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

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

It's still too soon for big conclusions, but yesterday's primaries in Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina broke with some trends and firmed up others. We take a look at what it all means for Republicans and Democrats preparing for the Midterm. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and Congressional correspondent Susan Davis. 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 there, this is Salvo, an American living in Toronto, and I'm just dropping my absentee ballot paperwork into the mail. I depend on the Politics Podcast to stay on top of what's going on back at home, and this particular podcast was recorded at 10.05 Eastern on Wednesday, May 9th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR One app, or on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. We are here with the results from yesterday's primaries.

Voters voted in Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and North Carolina, starting to set the stage for the fall midterm. Some trends held, some trends broke. I'm Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Susan Davis, congressional correspondent. Okay, we got a whole bunch of different results to talk about. We'll get through most of them throughout the show, but let's just start with this. Sue, Mara, did you learn anything

last night about what this fall's electoral climate is going to look like? One of the things that struck out to me last night is what a bad night it was to be a House Republican on a ballot. We saw this in the Indiana Republican Senate primary, where two conservative Republicans, Luke Messer and Todd Rokita. Messer had been seen as the establishment favorite, lost to a political outsider, a newcomer named Mike Braun. We saw the same dynamic play out in West Virginia, where the favored congressman who had been endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Congressman Evan Jenkins, also went down to a rival named Attorney General Patrick Morrissey. Though in that case, the much more outsidery outsider, Don Blankenship, did not win. Yes. And we should, we should outsidery outsider, Don Blankenship, did not win.

Yes. And we should, we should, we'll talk about Blankenship some more. Even in places where I think that the Republican, favored Republican did win, I'm thinking about House Republican Jim Renacci, who won the nomination to run against Sherrod Brown in the Senate race in Ohio. His numbers weren't great. You know, there wasn't a lot of great stories to tell about being a House Republican candidate. And we also saw the first incumbent of 2018 go down. North Carolina Republican Congressman Robert Pittenger lost to a what would probably be considered a more conservative Republican candidate now firmly putting into play a House seat that Democrats might be able to pick up this November. So, Mara, all bad news for House Republicans? No, not all bad news. First of all, I just want to offer this warning. It's hard to draw big lessons that you can apply to the whole cycle from a small group of primaries. But please listen to our show anyway. Yes, but that would never stop us. But we're going to try. That would never stop us. But I think

there were silver linings for Republicans last night. I think that they didn't get the nightmare that they were worried about in West Virginia. Blankenship didn't win. They were really worried that if he won, Joe Manchin would be safe, and they really need to defeat Democrat Joe Manchin in West Virginia if they want to expand their majority in the Senate. I also think that there were some other good data points for them. In Ohio. More Republicans turned out to vote in their primary than Democrats did. So if you're looking, yes, if you're looking for the signs of a blue wave and increased Democratic enthusiasm, which we have seen everywhere else across forward, as we extrapolate these small races and figure out what it means, is a lot of House Republicans, as we've talked about, have opted not to run again. But a lot of House Republicans have opted to run for higher office. And if you look at states like the Arizona Senate race, where Congresswoman Marthie McSally is running, in Tennessee, Diane Black and Marsha Blackburn, two Republican women running. What does this primary tell them?

Are they nervous now about their own races if the voters are just telling them we're not that interested in what members of Congress have to say? Voters are not loving the I have a lot of governmental experience that I can practically apply to this higher statewide office. That is absolutely a lesson of last night, particularly in the Republican primary dynamic. The outsider, the one that's going to shake up Washington, the one that comes outside the establishment is still an incredibly appealing candidate to a Republican voter. And it shows that Trumpism is alive and well. And what's really interesting is usually Republicans who are running for higher office or re-election will go and say, elect me because look at what I did. We had the majority. We had all the branches of government and we delivered for you. They can't say that because they really only passed one big thing, the tax cuts. And in a weird way, often parties are punished for overreaching. In this case, Republicans might be punished for under-delivering.

And the other thing that's interesting is there's this huge debate inside the Republican Party about what they should be running on and what their message should be. Donald Trump thinks it should be about him, and it should be about protecting him from impeachment and warning people that if Democrats win, they're going to come after Donald Trump. So it's a very Trump-centric kind of view of the races. Which is very surprising to see. Yes, not shocking at all. But Republicans, I think, in in swing districts would like to separate themselves from Trump. They'd like to be a brand apart if they could. But it sounds like as Sue is describing, just being a Republican congressman is a brand you cannot escape. A couple of specific things to talk about. Sue, you mentioned before sticking to the Republican congressman having problems theme that Pittenger lost in North Carolina. Why does that make the seat more competitive? This goes back to the old problem that Republicans have had in a lot of primaries in which the most conservative candidate has the most appeal in a Republican primary. That

makes sense. Primaries are made up of your most hardcore base grassroots voter. When you pivot to a general election, especially in a state like North Carolina, that I think is fair to call purple, you know, district by district is different, but this is more of a purple district than a hard, hardcore red district. Suddenly Democrats have an opportunity and that the candidate that beat Robert Pittenger, Democrats believe, will be less appealing to the bigger pot of voters that are going to decide this race come November. And, you know, the other interesting thing about North Carolina, just a little flag for our listeners, North Carolina is one of the few states where there are no statewide officeholders up.

It's purely state legislative races and congressional races. So you don't have those kind of big top of the top build races to push turnout. Well, we're talking about North Carolina. Quick plug. June 1st, we're doing a show in Charlotte. NPRpresents.org. All right. Live. Mara will be there. I'll be there.

It'll be very exciting. You can hear Mara unedited. Oh my goodness. A whole different level of Mara. We've got to talk about West Virginia. Yes. Don Blankenship, coal executive, went to prison, came out of prison, was running some crazy ads. We were all talking about the possibility that he was surging.

He ends up finishing a distant third last night. politics feels like in this climate that Don Blankenship, who served a year in prison related to his company's role in the death of 29 coal miners, was even seen as somebody who might be able to win a primary. Right. Because it wasn't like some sort of like EPA regulation, like the government's on my back. Right. It was like a very clear cut. He went to prison and was found liable for decisions he made in a coal mining business that led to the death of coal miners in West Virginia. But what's so interesting, there was a great clip. One of the voters interviewed as they were coming out of the polls yesterday was a guy who'd lost three relatives in that mining disaster. And he was voting for Blankenship because he told the reporter, I want an honest crook.

You had cousins who died in that mine disaster. Three of them. Three of them. Three of your cousins died in that mine disaster, and you're going to vote for Blankenship. Exactly. I want an honest crook, and that's Blankenship. I want an honest crook. At least he's an authentic crook. At least he's the crook we know. So Trump steps into the race. He tweets the other day saying, don't vote for Blankenship, he can't win. Blanketship. He can't win. Blanketship said he thought that that played a big role in him losing wind in his sails coming in third. I have an embarrassing question. So these ads that we were playing in the podcast, he was talking about Mitch McConnell's, quote, China family,

saying widely interpreted as racist attacks on the fact that McConnell is married to Chinese-American Elaine Chao, who's transportation secretary. He also called him Cocaine Mitch. And I was confused because I didn't get the reference. And Mitch McConnell is like one of the most boring, low-key people who talks. What was that even about? This was, OK, I think I want to get this right. So my understanding of the cocaine Mitch attack, if you have to follow sort of a yes, a loose line outlined by Don Blankenship,

is that Mitch McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, comes from a prominent Chinese-American family in which her father runs a shipping international shipping business. And the implication was that somehow the shipping business has allowed for drugs to come into the United States. There supposedly was a story where traces of cocaine were found in one of his shipping containers. So he used that as an attack against Mitch McConnell, dubbing him Cocaine Mitch. Also a pretty effective attack to the extent that Mitch McConnell's just really unpopular. He's an easy guy to attack. People don't like him. And he wasn't going to run against Donald Trump. He wanted to run against Mitch McConnell. But Mitch McConnell was feeling pretty good last night as the results came in. And he issued a great little post where he...

I had to rub my eyes. Mara, this is a meme, so you have to be the one to explain it. Oh my goodness. Okay. So the text says, thanks for playing, Don. Right. Thanks for playing, Don. And it shows Mitch McConnell smiling with a cloud of something. And you look at it like, what is he talking about? It turns out that it's a pop culture reference. It is Mitch McConnell apparently surrounded, photoshopped, I would hope, in clouds of cocaine.

But it's from a TV show. Yes. What's the TV show? Was it Narcos? Narcos. It's Narcos. It's Narcos. Yeah, I'm older.

I was thinking Scarface references. No, there was another Scarface picture, though, that I saw. McConnell, who is frequently attacked, including maybe even more often inside of his own party, has frequently taken these attacks and embraced them through his campaign arm. Like he took cocaine, Mitch, and clearly made it his own last night. He's done this in the past. Well, only after he won. We probably shouldn't call him that at the next press conference. Senator, Mr. Leader, Mr. Cocaine Leader. I don't know. We can we can.

But, you know, if we were the kind of podcast that had winners and losers, which we, of course, are not, we definitely say that Mitch McConnell was a big winner last night because he did what he did after 2010 when they nominated all sorts of unelectable fringe candidates. He decided that the empire would strike back, and in 2012 and 2014, he said he was going to crush every Tea Party challenger, and he did, and he did it again this time.

Though I guess he didn't last year. So he's back on track now. He's back on track. So last last point on this, though, like clearly this is a good night for outsiders. Look at Indiana. Look at Braun, who who really was able to dismiss two congressmen by saying, I'm I'm an outsider. I'm a businessman just like Donald Trump. It seems to have its limits.

We found last night in West Virginia. I think that this is also where Blankenship, there's been a lot of parallel. Yes, he was an outsider. Yes, he had a message. Yes, he certainly had an amount of appeal. But to me, he was people were seeing him as the reiteration of a Roy Moore type candidate in Alabama, that he was so toxic, that he was so broadly offensive that had he somehow eked out this primary, Joe Manchin would be on a pretty good glide path to reelection. Right. But I think the point that Sue's making is more that Jenkins lost to Morrissey. That's the story of last night. Not so much that the Blankenship didn't win, therefore the center's holding. I think that's we don't want to rush to that conclusion. But the

fact that the favored candidate, the establishment back candidate who was the congressman, did not win the primary. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about the Democratic side of things. 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,

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Corporate income tax! Planet Money, a podcast about the economy. A very enthusiastic podcast about the economy. Okay, we are back and the Republican races were probably more interesting yesterday, but some stuff worth pointing out on the Democratic side, too. Let's start with the Ohio gubernatorial primary. You had another attorney general, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, who more recently had been heading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was able to beat back Dennis Kucinich a long time. What's the best way to describe Dennis Kucinich's political career? Iconoclastic liberal lawmaker. Yeah.

Yeah. Kucinich ran for president a couple of times. Former boy mayor of Cleveland. Yeah. He gets back into the ring to run for Ohio governor. But Cordray is able to beat him back. Did we learn anything from this race in particular? Well, I think we learned that the much hyped Bernie versus Hillary wing conflict story is just not as big as people are making it out to be. I don't think that even though you could say that the establishment back candidate Cordray won, he was also backed by Elizabeth Warren. The Democrats internal fights are just not as big and divisive as the Republican internal fights. And Cordray is certainly a progressive. Dennis Kucinich tried to make him out to be some kind of an NRA-leaning Democrat, which probably

helps Cordray in Ohio. But it shows that the Democrats are just not as the civil war in the Democratic Party is not as big as it is in the Republican Party. But I do think, as I said before, there was a warning sign for Democrats. Cordray did not generate the enthusiasm that people thought he would. I think he goes in as the underdog to Mike DeWine. And the turnout in the Democratic primary in Ohio was less than it was on the Republican side. Now, do you think that says something? What happened to that big Democratic enthusiasm wave? Is that a little bit of a caution flag for Democratic enthusiasm in your mind or more of a statement? We talked so much in 2016 about Ohio is not quite the swing state it used to be. I think it's probably both. You know, Sherrod Brown is doing pretty well. There's a kind of Democrat that's perfect for Ohio, populist Democrat. I don't know if I want to say from this one primary that Democratic enthusiasm haven't seen these kind of competitive primaries. I mean, last night, Sherrod Brown, Joe Donnelly and Joe Manchin, the three incumbent Democratic senators, walked to the nomination. There was some nominal challenges, but no one

had a real fight. I think Democratic Party leaders have learned the lesson of Mitch McConnell, that the Democratic Party leaders in both the House and Senate have really been pretty aggressive behind the scenes, clearing the fields of candidates that they don't think can win or sending a very clear message about who they can support. And if anything, the candidates that we've seen the Democratic Party getting around is the more centrist moderate candidate. If you look more in the Conor Lamb mold, who won the special election in Pennsylvania, the three Democrats we're talking about, Sherry Brown's kind of an outlier, but Donnelly and Manchin are more of a centrist, bipartisan looking Democrat. And not having primary challenges is a pretty good place to be. You save a whole lot of money. You don't get weakened because you're not having these terrible fights where you're giving your opponents a lot of ammunition. And looking forward, there is no Senate Democrat up for reelection right now who is facing a competitive primary at this point. So Democrats have really been able to quell the conversation of a civil war. Obviously, we'll see what happens in the future, but it's

just not playing out. And I feel like at the beginning of 2017, when you had moments like when you had Democratic activists yelling at Democratic senators because they weren't opposing every single one of President Trump's cabinet picks, right? In moments like that, I think it would have been shocking to say, like in 2018, there's not going to be any serious Democratic primary challenge. Yeah. Democrats really want to win. And they're exhibiting the mature behavior of a party that wants to win, which means they're not getting into unnecessary fights. They also have learned the lesson, as Sue said, and this has been going on for several cycles, they've had less divisive

primaries, that they're picking candidates who fit their districts. You know, a liberal firebrand is just not going to work in Appalachia. And they are choosing the Conor Lambs of the world. And they're choosing soft-spoken candidates that are anti-Trumpian in their style. You know, they're all talking about working across the aisle. They're not hyper-partisan. They think that's the key to victory this year. Why do parties always forget that? Because, like, that's how the Democrats took back the House in 2006, right? That was a big part of it. Then they get away from it. They lose

seat after seat after seat, and then they rediscover similar tactics. Well, they didn't lose seat after seat because they lost track of that. They lost seat after seat because they were in the White House and they were on the side that voters were reacting against, just like the Republicans are now. So last big Democratic thing, Sue, is big night for ladies in House races all across these states. We've talked a lot about how 2018 is shaping up to be a year of the woman in a lot of ways. We have a historic number of female candidates not only running, but they're winning. And in one of the things that we saw last night is in House races in open primaries in which there was no incumbent running and there was 20 of those last night and 17 of those Democrats elected a woman. Now, caveat to that is they are nominating

women that are going to run in districts where they're probably not going to win because they're safe Republican seats. But it is a testament to the fact of not only the number of female candidates, but the enthusiasm in the Democratic Party right now. When we talk about that enthusiasm gap, a lot of that enthusiasm is being driven by female voters, both on the voter side and the candidate side. And last night was just one further data point that proves that this is very much a year of the woman. And black women have become this driving force in the Democratic base. And I think it also tells a story about why Democrats have learned lessons of the past. Not only are a lot of women running, a lot of first time candidates, a lot of immigrants or sons of daughters of immigrants

are running. But for the first time, I think this is the very first cycle where Democrats have a candidate everywhere. In the past, they would leave a lot of these races uncontested. And as Sue said, a lot of these women are in races where the Republican is going to win, but at least they're there because you can't win if you don't field a candidate. And they've all got their surfboards in the water, ready to catch the wave if it happens, as opposed to just standing on the beach and watching. So Democrats are doing a lot of things right this time to be in the right place if the wave strikes. All right. So we have been saying that this is the beginning of a pretty busy stretch of primaries. What are you two looking for next? I'm looking generally for

just turnout numbers. I mean, that's the thing that we've been watching all along is, is Democratic turnout, which is a sign of enthusiasm, bigger than Republican turnout? new district maps. They've got a Senate race. They've got it's a state that Trump won. It's a question of can Democrats win back there? I mean, it's just hitting on so many thematics that we're watching in 2018. And I think we're going to hyper overanalyze everything that happens in Pennsylvania next week. We're looking forward to that. All right. It is a busy week in your pod feed because we will be back at you tomorrow with our weekly roundup. But that's going to do it for this show. If you have comments, if you have questions, if you want to yell at us or say nice things about us,

or if you want to record one of those timestamps we use at the beginning of the show, the email address is nprpolitics at npr.org. You can always hear us on the real live radio on NPR One and on NPR.org. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Susan Davis. I also cover Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. © BF-WATCH TV 2021