Evening Edition: Campaigns Make Final Push Before Election
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I'm Brian Kilmeade. I'm Martha McCallum. I'm David Asman, and this is the Fox News Rundown.

Friday, November 1st, 2024. I'm Eben Brown. It's the final weekend before Election Day, something that feels years in the making. And the Trump campaign says they have the Harris campaign right where they want them. They're bouncing from news cycle to news cycle, hoping to try to grab on to some sort of manufactured outrage. And they're chasing headlines.

Four days away from Election Day, they are chasing news cycles. This is not a campaign that has a central message. This is the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition.

Election Day is just days away now. It means early voting periods are ending, absentee ballot deadlines are looming, and closing arguments are being, well, argued. Some would say former President Trump's quest for a new chance at the White House began the moment he left Washington on January 20th in 2020.

He has since endured prosecution, primaries and physical harm. And yet there is a sunny disposition among those who are hard at work trying to reelect him. I got to tell you, I would rather be where we are right now with President Trump's campaign than where the Kamala Harris campaign is today. One hundred times out of one hundred. No question about that. Tim Merton.

is the senior advisor to former President Trump's campaign, and we talk everything from polls to early voting to campaign language.

to being ready for the day after Election Day. And I do want to remark about it has been a long campaign and I don't think it gets enough attention still in the media that it wasn't very long ago that Donald Trump was very nearly killed at that first rally in Butler and then subsequently someone else had laid in wait for him on the golf course and was going to take another shot at him. So two assassination attempts

And it's like everybody just moved on from that. And I think that's unfortunate because I think it does go to the to speak to the state of politics in this country right now. But as we head toward the finish line and November 5th has been circled on the calendar for everybody for a long time. Again, as I say, I would rather be in our position than where Kamala Harris is, because everyone who is going to vote in this upcoming election.

has lived through both administrations. In the Trump years, they remember a strong economy, non-existent inflation, a secure border, and a world that was largely at peace.

Under Kamala Harris, the economy is in shambles. Inflation remains through the roof. A gallon of milk costs $7. The border has been effectively erased and the world at large is on fire. It is a very easy choice from our perspective. The Trump years were good. Kamala Harris's years have been terrible. And this is our closing message. Kamala Harris broke it. Donald Trump will fix it. Simple as that.

I want to get more into that closing message in just a moment, but you just brought up something that I was hoping to ask about, and that is sort of the campaign rhetoric. Yes, the former president survived essentially two assassination attempts, one in which he was actually shot. He is now getting some criticism for using language involving firearms and Liz Cheney.

I think when language like this comes out, it gets a bit mischaracterized. I think it happened with the garbage comments, both of them. And now it might be happening with this one. But, you know, at some point, do we turn this rhetoric down somehow? How does that happen? Because, well, let's face it, let's just face it. It is a little ugly. And I'm not putting that on either side here. Just I think some of the tone is is pretty rough.

Yeah, well, I'm going to dispute that. I think that Joe Biden undeniably referred to all Trump supporters as garbage. It's on videotape. The entire world can see it for themselves and make their own determinations. And with regard to the Liz Cheney comments, if you watch that videotape, what Donald Trump is quite clearly saying is that Liz Cheney, like all of the other chicken hawks, as the left used to call them, people in Washington, D.C., who vote to send other people's sons and daughters to war,

They would have a different perspective if it was they themselves who were deployed. You can hear it quite clearly in Donald Trump's answers. He said, if we gave her a rifle and sent her over there, he's talking about what if she were deployed instead of the young men and women who go over and get they would have a different perspective. That is exactly what he's saying. And anyone who says otherwise is trying to take political advantage of this. Well, that was my next question was this.

Someone takes a little bit of the language that is used and it becomes half a quote or something like that. And now there is, well, now he got shot, but he's using the same language now himself. There seems to be this back and forth of taking snippets out of context and saying,

That's led to a very bad climate. And I'm not putting any blame on any one person in particular. But I just I wonder, at what point do we we dial this down a bit? Because it's been going on for a long time. Well, listen, I'm going to point fingers at the at somebody for this Liz Cheney thing. It's a guy named Aaron Ruppar who does this for a living. He puts out half quotes all the time and the media just picks it up and runs with it. That's exactly who started this whole thing. And I don't think that what Donald Trump said is wrong at all. And it's perfectly defensible. And it's true.

If you take a look at what the left has, remember what they used to say about George Bush and John McCain and even Liz Cheney, the left and the people on MSNBC and Democrats all across the country, they called her a chicken hawk. And they say, you vote to send other people off to war when you never have to go face combat yourself. That is precisely right.

what Donald Trump said about Liz Cheney, and they are freaking out about it, saying, "You can't say that." They all said it about Liz Cheney themselves over years. So I don't buy this stuff. They know precisely what they're doing. This is something that was done on purpose to give them something, and it's pretty funny.

If you think about it, we're now talking about this four days before the election. Donald Trump's central message is, "I am going to fix the problems of this country. I'm going to fix the economy. I'm going to fix the border. I'm going to fix our standing on the world stage." That's his message. Kamala Harris's message is, "I love Liz Cheney."

She's looking for that elusive Liz Cheney voter that she thinks is out there somehow that she doesn't already have. It's bizarre. It really is bizarre. I want to talk about the theme about your closing argument that is, as you say, that Donald Trump will fix things. The jobs report came out this morning. I have to say it's it's fresh material for for former President Trump going into this last weekend, isn't it?

Certainly it is. And it's not, you know, we don't look at this as good news because Donald Trump wants the country to do well and he wants it to do better than it's doing right now. And it is not doing well. The last jobs report that we're going to see before the election shows that in private sector jobs, the jobs market actually shrunk by

by 28,000 jobs, 28,000 jobs to the negative. So we've lost jobs in the private sector over the course of the last month. The only jobs that were created were in government. And those are jobs

jobs paid for by taxpayers. It's not the same as a private sector job. So the economy is not doing well. And that's one of the things that Donald Trump is, of course, pledging to fix. And one of the first things he's going to do is unleash American industry and just stop this war on energy that the Harris and Biden administration has been engaged in ever since the very first day they took office.

And what I was trying – what I was going to say was – and I know I was talking on top of you. I'm sorry about that. Is that if you look at what is happening, it's always much more instructive. People can talk about polls all day long, and that's just talk. But it's much more instructive to look at people's actual behaviors and look at what the Harris campaign is doing. They're bouncing from news cycle to news cycle, hoping to try to grab on to some sort of manufactured outrage, and they're chasing headlines.

Four days away from Election Day, they are chasing news cycles and trying to generate negative headlines. This is not a campaign that has a central message. Their central message has degenerated into Trump is bad, Liz Cheney is good for some reason, as though Liz Cheney is running for something. It's sort of absurd. And this is a campaign that has never been able to figure out why Kamala Harris wants to be president.

why she specifically should be president. And in the end, in the closing days, she has just settled on Donald Trump bad, Liz Cheney good. And I guess she's not talking about the economy or the border anymore because she has no answers for that. This is just an extension of the Biden administration like it always has been, like we've always said. Donald Trump is the one talking about solutions and Kamala Harris is sowing division and hate.

Our guest is Tim Murtaugh, the senior advisor of the 2024 Trump campaign. And we are talking about the final few days before Election Day. Please like and subscribe here on the Fox News Rundown. We'll have more straight ahead. You talk about measuring people's behavior. There are some behaviors I want you to talk about here, and that is the behavior of early voting. There has been a major embrace, I think, by the Republican Party.

machine, if you will, if that's the right word, of early voting. We've seen incredible early voting turnout really across the board, but specifically for Republicans. We've seen it high, high turnout for Republicans in Florida. We're seeing it also in Georgia, which is a particularly important swing state this time around.

The AP this morning, today being Friday, November 1st, reports that more than 62 million ballots across the country have already been cast one way or another, whether it was in-person early voting or through mail-in absentee ballots. That's a big deal.

That's a big, big deal, isn't it? Yeah, it is a big deal. And that's a really big number. And it's true. We don't really have election day anymore in this country. We have more like election season, really. And so 67 million is a big number of votes already cast, that's for sure. And it is encouraging to see because we have been encouraging our

Republican voters, our Trump voters, to go and cast their votes any way they possibly can. If they want to vote early, if it's more convenient for them, if they want to vote by mail, if that's more convenient, vote early in person or wait. A lot of people really do enjoy the process of voting on Election Day itself as their tradition. And that's the way they like to engage in the process. And that's great, too. Any way that people can cast their vote, we're for it.

As far as the early vote totals go, it's very, very encouraging. You know, I think the conventional wisdom was that Republicans don't do that well in early voting. Well, this cycle is maybe proving them wrong. Nevada, as you mentioned, looked incredible. New records were set in North Carolina, and Republicans are actually leading in some of these places in the early vote, which is just an incredible sign for what we'll see, you know, come Election Day and then what the final results will be.

So we feel, again, very good about where President Trump is in this election. And I would rather not trade places with the Kamala Harris people because I think this is Donald Trump's race. And I think that as long as we keep the pedal to the metal and, as they say, to mix metaphors, run through the tape.

You don't stop accelerating until Election Day has already passed. And that's what we intend to do. We feel we feel very good, but taking nothing for granted. You know, polls, polls are just theoretical election results. They don't they don't represent real votes. You got to go out there and actually turn out the votes. And that's what we're doing right now. What does it look like for you guys post Election Day? There are already plenty of states who have said they don't expect to have their results done by the night of the fifth. That I that I know rubs back.

a lot of people the wrong way, but it might just be a reality. So what happens after Election Day? Well, I mean, it depends on what the results are and how much information we do have from the results of election night. I mean, that's kind of a hard question to answer in advance.

What are we going to do? You know, it depends on what happens. But we do have a ton of lawyers standing by ready to go to court in the expected challenges that we expect the Democrats are going to mount. And we've already seen and had some victories. You know, in Virginia, the Biden-Harris Justice Department tried to stop Governor Youngkin from removing non-citizens from the voter rolls. Can you imagine that thing? Non-citizens were registered.

to vote and they tried to stop the governor from removing them from the voter rolls. Ultimately, he prevailed. So we were right. Our side was right. And that's a great victory in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in suburban Philadelphia. People were being kicked out of line, waiting in line to vote. They're supposed to be able to vote and be in line at 5 p.m. and be able to vote if they're in line by 5 p.m. People were getting kicked out of the line at 2.30 in the afternoon.

And the courts have decided that we were right. And they have been ordered to keep early voting open for additional days because of the actions of those local elections officials. So it's that kind of stuff that we've been looking at before Election Day comes. And whatever the crazy challenges are from the Democrats, and we know that they have their high price lawyers ready to go. They've been at it for months already. We'll be ready to fight off whatever it is that they try to bring. But we don't know what that's going to entail because, you know, Election Day hasn't come yet.

If, like Donald Trump says, too big to rig with a substantial victory, we could well know on election night. But we just don't know that. It could also be razor thin and it could take days. We don't know. I would say that's why it's so important. Everybody needs to just go vote. That's all. Tim Murtaugh, senior advisor for the Trump 2024 campaign. Thank you so much for being with us on the Fox News Rundown Evening Edition. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

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