(tranquil ambient music) - Steven Henderson, we certainly are living through an extraordinarily political stretch.

I've never seen anything like it, I imagine you haven't either.

Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race, and sort of handed things over to his vice president.

I think once the democratic leadership last week started openly pushing Joe Biden out the door, that there was no way he could survive.

I don't believe this was his decision though.

Do you?

- Oh, I think it was his decision.

I think he has over time come to the idea that this is just too much.

And it probably started even before the disastrous debate performance.

This idea that you could run for an office that for the next four years would require you to be at the top of your game every day.

You know, it just wasn't realistic.

And like I have been saying since last fall, I never thought this was much of a serious bid by the president anyway.

I think he knew that this was not possible.

I think the question now is, if this was always the plan, why didn't he do it last fall?

If he had given Kamala Harris, you know, the last eight or 10 months to be able to build more of a coalition and the support for her, this election might even be over.

- Or other candidates, Steve, I mean, had he got out in December or January even before the primaries got undergoing in earnest, I think you could have expected a number of Democratic candidates in the race.

- Absolutely.

- And to go through that sort of test by fire that the primaries are designed to provide.

And you might have had a stronger democratic candidate or a candidate in a stronger position at this point, and to sort of just drop Harris on the American public three weeks before the Democratic convention and try to switch from, you know, the months and months of propping up Joe Biden and defending him against all the folks who were saying, "Hey, something's not quite right here."

Now they've gotta drop that, and you say, "Yes, we're all a gung ho about Harris."

I think had they had a competitive primary process, you know, you'd see a real difference in where the race stands now.

As it is, I mean, Harrison, this early polling is about where Biden was, sort of deadlock with Donald Trump.

- Well, the Reuters IPSIS poll has her up four.

There was another poll I saw earlier this week that's 44, 42.

I mean, the significance here is not the number, it's the positioning.

So Donald Trump may go down in history as the first presidential candidate to actually drop numbers after the week of his or her convention.

That's a huge momentum builder for the parties every time that you get this push from getting everybody together, having the presidential and vice presidential nominees on stage making their case to the American people, and you come out with the wind at your back.

Instead, what they face now is a candidate who is much more able to articulate what she wants to do.

She's much more popular than they imagine that she might have been.

And their key argument, which was that Joe Biden was too old to be the president, now is the argument that will be used against their candidate, Donald Trump is in his late 70s, not the sharpest guy in the world, rambling on speeches and losing his place.

That argument now turns right back on him.

- In fairness, Steve, I mean, the Republicans did have a good convention, they accomplished the things they set out to accomplish and they had momentum coming out, which was stopped sort of in its track by this unexpected announcement.

And of course all the attention then, all the coverage turned to Harris.

- I don't think that was an accident, by the way.

- No, I think it was very much intentional.

I'm surprised it didn't happen Thursday night during Trump's speech, but, you know.

So there was this sort of threw up a stopper.

I think it's gonna take a week or two to sort out.

I've always been surprised by the polls in this election, even when after the debate, the gap between Trump and Biden never grew that much.

I mean, so we're going to see over the next week or two how many of these voters are persuadable.

- Yeah.

- And that how Biden is gone, do they necess, I mean, Harris, comes with their own baggage.

You know, not being Biden it puts her in a good position right now, but that may not last long.

- So, but if you look at the things that you have as a candidate in front of you, the tools that you have to build support, one is the convention, that's still in front of her.

- Mm-hmm.

- She'll have four days on national television to introduce herself in a different way, to build support.

And then the vice presidential pick, that's the other big tool that you have.

Trump squandered his by picking JD Vance, who is a more bizarre candidate than I even imagined he might be.

He doesn't have a great track record to begin with.

If you look at the people that they're thinking about on the democratic side, they have a much better position possibility to give the campaign even more momentum.

If you pick a Mark Kelly, if you pick a Rory Cooper, again, that's gonna send independence, and again, it's independent women who will decide this election, it will send them into the democratic camp.

Donald Trump has really maxed out with his support.

His numbers have not moved significantly in more than six months.

The idea that, the question becomes what is the thing that he can still do that brings people to his side?

It's not gonna be, look at Kamala Harris, we don't like her.

He's going to have to sell the American public on himself in some way that he hasn't.

It's only gonna get more interesting.

- Yep.

- We got three weeks or so to the Democratic Convention.

We'll see what happens.

- We will.