Game on: the sprint to election day
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Election Day is a little more than 60 days off. And with your, we are going to win this November. With your vote, we will defeat comrade Kamala Harris. In a presidential election cycle that's been going on for more than a year, it feels like things will be over in a blink of an eye. But in reality, the roughly two months between Labor Day and Election Day is a lifetime and can be transformative in electoral politics.

When then-President Barack Obama took the stage at a 2012 Labor Day rally in the battleground state of Ohio, he had a small lead over Mitt Romney. Hello, Toledo! Americans were unhappy with the economy and skeptical that a second Obama term was right for the country. That's why I'm asking for your vote. That's why I need you to knock on doors. That's why I need you to get on the phone. I need you to talk to your friends. I need you to talk to your neighbors.

I need you to stand with me, Ohio. By November 6, 2012, Obama had overcome a shoddy debate performance and went on to win 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney's 206. Fast forward to Labor Day 2016. When we were trying to figure out where we could be, we all said, let's go to Cleveland.

Hillary Clinton had a comfortable lead in the polls in several swing states, and the first woman to head a major party's ticket for president overcame a coughing fit to take a swipe at her opponent. Every time I think about Trump, I get allergic. Clinton went on to win the popular vote, but lost the electoral college and had to concede defeat the day after election day. Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country.

I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans. Labor Day 2020. Well, first of all, thanks for doing this. In the middle of the COVID pandemic, Democrat Joe Biden was trying to unseat then-President Donald Trump.

Masked and socially distanced, he met with union leaders in a backyard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I got some questions if you have, but do you guys want to make any opening comment or anything? At that moment, multiple polls suggested Biden would easily win, and he did indeed win, but the split between the two candidates was much tighter than predicted, and it took days to call the election.

Consider this. Labor Day is considered the beginning of the end of the presidential election, but as history has shown, things can change a lot by November. Coming up, two of NPR's political reporters walk us through where things are and where they could go. From NPR, I'm Scott Tetreault. Support comes from our 2024 lead sponsor of Consider This, Anthropic.

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Support for NPR and the following message come from Chevron. Chevron's offshore platform, Anchor, is designed to help safely produce oil and natural gas with high-pressure technology. That's energy in progress. Visit chevron.com slash anchor. It's Consider This from NPR. If you feel like the presidential election has been going on for more than a year, no one can blame you because it has been.

But the first Monday in September marked the home stretch. Even though things are nearing the end, developments could come fast and furious over the next few months.

And Piers Franco-Ordonez and Domenico Montanaro have been watching developments for the last year and a half, and they will continue to do that through Election Day and beyond. Hey, Domenico. Hey, Scott. Franco, how's it going? How are you, Scott? I'm doing great, and we have made it somehow to Labor Day, which, as we all know, has traditionally been that time of year where people really focus in on a presidential race.

And Domenico, this race in particular, got so many shakeups this summer that I don't even know how to describe where we are on Labor Day now. But there is intense focus in a race that up until this point was really characterized by a lack of focus by voters. Where do things stand right now to you?

Well, we are where we were when the campaign started. Essentially where we are is all seven of the states that people have been watching pretty closely are in the toss-up category. The three blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania as well as the four Sunbelt states of Arizona, Nevada out west as well as North Carolina and Georgia back east.

When you look strictly at polling, though, and there's been a few out this week as well, Harris has really made up a ton of ground, four to six points or more in a lot of these places. She's leading now narrowly but consistently in those three blue wall states. And if Scott, if she's able to hold those, she would be right at 270 electoral votes. So the map has really been scrambled for Trump and a lot more paths have opened up for Harris. But this is still very, very close.

It is wild that after all of the twists and turns of the summer, it's those same seven states that it's been all along. And here we are.

Franco, so much attention on the brand new Harris campaign this summer, the candidate introduction, picking of the running mate, the convention, first interview we had this week. The secondary story of the Trump campaign was kind of a lack of focus, lack of momentum, not sure how to handle it. Where are things with Trump right now going into the fall? Has Trump kind of picked up the pace? Yeah, I mean, there was definitely a lack of focus when

Harris initially became the nominee, when Harris, you know, kind of took the reins from Biden. And the Trump campaign has absolutely ramped up its schedule, especially as Harris continues to gain momentum. I mean, he was really facing criticism for not adapting fast enough. But

But really, you know, since the DNC convention, he's been barnstorming across battleground states, sometimes holding multiple events of day. He's also doing some more interviews. He's posting more online, including on X, which, of course, is formerly Twitter, which he was temporarily banned for. You know, he's also getting more attention for some of that online activity, such as posting or at least reposting on his social media website posts.

Suggestions that Harris traded sexual favors to further her political career, which of course is not true. Now, I am not sure that's the kind of attention that Trump wants. But again, attention is attention to Trump. And that could be a win for him. What is his goal, though, at this point? Domenico laid out the fact that he lost just about all of his lead over the past couple months.

Yeah, I mean, I think for one part, I mean, he wants to show that he can outwork Harris or at least not be outworked by Harris, even though he's kind of the older candidate now. You know, as the campaign says, there will be no free shots on goal. You know, I think most of it, though, is trying to show, you know, as much of a contrast as possible with the Harris campaign, whether that means talking about specific policy issues such as inflation, crime and safety, the border, etc.

but also attacking and feeding criticism of Harris for not kind of engaging more with the news media and clarifying her own positions in a more unscripted manner. You mentioned, of course, that she did the CNN interview, you know, her first since taking over for Biden. But the Trump campaign argues or has been hammering her on this, that she's not doing enough. And in the same period,

period, he did dozens of interactions with the press, though I'll just know several of those were with very friendly media.

Yeah. Domenico, you paid attention to the Harris interview the other day. One of the things that Franco mentioned was kind of like the personal attacks on a wide variety of fronts that Trump has been slinging her way. I thought it was notable that she kind of stuck to this approach she's had before of same old playbook next, just didn't want to engage at all in the personal attacks that Trump is issuing on her, even as even as her campaign does.

Yeah, I mean she did not take the race bait for lack of a better term. And this is something that Trump has been trying to do, drag her into sort of his tumult, drag her into the controversies that he's created. And look, I mean the fact is the last two Democratic nominees before Joe Biden were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Barack Obama, obviously black man, first black president. And he was very careful about walking this line about his race because he wanted to make sure that he could reach out to the middle, especially white Americans in the places that are swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. And

He had this language of the Midwest, so it's something that he was kind of known for doing, wanting to appeal to downstate Illinois voters, for example, being somebody who is known as a, quote, liquid coal senator when he worked with Jim Bunning, the senator from neighboring Kentucky, because he really was trying to target those voters and show that he's not some radical Democrat.

and that he could win. And guess what? He did. Hillary Clinton took a little bit different approach in 2016, leaning in heavily to her gender, talking about the glass ceiling, and for a lot of voters, that didn't work. So Kamala Harris has seen both things. She has a bunch of Obama people on her team, and she's clearly made the decision that she doesn't want to lean into race and gender to give anybody any excuse to not vote for her. She's sticking to the kinds of issues that are

all geared toward the middle. Before we go back to Franco Domenico, I want to ask you about one more dynamic that the interview got at. And that is the way that Harris is trying to chart her own course of turning the page forward, but also, you know, claiming credit for the Biden things that voters seem to like. She'll be appearing with President Biden at a campaign event on Labor Day. How is she walking that needle? And how are you going to look for that, particularly in the debate coming up?

Yeah, well, I was looking for it in the interview last night, and she did not separate herself very much with Joe Biden. And I think that to a degree, there's gonna be a lot of people who see that character as having loyalty. And, you know, she one place that the Trump people are trying to attack her on is Bidenomics. She surprisingly didn't distance herself very much from that. But the

Politics is about two things sometimes. It's not always just about finger to the wind, picking what's popular. It's also about winning the argument. And I think that that's what she's trying to lean into on some of the things that a lot of Democrats have said that the Biden administration has accomplished, but that Joe Biden was not a good messenger on defending his own record on the economy, especially because

He took a lot of that stuff really personally and came off as defensive. And Harris has taken a very different approach by saying that she understands that prices are too high. These are the things we did. We think that we did a good job, but there's more work to do.

Franco, wrapping things up with you, we started the conversation with Domenico saying for all the twists and turns of the summer, we're kind of where the race started with seven states likely determining it, all those states very close. Does Trump world view this as a fundamentally changed race or kind of the same basic fundamentals they were running on all along? I mean, I certainly they see, you know, that there has been changes, but

They also recognize that there are different dynamics. I mean, obviously, we've been watching how Trump has tried to tie Harris to, you know, the Biden administration, the Biden policies. At the same time, they definitely recognize that there has been a momentum shift and they got to address it. I think that's why you're seeing such shifts.

In the campaign, I have talked with members of the campaign who say they're going to continue to kind of ramp up these efforts, and they really have no choice. I mean, Harris has been riding this incredible wave, polls, the half a billion dollars in fundraising. The Trump campaign has to act. And that's also why I think you're seeing some shakeups in the campaign staff.

That's Frank Ordonez as well as Domenico Montanaro. Thanks to both of you. Thank you, Scott. You got it. This episode was produced by Avery Keatley. It was edited by Courtney Dorning, Megan Pratt, and Krishna Def Calamore. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. And one more thing before we go, you can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, but you'll also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter.

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