Trump: Judge Barbara Lagoa is ‘excellent’
Trump has shown interest in candidate Barbara Lagoa to take over the Supreme Court position from the recently passed Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman joins The Final Round to discuss the latest on the battle at the Supreme Court.
Video Transcript
RICK NEWMAN: There's just one interesting wrinkle after another here, and now the Supreme Court choice could actually factor into Florida. So one of the top three possibilities is a judge named Barbara Lagoa who is a Cuban-American. She's the daughter of Cuban exiles who went to Florida. And there's now some talk that even though she seems to be less qualified than Amy Coney Barrett, because most of her judgeships have been at the state level rather than federal.
Trump might pick her, because he thinks it could really excite Hispanics in Cuba-- I was going to say Cuba-- in Florida, and that might give him an edge in Florida. So a Supreme-- a lifetime Supreme Court appointment could factor into the US election in Florida, the craziest of all states.
ANDY SERWER: So, Ricky, you're actually had the comment about the judge in Florida speaks to a question that I have, which is if you're spending money, are you trying to convert people or get undecideds, or are you just trying to get people to turn out? So in other words, that's the big thing here, right?
RICK NEWMAN: Yep.
ANDY SERWER: Is it turnout out or getting undecideds?
RICK NEWMAN: It's a great question, and we did our podcast this week on questions exactly like that with somebody from Advertising Analytics, which is the research firm that tracks all the advertising data. And the answer was this. Yes, you do want to try to convert a few people here and there, but those saturation ads that are going to air in this state right up until Election Day.
The real point there is turnout, and it's the people who are a little less committed, maybe didn't think ahead to get their mail-in vote. They might be a Trump or Biden supporter, but they don't feel strongly about voting. You want to reach that person at the last minute, a day or two before the election, and if you can, you want to get them on some issue that they particularly care about, whether it might be immigration or abortion or health care. And you want to remind that person that hey, the election is in two days, and if you're not thinking about voting, you should get out there and do it.
And let's look how close some of the elections have been, in 2001, when it was fewer than 600 votes in Florida that swung the entire presidential election, and then when it came down to 77,000 votes in three states, in three swing states, in 2016.
If you go county by county, which is how these ads run, that's a few votes per county that's just convincing a few additional people per county to turn out. So the advertising people say it really does make a difference.
