GWEN IFILL: I'm Gwen Ifill, and this is the Washington Week Extra, where we pick up
online where we left off on air.
Throughout U.S. history, newspapers have endorsed
presidential candidates, giving them a so-called stamp of approval.
But with just
a month until Election Day, not one newspaper editorial board has endorsed Donald Trump.
So, Reid, how is it possible?
And does it even matter?
We saw this week, for
instance The Atlantic magazine came out and said for only the third time in history
we denounce - they did more that denounced a candidate than endorsed a candidate.
REID WILSON: Yes, and I'm sure in the coffee shop in coal country in eastern Kentucky
they are talking about The Atlantic's endorsement.
GWEN IFILL: Exactly.
REID WILSON: You asked two very different questions, you know: how can this be, and does
it matter.
The how can this be, we've seen some pretty stinging zingers from
editorial boards across the country.
There have been a number of papers that have
not endorsed a Democratic candidate for 60, 70 years, or their entire history.
Hillary Clinton became the first Democrat to win the endorsement of the Arizona Republic.
The Dallas Morning News, the Cincinnati Enquirer - and these are pretty conservative
editorial boards that are coming out for her.
A lot of the editorial boards that
you would expect to come out for a Democrat have: The New York Times.
You can expect
The Washington Post to at some point relatively soon.
And there have been a few
people who have come off the fence.
It's not only The Atlantic.
It's USA Today has
never endorsed a candidate, and here they dis-endorsed Donald Trump, whatever that meant.
GWEN IFILL: I have a theory.
It's not about trying to persuade readers or viewers
to go one way or another.
It's in order to preserve their sense of self in the
history - in the future, the history books.
REID WILSON: I think there is a part of that, especially for a paper like USA Today,
that dis-endorses the candidate that they find so distasteful.
Does it actually matter?
The guys who endorse the candidate you kind of think they will, like The New York Times
endorsing a Democrat, no, that doesn't matter terribly much.
There have been some academic studies, though, that show that there is some influence, at
least around the margins, when a conservative paper endorses a liberal candidate, or vice
versa.
So the Cincinnati Enquirer hasn't endorsed a Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt.
Their backing of Hillary Clinton will probably make its way into a whole bunch of Hillary
Clinton advertisements in the southwest Ohio area, and you can imagine that that'll sway
at least a few voters.
GWEN IFILL: Well, since we're talking about history, Michael, I wrote a little blog this
week about the history of presidential approval ratings.
And one of the things that struck me is that the president's doing pretty well.
I don't know if it's nostalgia because now he's leaving office or whether this happens
all the time, that in the second term of a presidency people begin to all of a sudden
think more highly of you.
MICHAEL SCHERER: I think - I think there is a tradition of, when you're going out of
office, you getting a bump, George W. Bush being the most recent exception to that.
He left office pretty unpopular.
I think in this case, though, it becomes really difficult for Donald Trump to make the
case that we don't want more - eight more years of Barack Obama's administration when
both Trump and Clinton are polling at 45 percent and President Obama's at 55 percent in
the CNN poll.
This is not just high I think historically, but it's high compared to
where Obama's been most of his presidency.
He's averaged something around 47 percent.
Most of 2012, when he was running for election, he was closer to 45 percent.
GWEN IFILL: Is it the economy, like everybody says?
MICHAEL SCHERER: I think the economy's part of it, but I think it's what he said at the
White House Correspondents Dinner, that it's the contrast.
I mean, I think people are comfortable with him as their president, given the two
candidates they are now having to choose from.
GWEN IFILL: Don't say that to Trump voters, because they are distinctly -
distinctively not comfortable.
MICHAEL SCHERER: But in the minority on that question.
GWEN IFILL: But in the minority, as it turns out, on that question.
OK, Jeanne, I
want to talk to you about the other secret weapon, which is - it's not so secret, actually.
It seems like every four years we write about Michelle Obama, the secret weapon, and she
gives a terrific speech, and we say wow, isn't she good.
Wasn't she always good?
Wasn't she the closer in 2008?
JEANNE CUMMINGS: Yeah, she's always been very good.
But she does - she's done a good job of finish the campaign and go away.
So she comes out and she's refreshing, she is a surprise, and it seems as though they've
been holding her out as a secret.
But she is, I think, better than any of them.
And it's really amazing that she's the non-elected one.
But she has a way of connecting with audiences, particularly young people, that I'd
imagine comes from the fact - stems from the fact that she's been hanging in their
world with her children.
And so she's been watching Ellen and hip shows and -
GWEN IFILL: Children or teenagers, they don't hang around with their mother.
JEANNE CUMMINGS: Oh, well, the little - the one is still young enough that she
can still hang with mom.
GWEN IFILL: It's all relative.
JEANNE CUMMINGS: But she's in their space and she talks their language.
And Millennials aren't that much older than her children.
And some of them are right in the same range as her oldest daughter.
And so what we found amazing at UVA, she delivered her remarks, and they were picking up
on tiny words that it was just - she was connecting with them because she talked to them
the way they talk to each other, and she knows their slang.
GWEN IFILL: She also seems a little liberated.
She made that little crack about
the microphone, she just had to hit it and it took you a minute to realize what she
doing, that she was making a little dig at Donald Trump.
And I'm not sure that the
Michelle Obama of the first term would have felt free enough to do that.
JEANNE CUMMINGS: Well, and the argument that she makes about turning out to vote is so
compelling.
Where she - every state she goes into she breaks down the math, and
into a way that's really relatable.
So in North Carolina, she mentioned what her husband's margin of victory was in 2008, and
then drilled it down that it was three votes, say, I'm getting this off, but it was
definitely single digit number of votes per precinct.
So she said, you know, if you
and your mom and your sister don't show up, you could have been those three votes.
GWEN IFILL: And it should be said that - I happened to like the ABC program Blackish.
That was actually the whole theme of the program this week, people who were saying, we
don't need to go vote, and then Michelle Obama appears on the screen at the end -
JEANNE CUMMINGS: And makes that argument?
GWEN IFILL: - and makes exactly that argument.
Very interesting.
JEANNE CUMMINGS: It's really compelling.
GWEN IFILL: OK. Every now and then here on the webcast we like to go behind the
scenes about what reporters are doing with their days every week.
And Jennifer, God bless her, has been out there on that Trump campaign, on the Trump
train, covering it very interestingly kind of day-to-day, and watching more carefully
than the rest of us manage to the differences from day-to-day.
I want to play - you
posted this week a little piece of video of something that you saw in a classroom in Iowa?
JENNIFER JACOBS: It was in Nevada.
GWEN IFILL: In Nevada.
JENNIFER JACOBS: In Las Vegas.
GWEN IFILL: Not Nevada.
Here we go again.
Where he walked into a classroom,
Donald Trump, and this ensued.
DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)
Hi, kids.
Are they all great students?
CHILD: I'm nervous.
I'm nervous.
MS. : (From video.)
Nice to meet you.
MR. : (From video.)
She's the teacher here.
MS. : (From video.)
Yes, thank you.
DONALD TRUMP: (From video.)
Great student.
MS. : (From video.)
Yes.
We're working hard.
CHILD: (From video.)
See, Anna (sp), I told you his hair wasn't orange.
GWEN IFILL: Now, two things I love, in case you missed it.
One is, one kid is saying, I'm nervous, I'm nervous, throughout.
Three things.
The second is that they seem completely unimpressed by the fact that a presidential
nominee is in their classroom.
And the third is the kid who seemed to think - and
had a bet going - that the presidential nominee's hair was colored orange.
JENNIFER JACOBS: Right.
She says: "See, Anna (sp), I told you his hair wasn't orange."
And so she was very adamant that she was exactly right about that.
It was very cute.
So, yeah.
So the Trump campaign really tries hard to get cameras into some unusual situations.
And in this particular case, they were meeting with a bunch of Hispanic Evangelical
leaders.
This was a private Christian school.
The kids - many of the kids who
greeted him in the front hallway, in the front lobby, were very excited.
But with these first graders, you get nothing but authentic reaction from them.
And after I posted that on Twitter, so many people responded that their - that that
little girl saying I'm nervous paralleled their feelings about Donald Trump.
That child spoke exactly for what they were thinking about this campaign.
GWEN IFILL: I also think - I don't think most people realize behind the scenes that this
is - these are kind of semi-staged events.
But even the candidate looked like he was
kind of nervous, like he didn't know the last time he'd been in a room full of first
graders.
I don't know the last time I've been in a room full of first graders.
And maybe that made him nervous too.
JENNIFER JACOBS: He's definitely more comfortable around adults than children.
GWEN IFILL: I think we can kindly leave it at that.
Thank you very much, everybody.
We're out of here, but there's more online, including this week's Washington Week-ly News
Quiz, which I always fail.
You try it.
You check it out.
See if you can pass.
And we'll see you here next time on the Washington Week Extra.
