The Headlines - Poll Finds Harris Rising, and Florida Braces for Hurricane Milton

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Plus, have we reached peak human life span?   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Poll Finds Harris Rising as She Challenges Trump on Change, by Adam Nagourney, Ruth Igielnik and Camille BakerMilton Is Already a Storm for the Record Books. Here’s What May Come Next, by Judson JonesLead Drinking-Water Pipes Must be Replaced Nationwide, E.P.A. Says, by Hiroko TabuchiSupreme Court Will Hear Challenge to Biden Administration’s Limits on ‘Ghost Guns,’ by Abbie VanSickleHave We Reached Peak Human Life Span?, by Dana G. Smith

From The New York Times, it's The Headlines. I'm Traci Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 8th. Here's what we're covering. A new poll out this morning from The Times and Siena College shows Kamala Harris sitting at 49% with likely voters nationwide to Trump's 46%, giving her a slim lead within the poll's margin of error. This is the first poll where we see Harris ahead nationally since she entered the race a couple of months ago.

And this is the first time that we see any Democrat, Biden or Harris, leading in the presidential race nationally this year. Ruth Agelnik conducts and analyzes polls for The Times. We've seen some notable changes since our last national poll, particularly that Harris has sort of shored up support with older voters and made some small gains with Republicans. But sort of most importantly, she has sort of taken the mantle. She's edged Trump out as the change candidate. And we know that this is probably the most important metric. this election. A lot of voters really want change this year. And so Harris sort of taking the edge there really helps explain some of her growth right now. This poll does show

a lot of signs of strength for Trump, though. In particular, he's still favored on the economy, which is by far voters' most important issue. He also is doing fairly well with men who are an important group for Trump's victory. Right now, Kamala Harris is falling below where Biden was with men in 2020. And one sort of valuable metric that we've been tracking this whole election cycle is whether voters feel like Trump's policies

helped them or hurt them. And right now, more voters say that Trump's policies were helpful to them. And that's pretty consistent across demographic groups. So Trump still continues to show strength there. Overall, Ruth says the latest numbers offer a look at how voters are feeling right now. But they don't necessarily indicate how the electoral college numbers will shake out. That will be determined by the battleground states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,

where the polls have been exceedingly close. On Monday afternoon, I drove to the Tampa Bay area while everybody else was driving away from it. You could see the traffic on the highway from people leaving not only Tampa, but places to the south ahead of Hurricane Milton. Times reporter Patricia Mazzei is on Florida's Gulf Coast, where residents are bracing for the effects of Milton, which the National Hurricane Center called a potentially catastrophic Category 5. Every time I drove into a new county, my cell phone would start blaring emergency alerts, storm surge warning, hurricane warning, storm surge warning, hurricane warning.

Milton is currently on track to make landfall in Florida tomorrow night, squarely in the Tampa Bay region, which hasn't taken a direct hit in more than a century. Officials in the region are urging residents to evacuate from the vulnerable, low-lying areas there. This is a state that just went through Hurricane Helene two weeks ago, a Category 4 storm, and has had strong storms in the past few years where residents are just exhausted and worried and anxious and sick about having to think about evacuating again and where the storm might go and how everything is going to look like afterward. Even before Milton makes landfall, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has already been stretched thin, not just by Helene, but also by flooding, landslides, tornadoes, and wildfires this year.

It currently has less than 10% of its personnel available to deploy. Today, the Biden administration unveiled a landmark rule that will require lead drinking water pipes to be replaced nationwide over the next 10 years. The goal is to reduce a major source of lead poisoning in the U.S., which can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system and the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which brought the dangers of lead poisoning and the fragility of drinking water systems into glaring relief. Replacing all the pipes will be a colossal undertaking. The EPA estimates that it will cost $20 to $30 billion, most of which will fall to utility companies, and by extension, partly to their customers, though there is federal money as well. Notably, the rule doesn't require utilities to replace pipes on private property, like those that go to a home. And some environmental groups worry low-income homeowners won't be able to

afford that. Research has shown low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods are more likely to receive contaminated water through lead pipes. This morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether the Biden administration overstepped in regulating ghost guns. Ghost guns are firearms that people assemble themselves from kits you can buy online. Companies who sell them promise they're quick and easy to put together. You could be at the firing range in an hour or two. The key selling point for a lot of buyers was that ghost guns were effectively untraceable until 2022 when the ATF started requiring that they be marked with serial numbers and that would-be buyers pass a background check. Law enforcement says that before that change, the number of ghost guns used in serious crimes was rising, and minors and other people who aren't legally allowed to have guns were getting

their hands on them. Since the regulation was put in place, though, the number of ghost guns that law enforcement's recovered at crime scenes has fallen. Local officials and gun control groups fear that overturning the ATF's restrictions could reverse that. The challenge to the regulation is coming from a group of gun owners and guns rights groups who say the ATF doesn't have the power to put this kind of regulation in place, and that regulating firearms is Congress's job, not the job of an administrative agency. This will be one of the first cases of the Supreme Court's new term, which just started this week. The justices are set to tackle the issue of not only ghost guns, but also transgender

rights and potentially voting disputes that could decide the presidential election. And finally, for decades, humans' life expectancy has been marching upward, thanks to medical and technological advances like antibiotics and sanitation. And some scientists predicted it would just keep on going up. But a new study suggests there's a limit to what's possible, and humans could be closing in on that. The study, published in the journal Nature Aging, looked at three decades of data from places where people typically live the longest, like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland. And they found that while average life expectancies went up, they're not going up as fast. The research suggests that while modern medicine has helped

more people regularly live to their 70s, 80s, and 90s, getting the average age up beyond that will prove difficult. A professor who led the study, S.J. Olshansky, said, quote, we're basically suggesting that as long as we live now is about as long as we're going to live. Olshansky knows that not everyone agrees. One of his colleagues in the field has a bet going with him that a human being who is alive today could live to 150. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how the trade deal between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, known as NAFTA,

transformed the U.S. economy and broke American politics. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracey Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.