The Surprising Blueprint Jerry Springer Left Behind for Democrats

Before Jerry Springer headlined his controversial talk show, he was a progressive politician who won over Republicans and Democrats alike.

Jerry Springer, the politician. (Credit: Jerry Springer)

Hit the rewind button on Jerry Springer’s life — before he shocked viewers with sensational tabloid-like tales on daytime television — and you’ll discover an idealistic politician with the rare ability to connect with voters across party lines.

In Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer, an Audible podcast by journalist Leon Neyfakh, a fascinating oral history of Springer’s life emerges — from his days as a progressive City Councilman and Mayor of Cincinnati to the host of a bombastic television show which earned him the moniker “titan of trash.”

Over the course of nine chapters, Neyfakh tracks Springer’s surprising rise in Ohio’s political sphere, where he advocated for prison reform and helped ratify the 26th amendment (which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18), along with the sex scandal that threatened to derail his career in office. There was also Jerry Springer the local news anchor and Jerry Springer the television host, who — wildly enough — started out his career interviewing Oliver North and Jesse Jackson. A wealth of tales come courtesy of his closest political allies, opponents, former producers and guests of The Jerry Springer Show, some of whom open up about being exploited during the lowest moments of their lives.

Neyfakh spoke to Ministry of Pop Culture about grappling with the dual sides of Springer, what Democrats can learn from his political success, and the one question he’d ask the late talk show host.

It’s so hard to reconcile the early Jerry Springer, who demonstrated such empathy and cared about the less fortunate, with the host of The Jerry Springer Show. How did you navigate the grey areas of this person?

That was really exciting for us because you seldom get such a stark example of someone who really does seem like a different person when you consider them at work versus at home. I think Jerry really wanted to believe that you could separate your job from your identity — and I think for a lot of people that is possible. It's a harder case to make when it's your show, when you're making that much money on it, when your name is in the title. We try not to let him off the hook on that.

He was a huge anti-war activist during the Vietnam years and the Iraq War. A lot of folks in Cincinnati were really excited to talk about Jerry the politician, Jerry the city councilman, Jerry the mayor, and they really didn’t want to talk about the show … If I can generalize, I think they were kind of disappointed that this is what he made of his life and that he didn’t live up to the promise that they saw in him as a leader, as a public servant. I think they saw it as a series of accidents that led him there. He lost the governor's race in ‘82 and then he took this job doing commentary on the local news with every intention of going back to politics as soon as he could. One thing led to another and all of a sudden he’s surrounded by exotic dancers and incestuous siblings. I think a lot of people were like, “How the hell did our guy end up here?”

It was really interesting to learn that he managed to win over Democrats and Republicans alike as city councilman and mayor of Cincinnati. As the Democrats scramble after this most recent election, is there anything they can take away from Jerry’s early political career?

I mean, he seems like exactly the kind of candidate the Democrats dream of. He had super progressive views, he was very unapologetic about them, he could speak about them very persuasively and passionately. We talked to people in Cincinnati who compared him to Bill Clinton in terms of his political gifts, his magnetism and how likable and charismatic he was. He was able to connect with a very wide range of people.

He was very good talking to college kids who were part of the counterculture and who were against the Vietnam War. He first came into politics advocating for lowering voting age as part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He could give a speech to a bunch of hippie college students and get them excited and riled up and make them feel like he was one of them. And then he could go to a VFW hall and speak to a bunch of veterans and not stray from his anti-war messages necessarily but express it in a way that people were willing to hear. Even if they didn't agree with him, they could tell that he wasn't being condescending and he wasn't being fake.

…If you put a lot of other people in the role of the host of The Jerry Springer Show, they wouldn’t have known how to talk to people who were struggling with the sorts of things that people talked about on that show. He really came across as non-judgmental, non-condescending and not like an anthropologist. I think that's the really core skill that explains both his success in politics and entertainment — Jerry Springer is proof that these skill sets are not that different.

Yes, campaigning is different than governing … just because someone is likable and charismatic doesn’t mean they’ll be good at being president. But you do have to win first.

He knew how to make headlines as a politician, too — I mean, he once wrestled a bear to raise money for charity …

He had a real killer instinct for spectacle from the beginning. The old guard of Cincinnati politics saw him as a lightweight for that reason — “Oh, this guy's good at PR, he's good at marketing but he doesn't have substance.” I think that was the hater’s view on him early on but he knew how to make people listen to him, he knew how to get on TV, he knew how to make the news. I think that's even more important now than it was then.

What went into your reporting process for the podcast? You spoke to so many people from Jerry Springer’s world — from former guests and producers of The Jerry Springer Show to his former political opponents and the reporter who broke the story about his time with a sex worker.

You never know what you're going to find after you decide to do a show and you pick up the phone for the first time.

In some cases, there’s not enough people around who can speak to the story you're trying to tell or, for some reason, they don't want to talk to you. We had an early disappointing moment when we approached the Springer estate which I think is —either formally or informally — represented by one of his very close friends Gene Galvin. They were lifelong friends and he said that they didn't want to participate and that Jerry's wife wasn't going to be available to us … we kept knocking on their door every couple months to see if anything changed but ultimately they didn't talk to us. Often what happens when you get a no when you knock on the front door is that it forces you to get creative.

We started thinking about everyone who was on the periphery of the Jerry Springer story. There's all these different phases in Jerry's life. You have the television show, which ran for twenty-seven years … that's twenty-seven years of producers and guests and media executives who we could call. We were almost more interested in his political career — both his early years as a city councilman and mayor of Cincinnati and would-be governor of Ohio — but also these later efforts that he made starting in the early 2000s to make his way back to politics.

These figures like Jerry Springer or Michael Jackson, who we made a podcast about a couple years ago, move through the world and come into contact with so many different people and institutions. If you can be vigilant about writing down every name you come across as you read old newspaper articles and transcripts of interviews you can really get a pretty stacked cast at the end. Even if you don't necessarily get the people in the very inner circle, sometimes that can force you into finding more interesting, more surprising voices to be your witnesses.

Despite the differences in their political beliefs, there are some significant overlaps between Trump and Springer, which gets explored in the podcast. Did you have a sense early on how Trump would come into all this?

There's this sort of ambient conventional wisdom that if you were to try to recreate our culture's path to Trump, Jerry Springer is in there somewhere. He's one of the data points in the coarsening of our culture and the breaking down of norms that Trump has thrived [in]. I didn’t know how he spoke about being like Trump without the racism or that he said things like: “Trump stole my constituency, these are my people, these are my fans.” It’s really interesting to think that this guy who gets some of the blame for softening the ground for the rise of Trump was actually, potentially, someone who could have helped fight back if the chips had fallen a little differently.

If you could have asked Jerry Springer one question, what would it be?

Just to cut to the core of it, I would have said, “Do you wish you hadn't gotten that job with the local news? Do you wish you had stayed on the path you were on? How close did you ever come at any point to walking away from the show? … How close did you get to saying, ‘You know what, I'm not going to renew my contract. I have enough money. I don't need to keep flying around a private jet, I'm going to be done with this, move on with my life, and recommit myself to the political ambitions that I always had and the values that I have always stood for, privately and politically.’”

I couldn't tell. You read some of the reports about these aborted campaigns that he flirted with — first in 1999 and then again 2003 and then again in 2017 — and you get the sense that he really took them seriously, he really wanted to try and come back and reclaim his place on that path that he had left behind. Each time, he decided not to. I never felt like I fully understood his calculus about why he ultimately felt like he couldn't walk away from the show.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.