The NPR Politics Podcast - Midterm Update: First Transgender Gubernatorial Nominee & #MeToo Enters A New Era

Episode Date: August 15, 2018

Tuesday's elections in four states — Wisconsin, Minnesota, Connecticut and Vermont — produced some noteworthy results. It was a big night for Democratic diversity. And Keith Ellison's nomination shows signs of a new era for the #MeToo movement. This episode: reporter Sarah McCammon, Congressional reporter Kelsey Snell, and political editor Domenico Montanaro. 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

Hey, NPR Politics team. This is Sophia, and I'm on my way down to my local city hall to vote in the Vermont primary, my first ever election that I'm old enough to vote in. This podcast was recorded at 1057 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, August 15th. Things probably have changed by the time you'll hear this. Okay, here's the show. Congratulations on your first time voting. That's exciting. Yes, very cool. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. And with another set of primaries behind us, we're here with the results. I'm Sarah McCammon. I'm covering the White House.

I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And the big headlines from last night were all about history in the making. In Vermont, Democrats nominated the first transgender person for governor. In Connecticut, Democrats nominated their first black female candidate for Congress. In Minnesota, Democrats nominated a former Somali refugee, Ilhan Omar, for Congress. So let's talk about that history. We're going to start in Vermont.

Domenico, what's significant about this race? So Christine Hallquist is a former energy executive in the state, and she is the first transgender person to be nominated for governor by any major party in history. So certainly a historic night for Democrats in that way. You mentioned some of the others who are some of the more historic candidates and firsts that are going to be happening. There was a tweet that went around last night from Chris Johnson, who works for the Washington Blade, which is the oldest LGBT publication in Washington, who noted that Democrats this

year have actually, for governorships, nominated a lesbian, someone who is gay, someone who's bisexual, and now someone who's transgender, filling out all of the letters of the acronym LGBT. I think it's interesting that Hallquist had like 48 percent of the vote. Now, that's under 50 percent, but that's so much far out from her nearest challengers who were at like 22 percent. And then you had that 14-year-old. I know we talked about him in the past. Ethan Sonborn, a 14-year-old candidate over there in Vermont. He didn't even get very close. I guess we'll have to watch for him in the future.

He's getting started early. You know, if you sort of like average out the vote by age, like vote per year of life, it's not so bad, probably. Plus in four years, he'll get an extra vote. There's a whole lot more than I was doing at 14. You know, we should note, though, that in this race here, Democrats are actually fairly hopeful that they could actually pick up the governorship in Vermont because currently it's held by Republican Governor Phil Scott. And Scott's approval ratings took a nosedive after signing gun control legislation back in April. Remember, Vermont has a reputation as a pretty liberal state. It's also has a pretty pro-gun rights culture as well. And any Republican who's going to win statewide has to have his base firmly in place, win over some independents and peel off some

Democrats. And, you know, it was not a good sign last night for him. You know, what I think is kind of interesting is that in Vermont and also in Minnesota and Wisconsin, we have three states that are kind of trying to redefine what their image is in these upcoming elections. And it's rare when you see all of those states kind of having their primaries together. Because like you said, this is going to be a conversation about is this a big liberal state, like Vermont is to be, being the state of Bernie Sanders? And in Wisconsin, there's this question about are they going to be this purple state? Are they going to are they actually trending more red? And the same question coming up again in Minnesota.

Who are the electorates in these states? And it's interesting to watch them be in this transition. It'll be interesting, too, to see, you know, how this how this race plays out in Vermont, because this is a there's been a big acceleration, I think, for transgender candidates in the last couple of years. Remember, it was just last year that Danica Rome was elected to the state legislature in Virginia. She's also a transgender woman. And she was the first transgender woman to be elected and take a seat in a state legislature just last year. And now there is an openly transgender woman as a major party nominee for governor. And not just a major party candidate. We should be clear that these are Democrats, right?

That this is happening. This is a phenomenon that's happening inside of the Democratic Party, not inside of the Republican Party. Right. And look, I mean, Democrats are out there celebrating this. But on the other side, on the Republican side, it really does highlight the demographic difference between the two parties. You know, there was a Gallup survey. They did 338,000 interviews.

And they found that when they tried to look at the party makeup of both parties, who is within each party, nine out of 10 Republicans were white and about six out of 10 Democrats were white. You know, that's a huge shift away from where things were 30 years ago and says a lot about where the two parties are. Republicans and Donald Trump in particular really used a lot of the sort of outrage on conservative side at a country that they see demographically changing and not representing the kind of values they want to see put forward. Right. Demographically and culturally, more diversity and more acceptance of LGBT people, for example. Yeah. And they were able to use that. Frankly, President Trump was able to use that and continues to use that to stir up his base.

You know, I think it's important. This is something we have talked about as reporters, as political reporters, is that even as this trend continues for Democrats, the overall makeup of Congress and of representation here in Washington is still much whiter and more male than it is the makeup of the rest of the country. And that's something that as much as Democrats are making changes, that doesn't it's not enough to change the overall mix here in a huge and significant way, which I think a lot of people view as a problem with the way Congress and Washington represent the voters. You know, speaking of diversity, Democrats are celebrating all this diversity in the party. They see that as representative of the way the country is going. As we just talked about, some Republicans are uneasy about the way the country is going. But Democrats have their own challenges. And I want to talk about one other candidate who also is one of these diverse candidates, Representative Keith Ellison, one of just two Muslims in Congress, won the Democratic primary for attorney general in Minnesota. And that's despite some pretty serious allegations against him.

It's also important to remember that Ellison is the number two at the DNC. He's a major progressive figure for Democrats. And he decided not to run for his for reelection for his seat in Congress, to run for attorney general. And over the weekend, the son of one of Ellison's ex-girlfriends posted online that he had seen a video of Ellison abusing his mother. Now, this is something that Ellison denies. He says that he did not abuse his ex-girlfriend. But there are a lot of questions out there. Our colleagues over at Minnesota Public Radio have reviewed a number of texts and contacts between Ellison and his ex-girlfriend, but the video has not been reviewed by reporters. And it seems that it was having a kind of cloud over the conversation about the

election, but it wasn't having a cloud over Ellison's chances here. He easily defeated four opponents. And of course, this comes in the Me Too era when people are taking these kinds of allegations a lot more seriously, whether it's sexual assault or sexual harassment, domestic abuse. In very recent months, we've seen these kinds of allegations topple lots of politicians, lots of them in Congress. Right, Kelsey? Yeah. And this is one of those things where Democrats had originally kind of set out to make this a message of them being the party that was going to listen to victims and was going to have a zero tolerance policy for anybody who was who had allegations against them. And we saw that happen with Senator Al Franken when he stepped down after allegations of sexual misconduct. But there have been a number of allegations against Democrats, other Democrats who have not stepped down. And so there's this complicated tension right now about how political parties need to handle allegations.

How do they substantiate allegations? How do they go about verifying things? One good example is that over in Connecticut, we talked about Shahana Hayes. She had the chance to run for that seat, in part because the congresswoman who represents that district, Elizabeth Esty, said she wasn't going to run for reelection because she did not handle a situation where one of her staffers was accused of sexual harassment. So it is something that keeps having these rolling impacts on this election. So Kelsey noted that Ellison is a principal person in the Democratic National Committee. He's the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

And I reached out to them yesterday to the DNC, and they gave me their first statement that they've made about Ellison. And they said that they're reviewing the allegations against him, and they called the allegations of domestic abuse, any allegations of domestic abuse, quote, disturbing and should be taken seriously. You know, that's an important point because the party, as Kelsey's noting, has had a little bit of difficulty and inconsistency on what it should do. You know, I talked to a former communications director for the DNC, Luis Miranda, who said that the party should suspend Ellison immediately until they find out what else happens. He said that they have to because that's the standard that they've set. But other Democrats I talked to said that they felt like there were a lot of people within the party who are skittish at doing something like that because of what happened with Al Franken. In fact, one longtime

Democratic strategist told me the Franken incident has got a lot of Democrats thinking we've lost a progressive hero and right or wrong, we've lost him too fast. So there's a little bit of calibration on how we address these issues. And that's kind of fascinating because there were multiple people who accused him of touching them inappropriately during pictures. And now there's also this backlash to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was the one who essentially forced Franken's hand, because now I'm hearing from a lot of Democratic donors that they are not giving money anymore to Gillibrand.

Because she was calling for this sort of almost purity. You know, if there's any allegation, we got to take it seriously and we got to respond. And I think for Democrats, there are two are two questions. There's there's the moral question, right? What's the right thing to do in these situations? And it's complicated because every situation is different. The allegations are different and the evidence is different. But there's also, right, the political question, which is, do we do we win by being the pure party on this by saying we believe women, we take all these allegations seriously, we don't tolerate it? Or do we shoot ourselves in the foot by doing that? Because let's remember that we still have on the other side, President Trump in the White House, who has many serious allegations against him from multiple women of, you know, sexual harassment and another impropriety. And he's denied those and he's in the White House. And so, you know, if Democrats set too high of a bar, they risk, you know, any allegation could topple a candidate. And you could have the situation where you've got somebody who's about to go to

the voters and suddenly has an accusation. And then what? Kelsey, I feel like what Sarah's talking about kind of is reflective in a lot of what Nancy Pelosi has said, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely. Pelosi and a lot of other Democrats believe that there isn't really, shouldn't really be that difference between the moral side and the political side because they want to be the party that absorbs the moral side as their politics, right? Like that's part of the identity that Democrats are trying to cultivate for themselves and are trying to tell voters is the foundational core of what organizes them as Democrats in some ways. And so it is a real tension here where when they have to make

up make these decisions in real time when elections are happening. And I do think that more broadly, it's really interesting to see that we now seem to be fading from the point where in that when the first MeToo allegations were coming out. remember, Matt Damon tried to say that there are differences between what Harvey Weinstein did and what some people might do, you know, in sexual harassment in the workplace. And people came down on him and said that, you know, that's not the appropriate way to respond. And now it seems like the waters have kind of receded a little bit. And that point of view is starting to gain more traction. Right. With all these things, you often have a pendulum swing. And the thing about the moral high ground is in any high ground is it's nice to be up there. It's a great view, but it's hard to get there and it's hard to stay there. And, you know, I had one staffer tell me

that they're never in the history of American politics has one party been the had a lock on being less corrupt than the other, that there is this undercurrent of politics where you will find bad actors. And it's dangerous for either party to claim that they are so pure that those actors don't exist. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about how education is becoming a big issue in the midterm elections. Hey, this is Stretch Armstrong. And this is Bobby DeGaussier, the hosts of What's Good. We're kicking off a new season with legendary singer-songwriter Erykah Badu. That's why they call me Fat Belly Bella,

because they never know when I'm going to be impregnated. Subscribe now. And we're back. And we've been talking about yesterday's primary results. But last week, we left you with a cliffhanger in the state of Kansas. During the results last night, Kansas' Republican Governor Jeff Collier conceded the race to his Secretary of State, Chris Kobach, who had challenged him in the gubernatorial primary. Remind us what happened, Domenico. Before I get there, I should concede that there is, in fact, a cliff in Kansas. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Because I made what I usually do, which is make some offhanded remark about how there's no cliffs in Kansas. First time anyone ever said a cliffhanger in Kansas. And we got barrages of photos and especially from Echo Cliff Park. That's a legit cliff. I, as a native Midwesterner, as I may have mentioned once or twice, will not call you a coastal elitist because you are from Queens and that doesn't count. But still, you are from a coastal state. So you don't know. People from Queens are just aspiring elitists. It never happens.

But tell us what happened in Kansas. All right. So in Kansas, you had Chris Kobach and the sitting governor, Jeff Collier, were separated by about 91 votes. Then suddenly there was re-canvas. And last night, Collier conceded to Kobach. Kobach wound up going up about 345 votes. Collier could see the writing on the wall. And now Kobach is the Republican nominee. And again, this matters because Kobach's a pretty controversial guy.

Absolutely. I mean, he ran President Trump's Election Integrity Commission. He's a pretty hardliner on voter ID laws. He's a hardliner on immigration. And, you know, voters in Kansas have been upset with what they've seen with former Governor Sam Brownback and his big cuts to public funding to a lot of things. And that was one of the reasons his approval ratings wound up falling. And now Democrats feel like they have a chance to win with Kobach on the ticket. And this brings me to another point I want to touch on, which is just the significance of education in several of these races that we're

talking about. Laura Kelly, the state senator who is running as the Democrat, running for governor in Kansas. So she, a little background on her, she led the fight to essentially preserve education funding as the ranking member of the Kansas Senate Ways and Means Committee. Former Governor Sam Brownback led a fight to, you know, cut the budget. She pushed back against that. So she's somebody who's known for her support for education. That's likely to be an issue in this race. It's also likely to be an issue in a couple of these other races we've been talking about. So in Wisconsin, Tony Evers is a state superintendent of education. He's the Democrat running against Republican Governor Scott Walker, who we all recall led a big fight against the teachers unions in Wisconsin several years ago. And then we have a teacher of the year,

Johanna Hayes in Connecticut, who we've mentioned before. She was the 2016 National Teacher of the Year running for Connecticut's 5th District. Several races where education funding, these kind of, you know, kitchen table issues that come up a lot, but education is a big one, should be part of the conversation. So the irony in Wisconsin is rich, though. I mean, if Walker were to lose to the state school superintendent, every teacher in the state who's been trying to recall him and lost all those elections will absolutely be, you know, partying in the streets rather than protesting the way they had been. The fact is, with Walker, we should point out he's never run in a year where Republicans had the wind in their face. In 2010, 2014, those are Republican wave

years. But it is important to think about how Wisconsin functions politically, right? They've got a really strong Republican Party there, in part thanks to Walker and his relationships with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus, who we all recall that used to work in the White House, but is from Wisconsin. And they have, the three of them have really helped put together a very, very strong party infrastructure there, where money is targeted to the weakest places. They have very, very good polling that isn't usually made public, but they know the way that their state is going to vote. And they know, I mean, they know a lot more about their voters than a lot of other state parties do. And I think a good evidence of that was how much effort they put into getting Ron Johnson

reelected in 2016, in a year when most people expected that Johnson was going to lose. He walked away winning pretty handily. But this, you know, this is a year that Democrats are supposed to have the wind in their backs, right? You know, I do think it's funny that the Democrats have, in a lot of these situations, this came up again and again in our conversations on this primary and in previous primaries where they are eagerly watching as Republicans put up these more conservative Trumpier type candidates because they think that the way to win for Democrats is to run against the image of the president that is so unpopular. And I think that we saw that, like we already talked about in Kansas. This is going to be just an interesting, interesting way of looking at what kind of party the Republican Party really is. And that does bring us to the issue of voter turnout, because that's something to watch

in any election year, of course. But as we watch these primaries, we're looking at how the parties are doing, how much they're motivating their voters to come out for the primary, which might give us a sense of what's going to happen in the fall. Domenico, what are we seeing? Well, you know, week after week, what we have seen is Democrats have very high turnout in these elections, whether it's special elections or regular elections. And we saw that again last night. And frankly, I found that really interesting because last night were places, a lot of races where Republicans are supposed to be trying to put Democrats' backs against the wall in the fall. Think about these two Minnesota

congressional races that President Trump won in 2016, the Minnesota governor's race, the Connecticut governor's race, Vermont, where Democrats are pushing, all these places. And yet in every single one of them, Democrats had higher turnout. Let me just go through some of the numbers. In Minnesota, for the Senate race where Republicans want to contest, 268,000 more Democrats showed up. For governor, similar numbers. Wisconsin, where Walker's on the ballot, 132,000 more Democrats showed up. Connecticut, 69,000 more Democrats. And it went on and on that way. That's huge.

Yeah. Oh, and you know, in that Minnesota governor's race, there was a familiar name and also maybe a little bit of a clue again about where the GOP is going. Absolutely. You had Tim Pawlenty, who's run for president, but also was governor of Minnesota twice, wound up losing by a lot, actually, in a comeback bid to be governor to Jeff Johnson, who was the 2014 nominee and also someone who has embraced Trump. And Pawlenty has been a critic. Right. Pawlenty said that he was unhinged and unfit to be president. Clearly, that is not where Minnesota

politics is today. I think we can safely say Minnesota politics has changed Pawlenty. You are a dad, Domenico. I got to make one once in a while. You know, I haven't said that. I haven't said a dad joke in a while. It was a pretty good one. Thank you. I think we're done.

So a reminder that every weekend we catch up on the news with our NPR Politics newsletter. You can subscribe to that at npr.org slash politics newsletter. And we'll be back in your feed tomorrow with our weekly roundup of political news. I'm Sarah McCammon. I'm covering the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell, congressional reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.