678: The Wannabes

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace.

Zoe Chace

Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

So you went to Iowa.

Zoe Chace

I did. You know, there are like 50,000 Democratic candidates running for president. They're all in Iowa.

Ira Glass

It's what? It's 25 right now.

Zoe Chace

It's 25 right now.

Ira Glass

Mm-hm.

Zoe Chace

And there's this one political writer, Dave Weigel with the Washington Post, he writes this newsletter thing called The Trailer three times a week. And he has this particular superpower where somehow, he seems to be with every single candidate who's running at the exact same time.

So at this moment, where everything seems like this grand 25 ring circus with this race, he seemed like maybe the very best person in the world to watch this with. When there's the next president, he'll have seen every moment, not skipping anything. Hopefully, he will understand why it happened.

Ira Glass

And so you basically wanted to see the whole election all at once the way he does.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. And it's so crazy traveling through primary states with him. He knows these places so well. In Iowa, we pulled up to a gas station.

Zoe Chace

We were leaving a Hickenlooper event and racing over to a Beto event.

Ira Glass

Beto is a former Texas senatorial candidate, Beto O'Rourke. Hickenlooper, John Hickenlooper, former Colorado governor-- it took me so long to read up on all these guys. It took like a day to figure out who's who. Yes.

Zoe Chace

Thank you for that. We flew in. We went to four things in a day. First, Knoxville, Iowa. Weigel looks kind of like a reporter from the '70s-- mustached, notably, casually dressed, hair askew. We're going to this tiny event at this tiny brewpub. And as we're driving up to it, we think we see the candidate standing right outside.

Zoe Chace

I don't know why it's surreal to him. This happens to him literally all the time.

Ira Glass

Oh, he's really into it.

Zoe Chace

It thrills him. He loves this. There's this one moment after Beto finishes his little talk, and people come up to him and ask questions. And this guy-- it's in this tiny brewery, which kind of looks like a rec room, almost. And this one voter walks up to Beto with a beer in his hand, just like as though he's at some kind of relaxed Friday afternoon cocktail party. And Weigel sees this, and jumps up and kind of elbows people out of the way.

Zoe Chace

It kind of exemplifies the special part we're in, in the election. There's no Secret Service. There are no real barriers. Anyone can just wander up to a presidential candidate. It's extremely intimate. It's his favorite time of the presidential elections. People are really close to each other. At one point at another event, two of the candidates, Tim Ryan and Jay Inslee, they ran right past each other.

Zoe Chace

It's almost like Weigel and the candidates are on some kind of a cruise or at a camp together. And they just bump into each other day after day, like, oh, hi again. Oh, I'll see you tomorrow. Oh, I'll see you later. Are you going to be at the pizza thing?

Zoe Chace

You also, in this phase of things, you get to see the candidates interacting in the world, the regular world.

Ira Glass

Right.

Zoe Chace

Regular people with just the most random stuff that you wouldn't normally see.

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Zoe Chace

I had this thing happened to me. I was checking into our hotel in Waterloo, Iowa, right?

Ira Glass

What kind of hotel?

Zoe Chace

Hampton Inn.

Ira Glass

OK.

Zoe Chace

And the girl who's checking us in, who's like 20-ish maybe-- she seems funny and smiley. And she's really surprised to see these reporters there. And it turns out she's never heard of the Iowa caucuses. Even though the state is crawling with these candidates, it's totally possible to lead your life and miss it. So Weigel explains it to her.

Zoe Chace

All these presidential candidates for the nation to vote, blah, blah, blah. We go upstairs. But my key is demagnetized, so I go back downstairs. I leave all my stuff, including the recorder, there. And when I get downstairs, I see Beto just standing there. And he's trying to get a free bottle of water from the girl. And I'm like, Beto?

Ira Glass

Wait, do you know him?

Zoe Chace

No.

Ira Glass

You've never met him.

Zoe Chace

No. And I say to him, Beto, tell her what you're doing here in Iowa. And she looks at him, and she goes, are you running for president, in this totally sarcastic way. Like of course you're not. And he goes, actually, yes, I am, which is just a weird answer to that question. And she jumps up, goes, yes, queen! And he's like totally taken aback and is like, thank you so much. And she goes, I hope you win the presidency-- like not very sincere.

Ira Glass

And so this is just the world that Weigel was marinating in.

Zoe Chace

He knows them all so thoroughly at this point. He knows them as thoroughly as he knows the gas stations in Iowa. We were at a bar. He starts talking about the jokes that candidates tell when they're out on [INAUDIBLE].

Ira Glass

For today on our program, we're in this unusual political moment. The Democrats have even more people running for president than the Republicans did last time. 25 people-- what is that?

Today in our show, we are not going to cover all 25. What we're going to do is we're going to drop in here and there. My sense is that, at this point, everyone is still getting to know who these people are. And so hopefully, you will get in close with some of them and get an impression of them.

And what we're especially interested in in this show is all of the candidates at the bottom. That's the story of this particular moment in the election, is all those people between 0% and 1% in the polls who might still have a chance trying to get noticed and break out of the pack, and join the front runners, which is just an enormously difficult thing to do. And it's just right now starting to shift. How do you get noticed and rise above 1% in this pack of 25? From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1.

Zoe Chace

No. No acts today. Let's just drive around.

Ira Glass

So bossy. All right, ma'am. So Zoe, so 25 candidates-- and this political operative explained this to me, and I found it a helpful way to look at this. He said that the best way to picture what is happening right now is that there are four front runners-- Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris. And then depending on how you count it, Pete Buttigieg is in there, too.

Their poll numbers are way higher than anybody else. And also, they get most of the donations and most of the press attention, which then generates more donations and more press attention in a kind of self-perpetuating cycle that sucks the air out that all the others want to breathe.

So that's them. And then below those four or five people, there's basically everyone else in the pack of 25, most of them struggling to break 1%. And it seems just very interesting what is happening with them. And so, Zoe, you watched them trying to figure that out.

Zoe Chace

OK. So for example, take John Hickenlooper.

Ira Glass

Former governor of Colorado.

Zoe Chace

His polling is now at less than 1%. If you haven't heard of him, that's probably why. He cannot draw a crowd by himself. If he put out a sign in Iowa today, Hickenlooper Speaks, Please RSVP, probably nobody would come to that event.

Ira Glass

Crickets, right? Yeah. OK.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. So he does these-- they're called retail stops, when a politician tours a factory or whatever. So right now, we're at this brand new distillery in Des Moines, me and Dave Weigel.

Zoe Chace

And we walk in. Hickenlooper and this one elderly Iowa voter are sitting at the bar, the brand new bar in the brand new distillery. It's a totally staged photo op. There are about 20 reporters in a semicircle around them. But obviously, if you look through the camera lens, it looks like it's just Hickenlooper and the voter.

Zoe Chace

The old guy's like, you're running for what?

Ira Glass

It's so strange that these guys actually-- they do have to kind of just brag about themselves to people, huh?

Zoe Chace

Yeah.

Ira Glass

Like people don't know who they are. I mean, not to be mean about it, but people [INAUDIBLE] don't know who they are. So they just have to say, here's all the stuff I've done.

Zoe Chace

Even he gets kind of self-conscious about it.

Ira Glass

That's my shtick?

Zoe Chace

Yeah.

Ira Glass

Oh, I like that.

Zoe Chace

Good luck, the old guy says to him. 20 people are recording this, and no one is going to use any of this. No one's going to use these quotes, right? We move on to a distillery tour. Hickenlooper has tons of opinions about that. Remember, he was in this business.

Zoe Chace

No one is going to use any of this either. Instead, the reporters just wait til the end. They gather around, they ask him questions about Trump. That stuff, they might use.

Ira Glass

So this whole thing, this whole tour, all of it is just for pictures.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. What the campaign hopes for is that, out of the 25 candidates, tonight viewers will see a picture somewhere of John Hickenlooper drinking a beer in Iowa.

Ira Glass

I don't see how that's going to make him president. That is not going to be enough to take him out of the 1% and put him up there with the front runners.

Zoe Chace

Iowa, though-- voter by voter. These 1%-ers, they're also going around Iowa talking, and talking, and talking to the actual voters, the real human beings who go to the caucuses and vote. And in order to do that, the candidates who can't draw a crowd on their own, one thing those guys do is go to local Democratic clubs. The idea is you do these Democratic clubs for a while, county Democratic clubs, and then you get popular enough to graduate out and draw a crowd on your own.

Ira Glass

Ah.

Zoe Chace

Like Pete Buttigieg, he had to do the Democratic clubs for about a month. He went around introducing himself, and then he graduated out. Now he can draw a crowd on his own. Most of them have not.

Zoe Chace

John Delaney, also at less than 1%, rich guy and former congressman from Maryland. He's doing a meet-and-greet with the Clive County Democrats at Wobbly Boots Barbecue.

Zoe Chace

Delaney's moderate. He's not into Medicare for All. He's not into the Green New Deal. Even his climate change plan is all wrapped up in red, white, and blue bunting.

Zoe Chace

The room is packed, actually. People here are eating John Delaney up.

Ira Glass

So it's working.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. I came to see exactly this, one of these 1%-ers winning people over to their side. And Delaney is betting his chips on Iowa. He's got eight offices there. That's more than anyone else, as of a couple weeks ago, anyway. He's been there the most times.

We ran into him in the airport on the way there. It was his 29th trip. He's doing the purist version of this play on the campaign trail, a Jimmy Carter play. It's basically get a huge surge by doing great in the Iowa caucuses, the first in the nation. And the way you do that is voter by voter. That's what he's doing out here.

Zoe Chace

I talked to one voter. He liked this meeting so much, he said he might caucus for Delaney. He might. He's still shopping around. But the number of people shopping has dropped since the first debate. And the window's closing for the 1%-ers.

Ira Glass

The debates-- they are probably the biggest chance that any of these underdogs get to rise out of the underdog pack and come barking to the forefront.

Zoe Chace

The next one's at the end of the month. There has been one so far, of course.

Ira Glass

And two days before the first debate, the team for one of the candidates, as you know, Zoe, let me watch a full day of debate prep. And by sheer luck, it was the candidate that most of the media declared the breakout star of the first night of the debate, Julián Castro. Zoe, you ready to hear the story?

Zoe Chace

Obviously.

Ira Glass

OK. Here is the team that got him to victory.

Ira Glass

Meet Maya Rupert, Jen Fiore, and Sawyer Hackett, the campaign manager, communications advisor, and national press secretary for Julián Castro. Castro was mayor of San Antonio, then ran the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama. They all worked for Castro there. If you add it up, they had done three full days of debate prep before this one, the one that I saw. And they were going to do one more after that. That is how important this is to them.

Ira Glass

We're in a hotel conference room in Miami. All over the walls are these big pages torn from flip charts, each with a different topic and then three or four possible talking points for the candidate to use in the debate that they worked out in previous sessions. The guy talking is deputy campaign manager, Derek Eadon, who is running these sessions. And he's up in front by the easel with the flip chart.

And the candidate is standing at one of five podiums in front of the room. He's in jeans and a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, immaculately clean, white Adidas, iced tea, which, by the way, he told the New York Times is his comfort food on the road.

Ira Glass

Castro's staff, I should say, is deeply aware that most voters still do not know who Julián Castro is. And they told me that success in the first debate, to them, would be something very basic-- that voters would notice Castro, that he's in the race. Here's Jen Fiore, his senior communications advisor.

Ira Glass

One of the flip charts on the wall was, "Top Five Takeaways," meaning the top five things that they want voters to take away from this debate. They read, "I like him," "he won," "game changer," "can handle his own," and "win/beat Trump."

So OK. How do you get voters to change the math? If you think about it, the debate means 10 candidates standing on stage for 120 minutes, two hours. So that's 10 minutes per candidate. But you take away commercial breaks and questions. What it leaves, the average talking time for each candidate is actually eight minutes-- eight minutes to implant yourselves into the brains of millions of people. Eight minutes-- though that is just the average. Not everybody gets that much, which is actually the thing that Castro is most afraid of going into the debate. He says they've studied these moderators.

Ira Glass

Some candidates just end up getting five minutes. So you have limited time, and you have no idea what they're going to ask you about. And so you have to prepare perfect, pithy answers for every imaginable question. And what perfect means-- Julián's staff wants him to work three specific elements into each of those answers if he can.

They want some of his personal story-- raised by a single mother, working class neighborhood, that kind of thing. They want him to talk about the stuff that he has done in previous jobs in government-- prove that he's capable. And of course, they want him to talk about what he's going to do next if he gets the job of president. All three things in each answer. So for instance, when they're hammering out an answer about climate and the Green New Deal, Castro, he starts pitching policy ideas.

Ira Glass

Then Jen jumps in. Talk more about your experience.

Ira Glass

Talk about what you've done on climate change, she urges him, which he then incorporates into his next run-through of the answer.

Ira Glass

Notice the pivot there from his previous experience to his plans for the future? What makes all this so tricky is that under the rules of the debate, he has to finish his answer in just 60 seconds. To figure out how to fit everything in, basically, Castro answers the same question over--

Ira Glass

--and over--

Ira Glass

--and over--

Ira Glass

--and over.

Ira Glass

In case it isn't clear, each of those times, he talks until he reaches one minute.

Ira Glass

They spend hours doing this. It's tedium chewing over how to best fill those precious eight minutes they're going to get. And of course, the one politician that it's hard to picture doing this is the public speaker who improvises his way through stadium speeches and meet-and-greets at the Korean Demilitarized Zone-- the guy who got his job specifically by not doing this and is beloved by lots of people for not talking like this, the man that Castro hopes is going to be facing off against next year-- Donald Trump.

To break things up during the day, the staff organizes a surprise for Castro, just a little breather to lighten things up. Derek gets out his phone, and people crowd around him.

Ira Glass

It's a call with the Sklar brothers, the comedians and actors, Jason and Randy Sklar, who like Castro. And they've decided that they wanted to pitch jokes for him to use during the debate. The campaign was like, sure, why not?

Ira Glass

Castro met the Sklar brothers when they had him on their podcast. The Sklars are identical twins. And important fact about Julián Castro-- he has an identical twin brother, who's also in politics-- Congressman Joaquin Castro.

Ira Glass

Hard to imagine a more receptive room for that joke, just [INAUDIBLE] at the time with the front runners in the race. Here's another.

Ira Glass

The Sklars went through jokes, all of them pretty mean, about candidates Booker, de Blasio, Ryan, Moulton, Klobuchar, and Inslee. And can I just say, respect for anybody who can make a joke about Moulton, Ryan, or Inslee? None of these jokes are going to make the cut, Castro's staff tells me later. Those kinds of jokes just aren't Castro's style. The one joke they could imagine the candidate actually telling onstage at the debate-- I have to say, it really surprised me-- the one about how he's kind of short.

Of course, the other thing that Julián has to practice is reacting to all the other candidates and the moderators. They study videos of his opponents, and they do this.

Ira Glass

It's a mock debate session. Sawyer and a staffer named Millie play the moderators. Four other staffers stand at podiums flanking Castro's. The men are now in ties and jackets. They want to give Castro the chance to run his answers under debate conditions where he's going to have to wait for his opponents to speak, where he might have to field answers that kind of poke at him.

And I have to say, it was totally charming and fascinating how accurate they tried to be at playing the other candidates in the debate. Out on the road, they've watched these politicians deliver the same lines again and again. So when Derek, who is playing Cory Booker, gets a question about gun violence, he has Booker's lines down cold.

Ira Glass

When a staffer playing Beto O'Rourke is asked about Castro's ability to connect with Latinos and to speak Spanish-- apparently, Castro is not as good at Spanish as Beto is-- fake Beto responds fully in character.

Ira Glass

In the mock debate, Castro does a relaxed, solid job deploying the answers that he's been working on. But he also gets to practice interrupting other candidates. And this is important because, again, he is worried that other candidates might hog the stage, and he won't get much time or many questions directed at him. And Castro told me that his natural inclination is not to interrupt.

Ira Glass

I don't know if that's spin or not. But to make sure he does get to talk in the debate, he's keeping in his back pocket two little speeches that he knows are really strong, that if needs be, he's going to bust in and interrupt somebody with. They're actually listed. These two speeches are listed on a flip chart page on the wall that is titled "Interruptions." One of them is listed as "Police Brutality." And in the mock debate, he practices jumping in on another candidate's answer, the guy playing de Blasio, to deliver this.

Ira Glass

And then Castro delivers an answer that he knows really works.

Ira Glass

At the real debate, Castro delivered a version of that same speech. But that was not the moment that made him the breakout star. There was also not any of the meticulously crafted three-part messages that I watched him labor over.

And OK, just to step back, if you saw the Democratic debate, you know that the big clip from the second night was Kamala Harris challenging Joe Biden on race. But the big clip from the first night was the other item on Castro's flip chart, list of interruptions. On the chart, it just said "1325 Immigration."

Now 1325, if you're not following this, is the part of the immigration law that makes crossing the border a criminal offense. Castro wants to get rid of that. It would still be illegal to cross the border, but you wouldn't face criminal charges. And the day after I watched him prep, Elizabeth Warren came out in the Huffington Post saying, yeah, I'm with Castro on this 1325 stuff.

So that was the day before the debate. And seeing that, Castro and his staff to talk about maybe they should do more with 1325 in the debate. And they talked in the past about Castro maybe challenging the other candidates on stage to join his position on 1325, but now they decided, yeah, it's not really a maybe. He really should try to make that happen. And Castro walked on stage looking for an opening, which he got about half an hour in.

Ira Glass

Cory Booker is answering a question about immigration. As planned, Julián pounces.

Ira Glass

He then explains 1325.

Ira Glass

The next question is to Beto O'Rourke, and again, Castro swoops in.

Ira Glass

This is the exchange that ends up the biggest one of the night. And of course, the thing that made it pop is that all the preparation led to this unprepared, unscripted moment. Unlike all those careful one-minute answers that Julián rehearsed, this felt like and real.

Ira Glass

It all culminates with this.

Ira Glass

This is Van Jones on CNN that night.

Ira Glass

A lot of the media agreed, and lots of people on Twitter. Google reported a leap in people searching for Castro's name. And it led the campaign to its biggest fundraising day ever, 32 times more than just before the debate. Castro was suddenly invited to be on Morning Joe and tons of other TV shows. The only thing that had not gone optimally was his exit from the stage at the end of the debate. Derek had advised him.

Ira Glass

In fact, at the debate's end, Cory Booker is the one who got to Warren first, and they hugged, while Castro was shaking Tim Ryan's hand. And then Warren walked over to Castro, and they embraced. So it worked out in the end even there, just fine. Overall, a win.

And a week after his breakaway performance in that first debate, Castro was no longer a 1%-er, at least in one poll. ABC News poll put him at 4%, same as Buttigieg, and just below the four frontrunners, Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Harris.

Coming up, we tell you who's going to win the election. Kidding. We did, though, record a candidate who decided to just bribe a voter with $12,000. No joke. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Emanuele Berry

Hey.

Ira Glass

Hey. First time we're in the studio together.

Emanuele Berry

It is the first time we're in the studio together.

Ira Glass

OK.

Emanuele Berry

Yeah. Let's do this.

Ira Glass

And you had this kind of amazing cinematic recording that you're going to play for the people right now.

Emanuele Berry

Yeah. So I was down in South Carolina and Columbia. And I had this opportunity to pin a mic to Cory Booker, one of the people running for president.

Ira Glass

Mayor of Newark, New Jersey and now Senator of the United States.

Emanuele Berry

Yep, both of those things. And so this recording, it starts we're inside of a building. And then it goes outside, and he's sort of walking this distance to go and give a speech. And it's basically just his point of view in this moment, which is what I like about it so much.

Emanuele Berry

So in that moment, he just sort of flips from a normal person having a conversation to this super-sized human with a megaphone.

Ira Glass

What a weird job these guys have. You walk out into a crowd, and then suddenly, you're supposed to lead the crowd.

Emanuele Berry

Yeah. And there's all these people surrounding him. They've got giant posters of his head, like these Cory Booker head posters.

Ira Glass

Wait, wait. So you're there in a crowd, and there's Cory Booker's real bald head. And then in addition, there's giant bald Cory Booker heads?

Emanuele Berry

Yeah, floating around behind him.

Ira Glass

Can't you say that's like a weird nightmare image, in a way?

[LAUGHTER]

Emanuele Berry

It's very friendly faces, smiling.

Ira Glass

That is true. That's true, yes.

Emanuele Berry

And so they're walking in this giant crowd. And as they're crossing the street, someone comes up to him. And I can't make out exactly what she's saying. I think she's a journalist. And it seems like she's asking a question about the latest sexual assault allegations against President Trump.

Emanuele Berry

What hit me is just everybody wants his attention and his time. The press is in front of him. They've got cameras pointed at him. He's got an aide who's telling him where to go. And then he's leading this group of people, clapping and cheering while walking. It's just so much at once.

Emanuele Berry

So he's clapping. And then in the middle of all this, someone else walks up to him.

Emanuele Berry

It's Jesse Jackson, the civil rights icon, former presidential candidate.

Ira Glass

Wow.

Emanuele Berry

Jesse Jackson is someone who Booker actually talks about sometimes as the first presidential candidate that he ever voted for. And he's just standing next to him. He just pops out of nowhere, and then he's at Booker's side. We're in South Carolina, remember? Jesse Jackson--

Ira Glass

Huge black vote-- every candidate's got to try to get it.

Emanuele Berry

Yeah. And I mean, Jesse Jackson's not the worst person to stand next to. He's from South Carolina. People, they remember when he ran for president. So you sort of have these two black men in dark suits, one of them who tried to be president and the other one who's trying to do so now, parading down the street together.

Emanuele Berry

Jackson is hard to hear. He has Parkinson's. He speaks slow and stumbly, and I don't have a mic on him. Booker seems pretty chummy. He basically says, yes, we need to talk. We need to have a conversation, but not now.

Emanuele Berry

We often see pictures like this, right? Like leaders in suits and conversation in this public space. And I don't know. I like to think of the conversations they're having are about these great and epic things. But maybe they're actually just scheduling phone calls. [LAUGHS]

Emanuele Berry

You can hear that Corey says love you to Jackson. I'm not sure if he says it back. I just can't hear it.

Ira Glass

Or Jackson might just be like in Star Wars. I love you. I know.

[LAUGHTER]

Emanuele Berry

I don't think so.

Ira Glass

Jackson leaves him hanging.

Emanuele Berry

I don't think so. I imagine that he returned the expression.

Ira Glass

We don't know for sure, though.

Emanuele Berry

And that was only five minutes and 47 seconds of his day. And it was so intense.

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Emanuele Berry

And here's what else he did that day. He had a faith breakfast, barbershop meet-and-greet, Planned Parenthood forum, convention center speech, and then another meet-and-greet. Also, he's a senator. That was just a moment of his day. And I can't imagine having an entire day like that.

Ira Glass

Ugh, it's so much work, and he's not even a frontrunner.

Emanuele Berry

It's so much work just to be there.

Ira Glass

So now I'm joined in the studio by Ben Calhoun. Hey there.

Ben Calhoun

Hey.

Ira Glass

So you went out with one of the 20 or so underdogs in the race, Andrew Yang. And Yang, I think, is interesting because he's actually managed to get a lot more attention than most of the underdogs.

Ben Calhoun

Yeah. He's been doing things like getting on cable shows, profiles in Vanity Fair, Washington Post. And so now he's in this position where he's just trying to fan like whatever little flames he's kindled up until this point.

Ira Glass

And he's gotten that attention because, well, if you know who this guy is, he's this tech guy, former businessman, who organized his whole campaign around this one idea.

Ben Calhoun

Yeah, and the idea is that we should give every working age American $1,000 a month. Because what Yang says is he says this whole country is in this big crisis where workers are being replaced by automation and technology. And he thinks that when Democrats usually talk about this, their solutions are weak sauce. He says job retraining programs--

Ira Glass

The Democrats talk about that a lot.

Ben Calhoun

Yeah, job retraining. And he says the studies show that they don't work for most people. And most people kind of feel that in their gut.

Ben Calhoun

So $1,000 a month, which Yang admits, it's not enough for somebody to live on, but he says it's enough to keep somebody afloat. The name for that is Universal Basic Income, UBI. Yang's calling his version of this the Freedom Dividend. But so I went to go see him. He's going to demonstrate how this would work by actually giving somebody $1,000 a month, no strings attached.

Ira Glass

For a year?

Ben Calhoun

A whole year out of his pocket.

Ira Glass

OK. So tell what happened.

Ben Calhoun

So the night before this thing, I'm in the car with Yang and his campaign. And I've been recording them all day. Now it's like 9:30 PM. Everybody's pretty tired.

Ben Calhoun

And they're talking about this UBI event. Yang's like, I'm so psyched. But then right away, there's this logistical problem. To give away $1,000, you need to hand people something. And he doesn't have $1,000 on him.

Ben Calhoun

OK, it's pretty much impossible to hear. I'm way in the back. I'm behind Yang's campaign manager, Zach Graumann, and Yang. They're up in front. So I'm just going to tell you how a lot of this dialogue goes.

In that tape there, Yang says, I need to stop by an ATM and get a lot of cash, right? Because Ed McMahon doesn't show up at your house and just tell you you've won publisher's clearing house. That would be lame. You take a photo with the big check. So Yang's like, I got to get out a bunch of cash, to which his campaign manager says, well--

Ben Calhoun

"So you cannot give cash. We need to think about this," he says. And he gives this big sigh. Because shockingly, the Federal Elections Commission has a problem with a candidate for president giving a voter $12,000 in cash. Go figure. But also apparently, it's fine if that money comes in the form of a check. Again, go figure. Questions start flying. Does anybody have a check? Hey, what about Don?

Ben Calhoun

Yang, meantime, gets out his wallet and starts counting how much cash he has on him. $270, it turns out. And then he starts asking how much ATM limits are. How about a cashier's check, someone says, at a Walgreens on Sunday morning?

Ben Calhoun

I'm in a car with a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America who's trying to sell the marquee idea of his campaign, the concept he thinks will save America. And the question of the moment is, can you get a cashier's check at a Walgreens in Des Moines on Sunday morning before 9:00 AM?

The next day, we go to the house of the Freedom Dividend recipients, Kyle and Pam Christiansen. At this point, the campaign hasn't told them they're getting the money, just that they're being considered as finalists. Yang isn't with us. He's waiting to make a surprise entrance.

His staff was not able to get a cashier's check. So instead, Yang has a grand in $20 bills. That means that, legally, the campaign is going to have to hand the Christiansens the money for this photo op, but then take it back afterwards and promise to mail them a check, which seems really pretty tacky to me. But everyone with the Yang campaign is like, we'll figure it out.

Ben Calhoun

The campaign, I've got to say, picked a really lovely family to get this. Kyle, the son, is 41. He'd applied for this Freedom Dividend on behalf of his mom. About four years ago, the family lost Kyle's dad, Merle, to brain cancer. They seemed like such a tight, loving family.

Merle was a musician. And in their house, every Wednesday, it was music night. They'd play records-- Kiss, Black Sabbath. Merle would play drums, and the kids would dance around, which is how, I suppose, Kyle ended up being a musician, too.

Anyway, about a year after Merle died, Pam was also diagnosed with cancer. The day she was diagnosed-- her birthday-- her boss called her to tell her he was firing her because she'd had to miss too much work. Pam worked as an aide for disabled adults, which she said was hard, but she loved it.

After that, Kyle dedicated himself to taking care of Pam. And Pam, now in remission, still has a hard time getting around. Kyle's been piecing together work-- auto repair, computer repair, music work when he can get it. But it's hard making sure he's there for his mom.

The monthly bills are about $1,300, and they barely get covered. So $1,000 would mean a lot. Kyle, though, he says he'd like to see his mom spend at least some of this imaginary money, even just a little, on something genuinely frivolous.

Ben Calhoun

Kyle later told me, when he'd asked the campaign if Yang was coming, the staffer he was talking to on the phone hesitated and then said, no, in this way that Kyle figured Yang probably was coming. But he and Pam both act surprised. Andrew Yang offers to take off his shoes in the house.

Ben Calhoun

If Yang did this for everyone, if he gave every adult $12,000 a year, it would cost the government $2 trillion, give or take. The current federal budget is $4 trillion. So we're talking about a massive realignment of the economy and redistribution of wealth. Yang has projections on how all this could be paid for, and they include some very optimistic assumptions, all for a theory that's never been tested on anywhere near the scale.

Yang starts to explain to the Christiansens how this is going to work for them. But mostly, he tells them how grateful he is to help them out, in a way that feels pretty nice, actually. And it kind of drains a little awkwardness out of a very manufactured situation.

Ben Calhoun

The next 45 minutes are completely usual and unusual. Yang genuinely asks Pam and Kyle about their situation-- Pam's neuropathy, her treatment. He talks again and again about how much he admires Kyle for taking care of his mom. Kyle talks about the one doctor's appointment he's missed in the last three years. They talk about music, how Kyle quit the metal band he was touring with because he loved performing, but he never had an interest in the drinking and drugs that went with it. They laugh about Yang's flag socks. He talks about picking them out.

Like so little of political campaigning, it's unrushed enough to feel regular. Until it's time to go and the surreal logistics of a political campaign break through this small bubble of normality. Yang has to hit the road.

I feel like this is a weird and particular thing you see when politicians campaign. So many of their interactions are superficial and crassly abbreviated. And then sometimes, like in this room, they'll just drift into a space with some voters that feels intense, and authentic, and personal. And then poof, time to go.

Before Yang's got to leave, though, they have to pose for pictures. They have to pose with the cash, the cash they need, but won't be allowed to keep. After the pictures, they'll hand it back. For now, Yang pulls out this huge wad of twenties. Pam, with some struggle, stands up. And Yang hands each of them a stack.

Ben Calhoun

They fan out the money. And then they look for which lens to smile into.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun. Hey, Ben?

Ben Calhoun

Yeah.

Ira Glass

I see in the poll numbers that he's still stuck at the bottom.

Ben Calhoun

Yeah, and I mean, not the bottom, bottom.

Ira Glass

It's so crazy that people aren't voting for this. It reminds me of-- I knew somebody who was an editor at Playboy magazine. Like once the internet hit and Maxim and all those magazines hit, and it was like Playboy was printing pornography, and people wouldn't buy the magazine. And that's what I feel like this is. It's like he's giving away $12,000 to everybody who will vote for him, and people still don't want it.

Ben Calhoun

Uh-huh. The family did say that they are going to caucus for him, if he's still around in January when the caucuses happen.

Zoe Chace

Hi Ira, I'm back.

Ira Glass

Hey there, Zoe Chace.

Zoe Chace

I'm taking you through Iowa with Dave Weigel, the Washington Post reporter.

Ira Glass

I know. I feel like you saw so much more than we heard at the top of the show.

Zoe Chace

It's kind of crazy the way Weigel wants to go to every single candidate event. That's impossible, because there are too many happening at the same time.

Zoe Chace

But there's this intense lesson that I think a lot of the reporters learned from 2016, which is that any candidate can surge.

Ira Glass

Oh, you mean because Trump. Like, they didn't foresee that Trump could be the winner.

Zoe Chace

Yeah, all the things that indicated who'd come out on top-- like think Jeb Bush, right? He was the front runner. He had all the money. None of those things turned out to matter. So this time around, it's like any event can be the beginning of someone's big run. We went to so many events in just two days.

Zoe Chace

Kirsten Gillibrand, she wrote a kid's book. And she's reading it at the Y to just two small children, while a handful of people watch them.

Ira Glass

Wait, the senator wrote a kid's book?

Zoe Chace

Yeah, she wrote a book for kids, but not that many kids showed up to hear it.

Ira Glass

Oh, wow. What a coincidence. Brave just happens to be the theme of her entire campaign.

Zoe Chace

That's exactly right. We went to an Iowa Democratic Veterans event where Eric Swalwell, a candidate for president, was supposed to be.

Ira Glass

Oh, he's mad.

Zoe Chace

Yeah, Joe Stutler, secretary of the Iowa Democratic Veterans Caucus. That's a guy you want on your side early on.

Zoe Chace

Of course, there are lots of reporters who have covered these kinds of events a million times, who stand around afterwards nerding out about campaign history, which is kind of awesome.

Zoe Chace

And also, it's cool to see these guys talking about this moment-- this early moment in the campaign-- in this way, like it might be history later. It might not be, but they're talking about it like it is, like when Weigel and this other reporter were in the back of the room talking about Elizabeth Warren.

Zoe Chace

And the very next day, I saw her give this speech to a pretty big crowd in a backyard in Waterloo, Iowa. Everybody was just kind of rapt.

Zoe Chace

And this one guy was wiping tears away. At this point, Weigel can sort of divide the candidates into two groups. And it's not the moderates and the far left. He says, actually, the voters he talks to are less hung up on the policy questions. What they mainly want is to be able to close their eyes and see this person beating Donald Trump.

Ira Glass

Hm.

Zoe Chace

The two groups he notices are, one, the candidates where people show up at one of their events, and a transformation happens. The voter leaves the event excited, inspired. The other group are the ones where that transformation doesn't happen.

Ira Glass

So who's in the excited group?

Zoe Chace

Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and most of all, Elizabeth Warren.

Ira Glass

Huh.

Zoe Chace

People see her, and they're surprised at how much they like her.

Ira Glass

Huh. And the unexcited group?

Zoe Chace

Basically everyone else, including the front runner, Joe Biden. People would come to see him because they already loved him, and then they would leave feeling no different, or worse.

Ira Glass

Like they want to be inspired, but they weren't inspired.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. Beto-- people went backwards.

Zoe Chace

Now it's like the crowd is smaller, and people leave underwhelmed.

Ira Glass

And what does he see changing?

Zoe Chace

Since the first debate, at this point, the field is basically sorting itself out.

Ira Glass

Aw. So the special magical time where it seems like any of the two dozen candidates could rise, that's ending?

Zoe Chace

It is, except there's a dark horse out there still who could shake things up. There is one more move left in this great game of who will run America.

Ira Glass

I know where you're going with this. Yes, on the Republican side, things are still wide open and away. There, it is just the president and so far, one other candidate, former governor Bill Weld. Weld held elective office 20 years ago. He so far has not had much of an impact.

Ira Glass

And for our last story, we are joined now by one of our producers, David Kestenbaum. Hey, David.

David Kestenbaum

Hey, Ira.

Ira Glass

So you talked to two Republicans who are doing basically everything they can to find a genuine heavy hitter to run against the President of the United States from within his own party.

David Kestenbaum

Yeah, they feel like if the right person were just to enter the race, it could matter more than anything the Democrats are doing.

Ira Glass

Hm.

David Kestenbaum

So here's the scene, an office in Washington, DC.

David Kestenbaum

That's Sarah Longwell. She's a Republican strategist. The mug in front of her on the desk reads, "These are the tears of my staff." And it's filled with pens. The Bill she is looking for is Bill Kristol, the guy from TV, the one that seems to have an encyclopedic memory of every election in American history. Kristol worked in the first Bush administration, helped start the Weekly Standard magazine.

David Kestenbaum

He wanders in and sits down on a small couch. They've just done a poll of voters in New Hampshire, and they're meeting to talk about it.

David Kestenbaum

I think if you were taking on a standing president from within your own party, there are kind of two paths. You can do it quietly, out of view, or you can do it the way Kristol has-- by never shutting up about it on television and newspaper articles. He recently tweeted that he'd been accused of being in a secret cabal to find a challenger to Trump. His answer-- there's nothing secret about it.

Kristol and Longwell have raised a few million dollars in the past two years. And they've been using it to try and see, is this thing even possible? The whole idea of running against Trump in the primary can seem a little crazy. He has like an 80% or 90% approval rating from Republicans. But they feel like it is not crazy at all. In that poll they just had done of Republicans in New Hampshire and independents who might vote in the Republican primary, half were open to voting for a challenger. Half.

David Kestenbaum

One thing that really surprises people in these focus groups, she says, is when you explain just how much the debt has gone up under Trump. It's increased more during the first two years of Trump than it did the previous two years under Obama.

Bill Kristol lays out how this all might go for a challenger. You raise a little money, go to Iowa, New Hampshire. Maybe you get 30% of the vote in New Hampshire. That is a serious blow to the president. You're off and running. So that's their case.

There is one kind of noticeable challenge to this plan. Since we've had the current primary system, there are zero examples-- zero-- of someone challenging a sitting president in a primary and actually winning.

David Kestenbaum

And here, Bill offered up what seems to be the other math that candidates are doing. The last three presidents did not have a primary challenge, and they won re-election. When a sitting president has been challenged by his own party, like Carter by Kennedy, Ford by Reagan, Bush by Buchanan, the challenger doesn't win. But maybe because they damaged the president, he does not win re-election. In other words, this may be the bargain. You can run for president, possibly shape history, end Trump, change who wins, but you don't get to win.

David Kestenbaum

Sarah Longwell has been weighing all this, too. It's possible the whole thing could backfire if the wrong Democrat ended up in the White House.

David Kestenbaum

There's this scene in the HBO series on Chernobyl that's running right now where the nuclear reactor is about to explode. So these workers have to go into the basement of the power plant to try to open a valve. There's so much radiation, it seems certain they're going to die, but it will also save everyone else.

Sarah has been watching the show. I asked her if she ever thought about it like that. No, she said. Never. They're not asking someone to risk their life, they're asking someone to put their name in the hat to be the next president of the United States. Apparently, it's easier to get someone to walk into Chernobyl.

[MUSIC - STEVE FORBERT, "YOU CANNOT WIN IF YOU DO NOT PLAY"]

Our program was produced today by Zoe Chace and myself. People who put our show together today includes Bim Adewunmi, Emanuele Berry, Ben Calhoun, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Whitney Dangerfield, Aviva DeKornfeld, Neil Drumming, Damien Gray, Michelle Harris, Jessica Lussenhop, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Ben Phelan, Catherine Raimondo, Nadia Reiman, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Nancy Updike. Our managing editor is Diane Wheeler. Our executive editor is David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks to David [INAUDIBLE], [? Chris ?] [? Coons, ?] [? Scott ?] [INAUDIBLE], [? John ?] [? Harwood, ?] [? Harry ?] [INAUDIBLE], [? Walter ?] [? Shapiro, ?] [? Ben ?] [? Tourist, ?] the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, [? Jamie ?] [? Harrison, ?] [? Andrea ?] [? Gillespie, ?] [? Josh ?] [INAUDIBLE], [? Angela ?] [? Davidson, ?] and [? Jay ?] [? A. ?] [? Moore. ?]

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 670 episodes. Also, there's videos and tons of other stuff there-- thisamericanlife.org.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he organized a vote this week about what we should have for lunch as a staff. I don't know. He seemed a little too proud of himself.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS, "EVEN THE LOSERS"]