WSJ What’s News - How Georgia and Pennsylvania Could Decide the Election

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

A.M. Edition for Sep. 3. Locked in a tight race, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump pour time and money into Pennsylvania and Georgia. The WSJ’s Ken Thomas says the two battleground states are crucial to their chances of winning the election in November. Plus, Israel’s political divisions deepen after the killing of six Gaza hostages sets off protests. And, Cathay Pacific cancels flights after discovering engine issues in some of its Airbus planes. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Protests and mourning in Israel after six killed hostages are found in Gaza. Plus Germany's far right scores a historic win in regional elections. And White House reporter Ken Thomas joins us to explain why the Harris and Trump campaigns

are spending so much time, energy and money in Georgia and Pennsylvania. You're going to see a very big push from Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance in Pennsylvania. The Trump campaign views that state as the quickest way to deny Harris a victory and her ability to reach 270 electoral votes. It's Tuesday, September 3rd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Israel is set for more protests today after tens of thousands of Israelis first took to

the streets on Sunday to voice frustration with the government's failure to reach a deal to free hostages held by Hamas. Tensions spiked after authorities said over the weekend that the Palestinian militant group had killed six hostages in captivity. Israel's Western allies are also displaying signs of frustration. Asked yesterday if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was doing enough to get a hostage deal, President Biden said no, while the UK government unveiled a partial arms embargo on Israel. Netanyahu isn't backing down, however, and has said he won't stop insisting that Israeli

troops remain along the Gaza-Egypt border to prevent future wars with Hamas, a term that negotiators say has stalled a ceasefire deal that would free many remaining hostages. Here was Netanyahu speaking to reporters yesterday. And now after this, we're asked to show seriousness? We're asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas? It says kill more hostages.

In a statement yesterday, Hamas said that quote, military pressure equals death and failure and exchange deal equals freedom and life, end quote. Germany's far-right AFD party scored a win in state elections in eastern Germany this weekend that all but wiped out the centrist parties that make up the central government in Berlin. It is the first time that a far-right group has won a state or general vote in Germany since the end of World War II,

a development that journal Germany bureau chief Bertrand Benoit also told us reflects growing distrust in governments across Europe. So there's been a lot of political frustration in Germany since the current government came in power. And it's been related to inflation, some of the measures that the government took to fight climate change, the war in Ukraine, and obviously immigration. You've seen immigration numbers as far as asylum seekers are concerned, heating numbers

that we hadn't seen since 2015-16. This is not unique to Germany at all. And certainly, if you look at countries like France, if you look at countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Sweden, all these have very strong populist parties of the right. All these frustrations are connected together by a mounting skepticism among voters that centrist governments, mainstream governments,

are able to fix the problems that people are worried about. Venezuelan prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for the country's opposition leader, Edmundo Gonzalez, who the U.S. says is the rightful winner of July's disputed presidential election. country's opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez, who the US says is the rightful winner of July's disputed presidential election. Strongman President Nicolas Maduro, who claims to have won that election, has since launched a crackdown on opposition that has seen 2,400 people jailed.

In Washington's latest effort to pressure the regime in Caracas, the US yesterday seized a private jet that had been used by Maduro and his lieutenants and was bought in violation of American sanctions. According to the Justice Department, the jet was purchased by a Caribbean-based shell company for $13 million sometime in the past two years, hiding the involvement of Maduro's regime. The plane was confiscated in the Dominican Republic and flown to Florida. The President of Brazil, leftist Luiz Senasio Lula da Silva, is defending a decision by the country's Supreme Court to ban Elon Musk's social media platform X, saying that it should

serve as an example that, quote, the world is not obliged to put up with Musk's far-right ideology just because he's rich." Over the weekend, Supreme Court Justice Ali Shunder Demorash shut down X for failing to suspend accounts that he asserted contained hate speech and misinformation, and he's taken the added step of freezing the bank accounts of Musk's satellite internet operation Starlink to ensure that the social media network would pay its fines. The ruling has drawn criticism from free speech advocates as well as from some investors concerned about judicial overreach and the impact it might have on Brazil's business climate.

Musk on X has referred to Demorais as a dictator, while jurists say that Musk is also to blame for the escalating tensions and have criticized him for flouting basic laws. Cathay Pacific Airways has canceled dozens of flights after discovering engine issues on one of its Airbus jets during a flight to Switzerland. The Hong Kong airline said today it had completed inspections on its 48 Airbus A380 jets and that it had found 15 planes with affected engine components in need of replacement. It said it has already repaired three and that the rest will remain out of service until they're fixed. Airbus said it was aware of the situation

and referred our reporter to Cathay and Rolls-Royce, the maker of the 350 jets engine, which said it's committed to working closely with Cathay, Airbus and the relevant authorities. Its shares in London closed down more than 6% yesterday before recovering some ground today. And in other markets news that we're keeping an eye on, shares of U.S. Steel are down in off-hours trading after Vice President Kamala Harris yesterday said the company should remain domestically owned, echoing President Biden's opposition to its acquisition by Japan's Nippon Steel. And econ data-wise, this week's main event will be Friday's jobs report,

the last big indicator of labor market health before the Fed's meeting later this month where it's expected to start cutting interest rates. Coming up, Kamala Harris may have gained ground in national polling in the aftermath of the Democratic convention, but a handful of battleground states remain more important than ever. And White House reporter Ken Thomas will take us to two of them after the break. or a consultant. You can get customized coverage for your business. Contact a licensed TD insurance advisor to learn more. A Wall Street Journal poll last week found that for the first time since the summer of 2023, Donald Trump is no longer leading the race

for the White House, with Kamala Harris now narrowly edging him out in a head-to-head battle. But that still leaves the election on a knife's edge, with everything potentially coming down to a handful of swing states. So I invited journal politics reporter Ken Thomas to join me to zoom in on a pair of them that could play a pivotal role for either side. Can you and Vivian Salama write that a Trump victory in Pennsylvania would be his easiest path to victory, while for Harris it would be to repeat Joe Biden's surprise 2020 victory in Georgia? Just starting with Georgia, the simple fact that that is

even being talked about as a potentially winnable state for Harris shows us just how much the democratic odds of victory have improved since Biden dropped out of the race now. It really does. A few weeks ago when Joe Biden was still atop the ticket, there was this sense that Georgia and several other battleground states were lost causes. Now with Harris's emergence at the top of the ticket, She has essentially returned these Sunbelt states to prominence, to a place where Democrats feel they can win. And we saw her on a bus tour in Georgia last week with her running mate, Tim Walz, not going around suburban Atlanta or through Atlanta. She was in the southern part of the state right around Savannah. And so that really tells you that this campaign thinks it can compete in other parts of Georgia

for rural voters, for some of the voters in ex-urban areas that have been largely Republican stronghold in the past. And the thinking among the Harris campaign is that if they can hold down Trump's margins in some of these places and then have a huge turnout in cities, that could be the formula they need to win a state like Georgia again. Is that just kind of the gist of the strategy,

Ken, take the campaign bus somewhere new, maybe spread resources someplace else? Or are we hearing, I don't know, a particular version of the Harris Wall's message maybe being rolled out in these communities? It's a lot more than a bus tour. We're hearing Harris make this pitch to voters that she would be a president for, quote, all Americans.

During the Democratic convention in Chicago, we heard from Republicans like Adam Kinzinger, a former congressman from Illinois, Jeff Duncan, Georgia's former lieutenant governor, a Republican, who said that voting for Harris would be an act of patriotism. We're also seeing the Harris campaign put out some of these overtures to Republicans, they announced that more than 200 former staffers to prior Republican presidential nominees like Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, those staffers are now on board with the Harris campaign. We heard in the CNN interview, Harris say that she would certainly like to see a Republican serve in a Harris cabinet. So they're certainly trying to send the message to these independent, unaligned,

and in some cases moderate Republicans that there would be a place for them in a Harris administration. Take us over Ken quickly to Pennsylvania if you could. How is the Trump campaign thinking they can turn that state red in November? Yeah, you're going to see a very big push from Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, in Pennsylvania. The Trump campaign views that state as the quickest way to deny Harris a victory and her ability to reach 270 electoral votes. Trump, as you recall, won the state in 2016, but Biden recaptured it in 2020.

And so now what you're going to see is a lot of work from the Trump campaign to blow out the margins in rural counties around the state. Think about the areas outside of Pittsburgh, for example. And then the Trump campaign is going to try to just avoid losing big in Philadelphia. And so what the Trump campaign sees, though, is just this opportunity to put Vance, who is from Ohio, along the Ohio Pennsylvania border. I think you're going to see him a lot in Erie, around Pittsburgh. It would be very difficult for Trump to win the presidency if he can't carry Pennsylvania

It kind of sounds kind like these two strategies are sort of inverses of one another and it can kind of leave me Wondering a little of course no duh that they would be trying to neutralize the other's advantage But you've covered a lot of elections. Are there nuances to these strategies that that have caught your attention Well, I think what we're seeing here is just the signature importance of these roughly seven battleground states. It's such a polarized country and so many of these voters are automatically going to vote Democrat or Republican. So within these states, both campaigns are just trying to find this narrow band of the

electorate who they can persuade and get to turn out. In some cases, these are voters who just haven't consistently voted in the past, who've been turned off by politics. Some of them are independent and will maybe choose one party over the other based on what they see in the ticket. In some cases, it's women who live in the suburbs or black and Latino voters who maybe Biden was underperforming with and Harris is trying to boost her support

among now. But there's just such a small number of voters around the country who will really make a difference. And there's just not much time between now and when people actually start voting. You're going to have in North Carolina, for example, vote by mail beginning on September 6th. In Pennsylvania, vote by mail begins September 16th. And so it seems like we've only just begun this matchup between Trump and Harris, but we're already in a very crucial part of this election. I've been speaking to The Wall Street Journal's Ken Thomas in Washington, D.C. Ken, thank you so much.

Thanks, Luke. And that's it for What's News for Tuesday morning. Additional audio in this episode was from Reuters. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach and Kate Bulevent with supervising producer Christina Rocca. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.