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Episode: The Trump Campaign’s Big Gamble

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:37:52

Episode Shownotes

Warning: this episode contains strong language.The presidential campaign is in its final week and one thing remains true: the election is probably going to come down to a handful of voters in a swing states.Jessica Cheung, a producer for “The Daily,” and Jonathan Swan, a reporter covering politics for The

Times, take us inside Donald Trump’s unorthodox campaign to win over those voters.Guest: Jessica Cheung, a senior producer of “The Daily.”Jonathan Swan, a reporter covering politics and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for The New York Times.Background reading: In Arizona, many Latino families are divided about the 2024 election.The electorate has rarely seemed so evenly divided. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll found Harris and Trump tied at 48 to 48 percent.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_16
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. The presidential campaign is in its final week, and one thing still remains true. The election is probably going to come down to just a handful of voters in a few swing states.

00:00:17 Speaker_16
Today, my colleagues Jessica Chung and Jonathan Swan take us inside Donald Trump's unorthodox campaign to win over those voters. It's Monday, October 28th.

00:00:34 Speaker_16
Prevailing wisdom in American politics dictates that the ground game matters, things like door knocking, phone banking, and getting out the vote.

00:00:42 Speaker_16
But in a race that looks as tight as the 2024 presidential election, the ground game can be the difference between winning and losing. The Harris campaign has been running a really traditional and extremely well-funded ground operation.

00:00:55 Speaker_16
It has paid staff members and armies of canvassers who are all focused on turning out every single voter they can find. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, they've got a totally different approach.

00:01:06 Speaker_16
First of all, they've got less money and less paid staff, so it's a smaller ground operation. Some of the get-out-the-vote work has been taken on by outside groups, like Elon Musk's Super PAC.

00:01:17 Speaker_16
And the actual field offices, they're leaning a lot more heavily on volunteers.

00:01:22 Speaker_16
To get a sense of what this effort looks like inside one of those offices, we sent Daily producer Jessica Chung to a key place in a key swing state, Maricopa County, Arizona.

00:01:33 Speaker_16
It's the most populous county in the state, where more than half of all of Arizona's voters live. Trump won it in 2016, and then Biden eked out a victory there in 2020. Here's Jess.

00:01:43 Speaker_05
— The office of the Maricopa County Republican Party is just southeast of Phoenix. It sits on a quiet street in an anonymous-looking office park, next to a tiling company. I got there on a Tuesday afternoon.

00:02:02 Speaker_04
— Hi, you must be Craig. — Yes, how are you? — Hi, nice to meet you. I'm Jess.

00:02:04 Speaker_05
— Craig Berlind is the chair of the Maricopa County Republican Committee. He has all the businessman staples— warm smile, tidy suit, wire-rimmed glasses, handshake firm, but not too firm.

00:02:16 Speaker_14
— Go upstairs? — Yes! — OK.

00:02:19 Speaker_03
— Or maybe like a little tour, too. — Sure.

00:02:21 Speaker_05
— We go upstairs, and Craig starts to show me around. — Oh, so this is new?

00:02:25 Speaker_14
— It's pretty new.

00:02:26 Speaker_05
— Oh, where were you guys before?

00:02:27 Speaker_14
— We didn't have a place.

00:02:28 Speaker_05
— Oh, wow.

00:02:30 Speaker_14
We basically bummed around.

00:02:32 Speaker_05
— The Maricopa Republicans just moved here in May, but they've really made this place their own.

00:02:39 Speaker_14
— First of all, I don't know if you noticed when you walked in, but all the windows outside are mirrored, and the American and Arizona flag are mirrored in all the windows as you're walking in.

00:02:49 Speaker_05
— Once you get inside, this place might look like any random office space. We're not for the decor, which is festively Trump.

00:02:58 Speaker_14
— A lot of it's Trump-related.

00:03:00 Speaker_05
At the top of the steps, there's a life-size cardboard cutout of the former president with Melania. In the lobby, there's a large-screen TV with Trump giving a speech. There's red balloons all over.

00:03:13 Speaker_05
And there are portraits — Lincoln, Reagan, Frederick Douglass and Trump. And there's merch. Tons of merch.

00:03:20 Speaker_14
— There's all kinds of t-shirts and hats.

00:03:23 Speaker_05
— Craig points to a glass conference room that's been repurposed to what he refers to as a Trump store. It's stuffed with racks of shirts. And there are flags that say, God, guns, and guts.

00:03:33 Speaker_14
— But there's also some men's rings, and I think there's an $800 pair of golden tennis shoes in there.

00:03:40 Speaker_03
— And I imagine the proceeds would go to the county office.

00:03:43 Speaker_14
— It helps us, yeah. Right, exactly.

00:03:50 Speaker_05
These days, Craig says he's here 50 hours a week, fundraising, planning events, and helping to direct, according to him, more than 1,000 volunteers who come here to elect Republicans. In this close election, Arizona is a big deal.

00:04:06 Speaker_05
Polls show it could be very close again. And just to remind you, when Biden won the state in 2020, he won by less than 11,000 votes. That was out of more than 3 million votes cast.

00:04:19 Speaker_05
In a place like this, efforts to get voters to the polls could be the difference between winning and losing.

00:04:26 Speaker_05
And to understand what this office is doing, and its mission in these critical final days, it's helpful to know the story of how Craig ended up here.

00:04:35 Speaker_14
— I grew up in Kansas, in a very small farming and oil country.

00:04:40 Speaker_05
— Craig was a small-town kid turned businessman. He worked for General Motors. And eventually, he moved his family to Arizona, where he started an aerospace company.

00:04:50 Speaker_14
— Yeah, I was like many Americans, right? Your head's down, you know, you got payroll to make, you got new quotes to make, you got product to ship.

00:04:58 Speaker_05
Craig says he would vote Republican, but that was pretty much the extent of his political involvement — until 2020.

00:05:04 Speaker_14
— Well, I didn't like what happened in the 2020 election.

00:05:10 Speaker_14
I remember sitting there in our family room, switching from one station to the next, and then getting my phone out and looking for the New York Times or somebody to see what the counts of ballots were and what was left, and mentally doing math.

00:05:25 Speaker_05
— If you forgot, during the 2020 election, Maricopa County was ground zero for an ugly fight over alleged election fraud. It started on election night.

00:05:35 Speaker_14
— I can say that when we became very concerned is when, all of a sudden, counting started shutting down at many states, right? You know, it was Atlanta, and it was Detroit, and you're going, that's never happened before. What's going on?

00:05:54 Speaker_05
Craig is referring to an allegation from 2020 that some battleground states where Donald Trump was ahead decided to stop counting in order to prevent him from winning.

00:06:05 Speaker_05
This idea took off on Facebook among his supporters, who were suspicious of the voting system. For the record, this theory has been thoroughly debunked. In Atlanta, counting was only paused briefly after a pipe burst on election day.

00:06:19 Speaker_05
And election officials in other states said they never stopped counting votes, including, as Craig alleged, in Detroit. But for Craig, he wasn't buying it.

00:06:30 Speaker_14
— You know, we were all sitting there at night, and we'd seen that the candidates that we thought should win were winning. And then, in the middle of the night, the voting stopped. And when it restarted again, there was this shift.

00:06:44 Speaker_14
And I guess because of my engineering mind and the way I've been trained, is that curve is not something that you see in nature. It's not a natural curve.

00:06:55 Speaker_05
Early results that night misleadingly suggested that Trump was bound for victory. That could have been because Republican votes tend to dominate in rural areas, small towns where counting goes faster.

00:07:07 Speaker_05
And during the pandemic in 2020, Democrats tended to cast far more mail-in ballots, which get counted later. Was it because at a certain point they started to count the mail-in ballots, which leaned more Democrat in certain counties?

00:07:21 Speaker_14
— Yeah, here in Arizona, we've had mail-in ballots for a long time. I didn't perceive as that should have been the reason.

00:07:29 Speaker_05
— Neither Kragner or his wife trusted the explanations they were hearing.

00:07:33 Speaker_14
— You know, we both thought that something was awfully wrong, and we thought we needed to be more involved.

00:07:44 Speaker_05
For Craig, more involvement meant first joining We the People AZ Alliance, a far-right activist group. Then he joined the county party. And eventually, he was elected chair of that party.

00:07:56 Speaker_03
And to this day, do you still believe that Maricopa County actually went for Trump in 2020?

00:08:02 Speaker_03
Despite, you know, many processes of verification, including a Florida firm had done a hand recount and found that there was actually like 300 more votes for Biden than the previous count. I wonder where your beliefs are now.

00:08:16 Speaker_14
That's a complicated question. My intuition tells me that Trump won Arizona. And do I have proof of that? No. But what I do have is I do have proof that

00:08:29 Speaker_14
There was many, many, many, many ballots in Maricopa County that were counted that shouldn't have been legally. So how do I have that proof? So here we go back.

00:08:40 Speaker_05
— The year before Craig became party chair, he helped lead a review of signatures on mail-in ballots in Maricopa County, and is convinced that 10 percent of the mail-in ballots counted in 2020 should not have been.

00:08:53 Speaker_05
And that's because he claims the signatures on those ballots did not adequately match those on file, a claim experts say is based on incomplete signature history and a flawed methodology. But it's still something he's very fixated on.

00:09:09 Speaker_05
I'm telling you Craig's whole story because as soon as you start talking to others in the Maricopa County office, you start to realize how many people there are just like Craig.

00:09:24 Speaker_06
I started volunteering after the 2020 election. I wanted to find out why my vote didn't count.

00:09:31 Speaker_05
I spent about two hours talking to volunteers who were phone banking.

00:09:35 Speaker_13
I was completely apolitical. I was new. I had never, never volunteered in politics before. Never. And then it was after the 2020 election was stolen. Then it was like, okay, you've got to be more engaged.

00:09:50 Speaker_02
And it was at that point that I decided that I wanted my grandkids votes to count.

00:09:58 Speaker_05
People told me they believed Trump won in 2020. The election was stolen. And they were here to fix what they think is a broken system.

00:10:06 Speaker_07
I like finding out what was happening. This is my patriotic chore.

00:10:11 Speaker_13
My purpose is to do my part to honor God and my country by being here to help do what I can in Maricopa County. We have a nickname for it. It's actually Maricorruption County.

00:10:23 Speaker_03
Oh, they're a corruption county. Is that what people call it here?

00:10:27 Speaker_05
Some people do, because there's a lot of that. Volunteer after volunteer told me that in the years since Trump lost the election, they got involved. Some signed up to work the midterm election.

00:10:39 Speaker_05
A lot of them had volunteered for the mail-in battle review that Craig helped lead in 2022. And based on everything they've done and seen, they've only grown more suspicious.

00:10:51 Speaker_02
I was actually looking at the depth of the dot because you could tell if a dot had any kind of weight to it.

00:11:02 Speaker_07
The ovals being filled in absolutely perfect. like a dot matrix printer. I wasn't told, hey, this is what we think. Just here, do this. And all the volunteers that I managed through the course of that project walked away with, oh my fucking God.

00:11:31 Speaker_05
All these ideas that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from Trump aren't new, of course. They're in the ether of Republican politics all the way up to Trump himself.

00:11:41 Speaker_05
That's true, even though they've been widely disproven, with scores of lawsuits over alleged election fraud thrown out. There's ample evidence that there was no widespread voter fraud in 2020.

00:11:52 Speaker_05
Government officials, including Republicans, have assured people that election systems are secure. But it's important to understand, theories of a stolen election are why so many people are here. It's their motivation.

00:12:06 Speaker_03
— How many hours have you devoted to volunteering this election season? — Probably around 35 hours a week.

00:12:14 Speaker_02
— I do at least 4 to 6 every day.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
— 4 to 6 hours every day?

00:12:18 Speaker_02
— Yes, including Saturday.

00:12:20 Speaker_07
— I give about 50, between 50 and 60 hours a week.

00:12:25 Speaker_05
Their beliefs in a stolen election aren't just driving them to spend all this time here. They're affecting how they're spending that time here.

00:12:32 Speaker_02
Today I'm late because I was walking neighborhoods handing out golden tickets.

00:12:37 Speaker_05
And just to say, in this office, people are spending time doing the traditional things. Calling voters, knocking on doors, asking people how they're going to get to the polls. They are doing those things.

00:12:50 Speaker_05
But a traditional campaign would be laser-focused on that. And in this office, the attention is split, because Craig and his volunteers are doing a lot of other things.

00:13:02 Speaker_14
Back in the corner.

00:13:03 Speaker_05
While we were walking around, Craig pointed out this one conference room.

00:13:07 Speaker_14
We have some legal representations. We kept an office there, and there's war boards wrapped around the walls.

00:13:13 Speaker_03
War boards?

00:13:14 Speaker_14
War. War boards.

00:13:15 Speaker_03
What are war boards?

00:13:17 Speaker_14
The military will say, we're going to go into the war room and prepare for whatever's happening. We picked it up as a war room, war board. — Yeah, it's just a slang.

00:13:29 Speaker_05
— Craig says in that room, among all the things they're doing, they're spending time on what they call election integrity. That has included training a huge number of volunteers to observe polling places.

00:13:43 Speaker_05
And, in fact, Republicans say they have a record number of poll watchers this election. As we keep walking, Craig points to another room.

00:13:53 Speaker_14
— We do have one person that takes care of our servers. in our data, and we're massive data. We collect video. We're monitoring stuff.

00:14:03 Speaker_14
We get from the state the voter registration files, and we keep those up to date, and so we're monitoring those and doing comparisons.

00:14:10 Speaker_03
— Oh, wow, so that's a huge hard drive you have.

00:14:13 Speaker_14
— Yeah, it's millions of records, not thousands.

00:14:17 Speaker_05
— Craig says all these computer server systems have been set up to store all types of records and files related to election integrity.

00:14:25 Speaker_14
— We have a full-blown server room. So we have big server banks with very large servers in there recording video recording of cameras that are on 24 hours a day, monitoring outside drop boxes all the time.

00:14:39 Speaker_14
So we need to pull something up from last year, we've got it.

00:14:48 Speaker_05
Also among those records are voter registration files.

00:14:52 Speaker_05
Remember that mail-in-ballot review that Craig and some of these volunteers were a part of when they went in and compared signatures from ballots to voter registration files to see if the signatures were a match?

00:15:04 Speaker_05
The whole reason they came to believe that 10% of the mail-in ballots in 2020 should not have been counted.

00:15:09 Speaker_05
Well, this year, they have every intention to be in those files again, asking volunteers, just regular citizens, to scrutinize voter signatures and maybe even challenge them.

00:15:21 Speaker_05
You can imagine all the ways that citizens looking for suspicious activity or raising questions about signatures could affect this election. It could delay things. Perfectly valid votes could get challenged. It could be chaotic.

00:15:35 Speaker_05
Or it could add up to a big waste of their time. There are lots of possibilities. No matter how it goes, all this focus on what they consider election integrity takes resources away from the traditional work of a campaign office.

00:15:50 Speaker_05
Resources spent on efforts like this are resources not spent on getting out the vote. You can also imagine that all the skepticism about elections could hurt voter outreach.

00:16:03 Speaker_05
Do you worry by talking more about election integrity that it might actually create more distrust? Yeah.

00:16:11 Speaker_14
Well, that's an Achilles heel, and it's not without merit. A lot of voters right now that didn't vote in 22 didn't vote because they did not trust the election system to count their vote. They said, well, why should I vote?

00:16:26 Speaker_14
If there's going to be a cheat, why should I vote? And it's difficult sometimes to really convince people that it's absolutely critical to vote.

00:16:36 Speaker_05
It's difficult because they're encouraging people to vote at the exact same time they're telling people their vote might not count. So given these two things, I asked Craig what he wants Republican voters to do. And his advice is a little confusing.

00:16:51 Speaker_14
Our message is, if you get a mail-in ballot, the number one priority is, is vote it. What we'd like to see you do is go in on election day, turn in your spoil your mail-in ballot and vote in person. That's the best.

00:17:06 Speaker_14
You run through the tabulator and you're done. But if you don't do that, then at least turn it in. We don't want you to turn it in late.

00:17:18 Speaker_05
Just to be clear, Craig has been telling people to vote in person, and if they can't do that, he wants them to take their mail-in ballot to the polls and use it as a guide to vote in person.

00:17:29 Speaker_05
And if they can't do that, only as a last resort, mail it in.

00:17:33 Speaker_03
— Do you worry that that might actually confuse people, or, like, a voter might say, that's a lot of hoops to jump through, I don't want to think about it, I'm just not going to vote?

00:17:43 Speaker_14
— Well, yeah, the one thing we would leave them with is vote. No matter what you do, vote. That's the number one priority, is vote. You have to exercise your right to vote.

00:17:54 Speaker_05
— Before I left the Maricopa County Republican offices, I asked Craig if all of this was the right approach, or whether he wishes he didn't have to do any of this. that he could just focus on getting votes out and winning.

00:18:16 Speaker_05
Craig sees it differently, because he says he genuinely believes the election was stolen last time. So to him, this is part of winning. They're doing exactly what they should be doing. And the effort, he says, is huge.

00:18:41 Speaker_16
After the break, my colleague Jonathan Swan makes sense of what we saw in Maricopa County and explains how it fits into Trump's strategy to win the election.

00:18:53 Speaker_15
We'll be right back. Jonathan, hi. Great to have you here.

00:19:03 Speaker_11
Hi, Rachel. Thanks for having me.

00:19:04 Speaker_16
So, Jonathan, you cover Donald Trump's presidential campaign. And my colleague, who is a daily producer, Jess Chung, she went out to Trump's field office in Maricopa County in Arizona recently.

00:19:15 Speaker_16
And what she found was this operation that, at least on the surface, seemed a little bit scrambled. There was, of course, the regular campaigning stuff. There was the door knocking, the phone banking, all of that.

00:19:28 Speaker_16
But then there was this whole other piece. heist that was focused on election integrity. And that felt like it was taking up a surprising amount of time and energy.

00:19:37 Speaker_16
And in a lot of ways, it actually felt like the animating force behind why a lot of volunteers had come out in the first place. And so I guess my question for you is, what do you make of that?

00:19:50 Speaker_16
And is that what the Trump campaign field office is supposed to be focused on right now?

00:19:57 Speaker_11
Well, this all flows from the top. This is Donald Trump.

00:20:02 Speaker_11
And let me just give you a little flavor of how he thinks about the race, because I think it's really important to understand when you see something like this in Maricopa County, it's not an accident.

00:20:12 Speaker_11
It's something that has flowed down from Donald Trump, and not just over the last few months, but really over the last three and a half years.

00:20:22 Speaker_11
When Donald Trump talks about the election in private, something he often says to his advisors is, don't worry about getting people to vote. I'll take care of that.

00:20:34 Speaker_11
What you need to take care of is stopping Democrats from stealing the election, stopping them from cheating. Wow. The message Trump gave to his new chairman, Michael Whatley from North Carolina, was your mission

00:20:49 Speaker_11
Number one, two and three is to quote unquote stop the steal. Trump didn't really want to hear about anything else. So while it's true that his campaign is doing many traditional things, it's not that Trump doesn't want them doing any of that.

00:21:03 Speaker_11
But the thing that animates Trump most of all is this notion he has in his head, which I should say is completely baseless.

00:21:12 Speaker_11
There is no evidence that Democrats stole the last election and Trump's team was comprehensively defeated in court many, many times trying to prove his case. But what he tells his team in private is you need to stop Democrats from cheating.

00:21:28 Speaker_11
I will take care of turning voters out.

00:21:30 Speaker_16
But don't those two things kind of work against each other? Like, when Jess went to Maricopa County, she was hearing about how Trump supporters were feeling kind of deflated, like, why would we bother voting in a rigged system?

00:21:42 Speaker_16
So this constant stop the steal, stop the steal, does that have a depressing effect on turnout?

00:21:48 Speaker_11
Well, it definitely could.

00:21:50 Speaker_11
And there are a lot of Republican strategists who felt that that's exactly what happened in the Georgia runoff elections after the 2020 election, which Republicans lost, which is Trump basically went to the state and said, they stole the election, everything's rigged, etc, etc.

00:22:07 Speaker_11
Ergo, why would I bother voting if Democrats are just going to steal it? Right. Trump has kind of altered that message a little bit. And he said, you know, we need to go out in such large numbers that they can't possibly steal it from us.

00:22:20 Speaker_16
What's what's that Trump slogan that's trying to thread the needle on this too big to rig?

00:22:24 Speaker_11
Yeah, and I think swamp the vote is the other one. Basically, the idea is we need to vote in such decisive numbers that it's too big for them to steal.

00:22:34 Speaker_16
I want to turn back to something you said earlier, which was that Trump basically told his advisers, don't worry about the votes. I will bring out the votes.

00:22:43 Speaker_16
And that sort of suggests to me that he's actually not relying on these field offices like in Maricopa County. to get people out to the polls. He thinks that he can drive them to the polls.

00:22:54 Speaker_16
So what is his strategy to do that, to make it, as he put it, too big to rig?

00:22:59 Speaker_11
I think what's sometimes hard for people to absorb when they think about Trump and his campaign is Trump's own theory of the case, as he articulates it often, privately and publicly, is absurd.

00:23:15 Speaker_11
You know, Trump's theory of the case is, if it's a quote unquote, fair election, if there's no cheating, I'll win everywhere, I'll win New York, I'll win California, you know, etc, etc.

00:23:26 Speaker_11
He doesn't just say that publicly, he also says it privately, I have no idea what he believes in his heart of hearts, but that's what he says. But then, so you have this like, fairly absurd theory of the case, if you can even call it that.

00:23:41 Speaker_11
And then overlaid on top of that is a sophisticated campaign operation, which is running a smart and targeted campaign focused on a really small sliver of voters.

00:23:55 Speaker_16
The undecideds.

00:23:56 Speaker_11
Yeah, the campaign sees the electorate, the way they've modeled it right now, that there's only about 5% of voters that they think remain truly undecided.

00:24:06 Speaker_11
And a couple, maybe a couple of extra percent of voters that may be soft Kamala supporters that they see as movable. They're 59% male. They're young, about half are under the age of 45. And these are not political people. They're heavily independent.

00:24:27 Speaker_11
And they're more pessimistic about the economy than the electorate writ large. And they're more concerned about inflation. And everything they're doing from the campaign headquarters is targeted at turning out that group.

00:24:41 Speaker_16
How willing is Trump to take direction from his campaign?

00:24:45 Speaker_11
In many cases, he is taking direction from his campaign. He's traveling to where they say he needs to travel and where their data tells him that he needs to travel.

00:24:56 Speaker_11
And he's courting the exact same voters that they've identified as these persuadable voters.

00:25:02 Speaker_12
Good evening, everyone. My name is Dana White. I am the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

00:25:09 Speaker_11
You know, he's formed this really vital partnership with the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. His friend Dana White runs that.

00:25:18 Speaker_12
Donald championed the UFC before it was popular, before it grew into a successful business. And I will always be grateful, so grateful.

00:25:27 Speaker_11
Trump has this whole choreographed routine where he shows up to fights with his own entrance song. Crowd goes wild. That's a media event in and of itself. And there's this whole world of podcasts with these male comedians who are open to him.

00:26:00 Speaker_09
Last time we had you on, it was our biggest episode ever, obviously. 7 million views in 24 hours. It was crushing, going viral. It did really hit. It was a big monster, wasn't it? Huge.

00:26:11 Speaker_11
And he has these long conversations with them, one, two hour conversations.

00:26:15 Speaker_09
I feel like we need you back right now. Like we need you back in office. I feel like you're the only one right now that can really fix the problems here and abroad.

00:26:24 Speaker_08
Well, it's really nice that you say that. I appreciate it.

00:26:27 Speaker_11
He's talking to people like the Nelk Boys.

00:26:29 Speaker_10
Today's guest is the 45th president of the United States of America. And he's currently running for president on the Republican ticket.

00:26:38 Speaker_09
People like Theo Vaughn. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Flagrant. We are sitting down with Mr. President. Mr. President, thank you so much for being here.

00:26:45 Speaker_11
Andrew Schultz. You know, there's a whole lot of them that he does. And it's this sort of bro culture. They talk about sports. They talk about football. They talk about golf. And, you know, it's a non-political audience.

00:27:00 Speaker_11
And Trump is really at home in those interviews.

00:27:03 Speaker_08
Does Barron play sports or anything? He does. He plays golf and different sports, soccer. Loves soccer. Very good at soccer. He's a good athlete, Barron. Yeah.

00:27:14 Speaker_11
And when you listen to them, you know, he gets to basically just in this very comfortable setting, just riff and joke and talk about a mixture of like personal family stuff with, you know, how terrible Democrats are and how they're destroying the country.

00:27:31 Speaker_08
She was considered the worst vice president in the history of our country.

00:27:36 Speaker_11
So, you know, that's what he's been doing. And it's been reaching really large audiences of these people that they need to turn out.

00:27:45 Speaker_16
So even though Trump thinks that he's so popular, he doesn't really need to do much to sweep the election if they're free and fair, as he said, he's still mostly showing up and doing the things his campaign is directing him to do.

00:27:56 Speaker_11
So look, you have this dichotomy where on one hand, Trump's campaign is very data driven. The podcasts appearances that he's doing may look very sort of loose and rambling, etc.

00:28:09 Speaker_11
But behind them is real data showing that this is where you need to be to reach these young men. But on the other hand,

00:28:16 Speaker_11
Trump is running, to some extent, a very gut-driven campaign, and in some areas, following his gut over the data, the very clear data that's being presented to him by his campaign officials. And the clearest example of that is immigration.

00:28:33 Speaker_11
Donald Trump has been given data by his advisors. This is both public and private data showing unequivocally that the economy is the most important issue to the voters he needs to reach in inflation. And Donald Trump disagrees.

00:28:48 Speaker_11
He feels at a gut level that immigration and the border is the issue that motivates people more than any other issue. And he believes that's why he won the election in 2016. And so he's returning to that with his emphasis in this election.

00:29:04 Speaker_08
As we rebuild our economy, we will also restore our borders, if you don't mind.

00:29:09 Speaker_11
And you sort of had this moment recently in Atlanta where Trump just turns his back to the crowd and they play this video.

00:29:20 Speaker_09
Open borders, deadly consequences.

00:29:22 Speaker_11
Border crisis. Record high crossings are putting a strain on cities across America. This montage of just horrific crimes being committed by undocumented immigrants.

00:29:36 Speaker_01
My 20-year-old daughter, Kayla Hamilton, was murdered in her own room. Kayla's murderer was apprehended by border patrol crossing illegally into the US.

00:29:45 Speaker_08
And Trump turns around and he says, immigration is the number one issue.

00:29:56 Speaker_11
That beats it out. It's not even close. And that's basically a public iteration of a private conversation that Donald Trump has been having with his advisors for weeks. So it's not like he's not talking about the economy.

00:30:10 Speaker_11
He's doing a ton of economy themed events. at his advisor's behest, and he's doing economy-focused interviews, you know.

00:30:19 Speaker_11
So it's not that he's not talking about it, and certainly their paid advertising has been talking a lot about it, but there has been a disagreement between campaign's data and Trump's gut, and Trump is going with his gut in terms of his emphasis of immigration.

00:30:36 Speaker_16
You know, it really feels like people are often overestimating Trump or underestimating Trump.

00:30:41 Speaker_16
Like either they think that he's some kind of marketing genius who knows exactly how to connect with people when he follows his gut, or they think he's like a delusional narcissist who only acts out of impulse or self-interest.

00:30:52 Speaker_16
And when you look at this campaign, I feel like it might be hard to tell whether you think that some of these tactics are genius or insane or both. What do you make of it when you look at it?

00:31:03 Speaker_11
It's pretty hard to make any declarations about this until we see the election results.

00:31:08 Speaker_11
And even after then, there's going to be, this always happens, the winning campaign, everything they did was genius, and then the losing campaign are just a bunch of idiots. And the truth is that neither is necessarily true.

00:31:22 Speaker_11
But I think the campaign and Trump have made some pretty significant bets. in this election, and those bets will either prove to be really smart or fatally flawed. What I will say is that the bets they've made, in some cases, are bets of necessity.

00:31:39 Speaker_11
I'll just give you one example. They have made a huge bet that they will turn out people who don't usually vote.

00:31:48 Speaker_11
that will either be a spectacular success, or these people who like Trump or lean towards Trump may not bother to vote, or they may not have the ground operation that is effective enough to get those people to the polls.

00:32:02 Speaker_11
And that's a bet, but I'm not sure what else they could do. It's not like you'd send Donald Trump around to go to a bunch of Whole Foods in North Arlington and talk to all the mums there and say, hey, I'm going to be your protector.

00:32:18 Speaker_11
You know, as he's been saying, I'd be the protector of women. You know, I don't know how much room Donald Trump has to move with suburban women, for example. So yes, it's a bet. It's a gamble. But they're working with what they've got.

00:32:31 Speaker_11
The candidate is the candidate they've got. It's not like the views about Donald Trump are hugely malleable at this point. They're just going where they're fishing, where the fish are. And we'll see.

00:32:42 Speaker_11
Maybe they didn't have the infrastructure in place to pull this off. But I think based on the electorate as it is, it's pretty hard to argue with their strategy, I would say.

00:32:53 Speaker_16
You know, this whole conversation and looking at the difference between the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign, you've got this one traditional, well-funded, well-oiled machine and this other one that looks very non-traditional.

00:33:04 Speaker_16
And it's such an incredibly close race. And as you said, like, we're not going to really know much about what worked and what didn't work until after the election. So it just keeps reminding me

00:33:12 Speaker_16
of that great quote from the screenwriter William Goldman, nobody knows anything. And he's talking about the movie business and he's saying nobody really knows what's going to work, how to pick a hit.

00:33:22 Speaker_16
But I keep thinking about that quote on this campaign. Like, does anybody actually know what will win this election?

00:33:27 Speaker_11
I mean, the short answer is no. I mean, you talk to anyone on either side and they will tell you the data indicate this is as close a presidential election as they've ever seen, a true jump ball election.

00:33:44 Speaker_11
And it's going to be decided if the data is correct, maybe we're seeing we'll have another polling error like we have the last two times Trump's been on the ballot. But if the data are correct, you know, you're going to have, again, these states

00:33:56 Speaker_11
decided by potentially tens of thousands of votes. And when that's the case, any factor, you could pick out any factor as decisive.

00:34:06 Speaker_11
When you're talking about these kind of tiny wafer-thin margins, you know, anything could end up being the decisive factor.

00:34:22 Speaker_16
Jonathan, thank you very much.

00:34:24 Speaker_11
Thanks for having me.

00:34:45 Speaker_15
Here's what else you need to know today.

00:34:47 Speaker_16
With only days left before the election, both candidates made their final push with voters over the weekend.

00:34:53 Speaker_16
Kamala Harris traveled to Houston for a rally on Friday, then went to Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday, and finally to Philadelphia on Sunday, where she spent her time politicking throughout the city, including visits to a church, a barbershop, a bookstore, and a restaurant, before taking the stage at a rally

00:35:10 Speaker_00
We must not wake up the day after the election and have any regrets about what we could have done in these next nine days.

00:35:17 Speaker_16
— And giving a speech aimed at mobilizing supporters in this final stretch.

00:35:21 Speaker_00
— So let's spend these next nine days knowing we did everything we could.

00:35:28 Speaker_16
— For his part, Donald Trump also traveled to Michigan and Pennsylvania for campaign events over the weekend, but spent Sunday night in his hometown, New York City, where he hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden.

00:35:40 Speaker_08
And I just want to say a very big hello to a special place, New York, and to an incredible arena, Madison Square Garden. Incredible.

00:35:51 Speaker_16
What was meant as a closing argument for Trump that featured TV personalities, entertainers, and other notable voices from the right devolved into a carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism.

00:36:03 Speaker_16
Several of the speakers made crude and inflammatory remarks about Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, Jews, Hispanics, and even a black man in the audience.

00:36:12 Speaker_16
Trump himself referenced remarks he's made recently about how the greatest threat America faces is, quote, the enemy from within.

00:36:20 Speaker_16
The rally was a capstone for an increasingly aggrieved campaign for Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has grown darker and more menacing.

00:36:30 Speaker_16
And Israel launched a retaliatory strike on Iran early Saturday, about three weeks after Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel.

00:36:39 Speaker_16
The latest strikes marked a new escalation between the two arch-rivals, although they appeared designed to stop short of all-out war.

00:36:47 Speaker_16
Israel avoided striking nuclear sites that the Biden administration had warned against hitting, and instead targeted military facilities. Saturday also marked the first time that Israel has acknowledged conducting a military operation inside Iran.

00:37:04 Speaker_16
Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chung, Claire Tannis-Ketter, and Diana Nguyen, with help from Nina Feldman. It was edited by Devin Taylor and Ben Calhoun, with help from Rachel Quester.

00:37:16 Speaker_16
Research Assistance by Susan Lee contains original music by Pat McCusker, Alicia B. Etube, Rowan Nemisto, Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.

00:37:40 Speaker_16
That's it for The Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.