The NPR Politics Podcast - NPR Politics Live From Boulder: The Road To 2020

Episode Date: September 21, 2019

This is a special episode, recorded in front of a live audience at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado on Friday, September 20th. The cast breaks down everything you need to know about who's running for president, and how they match up next to each other. This episode: political correspondent Asma Khalid, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, 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

Hi, my name is Anna. I'm the first person in line for the Politics Podcast. Hi, my name is Dominic. I'm here for the NPR Politics Podcast. Hi, I'm Bob Carr. I'm here to see the NPR Politics Podcast. Really looking forward to it. This podcast was recorded at... This podcast was recorded at... This podcast was recorded at... Mountain Time on Friday, September 20th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it.

Okay, here's the show. Hey there, welcome to the NPR Politics Podcast live from Boulder, Colorado. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So we are here in Boulder at the Boulder Theater, and we are not alone for anyone listening to the podcast.

So why don't you all say hello? NPR is partnering with Colorado Public Radio and KUNC for this live show, and we want to say a huge thank you to them for supporting us. Well, let us just dive right in. It has been a little over a week since the most recent Democratic presidential debate. And so that means the pundits, the candidates, their spinmeisters have all had a chance to give their hot takes of what happened and if anything did much change. So why don't we just dive in? And Mara, why don't you give us a sense of has anything really substantively changed in the Democratic primary race? Not really. We've had a couple

debates. Joe Biden is still at the top of the polls. A lot of Democrats consider him a weak and vulnerable frontrunner, but he is the frontrunner and he's been pretty stable there. The only real movement, the only dynamic in the race is that Elizabeth Warren is coming up. One thing that you're seeing, this today at least, is that the rest of the candidates, while some of them have tried to take on Biden and failed, mostly they're just waiting for him to collapse of his own weight. But with Warren, they think they have to take her on. And she's finally getting criticism and attacks.

And today in Iowa, she was really pressed on whether or not she would raise middle-class taxes to pay for her mandatory Medicare for all plan. And she refused to say that she would. And you're going to hear more of that. Right. I mean, in the last day or two, few days, I suppose you could say you've had what Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, I should say, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, all take some measure of veiled or not veiled and later potentially backpedaled swipes at Elizabeth Warren or some of her plans. What this says to me at least is that after this long and steady rise in the polls, people are finally saying, even if she's not hitting other people, you have other people saying, all right, we're going to

hit at her. We see her as a threat. And we should mention that we actually should give a sort of a quick recap of just who is actually in this field, because there are a lot of candidates. So we have a handy slide here for you all. We're not going to read them all, man. And we should mention that we had to actually update this slide this morning because someone dropped off. Anyone know who that was? Mel de Blasio. How do we have such an informed audience?

Such a well-informed audience. And as regular listeners to this podcast know, we have a tradition of saying goodbye to candidates. And I do not sing. Danielle Kurtzleben does sing. And I'm hoping that you all can help her. Let's not overstate this. Most of you who know NSYNC just a little, we've got to say bye, bye, bye to Bill de Blasio.

Oh, you want me to start that was your cue Justin Timberlake hey hey bye bye bye don't want to be a fool for you alright we're not doing this I want to be clear this was not me demanding to take a solo

this is a fair use argument we were having. And so we settled on one of us singing it. That's it. But also when we sing people out, we don't usually sing it. But when we say goodbye, we say at least a little bit about their campaign and what they were trying to do. And in the case of Bill de Blasio, he was making a progressive argument in a race where the progressive lane has two very dominant people and neither of them are seven foot tall giants from New York City. Not seven foot tall giants from New York City, but very, very well known people, like people who had very big name recognition, name wide,

had had large platforms nationwide, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in their own way. Bill de Blasio was the other person who was really strongly backing, for example, Medicare for All. And just to get this out of the way, when I say Medicare for All, I mean Bernie Sanders' single-payer health plan. Mandatory Medicare for All. Right. As opposed to voluntary buy-in.

Everybody has stolen his branding at this point. But that's what we mean. And so Bill de Blasio was really hugging that, the Green New Deal, a lot of these very headline progressive policies. So when we look at who remains in this field of 19 presidential candidates, it is clear, and it has been clear for a while, that Joe Biden, the former vice president, has been seen to be a frontrunner. He has been extraordinarily resilient. You know, some folks, I will say some pundits, and certainly some voters we meet who are supporting other candidates will refer to him as a weak candidate. But I would say he's been remarkably resilient. And I'd love to hear, you know, if you guys have a sense of why he has been

so resilient, despite questions about how long he would stay at top. Well, I'll give you one reason. Outside of the democratic reality distortion field, otherwise known as Twitter, most Democrats are not left-wing activists. Most of them like the idea of having a voluntary option to buy into Medicare. No, they don't want to lose their employer provided health insurance. They see him as somebody who can beat Donald Trump. I don't think that his support is rock-solid. I think that it is shallow in a lot of states, but he represents ideologically where a lot of Democrats are. Now, if Warren ends up being the main challenger to Biden, and it certainly looks

like that's the dynamic in the race, we're going to see a pretty clear ideological contrast, and that's going to get played out. He has very strong support among African-American voters. So if you go into the polls and you dig below the surface, he is leading by a lot among black voters. And Asma or Danielle, do you have any sense of why that is? One thing that came up was when I was talking to some voter strategists, specifically who specialize in African-American voters, this was earlier this year, I was asking them about this. And one of them told me, listen specialize in African American voters, this was earlier this year, I was asking them about this. And one of them told me, listen, African American voters,

this is one of those generalizing things that strategists say, but he said, African American voters tend to be quite pragmatic. I believe the way he put it, and I'm paraphrasing here, was there is so much at stake that many African American voters feel is at stake when they vote, like their voting rights, like their economic well-being, that they want to stick with what they feel like is a safe choice. This is not at all of them, but this is definitely one factor at play. Biden's been around a long time, and he's earned the support and affection of African-American voters the hard way, you know, by decades and decades of service. And he was Barack Obama's vice president. And that counts for a lot. That does count for a lot. I was just recently in South Carolina with Biden out on a campaign swing.

And I mean, I can't tell you the amount of times I heard people say that they felt a loyalty to him because he had had such devotion to Barack Obama. I don't think that that can be really overstated. And look, a lot of these folks that I talked to are older African American voters, but those are the folks who are more likely to turn out at the polls in the South Carolina primary at this point. So, you know, how solid is his support to Mara's point? I don't know how solid it is. There's often a statement that Biden has a lot of support. It's very wide, but it also seems sometimes very shallow.

And I do think there's an expectation from some of the other candidates, some of the other campaigns, that at some point he's going to falter. We just haven't seen that yet. And when I talk to political professionals, and so, you know, it's the professional class, and you can take that with a giant grain of salt,

but people tell me that, you know, in 2008, Hillary Clinton had a lock on the African-American vote until she didn't. She had a lock on the African-American vote. If you look at the polling in South Carolina, she was winning. And then Barack Obama won in Iowa, in part through a really solid ground game, in part because he was showing up at events and just simply inspiring people, and people started to think, oh, it's possible he could win. Once it became clear that he could win,

it was like flipping a switch, and all of a sudden Hillary Clinton, all that support Hillary Clinton thought she had that was like she was just going to bank on that and win in South Carolina, it was gone. But to your point, though, Tam, that was the country's first black president, right? I do, I mean, I think there's very reasonable questions about whether or not an Elizabeth Warren, even if she won Iowa, even if she won in New Hampshire, could she really-

Those are two lily white states. And they just are. And the African-American vote is the most important piece of the Democratic primary electorate. You cannot win. You can't win the nomination without winning. Once you get out of New Hampshire and Iowa, you're going to South Carolina, you're going to the Midwest, other southern states where there are much, much higher proportions of African-American Democratic voters. This is why Barack Obama won once he proved himself in Iowa. I don't see a Barack Obama in this race yet. Kamala Harris hasn't proved to be that. And it's why Hillary Clinton won in 2016, because she had the support of the African American community and Bernie didn't. I want to talk to you guys, talk a little bit about Senator Warren, because we've talked a lot about her being the potential main challenger to Joe Biden. And I know that whenever you have these conversations in the newsroom, Mara will say that there's a lot of questions about sort of her base of support, because

it is very nuanced. And whenever I look at the polls, it seems like it comes largely from white college educated liberals. That is pretty much exclusively where her support comes from. She does not have support from African-American voters at all in the degree that Joe Biden does. And for that matter, neither does Bernie Sanders, who's the other main challenger at this point. What Warren, I think, does have going for her, based on there was a poll that came out of Iowa this week where a pollster asked Iowa Democrats, are you open to candidate X or are you not? Elizabeth Warren has not scared off Iowa voters yet. They are still open to her. There are plenty of candidates who have much bigger, I would not consider so-and-so, Bernie Sanders, whatever, than she does. There are voters who are

still open to her. I don't know what it would take for her to scare them off, but what she has done is she hasn't alienated people yet, which leaves a large door open for her. She's excited people. She's the excitement candidate in the race right now. Now, people say, okay, getting 15,000 people at a rally in New York City, that's a little different. Her campaign will say it was 20,000. Or 20,000, whatever. And Seattle. Those are not swing states. But she's the excitement candidate. She's probably the best performer. She's got the 360-degree campaign. She's got grassroots plans. She has a compelling way of making her plans connect to people's lives. The question I hear from Democrats is, has she moved so far to the left? Has she embraced so much mandatory Medicare for all, decriminalizing illegal border crossings? Is that the kind of thing that would hurt her in a general election, make her less electable against

Donald Trump? But I will say her campaign, I think, is really cognizant of those concerns, which is why I would argue part of the big rally strategy is to prove that she's electable. It's to show, hey, you know, if you're a Warren supporter, I mean, I look back at January, there were so many questions when she first got into the race about her, frankly, even from her own constituents in Massachusetts. She needs to have one of those rallies in Milwaukee. You're right. But there is this notion that, like, you know, look, I think that a lot of folks will say, what's crowd size? Well, look, when Donald Trump started holding gigantic rallies,

it's when a lot of folks started coming out and saying, hey, I like Trump, I'll go to one of his rallies. And crowd size became this metric for enthusiasm, and other folks who wouldn't consider the candidate came on board. With Warren, what I will say at some of her events, I meet people time and time again who tell me, I don't really think she's going to have a Medicare for all system. I don't really think that's going to happen.

I think she's more likely to moderate than Bernie Sanders. Which is not unlike what you heard from some people who voted for President Trump in 2016. Seriously, but not literally? Yes. And he really didn't. I mean, there were people in the audience that said that. There are people who are saying now, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, the wall.

Like, I don't care if he gets 500 miles. It doesn't matter. He's sticking it to the liberals. Asma, you talk about this electability argument that's being made through crowd size. You know, Bernie Sanders was doing the same thing in 2016. I remember relatively early in the summer of 2015 talking to a strategist in Iowa who said, objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.

And the reason he was saying that is because Bernie Sanders was attracting crowds to small towns in Iowa where the crowd was bigger than the population of the town. And then his rallies grew and grew and grew. And he, I actually covered a rally in New York in the same square where you just covered a rally that Elizabeth Warren held. I mean, that speaks to me a little bit also of how Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are taking really fundamentally different styles to campaigning this cycle.

Sanders' campaign will say, well, look, people already know him. He doesn't need to hold these giant rallies. He's holding these more intimate town halls. I mean, look, I don't know if that's a campaign strategy or also the reality that maybe he's not generating as much enthusiasm this election cycle.

His ceiling and his floor seem to be the same. No. But a couple things here while we're talking about the quote-unquote progressive wing. I think it is possible to overestimate how much ideology really drives people's votes.

I really do. You will meet people out on the- You're hearing this from the person who covers policy for the Empire Politics Podcast. Bernie Sanders, the second choice of Bernie Sanders voters be Joe Biden and the second choice of Biden voters be Bernie Sanders. That's insane. When I meet people out of the, When I meet people out of the trail... That's true.

Those polls show that. It's insane, but it's real. When I meet people out on the trail who say I like Biden and I like Sanders, I think, cool. And also I think... They like old guys. They just like old guys.

It just makes me wonder, when I ask them, what is your top policy? I almost don't care to ask it. And I'm not saying ideology has to drive a vote. I'm not making a value judgment here. But I think it's easy for us to get a look, and I say this as the policy person, unfortunately, I don't know how much policy matters to people. I think often it's a post-hoc rationalization thing. You like a candidate or you don't,

and then afterwards you decide, well, it's because they like TPP or it's because they don't like TPP. I really think that happens. There's a universe of people that really cares about TPP, mind you. But it's not. TPP is the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump pulled us out of, just to clarify. But for a lot of people, it's not really a voting issue. No. And when you talk about what do people care about at rallies, I find it so interesting because I've been doing a lot of work recently on white liberal voters in

particular. And one of the things that has fascinated me this election cycle is that they in particular, a lot of folks just looked out into the audience, Go on. I've been trending. There's been a pretty seismic transformation in the last decade around how white liberals feel about race. And that is something I do hear on the campaign trail. I hear from folks a lot, social justice issues really matter to me

or immigration really matters to me. And this is kind of fascinating because these are not what you would hear from white Democrats. Even in probably 2008, this is not something you heard. And in some of these metrics, you know, when you ask folks, does having a diverse country make the United States better or worse or not matter at all? You actually have more white liberals saying it's better. More white Democrats say it's better than black Democrats or Latino Democrats.

Is that virtue signaling? I will leave that up for interpretation. To be clear, one, did this predate Trump? And two, how much do you think Trump has accelerated it? So the researchers I talked to for this story did say it definitely predates Trump. They began to see this shift around like 2012-ish. It kind of coincides around the time that they said a lot of major news outlets started picking up on social media accounts of police brutality. That was sort of the key

connection they saw. But they also say that Donald Trump's election clearly accelerated things. But you know what's really interesting, even to just step back for a wider lens than just the Democratic primary and white liberals, is that Donald Trump's views have not caused majorities of Americans to agree with him. As a matter of fact, overall views on immigration, just simple questions like, are immigrants good for the country or a burden to the country, big majorities now say they are good for the country. Same thing with climate change.

It's almost as if his positions have caused large numbers of Americans to define their own positions in opposition to him. That is true. So he's not increasing racial feelings of white racial grievance, he's doing the opposite. That's true and that's what the researchers have said that actually on that very question of immigration,

they saw a huge change after the 2016 election. So we have just spent a lot of time on this stage talking about those three. But there are more. There are more. There are more. So let's talk, I guess, a little bit about the notion of what it would take for some of these other candidates who, you know, could potentially rise up. Let's see, someone like a Kamala Harris or a Pete Buttigieg, folks who, you know, tend to poll, depending on the particular poll, decently well. And I will say that they've made the debate stage. There is, though, a sense that it's still going to be somewhat of a narrow path forward for them.

Do you see a path forward for them? Well, there is the eternal hope among all the centrist candidates not named Joe Biden that when when when Joe Biden collapses, they think that he will, that one of them will be able to fill that vacuum. Including Colorado's own Michael Bennett. Bennett, although who sometimes makes the centrist case a lot better than Biden does himself. But right now, they haven't been able to get out of the single digits.

Kamala Harris is really the only candidate who's gone in the opposite direction after her kind of swipe at Biden. Which, immediately after that debate, everyone thought, oh, look, she showed she can debate Trump. Well, she did. Her numbers went up. And her numbers went up, and then it just went, hmm. I mean, a side note on that, by the way, is

that I think there was a lot of post debate, like Monday morning quarterbacking, that oh, Kamala Harris took a swing at Biden, and it paid off. I think briefly, briefly paid off, of course. I think what also happened, what maybe the counter narrative here is that she told a personal story and people went, oh, like what's the moment that you remember most from the last debate? For me, it's Pete Buttigieg talking about coming out when candidates tell their personal stories.

I think that's what really sticks with people. I don't know if it was so much her just taking a swing at Joe Biden. I think it was her being like, here's who I am. To me, what's interesting, too, is some of these candidates are really banking on Iowa. So Kamala Harris made a point that she's all in in Iowa, and you can expect to see her there pretty often, pretty frequently. And this is a strategy that many candidates and campaigns have used before, which is that you bank on doing really well in Iowa. You win in Iowa. The question for me is, this is a really crowded field. So does a third place finish in Iowa really get you anywhere? Historical rules only work till they stop working. But what we do know from covering these races for many, many years is that usually there are three tickets out of Iowa. If you can't place in the top three,

you're not going to raise money, you're not going to have any oxygen to continue. We've talked about sort of, not that we want to break these into hard and fast tiers, we've talked about the people polling just behind those top three, Harris and Buttigieg, but there's also Klobuchar and Booker, Yang, they were all on the stage at the last debate.

Once you've had your initial either media boomlet or poll boomlet, you can't get it back. That's a guess. I may be wrong. But Klobuchar, Booker, they haven't had it yet. But Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Harris, they have. I don't know if lightning strikes twice. We should also remind people that a very large percentage of Democratic voters are still undecided or say they could exactly what I was gonna say more than more than you and in a recent poll we just saw I believe it was from NBC it was like nine percent only of Democratic primary voters had actually

definitively made up their mind so we are gonna wrap up this section and we'll be right back support for this podcast and the following message come from the Annie 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. What happens when Ronald McDonald walks into a poor immigrant neighborhood in the south of France and sets off a supersized revolution. The story of how a company slogan to sell more shakes and burgers became a rallying cry for workers in France. That's on NPR's Rough Translation. And we're back. And we just spent a while talking about presidential politics. So now we'd like to shift gears and spend some time talking about Senate politics. Because in 2020, there is going to be, I would argue, sort of an epic battle over who controls the upper chamber of Congress.

In 2018, there was a lot of talk about just how bad that Senate map was for Democrats. So the question I have, Mara, why don't you start, is two years later, is that Senate map looking any better for Democrats? It looks a little better for Democrats. It doesn't look fabulous, but it looks a little better. They have to get a net three or four pickups to get majority control of the Senate, depending if they win the White House or not. It's widely predicted that Doug Jones in Alabama will lose his seat. Alabama is a ruby red state. It was kind of a fluke that he got elected at all. So they have to look for more pickups. Where are they? Here. Here, obviously.

Colorado and Maine are the only two blue states where there's a Republican incumbent senator. So those are the prime targets. You've got Arizona, where Mark Kelly is running against Martha McSally, who was appointed to the John McCain seat. So I think the universe is bigger, a little bit bigger for Democrats. I think it's still going to be an uphill climb for them, just as I think it'll be a really steep uphill climb for the Republicans to get the House back. So, Kim, would you agree with Mara's assessment on the key states that are going to be most at play? Yes. Now, let me tell you one other fun fact about the states that are in play this cycle. These senators who are running for re-election were elected. They won their

races in 2014. Now, what was 2014? A downright terrible year for Democrats. It was a midterm year in President Obama's second term. There were a lot of close races that people thought would go, maybe could possibly go to the Democrats. Basically, none of them did. If there was something that could tip in favor of a Republican, it tipped in favor of a Republican. So as you come around six years later, like for instance, in Colorado, you have someone running who won in 2014, which was a very different year. That is Senator Cory Gardner. Now, will this be a favorable year for Republicans or Democrats?

No. Well, right. Colorado is the state that Democrats are a little bit more optimistic about than Maine. Maine's going to be harder. Susan Collins, even though she's in a blue state, she voted for Kavanaugh. She voted for the tax plan. Then again, she has in the past voted for big Democratic things. She voted for the stimulus,

for example, during Obama's years. I'm not saying voters remember that particular vote, but if you're a hardcore Republican voter in Maine, you may not really dig her very much. The thing about the Senate races, the trend has been that the Senate races follow the presidential race.

In other words, there are very few states left that voted for a Republican presidential candidate and have Democratic senators, for instance. We're getting down to the last two. And that's the interesting thing to me about Colorado is that I spent a bunch of time here in 2016 because you all were seen as a more purplish state back then. I would argue, and this is probably not news to any of you all, that demographically, this state has changed, and it is changing. There's a whole lot more folks of color moving into the state, and I would argue there's a whole lot more white college-educated voters who also tend to vote Democratic moving into the state.

And look, there's still a primary here, but Democrats feel that they have a couple very strong candidates to defeat Gardner, but one in particular. One thing I want to say about Colorado, though, is that to me, it's exemplary of a trend that we're seeing nationwide,

which is a lot of these states where Democrats are trying to contest Republican-held Senate seats, there are people, Democratic people running, like John Hick and Looper, like John Ossoff in Georgia, like people who have a fair amount of name recognition already who have done this stuff

before, even though John Ossoff did not win. Democrats have these high profile names running in many of these states, which even if those Democrats don't win, it might force Republicans to put up more of a fight, spend more, put more resources into those states than they otherwise would. I think that a really fascinating question, both in Colorado and Maine, is, is there a lane, is there a chance for a Republican in a blue or purple state who wants to sort of distance from Trump but can't distance too much and is still a Republican so will take votes that Democrats don't like like is there was Mike Congressman Mike Coffman who lost he's a Republican in Georgia no he's a Republican he's a Republican in Georgia. No, he's a Republican. He's a Republican here in Colorado who was trying to make the case like, you know, I have opposed Trump. I voted against the

Obamacare repeal. You can, you know, you moderates and independents can still support me. And he lost and he lost by a lot. The question here is, can any Republican distance themselves from Trump enough to win in a state that is like Colorado? Theoretically, yes, although there's less and less ticket splitting. That's another big trend in American politics. That just doesn't happen as much as it used to. I think Susan Collins is in a better position to do that in Maine than Cory Gardner is here. One state we haven't mentioned, but that I want to mention here is Iowa. But not just because I'm from there. Daniela's from Iowa.

Yes, to be clear. So there's some favoritism here. But I am serious here when if we're talking about senators who might want to distance themselves from Trump, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican, very well might want to because Donald Trump has had two major policies that have that Iowa farmers are not pleased about the tariffs and also some things he's done on the renewable fuel standard. I'm not going to get into, but it's about ethanol in Iowa. And my point is it has Iowa farmers very upset and it has Joni Ernst and answering questions about, OK, do you like these tariffs? And I think that is a case study where you're going to see a senator trying to walk a very, very particular line. These lines are hard to walk. Yeah. All right. We are going to take a quick break, but don't leave.

And when we get back, it will be time for Can't Let It Go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Walton family foundation where opportunity takes root. More information is available at Walton family foundation.org. Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most well-known thinkers in the world, but he says a lot of his fans don't know that he's black. White people don't know black people always. How do you feel about that?

As I find it hilarious. Malcolm Gladwell on race, pop culture, and a whole lot more. Next time on It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we're back. All right. Well, now it is time for our segment, Can't Let It Go, which is where we all share something that we just cannot stop thinking about, politics or otherwise.

Danielle, why don't you start? All right. So I have four words for you. Public radio fan fiction. Yeah, it exists. All right. So I have this friend. This is not me being like, I have a friend.

No, I have a friend, actually. I say this from the bottom of my heart as a compliment. She's a total weirdo. She is very into fan fiction, and she was telling me about it this week, and she was telling me about the archive where she looks at it, and I was like, I wonder if there's public radio fan fiction. Lo and behold, she sends me a link, and I want to be clear, this is safer work. This is totally not bad. Yeah, so there's this place called Archive of Our Own. Some of you may be familiar with it. Oh, we have a fan.

It's where a lot of fan fiction lives on the internet. And I'm just stunned by the attention to detail that people have. Like, the way that they capture the voice of various shows in writing fake scripts. I even found an MP3, like someone actually recorded it and tried to make an NPR show. There's a lot of them involve zombies for some reason. There's like zombie, wait, wait, don't tell me, zombie pop culture happy hour, not joking. But like there are lots of This American Life things and they capture the Ira Glass voice perfectly. Like you can hear it.

Like there's one where he has Sarah Koenig interview Hermione Granger. This is like fan fiction, fan fiction. Oh, yeah. No, it's like melding. There's like Captain America. There's a lot. It's a lot.

But it's like, you have him saying like, you're listening to this American life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, people finding themselves in new worlds. We've arrived at act two of our program, people finding themselves in new worlds. We've arrived at act two of our program. Act two, owl post. Think back to it. And it just goes on like this. That's a pretty good read. That was really good. You're welcome. But anyway, I am stunned by how much time people put into this.

And not in a joking way. It's kind of great. So public radio fan fiction. Go look it up. So Asma, I think you are next. What can you not let go of? So some of you all may know that Joe Kennedy, who's a congressman in Massachusetts, has announced that he's going to be running for Senate against a fellow Democrat, Ed Markey. And if you're a Kennedy in Massachusetts, your name tends to carry a lot of clout. There's a

lot of Kennedys over the years who've been in Massachusetts. And back in 2011 2011 there's this pollster I know who ended up pulling a random Kennedy and found that this random Kennedy was very popular in fact he was so popular he had favorabilities of 25 to 1 that's like an enormous favorability on favorability rating wait so this was like a although this was a person's name it a fake Kennedy, just to see how a fake Kennedy would poll. Oh, a generic Kennedy. A generic Kennedy. So the joke is, you really better hope, if you are a random politician in Massachusetts, that there is not some like Joe Schmoe, in fact there have been Joe Kennedys,

so maybe a Pete Kennedy out there, ready to set you up for primary challenger, because chances are, you know, you're going to face a tough fight. So there you have it. So it's like polling versus a generic Kennedy. Any generic Kennedy. No Kennedy has ever lost a race in Massachusetts. Really?

Whoa. Kennedys are very popular in the state of Massachusetts. In the state of Massachusetts. All right, Mara, why don't you go next? So my can't let it go this week is Howdy Modi. Howdy Modi is the big rally that's going to happen this weekend. Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, is coming to Harris County,

a blue dot in red or maybe trending purple Texas. It's the Houston suburbs, which voted Democratic in 2018. Howdy Moody is a huge rally, 50,000 people, mostly Indian Americans. And Donald Trump is going to appear at this rally. So as a political journalist, this is almost too much for me to process. So we've got Donald Trump going to be the second banana at a rally where he can try to hope that the popularity of the Indian leader will rub off on him

in a Democratic-trending part of Texas before a group of immigrants. Brown, brown skin, brown immigrants. And that's like just almost too much for me to process. His crowd size, though, is going to be way bigger than Elton John's. The crowd is going to be huge, like 50,000 people. And Donald Trump, now that tells you so many things. It tells you about what's happening in Texas.

And it tells you to what lengths Trump is willing to go, even to be the number two at a big rally. Tam, what can't you let go of? You just blew their minds, Mara. I cannot let go of Sean Spicer. Oh, wow. Yes, yes, yes. So, Sean Spicer, on Monday, he made his premiere on Dancing with the Stars in this lime green ruffle shirt, playing the bongos, dancing the salsa.

I did watch Dancing with the Stars this week, so I think they did succeed at getting the ratings they wanted. This quote in the New York Times, though, is terrific. Sean Spicer is quoted as saying, I was wearing a lime green shirt and playing the bongos. If you weren't laughing, then you have a problem. He apparently was not thrilled about the shirt. He says, the creative team did it.

I think it was payback for a lot of people. At least he's self-aware. Which is to say that the wardrobe department is probably part of the hashtag resistance. Thanks to our partners, Colorado Public Radio

and KUNC. You can support this podcast by supporting them, your local public radio station. And we could not have done any of this without Ali Prescott and the NPR events team. If you enjoyed this show, you can check out another show coming to Denver soon. That's NPR's How I Built This with Guy Raz. He will be putting on a live show on November 13th in Denver. You can head to nprpresents.org to grab a ticket. A special thanks to our audio engineer, Andy Huther.

This show and the podcast are produced by Barton Girdwood and Barbara Sprutt. Our social strategist is Brandon Carter. Our editors are Shirley Henry and Mathoni Maturi. And a huge welcome to our new editor, Eric McDaniel, who is joining the team as we prepare for 2020. And most of all, thanks to all of you in the audience tonight and to everyone listening. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover politics.

And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you, Boulder, for being with us for the NPR Politics Podcast.