Pompous CBS Lecture: Kamala Will Beat ‘Darker’ Trump With ‘Silent’ Harris Voters

Curtis Houck
November 4th, 2024 5:29 PM

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With ABC’s Good Morning America continuing to run through the tape Monday with more venom toward former President Trump and cooing over Vice President Harris, CBS Mornings predictably had the same idea by emphasizing Harris pledging “unity, collaboration, and freedom” with Trump mired in “grievances,” “personal grudges,” and “violent rhetoric.”

CBS made sure to stand apart with some holier-than-thou lectures from John Dickerson and attempts by CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang attempting to imply Harris has this election solidly won thanks to what they argue are some sizeable portion of silent women voters for Harris out of fear of their husbands.

Co-host and Harris donor Gayle King got things started in the Eye Opener by huffing about Trump’s “angry closing message... including more violent rhetoric and personal grudges” and co-host Tony Dokoupil touted Harris as having “called for bipartisan unity in her final push[.]”

Dokoupil had his own Trump take cuing up anti-Trump and abortion-obsessed correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns:

Huey-Burns hit the ground running with this narrative about Trump being wholly unfocused, knocking him for comments about journalists and bulletproof glass:

After giving space to the chairwoman of the North Carolina Young Republicans, Huey-Burns closed with another mini-editorial:

Chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes played the contrast to Huey-Burns that ABC’s Mary Bruce did for her colleague, Rachel Scott with pure, unadulterated stenography for Harris:

“Some of those supporters you saw in line got there 12 hours before the Harris rally, a packed event inside the MSU Field House. In fact, all the rallies we’ve been to in these closing days have been filled to the rafters with supporters cheering for every line, especially anything she has to say about young voters, about health care and, of course, about reproductive rights,” Cordes later said.

Under the guise of objective analysis, King turned to Dickerson, who framed each candidate’s closing arguments as stark with Harris being “uplifting, optimistic” and respectful to our institutions whereas Trump embodied the opposite:

O’Donnell — who has made the openings to her newscast pure Harris propaganda — argued abortion as a leading issue and silent Harris voters bode ill for Trump:

The second half-hour included this ridiculous piece from Jiang about this supposedly sleeping giant of Republican women breaking en masse for Harris:

Moving to the second hour, CBS News contributors Joel Payne (of the Obama world) and Terry Sullivan (from the Rubio 2016 campaign) popped up. Naturally, King went first to Sullivan by lecturing him about Trump saying “dark” and “very offensive” things (click “expand”):

KING: I’m going to start with you, Terry, because when — even the front page of The Wall Street Journal, the message: “The dark pitch gets a third airing.” You know, I know all his advisers say, please just stick to the immigration.

PAYNE: Right.

KING: Please, just stick to the economy.

BURLESON: Stick to the script.

KING: Stick to the script. He doesn’t do that. Is this cause for concern or at this late date, is it, this is who he is? Love him or — love him or leave him?

TERRY SULLIVAN: As someone who spent several decades being a campaign adviser, it has got to be frustrating as hell for them.

KING: Yes.

SULLIVAN: But the reality is, he’s never listened to them, and it’s worked out pretty well sometimes and so, this is Trump being Trump, and he’s reverted a lot back to his old style. They ran a pretty disciplined campaign, by Trump standards, for this entire process, through the primaries, through the nomination process, they’ve done a really good job of being disciplined.

KING: But being — Trump being Trump, every time I hear that phrase, because it seems to give him a pass on some very offensive things.

SULLIVAN: Right.

KING: Is that okay?

SULLIVAN: You know, there’s — whether you and I think it’s okay, the voters think that he’s being authentic. And they may not agree with what he’s saying or the tone he’s saying, but they think that politics is way too scripted, that these people don’t mean what they’re saying. And most of them think, well, at least this guy believes what he’s saying.

PAYNE: It depends on what you’re talking about when you say "the voters," which voters?

SULLIVAN: Well, sure.

PAYNE: Because your theory, if Trump is doing that, then he does not think he’s going after any swing voters. He thinks he’s only going after heating up his base. He doesn’t believe that he can vie for those voters in the middle. He can only turn up MAGA, which that is — that is a theory. I don’t know if I would believe in that theory as an electoral victory strategy, because it’s not what he did in 2016.

As for Payne, Dokoupil at least called out Harris’s closing message screeching about Trump as a danger to the country as having been reminiscent of the one President Joe Biden deployed when he was in the race and we all know how it worked out for Biden.

Shifting to the show’s third hour (aka CBS Mornings Plus), chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett weighed in the bananas poll out of Iowa claiming Harris is ahead by four points.

While he argued “no one I know believes” this, he argued, in essence, that it could be true in spirit and have a wider meaning spelling “problematic” outcomes across the Midwest for Trump.

Payne and Sullivan were also back, but joined this time by Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez with co-host Adriana Diaz wanting to continue this charade pushed in the earlier show by Jiang about there being a measurable silent women voters for Kamala Harris (click “expand”):

DIAZ: [P]eople are leaving, women are leaving in spaces that women frequent bathrooms and — and that sort of thing saying, you know, what’s the — what’s the — the line that they’re using? Nobody needs to know.

PAYNE: Your vote is — your vote is private.

DIAZ: Your vote is private, basically.

(....)

SANCHEZ: Well, time and time again, the world has underestimated women only to be proven wrong. I mean, historically, I think you could argue the same case. We’ve been talking about a gender gap since the 1980s. And it was small. It was one or two points. Then it was really larger under Hillary Clinton in 2016. Right now, the breakdown that we’re seeing in the concern, I think Republicans have, they want to call that Iowa poll that showed Harris up an outlier, but with 65 and older women, 65, the granny vote, let’s say. There was a massive gap. I’m looking about 35 points. If you’re talking about independent women, it’s 28 points. So even if it’s a partial of that’s really a concern. But you have to go back almost a month before that. If you look at Selzer’s previous poll, 59 percent of the — of the voters overall did not support that six-week ban on abortion that has — that went into effect in January, sorry, in July. And you’re seeing some pushback that. And 81 percent of suburban women do not like this new restriction when it used to be 22 weeks.

PAYNE: People, Republicans are wondering, did we overreach on abortion? Maybe they’re not wondering, but they should be wondering —
    
SANCHEZ: Well — well, they’re taking action. The friction is there.

PAYNE: — did we overreach at the — at the state.

(....)

SULLIVAN: [T]he same polling shows the huge gender gap on the Democrat side where Republicans are supporting, I’m sorry, men are reporting Republicans by almost 20 points.

PAYNE: And who’s the most reliable set of voters, right? We know that women tend to be more reliable voters.

SULLIVAN: I understand. But —  but both sides, my — my only point is that both sides — well, I mean men voters, but — but — but both sides have a huge gender gap issue. And I think that’s what we’re looking at. And — and they — they offset each other pretty — pretty equally.

SANCHEZ: You both had that silent voters like white men, black men, Latino men on the Trump side, and then you have independent women and even some Republican women on the Harris side, where that question mark is really unknown.

To see the relevant CBS transcripts from November 4, click here (for CBS Mornings) and here (for CBS Mornings Plus).

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