This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to the battleground state of Wisconsin, where both presidential candidates are spending a lot of time. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris held competing rallies in the state Wednesday and return tonight for two more rallies just miles apart from each other in Milwaukee. On Wednesday in Green Bay, Trump posed in a garbage truck on the airport tarmac amidst Republican criticism of recent comments by President Biden about Trump supporters while responding to a far-right so-called comedian at Trump’s weekend rally at Madison Square Garden who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
DONALD TRUMP: How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris held a rally in Madison, a city where she spent part of her childhood.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: All right, Madison, are we ready to do this?
CROWD: Yeah!
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Are we ready to vote?
CROWD: Yeah!
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Are we ready to win?
CROWD: Yeah!
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Oh, it’s good to be back in Madison. It’s good to be back.
AMY GOODMAN: As Harris spoke, a group of peaceful protesters could be heard yelling “Ceasefire now!” from two corners of the arena. Some held a banner reading “No fundraising for war crimes.” This was her response.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: We have an opportunity in —
PROTESTER: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Hey, you know what?
PROTESTER: Ceasefire now! Ceasefire now!
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Listen, we all want the war in Gaza to end and get the hostages out as soon as possible. And I will do everything in my power to make it heard and known. And everyone has the right to be heard, but right now I am speaking.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was greeted with an “editorial”:https://captimes.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-welcome-home-kamala-madison-will-put-you-over-the-top/article_a4c3910e-9562-11ef-8cb8-a736f6cce3cc.html in The Capital Times headlined “Welcome Home, Kamala, Madison will put you over the top!”
For more, we’re joined in Madison by John Nichols, The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent, who has a new “piece”:https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trump-vance-johnson-gop-fascism/ headlined “Trump’s Not the Only Top Republican Whose Fascism Is Showing.” John is the author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, co-written with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, titled It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.
John, thanks for joining us. Why don’t you start off by talking about Kamala Harris’s roots in Madison, Wisconsin, and also lead into the Wisconsin Senate race?
JOHN NICHOLS: Well, that’s a lot of territory and important all around. Thanks for having me on, Amy. And you’re right to focus on Wisconsin. It is an incredible battleground. Tonight, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris literally could have passing motorcades in Milwaukee.
But, yes, Kamala Harris has roots in Madison, Wisconsin. Her parents were immigrants, a mother from India, a father from Jamaica. They met in California around Berkeley. They were participants at a club where folks talked about imperialism and colonialism and the changing world at that time. They were both brilliant academics, very progressive activists. And when they got their degrees from Berkeley, they were looking for places to work. And they traveled around the country, had worked on different campuses at times. They spent a year or so in Madison, Wisconsin, where their young daughter Kamala was — you know, she recalls playing along Lake Mendota. I’ve been with her at the home where she grew up. And we’ve talked a lot about her parents. Her father was a pioneering economist in many areas. He was one of the first Black faculty members at the University of Wisconsin in the area of economics. Her mother, a very brilliant cancer researcher. And she really did grow up as a very young girl for a time in that Madison environment, before her parents ultimately went back to California. And her mother went back; the parents divorced. But Madison is a part of her story, and she —
AMY GOODMAN: And her father became the first Black — her father became — right? — the first tenured Black economist at Stanford in California.
JOHN NICHOLS: Absolutely. He’s a brilliant man and also one of the most honored economists in the Caribbean, receiving major awards in Jamaica for the work that he did with multiple prime ministers as regards the Jamaican economy. And her mother, too, just if you look at her academic record and her work on breast cancer especially. Her parents are a remarkable pair of people. And, you know, in politics, we don’t explore the family as much sometimes, I suppose. But with Kamala Harris, when you talk to her, what you find is she really does speak with great depth and passion about her mother especially, but about her upbringing. And we could go on. We could talk for a very long time about it, because it’s a good story. And I wrote a lot about it. But you also asked about the Wisconsin Senate race. And —
AMY GOODMAN: Which could determine the balance of the Senate.
JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, that’s why it’s a big deal. Look, here’s the reality, and we should put it in perspective. If Kamala Harris is elected president on Tuesday or after a very long count in lots of battleground states, the first question is: How will she be able to govern? Similarly, that’s true also, obviously, for Donald Trump. And that comes down to the Senate, because the Senate will confirm cabinet picks. It will confirm judicial picks. There are just so many ways in which the Senate is essential. It’s not the only essential body. Obviously, the House matters a great deal. But this fight for control of the Senate is real.
And the fact is that the Democrats now have a very narrow — the narrowest — majority. They are going to almost certainly lose a seat in West Virginia, the seat that was Joe Manchin’s. They are in danger of losing a seat in Montana, which is the state where Jon Tester has been the senator for a long time. Tester’s holding on. I don’t necessarily like the analyses that write him off, because he’s had a remarkable run of winning in a very, very Republican state. But it’s a tough race this year. So, the Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the Senate. We can talk in a moment about a couple of other states that are really interesting and might flip that back.
But Wisconsin is really central to that. And it’s an interesting thing. Tammy Baldwin, the senator from Wisconsin, a recently progressive Democrat, has won by pretty good margins in the past. This year she is facing an onslaught. Her opponent is an incredibly wealthy man who started his campaign by pouring millions of dollars of his own money in. Now he’s received huge infusions of money from national Republican and conservative PACs. And so, the airwaves in Wisconsin are filled with brutal attacks on Tammy Baldwin, very, very personal attacks. She is an out lesbian, and they have actually had ads attacking her that show images of her partner and, you know, all sorts of attacks on her partner, as well as her. And so, it’s become an ugly race in many senses. The polling shows that Tammy Baldwin is still a little bit ahead. And frankly, this seat, as well as a couple others, these are critical, because there is no way that Democrats could control the Senate if Tammy Baldwin loses in Wisconsin or if Sherrod Brown, frankly, loses in Ohio.
And the interesting thing about Baldwin, one quick thing that I’ll note with her, is she’s a fascinating figure, because, to a greater extent than almost anyone except Bernie Sanders, she has focused on industrial policy, on trade, on economics, on a host of working-class issues, on getting pensions back for workers who lose them when a plant closes, things like that. That’s still a big part of all her ads. And so, Wisconsin becomes a real test of whether somebody who’s put a heavy-duty emphasis on those economic issues can overcome a lot of the personal attacks.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this whole issue of Tammy Baldwin being attacked as an LGBTQ person, and then, in Wisconsin, Eric Hovde, her opponent, will not reveal his ultimate wealth. Is that right? It’s around something like $200 million or more. And then you have Montana, Jon Tester up against Tim Sheehy. I remember being on the floor of the Republican convention when Sheehy got up and said, “That’s right. My name is Sheehy. Those are my pronouns: she/he.” There’s this obsession around the issue of gender. But then, you know, just as you’ve interviewed Kamala Harris a number of times through her career, if you can talk about another man you’ve been following, in Nebraska, and talk about this very unusual —
JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — race taking place there?
JOHN NICHOLS: It’s an absolutely fascinating race in Nebraska. I went out there and spent some time this summer and traveled around with Dan Osborn, who is running for the U.S. Senate as an independent against a Republican incumbent, Deb Fischer. And the interesting thing about Dan Osborn is that he is not a career politician by any measure. He’s a machinist. And he was a leader of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Millers Union at the Kellogg’s plant in the Omaha area. He led a strike there. It was a pretty bitter, pretty intense strike. And he got a lot of attention. He was on television quite a bit. And there were people who approached him and said, “Hey, you know what? You should run for the U.S. Senate.” Dan Osborn said, “You know, I might do that, but I won’t do it as a Republican, and I won’t do it as a Democrat. I will do it as a stone-cold independent who has objections to both parties.”
And so, he’s mounted this very populist campaign. He campaigns in union halls. He campaigns in community centers, driving thousands of miles across Nebraska in a truck with his picture on the side of it. And I can tell you that his economic positions are a stark critique of the power of corporations and the attacks on unions. He’s very, very focused on that. And he has done remarkably well in connecting with working-class people across Nebraska.
Now, Nebraska is a pretty Republican state, has a great Democratic Party that has pretty innovative leadership, folks who were tied to Bernie Sanders, and so they really built the party up a lot. But it’s still a Republican state by and large. And what Osborn has done — and I’ve seen him do it in meetings with groups of people — you know, he has spoken to, obviously, Democrats, but also he’s spoken to Trump supporters. And he will sometimes disagree with them on some of the issues or some of the things they bring up, but he draws the conversation always back to those economics, that stark critique of corporations and of the harm they’ve done to working-class people in the industrial setting but also on farms. And the polling shows that he has closed the gap to a point where he could actually win this race.
AMY GOODMAN: As an independent in Nebraska. John, talk about what’s happening here, where Democracy Now! is, in New York. People were floored a few years ago when one House race after another went to Republicans. It was a surprise upset. Talk about these congressional races and what they mean today in 2024.
JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, it’s a wild thing that New York state, which is obviously a very, very Democratic state, could well tip control of the U.S. House of Representatives. And this is a big deal. It is true that in 2022 you saw a number of seats flip to the Republicans. Many of those seats remain competitive. And the real fascinating thing is that 2022 was an off-year election with a governor’s race. This is a so-called on-year election with the presidential race. And you’ve covered very well the rally that Trump did at Madison Square Garden. That was seen in the national context. But remember, in New York, here was the former president of the United States and people around him, his supporters, saying incredibly brutal things about all sorts of constituency groups in New York state. This is a big deal.
If in fact there is a big turnout of Democrats in New York state — not a competitive state — for Kamala Harris at the presidential level, that could have a real impact on three, four, even five congressional seats. What I’m looking at in the polling suggests that Democrats could pick up several seats in New York, as many — again, up to five, if things go very, very well for them. That would very possibly tip control of the U.S. House of Representatives, because right now Republicans have a three-seat majority.
Democrats, really, because of the redrawing of lines around the country, they need to pick up at least five seats, and obviously they want more. When I look around the country, New York is one of the two states where they could pick up — just in one state, they could pick up enough to flip control. The other is California. There’s a number of competitive seats out there. It’s very, very important to understand that the forced redrawing of lines in a couple of Southern states — Alabama and Louisiana — has created two new seats in overwhelmingly Black constituencies that could well elect Democrats. And then, you know, we could go around the country, Amy, but the fact of the matter is that Democrats are in reasonably good position to take the House of Representatives. And where you may see it happen is, as you suggest, in New York state.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, John, you’ve written a “piece”:https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/shawn-fain-harris-nafta-trump/ on how Kamala Harris can win her so-called closing argument, “How Harris Can Win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania… and the Presidency.” You write, “Harris’s closing argument should be about more than the fact that Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has since embraced an increasingly authoritarian, even fascistic, politics. It has to include a strong pro-choice appeal and a loud defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.” Take it from there.
JOHN NICHOLS: Well, look, what I believe strongly is that the Harris campaign, it has delivered some good messages about Trump, but they need to understand that at the doors people want to talk about economics. I was with a guy named Steve Bauer out in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a very — a real swing county, very competitive. This guy has been doing doors since May. I asked him just yesterday, “What do you hear about at the doors? You know, what are you hearing? Do you hear about these democracy issues that are so important?” And that Steve thinks are super important. And he says, “Well, you know, the truth of the matter is, what I hear about is the economy. What I hear about is jobs and the impact of trade policies and things like that.”
And this is the bottom line, Amy. What I argued in my piece is that Kamala Harris actually has a good argument to make. Donald Trump, when he was president, restructured NAFTA and turned it into something else, created a new version of NAFTA, if you will. That has not worked well. Shawn Fain, the leader of the United Auto Workers, refers to it as “Trump’s NAFTA” and says it’s been devastating for auto workers and other industrial workers across the country. I’m surprised that Harris hasn’t put more emphasis on this in the closing days of the campaign, because the fact of the matter is economic issues are huge in this campaign, and there really is a way for Harris, who, by the way, voted against Trump’s NAFTA, to deliver a powerful economic message. And I think if her campaign is smart in these closing days, they will dial up a lot of that economic messaging, because I do think that it is what people, especially at the doors in these battleground states, want to talk about.
AMY GOODMAN: John Nichols, I want to thank you for being with us, The Nation‘s national affairs correspondent. His latest “piece”:https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trump-vance-johnson-gop-fascism/ — and we’ll link to a lot of them at The Nation — “Trump’s Not the Only Top Republican Whose Fascism Is Showing.” He’s going to be talking about — he in the article talks about House Speaker Johnson, and that’s who we’re going to talk about next. John, we hope to talk to you in the election night special Democracy Now! is doing. It’s a four-hour election night special, 8:00 to midnight. People can check it out — that’s Eastern time — at democracynow.org, and expanding to two hours on the morning after, Wednesday, November 6th, from 8:00 to 10:00. And any show, TV or radio station can take these broadcasts.
Next up, what’s that “little secret” between Trump and Johnson? We’ll speak with Elie Mystal about how Speaker Mike Johnson could help install Trump as president. Find out how.
