The point is that her party has pursued a set of policies that are profoundly anti-child, and people want to conflate the personal situation here with the fact that I'm making an argument that our entire society has become skeptical and even hateful toward the idea of having kids. So this is the context in which he has said the things he said in the past. But, Doug, I want to bring it up to you because it strikes me as something that has been tripping up Republicans for the last couple of months, even around the IVF discussion. It's like, how do you talk about the ways that women and families exist in the world without attacking people for not doing it in the most familiar way?
Republicans have a challenge that's a sort of new one.
Is that a biased question? The way I'm at I'm asking it.
I think it's sort of accurate.
'And that's because of how Republican rhetoric has changed. So, you know, we're in Technicolor now, as Kevin was talking about in the Romney age, we were sort of in black and white. Things were sort of normal political rhetoric. And what we've seen with Trump is an explosion in political rhetoric that is just, you know, 4 or 5 standard deviations from what we would consider normal just back in 2015. And as more and more mostly Republicans, Democrats do some of this as well, though not to the same extent, is as Republicans try and be more like Trump and talk like Trump, they're not Trump. Donald Trump gets away with a lot of things that nobody else would, and it's because things are just baked-in for Donald Trump in a way that no one else is able to. But Republicans still go down those areas. And what we've seen with Vance is he didn't make the childless cat lady comment once or twice. He has said it a whole lot, and he said it in ways that come off as mean.
We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact. You look Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats.
That's the problem for Vance in this. He potentially looks weird and mean.
Is there a nice way to talk about people who are childless as not having a stake in the country?
'I think you certainly can talk about, and I think Kevin and our mutual friend Tim Carney has written a book about this is that, you know, the lack of family growth is a problem for the country. And you can talk about pro-family policies and what that means, and that should certainly include IVF, without going down these sort of strange passages.
And here's the thing. It'll be the most sensitive thing I ask you here. It appears that Republicans are struggling talking about race and talking about gender when they talk about Kamala Harris. It's coming off as mean in the way you mention.
Well, my argument to that would be that there are very few swing voters who are motivated by those issues. There are very few swing voters right now, people who have yet to make up their mind on this election that are going to be motivated by esoteric debates about cultural issues.
No, no, no. Calling her a DEI candidate, saying that she's there only because it was, checked a box, that language is actually quite familiar if you sat through the primary and listened to Vivek Ramaswamy or Ron DeSantis for the last eight months.
And in a primary or the primary electorate, that was why it might have resonated. But I'm talking about swing voters right now who are very pragmatic. They're more independent minded. Some of them are ticket splitters. They are focused on core economic concerns.
But you don't think it resonates with them?
'I think it - I think it turns them off and they find it distracting.
The whole debate about race, gender identity politics, and culture. And so the swing voters...
'Cause it's never said like that. In my opinion, those conversations are never done academically, right? It's like, people talking about her in ways that the left can say are racially coded, or that especially progressive women voters can say, this is you disrespecting a woman specifically, this is a gendered insult. And especially with her, the way they talk about her past relationships. This conversation about her relationship with Willie Brown in California is very prominent online. I don't think it's academic, Kevin.
'Oh, I am arguing that you need to get out of online conversations. I'm arguing that you need to get out of conversations that have, at their core, a divisive nature. I'm saying that the campaign's focus, if they want to win this campaign and this goes for both campaigns, is to focus on the issues that swing voters care about right now, the number one issue they care about is the economy and how inflation is affecting their home budget, how the housing lock-in effect right now is...
But is this your Romney showing?
It's not my Romney showing.
Is that a real thing you can do in 2024?
It should be. That's the thing is that I think in 2024, everybody gets baited into these conversations that are about motivating the base or driving a hard contrast between the right and the left when the big middle is going to matter in this election. And that's how you win. It's talking to those voters.
OK, Dough Heye, I disagree as a journalist, but you're a message person. How do you... do you see what I'm talking about, frst of all? When you're watching cable news or whatever, I'm watching people step into bear traps.
I do. They're jumping into bear traps quite often.
But that's bad strategy, am I right? Yeah.
Isn't it so bad, I feel like as a Black American, I have listened to political discourse.
People walking into bear traps is really great content. It's really bad persuasive messaging for swing voters.
But the political discourse has been, you know, things have gone too far. Things have gone too far. We shouldn't be talking about race all the time. We shouldn't be talking about gender all the time. There's. There was a real. Maybe it was only content, but there was certainly an audience for the idea that things had somehow gone too far and that diversity, equity and inclusion was the villain of the story was not a default value good, and that the candidate who could win that back and speak common sense was gonna win the day. Did I make that up?
No. But welcome to the real world of American politics and American communications in the age that we're in now. And I think there's.
So, you're saying that is not as meaningful for a candidate to carry.
I think as a campaign, you want to be talking about what you want to talk about, and you want your opponent to be talking about what you want to be talking about. And so, if you're the Trump/Vance campaign, all of the things that you've mentioned is not what they should be focused on. The problem is, and again, this sort of goes to the small business, you know, multiple small business aspect of this, you can't control what happens, even if you're sending them material on all the points that Kevin made. You can't control what a local or national talk radio host says or blogger or what have you, or somebody who produces content and memes. You can't control what they say about anything else. And so, what we see is these conversations, they don't necessarily come from Trump. He's often not helpful, obviously. They don't necessarily come from JD Vance. His past comments on cat ladies and all that. Not helpful. If they focus, and Donald Trump can be disciplined when he chooses to be, if they focus on those 2 or 3 things that voters are screaming, especially those "double haters," this is what is important to us and ignore some of the, you know, Addams Family characters that are on the fringes of the party, then they can win those voters. If the conversation is not about that, it motivates Democratic voters and they're not connecting with the people they need.
I want to give an example from Donald Trump himself. He was in an interview on Fox where he tried to talk about Kamala Harris's record as a prosecutor.
He said she was a bad prosecutor. She put, she was a prosecutor of Black people. She put thousands and thousands of Black people in jail over marijuana. But when it came to big crime, murders and everything else, she was weak.
Again, as a reporter, I'm probably parsing that too much, but it felt like two separate messages, which was like, hey, she's a prosecutor who was really tough. She was especially tough on you Black people. But then also, she wasn't that really tough. She was actually really weak. And this is the kind of moment where I hear mixed messaging or unsettled messaging from the candidate himself.
And I would agree that that's mixed messaging and competing messages as well. I think the thing that I've always noticed about Donald Trump is it kind of goes back to that old adage when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But are you thinking that's just going to kind of wash over the voters? Like, the people will hear what they want out of that sentence?
'Yeah, he, I think he believes that, first of all, the meta-message he wants to send is he's on the attack and he's on the attack. If you are, you know, a person of color and you have views about criminal justice, he's reminding you that Kamala Harris is a cop. Right? And if you are a, suburban voter who has worries about crime, he's also telling you she's weak on crime. As long as he's on the attack, he is achieving his objective. That is the sort of best explanation I can give about how Donald Trump approaches political messaging. He's not a normal politician. Instead, he deals in volume rather than in precision.
But what I think Trump is concerned about here, and it goes to Kevin's point about being on the attack, is for the past week, Donald Trump has not been on the attack, presumably next week, if, Harris makes her, pick for vice president, Donald Trump will not be the lead story again, then the Democrats are going to have.
Right. And then we'll have a convention week where he won't be the lead story. So how does Donald Trump insert himself?
And he was supposed to be debuting a kinder, gentler Trump, right?
Okay. None of us in this room believed that. But the idea was, like, a lot of different things are going to roll out that happened because of this switch up. Well, thank you both for being willing to chat this out with me and listen to all my random questions. Thank you for being on The Assignment.
Doug Heye and Kevin Madden. Doug is a GOP communications veteran and former head of comms for the RNC. Kevin Madden is a GOP strategist. He's also a CNN political commentator and was senior advisor on Mitt Romney's presidential campaigns. That's it for this episode of The Assignment, a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And the executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Lickteig. we had support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks, as always to Katie Hinman and Wendy Brundage. I'm Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.
