--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, October 24th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shumita Basu: On today's show, the oil industry's blueprint to roll back climate regulations, the surprising decline in college enrollment, and how the 12-foot skeleton disrupted the Halloween market. But first, we're in the final stretch of the presidential campaigns, and one of the biggest divisions in this election is almost surely going to fall along gender lines.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In recent national polling, Harris is leading with women anywhere from 13 to 16 percent. Trump, on the other hand, is leading among men anywhere from high single digits to up to 16 points overall.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Now, it's typical that we see gender gaps between the parties in presidential elections. But if these current numbers hold, the spread could be historic.
--:-- Shumita Basu: With me to explain what all this means is my colleague Gideon Resnick.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hey, Shamita.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Hey, Gideon. So first, what do we know is accounting for this huge spread between men and women?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: There are a lot of factors here. First, to state the obvious, Harris is a woman and if she wins, she will be the first woman president.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And the Harris campaign is trying to make her candidacy a referendum on reproductive rights, which does seem to be resonating with women voters.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The message is effectively, Republicans do not trust you to make your own decisions, but Democrats do.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And you'll hear Harris and her campaign talking about this in the context of freedom, which is something that they've been driving home consistently.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And they look at places like Michigan, where abortion was on the ballot in the same election cycle as Governor Gretchen Whitmer when she was up for re-election in 2022.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: She ended up being reelected with the support of the majority of women. In fact, one exit poll showed that over 60 percent of women under 45 supported her campaign.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: So the Harris campaign looks at that and thinks they could maybe even get a bigger share of women than even those national polls are currently suggesting.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And there are Democrats who think this is a different environment than 2016 when Hillary Clinton was a historic nominee but ultimately came up short.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Many women in recent years have been elected to leadership positions in lots and lots of different states.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But of course, there are still some that are nervous about the role that sexism could play in the election.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Harris, for her part, addressed this head on. She said in an interview on NBC News that the country is ready to elect a woman president.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It is clear that regardless of someone's gender, they want to know that their president has a plan to put lower cost, that their president has a plan to secure America in the context of our position around the world.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: They want a president of the United States who honors our military, who understands the importance of America's leadership around international rules and norms.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And that is regardless of gender.
--:-- Shumita Basu: OK, so that's how Harris is thinking about it. What about Trump?
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Trump in some ways is running an opposite campaign in the sense that they have been trying to build this sort of tough guy machismo persona around him.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: We saw that at the RNC over the summer when Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt on stage.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: A lot of imagery associated with the Trump campaign comes from that assassination attempt on his life in Pennsylvania and the kind of remarkable image that emerged of him after that.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And then his messaging is often specifically geared towards men or about men.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And this is sort of, you know, translated to the conservative media universe as well, where a lot of Fox News hosts, whether it's Jesse Waters or Jeanine Pirro, have been trying to make the point that, quote unquote, real men should be voting for Trump and not Harris or her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, who they try to paint as not being masculine.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Kamala is scrambling to win back male voters who were ditching her in droves for Donald Trump.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But so far, her brode pandering has been a total joke.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Harris sending out her self-proclaimed knucklehead to go pheasant hunting.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But he couldn't even get that one right after fumbling around with his shotgun.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And then in addition to that, Trump has been making a lot of podcast appearances that appeal to a younger, more conservative, tilting demographic.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: In fact, he's reportedly recording a conversation with Joe Rogan on Friday.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Right. Gideon, thank you so much.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Of course. Thank you.
--:-- Shumita Basu: We have heard relatively little about climate change on the campaign trail from the candidates, but The Washington Post got access to documents that show how major oil and gas industry players are preparing for the next president and how they're counting on a Trump victory to roll back regulations.
--:-- Shumita Basu: So the story is about a bunch of documents that we got from the American Exploration and Production Council.
--:-- Evan Halper: The group he's referring to is the AXPC, a trade group that represents some big companies like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.
--:-- Evan Halper: AXPC will say that these documents are, they were basically drafted for any presidential administration, but they take particular aim at all of the Biden climate initiatives.
--:-- Evan Halper: And so obviously, if Vice President Harris is elected president, she's unlikely to unravel all these things, but Trump has said this is exactly what he wants to do, and the oil industry is basically giving him a blueprint here.
--:-- Evan Halper: They're specifically focused on emissions of methane. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases. It's responsible for nearly a third of human-caused global warming, according to the International Energy Agency.
--:-- Evan Halper: These documents lay out a plan to kill a Biden-era tax on those emissions. But it goes way beyond that.
--:-- Evan Halper: I mean, there's about a half dozen or more than a half dozen executive orders that are central to the Biden administration's pledge to abide by the Paris Accord to limit climate warming or global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
--:-- Evan Halper: And this roadmap takes aim at all of those executive orders. and most of what the Biden administration has done to try to keep emissions in check.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The United States played a key role in the creation of the Paris Agreement in 2016, but Trump withdrew the U.S. from it during his time in office and has previously called climate change a hoax.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Biden recommitted to it when he was elected.
--:-- Evan Halper: Halper and his colleagues found that executives from a number of companies in this trade group attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, where Trump made a surprising request.
--:-- Evan Halper: It was supposedly some kind of energy roundtable, but it turned into a really transactional, kind of shockingly transactional event where he told all these executives, look, you want these regulators off your back.
--:-- Evan Halper: You're complaining to me about restrictions on oil and gas that the Biden administration has put in and these climate rules. If you raise a billion dollars for me you know I will go ahead and undo so many of these things
--:-- Shumita Basu: The Trump campaign did not address the AXPC agenda when the Post reached out for comment
--:-- Shumita Basu: The AXPC responded saying it supports methane regulations but opposes the methane tax
--:-- Shumita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The United Nations says it'll take 350 years to repair Gaza's economy, which has been left in utter ruin by the Israel-Hamas war.
--:-- Shumita Basu: According to their report, economic activity in Gaza has ground to a halt, with construction, agriculture, manufacturing, and the services sector all nearly wiped out.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And the longer the war goes on, the worse it'll get.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The U.N. estimates that once a ceasefire is reached, it'll take hundreds of years for Gaza to restore its GDP to pre-war levels.
--:-- Shumita Basu: In domestic news, researchers say fewer high schoolers enrolled in college this fall.
--:-- Shumita Basu: New national data published Wednesday recorded a 5% decline in first-year undergraduate enrollment compared with last fall.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Researchers call the findings startling.
--:-- Shumita Basu: It's unclear why, but USA Today points to some possible reasons, including the problems with federal financial aid this year, fallout from the Supreme Court's ban on affirmative action, and overall attitudes about the value of college degrees changing.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And finally, we are a week out from Halloween, which means you've probably seen the now ubiquitous giant plastic skeletons on people's lawns.
--:-- Shumita Basu: They've been creeping up in popularity every year since Home Depot first launched them in 2020.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Bloomberg Businessweek has the story of how these absurdly large decorations became a breakaway hit.
--:-- Shumita Basu: The guy who came up with the idea says he saw huge skeletons at ticketed Halloween events like haunted houses, but realized nothing like that existed for the everyday consumer.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And so Skelly was born, a 12-foot giant that sells for about $300.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Skelly has inspired a whole wave of oversized decor at other stores, too.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You see 8-foot pumpkins, 12-foot scarecrows.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And Home Depot says Skelly is so popular on social media and literally unmissable if you go driving by one on a lawn that it practically sells itself.
--:-- Shumita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next.
--:-- Shumita Basu: Bloomberg Businessweek talks to scientists trying to tackle the nation's fentanyl epidemic with a different approach, a vaccine that could potentially prevent some overdose deaths.
--:-- Shumita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shumita Basu: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow. Thank you.
