The Story Before The Story
What Others Are Missing
The story before the story
The best conversations I have — whether on The Friday Reporter or The Deciders — tend to happen in the space between what’s being reported and what’s actually going on. This week gave me two of them.
THE FRIDAY REPORTER
Holly Otterbein at Axios is covering a presidential race that most political media hasn’t started paying attention to yet. The 2028 Democratic pre-primary is already underway — candidates are in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina right now — and Holly is one of the only reporters in the field. While she’s there, she’s also watching something subtler: AI and campaigns are already entangled in ways that most coverage has barely touched. When a voter asks a chatbot who to vote for, campaigns want to influence that answer. It’s SEO for LLMs. Nobody’s writing that story yet, either. Holly is.
She also had one of the most clear-eyed takes I’ve heard on Kamala Harris: she’s the most underestimated 2028 candidate in the field, and a lot of DC Democrats are deliberately looking the other way. The early polling among Black Democratic voters tells a different story.
THE DECIDERS
Patrick Dorton joins Brody Mullins and me on The Deciders Tuesday — and he arrived with a story I hadn’t heard before. In the 1990s, Dorton deliberately leaked the contents of a private Senate Democratic caucus meeting to The Washington Post. The purpose: expose senators quietly criticizing President Clinton behind closed doors and protect his boss, Senator Tom Harkin. “The White House certainly was appreciative,” he told us. Dianne Feinstein was not.
Dorton is the Founder and CEO of Rational360, and his career — Clinton White House, chief spokesman for Arthur Andersen during the Enron collapse, two decades of navigating corporate clients through Washington — is a masterclass in how influence actually gets applied. His message for anyone operating in D.C. right now: conservative media is no longer a niche strategy. Those reporters have the cell phone numbers of the president and vice president. If you’re not thinking about that lever, you’re already behind.
Two conversations. Two shows. One thread: the people who get ahead are the ones paying attention to the story before everyone else notices.
🎧 The Friday Reporter with Holly Otterbein → [link]
🎧 The Deciders with Patrick Dorton → [Preview link — drops Tuesday, May 5]