The NPR Politics Podcast - The DNC Starts Tomorrow. Here's What To Watch For.

Episode Date: August 16, 2020

Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and others will speak at the mostly-virtual Democratic National Convention. And, will conventions ever be the same?Want more? Sign-up for the NPR Politics Newsletter.This episode: campaign correspondent Scott Detrow, campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro, and national political correspondent Don Gonyea. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Bertie Condon, a home birth midwife in the Hudson Valley of New York. My colleagues and I are waiting for a bunch of babies known as the coronials to arrive. In January, we'll be expecting a bumper crop of babies known as quarantines. This podcast was recorded at it's a 216 Eastern on Sunday, August 16. Hopefully we'll have welcomed some new New Yorkers by the time you hear this. Here's the show. That's just what Trump wants in time for the election. New New Yorkers.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. So we're together on a Sunday because tomorrow the Democratic National Convention gets underway and we all plan to be in Milwaukee right now. Actually, we planned to be in Milwaukee a month ago.

Then we plan to be in Milwaukee right now. Then fewer of us plan to be in Milwaukee right now. Then nobody planned to be in Milwaukee because this has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk because of the coronavirus. So before we talk about that and what the Democrats are trying to accomplish here, can you guys just remind everybody what this is supposed to look like? I mean, think back just to four years ago, Scott, right? We were high in the rafters in this massive arena full of people, whether we're talking about the Democrats or

the Republicans. You had the balloons, you had people wearing like crazy costumes. It felt like just a huge big party. And to me, we were like two miles in the air. That was right. There were just so many people there. And I feel like to me as a radio reporter, one of the strangest things about covering this campaign lately has been how silent everything feels, right? There's like no applause when you go out to a Joe Biden event because there's no crowd. There's just no audience there. Yeah. And everything's everything's basically a TV show now. And you know, maybe it's suitable or fitting the fact that, you know, everything has moved so much online, that we're going to wind up with the first all online conventions, for the most part, we're not there, which is really weird because you usually

get to be on the floor. You get a sense of the room. You get a feeling for the vibe, like what are the delegates really thinking? And that's just not going to happen this time. And instead, we're going to have this huge TV production, especially with the Democrats who are going to be in multiple, multiple live and remote locations. And of course, millions of people watch this on TV, no matter what the year is. There's still going to be high profile speakers. Kamala Harris, now that we know she's the vice presidential nominee,

she'll be highlighting Wednesday night. Joe Biden will, of course, accept the nomination Thursday. We can finally stop saying presumptive nominee. We can just call him the nominee. Who else are the big speakers and what are we expecting to hear from them? So on Monday night, there'll be kind of an eclectic mix of people. You're going to have John Kasich, former Republican governor of Ohio. And you all might remember him because he actually ran to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016. He lost to Donald Trump.

But you'll also have people like Bernie Sanders and Michelle Obama. And to me, this is a really interesting mix of people that shows you just how wide the so-called Biden coalition is. It really is this hodgepodge group of people who are united singularly by one thing, which is to defeat Donald Trump. Yeah, I think the campaign really wants to contrast what leadership looks like, saying that Trump has messed up on the three big crises of the year, the coronavirus crisis, the economy, which is related to the coronavirus, and racial inequity. That's what the campaign is saying. They're saying that Trump has failed to address any of those. Biden is someone who's going to build back the country better, which is, of course, their slogan this year, and why you have

some of these speakers on these different nights. Tuesday night's going to be leadership matters. Wednesday, a more perfect union and talking about some of the issues that have been complicating climate change, health care, immigration reform, reasons why Biden got in. And you're going to have President Obama that night. And on Thursday, quote unquote, America's promise where they are looking toward, you know, what the vision is for for Biden and Harris and what they want America to be coming after Donald Trump. We got some questions from our Facebook group that we have for the podcast.

And one that came up was, typically, you have this thing called the convention bump, right? Like a campaign has four nights to kind of give their unfiltered message, make their pitch in long forms, and voters usually respond. And that candidate gets a little bit of a bump.

First of all, these are virtual conventions. Second of all, they're coming later in the year. And third candidate gets a little bit of a bump. First of all, these are virtual conventions. Second of all, they're coming later in the year. And third and most importantly, Domenico, our latest poll really emphasized this. Again, this has been such a static race. The dynamics haven't shifted much at all. Do we expect any sort of bump one way or the another after the Democrats or after both of them? Well, there's a lot of discussion among Democratic strategists as whether or not Biden is already at something of a ceiling. I mean, in polling, you know, he's at 50, 51, 52, 53. Our polling, he was at 52. You know, that's where he's been at 50%, which is very significant because it means he's already over the majority of what's

needed. And we're in such a hotly polarized country that people feel like negative partisanship is really the thing that's going to weigh out. Who do people hate less and wind up going to the polls and vote for? So can Biden get higher than that? How much of a bump can he get? Now, the campaign kind of expects that there's a possibility that they will at least have more unity coming out of this convention. They'll lock in their voters, maybe appeal to some new voters, and maybe that'll mean they get a little bit of a bump. So my question, though, about all of this is that, you know, Dominica, earlier you were saying that this is in some ways, in many ways, it's a large TV show, right? This is a week of just TV production. And radio show. Right, and radio show. Well, we'll be broadcasting it every night. True, true.

But it is all produced for broadcast medium. And you look at the fact that President Trump will be counter-programming the entire week, going out to hold his own rallies, and he is the king of reality shows. So I do have this question of, when you talk about a post-convention bump, it is true that Democrats have been organizing this TV show for a while, so it's very well likely, I should say,

to be very well produced. But my question is, you know, how much of that is really going to be felt when you've got counter broadcast programming going on by President Trump and there just won't be this sense of, you know, balloons and excitement and partisan kind of excitement that you might have at the RNC or the DNC typically. Yeah. I mean, look, you always want to be second as far as, you know, delivering a message because you can combat what the prior people were messaging and talking about. And that's what this is such an important piece of. This is one of their only opportunities in the general election to speak to a vast, broad audience. And guess what? Everyone's home. So I expect that viewership

is going to be pretty high. The production of this is certainly complicated. The Democrats have an entire control room in Milwaukee because even though nobody's going to be there, they've already been setting this up for so long. They have an executive producer who's been doing this kind of work since at least 1992 for the Democrats. They've got people in 20, 30, 40 different locations, a lot of people with their own sort of audio and lighting equipment that's been sent to them. So there's a high bar for some of this stuff to actually go off well. Now, the Democrats have a little bit of an advantage on this because as soon as coronavirus started to look like it was a serious threat, they've been planning this convention to be virtual. You know, the Republicans are a little bit on their back foot with this because, you

know, they moved the convention from Charlotte to Jacksonville. Then they decided to go all virtual once Florida started to spike in cases. So now at the same time, Republicans do have an infrastructure of speaking to their base through non-mainstream media television outlets that they've created. So I expect, like you said, Asma, that the president and his team will have it figured out. I'm waiting for my clock to stop before I close this. I should have turned that off. And actually, we're going to talk about that and whether some of these changes might be permanent after a quick break. Domenico, thanks so much. All right. Bye, guys.

Asma, you and I will be back with Don Gagne to talk about that future in a moment. Don't miss the national conversation with me, Jen White, every weekday on NPR's 1A. News, views, and insight for the relentlessly curious. A space for those willing to share what they know and ready to hear the other side of the story. Subscribe to 1A now and leave a review. And we are back and Asma and I are now joined by Don Gagne. Hey, Don. Hey, guys.

So, Don, you did a great radio story this week about political conventions, looking back at key moments, looking forward to what things could be like in the future. And I guess the best compliment is that it made me deeply sad listening to those iconic convention moments and just thinking through the lack of the lack of them this year it was it was just like a really good uh thing that took you back to conventions over the decades yeah and and i talked about it with my editor it was almost like we were doing an obituary for conventions because we we likely won't see the old school kind of convention again. Things are going to be different from here on out. Yeah. And even, let's set aside the conventions where you didn't know the nominee or where there was major drama because, you know, the nominee hasn't been decided at the convention

since the 1950s, really. And it hasn't been since the 1980 Democratic Convention that there was real tension about what the outcome could be. But even since then, the important thing about conventions is that they have created iconic moments that register with voters and that really launch careers in one direction or another. That's right. The rap on conventions in the modern era, in the televised era, has been that there are these tightly scripted, pre-packaged, nightly infomercials that are on television. And over the years, I mean, the audience has gone up and down from cycle to cycle.

But generally, the trend line has been down in terms of people watching them. But even though they're scripted, even though the parties try to convey this tightly controlled message, there are still genuinely newsworthy events. And one of the key things that they do is they introduce rising political stars. And every party has them. And the convention is generally the place where they get their first national stage. And there's no better modern example of that than 2004, when Barack Obama was a young state senator from Illinois, and people still didn't even know how to say his name. And he delivered the keynote speech that year for the nominee, John Kerry. The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too. And then four years later, another big political star, now one whose political

career fizzled pretty quickly, but Sarah Palin, this, you know, unknown Alaska governor had been kind of plucked from obscurity to be John McCain's running mate. And we went from I was riding the Obama campaign bus back then. We went from trying to figure out how to say her name. All the reporters on that bus. Is it Palin? Is it Palin? Is it what? To to this amazing moment on stage at the convention just days later.

I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick. And Asma, it wasn't as much of an iconic moment, obviously, as Barack Obama, but I still remember standing next to you and Tam on the incredibly crowded convention floor in Philadelphia watching Kizer Khan give that speech. We were talking about that earlier, just that moment where he, the father of a son who'd been killed in Iraq, denounced President Trump for that Muslim ban and just a moment where you could feel- And pulled up the Constitution, right, from his jacket pocket.

Have you even read the United States Constitution? And I think those are the moments that really stick with you as a reporter. And I would say they probably stick with a lot of people who are tuning in to watch these conventions because they're the moments that I think you don't expect, right? A lot of people will know and expect to hear a big speech from the presumptive nominee, but it's those moments. I mean, to me, the Khizr Khan moment was so powerful, because I don't think that anyone, you know, in the room or even watching on TV, A really knew much about who Khizr Khan was or what he was going to do. And, and I guess my

question, though, to you, Don, is like, do you feel like because everything is going to be so highly produced, everything is going to be virtual this year, that we won't have those moments for, say, breakout stars or anything that's going to really feel lasting when we look back on this convention. It will be different. It will be harder for something to break through. But they had already been trying to redesign these conventions, even before they knew they were going to be virtual. They were trying to redesign them to focus on those viral moments rather than what we used to consider a big TV moment. But the other thing is, one of the key things that these conventions do, any party operative will tell you this, is they do get those activists who come to the convention. Maybe they're serving as delegates or maybe they're there as a volunteer, but they really get them fired up.

And it kind of puts a marker down, you know, both for them and for the general public. It's like, OK, folks, it's for real now. We got less than three months and it energizes people to make that final push. They still need to figure out how to do that. Well, we will find out tomorrow. And every night this week after the convention wraps up, we will have a podcast for you on what just happened, what matters. So you can tune into the NPR Politics Podcast feed all week to hear about this uncharted waters convention that we're about to head into. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the presidential campaign. I'm Asma Khalid. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Don Gagne. I cover national politics. Thank you for listening

to the NPR Politics Podcast.