#27 Matt Negrin & Alexander Trowbridge on Campaign Surrogates and Presidential Elections
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2016
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the second installment of our election week series, Road to Now contributors Matt Negrin & Alex Trowbridge of Bloomberg Politics offer up another round of Path to the Present (the podcast inside a podcast) to explain the role that surrogates have played in Presidential Elections in the past and present. Through their own research and interviews with Donald Trump's Senior Advisor/Surrogate Boris Epshteyn & Hillary Clinton surrogate/US Congressman Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Matt & Alex discuss what motivates individuals to speak on behalf of a candidate, what we can learn from speaking with surrogates, and what makes a surrogate good (or bad) at their job.
For more on The Road to Now: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:02.2 | And I'm Ben Sawyer and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:05.2 | Yes, and the Road to Now finds us today at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. |
| 0:12.3 | But we are on the line, on the FaceTime, really, with Matt Negren and Alex Trowbridge. |
| 0:18.3 | How's it going, guys? |
| 0:19.5 | There are four of us. |
| 0:20.5 | Anyone want to guess how many |
| 0:21.6 | sets of the headphones we have? Only five. You're giving it away. So you guys did another |
| 0:30.5 | podcast and a podcast for us. What topic did you decide to tackle this time? We, we experience, as people in media, we experienced this election through people called, oddly called surrogates. |
| 0:45.3 | So that's what our podcast is about for you guys. |
| 0:47.8 | It's the people that the campaigns, the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaign, send out to talk for them. |
| 0:54.6 | And it's funny because last time you had us do the spin room as an issue, and the spin room |
| 0:59.3 | is filled with surrogates. That is one of the major playgrounds for folks who are representing |
| 1:04.3 | campaigns and for people like Matt and I to go up and yell at them. So we're pulling back the |
| 1:09.0 | camera. We're getting a wider and wider shot of the political animal. |
| 1:13.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:14.2 | I think in a lot of ways, the campaign is seen, it exposes how weird media presents politics. |
| 1:25.2 | And in this election in particular, there's a lot of criticism of the media the way that |
| 1:29.6 | they dealt with trump versus clinton um but the reality is that it's hard to get an interview with |
| 1:33.7 | these guys and the best way is to talk to one of their surrogates and so they go on tv constantly |
| 1:38.4 | you can turn on any cable channel any day and you'll see a surrogate. And who are they? |
| 1:45.3 | Like, what are they doing? |
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