Welcome to our special Friday dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Izger,

joined by the inimitable Steve Hayes. This podcast is brought to you by the

dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com. See our full slate of newsletters and podcasts

and make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. And we'll

hear a little later from our sponsor today Gabby. Today we're talking to a

stead-hernded national political reporter for the New York Times who's been on

the 2020 trail. We'll ask about attending the president's most recent rally, the

Biden campaign and how they're thinking about his vice presidential selection

and whether the Trump campaign can still appeal to black voters.

Let's dive right in. We're here today with a stead-hernded national political

reporter for the New York Times who's been covering the 2020 race and was most

recently in Tulsa. So we're definitely going to talk about that. Why don't we just

start with some of your background? How you got here to the 2020 race? I know

you started at the Boston Globe City Hall and all the way to the campaign trail.

Yeah, I went from outside Chicago. I went to school in Wisconsin and got an

internship at the Boston Globe when I was done with school and the globe was

great in a lovely place and I was originally covering crime and in the

eventually local politics. There was a city council in the name I honor

Pressley there which is a little more famous now. As are you.

That was kind of my initial local politics but I was trying to do things on

the trail. This was during the 2015 early 2016. So I would go up to New Hampshire

on the weekends and try to write stories and basically do the stories I now

...