Bonus: The Surge | 45 Days from Election Day
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2024
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s just 45 days until election day—and the polls are telling us…a little bit of everything. In our first Slate Plus exclusive crossover, Mary sits down with one of the nation’s foremost experts on political nonsense.
Guest: Jim Newell, Slate’s senior politics writer, who writes the weekly newsletter The Surge.
This episode is member-exclusive. Listen to it now by subscribing to Slate Plus. By joining, not only will you unlock exclusive episodes of The Surge but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme and Rob Gunther.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Happy Friday, everyone. |
| 0:03.0 | If you are listening to me right now, congratulations. |
| 0:06.3 | You are listening to the very first installment of The Surge, our weekly pre-election hangout |
| 0:11.2 | with Slate's Jim Newell. |
| 0:12.6 | Hey, Jim. |
| 0:13.8 | Hi, Mary. |
| 0:14.8 | Okay, some of you probably already know about The Surge, because it is the funniest newsletter |
| 0:18.8 | about politics you will have the pleasure of reading. It's basically like having a leisurely but hilarious brunch with Jim, who sends it out |
| 0:26.1 | every Saturday morning, which made me think, like, why can't we approximate this on the show? And then |
| 0:31.0 | Jim was like, oh, we can. So here we are. Jim, just explain the concept of the surge. Sure. So the surge, the original tagline was |
| 0:42.2 | the most important political nonsense of the week, which is a way of getting at the tone of the |
| 0:48.7 | newsletter. What we do is we rank the seven most important people in politics that week, whether in Congress. |
| 0:56.4 | Seven, why seven? |
| 0:57.4 | I don't know. |
| 0:58.1 | I think that had to do with the original design template from five years ago or something. |
| 1:03.6 | It's all about whatever's available, you know. |
| 1:06.0 | It's a Google Doc thing. |
| 1:07.1 | Or maybe eight would have been too many to write. |
| 1:08.8 | But so we just, I just kind of rank what's going on. |
| 1:13.2 | It's usually a spread across Congress, election, state government, anyone who's making noise. |
| 1:18.8 | Obviously now, since we have, what, about six weeks until the election, it's going to be a lot more election focused. |
| 1:25.8 | Oh, yeah. And there is so much noise right now. |
... |
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