Trump and Vance's 'divide and conquer' strategy on the campaign trail: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, we talk with JD Vance about how he has tried to expand the Republican ticket's appeal, and explore why Democrats are feeling newly energized in the critical battleground of Georgia. Plus, chief political analyst Chuck Todd explains why Harris is overthinking her media strategy.

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Vance opens up on running with Trump in new interview

By Henry J. Gomez, Alec Hernández and Jillian Frankel

A week ago, the rift between Donald Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp looked beyond repair, with the former president’s relentless ridicule of a popular battleground state Republican posing a potential mortal threat to his campaign.

Then JD Vance got Kemp on the line. 

Within hours of their phone call last week, Kemp, who along with his wife had been the target of vicious Trump attacks, was on Fox News publicly declaring his support for the GOP ticket. Soon after, Trump was thanking the governor for the kind words.

Vance, in an interview with NBC News aboard his campaign plane Tuesday night, downplayed any role he might have had in brokering a truce, wagering that he was one of many important voices in Kemp’s ear. But Vance also described a strategy, blessed by Trump, that takes advantage of the fact that he can reason with or appeal to people in ways Trump cannot. 

After their first few joint campaign appearances, Vance recalled, Trump “said, basically, ‘I trust you. We should both be in different places, unless it’s a really big event ... divide and conquer.’” 

“We’re each trying to talk to different people in different ways, and we’re each trying to try to run the race as best we can,” Vance added. “And he obviously sets the tone and sets the policy, and I just try to help.”

Reconciling abortion differences: In the interview, Vance also touched on how he has reconciled some of his policy positions with Trump’s, particularly on abortion. Vance campaigned last year against a constitutional amendment that passed overwhelmingly in Ohio, codifying abortion rights in the state. He also in the past expressed support for federal abortion restrictions. 

But since joining the GOP ticket, Vance has deferred to Trump, who has said he wants to leave the issue to the states.

“I don’t think of it as, like, backburnering your own values,” Vance said. “I am pro-life, and I do care about the issue. I do want to save as many babies as possible. I also remember here that voters get to make these decisions, and I advocated very strongly for voters to vote no [in Ohio], and we got our asses handed to us. And so I think all of us who are pro-life have to kind of step back and say, ‘How can we better make a case to the American people here?’”

The RFK effect: Vance also laughed off memes that suggest Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dropped out and endorsed Trump last week, should be the Republican vice presidential nominee. 

On Kennedy’s well-known vaccine skepticism, Vance said that his three children have received “the standard vaccines,” but that he likes Kennedy’s “general skepticism” to the public health bureaucracy.

“That doesn’t mean that I agree with him on every issue, but I do think that we should be a little bit more willing to challenge public health authorities in the wake of Covid,” Vance said.

Read more from the interview, including Vance’s response to an awkward visit to bakery in Georgia last week →

Harris gives Democrats new hope in Georgia

By Sahil Kapur, Alex Seitz-Wald, Jonathan Allen and Nnamdi Egwuonwu

Georgia is front and center in the presidential campaign this week, with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz embarking on a bus tour today that is scheduled to end Thursday in the Savannah area with a solo Harris rally.  

Joe Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes over Trump in 2020, becoming the first Democrat to carry the longtime GOP stronghold in nearly three decades. Now it’s up to Harris to prove that was no fluke by keeping the state in the blue column. 

Harris is a better demographic fit than Biden in Georgia, which has the highest proportion of Black voters of any presidential battleground state. Its electorate is also younger than those of most other presidential battlegrounds, and while Biden was struggling with young voters this cycle, they appear more receptive to Harris so far. The state also has a fast-growing Asian American population, which leans Democratic and has helped the party in close races.

To win Georgia, Harris will need to reproduce the formula that powered Biden and Sen. Raphael Warnock: boosting turnout and mobilizing Democrats in deep-blue Atlanta; putting big points on the board in the city’s population-rich suburbs, which are full of well-educated voters who are skeptical of Trump; and limiting her margin of defeat in the vast and solidly red rural areas, where losing by less could hand her the state’s 16 electoral votes.

Sammy Baker, the chairman of the Gwinnett County Republican Party, acknowledged that replacing Biden with Harris has improved Democrats’ fortunes in Georgia.

“I was very, very comfortable that it would be — not an easy win, but it would be a 4- or 5-point win. I think it’s going to be a little tighter now, because I think she’s energized a few of the Democrats that were not energized before, and they seem to be a little more active,” Baker said.

Read more on the state of play in Georgia →

2008 redux? The newfound energy Democrats are feeling extends well beyond Georgia. Natasha Korecki reports that some in the party are going as far as to say that Harris is reigniting the magic of Barack Obama’s historic 2008 run. Read more →

How Harris is overthinking her media strategy

By Chuck Todd

Among the sillier news cycles every campaign is the “debate over debates” and the debate over media coverage and access. It’s a conversation that the media and politicians care a lot more about than the public at large. Of course, these internal debates do matter, since they affect what the rest of the country’s voters eventually see of the presidential candidates, either on the debate stage or through the media filter. 

Let me start with the first big mistake of the Harris campaign since she took over as the Democratic nominee. They have now raised the stakes for her first sitdown interview. More words and phrases will get scrutinized simply because the campaign and the candidate are behaving as if doing these interviews is about as interesting to them as visiting the dentist’s office.

I know many Democrats have an allergy to all things Trump, but the one thing I thought more candidates would learn from his initial campaign in 2016 is that he viewed all media as good for him, whether he thought the interviewer was a friendly, a neutral or an opponent. When he said something outrageous or controversial during one sit-down, he’d do something entirely newsy (and just as notable) in another that would essentially dilute the impact of all of his interviews. 

What the Harris campaign ought to do is set aside one day a week for media interviews and saturate the landscape. As we all know, there’s no one place to go anymore to get near 100% media saturation. 

If she did five or six round-robins one day a week with a sprinkling of all types of media outlets, no one interview would be likely to overshadow any one news cycle, and she’d most likely have a chance to reach more diverse audiences on a regular schedule.  

By the way, these interviews would also help her with debate prep. Trump should be using the same strategy. Whether we like it or not, we live in a fragmented media environment, and that calls for fragmenting how a candidate reaches out. It should be an all-of-the-above strategy.  

Read more from Chuck →

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at [email protected]

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