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. Also, the American public is hugely divided on every issue – according to the media. But the truth is that the public actually agrees on MOST issues. 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.
The American public is hugely divided on every issue according to the media. But the truth is that the public actually agrees on most issues. The media sells division to this country. They do it to juice their ratings. They do it to make more money. This is all about money. Let’s divide the country and we’re gonna make more money doing it. I’ll tell you what, this was handled by, I think one of the most, by a formidable progressive, wrote for Axios.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And what’s interesting about this is obviously they did what Les Leopold had also done, they’re looking at the numbers. They’re stripping politics away from it because yeah, politics is divisive. But when you look at what people actually think, what they want and what they believe, pretty much everybody agrees on almost everything. Huge majorities left, right, and center agree that, hey, it’s okay to let immigrants come into this country. Hey, it’s okay for people to own guns. Hey, it’s okay for you to have your own religion, whatever.
Mike Papantonio: Or to be gay. Yeah, that’s what most people believe. But the media takes these talking points, and this is a media creation. They take these talking points from these fuzzy thinking hysterical fringe types. Well, on the left, it’s the snowflake fringe. Everything they read on a headline, they’re gonna accept. On the right is the snowflake fringe that buys into everything. And here’s what we miss. These are people that watch either Fox or they watch MSNBC and CNN. That is all they live by baby. That’s all they understand. Fortunately, it’s less than 2% of the population in America, less than 2% of these snowflakes are out there watching MSNBC saying, oh my God, this is the new talking point. And it just perpetuates itself. Right?
Farron Cousins: And look, the problem is with these networks that, again, only 2% of the country between the two of them actually watch.
Mike Papantonio: By the way, between the two. That’s right.
Farron Cousins: But the problem is the people who make the decisions about our daily lives, those folks in Washington, DC, they watch these.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: And they get fed the division, and they help spread the division. Right? Your Republicans are going on Fox, your liberals are going on MSNBC, and each side is saying, these people are evil over here. No, you’re evil over here. And then when these networks push their agenda, whether it’s to help their advertisers get another war contract or help big pharma kill legislation, those lawmakers who only tune into those programs, they buy into it. So it is a small portion that watches this, unfortunately, it’s the powerful people.
Mike Papantonio: But they’re the loudest. If we do a show, the big mouths, the real snowflake big mouths will show up in the comments. If you look at the comments compared to the likes, the likes are huge. But the comments, you may have a hundred people who are just rabid. They can’t control themselves. They gotta, I’ve gotta respond to this. And the response generally is being driven by what they’ve seen on either Fox for when you do a show or when I do a show, it’s what they watch on the MSNBC and CNN. You know, Papantonio’s a Trump guy. Farron is a crazy communist because this is what the media tells them to say. The only good news, the only good news is it’s less than 2% of the population that fall into that, what I call real, real snowflake class. I mean, when we get the reports from our folks that follow this, yeah, you don’t even have to read the comment. The first two lines you understand, oh, yeah. All right. Yeah, they’re watching MSNBC, CNN, that’s all they’re watching or with you, they’re watching Fox. That’s all they’re hearing. And so we just have to rise above it, don’t we? We have to. We can do better than that. People believe we have a right to vote. They believe in equal protection of the law. They believe that there’s a right to freedom of religion. That there’s a right to freedom of speech. That there’s a right to privacy. That’s what most Americans, those types of things, what most Americans believe. But you have the crazy fringe that feed on all of this. I don’t know. Get a job. What do you wanna say? Go get a job. Do something besides sit in front of the computer.
Farron Cousins: Well, the media wants us to be divided between you and your neighbor. Because if you’re not, if you realize how much you have in common with that person next door to you that is a different political affiliation, realize how much you have in common, then you’ll realize, well, wait a minute, then who should we be mad at? You should be mad at those corporations. You should be mad at those politicians that are basically keeping these networks alive That’s why they sell you division. Go hate this person so that you don’t hate the person funding my campaign or my network.
Mike Papantonio: I call ’em chatter monkeys. It’s like James Carville, the chatter monkey of all chatter, coming on the air and telling young people that they’re stupid, that they’re lazy. Like that’s gonna really help them turn out. But it’s this chatter monkey mentality, man, it’s just getting worse. It’s just getting worse.
Farron Cousins: It really is.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. Make sure you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you stories every week that corporate media just can’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow ’em to tell you or their political connections, they don’t allow it, because if you’re too Republican, you gotta color inside the Republican lines. If you’re too Democrat, God knows you better not color outside the Democrat line. But we don’t worry about coloring outside the lines. Hopefully we’ll see you next week.
