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Inside Politics

Harris, Cheney Campaigning Together Today In Swing States; Today: Trump Holding 3 Events Across Must-Win North Carolina; Trump Thrusts McDonald's Into Political Arena. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Aired October 21, 2024 - 12:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:33:07]

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. You're looking at live pictures of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, both having events in must-win swing states. You see on the left of your screen there, Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney just wrapped up their discussion, town hall, about voters and about the issues that voters there asked questions about.

And then on your right, Donald Trump is still speaking in North Carolina about climate, about the devastation from the hurricane, and about voting in that state of North Carolina. We're going to continue to monitor the Trump event, which is still going on. In the meantime, we're going to talk about the highlights and what we are seeing today on the campaign trail.

Joining me now is Josh Dawsey of The Washington Post. There's your boy, Mrs. Dawsey. The Wall Street Journal's Molly Ball, CNN's Manu Raju, and CNN's Eva McKend. Hello to everybody.

Josh, I do want to start with you because you wrote about the sort of strategy that we're seeing play out in the Philly suburbs right now. And that is the Harris campaign does believe that there are former Republican votes or swing voters in these ever-important suburbs who are gettable.

We saw some of it based on the discussion and even just the presence of Liz Cheney there, and we're going to see that all day. But also we're seeing it on the airwaves. This is an ad that is a prime example.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: In 2016, Donald Trump said he would choose only the best people to work in his White House. Now those people have a warning for America. Trump is not fit to be president again. Take it from the people who knew him best. Donald Trump is too big a risk for America.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: What are your sources telling you about why they think this is going to be helpful? [12:35:04]

JOSH DAWSEY, POLITICAL INVESTIGATIONS REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: So what was noteworthy last week was that Kamala Harris' campaign spent more promoting ads on television from Republican voices against Trump than they did on abortion, on any other policy thing. So we were sort of curious.

Why are you spending so much money on these attacks and putting Mark Milley, John Bolton, Mike Pence and others out there? And their theory of the case is there's a small sliver of persuadable voters in these states. These voters who, even after Trump was clearly going to be the Republican nominee, they still did protest votes for Nikki Haley.

They think that these people are still not down to quite vote for Trump yet. And they're trying to get them. So they're spending all of this money to get Republican voices like Liz Cheney. We see Sarah Matthews, a former Trump aide who resigned. Stephanie Grisham, who resigned after January 6th, out on the road to give these people what they view as a permission structure to vote for Kamala Harris, right?

We work for Trump in their minds. He was erratic. He was crazy. You might not like some of these things about her. But you really can't vote for him again. Now, whether that works or not, I don't know. We saw even leading up to the 2020 election, DNC and others did all sorts of focus groups on character.

And they found a lot of people didn't like Trump's character, but they still voted for him. And those character messages didn't work that well at that point. So I'm not necessarily thinking that this will work. I don't know if it will or not. But they're spending a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of energy.

As you're seeing today, it's sort of the central part of the strategy down the stretch to get Republicans to vote against Donald Trump.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And they may have to do that, right, because look at the coalition that she's trying to build to get to the White House here. It is -- she's not doing as well with black voters. She's struggling with younger voters as well, winning on some of these demographics, but not to the same level that Joe Biden won the White House or Barack Obama as well.

So she needs to pick up voters, those suburban voters, which she's doing pretty well. But some of the people who are Republican-leaning voters, people who are thinking about Trump, thinking about sitting back the election to offset the margin that she will not get with those key voting groups. Whether this works remains to be seen.

But the character attacks, Democrats in particular, have been urging, have been hoping that she would go harder against Donald Trump. We'll see if this works in the coming days (ph).

BASH: And, Molly, I was just, as the Vice President was speaking with Liz Cheney, I just looked up Chester County, which is where they are, one of those key four-collar counties around Philadelphia. In the 2024, in this cycle's primary, Nikki Haley got 9,338 votes. She was not in the race anymore.

So that's just one data point of the kind of Republican voter that they can try to appeal to, to vote for Kamala Harris, because those were almost 10,000 voters who were absolutely have -- voting to protest Donald Trump.

MOLLY BALL, SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: You can definitely see, and it's not just demographic, right? It's also geographical. And that's why she is in these suburban areas of the blue wall states in making this pitch. So the places she is with Liz Cheney today, it's Philadelphia -- sorry, it's suburban Philadelphia.

And then she's going to be also in suburban areas in Michigan and Wisconsin because there's a feeling among Democrats that Trump has left a lot of these votes on the table because of the type of campaign that he is running this year, right?

You have Trump trying to drive up his numbers with those base groups and with the disaffected voters that he believes he can bring in off the sidelines trying to drive up his margins in rural areas like where he is today. And so she is trying to gather some of those swing voters, the educated former Republicans, particularly, you know, college educated upper middle class women in a lot of these suburbs.

The idea being that while these are the groups that Democrats have made steady gains with over the past several cycles, there is still more that she can be doing to maximize her vote share there.

BASH: And you were with the Vice President as she was campaigning this weekend.

EVA MCKEND, CNN NATIONAL POLITICS CORRESPONDENT: I was. And when you talk to the campaign, they never viewed this as a base election. They agree -- they argue that every campaign needs some voters from the other side. And making this argument to those voters that the former president is fundamentally unfit, he's unhinged, it's a much different argument than agreeing with her on every policy matter.

I met a woman in Wisconsin. The state is arguably pretty evenly split. And she told me she was excited to be at the Green Bay rally, but she's still working on convincing some of her Republican colleagues and neighbors. And so that is why they are leaning on this message so hard.

They will argue it's not at the expense of messaging to the base. She had souls for the polls events this weekend targeting black voters. But it's a both end strategy.

BASH: Yes, really interesting.

OK, well, speaking of strategy, we'll talk a little bit about what the strategy is on the Trump side of the equation when we come back. And as you saw here on Inside Politics, Donald Trump is in North Carolina, a state that his campaign didn't think would be that tough. But he's there. We'll talk about that after a break. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:44:40]

BASH: Welcome back. Donald Trump is in Battleground, North Carolina, where a record setting 1 million ballots have already been cast. That's about 13 percent of its registered voters, according to the state's Board of Elections.

My panel is back with me. Manu, host of Inside Politics Sunday, if you were told back when he was running against Joe Biden that Donald Trump would have three events in one day --

RAJU: Yes.

BASH: -- in North Carolina this close to the election.

[12:45:09]

RAJU: I'd be surprised. I mean, look, this is a state that Democrats have not won since Barack Obama took it back in 2008. This is something that's been out of reach for some time. But if Trump -- this flips, Trump has, I wouldn't say no path, but very little path to the presidency. And they recognize that.

And there's so much unpredictability, too. What does the aftermath of Hurricane Helene mean for those hurricane ravaged spots of the -- of North Carolina, Asheville, state -- areas where the Democrats could pick up a sizable amount of votes? Does that change things as well? So clearly this is still -- this, like all the other battleground states, completely up for grabs at this point.

DAWSEY: One of the things about Hurricane Helene that's interesting is Trump's team has been very engaged in trying to expand voting access in these Trump heavy counties around --

RAJU: Despite what Trump said.

DAWSEY: Right, early voting, mail-in voting, one of these things Trump's been very critical of. But in these areas that have been disproportionately affected, they're heavily Trump voters. And the campaign believes hundreds of thousands of their voters have been affected in some way by the storm far more than Kamala Harris's voters.

So you see campaign officials are making calls to these counties to ask them to do, you know, more places where folks can deliver the ballots to open new locations. I mean, they're doing this expanded push for voting, which in 2020, where there was expanded push around COVID, the Trump campaign didn't really like it so much.

But they need these people in these counties to vote for them. And these people who are out of their homes or maybe have their whole lives have been upended, they've got to get these ballots to come home for them. BASH: Molly, there was a lot of discussion about -- over the weekend about what Trump said about Arnold Palmer and his manhood. And Mike Johnson was asked about it by my colleague Jake Tapper. I'm going to let everybody find that online and say that if you want a double entendre, as the former president said, you can maybe look for that.

But I think the most interesting moment that Jake Tapper had with Mike Johnson was pushing him on Donald Trump's repeated threats about the, quote, unquote, "enemy within." Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MIKE JOHNSON (R), SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: You know, that's not what he's talking about there. What he's talking about is marauding gangs of dangerous --

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHIR: No.

JOHNSON: -- violent people who are destroying public property.

TAPPER: No. He talked about Adam Schiff and Pelosi.

JOHNSON: And threatening other --

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: When you look at Shifty Schiff and some of the others, yes, they are, to me, the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: So, again, just to kind of underscore what we just saw, we saw Mike Johnson trying to defend and explain away the enemy from within with Jake, who was not having any of it. And then Trump himself on Fox around the same time saying, no, that is what I meant.

BALL: Well, and this is why the -- why Kamala Harris has been playing clips of Trump at her rallies is, there is a belief on the Democratic side that a lot of Republicans, including Republican elected officials and including a lot of Republican voters, are sort of in denial about what exactly it is that they're supporting.

And so, you know, the effort is to sort of force them to confront exactly what it is that Trump is saying, what it is that -- because he has not tried to modulate his rhetoric at all in these final days of the campaign. And if anything, he has amped up, you know, the arguably authoritarian things that he's saying.

And so the Harris campaign, you know, has also taken sort of a dark turn as they amp up these sort of fear based messages about the threat to democracy that she argues that he represents. And a lot of the way that she's doing it is simply amplifying his comments because --

BASH: Yes.

BALL: -- again, they are concerned that they feel that too many voters have not been confronted with exactly what it is that he's saying. BASH: And yet, Eva, on the Trump side of the equation, it's not just -- and I know that you all have reporting to sort of back this up as well -- it's not just that it's Trump being off the cuff and trying to entertain. I mean, there is a very deliberate strategy right now in the final weeks of the campaign.

Their get out the vote machine is about trying to find people who are completely disaffected with politics, have not voted before and will go vote if they are so inspired. And so, the Trump campaign is trying to inspire them with the most outrageous comments.

MCKEND: He's an entertainer at heart. And so, maybe he thinks that this is a winning strategy. I will tell you that there is a real double standard at work that I think is worth amplifying. If the Vice President got on stage for two hours and was waxing poetic about a sports star's genitalia, people would not characterize her as a credible candidate for president.

And so, this is the former president's strategy, but the Vice President is essentially using it as fuel for her argument to voters that he is, at his core, unserious.

BASH: Yes.

[12:50:07]

MCKEND: You know, it wouldn't be Harris being Harris if she was on stage exhibiting that type of behavior.

BASH: This is asymmetrical political warfare. There's no question about it. It always is when you're running against Donald Trump.

Thank you all. Thank you so much. I'm glad your mother was patient.

We'll be right back. Don't go anywhere.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BASH: That's Donald Trump putting on an apron to work the fry machine at a McDonald's restaurant yesterday in Pittsburgh. That was Kamala Harris's actual job when she worked at Mickey D's over 40 years ago. Something Trump repeatedly and baselessly accused her of not telling the truth about.

[12:55:07]

Trump also helmed the drive through window. Now, we should say that this McDonald's was closed during yesterday's event, they say, for security reasons. Kamala Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, was on this morning on The View, calling it a stunt.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. TIM WALZ (D), VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE: Vice President Harris and I grew up middle class. We understand that. She actually worked in a McDonald's. She didn't go and pander and disrespect McDonald's workers by standing there in your red tie and take a picture. His policies are the ones that undermine those very workers that were in that McDonald's.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: That's it for Inside Politics today. Thank you so much for watching.

CNN News Central starts after the break.