We face the truth: Our 2020 election coverage is officially underway.

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Friday, June 21, 2019

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President Trump on stage at his kickoff re-election rally in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday. Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Michael Barbaro

Around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, as our producers listened to tape of voters waiting in line for a rally, everybody working on that morning's episode had the same sobering epiphany: Here we go again.

The 2020 campaign is truly, inescapably underway.

Until now, "The Daily" has deliberately taken a slow and spare approach to the 2020 election. Campaigns are voracious — they have a way of crowding out the rest of the news. But voters won't cast a ballot for another 500 days. Why rush?

On Tuesday, when President Trump announced his re-election campaign, it felt like a turning point. There are now 23 declared candidates for the Democratic nomination and two declared Republicans. Democratic primary debates begin next week.

The slow and spare approach is about to change.

***

A former editor of mine, Dick Stevenson, likes to distinguish between what he calls "The Campaign" (the candidates, their message, their standing) and "The Election" (the voters, their hopes and anxieties, how they see the candidates).

We're looking to find new ways to cover both.

We need to meet and understand the candidates. But just as important, we need to meet and understand the voters.

***

Wednesday's episode was an experiment in weaving together those two forms of coverage, The Campaign and The Election. It began with the White House reporter Maggie Haberman exploring the role of Trump's freewheeling and grievance-filled rallies in his 2016 political rise. It then pivoted to conversations with his supporters as they stood outside an arena in Florida on Tuesday afternoon, waiting to hear the president kick off his re-election campaign. It ended with Maggie's analysis of that night's rally.

The rally didn't start until 8 p.m. — a logistical challenge for us. So we recorded Part 1, about the history of the president's rallies, in the afternoon. Maggie and our colleague Annie Karni then fanned out to speak with voters at the rally for Part 2, recording their exchanges on their iPhones and emailing them back to New York. Shortly after the rally was over, after 10 p.m., we interviewed Maggie again about what she had just witnessed for Part 3 of the episode.

***

Somewhere along the way, we discovered audio gold. Maggie had recorded a short audio file of herself inside the arena, describing her surroundings for listeners. But moments before she began speaking, her recorder caught the unmistakable sound of Frank Sinatra singing "My Way" over the arena's loudspeakers. Back in New York, the producers Alexandra Young and Michael Simon Johnson had an idea: Use "My Way" as a transition into our theme music. The result was something new for our show opening.

Talk to Michael on Twitter: @mikiebarb.

Have you ever been to a political rally?

A crowd gathered to hear Herbert Hoover, then a Republican candidate for president, speak from the rear of his train in 1928 in Bristol, Tenn. Bettmann, via Getty Images

Wednesday's episode took us to the president's re-election rally, an event that reminded Maggie Haberman how "fundamentally new" Donald Trump's rallies felt, with their unscripted deliveries, in the run-up to 2016. But rallies have long been a cornerstone of political campaigns.

If you've ever attended any political rally in your lifetime, we want to hear from you. Why did you want to go? What was it like?

Write to us at thedaily@nytimes.com, and, with your permission, we might feature your response in a future newsletter.

What we're listening to

Who: Andy Mills, producer for "The Daily"

What: "Making Sense" with Sam Harris, #160: The Revenge of History

For many of my growing-up years, I was a religious fundamentalist. I had firm — and, I thought, unwavering — beliefs about the world and the cosmos that were shaped by my community and my experiences.

At some point during my time at a religious university, I started to encounter all sorts of views that I'd never heard or deeply considered before. I met folks of other faiths. I met folks with wildly different political opinions. And, as it turns out, their views were often shaped by their communities and experiences too.

All these echo-chamber-bursting experiences — I loved them. That's how I went from a life committed to preaching dogma to one committed to staying curious about what people believe and why. And one of my favorite things about podcasts is how they've allowed me to listen in on all sorts of views that I'd never get to hear otherwise.

The podcast I'm recommending this week, "Making Sense," is one of them. I don't always or even often agree with the views of the host, Sam Harris, and his guests. But I'm grateful for the way they relentlessly try to figure out how belief works.

This particular episode is a conversation about the global rise of populism (which has been on my mind in light of last week's "Daily" series on the European Union). The episode features Yascha Mounk, one of the few people to predict the present political moment years before it arrived. Mounk is fascinating to listen to because he's both a scholar who has researched the history of populism and a journalist who has actually traveled the world speaking to populist leaders and their supporters. But what I especially value is how Mounk goes beyond just talking about what people say they believe, and instead tries to shine a light on how and why they came to believe it.

On 'The Daily' this week

The bill that set off some of the largest demonstrations in Hong Kong's history has been suspended. Austin Ramzy on why protesters are still marching.
David Sanger explains how American attacks on Russia's power grid are renewing questions about what's fair in cyberwar.
Maggie Haberman on the president's re-election rally: "He had this delicate line to walk between being the outsider and being the insider. And I think, based on the crowd's reaction, that he was successful at it."
The Trump administration is now telling migrants to wait in Mexico. It's a step toward an immigration plan that would fundamentally change how asylum works in the U.S., Zolan Kanno-Youngs tells us.
"So far, everything the United States has done has only emboldened Iran to behave even more like a bad actor," Mark Landler says. As tensions escalate, we look at what each side really wants.