Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the Trump campaign's response to the DNC

NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter join Geoff Bennett to discuss the latest political news, including this critical week in the presidential race and the Republican ticket’s efforts to counterprogram the Democratic National Convention.

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Geoff Bennett: Let’s bring in our Politics Monday team here to tick through all that we have talked about so far.

Good to see you both.

Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report: Thank you. Good to be here.

Tamara Keith, National Public Radio: Good to be with you.

Geoff Bennett: So, this convention will provide Kamala Harris with such an introduction to the biggest audience of her campaign.

And, Amy, just looking at the latest polling, there’s a CBS News/YouGov poll out yesterday that has her up 51 percent nationally, 51 to 48. And then she’s tied 50/50 in the battlegrounds.

What more do Democrats need to do, what can they do to sustain this momentum moving ahead to November?

Amy Walter: Yes, I mean, this — that’s why tonight is going to be very interesting in watching, of course, the president, who was supposed to be accepting the nomination, actually coming here and endorsing his vice president.

He wants to, of course, talk about his legacy. He wants to, as the reports are coming out, move forward, not just talk about the past, but basically passing the baton, passing the mantle to Harris. At the same time, part of the reason Harris is doing as well as she is that she’s not seen as part of the Biden legacy.

In other words, she’s not as closely tied to decisions that the Biden administration made. To me, one of the most interesting data points I have seen so far from recent polling — this is a Washington Post poll — “How much influence do you think that Kamala Harris has had within the Biden administration on economic policy and immigration?”

Only about a third of voters thought that she had significant influence on those issues. So, on the one hand, she wants Biden to say nice things about her, of course. On the other hand, she’s going to want a little, like, maybe we can have a little distance here. I like you, but I have got to go my own way.

Amna Nawaz: Well, Tam, what about that distance? I mean, we cannot really underscore enough how quickly this shift happened, right? I mean, it was just a month ago that there was a different person at the top of this ticket.

We have seen some policies from the Harris/Walz campaign on the economy in particular come out. We expect to see more of them. But does she need to break more from especially problematic issues — problematic policies that have created issues with voters from the Biden administration? What do you see happening?

Tamara Keith: I think that what she has been doing is creating a tonal distance, but not actually a policy distance.

You can see that on Gaza-related policy, where she talks a lot more about concern for civilian life in Gaza, but she still has the same position in terms of Israel and full support of Israel as it pursues this.

She — in terms of the economy, she says, is: I know prices are high. You don’t have to tell me prices are high.

She talks about it in a way that is somehow more empathetic or just emphasizes things differently. And then just in terms of the tone of her campaign, and I think we’re going to see this played out here in this convention, tonally, it’s a very different campaign than the one President Biden was running.

She is running a much more positive, forward-looking, even joyful, she would say, campaign. Biden talks a lot about democracy on the line, a tipping point, and, really, it was a darker campaign, and hers is a more joyful campaign. And that is another area of sort of tonal separation from Biden, though continuing to — essentially, the policies that she’s been rolling out on the economy are Biden’s unfinished business.

They are the parts of the Build Back Better plan that just didn’t make it through Congress.

Amy Walter: Yes.

(Crosstalk)

Geoff Bennett: That raises…

Amy Walter: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Amy Walter: Well, it’s such a great point about the difference between, say, the messenger and the message.

But even on the economic message, this is the — what she’s been talking about, about price gouging issue in particular,that’s something we have been seeing downballot Democrats talk about now for a while. Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania started running those ads in May. So it’s not — I think that’s a very good point, that the message is maybe slightly different.

As I said, it’s really much more about the fact that she can be seen as turning the page, even though the policies are not going to be drastically different.

Geoff Bennett: Well, tonight is President Biden’s night. Democrats will celebrate him, even though party leaders effectively pushed him out of the race.

Tam, building on your previous point, how closely aligned does the Harris campaign want to be with President Biden, and how do they use him effectively moving forward?

Tamara Keith: Oh, Biden is promising that he will be out on the road and he will be out campaigning. I don’t know how much of that there will be. We did see them appearing together last week at an event about bringing down prescription drug prices, which is one of these things that gets an applause line — got an applause line when it was in Biden campaign speeches, and now it gets an applause line when it’s in Harris campaign speeches.

But, certainly, she is a different person. She is running a different campaign. You talk to Biden aides. And they say, the speech he’s going to give tonight is not a farewell address. They keep saying, it’s not a farewell address. It is a call to action.

Part of that is that President Biden, he has said goodbye before. He doesn’t like saying goodbye in a way that makes it be the end. When he dropped out in 1987, when he dropped out of the presidential race in 2008, when he dropped out — when he couldn’t run again in 2016, every time, he said, but I have more to say or I will run again.

This time is the last time, but he does have more to say, and he’s going to try to keep saying it for the duration.

Amna Nawaz: Guys, I’d love to get your take too on the fact that obviously the Trump/Vance campaign has also been counterprogramming.

Amy Walter: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: And they will be this whole week. We know they have been out and about.

Here actually is what former President Trump had to say a little bit earlier today when he was speaking in York, Pennsylvania. Take a listen.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: Very simply, Kamala Harris is an economy wrecker and a country destroyer. Our country will be destroyed if she gets in. Her radical liberal agenda ruined San Francisco. It ruined California when she was the attorney general. It crushed our middle class, demolished our border, set the world on fire.

And now she wants to be promoted to the job killer in chief.

Amna Nawaz: Amy, when you take a look at that, what is the counterprogramming strategy here?

Amy Walter: She’s using this opportunity, of course, to define herself, not so much for the room. You talk a lot — we talk a lot about in the past of convention bounces, that this is an opportunity for the nominee to really unify the party and they get something of a bump after the convention.

I don’t think that’s going to happen here. Instead, I think it’s so much more about speaking beyond this place that we’re sitting in right now in Chicago, speaking to the independent voters who right now don’t know much about her, but what they have seen, they do like. She’s doing better among independent voters, let’s say, than Biden.

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

And for Republicans?

Amy Walter: And for Republicans, their job, they want to fill in the blanks, right? They want to be the ones saying, she’s telling you this, America, but let me tell you, this is who she really is, really tying her as closely as possible to Biden.

And that’s why tonight is such a sort of fascinating needle to thread for the Harris campaign. It’s notable that this is happening on Monday…

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Amy Walter: … right, which is not the highest-profile night, traditionally for a convention…

Amna Nawaz: Right.

Amy Walter: … and that this is not somebody who’s going to be introducing her on her big night on Thursday.

Amna Nawaz: Tam, I know you have been tracking the Republican messaging here too.

Tamara Keith: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: What stands out to you?

Tamara Keith: Well, this is quite possibly the most active week that the Trump campaign has had of the entire campaign.

He is going to have rallies in swing states every day this week. He has been doing one event a week, or maybe last week he held one rally and did a press conference. He has not been an active campaigner. He has not been going to swing states as much as you would expect from a very active campaign.

This week is different. They’re counterprogramming and going to those swing states, many of which he’s only visited a couple of times. So, this is a shift. I do think that, in terms of the messaging, they are still struggling to figure out what to make stick.

And part of that is the clip you played is very much that is the message that Trump’s campaign advisers would like him to stick to. However, every time I turn on one of his speeches, he’s talking about who’s more beautiful, him or Kamala Harris. He’s talking about TiVo and random things.

He is not on message. He is having difficulty figuring out how to talk about Vice President Harris. He has said that he doesn’t have a lot of respect for her, and he feels like it’s OK for him to make insults on her intelligence.

That’s not really the best way to win over independent voters, including many independent or formerly Republican women who are trying to figure out where to land.

Amna Nawaz: Yes. And we have heard Republicans say, we want them to stick to message.

Tamara Keith: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: We want him to stick to the economy.

Politics Monday joining us here in Chicago. Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, thank you so much.

Tamara Keith: You’re welcome.