Don Gonyea
You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.
Gonyea has been covering politics full-time for NPR since the 2000 presidential campaign. That's the year he chronicled a controversial election and the ensuing legal recount battle in Florida that awarded the White House to George W. Bush. Gonyea was named NPR White House Correspondent that year and subsequently covered the entirety of the Bush presidency, from 2001-2008. He was at the White House on the morning of Sept. 11, providing live reports following the evacuation of the building.
As White House correspondent, Gonyea covered the Bush administration's prosecution of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 2004 campaign, he traveled with both Bush and Democratic nominee John Kerry. He has served as co-anchor of NPR's election night coverage, and in 2008 Gonyea was the lead reporter covering Barack Obama's presidential campaign for NPR, from the Iowa caucuses to victory night in Chicago.
Gonyea has filed stories from around the globe, including Moscow, Beijing, London, Islamabad, Doha, Budapest, Seoul, San Salvador, and Hanoi. He attended President Bush's first-ever meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Slovenia in 2001, as well as subsequent — and at times testy — meetings between the two leaders in St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Bratislava. He also covered Obama's first trip overseas as president. During the 2016 election, he traveled extensively with both GOP nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His coverage of union members and white working class voters in the Midwest also gave early insight into how candidate Trump would tap into economic anxiety to win the presidency.
In 1986, Gonyea got his start at NPR reporting from Michigan on labor unions and the automobile industry. His first public radio job was at station WDET in Detroit. He has spent countless hours on picket lines and in union halls covering strikes at the major US auto companies, along with other labor disputes. Gonyea also reported on the development of alternative fuel and hybrid vehicles, Dr. Jack Kevorkian's assisted-suicide crusade, and the 1999 closing of Detroit's classic Tiger Stadium.
He serves as a fill-in host on NPR news magazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Weekend All Things Considered.
Over the years, Gonyea has contributed to PBS's NewsHour, the BBC, CBC, AP Radio, and the Columbia Journalism Review. He periodically teaches college journalism courses.
Gonyea has won numerous national and state awards for his reporting. He was part of the team that earned NPR a 2000 George Foster Peabody Award for the All Things Considered series "Lost & Found Sound."
A native of Monroe, Michigan, Gonyea is an honors graduate of Michigan State University.
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Candidate John F. Kennedy was young, energetic and handsome, and he knew how to harness the power of mass media. Fifty years after the president's death, candidates are still following his lead. -
Detroit this week elected Mike Duggan as its new mayor. The longtime county official and successful businessman, hard-charging and pugnacious, will lead a city rich in history and culture — and which just filed for bankruptcy. Don Gonyea, who calls the city home, ponders the challenges facing Duggan and Detroit. -
Bill Shuster, a seven-term Republican congressman from rural, central Pennsylvania, has long been considered a social and fiscal conservative. But his vote to end the government shutdown and close alliance with Speaker John Boehner has put him on the list of GOP incumbents facing Tea Party-backed primary challenges next year. -
It's been a tough week for the Tea Party and its supporters in Congress. But activist Sal Russo and others say that their movement isn't going away. They're looking ahead to next year's midterm elections, as well as to next month's local races. -
Despite their failure to defund the health care law, Republicans still detest it — and now there's a movement underway to oust Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. What's unexpected is that the effort is being led by Sen. Pat Roberts, a fellow Kansan she has long had close ties to. -
Beyond voicing frustration, the traditional Republican power players on Capitol Hill and in the business community haven't been able to do much so far to end the current congressional standoff. -
The GOP can still reasonably claim to be the "party of business." But it's clear there's a significant amount of tension between the Republican Party and the business community. -
Tea Party Patriots are making a push for Congress to defund the new health care law as part of debates over the budget and funding the federal government. On Capitol Hill Tuesday, Tea Party activists have scheduled an afternoon gathering to rally support for cutting off funding for the health law often referred to as Obamacare.
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Veterans of President Obama's presidential campaigns want to challenge Republicans' domination of the state's politics. The group says Texas' shifting demographics — including a fast-growing Hispanic population — combined with an intense grass-roots effort could give them an opening. -
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who died this week at 89, had been the only remaining World War II veteran in the Senate. Just two are left in the House. Today, fewer than 1 in 5 members of Congress have military service on their resume.
