Consider This from NPR - Ahead Of First Presidential Debate, Almost 1,000,000 Americans Have Already Voted

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will meet Tuesday night in Cleveland for the first of three presidential debates. Michael McDonald, who runs the U.S. Elections Project at the Unive...rsity of Florida, says almost 1,000,000 people have already voted in this year's election.NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson previews the debate, and political correspondent Scott Detrow looks at what to expect from Joe Biden based on his performance in past debates. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.We're working on an upcoming episode about pandemic precautions and we want to hear from you. Fill out the form on this page and we may follow up on your response. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Back in the late 1970s, when he was trying to open a new casino, Donald Trump handed over some tax returns to gambling officials in the state of New Jersey. According to those returns, for two years, it was in 1978 and 1979, he paid absolutely nothing in federal income tax. I don't mind releasing. I'm under a routine audit and it'll be released. During a presidential debate four years ago, Hillary Clinton said maybe that was the reason Trump had been reluctant to release his tax returns. The only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license. And they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax. So that makes me smart. Zero. That means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for
Starting point is 00:00:48 schools. That was 2016. This Tuesday night, there's another debate in another election. And this time we know a lot more. The president paid just $750 in federal income tax for the years 2016 and 2017. And for 10 of the 15 years before that, he paid no federal income taxes at all. That's according to a story published Sunday by the New York Times, which said Trump basically told the government he lost more money than he made.
Starting point is 00:01:17 It's a story that could play a role in Tuesday night's presidential debate, which was already going to be pretty dramatic. Consider this. Big political news keeps breaking, but almost a million Americans have voted already. So what effect could this debate have on the race? From NPR, I'm Audie Cornish. It's Monday, September 28th. This message comes from NPR sponsor Twilio, a customer engagement platform trusted by millions of developers, enabling you to reinvent how you connect with your customers. Whatever your use case, Twilio has your back.
Starting point is 00:01:53 It's time to build. Visit Twilio.com. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from BetterHelp, online counseling by licensed professional counselors specializing in isolation, depression, stress, and anxiety. Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to learn more and get 10% off your first month. With the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the president is hoping to fill the seat with a conservative judge.
Starting point is 00:02:21 And evangelicals who play an important part in American politics have been waiting for this moment. But how did evangelicals become such a powerful force? Listen now to the history of evangelicals on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. Around this point in 2016, less than 10,000 Americans had voted in the presidential election. This election season, as of Sunday, almost a million people had already voted. A million votes is unprecedented in American politics. We've never seen this number of people cast ballots so early in the election.
Starting point is 00:03:01 Michael McDonald runs the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. He says there are a few reasons why so many more people have already voted this year. More states have made it possible to vote early, and more people want to. There's about a two-to-one advantage that the Democrats have over the Republicans in either the ballots that have been requested or the ballots that have actually been cast. That early advantage could balance out when Republicans show up at the polls in person, McDonald says. Which brings us to one more big part of all this. You may have noticed we called it election season. That's because election day this year means less than it did in the past.
Starting point is 00:03:35 Many votes that have already been mailed in won't be counted until election day or later, and we may not know the winner until days or weeks after November 3rd. When the president and former vice president meet in Cleveland on Tuesday, it will be for the first of three debates. The second is October 15th. The third is October 22nd. And there's a vice presidential debate next week. With voting already underway, the debates are one of the last big shots for each candidate to reach the small number of voters who are still persuadable. Here's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liason. The first presidential debate of the 2020 election comes at a moment of high anxiety for the country. The public is fed up and we are so on edge with the passing of a Supreme Court justice, with an economy that is on knife's edge,
Starting point is 00:04:34 with a virus that has now taken 200,000 lives, with another city up in flames, it seems, each day. That's Republican strategist Frank Luntz, who conducts focus groups with at least 1,000 voters every week. He says they are simply worn out. And they want a sense of normality again. They want to return to their day-to-day lives safely, sensibly, and responsibly. And that is how they will judge the two candidates Tuesday.
Starting point is 00:05:04 Luntz says the voters tuning into the debate don't want to see a cage match or a bloodbath, and that poses a particular problem for the incumbent. Donald Trump needs to change the dynamic of the race from a referendum on his leadership to a binary choice between him and Joe Biden. There's a path for Donald Trump, but it requires a discipline and a focus that he's often not shown. And it requires him not to make the kind of personal attacks that have made voters so angry with him. Personal attacks like the ones he aims at Joe Biden almost every day,
Starting point is 00:05:39 the baseless accusation that Biden takes performance-enhancing drugs. They give him a big fat shot in the ass and he comes out. And for two hours, he's better than ever before. That's false, just like Trump's attack that Biden is senile. Oh, sleepy Joe. He also says Biden isn't tough enough. You know, in his best days, 25, 30 years ago, he was weak. He was weak as a senator.
Starting point is 00:06:04 He was weak. He was not known as being one of the smart ones. But Republican consultant Brett O'Donnell, who has run debate prep for conservative candidates from George W. Bush to Boris Johnson, says Trump has no choice. He has to attack Biden in any way he can. The president should go on offense and he should stay on offense because that's the way he can make Biden make errors in the debate. And the president has never been reticent about attacking his opponents at a personal level. And he certainly should be on offense if he wants to make this a choice election. For Biden, the debates also present some difficult challenges. Donald Trump is a terrible debater. It is terribly difficult to debate Donald Trump. That's Philippe Reines, who played Donald Trump
Starting point is 00:06:53 in Hillary Clinton's debate prep sessions. He says Biden should try not to take the bait. This is really a matter of two people mostly having a conversation with the moderator, and they're doing so in the form of talking to the camera. I mean, you're going to have a Super Bowl-sized crowd watching and listening audience, and you really have to take advantage of that. And every minute that Joe Biden is sparring with Donald Trump, it's a problem. Biden has said he also plans to be a fact checker in his debates with Trump, but former Obama White House political strategist Dan Pfeiffer says that should not be his primary goal. Despite Biden's lead, there still remains a dearth of knowledge about his agenda and who he is. This is his best chance to get his message out and cement his lead.
Starting point is 00:07:47 There are other hurdles for Biden. Even though the Trump campaign has unintentionally lowered expectations by attacking him relentlessly as old and out of it, Biden will still need to reassure voters that he's up to the job. In the end, says Frank Luntz, the debate will come down to this. When there is no similarity and no overlap between what these two candidates stand for and what they will do, it means that it is only about personality. So this is not just about who's got a better plan for the economy or for COVID. It's who they trust more and who they want to be in their lives for the next four years. Luntz figures there's only 6% of voters who are truly undecided,
Starting point is 00:08:30 and only about a third of them live in competitive states. So tomorrow's debate will have a huge audience, a tiny target, and very high stakes. That's NPR national political correspondent Mara Liason. So both candidates will play to a small group of undecided voters tomorrow night, voters that could make all the difference in a tight race. Most polls show Joe Biden with a steady but still surmountable lead. NPR's Scott Detrow has this look at what to expect from the former vice president based on his approach in past debates.
Starting point is 00:09:10 For Joe Biden, the primary debates were mostly unmemorable and, well, at times rocky. He had some early stumbles, like confusing a number to text with a website. If you agree with me, go to Joe 30330 and help me in this fight. Biden's campaign mostly viewed the crowded debates as something to take part in and move on from. They didn't think they'd change the race. But as the primary turned into a two-man contest between Biden and Bernie Sanders, Biden got sharper. That was especially true in March, in the only one-on-one debate between the two candidates. Bernie's implication is somehow I'm being funded by millionaires. Bernie, look, in the last Super Tuesday and before that, Bernie outspent me two, three, four, five, six to one. And I still won. I didn't have any money. And I still won. Dan Senor is an expert on Biden's debate strategy.
Starting point is 00:09:57 The Republican operative prepped then-Congressman Paul Ryan for the 2012 vice presidential debate. His main question going into tomorrow is how the Biden campaign views the race. Do they think they're winning and they just have to not screw it up? And are they running the clock? If so, Senor expects the Joe Biden who debated Sarah Palin in 2008. Someone there to look presidential and mostly kind of ignore the opponent standing across the stage. But if the Biden campaign sees a reason to tangle with President Trump, Sinar would expect the Biden who came to the 2012 debate with Ryan,
Starting point is 00:10:32 ready to interrupt and dismiss his opponent's arguments as malarkey. Biden's camp is hinting toward the first approach. Campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon recently talked to Politico about the debate. Our strategy being speaking directly to the American people, speaking about the issues that are impacting people like COVID, like the economy, school reopening, health care, Social Security. But at the same time, the campaign is also hinting Biden will likely be much more aggressive with Trump than he was with any Democratic rivals.
Starting point is 00:11:01 Fash Shakir, who managed Bernie Sanders' campaign, is well aware Biden has that ability. Biden can be an aggressor in these debates and will jump at the opportunity to frame it up because he knows where this conversation is going to go. He's no dummy. He's savvy. He's been in politics for a while. Like Trump, Sanders went into his one-on-one debate behind Biden in the polls, hoping that a weak debate performance from Biden could shift the race. But Biden came out swinging, preemptively criticizing Sanders for voting against the 2008 bank bailout, which had been a mainstay of Sanders' attacks against Biden. Had those banks all gone under, all those people Bernie says he cares about would be in deep
Starting point is 00:11:38 trouble. Deep, deep trouble. All those little folks. We'd have gone out of business. Shakir does expect Trump to attack Biden personally, and to try to set traps for him to create viral or memorable moments at his rival's expense. Still, Dan Senort thinks it's Biden, not Trump, whose performance is most important. The analogy I keep thinking of is Reagan and Carter in 80s. In that race, voters had mostly soured on Jimmy Carter, but were unsure of Ronald Reagan. Carter's campaign had framed Reagan as dangerous. They painted this picture of Reagan
Starting point is 00:12:11 that was like this volatile, bomb-throwing, not-entirely-there cowboy. Reagan had a good debate, and suddenly, in the final days of the race, his tentative lead over an unpopular incumbent shifted fast to a blowout victory. NPR political correspondent Scott Detrow. It's Consider This from NPR.
Starting point is 00:12:37 I'm Audie Cornish.

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