Full Episode: Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 8/30/24

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Labor Day marks the start of the final sprint to November 5th. And as things stand now, the presidential race is quite the toss-up. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have highly plausible pathways to victory.

Tonight, we'll take a close look at the polls in the most crucial swing states and attempt to divine the immediate future, next.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. We've got a little more than two months to go to the presidential election, and it's a dramatically different race than it was earlier this summer. The vice president has made up ground lost by Joe Biden in the months leading up to his departure from the race, and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance still haven't devised a strategy to counter her.

This week, Donald Trump's campaign had a fight with the United States Army about Trump's bizarre decision to politicize Arlington National Cemetery.

Joining me to discuss all this and more, Francesca Chambers, the White House correspondent for USA Today, McKay Coppins, my colleague and a staff writer at The Atlantic, Jeff Mason, a White House correspondent for Reuters, and Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and a correspondent at NPR. Thank you all for joining me.

Domenico, let's go right to you. You know all the polls. Just give us a brief, concise, erudite, but Olympian overview, if you will, of the polls and where we are today.

DOMENICO MONTANARO, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent, NPR: All right, I'll try to be shorter than that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Okay. Go ahead.

DOMENICO MONTANARO: Basically, it's close, right? And what we've seen now is that --

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is toss-up fair?

DOMENICO MONTANARO: It is a toss-up race in all the seven main states that we're watching. We did an analysis earlier this week. We can show you that map. And the three blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, everyone's watching very closely. You can see there and as well as out west, Nevada and Arizona and Georgia and North Carolina in the Sun Belt. All seven of those we now have as toss-ups. This is based on not just polling, but conversations with the campaigns, historical trends.

This is where we essentially started the race. This had slipped to where Donald Trump had a lead in the Sun Belt states by five or six points just after Joe Biden dropped out. And Harris has really made up about four to six points overall, not just nationally, but importantly in places like the blue wall, as well as the Sun Belt states.

And when you look just strictly at polling, Harris has a now consistent but narrow lead in all three of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If that were to hold, she'd be right at 270 electoral votes. This has completely scrambled the map for Trump, because he really has needed Georgia to be -- Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania -- to be the three states that he has as a block to get to 270. And now with Harris leading in Pennsylvania and making all four of those Sun Belt states within the margin of error, and they're all within about a point right now, as close as it possibly can be, it has really scrambled the map for the Trump folks.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Francesca, talk about Georgia. You've been writing a lot about it. And it's in play in a way that we couldn't have imagined when Joe Biden was the nominee.

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS, White House Correspondent, USA Today: And even just a few weeks ago, Kamala Harris was down in Georgia. And while it still is in the margin of error, to your point, she is now a couple points ahead in Georgia. Now, North Carolina, not looking as great for her and experts have said that they actually expect that she'll do better in Georgia, but her campaign is trying to put both of those states back in play.

Now, do they think that you absolutely, positively have to win in Georgia or North Carolina or any of those Sun Belt states? No. But they also don't think that you absolutely have to win the blue wall. They're trying to create a scenario where that if they lose in any one of those states that Joe Biden won in, that they can make up the difference.

She's now doing these bus tours. She did one in Pennsylvania, which Jeff and I were on, and then she also did the one in Georgia. Pay attention to where she's going. It is areas where Democrats had warned Joe Biden that if he did not start hitting up those places, he was not going to win. In Savannah, for instance, if Harris wants to repeat Biden's win, she would basically have to juice up the vote in that Savannah area, as well as areas like Columbus, and then you see her going there.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is it effective? And obviously she's coming closer, but do you think it's possible?

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: For her to win Georgia?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: For Georgia.

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Well, if she's able to keep those margins that Joe Biden had in places like Savannah, where by the way, a Democrat hadn't campaigned since Bill Clinton in 1992, her campaign is making the point, then, yes, when you have 11,000 votes roughly, and in that one county alone, if she were to go back down to the 2016 levels, that would be the difference maker.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. Jeff, what states are you thinking about of the seven? What is Nevada -- talk about Arizona. Give us a sense of where your mind is at.

JEFF MASON, White House Correspondent, Reuters: Well, we did -- I did the bus tour that Francesca mentioned with in Pennsylvania, but also before that.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I'm a little sad that we weren't invited on the bus tour.

JEFF MASON: Yes, it was a bus tour.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It was a bus tour, right.

JEFF MASON: You know, she's going to all the states that we're talking about. I was on a swing with her where she went to Arizona, where she went to Wisconsin, where she went to Michigan. On Labor Day she and Joe Biden are going to be campaigning together officially for the first time back in Pennsylvania. All of these states are in play. I mean, and to your question, is it possible for her to win Georgia, is it possible for her to win these other ones, they wouldn't be putting money in those states if they didn't think she could win.

Surely part of the strategy is, let's freak out the Trump campaign and let's try to narrow those margins, but for sure they wouldn't be putting her time and their efforts there if they didn't think they had a chance.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: All right. McKay, give us a sense of what the Trump campaign is doing beyond being freaked out by all of the change that they've had to confront.

MCKAY COPPINS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Well, I do think it's important to note the strategic shift in the way they're talking about the race. Like I was in Milwaukee, you know, earlier this summer, heard Chris LaCivita, Trump campaign's manager, talking about expanding the map. And this was when Joe Biden was still the nominee. They were saying, we're going to play in New Mexico, we're going to contest Virginia, like we actually have so many opportunities that it's a resource allocation problem. You're not really hearing them talk about that anymore. The fact is that they're on defense in places like Georgia means that they're not probably going to be devoting a whole lot of resources to trying to win, you know, bluish purple states like Virginia.

I do think though that you have an issue, which is that, you know, the campaign, I'm sure, has a strategy they're developing for how to respond. Donald Trump is not always interested in following whatever strategy they're laying out.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That's what's known as an understatement, correct?

MCKAY COPPINS: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I mean, there's two separate campaigns, right? There's the campaign machinery, and then there's whatever he's putting on Truth Social.

MCKAY COPPINS: And you've seen it this week, right? Donald Trump has been lashing out in pretty outlandish and provocative ways.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. So, the campaign wants him to bear down on the states that are still plausible, but it's not happening?

MCKAY COPPINS: And not just that, but also to emphasize these policy proposals that they think are going to be popular, you know, eliminating the tax on tips, which Kamala Harris has now also embraced.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: That works in Nevada.

MCKAY COPPINS: Just recently his proposal on subsidizing IVF treatments. Like these are clearly plays for the middle. These are plays for undecided voters. And if they had a more disciplined candidate, they could engineer the entire campaign communications apparatus around pushing those policies, but instead you have Donald Trump on Truth Social melting down.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Domenico, talk for a minute about Trump's pathway to victory. If you were analyzing it from the inside, what would you be telling Donald Trump? This is what you have to do, this is where you have to win.

DOMENICO MONTANARO: Well, when we look at the ad spending, I mean, that can tell you everything. You know, when you look at polls, that's fine and these things are within the margin of error, but where are they putting their resources? And Pennsylvania is the place where they are spending the most money, both campaigns are, just in the past month, a hundred million dollars on ads in Pennsylvania.

Now, their key is really this trio of Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina. They need all three of those to be able to win. They're really must-wins for the Trump campaign.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: If they get all three, do they win?

DOMENICO MONTANARO: If they get all three, they probably do get to right to 270. So, that's where we're looking at. And that's why Pennsylvania has been such a key place because Democrats have done well there, obviously, for lots of past elections, aside from 2016. But I am also interested in the place like North Carolina. The Trump people were not spending any money in North Carolina until Kamala Harris got in the race.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: They were making an assumption?

DOMENICO MONTANARO: Well, they were essentially feeling like, and they were right, that the polling was showing them with a lead that was outside the margin of error, that they were maybe going to have this locked down and they could concentrate all of their resources in places like Pennsylvania and Georgia, maybe, you know, being slightly ahead in Georgia and then really insulating that and knowing that Pennsylvania was the key.

But now they really have to spend their resources in a lot of different places. They're spending a lot of money in North Carolina now. The gubernatorial candidate there certainly is controversial on the Republican side. The Democratic candidate is far outpacing that candidate. So, a place that's 50-50 right now with North Carolina means the Trump people are having to spend a ton of resources to try to shore up that state, and it's not even assured that they're going to win that at all.

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: And just to pick up on that, in North Carolina, Harris' campaign, formerly the Biden campaign, always made a bet that because it was so close, roughly 1.3 percentage points in the previous election, that it was somewhere that they could win. They have roughly two dozen offices in both states, almost similar level of offices and staffing, nearly 200 staffers.

That is what they believe is going to bring this home for them in the end, is that earlier this year, while Republicans were in their primary, even if Donald Trump wasn't truly under that in that primary, they were busy building offices, hiring staffers, and already getting started in those states, so that once Kamala Harris did take over the ticket, now she already had an apparatus.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: One more question about North Carolina. Domenico used the word controversial, which is descriptive but it's more than controversial, this North Carolina Republican candidate for governor. He's said some pretty outlandish things. Is that going to drag the Republican Party in a serious way? Is that why North Carolina is in play?

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Well, North Carolina is partially just because it was nearly in play last time too. It was a very small percentage point. But when you do have Josh Stein, who's on the ticket there, Democrats think he has a real chance to be able to win the state. Before when Biden was the one on the ticket, Democrats thought maybe Biden was going to bring him down and he was going to be the one that was pulling Biden up in that state, but now they're feeling a lot better about North Carolina.

DOMENICO MONTANARO: I mean, North Carolina is in play because of Black voters and young voters. Barack Obama won North Carolina in 2008. A lot of people attribute that to the fact that he was able to turn out Black voters. But the biggest margin difference was with young voters. And those were two groups that Joe Biden was really struggling with, who Kamala Harris has now fired up.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right. If Josh Stein wins, it's a pretty good, political moment for Joshes, I think, generally, just noting that for the record.

I want to go to the interview that Dana Bash did with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. The fact that we're talking about a single interview suggests to people in the media that they're not doing enough interviews. I've talked to people in the campaign. They say we're gearing up to do so many interviews. You're not going to -- as Donald Trump would say, you're going to get sick of all the interviews we're going to do.

MCKAY COPPINS: I look forward to that moment.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, we'll see. Only time will tell, as we say.

But I want to get your assessments of how they did. Let's watch one small moment from that interview last night and then talk about how she did.

DANA BASH, Anchor and Chief Political Correspondent, CNN: Do you still want to ban fracking?

KAMALA HARRIS, U.S. Vice President, Democratic Presidential Nominee: No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.

DANA BASH: In 2019, I believe, at a town hall, you said, you were asked, would you commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on your first day in office? And you said, there's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking. So, yes. So it changed in the, in that campaign?

KAMALA HARRIS: In 2020, I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024, and I've not changed that position, nor will I going forward. I kept my word, and I will keep my word.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Give us your sense, McKay, how she did.

MCKAY COPPINS: You know, that clip, I think, was actually pretty well captured, the general tone of the interview. She did fine. She answered the questions. She didn't kind of resort to sort of the word salad that she's become known for sometimes retreating to, which was, I think, an improvement. I think the issue that you noted at the top here is the real problem for them, which is that they're just not doing enough interviews. And because they're not doing interviews, each one is going to receive an enormous amount of scrutiny, and, you know, even nitpicking.

I think that if she was doing wall-to-wall interviews, talking to everybody who wants to talk to the new Democratic nominee, understandably so. I mean, we're in a pretty unique situation. She should be answering questions. I think that people wouldn't, you know, be picking apart every little answer she gives. So, I think actually it would be wise if she ends up doing what the campaign is saying and does, you know, a dozen more interviews in the next month or so.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Jeff?

JEFF MASON: She needed to get through that interview without having a major stumble, and she did. Is that a low or a high bar? Is that the appropriate bar? I don't know. But that was the bar that was set. She had to answer some of the questions about policies that have changed. Is that going to help her with Republican voters? No. The Trump campaign came out right away and said she still supports fracking even though she said right there that she hadn't. There are weaknesses in those policy positions, just as there are weaknesses in Trump's policy positions that both candidates and both campaigns will try to continue to pursue. But as far as just the straight interview strategy, she got through it and that's what they wanted her to do.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Domenico?

DOMENICO MONTANARO: Since we're talking about the electoral map, fracking has to do with one thing, Western Pennsylvania. It's a huge political issue. It's very potent. I will say that she got to a good answer on this where she said, what I have seen is that we can grow and we can increase a clean energy economy without banning fracking.

So, it took her a while, though, to get to that, and I think her campaign is probably going to want to clean up her answer, make it more economical, because a lot of this is about how she does in the debate. That's the next big pillar, that's the next big test. And if she can sort of condense that and not look like she is squishy and like her 2019 campaign, I would say that what I heard from Democratic strategists about this interview is that she was competent, she was calm, it was fine, which they want to set up as a split-screen contrast.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Tim didn't do that much.

DOMENICO MONTANARO: Right. He didn't do that much.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Which is his job.

JEFF MASON: And that was one of the criticisms from Republicans in advance is that he was there as a crutch. And he answered a couple questions that, that Dana had directed to him, specifically on some of the things that he had said that have become controversial. But other than that, it was a Kamala Harris interview.

DOMENICO MONTANARO: Democrats really want to set up this split screen between, quote, boring and calm and competent versus the tumult of Trump.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Francesca?

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Also, but the contrast of divisive versus unity. She repeatedly talked about common sense solutions. She's chasing that center line. When you talk about places like Western Pennsylvania, by the way, that is actually where the bus tour was that she was at. The campaign says that they're going after a couple types of voters, Black voters, as well as disaffected Republicans, suburban women, and they are also looking at independent men.

They feel that if they can cut into Trump's margins, particularly with independent men and those suburban women, then they can make up the difference in other parts of places like Pennsylvania and these battleground states. That's going to be the ballgame.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I haven't been on one of those bus tours in a long time, and I'm feeling a little sentimental until you actually go on one of the bus tours.

JEFF MASON: Just to be clear, the press isn't on a bus.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, I know.

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: We're in a press van.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes, no, it's a terrible, stuffy van.

Francesca, stay on this subject of the interview. The thing that she didn't do is that she did not -- she was unwilling to address Trump's race baiting. Talk about the strategy there. I mean, she was --

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Next question.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: -- Dana, we're not going there.

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Which was her response. I wasn't telling you.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: Maybe that'll work here too.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You were telling me not to talk about it either. But what's going on there?

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: She doesn't want to talk about that. She wanted to stay focused on --

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I know, but why?

FRANCESCA CHAMBERS: I think part of the reason that we're talking about here is she wants to talk about the issues that she thinks will draw in more of those independent men or in the suburban women. So, she wants to talk about things like abortion rights.

I think that they were clearly very prepared for the fracking question and the ability to have to answer that. They clearly didn't want to go deeper into policy, on economic policy. When Jeff and I were on that bus tour, he asked a great question of her of how she would pay for her economic plans. She basically said they'd pay for themselves. The campaign had to issue a statement clearing that up, and then issue a second statement clearing it up a second time. She does not want to talk about things like price, other than price gouging, that could potentially drive away those Republican voters.

JEFF MASON: She also doesn't want the headline to be race and gender.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

JEFF MASON: And if she had engaged on that more yesterday, that would have been what we're talking about today.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And that's where Trump is comfortable playing.

I want to talk about, I'll call it plainly, a double standard that we have in this campaign. We're sitting here parsing, as we should, what the Democratic nominee for president says in an interview, how she answers questions about a whole range of subjects. Meanwhile, this is what Donald Trump had to say this week.

DONALD TRUMP (R), Former U.S. President, 2024 Presidential Nominee: Groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody's ever seen before. We've never seen anything like it, 50, 60, 70 percent. You take a look at bacon and some of these products, and some people don't eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy, wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn't blow, we have a little problem.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Here's the thing. I'll make this observation. I'll own it. If Kamala Harris went from bacon to wind in her interview with Dana Bash, she would, this morning, not be -- the next morning, she would not be the nominee of the Democratic Party. That would have been a very, very strange -- people would have been like, what is going on? Do we just have an absurdly low standard now for the things that Donald Trump says and does?

DOMENICO MONTANARO: I think that there is definitely a double standard, and I think part of it is how each side's voters interpret their candidate. And someone like Donald Trump, Republicans have had the opportunity for years to say this is not the guy we want. Instead, they've continued to get behind him. In every primary that Donald Trump weighs in on, he wins, and then the general election a lot of those candidates tend to lose.

I think that from reporter's standpoint, we do have to be careful about how we -- what level we hold both of them to. When I fact-checked Donald Trump's hour press conference, he told 162 lies and distortions within that time period, 2.5 a minute, compared to Kamala Harris' DNC acceptance speech, where she had 12 statements that I found were contextually misleading or needed more.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Okay.

MCKAY COPPINS: And it's not just his own voters. I think that, broadly speaking, most Americans have it baked into their perception of Donald Trump that he's rambling, that he's incoherent, that he lies, that he goes off on these bizarre outlandish tangents. It's fundamental to the understanding of who Donald Trump is. It's why, by the way, when we were all talking earlier this year about Joe Biden's cognitive decline and a lot of Democrats, I think, understandably were like, well, why aren't we talking about Donald Trump's cognitive decline? It's because from the very moment he entered the political scene, he's sounded a little crazy to a lot of people.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Jeff, I want to talk about the Arlington Cemetery issue in the couple of minutes we have left. That was another bizarre moment over the past week, the politicization of Arlington. Give us your sense of how damaging that could be and why it even happened that way.

JEFF MASON: Sure. I mean, I think the first observation I would make is how unusual it is that the Army weighed in and released a statement defending the individual who apparently was trying to uphold the law and prevent his campaign and the candidate from going into Section 60 of the cemetery, which is considered hallowed ground.

In terms of the overall implications, you know, he's pretty strong with veterans in that vote. And yet I've also seen polling that shows that military members have become more disenfranchised with Trump.

Certainly, he has said and done things that are controversial about the military for years, starting with his initial comment about John McCain and going up through his time as president and the cemetery that he didn't -- the cemetery ceremony in France that his former chief of staff talked about. There's a lot there, and it hasn't always led to veterans or military voters departing from the Trump train, as it were, but it's an important block.

And this was offensive to many people, and not just veterans, but others as well, who care a lot about the military and about that cemetery.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I have a feeling we're going to be talking about I'm going to have to cover that issue again on this show before we hit the election, but, unfortunately, we need to leave it there for now. I want to thank our panelists for coming and sharing their reporting. And to our viewers at home, thank you for joining us.

For more on Donald Trump's controversial visit to Arlington National Cemetery, please visit theatlantic.com.

I'm Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.