Everyone Not Named Trump or Biden Who Might Make a Difference in Trump vs. Biden (2024)

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If the 2024 presidential election were a road trip, I think we’d be at the part where you start to wonder, are we there yet? We know who the candidates are, but there’s still such a long way to go until November. And one of the things I’ve noticed about the questions that you all have been sending in is that you’re starting to mix it up.

You’re asking about different people —

— different races —

— anything to distract from the top of the ticket. So, today, we’re answering your questions by setting the main characters of 2024 aside and talking about people who aren’t named Trump or Biden. Some are candidates, some are officials, and some are a little weirder. But they all could have an impact on the election come fall. On the road to 2024 — we’re not there yet, but we are getting a little closer. From “The New York Times,” I’m Astead Herndon. This is “The Run-Up.”

Yo.

Hello.

Finally!

Hi.

[LAUGHS]: A long time coming. I swear to God.

Years in the making.

Years in the making.

OK, so let me introduce someone who’s gonna help me answer your listener questions. This is Jess Bidgood. She writes the “On Politics” newsletter for “The Times” and also a pal.

Jess, how’s it going? I’m so glad you’re on “The Run-Up.”

Hi, Astead. It is so exciting to be here.

[LAUGHS]: Right before we started recording, I was trying to remember where we first met. Do you remember? I actually don’t.

I don’t remember when we first met, but I do remember when I knew we’d be friends forever.

[LAUGHS]: When was that? I’m nervous of what this answer is.

[LAUGHS]: That would be the night that you ran out of gas on the side of I-93 on the way to an Elizabeth Warren event. You were covering Warren for “The Times.” I was covering her for “The Globe.”

Yes, yes.

You called me. You asked for a rescue. And I provided that rescue.

You did. You did. I was in a massive crisis on the side of the road, a crisis of my own making, for the record. I just simply was listening to a podcast and completely ignored the gas tank, ran out of gas in the middle of the highway in the middle of a snowstorm in New Hampshire. And I was like, you know who would save me? Jess.

And so you very nicely came with some gas. We loaded it up on the side of the road. And we’re so happy that you are back at “The Times” after leaving for a stint.

So here’s what we’re here to do, Jess. We’ve gone through our listener questions, and they’re mostly focused about people who aren’t Biden or Trump, but can still have a huge impact on this race in November. And I figure that we could go through some of them, and we’re going to call on some help. So I think Anna, our lovely “Run-Up” producer, is gonna help us go through some of these questions. Anna, are you there?

Hey, guys.

Hi, Anna.

Extremely helpful conversation just now. I feel like, as someone who is in the car with Astead while reporting a lot, I should just take a look at that gas every once in a while.

[CHUCKLES]: So how are we gonna do this?

Yeah, so I figure what we’re gonna do is we’re going to call on what I am now calling a “Run-Up” tradition. We’re gonna use the wheel, which, if people don’t remember, the last time we answered listener questions, I brought a set of wheel of third party candidates. We spun it. We talked about what was going on in the race at the time. And so what I’ve done here is, I’ve kind of compiled some specific names that kind of speak to some of the listener questions that we’ve got.

But to be clear, Anna, all of these names are names of people who could affect the race, who are not named Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

Yep, that’s right.

So the names are Tammy Baldwin, Judge Cannon, Larry Hogan, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift, and Cricket.

It’s like — yeah. Six people walk into a bar, you know? It’s like — you know? Like, I don’t know if all these names have been in one sentence together, but I’m glad we’re here now.

OK, so I will get to spinning.

Cool.

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[LAUGHS]:

I wasn’t expecting the music. [LAUGHS]

Tammy Baldwin.

Yeah, I mean, I’ll take this one. I mean, we were just in Wisconsin, and one of the things that really came through, which I think is further reflected in The New York Times polling that we got about swing states and battlegrounds, is that for a lot of Democrats, there’s a lot of good signs once you look underneath the presidential level.

And so someone like Tammy Baldwin is the Senator from Wisconsin who is running for re-election and whose race is considered pretty critical for the hopes of Democrats trying to hold on to the Senate. But in a state like Wisconsin, Baldwin stands pretty unique. She won her last Senate race by a significant — Wisconsin significant margin. I think it was more than double digits. And then when we talked to people this year there, everyone’s in pretty much agreement that Baldwin is in a pretty good position to win re-election. And I think that speaks to a kind of larger dynamic happening right now where, if you look at the Democratic Party through the lens of Joe Biden, there is all of these problems you can talk about and all of these signs of dissatisfaction and erosion. And when Anna and I were in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago, there was a couple we met outside of a Walmart in Milwaukee.

Yeah, we actually caught them as they were finishing up their shopping.

And this lady was a very enthusiastic Democrat. She was wearing a pin for climate change and voting.

And she supported Biden, but where she really lit up was when we asked her about the down ballot possibilities, when we asked her about what we heard from Governor Evers about a more moderate future for Democrats and Republicans.

And the only reason someone like a Baldwin can win in the state of Wisconsin by a bigger margin than we typically see on a presidential level is because there are some people who are willing to cross over and vote for a Republican and someone like her as a Democratic senator.

And so she does better in rural communities than we’ve seen a lot of Democrats typically do. It keeps the margins fairly low in the suburbs that are considered Republican, and then along with that, motivates a Democratic base. Baldwin’s up by 9 percent in the latest New York Times poll. She has 49 percent of registered voters, and Hovde only has 40 percent. If you’re up by 9 percent in Wisconsin, that’s basically a blowout, at least at this stage.

And so when you’re seeing Republicans really focus their Senate efforts in places other than Wisconsin, that’s sort of a tacit recognition that Baldwin, as a candidate, and the Democratic Party there has pretty much positioned someone to have an individual brand outside of what we think of as the problems with the national Democratic Party. Jess, that probably applies to more Senate candidates than just Baldwin. I’m thinking about like the Testers of the world.

It does. It does, absolutely. And there’s another element of both Baldwin’s race and Tester’s race, who is the Democratic senator representing Montana, which is a pretty red state that has sent him back to the Senate time again, although he has what’s gonna be a tough battle up this year.

But another element that both of their races have in common is this. It’s the kind of Republicans that they’re running against. This year, Republicans really tried to recruit wealthy candidates who could put a lot of money into their own races, but aren’t super tested on a national stage. Eric Hovde, who Tammy Baldwin is running against in Wisconsin, is one of these types of candidates. Timothy Sheehy, who Tester is running against in Montana, is another.

And so where, in 2022, there were some really messy Republican primaries, and sometimes the candidate that emerged from those wasn’t seen as the most like electable, this time, the Republican Party got a lot of the candidates that they wanted, but now they’re starting to find that because these Republicans aren’t super tested, not so much was known about them, they’re having to contend with some stories that don’t make these candidates look great.

They’re inexperienced.

Yeah, they’re inexperienced. They’re new, they’re untested. And that may also be what’s at play here with Tammy Baldwin’s big lead. And we’ll see how that plays out in Montana, in Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is trying to hold the Democrat seat there in a pretty red state, and some others, too.

I think back to what Mitch McConnell was saying in the 2022 midterms about candidate quality. We were talking about it so much in relationship to Donald Trump. But this really is a story going forward in overall. And so that’s the challenge Republicans have, is even if, per the New York Times battleground polling, Donald Trump is leading in several of those battleground states, we did not see that translate to Senate and other candidates lower on the ballot.

That could tell you that it makes it easy for Biden to make up that room, but that’s really not the full story here. The other story is that the people running in those states have individual brands that it’s been harder for Republicans to really tarnish at this point.

Yeah.

OK. Let’s keep rolling. Spinning, rather.

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[LAUGHS]: The next name is Larry Hogan. Jess, I’m gonna let you do this one since you actually spent the day with him for your newsletter.

Sure, sure. So, Larry Hogan was the very popular governor of Maryland. He was elected in 2014, handily reelected in 2018. He is a Republican who managed to make himself really popular in a deep blue state, in large part by — there are a lot of reasons for his popularity, but one of them is that as Trump rose in 2016, Hogan made it very clear that he wanted nothing to do with him. He didn’t support him in ‘16.

And once Trump became president, Hogan repeatedly clashed with him. And much like we talked about how Democrats like Tammy Baldwin have distanced themselves from the national Democratic brand, Hogan did that with the national Republican brand.

However, he is now running for Senate, and this race is really gonna be a test of whether a prominent Trump critic, a guy who’s really made himself out to be kind of one of the more prominent Never Trumpers in Republican politics right now, if there’s any path forward for someone like that, even in a deep blue state. He decided earlier this year to jump into the Senate race after kind of flirting with the idea of running for president, possibly on the No Labels ticket, which he ultimately decided not to do.

Former “Run-Up” guest. We talked to him about that.

Yes, yes, absolutely. So the week that the Senate border deal collapsed, he got a call from George W. Bush saying, please run for Senate. We need your voice. Kind of like almost — it’s like two figures who represent this kind of bygone era of Republican politics, saying, let’s get the band back together and see if we could do something going forward.

So he decided to run. And the question is gonna be, can someone like him, who left office with 77 percent approval rating back at the beginning of 2023, convince the moderates and independents and Democrats of Maryland to vote for him? And I think it’s gonna be really tough going because voters in Maryland want there to be checks and balances on the power of Trump, should he be president a second time.

And I think they’re gonna be really loathe to give Republicans another vote in the Senate. So as much as Hogan has built his own reputation in Maryland, he is going to be running against Trump and the idea of Trump’s power as much as he is against the Democrat who will be running against him.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting that Larry Hogan even got in the Senate race, considering that when we were talking last time, he was so, frankly, pained by the idea of where the Republican Party has gone. Like, when you talk to him, how is he trying to wrestle with his kind of consistent criticism of a Republican Party while now existing in it in a candidate way?

So I think for Hogan, in a way, like hope springs eternal. He told me that he comes from what he calls the “Republican wing of the Republican Party.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He says that he understands that Trump controls the party, but he thinks that he can be a reasonable Republican to kind of, like, bring common sense back to the party. I mean, right there, he’s talking about going back, right? He’s talking about going backwards. He’s talking about the encouragement that he gets from George W. Bush. And it’s just not clear to me how these figures see the path forward. And I don’t know whose is gonna work, but it’s notable.

I mean, we have asked these Never-Trump Republicans, what is the plan at this point for years.

Like, for years, we’ve been waiting on this sort of plan. And one thing that I don’t get is it keeps being this, like, punt down the road, right? The plan is, oh, once he loses in 2020, the party is gonna move on, or and then the 2020 primary that’s gonna move on, or when there’s a conviction, they’re just gonna move on.

And more so than me saying that that’s an impossible thing to happen, at this point journalistically, it’s the thing we have no evidence of happening. And so I’m like, for Larry Hogan, what are you pointing to say that the Republican electorate is looking for a non-Trump option and that that lane has shown harder and harder to actualize than is true in word. So we know that there’s donors who are anti-Trump. We know that there’s individual voters who are anti-Trump. We did an episode fully about folks who didn’t want to vote for Trump, some of which were with DeSantis and some of which were with Haley.

But when you ask both of them, were you willing to give up on your principles in order to stop Trump and join together, that answer was no, right? And so I’m like, I don’t know what the Republican coalition looks like going ahead without Trump. And if you’re Larry Hogan, you kind of need that to emerge.

Right.

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After the break, we keep spinning.

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All right, y’all. Let’s keep spinning.

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OK, so the next name is Kendrick Lamar.

I guess I got this one. As a longtime Kung Fu Kenny fan, it’s been a real couple of weeks here, but I think on the specific political angle, we are talking about something that happened last week, which is that in the wake of Kendrick Lamar’s very famous feud with Drake, which has now come and gone as Drake has accepted his very obvious L, the Biden campaign put out a diss track.

They played a slideshow of pictures of Trump. They played Kendrick Lamar’s Euphoria diss track in the background.

They changed the lyrics so that it was taking aim at Donald Trump rather than Drake. “I hate the way that you walk all over women’s rights, the way that you talk about immigrants. I hate the way that you dress. I hate the way that you sneak diss on Truth Social.” [CHUCKLES]

And the thing that I think that’s larger than Kendrick Lamar or anything else, I think this also speaks to the kind of pop culture moment and how campaigns try to see themselves as both policy and politics entities, but also ones that are looking to go viral and content create just as much as anything else.

I mean, you’ve seen this in the way that the Biden campaign has used TikTok to try to jump on latest trends, even as Congress passes legislation that could result in the banning of the app. But it feels also like a form of outreach and a way to drive headlines. This is the new version of earned media that more than a singular television ad, these campaigns are also looking to find themselves on music blogs and on rap blogs and be in different types of places.

I actually recently listened to an interview with the Biden campaign’s digital director, and he was saying really explicitly how they have deprioritized more traditional media in favor of trying to make sure that they find themselves in the places that people are going that are less interested in politics.

And so I think we can see these things like diss track, TikTok-viral thirstiness content as part of that. But I also think like, my brain also thinks back to in 2020 when Democrats got a lot of flack for how they knelt with Kente cloth after the murder of George Floyd. And that kind of seemed like an inauthentic message for this party to be delivering.

I think back to when Hillary Clinton said that she had hot sauce in her bag after Beyoncé‘s “Formation” video. And for the record, I’m pretty sure Hillary Clinton actually did love hot sauce, and it was legitimately in her bag, but it came off, and it became this, like, moment that supposedly encapsulated the party’s relationship to Blackness and Black culture.

So when they did the Donald Trump diss in relationship with Kendrick Lamar’s “Euphoria” track last week, the huge response online was about, oh, here they go again, trying to use stuff for votes. It went viral in a somewhat negative way. I don’t want to characterize the whole response as that, but that was a lot of the responses. And I do think that that’s something that’s in the air.

There’s a very thin line between leaning into pop culture and coming off as inauthentic, particularly when the candidate at the top of the ticket is 81 years old, right? No one in here — no one in the country thinks that Joe Biden actually knows what’s happening in the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef.

And some of that’s OK, right? They understand it’s a campaign, and voters understand that. But I think there is a sense that political parties have only dealt with communities at the margins, really without any substance. And so I think that that’s what these moments kind of exemplify, is the tough road that campaigns have in terms of trying to speak in an authentic language to communities that don’t feel like they have represented them.

This is often true around what type of events people do. I’ve seen like people try to have taco trucks for Latino voters. Like, is that responding to a legitimate desire, or is that a pander? And I think the line between that is just if it comes off as authentic, and if just if it feels like it’s in the natural language of the candidate and campaign.

And right now, I think that’s hard to say for a Biden or a Trump, right? Like when Trump engages with those communities, everyone knows it’s a photo-op, right? Like, he very transparently deals very disposable with these communities. One things Democrats try to do is try to make it seem deeper. I just don’t know if they always succeed.

Right, absolutely.

And don’t let the Biden campaign listen to the rest of Kendrick Lamars lyrics because he is not someone who is a huge fan of Democratic and traditional politics.

What’s up next?

OK.

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The next name is Judge Cannon. Jess, can you help us out here?

Yeah, absolutely. So Judge Aileen Cannon is the judge overseeing Trump’s Florida trial related to the Mar-a-Lago documents. Who can forget those photos of the documents in the bathroom, the classified documents that federal investigators asked for repeatedly, and he would not give back, and eventually, were taken from his house in a raid.

So there have been a lot of things that have happened in Trump’s trials where he just kind of seems to get lucky break after lucky break. And one of those lucky breaks was Judge Cannon being assigned to oversee this trial after she had previously made some favorable rulings to Trump that really made kind of seasoned legal observers raise their eyebrows.

Trump appointed her to the federal bench. She’s relatively inexperienced for being a federal judge. And just about a week ago, she issued a decision delaying the start of his trial. She had officially had a May 20th trial start date, and she issued this ruling that basically said there is just too much stuff to work through before we can start this trial. So I’m gonna scrap the trial delay and not even set a new one because we just don’t know.

This moment was a real victory for Trump because, once again, his lawyers’ strategy to just delay and delay and delay his trials, throw all kinds of motions at the judges in the trials, has worked.

Yeah, I mean, I think back so much to the episode that we did late last year called “Is Trump Going to Prison?” At that time, it seemed like his January 6 trial would be starting first, and that that was the one in which Trump lawyers least wanted to happen before the election. And the one they were least worried about was this New York case.

And we’ve seen it develop over these several months where the New York case is the one that’s taking place. And, while historic, it does seem like a big victory for Trump that the things that seemed most politically threatening via the case in Georgia, this case in Florida with Judge Cannon, or the other federal case on January 6th, are now, as you say, very unlikely to happen before November.

A lot of polling tells us that some voters would say that, if Donald Trump was convicted of a crime before November, could change their feeling about them. But we don’t really have answers on if that depended on which trial went first. And so I think it’s an open question about whether whatever happens in New York actually changes his political future.

But what is unquestioned is the Donald Trump legal team and political team wanted to delay these trials, particularly till after he was the officially nominated Republican per the RNC convention, and to delay them after the November general election, where they think that he can win and would be much harder to prosecute and convict a sitting president. And both of those delays are seeming to be things that might come to fruition.

Right.

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Taylor Swift.

All right, Taylor Swift, the princess of pop herself.

And we’re talking about Taylor Swift because this has come up in the last couple of months. As we remember, around the Super Bowl time, there was an idea pushed by some Republicans that Taylor Swift was being intentionally kind of blotting out all of pop culture because she was a liberal who had previously endorsed Biden, and that they were setting her up to be one of the most impactful celebrity endorsers of the 2024 election.

Now, there’s an open question about the impact of celebrity endorsem*nts in general. But if anyone may matter in this race, it is likely to be the person whose every utterance seems to be news and seems to be at the center of American pop culture.

And we were thinking about this actually when we were at CPAC and talked to Jack Posobiec, who was one of the Trump-supporting commentators who has famously popularized other conspiracies, like Pizzagate, and has dabbled in really kind of messy, icky stuff, but was one of the people pushing this idea that Taylor Swift was a Democratic Party plant, frankly. And we asked him about it.

Well, I think in that we hear some of the recognition of Taylor Swift’s importance and kind of power in pop culture and a real understanding that some of these people who have such platforms can drive big interest. I remember when Taylor Swift tweeted out that vote.org registration thing. I remember Beyoncé endorsing Beto right before that Senate race in Texas.

And I think particularly in the Trump years of 2016 to ‘20, there was a lot of pressure on pop stars and figures and culture to speak out more about politics. I, one time, interviewed LeBron James about his efforts with more than a vote to really push voter registration, and they were also doing a campaign to have people work as poll workers. And that was actually fairly successful. You saw battleground states really have an influx of poll workers partially because of the attention that was placed on this.

Now, while there is open kind of questions around how much celebrity endorsers move the literal needle in terms of votes, I do think they can be reflective of a larger cultural moment where people in the spotlight galvanize others to point their attention at politics. And, if we go further, I do think there was some in 2016 to ‘20, some galvanizing around anti-Trumpness, to say that this wasn’t America, that this didn’t represent larger values.

I wonder if celebrities and people are gonna be willing to step in it in the same way in 2024. The winds around that stuff have changed a little. The current Democratic president is pretty unpopular. There’s pressure around whether you’re gonna speak out about things like international conflicts or even some domestic issues. In the same way that I think that anti-Trumpness was a safe space for a lot of celebrities to land in a more liberal Hollywood, it’s gotten a little more complicated than that.

And so, Taylor Swift can very well bake her Biden-Harris 2020 cookies again four years later. And maybe that counts as a same level of endorsem*nt. But I bet you if she were to do that this time, people would have some more questions. And I think that is a kind of thing that’s happening, particularly among celebrities, is, there’s been what I feel is a retrenchment from social justice as part of brand, partially to avoid some of those questions. What do you think, Jess? Do you think by the end of this, we get like, superstars for Biden? Or even on the other side, I think about the ways that Trump had Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, a lot of rap endorsers, Kanye West famously. Like, how much do we think the Hollywood ecosystem is gonna play in this presidential race?

I think that’s such a good observation and an important point. I think the reason that she is so sought after is, yes, she is so famous. But I think a big part of the reason that she is so sought after for the Biden campaign is like, this is a year where the same two guys are running against each other. Voters know who Trump is. They know what he’s like. They know who Biden is. They know what he’s like. And it’s starting to feel —

He needs some spice.

Exactly. He needs some spice, but he also needs — I think this election may turn less on like convincing persuadable voters, convincing swing voters to come out for Biden or Trump, than it is in persuading low propensity voters, people who have not voted before, people who are feeling kind of apathetic about the election to come out and vote.

And I think that’s where a figure like Taylor Swift could be seen as helpful, less in convincing people who are considering Trump to go for Biden and more just in convincing people who weren’t sure they were going to vote or weren’t really thinking about it, and kind of putting it on their radar and getting them out.

One thing that Donald Trump is pitching quite explicitly in this campaign is a rejection of elites. And one thing I would say I would be interested in about celebrity endorsers is, if the tenor in the air is to intentionally provoke a class of people who has not been responsive, there’s a part of the Trump premise that’s kind of immune to this, because, one, he’s kind of the biggest celebrity of all. But two, I think what he’s pitching is to say F you to that class of people. And so if that’s the mood the electorate is in, Taylor Swift will not overcome that.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

All right, last but not least.

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Cricket.

Tell me who Cricket is.

Cricket was —

[LAUGHS]:

— a 14-month-old wirehaired pointer belonging to Kristi Noem, who is now the governor of South Dakota, who met her untimely end in a gravel pit after a failed hunt. And we know about this not because anybody asked Kristi Noem if she had ever shot her own dog in a gravel pit. No, we know about this because she told us. She put it in her memoir for all the world to see, the story of her euthanizing her own 14-month-old dog and a billy goat who is unnamed for good measure.

Wait, so I’ve only tangentially followed this story. Why did Kristi Noem kill her dog, and why might it matter?

She killed her dog, Cricket, because she had taken this dog in. It had come to her from a different home where Cricket had had behavioral problems. And Noem goes out with some visitors on this hunt with some of her kind of more experienced dogs and the dog Cricket.

And Cricket is just bad at this. I guess it is important if you are a hunting dog to not run after the birds too soon, kind of not scare them up out of the field so that —

So Cricket wasn’t built for the life of a hunter.

No, no. So apparently, Cricket scared up all these birds before the hunters could get into range. The day of hunting was ruined. And on her way back with Cricket, she loaded a bunch of these dogs into the back of her truck in kennels. Cricket did not have a kennel, so Cricket wasn’t restrained.

She stops at her neighbor’s house. Cricket jumps out and kills all these chickens belonging to her neighbor. And then Noem decides that this dog is untrainable, cannot be fixed. And she takes Cricket and her gun to a gravel pit and kills her.

So the governor of South Dakota kills her dog for being mildly annoying.

Yeah.

Like, why does that matter for November?

Well, Donald Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and it wouldn’t matter. And it turns out that that privilege is not extended necessarily to all the people that he is considering for vice president. So Noem is one of the figures who’s been in the mix, who’s talked about as a possible vice presidential nominee for him. She’s a kind of combative governor of South Dakota. She’s very —

Even combative feels like a joke now.

Yeah, in this, combative, murderous to dogs, however you wanna put it. She’s a brash governor of South Dakota. She’s been very, very loyal to Trump. She’s always talked him up. She’s always kind of backed him to the hilt. And this story, which just didn’t seem to go away, widely resonated. And her likelihood of being chosen for his vice presidential pick was not that high to begin with. But whatever chance she has, from our reporting, seems to have dimmed further.

Yeah, I mean, she’s been on television trying to explain the dog away over the last couple of weeks, and in doing so, has only dug the pit deeper.

The gravel pit.

I think dug the gravel pit — rest in peace, Cricket — even deeper. Do we know who the options of vice president Trump is more likely to pick instead of Governor Noem?

Yeah, so when I think about the kind of options that Trump has in front of him for vice president, I’m thinking about a few different categories. There’s a group of political veterans, people who come with more experience, people who come with their own constituencies, somebody like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. He ran for president. Trump and Scott kind of never really locked horns during that primary. They never really fought with each other directly.

Scott was very careful to not make Trump mad.

He was. He was very careful to not make Trump mad. Some other people who I think fall into that category of political veterans is someone like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who might be seen as like a little bit more of a palatable to slightly more moderate voter’s figure on the ticket. Whether there’s an actual swing voter who would be swayed by Marco Rubio’s presence on the ticket, I don’t know, but that kind of would be the theory there.

Elise Stefanik is another political veteran who really has hitched her wagon to Trump, has transformed from more of a Republican moderate to someone who just kind of blasts out his message at every turn. Then you can think more about kind of the second category that I think of is like the Trump loyalists, someone like JD Vance, who, initially, in his career as a writer, was pretty critical of Trump and has really just utterly transformed and made himself someone who defends Trump at every turn.

Sarah Sanders, she is now governor of Arkansas. She was one of Trump’s press secretaries during his presidency. And so it was literally her job to go out, talk to the media about him, talk about how great he was, how loyal she was to him.

And then there’s a group of kind of like younger up and coming type figures, and that’s someone like Representative Byron Donalds of Florida. He’s a second term congressman. He is one of not a lot of Black Republicans in the House. So he could bring some racial diversity to the ticket at a time when Trump is trying to make inroads with Black and Latino voters.

And then there’s also someone like Vivek Ramaswamy who made a name for himself in the primary by being Trump 2.0, in a way, never, ever saying anything bad about former President Trump. So, yeah. So thinking about the veterans, the loyalists, and the up and comers, next generation.

Interesting, but not the dog killers. [LAUGHS]

Probably not the dog killers, although I was talking to our colleague Mike Bender last week, and he said, Trump loves a redemption story. He loves when people come to him and kind of say, I did something that was wrong. I am still with you. And so it ain’t over til it’s over. But it seems unlikely.

I did see something on the VP search around the idea that Trump would be considering Nikki Haley that was immediately squashed down by Trump. What happened there?

So that was very interesting because what the possibilities that I have just run through really do is reach a constituency that Trump has a problem with, and that is moderate voters. Right? Like going back to the kind of Larry Hogan-esque Republicans of the world, there are not enough of them to run the party. There are not enough of them to have their pick become the presidential nominee.

But there’s enough of them to sink his presidential campaign.

Exactly, exactly. And so were he to look at Nikki Haley, who said, while she was running for president, that she was not running for vice president, that she wasn’t interested, were he to look at her, he would be finding a way, potentially, to bring along the, in some cases, 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent, sometimes even more, of Republican voters in swing states who were backing her, who didn’t like Trump, who were uncomfortable with his candidacy, but liked the way she kind of does throw back to a pre-Trump tradition of Republicans.

Right, you can see how they could help each other solve some of their problems. Trump provides her a sort of future while she provides him an outlet to voters, who are currently lukewarm on him. But —

Exactly.

But Trump said on Truth Social, she’s not under consideration.

Yes, Trump said on Truth Social, she’s not under consideration. There’s a lot of “bad blood” there, going back to Taylor Swift. And he’s saying —

They are never, ever getting back together.

They are never, ever getting back together. Exactly.

Jess, thank you so much. This was really helpful, and I think it’s gonna help check us a lot of boxes around the people who might matter in this race besides Biden and Trump. And it’s also just fun hanging out. So thank you for joining “The Run-Up.” And I can’t wait till we have more listener questions, and we can do this another week.

I can’t wait till we have a dinner party with all the people we just talked about.

[LAUGHS]: Cricket. Cricket can’t come.

No, no.

Cricket’s dead.

The memory of Cricket.

Yeah, Cricket isn’t showing up.

[CHUCKLING]

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Thank you so much to everyone who sent in questions. We’ll keep answering them regularly on the show, so please keep sending them in. We’re game to spin the wheel and answer whatever you’re curious about when it comes to 2024. Email us at therunup@nytimes.com. That’s therunup@nytimes.com.

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That’s “The Run-Up” for Thursday, May 16, 2024. Now, the rundown. This week —

— Biden and Trump have agreed to face each other in two debates, the first as early as June 27 and again in September. Some details are still being worked out, including format and the choice of moderator. But the proposed debates are head-to-head matchups without third party candidate RFK, Jr. Kennedy took to X and accused the presumptive major party nominees of colluding against him. Meanwhile —

— Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen took the witness stand. Cohen, who is central to the case, told the jury about payment made to Stormy Daniels and his reimbursem*nt by Trump. Trump’s legal team began cross-examining Cohen on Tuesday and will continue today.

Trump’s criminal trial has also brought a number of Trump’s potential VP choices to New York to show support for the former president — Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Governor Doug burgum, and Ohio Senator JD Vance, who denounced what he described as partisanship from the prosecution.

And three states held primaries on Tuesday — Nebraska, West Virginia, and Maryland, where Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, won the Democratic Senate primary. She defeated Congressman David Trone, who spent a record $60 million of his own fortune on the race. Alsobrooks will go on to face former Republican governor Larry Hogan in November.

There are 60 days until the Republican National Convention, 95 days until the Democratic National Convention, and 173 days until the general election. We’ll see you next week.

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“The Run-Up” is reported by me, Astead Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O’Keefe, and Anna Foley. It’s edited by Rachel Dry and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Diane Wong, Sophia Lanman, and Elisheba Itoop. It was mixed by Sophia Lanman and fact-checked by Caitlin Love.

Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, Larissa Anderson, David Halbfinger, Maddy Masiello, Mahima Chablani, Nick Pittman, and Jeffrey Miranda. And finally, if you like the show and want to get updates on latest episodes, follow our feed wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening, y’all.