The NPR Politics Podcast - Midterm Update: Tuesday's Primaries Raise Questions About Trump's Influence

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

There were lots of takeaways from Tuesday's election & primaries, from whether Republicans should stand with President Trump or whether an endorsement from Bernie Sanders helps a Democrat, to which issues really matter to voters. We explain what the results mean for the November elections. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. 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 Mandy calling from the Ohio 12th District. This is Aiden in Columbus, Ohio, where I just cast my vote in the special election in the Ohio 12th District. This is Sarah. And this is Corey, and we're sitting outside the Tuttle Park Recreation Center, having just voted in the Ohio 12th District special election. This podcast was recorded at... This podcast was recorded at... This podcast was recorded at...

1047 a.m. on Wednesday, August 8th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. On Monday, we were in your feed to prep you for Tuesday's big primary day. Today, we're back to give you the results. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And there were some big winners and some big losers, but we don't really have the final results in two of the races that we were watching most closely. Domenico?

Yeah, I mean, the race that everybody was watching was the special election in Ohio's 12th congressional district. Where our timestamp was taped. Oh, yes. There we go. And that's just north of Columbus, Ohio, in the Columbus suburbs and some of the surrounding rural areas, which generally is a place that should be pretty reliably Republican and has been for a long time. But it turns out that in this race, it was pretty much a 50-50 race. And it turns out that fewer than 1,800 votes now separate the Democrat Danny O'Connor, who's in second, and Troy Balderson, who's ahead. There are some 8,500 provisional and absentee ballots that are still to be counted.

And those will not even start being counted for another 10 days. And just to go deep dive on the math here, the provisional ballots, we don't know if all of them will count. They're provisional for a reason. And the absentee ballots may or may not be returned. Those are just the ones that are out. Right. And there's no way to exactly know which direction they're going to go. If you want to get really into the deep dive of the math here, Balderson being ahead, if you're Danny O'Connor, you need about 55 percent of the remaining votes to get within the 0.5 percentage point threshold for an automatic recount. If he wants to get ahead, he would need something like 60, 61 percent of all the remaining votes to get ahead in that race. And you could argue that the results of this race

actually don't matter. This is a race that's going to be fought again in November. Three months from now, we're going to have the same race again. Just to explain why we're going to relive this race once again in three months, it's because this is a special election to fill a seat that was vacated. And then every single House seat in America is up for reelection or is open in November. Every two years. Every two years. That's how it works. What's important and significant is what the results and the turnout tell us or don't tell us about what might happen nationwide in November. And here's why the results overall just really don't matter. You know, a win is a win. Sure. And if Republicans are able to get this win here, it's a big deal for them. But at the same time, you know, you

have to consider that Democrats need 23 seats to take back the House. And when I was crunching the numbers yesterday, I found that there are 69 seats held by Republicans that either Trump won in 2016 by less than this or Hillary Clinton has won. So, you know, when you look at that, that's a much wider field, those 69 seats than the 23. And this may be where that bar is set. Right. And if And if the Democrat came so close in this one, assuming what we know now is the actual result, that means the Democrats should be able to do better in those 69 districts. The other thing that we don't know is the Republicans put in tremendous amounts of money and resources. They sent their biggest guns to campaign, including Donald Trump, who came in for a special election for the House of Representatives. Usually presidents don't do that. So with all that effort.

Usually presidents don't do a lot of things that President Trump does. But for all that effort, maybe they'll pull him out by a hair. They are not going to general election structurally. And that's true. And there is some argument to that because, you know, there's a lot of money outside money in particular that winds up coming into a race like this because it's the only ballgame in town. Right. This started getting a lot of attention. Lots of liberal money from New York and California, as the Republicans would say, came into this district and it swamped Balderson, the Republican. But overall, I think Republicans spent more on this race than Democrats in the end. By a lot. Right, because Republicans saw what was happening and they needed to bring the resources in to help. They're saying that in the fall, when you have incumbents with name ID that's very high, that people know in these districts and who have strong war chests, they won't need to come to the rescue. Now, that's the argument, but it that only attract the most motivated and the most energized?

And what we know from history is that ordinary Republican voters tend to turn out more in midterms than ordinary Democratic voters. So can Democrats change that equation? One question that this race raises and that Mara mentioned is President Trump swooped in at the last minute. He held a rally. President Trump and his campaign are declaring victory here. They are saying, we pushed this guy over the top. He was in a lackluster situation and then he won. Did the president help? Oh, I look, it's hard to measure that because he also motivates people on the other side. But I would say if you look at his record overall, in many, many, not all, but many of the places that he has endorsed a Republican in a primary, that Republican has won. In general, Trump's endorsement in Republican primaries has mattered. It might be hard to measure exactly what his

endorsement did in the special election because he could have motivated Democrats just as much as he motivated the Republican base. But inside the Republican Party, Trump does have a lot of power to energize the base. So one thing that Domenico and I had been looking at with this race, the Ohio 12, is turnout in the suburbs, in the inner suburbs, where the Democrat did best, turnout was higher than in the more rural counties where the Republican did better. Right. This entire district, the special election, took place over like six or seven counties. And the one with the largest concentration of people was the suburban county, Franklin County, where O'Connor was the Franklin County recorder. Now in Franklin itself, turnout was about 42% of registered voters. That's unheard of for a special election to be that high. Overall in the district, when you include those other half a dozen counties, turnout was about

37% overall. Now, when you look at some of those more rural counties, you start to drop off. It was only about 30 percent in the more rural counties in the special election. You both talk about how there's this intensity and there's this focus and and voters are like more interested than they normally would be in a midterm on both sides of the aisle. It makes me think about how typically after an election year, ratings drop off for news or subscriptions go down. Like the awareness, the sort of focus on politics is so heightened in the country. I mean, it's like politics has replaced sports.

And I guess these midterms are going to be part of that heightened awareness. Well, I think the heightened awareness has to do with one word, and that's Trump. I mean, the fact of the matter is that, you know, we talk about how Trump is able to turn out his base. He is even more effective at turning out Democrats. And even Republicans will acknowledge that. But they realize they recognize that Trump puts them in a vice because it's very difficult for them to win by alienating their base. But it's also difficult for them to win in some of these bluer counties than, let's say, Ohio 12. You know, we talk about there's 69 other counties that Trump won by less or Hillary Clinton won in those places in Virginia,

for example, we saw that be the case. It's much more difficult for them to play this game of driving out the base and not alienating the other side or alienating independents to go vote for Democrats. And that's why we're going to be watching really carefully Trump's travel schedule. Yeah. Because he says he wants to be out six to seven days a week. He'll go anywhere. He did come into this Ohio House district, which is unusual for a president. But for the most part, he's been going to Senate races in red states where he won by big margins where there's a Democratic incumbent. And that makes sense. I think the question is going forward in the House battleground,

are we going to see him trying to go to places where he runs that exact risk that Domenico just described, where, yes, he can fire up some Republicans, but he might fire up more Democrats. I was just talking to one of his allies yesterday who says, expect to see him out there like that. He is going to be everywhere. He loves doing these rallies. I'm saying it remains to be seen what everywhere means, what that means. There's only so many places you can go, but it's going to be a lot. You know, the thing is, he's not going to listen to, you know, the talking heads who are going to tell him that his policies or his demeanor are turning off independence. He doesn't care about that. All he knows is his track record.

People told him he couldn't win in the upper Midwest. There was this blue wall, but he won. He took that wall down. And until he sees differently in an election, he's going to keep doing what he's done. There is much more to talk about, but we have to take a quick break. When we come back, another cliffhanger in a race where President Trump made an endorsement. E. Casey Foundation, developing solutions to support strong families and communities to help ensure a brighter future for America's children. More information is available at AECF.org. Sam Sanders here. On my show, we talk to stars on the rise. Jimmy O. Yang from Crazy Rich Asians in Silicon Valley, Brian Tyree Henry from Atlanta, Darcy Carden from The Good Place, and HBO's Barry, All in your feed now. Join us on It's Been a Minute from NPR.

All right. We are back. We left you with a cliffhanger. Now, the results, which are, in fact, a cliffhanger. We are talking about the gubernatorial primary in Kansas. The first time anyone has ever talked about a cliffhanger in Kansas. Because there are no cliffs. Because there are no cliffs in Kansas. because there are no cliffs in Kansas. People are going to be like, Domenico, there are cliffs. Oh, show me. I would love to see.

I know Missouri is the show me state. It's a sunflower state. But show me the pictures of cliffs in Kansas. Please send that in. Okay, the cliffhanger in Kansas is Chris Kobach. Man, how about that for alliteration? Chris Kobach, the Secretary of State against Jeff Collier, who is the current incumbent governor. President Trump endorsed Kobach over Collier and Kobach is in the lead, but as narrow as you possibly could get, he's up by only 191 votes over more than 250,000 votes in this race. And this is one race where Democrats were thrilled that Trump decided to endorse Kobach because they think that his hardline views on

immigration and voting rights are going to help them win the governor's mansion in Kansas, which would be quite a feat. Kansas is kind of a laboratory for conservative policies. They've gone almost as far as they can go with under the former governor, Sam Brownback. Who was wildly unpopular because of his policies. And there's been a kind of backlash to that. And Chris Kobach kind of represents that deeply conservative point of view. So if he wins this primary, Democrats think there's going to be a very competitive race, more competitive than if the sitting governor had. And the Democratic candidates, Laura Kelly, who won pretty easily last night, and you know that

she's going to have her campaign already starting those negative attack ads against Kobach and figuring out what their message is going to be. And we should remember, it hasn't been that long since Kansas had a Democratic governor. Kathleen Sebelius was governor of Kansas before she left to be President Obama's Health and Human Services Secretary. Now, you mentioned that the Democratic nominee for governor in Kansas is a woman. This is part of a larger trend. Yeah, the larger trend here, which, you know, our colleague Danielle Kurtzleben has been tracking all of the women who've been running in this in this election. And, you know, everyone talks about the year of the woman. Well, we have officially hit the record

number of nominees for general election races in an election cycle who are women. Which is pretty remarkable, though, then again, maybe not that surprising, given sort of the way women reacted to President Trump's election and Hillary Clinton's defeat. Certainly spurred a record number of women, in particular Democratic women, to go and become more active and to run for office. Record numbers of women running for office this cycle than ever seen before. And I've got the numbers to put behind it. Got them from the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. For the first time, 11 women have been nominated in gubernatorial races in a single year. And there are at least 173 women who have won nominations in U.S. House races.

That is a lot. That is a lot. And speaking of female people, there was a really interesting race in Michigan in the Democratic primary for governor. Let's go to the scoreboard, Domenico. So Gretchen Whitmer, who was a little bit more tied to the establishment here, wound up winning in a pretty much a landslide over Abdul El-Sayed, who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders had backed and campaigned for, actually, and Sri Thanedar, who had also gotten a lot of attention in this race. But Whitmer, it's really fascinating because a lot of people tried to tag her as the establishment candidate when, frankly, her record statewide had been as pretty progressive otherwise. And this is a trend that we're seeing. To give Bernie Sanders his due, there is no doubt that the energy in the Democratic Party is on the left, that they are

definitely shaping Democratic Party positions on health care and other issues, but they seem to be better at generating press coverage than actual victories in these primaries. And this got a tremendous amount of attention, mostly because Al-Sayed was a Medicare for all guy. He was a Bernie backed candidate, but he lost by a lot. And that was the trend in a lot of other races where Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came in to endorse someone. Lots and lots of press coverage, but in the end fell short by curvature of the earth. Well, yeah, I mean, they did. They do wind up losing in a lot of these races. You know, they would argue that they're not really that well funded and that if they had

gotten more attention and that people would back them, then they could do better. They also argue that they have also changed the conversation within a lot of the issues that Democrats are running on. You know, everybody sort of knows what they're running on. $15 minimum wage, Medicare for all. And Ocasio-Cortez really had kind of a mixed record last night because, you know, in some of these high profile places, she actually wound up not doing very well. She did get a win in Michigan with a candidate who she endorsed, Rashida Tlaib, who would wind up being the first female Muslim congresswoman, most likely, because this is a pretty liberal district. It was John Conyers' district.

And Republicans aren't even contesting it. That's right. And she'd also be the first Palestinian American who was in Congress. A district much like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's own. That's absolutely true. And I think the thing is what we've seen is as she's tried to move this democratic socialist message beyond the borders of a place that's that liberal, it's been a little bit more difficult. And, you know, they tried to take on William Lacey Clay in Missouri, for example, last night. He's somebody who has been there for a long time. He is a civil rights icon in many ways. His father founded the Congressional Black Caucus.

And her candidate, who was an African-American female pastor, wound up with about 30 percent of the vote, which is pretty good considering that she was fairly unknown, but didn't take him out. While we're in Missouri, there is not a candidate, but there was a ballot measure that I think is worth talking about. Because it's really interesting. It's related to organized labor. There was a state law, a right to work law. A lot of states, conservative states, have passed these so-called right-to-work laws that are basically aimed at constraining labor unions. Yeah, it prevents them from collecting dues from everyone who they represent. Organized labor came in, they collected twice as many signatures as necessary to put this referendum on the ballot, and then they won by two to one, which is extraordinary. Organized labor has been on the losing end of almost every political fight in this country

for a generation. And you see it at the Supreme Court. You see it all over the country with these right to work laws. But they won one in Missouri. And Richard Trumka, who's the head of the AFL-CIO, was at a breakfast I went to last week, who said that despite predicting success in this referendum, he said that he has never seen this level of grassroots organizing energy for about a generation, just in general. I was going to say you could probably extrapolate out what happened last night and just the overwhelming win in a Republican state. I mean, this was two thirds. It wasn't even close to repeal this.

And it really does speak to the democratic organizational strength this year. And that, I think, is a pretty big deal. And there's something else. It's yes, labor poured tremendous amounts of money into this, and they're not going to be able to do that, replicate that all over the country. But when you see red state teacher strikes, that's a wild card to watch for in November. Oklahoma, you know, West Virginia, these places where November. Oklahoma, you know, West Virginia, these places where there's Kentucky, you know, so you have all of this energy and organizing energy in red states. And that's the kind of thing that if Claire McCaskill, the Democratic embattled

incumbent in Missouri, is going to survive, that's what's going to help her survive. She is a senator from Missouri. She is on the ballot in November. She has to be looking at this ballot measure victory and saying, huh, maybe I'm okay. Grassroots doing pretty good. Yeah. Like, hey, they organized for that. Maybe they can organize for me. There's no doubt that in the larger war, Republicans are winning.

Union labor, organized labor is losing. But as a tea leaf that we're trying to look at after last night, as to what we might be able to expect in November, this is a sign of grassroots Democratic enthusiasm. All right, let's leave that there. We will be back tomorrow with our regular weekly roundup. And there's a lot to talk about, including the Paul Manafort trial that's been ongoing. Until then, send us your timestamps recorded for the top of the show to nprpolitics at npr.org. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. politics podcast. And I'm zipping up my ostrich coat. Did you see the onion had him come in

to the courtroom with a coat made up of live puffins? Oh my God. It was really funny. Did you see the coat though? It's like a bomber jacket. It's leather. It's not ostrich feathers. It's ostrich skin. I know, but I, I like... I didn't even know that a bird made leather. I pictured like lapels and a blazer, but no, it's a bomber.