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Oprah: Let us choose Joy.

applause]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Oprah from the Democratic convention. It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Now for the Democrats, the next phase of their work begins, as does the Trump campaign's work of stopping Harris's momentum. Here we are on just the Monday morning after the convention. An interesting development is that a role reversal is taking place around the Trump-Harris televised debate or debates that will presumably take place. Have you heard this one yet?

Remember, it was the Biden campaign who asked CNN to shut the mic of the candidate if it wasn't their turn to speak in the debate in June. That was to keep Trump from shouting over everything to dominate the night, which was a problem in the 2020 debates. Now Politico reports that the Harris campaign is saying it wants both their mics to remain open at all times. The Trump campaign is so far saying no. We'll talk about that script being flipped. More now with Philip Bump, national columnist for the Washington Post. Hi, Philip. Thanks for joining. Welcome back to WNYC.

Philip Bump: Of course, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get to the new debate over the debates, but can you start with the impact of the convention, however, it can be measured at this point? Expert consensus certainly seems to be that it was a smashing success on several levels. One that interests me is that it seems to have helped to mobilize an army of volunteers and small donors to the Harris campaign. That, by itself, is a big contrast to when Biden was in the race. Are you seeing any of that?

Philip Bump: Yes. I think that's correct. There's been a lot of reporting about the extent of fundraising that Harris has seen so far, somewhere north of $580 million since she got into the race, which was, again, just a little over a month ago, that the Politico had this great report noting that she had received more individual contributors within the first couple of weeks of her campaign than Biden had over the entire course of his reelection bid. There are a lot of hazy measures of the effectiveness of the convention at this point in time.

What we're going to be keeping an eye on is the ongoing fundraising, certainly the extent to which they do have volunteer signups, although that'll be hard to really get a concrete sense of until the actual election period itself and get out the vote. Then, of course, just poll numbers, and whether the surge that we've seen in the polls since Harris got in is the first part of a continuing surge or if we're bringing the race back to stasis and now it's once again, as was in '16 and '20, a couple of point lead for the Democrats.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and [crosstalk]-- Go ahead

Philip Bump: I will say very quickly, the convention did do a good job of not stepping on any of that. It was not the case there was a big flub, or that everyone coming out being like, "Oh, no, what did we do?" Instead, it reinforced it. Democrats feel very confident in their campaign.

Brian Lehrer: I think that's an important thing to point out. I was thinking the same thing, that this surge of volunteering and fundraising was happening even before the convention, almost right away, with some of the numbers you were just giving compared to the Biden campaign. Social media memes broke out in support of Harris, like the coconut tree video and some other ones.

What I think we saw at the convention and with all this fundraising and volunteering was not just an attempt to create a vibe of joy, like we heard in the Oprah clip, and fighting for freedom from scratch, but that there was something genuinely grassroots going on that they took the opportunity to amplify. Do you agree?

Philip Bump: Yes, I think that's right. I wrote about this last week, one of the shifts that occurred when the Democratic Party moved from Biden to Harris is that it wasn't just that Biden was seen as old and problematic. It was really that their message was old and stale, that they were running on a 2020 message in 2024. By Harris coming into the fray and by them shifting the way they talked about Donald Trump and the threat that Donald Trump poses to the United States, it was energizing in a way that I think a lot of people wouldn't have predicted.

Even just the weird thing from Tim Walz right out of the gates really helped reframe Donald Trump not as an opponent in a struggle, but as an aberration to be combative which is, which is a different framework. I think that really energized people. Then, of course, there's just the generational aspect of it that Democrats in particular, which is the party of younger people, can now say, well, Kamala Harris isn't young by most objective measures, turning 60 this year. She's certainly younger than Joe Biden and does reflect a shift away from what a lot of younger Americans have seen as this gerontocratic approach to governance. That, too, I think, gives them some energy.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it's funny you mentioned the weird thing, Tim Walz labeling Trump as weird. They certainly found a lot of snarky ways to insult Trump, and creative ways to insult Trump, and humorous ways to insult Trump during the campaign. We'll see if that goes over with swing voters. We'll see if they take weird and other things with them out of that campaign atmosphere into more serious rallies and debates and everything else

The Harris campaign, besides the over half a billion dollars since Biden dropped out, says they organized more than 200,000 volunteer shifts. I was thinking this must be why there was so much emphasis at the convention on speaking to people who are already Democrats, like the Oprah speech, like Tim Walz saying it's the fourth quarter and we're down by a touchdown, but we've got the ball. That's not for the years of undecided voters so much as trying to get your supporters to do stuff, yes?

Philip Bump: Yes. That's correct. I think it's really important to recognize, of course, that there's a big difference between making a donation and committing to volunteer shift, which is that you make a donation and it's done. That happened. A volunteer shift [chuckles], when that Saturday morning rolls around and you said you're going to show up to knock on doors and maybe it's a little early. We'll see how that actually happens.

This has always been one of the core strengths of the Democratic Party. One of the reasons that the labor movement, frankly, has been very helpful to the Democratic Party is that ability to go out knocking doors and talk to people. When we're talking about a race where we expect that in a number of swing states, as was the case in 2016 and 2020, that the difference will be made by 10,000, 20,000 votes, those sorts of efforts on the ground in the weeks leading up to election day, which, of course with early voting, those weeks leading up to it are more important than they were, say, 20 years ago, that can make a real difference.

One of the striking things about the Trump campaign this time around is the extent to which they have diverted their attention away from doing precisely that. In 2020, for example, they didn't do a good job of field, which is what that's called when you go out and talk to voters, but now there's really this huge disparity and a lot of energy, and it really is the thing that can make a difference in a very close race.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We'll talk about a very close race and the potential impact of RFK Junior dropping out and endorsing Trump on Friday. That happened after our show on Friday, so we haven't discussed that yet. We'll get to that, listeners, with Philip Bump.

Staying on volunteers, I see Harris and Walz are going on a campaign swing in Georgia now, big swing state. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that the Harris campaign signed up 1,000 new volunteers last Monday alone. I haven't even seen an article from the rest of the week as the vibe of the convention was just getting hotter and hotter. Last Monday alone, 1,000 new volunteers.

I was actually talking to a friend of mine over the weekend who lives in Georgia, and he told me how a volunteer has already knocked on his door and didn't just ask for money or his support, but asked him to volunteer to go door to door, too. They've got volunteers recruiting more volunteers. I guess you just started to explain why that is important if Trump doesn't have a similar-sized army come November and early voting in October.

Philip Bump: There are two phases to a campaign, essentially. There's the period in which you identify who the voters are that you want to either persuade or turn out, and then there's the period where you actually try and turn them out. Right now, traditionally, we're in the period where you're going out and you're either trying to persuade people who you know are definitely going to vote and who might vote for your candidate, or you're trying to ensure that people who would vote for your candidate if they voted are putting up a plan to actually go out and vote or have the materials they need, know where they're going to vote eventually down the line.

Then, of course, once you get close to election day, then you swarm the volunteers, have them go into the neighborhoods, be like, hey, look, you haven't voted yet. You can still do it. Here's how you do it. You give them all that information. It is all about counting votes. It's all about math when you're talking about politics.

The Democrats have traditionally been good at that. In 2016, Trump actually did well at that. That was something that was very noticeable, that he had a good operation in place to turn people out. In 2020, not the case, that they were more focused on this idea of fraud and visibility and he was the incumbent and so on and so forth. 2024, he's already made this commitment, which could certainly be reversed, but that the RNC, the Republican Party, is not investing in that effort, and instead they're outsourcing it to groups like Turning Point USA.

The challenge with that is the Turning Point USA fundamentally is in the business of promoting Turning Point USA. The volunteers that they engage and the money they raise for this, that bolsters them. It doesn't bolster the Republican Party. It doesn't bolster Donald Trump directly. It may end up in turning out some voters, but their focus is different than the campaigns. I think it's a huge misstep and is really a failure that they had in 2020 as well.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "For me, the convention amplified that I too am a patriot. As a Black PhD who used critical race theory in her dissertation, I am a patriot too. I even told my husband I want to hang a US flag on the front of our house." Listeners, does that resonate with you or help us report this story in any way? If the volunteer and fundraising surge applies to you, that could be one way. Have you volunteered for a political campaign in your lifetime? What do you do as a volunteer? Have you just now signed up to volunteer for or donate to the Harris campaign? Were you doing so for Biden? 212-433-WNYC, 212-9692.

Any new Harris volunteers out there? One of you thousand people from last Monday in Georgia, or anyone else who are Democrats, probably, certainly, but were not volunteering before Harris got into the race 212, WNYC, 212-433-9692 call or text. You can also call if you are an RFK Junior supporter, will you now vote for Trump? We'll talk more about that with Philip Bump, national columnist for the Washington Post. You can also call in if you have an answer to a question or a thought about the debates.

Open mic, closed mic, when it's not officially your turn to speak or anything else about the debates or anything about the overall effect of the convention on you as a voter like that text that I just read from that one listener, or maybe on you as a swing voter, undecided voter before last week, did that change for you or anyone else? 212-433-9692 212-433-9692 call or text.

Before we get to the debate news, Philip, just one more thing about the convention itself. I don't know who the people were. Maybe you know names. Whoever wrote and directed that convention, such a different set of feelings and speeches than I think we would have seen with Biden. They turned on a dime. They had almost no time, and yet they pulled it off to that extraordinary degree based on these results.

Philip Bump: Yes. No, I don't know exactly who's responsible for that. Obviously, the campaign had some hand, and I'm sure the party did as well, but yes, you're right. Again, the convention occurred less than a month after the party had switched its nominee, but again, less than a month after the party switched its entire focus of how they talked about the race.

There were certain elements of it that were static, sure, the location, probably a lot of the aesthetic in the room, the printing of signs and so on and so forth [chuckles]. That was probably hard from the outset, no matter what, regardless of the convention, but there were some of the more problematic and difficult aspects of it, I'm sure, were already lined up, but, yes, the slate of speakers, all of those aspects had to be lined up.

Again, it's important to remember they were operating from a position of enthusiasm. It wasn't as though they were trying to get high-profile people, to have Steph Curry come out and do a video for Joe Biden. They were doing for Kamala Harris, who a lot of people were excited about. I think that made it easier.

Brian Lehrer: How much trouble do you think they have now on their left flank? We talked multiple times on the show last week about how they were not allowing a Palestinian speaker to take the stage. There certainly were protests outside the convention hall, though from the reporting I've seen, they weren't as big as some people were anticipating beforehand, and they managed not to dominate or barely affect the television coverage of the debate on the various networks that I was watching anyway.

If people were expecting a rerun of the 1968 Chicago convention with anti-war protesters versus mainstream convention delegates, it's not what most of America saw, but there were some very unhappy people, also unhappy people that Harris was talking about having the most lethal military in the world in her acceptance speech, and emphasizing all those notes of patriotism, not talking much about climate change. How much trouble do you think they have on their left flank now, because that was already going to be a problem with Biden in terms of turnout?

Philip Bump: Well, the challenge the Democratic Party has in general is that it is legitimately trying to be a lot of things to a lot of people in a way that the Republican Party doesn't have to be. The Republican Party is very heavily centered around white people living in rural areas. The Democratic Party is basically everyone else. That means they need to figure out how they're going to have a consistent message, a through line that appeals to all those people to at least some extent. It also means then, that they're open to not being as much of what particular groups of people want them to be as they, as they potentially could be.

That is the longstanding challenge the Democratic Party has. That is why it has long been the case that there are elements both on the left and, to a much lesser extent, more toward the middle, that are putting pressure on the party to be a particular thing. I think at the end of the day, the Democratic Party has done a good job of articulating the stakes of this election and the reelection of Donald Trump in a way that those sorts of things for people who are not only marginally attached to politics, that is, for people who are actually engaged in paying attention, I think they have done a good job of making it so, like if we're doing a cost benefit analysis, doing a protest vote against Harris, as opposed to that allows Donald Trump to be president, is not necessarily worth it. The question then comes to those who are marginally attached, particularly younger voters. Does this have an effect and dampen enthusiasm for them? I think it remains to be seen, and I think the best guide for that is going to. The best guide, albeit an imperfect one, is going to be polling and we'll see.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I'm an introvert, so calling and canvassing terrify me. I've never volunteered for a campaign before, but this weekend I threw a postcarding party, and I'm seriously thinking of facing my fear and going out to knock on doors for Harris." There's one person's testimony. Here's another. "First time volunteer, I think. Milton and Sea Cliff on Long Island. You're on WNYC. Hi, Milton.

Milton: Morning. Hi, how you doing? Yes, this is my first time volunteering. I'm postcarding as well. I'm a performer, and there's a space in the story of QED that I was having postcarding parties, so I decided to volunteer and lick postcards or whatever. I guess you don't look anymore, but post postcards and send them. To, send them to swing state voters whatever, the six states Miss Michigan, Arizona, I'm spacing off the top, my head, but. I just, for me Mrs Harris has re-energized myself in the fact that she's a woman, a woman of color. She's way younger than Joe Biden. I just feel re-energized and I feel like the Democratic Party has been re-energized.

Brian Lehrer: Milton, what are the postcards say?

Milton: I haven't participated. I can't speak. I haven't attended one yet, but I'm not. That's a good question. I'm not sure because she's having the owner of QED having a bunch of them up until the election, so. I'm sorry, I can't speak. I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Okay. Thanks so much for checking in. Call us again. Philip, it's interesting. Our first texter and our first caller both talked about postcard parties. I'm sitting here thinking, postcard parties, when they could send 400,000 emails or social media posts in the same amount of time.

Philip Bump: Yes. There's been a good amount of research that's been done on how best to turn out voters. There's a group there at Yale that done a lot of research in this regard. one of the key things that is effective in terms of getting people to commit to turning out into voting for a particular candidate is making a personal one-to-one connection. What campaigns try and do is they try and figure out how to split that. How does it split that line? How to make it so that people feel comfortable in reaching out to voters, but also that they have an effect on voters.

Postcards are a way in which you do that. You send a postcard, you write a little note on it, hey, Joe Schmo, whatever you happen to be, I hope you go out and vote. Here's the information about your polling places. Make a plan to go out and vote. A person gets that mail, and it says information broadly about Harris and about where to vote. It's from someone. You can see it's handwritten. It's not like one of those pre-printed things that the anticipation is will have a more of an effect than simply just getting a random piece of mail from Kamala Harris.

Of course, the thing that campaigns really want you to do is go out and knock on doors, particularly on the weekend before and on election day or in the period when votes are being collected, and just say, hey, look, now's the time you got to go vote. What can we do to make it so you can vote today? At times, the Democrats have gotten banned together, and they'll drive you to the polls and do whatever it takes. That thing that sort of thing is extremely effective and can make a difference, particularly in a close race.

Postcards are a way to get involved, that is, is probably not the most effective, but is something that manages to find that middle ground between what people actually will do and what is actually useful.

Brian Lehrer: I guess maybe if senior citizens vote disproportionately compared to other age groups, which is a fact, they're still looking at their regular mail, sometimes more or even to the exclusivity or to the exclusion of any digital device. Yes, snail mail, as we might call it, is still important. I see, I see my mailbox, I see my parents’ mailbox. There's still tons of campaign-related mail that comes all the time.

Philip Bump: Sure, but importantly, too, a postcard, as soon as you pick it up, you see it. It's not like you have to open an envelope. That's why campaigns like it.

Brian Lehrer: Great point. Kathleen in South Orange, you're on WNYC. Hi, Kathleen.

Kathleen: Hey, how's it going? this weekend I volunteered with Susan Wilde campaign. It's a swing district. She's in a swing district in Pennsylvania. I went out and doorknocked for her and also for the ticket, so also for Harris. It was a really fun experience to doorknock and it was really great to just chat with fellow citizens and just hear some of their concerns and their how they're feeling about the election. It was the first time I ever did it and it was a lot of fun.

Brian Lehrer: What kind of responses did you get from people if you were having direct communication with potential voters?

Kathleen: A lot of people didn't answer their doors. You could tell that they were home and I'm sure they're being inundated with things like this, I would think. The couple of people that we had conversations with, it was really gratifying. I was asking a lot about, like, what are the big issues for them? A lot of people were talking about jobs and the economy and just how expensive things are in healthcare.

I was inspired by the messages that I heard during the convention and really was trying to connect with people over some of our shared values of things, because we were in eastern Pennsylvania. It was a lot different socio-economically, demographically than where I live in South Orange, but really trying to connect with people over the things that we all have in common and really trying to create those connections.

Brian Lehrer: I'll say we have three callers out of our ten lines who were telling a similar story to yours in at least this respect. They don't come from Pennsylvania, they don't live in Pennsylvania, but because their state is not a swing state. They're campaigning in Pennsylvania for Kamala Harris. There's probably a lot of you out there like that.

Kathleen: Yes. I just was so inspired by Michelle Obama's "do something" and just how many of us can get out there and do something for our democracy? It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to connect with my neighbors. I went with an organization called Soma Action in South Orange and Maplewood, and it was a lot of fun. It felt really gratifying to do something. I feel like as a white woman, it's white women disproportionately voted so much for Trump. I feel like we need to get out and be the change, too.

Brian Lehrer: Kathleen, thank you very much for your call. All right, we're going to take a break, and then we are actually finally going to get to the new debate over the debates. We'll get to some RFK Junior analysis and how much Philip Bump, who follows the numbers behind politics as his ID line on the Washington Post website, says how much he thinks it might matter. I was having a debate about this with some friends over the weekend. I have my opinion. They had theirs. We'll see what Philip Bump thinks, see what you think. 212-433-WNYC on any aspect of this call or text and stay with us.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Washington Post columnist Philip Bump and you on the Monday after the Democratic convention. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. 71 days until Election Day. Translation, 10 weeks and a day, a lot less until early voting begins in some places. Three days after RFK Junior dropped out and endorsed Donald Trump. We'll talk about the implications of that in a minute, but let's talk about this debates news. Remind us, why did Biden want the muting policy for the candidate whose turn it wasn't to speak? Why would it be in Harris's interest to undo it?

Philip Bump: The theory at the time was that the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, wanted to have the mic shut off, in part because they just had seen what happened during the first debate in 2020, which is that Donald Trump just railroaded the entire conversation. He didn't do much good. He did not come off looking terribly great after having done so, but the Biden campaign retrospectively, probably because they wanted to ensure that Biden was able to focus and do the best job he could, they advocated for having this switch made to the mics.

The Harris campaign, by contrast, is happy to have Donald Trump start chattering at any point in time during the debate. They feel as though Donald Trump will more than happily and very eagerly step on his debate talking points if he has allowed the chance to respond audibly to what it is that the vice president saying, and the Trump campaign, by contrast, doesn't want that to happen.

There's this really interesting tension going on at the moment in which the nature of the race has changed so fundamentally since Biden dropped out and Harris became the nominee. Trump is now definitely on the defensive. His response to this has always been, I'm just going to do what it is that I like to do, and I'm going to bring on Corey Lewandowski, who guided me in 2016 and wrote a book called Let Trump Be Trump. He's going to let Trump be Trump, and I'm just going to just talk. That's how I'm successful.

Of course, he's lost the popular vote the previous two times he's run. He never seems to acknowledge that, but this is the thinking is that Trump wants to go in there and he wants to just say whatever's on the top of his mind. He thinks that's successful. He now has a campaign team that has run real campaigns successfully. They don't think that's the best strategy. It seems like they're saying, hey, why don't we actually shut off the mics in between? Harris is saying, no, no, no, let the guy talk himself [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Well, I've never bought the line that Trump doesn't actually do debate prep. He was mocking Biden. mocking Biden before this first debate when there was so much news coverage of Biden going into a retreat mode to do debate prep in a concentrated way, while Trump was saying, I don't need debate prep, I know what I think, I know what I believe, I know why I'm the best candidate, I'm just going to go out there and do it.

That was never the case. He does a debate prep. He, from what I've read since confirming that he did debate prep for that debate to practice "looking presidential," by following that shut mic rule. Of course, it turned out that the quieter that he was, the better it was for him because Biden was in the process of destroying his own campaign without any help from Donald Trump, but that was studied on Trump's part, too.

Philip Bump: Yes, that's right. People may remember in 2020, they did debate prep before the first debate. That was when Chris Christie got COVID right, when they were sitting in a room together, so he absolutely has done this.

Yes, your listeners are going to be aware of the fact that Donald Trump does not always present a realistic picture of the world and his role in it. He makes these claims because he wants to seem like this all-natural, truth-telling, yada, yada, yada, but in reality, he does work on these things.

It's just that in the moment, even when he's sitting at a press conference or sitting at a speech in which he's got words on the teleprompter, that his advisors have done a lot of polling and say, this is what you should say, he can't help it. He just can't help it. He likes to approach it the way he likes to approach it. I don't think there's going to be anything that will keep him from doing that, which is why his campaign would be like what's-- I'm sure they'd be happy to have control of the switch themselves.

Brian Lehrer: Although if it worked to his advantage in 2020, maybe you're saying that it didn't, but I think the, but the presumption was that it did work to his advantage in 2020 to be able to interrupt whenever he wanted, make him look dominant, make him look like he knew what he was talking about. Given his freewheeling and always on offense style and that he wants to reinforce that, why would he resist that now?

Philip Bump: Well, I think he wants to do that. That's my anticipation. Again, I don't have any inside reporting on this, but i would be very--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but that he's being restrained by his campaign officials.

Philip Bump: Exactly, and/or that they have, for the moment, managed to convince him this is the best way forward, which also is another pattern we've seen in Trump's case.

Brian Lehrer: There's even some speculation now that Trump will find an excuse to refuse to debate Harris at all because he might no longer see a debate as in his interest. Do you see that as a possibility, or do you think the very existence of a debate favors one candidate more than another now, in a way that we can assume?

Philip Bump: Not necessarily, no. Debates are always wild cards. It's hard to anticipate what's going to happen in them. He certainly started making noises about this last night. He had posted on Truth Social that he thought ABC News was too biased because they had fair coverage of a guest on one of the Sunday talk shows. He started making noises about, oh, maybe I shouldn't be on ABC.

Obviously, it is in his interest and any political campaign's interest to try and shape the structure of a debate in a way that favors them the most. He wanted to have a big crowd at a Fox News rally-- Oh, or I said Fox News rally, which is actually more accurate, Fox News debate. Of course that would, that would favor him. He wants people there who are cheering and jeering as he wants them to. I see this more as gamesmanship. I would be surprised if he backs out of it because it would be so easy to say, oh, look at him, he's too afraid to debate.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it would look bad to swing voters if they're paying enough attention if he looks like he's afraid to debate and not going through with that aspect of modern democracy. We're still getting people writing and calling about postcards, so I'm going to do one more little round on this. Listener writes, "Postcards, just asking people to get out and vote. Democratic voting list sending to Arizona. Even my 92-year-old neighbor is getting involved," writes one person, who I guess is also involved in postcard parties. Andrea in Brooklyn is calling about postcards in support of campaigns. Hi, Andrea, you're on WNYC.

Andrea: Hi. I'm going to be one of those weirdos that says, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you. I'm one of those weirdos who says, yes, I can hear you just fine.

Andrea: [laughs] Oh, thanks. Thank you. Thank you for taking my call. It's actually my second time calling. I've been writing postcards for months. It's a really well-organized system. It's not random. You have to register to be a writer. You get names in the mail, lists of names to send it to, and often not names, just addresses. They're well crafted for each state or for each candidate. You're not writing your own opinion or your own little clever whatever.

One of the main things is the postcards do not ask for money. That's really big because I get 1,000 emails and texts every day from every manner of a Democrat since I gave a little bit of money, and I can't give an opinion without being asked for money. It's really great. Apparently, studies show it does make a difference. People can just stick it on their refrigerators and remind themselves to vote or to register. A lot of them are just to register.

If I could say one more thing. There are two kinds of postcards. Some, you're actually writing a few lines of "Register now today," or whatever. The other kind is the message is pre-printed and you're writing, "Thanks for voting. Thanks for being a voter." You write your first name, comma, "A volunteer."

Brian Lehrer: It's a personal touch. I get your main point there, not asking for money. It's refreshing in that way. Andrea, thank you. Call us again. Philip, I think all our listeners know, or most of them do, that RFK Junior dropped out of the race on Friday, or technically, he suspended his campaign. He says he's keeping his name on the ballot in non-swing states for the wild card scenario where no presidential candidate gets enough electoral votes and it gets into Congress and maybe they'll choose me. He's taking his name off the ballot in all the swing states that he can to help Donald Trump win.

Your most recent piece is called Kennedy is choosing to trust Trump. Let's see how that goes. Why are you raising that issue of Kennedy trusting Trump?

Philip Bump: Well, because he explicitly said-- As he was withdrawing himself from the race, he explicitly said, "I choose to believe that Donald Trump will make good on his pledge," that pledge being that healthy eating is going to be his legacy in politics, which is just like, I don't know how you believe that. [inaudible 00:33:26]

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Is that ordering the most healthy thing on the McDonald's menu in addition to the triple burger?

Philip Bump: Exactly right. [crosstalk] salad twice a year. I actually wrote a piece this morning that talks about the real alignment here is that Kennedy and Trump both take a subjective approach to reality, that they both orient their politics around what they believe to be true and then gathering information that bolsters that, as opposed to the way we would hope politicians would act, which is that you start with objectivity and then make your decisions based on what's actually happening in the world. I think that's the real alignment here.

To this broader question of what happens. We have polling. We've been doing polling for some time that asks both Harris versus Trump and Harris versus Trump with other people. One of the things we've seen, even just in Washington Post, ABC News, Ipsos polling that came out like a week or two ago, is that there isn't really that much difference that, A, that Robert Kendedy doesn't have that much support in the first place. He's generally polling around 5% nationally. B, that those sorts of voters, the kind that are inspired by third party candidates are loosely attached to politics. They're probably as likely to just stay home, say, I'm not going to vote for anyone, then if Kennedy's not going to be on a ballot, right, as to actually vote for him.

Then three, that the idea all along has been that the Kennedy voter was often someone that disliked both Biden and Trump. Harris gets in the race. A lot of those people shifted Harris. We can see that in polling from Pew and others, and then there just wasn't that much left. Yes, maybe someone will go to Trump, and maybe someone will go to Trump in swing states, but all the measures we have suggest, including Nate Silver's most recent analysis, that it's probably not going to make that much of a difference.

Brian Lehrer: I want to come back to that, the numbers, because I could argue the numbers a different way. I'm not a pollster or a polling expert like Nate Silver, and you're watching this all much more closely than I am, that aspect of it, but I want to come back to that in a minute and throw the alternative argument at that, that it could be devastating for Harris.

First, I'm glad you brought up the healthy eating aspect of the Kennedy endorsement, because I wanted to bring that up, too. Kennedy cited three policy reasons that he's aligned with Trump. That the war in Ukraine is the US's fault, not Russia's, that views like his, like Kennedy's, are being censored by government and the media, and to fight what he calls the chronic disease epidemic, things like obesity in the United States by disempowering pharmaceutical and other big companies.

It's that last one that really left me scratching my head. We know Kennedy is anti-vax, but he thinks a Republican Trump administration is going to disempower the big processed food industry or polluters or pharma on anything besides vaccines. Half the purpose of the MAGA movement is to abolish the administrative state, and that certainly includes public health regulations of all kinds on corporate America. Do you think I'm missing something?

Philip Bump: No. I think you're right. I would say that Kennedy is-- There was a savviness to his move here. He understood that he had at least something to offer at this point in time. If his support eroded anymore, he probably wouldn't have it to offer anymore, but he could at least go to both campaigns and be like, look, let's cut a deal. He tried to reach out to Harris, and she apparently snubbed him and he reached out to Trump, and Trump was very responsive.

That's not a bad bet to make with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is very much in the habit of rewarding people who have provided a boost to him. He's also in the habit of burning those people [laughs], which is the point of my piece on Friday. Donald Trump fundamentally doesn't care about policy. Right. He has certain things that motivate him in what he does, but he has no objection to taking Robert Kennedy and plunking him down as head of Health and Human Services or something like that. He doesn't care about that. There's no indication he does. Then Kennedy has free reign to do what he wants to do. From that standpoint, yes, I can see why Kennedy made that bet.

Brian Lehrer: On the question of vaccines. It turns out Trump doesn't need to make a deal with RFK to use the government to see that children don't get vaccinated, and presumably for anything. Here's a clip from a Trump rally in June, a line he routinely uses on the stump.

Donal Trump: In addition, I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or mask mandate from kindergarten through college. [applause]

Brian Lehrer: Now that RFK endorsed him, that line, which he uses at multiple rallies, is getting more attention. I guess my question is, do you take that to mean just COVID vaccines? Because it sounds more general. I listened to a few of these this morning to prep for this. He says it the same way every time. No federal funding for schools that mandate vaccines from K through college, is a way that he frequently says it. Then he throws onm or a mask mandate. A mask mandate makes it sound like it's about COVID but the rest of it, the part that he actually speaks about vaccines, sounds more general- any vaccines for kids, which would imply polio vaccines and everything else.

Philip Bump: You're right. This is part of his thumb speech. He says it in that way that you just heard over and over and over again. He is very intentionally being vague about it. When this first came out and people first started to notice as part of his dumb speech, there was a response from his campaign spokesperson which suggested he was only talking about COVID because he understood that he was speaking to a member of the media, and that was what the media wanted to hear.

Of course, Donald Trump could change it if he wanted to. He could say there will be no coronavirus vaccine mandate, but he doesn't, because he wants his people to hear what they want to hear. If people who are Trump-curious hear that and read somewhere, oh, he only meant COVID, they can believe it. If his base thinks that it applies to MMR and everything else, they can believe that. That's it. That's Donald Trump's approach to politics, and that's why he says it the way he does.

Brian Lehrer: back to the numbers. I'm seeing analyses all over the map, frankly, about the electoral implications of the RFK endorsement from what you said, which is that his support had become so small and not all his voters will go to Trump anyway. To, even if he drives just 1 or 2% more to Trump, maybe even half a percent, that's the margin to begin with in many key swing states. Remember the 11,000 votes in Georgia? Remember how close Pennsylvania was? This could actually be a game-changer with not many votes as a percentage being changed. What do you think?

Philip Bump: Yes, it could. You're right. We don't know fundamentally, and this is one of the challenges that we've had over the course of the past eight years is that these very small differences can have a big effect. 2016, Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college vote by something like 88,000 votes in three states. What was it? What made the difference? You can point to 19 different things.

That may be the case again this year, that you can point to 19 different things. Maybe it was RFK and maybe he shifted that half percentage point. It is absolutely the case that Donald Trump would rather have RFK on his side than not, but whether or not that makes the difference is extremely hard to predict. My sense is it probably have a small, make a small difference, but as you point out, that small difference could be the big difference when it comes to a particular state on election day. We'll have to see. It may also be the case that Kamala Harris extends her lead and it becomes very obvious that this didn't make a difference, or vice versa, that Trump extends his lead and it becomes obvious that it was.

Brian Lehrer: last thing, here are two clips that I wonder if you think represent a next phase that the Harris campaign would be moving into. Here is Harris from her acceptance speech. Just a few seconds to go.

Kamala Harris: I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired the world, that here in this country, anything is possible, that nothing is out of reach, an America where we care for one another, look out for one another, and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us.

Brian Lehrer: It's all vibe there, patriotism, optimism, building community across political lines. Maybe now they have to lean into the policy-oriented messages, like in this moment from the convention in the Tim Walz speech.

Tim Walz: If you're a middle-class family or a family trying to get into the middle class, Kamala Harris is going to cut your taxes. [applause] If you're getting squeezed by prescription drug prices, Kamala Harris is going to take on big pharma. [applause] If you're hoping to buy a home, Kamala Harris is going to help make it more affordable. [applause] No matter who you are, Kamala Harris is going to stand up and fight for your freedom to live the life that you want to lead.

Brian Lehrer: Philip, they'll be trying to give Americans reason to believe not just that Trump is a dangerous and destructive person to have in charge of the country, but that Harris can actually do a better job at solving people's problems. I was actually having a lively debate last night with some friends over how much the election will be decided on policy. I tend to lean toward more of a policy-driven outcome from this point. Do you have an opinion on that based on your reporting?

Philip Bump: Well, look, you are one of the best-informed people in the country about politics. You have a lot of information at your disposal, and you seek out that information in a way that a lot of Americans don't. I think one of the smartest things that Donald Trump ever said, he said in a conversation in July of 2015, right after he got into the race and he was being pressed to what are your policy proposals? What do you want to, what are you going to do? He said, I don't think Americans care. I don't think they care about policy proposals. I think that the media likes them and I like to look at them, but I don't think Americans do.

I think that's right. I think most Americans don't really care about that. I think most Americans look at political candidates and want to have a sense of what it is that they plan to do. I think Donald Trump has benefited from the idea that people remember basically 2017 to 2019 as a period in which things cost less and they had jobs. That's just generally how people think about Donald Trump, or did, at least when he was running against Joe Biden.

Donald Trump is not a policy guy. He offers no policies. One of the reasons the Democrats have been so effective at hammering on Project 2025 is because Trump can't say no, that's not what I plan to do here. I've articulated what I plan to do.

From that standpoint, it works, but again, Project 2025, there are specific elements of it that people have heard about and dislike, but it just has this vague reputation of like, oh, there's this bad thing that Donald Trump wants to enact. The Democrats play that up. That vague sense of what's going to happen, I think drives a lot of political decision making.

I think that what you even heard from Walz right there, he didn't really offer specifics. He just said, here's what we're going to do in a very loose way. I think that's what they're going to continue to do. One of the truisms of politics, of course, is that when you have the momentum, you don't change what you're doing. You don't shift if polls continue moving in the way that they've been moving as opposed to just reaching this point of stasis, as I mentioned earlier, I think Harris team just continues doing what they're doing, which is highlighting this sense of what the election is about as opposed to specifically what she plans to do.

Brian Lehrer: Philip Bump, national columnist for the Washington Post. Thanks, Philip. Thanks a lot.

Philip Bump: You bet. Thanks.

 

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