The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 24 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

We just learned that Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, believes that Trump will rule as a dictator if elected president. Kelly also says the fascist label applies well to Trump, and that Trump has declared that he wants his generals to function as Hitler’s generals did. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris jumped on this news, citing it as the latest evidence that another Trump term poses a serious, perhaps existential, danger to America, which raises a question: Is there a way for Harris to translate this bombshell news and news like it into a strong closing message that can win where it counts in the swing states that will decide this election? If so, what does that look like? Today, we’re fortunate to be discussing all this with Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin. He’s going to help us understand what to expect in his state, in the Rust Belt, or broadly in the race’s closing days. Thanks so much for coming on, Ben.

Ben Wikler: Great to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: John Kelly is now speaking out. He said Trump prefers the dictatorial form of government and that the term fascism applies to the former president. Kelly described fascism as a far-right authoritarian worldview that relies on forcible suppression of opposition, and said this fits Trump. Kelly also said that Trump has expressed the desire for generals like Hitler had. Here’s what Kamala Harris had to say about all this.

Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable. In a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there, and no longer be there to rein him in. So the bottom line is this: We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question, in 13 days, will be: What do the American people want?

Sargent: Ben, I’m guessing that a lot of Democrats in Wisconsin are really glad Harris just did that. Is that right? And if so, why is that, from the perspective of an operative on the ground?

Wikler: This is critical because this is the genuine article that stakes in this election. Now we’ve got Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Kelly, former President Trump’s chief of staff, who was a four-star general—and Harris amplifying it—making clear that the nation’s cameras are pointed directly at this reality. For the voters that are on the fence, who often feel deeply conflicted in the final weeks of this election, people who maybe have voted Republican in the past, but are not quite sure if they can vote for Trump again, this gives them a very clear reason to break against Trump. And that could be the entire ball game.

Wisconsin is a jump ball right now. There’s a poll today that finds 2 percent of Wisconsin, or 4 percent of Wisconsin voters, undecided, and 48-48 for Harris and for Trump. That means that the decisions made by those last 4 percent could tip the entire election here and probably, frankly, in all the other battleground states. There’s seven states that are jump balls in the final stretch. And what we know—I know this from directly knocking on doors and talking to voters; we know this from polls; we know this from models; we know this from focus groups; we know from every method of research that we have—is that there’s a share of the undecided electorate who have been traditionally Republican, who can’t stand the idea of Trump and are trying to decide for themselves whether they can overcome their aversion to Trump and still vote for him, or whether that is just so unacceptable that even if they disagree with Kamala Harris about a bunch of stuff, they’re going to vote for her in the final stretch. That is probably the election-defining question.

Sargent: Right now, the 538 polling averages have Harris up 0.4 points in the state. [It] couldn’t be closer. You often say that this is Wisconsin being Wisconsin. It’s a 50-50 state. So who are these undecided voters? A small subset are Republican-leaning, maybe Republican. Characterize the whole pool for us if you could.

Wikler: One way of thinking about who these voters are is a deep dive that Craig Gilbert at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did, where he looked at the undecided voters across a whole bunch of polls connected by the Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin. He found that, of the undecided voters in Wisconsin, half were people who had voted Republican mostly in the past. Ten percent, one-fifth the number, had voted Democratic mostly in the past. And then four in 10 had been swing voters who’d voted sometimes Democratic, sometimes Republican. So there are many, many more Republican-leaning voters and true swing voters that there are Democrats thinking about defecting over to Trump. The question is, How do you close the sale to those voters in the final stretch?

The two pieces of that are: make clear that Harris will be a president for all Americans—she is someone who sees and respects everyone and is someone who’s basically can be accepted even by people who disagree with her about a number of policy issues—and then, on the other side of that equation, make clear that Trump is a manifested threat to the American system of government, to the idea of democracy, the life and livelihood of millions of people across the country. You have to remove Trump from the equation of acceptability, and make sure that Harris is in the big We of people who disagree on some things, but all believe in the idea of the flag and this being a free country. That’s why Harris was here with Liz Cheney. That’s why so much communication is around these basic questions of whether we should have freedom in America, which used to not be a question that was really in doubt. And that’s why this revelation is such a game changer.

Sargent: Let’s talk a little bit about demographically who these undecided voters are. President Biden beat Trump in 2020 in Wisconsin in no small part by really running up better numbers than usual for Democrats in the suburbs around Milwaukee and Madison. We’re talking about Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties outside Milwaukee, Dane County outside Madison. Governor Tony Evers won in 2022 by getting more in those suburbs than Biden did. Where exactly is Harris right now in those areas? Where do you think Harris is right now—is she at Biden 2020 levels or Evers 2022 levels? How important is this, to your thinking, about winning?

Wikler: Waukesha County is the third-biggest county in the state. It is the biggest source of Republican votes, and it’s the third-biggest source of Democratic votes after Milwaukee and Madison. And Waukesha County has been moving toward Democrats ever since Trump came on the scene in 2016. We’ve had bigger shares in election after election. Right now, what we can see is high turnout from Waukesha County in the early vote and the absentee vote. The question that we........

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