NYT Podcast "The Run-Up" Interviews Kellyanne Conway

Almost all Fox News faithful viewers would attack The New York Times for being "liberal media." Sometimes, however, those stereotypes break down, and the echo chamber is damaged.

Travel back in time. It’s March 2013. The G.O.P., in tatters, issues a scathing report blaming its electoral failures on an out-of-touch leadership that ignores minorities at its own peril. Just three years later, Donald Trump proves his party dead wrong.

For this week’s episode of The Run-Up, host Astead Herndon speaks to Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for Donald Trump in 2016, and Times reporters Adam Nagourney and Jennifer Medina to explore how certain assumptions took hold of both parties — and what they’re still getting wrong — heading into the 2022 midterm elections.

You can listen to this episode of “The Run-Up” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon or wherever you get your podcasts.

The full transcript of the episode can be found here, with highlights below:

Astead Herndon
"OK, look, I’ve talked to a lot of Trump supporters over the past six years. I’ve been to about a dozen Trump rallies. I’ve been to Trump’s stock. And people who voted for Trump told me directly that his messages on race and identity matter to them. There are people who didn’t vote for Donald Trump in spite of build the wall or birtherism, but because of it.

"So it was both of those messages, economic and cultural, that helped Trump reach a new group of voters. And not all of them were white."


Kellyanne Conway
[...] "After Romney’s loss, they said, oh, my god. Romney lost Hispanics. We must talk more about immigration. It’s like, well then, you’re not listening to Hispanics. Yes, they care about that. But they care about 50 things.

"And so listen, we don’t tell voters what’s important to them. They tell us. So sure, you’re going to get a majority of Americans saying a majority of Republicans saying, I think we should reform our immigration laws or enforce them or whatever they’re going to, of course. But where is the intensity? Is that more important to you, as a Hispanic male head of house who wants to keep his job and wants his kids in a better school and wants to make sure his multi-generation household that includes his parents, his mother’s mother, his own kids, and he and his wife — he wants to make sure the issues for all three generations are attended to. And let me tell you something. People — if you don’t know people own guns, if you don’t know people or pro-life, if you don’t know people whose kids go to public school or who don’t have college degrees — and it’s even beyond that, just pretending people don’t exist, like, oh, I can’t believe anybody would actually go to church on Wednesdays and Sundays. I can’t believe anybody would actually own 12 guns. And I can’t believe — well, there are people out there like that.

"And just attacking Trump and never really educating oneself on the Trump voters, now 74 million strong — I mean, that is ignorance and arrogance.

"Here’s what I would say to you. We never deeply examine that which we deeply disdain. And that’s what’s happened. That’s what happened with the autopsy."

************************

Check out the rest of the episode. Trump supporters may be surprised.