By Stephen Silver
The 2024 presidential election was like no other in history, and CNN’s Dana Bash had a front-row seat for some of its most important moments.
Bash, who is CNN’s chief political correspondent and host of both “Inside Politics With Dana Bash” and “State of the Union With Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,” appeared Nov. 14 as part of the Main Line Speaker Series at Main Line Reform Temple-Beth Elohim in Wynnewood.
The event filled the synagogue’s sanctuary despite taking place opposite an Eagles Thursday night game.
The Main Line Speaker Series launched in 2018, with past speakers including Howie Roseman, Terry Gross, Jon Meacham, former Sen. Al Franken, Michael Smerconish and Doris Kearns Goodwin. The series will next host Adam Grant, the author and organizational psychologist, on April 2.
The sponsors of the talk were Tracy and Marc Ginsburg, Amy and Michael Koppelman, Rich and Rachel Lester and Marcy and Tom Wiener. Jeff Jubelirer, a corporate communications expert and Main Line congregant, moderated a Q&A with Bash, in which pre-submitted questions were asked.
“When we secured this appearance back in January, we all knew that Dana would deliver an insightful and provocative post-election recap,” Michael Koppelman said while introducing Bash. They didn’t know, however, that Bash would be present for so many key moments of the campaign — nor did they know, he joked, that the Eagles would be playing that night. Bash’s talk was titled, “Post-Election Analysis With Dana Bash.”
Bash is Jewish, grew up in northern New Jersey and is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. She shared in the speech that she was attending a Jewish summer camp visiting day with her son when she got word that Joe Biden was dropping out of the presidential race.
“I’m proud of being Jewish, and of how our community has come together,” Bash said during the speech. “I can feel all the Yiddishkeit here.”
She added that she appreciates that CNN has allowed her to report on antisemitism, including a 2022 special called, “Rising Hate: Antisemitism in America.”
The correspondent also told stories about several of the key moments she was a part of during the 2024 campaign. She and her colleague Tapper — the Jewish Philadelphia-area native — were the moderators for the fateful June presidential debate between Donald Trump and Biden, where Biden’s sluggish performance led to his departure from the race just weeks later.
Once Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, Bash in late August conducted the first interview with Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. She also conducted a memorable interview with vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, in mid-September, at the height of the “they’re eating the cats” controversy.
Then, in late October, Bash took a reporting trip to the Philadelphia suburbs, not far from the synagogue, where she spoke on camera with both Democratic and Republican groups who were working to turn out the Jewish vote for their respective candidates. Pennsylvania has the largest Jewish population of any of the seven battleground states.
Bash and Tapper got the coveted assignment to moderate the June 27 debate in Atlanta, which required a great deal of preparation, including mock debates much like what the candidates do.
While the CNN team prepared for what they thought was every possible contingency, “What we didn’t prep for was what happened,” Bash said, of Biden’s candidacy-ending performance.
While Trump arrived hours before the start of the debate, Bash shared that President Biden did not arrive in the debate venue until 8:40 p.m., about 20 minutes before the debate began. CNN’s makeup artists didn’t get to work on Biden, she said — disproving conspiracy theories that the network had somehow screwed up Biden’s makeup on purpose.
On August 29, Bash — who had interviewed Harris and her Jewish husband, Doug Emhoff, several times over the years — conducted the first interview with Harris and Walz. Among the questions she asked in that interview was what Harris planned to do to achieve a cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war.
Of that October visit to the Philadelphia suburbs, Bash stated she “got out of the studio for one piece,” in which she spoke to representatives of both the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Jewish Democratic Council of America. On that trip, Bash also visited Hymie’s Deli, which was used to film Jewish-focused ads for both candidates.
Bash said in the speech that “it’s too early to know how the Jewish vote went down” in the election, although she did state that Rockland County, New York, the most Jewish county in the country by percentage, had a 14-point swing towards Trump.
As for the election itself, Bash mostly attributed the result to inflation and the global anti-incumbency fervor that has affected most Western democracies this year, while also referencing the unique coalition that Trump cultivated.
After the speech, in a moment that went semi-viral on social media, an activist from the group Code Pink confronted Bash in the sanctuary, stating, “I’m really upset at what I perceive to be a conflation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism,” and accused Bash of “being a mouthpiece for the genocide in Gaza.”
Bash responded that she was not there to debate, but that “being anti-Israel, anti-Israeli government, is not antisemitic,” and referenced protesters who have showed up at her home.
“You came to a place of Jewish worship, stood on the Bima, near the holy Torah scroll, and pretended to be congregants,” Bash wrote on X, in response to the video. “You have no shame, no decency and no clue what you’re talking about.”
In the Q&A period, Bash also struck a defiant tone against the idea that the incoming Trump administration could pressure journalists who are doing their jobs.
“Intimidation is not gonna work,” she said.
Stephen Silver is a Broomall-based freelance writer.