35. Trump’s Plan For Power

27:58He's not a fan of Trump's. He is definitely not a liberal. He believes in the American system. And he pointed out something that was interesting, which was that in 2016, there was a long list of things that Donald Trump said he was going to do that would have been illegal, like reinstate torture as a policy of American foreign policy, lock Hillary Clinton up. He promised to build a registry of Muslims in the country. And he actually didn't do any of them. And I think Jack's point was that sometimes Donald Trump says he's going to do these things, and he actually agrees that Trump has authoritarian tendencies.

28:37And as John Kelly said, he would like to do these things. He would like to run America like a business with no checks and balances against him, but there still are checks and balances. Yes, he can call out the military, and the circumstances are very open-ended. Under the Insurrection Act, he can actually call out the military against protesters and against rioters and use that as an excuse to go after them. But as Jack was saying, it would end his presidency. I mean, it would ruin his presidency as well as ruining the country. And the likelihood is that he will probably use other means. He will try to change the Federal Communications Commission to give favorability, for example, to Elon Musk.

29:18He may use the Department of Justice to go after individuals, or he may use the IRS to go after individuals over their taxes. So I think there's things he would like to try, and we don't know. And I guess the point is yours is that, and as Jack Goldsmith said, the very fact that this is being talked about, even if it is only to try to win an election and get your base motivated, is in itself worrying for the United States and worrying for people who want to do business for the United States and has provided this incredible febrile atmosphere of uncertainty that is unnecessary, un-American and unprecedented.

30:00So we don't know. We cannot sit here and say, listen, he won't do the things that he said he's going to do. But it is worth looking at his first presidency, looking at the guardrails, looking at the things he said he was going to do that he didn't actually do and looking at how the system did hold. And yes, this may be different this time around. And yes, they are more organized. Yes, they realize where they went wrong and they've got this whole project 2025 and changing the civil service and using the vacancies act to put loyalists in positions of power across the government. But they didn't succeed to do this the last time around.

30:35And we have to just hope that the American system holds because it has been an excellent system for America and for the rest of the world and hope that it holds this time around as well. We are going to take a quick break and we will be back with our reporting from Pennsylvania. That was fun. We've both been out there. There's a little battle looming between the two of us. I'm going to win. I just like that said up front. Okay, you're showing your superiority.

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32:35Welcome back. And before we get into what's going on in the swing states and our reporting on that and the kind of general state of the race with just, what, a week and a half to go, we wanted to remind you that we have two live shows in the states next week. Thank you so much to everyone who's bought tickets. New York is now sold out. But we do have a very few final tickets available in Washington, D.C. So please do come along. That is on October the 30th, Wednesday, October the 30th, the night before Halloween. Come and get your trick or treat. It's therestispoliticsus.com to buy tickets. The link is also in the podcast episode description box.

33:16And also, don't forget that we have this bonus episode coming up for founding members of our podcast. It's coming out this Saturday. We're going to discuss Trump's accusation of election interference. appearance obviously that had something to do with your country I believe Caddy K and so we'll talk a little bit about that and whether or not that's bogus but it's the rest is politics us.com to sign up to be a founding member and I do appreciate the emails that I get from founding members hopefully we can continue to build our list of members. Okay so let's get on with this half of this week's program and we're going to talk about the state of the race and take a quick look at the main swing states.

33:57And Anthony, I know that you have been speaking to people from both campaigns, as has I. So let's compare notes. What are you hearing from the Harris people? Yeah. So I've sat in on a few conference calls and I've also talked to some people directly. And so I'm going to lay it out for you briefly, but this is what they are saying. They have raised a billion and a half dollars. I don't know if that number has been completely announced yet, but they've got the money until they've got 12 days. They have seven states. The Harris campaign believes that these are seven unique demographies, Caddy. It's almost like running seven national elections at the same time, and they are knocking on doors.

34:40And so since the convention, according to the campaign, they've knocked on over 1 million doors. We did 60 of them this weekend. I'll talk a little bit about that. They believe that obviously women are going to decide this election and the campaign is saying to people, women vote. The Donald Trump campaign needs to rely on people that rarely vote. These are young black men, black men ages 30 to 40, black men ages 18 to 30 that are supposedly before Trump when they do the polling data and white men in that age category. Turns out they don't vote as much as the demographically equal women in those age categories.

35:21And so campaign believes that the Trump campaign has to rely on people that typically don't vote. Harris is relying on people that always vote. Here's the question. Is Trump being under-polled again? Okay. Now the campaign believes that he's not. They believe there's just been major course corrections and even people just fudge factoring three-ish percent into these poll numbers as a 3 % plug on Trump. So he doesn't appear to be under-polled. But the real question is Dobbs being under-polled. Okay. And so what is Dobbs just briefly? That is the overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision. Basically, we had a national freedom of reproductive activity for women in the United States.

36:02Now we have 14 states that will deny women access to an abortion and in some states deny them healthcare if they're pregnant. And so it's a little bit of a risky thing there. That has been underpolled in 22. It's been underpolled in 23 by four to six points. And so the question is, is it still being underpolled? Of course, Joe Biden was supposed to lose the midterm elections in this broad-based red wave. That did not happen. He kept the Senate, as we both know. And so that's a big question. Can I just ask you something? Did you get a sense when you're sitting in on those conference calls, that their own numbers, what campaigns like to call the internal numbers, and those are polls that are generally based on larger polling samples, the national polls.

36:49It's obviously very expensive to conduct a poll for the New York Times or The Economist or Marquette University. And so they tend to use fairly small sample sizes of people because it takes a lot of time and effort and money to get to those people. And the internal polls for the campaigns tend to have bigger sample sizes of people. Did you get a sense from sitting in on those Democratic campaign conference calls that their internal numbers are significantly different from the public polls that we're seeing at the moment? I did not get that. I got the sense from them that they were being very straight up and saying that this stuff is very close.

37:27And so they see Wisconsin as of yesterday, they feel like they're up one to two points at Wisconsin. Michigan, they feel like they're up one to two points in Michigan. Georgia, they feel like they're down. They feel like they're tied in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Nevada, they feel like they're down. Again, when I say down, it's one to two points. It's all in the margin of error. When I say up, it's one to two points. The question is, who's showing up at the polls? Now, what these guys will tell you is they've got hundreds of thousands of volunteers and the door knockers are saying, you're voting for us.

38:05OK, that's great. Do you need a ride to the polling station? OK, OK, do you need help getting there? OK, and that's a big thing in this campaign because it's a get out the vote election. Two things that the Harris campaign does not like. OK, Trump is at his ceiling. It's 12 days before the election. He's never gone through 48%. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that he's there, if not past it. I'm hearing that too, that his ceiling may be higher than they thought it was. Yes, but it has been consistently tops out at 48%. It's 12 days before the election. He's there now. So that's concerning them.

38:44Can he go higher than that? Okay. They think she can get to 50, 51. They don't think Trump can get beyond 48. So the question is, can they get her people out? Now, this is the most fascinating part of the conversation, okay? Trump is really not campaigning. Follow his schedule. I thought the French fry thing at McDonald's was very effective, by the way. That's just me. I want to be very objective to people. He's charming in a situation like that. He was effective. Great photo op, but he's not campaigning. Believe it or not, she's doing more campaigning. If you follow things on Twitter, she's campaigning terribly.

39:20If you follow things outside of Twitter, she's campaigning wonderfully. Okay, just what's going on now in terms of media segmentation. But here's the thing, the most fascinating thing the campaign said is that low information voters, I think you call them low propensity voters, but they were calling them low information voters. So in the Latin community, as an example, they got to go to the low information voters and say, this is what Donald Trump wants to do to your family. They want to deport your wife. They want to hurt your son's job opportunities by doing the following things to him. And they have to explain to people what the issues are before they go to vote.

40:00And so this is a process, okay, where Trump has an advantage over her is with low information voters, he has 100 % name saturation. So someone going to the polls, they see her name, they see his name, his name's more familiar, four to five decades of name saturation. And so they're compadding that with the low information voter. So Katty, if this is all about getting out the vote, you've been out in the field, how do you think their operation is going? Is it as good as they're saying? I think you're right. At this stage in the election, it's less about persuading people and more about making sure the people they need to vote actually turn out.

40:39And I went with someone who was out knocking on doors, a volunteer who was knocking on doors in York, Pennsylvania last weekend. The campaign said they had 250 ,000 volunteers from around the country flood Pennsylvania alone over the course of the weekend. And it's an incredible operation. Volunteers get on a bus. They're driven two and a half hours up to York, Pennsylvania, which is where I was going to see the operation. Each volunteer is given an app on their phone, and they have like a four block radius, and they need to go and knock on those doors. Now, the guy I was with had these four blocks.

41:18He had about 50 houses, and only about six people answered the door. This was a working class neighborhood of York, Pennsylvania, very mixed, very Hispanic, black, and white. I mean, an unusually mixed neighborhood, but definitely working class. And the campaign had told them that this was a democratic area and that they would be unlikely to meet Trump supporters. So for about two hours, this guy was knocking on doors and he got about five people to answer. He spoke to a couple of guys who were sitting on a front porch who were Hispanic Americans from the Dominican Republic, who said to him that they would not be voting for Kamala Harris because she was not strong enough and that no foreign leader, particularly Arab leaders, they said leaders from Middle Eastern countries would never respect her because she's a woman and that they like Trump because Trump is strong.

42:09Another couple of black women who were on his list, elderly black women said they were not going to vote for Kamala Harris because she killed babies was the phrase they used because she's pro-abortion rights. So he managed to speak in person to 10 different voters, four of whom were for Trump and three of whom had actually voted already. And three said they were going to vote, but I heard the conversations, I would say maybe one or two of them would vote. So I came away from that thinking that is not great news for the Harris campaign. This was meant to be a democratic stronghold. First of all, it's taking a volunteer two hours to knock on 50 doors and fewer than a dozen doors are actually answering.

42:57So that's a lot of manpower not to reach very many people. And because they're doing it all on their phones and they've all joined the buses early in the morning in Washington, DC, they've driven up two and a half hours. They spent another hour and a half getting organized and being sent to the right place and uploading the apps, guess what happens to your phone after an hour and a half? It's dead. So after an hour and a half, most of the other volunteers actually had given up because they couldn't access the houses on their phone anymore. So even though these numbers are impressive, when you actually see it on the ground and you go around with somebody, you realize the pitfalls in the operation.

43:32I did then spend some more time on Tuesday in the suburbs of Philly with Congresswoman Madeleine Dean, a Democrat. And she said that in her neighborhood, there's much more enthusiasm. It's a much more pro-democratic area. They have very high turnout. And I think at this point, the campaign strategy is to drive up turnout as much as they can in these areas which are enthusiastic. And I know you went to that area too. And so you drive up turnout as much as you can, and you take your losses in somewhere like York, Pennsylvania. And you just hope that the numbers play out. But yes, the machine is there.

44:05Yes, they're all being bussed in, when it actually got to it, the numbers of doors that these volunteers are knocking on is pretty small. Makes you pessimistic. I came away from York quite pessimistic about the operation. Yeah. I would have to say having seen it in action, it was not the kind of rah, rah. It was not massively pro-Harris. I mean, a lot of these people, to be honest, Anthony, you ask them, are you going to vote? And they're like, you can tell their priorities, their rent. Not all of them really seem to know who Kamala Harris was. Then really not focused on the election. A couple asked when election day is.

44:40I mean, this is the low information, low propensity voters that the campaign said were in a democratic neighborhood. I'm going to watch York, Pennsylvania on election night and see what happens. It'll be interesting. When the campaign says they have to define her, they have to defend her and attack him. So they say define, defend, attack. Are they doing a good job of that? I think on the attack side, they've started doing a good job. I don't know still that the define side has been done as well. When we said in the last half, they're making this comparison, Trump has an enemies list, she has a to-do list.

45:17I still think the question is, what's the to-do? And you heard it in some of the interviews she gave with Liz Cheney, people saying, can you give me the takeaway from this? Can I know in concrete terms what you're going to do? And I think certainly the voters I heard in York, Pennsylvania were not saying, oh, yes, I love this policy of hers. That was not what was jumping out to me in York. Now, in Philadelphia, it was a different operation. It was a much more upscale neighborhood, people with more money, people with much more engaged, many more Harris Yard signs, sort of upper middle class voters who were talking about abortion rights and democracy, different electorate.

45:54How do you think she's doing there? I had a little bit different of experience. I was in Montgomery County in a place called Green Lane. And we knocked on a lot of doors and we were doing pretty well. Some people said, hey, please don't bother me. That always happens. But some other people were saying - You sure they weren't rolling out the carpet for the celebrity, Anthony Scaramucci, who was coming and they made sure people were home. I did take one or two selfies, by the way. Okay. So there. I saw, I saw the videos. Yeah. In all seriousness, one guy came out with his ballot. He said he just filled it out.

46:27He was putting it in his mailbox to be shipped over to the post office. Some other people said they were going to get out and vote. But to your point, a lot of door knocking, a lot of doors not being answered. But they say this works. They say that if you get the person, they come out of the house, they talk to you, you've asked them for their vote, it increases the propensity of them voting. But I guess my thing, and I want to talk, if you don't mind, a tiny bit about this Cambridge Analytica, because this is something that Trump used very effectively. And what Cambridge Analytica did was they targeted people and they figured out if the person was on the fence or not.

47:05And then they figured out what their hot buttons were. And then they love-bombed them, Caddy. So if they were pro-life, they would send love bombs of Trump talking about his pro-life position, or if they were pro this or pro that or against this. And they claimed that they could switch an undecided voter to a Trump supporter in 96 hours of this sort of algorithmic technique that they were doing. Now that's not happening anymore. But I guess my question to you is she has the money, but Trump has Elon Musk and he has X. He has this very formidable social media platform. It seems very clear to me that that social media platform has been engineered at this point to help his campaign.

47:48I don't know. It may even be borderline election interference. I'm just asking Is that helping? Borderline election interference may be the$1 million that he's offering to Pennsylvania voters, not to sign up to vote, but to sign up to a petition from which he can start getting names. So that is going to be, it looks like that's going to be contested by Pennsylvania courts. I think it's what you said earlier. There are now so few people left to persuade. Some of those people may be on Twitter, I suppose. And if it really is about dozens of people, not even hundreds of people in a particular neighborhood, then maybe that can make a difference.

48:23I'm not sure that low information voters, these low propensity voters that they're trying to get out of the polls are necessarily the people that are on Twitter following this in the way that you and I follow this anyway. So I think it's about the machine at this point and about using all the money they've had to turn out as many people as they possibly can. And when I was in Philadelphia in Montgomery County, and I think you met her Congresswoman, Madeleine Dean, she was confident that their machine is working well and that it was much, much better oiled. The 2020 election doesn't count because of COVID, but that it was a much better oiled machine than 2016 and that they were starting to see very high numbers of people already early voting.

49:09So that's what we're hearing from the Harris campaign. Oh, wait, stop. Before we move on from the Harris campaign to briefly discuss what you've heard from the Trump campaign, because they are sounding even more confident. I'm not hearing that Trump people, by the way, in my conversations with them say at all that this is close and this is a knife edge. They just seem to be saying they're going to win this. But before we get to that, when I was in Pennsylvania out with Madeleine Dean, I met the woman who held the sign behind you at the debate. She was your sign page. Her name was Elaine. She was lovely.

49:43And look what she did for me. Okay. So there is Elaine behind me, carrying a sign like Anthony Scaramucci's sign from the debate. And on it, it says Katty Kay. So I now have a sign too. You're just a brutal, you're a brutal person. And I've taken your sign. My sign was made by the woman who made your sign. First of all, I'm bringing out my sign. I'm bringing out the thing. Oh, you're bringing out your sign. sign. This Anglican woman is trying to suggest that her name is getting the props of my name on this sign. Do you see how small my first name is at the top of this sign? Look. Okay. They're using the entire K-A-T-T-Y on that sign.

50:23Okay. Look at the top of this sign. You want to know what Elaine told me? I hate to burst your bubble, but each sign is exactly the same height. So even if your name had been Smith or K, your height of your sign would have been exactly the same. I know you like to think you got a bigger sign than anyone else. When you told me to join forces with you, I didn't think this was going to be an ego crushing exercise every single week. Okay. All right. You've crushed my ego. I'll call my therapist after the show. Elaine sends you her very best wishes. Okay. Quickly. What What are you hearing from the Trump campaign?

50:59How are they? Confident, not confident, scale of one to 10. The Trump campaign is expecting a landslide. Vivek Ramaswamy is talking about that on Fox News. The Trump campaign thinks that this is a slaughterhouse situation. They are as smug as anybody they have ever seen. And I don't know. I am reminiscing about the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign, where I was told a week before the election. Mitt had it in the bag. We had to really get down to brass tacks related to his transition. We had to start thinking about the different agencies, so on and so forth. Mitt then had a big party in Boston at the Westin adjacent to the convention center.

51:41He had fireworks in Boston Harbor. And so he was going to shoot off the fireworks after the announcement of his victory over Barack Obama. When he lost the election, there was a group of stunned people. One person that was stunned and upset was wearing a trench coat, sort of this like weather overcoat. And he had orange hair and he stood up and he walked out of the place. His name was Donald Trump. And he stood up and walked out of the place with Michael Cohen. And I said, where are you guys going? And Cohen looked at me and said, oh, you know, Trump doesn't want to stay for missed concession speech.

52:18We're heading back to Logan airport to fly back to New York. So maybe they're right. I don't know because I've been humbled by life and I've been wrong about a lot of things. But I feel this thing is too close to call at this point. I would, you know, I'm for Harris. So I'd like to be able to tell people, you know, she's got it in the bag. It doesn't appear like she does to me. If you talk to George Conway, if we brought him on as a guest, George has this pack that discusses the psychological decline of Donald Trump. He thinks it's in the bag. He thinks that she's going to have an easy victory in 12 days.

52:52I don't see that. But I also don't see the need for the overconfidence that the Trump people have. What are your thoughts there? I almost wouldn't be surprised by any outcome. I could see, and I think somebody's done polling speculation on this, the most likely outcome is a clean sweep for her. The second most likely outcome is a clean sweep for him. I suspect there's going to be a division of the seven battleground states. And I wouldn't be surprised if we woke up and I don't think it'll be the next morning. It might not even be the morning after that. It may take two or three days, but I suspect it's going to be some division and it could go either way.

53:33Let me ask you this. If you're sitting here and it's November the 7th and Trump is ahead and they're now waiting, it's two days after the election the elections on the 5th is november 7th two days after the election trump is ahead and they're now waiting for maricopa county in arizona and they're waiting for york pennsylvania and all of the tabulation of these mail-in ballots and it flips and now he's losing and it's coming to saturday and that was a famous day four years ago where the networks declare Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States on the Saturday after the election. What happens, Katty?

54:19Well, Madeleine Dean told me when I spoke to her this week that she thinks that Pennsylvania will call it on Wednesday evening. And the chances are that when Pennsylvania calls, we know when the election is called. But if it flips, and again, remember, a lot more Republicans are voting in those mail-in ballots. So I don't think we're going to have quite the same scenario. of what was described last time as a red mirage, that it looked like the Republicans had won, and then all of the ballots flooded in from the mail-in ballots, and they were Democrats, because I think we're seeing a lot more evidence that Republicans are voting by mail and voting early too, and so they could be in that final count.

54:58That's the question we're all hoping that once it's called, it's clear and it's clean, and the other side concedes defeat. Before we go, let's have a calling sweepstakes. So this gets called Saturday after the election? I think it gets called earlier. If Dean is right and Pennsylvania has improved their counting processes and can do it much faster now of those mail-in ballots, then we should get a result on that Wednesday night is what she is speculating. But it could go into Thursday. But I think it'll be a couple of days. Okay. And if it's called for Trump, she concedes to Trump? Yes. I think if it is called for Trump, she concedes for Trump.

55:41Okay. And if it's called for Vice President Harris, he concedes? I see that as less likely. Okay. When do you think? What day are you putting this? I'm sticking with the Saturday. I think there'll be a tremendous amount of commotion. I think you may be right because they're so worried about it lingering, but I'm sticking with the Saturday. And then I'm also sticking with that he won't concede, but I'm sticking with he'll be more muted than people expect him to be. Interesting. In which case we may be for a calmer period after the election than many people are fearing. Because I'm making the bet, as I've said, and I said this at the O2 Arena last week, that he's got a sentencing on the 26th of November, three weeks after the election.

56:25And he doesn't want to go to jail. And he doesn't want to foment violence that will lead to that. And peace and harmony will reign in the United States of America. And on that nice note, we will end it this week. Who's going to win though? Don't leave without telling me. No, I'm not going to play that game this week. I'm not playing because it's a useless game to play. We don't know. I could call it either way. We don't know. I don't know any more than you know. So we're going to be grownups. Let me rephrase the question. Let me rephrase the question. Whose cards would you like to have? I would rather have her cards than his cards.

56:55That's my prediction. All right. We will see you guys next week. We're going to do some extra episodes. And don't forget that on Saturday, we have our bonus question and answer episode, including is the United Kingdom meddling with the American election? And that is just for our founding members. So do join the club. You'll get those extra episodes. And next week, we'll be back with a few extra episodes as well, just in the run up to the election. See you then. And for those of you that are coming to New York and DC for the live shows, we look forward to meeting you in person.