OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Fox News host Jesse Watters revealed a big update in the 2024 presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Kamala is not Joe Biden and yes she has a woman and there’s excitement around that. You should see my mom. Suddenly she’s a Kamala fanatic. Keeps talking about joy,” he began on his show “Jesse Watters Primetime.”
“Trump kept one woman out of the White House and he can do it again. This country is thirsty for leadership after four years of joked hideaway Harris isn’t going to fly and only so much bamboo sling voters can tolerate. And you can sense in the room today the press thrilled they can justify their paychecks. Kamala Harris hasn’t held a press conference since 2023 and that wasn’t even in America. It was in Dubai. Trump got the gang back together and this is what democracy looks like,” Watters continued.
He added, “Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, live exchanges of ideas without censorship. Voters listening to a man buying to represent him and serve them unscripted without cheat sheets and teleprompters. The media missus Trump. The relationship between the press and the politicians is supposed to be tense and challenging. With Biden and Kamala it’s flaccid and corrupt. Everybody knows it. They were even up to their old tricks again.”
WATCH:
This comes as there is fresh doubt over the first presidential debate in September between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Trump’s team, according to the source, would like for the microphones to be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak, as was the case during the first debate with President Joe Biden,” CNN reported.
“The Harris campaign, however, is requesting that ABC and other networks seeking to host a potential October debate keep microphones on, according to a senior campaign official, marking a change from the June debate when the then-Biden campaign wanted microphones muted except when it was a candidate’s turn to speak,” the outlet added.
“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement.
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own. We suspect Trump’s team has not even told their boss about this dispute because it would be too embarrassing to admit they don’t think he can handle himself against Vice President Harris without the benefit of a mute button,” Fallon added.
Trump’s team has said that when they agreed to the ABC debate with Harris as the front-runner, they agreed to follow the same rules as the last debate.
“Enough with the games. We accepted the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said in a statement.
The Harris and Trump camps are at an impasse over rules ahead of the Sept 10 ABC debate.
The holdup? Whether the candidates’ microphones will be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak.
Team Trump wants them muted.
Team Harris wants the mics hot.https://t.co/FDrCdAnvzO
— Zack Stanton (@zackstanton) August 26, 2024
This comes as the 2024 race took a major turn a few days ago after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
RFK Jr. was only polling at around 5 percent nationwide but in a tight contest between Harris and Trump, that minor percentage could be what decides the presidency, the New York Post reported.
“Most of Kennedy’s left-leaning support had already dispersed to Harris,” Cook Political Report senior editor and elections analyst Dave Wasserman said to The Post. “So this could represent a meaningful benefit for Trump.”
“We’re talking probably a fraction of a point in our survey from August in battleground states,” he said. “Forty-six percent of RFK supporters went with Trump in a two-way race, 26% went with Harris and Kennedy’s support had collapsed from 8% to 5% nationally.”
“Campaigns would spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a fraction of a point given how tight the margins are in these battleground states,” he said as he referenced the tiny margins in 2020, particularly in Arizona and Georgia.
“RFKs endorsement won’t move all his supporters to Trump,” he said. “We’re in a very volatile environment right now and it could remain that way through the election.”
Chris Lane, a pollster for Cygnal, said that “among swing voters who will ultimately decide this election, 16% indicated they were going to vote for RFK.”
“With margins in battleground states being razor-thin, that 16% could represent the difference between winning and losing a state,” he said. “If RFK encourages his supporters to vote for Trump, it could have a massive impact and change the calculus for both Trump and Harris, especially in battleground states.”
“Add in the fact that those 16% are more center-right than anything, and will ultimately add to Trump’s ballot share,” he said. “Our data shows 4:1, these swing voters were more likely to call themselves conservatives than liberals.”
