MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Labor Day marks the beginning of the final push in the presidential campaign. Some people will start voting in just a few weeks, campaigns will be trying to mobilize their voters and there are the debates.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Now, many people have already made up their minds about who they're going to vote for. But with a race this close, it can be a nerve-wracking time. So how should voters be thinking about these next couple of months and what should voters be watching out for?
MARTIN: Let's ask NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Domenico, good morning.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: OK, so with Labor Day behind us, that's the traditional start of the presidential campaign. Although, of course, we know it's been going on actually for, like, two years now.
MONTANARO: Yeah (laughter).
MARTIN: And the election looks close. So if somebody were to say to you, hey, I'm looking at these polls every day - is that going to tell me what's going to happen? What would you say?
MONTANARO: I'd say, stop it. (Laughter) You know, polls exist. They're largely pretty good. We even conduct our own to get a better sense of how people are feeling about the candidates and society. But all you really need to know about the horse race right now are two things. First, Harris is performing better than Biden was in the seven key swing states everyone's watching. And second, the race is very close, within the margin of error, and that's not likely going to change very soon. That's it. So now this campaign is really about mobilization and a couple of big tests coming up for the candidates.
MARTIN: OK, about those big tests coming up. One of those is the debate one week from today. How important is that and what are you watching for?
MONTANARO: Well, I think the debate is going to be really very important, especially for Kamala Harris. She's had a great first month. Now she's starting to face ramped-up attacks from Trump because she's narrowly ahead in some key places. It's likely to get pretty ugly because Trump has to try and pull her down. Pay attention to some of the attacks Trump is trying right now because we're likely going to hear a lot about them at the debate next week, you know, things like Harris' shifts on some positions and trying to tie her to the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal.
So this debate will be a test for Harris, for sure. But it also, I have to say, carries some risk for Trump, too. I mean, think about the last debate against President Biden. Trump's flaws were really overshadowed because of Biden's struggles. But Trump repeatedly lied, spread baseless conspiracy theories and made a number of unserious or incoherent policy proposals. So if Harris has a solid debate, the focus really should then be on Trump in a way that he doesn't want.
MARTIN: We're going to likely hear about a number of the issues voters care about in that debate. Which ones do you think are motivating voters and could possibly make the biggest difference this fall?
MONTANARO: Yeah, I mean, it's the issues that we've been hearing about, that the candidates have been focused on - the economy and inflation, immigration, abortion rights. In many respects, Republicans have advantages on the fundamentals in this election. Unemployment's low. Growth has been strong. Inflation has come down. But people continue to view the economy negatively, even if not as much as a year ago. And that's because prices are still higher than they were pre-pandemic. But negative feelings about Trump are arguably as strong or stronger than those feelings about the economy, and it's why Harris has been able to make a strong case that she's the one who represents change in this election.
MARTIN: Before we let you go, in an analysis published this morning on npr.org, you write that another advantage that Democrats feel they have is related to turnout. Say more.
MONTANARO: Well, Democrats have a lot more offices, paid staff and volunteers on the ground in swing states than the Trump campaign. Abortion rights ballot measures will be voted on in 10 states, including Arizona and Nevada, both swing states. And the Harris campaign believes those will boost turnout with key voter groups. Republicans, on the other hand - Trump has a deep well of support and tens of millions will certainly go to the polls to vote for him. But his turnout operation is a question mark because the Republican National Committee has turned over a lot of it to a group with very little track record of success. And Trump keeps talking down things like mail-in voting, which limits his campaign.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Domenico, thank you.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
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MARTIN: The U.S. seized the government plane of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, saying the purchase of it violated U.S. sanctions. It is just the latest sign of the tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela.
FADEL: Yeah, Maduro insists he won the election in Venezuela in July. But international observers and much of the world, including the U.S., reject his claim. They back the opposition candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, who says he actually got the most votes. So Maduro is cracking down on dissent, and a Venezuelan judge issued an arrest warrant for Gonzalez, accusing him of sabotaging the election and conspiring against the government.
MARTIN: Freelance reporter Manuel Rueda has been following this story. He was in Venezuela for the recent presidential election. And he is with us now from Bogota, Colombia. Manuel, good morning.
MANUEL RUEDA: Hi. Good morning.
MARTIN: So it's not every day that a country basically repossesses another country's presidential jet. What did the Venezuelan government say about this?
RUEDA: So basically the Venezuelan government is calling this an act of piracy. They issued a statement yesterday where they said they're going to take legal measures and try to get compensation for the plane, although it's not clear where they could head for this kind of compensation, where they could seek resource.
MARTIN: Well, especially since, as we've said, the U.S. says that this is a violation of sanctions. The purchase of it was undercover to begin with. Well, I'm just trying to - could you just bring us up to date here? Like, how did we get to this point?
RUEDA: Yeah, absolutely. So after the election took place on July 28, the Venezuelan electoral council, which runs the elections and is controlled by the ruling Socialist Party, declared Maduro the winner. But opposition activists in Venezuela collected thousands of tally sheets printed out by voting machines. They scanned them. They posted them online. And those records show pretty convincingly that Gonzalez won the election by a large margin. Possibly two-thirds of the vote went to Gonzalez. So that's basically what's bothering the Venezuelan government and making it lash out against Gonzalez and other opposition leaders.
And I think with this plane being confiscated, the Biden administration is trying to sort of show its teeth and signal to the Maduro government that they're serious about enforcing sanctions against the Venezuelan government, which could be sanctions over more serious issues eventually, such as oil projects in Venezuela, Venezuelan oil exports.
MARTIN: I see. OK. So now, I understand that there's a warrant for Edmundo Gonzalez's arrest. Do we have any sense of the opposition candidate, as we said? Do we know where he is or what his next plan is?
RUEDA: Gonzalez hasn't been seen in public for more than a month, and that's probably because he was protecting himself from this type of situation, from getting arrested. You know, he might escape Venezuela, as has been the case with some other opposition leaders in the past, and try to continue to make his claims from abroad. However, the most popular opposition leader in Venezuela is Maria Corina Machado, the politician who basically ran Gonzalez's campaign after she was banned herself from participating in the election. And she's still in Venezuela and is promising to stage more protests and keep up the pressure against Maduro.
MARTIN: As we've been talking about all this, do we have any sense of how the general public is reacting to all this?
RUEDA: Well, you know, more than 1,600 people have been arrested in Venezuela in protests following the election, so people are very worried about what's happening. Media outlets have been censored, even the social media platform X has been banned. So it's a difficult moment in Venezuela and many people are also thinking about leaving the country because of this.
MARTIN: All right. That is freelance reporter Manuel Rueda. Manuel, thank you so much.
RUEDA: Absolutely.
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MARTIN: Millions of sports fans watching ESPN over the weekend suddenly saw their screens black out.
FADEL: Yeah, DirecTV subscribers saw cable channels owned by Disney go off the air in the middle of the fourth round matches of the US Open. And it's all because of a contract dispute between DirecTV and Disney, which owns ESPN, ABC and Disney+.
MARTIN: Here to tell us more about all this is Alex Weprin. He writes about media and sports for The Hollywood Reporter. Good morning, Alex.
ALEX WEPRIN: Good morning.
MARTIN: OK, screen going black in the middle of the match - OK? - not a way to win friends. But what is the snag here? What have Disney and DirecTV been negotiating about?
WEPRIN: So every few years, media companies like Disney and TV providers like DirecTV, they'll kind of renegotiate their contracts just to keep their channels on the air. This time, however, thanks to cord-cutting, it's a little more significant for both parties. Disney wants to try and get as much cash as possible, keep their channels as widely available as possible. DirecTV is trying to change how they sell TV. They want to start selling TV in genres, like sports and news and kids. And so that's kind of caused this dustup between the companies, and Disney's channels are now dark.
MARTIN: Who is most affected by this outage? I mean, I can imagine some people who are saying, well, OK, just switch to another streaming service. Is that possible?
WEPRIN: Well, I mean, some DirecTV subscribers will be able to. They have about 11 million, you know, between their streaming service and their satellite TV service. However, there are many DirecTV subscribers - in fact, DirecTV over-indexes in this area - that live in rural America, that don't have access to high-speed internet because the cable companies never built out infrastructure there. So while some subscribers would be able to switch - although, as anyone who's tried to do so can tell you, it's not exactly easy or simple - there are actually millions of DirecTV subscribers for whom it's really difficult. And they may not have any other good options.
MARTIN: Do we have any sense of how these negotiations are going? I mean, it does seem kind of like a power move to, like, pull the programming off the air, like, in the middle of programming. But do we have any sense - and I know that's a difficult question, because obviously, by definition, negotiations take place behind closed doors...
WEPRIN: Yeah.
MARTIN: And so forth. But do we have any sense of it...
WEPRIN: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Like, how soon these channels could be restored, anything like that?
WEPRIN: You know, typically if the companies are close at all, they will try to avoid a blackout. The fact that there is a blackout suggests that they are pretty far apart on key issues. I will say that the start of football season is in one week. And I think that will be kind of the impetus to get these two sides in a room, to kind of start negotiating and cut a deal, because the NFL is the king of TV and I think they both kind of want ESPN back in DirecTV homes before the NFL season.
MARTIN: It was just last year that Disney's channels went dark during a dispute with the cable carrier Charter's Spectrum. So what does this tell us about, you know, the power of a company like Disney?
WEPRIN: You know, I think it wasn't that long ago that I think Disney would say they were operating from a position of strength. And DirecTV would've said the same thing. I actually think they're both operating from a place of weakness right now. They're both really impacted by cord-cutting. The dynamics of TV are changing dramatically. And I think the fact that we're seeing more of these blackouts - like Charter last year and DirecTV this year - suggests that these companies are really finding the current moment existential. They're trying to figure out how to survive in this new TV environment.
MARTIN: That's Alex Weprin of The Hollywood Reporter. Alex, thanks so much for sharing this reporting and these insights with us.
WEPRIN: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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