The Chaser Report - McDonald Trump | David Smith

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Dom Knight is joined by Dr Pepper himself, associate professor David Smith from USYD's United States Studies Centre, and PEP with Chas and Dr Dave. The two discuss Trump's bizarre McDonald's stunt, how close the polls are, and the current ploys from each candidate in the final two weeks of the race. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is the Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report. Dom here, Charles is off editing his TV series again, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, he's got a TV series, whatever. We've all had TV series, haven't we, Dr David Smith? You've been on Planet America many times. I have, indeed, yes.

And when I say Dr David Smith, I actually mean, Associate Professor David Smith of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney, I'm such a pro. Now, look, there's heaps going on in the US election. I wanted to try and bring it all together because it seems as though things are getting crazier and crazier and tighter at the same time and also sort of more confusing in a strange way. So I want to try and get to the bottom of this. Find out what the polls are really saying and whether we even believe them anymore, whether you can give us any sort of sense of how things are going. And then as per Matt Bevan's current series of If You're Listing, which is called America's last election, will it even matter if there's a plan to, uh, again?

ignore the result of the election anyway. So, but the most important question of the day, David, I want your views on this. Did Kamala Harris work for McDonald's because Donald Trump's just been at a macas drive-thru in Pennsylvania, shaking salt on two fries? Clearly, this is the job he should be going for, isn't it? So I think she probably did. She didn't make up this story this year. She's actually been telling it for quite a long time. The problem is it's quite difficult to verify because people who work for a month,

McDonald's in the 1980s in Alameda, California, generally didn't have very solid employment records of that. And I think this is what Trump has pounced on. Trump, of course, has a long history of questioning whether other people's biographical details are real. He kept insisting that Obama produced the birth certificate where he was born in Hawaii. Now, I don't think there's going to be a group certificate that Kamala Harris could prove that she were. at McDonald's. Trump is not the only one who doubts Harris's biographical details. So when she said that she and Tim Walls are gun owners, which we discussed with this sort of wow moment, like one of the few things we've learned about Kamala Harris, there were Republicans

demanding that she actually tell people what kind of gun it is because they just didn't believe she could be a gun owner. Yeah, fire it. Take it out and fire it, Kamala. So, yeah, Doubting people's biographical details is a very cheap way of getting some marginal advantage in American politics. However, I will say I agreed with Donald Trump Jr. when he said that his dad probably knows the McDonald's menu a lot better than Carmala Harris does. Yes. Even a McDonald's employee who'd worked there for 18 years probably wouldn't know the McDonald's menu as well as Donald Trump does. I will absolutely give the Trump saying.

And in terms of Toyota McDonald's consumed, yeah, he'd be well ahead. I mean, if that's the test, if the test is, who is more McDonald's? I mean, forget your Tim Walls with Middle America. In a dietary sense, Donald Trump is absolutely in that area. And, I mean, look, I haven't seen the footage yet, but I've read some of what he had to say. I mean, and clearly this was a highlight at the trail. I expect there'll be many more appearances from now. And I think, given that he was able to actually make fries, this is going to be, like, every single rally is just going to be basically about fries.

Forget the swaying awkwardly to the music, which we'll get to. It's just going to be former President Trump cooking fries for everybody. Yeah, he's hit his stride. Let President Trump serve America its fries. Let Trump be Trump. That's right. Okay, so let's just play some ads. Potentially for McDonald's, who knows.

And then we can talk a little bit more about what's going on. All right. So the polls seem ever tighter. There are various metrics by which each seem to be win. Meaning, most of the major poll aggregators that I read tend to have Kamala Harris slightly ahead. Not that it matters because it comes down to the swing states anyway, as we know. The betting markets seem to have Trump ahead, although someone suggested this week that the kind of person who would want to bet on this stuff, which in many cases requires crypto,

is probably more of a Trump fan anyway, and that made a degree of sense too. But it does seem, after all this time, that the numbers are almost immovable, David. Yeah. So Trump has gained very slightly in the last couple of weeks. And you can see that when you look at the national poll averages where Harris's lead has strung from about three points to just under two points. We can now see that just about every swing state is down to less than a 0.5% average. Now, when it is this close, I find it very hard to say that either has an advantage. I think one of the reasons we might be seeing that in the betting markets is it's not just the very accurate comment that you've made about the kind of people who play beds. But it is also, of course, the fact that people have a memory of 2016 and 2020 of the fact that the polls missed and they underestimated Trump's vote. Something that also happened in 2016 and 2020 was that Trump made gains in the polls in the last two weeks. So I think a combination of those two things, when people see basically tied polls, they, you know, they think that the advantage is probably with Trump.

Now, I'm not sure that there's going to be a poll error in the same direction this time as there was last time because the pulses have been working very hard to try not to underestimate Trump's supporters again. One way that they're doing this is by actually waiting their respondents according to how they vote. at the last election. So what they want to do is wait it so that people who voted for Trump at the last election have a weight that's proportionate to the size of Trump's vote at the last election. Because at the moment, sometimes in samples, they're seeing 10% more people said that they voted for Biden and voted for Trump at the last election when the margin was only 4%. So they're saying that's unrepresentative.

We will wait Trump voters a bit more in the sample. That's good. I think, yeah, so this is a way of trying to ensure that they don't miss Trump voters. I think the fact that this technique is being widely used, apparently about two-thirds of pollsters are using it, it makes it a bit less likely that there's going to be a miss in that direction. It could also, though, help to account for how stable the polls actually look, because when you're waiting the polls in that way, you're going to get fairly similar results every time. And that kind of the New York Times, which is a poll that doesn't use that, says this could be a way of alleviating that bias.

The problem with it is that it might not pick up real shifts in the polls. And so an example is their New York Times poll found Trump up by 13 in Florida. No other poll has found Trump with a lead anywhere near that big. It's all like 3 to 5%. And he said that's because they're all waiting their polls to make the electorate look more like it did in 2020. If Florida actually has become a lot redder, then they're going to miss that shift. By the same token, these polls might actually be underestimating Carmala Harris because generally the weighting is increasing the power of Trump's support in the polls.

Yeah, because that was the underreported one for the last two times. It is quite reasonable to look at the polls, look at how close they are and think, well, you know, Trump won in 2016 and came close to winning in 2020 from a position of being quite a long way, behind in the polls, therefore he must be ahead. We don't know whether the same thing is going to happen this time around. Pollsters are really trying to stop that from happening this time around. But also you had, I guess, you've got a fairly different candidate in Kamala Harris in that, from what I understand, her absolute most rusted on kind of support base,

as one would imagine, is black women. And that wasn't the case, neither of the past two elections. So maybe there are new groups that are not being accurately, counts it or sufficiently represented now. You can only correct for the last polling area. You can't fix the one. Okay, so that doesn't necessarily tell us a great deal. But it is fascinating, nevertheless, that as you say, not only does it, will it come down to the swing states, but yes, when we go, okay, well, the national polls are tight. Let's look at the swing states. They are all so tight individually. The odds against this must be quite extraordinary. So there's an

awful lot going on in terms of the tightness. But the overall question of why America is like this, why you have this so powerably divided country is a really fascinating one. And David Brooks from the New York Times, I'm not an unabashed fan of, but he was trying to answer this this week. And he came up with something that I hadn't heard before, which may well be old hat to you political scientists, but certainly was new to me, which is the idea that, you know, politics has become, he says it's like a religion, but it's a tribalism thing. It's an identity thing.

You're a Democrat and a Republican. And these are things that are really rusted on. And the bizarre thing about it was that there are actually all of these forces within both parties that are pulling them to the margins, increasingly so. There are all these internal purity tests and going on. And whereas in the past, popular figures like Bill Clinton used to run to the centre in elections to try and get those undivided voters, you can't really do that anymore. Certainly with Donald Trump, there's no interest in going near the centre.

But there are all these, he calls them kind of internal profits or internal priests. But a lot of the key figures are sort of Bernie Sanders types or whoever else you might say, they are kind of purists in a way that we didn't see before. And so there's just no one trying to find that common ground in the middle. And that really is fascinating because it just suggests a system that, A, bizarrely one side mirrors the other, which isn't always the case, certainly not in Australia. And B, seems to just have absolutely no way of meeting in the middle at all, as we're probably about to see on election day. Yeah. One of the things that makes American politics so perennially close

is it seems that a party can't make many gains with one group without then incurring losses with another group. So certainly these increasing gains that Republicans have had with working class men, not just white working class men, but it appears Latino and maybe black working class men as well. This is coming at the expense of their vote with college educated women. And so we've seen over the last few years, Trump's non-college vote has increased almost in direct proportion to the loss of the college vote. So it seems you can't make too many gains with one group without taking a lot of losses with another group, which I think is one of the reasons why it gets so even.

You can't just go out and grab a new bunch of voters without some somewhere else. I think that one of the things Brooks is getting at is this paradox of American politics. It's been around for a long time, which is that political parties are basically weak organizations in the U.S. They're not like they are here where the party organization outside of parliament, which is really connected to these interest groups like unions or business, is very strong and really controls the selection of candidates. Parties are weak organizations in the US, mainly because they don't control the selection of candidates. That is done at primary elections. Yeah, and I mean, Donald Trump doesn't get endorsed by either party here probably. Maybe the coalition, but I mean, all they could disendorse him if he said something that was, you know, considered offensive as his first speech in politics was.

He lost so many, or business deals as a result of that speech about Mexico. Yeah. And increasingly, parties as organizations are not the key forces. in elections either. It's these massive donors. It's media organizations. It's people like Elon Musk, who we will get to. We will. Trump has effectively subcontracted a lot of his campaign to him. So here's the paradoxical bit. Parties are so weak as organizations, but they have such a strong command of people's emotions, of their loyalties, of their identities. Party identity has become what the political scientist, Lilliana Mason, calls a mega identity.

That is, it subsumes all other identities. If you know someone's party identity in the US now, you can take a good guess at their race, their religion, what part of the country they live in, maybe their gender or their sexual orientation. Increasingly, there's so much overlap between these categories and parties, which didn't used to be the case. You know, there used to be white southern conservative Democrats, which that's the tradition that Bill Clinton, who you mentioned, came from. There used to be liberal, northeastern Republicans, especially the decline of the Southern Democratic bloc. That overlap is gone, and now increasingly party identity is correlated with all of these other identities.

Now, there are many reasons why this is a bad thing. One of them is that there are significant taboos around you can't hate someone for their race. can't hate someone for their religion or their gender or what part of the country they live in. It's totally fine, though, to hate someone for their party identity. So party identity is a way of licensing hate, which may seem fine until you consider that party identity is correlated with all of these other social factors. So it's one of the reasons why the atmosphere is getting to a boiling point in the United States.

You just don't see this emotional attachment to party in the US. in other countries like Australia, despite the fact that parties here are a stronger organisation. Yeah, no, that is very interesting. And obviously, our system is so different. But there is a little bit of that in that clearly the rise of the teals in Australia is a sort of kind of modern equivalent of that phenomenon that's going on. So there's a lot going on there to explain why things are so close. And it's not just this election.

There's a broader pattern going on here in terms of the great divided American public life. Let's get back to our candidates, though, David. And Kamala Harris has been on a substantial media blitz. And in particular, talking to people who disagree with her, talking to Fox News. There's talks she might even go on Joe Rogan's podcast. She's been in all kinds of places where people don't necessarily like her very much. But she's talked to all kinds of podcasts hosts. She talked to Howard Stern.

So no one can say she's not doing interviews anymore. How do you think it's going? Is this making any difference? Is this the right strategy to try and win people over? It's hard to tell whether anything's making a difference at this point. And I think that the first couple of months, she avoided the media because then she was really benefiting from people just being able to project whatever they wanted onto her. And I think this was a necessary first stage of her campaign because she needed to get back the Democrats who had just been so turned off by Joe Biden. She needed to appeal to the never Trumpers, you know, to convince them that she wasn't some extreme.

that they couldn't vote for. So for a while there, she was everything to everyone. If you didn't like Trump, there was something you could project on to her. Progressives could see her as a progressive candidate. Conservatives could see her as this safe moderate. African Americans could see her as a black candidate. White people could see her as a post-racial candidate. But it got to the point where there was a definite ceiling on that.

And I think, you know, we saw she got out to this lead in the polls and then it stopped. And it gradually started to shrink. And that seems to be because there are too many voters who just say they don't know who she is or what she stands for. And I think that the reason she's doing this media blitz is to reach as many of those as possible. Because she knows that she is not going to get them if they don't think she knows, if they don't know what she stands for. And so she may be saying things that they disagree with, but she's at least going to give them the impression that she stands for something. And I think part of the reason why she did Fox News was to give the impression that she is brave, that she's prepared to go and do interviews like this.

She's prepared to fight. These are all personal characteristics of her that people seem to like. So I think it does, it really does indicate that it's going to be very, very hard to get these last few votes in this election. And the, you know, the slight move in the polls towards Donald Trump, that may well be. Republicans who have been on the fence and have just decided, okay, I'm ready to bite the bullet, I'll vote for Trump. She really needs to stop that from happening. She really needs to get the people on the fence to either not vote at all or vote for her. And I think that's why she's doing it. And in terms of the calculus, I mean, I know it's always about the swing

states, but it does seem more than ever to be about particular places. And again, we'll get to Elon Musk's attempt to buy voters in Pennsylvania. But I mean, they're doing the same thing. I mean, they're just cycling swing state to swing state. Tim Wals is just going anywhere. You can get up on a hay bale or something or fix someone's car and doing what he's been sent to do to kind of micro-target that message, which I guess is not really making it into the national media as well. But, I mean, how do these look at the moment?

It seems as though, is it still the case that essentially, if Harris gets Pennsylvania, she's almost there. If she loses it, it's very hard. Is it still pretty much about Pennsylvania or is it more complicated than that now? Certainly, it's impossible to see Harris winning without Pennsylvania. Given how close it is in Wisconsin and Michigan now, it's possible, I think, that Trump could win it without Pennsylvania. It's possible that if he gets Arizona and Georgia where, I mean,

his lead there is less than 2%, but by the standards of this election, that seems huge. If he gets those and North Carolina, then he would only need, to get one of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. It wouldn't need to be Pennsylvania. And, you know, there have been enough polls showing him slightly ahead in Wisconsin and Michigan, even though the average is basically neck and neck there, that this is a real possibility. So this also might be one of the reasons why people see Trump as having the advantage at the

moment. It's he possibly has more pathways to do it than Harris has, whereas Harris really, really needs those three, you know, what used to be known as Blue Wall states. The only way she could do it while losing one of those would be if she wins North Carolina, which is perhaps the closest one of all, and Nevada as well, which is where her biggest swing state lead is, albeit only one point. If she gets both of those, maybe she could afford to lose either Michigan or Wisconsin, but not both. And I don't think she can afford to lose Pennsylvania under any circumstances. Can you just imagine the residents of places like Iowa and Florida that used to be

swing states and used to get all this attention now just going, what, what do we do? Poor old, Ohio. I didn't mean Iowa, actually. No, Iowa used to be. Iowa used to revel in this attention. Iowa was a serious swing state for a long time. Yeah, but no one's going to Iowa. No one's going to Iowa. Yeah, poor old Iowa. All right, so she's doing what she has to do. And I mean, in terms of who she is and her appeal, David. I mean, we've heard little titbits. She's open to legalising marijuana. That was something she came up with when talking to Shalom and the God, the African-American radio host.

There are grants for small businesses and so on. But I mean, I must say there isn't really a big idea, and she's quite tied to the idea that she can't disavow Joe Biden as well. Yeah, she is. She is. And I understand that I think that focusing on very small things, that's just the nature of the campaign at this. point it's just seeking any marginal advantage at all any group of people who might you know benefit in some small way from this this policy that that could be the thing that tips them into voting yeah that is what she's that is what she's going after micro dosing yeah it's it's possible that someone else could come up with a way of not tying themselves so closely to joe

Biden, but I think Harris has just never worked out how to do that. And she's not going to, you know, she's not going to do it now. She might be operating off the theory that Joe Biden is, you know, kind of secretly more liked than the polls suggest. But, yeah, I don't know. The Chaser Report, news you know you can't trust. So over to Donald Trump, David. And look, the Elon Musk involvement, it's always weird when Elon Musk gets involved.

There's the Department of Government efficiency which he wants to run or doge. The fact that everything turns into a shit meme is just extraordinary. There's no task so serious that Elon can't just trivialise it in that way. But then also now the million dollars per swing state voter or is it a Pennsylvania voter

specifically, it seems like it's one of the two who changes his mind. He's giving away a million dollars per day between now and election day to a swing state voter who signs a petition backing the First and Second Amendment, particularly the gun one, being quite controversial, but that's not buying a vote, David. That's just a giveaway linked to a petition

because buying a vote surely is illegal still in the United States, is it not? Yes, it is. There's a federal law that says that you can't induce someone to vote or withhold their vote using monetary reward. By the way, as well as that lottery, I think there's also a 14. $47 payment. I was he still doing that?

Yeah, because Trump 47 if he becomes the 47 president. Yeah. Yeah, so there's lots of ways to win. Yeah. And in Pennsylvania, it's $100. So really, really targeting Pennsylvania. So I assume that what he's done, and the other very important thing is, you have to be a registered voter to sign this petition.

Yes. So this is a voter registration drive. This is the way that we should look at it. And isn't that the point where it gets. legally problematic because it's the point where it's legally problematic because I think he is allowed to induce someone to sign a petition like that but because it depends on registered voter status that's where it gets legally complicated I mean I'm sure he checked this with his lawyers and put a lot of thought into a whole thing before he just went live with it yeah well I mean he's

not going to care and I think voter registration in Pennsylvania ends on Monday so the whole idea is to get just get as many people over the next 24 hours. So it's not election day. It's until, of course, there's a catch. Yeah. Well, that's, no, he's saying he's doing it every day to election date. But that's the relevant date. Yeah. I'm going to be cynical about this. He's just trying to get as many people, you know, who are maga-minded, registered over the next couple of days. Then some judge somewhere will probably say this is illegal and then Musk won't have to pay out. Wouldn't that be brilliant?

Well, that said, I mean, if I was a Harris voter who wasn't registered in Pennsylvania, I'd certainly be registering and signing up. Yeah, yeah. You can, you know, the Second Amendment, Kamala Harris said she says she supports that. Yes. Yeah, no, look, who knows whether this is going to work? There's certainly been some interesting reporting going on about Musk's efforts. So a lot of Trump's campaign has basically been outsourced to him.

The other organization, which is Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, in Wisconsin, that's now just been completely subsumed into Musk's America pack. So, you know, Musk is the main game at the moment. And he's put 75 million of his own money in. I think his pack has donated a lot more than that. But there are some potential problems. So Musk decided that they needed a big door-knocking operation, which is, you know, fair enough because Democrats seem to have a big advantage.

over that. But the way he's done that is then to subcontract that out to other vendors. Of course. So these are not diehard Trump supporting volunteers. These are paid canvases who are paid by the numbers of doors they knock. Now, the problem with this is, these canvases have an incentive to say that they've knocked on doors when they haven't. And there is apparently some way of checking on this, which is apparently when they are filling out a door knock details more than 100 yards away from the door that they're allegedly at, that gets flagged. And according to a report in The Guardian today, something like 25% of supposed doors knocked

in Nevada and Arizona are possibly fraudulent according to this flag. He might need a Department of Gryftor efficiency at this point. That's right. And these vendors are saying, No, no, no, no, it's all above board. But, of course, the vendors have to say that because if they don't knock on the number of doors, they promise, then they have to refund the campaign. So there's one theory about this whole lottery thing, which is that Musk is actually

failing badly at doing this job of knocking on doors and getting voters registered. And so he's resorting to these increasingly desperate measures. Right. So it might actually not be doing very much. I mean, the thing about Elon Musk is he never gives up his old jobs when he takes on a new job. So he just does the more. even worse than he was before. So who knows what's going on there?

The last thing I wanted to ask you about, David, is this idea of another big fight if Kamala Harris wins. Now, it seems inevitable that Donald Trump will dispute the election. He's actually just said that unless he wins, he won't accept the results. Very clearly, that's not going to be a shock to anyone. He's not exactly a graceful loser because he didn't ever loseers. He doesn't have to be.

But certainly Matt Bevan's podcast, if you're listening, started a series on efforts being taken. to try and bake in the system, or at least prevent what happened last time. How is that going? Because I know there's been a lot of litigation backwards and forwards. And I think some cases, wasn't there one in Georgia, where in fact one of those efforts fell over in the last day or two? Yeah.

So, I mean, the two big legal developments since 2020 were, first of all, the Electoral Count Reform Act in 2022, which did things like clarifying that the vice president only has a ministerial role. and can't use their discretion to refuse to certify the results, increasing the threshold for congressional protests, the fact that it has to be one-fifth of the chamber rather than just one member. The other big thing was that the Supreme Court rejected the legal theory

that state legislatures have the final say over who gets to certify the election. So there was this theory being pushed by one of Trump's lawyers called John Eastman. And according to the Constitution, it's state legislatures who run elections. So they're the ones who should decide, you know, who the electoral votes go to. You can just say no. It's a Trump state.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Whereas the actual law in every state, with the exception of two, is that the winner of the popular vote gets the electoral college votes. Two exceptions being Maine and Nebraska, which divided by congressional district. There'd been these particular efforts in Georgia by the state electoral board, which is stacked with Trump supporters, to try to make it easier to challenge results. So saying that county election boards, if they had a reasonable suspicion

that something had gone wrong in the vote, could delay certification in order to investigate the vote, which that would just be a license to refute certify for whatever bullshit reason you wanted. And also saying that votes, every vote, every ballot had to be counted by hand three times, which is a recipe for further delay. That one actually just got chucked

out by a Georgia judge, a Fulton County judge who said, no, George DeLore says you have to certify these votes by a certain date. If you believe that something's gone wrong, you take that to the Georgia Attorney General. That is, you know, that's how it's supposed to work. So some of the avenues which were tried last time seem to have been cut off. However, when every state has its own electoral rule. And where Trump has hired so many lawyers to get ready for legal challenges, you can bet any weakness in the system, any loophole, any obscure law that people have forgotten about, it's going to be tested. It's going to be pushed against. There are going to be thousands of Republicans who instead of trying to get people out to vote are just monitoring

voting booths, monitoring drop boxes. There'll be hundreds of pages of affidavits submitted detailing supposed electoral regularities, which will come to nothing. But the tactic is delay, delay, delay, delay, in the hope that some states that Kamala Harris won, the vote will just not be certified on time and that Kamala Harris won't get to 270 electoral votes. So the plan is if Trump can't get to 270 electoral votes, just find some state or find a couple of states where they can just delay for so long that it gets to the point where she doesn't have 200, And if that happens, then it has to be decided by a vote in the House of Representatives where every state gets, every state delegation gets one vote, which that would definitely go to the Republicans because they always have a majority of states, even if they don't have

a majority in Congress. So that's what the plan would be. Nobody quite knows what the legal challenges are going to look like, but if it looks like Trump's going to lose, there will certainly be legal challenges. So in other words, we don't get to stop talking about the US election after the US election. No, we don't. No, sorry. All right. Thank you, David. Plenty to keep you and Chaz. Going through the night then on PEP, we'll catch you there. Thank you for joining us again today.

My pleasure. Thank you. We're part of the Iconoclast Network. We'll catch you next time.