The Chaser Report - VP Debate: Would You Buy A Used Policy From JD Vance? | David Smith

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Dom Knight is joined again by David Smith, associate professor from the US Studies Centre at USYD, to unpack the VP debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. Who does Dr Dave think came across better, and what were all the best moments in the debate? Plus, what impact will it have on the election in November? 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. Usually with Dom and Charles, just Dom here with another US-focused episode. The debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris got the world talking for weeks, really, about the stark differences that we saw at that event. But a couple of hours ago, the two vice presidential candidates squared off. Governor Tim Wills of Minnesota, of course, and Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.

at the CBS New Center in New York. It was not as fiery an affair. The contrast was perhaps a little bit less dramatic. Talk us through whether it means anything at all. And if so, what? And also to explore some of the differences that were apparent during it, we have once again,

Associate Professor David Smith of the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney. David, welcome. Good afternoon. I think the best thing I can do is just turn your microphone off randomly during the course of the conversation. I think that's what the CBS moderators would want me to do.

that seems to be the main talking point of the debate in some of the coverage afterwards anyway is the fact that they turned their microphones off at some point. Yeah, that only happened once. And the hallmark of this debate was actually a performative civility from both of the candidates, constantly talking about how much they agreed with each other. And when Walls mentioned that his son had witnessed a school shooting, Vance said, oh, I'm so sorry about that. you know, talking about how much they would support each other if the other one won the presidency.

Well, I've enjoyed tonight's debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here. And I'm sympathetic to miss speaking on things. And I think I might have with the senator. Me too, man. There's one. So very, very different kind of debate from what we saw with Walls and Harris. The other reason, though, why it was very different was the talk may be about the moderators turning the microphones off. but what the moderators actually did very effectively and very unusually was to keep the focus on policy.

It was a really policy-focused debate, which was an interesting thing to watch, given that policy is not the strong point of either campaign. It meant that I felt that there was a lot more focused policy discussion in this debate than there had been at any other point during the campaign, certainly during either of the presidential debates or during the convention, for a lot of people, it would have been the first time they'd actually heard anything like a kind of detailed policy proposal

from either candidate. So that made it a very unusual debate in the context of this year. It was, wasn't it? And in fact, we'll talk more about exactly how the policy thing's unfolded. I'm going to announce just play some ads and then get into it

and we can get a sense of who did best I've roll because I was a little bit surprised about how it went down. Thank you for your patience. call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month.

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zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. The first thing to say, David, is that certainly when I watched the first hour, not the entire thing. But from the early exchanges,

it seemed as though Tim Walz was quite out of his depth in a way that I hadn't expected. And J.D. Vance was very, very polished. And across the detail. And in fact, For someone who's, in many cases, really struggled as the vice presidential candidate, he was very polished, wasn't he? He was incredibly polished, and Walls certainly looked very nervous and quite uncomfortable

in the first hour. He did hit his stride in the second hour, I thought, but the first hour is more important. That's what more people are watching. So, yeah, Vans definitely came across as being better prepared. He really had his lines that he was sticking to, and he wasn't. letting anything distract him from those. Both of them had this technique of answering the questions that they wanted to answer rather than the questions that they were actually asked.

Vance was able to keep bringing it back to the themes that he wanted, especially in the first hour. And Wals, yeah, he looked a bit flustered. He looked defensive. He was not speaking in complete sentences in the way that Vance was. he didn't look very well prepared at all. So certainly, especially watching the first hour, I think just about anybody watching that

would think that Vance was getting the better of Wals. Overall, I think that Vance got the better of the debate because he made such a better case for Donald Trump than Donald Trump ever did for himself. The contrast between Vance and Trump in the two debates was really quite extraordinary. Yes, so extraordinary. Vance, it has to be said, was telling some very brazen lies and engaging in some enormous

leaps of logic, claiming that the way to reduce carbon emissions was by ramping up fossil fuel production in the United States. The answer is that you'd want to reshore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you'd want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America. Saying that by failing to repeal Obamacare, Trump had actually saved it. But when Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs, Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.

Suggesting that the real threat to democracy in America was people getting kicked off Facebook for misinformation. You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn't wear a mask. That's not a prior in a crowded theater. that is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American. Senator, the governor does have the floor for one minute to respond to you. Yeah, well, I don't run Facebook. I've been quite appalling stuff on the level of truth.

When Trump says similar things, he just sounds crazy and unhinged. Vance had a coherence to him. He weaved it into a narrative that he was sticking with. So he came off as just far, far better than Trump. It was in contrast, apart from a couple of bits, didn't come across as really adding anything to Harris. There was one bit where I thought that he really did add something, and that was in the exchange about healthcare. Healthcare is an issue that is strong for Democrats, which hasn't actually got much airtime during this campaign.

And I think that Democrats really would have welcomed that there was a substantive policy discussion on healthcare. And that was one point where Walls definitely got the best of Vance. I think the Walls also did well right at the end of the debate, talking about January 6th and the threat to democracy that Trump posed. He did very well on those counts. But for the most part, Harris did a far, far better job in her debate than Walls did in his. And, you know, maybe vice presidential debates don't matter very much. But certainly, Vance might have made a few people feel more comfortable about voting for Trump.

People who might have been on the borderline, not sure whether they could vote for someone so crazy. Vance appeared to be telling them a far less crazy story than Trump did. For people who are borderline about Harris, I don't think that Walls will have won anybody else over. So I think that Vance got the best of the debate. Yeah, it was interesting too, just to see he'd clearly thought an awful lot about how to defend or even articulate Donald Trump's policy stances in a coherent way, particularly with the economy he was quite strong in talking about, and of course this was in many ways due to macroeconomic forces, but the notion of the Trump years is the good years and the Biden Harris years as the bad years. Now, Tim Wall did come back and talk about the COVID recession and all these kinds of things.

But yeah, it did seem as though, you know, just unleash the master again on the economy and it will all go well. And I can imagine that resonating quite well. And Vance somehow, yes, managed to make even some of the things on healthcare, bizarrely, even on abortion where Trump's policy is simply not to do anything and to just let the states work it out. He was a great salesman for Trumpism. And whereas Trump's positions really do see, like he just says best economy ever and uses superlatives, Vance actually had examples and seemed sensible and reasonable and to understand the issues in a way. that certainly, given some of the sound bites we've seen about him, some of the interviews that have gone badly for him, he wasn't able to do.

And it is now a weird disconnect where you've got someone who many Americans might feel, at least certainly those who aren't likely to vote for the Trump vans ticket, people might actually be more reassured to have him in control than his boss. Yeah, it has been pointed out, I think by E.J. Dion in the Washington Post, that there could be a possible backfire effect, which is people will look at this debate, they'll look at Vance and they'll possibly think this just shows how bad Trump actually is. And in the end, Vance isn't the one that they're voting for.

Trump is the one that they're voting for. But I think, yeah, on the whole, this will make people feel more comfortable about Trump. And even though I didn't find any of what J.D. Vance was saying convincing at all, Certainly, he was just putting it in a far more sane-sounding way than Trump ever could. Well, that's because you remember the substance of what Trump, A, did and B, wants to do. And so things like, I mean, the tariff policy is a great thing to talk about. So this is the 10% or more tariff on imported goods. Now, it does seem consistently, I don't think I'm being unfair here, that Trump seems to think

that when you put a tariff on something, there's going to be basically a check that China or whoever else it might be rights to him. So he puts a tariff on and trillions of dollars will flow into the Treasury that China will have to pay for the right to do business in America. I'm no economist, David. That's not quite how a tariff works.

And yet Vance, you know, at least sold that stuff to as best as he could, didn't he? He did, yeah. And no, that's absolutely not how tariffs work. Tariffs are paid by whoever is importing the goods. and whoever is importing the goods is then usually passing on the cost to whoever they're selling the goods.

But the way that Vance dealt with that was by pointing out that Joe Biden had kept in place a lot of Trump's tariffs on China and saying basically that's the best thing that Biden did and, you know, see tariffs are something that everyone can agree on. The one thing that Joe Biden did is he continued some of the Trump tariffs

that protected American manufacturing jobs. Think about this. If you're trying to employ slave laborers in China at $3 a day, you're going to do that and undercut the wages of American workers unless our country stands up for itself and says, you're not accessing our markets unless you're paying middle class Americans a fair wage. Of course, what got lost in that is that those are relatively specifically targeted tariffs, whereas Trump's talking about putting 10 or 15 or 20% on everything,

which would have a very different kind of economic effect. But the other thing that came out of that exchange, which I felt was quite effective of Vance and which will definitely appeal to a lot of Republicans at least was Wals was talking about, you know, the economic experts all disagree with Trump's plan. He was following on from what Harris had done in the first debate, pointing out these experts who disagreed with Trump,

which sent Trump into an absolute lather. Vance responded a lot more effectively to that, just saying the experts are wrong. The experts all said that shipping jobs overseas was a good thing. Look, they're all wrong. Trump's great because he ignored the experts. Those same experts for 40 years said that if we shipped our manufacturing base off to China, we'd get cheaper goods.

They lied about that. They said if we'd shipped our industrial base off to other countries to Mexico and elsewhere, it would make the middle class stronger. They were wrong about that. And for the first time in a generation, Donald Trump had the wisdom and the courage to say to that bipartisan consensus, we're not doing it anymore. What a powerful argument that was.

I remember at that moment thinking, that is, I can just hear Middle America agreeing with that. And if they forget, J.D. Vance's own record as a venture capitalist involved in that process. And one of the many things Walls could have said and didn't in being in effect, in attacking Vance. And we'll get on to him in a second. But yeah, gosh, he sold that one well, didn't he? Yeah, I mean, that was about the best response he could have given to that. Not everyone's going to be convinced by that.

I certainly wasn't convinced by that, but for a lot of people, that line is definitely going to resonate. And certainly Vance was always able to relate it back to this Trumpian narrative. He constantly came back to the idea that illegal immigration was responsible for every problem. Trump would like that. Again, not something that I find convincing, but he was able to keep coming back to that and to keep pushing it. And certainly people who might have found policy.

details in the debate, otherwise quite hard to follow, thinking about, for example, the way that Walls answered a question about housing policy, that was a very simple narrative that Vance was just pushing throughout. So I think that it probably went about as well as it could have for Vance except for towards the end when I think that, yeah, Wals, as I said, really got the better of him on health care policy. And also, Walls really pressed him on the issue of Trump refusing to accept the election results. For the point where Vance himself refused to accept that Trump had lost because Vance, his most important audience in this debate is Donald Trump. There's no way he could have conceded that. And at one point, Wals referred to something that he said

as a damning non-response. Did he lose the 2020 election? Tim, I'm focused on the future. did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation? That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer. So I thought that Vance did fall apart a bit at the end there, but what happens at the end of the debate is probably the least consequential thing in the debate. In a moment, let's look at how Jaddy Vance managed to spin his fairly embarrassing track record when it comes to what he said about Donald Trump. Thank you for your patience.

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Groceries that over-deliver. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens. Okay, so one of the things that was fascinating when Donald Trump chose J.D. Vance as he's running, supposedly on the advice of people like Donald Trump Jr. And I think some of his other mates were bigger fans of Vance than Trump was, was the very harsh things that Vance said about Trump in the past. And the moderators even put to him some of the things unearthed in the past week or so that he wrote about Trump, many of which to neutral commentators might ring reasonably true.

I mean, it's not often that you try and elect someone who you've previously described as a potential Hitler as president and the sense was that Vance would sort of say anything to get elected and had no core, no consistent set of beliefs. And I must say when Vance described himself as having been misled by the media into believing this caricature of Donald Trump. And sometimes, of course, I've disagreed with the president, but I've also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump. I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record. I could imagine Trump, you know, lapping that one and have some of his mega supporters going,

poor J.D. was a victim of the media lies. That was, again, he made about the best of that that he could. I think one danger for Vance in all of this is that he comes across as so polished and so well prepared, the people who might just not trust him, who see him as opportunistic, who see him as this guy who claims this hillbilly background, but at the same time is really part of the American elite

and has had this very rapid rise through politics and will say or do anything to get elected. Nothing that he said in the debate today would have disabused people. No, absolutely not. But did it well. It was like going to, it was sort of like going to a car yard

and having the top salesman on the lot, talking you through it. And there's a sense in which you're kind of going, I see what he's doing. But then part of you goes, but he's doing it really well. I'm not necessarily buying all this stuff about what an amazing

model this beaten-up jalopy ears. But you've got to admire the Polish he's putting on this thing. Yeah. And one of the other things, just yet again, which was such a contrast to Trump, was the self-control that he displayed throughout the debate. He never sort of seemed to let the emotional temperature rise at all. There were a couple of points where he talked over walls, but at one point in the microphone getting cut off, but not very often. It was a real. It was a really really, really disciplined performance from J.D. Vance. And yeah, salesman-like would be a good way to describe it. That might not be what everybody wants to see. But certainly, I think it was a huge improvement on what Trump offered, because Trump is also very salesman-like. But for Trump,

it sounded like you turned up to the car yard and he was insisting that he was actually selling you this train. You're like, that's not a train. That's a golf buggy. No, no, this is actually a train. The best train. Yeah. Yeah.

So once again, just a massive contrast to Trump. And I guess when we come to thinking about who the successor to Donald Trump may end up being, whether it's in four years after his president or after he loses this one, Jaddy Vance, I think made a very good case for himself as a good prosecutor of Trumpism, of, of, the mega movement. Let's talk a bit more about Tim Walz because he's quite new to the national stage. Vance quite insightfully began in his first answer by noting that most viewers wouldn't have actually seen him or Walls before and know much about them. And Walls kind of flubbed his first answer somewhat and didn't do that general introduction that's always cute at the start

of a debate. And Vance did. Vance also actually tried to answer the question somewhat in the first exchange, certainly more than Wals did. He just kind of babbled a bit there. And he did seem a bit unpolished at times. The thing that got me about walls was that there were so many opportunities to remind viewers of Trump and what Trump said and to tie the Vancey and Polish back to Trump himself and who they're actually going to be voting for. And many of those open goals seemed missed. I mean, in particular, when they started talking about Springfield, Ohio and the breakthrough moment of the Harris Trump debate where Trump started raving about immigrants eating cats and dogs and pets and all this stuff. And I'm sure everyone's seen the clip.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. Walls didn't even remind everyone of what had been said. Didn't even remind everyone of the quote. They sort of talked around it. And the moderators did more to remind people of what was actually going on than Walls did. So where he really had a chance to make fun of Donald Trump. And this happened time and time again. Maybe he did it towards Ian. I wasn't watching. But he just didn't seem to be able to get on the high ground and have fun. And Walls is usually good at that stuff.

That's normally his bread and butter and how he got the job, isn't it, is of being the every man who can actually remind us that Donald Trump is a very odd fish. And it just seemed as though he was a bit blindsided by what Vance was able to do. Maybe he wasn't expecting much from his opponent in this debate. Well, he set low expectations for himself by saying that he wasn't a good debater

and by making sure that it was known by the media that he had told Harris that he was not a good debater. And, yeah, I did. Yeah, I mean, I noticed the same thing when, yeah, he didn't actually mention this, you know, horrific story that he was referencing. There are a few points where he- Which we now know was invented by Vance. And that was sort of alluded to, but, I mean, the moderators asked a question about the invention and Wall still didn't go, why did you like, why did you make up this horrible racist lie? Yeah, it did seem like Walls was trying to put civility above everything else. which might not have been the greatest tactic for this debate.

But we'll, you know, we'll see how it plays out. Yeah, certainly from the get-go, that first answer from Walls where he said Israel when he meant Iran, he really just... Not easily confused. Yeah, yeah, really stumbled over everything when he was talking. And, yeah, did not answer the question. It just didn't lay the groundwork for a good debate for him.

He will definitely win the prize for the game. of the debate for saying that he's become friends with school shooters. So I've become friends with school shooters. I've seen it. What he meant was he's become friends with the families of school shooting victims. This was while when he was explaining why he changed his mind on gun control. But I'm reliably informed that him saying he's becoming friends with school shooters is just going nuts on Trumpian social media. Although that, you know, it's a gaffe, but it's not like it's a revealing gaffe.

No, and it's the sort of thing. I mean, it's just clearly a slip in the tongue of this author that Trump does. every sentence or so. But look, in terms of the positives for Walls, there were some moments where he was able to bring in his personal narrative that's been so compelling. And we have to talk about abortion because that is one of the major pitches that Kamala Harris is making. And Walls did reliably deliver the lines about freedom, about leaving things to individuals,

about it being a healthcare decision. And these upsetting stories that he brought up of women, you know, either getting very unwell or dying, trying to access healthcare, trying to get an abortion or whatever else it might have been, but also the stuff about IVF. So there were some strong suits. What did you think Wals did well during the course of the debate? You mentioned January 6th. What else, what do you have been happy with, do you think?

Yeah. I mean, with the abortion point, I thought, yeah, he was good, but again, not as good as Harris was. Oh, absolutely not. No, another league from Harris. On the same points. I feel that, as I've already said, the healthcare bit was really important for him. Yeah, ObamaCare you're talking about particularly, right?

Yeah, yeah, because there was this point, you know, there's been this situation since Obamacare was passed, which is that parts of it have been very popular and parts of it have been quite unpopular. And the popular things are protecting people with pre-existing conditions, allowing children to stay on their parents' plans for a lot longer. The unpopular parts are things like the individual,

mandate, which is that everybody has to have health insurance. And Vance did this thing that Republicans have been trying to do for so long of claiming that they will find a way to keep the popular bits while getting rid of the unpopular bits. Yeah. So he thought he really had Walls cornered when Vance said to him, so do you support the individual mandate? And Wall said to him, I think the idea of making sure the risk pool is broad enough to cover everyone, that's the only way insurance works. So I thought that that was a very effective answer to that argument. And I thought that that would have been one of the few points in the debate where people watching it really would have thought that Wals got the better of Vance, but also just more substantively, though, it actually

showed that Democrats have a much better plan for health care than Republicans do. Or perhaps a plan at all, really. Yeah. I mean, Vance's, I thought this was where Vance's kind of brazen re-rason, writing of Trump's record just didn't work for him in the slightest. And that was because Walls was, yeah, Walls was very good on this topic. Across the material. Yeah. Look, I guess the broader question here, David, of course, is the vice presidential debates are a weird quirk of the American system where you have this running mate system, which viewers of Hamilton will recall was introduced after the original system, which was that the runner-up became vice president, who was obviously the opponent of the president, which wasn't a great system. So

it's a sort of strange backup position, as Veep reminded us. So the questions are, you know, to what extent does this matter at all? And I guess the aim is to do no harm to oneself or to one's principle, right, to the actual presidential candidate. What's your take on that? Do you think people will be still talking about this debate in a week? I think for debate nerds, they would have absolutely loved this. Like, wow, finally, a substantive debate.

I don't know how many people watched it. We'll have to wait until we see the numbers. Yeah, under normal circumstances, you would say, no, this didn't matter very much. And also, both candidates did what they needed to do in terms of the do no harm thing. Yeah. Because, you know, it wasn't the best performance from him,

but it wasn't a really bad performance either. Like, there was no point where you just thought, well, that's a moment that the Harris campaign would want to take back. Yeah, it wasn't Biden. You know, it was just, he was just a bit awkward and unpolished and flub lines. And I just thought, having seen this really confident guy going out and smashing it, really, as the Vice-Presidential candidate, he could have done better. One point that was made, Ross, how do you say, said him, dude Hart, I don't know how he say,

said him from the New York Times, made the point that the kind of Harris Wall's approach of doing no interviews or very few interviews might not have helped him because the thing Jaddy Vance has done to his credit, is he's done a lot of interviews, he's done a lot of hostile interviews, he's faced a lot of tough questions, and he's honed his pitch very extensively over the past few weeks. And again, I'm not saying I agree with his position at all, other than just having a certain intellectual admiration for the fact that he's been able to polish up his act to the degree that we saw on the debate stage. And it did feel as though Walls was not comfortable defending Harris in any kind of hostile fire. Harris herself, of course, was all over that. And it did feel as though.

prosecutor that she is. But yeah, maybe, maybe Walls would have been better if he'd actually done more interviews. What do you think is behind this? Do you think it's that they don't want the chance for a flub or a gath with such a short time? Why are they doing so little media that is in any way, not even hostile, but just kind of neutral outside of these debates and some very choreographed occasional media appearances? Yeah, I think for them it's just all about controlling the media as much as possible and feeling that they don't have very much time, that if they make a major mistake, it's going to be very hard to recover from it, and that they really felt that this was just not something that they needed to do.

And to be fair, it probably wasn't, although, as you say, it might have helped if Wals had been doing some interviews before this to, you know, to sharpen himself up. CNN's snap poll results are just out, David. They've got poll of 574 registered voters, 51% gave it to Vance, 49 to walls. So maybe the flubbing that people who love debating like you and me, he wants debated together, as we've said before, maybe that sort of lack of the hesitancy was actually endearing, perhaps.

And maybe the answers cut through. And he certainly seemed like more of a human, which is his big pitch. Yeah, I mean, you never quite know how this stuff's going to play. And, I mean, the Harris campaign's response was, well, this was a slick politician versus an honest straight talker. That might have been how people interpreted what was going on. Certainly, I thought that it was a clearer into Vance than those numbers would suggest, even though I was far more convinced by Wals on the substance. And apparently, the closest of the last five, even Biden Palin, as you won't be surprised to hear, was the biggest walkover. Well, will it mean anything?

We'll find out. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at Fiz.ca.

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribby sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving. the kitty pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver.

The Chaser Report, now with extra whispers. Just before you go, David, I want to get your thoughts on the state of the race more broadly. It does seem as though the polls are still pretty tight. I know we can't really necessarily trust 538, but that's tightened in the past few days. What do we think? How is it actually looking? It's so close at this point that almost no outcome would be surprising. By that, I mean, it would even be unsurprising if Trump won the popular vote and lost the

electoral college. Isn't that interesting? If you were to actually just look at New York Times, Siena polls, they had that their last poll had Trump ahead nationally, but have Harris very closely ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. If those polls turned out to be absolutely accurate and absolutely predictive, then you'd actually get Trump winning the popular vote and losing the electoral vote. Can you imagine how much he'd hate that? What's remarkable at the moment is how much the different poll averages and poll aggregators

are actually converging with each other. And all of them seem to be converging on a fairly narrow national lead for Harris, although of the high-quality polls, something like one in four that you see has Trump in front. Then when you look at the swing states, they're basically all within about two points, and a lot of them are within one. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, North Carolina, apparently, is pretty tight. I mean, that's quite interesting that some of these states, I mean, because Trump was headed just about all of them quite comfortably against Biden. Harris posted some pretty comfortable. She was, looking good around the time of the convention and the first debate. Why is it so close to

you think in those states finally? What's driving the closeness? Is it just that America is very polarized and no one's position's really moving? I don't know what would make a Trump voter into a Harris voter or a Harris voter into a Trump voter. I mean, those are just two completely different outlooks on life. Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why these states are the swing states and most of them have been swing states for a while. And part of them is because they've all got these quite complicated urban and rural mixes, which means you've really got the basic elements of the coalition of each party quite strong in each state. And a lot of them have these other complicating factors like North Carolina,

for example, has a large number of internal migrants, which means that although it's a traditionally southern, conservative state at the same time. There are all these sort of fairly recently relocated northerners there. When you have a look at somewhere like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Michigan, you see these large majority black cities surrounded then by white suburbs and exurbs and white rural areas. So they've all got these very complicated mixes which make them just, you know,

usually very close states. And yeah, and this is why they're just so hard to predict. I think that a lot of what's going to come down to is the turnout operation. And that's really an unknown variable in this. Certainly Democrats have this time a very well-resourced, well-staffed, very traditional turnout operation, which they didn't have in 2020 because of COVID protocols, which Republicans, that was a very well-resourced. That was no problem for them.

They kept their turnout operation going. That might have been one of the reasons in 2020 why there was such a discrepancy in the end between the swing state vote and the national result. This time around, a lot of the Trump campaign's turnout operation has been outsourced to two very wealthy super PACs. Elon Musk's super PAC, blanking on the name of it, but also Charlie Kirk's Superpack, Turning Point, USA.

They don't have a lot of experience with these, they do have a very clear theory of the election. They're aimed at what they see as low propensity Trump voters. Their theory is there's a lot of Trump supporters out there who haven't been turning up to vote. That's who they're going to try to turn out, especially in rural areas. Now, if their theory is correct, this could be very effective because it's been well established in research, that it's a lot more cost effective to turn out your supporters

than it is to try to change people's minds. And their campaign doesn't seem aimed at changing anyone's mind. The Harris campaign's whole theory seems to be that they can win if they reach enough conservatives and Republicans who've got doubts about Trump. And I think that we've seen this pretty consistently from Kamala Harris, especially in her debate with Trump, when so much of it seemed as if it was aimed at Nikki Haley, boasts.

aimed at at Republicans who just can't bring themselves to support Trump. That's why, even in today's debate, they keep name-checking Dick Cheney. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they really just keep on name-checking Dick Cheney. And, you know, it seems to be a way of establishing their bona fides with conservatives. So they, I mean, they are focused on turnout as well. That's why, you know, the Taylor Swift endorsement immediately after the debate was important and why they have such a big and well-staffed turnout operation.

But they do seem to believe as well that they've got to get these borderline conservatives, that that's how they're going to win. Now, we're not going to be able to know until election day whose theory is correct and who actually did it more effectively. There is some concern among long-time Republicans that the way that these two super PACs are doing it

is not very competent, that they're pouring a lot of results, into things like poll watching and legal challenges rather than more traditional kind of driving people to polls and door knocking and things like that. Musk's called, I looked up, it's called America Pack, by the way. Why did nobody register that one? I can't believe that was available. America Pack.

Now, the cynic in me would say that that's because these organizations, they find it a lot easier to find volunteers who just want to stand at polling. booze and yell at people, claiming that they don't have any right to vote, then they are to find people who are prepared to, you know, go and persuade people to turn out in the first place. With the polls showing such a closed race, if the polls are correct, then the competence of the turnout operation could be the decisive factor in the election. Yeah, that makes all kinds of sense.

And I mean, thinking about the last election, just over a month until polling day, it's not far away at all now. The polls really did sort of polarised, didn't they? Biden had a failure of his potential lead by the end of that period. That's just not happening for Harris. Unless there are more twists in the tail, which is always possible in this race, we are really going to be on a nail-butter, I guess, when America votes in a couple of weeks' time.

I'd say so. Thank you, David. Great to have you. And look, I'm glad we managed to keep your microphone. If you'd said anything that seemed really wrong, I would have to turn your microphone off. So great to have you on board. And look, we'll catch you.

as well on PEP, the very long podcast you do with Chaz, now produced by our dear producer Lachlan, I'm told. Yes. So, yes, he's moving. Moving on. All right, very good. Catch you next time. David Smith there from the US Study Centre at the University of Sydney.

Catch him on PEP with Chaz and Dr Dave, Associate Professor Dave, but anyway, on your feed now if you want to settle in for a long one.