On Election Day, what’s driving the fight for US swing states?
The Take
Al Jazeera
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the US election, seven battleground states could swing the contest toward Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Voters in these states have faced a barrage of outreach and campaign visits. We hear from a panel of local journalists taking the pulse of their communities on the calculus of voters they’ve been talking to and the issues that matter most.
In this episode:
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Ruth Conniff (@rconniff), Editor-in-Chief, Wisconsin Examiner
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George Chidi (@neonflag), Politics and Democracy Reporter, The Guardian
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Sophia Lo (@sophiamaylo), Producer, City Cast Pittsburgh
Episode credits:
This episode was produced by Chloe K. Li, Sonia Bhagat, Ashish Malhotra, Khaled Soltan and Sarí el-Khalili with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Cole Van Miltenburg, Duha Mosaad, Hagir Saleh, and our host, Malika Bilal.
Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Hisham Abu Salah. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.
Connect with us:
@AJEPodcasts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Threads and YouTube
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Al Jazeera Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | Today, on U.S. Election Day, we head to the arena of the battleground states. |
| 0:16.0 | They're trying to get every single vote. |
| 0:20.0 | We're trying to figure out how many people are actually going to show up on election day. |
| 0:24.0 | The fight over the seven states that lead to the White House. |
| 0:29.4 | I'm Malika Bilal, and this is The Take. |
| 0:44.0 | I'm Ruth Conneth. I'm the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner, and I'm based in Madison, Wisconsin. |
| 0:52.7 | I'm George Chidi. I cover democracy and politics in the American South. I am just outside of Atlanta at the state of Georgia. |
| 0:54.7 | Hi, I'm Sophia Lowe. |
| 0:56.9 | I'm a producer for CityCast Pittsburgh. |
| 1:00.9 | I'm in Allegheny County and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. |
| 1:05.8 | Well, Ruth, George, Sophia, there's no one I would rather be with on Election Day. |
| 1:07.6 | Thank you so much for having this conversation. |
| 1:09.5 | And welcome to the take. |
| 1:12.1 | I want to start with a little rapid fire. |
| 1:19.2 | Each of you are coming from a battleground state. And for context, there were 168 million registered voters in the U.S. in 2020. And in that election, in each of your states, one candidate won by a slim |
| 1:27.4 | margin. So just saying the number, so candidate won by a slim margin. |
| 1:28.6 | So just saying the number, so we can give our international audience, the context here for how close, razor-thin in some cases, it really is. |
| 1:37.0 | How many votes in your state decided the election in 2020? |
| 1:41.0 | Ruth, let's start with you. |
| 1:42.7 | About 20,000 votes less less than one percent. Sophia. |
| 1:47.3 | Here in Pennsylvania, it was a little over 80,000 votes. And George. Famously, 11,779 votes, about a half a |
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