Transcript of Can the ‘bro vote’ bring Trump an Election Day win? Analysts discuss

Up first with just three days to go till election day, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are still locked in a dead heat, according to the latest CNN national poll. As they barnstorm the swing states, Donald Trump has been focusing on his male MAGA base, ramping up inflammatory rhetoric, which some supporters fear will turn off women voters. She's a radical warhawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Donald Trump taking aim at a fierce critic, former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney. Let's see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face. Cheney responded, comparing Trump to a dictator and saying, Women will not be silenced. I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them. As election day nears, Trump has been appearing with controversial figures popular with young men who often trash talk Kamala Harris. Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country. Add to that, Elon Musk's pro-Trump superpath, which aird but then pulled an ad which called Harris a seaward after facing backlash. A big old seaward. Some of Trump's female supporters fear his courting the, Brovo, could backfire.

This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they've got going. 53% of the electorate are women.

Women will vote.

While Democrats hope Trump's strategy will help put them over the I think we have going on right now in the state of Michigan what I call the secret women's vote. Here with me today, podcaster, journalist, and author, Kara Swisher. Rihann Salam, President of the Manhattan Institute, and National Review contributing Twitter. New York Times journalist and The Interview podcast host, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and conservative Polster and New York Times opinion writer, Kristen Soltis-Anderson. Welcome back, everyone. Rihann, Can the bro vote carry Trump to victory?

I think it can make a really big difference. Younger voters have always been a vulnerability for Republicans, and in particular for Donald Trump. Yet there's been a widening gap among young men, and I think that there's generally been a decline in the stigma around backing Trump, especially among men. I think that can make a big difference.

But when you hear the tone this bro appeal is taking, hyper-masculine, somewhat insulting to women, do you worry about that?

Well, what I worry about is the fact that if you look at democracies around the world, incumbent governments are getting shellacked. There's basically no chance of a shellacking in this case. This is the closest election in modern polling history, and that's partly because Donald Trump hasn't done what Nikki Haley recommended. Try to soften the edges, try to bring people into your coalition. He hasn't done that, but he has made significant gains among men. The thing about the gender gap is that it has two dimensions.

Cara, can Trump win with the bro vote? What do you make of this latest comment from Trump about Liz Cheney?

Well, it's terrible what he said, but I think he tries to do this every day, does something shocking, so we're all obsessed with the crazy thing grandpa's saying, whatever he says. This is very violent and dangerous, and I'm sure Liz Cheney, who already was getting death threats, is getting more of them. It's really irresponsible, but he doesn't care because he really is a misogynist. I think pretty much that tells the story, and he's comfortable doing things like that and then using some excuse like what I really meant to say was, but what he really meant to say was he hates Liz Cheney, and so that's what he was doing. I don't think it helps him in any way. As to the bros, I'm the worldwide expert of bros, especially tech bros, but I think they don't vote with as much enthusiasm as women do. I think it's a huge mistake. I thought Nikki Haley was absolutely on point this week saying that. I think she's issuing a warning, and given how many people she got to vote for, he should listen, but he's not.

Kristen, what do you make of the bro vote? Is it a way to win this election.

I think the bigger problem Republicans are going to have is around Dobbs rather than just about Trump and his tone.Dobbs being the decision to overturn Roe v Wade.Dobbs being the decision to overturn Roe v Wade. Think about this. I mean, Donald Trump, right before the election in 2016, the Access Hollywood tape came out. We're talking about misogyny, bad treatment of women. This was shocking. It was appalling. And yet Donald Trump, he didn't win women in that election, but he didn't lose them by massive margins. The polls that we've seen show him not doing well with women, but because, as Riham noted, the gender gap goes both ways. It feels like he's gambling that he can lose female voters by 10 to 15 points. But if he runs up the score with men in a way he has not tried to before, he can counterbalance that.

Loulou?

I think that it is a huge miscalculation. I think the bro vote is not going to come through for him. We're seeing an early voting, women voting at much higher numbers than men, especially in a place like Pennsylvania. I think it's 12 points over at this point. I think the numbers don't lie. I think the other issue that he's going to be facing is that there really was a big impact among Latinos with this comment that he made about Puerto Rico being trash. We're talking about that in the next segment.

One Trump backer who's popular with young men is Robert Kennedy Jr. This week, both Trump and Kennedy talked about Kennedy's role if the former President is reelected. The key that I think that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS in its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others. I'm going to let him go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on medicines. Lulu, is RFK Jr. A good choice, a reassuring choice for Healthsaar?

No. I think this is really important because now what is starting to come into view is what exactly a Trump administration might look like and how extreme it really might be. There was the Elon thing about letting him run wild, trying to reform federal spending, and now there's this. Listen, he is an anti-vaxxer. Let me just give you one statistic here. If you don't like vaccines, think about this. Polio used to infect, kill 500,000 people a A year before there was a vaccine. Now it's in the hundreds. Vaccines are safe. They have changed the health prospects of children and people across the world. The idea that we are somehow going to be throwing that out is crazy.

I was in the first generation that got the polio, the Salk vaccine, and we were all terribly grateful for it. Kristen, RFK Jr. Is scientific, but as far as aside, does Trump saying he's going to let RFK Jr. Go and mild on medicines and health. Is that a good political strategy?

I wouldn't say he'd be my first choice, and that's an understatement. But in terms of the politics of it, it's strange the way you now have this coalition that used to be thought of as the crunchy left, organic. We don't trust big medicine. We don't trust big industries. There is now this movement on the right that I think used to be thought of as this rump libertarian raw milk group that is much bigger now. As distrust in science, distrust in big anything has gotten to be a bigger deal on the right, there are now an awful lot of people, including some young women who fall right into that camp that might otherwise be very skeptical of Trump and Republicans on grounds like Dobbs who are saying, I am open to someone who's going to tell me I don't have to vaccinate my kids, or et cetera. I do think that that's not an insignificant piece of the electorate these days.

But, Cara, I mean, yes, we're talking about politics. We're also talking about real life and public health. Howard Lutnik, a big businessman who was one of the co-chairs of the Trump transition team, went on the air this week to basically argue that vaccines cause autism, which has been just wildly disproved.

Yeah. No, it was really disturbing to see that on top of it. I mean, Robert, having RFK Jr. The only people that will be happy are Meisel's. Meisel's best friend. I always call him that because it's really irresponsible to do this. The other thing, and I know it sounds crazy, Trump has a lot of supporters in the pharmaceutical industry and everything else. They're going to push back on RFK Jr. So from a lot of perspectives, it's going to probably be some ugly fight if he, in fact, gets in that job. I don't even think he'll pass the Senate.

I just feel like he's got so much. Yeah, but they're talking about him as a health Tsar, so he wouldn't have to actually go through confirmation.

Perhaps, but then he can't get anything done. I mean, whether he can get something done is a big question.

Kristen, final question. Election night could It could be election days or election weeks. We could be here for a while before we know who wins this presidential election. I'm going to ask you in the next segment about Harris, but what is your bellwether? What's going to be your early indicator? You're going to be looking at election night to see whether Trump is doing well or not.

I'm going to be looking at Bucks County, Pennsylvania. That's a county where Republicans and Democrats used to run pretty evenly. It's suburban Philadelphia, and yet it's the place that Joe Biden began running a little bit more away with. Democrats have begun doing better there. It's more college-educated than your median place in Pennsylvania. If Donald Trump is losing that by big margins, that's going to be a big problem for him.

If he's running pretty even?

If he's running pretty even, he may be holding on to more of that white, college-educated Romney-era vote than I think some people are expecting.