Doug Deason is a political donor trying to make the biggest decision people like him make every four years – which presidential candidate to back. Producer Zoe Chace follows Deason through the unpredictable primaries of the 2016 election.
There’s a political parable about Hillary Clinton that’s made the rounds this year. Host Ira Glass interviews contributor Jack Hitt, who says that in this parable you can see almost every version of Hillary that exists in the popular imagination: the A student, the opportunist, the mastermind, the rat fink, the pragmatist, the truth-twister.
(Podcast and Internet Only) Another tragic figure this year is the head of the Republican National Comittee Reince Priebus, who has the job of holding the whole party together. A grueling and thankless job, this year.
Ira talks about what’s alarming him about this year’s election: facts seem less meaningful than they ever have, and the gap between the mainstream media and right-wing media’s versions of the world have never seemed further apart. CNN’s Jake Tapper explains what it was like to be on the air live when Donald Trump tried to take a huge, obvious lie and pass it off as the truth.
Ira talks to Tom, who regrets his vote on Brexit this week. And Zoe Chace talks to Harry Enten, a senior analyst at the website FiveThirtyEight, about Donald Trump.
A year ago, we did a story about a study that found that a simple 20-minute conversation could change someone’s mind about controversial issues like gay marriage and abortion. But a few weeks after we aired the story, the study was discredited.
Ira's quest continues. He calls his Uncle Lenny, who gets his news from Fox and the Wall Street Journal, and lives with an entirely different set of facts, and Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, who explains that the central issue in Donald Trump’s candidacy is based on something that isn’t true.
We’ve been talking to Trump voters all year—a time during which they’ve watched their candidate’s chances evolve from laughable, to likely, to striking distance, to victory. Producer Zoe Chace checks in with a father and son who’ve been Trump supporters since February, when their guy was an underdog.
Sean Cole talks to reporter Garrett Graff, who read the 247 pages of interview summaries of the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Graff concludes that it’s not the scandal most people thought it was.
The story from the prologue continues, with the researchers re-doing the canvassing experiment. And the results are even more surprising this time around.
Producer Zoe Chace goes to Greenville, South Carolina to talk with Tony Beam – host of the radio show Christian Worldview Today. Tony and his listeners are evangelical Christians, and usually, Tony backs a candidate for office and his listeners tend to agree with him.
There’s a seismic, historic change going on in the Republican party this year. Producer Zoe Chace tells Ira about a place you can eavesdrop on a group of Republican friends as they fret and argue about that change week after week: a podcast called Ricochet.
In this election year we look at the story of one small ballot initiative, in one state. We heard this referendum would gut Georgia's Judicial Qualifications Commission (JQC), an independent organization that investigates ethics complaints about judges.
Ira explains that when Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all seemed to be against free trade agreements, he got genuinely confused. Is free trade good or bad? Was NAFTA good or evil? Are we down with TPP? He asked Jacob Goldstein of NPR’s Planet Money podcast to explain, once and for all, the pros and cons of free trade.
After this year’s election, Republicans in North Carolina went out looking for cases of voter fraud - all over the state. It was hard to find, hard to prove—until they stumbled across what could have been the best present ever: a seemingly clear-cut case of Democrats out to rig the election.
One way to understand the split inside the Republican party is to look at immigration. It’s this urgent, emotional issue for so much of the party these days.
Producer Neil Drumming talks to someone who was not happy with the results of Tuesday’s election. Janelle, who’s black, is bracing herself for the coming days.