2016 The Choice: Nicholas Kristof on the latest from the campaign trail

With just 15 days until Election Day, the latest national poll has Hillary Clinton with a double-digit lead over Donald Trump. Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric spoke with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof about the campaigns of Clinton and Trump.

This presidential election arguably has been one of the most divisive in U.S. history, and it has raised questions as to whether the U.S. government will be able to get anything done during the next administration. Kristof spoke about conservative Christians, specifically evangelical Christians, and how they are shaping this election. Kristof said there is a “God gap in America,” and he told Couric that “bleeding heart liberals have to align themselves with bleeding heart conservatives if they actually want to get policy made.”

Kristof also spoke about the article published in the New York Times today titled “The 281 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List.” “This is incredibly unusual in a presidential campaign. It’s common for candidates to snipe at each other, but not with this type of savagery,” Kristof said, noting the fact that Twitter hasn’t existed for many campaigns. “People didn’t even used to snipe with this type of excoriating prose in speeches or anything else.”

The New York Times columnist was critical of the media for its coverage of Trump during this election cycle. “I think we in the media screwed up, especially early on in the primaries, and I think especially cable television.” Kristof said. “There was a tendency to cover his events and his speeches and essentially hand him the mic without providing adequate fact-checking or scrutiny. And I think that was a mistake.”

“I’ve never met a national candidate, at least, who is as evasive and ill-informed as Trump.” Kristof said. “But that’s his style. You ask him a question, and he immediately wanders off on some other tangent. And you need to push back and drill back, and I think it’s somewhat uncomfortable for interviewers to push back that hard, but I think in retrospect we blew it by not doing more of that.”

Kristof says there is a possibility that Trump’s refusal to accept the election results could affect the social fabric of the country, as he’s seen happen in other countries where he’s covered elections. “I think at the end of the day that American institutions are strong enough that they can withstand that kind of a loser. But could there be clashes, could there be confrontation, could there be a loss of legitimacy of those institutions, which are a pillar of our national success? Yeah, there could be.”

Among the issues of this election are immigration and the refugee crisis, topics Kristof has written about extensively. “I would say that we cannot simply open our borders and let the floodgates open. I think that Germany has genuine reason to be concerned about the flood of immigration and the toll that it’s had on social services. Lebanon certainly does,” he told Couric. “It’s true we can’t solve this problem by admitting everybody from Mosul or everybody from Syria. We have to do a better job of trying to address the problems in those countries that force people to leave. And maybe even more important, doing a better job in supporting refugees in surrounding countries — in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Turkey — so they don’t feel compelled for the sake of their children to try to flee to Europe or America or anywhere else.”