The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 1 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Thursday, Kamala Harris’s campaign released a very hard-hitting ad featuring Donald Trump’s quotes about the need for a “punishment” for abortion. It tied this directly to the terrible stories we’ve been hearing about women suffering and dying under abortion bans passed after Dobbs. If Harris is going to win this election, it’ll probably be due to women who are driven to the polls in part by messages just like this one. Is it possible that we’re underestimating the political energy of women in the post-Dobbs era, just as happened in 2022? Today, we’re discussing this with Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of political communications who writes and tweets a lot about how political rhetoric and public opinion really work. Great to have you on, Jennifer.
Jennifer Mercieca: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Sargent: First, let’s play this ad in full.
Chris Matthews (audio voiceover): Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): There has to be some form of punishment.
Matthews (audio voiceover): For the woman?
Trump (audio voiceover): Yeah.
Narrator (audio voiceover): And the punishment is real. Women denied care. Unable to get pregnant again. Traumatized. Scarred for life. Young women who didn’t need to die. Now one in three women live under a Trump abortion ban. And if he’s elected, everyone will.
Trump (audio voiceover): There has to be some form of punishment.
Kamala Harris (audio voiceover): I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.
Sargent: Jennifer, what’s interesting here is how this ad takes Trump’s misogyny and gives it powerful, concrete, real-world relevance. What’s your takeaway from all this?
Mercieca: Absolutely. The connection of the word punishment—“there must be some punishment for the woman”—which is repeated several times in the Q&A with Trump, and then the juxtaposition of all of the women who suffered really extreme medical emergencies, life threatening situations, really does connect that notion of Trump is punishing women physically, emotionally, and in all other ways because of the abortion ban.
Sargent: Yes. The ad makes it really visceral, but it essentially says: You see that misogyny all the time on your TV screen; well, it’s actually ill will toward you. I haven’t seen it made this visceral before myself. Have you?
Mercieca: I have, because I went to the Houston rally that Harris had. The entirety of the rally was about this issue explicitly. When I think when conservatives and religious people think about abortion and abortion bans, they think about elective abortion. What the Harris campaign has done very wisely, I think, is show how it’s actually health care. It’s not these women who are getting elective abortions that are being punished. It’s actually women who just in the routine matters of pregnancy and the things that can go wrong with pregnancy end up suffering directly from Trump’s ban.
The thing about it being a visceral response is really key because what it does is it takes Trump’s threats away from just something that happens on the screen, and it makes it something that every single woman understands can happen to them. Any woman who’s been pregnant and has a child, any woman who’s been through that situation, they know all of the things that can go wrong because all of the messages that are directed at women while they’re pregnant are about the dangers and risks—it’s a very high stakes thing. More women die giving birth than in any other situation. It’s really threatening.
Sargent: That talk about doctors and patients is really directly aimed toward this particular constituency of right-leaning, maybe independent, maybe moderate Republican women whose negative partisanship gets triggered by talk that’s overly democratic sounding. When it’s about doctors and patients, this is something everyone can relate to. It doesn’t have that partisan trigger in it, right?
Mercieca: Absolutely. All of the research that we have is that things like freedom and choice resonate across the political spectrum. Nobody thinks that the government should be making health care decisions for them personally. The message that the Harris campaign is using, which is Donald Trump should not be making your health care decisions for you, the government should not be making the health care decisions for you, that should be between you and your doctor, period—those messages resonate across the political spectrum.
Sargent: Absolutely. By the way, to your point about how this is really about Trump wanting to punish women, Trump has embraced that idea himself. I want to play something Trump said on the campaign trail. Listen to this.
Trump (audio voiceover): They said, “Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say” ... You pay these guys a lot of money, can you believe it? I said, “Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them.”
Sargent: Note that Trump disagreed with his advisors over this. What that really shows is that Trump is very consciously doing this kind of thing because he thinks it appeals to the male voters he needs to turn out in big numbers. He’s openly declaring that the misogyny, that the punitive nature of what he’s talking about toward women is itself essential to winning this election.
Mercieca: Yeah. Trump likes to pretend he’s a truth teller. Despite best practices, despite all of the consultants opinions, Donald Trump is fearlessly being misogynistic. I don’t know if that message is going to convince any women to vote for him, but it certainly will resonate with men. It’s interesting to think about the way that Trump says that line ... There’s a really smart researcher on authoritarianism, Karen Stenner, and she had retweeted that—what she said was, Pay attention to how he says the word women. And if you listen to it, it’s really interesting because of so much visceral anger and hatred just dripping off of his tongue as he says the word women. That’s very indicative of Trump’s approach to women in general.
In the book that I wrote about Trump’s 2016 campaign, I wrote about how he treats women as objects, and how sometimes they are treasured objects. If they make Trump look good, if they’re beautiful, if they bear children for him, then he praises them and says how great they are and how much he loves them. But if they make Trump look bad, then they very easily become hated objects. It’s a very interesting approach to women: They’re sexy objects or they’re hate objects. Clearly what we’re seeing from Trump in 2024 is that women are hate objects that need to be controlled, that should be denied rights, that shouldn’t have the freedom to decide what they do with their bodies, that probably shouldn’t even have the right to vote. That’s all condensed in these messages that we’re getting from him.
Sargent: He actually said straight out that whether women want his protection or not, they’re going to get it. To your point, it’s really interesting because it’s almost like he decides who’s in the charmed circle and who isn’t.
Mercieca: That’s right. It’s authoritarian, obviously. One of the really interesting things in the research that I’ve done on the neo-Nazi community, white supremacist community, is the way that they linked anti-feminism to their neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideals. If you go back to Daily Stormer in 2014, 2015, they’re saying arguments about anti-feminism as being essential to understanding white supremacy; that the women’s only place is in making babies to replace the race essentially; that they shouldn’t have a voice within the white supremacist community; and that feminism itself is part of the problem and part of the reason why this “great replacement theory” is working. And so women are treated as hate objects, of course, in that discourse, and that discourse has become mainstream and is certainly a key part of the Republican Party today.
Sargent: You really see that as well with JD Vance’s cat ladies comment, women who don’t have children are inferior or at least to be scorned in some sense. I really find it interesting that you tie it to “great replacement theory” because there is a grand unified theory here: The nation and its strength and vitality relies on a certain type of production of children, the right amount of children per family; those don’t contribute to the population in that way are suspect, or at least not really doing their citizenship duty in some sense, right?
Mercieca: Absolutely. The essential role of the woman is to reproduce the white race is the argument that they make. It’s essentially what we’re seeing now, right? The fear and the threat is that there are too many nonwhite women who are having babies. Therefore, we have to get rid of those nonwhite people, kick them out of the country, deny their children’s citizenship, prevent them from entering the country, and then we need to make sure that more white women have babies. That’s the plan, as I understand it.
Sargent: They will, of course, adamantly deny that that there’s anything racial to it, but each of these things is an interlocking part of a whole vision of “great replacement theory.” They will say something like, Oh, we’re only talking about political replacement. They want to replace native-born Americans with immigrant voters. That’s not racial. Then they’ll turn around and say, Oh, we want women to reproduce more in order to contribute to the nation. Oh, that’s not racial. But if you put it all together, it becomes a message steeped in racial nationalism.
Mercieca: Like I said, this is a message that I saw percolating in 2015 on the white supremacist websites, which are avowedly white supremacists. They, of course, supported Donald Trump in 2016, and did meme warfare for him and all of those sorts of things. It really is the taking over of the Republican Party by the InfoWars mentality, the white supremacist mentality, and partnering with the Christian nationalists who share a lot of agenda and goals, a lot of the same things.
Sargent: Politico reports that in the battleground states, there’s a 10-point gender gap in the early voting thus far. Women are roughly 55 percent of the early vote, and men are 45 percent. It’s unclear what that will mean on Election Day and beyond, but it could be a sign of heightened energy among female voters. I also wonder whether we’re seeing some crossover vote in this early voting in which a sliver of Republican women are voting for Harris early. What’s your sense of all these things?
Mercieca: It’s really hard to guess, to be honest, right? Even if on paper they’re registered as a Republican, you don’t know that they actually voted for Trump once they got there. It’s a dangerous game to try to guess, and predictions about future facts are always weak, but it does seem as though, since Dobbs, there has been a huge amount of energy for women. The way that the campaigns, the Harris campaign in particular, has targeted women with their messaging has been very smart. The excitement that you see online, the positivity ... There’s been a lot of really exciting things happening in culture that have been very female-driven. I’m thinking of the Eras tour with Taylor Swift, I’m thinking about the Barbie movie. Both of those things are very joyful celebrations of women and women’s power that have shaped economies around the world. If the Trump campaign is counting on the women’s vote, they ought to rethink that plan. But I don’t know for sure, and I don’t think anyone else does either.
Sargent: Well, it sounds like you’re suggesting that we might be really on the threshold of a fairly big cultural event. I’m not predicting Harris is going to win. It’s extremely close; either one of them could win. There are some signs that things are starting to move her way, but those signs could be misleading. But, if she does win, you can see how it would represent a confluence of all these cultural streams, right? Can you talk about that a bit?
Mercieca: Yeah, absolutely. Historians will tell it that way, right? They’ll tell that story. They’ll say, After Dobbs, there’s this gender-awakening that happens through Beyoncé, through Taylor Swift, through the Barbie movie, through TikToks. They’ll tell that story. It’s also interesting that Kamala Harris is not running “as a woman.” She’s not centering that. She is centering women’s issues in addition to other issues—the economy is in a way a woman’s issue, and caring for elderly parents is, in a way, a women’s issue—but she’s not centering the campaign around herself as this unique woman who ought to be president, the way that Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
I looked at the polling about beliefs in feminism and things like that in 2016, and what I found actually surprised me, which was how negative feminism was seen at that time. In particular, 2016 was a bad time to be running a campaign saying I’m the new power broker or I’m the first woman president, it’s happening. Now is probably a better time to be running that kind of campaign, but Kamala Harris isn’t choosing to do that. Perhaps she’s learned from what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. But I do think that, if she wins and I’m hopeful that she will, and we have lots of reasons to believe she will, when we tell the story, it will be about the women’s vote.
Sargent: You’re getting at a really interesting tension of sorts. On the one hand, as you said, she’s not centering the historic nature of her candidacy, but on the other, she’s speaking directly to women about women’s issues and is actually speaking a cultural language that is really very much about this being a moment for women. That’s just fascinating. I think you really nailed it. Also Hillary, unfortunately, probably was the wrong icon to do that, and Harris just might be the right one. What’s the difference there? Why? Harris is incredibly shrewd culturally, isn’t she? She’s really tuned into what’s going on under the surface.
Mercieca: She’s running an amazing campaign. Hillary Clinton is a very smart person, so is Kamala Harris, not to take anything away from either of them. The difference is in persuadability. When you run a presidential campaign, you want to be able to tell your story and introduce yourself to the nation. You want them to be open to learning about who you are, and you want to be able to tell that story in a way that resonates with people. Hillary Clinton did not have that opportunity. Everyone thought they knew who Hillary Clinton was. They had their mind made up, whether it was good or bad. And she did not have the opportunity to tell her story as a presidential candidate in 2016. That story was already told. She was already defined.
Kamala Harris, even as vice president, people were like, Who? I don’t really know her. I don’t know two facts about Kamala Harris. So she has really had the opportunity to tell her story. And the way that she has chosen to tell her story is that she is someone who wants to protect others, that she has spent her career speaking up for people who don’t already have a voice, that she’s done it in a nonpartisan way, and that, as an elected official, she has continued to work to solve problems, help people, defend people that need to be defended and protect people that need to be protected. In a way, she’s using a lot of very masculine tropes, like I will be a protector for you, I will help you, but she’s doing it in a way that folds in all of those women’s concerns, like I see you, I see that you’re struggling to raise your family and take care of your parents, I know how impossible that is. So she’s been able to connect who she is, and who she wants us to see, who she wants to present with her story, in a way that Hillary Clinton was just not able to do. In that way, I’ve always thought that Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate in 2016 just because she couldn’t define herself.
Sargent: Well, I wonder whether she’s, fairly or not, associated with the battles over feminism in the 1960s and ’70s and the backlash to that. Harris obviously is just not associated with those things, so she really had much more of a clean shot to define these issues in ways that wouldn’t trigger people’s associations with those times. I want to play another ad that the Harris campaign put out just before her trip to Texas, which you mentioned earlier where she did a rally about reproductive rights. Listen.
Trump (audio voiceover): For 54 years, they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it.
Women narrators (audio voiceover): He did it. It was pretty devastating. He is bragging about the rights that he stole from American women. And Trump is promising to do more. Whew. In Project 2025, they’re restricting birth control, tracking pregnant women, enforcing a nationwide abortion ban. The government should get out of my business, stay out of my business. That’s not the government’s business in America. Women make their own decisions.
Harris (audio voiceover): I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.
Sargent: Harris gave that speech in Texas, but it was aimed directly at women in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Madison, and Detroit. Now, note the women talking in the ad. This is an issue that’s generating horrific stories that women are talking to each other about. You mentioned earlier that this really could be a moment among women that we don’t quite understand. Is that ad talking to that as well? What’s the potential here?
Mercieca: One of the things that the ad is trying to address is the indifference that some people in blue states might have to the problem of the abortion question. So if you’re a woman in a blue state, you might feel safe. Part of what Harris needs to do is to break through to those women and to say, You are not safe in your blue state. No one is safe. If Trump is reelected especially, he has plans to make sure that no one has access to this kind of health care. So part of it is cracking through that indifference. But again, just showing how visceral the consequences are to having someone else make your health care choices for you and to have the ability to deny you health care—there’s something that resonates that is so un-American to people to think that way. It’s one of the reasons why, for example, we don’t have complete government control over hospitals and we don’t have free health care. Part of it is because the American public is a little bit afraid of what that might mean. Tapping into those concerns and really trying to make it resonate.
Sargent: She’s really leaving it all on the field in a way, Kamala Harris.
Mercieca: It’s a great campaign.
Sargent: It really is. I just want to return, to close out, to how shrewd it is culturally. I’m only just coming to understand that now, but this is probably something—given your lens on things, you were probably perceiving from the outset—that’s just been almost perfectly calibrated to capture a very specific moment. Now, will it be enough? I don’t know. There are all kinds of headwinds. It could be enough. But either way, you have to acknowledge that it’s just amazingly attuned to the cultural moment in a way that is really quite complex and interesting. You want to reflect on that a bit?
Mercieca: It is. It’s absolutely complex and interesting and very much of the moment. One of the things that I’ve really realized in the last week or so is that no two people are experiencing this election in the same way because of the way our feeds and algorithms and the idiosyncratic haphazard news that we all are exposed to. We are each a unique data point in terms of what this election looks like. The things that are able to cut across large groups of people—an entire demographic, like being women—are the kinds of things that are going to have the capability at least of having the most impact.
She’s really targeting a campaign that will display positivity and uplift and that meets people where they are with their needs and their concerns, especially women in my age demographic. We were home with kids with Covid trying to do our jobs and trying to keep our kids safe at the same time. Now that we’re not doing exactly that anymore, we’re still traumatized by the experience. That’s another word she’s used a lot in her speeches. She talks about Trump’s impact on our lives. She talks about trauma. That’s a really important thing to talk about, because we do feel that trauma.
Sargent: Really, really remarkably interesting stuff. Jen Mercieca, thank you so much for such a fascinating discussion.
Mercieca: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.