--:-- Shamita Basu: Hey there, it's Shamita. I've got a quick request for you. If you like listening to this show and Apple News Today is part of your morning routine, please follow us in Apple Podcasts. And if you have another 30 seconds, leave us a rating and a review too. We appreciate it. Good morning. It's Thursday, October 31st. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, U.S. citizens say they're being wrongfully purged from the voter rolls in Virginia, how childcare made it from being seen as a household problem to a societal one, and a rollercoaster game five ends with the Dodgers beating the Yankees to win the World Series. But first, we talked yesterday about Kamala Harris's historically short campaign and her closing pitch to voters. Today, let's focus on Donald Trump, historic in a different way.
--:-- Susan Glasser: I think people don't understand, actually, that this is literally the first time since the Republican Party was formed in the mid-19th century that they've ever had one person be the party's nominee in three consecutive elections.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's Susan Glasser at The New Yorker. And it gives you both a sense of how much Trump has transformed the Republican Party into the party of Trump. But also, I think it suggests that its future is very unclear whether he wins or loses this election because it has become so dominated by the sort of adulation for a particular, a singular leader.
--:-- Susan Glasser: I sat down to talk with Susan Glasser and her sometimes collaborator and always husband, New York Times reporter Peter Baker. They both attended Trump's rally earlier in the week at Madison Square Garden.
--:-- Peter Baker: And the thing you walk away from that is how different people in that arena look at the world versus the people who are at a Kamala Harris rally, right? For them, it's about grievance and anger and resentment and the notion that somehow they're both, oddly enough, the silent majority and a persecuted minority all at the same time.
--:-- Susan Glasser: And he has tapped into that in a very powerful way. They're not rooting for him necessarily to do all the things he says he's going to do. They may not even know about all the things he says he's going to do. But they sense in him somebody who represents a disruptive force to a system that they believe somehow has left them behind.
--:-- Peter Baker: You know what? The biggest applause line is, again, we're nine years into this with Trump. The biggest applause line is saying his name. Many of the warm up speakers, that's what they would get the applause for is Donald J. Trump. And then everybody would clap.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, the last time I spoke with Susan and Peter was two years ago when they had just come out with a book about Trump's time in office called The Divider. They got so many inside accounts from people who were in the Trump White House and who had serious warnings about how Trump wanted to use the power of the presidency, but was kept in check by those around him.
--:-- Susan Glasser: This time, they say, some of those checks might not be around. This is the first president we can think of in our lifetime who not supported for another term by his own vice president who not supported for another term by his own secretary of state his own secretary of defense his own chief of staff his own national security advisor his own press secretary and so on and so forth.
--:-- Peter Baker: And you're right, the guardrails are gone. There will not be a Jim Mattis or an H.R. McMaster or a John Kelly or John Bolton. And so I think it'll be in that way a different White House because he's going to try again and he won't be stopped the same way.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tomorrow, we'll bring you more from my conversation with Peter Baker and Susan Glasser as they reflect on our divided nation and how they say, no matter the result of next week's election, that divide is only going to get deeper.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to Virginia, where the U.S. Supreme Court says Republicans can move forward with a plan to purge their voter rolls just days before the election. According to Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, the intent is to remove non-citizens who are ineligible to vote. But the purge also included some citizens, like Nadra Wilson, who was born in Brooklyn.
--:-- Nadra Wilson: She told NPR she recently got a letter from local election officials notifying her that her U.S. citizenship was in question. She had 14 days to confirm her status or risk her voter registration being canceled. But the letter had been sent to the wrong address. And by the time it got forwarded to her, the deadline had passed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I don't know exactly how this has come about, but it's very, very unfair. And there are a lot of people who it's going to impact who are registered voters. A lower court said Wilson, along with 1,600 other voters, should be restored to the rolls. But the six conservative members of the Supreme Court disagreed and did not publicly share their reasoning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's no way to check how many of the 1,600 names were unlawfully removed. NPR explains there simply is no existing database of all U.S. citizens to check against. Virginia's voter purge plan relies in part on people checking a box on a form at the DMV that indicates whether they are U.S. citizens or not.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A local election official told NPR some people simply don't notice that box on the form. It's kind of known to be something of a problematic form because it has these boxes at the top of the form above the title. It just lends itself to people making mistakes or not seeing the information.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Virginia isn't the only state where there's been last-minute confusion over voter rolls. In Alabama, a federal judge halted an effort to remove more than 3,000 people from the rolls. Again, the intent here was to remove non-citizens, but the Secretary of State's office found at least two-thirds of the names on the list are citizens.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Only a handful of non-citizens were identified, according to the judge. CBS News looked into a similar situation in North Carolina. They spoke with Jim Womack, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County.
--:-- Jim Womack: He and hundreds of volunteers are combing through the voter rolls, looking for names they consider suspicious, and planning to flag them and challenge results with county election boards across the state.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's a video CBS found of Womack giving his team instructions. If you've got folks that were registered and they're missing information, and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election and they got Hispanic last names that probably is a suspicious voter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When CBS asked Womack about those comments, he said, I would have to listen to the full context. The Hispanic-sounding last names certainly is not exclusive. Anyone who is lacking the required information, we certainly would consider them as a suspicious voter.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are trying to find every illegitimate voter and to challenge the ones that shouldn't be voting. All of these efforts come as Trump and his Republican allies have been insisting non-citizens are planning to vote in large numbers, something election experts say is simply not true.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Non-citizens casting ballots in federal elections is both illegal and extraordinarily rare. An audit of votes cast in North Carolina in 2016, for example, found less than 50 non-citizens voted out of nearly 5 million votes cast.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Virginia, there is still time for citizens who may have been removed from the voter rolls to register again. The state allows in-person registration through Election Day. Nadra Wilson was able to get back on the rolls, and NPR says this week she cast her ballot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to an issue that's getting more attention in this election cycle than ever before, the cost of child care. It's been rising, and the pandemic only underscored how difficult it is for families to get by with little or no support.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When parents can't find or afford quality care, families, and the entire U.S. economy suffer. The pressure from parents has become so unignorable and such a core pocketbook issue that the candidates have been asked how they plan to address it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Former President Trump has not proposed specific policies or plans. His running mate J.D. Vance has promoted the idea of grandparents helping with care. Meanwhile, Vice President Harris has promised working families that they won't have to spend more than 7% of their income on child care, and she's proposing a $6,000 child tax credit for parents with newborns.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We're also seeing policy proposals around this issue pop up on ballots at the local level. Some voters in Texas, California, and Minnesota have the opportunity to vote on ballot measures that would raise taxes to fund child care in their communities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of families will tell you that their child care payment is as much as their mortgage every month. That's Harriet Torrey, who covers economics for The Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Harriet Torrey: She points out in her reporting daycares don't get the same public resources as the K-12 education system. And the pandemic threw this industry into chaos. First, closures and layoffs, then struggles to reopen and restaff.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tori recently spent time in Austin, Texas. It's a blue dot in a very red state. And there, voters will consider an amendment that would raise property taxes by about $126 for the average homeowner every year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That money will be taken and used to fund affordable childcare, so create more spots for subsidized care so that low-income households can have reliable daycare, after-hours care, summer school care, and pay childcare workers more attractive salaries to attract them back into the profession.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Demand for subsidized child care in Texas far outpaces supply. Roughly 5 kids are on wait lists according to the Texas Workforce Commission. And this measure would only scratch the surface.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Local Republicans argue a better approach to support child care would be to reduce the regulations on daycare operators. Some people say, why should my property taxes rise in order to pay for the care for other people's children?
--:-- Shamita Basu: But generally, based on her conversations with voters in the area, Tori says the measure seems to have broad support. That is a city that has seen a great deal of inflation in recent years. A lot of people moved in during the pandemic. House prices shot up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So, you know, it is a place where people are already dealing with price increases. But equally, you know, people want the economy to grow. They want people to continue to move to Texas. And so I think people are really starting to pay attention to the fact that childcare is a very important piece of that puzzle.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. Dozens of people are dead and more are missing after severe rain in Spain led to some of the deadliest flooding the country has seen in decades.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The death toll is expected to rise as search and rescue efforts continue. President Pedro Sanchez declared a period of national mourning. In the United States, hospitals are up against a critical supply shortage and a recent hurricane is to blame.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hurricane Helene flooded a factory in North Carolina that produced 60 percent of the national supply of IV fluid. Here's what Dr. Chris DiRienzo, the chief physician executive of the American Hospital Association, told NPR.
--:-- Dr. Chris DiRienzo: This shortage is still touching nearly every hospital in the country. Now I've talked to hospitals coast to coast, border to border, all over the country, who are needing to engage in those kinds of measures.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In some emergency rooms, that means a patient might be asked to sip a Pedialyte instead of getting an IV. It also means hospitals have been forced to cancel and reschedule some surgeries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The factory in North Carolina, meanwhile, says it hopes to resume manufacturing as soon as this week.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, the Dodgers are World Series champions. The Yankees managed to blow a five-run lead in the fifth inning, leaving the door open for a Dodgers win.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On Fox's postgame show, former Yankees stars Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez tried to make sense of what went wrong for the Yankees, with A-Rod calling it one of the greatest meltdowns he'd seen in 40 years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Freddie Freeman was named World Series MVP, delivering a two-run single that helped the Dodgers make their comeback last night and setting a record for most consecutive World Series games with a home run.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is the second World Series win for the Dodgers in five years. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next from Vox that looks to Germany for lessons on how the American child care system can improve.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Germany has a free universal child care system with many imperfections, some uniquely German, and some not. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Have a very happy Halloween, and I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
