Is there anything more iconic in American politics than the whistle-stop tour? Author Edward Segal joins us on this week's episode of "The Downballot" to discuss his new book unearthing the storied history of campaigning by train. Segal takes us through nearly two centuries of rail campaigns, from early pioneers like Abraham Lincoln to the great popularizer of whistle-stop touring, William Jennings Bryan, all the way up to "Amtrak Joe" Biden. Along the way, learn how politicians' trains were actually deployed, lessons for today's campaigners, and the surprising era Segal identifies as the heyday for these tours.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also dive deep into Democrat Tom Keen's huge special election victory in Florida on Tuesday night, including why the result was a purely self-inflicted wound for Ron DeSantis and how it'll help Sunshine State Democrats get their mojo back. The Davids then dissect the many twists and turns in the court-ordered redistricting process that's now underway in Louisiana, where the state's new GOP governor seems intent on punishing a political enemy and rewarding a friend—only the former is a Republican and the latter a Democrat!
Subscribe to "The Downballot" on Apple Podcasts to make sure you never miss a show. New episodes every Thursday morning!
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. "The Downballot" is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to "The Downballot" on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: Well, we've got another big win to talk about today.
Nir: Hell yeah, we do. We are talking all about Democrats' huge special election victory down in Florida for the state House. Then we are going to be covering the many twists of the special session of the Louisiana legislature that is devoted to drawing a new congressional map. And then, coming up after the break, our guest this week is Edward Segal, who is the author of a fascinating new book on whistle-stop campaigning. Yes, we are talking about campaigning by train and its glorious history in the United States. It is a fascinating talk, and we have a fantastic episode. So let's get rolling.
Hell yeah, David Beard. We are starting 2024 off with a huge special election flip just like we did last year.
Beard: Yes, let the fun continue. Another big win to mark in the column.
Nir: Well, as I'm sure "Downballot" listeners know, Democrat Tom Keen, Navy veteran, won on Tuesday night, 51-49, in the 35th state House district, in the Orlando suburbs. This was a Republican-held seat, so it is a flip for the Democrats in Florida, a state that lots of folks have written off, and it's also the second black eye for DeSantis in as many days, coming literally the day after he got creamed in the Iowa caucuses.
Beard: Yeah, it's so much fun to watch DeSantis lose and then lose again. Hopefully, he can just keep losing throughout the year and into 2026, and we'll never have to see him again.
Nir: I would really love that. We know he's going to lose the next election. He's going to get his ass kicked in New Hampshire too, and forgive me for talking about presidential politics, but beating up on DeSantis, I can't resist.
Beard: And in New Hampshire, he is going to get, I don't know, 4% or something. Obviously, I haven't paid a ton of attention to it, but I don't think he's even in the realm of competitive in New Hampshire, so that'll be a nice little button on these past two elections for him.
Nir: Well, the amazing thing is that just like his debacle of a presidential campaign, this wound was completely self-inflicted by Ron DeSantis. Last year, he decided to appoint a crony in the state House to a cush gig running a state college that pays $250,000 a year. He could have picked anyone else. In fact, he should have picked anyone else because that dude that he picked, Fred Hawkins, had no experience in higher education whatsoever. But DeSantis obviously wanted to reward an ally, and he was arrogant enough to tap a guy in a district that Biden had won by 5 points. Now, it's very possible that DeSantis felt cocky because he, Ron DeSantis, had carried the district by 13 points. And with the way the Florida GOP has been believing their own hype, he might've thought that this district was completely out of reach for Democrats. But at the same time, DeSantis also radiated this weird anxiety. I guess everything he radiates is weird.
Beard: Yeah, I just remember that photo that was taken—I think it was after a natural disaster—where Joe Biden has his arm around someone and is very engaged and Ron DeSantis is just walking off looking very not-engaged with anyone, very off-putting. I'm just like, "That's Ron DeSantis, very off-putting."
Nir: Exactly. And the vibes he was sending out here were also off-putting, at least if you're a Republican. For progressives, they were awesome. At first, DeSantis refused to call the special election altogether. This has been a pattern with him. He has dragged his feet in calling special elections, particularly in Black districts, but here was in a Republican district. And then, when he finally did call the election with a possible lawsuit looming, he made sure to schedule it for the day after the Iowa caucuses. And Tom Keen said what everyone was thinking, which is that DeSantis didn't want to risk going into Iowa with a fresh special election loss in his home state on his résumé. But guess what? It didn't matter at all. He still got his ass kicked in Iowa just like we knew he would. And then he got embarrassed at home the very next day.
Beard: And I really can't imagine that any Iowa voters would've cared. Obviously, we're thinking in this other scenario where DeSantis was competitive in Iowa and was actually trying to win a primary, or caucus as the case may be, and imagine that this had happened a week or two ago and they had lost its district. Obviously, we would've been happy. It would've been fun on Twitter. I doubt any Iowa Republican caucus-goers would've cared about this, so the delay was really pointless, but it did make it fun for us to see him lose back-to-back.
Nir: That's a really good point. That was some galaxy-brain thinking, which seems to have dominated DeSantis' life for the last year and a half. But let's look ahead and talk about what this victory actually means. First things first, this makes Democrats' job of breaking the GOP's supermajority in the state House a lot easier. It takes the number of flips they need from six seats down to five seats in November. Second, though, this is another strong Democratic performance in a high-profile Florida election since the midterm landslide that DeSantis won. In May of last year, Democrat Donna Deegan won a huge upset in the race for Jacksonville mayor, which we talked about on the show before. That's Florida's biggest city, and not only that, DeSantis had won Jacksonville by double digits in 2022, much like he carried the 35th state House district. So Deegan moved the needle about 15 points and then Keen moved it about 16 points.
So it looks like there's maybe a pattern starting to form here, but I think that after Tom Keen himself, the person that this win probably matters the most for who we were talking about recently on the show is former Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who, of course, is running for the Senate against Rick Scott. Mucarsel-Powell was a big Keen booster. She campaigned with him multiple times, including the weekend right before the special election, and she really needs outside Democratic groups and big donors to invest in her race. Keen's victory is a very strong argument in her favor.
Beard: I think what this election, combined with the Jacksonville election, proves is that Florida is not the Florida of 2022 in perpetuity. Obviously, we all know how bad Democrats' performance was in 2022 in that state. Turnout had collapsed. It was terrible, just terrible performance. But that doesn't mean it's something that's going to continue into this year or into 2026, 2028, forever. It was one election, and we've seen now with these past two elections, where both parties have gone in and really tried to win, that the Florida Democrats have been seeing results more like the elections before 2022 than that terrible year. So that makes me a lot more confident that Florida Democrats can get past 45%, into the upper 40s, in a competitive statewide election. The question that's still unanswered—as we saw before 2022, in those previous cycles—is can they get over the top? That's what they struggled with before the disastrous election, was getting from 47, 48, 49, to 50, 51. So that remains to be seen. But I think the good news here is that Florida has not gone away as a competitive state.
Nir: And this race really signaled the importance of two core principles that have always motivated us at Daily Kos Elections. You should never read too much into the results of a single election. A lot of people were eager to conclude that Florida had become a deep-red state after 2022, but you literally can't draw a trend line when you only have one data point. And the fact is that Democrats had to get back to this place of showing they could be competitive. The first step after a drubbing like that isn't to win a statewide race, get 51%, whatever.
It's like you said, Beard, to show that you can really play this game and get back into that territory where you know you're going to at least be getting in the 40s, that you're not going to wind up at 39% of the vote, like Charlie Crist. The other thing that I really want to emphasize that is so core to our philosophy is that you have to play the long game. That's what this is part of. There is a very long road ahead for Florida Democrats, but at last, we are moving forward rather than backward. And you really can't overestimate how motivating a victory like this is for folks on the ground who really have been taking so much abuse and getting so beaten up, I think, often to excess by the national media, by pundits, by Democratic operatives, many of them unnamed. This is a huge shot in the arm for them, and making people believe that they can win is absolutely the first step to winning.
Beard: And we've seen that in other states where Democratic parties get really beaten down in states that are very red, and it becomes hard for the party to function, to then even win seats like this that are, in 2020, Biden won this seat. So it's something that Democrats should, at the least, compete in and be close in, if not obviously—like they did on Tuesday night—win. And we see state parties that have sort of collapsed not even be able to compete in places like that. And so this is a good sign for them. It's like you said, an opportunity for the Florida Democrats to start moving forward and to start looking at gains in 2024 as opposed to the terrible losses of 2022.
Nir: And it also really bears pointing out that Democrats got outspent here. We don't know the exact figures, but Republicans definitely spent more than Democrats did here, and they still wound up losing this race. So that is just a very positive sign for Team Blue in Florida. There's one final note that I have to make. I am very proud of our coverage of this race at Daily Kos Elections. In fact, we started writing about it before it even was a race, back when DeSantis was refusing to schedule this special election. This was half a year ago, and we've been covering it closely ever since. We endorsed Tom Keen in November, right after he won the Democratic primary, and I am just super proud of this victory. If you want the earliest possible notice of where the next battleground will be, stick with Daily Kos Elections.
Beard: And like we said, obviously one data point isn't a trend line, but not to pat Daily Kos Elections on the back too much, but this has been a recurring theme, where Daily Kos has been able to identify these races, invest in them, and make these special elections come to the forefront and get money directed where it needs to go when it comes to our grassroots supporters. Now the other story that we want to talk about here during the Weekly Hits is a doozy. So stick with me as I try to run through all of the twists and turns. This is about Louisiana and their current, ongoing congressional redistricting. The last time that we touched on this, a federal judge had ordered the state to draw a second district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice, very similar to the previous case that we've discussed a lot in Alabama, where a second district was eventually implemented by a judge and they're going to elect, likely, a second Democrat in the fall.
Now, Louisiana currently has five white-majority safe Republican districts and one Black-majority safe Democratic district, despite Black voters making up about a third of the population. Obviously, with six districts, about a third of the population should represent about two districts. Now, unlike Alabama, where we saw the state GOP just utterly refuse to ever engage with this process and just went down fighting it the whole way, GOP leaders in Louisiana seem open to creating the second district, but not really out of any sense of doing the right thing.
Nir: No way.
Beard: No. They're doing it for one of the oldest reasons in politics, to punish their enemies and reward their friends.
Nir: Oh, hell yeah.
Beard: Now, new GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, he doesn't like one of the GOP representatives, Garret Graves. Graves helped recruit Landry's most prominent GOP rival for governor last year, and he also made Steve Scalise mad when he didn't back Steve Scalise's short-lived attempt to be speaker, so Graves has made some key enemies among the Louisiana GOP.
Nir: As much as Landry hates Garret Graves, he apparently is close buddies with state Sen. Cleo Fields, who, interestingly enough, is not a Republican. Fields is a Black Democrat who used to represent a district in Congress in the 1990s in Louisiana. Last year, he reportedly did not do very much to help Landry's Democratic opponent in the race for governor. The claim that was reported was that Fields, yes, he did endorse Shawn Wilson, but he really didn't do much beyond that, supposedly because he's tight with Landry, and in Louisiana, we see these weird situations of strange bedfellows, unusual alliances between Democrats and Republicans, that really seem to have fallen by the wayside in most other states by this point. In any event, Wilson lost in a total blowout to Landry, who is now in a position to reward his friends, and it seems like Cleo Fields is interested in returning to Congress.
Beard: Now, if you're asking yourself, wasn't the '90s kind of a long time ago? Well, Cleo Fields first got elected when he was 29, so that's why somebody who was congressman for two terms in the 1990s is making a comeback in the 2020s, and also, yes, if I made you feel old for thinking that the '90s was a long time ago, I do too, but that's where we're at now. Now, in the litigation that's pending, the plaintiffs have argued that the district that should be turned into the second Black-majority district is Rep. Julia Letlow's seat, but she has a number of friends among the GOP. She's also the only woman representing Louisiana in Congress, and so most leadership doesn't want to target her. They instead want to target Graves, who is a nearby seat. It's not as straightforward to make this compact second Black-majority seat by going after Graves' seat, but it is doable to make that second district.
Now, Graves is obviously pretty mad about this for obvious reasons. He's going to get redistricted out of Congress by his own party if this happens. He put out a big screed about how awful the district was, how it wasn't compact. It was combining Saints fans and Cowboys fans, which, I felt like, was a really strange direction to go in when you're trying to make a legal political argument about something, but I guess he's desperate.
Nir: I guess Shreveport must be Cowboy country.
Beard: Yeah, I'm also not sure that's the case. My grandmother lived in northern Louisiana, not quite as far as Shreveport, but they were all Saints fans up in northern Louisiana. I'm not sure where he got that from, but he is a representative from Louisiana, so hopefully he's right about that. The other person who's not very happy is Speaker Mike Johnson, of course. He thinks that the state GOP isn't trying hard enough to keep the five seats for Republicans. Johnson, of course, is also from Louisiana. We have this strange situation where both the Republican speaker of the House and the Republican majority leader are both representatives from Louisiana, which is pretty unusual if you look back historically.
Nir: So now, we mentioned that Fields served for two terms in Congress back in the '90s. Why did his career end? Well, what happened back then is that, at the urging of George Bush Sr.'s Justice Department, a number of southern states run by whether Republicans or conservative Democrats decided that complying with the VRA would allow them to pack as many Black voters as possible into a smaller number of districts and therefore create more Republican seats. In Louisiana, they drew a very weird Z-shaped district that ran along the state's border with Arkansas, then the border with Mississippi, then another part of the border with Mississippi that, through this sneaking narrow pattern, managed to have a Black majority. Well, the courts threw that out because they said that's an illegal racial gerrymander. What courts really don't like is when mapmakers look at a map and they identify members of a racial minority group and they try to hoover up as many of them as possible into a single district. That's what the courts call racial gerrymandering, and generally, you can't get away with that.
Louisiana replaced that map with another district that was sort of a jagged dag and a line, kind of a backslash, that ran from Shreveport in the northwestern corner all the way down to Baton Rouge, the state capital, which is 250 miles away. This map was also struck down as a racial gerrymander, and here's the thing: That district—it was numbered the fourth in the 1990s, it was used only in the 1994 elections—looks very, very similar to the map that Landry is pushing now to eliminate Garret Graves. If this map becomes law, there's a really good chance it, once again, gets struck down like its predecessor from 30 years ago, as a racial gerrymander, so what the hell is going on here?
Beard: Yeah, it's very strange, and of course, they do have a reason that they're doing this that is not racial, which is they want to protect Letlow and go after Graves and so, of course, at times, sort of observe this distinction obviously between political and partisan reasons versus racial reasons, but obviously also, the districts are very similar. It raises this question, is the GOP here trying to reenact a seat that's previously been struck down in some sort of hope that it will also get struck down and just either delay the process or let them go back to the old map? It's not clearer if they actually think, if Landry believes, "Hey, we're going to put this map, the court's going to sign off on it, and I'm going to get my revenge." Maybe it's as simple as that, but obviously, we've seen the GOP be nefarious before.
Nir: It could be all of the above. Landry could be eager to punish Garret Graves. He could also have this nefarious second-order reason of trying to delay the implementation of a compact district that would be compliant with the VRA and that would not be a racial gerrymander. Who knows. These are Republicans. They are totally dastardly. You can never ascribe good faith to them, and we know that you can't ascribe good faith to them here, because Landry hates Garret Graves, and like you said at the start, Beard, this is all about punishing him.
Beard: Yeah, the maps have already started moving through the state legislature, which is in a special session particularly about this redistricting, and that session ends on Tuesday the 23rd, so there's not a lot of time to finalize this. I think the most likely outcome from the session, it seems, is that Landry will get his map passed. Obviously, we don't know that until it happens, but that seems like where it's heading. Then the biggest question is how the court will respond. Obviously, if this map gets passed by the Louisiana legislature and signed by Landry, the court could just accept the map and say, "There are the two districts that we required the legislature to enact, and the fact that they decided to do it that way is up to them." They could reject it for being a racial gerrymander and bringing back that district from the '90s that got struck down, and instead draw their own map that has the two more compact Black-majority districts. As this is a strange case, I guess something else could happen, but I think those are the two most likely outcomes.
Nir: Well, we will be following future developments closely, and the court will want to act as quickly as possible given the short timeframe for implementing a new map this year.
That does it for our Weekly Hits. Coming up, we have a fascinating conversation. We are speaking with author Edward Segal, who is publishing a book called "Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them." Yes, we are going to be talking about campaigning by train. Stick with us after the break. I guarantee you will learn a lot.
Joining us today on "The Downballot" is Edward Segal, who is going to be talking with us about one of the most interesting and unusual topics we have ever covered on the show. Edward is the author of "Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them." Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Edward Segal: Great to be with you today.
Nir: For listeners who may not know since, in a certain way, these are things of yesteryear, what is a whistle-stop tour and how does it differ from just a regular campaign event?
Segal: Well, a whistle-stop tour actually started in the 1800s and grew as the nation's railway grew and the light went on and some of the politicians and say, "Hey, I could use trains to reach people." And the longer the trains got and the systems got, the more politicians warmed up to the idea. Campaign trains has been around for almost 185 years, and they have been a way for hundreds of politicians, presidential, gubernatorial, congressional, even a few mayoral candidates, to reach voters at train stations and depots and sometimes track-side rallies across the country. They differ from regular train trips because these are usually specially configured trains with at least two, or sometimes as many as 15 or 20, additional passenger cars added onto the train. No other passengers or people can go on the train except those who are invited—reporters, staff members, VIPs, sometimes major contributors. It's been a great way over the years to generate publicity, connect with voters and I call it, essentially, political eye-candy for great ways of generating news coverage and calling attention to the policies and platforms of people running for office.
Beard: What got you interested in this topic? Obviously, this form of campaigning is no longer really a common practice, but obviously, it's been a major practice for many years in American history. What caused you to want to write a book about this?
Segal: Well, I actually have firsthand experience organizing a campaign train for a member of Congress from Oklahoma. I was a press secretary, and the member of Congress was looking for an attention-getting, publicity-friendly way to generate news coverage about his efforts to get reelected. And I knew, of course, in the back of my mind about Truman and his famous underdog campaign for the White House in 1948. And I did some digging, and it turned out we had a set of tracks, Amtrak tracks, in the congressman's district. And I did some more research, and we were actually able to rent a train to do an old-fashioned Truman-style whistle-stop tour through the middle of the state. And I really got interested in researching and writing a book because the more research I did at the time and an effort to provide background information to reporters about the trip, I really could not find a lot of information in terms of whole books. An occasional article. So the more I digged, the less I found. And that's why researching the book, collecting stories and anecdotes, that became my hobby, sometimes my obsession, and eventually the book, which will be published in February of this year.
Nir: We have a lot of history buffs who listen to "The Downballot," so I'm sure our listeners would like to know, if you're comfortable sharing, who was that member of Congress that you were working for on that whistle-stop tour?
Segal: Well, I've worked for both Republican and Democratic members of Congress in various capacities. In this case, I was a press secretary for Mickey Edwards, a Republican member of Congress from central Oklahoma. It turns out that all those tracks were usable, Amtrak had discontinued several years before passenger service, and Edwards made it part of his campaign platform and part of his speeches on the campaign train tour, his pledge to do what he could to help restore passenger-train service to Oklahoma.
Nir: So you mentioned at the top of the show that whistle-stop tours began in the 19th century. When did they really take off, and what would you describe as their heyday? And also, is there anyone in particular who gets credit for really being the first, or is that something that might be lost to the mists of time?
Segal: Well, there were various firsts. I think though the person who deserves the credit for inventing what we consider to be the modern-day campaign train trip was William Jennings Bryan when he ran for president in 1896, although politicians before him had campaigned by train: Stephen Douglas in 1858, Abraham Lincoln in 1858, when they were traveling around Illinois for the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. And before that, there had been occasional candidates, but for many years, it was actually considered it to be taboo to actually seek the office and do anything to overtly indicate that you wanted the office. The office was supposed to pursue the person; the person was not supposed to go after the office. And that's one reason why Bryan got so much attention is because he had broke that taboo, and he mounted a very attention-getting, newsworthy, crowd-generating campaign tour across the country.
But the more research I did into this book, I batted down a couple of my own preconceived notions. I had thought that the heyday of campaign train tours was in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, but actually, there were more campaign trains in the 1960s, '70s, '80s, and '90s—
Nir: No kidding.
Segal: —than they were in the earlier part of the century. And actually, they're not dead and gone. Joe Biden campaigned by train for a few hours in 2020. Peter Welch, a Senate candidate in Vermont in 2022—only two years ago, he campaigned by train. So although they're not used nearly as much as they had been in the last century, they're still regarded as political eye candy. And if it makes sense for the politician and their staff, if they have the money, the resources, and the time, I would not be surprised if we see at least one campaign train tour in this year's election season.
Beard: So clearly, modern presidential candidates, they primarily use planes to travel across the country and hit campaign stops from coast to coast all in the same day. And so whistle-stop tours—obviously much, much less prominent than they were during the 20th century. Do you have one in mind that you think of as sort of the last really prominent whistle-stop tour that was maybe conducted by a presidential candidate across a large stretch of the country or something like that?
Segal: Well, I think Bill Clinton's campaign train trip in 1996 certainly fit the bill. He went through the middle part of the country for several days on his way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And one of the reasons that they organized the trip before the convention is that he was expected to get the nomination, kind of a slam dunk. So his organizers and campaign strategists wanted to build in something appealing, something newsworthy, something to build up the excitement and generate attention to the convention itself, and that's why they came up with a trip. The trip, of course, made news. His daughter, Chelsea, was on the trip, and that was her coming out to meet the public and the media, and a lot of pictures and a lot of publicity about her campaigning and shaking hands with her father from the back of the campaign train.
I think that's a great example of one of the more recent campaign trips, and they went for several days. It'd be very rare to see a campaign trip last for several days now because of the cost, the time constraints, the scheduling conflicts that candidate and staff would have to deal with. And that's a big difference between campaign train trips now and those that were done in the mid or early part of the last century. Campaign train trips in the '30s, '40s, and '50s would last for days or weeks. It would cover thousands of miles across many states. You'd never see that today. A modern train tour this year would last probably only a few hours and cover only a few hundred miles. But I still think it'd be very effective in doing what campaign trains did in the last century, and that's to generate attention, awareness, and publicity, and get people excited about a candidate.
Nir: With the Clinton trip, you alluded to what I think is maybe the most iconic image—at least that I have in my mind, but I suspect a lot of people—of what a whistle-stop tour looks like, and that is the candidate speaking off of the caboose of the train to an assembled crowd. And earlier, you mentioned that the train itself was almost like a moving campaign headquarters on wheels where you could invite the press or dignitaries, VIPs, etc. I just think that's a fascinating notion that you have this literal vehicle that is both for very private use but also extremely public use when you pop off the rear car.
Segal: Oh, yeah. Sometimes it was a caboose. More likely, it would've been a traditional passenger car, but either way, it had to have had a rear platform built on the back of the car so that the candidate or his staff and VIPs could come out and give their speeches. But you're absolutely right. Campaign trains were what we would regard today as a traveling visual. It was the most attention-getting way that politicians could get the attention of the press and the media. It was really exciting and hard to forget when you saw this giant steam locomotive or, in more modern times, a diesel engine pulling in slowly to a train station and the noise and commotion would make. On top of that, there were often marching bands, cheerleaders, crowds yelling and screaming and clapping. It was quite an emotional, exciting, and a never-to-be-forgotten event by people who were there. And oftentimes, some politicians said it was the best, most enjoyable thing they had done on the campaign trip, and they thought that it was the best way to campaign for office.
Beard: That's particularly interesting because, nowadays, you hear a lot of complaining about the campaign trail, and that's in large part because there's so much fundraising that modern candidates have to do. That ends up taking so much of their time that there's less time to do the sort of interactions that you're talking about, like these whistle-stop tours, that really put candidates in front of voters.
Segal: Well, you're right. In fact, in some ways, the campaign trains were the Swiss Army knife of politics. It was a way to generate news coverage. Hundreds of reporters would often accompany the candidates. The staff were working on speeches and presentations and generating news coverage. Some candidates used the trains literally as a fundraising vehicle, as a way to help sell seats on the train, or to award major donors with the opportunity to be on the train. In earlier days, the trains would make so many stops that the trains would take on different delegations of local VIPs or dignitaries, welcoming committees, who would get on the train miles before it arrived at the train station and give the opportunity of the local political dignitaries to shake hands and schmooze with the politician, and then the politician would introduce the VIPs when the train got to the station. So it was really a win-win for fundraising, publicity, schmoozing, making points, and getting the support of people.
Beard: So what are some of the aspects of a whistle-stop tour that regular voters wouldn't think of in terms of practically getting it set up and making it happen?
Segal: Well, you can't wake up one morning and say, "I know, I'm going to do a whistle-stop campaign tour across the country." No, it never happens. These kind of train trips require a lot of time, sometimes a lot of money, and certainly effort and organizational prowess to help make it work. They need advanced planning to scope out the best routes, to work out with the train companies or railroad firms the best routes, the available routes. And if you're talking about a president or presidential nominee, security is going to be a big issue, whether it's a Secret Service or additional police, law enforcement. Sometimes, the national guards have been called out to help. So these can be incredibly expensive events to pull off, and that's why it's not likely you're going to see a member of Congress organizing a campaign train this year, although it's possible in a smaller state. You're more likely to see President Joe Biden or whoever the Republican nominee turns out to be mounting that, and they would have the time, the resources, the skills, and the staff to make it happen.
Nir: Taking us to the present day, do you think there's any aspect of contemporary campaigning that you might consider a modern-day successor to the whistle-stop tour?
Segal: Well, I actually look at it the other way around. I think that campaign trains set the tone and provide great examples for today's politicians on the strategies and tactics they can emulate. Some of the basics, such as go to where the voters are, and that was one of the beauties of the train at the time. Sometimes, if they knew there were people who wanted to see the candidate, but there was no train station. They would just simply stop to where the people had gathered, and do a track-side rally, so I think that was an important part of the success of the campaign trains. The other thing that people who want to learn lessons from whistle-stopping politicians is, don't talk so much. The traditional rear-platform campaign speech lasted probably five or 10, certainly not more than 15 minutes. Why? Because these trains were usually on a very strict schedule. The politician had to say their piece, the train had to move on, and they did not want to disappoint or be late for the next depot rally down the road.
Another important lesson for today's politicians is the importance of using props or visuals. In 1952, when a Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower was campaigning from the back of the train, he used about a 3-foot-long piece of wood to help demonstrate what he claimed was the shrinking power of the dollar. That piece of wood was cut into two different places. He would hold up the piece of wood and say, "This is what the dollar was worth before when FDR was president." Then he'd chop off a piece of wood and said, "This is what the dollar was worth, about a third, when FDR died in 1945." Pulled off that. And then he held up last foot or so and said, "This is what the dollar is worth under the Truman administration."
And that was a great, effective visual that got people's attention, helped made his point. And I think politicians today would be well advised to remember that important lesson. Don't just talk about what you want to do; show what you want to do. Just don't talk about a problem; show the problem in some way. And by using a visual, can be very effective not just to talk about the problem, but to show the problem. And that is more likely to stick in the minds of reporters, could actually be on the news, and be a great way for people to remember as long as possible what you were saying, what you want to do, and what you thought the problems are.
Nir: I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that 3-foot stick show up again on the campaign trail this year. It seems suddenly relevant again. But, Edward, maybe the most surprising thing that you have said on this interview so far is when the heyday of the whistle-stop tour actually was, and you said it was in the post-World War II era. I would have guessed that with the rise of the automobile that the real heyday would've been well before then.
What do you think accounts for that divergent trend that, with the rise of the interstate highway system and increased auto ownership and also rail travel becoming less and less popular at that same time, you're saying that the whistle-stop tours were really at their peak.
Segal: Yeah, I think it had to do with a combination of factors. First, the demographics. It wasn't until the 1920 U.S. census that was taken. That showed more people were living in cities than in farms and in rural communities. And that synced in nicely with a continued expansion of the nation's railroad system. Plane travel was just coming into its own. You certainly didn't have the kind of airport systems we have now. More people knew where their train station was because it was often downtown or very centrally located, and it was much easier for them to get to their train station than anywhere else in the county or the city. So that was a matter of convenience. People knew where the train station was, train travel was big and accepted, and politicians took advantage of that. It was a combination of demographics and the growth of the railroad system.
The growth of the automobiles in the country was a benefit for whistle-stopping candidates. It made it easier for people to drive in their cars, which were becoming more affordable. Having more cars made it easier for more people to take a short drive to their train station. And sometimes there were so many cars coming to see the candidates that the cars or the people traveling on foot would surround the railroad stations, shut down the streets. Generated so much attention that schools and businesses would close for the day just to give everyone an opportunity to see the local visiting president or other well-known person running for office.
Nir: I'm curious to know if, in your research, you learned that this was exclusively an American phenomenon or if these kind of train tours are something that politicians in other countries also have engaged in?
Segal: Well, actually, I think the success of whistle-stopping candidates in the United States was a tip to politicians in other countries to adopt and mimic the tactic. And that's exactly what happened. The tactic was copied in Germany after World War II. It was copied in Australia. It's been copied several times in Canada. And it's been a great way for politicians and other countries to do exactly what politicians in the United States have done, generate publicity, connect with voters, and help use the trains to get the word out for their policies or programs or plans for the future.
Nir: I have to admit, just talking about whistle-stop tours makes me excited to want to go see one, and I really hope that at least one politician does one this year. You'd think that Joe Biden, given his strong identification with Amtrak, would be the perfect person to do that in 2024.
Segal: Well, as I mentioned earlier, he did campaign by train for a few hours in 2020, but it was not his first time. He actually, when he ran for president in the 1980s, he did campaign by train. So campaigning by training is not new to Joe Biden. You're right about his affinity for Amtrak. They actually named an Amtrak train station for him in Delaware a few years ago. So whether it's Joe Biden, or anyone else running for office, I really hope they will take a lesson from past whistle-stopping politicians and try to campaign for office at least once during this election year from the back of a train.
Nir: Well, we have been talking with Edward Segal, who is the author of the forthcoming book "Whistle-Stop Politics: Campaign Trains and the Reporters Who Covered Them." Edward, where will readers be able to find a copy of your book? Will it be available on Kindle? And also, where can they find you online?
Segal: They can find me online at my website, www.whistlestoppolitics.com. The e-book edition of the book is already available for pre-orders on Amazon, and the hardcover edition will be available for pre-orders in early next month. But the e-book and hardcover edition will go on sale wherever books are sold, as they say. There's also plans for an audiobook, so I hope people will visit my website, pre-order, and listen or read the book. But I think it's a great education for all of your listeners about what I think is a forgotten history of campaign trains in American politics, and perhaps some politician or their staff who's listening to this broadcast will say, I think it'd be a good idea if we want the campaign train tour, because it worked in the past and I'm sure we could make it work for us this year.
Nir: Well, I hope we all get to take credit for that happening this year. Edward, thank you so much for coming on "The Downballot" this week.
Segal: Thanks. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Beard: That's all from us this week. Thanks to Edward Segal for joining us. "The Downballot" comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to "The Downballot" on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our editor, Trever Jones, and we'll be back next week with a new episode.