I’m sitting next to a crackling fire, talking with Melissa Alexander, a Covenant School parent, about this moment we find ourselves in.
We are sipping homemade wassail — a spiced drink with cider and cranberry juice. An old family recipe, she tells me.
Alexander is no stranger to interviews at this point. She’s a Covenant mom, a Republican and a gun control activist. And this summer, she was featured in a podcast I made called Supermajority in a partnership between WPLN News and NPR Embedded.
For months, Alexander and I — along with my big fuzzy microphone — spent lots of time together at the capitol. At the special session in August 2023, and then during the ordinary session that followed. We sat, day after day, in the House and Senate chambers and in committee rooms. I followed her as she buttonholed lawmakers and lobbied them to pass bills she supported. She saw a lot. I saw a lot.
And now, in the wake of the presidential election, I’d found myself revisiting so much of what we experienced. Because some of it had taken on a whole new meaning, or at least been far more prescient that either of us had realized. Especially with how well Republican candidates did. And how far the Democrats fell short.
“The aftermath of the election was like déjà vu,” Alexander told me.
Déjà vu. I knew she might say something like this. Because there’d been a big hiccup in Alexander’s advocacy last year. Something had happened that, now, was coming right back at her from a very different angle.
“What transpired with us being kind of raked through the coals for going on Tomi Lahren’s show,” she says.
Here’s the backstory: Tomi Lahren, a far-right media personality, had invited Alexander, and another Covenant mother, onto her show to talk about gun control.
They were eager to talk with Lahren. Not because they agreed with her views. But because Lahren had a big conservative audience. And it was an audience Melissa wanted to reach, to try to explain that conservatives can support gun safety laws. It’s been her platform. She and other Covenant parents had worked tirelessly to pull lawmakers toward the middle — to a place where safe gun laws could coexist with Second Amendment rights. And Alexander knew she needed their constituents, too, so appearing on Lahren’s show seemed like a no-brainer.
But that’s not how things went down. After her appearance on the show, progressive activists went on the attack for Alexander agreeing to sit with someone like Lahren. They were activists with large followings on social media, like Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, which lobbies for safer gun laws across the country. Watts went to social media and made her thoughts known.
“I don’t think you should be having conversations with white supremacists,” she said in one of several videos on the topic.
It turned into a deluge of pointed commentary and insults lobbed across social media at Alexander. It was all too much. She worried about her family, who was still recovering from the mass shooting. She worried about her mental health. It was so intense that it pushed Alexander to take a step back from public life for a bit. Eventually Alexander said she regretted the decision to go on Lahren’s show and issued a public apology.
But now, post-election, all of that has taken on a different hue. President Donald Trump had won. In part, by capturing moderates. According to CNN exit polls, Trump made significant inroads with them. What’s more, the network’s polls showed that liberals and conservatives have moved even further into their partisan corners since the 2016 election.
Which begs the question: Was trying to talk across partisan lines really something to regret? Or was it a strategy people needed to take more often?
It seemed the latter was becoming more and more acceptable in the aftermath of the election. Pundits and editorials were keying in on what they said was a fatal flaw in the Democratic strategy: Not courting more conservative media. Except instead of Tomi Lahren, it was podcaster Joe Rogan.
Vice President Kamala Harris had declined an invitation to go on Rogan’s show. And now people were saying it was a huge mistake. One that alienated voters she needed to reach in order to win.
“Kamala you should really go on Joe Rogan,” former presidential candidate Andrew Yang said in an interview.
“Weren’t we saying all along that this was a mistake?” lamented one independent podcaster.
Another Democratic candidate went on CNN to say, “I think there is a sense sometimes of tiptoeing around for fear of offending somebody.” It’s not working, he added.
One of the journalists who zeroed in on this issue was New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein.
Rogan, he wrote in his column just days after the election, is “a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist … the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with. But if these last years have proven anything it’s that you don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on Rogan regularly all these years.”
It seemed that what Alexander experienced was a small indication of a much larger problem that progressives are dealing with.
When I raised this issue to Alexander, she said it was this attitude that she couldn’t understand, that, “you can’t be a Republican and speak to Republicans …you have to be a Democrat.
“And I still don’t understand that mindset,” she told me.
If Melissa’s honest with herself, it leaves her, a moderate Republican, more confused.
“I don’t know where I belong. And I think a lot of America, maybe, feels the same way.”
