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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone, hope you had a great Labor day weekend. Fun, sun, social distancing. Please, social distancing. In the New York area, it was such a beautiful weekend all weekend. Hard to even fathom that it hit 121 degrees in Los Angeles County this weekend, their hottest temperature ever and just as the wildfires are raging.

We promise not to forget the warming of the earth as we cover issues in the presidential race this fall. Today, after our four day weekend we'll catch up on national politics first, then local stuff including teachers reporting for school in New York City with a lot about the school year still unresolved. I already have a tweet that came in a few minutes ago from somebody who wrote, "My wife's first day back at school. No soap, locked windows, not enough PPE and BS screening."

I don't know how indicative that is of a larger group but that tweet has already come in. We also talked to Greg Ip from The Wall Street Journal today who has a very interesting look at different countries' approaches to controlling Coronavirus as the US tries to figure out how much to close things down again when there are local outbreaks. We'll look at the reported spike in suburban home sales outside New York City.

I'm curious if this trend is being exaggerated in the press. We'll talk to a New York Times real estate reporter. A lot coming up this morning. Here it is the day after Labor day. They used to call this the real start of the Presidential race following the summer conventions. Of course, nothing is normal this year but here we are, the day after labor day. Election day or maybe we should call it last call for voting day is eight weeks from today.

This is Tuesday, September eighth, election day is Tuesday, November third, exactly eight weeks. Fasten your seatbelts. If you're not already subscribed to our daily politics podcast, you can also sign up for Brian Lehrer, a daily politics podcast, that's a national politics podcast, that's our national material only, as of course we do both local and national on this show.

Tell your people around the country, Brian Lehrer, a daily politics podcast should be one good place to get information and analysis and opinions during the election run-up. Although we do mostly issues on this show, we're going to start today with a look at the horse race where the race stands with eight weeks to go till election day and early voting season really beginning right now and who better for this than, Amy Walter, national editor of The Cook Political Report and host of the Friday edition of the takeaway known as Politics with Amy Walter. Hey Amy, thanks for starting your week with us just as you ended it on Friday.

Amy Walker: It's always fun to start my week with you, Brian.

Brian: Looking at your Twitter feed, I see you call yourself a lover of all things summer, as am I so my condolences to you as the calendar turns and fall lies ahead.

Amy: I really struggle with this Brian and this year even more so as the day is getting shorter and the opportunity to be outside, social distance as you pointed out, with friends, that time is getting shorter and shorter too. The thought of long days of cold and dark and not seeing loved ones is weighing heavily on me.

Brian: For most people though I think fall is their favorite season, so I've always felt like I was in the minority but yaay summer. Your latest headline in The Cook Political Report, with two months to go, a steady Presidential race. Let me ask you, did the conventions not matter at all to the Presidential race?

Amy: I think they have had little impact on the Presidential race and I think part of that is that the President himself is the biggest driver of the race and by that I mean what he's doing or not doing has had really the most influence on where voters are moving in terms of their vote preference. It's really his reaction, especially in these last four or five months, his reactions to two big events.

Obviously, the Coronavirus pandemic and then the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed, both of which he has been getting very poor marks on and people's opinions of how he handled both of those crises I think really plunged him over the summer to some of his lowest numbers, both in his approval rating and in the polling. He's come back a little bit since then.

The good news for the President, he's no longer in free fall, as he was earlier this summer, he's hit his floor. It looks like he's even picking up a little bit of support but he's still an underdog which is what that headline really meant, it's sort of a steady race in the sense that the President remains the underdog. It doesn't mean he cannot win, it just means that to win, he's going to need a whole lot of things breaking his way.

Brian: Of course what matters most is the swing states and Wisconsin may be representative of swing states as a whole, I don't know but it's been a particular battleground with both Presidential candidates going to Kenosha. I think Kamala Harris was there over the weekend after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in the back and everything that has flowed from that.

I heard a stat today that in a new ABC News Washington post-Wisconsin voters poll, Biden not only has around a seven-point lead overall, he has a plus 20 over Trump on who's better suited to deal with the unrest. Did you happen to see that number?

Amy: Yes, and I think that had been over the weekend, you're right, whether-- This idea about dealing with the unrest. Look, this has been the President's challenge all along on these issues which is he sees this opportunity to make the race, turn the race away from handling the pandemic to handling law and order where he feels much more comfortable and he can lean into the we're supporting the police and going on as he's done this sort of scare tactics about they're going to come to the suburban America and destroy all of your idyllic life and there's going to be blood running in the streets, et cetera.

Especially among a subset of white suburban voters, there's been a backlash to that kind of campaigning. What they see and I've been hearing this and folks who were doing focus groups and polling of these white suburban voters is they see a President who's making things worse. When a crisis like this hits, his instinct is to divide and to stir up the waters rather than calming it down.

I don't think that's what's helping him, I think what could really help him is the Coronavirus seems like it's not quite as ominous as it was, say early spring and fall, there aren't these big flare-ups and that that forced different states to really go into lockdown and that the economy is headed in the right direction. Again, we're not in free fall in the economy, we're not back to where we were, but things are not as bad as they were. Those trends are much more likely to help him than this focus on what he calls law and order.

Brian: Yet he continues to run on stoking it, he continued to do it over the weekend. I'm not going to cite chapter and verse but do you have any reason to think the next eight weeks we'll see less stoking of potentially violent division by the President rather than more?

Amy: No, that's the thing. If you're a political strategist right now and you didn't know anything about Donald Trump, you'd have said, "Looking at this date, looking at the reality ahead of us, here's what we should do. We should focus on the one thing that voters do give the President positive marks on and that's handling the economy. So let's just lean into that and really focus obsessively and in a very disciplined way on this and trying to get ahead of the Coronavirus especially as we head into the fall and we know the expectations are that things could pop up again and get worse."

That doesn't interest the President very much. He loves to do the dramatic, he loves the rallies, he loves the us versus them. That's what motivates him but that is not a winning strategy for this election. It worked in 2016 in part because people also disliked Hillary Clinton as much as they disliked Donald Trump. That's not what's going on with Joe Biden.

Brian: Listeners, you be the pundit or ask Amy Walker a question 646-435-7280. If you want to be the pundit, what's the state of the presidential race and who needs to do what according to you? Or ask Amy Walter any questions 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

We will also monitor Twitter so you can tweet @BrianLehrer. If you prefer to comment or ask a question that way, tweet @BrianLehrer or call 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 for Amy Walter from The Cook Political Report and Friday host of The Takeaway Friday politics with Amy Walter every week on The Takeaway. You have written consistently that the margin between Trump and Biden is less important than the share of the vote that Trump is getting. Can you explain the difference.

Amy: Yes, thank you for bringing that up. When people shorthand poll results, what they'll say is Biden up three points, Trump up six, which is an important marker. It tells you how theoretically how close the race is but what I think is most important, especially with this President is looking at what share of the vote he's getting. In other words, if it's a three point race, is it that Joe Biden is at 50 and Donald Trump is at 47?

That's a very dangerous place to be as an incumbent or if it's 50, 46. It's a four point race, but the President is not at 50%, he is the incumbent. Anytime you have an incumbent under 50%, you should be worried as that incumbent's campaign, but more important when it comes to this President if you go back and you look at how he did in 2016 not only did he not win the popular vote, so he took 46% of the popular vote, but in six states he didn't hit 50% of the vote.

Those include Flo-- All the states we know, so battleground states. Florida, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina. States that he won, he took less than 50%. How did he do that? Well, third party candidates took the remaining share. He saw he would win with 47%, 48%, 49%. Getting to winning with a plurality this year is going to be much tougher because we don't have third party candidates taking as much of the vote this year. They're certainly not as high profile as they were in 2016.

Polls are showing more people's minds are made up this time around than in 2016. Fewer undecided voters means there are fewer opportunities for the vote to get split three, four, five ways. That means Donald Trump has to really get to 50%.

That has always been his challenge. He talks a lot about being-- There's a silent majority that's out there. I think it's fairer to say there's always been a silent-- Though I don't think they're silent, but there's a plurality for Donald Trump and he's been very effective at using that plurality to his advantage. A plurality is not good enough in a two person race.

Brian: It was good enough in 2016 because the majority that-- if you add up all the other groups, plurality means he had the biggest share, though not a majority, but you had the Clinton voters, and you had the Jill Stein, Green Party voters, and you have the people who stayed home, and it's those three that might combine for a Biden win this time.

Amy: Exactly. If you look at polls that were taken say, by Pew organization, what they find is those folks who voted for somebody not named Trump or Clinton in 2016. By the way, that was 6% of the national vote. That's not an insignificant number. They right now, those voters today say they're voting for Biden by about a 55% margin. For Trump, that's the big challenge is can you win back those people who they might not have voted for Clinton, but they also didn't vote for you. Now, he's getting a smaller share of those people.

Brian: Now that you've done a fairly deep analysis of the polls as they've been coming out this summer in the last few weeks even since the convention, I'm going to go to bill in Beacon New York, who has the question that's probably on everybody's mind. Bill you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling.

Bill: We all love you here. I have two questions. What specifically makes the current polls more reliable than the ones in 2016? And two, and this is the more general question and I-- What benefit does horse race type coverage have to the voter? Thank you.

Amy: Great, great point. Well, let's talk about the accuracy of the polls without getting deeply into weeds here and of course, we could spend an entire hour talking about this, but I think what is fair to say is, number one, pollsters after 2016 did do some reflection and analysis and what they found, especially at the state level, was they were not accurately getting samples that included enough voters who were white, but didn't didn't have a college degree.

Again, not to get into all the details and the weeds, but they're doing a better job what's called now waiting for education. To me, here's what I think the challenges still are. One, there just aren't enough high quality state polls. We know that we elect our President through the electoral college and we don't get enough of those polls. We're relying on just a handful of good polls, and a lot of fly by night polls.

That's why the national polls, while they're not perfect, are a good way to think about where this race sits. In 2016, the national polls were pretty spot on. They said Hillary Clinton was ahead anywhere from one to three points obviously she won the national vote by two points. There we go. What national polls tell me is it's like a GPS but not perfect GPS. What it does is it can get you to the right neighborhood, but it can't get you to the right address in that neighborhood.

For example, Hillary was ahead by two points and she came up short in the Electoral College. What that tells you-- To me right now, anything between one and I would go as high as four points is an absolute toss up. Once someone starts getting-- If Biden starts getting in the five, six, seven close, but with Biden having a little bit of an advantage. Then once you get over seven, that's where Biden has a bigger advantage.

Right now, the race sits somewhere around seven points. We can't tell you exactly what states would flip under that scenario, but it tells you that there's a big enough margin that Biden can put together a coalition of states to get to 270 much easier than Trump.

Brian: I think the caller also had in mind, the so called hidden or silent Trump vote since the polls didn't pick up a lot of Trump voters last time, they probably under sampled maybe rural voters, other groups that they didn't expect to vote in as large numbers as they did in 2016.

The polling that showed Clinton ahead was inaccurate in a number of states. Plus, besides the under sampling, the people who just think it's going to get them in trouble with their friends and neighbors or the deep state if they admit that they're Trump voters, and so they don't tell pollsters the truth.

Amy: I'm not a big fan of the this idea that there are these shy voters who are unwilling to talk to pollsters. I do think it may be harder to find them. That is true. Especially when we're talking about white voters in smaller or rural areas who are maybe less willing to talk to a pollster in the first place but I don't think they're actively lying or not telling people. I do think that there is-- Again, remember what happened in 2016 was we had a huge number of undecided voters going into the election, who said they hated both candidates.

I think what we did was we made an assumption that those voters we're going to break rather evenly. If they don't like either candidate, they're they're going to probably split their vote somewhat normally they didn't. They voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and those voters broke in the last like five days. This race was really in 2016 much more volatile than it is now.

What I think the challenge for Biden is now, and the hope, if you're the Trump campaign right now, is watching where the trend line is going, which was Trump, he was in really, really deep trouble earlier this summer. Obviously, if the election were held in July, this would have been a blowout. It's not July, and we still have 60 more days before we hit official election day. If the trends continue to get better on the economy and on COVID, that can help the President narrow this margin and then put those states back into play that were off the table for him.

Brian: Manuel in Spring Valley. You're on WNYC with Amy Walter. Hi.

Manuel: Hi, Brian. Good morning. I have a comment and a question. I wish I could have a third choice of a candidate or a third-party because neither Joe Biden nor Trump are fit to be President at this time and Bloomberg John Kasich or Buttigieg in third-party also. What is the percentage of undecided voters at this time? Thank you, Brian.

Brian: Thank you very much.

Amy: Really a thoughtful question and I think you're not alone in wishing that there were more choices. I think the reality of this moment that we're in is the challenge of being a third-party candidate, given how polarized we are as a country and how many people believe that they may not love the two choices they have, but they worry that if they vote for a third-party candidate, it means that the other side will win.

The fear of whatever party you don't like winning, is a bigger incentive for many voters than anything else. The undecided voter, it's a really good point, there are fewer of them today than there were in 2016, which makes some sense. Usually, when there's an incumbent President people know that incumbent President, they've watched this person for four years, they have a pretty good idea who this person is. It's not like they have to learn a whole lot about them before the election.

In Joe Biden's case, we didn't have to learn that much about him either. He's been around for 50 years in our political environment and obviously been Vice-President for eight years. You have two well-known people and you have a President who is incredibly polarizing. Very few people feel ambivalent about this President. What that means is you do have fewer undecided voters.

Of those undecided voters, a lot of them are people who, it's not that they're undecided because they're not paying attention, but they're undecided because like you, they're thinking, "Is this as good as it's going to get?" Maybe something's going to happen out here that's going to make me say, "You know what? I don't like either one of these guys very well, but by November, by late October, there's going to be something that's going to give me that insight that I need or that spark to push me one way or the other."

The other thing about undecided voters is that many of them, they simply aren't paying attention in the way that people like, well, certainly like I'm paying attention to politics. I think of this Labor Day, Brian, honestly, as the way that I follow many sporting things where I don't pay attention to the regular season, I don't really know who's up and down in the NFL or that Major League Baseball day-to-day, or who's the best player, but once the playoffs start, I'll start paying attention. Certainly, by the time the world series comes around, I know the two teams in there.

Brian: Now we're in the playoffs.

Amy: Now we're in the playoffs.

Brian: There's one thing that I want to make sure to get to in addition to what we've spoken about so far before we run out of time in just a few minutes. You are writing and speaking about what to expect on election night, eight weeks from tonight. Obviously, not your traditional watch the returns come in night with so many mail-in ballots. Do absentee ballots get counted before election day or after election day, or does that vary state by state?

Amy: That's a great question. Vary state by state. A lot of these states that have a long history of vote by mail, the ones that we're going to be watching closely, Arizona, Florida, they're counting them before election day.

Brian: They are?

Amy: Yes. That's why you can see a whole bunch of those votes come in relatively quickly, but a state like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, they're not allowed at this time to start tabulating until election day. Now, just imagine if normally those states which have 5% to 10% absentee vote, that's doable. You're a local county clerk, you get 1,000 absentee ballots, you can probably process those in the day.

Now, let's say you have 20,003 workers, you're probably not going to get all of those completed that day while also that night, of course, tabulating what came in during election day. Those are states-- It's those Midwestern states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, that I personally, and I think a lot of other folks who study this, are the most concerned about in terms of knowing the outcome on election night.

Brian: Is it holding up that registered Democrats or people planning to vote for Biden generally are sending for mail-in ballots at a higher rate than Republicans? The reason that I think that's such an important question is if that's true, the public needs to know the mail-ins are going to tilt toward Biden and not to take the day of counts as the real ones. This is to inoculate against what I'll call fraudulent cries of voter fraud by the President when he seems to be winning a state, maybe like Pennsylvania at the end of election night, but two days later, the total, total goes to Biden.

Amy: Yes, you're exactly right. We've been seeing this in state as well as national polls, that Democrats are much more willing to pick up or request absentee ballots, though what we're also noticing is there is a racial disparity there that white voters are much more willing to take absentee ballots than voters of color, which could mean that you're going to get a mix in big cities, but Philadelphia, especially in the Philadelphia suburbs, they took a long time, this primary season to tabulate their absentee ballots.

Obviously, if you are the Biden campaign, that's where your winning margin is coming from, is Philadelphia and the suburbs. If that comes in late on election night, it is absolutely fair to assume that Trump will be ahead and it is incumbent and I think the news organizations are doing a good job of this, but incumbent for the news organizations for the social media outlets and for secretaries of state to go out there and tell people and be very transparent about what the expectations are given the number of ballots that have been cast by absentee and what to expect election night and beyond.

Brian: In our last minute, here's a question via Twitter that says, "For Amy. Has Trump lost the majority of the military now?" Huh. That obviously is building on this story of whoever these former administration officials were, who said that Trump did not visit that World War I cemetery in Europe a couple of years ago and called the people who were buried there, including Americans, suckers and losers.

I don't know what to make of this story. I certainly don't know what to make of this story politically. If John Kelly, General Kelly or whoever it was, who actually said it doesn't come out because I don't know that it changes people's opinions of Trump or who believes Trump's denial and who doesn't believe Trump's denial but give me just 30 seconds on what you think this means politically to a Twitter's question, "For Amy. Has Trump lost the majority of the military now?"

Amy: I am with you Brian, that I don't know how to sum this up, but I feel like we're at a status quo with the President. If you do like the President and you've stuck with him through everything, you're going to stick with him now and not believe the story in the Atlantic that has been corroborated by other news organizations. If you've always hated Donald Trump, this just confirms your prior.

Of course, this is true. I think for everybody else out there, this just washes over them. This has been the question Brian, that we started this conversation with, where does this race go from here and a lot of it is dependent on how the President behaves and how he conducts himself. That's always been the driving force of his personality and of his Presidency. Thus far though, more people dislike the way he behaves than love it. That's why winning the popular vote is been so challenging and will continue to be challenging and even the electoral college vote, even when things were going well in the economy, when we didn't have COVID, he still was struggling.

Brian: I know you've got to go. I want to mention listeners in North Carolina and elsewhere, Amy has an event tonight, a virtual event that you can stream from anywhere presented by WNYCs the green space and it is called Every Vote Counts: North Carolina. That's at six o'clock Eastern time this evening and to get a link to the stream, you can go to the greenspace.org to reserve your spot.

They'll send you the link, the greenspace.org for Amy Walter with Every Vote Counts: North Carolina tonight at six o'clock Eastern. Amy Walter is national editor of The Cook Political Report and host of the Friday edition of the takeaway known as Politics with Amy Walter. Thank you so much for so much insight today, Amy, this was great.

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