David Weigel Transcript: April 4, 2025
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00:00):
A lot of you are already familiar with David Weigel, our speaker here today, and the main reason his work or his must read in Congress and the White House is because he’s often doing the work outside of DC and weighing the political futures of candidates and parties in the process and with the Trump Republican party now in power, David is dug in not only to look at how firm that support is, but also what Democrats are doing to position themselves to respond. You probably saw his work in Wisconsin sort of gauging what was happening with the Supreme Court race there, and he’s written extensively about what happened in Florida. David is a founding reporter at Semaphore where he writes the Americana newsletter. He’s been on the campaign trail for nearly 20 years. Is that fair?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:01:13):
That’s fair,
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:01:13):
Yeah,
David Weigel/Semafor (00:01:15):
It is. If I do the math, I’m not afraid of the math. It’s great to remember campaigns before iPhones when I had to print maps out.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:01:22):
Yeah. He’s covering elections, congress and political movements for the Washington Post Bloomberg slate and reason. He’s also written for Rolling Stone, the American prospect, the American Conservative, and the Washington City Paper, and in 2017 he published the show that Never Ends a history of progressive rock music. He’s a 2004 graduate of Northwestern University and a Medill School of Journalism grad. Please welcome David Weigel.
David Weigel/Semafor (00:01:55):
Yes. Going to be back
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:01:58):
And we also owe him a big debt of gratitude for responding quickly given what’s been happening at the White House and how our program has changed. So a special thanks to ’em
David Weigel/Semafor (00:02:12):
And I was here before the inauguration, but this is a new group of folks mostly. Okay, good. We welcome them in
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:02:21):
January, 2025.
David Weigel/Semafor (00:02:22):
Okay, good. I didn’t recognize anyone. Now it’s not my fault anymore. Okay, good. So, oh yes, I am more interested in the questions. The setup was very good.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:02:37):
What I’d like to do, I guess is talk about given the bomb was dropped yesterday, how firm the support continues to be and then the party, we saw some, I don’t want to say defections, but people who were not in lockstep as everybody has always been. Perhaps maybe a discussion of what the tipping point looks like if there is in this party, in this administration and also from your work outside of dc, which I find really meaningful and consequential, what the Democrats are doing, is there a strategy and how important was what happened in Wisconsin to either the midterms or further down the
David Weigel/Semafor (00:03:33):
Road? Yeah, I can start with Wisconsin even though it happened last in the list happened furthest in the past. In the list that you’re talking about
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:03:40):
Seems
David Weigel/Semafor (00:03:42):
Like there’s always fighting about whether special elections can be refered. This wasn’t special. This was an off year municipal election where turnout is never as high as it’s in a presidential no matter where people do, and it’s not a persuasion election it unless something happens with a Glen candidates. It is a how much of our base can we turn out So the race was going to be competitive before Elon Musk got involved. Turning Point action, other allies of the president were in Wisconsin with a strategy of finding Trump voters, finding at least 200,000 Trump voters would usually skip these things and turning this into a referendum on Trump, if you support the president, you want to stop the radical left turn out in this. They spent a ton of money and brought surrogates to the state. We’re sending mail to voters that Republican voters just saying support Trump by voting for Brad Shimmel, the Republican nominee.
(00:04:33):
Shimel was very open about that too. We’ll have so many topics not to get too in the race, but the seal had already broken on whether to polarize and make a partisan election out of a judicial election that was already happening. There’s a weird minette going on where the candidates don’t say they’re Republican, don’t say they’re democratic, but make it clear what values they have, what party they’re aligned with, and then Elon got involved at the end of February spending money through America, PAC and Democrats in the state started a people versus Musk messaging campaign that said, this is election is now in large part about Doge and about whether the richest man in the world is allowed to buy this election. I’m repeating their messaging, but he is the richest man in the world, so it wasn’t fallacious and the Republican theory remained until Monday until Tuesday evening.
(00:05:26):
Really we think we’ve Elon bring attention to this by him spending money by all these groups being involved, we’ve done enough to turn this into the referendum that we can win and they didn’t. They actually hit their turnout goal. They found 230,000 more voters than they gotten for the last Supreme Court race, but Democrats who’d won that race decisively found 280,000 more of their voters. To the extent this isn’t surprising anymore that Elon was replying to an Alex Jones post the day after about how it might’ve been stolen because the numbers don’t add up. They added up. That was what I saw in Wisconsin that both bases were very excited, but Democrats were terrified and Democrats also were taking advantage of every news cycle because I’m ripping off, I think it was Chris Hayes’s insight and Ezra Klein’s putting it to it too, and it’s not their insight.
(00:06:17):
I’m sure someone put this in an academic paper first, but the commodity in politics and everything now is attention. It’s can you buy attention? Can you get free attention? Musk is very good at getting free attention and news in Wisconsin, which is hitting people differently. There’s some communities that don’t have local news. News was generally about what the administration was doing was about layoffs, was about layoffs and how they might affect your community and that was negative. That actually was a very negative political climate for Republicans in April of a new presidency, which is very early for there to be a political backlash at this point in the Obama years, they were still able to hold special elections at this point in the first Trump term, their vote was going down, but they were winning everything, so this was a setback. If we want to talk to the Florida race, that was different.
(00:07:05):
The tariffs roll into that because this election did show that one, the MAGA vote who came out for Donald Trump, which contains multitudes. It’s people who are obsessed with him and no other politician. It’s also people who remember his presidency fondly cannot be motivated the way that Democrats can be motivated now for lots of reasons, they pay less attention to news cycles. They pay less attention, they’re less educated, which I’m not saying in a pejorative way, but that there’s a different commitment to voting in every election based on how educated you’re, how much attention you paid in news. We all know that it used to be a neutral or pro-Republican bias and now it’s a democratic bias and these tariffs as they come down, come in a climate where we see that there are a lot of people who took a chance on Trump that are not terribly happy right now with how he’s acting.
(00:07:55):
They’re happy on immigration, they’re not happy on the economy because Trump had a really, an argument that was hard for Democrats to penetrate. They did warn that he was going to raise tariffs. That equaled what Kamala Harris called a Trump tax that was not very credible for the white voters. They were trying to convert, mostly convert back, and you found talking to Democrats in the campaign, a lot of working class voters who were taking a chance on Trump did not believe he was going to raise prices. They remembered that he lowered, he kept prices low and they remembered that he sent out stimulus checks and this is the reason that Democrats, even though ideologically many of them like the idea of tariffs, not the way these are being done, but they support tariffs in some instances. I’ve found this talking to Democrats this week, they don’t support this and they’re confident they won’t support this for the short term reason that they think the country is not actually happy with Trump’s economic management.
(00:08:50):
They thought it would be a lot of voters thought it would be a turn of the dial back to policies that made things cheaper in 2019 and they’re not getting that and as long as they’re not getting that, a lot of the people are not bought in for let’s say a two or three year transition where some were more manufacturing is going to come to America or more textile are going to be made here, more build America companies are going to benefit. They were waiting for prices to get lower quickly. Will mortgage rates go down? Potentially this affected that. I think positive in the short term will interest rates come down. Actually, the paradox is that the job growth is strong enough that the fed’s probably not going to cut rates very quickly or it’s not going to cut at four times this year, so I wouldn’t say the wind is at their back.
(00:09:32):
They’re still very unpopular, but as the party of, we would not let Trump get away with everything he’s doing. They feel very confident right now and they also have tools that they can run on and you mentioned last thing I’ll say. You mentioned some of the Republicans join in this week. Argument they can make is if we get Congress, we can actually take some of the power away. His ability to, without any input from legislature, put tariffs on people and declare emergencies. What they’re trying to do in Congress right now is pull back this Canadian emergency, which we can get into it. I’m not convinced that a lot of fentanyl dealers were paying tariffs. Not that I’ve smuggled much, but when I did take back some unpasteurized cheese from Quebec, I didn’t tell customs, actually, you should probably tax me on this cheese I’m bringing from Canada. Probably the same with fentanyl, but the premise of this emergency, I think Democrats are also very comfortable saying, this is bogus. Let’s go to these Midwestern states that are trading with Canada and all these countries that are affected and let’s weaken the Republican’s connection to Trump because he’s not doing what those crucial voters thought he would do.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:10:45):
What happens faster though? Do the Republicans get traction or do the Republicans abandon him in this way? Where do you see the most change or the quickest change happening?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:11:03):
Well, there is this course this week that I mostly ignored about and this I think will keep happening because it’s a very good way to place op-eds whether he’ll run for president again, he won’t. It is JD Vance set up to replace him. He is a lame duck president who and some people dispute, can you say lame duck? If he hasn’t lost Congress, he’s a president who does not have to worry about his next election. There was always the bet it was this will be different. I don’t have to listen to the same advisors. I’m going to have people who do what I do and I can lock in on policy without bending because I don’t need to worry how it’s going to affect my vote in Wisconsin in three years. Does he care about how this affects Tom Tillis, North Carolina? Probably not. The way that he interacts with these guys, I don’t think right now that a lot of Republicans are going to say The thing I should do is buck Trump on this.
(00:11:56):
The only one I’ve seen today on anything do that was Don Bacon from Omaha who’s one of the three Republicans in a seat that Trump did not win. Kamala Harris won his seat in Omaha in a couple of suburbs criticizing the firings at the NSC, which is a different story we didn’t mention, but I feel people know what it is on who voted with Trump with Democrats, I should say with Tim Kain on the Canada resolution. It was Mitch McConnell who’s retiring, it’s Susan Collins who is in a blue state and votes with Democrats on things. It’s Rand Paul who’s attitudinally against tariffs is Lisa Murkowski who none of that’s surprising. There’s not any, you have seen more. For example, look at John Corny, when I was thinking of Republicans going along with the idea that we needed to declare this emergency to stop fentanyl. Corny is one of the guys saying that corn’s biggest threat to reelection right now is whether Ken Paxton runs against him.
(00:12:53):
So yeah, the same politics are still there where republicans are more worried. They defy Trump and somebody says, I wouldn’t defy Trump if I got there and even though he’s going to be out of office 2029, that’s still the driver for all this because when I talk about Trump voters, I keep trying to distinguish there are the people who are going to vote in these Republican primaries that is a subset, a small subset of the electorate, the ones who took a chance on Trump and won’t come back for anybody else. Well, I just described what they’re going to do, the ones who matter and the Republican there is not a way that they have found to let’s say Reconvert a hundred thousand or so people who left the party under Trump and started voting for Nikki Haley and then bailed and voted for Kamala Harris. Those people are just not relevant in the primary, so I don’t think the Republicans politics have changed, not right now
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:13:42):
How much of what you’re relating here, because there’s always this tension for people who are reporters, I mean who are based in Washington and have little opportunity or access to get out of dc. How much of what you know or learning comes from outside rather than inside?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:14:07):
Well, that’s where the,
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:14:09):
And how do you make the case to your editors say, Hey, maybe you don’t have to do this, but just say, Hey, I need to go X because I know I can get to somebody who can clarify or provide some insight that I’m not getting anywhere else.
David Weigel/Semafor (00:14:31):
I do pitch it. I don’t just say, let me go take a wild swing at this place where I might have a story. I pitch it around the fact that there was election was happening and I could get people to talk to me in Wisconsin when I, in the first Trump turn, there were a lot of stories that felt like they were blowing up in the DC news climate and then I would get out. I remember one in Minnesota that was premised on our people are angry at the tariffs in ag communities and I went to, I think it was Tim Wells’s district. I was running for governor at the time and yeah, that was helpful. I was finding there were people in the farm bureau who were angry and average people were not that worried. He’s trying something new. We’ve never heard this before,
(00:15:19):
So can you manufacture that by not going to these places? No tenure. Knowing people, knowing people in these states that I can check in with is very helpful skepticism of some of the polling because a lot of issue groups are going to put up polling that says this is already unpopular. That’s pretty helpful. I think it’s just brought, if you can’t get out there and even if you can get out there to buttress what you’re doing, talking to people who are not necessarily political actors who do not care which party wins but are making long-term investments or advising people on what to invest in based on what they think the economy is going to look like, they’re more relevant, so the people I talked to in the farm bureau last time would’ve been helpful and I’ve seen local news reporting, which I always try to survey when I’m writing where local news was finding people in, where do I see it like Buffalo and Cleveland who their first reaction to the Trump tariff was, this is awesome. We want something to be done so that people are buying more products in America. That’s pretty helpful. That’s something I think you can do without leaving DC of just finding some way to stress test whether what everyone’s freaking out about is real, but that’s a long answer.
(00:16:37):
I think you can do this without necessarily going to these states to find it. If you’re at a news organization that will say, please go to the Michigan suburbs and find out if people are angry about this, that is an asset that you can do it without it. You just have to go through people who are not, they’re not worried about polling, they don’t even care about polling. They, they’re just going to say, how is this affecting what I’m ordering this year? I mean honestly on the way over here I was seeing Nintendo announcing it’s going to delay pre-orders of the switches. That’s a story you don’t need to travel for to see the consumer side of this, people who main decisions we’re not going to change, but we’re not even thinking about tariffs until that there are all kinds of angles. I think there’s a billion things you can write about becoming familiar with an industry without actually going to the factory. You can do it. It takes some stop and starting and maybe failing and figuring out who to talk to who’s not just a lobbyist.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:17:36):
I mean, I’ll ask one more question. I’ll open up to you all, but I guess in order to track what you’re tracking, you’ve got to be reading quite a bit and also looking at news organizations, regional news organizations around the country. We have a few of ’em here, but who out there is still doing a good job that you’re learning the most from and what is it that they’re doing that keeps you coming back to use them as a sounding board?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:18:18):
By and large regional news, regional local news and regional papers that have not been hollowed out, which is less every year are good. National Wall Street Journal I find always has consumer first reporters who are out there fighting stuff I would not know because their beat is not normally politics. I would say that and Bloomberg honestly of the national and no without any disparagement to the times of the posts, the people who cover the same things, but I think of the people, they cover politics, but their priority is the economy and their priority is what moves. Markets generally have been saying, okay, they know without the work I have to do, who is this going to affect? Oh, they’re affecting vanilla exports from Madagascar. Well, I know who’s going to be struggling with that in America and I don’t, but usually the consumer reporters of those places do. The local stuff is, yeah, I found people have jumped on it right away. It is a fascinating story. How is this going to affect us? How is this decision for DC going to affect us is a good story. It’s not one that happens with the NAC for example, or Cory Booker’s filibuster. I do separate the stories that are for people who pay attention to politics, who at this point are more democratic than not versus the does this mean I have to move some investments? Those people.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:19:38):
Yeah, and I guess I asked that question because there are many issues that are on a slow burn right now. Maybe not a slow burn, maybe they’re fully engulfed tariffs. One issue cost of living which is associated with that, but how do you sense given the travel that you’re doing and always doing that, that is fully engulfed now or are people running behind or on whether or not those issues are beginning to matter?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:20:17):
Well, I got back from Wisconsin before the tariff announcements, but the Canadian back and forth threatening new tariffs, pulling them back, et cetera, et cetera, how Prime Minister Carney was reacting. That was actually something that people had takes on the rest of it, not really. I want to make sure I’m separating when you talk about this. I’m separating what most people care about because everything I cover ends up being and then how does this affect the vote, which 60 some percent of people who can participate are going to participate in and it’s so early that usually this time of a presidency, people are not paying that close attention. There is usually a honeymoon, which is actually pretty truncated for Trump this time.
(00:21:09):
I don’t want to be super generic about it, but I’d say the trades issue was already so interesting to people For the reason I was saying before, this is new, how does it affect me? The other stuff, not as much. Just the Doge layoffs were in the news again, from the perspective of or with the angle of they va, they’re laying off people at the va. Did they lay them off at the clinic that is used here? Well, we know who to talk to at the clinic. They, the Department of education shrinkage or I don’t know what to call it even yet had just happened when I was there and that was in the discourse too. That was in the news. Now obviously it was hitting Madison different than it was other parts of the state, but I was struck when I was, another thing important at political events important to do is always pay attention to what people are not saying and I was not hearing specifics at Republican events about the great doge things that had happened that were amazing that we all love.
(00:22:05):
Not even they got rid of U-S-A-I-D and that’s amazing. It was just they’re finding fraud. It’s often boiled down to they’re finding waste in fraud and we’re not wasting your tax dollars anymore, but they would move on to other things that were more motivating to Republicans and they’re trying to stop Trump and they’re trying to stop his agenda, but for most people who are not, again, news junkies, it was really this thing I just heard, how is this affecting my school? The answer sometimes was, oh, it doesn’t. You have to worry about it. I have not seen that much impact journalism, for example on the Biden administration was putting conditions on through ed mostly on inclusive gender policies in schools and the Trump administration obviously has gone really hard in the opposite direction. That’s not a story that usually comes up unless there’s a clash.
(00:22:54):
Oh, there were people protesting. Oh, a student was affected, et cetera, but that’s what I expect. I expect a lot of this. I was struck in Wisconsin though how that was already happening. A new thing just happened. It means here’s the number of the dollars that was cut from the program, how is that going to affect us? We’re finding out and often they didn’t know yet. Often the local news interview is here’s an expert from the university talking about it. Here’s a Republican talking about it. They were not there yet, so it needs to actually interact with people in a real way.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:23:26):
Okay, open it up. Let me grab a mic. Oh yeah, you can go.
Hannah Demissie | ABC News (00:23:37):
Oh, sorry. Hi, my name’s Hannah Demissie. I work for a b, C news. I cover the White House, so I just want to get a fine point on it. Do you
David Weigel/Semafor (00:23:44):
Think
Hannah Demissie | ABC News (00:23:45):
What you were seeing in Wisconsin, the coverage around people talking about tariffs and people talking about tariffs and doge and the federal clutz, do you think news outlets, especially at the national level, were actually reflecting what you were hearing in the state. I’m just curious, you talk about some of the outlets you were referring to, wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. I’m just curious, do you think national levels have actually captured how people are feeling about this, especially in a battleground state?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:24:17):
Well, I was trying to distinguish, I can be finer about it between national security stories or personnel stories that are really interesting and important, who actually is running things versus how are these things affecting people back there? I guess every year, but every four years there’s just less interest by conservatives in media coverage of what a Republican administration is doing. They just assume that there’s a big heuristic already built. If the media is covering this negative thing, they want them to fail. They’re lying about us, they want it to fail, so the signal story is important. Is it super relevant to people who are not democratic partisans and swing states? I didn’t think that it was, but that’s not a reason not to write it, but that I didn’t see that one break through. I didn’t expect it to. It’s important not to be cynical though and say, let’s not write this story because we’re not going to find it, but again, the Elon and Doge role, that was interesting because there was not a temperature check of what people thought of that until the Wisconsin election and he really did lean into that and say, this is a referendum.
(00:25:32):
I think Elon made it pretty clear, but also Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, was at his Green Bay rally, Elon’s Green Bay rally and said, this is a way to show the radical left that you don’t mess with Trump, you don’t mess with Elon, you don’t mess with Doge. That’s pretty blunt. So yeah, the things that were Trump political turmoil or the scheduling of whether things are passing in the house even this week, I wasn’t out this week, but the thing that shut down the house for the week of proxy voting for new mothers, I don’t think that’s terribly important to most people. It really is what are the economic effects these programs and can Republicans defend them? Can they actually say this is why this is good and this is how we’re going to benefit. That’s what I mean, but not saying to be cynical. That’s one of my bad traits is I’ll say, well, this story is so big, no one’s, no one’s going to care and sometimes they do, but you find out through an election how uncomfortable are people talking about this. Again, that’s usually the clue. Do candidates not want to bring this up? Do they say it’s a distraction? Do they want to move on? Sometimes they say it’s a distraction because people don’t care, but they’re always saying it because they want to pivot to one of the issues they pulled is much better for them.
Speaker 4 (00:26:52):
Right next door and then we’ll go down.
Sophie Hills | Christian Science Monitor (00:26:55):
My name’s Sophie Hills, I write for the Christian Science Monitor, and this is my question’s kind of more broadly about the question of trust and trust in the media and readership and push back. My assumptions here are wrong, but to me the center for a long time has moved to the right and I mean the center politically and some organizations and within the media we have these discussions about trying to stay in the center and my question is about do we follow the center? But increasingly in the last election especially, there was so much coverage pointing out that many Americans don’t actually feel particularly represented by either party and it feels like a breakdown of kind of the two parties. That’s institutions and so when we’re looking for stories, when we’re framing stories, is it even possible to write for a wider audience? Sometimes it just feels like if you’re writing a story about Doge layoffs, it’s going to be read by a narrow audience. I dunno if that makes sense, but how do you think about that in terms of staying as, I don’t know.
David Weigel/Semafor (00:28:08):
I guess I’m optimistic on part of that is that just explaining what has happened with the layoff and what the program did is one useful and two, is it going to appeal to every reader? No, but the stuff that I tell people will tune out on is if the angle is how could this affect Donald Trump? Is this even if there’s a protest outside because one thing this administration has done and they didn’t invent it, but it’s easier for them because of falling trust in the media is just if there is a protest or if there is negative coverage in the media, it strengthens a resolve to not care about it. The fact that they were protest at us, A ID, they said, well, we wanted that to happen. Deporting college students for foreign college students, not for violence, but oh, they wrote an NAPA that we didn’t like.
(00:29:00):
They want the negative attention and I find the coverage that actually has picked up and people have read regardless of what they think about is just like the factual stuff. It’s just like, okay, let’s see what was in the sentencing document. Let’s see. Let’s find the attorney and talk to him. Not that 5 million reporters can call the attorney, but that stuff not the how is this effect politically, that’s what I’ve found and I’m arguing against interest is I write a lot about what the political impact of this will be. When I looked at my phone just approving some newsletter stuff, indeed, I make that point and I was making that there are a lot of voters who expected Trump to lower prices and he is not doing it. That’s relevant, but more if there is a tuning out, if the angle of a story is, is this going to lead to some political backlash?
(00:29:47):
If it is meet the people who are deported, meet the people who are being laid off, those have I think broken through. Now there are people who are saying, that’s amazing. I love that they’re laid off the way that they might like reading 24 years ago, Enron workers are laid off and crying. Oh great. There are people who take I think kind of a sadistically and government workers being laid off, but that story definitely gets through. I was seeing the people still want to know what is happening to these things. The ability to explain, well, what did U-S-A-I-D do has been really useful. The stories about these programs, some of them were through attorneys finding people affected by it. A lot of it was here’s, we looked into the grants, here’s here’s a story about what this grant was doing and there are people who say That’s a S story.
(00:30:37):
You don’t want to read it, but that’s been really an insight illuminating for how the government spends money, what the theory of it all is the it’s the follow-up, well, here’s China moving in and trying to do some of it or here’s the private sector moving in and trying to do some of it. I think those have been traveling now they don’t lead necessarily, but there are different outlet. There’s what leads on TV news often, especially if you watch Fox this week, it’s diverted even more from what the daily goings on the government are. It’s been a lot of culture war coverage of things that are happening but are not affecting people economically that that stuff goes through the trust in institutions generally. I think let’s stipulate that there are a lot of people who stop paying attention to media because they thought its coverage of Covid was hysterical and relied too much on experts saying things and I don’t know say you unring that bell, but I do with the lesson there was that people start to lose faith in a media outlet or source if it says stuff they think is not true.
(00:31:39):
If it’s lying to them right now about terrorists and saying, don’t worry about it, and then the terrorists affect them, I think that’s not going to be good for the very rah rah partisan. Don’t worry. Trump’s got this handled media and in that climate who benefits the people? Just trying to tell the story. I think generally hitting more roadblocks is you’re going to hit more roadblocks. You’re trying to find a fired worker who wants to talk and wants doing in the media, then you will a Republican or a Democratic operative, but that stuff has been breaking through. I do and that was what I was seeing that was people turning their heads to the TV or whatever when I was in Wisconsin was here is a human telling the story they got affected.
Grant Schwab | Detroit News (00:32:19):
Hey David, thanks for being here.
David Weigel/Semafor (00:32:20):
Yeah, of course.
Grant Schwab | Detroit News (00:32:20):
Grant Schwab with the Detroit News, Washington correspondent based here. You touched on this a little bit already, but best you can and I guess a couple minutes, what’s your guidebook or crash course doing drop-in coverage? Well that doesn’t seem too parachuted. I mean nitty gritty things like where are the places you like to go to? What does your prep involve? How much of your two day itinerary or three day or whatever are you setting up in advance versus just going with the flow when you get there?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:32:49):
Yeah, no, that’s a good question and again you have to just do it for a while in order I think to not, I always worry about looking like a parachute reporter. I worry less if it’s Wisconsin has been coming to for stories for 14 years. Yeah, no, 15 years so I know, but let’s say right now I wanted to go there blind, blind. The first part is really just a lot of tedious calling of people and finding out what the campaigns are doing and who has time to talk. Sometimes with America Pac, you often find they just don’t want to tell you what they’re doing necessarily. You find out for other people, but a lot of the calling of campaigns and getting a few things that for what I do, you can see in person to some extent, so like the Brad Shimmel campaign and conservative judge said, yes, we are not going to announce every event necessarily, but here’s where you can go to talk to him.
(00:33:50):
The Crawford campaign, oh, well this day she’s pretty busy but she has a block between phone calls so you can talk to her in her office then and then it was reading basically everything I could about the race and their records, not even as just the primary sources but the reporting on them. They both had pretty long careers in the state shiel I’d known from attorney general and I knew reporters who had covered him, so not saying give your notes just more. I mean I often just ask people like, Hey, I don’t want to be naive or make a mistake that you see national people making. What should I know? But I do that with friends I’ve had, it’d be tough if I was cold calling somebody. I’ve had that where there was one I did in North Carolina years and years ago where I thought I did a fine or a fair job covering these weekly protests that were happening against the legislature and I made a couple of local media really angry. They felt like they weren’t getting credit for what they’d done in that I had not cited them enough in doing it. Not that I was ripping them off, I just wasn’t saying they reporting enough, but just that there’s no substitute for just reading a bunch and calling a bunch of people and then you get there and you’re more confident for finding which places to go.
(00:35:17):
Madison, we know how it’s going to vote. I think it ended up being the city of Madison was 90 something percent for the Democrat and then the county around it was 77 to 78 and every time I would get a, okay, we can talk to you, we can meet this place in Madison. I would be not annoyed but a little crest like can’t we go somewhere where I’m a little less familiar with the territory? I do try to seek out places that are a little bit less, not a little bit less predictable in their politics and I know less about found. I say those for just getting voices from voters on election like this. The part of that is just finding a polling place that is not obviously, and you can go back and check, alright, lemme go online. This polling place or this precinct I should say was 90% Harris last time, so that’s not going to be very interesting.
(00:36:09):
This one was 55%. Let me go and talk to people outside that one. That’s the other part. The other angle glamorous part is let me park outside this place because early voting is happening and if I can talk to five of people after asking 20th, they’ll talk. Honestly, not to be too stereotypical, but Wisconsin’s pretty good for this. It’s not one of the ruder states. People do like to talk about their participation in democracy. Then I feel better. It’s like, okay, I’m here and I’m parachute a little bit, but I’m trying to find people who do not have totally set mindsets on this and I actually find, I found TV people I knew who did come in just for three days or something at the very end they did that and had really good luck doing it. They’re pretty good at finding it. I mean Shaq Brewster especially was doing something from NBC where he found a place that was in the Milwaukee suburbs had trended a little bit democratic in the last election.
(00:36:58):
It was Republican and he was finding people who said, yeah, I’m pissed off at Elon. I’m not necessarily a democrat and I voted for Scott Walker, but this is annoying, and just finding a couple of those got past the total stereotypical coverage of the state. Also calling it a cheesehead every time a story, we’d call it a cheese hat or a cheesehead hat, that was the signal that they were not paying attention. That was the holding up three fingers instead of that. But that’s part of it too, is reading it and saying, let me not get this pronunciation wrong. I did hear one TV package that got pronounced the name wrong of the Republican candidate and I was like, ah, that’s the tell you were only there for two days. You didn’t even talk to him. Maybe nobody cares. For me it’s like I don’t care if a journalist see it’s more well a reader see this and just say, that’s not my state. That’s a cartoon
Speaker 4 (00:37:50):
Right down.
Stephanie Lai/Bloomberg News (00:37:52):
Hi, this is Stephanie with Bloomberg News. My question for you is just based on all of your experience, it seems like you’ve been very nose to the ground, really aware of all the politics across the us. I’m just curious if there’s been any moment in the last couple of years that have surprised you, kind of similar to what you’ve said about this Wisconsin election that really shaped your understanding of the electorate.
David Weigel/Semafor (00:38:18):
I probably think well, we’re done probably think of one that totally shocked me as opposed to I had a hunch and this said, my hunch was a little bit right or wrong, one sticks mind. I was carpooling with a colleague in 2016, primary day of the primary day before the primary in Ohio, I think day before, and we went to Mansfield, which is one of the cities that had been in decline for decades, and when we talked to voters, not only were they voting for Trump, but they were just extremely blunt that they were voting for him because nobody had ever been able to turn around their city. It was falling. It used to be so much better. These had very detailed examples of how things had been in decline for a very long time and yeah, John Kasick was on the ballot, but he hadn’t fixed it and that was one of the, oh, okay. I had gotten Trump’s appeal before that, but really clear where his appeal was going to be if he was the nominee and indeed Ohio was one of those states that was competitive and fell off the map. That version of the pitch was so powerful. Yes, your town’s screwed and can you really trust Democrats after Barack Obama was president, he didn’t fix it either. That one was very helpful.
(00:39:27):
I’m surprised that it’s this blunt as opposed to, I’m completely shocked that this happened. I’m trying to think of an example that’s not Trump centric. Exactly. With Harris, anyone who covered Harris too had closely had this experience where they went to something where she should have done well met or even her own rally and just if you talk to people on the way out, if you prod a little bit, they were disappointed. They had thought she’d be more inspiring and they thought she’d more specific and they weren’t, and this was black women who’d come to see her. The appeal of the campaign was, part of it was she could be the first black female president and they weren’t happy about it, and so that happened throughout her career and there was one weekend before the election 2024 in Philadelphia where a group pitched me on its Philadelphia turnout program and I went and spent a day with them and you could just tell that people were people they thought were black voters in central Philadelphia.
(00:40:30):
This is more western central Philadelphia who definitely had voted democratic before you could just tell from talking to them. They were just not enthused by her and they weren’t saying, now I love Trump, but just the way that I remembered from covering Obama that was not there, that was much more or covering Biden 2020 much more. We got to get Trump out of there. I could just feel that I was surprised because they had invited me to see it and I told them just, yeah, you invited me to see a program that’s working, but clearly you’re finding people who are not excited. That was the surprise was they really thought we’re going to show this reporter a package of how this is working so well because I think a week before that it was this turning point in Arizona and their thing worked out great.
(00:41:07):
They were finding Republicans who didn’t usually vote early and they were getting the vote early and everything they said was going to happen happened and when Democrats didn’t, I said, oh, surprising, but this informs a lot. If I think of something at the end that was a full on shock, but I try to be completely shocked by things. That was one of my whole career going into things and saying, whatever biases are, let me not be shocked if they’re wrong, and Trump was actually hard in the beginning with that because I would find him saying things I thought would offend a conservative audience that didn’t, but after a while I got used to that. I can’t think of the last one that truly shocked me. Yeah,
Corina Cappabianca | Spectrum News (00:41:49):
Thank
Speaker 7 (00:41:49):
You.
Corina Cappabianca | Spectrum News (00:41:52):
Hi, I am Corina Cappabianca with Spectrum News. I work with our local TV stations in Florida and was wondering if you’ve ever gone to cover a campaign or a candidate and maybe you get there, they don’t want to talk to you or the campaigns sort of giving you a runaround. How do you deal with that?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:42:14):
Oh yeah, several times and sometimes with other reporters having the same experience. Lemme think of one example that was strange was in New York 2022, I wrote a story about first post Dobbs special election, which was won by this guy Pat Ryan, but the expectation was, oh, it’s a swing seat that the Republican who lost it last time is going to run the special no win the Democrat. I actually covered him in another race. He was super open to talk, here’s the schedule. He’s going to be at this event with Schumer. He has time to talk in this coffee shop. You only won 20 minutes. The Republican, no element of the campaign would answer me, and so I just had to go back to the Democrats say, you guys track him, do you know where he is going to be? And he was going to show up for a event with Lee Elden who’s running for governor, just Delvin’s bus was coming and he was going to show up and I showed up at that and introduced myself to his campaign person and I wasn’t like, Hey, how dare you ignore me.
(00:43:23):
His campaign spokesman and the candidate and the candidate turned out was like gave me his cell phone number and once I was physically there, the campaign person was like, oh yeah, we’ve been really busy. He was trying to avoid the media, but once I was there really busy and Mark Malara, the candidate told me about something that was happening in a day that I could go drive up to and I did that, but I had to just show up and be and pressure it things where I showed up and the campaign just said, actually this is closed.
(00:43:52):
That’s another version of it. It’s happened in Alabama with Roy Moore especially because the Post and his campaign just stopped letting the post into things and I generally would just show up anyway if it’s clear the candidate doesn’t want to talk to me. I’m like, well, I just want to see what this is like. So I’m going to show up, I’ll talk to people in the outskirts, I’ll show up and not register as press and to see what the speech was. I don’t care. Worst thing that can happen is they kicked me out of something that they want me to not be in any way. Then when we’re the candidates like, we’re going to talk to you. Oops. We decided not to.
(00:44:28):
That happened a few times covering Ted Cochrane was running for reelection senator from Mississippi 11 years ago and just was clearly too old and senile and his campaign came hiding from us, here’s the event, but you can’t talk to him. And that just became part of the story and I was open with the campaign. We will point out that we’re talking to his opponent, not him because we have the ability to explain this and if we had a camera, we would have the camera on him. They care less and less Republicans, especially if the story is they wouldn’t talk to anybody and it’s not like you’re trying to hold that above their head like a sword. We’re going to give you bad coverage. It’s just if their strategy is we think what’s great for us to ignore the media and go around you, then they can do, they don’t like it, but sometimes with those campaigns he wasn’t, he was senile, but there are other Republican campaigns that just don’t want to talk to some media and they go on podcasts where they go on X spaces or whatever.
(00:45:27):
You just have to listen to that and use that and note in the story. They didn’t talk to me, not ideal. I knew a bunch of people who did that for Brendan Herrera, who was his name, he was running in a Republican primary for the house in Texas in 2024 and lost very narrowly, just would not talk to mainstream media, but was always on these right-wing shows and we just listened to the shows and said, he said this, what’s his answer on this question? Luckily the host asked him to ask that question. We just had to make our own. But if I find out where they are and they say, oh, it’s not open press, I often just show up and then if I get kicked out, whatever, what are they going to do? Honestly is my thinking. If they want a story about how they have a TRO on a reporter who showed up to an event, great. Good story. I am not worried about it.
Speaker 4 (00:46:18):
Then we’ll go back. Excuse my back.
Cybele Mayes-Osterman | USA Today (00:46:22):
Hi am Cybele. I cover national security for USA today. I wanted to ask you about the rise of the Trump voter in politics and what the impact of that has been. I feel like before or after this election there was a lot of soul searching among outlets who thought that there was this talk about, oh, well, during the first Trump term our coverage of Trump was kind of, people took issue with that. A lot of people, Americans pushed back on that and we need to think about how we covered this President. Is there anything that you think was most fundamentally misunderstood about the Trump voter as this force in politics and what’s your outlook on that now?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:47:13):
The Trump voter, I think there was too much of a sense from the media and from Democrats that there were a lot of people who voted for him as last resort and wouldn’t come back because once it wasn’t Hillary that he was run against, they wouldn’t, I don’t want to be too passive. I was skeptical because there was so much late minute, last minute, well, I just don’t want Hillary being there. This guy would shake things up attitude that he had made so many mistakes up to 2020. I was a little surprised and also it was hard to get a sense of enthusiasm because of Covid. I was surprised how many people said no, we’re all in complete long haul. But I think overall reporters are pretty good at showing up and talking to people and the tell is always how angry liberal news consumers are when they just read a story about Trump voters somewhere who like what he is doing. They feel like we are, I’m not trying to be too generic, but just somebody replying on Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever, or in the comments angry that reporters went somewhere where they love Trump. It’s like, do you not want to know this? I think that the press has generally been pretty good at doing that.
(00:48:23):
Not quite what you asked, but I do think the way reporters can write stuff that if the Trump voter reads it, they you’re catering to ’em. It’s just not using anonymous sources who criticize things that are from name sources get through this idea that there’s this collusion happening between the press and between the deep state, et cetera that is trying to make him look bad even when nothing’s going that bad, and I always did that. I don’t like using blind quotes. I don’t like this is a bad looks had one source close to whatever, but I found when I talked to Trump voters, if that’s the story that I write, then not like I’m trying to make a Trump voter friend every place I go, but then I’d find that person says, oh yes, I hate the media, but that was fair. You quoted me accurately.
(00:49:16):
You quoted the de Republican accurately the stuff that they would say, this is why I don’t trust the media is, and sometimes unfair, I’d have people I would quote and then get angry that I quote them accurately, but generally things that are not, we’re going to give the narrative to somebody who won’t use their own name. That was absolute repulsion for Trump voters, for covering them. I really do think the press has done a good job on it. I’ll defend it all the time. There were not as many stories people going out and like, Hey, why do people still like Barack Obama? Why do they still like Joe Biden? There just weren’t, those weren’t written. I think the sense in the press that currently the press has constituted people with different educational experience, different political values than the average voter who is a non-college educated white guy, still by a little bit the average voter still, I think everyone’s figured that out.
(00:50:14):
We need to have a broad reach beyond our own social circle to understand people, and I find this as a reporter, if I talk to people who are more in academia or don’t do that interaction, that’s often what they ask me is How do you put up with that? What do you say when someone believes a conspiracy theory and think, oh, I dunno, they have a different life experience and I talk to ’em. That’s what the job is. Yeah. I feel like everyone I know who covers this is good at that. I’m sorry if that was too rosy and answer the question, but I feel like I always would defend us. I just don’t see as much. A lot of conservative media at this point is podcast stuff where they’re talking to each other. I don’t see them going out there and saying, why did you vote against Susan Crawford? I see more. It doesn’t make sense that she won. Let’s run a regression that shows that she didn’t. I feel like the press that has replaced it is much less open to finding different opinions than the press they hate so much. Yeah, not an unpopular opinion in this room, but thank you for letting me rant. Thank you.
Hailey Bullis | Washington Examiner (00:51:27):
Hi, I’m Hailey Bullis with the Washington Examiner. Thank you for coming to speak with us today. Getting back to the political side a little bit. We saw yesterday kind of a grail rebuke of Trump’s policy from Senate Republicans. As we are gearing up for this long term, do you expect to see more of that or do you expect it to be very much a case by case basis?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:51:57):
Case by case, and I was saying a little bit at the top, it’s just I think you have to cover every politician through their incentives and what are Tom Tillis’s incentives or is it to be independent from Trump because he is worried about running reelection or is it to avoid a primary challenge because he’s betrayed Trump on something? What is Bill Cassidy’s incentive, and this was the story with the RFK at junior nomination is this incentive that they would deny that he’s worried about a primary challenge, but he’s polling behind a primary challenger because he voted to convict Trump. So I don’t know if that would grow. Being on the lookout for some Republican who decides to break from this is possible. I just think each person should be understood and there’s not that many in Congress. There’s not that many on the ballot that are actually in trouble.
(00:52:47):
What are we talking about who are running for reelection and are on the ballot in a competitive state, five in the Senate, 20 in the house, 25 in the house, just understanding what each of them do. So do I expect more people to break 180 Republicans? I would not expect to break on anything at all because of those incentives. If I’m in a plus 30 Trump seat, I just think of Bob Good in Virginia who just didn’t endorse Trump very quickly and said some nice things about DeSantis and lost his seat. The point of that is for everyone who might want to break from him to feel the same way. So I don’t expect much of that. I am curious on, because I do think Vance is going to be the nominee the next time that he’s doing everything to set himself up that way.
(00:53:33):
I am curious that there are some breaks on that. I don’t think that’s going to be a big story though for another year. So once it’s like, do I want to campaign with somebody in my state who is, you didn’t ask this, but part of this, I do think it’s already been interesting to ask Democrats what they think of their leadership. And I’ve been through many versions of this. Republicans for years would say, I don’t want Mitch McConnell as my leader and then they’d vote for him. You’ve already seen some Senate candidates say they wouldn’t vote for Schumer. Good thing to ask everybody, would you vote for Schumer? Would you vote for Jefferies if you’re with one of these candidates, if a Republican would you vote for Johnson?
(00:54:12):
A hundred percent? They’ll be happy to break with Johnson before they are with Trump. But that’s an interesting way to see They’re thinking about the structure and the credibility of their party. I don’t know what would happen to turn Democrats enthused about their leadership around in a year. They’re not going to win many things. They’re going to stop some stuff. But that question I think will be, will lead to more interesting answers than can you really support Trump on this thing? But it’s always worth asking. Can we imagine the thing that Trump does that’s so unpopular that people, Republicans are comfortable breaking? I can’t yet. Maybe my imagination is not big enough, but I just keep looking at those primary results and saying, no, they would denounce Johnson and they would denounce heg Seth or they denounce somebody who seems weaker than him before they would denounce him.
Cady Stanton | Tax Notes (00:55:06):
Hi, I’m Cady Stanton. I’m a Capitol Hill reporter with tax notes. So obviously something I’m following really closely this year is the reconciliation package and possible extensions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And something that I find really interesting is how much of that decision making is thinking about the midterms when in reality, especially for this reconciliation package, it’s a lot of tax extensions rather than tax cuts. So I guess from your perspective and experience, how do you see trying to measure how voters would receive messaging, seeing these as tax cuts
Speaker 4 (00:55:40):
Versus
Cady Stanton | Tax Notes (00:55:41):
Actually seeing, for example, they may not see the impact of a tax package until they’re doing their taxes in 2027. What politicians might be saying about what the tax package is doing versus how it actually impacts pay stubs. How do you try to measure that, especially in relation to the midterms and how it affects voting?
David Weigel/Semafor (00:56:03):
Well on the rates, I don’t think those, because they’re invisible, they’re, you’re not going to see much reaction to that. It’s an interesting story the way Republicans are playing with the baseline, the Senate, but I think that’s fascinating, but it’s ironic because for most people it was a non-issue in the campaign. If you go back to how much Trump talked about it, occasionally they’d say Democrats want, you can always say Democrats want the largest tax increase in history because in real terms, that’s the most, getting rid of these would be the largest tax increase in history, but they knew that wasn’t one of their best issues because just the average person is making varies from state to state, but the average person’s not in these brackets that they’re actually playing with it. They were not paying that much in income tax before the 7 20 17. They were not paying much after Democrats actually did a pretty good job of making some of it toxic.
(00:56:59):
So I think unless things are added, the stuff that Trump ran on that he didn’t explain how he’d pay for the no tax on tips, no tax on social security benefits. That one’s especially interesting. I think it sounds good, but a lot of people don’t understand that most people with lower incomes are not ever going to pay. That was the tax that put in place in 1982 to balance it because they knew that some people could take the hit and some people couldn’t. Those they would. I think that the degree to which people would notice those, the tips, one they would notice, but it is only a yearly thing, but you’re bringing up an issue, something where there definitely is a lot of, not just lobbying but ad spending and messaging in Washington to convince people that everyone cares about this, but the way it would come up in the election next time is Democrats, Republicans saying that Democrats want to raise taxes, but they can’t because Trump will still be president.
(00:57:54):
I don’t think as a voting issue, it’s going to be super relevant until 2028 when the next Democrat’s running and these will have been extended, probably most of them, I don’t know how this ends yet, and they’ll be able to go back and say they want the largest tax increase in history. Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore, whoever wants that. I think that’s interesting how they prep themselves over the next three years to do that, but don’t, unless some of the new things Trump mentioned on the campaign trail happen, I don’t think, I’d be amazed if people are meeting and planning ads next summer and think this is one of their best issues. There can be far more. Democrats want boys in your girls sports team ads than Democrats oppose the greatest tax extension in history. You didn’t notice it. The invisibility problem in politics is real. That is immigration can be as big an issue next year. Well, probably not because when border crossings are down, people don’t pay attention to it and that’s the catastrophe of success. This has happened to Trump before they’re ray down. It stopped being an issue. He talks about it and if there’s not a caravan coming, people don’t care. Same thing if taxes, it didn’t change at all, you don’t get a reward for saying, look how you’re doing. Taxes didn’t go up.
Shrai Popat | PBS NewsHour (00:59:16):
Thanks for being here. I’m Shrai Popat with PBS News Hour, you sort of hinted at this in the last you gave, but I just kind wanted to talk about Democrats are apparent
(00:59:26):
What is and isn’t resonating in the voters you’re speaking with at the moment right now when it comes to the new faces or the faces that might be front and line to be the Democratic party, Gavin Newsom, folks like Alyssa Slotkin, Ruben Gallego, these sort of newer faces and their attitudes towards those big social issues when it comes to trans people in sports, immigration, things like that. We’ve seen people like Gavin Newsom come out and try and break through the noise when it comes to those right-wing podcasts and talk about trans issues, and I’m curious to see whether that comes across as genuine to certain democratic voters as a necessary strategy or it becomes trite and insincere.
David Weigel/Semafor (01:00:08):
Well, I haven’t pulled Democrats very much on what they think of, of Newsom overall. They think it is insincere because his record does not match what he’s saying. Now, Andy Kaczinski, CNN, had a very good story about Newsom saying, no, Democrat I know uses Latinx, and he had as governor as because it was the lingua frank of how Democrats talk. Not all Democrats, but again, the academics, the kind of people who talk, who donate, who come to, we have a new some fundraisers, he’s not seen it sincere, and the overall way that Democrats see that issue I find is that it is a distraction, the norm that they put ahead in place at the end of a Biden administration, which is protections, the acknowledgement of gender fluidity existing, which is not the Trump position. If we just got back to that norm and chilled, we can talk about real issues when this comes up at, for example, the Bernie, a OC rallies that I went to, I went to just the ones in Colorado.
(01:01:13):
That’s how it comes up is that they’re bringing this issue up to divide us. They want us to ignore that they’re going to cut taxes for the rich and they’re ignore that we’re cutting food stamps, et cetera, et cetera. That is generally how I see it. The only politician I’ve seen be a little more aggressive who’s in that mix is JB Pritzker. A little bit was more of just coming out and saying, no, I’m never going to give up on these people. I’m going to distinguish myself from the Democrat on your own with the C Nnn panel who’s saying we need to give ground saying we’re never going to give ground, but it’s often that context, I’m not going to give ground because this is a distraction from real issues because that one, we could do a whole thing on it because that’s a complicated topic where a lot of Democrats agreed to a lot of positive rights and equal rights in a way where they didn’t have to be pressured like they were on gay marriage where they said, well, no, no, of course we all support this.
(01:02:06):
We all support gender identity, et cetera, and then the political risks became apparent here everywhere, Europe, everywhere. Only after those rights were in place, oh, we’ve extended these rights. We’ve redefined gender, but now there’s somebody who wants into this bathroom, and what do we do about that? I’ve not seen them answer that in an effective way, apart from by effective way, I’m just saying just talk about some edge case and say, we have a solution for this with sports. I’ve seen it say, yes, the NCAA has this policy, we should just defer to them. That’s been pretty effective for them, I think, but in terms of saying how are we going to fight on it, general democratic response has been they want to talk about these issues or we want to talk about economic populism, and that’s Greg Cassar who’s not running for anything is the head of the congressional Progressive caucus really emphasized this.
(01:02:52):
He did a couple of interviews, but I talked to him this week about Elon’s stuff and he emphasized, again, we need to have a big tent or we’re not saying you’re not allowed in if you have the wrong position on social issues, and this is Sarah McBride’s position, this is a number of this position is we can deal with that later. We need to be a credible economic populist party, and then if we are, there’re going to be a lot of people who deprioritize their disagreeing with us on abortion or something because they agree with us on taxation, on welfare, on healthcare, et cetera. That’s the mood. I’ve not seen a Democrat really swerve from that. I really just haven’t seen even what when Newsome did is just he didn’t, because the reason I was hesitating is because if you could go on YouTube, download a hundred million hours of people arguing this issue and just saying There should be no quarter.
(01:03:42):
We must what Trump is doing, we must completely erase these definitions and these rights out of the law completely, and I’ve not seen Democrats say, no, we shouldn’t. Here’s how we fight back. They’ve said, alright, let’s emphasize our popular ideas first. It is really early, but I am struck when they do that because I’d say no center left party in the world has figured out how to navigate this conservative backlash on those issues, not the first time it’s happened. You go back to them dealing with liberal, the end of school prayer in the sixties when the Supreme Court struck that down, like liberal textbooks in the seventies. This always happens that they say, gosh, we’re losing on this one. Well, let’s talk about something else.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:04:29):
You have time for one more, David?
David Weigel/Semafor (01:04:31):
I do. Yeah. I mean whoever wants to talk. Yeah.
Nicholas Anastácio | National Journal & Hotline (01:04:36):
Hi, Nicholas Anastasio from National Journal and Hotline. I cover senate campaigns for them. In your early career, whether it’s talking with campaigns or talking with folks in states that maybe you’re not as acquainted with, how are you able to assert yourself and say, I need to talk to this candidate, I want to hear from them, or for the campaign to show some type of tangible evidence that their campaign is to be taken seriously?
David Weigel/Semafor (01:04:59):
Oh yeah. Well, you probably, I mean I’m sure a lot, just like you do have to see if they can actually raise money before there’s any polling. What sort of support do they have? How can they prove that this is a real campaign that has support? I do. Money is the most basic way to do that. Even when I was covering not a Senate candidate, but covering a OC in 2017, this wave of brand new Congress justice Democrats, she wasn’t raising no money. She was raising much less than Crowley, but oh, this candidate with no connections is putting together a real campaign and when I show up and talk to them, there is a real campaign.
(01:05:44):
I’m worried about getting super specific because we’ve got, let’s say last cycle, Alyssa Lockin is running and then there’s still Harper running as a progressive who’s talking about healthcare and stuff. I didn’t spend a lot of time covering that race, and it was because he could raise some money and he could get some attention, but just talking to you could talk to Democrats of the state and know there was not really that interest, and I was also going my gut that democratic voters care about electability not about any ideology right now in 2024 too, if given a choice between a candidate they agree a hundred percent with, and a candidate that they’re convinced is more electable, a lot of them will go with a candidate they think is more electable, but that’s just gut. How do you tell in a race, let’s say where I’m thinking of a couple examples.
(01:06:35):
Michigan again, Mallory Mc Morrow’s in Haley Stevens might get in. How seriously should we take somebody who’s like, I’m a rich person just getting into this race and I have no record. You start with just talking to them, like introducing yourself to your team, talking to them about the race and coming back to them later. I think it’s worth giving everybody a chance, unless it’s a clear stunt thing, which is rare. There’s a candidate who’s just running to get their name out in the media and you can tell, you talk to democratic Democrats in the state and they’ve never heard of the person before that Sometimes they can by their way into Congress like RIF edar or something, but even with him, I talked to him when for governor, it’s just like I always at least take the interview and the worst thing that happens is here’s 15 minutes and I’m never going to write about it.
(01:07:22):
I could tell this candidate wasn’t super serious. Once you get to who should people be taking seriously in this race that’s after a quarter of them raising money, I think is the only way. If you’re being, I just haven’t seen a candidate raise nothing and have no endorsements and blow past in the Democratic primary in a Republican primary. Everybody take everybody. Also, you have to take some people seriously. They don’t have the resources because for the time being, the plan is still become credible to Trump. Get an interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, get him to tweet about you and then you are credible. Democrats don’t have a shortcut like that available to them. Are we totally cut off? There’s one more hand up. Yeah,
Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:08:03):
Right over here. Sure. I just wanted to respect your time.
David Weigel/Semafor (01:08:06):
No, I’m good. Just there was some edit of a newsletter I think is fine, but I’ll check my phone. We’re done. Yeah,
Hannah Demissie | ABC News (01:08:14):
My question is, we’re kind of seeing, you talked about how JD Vance is most likely be the nominee for 2028. I’m curious why you believe there’s such this consolidation among GOP, at least a lot of GOP senators saying they believe Vance will be the nominee. I mean, he’s, the RNC announced last week that he’ll be the chair of the finance committee. I’m curious why you think there is this consolidation behind him
David Weigel/Semafor (01:08:42):
In particular. Well, that’s a good example. The RNC on paper is neutral in a primary unless there’s an incumbent president, he’s not. So by making him finance chair that was Vance and the story of Vance is that he just will take a risk and they often work for him. He’ll do something that might cause a backlash, but it has worked for him. Sometimes it doesn’t, hasn’t failed for him yet, but there was no Republican saying, how dare they do this? It’s supposed to be an open primary. They didn’t react that way. They’re not treating him. He’s the best candidate and he’s a shoe-in. If he’s the nominee, they’re not saying, we need to make sure he’s the nominee because they’re worried about somebody else, and I’m thinking of, even though Clinton lost, that was the attitude in 20 13 14 with Democrats is we hope she runs because we’re not sure that anyone else can do what she can do, but why are they not doing that?
(01:09:30):
Yeah. I think I was answering a little bit the last one, just if you’re Republican, unless there is some huge meltdown of Donald Trump’s political support and it’s a George Bush 2008 situation, then Trump will control, you can do everything you want, run against Trump and he’ll anoint somebody else and they’ll beat you. Nikki Haley has not been very relevant since she ran. No one’s talking about her running. The other people that are in the mix are in the cabinet, so how would they do it like a Marco Rubio? They also haven’t thought much about it, and I think even Democrats, I point this out when I say Trump, third term talk is distraction. They just are not thinking about a post-Trump climate yet. I don’t think they will until 2027 or right after the midterms and they realize, oh, there is an end date on this because it’s what they’ve been.
(01:10:25):
There’s a whole generation of strategists that have only operated, I’m thinking of everyone I know from justice Democrats in those groups. They started with Bernie, but Trump was the driving force in that election and that’s just been the Republican party they’ve known for 10 years, but that’s why there’s also, there is a philosophical debate about what the party should stand for. There are Republicans that we’re talking about who don’t. I do think that at this point the Republicans who say one thing anonymously to the media and then one thing out loud, I just trust the thing they say out loud. I feel like they’re saying what we want to hear, but are there Republicans who would rather the party move in direction away from protectionism and disagree with our approach to Russia? Are there any who say, and I can make that the basis of a campaign?
(01:11:17):
Not really. I think there might be somebody, let’s say everything goes okay for Trump and he’s still got 75% support Republicans in 2027. Would there be somebody who runs a Joe Walsh style campaign, says, I’m going challenge him. Sure, but then they have the context of Trump not debating in 2024 before that the RNC just not letting any Republican even on the ballot. In some states, if they were challenging Trump, they just have seen Republicans be very comfortable in preventing competition, which they might extend advance. So those are the reasons I haven’t seen somebody. I think somebody might, the situation where they say, can we actually deal with this guy is one where it’s a political disaster and it’s 2027, and Democrats had a great election advances polling at like 35%. That’s the climate. That was the climate in 1987. Republicans had a terrible midterm in 86.
(01:12:12):
They lost the Senate. George HW Bush was not popular personally, like Reagan, like Bob Dole, everyone piled in that race. They were like, yes, he’s the heir apparent, but we can’t possibly win with this guy. And they eventually did, but that will be, they’re not going to boldly go in with Trump as popular is right now, but I don’t know they’re missing something. I think because there is no argument in public about what Vance stands for, which is not what Vance stood for six years ago. I mean even on tariffs, it was not what he stood for. He went from this tariffs are a bad idea because the hollowing out of the Midwest that I’ve seen is not reversible with tariffs too. Yes, it is. You could theoretically argue with that, but the arguing is being done by bulwark writers, which I’m not saying I think they’re doing a great job doing it. It’s Jonathan last and it’s like Charlie Sykes. It’s not a Republican saying This is a bad idea.
Kevin Johnson/NPF (01:13:09):
Probably have to end it there, but I get this feeling that when David is not offering his knowledge that he is constantly on the phone or on a plane somewhere. But we’re lucky to have you here and I know you’ll be back hopefully with the next class, but thanks so much. Please.
David Weigel/Semafor (01:13:31):
Thank you. I appreciate it.
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