The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 28 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.
Over the weekend, Michelle Obama delivered an extraordinary speech in Michigan that comprehensively indicted Trump from every angle. She reminded us how catastrophic Trump’s presidency was, thoroughly aired out Trump’s debased moral character, and asked why the press expects Harris to meet basic standards of conduct that we expect in a leader without expecting anything at all from Trump. It was very powerful. But does this closing message have a chance at winning over the undecided voters who will ultimately decide this contest in the swing states? Today, we’re talking about this with Reed Galen, a former Republican strategist who was on the front lines of trying to peel undecided voters away from Trump for his group JointheUnion.us. Let’s just get right into it. Great to have you back on, Reed.
Reed Galen: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: Michelle Obama spoke at a rally for Kamala Harris in Michigan on Saturday. Let’s start by listening to this.
Michelle Obama (audio voiceover): So I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn. I hope that you’ll forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behavior, his obvious mental decline, his history as a convicted felon, a known … a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse, all of this, while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do, y’all.
Sargent: Reed, that strikes me as a clever appeal to undecided female voters who expect standards in public conduct from leadership figures. The Harris campaign is closing hard on this, aiming this messaging in part at moms who don’t want their kids subjected to this madness for another four years. What do you make of this appeal? What are you seeing out there among undecided women?
Galen: For undecided women, Mrs. Obama is an excellent communicator and messenger. Like her husband, they have transcended politics and are now part of the the iconography of America, for lack of a better way to put it. She has an ability to fill stadiums in her own right and to have people listen to her and take what she says seriously. And so for undecided women, she’s an excellent messenger. The question is now, How many people are frankly, Greg, still undecided? How many people are listening?
There are a lot of women who, and we’ve heard this anecdotally, said, like she did in her remarks, You don’t have to tell anybody what you do when you go into the voting booth. There are stickers now that are proliferating around target states in the stalls of ladies rooms that say when you go into the polling place, your husband doesn’t go with you. So this does have the potential to make this go from a very close race to a not close race at all, depending on how many independent and Republican women finally decide that, whether or not they’re a huge fan of Kamala Harris, they certainly want nothing more to do with Donald Trump.
Sargent: Can you tell us more about that demographic? Independent, undecided women, some of them are right-leaning, but not all. Who are these people exactly, in particular, in the swing states?
Galen: I’d say they tend to be white educated suburban. They’re the 35 to 55 demo—like me, maybe like you, Greg, Gen X, maybe early millennials—who are otherwise not necessarily conservative, but considered themselves Republicans back when that was a different thing. I worked for George W. Bush. I worked for John McCain. It was a different time. There’s some crossover with, say, a Nikki Haley.
Sargent: There really is this Nikki Haley demographic out there that Michelle Obama really might be pretty well suited to speaking to because those are people who are inclined against Trump to begin with. They just have to be talked out of deciding that Trump is going to be better for them on the economy, which he wouldn’t be. Anyway, I want to play another part of Michelle Obama’s speech in which she put a finer point on the double standard that Harris and Trump face. Listen to this.
Obama (audio voiceover): Can someone tell me why we are once again holding Kamala to a higher standard than her opponent? We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs. But for Trump, we expect nothing at all. No understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.
Sargent: Reed, this seems aimed at some women who have personally witnessed incompetent and morally degenerate men never held accountable for their failings. Are you seeing that type of sentiment out there among undecided female voters? And how effective do you think these types of appeals will be?
Galen: It’s important to understand that oftentimes Democrats, as much as I love them, don’t always understand the nature of how to fight in politics. Again, Michelle Obama is a much better messenger than many Democrats on this particular issue because I think she has so much social and political capital with American women. If there’s one person who’s been impugned more by right-wingers and conspiracy theories than Michelle Obama, Greg, I’m not sure who it is. The right fears her because they know how popular and how powerful her message is.
Sargent: I’ve got to say, all this from Michelle Obama brutally shames them. It’s just a fact about our political discourse right now that Trump’s obvious mental decline and his clear unfitness for the presidency, on display day after day after day, is really just treated often as not being news. I agree with you about Democrats. They sometimes don’t know how to fight, and on this in particular, they sometimes conclude in advance that attacking Trump’s derangement is a failing strategy because it’s “baked in” for voters. The derangement is baked in, so the media sees it as less of a story. But here, Michelle Obama is trying to focus the media spotlight on that. What do you think of the press’s performance on that particular aspect of all this?
Galen: Four years ago, Mrs. Obama said, When they go low, we go high, and now she’s like, No, when they go low, we’re going to meet them down there and punch them in the face. That’s the thing that she brings—she brought it in Chicago, and I think she brought it in these remarks too, which is, it’s not normal. What Mrs. Obama is trying to do vis-à-vis the media is say, Hey, get your act together.
Sargent: Let’s listen to one more part of Michelle Obama’s speech. Here goes.
Obama (audio voiceover): I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please. Do not put our lives in the hands of politicians. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need. So please, please, do not hand our fate over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us.
Sargent: It’s clear that the Harris campaign thinks that there’s this gettable demographic out there, maybe college-educated suburban men who have been awakened in some sense to the dangers that Dobbs poses to their own daughters and other female loved ones. Michelle Obama is aiming this right at them, and also at the low-propensity male voter who might be tempted by Trump’s celebrity and wealth and maybe even his notoriety and brushes with the law into thinking he’d be good with them somehow. What are you seeing out there on all that? Those two male demographics, what’s driving them, whether they can be peeled back by by these types of appeals?
Galen: Sure. The first group, we actually call Dobbs dads. We’ve done a ton of research on them. Again, they are suburban, educated, upper-income. Their kids go to good schools or they’re in college. If their wife works, it’s because she wants to, not because she has to. They are potentially gettable. But I would also say that we have to understand what the terms of victory are here, which is, if we can get 10,000 of those Dobbs dad, Greg, to just skip Trump, that’s a win. They’re Republican-leaning, but again, they don’t want.... They’re probably not comfortable with the topic of abortion. That’s the one thing that I was noting in her remarks as I was watching them, which is, Republicans fight campaigns in terms of values and stories and narratives.
Going through the litany of reproductive rights is important for some voters, but for Dobbs dads, the value proposition, like it has been for Republicans for many years is, Do you want someone, an unelected judge making a decision for your family? Do you want some politician in Washington, D.C., or in the state Capitol making a decision? Do you want somebody else, Greg, coming into your home and telling you how you have to live your life? That’s the value proposition: individual liberty. The issue is Dobbs or abortion. The value is individual liberty, and that’s sometimes where, again, I wish our Democratic friends would listen to us a little bit more, we know how to talk to these people. Just saying you have to support your wife because A through F on the issue scale is important, but it strikes at the wrong court. It strikes intellectually rather than emotionally.
Sargent: Right. Michelle Obama did have some stuff in there in her speech about what you’re talking about here, which is aimed directly at men saying you don’t want Republican politicians making decisions about your female loved ones’ lives.
Galen: But remember too, Greg, they don’t want any politicians making decisions about their lives. That’s the difference. That’s the distinction right there.
Sargent: It seems to me that there’s an appeal to a bunch of different male demographics there. As I brought up earlier, there’s this low-propensity male voter who might be tempted by Trump’s celebrity and notoriety into voting for him. What are you seeing out there on that?
Galen: I’m on my way to Wisconsin as we’re recording this. And back in July, we did focus groups up in northwestern Wisconsin with these exact types of men discussing these issues. The one thing that we found was that it wasn’t really the idea of abortion, or even Dobbs, as an issue. It was more along the lines of Donald Trump’s not the kind of guy you want your wife or daughter hanging around with or your sister hanging around with. It was interesting. One guy we were talking to was very Trump. He said, Oh yeah, no, for sure, I’m going to vote for Donald Trump.
But then when we started talking about the, uh, the idea of honor and dignity, he almost talked himself out of it, Greg. He’s like, So what am I going to tell my daughter about this guy? And he even surprised himself, which was, Wait a second. Like if I had to explain.… If my daughter brought home a younger version of Donald Trump, is this the guy I’d want, if I knew everything about him? And the answer is no. That’s the other part too in politic, in today’s media world, there is a big part of men who still see themselves as the protectors of their family. If you see a Donald Trump–type at your doorstep ringing the doorbell for your 17-, 18-year-old daughter, is your instinct, Oh yeah, he seems like a great guy, or does your protective instinct kick in, which is like, This guy’s never going anywhere near my daughter.
Sargent: Yes, in fact, Michelle Obama did describe Trump at one point as a sexual predator.
Galen: Plus adjudicated as such as well.
Sargent: Right. That, plus the sharp indictment of his character on so many levels by Michelle Obama, is also aimed at that type of male voter who’s maybe not paying the closest of attention; sees Trump in a vaguely positive light at times because of his celebrity, or at least has in the past seen him that way. They’re really trying to wake up these men to who this guy really is, and if you really want someone like that around your daughters and and and and female loved ones.
Galen: Well, I want to take issue with just one thing. I’ve been all over the country, I’ve been in nice neighborhoods and rough neighborhoods. We should make it very clear that just because someone is not college-educated, or a high-propensity voter, or doesn’t live in as nice a neighborhood as I do does not make them uninformed. If there’s one thing I found, Greg, is these folks are very, very informed.
The issue is the method and the medium by which they are receiving their information. That is one thing that is a much, much, much more difficult nut to crack than even just getting to them. How do you break through the wall of 40 years of talk radio and 30 years of Fox News and 20, 10 years, of Dan Bongino and Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan? These guys are hard to reach not because they’re uninformed but because the layers of mis- and disinformation they’ve been absorbing for the last 10 or 15 years is really something that, if we were a hundred years from now, Greg, we’d be having an intellectual discussion about, but here we’re suffering from the real effects of it.
Sargent: It’s a real thing that, that young men especially have been extremely hard for Democrats to actually reach in any sense because of how messed up our information environment is and the degree to which that demographic is pretty held captive by the Joe Rogans and the bro podcasters and all that. It sounds like the stuff that Michelle Obama was saying is maybe a little bit more geared toward those Dobbs dads that you’re talking about.
Galen: Yeah, because again, Trump can’t win without them. It’s like that old Woody Hayes thing, if you throw the ball, three things can happen, and two of them are bad. That’s what happens for Trump on Election Day. A Dobbs dad has three options, and two of them are bad for Trump. If he stays home or leaves it blank, bad for Trump. If he votes for Harris, worse for Trump. If he pulls the lever, great. But again, Trump cannot afford to lose any of those guys. His coalition is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white, which means that any white guy that doesn’t show is necessarily a real problem electorally and strategically for his campaign.
Sargent: Very well said. Obviously, this race is incredibly close. We had some new polling. The New York Times and CNN both had it tied nationally. If that’s right, it means it’ll be tough for Harris in the Electoral College, though there still could be a path. Meanwhile, a new ABC News poll finds it at 51–47 nationally for Harris. That seems a bit high to me, I doubt that it’s that big a gap. The polling averages basically have her up a little over a point nationally, and all the swing states are effectively tied in those averages. Where do you think the race is right now?
Galen: A friend of mine said the other day that he’s “nauseously optimistic,” and I feel the same way, Greg. On some of these things where it’s tied 50–50, I don’t know the methodology, if they’re asking leaners to make a decision, but Trump has never really cleared like 46 or 47 percent as a ceiling. Electorally, and by the numbers, I just don’t see that he’s going to be able to do that this time. Kamala Harris should win on the numbers, if nothing else. She should win on the numbers in a lot of these states, especially the upper Midwest because there are more otherwise decent, and I say pro-democracy because that’s where I live in the world, voters who maybe don’t agree with Kamala Harris on everything but certainly don’t want Donald Trump back. And frankly, we’ve had the baby boom generation in office since 1993. There’s a lot of people who are just saying, You know what, let’s turn the page. If you mix that with a lot of younger voters who want nothing to do with Donald Trump—I think it will be ultimately, Greg, the women who save us. It will be women of all ages, all demographics, all regions, all geographics, that ultimately come out in droves to say, We want nothing more to do with this guy, and to punish the Republican Party for Dobbs and what they did.
Sargent: What are the prospects of her getting to 49, 49.5 while Trump remains at 47, 48? And is that the path to winning?
Galen: I think it is. I think it is the path for Harris to get almost 50 in a lot of these. It’s, for conclusion, probably that she wins the popular vote. But again, I just think that at the end of the day, the numbers are on her side. There are more voters available to Harris. I spend most of my time here knocking on doors, speaking to volunteer groups. The people that I’m seeing are fired up. They’re there because they want to be, not because they’re being paid to be, Greg. Campaigns matter on the margins, and right now the Harris campaign on the ground and the Democrats on the ground and allied groups like us on the ground have a heck of a lot more energy, have a heck of a lot more infrastructure, and a heck of a lot more resources than Trump who’s paying Elon Musk however much money it is to have Ron DeSantis’s team go out and try and find voters for him, which makes no sense on several levels.
Sargent: Reed Galen, it’s always great to talk to you, man. We sure hope you’re right.
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.