GRACE: Hi. This is Grace (ph), and I’m currently hiking through Machu Picchu with a 2-year-old strapped to my back.
(SOUNDBITE OF BABY COOING)
GRACE: This podcast was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
1:06 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, October 21, 2024.
GRACE: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but this wonder of the world will still be kicking the butts of tourists like me. OK, here’s the show. Say adios, Harris (ph).
HARRIS: Adios.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Aw.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
MCCAMMON: I’m imagining the 2-year-old kicking mom ’cause that’s what mine would have done at that age.
KHALID: I’ve heard Machu Picchu’s hard enough to hike on your own. I can’t imagine how it is with extra weight luggage on you.
MCCAMMON: Hey there, it’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
KHALID: I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
GONYEA: And I’m Don Gonyea, national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: Today on the show – the presidential race in Michigan in the final two weeks of campaigning. Don, you are there in Michigan. You’re based in Michigan. You’ve watched a lot of Donald Trump’s campaigning over the weekend. And to sum it up, a lot of strange things happened. As much as you can make heads or tails of it, Don, what is Trump’s strategy in these final weeks?
GONYEA: Well, you know, the basic strategy or maybe the overriding thing is show up. Show up a lot in Michigan. And it’s him, and it’s his running mate, JD Vance. And when they are here, they hammer home the message that Trump will be good for the Michigan economy and that he’ll protect the U.S. car industry with tariffs on China specifically. He talks about China a lot. He rails against the push toward electric vehicles. But you mentioned the strange things that happened here over the week. And let me tell you about a couple of things that happened Friday, Trump’s last visit here. He did two big events, and then there was a little side trip as well.
He started out with a business roundtable in the far Detroit suburbs in a town called Auburn Hills. And it was just a really oddly low-key event for a Friday. U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers was there. He’s a former congressman. He’s been endorsed by Trump, but he wasn’t really showcased or highlighted in any meaningful way. There were some Teamsters there. There were some representatives of local police associations there. There was a woman who’s running for local school board there, all again kind of around this horseshoe table. But then came the big event, the really big event for the – you know, for the day, and that was a rally in downtown Detroit. And 10 minutes into the event, Trump’s mic just stopped working.
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DONALD TRUMP: Because to me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary – it’s not love. It’s not respect.
GONYEA: And it was the second time in not too short of a period where he basically just kind of walked around the stage for 18 minutes, to be exact, while they fixed the mic. And he wasn’t really interacting with the audience. He wasn’t doing anything except kind of walking around the stage. And it really did kind of take a lot of the energy out of the evening event. And he never really truly found his rhythm after that. And even 10 minutes after the microphone started working again, he would go off on a riff about how he’s going to sue the guys who provided this mic…
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TRUMP: If it goes out again, I’ll sue the a** off that company.
(CHEERING)
TRUMP: We’re going to sue them. Then they’ll say, what a horrible guy Trump is. He’s a terrible guy.
GONYEA: …Or how this mic is going to blow out his voice. And he just kind of kept complaining. Then that was it for Friday night. It’s hard to see the big takeaway for anybody at that rally being anything other than, oh, his mic stopped working.
MCCAMMON: I mean, and yet, you know, Trump has always been sort of an, to say the least, unconventional candidate. He’s never really followed the typical rules. In fact, that’s part of his brand. And if you’re listening closely, it can be hard to follow his message at these rallies. And yet, when you talk to voters, there are these key themes that seem to break through. What’s getting across to the voters you talked to, Don?
GONYEA: There are themes that break through. And, look, when I describe these kind of, you know, less-than-perfect events, I’m not necessarily saying that they were really bad for the campaign or that they were disastrous or anything – right? – or that they’re a sign of anything bigger because his message is simple, his message about an immigration invasion, his message about an economy that is not serving especially working-class people in a place like Michigan, his very simple billboards around town and elsewhere that basically, you know, have his photo and then say a very clear, simple message like no taxes on tips. Or he talks about how Kamala Harris is a lousy vice president – again, using stronger language than that – or how she’s not smart. Those are simple things that are breaking through with his supporters. Ultimately, he does, though, need more than just his traditional supporters to win this state. Polls show it to be very, very, very close. The question is, does that break through beyond his regular support?
MCCAMMON: Yeah. And, Asma, you were just in Michigan. You spent time with Vice President Harris. She’s been trying to hone in on just the strangeness of Trump’s behavior by playing clips of Trump at her events. What’s her message?
KHALID: That’s right. I mean, Harris has started playing clips of Trump so that folks in the audience can hear the former president in his own words.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And he tells us what he would do if he is elected president. So here tonight, I will show you one example of Donald Trump’s worldview and intentions. Please roll the clip.
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TRUMP: The worst people are the enemies from within.
KHALID: And I would say more than, you know, really focusing on the behavior, she’s really zeroing in on two big themes that Democrats have been trying to campaign on this cycle. One is their view that Trump is a threat to democracy. She plays clips of him describing this sort of enemy from within, all of that. You know, she’s also played clips of him on abortion. And these are two big themes that translate well to voters in the suburbs. And that, you know, is essentially the central vision that I have seen from the Harris campaign in these closing weeks. You know, they know that there are electoral challenges in some of these key swing states. They also will consistently say it’s going to be a tight race. The margins are everything. And they see advantages in the suburbs.
I mean, and to that point, today, the vice president is out there campaigning with the former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney in the suburbs of Detroit, in the suburbs of Milwaukee and in the suburbs of Philly. They believe that they can really sort of boost voter turnout in suburban communities – talking about white college-educated voters in a lot of these places. That’s not the only part of their strategy, but they see it as a key part of their path.
MCCAMMON: It seems like every four years, we talk about the suburbs – once again, a really big focus this year. You know, it’s also striking once again how much this campaign seems to be, yet again, a referendum on Donald Trump. Is that Harris’ closing pitch? Is that the way the campaign wants to frame the decision that voters face?
KHALID: It is certainly a central message of what we are hearing from Harris. Just take a listen to what she had to say at a rally in Oakland County the other night. This was in the suburbs of Detroit.
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K HARRIS: There is so much on the line in this election. And this is not 2016 or 2020. The stakes are even higher because, remember, a few months ago, the Supreme Court of the United States basically told the former president that he is effectively immune from doing whatever he does in office.
KHALID: That is, in essence, Harris’ closing argument. It is very much about the threat that she, that other Democrats see that Trump poses to this country. It is a message that, as you hear, really, really rallies up voters in some of these key suburban parts of the state. It’s not, again, the only issue. I mean, there was a woman I spotted there wearing a sticker that said, woman to woman, your vote is secret. Support reproductive rights this November. I mean, abortion remains a key issue for many Democratic voters. But the threat that Trump poses is something that I would say we saw President Biden really, really lean into. It is something that she is circling back to now in these final days.
MCCAMMON: All right, we’re going to take a quick break. We’ll have more in just a moment.
And we’re back. One of the things we keep coming back to is how much gender has played a role and how much sexism seems to be a barrier for Harris in a way that cuts across demographics. Asma and Don, what are you hearing from voters about this question of gender?
KHALID: Well, what I will say is that Harris is running a fundamentally different campaign when we talk about gender compared to how Hillary Clinton ran for the White House in 2016. Clinton really leaned into the symbolism of being the first woman, right? You’ll probably remember she wore this white suit when she accepted the nomination. Harris doesn’t do things like that. That all being said, though, it is an issue that I heard a couple of times on the campaign trail this past week. It was brought up unsolicited to me. There’s a man I met at a UAW event that Harris was doing in Lansing, Michigan. He himself said he’s all on board for Harris. His name is Matthew Peris (ph). He told me he’s 37 years old. He has friends who have reservations about whether or not a woman can do the job.
He wasn’t the only person who’s made comments like that to me. They’ll say – I’m paraphrasing here, but they’ll say, you know, I’m on board for Harris, but I know so and so who isn’t. How widespread some of those concerns are, I don’t know. I have also spoken with Ken Whittaker. He’s with Michigan United Action. It’s a group that fights for a lot of progressive issues, particularly around Detroit. And the director told me that some of the feedback they’ve been hearing critical of Harris has been, well, she’s been the VP for a number of years, and they don’t feel like their life has gotten necessarily better. But the other thing that he has been hearing are questions about whether or not Harris is actually Black. Now, to be clear, she is Black. She is also of Indian heritage. But that is something they – he says he’s been hearing from some Black voters as they go out to try to canvas.
MCCAMMON: It’s so interesting that Black voters seem to be imbibing that message that Trump himself first put out, as far as we know, at that conference a few months ago with Black journalists in Atlanta.
KHALID: To be clear, I mean, he did say that their target group are sort of low-information voters, voters who might just stay home rather than show up on Election Day. There is definitely – and he mentioned this – a clear population of Black voters who are extremely energized to vote for Kamala Harris. But there is, you know, a part of the population that he said, they’re apathetic. They have concerns. And he said that four years ago, some of these voters showed up because the anti-Trump sentiment was really, really powerful. What gives him a bit of anxiety this time, he said, is that he doesn’t hear among some of these kind of less frequent voters as much energy to show up because of Trump. Like, that is not solely enough of a motivating factor, he says.
GONYEA: And I don’t hear these complaints about Harris’ race or the fact that she would be the first woman president broadly across the Michigan electorate. You do hear them in these very kind of small subsets, even within some groups that Democrats would traditionally count on, and Trump is really leaning into that. He’s leaning into it himself but also with surrogates. So we see him trying to pull away the votes – again, a traditionally Democratic constituency – young African American male voters. He has kind of really been leaning into that.
Again, if you look at exit polls, Joe Biden carried the African American vote. Kamala Harris is polling below where Joe Biden was. Again, we don’t know where these votes are going to turn out, but – nobody is saying Harris will lose the African American vote, but she needs that big traditional margin. And if she doesn’t get that big traditional margin, she’s got to make it up somewhere else – in the suburbs, where there are plenty of votes to make it up, we should say.
But that’s what we see Trump leaning into. We also see him making a very big play for the Arab American and the Muslim American vote – again, usually a very reliable group of voters for Democrats. But because of the war in Gaza and because of the great, great anger over the Biden administration’s handling of that situation, a lot of that is creating problems within that community for Kamala Harris. So all of these things are swirling around, but ultimately, you know, as we sit here today, we don’t know how any of it ultimately shakes out.
MCCAMMON: And, of course, it all matters because, as we know, in such a close race, even small shifts in small groups of voters can make a big difference. On that note, of course, it’s all going to come down to turnout. And so before we go, we should talk about ground game and just the stark contrast between the organization and the ground game of these two parties, especially in Michigan. Don, what are you seeing?
GONYEA: This is the wild card, right? The Democratic Party in Michigan has always had a pretty good ground operation. It doesn’t mean they feel like they’ve always had the candidates to support it, right? But this year, kind of at the – at least the symbolic head of that is Michigan’s very popular and very dynamic governor, Gretchen Whitmer. She’s been working hard, and there are a lot of pieces to that ground game that are already in place. Part of that is the unions. And famously, Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, has been among Trump’s strongest critics, and he has mobilized his union’s political operation on behalf of the Harris campaign.
On the Republican side, you have a Republican Party in Michigan that has been in disarray for years now. There is some stabilization, but it’s pretty recent. And there is just no sense that they are organized like they might have been when Mitt Romney was the nominee, for example, to turn out the vote in ways that they traditionally would. You layer in the fact that the Trump campaign, the Republicans, are really relying on outside groups like one funded by Elon Musk, like Turning Point USA, to outsource to them this traditional ground game operation, and that just raises a lot of questions. We can’t say here that that’s not going to work or that’s not the way to do it. But I can tell you they are not as visible on the ground as the Democrats already are.
MCCAMMON: And, you know, Don, it’s worth mentioning, I mean, President Biden did win Michigan last time, but Trump has won Michigan before, back in 2016.
GONYEA: That’s right. He won it by just the narrowest of margins in 2016, something like 10,000 votes. Biden won it by more than that four years later. Trump has a record of either winning here or running very close. So that’s where we are with, you know, two weeks to go.
MCCAMMON: All right, we’ll leave it there for today. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.
KHALID: I’m Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.
GONYEA: And I’m Don Gonyea, national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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