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and I'm delighted to be joined Now by Thomas gift who's associate professor of political science at University College London and director of the center on us politics there thanks for joining us thanks for having me it's great to be with you so you wouldn't have thought perhaps that Trump still has the ability to to shock us after all we've heard from him but he clearly does how has he been able to close the gap with Harris is the entertainment shock Factor part of it or what else is going on here well I don't know if you posing the Gap that much I mean he has gained maybe one or two percentage points in the last week which gives him the momentum certainly but still right now we're looking at a race that's about 47 48 give or take that's certainly within the margin of error it's essentially just a coin flip you know I think Donald Trump has really tried to paint Kay Harris as a flip flopper who doesn't have any principles you will say that she used to be for medicare for all now she's not she used to be for looser border control now she's not she used to be against cracking now she's not and so I think that sort of playing that message over and over has been one way to resonate with voters in swing States stay with us because we're going to jump into a big talking point from Saturday night that's tesser and Spa SpaceX CEO ELO musk who held his own rally to support Trump and announced he'd randomly hand out a million dollars a day to a registered voter who signed a petition run by his prot Trump organization let's watch what happened there since early October Tech billionaire Elon Musk has been trying to encourage swing state voters to sign a petition in favor of free speech and gun rights and he's been using his most persuasive asset his money his Pro Donald Trump political action committee has been paying $47 to every registered voter who signs but on Saturday he said the media weren't paying enough attention to his petition so he upped the ante anyone who signs in the largest swing state of Pennsylvania will now get $100 and a lucky few will get much more so I have a surprise for you uh which is that uh we are going to be awarding a million doll to randomly to people who have signed the signed the petition every day from now until the election although he had previously vowed to stay out of politics musk has adopted deeply right-wing stances since taking over Twitter now X in 2022 over the summer he endorsed Trump and has ramped up various means of support for the candidate including donating at least 75 million dollar to his prot trump super pack musk's America pack has paid to run ads on Facebook and Instagram for voter registration but has come under Fire for only collecting detailed personal data on on people from Battleground states without helping them to register to vote on x musk has repeatedly praised Trump and pushed false and inflammatory claims on topics including immigration free speech and voter fraud in return Trump has offered musk a hypothetical highlevel position in the as yet unestablished Department of government efficiency so Thomas gift explain this for us right because this might be a surprising move for some of our viewers in countries with perhaps strict campaign financing rules is what musque is doing here seen as outrageous at all or is it just the status quo in America well it's certainly not soon as outrageous for pennsylvanians who are signing up actually I'm a Pennsylvanian and I'm a registered voter even though I'm in London and so I guess that makes me eligible for this contest you know I think musk is able to get away with this because he's not providing sort of an explicit quid pro quo that I'll pay you if you vote a certain way he's only doing it with his pack these political action committees essentially allow uh big donors to court up money uh to spend money in ways that lack transparency lack accountability uh Elon Musk I think the outrage that he hopes to provoke is sort of the point you know he wants attention for this he wants to uh place the spotlight on Trump and so there's so many things that Elon Musk has done uh in recent days and weeks this is just kind of the latest um so it's an interesting political strategy to say the least but I mean how could it not be of quid proo you sign a petition on his prot Trump website that puts you in the running for a million dollars I mean there's nothing clearer of a PR quid proo than that surely well it's not explicit that you have to vote for Trump then I think that that is kind of the the differentiation but at the same time I do think that it violates political Norms that certainly because we think about vote buying and clientalism as being anti-democratic it is ironic because musk has complained that if Trump isn't election elected that this will be the last election that Americans face and yet at the same time I think he's doing some things that critics would say are anti-democratic or at least not in the spirit that we would think of for a free open uh transparent democracy let's zoom in now to one of voter's top priorities which is Health Care Pew research says it's the second uh highest priority for voters on average so activists say a lot is at state for black women in particular and have been raising awareness about racism bias and intensive care let's take a watch of this news report Franchesca is a doer herself but when she gave birth to her third baby she knew something was deeply wrong when she was rushed into an emergency C-section it ended up having serious consequences as she required a hysterctomy and went into cardiac arrest I remember I told my doctor when I was getting cut I can't breathe and she said oh yeah you can when they cut me open they um they uh cut my uterus um and it ruptured my uterus and it bled out and it caused all the heart issues and the blood clotting and all that things like that according to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention black women in the US are three times more likely to die during pregnancy or delivery than white women it attributes these disparities to multiple factors including structural racism licit bias underlying chronic conditions and a lack of access to Quality Health Care with just two weeks to go till the US election Advocates are pushing to raise awareness about these reproductive Health inequalities impacting black women I think people feel demoralized and um scared about what is possible depending on who holds power and so I think that that's one of the things that makes this cycle feel really hard democracy looks like show me what democracy looks like activists say that reproductive Justice goes beyond abortion a key debate in this election since the US overturned roie Wade in 2022 kamla Harris has made abortion rights a tenant of her campaign calling out Donald Trump for the deaths of two young black mothers in Georgia a state with abortion restrictions and the eighth highest black maternal mortality rate Trump has taken credit for appointing Supreme Court judges who voted to reverse first abortion rights his campaign says that the former president has always made the health and safety of black mothers a priority now Thomas looking at roie Wade specifically um it wasn't long ago that some analysts that we've been speaking to here on France before was saying actually roie Wade alone could have been enough to really uh swing this whole election in favor of KL Harris but has Trump managed to change the narrative around this at all well I still think that abortion is the Achilles heal of Republicans generally and Donald Trump specifically in the 2022 midterms Republicans significantly underperformed in large part I think because of the abortion issue a lot of suburban women came out and supported Democrats we also saw that in state level referenda across the country in 2023 uh Donald Trump recognizes that this is a problem for Republicans it's especially a challenge for him because he has to court two different constituencies one is evangelical Christian conservatives who are very supportive of what Trump did by installing three conservative Supreme Court appointments uh to the bench which eventually uh overturned roow versus Wade um but at the same time he does realize that there are a significant number of women who on this issue alone uh won't support him so he's tried to take kind of a middle ground and say he's not in favor of a National Abortion ban but instead he's in favor of leaving this up to the states um but still that's certainly not satisfactory to a large fraction of women and I think it's going to cost them votes ultimately and given that this election might come down to a matter of tens hundreds of thousands of votes in swing states are there other key demographics in those states that might be a deciding factor as well well uh we always think about sort of the Suburban vote uh moderates who tend to be socially liberal but economically conservative certainly watching uh those groups um I'm also looking at black men in particular this is a constituency that Donald Trump has made a lot of inroads with and it some at one point during this campaign he was on Pace to uh have a higher share of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate in history of course the Latino vote is large and growing it's around 20% of the constituencies in some states Trump has also made some inroads uh with that group as well so uh Suburban voters uh minorities uh and women particularly uh in the suburbs I think that those are the key constituencies that are still maybe undecided or need to be mobilized to get out to vote for both candidates thas gift political scientist and UCL thank you very much for your time and obviously if someone offers you a million dollar check to vote a certain way you won't be accepting obvious of course thanks for your time Thomas speak to you s
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