From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Thursday, August 15th.

With the Democratic Convention set to begin on Monday, that's August 19th, it's remarkable to consider, isn't it, what the presidential race

has been through just since the start of summer. The debate where President Biden looked so

unwell was on June 27th. The Trump assassination attempt was on July 13th. Biden left the race

on July 21st. Then, to many people surprised the party coalesced instantly

around Vice President Harris as the new nominee presumptive, and everything changed. So it will be

just under one month of the Harris campaign when the Democratic Convention will begin, and what a

difference that month has made. So before going

into that four-day television commercial, which I think we can call these conventions generally,

like the one the Republicans had just last month, we're going to do something now that we try

not to overdue on this show, as many of you know, that is we'll talk about the polls.

Our attitude, I've talked about this before,

is generally that the political media obsessed too much on the horse race as if politics was a

sporting event and not enough on the issues. We try to keep our issue to horse race ratio very high.

This week, for example, we haven't mentioned the polls at all

until now. Our presidential race segments have been about Tim Wall's education about genocide

when he was a geography teacher, Walls' climate record, J.D. Vance calling for parents to have

more votes than adults without children.

Vance is forward to the new book by the architect of Project 2025 and the comparison that we had

...