US election: Will the Trump v Harris debate change how people vote? | BBC News

I've already talked to three undecided voters you may have found the three they might be the three who decide the election okay so somebody's in a very noisy Place somebody's in a quiet library I'm in London we are really spread out at the moment um I think I'm assumi how are you are you in like a nightclub or something I wish I were I wish but if I were in a nightclub at I don't know uh midday uh on a Thursday I I would be impressed yeah I would be impressed with myself as well no I'm in a lovely Cafe in downtown doy toown in Pennsylvania Buck County Pennsylvania this is I don't know if you've been to doown it is beautiful you should definitely come here Katrina are you're in a library or fake Library I'm in a fake Library yeah no it's not a fake library library any Library you see on television these days is fake let's be honest I would not be I don't think there's a librarian on the planet that would let me speak this loudly if I were in a library but I am in the library Court of the BBC Washington Bureau so I have nipped into the library corner to have this chat with you guys because it is very busy in this BBC Bureau we've had a lot of reinforcements come into town for the debate this week of course it's been another crazy busy week and a crazy busy month and a crazy busy year um but I'm delighted that us three are going to find the time every week to just get together and have a chat about what we've noticed from the campaigns what's impacting voters ahead of course of the three of us being together in studio on the big night election results night in November and a few days have passed since that big debate now I think people have had a chance to come up for air and kind of think about what happened moving away from the sort of dizzy enthusiasm that we saw in the spin room that night you know there was a night of claims and counter claims studying of body language stories about eating cats cat lady endorsements but I've been really wondering and trying to investigate how much this impacts voters and how much attention people actually pay to it I mean we hear from Ab you're right that's the big question isn't it I mean we hear from ABC News 61 million people tuned in to watch this about 10 million more than watched Trump and Biden in June but what we got was kind of same old same old Donald Trump and we got CA Harris trying to shift the focus onto him so all those polls we saw in advance that people wanted to hear from her learn more about her and what she stood for she was very successful I think in deflecting the attention onto him I mean she laid those traps that he walked into talking about his crowd size his vote size the size of his wealth and so on but she didn't answer some of the key questions that people had the first question she got on the night being potentially the most important when she was asked did she think the American people were better off now or were better off four years ago which is the question that Donald Trump and all the Republicans keep hammering her on and she didn't actually give an answer for that she didn't have an answer prepared for that um she didn't give too many specifics either now maybe the strategy was to try and keep the focus on Donald Trump and I was speaking to a high level Democratic strategist about this and he had a really interesting takeaway which was that he felt at the end of that debate they had succeeded in making Donald Trump Trump looked like an old person who wasn't in command of their thoughts who was rambling and easily distracted of certainly look like an old cross person which were you know the old was the thing that people were saying about Joe Biden and that they were kind of they were happy that they had shifted that on to Donald Trump that night and that they were very happy with how the whole thing went but I don't know I mean we won't know for another week or so if it's had any shift on the polls but nothing has shifted Donald Trump's performance for a Betty year he's been coming in you know between 48 and 50% no matter what has happened to him including that assassination attempt so I don't know do you guys think will this make any difference well I'll tell you that I've been speaking to some voters here in Bucks County Pennsylvania where I am specifically about the debate because I was curious you know how did this actually go down with voters so it's just anecdotal what I can tell you from here but really interesting that every person I've spoken to here about the debates that they all say that they were disappointed by the performance of both candidates on stage because they feel like policy issues were not actually addressed they feel like one man described it to me like two kids playing in a sandbox or fighting in a sandbox and that uh they weren't actually focused on answering the questions that matter to people and specifically we've been talking a lot to small business owners and they're so frustrated about um inflation Rising costs and they feel like neither candidate has actually presented a plan and explained how they would Implement that plan to bring down some of these costs so again this is anecdotal here but you know interesting to that I mean she several times she mentioned specifically small businesses she did and she that was like to the extent that she mentioned an economic plan and she didn't really talk about what that plan would be but she made a point of talking about small business owners and the $50,000 grant that she was going to give to small business owners but it's interesting when you mentioned housing sui because that was something that struck me at the debate she said I have a housing policy full stop move on there was no detail on what is a housing policy and that is something that everyone in this country is concerned about whether it's access to housing whether it's rent whether it's mortgages whatever form it is it really matters to people they need a roof over their heads and that's the kind of thing that voters vote on isn't it when they go into the polls I think that you know it's I mean after the kind of kind of sort of giddy Euphoria of the night of Democrats being so happy that kamla Harris had not performed badly which I think everyone can agree she didn't perform badly she probably exceeded expectations C certainly she ex exceeded the performance of Joe Biden back in June um I'm struck by how many messages I've got from kind of democratic strategists and how many conversations I've had you know I spoke to uh David Pluff who run who ran Barack Obama's 2008 campaign I spoke to Jim Ms who ran Barack Obama's successful 2012 campaign this week and and several Democrats have kind just in the last even 24 hours I'm looking at a DAT a text that I've just got from somebody this afternoon saying same swing States same undecided voters same lack of clarity there's been this kind of slight chill has set in now maybe Democrats are very nervous about being too exuberant and they see the polls but it it is striking the degree to which people are asking the questions I'm assuming to the extent you know you've been talking to voters I think there's a real realization that she gave a good performance but will that I mean some people are saying it doesn't even make any these set pieces don't make any difference when it comes to the polls will that actually change any minds and I think that seems to be the key question it sounds like you're both hearing the same thing that I've been hearing that yes it was a good performance but was it enough to persuade people that she had the policies to bring down the price of goods I had a few Republicans say to me as well very privately they were prepared to admit that it wasn't a great night for Donald Trump which of course is not what they're all saying publicly but they said to that exact point it doesn't matter because he was classic Trump you know he delivered that magga Mega mix of classic hit lines about how the Democrats the Biden Harris campaign have destroyed the economy how the borders are being flooded by immigrants how other countries are emptying their prisons and their jails and their Asylum institutions and all of the stuff that Donald Trump says at every rally of which there is absolutely zero evidence of that happening we have to say but he delivered all of those lines so if you're a Donald Trump supporter and you're watching that or even if you're not that's what you're expecting to hear from him yeah definitely and just in spin room you know we were at the debate in Philadelphia and talked to a bunch of uh lawmakers and surrogates and members of The Campaign teams and of course it's a spin room so you have both sides claiming that they won the debate of course uh but I thought it was so interesting including Donald Trump including Donald Trump who who was just actually two booths down at Fox News and so we could barely hear or do anything because of the massive scrum that that gathered around him which is usually the case but you know it was so interesting that you you heard some of the ccats for Donald Trump like Congressman V Donald's from Florida who came down to sit with us and talk to us right after the debate who said listen we very clearly are ahead on these issues on the economy on crime on immigration and yet when he was making those points he was able to prosecute that case better than Donald Trump did during the debate itself and kamla Harris's surrogates and some of the lawmakers we spoke to like Veronica Escobar of uh of Texas a congresswoman she was saying look you know we know that voters might not know what kamla Harris's plan is on immigration yet but we do believe that voters will trust us because they see this performance and they see that she's in command again you know we'll have to see whether it actually has any sort of impact but interesting to see that the Harris team on the ground and her supporters as well really were taking so much away from being confident at least that night the first night right after the debate had concluded um by the fact that she had performed better than expected to your point Katrina so I had a very interesting conversation I mentioned David Pluff who was the kind of Guru of um Barack Obama's 2008 campaign in the way that kind of Alan Greenspan was called the Oracle of the economy when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve David Pluff is kind of heralded as this person who can perform Miracles when it comes to democratic politics and certainly 2008 was a very successful Democratic campaign and I um asked him this question that we've been posing about whether it makes any difference and if so specifically which groups of the electorate he felt uh might have been targeted by this deap performance and I thought it was interesting the way he kind of broke it down to me in three separate groups of people and now he is a senior adviser to kamla Harris and he's working on her campaign so this comes from that perspective but the way they're kind of micro targeting is kind of worth perhaps framing it and one is that he felt that um there are a lot of Voters who want to learn more about her uh who don't know much about her voters of all different ages and he thinks that's somewhere between 4 and 8% of the voting population and he felt that uh they would have got Confidence from her performance on the debate stage because she looked like she belonged there was how he phrased it she you know she looked this phrase she looked like a commanderin-chief she looked confident she kind of owned the stage she didn't look like she was apologizing for being there uh she didn't look nervous maybe at the beginning the I'd say the first five to 10 minutes she did look a bit nervous but he felt that they would have been reassured so that's one group another group the second group that he spoke about were people who aren't sure whether they're going to vote at all um and who he felt would have been energized by that debate performance and I suppose that speaks to the fact that 60 million people tuned into it which is you know which is a sizable chunk of the American electorate and that they will have seen a high energy performance from her and that that might motivate them if they've been sitting on the fence to feel this is something worth going to the polls for and then the third group of people that they were trying to Target uh the people who are leaning towards Donald Trump but don't like his character and I'm sure you know you've both heard this out on the campaign Trail I've heard it a lot people who say well I don't really like the things he represents I don't like the way he talks about women I don't like some of the kind of antics I don't like his Twitter feed uh but I like his policies and he felt that some of those people may have been a little demoralized by what they saw on stage by Donald Trump's performance by the fact that he came across as you said earlier is kind of old which was a strategy of the the um Harris campaign was to use that word old it was like a drinking game after a bit you know every time he said she said old story that you could take another shot and the other thing I think that's interesting that I've heard from the Harris campaign is that they are super conscious that this is a vote that's going an election that's going to be won on the margins so even if in each of those three different groups of people which I think are probably broadly what have be known rather dismissively I think sometimes as low information voters or people who make up their mind late you only need to peel away a few of them right you only need to peel away a thousand or two potentially in the swing States you know 5,000 in Georgia or 5,000 in Arizona and you can start having an impact on the outcome of the race I just thought it was an interesting from someone who's such a master strategist in terms of they went into this debate with very clear people they wanted to reach and that was how they felt they were going to reach them yeah I think it's quite um clever of them in a because those people you've described those sort of low propensity voters they do tend to vote much nicer than low information they do uh they do tend to vote for Donald Trump and they're really hard to capture in polls because they're not engaged in sort of the daily day political cut and thrust as we I mean many of kind of you know women who have kids and they getting them to school and have other jobs they have a life exactly they have a life to do they have shift working to do they have all of that family stuff but they do tend to vote for Donald Trump so it shows just how concerned they are about those marginal voters that they're trying to Target those people at this remove and I think the other point that's worth noting is we're about to start mailin balloting right Alabama has already sent out its postal votes uh they have to go out to all the states within the next 10 or 11 days so there are people that's going to be you know an issue they can cast their vote now see the envelope and get it off and they don't need to worry about are they going to have to get the earlier bus on Election Day to get to their ballot Center or will they have to swap shifts with somebody else and all of that I actually the other really interesting conversation I had this week is I'm I met um Deborah mattinson who is a British pollster who was advising Kia starma in his very successful election this summer on how to win back uh voters specifically in the north of England who had drifted towards the conservative party and to get them back into the kind of Labor fold I it's kind of in Britain it's known as the red wall in America we would call it the blue wall um and she has been doing a string of focus groups and Advising helping the Harris campaign uh with this issue of how to recapture voters they feel working basically workingclass voters in uh the blue wall and the key thing that she said to me and I spoke to her before the debate and after the debate and before the debate she said the main thing for all of these voters is the single biggest thing is affordability and the second biggest thing is immigration um and that she described in her focus group people who have been going around grocery stores actually this was in Georgia not in one of the North in one of the blue wall States but she's been looking at the Battle other Battlegrounds and she says you know they'll go around the grocery store and they'll put stuff into their basket and they'll tally it all up on their phone and they'll get to the checkout and they'll have to remove some of it you know I can't afford that orange juice this week so that goes back and she said it's for those voters that are really hard to reach that Democrats feel that they want to try and reach but afterwards after the debate it was said she was very clear that she still felt to what you've both been saying what you've been hearing Sumi in Buck County that the plan even though Kamala Harris mentioned the middle class A lot and mentioned small businesses a lot and describe the $25,000 she's thinking of as a housing uh kind of Grant to help people buy their first house people just she felt that there was not a clear enough crisp enough strong enough plan to deal specifically with this issue of prices um and I asked her what what of all the policies that kamla Harris has mentioned so far has there been any policy that she's mentioned that has resonated with the people you've seen in your focus group and she said the only one that's really got traction is um the promise to do something about price gouging in supermarkets so to try and stop supermarkets um inflating unfairly their prices but that's the one one policy that CA Harris has mentioned that got actually quite a lot of push back even from democratic economists I mean it's not something that people particularly like it they say it could actually hurt competition that's not the way the American economy is went to work it doesn't sound very free market so it's interesting that in the focus groups because she just said people are so focused on the price of goods in particular and that she Harris is going to have to come up with something clean and crisp and one one thing uh that I thought was interesting is that if you think about Harris is she's never been known for economic policy that's not her background is as a prosecutor and she's kind of Law and Justice and now more recently abortion and people's rights but if you think of Bernie Sanders Bernie sandas is so associated with Medicare for all Elizabeth Warren associated with corporate profits um and corporate power I mean even Donald Trump to some extent associated with immigration and the kind of the working and that's just not what camela Harris has been passionate about dur her career so but matson's point was that this was something she really has to work on and I think that's why we're seeing Donald Trump and the Republicans really trying to skew kamla Harris on economic matters time and again because as you say that's not something she's known for and she's trying to distance herself from the Biden Administration but as Donald Trump and all of his Spin Doctors keep saying it's the Biden Harris Administration it's not just the Biden Administration but for me traveling around this country over the last few months I've been to six of the seven Battleground States so far it's the number one issue for people even when they say economy they actually mean cost of living they mean how you guys know we all know from we all know from living here it's impossible to go to the grocery store and spend less than $50 like even if you just go in for milk bread and a couple of apples you've almost no change out of $50 and you're walking away going what do I have to show for this a friend of mine was back home in Ireland recently and sent me a message show me the boot or the trunkload of groceries that she had bought in an Irish Supermarket for the same cost of a basket of stuff here and so it's a real thing and yes wages are rising but they're not rising in track with the price of things in shops and that's what people are really feeling in their pockets you know what I've been looking at this week no surprise Pennsylvania since I'm here in Bucks County and there were two things about it that I was really thinking about you know coming out to Buck County it's one of these CER counties so outside of Philadelphia we're about an hour's Drive outside of Philadelphia and you've really seen the growth of these callar counties as people have moved further out from the suburbs into the areas further and further outside of the big city and that means that of course the demographic and the politics also change a little bit as well we talked to a a staunch Trump supporter yesterday who said I don't like that all these liberals keep moving out here and changing the politics out here and I think that's a sentiment that we've seen among some of the more Republican leaning voters we've been speaking to but the other aspect actually tees up to something that uh Katrina mentioned a little bit earlier which is housing you know it's it's the groceries the gas prices but every single person we've spoken to has complained about the price of rent or the inability to buy a home and if you think about you know the American dream is often so based on that concept of buying your own home isn't it and because of that you know the people we've been talking to say they feel like they can't fulfill their their potential they can't fulfill their own dreams because they can't build a house or they can't buy a house or they they remain renting and they see their rents go up by $6 700 and you know it made me think about the fact that in 2017 uh I was traveling around Germany at the time and talking to people about election issues before that country's election and we assumed that the biggest issue on people's minds was going to be immigration it was just after the massive immigration crisis in 2015 where you had about a million people entering Germany it was affordable housing in small towns in big cities that was the point we kept hearing and it's so fascinating to see that this is still a big issue here in small towns where I am in doy toown but also of course in big cities like Philadelphia and I wanted to look up I was just looking at the Washington Post and have some numbers here next to me since 2019 home prices have risen 54% if you add that to the the high interest rates and then the low inventory you can really see the pressure that that adds uh on housing and of course you know you have the policies that are being introduced so kamla Harris saying she'll build 3 million new homes and then uh give down payment assistance up to $25,000 to firsttime home buyers Donald Trump talking about relieving some of those regulatory pressures on building housing but all of that is not actually going to help the fact that you need new inventory quickly and all of that takes time so I really wonder if any of these measures will make a difference I don't know what do you think Eddie I mean it's interesting because you you know you've you heard the same thing in the UK right pressures on housing and what a problem and how what a big deal that was in the UK general election this summer it's interesting that you heard you know there are s similar things in other places in Europe and you can see how then that ties into immigration and we are seeing some of that play out kind of online and with some of um the Trump campaign particularly from some of his surrogates and people standing up saying well there wouldn't be such high housing costs if it weren't for immigrants moving into our area that's an argument that I've been hearing um from people around the Trump campaign now that doesn't always necessarily correlate it's not always that simple but you can see how it's easy from the point of view of the Trump to kind of weave I don't know if we use that word anymore we anyway weave an argument together that is you know that you tie in the economy As Trump has done kind of masterfully in the past touching kind of hot Bush kind of cultural and social issues and people's fears by saying either they're taking your jobs away or potentially you know they're driving up the co price of housing as well and one thing I'm watching for as we come out of this debate week and and throwing it forwards is how much the Harris campaign now feels they want to to get her out not just at rallies but you know talking as much as possible to the media talking in town halls you know doing the Reps I mean like you know practicing bicep curls but I mean getting her out as much as possible to hone this specific economic message and whether they feel that that would I know that they've kind of resisted that up until the moment of the debate but I think they will feel not just pressure from the Press from all of us and from the Trump campaign as clearly there is pressure from the Trump campaign around this um and kind of goting her into doing that but also whether they think that they're going to need to do that if you know the debate alone hasn't totally sold the case um that she that she hasn't made you know the sale with some of those key demographic groups yet do you think that some people also in a state like Pennsylvania might just not vote because until now I haven't found anyone who said they won't vote they just haven't decided yet how they would vote I think that was a real risk earlier in the year wasn't it I I think so much has happened that people do feel a bit more energized that's what I've sense I've had anyway I often wonder when people come up with a microphone and I've had this many times going around kind of battleground States and everybody always tells me they're going to vote and I just wonder occasionally I'm a little bit skeptical and I think there is a difference between telling a journalist who is asking you are you going to vote and your kind of sense of civic duty kicks in and you say yes of course I'm going to vote I just haven't decided who to vote for and actually kind of doing the paperwork and getting to The Ballot Box and because clearly we know American elections don't don't have massive turnout so there are a lot of the electorate who choose not to go out and vote um so we'll see what the actual turnout is going to be in November always a good number to watch and a road from here to there even if it's only a matter of weeks plenty can happen as we know and we will be back here each week talking about what we've seen and heard through the week but we'll leave it there for today and uh chat soon sui and caddy see you guys soon for