The Biggest Loser
Episode Notes
Transcript
Sarah Longwell joins the group to evaluate the momentous midterms.
highlights/lowlights
Mona’s:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/07/putin-backs-down-ukraine-turkey-china-india/
Bill’s:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/world/europe/ukraine-russia-kherson-retreat.html
Linda’s:
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/21/texas-republican-democrat-hispanic-voters/
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
-
Welcome to Bank to differ. The Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right on Monochiren, syndicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I am joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institute and The Wall Street Journal. Linda Chavez of Lina Scanlon Center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter, Ij on the right. Our special guest this week is Sarah Longwell, the distinguished publisher of the Bulwark.
-
And what a difference twenty four hours make, but the midterms are, of course, the big story this week. I have to say I was kind of gobsmacked by the results Honestly, there’s so much to discuss that it makes my job easy. I’m gonna ask all of you for your reactions. And I want to start with Sarah. Sarah, what about the fate of some of the worst Republican candidates that Trump had backed?
-
Yeah, guys. Good day for democracy. It’s not over yet. There’s still a long way to go. I heard around the the bulwark, you know, block that it was positively funereal.
-
Over here on PEG to differ last week. But I gotta tell you over on the focus group pod in a different corner of the bulwark. I was a little more bullish, I think, in part because in talking to the focus group, the swing voters over the last, you know, three months or so, there was a very clear pattern in the swing states, which was the swing voters were like a lot of them were center right. They were pretty down on Biden. They weren’t wild about the democrats, but they really, really disliked the individual candidates.
-
They saw them as too extreme, sometimes because of abortion or because of the election denialism or just kind of the whole package. And I, you know, was pretty hopeful about a couple places that came through. So, you know, Wisconsin Evers holding on there. Whitmer just absolutely crushing in in Michigan. Mastriano going down really hard to Josh Shapiro by I think like thirteen points in Pennsylvania, and that governor gets to appoint the Secretary of State.
-
You know, for me, it was always about who’s gonna certify twenty twenty four? Will we have a bunch of election deniers in Governors seats in in Secretary of States, and we’re gonna oversee elections and for Wisconsin, for Pennsylvania, for Michigan, and for the Republicans in Georgia with Brad Ravensburger and Brian Kemp, we now have a bunch of contested states that have
-
people that we can be confident are gonna certify elections, and that is just a huge win. Yeah. Damon, another thing that was really just such a huge relief about this midterm was, first of all, everything was orderly. People voted. There have been, oh, I mean, a hat maybe one or two people who have refused to concede their losses.
-
But for the most part, you know, people actually conceded their races, doctor Oz did. Stacey Abrams did, J. D. Vance, defeated Tim Ryan, and Tim Ryan gave a beautiful statement about the importance of in a democracy of the losers conceding their losses. So that was kind of refreshing too.
-
Right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a remarkable day and
-
especially evening last night, you know, maybe we’re not supposed to usually refer to actual dates and time because want people to listen to the podcast into the future and not be hemmed in here, but of course, we are talking about Tuesday, November eighth, and the election. And the whole day became kind of more magical as it went on, and it has continued into the following day as more races have come in. And as you said, lots of people conceding in the way that you’re supposed to concede. You’re you know, and this sort of hits on some of those themes that that Tim Ryan mentioned in his concession speech that you concede the race because you know that the other side winning isn’t going to be the of the world and you’re gonna be back. There’s gonna be another election in a little while, and then you’ll get another chance.
-
And this really has vindicated that a lot. It felt like a really normal day and a normal process. Now, of course, if you’re the Democrats, it was a very cheering. And if you’re a Republican, you have a lot of reasons to be sad about it. But once again, you know, in two years, we’re gonna do this whole thing again along with the presidential election.
-
And the more that we can reaffirm that, okay, not everyone, even on the Republican side, is is as crazy as the craziest man of all. Donald Trump and our you know, people are willing to to lose and walk away like grown ups. That was very very nice to see our reaffirmed. It is a little sad that we got to a point where that needs to be affirmed since I consider that mine higher adult life to be a given, that that’s what American democracy is all about. You kinda start there and then you you have fights about who who should win, what vision of the common good we believe in and do get out over those things, but all with the kind of background assumption that you know, this is there there is no apocalypse at the end of the next vote.
-
We have our contest. We have our fight. Then we go away like grown ups and we come back and do it again two years later. So, yes, I’m I’m in a good mood today. And it isn’t entirely because a lot of the candidates eye support did well, although that helps.
-
Linda, let me sketch two sides of the coin. So in one sense, this is bad. That is the GOP Congress will now have in absolute terms more election deniers than it had on January sixth twenty twenty one. So that’s not good, but on the other hand, I mean, the whole vibe coming out of yesterday, first of all, the fact that, you know, for example, JD Vance thank a whole bunch of people in his in his victory speech. He didn’t thank Trump.
-
A lot of people are saying this is a very, very bad night for Trump. And the sense that one gets is that the worst thing you could have been on Tuesday night was one of the crazies that Trump had introduced into American politics. So how do you think that shakes out? Well, first of all, I’m really quite pleased with the outcome of the election. Look, I’m still
-
conservative. I still favor Republican policies by and large certainly on neck and neck. Where do you find them, Linda? I know. Well, that’s the point.
-
But what I see coming out of this is that you’re going to have a, I think, very narrow majority for the Republicans in the House, which means they probably will not be able to do great harm. They are not going to be able to, you know, for example, they were talking about impeaching not just Joe Biden, but also Merrick Garland. And, you know, they they were gonna do some really crazy my Yorkas. Yeah. Yeah.
-
Yeah. So that’s not gonna happen. And so I think that’s good. And the same holds for the senate. I mean, it looks like you know, it’s gonna end up being again a fifty fifty senate.
-
So all of that means that we’re gonna have to see some moderation on the wildest schemes of both sides, but particularly the Republican side. They’re not gonna be able to go wild and go crazy. So I think all of that is good, and I think what Sarah said is the most important. It is those important governor’s races particularly in battleground states, where if the Republican had won, there would have been much more chance that come twenty twenty four, we could see again games being played with the presidential election. And Donald Trump did have a bad day.
-
Not least because his, you know, favored governor in in the country, Ron DeSanktimonious as he likes to call him. Not only one, he won really big. And it’s clear that that is gonna, you know, give him ideas about maybe expanding his sites and running for the presidency, and he’s not going to be deterred by Donald Trump. And he is much more popular in Florida
-
than Donald Trump is. So, you know, I think it was basically a good night. Bill Galston, this was one of the most interesting midterms that I can ever remember. In part because it didn’t fulfill the usual outline. Right?
-
But okay. So if the president who is in power is unpopular, then his party is going to be badly punished. By the voters in the midterms. That often happens, but it didn’t seem to happen very much this time. People were able tell pollsters, yes, I’m dissatisfied with Joe Biden’s leadership, but they apparently drew a distinction between Joe Biden and Democrats running in particular races.
-
That’s absolutely true, Mona. It turns out that the way we were thinking about job approval wasn’t fine grained enough. If you look at it as a switch, approve, disapproved, then the results appear paradoxical. But if you break it down into strongly approved, somewhat approved, somewhat disapproved and strongly disapproved, It turns out that Democrats did very well in that third category where people said that they somewhat disapproved of Joe Biden, but gave Democrats a four point margin anyway. And what that tells me is that the disapproval of Biden didn’t reach a sufficient level of intensity.
-
To get people who are open to the Democratic message to turn their back on it and say, okay, I’ll boat Republican this time to send that guy on the White House a message he won’t be able to ignore.
-
The
-
biggest surprise and I think perhaps the most significant surprise at least for me was that it turns out that you can’t tell the electorate what it is supposed to care about. As you know, early on, Mona, I thought that overturning Roe was a big deal. And like others, I was seduced into believing that the saliance of abortion had faded in the fall, but that turned out not to be the case. Thirty one percent of people who voted said inflation was my number one issue. But guess what?
-
Almost as many, twenty seven percent said that abortion was their number one issue. And crime, the issue that was supposed to pulverize Democrats, trailed at eleven percent. And so it turned out that this was nearly as much of an abortion election as it was an inflation election. And if you break it down into the pivotal swing states, There were two states where significantly more people said that abortion was their top issue than inflation No surprise in Michigan that they said that because of of the Michigan referendum. But if you look at Pennsylvania, thirty six percent of Pennsylvania said that abortion was their number one issue compared to only twenty nine percent who said that inflation was their number one issue.
-
So this was not the inflation Uber alice election that everybody thought that it was going to be, and it was certainly not the revenge on candidates and democrats who were quote unquote soft on crime election that people thought it was going to be.
-
Yes, Sarah, I want to come back to you on this abortion question. So there was a proposed amendment to the state constitution in Kentucky that would have stated there is no right to abortion or any requirement to fund abortion in the state constitution that was voted down. And it does seem, and I’d be curious to hear what your focus group insights would be about this, that voters were concerned about it. They hadn’t forgotten about it. As Bill says, it had not receded to the background.
-
And it’s interesting that Rhonda Santos did so well, that’s really a crushing victory. And you have to remember that in Florida, he backed a fifteen week abortion limitation, which is much more moderate than a lot of other Republicans were proposing. Yeah.
-
I think you have to look at Rhonda Santa’s kind of carving out that fifteen week sort of compromised position as part of the reason he was so dominant and it look let me tell you about the focus groups in a portion because it’s it’s been really interesting. We always ask, you know, how do you think things are going in the country? And people tend to use that time to talk about the things that they’re most worried about. And they, you know, they say things aren’t going well. They’re concerned about inflation.
-
They’re concerned about crime. They’re concerned about the economy supply chain. Whatever. When they very rarely mention abortion, even after the Bob’s decision, sometimes it would come up at the top but not that often. But then when you would go into, hey, your, you know, your races between, you know, Adam Waxalt and Cortez Naso.
-
People would say, oh, well, I’m voting for Cortez Naso, and they would say, because, lack thoughts too extreme on abortion. Like, abortion would come up in their vote choice. Come up in the as the context in which they would describe the extremism of the individual candidates. Whether it’s why they thought Mastriano was crazy, it’s why they thought Tudor Dixon was crazy, like Tudor Dixon, got defined very early on by her position that she thought a raped young woman, you know, like a teenager should have to carry the baby to term. That every voter knew that about her.
-
Every voter remembered it about her. And and the other way that I would think about it is, you know, if you go back a year or so, I was spending a lot of time talking about how in the focus groups, there’s a real enthusiasm gap between the Republicans and the Democrats. The Republicans were like, we want a revenge for you know, and the last election was stolen. I wanna go vote for any living breathing Republican. And the democrats were like, Me, Joe Biden’s too moderate.
-
Joe Biden’s too progressive. We I want this policy and this policy, you know, and they were just in a sort of a state of things. They were upset about COVID and The thing that I saw Boshing doing is really evening out the enthusiasm. Then they were kind of in a dogfight for independent voters, swing voters, And that’s where the candidate quality really came in. And a lot of those swing voters just couldn’t get there on these extreme candidates and abortion is kind of baked into that extremism.
-
Yeah. Damon so I think maybe
-
last week when we were a little funereal, One of the things we were anticipating is how, you know, how the new Republican majority in the House would behave. I mean, I think we have to say it is still likely that the Republicans will gain the speaker’s gavel, but they will do so more by the skin of their teeth than with any sort of commanding victory. And so do you think that changes the calculus about how they march in and start, you know, threatening people and and investigating Hunter Biden. Well, I suppose that they won’t be able to resist. Hunter Biden is in for it.
-
But But what about the impeachments and what about shutting down the government and so on and so forth? Do you think this will sort of cow them a little? Or how do you see it?
-
Well, I’d love to think so, but I I really have no reason to think that they’ll be rational in that kind of a way, like actually say, hey, wait a minute. Maybe we we didn’t do very well here. Maybe we defied all of the historic trends. In this election by not doing very well because we’re perceived as to extreme. Maybe we shouldn’t risk default of the United States over nonsense.
-
Maybe we shouldn’t impeach Biden for a cause that will invent halfway through the process of doing it. But again, I I have no reason to assume they won’t. Now the question is, can they? And so I think more than them all getting together. And this is by the way, assuming that we’re right that they actually will take the house, it still does seem if you were going to be a betting person that they will.
-
But I it is by no means certain. There are a lot of house races still out, a lot of them in California, a lot of the outstanding ones were ones that were pretty close and seemed to be leaning the Republicans, but that could very well end up in this kind of chaotic situation that we had on Tuesday. It it could end up that the democrats win certain seats back and it ends up being that it stays in Democratic hands. So we don’t really know, and that’s amazing to think about in and of itself. But aside from that, the caveat I wanted to throw in, assuming they keep control of the lower house, the problem is going to be that, again, I don’t expect them to get together in a giant group and to side on moderation.
-
But all there, it’s possible that they’re all they need is like six or ten or a dozen members of the house in very swinging districts where they do, you know, the the member just either survived by their skin of their teeth or just one by the skin of their teeth. And they say, you know, I don’t think this is gonna help me when I come back up for reelection in two years if I act like a lunatic. So actually, I count me out. And in order to overcome that, you would need an extremely cagey extremely powerful and persuasive House Speaker and WIP to be wrangling votes and, you know, if it’s Carthy. I don’t really know that he has that skill.
-
I think it’s much more likely what I thought was gonna happen is that they would have a margin of thirty or more seats and that he would be pushed to do these things by the caucus. And he would just go along because he actually isn’t that skilled at it and isn’t that
-
powerful.
-
And so he’d be kind of dragged along into the circus. But but that could actually flip the opposite direction. Now. If it’s only if they only have a margin of eight or ten seats, it doesn’t take many to say, you know what? I got cold feet about this.
-
I’m not gonna go along with this. And if that means that it’s a little embarrassing, too bad, I wanna keep my seat. I don’t wanna be yelled at my by my constituents for the next two years and then lose. So that I think is more the dynamic we may see. The narrower the the majority, the more that, I think, will come into play.
-
Yeah. Linda, let’s just take a moment to consider the Federman Oz race, which, honestly, I’m thinking is gonna sort of be come a staple of campaign school for the next several decades as people think about the implications of debates. Because Anybody who watched that debate came away thinking, oh, gosh, he’s toast. I mean, this was the worst performance I can ever recall seeing a poor thing. But still, you know, It was terrible.
-
And as as Bill was saying, you know, you can’t tell voters what they should think is important. And the voters obviously took that on board but said, yeah, never mind. I’m I’m voting for a federalman overalls. And, oh, by the way, I owe a senator-elect Federman, a deep apology. I
-
drew shade on his sartorial choices last week, suggested he get himself a collared shirt But you know, as I was watching him and as I was listening to some of the analysis about the way in which he so successfully captured the nomination. My husband looked at him and said, you know, I think this guy he he appeals to working class men. He could easily be a trumpster. I mean, if you just looked at him with your son in the Walmart, well, you might think he is, you know, was a trumpster. The hoodie and the tattoos and very working class appearance had some appeal.
-
He doesn’t look like a member of the elite. And it turned out that when he was running in the primaries, he spent a huge amount of time in red counties, in red districts, not that he hoped to switch them to Democrat, but he hoped to be able to garner a few extra votes, and it turned out in when you look at the analysis of how he won that primary, that paid off because on election night, as the various analysts went through and looked at each of the counties in Pennsylvania, it turned out that Federman outperformed by in those very counties. Now maybe it was only a few dozen votes here, a few hundred votes there, but it all added up. So, you know, I do think that we do pay way too much attention to debates, those of us who are sort of nerds, political nerds, and spend all of our time watching these things. We think everybody else does, but they don’t.
-
And we also think that because
-
we’re good talkers, that being a good talker is everything, Right.
-
Well, yeah. I think Donald Trump sort of approved that through the wrong, you know. I mean,
-
just he
-
he
-
was, you know, not articulate, still is not articulate even less so today than he was in two thousand sixteen. So anyway, so I think you’re right about that. And I do think for Democrats to be able to reach union voters, to be able to reach the working class male voters, this is absolutely vital to their success in being able to hold on. And I think federal in some ways showed them the way.
-
Bill, yeah, we’re
-
not supposed to talk about the time stamp on the on the podcast usually, but because of the election story unfolding, I’m gonna break that rule this week. We’re recording on Wednesday. The president is going to give remarks later this afternoon about the midterms. And so I I realize this is putting you in a little bit of an awkward position, but not so much about what he’s going to say today, but if you were advising Biden on the right and wrong lessons to draw from the midterms. What would what would your advice
-
be? No. There’s a question I didn’t expect to be asked. But I’ll I’ll do my best. I guess I would say Mister president, you’ve dodged a bullet, but don’t now leap to the conclusion that your bulletproof.
-
You have a very hard row to hold between now and twenty twenty four, which may very well include a recession It’s very important when you make your remarks to talk not about the democratic party, not about the mechanics of politics, or don’t play the pundit. Be frank about the problems that lie ahead of us. Speak soberly as the president of the United States to the entire country. Talk about if you want your relief that the threat to our democratic institutions appears to be significantly diminished. But don’t take your eye off the ball.
-
People are gonna be listening very carefully to you. To see whether they think you’ve gotten any message from this election. And do your best to indicate that you have. This was certainly not a great democratic triumph. Disaster has been averted.
-
But we are still a deeply divided and narrowly divided country and don’t let these results distract your attention from that fundamental fact. That’s the best I can do on short notice. And now I’d
-
like to turn to our next topic. The results now set us up begin looking at the outline of leadership in both parties for twenty twenty four. And, Sarah, I’m gonna start with you because The inevitable conflict between Trump and DeSantis began even before the votes were tasked with Trump giving DeSantis a nickname, which is a giveaway that he’s girding for battle. And he even went further. He threatened an apo dump on him and said, oh, I know things about him that no one else knows.
-
So It’s on, I guess. Right? Or is DeSantis not up to the challenge? What do you think? Yeah, you
-
know, I get a long thread about this. Because I was getting very I didn’t understand. There’s a there’s a lot of the NRO types, our friends, the anti anti trumpers, they desperately need DeSantis to be the guy going forward. And last night did a lot to bolster the narrative that DeSantis, you know, could be that person. He dominated in his race while a lot of Trump’s people went down.
-
The thing is that if Donald Trump announces. There was a big difference between being kind of the big barking dog in your home state yelling at kids about wearing masks and fighting with Disney and you know, fighting with the media in your state. Like, people in the focus groups, I’ll say, and a lot of the voters, there’s a real appetite for the scientists. They like it. I think he did COVID well.
-
They like his culture, war
-
stuff. But
-
I haven’t not seen evidence that Rhonda Santos is a skilled enough politician to get in the ring with Donald Trump. Go toe to toe. Donald Trump doesn’t just try to win elections. He tries to humiliate you. He’s a scorched earth, terrible person.
-
And Rhonda Santos is a forty four year old guy who just want a dominating performance. And so, you know, there’s there’s this tension between picking your moment and a lot of people want this to be his moment because they don’t want Trump to run again. And saying, I don’t know. Do I wanna have this guy, you know, humiliating me in front of this stadium crowds of people while while I try to build my political brand. And the thing that I think a big takeaway from last night, people are gonna say, especially people with, you know, a dog in the fight of Well, Trump is done.
-
That’s such a terrible performance for Trump. But that’s a little bit of wish casting because you only have to go back a few months to the primaries to see Donald Trump get with the exception of Georgia just about every primary that he wanted. Here’s the thing. Donald Trump owns the Republican base. And the Republican base is quite large, and it is large enough to essentially win most Republican primaries.
-
He has an incredibly devoted following. They’re actually quite scary and menacing when you actually challenge them. So it is not to me obvious that Ron DeSantis who is sort of notoriously thin skinned has kind of a glass job that he is ready to go toe to toe with Trump the way that Trump goes toe to toe with people. If you go back and watch what he did to these guys in twenty sixteen, like their political careers never recovered. And so it’s just it’s not a straightforward decision.
-
And I think that for people who are saying, like, trunks out, you know, the voters wanna put them in the rearview, the general election voters wanna put them in a rearview. It is not at all clear yet, the primary. Republican voters wanna put him in the rearview. Yeah.
-
That’s an excellent point. And pundits wanna put him in the rearview for sure. And the anti Antis, as you say, are desperate to do so. But yeah, I mean, that so, Damon, that’s Sarah outlines what I think is the real nub of it, which
-
is that
-
looked at as a political science matter, you would say, oh, absolutely, this is the scientist’s opportunity, and he should strike while the iron is hot. And But the fact is when it comes down to a psychological battle between himself and Trump, a lot comes down to what kind of human being he is and whether he has the gonads, I’m sorry, to to to stand up to that kind of punishment. And meet it out, by the way, also. And and it’s tricky for DeSantis because, you know, all of the post Trump Republicans are gonna wanna say, I’m a loyal Republican. I am the most Trumpy, Trumpiest person, but you should you should choose me instead of him.
-
Yeah. I mean, I I’ve been wrong about things in the past. Really? I never have. The last twenty four hour as I’ve been wrong about some stuff.
-
But it’s interesting. I saw Sarah’s tweet thread where she made the case that she just reiterated here and and I actually jumped in and for a brief time we were sort of both battling the same folks in the anti anti crowd. On this issue because I, too, for my own reasons, without focus groups behind me, have tweeted and and kind of written things, trying to think through how is it possible that we actually get to Donald Trump not being the nominee. I would like nothing more than that to be what happens. I find it amazing that the folks on the anti anti side love to say the bulwark mockingly and And because Sarah’s so closely identified with the bulwark, they point to her and say, like like, it’s a grift Sarah needs clients to, like, be paying her money and, therefore, needs Trump to be the nominee so that she can Thrive and same with the Bulwark.
-
And I just my response is always, you’re you have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s nobody associated with the Bulwark. FERC or Sarah, who would like anything more than to snap our fingers and have Trump disappear from the political universe. And I feel exactly the same way, but I just look at the situation. I said in the fall of twenty fifteen that Trump was the front runner and he was going to win unless something changed.
-
And nothing changed, and that is exactly what happened. And as far as I’m concerned, I’m looking at the polls. Trump is at roughly fifty percent DeSantis is somewhere between twenty and maybe thirty and some of the now slightly discredited Republican leaning polls. And so that means Trump is lapping him, and Trump hasn’t even announced yet. He’s sort of on the sidelines.
-
I just again, do I want to see I don’t like DeSantis, I would never vote for him in a million years, but I think he would be better for country as a nominee than Trump, even if he’s more likely to win the general than Trump marginally better. But What we would need to see is that events unfold over the coming months such that Trump goes down and DeSantis goes up. And when I think in my head, what series of events are gonna lead that to happen and nothing comes to me? I don’t see a scenario. Now, I will add as a kind of a conicel to this.
-
Our friend, Josh Barrow, jumped in in response to Harry yesterday. And and he said something interesting. He said in in Sarah’s tweet thread, she never talks about the most plausible scenario for for DeSanta switches. He runs against Trump Fauci and says that basically Trump was a total wimp for the whole year of COVID and just loud himself to be pushed around by by the public health establishment, and I did it right and Trump basically is is a wimp who lets himself be bullied around by the the would be public health tyrants. And if you want better governance, you want me.
-
Can I actually ask Sarah, like, well, I didn’t see you respond that? Maybe you did. What do you think about that? Like, is that a plausible line of attack? Yeah.
-
So
-
I did respond
-
to it. And I said, it’s interesting. You know, I I think DeSantis could try that. I guess my skepticism around that is that COVID is quickly retreating as sort of the macro issue that dominating people’s minds. So I think that we just this cycle right now, the votes that just happened, people can run on their records on COVID, and people are getting punished or rewarded for the records on COVID and like it’s gonna happen this time.
-
I feel like when we’re another cycle out, I
-
just
-
don’t know that that look back is gonna be like the thing that is the differentiator. And I I think one of the struggles that DeSantis is gonna have is like, making COVID a singular issue in a campaign to differentiate yourself when it’s now, like, a year in the rearview mirror. I don’t know. But the most importantly, the thing is, like, to see if this is a is the pronunciation similar acronym? Like, he isn’t an imitator of Trump.
-
He just used this like slightly pale version of him. And like, okay. So so he can do that. And do you think that Donald Trump’s not gonna come back and be like, bro, I made you. Look at you standing there in your oversized suit and your sanctimonious crap.
-
Like, no one likes you. You’re a, you know, you’re a joke. I don’t know. And, like, Maybe okay. So, like, I I get that there’s maybe one line of rational attack, but I just think that might be insufficient.
-
For what we’ve seen Donald Trump Donald Trump, this is a guy who said, like, Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK and his wife is super ugly. Okay? So when he does those things to DeSantis, I watched DeSantis turn into like a petulant teenager and shout at the media and get really, you know, grumpy. The
-
how
-
does that play? Did did do Trump’s voters say, boy, you know what? DeSantis is just so much more responsible and I love his policy prescriptions and that’s just really great. Or do they say, man, Trump is clowning this guy so hard. It’s great.
-
I love this. It’s so fun. Yeah.
-
I think I mean, my my brief response, I agree with all that. And I guess, I I would say that it all comes down to what it is that makes Trump’s base love him. And the problem with a lot of pundits, including a lot of our friends on the anti anti side, who love DeSantis and see him as the kind of savior figure from Trump is that they think that those voters who love Trump are movable by the same kinds of arguments that they themselves are a kind of calculation that Well, yeah, you love him in the in the primaries, but he can’t win in the general, and you gotta wanna win in the general. That’s too rational. This is about loving to see Trump humiliate people.
-
It’s a visceral thing. It’s subrachial. And I think you’re right that in the end, they probably or they even if they are humiliating DeSantis, they sort of like DeSantis, but if he does it with a kind of with a typical Trumpian zing, they’re gonna clap. Alright. Well, Linda,
-
you know, in a different world, Republican voters would watch Trump’s despicable humiliation of others and say, well, certainly don’t want that guy because that’s that kind of behavior is horrible, but that’s not the world we live in. And so while some Republican voters might look at desantis be Trump and say, well, you know, DeSantis is young. DeSantis can serve two terms, whereas Trump is limited to one further term. Does Santos is not saddled with having, you know, potentially broken the law in about fifteen different ways. And facing possible indictments, etcetera, etcetera.
-
You might do all those calculations, but then when Trump launches his fuselage in DeSantis’ direction. The only thing that will matter is whether DeSantis seems like he’s a man, whether he’s tough, whether he can I don’t know. What do you think? Maybe there’s nothing DeSantis can do, and maybe DeSantis won’t run for that reason. You
-
know, who knows what’s gonna happen? After this week, I don’t think any of us should be making many predictions. I will say this, it is very hard people like us to understand that what we hate most about Donald Trump is what his face loves most about him. It is all of the grotesque behavior that he exhibits is actually what drives his face. That’s what they love.
-
So if he engages in that behavior and if you have a primary and it isn’t just a scientist that’s gonna be running, it might be also my pants. And Mike Pompeo and who knows who else, then Trump probably ends up emerging. On the other hand, Donald Trump, this week, made the promise that he is going to have a very big announcement on November fifteenth, and all of the assumption is that he is going to announce that he is running for president on November fifteenth. I mean, he is doing that for a reason. He wants to preclude the desantis isn’t others from getting in.
-
But, you know, he’s now getting some advice even from his inner circle Jason Miller, you know, has weighed in apparently on the BBC saying he thought it was a very bad idea for him to announce that he is going to run on November fifteenth. If Donald Trump makes that announcement, the big factor again is going to be Georgia because it doesn’t just look like the secretary of state who was reelected. Mister Raffinsberger in Georgia has announced that there’s going to be a runoff that runoff is going to be taking place on December sixth. And as we saw last time around when this very same thing happened in twenty twenty, That is the reason there is a senator warnock is because Donald Trump was a factor in that election. And you know, the democrats had, I think, under anybody’s estimation, a pretty good night considering historical records in terms of the number of seats that normally are lost during these off year elections by the party that holds the White House.
-
I think that, you know, Democrats are gonna be able to all join, and they’re gonna be able to throw everything they’ve got into that Georgia race. So, you know, if Trump announces that he’s running. And if that becomes a factor in the Georgia runoff, and again, Donald Trump causes the Republicans to lose control of the Senate. I think that is not gonna bode well. So I’m still of a mind that Donald Trump is beatable and that there are gonna be enough people who are going to see him as really a loser, which is what he is.
-
And therefore, you know, we may in fact see somebody like DeSantis.
-
So
-
the reality TV title that should really belong to Trump rather than the apprentice is the biggest loser. Absolutely. Right. Alright. So, Bill Galston, you were saying earlier, and I’d like you to elaborate that the results from the midterms sort of change the outlook for leadership in both parties?
-
What did what what did you wanna say about that?
-
Well, Number one, I’d like to weigh in on the great, should he or shouldn’t he desantis discussion? And rather than making my own arguments, I’d like to summon two witnesses to the bar. One of them is Chris Christie. And the other is William Shakespeare. You know, Christie can talk a lot.
-
It seems to me in very persuasively about what it means to miss your moment. But Shakespeare did it even better, you know, through his mouthpiece, brutus, And I quote, there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. But admitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. Ron DeSantis is never going to have another moment like this one. And the question is whether he has the courage to risk it and the skill to fight his way through the risks.
-
I don’t know the answer to that question. But if I were advising him, I would I would say, with all of the obstacles and uncertainties, governor DeSantis, this is your moment and you must cease it. Despite all of the rational arguments that you’ve overtured in the past fifteen minutes. Now, on the Democratic side, These results are going to greatly ease what otherwise would have been intense pressure. Unprisoned Biden to stand aside in favor of a fresh face.
-
I think that the famous Democratic circular firing squad will not form up as usual in the wake of these midterms And a lot of people are going to take note of the fact that Biden’s job approval was not the single determining factor in Democratic votes, that he doesn’t seem to arose the same kind of intense visceral opposition that other candidates with different domainers often do. And I think now the choice as to whether to proceed is in his hands and will not be driven by the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party. That is a big changed from
-
a reasonable expectation forty eight hours ago. Much has changed in forty eight hours.
-
Alright. With
-
that, we will turn to our final segment, our highlight or low light of the week. I will begin with Damon Linker.
-
Well, this is gonna be a little unusual, but my highlight of the week is simply American democracy. I I have to say, You know, I I have this sub stack, and I will probably write about this at greater length on Friday. But it it’s quite amusing. I was writing yesterday on Tuesday while the votes were being cast but had not been counted yet. A fifteen hundred word op ed for a major outlet whose name I shall not mention, about how and why the democrats screwed up and got whooped despite all the threats to democracy out there.
-
And so forth. You can you can write the piece in your own heads because we sort of were kind of hashing out parts of it on the podcast a week ago. And the delightful thing is that as my wife was going to bed last night and she doesn’t watch politics like I too and she gets to. Too anxious about it and so prefers, you know, to only hear occasional good news. So she calls down while I’m watching the returns and says, How’s it going?
-
And I call up and I say, it’s actually great, and I go through all these all these results and say it’s much better than expected Democrats are doing well. The worst of the Republicans are going. Down. And also my piece that I was writing all day, that’s gonna be trash. That’s not going anywhere.
-
Like, it’s it’s written for a totally different reality that is not the reality we live in. And she said, if you telling me that, I would have thought that you’d be in a bad mood. And I said, ah, what’s good for American democracy? It might not be good for my career for the moment, but I can live with it. And so it really is a humbling experience to spend your life looking at this churning crazy cauldron of facts and data points And to try to kind of get your grip on it and figure out what it all means and and where it’s going and so forth, it’s meaning And then you hold an election and the whole thing gets scrambled, and that’s pretty great.
-
I’m I’m delighted by by what has happened the last twenty four hours in America.
-
Amen. Okay. Sarah Longwell.
-
So bright
-
spot same general trajectory as Damon, which is the Secretary of State Racing. So if there was one thing that was keeping me up at night, it was the crazy caucus of election deniers who were gonna be overseeing elections or talked about this at length, but not only in the states that I’ve talked about now that we have, you know, Democratic governor in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and in Michigan, there was a, like, a QAnon crazy person named Christina Caramo, who was the secretary of state nominee she was defeated. In Pennsylvania, the governor gets to appoint the secretary of state. So Doug AUSTRANNA WILL NOT HAVE THAT HONOUR. JOSH Shapiro WILL SO, YOU KNOW, SUCK GREAT STUFF FOR SECRETARY STATES, BUT WE ARE STILL WAITING AT THIS MOMENT, RIGHT, FOR NEVADA AND FOR ARIZONA.
-
But one of the best things coming out of Arizona is, look, Cary Lake, and this is my low light. I’m gonna just do both. My low light is that that Kerry Lake made yet eke out of victory there in Arizona. But the secretary of state that she was running with who was a, like, anti Semitic election denier much in the same vein as Carrie. Like, he is running, like, six points behind her.
-
And the Democrat Adrian Fontes is is out kicking the other Democrats in the state. And so even if Carrie Lake wins, there will be a Democrat secretary of state, which I think will blunt her ability to be just like the full on crazy election denier that she is. Same story in Nevada, where this guy Jim Marshant, he’s the head of the America first Secretary of State Coalition, which is exactly what it sounds like. Trumpy secretaries of state who thinks that everything was stolen. He is also running behind the other Republicans.
-
And so we could end up with a pretty clean sweep on good secretaries of state, and that is huge for democracy and future elections. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Excellent.
-
Okay. Bill Galston.
-
And now for something completely different, the rest of the world has not ceased to exist while we’ve been focused on the elections. Russia’s defense minister announced a Russian withdrawal
-
from
-
her son. Which is just a huge, huge victory for the Ukrainians and a vindication of their strategy not to mount a head on attack against here son, but to make it impossible for the Russians to remain by severing their supply lines. So after a staged dialogue between the Russian defense minister and the new Russian commander in Ukraine, defense minister Shargou gave the order to withdraw. This is a
-
turning point in the war. And I hope it is the harbinger of many others. Wow, yeah, it’s fantastic. Okay, Linda Chavez.
-
Well, we’ve spent
-
quite a bit of time on the podcast talking about the Hispanic vote and the role that it was gonna play. And there was a lot of fear among some in some quarters that The Hispanic vote, particularly in South Texas, might suddenly lurch to the right, and there is I think a lot more heterogeneity in the Hispanic vote than people understand. But what we saw last night is that didn’t exactly happen. So I want to point to an article. It’s actually an old article that was written last month in the Texas Tribune.
-
It was called for GOP winning Hispanic voters will be a bigger fight than South Texas, and there are a lot of very interesting demographic data in there, including data that suggests that most of the Hispanics who live in Texas don’t live along the border. They live in much more metropolitan areas by about three to one. And even in those South Texas, districts. We saw Henry Quayar was able to hold on to his seat in Heathmann though he is under criminal investigation. We also saw that Democrat Vicente Gonzalez defeated Mira Flores who had won a special election, and she was the Republican And also, we saw a different shift, a shift to the right in Texas fifteen, in which Monica de la cruise became the first Republican to win that district.
-
So I think the bottom line in that Hispanic story is that Hispanics are not a monolith. They do not vote entirely one way and they’re sort of still figuring it out. Oh, by the way, and in Florida, Miami Dade was able to elect a Republican, again, a Republican in Hispanic. So Hispanics are still very much up for grabs and are sort of shape shifting.
-
Thank you. Alright. I would like to like Bill, I’m more focused on the rest of the world. In my highlight, I wanna mention a piece by Max Boot ran in the Washington Post. Putin just backtracked under pressure.
-
That’s a hopeful sign for Ukraine’s appeared a few days ago. But it concerned this, you know, threat or or announcement that Putin made that he was not going to abide by the deal that allowed Ukraine to export food through the black sea. Putin just sort of summarily announced that that was no longer going to be permitted, which of course would further impoverished and starve people in the third world who rely very heavily on Ukrainian grain exports. And then suddenly Putin under pressure from Turkey and lots of other countries, just changed his mind and said, oh, never mind. He said, you know, and then he gave some fig leaf about how well he’d been ish sure that the Ukrainians were not going to use this as an excuse to attack Russian ships.
-
Of course, they hadn’t been doing that. But the point is that we are understandably aware of, you know, Putin’s dangerousness and the fact that he is in control of nuclear weapons, and therefore, a dangerous person, obviously, is dangerous. He invaded another country. But you The point is though that he is not ten feet tall and you have to recognize that he does back down. It isn’t always escalate, escalate, escalate.
-
And that’s an important lesson for our policy makers to keep in mind that, yeah, putin in a corner, sometimes backs down. He doesn’t double down. With that, I want to thank our very special guests, Sarah Longwell. Our producer is Katie Cooper. Our sound engineers, Jason Brown.
-
We thank them as well. And of course, we thank our wonderful listeners and we will return next week as every week.
-
You’re worried about the
-
economy. Inflation is high. Your paycheck doesn’t cover as much as it used to, and we live under the threat of a looming recession. And sure
-
you’re
-
doing okay, but you could be doing better. The afford anything
-
podcast explains the economy and the market detailing how to make wise choices on the way you spend and invest. Afford anything
-
talks about how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about how it being. Make smarter choices and build a better life. Avoid anything wherever you listen.
An ad-free version of Beg to Differ is available exclusively to Bulwark+ members. Learn more here.