The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump's Nevada Rally Violated State Covid Rules. He Held It Anyway.

Episode Date: September 14, 2020

After the weekend's rally, aimed at building support among Hispanic voters, President Trump spent Monday in California hearing about disaster response there. Kamala Harris is set to visit her home state tomorrow.And Democrats have made the decision to abandon door-knocking to engage with voters. The Trump campaign alleges it's knocking on a million doors a week. So who has the best strategy?This episode: congressional correspondent Susan Davis, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and campaign correspondent Asma Khalid.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Kevin from Valley Glen, California, where I am off on what started in January as my morning walk, which became my morning jog, which became my morning run, and what has led to me losing 40 pounds and today taking part in my very first virtual 10K race. This podcast was recorded at 2.04 p.m. on Monday, September 14th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to it, but what won't have changed is my appreciation for the NPR politics crew for keeping me company and informed on all the walks, jogs, runs, and this race. Enjoy the show. That is awesome. It's so nice to hear somebody have a great 2020 experience. He's going in the opposite direction that I am. Congrats to you, sir. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. I want to start by saying, hello, Nevada. How are you doing? So after holding a crowded Nevada rally that defied the state's public health regulations,

President Trump is headed out to California, where wildfires are raging up and down the West Coast. Tam, this Nevada rally, first big indoor event for the president since his Tulsa event back in June. Yeah. And this one was not welcomed by local officials, unlike Tulsa. The governor of Nevada, who is a Democrat, tweeted out angrily a series of tweets last night. He says President Trump is taking reckless and selfish actions that are putting countless lives in danger here in Nevada. What is interesting about this is that this was originally scheduled to be an outdoor event at an airport. But the local authorities shut it down, said they couldn't be there because it violated state rules. And so they looked for a bunch of different other venues and ended up with an indoor venue at a business in a suburb of Las Vegas. And that town said

they weren't welcome to have that event, that it was in violation, but they went ahead anyway. Well, it's interesting because, you know, Nevada in the mix of swing states, but not necessarily as Republican friendly as, say, Oklahoma. But clearly Trump campaign making a play here for Nevada and specifically, I think, Latino voters. For the last four years, I've been delivering for our incredible Hispanic. I love the Hispanic community. He wants to win Nevada. And in fact, polling is showing that Nevada is close. And, you know, the reality is that Nevada was close last time, too. President Trump is making a push and trying to win Latino voters in states like Nevada and Arizona and Florida is part of the plan. I mean, not trying to win them outright, not trying to win all of them,

but trying to do better than he did last time to make up for any potential losses that he has in other parts of the base. I mean, you talk to Latino Democratic activists and there is some consternation that perhaps they feel like Joe Biden's campaign doesn't really understand how much they should be investing in the Hispanic community, how much, you know, they need to be doing more outreach.

I remember a while back I spoke with one woman who told me that she felt like, you know, part of the difficulty is that Biden is not this known commodity. Like he has this relationship with many black voters, but he's not as much within the Latino community. There isn't this strong connection. Many Latino voters are younger and, you know, Biden has some issues they felt that he needed to address around questions that his candidacy faced with young voters and that was a real hurdle and that the campaign did not fully understand that they had extensive amount of work to do. You talk to the campaign, they'll point you to like, you know, culturally specific advertising that they're doing and specific outreach that they're doing. But again, it goes back to the fact that like

Latino Democratic activists will point to how successful Bernie Sanders was in the primaries and how much ground game he had and how much outreach he had. And it doesn't feel like from some of them that Biden's campaign has been matching that both in sort of just what they are doing, but also when you look at what Trump is doing, like he is trying to make some inroads. And in a state like Florida, you know, some of the recent polling suggests that maybe he is. I don't know. I mean, it's routinely hard to poll Latino voters, so you can take that

for what it is. But some of those recent polls ought to give the Biden campaign some worry. All right. We're going to have more reporting on Latino voters soon. But let's talk about California. Y'all talked in the podcast on Friday about the West Coast fires and how the campaigns had been really quiet given the scale of the disaster. But now both campaigns say they're going to California. So, Asma, what's Biden's plan? Well, Biden spoke himself today about the wildfires. And, you know, I think what's interesting is he, like he's been saying about the pandemic, did not make this exclusively about President Trump,

but certainly felt that the president's, in his words, denial around climate change has exacerbated the situation. And he tried to kind of flip the script. You know, President Trump has made a lot of this recent campaign about the suburbs. Well, Joe Biden said, you know, the real threat to the suburbs are fires. Wildfires are burning the suburbs in the West. Floods are wiping out suburban neighborhoods in the Midwest. Hurricanes are imperiling suburban life along our coast. If we have four more years of Trump's climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires? How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will be burned in wildfires? How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in super storms?

And later this week, Kamala Harris, who represents the state of California as a senator, she's going to be going to California, her home state, to assess some of the damage there and connect with some of the emergency management folks. And President Trump, just as we are speaking, landed in California at an airport outside of Sacramento. He's going to get a briefing from fire managers and from the governor. And he's also going to do an event thanking California National Guard members for helping with the wildfires. There has to be good, strong forest management, which I've been talking about for three years with the state. So hopefully they'll start doing that. In the meantime, we're helping them up out in a very big way.

And I think safe to say California, not a swing state this year. Yeah, no, he's not there to win votes. He is there because, you know, he's the president of the United States and there is a disaster. And he was out there two years ago when the costliest fire in California history happened. And he stood in those ashes and he said, I hope this is the last one. And now he is back. And the largest fire in California history is now, along with several others that are breaking records. All right. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about the difference in ground game approaches between the two campaigns. Support for NPR and the following message come from YouStudio. YouStudio securely hosts, manages and distributes company content to employees, partners and customers through audio and video podcasts. Train remotely, broadcast town halls, share product updates, and more. Plus, you can control user access and monitor engagement. See why companies like Nike, IBM, and AT&T trust UStudio.

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Join us for the No Compromise podcast from NPR. And we're back. And Asma, you have a new piece out talking about how Democrats have given up the traditional campaign act of door knocking while Republicans are keeping at it. So what's the calculation here from Democrats? I guess the calculation is kind of twofold. One is that the Biden campaign believes that their voters, that the voters who are going to support Joe Biden, really don't want to have somebody knocking at their voters, that the voters who are going to support Joe Biden,

really don't want to have somebody knocking at their door and that they feel it's not responsible to be doing that in the midst of a pandemic. The second part of that calculation is that they have figured that by, you know, reaching out to folks, whether it's on Zoom or through texting or over the phone or writing a letter, that all of those ways they feel they can continue to have a conversation with people and that it can be just as effective as actually knocking at someone's door and having a conversation with them that way. But I will say, Sue, I think that this is a relatively untested theory. You mean like never tested? Yes.

So whether or not it will actually work, I mean, I talked to some political scientists who seem to think it's possible that it could work, but whether or not it will actually work, I mean, I talked to some political scientists who seem to think it's possible that it could work. But whether or not it actually works, I will say, you know, it's the old adage, time will tell. We really won't know until Election Day. Are they not knocking on a single door? Like it's not happening anywhere? So I did run this by the campaign again because the Republicans will say that they are knocking on a million doors a week, which sounds like a very large number. I mean, and it quantitatively is the Biden campaign's pushback to this very point. Let me actually pull up a quote I have from Biden's campaign manager, Jen O'Malley Dillon. She told reporters in a call the other week that while you might hear

their opponents spend a lot of time talking about the millions of door knocks or attempts that they're making. Those metrics actually don't have any impact on reaching voters. Our metric of success, the numbers we look at and use are conversations. So I reconfirmed with a campaign right before we ran this story that really, are you guys not knocking on doors? And they said, well, we're going to begin dropping off campaign literature at doors. But not knocking? But not necessarily have a physical, you know, actual conversations. But I will say, look, guys, this is not just the Biden campaign. And this is what fascinated me. I've had conversations with state Democratic leaders, whether we're talking about Michigan, Florida, you know, affiliated groups, whether

we're talking about BlackPak or Working America, which is this, you know, group affiliated with the AFL-CIO. And I've gone out door knocking with Working America a bunch in previous cycles. I mean, they are like the door knocking group. They tell me door knocking is in their DNA. They have paused it since March. They're hoping to be able to get back to knocking on doors in certain communities soon. But their calculation is they just don't feel like they want to start doing it again until they feel totally confident that they can keep all their canvassers safe and that the pandemic isn't on an uptick in certain communities. Yeah, I also think there's a reality of the moment where people just don't want strangers knocking at their door for unnecessary reasons. So would door knocking potentially have the opposite effect where you're trying to win votes for your campaign, where you're like just annoying people?

I think this is a really interesting question. OK, so here's my theory on this. The doors that the Trump people are knocking on are targeted doors, doors that are people that should be receptive to the Trump message who are less likely to be as deeply concerned about the pandemic as people who the Biden campaign would knock on. Well, that's true. And data supports that, that Republican-leaning voters aren't as concerned. They just aren't. I mean, like, we just talked about it. There were thousands of people, most of whom were not wearing masks, gathered indoors in Nevada where coronavirus is not gone. So, you know, I think that from the rallies on down to

the ground game and everywhere in between from inside their offices, you know, like the Biden campaign is all working from home and the Trump campaign, they're all going into the office. So like, through and through, there is just like a vastly different approach from the campaigns, from their voters, from everything to how seriously to take this and how to treat it. I will say this, there was an organization, I did the Brian Lehrer show, which is a WNYC public radio show this morning. And some folks called in, you know, Democratic volunteers. And some of them did say that, you know, they are, it seemed a little anxious about the idea of such an unequal

situation. And there was one woman who called in who I should point out, told me she actually has been door knocking in Pennsylvania, specifically targeting low information voters. And this is through an organization called Changing the Conversation Together. They are definitely, she says, working to elect Democrats. And what I thought was interesting is, you know, I can't remember the exact stats, but she's told us how many people she had had a conversation with the other week. And she had a relatively solid response rate, right? Meaning like the number of doors she knocked on, X percentage of people actually opened their door and had a conversation. And she said people were receptive. And then there was another woman who called in, who said that she's been doing phone calls, and she's so fed up with it, she's going to stop

because barely anyone's answering their phone calls anymore. So she's just going to start writing letters. So I do think that even within the sort of like rank and file democratic volunteer community, there may not be consensus about whether or not this is the best approach. Yeah, I have anecdotally talked to campaign managers on the House and Senate level in recent elections, not just this one, who kind of say that door knocking is something of the past, that a lot of sophisticated campaigns just operate in a much more targeted tech-driven way, and that the low information voter or the voter you want to target, social media, different kinds of community events are just like they have a higher bang for buck. So it doesn't

necessarily surprise me. That's really interesting. I think it's also partly because we just live in a really polarized time. There's just not as many neighborhood door knocking campaigns or just not the world we live in anymore maybe. And do smart campaigns, this is your point, like is it a risk or is it the smart play? Do smart campaigns move on to new technologies or is walking away from the tried and true the mistake? Yes. All right. Well, let's leave it there for now. You can find all the ways to stay connected with us by following the links in the description of this episode, including our private Facebook group newsletter and workout playlist, especially for anyone else

like our timestamp listener who wants to start start working out. We've got a playlist for you. Please check it out. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. And a special thanks to our funder, The Little Market, for helping to support this podcast.