Lost in the middle: America's Political Orphans

28/10/2024

Here in battleground Wisconsin many of us couldn’t sleep last night. As a political orphan I was tossing and turning. Trump or Kamala? Kamala or Trump? Completely bewildered, the thousands of campaign ads warring in my mind. How could I ever make up my mind without a Washington Post endorsement?

If Jeff Bezos hadn’t pulled the plug would any of us have a single doubt about what the paper would do? As I learned at Northwestern’s journalism school, dog bites man is not a story. Man bites dog! Now there is a headline.

Since the Post started doing endorsements for President it has never picked a Republican. Never. Not once since in its history. Its longtime publisher was a Kennedy devotee.

Look around. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t backed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover. The largest chains — Gannett, McClatchy and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing all have stopped endorsing. USA Today, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 38 years in 2020, has reverted to neutrality.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune also announced it was ending the practice last month writing “We are confident in the ability of informed citizens to decide whom they wish to vote for based on what they see, hear and research.”

Amen. Note to Washington Post reporters, get over yourselves.

23/10/2024

60% of Americans say they are worn out by so much coverage of the 2024 presidential election ( Pew research). And then there are the nagging questions of fairness when only 7% of journalists identify as Republicans.

Since I spent 8 years as a Member of Congress and 13 years as a journalist, listeners and readers ask me all the time where can I find solid political coverage that is not slanted?

Nobody does a better job than “Tangle News” founded by veteran political journalist and podcaster Issac Saul. In episode 3 of the Lost in the Middle Countdown we get his insights on the state of the election and our mutual concerns about America’s mainstream press. Episodes at scottklug.substack.com

20/10/2024

Hey Political orphans, proud independents, confused swing voters join me tomorrow for an appearance on 5 things I learned about America. Part Ted Talk/Master Class. And better yet, it's free. 6:00 CT. We'll talk about the 44% of Americans who want collaborations in politics, not Ted Cruz or AOC.

And why independents are now the largest bloc of voters in Nevada, Arizona and New Hampshire. and tick, tick, the election is oh so close.

Join former Wisconsin congressman and current podcast host Scott Klug for this free, 90-minute class and discover the Five Things He’s Learned about America’s political orphans – the great majority of our fellow citizens who want lead...

09/10/2024

Hey fellow orphans somedays the upcoming election makes you want to cry. But we think it’s even better to laugh.
In the first of our four special election countdown episodes at Lost in the Middle we talk to comedian and political podcast host Andrew Heaton who calls in from a phone both at the Royal Scotland Club in Edinburgh. We like to think he was wearing a kilt, but we really don’t know. Our buddy is the host of the popular podcast “The Political Orphanage” You can find our discussion at scottklug.substack.com

08/09/2024

We are 48 hours out from the first debate. Pretend you’re sitting in an anchor chair ready to pounce. If you ever worked in tv you know the smart ones in the studio are the producers whispering the questions in the anchor’s earpiece, said the guy who once had anchorman hair and carried pancake make up in his suit pocket.

Thanks for reading Lost in the Middle: America's Political Orphans! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

If you could ask the first question on September 10th, what would it be? Write your suggestions in the comment period below.

One simple ground rule. I want a question for Trump and one for Harris. They can both be the same. Zero points for being snarky.

I really want to know what’s on your mind. I have been thinking about this exercise in my own head for the last several days.

You should treat this exercise seriously, but I know some of you will still channel your inner middle schooler, so I won’t act surprised.

I will double back Tuesday and post the best. And I will post my questions too.

But to put you in the mood, first here is the story of my night in Boston listening to Al Gore’s sighs.

Not long after I left Congress, Brady Williamson, a Madison lawyer, and Democratic strategist called me and pitched me on the idea of landing a 2000 Presidential debate in Wisconsin. We thought it would be a great way to show off our city, and as political junkies we thought it would be a blast.

There were a few steps in the dance.

First, we had to raise $500,000 to stage it. We didn’t need it all up front but we needed several hundred thousand dollars to show the community’s commitment. Hat in hand we were able to get a local foundation and several large corporations to pony up. We checked that box much easier than we expected.

Keep in mind this is at its foundation, the Presidential debate is a television production, so the next step was scouting potential sites with the team from the now defunct Presidential Debate Commission. We were all hoping they would zero in the recently built Frank Lloyd Wright inspired convention center sitting on the shores of Lake Monona. Too many curves and weird angles, we were told. Clearly, they had never looked at any of Wright’s other designs since all of his buildings are unique or bizarre depending on your perspective.

Next, we visited a vintage theater downtown with a second-floor balcony that would provide a great vantage point for the cameras, but by the time they built out the set for the hosts on the first floor there would be little room for an audience.

In the end they picked the Dane County convention center which was essentially a big open box with no charm. Bingo. A blank slate to create the staging.

Like players waiting anxiously for the NFL draft, we waited for the call. Would we make the cut? Was there a chance we could have the first debate?

When we jumped on the call a few weeks later, wide eyed optimism turned to despair.

Oh, don’t draw the wrong conclusion. We were winners. Sort of. They loved Madison and appreciated the outpouring of support for the event in Wisconsin. Ugh! They wanted us to host the Vice-Presidential debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman. Then they told us the date. We checked out calendars. Whew. We were off the hook. They had picked the week of the World Dairy Expo. (insert Wisconsin joke here) Seriously the Expo was an event that filled up every hotel room in south central Wisconsin. We had to take a pass.

Soon Brady Williamson called with a consolation prize. We had tickets for the first Presidential Debate in Boston. Two things stood out. Christie Brinkley with her eggplant-colored leather pants was in the row in front of me. Not a good look

And for the next 90 minutes Al Gore famously sighed into his mike every time George W. Bush answered a question. This is not my Republican spin. It made Reuter’s list of the 5 worst moments in Presidential debates. “In his first debate with Republican George W. Bush, Democratic Vice President Al Gore drew negative reviews for sighing loudly while Bush spoke.” It was loud on tv. It was worse in person.

So back to your homework assignment. Your goal is to make Donald Trump or Kamala Harris sigh loudly.

Ask away. Civility matters. Ask a serious question. Don’t be a jerk.

26/08/2024

Great discussion about the lost political middle with Mike Baranowski and the team at the Politics guys podcast. With 9 weeks left in the election we arm wrestle over the voting decisions of independent and swing voters.

We know you've got a long Labor Day drive ahead of you. Can you really listen to sports talk or NPR for 6 hours? https://politicsguys.com/

23/08/2024

So sweep up the confetti and streamers in Chicago. The conventions are done. The election is 10 weeks away.

The bases are geeked, but nobody is paying attention to the lost middle.

Millions of Americans are still political orphans.

Listen to the only podcast in America focused on the swing voters who will decide this election.

Download the podcast and at the same location below

Subscribe to the blog ! https://scottklug.substack.com

“Great storytelling. A Hell of a lot of fun! “Former Congressman Jack Quinn (R-Buffalo)

“My hope is that Americans far and wide learn that the only hope forward in our democracy is not through the extremes but right up the middle.” Former Congresswoman Chris Bustos (D-Illinois)”

44% of American voters self-identify as centrists. 71 million bewildered, frustrated political orphans. We'll explore how we got into this mess. But we'll also tell you uplifting stories of people around the country trying to change the current zeitgeist. Click to read Lost in the Middle: America's....

18/08/2024

Trolling Polling
Is the quiet Tory lurking?

In 2016 I was asked by the U.S. State Department to spend a week in the Nordic countries: Sweden, Finland and Iceland, with Larry Larocco, a former Democratic Congressman from Boise and close friend, to explain the dynamics in the upcoming Trump-Clinton election.

Our presentation to college classes, editorial boards and business groups like the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce was Political Science 101. First, most Europeans can’t wrap their arms around the fact that the American system is really 50 separate state elections all of which then funnel into the puzzling mathematics of the electoral college. Along the way we were also peppered with questions about Trump’s economic policies, Clinton’s approach to the Middle East and just who in the hell was going to win.

I’ve saved my PowerPoint from that trip because over the years I have often reused some of the slides. I just dug through it last month to do similar presentations from the RNC for the State Department, to remote audiences gathered at the U.S. Embassies in Lithuania, Croatia and Tunisia.

Attached with this column is the last slide in that 2016 deck. It is a late October projection on who would win the 2016 election. Look at the odds. Hillary in a landslide. I grabbed it from one of the nationally respected polling sites. Note they had her winning the blue wall: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennslyvania. She lost all three.

On Friday, the well-respected Cook Political Report now has Harris ahead or tied with Trump in six of seven battleground states. On the eve of the convention, she has pulled ahead in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Arizona, and tied with Trump in Georgia. Nevada is the only battleground state that Trump still leads, the poll found.

As subscribers to my podcast and fans of my blog on the “Lost Political Middle” (both found at Scottklug.substack.com) I am not thrilled with either candidate. As a former Republican Congressman, I cannot abide Trump’s personal conduct and outrageous behavior and Harris’ proposals for rent control and policing grocery store pricing sounds like Romanian economic policy from the 1970’s.

I understand why Harris’ fans are over the moon about her candidacy. In just a few weeks’ time she has erased Trump’s polling lead, and her crowds are a sign of an enormous wave of enthusiasm. The contrast in energy between the two camps is palpable. But like an early lead in an NFL play-off game (I am looking at you my Green Bay Packers) The last half of the 4th quarter often wins games as the 49ers proved. And in politics, so do the last few weeks.

Remember in 2016 Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton University and co-founder of the blog Princeton Election Consortium, which analyzes election polling, called the race for Clinton. He was so confident that he made a bet to eat an insect if Trump won more than 240 electoral votes. Nothing like a grasshopper meal live on CNN.

Pollsters will claim they have fixed their models since the ‘16 races, but I not so sure. Traditional phone calls to land lines haven’t worked for decades. Now they must use a combination of online polls, cell calls, text messages and landlines and then bake in some assumptions to come up with an updated projection.

But whatever the secret sauce experts concocted in some mad scientist’s polling lab, the projections have remained flawed. Early election night in 2020 Democrats had the champagne chilled early because polls showed Biden likely winning North Carolina and Florida which meant game over. Instead, the nation stayed up late at night waiting for the usual slate of true battleground states to trickle in. Errors in seven key Senate races were even more egregious which caused political campaigns in both parties to misallocate resources to states they were doomed to lose, or not add enough firepower in states they could have won.

As Pew Research concluded “Most preelection polls in 2020 overstated Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump in the national vote for president, and in some states incorrectly indicated that Biden would likely win or that the race would be close when it was not”.

I keep looking at this week’s polls of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and still thinking about the train wreck in election polling in the UK. Pollsters are still trying to cope with what’s called the “Shy Tory” factor, the conservative voters who won’t respond to polls or lie about who they will vote for as a middle finger to the establishment. The elections in 1992 first got it wrong where the projections of a one-point Labor Party victory were in reality an eight-point Conservative Party win. Same flaws in 2015 and even this summer which wildly underestimated the votes for the Liberal Democrats and Reform parties. Looking back in recent years they were also wrong about Brexit, the vote to leave the EU and half of the pollsters were dead wrong on the Scottish vote to break away from the UK.

The race will tighten in October. It always does. The Trump folks rolled out of Milwaukee with confidence that was sky high. The Harris camp will do the same later this week in Chicago.

Today it’s all seashells and balloons for the Harris camp. Her exuberant supporters on one side of the political divide should take a cleansing breath as should the jittery Republicans on the other.

Ten weeks is a lifetime in politics. I keep that PPT slide to remind myself that polling is ephemeral. Never as good as it looks for the leaders, never as bad as it looks for today’s losers.

13/08/2024

Hey lost in the middle podcast fans---does the current state of America make you want to to cry. Here's option B. How about making you laugh! Great discussion this week on the Live from America Podcast --weekly show that combines political commentary with humor. Hosted by the comedy cellar owner Noam Dworman and producer Hatem Gabr with my favorite guest. Yours truly

‎Comedy · 2024

01/08/2024

My secret campaign weapon

I was sitting in a bar in northern Wisconsin on vacation waiting for a cheeseburger to arrive. Two young, scruffy, stocky guys walked through the door and plopped down at the bar. I turned to my family and said those have to be two Chicago cops. We have sort of have a love hate with Illinois tourists. They love our pristine northwood’s lakes and great fishing. We like the money they spend on tourism, and well that’s about it. Flatlanders we call them, and a lot of other things.

Less than a minute later they walked up to the table and introduced themselves. They were from my hometown of Madison and their mom Mary Anne was a volunteer on my campaign helping to send out mail and hand out yard signs to supporters. “Have a nice weekend,” said the one booming voice and big smile. “Good luck with the campaign.”
About three minutes later it dawned on me it was Chris Farley, Saturday Night Live’s rising star. And nobody loved him more than the 48,000 students at the University of Wisconsin. A few weeks later we were on a call, and he offered to help. It took me about 20 seconds to say yes.
We figured he might just be the key to unlock the vote on campus. In my first re-election Democrats rolled out candidate Bill Clinton who drew ten thousand people to a rally on the grounds of the State Capitol. Chris and I worked fraternity and sorority row and tailgate fundraisers before Badger football games.
The students were lured by a promise of polaroid pictures with Chris to the first 100 students who showed up at the quad at an apartment complex. The line stretched around the block. We rounded up some friendly musicians, with me on drums, and Chris belted out a rousing rendition of the old Ray Charles hit “Tell Me What I Say.”
When local Magazine editor and friend Doug Moe wanted to do a profile of the young rising star, he asked me to make a call to see if we could visit him in New York. Chris was a gracious host letting us watch the rehearsals and hang with him at the cast party afterwards. And before it sounds like a night of wild debauchery most of the room was all business, trying to cut show biz deals. A few of the Red Hot Chili Peppers were buttonholing Producer Loren Michaels about an appearance on the show. And to give you a sense of the outrageous behavior at the party, Sally Fields was there… with her mother.
On the ride home from the party one of Chris’s friends asked who I was, and I explained that Chris’s family had been big supporters of my campaign. I asked him who he was, and he said, “Chris’s spiritual advisor.” I assumed I was being played and burst out laughing. But it was the truth. He was a friend from their days at Marquette University who had become a Jesuit priest. He was the real Matt Foley, the stage name Chris used on SNL, the loser living down by the river in his mini van.
As we all sadly came to know, Chris had struggles with demons. He leaned heavily on his faith. His fans would never suspect he attended morning mass several days a week. In 1999 he died of a drug overdose like his
comedian John Belushi.
Chris was a big man, with a big appetite and a laugh that could shake a room. Lots of people helped me in my campaigns. Many of them are still friends to this day. Some have passed on and I am deeply thankful for all of their help. But Chris was special.
Please see the comments below for a campaign ad featuring his brother Kevin Farley.

23/07/2024

Most Americans are understandably focused on the US coverage of the RNC. What you probably don't realize is that more than 2,000 foreign journalists were in Milwaukee too. I enjoyed working with U.S. State Department to brief reporters from New Zealand, Japan, Norway, Australia and Egypt on the mechanics of picking nominee. And also having an opportunity to do a series of remote presentations to audiences at the U.S. embassies in Tunisia, Croatia and Lithuania. Don't undersell the value of soft diplomacy. We are still deeply admired around the world.