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.
-
As the president-elect meets with potential cabinet secretaries and tourists wander, the lobby of Trump Tower is an unusual scene. -
Young voters, an increasingly dominant force in Florida, are frustrated that many of the issues they feel so strongly about aren't a major part of the discussion by the major party candidates. -
The Ohio governor has suspended his presidential campaign, leaving Donald Trump as the last man standing. Kasich won one state — his home state — and trails far behind in the delegate count. -
The current leader for the GOP presidential nomination received a standing ovation from a crowd in South Carolina after he read aloud his statement to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. -
President Obama traveled to West Virginia to talk about prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction Wednesday.
-
His candidacy has floundered, so the Wisconsin governor is going back to what made him a hero to Republicans — taking on labor unions. But his sweeping efforts will likely run into stiff resistance. -
Scott Walker was riding high in Iowa until Donald Trump came along. Walker appeared at the Iowa State Fair Monday, where he tried to rekindle the fire with voters, who think he's gotten boring. -
The shooting at a historically black church in Charleston briefly put a pause on the campaign. But eventually politics crept back in, and both sides, as usual, took different lessons from the tragedy. -
Jeb Bush is walking back comments he made on Iraq that he would have authorized the invasion even knowing what we know now. But he later said he actually doesn't know what he would have done. -
Mike Huckabee is back on the campaign trail after finishing second for the GOP nomination in 2008. In his latest run, he's harking back to an even earlier time, with 1970s icon Tony Orlando.
