May 30, 2025: How 2026 looks from a key battleground

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

It’s a swing state with an open U.S. Senate seat, several competitive House races, an open gubernatorial seat — oh, and a potential leading 2028 candidate serving as governor. You may call it a political wonk’s dream; we call it Michigan. This week, as the battleground state’s political stars descended on idyllic Mackinac Island, the trends that will likely define 2026 across the nation came into full view. Live from the Mackinac Policy Conference, Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and supervising editor Zack Stanton talk through what they learned about the direction the campaign is heading. That, and President Donald Trump goes to Pennsylvania to trumpet the new U.S. Steel deal, while some leading Democrats head to South Carolina for a trial run of potential 2028 campaigns.

Transcript

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0:00.0	presented by BP.
0:08.0	Hello, I'm Zach Stanton.
0:09.6	And I'm Adam Wren, and it's Friday, May 30th.
0:12.2	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:14.6	If we sound a bit different this morning,
0:15.9	it's because we're coming to you live from the McEnough Policy Conference here in northern Michigan.
0:19.9	And you may hear some sounds in the background. birds chirping or horses clopping by or conference attendees chattering,
0:25.8	but that's the sound here on the ground. We'll talk more about the national lessons from the
0:29.5	political conversations we've been having this week in just a second. But first, without
0:33.6	further ado, here are the topics driving the day. The first story driving Washington's conversation today comes from the mother of all
0:40.5	swing states, Pennsylvania, where President Donald Trump is scheduled to host a big rally to
0:44.9	celebrate U.S. Steel acquisition by Nippon Steel, or as Trump is calling it, a planned partnership
0:50.5	between the Japanese and U.S. firm.
0:53.4	Now, this is a bit of a surprise. When Nippon announced
0:56.1	the deal back in 2023, Trump quickly came out against it, saying he would block it if he were
1:00.9	president, but he backtracked in light of the fact that as president, he wants to maintain
1:05.4	blue-collar support and preserve jobs in western Pennsylvania. Adam, when he speaks today in Pennsylvania, are we expecting
1:12.8	anything different from a standard Trump rally or our recent examples, say his speech at West Point,
1:18.0	examples of the sort of blurring of the lines here between the presidential and the political.
1:22.3	Yeah, I think we can look to the West Point as a template for what he's going to say here.
1:26.9	You know, I am curious about
1:28.1	how he's going to square the circle when it comes to accounting for his opposition to this
	...

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