Transcript of Red, White and Who? The Desperation Stage

All right, Molly.

It's only 68 days away.

I'm sorry. What is 68 days away? Christmas. Oh, well, then we do have something to look forward to while we think about the event that is only, what, less than 20 days away.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't keep track of that one. I only have my countdown to-Election? What election?presence.

What election? Presence. I don't know about any election.

When I know that you, obviously, of course, because you're here, you live and breathe this thing. So what have you been paying attention to this past week?

Both candidates are going into somewhat unexpected media places to try to reach more voters. We had Trump this week, going to the Economic Club of Chicago, going on Univision, doing a women's town hall. Donald J. Trump.

Welcome.

Harris going on Fox News. Madam Vice President, thank you for the time. Thank you. It's good to be with you, Brett. For the campaigns, this is the desperation stage. It's their last chance to reach those voters and get them to the polls. They've got their ground games, mobile mobilizing in full force, knocking on people's doors, trying to drive them out, and really heightening the argument, talking about the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms.

It seems like we're at the point where people They've seen enough. They've seen a lot. They've made up their minds. Now we're entering the phase of the election where it's just get out the vote, go, go, vote.

That's right. I mean, effectively, the persuasion phase of this campaign is over. People have made up their minds. We see that in the polls that are so incredibly static. Now it's just a game of who can turn out more of their voters and get them to the polls.

From the Journal, this is Red, White, and Who.

Our show about the road to the White House.

I'm Ryan Knutson.

And I'm Molly Ball.

It's Friday, October 18th. Coming up on the show, It's Almost Christmas. And Hanukah. And Hanukah, yes. All right, sorry. Let me do this thing for real. Coming up on the show, Whose Voters are More Likely to Actually Go to the Polls? We take a closer Take a look at another key swing state, Arizona.

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All right, so as we were talking about early voting has started in a lot of states, and a lot of people are already going out and doing it. Do you have a sense of how many people have voted so far in America?

Yeah. The ability to vote is now available in all seven of the swing states and a bunch of other states as well. According to a tally maintained by NBC News, 7.8 million male in and early in-person votes have already been cast across the country. Wow. About 40 million people have requested ballots in order to vote by mail or early.

How many people usually vote in an election? Like 150 million or so?

It was nearly 160 million in 2020, so it'll probably be more than that this year.

Do you have a sense of whether all these early votes help one party over the other?

Well, according to NBC's tally, in the states where voters register with a party, the votes that have been cast so far are disproportionately being cast by registered Democrats. About 50% of the votes so far have been cast by Democrats, only about a third by Republicans. The rest are independents or unknown. In a lot of states, people don't register with a party, so we don't necessarily have that data. This does not mean Democrats are winning the election. It just means that their voters are dramatically more likely to cast their votes before election day.

Let's talk about each party's ground game. What are Democrats and Republicans doing to try to get voters to the polls.

Yeah. The Democrats have traditionally put much more emphasis on this idea of a ground game, particularly since Barack Obama, who really created a massive field organizing model for his campaign that Democrats have then copied in each successive election cycle, where it's this gigantic pyramid scheme style organization that starts at the national level, goes down to the state level, and then you have thousands of campaign staffers and volunteers at that bottom rung working out of hundreds of offices in every state and potentially every neighborhood of some of the swing states, just blitzing these voters, knocking on their doors. So the Democrats have this highly centralized field operation that is operating from within the campaign. Republicans are doing it differently this year and have done it differently in prior years. You When you think back to the Trump campaign in 2016, there was really no field organization beyond what state parties and the Republican National Committee were doing anyway. 2020 was difficult because of COVID. This year, the Trump campaign has decided that those resources are better spent on this election integrity obsession of Trumps on monitoring the polls for nefarious activity, even though we know that that really is vanishingly rare, really doesn't happen.

They are outsourcing the ground game to superpacks and outside organizations. You have Elon Musk's new superpack that he's pouring tens of millions of dollars into. You have the Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk's organization. There's a lot of Republican hand wringing about whether what's being built is sufficient, whether Elon Musk, who's quite new to politics, knows what he's doing or he's just flushing a lot of money down the drain. A lot of Republicans are very nervous about this novel ground game structure. Now, it's not the biggest deal in the world. Conventional wisdom and the political science research suggests that the best ground game in the world probably gets you a one or two point advantage. But in an election that this close, that could be decisive.

That's going to matter. If we're at this point in the election where it's really just about getting your base out to the polls, are there any advantages that the Republicans or Democrats have in their base or challenges that are presented by the kinds of people that each side is trying to get out?

Yeah, one really interesting wrinkle in this election is that for a very long time, I think for decades, the conventional wisdom has been that higher turnout benefits Democrats. The Historic Democratic Coalition has been many more voters who are working class, people of color, lower propensity voters. The idea is the more low propensity voters get to the polls, the better Democrats do. But because of this political realignment that we've been talking about, that has really changed to the point where many people now think that lower turnout benefits the Democratic candidate and higher turnout benefits the Republican. Because the Democratic Coalition has shifted to be much more composed of upper income voters and college-educated voters, whereas the Trump coalition is much more about lower income and minority voters and less frequent voters, it actually may be the case higher turnout now benefits the Republican, and that would be a pretty significant reversal from past years.

I want to pivot to talk about something that I've been noticing over the past week, which is that Donald Trump has really been dialing up his rhetoric in a lot of ways about talking about how the real enemy in the United States is the enemy from within and the radical left. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within.

And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.

He's talking about using the military to go after radical left lunatics around election day. And meanwhile, Kamala Harris is also leaning into a much more aggressive posture, and she's just playing all these clips of Trump. I mean, if you go scroll through her social media account, it's just all these clips of Trump, which is funny if you think about it, because she's putting these messages out there that are from her opponent. But why do you think Trump is talking in this way now? And why do you think Kamala Harris amplifying it.

Yeah, we've really seen both campaigns take a really dark turn this week, really dialing up the apocalyptic rhetoric. Harris hammering on the idea that Trump is a threat to democracy, and as you say, amplifying a lot of his rhetoric on Charlemagne the God's radio show this week. She agreed that she thinks that Trump's rhetoric has become fascist in nature.

One mind that is about taking us forward and progress and investing the American people, investing in their ambitions, dealing with their challenges. And the other, Donald Trump, is about taking us backward.

The other is about fascism. Why can't we just say it?

Yes, we can say That's it. Trump has been calling his opponents fascists and lunatics for a long time, but you have him now really talking aggressively about, as you said, rounding up his enemies, putting them in jail. I think because we are in crunch time right now, because we are so close to election day, both of these campaigns are just turning the dial up to 11, turning up the rhetoric, trying to frighten people, frankly, with the stakes of the election and with the idea of the hellscape that they argue would result if they don't win.

What does Trump mean when he talks about the enemy from within?

Well, he's talking about his political opponents. In some cases, he's specifically referring to this imaginary election fraud that he's convinced stole the election from him in 2020. The other day in Pennsylvania, he said, These people are sick, they're evil, they've weaponized our elections. He's really laying the groundwork for Republican voters to, once again, if he loses, be convinced that the election was rigged and stolen from him. This is something that you see is really widespread among the rank and file in the Republican Party, something that I saw in dramatic fashion when I was reporting in Arizona last week.

All right, we're going to talk about that trip to Arizona and more when we come back from this break.

All right, so we've talked a lot about the issues in the Rust Belt swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

But I want to talk more about the Sun Belt swing states, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona. First of all, just at a high level, what is the state of affairs in those states? Does it look like any of them are tipping for one candidate one way or the other?

No. Nobody has a comfortable lead in any of the swing states. That is why this election is tied. Both candidates are within the margin of error in all seven swing states. I keep getting questions from people trying to say, Well, we'll Does that mean Trump has momentum here, there? Or are you saying that Harris is going to win because of this, this, and this? The answer is no. I am telling you over and over again that this race is tied and we do not know who's going to win, and that is actually the state of play.

All right, so I wanted Let me zoom in on Arizona, which is a state that you traveled to recently. First of all, why is Arizona important in this election?

I went to Arizona to see how and why this swing state is in play in the presidential election and also what's going on in this very hotly contested Senate race that they're having. Arizona is one of, I would say, two states that have been the most torn apart by Trump's lies about the 2020 election. The Republican infighting over the 2020 election has gotten a lot of attention in Georgia, where Trump has gone after a lot of the top Republicans in the state. It's a similar dynamic in Arizona, where people like Kerry Lake, who's now the Republican Senate nominee, and other Trump allies, have aggressively amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. Kerry Lake ran for governor in 2022. She narrowly lost that race. She has still never conceded, never admitted that she lost. When I interviewed her, she would not admit that she lost. Did you lose the 2022 election?

We have litigated this. We had major problems on election day. And had we not had those problems on election day, I would have won in a massive. But when you shut down election day voting and the machines don't work, this is what we get, and it's not right. And so I'm going to work really hard to make sure we have honest elections. The people out there, I challenge you, just go and talk to the people out there. They know what time it is. They know what happened. Is this it, guys? One more question.

Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?

I believe that Joe Biden did not get 81 million votes, and I've made my my position very clear on that.

The idea of election fraud and the idea that you can't trust elections is something that Republicans overwhelmingly believe. I went to a JD Vans rally in Tucson. In 150 degree heat outdoors.

Stage the next vice President and second lady of the United States, Senator J.

D.

Vance and Rusha Vance.

Talked to A lot of the attendees there asked them about their concerns, and over and over, they told me that they were concerned about the integrity of the election. One of the voters that I spoke to there was a man named Dave McCartney. Very concerned.

It's just so obvious. Except for military, we should all be voting in person, and we should have a picture ID, and we should be voting once. I'm very concerned about it. Is this a winning strategy for Carrie Lake in her Senate race?

It seems to be hurting Carrie Lake's campaign because it has alienated a lot of swing voters who see that she is not telling the truth about what happened in the past two elections. They were not rigged and stolen, but she keeps saying that they are. For a lot of swing voters and independent voters, that looks to them like a candidate who's not focused on the things that are important to them, who's not focused on solving their pocketbook problems, but instead is obsessed with conspiracy theories. The way that this issue has really fractured the Republican Party and pitted Republicans against one another, people in Arizona who are involved in the political process tell me this has been a major factor in making the state into a swing state.

What does this mean for the presidential race? Does it help or hurt Trump that the Republican candidate for Senate is making this one of her central issues?

Well, Trump is running ahead of Kerry Lake in Arizona so far. In the polling average, he is a little under two points ahead, while Kerry Lake, the Republican Senate candidate, is about eight points behind. But a lot of Republicans worry that the doubts that Trump and Kerry Lake have sowed with Republican voters may hurt Republican turnout. There's a lot of research to support the idea that people are less likely to vote if they feel like their vote doesn't matter. We saw back in 2021, in January, immediately after the presidential election, when Trump was going around telling people that the election was stolen, there was a double Senate runoff in Georgia on January third, and Republicans lost both of those races. They think that part of the reason was that a lot of Republican voters were hearing Trump say, The vote is fake. That really is a disincentive to go out and cast your vote if you think that the whole thing is just being determined by some conspiracy somewhere.

All right, so let's get to our listener question. Our senior producer, Rachel Humphreys, is here. Rachel, you spoke to one of them.

Hi, Ryan. Hi, Molly. Yes, we-Hello. Continue We're going to get so many listener questions. Thank you to everyone who is sending them in. This week, we have a question from Paige Durenberger. She's 18 years old, and she's studying economics in East Texas.

Hi.

Hi. Is that Paige? Yes, it is. Actually, when I spoke to her, she had just taken a math test, trigonometry.

How'd she do?

She thought she did pretty well. It was triggering for me to hear that work. That takes me back.

I'm very bad at math. Trigonometry is very triggering. It's very triggering. For sure. I never took that class, so I'll be honest.

Well, I think Paige probably knows a lot more about this than either Ryan or I do. But as well as being into math, she's really looking forward to this election, and she's really looking forward to voting for the first time.

I'm feeling very excited. I have always looked forward to an election. Even before I could vote, I would watch my parents vote whenever they would cast their ballots, and now getting to do the same. It really is a dream come true.

A dream come true, which is exactly what the campaigns want to hear. Yeah.

There's a high propensity voter right there. So did she say who she's going to vote for?

She did. Page told me she is voting for Kamala Harris because of her stance on abortion. Texas, where Paige lives, has an abortion ban in place. Paige said it's something that she and her peers are thinking about when they go to vote. But it's also an issue that she says divides her friends and her peers at college along gender lines?

Girls and women that I know are flipping their vote from Republican to Democrats simply because they want their control of their own body. That's something that, while a lot of men are able to empathize with, they don't fully understand it until you're in it. I do see a divide sometimes where some men in my life don't understand the importance of maintaining the rights to your own body, where women really... It's a personal issue.

Paige, what's your question for Molly?

My question for Molly is, how influential are Gen Z voters like me going to be in this election?

Well, thank you, Paige, for a It's a wonderful question, and I love your enthusiasm for politics and your enthusiasm for voting. I hope it is contagious. I looked it up, and technically, Gen Xers right now are between the ages of 12 and 27. Obviously, only the ones over 18 can vote. Turnout tends to be somewhat low in this demographic. We'll call it the 18 to 29-year-old vote because that's how it's usually measured in things like exit polls. 18 to 29-year-olds in 2020 were about 17% of the electorate. A pretty important chunk and one that tends to be pretty strongly Democratic. There was recently a poll conducted by Yale University of voters under 30, and They found that this group was going for Kamala Harris by about a 20-point margin. That is not quite as well as Joe Biden did with this group in 2020. He had about a 25-point margin with the under-30 vote. You definitely do see the Harris campaign working hard to juice turnout in this segment and to get as many young voters motivated as possible. But it's not as democratic a group as it used to be. We are also seeing increasing signs of a gender divide among young voters with younger men inclined to be a little bit more conservative than potentially their elders.

Right. Just like Paige said, she sees among her own friends.

Exactly. She's our perfect focus group.

All right. Well, thanks, Molly, for your time. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Ryan. Always fun to talk with you.

Before we go, are you still undecided about who to vote for? If so, why? We want to hear from you, especially if you live in a swing state. Send us an email or voice message to thejournal@wsj. Com. That's thejournal@wsj. Com. That's thejournal@wsj. Com. Journal@wsj. Com. Red, White, and Who is part of The Journal, which is a coproduction of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Our senior producer is Rachel Humphreys. Our producer is Pierre Singy. Our editor is Katherine Whalen. I'm Ryan Knutszen. This episode was engineered by Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wily and remixed by Peter Leonard. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard. Fact-checking by Amelia Shonbeck. Artwork by James Walton. Special thanks to Kate Limeba, Sarah Platt, Ben Pershing, and the whole journal team. Thanks for listening. Red, White, and Who will be back when, Molly?

We'll be back one week from today.

Can't wait. At that point, it'll only be 61 days until Christmas.

Are you a Christmas person? Are you obsessed with Christmas?

I love every holiday. In high school, I was voted Mr. Spirit.

What did you have to do to be Mr. Spirit?

Spiritful.

Did you wear a lot of costumes?

No. I was really into my high school, and I was very enthusiastic, I guess.