The Campaign Moments That New York Times Reporters Won’t Forget

The night ended at the hotel bar, with Sanders aides drowning their sorrows and the reporters there unsure what would happen next. Just before midnight, another reporter got a call from his desk: Come home now, the campaign trail is no longer safe. Soon, the case would be the same for all of us. — Reid J. Epstein

Young eyes

The night before Super Tuesday in early March, I took my then-7-year-old daughter with me to East Los Angeles for an Elizabeth Warren campaign rally I was covering. For months, my daughter had listened to me describe scenes and politics she didn’t really understand. By then, it was clear that Senator Warren, the last woman standing, would not succeed in getting the Democratic nomination. But you would not have known that from the pumped-up crowd that night before the California primary.

My daughter was mostly in awe of my friends working for the television networks, as they stood in the stands with their cameras and laptops, predicting the applause lines of the stump speech. That press corps was mostly young women, who were exceedingly generous to a second grader. The night was a moment for her to witness history, and women’s roles in it. We had no idea that the world would change just a week later amid a pandemic. — Jennifer Medina

Hard loss

In February, I was in a New Hampshire ballroom with Andrew Yang, the long-shot candidate I had been covering for months, when he announced that he was dropping out of the Democratic primary. You could feel the room deflate as soon as he said the words. Soon after he exited the stage, I met Gene Bishop, an 81-year-old New Hampshire voter who told me he had never contributed to or canvassed for a political candidate before he began supporting Mr. Yang. “I just can’t believe that it’s over,” Mr. Bishop said, his brave face melting away. Then, to my surprise, he began to cry. It’s easy to get jaded about politicians. But my brief interview with Mr. Bishop has stuck with me. Mr. Yang, he lamented, had been “a big part of my life.” — Matt Stevens

A fitting ‘conversation’

The best part of political reporting is getting out in the country and seeing voters in their communities to better understand how their home settings shape their views. But during the start of the pandemic, I was left to work from my New York home, isolating like many of us and doing interviews over the phone.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/insider/reporters-campaign-memories.html