Clip: The biggest political surprises of 2024

Jeffrey Goldberg: Mark, I want to ask you about Joe Biden, president United States for another few weeks. A lot of coverage in the last week or two about, including The Wall Street Journal, his limitations that were showing themselves, his intellectual limitations or cognitive limitations, the age issues coming out long before this past summer, or the debate on June 27th.

You were warning early about Biden's age. Is there anything surprising coming out to you now or is this kind of a story about a group of people around Joe Biden covering up for him?

Mark Leibovich: I mean, I'm not really surprised. I mean, I'm surprised to the degree to which he has completely disappeared since the election. I mean, I guess it's sort of obvious that a lame duck president by definition will not be a factor, especially when someone who has such a big footprint as Donald Trump is waiting in the wings.

I do think that there's a lot of sort of unfinished reporting done on this, which I think is going to come out around what this White House really did look like. And is that a failing of the media over the last few years? Maybe. But I also think, you know, there was a very serious effort to protect him, and to shelter him, and to keep him away from cameras, and to keep him away from situations where this would be exposed.

And, look, is it a scandal? I don't know if I'd use that word, but I also think it is a massive source of, you know, information that we're still trying to understand.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Mark, let me stay with you. I wanted to ask since we're coming to the end of the year, I wanted to ask you all veteran political analysts, as you are, to talk about the things that actually surprised you a bit over this last year.

Mark, let me start with you. What was the -- there's a lot of surprises this year, but what's something that really struck you as, oh, that's unusual?

Mark Leibovich: Yes I mean, I think one of the things that struck me was, I mean, the sort of sprint to the election that the Kamala Harris, you know, Tim Walz campaign ran. I was surprised by -- first of all, I thought Kamala Harris did a nice job. I thought she -- I think Tim Walz was a good -- you know, pretty good candidate. But I was surprised that they sort of landed on the politics of joy, which struck me as one of the most fundamentally sort of bad misreads of a political moment, you know, in a long time, which is, you know, this is not a joyous moment in the American economy, in the American sort of mood in general.

And it was -- it struck me as something that was tone deaf and something that when I heard it, I was thinking, I don't know if this is going to work at all, and I don't know if they've thought this through. And so I guess I would say that my surprise from the last year is the politics of joy being a thing, because it struck me as misguided.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Vivian, what was something that really struck you as unusual, or just you weren't expecting?

Vivian Salama: Well, I told your producers, I don't know if this was too obvious, but Donald Trump getting shot this year was mind blowing for a lot of us who have covered him for years. But not only that, the way that how he narrowly escaped death, I mean, literally by millimeters. And --

Jeffrey Goldberg: A head turn.

Vivian Salama: It was a head turn that saved his life, and it is pretty extraordinary. And we went just from that extraordinary moment to two days later, the Republican National Convention, which took on a completely new mood, catapulted his candidacy, and he was already doing well, Joe Biden was still in the race at that moment, and so his polling was still fairly good and he was in the lead.

But to see the enthusiasm behind his candidacy after that, it was really just an extraordinary moment in American history.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Asma, what about you?

Asma Khalid: Equally perhaps unsurprising, but covering the Biden campaign, which then became the Harris campaign, for me, which the moment that was just so surprising because I genuinely didn't think it was going to happen was when Joe Biden officially dropped out of the race.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Why didn't you think it was going to happen?

Asma Khalid: For a couple of reasons. One is -- I will say, one is that the campaign and the White House was so insistent it was not going to happen. Secondly, I think that the moment in which it happened, I mean, keep in mind this was after he had already debated Trump, after the RNC had taken place, talking about the end of July, it was so late in the season that it just seemed like it was not a recipe for success for the Democratic Party to take place at that moment.

But I also just think there is this sense that Biden has often had, that he was the man, the ultimate man, he said this, he thought this that could save the day and do this job. And he felt he was the best equipped man to do this. I remember I asked him at a presser why he did not stick to his commitment to be a bridge candidate. And he said, essentially, the circumstances had changed.

So, I just felt like there was such an insistence, even after the debate --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Which is what he said about the pardon of his son, also, the circumstances --

Asma Khalid: The circumstances have changed.

So, I just think it was so shocking, the fact that he did it initially by a statement while having COVID, the moment that it happened, the time that it happened, and, frankly, the fact that it even happened,

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, it's so interesting, not as shocking as an assassination attempt, obviously, but the fact that the debate -- if that debate, the first debate, had happened in September or even October, Joe Biden would have had to have been the candidate running against Donald Trump. We'll never know. It's alternate history. But just the scheduling of that debate is actually one of the most important facts in modern American political history.

Asma Khalid: I mean, I remember I had to write -- like you know everyone writes their pre-write stories that all editors make you do. So, I had pre-written a story, and I did one of those. And I remember after the debate, the editors are bugging me on vacation, edit, fix your story, fix your story. And I was like nah, it's not going to happen, and lo and behold it did.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, people -- I think, generally, people should listen to editors, but that's just me.

Ashley, what about you?

Ashley Parker: Since everyone has taken the good ones, I will just go meta and say what was surprising to me was how surprising and exciting this race ended up being. I was sort of the view of the American public that this was kind of going to be a slog. It was the exact same two white guys fighting over more or less the exact same issues. They were just both like four years older. And then for all the reasons they stated, everything just got upended in this wild, wild way.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, right. That was -- I mean, I guess the surprise -- was it at all surprising to anyone that Kamala Harris didn't do well or is that baked into this?

Mark Leibovich: Was it a surprise that she did or didn't do well?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Did not do well, like did not win any of the swing states. That would have been one of mine.

Mark Leibovich: Yes, I thought she was going to do better. I mean, I might have drank too much lead up to the election Kool Aid and wasn't smart enough.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You were so joy-filled.

Mark Leibovich: I wasn't. No, I was condemning the politics. Let's get this on the record.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Joyously though? Okay.

Mark Leibovich: No. I mean, look, I just thought I'm actually -- I mean, I was at a lot of her events. I mean, they were very spirited events. There were big crowds and everything. It felt like something was happening.

Vivian Salama: Also in the final days, it felt like there was a tiny bit of momentum for her, especially with women voters. And so they thought maybe she'd get some a bit, do a bit better.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. Well, we -- unfortunately, we do have to leave it there for now.