Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on how candidates are appealing to working-class voters

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• John Yang:

  And for more on both presidential campaigns' efforts to appeal to working-class voters, we're joined by our Politics Monday duo. That's Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter, and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  As we just heard, the endorsements from a union don't necessarily mean that the union members are going to go that way.

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  That's right.

• John Yang:

  But, Tam, how is the Harris campaign trying to turn all those endorsements into votes?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  It's pretty simple.

  Those endorsements come with what we would call a ground game. That is union members out knocking on doors, campaigning with their family members, campaigning with their neighbors. And, for instance, the AFL-CIO endorsed, well, Biden back then extremely early, very, very early.

  And when I talked to them about why they did that, they said because that then opens the floodgates to be able to begin doing that door-knocking and other on-the-ground campaign work. It really just, for Democrats, magnifies their already existing infrastructure to try to reach voters where they are, because the feeling about this election is, it will be very close.

  It will be decided in key states where there are a lot of union members. And, yes, the union members, the rank and file, are split, but in terms of who's knocking on doors, they're knocking on doors for Democrats.

• John Yang:

  We also just heard, Trump has a lot of support among union members. How is he making those inroads?

• Tamara Keith:

  It's — in a lot of ways, it's cultural. He is appealing to these voters. He appeals to a lot of working-class voters.

  He is appealing to them in the same way that he's appealing to a lot of voters across a swathe of the country. What he is doing is saying that he is for the workers. He is trying to drive a wedge, in fact, between the workers and their union, in many cases, particularly with the autoworkers.

  I'm not sure how well that's actually working. Certainly, the union leadership will point out that, when he was president, he appointed members of the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, that were not pro-union at all.

  But he is sort of trying to say that he's pro-worker. And it works with some voters, certainly.

• John Yang:

  And, Amy, they chose — the Democrats chose to have their union events in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Any coincidence?

• Amy Walter:

  What a coincidence. I have no idea why they would choose those two states.

  (Laughter)

• Amy Walter:

  And that Harris was with the president in Pittsburgh, a state where, obviously, he is from, the president from Scranton, from the other part of the state, but hoping that there's maybe an ability for Biden to convey some of that goodwill among those types of voters.

  And I think both the setup piece here and Tam's point about cultural, that when we talk about labor unions, as a whole, it is about 18 percent of the national electorate. So it's not a huge percentage of the electorate, people who say, I am in a working — I'm in a labor household.

  But when you talk about people who feel like they're defined by, not necessarily that they belong to a union, but consider themselves to be working class — and this is where I think Trump has done a job — a good job of getting beyond just the cultural attachment. But he's talking to them about workers, particularly putting workers first, specifically in a place like Michigan.

  Hey, those electric — the electric battery mandates and electric car mandates, we don't like them, you don't like them, going to get rid of them. We're going to put tariffs on cars coming from overseas. That's going to help your job. We're not going to let the country get flooded with those foreign cars anymore.

  And then we were at the RNC and the head of the Teamsters was speaking. This is not something we thought we'd ever see at a Republican Convention. So as the…

• Tamara Keith:

  Though he didn't endorse.

• Amy Walter:

  He did not endorse.

• Tamara Keith:

  It was this weird dance.

• Amy Walter:

  But just having the head of the Teamsters speaking at a Republican Convention is sending a message beyond just labor, people who are part of a labor union, but to those people who identify themselves as part of that sort of forgotten working-class voter.

• John Yang:

  Last week, the unpredictable Donald Trump surprised a lot of folks by coming out and saying that in vitro fertilization, IVF, should be free. Either the insurance companies should pay for it or the government should pay for it.

  That sent a lot of Republicans scrambling to try to figure out how to deal with this issue. We have got two senators, two Republican senators, who each came down on the other side, opposite sides of this issue over this weekend.

• Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR):

  So I think we'd have to evaluate the fiscal impact, whether the taxpayer can afford to pay for this, what impact it would have on premiums.

  But, in principle, supporting couples who are trying to use IVF or other fertility treatments, I don't think is something that's controversial at all.

• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC):

  I think he's just trying to show his support for IVF treatments, that we have been accused, the party has, of being against birth control. We're not.

  Jonathan Karl, ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent and Co-Anchor of "This Week": But you wouldn't support this idea of mandating insurance companies to cover this, would you?

• Sen. Lindsey Graham:

  No.

• Jonathan Karl:

  I mean, you have already voted against it. Yes.

• Sen. Lindsey Graham:

  No, I wouldn't, because there's no end to that. Yes, there's no end to that.

• John Yang:

  Amy, the Democrats are clearly making reproductive rights an issue in this campaign. Have the Republicans figured out how to deal with it, how to react to it?

• Amy Walter:

  No, because it is not an issue that they had expected they were going to have to deal with in 2022. And there's no easy answer for it in 2024.

  The difference, though, between, say, somebody like Lindsey Graham there, who was trying to fit this conversation about IVF and abortion into the traditional Republican box, is that's not where Donald Trump is, right?

  There's not a philosophical, ideological issue that Trump is grappling with. What he sees is, wow, I'm not doing very well with women. How can I get women voters back?

  And so you saw him the other day try to get a little bit further away from Republicans on the issue of abortion, specifically the six-week abortion ban in Florida. Then he sort of had to backtrack a little bit on that because that made pro-life voters and supporters very upset.

  But IVF, here's another way that he sees us as an opportunity to really win over voters he needs to win over. It's not a change in philosophy or ideology. That's where the party gets itself sort of caught up in this issue, because they're trying to fit it into something that's bigger than just one election. That's not where Donald Trump is.

• John Yang:

  And, Tam, tomorrow, the Democrats are kicking off what they call the Reproductive Freedom Bus Tour. And they're doing it in Trump's backyard in Palm Beach, Florida. Has the Harris campaign reacted to the — to Donald Trump's comments on IVF?

• Tamara Keith:

  They have. And they essentially said, why would you believe him now?

  Because he has changed his position reproductive rights, on IVF, on any number of things repeatedly, though he has been very clear that he — and they will point this out repeatedly. Trump has been pretty clear that he's responsible for Roe being overturned because he appointed those three Supreme Court justices, created the conservative supermajority, and he points that out whenever he's in front of a conservative group or a religious rights group.

  So he wants that. He wants credit, but he doesn't want too much credit, and he doesn't want the political problem that doing away with Roe has created. Even with IVF — when Alabama — when an Alabama court put IVF on hold, it was because of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe.

  So this is a problem of his creating. This is the dog caught the car, and this is the political challenge that he's trying to sort through. And he's doing it in a very Trumpy way, which is he just says, I believe this, I believe that. Oh, wait, no, somebody said that I should not say that I would possibly maybe support that Florida ballot measure. So, no, I'm going to vote against it.

  He had multiple positions last week, and I think we can see more of that to come.

• John Yang:

  It's been a week since the — Mr. Trump made his controversial visit to Arlington, Arlington National Cemetery. We're still talking about it.

  Vice President Harris was silent, and then finally issued a — put up on social media this past weekend: "Let me be clear. The former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt. This man who is unable — this is a man who is unable to comprehend anything other than service to himself."

  And the Trump campaign reacted by putting out statements from Gold Star families. This sort of feeds in, doesn't it, Tam, to the Democrats' line about Donald Trump?

• Tamara Keith:

  Certainly, this was an event that has been snowballed. It started out with Trump being invited by these families, but then there was video and there was photos. And they — and someone on his staff pushed back someone who worked at the cemetery who said, the rules say you can't film in Section 60.

  They did, they put out a video, he didn't apologize, and now we are, like, multiple days into this cycle of Trump controversy, which now has muddied the water, and he is making it about Harris, when in the start it was him who didn't apologize.

• John Yang:

  We have got to leave it there, because we're out of time.

  Tamy — Tamy and Am.

  (Laughter)

• Tamara Keith:

  Tamy. There you go.

  (Laughter)

• Amy Walter:

  Yes, we have a new moniker.

• John Yang:

  Amy and Tam, right. Thank you very much.

• Tamara Keith:

  You're welcome.

• Amy Walter:

  Thanks, John.