The NPR Politics Podcast - Looks Like The Sun Belt Is Back On The Menu

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

With Vice Present Harris replacing President Biden as the likely Democratic nominee, early surveys of the race show Harris winning back younger, nonwhite voters that had soured on Biden.Those shifting coalitions point to improved chances for Democrats in the more diverse Sun Belt swing states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada — and put the original battleground map back into place. This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, politics reporter Stephen Fowler, and White House correspondent Asma Khalid.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Gustavo from El Paso, Texas, sitting in my hospital bed after a kidney transplant in San Antonio. This podcast was recorded at 12.36 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, August 1st, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll be forever grateful to the anonymous living donor who gave me a second chance at making a difference in my community. Okay, here's the show. Hope your recovery goes smoothly. And yeah, what a beautiful gift. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign.

And I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. A lot of news this week. So please follow the show wherever you get your podcasts if you haven't already. That way you can make sure you catch our roundup tomorrow. But today on the show, some states that seem to be slipping for Biden now appear to be in reach for Vice President Harris. Stephen, you've been looking at some of this. You're in one of those states. What's changed? Yeah.

So what's old is new again. It's deja vu all over again. What's changed? Now, at the start of the year, those were the seven battleground states, and polls were getting worse and worse for President Biden. After his debate performance, which did not help things, he was outside of the margin of error behind Donald Trump everywhere but those Midwestern blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And so his campaign was shifting towards trying to win in those states only as his path to victory. But now with the top of the ticket switch, we are in a whole new ballgame, which is the old ballgame of the seven states that include the Sun Belt. Yeah, we saw Vice President Harris campaigning this week in Georgia. Asma, I think you were there. You've done a lot of reporting from Georgia. What have you been hearing? I think the biggest change to having Harris at the top of the ticket is just the energy and enthusiasm that you're seeing from Democratic voters. You know, at that rally on Tuesday night, it felt like being at a club,

a concert. It was loud. Stephen, you were next to me. I could barely hear you speak. It was just like deafeningly loud. And I've gone to a whole bunch of Joe Biden events. They were very quiet. You'd have rows of, say, a couple hundred people maybe sitting in chairs. At Tuesday night's rally, we had estimates that over 10,000 people showed up. You know, there was a banner in the back at one point that read hotties for Harris. I just mentioned that as a nugget because we were joking that like that is just not a sign you would have seen at a Joe Biden rally. I think that is the biggest, biggest difference. And that's a reference to Megan Thee Stallion, a very, very popular rap artist who performed at that rally and had that kind of energy that Asma was talking about that, yeah, you just would not

see or believe would be part of a Joe Biden event. We talk sometimes about how much weight to put on or not put on crowd size, but this felt really different. I mean, this looked different from what we saw in polling, but because I spent time interviewing Democratic organizers and activists. These are the boots on the ground, the types of folks who spent time knocking on doors, you know, in theory, to help to get those senators elected. Democratic senators, state of Georgia, spent time phone banking for Joe Biden. They were just themselves really unenthusiastic about Biden's candidacy. I've been checking back in with some of those folks. And there's a young woman I met. She's a progressive organizer. Her name is Marissa Pyle. She, when I met her in early May, told me that, frankly, she did not know if she could

ultimately cast a vote for Biden. And now she says she does think she'll vote for Harris. She went to that rally on Tuesday night. It's the first campaign rally I've been to in a long time. I was really taken aback, actually, by the amount of energy and enthusiasm. It was wild to feel that in person and be surrounded by that. And so, you know, I feel like there's been a lot of pessimism from organizers in Georgia about our ability to, you know, have a presidential campaign carry the state with the tack that they've been taking.

And this was one of the first times where it's felt like, OK, maybe we can do this. You know, the Harris campaign is clearly excited about this. I remember the day after that rally, they were sharing excitedly this headline in the AJC, the Atlantic Journal Constitution, that talked about Georgia maybe being back in play. What is Harris saying about Georgia? Yeah, the Harris campaign is definitely of the opinion that Georgia is a competitive state and not just something that politicians say, oh, yeah, we're going to win everywhere. I mean, Harris opened her remarks by saying that she

believes the ability for her to stay in the White House and become president is going to come down to Georgia. So this opens up more pathways, right, to the White House that for Harris than Biden might have had. Yeah, I mean, really looking at it this way, Sarah, the Trump campaign has one major path to the White House. And that's that 2020 coalition that showed up for Joe Biden, not showing up. There's multiple different ways you could have different demographic groups switch to vote for Trump or just not show up at the polls. And that's their main path to the White House. But now the enthusiasm around Harris, some of the early polling we're seeing with younger voters, black voters, and other key parts of that coalition coming back into the fold for Harris, there are multiple mathematical pathways for Harris to win the presidency. It's not just the Midwestern blue wall states. It's not

just the Southern Sunbelt states or the Southwest. There are many, many different ways they can slice this and still come out ahead in November. If I can express a bit of caution, I think, here for the Harris campaign, there is a lot of enthusiasm in this moment. But what I keep hearing from folks is that Democrats need to sustain this level of enthusiasm. And to Stephen's point, you know, there were a lot of demographic groups that came together, that stitched together, I would say, rather perfectly for Joe Biden in 2020. And so the counterargument to me is that Harris also can't afford to lose really any one of these key demographic groups, because a lot of things went right for Joe Biden in 2020. A lot of people will say, what was it? What was the key ingredient that helped Biden win?

And I would say it was many things. It was white women in the suburbs. It was Black voters. It was broadly voters of color, young voters. And Harris needs to really energize that broad base coalition again. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll have more in just a moment. And we're back. Democrats are feeling more optimistic about energizing some of their key voting blocs, including those younger voters and Black voters in particular, with Vice President Harris moving to the top of the ticket. And Stephen, this is

happening at the same time that Donald Trump is doubling down on his attacks on Harris's identity. Yeah. In the early days after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, people were watching. How was Trump going to respond? Was he going to pivot his attacks on Biden's record and just replace Kamala Harris's name or something else? Well, we've gotten to the something else. Yesterday at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago, Trump sat down for a panel discussion. It was supposed to last an hour. It only ran for about 35 minutes. And most of it was very antagonistic. And it included Trump questioning Kamala Harris's racial identity and sort of making it seem like she was lying about her identity for political gain. I've known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much,

and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? She is always identified as a black woman. I respect either one. She went to be known as black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she black? She is always identified as a black. I respect either one. I respect either one, but she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way. And then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a black person. Just to be clear, this is feeling a lot more like 2016, isn't it? This is vintage Trump, Sarah, right? Like covering the 2016 campaign, we saw

so many attacks from Trump on people's race or ethnicity. And so there was a sense to me, and I'll be the first to say that I thought the Republican convention this year did have elements of a vibe shift, a sense as I was walking around the floor of the convention that, you know, I met people who came up to me from different religion or racial backgrounds who wanted to chat. There was a sense that the Republican Party was trying to broaden itself out demographically. To me, this is striking for two reasons. One is it strikes me that this is where Trump feels so politically comfortable, right? Like it is his go-to mode of what he goes to when he's

just kind of in a corner and needs to say something. It's what he began his campaign on when he came down that escalator and launched his 2016 presidential bid. He talked about Mexicans, some of them being rapists and not Mexico, not sending some of its best people. I think that this is a different electorate than the electorate that the country saw in 2016. At the same time that Trump is trying to suggest to an audience of Black journalists that Harris is not one of you, I would say Democrats are trying to suggest that she's one of all of you with her multiracial identity. And I was at that rally that we mentioned earlier in Atlanta, and I was struck by something that the senator from Georgia, Raphael Warnock, said in trying to biographically introduce Harris. This predates the NABJ event, but I bookmarked it, kind of started because I thought, aha, this is interesting the way he's trying to talk about her.

Her dad is of Jamaican descent. Her mother is of South Asian descent. And then she went to the great Howard University. Worked in California, worked in the United States Senate. That is the American story. And she brings all of those strands together. She sees us because in the real sense, she is all of us. her identity, essentially saying you can only be one thing. Stephen, how do you hear this resonating, especially in Georgia, which again, could be a more important state than I think we thought a few weeks ago, especially with this broad coalition that Harris needs to energize? I mean, Georgia is one of the most demographically diverse states in the country. It's one of the

fastest growing states. It's one of the most politically important states because of its diversity of backgrounds. You know, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party in 2016 and in 2020 made efforts to try to expand their outreach and expand their sway with non-white voters. There was minority outreach centers that the Republican National Committee opened up in different non-white communities that was staffed by local conservatives of that background, those are gone now. Trump had his platinum plan that he released in 2020. It was a half trillion dollar plan for black Americans and to tackle things like housing and income inequality and everything. That's not there now. And so what we're seeing with this sort of return to 2016 style Trump is undoing nearly a decade's worth of work to try to expand the tent of the Republican Party to

include people of color. All right, we're going to leave it there for today. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover the campaign. And I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.