There's a Map for That: The Harris Electoral Path

Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my hundredth mint commercial. No, no, no, no.

I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do, like, four of these. I mean, it's unlimited to premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much?

Unknown
I'm sorry.

Ryan Reynolds
I shouldn't be victim blaming. Here. Give it a try@mintmobile.com.

save whenever you're ready.

Unknown
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Ryan Reynolds
It's Friday, July 26. She's polling better than Biden, but that's not nearly good enough. We start here.

Vice President Kamala Harris tries to chart a new path to election.

Unknown
If her first campaign stop is any indication, it's gonna be the exact same map as Biden.

Ryan Reynolds
But first, she has to shore up the democratic base. What new polling says about her strengths and weaknesses. A wildfire explodes in northern California.

Unknown
All of a sudden, there was a major shift in the wind here. This fire just spotted right up what.

Ryan Reynolds
We know about the damage and the suspected arsonist behind it. And a chinese spy balloon is one thing, but what are chinese bombers doing off Alaska?

Martha Raddatz
Kind of the equivalent of an aerial finger to the US.

Ryan Reynolds
The US scramble jets to escort them away for what might not be the last time.

From ABC News, this is start here. I'm Brad Milke.

This week began with President Biden making the historic announcement that he would not be seeking re election. This week ends with his vice President Kamala Harris, in full presidential campaign mode.

Martha Raddatz
We are witnessing a full on assault on hard fought, hard won freedoms and rights.

Ryan Reynolds
On Wednesday, Harris was in Indianapolis holding a social justice town hall. Yesterday, she spoke to thousands of teachers at an AFT union event in Houston before meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back in DC.

Martha Raddatz
We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.

And I will not be silent.

Ryan Reynolds
You can almost see what her team is thinking right now, right? Focus your efforts on the upper midwest. Get unions behind you. Rally black voters and other groups that you'll need to win a national election. And do it fast. In the last few days, the Harris campaign says they have signed up more than 100,000 new volunteers. They've scheduled more than 2000 local events in battleground states. However, former President Trump clearly has a plan here as well.

Donald Trump
If you don't mind. I'm not gonna be nice. Is that okay?

Ryan Reynolds
Since the debate. You've seen him on the stump almost workshopping new lines of attack against his new potential.

Donald Trump
The borders are. Oh, the borders are. When you look at how bad they are, you say, you know, I like Trump, but now I really like Trump.

Ryan Reynolds
Some are rooted in the policies of the Biden Harris administration. Others seem rooted in sexism or racism. Mocking Harris voice, intentionally mispronouncing her name, which has really become a thing throughout the republican party.

Donald Trump
Kamala, I call her laughing Kamala. You ever watch her laugh? She's crazy.

You know, you can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she's crazy. She's nuts.

Ryan Reynolds
Each candidate is racing to define Kamala Harris to the masses. Well, we started getting a sense of how the masses are responding back. So let's start the day with Galen Druch from our partners at 538. He hosts the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. Galen, we've actually seen a flurry of polls now coming out over the last 48 hours with Kamala Harris's name at the top of the ticket. Right. So what are we learning from them?

Unknown
The top line news is that on average, Donald Trump leads Kamala Harris by about a percentage point nationally. That is a bit better than Biden was doing against Trump towards the end of the push for him to drop out of the race. According to FiveThirtyEight's average, it was paused when Trump was leading Biden by about three and a half percentage points. So that's an improvement nationally. But I want to caution here that so much news has happened over the past week and a half that we should probably be waiting, I don't know, until the end of next week or maybe even a little bit longer before we try to get a sense of where the resting point of the race is going to be, according to the polls. But we can say a couple things about the fundamentals before we get into the nitty gritty, which is one, I found this poll from YouGov to be really helpful in understanding the race. And it essentially asked Americans, do you see Biden or Trump fit for a second term? 60% of Americans said no to Trump and no to Biden. And for those folks, they asked, why not? For Trump, the answer was that they saw him as corrupt and dangerous. And for Biden, it was that they saw him as too old and incompetent. The Biden side of the equation has been removed. Kamala Harris's age is not going to be an issue in this campaign, maybe apart from the fact that she's about 20 years younger than Trump. But I that's perceptions of the candidates when it comes to the issues. Things have probably not changed all that much.

According to new polling out from blueprint voters see Harris and Biden as basically just as liberal on all of the issues. And you may be thinking, oh, maybe that redounds to Harris's benefit because Biden was seen as kind of moderate, but not actually. Over the three and a half years that Biden was president, he came to be seen as very liberal, in fact, more liberal than the majority of Americans on issues like inflation, the economy, immigration, crime and safety and the lot. And so that is was a vulnerability for Biden, and it's going to continue to be a vulnerability for Harris. Now, I think the Harris campaign is going to try to moderate a bit, particularly from the policy positions that she laid out during the 2020 democratic primary, which were even to the left of Biden, things like decriminalizing, crossing the border, getting rid of private health insurance and the likes of. So we'll see if she's able to beat Republicans to the punch and try to reshape how voters view her on the issues or if Republicans are able to define her first.

Ryan Reynolds
Hey, if we're seeing this, like, slight improvement in the polls with Harris, who are those voters? Like, are there certain groups of people that are actually finding their way into the Harris camp? Are we able to deduce that at all?

Unknown
Yeah, and it's a pretty simple answer, actually. It's the parts of the electorate that you would naturally assume would go more democratic but were not so hot. Biden. So it's, for example, young voters, voters of color, women to some extent.

Martha Raddatz
We trust women to make decisions about their own body.

Unknown
I mean, young voters is a really good example. Biden won them by about 25 percentage points in 2020, but was down to a single digit lead with young voters in the polls before he dropped out. Now Harris is back up to about a 20 point lead with young voters. So getting democrats back to where they were before.

She also has potential new vulnerability with the kinds of voters that Biden maybe over performed with, a little compared to where democrats had historically been. And that's largely white voters.

Donald Trump
I'm a capitalist.

If you want to, if you're able to go out and make a million bucks, fine, that's okay. But just make sure you pay your fair share in taxes.

Unknown
He did significantly better than democrats usually do with white voters with a college degree in 2020 that had held up pretty well. I don't think there's any reason to think that Harris won't hold up pretty well with those voters either.

The reality is that Biden didn't improve that much on how Hillary Clinton had done amongst white working class voters. You know, Clinton lost them by 37 percentage points. Biden only lost them by 35 percentage points. But what Harris is going to have to watch out for is stemming the losses for democrats there, because that's a group of voters that is very overrepresented in the northern battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And so, so her support erodes even a little bit more amongst those voters. It could put the electoral college a little bit further out of reach. The electorates that she, the parts of the electorate that she does quite well with are overrepresented in the southern battleground states like Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina. So Harris, for her part, doesn't want to be caught in a situation where she does a bit better in the southern battleground states, but nothing better enough to actually win them while doing worse in the northern battleground states and putting them out of reach. So she's really still going to, in many ways, try to pursue the same campaign strategy that the Biden campaign was pursuing.

Ryan Reynolds
Speaker one, that's what I was trying to get at, Gayla, is because you're saying, like, she actually might have a bit more advantage in a place like Georgia or North Carolina. People, you know, places where there are more, say, black voters or, you know, or young voters, whatever it is, she might have a bit more of an advantage there. Does that mean that her map, her electoral chances are different than Biden's were? Or does she have to win the exact same states they're going to send her? The exact same places that they would have sent Biden?

Unknown
If her first campaign stop is any indication, it's going to be the exact same map as Biden.

Martha Raddatz
Good afternoon, Wisconsin.

Unknown
Wisconsin was the tipping point state for Trump in 2016. And it was the tipping point state for Biden in 2020, which is to say that the state that put them over the edge in the electoral college. And look, Trump also knows that these are the states where the bid for the electoral college is going to play out.

Ryan Reynolds
We're going to drill, baby, drill. We're going to shut down that border. We're going to put America's citizens first.

Unknown
In some ways, the choice of JD Vance as a running mate was a doubling down on his appeal to white voters without a college degree. That's the kind of voter that Trump overperformed with in 2016 that handed him the electoral college.

Donald Trump
I will eliminate taxes on tips for restaurants, restaurant workers, hospitality workers.

Unknown
And so while it is true, you know, the south is full of states that do have younger voters and more diverse electorates.

But because Democrats have been running so far behind in those southern battleground states, down by more like seven plus points in places like Nevada, Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, I think that they still imagine those northern battleground states to be more within reach. And so far we've seen, you know, in the limited, really limited state polling that's been out there, that she's still polling pretty close to where Biden was in a place like Pennsylvania. So I think in some ways she expands the map a little bit. If Democrats do really well, there's probably a better chance that Harris picks up some of those states that Biden flipped in 2020. But at the end of the day, I don't think you're going to see any less attention paid to Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Ryan Reynolds
It's almost like you're talking about the two belts, right? You got the rust Belt thing. You'll definitely need to win that. But you also have the Sunbelt belt, which now, you know, these states from the southeast to the southwest, maybe those look more interesting or more competitive than they did a few months ago. GALEn the other thing I keep going back to here is if Harris, like in this New York Times Sienna poll that just came out yesterday, Harris has climbed back to a one point deficit in the popular vote. And I'm like, excuse me, if a Democrat loses the popular vote by 1%, isn't that an electoral college wipeout? Like, everything I know about modern politics tells me republicans can win with a minority of voters, but Democrats certainly can.

Unknown
Yeah. I mean, for some context, Biden won the national popular vote by about four and a half percentage points, but he barely eked it out in the battleground states. And of course, that's what matters in this game of winning the electoral college.

We have to slow our roll here because we really don't know how this is all going to end up. For example, Trump could still be experiencing a convention bounce. Orlando, you know, an increase in his approval rating based on an assassination attempt against him just a week and a half ago.

Donald Trump
I'm not supposed to be here tonight. Not supposed to be here.

Martha Raddatz
Yes, you are.

Ryan Reynolds
Yes, you are.

Unknown
Americans are reacting to so much because to your point in that New York Times Santa college polling, they recorded the highest approval rating ever for former President Trump. So people are viewing Trump in a kinder light in this very moment. But will that persist? I have no idea. Also, Harris may be experiencing a honeymoon moment because there's just been so much positive press about the enthusiasm, the fundraising, et cetera. And by the same point, Republicans haven't really had a chance to define her yet. So I think we really have to be careful about assuming that the polls today will be the polls tomorrow or even, you know, a month from now. But if Harris does lose the national popular vote. Bye, percentage point. Yes. I think there's almost no circumstance in which democrats have an electoral college advantage that results in them winning the electoral college despite losing the national popular vote.

Ryan Reynolds
So she has to basically keep improving on whatever gains she's seeing right now. Really interesting. Galen Druk from 538, and, of course, the 538 Politics podcast, which you should all be listening to. Thank you so much, Galen.

Unknown
Thank you.

Ryan Reynolds
Eczema on start here, those who avoided the deadliest wildfire in California's history are seeing another one roar into town. We'll take you to the fire line after the break.

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You can do this. And Ford Pro finsimple can help. Our experts are ready to make growing pains less painful for your business with flexible financing solutions that meet the needs of your business today when you need them. Get started@fordpro.com. financing there have been several huge wildfires in California in recent years. But among the most horrifying, it has to be the one that basically wiped out the town of Paradise, California. It's so hard for people to understand why they can't go back to their homes. The entire community of paradise is a toxic wasteland. Remember, this fire killed dozens of people in 2018. It destroyed entire neighborhoods. Part of what made it so deadly was the geography itself. Paradise was only accessible by one major road.

Martha Raddatz
I called my husband, and I just said, I don't think I'm gonna make it out of this. It's coming in too fast.

Ryan Reynolds
This fire got so big and so fast, people couldn't escape. Well, on Wednesday, another fire began in northern California near the city of Chico, and quickly exploded in size. It is currently the largest fire the state has seen this year. And some of the flames are less than 10 miles from the town of paradise. Let's go to ABC's Kana Whitworth who spent all day yesterday there on the fire line. Kaynae, what have you been seeing?

Unknown
Yeah. Hey, Brad, I mean, you can actually see the plume of smoke from Sacramento, right? I mean that is almost 2 hours away.

And when you were talking about paradise, you know, I want to tell you, I reached out immediately to the football coach at Paradise High School who I met after the fire there. And you know. Cause he popped in my mind right away. There was so much trauma because of that fire for people that still live in this area. And he said they were really on edge. They were waiting for the wind to shift. They were concerned. And so that trauma rings deep throughout this neighborhood. And so to stand there and you get yourself to Chico and you can see this massive plume of smoke in the horizon.

It's a really scary deal, Brad. And there's so many similarities here. When you talk about that one road, I just drove up and down it. Same thing. It's a two lane road. The only way in, the only way out. In fact, the fires started so quickly that in the middle of the night they started opening up logging roads to help get people out because it was moving so fast.

Ryan Reynolds
I'm completely surrounded right now. So I'm gonna. I'm actually gonna bone out of here and see if I can get ahead of this thing because I'm gonna.

Unknown
I'm gonna end up getting caught overnight. It burned 4000 acres an hour.

Ryan Reynolds
Wow. Right.

Unknown
So it scorched 45,000 acres in the first 12 hours.

I mean, that kind of speed is astonishing. Especially Brad, when we're not talking about a Santa Ana wind event here.

Ryan Reynolds
Well, and there are big forests in this part of the state. Right? So a ton of vegetation burning. Are people okay? Are structures? I mean, how threatening has this been?

Unknown
Yeah. So you are right to say that is burning in a lot of forest land. Some of this land, you know, hasn't burned in decades. But definitely people are being impacted here.

Ryan Reynolds
Two entire communities that are under evacuation orders. The communities of Cohasset and Forest ranch. Both of those are areas that have not seen a lot of fire in recent history.

Unknown
4000 people had to be evacuated again. Many of them leaving in the middle of the night, jumping in their car, finding themselves in bumper to bumper traffic with nowhere to go.

Unknown
We've got approximately 100 vehicles that are sheltering at the radio towers on Glasson Road.

Unknown
There have been homes damaged and destroyed. And really we're so early on in this that they're out assessing that right now. That number could grow and change. In fact, we yesterday were up on a ridge and we watched the fire just come right down. All of a sudden there was a major shift in the wind here. And this fire just spotted right up. It's been burning down this ridge here. And that one big gust ignited this whole area. I mean, it is so close to homes and communities. It is very scary.

Ryan Reynolds
How did it start?

Unknown
Yeah. So that has people enraged, Brad, because we know we are in a high fire danger situation here. There's red flag warnings now, high heat, and now someone has been arrested for arson in this fire. Brad, a 42 year old man, they think that he pushed a car sort of into a ravine that was on fire and it just ignited this thing. I mean, people's lives will be changed forever because of that.

And then to add insult to injury on that one, Brad, authorities think that this, this 42 year old started the fire and then essentially made this attempt to blend in with those who were evacuating their homes, leaving all of their belongings behind because of him.

Ryan Reynolds
Wow. And again, you think about this community, right, this part of California and how everyone would have been in such a panic to get out quickly. You don't realize you might be running alongside the arsonist who started it, Canaan Whitworth. They're on the fire lines. Be safe. Thank you so much.

Unknown
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Brad.

Ryan Reynolds
A couple nights ago, american fighter jets intercepted a couple of bombers off the coast of Alaska. And this sort of thing happens sometimes between the US and Russia. Not quite a mid air dogfight, more like probing the edges of each others airspace. They let us know they're poking around, we let them know we're watching. But what alarmed american officials here was these weren't just russian planes, they were russian and Chinese, and they were together. Let's go to ABC's chief global affairs correspondent, Martha Raditz. Martha, this looked like a very coordinated, not an attack, but like a coordinated drill near american airspace. Like what happened here.

Martha Raddatz
One word, Brad. It is provocative. What the Chinese and the Russians were doing was kind of the equivalent of an aerial finger to the US. Never before have not only the Chinese sent strategic bombers off the coast of Alaska, but certainly not joint exercises together. We should say right away, these were unarmed strategic bombers, the two Chinese, two Russians, but they were nuclear capable strategic bombers. So the message was very clear. We're here.

You should be scared of us. And look, we're doing it together.

Ryan Reynolds
What is the response from the US military in a scenario like that? Cause, like, I imagine you see them coming. These are not like stealth bombers. Like, they can see them, but you don't know they're unarmed. Right? So do you arm your jets? Do you treat them like they could be dropping nukes on us? How does the US respond?

Martha Raddatz
You know, the us military reaction is kind of the equivalent of what Russia and China did. They. They are not about to shoot them down. They don't think they're. They're armed, the bombers. But by the way, the fighter jets that we scrambled and Canada scrambled are armed, and they are armed because they are there defending the United States.

Ryan Reynolds
If there is a. If there is a challenge or a threat to the United States of America, your troops will be at the ready and they will do the right thing.

Martha Raddatz
And by the way, they knew the US, the Pentagon, from the very beginning of the launch that Russia and China were doing this.

Ryan Reynolds
This was not a surprise to us. We closely monitored these aircraft, tracked the.

Martha Raddatz
Aircraft, and when they got within about 200 miles of the coast of the US, up by Alaska, that is when the fighter jets were launched. Now, by the way, China and Russia were not trying to keep this secret. They wanted everybody to know they were doing this. They released video showing the bombers taking off. Yeah, yeah. Showing the bombers taking off in the darkness. It's all very dramatic video. You see these bombers taking off. You see aerial refueling. It was released by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

And you see the cockpit view from one of the russian bombers, of the us fighter jets and canadian jets coming up and essentially surrounding the bombers. They follow them for about an hour before the bombers exit.

Ryan Reynolds
At this point, what is the military relationship like between the Russians and the Chinese, even beyond the Pacific? Martha?

Martha Raddatz
Well, getting closer all the time, and that is really what's behind this look. You know, we're strong and mighty militaries, but it is not just the Pacific. It is Ukraine. It is wherever China and Russia can join forces and send that message. Now we're joining forces and trying to make the US look as weak as possible. They didn't really look very weak in this thing with the fighter jets going up there, but it's just that message. We're together.

Look out.

Ryan Reynolds
And to hear this, it's so weird that there is a kind of choreography here that individual countries are used to kind of doing with each other, but now to have multiple countries kind of doing these rounds around american airspace, really bizarre. Martha Raddich, thank you so much.

Martha Raddatz
You bet. Brad.

Ryan Reynolds
Okay, one more quick break. When we come back, what would Southwest Airlines be without its chaotic boarding process? We're about to find out. One last thing is next.

Unknown
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Ryan Reynolds
And one last thing.

How seriously do you take picking out a seat?

Clara McMichael
Im not afraid of throwing some elbows, Brad.

Ryan Reynolds
That is ABCs Clara McMichael, who covers air travel. And in the eyes of anyone who travels for a living, you can divide air carriers into two groups, Southwest Airlines and everyone else.

Unknown
Sometimes my friend will get called first and she can save my seat.

So, you know, I like it when you first come, first serve.

Martha Raddatz
My feet are swollen, I'm upset, I'm.

Ryan Reynolds
Stressed, I'm tired, and I hate them. For the last 50 years, Southwest has very intentionally not assigned seats. When you buy your tickets, you pay your fare, you show up, you might get a boarding group, but once you're on that plane, you select whatever seat you want that happens to be empty.

Clara McMichael
The company really prides themselves on this egalitarian approach. No first class, everybody got the same snacks. And apparently at one point, the flight attendants would tell the passengers, you can sit anywhere you want, just like at church.

Ryan Reynolds
Now to some, this is a positive. Studies have even shown that open seating leads to faster departures, which Southwest says leads to cheaper flights. But to other customers, southwest flights are like an anxiety factory. What if you got a big family and there aren't enough seats to put you all together? What if you hate a middle seat so much, you would gladly pay to get out of one? Well, yesterday, in a historic decision, the company decided to finally join the crowd.

Clara McMichael
So they're going to switch to assigned seats. And a majority of their customers and potential customers, as it turns out in this research they've been doing, they prefer assigned seats. And they also found that when a customer, quote, unquote, defects to another airline, this open seating policy is the number one reason why.

Ryan Reynolds
Now, they haven't said when they're going to do this. But the immediate reaction from some southwest loyalists was one of betrayal. This was known to some as the people's airline. No baggage fees, no first class. We're all in this together. Could this be the beginning of the end?

Clara McMichael
So Southwest really says this is all about these changing customer needs. But no doubt money, as always, is also a part of this, and they want to bring in more revenue. Southwest said on their earnings call that the extra products they offer right now, like early bird boarding, those generate around a billion dollars. These new offerings, they said that theyre going to be substantially north of that.

Ryan Reynolds
Now, Southwest is emphatic that it has no plans to alter its other policies, like free checked luggage. But think about how one thing can lead to another, right? Airlines figured out a while ago that if people care enough to reserve their seats, they also care enough to pay more for aisle seats or extra legroom. JetBlue was known as a budget airline, no first class, until it did finally start offering mint seats up front that seem suspiciously familiar. Regardless, if youve ever lined up to run on board and snatch your seat feeling like a penned up bull about to hit the streets of Pamplona, those days might be over, but you might long for the days where friends fly free and the airline actually felt like a friend.

Okay, thatll do it for us. But I guess in the last couple weekends, what a former president has survived a shoot, a current president has ended his campaign. I'm going to stay close to my phone for the next couple days, but I hope you get out and that you have a great weekend start. Here is produced by Kelly Torres, Jen Newman, Brenda Salinas Baker, Vika Aronson, Cameron Chertabian, Anthony Ali Mauro, Milwaukee and Amira Williams. Ariel Chester is our social media producer. Josh Cohan is director of podcast programming. I'm our managing editor. Laura Mayer is our executive producer. Thanks to Lakia Brown, John Newman, Tara Gimble and Liz Alessi. Special thanks this week to Chris Berry, Connor Burton and Jenna Harrison. I'm Brad Milke. See you next week.

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Martha Raddatz
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There's a Map for That: The Harris Electoral Path

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Campaign Strategy

2: Voter Dynamics

3: Electoral Challenges

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

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