On the on latest episode of Bloomberg’s Masters in Politics podcast with hosts Tammy Haddad and Betsy Fischer Martin, Bob Shrum, longtime Democratic strategist, said that while issues of honesty and trustworthiness will continue to plague the Clinton campaign through the summer, the voters she will lose on the left will be more than made up for by disaffected Republicans if Trump becomes the Republican nominee.
“I think for every one of those voters that Hillary Clinton lost in the general election to Donald Trump she would pick up suburban Republican voters, she would pick up Independents, she would pick up moderates. The trust question is gonna be there the whole way until November. The Republicans are gonna make sure of it.”
He also thinks Donald Trump could stand to lose a few yes men if he wants to win in a general election contest. “He must not have people around him who can say, ‘You can’t do that,’ One of the most important things in the presidential campaign is you have to have two or three people around the candidate who can look at the candidate and say, ‘That’s a really bad idea.’”
Haley Barbour, Reagan administration Political Director, former RNC chairman, and two-term Mississippi governor thinks the media has had a large part in fueling the Trump phenomenon, and took issue with reporters taking Trump’s phone calls on-air.
“I have commented a number of times, and I’m amazed by it, that the media has become part of the campaign. My first campaign was 1968 and I have in the years through then as RNC chairman, as Political Director for the Reagan White House, I have never seen so much of the media being part of the campaign story. And it goes beyond anything that I have ever seen. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan being on Meet the Press on the telephone? Even when he was President? And here we see Donald Trump being interviewed on TV on the telephone, it’s unimaginable,” while later adding, “The American people are being denied the kind of coverage of substance that they deserve.”
Asked if he has confidence in Trump, Barbour says he has more in Trump than in Hillary Clinton. “He does not have a record, she’s got a terrible record. Of the two, I’ll take my chances with no record.
You can listen to the latest episode of Bloomberg’s Masters in Politics podcast here.
Previous guests include Jeb Bush, the top strategists for the Clinton and Sanders campaigns, GOP superlawyer Ben Ginsberg, and veteran political consultant Mike Murphy.
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