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DONALD TRUMP: The task before us will not be easy, but I will bring every ounce of energy, spirit and fight that I have in my soul to the job that you've entrusted to me.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Donald Trump, addressing supporters last night in Florida, claiming victory in his bid to return to the nation's highest office. Now, this came before key states had reported their results, but it is now confirmed. The Associated Press has now called the race in his favor. He will become only the second president in U.S. history to leave the White House and then return. So let's take a look at the supporters who got him there. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben and Tamara Keith are here in the studio with us. Good morning to you both.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Good morning.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So, Danielle, let me start with you. You've been to many, many rallies and campaign events with Trump over the last year. Talk to us about who his most enthusiastic supporters are and have been.
KURTZLEBEN: Sure, yeah. I mean, the base of his support - and this is not going to be a surprise - is older and white people. When you look at his rallies, that is who they are full of. And these are people who have stuck with him from the beginning in addition to that. I've talked to countless numbers of rally attendees, and it is the - I've asked every one of them or near every one of them, how long have you supported him? And it is the rare person I've spoken to who has said, oh, I'm a convert. Overwhelmingly, they've told me, I've been with him since 2015.
So even though Trump picked up some new voters last night - clearly - the base of support is just the base of support that's always been. Now, one other thing that you could see at rallies is young men. You did not see small cadres or at least many small cadres of young women showing up together. But young men, you saw a lot of them coming to those rallies and really, really getting pumped for everything the former president said.
MARTIN: Tam, let's go to - let's go to you now, Tam Keith.
KEITH: Yeah.
MARTIN: Where Trump went for motivating his core group, Harris was focused on building an ideological coalition. She was relying on people like, you know, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, representative - former Representative Liz Cheney, who had been a member of the Republican leadership. They actually campaigned together. But that does not appear to have been enough.
KEITH: Yeah, she was trying to stitch together an anti-Trump coalition that included a lot of strange bedfellows, people from the far left, and then people like the Cheneys. And it was always a little bit of a risky bid, right? Trump was trying to get more people who supported him to turn out. Harris was trying to get people whose identity, people who long identified as Republicans, to do something that was not in line with their long-standing identity about who they were.
MARTIN: And what was that about? Like, why?
KEITH: In part, that was because they were seeing the erosion among Democratic base voters that clearly came through and actually came through, I think, stronger for Trump than they were expecting. But they knew that they might lose Latino men, for instance. They knew that they could lose young men, and they knew that Black men might stay home. They knew that they were not going to do as well with men as President Biden did when he won. And so they were trying - they were searching for some other well of voters, and they were searching in the suburbs.
MARTIN: So, Danielle, talk about that if you would. Now, certainly, some groups of Black voters and Latino voters have always voted Republican...
KURTZLEBEN: Sure.
MARTIN: ...You know, for lots of reasons. But what about that erosion that Tam was sort of talking about? How did that happen, and where did that happen, and why?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, the short version is we have, at the very least, seen it among men. When I'm looking at these exit poll numbers - now, you ought to be careful when you're talking about these smaller subgroups 'cause there are huge margins of error on there. But it really does look like Black women and Latinas really stuck with the Democratic Party, and Black men and Latinos, especially the Latino men there, really swung towards Trump.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
I'm hearing the feminine and the masculine there in the way you're using the speech.
KURTZLEBEN: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
KEITH: Yeah. I mean, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. That's this selection.
KURTZLEBEN: Yes.
MARTIN: But, Tam, will you talk a little bit about that? You started talking about this earlier. But what about Harris' performance with white women, with younger voters, with groups that Biden had overperformed in 2020 in order to win? Did Harris fall short there?
KEITH: Yeah. You know, I was looking at certain, you know, in Wisconsin, in fact, certain suburban districts that Harris needed to perform better in for them to, you know, meet their numbers. And the reality is that she really didn't outperform Biden in these key counties. She just didn't. And that their theory of the case falls apart there.
INSKEEP: I'd like to make a couple of observations and see what you think about them having covered the campaign all the way through about people who supported Trump. Our colleague, Mara Liasson, made an observation the other day that Trump was not looking to expand his base. He was not looking to reach out. He was looking to find more voters who already agreed with them, to begin with. And there are always millions of voters out there that don't vote regularly, have never voted at all, and you reach out to more of them. But when I interviewed some of those voters over the past year, I felt like there were a lot of people who were kind of choose-your-own-adventure Trump voters. They would pick the parts of Trump that they like. And of the many, many things that he said, if there was something wild or controversial or noxious that he said, they would, well, he's never really going to do that. That was my impression of a lot of Trump supporters.
KEITH: That's always...
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
KEITH: ...Been the case.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you and Mara, I - by my eyes, are both right on that. I mean, when you're talking about Trump not trying to persuade and just trying to drill down deeper into his base and wider, yeah. I mean, in the last few weeks, when we have seen him not being careful with his message, to put it mildly, and not doing - not moderating, not reaching across the aisle, anything like that. Yeah, that is what he has been doing. And people who want to ignore parts of his message, they'll ignore the parts that they want to ignore, and they will latch onto the parts they want to latch onto. For example, his talk about the economy, his talk about mass deportations, whatever they like - and there's a lot about him that a lot of people do like - that's what they will go with.
INSKEEP: And if he talks about RFK and fluoride, either you like that or you don't like that.
KURTZLEBEN: You could ignore it.
INSKEEP: You can vote for him either way. Yeah.
MARTIN: Real quick, though, Danielle. Trump will be the oldest person ever to take the oath of office in January, but we also have our first millennial in the White House, the vice president, Senator JD Vance. That's also another interesting sort of dichotomy. What do you make of it?
KURTZLEBEN: Most definitely. I mean, JD Vance is also a proponent of a lot of thinking about the new right. He is a - he is profoundly online. So he is very much like Donald Trump, but he is not. And so I am very curious what influence, if any, he has on the Trump presidency or if he is just going to fall in line behind whatever Trump says.
MARTIN: Real quick Tam, does - any agenda? What's left for the Biden-Harris team? What can they do?
KEITH: They are going to try to lock in their policy wins, but it's really hard to lock that in when you lose the presidency and you lose the Senate.
MARTIN: That is Tamara Keith and Danielle Kurtzleben, who've spent many, many hours on the campaign trail following these candidates. Thank you both so much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
KURTZLEBEN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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