The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 28 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.
Over the weekend, Michelle Obama delivered an extraordinary speech in Michigan that comprehensively indicted Trump from every angle. She reminded us how catastrophic Trump’s presidency was, thoroughly aired out Trump’s debased moral character, and asked why the press expects Harris to meet basic standards of conduct that we expect in a leader without expecting anything at all from Trump. It was very powerful. But does this closing message have a chance at winning over the undecided voters who will ultimately decide this contest in the swing states? Today, we’re talking about this with Reed Galen, a former Republican strategist who was on the front lines of trying to peel undecided voters away from Trump for his group JointheUnion.us. Let’s just get right into it. Great to have you back on, Reed.
Reed Galen: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Michelle Obama spoke at a rally for Kamala Harris in Michigan on Saturday. Let’s start by listening to this.
Michelle Obama (audio voiceover): So I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior, his obvious mental decline, his history as a convicted felon, a known … a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse, all of this, while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all.
Sargent: Reed, that strikes me as a clever appeal to undecided female voters who expect standards in public conduct from leadership figures. The Harris campaign is closing hard on this, aiming this messaging in part at moms who don’t want their kids subjected to this madness for another four years. What do you make of this appeal? What are you seeing out there among undecided women?
Galen: For undecided women, Mrs. Obama is an excellent communicator and messenger. Like her husband, they have transcended politics and are now part of the the iconography of America, for lack of a better way to put it. She has an ability to fill stadiums in her own right and to have people listen to her and take what she says seriously. And so for undecided women, she’s an excellent messenger. The question is now, How many people are frankly, Greg, still undecided? How many people are listening?
There are a lot of women who, and we’ve heard this anecdotally, said, like she did in her remarks, You don’t have to tell anybody what you do when you go into the voting booth. There are stickers now that are proliferating around target states in the stalls of ladies rooms that say when you go into the polling place, your husband doesn’t go with you. So this does have the potential to make this go from a very close race to a not close race at all, depending on how many independent and Republican women finally decide that, whether or not they’re a huge fan of Kamala Harris, they certainly want nothing more to do with Donald Trump.
Sargent: Can you tell us more about that demographic? Independent, undecided women, some of them are right-leaning, but not all. Who are these people exactly, in particular, in the swing states?
Galen: I’d say they tend to be white educated suburban. They’re the 35 to 55 demo_like me, maybe like you, Greg, Gen X, maybe early millennials—who are otherwise not necessarily conservative, but considered themselves Republicans back when that was a different thing. I worked for George W. Bush. I worked for John McCain. It was a different time. There’s some crossover with, say, a Nikki Haley.
Sargent: There really is this Nikki Haley demographic out there that Michelle Obama really might be pretty well-suited to speaking to because those are people who are inclined against Trump to begin with. They just have to be talked out of deciding that Trump is going to be better for them on the economy, which he wouldn’t be. Anyway, I want to play another part of Michelle Obama’s speech in which she put a finer point on the double standard that Harris and Trump face. Listen to........