The NPR Politics Podcast - Midterm Update: Republicans & Democrats Make Their Final Pitches To Voters

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

In the final hours before the midterm elections Republicans point to the economy and stir up fears of immigration, while Democrats focus on the same message they started with, healthcare. But at the end of the day, the election appears to be all about Trump. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Asma Khalid, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jonathan Reilly from Oklahoma. I just jumped out of a plane and I'm skydiving to Earth. No, just kidding. I'm just sitting in my house. But wouldn't that be cool? This podcast was recorded at... 2.06pm on November 5th. Things may have changed by the time that you hear this, so enjoy the show. That's a great time. That may be one of my all-time favorites. I feel seen. I feel like he's caught on to us. He's on to us. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It's finally here. The midterm elections are tomorrow, Tuesday, and Republicans and Democrats are out making their final pitches to voters.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. All right, guys, are we ready for this? I am so excited about the election being tomorrow that I'm currently regretting the amount of coffee I drank this morning. And on top of that cocktail is that everyone brought in the extra Halloween candy. So there's a lot going on. Sometimes when I drink too much coffee, I am over.

I currently have mesquite barbecue chips here in the studio, along with my sparkling clementine juice. Will you be punctuating every point of analysis with a crunch of a chip? Get snacked, keep things calm. Okay, so we are going to dive into what candidates in both parties are saying in these final hours. But first, let's talk about the big guy, the person who isn't on the ballot, but who is making his case very loudly and in multiple rallies. Trump is the wallpaper of this election. You know, all midterm elections are referendums

on the president and the party in power, but no president has embraced that role as enthusiastically as Donald Trump. He has gone out on the campaign trail and said, I'm not on the ballot, but I am on the ballot. You know, go out there and vote for me. He has made the election all about him. And I do think that

this election is a referendum on him and his style of leadership. You could think of it almost as a mathematical formula. This election will either prove that Donald Trump equals America or that Donald Trump equals with a slash through it, you know, doesn't equal America, his values and his leadership. Not equal to. Not equal to. What is equal with a slash? That's what I meant, not equal to. It equal with a slash that what I meant not equal to it's one of the two things I remember from algebra right and the thing that's so interesting about this election is the Democrats are trying not to talk about Donald Trump Donald Trump has baked into the cake he's already energized their base and they don't want to be talking about him they

want to be talking about health care and all sorts of bread and butter issues so Asma you have the distinction of being the person in this room who has been on the trail with President Trump most recently. You went to two rallies on Sunday. I did. I was in Georgia and Tennessee with him. And it was really interesting for me because, candidly, I hadn't been out sort of immersed with the president at one of his rallies in a very long time. And so I had the chance to kind of compare his message yesterday to how it compared, you know, ahead of the 2016 election. And I will say, you know, there were sort of two big themes for me. One is he is somewhat more celebratory. He can tick off achievements that he's made. He can talk about the embassy

being in Jerusalem or Brett Kavanaugh. These things get huge applause lines. But the other thing is the actual like arc of the message. So he will often start by talking about the economy, how hot the economy is, but also positions this as being something that could potentially go away if Democrats take control of Congress. The contrast in this election could not be more clear. Democrats produce mobs. Republicans produce jobs. Nice rhyming line there. Yeah, like initially he didn't quite have the rhyme and it's been interesting to watch this evolve. He kind of galvanizes his base. But I think what's interesting to me is that, you know, he'll begin by talking about the Congress and whether or not these are real or not. He talks about threats of caravans coming into the country and how that would increase the rate of crime. And this is Donald Trump's theory of the case. On Friday in West

Virginia, he even said, they're telling me to talk about the economy and the economy is great, but I want to talk about more interesting things. They all say, speak about the economy, speak about the economy, speak about the economy. Well, we have the greatest economy in the history of our country. But sometimes it's not as exciting to talk about the economy, right? Because we have a lot of other things to talk about. Meaning crime and immigration, race. These are the issues that Donald Trump thinks work better to fire up his base than economic issues. I mean, he really believes that emotions, fear, anger, anxiety work better than the gratitude and satisfaction of a good economy, of voters for a good economy. That just leads to

complacency. Now, these issues worked for him in 2016. The question is, will they work for him tomorrow? Can we just say that he's also saying a lot of things that aren't true? Somebody who came into the country and ended up killing police officers. Fact after fact in that video is not true, not to mention the initial implication that most immigrants are coming here to kill people. So if we had to sum up the president's message, what would we say it is? Be afraid, very afraid, but also kind of happy. Promises made, promises kept is the celebratory part of the message. But I think it's a very apocalyptic, dark message. It's the same message. His closing argument is the same as his opening argument when he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower and said that Mexico was sending rapists across the border. I mean, he has never wavered from this hardline, nativist,

anti-immigrant message. So I was working on a story and I went back and looked at President Trump's inaugural address. And it's kind of remarkable. In that speech, he says, it doesn't matter which party is in power. What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. Imagine how far he has come. His agnosticism about which party is in power is over. He is very much we need Republicans. I need Republicans. He seems to be saying that his presidency is on the line. We need Republicans. You know, they talk about majority. We have a majority of this much. I always say if somebody has a cold, just a minor

cold, we no longer have a majority. So we need Republicans. But is that the message that Republican candidates are using? That's the question I have. Trump has a nationalized message, although I would argue that if he's talking about Republicans now, the day after election day, he might revert to it doesn't matter which party controls Congress because I'm the president, I can work with anyone or whatever he will choose to say. But I think that the difference between Trump and Republican candidates, although many of them have embraced his anti-immigrant message, is that Republicans started out this cycle thinking they were going to run on the economy and they were going to run on tax cuts. And as a matter of fact, top House leadership aide tweeted right before this weekend,

we're going to spend this last weekend talking about the economy, right? And I think that he was acknowledging that, you know, Donald Trump doesn't want to. And when incendiary issues like immigration, race and crime are injected into the debate, guess what? They get covered a lot more than economic good news. And this has been one of the themes of the last few months that as Trump has gotten more and more hard line and made this about immigration and and fear mongering and things like that, a lot of Republicans running in the suburbs, a lot of the swing districts that will probably decide control of the House of Representatives have been pretty frustrated because the Republican voters they are trying to win over are not the ones who are energized by that. In fact, they're the ones who are very turned off by that. So you've seen, depending on where Republicans are running, either a full embrace of President Trump or an arm's length approach to President Trump, where you like talking about, hey, we passed tax cuts. Hey, we got rid of so many regulations. Hey, we put two

Supreme Court justices on the Supreme Court. But remember that time that I put out a statement criticizing President Trump for saying X, Y, Z, I'm an independent voice. And even in some justices on on the Supreme Court. But remember that time that I put out a statement criticizing President Trump for saying X, Y, Z. I'm an independent voice. And even in some swing districts, Republicans are talking about being an independent voice in Congress as opposed to I'm a Republican in Congress. Well, there was that crazy example of the House candidate in Kansas who actually started attacking his Democratic opponent, saying that his opponent was not tough enough on Trump, that he would be tougher on Trump than his Democratic opponent. When that happens in Kansas, you know something is going on.

But on the flip side, though, don't you have a number of Senate candidates as well as gubernatorial candidates, to your point, Scott, who have, you know, sort of taken the full embrace model of Donald Trump, because they have deemed it to be beneficial to them. And these are some of the candidates, you know, I've spent some time going out and observing, and it's been really interesting to watch how for them, this strategy of cozying up to Donald Trump seems to be effective, and they seem to be going sort of full steam ahead on that strategy. Absolutely. Almost every Republican running for Senate,

especially in the pretty Trump-friendly states where the Senate battleground is this year, and in a very high-profile way, and two of the races we're going to be talking about the most tomorrow night, two of President Trump's last two visits were to campaign for the governor's race in Florida and Georgia, and the Republicans in both those races were very happy to not only appear on stage with him, but Brian Kemp in Georgia actually canceled his final debate with Democrat Stacey Abrams in order to appear with Donald Trump at a rally. And that says a lot about how candidates running statewide in red states have no qualms whatsoever about being with the president. Well, and those are the states where Donald Trump's theory of the case might actually be correct. In other words, he thinks this is a base election. It's always been all about the base for

him. And he has this concept. It's almost like a social media or cable news business model. You don't really need to expand your audience. You just need to keep them watching your show more hours per day. And he believes that, you know, extreme content means more engagement. That's the social media model. Extreme content riles up his base more and will get them to turn out. OK, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to focus on the Democrats closing message. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. That's why Grow

with Google is providing free online training and tools to help Americans learn the skills they need to succeed. Learn more about Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. Sam Sanders here. This week, I'm talking to Abbey Jacobson. You know her from her Comedy Central Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. Sam Sanders here. This week, I'm talking to Abbey Jacobson. You know her from her comedy central show, Broad City. We're going to talk about a solo cross-country road trip Abbey took recently and why she wrote a book all about it. That is on the latest episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we're back and let's turn to the Democrats now. They have been for months and months and months wildly consistent. Right, Scott? Actually, I think years is the better way to put it. I was I was looking back on some of the early reporting I did even before

President Trump was sworn into office on how Democrats were going to respond to the shocking loss that they had in 2016. The weekend before Trump's inauguration, I went out to suburban Detroit for a rally that Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer and several other Senate Democrats were having. And I was listening back to it and they were talking about health care and providing a check and balance to President Trump. But it was all about health care, protecting the Affordable Care Act, saying we're not going to let him repeal it. We're not going to let him cut back Medicare and Medicaid. And that is by and large what Democrats have focused on this entire election. We've seen that health care is the top issue for them.

All over the country, Democrats are talking about protecting the Affordable Care Act and its more popular aspects and trying to make health care more affordable. And also in a subtle way, or maybe a not subtle way, depending on your district, talking about providing a check and balance to President Trump and the Trump administration. Yep. I think it really depends on the district. I was in the Florida 15 district, which has been Republican for, I don't know, like a generation at least. And you ask the Democratic candidate who has to win Republican votes if she has any chance at all what the top issues are. And she's like, Medicare, Social Security, health care. And you ask, well, what about President Trump? You know, we're really not

talking about him much here. He's not much of a factor. And I think I think that has been true a lot, because one thing that Ben Ray Lujan, the House Democrat running their national campaigns, has said repeatedly, and Mara, I think, said it earlier today and has said it many times, it's not like Democrats need to remind voters that Donald Trump is in the White House, right? Like that's there, that's in their face every day. But Scott, don't you think there are places in this country where it's been impossible for Democrats to avoid the specter of Donald Trump? And I think, again, of the Georgia gubernatorial race, where Donald Trump has repeatedly called the Democratic nominee, Stacey Abrams, unqualified. So she has to hit the Sunday morning talk shows to literally defend

herself against criticism from the president. So in some of these races, and I would argue that we see this more often in races where there are minority candidates, we see them really not shying away from responding to the president and also sort of wanting to show that they will. They are very willing to stand up to the president on a sort of values level. Can I just say that she probably wasn't like, oh, gosh, I have to appear on the Sunday shows to defend my name. She was like, thank you, Donald Trump, for criticizing me again so I can get invited on the Sunday show. Totally true. But is that what she wants to be talking about? I don't know. I mean, that's the question that you have. Would she rather be talking about issues or would she

rather be talking about the fact that she too has a Yale law degree, as does Brett Kavanaugh, but yet she is deemed unqualified. And that unlike President Trump, she actually served in government beforehand. She was the minority leader of the state legislature. Yeah, that's a good point. And they've gone back and forth. But I the minority leader of the state legislature. Yeah, that's a good point. And they've gone back and forth. But I think in terms of the messaging and the ads they're running, one reason why they haven't responded to every Trump controversy is because you put together an ad on Controversy X and we're on to Controversy Z 20 minutes later. One thing I have

noticed, especially when it comes to the high profile surrogates on the going out and stumping for these Democrats all over the country, is that in the closing days of the race, they really have made it a much broader Trump message and kind of a question of American values are on the ballot. What kind of country do you want to see? I've heard this from a lot of Democrats. I heard it from Kamala Harris in Georgia the other week. Yesterday, I went up to Pennsylvania to to Harrisburg, because Joe Biden came to campaign in one of these races that's pretty solid Republican, but it suddenly looks like a toss up and he was doing so on the 10-year anniversary of he and Obama winning the 2008 election and Obama coming out in Grant Park in Chicago, and just so many Democrats felt like racism has been solved is the joking way that we refer to it now, which of course is not the case. So then 10 years later, to hear Biden say something like

this really jumped out to me. The very character of our nation is on the ballot on Tuesday. I mean, who we are, who we are as a people, the rest of the world is looking. And as you can hear, Biden's voice is just totally shot from all the campaigning he's been doing. He's been in a different state every day the last few weeks, just like so many other high profile Democrats. Can I just say that this gives me flashbacks to the closing, say, 10 days of the Clinton campaign, which I know 2016, we're doing it again. But it was so dark. And her pitch was so much about what does this what does this say about us as a country? And it was very much like that. It was about the

soul of America. Which didn't work, though, at the end of the day, right? In terms of Democrats being successful. And so I'm curious. You're right, Scott. I think we heard President Obama over the weekend as well talk about the fact that Trump is just fear mongering. I believe he said that Trump was blatantly lying about certain things and that, you know, we have Republicans claiming that they're now upholding, say, preexisting conditions for the Affordable Care Act, which he says wasn't true. So we do have, I think, this this tone from some of the surrogates. But to that question, Tam, like even if they're talking about American values being on the ballot, that does remind me a lot of Hillary Clinton in the closing days. And it was not a message that worked Clinton in the closing days. And it was

not a message that worked for Democrats at that point. I think there's two differences here. One is that now you have a two year track record of what the president has done. And Joe Biden, right before he said that, was talking about the response to Charlottesville. He can say, remember when the president came out and said there's good people on both sides? So many specific examples. And two, Democrats are kind of framing it in a more hopeful way, as weird as that sounds, saying we can begin to turn the country around. We can say, no, that's not America. This is America. And I wonder if that's, I'm not sure if this is point two or three, but it's not a binary choice between Hillary Clinton and President Trump. It's a

referendum by and large on President Trump with a lot of Democrats who are first time candidates who voters don't have hard images of them in their minds. It's do you like what Trump is doing or not, as opposed to do you want Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? Right. Scott, you've been out talking to Democratic voters and there's been I don't know, like you've you've sensed some angst, I guess. Well, we were all talking about 2016 as a reference point before. I think they all have that in their head of we thought we were doing well. Then we lost. Then Donald Trump became president. We never thought that could happen. The polls are ahead. I don't know. looking at any poll at all. And on top of that, there's a lot of reasons why Democrats have reason to feel good about the election, but it's not overwhelming poll numbers. All these races continue to be pretty close. Yep. And also, look, even paranoids have enemies. Democrats have a lot of reason to be worried. Number one, gerrymandering. They need a big advantage in the generic ballot. In other words, the national vote for House just to even break even in the House because of the way districts are drawn and because of the way Democratic voters are clustered in

urban areas. The economy is really good. That should work for Republicans. Hispanics and young people, two of the groups they really are counting on in many key races, have a history of not showing up. And unlike all previous midterms, when one party is super energized and the other is complacent, Republicans are also enthusiastic and energized this year. So Democrats have a lot of reasons to be kept awake at night. All right. So we are going to end this podcast here without making any predictions about what is going to happen. That's really good because it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, even if the future is 24 hours away. But if you after you finish listening to this podcast, if you just can't get enough and we hope you can't. There is another podcast in your feeds. It's also available on NPR One, where we talk through hour by hour, both what we plan to be

eating and what you should be watching for on election night. So check that out. It can be your companion as we go forward. Tomorrow is the big day. We'll be doing a super late night pod, also known as a very early Wednesday morning pod. The window between you taping your podcast and Mara and I are going to be on up first might not be too large. You might be walking out of the studio as Mara and I walk into the studio. So on election night, you can follow our live coverage of the results. We'll all be part of it on your local public radio station on the NPR One app, or you could enable NPR One on your Alexa or other smart speaker. Just say Alexa, ask NPR One to catch me up on the elections.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Tetreault. I cover Congress. I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.