In a presidential election so tight that no single poll can possibly be predictive—or comforting—experience is a premium. Stuart Stevens, the campaign cowboy who famously left the GOP to turn his fire on Trump as a member of the Lincoln Project, is nothing if not experienced.
I first met Stevens 20 years ago when he was a media consultant on George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, responsible for helping make the GOP convention film featuring footage of Bush throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium after 9/11 that recast the flailing wartime president as a sure-handed Nolan Ryan against a strikeout John Kerry (while fellow Bush adviser Chris LaCivita, now a manager of Trump’s campaign, smeared Kerry with the notorious “swift boat” ads). Later, Stevens ran Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 bid, itself a harbinger of Trumpian things to come, and one of the things that precipitated Stevens’s exit from the party.
Stevens can be relied on to have a forceful opinion, and usually a damned smart one, his sure-handed command of the facts delivered in a barrel-aged Mississippi accent. Witness his artful dismantling of pro-Trump hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, using Ackman’s own words to hog-tie him to Trump’s rankest comments. “The ballot box isn’t a cafeteria where you can go down the line and pick and choose what you like,” wrote Stevens on X. “If you vote for Trump, you are voting for a criminal out on bail who describes non-white immigrants with the same language as National Socialism described Jews.”
Frank Rich, the columnist and executive producer of Veep and Succession, called it “as powerful a moral and political demolition job as I’ve ever read.”
On Trump’s narcissism, Stevens is merciless—“You pet him, he follows you home”—and on his own former party’s retrogression, even more so: “They are selling pagers in an iPhone world.”
Surety is Stevens’s business. And when asked who he believes will win the most important election of our lifetimes on November 5, his answer is a fastball straight down the middle. Read on.
Vanity Fair: I was talking to a former Bush White House official and he said he thought the Harris campaign is operating out of some kind of panic. That the surge of interviews she’s been giving recently signals that the campaign must have seen bad internal polling and is now freaking out. What’s your read?
Stuart Stevens: I would say that’s probably somebody who worked in the White House but didn’t work in campaigns a lot. I think the Harris campaign is running what we’re probably going to look back at as the best presidential campaign ever run.
Really?
The structure of the race is the same. That’s why I also think Joe Biden could have won. Forty-seven percent of the country is MAGA, 53% isn’t. The Harris campaign has a very simple goal: Coalesce as much as they can of the 53%. So how are they doing? Well, we woke up today and Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders are supporting the same candidate for president. Not so bad.
