A year ago, Astead took “The Run-Up” listeners home for Thanksgiving. Specifically, he convened a focus group of family and friends to talk about the election and the question of Black people’s changing relationship to the Democratic Party. This year, he got the group back together for a different mission. The question was: What happened? What can Democrats learn from their defeat in 2024? On today’s show: an autopsy conducted not by consultants or elected officials but by committed, everyday De...
Nov 21, 2024•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast President-elect Trump’s cabinet nominees and major appointments — which have arrived quickly in the days since he won the election — are more than just a list of allies. The roster is a window into how he sees the mission of a second term. One priority will be immigration and border control, and, more specifically, Trump’s campaign promise of “mass deportations.” On Sunday night, Trump announced the person he was putting in charge of this effort: Tom Homan . Homan was the acting director of Immi...
Nov 14, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast For more than two years, we’ve been asking pretty much everyone we meet a version of the same question: Who are you going to vote for and why? And on Wednesday morning, we had the answer to that question. Or at least the first part. Donald Trump easily won the electoral vote, and as of early Thursday, he’s on track to win the popular vote too. The second part of the question — the why of 2024 — is a little more complicated. It will take time to answer in its entirety. But we wanted to start smal...
Nov 07, 2024•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast For months now, “The Run-Up” has been traveling around the country talking with people, trying to ensure that when today came, whatever happened wouldn’t feel like a surprise. So as people go to the polls to cast their vote for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump or someone else, we wanted to return to the place where we started almost exactly a year ago . Clallam County, in the northwest corner of Washington State. It’s the last true bellwether county in America. Voters there have correctly picked the ...
Nov 05, 2024•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast One phenomenon that’s been getting a lot of attention during this election is the growing gender gap among young people. Young men are leaning right, and young women are moving left. In recent national surveys from The New York Times and Siena College, young women favored Kamala Harris by 42 percentage points and young men favored Donald Trump by 12 points. And Trump has made explicit appeals to men — or at least his version of masculinity — a huge part of his message and campaign strategy. So, ...
Nov 02, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast For most of this year, we’ve been focused on the race for president, the messages coming from both parties’ nominees and their reception among voters. But that’s not all that’s on the ballot this November, and so much of what any president can do in the White House depends on who’s in Congress. So before Election Day, we wanted to take a look at the down-ballot landscape of 2024. Who will control the House and the Senate? And what can we learn about both parties when we turn away from the top of...
Nov 01, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast There’s no state more likely to tip the election than Pennsylvania. It has the most electoral votes of any swing state, with 19, and its flip from red to blue in 2020 helped secure the win for Joe Biden. For Kamala Harris to prevail there this year, she needs to win over moderates, even Republicans, who are turned off by Donald Trump. And she has to drive up enthusiasm among the Democratic base, including Black voters in urban centers like Philadelphia. On the show today, the Democrats’ final pu...
Oct 31, 2024•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Here’s what makes North Carolina, with its 16 Electoral College votes, unique among the electoral battlegrounds this year. Come election night, it will be one of the first of the closely fought states where the polls will close, giving the campaigns, and the public, early clues on where the night is headed. The state is probably the best opportunity for Democrats to win a state this year that they didn’t win in 2020, and the party — along with the state’s Democratic governor — is optimistic that...
Oct 24, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Tuesday night, with three weeks to go until Election Day, Donald Trump was in Georgia. In 2020, he lost the state by around 12,000 votes, and Georgia became central to his claims that the election had been stolen. After his defeat, he went after Republican state officials and voting machines. At his rally on Tuesday, he was doing something different. He was encouraging people to vote early, to participate in a system his party had previously questioned. The plan was to make the results “too b...
Oct 17, 2024•2 hr 32 min•Transcript available on Metacast We are less than a month from Election Day. That means our polling colleagues are busy. And that they are well positioned to help answer some of the biggest questions we have at this stage in the race. Like: Who has the advantage between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump? What’s the most important battleground state? And what are the chances we actually know the final result on election night? On today’s show, we do our best to get answers — and to get ready for these next few weeks. Featured on to...
Oct 10, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tim Walz, a former high school football coach from a tiny town, has folksy sayings and a camo cap. JD Vance shot to fame with “Hillbilly Elegy,” aiming to speak for parts of rural America that felt left behind. Both parties — especially with their vice-presidential candidates — are trying to convey to rural Americans that they are not forgotten. This comes after Democrats have seen significant erosion of support in rural areas. How have Republicans grown their rural advantage to historic levels?...
Oct 03, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast At one point, he supported the presidential aspirations of Donald Trump, a fellow reality TV star and businessman. But now Mark Cuban — perhaps best known for his longtime ownership of the Dallas Mavericks and his perch as a “Shark Tank” shark — has taken on a surprising new role. He is a prolific and vocal supporter of Kamala Harris. Especially when it comes to his view of what a Harris administration would mean for the economy. So, today on The Run-Up, as we enter the homestretch toward Electi...
Oct 01, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This year, Democrats and Republicans are both fighting to convince voters that their party alone can fix what both parties say is a big problem: the Southern border. And public sentiment on the issue is shifting. According to Gallup, 55 percent of Americans want to curb immigration, the highest recorded total since 2001. With that in mind, we wanted to talk with people who actually live and work near the border. So we traveled to El Paso, with Jazmine Ulloa, a Times politics reporter who grew up...
Sep 26, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast There’s a message that Kamala Harris and the Democrats are trying to send in these final weeks: The Democrats are patriots too. It was all over the place at the Democratic National Convention, in the chants of “U.S.A.!” that broke out on the convention floor, in the vice president’s speech and in a speech by Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. This effort to reclaim patriotism can be seen as a way to reclaim more white rural voters. But it’s also an appeal to disaffected voters, especially some...
Sep 19, 2024•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast For the people still on the fence about 2024, Tuesday night’s debate was an important data point. How would Vice President Kamala Harris differentiate herself from President Biden? How would former President Donald Trump come across when facing a new opponent? Would this matchup, the first time these candidates met, be enough to help these undecided voters make a decision? On today’s “Run-Up,” we look at how they are thinking after the debate. Up first, we watch the debate with Corrie Zech, an u...
Sep 12, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will face off in Philadelphia on Tuesday night for the second presidential debate of 2024. It will be the first time the two candidates meet on a debate stage. They enter the debate in a neck-and-neck race, with Mr. Trump leading Ms. Harris, 48 percent to 47 percent, according to the latest national polling from The New York Times and Siena College. That means the people still on the fence — those unsure about whom to vote for or whe...
Sep 10, 2024•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Former president Trump frequently takes credit for helping to overturn Roe v. Wade. But in recent weeks, he has posted on Truth Social, his social media site, that his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.” He suggested that he might vote for a Florida ballot measure allowing abortion up to around 24 weeks, before reversing his position. And he floated the idea that under a Trump administration, in vitro fertilization treatments would be covered by insurance com...
Sep 05, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast This election, like a lot of elections before it, may come down to which candidate voters think might help them with their grocery bills and housing costs — the essential stuff of everyday economics. That’s what people around the country say — and what they tell pollsters too. But the fact that life feels expensive right now is not just something voters are talking about. Campaigns are too. Kamala Harris just released an ad focused on how hard it is to own a home in the United States and an econ...
Aug 29, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast On the final night of the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage and formally accepted her party’s nomination. After the balloons fell, Astead Herndon and his colleagues Maya King and Jennifer Medina broke down the moments that stood out to them from the night — from people touched by gun violence telling their stories to the way Ms. Harris talked about Israel and the war in Gaza to how she told her own story. Plus, there was the rumored special guest who nev...
Aug 23, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Democratic National Convention tonight, formalizing her rapid ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket and capping a very unusual path to the nomination. No primary. No serious opposition. No real robust sense of what her legislative priorities might be. On today’s show, a quest to answer this question: Is a Harris-led Democratic Party substantively different than the Democratic Party of Joe Biden? As they all gathered in Chicago, we put that question...
Aug 22, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast After two days of the Democratic National Convention, one thing is clear. Democrats are united behind their new nominee. And Kamala Harris has those in the Democratic Party, from the high-profile speakers to the delegates in the hall, thinking they can win. In fact, the unity is such that after months of worrying about whether the convention would be upended by protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, so far, things feel quiet. But does anger over foreign policy still pose an electoral threat? On tod...
Aug 21, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last night, thousands of people gathered in Chicago for the first night of the Democratic National Convention. And the crowd at the United Center was ready for a party. The evening featured a cameo from their candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and speeches from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and, closing out the night, President Biden. Before he could begin his speech, he received a sustained round of applause — more than four minutes lon...
Aug 20, 2024•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago today, less than a month after Democrats changed their nominee in a remarkable political shake-up. To get set for the week, “The Run-Up” talks with Leah Daughtry, an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee, the chief executive of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions and a co-chair of the convention rules committee, an incredibly significant role this year given the nominee switch. She is the ultimate Democratic Par...
Aug 19, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast For much of the 2024 presidential election, it felt like there were pretty ideal conditions for a third-party candidate. Republicans and Democrats had both lined up behind broadly unpopular — and familiar — candidates. In the spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was polling at 10 percent in The New York Times/Siena College survey of battleground states, and sustained interest in his candidacy was enough to raise alarm among his major-party rivals. As that alarm grew, the Run-Up team traveled to Royal O...
Aug 15, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Tuesday afternoon, just hours after Vice President Harris announced that Tim Walz , governor of Minnesota, would be her running mate, Astead sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders in Burlington, Vt. Mr. Sanders, the Vermont progressive who has twice run for president himself, supported the choice of Mr. Walz. But a Harris-Walz ticket was not what he was envisioning for 2024. He was a staunch defender of President Biden remaining in the race , arguing that Mr. Biden was best positioned to defeat...
Aug 08, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast It has been less than two weeks since President Biden dropped his re-election bid and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Already, Ms. Harris has closed the gap with former President Donald J. Trump in some national polls. The Harris campaign said it had raised more than $200 million in a week. Ms. Harris’s supporters even broke attendance records on Zoom, with one group gathering more than 160,000 people on a single call. After more than a year of a presidential contest that ...
Aug 01, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Warning: this episode contains strong language and mentions of sexual abuse. Since 2019, our host, Astead Herndon, has been reporting on Kamala Harris — from her campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination to her time as vice president. Over the years, the same questions have swirled around her. What does she stand for? How does she make decisions? Was she only selected as President Biden’s running mate because of her race and gender? Today, Ms. Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee after...
Jul 25, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast When it finally happened, it felt both inevitable, and unfathomable. President Biden was out of the 2024 presidential race. Shortly after making that announcement, he threw his support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the next Democratic nominee. Mr. Biden had finally fulfilled his promise to be a bridge to the next generation — albeit under enormous pressure. Ms. Harris issued a statement later in the day, saying that she was honored to have received President Biden’s endorsement...
Jul 22, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” has become former President Donald J. Trump’s unofficial theme music on the campaign trail . Here at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, the song was performed live by none other than Mr. Greenwood himself, as Mr. Trump walked into the arena on Monday. The anthem, released in 1984, is essentially a song about togetherness and the diversity of the United States. And it’s now become tied to a candidate who has often represented division and chaos...
Jul 18, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast On the second day of the Republican National Convention, a collection of Donald Trump’s former challengers took the stage. There were people who ran against him in 2016 — like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Marco Rubio. And people who just challenged him this year — Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. No matter how fervently, or recently, they had criticized him, all voiced their support for him and emphasized a message of unity. For analysis of Night 2 of the R.N.C., and this parade of Tru...
Jul 17, 2024•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
