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--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): There are a lot of questions about what's going on with Donald Trump in the final days of his campaign. His inflammatory rhetoric is ramping up and he's been doing and saying some strange things, including dancing for half an hour at a town hall.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): I'm Laila Faldi, that's A. Martinez, and this is Up First from NPR News.
--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): California won't swing the presidential race, but voters in the blue state could determine who controls the House of Representatives. I want to give them full access to the American dream.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): How are Republican and Democratic candidates pitching voters? And Italy's right-wing government is trying to salvage a deal to send migrants to offshore detention centers in Albania. Stay with us. We've got all the news you need to start your day.
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--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): In the final days of the campaign trail, both presidential candidates are filling their calendars with interviews and events. For former President Donald Trump, the grueling schedule is one he's handled twice before. But amid headlines about unusual campaign antics, there's a question. Is Trump veering off course?
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): For more, we're joined by NPR's political correspondent, Danielle Kurtzlaven. So, Danielle, you've been following Donald Trump this week. What are you hearing?
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: Well, I'm hearing a candidate who's making zero attempt to be less inflammatory as a really close race comes to a close. At a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina last night, he delivered his usual rally speech in many ways, but also parts of it were ratcheted up. There were insults, for example. He said former President Barack Obama is a jerk. He also falsely suggested Vice President Harris is on drugs. He also, as he almost always does, demonized undocumented immigrants.
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: But in this instance, he specifically framed them as taking jobs from non-white citizens. Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense while taking the jobs from African-Americans and from Hispanic-Americans. And he tells that lie as he is also pursuing specifically black and Hispanic voters and especially targeting men in those groups.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): Now, there's been a bit of a run lately about Trump being outrageous or acting strangely even. He's always had a different approach to politics. Daniela, what do you make of this?
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: To put it mildly, yeah. I mean there was him playing music for his audience for half an hour roughly at a town hall recently while he just stood on stage. There was him in another rally where he had this lengthy riff about golfer Arnold Palmer including alluding to the size of his genitals. And that's all on top of the many lies, for example, about saying that FEMA funds are being misspent. Again, no evidence of that.
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: Now, yes, Trump is 78. There are questions about what of this is due to age. Now, I've watched him for years. A lot of us have. He is slowing down for sure. You could argue he rambles more, but also he has always been circuitous in how he talks.
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: Now, to me, what's really interesting and that we can say for sure is that he isn't acting the way a candidate usually acts as a really close race is drawing to a close. I mean, look at Kamala Harris right now. She's out with Liz Cheney. She's emphasizing that she owns a gun. She's talking about being tough on crime. Trump is not reaching out to moderates in that same way in any way.
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: So what does that say about his strategy? Well, I mean, we always say that it's all about turnout, right? But he in particular is leaning into that instead of persuasion. He does not seem concerned with that middle segment of voters. He's just trying to turn out anyone who might be sympathetic to him. And when he has guest speakers at his rallies, you hear them really getting at this, telling people, hey, get 10 of your friends to the polls. You hear that all the time.
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: And this is something that his campaign has been saying a lot. They told me this a couple months ago about his strategy of going on all these podcasts. They say they just want Trump to get his message out to everyone, to leave no stone unturned. Well, we now know he's doing that more. He's doing an interview with Joe Rogan this week, who regularly tops the podcast charts.
--:-- Danielle Kurtzlaven: To bring all of this back full circle, though, to how he's acting, when Trump is being a loose cannon, he's doing the thing that makes his followers like him most. Now, is that a winning strategy? We don't know yet. But that authenticity has gotten him this loyal movement. He seems to think it'll carry him to a win.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): That's NPR's political correspondent, Danielle Kurtzleben. Thank you very much, Danielle.
--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): California is not a swing state, and so it's largely left out of the presidential contest. Right. But this year, control of the House of Representatives could be determined by the deeply blue state.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): About five House seats are considered among the closest in the country and could go either way. Guy Marzarotti from member station KQED has been following these elections in California. So, Guy, all five of the California races that are considered toss-ups by Cook Political Report are held by Republicans. So how are they able to compete and keep these races very tight in a state that's bluer than Frank Sinatra's eyes?
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: Well, I think in many cases it's Republicans here kind of succeeding in spite of Trump. You mentioned those five toss-up seats. Voters in four of those five districts actually voted for Joe Biden in 2020, some by pretty wide margin. So, yeah, how are Republicans surviving?
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: I think some of it has to do with the candidates, right? These kind of GOP incumbents have established their own political identities apart from Trump. But the voters here are unique, too. I talked to University of California Irvine Dean John Gould. He does a lot of polling on those swing district voters in Orange County, including a lot of Republicans.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: Who at a congressional level think Republican, but at a presidential level are put off by Trump and the election denialism and January 6th and some of the social issues that they don't agree with him or the party on, particularly on abortion. I just will say that this kind of ticket splitting, you know, voting for a Democrat, for president, voting for Republican for Congress, it's getting more and more rare nationally.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: And I think the big question here for the GOP is, can they just keep it up in 2024? All right, so tell us about the districts that Republicans are trying to defend. Yeah, I start with the Central Valley, California, big agricultural region. There you have these two Republican incumbents John Duarte, David Valadeo, who are both actually facing rematches from 2022.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: There's a district near Merced where Duarte is facing former Assemblyman Adam Gray. That race was just about decided by 500 votes in 2022. And we have seen since Duarte's taken office, he's kind of followed this long tradition of Central Valley Republicans who have broken with their party on immigration.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: He's actually voted against tougher restrictions. Family's been here five years, 10 years, working hard, showing up to work and not breaking the law. I want to give them full access to the American dream. And I simply disagree with certain members of my party on this.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: Meanwhile, down in Bakersfield, you have David Valdeo. He's one of the only Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after January 6th. He's getting another challenge from Democrat Rudy Salas. And I think big picture what you're seeing in these Central Valley elections is a lot of focus on the cost of living. Ads on gas prices, on food prices, drug prices. These are the issues the candidates are battling over.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: Let's keep heading south through California, a bit closer to me here in Southern California. How are the campaigns shaping up here? I've got to imagine that they're in Orange County. That's right. Orange County continues to be the biggest battleground.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: It used to be a Republican stronghold. It's moved left. And really what we've seen here is Democrats benefiting from this idea of the diploma divide, right? Voters with college degrees moving towards the Democratic Party. And as a result, I think you see the issues campaigns debating over here are less about pocketbook issues than in the Central Valley.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: You have Democrats like Dave Min. He's running to succeed Katie Porter. He's really running a campaign focused on fiscally moderate, but really socially liberal voters. I've been strong on women's reproductive rights, on gun safety, on climate. And you'll note that the Republican Party is not attacking me on those issues, right? Because they're popular issues.
--:-- Guy Marzarotti: I think I reflect the values of this district. Republicans definitely also have their eye on that Katie Porter seat. And they're also defending a seat held by incumbent Michelle Steele. That's KQED's politics correspondent Guy Marzorati in San Jose. Thanks a lot.
--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): Italy's right-wing government has passed a new law so it can proceed with plans to process migrants' asylum claims in offshore detention centers in neighboring Albania. Yeah, this follows a legal decision in Rome last week, ordering the first group of individuals who had been sent to Albania under the policy back to Italy.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): The plan places Italy at the heart of an immigration debate that is roiling Europe. For more, we're joined by journalist Willem Marks, who is reporting this morning from the Albanian port town of Shengjin, where more migrants are expected to arrive in the coming days.
--:-- Willem Marks: Well, A, the one I can see right now in Xinjiang is kind of a large site right inside the city's port. It's been purpose-built to process and accommodate hundreds of migrants at a time. The idea the right-wing Italian government of Giorgio Meloni has had is to pick up people who are attempting to cross from North Africa to the island south of Sicily, and in some cases to bring them directly to Albania if it's possible, since space and resources on the Italian mainland have been so stretched by the large number of recent arrivals.
--:-- Willem Marks: The government here in Albania has agreed to accommodate up to 3,000 migrants at a time, while their claims for asylum are processed. And here's the twist. The entire detention centre that the Italians are calling a migrant hub, it's going to be staffed and managed entirely by Italians. It's kind of like an embassy. The land itself I'm looking at legally constitutes Italian sovereign territory.
--:-- Willem Marks: So why has this plan so far struggled to get off the ground or get going? Well, last week the Italian authorities sent 16 individuals to Albania on a Coast Guard vessel. Before it even arrived, four of those on board were excluded. Two were deemed vulnerable, two were underage.
--:-- Willem Marks: The remaining 12 people from Egypt and Bangladesh were then checked into the facility here in Shengjin before being moved on to another centre inland. But their detention in Albania was challenged by lawyers at a migration court back in Rome. And within a couple of days, the judges there made a ruling that all 12 detainees should be returned to Italy.
--:-- Willem Marks: The judges relied on a very recent ruling by a European court earlier this month that essentially said governments can't decide that countries are safe for asylum seekers to be returned to if even some parts of those countries, like Bangladesh, like Egypt, are considered dangerous. And so in response to that ruling, the Italian government passed this new decree Monday, hoping to override all this, giving itself power to designate specific countries as safe, which means we could expect more arrivals here in the next few days.
--:-- Willem Marks: Okay, so then what comes next for this plan? Well, the Italians have already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to these centers. I'm looking at this huge complex of buildings in front of me. It represents at least some of that budget. The Albanians are hoping local businesses will see economic benefits if they can supply food and goods to the authorities here.
--:-- Willem Marks: There is some opposition to the plan in Albania. And more broadly, this is just the latest attempt to kind of confront this challenge that's bedeviled Europe for more than a decade now. You've got the number of people entering Europe across the central Mediterranean route. That's the one into southern Italy that's actually fallen this year.
--:-- Willem Marks: And that's thanks in part, the UN says, to a perception that the Italians are getting tougher on asylum seekers. You've got Britain's efforts to use Rwanda in a similar way. That's been shelved after years of judicial struggles. Other countries also encountering difficulties, even though European leaders have recently agreed the process for speeding up these kinds of irregular migrants needs to really happen soon.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): That is journalist Willem Marks. Willem, thank you very much for this report.
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--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): And that's Up First for Wednesday, October 23rd. I'm E. Martinez. And I'm Leila Faldi. For your next listen, consider this from NPR. By the time Alexei Navalny died in a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle last February, he'd been a powerful opposition force in Russia for more than a decade.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): In his memoir, Out After His Death, Patriot, he details his life and time in prison. Listen to Consider This from NPR.
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--:-- Host (Laila Faldi): Today's episode of Up First was edited by Megan Prantz, Padma Rama, Ryland Barton, Lisa Thompson, and Alice Wolfley. It was produced by Paige Waterhouse, Nia Dumas, and Katie Kline. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott, and our technical director is Zach Coleman.
--:-- Host (A. Martinez): Join us again tomorrow.
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