risk. ian bremmer, time magazine columnist and founder of the eurasia group consulting firm. bremmer will tell us some of donald trump's foreign policy notions aren't as outrageous as hillary clinton says, however... >> the thing that really worries me about trump is god forbid trump elected next 9/11. god forbid. because where a president really matters is response to crisis. that's where everyone is looking to the u.s. president and congress is like, okay, whatever it takes. >> ian breming coming up shortly. and later, in our evidence based politics segment, a scholar who sees monday's debate as serious show business. first, as the candidates prepare to fight tooth and nail on monday, are they neck in neck? yes, time for the horse race. it has been a rough month for hillary clinton. donald trump has gained significant ground in the polls. according to nate silver's forecasting models at 538, trump is within striking distance of defeating clinton in november. since mid-august trump has climbed steadily from about a 20% chance of winning the election to more than a 45% chance this week. at the same time, clinton's chances have plummeted from roughly 80% to 55%. so what happened? might be that trump has restrained himself, declared the president a citizen and avoided being the main story. gallup polling shows in recent weeks americans have been hearing more varied information about trump's campaign while continuing to hear news about hillary clinton's e-mails, e-mails, e-mails and now her health. for example, the weeks of august 29th and september 5th, the world's most remembered about clinton were lie, scandal, fbi and release. for trump in both weeks it was immigration, president and speech. clinton's struggle with trust is undermining her support among young voters as she tries to defend the electoral firewall that barack obama built for democrats in 2012. young voters appear less passionate voting for the first female president than the first black president. recent polling shows clinton support among young voters has been weaker than expected and many of the hope and change voters are voicing dissatisfaction with the two party system by throwing support behind third party candidates, gary johnson and jill stein. and this could tip the scales. according to quinnipiac polling released on september 15th in a head-to-head matchup clinton bests trump 48 to 43%. when third party candidates are factored in the race becomes too close to call, with clinton getting 41%, trump 39, with gary johnson at 13% and joe stein at 4. if you were hoping for many more republicans like george h.w. bush to defect to hillary, think again. according to a recent huffington post analysis, republicans are just as unified behind their candidate as democrats are behind theirs. each candidate is now pulling in 83% of their own party's vote, yet even after so much bad news for clinton it still may be her race to lose in the last weeks of the campaign. according to that quinnipiac university poll, despite her low marks for honesty, 62% still believe that clinton is qualified to be president while roughly the same number, 61%, believe trump is not. all right. let's think about those qualifications in the arena of foreign affairs. how might america's role on the world stage change with donald trump versus hillary clinton in the oval office? recently i had a wide ranging conversation about this in a public forum with ian bremmer, founder of the eurasia group, a consulting firm that addresses global political risk. bremmer is author of nine books, most recently "three choices for america's role in the world." he is also foreign affairs columnist for time. the event was organized by the center for global affairs at new york university where bremmer teaches, and it took place september 8th, which happened to be the day after the commander-in-chief forum with the two candidates on nbc. here is about ten minutes of our conversation, edited in sequence. >> at the forum last night trump said he is less trigger happy than clinton, but he said no more -- sorry, she said no more substantial numbers of ground forces in iraq other than special forces, and he said we should capture and defend iraq's oil fields. am i missing something, or not trigger happy and capture and defend iraq's oil fields are contradictory? >> well, i mean you cannot ask me as a political scientist to try to defend consistency on the part of trump's policy descriptions, right? i can't do that. but what -- what i think is a fundamental truth, that trump has been able to get at in a way that establishment republicans just can't, which is that the .1% in the united states and the establishment media and a lot of the intellectual crowd actually have a lot more in common, both in their world views and their values, with the top .1% in other countries around the world than they do with their countrymen and trump is calling b.s. on that. once you unpack what the policy recommendations are underneath that, i could tell you some things on foreign policy i think that he says that people ridicule that aren't ridiculous. so, for example, when he said -- and please don't make it sound like i'm defending him, but i think the anti-establishment point is real. when he said that, look, if the south koreans and japanese don't want to pay more, well, maybe they should just go nuclear. would that be such a big deal. and hillary ridicules him. hillary says, i don't think he knows what he means in terms of them going nuclear. i think the average american couldn't care less if japan and south korea went nuclear, and if it meant the u.s. was spending less that would be a good thing. by the way, pakistan is nuclear, india is nuclear, north korea is nuclear. we didn't want that, right? but japan would be one of the most responsible powers in the world with nukes. i don't think that's a huge problem. i know they are immensely anti-nuclear, hiroshima, nagasaki, fukushima, i mean that actually brings out lots of japanese to demonstrate and they're not people that demonstrate easily. they're pretty happy with the establishment, they have basically a one-party functional system that's okay-ish. but hillary just demonized him for this. >> you have an article on politico recently that adapts your top ten political risks of year format to the top trump risks. number one is what you call the bolt from the blue. what does that mean? >> that's the thing that worries me the most about trump becoming president. i'm not someone who -- first of all, i think it is unlikely he will get elected but he could get elected, we know this. if he got elected he, i'm not someone that believes suddenly the day after inauguration the united states loses super power status. i don't believe that. i think the ability of an individual u.s. president to make significant moves in policy, domestically, incredibly constrained, and even in foreign policy. think about how different obama is from bush and think about how limited obama's ability to truly move the needle on things he's been passionate about has actually been. and i think that trump, who is not exactly a hard worker, right? he's not going to want to be in the trenches, right? he's going to want to delegate a lot of stuff. well, in terms of the conversations his son had with kasich, for example, well, you're do domestic policy, you will do foreign policy and i'll make america great again. >> right. >> that's, you know. >> right, right. >> i know a lot of billionaires in this town, hedge fund types, that are voting for trump because they believe, correctly in my view, that they will have unprecedented access to people with financial and, you know, sort of the inside, you know, the valerie jarrett types. as a consequence they're going to do really well. i think they're right. i think that is a good venile reason for voting for the president. not one i happen to ascribe to but i understand it, right? it is one that putin would get. now, you asked me two questions. >> it is the first time i've heard good and venile used back-to-back. >> you need to spend more time with hedge fund types. so, look, the -- i can answer the putin question or bolt from the blue question. >> bolt from the blue. >> the thing that worries me about trump, yes, there would be incremental damage to u.s. alliances, to the u.s. dollar, to u.s. trade relations that would be worse under trump than they would be under hillary, although i think the structural effects of geo political destruction, the drivelessness of sort of, you know, world politics today actually outweighs either. the thing that really worries me about trump is god forbid trump elected, next 9/11. god forbid. because where a president really matters is response to crisis. that's where everyone is looking to the u.s. president, and suddenly congress is like, okay, whatever it takes. you want us to pass a trillion dollars in bailout on two pages of paper from hank paulson, we have no idea what's in there? fine. >> that will never happen. >> because we're freaked out, right? i think if trump were president in a time where there was a true crisis, i think you could do really systemic damage to american democratic institutions, to the legitimacy of those institutions. >> because he would seize power or overreact to the crisis? >> either. that's what we don't know, the bolt from the blue. i think that's one where sort of media independence could really take a hit we couldn't come back to, where the judiciary could become politicized in the sorts of ways you presently see in turkey. that could never happen on a day-to-day basis, that would not happen under president trump in a normal environment. but take trump and put 9/11 on top of that or massive cyber attack that brings down the u.s. markets, things that are now thinkable in a way that a year ago were not thinkable, and i actually worry about the future of american supremacy, super power status, democracy, you name it. i do worry about that. by the way, the putin question, putin is a strong leader. i am on record saying that putin is the most powerful individual in the world. he's accomplished that despite the fact that his country is in decline. what does it say about a presidential candidate who believes it's fine to lionize someone who actually actively wants to undermine america's position in the world? that's the real question. what does that say? because who are the people out there that support trump right now? i understand why a lot of americans would want to vote against hillary, i really get it. but as a foreign policy person, you look at the people that support trump, it is putin, it's hungary, it's farage, it's lapin, it's wilders in the netherlands, it is kim jong-un. are you fricking kidding me? that's -- if you care about america's role in the world -- now, there are good reasons why many americans increasingly don't care about america's role in the world. they say, look, we cared before and it hasn't helped me, and they're right. they're right. it is an enormous indictment on washington and the establishment. but if you care about america's role in the world, then it is very clear that putin -- that trump is a very bad option. >> you also have trump red herrings in that article, what not to worry about. number one is u.s./china relations. really? >> number one, china is not going to take the easy bait. the chinese understand that working relationships with the united states, because they're getting more powerful over time, they can do incremental. they can build up their military a little bit more, day by day, monthly month, they can do bilateral relations with the indonesia, the vietnamese. as long as they don't lose power in terms of the communist party, the world is moving towards them. so i don't think -- they do not want conflict, the way that -- the russians want the americans to fail, the chinese don't. the chinese want the system to be stable, just let it keep kind of going in their direction and they will play more ball. we see it on climate. the chinese are doing more in syria on the humanitarian side, from a low ball but more than it was. peace keeper, they're putting them into africa, they weren't doing that before. they put a military base in djibouti. why? they're concerned about the supply chain. those are marginally constructive things. >> did you also or could you bring an article on the top clinton risks if she is elected president? >> sure. they would look very differently obviously. >> where would you start? >> it would be really boring. no, the clinton risks, the biggest clinton risk would be for four more years, maybe longer, we have a government that is largely captured by a bunch of entrenched interests, big pharma, big finance, the aarp, you know, and as a consequence you would not be able to really address these growing structural problems around the middle class, the working class. i mean they'll say it, they'll throw some -- they will check the box. it is like when corporations do sustainability. there are a few companies out there that truly care, but most of them are like, okay, we know that we're going to get hit by, you know, sort of all of the demonstrators and the ngos unless we check the boxes, so we will check the boxes. financial institutions will check the boxes on diversity. are we done with that? we'll focus on making money again. the biggest risk with hillary is check the box approach, sort of buying off bernie sanders, elizabeth warren, all of the people that had to hold their nose to vote for her and four years later the structural problems are greater. it is a boring risk, precisely because we can get away with it, you know. >> ian bremmer, author of three choices for america's role in the world and founder of the eurasia group, a consulting firm that assesses global/political risk at new york university on september 8th. by the way, among the topics for the first clinton/ trump debate monday is securing america. now let's place that debate in historical context with some additional evidence. time for evidence-based politics, where we report cold, hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric. monday's presidential debate continues a tradition slow getting started, head-to-head broadcast debates between the major candidates only go back to 1960 when senator john f. kennedy took on vice president richard nixon. >> and it is a fact that through most of these last 25 years the republican leadership has opposed federal aid for education, medical care for the aged, development of the tennessee valley, development of our natural resources. >> when you're in a race, the only way to stay ahead is to move ahead, and i subscribe completely to the spirit that senator kennedy has expressed tonight, the spirit that the united states should move ahead. >> after nixon lost to kennedy, there would be no more debates for 16 years. but beginning with gerald ford/jimmy carter contest in 1976 the tv debate became firmly entrenched. the stakes are high because anything can happen, that includes the good, bad and the gaffes such as a small gesture of impatience like looking at one's watch. >> we have a question right here. >> yes. how has -- >> in nixon, would you like to comment? >> i have no comment. >> it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in benghazi an attack of terror. >> get the transcript. >> he did in fact, sir. let me call -- >> that's what this campaign is about, not what is your philosophy and position on issues, but can you get things done. >> i see people in my state, middle class people, their taxes have gone up in washington and their services have gone down. >> here you go again. >> debates often include impressive one liners and zingers. how much of what we see is spontaneous? who sets the rules and how much do debates matter to the election results? with some answers, alan schroeder joins us via skype from boston. he is professor of journalism at north eastern university and author of "presidential debates: risky business on the campaign trail". hi professor schroeder, thanks so much for coming on, >> hello. thank you. >> so, what is a debate supposed to prove? governing well is not about matching wits with an opponent on national television. >> i think you have to remember debates are a single component of a complex and lengthy campaign process. i think sometimes people look at debates and think they're kind of the magic bullet and they're supposed to give us all of the information we need about the candidates and their positions. they're not really that at all. they're more of a sort of personality test. they give us a little insight into the candidates at a moment under which they're performing under great pressure and they put them side by side on the same stage, which is a very awkward and unnatural thing for them to have to do. so i think they're important because they get the campaign -- they get the candidates off the campaign trail, into a situation not of their own control entirely, and then give us some insights into how they perform under a highly pressurized, awkward set of circumstances. >> the famous cliche is nixon won the 1960 debate for people listening on the radio, kennedy won for people watching on television because nixon looked sweaty and shifty. but i've also heard that's a myth. what do you think? >> i think it is somewhere between reality and myth. there were a couple of small surveys that were taken on that question that indicated just what you described, but, you know, by modern methodology the sample sizes were small, it wasn't particularly scientific. it's more anecdotal than anything else, although i have to say it does make a certain amount of sense. >> when hillary clinton ran for senate in new york state in 2000, she was in a televised debate against republican congressman lazio who staged a stunt where he walked to hillary clinton with a piece of paper asking her to sign an agreement about something, a policy challenge or ethics challenge, but the content of the challenge got lost to history. compared to the fact that here was a man walking over and getting in a woman's face. are you familiar with that moment? >> oh, yeah, absolutely. >> is there a lesson in that for donald trump or do the conventional rules not apply to trump in almost anyway including that? >> the conventional rules don't apply in almost anyway. however, i think that given that there's this very clear example that he could study and benefit from that he shouldn't do it. i mean you shouldn't do that- just a male, female thing. he should never get up in someone's face the way that rick lazio did waving that piece of paper and demanding she sign it. one of the things that interesting about debates, having debaters on the same stage together is you get to see how they treat each other. >> so what kind of rehersals do you think are going on behind the scenes right now? with your knowledge of history, would it have changed over time? did they rehearse for a policy knowledge earlier and now they rehearse more for personality or anything like that? >> no, they rehearse for both. going all the way back, nixon did not rehearse and kennedy did, and kennedy's team sort lobbed questions at him and made sure he was ready for the idea of under pressure and very quickly having to respond to things. nixon, by contrast, just said, i know how to do this and read briefing books but didn't do any kind of performance rehearsal. over the years it has gotten increasingly complex. so on the hillary clinton side, for instance, i will take the more traditional candidate as an illustration, they're probably doing full-scale mock debates in which they do a real-time sort of approximation of what will happen during the actual debate. they do it with cameras and lights and mock opponents, mock moderators, they videotape and go back and critique after the fact. that's the way that most modern candidates would prepare for a debate. now, with trump he did not do much debate prep by all accounts during the primary, and he has said he doesn't intend to do mock debates before the general election debates. you have a whole different model here. somebody, again, almost in the nixon model of thinking, i'm good at this, i've been on tv a lot, i really don't need to go through this whole process. >> we have this presidential debate commission that lays out the rules of the debate, picks which networks and moderators get to participate and which candidates, and that's controversial this year because gary johnson could be significant to the outcome, jill stein too but less so. johnson is polling 10% or more, but the threshold is 15% and he doesn't qualify. who is this presidential debate commission made up of and why do they have all of this power? >> well, the presidential debate commission goes back to 1988, it was originally called the bipartisan presidential debate commission. they have since changed their name to the independent commission on presidential debates and have lost any sort of party affiliation. they are a small group based in washington, d.c. who do nothing other than stage the general election debates in the u.s. every four years. they also do a lot of international outreach to other places, other countries in which debates are being either planned or proposed to try to sort of, you know, work through some of the issues that come up time after time. and, yes, they are controversial, they're always controversial, and this question of inclusion and third party and independent candidates. this is something that comes up every four years. >> how would you arm our viewers to watch the first debate with as media savvy an eye as possible? >> probably the media savviest as possible would be the dual screen experience where you watch on television and follow along online or on a mobile device of some kind, especially if you are interested in ongoing immediate real-time reactions. twitter is the obvious place for that. i'm kind of torn about that. that's how i watch it, but i also realize that you're not really probably paying 100% attention to the actual debate if you're also reading tweets, and especially if you are writing tweets, which requires a certain amount of brain power. so i think that it is great to have kind of all of these alternate ways of viewing the debates, but i do kind of wonder the extent to which that diminishes the way people actually get the info. >> so do the winners of debates go on to win elections historically? >> not necessarily. i think you can make the case for sure in 1980, ronald reagan and jimmy carter had only one debate, it was a week before the election, the latest there's ever been a presidential debate. reagan got a big boost, came out with a lot of wind in his sails and carter did not have time to recover from that. apart from that year, and maybe 1960 because it put kennedy and nixon on an even playing field, generally speaking they don't change the outcome of the election but they're definitely influential. >> thank you so much. >> my pleasure. thank you. >> and that's potus 2016 for today. we're here each week at this hour calling the presidential horse race and pouring cold, hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric. note on monday facebook will live stream the debate and nbc plans a virtual reality stream. much of the campaign has felt like virtual reality, so i guess that's appropriate. put on those glasses. i'm brian lehrer. thanks for watching. thanks for watching. ♪ [theme music] ♪ [theme music] >> welcome to potus 2016, where we call the presidential horserace and pour cold hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric. i'm brian lehrer. the very first u.s. vice president, john adams, said of his office, "in this i am nothing, but i may be everything." so, just in case, millions of us did watch senator tim kaine debate governor mike pence. of course, we also wanted to see how they would defend a couple of unusually unpopular presidential candidates. with our guests, we'll try to spot the gems and the fools' gold in their debate. but first, the polls --- which now are at a gallup. yes, time for the horserace. who won the v.p debate on tuesday? cnn's post-debate poll, and it's early so it's not entirely scientific, reports that mike pence finished first in the judgment of 48% of respondents versus tim kaine at 42%. but throughout the debate, as noted by projection guru david rothschild, the betting markets on the overall race didn't move, which may be an indication of the slight impact the vp debate will have on the upcoming election. clearly, not good news for trump on the heels of his disastrous debate performance last week. new polling shows a significant boost for clinton. according to the cnn/orc polling of likely voters, taken through sunday, clinton jumped 4 points during the last week and is now at 47% - running 5 percentage points ahead of trump. real clear politics 4-way polling averages now show clinton with a 4 percentage point lead overall. similarly, huffington post's curated polling averages for a 2-way race show clinton with a 6 percentage point lead. clinton, it is worth noting, has consistently led in polling averages. polling also showed that the clinton updraft is coming from men. her 22% deficit to trump has shrunk to just 5%. and she is also gaining among independents, who now lean in her favor after heavily tilting towards trump in early september. and with each day that fades, so do trump's opportunities to turn the race around, a fact made abundantly clear over the weekend as news of trump's near billion dollar 1995 tax losses became public and continue to drive the news cycle. cnn/orc polling has found that more than 8 in 10 voters consider paying taxes a civic duty rather than a burden that one should avoid by paying as little as possible. those results came in before trump's recent tax news. the noose appears to be tightening around trump's electoral map as well. according to recent quinnipiac polling, clinton has improved her position in three battleground states, moving ahead in florida and north carolina, and bolstering her lead in pennsylvania. then again, there is another trump/clinton debate sunday. so anything can happen. but today let's deconstruct the vice presidential debate with our guests. joining us greg david, columnist and blogger for crain's new york business. greg directs the business and economic reporting program at the graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york and understands real estate and taxes which is real useful this week. also a regular at our table: fordham university political scientist christina greer, author of "black ethnics: race, immigration, and the pursuit of the american dream." and via skype from virginia, our expert in political rhetoric jim kuypers, virginia tech professor and author of - among many works - "purpose, practice and pedagogy in rhetorical criticism." welcome back to the program all of you. let me start with a clip from the debate and find out what you all make of this interaction between pence and kaine about trump's taxes. >> his tax returns showed he went through a very difficult time and he used it the way it was supposed to be used and he did it brilliantly. >> how do you know that? >> he created a business worth billions of dollars- >> how do you know that? >> he won on points there, kaine, probably. no style points because he was mr. interrupting like he was for most of the debate. he got the point across that trump is not revealing his tax returns. >> this is a really important development. whoever sent the new york times these infamous three pages picked just the right tax return in which donald trump took a $915 million write off. we don't know what for, but remember we know that his investment in the plaza hotel was disasterous and he lost an enormous amount of money. he had to sell the trump shuttle airplane because it was losing money and probably there was a big write off in the casino business. it does show that trump's mantra that he is a very successful businessman is not exactly true. >> christina, go ahead. >> and beyond that, trump is making so much of his name especially with a large percent of his poor supporters which is you are a loser and i'm a winner. if you vote for me, you will become a winner. we have no idea how much is in this checking account. part of trump and pence, part of their strategy is to say that hillary clinton is untrustworthy. if kaine can make the argument on the road, they taps into their strategy to say he is possibly not trustworthy either. that levels the playing ground for two highly unpopular presidential candidates. >> and jim, what was the framing on both sides as you saw it in that short clip. >> well the framing involved is really much larger. there were two main frames that were going on throughout the debate for which you could view that one exchange. there was the idea of kaine saying things are getting better and pence saying things have been getting worse. most debaters will do that. the real news is this idea of trump as indefensible. you cannot defend trump and pence being put on the defensive saying he is defensive. to the degree that kaine is successful with this framing would be to the degree that pence was hurt and trump would be hurt in the debate. >> right. one of the things that pence did was to say that did you not take the tax deductions that you're entitled to. do you think it's not landing that way out in america? >> the hard core trump supporters believe that trump is a genius. mayor giuliani has been going on television trying to convince everyone. >> a genius for using the tax code so shrewdly. >> exactly. to his advantage. i think that there is a segment of a trump supporter who think this is great. >> but to everybody else. trump supporters are trump supporters. >> for some undecideds and i think hillary clinton planted this seed and kaine followed up on it, we'll probably see this on sunday and the last debate on the 19th which is paying taxes is sort of an amorphous thing for a lot of people. we always talk about taxes but we never get to the bottom of it. every four years it kind of comes up, you know we have death taxes and property taxes but we never have a substantivbate. i think clinton and kaine are saying, taxes pay for very basic things. you may not understand the complex tax code of real estate and finance and airplanes, they pay for schools, roads, military, veterans and things that you probably care about and that are linked to your day to day life. >> and that cnn or c-poll finding that eight in ten people said paying taxes is a patriotic duty and people shouldn't avoid it. really? >> i think this has done and i didn't understand the extent of it either before we started obsessing about this. real estate is favored in the taxe code for those of us buying a house because we get the morgage deductions. i don't think we realized how much it is favored for real estate people and even before the times got these pages, jim stewart in the times has done some really good pieces about how favored real estate is and to your point, you know, i just wonder and i don't know if this is true that this has planted the seeds for more aggressive tax reform when someone wins because i think a lot of people are realizing as hillary said the other day how rigged the system is. >> we'll see if either of them come forward with actual proposals to reform the advantages that real estate developers get in the tax code. now let's look at a clip from the debate about police bias. >> but senator, please. enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias every time tragedy occurs. >> people shouldn't be afraid to bring up issues of bias in law enforcement and if you are afraid to have that discussion, you will never solve it. >> professor, how about the framing there? you think tim kaine practiced that language by being afraid to confront it? >> i think everything that tim kaine did was very well practiced. it was very scripted. pence was trying to personalize the relationship with the police and kaine was trying to make it more abstract. and looking at it as a system. it's really a person's point of view which one they're going to buy into. it does go back to the basic framing that is going on in terms of are things getting better or worse? >> christina, i thought as that exchange went on and we don't see it there, but pence started out by saying police are the best among us and don't accuse the whole institution of bias. it's just not fair. by the end of the exchange, he did acknowledge the bias and the value of community policing and that it needed to be addressed. >> right. the interesting thing about pence is he started out strong at the beginning of the debate and he got frustrated or tired and his skill set diminished a bit as we saw with that mexican thing as he sort of waves off thing later on in the debate. pence has a really fine line to thread because there is a structural argument on systemic issues that need to be made and think he is savvy enough to have it, but that's not one of his talking points. it's easier to say if you raise the question about the police you are anti-police. as kaine argues, that's not what we are saying at all. if we can be our higher selves we can have this conversation which pence had to rise to that and agree with it. >> with pence, does he have a higher self that he can rise to on this issue compared to rudy giuliani who will only say you don't pay attention to black on black crime and things like that? >> that's a pretty low bar. >> i think rudy giuliani has proven to us in the 21st century and especially in 2016 that he is not to be trusted in many issues in an intellectual and thoughtful way. he has talking points and is doubling down on them. pence in some ways whether he is setting himself up or realizes he can only go so deep into the abyss, but he was making an argument and it goes against his talking points. >> now, even if you didn't see the debate, you could see from those two clips that there was a certain kind of pattern that was set up here. tim kaine going after pence with something that was just unacceptable that trump has said. at one time or another, pence was put in a box to defend the indefensible or pretend that trump didn't say what he clearly said. maybe this is was point of the tim kaine strategy. right away after the debate, the clinton campaign came up with this ad. >> jim, holy moly. that's the first time i saw that. and they did in that two minute spot what it took cnn hours post debate analysis to do with seven panelists. it's fact check a spot and they had so much to work with. >> trump is an easy target. he is a contextual speaker. and when you speak contextually it's easy to take one line and apply it to a different context and that happens to trump a lot. most of those one-liners that you see trump say in that ad are lifted from a different context and put into another. it does make him an easy target and that's part of what kaine was trying to do throughout the debate in terms of his numerous attacks after attack. and that did put pence on the defensive somewhat and he was pretty good about coming back in terms of staying focused on not every single one of kaine's assertions but choosing one and when attacking that. you saying in your view that ad is misleading because it takes trump out of context and kaine took trump out of context to set up that ad? >> yes, i would. that goes part and parcel with most political attack ads. >> do you have an example? >> for instance, the ukrainians and the russians in ukraine. they had annexed crimea and that's what trump was specifically referring to there. the idea of a trump presidency they would not move in and take over ukraine. they would not go in there. if you look at the context of that- >> into the rest of ukraine. >> i couldn't disagree more. >> maybe it's a new york/ virginia divide. i don't know. >> the abc interview that was disclosed, trump didn't think that russian troops had ever gone into the ukraine and clearly showed he knew nothing about the situation. >> or foreign policy. >> i don't think there was a single thing in there that trump was out of context. it is true that trump says contradictory things the next day, later that day, etc. he walked some of those things back, but he doesn't walk it back the next time. what is appropriate to say is that trump says so many things, he's an easy target for that reason. because we have no idea what he believes. that's true. we have no idea what he believes. >> i think he's a much more difficult target than what we've seen in the past. he is teflon. we have never seen a candidate that said one thing on a monday and the opposite on a tuesday and not apologize on wednesday and doubles down on thursday on one or both of those. >> historically so unacceptable but he remains competitive. jim, how do you think that whatever happened after the debate between the vice presidential candidate changes that clinton and trump might do sunday? >> i don't think it's going to change too much overall strategy. i think trump is going to focus more on what he needed to do in the first debate which is to prepare more and come across more polished and take advantage of the opportunities presented to him during the debate. >> all right. they said that tim kaine -- trump came in under prepared for his debate kaine might have actually come in overprepared for his. >> whatever that means when we're thinking about leading the free world. i think that that's something that we need to ask ourselves as a nation. someone who's really going to think about these ideas and be excited about them. >> the person that i watched the debate with was crazed about everything kaine did. hillary supporter for sure, worried about trump, but at one point she said this is impossible. how can anybody follow the debate? at the end of the day, it's clear that this debate did not fundamentally have a significant impact on the election. >> thank you all very much for being with us. stick around for additional vice presidential evidence. time for evidence-based politics, where we pour cold hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric. as we've discussed, vice presidential candidates can serve many rolls in a campaign: surrogate, attack dog, calming voice, ideological or geographical counterweight. at minimum though, running mates are expected to deliver their home state -- this time: kaine, virginia, pence indiana. but historically, does this usually happen? joining us on skype kyle kopko. he is professor of political science at elizabethtown college in pennsylvania and co-author of "the vp advantage: how runningmates influence home state voting in presidential elections." welcome. >> thank you, great to be here. >> so do vice presidential canidates influence voting in home state elections? >> generally they don't. there are certain times whenever we examine the data that they could deliver home state advantage. that's likely to occur under two conditions. they have to come from a small less populous state. think of someone like a joe biden. delaware is a very small homogenous state in terms of identity. only three counties and he was a political institution serving many decades as county government and united states senate. if you have those two continues in place, we are must likely to observe a home state effect. >> it's a reliably blue state anyway. he was not picked for that reason. >> delaware was a democratic state and the other twist is that small state had few electoral college votes. >> any state that size, 3 electoral college votes is not going to play a big role in deciding the out come of the election. that's normally a larger state like pennsylvania and ohio that have much more electoral college votes. >> how does it apply to tim kaine or mike pence? they are both very well-known in their states and both have been governor and also been in congress. pence in the house and kaine in the senate and currently in the senate. they are likely to swing those states or have an influence in one direction or another? >> that's a good question. the evidence that points to the conclusion that it is unlikely. think about it this way. you need a vice presidential candidate that is so popular and well connected to voters within a state that they are able to change their hearts and minds and able to subjugate the feelings and at least make the vice presidential candidate equal to or greater than. that's going to be a tall order if you think about it. it's going to be exceptionally difficult for someone from virginia or indiana to have that personal connection with a wide range of voters and that state to make them behave like that. that's unlikely in 2016. >> each candidate brings other things to the ticket. they are both fathers of marines. for trump and clinton who don't have military backgrounds, you can go down a list of other things. temperament and the kind of match they bring to the ticket, the kind of balance. at least can you say in these cases and in general, the vice presidential candidates do no harm if they are swing states. >> that's right. i think that is the case. they wouldn't have wanted it within those states to begin with. they will have popularity at the very least and to your point too this is where ticket balancing comes into effect. with the exception of the vice presidential running mate. a lot of republicans have not accepted a spot on the trump ticket. he said he was becoming unpopular and the analysts said he might lose his reelection bid for governor and they had to roll the dies on something else and he is popular nationally with the religion right wing of the republican party. he is not unpopular enough in indiana. >> with the presidential candidate relative to the vice presidential candidate. it would have to take somebody really unpopular in order for them to go on a national level. based on the estimates, the evaluations of presidential candidates had at least 3.5 times the weight of evaluations of vice presidential candidates. it's the presidential candidate that is influencing the choice. >> we only have a little time left and we are taking examples. who else are you pointing to, positive or negative. once we dig into the data, the evidence shows he was not popular enough in his home state of texas to deliver. in the old south for that matter. using 1960 american national elections studies data, what you find is lyndon johnson is the most popular outside. he gets to his home state of texas and the less favorably he is viewed. there is a number of open ended responses in the 1960s survey that saw him as being opportunistic and ambitious and might not put the interests of the south on the forefront. they suggest even there that example of the home state advantage is probably just a myth. >> real quick, al gore, he didn't win his home state of tennessee. did he help clinton win it when he ran for vice? >> in terms of his home state, probably not. this is the indirect effects again. you had a new democratic candidate in this period of time and he helped to reframe the ticket. two young southern candidates and that image, that message i think is what carries it at the end of the day. >> thanks so much for joining us. i appreciate it. >> thank you for having me. >> and that's potus 2016 for today. we're here each week at this time calling the presidential horserace and pouring cold hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric. most places, there's just a few days left to register. let he without sin cast the first stone but, don't wait for a democracy without sin to cast your first ballot. i'm brian lehrer, thanks for watching. ♪ [theme music] - today on america's test kitchen: bridget bakes the ultimate chocolate caramel layer cake, adam reviews ice cream scoops in the equipment corner, and gadget guru lisa reviews the latest kitchen gadgets. right here, on america's test kitchen. america's test kitchen is brought to you by dcs. dcs: manufacturers of professionally styled indoor and outdoor kitchen equipment. at dcs, our mission is design that delivers,