ADAM: This is Adam (ph). I'm sitting here in the beautiful Santa Ynez Valley with my baby, Will (ph), on my lap, surrounded by alpaca, chickens and grapevines. This podcast was recorded at...
ASHLEY LOPEZ, HOST:
12:35 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, April 11, 2024.
ADAM: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully I will be a couple more glasses of wine deep. OK, enjoy the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Wow.
LOPEZ: Oh, my God. Wine and alpacas - is that, like, maybe a dream of mine that someone is living?
MONTANARO: If you just, like, Google pictures of the Santa Ynez Valley in Santa Barbara, it looks like a wallpaper background of a computer. It's, like, really pretty.
LOPEZ: Some people are really living the life. I'm telling you.
MONTANARO: Yeah. No kidding.
LOPEZ: Hey there. It's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
MONTANARO: I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: I'm Don Gonyea, national political correspondent.
LOPEZ: And we're deep in a presidential election season, so you know what that means. We're talking about swing counties. Don, you went to Erie, Pa., recently. First, can you tell me why you went there specifically?
GONYEA: So yes, there are swing counties - counties that we look at that we figure, hey, could go either way. Who knows? Depends...
LOPEZ: Yeah.
GONYEA: ...What happens. Erie is one of a subset of swing counties that we like to call boomerang counties, OK? You want to know what that is, right?
LOPEZ: Mmm hmm. Please.
GONYEA: A boomerang county does go back and forth. But in this case, the boomerang counties we've identified - Erie prominent among them - voted for Barack Obama twice, then voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and then went back to Joe Biden and the Democrats in 2020. So it's a four-election thing, where they were always with the winner, kind of going back and forth. Erie, Pa., tucked away in the northwest corner of the state, up on Lake Erie - it's just a tiny little sliver of the lake there - is one of those places.
MONTANARO: And if it sounds like that's rare, it is. I mean, there are, like, more than 3,100 counties in America, and there were 25 counties that went for Obama twice, for Trump and for Biden. In fact, there were only 57 counties that went for both Trump and Biden.
GONYEA: And if we're talking rarity, of those 25 boomerang counties, only a handful - like, five of them...
MONTANARO: Yeah.
GONYEA: ...Are in battleground states - states that are close. So that makes Erie particularly interesting because we all know Pennsylvania is one of those places.
LOPEZ: Well, what do you think is happening there? Like, what makes Erie so swingy? My guess would be like, there's a lot of white, working-class voters 'cause those are, like, the voters to watch, right? They voted for Obama. Hillary sort of like, you know, had trouble with these voters. And then Biden did a little better, and that sort of predicted the outcome of the election. Or is there something else going on there?
GONYEA: There's certainly that. Erie has a lot of industry. It's one of those coastal towns sitting on the lake there that uses its coastline for industry, and the downtown of the city sits right on the coastline as well. And those are both Democratic strongholds. But, again, you've also got a lot of union workers. And union workers certainly lean Democratic, but it's a place where Donald Trump has made inroads the times he's been on the ballot and hopes to do so again. But the thing about Erie is it is kind of a microcosm of Pennsylvania broadly.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
GONYEA: You've got the city. You've got the industrial stuff. It kind of gives way to suburbs. You've got I-90, which runs right through it there. You've got three small colleges there. And then it gets really rural really fast, and that is the deep red part of the county. And again, all of that adds up to make it a very unpredictable place.
LOPEZ: Well, OK. So you went to Erie recently. You did the Don Gonyea thing, got your microphone out, talked to folks. I understand they didn't disappoint.
GONYEA: They did not. And you're always looking for someplace to talk to voters, right? And we started out at a minor league hockey game right downtown, and it was a playoff game - so added bonus. We knew there would be a big crowd. And between periods, we just started chatting people up in the concourse. And the very first person we talked to was a 34-year-old woman named Bekah Mook (ph), and she agrees to talk politics with us. Turns out the topic had already come up with her that night. Listen to what she says happened when she was waiting in the concession line.
BEKAH MOOK: Earlier, behind me, somebody was talking about Biden. In front of me, somebody was talking about Trump. And I'm just like, I can't even stand here and get chicken tenders (laughter), you know what I mean?
GONYEA: At the game.
MOOK: At the game.
GONYEA: And it gets even better with Bekah Mook. She is one of those swing voters. She grew up in a Republican family. She was a single-issue voter back in the day. She said she was a voter who voted pro-life on abortion, and she voted for Donald Trump in 2016. She watched Donald Trump in office, didn't like what she saw, especially on issues like the border and, you know, childhood separation from families and all those sorts of things. She broke with her very Republican family and voted for Joe Biden in 2020. And keeping with the boomerang thing, I said, so who you voting for this year? And she said, I'm undecided. She's not sure yet, but she did say she's probably leaning 60/40 Democratic right now. So we look at all the data - right? - and we find counties that we think might be interesting, but you never know until you get there. Is it just us? Will it feel like it's a swing or a boomerang place once you get there? And Erie is a place that really does deliver the goods. You can feel it on the ground.
MONTANARO: Yeah. And the campaigns really take kind of a big picture view of this stuff. You know, they start at such a high level because they're looking at all of the states, and then they zoom in on which states are important, and they zoom in within those states to regions and areas that are important, places like Erie. Let's take a listen to Kevin Madden, who is a Republican strategist who had worked on Mitt Romney's campaign in 2012, and how campaigns kind of go about that.
KEVIN MADDEN: There are swing regions in swing states. So if you were to take a pen and draw a 30-mile radius around the Atlanta metropolitan area, a 30-mile radius around Philadelphia, a 30-mile radius around Harrisburg, 30-mile radius around Detroit and Grand Rapids in Michigan, those voters in those areas, they're going to see billions of dollars in ads between now and Election Day 2024.
MONTANARO: Yeah, and they're already seeing a lot of that kind of activity, much more of it right now, though, from the Biden campaign than from Trump. Trump's actually spending a lot of money to try to raise more money. But almost nowhere in the country do you actually see Trump on TV right now.
LOPEZ: All right. Let's take a quick break. More when we're back.
And we're back. So, Don, besides voters, you also talked to organizers there in Erie, Pa. Let's start with what you heard from Democrats.
GONYEA: The Democratic chairman is Sam Talarico. He's a new county chairman. He's a retired school teacher. He's a real kind of nuts-and-bolts organizing kind of guy. I kind of wanted to talk strategy with him. Right? This is a boomerang county. You must be out there making the case, telling people why Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump. And he said, you know something? I leave all of that to the campaigns (laughter). They're going to make the pitch on strategy. He said, it is my job to identify where our voters are and to make sure they turn out. So he starts telling me about townships that turn out at a far lower rate than the township right next to it, and they're both in Democratic strongholds. He doesn't know for sure those are all Democratic votes, but the odds are. So he is all about doing the grunt work of a campaign.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And what did he say about how - like, what he's - like, the kind of response he's getting from voters? Does - do they feel, like, pretty excited about this election, or is everyone kind of, like, a Rebekah (ph) Mook, not really sure where they land right now?
GONYEA: The interesting thing he says is that he thinks most voters, Bekah Mook notwithstanding, have already pretty much made up their mind. So there's not a lot of persuasion to do. It really is about getting people to vote. Now they're actually, like, laying the groundwork for what they need to do to reach out to people as it gets closer to - you know, as we get into the summer and as we get closer to the - to Election Day to make sure they've got their registration numbers up. They're also focusing on the Democratic side again, a lot on mail-in ballots...
LOPEZ: Yeah.
GONYEA: ...And making sure people are on board with that.
MONTANARO: Well, you know, in a campaign where Trump and Biden are just so well known, of course, you know, mobilizing voters is going to be super important. But this is kind of like you're spending a lot for a few feet of important ground. A couple of strategists I talked to said that there's a time for persuasion and a time for mobilization, and right now is a time for persuasion for those marginal voters who, you know, might be sort of on the fence but may have leaned in particular toward Biden since he's been lagging in his approval ratings. He's struggling with Latino voters, with younger voters, especially younger Black voters as well. You know, to be able to get people back on board, to remind people of what the Trump threat was that they saw in 2020 but may have heard less from Trump this time around, to really engage people to be back part of the game and be back on board with voting for Biden - so there's going to be a lot of money spent for just a few points, really.
GONYEA: Again, that's work that's being done by the campaigns - targeting ads, targeting direct mail, targeting, you know, social media outreach, all of that. It's the county chair that's really looking precinct by precinct at those registration numbers.
MONTANARO: Yeah, and knocking on doors and organizing in places like Erie that have been bellwethers in the past.
LOPEZ: Well, then I guess it's important to ask, like, how the other side - like, how Republicans are thinking about their turnout strategy. Like, does it sound similar to how Democrats are thinking about this, or do they have, like, sort of different concerns?
GONYEA: It's similar in that it's all about voter turnout more than it is about issues. Tom Eddy is the Republican Party chairman in Erie County. Here's what surprised us about our conversation with Tom Eddy. We have all heard Donald Trump vilify mail-in ballots, right? He portrayed that as a big source of voter fraud in the 2020 election, falsely portrayed it as a source of voter fraud. There was no evidence of that. But Donald Trump continues to badmouth mail-in voting. The catch is it is legal in Pennsylvania, and a lot of people are going to take advantage of mail-in voting so they don't have to worry about showing up on Election Day when the weather could be bad or who knows what could happen - right? - on Election Day.
So the Republicans in Erie County, under the leadership of Tom Eddy, are trying to get rank-and-file Republican voters to sign up for mail-in balloting. And it's an uphill battle. Trump was in town for a rally last summer. Eddy was already on the mail-in bandwagon - right? - so he decides he's going to get out there and start working the line and get people to sign up right there for an application for a mail-in ballot. Listen to how it went.
TOM EDDY: I started at 6:30 in the morning, and I went to everybody that was lined up, all 10,000 people. And I asked them, here's a mail-in ballot. And I gave them my reasons why. And the majority of those people said no, because, one, Donald doesn't endorse it. Two, it's fraud. It's where fraud occurs. And, you know, I might have gotten 300 ballot applications out.
GONYEA: So that's the dilemma for the party, right? They have recognized they need to use this important tool come the election. But they have to convince their own voters that it is an acceptable way to cast a ballot.
MONTANARO: And there's a key court case, actually, that's going on right now that actually was centered in Erie about mail-in ballots because you had a judge there back in November say that mail-in ballots that didn't have accurate dates on them that were handwritten on still had to be counted if they were received in time for the election. The Republican National Committee didn't like that ruling, obviously, appealed it. The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Philadelphia area reversed that, and now, the NAACP and others are appealing that. So we're going to be probably hearing a whole lot more about the very specific sort of ways in which people handle mail-in ballots, and that's how close people expect this election to be in a place like Pennsylvania, which was decided by less than 2 points.
LOPEZ: All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. And before we go, a huge thank you to everyone who supports the show by donating to your local NPR station or by signing up for NPR Politics Plus. Especially this election year, your support really matters. And if you haven't signed up for NPR Politics Plus, now's your chance. You get things like sponsor-free listening and bonus episodes. Our latest bonus episode is about the major changes coming to how the U.S. census and federal forms ask about race and ethnicity. It's in your feeds now. To sign up for Politics Plus, just go to plus.npr.org/politics. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover voting.
MONTANARO: I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
GONYEA: And I'm Don Gonyea, national political correspondent.
LOPEZ: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA'S "TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)")
ADAM: This podcast was recorded at...
LOPEZ: 12:35 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, April 11, 2022 - sorry, 2024 (laughter). Oh, my God, let me do that again.
(LAUGHTER)
LOPEZ: That's really bad. OK, sorry. What year?
GONYEA: I ain't going back.
LOPEZ: OK. Oh, my God.
(LAUGHTER)
LOPEZ: Oh, my God. OK.
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