Beyond Horse-Race Journalism: Promoting Light and Truth
An interview with Sam Benson, national political correspondent for the Deseret News
Recently, the Utah Monthly had the chance to talk with Sam Benson, national political corresopndent for the Deseret News. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Thank you for being willing to sit down with us. I guess my first question is about your role. I was reading your bio, and it says that you are the Deseret News’s national political correspondent. So are you the only national political correspondent for the Deseret News? I assume you have colleagues. I just didn’t know based on the bio who you were working with I guess.
So we have a team of political reporters. I’m on kind of a big team, we just merged with another team. There’s probably twelve or fourteen of us that cover state and national politics, or kind of political issues in the West. So we have people that cover education, that cover water, and land use, that cover all these different things. But I’m the only national political correspondent, meaning I’m the one who covers the presidential race. And there are two other reporters that will do some spot news on the presidential race; when something big breaks and we just need something quick, they’ll do something. But they’re much more focused on either Congress, like Utah’s congressional delegation or politics in Utah. So I’m kind of the main reporter focused on covering 2024. And then the main one traveling and following the candidates and that type of thing.
Overall what has it been like covering your first presidential election as a full-time journalist? I mean, I remember you in honors classes, you know. And I think you were working for the Deseret News part time as a student, but then you get hired full time and you’re kind of given this beat. I mean has it been overwhelming, or do you feel like you were prepared for this with some of the stuff you did in undergrad, internships, part time work?
Yeah, that’s a great question. I wouldn’t say it’s been overwhelming. But I don’t think there’s any way to really prepare for what a presidential race is, especially this race. There are so many things that we could spend hours talking about with this election that are just quite unprecedented. For a lot of reasons. And so the way you you cover it, I mean, I feel like, in some ways, because this is my first presidential election that I’ve covered, and I’m somewhat a greenie when it comes to this, I’m going and I’m just covering the way that we feel is best to cover whereas there are other reporters, you know, I’ll be at debates or I’ll be at campaign rallies, you know, with 50 other reporters who have been doing this for decades. And to them so much is just shocking, because it’s so different.
Like one example, I mean, we were a week before the Iowa caucuses, Politico released a report that showed that campaign events were down 50% from the same time in 2016 and 2012. Just because people aren’t, weren’t, like campaigning as much Trump would pop down one day and do one big rally every week, and then DeSantis would do like two a day. Whereas, like in 2016, you had Rubio doing like six events every day, you know? Just kind of a different type, technology’s changed things, social media’s changed things. It’s just like a different, different way to do stuff now. But to me, I had no idea. Like, I was just doing what I thought was right. So in that sense, I think it’s been kind of nice. Like it actually is somewhat of a better fit to do our first one [cover our first presidential election as a news organization], because it’s different, but you don’t know what you don’t know. That said, I think there are a lot of intricacies and complexities of reporting on the big stage—perhaps that it’s not as easy to get access to the candidates as it is in a local race. It’s not as easy to break news as it is in a local race. So you just kind of have to be creative and entrepreneurial and, and find angles that no one else is writing about that kind of align with our brand and with what our what our readers care about.
Your last comment connects with the next question I wanted to ask, I mean, you know you’re working for the Deseret News. So what does it mean to find angles that align with your brand? And what does it mean to report on the presidential election for an outlet like the Deseret News? I mean, you’re, you know, your beat is national, but I’m assuming you consider your audience to primarily be Utah or Western American voters. So how do you frame your reporting given that, and given the sort of unique brand that is the Deseret News?
Yeah, I mean, this is a big investment for the Deseret News, like they’ve never had a reporter cover a race like this. And the reason they wanted to do it is because they wanted to fill what they perceive to be a hole in coverage of presidential races. And what I mean by that is there’s not a whole lot of coverage on issues like faith and religious liberty, family policy, humane approaches to immigration, like stuff like this. When you’re covering a presidential race like it’s a horse race (“I’m just kind of focusing on polls and who’s up and who said what”) you kind of lose focus on some of the things that our owners feel like are really important.
So that’s what we’ve tried to do. And we’ve actually found some success kind of [homing in on] that stuff, like our probably biggest stories that we’ve done in the race so far deal with religion, like we brought Nikki Haley in two weeks ago when she was in Utah. And we talked to her a lot about faith and like, what is a country that allows kind of, or promotes people to practice faith or not practice, you know, whatever they want? What does that look like to you, as a potential presidential candidate? We did a big story around Vivek Ramaswamy’s faith; he’s Hindu but he hired two Latter-day Saint guys in Iowa to run his campaign there, because he figured they knew what it would be like to be a religious minority, just like interesting stuff like that. And that doesn’t mean we haven’t broken other news, like, we broke the story of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting his Secret Service request denied. And that’s good for us. But in terms of our brand, it’s good to focus on the things that kind of make us unique that we know, our readers, whether they be in Utah or the West, or just kind of readers of faith nationally kind of care about.
Interesting to hear. And on that note, when Nikki Haley was with you all, was she fairly unguarded? Was it sort of like “here, let me talk frankly about my faith”? Or did it feel like she was just sort of talking religion like any buttoned-down presidential candidate would?
Yeah I mean, we were in a pretty intimate setting. It was our editorial board, and then a handful of reporters myself included. So I felt like we had a good relationship; that said, I followed Nikki Haley around, you know, off and on, for six months. Right after that meeting, I went and followed her through kind of her last ditch swing through North Carolina, Virginia, DC, Massachusetts. So like, I have her stump speech memorized. Like I know the stuff she says. And so she’s a politician and a lot of what she says it’s kind of just like memorized lines. And when you ask her something, she’s like, “How quick[ly] can I pivot back to like a memorized line?” I mean, her discussion of faith I think would have been very different if I wasn’t a reporter and we were friends and we were like, sitting at her you know, on her living room couch discussing it. Because it was kind of scripted but it’s one of those things that she doesn’t get asked about a lot. So definitely it was something that we heard, I heard, new things coming from her on. That said, I don’t think when you ask any politician about faith, they’re going to be the most open—especially someone like Haley, who was raised as a Sikh, the daughter of Punjabi Indian immigrants, and then converted to Christianity in her 20s and has been hammered on that, like Vivek Ramaswamy accused her of doing that as a political stunt. And so naturally, she’s going to be, like, kind of more guarded about it. But I think we had a good [conversation]—we didn’t talk much about her personal faith, but a lot about what religious liberty looks like to her in the United States and abroad. And that was interesting.
Yeah that’s fascinating. Yeah, I didn’t know much about her background. I guess my next question, and it’s kind of a follow up to the last question. What does it mean for you, sort of practically or on the ground, if anything at all, that you report for a newspaper that’s, you know, that’s owned by the church through the Deseret Management Corporation? Is it not relevant? How does that factor in, if at all, to your day-to-day reporting activities?
Yeah, I think it’s a great question, because I think there are a lot of ideas, some accurate, some not about the role of the church in the Deseret News. Editorially, [at] the church, there aren’t general authorities looking over my stories, like there’s really no interaction between church headquarters and what we do. We’re really grateful for the church, because we’re owned by Deseret Management Corporation, which is one of the church’s for-profit businesses. And so financially, we’re benefited greatly by being connected to these other organizations. Because to a degree there is kind of like a cost-sharing mechanism, not that we’re getting funding from the church, but these for-profit organizations connect to each other in some ways. But not everyone understands that. So when I go, and I try and get an interview with a candidate, and I tell them that we’re from the Deseret News, which is you know, the oldest newspaper in the Western United States, and we have a predominantly Latter-day Saint readership and they Google us and they see we’re owned by the church, they immediately think, “Oh, we’re like the the Mormon newspaper.” And I, frankly, I think that’s a good thing, in some ways, because we don’t want to mislead people. And I do clarify, like, we’re not like the church’s newspaper, like what I write, it’s not like the will of the church in any way. And we have to be very explicit about that.
But I do think it’s a good thing for us to recognize that people associate us with the church, they associate us with Latter-day Saint values, and everything that we write should live up to that. And we’ve talked about how that kind of steers our coverage. But it also makes us recognize that, you know, our motto is “light and truth”; everything we write should be promoting light, should be promoting truth. I think the national media does a fantastic job on a lot of things, [but] I also think the digital age has made it a lot easier to kind of promote speed over accuracy in some ways. And so we want to be very careful that everything we’re doing is the highest quality and accurate and fair to people. I’m not perfect at that. I’m far from it, but it’s good to have something to live up to.
What is the relationship between top church leaders and your own newspaper’s leadership?
So the kind of chain of command at the Deseret Management Corporation is you have the top editors of the Deseret News, so our editor, our executive editor, they work very closely with the leadership of Deseret Management Corporation. Jeff Simpson’s the president. And then Sheri Dew is the vice president. And they work very closely with the board of DMC, to include some general authorities. But in none of those meetings are they like taking our articles and they’re looking at, they’ll talk broadly about, and I’m speaking simply from my understanding, but there are frequent discussions at these meetings and these board meetings about kind of the direction of the newspaper. The business side, logistics, and things like that. But in terms of editorial freedom, in my, you know, four years here, never have I seen an instance of like church leadership steering our editorial coverage in any way. So I, as far as I understand, it’s mostly like a pragmatic business perspective.
Well, thank you. Yeah, that’s a fascinating perspective to hear. You know, and you touched on this, my next question, but I’m just gonna ask it again. What do other reporters on the trail say when you tell them that you work for the Deseret News, you know, when you’re in like the press pool at a debate or whatever, you know, like, you see, I mean, yeah, what’s the initial reaction? Just sort of like, oh, like you’re the Mormon newspaper? Or is it, or do a lot of these people now know, like, oh, like you, you know, people will kind of do at least reporters understand now, at this point, the relationship, the true relationship between the church and your paper? Or is it sort of like, oh, like, You’re from Utah, you work for this? Have they sort of pigeonholed you, I guess, when you say that?
Yeah. In some ways. I don’t get the sense that everyone knows, like, our relationship with the church. If anything, I’ll say, I’m from the Deseret News. And they’ll be like, “Oh, is that in Salt Lake?” And then it’s like the Utah thing that’s the connection with the church. But I’ve noticed even a difference. And maybe it’s just a placebo. But I feel like I’ve noticed a difference from when we started doing this in August to now of how much people recognize Deseret. And I think that’s just a matter of us having boots on the ground and chasing stories that the other people are doing.
We’ve been doing polling with a firm out of DC, HarrisX. Every month, we do a big sample of voters nationally, and we ask them questions on tons of stuff. But in October, we kind of struck gold with this poll where we asked them, here’s a list of politicians, do you believe they’re people of faith or not? And Republicans? The top person they said that is a person of faith was Donald Trump above Mike Pence, above Biden, above Romney. And then we ran it back but with different wording and then a couple different questions a few months later and got the same results. And that poll just kind of went haywire, like everyone saw it, in like the national press pool. It was on brand for us. It was deeply interesting. And it broke news. So I think people are starting to recognize this more.
I’m not sure how many people recognize that we’re affiliated with the church. But some certainly do. And this has led to some really interesting conversations. One example is, I was on the bus headed to the debate in Simi Valley at the Reagan Library, this was in September I think. And I was sitting next to Dave Weigel, who’s from Semafor, but used to be at the Washington Post as a national political correspondent. And he was reading his Bible on the way up. We started talking, and he was saying that he wasn’t deeply religious, but that he was gonna be spending the next year covering Republican politics. And he’s like “a lot of these people claim to be or say they’re Christians and so I want to understand them better so I’m going to read the Bible,” which is a really interesting strategy. But I thought that was fascinating. We had a great conversation about covering people of religion and our own faith and things like that. And so I think it’s led to some really interesting conversations when people recognize where we’re coming from and why we’re doing what we’re doing.
This next question sort of gets at the mechanics of things—and it may betray sort of my ignorance of, you know, how being a political reporter works—but during the primary phase, how does it work in terms of travel? Like you’re riding buses, like campaign, are you like on campaign buses? Or do you arrange travel with other press members? And you’re flying around? I mean, how was chasing all of these primary candidates on the Republican side? How did that or what did that look like?
Yeah no, that’s a great question. And that’s one of those things that has made this year so different from previous cycles. In 2016, for example, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio would rent out these buses. And then when they would do these, these trips through Iowa, reporters could pay to get on these buses. This cycle, no one did that except Vivek Ramaswamy. And you can pay 50 bucks a day, get on his shuttle and then go around with his campaign. We never did that. Because we were, of course, covering Ramaswamy but we were covering the other candidates as well. So it’s mostly like, and I’m not exclusively on the trail. Like, it’d be really expensive to have me just like, on the road constantly. So I’m probably out, you know, a week or two out of every month, probably close to two weeks out of every month. Yeah. But it’s really strategic. It’s my editors and I get together and we strategize and like what are the stories you want to chase? What are the themes you want to chase and then what’s happening like, where are candidates? What are candidates doing? And what are certain events we want to cover.
So I, you know, go out for five days at a time, a week at a time, I mean, with the Iowa, New Hampshire caucuses back-to-back, I was in Iowa for a week and then went straight to New Hampshire and I was in New Hampshire for a week and then came back to Utah. And then really I’m on my own for transport. So I’ll either rent a car or I’ll just use public transportation to get around to these different events. And every once in a while, we’ll do some sort of—like if there are other reporters in the area that I know are going to be going to the same events—sometimes we’ll find a way to share the transport costs. But that’s more rare, because a lot of times we’re bouncing around a ton, but it can be kind of crazy. Like one example is right before Haley dropped out, we wanted to do like one last kind of story on her last-ditch effort to sell Republicans on why she can win. So the weekend before Super Tuesday, she was in Utah on Wednesday. I caught a red eye to Richmond, Virginia. She did a Thursday-morning event in Richmond, I drove to Northern Virginia. She did an event that night in Falls Church, spent the night there, a morning event in DC. Then I drove up to Baltimore to catch a flight down to Charlotte. And then she did an event that night in Charlotte. And then that night I drove to Raleigh, for a Saturday morning event in Raleigh. And then I had to leave that event early to catch a flight to Boston because she did an event that night in Boston and then it was back to Utah. So it really is just kind of a game of finding the cheapest flights you possibly can but also logistically making it work. And it’s kind of crazy, but I think it’s an art and I’m hoping to master that art.
Wow yes, so occasionally, there’ll be these whirlwind moments of travel. But otherwise, it was just a week or two out of every month where you were strategically flying into various campaign sites during the primary season, right?
Yeah and that will change. I mean, now that we’re down to kind of a Biden-Trump rematch—and there’s a handful of other independent candidates that might be interesting—but yeah, neither of them are campaigning much. I mean, Trump does maybe one event every ten days, Biden has barely started campaigning. So we’ll have to be strategic about how we want to start doing things. And so far, it’s basically been a matter of what are the stories we can tell that are deeply interesting, that aren’t shoving Biden and Trump down people’s throats, because a lot of our readers are sick of that and don’t want to really pay attention to that yet. So I was in, I just got back yesterday from eastern Washington, doing a really interesting story that I think our audience will care about, that’s like, adjacent to the presidential election, but isn’t directly covering the candidates. So we just had to be creative with that kind of stuff.
Yeah. That’s fascinating. And I, you know, I’m glad that you kind of pivoted to general election stuff, I was gonna ask you about that. So now that we’ve reached the general election phase, you were saying that Biden and Trump are not doing much formal campaigning yet, but would you go, say, to his trial, Trump’s trials? Or would you try to go find them in other places—go to one of Biden’s, you know, let’s say he’s pitching some infrastructure project? Would you go to these events that maybe aren’t explicitly political, but are, of course, deeply politicized because it’s an election year?
Certainly, I mean, anytime those two candidates have public events or opportunities for some kind of press coverage, whether it’s explicitly a campaign rally or not, I think we’d consider covering. It’s interesting, because on the one hand, you have Biden, who’s campaigning, while still, you know, acting as the president of the United States. And so not everything he does is a campaign event. But if the State of the Union last week was any indication, lines between campaign and presidency are gonna become very, very blurred. And so I think that in some ways makes our job a little easier in the sense of like, covering Biden is me covering Biden and covering Biden has to be covering his campaign. On the Trump side, it’s almost as if he’s like, avoiding public appearances more than he asked to. He’ll go on TV fairly frequently. And he’ll speak at these different, you know, Christian broadcasters, network meetings or different meetings. But in terms of formal campaign events, they’re kind of few and far between. And so yeah, so we’ll have to kind of get creative to be in spaces where we can see him but also that we can interact with his followers because that’s what’s so interesting to us is like, we need to find a way to figure out why are people supporting these two candidates, and fairly report that. And so if he has a huge group of people outside of his courtroom in New York, there’s waving signs and flags and stuff. That’s a good idea for us to go and talk to these people. It’s reasonable for us to go out there and there are other things going on perhaps. It’s certainly something we’ll consider.
Makes a lot of sense. My next question is just can you tell us a little bit about your path to this job? What led you to the Deseret News? I know you studied sociology and Spanish, I think undergrad. Talk to us about your path.
So journalism was my first real passion as a kid. I loved reading the newspaper. I was just a sports nut. I loved BYU football. I loved the Celtics. And as soon as my mom got a computer that she would bring home (I was probably eight or nine), every night, I was online reading articles about the sports teams I love. So for BYU football, that was the Deseret News and the Tribune, for the Celtics, it was like, whatever free stuff I could find on the Boston Globe website, or ESPN, or Bleacher Report. And I was 12. And I was on Bleacher Report, which is just kind of this low-end, highly aggregated sports website. And they had a kind of ad for they said, “We need writers, apply to write for us.” And they were unpaid gigs. But I applied and I got this writing gig for this, like a glorified sports blog as a twelve-year-old. I never told them my age, they probably didn’t care because they just needed people to write like kind of garbage stuff about sports. But long story [short], that kind of developed into my love for storytelling and writing and journalism.
We moved to Utah when I was fifteen. And I started, I sent some stuff to editors at the Deseret News. And they had a contributor, syndication program at that point called Deseret Connect. So I started writing for them doing local sports stuff. Yeah. And then I went on my mission, came back wanting to go to law school. And thought that was all just kind of in the past. And then at the start of the pandemic, when everything kind of shut down. I needed an internship or a job or something to do that summer that could be remote. But that I could be, you know, staying busy and making some money. And Deseret News was hiring an opinion intern just to help with their editorial pages. Yeah, so I applied and got that and then quickly fell in love with journalism again, and at the end of the internship, they had an opening on staff. And we worked out a way for me to stay on but do the part-time thing during school, full-time during the summers. And that just kind of led to this. So yeah, it’s been a really fun ride. I interned at Politico for a bit while I was at BYU, and that just solidified my desire to get into political reporting. But yeah, it was kind of an unconventional path, but a lot of coincidences. And it’s been fun.
Let’s see here, maybe one of my last questions. You know, I (true confession) don’t necessarily read the Deseret News a ton. But I do read the Salt Lake Tribune, at least like their Mormon Land stuff. I mean, what’s your relationship like with the Tribune? I mean, obviously, it’s not one of like, “oh, we hate them because they hate the church.” It’s not one of these caricatured things I don’t think, right? But they’re the other big newspaper in Utah. So is there a relationship there at all? Maybe politically, do you know their political correspondents? That kind of thing. Just curious.
I mean, I read the Tribune. I like the Tribune. They do really good coverage of what’s going on in the Salt Lake Valley. I know several of their political reporters and I like them a lot. We used to have a formal joint operating agreement where we would print with the same printer. And we would split revenue costs, like ad revenue. Because we would get ads sold and they would go in both the Deseret News and the Tribune. And for a long time, it was kind of mutually beneficial for both of us. And then in 2020, that ended. And that kind of coincided with the Deseret News’s efforts to expand beyond just being like a Salt Lake City metro paper. So we launched our news magazine, and we kind of expanded our vision to encapsulate the Western US, kind of the Deseret region, per se, like, the Mountain West region, and then focus on the values that people in this area care about—whether it’s faith or family or stuff like that, climate. So, I don’t see us as much as competitors with the Tribune as we once were. A lot of like, our local day-to-day reporting has been kind of offloaded to KSL (our sister publication). So I think that the Tribune does a lot of really good stuff in the Valley that we don’t do. They have a lot of really great reporters. And I, you know, I have a lot of respect [for them]. I don’t agree with everything their editorial board says, or I don’t agree with the way they cover some stuff, but like, they’re a news publication, they’re privately owned. What they’re trying to do as a nonprofit I think is really impressive. It’s really unique. It’s had its issues over the last couple of years. But they’re an important voice.
Okay, I think maybe two or three more questions. Don’t want to take too much more of your time. Thinking back on your experience covering the 2024 presidential campaign so far, what is one moment with a voter that’s really stuck with you? Perhaps it was an interaction where for whatever reason, you kind of got—someone said something that got to the heart of why they were supporting Trump, kind of a lightbulb moment. Yeah, I just, I’d love to hear about maybe a really impactful experience with a voter on the trail.
Sure. Yeah, that’s a really, really great question. So the first Trump event I covered was in Fort Dodge, Iowa, this was in November, December of last year. Covering a Trump event is a really unique experience, because you go and you’re kind of, you’re told to get there, like three hours early. There are people outside like hawking merchandise, and the line wraps around the venue. And you’re there sitting in kind of this press corral, just like this blocked off area with tables and risers. And throughout the event, you know, people or Trump will kind of take shots at the media, and everyone turns around and just like jeers at you, just like boos. And like, old women, like flip you off. And it’s just like, kind of a really weird experience. And then afterward, your job is like to go out and interact with these people, you know, and understand why they’re here and why they support this candidate and whatnot.
And I had a really interesting interaction with an elderly woman there that I think kind of helped me refocus on like, why, why people care, one about politics, and two, you know why some people support former President Trump. As we were talking, she expressed, she told me about her family, she told me about her job. She told me about her kids trying to go to college, she told me about like, all these things and just like, like she just like a normal American mother, you know, that had the concerns that a normal American mother does. And then when we started talking about, you know, “why do you support Trump?” it was very much like, “I’m not that interested in his policies, like he talks a lot about foreign policy and that type of stuff. And I’m not really into all that. But I do know that he’s someone that fights for me and my family, like we have these values, or we have these things that we care about. And we can trust him to go and fight for us.”
And you can agree with that. Or you can disagree with that characterization of whether you feel the same way about a politician fighting for or standing for your rights or whatever. But I think that’s a way that a lot of people view him. And then we did polling later that confirmed that actually, [asking] questions like, “What do you mean when you see this person is a person of faith?” And most people who answered that said he fights for Christian values or he fights for Christian people. Again, you can agree with that or disagree with that. But I think it’s helpful for me to kind of understand why people say they do what they do. And I’m not a social psychologist, but I think that was an eye-opening interaction for me, because it’s very easy to characterize or caricaturize supporters of any politician, I think, especially of former President Trump. And so it’s helpful for me to go to these events and talk to people and understand that in him they see a fighter, they see someone who’s supporting their style of life, perhaps. And maybe it goes beyond just policy.
Very interesting. One last question. When you’ve been on the trail, have you ever had the chance to go to an LDS church service, say in like rural Iowa, and you fall into conversation with a member, you know, who realizes who you are? I’d just be curious to know if you’ve had any interesting interactions with members, like Latter-day Saints, maybe on Sunday at church, if you’ve been able to go to a sacrament meeting in, again, some random Iowa county.
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. The last time I was on the trail on a Sunday was like three weeks ago in South Carolina the day after the primary. And I got to the ward building, and everyone was leaving. And I walked in and it was stake conference. That’s the worst. But one of my first Sundays on the road, in the morning, I drove out to Oskaloosa, Iowa—which is kind of in east central Iowa—to cover, to meet with this pastor who was pretty politically involved. And I went to the service and I interviewed him after. And it was nice. It was uplifting. He gave a beautiful sermon. We had a really interesting conversation about politics on a Sunday in his church, which was kind of unusual for me. But it was interesting. And then after I drove back to the Des Moines area and went to a YSA ward. And it was interesting because I had spent all week at the state fair, which is like the political epicenter in Iowa, like all the candidates show up. Everyone’s talking politics. My whole week was just like, politics, politics, politics. And then I go to this church that had a beautiful service. But then after, I sit down with the pastor, and it’s more politics, politics, politics. Which I’m not saying is good or bad, but it was very different for me.
And then I go to this YSA ward. And it was just completely focused on the gospel and on Christ. My first thought was like, did none of these people go to the state fair this week? Then I was like, no, this is very, very beautiful, like, they come here and I don’t know how these people vote. I don’t know if they’re politically involved or not. And frankly, I don’t care because we’re here to worship together. And so yeah, it was a YSA ward and YSA wards can, I mean, I’ve been in a YSA ward for years and they can be a little goofy. And so I thought, if anyone’s going to bear their testimony about, you know, Tim Scott, it would be here. But no, it was just kind of a beautiful opportunity for me to recenter myself. And I’ve really started to cherish those opportunities to go to different wards on Sundays. I try not to travel on Sunday when I don’t have to, but when I do, I make the time to go to church. And it’s not only an opportunity to refresh and renew my covenants, but an opportunity to kind of see the church in different places and center myself.
Yeah it seems like it’d be a fascinating opportunity. So here’s my last question. You’ve been all over the country. Has your view of, I mean, are you fundamentally optimistic about sort of the trajectory America is on as a country? I mean, have your travels—what have they done in terms of either darkening your perspective or making you more of an optimist about what’s ahead? If you can speak to that.
That’s a great question. No yeah of course. I think one thing that was surprising to me is I expected to go around the country following these candidates, and I counted it the other day, like in the last seven months, I’ve been to like 23 different states. So we’ve been to a lot of different places, talked to a lot of different voters. And I expected a lot more strict partisans. People that were like, “I’m in the bag for this candidate,” or “I will only vote for a candidate of this party.” And perhaps my vision is colored by covering Haley pretty regularly for the last two months. But I’ve been surprised how many people are out there that are pretty dissatisfied with there being a Trump-Biden rematch in November and really want to see a return to normal politics. Maybe they all define that differently. But there’s just a lot of discontent with where the state of our politics are. And so when I see polls from Pew Research that say that only 9% of Americans [believe] our political system is working, or when I see the polls that say that 70% of Americans don’t want, are unsatisfied with Trump or Biden, yeah, those are no longer like numbers to me. They’re faces of real people all over the country. And I think that gives me a degree of hope that like people are unsatisfied.
The question is, are people going to do something? Like the primary was a wonderful opportunity for people to kind of voice their discontent. And we kind of have the same outcome in some ways. But a lot can happen in the next seven months. And I’m not saying an independent candidate pops up and wins, you know, a plurality of the vote. But there’s a lot of room for normal Americans to kind of band together and decide to do something differently. And this election to be kind of a hinge point for our political system. I’m not sure if that’ll happen. I’m not sure if I can say I have hope that will happen. But it’s certainly changed my perspective in terms of whether Americans really are as, you know, kind of dissatisfied as sometimes they are made out to be in polls
And to you it does seem like they legitimately are—you sort of have that on-the-ground experience of their dissatisfaction.
And the wild thing is, I’m largely at campaign events for a candidate or for an organization. The people I’m talking to are kind of in one of the top, you know, in the some of the top percentiles, in terms of political engagement. Like not everyone turns out to a political rally on a Tuesday night. And those are the people who are saying, “I’m dissatisfied, and I wish we had different candidates.” And that I think speaks volumes. I think that’s very interesting to me.
That is really interesting. Well, thank you again so much for sitting down with the Utah Monthly. It’s been such a pleasure.