The Immigration Threat to Biden’s Reelection
Episode Notes
Transcript
Noah Smith joins to talk about the border crisis and its political implications as well as Haley’s surge (if it is one).
highlights / lowlights
Mona Charen: An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth by Matti Friedman (Tablet) and What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel by Matti Friedman (The Atlantic)
Noah Smith: People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone
Damon Linker: The global demographics Twitter / X account @nonebusinesshey
Bill Galston: Israel Knew Hamas’s Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago by Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman (NYTimes)
Linda Chavez: Once again: Speaking freely doesn’t mean speaking without consequence, by Philip Bump (WAPO)
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!
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Welcome to beg to differ, but Bulwark’ weekly roundtable discussion, featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum, We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Sharon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark. I am joined by our regulars. Will Saletan of the Brookings Institute and the Wall Street Journal. Damon Linker, who writes the sub stack newsletter notes from the middle ground, and Linda Chavez of the Niskannon Center.
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Our special guest this week is Noah Smith, who writes the sub stack, no opinion. One of the great puns in bloggerland. So welcome one and all, and we’re going to begin this week with a discussion of immigration and the twenty twenty four election. It happens that two panelists this week have addressed the matter, Will Saletan, and Noah Smith. And Linda has been a tireless explainer of all things immigration for for many, many years, but it has reached a point of real potential peril for president Biden.
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He gets very low marks from voters, not just Republican voters or independents, but even from Democrats for his handling of the border. And we’ve seen that it is even causing some intra Democratic party squabbles because It is presenting real problems for Blue City mayors, for example, with dealing with the large number of asylum seekers. So Noah Smith, welcome back. And let’s start with you. Why don’t you, lay out what you talked about in your sub stack, you know, that You’re writing this from the point of view of somebody who is pro legal immigration, but you’re concerned about the way the issue is playing out.
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Tell us about the problems with our current system.
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Right. Well, I think that, people who came here illegally and have been living here for, like, thirty years, I’d be happy to give them amnesty we did that in the nineteen eighties. I think I would do that again. So I’m a fan of immigration general. I think immigration strengthens our country, but it needs to be done in a sustainable way.
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If we try to lead in a burst of people in a disorderly chaotic way that tramples over institutions and looks like chaos, I believe that that will cause a general anti immigrant backlash that will in the long run make it harder for us to get people to move to our country. And, you know, it’ll cause this lengthy nativist backlash. So what I’m worried about is the chaos at the border is causing a backlash. And so when you look at the poles, you see that during Trump’s years in office, there was a dramatic increase in pro immigration sentiment across the board in in every poll you wanted to look at, now that has reversed and more than reversed, there has been a stunning increase in anti immigration sentiment in pretty much every poll people approve of the Republicans more than the Democrats or Biden. And when you look at the specifics, what people are upset about is the border situation chaos at the border.
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And so what’s going on in a nutshell is that, basically, a bunch of people in Central America and a few other countries realized that our asylum system is set up such that if you illegally sneak across the border and then turn yourself into the border patrol, you basically get a free entry ticket to America you get years to work and live in America while you’re awaiting your asylum hearings. Even if they they reject you, you can just disappear and become an actual illegal immigrant of the traditional type. But then, essentially, it’s this get into America free card that you get by illegally crossing the border. So incentives Bulwark. When you have that fundamental incentive, what do you think is gonna happen?
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People are gonna just illegally cross the border in droves and just turn themselves right into the border patrol, which is exactly what’s been happening. And people are incensed about this. People are mad. The people close to the border are mad. And the people in cities, in the blue cities where the migrants are then being bussed or shipped, and are often settling down to wait their asylum hearing are also mad.
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Everybody’s mad about this, and we’ve just been sort of ignoring it We’ve been paying attention to the economy and to war and to issues like that. But when you look at people’s list of the most important issues right after, you know, inflation, basically, is immigration. People are angry about this. And the media has just completely ignored it unlike during the Trump years when we talked about it all the time. Now pretty much everyone
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Well, the right wing media is not ignoring it.
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Oh, well, okay. Maybe I should watch some more Fox News.
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They talk of little else, I think.
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Fair enough.
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But let me follow-up with one thing, though. So you mentioned the polling. And how much of that do you think though is the thermostatic effect, right, that When there is a Republican in office, people are less likely to say they’re worried about the border or immigration. Than when a Democrats in office and vice versa. And by the way, when a Republican like Trump was in the White House, you saw increases in support for immigration in general throughout the population except for Republicans.
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So, anyway, the thermostatic effect of polling.
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Right. So a couple responses to that. Number one is when you look at immigration sentiment over the long term since the nineteen seventies. You don’t see much of a thermostatic effect, actually. You see basically anti immigration sentiment rose from the nineteen seventies through the mid nineteen nineties, and there was this peak of sort of anti immigration feeling in the nineties.
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And then, after that pro immigration sentiment started to rise, anti immigration sentiment fell. And that fell and there were a couple, you know, small zig zags and interruptions, but overall that fell all the way through the Trump era. And so you didn’t see much of this thermostatic effect that you’re talking about. I do believe that some of the pro immigration attitude of the Trump years was a reaction to the fact that Trump directed so much hatred and so much animosity toward immigrants and immigration. I think you did see a backlash against Trump, and that was very thermostatic.
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And once Trump got out of there, I think that backlash became less salient, people stopped thinking about it. Mhmm. But my second point is that when you look at the actual numbers of immigrants during the Trump and Biden years, you know, obviously, there’s legal immigration, which has proceeded at about the same pace during the the Trump and Biden years Biden. It’s increased a little bit under Biden it collapsed under COVID, but that’s just natural. But Trump didn’t really decrease legal immigration much.
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This border chaos, you know, what I like to call asylum spanning Mhmm. When people just jump over the border and turn themselves into the border patrol immediately. The asylum spanning thing started to rise under Obama and Trump basically put a stop to it successfully, with policies like the remain in Mexico policy. And later with COVID inspired policies, you know, that we can’t really do permanently, But then with the remain in Mexico policy, he basically said, okay. If you try to do this, we’re just gonna dump you to Mexico while you await your asylum earring course, no one wants that because they don’t wanna stay in Mexican border towns.
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They wanna stay in the United States for years. And so so that actually worked. And so you saw before COVID, a collapse in the number of people who were trying this this this trick. But, you know, the courts kept sort of smacking down what Trump was doing because our basic asylum law sort of really says that you should be able to do the asylum spamming thing, but Trump actually managed to put a stop to this stuff. And then Biden basically takes away those controls.
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And then the asylum spamming just starts, you know, ten times as much as before. And so I think don’t mistake responses to actual policy changes for simple responses to the party of who’s in power in the White House because whose in power in the White House actually matters and policy actually matters. I think that during the trump era, the asylum spamming basically, you know, mostly went away as a result of Trump policies and that that Trump kept attacking legal immigration And, you know, people who’ve been here for a long time and dreamers, and basically immigrants are very, very popular in America. Americans love immigrants. They don’t like border chaos, but they love immigrants and trump attack immigrants.
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And I think that that became the most salient. And now that Biden’s in office and the asylum spamming thing has started again. I think that you’re seeing a real reaction to that, and that’s not necessarily the same as thermostatic politics.
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Linda, there’s a little bit of ambiguity about the number of encounters at the border. I mean, you’ve you’ve written and talked about this at some length, One of the reasons is that the nature of border crossers has changed so much. In the past, people used to try to sneak across the border and not be apprehended And so, you know, we didn’t necessarily know how many got here. Whereas now, they speak across the border and immediately present themselves to border patrol agents so that they can claim asylum. It may artificially inflate the numbers.
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But whatever the case, it is too many for most Americans to be comfortable with and people don’t. As much as they love immigrants and as much as they love legal immigration, they really, really hate the idea of chaos at the border or, you know, illegals flooding through. And yet, as Noah was outlining, that’s the law. The law is what it is. So what do we do about that?
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Well, you know, I I’m a broken record on this subject as you know. The only way to fix illegal immigration or or asylum laws for that matter is to actually have Congress pass new laws. And Congress seems unwilling, unable, and uninterested in doing that. There have been some negotiations going on in the Senate, the supplemental bill, for support, for, Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. The Republicans in the House want to make sure there’s a border element in it.
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And there are are Democrats who want that as well. Because as you say, as a political issue, Democratic mayors in particular are starting to feel the brunt of large numbers of Israelis, people claiming asylum, and doing so as you suggested, Mona, under existing laws. They are not illegal aliens. They are people who are in taking advantage of the law as it is written, which says you have to put your foot down on American soil in order to claim asylum, and it also says that you can do it between normal ports. And the Biden administration has tried to do some things to mitigate that.
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We saw huge numbers of Venezuela coming in Nickaraguans coming in. The kind of people that frankly we would give asylum to because many of them are, in fact, political. Asylees, and they are facing not just discrimination at home. They’re they’re facing persecution, but you can’t have thousands of people coming up and just showing at the door. And so these things need to be dealt with.
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Under existing law, If you claim asylum, you’re essentially pretty much assigned a number. You get in in line in the queue to have your case heard where you have to present credible evidence that you, are being persecuted.
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Linda, just just to remind listeners, what are the criteria for asylum?
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Well, the criteria is you have to feel that you have a credible fear of persecution based on your affiliation in a political group because of your religion, essentially because of of your beliefs, or being a member of a, you know, distinct minority. You know, and when you’re talking about Venezuelan, you’ve got an autocratic, pro communist leadership there that’s been there now for for decades. And You’ve had a collapse in the Venezuelan economy and people are leaving. But as I say, the Biden administration has tried to deal with that. They put in place a system where they were going to give humanitarian parole to a certain number of of people from Cuba, Haiti, in Venezuela and allow them to come in in an orderly fashion and have to apply when they were out of, the country and then wait until they were called and and be brought in, and then they would be sponsored by people here in the United States who would who would essentially accept responsibility for taking care of them, for housing them, for helping them financially.
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That is something that the Republicans immediately went into court, to try to block. That case is, I believe, still pending. It was as a lease two weeks ago. And so we do have some solutions. Even if under existing law, we have the number of asylum judges necessary be able to deal with these complaints so that they could be heard and if they were not credible, people could be removed.
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That might help. But we’ve got more than two million cases. In line now waiting to be heard. And the Republicans aren’t interested in having more immigration judges. The real problem is a problem of politics and political will.
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And you mentioned Fox News. This is a selling point for the right that have become anti immigrant, and it’s not just anti illegal immigration. The whole Trump administration policy and immigration was to reduce, in fact, halt for a time, legal immigration to the United States. It’s not just about your legal immigrants. They are simply anti immigrant.
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And by the way, the only thing I’ll correct both you and know on in terms of your history is that the United States, we love immigrants of our grandparents and great grandparents generation. We don’t much like the people that are coming, in contemporary times. And that doesn’t matter if you were talking about revolutionary times in Germans or whether you were talking about the Irish and Scandinavians in the in the nineteenth century or whether you were talking about Jews and Italians that were coming in the early twentieth century. We think of ourselves as this immigrant loving country, but we’re not all that happy. We’re a whole bunch of new commerce, show up.
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It takes time for people to assimilate, to learn the language, to move up economically, and there’s competition, particularly among low wage workers. So this problem could be solved, but not without Congress getting in and doing its job and it has refused to do that since nineteen eighty six, which was the last major immigration overhaul that we had under president Ronald Reagan.
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Right. Well, I think I can speak for Noah on this as well because he mentioned the anti immigrant sentiment throughout American history in his piece, and I certainly am aware of it very well and the Asian exclusion act was one of those black marks that pockmarks American history. Absolutely.
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And the nineteen seventeen and nineteen twenty four and control that. I mean, most of most people’s great grandparents came here.
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Absolutely. Just
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the way the Mexicans and Nicaraguids in Venezuela just showed up on our door step and they were living. Yeah.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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We didn’t have controls.
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Yeah. Well, okay. Damon, so when gets the sense that There is an appetite out there. And and this is part of a larger problem, with our politics in general where people are becoming ever more cordial to authoritarianism, but there’s this notion that the president should be able to solve this problem and that Congress is irrelevant and that, you know, if there are more encounters at the border, if there’s more chaos at the border under the Biden administration, It’s not the fault of the asylum law or the fact that Congress is, you know, failing in its duty to change the law. It’s Biden’s fault.
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And that, you know, he should just unilaterally take care of it.
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Well, when you’re the president, you you get windfalls from things that you don’t really have much control over, and then you get a lot of, flack for things. You also don’t control. And so, you know, Vernon and economic boom. Everyone cheers the president and gives the president credit and the president gets reelected. Although it appears we’re in a kind of boom right now, and that isn’t redounding to Biden very much.
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That’s a topic. Yeah, but traditionally, that’s the way it works. And then if we’re in a recession, the the president takes takes the hit even though usually the president really didn’t do much of anything specific that led to it. It’s just part of the business cycle and It probably was not very much the fault of the the man in the White House. And and that happens with other areas of policy as well.
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It have in foreign policy, and it happens with immigration. It is true that the border doesn’t look great, and we now do have a kind of media machine on the right that kinda sets up down there and promotes any of these images that crop up of lots of people, you know, crossing the Rio Grande. And I was seeming to overwhelm the border patrol there, and then it gets trumpeted on, the right wing media that gets the right very upset about it, and it then ends up being, a weight around Biden’s neck, but as you as you implied in asking your question and as Linda indicated in her response, the reality is that this problem is not going to change unless one of two things happen. Either you get Donald Trump back in the White House who just decides to shut the border entirely, whether or not that is in accordance with the laws of the nation. Of course, they’re gonna try to fire a whole bunch of bureaucrats so that no one complains if he tries to override what the law says he’s allowed to do.
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So some kind of unilateral act in which Trump managed to do by in part, you know, leveraging, the pandemic. To help close the border, in the toward the end of the of the Trump administration. So that’s one thing. And then the other thing would be the the thing that should happen as Linda indicated, which is that Congress actually does something about this problem, and we have needed it for a very long time. I mean, I taught a course this semester about the last several decades history of the Republican Party and rehearsed went through once again things that I lived through, which was the the debates over a massive immigration reform bill after the twenty twelve election and the hopes that were generated and the fact that the Senate passed such a bill and Obama was gonna sign it and then it collapsed in the house because a nice big chunk of the Republican Party, as Linda indicated, do not want anything to to liberalize immigration law at all.
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They would like to shut the border close it entirely and let nobody in at all, and they care passionately about it. That’s, of course, in policy. Always the other part of the equation. It’s not just are you four or against, but how much do you care? If the people who want more immigrants to come in if you ask them on a survey, say yes, but then you ask them, but on a scale of one to ten, how much do you care about this relative to other issues and they answer like a three?
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And then you ask other people, do you want to close the border and let in no immigrants? And they say, yes. I don’t want anymore. And I care about it at a nine. Those people are going to prevail at least within, the coalition of one of our two political parties.
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And as long as that remains the case, we were sort of deadlocked and and stuck. And I I don’t see any way out of it. And, of course, the fact that it hurts Biden, as it’s unfolding right now is only to the better as far as the Republicans are concerned. So they have absolutely no incentive to move one inch on the issue.
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Will Saletan, the radicals on the on the left don’t want any restrictions at all on immigration. They believe in open borders, and they believe that it’s it’s people’s right. Come here. And so they’re extreme in their own way. But if they succeed in pushing Biden away from some kind of compromise on this issue that would help him politically That could be quite disastrous for the republic.
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If Biden doesn’t do something about this problem, we will get Donald Trump back in the White House. Make no mistake about it. In a close election, this issue by itself could make the difference. And I think we’re letting the president and the administration off the hook a bit in this conversation. Everybody knows that for better part of two years, there was no policy movement, because the administration and the White House were split down the middle, and then something in the spring was put in place that worked for a month or two.
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You know, before before collapsing, this has been a policy failure on the part of the Biden administration. And I say that as someone who passionately wants Joe Biden to be reelected, but who fears that he won’t be If he maintains the status quo or worse gives in to people who think that immigration policy should be even more accommodating. So let’s put some facts on the table. Most of the people who are asking for asylum do not qualify for it. They are economic migrants.
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And Linda, that includes most of the people now coming in from Venezuela. These are not political activists. Fleeing because they have a reasonable fear of persecution based on their political opinions and activities. These are people fleeing Venezuela, because, you know, the Venezuelan economy has collapsed. I can understand that and sympathize with it.
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But the asylum system is not set up to be a cure for economic pivation elsewhere in our hemisphere. It just isn’t. It can’t be that. We’re acting as though this is a theoretical conversation. It’s not is an urgent legislative conversation because Republicans and the Senate have made it very clear That aid for Israel and, Ukraine, among other troubled areas in the world, is simply not going to be approved.
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Without some sort of compromise on border policy, which is why a team of senators Democrats, Republicans, and one independent, cursed at cinema, are working very hard. To come up with a compromise on asylum definitions of legitimate asylum requests as well as changes to the parole system and other aspects of immigration as well. And if they can’t reach that compromise, then it is entirely possible that aid, at least to Ukraine, will not be forthcoming despite the fact that Mitch McConnell wants it. It’s not clear that even if there is a compromise in the senate, that it will be approved in the house, but at least there a fighting chance, and it is a necessary condition for senate action at this point. So the time for dithering is over.
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And if Joe Biden has to do for immigration, in twenty twenty three, what he did for crime and defunding the police in twenty twenty, He’d better do it.
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Could I just get back in real quickly, Mona? Because I I do wanna respond to a couple of things. First of all, I I’m not in any way suggesting that the current system is working. It’s not. But as you suggest, it’s got to have some legislative change or the administration could be given more money to be able to have more immigration judges so that we could take those people who do not have credible fears and deport them.
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Because that’s the way the system works. But I think the whole point is that it’s not just asylum law and the limitations around parole that are being talked about. The only way you really solve this problem is by coming up with a modernized immigration law that allows us to let in people that we need because we need their labor. And right now, We are not allowing enough people to come in to actually satisfy our economic needs. And as an aging country, we’re gonna be really in trouble.
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If, we don’t start letting in more immigrants legally.
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Linda, I’m entirely with you on that point. But we face a situation right now. I mean, we have to do something now. Comprehensive immigration reform, which I’m sure you and I would agree on. In nearly every respect is simply not on the horizon.
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So there’s gotta be something in between where we are right now, and the utopian solution that we both favor.
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But I think the only way that’s gonna happen is if you can get enough Republicans, on the hill to understand that you cannot have the kind of draconian end to asylum and end to parole that they want. You can have changes. You can you can change the standards, and those are the things that are being debated down the Senate. But unfortunately, then they go back to the house and Chip Roy will have none of it. So this is the problem.
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Okay. I’m gonna give you the last word Noah Smith. Thoughts about Biden’s role in all this, and could he potentially step in and step up here and and do something actually courageous that would also be good for him politically and the right thing to do. And do you think he has it in him?
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So, first of all, I have no idea if the average American who’s upset about border chaos understands that that reform of the asylum law is what’s necessary to stop it, and that’s what’s needed to stop it. I think that Biden should work on this, but I don’t if if it’s just in terms of optics before the election, I have no confidence that that will bear any fruit And I think the Republicans might even delay action on it just to screw Biden in twenty twenty four. If I were Biden, what I would do is over the next year, is simply, you know, talk tough about border chaos. Say, we love immigration, but we don’t want border chaos. We need an orderly border.
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We need to, you know, accept people have people stand in line for asylum, orderly fashion, blah blah blah. And, and then, you know, do as many sort of vaguely trumpian restrictions in terms of, like, you know, booting people when you catch them at the border, just boot them right back to Mexico. The courts will, you know, try to stop Biden from doing that, but that’ll, you know, take a while. And it will have a real effect on the situation at the border in the short term. It is not a long term fix, but If you’re just talking about looking good for the election, I think that’s what Biden needs to do, rhetoric, and then just administrative changes that boot people back to Mexico when they cross the border legally looking for asylum.
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I think those are the two things he needs to do in the short term. In the long term, of course, you know, what, what Linda talked about. That’s what I think we need to do. But then pro immigration anti border chaos rhetoric, I think, is the that’s the way to go. And, you know, no surprise.
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That’s also my own position. You know, I think that getting rid of border chaos help sustainably increase support for immigration because Americans really do like immigrants and immigration. The whole idea of immigration And so I think that getting rid of Bulwark cast allows that to shine through. So that’s my sort of final word on that.
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That’s free breakfast for life at hello fresh dot com slash beg to differ free with code Beg to Differ free. Alright. Nikki Haley is moving up in the polls. She is showing real momentum, And arguably the debates, which people said would not matter, certainly mattered for her. That seems to have been the turning point, the thing that propelled her forward and caused among other things caused Ron DeSantis to go into a bit of a stall.
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And this week was very significant for Haley Americans for Prosperity Action, which is the political arm of the Coke Network, has endorsed her. Which is a big deal because, first of all, there’s a lot of money. And they also provide not just money, but They have grassroots supporters. They have people who go door to door. They do phone banking.
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They do research. They do digital. They also run ads on television and and and online. So this is potential? If you squint just right, what do you think Linda Chavez?
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Is this, fantasy land or is this something to possibly allow a flicker of hope.
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Well, Mona, I’ve always predicted that the first woman president would be a Republican and I think Nikki Haley, if she were in fact, the Democratic nominee would probably have the best shot at breathing, Joe Biden. Nikki Haley would have the best chance of beating Joe Biden. And so, you know, I think the real question is whether or not she is going to be able to win the nomination. And for all of the Hoopla about the endorsement of the Coke Network, which I I think was, a great thing for her, and for the Republican Party, frankly. It’s not clear to me that it’s gonna be enough because money simply doesn’t have the same sway as it once did in politics.
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I know that probably sounds strange to a lot of years, but It it just hasn’t in recent years. The the best hundred candidates have not always been the ones, that want. So it’s really gonna come down to whether or not she can make, I think, at least a good second place showing, in Iowa. And then, you know, the travails of of Donald Trump and in his various law cases, you know, including the the trial next year in March. I suppose it is still possible.
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That that he will not be the nominee, but I’m not holding my breath. I think Nikki Haley would be a far, far better representative of a responsible, Republican party, but whether or not the populist Republican base, is ready for Nikki Haley. It’s just not clear to me.
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So, Damon, first of all, just to clear away some underbrush here. We’ve all been I think everybody on this podcast has been critical of Nikki Haley for a variety of things. Including her extreme slipperiness and malleability, let’s say, regarding Trump and her, you know, playing it very coy. She doesn’t denounce him. And she she seems incredibly opportunistic.
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That much having been set. Of course, if she were to be able to be the Republican nominee in some fantasy world, but Americans for prosperity did put out a couple of memos with their endorsement of Nikki Haley, and they point out that Seventy five percent of Republican primary voters say they’re open to supporting a candidate other than Donald Trump. And here’s something interesting. They say sixty percent of the Republican voters that they have identified, and they have made contact with, who have never voted in primary or caucus before say they are an extremely enthusiastic to vote for the first time?
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Well, I have to admit that I kind of deny the premise of this whole segment in a way. I mean, can Nikki Haley come in second, thirty or forty points behind Trump? Absolutely. Sure. I’d give that maybe, I don’t know, forty, fifty percent chance.
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I mean, it’s basically between her and, Ron DeSantis and and DeSantis is kind of stuck in a narrow window in the polls between about twelve and fourteen percent for months now. So and she’s, you know, even even sort of deny your premise that she’s surging is she’s surging compared to how she was doing over Summer, yeah. She was around four percent. Now she’s like in the high nine percent. She briefly rose above ten percent about a week ago.
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Now she’s back under ten percent.
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You’re looking at national polls, but if you look at the early states, she’s doing a lot of that.
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A little. She’s doing quite well in New Hampshire, which means she’s still, like, double digits and a lot double digits behind Trump there. But, of course, in New Hampshire, you can vote if you’re a Democrat or an independent. And, and New Hampshire also is a very secular state. I I think she will do pretty well in New Hampshire, but even in her home state of South Carolina, she’s behind by thirty points This is not serious.
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Can again, can she finish second kind of wipe DeSantis off after the first several primaries. Yeah. That’s possible. And I kinda hope it happens. But she has, I think, pretty close to zero of winning the nomination.
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Donald Trump is now at sixty two percent. That’s half plus twelve which means that if she won every single other conceivable vote, every other vote out there, doesn’t go to Trump, but only goes to her. She will still lose. And there is no evidence whatsoever in the polling that that is gonna change. Nothing is gonna happen in the trials between now and, you know, mid to late spring, to change that dynamic either.
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So She’s fighting to be second. I have no idea why the Coke Bulwark thinks that that’s worth their money to make her a distant second to Trump. You’d have to ask Charlie Sykes and his team. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but I’m really, kind of a Damon Downer on this question. I think the hype we’re seeing is just a function of people mostly just wanting something to talk about.
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And kind of exciting to think that this, you know, maybe first woman president is doing well and she’ll take down Trump. But said, like, nine point six percent in the polls and Trump is at at sixty two. I mean, this is not anything like a formidable challenge to the front runner.
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Will Saletan. I think Damon undersells the importance of what AFP has done here considerably, first of all, Well, I don’t disagree that money isn’t as important as it used to be in campaigns. I mean, ask Deb Bush and so forth. On the other hand, you know, these people. These are libertarians.
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They are foreign policy doves. They’re against aid to Ukraine. I mean, they are ideologically not aligned at all, or at least on significant issues, they are not aligned with Nikki Haley. But they are doing this. They’re putting their money behind her and their and their considerable grassroots operation at her disposal because they feel this is an existential crisis, and we need, you know, all hands on deck, and she’s the best possible candidate to run under the circumstances.
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And so they are putting aside their distaste for her foreign policy, for example, You know, I think that’s creditable.
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I agree with you completely, Mona. And I will refer to my own personal experience in nineteen eighty four as Walter Mandale’s policy director, Mandale got forty nine percent of the vote in Iowa. Gary Hart, was a surprise second with seventeen percent of the vote, and that was enough to produce a media frenzy that enabled him to overcome in the space of eight days a fifty point deficit in the New Hampshire polls, and to beat Walter Mandale by thirteen percent. Granted, Damon and others, Walter Mandell was not Donald Trump, and he didn’t inspire the same kind of passionate loyalty. But I think just to keep ourselves honest, we should inspect the basic premises of our argument.
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And one of the fixed points of the sort of the Damon Downer argument is that all of the people who say that for Trump are unswervingly for Trump and will not peel away if someone else can make an attractive case for him or in this case herself. We honestly don’t know that. And I can tell you this. If Nikki Haley comes in second in Iowa, I think an outcome that can’t be ruled out, which pretty much destroys the political premise. Of Ron DeSantis campaign, which is bet the farm, so to speak on Iowa, then it’s pretty close to a two person race already.
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Right.
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And in New Hampshire, you have not only more moderate Republicans, but also a plurality of independence who could decide on the day of the primary, that they’re gonna participate on republican side. There’s not much going on on the democratic side in New Hampshire. Thanks Joe Biden. And If Nikki Haley finished second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire, I’d attach about a twenty percent chance to those two events occurring in sequence, then I think the entire media narrative changes and the next state up is South Carolina. So I just attach different probability estimates to Haley’s prospects based on my own experience in the sense that I may be seeing history rhyming, if not exactly repeating itself.
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And Noah Smith to add to what Bill was just saying, it’s likely that if Haley were to come in a respectable second in Iowa, a head, you know, head of DeSantis, that heading into New Hampshire, Chris Christie would almost certainly drop out and she would be the beneficiary of his supporters. And one of the other interesting things from the, memo that the AFP put out was and this was news to me. They look at DeSantis supporters second choice. Now I had been under the impression that DeSantis’s supporters would all go to Trump, but it’s actually not true according to them. Actually, a slightly larger percentage would go to Haley than would go to Trump.
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So it’s it’s about even, but still, slightly more to Haley. So that’s interesting too. And by the way, just to put the numbers on the board here, because Damon, you were giving, I think, numbers that were more national. So this is from Iowa. K.
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This is five thirty eight as of November twenty first. Trump forty four point seven percent. DeSantis seventeen point five. Haley fifteen point three. That’s where we are.
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Okay. So what do you make of this scenario, Anoa?
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Well, you know, I think that, Trump is gonna win the nomination. Because regular people, you know, react to events with a very big lag. I think that for most people, it’s still, like, you know, in their minds, it’s twenty twenty, maybe twenty twenty one. I think that the rapid political changes that the commentary feels, the the vibe shifts and whatever, don’t catch up for a while, and a lot of people are still stuck in the late twenty tens in terms of how they think politics works. So Trump’s gonna just win this nomination.
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And what’s really happening is that people are other candidates are running for who gets to take over when the Trump phenomenon fades. Now, Trump might win the election. But I I, you know, I think that, if he loses if Trump actually loses the election, then, then his populist moment is over. His movement is over because populist movements tend to run out of steam over time. And so at that point, you need some sort of actual stable non populist conservatism to take over the Republican Party.
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And I think you see people jostling to to define what that’s gonna be So in some sense, this is a this is a dry run for twenty twenty eight. So I think that, you know, Haley might be a a player for for twenty twenty eight. DeSantis, I think, doesn’t have the charisma, but what do I know? I’m not a political analyst. Probably some dark horses who aren’t even running like Yonkin or whoever.
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Anyway, so I think that moderate conservatives like Romniite conservatives, whatever you have to do this time, support Haley, blah, blah, blah, pick your favorite, non non mega, you know, non insane conservative to support. But once Trump wins that nomination, y’all are gonna have to do the hard work of telling Republicans voters to sit this one out and to stay home on election day because none of them they’re not gonna vote for Biden. Right? Because everyone’s been telling them.
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Well, some of them will.
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A few of them will. That’s right. Independence will, you know, independence Will Saletan maybe a few principal conservatives, but primarily what, you know, reducing enthusiasm for Trump and getting Trump voters to stay home on election day will be the best way of defeating Trump in a way that doesn’t sabotage the moderate conservatives who will come after Trump or the the I won’t even say moderate because it could be very strong conservatives in a different direction. Right? But then the the more traditional let’s say traditional conservatives who I I can’t use Neo conservative because that was something else.
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That that’s taken. God damn it. But then but then, the post trump conservatives a way to weaken Trump without weakening the post trump conservatives is to simply reduce enthusiasm for Trump. Democrats have been winning low turnout elections and losing high turnout elections in recent years. Trump, as a populist, has thing was generating excitement.
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And honestly, I think the shtick is old. It’s tired. It’s worn out. It was, you know, people thought it was fun in twenty sixteen. And then, you know, twenty twenty, they were very angry and full of rage and, you know, blah, blah, blah, riots, and George Floyd and whatever.
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And COVID. And now I think it’s just old and tired. And so I think that what you guys should focus on is trying to get people to just stay home and not vote for Trump, sit this one out, and come back and vote for a real conservative in twenty twenty eight.
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Well, there’s a lot of assumptions there that there’s still an appetite for real conservatives in the Republican Party.
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It’ll come back.
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Which is an open question in my, in my humble opinion. But we’ll see.
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I think it comes in Yeah.
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Okay. Very good. Let’s turn now to our final segment, which is the highlight or low light of the week. And we’ll start with Damon Lincoln.
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Okay. Well, I’m I’m gonna kinda broaden perspective a little bit from, we’ve been talking about. To a a bigger issue, I consider it a problem and potentially a pretty bad one, but it’s a very slow boil one. And it’s one that you can follow, if you, follow a, Twitter or X account that is, titled Global demographics, it’s actual at name, which we’ll put in the show notes because it’s kind of strange to listen to is at none business pay. I don’t know why it’s called that, but this is basically someone who just simply compiles, fertility rake out relations as they are released by countries around the world.
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And so if you subscribe to or follow this account, you get as these number come out around the world. They show up in your in your feed. And I have to say that there have been some numbers released over the last few weeks that are truly amazing, like jaw droppingly low. Now this is a story that’s been going on for a long time around the world declining fertility rates. Basically, countries diving below replacement fertility, which is about two point one in the, the TFR rate, the total fertility rate.
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So you have countries like, for instance, in Europe, Poland is at one point two two. Spain is at one point one three. Japan is one point two two, Germany one point three eight. So those are all well below replacement. But then what we’re seeing now is incredibly big drops very rapidly.
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So South Korea has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, but In the last year, they are down eleven point five percent in a single year. To a total fertility rate, it looks like right now of point seven, which is catastrophically low. Egypt has dropped nine point three percent in a single year. Sri Lanka is down seven point two percent, in two years. And note from the the range of countries I’ve mentioned, this is happening all over.
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It is happening in rich countries, middle income countries, poorer countries in certain Asian countries in the Middle East and Africa where fertility rates are much higher But, they are too are falling very rapidly from their much higher rates. And then it’s really happening, of course, in the countries of Western Europe, the United States seem to be somewhat immune to this as recently as a decade or so ago. But it’s happening here now too. So this is a global phenomenon, which points to a very broad causes And I I know you typically, people look at it and assume that it might it’s about wealth and that you get to a certain level and women don’t wanna have as many kids and there’s contraception that allows them to follow through on that. But the what would be driving such dramatic declines in such a recent constricted period of time over the last couple of years.
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That’s a very interesting, and I think probably pretty darn important question to ask that, Twitter account or x count that I mentioned is a good way to follow along and try to think those things through.
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Okay. Thank you. I find this trend kind of mystifying myself. I mean, it’s it’s very interesting, Damon. You know, we’ve all understood that with, you know, as countries get wealthier, their birth rates go down, But we didn’t necessarily picture them cratering to the point where, you know, whole societies are in danger of just, you know, really having terrible problems with not being able to care for their, you know, elderly and kinda disappearing.
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So this is
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Yeah. I mean, we also have no we have no history for the higher globe going into what negative economic growth because we’re all shrinking so rapidly. I mean, we could be facing a reality like that over the next decade or so, and and we’ve never really lived through something like this.
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Right. Right. Right. Noah, you’re an economist. Have you looked into this at all?
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And you should go next.
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Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I wrote a post called, humanity is going to shrink. I wrote that a couple months ago.
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Oh, okay.
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Yeah. I’ve looked very deeply into it.
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Okay. Well, we’ll have to look that up. I’m sure it’s full of wisdom. Alright. So what is your highlight or low light?
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Well, my highlight is that the US economy is just doing great, and that finally we’re starting to see an uptick in consumer sentiment measures. And, you know, consumer sentiment hasn’t, you know, isn’t super positive, but I think second half of twenty twenty one through first half of twenty twenty two was a terrible year real incomes dropped. Inflation surged. And, and people, you know, everybody had a job, but people were getting poorer all across America, and people got really mad And we haven’t gotten over the PTSD from that. I think we’re still Americans still haven’t realized that that was a temporary thing.
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That was a one time burst. That’s going away. So now they’re starting to realize it as in, you know, we achieved a soft landing. Inflation is back down. In short term measures, it’s back down all the way to the two percent target.
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Growth is absolutely booming. We outgrew China last quarter about five percent growth. I think five point two percent growth. In GDP, everyone has a job. It’s just, you know, incomes are rising.
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Just asking, was there ever five percent growth in any quarter under Obama or Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think
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there was, there was, like, one quarter in each of those presidencies, I think. It’s, it’s not so uncommon, but it’s, like, you know, it’s really good.
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Okay.
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And, and I think that the economy is really good. And people are starting to realize that you’re starting to see, like, the conference board takes high frequency measures of consumer sentiment, and they’re starting to tick up. So that’s great. Right? The, let’s see.
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The low light is that I’ve become increasingly anxious over the US defense industrial base, and I just wrote a post about that today. Called people are realizing the arsenal of democracy is gone. And it’s scary, but I really wanna sound the alarm over it because America’s inability to make anything is affecting our inability to defend ourselves in the world in a very severe way. And so that is something that we need to about and focus a lot of, you know, attention and and policy, clout and and resources on fixing.
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Right. Absolutely. Linda Chavez.
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Well, we’ve talked a lot about Twitter, in the last, two. So I’m gonna talk a little bit more about it, is regular listeners know I’m not a big Twitter fan and even less of a fan of x, but, Elon Musk is back in the news this week, and I wanted to point out an article appear in the Washington Post. Once again, speaking freely doesn’t mean speaking without consequence. It’s by Philip bump, and it’s a story about Elon Musk interview with Andrew, Ross Sorkin, at the New York Times Deal Book Summit. And as many people know, Elon Musk has gotten into a lot of trouble by reposting anti Semitic and conspiracy theory coast from X and advertisers are taking notice and deciding to no longer want to advertise in part because some of those advertisements were actually being run alongside pro nazi and anti Semitic and other kinds of crazy posts on x So Elon Musk, at this summit, when being interviewed, he had the most bizarre response for anyone who considers themselves a capitalist that I can think of.
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He said that if the advertisers wanna quit. He said, if somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, he said, go f yourself. Well, that’s a very strange thing for capitalists to say. I am for the richest man in the world to say. Because if you are selling a product and people don’t wanna buy it, then you’re not gonna be rich for long.
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So it it was very strange, and I think what it shows and what Philip Bump talked about is the confusion about free speech on both the left and the right. Free speech and being able to say whatever you want doesn’t mean being able to say whatever you want without consequences. And as long as it is, as it is not the government that is coming in in restricting your right to say it, private individuals, private companies, etcetera, can certainly exercise their influence and that is not a mark that is not suggested to not favor a free speech but you do have to also understand that there are consequences.
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Thank you. Will Saletan.
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Well, we didn’t get a chance to talk about Israel and Gaza this week, but I’m afraid that my low light comes from that issue. Within the past twenty four hours, very credible and well sourced accounts have emerged that The intelligence officers whose business it was to monitor Hamas and report up the chain of command were waving bright red flags in the summer of twenty twenty three. I have read partial transcripts of emails that were sent up the chain of command, that talked in chilling detail. About the very realistic drills that Abbas was conducting to do exactly what it ended up doing and the reception of of these emails and analyses in the upper reaches of the intelligence community is a case study of how fixed ideas and arrogance can combine to produce deadly blindness. And I’m afraid that’s what happened in this case.
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And the commission of inquiry that will certainly be constituted after the conflict in Gaza’s over however it may end will put, I think, the commission of inquiry that was constituted after the yom kippur war fifty years ago in the shade and very substantial portions of the Israeli intelligence, establishment, military establishment, and political establishment for Mr. Netanyahu on down, are going to be cut down, and their careers will be ended. And it’s not going to be pretty.
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According to polls, I’ve seen something like seventy six percent of Israelis, believe that Netanyahu needs to be removed. I mean, the timing of that will depend. But as you say, it’s it’s not just netanyahu. It’s a a much broader failure. And Israelis do speak of it that way.
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Well, I have a related low light, and it’s actually not a recent article. This article is almost ten years old, that I’m going to recommend, but it is really one for the ages. This is an article that appeared in tablet magazine, August of twenty four seen by a reporter named Marty Friedman, an American who, moved to Israel and worked for the, associated press there. For about five years. But he quit after about five years because he found the culture intolerable.
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And his piece is a dissection of not just the AP, but how the whole international press corps covers Israel. And it is really I mean, there’s nothing in this. It could have been written yesterday. He talks about many things, but one of them is, you know, the fact that, there’s a disproportionate number of reporters that are assigned to Israel compared with the region or even the world. He said when he was a correspondent there, the AP had more than forty staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories more than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the countries of sub Saharan Africa combined.
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It was higher than the total number of news gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the Arab spring erupted. And then he talks about the corruption. So, for example, there is a tremendous emphasis on reporting which points out is easy because Israel is an open country and a democracy, and you’re not gonna get harassed or, you know, in any trouble, if you if you report critically about things in Israel, and so they do. But he said, inside Gaza, he said he’s he personally knew of situations example, the AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right outside their office. Endangering reporters and other civilians nearby, and the AP would not report it.
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Not even in AP articles about Israeli claims, that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. And he cites examples of where Hamas fighters would burst into AP’s Gaza Bureau and threaten the staff. Now the staff would have been mostly Palestinians, and the AP wouldn’t report that. And he he says there is this fixed storyline that the overwhelming majority of the press follows, which is that The Palestinians are the victims here that they are passive. They are not agents of their own fate.
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They have no responsibility for anything that happens. And the Israelis are the colonizers and the oppressors. And so Israeli actions are analyzed, criticized, and so forth, but There’s no analysis of what’s going on inside the Palestinian world or what kinds of internal strife is happening in Palestinian society. And so it is an article, as I say, that has incredible numbers of really damning details that remain exceedingly relevant to where we are now. He wrote a follow-up piece in the Atlanticic that I will, also put a link to.
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It’s a huge problem because the group think that characterizes reporting from Israel has real world consequences. We see now the tremendous fall off of support among younger Americans for Israel. And I think a lack of under standing of the difficulty that Israel faces with an enemy that makes war on Israeli civilians and then hides among Palestinian civilians. And, highly recommended. So it’s called an insider’s guide to the most important story on earth by Marty Friedman.
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And with that, I would like to thank our guests, Noah Smith, and of course, our regular panel, as well as our producer Jim Swift, our sound engineer, Jonathan Last. Before Thanksgiving, I said we’d return next week as every week and course, we had a special during Thanksgiving. So I wasn’t completely wrong, but I was mostly wrong. So I apologize for that, but next week, we really will return like every week. Thank you all.
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