The Notebook: "Coffee is always on."

Friends,

I’ve sat in a lot of morning assignment meetings.

Thirty years of them almost, in glass conference rooms in New York and Washington, on conference calls from hotel rooms in Baghdad and Belgrade and Des Moines.

At their best, they’re a rich and productive part of the business—people in different roles across the newsroom, arguing about what the story actually is, who might know something, where to go and get the interview, get the shot, get the story. At their worst, they’re a room full of people looking at the same wire copy everyone else is looking at, deciding to do what everyone else is doing.

Last Monday I opened Terry's Notebook and asked you a simple question: Where should I go, and who should I talk to?

What came back was the best assignment meeting I've been in in years.

I want to be straight with you about the numbers, because I want this place to run on candor and because you're entitled to know how it's going. Twenty-seven of you became Members in the days after that post. That matters. A lot It’s what puts gas in the car and pays the editor. But that’s not what surprised me, got me right out of my chair.

The thing that got me out of my chair was the mail.

Within a day I had a country's worth of assignments.

Maine, to cover the race to unseat Susan Collins.

New York's 21st, where a dairy farmer named Blake Gendebien is running in the district Elise Stefanik held.

New York's 17th, Mike Lawler against Cait Conley—a race, as one of you pointed out, that sits well outside the progressive weather system of New York City, and is therefore worth understanding on its own terms.

Ohio, twice over: Husted and Sherrod Brown for the Senate, and Amy Acton for governor.

Idaho, where a Senate seat might actually move.

Kansas.

Iowa, where I’m already planning to visit the State Fair.

Alabama, where Doug Jones may have a live chance.

Texas, and a monthly gathering in North Dallas called Blue Tsunami, where the speakers skew young and, I'm told, carry a kind of conviction that feels new.

Wisconsin, and Francesca Hong's run for governor, sent by a reader who added, with lovely honesty, I know she's not going to be your cup of tea.

Arizona, from a reader watching the summer monsoon come down green over the borderlands.

New Hampshire. Missouri. Florida. North Carolina. Alaska.

I won’t make it to all of those places, of course. I said four or five trips and I meant it; the budget is real but it is not an ABC News budget, and I'd rather do six places well than eighteen from a rental car window.

But that's not the point. The point is the map you all made, and what that map is made of.

Sponsored Post with Ground News

People ask if I miss ABC News. Some days. I miss good friends and colleagues the most, of course. And sometimes, what I miss is the machinery—the specialized units—Medical, Politics, Business and Economy. And all the accompanying researchers and producers across bureaus foreign and domestic--the whole expensive apparatus that existed to find out whether a thing was true before anyone said it on the air.
 
Example: I was in Syria in 2013, covering the terrible civil war there. It was dicey. Every morning, our team got a security briefing via email from Disney’s security unit (which is excellent). It was extraordinary. Granular intel about attacks overnight, which roads might be safer than others, location of gas stations, etc. We could not have done our work without that daily email.
 
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So the work moves out here, to places like this one. And it costs money—always. (Not that I’m off to cover a war in the near future. But a campaign, for sure.)  I’m not complaining; that’s just the arithmetic. It's why this newsletter has readers who pay and partners who sponsor.
 
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Here is what struck me, reading all the Notebook responses in one sitting: almost nobody sent me a poll.

You sent me beats. And your first-hand understanding of them.

A reader named Sharon wrote that she was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta during Jim Crow, and wanted to know about the current zeitgeist there—not who's ahead, but what has actually changed on the ground and what hasn't, and whether the Indivisible chapters that popped up around the state last year are connected to anything real in the small towns.

A reader named Hannah made the case that nowhere in the country matters more right now than the South after Louisiana v. Callais, and that the story there is the organizing and the resistance, not the litigation.

A reader named John, writing about Alaska, gave me in four sentences as good a story outline as any I got from producers at ABC News. He said: go to the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and talk to tribal members, college-aged and older; understand that the state is far more diverse than the Lower 48 imagines. And understand that the interests of oil and gas workers frequently run hard against the interests of people who make their living from seafood and tourism. That is not a race. That is a place, with a fault line running through it.

John also suggested that if I do get up to The Last Frontier I should sit down with Tekla Butcher-Monson, who is the daughter of Susan Butcher, who won the Iditarod four times, and for whom Alaska keeps a state holiday.

In 2007 I covered the Iditarod. Absolutely thrilling. It remains one of the great experiences of my working life. Susan Butcher died the year before I got there. Her name was everywhere anyway.

So: probably yes.

And a reader in Oregon, whom you'll meet properly in a minute, told me her state needs data centers for its tech economy and cannot afford the electricity and water they drink. Which is, I'd wager, one of the sleeper issues in the next several election cycles in many states, and almost nobody is covering it as a kitchen-table story yet.

These aren't tips. These are assignments. They’re great.

Two of you handed me things that were harder, and I want to answer them in public rather than in a reply box.

Isabelle Selikoff wrote to say she is 83, Jewish, not especially observant, and worried. Her concern is that a rising pro-Palestinian politics on the Democratic left is being received by some Americans who don't know many Jews as a permission slip—that antisemitism is being laundered into acceptability by people with almost no grasp of the region's actual history. She asked whether I'd take this on as I go out into the country.

Yes. I will.

I'll say now what I've said before: I hold to a two-state commitment and I don't intend to pretend otherwise. I also intend to report honestly on a coalition that is arguing with itself about this, loudly, in real time, in races from Michigan to New York. Both of those things can be true, and the reporting is better when the reporter's own position is on the table rather than smuggled in.

Scott Herbert proposed two lines of inquiry, and they are, I think, the two best questions in American politics right now:

One: for Republicans who are not MAGA true believers—do they see the excesses and the corruption? And are they open to something else: moderation, civil argument, a working legislature?

Two: are working-class voters who went for Trump actually responding to the economic message coming out of New York with Mamdani, which is the affordability argument, not the ideological noise around this particular mayor?

I don't know the answers. I have hunches, and hunches are what you get when you haven't gone and looked. That's the trip.

Now let me tell you about my favorite thing that happened last week.

A reader named Liz Scott wrote in from Oregon. Liz is a Republican. She is pro-life. She is also, at the moment, politically homeless in her own state, and she laid out exactly why with a real clarity grounded in her experience and her values. Her governor is a Democrat she considers ineffective and deeply unpopular; the GOP had, in her view, a real shot at the seat and blew it by nominating a candidate she can't stomach. So she's considering not voting in the governor's race at all. She called that the coward's way out. She's still thinking about it.

Then she told me about the data centers. Then she told me this:

Forty-five people. Twelve hours a week. In a small town in Columbia County, Oregon, a pro-life Republican who may leave the top of her ballot blank is spending two working days a week handing out bread to her neighbors.

That is our America—all of ours. That’s the republic. Not the shouting. That.

I’m building Real Patriotism on a bet that there are more Liz Scotts out there than American media will ever let you see. People who don't fit into the cartoon version of our country, who hold maybe four positions that don't sort neatly onto a team, who show up anyway. She didn't come here to be converted and I have no interest in converting her. She came to argue and to tell me what her state actually looks like from inside it.

That's a newsroom. That's the whole idea.

She closed with an invitation to come out in September—best weather, public access on every beach, salmon hitting, trails empty.

I'll try to get there!

Here's what I've decided, based on last week.

Terry's Notebook will publish twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays.

Mondays will look ahead: What I'm chasing this week, who I'm trying to book, what I'm reading, what I'm arguing with myself about, where the trips stand. Forward-looking. Every Monday entry will end with a question for you.

Thursday is the mailroom. What came back. Your tips, your corrections, your view from where you live, the arguments in the comments.

Last week you proved the mailroom is going to be at least as good as anything I bring to this place.

The columns stay free. Every one, to everybody, always—the deeper dive on Thursdays, and the poem on Sunday. After 48 hours, they’re archived. That commitment isn't changing and won't. Civic journalism belongs in the commons.

The Notebook is for Members, because the road costs money and there is no network behind me anymore. Twenty-seven of you pulled up a chair this week. If you've been reading along and you want to be in the room where the assignment actually gets decided—where a Republican from Oregon and a Democrat from the Delta argue about what I ought to go see, and I take notes—that's what membership is. Ten dollars a month, or a hundred for the year.

One housekeeping note, and a real one: if you write in the Notebook and I quote you in a column, I'll use the name you sign with. If you'd rather I didn't, say so and I'll honor it, no explanation needed. Corrections are welcome and will run. That's how newsrooms work, and this is a newsroom.

There's more mail than I could fit here—Vermont and Nevada and Georgia and a half-dozen House races I'm still reading up on. Keep it coming.

One of you, K. Erickson, wrote to say that if I make it to New York's 21st, her father owns the Panorama Motel in Hampton, up in Washington County. Then she made me a kind offer.

I've been offered a lot of things in this business. Green rooms, town cars, a satellite truck idling outside a courthouse at three in the morning, pickled pigs ears. I don't know that anyone has ever offered me a room.

See you Monday.

— Terry