The Daily - Six Weeks to Go

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

As the presidential race enters its final 45 days, we assemble a campaign round table with our colleagues from the politics desk.Maggie Haberman, Shane Goldmacher and Nate Cohn interpret this week’s biggest developments.Guest: Maggie Haberman, a senior political correspondent for The New York Times.Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times.Background reading: Harris had stronger debate, polls find, but the race remains deadlocked.Here’s the latest on the 2024 elections.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. The race for the White House has kicked into overdrive tonight with attacks. As the presidential race enters its final 45 days. It's good to be back in Pennsylvania. Hello, Pennsylvania. How are we doing, Pennsylvania? We assemble a campaign roundtable with my colleagues from the politics desk.

Today, Maggie Haverman, Shane Goldmacher, and Nate Cohn make sense of the week's biggest developments. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates today for the first time in four years. You know, the Democrats have always taken for granted that they're going to get our vote no matter what. And the Republicans fancy themselves as the working people's party. Former President Trump has now faced two apparent assassination attempts. It's sort of mind boggling. It's Friday, September 20th. Maggie, Shane, Nate, thank you all for doing this.

Thank you for having us. Thank you. Yeah. So just to explain what we're doing here, it feels like we've reached the point in this campaign where the news is coming at us so fast that our normal format of telling one story a day is not quite keeping up. And so to meet this moment, we've recruited you three to come kind of walk us through the thicket that is the news at this phase of the race.

So it's an experiment for us. We invented something. It's brand new. It's called the political roundtable. Congratulations. Wow. What an honor to be part of the race. So it's an experiment for us. We invented something. It's brand new. It's called the political roundtable. Congratulations. Wow. What an honor to be part of the first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Inaugural.

The first of any kind. Yeah, no, ever, ever, ever. Yes, in history. So let's start with a very big new poll, co-conducted by the New York Times, that came out just a few hours ago. Could each of you just tell me what you took from this poll? I think that this is a poll, there's actually two polls and there's some contradiction between the two of them. The first poll is a national poll and it shows a tide race, which isn't really a surprise.

And it shows no movement basically since the debate a week ago, even though voters overwhelmingly said that Kamala Harris performed really, really well. So that's the first part of the poll. Is that worth lingering on that people told us in this poll, Kamala Harris did great, and it had been our understanding that if she did great, she'd get a bump in the polls nationally if she doesn't. Yeah, I think that's definitely worth lingering on. The fact is that overwhelmingly, voters said she did really well.

Something close to 70% of voters said she performed well in this debate, far more than the 40% who said the same of Trump. That means a big chunk of people who said she did well are not voting for her. But that's also part of the story, which is that she might have done better in the debate, but it didn't actually change how people said they were planning to vote in the head-to-head matchup with Donald Trump. And it wasn't just on that top line, who are you going to vote for? It was on a whole suite of issues.

Who do you think is better on the economy, on immigration, on abortion, on democracy? All of these issues were essentially unchanged by this debate that was watched by 67 million Americans, the most who watched anything since the Super Bowl. And yet, no difference in the head to head. Why not, Nate? Well, it's a pretty polarized country and the number of undecided voters did tick down from our previous poll to this one. So a lot of voters are making up their minds and they're mostly falling into the place

where they were before. This is a matchup that neatly divides voters in a lot of ways. We have a populist, older white conservative against a younger, black, and South Asian woman from California who has liberal views on all the issues. So there's room for someone to be torn between these two options, but as far as choices go, this is a relatively clear one. Okay, but this poll did something else, which was it told us about how Kamala Harris is doing in the very specific crucial

state, Maggie, of Pennsylvania. What do you take from that result? What's striking, and as Shane said, is it's contradictory to what we saw in the national poll where they're tied. She's up. It's 50 to 46. In Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania.

And one of the reasons that might be is the Democrats have done relatively better with white voters this cycle than in previous cycles. And Pennsylvania is a particularly white state compared to the rest of the country. And so if you look at how Joe Biden did with white voters in 2020, it was slightly less. Hillary Clinton, substantially less. And so if she has made some modest gains there, that could be why. Huh, does that feel right to you, Nate?

Because I think my inclination would be to think that if Kamala Harris is tied with Trump nationally, I would not expect her to be doing better in a swing state where I would just imagine demographically things might be stacked a little bit against her. Look, I wouldn't expect it either. And, you know, they are polls, they're subject to a margin of error. It's possible that if we did the polls again, that they would come

a little closer. But this doesn't come from nowhere. In the 2022 midterm, Democrats swept the key Senate races, including winning Pennsylvania by five points, even while Republicans won the House popular vote. So there could be a change from the last election, maybe not all the way to this poll result, where Harris does four points better in Pennsylvania than she does nationwide, but one where the gap between the key battleground states and the electoral college is a little smaller than we're used to. I was just going to say, I mean, there's like two stories you can tell about the race right now that I think that these polls capture. And we talk about how polls are a snapshot.

This snapshot shows a really close race nationally and maybe a slight edge for Kamala Harris, not just in Pennsylvania, but looking at other polls across those key battlegrounds around the Great Lakes. And so how do you get the story of what that means next? And it's not at all clear to me what it means next because we got here and it's look, Kamala Harris just had an incredible two months, right? She's gotten almost exclusively positive reviews and coverage. She had a strong debate. Her favorability rating in Pennsylvania is above 50%. All these

things are going in her favor. And yet you get all of that and she's tied and just maybe marginally had in these really, really important states. It's not just that she's had a great series of weeks, although she absolutely has. Trump's had a terrible series of days. Trump had a debate in which he was spreading a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets. And doubling down on that ever since, he posted inexplicably on Truth Social,

I hate Taylor Swift, who is an incredibly popular figure. Yeah, a lot of people don't hate her. A lot of people don't hate her, and now he has done any number of self-destructive things while also facing one clear assassination attempt, one apparent assassination attempt, normally speaking a politician would get some measure of sympathy or voters feeling sorry for them or feeling more open to them and because of Trump's own behavior, he just does not. Okay. Are you guys a little bit reigning on Kamala Harris' Pennsylvania parade? Because I'm hearing, if I'm reading between the lines, you all say, she's out of Pennsylvania,

but not that much. And after a really great run, and Maggie, you're saying Trump's had a rough couple of days so she could be up even more. I think the poll shows that a lot of the vulnerabilities that we've talked about before are still there for Kamala Harris. You know, in the last episode that I was with the vulnerabilities that we've talked about before are still there for Kamala Harris. In the last episode that I was with you on, we noted that more voters thought Harris was more of the same rather than change. And Harris has tried to pitch herself as a new generation of political leadership that

can take the country in a new direction. But the poll still finds even in Pennsylvania that most voters think she's more of the same and most voters think Donald Trump is change. And to me, that just shows that she is swimming a little bit upstream in this election. One related issue here that may be another reason to rain a bit on Harris's parade is that Harris's strength in this poll comes out of white college graduates.

She's still doing really poorly among white working class voters just as badly as Joe Biden did or worse than Joe Biden four years ago, both in Pennsylvania and nationwide. White college graduates, that's a different story. Now they're somewhat insulated from the economy. They may have the disposable income to survive rising prices, but it's also to me a possible indication that maybe we're talking about a lot of overeager democratic voters Who are looking to pick up the phone right now after a debate and after a month where Harris fared really well And that perhaps might explain why she's doing well in Pennsylvania a state I think of as being very working-class having a lot of voters who didn't go to college. That's right

Okay, something happened right before this poll and that's that the Fed lowered the interest rates, something we've been waiting for and talking about for a really long time. In theory, that should make certain prices, especially the price of a 30-year fixed rate mortgage start to come down. When it comes to the economy and how voters view these two candidates, is that too little too late if you're Kamala Harris? Is that a frustrating bit of timing for Donald Trump or does it not much matter at all?

I mean, Donald Trump was complaining about it as political yesterday, so it tells you how he sees it. He's clearly frustrated and thinks that it might help Democrats. And could it help Harris? Sure, it could help Harris. But I think you are going to see Trump and Republicans claim that this was some form of interference by Democrats. Yeah. I mean, I think that the interest rates lead to changes in some of the few economic numbers that people experience in their life, right? This is the kind of thing that it juices the economy in a way that like people don't see immediately, but it can change how people feel.

Right. I think it's going to take a bit of time. In Pennsylvania, only 22% of voters thought the economy was excellent or good in this survey. There's a lot of ground to make up here before the economy starts being anything like an advantage for Harris. Voters have believed for years that the economy was bad. I don't know that they're going to change their views on this very quickly. I think we're going to go take an ad break.

Do you want to give it to us? We'll be right back. All right, let's turn to our next piece of business here, which is news of something that kind of sounds like not news, because it's the non-endorsement from a very big union in the US with 1.3 million members in the transportation industry. So tell us that story. Sure. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, they are in a variety of states across the

country, hugely influential, for 30 years endorsed Democrats. This year, Sean O'Brien, the head of the Teamsters, for his own personal, internal political reasons, started flirting with Donald Trump as a possible endorsement. Why? He went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with him. A lot of his members are in southern states, and they are more Republican leaning, and he is trying to appeal to them and show that he is not just going in one political direction. So it is not a surprise that he spoke, say, at the Republican National Convention.

Right. Because he had been drifting toward Donald Trump. Now, his advisors said that he asked to speak at both party conventions. The Democrats, after he spoke at the Republican convention, did not have him. And he gave a pretty aggressive anti-corporate speech at that convention. Right. I was in the room. But nonetheless, it was seen as a boost to Donald Trump because it tied him to organized

labor. And working class voters. He was a proxy for working class voters. And working class voters. And the union has now decided not to endorse this cycle. This is at minimum a harm to Harris, and it is helpful to Trump to be able to say, as he has been for the last day, rank and file members support me. Now he said that on Long Island where the local Teamsters affiliate had actually endorsed

Harris. But it doesn't matter. It gives Trump a talking point and that's the strategy here. They didn't exactly peel off the international brotherhood of Teamsters, but they did get neutral and that's good enough for them. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a reflection of the shifting voting patterns of union members. This is union leadership of union members.

This is union leadership reflecting union members, which is in some of these trade workers, they are increasingly been for Trump, right? They released some of their own internal surveys about where they were. Even in when Biden was in the race, there was a big chunk in favor, right? So if you look at union leadership across the country, it's almost universally for Democrats. This is an exception. The exception is a non endorsement, right? Most are not going anywhere near Trump. But it's a reflection that the membership has shifted on these issues. And again, for Trump, that's a win. He wants to be making inroads with those voters and he wants people to have a pass that it's okay to consider him. And I think that that's what

helps. Look, it's also a positive for Harris that a person who spoke at the Republican National Convention didn't go all the way to endorsing Trump, right? Right. Nate, why does it matter that the Teamsters Union has in effect, de facto, kind of signaled an affinity for Trump and not given the Democrats what they may have viewed as their kind of birthright, which was the endorsement of such a powerful, longtime democratic leaning union. I want to go back to something Shane said, which is that the Teamsters conducted their own surveys of their members. And previously they found that most of their members backed Biden, only narrowly.

Now they find their members back Trump over Harris by a wide margin. Now not all of these surveys are scientific. Some of them attempt to be. Others are just a straw poll. But this is part of a larger pattern that we see in our data, which is a further decline in democratic support among white working class voters since Harris became the nominee and a group like the Teamsters is suddenly up for grabs. This is something of a sharp turn, but I think we do need to talk about the fallout from

what happened five days ago. It feels like it's a lot longer than that. And that is this second plot to try to kill Donald Trump. And so I want to ask you all to help us think through what this second attempt means for Trump and what it means for the electorate, because we're really dealing with something truly unprecedented. I mean, I remember seeing the first statement that Kamala Harris put out, which is that violence has no place in this country.

And it just made me think that I'm not sure that's true anymore. That there is increasingly a place where violence is in our country and in our politics. And when you go back and think through all the different people who are political leaders who have been subjected to violence recently, it's a long list. And of course, we had the violence on January 6th. And so, you know, these are horrific things. And they're a reminder that this country isn't that far from violence anymore. Maggie, what's your sense of how Trump personally

is handling the fact that two people seem to want to try to kill him in the past two months? How is that affecting him based on your point? Is it affecting him? It's an interesting question, Michael, and we got a bit of an answer at the rally on Long Island on Wednesday night. So after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump was clearly in shock and lots of people

around him described him that way and I think he probably still is to some extent. After what happened on Sunday in West Palm Beach, people who talked to him that afternoon and saw him that afternoon said it was as if nothing had happened, that he just basically resumed life, you know, it just became more grist for his storytelling. But he wasn't stuck on it the same way and he wasn't processing it the same way. And yet, at his rally, in the middle of an answer about, I don't even remember what, I think it was tax policy or economic policy, you can see on the live stream, if listeners were to watch it, his eyes flicker to his right, and he sees someone moving.

And he sort of startles, and he says to the crowd that he thought, essentially I'm paraphrasing, but he thought somebody was coming up, meaning coming up on stage. And he said, I thought that I was going to have to get ready to fight, and then jokingly says that he's got a bit of a yip problem. Just translate that. He means anxiety, yip, anxiety says that he's got a bit of a YIP problem. Just translate that. He means anxiety, YIP anxiety. And he's... How could you not be constantly looking over your shoulder?

100% as any normal person would do. But when have we ever heard Donald Trump say something like that? Vulnerability expression is not his natural state. It's not his natural state at all. And so to hear him vocalize that and to see it in real time was pretty striking. Now there was a moment in the 2016 campaign where someone rushed to the stage when he was speaking. I remember that. You remember that?

Yeah. He sort of ducked. That was his impulse. That was the only time I've ever seen anything close. This was really somebody who is on high alert right now. And so even if he is not saying, yes, I'm worried. Yes, this is scary. Because he will never say something like that. he clearly is and is clearly experiencing it.

Very understandably. Nate, when we think about these back to back plots, how do you try to assess the way voters think about it? I don't think we have asked people in polls about this, but just knowing what you know about how the electorate processes things, what are you thinking? We haven't asked a single question about it to your point. And what would we ask really if you think about it? But if you step back for a second, take the long view of Donald Trump's political career. Donald Trump today is more popular than he has ever been before.

Back in 2016, voters disliked him by nearly a two-to-one margin. This year it's much closer to 50-50 because almost all of the people who support him today have gotten behind him. And I wouldn't rule out a role for these assassination attempts in that process. Consider this. In the nine national polls that we took this cycle before his assassination attempt, between 21 and 24% of voters said they had a very favorable view of him. Since the assassination attempt, the numbers are 31, 27, 30. So there has been a big step up in the proportion of voters who say they have a very favorable

view of him. Those reluctant Trump supporters over the years, a lot more of them are less reluctant. And then there's an overall increase in favorability as well, where now he's consistently in the upper 40, something we had never seen in the course of his time as a major figure in national political life. I mean, Nate, you've touched just on something that I think is really interesting

about what my expectations were for how this election was gonna go, not just because it was originally gonna be Trump and Biden, but it was going to be two deeply unpopular people that the American people did not want to send to the White House. And that's just not what the polling is showing anymore. It shows with all the attack ads running against Kamala Harris, that she is more popular than she's been before. And Donald Trump is more popular than he's been before.

You have two people in the upper 40s sometimes tipping at 50%. She is more popular than she's been before, and Donald Trump is more popular than he's been before. You have two people in the upper 40s sometimes tipping at 50%. That's really popular right now in this country. We've had people in the 30s and the 40s. We actually have a shifting dynamic of what voters are thinking about these choices. They don't dislike these choices nearly as much as we expected a few months ago. That's very true. 2024 was beginning to look like a replay of 2016 where there were

these two deeply disliked candidates and it was going to be whoever was less disliked ended up winning. That's still usually how elections work, but if there is an election that could scramble that, it could be this one. Well guys, that's it. Wow, a historic first of a roundtable in America. That was fun. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having us.

You know, when they set up the exhibit in the Museum of Media History, I'm going to be really proud to be in that photograph. Oh, thank you for having us. This was fun. Thank you, Nate, Maggie, Shane. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Michael.

Let's do it again. [♪ music playing. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the leader of Hezbollah accused Israel of breaking, quote, all conventions and laws by blowing up thousands of handheld devices belonging to Hezbollah fighters over the past two days, and vowed to seek revenge. As he spoke, Israeli fighter jets flew overhead, producing large sonic booms and shooting off flares in an apparent show of Israeli force.

So far, the attacks have killed 37 people, most of them in the second wave of explosions targeting walkie-talkies. To prevent further deaths, the Lebanese army is now carrying out controlled explosions of electronic devices across the country. Today's episode was produced by Diana Nguyen and Nina Feldman. It was edited by Rachel Quester with help from Paige Cowitt, contains original music by Pat McCusker, Alicia Baitu and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly.

Remember, you can catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. David Marchese talks with the Irish writer Sally Rooney, who's written a new novel called Inter Mezzo. One of the things that I find difficult to accept is that I only get one life. That's the it. I'm just me and I can never be anyone else. And in a way, being a novelist allows me to get around that problem. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bobauro. See you on Monday.