Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on Trump investigation, Biden’s warnings, resurgence of unions

William Brangham:

The investigation into former President Trump's handling of top secret documents, President Biden's warnings about threats to democracy and the resurgence of labor unions are all playing into this year's midterm elections.

Here to make sense of it all are Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

Welcome to you both. Thank you so much for being here on Labor Day.

Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

Of course.

William Brangham:

So, Amy, as we saw earlier in the program, we have seen this — further developments in the DOJ investigation. We have seen President Trump very angrily responding to it, and this all coming on the heels of President Biden warning that there's a real threat to our democracy.

None of the — neither of those two men are on the midterm ballot.

Amy Walter:

Right. Right.

William Brangham:

And yet they're — here they are center stage. Is this…

Amy Walter:

And yet you wouldn't know that, right.

William Brangham:

Right.

Amy Walter:

We have never…

William Brangham:

Is this going to matter?

Amy Walter:

Well, we have never seen anything like this before.

Midterm elections are almost always a referendum on the party that's in power. It's hard to make the out-party the focus. The only time that that has actually succeeded was in 1998, when it was Democrats in the White House. Republicans impeached then-President Clinton. But the difference was that President Clinton was really popular. He had about a 60 percent approval rating.

This president, of course…

William Brangham:

And a good economy.

Amy Walter:

And a great economy.

And that's the other piece of this. So we have never really seen this before. Of course, we have never seen a former president put themselves in the politics front and center in the way that Donald Trump has. And it's pretty clear that the Democrats do believe that the coalition of voters who turned out in 2018, who turned out in 2020, not necessarily to vote for Joe Biden or vote for Democrats, but to vote against Donald Trump, that they're still out there.

And they see that, any time he's in the news, it helps their prospects. And so they don't need to bring him in all that much, but he is still — because he will put himself front and center. As you said, he had rally this week.

And even regardless of where these investigations go, remember, we still have the January 6 Committee that will hold hearings.

William Brangham:

Right.

Amy Walter:

We don't know how many, maybe one or so, in the fall, and they still have to put a report out. Maybe that's before November.

Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

Yes.

And it isn't just that you have never had a former president put himself in the news so much. It's also that you have never had a former president claim that the existing president isn't legitimate or calling the existing president, the rightfully elected president, an enemy of the state, or declaring multiple times on social media in the last week that he needs to be reinstated, hurry up and reinstate me. There was something that wasn't quite right. Reinstate me. Re-hold the vote.

That's absolutely unheard of. And so, when President Biden is talking about democratic erosion or when academics who specialize in democratic erosion are talking about democratic erosion, they're talking about the idea, this sort of fundamental idea of democracy, that, if you lose, you accept that you lost, that that has been broken.

William Brangham:

We saw as you mentioned, the president, former president, make, even by his standards, a pretty hard speech against the current president.

And we'd heard President Biden say, look, the MAGA Republicans are a real threat to democracy. And President Trump this past weekend, former President Trump, flipped that on its head.

Let's take a listen to what he had to say.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States: These are very dishonest, sick people.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

Donald Trump:

Very dishonest people.

Americans are sick of the lies, sick of the hoaxes and scams, and, above all, sick of the hypocrisy. But our opponents have badly miscalculated. This egregious abuse of the law is going to produce a backlash, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

William Brangham:

Amy, do you think that — I mean, some people have suggested that President Biden, in all of his warnings about President — former President Trump and his supporters, was an effort to goad Trump into doing what we just saw him doing, putting himself back at center stage.

Do you think, politically, that does benefit them?

Amy Walter:

Benefit the Republicans to have…

William Brangham:

The — no, the Democrats…

Amy Walter:

Oh.

William Brangham:

… to have Trump doing what he's doing there.

Amy Walter:

I mean, I think a combination of issues, abortion being front and center and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, Trump and the continuing stories coming out about what was at Mar-a-Lago, of course, what January — what is being presented by the January 6 Committee, and the fact that the party now seems to be really lining up behind Trump.

All the candidates who he's endorsed have won these primaries. So he is in some ways still on the ballot, even — and even though he's not, and even though he's no longer in the White House.

The backlash thing is an interesting point. Is it that they're going to turn out a whole bunch of people who might not have been particularly interested in showing up in the election to come out and support Republicans because they want to defend the president?

At the same time, I was watching that, and I just thought, oh, my gosh, it's not just that we're reliving 2020. We're reliving 2016.

Tamara Keith:

And 2017.

Amy Walter:

And voters are also looking at this and thinking, are we going to relive this in 2024?

So the exhaustion level among independents, I think, is what we really need to watch for. And if I'm a Republican strategist right now — and we're hearing them on television, we're hearing them in news reports say, we just want to focus on the economy and we want to focus on Biden.

William Brangham:

Tam, we saw a lot of these, both the president and the former president, in Pennsylvania.

Now, there's some high — Senate races there, but there's also — seen this issue of trying to woo union voters. Democrats have always thought, like, those are my guys. Is that going to hold true?

Tamara Keith:

There has been a growing separation. There was a time, a long period of time, where union voters were Democratic voters. Union voters — union members campaigned for Democrats, even going back many years.

But, in 2016, I was out interviewing union voters, and they were telling me, yes, our leadership is Democratic. We like Trump.

So that separation has been happening for some time. President Biden today giving two speeches to two big union crowds. Even not in front of union crowds. Joe Biden loves to talk about his connection to the labor movement. And the labor movement is getting more interesting than it has been for a long time.

It used to be very tied to sort of industrial jobs. And now various…

William Brangham:

You're seeing Amazon and Starbucks, Chipotle.

Tamara Keith:

Yes, I'm thinking Amazon and Starbucks, yes, areas of the economy — as the economy has shifted away from industrialized labor, so has the labor movement.

And the labor movement has more life right now than it's had in a long time, a lot more support than it's had in a long time. But, again, it's not clear that that sort of lockstep for Democrats exists the way it did a generation ago.

Amy Walter:

Yes.

And there's this image that, when we talk about union voters, we're talking about white men in hardhats. The service sector — and it's — Chipotle is — or those other brands you mentioned are part of it.

But, remember, for years, you have had service employees, people who are working in service jobs in big corporations or in other places, much more likely to be female, much more likely to be a person of color.

So there are labor folks who are supporting Democrats, but they don't look like our image of what a labor person looks like. White men are — have not been voting for Democrats for quite some time. What Democrats need to do is hold onto as many of them as they can, but continue to bring those other types of voters into the mix.

William Brangham:

And it is worth noting they're still a very small slice of American workers, but a lot of energy, as you are saying.

Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, great to see you both. Thanks for coming in.

Amy Walter:

You're welcome.

Tamara Keith:

You're welcome.