Anika Begay
Vice President Harris is close to picking her running mate, and the stakes are high as the election between her and former President Donald Trump inches closer. Here’s a look at the state of the race.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Let’s move on to Vice President Harris, who is just hours away from choosing her running mate. Who will it be? That’s the question right now. Also, whoever it is, what impact will it have on the race? Well, here are the answers, as far as we have them, from NPR political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Hey, Domenico.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey there.
KELLY: Give us a short list. Who is Harris going to talk to?
MONTANARO: Well, you know, this is really about Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, and Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota. And any time a presidential candidate picks a running mate, they think about balance. You know, that’s the most important thing, whether it’s ideological or geographic. Sometimes it can be both.
Just look at, you know, who he’s considering. I mean, you know, you think about someone like Walz, he appeals to progressives, maybe he could appeal to those middle-aged voters in the upper Midwest with his message. He’s the guy, by the way, who gets credited with starting this anti-Trump, anti-MAGA message as, quote, “weird.” Senator Kelly from Arizona, you know, he’s from a key swing state. He’s also seen as more of a moderate and could help with the immigration message. And, of course, you have Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. He’s seen as a moderate and maybe in the most important presidential state, and he’s got a 60 percent approval rating there, so that’s pretty good.
KELLY: That’s pretty damn good. OK, whoever it is, this ticket, obviously, is going to face a lot of scrutiny very quickly. There’s no on-ramp here. How is Harris framing her candidacy? How are Republicans framing her candidacy?
MONTANARO: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have said that Harris is in a sort of honeymoon phase right now. I would say that’s true to a certain extent, but it’s more like I want to think of it as the liquid gelatin phase (laughter).
KELLY: Okay.
MONTANARO: Opinions about her haven’t solidified yet. And the fight is on to really define her. Here are excerpts from two multi-million dollar ads that have been running non-stop in hotly contested states. The first one is from MAGA Inc., a super PAC that supports Donald Trump. The other one is from Harris’s campaign. And you can hear in these, both of them focus on her time as a prosecutor in California.
(ARCHIVED RECORDING SOUND)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Before she was the most progressive U.S. senator, Kamala Harris was the liberal prosecutor of San Francisco, the most progressive in all of California. She led an MS-13…
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT, “FEARLESS”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The one thing Kamala Harris has always been: fearless. As a prosecutor, she has put murderers and abusers behind bars. As California…
MONTANARO: There are very different ways they’re trying to frame Harris’s resume here. And the Trump campaign is spending a lot of time and money criticizing her on immigration as well. But so far, it looks like Harris’s message is winning because her image seems to have improved since she got in.
KELLY: OK, let’s put the structure aside and just talk numbers, because you’re a numbers guy. You published a new analysis today on the electoral map, and I wanted to ask you, how has it changed since Harris came in?
MONTANARO: Well, overall, this is a very, very close race right now, and we’re pretty much back to where we were before President Biden’s terrible performance in the debate in late June. What we’re seeing is, in the blue wall states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin – they’re now really neck and neck. Trump had a small lead there before Harris got in. Now he’s gone.
In the other four states we’re watching closely, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, he’s now within the margin of error in all of them, which is a big change. Trump had built a lead there in the Sun Belt states of about five or six points, but he’s now backpedaled. That’s largely because of Harris’s appeal to younger, nonwhite voters in these very diverse states. Trump has a slight edge in those states right now because of his consistent leads, but the Harris campaign is feeling optimistic that his momentum can continue there and that he can perhaps overcome some of the deficits with some of their organizational advantages.
KELLY: So in the minute we have left, sketch out what the roadmap looks like, like the path to the presidency for each candidate. Start with Harris.
MONTANARO: Yes. The easiest route for Harris is through the blue wall. If she carries Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and that one congressional district in the Omaha, Nebraska area, that would put her at exactly 270 electoral votes without needing any of the Sun Belt states.
But for Trump, he really needs to win all the Sun Belt states he’s favored to win, and he needs to take one of those blue wall states because winning the Sun Belt would put him at 268, which is just shy of the 270 he needs to win. His campaign has been focused on Pennsylvania. Trump groups have spent $50 million there of their more than $85 million in ad dollars. The next highest is Georgia. And this election could very well come down to those two states, Georgia and Pennsylvania. If Trump wins both, he’ll get to 270 without needing any of the other states we talked about.
KELLY: This is Domenico Montanaro from NPR. Thank you, Domenico.
MONTANARO: You’re welcome.
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Please visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for more information.
NPR transcripts are created on a time-sensitive basis by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR programming is the audio recording.
