The NPR Politics Podcast - Why Harris And Trump Are Dumping Cash, Time Into Pennsylvania

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

NPR tracked where the candidates are investing the most travel time and money. Unsurprisingly, the most competitive states are receiving the most attention — especially Pennsylvania, which is essential to both candidates' path to the White House.This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and campaign correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.The podcast is produced by Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. 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

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. This is Patrick in Wilmington, North Carolina, and I'm on my back porch listening to the chorus of frogs. This podcast was recorded at 1.04 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, September 4th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'd be willing to bet we'll have more tadpoles in our backyard frog pond after all this rain.

Amazing. Okay, here's the show. I love that deep-throated croak. I just wanted to send me a soundscape to fall asleep to, because that was so peaceful. It is. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon, I cover the campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, I also cover the campaign. And I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. Today on the show, the candidates have been spending a lot of time and money in seven swing states and quite a bit more in some states than others. And that's where we're going to start. Tam, you've been looking into this. What are you noticing? Right. A candidate's time is the campaign's single greatest asset.

So where they spend their time tells us a lot about where these campaigns think that they could win or where they need to win. And so I will not bore you with all of the time I spent building spreadsheets of travel by Trump and Harris and President Biden before her. But we thank you for your service in doing so. And I did all these spreadsheets.

And what I discovered is they are going to the swing states. No, what? I know. But it is interesting because you see a different emphasis. So since Harris started running, they have visited all seven swing states at least once. However, some states are getting some extra love. The blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are getting a lot of love, especially Pennsylvania. Yeah. And that, I think, is one of the most interesting pieces of your research, Tam.

It's not just a little bit more love. It's a lot more love. Yes. Pennsylvania is shaping up to be the state to watch. If you go through the entire year, former President Trump has visited Pennsylvania eight times, five of those times just since July. Vice President Harris has visited Pennsylvania eight times, including a recent bus tour of the western part of the state. So this state is getting a lot of attention. They're also spending a lot of money. Ad Impact tracks reservations made by campaigns and their allies for television advertising. Between now and Election Day, they have each reserved about $71 million in television ads in the state. Just to put it in perspective for Trump, add up the reservations

in all other states and they don't match Pennsylvania. And I think broadly speaking, of course, that all makes sense, right? Because if you were to look at all of the states on the map and you try to find the states that are at the intersection of states that are purple-ish, are gettable possibly by both parties, and that have a lot of electoral votes. Pennsylvania is just at the top of the list, right? Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes. And then two states that come after that are North Carolina and Georgia, which each have 16. And those are states that I know TAM's reporting has also found the candidates are spending a lot of time and money in. So, I mean, you could just

say that they're all more or less cost effective for whatever money or time you're going to spend in those states. You have more electoral votes to get because it's a winner take all system. Of course, there is some complication there when we're talking about, you know, different media markets cost more money or less money. But broadly speaking, those states, yeah, are cost effective. The other thing we can say about Pennsylvania is that it's close. It's close to Washington, D.C. It's close to New Jersey, where former President Trump has been spending his summer. And it's not that far from Florida, where he spends the rest of the year.

A candidate spending five hours on an airplane is a candidate not on the ground campaigning for those five hours. A candidate spending 20 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour in an airplane to get to Pennsylvania, that's just much more cost effective. That's what David Urban, who has worked with Trump over all of his campaigns, that's what he told me. It's something we don't think about as much. I mean, it's a big prize. We know that it's gettable. Like Danielle said, it went for Trump in 2016, narrowly for Biden in 2020. But that that geography piece comes into it, too. As you have both been traveling, does the message you're hearing from the candidates sound any different depending on where they are as they go to these different places? So I spend most of my time with Donald Trump or people supporting Donald Trump.

And I would say yes and no things sound different. Trump's campaign speeches, of course, are a little different anywhere he goes because he ad-libs so much. But they're all broadly the same, right? He hits on immigration a lot. He hits on tariffs, the economy, et cetera, a lot. In any given place, he might tweak his message a bit. In Pennsylvania, for example, he talks a lot about fracking. Why? Because fracking is big in Pennsylvania. When I've heard him in Michigan, he talks more about the auto industry. He tweaks his message a bit for any given audience. But really, this is another instance, I think, of a thing I know we've talked about on this podcast

before, which is the nationalization of politics, right? And I think Trump is very exemplary of this, where no matter where Trump is, because immigration, for example, is his signature issue and has always been, he talks a lot about immigration in Pennsylvania, and he talks a lot about immigration in Arizona, even while Arizona being a border state, immigration is, I think you could argue, quite a bit more germane to a lot of people's lives there. But Trump is also just the leader of a movement. He transformed the Republican Party and has people who are so loyal to him that I think he is. You might even be able to argue that he's an especially special case when it comes to nationalization of politics because his movement is there to see him, whether they're in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or wherever, and they're here to hear the Trump message. And so for Harris, I would say that her campaign

hasn't been around for very long. I've traveled with her in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, where she did another one of those bus tours and then a big rally in Savannah. And I would say largely the message has been the same. Her stump speech is her stump speech. It iterates a little bit from stop to stop, but it's a pretty new stump speech. She hasn't been delivering it for very long. At this point, people in the audience will shout back, we're not going back. They will repeat her lines back to her, much like at a Trump rally. But in terms of specifics, you know, today, randomly, sort of, she's in New Hampshire, which isn't thought of as a true swing state.

It's a state where she is rolling out a proposal related to small business. And there have been a lot of small business startups in New Hampshire. So they chose New Hampshire for that reason. Also, perhaps because she had never been to that state this calendar year, at least. Okay, we'll talk more about that after the break. And we're back. And I want to talk more about the voters. I mean, you both talked about the candidates, of course, but as Danielle was just saying, these issues are nationalized. I mean, I remember speaking of New Hampshire all the way back at the beginning of the primary season, hearing voters in New Hampshire talk about immigration, even though they were a long way from the southern border. Right. Do you notice a difference as you go from state to state, the swing states especially, about what the voters are talking about? Personally, honestly, no. But I think that's also part of what I was talking about. I mean, because the Trump diehards, for example, again, I am almost entirely at Trump events here,

are often there for the same reason wherever they live. Now, that doesn't mean the different issues don't matter in different states. For example, you have abortion ballot measures in many states that many, especially on the Democratic side, are hoping get more people out the door. These aren't necessarily the diehards you're going to see at a Trump or a Harris rally, but people who might be inched one way or the other on the issue of reproductive rights or on any other given issue. There's any number of issues that candidates are hoping will get voters out the door, not necessarily convert people, because as we know, the electorate has also gotten very calcified,

as John Sides and Lynn Vavreck would put it. There are people who are so dug in that campaigns really just want to get more people voting, not necessarily hope to move people from one camp to another because they can't. There have also been some surprises. I mean, we didn't expect Harris, for example, to invest so much in North Carolina. We mentioned she's visiting New Hampshire today, not what we typically think of as a key swing state. Tam, what else are you noticing? A Democratic nominee has not won North Carolina since 2008 with former President Obama. So it's been a long time. And it has been sort of this great white whale for Democrats that's just always been out of reach. And that may be the case again this time. But what I'm seeing is that it's

not just Harris who's spending a lot of time in North Carolina. It's also Trump. He is also visiting North Carolina a lot. He's visited it five times, two of them since Harris got into the race. What that tells me is not just that the Harris campaign is reaching for this distant thing, but that the Trump campaign feels that it needs to shore up in North Carolina. There's also a highly competitive gubernatorial race in North Carolina that matters a lot because of the balance of power in the state legislature and in the governor's office. Yeah. And I think that's something to think about when you're looking at where these candidates are spending their time. For example, Pennsylvania, once again, is important because of the presidential race, but also it has a key Senate race. Bob Casey, a Democratic senator, a longtime Democratic

senator and ally of Joe Biden's, is facing Republican businessman Dave McCormick. If you're running for president, you not only want to win the White House, you would like to have some snowball's chance of getting any of your agenda passed. Well, you need senators to do that. So, for example, you saw Donald Trump out in Montana. Now, Montana just goes Republican, but Donald Trump was out there. Jon Tester, a Democrat in the Senate from Montana, again, he's been there a while, is facing a tough reelection bid against a Republican in Montana. So even though that's not a place you would usually consider a place where Trump really needs to do a rally, it's a place map now than Biden was facing. You know, how much has Biden stepping aside, Harris stepping up, shifted the map? For Trump, if he can win Pennsylvania, then he essentially deprives Harris of most of her paths to getting to 270 electoral votes. That's why Pennsylvania is so key to Trump. He won it in 2016.

He lost it in 2020. He won the race in 2016. He lost in 2020. As for Harris, she has fewer paths to winning the 270 electoral votes needed. The clearest path is going through the blue wall states and adding one electoral vote from Nebraska. But there are other options if she were to be able to win North Carolina or Georgia, if she's able to win Arizona or Nevada. You know, before I let you both go, I want to go back to a question that kind of echoes one we often ask in the primary process, which is, is this a good system? I mean, so much money, so much time poured into just a small number of count. Because, you know, if you're a Republican voter from Illinois, a state that always goes blue, you feel like, well, what difference does my vote make? I think there's a lot of people think, well, does my vote matter? Am I participating as meaningfully in the democratic process as a voter in Pennsylvania, for example?

So that is one very important chasing fewer and fewer people. And you have to wonder where the ceiling is. I don't know if we've even reached it yet, but this is a question I ask myself every election since Citizens United. The only thing I'll add to this is that in 2004, I lived in Ohio, which we could say it was the Pennsylvania of 2004 or the Florida of 2000. It was the state. It was the state that was getting all of the attention. All the candidates were there. I heard a lot of complaints from regular people who were like, yeah, we appreciate the attention, but we could use a little less. We would like to watch ads for anything else.

At some point, the campaign becomes the background music of your life in these states in a way that people who don't live in these states may not appreciate. Something, Danielle, you and I can both probably understand, having lived in Iowa at different times in our in our lives where this all begins I was just thinking of Iowa as Tam said that we're gonna leave it there for today always bringing it back to the Midwest if we can right yeah yeah I'm Sarah McCammon I cover the campaign I'm Danielle Kurtzleben I also cover the campaign and I'm Tamara Keith I cover the White House and thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.