"This is bad for America, but great for us"

In many ways, though, Travis is an unlikely figure to become the voice of the disaffected conservative fan who doesn’t want his peas and mashed potatoes to touch. Travis is a lifelong Democrat, having volunteered on Al Gore’s presidential campaign. In college, at George Washington, he worked in the office of Democratic Congressman Bob Clement of Tennessee. In addition to his law degree from Vanderbilt, Travis also has a Masters of Fine Arts (his thesis was a murder mystery based in the Virgin Islands). His bookshelf, he pointed out to me, contains Taylor Branch’s seminal series on the Civil Rights movement and a stack of William Faulkner novels. And, yes, there’s a copy of Jim Miller and Tom Shales’ exhaustive oral history on ESPN—Those Guys Have All the Fun.

But there were some aspects of Travis’ background that made him absolutely perfect for the role. His biggest audience was SEC football fans, living in states where the distinctions between college football and Republican politics are sometimes hard to discern. (It also didn’t hurt that in 2013 he had been hired by ESPN competitor Fox Sports as a TV personality, and the site hosted his blog). There was plenty of overlap between his audience and the one that lapped up accusations of liberal bias in political media. It helped, too, that Travis loves controversy even more than college football. “He loves the big response,” his wife, Lara, told me. Bobby Bones, another Nashville radio host, recalled the first time he listened to Travis on local sports radio Travis delivered a screed against food stamps. “I had been a food stamps kid, so I hated him,” Bones said. “But, honestly, the more I listened to him, the more I respected that he was willing to make his arguments.”