The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 31 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump very well could still win this presidential race, but he and his allies are suddenly pointing fingers of blame at others in case of a potential loss. Trump is reportedly angry with Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, he’s raging about supposed voter fraud in Pennsylvania, and perhaps most important, his allies are sounding new alarms about the ground game in key swing states. All this comes as new polls show a problem for Trump. While the race is still unquestionably tied, those surveys show that more engaged voters are tilting toward Kamala Harris, which means more pressure on Trump’s ground operation to turn out low-propensity voters. And if that operation isn’t up to snuff, that’s a potential issue for him. Today, we’re discussing all this with Joel Payne, a senior official at MoveOn. He’s going to help us understand what’s really happening with both campaigns’ ground games and talk about an innovative new technique Democrats are using. Welcome, Joel.
Joel Payne: Greg, thanks so much for having me. Good to be with you.
Sargent: Axios reports that Trump has privately blamed RNC chair Michael Whatley for dropping the ball on supposed election integrity issues, which means he fears a loss. Trump is baselessly claiming on social media that Pennsylvania is already cheating on a large scale. He’s worried about the state. Republican National Committee is suing Bucks County in Pennsylvania. Clearly the RNC is feeling big-time pressure from Trump to find voter fraud so he can lay the groundwork now to contest the potential loss. Joel, how worried should we be about this? Are Democrats going to be ready for postelection litigation?
Payne: Well, Greg, your analysis is right. It’s really clear that the Trump campaign and his allies are concerned because Kamala Harris is running a much stronger campaign. She’s closing stronger than he is. They are setting up a predicate to challenge the results of the election, regardless of however many baseless claims they may try to come up with. There’s something to be concerned with in terms of making sure that the public understands what’s happening here. What’s helpful is that they’re doing it out in public and that they’ve road-tested the strategy before. It’s easier after 2016 and 2020 to understand what Trump’s M.O. is here, but we need to keep voters vigilant and help them understand what they’re hearing. It’s very likely that whatever happens on election night, Donald Trump is going to claim that he wins, regardless of the data.
Sargent: They certainly have road-tested it in the past, with a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. There’s an irony to all this as well. Axios reports that the RNC is putting a bigger priority on “election integrity issues” than on the ground game. A lot of that, the ground game, has been outsourced to Elon Musk’s PAC. Wired magazine now reports that in Michigan, the GOP is largely winging it with its ground operation, leading to some panic. One Trump-world source describes the Musk operation as a bunch of grifters. Joel, this comes after Cameron Joseph reported that despite $75 million that Musk pumped into America PAC, his PAC to fund the ground game, Republicans privately fear this could be swamped by the ground operation from Harris. Can I ask candidly, what are you guys seeing out there on the ground? We’re getting some mixed signals. Can you clear it up for us?
Payne: You mentioned Elon Musk; let’s not leave out Charlie Kirk. He’s the other Republican ace in the hole. That’s Donald Trump’s dream team that’s going to help him organize the electorate. I certainly would rather have the folks on the Democratic side, the David Plouffes and the Jen O’Malley Dillons, who are experienced, well-respected organizers, than the folks that Trump have. But we also know that Donald Trump was able to win an election in 2016 with virtually no ground game. While I’m certainly happy with our team compared to their team, we still would be mistaken to drop our guard.
In terms of what we’re seeing out there, there is no doubt, from a MoveOn perspective, and we know [from] a lot of our partners in the progressive space, after Kamala Harris became the top of the ticket, that was the shot in the arm that a lot of organizations on the left needed. President Biden: very well respected, did a great job as president, but his message politically was not resonating. Kamala Harris gave us a second look, not just with the Democratic base but with low-propensity voters, folks that will need to turn out to keep that anti-Trump coalition together.
So things are looking better. We’ve got to finish strong. We’ve got to get people out knocking doors. That’s why, at MoveOn, we’re so excited about some of the work that we’re doing with our community-based relational organizing with partners like Vote Rev, who are helping to make sure that we’re not only doing this community-based organizing but we’re doing it with the advantage of really smart behavioral science behind it as well.
Sargent: I want to get to that in a minute. You raise an interesting point there, which is that in 2016 Trump really did win, not nationally, but in the swing states—[in] enough swing states to win through the Electoral College without much of a ground game because he knows how to turn out a certain type of low-propensity conservative voter. We saw that again in 2020. Right now, I’m wondering, and maybe you can shed some light on this, whether he can squeeze that juice out of the lemon one more time without the operation. What’s your sense of that?
Payne: Let’s think about what he’s trying to do. You mentioned the low-propensity voters, but let’s be crystal clear about what we’re talking about. These are mostly white male voters—the Joe Rogan, Barstool Sports, that universe of folks—who are not interested, have low trust in politics, and who are turned on by conspiracy theories and who are, frankly, engaged by the type of ugly rhetoric we saw at the Madison Square Garden rally that Donald Trump and his gang of MAGA allies put on a few days ago. These are the folks they’re trying to reach. It’s not an expansion strategy to go and find swing voters. They’re not trying to go win over people in the middle. They’re not trying to win over the Bulwark crowd. They’re not trying to win over Never Trumpers or Nikki Haley voters. They’re going after people who are less likely to vote.
One of the advantages of what they’re trying to do is that there are a larger pool of those voters. Those folks are also less likely to show up. That is something, as a Democrat, that you got to feel good about: The voters that Kamala Harris is trying to turn out in the closing days are folks who are more likely to show up. The folks that Donald Trump wants to get out, the “persuadables” that he’s identified, they’re less likely to show up. Does that mean she’s going to win and he’s going to lose? No, but I like our chances with that equation.
Sargent: I want to point out to listeners that it’s not a joke that he’s outsourcing some of his get-out-the-vote to Charlie Kirk. He actually is relying on a certain type of young male podcaster to get this Barstool vote out. But on the other side of the equation, the Harris operation—and nobody ever talks about this for some reason—is also trying to target another type of low-propensity voter. With the help now of that Madison Square Garden hate rally, trying to move Hispanics in Pennsylvania, for instance.
Can you talk about the Harris efforts to reach low-propensity voters? Who are those voters? Trump is going after these low-propensity male[s]. The Harris operation, as you say, has a smaller pool of low-propensity voters to draw on, but they are trying to get them. Can you talk about that?
Payne: Sure. It depends on where you are. If you’re in a state like Pennsylvania … you talked about the Madison Square Garden rally. There are 400,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania who probably did not like their—of course, Puerto Rico is a part of the United States—native island being called “an island of garbage.” That is a very important message to get in front of those folks over and over and over again through paid media, through door-to-door contacts, and we know that the campaign has plenty resources to do that.
Maybe if you’re in a place like Michigan, there are folks who maybe in the past would have supported a Nikki Haley but they feel alienated by Donald Trump and by this version of the Republican Party. And so that’s why Kamala Harris has been going on tours with folks like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. That’s why she is going to uncommon places and finding strange bedfellows, because she understands that that broad coalition; you’ve got to keep them together from 2020 in order to be able to defeat Trump again. That’s also frankly why groups like ours and others in the progressive space have been working to make sure voters understand the important stakes of not parking your protest vote with a third-party candidate like a Jill Stein or an RFK Jr.… or No Labels in the past. We know that every vote in an election this close is gonna make a difference. Democrats have gotten really good at understanding what it means to coalition-build and to maintain that coalition.
Sargent: It’s interesting. You really have a coalition of low-propensity voters that the Harris campaign and Democrats are going after. She’s campaigning with Jennifer Lopez, which is clearly an effort to capitalize on the Madison Square Garden hate rally and Hispanics. She’s, as you said, campaigning with Liz Cheney—although those are maybe more generally high-propensity voters. She’s also reaching out pretty hard, and the Democratic Party is reaching out pretty hard, to voters who might be tempted by RFK or a third-party candidate. That is definitely a certain type of low-propensity voter who might be gettable for Democrats. The pool is smaller of these voters for Harris than it is for Trump, but it exists, right? Can you talk about who those voters are?
Payne: It really depends on where we’re talking about geographically. You alluded to JLo. In a place like Nevada, they might be younger Hispanic voters who are new to that marketplace. And [in] Pennsylvania, you mentioned the Madison Square Garden rally. There’s 400,000 or so Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania who you can bet that the Harris campaign is going to make sure sees what happened at that rally and some of the dreck that was coming from those speakers and the really disgusting comments about Puerto Rico and just other.... [It’s] so funny. The focus on those comments takes the attention off the fact that Donald Trump has been talking like that the whole time. But that was a breakthrough moment, and they have the resources to put that in front of those voters.
And then in a place like Michigan, you have a different type of voter. Maybe they are more open to a Nikki Haley, and they were thinking about sitting this out. They’re choosing between, not Harris and Trump but maybe the couch and Harris. And you can go after those voters. The campaign has shown itself to be really smart about alternating heir tactic around all of those different universes of voters.
Sargent: They definitely are adopting a whole bunch of different targeted messages. I want to bring up what some new polls are telling us about a problem that Trump faces. CNN finds Harris up over Trump by five in Michigan, six in Wisconsin, and a tie in Pennsylvania. Those Michigan and Wisconsin numbers are a bit rosy, but the poll finds her narrowly ahead among those extremely motivated to vote in all those three states. New Marquette poll puts Harris up one in Wisconsin, finds Democrats have an enthusiasm edge there. New Monmouth poll has a tie in Pennsylvania; that finds her significantly up with frequent voters, whereas Trump does better with much more infrequent voters. Does that put more pressure on Trump to get out these low-propensity voters on his side? Can his ground game do that or not?
Payne: The way I always talk about this, and I think about it, is Kamala Harris, it would appear, has a higher ceiling. She has more of a pool of available voters who are willing to potentially vote for her. Now she doesn’t have the name ID that Donald Trump does, and where she has name ID, it is not the depth of name ID where they understand her political philosophy the way they might understand Donald Trump’s. So there’s work to do in educating new voters or people who are new to Kamala Harris. Political junkies like you and I may not believe this, but there are people who literally, within the last 10 days, are just plugging into this campaign, so you have to catch them up and help them understand. I do think that Kamala Harris has to feel like she’s got some wind at her back coming down the stretch here.
One thing that I’ll point out: A lot of the public polls have Harris underperforming with African American voters as an example. You would have to believe that she’s going to underperform by anywhere from eight to 12 points what Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did with Black voters. Now, is that possible? Sure. That would suggest a pretty significant resetting of the coalitions. I’m not sure if the evidence is there on the ground, beyond bluster and beyond some anecdotes, that that’s the case. So those are the political realities that both of the campaigns are jousting with right now. As a lot of people have said, you’d rather be Kamala Harris with this set of political circumstances than Donald Trump.
Sargent: Let me ask you about what you guys are doing to get out the vote. If you could talk about outreach to African Americans as part of this, it would be helpful. MoveOn is using something called “community vote tripling,” which involves friend-to-friend outreach. Can you tell us what that’s all about?
Payne: Appreciate you asking. MoveOn, at our core, we are a community organization. We’re an online community organization, but we have always, not just in recent years, found this to be a really useful way to get at voters. It gets around the filters of lower-trust information sources. We know that we’re in an era of misinformation and in degraded trust in institutions. So when you’re able to have an organization like ours that can go and that can do community-based relational organizing—bloc by bloc, precinct by precinct, through friends, neighbors, people you know and trust—we find that to be really valuable in a moment like this where you need people to have high trust messengers in front of them.
Our vote tripling allows us to use our pool of members to get to some of these hard-to-reach voters. We call them surge voters. There’s about 1.5 million of them across the battleground states. And in many cases, they make the difference. They certainly made the difference in 2020, and we think they’ll make the difference again in 2024. We’re able to get in front of those folks through their friends and their neighbors, and we just find that to be more sustainable and more impactful.
The other thing I will say is, we’ve got great partners. We’ve worked with Vote Rev, who is a really creative entity that takes our experience and community-based organizing and relational organizing and matches it with behavioral data science and presents that as a real smart way to figure out, What’s going to move these folks most? What information do we need to get in front of them to get them off the couch? Someone who is in our target universe, did they not see that MSG rally? And if they didn’t, what’s the best way to get in front of them? That type of technology helps us do that. We found a lot of success with it. Particularly in a cycle like the one we’re in right now, we think it’s going to be really impactful going down the stretch.
Sargent: It really is clear that Democrats are experimenting with a whole bunch of new GOTV tech techniques and stuff. It’s very impressive. Can I ask, though, you mentioned earlier that Democrats do have to be concerned about the loss of African American votes. This is a real thing. Also, other nonwhite groups like Hispanics have been drifting to Trump. All that’s a genuine problem for Democrats. But how real is it, do you think? The data seems mixed on that. There are reasons to distrust it or at least to be a little skeptical of it. What are you guys seeing out there? How big a problem is it, and is it reversible?
Payne: I’ll start with what you said: The data is mixed. Anecdotally, it would be fair to say that there is a less strong grip on some parts of the African American and Latino vote share than there has been in the past on behalf of Democrats. There’s a lot of reasons for that. Economic challenges for those communities; as I like to say, like any other community in the country who feels the brunt of rising prices and wants to buy a home but can’t afford to do it, those communities feel that as well. Combined with that—I don’t want to give Donald Trump credit, but I will say Donald Trump has made at least a surface level effort to make a pitch to those voters.
As an African American political consultant, I’ll say, I think that’s good. I think it’s good that those voters are being treated as a persuasion universe, but that presents a challenge now for Democrats to not just retain those voters as a GOTV target but to treat them as a persuasion target. They’re not just a turnout universe that you reach out to two weeks before Election Day and give them logistics about where to vote, but you actually need to be on a regular basis persuading and earning their vote. The good thing about Kamala Harris is she’s very clear about this. She has, on many occasions, publicly talked about the need to earn the votes of these communities and not take them for granted. You’ve got the right candidate with the right frame of mind to continue to be viable with those groups of voters.
It’s unsustainable for Democrats to expect, over the long term, that you’re going to have 90, 91, 92 percent vote share with African Americans. We know that, historically in recent elections, the Latino vote share has gone down a bit; depending on who you believe, Donald Trump may get anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of the Latino vote this time around. There’s evidence to suggest that Republicans are going to continue to be more competitive with Latino votes in the near future. So Democrats are gonna have to vie for those voters maybe a little bit more aggressively and, again, not just as turnout voters, but as persuasion voters.
Sargent: Absolutely right. To wrap this up, Joel, tell us how Harris gets to a victory, from point A to point B to winning on the ground. What has to happen on the ground? And what are the three things about the ground that keep you awake at night, that could go wrong?
Payne: It’s a turnout election. You went through polls and gave a very good analysis of it, but really at the end of the day, what that tells me is that this is a turnout election. That means that we know it’s close, and it’s just about, what is your muscle on the ground? What’s your organization? I worked for Harry Reid about a decade ago. I’m familiar with that Reid machine in Nevada. What are the mechanics looking like in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina? Are you talking to the right people? Have you activated community-based organizers and trusted messengers on the ground in all those places? So that’s what I’m looking for.
I’ll say one big picture thing is the gender gap. In this election, the gender gap is going to be really significant to look at. Kamala Harris clearly is going to perform well with a lot of women voters. A determining stat in this election might be, Can her gender advantage with women outflank Trump’s gender advantage with men? I’m sure that the Harris campaign is thinking about that as well. And she wants to mitigate her challenges and some of her shortcomings with male voters, particularly in rural parts of the country where Democrats tend to struggle.
Sargent: What’s the bottom line then? Two things, right? That gender gap has to hold. In other words, she has to really get that big double-digit lead over women. And female voters have to be at least what, 55 percent of the electorate? And then maybe she wins? If the female vote doesn’t come out at the levels we expect it to, and there’s this unexpected surge of young male voters, then he wins, right? Is that the bottom line?
Payne: That’s a good way to top-line it. His potential surge with young male voters could be offset if she surges with white college women, college-graduate women who identify as white. She could surge with that population of voters, or she could over-perform, based on what the public polls are saying, with Black voters, particularly Black men. There are places where she could offset his gain. So use the early vote window, the time that we’re in right now, to lock down your for-sure voters and then spend that time on Election Day, and right before Election Day, getting in front of those sometimes voters, the folks that you might have to nudge to get out, that you might have to do a little bit more of a tried and true persuasion effort into turnout on the last hours of the campaign to get them to show up. Again, David Plouffe, Jen O’Malley Dillon, I like our chances with smart folks like that at the head of that organization.
Sargent: Well, they’ve certainly been there. They’ve certainly been in battle before, and so they’ve done well. Joel Payne, thanks so much for coming on with us today, man.
Payne: Greg, always a pleasure, always happy to join you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.