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One moment that sticks with me from last night's town hall with @ewarren. One of the voters we had, Renee, who was laid off from Carrier and had voted for Trump, asked Warren: "What are you going to do about the opioid crisis? It's effecting everyone."
Warren, of course, lept at the chance to lay out her plan on this, which is embedded in legislation she co-authored w @RepCummings that would spend $100 billion to massively expand access to treatment and rehab (among other things).
But what stuck out to me is that "what are you going to do about the opioid crisis"? the kind of question a journalist (myself included!) almost certainly wouldn't ask.
And that points to a larger, structural issue: which is the divergence between what political reporters (again, I include myself here) are after with a candidate and what *voters* want to know.
We have a professional interest in "making news." But "making news" can be substantive or it can be trivial. We are also waayyyy more familiar with a candidate than the public, so what's old and boring to us, isn't necessarily old and boring to a given voter.
Anyway, I think these biases/perspectives played a huge role in 2016, where Trump was a news-making machine and ended up driving news cycle after news cycle, while Clinton wasn't ever able to get much attention of coverage to, say, her plan for the opioid crisis.
I think you need both: coverage of the daily news cycle, scrums and interviews where reporters push candidates off their talking points, as well as engaged, substantive coverage of what candidate's actual plans and proposals are on issues.
Really hoping all of us focus on calibrating those dueling imperatives as the campaign accelerates and intensifies.
