The NPR Politics Podcast - Primary Season Kicks Off With Texas

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

Primary season officially gets under way this week. Texas is first up, on Tuesday. For the first time in years, Democrats are fielding candidates in every congressional district there, and in early voting, Democratic turnout surpassed Republican turnout. Also, President Trump has driven a wedge between himself and many of his fellow Republicans by announcing he will impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. And he's not backing down. This episode: host/White House correspondent Tamara Keith, political reporter Jessica Taylor, congressional correspondent Susan Davis and editor correspondent Ron Elving. 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 Lucas Braun calling from Raymond, Ohio, where I am about to listen to the audio of the musical Hamilton for the first time ever. Why haven't I done this already? This podcast was recorded at 1 40 p.m. on Monday, March 5th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to it. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage at npr.org, the NPR One app, and your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast, and primary season officially gets underway this week. Texas is up first tomorrow.

For the first time in years, Democrats are fielding a candidate in every congressional district there. And in early voting, Democratic turnout surpassed Republican turnout. But how much of Texas could really be in play for Democrats? And President Trump has driven a wedge between himself and a big chunk of the Republican establishment on trade. Today, he said he isn't backing down. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Jessica Taylor, political reporter. And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And take that, Scott Detrow. Yeah, we need to explain on the last podcast, Scott Detrow admitted that he had only just

recently listened to Hamilton all the way through for the first time. I know, Jess. I thought he admitted he'd never listened. No, no, no. He said just recently. Just recently and discovered, like, wow, it's not overrated. Actually, that sounds pretty interesting, Scott said. Have a lot of people seen and heard this before?

I feel like maybe I've heard it a few times. You know, I don't know. Most people can only hope to someday see it once in a high school production. In 2032. Exactly. Which is when I plan on seeing it. All right. So, guys, I have to admit that I have been in denial about the fact that the year is 2018, and that means that it is, in fact, an election year. However, reality is smacking me in the face this week because Texas is having primaries tomorrow. Yeah, voting. People will be voting. People already have been voting, in fact, with this early voting. So it is underway. It is underway. And Texas is getting a lot of attention, probably in part because it's first. But Jess, tell me why for people in the rest of the

49 states, we should actually be paying attention to Texas. I mean, you know, we've seen these signs of Democratic enthusiasm happening for a while. There have been 39 state legislative districts that flipped since Trump was elected, flipped from Republican to Democratic hands. We had big wins last year in Virginia and New Jersey for Democrats. And of course, the women's marches and protests and everything, too. So there's been evidence of this. But this is the first time we will get actual concrete voting numbers.

And we're already getting some data in because Texas had 11 days of early voting. And the enthusiasm that is there for Democrats in a red state like Texas, of all places, is astounding. So not only did Democrats surpass Republicans in the early voting numbers in the largest counties in Texas that we looked at, which comprise about two-thirds of the state's population, they outpaced their 2016 numbers, which is when you typically have larger turnout, certainly because it's a presidential year. And they doubled their numbers from 2014. So, you know, the Democrats, you know, have been talking for a while. Texas is eventually going to turn blue because it's trending that way. But I mean, this is sort of the first

concrete evidence that we have seen of a real swell. And the fact that it's happening in a state that typically votes so Republican is certainly noteworthy. How many open seats are there? There were a bunch of retirements, right? Is there a potential, and this seems even crazy to ask, because it's Texas, but is there a potential for Democrats to actually pick up seats in Texas? And how many? Right. So there are eight open seats, six Republicans and two Democrats are retiring. The majority of those are really safe Republican seats.

Whoever wins the primary is going to probably be the next congressman or congresswoman. I think the ones that we are focusing on here are those three seats that were won by Hillary Clinton. So it's John Culberson's suburban Houston seat, Pete Sessions' suburban Dallas seat, and then Will Hurd's seat, which has usually only been the one swing seat in Texas, really, after they did the redistricting. And he's someone who has sort of cut more of a moderate profile in the House. And he may not be as easy to knock off as the numbers would show. And it's still a climb. And even Democrats that I talked to for my story on this even admitted, you know, it's going to be tough even with this surge. As we mentioned before, but let's just like actually talk about it. For the first time in 25 years, Democrats are fielding

candidates in every single congressional race in Texas. Right. And they're not going to win in a lot of these places, but it shows that people are willing to step up to run. And, you know, given the crazy political environment that we're in, you can't rule out some type of scandal or something happening. And you can't win a race unless you have a candidate there. And Democrats have seen that happen in races before. Also, when you have potential wave years like 2018 is part of the argument to have just a candidate on the ballot is that a lot of times in a wave year candidates win in places we're not even watching. Right. They wash out incumbents who nobody was wasn't on anybody's radar. And you can't beat people if you don't have somebody on the ballot. This was the same tactic that Republicans employed in 2010, where some of the candidates that won that year, the NRCC, which is the counterpart to Democrats, didn't even know who they were when they won their elections. There's one more race in Texas that's getting a lot of attention, and that would be the Senate race. Texas Senator Ted

Cruz, a Republican, is up for reelection, and he is getting a more legit than usual challenge. That's right. And people have been asking, why don't we hear so much from Ted Cruz these days? Why is he not as noisy as he's been in his first five years in the Senate? And one of the reasons is he's back home trying to get himself reelected, trying to do the right thing so that he doesn't suddenly find his political career cut short before he can run for president again. And the Democrats have an actual candidate in Beto O'Rourke, who is, you know, a young guy. Some people call him the Texas version of a young John F. Kennedy. That's probably not what you want to hear, but not what you want to hear in some parts of Texas. He's quite liberal for Texas, but he has a populist air, and these

are populist times. And perhaps the most energy in the Democratic Party, even in a Texas, is now on the left. So he is a man of his times. He may not very well be Ted Cruz. That is probably a little bit high as the bar, but he is going to make it more competitive than anyone would have imagined a few months ago. And the more Democrats turn out to vote in congressional districts because they've got a candidate to vote for, the more statewide enthusiasm there is, even in very deeply Republican districts, the better chance there is that Cruz would be in trouble. And he outraised Cruz last quarter, too. And that was largely from small dollar donations, like ones that we saw Bernie Sanders getting. So that's another measure of enthusiasm for a candidate as well. Yeah. And Beto O'Rourke has been having these town halls

and these rallies, these events, and the parking lots are full. People are showing up and it's in Republican areas. Yeah. And it's March. Some of that is anti-Trump. Some of that is anti-Cruz. And some of it is 2018. Although I think we should say that I think Ted Cruz still enters this race heavily favored in the general election. And if Texas does become truly a competitive toss-up race as the field of the year develops, then Democrats are in a much better position to gain seats or even the majority in the Senate if Texas is in play on the Senate level. Absolutely. Yeah. The crazy thing, Sue, about Texas is that in 2016, Hillary Clinton actually lost by less in Texas than she did in Iowa and Ohio. And there's another weird thing that's happening in Texas right now that I think has another reason why people are watching what happens in these primaries.

It's also a state where President Trump is not doing very well right now. According to tracking poll data, his approval rating is hovering at or just below 40 percent, which is a really weird position for a Republican president to be in Texas. One caveat about this polling data is that the approval ratings track all adults, not just likely voters, so that it could be a different kind of microcosm of where voters are. But to have a Republican president so upside down, given all the other atmospherics, just could make for some very weird outcomes in Texas. Ron, do you have any idea why? Trump would probably not be doing as well in Texas as in other places because his immigration policies, which would please some in the Republican Party of the Texas mentality, but do not by and large please the average person in the

Southwest, even people who are not Hispanics, even people who are Anglos, are not happy about the divisiveness of some of the president's rhetoric. They're not crazy about the wall. They're not crazy about the way that it changes their culture. This is certainly true in parts of Arizona, obviously true in New Mexico, even more obviously true in Southern California. So all across those states that would actually be affected by the wall, there's a great deal of disaffection about it. There's also what they have in Texas is a considerable number of a lot of the demographic we're going to talk a lot about in the midterm elections is white college educated voters. The Texas economy is doing really well right now in the suburbs of cities like Houston and Dallas are popping. And the kind of affluent, educated voter there was kind of a very traditional Bush

Republican, right? A Bush-style Republican, a Mitt Romney-style Republican. And they are less enamored of Donald Trump's Republican Party. Well, in those areas that Sue just pointed out, there were actually three congressional districts in Texas that are held by Republicans currently that voted for Hillary Clinton. You have John Culberson's suburban Houston district. You have Pete Sessions' suburban Dallas district. And then Will Hurd's, he represents a border district that's really expansive, reaches all the way from El Paso to San Antonio. And Republicans that I've talked to, I talked to one Republican strategist there in the state, Derek Ryan, who's been doing a lot of analysis into this data here. And the thing that he pointed out that I think should really worry Republicans is that Democrats are getting low propensity voters to the polls. And what we mean

by that is that typically in midterms, you see Republicans turn out. We will see older voters, whiter voters, and things like that. But Democrats are getting their voters to the polls in this election. And he found that nearly a quarter of the early vote through last week was new voters that had registered since 2016. That first time primary voters, they maybe voted in a presidential election, but they hadn't voted in a midterm election before. For Democrats, that made up 22 percent of the early vote, up from 14 percent in 2014. But for Republicans, it only made up about 10 percent or so of first time primary voters. And that's actually a dip from 2014 for them. Midterms have typically been, you know, lower turnout elections. to a presidential election, the electorate nationwide goes up 50%. It's half again as big. And the difference is almost entirely accounted for by women, voters under 30, and people of color.

And also, Texas is always in the bottom five of states of voter turnout. This is not a state that has a lot of voter turnout. So this big surge, and on the Democratic side, that's another thing that I think is really, really important to note. I think specifically, too, we're watching Hispanic turnout. I mean, Texas is a state that has a critical mass of Hispanic voters who historically don't show up in midterm elections. That's exactly who you're talking about, Jess, that low propensity voter that shows up in a presidential year but sits this one out. And considering the immigration debate we're having in this country over DACA and DREAM Act legislation, and everything is fresh in voters' minds. I mean, today is March 5th. The eve of this election was originally the deadline that the president had set

to end the DACA program. Obviously, that's going to be extended, and we're going to continue to have this immigration fight. But it's kind of the first real test of how angry are Hispanic voters? Are they showing up and are they voting for Democrats? Sue, I just want to put a pin in something you said, which is this is March 5th. This is the day that President Trump had set for the end of DACA, but it's not ending because of various court rulings, including the Supreme Court last week saying, hey, we're not going to rule on this early and kicking it back to the Ninth Circuit. If y'all would like more detail on that, we have a podcast in your feed from early last week where Scott Detrow and Domenico Montanaro

and Mara Liason get into way more detail about that case. But suffice it to say, Congress is not moving with due haste at the moment. Okay, so once Texas is over, then, you know, we have many other states to come. Are there any states in particular, primaries in particular, that you guys have your eyes on? I think California will certainly tell us a lot, and New York, these big states are places where Democrats need to pick up seats if they're going to win back the House, but also, you know, Ohio, Pennsylvania. You know, we have, so in two weeks, we have Illinois will be the next primary that we have. And then there's a little bit of a break. It doesn't start again until May, but then May, June, there's a break in July, sort of onward, it's going to be primary, primary, primary. And Ron, this isn't a primary, but next week there is an election in Pennsylvania,

a special election outside of Pittsburgh that is generating a lot of heat. This is a southwestern Pennsylvania district that is absolute ground zero for Donald Trump and his issues. He has been very popular there. He won it in 2016 handily going away. Absolutely clobbered Hillary Clinton in this district. Even though 20, 30 years clobbered Hillary Clinton in this district. Even though 20, 30 years ago, it was kind of a Democratic district, it's a perfect example of how blue-collar voters have shifted over because of Donald Trump. Now, the two candidates are pretty strong. Rick Saccone has raised a lot of money on the Republican side.

We've got the president coming to just outside Saccone's would-be district, the district where he's running. We expect he would probably say nice things about the guy, since he's certainly said a lot of nice things about Donald Trump. So on the other side, we've got the Democrats, Conor Lamb, young man, very attractive, very well-spoken. Democrats are very high on him. Normally, we would consider him, I'm sorry, a sacrificial lamb. But in this instance, he may have just personal characteristics. And again, it's because 2018, the energy is running the other way, even in Barry Trump district. And they're spending so much. Both parties are spending a lot of money in this district,

but it's not even going to exist in November. That's the crazy thing. Yeah. This district is because of redistricting that Pennsylvania is going through the court ordered redrawing of the lines, this district essentially doesn't exist. Neither of the candidates will even live in the new version of it. But I remember talking with Republican strategists even two months ago when this didn't even seem as competitive as it is now, and them saying, like, this is the canary in the coal mine. This is the district we will look at to see whether this is going to be

a really, really bad year for Republicans. Bang on. Lots of canaries to look out for in the next week or so. And we are going to come back and talk about trade. Jess, you are leaving us. Thank you for bringing the knowledge. Thank you for having me. And we will be right back. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Simply Safe Home Security. Thank you for having me. And we will be right back. Home and family are protected with SimpliSafe. Each SimpliSafe system is a complete security arsenal. There are no contracts and no hidden fees. Learn more today at SimpliSafe.com slash NPR politics.

Invisibilia is back for a new season with new stories about small personal battles. I'm a different person now. You're fake. And huge cultural issues. This is probably going to get somebody killed. So tune in for Invisibilia, season four. We are back. And last week, President Trump announced his intention to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

And the reaction from Republicans has been less than positive. The decision isn't final yet. He says it's coming this week. The president hasn't signed anything yet. And so there is this intensive lobbying effort underway to get him to change his mind. And one of the people doing the lobbying, Sue, is House Speaker Paul Ryan. House Speaker Paul Ryan and I would say essentially every congressional Republican. I mean, this is an issue where probably for the first time since he's been in office, this is really an issue where Donald Trump has broken with the Republican Party. This is his decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports go directly at the heart of traditional Republican philosophical views on

trade in the free market. It is fair to say House Speaker Paul Ryan strongly opposes the president on this decision, as does Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady. His committee oversees tax and trade policy. Senate Republicans are almost unanimously against it, according to senators we talked to on Friday. So the president is really at odds with the Hill on this. And the question now is, can they change his mind? And what would they like to see him do if they can't? Can they mitigate the effects of this in any way? We did see the president today at the White House, as well as one of his top advisors, Peter Navarro, show no indication that they are willing to wiggle at all on these new tariffs. If anything, the president said very explicitly today, we're not going to back down.

Paul Ryan says he's worried about a trade war. Are you going to back down on the tariffs? No, we're not backing down. Mexico is, we've had a very bad deal with Mexico, very bad deal with Canada. It's called NAFTA. Our factories have left our country. Our jobs have left our country. For many years, NAFTA has been a disaster. We are renegotiating NAFTA, as I said I would. And if we don't make a deal, I'll terminate NAFTA.

But if I do make a deal, which is fair to the workers and to the American people, that would be, I would imagine, one of the points that we'll negotiate. It will be tariffs on steel for Canada and for Mexico. So we'll see what happens. But right now, 100 percent. Here's the argument that people like Paul Ryan are making and Republicans on the Hill are broadly making, that their fear is that new tariffs will mitigate all of the economic gains that they are hoping to see from policies like their tax cuts. And if you mitigate all of your economic gains in this election year, you put your majorities in Congress even further at risk. So they think it is policy-wise the wrong thing he has dealt with as president of the United States, of all the things that have come before Congress. This is the thing where he has a rock solid ideology.

Yeah. This is an issue on trade policies. Donald Trump, as a real estate developer, as a presidential candidate, as a reality TV star, now as president, has always been consistent in his views on trade and on cracking down on China and on cracking down on trade imbalances. And you're right, Sam, it's not like tax policy or gun policy that we saw last week or other issues or immigration where he has shown a flexibility to change his mind or be hard to peg down or or say one thing one day and something different the next. On this

issue, he has always been very consistent. So that's why I think, one, that there's more concern coming from Capitol Hill that this is going to happen and they won't be able to change his mind because they know that about him, that this is a strongly held view, and that that could mean consequences. to impose certain tariffs in situations where the president determined on his own that there was a threat to national security. And if Donald Trump believes that our steel and aluminum industries are on their last legs, and obviously we need steel and aluminum in national security terms in the long run to build new tanks and new weaponry, the president has basically carte blanche to put in these tariffs. And Congress is not going to be asked for their approval.

They're going to have to figure out some way to actively express their disapproval. So I heard from a GOP source that congressional leaders won't rule out potential action down the line. But Sue, I don't know what that means. Theoretically, Congress could undermine the president on this. They have given the president the authority to do these things, and they could technically take that authority away. It is in their constitutional wheelhouse to pass some kind of legislative recourse if they wanted to combat the president on tariffs. Oh, wouldn't that be something to see? Well, it's difficult for a lot of reasons. One, just take the raw politics. I think reasonable people can conclude that there's probably not a huge willingness among Republicans to take on President Trump within the Republican Party in an election year. extraordinary move to try and do something like this because philosophically, the way these trade

deals are written, the trade authorities given to the president are written in a way that we give our commander in chief a very long latitude to decide the rules of international trade. So if Congress isn't really interested in setting a precedent in which you get to second guess the president on any kind of decision that he makes here. But I do think the fact that congressional leaders are sort of winking at that, Tam, and saying, oh, we're not taking that off the table, speaks more to the fact of how much they oppose this and at how much at odds they are with this White House. And I think right now the most they can do is talk a little tough. And if they were to move forward with this, which is many, many, many steps down

this process, they would likely need veto-proof majorities in the House and Senate to be able to undermine the president on this. And this is one of those issues where the president has some allies in Congress. They just happen to be Democrats. Democrats. What do you know? Here we are again. And there are no good options, really, other than to persuade the president not to actually carry through with the talk tough. I want a trade war. They're easy to win rhetoric. And I once had a top aide to the president tell me that the best way to get Donald Trump to do something is to tell him not to do it. Or tell him he can't. And if you want to make, you know, further make leaders' heads explode, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, two of the voices that were quick to come out last week when this decision was first announced were Democrats like Sherrod Brown, a Democrat in Ohio, and Bob Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, two traditional steel-friendly states, coming out and applauding the president and talk about giving Democrats pretty good cover on an issue that's important to their home states in an election year. In an election year when those Democrats are on ballots.

Both of those two. And just to make this more fun, and I think we've talked about this before, but like among the products that Europe is talking about placing its own tariffs on are Harley Davidson motorcycles from Wisconsin. They don't call it retaliation for nothing. And Kentucky bourbon. And Wisconsin cheese. Right. So our allies in the rest of the world are potentially trying to make this even more painful for the people who should be the president's close supporters. Sure. And the president, for his part, has been very dismissive of those concerns. I would say that those concerns are very real when you're someone like Paul Ryan from the state of Wisconsin or Mitch McConnell from the state of Kentucky. But Trump just kind of waved it off today at the White House and said, I don't think you're going to have a trade war.

He just does not believe the threats that are coming his way. And he thinks that the U.S. will come out on top of this. I don't think you have a trade war. No trade war? I don't think so. I don't think you're going to have a trade war. He has also tweeted that trade wars are good. They're easy to win.

They're easy to win. Well, we're going to find out. All right. That's a wrap for today. We will be back in your feed Wednesday with results out of Texas. Keep up with our coverage on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. You can also always catch one of us on Up First every weekday morning. And if you like the show, we would love it if you would subscribe and rate us in Apple Podcasts.

It really helps others find us. Thanks so much. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House for NPR. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Helving, editor correspondent. Thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. What's unique about the human experience?

And what do we all have in common? I'm Guy Raz. Every week on TED Radio Hour, we go on a journey through the big ideas, emotions, and discoveries that fill all of us with wonder. Find it on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts.