What It Takes

Cheri Bustos spent almost two decades as a newspaper reporter before entering public life. She served on her city council and then, in 2012, flipped a Republican seat in a working-class stretch of northwest Illinois. Even when Donald Trump won her district in 2016, Bustos held on to that seat and won by more than 20 points. Her colleagues later chose her to lead the Democratic Congressional Campai...

When Dr. Annie Andrews launched her Senate campaign in a solidly Republican state last year, she knew she was the underdog. No Democrat has won a Senate race in South Carolina in close to three decades, and the state has voted for Donald Trump by double-digit margins in every election he's run. Dr. Andrews is running against Darline Graham, the sister of the late, long-serving Senator Lindsey Grah...

Jared Polis took an unusual path into politics. When he was 25, and not yet a parent, he won a seat on Colorado's State Board of Education. He later had kids of his own and became the first openly gay parent to serve in Congress. In 2018, Colorado made him the first openly gay man ever elected governor in the United States. Eight years later, education is still Governor Polis's signature issue, fr...

For stretches of his childhood, Quinton Lucas was homeless. He crashed at motels, with relatives, and even at the nursing home where his great-aunt lived. Now he's the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri. He was elected in 2019, the youngest mayor of Kansas City in more than a century. Four years later, he was reelected with more than 80% of the vote. Sarah McCammon, who grew up in Kansas City, spoke w...

Jessica Tarlov is, for lack of a better term, a prominent moderate. She's one of the most recognizable Democrats on Fox News, arguing daily with people who don't agree with her, and she co-hosts the podcast “Raging Moderates” with Scott Galloway. In her new book, I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends, she draws on those daily fights to share what she's learned about arguing well—wit...

Yadira Ramos-Herbert grew up in Queens, the granddaughter of immigrants. She started her career as an attorney in New York City, then spent a decade in leadership at Columbia University Law School. She was working with students there when the campus was rocked by protests over the war in Gaza, after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Soon afterward, she became the first woman and the first per...

Third Way Senior Fellow Frank Sharry has been at the center of nearly every major push for immigration reform for decades — and watched almost all of them fall apart. Now he wants Democrats to reckon with where they went wrong on immigration, and how the party can reclaim the middle in the midterms and beyond. Sarah McCammon spoke with Sharry about how Democrats lost credibility on the border, the...

Most kids hang posters of their favorite bands on their walls. Jake Auchincloss decorated his room with pictures of the Founding Fathers. His grandfather, the son of Jewish refugees, snuck into a Marine recruiting station as a teenager during World War II, over his mother’s objections. Representative Auchincloss joined the Marines to carry on that legacy. He commanded infantry in Afghanistan, then...

Elissa Slotkin arrived in New York City as a student one day before 9/11—and before the smoke cleared, she knew what she wanted to do with her life. She went on to serve in the CIA, did three tours in Iraq, and worked in the White House under two presidents: one Republican and one Democrat. Michigan voters elected Senator Slotkin to the US Senate in 2024—the same night Donald Trump carried the sta...

Brooke Jenkins was a homicide prosecutor in San Francisco when she walked out the door and helped lead a campaign to fire her own boss. That boss was one of the most famous progressive prosecutors in America. He had promised fewer prosecutions and a new model of justice. But as drug markets spread and theft videos went viral, voters in one of America’s most liberal cities decided the experiment ha...

Tom Suozzi grew up in a family where public service was the family business. His father immigrated from Italy, and flew bombing missions over Europe during World War II, before becoming a mayor. Suozzi went on to follow his father into politics. Today, he's the only Democrat in New York who holds a congressional district that Trump won. He’s on a campaign to push his party to declare itself capita...

Ken Salazar comes from a part of Colorado with a complicated history that has shaped the way he understands immigration and identity. Salazar has represented his home state in the U.S. Senate, served as President Obama’s Interior Secretary, and more recently, he was President Biden's ambassador to Mexico—at a time when Biden’s border policy was under scrutiny.  Now, Salazar is sharing his ideas ab...

Justin Bibb grew up in a house where public safety was personal. His father was a police officer and firefighter, his grandmother led the neighborhood watch, and those experiences shaped how he thinks about government, safety, and civic responsibility. Even after leaving Cleveland, Bibb never stopped thinking about how to make his hometown stronger. He eventually returned to run for mayor, becomin...

Most people know Mark Cuban as a Shark Tank investor or longtime owner of the Dallas Mavericks. But a few years ago, he started Cost Plus Drugs to cut out the middleman in a pharmaceutical industry he says is fundamentally broken. Cuban wants healthcare for everyone—even if he doesn't think Medicare for All is the answer. He argues that transparency is the missing ingredient, and lays out what he...

Jackie Payne on the Moderate Women Who Decide Elections After Donald Trump won in 2016, Jackie Payne did something unusual. She got in a car and spent two years just listening to women. What she found was a huge number of moderate women — in the suburbs and small towns — that both parties keep underestimating, and keep getting wrong. Closing that gap with America’s largest single voting bloc would...

Democrats have a branding problem. Joe Walsh and Yemisi Egbewole think they know why. They took very different roads into the Democratic Party. Walsh was a Tea Party congressman who campaigned for Donald Trump in 2016. Egbewole ran communications in Joe Biden's White House — and now she's a political commentator on Fox News. They both have ideas about why the Democratic Party feels so out of touch...

Bobby Pulido spent thirty years building a career as a Tejano music star. Now he's running for Congress in South Texas, in one of the poorest parts of the state, trying to unseat a Republican incumbent. Pulido's opponent mocked his music career, saying the election wasn't about who you want performing at your niece's quinceañera. So he turned that dig into four thousand invitations to quinceañeras...

Nikki Budzinski is the kind of Democrat a lot of people say the party needs more of — a reluctant politician who came up in the labor movement and now represents a sprawling district in downstate Illinois. But she'd be the first to tell you her party has lost touch with the voters she grew up around. She was born in Peoria, moved around as a kid, and landed back in the heartland. She likes to say...

Rahm Emanuel believes in Israel. He also thinks its government is making historic mistakes. In Part 2 of our conversation, he aims his critique in every direction. Sarah McCammon spoke with Ambassador Emanuel in Chicago about the Jewish upbringing that still shapes him, why he confronted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his face in 2009, and why he says the party's divide on Israel is...

Rahm Emanuel has a reputation for two things: a tough demeanor and a policy nerd's command of detail. In Part 1 of our interview, he lives up to both. Ambassador Emanuel argues that America has spent 25 years sleepwalking — through the Iraq war, the Great Recession, and the pandemic — and that the people responsible were never held accountable. His solution starts somewhere you might not expect: a...

Catherine Cortez Masto has run and won twice in Nevada — even in an environment where Republicans had a six-point advantage. She's already the person many presidential hopefuls want to talk to as Democratic hopefuls plot their path to victory in the Silver State, first in a Democratic primary as Nevadans lobby to be first in the nation, and then as a battleground in the general election.   The gra...

In 2025, Eileen Higgins was elected the first female mayor of Miami and the first Democrat to lead the city in nearly thirty years. She beat a Trump-endorsed candidate by close to twenty points—in neighborhoods where many residents were skeptical of Democrats. Higgins left a corporate career to run the Peace Corps in Belize, served as a diplomat, then won a county commission seat representing Litt...

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill flipped five Trump counties last year and outran Kamala Harris statewide — with a message aimed squarely at voters in the middle, promising to tackle the cost of living and get government working. Sherrill is a former Navy pilot and the first female veteran ever elected governor. Sarah McCammon talks to Gov. Sherrill in Trenton about how she actually flipped Trum...

What It Takes with Sarah McCammon is Unmoderated News's flagship podcast that examines the personal stories that shape a new generation of leaders. The first episode premieres Thursday, May 14 featuring an exclusive conversation with New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal da...