♪ welcome back to "face the nation." we return to our conversation now about election security with cbs news cyber security expert and analyst chris krebs. chris, i want to talk about something that's happening right now. social media is already changed the way we communicate, and certainly our political world. president biden said a few days ago that he has concerns about billionaire elon musk's purchase of twitter. he said the platform spews lies all across the world. there's no editors anymore in america. there are no editors. how do we expect kids to understand what is at stake. it's not just kids, right? what concerns do you have about this happening just days before the election, these changes to twitter? >> well, i think the government, for one, has a mechanism by which they can review the acquisition. the committee for foreign investment of the united states can take a look at particularly

the second and third ownership positions in twitter, including saudi arabia. that is something that i'm assuming that the treasury department is taking a look at right now, see if they can put in place a national security agreement or even potentially unwind the purchase. but i think more specifically to what's happening right now with twitter, i think there are kind of -- there are two elons we're seeing. there's the public elon that's trolling and saying $8, please, on all the complaints about some of the shifts in the moderation and other activities. then there's what's happening behind the scenes, the conversations with the civil rights groups, with advertisers, with the teams, which, perhaps, may be a little more stable. and i think if you look at the platform itself right now, not a whole lot has changed. that may not be a popular opinion, but i think the reality is that you haven't seen too much of a change in the moderation. now, the concern, though, is what happens tomorrow where you can buy the blue tick for $8 a month.

the twitter blue. >> for our viewers that don't use twitter, a blue check is a sign of credibility. >> it has historically been a marker of trust in that twitter has said, we have confirmed and authenticated the identity of this person, which tends to be a politician or a news media personality or a journalist, an academic or someone that may be a popular voice in certain civil rights, civil liberties issues. >> now you can buy it for 8 bucks a month. >> along with a number of other features, editing, longer form video posting. to have such a dramatic shift in that marker of trust, now you can buy it in advance of, as we've been talking about, a very contentious and important election t opens the information space to a broader community of influencers, clout chasers, election denialists. >> foreign actors? >> absolutely. we've seen reports lately of russia, china and iran back at their old tricks.

it is going to create a very chaotic environment. >> to that point, in 2018 during the midterms, cyber command took offensive operations to take out russian trolls who were spreading misinformation. "the new york times" has a story today saying, russia's back at it. what does that say to you about u.s. defenses? >> well, i think -- recorded future and graphic are two research firms have he released information that russian bots, trolls associated with the internet research agency, which is a group that targeted the 2016 and the 2018 election, are back at it and are undermining this time democratic candidates for senate in some of the more contentious races. i think what it says is that the -- there's a broader community of actors. they recognize that political discourse is very divisive here in the u.s. and they have more opportunities probably than ever

before to continue to undermine confidence, create chaos, their primary objective here. not that a winner wins, but we've all lost confidence and they degrade the american democracy experiment. >> there are also a number of sitting senators, and ambassador richard, former president trump's acting director of national intelligence, has been posting some misleading information. that's him on the screen. about the election. he said any state which doesn't count all the votes and announce the winner tuesday night is incompetent. >> so, all 50 states then by that formulation. >> because what you're saying is just the fact that votes are never finalized on election night. but why do you think someone who knows better is posting something like that? >> well, whether he knows better, i can't assume that, but the point here is that it's for clout-chasing. it's for influence. there's a reward system and

structure set up right now within the far right of the gop that provides additional engagement. so, you tweet something like that and you can see your likes, your retweets, your amplification really take off. and if you're just talking about some other, you know, more mundane domestic issue, nobody cares but there's a reward system and incentive set up where exactly this sort of messaging is rewarded, it's encouraged. again, this is going back to governor sununu's comments. we need leaders to lead. we need the presumptive leaders of the republican party to stand up and say, this is unacceptable. this is not how it works. we need to be good-faith actors in this process and, unfortunately, leaders aren't leading right now. >> chris krebs, thank you for your analysis. we'll see you on election night as part of cbs coverage at our democracy desk here at cbs news. p you reach your goals. i can make this work. it can help you reach them with confidence.

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tracking four groups of election influencers who could prove decisive in this year's midterm campaign. one group, pressured parents. they say they're anxious about the potion-covid era, particularly when it comes to their finances and their children's well-being. for a closer look at concerns facing this group, we're joined by laura meckler, national education writer at "the washington post," dr. scott gottlieb, and emily oster from brown university, joining us from providence, rhode island. emily, you wrote an article about pandemic amnesty. you said, basically, we need to forgive public officials for what they didn't know during the worst of the pandemic. you had argued early on for opening of skochools when the pandemic was still raging. what do you think we need to be focused on now? because some of the debate still seems to be stuck two years ago. >> yeah, so i'm an economist, but i'm also a parent.

and i talk to a lot of parents. what i can say is right now, parents are very worried about the next steps for their kids. they see the historic test score declines. they see the declines in routine vaccination rates for kids. and they want us to be looking to solutions. they don't want to be looking to rehash the debates we had two years ago. they want to know what investments are we going to make as a policy group to fix the problems that they're seeing for their kids. >> well, amen to talking about solutions, but we aren't, laura, talking much about them as a country. to those scores we heard mentioned, the education department reported appalling historic declines. 25% of fourth graders are below the bake level in math. 37% were below the basic level in reading. how much of it is linked to the pandemic closures, how much of it is linked to a broader problem? and why aren't we hearing more about it? >> well, we're talking -- some of us are talking a lot about

it. i think it is really important. we have seen historic declines, particularly in math, but also in reading. and it is certainly linked to the pandemic. some of it is linked to the schools that were remote for an extended period of time. but even schools that were not remote, also we've seen -- i mean, that were not remote for very long, i should say, have also seen significant declines in academic achievement. i think that paired with the sort of social, emotional mental health real crisis we're seeing among children and teenagers right now is really putting enormous amount of pressure on schools and on families. >> to your point, because we looked at it, new hampshire, which opened earlier, georgia, florida where skills reopened faster, they may have fared better but they still saw declines. so, there's still something happening. >> exactly. and i think that what most experts tell us is that the pandemic was still happening. even if kids were back in school. first of all, there were closures, quarantines, people in and out of school. beyond that, people were

experiencing loss. they were seeing stress all around them. they didn't have their normal lives. so, i think that, you know, the pandemic had a deep effect on families and on children and on schools. and i think those are going to be continuing for really many years to come. >> and i know i don't like it when i say the pandemic is over because i still feel like i'm living through this haze, dr. gottlieb. school closures are still a live issue. we've seen upticks in rsv and flu and other viruses and some schools have closed. in indiana we just saw one, virginia. should communities just take this out of the tool kit and keep schools open no matter what? >> look, we have a major epidemic of rsv, maybe peaking right now. we're going to enter a major epidemic of flu and we haven't been taking the actions we would normally take to mitigate these pandemics. i think a lot of public health officials and school districts are gun shy right now given the backlash to what we did during the pandemic. closing a school for one incubation cycle for two or three days when you had a major

outbreak of flu or rsv was not that uncommon. if you had 40% or 50% of kids out of school. now when a school in indiana does it, it's national news. we know hand hygiene is preventive in stopping flu. wearing a mask if you have rsv or flu protects against forward transmission. no one is stalk being that. there's reluctance, partly because of failures of public health messages and the backlash to it. we don't have a good solution for what we're entering right now. >> what do you make of emily's premise there needs to be amnesty? >> she was at the vanguard arguing for schools to be reopened. a lot of kids got back in the classroom because of her efforts. i think we need to distinguish between structural failures of institutions and mistakes that were made because we're in the fog of viral war and we didn't understand the virus itself. there were institutions that

failed. cdc, there were a lot of systemic failures, even the teachers union not working to get kids back in the classroom, and we didn't know it was airborne, we thought it was droplet transmission and we advocated cloth masks when they weren't effective. i think the structural features we got wrong, where institutions failed, that we can't move on from because we need to reform those institutions. >> emily, parental rights has been harnessed effectively by republicans in certain places on the campaign trail, but our cbs news polling shows this is broad concern, to your point. 72% of those polled say they're concerned about learning declines after covid. 72% said they're worried about bullying at their kids' school. 68% said they're worried about gun violence. 57% said discussions of sexuality and gender concern them. there's so much concern about the classroom. where does the focus need to be

and where does it need to come from here? >> i think that the focus needs to be on what we need to do to move forward for solutions, and, you know, to give you a concrete example, when we look at something like test scores, which many parents are very worried about, we see that over the last school year, there's been some test score recovery, but that's uneven. some school districts have recovered to where they were in 2019. some school districts haven't recovered at all. at this point, if we want to speak to these concerns of parents, we need to think about what are the investments we're making to figure out why have some school districts been successful, what did they do that was successful? how can we comport those lessons to districts that haven't been successful? this solutions-based focus has to be where we go rather than rehashing the discussions we had two years ago. that's how we're going to find solutions and get kids back on track because it's, frankly, exactly as you say, kids are really suffering and we're losing time on getting them back. >> laura, the focus that we are

hearing about the classrooms is on the content of what's being taught in them. we saw diussion of sexuality and gender. >> i think that the sort of culture wars that have gripped schools in the last couple of years are now coming to the question of gender and sexuality. for a long time we saw them centered on issues of race, so-called critical race theory and there was conversation, discomfort among conservatives of talking about systemic racism, for instance. that has given way to concerns around gender identity, transgender, transgender women competing in sports. all of those things, i think, are concerns among many conservatives and there are a lot of candidates for office and political figures who are playing on that and talking a lot about that. and i think when they talk about parental rights, that's what they're talking about.

they will assert things like, schools are trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys. i don't think that that's true. that's the kind of fears, because there's still a lot of discomfort about the idea of questions around gender identity and there are people really working to tap into that. >> i mean what emily has argued, we need data on how to make up for educational deficits. >> this has nothing to do with that. >> can we put that on a bumper sticker? >> right. that is the core problem facing education today. actual academics, can kids do math? can they read at the levels they need? those are the skills you need into your education and into life. these other things are much more emotional and tapping into sort of these culture war conversations that we're having in this country. >> dr. gottlieb, when you look at parents, it's like a formula shortage, completely incoherent messaging from the cdc that you just laid out here, child care shortages in part due to what's

going on with infection rates. it is hard not to have anger and emotion about public health and how it's communicated. >> look, i think there's a pervasive sense, rightly so, public health institutions have failed the public and they weren't equipped to tackle the challenges people have been facing. we shouldn't have had this shortage we had with formula. we should have responded more adequately to it than we did. cdc didn't advise families on what to do. require six feet of distancing is what kept schools shut into the spring of 2021. public institutions didn't work on behalf of families, slow for new integration. cdc is working to reform itself, but that's not usually the way it works. it's hard to self-organize around a new mission if you're an organization. i think if the administration was more aggressive addressing these deficits, people wouldn't feel so much angst. >> you need to hear that from the new congress, pressure to

reform. emily, you also raised in your article the question of mandates for vaccines. are you arguing for flu and covid vaccine mandates? that's very controversial. >> in the article i discuss routine vaccinations, measles pertussis where we don't typically have mandates but the rates are very high. they've gone down over time. we haven't seen schools move to covid vaccine mandates and i don't expect them to. similarly, we haven't seen flu mandates and i don't expect to see those either. >> okay. i know dr. gottlieb is also against mandates -- >> i don't think this vaccine reaches the threshold of being mandated in schools. >> thanks for all of you. we could do a whole hour or more on all the parental tensions right now, but we have to leave it there. we'll be back in a moment how the fight over abortion rights is impacting the midterms.

jim mansfield: my job was more important to me than my family, and i started drinking a lot, staying out of town. it took a toll on me. dr. charles stanley: you may be as low as the prodigal, but you are not hopelessly, helplessly lost if you will listen to what i'm about to say. jim: sitting on that couch, watching that sermon, something had happened to us. i'm talking about the joy and love in our hearts. i want more of that.

we are joined now by chief legal correspondent jan crawford and political correspondent caitlyn huey burns. you've been covering abortion access in states around the country, and that's where the decision about access will be made, at the state level. there are five states where abortion access is literally on the ballot november 8th. what's the expectation on whether this election will make access looser or tighter? >> and three of those states, california, vermont, michigan, the question is whether to amend the constitution to enshrine

abortion rights into law and the other two states there is either a ban or attempts to criminalize it. the biggest one i'm watching is in michigan, that ballot measure because there's such a competitive governor's race with gretchen whitmer, the incumbent, the democrat, very much campaigning on this issue of abortion access and rights, trying to galvanize her base of support and reach out to those independent suburban women in particular. tudor dixon is trying to say to voters, you can vote for this measure and also vote against gretchen whitmer and vote for me. the biggest question we've been having this election cycle, when it comes to ballot measures is, you know, does this actually translate to support for the democratic candidate? i was in kansas covering that ballot measure where we saw overwhelming turnout, where we even saw republicans vote for it. but that was a direct question to voters. so, what is on the ballot with candidates, does that have the same effect?

i think michigan will be an interesting test of that. we're also looking at states like wisconsin and north carolina that don't have ballot measures but the makeup of the state legislatures and other competitive races there could shape how this comes out because that's really where this is being decided. it's at the state legislative level. >> which is what the court intended. >> sure. this is not a federal constitutional issue. this is an issue the state should decide and leave it to the political process. that's what we're seeing. i think what's interesting, though, you know, some of the debate and the outcry among democrats back in july is receded a bit. i think people realized the supreme court didn't ban abortion when it overturned roe versus wade and many state laws weren't changing at all, has taken a backseat to crime, inflation, the economy. but it does still have an impact. on the flip side, i think it's important to remember for republicans what that decision has done. had the court refused to

overturn roe versus wade, it would have really demoralized a key segment of the republican base. those voters who care deeply about social issues, the pro-lifers, evangelicals, people that care about religious. those voters are excited and enthusiastic about voting. that's an important segment for republicans. they're also seeing at the national level where there isn't a law protecting abortion. the conversation from president biden is if democrats win, i will enshrine abortion access, specifically at that 24-week -- the language that was in roe. but then you have senator lindsey graham trying to start the conversation and say it's got to be up until 15 weeks. is the bottom line that we will just not see any national law, period, that is will stay at the states? >> what we're seeing is both sides are using it to galvanize their supporters, right? democrats are threatening that republicans get control and then there will be a ban.

lindsey graham handed them kind of a gift in saying, look, i would like to implement national restrictions. >> restrictions but not a ban? >> not an outright ban at 15 weeks. but i think, you know, and you talk to republicans and they don't want to say at this point, yes, i'm supportive of a national ban, because they don't want to turn voters away. that they need to attract here. and it also kind of flies in the face of their argument that this should be a state's issue. but there is no question that this is a base amplifying issue. and democrats need it. >> jan, i want to ask you about a case that is also getting politicized, potentially here. moore versus harper. former secretary of state hillary clinton spoke about it to a progressive group and said it's about right-wing extremists having a plan to literally steal the next presidential election. that's a big statement. what is this case about and what's the outcome? >> she's talking about a case

that the court's going to hear arguments on next month. it involves this kind of -- called the independent state legislative theory. to opponents, that's a radical theory that would really strip state courts of having any oversight into t election laws and procedures adopted by state legislatures for federal elections. now, supporters of this new theory say, well, the federal constitution gives that power to the state legislatures, not to the state courts. if you've got a problem, take it to federal court and they can deal with it. the question i think is not so much would it directly address things like presidential electors. opponents of this theory, and it's a serious concern that they have, is that if the court adopts this theory, then that sends a message, katie bar the door, state legislatures can do anything they want. that, they believe, is dangerous in terms of what they may try to do in some of these election laws and procedures. >> thank you, ladies, for tracking that for us. we'll be back in a moment.

that's for us today. we'll see you tuesday for election coverage. for "face the nation," i'm margaret brennan. how is social media affecting the conversation around this year's elections? you'll be surprised at what "60 minutes" found tonight on cbs.

♪ this is the cbs overnight news. >> we are finally here. after months of campaigning, a record $16.7 billion spent, american voters finally get their say tuesday. more than 39 million of us have already voted early. republicans expect to win big. democrats appear to be scrambling. today president biden flew to new york campaigning for kathy hochul, trying to blunt the momentum of her republican opponent in an unexpectedly tight race. we are tracking ten key battleground races, five of which are hotly contested toss-ups. cbs' nikole killion is in georgia where it's