The NPR Politics Podcast - Roundup: Ahead Of DNC, Trump Struggles To Find A Message

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Kamala Harris has seen her campaign continue to gain momentum as Donald Trump has struggled to find an effective line of attack. As the Democratic party prepares to begin its own convention in Chicago, the race has totally changed since Republicans formally nominated Trump last month in Milwaukee.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.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 Julia from Durham, North Carolina. Currently, I'm waiting for my partner to get home so that we can have a date night where we paint portraits of one another. Oh, nice. What they don't know is that my painting will have, Will You Marry Me? written on it instead of a picture of their face. This podcast was recorded at 12.07 p.m. on Friday, August 16th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully we'll be celebrating our engagement. Enjoy the show.

Wow. Congratulations, I hope. Congratulations. Oh, it's a done deal. Congratulations. I mean, that is the most creative proposal I have heard in a long time. And we need an update. Send another timestamp. Tell us how it went. Another picture. Another drawing. Yes. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. Today on The Roundup, what the Donald Trump-J.D. Vance campaign has been doing as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz continue to rise in the polls ahead of next week's Democratic National Convention. Franco, you've got some reporting from allies of Trump suggesting that he's still pretty off balance as he figures out how to run against Harris. What are you hearing?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely the case. I have heard from allies who are concerned that basically that Trump's allowing Harris's honeymoon to just continue and continue. They want him to focus on the economy. They want him to focus on inflation. They want him to focus on wars. They want to focus on border and immigration. And that any time that he kind of strays away from those topics, it's a wasted opportunity. And clearly, Trump is focusing so much on personalities, you know, attacking Harris as not being smart, etc. You know, and it's not just kind of these background conversations that I'm having.

Leaders have been not shy about this either. Nikki Haley, Trump's former rival, brought this up, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And here's Trump's former political advisor, Kellyanne Conway, speaking on Fox Business about it. The winning formula for President Trump is very plain to see. It's fewer insults, more insights, and that policy contrast. And look, he has given no indication that he's going to kind of tone it down. He was asked about it yesterday at his press conference, and he said he was angry. I think I'm entitled to personal attacks. I don't have a lot of respect for her.

I don't have a lot of respect for her intelligence. And I think she'll be a terrible president. And I think it's very important that we win. I feel like we've seen this movie before, the movie where people go on cable and say, if only Donald Trump would just focus and be serious. Well, Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and it's very hard to get him to change. I will say that the last three weeks of the 2016 campaign, he was pretty disciplined. But that's the only time that we've seen him restrain himself.

He made it pretty clear in that clip you just played that he's going to keep doing what he's doing. And large numbers of Republicans, growing numbers of Republicans think that is hurting him. And he's not doing the things he needs to do to get back to that nice lead he had before the Republican convention. And he says, and he says he is the candidate. He's the one who won the primaries and he's got to be himself. He's got to do it his way. And his supporters love his way. I've been to many rallies. We've all been to his rallies. His supporters don't want him to be nice, at least those at the rallies. And rallies, you cannot overestimate how important Donald Trump thinks rallies are. Rallies are the metric. Crowd size is the metric of success. And he cannot be budged from that. He went so far to say that there was no one at Kamala Harris's rallies. They were all AI'd,

you know, faked. All the pictures were faked, which is completely and utterly false. I was there. The alleged AI photo is real. I was there. But I think that that is a reflection of Trump wanting to have a different reality than the one that exists right now, because there has just been such a dramatic change from a month ago when we were at the RNC. Yeah, and that has huge psychological effects. I mean, to go from thinking you were going to win in a landslide, that you had this election in the bag, and that was the mood in Milwaukee. It was this kind of zen confidence to now potentially losing his lead completely and not quite being able to figure out how to go after his new opponent. Now, his campaign has a theory. They think he should just stick to you're too

liberal, border out of control, price is too high. But he can't or won't do that. So yesterday, he held another press conference. He delivered a monologue that lasted a very long time, about 40 minutes. Most of that was on message-ish. And then he took a few questions. Franco, you were not there. I think that's actually part of the story. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a big part of holding this press conference, and he talked about it at the end of the conference, is saying that Harris is actually hiding from the press. So he's trying to highlight that he's taking questions from the press while she's not. Yet, there was a really limited number of people there, as you just pointed out. There was only a handful or maybe a little more than a handful of questions taken,

several from very friendly journalists. And they also limited who was allowed. And we, NPR, was not allowed in. And also, in terms of the contrast he's trying to make, I'm holding press conferences, she isn't. I don't think that the voters reward you for holding a press conference. But what press conferences are good for, if you actually take a lot of questions from the press or town halls with voters, for that matter, is they're very good practice. Good practice for the upcoming debate. Well, I'm a little surprised that he hasn't done more. Just thinking about 2016, he had so many press conferences. Of course, it was, you know, a different race. He kind of had nothing to lose. Now, I think you can sense that he feels,

you know, there is something to lose. He's a little bit more careful. And some say, you know, critics say it also has to do with him being older. So ostensibly yesterday, that event he held was to talk about economic policy and to talk about inflation. Harris is giving a big speech today about bringing down prices for consumers. They differ greatly on whether Harris's ideas are a good idea or not. They differ greatly on a lot of things. But Mara, Security benefits. These are very broad ideas that don't have a lot of details behind them. That's not the point she's doing them. She knows that voters care about prices, not the rate of inflation, but prices, and she wants to tell them that she has a plan for that. And that's why campaigns roll out policies when you think they would have done that at the very, very beginning. Well, it's also one of her biggest vulnerabilities. Polls still show that Americans still

feel more confident with Trump when it comes to the economy. And it is absolutely something that Trump and his team have been attacking Harrison repeatedly on the economy because they know that Americans feel this, even though many of the, you know, the factors and the data points to the economy doing well, people still are looking at their gas prices, at their food bills and seeing them high. All right. We're going to take a quick break. But first, we will be late in your feeds all next week because we're covering the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Now is an ideal time to pause the show and hit the follow button wherever you're listening so that you can get the latest on what's happening at the convention, including expected speeches from former presidents Obama and Clinton, plus President Biden and, of course, Vice President Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. We've been told to expect surprises. We don't know what they are, but we will be sure to bring them to you. All right. More in a moment. And we're back.

And Mara, Vice President Harris has, of course, been riding pretty high over the last few weeks. And the party convention comes at a time that she is enjoying an extended honeymoon and all the good vibes. What are you expecting from the convention? Well, I'm expecting to see a lot of Democrats who had been curled up in a fetal position on the floor to be dancing the Macarena. Democrats are all of a sudden hopeful, and that's something they hadn't been feeling for a very, very long time. I also expect to see her continue the effort to make herself the candidate of the future, not the past. When you hear people at her rallies chanting, we're not going back, that's what they mean.

She wants Trump to be the past. She's the future. She also wants to be the change candidate, because in every single election, modern election, except for 2012, voters vote for change. And it's a pretty neat trick to be the change candidate if you're the sitting vice president. But she's running against someone who also was an incumbent. And I think being female and black and South Asian is so new and different that almost by definition, you are a change. I feel like we have to explain this Macarena thing because at the 1996 Democratic Convention, which was also in Chicago, there is just epic video you can find on c-span.org of Hillary Clinton in the audience dancing the Macarena, which was a very popular dance at the time and thankfully for all of us has been put out of its misery.

That's right. I think the Macarena is kind of cool. Now, I don't think you're going to see the kind of confidence in Chicago that you saw in Milwaukee. They were talking about a landslide and they thought that they had the election in the bag. Democrats understand that Kamala Harris has not yet opened up a really clear lead. She's closed the gap and is doing really well. But it's a long way between that and 270 electoral votes. Can we just pause on this? We talk about Harris doing better in the polls and, you know, looking at polling averages, she appears to be up at least a little bit in most swing states. But the campaign and Harris herself are acting like they are not winning. They are they are they are talking about running from behind. They are not winning. This is not spin. To win the Electoral College, a Democrat needs to be ahead in the popular vote.

A Republican can win the Electoral College without even getting a majority of votes because the Electoral College is tilted to Republicans, small rural states, also because of the way the population has sorted itself out and how Democratic voters are masked inefficiently around metro areas and on the coasts. But that's just a fact. Democrats have to do a lot better. They have to get a lot more votes to win. Republicans don't even have to get more votes than the opponent. Franco, we are seeing something interesting that beyond Trump's mood can tell us how the campaign feels about how things are going. And what we are seeing is both former President Trump and Kamala Harris campaigning in the state of North Carolina. Yeah. I mean, like Mara talks about this a lot, you know, where they spend their time and where they spend their money, you know, speaks a lot to where their priorities are. And, you know, Democrats are making a play for North Carolina. You know, that is not necessarily a state that, you know, Republicans should be concerned about. But they are now.

And, you know, for valid reasons, because polls are showing that Harris is doing better. And, you know, it's not just North Carolina. There's talk of, you know, former battleground states like Florida. I think it's, you know, Florida may be a little bit of a reach. But, you know, North Carolina is certainly a place where Democrats are making a play for. And I think Republicans are feeling the heat. Trump shouldn't have to be campaigning in North Carolina. Agreed. But he is. So talk to me about counterprogramming. What is former President Trump? What is J.D. Vance? What are they going to be doing during the DNC while Harris and

Walls are getting all this attention? Well, I can tell you they're not going to be dancing. And while basically they were dancing the Macarena at the Milwaukee and the RNC, that's not happening now. Now it's more about scrambling, I would argue. You know, look, they're going to be kind of, I have spoken with allies who say, look, Trump's likely to, you know, make some appearances, perhaps in some battleground states with some rallies, one or two. J.D. Vance, the vice president nominee, is likely to be, you know, taking interviews. They are not going to cede the spotlight. They are in a race to define Harris. They do not want, as I said earlier, the honeymoon to be prolonged any longer

than necessary. So they're going to kind of fight back. There's obviously going to be so much attention, so much excitement from the Democratic Party about the convention. Not only is it going to be Harris's night, but you're going to have a lot of former presidents there. You're likely to have a lot of celebrities there. There's going to be a lot of attention there. And the Republicans are going to try to take back as much of that attention as possible. As I was told, you know, it's going to be daily counter-programming, potentially even hourly programming. At least that's how it was described to me. Can we just talk about celebrities versus former presidents? Both conventions, obviously, are going to have a lot of celebrities. But there won't be, there wasn't a former president in Milwaukee.

But there will be two for sure in Chicago. And it's really interesting because the Democratic Party has a past. The new Republican Party was born anew by Donald Trump. And they certainly weren't going to invite George W. Bush. But the Democrats love their former presidents, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. It's going to be a really different feeling. As we talked about lots and lots while we were in Milwaukee, it was Trump's show. It was all about Trump. It wasn't necessarily about the Republican Party. It was about the party of Trump. And all the speakers, you know, were, you know, kind of just were under that, built to that point. And it made it just so clear how much it was Trump's party. This is a Democratic convention. On Saturday, former President Trump is

going to be campaigning in Pennsylvania again. He has been back repeatedly. That seems to be like a state where he is taking a stand because he needs to win that state to win the presidency. And what is interesting now is Harris and Walz are going to do a series of smaller events working their way up the state. And then on Tuesday, during the Democratic Convention, not enough for there just to be a Democratic Convention, they're also holding a rally in Milwaukee. The Democrats. Yeah, I think that the way that they're handling the campaign, campaigning together with their spouses before getting to Chicago, going on a bus trip, at least through Pennsylvania before the convention. These are things that confident campaigns that have a lot of enthusiasm behind them do. And it allows them, these kind of bus trips, allow them to reach small towns, rural places that couldn't necessarily hold a gigantic rally. It's not a tarmac kind of

campaign. And I think this shows that they know that they have a lot of paths to 270 electoral votes, and they're going to explore all of them. All right, well, we're going to take a quick break, and then it's time to end the week with Can't Let It Go. And we're back, and it's time for Can't Let It Go, the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop thinking about politics or otherwise. I will go first. And I think mine is both politics and otherwise. This week, I was working on a story about the Democratic Convention and the preparations that the party is making and what they're going to do to try to make it interesting and viral. And I fell far into a rabbit hole. Remembering from the 2020 convention, the real viral moment came during the roll call,

where each state produced a very short video with a representative saying, you know, my state votes for Joe Biden with this many votes. And the state of Rhode Island just really stood out. The calamari comeback state of Rhode Island casts one vote for Bernie Sanders and 34 votes for the next president, Joe Biden. So that was a state representative from Rhode Island standing on the beach. Next to him is a man wearing all black. He's in a black chef's uniform with a mask, with a face mask because it's 2020. And it turns out he's going to vote for Trump. Says the American needs a businessman as president. This man who became virally famous because of the Democratic National Convention is totally voting for Trump. OK, Mara, what can't you let go of? I can't let go of a story about a zoo animal.

It would be nice if we could all go to the zoo and look at tiny animals instead of covering the campaign 24-7. But there is a tiny South American deer that when it is grown is only going to weigh as much as a watermelon. It's called a Southern Pudu. And a Southern Pudu fawn weighing just two pounds when it was born on June 21st is now in the Queen's Zoo in New York City. And it's pretty incredible.

It's one of the world's smallest deer species. It's listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It's native to Chile and Argentina. It's a perfect little miniature deer. My dog weighs four times as much as this deer. Franco, what can't you let go of? I'm definitely in the otherwise category as well. I can't let go that they have cloned little bits, clippings of Stumpy the cherry blossom tree. Stumpy was this kind of

gnarled, mangled tree on the side of the tidal basin, which had really just gone into such disrepair. It was literally flooding up to Stumpy. And Stumpy was one of many, many cherry blossom trees that actually had to be removed so that they could renovate the basin. And Stumpy was one of many, many cherry blossom trees that actually had to be removed so that they could renovate the basin. And it just really went viral. I actually took my kids to go see it. I got a picture here, Tam. Kids and Stumpy. Aw, I'm waiting for the aw. Aw. Aw. Thank you, Mara. I'm sorry. Well, I think it's just so cool that they actually were able to clone the tree. And they've actually replanted a few of those clippings in the Arboretum, which is also in D.C., a national park. Actually, five small plants.

And they're growing it. And the plan is to return those to the tidal basin at some date. And we'll have many new little stumpies. We'll have new deers and new little stumpy cherry blossom trees. But will the stumpies look like stumpy? I don't know that much about the biology of cherry trees, but we'll find out. Does the cherry fall far from the tree? God, it was a bad joke.

All right, let's leave it there for now. Our executive producer is Mathani Mathuri. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Jung-Yoon Han, Casey Morrell, and Kelly Wessinger. Special thanks to super editor Roberta Rampton. Our intern, Bria Suggs, is leaving us today after a whirlwind summer and some great reporting that you can find on our site. She's the best.

And Bria, thank you for everything, including the brownies you brought today. Clap, clap, clap. Delicious brownies. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Frank Ordonez. I cover the campaign. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.