Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on campaign strategies with 3 weeks until Election Day

NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter join Amna Nawaz to discuss the latest political news, including polls showing the presidential race is still in a dead heat with just three weeks to go until Election Day, how Kamala Harris is trying to reach more voters and Donald Trump’s extreme rhetoric.

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Amna Nawaz: With just three weeks to go until Election Day, the presidential race is still in a dead heat, with both campaigns looking to cut into their opponents’ margins.

For more on their strategies and policies, I’m joined now by our Politics Monday duo. That is Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Great to see you both.

Tamara Keith, National Public Radio: Good to be here.

Amna Nawaz: All right, let’s take a quick look now, set the stage. Two new national polls to kind of tell us about the race. The first is from NBC News. Right now, you see Harris with 48 and Trump with 48 percent there. The second is from ABC News, and you have got Harris with 49 percent there, Trump with 47 percent. That is within the margin of error.

So, Amy, it’s a close race, getting closer it seems by the day.

Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report: Yes, it does feel that way.

If you think about where we were, say, in September, maybe at the end of September, it had been a pretty momentous few weeks for Kamala Harris. She gets the nomination, the base rallies around her pretty quickly, we go right to the DNC, then she has a successful debate, but that momentum has since, I don’t know whether the word is plateaued or hit a wall.

And there is some signs in those national polls that there’s been a little backsliding as well, that Trump is doing much better with independent voters. He’s basically halved in that poll, as well as CBS. All three networks came out with their national surveys.

So there’s that sense that on the issues that voters — there’s also the fact that on the issues that voters are the most concerned about, like the economy, Trump still has a lead. To me, the most important thing I found in that NBC poll is that voters look at Trump’s presidency retroactively a lot rosier than they did a year ago, and probably a lot rosier than they did when he was sitting as president.

Harris’ entire focus is on trying to make the case that he shouldn’t be brought back into the White House. But, right now, you saw most voters or a plurality of voters in that NBC poll saying they thought Trump’s policies helped them. They did not think that Biden’s policies had helped them.

Amna Nawaz: And, Tam, we have been seeing the Harris campaign rolling out some major surrogates, right, President Obama last week, President Clinton this week, specifically trying to reach male voters, specifically Black men.

We saw some new economic proposals from the Harris campaign today. How crucial is that demo for Harris to win?

Tamara Keith: That demographic is very important. In a race that is going to be decided on the margins, we always say this, but in a race that’s going to be decided on the margins, she can’t afford to lose these voters.

And I was in North Carolina last week reporting in a part of the state where Black voter turnout really was down in 2022 and has been falling in recent years talking to voters. I went to barbershops. I talked to some voters who I talked to when Joe Biden was on the ballot, went back and talked to them again now that Kamala Harris is there.

You know, the euphoria that you’re seeing at her rallies was not present in those barbershops. And a couple of people I talked to said specifically that, while they were supporting Harris, they weren’t sure that all of their male friends and family would, simply because they don’t believe that their friends and family are ready for a woman leader, for a female president.

And they’re talking to their friends about it and going back and forth about it, but this is actually a real concern that was voiced by former President Obama at a campaign event in Pittsburgh, where he said the enthusiasm, particularly among Black men, isn’t what it was for him.

And he called it out and said that maybe there just are some people who aren’t feeling it. Now, does that persuade? Does that move people to the polls?

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Tamara Keith: I don’t know. But they are certainly being quite open about their challenges and she will be appearing with Charlamagne tha God doing a town hall style-event, again trying to reach that key demographic.

Amna Nawaz: So much more to unpack and that we won’t have time to in this one conversation.

Amy Walter: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: But, Amy, the Harris campaign also announced she’s going to do an interview on FOX, sit down with Bret Baier in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

Amy Walter: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: Is it risky for the Democratic nominee to go on the pro-Trump network with three weeks left in the election?

Amy Walter: Right.

So when we talk about fighting on the margins, the other margin is where she does with white voters, especially white voters with a college degree. So, for as much as her coalition is not looking like the Biden coalition with voters of color, where she is doing better is than Biden did and probably, if this holds, then any other Democrat has ever done is with white college-educated voters.

Now, that — again, you’re not going to win over a lot of FOX voters, but pulling in at some of the margins. I think what she’s also trying to do is to get and sort of goad at Donald Trump to go out in the public a lot more. She needs Donald Trump to be in the spotlight.

More specifically, some of the things that he says and does that what — what Laura Barron-Lopez’s piece just was about, we have to be careful because of the enemy within, making that a centerpiece of her campaign. And one way to do that is to go on to sources of news that aren’t necessarily friendly to her side.

Amna Nawaz: Well, Tam, to that point, in terms of what we heard from former President Trump, there has been a ramping up and escalation of some of the more dangerous kind of rhetoric, now saying, if he was reelected, he would go after the enemy within with the U.S. military.

That was yesterday he said that, the same day that his running mate, J.D. Vance, once again refused to say in an interview that Trump lost the 2020 election. I mean, these are antidemocratic messages, but not disqualifying for his supporters.

Tamara Keith: These are absolutely antidemocratic messages.

However, he is not trying to win over new voters. He’s not trying to expand into suburban women who didn’t support him last time and probably won’t support him this time. He is not trying to win over people who will find that language alarming. He is trying to excite people who aren’t worried about that language at all, who want that, who are here for it, and who are excited about the idea of returning the country to something that it was in a different time.

That’s why you have him running these ads on repeat with different narrators even targeted at different demographics talking about trans athletes and Harris supporting trans people, saying that she’s for they/them, and not us. This is messaging that is directly targeted at young male — young white male voters and others who are uncomfortable with changes happening in society and who are looking to him to take him back and make America great again, if you will.

And so that language, yes, that’s going to turn off the people who are already not going to vote for him, but it could excite the people who he needs to get off the couch. In the competition with the couch, he is escalating the rhetoric to try to make the stakes higher for those people.

Amy Walter: Right, and we’re going to hear from Harris this week as well, who is going to lean into exactly that, which is we can’t allow this kind of rhetoric, we can’t let this person be back into the White House, sort of ramping up those same distress signals to her voters who might be sitting on the couch.

That’s where both of them are right now. Their greater fear is not that they’re going to lose swing voters to the other side, they’re going to lose them to just sitting at home.

Amna Nawaz: The competition with the couch, as Tam said.

Amy Walter: Yes. Yes.

Amna Nawaz: Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, always great to see you both, thank you.

Tamara Keith: You’re welcome.

Amy Walter: You’re welcome.