Rachel Maddow and other MSNBC hosts are holding a live event ahead of the 2024 election
MSNBC hosts Chris Hayes, Lawrence O'Donnell, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner, and Jen Psaki are among those also slated to speak at the network's live event.
About two and a half million viewers tune in to MSNBC to hear Rachel Maddow opine about politics and the state of the president race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But as the 2024 election nears, fans will get the chance to hear her live and in-person.
Maddow and more than a dozen MSNBC hosts and personalities will take the stage at a daylong event the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City on Saturday, Sept. 7, to discuss the presidential race, which at that point will be just two months out from Election Day.
Tickets go on sale Monday, and can be purchased on MSNBC’s website. The event will not be livestreamed — the only way to check it out is to attend in-person.
Among those scheduled to be on hand with Maddow are fellow hosts Chris Hayes, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Stephanie Rhule.
Two former Biden administration staffers turned MSNBC hosts — Jen Psaki and Symone Sanders-Townsend — will also be part of the event, as well as resident number cruncher Steve Kornacki, who will be breaking down the latest polling.
The event will be moderated by Luke Russert, author and son of late Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert, who returned to the network late last year to serve as the creative director of MSNBC’s live events.
“MSNBC has the most dedicated and loyal fan base. It’s an honor to bring the best of the MSNBC portfolio to the most important part of our family — the viewers — in-person,” Russert said in a statement. “We hope to continue to foster unique connections and inspire our audience.”
MSNBC held its first live event in March, which featured former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican running for Senate in Maryland despite being a vocal critic of Trump. The live events are part of the network’s strategy to invest in nonlinear programming as viewers continue to shed their cable subscriptions.
“We continue to meet our audiences where they are in innovative ways and MSNBC Live is a natural extension of that effort,” MSNBC President Rashida Jones said in a note to employees. “It’s the result of the brand loyalty built by trusted journalism and fostered by the most engaged weekday audience in all of television.”
In 2019, MSNBC experimented with having a studio audience during live tapings of Hayes’ All In show on Friday nights. The format showed promise, but was disrupted by the COVID pandemic.
Since then, Hayes has cut down hosting All In to four nights a week, but hit the road last year for live tapings of his podcast, Why Is This Happening?, which included a stop at the Fillmore in Philadelphia in October. He was also joined by Maddow in New York City in November, which drew an audience of 1,200.
Maddow only hosts The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday nights, easily the network’s most-viewed hour every week, but is keeping busy with other projects. Earlier this month, she launched a new season of her podcast Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, which tells the true story of World War II-era lawmakers who plotted to overthrow the government by spreading lies and misinformation across the country.
“Even though I find it disturbing and a little scary that, in our own time, some sizable chunk of Americans seem ready to jettison real elections and instead embrace rule by force, it’s somehow heartening to me to know that this isn’t a brand new challenge — another sizable chunk of Americans felt essentially the same way in the lead-up to World War II,” Maddow said in a statement.
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