Swing State Tom Ashbrook and Heidi Legg

It's been quite an August, for the country and host Tom Ashbrook who lost his beloved dad. They promised they'd be back and take us to November 3 and Election Day. The big issues have put our whole country in a "Swing State" – life and death with Covid-19, the life and death of democracy on the table. Our very first Swing State guest was the great American historian and chronicler of our fraught times, Heather Cox Richardson. From her home up in Maine, she's been following and interpreting every twist and turn of this country's election-year journey. We asked her back to kick off what we're calling Season Two. Don't miss this frank look at what you should know before you vote.

Republican super-strategist Stuart Stevens knows the home stretch to presidential elections like very few others. He’s been at the heart of Republican campaigns for decades – for big-name governors, senators, Republican presidents, and contenders: George W. Bush, John McCain, Bob Dole, and most recently as the top strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012.   In his new book, “It Was All a Lie”, Stevens is tough on himself and he’s brutal on the Republican Party. The GOP has embraced its own dark side, he says. Forget decency. Forget ideals. It’s just a power cartel, says Stevens, wound around race, racism, and institutionalized hate. Stevens is on the team at the Lincoln Project, the squad of ex-GOP campaign hotshots now looking to take Trump down in November. And the party itself? Stuart Stevens doesn’t believe it can be rehabilitated. But he’s sure Trump and his Attorney General William Bar will try anything to hang on to power. The next 50 days, he told us, will be the most dangerous for this country since the Civil War. 

Is there a better way to do journalism than Americans are seeing, hearing, and reading right now? Heidi and Tom dive in with John Gable who set out almost a decade ago to help news consumers get out of their information bubbles and see the world afresh with his website . But is there a way to cover these times with a straight face when the President doesn't tell the truth? How do journalists cover this moment in a time of social media disinformation and deep polarization? 

The 2020 election campaign season is fraught with unrelenting drama – who's infected now, hate-spewing, and the president's latest Tweetstorm – we lose track of the scale of what's really upon us. Beyond masks and death rates, the pandemic, the high court, the economy, democracy, fear of fascism, and all the rest there looms the Big One, our climate, and how the hammer of climate change will dramatically change our lives. Half of the American population will see a decline in their environment conditional.   People are already on the move, fleeing fires, rising seas, too many hurricanes, too much heat. In the decades in front of us, climate migration - vast movements of people driven by painful climate change - is on track to explode. Abrahm Lustgarten does soften the blow. His New York Times and ProPublica piece over the summer reveals a world already on the move and forecast what's ahead for the United States...

Voters are already out in record-setting millions, many in line for hours to have their say. We've tried to be a point of honest clarity in this election run-up, but we all know it's an information war zone out there. We have two leading lights from the news business for their take on the battlefront. Margaret Sullivan is media columnist for the Washington Post, former public editor at the New York Times, and author of "Ghosting the News." Bina Venkataraman is editorial page editor at the Boston Globe, a science policy maven out of Harvard and MIT, author of "The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age." who's now taking on the whole world of policy, politics, and our information Wild West. We pulled them out of the news torrent to talk 2020, the loss of local news, and how to fix our information ecosystem.

It will be Trump or Biden, with everything that choice means. In Covid time, with many millions out of work and so much uncertainty around basic questions of health, housing, money for food, the future of businesses and jobs, we wanted to look straight at the US economy in the midst of pandemic and political instability.   The great economic journalist and analyst David Wessel, long of the Wall Street Journal news pages, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, now at the Brookings Institution joins us.   In our final Swing State episode, as we arrive as promised to November 3, Tom and Heidi share what's next!