I’m worried that democracy is being eroded.

Our Democratic system is under direct threat.

I think democracy’s — I think it’s much more fragile than I realized.

Well, as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault.

And everybody who’s listening to this podcast, who cares about these issues, needs to fight harder. I mean, make phone calls. Go door to door. Send resources.

In our bones, we know democracy is at risk. But we also know this. It’s within our power, each and every one of us, to preserve our democracy.

You have the power. It’s your choice. It’s your decision. The fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America, lies where it always does, with the people.

Shane, have you recovered from last week?

I mean, it’s like one week ago for the formal end of the 2022 campaign. We haven’t even called the House at this exact moment, and yet we’re about to have a 2024 campaign. So I would say, no, I have not. I have not yet recovered.

You know, I remember —

Shane, I’m really excited to have you on and to be able to do this. For maybe the unaware, you’re a national political correspondent, which means that pretty much your job is to understand the parties and where they’re at, what they’re up to, what their message is particularly at a high level.

In that context, I want to think about the midterms that we all just experienced. How was the Democratic Party thinking about Joe Biden’s message heading into the midterms? And how was the party specifically thinking about his ask of voters to protect democracy over everything else?

I mean, I would say the weekend before the midterms, the party was largely freaking out. They were freaking out about what they expected to be significant losses in the House of Representatives. They were freaking out about the possibility of also losing the Senate. And when it came to the president, they were worried that he wasn’t talking about the issue that in poll after poll was shown to be the top issue for voters in 2022, which was the economy and inflation.

And there was actually a moment just before the midterms that I think really captured this, which was Hilary Rosen, who is this longtime Democratic strategist, been around forever, and she did the Sunday shows. And she was on CNN. And she sort of ripped into the Democrats and said, we have missed the message on this election.

The voters keep telling us over and over, we care most about the economy. And all we are doing is talking about how democracy is at stake. This is the catch phrase in politics. It’s like, meet people where they’re at, right? So we were not meeting people where we’re at. That was the concern that Democrats had over and over and over again heading into the election.

I mean, one of the nights that I was working, one of the many nights that I was working late this last few weeks, and I was in the office, I stayed to cover Joe Biden’s speech about democracy. And I was in the office late enough that I said, I’m taking a taxi home. And I remember calling.

And I talked to several Democrats on my taxi ride home. And I was saying, hey, what did you think of the president’s speech? And they said, look, I mean, it’s fine. They weren’t against him giving a speech about democracy the week before the election, but it wasn’t what their campaigns were about. They felt that it was him talking about an important moral cause, but not necessarily something that was helpful politically.

Right. There was a feeling that Biden and other Democrats were overly focused on trying to convince voters to reject growing extremism and that maybe that wasn’t something that the majority of Americans were all that troubled by.

Yeah. I mean, there was a ton of criticism for Democrats for intervening a handful of these primaries to push these more extreme Republican candidates who were successful in a House race in Michigan, where the Democrats backed a more extreme Republican who ousted in a primary, one of the 10 Republicans who had voted to impeach Donald Trump. There was pushback to that.

There was pushback to Democrats pushing through candidates, for instance, in Illinois for governor and how the Democrats got a lot of — can you say shit? While the Democrats got a lot of problems for doing that, you can lose the fact that there’s a supply and demand issue here, which is the Republican electorate, there was demand for these kinds of candidates. So the Democrats —

Yeah!

— helped supply the candidates, but the voters were looking for them. And so when Joe Biden was talking about this, he was talking about a real phenomenon that the Republican Party was moving in this direction, that if you took the totality of the 2022 primaries, Donald Trump, for the most part, was winning in terms of getting candidates aligned with him through the Republican primaries. And so when you look at how the results came out, his focus on democracy was part of a broader message that he was pushing. It was part —

Right.

— of a broader message that Democrats were pushing, which was this is a Republican Party that is so extreme that they will take away your democracy. They will take away your abortion rights. They’ll take away your Social Security. They’ll take away your X, Y and Z. And put it all together, and it seems like it had some success.

Mm. Two things there. One, to highlight what you said, I think that is a core point. What we often talk about as bad candidates was really a reflection of what Republican voters wanted. The slate that Republicans had in this midterm, as we talked about on this show, was often driven by Republican voters who have wanted those grievances reflected in their candidates.

But then the second thing here is, I mean, it wasn’t fully out of left field for people to question that democracy messaging strategy, right? To your point, polling did consistently show that Americans ranked economy as the top concern, concerns about inflation as a broader concern. How should we think about that type of issue-based polling that told us that consistently throughout the year and what we know to be true now, which is that voters were really concerned about democracy and protecting the political system?

Yeah. I mean, I think the real question is about how do you ask people, what are the issues you care most about? Because in poll after poll, including The New York Times poll that we did in October, overwhelmingly, inflation and the economy were the top issues. It was 44 percent of voters said those were the top issues for them. And democracy, that was down at the 8 percent, 9 percent range.

And so if you’re going to say, well, what’s the most important issue, I think the most important issue of the 2022 elections was probably the economy and inflation, but it doesn’t mean that it was the decisive issue. And I think that that’s where you get into what the Democratic messaging was, which was it was trying to take this election and, for voters, say, look, you might not like the economy, you might not like Joe Biden, but if you go to the voting booth, don’t just think about the economy.

Don’t just think about Joe Biden. Think about the broader consequences for this country. Don’t make it a referendum on Joe Biden. Don’t say, I don’t like Joe Biden, so we’re going to vote for the Republican. Say, I don’t like Joe Biden, but I also really do value abortion rights. But I also really do value free and fair elections. But I also really do value X, Y and Z priorities that the Democratic Party aligned with them on.

And what you can see is, in totality, in many states — we can get into this, but in many states — the results show that on balance, voters were choosing the suite of issues that were not just their feelings about Joe Biden and not just their feelings about the economy when they cast their ballots.

Mm-hmm. I know it’s just a week from election results. I know that we’re going to get more and more info about the specifics of who came out on Tuesday. But to the extent that we know now, who responded specifically to that message about protecting democracy?

I think I’d answer that question a little bit differently by not exactly answering your question. But what I would say is that Joe Biden won in 2020 chiefly by motivating an anti-Trump, stop-Trump coalition. And the same coalition was what delivered Democrats the House of Representatives in 2018.

And so for the Democrats, for the White House, this was the kind of messaging that could pull the party together and bring in progressives who might have been disaffected with some of the things that Joe Biden didn’t push through, moderates who might have had misgivings about Joe Biden’s leadership, that those are both voters who went with Joe Biden in 2020, and that this kind of messaging could bring them around in 2022.

And while the exit polls will continue to get adjusted in the days and weeks ahead, there’s one really interesting finding in the exit polls that shows where this worked, which is voters rank their feelings about the president in four main categories. Do you approve strongly?

Yep.

Do you somewhat approve? Do you somewhat disapprove? Or do you strongly disapprove? What happened this election that’s really different is that voters who somewhat disapproved of Joe Biden actually voted for the Democrats.

So a plurality, 49 percent, of voters who said they somewhat disapproved of Joe Biden, they nonetheless went and voted for a Democrat for Congress. And that’s very different than what has happened before. In the 2018 midterms, during Trump’s first term, during the 2010 midterms, during Barack Obama’s first term, those voters went overwhelmingly for the opposition party. So for months going into the election, Republicans said, oh, look at Joe Biden’s approval rating. We’re going to win. The environment is so bad. He’s at 41 percent. He’s at 40 percent. This is toxic. You can’t run that far ahead of Joe Biden’s political gravity. And at the end of the day, that’s what Democrats did because a chunk of voters, who didn’t like Joe Biden, nonetheless went and voted for a Democrat.

It somewhat feels like 2020, where you have this unlikely and, frankly, relatively dissatisfied coalition turn up and vote for the Democrat anyway, even though it wasn’t always clear that they would.

I mean, this is the dynamic typically in a midterm, right? The party out of power — and at this point, the Republicans were out of the House, they were out of the Senate, and they were out of the White House — they’re usually the party that’s most pissed off. They’re the party that’s aggrieved. They’re the party that’s getting policy stuffed down their throat that they hate.

And if you look back at 2018, and you think about how Democrats were feeling during those midterms, they were the ones having everything ripped away from them by Donald Trump. And you go back to 2010 and think about those midterms. It was the Republicans who were exclusively having everything ripped away from them by Democrats. They were angry about the spending. They were angry about the health care bill.

But this year, it was different. The single most impactful change that happened, it was being stuffed down the throats of Democrats, right? The Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court, it’s just hard to overlook. This took away a half-century of federal abortion rights.

And so what you had is a Democratic base — not just a Republican base, but a Democratic base — that was having their policy priorities ripped away from them. So the dynamics were different. And I think that the messaging around the Republican Party sort of tried to tie all those things together. And I think it surprised most people. It surprised even Democrats the degree to which it was successful.

The Republicans are still taking control of the House. And in the House, 218 votes is the only thing that matters. They’ll have subpoena power. They’ll have power to initiate investigations. But when it comes to setting the stakes of how the election unfolded, I do think it’s hard to overlook that inversion, that the party out of power is usually the ones that are getting screwed. And in this case, the people who are in power in Washington, their voters are the ones feeling most aggrieved.

So Shane, Democrats were able to successfully make the case for democracy protection, especially in important battleground races. But let’s square that, though, with results we saw in other parts of the country. I’m thinking of New York or Florida, where there was a significant shift in the Republican direction. This is something our colleague, Nate Cohn, has been reporting on.

The 2022 midterms unfolded in a way that recent midterms and recent elections haven’t, frankly, which is to say they didn’t unfold uniformly, the same way, all across the country. There wasn’t so much a national trend at the House of Representatives. There was a series of state trends.

In New York, the Republicans are going to pick up several seats, even though this is one of the most Democratic states in the country. But in many of the battlegrounds, the places where Trump-aligned candidates were talking about not certifying the last election, states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, there wasn’t a red wave. There was a blue wave, that voters came out because they were motivated by the suite of issues we talked about already.

They were motivated to protect democracy. They were motivated because abortion was quite literally on the ballot in Michigan this year, where there was an abortion measure. And in Michigan, the Democrats are actually taking more power, taking over parts of the legislature.

In Pennsylvania, there was a strong rejection of the Republican candidate for Governor Doug Mastriano by, really, a landslide in a state that’s that close. And along the way, John Fetterman won the Senate race. The only Senate seat to flip so far is for the Democrats, and it came in a battleground state.

And so in these states, where the issues of democracy and abortion were more viscerally there, they won statewide, and they won locally. And so that was a very different election than the one you saw in New York. It was a very different election than you’ve seen in California, where they continue to count the votes.

It wasn’t that there wasn’t some red waves. It was that the red wave was true in New York, but it wasn’t true next door in Pennsylvania. And, again, that’s different. We have not seen an election like that, that was localized by state, in many years.

I guess you’re saying that to the extent that media and the Democratic Party missed the story, it was in seeing things going the way that you would expect, or even worse, in places like New York or Florida and thinking, oh, this is going to be what happens nationally, that voters are not going to respond to that kind of “democracy on the ballot” question. It won’t be enough.

When as it turned out, particularly in the most critical races, in the biggest battlegrounds, and when democracy and extremism felt really tangible to voters, when it didn’t feel, really, like a theory or academic concept, people did behave very differently.

I mean, if you look at the win-loss record of the Republicans that Trump backed, who were election deniers in these key swing states, it’s overwhelmingly a series of losses. It’s Kari Lake in Arizona losing. It’s Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania losing. It’s Tim Michels in Wisconsin losing. It’s Tudor Dixon in Michigan losing.

The lone win is in Nevada, where the Republican is winning the governorship and unseating the Democratic governor. That’s just the governors’ races. And if you go into Secretary of States’ races, all of the Republican candidates who ran on Trump’s denial of the last election, they all lost. And you just don’t often get that kind of uniform defeat in a midterm for the party out of power.

Mm-hmm. It’s interesting because in the lead up to the election, abortion and democracy were sort of being talked about as two distinct and separate issues — abortion as a tangible issue that might mobilize voters and help Democrats turn out specifically among the base, and democracy as this kind of existential threat that it wasn’t clear if Americans would respond to.

But in the end, it seems like you’re describing a midterms environment where they sort of work together as part of a larger message about unchecked extremism among Republicans and that abortion and what has happened to Roe v. Wade was, on some level, an example of how Republicans have distorted democracy. And that’s how it resonated with swing voters to back Democrats. Intertwined issues rather than distinct ones — is that fair?

Yeah. I think you can go back to the messaging that was coming from the White House, some of which was mocked, which is that Joe Biden, early in 2022, started using the word ultra MAGA.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Then this was not an accidental label. This is a label that had come through months of research by groups aligned with the White House saying, look, we made word clouds of what Democratic talkers said about the Republican Party, and it looks like a mess. Nothing pops out.

We see all these different words — spineless, supremacist, democracy, cowardly, petrified, race, culture, wars, identity, politics, divisive. But they’re all around the same size. There’s no singular message.

And what we need is a label, a label that we can put on the Republican Party that voters already associate with negative things. And the research came up that MAGA, which is a term that the Republican Party had embraced, that MAGA was actually an effective tool to lump these things together in the minds of voters because voters already were lumping them together.

Mm-hmm. And voters already intuitively felt Republicans were changing.

They felt that they were changing. And they felt that this MAGA label, the Trump-embraced MAGA label, in this research, it meant already radical and extreme and power hungry. So the Dobbs decision leaks, and Joe Biden rolls out this ultra MAGA label. And it told voters that a big change was coming, that a Supreme Court was, in the view of many Democrats, radically rewriting what was the law for 50 years around abortion. And so yeah, it fit into that messaging frame. And I’m not saying that this was a brilliant plan, that the White House had concocted to come up with this just before this happened, right? Some of this is happenstance. But what is true is that Joe Biden went from that 2020 race, where he was talking exclusively about Trump, to a broader label. And some of the reporting I’ve done shows that it wasn’t easy, necessarily, for him to come to using a label, right? He is a label-averse kind of a guy.

Yeah.

He is a Senator who reached across the aisle, who prizes his relationship with Republicans, who is proud of the fact that he got some Republicans to line up with him on an infrastructure package, right? He is not the first person to go use words to label the party writ large.

But he came to this in part from some conversations he’d had with historians. So Biden meets with historians at the White House occasionally. And they told him that, according to a person who’s spoken with Biden about this, that this kind of labeling, that it’s effective. And it has been effective throughout history at sort of battling far-right factions. And so Biden did really come to embrace it.

And interestingly, after Biden embraced this kind of label, so did Trump, right? He slapped ultra MAGA on a T-shirt. He slapped it on wine glasses and pint glasses. And he says, I’m your MAGA king, just days before the election. And so if you’re trying to push out a message that this party is this thing, and the other party wraps themselves up in it too, it helps promote the message, right? And the combination was that it stuck, that I think for —

Well —

Oh, go on.

No, no, no. I want you to finish. But I’m saying, I’m sure in the Trump Republican head, they thought that this was going to be another basket-of-deplorables moment, to go back to 2016, that they could use a label that came from Democrats and actually use it as something that they can embrace branding-wise to drive energy among the base. I think the key difference here is while in 2016, independents, swing voters did not like the Democratic options and did not view the Republicans as radical, in this case, MAGA Republicans is, in fact, something that they ended up punishing Republicans for.

I mean, I think the biggest challenge for Trump in 2022 and going into 2024 is the idea of Donald Trump was deeply appealing to the middle in 2016, the middle that was really unhappy with where the country was and was ready —

100 percent.

— to just break things, right? When you talked to voters in 2016, voters were talking about upending the system. And he was the candidate who they thought would do it. And it was a risky bet, but you know what? Let’s just do it. It’s time. And they saw what that looked like. They had four years of it. And when it comes to denying the election, they saw a pretty ugly result at the end of those four years. This has not showed up in polling, and it’s really one of those things that’s impossible to test, but I am really curious about how the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband played at the very end of the cycle.

I am too. I really think this was a late break from those independent moderates, and something happened in the last couple of weeks. And that was a real example of that extremism and violence.

Yeah. It’s hard not to overlook that this political cycle began with violence and ended with violence, right? Democrats took control of the Senate on January 5, 2021. And on January 6, the Capitol riot happens, right? It is the first full day the Democrats are now going to be in control of Washington.

Now, they hadn’t taken formal control yet, but the first full day. And at the very end of the cycle, you had another example of political violence and the break-in of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which was not met with the kind of universal condemnation by the Republican Party that it might have once been. It was met with some conspiracy theories spreading at the highest levels. The break-in —

It was met with jokes by some candidates on the ballot for Tuesday.

It was met with jokes by some. It was met with mocking by others. There were memes that was pushed out by Donald Trump Jr. The idea that the country was moving toward a place where the octogenarian husband of the House Speaker could be in their own home, somebody could break in, a politically motivated assailant could break in, threatening to potentially kidnap the House Speaker, and bludgeon her husband with a hammer —

Again, there’s not polling to show the impact of this, but it’s one of those moments that almost everyone in the country heard about. And it’s hard not to imagine that it didn’t have some impact on the psyche of voters as they went to the polls. Again, I don’t have any way to show that yet, and I’m not even sure how you would, but it just feels like the kind of moment that matters.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. In 2016, people agreed with Trump that the system was broken and that the establishment was totally out of touch. But in 2022, there is not that same level of agreement, particularly when what has become of the Republican establishment now represents a openly, at least in this cycle, anti-democratic wing. It seems like a key question here then, is to what extent should we see this as a Democratic victory versus a Republican loss, that the GOP just handed them this huge advantage in the form of Trumpism, in the form of extremist positions, in the form of out-of-touch candidates?

Can you ask that again?

[LAUGHS] To what extent did Democrats win this? And to what extent did Republicans lose this?

Yes. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHS]

I mean, I don’t know that there’s a clear answer to that question. There’s never just one side of an election, that just one side won and one side lost. I think that what is clear is that that embrace of Trump without Trump on the ballot was not helpful. And I think that that’s something worth looking at too, which is that for all the talk of the downsides of Trump this year — and there’s a lot of talk among Republicans about the downsides of Trump this year — there is an argument from Trump allies that what they really needed was Trump himself.

Yeah.

The problem wasn’t —

That everyone else is doing diet Trump, and what —

Yes.

— people want is the pure, unfiltered stuff.

That there’s no substitute for the real thing, right? And so by the way, this is a calculus that House Democrats made at the very beginning of the cycle. They did a big study of what went wrong in 2020. So House Democrats lost seats in 2020. They are likely to have lost more seats in 2020 than they lost in 2022, in a year where everyone is expecting them to lose a bunch of seats.

So after that 2020 race, they set off on this big internal study. They called it the Deep Dive. And in this study, one of the findings they had was, we think, that Trump is a minus, Trump is a big political loser, because Trump’s base doesn’t turn out.

And so in this big PowerPoint presentation that they presented to their conference early in 2021, they had a few slides talking about this exact question and said, what’s going to happen if he’s not there? And one of the side questions they had — and I’ll read it to you — is, will this Trump toxicity work without Trump turnout?

These are negative things that Trump has brought about for his party, but he also had an upside. He brought out people who otherwise weren’t voting. And so in the post mortem that’s happening, I think it can get lost that there are people inside the Republican Party who don’t see the lesson as less Trump. They see the lesson as more Trump. And that’s playing out right now as House Republicans select their leadership team for the coming Congress.

That does feel like the core question facing the Republican Party right now, not just what to do about Donald Trump as an individual, but what are the defining features of Trumpism? And how much does that have a place among the Republican base? As Donald Trump makes his presidential announcement, this is what the party is asking itself.

Yeah, and it’s going to ask itself in two key places simultaneously over the next two years. Place one is the campaign trail, where the question will be, do people run against Trump, and how many of them, because he won, again, the 2016 Republican primary through a fractured field, right? That was not a majority of the Republicans. But he still holds an almost exclusive hold on 35 percent to 40 percent of the Republican Party. And so when I’ve talked to Republicans, the question is, how many want to run? Well, they’re all afraid that too many of them would run, and the chance if one strong one gets in, then many of them will get in, and then he skates through a divided field. So it will happen on the campaign trail, but it’s also going to be happening on Capitol Hill, where I don’t think we should forget that even if Republicans had a deeply disappointing night, they are on track to have the House majority.

And once they have the House majority, they have subpoena power. They have ability to pass legislation. They have an ability to set their own agenda separate from Donald Trump. To the extent that Kevin McCarthy as potential House Speaker is able to muscle through legislation, he can put out legislation that would define what a Republican Party could stand for separate and in addition to Donald Trump.

He could initiate investigations into the Biden administration that would define what the party stands for separate and in addition to Donald Trump. So the question of what does the party become, it’s going to happen in two places at once.

Mm-hmm. It feels like, to your point about the campaign trail and about Capitol Hill, it’s really a question about Republican voters themselves. Donald Trump, from every indication I’ve ever had about the man, is going to say the things that he has always said. To me, what seems to be the open question is whether that 30 percent to 35 percent that has been so tied to him responds to those messages in the same way and, to your point about Capitol Hill, whether they’re pressuring the Republican House to really play out Trump’s grievances, because what we could be defining as Trumpism could be just what the Republican base believes in, whether Donald Trump is leading the charge or not.

Well, Astead, I think you know this better than almost any other political reporter, which is they call themselves political leaders, but, in many cases, politicians are political followers. They’re following where the votes are. They’re following where their base is. They’re following the first election they face in every election, which is the primary. Their chief concern politically is their own base. And so where the base of the Democratic Party goes and where the base of the Republican Party goes, so goes the party itself in general.

Mm, mm-hmm. As we said, there’s an open question about that Republican base. But to your point about the Democratic base, what should they take from the results on this Tuesday? I mean, on one hand, there is a universal understanding of Democrats beating expectations, of overperforming, of really succeeding using, as we talked about, that language of Republican extremism and protecting democracy and abortion rights.

But at the same time, with all of those things kind of breaking the Democrats’ way over the last couple of weeks, they still will face a Republican House, and they still face a Democratic base that has shown real signs of erosion and continued to show some of them in these midterms. If you are the Democratic Party after the glow of this midterms, what fades off, how should you view the state of where Democrats are right now?

Well, I think that the best thing to do sometimes is actually to listen to the politicians. And Joe Biden had a press conference right after the election. He was asked, given the results, given some of the unhappiness in the country, what would you do differently? And one of the very first words he said was nothing.

[LAUGHS]

He said he didn’t want to do anything differently. And when you talk to people around the White House, they say the Republicans weren’t actually running against our agenda. They didn’t run against the specific policies that we pursued. So the White House doesn’t feel like their agenda was rejected.

But when we’ve talked about what did Democrats run on, we’ve talked about it almost as if they were the opposition party. They were running to stop a set of Republican priorities. And so I think it’s a real open question what the agenda is for the second half of Joe Biden’s first term.

And beyond that, there are already questions about who the party standard bearer should be in the future. As much as there are nagging concerns about Joe Biden’s age, there are deeper concerns among Democrats about the idea of running against Donald Trump again. And the same reason that Democrats came to Joe Biden in the first place might be the reason they rally around him again, which is he is still the only Democrat to have beaten Donald Trump. And his candidacy is very much pitched on that he’s the candidate who can do it again.

Right, right. On one hand, you have an electorate who, even while backing Democrats in this midterms in historic fashion, did so while reporting that they weren’t that satisfied with the president and the party in power, that they were doing so in spite of President Biden, not because of him. I’ve talked to so many Democratic voters who tell me they’re sick of their party offering themselves as just not Republicans. But at the same time, the strongest bond between Democratic voters, the biggest motivator for Democratic voters, the biggest money driver for the voters Democrats need, seems to be pitching themselves as not Donald Trump and the Republicans.

If you think about what are the two successful political coalitions that Democrats have mobilized in the last 15 years, the first was Barack Obama’s political coalition of hope and change. The second is a stop-Trump coalition. And that came together first in the 2018 midterms. It came together again in 2020 with the election of Joe Biden.

And it showed its strength in an unlikely and unexpected way in these midterms, where Democrats are still expected to lose the House, but by such a small margin that it wasn’t really a repudiation, and to hold or even gain seats in the Senate. And so there’s tension among Democrats for what the party should stand for, but there’s broad agreement that stopping Trump is the recipe to unite the party.

Just days before Joe Biden secured the Democratic nomination, he described himself, I think for the first time, as a transitional figure. He was running to transition the Democrats to a new future. And right now, we know what the present is. And the present is that he can lead a stop-Trump coalition. But what we don’t know is what that future looks like and who’s leading it.

Mm. Thank you, Shane. I really appreciate your time.

Thank you.

USA! USA! USA!

USA!

Well, thank you very much. And on behalf of Melania, myself, and our entire family, I want to thank you all for being here tonight. It’s a very special occasion.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

In 2011, I was a college student in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And during that time —

— a bitter political fight broke out in the state over what came to be known as Act 10.

On one side were state Republicans led by Governor Scott Walker. He was proposing a plan that would limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights.

And on the other side —

— were thousands of protesters who were enraged by the new governor’s proposed reforms.

But the anger wasn’t just coming from protesters. The plan severely limited the power of unions, a key backer of Democrats in a state that’s evenly politically divided. It was a plan designed to weaken the opposing party. And to show their frustration —

— Democrats in the state legislature literally fled the state.

They hid out in the next state over, Illinois, hoping to shame the governor into backing down.

But it didn’t work.

In fact, Walker and state Republicans were only emboldened.

Today, how a 12-year project in Wisconsin could culminate in this year’s midterms and give us a glimpse of where the rest of the country is headed. From The New York Times, I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run-Up.”

How are you?

I’m doing all right. How are you?

I’m fine. I’m glad we’re doing this.

It’s about time. I thought that every episode of this show was going to be about Wisconsin.

So I came to Wisconsin as a college student, but my colleague, Reid Epstein, spent years there as a political reporter. And we both watched this story play out in real-time.

I want to go back with you to the Scott Walker days to give people a sense of what Wisconsin was politically like before we get to this moment.

So when I got my first job in newspapers in Milwaukee, it was in the Waukesha County Bureau of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And Scott Walker had just been elected Milwaukee county executive. He was a fixture on the local conservative talk radio shows and was really somebody who had learned sort of the new way of politics in Wisconsin that was less about collaboration and more about trying to find ways to create a zero-sum politics that was good for you and bad for your enemies.

And by 2010, the first midterm election after President Obama was elected, the Wisconsin Democrats took a real shellacking. And in that election, Scott Walker rode the Tea Party wave to become governor of Wisconsin. And it wasn’t just Walker that year. Republicans took over control of both houses of the state legislature and had unified control of the state government heading into a redistricting year. And the first thing that Scott Walker did as governor was basically decide the era of working with Democrats was over.

Right, this is when Walker passes Act 10. And that’s him right away showing that he’s going to be a politician who uses that hyperpolarized us versus them approach to the office. And it’s at a moment where because Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature, Democrats can protest all they want. They can even flee the state. But there’s nothing they can do about it.

That’s right. I mean, he determined pretty quickly that there was more political advantage for him to be seen as a fighter for Republican and conservative values than there was to be — so to someone who was responsible to the entire state, I mean, this was a political philosophy that hadn’t really been in place in Wisconsin before this. But Walker ushered it in, and Republicans ever since have followed his lead.

How does the party take up that mantle? What does it mean for Republicans in the state to embrace Walker’s no holds barred, power at all costs, type of approach?

Well, Republicans decided that the next step was to lock in power for as long as they could. In order to maintain and lock in this power, they needed a map that would allow them to do so. And they didn’t do it in public. They didn’t hold hearings to discuss what they were doing. A map was designed essentially in secret. And it’s presented for a vote.

Democrats were blindsided.

And they tried to fight it.

And over the next few days, they call it out as a political ploy.

They raised a lot of objections, but at the end of the day —

— they don’t have the votes to block it, and the maps go into effect.

And those maps, more than anything else, more even than Act 10, have shaped Democratic politics in Wisconsin for the last decade.

Hmm, in what way?

By making it impossible for Democrats not just to win a majority, but to come even close to competing for majorities in the state legislature and, essentially, reducing the level of democracy in Wisconsin by minimizing the input that voters have.

How specifically, though, did they do that? Gerrymandering is happening all over the country. How were they so successful in Wisconsin, especially given the fact that it’s a swing state?

They did that by concentrating Democratic voters in a minimal amount of districts in the state cities. And Wisconsin’s geography made this possible because even though Wisconsin is a 50/50 state in statewide elections, the preponderance of its Democratic and liberal voters live in their cities in Milwaukee, in Madison, in Green Bay, in Racine and Kenosha, and in the college towns throughout the state.

And so you could draw a map easily that drew state assembly and state Senate districts that packed Democratic voters into those cities in a minimal amount of seats, while drawing a far larger number of seats that covered the state’s vast rural, suburban, and exurban areas, where Republicans are more likely to live.

Mm-hmm. They packed Democratic votes in to limit the amount of seats that urban areas could have overall, but how did they actually explain this aggressive redistricting? What was the rationale that those state legislators gave about what they were up to?

I mean, what I’ve heard Republicans say is that Democrats in Wisconsin aren’t competitive in rural areas because their policies don’t appeal to people in rural areas, and therefore, that’s the reason why they suffer in the minority in the state legislature, and that if they change their policies to be essentially Republican policies, then they might do better.

It switches the point of blame. It’s not the maps that are problem for prioritizing rural voters, it’s the Democrats who are the problem for not speaking to those rural voters.

Right. Basically, if Democrats want to win more seats in the state legislature, they should act more like Republicans.

So what do Republicans get from all this with these surgically drawn maps? With Walker in place as governor, what becomes of it?

Well, in 2012, when Barack Obama won Wisconsin by 7 points, Republicans won 60 out of 99 seats in the state assembly, cementing an advantage that they first won in 2010, but now was drawn in ink for a decade in the state’s elections. And it didn’t matter how well Democrats did in the statewide elections or how many votes they got out. The Republicans had an insurmountable edge in the state legislative chambers.

Hmm, I’m going to slow that down. That seems like an important point. In 2012, when Democrats had a big success on the statewide level, when Barack Obama was able to win Wisconsin in the electoral college that helps him get re-elected, Republicans had a great year on the down ballot level because of that gerrymandering.

Right, and even though Democrats won more votes statewide and won more votes in the state legislative races, because their districts were overwhelmingly Democratic, their votes were not spread out across enough districts to compete for majorities.

The maps worked.

Yeah, and they didn’t really mount a defense to this until about 2017. After Barack Obama was out of office, he and Eric Holder, who had been his attorney general, started something called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee that sought to pour money into some of these state legislative races, into state Supreme Court races, to try to claw back control of some of these map drawing powers.

And they have had some successes. They helped elect state Supreme Court justices in important states. And in Wisconsin, they helped elect Tony Evers, a Democrat who ousted Scott Walker in 2018, with the idea and thinking at the time that it would give Democrats an equal seat at the table for the redistricting cycle that would follow the 2020 census.

But at the time Evers comes into office, he’s still contending with those older maps and the Republican-controlled state legislature that those maps produced.

Right, and by this time, one person has emerged as the leader of the Republican majority in Wisconsin. And that’s Robin Vos, the Assembly Speaker.

Vos has been in state politics at this point for some time. He was first elected in 2004. He was at Scott Walker’s side during the Act 10 protests.

He was the guy who had to get the votes for what Walker wanted to do as governor. And in a lot of ways, he cares even less about public opinion across the state than Walker does. But he really embodies the philosophy of political power at all costs. And by the time Evers becomes governor, Vos is by far the most powerful Republican in state government.

Hmm, the Mitch McConnell of the Wisconsin state assembly.

Except with even more power. And even before Evers takes office after that November 2018 election, Vos begins a series of maneuvers to concentrate power for himself and his Republican allies in the legislature.

So in that period between the 2018 election and Tony Evers becoming governor the next January —

Robin Vos proceeds to shepherd through legislation to reduce the power of the governor, stripping away some appointment powers and spending powers, transferring them to the state legislature.

Basically leaving the Democratic governor with a Republican majority powers only to veto legislation and not do a whole lot else.

I mean, that feels like a political power play in its purest, most unadulterated form. This is a legislature that is seemingly going beyond what the people of Wisconsin had just said in the election to bring in the Democrat, to then strip that newly elected Democratic governor of power before he’s even in office.

It was a legislature — was and is a legislature that is responsive to its political base, and not the entire state. And that was how they viewed that period in time. It’s how they still view themselves.

Mm-hmm. I mean, where have the courts been in all of this?

Well, this is another place where Republicans have been ahead of Democrats in Wisconsin. Wisconsin state supreme court justices are elected to 10-year terms. And Republicans have put a bigger focus on those elections than Democrats have over the years. In 2019, they lost a race by just 6,000 votes.

In 2017, at sort of the peak of the Women’s March post-Trump election era, Wisconsin Democrats didn’t even put up a candidate against an incumbent Republican supreme court justice, two opportunities that they had, either of which would have given them majority control of the state supreme court in order to block some of what they see as the most aggressive and extralegal moves by the Republican legislature. And they failed in those efforts.

And that’s part of the reason why we’re here today, because of the combination of Republican control of the legislature, conservative control of the Supreme Court. It has left Democrats without a hand on any of the levers of power in the state.

We’ll be right back.

So let’s get into what all of these political changes actually mean on the ground. What’s the significance of what happens when Republicans have such a lock on this state?

Well, it means that the Republicans don’t have to listen to the concerns of Democratic parts of the state, in particular, the big cities. And so a city like Milwaukee, the chief economic engine of the state, doesn’t receive as much money from the state to run its sort of basic functions as it would like. Milwaukee has to go basically hat in hand to the Republican state legislators for things like the permission to raise their own sales tax or for funding to pay for city services, like the police department.

And so the city then has to make tough choices about what to fund and what not to. And so it’s not that Republicans in the legislature are directly defunding Milwaukee’s Police Department, but they are limiting funds to the city in a way that forces a difficult set of decisions on it. And so when crime is up in the city and Milwaukee can’t pay for more police officers, the Republicans in the state legislature demonize Milwaukee for being high crime and use that to attack Democratic lawmakers across the state.

They’re getting blamed for the problems, while at the same time, the Republicans who are doing that blaming control the purse strings for the solutions.

They not only control the purse strings for the solution, they’re using the evidence of the problem to help their compatriots get elected governor and to the Senate. Republicans are hammering the Democrats. Both Governor Tony Evers and his Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who is running for the Senate, are just getting killed on TV for crime in Milwaukee that the Republicans in the state legislature have refused to help solve. It’s a self propagating circle.

OK, so they’re able to use these structural realities for their political gain, but let’s talk about how this plays out when it comes to another important midterms issue — abortion. I mean, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe, it was done so with the explained premise that it was sending power back to the states. How has the Republican control of Wisconsin intersected with that Supreme Court decision?

Well, in Wisconsin, there’s a law written in 1849, the year after Wisconsin became a state, that outlawed abortion. Now, lots of polling shows that the majority of the people in Wisconsin don’t agree with that as the state law. And after that Dobbs decision, Governor Evers convened a special session of the legislature to allow for a referendum in which the people of Wisconsin could vote on what they wanted the abortion law in the state to be. And Republicans essentially mocked it.

[GAVEL]

The Democrats didn’t have any recourse but to gather on the steps of the Capitol and make the case to their voters that they should be re-elected.

This feels like all of the pieces coming together. The state’s Democratic governor, who has already had his power drastically reduced, asked the legislature to open up a special session that will put the question of abortion rights directly to the people, who polling suggests do not support that type of 1849 abortion ban. And that legislature essentially says, forget it. We’re not even going to pretend to entertain that idea.

And it was completely in line with what they have done throughout his term in office. No one expected them to do anything differently. And they have ignored Governor Evers as much as they could and in as many places as they can. And frankly, most of their voters agree with what they’re doing. There is not any real grassroots push among Republicans to change the law.

It seems like on the two examples you just gave me, crime and abortion, that those two examples also happen to be huge issues, two of the biggest issues of these midterms. And in both of these cases, what Democrats are able to do to respond to that is severely limited because of those maps from 2011.

I mean, to call it severely limited, I think is an understatement. I mean, they’re able to do nothing. And they’re able to hold rallies. They’re able to use it as a — try to use it as a galvanizing force for people to vote in November, but there is nothing that they can do legislatively on either of these issues.

Which I think brings me back to something I’ve talked to other folks about and what feels like a huge challenge facing the Democratic Party right now, which is voter apathy, right? If their pitch to their voters is show up and vote for us to change these things, even if you take them up on that challenge and you back the party in November, they’re not able to then translate those votes inherently into policy action.

I mean, their pitch for a lot of people is, it could be worse. Vote for us or it could be worse. And for low propensity voters who aren’t watching the news, who aren’t consumers of politics on a rigorous basis, that’s a hard pitch to get people motivated to go and vote with the idea that things are bad, but if you vote for the other guys, they’ll get worse. We’re not going to be able to make them a whole lot better.

So let’s talk about how the next chapter of this is going to play out in the midterms. What should we be looking for, specifically to the question around political structures and power in the state?

Well, Tony Evers, the Democratic governor who beat Scott Walker in 2018, is running for re-election. He’s in a very narrow re-election fight with a Republican construction executive named Tim Michels. And if Michels wins, there will be no friction for Republicans in running the state government as they see fit.

And just like Democrats, who struggled in 2011 to understand what Republicans would do with total power in the state, I don’t know that we have sufficient imagination to grapple with what Republicans would do in 2023 with total power, especially given the fight over how elections are conducted in the state because Tim Michels and the Republicans in the legislature have said that they’ll eliminate the bipartisan state Elections Commission that helps run and oversee the state elections.

And replace it with an agency responsive to the state legislature, or put it under the auspice of a partisan attorney general or a partisan Secretary of State, essentially giving Republicans more control of the elections apparatus in the state, which is really one of the few areas that they don’t have an iron grip on at the moment.

What about if Evers does win? What does that look like? And what’s the path forward for Democrats to be able to get more than just a veto power in Wisconsin?

If Governor Evers wins, the status quo probably remains. There’s an outside chance that Republicans could win a veto proof majority in one or both chambers, but that’s unlikely if the governor holds on and wins reelection. But the next real sort of inflection point for Wisconsin is going to come in April of next year, when an election is held for Supreme Court seat being vacated by a conservative justice. And already, we’re seeing significant fundraising for that seat. And the expectation is that that is going to be the most expensive state supreme court race in the history of the state.

So for Wisconsin Democrats, it feels like this midterms, at least on the state level, it’s not really a chance to grow political power. It’s a chance to maintain the status quo or really stop Republicans from expanding their political power. It feels like if there’s any place where Democrats are actually going to claw back meaningful inroads at this point, that’s going to be at this state supreme court race in April.

I mean, that’s really the next place that Wisconsin Democrats have an opportunity to play offense is in that supreme court race because if they win, the balance of the court would flip from a majority conservative court to a majority liberal court.

And Democrats that I’ve talked to are already planning that if they are to win that supreme court race, that they can bring cases to try to overturn the map in Wisconsin, or legalize abortion in Wisconsin, or allow cities to create their own gun control laws in Wisconsin, or something as sort of [INAUDIBLE] is raising their own sales tax in Wisconsin. And so those are the sorts of things that are at stake in the supreme court race that aren’t on the ballot in the governor’s race.

But the thing to remember about the governor’s race is the new governor will be seated in January. And the supreme court election isn’t until April. And so a Republican governor could certainly sign legislation to change the way that voting takes place in Wisconsin before the April election. I was at a rally in Madison a couple of weeks ago where Governor Evers said November 8 will determine what kind of state we’re going to be forever. We have to win. We cannot afford to have Wisconsin become the worst state of the Union.

This election is forever.

Forever in Wisconsin.

Reid, I want to go back to where we started all of this, how after Governor Scott Walker instituted Act 10, his party embraced this power at all costs type of mentality that you described. I’m mindful that a lot of the reporting we’ve been doing on this show has focused on Trumpism, on the grassroots elements of Republicans, and how that’s been driving the party.

But here, we’re talking about Scott Walker and Robin Vos, two members of the Republican Party establishment. They’re the ones who built this system that the Trumpist elements, the grassroots, have now taken over. I wonder how you’re thinking about all of that.

Well, both Scott Walker and Robin Vos are not really on the inside track of the Trump takeover. In fact, when Donald Trump ran in 2016, all but one of the Republicans in the state legislature endorsed somebody else in that primary. And most of them, Robin Vos included, actively campaigned against Trump in the primary.

First, they were for Scott Walker. And then Wisconsin was the last primary that Trump lost in 2016. They were all on board with Ted Cruz to try to stop Trump. Robin Vos has spent the last year and a half being heckled by Donald Trump in press releases and on social media. And Robin Vos almost lost a primary election to a no-name challenger who was endorsed by Donald Trump.

And so this is not a product of Trumpism. This is something that glommed onto Trumpism after the fact. But it already existed as a sort of Republican power play in the state. And so these guys are, in some respect, hanging on to relevancy within the Republican Party on the same type of cliff that Democrats in Wisconsin are for their political life.

I have this image in my head of Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans building this super-fast racecar, all these levers of Republican power that can totally outpace these Democratic cities and that can totally outmaneuver Democratic politicians. But then, at some point during the race, they’ve just been kicked out of the driver’s seat.

They’ve made it so that Republicans have control over the political process and the political levers of power in Wisconsin. It’s just not certain that they have control over the Republicans in Wisconsin.

So Wisconsin sticks out for its severe gerrymandering, built methodically over a decade. But there are several important swing states where state Republicans have executed a similar strategy. Their power is written into the maps. And that protects them against the will of the majority.

This system that Walker and other states put in place more than 10 years ago is now colliding with the hardened Republican base that is increasingly pushing the party toward extremes. They’ve overrun the Republicans who created the system, and also the Democrats, who can’t stop them. This is what democracy looks like.

Next time on “The Run-Up,” we hear from voters.

“The Run-Up” is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez and Caitlin O’Keefe. It’s edited by Frannie Carr Toth, Larissa Anderson and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop. It was mixed by Corey Schreppel and fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, David Halbfinger, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Shannon Busta, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello. Thanks so much for listening, y’all.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

It’s easy to forget this, but pretty much everything about our current political reality comes back to Georgia.

After the 2020 election —

— Democrats flipped the state —

— and gave the party new hope for the future. As the story goes —

— the reason Georgia flipped —

— is Stacey Abrams and the playbook she developed for the state —

— a playbook that many Democrats saw as the antidote to Republican grassroots dominance.

It cemented her role as a national celebrity in politics —

— in pop culture —

She even got cast —

— as the president of United Earth on “Star Trek.”

That celebrity —

— has also made her a target of Republicans —

— who say even though Georgia flipped, she’s a losing candidate and her playbook has gotten more credit than it deserves. But let me tell you something, behind closed doors, in Georgia and in Washington, there are Democrats who increasingly whisper the same thing and question her playbook as a winning strategy for the party. Today, the Stacey Abrams playbook and why the Georgia governor’s race has more at stake for Democrats than a single elected office.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run-Up.”

So about a week ago, I called Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia. And we started with the playbook itself and what we actually mean when we talk about what Abrams did in Georgia in the lead-up to 2020.

So Abrams and I are agreeing that the national narrative around what happened in 2020 — and the role that the Abrams playbook had in that — is too simplistic. But we differ on why it’s too simplistic. What I’m saying is that this is a narrative that is often reduced to one of Abrams and organizing — and doesn’t fully account for what else was going on at the time in terms of moderate swing voters turned off by Trump and moving towards Democrats. Abrams downplays the significance of those swing voters and instead focuses on the years of organizing that she says laid the groundwork to make that flip even possible in 2020.

And that’s about to be tested. Because this year, Trump is not in office. An Abrams opponent, Governor Brian Kemp, was one of the few Republicans to stand up against Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn election results.

So if Abrams is right in her view about what’s decisive in these elections, then she’ll need to turn out a lot of the voters who are at the center of her playbook, which includes young people, communities of color, and, specifically, Black men. But right now, according to polling and recent reporting from my colleagues, she’s actually struggling there too.

We’ll be right back.

My colleague Maya King is on the Politics desk and is based in Georgia. It was her story that Stacey Abrams took issue with. And I wanted to ask her about the specific details of her reporting, starting with what she was seeing that led her to take up the story in the first place.

I want to pick up on what Maya was saying. Democrats have often deployed a short-term political strategy that focuses on moderate voters in hopes to seize on weak Republican candidates. And sometimes it works. For example, in the other big midterms race in Georgia, the incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock has benefited from a controversial Republican opponent in Herschel Walker, whose scandals have hurt his standing with moderate swing voters in particular. That’s raised the possibility that Democrats could succeed in the Georgia Senate race even as Abrams falls short in her own race. But the point of the playbook is less about immediate victories and more about a long-term strategy for Democrats to build a grassroots machine of their own — one that’s on their own terms, empowered by previously ignored voters who’ve been apathetic and mistrustful that the system can deliver for them.

Next time on “The Run-Up”: how Republicans have already seized control of two key parts of the system and are, once again, a step ahead.

“The Run-Up” is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez and Caitlin O’Keefe. It’s edited by Frannie Carr Toth, Larissa Anderson and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop. This episode was mixed by Brad Fisher and fact checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, David Halbfinger, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Shannon Busta, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello. Thanks so much for listening, y’all.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

So there’s this show hosted by Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist. It’s called War Room. And while it’s controversial enough that YouTube and Spotify won’t publish it, in the conservative world it’s a big deal.

A couple of months ago Bannon hosted a live recording at CPAC, basically the most important gathering of influential grassroots conservatives, and he brought out a guest.

Someone with the blueprint for conservative politics in the Trump era.

The head of a Christian cell phone company.

It’s called Patriot Mobile.

And during the interview —

— he lays out how they use their money.

It’s all part of a strategy to point energy at the local level and stay ahead of a changing country.

Today —

A case study in grass roots Republican politics.

And whether Democrats can catch up.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run Up.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All righty, team, y’all we all mic’d up and ready?

I think so.

I kind of wanted to do the first question. So my colleague, David Goodman, is the Houston Bureau Chief, and he’s the one who told me this story about Patriot Mobile. David, what’s the backdrop of how you come to report on this story?

So I moved to Texas last July, and one of the major political questions that’s hung over this state, really in every election cycle going back several, is when the state is going to turn blue, if ever. And hope springs eternal among Democrats that it will eventually do this, but they keep falling flat. But there’s a big asterisks to that, and it’s these suburban counties that had been trending towards the Democrats in recent years. And that was particularly the case in the surrounding county of Fort Worth called Tarrant County, where you had the county actually go slightly blue in each of the last two elections, so in 2020 and in 2018.

Yeah, yeah. As a political reporter, the question of whether Texas will turn blue feels like omnipresent always, everywhere. But it’s because it’s so central to the political future of the country.

If that were to happen, Democrats would have a huge, I mean, almost insurmountable advantage in things like the electoral college through big states like California and Texas. But it seems like you’re saying that if that’s going to happen, it’s likely going to be driven largely through the suburbs that have been trending toward Democrats. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, that’s where the Democrats have been making their gains, and where the Republicans really need to make a last stand if they’re going to keep some of the demographic shifts in voting patterns from overtaking them. And so it’s become this real battleground. And nowhere really more intensely, I think, than in the suburbs around Fort Worth and Dallas, just because those are suburbs that are just very traditionally conservative and really reacted strongly to seeing their fellow neighbors and whatnot voting more Democratic over time. And so this became a real cause. You saw, actually, a very strong Tea Party emerge in that area, and it’s sort of morphed into a pretty engaged conservative base in that part of the state.

So how does Patriot Mobile factor in here? I should say, I’ve heard of this company. They would pop up in my reporting on conservative politics every now and then.

Their swag is very visible at Trump rallies. I’ve seen their ads in conservative media. But I’ve never gotten a full understanding of what they’re up to.

Well, it’s true, they’ve been around for a while. I didn’t really know too much about them, and that’s why I went out to try and set up an interview and actually talk to them face to face. It was pretty clear to me they weren’t going to agree to a phone interview with the New York Times, necessarily. That it would be better if I showed up in person and talked to them.

But when you track down the address from their campaign filings, it’s a PO box in Grapevine, Texas, north of Fort Worth. I dug a little deeper and I was able to find an actual address of a place, and I drove to that office park and knocked on the door and went through. And it was completely unmarked from the outside, but when you got inside there was all kinds of folks wearing Patriot Mobile t-shirts and there’s other branding around.

So I knew I had landed in the right place, but it was not the right time. This was back in the spring and they decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with a reporter who just showed up at their door.

An experience we’ve both had before.

Well, they were surprised to see me, in fact. Because they’ve done a lot to try and conceal sort of their location, they would say for safety reasons. And so they were surprised that I’d showed up, but I did have a brief conversation with the president and one of the founders, Glenn Story.

And he essentially said he’d think about interview, and thought about it, and said no. But then I decided to keep pushing it because their influence is really very clear in that area, that they were spending a significant amount of money. And I felt like their story needed to be told. And I followed up a couple of months later and reiterated my interest in talking, and we had a long cell phone conversation off the record about what kind of story I wanted to do. And he came away, at least at that moment, convinced that he wanted to sit down.

So tell me about that. You go back to this office park, and this time they let you in?

Yeah, so it looks a lot like a typical small business. You have cubicles and people kind of buzzing back and forth. But it’s just a little bit different and has a little bit more of a conservative feel, namely because you have flags that you might see at a conservative rally hanging from some of those cubicles, including one modeled on the Texas flag, except there are two silhouettes of assault rifles on it and the words come and take it in Hebrew and in English.

And so there’s an overtness to the politics that are just not present in your typical office space. The other thing they do at the office is every Tuesday they have a Bible study with Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Raphael.

It’s just a packed conference room with people out in the hallways trying to listen in. So for those that are interested, and it seems like a lot of people are, that’s a real highlight of the week there. So it’s a normal sort of company, but it’s got these aspects that make it unique.

Yeah, and what did you learn when you sat down with Glenn?

Yeah, so I sat down in Glenn’s office with him and with his wife, Jenny Story, who’s the chief operating officer for the company, and with their sort of VP for government affairs, Leigh Wambsganss. And she also runs the separate entity which is their political action committee. And so we spoke for almost two hours.

What they do, they don’t operate their own towers or anything like that. They essentially buy space from T-Mobile, is the provider they take space from, and then they will sell you your cell phone and a plan. And they’re like the customer service part of it. But really, for these executives that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part for them was the conservative politics that the business allowed them to pursue.

And they talk about it as this is their for-profit mission. And they see it as a Christian mission. And on the whiteboard in Glenn’s office he has the core values for the company still sort of written in handwriting with a black marker. And the first one it says —

Missionaries versus mercenaries.

And then the second one is God is in control. And they talk about that, that all the decisions they make, they pray on. And that’s how they view their business.

So when they say for-profit mission, what is that mission? What are the conservative Christian causes that Patriot Mobile is most concerned about?

Well, so broadly they set out a mission for themselves of essentially four areas, or four pillars as they would say.

First Amendment, the Second Amendment, they’re about support for the military.

And then the pro-life issues.

Pretty standard conservative causes.

Exactly. And for a while, Glenn was telling me they were just giving their money to politics and political causes that were bigger than them. And then they started to look more in their own backyard.

And they just this year decided to start spending money on local school board races.

All the executives have kids in the schools in this area.

And they were very focused, at least in the meeting that I had with them, on the content of the books that were being offered to offer to students.

And so it really wasn’t born of their pillars, per se, but more of the general sense of their faith and being able to instill that faith in their own kids and have other parents be allowed to do that themselves for their own children.

And so what does this actually look like for them getting involved in these races?

Well, there were several. There’s four different independent school districts where they supported candidates. And the one that I looked at most specifically was one called Grapevine Colleyville ISD. And this is a school district that spans two towns, Grapevine and Colleyville. And Grapevine is the corporate headquarters for Patriot Mobile, so that’s the reason I was most interested in that district because everything was kind of happening right in the span of a few miles.

The other reason I was interested in focusing on that area is that it had this recent history with the district having gotten rid of a pretty popular new Black principal at its high school, the first Black principal that they’d had at the Colleyville Heritage High School. And he only lasted there a year. And that year was really marked by a lot of controversy, especially towards the end. And parents coming to school board meetings and complaining that the principal was bringing “critical race theory,” quote, unquote, into the schools.

And was privileging conversations about equity and diversity over concerns about the education of the students. And there was a pretty bitter back and forth that ended with the principal agreeing to step down and the school district moving on from him. But it was a kind of ugly chapter that came to a close only really at the end of last year. And so this was the backdrop for then the school board elections that come up in the following spring. And so there was an effort to push further with more changes that they could put into place.

I mean, it seems like you’re laying out a school district that has a lot going on. What kind of impact did Patriot Mobile’s involvement and investment have for those school board races?

Well, these are races where really only a few thousand dollars is spent by a campaign. And here you had Patriot Mobile allocating $420,000 to 11 different candidates.

Right, right. If you want to focus on national politics, maybe that $400,000 doesn’t go that far. But when you’re looking at a school board race or a local race, that’s essentially bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. That has a big impact.

Right, that money goes in just a dramatic way in these little races where people — name recognition is quite low, if it exists at all. And people go to the polls out of a sense of duty often on a day that’s unusual. This was a vote that was in May that didn’t have any other races besides a couple of local ones happening. So that spending had just a tremendous effect.

I mean, they won each of the 11 races where they favored a candidate. And in doing so, they put more conservative school board members on the boards of four school districts, solidifying control in some cases. And in the case of Grapevine Colleyville —

— actually flipping control from a board that had been more centrist to one that was decidedly much more conservative.

Say more about that.

There were a bunch of new policies that were under discussion. And once the school board flipped, those new policies that more tightly restricted books and changed the way students and their pronouns would be handled, those new policies passed easily. And so it changed the atmosphere in the schools pretty quickly. But the other thing that happened during that school board fight that kind of didn’t get as much attention, it sort of flew under the radar, was that the school board at the same time as they were voting changes to how books are handled and how transgender students are dealt with in the school and pronouns and all the hot button issues, they also changed the election rules.

What do you mean?

Well, what they decided to do is move from a system where you had to get a majority of the vote to win a seat on the school board to one where the person who had the plurality of the votes would win. And so the current system, if you don’t get a majority, there’s a runoff election between the two top vote getters. And what they said was, hey that system is too expensive and pointless in these small races where we can just say the person who has the most votes of the candidates who are running gets that seat. So this was presented as a cost saving measure. It’s completely within the rules of how these elections are run. You can either do a plurality system or one with runoffs.

But they changed this at this very heightened moment, and opponents of the new school board said they did it in order to preserve their majority. On the theory that the folks that are currently in control of the school board have a really animated and organized base of support, and that they could always turn out a plurality, 40 percent or so, of the voters. And as long as there was more than one other candidate they stood to hold on to those seats or even gain them with new candidates. So this is actually seen as a way of maintaining power by the folks in the school board, even if majority of voters were voting against them. As long as they could sort of split their opposition, they can hold on to their seats.

That feels like a pretty big success story.

Oh, certainly. And you’ve seen them get a ton of national attention for this in conservative circles. I mean, they were vetted at CPAC by Steve Bannon. And so they’ve kind of become these darlings of the far right here, especially those who really champion Christian values and want to see them more in place in policy.

At the local level, there’s few things that have more of an impact on the community than how your schools are run. It’s what’s taught on issues of race and gender. It’s what your children are coming home with and telling you about they know about the world. And so it’s a very direct kind of reflection back to conservatives of this changing society that they’re looking to push against. And so this is a very powerful space in order to try and take a little bit more control.

And so there’s this understanding of a larger political opportunity here to own the idea of parental rights. And you’ve already seen other communities sort of looking to their playbook and thinking about how it can be expanded. And it’s something that they’ve talked about, that they sort put this together and hope to be able to show other places that maybe don’t have the resources to develop plans of their own, kind of give them essentially this strategy for how to win.

A blueprint.

Exactly, exactly. And I talked to them about what’s next. And they were not really that interested in getting into the nitty gritty of where they plan to spend their money, especially after this election cycle here in Texas. But you can sort of see how the model might scale.

And for example, Fort Worth, which is the largest city in Texas that’s still run by Republicans, you have a mayor there who came up under a Republican who is fairly centrist. And that former mayor actually just lost the county race in the Republican primary to a candidate who is aligned with Patriot Mobile, and in fact, is friends with one of the folks who helped engineer Patriot Mobile strategy. And so you could sort of see them thinking we’re going to push not only school boards in a more conservative direction, but maybe also start to think about how to do that at the county level, and then at the level of one of the largest cities in the state of Texas.

And this feels critical, because as you said, these communities are core to the question of whether Texas flips. And that is core to the question of America’s political direction. It feels like a lot of that ties back to these communities, which is why you went there. So how should we think then about Patriot Mobile’s place in that larger story?

Well, it’s not that Patriot Mobile is this incredibly powerful operation. It is, at the end of the day, a local cell phone provider. But I think the point is that the conservative movement has these folks like Glenn who are really willing to put their money and their businesses in service of the values and the politics that they feel most strongly about.

And I think one of the things that something like Patriot Mobile and folks like Glenn and Jenny show, or at least what they’re trying to prove, is that even as the state changes demographically it doesn’t actually mean that they need to change their values, that the state needs to change the values that it’s had before. And I think what you’re seeing with this kind of very organized movement is a minority of folks, but one that’s quite organized and really animated in their values and in their politics, can be quite effective, especially against a majority that’s much more fractured and maybe doesn’t have the same kind of alignment around similar goals. And so you can imagine that this will play out, not just in these suburbs in Texas, but in suburbs in areas all over the country.

Yeah. I mean, it makes me think about one of the blind spots of the demographic destiny argument. The idea that when these changes happen, conservatives or Republicans who would have been politically hurt were just going to sit there and not do anything. They are creating the infrastructure to really wrest their community back to where they are, and even willing to change some rules to do that.

Well, that’s right. And I think the other thing that’s important to point out. And something that is notable when you go to Patriot Mobile, is that the folks that work there are quite diverse. It’s not an all White employee base. You have people of all backgrounds who are employed by the company, visibly.

And it’s sort of this idea that I think is overly simplistic, that the demographic change in Texas, which is largely towards Hispanics, that that wouldn’t mean necessarily that Democrats would take power. But I think we’ve seen, and especially what Glenn and folks like him are stressing, is the centrality of Christian values and of that kind of commonality that actually does cross racial lines in a place like Texas. And I think that may be core to the future of this kind of strategy of reaching across maybe racial divisions to find common ground on questions of values and how we should be raising our kids.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So grassroots Republicans, bonded by faith and motivated by fears of a changing country, have mobilized in local races to have an outsized impact. But this summer, they may have gone too far. And in doing so, given Democrats —

— something of their own to mobilize around.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s the thing, Republicans have been really good at using the system to their political advantage and changing certain rules to their own benefit, even when it’s out of step with the majority. The biggest example of that has to be the stacking of the Supreme Court with deeply conservative judges and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Nearly 6 in 10 adults disapprove of the court’s decision. So the question is, have conservatives gotten so out of step with the majority that there will be a backlash? One that benefits Democrats, and finally gives the party a rallying issue of their own.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been sounding the alarm on Roe for years, an issue that most of the party largely ignored while Roe was still in place. Now that it’s been overturned, I wanted to ask her, can Democrats catch up to years of Republican unity? And is their biggest problem in how they deliver their message? Or is it the message itself?

So Gillibrand says the Democrats problem is not a failure of the party’s own messaging. Rather, it’s what she calls the corruption of Republicans. But when it comes to abortion, Democrats have, at times, tried to make protecting Roe a priority long before it was overturned. But it wasn’t a unified effort, and voters didn’t really respond. And I wanted to know if she thought that actually contributed to Roe being overturned.

What I hear from Senator Gillibrand and many prominent Democrats is that the party is hoping that backlash to overturning Roe has given them the opportunity to use the Republican blueprint and energize their own grassroots. But the Republican blueprint isn’t just reactive. It’s proactive.

From Patriot Mobile’s work in the Texas suburbs all the way to the Supreme Court, what Republicans have really done is craft a political strategy that anticipated the country’s changes and got ahead of them. So much so that it’s raised the bar for Democrats in these midterm elections and beyond. Now, Democrats have to do more than just defy expectations. They have to defy political gravity.

Next time, on the Run Up.

We talk to the woman whose vision for how to do that will be tested in November.

The Run Up is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez and Caitlin O’Keefe. It’s edited by Franny Carr Toth, Larissa Anderson and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop. It was mixed by Dan Powell and fact checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, David Halbfinger, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Shannon Busta, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello. See you next week.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

In early September, Joe Biden kicked off the midterms with a message for the country.

He told a familiar story about American democracy — that it’s a shared value enshrined in the country’s founding.

And while it can be tested —

It’s resilient as long as we participate in it.

But I don’t think the story’s that simple.

I think if we really want to understand the message Joe Biden has for the country and the test democracy is facing right now, we need to start with the voters who were most activated by Biden’s message back in 2020, the voters who saved his campaign because of their own understanding of American democracy.

[MUSIC]

Today, why that group of voters rallied behind Joe Biden’s message before anyone else.

And what Biden is still missing heading into the midterms.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run-Up.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hello. Can you hear us? Congressman, can you hear me?

Yeah, I hear you, and I see you.

Oh! I didn’t know either of those things were happening. Thank you.

So back in 2020, Democrats had a historic slate of candidates trying to become the next president. There were over 20 of them who reflected the diversity of the party and who had a range of policy visions. Then there was Joe Biden. He was asking the country to forget all that stuff, saying that beating Donald Trump was more important than anything else.

And as the primaries got underway, it wasn’t clear that Americans were willing to make that compromise. In fact, after two big losses in the first primary states, the media was writing his campaign off altogether. But the way I see it, Biden was always going to be the nominee. Because from the very beginning, the most important voting bloc of the Democratic primary, older Black voters, they prefer Joe Biden to any other candidate, and by a big margin.

This really set in for me long before primary season even started at a fish fry in the summer of 2019. It was hosted by the highest-ranking Black man in government, South Carolina’s Congressman Jim Clyburn, the Democratic kingmaker of the state. It was a flex of Clyburn’s power. All the candidates were there, hoping against hope that they might win Clyburn’s endorsement.

I was there, and I remember the scene of all of them making that pitch, and specifically making what seems like a pitch to you. They all had on those Clyburn shirts. What do you remember from that afternoon?

That night that you were there, that was the biggest fish fry we had ever had. And we had the biggest number of people running for president.

Certainly. The stage was packed. [LAUGHS]

Yeah. So you got over 20 people running, and they’re all there. And there was going to be a heck of a trust to be made. So how do you winnow that out?

Well, that night, my late wife was ailing at the time and could not have come to the fish fry. So the night after the fish fry, I shared with her how successful the fish fry had been. I said, we have some good friends running. And her position was no matter how many people are running, no matter how many were friends, if we really wanted to win, we needed to nominee Joe Biden.

That was her position at that time, even back in 2019.

Yeah. That was in June, 2019.

Were you there at that point at that time of the fish fry? Did you think that Joe Biden needed to be the nominee?

Oh, yeah. I’ve been for Joe Biden all the time. I was always for Joe Biden. There was no question about that.

So what was the importance, then, of convening such a group in South Carolina for that moment? I have such a memory of that stage, of everyone with the shirt on, Bernie not wearing the shirt, and then those folks making that pitch to your constituents. What was the importance of that if you knew in your head it would have to be Biden for you?

Well, my granddaughter was there. And you’re right. Bernie refused to put on the shirt until my granddaughter confronted him with the shirt. He put the shirt on. And I was sitting there, and I let him know that he was going to put [INAUDIBLE]. They all had to have it on the shirt. So Bernie finally put the shirt on.

I didn’t know any of this was going on until later. But what I did know was that most of those 7,500 people, according to the fire department — I did know that most of those people were a part of my network. And I knew from all of the people that I interact with that Joe Biden was a favorite. And I also knew that they were concerned that Joe Biden had not caught fire, and they needed to be fired up.

There are all those candidates on that stage, a constituency that can look up and see a Black woman in Senator Harris or Vice President Harris now, who can see Cory Booker, who can see candidates promising a lot of stuff on racial justice platforms. Why, then, do you think that they — and you, from what I’m hearing — looked out at that stage and said, still, it needs to be Joe Biden?

Because first of all, Joe Biden —

Joe Biden is in and out of South Carolina all the time. That’s the way it’s been with him. He’s been in and out of South Carolina for years. And people knew Joe Biden. And these connections were there.

So you didn’t have to introduce Joe Biden to people. What we had to do was make him valuable. The value of his candidacy is there. The big thing — who can beat Donald Trump? We felt that the best chance for Democrats to beat Donald Trump was to nominate Joe Biden.

Why?

It just stood to reason.

I guess I still — because a lot of other people didn’t make that calculation, right? You had a lot of donors who went elsewhere, even on the moderate side. You had Iowa embrace Pete and Bernie. You had New Hampshire go a different direction. I’m saying, why was the answer for you all so clearly Joe Biden when the answer across the Democratic landscape was not him for a lot of other people?

Well, there’s one thing I can say about Southerners. Louisiana is the South. Mississippi is the South. South Carolina is the South. We have learned over the years what it is to be effective politically in a country for a race. Trump’s a lot of things.

And we have learned that African-Americans in the South got a certain antenna. And from that antenna, they can read. They pick up things a lot of people with other experiences don’t pick up. But you operate politically in the South, you learn how to operate in two different worlds.

What do you mean?

I mean you have to learn how to be successful with your base, basically Black people, and how to be successful in reaching across the color line to attract white voters.

And you’re saying — and I want to be clear — you’re saying in your life, that’s how you’ve learned to navigate those different compromises or what you give and take, is because that’s just the reality for growing up as a Black man in politics in the South?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s the way most of us are in the South. We’re not concerned about who gets tomorrow morning’s headline, who gets the most hits. We are concerned about whether or not we can move the agenda forward, put enough substance in place so our children and our grandchildren will have something to look forward to as they come along.

Watching the Trump administration gave me some understanding of what was going on in Germany after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. And then he set out to discredit the press, to co-op the church. And I saw Trump doing the same thing that he did.

Look what he did in four years. What the hell would he have done with eight years? That’s what was motivating me and a lot of other people. We got to get rid of this guy. We can’t take any chances out here talking about who may be able to win. There was one guy sitting among all those people who had enough cachet to win. And it was Joe Biden.

With that view in mind, then, if we look back to the 2020 primary, did it have to be Joe Biden not just because of all that history, all those relationships and such? But did it have to be a white guy that people knew?

It had to be Joe Biden.

It had to be Joe Biden.

It had to be Joe Biden.

You don’t think whiteness was key?

I’m sorry?

Did whiteness play a role? Did maleness play a role?

Whiteness always plays a role in the United States of America. And it’s still playing a role. Whiteness played a role even when Barack Obama was elected.

Let me share something with you. I’m from the town of Sumter, South Carolina. I went to Sumpter during the primary when Barack Obama was running. And I went to speak at this Sunset Country Club. It’s a country club when I was growing up was white only. And there’s a lady there who was a public school teacher in Sumter.

And she said to me that night — and I don’t know why she said it. I don’t know if she understood what she was saying. She said, you know, I’m really impressed with this young man. Obama. And I said, yes, he is a very impressive young man. She said, I think I’m going to vote for him. You do know his mother’s white, right? Now, what was she saying to me?

You tell me.

OK. You know what she was saying.

[LAUGHS]: I want you to say it, though.

As if that was a factor in why she was impressed with him. That’s what she said. I just looked at her and said, yes, ma’am, I do know his mother is white. I was just smiling, kept going.

The story Clyburn tells me is a version of a story I’ve heard many times in my reporting. Because when voters ask themselves who’s electable, what they’re really asking is who they think other voters will accept. And for many Black Democrats in 2020, Biden was the only candidate they believed who could win a general election. And that was the first step to dealing with the existential threat they felt the country was facing, a threat that, at the time, Joe Biden said was rooted in one person — Donald Trump.

But over the last two years, Biden has changed his language and what he wants the country to unify against. He no longer just points at Trump. Instead, he now talks about Trumpism and semi-fascism as a movement that must also be expelled.

But it sounds like he is merely only arriving to where you were originally in terms of understanding the distance between Democrats and the Trump wing. Is that fair?

Well, I don’t know when Joe Biden got there. I don’t know if his recent expressions mean he just got to that point.

Can I offer a theory here?

Sure.

I mean, I partly think that you got to this understanding of unity before Joe Biden because of that history in the South, because of that long understanding that democracy is not given, and the long understanding that sometimes, folks are asked to make a choice that’s between bad and worse. Is that fair?

Yeah, absolutely that’s fair.

[LAUGHS]:

I’ve been choosing between the lesser of two evils most of my life. This is not a perfect country Alexis de Tocqueville, in his writings, “Democracy in America,” wrote that America is not great because it is more enlightened than any other nation, but, rather because it has always been able — he didn’t say willing — always been able to repair its faults.

Now, it’s one thing to be able to repair a fault, and it’s something else to be willing to repair a fault. So many times, even against its will, America has muscled up the capacity to repair its faults.

I mean, I’m thinking about the arc in your own life, rising to be the highest-ranking Black man in government. But at the same time, your party is now openly saying that democracy is on the brink.

Mm-hmm.

How do you wrestle those two things, both the promise of what democracy can give, which I think you have pointed to over and over, and what I hear from Democrats right now, which is that in doing those kind of compromises, we have also left democracy exposed?

Yes. But, you know, I’m not a so-called Roosevelt Democrat. Most Democrats that you know identify with Franklin Roosevelt. I don’t. I don’t. I’m a Truman Democrat. The New Deal was a raw deal for most of the Black people in the South.

The New Deal gave us Social Security. And you’ve learned from your studies that Social Security was the greatest anti-poverty bill ever written. However, what you may not have paid attention to is that Social Security did not cover farm workers. Social Security did not cover domestic workers. 6 percent to 5 percent of the Black people in this country were in those two areas.

Then we go off to war in World War II. And what gave those soldiers a leg up when they came home was the GI Bill, 3,000 GI Bill grants. Only 2 went to Black people — not 2 percent, 2 — 1, 2 — out of 3,000. See, I know all that. And I deal with all that. Most Black people don’t deal with that because most people don’t know that.

But I’m saying I often hear, though, from Black folks, maybe younger Black folks, I should probably admit, that say those are actually reasons to not work within the system, to not compromise with the system that has, oftentimes, as you articulated, and I think we both agree on, left the Black folks out of their dealings. Right?

Yep.

I’m saying, what is the response to that? Not that those reasons are reasons to continue to politically maneuver. But actually, those are reasons of why compromise with Democrats hasn’t worked out for Black folks.

And I would say that you’re wrong about that. Just because Franklin Roosevelt didn’t do it — when Harry Truman became president, Harry Truman was the first United States president to speak to the NAACP.

Harry Truman did that. Harry Truman sat down and wrote an executive order to integrate the armed services, a white guy, a Democrat.

Do you retain that hope in this moment that America is still able to repair its — I mean, if we just use Joe Biden’s articulation of America’s faults right now, do you still have that hope that America is able to repair those faults?

Absolutely.

OK. What gives you —

My goodness. I’m raising children and grandchildren. I got to have that. How do you lose hope? I’m a South Carolinian. Our motto — our state’s motto is “while I breathe, I hope.”

What do you think it says about the country that even after January 6, even after a Trump presidency, that Donald Trump-endorsed candidates are up and down the Republican ballot? I’m asking you what you think that says about America.

It says that we are always in pursuit of perfection. Look, nothing is — nobody’s perfect. No country is perfect. We’re in pursuit of perfection. And we have not gotten to this point by being a perfect nation. Slavery in an indication that we are imperfect. Jim Crow — we are imperfect. And when you measure this country against all others, I can’t think of any other country that I prefer to be living in.

[LAUGHS]:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK. So if Clyburn is right and the story of America is a story like the ones that Tocqueville told and the one Biden told in his speech in Philadelphia of a country that’s able to repair its faults on the road to a more perfect democracy, then 2020 was a bump in that road. And even if the midterms turn out to be another bump, America would still have the capacity to self-correct through participation, through voting.

But when I talk to my colleague, Robert Draper —

Hello.

Hey, Astead. How’s it going?

Hey. How are you?

Doing all right.

He laid out another possible version of history, one in which 2020 was not just another bump on the road but a sign that for some people, democracy isn’t even the destination.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

A big theme in this year’s midterms, and part of the reason Joe Biden gave that speech in Philadelphia, are the shifts in the Republican Party. Throughout the primaries, right-wing candidates won up and down the ballot. And they won mimicking Donald Trump’s most extreme talking points about the election and immigration and diversity itself.

The question’s fair — how these candidates are going to land with voters in the general election or whether Republicans have gone too far, and the Trump-backed candidates will ultimately help Democrats in the midterms. But then I saw reporting from my colleague, Robert Draper, who spent the last year recording in Arizona, and I realized that that question wasn’t big enough.

Robert, your reporting is really astonishing. How did you end up in Arizona in the first place?

I became interested in Arizona as a result of the 2020 election because it was the first contested state to be called by Fox News on election night and to swing against President Trump. And I then looked to see if Arizona, now finding itself in the position of being a true swing state that had been lost by the president, would descend into a kind of penitent meditation and essentially do what one would expect parties do when they’ve been defeated — to try to win back voters who they’ve alienated. But it didn’t.

And that became very clear in the days just after the election where Arizona became ground zero for the Stop the Steal movement, the movement to overturn the election. That’s what first put Arizona on my radar. On top of which, it’s not only that they did not move towards the center, the state party, but that they actually endeavored to push out of the party or in other ways alienate those people within the state GOP who you would ordinarily describe as middle-of-the-road conservatives — censuring, for example, the sitting governor, Doug Ducey, and for that matter, the sitting house speaker, Rusty Bowers.

So far from becoming a bigger tent, they actually had become a smaller tent, pushing out people who have been bulwarks of the Arizona GOP and catering entirely to the far right.

Mm-hmm. And how do you see this playing out when it comes to the midterms?

Yeah. Well, in the immediate, the far right has taken over the Arizona Republican Party. There’s no question about it. Kelly Ward is the chairperson. Ward said to me that she utterly rejects the notion of, well, we should perhaps nominate people who are electable to the larger population so that they’ll actually win.

She rejected that, saying, no, we’ve heard that over and over. And they keep producing these spineless weaklings, the Republican Party does, who are just squishes and don’t do anything for the American people. We’re all sick of it.

So that’s been the philosophy of the far right. And it has paid off as a result of the primary in which a Trump-endorsed slate of Republican candidates basically swept the field.

That includes Kari Lake, a political novice and former local Fox anchor.

Who is a 2020 election denier, who has spoken with extreme skepticism about COVID vaccines.

And who, in particular, is a social justice warrior of the right.

When it comes to critical race theory, for that matter, speaking in terms every bit as harsh, if not more so, than Donald Trump has when it comes to border policy.

So you have her. You have the US Senate candidate, Blake Masters —

— who himself is an election denier, has had campaign posters everywhere I looked when I was there saying Blake Masters as senator will not ask for your pronouns, Blake Masters will prohibit critical race theory.

You have a secretary of state candidate, Mark Finchem.

Who not only was a 2020 denier but actually fought first in Arizona to do everything possible to overturn the state election results there, and then, when that failed, showed up at the Capitol as well on January the 6th and, rather than tweet anything that indicated contrition, doubled down, showing imagery of the rioters, saying this is what happens when, essentially, Americans are lied to.

So that’s the slate, then, that the Arizona Republican Party has come up with.

Trumpism seems to be winning, at least in the primaries.

For sure, yeah. But, of course, that’s been true largely across the board, as you know, Astead. I mean, it’s been almost axiomatic that in the primaries, anyone who’s against Trump loses.

But what I did not expect to encounter was a real grassroots movement not only to continue to push the Republican Party to the right, but also to push it away from democracy.

And let me back into this just by observing, Astead, that I’ve been covering conservative politics for over two decades. And I’ve seen a lot of things on the right over the years. I haven’t seen anything like this where, in meetings both to candidate meet-and-greets or grassroots events —

That people would begin to stand up and just talk about how they thought the democracy was an anti-American concept.

I heard, for example, a state representative candidate, Selina Bliss, say in front of a group, “I want to make clear to everyone we’re not a democracy. We’re a republic.”

And to hear grassroots activists openly and proactively espouse hostility towards democracy, to actually say that we’re not a democracy, we’re a Republic — one of them said to me, to me, the word “democracy” means mob rule. Another one said to me, democracy means that if you get 50 percent of the votes plus 1, it means you can take my property away from me. You can take everything away from me, the tyranny of the majority, notwithstanding the fact that there are all sorts of constitutional protections against such a concept.

So what I came to realize, Astead, was that what changed things was January the 6th, when, ultimately, the presidency was not restored to Donald Trump. And I should mention that Trump, on that very day at his speech on the Ellipse, used the word “democracy” no less than four times, about how we must save our democracy. This is our last-ditch attempt to save our democracy. Well, when all that failed, apparently, the view from the right was, well, democracy is, in fact, a dirty word.

But let’s interrogate that idea, right? They’re saying democracy is a dirty word, that the country is not a democracy. It’s a republic. Are they wrong? I mean, I don’t mean to go full civics class here, but we don’t have a direct democracy government.

And, you know, American democracy has, for a long time, excluded some people, particularly people of color, women, and folks who weren’t originally included in the idea. So what do they mean by the idea of republic and democracy? How are they defining those words?

Right, yeah. I mean, let’s stipulate a couple of things. First, you’re absolutely correct that we’ve never had a direct democracy in the Athenian sense. We’ve always had a representative form of government. A constitutional republic is the mechanism by which we deliver democracy, but it’s still meant to be rule of, by, and for the people.

The second stipulation is also a truth that you just uttered, which is that America has fallen well short of its democratic aims over the centuries, particularly when it comes to people of color and women. But that’s not what these individuals in Arizona were talking about. They certainly weren’t saying that democracy is a goal that America has never measured up to. No. What they’re saying is that democracy has now become a means by which a majority of Americans — if, indeed, a majority does prevail in an election — can change the country in ways that makes America unrecognizable to these people.

So what I was hearing over and over, Astead, was mainly social stuff, that the majority is now perverting our schools. We now have drag queens in our schools. We now have critical race theory being taught to our children. In that sense, it’s a not-unfamiliar lament that we’ve heard from the right, the “I don’t recognize my country anymore.” But I was surprised in Arizona not to hear it cloaked in anything resembling economic anxiety.

This was not anyone talking about a loss of manufacturing jobs. They were talking about, quote unquote, “America as we know it” and how it has been — America has moved not just far left, but to a point where people are losing their freedoms, and the anxiety has reached existential proportions.

Yeah, I mean, it does feel like a lot of this is familiar from the last six years. Maybe Trumpism in Arizona is more culturally focused than in other parts of the country, where it’s more economic focus. But it is a sense of loss that I think is a through line for this political moment.

What’s new here is that in the wake of Trump’s loss, candidates are running on a clear anti-democracy message, a message that, if it wins, would be brought to the democratic system itself. But what happens to this movement if they lose?

Well, there’s always an excuse for losing. But the legitimate excuse that a lot of these far-right candidates will have, these MAGA candidates, if they lose, is, well, sure, we lost. It’s not just that we were up against the Democrats. We were up against the RINOs too. The establishment Republicans, the so-called Uniparty, as they now say, speaking of Democrats and establishment Republicans in tandem, did us in. And it wasn’t a fair fight.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you back that up? They called the tandem of them the Uniparty, the Republican establishment in cahoots with Democrats?

That’s right, yeah. Uniparty, again, is a term I hadn’t heard, really, before 2020, but I’ve certainly heard it a lot, both in Arizona and beyond, since then, from conservatives who feel that, essentially, the Republican Party, as imagined by the establishment, is only slightly different, only nominally different from the Democratic Party, that they’re basically all one controlling organism that wants to keep the elites in power and wants to keep the will of the people suppressed.

They have a built-in excuse to an electoral loss, which is that the establishment is united against them.

Yeah, that’s right. And again, to be fair, they’ve got an argument.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like, for me, what you’re laying out, the feeling of we got cheated, encompasses the 2020 election and that conspiracy theory. But it’s also much broader. Birtherism is we got cheated with Barack Obama.

Great replacement theory is we got cheated as new folks are coming in. The abandonment of democracy and majority rule feels like we get cheated as the face of the country is changing. I mean, it seems as if a lot of this stuff is wrapped up in that basic feeling that the cultural power, the cultural face of the country is changing, and that’s the biggest cheat of all.

Right. No, that’s right, Astead. And it goes back to — I mean, to a lot of us, including myself, in 2015 who wondered aloud, how in the world is this billionaire real estate developer named Donald Trump going to appeal to rank-and-file voters in South Carolina, or for that matter, Arizona?

And it’s because he understood that sense of grievance and that sense of stolen victory. America is being stolen away from them. And so even with birtherism, which sounds like it’s just about Barack Obama and a couple of Hawaii state officials, it’s basically the view that Democrats cheat. And —

That the other side is inherently invalid, and so is the coalition empowering them too.

Yeah, that this was the active wish of other nefarious groups trying to do in ordinary Americans. And I should say that, too, that this is a language that I heard time and again from Arizona candidates, but I think especially because it is very much a notion embraced by the grassroots right in Arizona, which is that the stakes in this election are existential. Kari Lake, the night before the primary, basically said this is an election about good versus evil.

So given everything that you’re saying, that Republicans in Arizona are laying out this election as a fight between good and evil, as a battle for civilization itself, how should we think about the proposal Biden has made for the country? He is asking Democrats and establishment Republicans to take a stand against MAGA and Trumpism. He’s frankly asking for the Uniparty to unify, right?

Right, yeah.

But it feels like, from what you’re laying out, that that misses at least one big thing, which is that for this group, there is already built-in excuses to dismiss electoral results, that no matter what happens in November, they’re ready to cast it aside.

Yeah, no, that’s — I mean, when you ask either side what is it we’re trying to save here, what is it about America’s greatness do you see, you get entirely different answers. And from the right, that answer largely has to do with individual freedoms, and it has to do with faith. It’s, I think, almost inextricably tied to so many of these arguments that the existential stakes are quasi-apocalyptic as if outlined in the Book of Revelations in the New Testament, that the Democratic forces are quasi-satanic forces.

Whether it’s Antifa or Black Lives Matter, trans bathrooms, critical race theory, or an influx of immigration, the country is changing in the woke liberal direction. And for some of these folks on the grassroots side of conservative politics in Arizona, stopping that change is more important than democracy in the form of democracy that we’ve known.

It’s not only more important than democracy. The concern is that democracy may actually be thwarting their ability to do this, that the democracy has become a kind of tool —

Democracy’s an obstacle.

Yeah, yeah. It’s become it’s become a tool for the left in its promotion of these anti-American values. And I also should mention that I heard at one event that I was at two different individuals, one of them a political candidate, another a head of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers —

— talk about Senator Joe McCarthy, the former Senator from Wisconsin who ushered in the Red Scare of the 1950s.

They spoke of him longingly, saying that that’s what the country needs now. And I bring that up in this context because McCarthy was as anti-democratic a force as we’ve seen in American politics, trying to spread fear, trying to get people blacklisted, trying to get people pushed not just out of the party, but arrested for treason. And it was all on the basis of a fictitious list that he supposedly had of communist sympathizers and communists who worked in the State Department.

And I actually had thought that I would never in my lifetime hear anybody, much less Republican office-seekers, speaking with nostalgia about such a man as Joe McCarthy. And again, it’s an indicator of how deeply rooted the anxiety is about what McCarthy called the enemy within —

— a phrase that I’ve now heard in Arizona and elsewhere espoused about the left.

That this is the enemy within. And so when you have enemies like that, you’re in a kind of state of war, and you don’t think about trifles such as a democratic system of government except insofar as you view it, as you say, a kind of obstacle, something that actually has been turned against you.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When I think about the story Biden’s telling the country, and also the way that Clyburn and the grassroots conservatives in Arizona think about that story, I wonder who’s closer to the truth. Because the thing that Clyburn and grassroots conservatives in Arizona share is a view of democracy that isn’t as much a value that beats in the hearts of Americans, but more as a tool.

For Clyburn and for many of the Black voters who delivered Biden the presidency, it’s a tool to perfect the country, make it more inclusive, and grow political power for people who have been left out. For the grassroots conservatives in Arizona, it’s a tool that’s increasingly being used against them to take away political power.

Next time on “The Run-Up —”

If some conservatives have turned on democracy —

What beats in their hearts instead?

“The Run-Up” is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Alyssa Gutierrez and Caitlin O’Keefe. It’s edited by Frannie Carr Toth, Larissa Anderson, and Lisa Tobin with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Elisheba Ittoop. It was mixed by Corey Schreppel and fact checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, David Halbfinger, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Shannon Busta, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, and Maddy Masiello. Catch you next week.