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 Republicans had a big day on Monday. Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate. Two days after surviving an assassination attempt, he officially became his party’s presidential nominee. And the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee got underway, with a festive mood among the delegates. The Run-Up is here in Milwaukee for the occasion. In special episodes this week, we’ll tell you what we’re seeing — and what that tells us about Trump’s Republican Party. To kick things off, Jess Bi...
Jul 16, 2024•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast You’ve seen the image by now: Former President Donald J. Trump has blood running down the side of his face. He’s being escorted off his rally’s stage by the Secret Service, and he pauses to look at the crowd, his fist proudly in the air. It’s too soon to know how the attempt on his life on Saturday in Pennsylvania will affect the outcome of the race. But Trump’s allies have already made the shock of the assassination attempt, and the violence, part of a clear political message. To hear them tell...
Jul 15, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast President Biden is telling people to Google it . Former president Donald J. Trump is distancing himself from it. Even the actress Taraji P. Henson talked about it onstage at the B.E.T. Awards. Project 2025. It’s a blueprint for an incoming conservative president — presumably Donald Trump — spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation , a conservative think tank. And now it is everywhere in this tumultuous moment of the 2024 presidential race. But what is it? Is it a guide to a possible second Trump ad...
Jul 11, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The latest national poll from The New York Times and Siena College shows former President Donald J. Trump leading President Biden by nine percentage points among registered voters — a pretty big shift in his direction in the week since the presidential debate. It has become clear in the past week that there is no obvious path to replacing Mr. Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee. But there is a strong desire among Americans for something different. We heard that directly from voters we met la...
Jul 04, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast As you may have heard, Thursday night was the first debate between President Biden and former president Donald J. Trump. In short, it was not a great night for Mr. Biden. The president’s debate performance triggered significant panic among top Democrats, who for months have been dismissing concerns about Mr. Biden’s age. So, how is this happening? Despite all the concerns polls showed about age, how has the Democratic Party arrived at this moment? That’s a line of inquiry The Run-Up has been put...
Jun 29, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast We don’t know exactly what will happen when President Biden and former president Donald J. Trump take the debate stage in Atlanta tonight. We do know, however, that the first debate between the major party candidates is happening earlier in the election season than usual. And we also know that we’ve seen a version of this show before. Their past matchups have featured bitter insults, constant interruptions and were political spectacles judged more on optics than on substance. This year, consider...
Jun 27, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast For decades, the mainstream Republican position on abortion rights was clear: Overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue back to the states. But since June 2022, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority did exactly that, Republicans have faced a question that few seemed to consider beforehand: What comes next? In Arizona, that question is especially important. In that battleground state, Democratic groups have already mobilized to put a citizen initiative on the November ballot that would ens...
Jun 20, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Arizona is a battleground state that both parties are desperate to win in November. And right now, supporters of abortion rights in the state are in the midst of gathering signatures to ensure that, along with the presidential race and a competitive Senate contest, enshrining the right to abortion in the state’s Constitution will be on the ballot this fall. The measure has broad support in the state, and Democrats are banking on that to drive a wide range of people to the polls to vote on the ba...
Jun 13, 2024•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the days since a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts, people have mostly been asking one big question. Will this matter in November? Over the past few days, our colleagues at The New York Times and at the Siena College Research Institute have been trying to answer that question. They spoke with 1,900 people they had previously polled to find out how they are currently thinking. Most people have not changed their mind. But some have — and they are moving away from Mr. ...
Jun 06, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast While the political world waits for a verdict in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, we wanted to take a moment to remember how we got here — especially the broader political context of the fall of 2016. Mr. Trump is charged with falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels as part of a scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Back in 2016, Mr. Trump was down in the polls and worried about losing support fr...
May 30, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
