- Ted, welcome back.

It's good to see you.

It's been about a month since you and I last talked about politics, and yet it feels like we've packed about a year's worth of news in that time.

- Yeah.

What a month it's been.

I mean, I've never seen the series of news cycles we had from late June into July.

It's just been an extraordinary period.

- Yeah.

Many major news events to talk about.

Of course, there was the attempted assassination attempt against the former President Donald Trump, and also what many have described as really a disastrous debate performance by President Biden, and ultimately, his decision to step down from the presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

You had a chance to talk with Rhode Island U.S.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in the days following that debate about what his reaction was to his performance.

What did he say to you?

- Well, Michelle, you know, every senior figure around here is a Democrat because it's such a blue area in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and I felt it was important to get all of them on the record.

What did they think should happen as the party was facing this kind of existential crisis about Biden?

And so Whitehouse agreed to meet up with me in Providence, and the second we started talking, I was struck by the fact that he was clearly ready to go further than most other Democrats were at the time in expressing concern about Biden and I had a feeling it would get a lot of attention.

- We have a clip from that interview.

I wanna point out, this is four days after that debate.

Let's take a listen, - Your honest reaction to the debate?

- I think like a lot of people, I was pretty horrified.

Well, I think people want to make sure that this is a campaign that's ready to go and win, that the president and his team are being candid with us about his condition, that this was a real anomaly and not just the way he is these days.

- And Ted, those comments by Senator Whitehouse really ricocheted.

"The New York Times" ran a story about it.

Several networks picked it up, and it's noteworthy because Senator Whitehouse was really one of the first prominent Democrats early on to publicly voice concerns about the President's debate performance.

- Exactly.

I think that's why it made national news, Michelle, because I think Senator Whitehouse was saying publicly what many Democrats were only saying privately.

And it was clear to me he felt that he needed to kind of force a tough conversation.

I asked him at a virtual news conference he held after Biden dropped out, you know, "Why did you take that step?

Why were we willing to go further?"

And he said, quote, "Facts matter."

He said he felt that Democrats and all voters had been so taken aback by the President's condition in the debate that it couldn't be just kind of swept under the rug, pretend it was just a bad day.

And that Democrats really needed to reckon with that and have a difficult conversation about what they needed to do ahead of the election.

- Right.

Which is now three months away from that election.

- Hard to believe.

- Yeah.

- Let's turn now to local politics here in Rhode Island.

We are nowhere closer to knowing when the Westbound Washington Bridge will be reconstructed.

Of course, we know that the state put out bids and the state received no bids to construct this Washington westbound bridge.

Here's how Governor McKee explained what went wrong on the day that this news broke.

- I think it was in a very aggressive timeframe that we put in place, right.

As well as incentives to meet that timeframe and penalties if we didn't meet that timeframe.

So we gotta get out with a more realistic type of a time schedule to make sure that bidders do bid on it.

- And Ted, the fact that the state received no bids really did shock a lot of people.

- Yeah, there was a huge reaction to this headline, Michelle.

And I mean, we have to keep in mind, this bridge has now been closed since December, and at this point, the state has no estimate for when the new bridge will be built.

No estimate for how much it will cost.

Right now, they're starting over by surveying construction companies to get feedback on why nobody bid on the initial proposal, and kind of what they need to do to put together a more successful one.

It's just, it's not where people expected to be by mid-summer.

- Were you surprised that there were no bids?

- I was shocked.

I was shocked.

In the newsroom, a colleague, Alexandra Leslie, was looking, waiting for the bids to come in, and she said to me, "I think it says there are no bids."

And I said, "Oh, that can't be right.

Let's take another look."

And I was stunned.

That's how surprising it was to reporters who were tracking this.

- And the governor's administration is looking at this at the same time that a new poll shows that the governor's approval rating is low.

Let's talk about that.

- Well, you know, so this new UNH survey of Rhode Island voters, which came out in July, showed his approval rating all the way down to 29%, a little worse than some other recent polling, but all the polls have shown him taking a hit.

And yeah, it's hard, Michelle, not to think, this is partly related to public concern about whether the governor and his administration has their arms around the bridge problem.

Of course, the bidding issue being the chief reason for that.

And it does come, as you know, McKee is looking ahead.

He wants to run for reelection in 2026.

He's clearly gonna have another strong challenge from Helena Foulkes.

New campaign fundraising numbers out this week showed he raised a bit more money than her in the last quarter, but she's actually already sitting on more cash than him looking at that campaign.

So it's something his advisors have to start to think about.

- And you're thinking about 2026 and 2024 is not even over yet.

- Oh yeah.

- Thank you so much, Ted.

- I'm thinking many elections ahead.

- No surprise.

(Ted laughs) Always good to be with you.

- Good to be here.