The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 29 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.

Donald Trump is now working furiously to contain the damage unleashed on his campaign by the hate rally he held in New York. In a rambling monologue Tuesday, he defended the event as a “lovefest” and insisted Democrats are the ones running a campaign of hate. Trump is worried because new reporting shows that the vile “joke” about Puerto Rico at the rally is infuriating Puerto Rican voters, a key demographic in Pennsylvania. This is potentially a big deal. GOP strategist Mike Madrid posted a fascinating thread explaining why this may be an October surprise that could cause him to lose this race. So we invited Madrid on the show. He’s a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an expert on the Latino vote, and author of a new book called The Latino Century. We’re going to talk about all of this. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Madrid: Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Sargent: To recap, at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, a supposed comedian described Puerto Rico as “a pile of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” The whole event was a festival of racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, and all around ugliness. And here’s what Trump said about this on Tuesday.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): The love in that room ... It was breathtaking, and you could have filled it many many times with the people that were unable to get in. But politicians that have been doing this for a long time, 30 and 40 years, said there’s never been an event so beautiful. It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest, and it was my honor to be involved. And hopefully ... they started to say, Well, in 1939, the Nazis used Madison Square Garden. Well, and you know what? Every ... no, but can you imagine that? 1939, the Nazi, they would ... But how terrible to say, right?

Sargent: Trump also described Kamala Harris’s campaign as a campaign of destruction and hate. Mike, I didn’t hear a lot of love at that rally at the Garden, but should we read this as a sign that he knows the rally is breaking through to voters as a story about his and MAGA’s racism?

Madrid: Look, there’s no question that they’re going to be reeling from this. Any time you have a flub like this, and again, I mean a campaign flub. This was obviously a concerted strategy by the Trump people to have this person—persons by the way. It wasn’t just this one comedian, it was the whole litany of “terribles” that took the stage and those reams of stuff that they were saying. This is not a mistake by one person mistakenly saying something; this was a conscious effort, which they are realizing was a mistake in a campaign context. But anytime that happens and popular culture starts to weigh in, we start to have celebrities with tens of millions of followers uniformly weighing in immediately, you’ve got a campaign problem on your hands—because pop culture starts to drive the narrative and politics being downstream from culture will start to reflect that.

Sargent: That’s so key. The whole thing about this that makes it so lethal for Trump is that it has penetrated to the culture. You wrote in your thread that there are 450,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania alone and that, as a result, this rally fallout could very well cost Trump the election. Can you elaborate on all that?

Madrid: This is going to be most acutely felt in terms of a campaign reverberations in the state of Pennsylvania. This is the key swing state among swing states. Both candidates have over 93 percent probability of winning the race if they win Pennsylvania. So it’s really the whole enchilada here, as we’d say. Pennsylvania is also the one of swing state whose Latino population is Puerto Rican by the largest plurality. All of the others, Mexicans are the largest ethnic Latino plurality; not so Pennsylvania, it’s Puerto Ricans. And frankly, it’s the state where she was doing the best anyway with Latino voters. Now, if she’s able to move just 2 percent of Latinos away from the Republicans—where they’ve been a little bit Republican-curious over the past few election cycles—back into the Democratic fold, that’s going to have a really dramatic impact.

And when you start to see cultural leaders, again, the Bad Bunnies, the Jennifer Lopezs, the Geraldo Riveras, the Residentes, the Ricky Martins, all of which have combined over 100 million social media followers—it becomes a point of Puerto Rican pride. Can this move the needle two or three points with the Latino vote in Pennsylvania? Absolutely, it can. This state is uniquely positioned to be affected by what happened in Madison Square Garden, and we’re probably going to see that next Tuesday.

Sargent: It’s an extraordinary development because nobody could have predicted that something like this would happen. Well, I guess someone could have predicted that it would happen, but no one could have predicted that it would happen in such a vivid way. And I don’t think anyone could have predicted that it would have been laser-focused on this key swing constituency in Pennsylvania as well. You mentioned in your thread that Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania had shifted toward Republicans recently, but this could very well move a lot of them back. The reporting is showing that that’s actually happening. In some sense, the key point is that this is soft support for Republicans, right? That movement toward Republicans is soft.

Madrid: Yeah.........

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