Transcript: Liz Cheney Says Women Will “Save the Day in This Election”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 4 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.

It’s finally Election Day. If Donald Trump is going to be defeated in this contest, it will probably come down to women. By many indications, from polls to the early vote, female voters look poised to vote for Kamala Harris in startling numbers, and if she’s going to win, this is probably how it will happen. Liz Cheney went on The View on Monday and flatly predicted it, “Women will save us from Trump in this election.” She also laid out a clear argument for why women, including right-leaning and conservative women, should and will vote for Harris in the numbers needed to defeat him. Today, we’re discussing this with Stella Sexton, who’s the vice chair of the Democratic Party in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, because if women are going to decide this election in Harris’s favor, it will be in places like Lancaster. Stella, thanks so much for coming on.

Stella Sexton: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Stella, let’s start by talking about Lancaster County. It’s southwest of Philadelphia, went for Trump in 2020 by 57 to 41 percent. It’s a mix of the small city of Lancaster and rural and ex-urban stretches. Can you tell us about Lancaster’s demographics and why it’s so important for understanding where Pennsylvania is going in this election?

Sexton: Sure. Lancaster County is a really interesting place right now because it is probably just about the next most flippable county after the collar counties around Philadelphia all flipped during the Trump years. We have a really incredible mix of population here, from certainly the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch folks and folks of that heritage to a really diverse group of individuals from all over the world because we are really the refugee resettlement capital of the nation. So we have wonderful communities here and it makes it such a great vibrant place to live. We have a growing economy, good schools, a lot of in-migration from other areas which accelerated during Covid due to cheaper real estate prices. And a lot of folks just moving here for the quality of life.

Sargent: There are some big rural stretches, right? It’s pretty Trumpy in some parts. Can you talk about that a bit?

Sexton: It is. There are definitely some Trumpier areas, but there are also a lot of areas that are rapidly purpling. There’s 550,000 people in this county. So while folks talk about it as a rural county—and we certainly do have many beautiful rural areas—it is no longer really a rural county due to the population size.

Sargent: This is the place where Harris has to really cut into Trump’s margins to win, I think. Let’s listen to a clip of Liz Cheney on The View. Cheney was asked whether women will save us in this election and here’s how she responded.

Liz Cheney (audio voiceover): Well, number one, yes, women are going to save the day in this election. I really do believe that. And every time you see people like Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump—those people come out and act as though they’re somehow horrified that a woman might make her own decision about how she’s going to vote. They have actually talked about repealing the 19th Amendment, some of those people working for Donald Trump. So people need to really, really remember the misogynist aspect of all of this.

Sargent: Stella, this seems like it’s directly aimed at right-leaning independent women, maybe moderate Republican women. There are a lot of women like this in Lancaster, right? What is your experience of that demographic there? Are they thinking along the lines of what Liz Cheney said here?

Sexton: Yes, I would say they are, Greg. I’ve knocked a lot of doors in this county. Going back to when Dobbs first happened in 2022, I was working on a state house race in a suburban area for a Democrat, and we had to go talk to a bunch of college-educated Republican women, independent women to win that state house seat, and, of course, win our area for Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman—that echo from 2022 really is just one long string going straight through to today.

Women are very, very mad, and they don’t want to see what has happened in other states happen in Pennsylvania. I really think there’s a lot of strong echoes between the current race we’re in and the race that Josh Shapiro ran against Doug Mastriano. We’re talking about the same issues. We’re talking about a competent candidate who is going to run a sane and good government and protect our rights, and somebody [who is] just totally unhinged on the other side. And the same types of folks who crossed over to vote for Josh Shapiro are the types of folks that I think are going to cross over and vote for Kamala Harris.

Sargent: Stella, let me ask you, what do you predict? Do you expect Harris to get somewhere between what Trump got in 2020 in Lancaster, which was 57 percent, and what Josh Shapiro got there, which is he came very close to winning it. It’s going to be somewhere in the middle there. Where do you think it’s going to end up?

Sexton: Where I think that Kamala Harris will end up, and also where Bob Casey will end up, is somewhere in the range ... Now, gubernatorial elections are a little different turnout than presidential elections, but somewhere in the range of where Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman ended up in Lancaster County, which is they narrowly lost it but they vastly improved margins over what any Democrats had done in recent history. Joe Biden got 41 percent here in 2020, which was already a record—that was with no ground game, and because of the pandemic. And here we are, the Biden and now the Harris campaigns have made a historic investment. We have two field offices. We have a myriad of staff here. Today, I learned that we literally knocked every single turf in every single precinct in the entire county this weekend. They ran out of turf, and they’re now recycling and going back through the stuff they did Saturday because we still have people going out. With a turnout operation like this that we have never seen here, that field margin combined with the women who are voting in the post-Dobbs era, I think is going to lead to a historic margin for a Democratic presidential candidate here in Lancaster.

Sargent: If Harris can get within a few points of Trump in that county, which it sounds like you’re saying will happen, that would be really pretty striking. Presuming that Trump maybe squeezes a little more juice out of the very rural deep-red counties in the state, and there are many of those as we know, the key will be to bring down those margins in places like Lancaster. And it sounds like you say that’s going to happen.

Sexton: I’m confident that we’re going to get increased margin. I don’t know if I want to pin it down to a specific percent because I don’t know that anybody knows that. But boy, if we hit 50 percent, put me back on and I’ll take ... (laughs).

Sargent: You got it.

Sexton: It’s a huge team effort with a bunch of people, but we are definitely going to see historic margins. And we’re seeing that in the volunteers that are coming out to knock those doors. Yesterday, we had 500 folks signed up to knock doors. We did 50,000 doors this weekend. The level of energy that we have seen all cycle since the spring here in Lancaster County and the volunteers that are coming out of the woodwork is just totally amazing.

Sargent: Very remarkable for a place that Trump carried by 57 percent. I want to center the role of Trump’s violence in what Liz Cheney is saying to women. Listen to this from her on The View where she was asked about Trump recently fantasizing about putting her with a rifle with nine gun barrels shooting at her.

Cheney (audio voiceover): What he did couple of days ago, he’s never done before—taking the step of saying nine rifles shooting her in the face. And he knows what he’s doing. He knows it’s a threat, a direct threat, to intimidate. Obviously the intimidation won’t work. But what he’s doing frankly is ... Every day when I’m out there, I’m talking about his lack of fitness, and especially making sure people remember what he did. He watched television as our Capitol was attacked for over three hours. He watched police officers be brutally beaten. He was told the vice president had been evacuated, he said, So what? People were rushing in, pleading with him, Tell the mob to leave, and he wouldn’t. And that level of depravity, he knows he has no defense to that.

Sargent: Stella, E.J. Dionne recently wrote that Trump is closing on a barrage of violence and threats. There’s this line about Cheney. There’s Trump talking about people “shooting their way through reporters.” There’s Trump laying the groundwork to overturn a loss by complaining about supposed voter fraud in your county and a few others. There’s Trump saying he’ll protect women “whether they like it or not.” It seems like this argument from Liz Cheney that Trump’s violence is unacceptable really might work on female voters. What are you seeing out there on this?

Sexton: First of all, since I know there’s been a lot in the news about Lancaster County and our Board of Elections, we are going to have a free and fair election here in Lancaster County. There was a small number of applications for voter registration applications that were caught and rejected. That happens in every presidential election cycle and it was handled appropriately. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is out there spreading conspiracy theories with the help, to some extent, of our two MAGA county commissioners who hold the majority on the board of commissioners, which is very disappointing. Despite that, we are going to have a free and fair and peaceful election in Lancaster County tomorrow. I’m very confident of that.

To the second part of your question, this is who Donald Trump is. He’s someone who commits violence against women. He’s an adjudicated rapist. He constantly talks in violent terms about knocking people out and what he’s going to do to them. We all know there’s plenty of anecdotes that this is the kind of guy that he is. He has absolutely no problem threatening women and using physical force on women to get whatever he wants. The good news is I don’t think Liz Cheney is scared of that. And it just is a chance to remind women that this guy is an abuser. He’s a creep. He’s not someone ... Listen, I have a 13-year-old daughter. I would never leave her alone in a room with Donald Trump. And I don’t think any mother would leave their daughter alone in a room with Donald Trump. So this is who he is. This is a guy who enjoys violence against women, thinks it’s fun, thinks it’s funny, and he seems to think that other men enjoy that rhetoric as well. But I know that most men, the vast majority of men, also reject that thinking.

Sargent: Stella, speaking of who Trump is, there’s also Trump’s recent hate rally at Madison Square Garden, which featured a “joke” about Puerto Rico being an island of garbage and other vile racism like that. There’s a large population of Puerto Ricans in Lancaster, but some of them do seem pretty right-leaning. Realistically, how plausible is it that Harris gets some of those voters in your county due to Trump’s rally? How does that figure into the larger calculus of the state, do you think?

Sexton: Well, we have a very vibrant Puerto Rican community here, and a vibrant Latino community with families from all over Central/South America, and Mexico, and Caribbean, everywhere. It’s a beautiful thing that we have such a large Latino community here. There are a whole lot of folks coming in off of our Spanish-language canvassing efforts, of which we have a ton of people from our community who are Spanish speakers going out and doing canvassing in English and in Spanish to these communities. They’re coming back and telling us that folks are very mad, that it has changed their vote or it has motivated people to turn out and vote.

Anecdotally, a good friend of mine had a coworker who’s Puerto Rican who has registered to vote but had never voted in her life. She called me a week ago yesterday and [said] they needed mail-in ballot applications ASAP. So I drove those out to them at work because they didn’t have time to get them back. I brought those applications back to the Board of Elections and we got them mail-in ballots. My friend texted me today and said that this Puerto Rican voter who had never voted before returned her mail-in ballot, and she cried. Those are the types of anecdotes that I’m seeing, and it is absolutely a huge demographic problem for Donald Trump. We saw when the second gentleman was here this weekend, there were people in that room waving Puerto Rican flags. There were folks lining the streets waiting to see him, holding up Puerto Rican flags and American flags and Harris-Walz signs. So it’s a huge problem for him.

Sargent: Those little anecdotes really say a lot about what’s going on. Let’s go big picture. The polling averages show an absolute dead heat in Pennsylvania right now. Democrats are still struggling to win back working-class whites, which are a disproportionately large constituency in Pennsylvania. To win the state, Harris has to shave those margins down while getting huge numbers out of the collar suburban counties around Philadelphia. But women are key to both those, right? She has to win over some working-class women to limit Trump’s working-class margins; he’s doing really well with working-class whites and cutting into democratic margins among working-class nonwhites. She also has to win big among college-educated suburban women around Philadelphia. When you talk about that, it seems like the key is just getting as many women from all these different constituencies as possible, right?

Sexton: Women make their voting choices for a bunch of reasons, but the one thing that I would point out is that the Biden-Harris administration, and certainly the Harris-Walz campaign, have been very focused on economic issues that impact working-class women. Labor issues—they’ve been incredibly strong on the labor unions; incredibly strong on kitchen table issues—talking about price gouging, increasing home ownership, childcare, prescription drug costs, medical costs. There’s all kinds of economic reasons why voting for Kamala Harris is the best choice. That is definitely part of ... I can’t speak to Philadelphia suburbs, but for around here, it’s definitely part of the thing that we talk to voters about: the economy and prices. Certainly, Bob Casey’s message on Greedflation is one that’s really caught on here in my part of Pennsylvania. People love that. They really trust Senator Casey on that issue. That message is breaking through as well. So it’s not just reproductive freedom and health care, but it’s also the economic issues and the family care issues—caring for elderly parents, caring for children. So I do think that there’s a strong message there that’s breaking through.

Sargent: To your point, people miss this, but an enormous amount of resources is going into advertising on the economy. It’s not just reproductive rights, even though reproductive rights is an economic issue in its own way. Tons and tons of money is going into ads in Pennsylvania and all the other swing states talking about Harris’s economic message or agenda. We really miss that when we talk about how Harris is making an issue out of Trump. There’s all this communication happening under the radar as well about the economy, right?

Sexton: I wouldn’t say it’s under the radar. It’s definitely something that voters talk to us about. When we’re knocking doors, the first thing is just so many people just cannot stand Trump. They want him gone. They don’t want to have to think about him ever again. And they will crawl across broken glass to vote against him. He’s toxic to voters. That is probably the number one thing I’ve heard knocking doors all cycle. Reproductive freedom, be that IVF, birth control access, abortion—it’s bigger than just abortion. That is the one difference in talking about reproductive health care that is a difference from 2022 when people really thought, This is just abortion. It hadn’t really sunk in at that point that this means you can die of sepsis if you have a miscarriage. Now we’re seeing that happen to people. People are understanding that and how scary that is. We’re seeing more men, for that reason, too, talk about it. It really is a broad message that is breaking through with women.

On the economy specifically, especially since the debate, she has really improved her messaging on the economy, and that is breaking through to voters. That’s part of the conversations that we’re having at the doors as well.

Sargent: Just to close this out, how important are right-leaning women in the end to winning Pennsylvania? Does Liz Cheney have a real shot at reaching enough?

Sexton: Oh, yeah. We here in Lancaster County actually had the first Republicans for Harris event in the nation. We have a former Republican Party chair of the county here named Ann Womble who has been the statewide co-chair of that. If you told me 10 years ago that I’d be at a rally with Ann Womble and I would hug Joe Walsh at the end of it, I would have thought you were crazy, but here we are. Something the Harris campaign has done extremely well is create these permission structures for folks who maybe don’t agree and will never agree with Kamala Harris on policy to still view [themselves] as a Republican—because there are still many decent Republicans out there—but yet make this choice, the same one that Liz Cheney is encouraging people to make: to vote for Kamala Harris, to get rid of Donald Trump.

There are a lot of people out there who actually want their old Republican Party back. We will be healthier as a nation if we have a strong two party system. So yes, absolutely. I think that is true. Here in Lancaster County, Nikki Haley got 20 percent in the primary. In some of our precincts, she was getting 30 and 40 percent. There are a lot of Republicans out there who are very dissatisfied with having Donald Trump on the ballot again, and I do think that with the outreach that we’ve been doing that they’re going to vote for her.

Sargent: Well, that’s certainly a critical piece of the puzzle in beating Trump. Stella Sexton, thanks so much for talking to us today.

Sexton: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some new content we have up at tnr.com: Michael Tomasky arguing that Donald Trump has lost his sh*t, and the only question is whether enough voters will recognize it; and Parker Malloy arguing that we already know who the big loser in this election is: the mainstream media. And check out the latest episode of Above Average Intelligence on the DSR network where Michael Weiss joins Marc Polymeropoulos to examine the election from a foreign policy perspective. Quick note to listeners, we will not have an episode on Wednesday morning because everybody is going to want to talk about the election, and we record the day before. So we will bring you an episode as soon as we can after we know a little more about the election. Thanks for your patience.

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.