The NPR Politics Podcast - Midterm Update: May 8th Primaries Look Ahead

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana hold primaries on Tuesday. We take a deep dive into the key races that will decide who goes on the ballot this fall in Trump Country. Republicans and Democrats are both keeping a close eye, because these votes help determine whether or not the Senate is at play. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, political reporter Jessica Taylor, 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

This is Valerie from the top of the Manitou Incline in front of beautiful Pikes Peak just outside Colorado Springs, Colorado Where today on May 3rd, it is snowing I have just ascended to 8,590 feet above sea level by climbing 2,000 feet in less than one mile That is 2,744 railroad tie steps up the side of the mountain to my happy place This podcast was recorded at 1227 p.m. on Monday, May 7th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, so keep up with all of the NPR political coverage at npr.org, the NPR One app, and on your local NPR station.

Go KRCC in Colorado Springs. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Tomorrow is another primary day, so we're going to take a look at some of the big races in West Virginia and elsewhere. We'll talk about what to look for and what we can learn from this week's results. I'm Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent. I'm Jessica Taylor, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. All right, everybody, so we had a month or so where it was a bit of a low. We didn't have that many primaries going on. But Tuesday's another big primary day.

And then we've got a steady stream of elections to care about and cover going forward. Yeah, this is the big kickoff. We've already had Texas and Illinois. Those were kind of preseason games in a way. And there are some really big states on the ballot. Indiana, West Virginia, Ohio. And these are big Senate races, too, that are happening. I think those are the big states we're looking at because of those storylines. We should mention

North Carolina also has a primary that day, too. There are a whole lot of elections coming up from here until November, but lots of primaries. This primary season really kicks off here. And there's a lot that we're going to see when it comes to turnout and the enthusiasm. Who has really got this fired up? Midterms are always years for activists. And we're already seeing that the wings on both sides are the most fired up and heading to the polls here. Yeah, Domenico mentioned turnout. That's one thing that I think this is sort of the first big tell because we had big Democratic races in the other two states we've already had. And there's very competitive primaries in West Virginia and Indiana. Is that going to drive up turnout? Are Republicans going to get out to the polls? That enthusiasm gap, I've talked to

a lot of strategists over the past week. That's something that's really worrisome to them. So let's start with West Virginia. Jess, who are the Republicans running in the Senate primary there? So there are three major candidates. You have Evan Jenkins, who's a congressman. He's sort of the establishment favorite. And Republicans really think that he can best eat into Democratic Senator Joe Manchin's base and sort of appeal to sort of these maybe traditional Democrats and independents. Then you have Patrick Morrissey. He's the attorney general. He's running as sort of I'm the true conservative.

He sued the Obama administration a lot on regulations and different things, too. But he's been sort of pegged as a carpetbagger. He ran for house in New Jersey before he moved to the state in 2006. And he also was a lobbyist for some pharmaceutical companies. And they've really hit him over that. And then the big wild card is Don Blankenship. Now, he's the former CEO of Massey Energy, actually spent a year in prison after there was a mine explosion that killed 29 miners.

He was convicted of a misdemeanor over federal mine safety regulations. He's still under parole. His parole actually ends Tuesday night at midnight, so right on election night. And he has just come out swinging. He's saying, you know, I was a victim here of sort of federal prosecution run amok and is just hammering at his other opponents. And not just his other opponents. Mitch McConnell, he has come out very much against the Senate majority leader. Let's just take a moment and listen to one of his ads, because I think that that sums it up more than any of us can. I'm Don Blankenship, candidate for U.S. Senate, and I approve this message.

Swamp Captain Mitch McConnell has created millions of jobs for China people. While doing so, Mitch has gotten rich. In fact, his China family has given him tens of millions of dollars. Mitch's swamp people are now running false negative ads against me. They are also childishly calling me despicable and mentally ill. The war to drain the swamp and create jobs for West Virginia people has begun. I will beat Joe Manchin and ditch cocaine Mitch for the sake of the kids. So what he's referring to there with the China comments is that Mitch McConnell is, of course,

married to a Chinese-American woman, Elaine Chao, who is also transportation secretary, has had a long career in government. Her father owns a shipping company. That's what Blankenship is referring to. But Domenico, cocaine Mitch, China family. Is this another potential Roy Moore situation for Republicans if Blankenship gets the nomination? Yeah, you know, and Blankenship is engaged to a woman who was born in China. So it's just a whole lot of cross currents going on here.

But Republicans over the past decade have had a huge problem where they've been nominating candidates in places where they should win, and it's cost them almost half a dozen seats. So when you're looking at this race, here's another example where they could be nominating somebody who is seen as so odious in a general election that you could cost Republicans in a state that Donald Trump won by more than anywhere else in the country. Trump in fact this morning tweeted out, don't vote for Blankenship, vote for either of the other two candidates.

He said, remember Alabama. So remember Alabama could become a slogan here. And for Mitch McConnell, who very well knows what his majority could have been, it's remember Delaware and remember Nevada and remember lots of other places where Republicans could have won and didn't. Right. And because the news cycle moves on so many times. Very quick reminder, if you forgot this story already, Alabama, Roy Moore, former state Supreme Court justice, of course, was accused of soliciting and approaching underage girls for relationships earlier in his career when he was in his 30s. And as a result of that and a whole other bunch of things, a Democrat now holds a Senate seat from Alabama.

Jess, what do the polls look like? A few weeks ago, I think Republicans were feeling a little bit better. They saw Blankenship kind of drop. But in the past few days, there's been a lot of concern. So I watched a debate last week between the three of them. And one thing that was notable was we saw Morrissey and Jenkins go really, really heavy against each other. Blankenship almost kind of felt like an afterthought. But I think that negativity really might have propelled some voters to him. There was almost 30 percent of voters undecided here in the primary. Just today, we've had both the Morrissey and the Jenkins campaign leaking internal polls showing that Blankenship is now narrowly ahead.

It's almost a virtual tie. And there's real concern that he could bump back up because he's putting his own money into the race. He's spending millions on air in West Virginia, where that sum goes really far in a really inexpensive state. And, you know, he's saying I'm sort of this anti-Trump type person. You know, Domenico mentioned his tweet. He's almost trying to frame this as, OK, well, the swamp's coming coming for me and everything, too. So I guess President Trump's part now part of the swamp, too. And, you know, this is great news for Joe Manchin, the Democrat in the race, because, you know, he's got huge name ID in the state. He was governor of the state. People know who he is. He's had very favorable ratings in the past with Republican voters. So this is, again, Democrats looking at it and saying, here's one that Republicans should pick off or have a great

chance at doing so and, you know, shooting themselves in the foot. And just before we get to Indiana, I want to talk about a story that you published on NPR.org today that gets into this. There are so many Democrats on the ballot this year defending Senate seats in states that Donald Trump won big in 2016. And going into the year, Republicans thought we could pick up a ton of Senate seats. But the wins look much different. And people like Joe Manchin, who on paper should be losing by a lot, really seem to be doing well. Yeah. So Democrats are defending 10 incumbents in states that President Trump won and many of them, like in West Virginia, by easily double digits,

very heavily. I think of Manchin sort of, people I've talked to, they kind of think of this in tiers, and he's sort of a second tier race right now. And Manchin's very similar to Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, John Tester in Montana. On paper, they should be easy pickups, but these are Democrats that have been able to sort of solidify their own independent brand. They have a lot of crossover appeal in the state, and they're really not going to be as easy to knock off. And I think in West Virginia, especially where you have such a messy primary, that I think, you know, even if it's Morrissey or Jenkins that comes out, they've been bloodied so much. I had one Democrat tell me, you know, they're airing their dirty laundry for us. These are just ready-made attack ads

that we're going to use. I mean, the odds of Democrats taking back the Senate right now are still long. I mean, they'd have to pick up a total of two seats net. And to do so, they'd have to win in places like Arizona and Tennessee, which, you know, Democrats are feeling a little better about. But I still think that they're more difficult than they are likely. OK, so one of these Democrats who, you know, last year when everybody started to first think about 2018, they thought, wow, this guy's going to have a really hard time winning. It's Joe Donnelly, the Democrat representing Indiana, a state that has gotten more and more Republican every year, it seems. Bunch of people running to go against him in the fall. Jess, give us the rundown of the

Republican Indiana Senate primary. So this is another three-way race. You have Congressman Todd Rokita and Luke Messer running there. And then Mike Braun is this outsider businessman. He's serving the state legislature and he's poured a lot of his own money into the race too. Again, he's sort of positioning himself as the outsider here saying, you know, I'm a job creator. The best ads that he had, I've had a lot of people point this to me, is he actually walked around with cardboard cutouts of Messer and Rokita in a debate. They actually dressed almost similar in red ties. And, you know, they're kind of white middle-aged congressmen asking people to pick them apart, and they couldn't. So he sort of lumped them together.

Though, to be fair, it's probably hard for most voters to pick up most Senate candidates in any state in any year. It's very true. But he's, you know, he's been able to sort of lump them together in the way that, OK, they're creatures of Washington. They've been there and everything, too. The thing that Braun has run going against him is he was a longtime Democrat and they've sort of tried to paint him that way, sort of a wolf in sheep's clothing. And you've had both Rokita and Messer run to Trump as much as they can. Rokita had an ad where, you know, he puts on a Trump hat and says, you know, I'm going to be with him every way. And then Messer actually this past week circulated a petition in Congress to nominate President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on North Korea. So they're each trying to get out the base in this election.

Yeah. I mean, Domenico, it's such an interesting dynamic. And Susan Davis did a story on this last week that for all the talk that we hear in Washington about, look at Donald Trump's approval numbers. Is he a liability for the Republican Party? And certainly in a lot of suburban House districts, he is a liability, and that's why the House is in play. But you have a Senate race, and it's not just Indiana. This is happening in so many races across the country where the argument on the. He says, I'm pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Trump. And there's a reason for that, right? In a Republican primary, Indiana is a state where only four counties in the 2016 election went Democratic. Now, when you add up all of their votes, there are a little more than one in four of all of the votes in the entire state, those four counties. But that's not where Republican primaries are won and lost.

They're won and lost in other parts of the state. But when you do pivot to a general election, yes, President Trump won it by a lot. But remember, Barack Obama did win it and pull it out in 2008. So there are some latent Democratic voters in some of those places in the state where Democrats are hoping that they'll be able to buoy Joe Donnelly come the fall. And the more that these candidates out TrumpTrump each other, the more liable that makes them in a general election. That's going to be tested. And I think that's going to be tested in this entire 2018 midterm in a lot of different places.

Yeah. And a lot of money has been spent on this too, right? Yeah. I mean, already we're seeing in this race more than $12 million has been spent on advertising in this primary, which is a whole lot of money in Indiana to be spending. So you see what the stakes are here. The thing about Indiana, though, too, Republicans feel comfortable with any of these nominees. I don't think they worry about being saddled with someone like Blankenship. So I think it is a real test of they're running closer to Trump. Is that going to turn out their base in a general election or is it going to hurt them? So, Jess, before we shift gears and talk about Democrats for a minute, any other is there any particular thing you're looking

for in tomorrow night's results when it comes to the Senate primaries that will tell you something a bigger picture about what we can expect this fall? I think that the biggest wild card is how Blankenship does. If he's the nominee, I think that's a race that becomes almost off the table for Republicans. And they're going to be saddled with someone that's very, like you said, in Alabama, that's very Roy Moore-like with sort of these outrageous comments that could sort of drag down other nominees. We saw this happen in 2012. That's how Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly are still in the Senate because they had these nominees that said these things about abortion and that sort of drug down of people, candidates across the field. And then again, turnout. These are big Republican primaries. Are people going to come out and vote

for them? Or are some of these Trump voters still, you know, kind of not really caring or engaged? And if there's not big numbers coming out for such competitive races where there's been millions spent, that's a big worry for Republicans. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some Democratic races to watch. This message comes from NPR sponsor, Lisa, the mattress with over 11,000 five-star reviews and a mission to end bedlessness in America. The Lisa mattress was designed to provide support and pressure relief to every body type and sleep style for a deeper night's sleep. Lisa plants a tree for every order and donates a mattress for every 10 sold. Get $125 off,

free shipping, and 100 nights to try the Lisa mattress. Go to leesa.com slash NPR. Planet Money tip number 17. Sometimes the most important things need a hype squad. Corporate. Corporate. Income. Income. Tax. Corporate income tax. Planet Money, a podcast about the economy. A very enthusiastic podcast about the economy. Okay, we're back. And I want to talk about the gubernatorial primary in Ohio. But before we do that, I think it's interesting to point out that as we talk about these contentious Republican primaries on the Senate side, the Democratic incumbents in the Senate, by and large, have avoided any nasty primary fights. And I think that's so interesting because you have so many conservative

or moderate Democrats running for reelection. And there was so much energy in the Democratic Party of the Bernie Sanders type wing trying to pull the party to the left. And yet the Joe Manchins, the Bob Casey's, the Joe Donnelly's of the world didn't have to fight off the left in the primaries. I think that it's also in some of these places,

North Dakota, Montana, there's not a deep Democratic bench. So I think getting someone even on the ballot that would pose a real threat is going to be harder. I think it's much easier to find people in these House races and different things to Europe, seeing that dynamic play out in a lot of House races, too, that really could end up costing Democrats some winnable seats. But again, these incumbents are entrenched. They have a lot of money in their campaign war chests. And probably in North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp is the only person that could win there. John Tester is the only person that could win in Montana. And I think Yeah, but like pragmatism hasn't stopped primary challenges in the past.

True. But again, I mean, it's just I just don't know how active they are in some of the states that are on the ballot. Well, it's certainly going to affect this next race that we want to talk about when it comes to the Ohio governor's race. And we should mention this is the seat held by John Kasich for two terms. He's term limited. So set that up for us. It's an open seat. Yeah, it's an open seat. And on the Democratic side, you've got Richard Cordray, who was an Obama appointee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Can you give a quick 10-second recap on that before you keep going? The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been set up during the Obama administration as a reaction to the 2008 financial collapse to be what it is, a bureau to protect consumers against fraudulent activity in the banking market. There's Elizabeth Warren's brainchild. She helped set it up. She helped set it up. People would think that she was going to run it until it was clear she wasn't going to be able to be confirmed. And she decided to run for the Senate, ironically. Which worked out for her.

Which worked out for her. She's endorsed Cordray. Now, no one's going to say Elizabeth Warren is not a progressive. But that's been the knock on Richard Cordray in this primary because he's running against Dennis Kucinich, the presidential candidate, former congressman from northern Ohio, also was the mayor of Cleveland. And we can get into some of his tenure when we talk about this race. So this has been one of the more interesting dem on dem primaries. Cordray is really still outspending Kucinich by a lot, though, and has a lot of the institutional momentum behind him, right? Yeah, you know, he is the establishment candidate in the race, but I mean, he's not a centrist or sort of a squish by any means. But the one knock that they

that Kucinich has hit him on is guns. He had a past A rating by the NRA. And, you know, he supports tougher background checks, but maybe not as many regulations as a lot of progressives would like. And of course, we are talking a lot about this with so many tragedies happening. Democrats really sort of see a momentum on guns. And again, in a base election, this is something that you can capitalize on and sort of find these wedge issues. And state houses matter for Democrats, because that's been the biggest storyline of the past decade or so is Democrats just losing ground in governor's office after governor's office, state house after state house. There's hardly any Democratic governors in the country compared to

where they were early in the Obama years. So this is a state where they feel like they can claw their way back into competition. And the thing is here, you know, there's a lot of places in the country where, you know, politics is all national now. Like it seems that politics normally we'd always said is politics is local. Right. But what you have is a lot of people running on ideology, stuff that would matter to national electorates. But when you have someone like Dennis Kucinich running, for example, when you try to become a governor of a state, being a governor is about trying to run the state. He's running to be governor here. He's not running to be another congressman who's talking out against President Trump. That has nothing to do with what you're doing as a governor in a state. And we've seen some Republicans actually in other states have difficulty because they ran as ideological candidates. And now when it comes to the rubber

hitting the road and trying to govern, it's been a lot tougher and they've seen their approval ratings dropped. I think Sam Brownback in Kansas is a great example. Mary Fallin in Oklahoma. When you put these talking points into actual policy, sometimes the result is not pretty as Kansas saw with its budgets the last few years. But then you have some really centrist Republicans that are going to be harder to knock off for Republicans in places like Maryland and Massachusetts, too, that sort of have run as pragmatists and have governed that way. And think about that. That's why. All right. So that's the big Democratic race to keep an eye on. Anything else, any House races

in any of these states that Jess or Domenico, you'll be watching when you have the 75 tabs open late Tuesday night as results are coming in? There's some that we'll see in Ohio, which nominee gets on the Republican side, how competitive this can be in different things too. But I think, again, this is a big, big Senate night, especially governor's race. We're also, of course, looking at, but some of these statewide primaries, I think, are going to tell us the most about the energy of the electorate and what type of candidates get nominated. Yeah, I think big picture, you've got big Senate races, but we're going to see where the momentum is. Do the Democrats, you know, continue to have the kind of momentum that's been on their side for enthusiasm? And what kinds of,

you know, candidates do they pick? Are they going to be more pragmatic? Are they going to be more going toward the wings? It's all going to be tested. Okay. Once we have results, we will be back in your feed on Wednesday talking about those results. If you can't wait for that podcast, we'll be telling you about this on the real live radio on your local public radio station. Also on NPR.org and on NPR One.

One more exciting thing to tell you about. We always get tweets from you. When are you going to do a live show here or there? Well, if you live in Charlotte, we are doing a live show near you. We're going to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 1st for a live show at the McGloin Theater. You can find more information and tickets at NPRpresents.org. Really looking forward to that. I'm Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent. I'm Jessica Taylor, political reporter. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor.

Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.