Right now, both campaigns are projecting cautious optimism that their candidate will win as most battleground-state polls continue to suggest a very tight race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Later this week, we’ll find out if the polls hold up.
National Review briefly caught up with longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin Sunday evening to chat polling, strategy, and a little bit of policy. We also spoke about why the Trump campaign has such a targeted focus on turning out low-propensity voters this cycle.
“That’s how we won in 2016,” says McLaughlin. “We got voters who didn’t vote in 2012 for Mitt Romney to come back out for Donald Trump in 2016. A lot of his supporters are enthusiastic, but they don’t normally vote for traditional Republicans. So you need these independent working men and women to come back out for Donald Trump because the issues of inflation, illegal immigration, and crime propel them to go vote for Trump.”
The full transcript of our telephone conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
How worried are you about the gender gap in this election, and what are your data telling you about how voters are feeling in the suburbs?
As far as the gender gap goes, it’s to our advantage in that men are more likely to vote for Trump in greater numbers than women are for Harris, and the difference is that Republican women are voting for Donald Trump and independent women even are tilting towards us. And our biggest deficit with women voters are among African American women, but it’s more than offset by African American men. And we’re doing very well with Latino voters too.
So right now, it’s a very close race, precisely because Trump’s been working over the past couple years to attract more African American voters, attract more Hispanic voters, attract suburban women, and attract younger voters that we didn’t have four years ago. It appears to be going well.
Is it your impression that part of the Trump campaign’s strategy in avoiding a second debate with Harris was geared toward preventing Harris from getting a momentum moment?
No, it’s more about not putting President Trump in a situation where the media is biased against him. I mean, the last and only debate was a three-on-one match. They fact-checked him and they didn’t hold her accountable. Right after that, he had already said he wanted to do a September Fox News debate which is not as biased as ABC. During the ABC debate, the moderators were friends with Kamala Harris, and one of them was even her sorority sister. Why would we go into a situation that is rigged against our candidate? Harris didn’t want to do Fox News when we wanted to do it. They wanted to do it in late October, when early voting is already going on in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, and significant parts of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan have voted by mail.
As for the ABC debate, they kind of get you in a situation where you’re wondering whether the fact checks were written ahead of time before the debate even started, and you’re wondering if they even coordinated them with Kamala Harris? So there was no venue that he could go into where we thought we would get a fair debate.
What do you say to Republican detractors who worry about the Trump campaign’s ground game and strategic turnout focus on low-propensity voters?
That’s how we won in 2016. We got voters who didn’t vote in 2012 for Mitt Romney to come back out for Donald Trump in 2016. A lot of his supporters are enthusiastic, but they don’t normally vote for traditional Republicans. So you need these independent working men and women to come back out for Donald Trump because the issues of inflation, illegal immigration, and crime propel them to go vote for Trump.
It seems to be working, when you look at the early voting stats, and not just in the battleground states, but around the country as well. There’s good turnout among Republicans and independents and disaffected Democrats who would support Donald Trump and who don’t normally vote in elections.
I saw this post on X…
Such a fake tweet, No actual quotes. Just twisted character assassination.
Is there a nervousness in Trump world about candidate discipline in these final days, especially as the Harris campaign continues to project confidence that late deciders are pulling the lever for the vice president?
No, because he’s been focused. Every one of his rallies, he opens with the line, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” He talks about issues, whether it’s inflation, high taxes, high prices, crime, illegal immigration, wars around the world. He’s making a comparison about job performance versus Harris, and we know President Trump has done a better job than Biden and Harris have over the last four years.
And they’re the ones who have resorted to political character assassination, which is ironic given we have a candidate who actually survived two assassination attempts by the grace of God. And in the meantime, all she does is call us “Nazis” and “fascists.” Biden, the president of the United States, called Trump supporters “garbage.” They want to get into the gutter and run a campaign of political character assassination at a time where seven out of ten voters in the United States say the country is on the wrong track, and they’ve got real issues that have to be solved. Trump has the better record to solve those issues, and they want to distract from that. So, we’re not falling into that trap.
Back in July, around the convention, you told me: “It’s a very different campaign. It’s more experienced, and it’s more determined…. I’ve never seen him as determined.” Over the past few months, Trump has experienced multiple brushes with death. There’s an ongoing Iranian plot to kill him, there are reports of Chinese hackers targeting his phone, and he got a new Democratic opponent.
Crazy things always happen in campaigns, but this one’s been a real roller coaster. Tell me about that personal determination factor from the team and the President now, especially given the lawfare element when it comes to Trump.
When you think about everything he’s been through — they tried to take away his wealth, take away his business, put him in jail. A lot of his lawfare cases had significant penalties with them. And it all fell apart. And then suddenly, the situation where he was able to survive an assassination. And then there was another attempt. They didn’t have enough Secret Service protection. And the campaign had requested more. And when you look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who now supports Donald Trump, he didn’t have any. And how do you not give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. any Secret Service protection?
President Trump has weathered all that adversity with a level of class and a level of determination and a quiet defiance. He dealt with it with dignity, and he’s now leading his voters to hopefully an election where he puts America in the right direction, because he cares passionately about our country. He really does want to go back to the policies that work. He really does want to see the working men and women of America in a better position, where their standard of living is better, their wages are protected, they can earn more, they’re safe in their homes, and they don’t have to worry about sending their send their sons and daughters off to these endless wars.
Trump’s always run as an economic populist. In this final stretch, he’s thrown out an interesting buffet of populist policy ideas out there: no tax on tips or overtime pay, universal coverage of IVF, temporarily capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent, and tariffs of course. What or who inspired Trump to throw a lot of these ideas out on the campaign trail this cycle?
He usually talks it over with people. Some of them are high-level policy advisers. On economics, he’ll talk to Larry Kudlow, Steve Moore, Steve Forbes, and Art Laffer. He’ll also talk to average men and women, and he’ll get inspired by what they say and how they’re feeling. He knows that working people who work for tips used to get tipped in cash, when they didn’t have the IRS chasing them to find out what their income was. Now that’s all different, and now people are being tipped in credit cards, and people are being discouraged to work because they’re paying taxes all the time. And Kamala Harris wants to let the Trump tax cuts lapse. There’ll be a $5 trillion tax increase. She wants to raise income taxes, capital gains on homes and retirement savings and taxes on small businesses.
President Trump’s got a good plan that he gets from his own focus groups talking to average people. And when you look at his proposals, he runs them by policy people. He’s got advisers from America First Policy Institute, he’s got advisers on the campaign, and he runs it by them.
