Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. One of the biggest surprises in the recent elections was the change in party control of the Onondaga County Legislature, which Democrats won all six seats that they contested, shifting the balance of power from 12 to 5 in favor of Republicans, to 10 to 7 in favor of Democrats. Joining me today to parse out why that happened and what it might mean are two members of the legislature who won their elections. Maurice, or Mo Brown, a Democrat, represents the 15th district, which is made up of a ring within the city of Syracuse on the east, south and west sides, kind of like a horseshoe around the inner part of the city there. David Knapp, a Republican, represents the 12th district, which includes the towns of Pompey, Fabius, Tully, Lafayette, and parts of DeWitt and Manlius. And as full disclosure, I should also mention that Legislator Brown was a student way back when, in one of my classes at Syracuse University, and I've also worked with Legislator Knapp in a veterans-oriented program at the university. Legislator Brown, let me start with you. Did you expect your party to pick up this many seats in the legislature? Were you surprised?

Maurice Brown: A little surprised, but there were, you know, telling signs that this could happen. And we kind of prepared for the possibility that it might happen. I put it at 10% to someone before. When you looked around the country, there were similar swings. The most notable example locally, when, Congresswoman Stefanik was thinking about running or she was going to get an appointment with the Trump administration, she turned it down. And the rumor was because they were expecting that seat to be vulnerable. If the North Country seat is vulnerable, then everything else, you know, logically is in play. And that kind of held true, you know, we saw swings as big as I think 14 points in district four, but, and I think the average was like a nine point swing. So yeah, the community wanted something different.

GR: And Legislator Knapp, same question to you. Did you see this coming?

David Knapp: Well, you know, like Mo, you know, there were some concerning things for me. You know, I think there might have been a little complacency out there, number one, and number two, you know, certainly when early voting kicked off and we saw the enthusiasm of the Democrats coming out to vote and, you know, the makeup of the early vote, I was, you know, I was definitely concerned a little bit. You know, there was a few seats that I knew were going to be really, really difficult. But there was a few that I thought we were okay in, that it'd be closer than usual, but they probably pull it through, that didn't. And so from that standpoint, yeah, I was surprised that, in a couple of seats, I'm not surprised in a few others.

GR: I want to come back to something you mentioned and ask Legislator Brown about it in a second. But let me ask you this question first, Legislator Knapp.

DK: Yeah.

GR: You had the luxury of not having an opponent, as I recall.

DK: Yup.

GR: But you also still went door to door and talked to people, too, as I believe. So, did you get any kind of inkling from the ground that something was different this year from doorstep conversations?

DK: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think people were, you know, not as much looking at local issues as national issues, you know, in talking to them. And, you know, so there definitely was a concern, you know, with the government shut down, you know, being the way it was and, you know, and just, you know, the polarization of things at the national level that, you know, inevitably are going to, you know, siphon down to the local level. That was a concern. You know, I talked to, just yesterday, I talked to a friend of mine who's a Democrat. And, you know, good guy, known him forever. So I was talking to him about it, and he just said, you know, overall, I've been pretty satisfied with the governance of Onondaga County. And, you know, in years past, I would, you know, maybe, crossover and vote for a Republican and stuff. But he said this year, with everything going on, I just found myself, you know, staying on the Democrat line and not even thinking about, you know, something else. And so, you know, I think that was absolutely a big piece of it.

GR: Well, Legislator Brown, Legislator Knapp mentioned the enthusiasm from the early voting on the part of the Democrats. And I'm going to put my political scientist hat on here for a second. Usually when you see something like this, particularly something that is up and down the ballot, it's often turnout, it's more about turnout than persuasion. Was your sense that it was, part of the phenomenon was just more Democrats making the point of going out and voting in a local election, and then maybe capitalizing on that ambivalence that on the Republican side, that legislator Knapp mentioned?

MB: I think it was a combination of all the things. I want to say turnout was 29% last week, which I'm told isn't particularly high, but they are correct. Like Dem turnout was slightly higher, but there was also Republican turnout being slightly lower. Like it was a combination of things. I think we as the Democratic caucus that we're running, we did a good job of highlighting the similarities between the national and the local. And I think the, you know, the Republican Party didn't do a good enough job of standing up to Trump. We acknowledge that, you know, Trump is a problem. Trump is making it hard for Republicans to run, and he's making it hard for Americans to live. I have a bias, and I won't run from that. But at the same time, the community wants people who are going to stand up to him. And when the Republicans didn't do it, and we did, I think it just created such a playing field that favored us heavily and we kind of never yielded it.

GR: Well, let me build on something that you've said there, and I'll ask this question to Legislator Knapp, but it has to do with why now in the sense of Onondaga County. Because we do know that President Trump has not been especially popular here for a while. And, Legislator Knapp, do you think if we're trying to answer the question, why did this happen in this election, as opposed to say, you know, two years ago or two years before that, is it, do you think it's the phenomenon that Legislator Brown's pointing out that there was a sense that Republicans aren't doing enough to provide some kind of boundary or guardrail on this president?

DK: Yeah, you know, potentially. But, you know, there's a few local, you know, hot button issues too that probably didn't help us as far as, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the inquiry and for example, whether that's, you know, a good investment or not, you know, so that certainly, you know, didn't necessarily help our cause. But, you know, we still got to do a little bit of a postmortem on why Republicans didn't get out. You know, just as an example, town of Manlius had 600 Republicans less than 2023 come out and vote. And why, you know? It's not like they came out and voted against us, they just stayed home. And so, you know, and in a town like Manlius, that's, you know, very close. You can't, yeah, you're not going to win with 600 people staying home. And so, you know, that's something we need to work on. It's going to be really interesting this next year with at least Stefanik running for governor. I'm really curious to see how she runs as far as, you know, she's been pretty close with the Trump administration in the past. Curious to see how she does this.

GR: Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine in a blue state, she's going to have to separate a little bit, but we'll have to see. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Onondaga County legislators David Knapp and Maurice Brown. So, Legislator Brown, I'm curious, what difference is this going to make in the county's affairs and policies going forward? Legislator Knapp just mentioned the aquarium, for example. But what kinds of things do you see might be different than they would have been had the Republicans kept the majority?

MB: So, a lot of our candidates, myself included, we ran on transparency. One of the biggest things that we heard from voters at the doors was it just felt like decisions were happening around them. It feels like Micron is happening around them, it feels like the aquarium is happening around them, and they didn't really feel a part of that conversation. You know, this community, I think 81 is the biggest example, but we will discuss a topic. We will talk about the pros and cons of a big proposal for a long time. And it didn't happen with those projects, and it stood out to people. People want to be a part of government, people want a government that includes them. So it's something we plan on prioritizing as far as, you know, town halls, public forums, just ways for people to get more engaged with the government. I think that's a good start, and it's something we're, you know, looking forward to delivering on.

GR: Yeah. You mentioned several things I wanted to ask the two of you about. And so, Legislator Knapp, I’ll come back. You mentioned the aquarium, it has become something of a lightning rod of criticism for the McMahon administration and more generally, the legislature. Do you think there might be some blockage to it now, at this point?

DK: Well, you know, a lot of it has to do with what the legislature could do or can't do and where we are in the project. You know, I haven't talked to the county executive about it since the election. So, you know, I don't know what more contracts are in place, you know, a lot of the money's already been spent. I mean, the opening is, you know, nine months away. So, you know, it might be something where, you know, in that particular instance, you know, where the ship has sailed, so to speak. But, yeah, that's, you know, that's part of the discussion.

GR: And Legislator Brown, I definitely want to get your perspective on this. A big issue, at least it's been going on as long as I've been in Syracuse, which is now going on 35 years, is the relationship between the city and the surrounding towns and villages. And now we'll have a Democratic mayor and a Democratic majority in the legislature. Do you think that the city will have kind of a relatively stronger hand, or there'll be more active support for it at the county level than there was before?

MB: So I have a bias, I do represent a district located entirely within the city of Syracuse. So I would say, yeah, I would like for the city to be a bigger part of that conversation. Not necessarily that the city will have a disproportionate one. I just feel it's been balanced historically. So it's more balancing of that about, you know, 48% of the city residents pay 100% of the tax base. You know, we know these numbers. But a lot of the things that are located within the city, like the hospital, like the universities, these are the biggest, you know, job providers in the area. So like, the city is paying for those, but a lot of those, you know, employees, a lot of those jobs are going to Dewitt, are going to Salina or going to Cicero. So yeah, figuring out how to balance that, I think is going to be a lot easier said than done. But I do hope it's something we can, you know, prioritize. But because like I said, I do think historically it's been imbalanced, in favor of the suburbs at the expense of the city.

GR: And Legislator Knapp, so, you represent a mostly rural area geographically, and then you've got some suburbs then, too. And even those suburbs are kind of, some of them are a bit outer suburbs. Does this possibility of what I've suggested, does it concern you at all as a representative?

DK: No, actually no, not at all. Because I, you know, I always believe that the county can succeed if the city isn't succeeding. And, so over the years, you know, I actually in my original district had a one election district in outer Comstock, which was, that was an interesting district. But you know, so with like, with the Agriculture Council which I lead, for example, we've done a lot of work with urban agriculture to encourage, you know, we helped get the Brady Farm started which is a six acre farm on the south side of Syracuse, largest urban farm in the country. And, you know, working with the Martin Luther King School, you know, doing raised beds and things like that to, you know, talk about where your food comes from, growing your own food. And you know I voted years ago to help the city pave some streets when they were in tough shape, some of the streets around the county complex downtown and things like that, Adams Street and a few others. So, you know, I don't mind that at all. And obviously the lead issue is, you know, has no boundaries. It's in the city, in the towns, you know, a lot of old houses. My house was built in 1835, you know, there's lead paint all over the place. And so, I don't, you know, I don't see a problem. And I, you know, obviously a balance is what's needed. And, yeah, I've always said the city pays taxes too. So, yeah, no, I'm not afraid of that of that at all.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Onondaga County legislators Maurice Brown and David Knapp, and we've been discussing the recent county election results and what they might suggest going forward. Well, we've mentioned this a couple times, and my view, it's the elephant in the room for the county and the city… Micron. It's the biggest issue and opportunity for this region and at least a generation, perhaps more than that. But there have been concerns that have been raised about this project's impact, about how inclusively distributed the benefits from it will be, whether the city will start to become gentrified, who's going to take on the responsibility for the necessary growth and housing? As well as environmental and infrastructure concerns. This place is going to use a lot of energy, a lot of water. So, it's been my impression, and either one of you can correct me on this, but it's been my impression that most of those concerns have been the loudest on the Democratic side when they've been raised. And so, Legislator Knapp, I wanted to ask you this question first. Do you have concerns now that the county legislature has flipped and there is a Democrat in, going to be leading the city as mayor, do you have concerns that the progress on Micron might be impacted by this change in any way?

DK: No, I don't think so. I mean, you know, the Micron project gives us the, you know, the opportunity to, you know, not only grow the community but enrich the community. And, you know, I'm a believer in the old, you know, rising tide lifts all ships. You know, we have the opportunity to do that, but we have to be, you know, mindful that, you know, there's not one community that's bearing the brunt of it or one that's getting, you know, more of the benefit than others. You know, it's not just, you know, the city of Syracuse to be concerned about. I'm concerned about, you know, farmland protection and are we going to be, you know, paving over a lot of really, really rich farmland up there for housing developments or other things that, you know, might not be long term in our best interest. And so there's a lot of things to look at here, you know, I think the opportunity, you know, goes above local politics, obviously. You know, Senator Schumer has been very involved, you know, Governor Hochul as well. And so, you know, they're going to, you know, have a, you know, they're going to be talking to us about it too, if the pendulum swings, you know, too far one way or the other.

GR: And Legislator Brown, curious to get your take on this. So do you anticipate that some of these voices of concern, and maybe voices of dissent, may get more of a hearing now than they've had before?

MB: Yeah, I am. I do think more voices will be heard and there will be more outreach than in the past, but I more think it's just the misinformation. So, I'm very informed on the project because I sit in this position, but like the average citizen isn't. So, the average citizen has questions that I just don't have because I'm able to do that much homework. I want to bring the average citizen into it, because I think once they learn, you know, about the project, they'll be into it too, I call it the, you know, the Micron promise. It’s something that's not been offered to our children before, but we're going to be able to say, if you graduate from Corcoran High School, if you graduate from Henninger in three years, you can be making 80 grand plus in your community, like to give back to your own community. We've never been able to offer that to our young people, and I think that's wholly worth pursuing because that's life changing, it's generational changing. But at the same time, if that promise costs us, you know, a great lake, if it cost us a Finger Lake because of the environmental damage, then we have to, you know, pump the brakes and evaluate how we're doing this. But having done my homework, there are, you know, reasons for pause, but no reason for stop. I think we just need to do a better job of explaining to people what's going on, how the process is happening. And because we haven't done that, there's so much skepticism, there's so much criticism of it. But I think once we do that and more people learn about it, I think more people will get on board and get excited about it like I am.

DK: I think this delay that was just announced the last week, you know, I know a lot of people were disappointed by that. Quite frankly, I'm not. It gives us a little more time to catch our breath and, you know, we were going at a really serious clip there for a while, and so it's good to, yeah, maybe slow down a little bit and give us an opportunity to, yeah, make sure everybody's getting all the information they need. Yeah, I don't mind that a bit.

GR: And let me just be clear on that, ask either of you. Do either of you have any concerns about Micron's commitment to this changing at all because of that, no?

MB: No sir, no sir.

DK: No, I don't think so. I think long term we're good.

GR: Okay. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guests are Onondaga County legislators David Knapp and Maurice Brown. Legislator Brown, I wanted to ask you this question, and it's a bit more sensitive. But it's a question about politics and race. And so just thinking about this election, we're going to have the first African-American mayor in Syracuse that we've ever had. Syracuse was one of two of the big five cities that didn't have an African-American mayor. The Democratic leader of the legislature, the minority leader is a woman of color. You have announced, it's part of the official record, that you're interested in becoming the chair of the legislature.

MB: Yes sir.

GR: You would be the first African-American chair of the legislature, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong on that.

MB: You are correct.

GR: Is this kind of, do you think we're at sort of an inflection moment, a threshold moment for where Syracuse is with race and politics? I don't know how you want to think about that question, but I'm curious just to see, you know, whatever your thoughts are.

MB: I mean, I think to ignore it would be irresponsible, like, full stop. It is historic. The election of Sharon Owens is literally once in a lifetime. That representation matters. To be able to see yourself in your mayor is huge, and there are people who are going to be able to see themselves in the mayor that never could before, full stop. But I don't want it to take away from that, you know, Sharon Owens has been doing great work in this community for decades. Like, she is duly qualified of her own accord. And, you know, I'd say the same about myself. I'd say the same about Lita Hernandez. Should one of us become chair, you know, we, I am a man of color, I am a black man, I will always be, there's no way around that. Lita Hernandez is, you know, Afro-Latina, she can't run from that. But I like to think that I'm qualified outside of that. You know, I served in the military, I, you know, degrees from OCC and SU. I'm connected to this community. I am qualified of my own accord. But to ignore, you know, that historic moment would be irresponsible. But I don't think it'll be as historic when we look back 10, 15 years from now, because I think it'll be a lot more common than it is at this very moment.

GR: Well, you were in my class. That should just end any discussion about that. (laughter)

MB: Exactly. I'm perfectly qualified, training of Grant Reeher.

GR: That's what we like to hear.

DK: Top of the resume right there, absolutely.

GR: So, we’ve got about 3 or 4 minutes left, and I kind of want to take some time with this last topic here. And Legislator Knapp, I'll come to you with this first. Now that the legislature is in Democratic hands, or will be in January, does it have any effect on the races for county executive or the races for Congress or, you know, or maybe just think about the transition that we just went through. The fact that there was this pretty big swing, we've only ever had Republican county executives. How do you think this is going to matter down the road?

DK: You know, it certainly makes, you know, gives people on the Democrat side an opportunity to, you know, be out there more, be in the media more, you know, and, and be heard. So, you know, as far as building a bench, so to speak, as we, you know, as we say, you know, on the political side, you know, it absolutely gives them the ability to, you know, to get more people in the mix and get their voice out that much more. So it could absolutely have an impact on the next county executive race in a couple of years or other races for higher office, absolutely.

GR: Do you think that this thing has put a chill down the spine of Ryan McMahon?

DK: You know, again, I haven't really had a long conversation with him. But, you know, I think, you know, if I was him, I'd certainly be, you know, reassessing some things about, you know, how we're doing things in communication and things like that. I still think he has an absolutely tremendous resume to run on and, you know, a lot of accomplishments. So, you know, from that standpoint, you know, he's in a nice spot. But no, you've got to keep evolving in this business or, you know, you can very, very, very quickly all of a sudden find yourself, you know, a dinosaur, so to
speak.

GR: And Legislator Brown, I was curious to get your perspective on this, too. Does this change the way that you see these big elections coming up?

MB: I think that, you know, I come from sports. It's like a track game. I think that we can't fall into that trap. Folks didn't elect us because they want us to, you know, run for higher office. You know, some of my colleagues are thinking about the executive's race or what seats can we pick up next year? But we have a chance to help people. We've not been able to do that, especially as Democrats. But we have a chance to, you know, have our voice be the loudest in county government it's ever been and we can influence policy. We can use the levers of government to help people. And I think that should be our first priority. Do we forget about the upcoming elections? Of course not. But I think that they go hand in hand. And if you're worried about winning the election and not worried about actually helping people, you can't catch both. Whereas if you try and help people, it will spill over into elections.

GR: That makes sense. Well, we're just about at the end of our time. But, you know, I was thinking about this. We're talking two days after Veterans Day, and I'm talking to two veterans. Remind me, Legislator Brown of your service branch.

MB: Yep. So I was a military police officer in the United States Army.

GR: Okay, you have that in common with Legislator Knapp, then?

DK: Absolutely.

GR: Because I know that he is an Army veteran and actually a West Point graduate. So, on behalf of the program and myself and anybody listening, let me just as a close wish both of you a happy Veterans Day, two days late. But thank you both for your service. Both as in the military, but also in the county legislature, it's a very important public service that doesn't always get the attention it deserves. So, thanks to both of you, really appreciate you taking the time for being on the program.

DK: Thank you.

MB: Thanks for your support, it’s appreciated.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media Conversations and the Public Interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Well, we had another election, and the results have set the political classes completely chattering. Here with me to parse out some of the real meanings from the results are New York State Assemblymember Pam Hunter, a Democrat, and Town of Salina Supervisor Nick Paro, a Republican. Democrats seem to have had a good night across the country, up and down the ballot. And I want to note that one of the Republican casualties of that night was Supervisor Paro, whom I had invited on the program prior to Election Day, but nonetheless graciously and gamely agreed to still come on and help us to understand what happened. So, Supervisor Paro, thanks so much for that, and Assemblymember Hunter, thanks as always. Welcome back on the program to both of you.

Pam Hunter: Thank you.

Nick Paro: Thank you so much.

GR: All right, well, Supervisor Paro, aside from your own race, obviously, what was the most important takeaway, do you think, from the elections on Tuesday?

NP: Yeah, you know, you saw a revolt, I'd call it a revolt, against the Republican Party. I think unfortunately, politics nowadays have become more about a label and less about the individuals. We've seen this shift occur probably over the last ten, fifteen years. It may have started even earlier than that, but it's definitely been energized. What your party affiliation I think is matters most to voters, and right now voters are very upset with the Republican Party, and they're upset with the person who leads the Republican Party, and that's Donald Trump. A lot of Republicans voted for him because they liked what he was saying on the campaign trail, and now we're seeing things that he's doing that are beyond what he had promised. They're more extreme than what we had signed up for, and we're seeing the results of that. I do like the caution, though. I don't think the results for the Republicans are as devastating as some people would take it. I think in Onondaga County, where I'm from and the results of my election, I do think we're seeing something that's much more of a shift than we are seeing elsewhere. But if you look, my example would be Nassau County. Nassau County voted Republican, right? You still were able to keep the countywide seats there, they were Republican. In Auburn, right around the corner from us, they just elected a Republican city councilor. And down in Binghamton, Binghamton kept their Republican mayor. So, you see these in other areas, but in Onondaga County, Central New York, you saw a large shift. Democrats won around the entire ballot. And then if you look at Virginia, New Jersey, those results were similar to 2017. So they were expected, they weren't as extreme as we imagined. But in Central New York, we're looking at a major shift.

GR: Well, what would you attribute that to? Because your original diagnosis was kind of a, you know, a rejection of or a reaction against Donald Trump. But what was different about the reaction here? Why?

NP: So, one of the cool things about our country, about our state is you have different people that live in different areas, they have different motivations. Central New York has this very specific characteristic. The people that live here have a different personality. They have different things that are important to them. And I think some of the things that are important to them are the complete opposite of what's important to Donald Trump and the Republican Party at the national level. You talk about that raid, the ICE raid that took place in Cato, that's not something that people signed up for. Just two days before the election, you talk about those two folks that were that are being held in an ICE facility in Batavia, they were employees at a local hospital. It's not something people in central New York signed up for. Those are things that mattered. And I also, I think the government shutdown, in Central New York we have people that that's affected deeply and those are things that they're rejecting.

GR: Okay, fair enough. Assemblymember Hunter, what do you think your most important takeaway from the elections?

PH: I do agree very much that, voters across the country send a clear message that they're just tired of broken Republican promises. And similar to what Supervisor Paro had said, it's not what people signed up for. I think that closing a border is different than scooping up people in your neighborhood who are hard working, who were, had legal papers to be working. That is something very different than the notion that criminals were going to be the ones scooped up. But also, you know, I think here locally too, especially as you look at the county legislature, there's been a lot going on in the county that people, I think, just are just tired. You know, when you're hearing SNAP benefits are going to be taken away, and yes, this is a federal issue, you need to make sure that those people who are providing social net services, which is the county, you want them to make sure that they're standing up and saying, hey, hey, hey, not on our watch, we're going to make sure we take care of our citizenry. That was not, you know, what was communicated. When you're hearing money for an aquarium, you're hearing, you know, money, huge tax breaks for Micron that could take away from school districts and the monies that they need, all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, these are some of the things that we aren't getting to vote on that that's impacting our lives? But also tariffs, you know, people can't afford anything. Right now, people are going to be going through their health insurance premium increases, all of this is happening right now. A shutdown, tariffs, premium increases, SNAP benefits decrease. And we saw across the country, but more specifically in Onondaga County that this is not what voters want. This is not what people sign up for and they want something different. And it's up to the people who are elected, to make sure that they can keep promises and keep what they said, that they are going to do, that they do those things, they take care of affordability, that they're being transparent as they said that they wanted to be. And I think that will be something that we have to look for in the days coming up.

GR: Well, you mentioned the Onondaga County Legislature, and I did want to ask both of you about that, because I guess my big takeaway was, me and a lot of other people that do commentary on this kind of thing, we're looking in the wrong place in a lot of ways. I mean, we kept talking about Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Prop 50, and of course those are all important things. And Supervisor Paro, you made some really good points about those other races, the New Jersey and the Virginia one, I think is important to remember, placing them in a historical context. But, I think it was down ballot where the real, to me, the real surprising stuff was. I mean, did anybody see the flipping of the legislature coming, at the county level? And beyond that, all of the races that were contested by Democrats were won by Democrats. I mean, the new ones, those six seats. So, I mean, Supervisor Paro, I mean, do you agree with Assemblymember Hunter's diagnosis? It had a lot to do with SNAP benefits and other things, or was it's more of a, just a deep reaction to the president again?

NP: Yeah. All due respect, Assemblywoman Hunter, I’m going to disagree with you. And I understand a lot of the talking points that you touched on, I think are important, especially from your side of the aisle, to try to take credit for some of the victory. But unfortunately, if that's the case, then you wouldn't have seen a sweep in the New York State Supreme Court seventh district over in Cayuga County, Monroe County. You wouldn't have seen three of the four Supreme Court justices here in the fifth district, all Democrats, they win. Those races have nothing to do with SNAP benefits, those races have nothing to do with an aquarium. Those are five other counties, in fact, that were involved in the fifth Supreme Court district. They won strictly because their label was Democrat and the other people's labels were Republican. Mind you, one Republican won, Judge McCluskey, he was an incumbent. He was obviously one of the lowest vote getters to win in the fifth Supreme Court district. But when you are able to see, when you see losses like this that are from different political offices and from different sections of our community, and like you said, Grant, all the contested races went Democrat, there's something much larger than, I think, specific issues. We're talking now, like I said, just a revolt. This was a sending a message that we don't like a monolith of a party, which is the Republican Party in this case. We have an emotional response to them and what's occurring. Now, the factors that you put in, those all may accumulate to it, but they don't transcend Supreme Court justice races. Those become more, well, you're just a Republican, we don't like what the Republican Party's doing, so we're voting against all Republicans. You know, and what happened in Onondaga County legislature, again, it was a revolt against the Republican Party. They were making a statement to Republicans. We don't like what you're doing. I think you're going to see a little bit of a correction to that. Some people did a vote, but also in Onondaga County, there's been a shift for a while. This has been building up. I think your side of the aisle has known that this is building and you guys have been taking advantage of that for the last few years. This was the watershed moment where you guys have finally broke through. Onondaga County has been shifted this way for some time, and we were expecting this to come. I think everybody expected it next year, but this was coming, we knew it was coming. It just happened a little bit earlier, and it's the way it is. I think the Republican Party has a lot of work to do to rebrand themselves, and I don't think they're going to be able to do it in the short term. I think this is going to be a long-term project by the Republican Party.

PH: I think that's true, that the shift has changed for sure. And while we are celebrating this overabundance of Dems winning on Tuesday night, this has been a long, concerted effort. This is not just something that just started this year. You know, we've been picking up races here and there. You know, obviously we have three of the four countywide races that are Dems right now. But looking at towns like a Salina, looking at Marcellus, looking at picking up seats in Onondaga, whether it's a specific to SNAP, ICE, aquarium, etc., I think that the, it is loud and clear that folks are just not buying in to the message that is the broken Republican Party that they are not wanting to support. And if they can pick an issue, whether it's SNAP or ICE or whatnot, I think clearly people were just going right down row A regardless of what race it was for and more Dems vote than Republicans and this is what happens. But if you look in towns like Clay, huge overwhelming upset, you're expecting Dems to win in the city, you're expecting Dems to win a majority dem districts. You're not expecting Dems to sweep in a Salina or in the Clay, where the enrollment doesn't necessarily reflect that. Even though there is a Democratic majority in Salina, what happened in Salina didn't reflect the demographics. So, the same thing in Cicero with the Supervisor, and we're going to wait to see what happens. And I think that is just either, a couple of things, Republicans stayed home, and also the sentiment of what is happening is just not where we need to be. But again, people vote and then it is the responsibility of those elected to deliver on what they say they're going to. And it can't be over-promising under-delivering because people are struggling right now. And that is real. And that affordability, you know, mantra where you just keep saying it's in your pocketbook, in your pocketbook that really resonates with people as they can't afford food. I was just, anecdotally, was in Utica yesterday and they do a Feed Our Vet every single Wednesday for veterans. I go and, you know, partake and see my fellow veterans. They had more people in line yesterday that I have ever seen. And I asked the gentleman in charge like, what's going on? It's never usually like this. And he said, it's all new people because their benefits were taken away. So this is what's going on, and I think the federal shutdown hasn't helped.

GR: Well, it sounds like in the main, the two of you are in agreement. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with State Assembly member Pam Hunter and Town of Salina Supervisor Nick Paro, and we've been discussing the recent election results and what they might suggest going forward. So, Assemblymember Hunter, you served was Zohran Mamdani in the Assembly, he's a party colleague of yours. What was he like to work with? Is he a workhorse, or is he a show horse?

PH: I did, and I do. He's obviously still in the assembly until the end of this year. I think it’s very interesting because he obviously is a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. He, and there are few others in our conference who, their mantra has been they sing from the same songbook. They say every single talking point exactly the same, and so they move as they bloc, they move as the democratic socialists in our party. And so, if you're talking about an activist, I think that in many ways, the DSA members, they have their talking points that they get from their leadership from the DSA, and they don't vary, you know, deviate from that at all. And so, in some ways, I don't know if I was able to see the individual Zohran that is apart from the DSA because they were all always together in their thought process and their communication. And that's how it works, right? It's not really very dissimilar than Tea Party. You're all saying the same thing, you keep saying the same things over and over.

GR: Is what you're saying then that in the Assembly, Mamdani was sort of an ideologue.

PH: Very much an ideologue. I think, you know, very much the DSA platform. They were very committed to that and that is not something that they detracted from. That's not something they shied away from, they weren't embarrassed to say that. I mean, literally, that was their identification. There is something different between being an advocate legislator and there is something different than somebody who is an executive, you have to deliver now. It is not pointing the finger at someone else that they're to blame. You are responsible for successes and failures, and I think this is going to be the tipping point to see how that works, because, you know, some of the ideology that the DSA espouses is not necessarily moderately accepted. And I think this is going to be a huge, I'm not taking away that the grassroots, the amount of people who helped and volunteered, and they pivoted from public safety that was the very first, you know, thing that they were going to work on as his platform, polling said affordability, and they ran with that. And it worked because people, their pocketbook, it matters. How do you deliver that? Zohran the mayor is going to have to figure that out.

GR: Supervisor Paro, sticking with this for a moment, Assemblymember Hunter made it very clear just how far to the left this guy is and has been. But one of the things that struck me was he seemed to even go beyond that in his victory speech relative to his campaign speeches, and just a couple things. I mean, he starts right out of the gate quoting Eugene Debs, you know, this pretty hard driving socialist from about 100 years ago and then tells Donald Trump, ‘turn the volume up’, which I was literally scratching my head when he said that. So, what's your sense from your perspective of this guy?

NP: Yeah. I mean, look, I'm a little, shocked is probably not the word. But he's taking 50.4% of the vote and calling it a mandate. I've never seen somebody who got such a thin margin for over 50% of the vote and run so far towards his corner of the political field, it's a little astonishing. I think he should have a little bit of a reality check that, you know, we're looking at, what is it, 49.6 (percent) of the people in New York City did not vote for him. They were very skeptical of what he's offering in his positions, and he needs to figure out how to govern, to represent 100% of New York City. But this is what we all knew was going to happen. The guy is a democratic socialist. I think that the democratic socialist brand is truly a red herring. I don't I don't really find that to be, that's a modern ideology, but it's really a socialist ideology from the early 1900’s. You even said it, Eugene Debs, he quoted Eugene Debs. Eugene Debs ran as a socialist, there was no democratic in front of it. I think this is a wing of the party that Assemblywoman Hunter and them are going to have to deal with. This is going to be a struggle. We have it on our side. Both parties have these wings of the, that we have to work with or work through somehow. This is something the Democrats are going to have to deal with. He didn't vote for himself on the Democrat line, he voted for himself on the working families line, he in fact voted straight working families line. That's just another example of the fact that he doesn't truly identify as a Democrat. He identifies himself as a socialist and he thinks the Working Families Party is a socialist party, even though they have a name that seems to be a lot more moderate than it is. So, I'm not surprised. I'm truly, I'm actually interested to see, I don't live in New York City, so it gives me a little bit more of a, I can relax my shoulders a little bit and observe to see what happens. I am nervous, though. The policies he's talking about we've seen elsewhere in the world. I mean, the city run grocery stores, we know what happened in Venezuela with that. We've seen this stuff before, it never seems to work. I'm shocked that people might, he's the same age as me, he's 34 years old. I'm just shocked at the lack of understanding of what some of his policies have done elsewhere in the world. Why would they be successful today? And what makes him so special that he can make some of these policies work? I'm unsure.

PH: I don’t think it's just that, though. I think it's the talking to people like where they are. If you see, like, the young people in New York City and you know, you're talking about what resonates with you, they're like, they literally were saying they didn't care about other people. They cared about their pocketbook, and he said that he was going to help us freeze the rent and have affordable. And that's in the pocketbook of people.

NP: That's a scary sentiment that these people, that these folks, you know, they're missing history. They're missing an educational component of, well, how do you help people's pocketbooks? We have a great example in America, what makes life easier, what makes life better, what makes life more affordable and it's capitalist ideology, it's capitalist policies. You know, who said it…

PH: We’re not going to be able to get to that if you can't pay for bread and food. I think the foundational things that folks need, you need to start from there before you can get to that.

GR: Yeah, I can see and I think you folks are making sort of overlapping points rather than directly oppositional lines. But I, Assemblymember Hunter, I get what you're saying about that appeal and why it resonated and who it resonated with. Let me though, stick with you, and it's something that I've heard the last couple days from the Democrats who are the most celebratory of the election, but I'm suspicious about it. And it's the idea that these returns showed that this broad coalition of different kinds of Democrats can stay together. So, you know, they'll say, look, look at Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. She's a much more centrist Democrat, she won. Mamdani won in New York, much more to the left. The problem that I see with only seeing this as a good thing, for me, is that this difference within the Democratic Party, and Supervisor Paro already spoke to it, you know, it's a fundamental feature going on with both parties, but it's also been around for a long time. And so this particular rift within the Democratic Party is at least 40 years old. And when we get to 2028, the party's going to have to choose one. They can have one as a vice president, I suppose, but they're going to have to choose one at the top of the ticket. So is there some kind of coming together that you see for Democrats, Assemblymember, other than just the deep dislike and reaction against Trump that we've already been talking about?

PH: I think a lot of it has to do a couple of different things. If you're talking about Pam, you know, the legislator, you know, elected person is different than Pam the constituent Democrat who, you know, sometimes is not happy with the Democratic Party, right? I'm not happy with, you know, some of the actions that they do and some of the inaction, quite frankly. But I think a lot of it has to do with, you are really only given the option of A or B, okay, maybe A with a working family line or a B with a conservative line, but you're really, you're not given, A are you voting moderate, are you voting left? Are you voting progressive? You're either voting A or B, and then it's for us to figure out after A has been elected, how do we do this together? And I think that you will see that in some of the towns that went, you know, blue you'll see that on the county ledge, how are they able to work together? Because every one of those county legislators are not left, they're not socialists. And that's okay, that's the way this melting pot works. But it has to work in order to be able to move a community forward and not be self-serving for a political platform.

GR: So, quick follow up then I want to get Supervisor Paro to weigh in on a different topic unless he wants to comment on this one. Let's just say Tuesday is kind of our classroom, okay? Democrats now are thinking about 2028. What is the lesson that they draw from that regarding who their nominee should be? Because I don't see a clear one.

PH: I think that's something that needs to be worked out. I don't have an answer for that. I don't, you know, have an answer for that today. I mean, Gavin Newsom is like beating his chest and like, you're the guy in 2028. I'm trying to get people food for Thanksgiving. I mean, literally, I think that is a political strategy that is kind of outside of my sphere as of today. But I think those conversations, it has to happen with the Democratic Committee, it has to happen with the Assembly Conference committee, the Senate, and it needs to happen at county level. I think really, you know, the county apparatus is just a legal entity to get Dems or Republicans on the ballot. Really, I think people think it's the Democratic Party, it isn't. It's a committee whose legal responsibility is to get these folks on the ballot. It's the committee members and the universe that kind of works together to make this happen. And there’s not, if we're looking for one savior, that person is not going to come.

GR: Okay, fair enough. Supervisor Paro, I know your party's going to have to sort this out too in 2028, and it'll have similar interesting conversations. But let me ask you this if I could. The California voters voted overwhelmingly 2 to 1 to gerrymander their districts in the name of small ‘d’ democracy. (laughter) Sort that one out in our heads. But my concern about this, and I wanted to know how you see this is, what's the next shoe to fall and where is this all going to end? Do you have any sense about this? I mean, Texas is doing its thing. Some other states have said they're going to do it, now California is definitely going to do it, they've got the backing of the voters to do it. Where does, where do we end up on all this?

NP: Well, look, I'm going to fire a shot here and say this, New York State did it first, right?

GR: Oh, yeah, true, true.

NP: This actually started, you know, back in ‘24. You guys gerrymandered three, you sued the special master and gerrymandered three congressional districts. And now you had three more, Democrat congressmen. Texas decided to respond, California responds. You know, I'm nervous about the filibuster in the Senate, to tell you the truth. That could be the next shoe that drops. The stakes are only going to get higher and I think we just got to recognize that's going to happen. We're on the climb right now. And this is something, as young as I am, this is something that I know and I learned this from some mentors of mine. Politics is cyclical, and this isn't going to be the way it's going to be forever. But right now, I think we're still on the climb and I only think this is going to get worse before it gets better. But we're going to hit a point where I think we will have a reset. We're going to have things go back to a little bit of a calmer, more sensible way to handle things. And, you know, truthfully, I could imagine that'll be in 2030. I truly think that we're in the midst of this climate now and there's not going to be a short-term solution, but I think, 2030 or so, we're going to see a shift, a different type of politics, something that we can recognize a little bit. That's some hopeful thinking…

GR: Yeah.

NP: ..but I think that's where we're going. Just expect it to get worse before it gets better, I think.

GR: All right, yeah. Well, let me let me ask you.

PH: (unintelligible)

GR: Oh, I'm sorry, let me follow up with Nick and then, Assemblymember, I'll give you the last word, but these are just super quick things. Filibuster, just tell me the percentage of your estimate that it's going to end anytime soon, just a one word hit.

NP: The government shut down?

GR: No, filibuster, the filibuster.

NP: 75% it'll end, so that way they can open the government.

GR: Oh my goodness, okay. And last question for you, Assemblymember Hunter. We're out of time, but give me your percentage estimate that, either chamber is going to flip in 2026 and at the at the national level.

PH: I think it's pretty high. That's usually what happens midterms after a presidential election. So, I'm not a gambler, but I have to say it's going to be the percentage necessary to get over so that 50% plus one will be enough to be able to take back the house. I don't know if both of them, but I definitely think one of the houses will definitely, the margins are too slim right now anyway, and if the trajectory keeps happening, I don't foresee that not happening.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Nick Paro and Pam Hunter. Again, Supervisor Paro, Assemblymember Hunter, thanks again for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

PH: Thank you.

NP: Absolutely.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. We're in the thick of football season, and we always try to have at least one program on the sport every year. My guest today is Ken Belson, the longtime New York Times reporter. He's covered both the playing and the business side of the NFL, and he has a new book out. It's titled, "Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut." Mr. Belson, welcome to the program.

Ken Belson: Thanks for having me on, appreciate it.

GR: Thanks for making the time, we appreciate it. So, we'll get into exactly who did what for the NFL. But first, I just want you to give our listeners an overall sense of this. What have been the biggest changes in the NFL since the, say, the late 1980s that have turned it into this cultural and economic juggernaut that's in the title of your book?

KB: Yeah, I think the biggest is media. The NFL, like all the leagues, had pretty cozy relationships with the networks over the years. And if you think back to the late 80s, even into the early 90s, there was basically three types of packages. There was the AFC package, NFC package, and Monday Night Football. And there were only three bidders, ABC, NBC and CBS. That was kind of it. There was a little bit of cable, ESPN had started to get in, but it was more or less a cozy relationship. And the networks did well, and the league sort of did well, but the growth wasn't really there. It took a fellow named Jerry Jones, a born and bred entrepreneur, to look at that and say, why aren't we running an auction? Which is sort of standard business practice. So he invited, or brought into the fold, a fellow named Rupert Murdoch. And Rupert was desperate to grow his network. If you remember, back in those days, it was Bart Simpson and In Living Color, that was Fox TV at that point. So, by bringing that fourth bidder to the table, the media rights exploded. Rupert outbid CBS, CBS regretted it, came back at double the price four years later. So, that was both a big moment for the NFL, it Was kind of an inflection point, but also for all sports. The NBA saw this, Major League Baseball saw this. So across the sports landscape, you had bidding wars for property rights. And that, of course, changed the economics of network television as well.

GR: And so, you know, you pull out Jerry Jones, you've just said something about why you would choose him, but you've also got Robert Kraft. Why do these two owners, why are they so much more important than all the other owners?

KB: Well, they joined the league at this critical point. Back in the 80s, fans of a certain age will remember there were work stoppages. There was a strike, a brief strike in 1987, there were scab players, it was a bad time for the league. They weren't growing well, there was fear of losing games. A fellow named Paul Tagliabue was, longtime general counsel of the league was, or outside counsel to the league, was elected commissioner. And he saw that this was not a stable business model. And so he really worked hard with Dan Rooney of the Pittsburgh Steelers, as the kind of peacemaker amongst the owners and Gene Upshaw to set a foundation for the league. And that included free agency, of course, and the salary cap to offset it, but really revenue sharing. The league and the union finally became, I guess, what we would call partners. And they weren't adversaries in the same way they had been for generations, really. So that that also put a floor under the league. And Jerry and Robert came in at this time, they both had paid record amounts for their teams, they both went heavily in debt to do that and they were hungry to pay back their loans. It's that simple. They had to fix their franchises. The Cowboys were losing $1 million a month. The Patriots were always the last in the league in revenue. So they had some homework to do there. But they also, and this is really where they stand out amongst other owners, they got very involved in league business very quickly. All owners do to some degree, but those two really embraced it. I gave the example of Jerry, you know, bringing Rupert Murdoch to the table. Robert, very quickly. now, he owned part owner of a CBS affiliate in Boston before he owned the team, so he knew the guys at CBS. And guess what? He brought them back to the table for the AFC package at twice the price. So both of them realized, we got to grow the whole pie, we'll share in that, of course, but the league itself will benefit from that.

GR: One of the things that I was surprised to recall when I was reading through your book and you just mentioned this, was the fact that the price of the Cowboys when Jones bought it was a record price.

KB: Yeah.

GR: And when I look at the figure and I think, oh man, did he get that cheap, I mean, from today's perspective, he did. But I had sort of created the memory that he bought it cheap at the time. But no, it was considered a real gamble at the time.

KB: Yeah, it was a gamble 115 for the team and then he had to buy the stadium and absorb some debt. I think it came to $140 or 50 million. But you got to remember, this was when the SNL crisis was going on in Dallas, in Texas. The oil market had fallen. So the local economy was doing terribly. The team wasn't good, and they weren't selling suites and tickets. So the team was kind of on its back, and yet he still paid a record amount for it. But yeah, nine figures, wow, now it's easily ten, and someday will be 11 figures for a team. So, yeah, it seems cheap now, but the, you know, the cost of money back then was what it was.

GR: Interesting. So I don't know Kraft and his story as well as I know Jerry Jones. But to me, they seem like just two very different kinds of owners and personalities. Aside from, again, you know, making the purchases of the teams at the times when you note. And the other thing I thought they had in common right off the bat is they both had controversial hires as head coaches, you know, Jimmy Johnson for the Cowboys, Bill Belichick for the Patriots. But, you know, you have you have Kraft, who is this Jewish kid, he went to Columbia on academic scholarship, Harvard Business School. And then, as you say, Jones, you know, the entrepreneur, the oil tycoon, he went to Arkansas on an athletic scholarship. How, as you were researching these people, you've talked to them, you know them, how do you assess kind of their core similarities and differences?

KB: Yeah, I actually found they had more in common than I thought. I very much saw what you saw. Boston, South, you know, they're roughly the same age, but very different background, I thought, very different backgrounds. It's really very different styles. They both had dads who were very influential in their lives. Both of their fathers were small businessmen, both left college and went right into business as entrepreneurs. Jerry had the audacity at 23 years old to try and buy the San Diego Chargers and went to Jimmy Hoffa’s pension fund to get a line of credit. It didn't work out, obviously. Robert bought a tennis franchise fairly early on. Both are really, true fans of those teams. I mean, people like to say the owners are just about the money, but they both really love the sport and both love their teams. Robert was a season ticket holder at the woe begotten Schaefer Stadium from the 70s with his kids. So I think that's genuine. And the other thing is they're very, they think big, and not every owner does that. There were a lot of owners, particularly back then, who were very comfortable, you know, getting their checks and their dividends and so forth. A lot of owners back then had inherited their teams. So it wasn't the same entrepreneurial spirit. And those two guys, because they had businesses outside the league when they joined, were really kind of the new breed, I guess, back then.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Ken Belson, the author of "Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut." So, you mentioned that both of them had gone into debt to buy these teams. I had also the sense that though Jones from like a family financial perspective, was all in, I mean, it was all or nothing for him. Whereas Kraft, I thought, had more money kind of available. I mean, he wasn't like, didn't sink everything he had into the team. I was just thinking, particularly for Jones, do you think that all-or-nothing investment influenced and fueled some of, not only his approach to the team, but also the league in the way that you've already been describing in terms of television contracts and thinking about those things?

KB: Yeah, there's a hunger to Jerry, or maybe a desperation. I mean, look, he made a lot of money in the oil and gas business, that's an all-or-nothing kind of business. You take your shots. He also understood, and I mentioned how they both love football, they both understood the power of the NFL brand in a kind of visceral way. There's a great quote in the book from Robert about Jerry. Jerry is one of these sort of irrepressible salespeople whose constantly got balls in the air, juggling, thinking of ideas out loud, pushing other people in the direction he hopes they'll go in. Robert said, Jerry could charm a dog off a meat truck. And it really kind of encapsulated the energy around him and the bone that’s always in his, whatever the bone of the moment is, he hangs on to it. Robert's a very different character. It's not that he's uninterested in making money or closing a deal; he's more a diplomat. And the ideas don't necessarily bubble from Robert, but when the ideas are out there, he finds a way to create, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, a win-win. And he's willing to leave some money on the table because he sees this as a long-term play. And that's particularly true in the TV contract world. CBS, let's be honest, even after their merger now, they can't compete with Amazon or Netflix. Those two companies could buy out all of the rights if they really wanted to or could. So, Robert understands, hey, we got to help all of our partners in this endeavor.

GR: Interesting. And so I want to join some of these financial things with the actual things that go on on the football field and the success of the teams, in terms of their playing. And I've got this pet theory, actually, about the financial success of the Cowboys over the years and then the impact it's had on the team's success or lack thereof on the field. They, both of them, have had great football successes on the field, and they've also had obviously great financial successes in terms of where they sit, Cowboys being the most valuable sports franchise in the world last time I checked. And so I'm just wondering, do you think that creates a challenge for these two teams currently under what is now the old ownership, in terms of that collective hunger and the dedication to winning on the field? I sense kind of an underlying complacency for all of Jerry Jones's hunger an underlying complacency for the team in terms of football performance. Because, you know, if you're a player on the Cowboys and you have a successful career, even moderately, you're set for life regardless of whether the team makes the playoffs or not. So, I just wonder if you, any impression you had about that.

KB: Jerry has said, and I have no reason to doubt him, that he would give up a certain body part to win another Super Bowl. Robert, you know, despite the six Super Bowl Lombardi trophies and the ten appearances in his tenure, I think it's ten, he's still, I mean, you know, all these guys are also thinking of their legacy, and I want one more before I go and all that. Of course, you can't orchestrate life like that. But no, I don't think the business gets in the way in general. However, Jerry is the only owner that's also the GM. And, although I'm sure he's not sitting around watching tape and analyzing spreadsheets and all the metrics that we have now, everything goes through him. And I think that lack of a division of labor can be a problem or has been a problem to a certain degree. Number one, it creates a dynamic where the general manager, whoever is the general manager, or the coaches are always kind of looking over their shoulder to a certain degree or even more than normal. Robert Kraft, when he got in, he really did meddle in some of the personnel decisions. It was a different time. The salary cap had just come in, it was just a different dynamic. But he said and has said many times, like, the smartest thing he ever did was hire Belichick because he felt like Belichick understood how to manage the salary cap. And, you know, Robert shouldn't be tipping the scales having Drew Bledsoe over for dinner, hearing his woes about Bill Parcells. You know, that just muddies the water. There has to be a clear division of labor. Bill Belichick actually never had the title of GM, but he certainly managed the salary cap and it's paid dividends. So, Jerry, for whatever reason, the hubris, you know, overconfidence has never let that go and I don't think that's really helped.

GR: I agree. That's another one of my pet theories is that joining is just not a good recipe. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Ken Belson. The New York Times reporter is the author of a new book on professional football. It's titled, "Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut." Well, we haven't talked about Roger Goodell yet. How does he figure into your story of the growth of the NFL? What were his key contributions?

KB: Yeah. Well, Roger is a lifer, 40, almost 45 years at the NFL. Born in Jamestown, New York. His dad represented the Western New York and, you know, really the son of a politician, grew up half in Washington and a half in Westchester County. You know, a football jock, I guess, by most accounts. But he wrote to his dad right after graduation and said, I want to be commissioner of the NFL, that has to be one of the top ten job searches in all time.

GR: (laughter)

KB: And he did it. But one of the things I, you know, and Roger, to his credit, I guess, I don’t know if credit is the right word, but he was a go-getter. And Paul Tagliabue recognized that Pete Rozelle before him, this kid was hungry. And he kept getting more and more significant assignments, including going to cities and negotiating stadium deals on behalf of teams extricating the Browns from Cleveland to, or sort of cleaning up the mess from that, and the international efforts that the NFL had back then, so he was a fix-it guy. A lot of owners owed him favors because he was the guy who, you know, strong-armed the city or the county to get money for a stadium. The owners didn't have to get their hands dirty. And so when it came time to appoint a commissioner, he was the logical choice. He knew how the league ran; he was familiar with all the ownership groups. He had dated some of the daughters of some of the owners. You know, he was a very much a known quantity with a very unique resume. What he's done different, Paul Tagliabue put this foundation under the league, the, you know, the sponsorships, the TV money, the revenue sharing. That was all great; that is the foundation. Roger took it to a new level. He has turned the NFL really into a media company, more of a high growth stock. Just to give you one data point, under Paul's leadership of 17 years, the league's revenue basically doubled under Roger. Still going, 19 years at this point, it's tripled. That's a growth stock. And the owners want that. I mean, the owners came in, we were joking earlier about Jerry Jones paying over $100 million. The owners have big bills to pay back, and they are buying teams for multi-billions of dollars predicated on a certain growth rate. And Roger is delivering that.

GR: Well, you know, compared with Jones and Kraft, who are 83 and 84, Goodell is still a relatively young 66. I'm wondering about the future here. Who assumes the mantle of the NFL when these few owners leave the scene? Which they're going to do, you know, before too long. Is it going to be Goodell? Are there any other younger dynamic owners out there who comes to the fore?

KB: Well, let's joke about Jerry for a moment, but I write in the chapter on Jerry Jones, if you take the tour of AT&T Stadium, the $65 owner's tour, you get to see a hologram of Jerry talking about things. So, he may live on digitally.

GR: (laughter)

KB: The only owner in the league who would create a hologram of himself. But anyway, and by the way, I should joke, I mean, it's in the book, but I went on this tour, and I asked AI Jerry, you know, what do you think of Roger Goodell? And he responded that he thought Roger Staubach was a great quarterback. So, I don't know whether the AI was confused or didn't have Goodell in its brain, but anyway.

GR: (laughter)

KB: So look, both of those teams have their kids involved, Stephen Jones, Charlotte Jones, Jonathan Kraft, they're in good hands. They've been along with their fathers the whole way. Those teams will remain, you know, financially successful. I can't speak for the field. They're very different people. I would say Steven is more like his dad. Jonathan is more analytical, kind of hard driving in a way that Robert has a kind of softer edge, at least publicly. But, you know, there's a bench of very good owners. Clark Hunt in Kansas City is considered a very shrewd financial manager. Fans may not agree, but Jimmy Haslam is becoming quite influential on the financial side in league circles. David Tepper in…

GR: Name the teams that all these people are associated with, not all our listeners will know that.

KB: Forgive me, sure. Jimmy Haslam owns the Cleveland Browns, David Tepper bought the Carolina Panthers, he's a hedge fund mogul. Josh Harris led a group to buy the Washington Commanders, helped push through the entry of private equity money into the league. And then Greg Penner, who's part of the Walmart family, that bought the Denver Broncos. So there's quite a few shrewd owners. And then you have the sort of old guard, the Rooney family in Pittsburgh with the Steelers and the Maras here in New York with the Giants. So, you know, it's not a long bench, but it's a deep bench. And then there's Roger, you know, he has continued to sign contract extensions and the owners are in no rush to replace him. And everybody's guess is he'll work through the next labor agreement and television deals, which will probably end by this decade. So, if anybody wants to keep booing him at the draft, you’ve got 3 or 4 more opportunities.

GR: (laughter) That's good to know. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is the New York Times reporter Ken Belson. We have a lot of Buffalo Bills fans in our listening area. Where do the Bills fit in terms of the owners and the things that the team has done?

KB: Well, look, Western New York is, and Buffalo has been one of the smallest markets. I guess Green Bay would be the only other, maybe Jacksonville. So, you know, it hasn't carried its weight financially in league circles. Everything now is big numbers. But Terry Pegula got this stadium built and that'll increase the value of the team, and, you know, all boats rise at that point. Terry hasn't been a terribly active owner, certainly nothing like Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft. You know, he's kind of a, I don’t want to call him a get-along owner, but, he, you know, he says his piece, but he's not trying to win the room, if you will. But he did keep the team in Western New York. I know there were a lot of fears about the team going to Toronto at one point. And, you know, a lot of owners, when they want public money and they got 900 million from Erie County and the state, you know, they threaten to leave. They dangle, I don't know, name the city, Portland, Oregon or something like that. They dangle that out there as, hmm I'm thinking about Portland, Oregon. You might even fly out to Portland and have a conversation with the mayor. They never did that. Terry's from western Pennsylvania. I don't think Roger Goodell himself, not that he could singlehandedly do this, I don't think he wants the Bills to leave. I think he has a soft spot for Western New York. So to his credit, he didn't play that game. Now, on the other hand, like every other owner, he's looking for money from fans in personal seat licenses and so forth. There is a section toward the end of the book where you hear from Bill's fans really struggling with what to do. You know, on sort of middle-class incomes, trying to figure out how to pay for it all. And, I would say I've been to almost every NFL market over the years to see games and meet people and so forth. The Bills have, along with probably Green Bay although Green Bay is different, the Bills have probably the most rabid fan base. I mean, you know, when you talk about the city's identity wrapped up in the team, that's Buffalo. And so, to the league’s credit, they didn't abandon the city. On the other hand, there's a price to pay for it in the modern economics of the NFL.

GR: What are the next frontiers for the NFL in terms of growing in terms of media audience, developing other synergies? You know, Jones is always big on sort of creating new entities and finding synergies. Where do you see the big ones coming in the next few years?

KB: The NFL is already a media company, but you'll just see, you probably if you've heard of or seen the Netflix documentary on Jerry Jones, and I think it's eight parts. That grew out of an alliance with Skydance, big Hollywood studio. And so, yeah, this is very much what they're doing. They're trying to fill in the calendar with NFL content. I hate that word, but that's what it is. You know, the football season itself is only, what, five months long, something like that. So they want it to remain front of mind. It used to be the Super Bowl was over and you just switched to spring training, not anymore. Football continues to be ever-present. So you're going to see more media ventures. You saw the ESPN purchase of NFL Network; that's going to lead to more media opportunities. And I think you were already seeing the Black Friday game coming up. Amazon paid 150 million for that game a couple of years ago. They're now going to show it globally. Netflix, two Christmas games. So we're going to see more and more of these sort of opportunistic expansions of the media landscape for the NFL. The other thing, I think, probably more broadly, and I know people ask a lot about international. The NFL has been very deliberate; it's been 17, 18 years since they first started playing regular-season games. We're going to see more of that. Some of this is really necessity. I mean, the NFL is kind of saturated here in America. I mean, 90 of the 100 top shows in television are typically football games. So I don't know how much more they're going to grow the pie in terms of number of fans or percentage of fans. They can certainly charge more for a product, but they're looking overseas because they need new fans. And I think that's going to be a new frontier. And then finally, I would say gambling, although, as we know with the NBA scandals, there may be some trimming of things like prop bets and whatever. But the simple fact is, the NFL doesn't actually collect from the handle, doesn't take a percentage of bets. It makes money on selling the data. The game day data that fuels all those bets. And so they, you know, FanDuel or DraftKings or any of the casino sportsbooks, they pay the NFL for that data feed. And that's really where they're making the bulk of their money, plus the signage and sponsorships.

GR: Interesting. We've only got about a minute left. So this is going to be the lightning part of the round. But I have two questions I want to put to you if I can in this time. So you have to be really quick on this. These are concerns about the future. One is concern about football and younger players. There's been a lot about this medically last 20 years; it's not good for the brain, it's not good for the body. Do you see that as a major problem for the NFL going forward?

KB: I think if a player died on the field, and we had a pretty darn close call a couple of years ago, that could influence public behavior. I think we're already seeing fewer younger people. I mean, the population is not growing as much and more parents, and I've done numerous stories on this, more parents are putting their kids in baseball and soccer, and other sports. So that is a constant worry.

GR: And then the second one is the one you just mentioned, really quick now, soccer. It does seem to me that professional soccer is getting more and more attention. I notice it with my students, they're following these teams I've never even heard of sometimes. So, does football need to be worried about soccer? Does soccer need to be worried about football? What's the future there?

KB: No. American football is truly an American sport. It's tribal, it's made for television, it is dominant. I mean, soccer is chewing away at some of the mine share, but football and the NFL particularly, will remain dominant.

GR: Well, that's good to hear. That was Ken Belson. And his new book is titled, "Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut." Ken, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me. It was really fascinating.

KB: Yeah. Thanks, Grant, I appreciate it.

GRL You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Sometimes in the heat of expressing political frustrations, we'll hear people advocate for some kind of political secession. How seriously do we need to be thinking or worrying about that possible outcome? Grant Reeher speaks with Ryan Griffiths, a political scientist at Syracuse University, about his book on the subject, "The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work."

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Sometimes in the heat of expressing political frustrations, well, here people advocate for some kind of political secession. I've heard such things from Californians, for example. How seriously do we need to be thinking or worrying about that possible outcome? My guest today has written a new book on the topic. Syracuse University political scientist Ryan Griffiths is the author of “The Disunited States: Threats of Secession and Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work.” Professor Griffiths, welcome to the program.

Ryan Griffiths: Thanks, Grant. Good to be here.

GR: Well, it's good to have you here. We appreciate you making the time. I want to start with just basic terms, just so that we're all on the same page. Give us just a very brief definition of what you mean by secession.

RG: Sure. Secession, and the way that I use it, is where a part of a country tries to break away and become its own independent sovereign state. So the two examples in American history, of course, the Civil War, where the Confederacy attempted to do that and failed. And of course, the American Revolution, where the 13 colonies attempted to do it and were successful in becoming a new independent state.

GR: Right. Okay. Thanks. So I got to say, I found this book fascinating. And it's both fun to read, disturbing to read. Insightful. But I want to start with a basic skepticism I have about part of it of a particular kind. And I'll begin that by quoting actually, from your book, you say near the beginning: "To sum all of this up, there is no way to efficiently and peacefully disentangle and divide red America and blue America without it cascading into violence and chaos. It can't be done, and it is folly to think that it can. Much of this book is dedicated to showing why this is... This is the case." So we're going to get into that.

But my skepticism is this kind of building on that. It would seem that at first maybe I wonder how real of an issue is this? I mean, it might be kind of a parlor game that's played by disgruntled liberal academics or frustrated conservatives. But you mentioned the Civil War. Seems to me you could say the Civil War ended this discussion with 600,000 exclamation points in the form of US dead. Why is this a topic that needs your book?

RG: Right, that's a good question. It's a good place to start with. So there's a few ways I can answer this. First, let me just say that it's not a doom-and-gloom book. And as a scholar, I'm not a doom-and-gloom guy. Like, I don't think that this is the most likely outcome for America. I don't think it's right around the corner.

That said, it is an increasing sentiment. All right. I've been tracking this for over 15 years, and 15 years ago, it was a pretty minor thing. But now these movements are gaining traction. They're not as big as some movements around the world, but they are gaining. And one of the things about secessionism is that it can move rapidly.

A good example of this is Catalonia in the northeast of Spain. And, you know, they had a secessionist crisis a few years back. But as recently as 2006, only about 15% of Catalans were pro-independence. And then over a period of eight years, that tripled to 45%. So that kind of secessionist energy can move very quickly and it can respond to triggers. So the book is meant to get ahead of that type of thing and talk about the dangers and the perils of thinking that this is a solution to America's problems.

GR: Okay. Interesting. So, you write in your book about a couple of the different arguments for secession and some of the justifications for it. And one of the things that you write about is this notion of people having a right to secede, you know, if there's a sufficient level of consensus and a sufficient difference between one part of the country and the rest of the country, that there is this right. Just briefly tell us what is that right, supposedly? What's it based on? And then I have some follow-ups about complicating it.

RG: Sure. So there are three. I spent a lot of time at the start of the book walking through the arguments I hear from secessionists in America, whether it's regional groups in Texas or California or Red state America, things like that. The three arguments, in brief, are what I call irreconcilable differences, which we'll get to. And then one about a legal or normative right to secede, which is what your question is after.

And then another one about economic units and the benefits of small units. But the second one, there is an argument that it's not just in America. Right? It's sometimes called a primary right. Basically that a group of people, self-defined, have a right to choose what state they're in. So, if Syracuse, which is where you and I live, the Syracuse area, if the people by an overwhelming majority, by 85%, say, "Hey, look, we should become the independent state of Syracuse," then there's a normative argument out there made by political theorists that they should have that right to do it.

All right. And that is an argument that is picked up by any secessionist movement I've studied for good reason. Why would they, you know, ignore it? It's also one that isn't exclusively American. It's used all over the place. And then next to it, of course, is this constitutional argument that you often hear. And that's more specifically American.

GR: Interesting. And very briefly, what's the constitutional argument?

RG: All right. The constitutional argument is fascinating. I have to say, too, the book is written for a general audience. I deliberately tried to write it for a broad audience. Some of the chapters get a little more academic, and the one about a constitutional right is the most academic, but it's also maybe the most fascinating. I love that chapter.

So the consensus in American constitutional law right now is that there is no right to secede based on a 1869 Supreme Court decision, just a couple years out from the Civil War, that ruled that secession was unconstitutional unless the government agreed to it. Now that decision gets into all kinds of Supreme Court politics. Completely fascinating, which is probably too much for us to talk about here.

But that's the argument. Now, so the status quo argument is that there is no constitutional right, but plenty of people push back on that. If we brought on the leader of the Texas Nationalists or Cal-exit or whatever, they would have all kinds of reasons to say why that was incorrectly decided. Okay.

GR: Okay. Yeah. So you... one of the political thinkers that went through my mind when you were talking about this notion of a normative right would be John Locke. And, you know, the contract theory of government. But on talking about this right, I'm also thinking about Jeremy Bentham, who said, you know, "rights are nonsense and natural rights are nonsense walking on stilts." So, you know, if you... Okay, you have this right. But ultimately, that right is going to have to be enforced. Wouldn't it ultimately come down to force? And we're back to the Civil War again. I mean, this is just, you know, it's great that you might think you have a right, but.

RG: Right. So the argument about having a right of a people to secede through some sort of democratic process. And I've written about this in earlier work. You know, I am sympathetic to it. You just need to have rules in place for it. All right. I don't think that... Imagine if you and I did form this sovereign state of Syracuse, or we wanted to have a referendum.

GR: As long as long as long as we can take Micron with us. Okay.

RG: Go ahead. And Green Lakes, I really want Green Lakes. I love walking out there. You know, we shouldn't be able to call for a referendum every Tuesday. Right. And we shouldn't be able to say as long as just north of 50% are on board, we win. Right. That creates chaos. It's too much turbulence. So I think you need a very high bar for what success would be for that kind of thing.

That said, to your question, and I think this gets at, you know, the Jeremy Bentham comment, ultimately, secession... probably secession is that it's not governed by domestic law. Right. There is no... you know, if you and I rob a bank today, the law will determine our fate. There is no law that governs how this works.

All right. It's all... it's usually worked out when it is worked out by politics. Political people, you know, figures or movements or sometimes armed groups. They work it out. And so the problem with secession is it transcends law. And it becomes a very thorny, very difficult political issue.

GR: Yeah. I think in your book, you say it's the "Wild West" as one of your phrases. Yeah. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Ryan Griffiths. He's a Syracuse University political scientist and the author of a new book titled “The Disunited States: Threats of Secession and Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work.”

You mentioned earlier in our conversation when you were talking about the three things and the economic benefits of smallness. I wanted to drill in on that attractiveness of smallness because it seems to me, indeed, it goes back several decades now, but there has been this kind of new discovery of kind of a romantic attachment to being small.

I mean, I'm thinking like there was a book several decades ago called “The Vermont Papers,” which was about the value of small government and community-based government. It goes back to the ancient Greeks, the idea that democracy had to be small. And then you have like, you know, these idyllic notions we have of countries like Norway or, you know, small, organic farming is another one that you hear a lot about. Why, why is smallness a problem in modern nations? I mean, what's the what is the limits of that attraction?

RG: All right. So, the argument for the benefits of smallness this is the third argument that is utilized by a lot of these groups. So it's used by many groups internationally as well. Is that smaller political units tend to be more homogenous. Their political preferences are more homogeneous. And if they're political preferences are more homogeneous, then the government can design policies that will be more accommodating.

That will be preferable to a broader set of populations. So people will point to Singapore, for instance, and say, that's pretty small, pretty successful. Not really a democracy. In any event. Yeah. People will point to states like that. All right. There's a pretty rich literature in economics that gets at this. Now there's of course benefits to having a big state, large internal economy.

Right. Regional insurance if there's catastrophe, big, you know, militaries. So, you know, in economics, this is called the "size of states" literature. There's benefits to having a big state and benefits to having a small state. So it is used in some of the people who've advocated for secession in America. We'll talk about that. They'll say if Texas was independent or if Red state America was independent, then, however that is delineated...

They could have policies that suit them best. I'm a bit skeptical of this just because, you know, we already have a federal system which is partly designed to accommodate the interest between region and center right, and there are many benefits to the United States having a large country. Right. And I should say, too, that this argument is only really relevant when you've got a lot of polarization and people pushing for secession.

Right. In a time of harmony, the argument about the benefits of smallness doesn't really become that salient an issue. So it's one that people talk about, and I spent some time working through it, but it's probably the one I'm most skeptical about.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Ryan Griffiths. He's a political science professor at Syracuse University and the author of a new book on political secession titled “The Disunited States: Threats of Secession and Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work.” This next question kind of taps into one of the three things you mentioned at the beginning: the irreconcilable differences.

But I'm thinking of these discussions about secession or related to it that I've personally heard, like at dinner parties, for example. And, you know, the most common one for me, given the circles I travel in, in academia, is, you know, mostly on the liberal side, these folks will start to dream out loud. And it seems to me like they're not talking so much about secession, but what I would call "ejection."

And so I hear things like, "Oh, wouldn't it be great if we could just get rid of the deep South, for example, or parts of the Midwest?" And, you know, they laugh, but they're not joking, if you know what I mean. So, how... you know, are there, first of all, are there precedents for ejection, in the world that you've ever seen or held? How does that fit into this notion of irreconcilable differences?

RG: Yeah, yeah. Great question. Ejection, as you're putting it, is quite rare. The one case I can think about is actually Singapore. It had been part of the Malaysian union shortly after independence, and then it was kicked out. You know, apparently, the leader of Singapore at the time was quite upset about it. I mean, ejection and secession are...

It's just like two sides of the same coin, right? Basically, trying to break a country up into smaller units. And, you know, because there are tensions between them. I mean, I guess that, you know, that opens a space to talk about that. The key argument that is motivating the secessionist—and this is whether they are liberal or conservative or moderate, there are plenty of libertarians. The New Hampshire secessionists are kind of libertarian.

GR: Right.

RG: A core argument they bring up, I call it the argument of irreconcilable differences. And that's partly because the groups regularly make an analogy with marital divorce. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene periodically tweets, "We need a national divorce" because the two sides can no longer get together or can no longer get along. Right.

She did this in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. And so that argument, it appeals to people because most people are familiar with divorce, and they understand that sometimes a couple is just... the love is gone. They don't get along. And they would be able to lead happy, productive lives if they separate.

So why can't we do that with America? And it makes sense to people, right, reasons by analogy. And so a lot of the book is dedicated to trying to show why that analogy doesn't work in the way that people want it to work. Right. And I spent a lot of time doing interviews with folks, and they were gracious to talk to me about their feelings on this.

One of the problems is that in a marital divorce, it's, of course, governed by domestic law. Right. So if my wife and I get divorced, I cannot just run off with the, you know, the kids, the cat, and the car. She can call the cops. All right. There is no 911 number in secession. There's no law that determines how it's worked out.

That's one thing. Also, unlike most marriages, are two people. And, you know, a national divorce in America? That's 340 million people, right? And they are intermixed. So the whole idea of a red state, blue state thing imagines that they are somehow clearly grouped in, delineated like one is on one side of a river and the other side.

And that's just not the case. You and I live in the suburbs of Syracuse. They're quite purple. You know, the political lines run through the neighborhoods, even through households. All right. So, trying to disentangle that means you need to create some sort of partition system to disentangle America. And one of the chapters I work on tries to show just the... it was a great chapter to write.

I spent time trying to think about the maps that we would use. And so I imagine, let's say there was a constitutional convention that got together to try to figure out how to break America apart into what I call for fun, a "red land" and a "blue land." If they started with a map of states based on the last election, then you would have a reasonably coherent map.

Although again, Blue Land would be kind of a West Coast and a northeast thing, and Hawaii, etc. but still, within those places... in California alone, right? There are millions of Republicans, millions of people who would feel that they're in the wrong state. Sure. So you could drill down. And then I used a map of congressional districts. Right. Which is a bit more accurate.

But now you've got, you know, I forget the exact number. What's 400 something? And then you get this archipelago of red and blue, you get an impossible jigsaw of a country. But of course, people are more often sorted in the country they want. And then I drill down one level further to counties.

That's 5,000 political units. And then you get this impossible map, right? But in that map, of course, more people are sorted into the country they want to be in, although not all, because you can't possibly sort everybody, you know, everybody into the right country. And so one of the things I want to point out is I call this the scale problem.

There is no way to draw a perfect map. The more coherent the map, the larger the number of people that are sorted into the wrong country. Whereas if you get a map where a larger percentage are actually in the country they want to be, then you get an impossible map where, you know, it just doesn't make any sense.

And the problem with trying to do this in the first place is that—and I have a chapter dedicated to walking through the types of hyper-polarization and conflict and land grabs, all of the conflict that can result—that, you know, that's going to get in the way of any sort of peaceful or responsible attempt at trying to divide the country.

GR: Just two quick comments on that. One is if we work with the divorce metaphor, I think most people who have been through one will resonate with this. There's also financial Armageddon involved. And so I don't know if that's going to convince very many people if that's the analogy. The other thing is this reminds me, too, of the discussions of federalism and the value of federalism again, because, you know, all things being equal, you put more people in places where they want to be.

But you're right. You can never... you're never going to fix this unless we become almost individual countries. I wanted to kind of circle back to my skepticism a bit, and ask you this question because you did, as you just mentioned, you did a lot of interviews with people, and you've looked at these movements, you've taken them very seriously.

How serious do you think people are being about this? And let me give you an analogy. There's a lot of discussion now among our colleagues, and others, about democracy being on the ropes, you know, that it's under existential threat. But I do not see among these people any changes in their behavior. I mean, they're not rearranging their finances.

They're not making plans to move to another country. They don't seem to be like, you know, they're not creating bunkers in their houses, you know, in their basements. So they're talking about it, but they really don't seem to be doing anything differently with their lives. So that tells me that maybe, maybe this is hyperbolic to some degree. Maybe not. But I'm wondering if the same thing about this. I mean, I don't see people like getting ready for this divorce. Maybe you have.

RG: Yeah. Look, I think it varies. I think the people I interviewed were, by and large, quite serious about it. Some of them are writing books about it. They're... becoming their jobs, their careers. And some of the folks I talked to, expressed, you know, security concerns and things like that. That said, I attended a meeting in February, it was called the Summit of Independence Movements, put on by people out in Cal, the Cal-exit movement.

They had independence movements from all over the world zooming in. And also I think it was something like 12 different states in America had an independence movement represented. One of them was from my home state of Florida. I was astonished. I didn't know Florida had an independence movement. I think some of these are a bit more, you know, you can call it, a weekend kind of thing.

I think, I think that is the case. But some of them are quite serious. And, you know, I guess one of the key points in the book is that I'm trying to get ahead of the issue in trying to disabuse people of the belief that secession is a solution, and because the sentiment can increase, it's then very, you know... if you've got... there was an Axios poll a few years ago that found that 20% of Americans thought a national divorce was a good idea.

Now, you and I know that polls are sensitive to how they're framed. And things like that. Nevertheless, you know, there's a foundation of interest in it. And that is vulnerable to triggers. You had a political assassination. You had a failed election. Right. You could imagine. Or just you get a political leader who jumps on board and becomes the champion for a cause that can really galvanize support.

Right. And then you could take somebody who's maybe only interested in this on the weekends to somebody who's all in. And, you know, in my experience with interviewing or doing fieldwork with secessionists around the world is that, you know, there's like a Kool-Aid people can drink where they really get into the movement, the sense of hope.

It can be at close range. These things can be very stirring. And yeah, that could develop in the States with the right kind of momentum, the right kind of catalyst. So the whole point of the book is it's not to argue that polarization is non-existent or to be unsympathetic to these currents, but to say that secession is not the solution that people may wish it to be.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Syracuse University political science professor Ryan Griffiths. I had a few questions I wanted to make sure that I got to here before we end. But a quick one here before I get into them. You talked about polling.

It... the polling does indicate, though, that although we are quite divided in terms of "I don't like Republicans, I don't like Democrats," or, you know, once you put a line between the two parties, at the same time, if you ask me questions about what I think policy should be, we're not as divided as the party differences would indicate. And so that might be a mitigating factor in all this. I don't know if you look at that or not, but.

RG: I do in the... so at the conclusion... the conclusion is called "Why We Should Stay Together." Right. To end in a kind of hopeful way. And one of the points I make is that, you know, I think... and some of the data you're pointing to show that we're less divided than we think. There's a term out... "affective polarization."

That, you know, you get Republicans and Democrats to talk about their core values, and they end up being kind of the same. But then they say the other side doesn't have those values, even though the other side in a poll said that they have them. Right. So I think there's a lot that holds us together. And I think there's a lot of benefits to America staying together.

I think it, you know, it is a good country in the world. It's done a lot of great things. You know, it's imperfect, of course, but so I think that that gets neglected or overlooked in the argument for a national divorce, that there really is all these great things that kind of hold us together. But polarization sometimes hides it, right?

I mean, I should say, too. The book is written... it's a nonpartisan book, right? It's not. I didn't write it for Red America or Blue America. I wrote it for all America. And I'm trying to make the argument to the entire nation about why this is not a good solution, and why we actually have a lot of reasons to hold together.

GR: Yeah, no, that comes through. So we got about two minutes or so left. I want to squeeze in two questions. The first is, as you've demonstrated already, you have studied and written about secessionist movements around the world. You've looked at the history of this. Are there any cases or classes of cases where they are successful?

RG: Yes. So secession tends to work in very specific circumstances where you've got a defined nation. It's concentrated in a particular region. There's some sort of boundary or border that separates them from the rest.

GR: Makes sense. Yeah.

RG: And they've got some sort of special administrative status that kind of makes them seem different from the rest of the country, so that the country, the government feels that it can permit that secession without worrying about some sort of cascade effect. Right. And in books I've read and I've studied this, I've, you know, mapped them out.

None of those conditions hold in the idea of a red and blue America. Right. It's actually much closer to the partition that existed in India and Pakistan or in Cyprus. So it's a very dangerous set of circumstances.

GR: Right. Right. Okay. And then the last thing about a minute left, one obvious current-day potential application of this would be the Middle East. And have you given any thought or are there views about thinking of secession as a lens to see a way to create more peace? I don't know if that question makes sense, but.

RG: Oh yeah, that's tough. I mean, it kind of depends on the different countries or the different regions you're talking about. Of course I did. I did do a lot of work in Iraqi Kurdistan for a while. And that hasn't worked out for them. But if you're talking more specifically about Palestine.

GR: That's one that comes to mind. But I was thinking of other areas too. But yeah. What are your thoughts there? Quickly.

RG: Secession is difficult. It's hard to work out. I mean, I support a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. I think that's the least bad solution. That's a kind of a form of secession, although the specifics are a bit different there. But look, secession is hard to pull off. And where it works out peacefully, it only does so in very specific circumstances.

GR: All right. We'll leave it there. We're sticking with America, we’re both in on this. All right. That was Ryan Griffiths again. His new book is titled “The Disunited States: Threats of Secession and Red and Blue America and Why They Won't Work.” It really is a fascinating read. Ryan, thanks again for taking the time to talk with me.

RG: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. This November, Syracuse will elect a new mayor. Joining me today is the Democratic candidate for the position, Sharon Owens. In addition to serving as the city's deputy mayor in the Ben Walsh administration, Ms. Owens is also the board president of Blueprint 15, which is helping to lead the effort to develop the East Adams Street area, following the tearing down of Interstate 81 in the city. I'd like you to note that you can find interviews with two out of the other three candidates for mayor on the Campbell Conversations webpage. But, Deputy Mayor Owens, welcome back to the program, it's your turn today, thank you for joining me.

Sharon Owens: Thank you, it's always a pleasure to be on with you.

(Interview with Republican mayoral candidate Thomas Babilon)

(Interview with independent mayoral candidate Tim Rudd)

GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. So let me just start by saying that, you know, we had a previous interview last May, it was before the Democratic primary and our listeners can find that interview on the Campbell Conversations webpage, too. But I asked you a lot of the standard candidate questions then, such as how your leadership style might differ from Ben Walsh's, your vision for the city, and so on. And in this interview, I wanted to go beyond that, since I think we covered that pretty well. So this is kind of like part two in a way. So, I do want to start though with my first question, I want to start with that primary because, we talked before it happened and the result of it was a bit of a surprise, I think, to a lot of local political observers. You were the front runner, I think, I said that publicly. You were the front runner, but it was looking to be a, you know, competitive primary. You had two other candidates who had won elective office in the city, they've run for other offices before. But in the end, it was, well, it was a blowout pretty much for you. What do you attribute that to?

SO: It was absolutely a good night. If you don't think you're going to win, then why are you running? So, I believe that I was going to win. But to win by, I think it was 40 points, was really satisfying for just not me, my team. We worked hard during that primary. While I think generally we all were respective of each other, it was a hard fought primary, you know, and I believe it was the message, Grant. My opponents really came after me, came after the Walsh administration and it's interesting, it's for, seven years it's been the Walsh administration and now it’s the Walsh-Owens administration during the political year.

GR: (laughter)

SO: But, I think that, and I know I heard from people that it was the messaging. The messaging never went at anyone else. The messaging was the messaging needed for people to hear about why I believe I’m the right candidate to be the next mayor, what my vision is for Syracuse. And all those things we talked about before, safety, housing, economic opportunity. And I kept the message, the message. I didn't spend time talking about other people and taking shots at other people. And quite frankly, in this political climate, I think people are sick of hearing that. And so, regardless of what's happening in the general and the same kind of retrenching of that model from the opponents I'm running against now, I'm going to stay focused on what was successful for me before, and that is talking about Syracuse and the vision for Syracuse and the opportunity that lays before Syracuse. And I think that was the game changer for the primary.

GR: Okay, yeah. I was going to ask you about whether maybe this said something about the public's frustration with where we are right now that you already addressed that. And I agree with you, I think that that probably was an ingredient in it. Well, I want to combine kind of two things we talked about in our previous conversation in May and reframe it in terms of one kind of question. And so I'll start by saying the city's facing, and we talked about this before, the city's facing two big important inflection points. The redevelopment of the area in the footprint of the elevated portion of the highway in the city of I-81. That's a big one, and then the arrival of Micron and that, you know, the whole playout of that over the next few years and, maybe Micron probably better described as a potential new birth rather than inflection, I mean, it's really big. But one of the big concerns and challenges for both of these projects is how inclusive will they be? How much of the city will be brought along in the successes there? For example, what will happen to those who are currently living in public housing under the highway that are going to be displaced, at least for a period of time? How many of the city's poorer residents will benefit either directly or indirectly, from the huge investments that Micron is making and going to make? And so the question I wanted to get to, that's a long introduction there, I apologize, but do you think it's important for someone with your background, and I'll just state of plainly, you know, your ethnicity to be leading the city during those big transitions? Do you think that is something that is going to be helpful, both symbolic and in other ways, to try to realize these opportunities for everybody in the city?

SO: What we're talking about, Grant, is nothing new just because I'm running for mayor. From the moment I graduated from Syracuse University and stepped foot as a resident of Syracuse, my calling, my mission has been assisting people who are less fortunate than me, who didn't have the opportunity to go to a top tier university, and get a degree and go down a career path, and who's been fortunate to be in safe, affordable, clean housing. And so this conversation is the driving force of my DNA, my just who I am, and ensuring. And it's been, unlike my opponents, it has been, I am not just speculating about this. I've been on the ground working to, particularly let's talk about the workforce opportunity, I've said before, when we talk about poverty, unless we are setting a path for getting people to work, we're just talking about changing the trajectory of poverty until we're changing the household incomes of individuals. So for the I-81 project, everything that Pathways to Apprentice for Syracuse Build started on a whiteboard with a marker in my hand that created a now nationally known workforce initiative that is getting people to work and putting money in their homes. I had a young man say, you know, for the first time in his life, and he's in his early 30’s, he was able to take his family on vacation. That's what the job is about, that's what a job is about. Not just punching in, but changing the quality of life, and that includes the housing. Adding to, not the 81 project, but one more thing to add to those folks in that footprint that is just continue to be inundated with information that affects their day to day lives, is the changes in HUD in real time that we're seeing because the, you know, the Housing Authority is a HUD funded initiative and all the changes from the Trump administration that we see coming through, really targeting so-called illegal citizens in our community. So we have layers upon layers of changes happening in that community. We’re finally at a place where we are headed towards a closing that we can start getting demolition done over there to start, you know, one of my opponents said that, you know, they didn't see the need to redevelop that property. And clearly, you must not have been in it. That property is unworthy of the folks who live there. It is old. It is the original housing that was developed in this country. And so, this is 2025, they deserve a 2025 era housing there. What is critical for us to ensure that that happens without displacing people who want to live in their neighborhood and have lived there for generations. And so, I've been on the forefront of that. I get criticized, it hasn't moved fast enough. No, it hasn't moved fast enough, as far as I'm concerned. But it is moving and it is hard, painstaking work.

GR: Yeah, I appreciate that. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with City of Syracuse Democratic mayoral candidate Sharon Owens. Well, I wanted to stick with that though, and just ask you this. You've kind of addressed it in a way, but if someone comes into this and looks at this from the outside and says, okay, somebody tells them, here are the two things that are about to happen to this city. They might say as first reaction, this has got gentrification written all over it.

SO: Sure.

GR: What do you say to someone that sort of looks at that?

SO:I would say the same, I would say this, I was working in the community when, if you remember Kennedy Square over there where the biotech center is, I was working in the community at the time that that happened. I remember, and Grant by no means was that quality housing. It was lousy housing for people, but it was home for people. And then the transaction happened with SUNY Upstate and those, I remember being on the ground in the community working for not for profit. It was a Thanksgiving during the holiday when those folks were given notices that they had to move. It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen and experienced. And I have to say, I have to give credit for the housing authority because they implement Section 8 vouchers in our community, one of two agencies. And they were able to get those individuals Section 8 houses to be able to relocate, but relocate during a major holiday? We cannot let that happen. So, there has to be, the difference between that and this is that this is HUD funded housing, there are HUD regulations that weren't even there when the highway was built, when all that dislocation happened. It is also critical why I was a voice that spoke, if you can remember, Grant, when the news had kind of broken that SUNY Upstate was looking at part of the Housing Authority property, right behind it. And it was duringone of my standard meetings when I noticed that was going on and I said, what is that? And when it was explained to me, I said, that cannot happen, that absolutely cannot happen. That is the fear that the people in that community have is that the university and the Hill is going to continue to encroach. It is another reason why the city must, and we're continuing to push this issue with the New York State DOT, the city must get control of the land under the viaduct now, once it comes down. It is owned by New York State. We need to be in possession of that, because then we go through a local public process of zoning it appropriately for the needs of our community to ensure that the use of that is just not for those who have the most money or the most influence. And so that is going to be another critical process for this next mayor is negotiations with DOT. Which, by the way, Grant, I have on a regular basis now, for every part of this quickly moving project that's going on. The next mayor, you know, we talked about Micron, and I'll hopefully be able to answer just a little bit about that. But for 81, this mayor has to keep this city moving and open. And if you, we always think that, oh, construction projects take years and it'll be delay upon delay. Oh, no. If you are driving in Syracuse, each phase of this contract is moving like gangbusters. And now the big part of it is everything going on behind City Hall now at that 690 intersection. And then we’ll be moving the preparation on Almond Street and then the viaduct coming down if everything's on track in 2027. That's not a long time from now. And so what's going on now is the environmental protections that need to happen before that preparation goes on. Social activists making sure those calls and those meetings are happening right now. And there's been amazing collaborative efforts between DOT, Upstate hospitals, doctors and social activists to make sure that environmental quality of life continues for people in that footprint.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Sharon Owens, the Democratic city of Syracuse deputy mayor is running for mayor in this November's election. So I wanted to get into a couple of the things that your two, well, you have three opponents, but two of the opponents that I spoke with mentioned to me about the city. Like in the primary, the these criticisms that have been leveled are pretty serious against the Walsh administration. Tom Babilon said that there were inefficiencies throughout the city administration, and that's part of the reason why the spending and the budget have increased during the last eight years and he listed a few examples. He talked about trash pick-up, talked about the codes department, talked about the initiative to reduce gun violence. And I wanted to just put the question to you this way, are there currently significant inefficiencies in the city administration?

SO: No, there are not significant inefficiencies in the city's administration. Any operational organization has areas where it needs to improve and areas where it is doing what it needs to do to serve the people of Syracuse. I would never say that it is perfect, not even close to perfect, there's always room for improvement. But, for how they describe the city and the way the city is run, you know, we should be in bankruptcy and receivership and no functioning activity at all. I just don't know how people who want to be the mayor of the city think it's just so bad. And so, some of the things you mentioned, that trash can program was a game changer for the cleanliness of this city. The sidewalk program that was implemented was a game changer for accessibility for the city. Our ability to provide services on a day to day basis, it was during this administration that our fleet was just abysmal for DPW and we, you know, got out there and purchased what needed to happen to be able to serve our people, both for picking up for fall refuge and also for snow plowing and included the public in naming these new vehicles. Our fire department needed new equipment, we stepped up to the plate to do that. This lighting infrastructure that we have now, LED lighting that we have now, and what we're doing now with the EPA to do private side lead replacement. There has been multiple things that have happened in this administration. And again, yes, the code enforcement, oh my goodness, we are online now, getting applications and processing online. Mr. Babilon in particular, if he had his druthers, there would be no permitting process. Permits are issued for protection of people that are going into businesses and structures that are being renovated. It is a public protection and mechanism. And so, we have, the numbers are there over the last year, approaching $1 billion in economic growth because of our ability to get things through. There are other things that we're going to do, we’ve outsourced permitting to streamline it. So we have been, and I have been, because these entities have been under my watch and my background in ensuring that individuals in this community and businesses in the community can thrive, have been my responsibility. Unprecedented housing initiatives going on in the city under my watch. So I'm not speculating about what, has happened or what can happen. I live it every day. I put my shoes on and go into City Hall every day to get the job done.

GR: So let me ask you a question about Micron that builds a little bit on this, because it has to do with spending in the budget. And this is probably, you know, a problem that a lot of mayors would like to have. But if I'm looking at Micron coming in, I might be tempted to say something like the following, that there's going to be a lot more people in and around Syracuse who are making high salaries, they're going to be spending their money. The property values of the most desirable parts of the city are going to keep going up. They already are, I'm seeing it in the university neighborhood, for example. The prices are really launching up. And so if I'm a mayor looking at this, I might think I'm going to have more money in my budget even if I don't lift a finger, it's just going to come in. So, my question I guess, is don't you think that might be a temptation to start a lot of new programs, spend a lot? I mean, you're going to have a lot, you mentioned the activist groups just a second ago and talking about I-81. You're going to have a lot of pressure from those groups saying, this is the moment to do some of the things I've been wanting to do. How are you going to navigate that? I mean, it's a good problem to have, but how are you going to navigate it?

SO: I hope and pray that is a problem I inherit. Right now, I'm looking at a 25 or $30 million deficit. One of the things that I plan to do is to reach across the aisle, Rita Paniagua will be the next president of the Common Council. What I want to avoid is another council administration battle that we had with the budget this time. The oversight, fiscal oversight and execution of the city's budget is the responsibility of us jointly, the administrative wing and the legislative wing. I want to jointly put together a commission to really look at how we can look at our costs without sacrificing the services that the taxpaying people deserve in Syracuse, but also looking at how we can generate revenue. The growth of our region and the growth of our city is one way to do that. But we have to do it without pricing out our residents in this community. Affordable housing, the federal government is a big part of those subsidies that make that housing affordable. That is going to change, Grant, you know, the funding coming from the Trump administration. But how can we reduce the cost of affordable housing reconstruction? Manufactured housing, the Land Bank has a project it's working on now that reduce the costs of building houses that can be affordable to keep people in Syracuse who are going to stay in Syracuse in new homes to increase our tax base, but also addressing the rental issue, 60% of our city residents rent. So ensuring the quality of housing for rentals are there as well. And so, we have to be responsible. I mean, we were responsible with ARPA funds. We used it for a project that we normally would not have the funding to use for. It was one of the ways we started the sidewalk program. So we have to be responsible, but we have to work collaborative because, you know, my mother has always taught me, save the money, but the money is there for a rainy day. It feels like it's raining, but let's make sure that when it's different from sprinkling to a good rainstorm to a hurricane. And so, we have to adjust accordingly to our fiscal status.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is Syracuse mayoral candidate Sharon Owens. So, I’ve got about five minutes left or so, I want to try to squeeze in at least, two, maybe three questions if I can. The first one is, both Tim Rudd and Tom Babilon claim that the administration hasn't been as transparent as it could have been with the city council and otherwise, and I think also the newspaper has suggested some things similar to that. So rather than ask you whether it's true or not, I just wanted to ask you this, do you have plans for making what the administration does more transparent to the public and the council? You mentioned you want to work with the council, but are you going to try to make it more transparent?

SO: Well, first of all, I must answer that, it's not true. We have $123 million of ARPA money. If we weren't going to be transparent, we wouldn't have created a public dashboard so the public can see exactly how we were planning the spending, actually did spend that money. This administration was the administration that actually put in the infrastructure to make the council meetings accessible by video in live streams, it was us that did that. So when we talk about transparency, and it all, you know, really comes down to that, modernization, payroll modernization project. We, I, have said that could things have been done differently, the management of it? Absolutely. Grant, when I came to the city in 2018 from Southwest Community Center, when I was at the Southwest Community Center, there was an automated way by which I would scan and be able to get paid. I come to the city and we're doing that on paper timesheets. We're a 300 plus million dollar organization, and so this process has been hard, but we are making progress and I don't regret doing it at all. I am a transparent individual, I have been my entire life.

GR: Okay, thank you. So, just a couple of minutes left now, and two questions here. The first one, Mr. Babilon also made on air a no new taxes pledge for his four years. I'm going to ask you, are you running on a similar pledge? How would you handle that question?

SO: That would be, we just talked about transparency. That would be disingenuous to say that over the course of four years, you can make that commitment right now, that there would be no new taxes. I do not want to tax the people of Syracuse, but I'm not going to make that pledge predicting four years from now.

GR: Okay. Fair enough.

SO: Irresponsible.

GR: It didn't help George H.W. Bush.

SO: (laughter)

GR: And so last question, and you got about a minute and a half, two minutes to answer it. I wanted to give you kind of a big picture question and a chance to sort of take everything from your campaign and your vision and put it all under one thing. Imagine that I am a 30-something person okay? (laughter) You have to have to put on your rose-colored glasses there, and I'm relocating to Syracuse because I'm going to work for Micron, okay? I want you to convince me and about a minute to live in the city, as opposed to the suburbs.

SO: I am so happy that you are coming to this community. You have picked a amazing place to live, an amazing place to grow yourself personally and to raise your family. Syracuse has a long history of individuals in this community that have helped it grow over the course of its existence, and you are about to be a part of its history and a pinnacle time, a game changing time, where we have technology that we are going to be implementing here in Syracuse that rivals any other place in the world. And here you are right now. You can take advantage of our amazing city, our amazing parks, our affordable living, and just the best people you're going to find on the face of the Earth here in Syracuse, so welcome aboard.

GR: Okay, all right, I'm in, all right. So, we'll leave it there. That was Sharon Owens, she's a candidate for Syracuse mayor. Again, I want to remind everybody that my conversations with the other candidates are available on the Campbell Conversations webpage. And my previous conversation with Deputy Mayor Owens when she was running in the primary is also available there. We covered in that conversation some general things about vision for the city and other important issues. But Deputy Mayor Owens, again, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. Best of luck with the rest of the campaign trail, I know it's hard work.

SO: Thank you. Great to be here and I'll see you on the other side.

GR: Okay. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Last week we heard from Nina Jankowicz about disinformation and the information war. My guest today also writes about the intersection of technology and government. Jennifer Pahlka was the deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration and is the founder of Code for America. She's also the author of, “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.” Ms. Pahlka will be on Syracuse University campus to give a public talk on October 29th titled, “Governing in the Age of AI: Lessons from Recoding America.” Ms. Pahlka, welcome to the program.

Jennifer Pahlka: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.

GR: This is a book about government underperforming, even failing in some ways, and also about governing and the digital age. Obviously, there have been deep complaints about government failures well before the digital age. And so my first question is, is government failing in substantially new ways now?

JP: I think it's failing in ways that the people really feel more, and that has sort of come to ahead in terms of a crisis. You saw leading up to the election last year, over the summer, there was a poll that said that 70% of people feel the system needs either major reform or to be blown up altogether. And I think that does speak to just, you know, a real frustration with the public. And you can see it in ways, everything from, you know, I had an experience in my hometown in Oakland, California, where I had a home invasion, and I called the 911 center and they didn't pick up for quite a long time. In fact, they dropped the call three times.

GR: Wow.

JP: And then they said, Oakland Police Department will be there as soon as they possibly can and it took them two whole days to show up.

GR: Oh my goodness.

JP: And so that's kind of thing where you expect, right, that when you, at the very minimum, you expect that when you call 911, someone will answer the phone and if there's someone in your home that the police will show up. And that's not something that people feel that they can count on these days. And all the way to that very personal experience at the local level, to the experience that I think people had during the Obama administration, where at a very, at a national level we set some big priorities like, you know, moving to green energy infrastructure or, you know, building more roads and highways or, you know, reshoring chips to manufacturing, or connecting homes to more broadband. And then we spent a lot of money and made a lot of announcements, people didn't see those things actually happening. So you start to get this sense that government can set a goal but not actually achieve that goal, and that can really erode trust and faith in government.

GR: Well, it seems to me that many liberals will argue that government appears to fail because it's under-supported and underfunded. And then conservatives will often argue that government fails because in some fundamental way it cannot do or do well what we want it to do, what we hope it will do. What are the root causes of government's current failures or major shortcomings in your view?

JP: Yeah, I think it's time that we sort of looked past the partisan swipes at why. And, in fact, I think there's increasing bipartisan support for the acknowledgment that fundamentally, we moved into an internet age and we left the operating model of government back in an industrial era. I shouldn't say that we haven't updated it to some degree, but it's kind of like we slapped a website on the front end of it, but the guts of it really still are how things operated as we sort of came out of World War Two and moved into an industrial era. It's a very, you know, in the framework of software development, we call this like waterfall development. It's very stepwise, it doesn't have feedback loops in it that, that, you know, you see in the society around us and the things that work well. So, you know, at its fundamental diagnosis, I would say it's time not only that we addressed this operating model of government that's been left behind, but also realize that while we sort of failed to update it for the internet era, we are now entering an AI era. And so we can't really fight the last day’s battles, which I'm prone to do, right? I fought those battles and so they’re still sort of bothering me, but I need to let go of them and say it's time to ours to figure out how to drag government into the AI era, not, you know, not the era where we, we sort of missed the ball for a while. I could talk a little bit about what that operating model looks like, but I think that's the fundamental problem. It's not just that the policies aren't getting what, you know, they intend, but that those policies sit, they rely on this operating model to be successful.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with governance and internet expert Jennifer Pahlka. She's the author of “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.” So, I want to pick up on just that last set of points you were making. And obviously, it sounds to me then that what we need is a real, a core rethink, first of all, and a core restructuring. What would be some of the most important elements of what we ought to be doing then that we're not doing, in your view?

JP: I spent the last 15 years trying to work on the digital side of government. And what I realized is that if you want to move government forward, you have to pick up all of the elements of the operating model. And the way I break those down is the following: If you want government that can achieve its policy goals, you have to have the right people, which implicates civil service reform, they have to be focused on the right work, which implicates procedural reform, right? Today, they're sort of drowning in paperwork and procedure that doesn't necessarily accrue to the outcomes people expect. Third, you need purpose fit systems for them to work with, and that is the world that I've been in. But, trying to get the right digital systems for government, we have the wrong processes and procedures that result in systems that aren't really fit to purpose. And then fourth, and maybe this is the most foundational, we need to be able to operate in test and learn frameworks. Again, not just this idea that we create a plan and then we operate to that plan, even as we can see that it is not getting the outcome that we intended, or not getting it fast enough, or getting a perverse outcome because, you know, we haven't thought this through. When we continue to follow that plan, even as it's not working, because we're locked into this particular framework. But there's a whole bunch of ways the government needs to relearn how it operates that does learn as it goes and has these very much tighter feedback loops where we're able to adjust along the way to get to where we need to go.

GR: That all makes perfect sense. And the last point, which you said may be the most foundational, the first thing that popped in my head when you said that was how difficult that would be to pull off in the media age that we live in, because things get scrutinized so quickly and so critically that the idea that, I mean, it sounds great, you know, we're going to test and learn and we're going to adjust and we're going to do these things quickly. But if something doesn't work right, the media is all over it, as this is a government failure, this didn't work the way it was intended. I'm thinking of the rollout of Obamacare, which you're very familiar with. I'm thinking of some of the things having to do with COVID, both during the Trump administration and the Biden administration. So how do you create the space where people will tolerate, I guess, or the media will tolerate that kind of smarter approach?

JP: It's a really good point, and I think we need to bring both the public and the media along on this shift to a new operating model and I’ll give you a really good example. Speaking of very public debacles, we more recently had the FAFSA, it’s the federal student aid form. And Congress ordered a modernization of that form, essentially with the Better FAFSA Act, I want to say, back in 2020. But unfortunately, the way we, quote unquote, “modernized” today, it really doesn't work. And so the, you know, what was supposed to be a better new system really failed students. Many of them couldn't get through it and there were millions affected, especially, unfortunately, those who most need the support of the federal government to go to college. The Department of Education did bring in a fantastic team to get it back on track. Some folks from the College Board volunteered their time, and then they sent some people over from the United States Digital Service. And they brought a new way of working that really is consistent with this operating model that we need government to move to. We call it the product model. There's a lot of nerdy stuff that goes into that that your listeners don't want to hear about. But it is what we were talking about, it's being able to adapt as you go. It's having the right internal technical leadership to do it right, some flexibility and really being centered on what users really need. Well, they got the FAFSA very much back on track. If you look at it now, it has very high satisfaction rates, very low error rates. But the Government Accountability Office still wrote them up, with a very, you know, critical report. And the reason the report is critical is that they are holding the Department of Education accountable to the old way of doing things. They didn't realize that the successes have come from this shift to this new product model, way of working that's been incredibly successful. And the good news, the other good news, though, is that what typically happens in government when you get a bad GAO report, is everybody sort of gets defensive and everyone gets told to return to the old ways of working because you don't want to get criticized. But in this case, the Department of Ed wrote a letter back saying, here is what you should hold us accountable to. These ways of working are better, they're getting better outcomes, and please, the next time you, you know, assess our success or failure, assess us according to these kinds of criteria, because that is what is actually helping kids apply for financial aid.

GR: That's a good example, I'm sure it's something that a lot of our listeners have lived, so it will resonate. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Jennifer Pahlka, the governance and internet expert has served in the Obama administration and is also the author of “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.” And we've been discussing her book and some of her more recent findings and research as well. So I'm going to get a little wonky myself. You were saying you didn't want to get too wonky before, but as I was reading through your book, I got the clear impression that one of your arguments that we haven't really talked about as much, although indirectly, is that the details of policy delivery and implementation have been undervalued and understudied, but that they're terribly important. Do I have that right as take away from your writing?

JP: Yes, I think that's correct. I think that, you know, I came to government from the tech industry where the people who actually, you know, do the work, they create the website, they, you know, deal with the customers are kind of at the top of a social hierarchy, right, if you think about it. Those companies are all run by founders who, you know, did the first version of their product. And in government, it's the exact opposite. The people who actually make the interfaces to the public are very, very low on a very, very tall totem pole. And I think that creates real problems because we give respect and status to those who think the big policy thoughts, we don't connect them to the people who are actually going to make that stuff real. And they're so far apart in the sort of social hierarchy, then that's part of how we get really bad interfaces to government.

GR: Yeah, exactly. And the other thing that I thought of was my own field of political science, and that it seems like there's a similarity there too, where it's exactly as you just said, that, you know, there's a value priority put on sort of, for lack of a better word, higher altitude sort of theoretical discussions, less emphasis on the actual nuts and bolts of delivering things. And there's kind of a dearth of interest and attention in the academic field as well. Is that your sense?

JP: Absolutely. There's so much that I would like the academic world to study that really gets very little attention because it's not about the, you know, the nuts and bolts of government, but in fact, that is where we're failing people. It's not just that we want there to be a closer connection between policymakers and the folks that are doing, you know, the actual work in government. But as I said earlier, these test and learn frameworks it means that we need a feedback loop. People who make policy and law today really need to understand what implementers do in order to get better at what they're doing. When I spend time on the Hill with congressional staffers, they will secretly or quietly admit that they know that the law and policy that they write is not really implementable. They know that it doesn't get the outcomes that they intend or very often doesn't, and that what they need to learn is sort of more of the full cycle, so that as the people in the agencies that are implementing these laws are learning what, you know, what users want or, you know, what actually happens when you go to implement these things, that they can bring those learnings back up the chain, and we just don't have those feedback loops in place right now. But it's not just about a better communication, it is really about the learning, being, you know, multi-directional, and our policy and lawmakers having the humility to learn from the actual execution.

GR: What you just described for that feedback loop sounds like the right thing to do. But we are currently, you and I are speaking in a moment where the federal government and civil servants, I think it's fair to say, are under an assault, where at least they feel like they're under an assault. And how do we create the political space or the trust space for there to be that kind of sharing of information and mutual respect from the lawmaker and the policy designer to the implementer and back again in order that we get this more right?

JP: Well, our founders created a system of federalism, and I think that's a big advantage right now, because when things are not possible in DC, they are possible in the States, and we can experiment with them. I think actually there is more room for maneuvering and learning and talking about new things right now than we're going to, you know, admit publicly because their headlines are quite dramatic, but there is still stuff going in Congress where, where people want to figure out what is next. But leaving that aside, you've got, you know, 50 states or 53 if you count the territories and something like 30,000 local jurisdictions that can experiment with these new ways of working and show what it looks like, and then we can adopt those back into the federal level when, knock on wood, we have a more functional Congress in the future.

GR: Well, one of the things I've noticed as a political observer is that the partisan divide and some of the dysfunctionality of hyper-partisanship has now kind of infiltrated to the state and even the local levels. I'm wondering if that is going to compromise that kind of dynamic that you're hoping for from the, you know, 50 laboratories of democracy. I forget which Supreme Court justice used that phrase, it might have been Oliver Wendell Holmes. But anyway, you know, I'm wondering whether the window for that is closing.

JP: Well, I think that it's a tough political environment, for sure. And to the degree that culture war stuff can really distract from the very serious business of governing. Yes, we do have a problem, but, you know, they also, to quote another sort of tried and true government line, there's no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage, right?

GR: Right.

JP: I mean, these things still matter in communities even when there is political strife. And that is a lot of what we're talking about here. People need to live together, they need to, you know, have roads and schools and garbage pickup. All these things actually really do rest on that operating model of government and are the places where we don't disagree that much. And I think in some ways, by raising the visibility and salience and, and relevance of this core operating model, we actually give people something to talk about where there's just a lot more common ground and a lot more sense of, this is just common sense. This is just, you know, this is part of how we're all going to live together in this community and how things work well. So I think in some ways it's really an antidote to the divisive headlines.

GR: Yeah, that's a good point. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the governance and internet expert Jennifer Pahlka. I wanted to ask you something that is also in your book that I think would be of particular resonance with people who are living in this part of upstate New York, especially the Rochester area. You write of something that you call the ‘Kodak curse’. What is the Kodak curse, first of all?

JP: The Kodak curse derives from, I guess, it was back in the 80s, when
these companies, starting with Kodak, decided to outsource all of their IT. And, we've done that in government, right? We've said, look, this isn't something government does, well, let's just buy this from vendors. Well, in a sense, there are many things that can be outsourced well. But when you get to the point where all of the digital competence and understanding of the digital world is outside your company or outside the institution of government, you really can make some pretty bad strategic blunders. And Kodak did this when they, you know, they had a lead on everyone else, they were the first people to have a digital camera. But they lost that lead. And, you know, it really hurt the company because it, you know, sure, you want someone to fix your printer or get you on the internet, I can see why people want to outsource that. But if nobody understands the value of digital expertise in your company, you're going to miss a lot of strategic decisions that would really, you know, put your company forward. Our government has very much treated everything digital as just something you buy. In reality, digital is something you do, right? None of the companies that run on technology today outsource it entirely. You don't outsource your product. If you think about something like unemployment insurance, yes, people in government think of the politics of unemployment insurance and the policies as the product. And in fact, what people experience is the website is the product And you really have to have control of that and know that it works and know that it's good and that it's going to meet people's expectations. You know, at the end of the day, you're going to be a legitimate government that people trust and want to have work.

GR: This applies so much to the university as well. I'm thinking of the experiences we've had with our website, and I'm also thinking of the experiences with online teaching and buying the packages from elsewhere, where they don't actually fit. I wanted to give you some space here at the end, to end on a positive note and to ask, are there, you mentioned before the different laboratories of democracy and this is one of the benefits that we can see. Some of these things that you're proposing might start to be done at the state level or the local level. Are there particular states in the United States, or are there other countries that have caught your eye as leading the way on this issue that the United States national government, federal government could be looking at, to get some important lessons from?

JP: You know, there are bright spots everywhere. There's no place that is such, you know, a perfect model for the United States, because every place is different. So at the state level, you know, I'm inspired by Governor Shapiro's leadership around the I-95 rebuild, for instance, where he just said, we have to do this quickly and pulled out all the stops. And I think people really saw a way government can really deliver when it has to. And I think all leaders should take a page from his book on that front. Overseas, I've always been, gotten a lot of inspiration from my colleagues in the UK who started the Government Digital Service before the United States Digital Service came into being. In fact, we modeled the USDS on the GDS and they continue to do great work. And I think they're much more of a peer nation, whereas a country like Estonia, which is very often cited as the leader and truly is incredible in its sort of digital forward in its ability to serve its citizens with incredible ease and convenience and confidence, right? They just don't have the policy legacy, the sort of accumulation of decades of policy debt that we have, which makes it a lot easier for them. But I still think we should aspire to their kind of work. They, for instance, are going to be, I think, quite forward-leaning on the adoption of AI. And it will just be harder for us, for a number of reasons that we really need to grapple with. Because if you think about this AI world, I mean, think about how fast vectors for fraud and abuse in programs are going to evolve in a world where lots of people have access to AI. If government doesn't avail itself of those tools, we're at an enormous disadvantage. Think about how fast we need regulation to respond. I don't just mean regulation of AI, I mean any kind of regulation. When we move into a world where people can do things very quickly with AI, government will need to respond just as quickly. And we're going to have to start clearing out some of the clutter that keeps us from being able to move into that world. All the time recognizing that AI has, you know, a bunch of challenges that we need to be very careful with it, that we should not be adopting any technology without lots of systems in place for, you know, constantly testing it to make sure it's doing what we intend it to do and not causing real harm to people. But we have to speed that process up enormously. And I think we can look to places like Estonia for inspiration while recognizing that they are, you know, they don't have some of the challenges that we have in terms of really 250 years of always adding to our laws, policies and regulations and never subtracting. This is a real problem that we need to deal with. The good news is that AI also can help us deal with that problem of policy accumulation and cruft. LOM’s are fantastic at this, and I'm really excited to see a lot of people use those tools to do this sort of regulatory and policy simplification that is really long overdue.

GR: Well, I'm happy to leave it there because, you know, this has been such a challenging environment in recent years and you're finding rays of light. And so, you've left me more optimistic than when I started the conversation, so I appreciate that.

JP: I’m glad for that. I’ll just say, since you mentioned the federal workforce and the disruptions. I mean, if we may leave on a note that is sobering but also positive, you know, I spent a long time sort of, frustrated with governments sclerosis and it's and its slow pace. Things are now moving rather quickly, and you know the phrase, you can't make an omelet if you don't break some eggs? I think the present side of this particular moment is that the eggs have been broken, so it's really up to us to now just go make that new omelet.

GR: What we make with it, that's a good analogy, yeah. Jennifer Pahlka is giving a public talk on the Syracuse University campus on October 29th. It's titled, “Governing in the Age of AI: Lessons from Recoding America,” and more information on that talk can be found at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs website. Ms. Pahlka, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. I learned a lot.

JP: Thank you, it was a joy.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Nina Jankowicz. Ms. Jankowicz is an expert on disinformation and democratization, and she headed up the Disinformation Advisory Board during the Biden administration. She's also the author of two recent books, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict” and “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back”. Ms. Jankowicz will be on the Syracuse University campus to give a free public talk on October 27th. It's titled, “War on Reality: How Autocrats Are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World”. Ms. Jankowicz, welcome to the program. Thanks for making the time to talk with me, really appreciate it.

Nina Jankowicz: Glad to be here.

GR: So let's start with the first of the books I mentioned, “How to Lose the Information War”. I'm going to start with what probably seems like an overly basic question, but what is the information war? Briefly.

NJ: Yeah, not overly basic and an important question. So when I wrote this book, I originally conceived of the idea when I was living in Ukraine where information war is very real and so is the kinetic war, right? And for me, I thought at that point in time, which was 2016-2017, the United States was not taking seriously the information war. We thought, oh, surely our systems are resilient enough, our democratic infrastructure is resilient enough that we can deal with this, right? That, you know, people will be able to suss out fact from fiction. And here we are, you know, eight years later, nine years later, and I think the problem has only gotten worse. We have adversaries like Russia, China, Iran, and many more using the Russian playbook now online to influence Americans, to influence our political discourse, to influence decision makers. And now we've also got political decision makers in the United States using disinformation as well. So I think it's important to characterize it as a war, because it can have very real costs, and we tend to discount what goes on online as just, oh, words that people say on the internet. But really, it does have impact in the offline world, in real life, as the kids like to say, IRL.

GR: (laughter) Okay, well, so, a question about that. I mean, you mentioned these other countries and some of the things that they've been doing in recent years. I would assume, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that the United States does similar things and has done similar things to other countries. What at least can you say about that?

NJ: Well, this is a question that I get a lot from people who think that U.S. imperialism is a bad thing, as do I. And, you know, there's certainly been, particularly in the 70's and 80's, instances of covert U.S. operations that have been attempting to influence publics all over the world, places like Venezuela, Cuba, certainly in Asia and in Russia as well. The difference is that in the modern era, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have stuck to overt influence operations, right? They are labeled very proudly with 'paid for by the U.S. government', 'paid for by the U.S. taxpayer'. And I'm thinking of institutions like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, you know, programming that went through the National Endowment for Democracy or the National Democratic Institute, these sorts of programs, right? You would not be able to do that programming if you didn't have a big U.S.A. or State Department stamp on that. And what we're talking about when we talk about what Russia has done since 2016 and in fact, before, is covert operations. They are operations where Russian individuals are masquerading as American citizens, talking to us, influencing us, advertising us and attempting to change our political outcomes. I think the overt realm is defensible, the covert realm is not. And I hope that any American would be upset to learn about some of the hi-jinx that Russia and others have gotten away with in their covert operations, masquerading as American citizens and attempting to influence us from the inside.

GR: Well, interesting the way you ended that response, because I did want to ask, what I would assume also that we do covert operations, too. I mean, the point of this interview, by the way, is not to get into all of this, but I would assume that the United States has got to be doing that. I mean, in some ways, I almost hope they are.

NJ: Yeah, so it's interesting. I think certainly there is the realm of military psy-ops, psychological operations and that's in a whole different kettle of fish, right? We're not really discussing that, I don't have as much experience with that. There have been a couple of instances of U.S. information or disinformation campaigns, including one during the pandemic where the US military was targeting audiences in, I'm forgetting which Southeast Asian country at the moment, but were targeting them and encouraging them not to take the Sinovac Chinese COVID vaccine there, which I think was just absolutely malicious. I would have condemned that, I have condemned that publicly, and probably caused some people to get ill and maybe even die. Like, I think that's morally reprehensible. One of the things that I had hoped to do in my time in government was learn more about the ways that we were doing that and hopefully influence it so that it was curving more toward the, you know, the moral arc that I would hope the United States would follow. But the Russian government of course is doing this, in a way that I think, you know, is only aided by the technology that we have at our disposal today, the way that you can target the most vulnerable audiences with, you know, a single credit card payment, very easily. I think they really seized on that and the United States is not doing that same sort of targeting, to change political fortunes. It might be trying to plump up its own image, but it's not as pernicious. And we're certainly not spending the amount of money that the Russians are on this, unfortunately.

GR: Okay. So it's a difference in kind and a difference in intensity it sounds like. So I'm just curious, you don't have to spend a lot of time on this question, but I am curious. When you were serving in the Biden administration, what did you spend, sas there was there one thing that you spent more of your time worrying about than anything else? Because you listed all the different threats at the beginning, but was there something that got you up at 3 in the morning, like, oh, those people or, you know, that kind of thing?

NJ: Well, I will preface this without going into a long aside that, you know, my time in the administration was quite short. I was there for three months because my position and the work that I was hired to do, ironically came under attack by disinformation itself. And so a lot of my time, even prior to those attacks began, was spent thinking about the way that the administration could communicate most proactively and transparently about its intentions for the Disinformation Board. Unfortunately, my warnings to my supervisors at DHS were not heeded, and that's why we ended up in the pickle that we were in with my family being threatened. And to this day, you know, more than three years later, I still receive threats and am the subject of conspiracy theories because of that short time in the board. So I thought a lot about basically the responsibility of government to communicate to its citizens, again, proactively, transparently, respectfully, and instead, I think, you know, I will criticize the Biden administration. It wasn't just this effort, but many others where, that administration operated as if the internet wasn't a thing they had to worry about. And it very much is now, you know, we went from, one influencer with, you know, over a million followers targeting me to being on Fox News every hour on the hour the next day. And it got very ugly very quickly. And, you know, I had hoped they would think about that, but unfortunately they discounted the disinformation experts' opinion. Aside from that, I started right as the full scale invasion of Ukraine had started, in March 2022. And so we were looking a lot at the ways that Russia might be influencing American publics, particularly as we were headed toward a midterm election and the end of the year, how they might be targeting cyber infrastructure or even other critical infrastructure like financial infrastructure in order to try to influence the American public to support the Russian's cause in the war. None of that really ended up happening because, you know, I just criticized the Biden administration, I'll give them kudos, the coalition that they built and the way that they were able to declassify intelligence to show the American people what was going on in Ukraine and what Russia was up to, I think was very, very compelling for at least the first 18 months of the war. And I'm glad that none of those, you know, nightmare scenarios came to pass.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, the author of, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict”. A little bit later in our conversation, I want to come back to something you mentioned there about your own personal experience, but let me stick with this for a second. Who's the bigger threat down the road do you think, in this area, is it Russia or is it China?

NJ: It's a hard question because Russia is certainly committed. We have sanctioned them, we've kicked them out of the global clubs. You know, they until recently were pariahs because of, in part, because of the disinformation campaigns and influence campaigns they had run. But we've never really seen the full force of Beijing's influence campaigns trained on the United States before. Your listeners may be aware that Beijing has its Tencent Army, which is essentially a massive troll army called the Tencent Army because they're paid ten cents, I think, per post or something like that. But, you know, they've never trained that army on the United States. They use it in particular for domestic propaganda. And they're wildly successful within China itself, including by creating kind of controlled opposition postings that make it look like there is dissent in Chinese society to keep people kind of quelled. But we've never seen that really trained on the U.S. in a way that I think has been effective. We've seen a couple campaigns around the Uighur genocide and things like that. But, I don't think if China really tried hard, I'd be pretty scared because of the resources, the sheer number of people and frankly, the ability that they've shown to control the conversation at home. The one thing that they don't really have going for them, which I think is actually solved by the advent of accessible artificial intelligence, is typically these posts that China has used against the United States have been easy to spot because they're in poor English or they're just like rote copy-pasted. With AI, you can easily generate perfectly grammatical, idiomatically correct English posts, and you can generate lots of different variations of them. it won't be that same rote copy paste. So I think we're we're in for a rude awakening. And unfortunately, over the last nine months or so, the U.S. government has entirely stood down its counter foreign propaganda apparatus throughout the government. So, I'm a little worried about that, Grant. I'm not gonna lie.

GR: Well, I've got the student papers to prove your point about how you can use AI to (laughter) write it well and write it differently each time. But on that point, the very last point you said, I was going to ask you, what's the most important thing America should be doing at present, which it is not doing? And it sounds like the most important thing is get back on this and not ignore it, is that what's going on right now?

NJ: Well, certainly the U.S. government under the Trump administration has unfortunately shut down things like the Global Engagement Center, which was the State Department's nerve center for Countering foreign propaganda. They shut down the Foreign Malign Influence Center within the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Foreign Influence Task Force at the FBI. So, like all of these different nodes of our response to foreign influence have now been terminated because of the politicization of this topic. And I think that that is quite disturbing, because it's democracy that suffers when we allow our adversaries to influence our political systems. It's not a political issue one way or the other. Disinformation, Russia, China might be angling for President Trump today, but that could turn on a dime, depending on what President Trump does in negotiating a peace in Ukraine or, you know, trade negotiations he might strike with China, right? Like these things are like the winds. And I think it's very silly to have put down our defenses entirely. But I also make the point in my book that one of the things we've never invested in, at the level that I would have liked to have seen, and something that has worked for a number of the countries that I profile in my book, is information literacy. And I'm sure you see this with your students as I do mine, you know, students at Syracuse are wonderful and smart and, you know, they also are influenced by the media that they consume. We're in an environment where, unfortunately, the media that we consume is put toward us entirely passively. We're consuming it passively, we're not seeking it out, it's all algorithmically, you know, served to us. And so I think people need just a little bit of heuristics for how to navigate this increasingly complex, polluted information environment and we haven't invested in that as a country. Some states are doing it, but, we haven't done it at a national level. And that wouldn't be saying, you know, this outlet is good, this outlet is bad. Again, it would be just giving people those skills of how to understand the information that's being presented to them on all of these apps and services that we use today.

GR: Just a quick follow up on that. So when you said a little bit earlier the politicization of these efforts, I want to make sure I understood to you, what you're getting out there, because I can think of two ways in which that might make sense. Are you saying that there is a pushback on saying, hey, look, we've got to counter this Russian disinformation because the impression is it's Democrats that are emphasizing Russia right now, is that it?

NJ: Yes. That's been primarily the narrative that Republicans have used to shut down these efforts. There's also been a long campaign that ties in with some of the stuff I experienced against disinformation researchers, government employees, tech employees. That the narrative, and I will just preface this by saying it is not borne out by any of the evidence or data, is that, you know, researchers colluded with government to pressure the tech platforms to censor conservative content online, and that's just not true, right? So it's the two prongs there, the Russia, Russia, Russia thing and then this censorship lie, which has unfortunately left us almost defenseless in the face of continued foreign assaults on our information space.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Nina Jankowicz. The disinformation expert has served in the Biden administration and she's also the author of, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict”, and, “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment and How to Fight Back” and we've been discussing her two books. So I want to get into your second book about how to be a woman online here in a second, but I have a question I wanted to ask first. Strange question, and I don't mean it to sound like a hostile one, given that you served in the Biden administration, you've already been critical of it in some way. But it does seem to me pretty clear that we, we meaning the American people, were exposed to a premeditated disinformation campaign during the Biden administration about Joe Biden himself.

NJ: (laughter)

GR: And the leaders of the party, for example, all told us nothing to worry about, Bill Clinton said this, Barack Obama said this. Some good journalists have since explained to us that this was otherwise and people knew. So what should we make of this?

NJ: Yeah. You know, Grant, I think that really comports with my experience of the Biden administration, unfortunately and the hope that, you know, they were able to bury bad news, bad press, or twist the narrative in some way. I don't necessarily think it was disinformation, I think it was electioneering, right? I don't think it was with a malign intent, which is the distinctive factor around disinformation, but I don't think it was excusable. And I'm reading Kamala Harris's book right now, and she's quite harsh with them as well, but I think she'd bears some responsibility for not coming out and saying it and not trying to influence a little bit more. But yeah, I would agree with you. And I think, unfortunately, you know, we're left with the consequences today.

GR: Yeah, I think, just a quick comment, I think the bind for Harris is she's either got to say that she was so far out of the loop that she didn't know and that indicates something or that she was in the loop and she did know and didn't say anything, and that's at issue too. Well, let's move to your other book, “How to Be a Woman Online”. First of all, again, I don't mean this to be a hostile question, but men get a lot of abuse online too. Is the problem fundamentally different for women?

NJ: Yes it is and the data show this. There were a couple of studies that were done early in 2020 looking at the way that male politicians were abused online, and the tone and tenor of the abuse that women in politics received and women receive more gendered abuse, it's more toxic and it's more often violent than the abuse that men receive. It also is more numerous. The only male politician whose abuse in 2020 exceeded that of any female politician, I think, was Mitch McConnell and at the time, of course, he was Senate Majority leader, and then again, the tone and tenor issues still apply. I will also say from my personal experience, the abuse that we receive as women often, very much brings into account sexuality in a way that I don't think we see with men. It it also brings into our families into the conversation. So, when I was receiving a lot of abuse, when I was pregnant, my unborn child was frequently threatened as well. And you don't want to get between a mom and her baby, right?

GR: (laughter)

NJ: So it's it becomes very visceral, very quickly.

GR: Yeah, interesting. So what are the biggest pitfalls online for women who are taking on more of a public role? What are the, are there some things that you have to watch out for more than others?

NJ: You know, I think it is something that so many people just assume is part of the cost of being in public life and I want to say it doesn't have to be that way. The reason I wrote, “How to Be a Woman Online”, which is basically a handbook for how to deal with the abuse that is so common for so many of us, is because I want people to be equipped and to be able to hold their digital ground. And this book is helpful for men too, by the way, I think particularly in this day and age of kind of mass digital surveillance, but...

GR: I thought it was, yeah.

NJ: Thank you, thank you. I mean, I think we received trolling, but there's also a lot of invasions into our personal privacy, our, you know, home addresses, phone numbers, things like that being leaked. Individuals have tried to hack me before, but little did they know, I have been a target of the Russian government for the more than ten years, so I'm pretty, I've got pretty good security on my end.

GR: Is that all you got, is that what you're saying? (laughter)

NJ: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I think there's a number of things to be worried about, but also in the age of, of geolocation and kind of, hobby open source investigators and kind of the same era where we're all sharing parts of our lives online, you know, a single photograph can give away your location, it can give away your pattern and life and make it more easy to stalk you and threaten and harass you in real life, right? So I just try to bring these things up because, unfortunately, again, the response is, if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen and I don't think it needs to be that way. I don't think we'll see a response from the platforms very quickly, you know, putting in a good faith effort to protect women and minorities. But, you know, we can protect ourselves in the interim.

GR: So what would be, to boil it down, your most important piece of advice for women, the most, maybe the most important thing they should do or the most important thing they shouldn't do when managing their online presence? Is it like to be really careful and sort of rethink the things that you're going to be putting out there, or is it something else?

NJ: Well, I wouldn't want people to censor themselves, right? And when you have dealt with, you know, extensive online abuse, as I have, it does get to be that way that you rethink everything and you think things through too much almost, it can be kind of stifling. But the point that I make in the book is that most of these tips that I give, you know, getting a private information service that removes your information from the internet, using middleware like this tool Block Party to block trolls without having to be exposed to the stuff that they're sending you. These things are kind of set it and forget it, and they make your experience a lot more pleasant. So I think it's just to be in control, to think about these things ahead of time so that you don't find yourselves in a moment where things are bad. You are the subject of an online hate campaign or worse, and you're scrambling to get it all set up. And in fact, that is, I was lucky in that when I had the worst abuse that I dealt with in my life, a private, kind of security consultant that I had hired to help me make sure that my family was safe, told me that if I hadn't been me, you know, things would have been much worse, right? So doing that set it and forget it is really important. But the other kind of single most important tip I would give is just don't, I wouldn't say don't feed the trolls, don't be afraid to block people, right? You don't need to give people your time, your energy. Taylor Swift recently put it like, your energy is currency and it's very expensive, you don't need to spend it on everyone. And that is something I am trying to, as a good millennial Taylor Swift listener, I'm really trying to embody lately. You don't owe people a response if they're not engaging in good faith.

GR: I bet her energy is probably extremely expensive right now. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz. We have about five minutes left or so, and I have basically two more questions for you, but one of them, I think you'll want to take some time with, the first one. It's a personal question, you've alluded to it already several times, but is part of the motivation for this book, “How to Be a Woman Online” autobiographical? You've kind of hinted that it is. And then the bigger question is, tell us a bit about how you have had to deal with the threats and the challenges that you discuss in the book.

NJ: Yeah. So the book came into being after I had dealt with some online abuse as most women in public life do. And after I had done a big piece of research around the 2020 election that looked at the ways that women political candidates were abused online. And I thought, this is so endemic to our society and it doesn't seem like the platforms, as I mentioned before, are going to do anything about it. But I don't want to see women shrinking from expressing themselves in our democratic discourse. And so many of the focus groups and things that I had done, particularly with young women, showed me that that was the case. One young woman told me, I don't want a lifestyle that public anymore, like it was really heartbreaking to me. Ironically, just a couple of days before the Disinformation Governance Board at DHS was announced and my appointment to it was announced, was when my book came out, the second book, “How to Be a Woman Online”. And so the book came out, and then I was hit with this wave of online abuse, which has now lasted for for three and a half years. And essentially it was based on a conspiracy theory about the board that I was going to be censoring people. I'm a granddaughter of somebody who was put in a Soviet gulag. The thought of me censoring people is just so anathema to every fiber of my being. And frankly, it just goes against all of my public scholarship over time. It was shocking to see it take such root, but it was it was not just something that was happening online. It was happening on the airwaves of the most powerful cable stations in the world, like Fox. And that translated into threats against me and my family very quickly. I was in the third trimester of my pregnancy, my son was just a few weeks away from being born. As I mentioned before, he was threatened, we were doxed, which means that our home address was leaked. We received mail at our house. I was advised to leave my house by that consultant that I mentioned before, and I just, I couldn't figure out how to make that happen as, you know, a 36 week pregnant woman with a dog, a cat, and a bunch of stuff. And like, I wanted to be near my doctor and my hospital. I had to go to my prenatal appointments in a disguise, basically. I like, wore a hat and a COVID mask, it was still during COVID, and sunglasses because my face was on TV so much that I didn't know who I would meet on the street would wish me harm. And I've been recognized on the street before as well. And you know, this stuff just changes how you move around in the world. And when so much of your work is online, not even your work, but, you know, dealing, trying to be in touch with family and friends around the world, around the country, when you're dealing with online abuse and you're receiving that level of vitriol so much, it really cuts you off, it isolates you, which is the point, right? The point is to make you withdraw and say, well, this isn't worth it, this level of engagement isn't worth it. And that is something I've really tried to stand against. And, you know, I'm glad that the book is out there so that I can, equip other women to fight back and to hold their digital ground.

GR: We only have a couple seconds left, literally. But give us just a taste of what you'll be discussing in your talk at Syracuse.

NJ: In part, I'm going to be discussing my experience but my experience is not the only one of, you know, autocrats that are targeting truth tellers. It's happened around the world and in order to control the society and the outcomes in society, you need to control the narrative. And that's why journalists, civil society activists, researchers are being targeted right now.

GR: All right. We'll have to leave it there. That was Nina Jankowicz. Again, she's giving a free public talk on the Syracuse University campus on October 27th. It's titled, “War on Reality: How Autocrats Are Silencing Truth Tellers Around the World”. More information on the talk can be found at the Maxwell School of Citizenship Public Affairs website. Ms. Jankowicz, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I learned a lot, and I'm sorry that you went through what you did, but it sounds like you've come out stronger.

NJ: Thank you so much, Grant. A pleasure to be with you.

GR: Thank you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

I mention this in the introduction to the interview with Tim Rudd, but you may notice that missing from the group of interviews with the Syracuse mayoral candidates is Alfonso Davis, who, like Rudd, is running on an independent line. In all regional races where there are multiple candidates, I make an assessment of the candidates’ basic viability. This is not a fine-tuned effort to gauge a candidate’s likelihood of winning, but rather an assessment of whether there is an active campaign of basic viability. That determination is based on party backing, funding, both secured and likely, polling when available, past performance when available, and the background and experience of the candidate, among other factors. Because our political system in the U.S. is overwhelmingly based on the two-party system, candidates from the two major parties are automatically included.

The context for needing to do all this is the fact that the Campbell Conversations is a once-a-week program, of only 30 minutes duration. If we had more airtime, we could be more inclusive regardless.

In this instance, regarding Mr. Rudd and Mr. Davis, I made the determination to give them time, but to put them together into a single half-hour program. I invited both of them to appear on the program, and while Mr. Rudd accepted the invitation, Mr. Davis refused, stating that he didn’t want to have his time shared with Mr. Rudd. When that happens, it is the policy of this program, consistent with that of most other programs, to go forward with the candidate who accepted the invitation. That is what I did with Mr. Rudd, and that is why Mr. Davis is missing from the interviews. -Grant Reeher

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Today we're bringing you the second of our series of interviews with the mayoral candidates for the city of Syracuse. My guest is Tim Rudd, the former Syracuse City budget director and city councilor-at-large, who's running as an independent on a line named Transparency and Accountability. I'd like our listeners to note that we made an effort to invite Alfonso Davis, the other independent candidate, to join this conversation, but he declined to be interviewed in a joint fashion. I do plan to conduct an interview with the Democratic nominee, Sharon Owens, in the coming months. But today, it's Mr. Rudd's turn, welcome to the program.

Tim Rudd: Thank you for having me.

GR: Well, thanks for making the time, we do appreciate it. So let me just start with kind of what may have been the start of your campaign. You've been in the media, you were in the media with some pretty deep criticisms of the Walsh administration. Just, if you could, I know you could speak the entire time about this, but in a nutshell, what are your main criticisms of the way the Walsh administration has used the past eight years?

TR: Well, I think there's, the Walsh administration prioritizes their narrative over telling the truth, over acknowledging things that are problems and trying to improve them. And I think there's a steep cost for that. And I think we see it in many ways.

GR: So give me some of the most important ways in which they've not told the truth.

TR: Well, I mean, I think it's, we're getting to the point where enough time has passed where it's starting to be interesting to look at my announcement and all this. Like just the other day, the Walsh administration went before the city council, I was the budget director, but I also got elected citywide to the city council eight years ago, so I was the finance chair on the council for the first three years of the Walsh administration before I became his budget director, and just this week, the council brought an item for $900,000 to buy and get a new consultant and a new software company for an IT project for payroll modernization, which, ironically, was initially funded through a grant that I helped write the request to the Financial Review Board as the finance chair on the council. And one of the options was to have a new timekeeping system because we use paper time sheets. And that project, over many years, that got delayed at first because of COVID and just slow state funding and then it had a consultant, they spent $2.5 million of New York State money and got nothing for it. They had a launch, a product launch that failed. This is a few years back. And then instead of acknowledging the problems with the implementation, the problems with the product, the problems with which they went about it, they really, like, doubled down, said nothing wrong here, misrepresented a bunch of things to the council, in my opinion, in order to secure additional money. They eventually spent like $8 million on this project. This is really what led to my separation with the Walsh administration, primarily because in November of last year, a whistleblower showed up with a 200 page document that I read, and it corroborated a lot of what I had already thought about the project and made me understand it in many new ways. And that snowballed into me resigning, declaring for mayor, and then the Walsh administration, in my opinion, needing to discredit me and doing so in a racial way that I also feel was inaccurate. But the irony of them going to the council after $900,000 for a new product with a new consultant, to my eyes it shows that their 8 million literally bought nothing, right? Which is basically what I was saying, which was a very controversial statement at that time and nobody wanted me to say. And time passes and truth kind of becomes more evident, but it's still a complex story. And I think that applies to a lot of things in Syracuse. So I just think there is a desire to say all is well with, like the way in which crime is reported, crime is down, right? They celebrate crime being down. They don't discuss the people who call 911, who don't get the response they need for what they perceive to be a very serious thing. They don't talk about the criminality that exists in the corner stores that caused drug stores to, like, ride out leases and leave. Such that like intersections of the city and private business corridors are totally vacant, right? Because there's no crime? No. It's because there's been normalized criminality where the stores just get pilfered all the time and don't want to deal with trying to stop it. So in my perception, there is a problem where they have a narrative that tells a story of rising above all kinds of stuff, but they don't actually engage with the reality on Syracuse. And in many ways, I feel like I'm connected to the reality in a way different than Walsh in particular, mainly because I grew up in Syracuse my whole life. My dad still lives in the house I grew up in. That's where I launched my campaign, was on my dad's steps with my wife. Ironically, they will crop my wife out of the pictures when they want to insinuate that I'm somehow racist, which my wife laughs at and I cringe. And then I went to Syracuse University through the Syracuse Challenge. I went to the Maxwell School eventually. I lived in New York City for seven years, where I really got to see an urban space and imagine how Syracuse could be different. I even bought my house on the south side while I was living in New York and renovated it on weekends. It's in a qualified census tract, so my neighborhood has more than 20% poverty, and it shows. Eight years ago I took like reporters on walks on my block and there were vacant houses, drug houses, all kinds of stuff. And it was really at that time when I left my job in New York, officially to run, to be on the city council, I cashed out my 401K and I brought the two family in front of mine, and I fixed it up. That was like my side gig while I was on the council the first six months, was fixing up the house in front of mine. And over the last eight years I've bought five other houses on my block and fixed them up. So, I think I know I have this unique set of experiences where I'm from here born, raised, educated, understand the value of the large nonprofits like Syracuse University. Had outside, professional experience in the New York City mayor's office doing public finance stuff. Then I worked for a national nonprofit, where I did cost benefit analysis of anti-poverty programs. I really wrote quite extensively in syracuse.com, probably more extensively than the mayor himself or any other public official over the last ten years. I've run for different things, I've lost, I've won, I've lost. We'll see. But I'm definitely a scrappy Syracuseon who believes that our community and who's worked to have, like, success professionally and I'm still committed to this. Everything I own is on my block. Like, I'd take, like, side yards that were, the vacant houses and make them to beautiful family garden, right? Like the people on my block know what I do, that's hard to necessarily communicate to 143,000 people all at once. And, in many ways, I've witnessed Ben Walsh and kind of his approach. So, I think that may have, I initially declared that I was going to be a RINO, so I didn't have an independent line. I actually think in many ways Ben and I learned to get along for a period of time, but we were never really like, friends to say. We were always pretty like, I would push for things, and I was rough and willing to be that guy who disagreed. And, that went the way it did. But I think he soured me on the independent approach because I was like, rise above politics, I've been this loyal, in theory, loyal Democrat, right? Like, I do the work, I carry the petitions, I help the slate. When my candidate loses, I eventually endorse the other person when they win the primary. And in other ways, I feel like the party has moved left, too far left for me. So like I do believe in home ownership, I definitely believe in free speech and all these other things. And in some ways, the Republican Party had things like Make America Healthy. That resonates with me. Like, I wake up every day to go to the gym with my wife at 4 a.m., to be there at 5 a.m., but like, and stop the wars. Like the whole time I was at Maxwell, I thought the wars were very bad and a bad thing and all of a sudden the Republicans were saying that. So I really thought there was this opportunity to, and they didn't have a candidate. So I kind of thought, I was being sincere, saying I was going to be a RINO and I was transparent about that, like, hey, I want to be a Republican in name only. Unfortunately, I think because of my political history as a Democrat, I didn't realize that RINO to me sounded like a good thing, right?

GR: (laughter)

TR: So in my experience, RINO meant like moderate or like person willing to compromise, person willing to work. But it turns out it's like a slur within the current Republican Party.

GR: Yeah, they don't see it that way.

TR: I ended up alienating myself to them, even though I really was trying to be sincere in my, like, hey, I think we have mutual agreement here. And I also think it's not really, given the numbers, the 18% enrollment for the Republican Party in the city of Syracuse, I didn't think it was feasible for any Republican to win. So I thought being a RINO was like a reasonable compromise. But I didn't do it in a way that signaled compromise to any of them. So that, ironically caused me to be literally, like, thrown out of the Republican Party. Well, at least my father and my wife got thrown out for being RINOs and I chose to re-enroll at that time as a Democrat because I was being threatened with all kinds of legal lawsuits. And I just thought, this is not the right path. So in a way, I got forced into an independent ballot line, right?

GR: I see. Let me ask you though, a question about something you mentioned earlier. Which is that, you being tagged as a racist because, you know, and I'm sure you knew I was going to ask you this question at some point, so I might as well do it now. But some of the criticisms that you were making of the Walsh administration in the past, at least as they were related in media outlets such as the Post-Standard, you know, veered into what appeared to be bizarre or or even offensive, invoking plantation's slaves to make your point. And, you know, you mentioned you resigned. I mean, there was controversy, were you fired? Did you resign? They say they fired you over those comments. So, if you can briefly, what should voters make of all that? I mean, what is the bottom line here of the reality of all that?

TR: Well, I mean, the reality is that I went through what was a very stressful period with a fraud, what I perceived as a fraud at City Hall. And I still believe it to be a fraud.

GR: And that was the example related earlier.

TR: The whistleblower, all of that, right? So there was a period of November and December last year where I figured all this out, and it really, the process where I eventually like leak the whistleblower report to the city council and the city auditor, ruins my relationship with both the mayor and the deputy mayor, who is now the favorite to become the next mayor. So I was like, well, I'm done. I'm going to run for mayor because I don't want to work, I don't really I don't have a place here and I think I could do a better job. So at that time, I meet with a mentor and I record a conversation. And I recorded it because I didn't have the emotional capacity to have that conversation with thousands of people. And it's a 2.5 hour conversation, and I go through the whole of the fraud and like, the first half is like talking about this, like learning of the fraud. And I use all types of language, like I call all kinds of swearwords, all kinds of stuff. The mayor, I clearly don't like the mayor. I'm loyal to the people I'm loyal to. And then toward the end, when I'm talking about political strategy, the person who I'm talking to asked me a question about like, different demographics, like, I don't know, maybe the black vote or something. And when I was on the council, I was probably closest aligned to Khalid Bey, right?

GR: Okay. He's been on the program before and I know him, yes.

TR: Khalid and I vibed on many levels. Like I would often read all this stuff about math being the guiding, like, the explanation of the universe. And we would just talk about like that kind of stuff. And we got along. And Khalid is an author, so I've read all of Khalid's books. And one of Khalid's books is called, “The African American Dilemma” and in it he talks about Willie Lynch. And after the mayor got reelected, I mean, I supported, I didn't support Mayor Walsh at that time. I worked for Ben Walsh, and I told him I couldn't support him. I decided I will stay out of it, but I can't help you because Khalid is like my big brother, right?

GR: Got it.

TR: And, as a reward, not a reward, but I think in a way, when I was asking for numerous like additional responsibilities as the budget and procurement director, the deputy mayor and the mayor said, hey, we want to give you minority affairs. So they literally move minority affairs into the budget suite. And I do all this stuff to do it legally, which hardly anyone does in the Walsh administration. Like I changed the city charter, I moved it under the budget department, I renamed it Equity, Compliance and Social Impact. And then through that, I kind of had to deal with some staff that weren't great, which I think was part of the reason they were willing to give it to me because they thought I was a manager who would actually be able to handle the situation. Like they literally entrusted me with minority affairs, right?

GR: Wait a minute, let me stop there because we got to take a break. But then I want to get to the other side of that story, on the other side. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and we'll continue the conversation after a short break. Welcome back to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Tim Rudd. He's running for mayor of Syracuse on an independent line in this November's election. So go ahead and pick up on this story now, because I'd asked you about these comments that you had made that became quite controversial and generated a lot of media attention. So take me from where you were to that point.

TR: Long story long, I feel like I was one of the few white managers in the city who was comfortable talking about race. Like in many ways, I was always in those conversations in college. I was in that in the places I worked, I would be on the diversity council. Literally last summer I drove to Boston for racial equity in municipal finance with Sharon Owens in my car. Like, I think if anything, I became too trusting of being comfortable talking about it. And I talked about an element of this Willie Lynch concept at the end of the recording. So you'd have to listen to two hours of absolute like, if your takeaway from this two hour plus conversation is Rudd is racist, then like, I can't, I don't know what to tell you. There were many other things and at that point I decided, like when I was still, I had announced the resignation, I had announced the candidacy for mayor and then I shared the tape, I shared the majority of the tape. Like you, there are space constraints so I couldn't share 2.5 hours because nobody would listen to it, so I shared like the first 70 minutes. And then it was that that I think it was just too much of a disobedience to be tolerated. So even though I had resigned and all this other stuff, then I think they really needed to discredit me. So they decide to have me discredited through a racial lens where the headline on the syracuse.com article that really did all the damage, it said, “Rudd compares to slave breaker”, (editor's note: actual headline reads, "Rudd compares Syracuse mayoral opponent to a slave breaker: ‘I can say it with a dog whistle’" -ML) and many people don't even have a subscription and read it. And like social media spreads lies eight times faster than any other medium in history, so like, it goes crazy. But I never even used the word slave breaker. So like if you had phrased it in 19 other ways or any other point from that conversation, I don't think it would have had the same effect. But they chose to use the word slave breaker. That's Jeremy Boyer's word, or whoever wrote the headline, not mine. And from there, it just takes a life of its own. And they were probably pretty successful in discrediting me, even though I think people who had really been paying attention realized that I was poking a bear, and I basically got attacked by a bear.

GR: And just to make something clear here, from what I heard you say, the other thing is, you were using, at least as far as you understood it, a metaphor that you had gotten from Khalid Bey's book. So, you know, you were drawing on that.

TR: Oh, definitely. Like, does the Walsh administration use race as a factor in their management assignments, decisions and their general approach? And then should they or not? I don't know, those are questions that other people could ask or answer or pontificate on, but I spoke about it through a historical lens, which is really how I have learned to engage the world is you read about it, you're thoughtful about it, you're open and honest about it, and you realize that we've all passed through this collective history, and we share it to some extent, even if we're unaware of it. And you got to be open to talk about it, to not perpetuate it. And that's how I've lived. So the irony is being portrayed as a racist, and I've been on, like, I've seen enough to know that once charged with such an allegation, there's nothing I can say, do, to prove that I'm not a racist. So I have largely stuck to my, I have not apologized because I do not feel that there was any ill intent. Like, I kind of think of racism as like hatred toward a group or like really like judgment toward a group or an expression of superiority over a group. And if you listen to that tape, I'm literally expressing an affinity with the group, like a shared identity in many ways. Like, it may sound strange to people for a big white guy to identify with, quote unquote, like the slave in the master slave relationship, but in some ways I do, like that's the hero of the story in the narrative, even though they're intertwined. So like, I think it's a complex understanding that social media and so much of the narrative and much of the population isn't ready to talk about, and that's been very hard. And one of the reasons why I was like, excited to try to speak with you because you at least have a longer form and like, set up to talk. It's a very hard thing to talk about in any thirty second segment.

GR: No kidding. So let me jump to another topic, and this is one probably you already expected. So you know, your campaign lacks an organized party to help with all the components of what we normally would consider a successful campaign. My understanding is you're almost unfunded and, you know, it's kind of one man band or a one family band. So, you know, it's unlikely that you're going to win. You already said that Sharon Owens is the favorite. Sometimes campaigns that are in this category, that I just put you in, are in it to try to move the public dial or raise awareness about a particular issue and change something very specific in particular. Does that describe your campaign in a way, and if so, what is that issue? Is it the transparency and accountability in government for the next administration?

TR: Well, I think yes, I would agree with that sentiment. Like at this point, I'm fighting for principle, right? And in many ways I feel like I'm fighting to restore my name, but in the way I've been a thoughtful advocate for all things Syracuse and how we can be different over the last ten years and really the whole of my life. So I'm trying to make it that way as well. And I do think that we have cowardly leadership, in particular with Ben Walsh, and that he is not honest. I don't think he's honest with himself or his staff or anyone else. So he kind of believes the delusion. And I think we have to be honest and until we're honest, we're not going to have any kind of progress. And even if that has to do with crime or if that has to do with the trash carts, and it doesn't mean like the trash, just as an example, I think there's a need for the leadership to, you can deal to praise or celebrate an achievement while still acknowledging it may be imperfect and you need to work to improve it. So, like the trash carts I view as an improvement but they created new externalities, unintended things. So I think people stack trash on the sides, front and rear of their house, especially in qualified census tracts that have more than 20% poverty, more than they used to because they can't fit it, and they don't have the wherewithal to follow the rules to get rid of it. And it's kind of cumbersome because you only set one up. Anyways, so like, I think if we were honest about that, then we could build a solution that would get rid of the trash and we wouldn't have this problem. And I think that environment creates all type of disorderly-ness. So like in my life and in my approach to a landlord and even at work, I think details matter a lot. So, and you have to be honest about all the details. So, and you have to address them in order to get the solutions. And if you're lying about whether they work, whether there's trash on the side of the house or not, then you're not going to get rid of it.

GR: So let me ask you this then, it sounds like, and again, tell me if I've got this right or wrong, but it sounds like to me then the core nugget of the point of your campaign is not so much about policies that are wrong, but rather about the way that policies have been discussed, the way they've been evaluated, the way they have been publicly held accountable or not held accountable.

TR: Or not discussed, yeah.

GR: Yeah, and sort of the way that government is working rather than this administration has the wrong aim here or the wrong...

TR: The government rolls out a narrative, I think this is true of the Walsh administration and of probably many other layers of our current structure in government, then they want everybody to stick to the narrative. Don't think critically, don't push back. Even if you're an ally and you're on board, you're not allowed to publicly dissent. You got to be on board all the time, any dissent is total dissent. And I think that's a very unhealthy environment and it doesn't allow for you to be thoughtful and get the type of response you need. And like I would say, Syracuse does have a moment, right? The highway coming down took a lot of people pushing to get it, it's the right decision, it's a huge opportunity. The university and downtown are not properly connected. I think this administration has built a strategy that really, the energy of the highway coming down is focused around the housing authority. And I think that's not a good strategy because it requires so many public dollars that it doesn't, it's not going to be very successful. Because, one, the dollars aren't there with the current federal partners, and two, it's not using the limited dollars we have to activate private investment where it might actually go. So, like, I really do think if we maintained the housing authority and invested in that housing stock and the people who live there and make it a better place to live, which I think is a good place for affordable housing, right, because it's right next to the universities, it's right next to the downtown. There's lots of economic opportunity there, it's a good place for permanent affordable housing. So we don't need to be dedicating massive, destroy, rebuild and all that it takes to support that, right? We could be using those same monies to get denser developments along East Genesee Street, where they are happening already, to ignite it faster and to have plans with like, and even getting to the point where you could have new art at the center of Syracuse at Almond and East Genesee Street to really like connect the university to downtown, make it feel like one urban core. I think that could spark a desire for living in the inner ring neighborhoods which have the most divestment. All of that is like a nexus of money creation, right? Like money gets injected into the economy through housing and in real estate investment and through the universities, through higher ed, through students taking out loans there. So it's really this opportunity to get more money in the community. And that's the way we're going to reduce poverty. We have a poverty problem, we need more people getting higher incomes and this is a way to do it.

GR: Okay. So we've only got a couple of minutes left and I want to squeeze two questions in related to what you've just been talking about, or at least one is. So the first question is and again, just about a minute on each one. So regarding Micron, which we haven't talked about yet, obviously that's going to add to the level of opportunity that you just described, potentially. Do you have one big concern about the Micron development and what would it be? But you have to be brief.

TR: I think that the idea that Micron is a sincere opportunity, like as an employment center for the average citizen in Syracuse is not true. And I think that's almost like a, illusion that's damaging. We would be better to focus on home ownership and like, just general, security, right? Like the schools, if security, we have a poverty problem, which then creates instability, violence, a whole bunch of problems, we need to deal with the security, that's like a higher level human need. And then when we do that, people can begin to be prepared to start making better decisions about their health, about their, like, academic and professional trajectories. And there's lots of people with a regular job who could afford to own a home. And that's really the permanent, afford, like the best housing affordability in the long term is the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. I think that is clear in most of the country, and we don't have enough of that in Syracuse. And that could be true for affordable home ownership as well. And the housing authority can do a role, they would be well served to facilitate people to become more, better tenants who are eventually capable of owning a home.

GR: Okay, I get the point you're making about priorities. Finally, thirty seconds, hate to do it to you, but, if you can, thirty seconds just encapsulate, what is your view about the recent uptick in ICE raids and the aggressiveness of some of those raids? If they were to come to Syracuse, where are you going to be on that?

TR: Well, largely, I think we're seeing that ICE is run by the federal government. I'm pro following the rules until it creates the demand for a solution. I think Mayor Walsh is pro if the rules are not great, ignore the rules. I think that's arbitrary and capricious and it's a disservice. I would say enforce the rules until there's a political will to get an adjustment in the rules to like, make them reasonable. That's the way I approach like things less controversial, like the sidewalk program. There wasn't will for municipal sidewalk program. So I went around and condemned a whole bunch of sidewalks because that's how it used to work.

GR: We won't have time to get into that.

TR: And that creates the will. Sometimes you to follow the rules in order to change the rules.

GR: I see, yeah. Okay, thank you. That was Tim Rudd and again, please keep your eye out for a future conversation with the Democratic Party candidate, Sharon Owens. You can also find my previous conversation with Republican nominee Tom Babilon on the Campbell Conversations web page. Mr. Rudd, Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, I appreciate it.

TR: Thank you, appreciate it.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. This November, Syracuse will elect a new mayor. Joining me today is the Republican candidate for the position, Tom Babilon. Mr. Babilon is a senior attorney at Hiscock Legal Aid, and he also has experience as Assistant Corporation Counsel for the city, where he worked with housing, neighborhood and business development, and labor and employment. I want to note that I also plan to have the other three mayoral candidates on the program in the coming weeks. So, Mr. Babilon, welcome to the program, you’re first, and thank you for doing that, and thank you for making the time to talk with me.

Tom Babilon: Well, thanks for having me on, Grant, I appreciate it.

GR: Well, we appreciate you making the time. And so let me just start right in with the core question. You know, you have painted Sharon Owens, the Democratic nominee as kind of a continuation of the Walsh administration, so I wanted to ask you about the Walsh (administration). What are your main criticisms of the Ben Walsh administration?

TB: Well, I've got several. I don't know if we've got time for all of them. Primarily my biggest concern with Walsh has been his disregard for balancing the budget. It seems like every year he's increased the budget. I think the city operations budget increased over $100 million alone under his watch. And, you know, because of that, we've had three tax increases that were implemented in, you know, six 1% tax increases. You know, we've got a new sidewalks tax, water rates have increased. So really, you know, there hasn't been very much transparency. You know, he's been caught numerous times not telling the truth or his administration has to the Common Council. So that things like that and then also, you know, I think, he's really decimated our police force and not been very good with public safety, which is another concern of mine.

GR: Okay, we'll get into all those then. Let's start with the budget, which is obviously a big part of what the mayor is going to have to manage. You said, and you've got on your website I think too, that you're going to look through the entire budget for efficiencies and try to eliminate the waste and, you know, fraud that you can find in there. Historically that doesn't generate big savings when people try to do that. So if you really want to rein in the spending, tell me a little bit about what areas you'd be looking to cut into, because I think that's the only way that that is going to happen.

TB: There's a lot of things just for working at the city that a lot of people don't know, that actually happen. Like, for instance, the DPW workers, the trash workers go home at noon, regardless of how long they've worked, as long as they've completed their routes, things like that. You know, we’re supposed to reduce the number of men on the truck, I believe when we got the new carts and that never happened. So there's certainly things like that that can be looked at. Maybe doing more than one route. There's also issues in the Codes Department, you know, we've got like eight guys that are doing rental registry inspections and, you know, not very many guys doing other things, things like that we can look at. But also there's a lot of spending that, just doesn't, like the, you know, the mayor's office to reduce gun violence. I think that was a $1.5 million expense that really hasn't produced any kind of results. There's all kinds of things like that that get spent. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I was sitting in my office and I would get a call from someone telling me not to collect money that's owed to the city or just to not file judgments You know, and other people, you know, t it depends on who you know, which is is another thing that I really don't like about city politics and I want to change. There's really a lot more money than you would expect with waste and fraud and part of that is, you know, the kinds of things we do with that money, not just money that's wasted on a program, there's a lot of programs that don't present any kind of results at all.

GR: Well, what would be your top priorities? It sounds like, you know, the police force would be one, but where is it most important to you to maintain the effort that the city's making or even increase it?

TB: Well, with regards to the police, I mean, the problem we have with the police is, you know, we've got 200 less officers than we did when I moved here in 2003. We've lost over 100 since 2017, 80 of them I think in 2021 alone, 30 people resigned. So we need to bring up the ranks back up to around 550 people is the first thing we need to do, because simply, the police don't answer calls. I mean, you can talk, I mean, I don't know where you live, Grant,I don't live in the greatest neighborhood. I've had to call 911, I can't tell you how many times in the last 20 years, and I can't tell you how many times, you know, they don't even show up, or they'll call you, we’ll show up when we can, or they don't show up at all. I mean, I had someone tell me about a home invasion where they didn't show up until several hours later a few weeks ago. It's just we're so understaffed, it's the biggest problem. You can't really blame police for it because we're just so understaffed. And part of that is because of things that happened under this administration, including residency requirement for police officers, because that limits the pool of, you know, of new officers that are going to work for us. And, you know, basically, there hasn't been a lot of support from the mayor's office historically under this last administration. You know, from calling the police department an institution of, you know, having institutional racism to, you know, basically, you know, defunding them to a certain extent, telling them not to answer certain calls, telling them not to enforce certain things, cutting ShotSpotter, which is a very important tool for them, I believe they cut license plate readers at one point. There's all kinds of things that they haven't really had the support from the mayor's office that I think they deserve. You know, and the other thing is, you know, we've got other departments, like particularly the mayor's office, I think that spends a lot of money that really is unwarranted.

GR: Well, are you running on, any pledges or promises regarding taxes, especially new taxes? Are you sort of making a public stand on that?

TB: Yes. I think, you know, I would love to reduce the tax burden of the citizens of Syracuse. I don't know if that's going to be possible right off the bat. Certainly I would pledge to no new tax increases because I think that, we've had more taxes in this last seven years than I think any mayor in recent history, you know, and he wanted to taxes more. I mean, the Common Council has now cut him off twice on tax, I mean, he wanted to tax another 2% tax increase this year. And I believe in 2019 he wanted a 4% tax increase and they cut him down to 2%. So I mean, he just says this, you know, he wants to spend a lot of money, but you need money to spend money and he's taking that from the people that live here, and it's caused a lot of people to leave the city. I think the tax and the crime has really caused us to lose a lot of people from living here.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the city of Syracuse Republican mayoral candidate Tom Babilon. So there's two big things I want to ask you about, and I'm going to ask all candidates about this. Whoever the next mayor is, they're going to have to manage two really difficult things that provide opportunities, but also challenges. And the first one is the taking down of I-81 and the redevelopment of the East Adams Street area, which kind of is close to where you live. So the taking down is already happening. But what are your biggest priorities and also concerns about where this project goes from here?

TB: Well, I mean, it’s certainly going to be a mess when they're doing the construction. And, you know, we've got to have, you know, make sure that the DPW controls the traffic properly, that's going to be the immediate concern. But my biggest concern about the project is, you know, what are we going to do with the land when the highway comes down, which is, you know, some of my, other people that are running for mayor have, you know, come forth with their ideas. I think that we need to use that land for its highest and best use. I really think it's going to be very valuable property, probably some of the most valuable property in the city of Syracuse. And I think that it needs to be used for, you know, uses that are going to create income, create for the city, revenue for the city, taxes for the city, sales tax for the city, property taxes for the city, things that are going to make people stop in the city and spend money. You know, some of the other plans have called for public housing there, which I think is the worst possible use. You know, it's going to create a tax exempt property, most likely, and it's also it's not really going to be a suitable place for housing I don't think. It's going to be some of the most heavy traffic in the city, because I've been to these projects in other cities and people, historically, a lot of people do not take the route that they're supposed to take. They'll take the straight route through the city, they'll drive through Almond Street and continue on I-81 south on the other side of the city. So it's going to be a very, very high traffic area and I think the last thing we need to do there is add in a component of residential housing.

GR: Well, the people that are going to be displaced, there are, a lot of them are in public housing and those public housing areas have kind of run their course of useful life. So what happens to those folks then if we don't put public housing back in that East Adams neighborhood?

TB: Well, there is, I mean there is public housing proposed, where McKinney Manor is now, they’re putting in proposals to renovate that. I don't know if it's going to replace all the housing that's, you know, all the people have been displaced. I know in the interim that the Syracuse Housing Authority is having a problem placing those displaced residents. I don't know what the final numbers are going to be. And I'm fine with, you know, housing on that area where we already have residential housing. I think the plan is to increase density, where the, McKinney manor is. So I'm fine with that plan. My problem is, on both sides of Almond Street, where there’s going to be the this vacant lots now on one side and there's a highway on the other where there's soon to be vacant lots, I think that needs to be developed, commercially, you know, that's my position.

GR: Okay. And then the other big thing, of course, is Micron coming in, that's not in the city, but it's going to certainly affect the city, the mega microchip facility and Clay. What are your biggest priorities for how that affects the city, and again, concerns as well?

TB: Initially I think it's, what I've read, I think it’s going to take several years before their even operational. So it's going to be the construction of the plant that's probably going to happen under my first term, at least start. And of course, you know, making sure that city residents are available, make sure they get part of that construction work, that's certainly a concern. You know, I don't really have a lot of concerns about the project in particular because, frankly, it's outside my jurisdiction or any mayor's jurisdiction. You know, we've got to make sure we have the people that are available for the jobs and maybe encourage people that are going to be working there or working on the construction to live in the city. You know, one of my main things I want to do is I want to make the city of Syracuse a place where people want to live, not where they want to leave. And it's too often right now you talk to people and they say, I can't wait to get out of here, why am I still living here, why do you live there? And I want people to say, no, I want to live in Syracuse, I want to live in the city.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Tom Babilon. The Republican attorney is running for mayor of the city of Syracuse in this November's election. So I wanted to talk to you a bit about something that's been in the news a lot lately, and you were also in the Syracuse Post-Standard talking about this. And it has to do with the enforcement of immigration law by ICE and the relationship between the federal government and local governments, regarding that. You said in the paper, if I understood you correctly, that you would not enter into any kind of formal agreement with the federal government to help with immigration law enforcement, because, first of all, it violates state law, which forbids those kinds of agreements, and then, more importantly, you said, because the Syracuse Police Department doesn't have the extra bandwidth to deal with that rather than more pressing problems. I think you've already spoken to the concerns you have about the police department. So am I relating your position about right on that?

TB: That's, you're absolutely right on my position on that.

GR: Okay. So I have some hypotheticals here though if I could press you on this. So what would you do as mayor though, if ICE made a particularly heavy thrust in Syracuse? I mean, we saw this set of arrests up in Cato, you know, with those workers. What if we had in the city of Syracuse a much heavier ICE presence, how would you deal with that?

TB: What can the mayor do, really? I mean, you saw the Oswego mayor come out and say, oh, I don't agree with this, I'm a Republican, please don't do it. It's not going to stop ICE from going and doing whatever operation that they want to do. I don't really think that the mayor can do anything. If there's some kind of egregious raid that I feel that I need to speak out on, of course I'll make a statement. But in reality, I'm not going to stop Donald Trump from doing anything that Donald Trump wants to do.

GR: Okay. And then what would you do if there were significant street protests that erupted? If something like you say, particularly egregious happened, you know, and those folks started to try to interfere with the work of ICE, we've seen that in other cities. So what happens then?

TB: Well, I mean, I think I’ve talked a little bit about public safety before. Public safety is always a priority of mine. And, you know, if there's some huge protests, then I think we need to have a police presence just to make sure that they don't get out of control. I mean, we all lived through the George Floyd protests, and we saw what happened in many cities where, you know, businesses were looted or there there were set on fire, and you know, some police really didn't have things under control. So I think that we definitely need to have a police presence to make sure that everything is fine, that people are not going to have their businesses looted, the people are not going to have their homes or businesses set on fire, you know, or anything, any kind of property crime or, you know, could be even a violent crime, you don't know what's going to happen at these things. So I think that, certainly we need to have a police presence to monitor to make sure that everything's okay. But, you know, people have a right to protest, if people want to come out and protest and they abide by all the rules that are in place, I welcome that. I'm a very big person on free speech, and I think everyone should have their opinion and have their opinion heard. And if you disagree with that, you can have your opinion heard. That's how America works.

GR: Okay. And that topic, and you already, I think, spoke to this in one way, but it invites another set of questions that has to do with the fact that, you know, you're running under the Republican Party banner. So one obvious question that I would want to ask you is how you view the Trump administration so far. You mentioned that you know, there’s nothing a mayor can do to stop Donald Trump, what Donald Trump wants to do. But how would you assess what this administration has done so far?

TB: Well, I mean, I agree with some of the things that Donald Trump does, other things I don't agree with him. You know, it's a mix, almost like any other president. You know, I think that if you're going to put me on the spot, I think we're in better hands then we were last year. The other thing that happens with Donald Trump is he proves me wrong. I think that he's wrong on something and then, you know, six months later, I'm like, wow, okay. This whole thing, like tariffs for instance. Everyone thought it was going to be a nightmare, I was not in favor of tariffs, I thought was a terrible idea. And here we are several months later and we don't have the crazy inflation everyone thought was going to happen. And apparently our revenues have gone up, and we're talking about paying down the deficit with those money. So, I mean, I can't, there's certainly things I disagree with Donald Trump on. I'm not, you know, I always was a, I'm a kind of person that was always for more open immigration. I was never a, you know, a close the border type kind of guy. But I think his, you know, when you look at his immigration actions, what's going on now, it's kind of sorta in response to what happened last four years when we basically had an open door policy. We said everyone come in, we will house you we’ll feed you. You know, we put a huge strain on our public safety nets to such a point where even like the mayor of New York City was complaining about it, you know, the most liberal place, probably on the planet. So I think, you know, what he's doing as far as a mass deportations is in direct response to, you know, what happened to the Biden administration and I think probably both of them went a little too far.

GR: Do you think that you, being a Republican, might give you some kind of ability to distance the city or distance yourself from him without incurring kind of the wrath of Trump? I mean, he seems to be very antagonistic toward Democratic mayors, that's for sure.

TB: Well, I'm not going to fight with him. You know, I think I've said this a few by events before. One of the things, the city is very dependent on federal funding. You know, we just we lost $30 million on the 81 project. We're supposed to possibly lose several million dollars a year in HUD funding. I'm not the kind of guy that's going to say, oh, Donald Trump's horrible, Donald Trump is evil, because that just kind of brings on his wrath exactly as you say. I'm not going to upset the president. If he does something horrible, I'll let him, I'll say something about it. But I'm not the kind of person that thinks everything that he does is horrible, which unfortunately, is the position of a lot of people these days. You know, you talk to them and they can't do anything, you say something that everyone should agree on. Hey, Donald Trump, you know, negotiated a peace deal in the Congo. Oh, he's terrible, you know, I mean, there's people that that have that position, and I'm certainly not one of them. I think that I could facilitate a better, you know, relationship with the president than maybe Sharon Owens can and I think that's going to result in higher federal funding for us.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the Syracuse mayoral candidate, Tom Babilon. So this to me, the next question I wanted to ask you seems to be something that has really, I've been here for 35 years, and it seems like it has been haunting the city the entire time. It has to do with the responsibility of the surrounding towns and villages for the city's success and welfare and I wanted to know how you see that. Do you think that the towns and villages do have some responsibility for the city, because people who live in those places often work in the city? And then are they meeting that, or do you have thoughts about how that relationship might change?

TB: Well, I think that we have, you know, responsibilities towards each other. I know it's not a one sided deal, you know, it's definitely not a one sided deal. And this is something we talk about often is, when I talk about public safety is, if there's a problem in the city of Syracuse there’s a problem in Solvay, there’s a problem in East Syracuse. We are all, all are interconnected. I don't necessarily think that the city, you know, that the people, in the towns and villages have an obligation to make sure that the city succeeds. But I think that we all have a mutual obligation to make sure that, you know, when we're working together or we need to work together to make sure that we have, you know, better cooperation, especially with public safety, with public works, you know, I mean, there's all kinds of things we could work with the county, with them on. And I think that, you know, the county, I'm sorry I'm off a little bit, but I think, you know, the county has a responsibility to the city, the city has responsibility to the towns of villages. We all have to work together in the next four years.

GR: Okay, now, one of the things you mentioned right at the beginning was one of your priorities would be increased transparency. And I wanted to give you a few minutes to lay out what you see as the problem there, and then what plans that you would put into place to make the city’s government more transparent.

TB: The the biggest problem I see, and this is from working with the three different mayors and working in the core counsel's office, is that, the city, the Common Council doesn't have their own attorney, they don't have their own representation. And that makes it very uneven. Such to the point where, you know, the mayor can literally tell things to the Common Council that are untrue. And it has happened lots of times in the past, and there's nobody to come back and say, well, that's not accurate, you know, and the Common Council relies on this. I mean, there's numbers of times when the mayor has has lied to the Common Council.

GR: Well give me a couple examples of the worst ones, okay?

TB: Well, they told the Common Council that the Payroll Modernization project had been bid out when it was a no bid contract, and they were asking for the contract to be renewed. So, I mean, that was a huge, you know, the council flat out asked administration is this bid bid out? They said yes, it was bid out previously. Okay, we just want to re-award the contract that was bid out. That was never bid out. You know, those kinds of things happen all the time. And there's instances where, you know, for instance, if you look at City Hall commons, City Hall Commons has been vacant for two years now. It was sold by the Walsh administration, supposedly they got the contract to sale and they moved all their people over to rental, and they're renting it in a commercial building now. So, you know, the anticipation was that this property was going to sell and it was going to be redeveloped and it would be put back on the tax rolls. Now here we are two years later and it still hasn't been sold. I mean, there's, and the reason because of that is, is because what happens is the Corp Council, they come, the mayor says I want to do this, and the Corp Council says, ask the Common Council for authority for the mayor to do something, whatever that may be, authority to sell City Hall Commons. And the Common Council says, sure, you have authority to do that. Now, what should happen is, the contract should be negotiated between the mayor's office and the buyer, and that contract should be presented to the Common Council for approval. And then that way, they would know exactly what kind of deal they're getting into. This has never been done. And I will, first of all, I'm not going to lie to the Common Council. I'm probably the most honest person you ever going to meet. I hate lying, it's terrible, so that's that's number one. Number two, I want the council to know what they're approving. I'm not going to try and hide anything from them. So, and I think that we need a tracker from how our money's actually spent because when you see the budget and you see like, okay, $1.5 million for that, $2 million for that, you don't know how it's actually spent and there's no good tool that says this is how we spent the money. So I think that we also need to know how the money is spent, and I think that needs to be public.

GR: So, we've got about three minutes or a little more left. I wanted to now get into a little more about you as a person. In some ways, it seems, if I just look at you on paper, you kind of go against type. I mean, you're a Republican running as a Republican, but here you are, you're devoting your legal expertise and your legal work to helping those who need help and to those who can't afford it. So that's not, you're not being sort of a lawyer in a market based system, so to speak, you know? So, what explains that? What is it about Tom Babilon that makes him want to do that?

TB: I've dedicated my entire legal career to public service. I really enjoy helping people. You know, some people, enjoy making money, you know, I kind of said, I'm not going to do that. I, when I can help somebody that needs my help, that makes me feel good. And that's kind of why I got into the mayor's race in the first place, because I would see the kind of things that would happen at City Hall that would make me crazy. I used to do criminal defense work before I worked at City Hall, and no matter what kind of case I had, and I didn't have the worst cases, but no matter what kind of case I had, I never felt bad about representing my client. Some of the things that City Hall made me do when I was there made my stomach turn. They made me not feel right. And that's not the kind of thing I thought that city government should be doing to its citizens. So that’s part of the reason why I decided to run as mayor. And that's that's kind of how I've run my whole life is, you know, I do something that I like, which is helping people, so I get a reward that I actually like my job. I get to go to work every day and happy about that. And, you know, I’ll worry about the money thing when I retire, you know?

GR: (laughter)

TB: I don't need a big mansion on the beach. I'm just happy hanging out with my family, so I'm not too concerned about that.

GR: Okay. Tell me something about the city. What's your favorite place to go in the city when you want to kind of recharge your batteries? Where's your sort of power spot in the city?

TB: My favorite spot to go probably is the creek walk between the inner harbor and the lake. And, I can't tell you how many times my fiancé and I have made that walk or bike ride. Just, you know, it's great when you get down to the lake and you can spot eagles or giant carp swimming in there or, you know, and just the whole walk is nice. And we like to kayak too so we've kayaked that before.

GR: Okay. And then what about, buildings in Syracuse, what are your favorite buildings in Syracuse?

TB: Oh, you know, there's so many beautiful buildings in Syracuse. You know, we were lucky to keep all these historic buildings. City Hall is a great, great example, (it) looks like a castle. You know, I thought I was working in a castle for ten years every day I walked there. And then I worked at the City Hall Commons for a while, you know, it's like a flat iron building, and my office was right in the point of the flat iron so I had like a 180 degree view of the city. It was amazing. There's so many buildings that are beautiful downtown Syracuse.

GR: One last quick question, we just have a couple seconds left. Is there any particular book or anything else you can point to that inspired you to want to do the kind of public service work that you've done?

TB: You know, I can't point to a book. I can only point to some of the, you know, some of the instructors I had when I went to undergrad law school that were very, you know, service oriented, that made me feel like this is something I wanted to do. Originally. I wanted to do criminal defense, I wanted to work at the public defender's office. I did work at public defender's office in Florida for a small period of time. That's what I initially thought I wanted to do. And then, I started working for the city. And then I just ended up, you know, doing family court appeals for people who can't afford lawyers. So, I mean, it's just really I've always enjoyed helping people, and I think it's myself and probably service oriented professors that I had in school.

GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. That was Tom Babilon, he's a candidate for Syracuse mayor this November. Again, keep your eye out for future conversations with the three other candidates. Mr. Babilon, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I enjoyed it.

TB: You're welcome. Thanks for having me on, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Are we on a path towards significant unmet hunger, problems in food supply and conflicts regarding food? My guest today is Richard Sexton. He's a professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, and he's recently published a new book, it's titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". Professor Sexton, welcome to the program.

Richard Sexton: Thank you, Grant. Thank you for having me.

GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So I want to start, as I often do with books, with just sort of laying out some of the basics of the context before we get into the arguments that you make about some of these issues that the title brings up. And I want to just get a brief and basic sense of sort of where things currently stand regarding food and hunger. So first, let me ask you a very, very basic question. How do we figure out or how do we know when a person or a group or an entire people, even a country, is suffering from a hunger problem? Is there some commonly used marker for that?
RS: Well, that's actually a great question and the United Nations is the official body that measures that. And you know, they just released their most recent estimates for 2024 and so they, according to the U.N., there's about 700 million people that face hunger and malnutrition routinely and then in excess of 2 billion that are what the U.N. calls food insecure. And, you know, I honestly don't know all the means that they use to estimate that. I'm thinking they're piecing together, you know, various pieces of information, there's no single survey or anything like that. And so I think they're, you know, doing their best to compile data and come up with that. But, yeah, it's probably subject to some kind of error. But the, you know, there's quite a bit of consistency in the numbers across the years. It went up higher during COVID and really stayed disturbingly higher, came down a little bit this past year, but it's those are the numbers we're seeing routinely.

GR: And that's a big, those are big numbers. I mean, that's a decent sized chunk of the world's population.

RS: Yeah, no, there's, you know, about 8.2 billion of us. So, you know, 700 million is what, about 8% of the world that's facing hunger and yeah, malnutrition, stunting, those are routine outcomes in, you know, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. And so, yeah, by no means have we solved the problem as a global society of adequately feeding our population.

GR: You mentioned sub-Saharan Africa. Are there general areas of the world that are more heavily hit by this than others? I mean, I would assume it's the poorer countries.

RS: Yeah, no, absolutely it is the poorer countries. And yeah, the biggest concentration is certainly in sub-Saharan Africa. There's some parts of Southeast Asia where there's a significant hunger problem and, you know, less so obviously in this country and, you know, Europe and so forth. And so the, you know, the real heart of the problem is in sub-Saharan Africa.

GR: And you mentioned less so in the United States. Is this a problem inside the United States, though, nonetheless?

RS: Oh, sure, but an isolated basis. But you know what the United States has that most other countries don't have, is we have very significant feeding programs. So we have, you know, the SNAP or the food stamp program, WIC, Women's, Infants and Children's program, and then the school lunch program. So, you know, we're very unique in countries across the world that we put in place these programs to take care of hunger and malnutrition. Do they work perfectly? No, they don't. And then, you know, there was quite a bit of controversy with the most recent congressional session about cutting back some of these things. And so it's a difficult question but yeah, we've uniquely addressed that problem in this country with those programs, you know, dedicated to putting food in the hands of the right people. Most other places in the world do not have that.

GR: And I hope this question isn't too abstract. And I'm going to unpack this, obviously, as we go on our conversation, but are the are the food problems in the world primarily in food production and food supply or are they more like social distribution and economic fairness issues? In other words, we have the food, it's just not getting to those people for whatever reason.

RS: Yeah, I think that's certainly a big part of the problem. And so, for example, tariffs are a bad thing in terms of distributing food to where it needs to be consumed. And so, yeah, it's a big income problem, right? There needs to be more food going to sub-Saharan Africa, but those are very poor countries. And so, you know, it's not an attractive export destination for a lot of companies that that specialize in those types of things. And so, yeah, it's at least partly a distribution problem that we're not getting to the food to where people need it the most. But then, you know, a very premise of the book, Grant, is that it's probably going to become a more significant problem over time unless we mend our ways in terms of the actual food production itself.

GR: Yeah. And I wanted to get into that with you. Before I do that, though, there was something in your book that really struck me. You've got a couple of sections on it, and I wanted to ask it directly early on. How much of the problem right now comes from wasting food and who are the biggest waste culprits?

RS: Yeah, great, great question and based on the official statistics, which
is largely coming from the U.N., about 31% or close to a third of the potential food supply is lost or wasted. And those are terms that the U.N. distinguishes. So they say food loss is everything that occurs from harvest to retail, and then food waste is everything that occurs at retail or in the households. And so that's a big number. And the interesting thing is it's kind of similar across both rich and poor countries. We might think to ourselves that, well, in the poor countries, they'll certainly waste less food, but then they have less means of preserving food. For example, refrigeration is rare in some parts of the world, so food is wasted because it's spoiled. Probably in the rich countries we're wasting it because it's just, you know, simpler and easier to buy a little bit too much than a little bit too little and so, yes, we can reduce that. And the UN, the U.S., the European Union, they all say we're going to cut it in half. I don't think for a second that that's going to happen, but certainly we can improve on that. I mean, one way, the low hanging fruit for that, as far as I'm concerned, is freshness, dates on packages, right? So that we need to, you know, have better understanding of what those dates mean and so that we're not throwing things out just because you know, there's a date on it. Maybe it's a sell by date and not a use by date, but we see a date and it's expired and we toss it, right? So we can do better on that. But I do not think that wasting or losing less food is a real answer to the food production challenges that lie at lie ahead of us. But of course, as it becomes more expensive, there'll be less waste and less loss. But, you know, I think it's a pipe dream to say we're going to cut it in half, which is the goal of, you know, a lot of the main governmental bodies in the world right now.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Richard Sexton, the author of a new book titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". Yeah, so let's get into that part of the book. First of all, you mentioned something earlier, you said it's going to get worse, these problems are going to get worse. So it's going to get worse if we don't do something different. Why? That may seem like an obvious question, but what are the biggest reasons why it's going to get worse?

RS: Well, one big reason why is climate change itself, right? I mean, the climate has warmed in recent decades, but it hasn't warmed that much. And so based upon all of the forecasts, all the models, the greatest warming is yet to come. And there are a myriad, hundreds of studies across wide ranges of crops, all parts of the world that say that a warming climate is going to be detrimental to food production. I mean, I've got a basic statistic in the book that basically compiles all of this scientific information and then adds in the warmth that our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA is projecting without mitigation, which is 2.8 degrees Celsius or roughly five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century and I come up with a 14% yield loss. Some of that can be mitigated by adaptation, but not all of it. And so, you know, that's a challenge we haven't faced in in previous centuries. I mean, another great challenge is pest resistance to traditional treatments, and that's happening right now as we speak. And the dramatic thing that's happening, Grant, is that the next generation to replace things like glyphosate or Roundup, as we more commonly know it, it's not in the pipeline. And so when plants achieve resistance to glyphosate, people are going back and using the previous generation of those pesticides which are harmful in and of themselves. Those are the pesticides that we used when I was a youth on the farm all these many, many years ago. So that's just another example of a challenge. And I'll mention one more, it's very, very important because, through the centuries, what saved us from hunger and malnutrition that a lot of people like Malthus and so forth were predicting has been technological advancements. And I'm blessed to have a faculty colleague here at UC Davis, who's the world's leader on research on productivity advancements in agriculture. And what their work showed is that through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, the productivity growth was about 2% a year, which means essentially we can get 2% more output for a given amount of inputs, land and labor and fertilizer and so forth. But then it basically has been cut in half in the most recent decades, and there's no real evidence that the tide is turning. And that's a dramatic effect, right? Because we can't count on technological advancements to save us as they have in the past, right? A 1% rate of growth isn't sufficient to keep up with the growth rate in demand. And so that's a big, big factor that a lot of people don't understand and know. But then, yeah, so kind of the blithe response to concerns raised by people like myself, oh, yeah, the technology will advance and we'll be fine. That's not true anymore.

GR: Yeah, we'll figure our way out of it.

RS: Yeah.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Richard Sexton. He's a professor at the University of California, Davis and the author of a new book on food and food supply. It's titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". So, a lot of what your book is about is debunking, like, myths that are popular and are held by policymakers or sometimes deliberately put forward by others and then also spread by the media. What are some of the biggest myths out there right now about food production and supply?

RS: Yeah, a lot of the myths pertain to, you know, different ways of producing food beyond the conventional means that people think are better for the environment and maybe somehow result in better foods being produced and so forth. And all of these, the thing all of these methods have in common and certainly the list includes organic, non-GMOs, production by of local food, small farms and so forth, is that they're all associated with significantly lower yields, right? And so those are examples of, you know, inefficient ways of producing food that nonetheless, as a society we've embraced and in many cases subsidized. And, you know, the consequence, of course, is less food produced off a given land base in agriculture. And then the really unfortunate thing that results when we're either taking land out of agricultural production completely, which is something we do with what we call the Conservation Reserve Program or moving land into less productive means of producing food, is that we cause the land base in agriculture to expand, and that's what they call indirect land use change and we've come to understand that much, much better in the recent decades. And so if the U.S. produces less food, if the Europeans produce less food, people are going to try to produce more elsewhere. And that results in deforestation of the Amazon, of the forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, in sub-Saharan Africa. And there's no dispute that's about the worst thing we can do for the environment. These virgin forests are great sources of carbon sinks, they remove carbon from the atmosphere. You burn them down and clear cut them, you fill up the soil, all its carbon is released. It's, you know, it's horrible for carbon emissions, biodiversity and so on and so forth. But we're causing that. We're undeniably causing that with our policies in the Western countries, the US, Europe, all of our strategies to produce less food. So, you know, frankly, Grant, I don't get it in the sense that the Europeans want to take 10% of their ag-lands out by 2030. The U.S. has 7% of its ag-lands in conservation reserve and we're proud of it. Well, what do we think is going to happen? If we take land out, it's going in somewhere else in the world where it'll probably be less productive and more environmentally damaging. And that's really, you know, the elephant in the room for all of these policies that we're enacting in the name of the environment. If they cause us to produce less food on a given land base, they are going to cause this indirect land use change and they're going to cause deforestation in some of the most environmentally sensitive places in the world.

GR: Yeah, that's a fascinating connection you're drawing. But let me just back up a minute and say organic food, return to small farms, you're skewering some pretty sacred cows there that you know, among a constituency that is not necessarily entirely on the left, but a lot of it is on the left and that's the group that usually voices concerns for things like the rainforest and international concerns about, you know, less wealthy parts of the world. So there's quite a contradiction built in there.

RS: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's and it's quite ironic indeed, yes. Because we might associate those groups of people with the support for these types of food production systems. But then, yes, those people would, you know, tend to be advocates for the poor and so forth. But yeah, there's no basis to deny the fact that if you put into place production methods that are less efficient or if you simply take the land out of production completely, A: you're raising food prices and those that are harmed the most by that are, of course, the poor in some parts of the world to this day, upwards of half or more of people's incomes go for food. And so when we make it more expensive, we really hurt the poorest among us unequivocally. And then yeah, the response to less food availability and higher prices is to, you know, anywhere in the world =to try to produce more food and then it's now it's resulting in deforestation then we cause, you know, great environmental harms. And so again, the ironic thing is a lot of these policies are enacted in the name of the environment, but probably ultimately end up hurting the environment.

GR: Interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is UC Davis Professor Richard Sexton. Okay, so what are the policies and programs that you would recommend that we should pursue and start pursuing now?

RS: Yeah, well, the nice thing is my policy prescription is one sentence, and so it's not very complicated. And that one sentence is, we need to produce food in the places of the world where it's most efficient to do so and using the most efficient means of production. And then, the thing is, of course, that will maximize the amount of food that we're able to produce, but it will also be the best thing for the environment and that's the thing that gets missed, right? Because then we will stop the deforestation, we'll, efficient production, you know, by its very definition means the least resource use, right? And so it's not only that we're stopping the deforestation, but, you know, as we economize on inputs, the fertilizers, the pesticides and all of those types of things, those yield environmental benefits as well. So that’s the answer. That's the simple answer because it addresses both the food production problem and the environmental problem.

GR: Right. So on the ground, what does that mean? Does that mean the United States produces more food, Europe produces more food? Do we do more things in Asia? What would it look like?

RS: Well, it would look like the US stopping, you know, subsidizing people, taking land out of production. The Europeans have the goal for 2030 to take 10% of their ag-lands out of production. So, you know, for most crops, the most efficient producer in the world is the US. The Europeans are pretty good themselves for most crops. So for example, they're more efficient at producing wheat than the US, but corn and soybeans, that's our big strength. But yeah, the most efficient places, you know, that list, I mean, Brazil now has become a very powerful producer of soybeans and corn and so forth. But yeah, we want the most efficient producers to be doing it. That's going to stop the deforestation, that's going to make food most plentiful. And so any of these policies that we're enacting in this country, I mean, we subsidize organic production in this country in various ways, but every time we convert an acre from its conventional form into its organic variant, depending upon the crop and the location, we're going to give up between 30% and 45% of the available yield. So every, say, three or four acres we convert from conventional to organic, we got to put one more acre into production, you know, in order to maintain food production. So the, you know, the idea of land use change applies to things like organic, it applies to things like non-GMO. In this country we're quite receptive and open to GM foods, but they're largely banned in Europe, they're banned in parts of Africa, they're banned in Russia. And so that's been a significant impediment to food production as well because those GM variants are associated with significantly higher yields.

GR: So I'm a political scientist, I want to come back and hit you again with this politics question as I was listening to what you were just saying. There are going to be people, political figures, media people in particular, who are going to hear that and they're going to say, ah, this guy is basically just making an argument for big agriculture. And, you know, he's against organic food, he’s against the small farms, and they're going to just switch it off right away. Do you have a response or a counter argument to try to penetrate that?

RS: Yeah, I mean, coming from psychology or behavioral economics, that's called the disconfirmatory bias, right? We don't we don't want to hear about things that challenge our or beliefs. And so, yeah, I agree that this book challenges a lot of these traditional beliefs, but there's really no denying it, right? I mean, the book itself is meant to be, you know, accessible to a broad audience, it's not laden with a lot of jargon and so forth. But the footnotes are there, you don't have to read the footnotes if you don't want to, but the footnotes document what I'm saying in terms of a vast scientific literature, are there. But Grant, you're right that we don't turn on a dime. And so one thing we haven't talked about is biofuels in this country. But it is a fact that based on productivity potential, we're probably using about 25% of our ag-lands to produce fuel, not food, corn ethanol and soybean oil for diesel fuel. If you back up to the beginning of the century, we were doing almost none of that, right? And so, are we going to phase out biofuels? No way, right? That's ,you know, you're the political scientist and that's built in to the economies of big parts of the Midwestern U.S., where there's powerful senators and congresspeople and they're not satisfied with the status quo. We're all burning E-10, 10% ethanol in our cars but they want E-15, they want E-20, they want corn ethanol to qualify as a sustainable aviation fuel. So it's not less, it's more and we need to draw the line someplace because, yeah, since we enacted that policy in 2005, that's when we passed the Renewable Fuel Standard, there's been lots of research that demonstrates once you factor in these land use changes, the environmental impacts of biofuels are more harmful than fossil fuels. And so yeah, we're not going to get rid of it, but we can at least put the brakes on expanding it.

GR: Yeah, that's a good observation and it's probably not unrelated to the fact that Iowa is the first primary. I even think there was a West Wing episode on that. We've just got about a couple of minutes left and I want to squeeze in one, maybe two more questions, we'll see, but, well, I'll leave it with these two things. So that's from the production standpoint, that's sort of big level policy. What about myself as a consumer? Is there anything I should be doing differently to help you, or to help all of us with this big problem you've identified? Do I give up beef, for example? I mean, give me some pointers here.

RS: Well, I mean, we haven't talked about it, and it would probably take more than a couple of minutes we have left. But, yeah, I mean, meat consumption is an inefficient way of converting land resources into production for foods, right? So that if we did eat less meat, it would take some of the pressure off of the food, the food production systems. But the problem is going to be that as we move forward, as some of the poorer places in the world become wealthier, they're going to want to diversify their diets and that includes eating more meats and dairy products. And so, yeah, for a lot of people, the answer is, oh, yeah, we just need to eat less meats. And yeah, that's not a bad answer, but it's not going to happen, right? People are going to want to eat more, not less. And then, you know, another thing I say in the preface to the book is that if you read with an open mind, if you don't let your biases really take hold, you can save a lot of money in your food budget because things that you're paying maybe double what you'd need to pay for, probably aren't doing what you think they're doing. And so if you, you know, if you read the book with an open mind, you might say, hey, I can spend a lot less on food than I'm spending right now.

GR: Well, you've convinced me on a lot of things. I think the one thing I'm going to hang on to is my beef from my small farm because I like the way that tastes and it seems to taste different now. Maybe we could have those other cows eat the same feed, but you've got me part of the way, not all the way, yeah.

RS: Well, I'll consider that a victory, right? And so, yeah, and I know we're running out of time, and so it's not so much the small farms in in this country because they're not that small, but in a lot of parts of the world, they're just a couple of hectares or two, three acres. And those farms condemn people to a life of poverty, and they're not very good ways of producing food. And so that's the bigger problem, not the smaller farms in this country because they're not that small.

GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. Richard Sexton's new book is titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World”. As you've just seen from our conversation or heard, it's a very provocative book and make some very interesting arguments. Richard, thanks again for making the time to talk with me, very illuminating.

RS: My pleasure, thank you, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.