Early voting gives both sides hope of victory in elections – debate – Channel 4 News

We speak with Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, who is in Pennsylvania, and Republican strategist Christine Davison, who is in New Mexico, as the campaigns head into the final days.

Matt Fry: Julie, that Iowa poll, the Seltzer poll, made you smile, do you think that indicates something more than what’s going on in Iowa?

Yulia Roginskaya: I’m not going to take any poll on whether this is good for Kamala Harris or not good for Kamala Harris. I will say this: Something is happening now, and it has been going on since 2022, when Roe v. Wade, the American right to abortion, was overturned by the Trump Supreme Court. The polls then really missed what was going on, especially among American women. There was an assumption that there would be a red wave. It was the midterm elections for Joe Biden, and poll after poll after poll predicted that Republicans would have a very, very quiet night in November. It turned out that this was not a red wave. For the most part, it turned out to not even be a red trickle. And I think it’s because there are a lot of women who understand that it’s not about fear mongering.

Everything Democrats have been saying for generations, which is that if Republicans get their way, the right to choose reproductive rights will disappear. Finally it happened. This is not alarmism. This is not fear mongering. Now we have stories of women literally dying from sepsis in a country where, and I want to say this to people listening in Britain today, we are a country, the United States, where kings and heads of state from other countries fly to the United States. to get medical help. And today we have a situation where there are doctors who are able to treat women who are on their deathbed because they are having miscarriages and developing sepsis, and they cannot get the medical care that they need, despite the fact that these doctors can to save their lives because these doctors are afraid of going to jail and being prosecuted for providing health care to women because of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court. That’s what’s happening here in the United States. And that’s something that women fully appreciate and understand when they go out to vote this Tuesday.

Matt Fry: Then let me tell Kristen about it. Do you think that if he loses this election it will be down to women and the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, which might have won evangelical votes but would have cost him millions of other votes in this very difficult elections?

Kristin Davison: We talk about the women’s vote and treat everyone as one monolithic group. With women everything is much more complicated. I certainly think that there are supporters of abortion, and there are women for whom this is their motivation. But you know what? If that motivates you, you’ve already voted for the Democrat, whoever he is. And so I think it’s more than that. The only thing we saw in the Iowa poll is that Donald Trump is going to win Iowa. It won’t be close, he will win by 5-10 points. But this poll, a very respected group that does this, has really shown us that support for these independent women may be declining. And what’s even more interesting is that in addition to women, older people and voters over 65 years of age. This will mean a huge realignment of party support. Overall, Republicans do better with voters over 65 than Democrats. And we’re seeing that in a number of states where I think some of the liberal boomers over 65 are getting older.

But I also think that Democrats have been very vocal about abortion for a long time. But deep in these states, if you’re in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin or Ohio or North Carolina, they’re talking about Social Security and benefits for older voters. And I think this may be one of the reasons. I think Trump will win, I think the way the Republicans handled the early voting was unprecedented. And I don’t think this is all cannibalization of our voting on Election Day. I think this figure ranges from 16 to 40 percent of new voters. And if that’s the case, he’ll win the entire Sun Belt, which is Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia. He just needs to win one of the Rust Belt states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan.

Matt Fry: Julie, one thing I keep hearing on the campaign trail is that people like Kamala Harris, women like Kamala Harris, think she’s on their side. They don’t like her economic policies and don’t feel like she feels their economic pain.

Yulia Roginskaya: I don’t know where you hear this, because the other day we published statistics that showed that the United States is the envy of the whole world: growth of 2.8 percent in the last quarter, growth of 3 percent in the quarter before last. , record low…

Matt Fry: But people don’t feel it?

Yulia Roginskaya: I’m not sure people don’t feel it. I think what Republicans are saying is that people don’t feel it. But I’m in Pennsylvania now and I talk to people all the time and I can tell you that they understand that there have been very difficult times with inflation since Covid. They also understand the price of gasoline, the price of gasoline has dropped significantly. They understand that product prices have dropped significantly. They understand that today more and more people are working, unemployment is at an all-time low. And so it’s one thing to tell people that they don’t believe in it. It’s another matter when people believe that they don’t believe it.

I understand that there are issues with immigration that people certainly disagree with Democrats on, but the economy is not one of them. And if you look at the polls, you’ll see that Kamala Harris is absolutely neck-and-neck with Donald Trump on who will handle the economy better, and that’s very unusual for Democrats to be with a Republican. And this is because the United States economy is, empirically speaking, the envy of the world. I think that you in Britain and on the Continent too would like to have the kind of economy that we have here in the United States today.

Kristin Davison: I just have to say that if you look at Kamala’s rating, it’s not very good. I mean people don’t really like her. And this idea that people think the economy is doing well, we just got an anemic jobs report on Friday that showed no job growth. So we live in two different worlds here. People are suffering. And if they’re going to vote for Trump, it’s because they’re afraid she won’t be able to…

Matt Fry: The Wall Street Journal said the economy is actually in great shape. Very briefly: There is one man who can beat Donald Trump, and that is a guy named Donald Trump. If he had kept his mouth shut and refused to say some of the ridiculous things he said, surely he would be in a much better position now?

Kristin Davison: So every time the media talks about something outrageous that Donald Trump says, it’s like rinse and repeat. Trump says something. Everyone in the media is talking about it and it’s fake outrage. And Americans ask: Why are we becoming so outrageous? They get tired of it. And there’s one main thing that I think most people in the media are going to… They’re helping him. I know they don’t want him to win, but they are helping him because every time they give Donald Trump a news cycle, he gets a larger share of our media and it makes it difficult for Harris to get her message across.