The Daily: ‘One Day More,’ We Sang. We Spoke Too Soon.

February 7, 2020

By Michael Barbaro

Selfie with a senator. Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar showed up at the Johnston, Iowa caucus site on Tuesday night.Michael Barbaro/The New York Times

The Iowa caucuses were a chance for “The Daily” to try something new with our election coverage. Beyond representing the kickoff of the 2020 presidential race, they are a storied and unique style of picking a candidate — a strange exercise in democracy that’s hard to understand unless you witness it.

For those who will never experience it in person, we wanted to bring it to life in audio.

We asked our colleague Reid Epstein to pick a caucus site that would represent the state overall. As it happens, Reid had just written an article explaining how the Iowa caucuses work, and zeroed in on a town called Johnston, Iowa. Johnston, he told us, was perfect for our purposes: suburban and relatively moderate, like much of Iowa.

Around 5:45 p.m., our producer Clare Toeniskoetter, Lisa Tobin, the head of the audio team, and Sam Dolnick, a New York Times masthead editor, hopped into Reid’s rental car and headed to the gym at Johnston Middle School, where the caucus was being held.

Reid, who had spent countless days in Iowa in the lead-up to the caucus, had queued up his favorite Election Day song, “One Day More,” from “Les Misérables.” This turned into a haphazard group singalong. (A painfully long, unharmonic version can be heard here.)

Continue reading the main story

We had no idea what to expect once we arrived. Would the caucus be quick? Long? Interesting? Boring? And what kind of access would we have?

The answer to the last question was evident right away: We had access to everything.

Clare records a precinct captain for Pete Buttigieg trying to woo an undecided caucusgoer.Michael Barbaro/The New York Times

We began recording caucusgoers signing in. The caucus chairman shouting out instructions. Precinct captains cajoling votes. And, above all, caucusgoers agonizing over whom to support.

Continue reading the main story

As the caucus began to unfold, Clare, Reid and I darted from voter to voter, precinct captain to precinct captain, trying to figure out what was happening, who was up or down and what kind of negotiations were underway. Caucusgoers were remarkably generous with their time and candor.

In between interviews, Clare raced to download audio onto her laptop and send it back to the team in New York. Lisa began structuring the episode based on what she was seeing in the room.

When our studio is a gym, who needs an office chair? Lisa and Clare start working on the next day’s episode.Michael Barbaro/The New York Times

When the caucus was over, we piled back into Reid’s car and called the “Daily” executive producer Theo Balcomb and the producer Rachel Quester to talk through all of the tape Clare had collected. It was 9:30 p.m. The clock was ticking. There were hours of production ahead.

Continue reading the main story

Back at our hotel, we waited for the results of the caucus. And waited. And waited. The landing point for the episode was to be the outcome of the caucus. But we soon realized there would be no outcome. The reporting of results was delayed.

The New York Times war room at a Marriott in Des Moines, Iowa. This is where we worked and waited. And waited some more.Austin Mitchell/The New York Times

So we improvised, asking our colleague Alex Burns to analyze the absence of an outcome, rather than the story of who won or lost. We finished recording with him around midnight.

For the next six hours, the team turned everything we had heard into a documentary of the night.

We always knew it would be a late night in Iowa. We just didn’t know it would be that late. At the last minute we changed the episode title. It had originally read “A Long Night in Iowa.” It became “A Very Long Night in Iowa.”

Talk to Michael on Twitter: @mikiebarb.

Introducing ‘The Field’

The New York Times

On Monday, you heard our new podcast “The Field,” in which Times reporters travel across the country to talk to voters about their hopes and fears leading up to an election where the stakes have never felt higher.

For the episode, our producers Austin Mitchell and Andy Mills went to Iowa with the reporter Astead Herndon to check out the scene before the first wave of 2020 voting.

It was Austin’s first time in the state. “It’s always seemed wild to me that the whole nation focuses intensely on Iowa for just a few months every four years while people gather in gyms and rec rooms to perform a complicated democratic show,” he told us. “It was great to actually be in Iowa and ask voters how they were feeling as the country turned its attention to them.”

Austin’s other impressions? “It was full of disarmingly nice people. It had devastatingly delicious meat products. It was also very, very cold.”

You can listen to Monday’s episode here. And for more from “The Field,” subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.

On ‘The Daily’ this week

Monday: “They no longer trust their own instincts about determining what electability is.” In an episode of “The Field,” we travel to Iowa with Astead Herndon to talk to caucusgoers.

Tuesday: Confusion and chaos at the caucuses: We report from a middle school gym in Johnston, Iowa.

Wednesday: “It was almost like a menu of options where different voters could hear what they wanted to hear in his words.” Maggie Haberman on President Trump’s third State of the Union address.

Thursday: Hours before Mitt Romney became the only senator in American history to vote to remove a president of his own party from office, he sat down with Mark Leibovich to explain his decision.

Friday: In an interview with Donna Rotunno, a lawyer for Harvey Weinstein, Megan Twohey asked if she’d ever been sexually assaulted. “I have not,” she said. “Because I would never put myself in that position.”