The Justice Department’s federal indictment of Donald Trump came just as more rivals in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination declared their candidacies, and as the national party geared up to begin presidential debates later this summer. Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson are together claiming up to a third of the Democratic electorate in some early polls. It remains early, but presidential election season is here, ready or not.

Astead W. Herndon, who I last spoke to as Trump was leaving office, spent the past several months hosting a new season of the New York Times podcast The Run-Up, during which he spoke to Democrats and Republicans all around the country about what they see coming as the presidential race gears up. Herndon said that even with all the fanfare over Trump’s indictment, the sheer uncertainty it brings to the next 18 months hasn’t really sunk in. We talked about whether Trump’s “inevitability” is cracking, what both Democrats and Republicans have been saying privately, Ron DeSantis’ real chances, whether Democrats are turning on Biden, and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Aymann Ismail: Were you surprised by how serious the indictment was? As someone who’s talking closely to both Republicans and Democrats on your show, how has it played?

Astead W. Herndon:We’ve known this was coming. Donald Trump announced his presidential race partially because it would politically insulate him from these legal challenges. We were thinking of how to make this season of The Run-Upwith it in mind. But I think certainly we did not expect the seriousness of the charges. The actual details that we got last week are obviously really shocking.

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I think what we haven’t seen before is this direct level of accountability. What I really think we’re seeing is Donald Trump wrestling with the fact that he’s facing real accountability. And that’s even more important, I think, than his relationship with supporters, because I’m telling you, when I’m in Iowa this weekend talking to them about the indictment, they don’t care. Someone said it best for me: If you are someone who is already looking for alternatives, which there was already a plurality of Republicans who were, this only makes you more likely to want those alternatives. But for the people who were with him, the hard floor of 30, 35 percent who haven’t gotten an interest in the other candidates, this is only making them dig in even deeper.

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You’ve talked to quite a lot of Republicans about Trump’s “inevitability.” Do any of them think this indictment matters?  

To be clear, this indictment is not a good thing personally. He is facing a serious prison term. But it’s not a good thing for him politically, either. The vast majority of Americans do not think an indictment is a good thing. If he gets to a general election with the prospect of jail time, his biggest problem would be the independents, the swing voters. The traditional people who they lost in the midterms find this to be a real drag on their ability to support Trump. But just in the short term, it’s not clear that it’s fatal. This is someone whose support is not just baked in for passive reasons, but people like the way that he’s changed the party, like the way that he’s refocused his message and that he was trying to update that to re-meet the moment. And then I think in the first arraignment, you saw people come back to him and support him, and I think that was step one of this process to set the race in its early paces.

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What I think this indictment does is really create room for the alternatives to Trump, mainly DeSantis, but other people, to criticize him on the merits. When we were talking to people in Iowa this week, they were saying that he’s had to do rallies at smaller and smaller venues, that they’ve not seen the level of callers calling into congressional offices or pressuring leaders like they used to after something like this. I think there is a certain level of tapering off that has also seemingly emboldened his alternatives. And so when we think about a state like Iowa, the real function of a place like that may not be in knocking Donald Trump off, but just really making clear who the real alternative is, and then it will be up to the rest of the states going forward to see if there’s enough coalescing that there wasn’t before.

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On your show you laid out how what helps a Republican candidate win a primary might also hurt them in the general. I’ve noticed Trump-alternative candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy trying to court Trump’s base by promising to pardon Trump if he wins. But Pence went the other way and called the allegations indefensible, which will probably hurt his chances winning that base.

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Unless you’re Chris Christie, who’s going to just go at him, a lot of Republicans are walking a thin line. They are trying to not upset Donald Trump’s base because they really view this as an example of federal-government targeting against Republicans. And so they need to speak to what is a mass Republican belief of liberal overreach, and at the same time, make an argument that says, “But you can in this instance use this as a reason to reject Donald Trump.” That’s the thin line that these candidates are trying to walk, partially because there’s not enough anti-Trump Republicans to win a primary by themselves.

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There are simply not enough people for Chris Christie to win on an anti-Trump message alone. You need to get enough Republicans who were interested in him, who like him, in addition to people who don’t, to be able to overtake his 30, 40 percent of the party. And so that’s the difficulty. Even the Republicans who don’t like Trump, they don’t all dislike him for the same reasons. Some of them are moderate, some of them think he’s gone too far. Other people are people who were more into Ted Cruz in 2016, who find him maybe personally incompatible or inconsistent with conservatism writ large. And so you have to cobble together a coalition that is anti-Trump in name but not anti-Trump in ideology. The Republican party is not anti-Trump in ideology.

Where does Ron DeSantis fit into that?

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I think, one, there’s a distinction between DeSantis and the rest of the alternatives. He has shown real traction past someone like Haley or Pence or whatever. He is really the king of the alternatives, and that is partially because of the way that he has made name-recognition for himself in the South and through COVID and on Fox News. And he does seem to have a real relationship with Republicans who are seeking to have Trump’s message, but without the chaos. When I was at Trump rallies, the No. 1 thing I would always hear is, “I could do without the tweets. I could do without the chaos.” And so it’s very clear to me that some of those people have become DeSantis supporters, and I think that that part has really shown himself to be of the ability to break out of the pack. But at the same time, that has been an increasing struggle for him to get to the next level, or to rival Trump in the way that he was after the midterms. I think what that shows us, and this is what Nate told us and I think the data says, is that for some people, when they were saying Ron DeSantis after the midterms, they were really just saying, “Oh, anybody else,” or maybe, “I’m just sick of Trump right now,” but they maybe came back to him.

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So if this federal indictment isn’t the silver bullet, what do you think are the animating issues that will actually decide this election, based on your interviews with voters?

I do think the indictment matters, but I just don’t think the foremost question is “Will it lead to Donald Trump being the nominee or not?” I don’t even think the foremost question will be “Will it lead to Donald Trump being president or not?” I think the indictments guarantee the next year and a half is unprecedented, and that no matter who comes out of this presidential race, the most important transformational national political figure of the last decade will be facing jail time. And it could be that a Republican nominee on one side is promising to pardon him and the Democratic one is pressured around that question, and that is just as much of a litmus test question for voters next November than the economy, than some individual policy issue.

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But it is a system-breaking phenomenon that we have found ourselves in, and I think that train is in motion no matter what happens in terms of the literal vote counts in Iowa and New Hampshire on the Republican side. The vast majority of evidence that we’ve seen and the people we talk to tell us that Americans do not want these options. And so that doesn’t mean that Joe Biden’s not going to be the nominee, but that does mean, I think, we have an overarching story that media and political reporting has a responsibility to follow: “Why does a system keep producing results that the vast majority of people feel are further and further disconnected from them?” And I think in the era of nihilism and jadedness that we have seen in politics for a long time, I think 2024 threatens to be the bottom-falling event there.

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That’s not necessarily in the kind of big cable news voice, “Democracy is on the line,” but just the way people have checked out of believing in the system for working for them, I think it is only going to further fuel that point. And I think that’s different as a storyline that we have to follow rather than just, does it help him win or lose? Because think about it. Let’s say DeSantis wins Iowa and gets more delegates headed into the Republican convention. My biggest question in that scenario would still be, “What is Donald Trump doing? Is he accepting those results? Is he handing over his party and coalition to this other person? Is he convicted?” There’s so many what ifs, but they all come back to this train that we’re on that feels completely independent from the electoral results.

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On Biden’s end of things, Politico reported that the White House is ordering national Democrats to stay quiet about the indictment, not to fundraise off of this, and on your show, you dug into the Democrats’ strategy in this election being a defensive one.

Well, the White House would say they have a lot of accomplishments, and that they’re not executing a defensive strategy. But that hasn’t really moved the traditional markers: Biden’s approval rating, voters’ confidence level, voters’ desire to see him run for another term. You got RFK and Marianne Williamson polling at a combined third of the electorate. That’s not because I think people actually want those people. It’s partially because we know a lot of people are interested in just hearing from anyone who’s not Joe Biden.

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But at the same time, I think the party Democrats would say, and they should say, rightly, that people can feel that way and still vote for Democrats and Biden. That’s partially because the Republicans on the other side were seen as extreme, and that’s also because Joe Biden’s kind of made that case an explicit one: “Don’t judge me against the almighty, but the alternative.” This is a phenomenon that came up last year, particularly in the midterms, and I think that’s informing candidates that even if those numbers don’t shift, they can still be in a good position to win.

At the same time, it is a strategy where that confidence diminishes completely if Donald Trump is not the candidate on the other side. And I think it is still a strategy that requires Democrats pointing to Republican alternatives as scary rather than pitching from their own position of strength. If it does remain just a contest between him and Trump, Democrats like their chances.

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The last time we spoke, over two years ago, we talked about the job that the media played in the rise of Trump. Do you think the press is ready this time?

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Well, we cannot live in a fantasy world and act like media does not play a big role, and that Donald Trump hasn’t succeeded by manipulating media to carry his messages. I think that was a huge part of his rise in 2016. I actually think when we look eight years later, I would really honestly say that both media and the public’s intake of Trump messages has changed. Trump as a candidate isn’t having that much fun this time channeling the same stuff as he was before. The ratings of his town halls and rallies are down. CNN and MSNBC didn’t take his Bedminster speech live. Think about how much of a fundamental shift that was from when they were taking every utterance live.

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We haven’t returned to a world like 2016, but it has not been a thing that we have solved, because to me, this usually comes down to a question of people being like, “Do you amplify messages, and what does good Trump coverage look like?” And for me, and what we’ve been trying to do, is make sure you’re understanding the time of the race that we are in. Voters are not weighing in until a lot later. We need to be covering things that actually have specific resonance, and so this is actually a time when we chose for our show to follow the insiders under the premise that we’re going to show backroom maneuvering in this period, because it’s a time that’s distinct from voting.

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We had Mike Lindell [the MyPillow guy] on this season, and we did that not because “insert crazy person,” but because there was a legitimate story to tell about the relationship this election-denial wing has and the power that remains over conservative media that culminated with this Dominion lawsuit. I think when you lay out that purpose and then you go into that interview, people will sit with you even though that person is someone who spreads falsehoods and conspiracies. That does not feel like platforming; that, to me, feels like journalism. We took what we learned from Mike Lindell and we brought it to the RNC chairwoman in the interview with her to see that in relationship to power.

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The first debate for Republicans is supposed to be in August. More people are jumping into the race. What are you watching for right now?

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I think this is a period where we’re going to have a real focus on Republicans, and the everlasting question of “What is their Trump intake threshold?” We have seen very few things really stop Republicans from being willing to support Trump. He did fall in polling when the people felt like he was being a drag on the party largely, even if they have since come around to him. And so one of the things that they told me is we should not forget that his floor is lower than I think we may have known previously, and there’s nothing to say that these indictments or maybe something that happens legally or otherwise couldn’t bring him back to that. And I’m going to be interested to see how these other candidates interact with each other. I think if you’re Ron DeSantis, you probably have to be going into 2024 almost certainly needing to win Iowa, but really making sure you create a distance between yourself and the other Trump alternatives so that you can leave Iowa as the other option that people can coalesce around.

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And so that internal fight, absent from Trump, is going to be, I think, really important because whether DeSantis frankly has the juice is a big question of this race. If he doesn’t, the Republicans are scrambling to find any other Trump alternative who can cobble together a coalition. So I feel like that’s one of the things I’m really looking at, and then there’s material conditions: What’s our economic position when we’re leaving this year? What’s Joe Biden’s approval rating if the economy’s still feeling in a good place? That certainly is going to be a huge hang over the race.

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