Tamara Keith and Jasmine Wright on the closing messages from Harris and Trump

NPR’s Tamara Keith and Jasmine Wright of NOTUS join Geoff Bennett to discuss the latest political news, including the closing messages from Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the fallout from Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden and lies about election fraud.
Geoff Bennett:
For analysis of the presidential race and the candidates’ closing messages, it’s time for Politics Monday with Tamara Keith of NPR and Jasmine Wright of NOTUS. That’s a new publication from the nonprofit nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute. Amy Walter is away.
Good evening to you both.
Jasmine Wright, NOTUS:
Good evening.
Geoff Bennett:
So, as we have reported and discussed on this program, former President Donald Trump held a rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden where allies made racist and vulgar comments about Latinos and Puerto Rico, in particular.
And his campaign, Tam, is doubling down on his promise for a massive deportation to reverse what he calls an immigrant invasion. This is a closing argument tailored to reach whom exactly?
Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:
To reach people who they need to motivate to get out to vote.
At this point, it’s not about persuasion. At this point in the campaign, it is literally about getting people to go and cast a ballot. And the theory of the case of the Trump campaign is that there are voters who are out there who aren’t yet voters, who are people who have not voted in the past, who felt disengaged, who feel like there’s nobody speaking to them, and that Trump is going to be the one who gets them off the couch and gets them to vote.
And so this sort of language, I mean, I don’t know if it’s going to work to persuade the 500,000 Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania, but the idea here is, this was a rally, this was a giant safe space for Trumpism, and for people who feel like they can’t say stuff like that in their communities.
And this rally was an embodiment of Trumpism, and that is motivating for a lot of voters.
Geoff Bennett:
What about that, Jasmine, this bet, this apparent bet by the Trump campaign that they will drive voters who don’t normally cast ballots, but who agree with Trump on his hard-line politics and his nativism?
Jasmine Wright:
I mean, frankly, it’s risky, right? I think, in elections, staffers and aides and people who are putting together a strategy, they want to focus on high-propensity voters. They don’t want to have to rely on their wins for low-propensity voters, because it’s just not clear what works with them. It’s not clear what is enough to motivate them to go to the ballot, to put those ballots in the mail, to really show up on Election Day.
I call this the base-plus election. I think for a long time we thought it was the base election, Democrats would be talking to Democrats, Republicans would be talking to Republicans. But I think that we have seen both campaigns, both the Harris campaign, go a little bit outside of that Democratic lane, go to right-leaning women, conservative women, Republican women, suburban women, to try to inoculate maybe some of the losses that they have seen with voters of color.
And then we’re also seeing Trump go to that low-propensity, maybe not so educated, maybe not very clear about when they can vote or how they can vote or what they want to vote for, but they like his message, they like that draw, they like that real kind of grit that they believe that they’re getting from Trump and people who are associated with Trump.
They believe that they’re being seen when he says or when people who are supportive of him say quasi-racist things or things that are misogynist or calling people names or belittling because they can’t feel — as Tamara said, that they can’t stand in their real life.
And so I think this is the base-plus. They’re reaching just a little bit outside the edges to try to get some of those voters to come over.
Tamara Keith:
And I think that what you say about it being risky, it’s also risky for Harris because her strategy bets on people who have identified as Republicans.
Jasmine Wright:
Who voted for Nikki Haley.
Tamara Keith:
Who voted for Nikki Haley who maybe voted for Trump before, taking this thing that is probably core to their identity and saying, OK, this time I’m going to do something different when I go vote.
But they are high-propensity voters.
Jasmine Wright:
Yes.
Tamara Keith:
So they’re more likely to vote, but are they going to take that step? That’s the push that Harris is trying to get them to do.
Geoff Bennett:
She’s clearly trying to draw a contrast. I mean, tomorrow night, she’s going to speak from the Ellipse, the same place where Donald Trump spoke before his supporters launched that violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Jasmine Wright:
Yes.
Geoff Bennett:
This is something — this is the Biden argument, right, that Trump is an existential threat that Harris initially did not really lean into, but now she is. Why?
Jasmine Wright:
Yes, we initially saw her leading into the freedom argument, really talking up reproductive rights. And now we have seen her in some ways kind of regress back to that democracy as core.
And it’s because it is attractive and it is motivating for base Democratic voters. It is something that Democrats like to hear. They like to talk about Project 2025. They’re scared of Project 2025. It motivates them to get to the polls. They like to talk about the fact that they believe Trump is unstable, that he’s a mean person, and that he’s going to do mean things in the government, and that he absolutely should not be back there.
And it’s also kind of attractive with those suburban women who may feel that their rights are under threat or who may not like where the Republican Party has gone on reproductive rights or abortion. And so it is an attractive thing for Democrats to put out there because they see that in some ways, at least, it motivates people to get to the ballots.
But, of course, we know that on these surveys, time after time after time what Americans are saying that they are most concerned about is the economy. And so I think right now you’re seeing the Harris campaign kind of walk a tightrope between whether they should be talking about the economy or whether they should be talking about democracy.
But, clearly, we’re going to see democracy win out tomorrow.
Geoff Bennett:
And we should say this election is already under way. Election Day is really when voting ends. And 40 million Americans have already voted early in person or by mail.
And Trump and his surrogates, as we said earlier in this broadcast, continue to spread lies about election fraud. And there’s a new CNN poll that shows more than two-thirds of Americans say Trump will not accept the results if he loses. The question, will Trump accept results and concede if he loses? Sixty-nine percent say no, 30 percent say yes.
When that same question is asked of Vice President Kamala Harris, 73 percent of respondents say yes, 26 percent say no.
Tam, help us understand how Trump and his allies are laying the groundwork to contest his potential election loss.
Tamara Keith:
Just look at the way he talks. And this is very similar to language that he used in 2020, when, of course, we know he did contest the results of the election. He claimed victory before it was clear that he had lost. And then he continued to this very day deny that he lost the election.
He is talking about, oh, this could be rigged. He is — in particular, a lot of the misinformation that he was spreading about the hurricane recovery also had tinges of — as we saw in this previous report, had tinges of, well, and maybe those voters are being suppressed.
So the groundwork is there. And what I will say is, the groundwork was also there in 2016, but he won. So he didn’t contest the results. In 2020, he lost and he did contest the results in a lot of ways. And he — they have more lawyers. They have a greater emphasis on lawyers.
When Trump took over the RNC, he was like, we need less on voter turnout and we need more lawyers.
(Crosstalk)
Jasmine Wright:
Yes.
Tamara Keith:
We need more people working. And there are active legal cases right now, as there are before every election or in this period. And the Harris campaign certainly has many, many lawyers too. I went and visited a campaign office in one of the swing states and getting a tour. And there’s our election protection team.
Jasmine Wright:
Yes. Yes.
Tamara Keith:
This is a part of modern campaigns. Certainly, it was amplified after the 2000 election and amplified way more after 2020. This is a part of the campaign. It’s the part that comes after the voting is done and a little bit before the voting starts.
Jasmine Wright:
And I would say just a difference between 2020, 2024 and 2016 is that, because he won in 2016, you didn’t hear it for four years.
Tamara Keith:
Yes.
Jasmine Wright:
You didn’t hear about the election being rigged as much because he was actively governing.
But, instead, because he contested the election in 2020, you have heard or Republicans have heard, people just in the apparatus of the U.S. have heard for four years that the election has been rigged, that Democrats are not playing fair, that the Democrats most recently are the enemy within.
And so he has really laid the groundwork that shows up in that poll; 70 percent of people that are supportive of Trump don’t believe that the election, if he loses, will be fair, according to that CNN poll. I may have botched the words a bit, but, in genesis, that’s what it says, right?
That is a huge amount of the American public that no longer feels really confident in our electoral system. So whoever wins next week or whenever we figure out the results will have to address those amount of people because that is a huge amount of people. And, of course, it is what led to, in some parts, that feeling January 6.
It’s what led to the conversation around election and voting for the last four years.
Geoff Bennett:
And we should say, to your point, we may not know who won election night.
Jasmine Wright:
Exactly.
Geoff Bennett:
And that does not mean that there was evidence of fraud or anything inappropriate. It’s because some states are barred by their own laws from counting until Election Day, and that delay will exist most likely.
Tamara Keith:
And it depends on which ballots are counted first.
Geoff Bennett:
Right.
Tamara Keith:
It will show — depending on the county, it may show one candidate up who isn’t actually up in the end.
Geoff Bennett:
Tamara Keith and Jasmine Wright, thanks, as always.
Tamara Keith:
You’re welcome.
Geoff Bennett:
Appreciate it.
Jasmine Wright:
Thank you.