[applause]

Kai Wright: The St. James Baptist church in Monroe County, Georgia is just a little over an hour South of Atlanta. The vibe in the chapel today is just electric. It's got a very Obama, 2008 feel. A room full of Black folks, young and old gathered on the first day of early voting waiting for Stacey Abrams to send them off to the polls.

Stacey Abrams: Thank you Councilman Howard. Thank you, Rev. Potter. Thank you mayor for having me here in your town again.

Kai: Abrams is running for governor quite famously at this point.

Stacey: You may have noticed I'm a little different than the other candidates who have come before me. Not only am I a little taller--

Kai: If she wins, she'll be the first Black woman to serve as governor of any state in all of US history. Yet this may not even be the most radical difference between Abrams and previous Democrats. She represents a hard break from democratic party convention not only because of who she is but also because of how she's running. Abrams has pushed Georgia Democrats into a totally new kind of campaign.

If her strategy works, it could realign politics all over the South. I'm Kai Wright, this is the United States of Anxiety, gender, power, and the midterm elections. In this episode, we dig into two races that have drawn a lot of headlines. One here in Georgia, the other up North in New Jersey, in each place a democratic woman has made her party a real contender in previously unimaginable territory by doing and being something totally new.

[music]

Stacey Abrams is running neck and neck with Republican candidate, Brian Kemp, they're vying for an open seat and there are not enough adjectives to explain how epic this race has become. Kemp is in just about every way Abrams's is polar opposite, a deep conservative who won an upset victory in the primary by proving just how Trumpy he can be.

Brian Kemp: [crosstalk] and two things, if you going to date one of my daughters.

Speaker: Respect.

Brian: And?

Speaker: A healthy appreciation for the second amendment, sir.

Kai: Yes, that is a Shotgun clicking in the background. He's been waving it in the direction of a kid who wants to date his daughter. The lead story of this race has been voting rights. There are so many concerns about Republican suppressing votes in Georgia, that Kemp has become a late night TV punchline. He is after all the sitting secretary of state.

Trevor Noah: Come on, guys, really? The guy in charge of the election is also running the election like that is some African level shit right there.

Audience: [laughs]

Kai: Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp have actually been fighting over voting rights for a long time. Really Abrams's whole campaign is rooted in voting rights work. She started an organization back in 2013 that's been credited with registering tens of thousands of new voters and not just in Atlanta. Georgia is a sprawling mostly rural state with a lot of counties. Only Texas has more and Abrams wants to put all of them in play.

That's what's really new about her. Democrats do not usually go running around rural Georgia. Their typical strategy goes something like this, you run up the vote in big cities where there are lots of reliably democratic Black voters. Then you field the kind of candidate who appeals to less reliably democratic, wealthy white voters in the excerpts of those cities. That was quite a morning.

Stacey: Yes.

Kai: I ride with Abrams as she heads to the next stop on her early voting tour. She describes why she thinks this typical democratic strategy is just self-defeating.

Stacey: You miss people who were supporting you until they saw that you didn't care about them.

Kai: Her own strategy is simple, go after every vote you can get everywhere you can find them.

Stacey: What I mean is that Clay County may have 15 people who haven't voted before, but if I can get them engaged then they decide they want to vote, they get added to 5,000 folks in Clayton County who also haven't voted before. I add them to 15,000 to 20,000 the Cab County voters and over time what we do is develop the 250,000 votes we need.

Kai: This is how she landed an upset victory in the Democratic primary. She went 153 of the 159 counties.

Stacey: I think what's really important is that so many Democrats have written off the South.

Kai: Christina Greer is a Fordham University political scientist. She's been a vocal Abrams supporter among Democrats nationally. She says the party at all levels has refused to invest in building meaningful statewide campaigns in the South.

Christina: Some of the research that I did down there when I was speaking to Black voters, they kept reminding me Obama didn't win Georgia. This is not going to be easy for Stacey Abrams and somehow she's been able to do the work across the state to really change the minds of Democrats, to help them believe that actually, they can get the leadership that they want and they shouldn't just cede to the Republicans just because it's a mid-term year.

Kai: Now, to be clear, there's a good reason Democrats haven't adopted this strategy before. It's really, really hard to pull off because in many of Georgia's counties, democracy is up against some hard realities. The day before I met Abrams, I went down to Clay County, found 180 miles South and West of Atlanta on the Alabama border. It's home to about 3,000 people spread along winding forested roads. I met Shirley Cody. Oh, there you are. How are you doing?

Shirley Cody: All right. How are you?

Kai: I'm good.

Shirley: You are all right. [laughs]

Kai: Shirley's a 74-year-old minister who laughs easily. Her small ranch home sits on a big grassy lot with an unpaved drive. She's worried in my little city car is going to get stuck.

Shirley: You have to be careful with all this sand out here. We have a lot of sand, even though we done had all this rain, but the sand is still here.

Kai: It's just a few days after Hurricane Michael has passed through and you can see the damage everywhere.

Shirley: It was terrible and do you know I have lights, but my neighbors don't. FEMA just called and I let them know that they're going to be out passing out food and water because people have lost all their food

Kai: I'm giving Shirley a ride to church, not the one she leads that's just up the street right past her brother's house. We're going to a church where she's to be a guest speaker today. It's a couple of miles away and that's further than it sounds because like a lot of her neighbors Shirley doesn't have a car and the only way for her to travel is to walk on narrow roads with cars zipping past at 55 miles an hour.

That should give you a sense of what Shirley is up against, but also of how determined she is about our mission. She's trying to make sure everybody in this County and the surrounding counties knows that early voting has begun. She bums rides. She carpools. Southwest Georgia is one of the poorest pockets of this state, of the country really. People travel 30, 40 miles just to find work.

Shirley: We live in a predominant Black community where we have homes, but all of the homes are not sustainable for living conditions because the younger generation inherited the homes and everything, but they don't have the money to sustain them and keep them up. People are struggling with those kind of things.

Kai: Shirley used to live in Atlanta. She worked as a nurse and did a lot of activism up there, but when her parents got old, she came home to care for them.

Shirley: It was a great place to live for me growing up here, but when I returned back I realized that things did not go forward.

Kai: Over the past couple of generations, poverty in Southwest Georgia has just steadily intensified. During the 2008 recession, it was one of the worst-hit regions in the nation.

Shirley: I didn't understand what happened because at one time, we had industry, we had import, export up and down the river. It was great. It was fabulous. We even had a traffic light. Now we don't have anything. [laughs]

Kai: Yet Shirley has kept at it for years trying to build some political power for Black people in this part of the state. Now she has put her faith in Stacey Abrams. Shirley's been coming to this church since she was a kid. Of course, it's a lot smaller congregation now. Today, it's just about 10 people and at the end of the service they invite her to the front.

Shirley: I won't be long. I just wanted to talk to you all briefly about upcoming election as we know--

Kai: She offers help and figuring out how to use an absentee voting ballot. She talks a bit about the importance of voting in general, but you get the sense that this crowd knows that stuff already, so she moves to her real ask.

Shirley: I got a couple of posters and I would like to give those out to ones that's active. I know Mr. Joe, if you would put these up anywhere you think that-- To remind people is to let them know what they need to bring when they go to vote. A lot of times people don't know if they haven't voted before.

Kai: Here's the real rub for Stacey Abrams. Remember her strategy is to engage this broad swath of voters in previously ignored places. Places like Southwest Georgia. The biggest challenge to that is the fact that voting in Georgia has become quite a complicated business. Thanks primarily to Brian Kemp.

Carol Anderson: Who has been absolutely lethal in terms of voter suppression.

Kai: This is Emory University professor Carol Anderson whose new book One Person, No Vote traces the erosion of voting rights since the civil rights movement. She says Kemp has been a trailblazer for Republican election officials all over the country who have come up with an array of tactics for reducing turnout, all of which land hard in places like Clay County, places with a lot of poor black residents. You can think of it as working in three stages. First, there's this stuff that stops you before you even get started.

Carol: For instance, here in Georgia they've got a type that keeps you from registering to vote at all and that's called exact match. That is where your voter registration card is matched up against the databases, either from the social security office or from the department of motor vehicles. If there is one thing off, so say your name has a hyphen in it on your driver's license, but as you wrote it on your voter registration card, it doesn't have a hyphen, that kicks your voter registration out.

Kai: This is the program that's been a huge national news story.

Speaker 2: The AP reports that more than 53,000 voter registration applications have been on hold with Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp.

Kai: That's for new voters. There's a second tactic for people who registered a long time ago.

Carol: Voter roll purges. Voter roll purges also go after this notion of rampant voter fraud.

Kai: That's been Kemp's argument that he's just preventing voter fraud. Of course, it bears repeating that there is no evidence of a meaningful fraud problem. Still this summer the Brennan Center for Justice found that Georgia had purged 10% of its registered voters in just the past two years alone. That's the first and second stage. The final stage is when you actually show up to vote on election day. There's the voter ID laws and understaffed precincts and stuff like that. In Georgia, they've just straight up closed the doors to the voting booth.

Carol: Georgia has already closed 214 polling places.

Kai: That's since the Supreme court weakened the enforcement authority of the Voting Rights Act six years ago, according to an analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It's happened all over the South actually. One civil rights group found that 868 polling places had been closed in seven mostly Southern states, which means people in places like Clay County are now traveling much much further to vote.

Carol: What we know is that for every 10th of a mile that a polling place has moved from the black community, African-American voter turnout goes down by 0.5%. One of the things that they had tried in Sparta, Georgia, and this is wrapped in the language of just being reasonable, for fiscal reasons and to consolidate all of these polling places because elections are really expensive. When they did their consolidation, they try to put the voting precinct for the black community 17 miles away. 17 miles away.

Shirley: Now we coming up. Not yet, but when we get to the crossroad we're going to turn and go this way.

Kai: After church, Shirley asked me to drive her to where she says folks around here had been voting as long as she can remember.

Shirley: This is a voting precinct that was closed. They said they closed it because it was in need of repair.

Kai: It's a little yellow brick building just off the side of the main road that runs through this section of the county.

Shirley: They closed this two years ago. Two years ago, no warning, anything. We got ready to vote and they said, "We forgot to tell you. You have to go to Fort Gaines."

Kai: People came here then?

Shirley: Yes, people were so used to coming here and to find out, "Oh no you have to go to Fort Gaines."

Kai: That's the county seat. It's about 10 miles away. Shirley says that's a radical change. Especially for all the people who are ready have to travel long distances to find work.

Shirley: They could come here early in the morning before they go to work and the ones that got off late in the afternoon before 7:00 they could cast their vote and then come home. It worked for them, but now how are we going to reach them? Now, I got to try to get out the best way I can, reach those young people, let them know they can vote early. Let's try to get some votes in that way or do absentee. That's what I got to do. I got to educate them on another alternative.

Kai: Randolph County is right next door to Clay. Now, you might recognize Randolph because again, it's a voting rights story from Georgia that has drawn a lot of national attention. Election officials there tried to close seven of the countys' nine polling places earlier this year. Shirley, carpooled over to Randolph and joined the fight to keep those polls open and they won. That's what Stacey Abrams takes from all this. She says she's got Brian Kemp's number.

Stacey: My campaign has been grounded in a very clear understanding of his approach because I watched him do this over successive elections. I knew what he was going to do and we've done everything in our power to anticipate and block it.

Kai: Including this early voting tour. Like Shirley Cody, Abrams wants everybody to know all of their options. It's plainly working. In just the first week of early voting turnout was three times that of the last governor's race.

Stacey: We're going to transform the electorate. We're going to bring new voices and add new voters. It's hard for people to see that because they're so used to looking at the same narrative and the same composition of the electorate. Worse they're used to dreaming that something new will happen, but not putting the work in to make it. That's really what's different about our campaign. I don't believe that demography is destiny. I think demography is a pathway, but it takes work. We are the first campaign in the deep South to put in the work.

Kai: We'll see if that work pays off for Georgia Democrats. It'll be one of the most closely watched returns on election night and by all indicators, it'll go down to the last vote which is precisely why questions over voting rights matter so much here. Either way, Abrams has already changed her own party's politics.

Christina: If Stacey Abrams is successful hopefully we will see this model replicated.

Kai: This is Christina Greer again.

Christina: I see her as a beacon for especially women, people of color, and women of color to say, "Okay, I may be running and my party may not necessarily support me in the ways that it could or should, but if I have a clear vision, I have a message and I work hard, I can actually make some strides." What Stacy Abrams has been able to do in the state of Georgia without real institutional support from the national party has been borderline incredible and a miracle.

Kai: That's Georgia. Next, we go to a very different kind of race, but one in which once again a woman running for office has given the local Democratic party new life in a previously unimaginable place.

[music]

Let's pivot from Georgia to the suburbs of New Jersey where a woman running for Congress in the 11th district, represents a very different challenge to the Republican party. One that may be just as formidable as Stacey Abrams for different reasons. WNYC's Nancy Solomon has been tracking this race very closely. Hey, Nancy.

Nancy Solomon: Hi, Kai.

Kai: Nancy, the last time we checked in with you, you told us about this group of women in New Jersey who had managed to take down their Republican Congressman who'd been in the seat for like 20 years.

Nancy: That's right. Rodney Frelinghuysen.

Kai: Rodney Frelinghuysen. Now, you've been focused on the woman who is trying to replace him.

Nancy: I have, she's a Democrat. She's been a rising star in the selection even though she's never run for office before and her name is Mikie Sherrill. I have followed this woman all over this district. I watched her at a small town labor day parade. We went to a street fair where people now recognize her and they just come up to her and mob around her and want selfies.

Speaker 3: Do you mind if we get a picture together? Is that okay?

Mikie Sherrill: Do you want a selfie or you want someone to take it?

Nancy: It's not a stretch to say that they're gushing over her.

Speaker 4: You're beautiful. You're absolutely gorgeous.

Kai: It seems like she's a pretty popular candidate, but how she looks in the polls?

Nancy: She's up by about four points, which is really right at the margin of error. There are a couple of other indicators that make it look like she's doing pretty well. I mean, let's remember, this is a Republican district. It has more republican registered voters, and it has had a Republican Representative since 1984, but there are three things going on that are worth looking at. One is she's got this enormous group of activists in the district who are knocking on doors and calling people and working on her behalf. She's gotten a lot of endorsements.

Now, candidates always get endorsements, but she's gotten some unusual ones for a Democrat in this district, most notably the Policemen Union and the Firemen's Union, and she's got a lot of veterans behind her. Then the biggest indicator really is that she's out raising her opponent, Jay Weber, seven to one. She's got $7 million to his one that she's brought in.

Kai: Which is to say, Mikie Sherrill really has turned this district on its head?

Nancy: Yes.

Kai: Why do you think that is?

Nancy: Well, some of this is a reaction to Trump, there are a lot of Republicans in this district, but they're largely moderate Republicans, and he's just not that popular in this part of New Jersey. I think there's another way to think about it. I mean, this district is predominantly white 82%. It's almost completely suburban and what's not suburban is rural. At the same time, Mikie Sherrill really represents for this district, the perfect kind of candidate that the Democrats need.

Kai: Why is that? What do you mean by that?

Nancy: Well, all you really have to do is watch her campaign ads.

Mikie Sherrill: Before the Navy let me fly one of these, I had to pass a lot of tests.

Nancy: This is a woman who's a former Navy helicopter pilot.

Sherrill: The goal for parents to work together and get the job done. I'm Mikie Sherrill--

Nancy: She was a liaison between the US Navy and the Russian government. She learned Arabic at one time and became a federal prosecutor.

Sherrill: -we need to put Congress to the test.

Nancy: She's a mom of four kids.

Kai: She's really everything.

Nancy: These are all qualities that arguably appeal to white Republican voters. It really kicks the ground out from under the Republicans in terms of their ability to be big supporters of the military. One of the biggest employers, by the way, in the New Jersey 11th is an arsenal that depends on military funding.

Kai: In a way, she's almost the flip strategy of a Stacey Abrams in terms of how Democrats are remaking the electorate. If Stacey is talking about, "Hey, we don't need to chase these moderate whites. If we get all of our supporters who are Black and people of color out." You have Mikie, who is instead saying, "Hey, I'm just the kind of person to reach the moderate whites of this district."

Nancy: Yes, this is a strategy that appeals to a base for these kinds of districts. This isn't just in the New Jersey 11th. This is all across the country, you see a tremendous number of women running for Congress this year, more than ever, and a tremendous number of women who are veterans, several of them with this incredible resume of having fought to get into flight school to become fighter pilots and helicopter pilots and this sort of thing. She fits right in with this group, where you have these white suburbs that are mostly Republican or slightly Republican where Trump won by a point, but they're essentially moderate well-educated white districts.

Kai: As we've talked about this is precisely where the Democrats are either are not going to take the house and particularly based on the votes of women. How has Mikie Sherrill's experience been as a woman in this race?

Nancy: Well, let's talk for a minute about her name.

Kai: Mikie.

Nancy: Right, Mikie Sherrill. Her full name is Rebecca Michelle Sherrill. This is not a traditional name for a woman, obviously. I asked her where it came from?

Mikie: When I was about two my dad said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we called you Mikie from my middle name Michelle?" My mother said, no. I said, Yes. I guess decided I would not answer to anything except Mikie.

Nancy: Before she was known, she would get calls to the office and she'd be talking to a potential voter or someone who maybe wants to donate money, and they just assumed Mikie was a guy.

Mikie: -go, "Oh, yes, I'm definitely voting for him."

Nancy: Yes, no, I've heard that too.

Kai: People just assume she was a man.

Nancy: Right.

Kai: How does Mikie Sherrill feel among women voters, though, specifically in New Jersey?

Nancy: She's doing quite well. I think this is again, something that is happening in suburban districts all over the country. I spoke with Christine Todd Whitman, about Mikie Sherrill's candidacy. For people who don't know her or don't remember. She is a notable figure in New Jersey. She's a Republican, she was the first and only woman to be elected governor of the state. She's been very critical of President Trump. She says that Mikie Sherrill really is a very tough candidate for a Republican to beat in this time, and in this moment.

Christine Todd: She is really out there working it hard and right now with a gap that Republicans have amongst women, which is extraordinary. It's a chasm, not a gap anymore. That's going to be a hard thing to overcome.

Kai: A chasm. Those are strong words from a Republican.

Nancy: Yes, and it's starting to show up in the polling. Monmouth University had a poll in this district, just the week of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and his ultimate confirmation, it found the whole debacle hadn't necessarily changed people's minds, but the gender gap really is widening. It found that 57% of women prefer Mikie Sherill in the district to only 35% to support her opponent Jay Weber.

Kai: Did you see much reaction to Brett Kavanaugh out on the campaign trail?

Nancy: I did. I was with Mikie Sherrill on October 7th. It was the Sunday after the confirmation and swearing-in. We went to a meet and greet at somebody's home in Livingston.

Mikie: Thank you for having me here. It's so great to see--

Nancy: Out of the gate, there were just several women who were super emotional, and this stuff just came bubbling right up.

Speaker 5: It's been a pretty dramatic week. What I've heard over and over again, is that the difference in this election is going to be getting the non-voter to be a voter.

Mikie: Yes, I've heard from a lot of people that are really upset this week. It's easy to get lost in what's going on in Washington. It's easy to get upset about things that are happening, that are sometimes beyond our control. Here's what I've been telling people. Let's focus on what we can control. Let's focus on taking back this seat. Let's focus on taking back the House of Representatives, lets make sure--

Nancy: To answer your question, Kai, it's not just the polling. There's a social movement happening in the suburbs, and it's made up of middle-aged middle-class white women, and they intend to knock on every registered democratic door in the district between now and election day. It's a level of mobilization and activism that we haven't seen in New Jersey in a long time. People are comparing it to the anti-war movement and saying this is bigger and more involved and more active than those days.

[music]

Kai: From New Jersey to Georgia, whatever the outcome on Election Day, women have mounted campaigns this year that have changed at least the Democratic Party in profound ways. Let me return to something Nancy pointed out earlier in the episode, how Rebecca Michelle Sherill became Mikie Sherill. That seems to be a choice she made willingly, but it reminded us of something that's been happening for a long time to women who run for office. Take US Senator Patty Murray of Washington State. She was famously elected as the mom in tennis shoes through the last year the woman in 1992. Democratic consultants initially told her that she should somehow conceal her gender, starting with her name.

Patty Murray: People told me when I ran not to use the name Patty because people might think of me as a woman. I said I am running as a woman.

Kai: For more than that thought, we go down to our colleague Anna Sale, host of the excellent Death, Sex and Money podcast from WNYC Studios. In a recent episode, Anna sat down with Jennifer Granholm, who was both the first woman to be elected governor and Attorney General of Michigan.

Jennifer Granholm: When you run for office as a woman, this is what I was told this is different now, I think, but when I was first running for office, one, I had to cut my hair.

Anna Sale: Into a short--

Jennifer: To super short and which I like anyway, but it was-

Anna: It was the instruction.

Jennifer: It was three, you had to cut your hair-- I actually asked my hairstylist because I was young when I first ran I was in my 30s, and so I was-

Anna: 37, right?

Jennifer: Right, can you put some gray streaks in and at the time they didn't have a product that was good for that because it made me look like a blue hair which really be [unintelligible 00:29:38] I can't do that. You have to look completely asexual. You cannot have people look at you and the first thing they think about is how you are shaped, what you are wearing. You have to be as neutral as possible so that people will pay attention to the words that are coming out of your mouth. There is no way you should be showing any boobs, you shouldn't be showing your toes.

Anna: Now that you're out of office, your toes can show?

Jennifer: I were here and I'm free toes. Free those toes.

Anna: Who told you to cut your hair?

Jennifer: You have consultants all around you who are-- Actually I wanted to because I didn't want-- I wanted to look tough, I didn't want to be distracting. If I had long blonde hair, I would be-- you don't want the bimbo thing applied to you at all, so I wanted to do it as well, but there's a whole series of things that you do when you run for office.

Anna: Do you remember feeling hemmed in and resentful at any of the particular instructions?

Jennifer: In order to feel, hemmed in and resentful, I think, you have to be more aware that I was just learning. "Oh, really? Is that how you doing? Oh, okay." If I had had more experience in life perhaps I would have felt resentful. If I were doing it now, I would definitely feel resentful, but then I was a young woman, "I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got to do this to be elected."

Anna: Were you told to emphasize or deemphasize that you would be the first female attorney general?

Jennifer: Deemphasize. It was obvious, that I was a woman. I didn't have to say that. Everything you had to deemphasize, you had to deemphasize your children.

Anna: Really?

Jennifer: Oh, yes, because they were nervous. I mean, I had a 10-month-old. They would want to know, "Well, what the hell, we're not going to send a woman in there when she's going to be torn and her kids will be at home and who's watching the kids and all of that." If you looked at any of my literature, you didn't see kids.

Anna: Did you have your husband?

Jennifer: You didn't even really see my husband. It was all about this disembodied creature who was going to fight for you because you don't want to remind people of the mess that is a family and all of that. It would make you look to potentially diverted.

Anna: Did you have a standard line when someone would ask who's looking after your toddler? Who is looking after your baby?

Jennifer: Well, I had three at that point looking after your kids. Yes, I would say, John Engler, who was the governor had triplets. I said, "I'm sure you've asked him that very question." They did participate with me in parades and stuff, but after a few parades, it gets old and you don't want to drag kids to something they don't want to go to because that's a terrible picture.

Anna: It's bad enough if you're a mom, if you're a bad mom with a crying baby.

Jennifer: Oh, my God, right?

Kai: That was former Michigan, governor, Jennifer Granholm, in conversation with Anna Sale, host of Death, Sex, & Money here at WNYC studios. If you like what you heard from Anna and the DSM team, then you should subscribe to Death, Sex & Money. You can get it on your favorite podcast app or visit them at deathsexmoney.org. This full conversation with Jennifer Granholm is waiting there for you and your feed. If you want to hear more from Patty Murray and the many US senators we have spoken to for this season, we've put together a little yearbook of the women of the Senate, and you should check it out, you can go to wnyc.org/senators, or you can follow WNYC on Instagram.

[music]

Kai: United States of Anxiety is a production of WNYC Studios and the newsroom of WNYC. This episode was reported by me, Allison Light, and Jessica Miller. Nancy Solomon reported from New Jersey. It was edited by Christopher Werth and Karen Frillmann, who is also our Executive Producer. Cayce Means is our technical director, our theme music was written by Hannis Brown and performed by the Outer Borough Brass Band. A special thanks to the Death, Sex & Money team for their contribution.

Our team also includes Christopher Johnson, Kaari Pitkin, Melinda's Siriwardana, Courtney Stein, and Verlyn Williams. Jim Schachter is Vice-President of news for WNYC and I'm Kai Wright, thanks for listening. United States of anxiety is supported in part by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Additional support for WNYC's election coverage is provided by Emerson Collective, the New York Community Trust, and New York public radio trustee, Dr. Mary White. This report is produced with support from Chasing the Dream, a public media initiative from WNET reporting on poverty, jobs, and economic opportunity in America.

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