The Journal. - Is the Trump Campaign Going Off Track?

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

WSJ’s Molly Ball breaks down the past week for the Trump campaign as the former president continues to try and counter a surge of support for Harris. Plus, do undecided voters truly exist? Molly answers your questions. Further Reading: - Race Is On To Reach the Rapidly Shrinking Pool of Undecided Voters  - Inside Elon Musk’s Hands-On Push to Win 800,000 Voters for Trump  Further Listening: - The Week that Changed the Presidential Race  - Kamala Harris, In Context   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2007, our colleague Molly Ball was on the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? She was getting to the big money round when she was asked this question. What country's national anthem features the surprisingly graphic line and drench our fields with their tainted blood. Germany, Russia, France, Italy. Molly had to think about it. She used a lifeline. And then?

See France, final answer. How did that go? Da da da da da da da da da. You got it for $50,000. How much did you win on that go? Da da da da da da da da da. You got it for $50,000. How much did you win on that show? $100,000. That's how I paid off my student loans. Wow.

Pretty good. Pretty good. And you were off last week. So we wanted to see just how good you are at trivia nowadays. Oh boy. With a few election themed quiz questions. Are you ready? Ready as I'll ever be. Okay.

There's no money in this for me, right? No, there's glory. We offer glory. Okay. So before Kamala Harris's running mate, Tim Walz was a politician, he was a teacher. What subject did he teach? Oh, wow. I do not know that.

I know he was a football coach. Um, I'm going to say chemistry. Unfortunately that is not the answer. Wow. Oh, man. Wow. Yeah, geography. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Which presidential candidate claimed they left a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago? This one I did see. This would be RFK Jr. Nice.

What breakfast item is Trump not ordering anymore? Because he says it's too expensive. Bacon. Nice. What breakfast item is Trump not ordering anymore because he says it's too expensive? Bacon. Okay. How many children does Ryan Knutson have as of this week? I know this one too and it's so exciting

because Ryan just had a baby. So now he has two. All right. In one sentence, what is the big theme coming out of the campaigns this week? And now we can talk about something I actually know about. So my headline for this week is Trump struggles to navigate the vibe shift.

The momentum has shifted to Kamala Harris. She's surging ahead in the polls. She's getting big crowds, lots of attention, lots of enthusiasm from Democratic voters. This has shifted the vibe of the campaign and Trump is clearly flailing a little bit in response. He's struggling to come up with ways to approach the campaign, he's repeatedly made sort of outrageous statements that have drawn attention to some of the things voters like the least about him, his penchant for falsehoods, his tendency

to be sort of erratic and negative. And there's a real concern on the part of a lot of Republicans that he's squandering his chance to reset the stakes of the campaign. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Kate Leinbach. It's Friday, August 16th. Coming up on the show, is Trump's campaign going off track. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it.

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When you say that former president Trump's campaign is struggling, what are you looking at? What would you point to, to support that? So, you know, we have all as a nation had about a decade now of closely monitoring the moods of Donald J. Trump, which tend to be so much on public display. And he's clearly in a funk. And when he gets in these moods, he tends to lash out. He lashes out at his perceived enemies.

He often lashes out at his perceived allies as well. This is a time of year where in his past two presidential campaigns, there's been a campaign shakeup as the campaign has encountered turbulence. So he's doing a lot of these sort of erratic and angry things and it's clear, you know, from our reporting, my reporting and others that behind the scenes, he's not happy.

And some Republicans are calling for Trump to stop with these personal attacks and like, complaints about the size of a crowd at a Harris rally. Here's former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. I want this campaign to win. But the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It's not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It's not going to win talking about whether she's dumb. It's not you can't win on those things.

The American people are smart. Treat them like they're smart. What does that say to you? Well, and it's not just Nikki Haley, right? It's a real chorus of Republicans currently in office, out of office, strategists, advisors. And the concern is that what he's doing now is counterproductive. The concern is that he's turning off those swing voters, those persuadable voters, that he needs to get back into a good position in this

race. Now, I think it's important to point out that he is still doing better, according to the polls, than he was at this point in either 2020 or 2016. In both of those campaigns, he was behind in the polls for the entire campaign. So he is in a better position in this race than he has been in his other two races for president. But he's experienced a real reversal in fortune, right? The polls are virtually unanimous on this point that Kamala Harris has pulled into a tie or a narrow lead in the national popular vote

where Biden had fallen into a pretty deep hole, like a five to 10 point deficit. And in the battleground states, there's been a lot of polling in the states that are considered to be up for grabs in this election. Notably the Cook Political Report, for example, had released a bunch of battleground state surveys earlier this week where they had Harris tied or leading Trump in every single one of the swing states except for Nevada where Trump was ahead.

So that has got Trump and the Republicans really panicked about how best to get him back into good position. And the feeling is they need to define her in a way that is persuasive to those voters that are on the fence. Right, what do Republicans like Haley want to see from Trump? Well, the feeling is that if you look at these polls,

he is winning on the issues that are most important to American voters. Trump is more trusted by voters on the economy, on immigration, on foreign policy, on a lot of the issues that are top of mind for American voters. I really the only consistently winning issue for Democrats is abortion.

So the idea is if he focuses on those issues, if he talks about policy, if he makes the case that his policies will improve people's lives and change the landscape on the issues that they care about, that is how he can win over those voters who aren't necessarily yet persuaded that they can vote for him. And amid this sort of these critiques from within his own party of his approach, yesterday he held a press conference and seemed to be maybe more on message. Let's take a listen. Grocery prices have skyrocketed. Cereals are up 26 percent. Bread is up 24 percent. Butter is up 37 percent.

So here he is at his golf club, Bedminster in New Jersey. He's got this binder where he's got all these statistics about prices and, you know, the pain that people are facing arguably because of the policies of the Biden Harris administration. So this is the message that his advisors would like him to be talking about completely. We talk about being on message. What that means in a political sense is focus and repetition. If you only ever say one thing and you say it over and over and over again, that's going to be the thing that voters hear.

If you say the one thing, but you also say a bunch of other things and the other things are much more interesting or novel, people are not going to hear that policy message that you tacked on at the beginning. And that was sort of what happened in this long and sort of meandering press conference in Bedminster and at the previous press conference and in the Elon Musk interview and so on. Okay. So let's get into this interview that Trump had with Elon Musk. It happened this past Monday on X. What do you think the goal was?

I think along with these press conferences, along with these unscripted appearances he's been doing, Trump is trying to send a message that Kamala Harris is scripted and is not capable of speaking off the cuff. In fact, he said so. He said this in, I believe, his speech in North Carolina this week. She refuses to do any interviews or press conferences. Almost 30 days now, she hasn't done an interview.

You know why she hasn't done an interview? Because she's not smart. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have been hammering on this idea that Harris owes the American people an explanation of her policy. She needs to sit down for tough interviews with journalists. Of course, as a journalist, I agree.

I think all candidates need to face adversarial questioning and speak to the media, ideally the Wall Street Journal. So this argument that Trump's making that Harris isn't doing these kind of interviews or doing unscripted conversations, is that a problem for her? I don't know. I think, frankly. As I said, I think she should talk to the media. I think all candidates should talk to the media.

I think for the sake of not just journalists, but for the sake of the electorate, it's important for candidates to be pressed to lay out their plans in those types of settings. But what I want, my goals are not necessarily the same as the goals of a campaign, right? And the goal of the campaign is to win the election. And given the momentum that we're seeing for her campaign so far, I think there's a feeling among Democrats that she should just continue to ride this wave and not do anything that risks disrupting it for as long as she can. And then potentially after the convention, she'll reach a point where

it does become more pressing for her to offer that type of access. And all of this matters because what Trump and Harris both need to do is win over undecided voters? Well, they both want to win the election election and that means they have to win most of the voters and so far it's very, very close and neither one of them has succeeded in locking that down. So yes, they've got to win over some of the voters that aren't necessarily ready to vote for them.

So yes, there's a pool of voters out there who haven't yet committed to either candidate and both of these candidates need to find a way to convince them. Okay, Molly, we need to take a break but we're gonna come back with some listener questions about undecided voters. I'm so excited. Me too. When we do episodes with you, we end the episode asking our listeners to send in questions. And we've gotten a bunch on undecided voters. Robin from Ithaca, New York sent us this one. My question for Molly is whether there really are undecided voters anymore. It's hard to believe that in our deeply fractured environment, such a thing even exists.

How is that block identified or measured? So I love this question because it gives me a chance to really demystify something that I think is really important to campaigns, but that a lot of people don't understand, obviously. And thank you, Robin, for your question. Obviously, if everyone voted the same way every time, elections would always turn out the same and they don't.

So something has got to be swinging them, but it isn't necessarily voters changing their minds, right? The electorate changes every year. People die, people turn 18, and perhaps most significantly, people make decisions about whether to vote. One interesting thing about this election is that until recently,

it actually has not been as polarized as usual. There has been a much larger group of undecideds. Our own Erin Zittner, who does our poll analysis a couple of months ago, calculated that about 28% in our poll were so-called persuadables, who were sort of up for grabs for either campaign. Some of the operatives I talked to

say that in their polls and focus groups, they've found as much as 40 percent. You may have heard analysts in this election talking about this group of, quote, double haters who didn't like either candidate when their choices were Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A lot of voters turned off by that rematch and wishing for other choices. Well, they got it. They did get it. They got another choice.

And so we have seen that group radically decrease in response to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee. And Erin did a follow-up analysis and found that that group of persuadables is now closer to 15%. Some analysts put it even lower. Amy Walter, the head of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently wrote that the group of true undecideds in this election is 3 to 5 percent. So that sounds very small, but out of 150 million voters, that's maybe 7.5 million people. But in terms of who they are, I think this is really interesting.

And I'm going to quote from Amy Walter's analysis. She says, these voters are disproportionately female, younger and identify as moderate ideologically. While they are pro choice, they are much more pessimistic about inflation than the overall electorate. So this is a really interesting group of sort of cross pressured voters, right, who may lean toward the democrats on an issue like abortion, but lean toward Republicans on an issue like the economy. And that, in a word, is why they are undecided.

So we got another question about undecided voters from Archit in Salt Lake City. Here he is. Do the undecided really swing elections? And can minds really be changed? Thank you, Archit, for that question. And yeah, I think this is part of the same analysis, right? Obviously, we know from our own experience as humans that people do sometimes change their minds, but it doesn't happen very often, particularly, again,

in our highly polarized politics, where for so many people, their political affiliation or ideology is as much a part of their identity as anything. So campaigns often in this era of polarization do focus as much on mobilization, galvanizing their base of voters who already feel loyal to them as they do on persuasion, you know, convincing new voters to come to their side or convincing voters on the other side to change their minds. I like persuadables.

I like new terminology for the same thing. Yeah, well, the persuadables bucket is really interesting and I urge everyone to read Erin Zittner's articles in the Wall Street Journal on this subject because this is obviously the white hot center of the presidential election is the voters in the middle. And next week, Molly, you were gonna be in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. What are you looking out for there? This is gonna be such an interesting convention, right? And I think, number one, it's just Kamala Harris.

What does she say? What does she do? So I think, similar to the Republican convention last month, there's an expectation that we're going to see a lot of enthusiasm, a party that's very excited and happy and unified in a way they haven't always been in the past, and a little bit of anxiety as well, right? This is still a very close election, a very tough election,

and I think we all want to hear Kamala Harris's convention speech because that is going to be her really planting a flag for her candidacy saying what she wants voters to know she stands for, what she wants America to know about her, how she is defining her candidacy as we go into, you know, pretty soon it's going to be Labor Day and that's the final stretch of the campaign. Well, good luck in Chicago and we will talk to you next week. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Kate. Before we go, if you want to ask Molly a question about the election, send us an email or voice

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