BONUS: "We, The Voters" Swing State Debrief
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Okay, this is unbelievable. There are four co-hosts, and we're all in this next segment. Together. At the same time. Simultaneously.

Hi. Okay, so we're all here because we all took part in a giant voter project, listening to voters in several of the key states. Michelle and I went to Pennsylvania. Leila Fadal went to Michigan. A. Martinez went to Nevada. And stay with us for your Swing State Debrief. ♪

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I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign for NPR. So I go to rallies, a lot of them. I want to hear what the candidates say, talk to voters, and find out what ideas are resonating. And I put it all in my reporting to help you make sense of this election. It's why being there is important. To help support this work, sign up for NPR+. Go to plus.npr.org.

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Okay, so the project was called We the Voters. Several NPR news teams went across some of the most vital states listening to the people who have the power, listening to the people who decide the election. Somebody else spends all the money.

Spends all the time, but in the end, it's your vote. And A. Martinez, how did you go about interviewing people in Nevada? Well, because I'd heard about so many people, especially online, just being very, very tired and frightened and worried about this election, I had the same question for everyone that I spoke to. And it was, how are you feeling about the election? And pretty much everyone I spoke to in Nevada had the same answer.

I can't wait till it's over. I am ready for it to be over. So that's to Cameron Granger, who is an Uber driver, and Darren Squires, who is an executive at a law firm. I mean, both of them gave me the same answer that almost every single person that I asked that question to had. I mean, it was just like they were just tired of it. They just, they had a lot of anxiety. They wanted it to be over. And here's the thing, too.

One of the things that I hope you guys run into as well is that when it comes to trying to get people to talk, it was a chore, a struggle. That's actually what I was wondering when they said, I want it to be over. Were they talking about the election or just the interview that they were in? Yeah, and hoping that I would go away, right? I got to tell you, Michelle and I were in Pennsylvania and ran into something similar. I've done something for more than 20 years now where I knock on doors, random doors in interesting, politically interesting neighborhoods.

And some people say no, and some people say yes. I had to knock on a lot of doors to get a few interviews. I can't tell you how many times the sound of the doorbell was met with silence or some kind of rejection or anxiety or a no comment. People really didn't want to talk about this. How about with you, Michelle? You know, I had a similar experience just having covered politics a long time, and this was

The first time that I found people really not wanting to talk. I mean, some people just don't have an opinion. Some places it's sort of culturally, it's not something that people are used to doing. But this is the first time that people seemed almost, some people, I have to say, seemed almost afraid to talk. People would say, I have people on the other side in my life and I don't want to annoy them. So exactly. And one of the things I found really interesting is that, you know, I went to Gannon University, which is in the western part of the state. It's sort of in the Erie area.

So, you know, college students, right, they generally are really interested in sharing their opinion. And even there, a lot of students said that they just didn't want to fight with people or they didn't want to disappoint or they didn't want to get into beef with family members or with friends even. And I asked Jeffrey Bloodworth about this. He's a professor at Gannon. He teaches modern American political history. He also teaches genocide studies.

And he said that he sometimes has a hard time getting students to talk politics in the classroom. I think it's a social media age in which there's a lot of kind of shaming. You can get so much negative blowback, you know, if you say something good about Donald Trump and you don't know you're with a bunch of liberals. And I can understand a 20-year-old just wanting to talk about the Steelers winning on Sunday as opposed to why they don't want to vote for Kamala Harris or Biden.

Donald Trump. Okay, well, Layla, I listened to your amazing reporting out of Michigan and got the sense it maybe was different where you were. I mean, there definitely was trepidation, but I found a lot of people ready to talk about

And Michigan is this place where foreign policy actually has a major impact right now. We spend a lot of time in Dearborn, which has the largest Lebanese American population in the country, one of the largest Arab American populations. And this is a group of Americans who say that they're seeing their family members getting killed, and they say that their tax dollars are paying for the weapons killing them. And so

They're in this moment where they feel like the election is life or death for them. And both candidates, in a lot of our interviews, they felt like both candidates were people who didn't see their lives as lives that mattered. And so because they're so small and they don't decide elections, you know, maybe about 200,000 people identify as Muslim, about 300,000 people identify as ethnically Middle Eastern or North African, a lot of overlap there.

People are really fractured over how to express their very limited political power. And so we saw people who were like, punish Vice President Harris for the current administration's policy. We're going to vote for Trump even if it's against our interests, even if he's going to implement a Muslim ban as he's promised on the campaign trail. We found people who are going third party because Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, is saying she'll end Trump.

what she calls the genocide, obviously something that's being debated on the international stage.

something Israel denies. And then, you know, you have Harris voters like Abbas Alawiya, who's a co-founder of the Uncommitted Movement, which describes itself as an anti-war movement, Democrats. He told me this is how he's thinking about who to vote for. I think if we take on an approach at this position of let's punish Harris, regardless of the cost, even if that gets us Donald Trump, I think that's a misguided approach. And I've gotten a lot of criticism from my own colleagues

you know, beloved community members for this position. But I think the real punishment, if we get Donald Trump, would be endured by our loved ones in Palestine, in Lebanon. I think the rate of killing would intensify. So he's gotten a lot of blowback. There are text messages going around with his face and other Arab Americans who publicly supported Harris saying they're complicit in quote unquote genocide, right? And that is the cost of him publicly saying, I'm going to support Harris.

And then you have people like Imam Mikhail Sadik, who is a son of Detroit, born and raised there, who said, I understand the pain that Palestinian Americans are, and I'm not going to convince them otherwise. I understand their political calculus, but they have to understand mine. When it comes to Trump and the MAGA beast at the gate again, we ask the question, OK, now are you asking me to sacrifice myself? Because remember,

Anti-Black racism. Usually when you're darker, you get it the worse. You realize this is an excruciating calculus for a lot of people. If you are thinking about the issues and not just personalities, I like that personality, I like that personality or that person's identity. If you think about the issues...

you may be conflicted. And I am now thinking of some students that I spoke with at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. And it's one of these elite universities that's been torn by protests over the war in Gaza. But for Darcy Elliott and Axel Ramirez,

the main issue was different. And I think they would agree with the people who were upset about the war in Gaza, but they're both voting for Kamala Harris and both essentially said, I think something else is more important to me. For me, I would say...

The right to my body is super important, and I'm pro-choice, and so I believe it's important that people across the country have the right to abortion and access to abortion. So I would say that is something that's really important to me. That's Darcy Elliott, and the other student, Ramirez, had similar views, which overtake her concerns about the war. I think there are also just a lot of domestic issues that are on the line right now as well.

And so I can't be a single issue voter. I think a lot of the times when we end up in these swing states,

looking at how voters are going to vote. There's a lot of focus on minority communities, the margins. But really what's important and interesting politically is that in all of these states, ultimately it's white voters that will decide the election. And the moments that a lot of these communities feel they're focused on is when the campaigns want to get the margins because this race is close. And so there's a focus on black voters. There's a focus on Arab American voters who are smaller communities, frankly, nationwide.

And so, you know, I spent some time in West Detroit with black voters who were divided on whether they were going to pick Trump or Harris. And civil rights came up a lot for some people. There's a lot of people that found the candidates indistinguishable because they feel that campaigns come around, especially to minority communities, make a lot of promises about the economy, about an improved life that don't come to fruition. And so you find disillusionment there.

in communities who feel like they only get focused during these campaign seasons. And Layla, when it comes to voters in Nevada, one of the things that they really focused on was how are the candidates going to help make me money? And then how are the candidates going to help keep as much of that money in my pocket? Because here's one of the things that

that was very unique about Nevada. Both candidates, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, both were in Las Vegas, and they both announced support for the same policy, which was to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers. Now, in Nevada, I mean, that's huge. That's a huge part of the economy. But a lot of the people that I spoke to, actually almost every single one of them felt that

Number one, they didn't believe the candidates when they made these promises. They were very skeptical that number one, they could make that happen. And number two, if they could, that something else would happen that would somehow make them lose hours on the job or make them maybe not be able to take advantage of those tips that aren't taxed. So the suspicion and the skepticism in Nevada about the candidates' promises was...

was really striking. Well, Michelle, this reminds me that in Pennsylvania, we set up a lot of the interviews based on people's economic situation, based on their jobs. And you could sometimes find a correlation between the work that they did and the way that they saw the world.

That is so true. But, you know, one of the things that stood out to me is, you know, like everybody remembers that famous phrase from the first Clinton campaign, it's the economy, stupid. And sure, yeah, that came up over and over again. But the other thing that struck me is, and, you know, I'm not sure we really know how to capture this or how to assess what difference it makes, but the way the candidates made you feel. Mm-hmm.

It's a hard thing to capture, but I think it's real. And when I thought about that, I was thinking about Jose Rivera here. He's originally from New York. He moved with his family to Allentown when he was a teenager. He basically grew up there. And he talked about how the candidates talk to people. I can say the messaging on both sides has been horrible because I've said this to some of the Democrats today when someone called my house and said, you know, vote for us because you don't want a convicted felon in the White House. And I'm like, hold up, but I'm a convicted felon.

I might not like him, but now you push me towards him. One person asked me, why would you vote for him? I was like, hey, because if he can win the White House, I can go for city council. I can go for mayor. Like, it opens up doors. Oh, wow. I know. All of us who heard this, we were like, wait, what?

And it just goes to show you that sometimes things don't hit people the way you think they're going to. And things may not hit people the same way, even if they live in the same neighborhood, even in the same house. I'm thinking of one of the doors that I did knock on where the person answered the door and she says, well, yeah, I guess I can talk about the election, but I'm in a mixed race household.

By which she means I'm voting for Harris and my husband is voting for Trump. And I did get a lot of encounters with people who were not in a totally divided America, who are involved with people or on the other side of the line.

Yeah. And it's just interesting to me how people who can live in the same place and be confronted with the same issues can see things in very different ways. And here I'm thinking about these are two political figures that we met. These are two state representatives. Their districts are right next to each other. There's Ryan Bizarro. He's a Democrat who represents District 3. And Brad Roy, he's a Republican who represents the 6th District in Pennsylvania. As I said, these are state representatives. Trust me when I say they are very different. Like here's Representative Ryan Bizarro.

Right now, people are in this region, they're voting with their pocketbook. Inflation is a real thing. But what a lot of folks don't understand that this is manufactured inflation. These are people who took advantage of a national crisis, who are purposefully jacking up the price of goods and services because people finally started making a little bit more money. So they took advantage of that. So their jobs, the economy, inflation.

Those are big issues up here. OK, so it won't shock you to know that Mr. Bizarro, who has a background in urban planning, he's the director of policy for the Democrats. And then here's Brad Roy, who represents the district, as I said, was right nearby. A lot of people are very, very concerned with all the illegal immigration. The concern is that over time,

they're going to disperse throughout the country. You know, all 10 million of them aren't going to be in New York City, Chicago, and along the Mexican border. Gradually, they're going to move throughout the country. And that creates another problem. There's already a housing shortage. You know, there's a shortage of apartments, a shortage of housing. So when you get houses and apartments for 10 million people, that makes it that much harder to

for our citizens. But at the end of the day, you know, people are people and they kind of do want to find a way to get along, even if it's just not easy right now. All right. So we're talking about people who try to get along, even though they have different views. But I guess we should note, Leila, that there are plenty of people who you can encounter across America who want a big change in this country, even something that might scare people. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big questions is the day after, right? And we ended up in a rural county, Hillsdale, and

you know, about an hour and a half from Detroit, maybe two hours. And there the Republican Party has split between, frankly, people who buy into debunked conspiracies around election fraud that didn't exist in 2020, but many still really believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, and Republicans who believe in the process and are running the process of the election in the county, poll watchers and elected officials. And so the big question is,

If the election happens and a person's candidate, I mean, Trump, who has sort of geared his supporters into believing the election will be stolen if he doesn't win, will a good portion of America accept the results? And that concern around election fraud is not a minority concern. An NPR-PBS Newsmares poll recently showed that more than half of Americans say they're concerned or very concerned about voter fraud.

And I spoke to Josh Gritzmaker, who is the newly appointed chair of a GOP faction, America First in Hillsdale, that's known as being right wing, conspiratorial, confrontational and full of people who don't believe that Biden won the election in 2020, despite all the evidence that he did. I think there's a lot of members here that are going to get involved just to have peace of mind.

And at the end of the day, hey, maybe they found a couple spoiled ballots. Hey, maybe they found a couple of miscues. Maybe they don't. And then they're like, hey, you know, this was a good, fair election. Maybe some folks can get involved and be part of that process that have never been part of that process before and solidify that there's some funny business going on or solidify that,

Hey, these are a lot cleaner than what we've been told. And just for context here, at the meeting that we attended that day, we spoke to Gritsmaker right after the meeting. Somebody from the Trump campaign had come to encourage people to come to the polls and make sure no funny business was going on. He was attacking the Democratic Secretary of State over the election process already. And

Yeah.

And I just want to mention that in spite of all the fear, there are a lot of people who seem enthused and excited about this election who are wearing the hats, who are wearing the shirts, who are putting out the signs. Did you see people like that in Nevada? Yeah. Speaking of hats and signs. So I went to a rodeo and a carnival in Pahrump in Nye County. Very, very red county, the reddest county in all of Nevada. And I was there.

And there was funnel cake stands, barbecue being served, cream soda. I drank and ate some of that myself. Good. But there was also plenty of MAGA hats and plenty of Trump signs that were being handed out and passed out and being carried by lots of people. But...

Then I saw a woman, Mary Beth Powell, in this sea of red. She was wearing this Harris Walls camouflage hat. You remember that hat that was made very, very popular on social media? So I made a beeline to her because I had to know, like, why would she want to wear this hat in this environment? She's from Pahrump. She grew up there. She lives in Las Vegas now, but has plenty of friends and family still left in Pahrump. And she said that over time, she realized that she thinks differently than the people that she grew up with.

And here's what she said about why she wanted to be so visible with that Harris-Walls cap in the middle of all these Trump supporters. I've lived here. I've lived in Washoe. I've lived in Clark. And, you know, I grew up here and I just wanted people to know who I was voting for. And I kind of hope that...

It empowers some other people to maybe vote that way, too. And just also empowers people to just be who they are and not be afraid that they can't speak their mind and give their opinion to other fellow Americans. Because, you know, as we've heard over the years, there's been a lot of division and some people get very frightened and worried about whether they can be honest about what they believe in. But for her, that didn't cause her any issues.

Listening to all of us here, I'm reminded of how deceptive the political map can be. We look at the map and it has red states and blue states, or maybe it's a little more detailed and it has red counties and blue counties, or even red precincts and blue precincts. But all of that is deceptive, isn't it? We're all jumbled together. We're all mixed together, even if one group or the other is in the majority in one place or another. You know, I think

when I was listening to all of you and what you found in the states you went to and the state I went to, you see a country that is trying to figure out who's the best leader for them, some people buying into conspiracies, but in the end, this race is incredibly close. And so the states that we went to

Every single demographic could be the decider, whether it's labor, whether it's a certain ethnic minority that wouldn't have that sort of power in another state, whether it's college educated, not college educated, socioeconomic status. And this is the moment in these states that we went to where every one of those votes really matters in a close race like this. OK, guys, this has been really insightful. Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me on, Steve. Having you on? It's your own show.

Thanks for inviting me to myself. You should thank yourself. And that's it for this special Swing State bonus episode of Up First for Friday, November 1st. Today's episode was edited by Lisa Thompson, H.J. Mai, Jan Johnson, Arazu Rezvani, and Alice Wolfley. It was produced by Lindsay Toddy, Julie Deppenbrock, Barry Gordimer, Ziad Butch, Chad Campbell, Claire Murashima, Milton Gavada, and Destiny Adams. We get engineering support from Andy Huther.

And be sure to stick with us here on Up First. We drop in regular episodes every morning to make sure you get the news you need. And we'll also be bringing you special bonus episodes. So stick around. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.

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With more electoral college votes than any other swing state, Pennsylvania is largely seen as the make or break battleground. Getting those last couple yards in the red zone in Pennsylvania is really, really tough. The presidential candidates have their eyes on it, and so do we. All this week on the Consider This podcast from NPR. Come along.