Tangle - The Sunday Podcast: Isaac talks with former Congressman Scott Klug.

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

On today's episode, Isaac talks with Scott Klug, a former Congressman, journalist, and lobbyist. They discuss the polarization of American politics and the need for more civility and collaboration, the disappearance of the political center in Congress and the need for more balanced and local coverage. You can listen check out his podcast, Lost in the Middle, here.You can watch the entire Tangle Live event at City Winery NYC on our YouTube Channel!Check out Episode 5 of our podcast series, The Undecideds. Please give us a 5-star rating and leave a comment!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Help share Tangle.I'm a firm believer that our politics would be a little bit better if everyone were reading balanced news that allows room for debate, disagreement, and multiple perspectives. If you can take 15 seconds to share Tangle with a few friends I'd really appreciate it. Email Tangle to a friend here, share Tangle on X/Twitter here, or share Tangle on Facebook here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Coming up, a six-pack on some of the latest breaking news, my love for the Olympics, and an interview with former representative Scott Klug. You guys are going to like this one. Stay tuned. Scott Klug. You guys are going to like this one. Stay tuned. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast,

a place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and this is a little different for our Sunday edition pod. I'm here solo today, no Ari, because we have an interview coming up in a moment with Scott Klug, the former member of Congress, who I'm going to talk to about bipartisanship, current state of Congress, working across the aisle, some of the stuff he's seeing right now. It was a really interesting interview. And before we jump in, I'm going to do a little six-pack. I'm putting 60 seconds on the clock for six topics that I wanted to get into. So 60 seconds each. And just going to go a little rapid fire here before we get Scott on, because there's been

so much news. I'm recording this Thursday, August 8th, that it feels like too much to ignore, I guess, to just go in and do this interview without sharing some of that. First up, I'm going to start the clock on Tim Walls really quick. 60 seconds on Tim Walls. The Stolen Valor stuff, I think it might stick a little bit. I don't think this guy faked any kind of military service or anything like that, but these clips of Tim Walls referring to his experience carrying weapons of war into the battlefield are clear exaggerations of his military record because he never served in combat. And the fact

that he was being referred to as the wrong title because he advanced to a certain level and then had his demotion before he retired, that's also something that's a little bit sticky in the military and veterans community. And I know on the surface, some of these attacks might seem a little overblown or silly, but I actually think there's a chance that a couple of them might have some traction and he's going to have to answer questions about them in some interviews that might be kind of awkward. Number two, Kamala Harris's crowd sizes. Weird thing to talk about because for the last eight years, all we've ever done is talk about the Donald Trump rallies. I saw a video of Kamala Harris at Temple University in the same arena that Donald Trump had a

rally not long ago, and it looked very different. She is driving on-the-ground enthusiasm in a way that I've not seen any Democrat do since Barack Obama. And I don't say that lightly. I mean, I know we've had two, three presidential cycles now, 2016, 2020 and 2024. And I know other people have had big rallies and big crowds, but the scenes around Kamala Harris in Atlanta and in Philadelphia are genuinely eye-opening. And I think dismissing them would be just as silly as it was to dismiss the crowd sizes that Donald Trump was driving in 2016 and 2020. Admittedly, much bigger crowds.

But still, Trump's campaign seems to be lacking a little bit of energy, especially when compared to hers right now. Number three, speaking of Trump, this guy has to get focused. If Donald Trump keeps doing the stuff that he's doing right now, he's going to lose this election. And I hate to break this to people who are rooting for him, but I want to be really clear. He could be talking about Minneapolis. He could be talking about immigration still. He could be talking about chaos in the Middle East and Russia on the march. talking about chaos in the Middle East and Russia on the march. He could be talking about the Harris Wall's record on immigration. He could be talking about all the positions Kamala Harris has flip flopped on. Instead, he's talking about Brian Kemp, a Republican in Georgia, he's criticizing. He's talking about January 6th still. I mean, I just watched a press conference he did today. He spent 10 minutes on January 6th. He could be talking about so many different things that are weaknesses for Kamala Harris. And instead, they're throwing out the DEI candidate stuff. And he's questioning whether she's Black or Indian or whatever it is

in this conference with the National Association of Black Journalists. The stuff he's doing on the campaign trail is really, really self-defeating. And if they don't figure it out soon, he's going to be in big trouble. And I think Kamala Harris has a lot of momentum right now. Which brings me to number four. The fact that Trump isn't getting focused is not good for him when you combine it with what we're seeing in the data. We just had a Marquette Law School poll come out showing Kamala Harris up eight points on Donald Trump. That's remarkable. That is a total flip of what we were seeing even two, three months ago with Joe Biden atop the ticket. She's leading likely voters with 50% of the vote to Trump's 42%. Also, those numbers get better

when you include a third party candidate, which is something that seems likely to happen. So this is big news. I mean, we are pretending like these polls maybe aren't that significant. They are very significant. On top of that, I'd like to just throw out there that Ipsos recently recontacted battleground state respondents. And in that poll, those respondents went from plus three for Trump with Biden on the ballot to plus two for Harris. That's a five point swing. Again, this stuff is very significant. And if Trump keeps campaigning the way he's going to campaign, I genuinely think he's going to lose. touch on the war in Gaza and some of the latest developments we have, which basically amount to us being on the precipice of a regional war. I know we've been saying that for a long time, but the assassinations of political leaders from Hamas and Hezbollah, they're putting this entire thing as far out on the precipice as you possibly can be before falling in. I'm hoping that by

Sunday, when this podcast is published, we are not in a live hot war between Israel and Iran, but I genuinely think we are about a half step away from it. And it's terrifying me. And I think it should be on the front page of every newspaper and it should be most of what the candidates are talking about is how to avoid this. It's really, really scary. And I also want to acknowledge that some of the things that Israel has been accused of in the last few months have been corroborated, like sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners. And there's a great deal of shame and division and anger among Zionists and Israelis right now about this. And it's hard to overstate

how divided and tense and running hot the country is generally on all fronts right now about this. And it's hard to overstate how divided and tense and running hot the country is generally on all fronts right now, whether it's about Netanyahu, Hamas, these accusations of abuse among prisoners, the fears about Iran, it's all just boiling. And I'm really scared. And I'm genuinely, genuinely really scared. And it feels important just to mark this moment in time. Hopefully in a week or two or a month or two, it feels like, you know, things have gotten better. But I'm currently not optimistic. Finally, number six,

I do want to end on a little bit of a happy note. I love the Olympics. I just like, it's incredible. And nothing, not nothing, few things make me feel so patriotic as watching the Olympics do. Just like rooting hard for an American athlete to win and then watching them do it. Our track team's incredible. Our volleyball teams are incredible. We have some of the best swimmers ever. I just got done watching the basketball team come back and beat Serbia in the semifinal to go to the gold medal game. I'm fired up, man.

And I remember the Olympics being awesome always. They come around every four years. I remember four years ago, it was kind of crappy because it was in Tokyo and there was COVID and it just didn't feel right. But I forgot how exhilarating and incredible it is when it's a real full throttle Olympic event and you're all in for your team. And I'm just all in for the USA, baby. And I love it. It feels good to be patriotic. You should do it. Love the country. Root for your guys and gals. Yeah. So if you're not watching Olympics, you're missing out. And by the time you hear this, the Olympics will be over because I think they end on Sunday. So maybe it'll be too late, but

I am so pumped for the women's 200 meter final for the gold medal game in basketball, for all the events we have coming up. I'm just going ham for the USA and I'm super excited about it. All right. That is it for my quick six-pack on this Thursday afternoon, which brings us to the main thrust of today's podcast, which is my interview with Scott Kluge. Scott is a former Republican member of the House of Representatives from Wisconsin. He won his seat in a surprise upset of a 16-term incumbent, and then he served in the House for eight years from 1991 to 1999. Scott was a television journalist before he became a member of Congress, which makes him particularly interesting to me. And after he left the House, he worked as a lobbyist focused on

public affairs. He now hosts a podcast called Lost in the Middle, which I think I'm going to be appearing on pretty soon, where he focuses on moderate and centrist voters in the US. We had a great conversation. We talked about his time in Congress. We talked about this project, Lost in the Middle, he's working on. We talked about polarization. We talked about his former colleagues,

all the solutions he has for polarization. It was great. I really enjoyed it. Scott is an awesome dude. I'm very grateful he came on. And I think you guys are gonna be interested in this one. So stick around for the interview. And yeah, let me know what you guys think. You can always reach me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C at readtangle.com. Scott Klug, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. Good afternoon.

So before we get into some of the work you've been doing since you left Congress, which I'm super interested in given the work we do here at Tangle, maybe it'd be good if you just started telling our listeners a little bit about who you are and some of what you did in your career. Sure. Well, I have the whole access of evil covered. So I spent about 14 years working in television news, mostly in Seattle and Washington, D.C. Then I spent eight years in the U.S. Congress as a Republican for Madison. And then I spent the last 10 years on and off working for a law firm lobbying in Washington. So every direction you want to look, you can stick me in a place you don't like or you do like. So journalist followed by politician followed by lobbyist.

I'm really interested in one of the things you're doing that you actually didn't mention there, which is this podcast you're a part of called Lost in the Middle that I think focuses on some of the same stuff we focus on here at Tangle, our polarized politics and trying to find a little bit of common ground. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit

about what made you want to do this pod and get involved in this effort and maybe what you've learned so far. Yeah, so it actually started with the first Kevin McCarthy fiasco, not the one where he got dumped, but the one where he struggled to get an election. And I was in the cereal aisle of a grocery store pulling a bag of granola off the top shelf. I am actually a Republican in the People's Republic of Madison, so I have to eat granola to fit in with the rest of the gang. And this guy who recognized me for my days in Congress said, I don't really get what's

going on in our country. I meant this whole McCarthy thing. The Republicans are running around the country taking middle school books off the shelves. The Democrats are trying to take the stove out of my kitchen. It's like, who the hell signed up for these people? So I reached out to a friend of mine and said, we should really take a look at the middle, because I think that they're getting ignored in this entire debate. And I think what you hear a lot of in Washington and nationally doesn't really represent what's going on in the rest of the country. I mean, I don't think it

represents central Pennsylvania or suburban Atlanta or, you know, small towns in Wisconsin. And I think people are just puzzled by the tone of politics, by the fact we can't seem to get much done. And so that sort of launched the whole podcast idea. It's storytelling episodes, and we do one episode a month. And we're in the episode 11 and 12, we just did on reform ideas and whether any of them will work and what they really accomplish. But along the way, we've talked about realignment, civility, and politics, what the hell went wrong with the media. And we're obviously hitting a note because we've got lots of folks following us, and it's been a fun project to do. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break. and funny films of the year. Written and directed by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg and starring Eisenberg and Emmy Award winner Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a comedy about mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes

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seeing or experiencing that feels not quite right? Well, I think the first thing is there's no middle left in the House. It's all completely gone. So if you look in 2010, Obama had 60 blue dogs he could lean on when he was trying to get the health care bill passed. And after 2022, the blue dogs gathered for a meeting in washington there were 11 of them left and there was a fight over the name because half of the people who were sort of centrist democrats said look i'm not a southern male so i'm not a blue dog and we should change the name of the organization and by the time it was done six people stormed out the room and formed one group, and the five people were left in the traditional blue dogs. From, so, 70 down to 12 or 13. Moderate Republicans have gotten wiped out in big chunks of the public in the country.

And so if you looked in New England when George H. Bush was president, I mean, it was filled with old Yankee moderate Republicans. Same thing happened in the Midwest. Same thing happened in the Midwest. Same thing happened in Southern California and Orange County. And so if you look today, the number is, I don't have to have this precisely, but it's only 15 or 16 congressional districts in the country where the member who got elected to Congress was elected from a party that was different than the president who won that congressional district. So when the middle disappears, there's not unbelievably very much middle ground to get things done. And the one I always tell people about is, you know, you and I can find three people at a diner in Bucks County and pull them off, you know, next to us. We can write down an

immigration plan in 15 minutes on the back of a napkin. And you look this time out, you know, the Senate comes up with the deal. They send it to the House. Johnson kills it because he wants it as a campaign issue for Bush and all the Democrats, you know, rail against it. Except you have to figure out that when George W. Bush was president, there was an immigration deal the Republicans did in the House, and they sent it to the Senate, and Schumer killed it because they wanted it as an election issue for Obama. And I think that's what drives the country crazy, that, you know, people are more concerned about scoring political points than actually getting things done in Washington. And so I would argue that we were much more effective, much more collaborative, and much more focused, I think,

on our districts. Today, it's all become nationalized, which then dovetails into the media, which is a whole other story. Yeah, I know it's hard to talk in generalities. And actually, I really do want to talk about the media with you, but I want to stay with Congress here for a minute before we do. I know it's hard to talk in generalities. I guess I'm wondering, you know, how much of what we see, I'm a journalist reporter, but also just, you know, a regular guy who's following the news like crazy, is performance art. And how much are, you know, do these guys really hate each other and loathe each other? Because I'm starting to have trouble distinguishing between, because the performance art part of it has gotten so wild that I'm starting to struggle to see what these guys are actually like in the room with each other,

which is kind of an interesting place to be, is I don't really know how they feel about each other anymore. Well, part of this goes back to redistricting, right? And here's part of the problem. So, you know, you're a Republican, you get up in the morning and you worry about a primary challenge. And it's the same thing in the Democrats on the other side. And so what it's done is really pull incentives out of the system to essentially sell the fact that you're working with the other side. Today, it buys you a primary and you look like a turncoat. You know, you can't even use the word that we ended up compromising on something because it implies, Isaac, I gave something away to you that was important to me. And so if you look, you know, nobody rarely,

rarely runs ads anymore that says, I worked on the other side. Now, one of the things that was interesting in 2022 is there was a huge sort of outburst of ticket splitting around the country. And it happened in every corner, right? And so my favorite one is actually in Georgia, where you've got a Republican, Brian Kemp, who ran away from Stacey Abrams, which was supposed to be this great race that Democrats were excited about for five or six years. But the Senate race, Raphael Warnock, who is a Democrat in what's now a very purple Georgia, ran ads actually talking about how he worked together with Ted Cruz to get something done for a military basis in Georgia and Texas. I mean, simply to cite a Republican

was a pretty amazing story. But then to cite Ted Cruz, who most Republicans don't even like, I think was a really telling sign. And I think the public really hungers for that kind of cooperation. And, you know, you see it in New Hampshire with, you know, Sununa gets reelected as a Republican. There's a Democratic senator. You go up the road to Vermont, amazingly, where the most popular politician is not Bernie Sanders. It's actually a four-time elected Republican governor. Same kind of ticket splitting in Wisconsin and Kansas and Arizona. And I think that's what people in the country are really hoping for, because that's how they deal in their everyday lives. You know, you see this tone in the country right now, and it doesn't work anyplace else in politics. I mean, it doesn't work

at where you work. I mean, if you talk to your co-workers like that, you know, they'd chase you out the door. It doesn't work where you go to church. It certainly doesn't work when you go to your kid's school and meet with the teacher's conference. It sure as hell doesn't work in your family between you and your spouse. But somehow that's become the executive practice in American politics. And I think we really need a return. And I always sound like some guy who went to British prep school when I say this, but I think we need a return to old-fashioned civility. I mean, people can't have Thanksgiving dinners with their families before half of the family walks out the door. And it's just craziness. The country can't run that way and families can't run that way.

it's just craziness. The country can't run that way and families can't run that way. I guess I'm interested in how you feel we take a step toward that. You know, I mean, the solution element of this seems like the complicated part because we've identified, I hear a lot of people identify similar problems, primaries. We'll talk a little bit about the media and their role in it. But it doesn't seem like anybody has a roadmap right now for a solution. I don't know if you're starting to hear rumblings from former colleagues in Congress or grassroots movements that you're a part of, but I'd be curious how you feel like we kind of dig ourselves out. Well, people try to do it. So let me tell you two examples. So close to home, Utah, there's a woman named Tammy Pfeiffer. She started her political career working and running for city

council in Logan, Utah, because she was mad about a zoning fight in her neighborhood. Pretty classic stuff. She's got five kids. She's got a Republican, an Independent, a Democrat, a Democratic Socialist, and a Libertarian. And she started to get frustrated by this, and it really hit a head at her dinner table. Two of the girls were teachers, and one of the guys who was the Libertarian was furious about any kind of mask orders in public because he didn't think it was the government's role to do that. So they literally walked out the door and did not have a Thanksgiving dinner together for the next two years and barely talked to one another. So she actually said, we've got to figure out a way to fix this. And so she started to work with a group on the East Coast called Unite. And what they tried to do was

develop a civility index for political speech. And so she worked with researchers at Utah State, worked with social scientists, worked with political scientists, got students together with a Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent to score political speech. And basically, if we started to talk about immigration, and I said to you, Isaac, well, I don't agree with you on the wall, but I agree about how we can get more Ukrainian and Afghan refugees in the country versus me saying, well, you're full of crap and you're going to send the whole country to hell if that's the way they do it. They work on this project for months. They actually post it on Facebook and tick, tick, tick, within 36 hours, she has to take it down

because every Republican said it was a Democratic plot and every Democratic said it was a Republican plot. every Democratic said it was a Republican plot. So she continues to work on this. But I think that's an indication of the kind of stuff that's going on in little bits and pieces. There was another group that was active right after Trump got reelected originally that said, let's make dinner great again. And so the idea was you'd invite four other couples to dinner with you, Republicans and

Democrats, and try to get folks to talk about it. So there's little stuff I think that's going on in the grassroots movement, which gives me lots of hope. I'm actually working with some folks right now to try to copy something the Brits did. The Brits actually have national political civility awards, and they give them out every year. And the interesting story is the first one, first person who won it was the last person they thought would win it because it was actually the guy who led the fight to win Brexit. And most of the folks involved in the group were from academia and more literature and sort of left and center. But when the guy who led the fight, the MP, the night of the actual first vote over, you know, over Brexit, he stood up in a crowded ballroom and said,

you know, tonight we won. And the usual practice is we crow about it. And I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go home and have a quiet glass of champagne by myself because we've won a very important victory. But I know there's a lot of people in England who've been devastated and hurt by the vote tonight. And tomorrow morning, we all have to work together to figure out how to get this done. When was the last

time you heard an American politician talk like that? I can't think of anybody in the last 20 years. And so the answer is, it starts, I think, on the grassroots level. And I think it has to start up above where we single out some role models who are doing and saying things exactly the right way. You know, one of the pieces of this is the media piece. And it's part of why I do the work that we do at Tangle. I mean, our North Star is trying to build an organization, a media organization that can be trusted by conservatives and liberals, a media organization that can be trusted by conservatives and liberals, and also that shares a wide range of opinions on the news every day. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how the media impacted your job as a member of Congress and kind of how you see it impacting

other members of Congress, because, you know, it's sort of a chicken and egg thing sometimes, but from where I sit, it's very clear to me that our representatives are playing to the press and to the cameras. And, you know, the old joke is when you go to a scrum in Congress or whatever, you see a hundred people surrounding Marjorie Taylor Greene, but there's nobody talking to Dean Phillips or whoever, because they want the Marjorie Taylor Greene quote. And so we play a role in that. I know we do. And I'd be curious how you view that. I think it's a tough time for the media because the business model has changed so much. And people always ask when did this start? And

I say not facetiously. When somebody brought a used car on Craigslist in 1994. And people go, what does that have to do with anything? Well, if you're my age, and you're old enough that you might remember this when you were a little kid and you were looking through sections in Sunday papers, is that classified advertising was a huge part of the American newspaper industry. It's where you, you know, think of everything you do on the internet today. It's where you bought dogs, where you found a job, where you bought a house, where you sold a house. And when Craigslist exploded, it destroyed the classified part of American newspapers, which was probably 40% of their income. At the same time, a round rolls the internet and everybody

says, oh, this is great. We'll just put our product on the web and everybody will get it for free. Well, it's tough to support a business if you're losing classified advertising and you're losing subscriptions at the first part. So I think that's a lot of what's changed newspapers. And I think newspapers have had to subtly shift left or right in order to hold subscriptions. I mean, you saw what the New York Times, where they very blatantly said, we're going to be an anti-Trump newspaper. You saw it at the Washington Post,

where they said, democracy dies in darkness. If you could ever find a more pretentious slogan, let me know. And now the same thing's actually happening to cable TV, right? So everybody went down the rabbit hole. And I don't know about you, but if I watch Fox or I watch MSNBC, they're in parallel universes that I never choose to visit. So the cable systems have got to become much more partisan because it's the only way they can stay in business is people start to cut the cables. So, I mean, I feel frustrated like I think most people do with the media. And I think there's a real lack of balance. I say this, you know, not only was I a Republican in Madison, but I was a journalist who was a Republican. And I'm still's a real lack of balance. I say this, you know, not only was I a Republican in Madison, but I was a journalist who was

a Republican. And I'm still active at the Board of Visitors at Northwestern. And I think what really drives me crazy is the press gets very defensive about this. I meant, you know, sort of arrogance is not an issue. And when people complain, they sort of say, well, you're, you know, you're not fair. We're trying to do the best job we can. And then you saw the NPR story from, what, five or six weeks ago, where one of the reporters in the NPR offices of Washington goes and checks the voter registration of his compatriots

on the editorial side. And the number, I think, was correct, 93 Democrats and no Republicans. So there's a real problem in balance with the media. And people often say, well, you're a journalist, why are you a Republican? And I say, well, because I did lots of stories on government programs that never worked. So why would I ever want any more of them? And so part of it's a mindset. And I think it goes back to, you know, the old H.L. Mankin days in the 1920s where he said, you know, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

But the solution tends to be, I think, for many journalists, that means we need a government program to set it up. And I think it takes away individual responsibility. So like everybody else, I'm frustrated with the media, you know, that, you know, again, I think only 7% of journalists identify as Republicans. And my answer to newspaper editors is, we'll hire some more of them. It'll give you a different perspective on how things are going. So the media really drives me crazy. And you're right. I mean, it's really become, you know, it's a social media game that, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene has sort of perfected. But the flip side of that, Isaac, is that 60 Minutes does a 20-minute story on her. So really, the grandfather magazine of sort of all-serious television news journalism and your focus for a weekend is Marjorie Taylor Greene. So it's sort of, in many ways, a dooms loop that we have to figure out some way to get out of so people can trust the institutions again. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. I imagine you still have, you know, relationships with former colleagues and stuff in Congress. I'm curious, them on the inside, you know, what do they say about this? What are the kinds of things you hear from people who are kind of living through and working in this environment right now? I think there's a wide swath of them that are very frustrated.

But they're trapped, right? They're sort of trapped in the House side on the redistricting game. You know, they're trapped with reforms out there. If, again, I think if they raise their hand and in most cases say, you know, we tried to get things done as the Problem Solvers Coalition or whatever, people are very quiet about that on the campaign front. And I think it's a big shame. And I think it's, you know, at the end of the day, the only way you can make a democracy to work is if the public's informed. And the only way you can get the public informed is if they pay attention to what's going on. And unfortunately, in a lot

of situations today, it's, you know, it's Facebook and TikTok and Twitter, and it's hard to get people to look at problems seriously. And so I worry about the country, but I think that the one thing we could do is to reset this just on a one-to-one basis with people. You know, you and I can disagree about stuff violently, but at the end of the day, we've got to figure out some way to work together. And I knew that when I was in Congress, right? You and I could have a big fight over an issue on Wednesday, but we'd go out for a beer because on Thursday, I might need you for something I'm working on, you know? And that's the way it should work.

And again, I think we've become a very polarized society. But I think, if I could tell you one more media story, if we've got time. Of course. So there were three political scientists about four years ago who did a big study on newspaper desert spots, where local newspapers have dried up completely. And what they discovered, back to one of my earlier points, was that ticket splitting in those places had largely disappeared because people were now only voting on nationalized issues. They weren't thinking about local issues. So the study gets

published and a woman who's an editor for the Desert Sun out in the Palm Springs region in California decides to call up these three people and say, look, would you do a study with me if I try to do it? And they said, what do you want to do? And she says, what I want to do for a month is to take off our editorial and opinion page anything that's national. I only want letters to the editor that are about local community issues, and I only want opinion columns about what's going on

in this corner of California or in California as a whole. So they go in and do interviews with 1,500 of our readers before they make this trend. And then they do interviews with 1,500 readers at another Gannett newspaper that's just down the road some. And at the newspaper, the other newspaper, they continue to do traditional coverage where it's all nationalized political columns. continue to do traditional coverage where it's all nationalized political columns. So after a month, they test it. And it turns out that in the paper in Palm Springs, the levels of partisanship and harshness starts to go down because people are now focused on local school boards, roads, constructions, high school football games. And it's much less than the sort of standard, you know, crossfire shouting matches you see in most national newspaper opinion columns.

So she's all excited about this. And then it turns out Gannett, not exactly a shining light for the American newspaper industry, decides it's going to eliminate all their local opinion editor pages, auditors across the country. So the guy she's been working with has got a choice. You can either take the buyout package or you're going to get fired. It's pretty clear the writing's on the wall. So she turns around and goes to the local community and starts a GoFundMe page and says, we just did this big experiment. And in order to do this, we've got to raise $80,000 a year so I can pay an opinion page editor ongoing. And the community rallies now. And for the last three years,

they've had an opinion page editor actually paid by people from the community who rallied to do this. And then, boom, about six months after she leaves the newspaper to take a job in San Francisco, Gannett turns around and says, you know what, all those opinion page editors we fired, that really wasn't a very good idea

because that's how we keep circulation up. So then Gannett turned around and started to hire local opinion page editors again. So again, like you're questioning about civility and you're questioning about how we change it. You think you have to find people in the press who are trying to be creative about this too and sort of buck stuff and figure out a way where you're talking to your local community that you're not just part now of the, you know, Harris Trump echo chamber that's going to go on for the next 90 days. So before we get out of here, I mean, I do have to ask you, we have a big election coming up. Obviously, the contours of that race have changed quite significantly in the last

month or so. I know you've written a lot about independent candidates. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sort of mounted a third party run that's still getting some traction. I saw, I think, today in the New York Times, Santa College poll, you had about 5% support. I imagine a lot of people you talk to, the moderates in the middle, are looking for an alternative to Trump or the new Harris, whoever ticket. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how you're looking at this election, what you're weighing, what you plan to do with your vote, if you're willing to share. I mean, I'm very interested how other folks in the middle, as it may be, or close to the middle,

are navigating this. So the one thing, I'm going to go back to the grassroots thing again. If you look, which I think is an interesting trend, independents are now the largest sense of registrants in Arizona and in Nevada. Independents are the largest block of votes in New Hampshire, although that's a fancy term up there. They're unaffiliated. But I think that's a national trend where people are so frustrated with both political parties. And you see that with the big numbers of people who are essentially double haters, who don't like either of the political party. People under the age of 30 won't register with the political party for the most part. And so if you talk to a lot of people, I had a long conversation with Mike Murphy, who used to be McCain's chief of staff about this. And Murphy would say, ah, they're just Republicans and Democrats, and they don't want to say it, and they vote the same way they always have. But if you talk to the folks at Arizona State University, which has the only

political science department in the country which studies independent voters, they'll say that's wrong, that independence can shift pretty dramatically. And so if you looked at 12, there was a wave for Obama. In 16, there was a wave for Trump. And at 12, there was a wave for Obama. In 16, there was a wave for Trump. And in 20, there was a wave for Biden. And I think this is a powerful political force we haven't figured out yet. Now, the problem on an independent run for president is the rules are absolutely rigged by the Republicans and Democrats to prevent it. So in California, you need 165,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot. So that means you probably have to get 240,000.

That's Kennedy's problem. I mean, that's the kind of wave that Ross Perot has that Kennedy does and he's struggling to get, you know, an eight, nine, 10 ballots. The other three worst states are New York, amazingly two Democratic big states. And on the Republican side, it's Florida and Texas that screw independent runs for president. So I think what's eventually going to happen is people will start more to run as independent candidates for governor or senator in Congress. That's where I think the wave will come. And Murphy, I think, would even concede now he thinks depending upon how the next four years work out, that could be a pretty powerful force four years from now. I think you saw it with no labels, but it's not right.

You have to pull three things together. You have to be charismatic, which Teddy Roosevelt managed to do in his run in 1912. It's what George Wallace actually did with organization that most people don't appreciate. But George Wallace was on every state ballot in the country and at some point managed to be close to 24, 28 percent. And Perot was probably the peak in 30. And Perot was actually somebody who had the wind behind their back. But it seems if you look at other people that do it, they don't have the charisma.

They don't have the organization. They're sort of trying to do it, they don't have the charisma, they don't have the organization, they're sort of trying to do it when nobody's really paying attention to it. So I'm a big fan of independent voters. I'm a big fan of swing voters. I think it's how we have to reset the political discussion in the country. So I was just at the Republican convention last week, not as a Delic, but it was down the road in Milwaukee, and I was doing some stuff for the U.S. State Department, but also doing lots of radio interviews. And it was down the road in milwaukee and i was doing some stuff for the u.s state department but also doing lots of radio interviews and it was interesting there was a huge um sort of spring in the step for republicans in milwaukee i think they felt like things were going well um you know trump had survived the assassination attempt and i think people thought if you looked

at the battleground states they were in pretty good shape and it's gonna you know the amazing we're gonna it's the same 10 or 11 states. We go through this every time. You know, it's Georgia, it's North Carolina, it's maybe Virginia. It's up the road to Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. I don't think Ohio is really a battleground state anymore. I mean, Mike DeWine is the Republican governor, won Ohio by 66%. I mean, Gavin Newsom only got 58% in California, which is the bluest of blue states. It'll be Wisconsin, Iowa maybe, and then skedaddle down probably to Arizona and Nevada. And that's sort of the subset. You know, there was some talk last week with Trump when he came out that, you know, Minnesota was in play. I don't really see that. It's hard to believe.

I think we've got to let this settle down here. She's got to pick a VP candidate. If I was her and if they did it strategically, if I was Trump and had done it strategically, I would have picked Marco Rubio since you've got Hispanics shifting to Republicans. And I don't know what Vance gets you that he didn't already have. If I was her, I'd pick Shapiro, because if the Democrats win Pennsylvania, they can win, even if they lose a lot of places. But they lose Pennsylvania, it gets really tough to beat. So, you know, we're sitting here where she still hasn't made an announcement. I think it's going to be razor thin. I mean, the problem for the Democrats is that the two biggest issues in the country, they're upside down on. They're upside down on the economy and they're upside down on immigration. And so if you look, you know,

economists can tout out numbers that say the economy is better than people think that it is, but people still think milk's more expensive, gas is more expensive, it's more expensive to take kids to McDonald's. And so you can sort of have, you know, the Federal Reserve saying all kinds of things, but it doesn't matter when you go to the grocery store, it seems more expensive than it was three years ago. And then on immigration, you know, I just took a great trip to England. I'm sort of an old history buff. So I wanted to see an exhibit at the British Museum. Now people will really think I'm an old footy dud. But I wanted to go up the road to take a look at Hadrian's Wall, which really fascinated me. So Hadrian's Wall was built by the Roman general and later emperor Hadrian to keep roving bands of Scots coming into northern England. So it was a defensive wall. It doesn't look like the Great Wall of China. You can't get a chariot

across you. They built sort of a five-foot stone wall, but they usually built it up against cliffs and abutments, so it was hard to get up. So it's a defensive wall. At the same time, there were towers along the way because that's where trading was done. So the trading gets done, and actually, if you go, you can discover old amphora bottles of olive oil that came in through Hadrian's Wall from Greece, you know, and you can see coins from all over the Roman Empire from, you know, one corner to the next. And the people who actually worked at Hadrian's Wall, the sort of defenders, were not legionnaires. They were folks who volunteered from across the empire. So they're from Syria, you know, Bulgaria, Spain,

southern France, every place else in the world. But they weren't legionnaires. But if you successfully served on the frontier for years, you could work up your way to be a legionnaire. And once you became a legionnaire, if you served well for 15 years, you could become a Roman citizen. So check this out. In the year 200, the Roman Senate can basically figure out immigration reform with border security, trade, and a pathway to citizenship. And we haven't been able to do it for the last 20 years. So it's a lesson, I think, for how you got to figure out a way to work together and recognize that the U.S. government is based on trying to solve problems. And there are different solutions to problems. But, you know, at the end of the day,

we're fellow citizens. We have to be colleagues. We can't be enemies. Scott Klug, I appreciate the time. Thanks for coming on the show. If folks want to keep up with Scott, he hosts a podcast called Lost in the Middle. Scott, I appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you, Isaac. Thanks for the show. If folks want to keep up with Scott, he hosts a podcast called Lost in the Middle. Scott, I appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you, Isaac. Thanks for the invitation. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady.

The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.