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- [Voiceover] This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra.
- Hello, I'm Gwen Ifill, and welcome.
We had so much to talk about on the regular broadcast
that we just had to stick around a little longer.
Joining me, Molly Ball of The Atlantic,
who wants to know what she's gonna be talking about,
but I won't let her know.
Dan Balz of The Washington Post,
Jackie Calmes of The New York Times
and Michael Sherer of Time Magazine.
First to Michael and the story behind the story
of that meltdown cover that you had
on Time Magazine this week.
How do you decide things like that?
That's such an eye-grabber and so, um,
I don't know, opinionated? (laughing)
- Well look, we did a cover in August
the cover line was Deal with It.
It was right when his rise came right after the Iowa
State Fair, which it sort of wowed everybody
in Iowa and established him.
I think we hit that at the right moment in J--
- [Gwen] Was that the eagle one?
- Yeah, that was it.
We had a photo of him with an eagle inside.
We did a cover the second week of January,
and the cover line was How He Won.
It was a little presumptuous of us 'cause no one
had cast a ballot, but the idea of the story was
he had so dominated the conversation that he
may not win all the ballots, but he'd won the season.
So I think what we're doing here is marking the moment.
It's in the same spirit as those two covers.
You could say it's opinionated,
but I think there's some subjectivity in using
the word meltdown.
- [Gwen] (chuckling) Yeah.
- But the fact that there has been a precipitous,
worrying fall, sort of collapse--
- Is pretty universally agreed upon, for now.
- You can see it in data.
We're not, I'm not implying that, it is real.
- And he has usually in the past loved his
Time Magazine covers.
Any comment so far on this one?
- We have not heard from him.
- Yeah, I guess not.
Okay, I promised at the end of the regular program
we were gonna talk about the debate over debates,
which happens every four years.
That's part of the conventional part.
The unconventional part, Dan Balz, is that it's
gonna involve master negotiator Dan, you're Dan Balz,
master negotiator
(laughing)
- [Jackie] For master negotiator, sure.
- [Gwen] Donald Trump.
- [Dan] Write that down.
- So, how's it gonna be different?
- I don't know.
I think he will play with the topic for a while,
and it could end up that he'll, in one way or another,
concede, not defeat, but he'll concede,
and he'll show up for the three debates.
- [Gwen] He said a couple places he's definitely gonna
do the three debates, so he thinks he's good at 'em.
- He'll argue over format.
He'll have ideas on moderators, but--
- See how I kept my face just like that
when you said that?
Just like that.
- He doesn't have, he doesn't have a lot
of chips to play.
The formats were set by the commission.
The dates were set by the commission.
He's talked about, oh, that conflicts with Sunday
Night Football, one of the debates.
Well, if you try to put the calendar together
for debates in a season when you have
professional football, Major League Baseball playoffs,
religious holidays, and I was told that you can't
do a debate on the same night twice because
- [Gwen] Really?
- Because networks don't want to give up
the same night twice.
So you add that together, you know, draw the calendar.
- Isn't it so different this time?
Before his argument was always I give you ratings.
It's all about ad dollars.
That's where I have the negotiating power.
Presidential debates in a general election
don't have ads in the same way.
They're broadcast--
- [Gwen] That's because they're broadcast
across every single network.
- So he doesn't have the same leverage he had
with CNN last time or something when he
was trying to do this originally.
- [Jackie] And the presidential debates have had
good ratings even long before Donald Trump.
- [Molly] If things continue as they've been going,
if this slump continues for Trump, he's going
to need some real or perceived opportunity
to turn things around, which the debates
will presumably present.
We saw him back in Iowa experiment
with counter-programming the debates, right?
Boycotting the debate, staging his own event instead,
and that did not work out well for him.
That was one of the few - [Jackie] No, it did not.
- times that his poll numbers actually slipped
in the runup to the primaries.
- I think the danger is the debates become too
important for him.
You know what I mean?
That there's so much put on those debates
that he almost can't quite meet the standard
that people say he has to meet.
- Which is why Hillary Clinton is already saying
I am going to do these debates no matter what.
See you there, guy.
I wanna ask you, Molly, we don't talk enough
about voters and what they think, but you spent
some time with some Walmart moms at a focus group this week.
First of all, who are Walmart moms, and what did you learn?
- Yeah, we should disclose these are sponsored by Walmart.
They pay for the focus group, so it's not like
our term for this catchy new demographic.
But I've been following these
focus groups for several years.
They're groups of swing voters, so voters who
have not decided whom to vote for.
They are women who have children under 18
in the home and shop at Walmart on a regular basis,
and they end up being a very good cross-section
of regular American women.
These ones were conducted in Columbus, Ohio,
and Phoenix, Arizona, and the interesting thing is
when you select for people who are not,
who haven't decided who to vote for, a lot of the times
the people who get screened into the focus group
are just people who aren't really paying attention.
That's why they haven't decided.
These were people, the difference in this
campaign cycle is the people who are undecided
are high-information voters.
They know a lot about these candidates.
They just hate them both.
(laughing)
And that was almost universally the case
with all of these women was that they were
so distressed, they felt so torn by the choice
between two candidates that they found
almost equally unpalatable.
Some were leaning one way or the other.
The other thing that was very interesting,
so there was a lot of desire to vote
for a third-party candidate.
Who knows if that dissipates by the time
it gets to November, but at this point,
there are a lot of these women saying they
do not want to vote for either
of the major-party candidates.
A lot of ticket-splitting.
A lot of these women saying that they do not,
both focus groups were asked do you think
that Donald Trump is a regular Republican,
and they all said no.
He's a completely different phenomenon.
Didn't affect their opinion of the Republican Party,
heartwarming to a lot of Republican strategists,
and a lot of them who had ruled out voting
for Donald Trump were nonetheless willing to vote
for, in both cases, an incumbent Republican senator
in both of those states, Rob Portman in Ohio,
John McCain in Arizona.
So, ticket splitting, which we thought that we'd
written the obituary for in American politics
- It took Donald Trump to bring it back.
- may be back.
- It took Donald Trump to bring it back this year.
- And under this radar, I want to ask you, Jackie,
one of the things that we have seen both of Donald
Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on is that
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the big trade deal,
shouldn't happen, except there's some suspicion,
as you said in the regular show, about whether
Hillary Clinton really means it and will change her mind.
Well, she obviously disagrees with the current,
incumbent president on this, but he's just
moving right ahead, isn't he?
- Right, and he considers it a potentially legacy-making
achievement if he were to get it.
Now that's looking less and less and less likely,
but today, the day after she made her definitive
statement yesterday about I was opposed to it
as a candidate, I'll oppose it after the election,
and I'll oppose it as president, he sent Congress
a letter, required by law, to serve notice that
he's gonna be sending up what they call
implementing legislation, and if there is to be
any hope of a vote on the Trans-Pacific Partnership
in the lame-duck session, as many people have
long suspected that the Republican leadership
will engineer in cahoots with the White House,
if that's going to happen, there are things
that have to be done starting about Labor Day,
and the president sending his letter to the Hill
today was part of that.
Now, I think the president would just as soon
keep quiet on TPP for Hillary Clinton's sake
between now and November, but he was caught.
He had to take a step because of this process
that has to happen if there is going to be
a vote before the end of the year.
- Okay.
Well we'll be watching all the sneaky things
that happen as well as the overt things.
Thank you everybody.
Stay online all week long for the latest
developments on these and other stories
from the best reporters in Washington, our panelists.
That's of course at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek,
and we'll see ya next time
on the Washington Week Webcast Extra.
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