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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On today's show, we'll continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. For this Labor Day week, after 100 years of unionization and de-unionization on Monday, we'll do 100 years of employment and unemployment today with economic historian, Brad DeLong, and your oral history calls. Also, Liz Kim is back from vacation, so we'll resume her usual Wednesday visits with excerpts from analysis of and to take your calls about Mayor Adams' Tuesday news conference.

A number of interesting and important topics that the mayor addressed yesterday, including a question that Liz asked about why some guards at Rikers Island are still on the job even as they're being investigated, actually charged in lawsuits with sexual assault and rape in the Adult Survivors Act lookback period in New York State, so we'll get into that and other things with Liz Kim. We'll take your calls at the end of the show on this year's record attendance at the US Open tennis tournament entering the home stretch now in Flushing. Have you become a tennis fan recently if they're seeing record attendance now? If so, how come? Who are you into at this year's tournament?

I'd say if Taylor Swift was a draw in last year's football season, it's rising American tennis star, Taylor Fritz, at this year's Tennis Open, so we'll talk about that, but we begin on the presidential race. Election season is here. North Carolina sends out mail and ballots beginning this week. Early voting begins in Pennsylvania a week from next Monday. Kamala Harris is unveiling a tax cut proposal for small businesses. We'll get into details. CBS describes her as basically camping out in Western Pennsylvania until next Tuesday's debate. Trump, meanwhile, keeps flirting, at least by implication, with not attending that debate.

JD Vance and Democratic Pennsylvania senator, John Fetterman, are both using expletives on the campaign trail there. The Republicans continue to pressure Harris to sit for more media interviews after the one she and Tim Walz did on CNN last week, and hold a news conference already at some point. Trump won't take a position on the Florida abortion rights referendum, as the question rises, could Florida become a swing state again and be in play for the Democrats? As the Democrats have a reported advantage in the get-out-the-vote effort, the Republicans in some states are ramping up their effort to overturn the vote if Harris wins, and there's plenty more.

With us now, NPR senior political editor and correspondent, Domenico Montanaro. Domenico, nice of you to give us some time today when you've got so much on your reporting plate. Welcome back to WNYC.

Domenico Montanaro: Hey, great to be back with you, and I'd much rather be in Flushing watching tennis.

Brian Lehrer: Right, so you reported on the Democrats seeming more organized in their get-out-the-vote ground game in some important states. What can you tell us?

Domenico Montanaro: Yes, well, the Harris campaign has more staffers on the ground, they have more offices, they have more volunteers in all of the swing states. In Pennsylvania, for example, you were talking about Pennsylvania, they just opened their 50th office. It's more than double what the Trump campaign has. Of course, this has been the story with Trump since he's gotten on the political scene. He makes Republican professionals nervous. They scratch their heads. They don't understand his strategy, and in '16, he obviously won because he had that deep well of support from his base.

He still has that deep well of support, so he's counting on not having to spend all that much money on the turnout effort. The other question mark that they have is that the Republican National Committee turned over a lot of their get-out-the-vote efforts to this group, Turning Point USA, which has really been like a young Republicans' messaging group, and they haven't had a lot of success in turning out the vote in places like Arizona, where their founders are from.

Yet they're still getting the keys to the operation here, and it really has a lot of Republicans, who've done this a long time, very concerned that they're not necessarily going to be able to match up with Harris, especially in what's expected to be a really, really close election.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and I presume even more so after the Democratic convention and the other surge of interest in Kamala Harris giving their campaign so many more volunteers?

Domenico Montanaro: Yes. After Harris got in, the campaign told me that they had a surge of tens of thousands of volunteers across the swing states with this surge of enthusiasm, so certainly having enough people to go out and make the case to undecided voters and even to get out people who might have been-- It's almost equally important to be able to get out the people who might have felt like they were disengaged from the process. They might have voted Democrat, but they were maybe going to stay home because they weren't that enthusiastic.

It does make a difference when you have somebody door to door coming to you, having a conversation, encouraging you to vote, and upping the stakes, making you understand what the stakes are in the election.

Brian Lehrer: Is that really where the game is now in that population that you just referred to, people who are sort of Democratic party leaning but weren't very enthusiastic during Biden and are deciding if they're enthusiastic about Kamala Harris, people who may not be so inclined to vote for Trump, but they have to turn out in order for Harris to win?

Domenico Montanaro: Yes, I think this is why early voting is so important. It's really not election day, it's election season, and you mentioned North Carolina sending out ballots. People are going to be voting in a couple of weeks starting off, and what the campaigns do is they rank you one to five based on the likelihood that you'll vote for them. A five is a really strong voter, somebody who goes out a lot, somebody who votes Democrat or Republican pretty consistently. Then threes are more moderate and ones are people who maybe you might have a shot with, but they're lower propensity voters.

What they'll do is, in the early stages of early in-person voting or mail-in voting is to get those fives to submit their ballots. The people who they can really bank their vote. This way, up toward election day, they can really try to turn out those lower propensity voters to come out on election day or as close to it as possible to get them to vote. They have a lot more opportunities now with expanded early voting to get those wavering voters, so that's where a lot of this game is going to be fought. We've seen Trump all over the place on whether or not he likes the idea of mail-in voting.

He's recently said he doesn't. Whether or not he thinks that Republicans need to turn out the vote at all, in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, he said that it's not about turning out the vote, it's about making sure they don't cheat, which, of course, is baseless, just sore loser gripes about losing in 2020. Again, spreading these conspiracy theories, which I'm sure we'll hear again in the debate about how he feels he won in 2020, even though he didn't, and was proven to not have won.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, let's talk more about that because we're hearing reports of Republicans having new laws since 2020 in some states, Georgia and others, that could make it easier to not certify the vote. The kinds of things Trump was trying to get them to do in 2020 but they never really did in any state because the courts wouldn't allow it or the county executives or the state legislatures wouldn't quite go there on his behalf. Can you explain what's changed in Georgia or any other example of such a state?

Domenico Montanaro: I think the biggest thing that's changed just in a macro level, is that mail-in voting is not going to be as widely available as it was in 2020. Every state that we know has mail-in voting, has something like 80% to 90% of their registered voters turn out to vote, which is way, way, way above what we usually see in a presidential election. If you get 60% of people or so to turn out to vote, of registered voters, it's seen as a fairly robust turnout, so without having that available in a lot of places, turnout experts I've talked to said that they think that just by the mechanics of it all, we're going to see a lower turnout election. That's going to mean that the margins are going to be hugely important.

Brian Lehrer: Can I just jump in there for one second?

Domenico Montanaro: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: What you just described means the Republicans are trying to make it harder to mail in vote, are literally trying to suppress the vote. If you're saying that's going to result not just in more people going to the polls on election day or the early in-person voting period, but a lower total vote, it's a voter suppression tactic explicitly.

Domenico Montanaro: When you talk to Republicans, certainly Democrats and a lot of people who would want more votes, more voters to cast ballots, would make the same argument that you're saying. When I've talked to Republicans, they'll say that they're trying to make the election as transparent as possible because they don't trust things like mail-in voting and they don't trust not having things like photo ID, but it certainly does create barriers for a lot of people who might not have the same ability to go vote on election day for one reason or another.

It does lower what are the efforts that are made by Democrats, for example, to try to turn out some of their lower propensity voters in non-white voters, and younger voters in particular, to make it easier for them to vote. Republicans have an advantage on election day, usually, because they'll have older voters or people who are used to voting in person, going and doing that, so that is where a lot of this fight is taking place for sure.

Brian Lehrer: Making it harder to use mail-in ballots is one battleground there. What about in the Georgia example? I'm no expert on this, I don't know if you've reported deeply on this, but my understanding is the new law there in the last few years would make it easier for county-level officials, for example, to refuse to certify a vote.

Domenico Montanaro: Yes, that's part of it, and I haven't done as deep reporting as some of my colleagues have on this, as we have a whole voting team that's been doing really good work on it, but essentially, the Trump folks have been trying very hard to get that to be something that you can gum up the system with. People who've been close to Trump or have worked with him previously, have been behind some of this effort. Part of what they call their "election integrity network", which really is code for Trump's team trying to make it a little bit more difficult to get these things certified.

In a place like Georgia, we know Trump had that phone call where he asked for 11,780 votes or whatever it was that he needed. Brian Kemp is still the governor there. We know Trump and he have had a bit of a spat. Kemp, for the most part, has upheld what Georgia did in 2020, but I would expect that what we're going to see after election day is a lot of really, really contested votes down to the precinct level. You're going to have a lot of poll watchers and things like that from the Republican side in particular, who are going to be challenging the veracity of different votes.

You're going to see a lot of provisional ballots that are contested, and in a close, close election, it could drag things out for quite some time. It's why you saw-- I was struck by Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention, essentially saying that she felt like Democrats needed to win by more than just a slim margin and not rest on their laurels because it makes it a lot harder to then slow the process down and contest the election.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we had a Pennsylvania politics reporter yesterday who said not to expect a result from there on election night because the state doesn't allow counting of mail-in ballots until election day itself, so they will be slow in getting to a total, especially if it's close. I'm curious, given that fact and given the possible attempts to not count some of the votes or not certify them that we just mentioned, I'm curious how you're getting ready to cover election night and the next day at NPR?

Domenico Montanaro: With a lot of rest and being able to keep your head about you and understanding the rules. When the vote will be counted is a really important thing, I think, also for our audience to understand, because the votes are not certified on the night of the election. This is a lot of mud in the water that Donald Trump has tried to continue to throw in here saying that, one way or the other, whichever way, doesn't benefit him, it's "fraudulent" when it's not, that a network might have a lead for one candidate at one point in the night, and then later on, he says, suddenly you wake up and there's a change.

Well, it's not suddenly, or a nefarious thing. This is the way vote counting works. Sure, decision desks on networks and at the Associated Press are very good at their jobs and are able to suss out based on key precincts where the vote is coming in and whether or not somebody can win. Which is why you see in states that are 0% in but are very strongly Republican or Democratic, a place like Wyoming, for example, which is expected to be overwhelmingly Republican, they can make a call with 0% in because they see enough vote in key precincts.

That doesn't mean that all of the vote is counted or in or certified. The certification dates are much later, and those are the official tallies, and I think that we have to be really careful when there's so much misinformation floating around about what's actually happening on election night and the difference between projections and certification.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and even the network projections, those statistical projections of who's going to win based on the sample size that they have, if we remember correctly, that didn't occur until the following weekend last time around in 2020, with Fox News being first out of the gate to project Biden had won the presidential election, but that was days after election day.

Domenico Montanaro: They were very nervously watching the vote in Arizona because they were first out of the gate to call Arizona for Biden, but the margin continued to close and close and close until it was around 10,000 votes. Ultimately, their projection was correct, but it's going to take a lot of restraint from the decision desks and a lot of understanding from viewers and readers and listeners to not necessarily jump one way or the other, but to realize this is probably going to be close and the most important thing over the next several weeks is going to be that kind of activism.

I get so many questions about the polls and whether they're right or wrong or what's happening or this and that, and I wrote this week, people need to just stop, because people have their votes pretty much-- They have their minds made up, and now it's the waiting period of nervously watching and refreshing whatever horse race aggregator you want to look at. The polls are really close. They're within the margin of error everywhere, so these seven states that we're all watching, they're likely to be close, so I said, "The election will not be won on your computer screen."

Brian Lehrer: You'll notice we're 15 minutes into this segment, and I have not asked you a polling question, so we're on the same page. Listeners, your comments, questions, or stories about the presidential race right now with NPR senior politics editor and correspondent, Domenico Montanaro at 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Or anything you've always wanted to ask Domenico Montanaro about his job at NPR. Maybe you listen to him with Scott Simon every week or other times. Domenico Montanaro is here for your phone calls and texts.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, and here's a text that has come in already based on something we were discussing a few minutes ago. Listener asks, is there data to demonstrate that more offices and staffers on the ground translates to more votes?

Domenico Montanaro: Usually, before the Trump era, it was absolutely one of those big metrics, and you took it as one thing, in addition to how much money they're spending on campaign ads, what kind of people they have around them, what's the strength of their messaging around the key issues that you're seeing? Usually, the people with the best turnout operations do go on to win. 2016 was a huge asterisk for all of the normal political things that we'd been watching, and I would say, as far as Trump's strength goes, he got 46% in 2016, he got around 46%, 47% in 2020. The difference was third-party voters, and in 2016, it was about 7% of the vote.

In 2020, it was less than 2% of the vote, so I think that's a real key because Trump is one of these politicians people know to be having a high floor and a low ceiling. In other words, he's not really going to go very low, and he also has about more than half the country saying that they have an unfavorable opinion of him. The thought has been that with a generic Democrat who Kamala Harris fits the bill more so than Biden did because of the asterisk about his age and people's concerns around whether or not he fires up key Democratic base groups, that a generic Democrat could have a better chance against Trump.

Right now, that's playing out in the polls, but it's still super, super close, and normally, the data does show that more offices and staff and volunteer do lead to somebody winning in a close race, but you just never know in the age of Trump.

Brian Lehrer: I may not have asked you any polling questions, but that doesn't mean the listeners aren't allowed to. Nick in Manhasset, you're on WNYC with Domenico Montanaro from NPR. Hi, Nick.

Nick: Yes, hi, Brian. I think Domenico answered the question, but I'm still very troubled about what I'm seeing. I've heard a lot of analysts say that it's almost certain it's going to be a three or four-point margin/percentage point separating Trump and Harris. Does Domenico think Harris could do anything, change anything in her strategy, or any external event that would lead to a blowout where Harris wins by 8, 9 or 10 points in the final results?

Brian Lehrer: Nick, thank you, and it reminds me of what you just said about Michelle Obama from her speech, like, "Hey, folks, let's get out there and make this not close." I'm thinking about somebody else who said to me off the air, who's a close watcher of the election campaign, "Look, Trump never exceeds about 42% in general approval rating, so maybe this isn't going to be close." What do you say to either of those?

Domenico Montanaro: I think we live in an age of hyperpolarization and a time when people are not able to agree on the same, on what the facts even are. Unfortunately, it's one of the more distressing things, I think, about our society and the role of journalism, which is a whole other conversation. I think, because of how the views are locked in because of how polarizing Trump is and how divided people are, they either loathe or love him, that I don't think that there's much chance that we're going to see a huge expansion for Harris or for Trump.

I just don't think that we're in a stage where you can convince people to get off of how they believe about Trump, and I know I continue to talk about him, because he is really almost functioning as the incumbent in this race in a weird way, even though Kamala Harris is the vice president and has been able to pick up this mantle of change. Trump feels new, but he's been on the scene for almost a decade now in politics, and this is a long way to say that I don't think that we're going to see an ability for the polls to get out to eight or nine points for a lead for Harris. I would be surprised if they got much further beyond what they are or much closer than what it is right now.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue talking about the presidential race with Domenico Montanaro and your calls and texts in a minute. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we talk about the presidential race with NPR senior political editor and correspondent, Domenico Montanaro, and you. Calls and texts to 212-433-WNYC. Domenico, I mentioned the CBS news story that referred to Harris as basically camping out in Western Pennsylvania until next Tuesday's debate. Pennsylvania is often being called the ultimate swing state. Can you give us a very brief reminder of why that's the case?

Domenico Montanaro: It's been really close. Trump won it in 2016. Democrats generally do pretty well in the state otherwise, but Pennsylvania is one of those places that continues to have a significant white population, that voters who don't have college degrees. Democrats do very well in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In between, you've got a place where Democrats have really struggled. Trump ran up the margins with them. Even in 2020, he won 66% of white voters without college degrees as compared to Wisconsin and Michigan, which he still won those voters, but he won them by significantly lower margins.

That's what makes Pennsylvania a little bit more of a swing state for someone like Harris, who seems to be holding up a little bit stronger in Michigan and Wisconsin right now, even if it's a very, very small margin. It's really because of how much stronger white voters without college degrees have voted for Trump in Pennsylvania.

Brian Lehrer: And because it has more electoral votes than Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia.

Domenico Montanaro: Sure. Yes, it has 19 electoral votes and it's pivotal. Trump really needs-- The theory of the case for his campaign is winning Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. It's where they're spending the lion's share of their money. $100 million or more has been spent in Pennsylvania between Harris and Trump just in the past month. We've already seen $1.2 billion in ad spending in the seven swing states since the beginning of this election cycle, which is just incredible amount of money and a lot more to come.

Obviously, Pennsylvania is pivotal because it has those 19 electoral votes, and with those 3, the Trump folks would be right at 270 electoral votes, so that's where they're putting a lot of their resources to try to win there.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking about Pennsylvania. We've been talking about get-out-the-vote efforts. I think Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a call that ties those two things together. Rebecca, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Rebecca: Yes, hi, and by the way, I've gone door to door in Pennsylvania in the suburbs, honestly. What I wanted to say is, I want to encourage anybody who would do anything, make a phone call, go door to door, do anything to volunteer for the effort. I don't even care what side you're on, but I went-- Well, no, every election year, every national election year, I get on the phones or get on a bus and try to get out the vote. One year, it was after work and I went down in the basement and started making calls, and it was the first year that Barack Obama was running for president.

I got a guy in Georgia, an African American man who said he was 80-something years old, and he said, "I want to vote for Barack Obama, but I don't have any transportation." I was able to say, "I think I can call your local get-out-the-vote effort and get you a car." It was, I'll get you a ride to go to the polls," and I said, "Can you wait for me to call back in five minutes?" I was able to call that local get-out-the-vote, and this is really important, in Georgia, that minute, not that day, that minute, I was able to get him a ride and he was able to go to the polls and vote for the first African American president.

Brian Lehrer: It's a beautiful story. You don't even need to tell the moral of the story because the moral of the story is baked in, and thank you, Rebecca. Domenico, it's a wonderful example of what get-out-the-vote means on the ground.

Domenico Montanaro: Yes, it really is engaging with people, figuring out what their needs are, and not everybody has access to transportation. Not everybody has the ability to take off from work on election day. Some states have made election day something of a holiday. There's no schools, for example, where I live in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, and not everywhere does that.

There's a lot of people in Nevada, for example, who are working-class voters who have had a harder time trying to take off. It's one thing that unions there have tried to get there to be time for people to be able to go and vote. There's these souls-to-the-polls efforts in Black churches on Sundays which have also been attempted to be cracked down on by Republicans in a lot of different states, so it takes a lot of effort. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Was that a part of the Georgia law too? You can only have early voting on one weekend day, and the aim was to get it to be Saturday, maybe I'm not remembering this exactly right, but souls-to-the-polls couldn't take place?

Domenico Montanaro: Right. Yes, that was one of the more controversial aspects of that law when it first took effect.

Brian Lehrer: That it did not go through that way, though, we should say, right?

Domenico Montanaro: Right, yes, and there's a lot of these kinds of efforts. There's a lot of misinformation. There's been efforts. Even the New Hampshire primary, somebody had put up a fake robo call telling people that the election was on a different day, so you got to be wary of these kinds of things. Get yourself a plan for election day, a lot of people talk about, or when you're going to vote. Never mind election day, but when you're going to vote, figure out what your early voting procedures are in your state. Figure out where your local precinct is. Figure out if you're registered to vote.

There's a lot of people who would vote who might not have realized that they need to be registered to vote, and there have been a lot of interesting attempts at trying to register younger voters. In particular, I went with my son to a Green Day concert, for example, and they had signed up thousands of people just at this stadium. Of course, I'm the political dad, and I'm like, "Hey, how many people have you got signed up with this thing?" That was interesting.

Brian Lehrer: They said, "I don't know"?

Domenico Montanaro: No, they knew exactly. They had clipboards. They knew exactly everybody, so very organized efforts around this stuff, but that's what it really takes to turn people out to vote.

Brian Lehrer: Another Pennsylvania-oriented call, Bob in Rego Park, Queens. Bob, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Bob: Can I ask the reporter, so not picking Josh Shapiro, the biggest mistake in political history, that's if you don't have the right strategy, if you don't draft pick, you don't win, if they lose Pennsylvania, which is a big possibility, the gentleman which I love as vice president, nice guy, talk about that.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and your phone is breaking up, so I'm going to go, but I think the question was clear, the calculus of not picking Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, when Pennsylvania is the ultimate swing state. What can you tell us in retrospect?

Domenico Montanaro: I feel like I'm on a different New York radio program. Feels like I'm on WFAN.

Brian Lehrer: A little sports talk there from Bob in Rego Park.

Domenico Montanaro: Bob in Rego Park, first time long time-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: He's not too far from the Tennis Open and the Mets Citi Field, so maybe it's infecting him.

Domenico Montanaro: The idea of which person you should have traded for, which person should be on the team because of a what if possibility, I do think that there is a question mark that if the Democrats lose Pennsylvania very, very narrowly, there are going to be a lot of questions about whether or not someone like Shapiro could have made the difference. We know that people don't really vote for the vice president. It's just one of those things that the veepstakes become a big thing that people talk about, and then they have very little to no effect on the election usually, but in a swing state where that person is from, they do tend to make a little bit of a difference.

Any bit of difference is certainly something Harris would have taken. At the same time, part of picking a vice presidential pick is to balance the ticket so other voters maybe see Harris in a different way. If you had two hard-edged prosecutors running together on a ticket, it might not have the same effect as having a Tim Walz who's able to soften her edges or round the views of her or make the ticket overall a little bit more favorable, so you don't necessarily know what the sliding scale is on that.

Brian Lehrer: If the Yankees had signed Bryce Harper, we'd be living in a different world. Did you see the rise of expletives, curse words on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania? Talking about the running mates, JD Vance campaigning there, said Harris could, "Go to hell," because of the deaths from the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Democratic senator, John Fetterman, there, put out a press release with a headline, "JD Vance to say more truly bat blank takes in Erie, Pennsylvania," before the Erie rally for Vance.

It goes on to say Vance has no effing clue who he is and why he's there, and you heard how I cleaned that up. Is there an expletive-not-deleted strategy emerging in both these campaigns or in Pennsylvania specifically for some reason?

Domenico Montanaro: This is something both of these guys-- It's like a convergence of their styles because Fetterman has sworn in other press releases and things like that. Vance has done it on the campaign trail and during his stint running for the Ohio senator, but I think that it's one attempt to sound "normal". I don't want to clutch pearls too tightly here because we know that when we don't have microphones on, some people might use a little bit more salty language than we might do on the airwaves. I think that's what they're both trying to do in maybe a schlocky way, trying to appeal to these white voters without college degrees or seem like they're men of the people. I don't know how much it really matters.

Brian Lehrer: Here's the latest JD Vance clip to surface on women and childbearing from a 2021 podcast. Media Matters and the Guardian surfaced this originally in a conservative host podcast in '21, which I think was the same year as childless cat ladies, but here's what people are hearing now for the first time.

JD Vance: You have people at Yale Law School, you have women who think that, truly, the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children, and I think that those people, in their defense, they genuinely believe that the path of liberation is to work 90 hours in a cubicle at McKinsey. What they don't realize, and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God, that that is actually a path to misery, and the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.

Brian Lehrer: What jumps out at me about that, and I mentioned this on yesterday's show but I'll mention it again, is that he's really talking about women there and not men. He could be talking about men too as having a better work-life balance. He also could be talking about McKinsey, I don't know, McKinsey's paid leave policies or maternity, any kind of family accommodation policy as one company, but corporate America generally as making it easier, as something that government officials should be talking about to pursue both. Instead, he makes it sound like women are doing the wrong thing. Does it matter?

Domenico Montanaro: I think this does matter, and I got Harrison Butker vibes on that, the kicker from the Chiefs who made that speech at a conservative Catholic college about women and their highest calling being raising children. Listen, if that's what you want to do in life, that's up to you, but I think the point is, when you say that something is more virtuous than somebody else's choices, I think that's where you get into trouble as a politician. I'm all for a work-life balance. I wrote that down too that he's talking about women here at Yale Law School rather than all people in the different kind of work that's expected so that you can parent.

For example, if you have children and if you don't have children, then being able to take a vacation or whatever it is you want to do, but to be more productive. There's a lot different kinds of data on productivity and being able to connect with your kids or having maternity and paternity leave that's more reasonable. That, obviously, is a policy debate that could and should be had, but I think that it's going to be one of those things that, again, plays into the narrative of the childless cat lady stuff and what JD Vance and Donald Trump's views of women are in the workplace and whether or not that that's what really should be important to them or not.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, somebody chimes in on the expletives in a text message, listener writes, "Trump has used the term mother blanker while on stage in front of a mic." Do you know about that? Is that true, yes, in a campaign?

Domenico Montanaro: That is true. Yes, he has done that, but look, I don't know, he's from Queens, I'm from Queens--

Brian Lehrer: I'm from Queens.

Domenico Montanaro: Somewhere on 34th street, you can probably get one of those shirts that say all the expletives using the F word as a noun, verb, and adjective.

Brian Lehrer: The Queens mafia is out there. Harris is unveiling small business tax cuts today. Can you give us the basics economically and politically? I know there'll be a lot more on this once it actually happens on All Things Considered later today and other places, but what do we know now?

Domenico Montanaro: Shocking this is taking place a week before a debate. There are specific things in policy that a politician is proposing, but what she's proposing here is essentially upping the tax incentives for small businesses for their startup expenses, something like 10 times what it is currently. Right now it's about $5,000 in tax credits that you can get to start a new business, and she wants to up that to $50,000. That, they think, could lead to some 25 million new small business applications over Harris's four-year term if she were to win.

Her campaign says that the average startup cost is around $40,000, and new businesses would be able to wait until they turn a profit to try to maximize the tax impact. It's interesting because she's going to need Congress to do any of this if she were to win. The Trump tax cuts do expire at the end of next year, so legislatively, it does offer an opportunity for Harris to submit her own slate of new taxes or tax incentives. If she were to win, that would be part of trying to re-up those or change it. She wants higher corporate tax rates.

She wants to raise taxes on those who make more than $400,000 a year, and cut taxes, she says, for middle-class families, as well as implementing this small business tax credit. It's another effort by Harris to lean into the economy, to take a middle-of-the-road approach on a policy, that small businesses probably have fairly high approval ratings and they employ a lot of people across the country, so this is an effort by her to, again, look more middle-of-the-road while Trump flails on some issues like abortion rights.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and I'll just let the listeners know we're planning a three-part series comparing Harris and Trump on major affordability issues, housing, healthcare, and food, so stay tuned for details on that as we take a very microscopic focus on their economic policies, especially with respect to the cost of living in the United States, which is such a major issue. Domenico, to wrap it up, you mentioned it's a shock that Harris is unveiling a tax cut proposal one week before the debate. Will this debate happen next Tuesday night on ABC? We keep hearing little Trump-- I don't know what the word is-- implications that maybe he won't show up.

Domenico Montanaro: Yes, intimations maybe that he might not, but this is par for the course for Trump. He likes to build drama around these things. It reminds me of a pre-heavyweight fight fight on the stage while they're all mugging for the cameras and stepping on scales. It's just the way Trump does things, whether it's ultimate fighting or WWE, he likes to build this drama around things. If I was a betting person, I would say the debate happens. He needs the debate now more than Harris does. He can't continue to let Harris's image be out there as a positive one, and right now, she's pulled ahead of him.

We've seen a shift in four to six points in the polls on average across the country, and I don't say this to say that she's going to win. I say this to say this because Trump's team is looking at these numbers, knows this stuff and knows that they have to come up with some strong attacks to try to knock her off the pedestal a little bit, where she's had a month of good media coverage, essentially, where it's helped her image. Trump needs to be able to dislodge her, and there's no better way to do that than at one of the most highly-watched events that takes place during a presidential campaign, and that's at the debate.

Brian Lehrer: NPR politics editor and senior political correspondent, Domenico Montanaro, thanks for all the time this morning. We'll be hearing you on the network.

Domenico Montanaro: You're welcome. Always a pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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