Transcript: Liz Cheney Says Women Will “Save the Day in This Election”
Anecdotally, a good friend of mine had a coworker who’s Puerto Rican who has registered to vote but had never voted in her life. She called me a week ago yesterday and [said] they needed mail-in ballot applications ASAP. So I drove those out to them at work because they didn’t have time to get them back. I brought those applications back to the Board of Elections and we got them mail-in ballots. My friend texted me today and said that this Puerto Rican voter who had never voted before returned her mail-in ballot, and she cried. Those are the types of anecdotes that I’m seeing, and it is absolutely a huge demographic problem for Donald Trump. We saw when the second gentleman was here this weekend, there were people in that room waving Puerto Rican flags. There were folks lining the streets waiting to see him, holding up Puerto Rican flags and American flags and Harris-Walz signs. So it’s a huge problem for him.
Sargent: Those little anecdotes really say a lot about what’s going on. Let’s go big picture. The polling averages show an absolute dead heat in Pennsylvania right now. Democrats are still struggling to win back working-class whites, which are a disproportionately large constituency in Pennsylvania. To win the state, Harris has to shave those margins down while getting huge numbers out of the collar suburban counties around Philadelphia. But women are key to both those, right? She has to win over some working-class women to limit Trump’s working-class margins; he’s doing really well with working-class whites and cutting into democratic margins among working-class nonwhites. She also has to win big among college-educated suburban women around Philadelphia. When you talk about that, it seems like the key is just getting as many women from all these different constituencies as possible, right?
Sexton: Women make their voting choices for a bunch of reasons, but the one thing that I would point out is that the Biden-Harris administration, and certainly the Harris-Walz campaign, have been very focused on economic issues that impact working-class women. Labor issues—they’ve been incredibly strong on the labor unions; incredibly strong on kitchen table issues—talking about price gouging, increasing home ownership, childcare, prescription drug costs, medical costs. There’s all kinds of economic reasons why voting for Kamala Harris is the best choice. That is definitely part of … I can’t speak to Philadelphia suburbs, but for around here, it’s definitely part of the thing that we talk to voters about: the economy and prices. Certainly, Bob Casey’s message on Greedflation is one that’s really caught on here in my part of Pennsylvania. People love that. They really trust Senator Casey on that issue. That message is breaking through as well. So it’s not just reproductive freedom and health care, but it’s also the economic issues and the family care issues—caring for elderly parents, caring for children. So I do think that there’s a strong message there that’s breaking through.
