Podcasts have their 9/11 moment on 11/9
If you listen to any podcasts related to news, you have likely heard a post-election show regarding the election of Donald Trump, and while the shows were planned, the content of it was not — or at least changed dramatically before the show actually went out for consumption.
President-elect Trump’s shocking victory had reverberations in the podcast world, leaving commentators with time to perform pre-written lines at the closest to what could qualify as speechless — their tone.
“It’s 3:30 a.m. in the newsroom. And we’re in a state of shock,” said Michael Barbaro, reporter and host of The New York Times election podcast, The Run-Up. “This was not supposed to happen — the biggest political upset of the past 50 years.”
“This was a stunner of an election,” said Kristin Roberts, national editor and host of POLITICO’s “Nerdcast” podcast, with a special emphasis on “stunner.”
“Where do you start with an election like this? It is one for the ages,” said POLITICO’s Charlie Mahtesian, who sounded both tired and astounded at the words he was uttering. “I think it’s bigger than the Dewey and Truman upset. I mean, I can’t even think of a comparable upset like this where we were all so wrong in so many ways,” he said.
“Those polls were a disaster,” later interjected Roberts. “And it wasn’t just the public polling. The Republican party polling was completely inaccurate.”
“Okay, so it’s the polling — we were wrong about the ground game — guy literally had no ground game at all, turned out not to matter. Imagine what his results would’ve been with a ground game? So, we were wrong about that,” continued Mahtesian. “We were wrong about him getting in the race — nobody believed he would get in the race. We were wrong about him in the primaries. Nobody believed he could beat that field. We were wrong about everything, and where do you go from there?”
“I think it’s an incredible moment where the American people — it’s a repudiation — of not just the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and the establishment. It’s a repudiation of the media. It’s a repudiation of the pollsters. It is the American people saying, ‘We are done with you. We are completely done. You don’t listen to us and what you write and what you say do not reflect how we feel,’” Roberts continued.
“It’s the biggest bird-flipping in human history,” said Mahtesian to some chuckles from his co-hosts.
The missed warnings were echoed on The New Yorker’s “Political Scene” podcast with host Dorothy Wickenden. “Donald Trump kept telling the country he was building a movement,” said Wickenden to writer Evan Osnos, who wrote a story for the magazine back in September titled, “President Trump’s First Term.”
Wickenden continued, “You described what a Trump presidency would look like. At the time, when we were working on it, it seemed like almost a fanciful thought experiment,” to which Osnos replied, “That story went from being a thought experiment to being something closer to a roadmap for our political predicament.”
“So much of the conventional wisdom of political science — and not conventional wisdom but empirically demonstrated findings of political science — have been upended by this election,” remarked New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. “The number of columns people wrote over the last year about the decline of the Republican party completely failed to see that it is the Democratic party that has been destroyed.”
On WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” host Brian Lehrer started his show with a simple statement. “So…Now what?” he remarked. Lehrer took calls since 6 a.m. the morning Trump won the election. “We’ve been hearing people cry and stammer about what they’re going to tell their children,” he said, and received a statement from filmmaker Ken Burns which he read out to his audience:
“The divisions evident in this political season can be healed. Let’s find what Lincoln said were ‘the better angels of our nature.’”
When Lehrer brought in his first guest, New York Times columnist Gail Collins, he asked her for her reaction, while stating his own astonishment within the question.
“Where do you even begin?” asked Lehrer. “It’s so disorienting.”
“It is pretty disorienting,” chuckled Collins, later saying, “we’ve gotten through many, many other things. We’ve known known Donald Trump all our lives around here, and we’ve known, in general, that he’s a man of many defects, but he is not an insane person. We’ve had weird presidents before, and we’ll get through this one too.”
“Well, I guess that’s, um, the basis of hope,” reacted Lehrer. “That presidencies are temporary. Also, that the responsibility of being in power tends to moderate people,” he said.
“But maybe the scariest thing is that this president — without any experience, with his impulsive tendencies and everything else — also has this Republican congress now. So where are the checks and balances going to come from?”
When Lehrer started taking calls, the reaction of dread was overbearing. The first caller, ironically named Serene, reacted this way: “I’ve been trying for the past two hours; I could not even walk into my classroom and teach,” she said. “This is one of the saddest days in my life, and I feel like there’s a lot of people sharing this view.”
“I wanted to ask you Brian, What kind of a mandate does Donald Trump have when he lost the popular vote, that’s number one,” said another caller named Steven. “The thing that’s most troubling is this coalition of hatred that this guy has cultivated,” he said, following up with an example. “I think it’s informative to listen to C-SPAN in the morning, and to hear some of the phone calls coming from the middle of the country, from people who voted for him,” he said. “People were saying that the liar and the dishonest person was not Donald Trump, it was Hillary Clinton. There was no talk about Chinese steel or the clothing line was not manufactured in the United States,” Steven said. “There was none of that.”
“Donald Trump is our president-elect,” reacted Jody Avirgan, host of FiveThirtyEight’s Elections podcast. “[It’s] a stunning turn in American politics and society, and that is the word I am left with today: stunned, and honestly, somewhat numb, both intellectually and emotionally.”
“Um…Boy,” said FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver. “Sometimes things come together in a way that a number of things have to come together, but all these things were foreseeable.” He noted that while the odds were in Clinton’s favor, she didn’t have a very large lead in the polls — around 3 percent, and was underperforming in critical swing states, with leads that were well within the margin of error in most polls. That margin, apparently, was enough to flip the script on this entire campaign.
Boy, indeed.
