Tabulation begins, the stakes are incredibly high. As harris prepares to debate donald trump. Senator elizabeth warren and governor wes moore join me on trump's vengeful rhetoric and the alarming agendas being pursued by republicans on the state level. On issues like migrants, abortion restrictions and voting rights. And we begin tonight with the huge and sobering stakes facing america and vice president kamala harris as she prepares to debate donald trump. Late this afternoon, harris landed in philadelphia, site of the debate. But she had been in pittsburgh since thursday preparing for the big event. Meanwhile, trump has been golfing and posting insane threats on his failing truth social, and now back on twitter, yay. And i say huge stakes for harris because if we're being honest, trump faces almost no stakes. Tomorrow night's debate will matter much more for harris than for him. Not only do polls show more than 90% of americans have made up their minds about trump versus just over 70% who have formed firm opinions of vice president harris, because we're now past labor day and many voters are just now paying attention, harris will essentially be reintroducing herself to potentially the largest audience ever to watch a presidential debate. And anyone who has been paying attention to the mainstream media understands that trump and harris are going to be judged on two very different scales tomorrow night. Legacy media organizations including the country's largest newspapers which according to media matters covered 82yearold president joe biden's age and cognitive acuity ten times more than they have 78yearold donald trump's age and clearly declining mentals, are going to judge vp harris much more harshly than they judge trump, regardless of the outcome tomorrow night. That's just a sad but true fact. Her performance essentially has to be perfect, and even if it is, she's going to be picked apart, every word, every syllable, every comma, what she wears, how she answers the questions while trump, even if he rambles incoherently and lied for 90 straight minutes about tariffs being paid by anyone other than american consumers and about hannibal lecter, his answers are sure to be sane washed by much of the media immediately after the debate and in the days to come to insure that he continues to be taken seriously by american voters and that this race remains a dead heat right up until election day. It is unfair to be sure, but that's the way the media operates when it ams to democrats versus republicans. It's been that way the whole time i have been paying attention to politics. It was that way for jimmy carter and bill clinton and hillary clinton versus george bush and ronald reagan and trump. In fact, let me take you back to 2016. When hillary clinton thoroughly trounced donald trump in all three debates that election season. She doesn't have the looks. She doesn't have the stamina. I said she doesn't have the stamina. He tried to switch from looks to stamina, but this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs. And someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers. Well, that's because he would rather have a puppet as president of the united states. No puppet. You're the puppet. It's pretty clear you won't admit the russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the united states of america that you encouraged, espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up nato, do whatever he wants to do. The public, anyone with eyes and ears, clearly thought she won. Hillary won. But the media made a choice to focus instead on her emails, her husband, her likability. And we all know how that race turned out. Which brings me to the second reason we need to be soberly serious about what happens in the next 56 days. The structure of american elections favors republican presidential candidates, period. The electoral college is tilted in republicans' favor because of how many electoral votes are allocated to low population rural states. That means republicans don't actually need to win the popular vote in order to enter the white house. They only need to win key states by incremental margins to tip the electoral college their way. That's how al gore wins the popular vote by 540,000 and does not become president. It's how hillary clinton, who didn't just beat donald trump in the debates, she also beat him in the popular vote, by 3 million votes, did not become president. With the results being a 63 right wing supreme court, and the end of roe v. Wade and affirmative action, more than 1,000 migrants children still separated from their parents, the unleashing of hate and americans dead from covid. The popular vote, meanwhile, is tilted the other way. Because democrats tend to win large majorities of every group except white americans. Who despite demographic changes are still 60% of the electoral and consistently vote 60/40 in republicans' favor. As long as republicans hold that 60%, they frankly don't need majorities of anyone else. The last time republicans won the popular vote, it was george w. Bush in his 2004 reelect and he got just 50. 7% of the popular vote. All of that may give you some insight into donald trump and jd vance's strategy and why they don't really seem to be campaigning very much. When they do bother to hold rallies, they seem to do them in sundowntowns, small towns with a history of making it known to black and nonwhite folks they better be gone by the time the street lights come on. As ayman mohyeldin pointed out this weekend. Showing up at these towns is not the problem. But showing up at them when your stump speech includes lines about how some human beings are vermin, about the need to confront hoards of immigrants, about the need to crack down on crime in majority black cities, this is a problem when your slogan is the nostalgic phrase, make america great again. A campaign tour of sundown towns helps us understand the america donald trump is yearning for. I mean, if all you need is to root out more and more white voters, you might do that sort of thing. And you might drone on about migrant crime that isn't actually an epidemic and push to ban boeks about queer and black folks to keep that one vote you need on your side. That also might explain why trump continues to unleash unhinged social media posts threatening to jail his political opponents and why he continues to lie about the 2020 election, even though he has admitted twice just in the last week that he did in fact lose to joe biden. White christians tend to be more open to believing that nonwhite voters are stealing elections for democrats. Donald trump isn't trying to win more voters, guys. He's just trying to convince the voters he already has to not allow a nonwhite woman to become president, while picking off some minority voters who may be open to a message that is antiimmigrant, antiwoman, and probillionaire as well. That appears to be working if you look at the polls which remain essentially tied. As a backup, he's counting on his big lie and embedded officials in key states who believe the big lie to simply refuse to certify the election in their states due to claims of socalled fraud by nonwhite voters. Throwing the election to the republicanled house of representatives or to john roberts and the right wing supreme court majority, both of which would absolutely name trump as the winner regardless of the popular vote. In other words, all the joy and possibility represented by the harris/walz campaign isn't translating into some landslide victory for the fresh faced candidate despite how hopeful and refreshing it would be to live in a world where the american president is a bad ass woman who laughs and can talk to regular people and kids whose running mate is a decent exfootball coach and teacher who cares that children not be hungry and who would end once and for all america's serable experiment with cruelty and prevent project 2025 with mass deportation and a national abortion ban, and quote, unleashs the police and the u. S. Military on urban communities and protesters. Despite how exhausting and deadly the trump era was, and how it devastated our lives, our psyches, our families, our economy, tens of millions of americans, our fellow americans, want to go back to that era. They do not want to move on. They want to go back. It makes no sense to me, and probably not to you either. But that is reality. Electing a woman president, let alone a nonwhite woman president, is going to be a fight, y'all. A huge fight. And that debate tomorrow night is a critical round in that fight. Kamala harris has to nail it. She has to beat donald trump like he stole something. But beating him will not be enough. Because he's going to be graded on a curve. And when the debate is over, democrats, independents, and prodemocracy republicans are going to have to find and turn out every single voter they can in order to put trumpism where it belongs, in the dust bin of history. Cedric richmond, go chair of the harris/walz campaign will join me in a moment, but first, cornell belcher, hugo lowell, senior political correspondent for the guardian, and amy allison, founder and president of she the people. Thank you all for being here. I'm going to start with you, amy, because you know, i think there is there has been over the past, you know, i don't know how many weeks, six to eight weeks since vice president harris became the nominee, that a lot of people have been wrapped up in the joy. And wrapped up in just the sort of dream world of having this president. I mean, how cool would it be to have this amazing woman be president? forgetting there is a large pool of americans who do not want that dream. They really want to go back to trumpism. I think a lot of people really don't see how that could be, but it is real. What do you make of what it's going to take to get from the dream and the, you know, sort of fun of the harris/walz campaign to an actual first woman president? you hit the nail on the head. You know, we're amazed that we're at this moment and america has an opportunity, but the fact is it is and has always been a fight. I think that's the reason why the joyful warrior idea for kamala harris is very fitting. Yes, we need joy. Yes, we need some relief to the dark visions of project 2025, but the reality is we have to work and we have to work like we have never done before to overcome all the ways in which trump and maga have made it difficult for democracy to function in the swing states, so what i make of it is the debate is a moment for us to realistically assess what's happening and particularly in battleground states, start sending legions of people to call and text and door knock and do everything that we can to turn out the vote. That's what we're in for, for the next eight weeks. And it's the kind of thing where those of us who work in politics and understand that this kind of change is a generational change, it would usher in a new era, but it isn't like power is going to concede without a struggle. It is we're in the moment of that struggle and you couldn't have said it better. There's nothing more stark between a vision of the past and a vision of the future. And that we'll see tomorrow night at the debate. Cornell, talk about the stakes here in terms of where the polls sit right now. We have seen this huge onrush of newly registered voters. You're seeing a lot of excitement for the harris/walz ticket among younger voters. The question is do they wind up turn out in enough numbers to get what they want, this fresh new candidate? when you're looking at the polls, what are you seeing? they're connected, joy. And so here's the thing. Here's where joy does come in. You know, i go back to the presidential campaign of '08, which i think is similar to this, that i worked on. And a lot of the polling was off, especially early on, because quite frankly, we didn't have models to contend for what we saw in the surge of voting among especially young people and people of color because they had something to vote for. And i think that's really critical. So i don't want to dismiss the joy, because the you is important, because you have to give the young people something to vote for. What you're seeing in the polls is look, when you give them something to vote for, their enthusiasm changes. And look, poll after poll, and certainly in our internal polling we do for black pac of large samples of african americans, we have seen the motivation and the levels of importance, you know, triple in some areas with certain cohorts of african americans. Look, african american women right now are as excited to vote as i have seen them in the polling since '08. So the joy is important, and it helps sort of the enthusiasm and the mobilization. So then it comes to turnout. Take a state like north carolina. I saw a poll in north carolina last week where it is tied. It is a dead heat. The last time i saw a democrat in a dead heat in north carolina at the top of the ticket was '08 and we won that because of joy and enthusiasm. Let's talk about the other side. Hugo, you were following what the trump campaign is doing. Their campaign is not highly visible, but back when i was in politics and not in media, i worked on a campaign where we didn't see the george w. Bush campaign, they weren't visible, but they surely won because they had an outreach into places you weren't going to see. They were at that time getting senior citizens and senior voters to turn out, mailin ballots which now they're against. What are they doing and how organized are they on the ground, the trump campaign? yeah, it's a really interesting point that you raise because we have also heard a lot of the same in places like pennsylvania, the state that both sides really need to win and try to take the electoral college. We were speaking to a lot of local republicans and they were alarmed because they thought the trump campaign's presence was really, really small for a president. They were comparing it to us, as more something akin to a midterm election, and so we went back and looked at the numbers. For a midterm election, the rnc in 2022 had about 50 paid staffers on the ground. And that is obviously lower than the rnc's projection for 2024, for this presidential cycle, and they were looking at roughly 88 to 90 staffers on the ground. We are told by the trump campaign they have more than 50, but they won't tell us exactly what the numbers are. That's always a tell because if they were proud about the numbers they