Morning Wire - State of the Race: Who’s Poised to Win in November? | 9.22.24

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

Political analysts say it's anybody’s guess as to who will win this November. In this episode, we sit down with a veteran political reporter to get a clearer picture of where things stand. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Political analysts on both sides of the aisle are pouring over the polling to try to make sense of what's turned out to be the least predictable presidential race in our lifetime. But who's really poised to win come November? In this episode, we talk with a political insider about the real state of the race. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's September 22nd, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Hey, guys, producer Brandon here. Balance of Nature is my go-to source for whole-food ingredients. Balance of Nature takes fruits and vegetables, they freeze dry them, turn them into a powder,

and then they put them into a capsule. The capsules are completely void of additives, fillers, extracts, synthetics, pesticides, or added sugar. The only thing at Balance of Nature fruit and veggie capsules are fruits and veggies. So go to Balance of Nature.com and use promo code Wire for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer, plus get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's Balanceofnature.com promo code Wire. The following is an interview between Daily Wire, Senior Editor Cabot Phillips, and editor-in-chief of Two-Way, Mark Halpern.

We're joined now by Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two-Way. Mark, thanks so much for coming on. Great to be here. Thank you. So you have been reporting tirelessly on this race, covering the numbers very closely. Just to start, big picture, who is winning right now, if anyone, between Trump and Harris? Well, not the American people,

because you've got two candidates who seem to be doing everything they can to make their situation worse. people have doubts about Vice President Harris on policy and what she stands for and if she's too liberal for the country, she won't engage. They have trouble with Donald Trump on a different P word, not policy, but personality. And he continues to go out and do things and make people slap their forehead. I think right now the election is there's so many variables, right? But the big variable is, will she be seen as out of the mainstream by sufficient number of people in the seven battle grand states that they just won't vote for her? and Donald Trump and the media will play a role in that.

I think who's winning? She's winning until Donald Trump and the media start to work together, which seems like a strange idea, but Republicans can do it. If they work together to tell people, here's her record, here's what she won't answer. She's out of the mainstream. If that happens, I think Donald Trump will win. If it doesn't happen, if he's not skilled and disciplined enough to do it, and if the media keeps protecting her, I think she'll win.

To your point about the media protecting her, There was a story out today from Axios. Harrison Walls have sat for fewer interviews than any candidates in modern political history. Do you see that changing anytime soon? Well, her people are very sophisticated. They understand how the media works. She had a lot of staff turmoil, but she's the most blessed person regarding musical chairs because the team she happened to have when she suddenly became the presidential nominee.

They understand what the traffic will bear. they've done now a local TV interview, an interview with the Association of Black Journalists, CNN, and then the debate, fully protected there. Will she do more? Yes, she'll do more, but she won't do a lot more. And if she continues to do it with people who are friendly, it doesn't matter if she does 10 or 100.

Until she subjects herself to interviews or press conferences in which people ask her tough questions with tough follow-ups, it's not going to be a different result, whether she does 4 or 40 or no more. I think the press core and the organizations and the individuals who are covering her are the same people who covered up for Joe Biden for the entirety of his administration and even back to the previous election when it was obvious to anyone who'd been around Joe Biden what was going on. So she's not going to be forced to do more. She may choose to do more. But as I said, if she does an interview with the cast of the West Wing on a podcast, if she does MSNBC, if she does friendly interviews or. local interviews, it doesn't matter whether she does more or not.

So I want to get to the polling in these seven battleground states, but first, I'm interested in your confidence in these polls more broadly. Obviously, it's no secret. 2016, 2020, the polling vastly underestimated Donald Trump's support. Do you think they've remedied those problems from a systemic level, or do you think that they are still underestimating Trump's base of support? For those who are poll addicted, I hate to tell you, these polls are junk. Media polls and academic polls are done on the cheap. That's one problem with them. Well, there are many. But the second big problem is what you cited. Partly it relates to undercounting Donald Trump supporters systematically. And we can talk about the reasons why that was the case and might still be the case.

But it's also in this election in particular, knowing who a likely voter is is impossible with any precision, even for a great pollster with a big budget. And when you've got bad pollsters with small budgets, good luck. If they happen to pick the right balance of what the electorate's going to look like, it's just blind luck because they don't have the expertise, the money to do it. So I would say there's lots of reasons to think Donald Trump's being undercounted. But if you're a Trump supporter, Gavin, I don't think you can just assume it. I don't think you can say, well, Trump was behind Biden by four last time and he almost won, and now he's behind three, so of course he's going to win. It's just not the case that it's systematically without inexorably going to undercutting Trump supporters.

But as I said, there are reasons to think that even though there have been some, some good faith efforts to correct and not undercut Trump supporters, there's reasons to think that's still happening. Now, I've seen you in the past whip out your whiteboard with the battleground states that Donald Trump is looking good in versus Kamala. So let's go to each candidate. We'll start with Donald Trump. Which battleground states do you think he's most likely to win right now down to the world? ones that he's least likely to win. Cabin, I think the key right now is something that my sources, not just Republican sources, but Democrats too, raised for me shortly after her convention, which, of course, was the culmination of her initial run of extremely favorable price coverage,

a very good performance by her and the kind of thing she was being asked to do and was doing in conjunction with her campaign. You can break the battleground states down into two groups, right? There's the three Rust Belt states or the so-called Blue Wall or Great Lakes states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And then there's the four Sunbelt states, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia. The key thing that my sources tip me to early on after the convention in Chicago was what will happen to those Sunbelt states. Recall that before Joe Biden quit the race, before the debate, he had one electoral college path. And it was winning the four Midwestern states, the four Great Lakes states, because the same thing, Sunbelt states had all slipped out of reach. After the debate, those Great Lakes states slipped out of reach, too.

But what my sources told me was, watch the Sunbelt states where although Harris would have more strength because she's better with younger voters and more diverse electorates than Biden was, they believed that there was a good possibility that by the end of September that those four Sunbelt states would have drifted so far back towards Trump. Now with huge leads, but when he had over Biden, small but durable leaves. So those four Sunbelt states are almost certainly as four best of the same. roughly in order of strength for Trump, I would say Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina in that order, probably. Nevada is a tough state. One, I never know how to pronounce it correctly. It's either Nevada or Nevada, and I never can remember which it is. So I usually call it the silver state. It's a very hard state to pull, even harder than the others, because as you know,

the nature of the economy there is you've got a huge turnover every four years in the electorate, people moving in and people moving out. But I think that's probably the third best. for Trump and then North Carolina. And if my sources are right, and if it goes that way, and there are some Democrats who think that's a real possibility, too. And the public polling and the private polling doesn't run against that. If he can lock up those four states, then he simply needs to win either the Nebraska

two congressional district, because Nebraska allocates its electoral college votes differently than every state but Maine, or Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Michigan, just one of the Great League states. And Pennsylvania is a very, very tough state. So Pennsylvania might even be a better state for Trump than North Carolina is. Some people think that, including some people in her orbit. I've been told by some people that she thinks that. She's very bullish on North Carolina.

Swapping Pennsylvania for North Carolina, though, doesn't allow her to win. Then Michigan, then Wisconsin. Wisconsin's probably Trump's worst state of the seven. But the big question for me, what I've been watching for all of September and even back into August is, is she truly competitive in one or more of those sun-billed states, or are they going to slip away from her because she's not a good candidate for those four states? If that happens, as I said, Trump is back to where he was. When Biden pre-debate looked like a very troubled candidate with simply one electoral

cost to exactly 270 electoral votes, absolutely no margin of error. So let's focus in on Pennsylvania. What are you hearing from each side? what are your sources saying about their confidence to win the state? Yeah, that in some ways is the ultimate question, because it is the pivot state. If Trump wins Pennsylvania, he'll almost certainly win. If he loses, he could still win, but it's much tougher. It's a bad state for her, and the public data lately has suggested good data.

You know, Wednesday and to Thursday, there were no fewer than five Pennsylvania polls, which either showed Harris ahead or then tied none with Trump ahead. But I think they're all wrong based on my sources in both. parties. Trump has been a little bit ahead that what we call that small but durable lead in Pennsylvania. I would say based on what I've been told by the campaigns, by both campaigns, that Trump is a slight favorite in Pennsylvania. Doesn't mean she can't win it, but it does mean that there's a problem for her there. It's the oldest of the states, older than Wisconsin, for instance, and whiter than some of them. And so those are good things for Trump, old and white is good for Trump.

So I would say today, based on talking to both campaigns, it's somewhere between a toss-up and slight edge to Trump. Looking at recent history, where is Harris running compared to Biden in 20 and Clinton in 16? Behind. She's ahead of Biden 24, but she's behind both nationally and in the battleground states where those two were. And again, if you're someone who believes, and it's a reasonable thing to believe, as we talked about earlier, that these polls are undercounting Trump support. Then you would say, given that he won in 16, when he was running in the polls, National and Battleground, behind where he is now. And same in 2020, when he barely lost, you'd say if that holds, Trump will win. And that's the belief in Trump world. But they also, their private polls show him in a better standing in every one of these states than does the public poll.

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And sometimes, a smooth, silky latte just wins. It's exceptional but effortless. Like actually effortless. Simply press, brew, and explore. Nispresso, what else? Keep exploring at nespresso.com. I want to talk about a specific portion of the electorate that Donald Trump has been very open about wanting to win over.

Hispanic Latino voters and also black voters. The polling, 2022, did seem to show a shift among Latino voters. We've seen polling showing black voters, especially young black men, more open to Trump. Is that smoking mirrors? Are these just small sample sizes in the polls? Or do you think there is a legitimate chance that he could double his support among black voters and increase it further with Latinos? Well, they are small sample sizes, right? As small as a sample overall samples are, when you start doing the cross tabs and looking at young black men in a poll of even a thousand people, you know, you're talking about like few enough people to like host at a small dinner party. It's just not a lot of people, maybe a large dinner party.

I think that there's three reasons to think that it's not just smoking mirrors that Donald Trump could be doing well with these voters, particularly males, younger males. So not all black voters, not all Hispanic voters, but young, less educated and male in particular, not exclusively, but in particular. So number one, Trump has always had appeal to them, celebrity, lifestyle, attitude. Again, I don't like to do my reporting all by anecdote. But my young Uber driver in Milwaukee, a black man in his late 20s, talked on and on about how he loved Trump, talked about how he was gangsta compared him to some rap artists. And I said, so you're voting for Trump, right? He said, well, no, I'm not because I'm a felon, so I can't vote.

Trump has said and been criticized by the media as racist, some younger black people identify with me because I've been persecuted by the criminal justice system. It seems to me it's true. It's not racist. It seems from that conversation and other things I've heard in black communities, that there's some truth that. So number one, there's some identification with Trump on issues and on lifestyle and attitude. Number two, although the data is small in each individual sample, the accumulation of it's clear. Almost every poll has shown Trump doing better with young black and Hispanic men than past Republicans, including Trump himself.

And so there's reason to believe there that that's the case. And then demographically, those groups have borne a lot of the brunt of higher inflation of the problems in the Biden-eris economy of immigration. They're not so different than other folks. And in some ways, they've suffered worse to try to buy a home, to try to afford, you know, just daily things. So I'm not sure it's going to happen, but there's reason to believe. And, of course, as you well know, technology allows the Trump campaign to target those voters in a micro way. In the olden days, is it really worth the money to do TV ads to try to reach young black men? No.

But today, they can be highly targeted. And Trump, of course, targets them through his events as well, through social media and through events. So paid organic events, surrogates, yes, those groups are being targeted. And I think you're going to see the potential for that to be the decisive group. It may not be. It may all collapse. But they're not doing it for fun. They're not doing it for symbolism.

The campaign does believe that they can win a historically high share in those areas. And that can be the difference. Final question. We'll end with a fun one. What is a red state and a blue state that are not considered battlegrounds right now that you think could turn some heads, maybe not ultimately flipping, but states that you think will be closer than folks expect? Yeah.

So first of all, I thought all the questions were fun. So I resent you're saying that this was the fun one. Look, I'll answer the question, but I just want to make clear. There's two things that are really distinctive about this cycle as compared to the past. Number one, the number of battlegrounds is super small. It's only seven. It's never been this few. And the other thing is, it's unlikely to either shrink or grow up.

In a normal cycle in the last couple weeks, one campaign will say, well, we were trying to win Ohio, but it's off the map. We're canceling our ads. I don't think that'll happen because it's so small and because they both have enough money to play full force in every state, probably. Number two, I don't think it will grow. When Biden was the nominee, there was opportunities for Trump to expand in Minnesota, in New Hampshire, in Virginia, maybe in New Mexico. With Harris as a nominee and the two parties back to their norms, it's very hard for me to answer your question because the gap between 7 and 8 or 7 and 9 is so big. I'll say for the Democrats, it would probably be Florida or Texas. I don't think they'll win them. But I think you could see them be closer than they were in 16 and 20. And then for the Republicans,

I'd say Tim Walt's state, Minnesota or maybe Virginia, which are two states that are, like I said, were more in play when Biden was the nominee. But I think it's possible if Trump really closes strong and if Harris really has some experiences that put her in the so-called barrel, I think you could see New York close. I think you can see New Jersey close. I think you can see a number of states that are blue states where Harris doesn't lose them, but she does have a little bit of an existential sense of trauma if they poll it or there's public polling that shows them quite close. All right. Fascinating stuff. We will leave it there. Mark Halperin, editor-in-chief of Two-Way. Thank you so much for making time for us. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on. That was Daily Wire senior editor Cabot-Philip,

speaking with Mark Halpern, and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.