The Long Game

By Jon Ward

News & Politics Society & Culture Government & Organizations

What's The Long Game about?

An investigation into the reasons why Americans can't solve big problems anymore.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Will Big Money Donors Get B...

03.30.2021

American politics is being held hostage, says a group of reformers with growing access to big-donor money who define their mission as trying to set it free. The hostage-takers, to hear them tell it, are the small group of voters ...

The Long Game episodes:

03.30.2021 Will Big Money Donors Get Behind the Move to Get Rid of Partisan Primaries? Nick Troiano Is Working On It American politics is being held hostage, says a group of reformers with growing access to big-donor money who define their mission as trying to set it free. The hostage-takers, to hear them tell it, are the small group of voters ...
03.11.2021 Yuval Levin Wants the GOP to stop making it harder to vote You would think that most people would agree that we should try to make voting secure and accessible, that we should have confidence in the results and that we should make it possible for as many people as possible to ...
03.04.2021 Can Americans Still Discuss Their Differences Constructively? David Blankenhorn Is Trying To Make it Happen. David Blankenhorn is co-founder of Braver Angels, which now has 70 chapters around the country, and has hosted more than 1,400 meetings, Blankenhorn said. The mission of Braver Angels is to get Americans to talk to one another, and to ...
02.24.2021 Adam Kinzinger says the battle with Trumpism has to be fought in public (bc he knows political parties have lost their power) Adam Kinzinger, 42, has been in Congress since 2010. He's an Air National Guard pilot who flew over 100 combat missions on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He never said much about Trump prior to the election, and has ...
02.23.2021 The Congressman Who Became A Qanon Topic Himself: Rep. Tom Malinowski Tom Malinowski, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey who was working on a resolution last year condemning the Qanon conspiracy cult, when suddenly he became a target of the cult himself, with the help of the Republican party establishment. Malinowski ...
02.18.2021 Reducing Big Tech Censorship, Preserving Free Speech, and Fighting Disinformation, with Peter Pomerantsev Peter Pomerantsev is one of the best thinkers on online disinformation. He's the author of two books, "This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality," and "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the ...
02.03.2021 If Things Are Going to Hell, Let's Talk Structural Reform with Don Beyer Gerrymandering is a major problem. But it's not the only structural cause of radicalization, extremism and polarized politics. I talked with Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, about some other reform ideas that he's working on with other members ...
01.16.2021 Russell Moore on the Capitol Insurrection and Why He's Willing to Put His Job On the Line to Speak His Mind Russell Moore is the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in America, with 15 million or so members in its ...
01.13.2021 Brendan Buck on the Lessons of the Trump Disaster & the Urgent Need for GOP Pols to Tell the Truth to their Voters Brendan Buck worked for two Republican Speakers of the House: John Boehner and Paul Ryan. He's now a partner at the strategic comms shop Seven Letter. I first met him when I was writing about the rise of the Tea ...
12.16.2020 John Dickerson Thinks The Way We Pick Presidents is FUBAR John Dickerson is a correspondent for 60 Minutes, a political analyst for CBS News, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and one of the three hosts of Slate's Political Gabfest podcast, which incredibly has been going for 15 years. He ...
12.04.2020 He Fought Liberal Bias in Media But Then Realized He Didn't Understand Journalism Matthew Sheffield fought against liberal bias in the news media for years. He grew up in a fundamentalist Mormon family, one of 10 children. His street preacher father watched CBS News. And in the late 90's Matthew started getting into ...
11.30.2020 Eli Lake Has Hammered the FBI for its Handling of the Russia Investigation. He Weighs In on Trump's Refusal to Concede One of the most common defenses of President Trump's attempts to overturn the election results is that he was undermined for much of his presidency by the media and the so-called "deep state," primarily through the Russia investigation. In essence, ...
11.24.2020 We Have Entered the "Post-Truth" Era, With Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. John Fetterman & Gisele Fetterman John Fetterman is the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, and the former mayor of Braddock, PA, which is just outside Pittsburgh. He and his wife Gisele and he have long been involved in community work, helping those who are in need, ...
11.23.2020 How to Tell Real Conspiracies from Conspiracy Theories, With the BBC's Marianna Spring The purpose of this episode is to help us think about how do we talk to people who are either confused by conspiracy theories or committed to them. How do we interact with family members who are in one of ...
11.17.2020 The GOP Needs Fewer Tax Cuts and More Labor Unions, Argues Oren Cass Cass, 37, is an up and coming conservative thinker who got his start in politics on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Cass was an associate at Bain and Company, where Romney had worked before starting Bain Capital. Cass ...
11.16.2020 Tim Alberta On the Future of the Republican Party We talk about what comes next for the Republican party in the wake of an election where it showed promising trends for the future, but in which the party's leader and the sitting president told lie after lie about the ...
10.25.2020 Mindy Belz on What American Christians Can Learn from Middle Eastern Christians & Emily Belz on Qanon in the Church Mindy Belz has been with World Magazine since its founding in 1986. It’s a publication aimed at evangelical Christians, started by her brother in law, Joel Belz. Emily Belz, Mindy’s daughter, is also at World now, and has worked at ...
10.21.2020 Charlie Camosy Talks Abortion Politics Charlie Camosy is a professor of theology and social ethics at Fordham University, and has written several books on the issue of abortion and the politics of abortion. What I appreciate about Charlie is that his main theme, or one ...
10.09.2020 Kim Wyman, the Republican who oversees all-mail elections in Washington, on the security and integrity of the election I talked with Wyman about two main things: the robust controls that they have in Washington for verifying that ballots are legitimate and not fraudulent, and what she says about concerns that millions of ballots go missing every election. A ...
10.02.2020 Republican Super Lawyer Ben Ginsberg Says When It Comes to Election Fraud, There's No Iceberg “I've been looking at polling places for 38 years as part of my duties and passion for [the] Republican party doing well in elections. We’ve been looking for fraud and I know what evidence is available, and there's not anything ...
09.18.2020 Judy Wu Dominick thinks if you have wealth and aren't friends with others who don't, you're spiritually poor Judy Wu Dominick comes to the issue of race from a decidedly Christian perspective. As she explains in the first portion of our conversation, she came to this work of writing about race and faith and justice essentially as a ...
09.11.2020 Eddie Glaude on his timely book about James Baldwin, Racism, and the Betrayal of the Civil Rights Movement Eddie Glaude is the chair of Princeton University’s African American Studies program and is a regular fixture on the set of “Morning Joe.” Eddie has written several books over the years, such as "Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves ...
09.08.2020 Stacey Abrams and filmmakers Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes on their new documentary "All In: The Fight for Democracy" Stacey Abrams is president of Fair Fight Action and was House Minority Leader in the Georgia legislature from 2011 to 2017. In 2018, she ran for governor of Georgia, losing a closely contested race to Republican Brian Kemp and alleging ...
08.29.2020 Michael Steele on How Biden Should Respond to Trump and to Kenosha Michael Steele is the former lieutenant governor of Maryland who went on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011. He’s a regular mainstay on MSNBC these days, and is a possible candidate for governor in ...
08.28.2020 Frank LaRose, Ohio's Top Elections Official, GOP official, Warns That a Single Law is Going to Delay Election Results in other Midwest Swing States Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said that in his state mail-in ballots will be among the first ballots counted on the night of the election. This is because Ohio law allows election clerks to process mail-in ballots ...
08.23.2020 Top Republican Elections Official Who Has Advised Vice President Pence Says Trump Voting Fraud Claims are "Not Feasible" Michael G. Adams is Kentucky's Secretary of State, the top elections official in that state. He is a Harvard Law graduate who was a senior lawyer at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration. He built a private ...
08.17.2020 Howard Dean on the Democratic Convention: "All We Have to Do Is Be Ourselves" As Democrats get set to start the first virtual party convention in history, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean talks about what he thinks the party needs to accomplish this week. Dean was governor of Vermont from 1991 to ...
08.06.2020 The Pure Pleasure of Speaking with Bill Buford, author of "Dirt", about food, writing, and adventure Bill Buford is an author, chef, and adventurer. I've read his two latest books in the last year. Dirt, released in 2006, was the first half of an epic narrative that’s taken up the last two decades or so of ...
07.29.2020 Nicholas Carr on "The Shallows" 10 Years Later One of the foundational books of my adult life is “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. It helped me see the ways in which the modern world was driven by entertainment more than information, as we transitioned from an ...
07.23.2020 Meet the Guy Who's Hauling All 4 Big Tech CEO's (Virtually) Up to the Hill Next Week, Rep. David Cicilline Next Monday, the CEO’s of four of the most dominant and important technology companies in the world will testify to Congress: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook will all appear before the House ...
07.14.2020 The Election Nightmare Scenario that Keeps Rick Hasen Up At Night Rick Hasen is professor of law and political science at UC-Irvine and author of “Election Meltdown.” Rick is two things that make him worth your time. First, he knows more about elections than almost anyone I know of. He updates ...
06.17.2020 Tom Ridge: For His Own Good, Trump Should Stop Knocking Mail-In Voting Tom Ridge is the former governor of Pennsylvania, from 1995 to 2001, and went on to become the first ever head of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. In ...
06.04.2020 Sen. Tim Scott on the killing of George Floyd and whether violence is a legitimate form of political action Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, is the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate. When he was elected in 2012, he was only the 7th African-American senator in the nation’s history. Scott has been quite vocal on many sides of the ...
05.29.2020 NIH Director Francis Collins is overseeing the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine and is concerned about anti-vaccine activists Francis Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary U.S. government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. It’s a giant agency, with 20,000 employees, including 6,000 research scientists, and a $39 billion ...
05.27.2020 Religion reporter Terry Mattingly on White Evangelicals and the Qanon political cult Terry Mattingly, founder of GetReligion.org and a nationally syndicated religious columnist, talks about the ways in which conspiracy theories like Qanon are merging with conservative white evangelical subculture. The Atlantic piece on Qanon is here, and Terry's responses are here, ...
05.26.2020 Tim Miller on the need to take conspiracy theories and disinformation seriously Tim Miller worked in Republican politics for many years but over the last few years he's become more of a writer. One of his latest pieces at The Bulwark is titled, "Taking #Obamagate Seriously: President Trump's Bonkers Theory Explained." Tim ...
05.20.2020 The Man At the Center of the Red Hot Battle Over Voting Rights: Marc Elias Marc Elias is leading 32 current lawsuits in 16 states to try to push for more expansive voting rights, and since the coronavirus, his workload has gone way up. We go deep on the debate over vote-by-mail, and ballot collection, ...
05.05.2020 DL Mayfield on her new book, "The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety & Power" “When I was young, it was so simple. I thought God was good. I thought God rewarded those who obey the rules. I thought my good news was accessible to everyone if only they had the ears to listen. I ...
04.29.2020 Jonathan Karl on his "Trump Show" book, media as the opposition, and the "fakest thing" of the Trump era Jonathan Karl is chief Washington and White House correspondent for ABC News. His new book is “Front Row at the Trump Show.” Jonathan writes in his book that Trump’s attack on “fake news” are “fake” is that Trump actually loves ...
04.17.2020 The Only Things Worth Discussing: Testing, Tracing & Therapeutics, with Adam White from AEI Adam White is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a law professor at George Mason University. He wrote about how we are focusing too much on the president's role in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and that ...
04.17.2020 Sen. Ben Cardin on Why Democrats Are Holding Up Money for the Small Business Emergency Fund Republicans are hammering Democrats for not automatically approving another $250 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, a fund set up to help small businesses avoid going out of business. The fund received $350 billion a few weeks ago, but has ...
04.09.2020 Congressman Patrick McHenry Says Every Small Business Who Needs an Emergency Loan Should Get One Congress authorized $350 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program in its coronavirus rescue package that was passed two weeks ago. Any company with 500 employees or fewer can get a loan of up to $10 million and that loan will ...
04.06.2020 It's His Job To Critique the President. How Do You Do That During a National Emergency? The question of who’s to blame for the mess we’re in with coronavirus is not a fun one. It’s clear that the U.S. response has been pretty terrible on a number of fronts: the testing component has been a disaster, ...
04.03.2020 Sen. Ron Wyden on His Push For A Vote-By-Mail Presidential Election I talked with Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been leading the push with Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to send at least $2 billion to states to help them get ready for a fall election conducted during ...
04.01.2020 Yuval Levin on How to Come Back from the Coronavirus Pandemic I talk with Yuval Levin about his article in the Atlantic about how to come back from the pandemic shutdown we are currently in. He writes: “Along with making the hard pause bearable, we also need to enable a soft ...
03.02.2020 AFSCME President Lee Saunders on a contested convention and how adversity rejevenuated his union Lee Saunders is the head of one of the country’s largest unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He talks about why union membership has steadily gone down for decades, how an adverse ruling at the Supreme ...
02.28.2020 Addisu Demissie - who ran Cory Booker's campaign - on the Democratic primary Addisu Demissie ran Cory Booker’s presidential campaign and has an expert resume in Democratic campaigns. Right now he's an undecided voter in California. We talked about what's going to happen in the California primary on March 3, how the South ...
02.19.2020 Bakari Sellers On the South Carolina Primary and Joe Biden's Last Stand Joe Biden’s last stand will be in South Carolina, where he is still expected to retain support from a large number of African-American voters despite his poor showings so far in Iowa and New Hampshire. Black voters make up about ...
02.08.2020 Carl Hulse on What We Learned From the Impeachment Trial & How to Cover Congress and not Lose Your Mind Carl Hulse is chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times and has been writing about Congress for the Times for three decades. He knows the US Capitol better than almost anyone. He’s also the author of "Confirmation Bias: Inside ...
01.31.2020 What If You Had More Than Just Two Choices For President? Lee Drutman's Argument for Ranked Choice Voting and More than Two Parties Lee Drutman is author of “Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-party Democracy in America.” He says introducing ranked choice voting would make it more likely that other political parties would emerge beyond just the two we ...

Older episodes

The Long Game

What's The Long Game about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Long Game episodes:

Will Big Money Donors Get Behind the Move to Get Rid of Partisan Primaries? Nick Troiano Is Working On It

Yuval Levin Wants the GOP to stop making it harder to vote

Can Americans Still Discuss Their Differences Constructively? David Blankenhorn Is Trying To Make it Happen.

Adam Kinzinger says the battle with Trumpism has to be fought in public (bc he knows political parties have lost their power)

The Congressman Who Became A Qanon Topic Himself: Rep. Tom Malinowski

Reducing Big Tech Censorship, Preserving Free Speech, and Fighting Disinformation, with Peter Pomerantsev

If Things Are Going to Hell, Let's Talk Structural Reform with Don Beyer

Russell Moore on the Capitol Insurrection and Why He's Willing to Put His Job On the Line to Speak His Mind

Brendan Buck on the Lessons of the Trump Disaster & the Urgent Need for GOP Pols to Tell the Truth to their Voters

John Dickerson Thinks The Way We Pick Presidents is FUBAR

He Fought Liberal Bias in Media But Then Realized He Didn't Understand Journalism

Eli Lake Has Hammered the FBI for its Handling of the Russia Investigation. He Weighs In on Trump's Refusal to Concede

We Have Entered the "Post-Truth" Era, With Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. John Fetterman & Gisele Fetterman

How to Tell Real Conspiracies from Conspiracy Theories, With the BBC's Marianna Spring

The GOP Needs Fewer Tax Cuts and More Labor Unions, Argues Oren Cass

Tim Alberta On the Future of the Republican Party

Mindy Belz on What American Christians Can Learn from Middle Eastern Christians & Emily Belz on Qanon in the Church

Charlie Camosy Talks Abortion Politics

Kim Wyman, the Republican who oversees all-mail elections in Washington, on the security and integrity of the election

Republican Super Lawyer Ben Ginsberg Says When It Comes to Election Fraud, There's No Iceberg

Judy Wu Dominick thinks if you have wealth and aren't friends with others who don't, you're spiritually poor

Eddie Glaude on his timely book about James Baldwin, Racism, and the Betrayal of the Civil Rights Movement

Stacey Abrams and filmmakers Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortes on their new documentary "All In: The Fight for Democracy"

Michael Steele on How Biden Should Respond to Trump and to Kenosha

Frank LaRose, Ohio's Top Elections Official, GOP official, Warns That a Single Law is Going to Delay Election Results in other Midwest Swing States

Top Republican Elections Official Who Has Advised Vice President Pence Says Trump Voting Fraud Claims are "Not Feasible"

Howard Dean on the Democratic Convention: "All We Have to Do Is Be Ourselves"

The Pure Pleasure of Speaking with Bill Buford, author of "Dirt", about food, writing, and adventure

Nicholas Carr on "The Shallows" 10 Years Later

Meet the Guy Who's Hauling All 4 Big Tech CEO's (Virtually) Up to the Hill Next Week, Rep. David Cicilline

The Election Nightmare Scenario that Keeps Rick Hasen Up At Night

Tom Ridge: For His Own Good, Trump Should Stop Knocking Mail-In Voting

Sen. Tim Scott on the killing of George Floyd and whether violence is a legitimate form of political action

NIH Director Francis Collins is overseeing the hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine and is concerned about anti-vaccine activists

Religion reporter Terry Mattingly on White Evangelicals and the Qanon political cult

Tim Miller on the need to take conspiracy theories and disinformation seriously

The Man At the Center of the Red Hot Battle Over Voting Rights: Marc Elias

DL Mayfield on her new book, "The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety & Power"

Jonathan Karl on his "Trump Show" book, media as the opposition, and the "fakest thing" of the Trump era

The Only Things Worth Discussing: Testing, Tracing & Therapeutics, with Adam White from AEI

Sen. Ben Cardin on Why Democrats Are Holding Up Money for the Small Business Emergency Fund

Congressman Patrick McHenry Says Every Small Business Who Needs an Emergency Loan Should Get One

It's His Job To Critique the President. How Do You Do That During a National Emergency?

Sen. Ron Wyden on His Push For A Vote-By-Mail Presidential Election

Yuval Levin on How to Come Back from the Coronavirus Pandemic

AFSCME President Lee Saunders on a contested convention and how adversity rejevenuated his union

Addisu Demissie - who ran Cory Booker's campaign - on the Democratic primary

Bakari Sellers On the South Carolina Primary and Joe Biden's Last Stand

Carl Hulse on What We Learned From the Impeachment Trial & How to Cover Congress and not Lose Your Mind

What If You Had More Than Just Two Choices For President? Lee Drutman's Argument for Ranked Choice Voting and More than Two Parties

Other shows like The Long Game: