It's the democracy, stupid

I began my conversation with Pat Kreitlow by saying something you don’t hear often from a Chicago guy: “Go Brewers!” But the goodwill across the state line wasn’t really about baseball. I wanted to know whether Wisconsin has a chance to make its legislature look more like the people it represents—and whether Democrats are able to hold on to the governor’s office.

Pat, the founding editor of Up North News and a former Wisconsin state senator, sees reasons for optimism. He also knows better than to confuse a favorable political environment with a victory. Wisconsin is closely divided, billionaire-funded advertising is relentless, and an election isn’t won because your side has good reasons to win it. “You got to run all the way through the tape,” he told me.

What interested me most was our discussion of what voters actually want. I told Pat that I thought voters in this primary cycle chose candidates who will fight for the vast majority of Americans, not the billionaire class.

Pat put the governing challenge plainly: “Stop waiting for center-right partners and just get done what the people want done.” He pointed to reproductive rights, gun background checks, fair taxes and fair maps as places to start. His argument wasn’t that Democrats should abandon compromise. It was that waiting indefinitely for a willing negotiating partner is not a governing strategy.

Amen.

He also connected that argument to everyday life. In his account, inadequate state support for Wisconsin’s schools forces districts to ask local voters to raise their own property taxes. Then the politicians responsible get to blame the school boards. His prescription: “Say yes to the school referendums, say no to the politicians who created this cycle of endless school referendums and higher property taxes.”

That’s the kind of accountability a healthy democracy delivers- one where decision have consequences and electeds get held accountable for those consequences.

As for the final weeks of this election? “We’re past the point of persuasion,” Pat said. “We’re now into motivation.” And Pat asked all of us to reach out to friends and family in Wisconsin. Ask whether they’ve voted. If they are just exhausted by years of political fights, give them some encouragement.

After all, in Wisconsin, a state once suffering the nation’s worst gerrymander, this election might finally put that awful experience in the rear-view mirror.

(Wisconsin Dems need your help in the closing days of this important election. Go here to find in-person and phone banking volunteer opportunities.)

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.

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I began our conversation bemoaning all the negative campaign garbage filling our mailboxes and phones. But the real question isn’t how much money they can spend making us miserable. It’s whether cruelty still wins elections—or whether Americans have had enough.

Joe’s former Republican colleagues have learned Trump’s lesson: never apologize, never take responsibility, just attack. On the hideous Vivek Ramaswamy ad, Joe said,

“So this ad comes out. What does Vivek do? F**k it. Double down, triple down, lie, attack. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Never, never take accountability.”

We talked about Putin, Musk, and what happens when rich men get to exercise powers that belong to the government. My view is pretty simple: the people we elect have to be in charge. Otherwise, what exactly are we voting for? And a free market isn’t free when a handful of oligarchs own the switches.

But we kept coming back to the election—and to anger. Joe thinks today’s anger dwarfs what sent him to Congress in the Tea Party wave. I asked why.

“This anger is like, this just is not who the f**k we are. It’s the economy, but it’s what ICE is doing. It’s the cruelty that we’re seeing on the streets of America every single day. It’s how mean and indecent one side is.”

I also made the point that Trump and the Republicans are just terrible at the job. On every measure- the economy, ICE, rule of law, corruption, inflation, their idea that foreign policy is just blowing folks up… none of it makes our lives better.

Can that anger overcome party loyalty? That’s where we differ. We both called the Senate a knife’s edge. Pressed to choose, I said Democrats take it. Joe thinks they fall just short.

“So I think it’ll be a pickup of three seats. … I hope I’m wrong. I hope my partner is right.”

Neither of us knows. Certainty about everything is stupid. But uncertainty is no excuse to sit this one out.

If you can join us for our live conversation next week, please come and tell us you’ve already voted!

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. Bluesky: @eisendrath.net

Joe Walsh: A former Tea Party Congressman and right-wing radio host, I torched my career to challenge Donald Trump & the MAGA GOP head on. Director of The Social Contract. Co-Founder of PAXIS. Founder of HopeNotFearProject.org. Conservative Democrat.

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Before I asked Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, about the attacks on higher education, I wanted to talk about what he’s defending.

Roth is a historian and an unusually outspoken defender of higher education. His first argument for a liberal education is practical: nobody knows what the future will require, so students need more than training for the job somebody thinks they’ll have.

His second argument is profound: young people need to learn “how to think for yourself in the company of other people.” The point, he told me, is to build “a capacity to shape the future and not just to be shaped by the future.”

That doesn’t mean choosing literature over engineering. It means understanding engineering in the context of society, or science in relation to the world in which its discoveries will be used. As Michael put it, problems and opportunities “don’t come in disciplines.”

Neither do threats to democracy.

That was the thread running through our conversation. Universities, media companies, law firms—these are different institutions, but their ability to do their work depends on freedoms all of them must protect. And, as we know, many are not.

I asked him about an argument I’ve heard from people I respect: If universities enter politics, shouldn’t they expect politics to bite back?

He drew the distinction that too many people seem willing to erase.

“You should expect to be criticized,” he said. “That’s very different from being punished by the government for your speech.”

And then this: “This administration has gotten people to believe that they should expect to be punished for their speech. That is a serious erosion of our basic freedoms.”

We ought to sit with that. Disagreement is not cause for repression. Criticism is not a license for government retaliation. Accepting punishment as the ordinary price of speaking is not somehow evidence of sophistication about our politics. It is capitulation to a very different kind of country.

When I asked about university leaders who caved under administration pressure, Roth responded with an analogy. He said think about a parent paying a kidnapper: “I’m not going to criticize the parents, but I’m not going to praise the deal.”

But, he also said it was shortsighted. “Your school will not be able to thrive if our democracy is destroyed.”

Near the end, I told him I didn’t envy his job. He pushed back. He still teaches. He loves being around students. There were games, a concert and a science presentation ahead.

“I wish I didn’t have to worry about democracy,” he said.

That is not supposed to be the central responsibility of a university president. But when the freedoms that make education possible are threatened, defending them is part of the job.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. Bluesky: @eisendrath.net

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G. Elliot Morris, the journalist behind Strength in Numbers and the election-forecasting site 50 Plus One, is a numbers guy. He is smart and works very hard. That has made him THE go to guy for anyone attempting to understand polling data this cycle.

But during our recent conversation on Heartland Signal, Morris told me something was happening in Texas. I thought he was going to talk about polling data or voter suppression efforts. Instead, he talked about governing failures- failure to protect water supplies, syphoning money away from public schools, and deporting hard working Texans.

It reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from FDR. In a November of 1938 radio address, Franklin Roosevelt said,

I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

Subsequent history proved him correct.

I have a lot of confidence in Americans. We make mistakes, but we fix them. This conversation offered plenty of reasons to believe we’re working on the fixing part. Or at least we are working to put on the field a team that will then work on the fixing part.

Morris sees an electorate preparing to punish the party in power. He is clear that we are not seeing a wholehearted embrace of the Democratic Party, but rather a demand for accountability.

“The best way to understand the American people right now is not as a sort of left versus right fight against the Republican Party,” he told me, “but an anti-incumbent sentiment that can be reflected on whoever is in charge.”

People wanted lower prices and less economic anxiety. Morris’s reading of the surveys is clear: voters don’t believe they got what they voted for. Now the anger that helped elect Donald Trump is working against him.

And evidence coming from different sources, Morris said, points in the same direction: special elections, congressional polling and conversations with voters.

“We don’t have contrary indicators pointing to Republicans doing well.” For control of the House, his assessment was enough to make me want to get out of my chair and dance. At the time of our conversation, his model gave Republicans roughly a 1% chance of retaining control.

The Senate is another matter. His model gave Democrats about a 70% chance of taking it. That leaves a substantial chance they won’t. A historically normal polling error could change the outcome.

“We cannot reliably predict the direction of the error,” Morris cautioned. Republicans insisting the polls must be missing their voters are making an argument, not establishing a fact.

I think voters are also motivated by something beyond prices. People look at the cruelty, the corruption, the abuse of power, and say: This isn’t us.

Morris was careful not to turn my intuition into a finding his data couldn’t support. But he did identify something measurable: “About 80% of the American people say the Trump administration isn’t focusing on the issues that matter most to them.”

Morris does not expect the forces behind Trump to disappear when Trump does. “I don’t view Donald Trump as a cause of the Republican Party’s current predicament, but a symptom,” he said. The nativism, the us-versus-them politics, the refusal to accept the legitimacy of Democratic victories—those can survive their current leader.

So, yes, I’m encouraged. But winning an election and repairing a democracy are different jobs. Democrats need to win. Then they need to heed FDR’s admonition and work ceaselessly to better the lot of our citizens while they hold accountable the fascists who have taken hold of our government.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. Bluesky: @eisendrath.net

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

The election is underway. People are already voting, and the question before them is pretty simple: Donald Trump and the Republicans hold all the power in Washington. Have they used that power well?

As we vote, it isn’t, what did Donald Trump promise. Or whom did he insult. It isn’t a question of policy. It is a question of results. Can you afford the life you want to live? Are you better off? Is your country?

In my conversation with Joe, we kept coming back to that basic test. Joe pointed out that Trump’s tariffs, war and mass deportations aren’t distractions from his governing record. They are his governing record. He wanted the authority. He got the authority. He owns the consequences.

I suggested that economics alone doesn’t fully explain the disgust. There’s another question people ask about their leaders: Whose side are you on?

They’ve figured out Trump is on his own side.

That connects the corruption, the cruelty and the treatment of friends as enemies. As I told Joe, we like Canada. Cananda is like a sister. We can argue among ourselves, but somebody else starts picking on her? Don’t you dare. We agreed that Americans are tired of being asked to mistake bullying for strength.

The phrase I kept coming back to was this: This isn’t us. I don’t believe Americans want deliberate cruelty to be our government’s calling card. This is bigger than party identification. The folks rejecting Trump and his meanness are a much bigger group than the those who identify as Democrats. The election isn’t about what party we want; it’s about what kind of country are.

Joe and I don’t always reach the same conclusions. But I think we manage to talk about difficult choices in a generous way. When you listen, let us know what you think of our discussion of Michigan’s Senate race. Of course, we aren’t willing to argue about all our differences before the midterms. We agreed to discuss the second amendment next year!

Defending democracy doesn’t require agreement on every policy. It requires understanding what is at stake, winning the power to protect it, and then having the policy arguments in a system where our votes still matter.

And winning cannot be the whole assignment. People want a more affordable life. They want accountability for those who abused power. They want a politics that rewards working together instead of beating one another over the head. If Democrats prevail, there will be precious little time for congratulations because there’s an enormous job to do.

Joe asked if I am predicting a sweep? I’ve been heartbroken too many times to start declaring close races over before the votes are counted.

But I’d much rather be us than them right now.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. Bluesky: @eisendrath.net

Get full access to It's the democracy, stupid at edwineisendrath.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been to Alaska. It is stunningly beautiful, impossibly big, and a place most of us in the lower 48 don’t understand very well. We see Republican election victories and think we know the politics. After talking with James Brooks, the Alaska Beacon’s state reporter, I think we ought to look again.

“How I typically explain it is that it’s conservative without being religiously conservative,” James told me from Juneau. Gun rights matter. So does oil. He described a state whose politics changed as the Trans-Alaska pipeline brought workers from Texas and Oklahoma north. But that doesn’t mean Alaska behaves like every other Republican state.

For one thing, its legislature operates with bipartisan or multipartisan governing coalitions in both chambers. For another, James described a competitive Senate race between Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola, and a governor’s race in which the Democrat has a real chance of winning. Rural Alaska, he noted, generally votes Democratic.

The Senate ballot also includes another Dan Sullivan. Not the senator. A different fellow, from Petersburg, who is unhappy with the incumbent and decided to run against him. Two candidates with the same first and last names? That part, at least, sounded familiar to somebody from Chicago.

Given the increasingly partisan edges to our politics, Alaska’s unique election rules deserve more attention than they get. Candidates of all parties compete in one open primary, with the top four advancing regardless of party. Voters then rank their choices in the general election.

James described a recent gubernatorial debate in which one Republican pushed back against another Republican for attacking the Democrat. The message: “We don’t do that kind of thing here.” With ranked-choice voting, James explained, “You have to really cooperate in a way you don’t in other elections.”

Think about that. A system that rewards civility, rather than making warfare the safest route through a party primary.

The issues themselves are plenty serious. James described tensions over industrial fishing and salmon, and rural heating-fuel prices regularly exceeding $9 a gallon in figures he had reviewed. “People are really worried about how much it just costs to live,” he said. In a place where some communities can be reached only by boat or plane, that’s not an abstract campaign slogan.

This cycle, the election system itself is on the ballot. James said the repeal fight remains uncertain. That makes Alaska worth watching not just for who wins, but for whether voters preserve rules that encourage candidates to work across political lines.

There is one big flashing warning sign. James said close ranked-choice contests won’t be settled until November 18, after the deadline for overseas ballots to arrive. My concern isn’t that counting those votes is suspicious. It’s that the waiting period gives people an opportunity to call a legitimate count fraudulent. If control of the Senate is down to who wins in Alaska and we have to wait for the results- well, we all better be prepared because we all know what the election deniers will do.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. Bluesky: @eisendrath.net

Of course, we all remember Trump’s last trip to Alaska. It was part of his ongoing and disgraceful appeasement of Vladimir Putin.

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Mark Jacob and I covered a lot of ground, but the through line was clear: we are living through a constitutional, media, and civic emergency—and too many institutions are still treating it as a series of disconnected incidents rather than the larger crisis it is.

We began with Time Magazine’s unusually unvarnished Trump interview. I said no novelist could write dialogue that strange; Mark’s central point was that the press has still not fully confronted what is plainly in front of it: “the president’s brain is broken.” He argued that the failure is not merely to call out individual lies, but to write the necessary umbrella story—one that explains the accumulated evidence of disorder, abuse of power, and danger. As Mark put it, major outlets have too often avoided “hitting the total button and saying that this president is out of his damn mind and a danger to all of us.”

We talked about why: corporate caution, fear of retaliation, pack journalism, and a decade of “sane-washing” behavior that treats destruction of norms as though it were simply another tactical variation in conventional politics. Mark’s view was blunt: this is not normal, and the media has been “dragged toward truth by the American people” rather than leading.

From there, we turned to the courts. Congress, we agreed, has largely abandoned its constitutional role, while federal judges have increasingly become the most visible institutional check on an executive branch asserting near-total authority. But justice moves slowly, and that delay can itself be exploited. Mark noted that Trump has long used legal processes not just to avoid accountability, but to make accountability arrive too late to matter.

We also discussed the midterms, election interference, gerrymandering, attacks on mail voting, polling-place reductions, and the larger effort to undermine public confidence in elections. I was somewhat more hopeful than Mark about the resilience of local election administration and the public’s attachment to voting.

On national security, we examined Pete Hegseth’s priorities against the actual demands of running the Defense Department: strained supply lines, deployments, readiness, morale, civilian casualties, and a deeply unstable world. Mark said Hegseth’s record has been one of politicizing a military whose strength has long rested on professionalism and merit. “This is not what this country is about,” he said, “and this is not what most people in this country, the vast majority, want.”

We then moved to the emerging divide between ordinary Americans and the billionaire class—the fights over data centers, monopolies, mergers, public resources, and the Trump circle’s conspicuous alignment with wealthy insiders. Mark said he believes in capitalism, but not the crony capitalism now hollowing it out. “Capitalism requires—markets require—transparency and competition,” he said. Without them, the system becomes oligarchy rather than opportunity.

That led naturally to the Paramount merger and the broader problem of media capture. Mark warned that when powerful media assets are consolidated under politically aligned billionaires, news organizations can become instruments for protecting the people in power rather than informing the public. He called the Paramount deal part of a familiar authoritarian pattern: “The authoritarian leader and the oligarchs who own the media cooperating to lie to the American people and to silence dissent.”

Finally, we talked about what is missing from our journalism and media culture: stories about ordinary Americans—their struggles, resilience, work, families, and communities. I asked why, in a period of profound economic and social stress, we have so little of the moral imagination that produced The Grapes of Wrath, and so much billionaire worship and escapism. Mark’s answer was practical as well as cultural: real reporting costs money, requires people on the ground, and has been replaced too often by cheaper studio talk. But the loss is larger than news. Young people need stories that remind them who we are, what we have survived, and what democratic citizenship can still demand of us.

Mark’s Stop the Presses newsletter is free to subscribe to, and his next piece focuses on media capture and the effort by wealthy interests to buy up the institutions that shape what Americans know about their government.

As a guide, here are timestamps and topics:

* 00:00–00:09 — Trump, the Time transcript, and the press’s failure to state the obvious

* 00:09–00:16 — Courts pushing back; Congress’s abdication; executive overreach

* 00:16–00:25 — Senate spectacle, public opinion, election interference, and the midterms

* 00:26–00:32 — Pete Hegseth, defense failures, militarization, and accountability

* 00:32–00:35 — Billionaires, data centers, oligarchy, and the crisis of contemporary capitalism

* 00:35–00:40 — Paramount, CBS, CNN, the Ellisons, Bezos, Musk, and media capture

* 00:40–00:45 — The missing stories of ordinary Americans; journalism’s shrinking capacity; escapism and cultural failure

* 00:45 — Mark Jacob’s Stop the Presses newsletter and upcoming media-capture column

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools. Bluesky: @eisendrath.net

Mark Jacob is the former metro editor of the Chicago Tribune and former Sunday editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. He is the co-author of 11 books, mostly about history. Bluesky: @markjacob.bsky.social Threads: markjacobnews

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Elie Mystal is the Justice correspondent at The Nation, an author, and an attorney who focuses on the Supreme Court. He came to our conversation ready to make the case that America’s political and legal problems are deeply connected, and that the Supreme Court sits near the center of both. He successfully made his case.

We started with 9-11 and the war in Iraq, partly our combat operations in Iraq officially ended this week, and party because so much of contemporary America would be unthinkable without that tragedy and the choices the nation made in its aftermath. In retrospect, we should have seen it. Elie said,

It is a classic example of authoritarian figures never letting a good crisis go to waste. They had a plan for more authoritarian control. 9-11 gave him the excuse to implement that plan. And not enough people stood up. Not enough people prevented them.

We went on to talk about racism, the fractured media landscape, democracy, voting rights, political corruption, and whether the Supreme Court’s power needs to be curbed. We agreed that the Voting Rights Act was “the single most important piece of legislation ever passed.” Naturally, that led us to a discussion of Chief Justice John Roberts and the need to reform the Court.

On reform, Elie was direct: expand the Court, impose enforceable ethics rules, and use Congress’s constitutional power over the federal budget to compel accountability. He was clear about the order of decisions that we need to make going forward:

Congress cannot fix any of this unless they fix the Supreme Court first because the Supreme Court will overturn whatever Congress does if the Supreme Court is not fixed- full stop.

We talked about potential court reforms. Elie argued that a larger Court would reduce the outsized importance of any one justice and make constitutional law less dependent on “accidents of death.”

He also urged journalists and the public to quit treating justices as above politics. “I cover the court like other people cover Congress,” Mystal said. “I cover the court as if they are politicians, right? Because they are.”

The time flew by so fast that I ran over my usual time. Here’s a look at all the topics we discussed and where to find them within the show:

* 01:41 — “Injustice correspondent”: Elie Mystal’s opening assessment of the Trump era

* 01:52 — Iraq, 9/11, and the rush to war and its long consequences

* 10:17 — Why Mystal believes post-9/11 changes helped enable Trump’s rise.

* 15:01 — The decline of local news, platform power, and the breakdown of a shared factual reality.

* 20:17 — Race, the white vote, and the prospects for a multiracial democracy.

* 27:12 — The Voting Rights Act, John Roberts, and the Court’s role in dismantling voting protections.

* 32:09 — Can the legal system restrain an executive branch that goes wrong?

* 35:02 — Judicial review and “jurisdiction stripping”: shifting constitutional power back toward elected branches.

* 39:03 — Corruption, Citizens United, gerrymandering, and why Mystal sees Court reform as a prerequisite for other reforms.

* 43:36 — Court expansion: reducing the power of individual justices and limiting the stakes of vacancies.

* 51:38 — Supreme Court ethics rules and Congress’s power of the purse.

* 56:53 — Media coverage of the Court and ending reflexive deference to the justices.

* 1:01:44 — The shadow docket, precedent, legal stability, and why lawmaking belongs in Congress.

* 1:07:35 — Accountability, irreverence, and the need to treat justices as political actors.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.

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This week Joe Walsh and I agreed that Senate hearing into Jack Smith laid bare what today’s GOP is. We talked about the next few weeks of the midterms, and about what faces the next Congress.

Highlights here (yes, courtesy of AI):

* 00:00 — Can Democrats win the Senate?

* 01:36 — Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith hearing backfire

* 03:26 — Trump’s GOP: Never apologize, always double down

* 04:13 — Why Trump may be hurting his own party

* 07:18 — Why a midterm win is only the beginning

* 09:12 — The economy, prices, and voter backlash

* 11:40 — What should the Democratic Party become?

* 15:36 — Can democracy regulate political lies?

* 19:42 — AI-generated deception in campaigns

* 21:04 — AI risk, regulation, and political failure

* 24:22 — Midterms as a democratic beachhead

* 25:31 — The case for a day-one impeachment vote

Give a listen and tell us what you think.

Even more important: Check your voter registration now!

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Kansans seem to have turned from Republican policies, even if they aren’t in the habit of voting from Democrats. I find that curious, so I reached out to Clay Wirestone, an opinion writer at the Kansas Reflector.

Clay called it “the fundamental mystery of Kansas politics.” He then explained it by reviewing the unique history of that state. He explained how the meaning of Republicanism changed over time, but the party loyalty endured. Today, many Kansans’ views are not necessarily what we would call MAGA, yet in legislative races, “if you’ve got an R by your name, that’s just kind of the automatic checkbox.”

We talked about the surprisingly close U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor. Clay told me he never expected the contest to look competitive. But he believes Marshall damaged his standing when he left a contentious town hall early in 2025 and subsequently avoided open public events. Hamilton, meanwhile, has borrowed the moderate tone that helped Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly win statewide. “Hamilton looks and sounds really authoritative,” Clay said—an impression he thinks matters to voters.

We also talked about the pressures on rural Kansas: tariffs, farm economics and immigration enforcement near western Kansas meatpacking plants. Clay hears frustration from farmers and ranchers, but he cautioned against assuming that frustration automatically translates into Democratic votes. “I think it is a stretch to say these folks have ever been MAGA,” he told me.

Not MAGA, but also not Democrats.

Clay’s book, Opinionated: Kansas Journalists Who Proved Why Commentary Matters Then and Now, brought us to a question I care about deeply: What makes an opinion worth reading?

He is one of just two full-time opinion editors in a state of roughly 3 million people. Yet he hears from readers every day. “People are actually really, I think, hungry for this kind of connection and this kind of content,” he said. That is a good argument for keeping informed local voices in the public conversation.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.

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