AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Let's turn to NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson to put those comments into context. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So let's start with that new F word that emerged in the past week - fascism. Many Democrats have thought and said for a long time that former President Donald Trump is fascist. But why is Harris now getting behind that label?
LIASSON: I think Harris has decided that in these closing weeks of the campaign she needs to put Donald Trump more front and center. It's just not enough to say, we're not going back. What she's trying to do is rely on something called negative partisanship. She wants people to go to the polls, and even if they're not excited about voting for her, she wants them to cast a vote to stop Donald Trump. And she got some support recently. Three former high-ranking officials - John Kelly, Marc Milley, Mark Esper - have called Trump a fascist, and more than a dozen former top national security officials signed a letter calling the former president increasingly unstable and unfit to serve.
RASCOE: Let's talk about another issue that Harris has put front and center since she got into the race in mid-July, and we also heard just now in that clip of her from the NBC interview, and that's her support for reproductive rights. Why hasn't that been a more successful argument for her?
LIASSON: Well, I think it has been successful. It's probably behind the big gender gap. You know, two-thirds of the country favors legal abortion with restrictions. But the thing about the abortion argument is that it works for Democrats, but not necessarily for Harris. And an example of this is in Arizona, where a right-to-abortion ballot question is winning by curvature of the Earth, polling like 70% to 27%. But in presidential polling in Arizona, Harris is slightly behind Trump. And what that tells you is that there are a lot of voters who are going to vote for a state constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights, and also vote for Donald Trump. So it may not be working the way Democrats had hoped.
RASCOE: One of those Trump clips that we heard came from a three-hour-long interview that the former president gave to Podcaster Joe Rogan. And three hours in one interview with less than two weeks before the election is a huge commitment. What do you make of that?
LIASSON: Well, yeah, and he kept his supporters at a rally waiting for those three hours. But I think it says a lot about his strategy right now and who he's going after. Joe Rogan is the top podcaster on Apple and Spotify. He's also the king of bro podcasting. A lot of his listeners are white non-college-educated men. They overwhelmingly support Trump, but they are low-propensity voters. They don't usually turn out, and they're a shrinking percentage of the electorate. Less than 40% of voters are now non-college whites. They were about 50% in 2008. Of course, in some important states like Pennsylvania they're still about 50%, but the point is Trump is fishing in a shrinking pool.
He has to get a lot of these people in the pool out and to vote for him. He thinks Joe Rogan can help him do that. Trump may not have as good a ground game as Kamala Harris, but some Democrats call him a human turnout machine, and that's why he's on with Joe Rogan for three hours.
RASCOE: So what do we have to look forward to in the coming week?
LIASSON: I think we have to pay attention to the swing states. Trump is headed to Georgia and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Nevada. Harris is going to go also to those swing states, but she's going to appear at The Ellipse on Tuesday. She's going to give a speech in the same spot that Trump gave his famous speech on January 6. She wants voters to remember what happened on that day, and the fact that he asked his supporters to go up to the Capitol and overturn a free and fair election.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Thank you so much for coming on.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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