What It Will Take To Get 270
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Hey, it's Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday Story. Some of you might remember that I used to be a White House correspondent for NPR back when former President Trump was in office and at the beginning of the Biden administration. So I had to be on top of the news 24-7 and it's always extra busy during election season.

Here at NPR, we want you to know about three ways to make sure you don't miss election updates throughout the day. You've got Up First in the Morning, Consider This in the Evening, and the NPR Politics Podcast, Anytime Big Stuff Happens. It's an election news survival kit around the clock from NPR Podcasts.

Today, we're going to give you a taste of the NPR Politics Podcast. They've been on top of every twist and turn of this rollercoaster election with analysis that helps you and me understand what's going on. And now, with only two days to go until Election Day, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are leaning big time into the swing states.

To help us understand each campaign's strategy, host Miles Park is joined by Domenico Montanaro and Mara Eliason to talk about what each campaign is doing to gain those magical 270 electoral votes. Okay, here's the show.

Hi, this is Nikki in Westminster, Maryland, and I'm getting ready to vote in my first presidential election. This podcast was recorded at 1237 p.m. on Friday, November 1st, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will have cast my ballot. Okay, here's the show. Congratulations. I'm loving all these early voting timestamps. Very exciting. Hey,

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. It's the final Friday before Election Day. And today on the show, we're talking about how the two presidential candidates can win.

Specifically, which states, assuming that all of the safe Democratic and Republican states go the way most people think they're going to go, which swing states each candidate needs to win to actually win the presidency? Domenico, let's start with Kamala Harris. What is the most straightforward path for her to win next week?

Well, for her to win next week, you know, she needs to win everywhere that she's favored. And if she were to add to those the toss up blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, that would get her right to 270 electoral votes. And certainly that's where her campaign is focused, because that's where she's been polling best and where some of the demographics and history have helped them there. And I gather that there is a sense from the ad spending that that is also where the Harris campaign is focused. Is that right?

You know, the ad spending has been incredible. Pennsylvania has been the state with the most ad spending. We've seen almost $600 million spent in Pennsylvania just on the presidential race. When you combine everything else that's happening in the state, Senate, House races, county commissioner seats,

$1.2 billion has been spent on political ads in Pennsylvania. It's the first time any single state has crossed the billion dollar threshold when it comes to political ads. So yeah, a lot of money spent in those key states.

And Mara, it feels like all of the swing states right now, the polling averages have them very, very close. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means for what we can expect after Election Day when it comes to challenges as well? Well, I think Pennsylvania is kind of the whole ballgame no matter which way you look at it. It's where Donald Trump has focused most of his legal efforts to question the results.

It sounds like he is getting ready to challenge Pennsylvania because he needs Pennsylvania, and so does she. It's very, very hard to imagine a path to 270 electoral votes if Kamala Harris doesn't win Pennsylvania or wins.

if Donald Trump doesn't win it? Yeah, there's two things that have to happen in this election. Either Donald Trump is going to have to win one of those blue wall states to be able to win either Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. He's got to win one of them. The math just doesn't add up otherwise. Or Harris has to win one of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, or Georgia.

The math doesn't add up for her either if she doesn't win one of those places. So that's where the intersection is, is Pennsylvania. Well, wait a minute. I want to just understand something. Kamala Harris can lose Pennsylvania and make up for it with just one other state? No, I'm saying when you look at those three states, she has to win at least one of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, or Georgia, and then add to that the other states. But without winning one of those three states,

There's no path for her no matter what she does everywhere else in the country. I see. OK. So as you mentioned, Domenico, the most straightforward path for the vice president to win is this Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan path. And I wonder, Mara, as you've been watching Vice President Harris on the campaign trail, have you seen her tailor her message specifically to those blue wall states?

I don't think that her message is tailored to specifically the blue wall states. I think these battleground states have shown that most of them, voters care about the economy, number one. Her goal and her task in each of these states is to make it be a referendum on Donald Trump and to make him be the bad change and her the good change because we know Americans are very unhappy with the status quo. They want a change candidate.

And what she's been doing is making a more explicit contrast between her and Trump. He has an enemies list. I have a to-do list. And you could hear it in this big speech she gave on the Ellipse on Tuesday night. And it was pretty Trump focused. We know who Donald Trump is.

He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election, an election that he knew he lost. Americans died as a result of that attack.

140 law enforcement officers were injured because of that attack. And while Donald Trump sat in the White House watching as the violence unfolded on television, he was told by his staff that the mob wanted to kill his own vice president. And Donald Trump responded with two words: "So what?"

America, that's who Donald Trump is. And that's who is asking you to give him another four years in the Oval Office. Not to focus on your problems, but to focus on his. Certainly, that's a huge part of her final campaign message, which is to say that you can't trust him and that he's unqualified to be president. In a lot of ways, it's a coda to what Joe Biden was running on. And at the end of the day here, as these polls have tightened, her

Her campaign just sees drawing that contrast as a red line, something that the people who don't like Donald Trump but might not be sold on voting for her, they're trying to say this is what you need to understand for what's at stake here. You know, the Harris campaign is hoping that to independents, to Haley voters, to people who are still undecided, January 6th matters to them in a way that it might not matter to other voters. OK, that's interesting, Mark, because that's where I was going to go is I feel like I keep seeing all these issue polls that find that democracy or the concept of democracy

is not super high up on swing state voters' minds, but you're saying that it seems like there is this subset of voters that they're targeting with this kind of message. Yes, I think there is a subset of voters. And look, the economy is number one for every voter. It always is. But for

For the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for Nikki Haley after she had dropped out of the race in the Republican primary, when they could have voted for Donald Trump, that tells you something. And it tells you that they are still not comfortable with voting for Trump again. Now, the vast majority of those voters are going to vote for Donald Trump because they're Republicans.

But enough of them are still up for grabs. Her campaign believes this message will work for them. One last thing on Harris's path, Domenico. In 2020, Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million votes. And still, a number of these swing states were really, really close. I'm wondering if...

Is that the kind of dynamic that is still at play that for Harris to win, she needs to run up the total in the popular vote? Well, I mean, the popular vote isn't how candidates are elected. But when you look at the country overall, we talk about like these national polls. Usually a Democrat has to do better than, you know, three or four points in the national polls because those seven swing states are.

are more conservative than the country at large. There's just more white voters without college degrees who tend to favor Trump. They're older than the national average, less diverse on average when you look especially at those blue wall states, which is why they've become more competitive for Republicans. So yeah, Democrat basically has to tip the scale a little bit more on the national popular vote to be able to win in those seven swing states. All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to hear about

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And we're back. And so let's talk a little bit about former President Donald Trump's path to victory. Domenico, I always imagine you with the whiteboard, like circling a bunch of stuff, pointing at different things, telling us the numbers. What is the most realistic path for Donald Trump to win? And I'm just going to visualize that as you're talking. Okay. Well, I mean, he could certainly win victory.

Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. And he would not have to win any of the other swing states, provided he wins everywhere else that he's favored. And he would get right to 270 electoral votes. I call that the eastern sweep for Trump. So Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia. Those are the three states that the Trump campaign is invested heavily in. And they know that if they win all three of those, it's basically game over. All right, Domenico. So that's the eastern sweep. But Trump has another path to victory, right?

He does and it's the same one as Kamala Harris but instead of the blue wall, let's call it building the wall, the red wall and it's something that Trump did in 2016, winning Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. They're certainly aiming for those as well. It's not like they're selling out completely and just putting all their money on Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. They're spending a ton of money too on Michigan and Wisconsin and they think it's very possible that they could win all three of those as well and doing that –

and winning one Sunbelt state in addition to those three would get Trump over 270. So Domenico, is it fair to say that what Donald Trump has to do to get to that path is to turn out a lot of voters who really like him but don't have a history of turning out to vote? They're low propensity voters. I think this is one of the big tests for Trump in this election to see if he can sort of replicate what he did in 2020 but be able to get over the top with some of those

you know, maybe Latino voters, younger black voters to sort of make up the margins at because as you say, this is a shrinking pool when it comes to rural voters, white non-college voters. But I think that is the key for him. Do these voters who tend to be lower propensity voters, meaning they vote at lower rates than white voters with college degrees,

Do they defy what's likely to be the national turnout trend? Every expert will say that turnout likely this time will be down slightly from what it was in 2020 just by fact that there's less male voting in every state like there was universally pretty much.

in 2020. And usually the voters who are lower propensity wind up following the trend of voting going down. So we'll see if he's able to get those voters to turn out, but that is the focus of the Trump turnout effort is going after what campaigns see as zero, one and two voters. Those people who they rate as on a scale of zero to five as being high or low, uh,

likelihood to vote, zero being the lowest. They're focused on those voters, the voters who the Republican National Committee in the past has seen as inactive voters. They're really trying to turn them out, which is why we haven't seen Trump really change his message very much because he's aimed squarely at the folks who have voted for him before and the ones that he wants to. And you know, there is a theory about his extreme rhetoric that it's not just him letting loose and being undisciplined, but

But the more he can scare and anger low propensity voters, the more he can turn them out. Well, anger is a huge motivator in elections, no doubt about it. Yeah, and extreme rhetoric can do that. Well, for people who are going to be watching on Tuesday night, who are kind of tuning in right as polls close, Domenico, I'm wondering, is there one state early that you're going to be watching to kind of start to get a read on what is happening in the broader electorate?

I think two places, you know, we'll watch Virginia and Georgia. They close fairly early. Virginia is not necessarily a swing state. It's a lean democratic state. But there are areas in Virginia that where the polls kind of close early in rural southwest Virginia and sort of the suburban areas outside Richmond and Virginia Beach that are going to tell us probably whether or not Trump has been successful in being able to turn out these

rural voters in the way that he wants to. Because, you know, if all politics has kind of become national, these trends we've been seeing over the last couple election cycles have actually translated to elsewhere in the country. So that's where I'd be watching to start off, as well as, you know, those Atlanta metro area counties and some of the rural Georgia counties that are going to tell us a little bit about what could happen across the country. It doesn't seem like to me, Mara, that he is

moving towards trying to get these undecided middle voters at this point. Is that a fair assessment? Yes. Donald Trump throughout this whole campaign has never moved to the center, tried to appeal to the Nikki Haley voter. He has really doubled down to try to get his base out. And his rhetoric, his closing message has gotten more and more

distilled, some people would say extreme, more violent rhetoric. He's talked about using the military against the enemy within. He's been very specific about who the enemy within is. He's named Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi. And now his latest target was Liz Cheney, very famously Republican, conservative Republican, who has broken with him.

And here's what he had to say about her. And he starts out by talking about her dad, Dick Cheney. And I don't blame him for sticking with his daughter. But his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.

You know, they're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, "Oh, gee, well, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy."

But she's a stupid person. And I used to have meetings with a lot of people. And she always wanted to go to war with people. You know, Liz Cheney did respond. She posted on X, quote, this is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant. But there you have it. That's the closing message for Donald Trump.

It's certainly an extreme message. He's also, you know, in that clip there, targeting women. I mean, the way that he talks about, you know, Liz Cheney as quote unquote, dumb is certainly the kind of thing that he has said about women. Well, and Kamala Harris over and over again. Absolutely. And, you know, he has said that he wants to protect women, quote, whether they like it or not.

It's almost as if his campaign showed him the numbers of how this could be the widest gender gap in history. Not sure that that's going to really close the gender gap much at all. Well, in 2020, on election night –

Trump did claim victory long before the race was called. Are you guys expecting that dynamic again? Pennsylvania is one of those states, as you know, miles covering voting that could take a little bit longer to call, especially if it's within a point. Um, and in that chaos, Trump is going to fill the void. He's going to say that he won. And I think that people should just be prepared for the fact that these things take a while. Um,

The election wasn't called for really a couple days after the last election in 2020. That's what we should expect. Tuesday is really the start of things, not the end of things. And I think it's highly unlikely we're going to know a winner at 11 o'clock on election night unless Trump wins by more than a point in each of these swing states. Because I think he's going to definitely declare victory, say that there was fraud, and be able to kind of just push that same message that he's been pushing for, frankly, the last four years.

All right. Well, let's let's leave it there for now. Lots more to talk about next week as voting concludes. Our executive producer is Mathoni Maturi. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Jung Yoon Han, Casey Murrell and Kelly Wessinger. Special thanks to Christian Devin Calamer. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

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