The NPR Politics Podcast - Biden Won Georgia And Arizona. Why Are Their Democratic Senators So Different?

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

The states both have long histories of Republican control, but the two pairs of senators have taken remarkably different tactics in Congress. Arizona's Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema came to Washington by persuading the state's split-ticket voters and soft partisans, while Georgia's Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won by exciting Democratic base voters.READ THE STORYThis episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, WABE reporter Emma Hurt, KJZZ reporter Ben Giles, and congressional editor Deirdre Walsh.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey y'all, this is Yuri Grace Ohashi calling from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yesterday I submitted my final assignment as a Harvard undergrad. Today I'm getting my second dose of the vaccine, and tomorrow my parents are coming to visit from Georgia. This podcast was recorded at... Whoa, so many milestones. It is 1-08 Eastern on Tuesday, May 18th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this,

but I will definitely be celebrating graduation with my family. Enjoy the show. Congratulations to everybody graduating, everybody getting a vaccine and everybody reuniting with family members. All great things happening right now. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh, congressional editor. So we're going to talk about a great story that you were part of, as well as a couple of our great member station reporters. It's about this. You know, Democrats have control of the U.S. Senate in part because of all four senators from Arizona and Georgia now being Democrats, which is such a big change from just a few years ago. Narrow victories in those states also help

put Joe Biden in the White House. But the politics of those states and those senators are really different. And that fact is shaping what is happening in the Senate right now and what could happen in the midterms next year. So we're going to talk about all of this and what it means with WABE's Emma Hurt back on the podcast again. Hey, Emma. Hey, thanks for having me. And Ben Giles from KJZZ in Arizona. Hey, Ben. Hey, Scott. I really loved hearing both of your reporting on this. Let's go back and forth a little bit here. Let's start in Georgia, a state that we have talked about probably more than any other state in the country over the past year. It was a red state for 20 years, two Republican senators for basically all of Trump's

tenure. Then suddenly in the runoffs, two Democrats elected. It gives control of the Senate, two Democrats, a huge shift. And Emma, they are both taking a pretty progressive approach so far, aren't they? Yeah, I know. I thought you all thought you were done with Georgia Senators Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff, but we're back. So as a refresher, if anybody missed it, these are the two that won these upset runoffs in January. And, you know, they did campaign really close to Biden. That was really the platform was elect us and the Biden agenda will be able to happen. And since Biden had just won Georgia, as you said, that was a winning strategy and it worked. And then in their early days since, they've been sticking to that tune.

They've been championing Biden's infrastructure plan, championing his COVID relief, and not afraid to say that, yeah, we need to raise taxes on corporations to pay for it and things like, yeah, we need federal voting legislation. So this is a really big change for Georgia, which has had Republicans in office in the Senate for a long time. And Ben, in Arizona, they had two Republican senators. We've talked about both of them on the podcast a lot, John McCain and Jeff Flake. Now two Democrats representing Arizona, but they are doing so in a very different way than Georgia. What has the approach been for Arizona's Democrats? Well, it's not like they're

anti-Biden, but the Biden agenda isn't always front and center. And that's because Sinema in 2018 and Kelly last fall, they both are Democrats, but they're running in Arizona almost as independents because that's what appeals to voters in statewide elections in Arizona. A press event two weeks ago, Kelly didn't explicitly mention the president or the infrastructure plan. Instead, they prefer to talk about local job efforts. They talk a lot about reaching across the aisle, the bipartisan legislation they're co-sponsoring with Republicans in Congress, trying to make Congress work more efficiently, trying to make congressmen work together.

Deirdre, there is so much to talk about, about how this is affecting the Senate. It's a 50-50 Senate, so every senator's individual choices affect the body. But broadly, this gets to such an interesting tension point in the Democratic Party right now as they figure out how to keep these narrow majorities, the Senate majority that cannot get any narrower next year in an off-year election where typically it's not great for the party in power. Right. And the stakes could not be higher for president Biden's agenda. And right now this week,

they are trying to negotiate potentially a bipartisan deal on infrastructure and the policy differences between the centrists in Arizona or more moderates, however you want to talk about them, and the progressives in Georgia, and how they think about whether or not we should be raising taxes to pay for it on the rich, or in Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema's view, reaching across the aisle and making sure there is a bipartisan proposal that they can tout. Those are very different ideas. And Biden has zero room for error because he needs policy support from both ideological wings of the party. And just quick politically, a reminder, Republicans only need to net gain one seat in the 2022 midterms to flip control of the Senate and retake control of the agenda, which means the final two years of Biden's term could be that much tougher for him to get anything done. And you can see the way that these lawmakers have have positioned themselves playing out in real time. I mean, it's worth noting of these four senators, the one who's

being really courted by the White House getting Oval Office meetings with President Biden is Sinema. Right. And she had a solo sit down with President Biden, even before her own leadership did last week. Yeah, yeah. So so Emma, let's let's look at the tactics in Georgia and the thinking behind them. Because, you know, running toward the progressive lane, the idea of energizing progressives more than winning over moderates and Republicans, it's worked for several cycles now, according to Georgia Democrats, right? Yeah, you know, and it's a new one. So, I mean, I think to go backwards a bit, when Georgia Democrats and Democrats in the South first started to lose control in the early 2000s,

the theory at first was, wait a minute, let's try to get those people back and those, frankly, white voters back that were switching tickets and going to vote Republican. And so they put up candidates who, as someone, as the current chair of the Democratic Party in Georgia, told me were Republican-lite. And that didn't work. Republicans kept control. And so they've changed that.

As the state has changed demographically. The Democratic Party has really been speaking directly to, as the party chairwoman told me, marginalized communities to our base, talking about things like raising the minimum wage, clean energy, abortion rights. rooms really was the face of that new strategy in 2018. And Warnock and Ossoff have carried it on. I mean, there's this great quote from a Democratic strategist, Stefan Turkheimer, who said to me, you know, the theory of Georgia Democrats right now isn't about persuading the middle. It's about motivating the base. It's not about trying to get Catholics to convert to Baptists. You're trying to get Baptists to go to church. And that really sums up where they are. And the theory is that the numbers will work out in your favor if you do that in a way that maybe they didn't used to. I love that. I love that quote.

So, Ben, is it fair to say, though, that in Arizona, Kelly and Sinema are out there trying to convert people knocking on doors? Is that fair to frame it that way, running with this? They are definitely trying to appeal to Republican voters, maybe those as Emma referred to as Republican light, because there's this fierce independent streak in Arizona. I mean, a third of Arizona voters are independents. I spoke to Kirk Adams. He's a Republican, a former speaker of the Arizona State House, and now he's a Republican political strategist. And he told me statewide elections here are decided by what he termed soft Democrats, soft Republicans, and independents.

It's those voters who, when they go to the ballot on election day, they're not bound by the views and the opinions of the activists, the far right, the far left in either party. Now, I also spoke with some progressives in Arizona who wish that things were more like Georgia, who wish that Arizona senators were focused on the progressive base. But we just haven't seen that be a winning strategy yet in Arizona. All right, we're going to take a quick break when we come back more on how these differences are playing out on the Senate floor and affecting the Biden administration's agenda. I'm Yo-Ai Shaw. I'm Kia Myakonitis. We're the hosts of the NPR podcast, Invisibilia. You can think of Invisibilia kind of like a sonic blacklight. When you switch us on,

you will hear surprising and intimate stories. Stories that help you notice things in your world And we are back. We're going to talk about the F word again, the filibuster, whether Democrats will get rid of it. It has been an ongoing topic on the podcast because it's been a big storyline with Democratic control of the Senate and House and White House. Quick reminder, it allows the minority party to force 60 vote thresholds to pass bills through the Senate. Some Democrats have been pushing to get rid of it, particularly to pass voting rights reforms. This is a really big difference between the Georgia and Arizona senators. Let's start with Arizona because, you know, going back to how Senator Sinema has been positioning herself, she's made it pretty clear, Ben, she's not really interested in doing this.

No, she thinks it's a good rule or at least a good tradition in the Senate. And I think it speaks to that desire for statewide Democratic candidates in Arizona to express how hard they're trying to reach across the aisle to work with Republicans. They think that's what Arizona's voters want to hear. They want to hear about bipartisan efforts. They don't want to hear about one party ramming something through over the full-throated objections of the others. And so Sinema has been out front on that. Kelly has been dodgy on this issue. It's something that dating back to the 2020 campaign, he did not want to address. It was seen as a good attack for Republicans. And he kind of dodged a question I asked him the other week, just very quickly pivoting to other topics, saying, if there's a real proposal on the filibuster out there, I'll take a look at it. And I think that that's really going to be a struggle for them in 2022 with the progressive base.

They've been out there. They've been campaigning, holding events, urging Kelly, urging Sinema, support getting rid of the filibuster if that's what it takes to overhaul voting in America. Emma, Senator Warnock is on the ballot next year. How has he handled the filibuster question? How has Ossoff handled the filibuster question? They've both pretty much said that in the case of voting, in the case of getting federal voting legislation through, it's worth it. It's got to be on the table. We have to do everything that we possibly can to pass that. And that, you know, comes from the fact that Georgia did pass a voting law to increase, this is the line in the sand for them.

And they're not afraid to talk about getting rid of this rule to try to get around what they would argue is Republican obstructionism. And they're framing this as a very much. Why does this even have to be a partisan issue? This is voting. This is what everybody should want this to happen. So Deirdre, there are a lot of interesting states on the Senate map next year, actually, including some of the big traditional Midwestern battleground states we talk about a lot, but those are mostly in Republican control. If Republicans want to retake the Senate, they need to win one or both of these states next year. How are Republicans responding to these different tactical approaches in Arizona and Georgia? And what are they thinking about as they recruit candidates to run against Kelly and Warnock? Well, they don't really want to talk about their

own recruiting issues right now, because the Republican parties in both states are divided and unclear about who the best candidates will be. Democrats are banking on messy Republican primaries in both states. But overall, for now, they're trying to define the Democrats in these two Sunbelt states, and they see these states as their best chance to flip a seat because they were previously held by Republicans for decades. So what they're trying to do now is to define both Mark Kelly and Warnock as reliable Democratic votes for what they see as an overreaching Washington agenda. They think some of the campaign finance voting legislation is kind of a Washington power grab. That's sort of the bucket of things that they put a lot of the Democratic policy proposals in. And I think they're going to run against both Democrats with similar proposals, trying to paint them as, you know, regular supporters of Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, sort of the liberal Democrats that they think will animate their voters to come out against those Democrats next

fall. All right, great reporting from two of the most important states out there right now and shaping the political future of the US. Ben Giles from KJZZ and Emma Hurt from WABE in Georgia. Thanks to both of you. Thank you. Thanks, y'all. And there's some great reporting online on NPR.org from Ben and Emma and Deirdre as well. That's definitely worth reading if you've listened to this much of the conversation. We will be back in your feed tomorrow. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh, congressional editor.

Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.