‘The Run-Up’: Can Democrats Catch up to Years of Republican Unity?

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

So there’s this show hosted by Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist. It’s called War Room. And while it’s controversial enough that YouTube and Spotify won’t publish it, in the conservative world it’s a big deal.

A couple of months ago Bannon hosted a live recording at CPAC, basically the most important gathering of influential grassroots conservatives, and he brought out a guest.

Someone with the blueprint for conservative politics in the Trump era.

The head of a Christian cell phone company.

It’s called Patriot Mobile.

And during the interview —

— he lays out how they use their money.

It’s all part of a strategy to point energy at the local level and stay ahead of a changing country.

Today —

A case study in grass roots Republican politics.

And whether Democrats can catch up.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run Up.”

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All righty, team, y’all we all mic’d up and ready?

I think so.

I kind of wanted to do the first question. So my colleague, David Goodman, is the Houston Bureau Chief, and he’s the one who told me this story about Patriot Mobile. David, what’s the backdrop of how you come to report on this story?

So I moved to Texas last July, and one of the major political questions that’s hung over this state, really in every election cycle going back several, is when the state is going to turn blue, if ever. And hope springs eternal among Democrats that it will eventually do this, but they keep falling flat. But there’s a big asterisks to that, and it’s these suburban counties that had been trending towards the Democrats in recent years. And that was particularly the case in the surrounding county of Fort Worth called Tarrant County, where you had the county actually go slightly blue in each of the last two elections, so in 2020 and in 2018.

Yeah, yeah. As a political reporter, the question of whether Texas will turn blue feels like omnipresent always, everywhere. But it’s because it’s so central to the political future of the country.

If that were to happen, Democrats would have a huge, I mean, almost insurmountable advantage in things like the electoral college through big states like California and Texas. But it seems like you’re saying that if that’s going to happen, it’s likely going to be driven largely through the suburbs that have been trending toward Democrats. Is that right?

Yeah, I mean, that’s where the Democrats have been making their gains, and where the Republicans really need to make a last stand if they’re going to keep some of the demographic shifts in voting patterns from overtaking them. And so it’s become this real battleground. And nowhere really more intensely, I think, than in the suburbs around Fort Worth and Dallas, just because those are suburbs that are just very traditionally conservative and really reacted strongly to seeing their fellow neighbors and whatnot voting more Democratic over time. And so this became a real cause. You saw, actually, a very strong Tea Party emerge in that area, and it’s sort of morphed into a pretty engaged conservative base in that part of the state.

So how does Patriot Mobile factor in here? I should say, I’ve heard of this company. They would pop up in my reporting on conservative politics every now and then.

Their swag is very visible at Trump rallies. I’ve seen their ads in conservative media. But I’ve never gotten a full understanding of what they’re up to.

Well, it’s true, they’ve been around for a while. I didn’t really know too much about them, and that’s why I went out to try and set up an interview and actually talk to them face to face. It was pretty clear to me they weren’t going to agree to a phone interview with the New York Times, necessarily. That it would be better if I showed up in person and talked to them.

But when you track down the address from their campaign filings, it’s a PO box in Grapevine, Texas, north of Fort Worth. I dug a little deeper and I was able to find an actual address of a place, and I drove to that office park and knocked on the door and went through. And it was completely unmarked from the outside, but when you got inside there was all kinds of folks wearing Patriot Mobile t-shirts and there’s other branding around.

So I knew I had landed in the right place, but it was not the right time. This was back in the spring and they decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with a reporter who just showed up at their door.

An experience we’ve both had before.

Well, they were surprised to see me, in fact. Because they’ve done a lot to try and conceal sort of their location, they would say for safety reasons. And so they were surprised that I’d showed up, but I did have a brief conversation with the president and one of the founders, Glenn Story.

And he essentially said he’d think about interview, and thought about it, and said no. But then I decided to keep pushing it because their influence is really very clear in that area, that they were spending a significant amount of money. And I felt like their story needed to be told. And I followed up a couple of months later and reiterated my interest in talking, and we had a long cell phone conversation off the record about what kind of story I wanted to do. And he came away, at least at that moment, convinced that he wanted to sit down.

So tell me about that. You go back to this office park, and this time they let you in?

Yeah, so it looks a lot like a typical small business. You have cubicles and people kind of buzzing back and forth. But it’s just a little bit different and has a little bit more of a conservative feel, namely because you have flags that you might see at a conservative rally hanging from some of those cubicles, including one modeled on the Texas flag, except there are two silhouettes of assault rifles on it and the words come and take it in Hebrew and in English.

And so there’s an overtness to the politics that are just not present in your typical office space. The other thing they do at the office is every Tuesday they have a Bible study with Senator Ted Cruz’s father, Raphael.

It’s just a packed conference room with people out in the hallways trying to listen in. So for those that are interested, and it seems like a lot of people are, that’s a real highlight of the week there. So it’s a normal sort of company, but it’s got these aspects that make it unique.

Yeah, and what did you learn when you sat down with Glenn?

Yeah, so I sat down in Glenn’s office with him and with his wife, Jenny Story, who’s the chief operating officer for the company, and with their sort of VP for government affairs, Leigh Wambsganss. And she also runs the separate entity which is their political action committee. And so we spoke for almost two hours.

What they do, they don’t operate their own towers or anything like that. They essentially buy space from T-Mobile, is the provider they take space from, and then they will sell you your cell phone and a plan. And they’re like the customer service part of it. But really, for these executives that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part for them was the conservative politics that the business allowed them to pursue.

And they talk about it as this is their for-profit mission. And they see it as a Christian mission. And on the whiteboard in Glenn’s office he has the core values for the company still sort of written in handwriting with a black marker. And the first one it says —

Missionaries versus mercenaries.

And then the second one is God is in control. And they talk about that, that all the decisions they make, they pray on. And that’s how they view their business.

So when they say for-profit mission, what is that mission? What are the conservative Christian causes that Patriot Mobile is most concerned about?

Well, so broadly they set out a mission for themselves of essentially four areas, or four pillars as they would say.

First Amendment, the Second Amendment, they’re about support for the military.

And then the pro-life issues.

Pretty standard conservative causes.

Exactly. And for a while, Glenn was telling me they were just giving their money to politics and political causes that were bigger than them. And then they started to look more in their own backyard.

And they just this year decided to start spending money on local school board races.

All the executives have kids in the schools in this area.

And they were very focused, at least in the meeting that I had with them, on the content of the books that were being offered to offer to students.

And so it really wasn’t born of their pillars, per se, but more of the general sense of their faith and being able to instill that faith in their own kids and have other parents be allowed to do that themselves for their own children.

And so what does this actually look like for them getting involved in these races?

Well, there were several. There’s four different independent school districts where they supported candidates. And the one that I looked at most specifically was one called Grapevine Colleyville ISD. And this is a school district that spans two towns, Grapevine and Colleyville. And Grapevine is the corporate headquarters for Patriot Mobile, so that’s the reason I was most interested in that district because everything was kind of happening right in the span of a few miles.

The other reason I was interested in focusing on that area is that it had this recent history with the district having gotten rid of a pretty popular new Black principal at its high school, the first Black principal that they’d had at the Colleyville Heritage High School. And he only lasted there a year. And that year was really marked by a lot of controversy, especially towards the end. And parents coming to school board meetings and complaining that the principal was bringing “critical race theory,” quote, unquote, into the schools.

And was privileging conversations about equity and diversity over concerns about the education of the students. And there was a pretty bitter back and forth that ended with the principal agreeing to step down and the school district moving on from him. But it was a kind of ugly chapter that came to a close only really at the end of last year. And so this was the backdrop for then the school board elections that come up in the following spring. And so there was an effort to push further with more changes that they could put into place.

I mean, it seems like you’re laying out a school district that has a lot going on. What kind of impact did Patriot Mobile’s involvement and investment have for those school board races?

Well, these are races where really only a few thousand dollars is spent by a campaign. And here you had Patriot Mobile allocating $420,000 to 11 different candidates.

Right, right. If you want to focus on national politics, maybe that $400,000 doesn’t go that far. But when you’re looking at a school board race or a local race, that’s essentially bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. That has a big impact.

Right, that money goes in just a dramatic way in these little races where people — name recognition is quite low, if it exists at all. And people go to the polls out of a sense of duty often on a day that’s unusual. This was a vote that was in May that didn’t have any other races besides a couple of local ones happening. So that spending had just a tremendous effect.

I mean, they won each of the 11 races where they favored a candidate. And in doing so, they put more conservative school board members on the boards of four school districts, solidifying control in some cases. And in the case of Grapevine Colleyville —

— actually flipping control from a board that had been more centrist to one that was decidedly much more conservative.

Say more about that.

There were a bunch of new policies that were under discussion. And once the school board flipped, those new policies that more tightly restricted books and changed the way students and their pronouns would be handled, those new policies passed easily. And so it changed the atmosphere in the schools pretty quickly. But the other thing that happened during that school board fight that kind of didn’t get as much attention, it sort of flew under the radar, was that the school board at the same time as they were voting changes to how books are handled and how transgender students are dealt with in the school and pronouns and all the hot button issues, they also changed the election rules.

What do you mean?

Well, what they decided to do is move from a system where you had to get a majority of the vote to win a seat on the school board to one where the person who had the plurality of the votes would win. And so the current system, if you don’t get a majority, there’s a runoff election between the two top vote getters. And what they said was, hey that system is too expensive and pointless in these small races where we can just say the person who has the most votes of the candidates who are running gets that seat. So this was presented as a cost saving measure. It’s completely within the rules of how these elections are run. You can either do a plurality system or one with runoffs.

But they changed this at this very heightened moment, and opponents of the new school board said they did it in order to preserve their majority. On the theory that the folks that are currently in control of the school board have a really animated and organized base of support, and that they could always turn out a plurality, 40 percent or so, of the voters. And as long as there was more than one other candidate they stood to hold on to those seats or even gain them with new candidates. So this is actually seen as a way of maintaining power by the folks in the school board, even if majority of voters were voting against them. As long as they could sort of split their opposition, they can hold on to their seats.

That feels like a pretty big success story.

Oh, certainly. And you’ve seen them get a ton of national attention for this in conservative circles. I mean, they were vetted at CPAC by Steve Bannon. And so they’ve kind of become these darlings of the far right here, especially those who really champion Christian values and want to see them more in place in policy.

At the local level, there’s few things that have more of an impact on the community than how your schools are run. It’s what’s taught on issues of race and gender. It’s what your children are coming home with and telling you about they know about the world. And so it’s a very direct kind of reflection back to conservatives of this changing society that they’re looking to push against. And so this is a very powerful space in order to try and take a little bit more control.

And so there’s this understanding of a larger political opportunity here to own the idea of parental rights. And you’ve already seen other communities sort of looking to their playbook and thinking about how it can be expanded. And it’s something that they’ve talked about, that they sort put this together and hope to be able to show other places that maybe don’t have the resources to develop plans of their own, kind of give them essentially this strategy for how to win.

A blueprint.

Exactly, exactly. And I talked to them about what’s next. And they were not really that interested in getting into the nitty gritty of where they plan to spend their money, especially after this election cycle here in Texas. But you can sort of see how the model might scale.

And for example, Fort Worth, which is the largest city in Texas that’s still run by Republicans, you have a mayor there who came up under a Republican who is fairly centrist. And that former mayor actually just lost the county race in the Republican primary to a candidate who is aligned with Patriot Mobile, and in fact, is friends with one of the folks who helped engineer Patriot Mobile strategy. And so you could sort of see them thinking we’re going to push not only school boards in a more conservative direction, but maybe also start to think about how to do that at the county level, and then at the level of one of the largest cities in the state of Texas.

And this feels critical, because as you said, these communities are core to the question of whether Texas flips. And that is core to the question of America’s political direction. It feels like a lot of that ties back to these communities, which is why you went there. So how should we think then about Patriot Mobile’s place in that larger story?

Well, it’s not that Patriot Mobile is this incredibly powerful operation. It is, at the end of the day, a local cell phone provider. But I think the point is that the conservative movement has these folks like Glenn who are really willing to put their money and their businesses in service of the values and the politics that they feel most strongly about.

And I think one of the things that something like Patriot Mobile and folks like Glenn and Jenny show, or at least what they’re trying to prove, is that even as the state changes demographically it doesn’t actually mean that they need to change their values, that the state needs to change the values that it’s had before. And I think what you’re seeing with this kind of very organized movement is a minority of folks, but one that’s quite organized and really animated in their values and in their politics, can be quite effective, especially against a majority that’s much more fractured and maybe doesn’t have the same kind of alignment around similar goals. And so you can imagine that this will play out, not just in these suburbs in Texas, but in suburbs in areas all over the country.

Yeah. I mean, it makes me think about one of the blind spots of the demographic destiny argument. The idea that when these changes happen, conservatives or Republicans who would have been politically hurt were just going to sit there and not do anything. They are creating the infrastructure to really wrest their community back to where they are, and even willing to change some rules to do that.

Well, that’s right. And I think the other thing that’s important to point out. And something that is notable when you go to Patriot Mobile, is that the folks that work there are quite diverse. It’s not an all White employee base. You have people of all backgrounds who are employed by the company, visibly.

And it’s sort of this idea that I think is overly simplistic, that the demographic change in Texas, which is largely towards Hispanics, that that wouldn’t mean necessarily that Democrats would take power. But I think we’ve seen, and especially what Glenn and folks like him are stressing, is the centrality of Christian values and of that kind of commonality that actually does cross racial lines in a place like Texas. And I think that may be core to the future of this kind of strategy of reaching across maybe racial divisions to find common ground on questions of values and how we should be raising our kids.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So grassroots Republicans, bonded by faith and motivated by fears of a changing country, have mobilized in local races to have an outsized impact. But this summer, they may have gone too far. And in doing so, given Democrats —

— something of their own to mobilize around.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s the thing, Republicans have been really good at using the system to their political advantage and changing certain rules to their own benefit, even when it’s out of step with the majority. The biggest example of that has to be the stacking of the Supreme Court with deeply conservative judges and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Nearly 6 in 10 adults disapprove of the court’s decision. So the question is, have conservatives gotten so out of step with the majority that there will be a backlash? One that benefits Democrats, and finally gives the party a rallying issue of their own.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has been sounding the alarm on Roe for years, an issue that most of the party largely ignored while Roe was still in place. Now that it’s been overturned, I wanted to ask her, can Democrats catch up to years of Republican unity? And is their biggest problem in how they deliver their message? Or is it the message itself?

So Gillibrand says the Democrats problem is not a failure of the party’s own messaging. Rather, it’s what she calls the corruption of Republicans. But when it comes to abortion, Democrats have, at times, tried to make protecting Roe a priority long before it was overturned. But it wasn’t a unified effort, and voters didn’t really respond. And I wanted to know if she thought that actually contributed to Roe being overturned.

What I hear from Senator Gillibrand and many prominent Democrats is that the party is hoping that backlash to overturning Roe has given them the opportunity to use the Republican blueprint and energize their own grassroots. But the Republican blueprint isn’t just reactive. It’s proactive.

From Patriot Mobile’s work in the Texas suburbs all the way to the Supreme Court, what Republicans have really done is craft a political strategy that anticipated the country’s changes and got ahead of them. So much so that it’s raised the bar for Democrats in these midterm elections and beyond. Now, Democrats have to do more than just defy expectations. They have to defy political gravity.

Next time, on the Run Up.

We talk to the woman whose vision for how to do that will be tested in November.

The Run Up is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez and Caitlin O’Keefe. It’s edited by Franny Carr Toth, Larissa Anderson and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano and Elisheba Ittoop. It was mixed by Dan Powell and fact checked by Caitlin Love. Special thanks Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, David Halbfinger, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Shannon Busta, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda and Maddy Masiello. See you next week.