Front Burner - The state of the U.S. presidential race

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is happening on Tuesday.With six days left, the New Republic's senior editor, Alex Shephard, is here to take the temperature of the race. What are presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris pitching in this last week of the campaign? Where are they focusing their efforts? What issues and revelations could make a difference in these final days of a race most pollsters say is too close to call?For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. So we have now officially entered the homestretch. The 2024 U.S. election is less than a week away, if you can believe it. So we're going to set out today to take the temperature of the race and get a feel for where things stand.

What are the polls saying? What are Trump and Harris pitching in these final days? What are the issues or revelations that could move things just enough to deal a blow to the other side? We're going to do all of this with my guest today, Alex Shepard. He is the senior editor at The New Republic. Alex, hi, thanks so much for coming on to FrontBurner. It's great to be with you. So could you put this in perspective for me? How tight is this race, according to the polls? It's very tight. I think it's extraordinarily tight, according to the polls? It's very tight. I think it's extraordinarily tight, according to the polls. No one really has any sensible prediction. Anyone that I talk to that knows or has their own set of polls who kind of gives me a authoritative reading on this,

I tend to mistrust because almost all the data that we have, both national polling and particularly in the sort of seven swing states that will almost certainly decide this election, points to a race that is hovering, you know, within one or two percentage points. And just how much faith do you think that we should have in these polls, given how we saw things play out in 2016 and 2020? And in both cases, I believe the polls actually underestimated support for Trump. They thought Hillary would win. Our latest tracking poll shows Hillary Clinton holding steady with a four-point lead. Five new polls that have come out in the last 24 hours,

all with Hillary Clinton ahead, but from a range of three points to 14 points. Our new CNN poll of polls, that is the average of the last four polls, shows Clinton at 47, with Trump eight points behind. Meanwhile, the latest national poll has Clinton up by nine, just 12 days from Election Day. And then they thought Biden would win by more, right? And so how are you thinking about that this time around? Yeah, I mean, I think that what we saw in the last two elections were, yes, there was a slight undercounting of enthusiasm for Trump, but also that, you know, generally speaking,

the results of those elections did fall within the model, just kind of in more unlikely parts of that model. But what we're seeing in this race, I think, is a little different. I think pollsters are really going out of their way to try to figure out how to accurately track Donald Trump's support. And so they're waiting polls in ways that tend to emphasize that, right, to not get it wrong in the way that it did in the last two cycles. So there has been we call it hurting. There's been a sense that actually that a lot of the sort of more reputable pollsters are fearing missing in that kind of way. So you're not seeing a lot of outliers and you're seeing a lot of polls that just say Pennsylvania 50-50, Michigan 50-50, Wisconsin 50-50. So you just mentioned three of the swing

states and I just for our listeners could you just tell me a little bit more about what is happening in these handful of states that we know decide your elections really just being fought in like what seven states yeah it's it's basically seven states or it will most likely be seven states so the big three are Pennsylvania Wisconsin and Michigan we Ohio used to be part of this we used used to call it the blue wall. These are sort of robust, democratic-leaning, post-industrial states. Ohio has now weirdly become one of the reddest states in the country. It was reliable Republican states more recently. But the race, I think everyone, both campaigns know that this race will likely be decided by Pennsylvania. So they are spending almost all

of their time just hitting Pennsylvania as hard as they can and going after Pennsylvania voters. From now until election day, we are going to get out the vote here in Pennsylvania. A very big hello to Pennsylvania. Thank you very much. This is some little gathering we have. Pennsylvania voters, there's a sort of large, there are two large cities, but one very large city in Philadelphia. But in general, the population of these states is slightly older, slightly whiter than it is in a lot of the rest of the country. There are kind of other blocks here. So there's Arizona and Nevada. Those are in the southwest. They tend to matter a little bit less, but there are more Latino voters there. They've been leaving Trump recently. And then there are these kind of other outlier states,

Georgia and North Carolina, Southeastern, more socially conservative. They tend to seem a little bit out of reach for Harris as well. I wonder if you could just explain to me a little bit more why Pennsylvania matters so much. Well, the short answer is just that it has a lot of electoral votes. So that's more than the other states and it's tighter. And I think that, you know, we're seeing that as being the tipping point state. So, you know, basically you can look at this race in one way, which is that Harris has been, Michigan has been her strongest state. So if she can win Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, then that's 270 electoral votes. She doesn't have to worry about

any of the others. If Trump loses Pennsylvania, meanwhile, it has such a large number of electoral votes, he probably needs five of the other states to win. And that would also be very hard for him. So, you know, it's in most models, it's what they call the tipping point state. So whoever wins Pennsylvania becomes far more likely in some models, you see it as like, if Trump wins it, it's 91%. If Harris wins it, it's 91%. If Harris wins it, it's 96%. Wow. Okay, okay. So now I want to talk about the final pushes that we are seeing from both campaigns as they near the finish line.

And can we start with Trump and the Republicans? And how would you describe the pitch that they are making at this moment? What are the messages that you think that they're hammering and why? So with any Trump campaign, there are always two messages. There's kind of the one that the people behind the scenes are pushing. So in that case, it's this idea that, you know, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris destroyed the nation. Are you better off now than you were four years ago? They wrecked the economy. They brought about inflation. They opened the borders,

which have been flooded with undocumented immigrants who are selling drugs, flooding the country with fentanyl, killing your children, et cetera, et cetera. Promise you we're going to end inflation very quickly. We're going to get those prices down, too. And I'll stop the invasion of criminals pouring into our country. They're criminals and they're pouring in like we've never seen. Trump's personal message tends to focus on the last part of that. Everything kind of comes back

to the sort of migrant push. And it is a lot more incoherent. So you saw kind of the danger of this approach, this sort of two-tiered approach of both kind of doing more, whatever, traditional campaigning, plus Trump's more improvisational thing at Sunday's rally at Madison Square Garden,

which has been kind of dominating the news cycle because of a racist joke that was made by an insult comic that for some reason was one of the warm-up acts. Cool black guy with a thing on his head. What the hell is that? A lampshade? Look at this guy. Oh my goodness. Wow. I'm just kidding. That's one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together. It was awesome. One about Puerto Ricans or Puerto Rico specifically.

You know, there's a lot going on. Like, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah. I think it's called Puerto Rico. And another about Latinos that were just racist and horrible. And I think actually make a big difference to go back to our earlier

conversation about Pennsylvania. You know, there are 600,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania, right? Like this is not a good thing to do to make those people upset. Yeah. But the other other aspect of this is there's just so much confidence emanating from this campaign. It's been a long time since I've seen Romney 2012 had a similar energy that they're just convinced that they're going to win. Their supporters are convinced that they're going to win. So a lot of it feels like this kind of jubilant victory rally that's totally premature. Next Tuesday, you have to stand up and you have to tell Kamala Harris that you've done a terrible job. That crooked Joe Biden has done a terrible job. You've destroyed our country. We're not going to take it anymore. Kamala, you're fired. Get out. Get out. You're

fired. Yeah. Yeah. Just just why do you think that the confidence is there, given that the polls certainly don't seem to show it? Right. I mean, yeah, I think some of it is just, you know, Donald Trump's primary asset as a politician is a sense of shamelessness. And that leads to, you know, this projection and his projection has always been of himself as this, as you know, history's greatest winner, which has never been true. It's always been, you know, a castle built on sand. But they've been very successful at pushing it. And I think But they he's been very successful at pushing it. And I think related to it is just that they really the people in that campaign really do not like or respect Kamala Harris at all. I think they've underestimated her consistently throughout this campaign.

And even as she's made several pretty successful pushes against them, she by most accounts won the only debate she had with Donald Trump quite handily. They just don't take her seriously at all. So I don't think it's actually based on anything. I mean, they certainly have internal polls themselves. And I think that they just disregard the ones that show this is a close race, but they don't believe that it's a close race, but that is not built on or it's not based on anything. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share

with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. The other thing this week that's been dominating headlines is that Trump did the Joe Rogan podcast, right? And now it looks like his running mate

is going to do the same. I think they spoke for, they spoke for so, so long. It's like a three hour podcast. I did not listen to the whole thing, but I'm just curious, what did you glean from, from that? And do you think it's going to have any impact at all in the race in this final week? And I use the word glean loosely. The Trump campaign's theory of the race has been that they are making inroads with voters of color and particularly and all young men. So particularly young Latino men and young Black men, but also they have an advantage with younger white men. And they've really been trying to sort of run up the score there. And you kind of don't really see a huge shift in a lot of the polls, particularly among

voters of color. There's been some inroads that Trump has made over the last three elections. And I think that this has been their media strategy has just been to go to places where young men tend to be. And so Joe Rogan is one of those places as, you know, a voter outreach tool. I just don't know. I mean, the big problem with this approach is that young men are just low propensity voters. And I don't think there is anything there to really convince anyone to get on board. But what it does suggest to me is just that that's kind of their big strategy down the stretch. And I'm curious to get your thoughts on this one, too, sort of related, I think, to appealing to young men. Billionaire

Elon Musk has been out on the campaign a lot with Trump. He's obviously thrown an enormous amount of money at his campaign, including just handing out checks for, I think it's a million bucks, right, to registered Swig voters who signed this petition that he has. I actually feel like I've seen more of Elon than a VP handed it, J.D. Vance. And so what do you think is going on there? Do you think that when all of this is said and done, Elon will have been considered a huge asset for Trump? I think that whatever happens here, Elon Musk will end up bearing a lot of responsibility for it. He has essentially taken over the get out the vote effort. And so

if you look at a state like Nevada, Elon Musk hired someone there who is a enormously respected kind of old hand there. They seem to be doing great work in terms of early voting, which Republicans usually have trouble with. In Pennsylvania, however, you know, it's been a big question mark. And essentially, you know, when you talk to some Republican field operatives, there's a lot of concern about the way that Musk is actually running this sort of day to day element of the campaign. He's never done this before. And I think, you know, generally speaking, he's somebody who is, his companies have sort of lived or died based on other people he's outsourced things to. And you can see both in this race where he's spending a lot of time in Pennsylvania and that's where the

get out the boat stuff is, is kind of going the poorest and places where he's handed off to other people, it's going the best. Which is also, I think, true with his companies. If you look at X, that's where he spends the most time. That company is doing the worst. The other aspect of this, which I think is kind of more interesting, is just, is Elon Musk a good surrogate? I mean, for me, at least, just based on vibes, I can't really tell. He's a kind of awkward presence. I'm not just MAGA. I'm dark, gothic MAGA. USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! And the other thing that I think,

I think people on both sides of the spectrum kind of either over or underrate this is just that she's an enormously controversial figure, right? I think there are people who think that he is Iron Man, who think that he is the most successful and brilliant person in the world. And there are other people who just think that he's kind of an idiot or that he's destroying the world. just think that he's kind of an idiot or that he's destroying the world. And so I think that making that person, your kind of, uh, your, your go-to guy in pivotal swing States carries some substantial risks. And just briefly, the other thing I think that this points to, which I think has been a little under discussed is just that Trump's stamina is, is way lower than it was the last two races. He's just not out there as much. He's not doing as much media. So you're seeing a lot more of Musk and Vance. Vance is going on Rogan, but Vance has been kind of the Republican Pete Buttigieg, right? He's the guy who goes on cable TV and sort of

fights back against the press. And that used to be Trump, right? Trump used to be out there. So I think what we're seeing is at 78 years old, he's slowing down a little bit more and he's relying on these two figures, Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, who just happen to be two of the most polarizing figures in American politics. Right. But not unlike Trump, too, right? Yeah. You know, I think the way that you described how people think about Elon, some people think

that he's Iron Man and some people think he's an idiot and a danger is probably actually the exact same way that people would describe Trump. Let's do Kamala Harris and the Democrats. How would you describe their big push to the end? What are they choosing to emphasize? What does that tell you about their strategy? Yeah, so I mean, it's in some ways they're also focused on a really small number of voters. Their message down the stretch has always been focused at sort of older white voters who may not be excited to vote for a

Democrat, but also really don't like Donald Trump. I never once asked in my career, are you a Democrat or are you a Republican? The only thing I ever asked is how can I help you? Are you okay? And so, you know, what we're seeing is we've seen a bit of this sort of, we call it like a fascist message or warning about the dangers of Trump. But mostly, you know, it sort of boils down essentially, you know, Donald Trump has an enemies list, and I have a to do list. And I'd ask us to just imagine the Oval Office in three months. Okay, so just picture it in your head. So either it's Donald Trump sitting in there stewing, stewing over his enemies list, or me with your help working for you

checking off my to-do list. That message basically makes the case that, you know, Trump is going to be this big distraction. He's this big divisive figure. And I'm just going to not worry about that. I'm just going to sit here and kind of get stuff done. And that, I think, is aimed at mostly older voters or hasn't been a kind of larger. If you look back at Joe Biden in 2020, Biden had a pretty big, robust, almost Bernie Sanders-ish economic agenda. He was talking about not only getting the country out of COVID, but about remaking the American economy, which I think to some extent he has. Harris's pitch has been much more conservative.

It's been much more aimed at quelling doubts that some of these folks might have, particularly about her record on immigration, but also about these fears that she's some sort of communist. In general, she's stressing just this kind of quote-unquote opportunity economy and that she would be a sort of strong force to sort of stop or at least slow the waves of undocumented immigration

that we've seen over the last four years. This strategy that, you know, that they're trying to grab Republicans that don't like Trump, she's talked about, Kamala has talked about how she would have a Republican in her cabinet, but that has also drawn pushback from the more progressive elements of the Democratic base. And do you think that that could be a problem? Do you think that is a problem for them? basically, to focus entirely on persuadable voters and basically bet that voters that are Democratic-leaning will not flee because of it. Yeah, like they will just show up anyways. Yes. And so there's been very little outreach, particularly to the quite sizable Arab-American community in Michigan. Michigan has the highest proportion of Arabs of any U.S. state,

and many of them are furious. Furious with the Biden-Harris government for supporting Israel's war in Gaza and failing to stop a new war in Lebanon. I will vote Harris, but I will not have the energy or the audacity knocking doors on my Muslim community and tell them to vote for Harris. How can I tell the Dearborn pharmacist who lost 80 members of his family in one day to vote for the vice president? There's been very little, or at least comparably less outreach to progressives. So she's been appearing more with Liz Cheney than she has with Bernie Sanders, for instance.

I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump. And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president. Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris. A fixture running Republican administrations as chief of staff, and then running their war policies as defense secretary and vice president, most famously during 9-11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, this news would have been unheard of 10 or 15 years ago.

They they believe that they're sort of the case that they're making is so heavily micro targeted and it is very, very data-driven. They know who these people are and where they live and how they will likely vote in contrast, I think, to the approach that we're talking about with Trump, where they're just kind of guessing that young men might be into this. And that is guiding their approach. Now, that may very well work, especially in an election that will probably be decided by, let's say, less than 100,000 votes, you know, you don't need to go very far. But, you know, that works the other way, too. And I think, you know, there are also, you know, to go back to those Arab American voters in Michigan, for instance, you know, that's a state that she's been doing very well in. But, you know, if they get that wrong, then and the Liz Cheney stuff, it's been heavily targeted by, you know, Musk backed

PACs and super PACs, and to a lesser extent by Trump and Vance as well, then, you know, this will go down as a disaster. So I think, you know, it's a risk. It doesn't feel that way, because of how conservative the approach is, or how cautious the approach is. But to an extent, it just speaks to the lack of time that Harris has had as a nominee, right? She's only been the Democratic nominee for 100 days. She didn't have this sort of normal grace period you have as a candidate to kind of win over the sort of further flank in your party, particularly progressives here. She just had to go right into a persuasion campaign. And that campaign has involved, you know, persuading older white voters, you know, in three states, in one state in particular.

I watched Michelle Obama's speech this week in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was just also interested to hear what you think about that speech in general, specifically the part where she really lays out the case for abortion rights. And she actually appeals to men quite a bit. Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out of state or overseas. Your wife or mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care. Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she's bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy.

What does that tell you about what the Democrats are trying to do in these final days as well? I think that you've seen both the Obamas be used as surrogates in really interesting ways. And these are two of, I mean, for Democrats, they're practically godlike figures, but they're, for all voters, really very, very popular figures. You know, Michelle Obama will never run for president. But, you know, if she did, you know, every poll basically says that she could beat anyone in the country. And the way that they've deployed them is as the people who make the riskier appeals, right? So for Michelle Obama, that was really laying out the case for abortion. And Democrats, much more comfortable talking about abortion than they ever have been after the repeal of Roe versus Wade in 2022. But they still you know, there's still a sense of discomfort, I think, in really making the full throated case for for abortion with fewer exceptions. And Harris has dodged every time she's been asked, like, when should the cutoff be? She's dodged it. And so Michelle and Barack have been, Michelle and Barack Obama have been used to really, like, aggressively make that case. And I think

also relatedly to kind of shame voters in ways that Kamala and Tim Walz feel uncomfortable doing. So, you know, Michelle Obama's case for abortion was aimed at men, and I think that was because she can get away with it. So I am asking y'all from the core of my being to take our lives seriously. Please. Do not.

You know, Barack Obama has talked both to Arab American voters and to black men in particular, in a way that is aimed at kind of shaming them. If you're a Muslim American and you're upset about what's happening in the Middle East, why would you put your faith in somebody who passed a Muslim ban and repeatedly suggested that somehow you weren't part of our American community? We have not yet seen the same kinds of energy and turnout in all quarters of our neighborhoods and communities as we saw when I was running. Now, I also want to say that that seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.

But I think that that is a case that, you know, they're kind of using the appeal that they have to make that case. And Kamala Harris can't't do that but there's been pushback right that uh that maybe that's not the right strategy that kind of finger wagging shaming strategy do we know right now if if there has been an obama bump at all because they really are mashing the obama button hey like yeah they're out there a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, the Obama button is the Democrats' most potent button to push, right? Hit it, hit it, hit it. Yeah. It's that Beyonce, Taylor Swift, you know, and you just kind of, you know,

with the weeks to go in the election, you just mash them as hard as you can. I think they may not have anticipated the amount of pushback that they've gotten. And I think to an extent, I think that the Democratic Party still operates in an older media environment than the Republican Party does. So that type of messaging appeal 15 years ago, you might have gotten one or two people on cable news saying, well, I don't know about this, but now there are 80 podcasts and I can listen to Charlamagne Tha God talk to the New Yorkers, David Remnick, about how he doesn't agree with that approach. What do you think of Obama's speech? I thought that seemed to piss a lot

of people off. Yeah, I didn't I didn't like it because I just like I said, I just think that, you know, pointing the finger at black men when we are the second largest voting bloc for the Democrats all the time, is ridiculous. And we're looking at polls. That's, I think, the risk there. That being said, I do think that they think that there's an appeal there because of the messenger, right? That I think there is some data backing this up because they're saying, look, we need somebody

to go out and make this case. And we're going to have our most powerful people do it because they won't get as much pushback for making. So this is something that you have alluded to throughout this conversation, but I think it might be helpful to just ask you straight up because somebody has to lose here. I say that with the caveat that it's not clear that Donald Trump will accept that loss. We just did a whole episode about the Stop the Steal 2.0 campaign that is very much in motion.

But in theory, somebody has to lose here. And let's say Trump does lose. As somebody who spends so much time immersed in this world, what do you think his biggest liability will have been? I think, well, the biggest liability is the one that people consistently overlook, which is that he is the most unpopular figure in American politics and voters. He's off-putting to just an enormous number of voters, and he does nothing to try to reach those people. I think he saw a rare favorability bump that's mostly stuck around

after the July assassination attempt, but that was only four points. He remains a kind of uniquely hated figure in politics, and he will not do anything to try to change that. And I think the Republican Party has been remade in his image. So in 2016, and even in 2020, I think there were Republican or sort of right-leaning voters who could still be persuadable based on some of the people around him, that there were kind of, you know, older hands that were familiar, or at least that reminded these voters that, you know, this guy would be kept in check. And the campaign that he's run this year has been one that is completely unbridled, even by his own standards. And, you know, the big bet that they have made going down the stretch is that, you know, that that will be appealing to a larger number of voters.

And I just am not sure that that's the case at all. talk to people that are part of that campaign, certainly when you talk to people in the sort of crowds that are attending his rallies, you feel that, you know, it's not really based on anything. It's just a vibe. And that kind of vibes-based approach to politics, I think, has real and pretty grave limits. And, you know, this is by far the most extreme political campaign in modern American history. And then what about the Democrats? What about Kamala Harris's campaign, which has also been called the vibes-based campaign by some people? You know, when this is all said and done, if she loses next week, what do you think people will say, like, did it? What, you know, was there a moment? What were the big errors? And what do you think?

Yeah, I mean, the one way of looking at her campaign is just that I think she's made almost the best of a pretty bad situation that Joe Biden, who was the presumptive nominee of the party, you know, there was almost a 0% chance that he was going to be reelected. Just voters had already decided that he was not capable of doing the job. And, you know, for a campaign that is only 100 days old, I think she's done a pretty decent job. That being said, you know, it's also a campaign that I think has showcased her limitations. I think she has not really been able to ever kind of conclusively make a sort of larger appeal or message. It's still not entirely clear what the first thing she would do if she was elected president. And I think that, you know, if she were to lose, despite the fact that, again, I think that if it's a close election, then that is kind of an accomplishment in and of itself, given the pretty enormous constraints around her.

I think there will be a civil war essentially within the Democratic Party and that I think there will be a despite the fact that she's running on the most kind of conservative immigration platform that a Democrat has run on in at least 60 years. There will be, I think, an effort to push the party even further to the right on immigration. I think there will be larger questions about their sort of approach to economics. And I think for progressives, I think they will reasonably say, well, you know, Kamala Harris never made any outreach shows. She never tried to answer the question of how she would deal with Israel differently. She never made that reach to Bernie Sanders. I just think that you'll see an enormous reckoning with the party. Okay. Alex, this is great. Really appreciate it. I know you're super busy right now. So thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.