Transcript: Harris’ Harsh Takedown of Trump’s Hitler Stunner Nails It
Sargent: Ben, it’s very persuasive. What exactly has to happen between now and Election Day in the most granular demographic terms possible for you to win? And one of the three biggest things that could go wrong that you worry about most, that keep you awake at night?
Wikler: I’ll start with the thing that could go wrong, which is: the Trump campaign has been saying everywhere that they know about hundreds of thousands of people who basically are MAGA, but they don’t vote. Their goal with their field programs, such as it is, is to get those folks to turn out. Republicans engage in voter suppression and mobilization for their side. We get involved in mobilization of our side and persuasion of the other side. Different strategies. And I would seek to persuade those voters that in fact they should vote for Harris this time and they certainly shouldn’t vote for Trump.
What we saw in 2016 and 2020 was a ton of people who were Republican-supporting voters, who hadn’t voted before or hadn’t voted much before, turn out [to] same-day register or cast ballots for Trump. People who were not in polls, not in the models. And Trump over-performed his predicted vote share and vote total by a dramatic margin, bigger in Wisconsin than anywhere else. The RealClearPolitics polling average was seven points off in Wisconsin both of those two years. And if that happens again, then this is not a close election unless Democrats are able to also over-perform and find tons of people to come out of the woodwork and cast ballots. So the question of, Is there a polling error? Is there a big block of people that are hidden Trump and or Harris voters?, is unknowable in a certain sense. We do everything we can to look for them, but it’s something that we don’t have a window onto. The only thing we can do is try to overshoot the mark. You take a 48-48 race—we’ve got to swing big, try to get a lot more voters than that to be ready for a situation where there’s an overwhelming surge of Trump voters who come out of the woodwork and cast ballots at the last second.
Now, if the polls are actually like 2012 and they’re underestimating Harris’s support, then I think we would also be glad that we swung for the fences because, in that scenario, we can win a majority in the state assembly with some seats to spare. We can win a slew of state Senate seats. We can win multiple U.S. House seats in Wisconsin, and Tammy Baldwin goes back to the U.S. Senate. And if this is happening across the country, then maybe we’re going back with a Democratic trifecta. So try to capture the upside as well as prepare for the downside.
