was wendell willkie consistent on the issues in the campaign? james: no, he wasn't. w politicians are consistent on the issues, especially in the heat of a campaign and a campaign that started to go badly for willkie. the chaos and difficulty of challenging roosevelt. in the last weeks of the campaign, he moved toward positions on war and the new deal that he might not have fully agreed with that were more harsh, more 52 per to than -- more by two per div. amity: he was inconsistent, but we can't downplay his success. he won more votes in that election then any republican had ever won. electorally, roosevelt was the wily fox and had a large number of electoral votes relative to willkie, but the spread on the popular vote which much narrower. so willkie got much closer to the democrats and republicans had before. i want to mention roosevelt really did become worried. that's where you see him worried thinking about all sorts of things and maybe we will hear another tape where he worried about whether he could use willkie's mistress as a fact to beat him. so there's a lo

hville, indiana, one of the homes of wendell willkie. >> this is a wooden post card sent to the united states mail, sent from aberdeen, washington. all of the people in the town actually signed the back of the postcard to say "we want willkie." we want wendell willkie to run for the presidential nomination for the pregnancy. >> was the campaign like? you had or will keep clubs. you had boxes of buttons and banners. >> people wanted something new and different that they had not had before. this is where the willkie name started to take off. here was someone who had challenged the new deal successfully. he had been a strong proponent of individual freedom and liberty. people were drawn to the message. >> we are about a block off of main street. your mother, wendell willkie's daughter in law, lived a few blocks from here. >> if it was my grandmother's home town. my grandfather grew up in elwood. when they married, this was the place they generally call home. in the family, my great great grandfather had lost his shirt during the depression. instead of giving his father in law a handout, w

huge mistake for wendell willkie's 1940 campaign to go with this slogan: "wendell willkie wants to killkie lead biden's lead is largely thanks to the suburbs. finhe v by more 15 pots with suburban voters. trump needs to appeal to the suburbs! if this gets any worse, he's going to have to replace mike pence with a riding mower. to frighten suburbanites, trump claims that they will face rising crime and falling home values if a democrat is in the white house. and he has not been subtle about it. >> people have worked all their lives to get into a community and now they're going to watch it go to hell. >> stephen: go to hell? we've been boarded into our homes for the last four months afraid to touch our groceries or each other, only leaving to wait in long socially-distanced lines so someone can jab a cotton swab into our brains. this is hell. all we're missing is the devil. ahh! as part of the law-and-order fear campaign, trump rolled out this ad. >> seattle's pledge to defund its police department by 50%, even including a proposal to remove 911 dispatchers from police control. >> joe biden

in 1940, they forced on the republicans a man named wendell willkie who wasn't even a republican. he had been a democrat, and he was kind of a 90-day wonder. they enlisted all the media. they did a lot of crooked things, and they put him over as the nominee and he ran for president on the republican ticket and lost to roosevelt. and then in 1944, they tried a governor, former governor of new york, named tom dewey, the one whom somebody called looking like the little man on the wedding cake. and he didn't do very well in 1944 and then came 1948 and they had the gall to nominate tom dewey again, which we the grass-roots were very much opposed to. but they forced him on us and there was a lot of opposition to the grassroots. i remember alice roosevelt longworth said you can't make a souffle rise twice, but at any rate, tom dewey was the candidate. and there were all kinds of wonderful issues that he could have talked about. the truman scandals, the korean war, the communist infiltration of our government, the alger hiss case, but tom dewey waged a me too campaign and he lost. and roo