The NPR Politics Podcast - Election Update + Turkey Traditions

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

An update on where things stand in Georgia and Florida plus why President Trump is planning some rallies in Mississippi. And of course, Domenico Montanaro's annual discussion of why turkeys get presidential pardons. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political editor Domenico Montanaro and political reporter Asma Khalid. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Mark and baby Miles calling from the gorgeous Agincourt Ribbon Reef on the Great Barrier Reef just off of Port Douglas in Queensland, Australia, where we're watching mom and sis take their term snorkeling and catching up on news and hopes things are improving in our home state of California. Our thoughts are definitely with friends and family affected by the fires and all the brave men and women working to contain them. This podcast was recorded at 2.33 p.m. on Monday, the 19th of November. Things have surely changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, here with an update on where things stand in Georgia and Florida,

and why the president is going to be spending some time in Mississippi. Also, a look at one of the annual Thanksgiving activities at the White House, which one of us at least loves to talk about. Loves to talk about? I think he's forced to at this point. What is the word for, like, love-hate? Yeah, that's exactly right. It's like a frenemy except in the form of a turkey. Yeah, we can get into that. All right. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico

Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. All right. So, guys, a lot happened over the weekend. Like, we got the results, finally, in a bunch of races, including in Florida and Georgia. So let's start with Georgia. Democrat Stacey Abrams ended her run for governor this way. I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election. Asma, you have covered this race. That does not sound like your standard concession speech. No, it doesn't. And she was really careful about using that word concession as well. I mean, she said that, you know, eight years of systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment, and incompetence had its desired effect on the electoral process in Georgia. This was a major theme in this election.

It was. And part of it's because Brian Kemp, who is now the governor-elect, was the secretary of state. And he was in this position overseeing his own election as governor. While he was secretary of state, about 1.5 million people were purged from the voting rolls. And we should point out, you know, people are routinely removed from the voting rolls if they move or if they die. But this was happening on a really unprecedented level in Georgia under Brian Kemp. There's a really delicate line here, though, because some Democrats, including Sherrod Brown of Ohio, have come out to say more explicitly that this race was stolen from Democrats and Stacey Abrams. And I'm not sure that that's politically a line that Democrats want to be on that side of. There's a difference between calling out voter suppression

and then saying an election that was run under those rules was stolen. Well, you tiptoe up to the very sort of language that the president has used of discrediting the election system. That said, Democrats have a very real beef with some of these election laws and how they disproportionately affect minority voters. I mean, they certainly do. But somebody has to stand up and say that these elections are fair and that people voted and that this is where it goes, because there's a peaceful transfer of power. That's a really important thing in a society to be able to continue to function. I understand people have bitter feelings and that they have real gripes. But is this the right way to go about it? When you're thinking about appealing to independents, voters like that, I'm not sure that it is. Also, I mean, one thing that I think is worth pointing out is Stacey Abrams is saying now that

she does not think that this was a fair process. And for her moving forward, you know, she's talked about setting up this organization that is going to push on voting rights issues that would potentially, you know, sue as well here in this case. But she sees this as a longer term issue around voter disenfranchisement, of which I would make the argument that many of her supporters also feel like this was not a particularly fair process. Let's move on to the great state of Florida, where there were three elections resolved over the weekend. The Agriculture Commissioner, which is a statewide position and was part of a recount, the Agriculture Commissioner is now the only Democrat elected statewide in the state of Florida. Great point. The governor and the senator

will both be Republicans after the recount. The recount didn't really change the outcome, which I guess is a pretty common thing with recounts. Yep, pretty common. Recounts generally are intended to just make the actual vote that took place look legitimate because somebody might have a gripe and say, hold on, recount those votes for me. I don't know if I buy that. And then you recount them and they might affirm that election. Now, actually, the margin shrank somewhat between the machine recount and the manual recount, went down to about 10,000 votes, but still in favor of Rick Scott, the Republican. In the Senate race.

And then in the race for governor, Ron DeSantis won, beating Andrew Gillum. Andrew Gillum conceded for a second time. Right. Much different response from Gillum than Abrams. That's true. And part of that, you could speak to the fact, though, that I think Kemp being the secretary of state and this being just this highly contentious issue around voting rights, we saw in Georgia more than we saw in Florida, in part just because of who

Brian Kemp was during the entire election process. I think also there's like a different political calculation that Abrams is making than Gillum is making. I think both of them believe that they will continue to have a future in politics, but I think they were approaching the resolution of this election in different ways. That's true. And look, now with Rick Scott's victory, this is going to be, I believe, the fourth Senate seat, right, that Republicans have flipped in this election cycle. I mean, they've only netted two seats because Democrats actually won Arizona and Nevada. But I mean, Florida was a big win for Republicans. I think that

many Democrats early on did seem to feel a little bit more positive about their prospects in Florida. Yeah, I think that's part of why so many Democrats on election night were so disappointed because one, Florida is Florida, right? So it's always a 50-50 state. It's an important bellwether state in the rest of the country. But also because the polls had shown Andrew Gillum doing so much better than he wound up doing. The narrative going into election day was that Andrew Gillum doing well might actually pull Bill Nelson over the line, the Democratic senator. And in fact, you know, Nelson wound up doing better than Gillum doing well might actually pull Bill Nelson over the line, the Democratic senator. And in fact, you know, Nelson wound up doing better than Gillum.

And one of the things that I do think is an important takeaway that maybe Republicans in other states might be wanting to pay attention to as they move into 2020 is that the margin between Republicans and Democrats, when you look at the Hispanic vote, was really tight. I want to say Ron DeSantis got like 44% of Latino voters. I mean, you're talking about like George W. Bush. I wonder if that's Rick Scott related because he did so much work to try to pull up Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans, where he really split with President Trump on the response to Hurricane Maria. Exactly.

And the other thing I was just on the phone with an analyst down in Florida, he pointed to the fact that Ron DeSantis had this Cuban-American running mate. And oftentimes we think running mates don't matter. But in this particular case, it may have because we actually did see. You get that name on a line and you see numbers definitely go up sometimes. Well, so one might think that with this conversation, the election is over. But this election cycle is not yet done. Not done yet.

There will be a Senate runoff election in Mississippi on November 27th. That is the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. It is in Mississippi. It is a runoff in the Senate race there. It was, in theory, supposed to be a very easy Republican win. Domenico, does it still look that way? You know, it's going, it could be a lot tighter than I think people were expecting it to be. You have the Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. She's the former Mississippi Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce. There we go with the ag commissioners again. Former member of the Mississippi State Senate. Now, here's the thing about her. She's well known, obviously, statewide, but there have been a couple controversies since the election that she's

had to deal with that have appeared to benefit the Democrat in the race, Mike Espy. He's a former congressman. He's African-American. So Cindy Hyde-Smith has not been the senator for a long time. She was appointed by the governor to fill the seat opened up by former Senator Thad Cochran, who retired early. But Domenico, as you were saying, she's gotten in a little trouble in recent days with some things she said, right? Yeah, there was this video of Hyde Smith in Mississippi after receiving some praise from one of her constituents who is a cattle rancher. And let's take a listen to some of what she says in that video. Okay, so that train is making it a little hard to hear what she's saying.

Right. But what she essentially says there is that if she were invited by one of her supporters to a, quote, public hanging, she would be in the front row. And for a state that is the kind of thorny, racially divisive background as the state has had, it... A history of lynchings. The most lynchings of any state in the country from that time. And the last public hanging was in 1940. You know, this kind of comment rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and certainly suddenly focused a lot of people's attentions on Mike Espy and whether he had a shot of defeating her. Espy also talked about it and reacted in his way too. They're hurtful and they're harmful. They're hurtful to the millions of Mississippians who are people of goodwill and they're harmful because they tend to reinforce the stereotypes

that have held back our state for so long and that have cost us jobs and have harmed our economy. One thing that struck me this election cycle is that we saw a couple of really key moments where race in politics seemed to come to the forefront with these really off-color comments. I mean, I can think of specific things that Brian Kemp in Georgia said, that Ron DeSantis got in hot water, you know, running in Florida. Almost immediately after winning the primary, he started saying things. And we should say, I mean, he said something around, don't monkey this up. And I don't understand. I mean, are these comments accidental? Because they don't seem like particularly common phrases. Yeah. And that's honestly not the only thing that got Cindy Hyde

Smith in some trouble. Cindy Hyde Smith wound up getting into trouble with another video that was talking about voter suppression and how it might be a good thing. She said, quote, there's a lot of liberal folks in those other schools that maybe we don't want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. So I think that's a great idea. So her campaign said, oh, of course she was joking. But this is just another thing that is another joke that is making this race more interesting. I don't know how it affects the political dynamics, though. The reason that there's this runoff is because no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote. There had been two Republicans on the ballot. will or may turn out black voters to a pretty high margin. I mean, this is a special election after Election Day when black voters are key to Democrats' chances in the South all over, not just Mississippi. This is the kind of thing that could

fire up black Democrats to go and vote and may have the impact of, you know, suppressing some of the energy or enthusiasm among Republicans. Hyde-Smith has not been left alone on this. The governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant, jumped in to defend her remarks. I can tell you all of us in public life have said things on occasion that we could have phrased better. When you make as many speeches as we do in public life, that does occur. But I know this woman and I know her heart. I knew it when I appointed her. I know it now. She meant no offense by that statement. Obviously, Republicans see this as a potential vulnerability for her and felt like having the Republican governor go out there, have her back and reassure some of these Republicans who should be voting to go out and do so. Yeah. And President Trump has already endorsed her long ago, but now

he has two rallies scheduled in the coming days. So President Trump's going to get his group back. And she may need it. Yeah. All right. We have to take a quick break. And when we get back, it's turkey time. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. That's why Grow with Google is providing free online training and tools to help Americans learn the skills they need to succeed. Learn more about Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. I'm Maria Hinojosa, and this week on Latino USA, President Trump says he wants to get rid of birthright citizenship, a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. But one country did take

birthright citizenship away, and we tell the story of what happened next. That's this week on Latino USA. And we're back. So now to Domenico's favorite story. Here we go. Every single year. Every year. This year, the two turkeys are named Peas and Carrots. Peas and Carrots, which, by the way, turkey, in case you don't know, is a meat. This year, the two turkeys are named peas and carrots.

Peas and carrots, which, by the way, turkey, in case you don't know, is a meat. Peas and carrots are vegetables. I don't really understand. Peas and carrots for turkey names? Okay, but let's say what we're talking about. Tomorrow is the big day. Right now, the turkeys are in a hotel getting pampered because tomorrow they are going to the White House. At the Willard, by the way. The Willard Hotel.

Very nice hotel. They are going to the White House tomorrow to be pardoned. For what crime did they commit? Being turkeys. A happenstance of their birth. Once again, the odd, peculiar, weird, strange tradition of the turkey pardon at the White House where dad jokes and embarrassed children will gather around. You know, it's the weirdest thing. And I have to say, the reason that I know so much about this event is because I was so confused by it. Some 10 years

ago, I started looking into it and asking questions about it because I was aware that this thing start. And all I found was misinformation, people getting things wrong. The president of the United States, Bill Clinton, crediting Harry Truman with the first pardoning, completely false. Fake news. That was fake news. They've since cleaned up their act. I'd like to think because of all the digging that I've done, the stories that I've posted, the White House Historical Association has responded to my inquiries and they've posted much better, more thorough history. So we've done something right here. In short, Domenico, what is the history?

Well, OK, the first president to actually give a reprieve to a turkey was John F. Kennedy in 1963. He took a look at this turkey. There's a great photo on my story of it where he has a sign hanging around his neck in all caps. It says, Good Eating, Mr. President. This was not intended ever to be pardoned. These birds were intended to be eaten. The National Turkey Federation, which is the turkey lobby, big turkey, if you will, started giving turkeys.

Big drumstick. They started giving turkeys to presidents in 1947. That's where the confusion came with Bill Clinton about Harry Truman. Now, Harry Truman ate them. I reached out to the Truman Library 10 years ago and asked them about it. And they said there's no evidence that Harry Truman never ate a turkey that was given to him. So there's that. From 1873 until 1913, there was a man named Harold Vose, who was the poultry king he was known as. He would send turkeys unofficially to the

White House. And then it was sort of a free for all from 1913 until 1947, when the turkey people moved in on this thing to make sure that you keep turkey on your plates every night, because that's what this is about every thanksgiving they want you to make sure you remember turkey is the centerpiece of the thanksgiving table now when it comes to the first president whoever used the word pardon for a turkey that was ronald reagan interestingly in 1987 when sam donaldson the jim acosta in ronald reagan's uh you know back uh asked a question about the iran contra scandal and asked if president reagan was going to pardon one of two people who were directly implicated and reagan doing his reagan thing pivoted and said well uh you know i don't know if i'm gonna do that that, but I'm going to pardon this turkey. So he moved on, pivoted. And from that moment on, we have used the word pardon when it comes to the presidential turkey.

It was formalized by George H.W. Bush in 1989. And now you can breathe. Thank you, Domenico, for the history of the turkey pardon. Yeah. And you guys might think with all this turkey talk, this would be our last podcast of the week, but it is not. We will have another episode in your feed tomorrow.

But for now, that's it for us. You can keep up with our coverage on NPR.org and on the NPR One app, and of course, on your local public radio station. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor and apparent Turkey historian.

And I'm Asma Khalid, political reporter. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.