Joining me today to discuss it all is my friend Josh Holmes. Josh is the President and founding partner at Cavalry, LLC. Previously served as the Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager to Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. But you might already know him because he is also the co-host of The Ruthless Podcast. You can hear more of his humor and analysis there every Tuesday and Thursday. Josh, welcome to Perino on politics.

Dana, I'm so excited. This is just great. Are you? Yes, this show. I've been.

Waiting to do this. This podcast is a bit of a thing. It's a thing. It is a thing. It is a thing. Thank you for having me. One of the things I heard last week from my girlfriend is she doesn't work in politics every day, but she wants to keep informed. And she said, I listened this morning and I feel so much smarter.

There you go. There you go. I mean, that's the whole goal, right?

It's the goal. Let's talk about the news of the day. Last night, Trey Goudie show was live at 9:00 PM. Trey Goudie and Tim Scott are very close friends. I don't think, in talking to Trey, that he was surprised eventually that this decision was coming for Tim Scott. But the timing, I even wonder if Tim Scott knew he was going to do it when he got on the show because his campaign staff didn't know. The Gouty looks surprised. But regardless of that and the timing, it is over for Tim Scott. He is no longer a candidate.

Yeah, well, it's significant. I think his entry into the presidential field was filled with a lot of big hopes from people around the country who got a ton of respect for Tim Scott, loved what he's done in the Senate, and thought he brought a very important voice to this debate. I think he did. The campaign never really clicked the way that he wanted it to, however. And the traction that he saw initially was winnowed away bit by bit. I think the biggest turning point for him was that first debate in Milwaukee when you couldn't see him on the.

Stage, right? Yeah, he faded into the background.

Right. Big personalities took over. Nikki Haley really reafferted herself as going to be somebody who was here till the end. That vote share started pushing away from Tim in a serious way. Look, he's not in this just to take up space, right? I mean, he wanted to win. He's a very serious guy. I think that's one of the things that we're seeing here in 2023 that we didn't see in 2015 in that wide-open primary, and that your candidates are beginning to get out of here quicker and that field is winnowing faster. Part of that, Dana, honestly, is a credit to the RNC. Let me explain what I mean by that is they put rules into place, much like Democrats did in 2020, that made it difficult to qualify for the debate stage itself unless you had significant momentum, both in terms of fundraising, small dollars, and polling. What that's done as a result is people have to make some tough decisions. You saw former Vice President Mike Pence, when he knew that he wasn't going to be able to qualify for the Miami debate, step aside. I think that's what's happening here with Tim Scott.

He qualified for Miami. It was going to be borderline impossible for him to qualify for the debate in Alabama. What's the point of continuing to run out this string if you're going to get to a point where you're ultimately not on the debate stage?

He was a prolific fundraiser. I assume that doesn't end, and that he has been a good friend to a lot of other people that are in the GOP, including the Senate races to come.

Yes. He's been a massive asset for the Republican Party across the board. He did a ton of travel in 2022 for candidates helping people out. As you said, he raises an awful lot of money, and the donor circuit certainly loves what Tim Scott has to say. I imagine he is going to be a continued force in Republican politics. He's not going anywhere. He may not win the nomination for President, but he's certainly sticking around. You haven't heard the last Tim Scott.

Once there is a Republican nominee, whoever it is, I imagine that he will work hard to help get them elected. He said he's not going to endorse anybody right now, but I understand that part of it. But what happens to people who supported Tim Scott? Tim Scott's our guy. Now Tim Scott's no longer there. Do you have a sense? Do they go to Haley or DeSantis, Vivek, Ramaswamy, Chris Christy or even Donald Trump?

Yeah. That's the open question with all of these exits is where do people ultimately land? With Tim Scott, it's a little bit complicated because at some point, he had a very big voting block that was weaned away a bit, primarily by Nikki Haley, to be honest with you. I think ideologically speaking, there's an awful lot in her campaign that would be an easy fit for his supporters. That being said, look, Donald Trump has benefited a great deal within the Republican primary so far as having this of inevitability. He's got anywhere between 30 and 35 hard-based supporters who aren't going anywhere no matter what. But on top of that, he's had anywhere from 10 to 15 to 20, in some cases, % of Republican voters who think he's going to win anyway and they might as well get alongside of him for the big win, you wonder whether or not that plays a role and ultimately how this win that was down to. Desantis has got a role. The thing about Tim Scott is he didn't really have an enemy. I mean, he could in terms of Nikki Haley on the debate stage. They had a few back and forth, but there was no enemy of Tim Scott.

It's hard for me to believe that there's somebody in this field where they're like, Absolutely, we're not going to vote for. It will be interesting to see how it scatters. My guess is Nicky probably benefits the most, but I think Ron DeSantis probably has a even odd shot of picking up some.

Do you think it helped last week when Ron DeSantis got the endorsement, a surprise endorsement from the governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds. She's super popular there. I think DeSantis was smart, figured out a way to take that away from Nicky Haley and from Trump. She had said she wasn't going to endorse. There's rumors out there, Josh, rumors that he might announce Kim Reynolds as his running mate in the lead up to the Iowa caucuses. Does that work? I know Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina flirted with that back in 2016.

Yeah, and that's our only precedent for this, was that ill fated prior to Indiana rollout.

Of Carly Fiorina. It seems like a bad way to make a decision. Even though I think Kim Reynolds is a great governor and maybe she would be the best vice presidential choice, but to base your vice presidential choice on who might help you with getting some votes in Iowa, I don't know if that's the best way, but I do think she's a very competent person.

I think the world of Kim Reynolds, I think she's absolutely terrific, and people in Iowa have fallen deeply in love with her, particularly in a Republican primary component. But I'm not a huge fan of that play. I think at some level, what you're doing as a candidate is trying to make the case yourself. If you can't make the case yourself, nobody else is going to be able to make it for you. It didn't work for Tech Cruz. I doubt it would work going forward here. It's more like a PR, a press distraction at some level, that the Trump campaign, at least in 2016, did a really good job of mocking. They've done a really good job of mocking opponents thus far in this campaign. It adds to what you have to try to control in the context of a campaign, and I'm not in love with it. What I do think is interesting about Iowa, and by the way, I think when we had Tim Scott on Ruthless, he spoke about this very specifically, is he thinks it's important for this field to winnow because he thinks that there's ultimately a choice that needs to be made here.

If you have seven or eight different candidates taking up little pieces of this vote share, you never really get a head-to-head against Donald Trump. Now that we're working into maybe four, five, when you get into New Hampshire, candidates, I think post-Iola, there's going to be even more consolidation here. I mean, if you're not running second or third and you're not up into the 20s, you got to start wondering about what you're doing for the field. I think almost everybody in this field believes that consolidation is super important.

It's something to watch. Maybe for two people who I got notices today that they're holding campaign events. I got emails coming in. Tim Scott is out of the race, but Assa Hutchinson and Doug Bergum are holding events this week, and so they continue on. Okay, Josh, I want to discuss a few things happening last week for Joe Biden. The President on Sunday of last week, he wakes up and there's the New York Times Siana poll that says, Donald Trump would beat you in five out of the six races. And that Nikki Haley would beat you in all of them. There was some meta news for him if the nominee were DeSantis. They have a bad 36 hours of a news cycle and the elections happen on Tuesday. They're off-year elections, but super interesting that I would like your take on it. And Biden says, Look, the Democrats are doing great. And he tried to take credit for Andy Behear's win in Kentucky, and Governor Behear was having none of that. Tell us about where you think Biden is right now. Jim Messina, who I would say that you and him have similar trajectories in your careers.

He worked as a campaign manager for the re-election of Obama. In a podcast on the Run Up podcast this week, he said he feels confident that all is fine, that he 100 % disagrees with David Axelrod that Biden should step aside. He said, I'm looking at the data and the data is good, even though he admitted that right now they have some work to do. What do you think?

Well, I think they're both right in many respects. Look, machine is very smart. He looks at this the way I think a lot of analysts look at the data. The reason that Joe Biden is underperforming so significantly vis-a-vis Donald Trump in a lot of these polls is because his base isn't solidified. You look at the remaining part of the electorate that's either unaccounted for in terms of not showing up for Joe Biden or it's in this independent, weird territory. It's young, predominantly progressive, often African-American or Latino votes. Now, is that bad news for him? Yeah, that's really bad news for him. Do we think there's any chance that Donald Trump is going to be able to capitalize on that voter segment? No, not even a little bit. If you look at the Senate race in 2022 with John Fetterman against Oz, despite all of the problems that he had and the obvious limitations going into that election, they all consolidated in the end. Everything that he was under-polling going into that election ultimately showed up and voted for Federman. I suspect no matter who you get on the Democratic ticket, much is going to be the same.

Now, will they have the same enthusiasm for Joe Biden that they would like? No, not at all. But if the nominee is Donald Trump, there's plenty of enthusiasm on the left to consolidate against him. That's, I think, Massina's point of view. From Axel's point of view, he's looking at this as a historically unpopular president. I mean, historically, but what makes it much worse… I mean, Obama was pretty unpopular, too, going into his re-election. But what makes it worse for Biden is that he can't fight his way out of this. Obama could go city to city, state to state, and deliver it because he was really good at that thing. They can't take Joe Biden out and have him have any expectation that he's going to be able to close the deal with voters by himself. If I'm a strategist and I'm looking at that, you're pretty limited in all the options that you have before you, and you better hope that the trajectory from an economic standpoint and a world security standpoint doesn't get worse, because ultimately, he's teetering on the edge.

What about the additional factor of a possible third-party run?

Before.

We talk about one in particular who you know well. Rfk Jr. Is actually pulling fairly well in some states, I think there's a lot of caveats on that. Jill Stein announced last week that she will run with the Green Party, and that gives Democrats fits.

Because they really agree. I'm sure Democrats love to hear.

That name again. Yeah, because they remember 2016 and they really think that she was one of the people that peeled enough votes away from Hillary Clinton to take that off the table for her. Then you have Senator Joe Manchin, who finally announced that he's not going to run for re-election in West Virginia as a Democrat there. He's been flirting for a long time with the idea of running as a third-party candidate, perhaps on the no-labels ticket. What about all that?

Historically, I've laughed at this suggestion because I think in a post-Ross-Perot world, both parties have polarized. Both parties are further from the center. The idea that you're not picking a team has been pretty ridiculous. But I do think there's an exception this time that's worth looking at. You've never seen a Venn diagram of voters who don't like the two prospective nominees and don't want them to run for president. That looks more like a circle than this one. I mean, this is an incredibly high, in some cases, 70% of the American electorate that don't want either candidate to run. Obviously, there's a huge swath of the electorate that's open for business on a potential third party. But there's some infrastructure issues there. Clearly, ballot access is a big one.

That means making sure you get your name on the ballot. Maybe just explain to people. You can't just say, Hey, I'm on the ballot.

No. Every state has their own set of rules. You literally have a 50-state effort in very different… Sometimes it takes 10,000 signatures. Other times you actually have to try to win a third-party nomination from a party that's currently on the ballot, which is you got to get those endorsements, too. But last I checked, no labels, which is the one that's been flirting with Joe Manchin and a few others, they had 15, 16 states that they had secured ballot access. Well, that ain't going to cut it. You're going to need a 50-state operation, and most of these states are win-take-all type deals that we're talking about. I find it very difficult from an infrastructure standpoint to get somebody there. Now, if this was simply like a poll, it could get pretty interesting in a hurry for sure. I'm not sure where a guy like Joe Manchin pulls off of probably off of both. The funny thing, as you mentioned with RFK Jr, as he augured towards the center and out of a Democratic primary is because he's picking up what I call a libertarian tech bro guys who are very, very off the wall. They've considered themselves, I guess, Republican for the time being.

But really, it's an anti-vax crowd that doesn't want any government at all. Well, if you know anything about RFK Jr, that ain't his politics. He's gotten there because of this vaccine discussion. But there's a guy who is like, I mean, you remember well in the Bush administration when he was Pallin around with Hugo Cháves and talking about the wonders of socialism. That's a disconnect that I think ultimately falls apart at some level. But the Joe Manchin thing is more interesting to me, provided that they do have some valid access that isn't evident to me right now.

The thing about Joe Manchin, I always try to remind people, is that he voted with Joe Biden and the Democrats 88% of the time.

It's.

Not like he was really middle of the road. He is mild-mannered and the way he speaks is very commonsensical, and he has a really nice way about him. I think that he's easy on the ears, and he seems like a good man, like you'd want him as your neighbor for sure. But I always look at him like, Guys, he is pretty much the deciding vote on all of these big things that Biden are saying are his big legislative accomplishments. What would Joe Manchim bring to the table that you don't already get with Joe Biden?

It's a really good point, Dana. I think, well, he has a reluctance to dive off the left-hand side of the map that Joe Biden has not displayed at all. The first year of the Biden administration was about his progressive leftist of an agenda that we've ever seen in this country. He's not going to do that. But you're entirely right. I'll remind you, this guy, Joe Manchin, is at every opportunity in the world to be anything other than a partisan Democrat. Believe you me, a lot of people made some.

Serious inroads to try to- He was the last one to vote. He was the last vote that they needed for the Inflation Reduction Act, which was really like the Green New Deal.

And.

Then complained about the Green New Deal. That's why we have a mutual friend whose name is spelled S-T-E-W. He always reminds me to... He's like, Don't fall for it.

Yeah.

Well, it's true- It's like, keep my wits about me.

But it's true with Joe Manch. I mean, look, he is a charming guy, and I think that that's the reason that he's gotten as far as he has in West Virginia. But at some point on a presidential stage, charm only gets you so far. You do have to have institutional backing of a base of support, and you do have to actually roll out what it is that you believe. Joe Manchin has been very loath to admit any of that in public and not when he's had a chance to put his vote on record, as you just said, the Inflation Reduction Act. There's not been anything since new deal politics that has been as far left as that. He's, of course, a sponsor of the dang thing. I think he probably pulls more off the left.

I don't think he'll ultimately run.

I think so. He doesn't want to be embarrassed. The reason he's not running for.

Re-election- He doesn't want to lose.

-is because he doesn't want to lose. If that's the same calculus on a national stage, I think you're right.

All right, you heard it here on Perino and politics. Josh and Dana don't think Joe Manchin is going to run. If he does, you can come back.

And.

Throw pies in our faces or something.