TALLAHASSEE, Florida (HUNS) — It is twilight at Bragg Memorial Stadium when, amidst the familiar buzz of the night on Florida A&M’s campus, a large blue bus makes a sharp turn downhill to pull into the parking lot.
This isn’t a Greyhound or a typical coach, rather this midterm season it’s become the new home base of Joy Reid, famed former MSNBC television show host and prolific political commentator.
“You’re basically in our living room,” Reid quipped as students toured the bus which is now acting as her center of operations during The Joy Reid Show’s ongoing “Midterminology Tour.”
During the tour, she’s hosted several politicians from Justin Pearson, a candidate for U.S. Representative in Tennessee to Angie Nixon who is running for the U.S. Senate in Florida.
She’s also engaged with voters across the South, going to areas that many traditional news networks have shunned for years, including Mississippi and Alabama.
“And now we’re in Tallahassee,” Reid said.
Reid remarked that this year Black voters seemed motivated in ways that she hadn’t seen for over a decade.
“I’ll tell you, the consistent thing that I’ve seen is a level of motivation among Black voters that is unlike what I’m used to in a midterm. And I’m including the midterms when Barack Obama was president.”
She pointed to a variety of potential factors that may be leading to this surge in motivation, from rapidly increasing prices for consumers, to an upsurge in voting rights concerns among Black voters after a 2025 Supreme Court decision, that led to a mass slashing of majority Black districts across the South.
“Between the gas prices, the food prices … and the anger over the attempts to steal Black votes and undermine the Voting Rights Act, it seems to have motivated some folks”
For Reid, this year’s election cycle is deeper than a simple civic choice; she views it as a way to protect the Black community from ongoing attacks.
“Whichever party is anti-Black, that’s where six in 10 white voters are going to go. … Black voters have to wake up to that being an actual fact, and we have to vote in a bloc to prevent people who think like that from governing us,” Reid said. “I don’t really care if people are racist, if they don’t like Black people. I just don’t want them governing me.”
Reid doesn’t simply view voting as a right, but also as a crucial component of Black culture. In Reid’s eyes Black people who refuse to vote are shunning a history and tradition of civic engagement.
“Our history is voting,” Reid said. “The minute we got the vote after slavery, we went right in there and voted. Don’t be anti the culture. If you don’t vote, you’re anti your culture.”
The idea of touring across the South to meet voters wasn’t new to Reid. During her time at MSNBC, she felt limited to areas where journalists typically swarm during election season like Iowa or New Hampshire.
“I always wanted to go out during election season, and they normally let us,” she said. “So, we would go to Iowa. You know they always want to go to the same place.”
“I asked to go on a five-city tour, I wanted to go to Arkansas, all these Southern states, places that no one normally goes, and they said no.”
Reid sees the Midterminology Tour as a way to express her newfound journalistic freedom while also connecting back to one of the basics of journalism — the face-to-face contact that breathes life into stories.
“It’s about talking to our people, inspiring our people and also just finding out what our people are doing,” Reid said. “I’m doing this, because that’s the only way to cover people; it’s to actually talk to people.”
Joy Reid’s tour continues, and she livestreams her journey on various platforms, including her YouTube channel, Facebook page and Instagram page.
Justin Jordan is editor-in-chief and Chloe Waites is managing editor of The FAMUAN at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida, where this article was originally published. The FAMUAN and HUNewsService.com are part of the HBCU Election Project in collaboration with WHUT-TV Howard University Television. They are also among 10 HBCU newsrooms in the Indaba Student Press Leadership and Innovation Consortium, sponsored by Howard’s Center for Journalism & Democracy.
