SHEPARD SMITH (HOST): Do the polls give you an indication of when and why that happened? Was it this last few days of Clinton absence during illness? Is there something specific in the internals there?
CHRIS WALLACE: Not so much, that but certainly in the timing, and it proceeds these last few days and the whole pneumonia incident. I think there are two issues. On the Trump positive side, over the last month -- since he got this new campaign team -- he's been a better candidate. I don't know if he is listening to them, or he simply saw the polls and realized he was going to lose if he didn't clean up his act. But he has been more disciplined, he sticks more to teleprompter, he's been more policy-oriented just in the last week on his child care plan --
SMITH: Who do you think is responsible for that? There's no way to know?
WALLACE: Well, I mean, I'm not inside to know. My guess is it's a combination, one, of the new team and that would be Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon, and also the fact that they have reportedly shown in the polls that indicated if you continue on the path you're on you're going to lose and lose big. We know Trump doesn't like that. Now, that's the positive side for Trump. The negative side for Clinton is it has really been just a steady drumbeat on the emails, the 15,000 new ones from the FBI, the cozy relationship between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton State Department, and then, of course, the health incident. And, I think, less the health than the failure of transparency. The fact that she didn't come clean about it for a few days.
SMITH: And would you, given your history in this business, would you guess that today would have any impact on polls that are I'm sure being commissioned now?
WALLACE: You're talking about the birther incident?
SMITH: Yeah.
WALLACE: Yeah. I don't know. The answer is I don't know. I will say this, and this is different for Trump than a lot of the others have been. There's no question this was a mistake on his part to leave this open. I mean, it's damaging. You can tell by how quickly the campaign rolled it back. What's different is that so often in the past when Trump would get into one these things like the fight with the gold-star family after the Democratic convention or going after the Mexican-American judge who was handling the Trump University case, he would keep it going for a while, and he would refuse to back off. That would feed the flame, if you will. This one in less than 24 hours, he cut it off, he said Obama was born in America, period. So that's different, and may in fact help him limit the political damage.
