Renowned political journalist Judy Woodruff, who has covered politics and breaking news for more than five decades, will moderate a town hall in Milwaukee on Monday night as part of her ‘America at a Crossroads‘ series, a PBS project that examines the many divisions fracturing the United States.
The town hall taping will take place at Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery.
“We’re going to gather together roughly 50 or 60 voters,” Woodruff said in an interview this week with Milwaukee Magazine. “We’ve been in contact with far more people than that. We want to put together a mix of views for a cross-section of Wisconsin and Milwaukee area voters, broadly. We know the city of Milwaukee leans one way and the state of Wisconsin is split right down the middle and rural areas lean another way. We are trying to bring together a representative sample. We will have people who lean left, lean right and lean to the center, people who are undecided, former Donald Trump voters who now aren’t and vice versa, former Democrats who are undecided. We have what we think will be a good cross-section of the state.”
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Best Place was selected because “we like the look of it and we thought Pabst said Wisconsin and Milwaukee,” said Woodruff, senior correspondent for PBS News Hour.
The special, “Crossroads: A Conversation with America,” will air in prime time on PBS stations across the county on Sept. 23. The town hall, which isn’t open to the public, is being produced in partnership with Milwaukee PBS.
It will mark the first town hall held as part of “Judy Woodruff Presents: America at a Crossroads.”
“When we started out, I said that at one point during these two years, I would love to do a town hall-type event in a swing state,” Woodruff said. “I wanted to go where we have a mix of voters and I preferred to do it while we were well into this project. We’re on the cusp of this election, less than two months away, and we want to know what people are thinking about the divide, what do they think about the issues, what do they think about people who are on the other side, and are there ways we can come together on issues like spending, the economy, immigration and reproductive rights. Can people envision a way of accepting compromise on the things they feel so strongly about? Those are the questions that I want to ask.”
Woodruff, 77, launched “America at a Crossroads” after stepping away from anchoring duties for the PBS News Hour in December 2022. She had solo-anchored the News Hour since 2016 and served as a rotating anchor for the broadcast from 2009 to 2013.
In 2013, Woodruff and the late Gwen Ifill were named co-anchors and managing editors of the PBS News Hour, the first time a U.S. network broadcast had a female co-anchor team. Woodruff first joined what was then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, as chief Washington correspondent in 1983, serving until 1993 in that capacity. She previously reported at NBC News and CNN.
“I had been anchoring for a long time at News Hour and I knew I wanted to keep reporting in some form,” Woodruff said. “It struck me, as somebody who has covered American politics for decades, literally going back to the 1970s, that the country has never been as divided, or I have never seen it as divided, as it is right now, with people farther apart on the issues, and angrier. It seemed that everywhere I looked, not just in Washington but increasingly across the country, people were fighting over things. I decided that I really wanted to spend the next couple of years focusing on that. Why are we so polarized? Why are we so divided?”
America at a Crossroads began airing in early 2023.
“We’ve spent the last year and a half traveling around the country,” she said. “We’ve been to 25 states plus the District of Columbia. We have prepared and aired 43 pieces on News Hour, every other Wednesday night, and we aired a special at the end of last year and in the coming week we will be recording this town hall in Milwaukee. The goal of it has been to try to understand and hear from the American people themselves about what are we divided over, why do people think we’re divided like this, do they feel it is the right place to be and, if not, what do they think we ought to do about it. I wanted to understand it from Americans themselves.”
The findings have been eye-opening, Woodruff said.
“To boil it down, these are divisions that are not only deep, they are long-standing and they’ve been building and growing over a period of time and it’s complicated,” she said. “On the one hand, you can say that it’s pretty obvious that it’s complicated, but there are layers to this. You could argue that it goes back to the 1990s when Newt Gingrich came out with his Contract with America. You can look back to the results of the 2000 election, which went to the Supreme Court. George W. Bush won but Al Gore’s supporters felt that he had really won. There are resentments and gorges that go back decades.”
People now have stronger feelings on issues from immigration to abortion and the role of government and they are expressing them more openly, Woodruff said.
“The media has made that more possible with cable news and talk radio. Social media especially has made it possible for people to just throw their views out there and do it anonymously if they want to and be really angry about it,” she said. “I would say it’s also the case that economic inequity has also played a role. Many Americans, thanks to globalization and trade policies, feel left out and they point a finger and say that Washington doesn’t understand us and have let our jobs go overseas. You have more recently this populous playbook on the part of some American politicians who have said let’s use these feelings of resentment to our benefit. You put all that together and it’s a pretty angry stew and it’s just getting more so as we are in the election season.”
Woodruff spent time in Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention in July but it was during the election for state Supreme Court justice in 2023 that she decided a return trip to the city would be important for her program.
“I decided back them that this was a place I really wanted to come back to before the election,” she said. “We knew the RNC would be there but I thought it would be great to come back again before November. To me, Wisconsin is emblematic of the whole country in many ways. Of course, over the years I’ve been in and out of Wisconsin covering politics there. I’m really looking forward to being back in Milwaukee.”
