The NPR Politics Podcast - Immigration, Inflation Loom Large As Dems Wonder How To Tout Wins Ahead Of Midterms

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

In a conversation with NPR, Reps. Ro Khanna of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland said that while thin margins have limited Democrats' legislative agenda, the American Rescue Plan and infrastructure package have made a considerable difference in the lives of Americans — and that touting those wins to voters should buoy the party's chances in the midterms. In Arizona, Rep. Greg Stanton, a former Democratic mayor of Phoenix, won his district handily in 2020 but a redrawn map has put him in a tough fight to keep his seat against a crowded Republican field. The economy and immigration are central issues in the campaign and progressive politics are far from top of mind.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional reporter Claudia Grisales, and acting congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.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

This is Tom McDermott in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. I just browned lamb shanks and root vegetables, seasoned with rosemary, garlic, salt, and pepper, and moved it to the oven to braise for three hours on low heat. This podcast was recorded at 1 25 Eastern on Tuesday, April 26th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I may still be waiting for dinner. News moves fast, but braising is a slow process. Okay, here's the show. I feel like in the last few years, I've come around to how delicious and how good rosemary

smells and so many things. I don't know about you two. It's definitely very fragrant. Yummy. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. And it is as close to a sure bet as you can get in politics.

The president's party often loses seats in midterm elections. In fact, in the 19 midterm elections that have happened in President Biden's lifetime, the incumbent's party has lost seats in 17 of them. And with low approval ratings for Biden, high inflation, and a stalled legislative agenda, the president's thin majorities in Congress are in very real danger. And Deirdre and Claudia, you have both done a lot of reporting in recent days about the different ways that Democrats are thinking of trying as best as they can to buck these trends and trends that look increasingly close to set in stone. So,

Claudia, let's start with you. You sat down with two prominent House progressives, Ro Khanna of California and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, to talk about what they think of the party's message right now. What did they tell you? Right. Khanna and Raskin sat down with NPR to talk about what they've been working on several months ago. They began these strategy talks. They think the progressives and the Democratic caucus can do a better job with messaging. For example, Raskin said thin majorities are not conducive to passing sweeping plans like the Green New Deal, but they have approved major legislation, such as the trillion-dollar infrastructure plan and then the nearly

two-trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan for pandemic relief early last year. Here's how Raskin put it in his conversation with us. If Democrats were like Republicans, Joe Biden's name would have been on every one of those checks, you know, and we'd be able to remind people of that. But we just have to tell people of that. So the real issue is that we have to explain to the country that we've got a program. I mean, we're up against a political party, which met in 2020 and came back and said they had no platform for the first time in the history of, I think, either major political party. They said they literally had no platform. What does that tell you? Their platform is whatever Donald Trump tells them is their platform.

I mean, Claudia, why is this so hard for Democrats when they literally gave people money for a good chunk of this congressional term? Right. So what Raskin and Khanna argues, they have not done a good enough job. As you heard there, Raskin is talking about the checks that were sent out under the Trump administration, that they did a good job there making sure Trump's name was on those checks. And they could have done a better job in terms of selling their accomplishments in these last couple years in terms of looking back at what they were able to do under these razor-thin margins. And Deirdre, you just got back from a reporting trip to Arizona. You were in the fourth congressional district, one of the swing districts that could decide control of the House later this

year. You were talking to a lot of voters there. How did all of these dynamics play out in the conversations that you had? Right. I traveled to this newly drawn district in the Valley of the Sun in the Phoenix area where Congressman Greg Stanton, the Democrat, is running for his third term. Stanton's facing off against a diverse field of Republicans who really see this district as an opportunity to flip what was a solidly blue district red. And I talked to Christina Sykes, an independent voter from Mesa. It reminds me of high school, like when there was someone running for class president and they're like, oh, we're going to give you pizza every day for lunch and Kool-Aid in the water fountains.

Show up like you guys not showing up. I love that comparison. I know. And the Democrat who represents the area now, his name is Greg Stanton. I love that comparison. Congress delivered for small businesses in the area. But, you know, he just sort of continued to say over and over again, I'm running on my record. Whereas, you know, people like independents like Christina, but other conservatives in the district were like, you know, what happened to Build Back Better? What happened to all this other stuff the Democrats were going to do? You know, they haven't done it. It's interesting you bring up Build Back Better because that is one point

that Kana raised during our discussion. He said that because those negotiations have dragged on so long, it's created this appearance of paralysis on Capitol Hill, which he argues is not correct because he goes back to, for example, the American Rescue Plan infrastructure. He says over the next few months, they have to really be out there showing that they can get things done. And that's where they look at the executive actions, for example, that the Progressive Caucus has pushed for that perhaps President Biden could help them out there too. I guess, and I'm curious what you made of this, Deirdre, in your reporting on the ground. I feel like I've been hearing Democrats say for two years, we just need to talk about this more and things will improve. And if anything, the situation for Democrats has gotten worse over that period of time, even as they have passed big things like the infrastructure bill. Yeah, I mean, Congressman Stanton, you know, I think was trying to connect

things that he was doing with real life projects and programs in his district. He spent a lot of time during the recess touting the federal money he's been able to steer back towards his district. But he didn't really seem to address, at least when we sat down with him, the sort of demoralized state of some of the fellow Democrats in his party. I think Democrats going back and selling a bill like the American Rescue Plan that passed so long ago and people spent those checks a while ago and some of the benefits of these programs are going away like the child tax credit

and not getting renewed. I think it's a harder message to say, the pandemic could have been worse, but because of these PPP loans, you know, people are still working. I think it's just a harder message to sell. And, you know, they got their work cut out for them. The recession could have been worse was not the winning message in 2010. The last time Democrats were in a similar position. And one more thing I wanted to ask you about, Claudia, from your conversation, one thing that I thought was really interesting was you have these two lawmakers kind of like from almost the archetypes of like liberal background districts, right?

Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley guy, Northern California, Jamie Raskin, academic from one of the most liberal districts in the country. And yet both of them really kept pushing back against this idea of purity tested identity politics, progressivism, and saying the party needs to do a better job of just connecting to voters, even voters who really culturally disagree with the party. What are the ways that they see that can actually happen? Right. For example, Raskin talked about how he hears from Republicans in his district who say they can't take it anymore with their party. They want to be Democrats, but they don't know that there's a place for them in the Democratic Party. Khanna, on the other hand, talks about how he's for Medicare for all. He co-chaired Senator Bernie

Sanders' campaign for president. He'd vote for that bill tomorrow that he was heavily involved in. But at the same time, you can't be preachy about legislation like that. He said you can't go on TV and say if you're not for Medicare for all, you're evil and you want people to die and you're wrong. So he says we can talk about these ideals and have back and forth, but not go into this preachy tone with voters. All right, we're going to take a quick break. More on both of these stories in a moment. And we're back. Deirdre, you briefly mentioned this before, but I want to talk more about it. Earmarks went away for a long time. They came back. This is funding that members have the ability to

directly dictate where it goes. It's a long process. It's complicated. But the point is, it was a big deal in Washington, D.C. that this way to spend federal money came back. A lot of lawmakers thought that this could really help them make their case in their district saying, hey, I got you this particular project. Any sense how that is affecting local congressional races at this point? Well, at least in the district I was in, it seems to be a big issue in this race. Congressman Stanton, who used to be the mayor of Phoenix, touted his relationships with local leaders and said they helped him, you know, craft requests for, I think they're calling them community funding projects now, but they're known as earmarks.

And he had multiple events during the congressional recess with like the blown up checks where he was, you know, with local officials touting his ability as a member of the Democratic majority to bring home the bacon, right? To get money to a lot of these projects. There were some really good ones. Water projects for the city of Chandler, helping small business in the city of Mesa. You know, he and other Democrats who represent districts that are competitive are saying, you know, this is a big part of their pitch. You know, we can help get money directed to, you know, deserving projects and, you know, defend them. One of the Republican opponents who's running against him, Tanya Willis, who we sat down with, said she opposed bringing back earmarks, and she thinks the ban should come back. And she said it was part of an overspending

problem. So it was one area where there was, you know, big difference between those two candidates. And let's talk about one more big issue, particularly in states like Arizona, and that's immigration. It is, of course, an animating issue in Republican politics right now, border security, many Republicans tie it to the drug trade as well. Claudia, it's something that also animates progressives, an area of many that many progressive voters are very frustrated by the Biden administration on. What did Khanna and Raskin say about this? Right. For example, Khanna said when his parents came to this country from India, he highlighted how much of a shift there's been since then in terms of the immigration we see now. There's much less European immigration now. But he acknowledged there will be conflict along the

way, and it's an opportunity for Democrats to talk more candidly about race. And the idea that we would become this first major multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy in the world without conflict, I think, is naive. Trump is fighting for a parochial vision of American patriotism. The answer to that is not to shun patriotism, but it's to offer the true version of American patriotism, which is to say that what makes us exceptional, what makes us unique, is precisely the fact that we're going to achieve this dream, as Frederick Douglass said, of being a composite nation. He said one example of how this ultimately plays out politically is this Republican fight, for example, over critical race theory. And at the root of that, Khanna argues that

what some parents fear is that their kids are being taught to be ashamed of being white, and that shouldn't be the case at all. And Democrats need to do a better job of combating that while at the same time recognizing the country's past wrongs, such as slavery. Deirdre, how does that compare to how you heard immigration talked about in Arizona? It was a very different conversation. I mean, it's a border state. Congressman Stanton, a Democrat, made a point repeatedly when we sat down to distance himself from the Biden administration on the issue of immigration. There's a debate right now about the Biden administration's policy to lift Title 42, which is a Trump era policy that kept those seeking asylum or those wanting to cross the border because of the pandemic shut down that process.

Now that we're moving past that, the Biden administration is trying to lift that policy. Stanton and other Democrats in Arizona are critical of the Biden administration for moving forward without what they say is a real plan to sort of address the surge that is expected in border states like Arizona and others like Texas. I've been critical of this administration for not doing more on getting a modernized immigration system that advances our economy, including immigration reform. Clearly, the Republicans in the race, including Tanya Willis, who's one of the candidates

that we sat down with, said that the border was a big issue in the statewide races in Arizona. You know, clearly, the broader issues of border security and, you know, more conservative Republicans linking their positions to former President Trump is just a theme that they're going to see over and over in Arizona and likely in the fourth congressional district. All right. Well, thanks so much for both of your reporting, Claudia, reporting in D.C., Deirdre, out in the real world, which continues to be an exciting novelty out in Arizona. We'll have a lot more coverage on the midterms over the next few months, but that's it for today. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover

Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.