We are down to the final two months before the presidential election, and the race is still up for grabs. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are planning a mad dash to the finish line, but the real race only comes down to just a handful of swing states. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: We’re down to the final two months before the presidential election and the race is up for grabs. Both the Harris and the Trump campaigns are planning a mad dash to the finish line, but the real race only comes down to just a handful of swing states. I’ve got Farron Cousins with me to talk about that. Farron, it is a mad dash. You’re seeing, God, the money, the money for both parties, we’re gonna talk about that today, but I’ve never seen this amount of money being pumped in an election like this. I guess I have, but it’s been a while.
Farron Cousins: Oh yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I think it was Bush where you saw this huge surge in the last eight or nine weeks. Anyway, so what’s up with the swing states right now?
Farron Cousins: Well, we don’t know, to be perfectly honest.
Mike Papantonio: That’s what I thought.
Farron Cousins: It depends on which poll you look at because we’ve got some polls that show that, oh, Harris has pulled ahead in six of the seven. Other polls showed, nope, she’s only ahead in three. Trump is winning in the other four.
Mike Papantonio: You can’t make any sense out of it, can you?
Farron Cousins: No poll is giving us the same result as the other polls. And look, we talked about this in the runup to 2020. Remember we were covering the polls every week, mostly due to the fact that none of this is consistent. None of this seems to be reliable.
Mike Papantonio: No, it doesn’t. It’s not. It’s like, doesn’t it remind you of the Hillary cycle?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Hillary, oh, she’s gonna win. The polls are showing she’s gonna win. She’s ahead in the swing states, everything’s good. And then Donald Trump, of course, Hillary wins popular vote by 3 million votes. Swing states kill her. This has that feel right now. I’m telling you, it really does have that feel.
Farron Cousins: I think the only difference, and I think the Harris campaign’s aware of this is what Hillary did was nothing. She didn’t go to Wisconsin. She didn’t go to Michigan. She’s ignoring, oh, oh, I’ve got this in the bag.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: Just this overall horrible arrogance from that campaign.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, it was terrible.
Farron Cousins: And I think, I think, Harris’s campaign understands, listen, we can’t make these mistakes that she made. She destroyed her campaign by taking the voters for granted, by acting like they don’t matter. And this guy was out there at some points doing two and three rallies per day.
Mike Papantonio: The energy was amazing.
Farron Cousins: Now he doesn’t have it this time.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. But I gotta tell you something, I feel the same kind of things I’m seeing with the polls. The Democrats obviously, their Democrat folks want everybody to believe everything’s okay, which I think is a mistake. I think they ought to do just the opposite. They shouldn’t be saying, your candidate is ahead. They should be saying, your candidate is in trouble. Your candidate needs your help. Go out there and do something about it. Same way with Trump. They feel like, oh my God, if we put a poll up there and it shows you’re ahead, then you’ve won the election. It’s just ridiculous kind of thinking. But you see it every time. These pollsters, I’ve never even heard of most of them, Farron. They’re popping up like little weasels all over the place and they’re a name you’ve never heard. Well, I did a poll. And the poll shows that my person Harris is ahead, or my person Trump is ahead. I don’t think it helps to say you’re ahead. I think you want to say, this is a tough race. We’re not ahead and we gotta do something about it.
Farron Cousins: Right. And you’re absolutely right about these really random groups popping up like, hey, look at our poll, because I’ve read so many of those and say, well, who did this? Who the hell is this?
Mike Papantonio: Exactly.
Farron Cousins: You’ve got these random universities that are not known for doing polls putting out these polls and survey. Monmouth, they’ve been doing it for decades. They get it. Reuters and AP, I trust them. Everybody else is a little off.
Mike Papantonio: You know what they’re doing, Farron? I saw an article where you’ve got somebody’s in political science for example, and they may be doing a graduate term in political science. They’re people that are being asked to go out and do this. They’re saying, I’m gonna do this to kind of pump up my degree, or whatever it may be. They’re popping up all over the place and it’s insane because they don’t understand it doesn’t really help to go out there and say, my candidate’s well ahead. You know, they’re five points ahead. Everything’s good. I think it’s the most destructive thing you can do for either party.
Farron Cousins: Right. And not to mention too, when you look at the sample sizes of most of these polls, most of them are sticking to around 1000 people.
Mike Papantonio: I know.
Farron Cousins: So when you’re talking about a swing state that has 15 million, 20 million people, you cannot get an accurate representation from a thousand people who agreed to take your. No, it’s just polling today is not what it was 20 years ago. It’s not what it was 30 years ago.
Mike Papantonio: Well, Trump, his talking points are, I’m doing really well with Hispanic voters and black men. And he says that based on three or four polls that were done and we don’t know what that means. We don’t know whether they’re real or not. They’re almost useless. I mean, they literally are almost useless now.
