Transcript: Trump’s NYC Rally Could Cost Him Must-Win PA, GOPer Says

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 29 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump is now working furiously to contain the damage unleashed on his campaign by the hate rally he held in New York. In a rambling monologue Tuesday, he defended the event as a “lovefest” and insisted Democrats are the ones running a campaign of hate. Trump is worried because new reporting shows that the vile “joke” about Puerto Rico at the rally is infuriating Puerto Rican voters, a key demographic in Pennsylvania. This is potentially a big deal. GOP strategist Mike Madrid posted a fascinating thread explaining why this may be an October surprise that could cause him to lose this race. So we invited Madrid on the show. He’s a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an expert on the Latino vote, and author of a new book called The Latino Century. We’re going to talk about all of this. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Madrid: Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Sargent: To recap, at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, a supposed comedian described Puerto Rico as “a pile of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” The whole event was a festival of racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, and all around ugliness. And here’s what Trump said about this on Tuesday.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): The love in that room ... It was breathtaking, and you could have filled it many many times with the people that were unable to get in. But politicians that have been doing this for a long time, 30 and 40 years, said there’s never been an event so beautiful. It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest, and it was my honor to be involved. And hopefully ... they started to say, Well, in 1939, the Nazis used Madison Square Garden. Well, and you know what? Every ... no, but can you imagine that? 1939, the Nazi, they would ... But how terrible to say, right?

Sargent: Trump also described Kamala Harris’s campaign as a campaign of destruction and hate. Mike, I didn’t hear a lot of love at that rally at the Garden, but should we read this as a sign that he knows the rally is breaking through to voters as a story about his and MAGA’s racism?

Madrid: Look, there’s no question that they’re going to be reeling from this. Any time you have a flub like this, and again, I mean a campaign flub. This was obviously a concerted strategy by the Trump people to have this person—persons by the way. It wasn’t just this one comedian, it was the whole litany of “terribles” that took the stage and those reams of stuff that they were saying. This is not a mistake by one person mistakenly saying something; this was a conscious effort, which they are realizing was a mistake in a campaign context. But anytime that happens and popular culture starts to weigh in, we start to have celebrities with tens of millions of followers uniformly weighing in immediately, you’ve got a campaign problem on your hands—because pop culture starts to drive the narrative and politics being downstream from culture will start to reflect that.

Sargent: That’s so key. The whole thing about this that makes it so lethal for Trump is that it has penetrated to the culture. You wrote in your thread that there are 450,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania alone and that, as a result, this rally fallout could very well cost Trump the election. Can you elaborate on all that?

Madrid: This is going to be most acutely felt in terms of a campaign reverberations in the state of Pennsylvania. This is the key swing state among swing states. Both candidates have over 93 percent probability of winning the race if they win Pennsylvania. So it’s really the whole enchilada here, as we’d say. Pennsylvania is also the one of swing state whose Latino population is Puerto Rican by the largest plurality. All of the others, Mexicans are the largest ethnic Latino plurality; not so Pennsylvania, it’s Puerto Ricans. And frankly, it’s the state where she was doing the best anyway with Latino voters. Now, if she’s able to move just 2 percent of Latinos away from the Republicans—where they’ve been a little bit Republican-curious over the past few election cycles—back into the Democratic fold, that’s going to have a really dramatic impact.

And when you start to see cultural leaders, again, the Bad Bunnies, the Jennifer Lopezs, the Geraldo Riveras, the Residentes, the Ricky Martins, all of which have combined over 100 million social media followers—it becomes a point of Puerto Rican pride. Can this move the needle two or three points with the Latino vote in Pennsylvania? Absolutely, it can. This state is uniquely positioned to be affected by what happened in Madison Square Garden, and we’re probably going to see that next Tuesday.

Sargent: It’s an extraordinary development because nobody could have predicted that something like this would happen. Well, I guess someone could have predicted that it would happen, but no one could have predicted that it would happen in such a vivid way. And I don’t think anyone could have predicted that it would have been laser-focused on this key swing constituency in Pennsylvania as well. You mentioned in your thread that Puerto Rican voters in Pennsylvania had shifted toward Republicans recently, but this could very well move a lot of them back. The reporting is showing that that’s actually happening. In some sense, the key point is that this is soft support for Republicans, right? That movement toward Republicans is soft.

Madrid: Yeah. I’ve argued that this whole rightward shift is really not a pro-Republican shift. It’s a movement away from both parties. Democrats are feeling it a little bit more because there are more Latino Democrats. You’re not, for example, seeing changing Latino registration in Pennsylvania. You’re not seeing a change anywhere. You are seeing some voting behavior change, but that’s a sign that those are gettable. They’re very much gettable voters. That’s the most important point.

The other, though, is Latinos broadly are a late-deciding vote. It’s a lower information working-class voter that’s not watching our politics 24-7. Just as they’re tuning in and starting to focus on realizing, Okay, Election Day is coming Tuesday, maybe I don’t like my economic conditions, maybe I’m not really happy with the Democratic Party, but then this pops through. It’s not even necessarily that they’re watching a two-hour, five-hour Trump rally or whatever it was; they’re hearing it through their Instagram feeds from the community, they’re hearing it on WhatsApp channels from people throughout the community. That breaks through.

And this late-deciding voter, it’s the worst possible time for this fiasco, on behalf of the Trump campaigns, to happen. I want to really drive one last point home here, Greg: The reason why this has legs beyond Trump’s normal racist vitriol and dog whistling—and it’s not even dog whistling anymore, it’s just overt—is because it all came from other people on stage that he promoted. If this had been Trump ... There’s already this cultural tendency to roll our eyes and say, That’s just Trump being Trump. It’s the same reason why a lot of Latino voters are saying, He’s not talking about me when he’s talking about mass deportations and border security, border enhancements. This is different. This did not come out of his mouth. They heard it from the voice of others. And it wasn’t just this one comedian, it was a lineup of people saying these horrible things. And that sticks different. It hits different.

In many ways, it’s almost a good thing because it reminds me that Americans, our sensibilities, still can be shocked. We still have some sense of shame, even in the Trump era. And while we may have lost it with him and disregard him as just this peculiar entertainer—he’s not real and he doesn’t mean it when he obviously does, we’ve become inured to that—when we hear it in other voices, and he’s platforming those voices, numerous ones, surrounding him with intensity, with passion and deep, deep offense, that’s why this is broken through. That’s why we’re seeing the reverberations that we are.

Sargent: It’s really interesting, as you point out: We’re talking about a certain type of low-propensity voter, maybe someone who isn’t paying super close attention, is deciding at the end, doesn’t pay attention to the media sources you and I pay attention to, working class a lot of them. These are the types of voters who Trump has to do well with. That support has to be solid for him, and it’s shaky. Your point, if I understand you correctly, is that this type of event is precisely the thing that penetrates to this type of voter via social media feeds, via influencers. These are voters who don’t listen to politicians, but they listen to influencers. These influencers are telling them, Hey guys, this is an important election, all of a sudden, and these voters are going to pay attention.

I want to ask you about the broader set of questions here. There’s no question that Democrats have to worry about the move of Latinos to Trump. Some polls have showed that Harris has closed the gap somewhat with her getting into the high 50s with them, but that’s not enough. Where does she have to get to with Latinos nationally to win this election?

Madrid: That’s a great question because I don’t think there’s any one set number. The reason why is because it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The way I have been looking at this, and advising people to look at this for the past couple of years, is the winner of this race is going to be determined by whether or not Republicans can hold on to enough college-educated white, largely women, voters who have been moving to the left for the better part of 10 years now, or Democrats holding on to their base of U.S.–born, non-college-educated Hispanic men, largely under 30, moving to the right.

In 2020, Joe Biden’s Latino share of the vote dropped to 59 percent. Kamala Harris can still win with that same share. She could actually lose a couple points beyond that and still win because, mathematically, if you’re looking at fishing where the fish are, there are more Republican white women in these battleground states than there are U.S.–born younger Hispanic men. She’s actually fishing where there are more fish. But moreover, she’s making inroads into that elector. This is not like a Hail Mary pass. They’re quantifiably moving voters. And incidentally, Pennsylvania is where we saw the most Republican defections of Republicans to Biden. So they’re very heavily into that, as they should be. There’s going to be more return there than perhaps stopping the loss of Hispanic men. In the key states where this matters, they can nationally lose a couple more points of the Latino vote and still win the election with a one- to two-point defection amongst Republicans.

Sargent: Let me ask you about some hard numbers in Pennsylvania. There are 450,000 Puerto Ricans there. Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes. What are you anticipating this Madison Square Garden thing does among Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania? How many percentage points, how many voters do you think it plausibly shifts to Harris among that demographic? Does that basically solve the Latino problem, at least in that state for Harris?

Madrid: Great question. There are 450,000 Puerto Ricans, not all of them are registered to vote. That’s just the population. About 6 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate is Latino; about 3.7 percent is of Puerto Rican–descent. A city like Allentown has 33,500 Puerto Ricans alone. So in Allentown, you could actually make a significant impact by coalescing ... Just Allentown alone could really make a big difference in the statewide outcome of the contest. If you shift just 10 or 15,000 votes of Puerto Ricans away from Donald Trump and back to Kamala Harris, you put her in a very strong position to win. Can Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez and Geraldo Rivera and Ricky Martin do that? I think they probably can.

Sargent: In Pennsylvania, the four suburban counties around Philadelphia, Biden netted 285,000 votes over Trump out of those counties. Ron Brownstein was on this show recently. He said she can get to maybe 315,000 and then she probably wins the state if she can get there. Let’s talk about that. One of your points has been that not only does this Madison Square Garden stuff shift Latinos who are drifting away from Democrats potentially back but also it is perfectly tailored to getting those suburban white numbers higher for Harris. Can you talk a bit about that?

Madrid: Yeah. First of all, I see the world very similarly to Ron Brownstein on most things. I think he’s exactly right. The greater numerical impact beyond Puerto Rican or Latino voters is with college-educated white Republican voters, specifically women, who have had a very uneasy relationship with the party in the Trump era. They are looking for any basic reason to leave, and this really gives them the perfect one to do it, because they’re leaving on cultural reasons. They’re not leaving because of tax policy or foreign policy or even the economic conditions that they’re more immune to as higher income earners and higher income families. They don’t like being in the party of the Confederacy. They don’t like being in a party that is anti-immigrant. They don’t like being in a party that is telling them what to do with their bodies or is witnessing the rise of Christian nationalism.

This whole debacle, this whole five-hour circus festival, reminded them at precisely the right moment why they don’t feel comfortable in the GOP anymore. The timing could not have been worse for Trump and better for Harris because we may see greater defections amongst Republicans to Harris than we actually see returns of Puerto Ricans back to Harris as well.

Sargent: Well, it’s a double whammy. It’s worth telling listeners that David Plouffe, a senior strategist for Harris, has been saying that their internal numbers show that she’s posting surprising strength with Republican-leaning independence and moderate Republican voters. They’re insisting that that’s a real thing, and they’re saying that that can get them over the line. What do you think of that? It seems plausible to me.

Madrid: This was my life existence for the past four years. This is what I did on the Lincoln Project when we were pushing the numbers further than we thought we could. We have to remember that all of the primaries that were held this year, all of the Republican primaries, more than 40 of them showed Donald Trump losing between 17 and 21 percent of Republican voters.

Despite the fact that in many of those there was no other candidate actively running, anything half of that would be cataclysmic for the GOP. So it’s good that Plouffe’s internals are showing that the campaign is certainly behaving like that. It explains why she’s on Fox News, it explains why she’s there with Liz Cheney. But what I would offer and suggest is: Even more importantly than having all of these third-party testimonials of Republicans who’ve defected, it’s this type of an issue which remind voters, even before Liz Cheney was against Trump, why they were against Trump. This is incredibly impactful. It’s dropped into pop culture. It is being discussed at the soccer games with the kids’ practices. People are saying, Did you see that? Did you hear that? That’s exactly the type of narrative that the Republicans ... It’s the nightmare scenario for Republicans.

Sargent: It’s the stuff that gets people actually talking to each other that really matters. That’s why abortion is such a big issue in this election as it was in 2022. It’s an issue that’s really well-suited to one voter telling another voter, Hey, I know this person that this horrible thing happened to. What a horror show. Can you believe what they’re doing to us?

Madrid: Again, that’s why cultural issues are moving college-educated Republicans away from the GOP. This is the reminder. It’s not a politician giving us a “permission structure.” You don’t need a permission structure to know that Donald Trump is a bad human being. And you may not know enough about Kamala Harris to say, OK, I vote for her/I won’t vote for her. Maybe economic conditions are a little bit bad, but this reminds you of every reason why you fired this guy in the first place. It reinforces in the mind of voters of what the next four years look like, waking up every day going, My God, are we going to do this again?

Sargent: Let’s talk about immigration for a second. Harris has been leading with border security, vowing to sign the bipartisan border bill negotiated with Republicans that Trump killed. But something that’s often missing from the coverage is that she’s also promising a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and talking about getting right with the DREAMers and so forth. You’ve long argued that it’s this combination of those two things—security first, but also citizenship, making the immigration system sane—that’s essential to winning Latino voters.

But, Mike, why isn’t that working quite well enough? How is Trump able to win some Latinos when he’s promising not just mass deportations with giant camps carried out by the military but also to slash legal immigration too? How does that work?

Madrid: It’s a very important question because, in many ways, this is what has limited the abilities of Democrats to get these voters back. You have to understand, and again, this isn’t Mike Madrid just suggesting—this is The New York Times poll that came out last week of Latino voters. It was very insightful. Overwhelmingly, Latino voters do not believe that Donald Trump is talking about them. They believe that he’s talking about immigrants broadly, and illegal immigrants specifically.

That should not come as a shock to us. Now, you and I would realize that the ramifications of what he’s ultimately going to do are far beyond that, and that’s fair. But they don’t believe for a moment that he’s talking about them. Let me give you an example, specifically, of how deep this runs. Nine percent of Kamala Harris’s Latino voters—nine percent—support mass deportations, according to The New York Times poll. These are Kamala Harris Latino supporters. So we’ve really got to ... If the Democrats are going to get this vote share back, they’re going to have to really recuse themselves from this real strong tendency to say, Why isn’t this working? Maybe if we just set it different, let’s bring it up differently. Here’s where I disagree with Ron Brownstein.

You should not be talking about this issue. Do exactly what Kamala Harris is doing. Speak to exactly where the sentiment of the vast majority of the American public and a larger and growing number of Latinos are at on this issue. Don’t muddy it. Don’t step on it. Don’t mitigate it. Do everything you can to bring this into focus.

Sargent: Mike, what is she doing that’s working, do you think?

Madrid: She’s talking largely about border security, to close that gap between this enormous margin of where voters, including Latino voters, trust Donald Trump more on the border.

Sargent: I absolutely get that, and I’ve actually been someone who said that it makes political sense what they’re doing. But what I still don’t quite get is: You also need the citizenship piece of this to reach Latino voters. Some of the Latino ads, the ads targeting Latinos that I’ve seen, have that in there. And I guess she is saying that. When she speaks in Arizona and Nevada, she brings that up, whereas when she’s in the Rust Belt, I don’t hear it as much.

Madrid: Well, we can infer from that what we will. But what I will say is she does not need to include that to get Latino voters back. That is quantifiably not true. That’s why they’re not doing it. That doesn’t mean she’s racist. That doesn’t mean she’s anti-immigrant. It means she’s prioritizing exactly what voters want, including Latino voters. As somebody who has worked on immigration reform for 30 years, it is not a surprise to me that this issue begins with border security.

The beauty of the moment is we all know that when elected, she is going to work and emphasize and prioritize the immigration reform and DACA pieces. That doesn’t mean that you have to lead or even mention that. She’s giving it, I would say, 10 percent play, which is probably right to remind some of those groups, largely a D.C. crowd, that are frankly not speaking for the Latino community. Follow the data. It’s overwhelming. It’s not marginal. It’s not something we can infer. It is overwhelming. Go solve the immediate problem, then we will get to those other issues that we support. That’s OK.

In fact, I would argue, decouple those two and you can get them both done. By jamming together the candy with the ice cream, you’re trying to stuff it all in your mouth and it’s going to make you sick. If you eat them separately, you’re going to be able to get both of them; and you will. I believe that President Kamala Harris will get one of the most stringent border security policies ever accomplished, and I believe that she will also get the most comprehensive immigration reform piece done, but I believe that they will be done separately.

Sargent: Yes, there’s a real chance that she could conceivably get something like the Republican border bill plus legalization for DREAMers and maybe more and a few other pieces. We’ll see. Let’s wrap this up, Mike. In the end, what you’re basically saying is that this Madison Square Garden hate display was an October surprise, in the sense that it’s almost a double whammy. It has the capacity to move a small number, or maybe not even that small number, of Puerto Rican votes away from Republicans and back to Democrats or maybe move them from not voting at all to voting for Democrats. And it has the capacity to help Harris had her numbers in the suburbs of Philadelphia. That’s a double whammy. Is that the October surprise? Could it cost him this whole race?

Madrid: That is the October surprise. Surprise, Donald Trump, you blew yourself up. Yes, it could absolutely bring Pennsylvania into the win column for Kamala Harris. I believe that. Regardless, this is not a good development for Donald Trump. The question is: How bad is it going to be?

Sargent: Mike Madrid, terrific discussion. Thanks so much for coming on with us, man.

Madrid: Thanks for having me, Greg. Good to talk to you.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.