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In this edition: RFK’s podcast campaign, the aftermath from Virginia’s primaries, and the GOP field ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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June 23, 2023
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Americana

Americana
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David Weigel
David Weigel

In this edition: RFK’s podcast campaign, the aftermath from Virginia’s primaries, and the GOP field campaigns for social conservatives.

David Weigel

RFK Jr. is running for president of podcastland

Lisa Lake/Getty Images for SiriusXM

THE SCENE

Thirty-seven minutes into his interview with Jordan B. Peterson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. explained why he was doing it. Television had been a “new phenomenon” when his uncle ran for president in 1960. Twitter “played a key role in getting Donald Trump elected.” The 2024 campaign would be “decided on by podcasts,” especially because President Biden wouldn’t debate him.

“I think the podcasts have the capacity, this election, for reaching people and allowing dissident and insurgent candidates like myself to end-run the corporate media monoliths,” Kennedy explained. The reach of people like Peterson and Joe Rogan was so vast, he said, that a candidate could “reach large numbers of Americans without going onto the networks.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Kennedy is right about the reach he’s getting. His two-month-old run is grabbing headlines and attention for a candidate who the Democratic Party barely acknowledges. That’s frustrated fact-checkers, who’ve been refuting Kennedy’s interpretation of data on vaccine safety, wifi radiation, and election integrity for 18 years, dating back to when his blockbuster Rolling Stone story on supposed vaccine dangers was retracted. Even after Peterson’s interview was struck from YouTube, Kennedy’s speculation that a “soup of toxic chemicals” was increasing “gender dysphoria” made news.

Kennedy certainly isn’t the first candidate to try and break out via podcast appearances, or leverage them for a boost. Pete Buttigieg helped put himself on the political map with an interview on the Ezra Klein Show, then hosted by Vox, where he talked about issues like reforming the Supreme Court that other candidates weren’t touching at the time. Bernie Sanders famously sat down with Rogan in 2020, blowing off some outrage from progressives.

But Kennedy’s podcast tour is interesting because, for all intents and purposes, it is his campaign. He has held just a few in-person events in primary states — and none in South Carolina, which Democrats are hoping to push to the front of their calendar. Instead, he’s testing the potency of alternative media sources, especially the sort of post-left, anti-establishment, “free thinker” outlets that grew as traditional news outlets shrunk.

There’s logic to that strategy. There are fewer local political reporters in those early states Kennedy is mostly skipping, with less access than they had four or eight years ago. And some podcasts, like Peterson’s, have a reach comparable to national media. An estimated 632,000 viewers tuned in for all or part of Mike Pence’s town hall this month; Mike Pence’s hour-long interview with Peterson, released this week, has clocked more than 333,000 views on a channel with more than 7 million subscribers.

“You don’t necessarily need traditional gatekeepers in order to reach tens of millions of people,” said Saagar Enjeti, the co-host of the YouTube show and podcast Breaking Points. Its two interviews with Kennedy have nearly 650,000 combined views; Kennedy’s first televised interview as a candidate, a testy sit-down with ABC’s streaming newscast, has just over 100,000 views on YouTube.

“When he has the opportunity and the ability to reach a lot of people, why would he have to put himself in a situation like that ABC News interview?” Enjeti added. “That was a catastrophe for mainstream media organizations that might want to talk to him.”

Unlike ABC, the outlets giving Kennedy the most exposure are simply letting him talk, at a decent length, and not focusing too much on the story of the day.

Look at the Joe Rogan Experience, which put Kennedy on air for three hours. After some small talk, Rogan asked an open-ended question: “How did you adopt these opinions that people find so controversial?” The candidate went on for more than 30 minutes, without interruption, about suing polluters in the Hudson Valley; claims that other interviewers might have pushed back on got a friendly airing.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Caveat time: Kennedy’s alt-media barnstorming may not be helping him with Democratic voters. When he entered the race, public polling put his support in the teens. Two months later, after copious earned media, those numbers haven’t budged, and the share of primary voters who say they won’t vote for him is rising.

His challenge is that he’s running for the nomination of a party whose voters overwhelmingly do trust the mass media, as well public health authorities and vaccines. The Democratic base is not predominantly made up of Peterson or “All-In” listeners.

Kennedy’s media strategy seems better geared to more independent voters, for many of whom frustration with the media isn’t ideological. Instead, it comes from political fatigue. Polling released by the AP last month — funny enough, in a partnership with Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights — found 74% of Americans agreeing that the media did too much to “increase political divisions.” A show like Rogan’s can help reach that crowd.

Ari Rabin-Havt, the deputy campaign manager for the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, said that Rogan’s questioning helped the Vermont senator reach a new audience. Rabin-Havt recalled how surprised he was, after the interview, when the candidate dined in Miami and was approached by “a 50-year old Cuban woman” telling him she’d loved him on Rogan.

“There was no interview I’ve ever been a part of, with any politician, where I saw as clear an impact as I did with Joe Rogan,” Rabin-Havt said. “The people who watch MSNBC and Fox — their minds are made up.”

In one way, Kennedy has less competition than Sanders did: President Biden has given a single interview, to MSNBC, since he announced for a second term. Lis Smith, the Democratic communications consultant who made Pete Buttigieg available for endless new media interviews during his 2020 campaign, explained that spending time with outlets that would let the candidate talk, and ask anything, introduced the candidate to people not inclined to trust politicians.

“Anyone can survive a two minute TV hit; all you need is a team that can produce topline talking points for the likely questions,” Smith said. “Once people were able to hear him in the longform format, they realized — this guy is the real deal, he’s not just running to sell a book, he has deeply held values.”

Buttigieg’s campaign ended a few weeks after the Iowa caucuses. But he repeatedly yanked the conversation in a new direction, which Kennedy has begun to do.

THE VIEW FROM REPUBLICANS

The alt-media circuit may be a moral natural fit for Republican politicians, whose voters eagerly get information outside of established news sources, which they don’t trust. The project of replacing legacy media loyalty with new conservative brands has made huge gains since 2020, led by Ron DeSantis, who’s taken some questions from the campaign press corps but only given interviews to conservative outlets.

Mike Pence’s campaign has played more ball with traditional media than Kennedy or DeSantis, but his interview with Peterson delivered what quick TV hits and gaggles can’t. When Pence explained his opposition to gender-affirming medicine for minors — “There’s a reason we don’t let kids drive cars until they’re 16” — it didn’t halt the conversation, and it made news.

“The sheer size of the audience, of folks that are ideologically aligned with us, is an opportunity that we can’t pass up,” said Pence spokesman Devin O’Malley. “And it allows you to highlight the contrasts with other candidates, as the voice of reason. This interview comes out at a time when the Trump and DeSantis teams are bickering about personnel and lamb anatomy.”

NOTABLE

  • On his new Twitter show, Tucker Carlson praised Kennedy’s campaign and said he was already “winning” by changing the conversation. In a CNN column, Jake Tapper refuted Kennedy’s claim that a “documentary” they had worked on was “killed by corporate” – Tapper covered Kennedy’s 2005 vaccine controversy in a segment that aired on ABC News, an example of the media gatekeeping that the candidate can now avoid.
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State of Play

Virginia. Republicans endorsed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin swept Tuesday’s legislative primaries, while progressives — some backed by Democratic leaders — unseated more conservative legislators. In Northern Virginia, a trio of progressive local prosecutors survived challenges from tough-on-crime opponents.

After winning nearly all of her party’s endorsements, former Del. Lashrecse D. Aird bulldozed Joe Morrissey, the only anti-abortion Democrat in the state Senate — rolling to a 38-point victory powered by the slogan “Roe not Joe.” Saddam Salin, a young Democratic Party activist, defeated state Sen. Chap Petersen, a moderate who’d flipped a then-swing seat in 2007; the newly-drawn seat they were running in is safely Democratic. And Republican Sen. Amanda Chase, who’d come to the Capitol on Jan.6 and questioned whether the 2020 election in Virginia was stolen (Trump lost by 10 points), went down in a three-way primary.

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Ads

Never Back Down, “Once Upon a Time.” The pro-DeSantis super PAC tells the story of his fight with Disney with clips of the culture he’s fighting against — a nonbinary park employee, Dylan Mulvaney drinking Bud Light, Pride-branded merchandise at Target, the “special district control” that the Disney company had in central Florida before the governor stepped in.

Donald J. Trump for President 2024, “Lockdown Ron.” Florida’s covid stay-at-home order lasted just one month, in April 2020. The Trump campaign revisits that period with contemporary TV news interviews (“Please, governor, open us up!”) and a clip of Gov. DeSantis telling spring breakers to stay off the beaches: “The party’s over in Florida.” Why would two candidates who advocated for both stay-at-home orders and vaccination condemn it now? Great question.

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Polls

Democrats who don’t want the president’s primary challenger to get traction have a theory about his support: It’s inflated by his name recognition, and his appearances on conservative and post-liberal media outlets won’t help it. There’s some evidence for their belief here. Democrats with college degrees have the most unfavorable views of Kennedy – 42% of all college graduates likely to vote in the primary, and 54% of white college graduates. Non-white voters are the most supportive, with 43% holding a favorable view of Kennedy.

Conservatives gathered in D.C. this week are still debating how to run on abortion in swing states, cognizant that the generational victory they won with Dobbs has — for now — helped Democrats. Voters in every demographic are more likely to say that they’ve become more pro-choice since last year, when conservative states, free to ban abortion, started doing so. Women (by 19 points) and voters under 35 (by 21 points) claim to have shifted most in favor of legal abortion; voters born between 1959 and 1973, who were alive before Roe but didn’t vote until it was in place, have shifted the least.

Polarization: It just works. The merger between the U.S.-based PGA tour and the Saudi-funded LIV is wildly unpopular, and 65% of all adults favor congressional and DOJ investigations into how it happened. But support for the LIV tour from Donald Trump and some conservative influencers had an impact. Just 14% of Democrats approve of the merger, compared to 26% of Republicans; while 77% of Democrats want investigations, just 63% of Republicans do. The higher any demographic’s support for Trump and the GOP, the more comfortable it is with the deal.

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Dept. of Memes
Paineful Memes

PaineMemes, “The Chosen One. In “Revenge of the Sith,” Obi Wan Kenobi battles Anakin Skywalker and leaves him to die. Through tears, he screams that his pupil was supposed to “bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness.” In PaineMemes’s video, Kenobi has Ron DeSantis’s face, and Skywalker has Donald Trump’s, a joke that so impressed the DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down that it shared the whole thing on Twitter — perhaps forgetting that, years later, as Darth Vader, Skywalker murders Kenobi.

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2024
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd joined the GOP primary on Thursday, with an interview on “CBS This Morning” and a launch video warning that a “lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump” wouldn’t be able to win in 2024. He’s the only Republican running who voted against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act under Donald Trump, after voting for doomed repeal bills under Barack Obama, and the only one who supported the Equality Act, legislation that would ban discrimination for LGBTQ people.

The new, ever-more-crowded Republican field is spending a rare weekend in D.C., where the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual “road to majority” has returned. Two themes as the conference started: What they’d do to limit abortion rights and fight “gender ideology.” Donald Trump, who’ll close out the final night, was not mentioned by name, but his queasiness about a national abortion ban was.

“Every Republican candidate for president should support a ban on abortion after 15 weeks as a minimum nationwide standard,” said Mike Pence. Ron DeSantis delivered the remarks he’d been giving in primary states, but added a condemnation of the investigations ProPublica had run about wealthy friends giving favors to conservative Supreme Court justices.

“I stand with Justice Thomas, I stand with Justice Alito, in the face of these attacks,” DeSantis said. ‘They are wrong.”

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Q&A
Nick Adams

Six years, three months, and twenty days ago, Nick Adams went on “Fox and Friends” to promote a slim new book about immigrating to the U.S. as a conservative Australian. Moments later, from the White House, Donald Trump tweeted that “Green Card Warrior” was “a must read” about the need for merit-based immigration.

It was the first book Trump ever endorsed as president. Adams would repay the favor, writing two books about the 45th’s president’s greatness: “Trump and Churchill,” then “Trump and Reagan.” He became a surrogate for the re-election campaign, called the 2020 election “stolen,” and on Twitter — as “Nick Adams (Alpha Male)” — his praise of Trump was so fulsome that people who discovered it wondered whether he was joking.

He was not. Adams, one of the guest speakers at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference this weekend, talked with Americana about his mindset, the meaning of “alpha male,” and the widespread (and incorrect) idea that he must be kidding.

Americana: What’s an alpha male? Can you give a preview of what you’re going to talk about at the conference?

Nick Adams: Men are the most isolated, persecuted, and maligned group in the world. Masculinity is the most suppressed, hated, villainized and attacked ideology in our culture. The left tell us that masculinity is toxic. That’s absolutely wrong. I believe it is the absence of masculinity that is toxic. And I think that every single issue or problem, in any and every arena in American life today, can be traced back to the absence of real men or masculinity or alpha male mentality.

I’m talking about discipline in schools, everyone getting a trophy, disrespect for police, safe spaces, drag queens reading to children in libraries — wokeness in general, none of this would be happening if men still had a significant or substantial influence in our culture.

Americana: What makes Donald Trump alpha, in your view?

Nick Adams: He certainly gets in there and scraps. He never takes a backward step. He’s never afraid to voice his opinion or tell you what he thinks. He is forthright. He doesn’t sugarcoat what he feels. He doesn’t seek to conform to the consensus. He seeks to create a consensus, and then get people to come along with it.

Look, Donald Trump is charismatic. Donald Trump is affable. Those that know him, love him. People that don’t like Donald Trump typically don’t know him. And if they don’t like him, and they have known him, it’s because there was some transaction that went south — maybe they got fired or something else happened, so they’re on bad terms. There are some great politicians in this primary, but none of them have that charismatic x-factor, that feeling that you’re walking with a man of destiny, like Donald Trump.

Americana: What stands out from your own interactions with him?

Nick Adams: He’s got a great sense of humor. He’s very funny. In some ways, he’s like a lion. He’s the most powerful person — the way he walks, everything else. And yet he also has grandfatherly touches. He likes candy, and if someone’s in the room, he’ll get some candy for them.

Americana: When you post an illustration of Trump as a muscle-man, what message are you trying to get across? Do you make those illustrations?

Nick Adams: I have those images made, but I don’t know how they’re actually done. I’m a 38-year old speaker and writer. That’s not my forte. But I post them because it’s a unique way of representing how I feel, and what I think many, many, many people in America feel that Donald Trump is like, and what he’s capable of.

Americana: When you talk like this, on social media, you get a baffled reaction from people. They can’t believe you mean this. What do you make of that?

Nick Adams: Look, I am a happy warrior. I believe that humor is a very effective method to get your message across. I use humor in order to be able to reach as many people as possible. I think that if I didn’t take that approach, there’d be a lot of people, particularly a lot of young Gen Z men that may not hear it or see it or know about it. So I really kind of go out of my way to maximize the impact and reach. I’m a serious person. But I like to have some fun as well.

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Next
  • 46 days until primaries in Mississippi
  • 61 days until the first GOP presidential primary debate
  • 74 days until the special congressional election in Rhode Island
  • 117 days until elections in Louisiana
  • 135 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia
  • 501 days until the 2024 presidential election
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