Transcript: Trumpworld Rattled as Polls Show Undecideds Move to Harris
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 4 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.
According to new reports, Donald Trump’s allies are not nearly as confident about his chances of winning as the campaign’s public posture suggests. They fear Trump’s hate rally in New York might have badly hurt him, and worry that the campaign’s internal polls aren’t getting it right on how shaky his standing is in Pennsylvania. All this fretting comes as new data shows real movement among women and undecided voters toward Kamala Harris. But the race remains a coin flip. How real is this movement among those groups? Today, we’re talking about what’s really happening on the ground with Danielle Butterfield, executive director of the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA. She’s going to tell us what has to happen now if Harris is going win this thing. Great to have you on Danielle.
Danielle Butterfield: Thanks for having me. Happy GOTV.
Sargent: Happy GOTV Day. Tim Alberta reports for The Atlantic that none other than Stephen Miller believes that the racist joke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, which compared Puerto Rico to a pile of garbage, was a “huge unforced error” that might do profound damage to Trump’s chances. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Trump aides are “jittery” about his standing in Pennsylvania, with some doubting the accuracy of the campaign’s internal polls of the state. Danielle, you’re in Pennsylvania right now. What are you seeing on all this? Is the hate rally resonating?
Butterfield: A really big difference between people hearing Trump’s words and Trump’s allies words in this context is that they have a retrospective understanding of not just his words but his actions and how the two can be really related to each other. When we heard messaging at the MSG rally last week, there was a really easy ability to then connect that to how he handled certain situations when he was president. It’s not just a flippant joke but a representation of how he actually acted. For example, we’re running an ad right now targeting Puerto Rican voters in partnership with Somos Votantes across the battleground, particularly in Pennsylvania, that really ties together the joke about Puerto Rico being an island of trash up against how Trump handled Hurricane Maria. That ad is testing really well amongst Latino voters, in particular Puerto Rican voters, because it reminds them, and it really contextualizes, that this isn’t just words, it’s his actions. That’s a really big shift that we’re seeing this year in terms of our ability to show Trump’s impact.
One other thing that we are seeing is that young voters are hearing audio from Trump’s Billy Bush interview where he said grab them by the p-word—they’re hearing that for the first time this year, even though it leaked originally in the 2016 cycle. This is really important because these voters who are voting for the first time in 2024 were 10, 11 years old when Trump was first elected in 2016. So when these voters are hearing this horrible sound and this horrible audio interview from Trump with his graphic depiction of how he views women, they’re hearing it in the context of him being proud of overturning Roe v. Wade. The context of how his words have actually had a disastrous impact, it’s just landing a lot differently in this cycle.
Sargent: One of the big stories of this race is this weird “forgetting” about what Trump’s first term really was like. You have that in a pronounced way among low-propensity young and nonwhite voters. Additionally, you’ve got this cohort of young voters who was in high school during Trump’s first term and really are only tuning into who this guy is now. It sounds like those two things together, the MSG rally plus various other assorted things he’s been saying lately, at least give you a chance at reminding these voters, and, in some cases, educating them from the ground up on who this guy actually is. Is it working?
Butterfield: Absolutely. We talk a lot about how there’s a difference between talking about Trump the person and Trump the........
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