Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #11: Ryan and Emily's Election Takeaways

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Ryan and Emily cover the elections across the country and what they mean for the future of both partiesTo become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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But enough with that, let's get to the show. All right, welcome back to CounterPoints, and we promise we are working on intro music, so you have to stop kind of humming something to yourself when you see that logo. We're going to talk most of this show about midterms, midterm fallout, leadership elections in Congress that are shaken up by the midterm fallout. But first, two pieces of news breaking last night and this morning. First, the new inflation report shows the numbers cooling, 7.7% annualized. Now, nobody's going to celebrate 7.7% inflation year over year, but compared to 8% plus, that's the trajectory that you want to go. How do you think, and there was also, and we're going to talk to Sarota for a weekend segment,

Sarota flagged this Morgan Stanley report that said that the way that voters responded to inflation in this midterm suggests that there might actually be more policy room for fiscal policy. That actually, wait, maybe full employment is something that people like more than they dislike inflation. So they were basically warning their clients, look out, there could be some more fiscal headroom here for policymakers in Washington. So don't get your hopes up too much on a grand bargain that cuts Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, which Biden took off the table yesterday. So the fact that you're now seeing this cooling, could this signal the end of or the beginning of the end of the Fed's monetary policy tightening, you think? I hope it's the beginning of the end, but I still do worry that it's more of the

beginning and that we don't know how bad this is going to continue to get. Because again, the left makes this point a lot. There's really nothing Joe Biden can do about Vladimir Putin at this point. I mean, the only thing he can do right is pump oil out of the strategic reserve for political purposes heading into a midterm. Well, people have voted now. So I think gas prices are going to head back up. Well, the strategic reserve, I mean, it's at a historic low. They're going to have to start filling it back up. Right. Well, people have voted now, so I think gas prices are going to head back up. Well, the strategic reserve, I mean, it's at a historic low. They're going to have to start filling it back up. Right. You guys voted.

Joe Biden thanks you for your votes. Gas prices are going back up now. Speaking of that, there's news out of Ukraine. This is the other sort of bit of breaking news we wanted to touch on before diving into what we know more about the midterms here. What happened? Right. And Biden made an interesting comment that felt a little narcissistic. And then I thought about it more. I'm like, well, wait a minute. Is there something to this? So Biden, so Putin

announced that there was going to be a broad retreat from Kherson, which would avoid this titanic battle that people have been speculating is just around the corner and that Russia was likely to eventually lose, he announced he's going to leave, that they're retreating from Kherson. It was initially met with some skepticism, but it does appear to be real. Like areas around there are being liberated regularly and all indications are that this is accurate. Biden said at his press conference yesterday that intelligence that the United States had indicated that they were, in fact, going to retreat from Kherson. And he said, I find it interesting that Putin saved this until after the midterms. And at first, I was like, that's absurd. And I'm like, well, wait a

minute. He did actually announce this. Like, we it was going to happen and he held the announcement until after the midterms. What does that say, if it's true, about how Putin sees the war in Ukraine playing into domestic politics and what his interests are in the outcome of our politics? Yeah, I think it's, that's a really good question. And Biden, by the way, was in a hell of a mood yesterday. He was feeling good. It was early in the day too. in a hell of a mood yesterday. He was feeling good. It was early in the day, too. It was like 4 p.m. That's pretty early.

I mean, that's early for him. That's dinner time. He was feeling great yesterday. Early bird special. Interesting. The White House. Right. He said some interesting one-liners.

Well, I think we have always known that Putin and his government believes that we are very vulnerable and that our divisions make us vulnerable to sort of outside manipulation. So I don't think that that's implausible, actually, at all. Right. He doesn't want to do anything that he thinks might make Democrats look good. Yeah. Well, yeah, or makes Biden look good. Yeah. Well, yeah, or it makes Biden look good. And all this is happening in the context, by the way, of that Washington Post report, which confirmed that there are channels that are trying to urge Ukraine to the negotiating table. And that came out, what, last week, last Friday? Right, right. Right. Which would be nice. There's movement. To end the war. So let's start by talking about the Senate. So

not much has changed, interestingly, since we left this studio a little after midnight on Tuesday night. We have some more vote totals in. We know for sure that Georgia, we could put this, so we know for sure that Georgia is headed to a runoff. This will be early December. Last time, it was a eight, nine-week sprint marathon. Gosh. It wasn't until, what, January 4th or 5th that the runoff happened. This time, it's early December, so it's just a four-week sprint. Meanwhile, Nevada and Arizona are still too close to call, but Democrats are pretty confident that they're going to win at least

one, maybe both of those, depending on what votes come in in Nevada. We can talk about those races in a second. But I'm curious for your take on the effect of, let's say, it's not for all the marbles. Let's say by this weekend, we know that Democrats are going to have at least 50 seats in the Senate. Or Republicans, depending on Nevada. Or let's say Republicans win them both. Right. And so this Georgia Senate race becomes a nice-to-have for both parties,

but not deciding the balance of power. Which party's turnout operation do you think that that helps the most? That's a really good question. I mean, I think it does depend because if you're a Democrat, you have the tiebreaker, right, in Kamala Harris. Depending on how the numbers shake out, that's obviously a huge advantage. Kamala Harris is not going to vote the way of Republicans. It would be funny if she did. Yeah, she just goes totally rogue. So I think that will matter a little bit. But I don't know. I mean, it's just going to be a ton of money no matter what. It's

going to be, because even for Democrats, they've been frustrated with the margin that they have right now. And if there's an opportunity for them to pick up another seat, well, to keep Warnock in the Senate and increase their margin, even by one vote, they'll feel so much more comfortable that it's going to be worth the spending. And so do you think that Republicans, after this disappointing night, which is going to lead to a bunch of finger pointing, already is leading to finger pointing, you already have Trump out there making fun of Ron DeSanctimonious for getting fewer votes in a midterm than he got as president in a presidential year, saying that nobody has ever won 219 seats before. So he's going to be stirring

the pot for four weeks, which is him stirring the pot for eight weeks in Georgia last time, really hurt turnout for Republicans. So do you think that Republicans are going to say, you know, we thought we're going to have this red wave. Instead, we got embarrassed. Like, I'm not coming out again for Herschel Walker? Or do you think that the stakes for them are so existential that they're like, you know what, I'll walk through fire for Herschel Walker early December? I think that's what we're going to see. The money is going to be framing it very much as that, that this is existential. And I'm sure the Democrats will follow suit because that margin is really important to them. It's not every day that you have a president and a Senate.

You can get a lot done with that. Because Democrats hate Manchin so much that they would love to be able to make him moot. It's helpful. Yeah, it's a neutralizer. And again, it depends on how the numbers shake out. But yeah, I think there's going to be a ton of money pouring in telling both sides. And in a red state like Georgia, I think that's helpful for Republicans because you have that homestay advantage, right, of people that are generally going to be inclined to say, oh, this is existential in that direction. Now, one thing that the conservative sort of

commentariat has settled on over the course of the last couple of days, the buzzword is chaos. They have said that candidates like Herschel Walker, Mastriano, Michaels, voters don't want chaos. They want a sense of normalcy. And Walker is an example of a chaos candidate. And so I would expect that- Do people really want normal chaos? It's so much more interesting. Well, here's what's really interesting. So my old editor, Tim Carney, pulled out a quote that we got one time during a editorial board interview at the Washington Examiner with Thomas Massey. And Thomas Massey explained to us, he said he went and campaigned with Rand Paul and Ron Paul. He's a fairly libertarian.

And it wasn't until Trump came along that he realized, you know, he used to think, wow, all of these people just really love limited government. And he said, I realized when Trump came along, they were just looking to support the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Carney pulled that one out. And he said, you know, basically, that's what Trump voters want. But that's not the entire public. Right. So especially in some of those districts, we're going to talk about Erie County, for instance. You know, you might have people that

liked what Trump's chaos was, but nobody else can channel that. There's just no other Donald Trump, and it's certainly not going to be Dr. Oz or Mastriano. End the Fed, don't end the Fed. Make me laugh and make this party establishment cry, and I'm happy. Pretty much that, and take on the media. Right. No, absolutely. So anyway, I think that just expect to see that sort of nudge for Walker to not be such a chaos candidate because, well, I don't know how you do that. Yes. Also, how do you do that? I don't know how you do that. He's one, he has that. Like how he did in the primary. Yeah. Right. I think that's right. So let's put this next element up.

Wisconsin, this is one of the calls that we did have after Tuesday night. It looked like it was headed in this direction. It did go. So the biggest surprise here for pundits, myself included, was how close it was. Yeah. how close it was. And I think that in some ways, Barnes here was a victim of the massive Wisconsin polling misses in 2016 and 2020, and that he was able to say, look, I'm up seven points here in these polls. Party doesn't come in and help him. Hey guys, I'm up four points here. Party doesn't come in and help him. Hey guys, this is a dead heat. Party doesn't help him.

Guys, I'm only down by a couple points here. Party doesn't help him because they keep adding in this extra four or five points that they think the polls are off by. Instead, the polls were off in the other direction. Democrats spent something like $72 million in Florida going after Marco Rubio. Insane. To lose by almost 20 points. And they left Mandela Barnes hanging out to dry in Wisconsin. Now you can have criticisms of Barnes as a candidate and a campaigner and whatever. He was within two points or so. What was the-

Within one point. It's with 99% in, we have Ron Johnson at 50.5% and Mandela Barnes at 49.5%. So how do you justify spending $70 million in Florida? You don't. And Florida is so much more expensive to campaign in than Wisconsin. You're from Wisconsin, right? Yeah, we're cheap. It doesn't cost anything with a Green Bay market or whatever. Well, I don't know what they were thinking.

I mean, Mandela Barnes obviously isn't the ideal candidate in Wisconsin just because he has what you would refer to probably if you're a political consultant as like progressive baggage, right? They kept showing the abolish ICE t-shirt. Yeah, that's not helpful. Right. Yeah. From a purely political perspective, it's somebody who would have aligned himself with an AOC running in Wisconsin. And again, Randy Bryce was there and Randy Bryce ended up sort of falling flat on his face. But there's an argument Jason Kander likes to make it that if you run sort of boldly on progressive ideas, it's the Reagan formula. because people know you're principled. People know that you believe what you believe, and you're going to bring some populism into it, likely, and there's a way to do it. Medicare for all. Can it win in Wisconsin? Absolutely. But all that is to say,

even Wisconsin's polling has been off in a lot of Ron Johnson races, a lot of races in general. So like the Marquette poll that everyone referred to in Wisconsin for a long time as the gold standard of polling. It wasn't picking up on a lot of races in general. So like the Marquette poll that everyone referred to in Wisconsin for a long time as the gold standard of polling. It wasn't picking up on a lot of this stuff. And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit later. But just like, I don't think that any of these postmortems that are saying the polling was okay are right. I mean,

I think, you know, first of all, polls should be better than okay. And second of all, I think there were some really, really big misses that just shouldn't have happened, still shouldn't have happened. This though, I think the governor's race shows that this, so not just the one, being one point away means it's a winnable race. That's what they call within the margin of maneuver. Like a couple decisions you make differently can shift those numbers of votes. But also you can look at the statewide gubernatorial race. Tony Evers was reelected. He's currently up by about 100,000 votes, 51.2% to 47.8%. And Barnes underperformed Evers. Barnes was identity politics-based argument that said that Barnes would turn out black voters in Milwaukee and also young voters. In Madison, huge college town. Instead, Milwaukee did not turn out in the way that they predicted it would. And Barnes then

significantly underperformed Evers in the rural areas of Wisconsin, which you have to, you're not going to win those as a Democrat, but you have to lose them less bad. That's what Evers did. Well, and maybe this is a good transition over to the House because that's our next block. Actually, let's talk about this. I want to take it real fast because you know Arizona really well. I don't actually. I mean, you know Blake Masters. You know, we had Blake Masters on Rising.

This is somebody whose career you followed for a long time. Do they think they have a shot? Do they have a shot? What's your sense at this point? I think they do have a shot. I think they have a path. I think they're projecting optimism about that path that's probably disproportionate to what the reality is. Down by five points.

Which is not abnormal. Yeah, I think Kerry Lake probably has a path, but I don't know that Blake Masters does. And, you know, a good example also, like thinking about where, I mean, I don't know. We have a block on the House and the governor's coming up, so I'm trying not to mash them all together. But I think you're right that there's optimism on their end about all of that. And Arizona is such a mess. It's that. And Arizona is such a mess. It's like, it is such a mess. The right there has little faith in the counting.

And so basically the prayer is just that this doesn't turn into another 2020 nightmare at this point. And I don't know. And meanwhile, Catherine Cortez Masto is down by 15,000 votes. But Democrats do think that the votes that are out ought to hew her way and that she has a pretty strong chance of holding on. It's going to be extremely close either way. If you're listening to the podcast, we're going to move right into the House here. If you're watching this somewhere else, you've got to go find our next video, which is on the House of Representatives. So let's- Or you're a premium subscriber and you're just watching all the way through.

Just watching us all the way through. That's right. That's awesome. So let's put up this first element here. So Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the DCCC, who fled his district because he felt it was too close. It was like a deep zero race, jumped further south, closer to New York City for a suburban district that leaned more heavily Democratic because he thought that that would be easier for him to hold. The problem for him was that it was currently occupied by an incumbent Democrat, Representative Mondaire Jones. Mondaire Jones hemmed and hawed for several days and then decided to leave,

ended up running in Manhattan, New York 10, to avoid a fight with the DCCC chair. A fight that I'm confident he would have won, but it would have been bloody. It would have been a mess. And then what does the DCCC do for you in the general election after you've ended the career of the DCCC chair? So I will acknowledge that Jones was put in a pretty difficult spot there. But then for Maloney to lose his own race and then in his state basically cost Democrats the House. We'll see what the margin may, I mean, bizarrely, Inside Elections was saying this morning that there's still a chance that Democrats could hold the House. Like,

there's a path. They don't think it's likely, but they think there's a path. But let's say that they lose it by a couple of votes. If they do, it was in the House, it was in New York that they lost it in a number of close races, including Tom Swozy, who was a Long Island representative, stepping down for a ridiculous run for governor. And very popular, former mayor for 20 years, incumbent Democrat, would have won easily. Instead, Democrats lost his seat. They lost, then they lost Maloney's seat. They lost also in, let me pull some of these up, New York 19. Mark Molinaro wins by two points in that district. Max Rose got completely waxed.

Mike Lawler beats Sean Patrick Maloney by two points. Who else we got? Brandon Williams, Republican, beats Francis Canole in New York 22 by just 4,000 votes. It's not called yet, but Brandon Williams is up. Pat Ryan, who ran on a kind of anti-corporate populist slash abortion strategy, he won that special election that we talked about. He wins. Like, well, it's not called yet, but he's up by 2,000 votes at this point. And then Elise Stefanik held on quite easily. But those four or five losses right there

will likely end up being the difference. Well, and here's another one. And I want to get into that actually, because let's camp out on New York. I didn't mention the whole sweep in Long Island. Yeah. Okay. So if we camp out on New York, it's a really interesting question where Lee Zeldin didn't win. And the headline, if Lee Zeldin had won, although he did tighten the margin as the votes were coming in, it did end up being sort of, for a Republican, he made a really good showing, just like Drazen and Organ. The headline, if Lee Zeldin had won, would have basically been like red wave,

because that's like insane. But down ballot, what we were seeing is huge inroads for New York Republicans. And I saw a couple people tweeting. He's only lost by five, it looks like. Yeah, I mean, and that's a loss for the polling industry. Some people had him up. But all that is to say,

Zeldin, that's the headline, right? But down ballot, he made inroads. He did really well in parts of New York. He outperformed historic Republican patterns in different parts of New York. And all of those races that you just mentioned were similar, where you saw Republicans doing surprisingly well. And that's a real problem. I don't know how durable that is in Oregon. I imagine in New York, depending on how

things go in New York in general, what the Hochul term looks like um that could be a serious sort of problem for democrats in the future the other race that i wanted to talk about actually is wisconsin if we go if we go back to wisconsin here wisconsin's third so that's ron kine's district for a long time um and here i'm quoting uh jr ross who is the editor of WisconsinPolitics.com, he put up a tweet showing that the Republican in Wisconsin's third district, that's a rural district on the western side of the state, sort of southwestern into the north, if this margin holds, he wrote, the complaints I heard from Wisconsin Dems about the DTRIP not putting enough in this race will be justified. And the decision by House Majority

Pack to kill $1.8 million in ads for FAFSA for Congress over the final two weeks will be justifiably scrutinized. So the Democrat is down in that tweet at least with 64% of the votes counted by the AP's estimate. He's down about three points to Derek Van Orden, the Republican. Now, that's really interesting. Kind won that district in 2018 easily. I think he had like 60% of the vote. One of those guys that everybody likes them, Republicans vote for him. He can have the seat as long as he wants kind of thing. Yeah, like Hogan. Yeah, totally. It looks like Van Orden is in that margin. He's winning by almost exactly the margin that he lost to kind back in 2020.

So he flipped that. And this is, again, where you see, we talked about the Senate in the last block, you see a razor thin margin for Ron Johnson and Mandela Barnes too. So Democrats are, Wisconsin, New York, we're talking about relatively rural areas in both places where there was problems for Democrats. There was probably problems that they could have fixed if they saw it coming. I don't know. Would that be your assessment of Newark as well? Yes, I think that Faf here was also a victim of the skepticism around the polling. Exactly.

That the Democratic bosses who either run the Super PAC, House Majority PAC, that's the DTLC super PAC, or who run kind of the Senate campaign spending, looked at the races, and I'm sure Faf was screaming at them. This is a dead heat. We are statistically tied with Van Orden here. They'd be like, yeah, you're statistically tied, but Wisconsin polls were wrong. So you're actually down by five or six or seven points. Yes. Since Biden was polling, what, up 17? Or was that Hillary that was polling 17? They missed it so badly that now they're just going with their guts and their guts have no idea what's going on in Wisconsin.

And the conventional wisdom is that they're under-polling Republicans. Right. And it turned out they were under polling Democrats. In certain places, yeah. It's very interesting that the conventional wisdom in the polling industry was we are having a really hard time tapping into these covert Trump supporters. I'm getting into this in my monologue, but basically that conventional wisdom was not right. And I think especially when you don't have Donald Trump on the ballot, it's not right. But the fact that so many political professionals, and you can see this in the DTRIP numbers, and you can see this where Republicans started spending money, people's internal polls even, we're not even talking about the media stuff, clearly nobody

had any idea what the hell was happening in a lot of these races. They just didn't know. One side point here. So Iowa was completely swept by Republicans, all four seats. Republicans dominated in Florida as well. Dominated. I was talking about this before that a lot of our policy has been twisted by the fact that Iowa is a swing state where the presidential races start and Florida is a swing state where the presidential races end. Like that's how, like, you know, there's that saying that races begin in Iowa and end in Florida. Not true anymore. So somebody was making the point, it was Eric Sterling of Just Foreign Policy. He's

like, okay, you know what? Enough with the Cuban embargo now. We've been doing this, we've been making the Cuban people suffer for 50 years so that we have a chance of winning in Florida, which is so cynical and awful. Like that people are eating, you that some consultant has a chance of like, you know, narrowing the margins in Miami-Dade County. So scrap that. Now make the policy on its merits, not just for one community in South Florida. Secondly, in Iowa, our stupid ethanol policy has been just completely driven by the fact that Iowa's a swing state and the Iowa caucus. Democrats are, it looks like they're scrapping the Iowa caucuses. It's no longer a competitive state. Enough with ethanol subsidies.

Done. Figure something else out. What about the sugar subsidies in Florida? Yes. Done. Done. Done. Like how many cases of diabetes do we have in this country so that Democrats and Republicans can jockey for the vote in Florida? You know, I'm sorry for Democrats that they're not competitive in Florida anymore, but just write it off and end the sugar subsidies, end the ethanol subsidies, end the Cuban embargo. Done. Make the world a better place. I disagree, obviously, with your take on, I don't disagree with the ethanol and sugar at all. Keep subsidizing it and you can send the corn and the sugar over to Cuba.

I disagree with both the politics and the principle of your take on the embargo, but we can talk about that later. An issue you know very well, though, but I think there's a really good point there, which is how does this shake up American politics, period? Like if you have Republicans suddenly being competitive in places like Florida and Democrats or in places like Oregon and Democrats not being competitive in places like Florida, that changes policy. Like that has a huge, especially Florida, which is a highly populous state that does have a lot of outsized influence because it's sort of generally been seen as purple. But the margins that came in this week are not indicative of a purple state at all. And maybe there's still places Democrats can be competitive. Maybe with the right candidate, they can be competitive. I don't know. I mean, remember how close that was with Gillum? That was a very, very close race. If not for that stupid scandal where like

some undercover FBI agent gave his brother Hamilton tickets. I forgot about that. Gillum was a frontrunner for the presidency. Instead, he was arrested. Yeah. DeSantis is a frontrunner for the presidency. Oh, we're still technically in the House block. Some news here.

I asked Tom Suozzi, are you thinking about running for your old seat in 2024? People are missing you already. He says, ha. You said people are missing you already? So says, ha. You said people are missing you already. So not a no. Not a no. Not a no. Ha. I think Democrats, even progressives, would be like, you know what? That guy really annoyed us a lot by being part of the no label, the centrist stuff, but he won. And they would rather have a Democrat who annoys them than a Republican who's just going to vote constantly against them. I think one big storyline that may be emerging, and you were touching on

this from Tuesday's results, is that the country is starting to almost balkanize in that people are starting, like Florida is a good example, to concentrate in different parts of the country. And that's going to be, that's going to have a difference, not just in politics where people compete, but then downstream of that in policy and downstream of that sort of in our interactions with each other. And obviously, you know, since bowling alone and coming apart, people have written about this, but when it actually starts happening with physical moving, where people are sort of actually also voting with their feet and not just saying, well, we're in Oregon, it happens, or we're in New York, whatever it is. But when people are

saying, listen, we're getting out of the city, or we're getting out of Portland, we're getting out of Manhattan, you're going to start, our politics are really going to change. And so the DCCC chair losing in a pretty good year for House Democrats, awfully funny, might not be the funniest to compete for the funniest races. One, did you know Sarah Palin was running again? I did. All right. So, and then we're going to get to Laura. Because you can do writing campaigns pretty successfully in Alaska. You can. Murkowski. If Murkowski can win, I think, weren't they handing out pencils that said Murkowski on them? So, to run through these really quickly. So, Mary Peltola, the Democrat who said she was the fish candidate, which is important in Alaska. Everything's dying up there. 47%, Sarah Palin with 27%, Nick Begich with 24%. Once all the ballots are counted, their ranked choice, that's with 80%, and once all the ballots are counted, their ranked choice

kicks in. And so, if Mary Peltola doesn't get over 50%, then the second place choices for Nick Begich play in. And so, if every single Nick Begich voter chose Sarah Palin as their second choice, she would win 53-47. But we know that that's not going to happen. Some of them are going to pick Peltola, a small margin, because they just hate Sarah Palin for all the different reasons that people don't like Sarah Palin. I mean, if you don't really live in Alaska, it's going to be very hard to win in Alaska. Right. Yes. Dr. Oz. As Dr. Oz learned in Pennsylvania. And he was pretty close. She's not even close. But a lot of the baggage voters are also going to just leave it blank. So they're like, look, I like baggage. Who's my second choice? I don't like either of

them. And so those get pulled out. So Peltola's probably got that. That's funny. Colorado, Lauren Boebert. She's currently down by, oh, I can't do this math, 156,746 votes for the Democrat Adam Frisch, 156,682 for Lauren Boebert with more than 95% counted. So this is actually still up in the air. It sounds like, and we were laughing about this last night on Twitter, it sounds like Aspen has been fully counted. Aspen, obviously not Lauren Boebert country. And I'll say this for Lauren Boebert, at least she had the right enemies. Doesn't mean you're not a jerk, but she had the right enemies there. Like, if you're losing Aspen 9-1, that's kind of, or 8-2 or whatever it was, that says something.

It feels like we're in a weird place if the left is the super rich people in Aspen. Well, and the left are also leveling sexist attacks on her, like saying that it's good news for only fans, as Kurt Bardella did on MSNBC last night. Although the loudest one on this front has been Maga Man Lenny Dykstra, my hero when I was a kid. Nails, the old Mets and Phillies player, took the opportunity to hit on her on Twitter. I mean, what it's turning out to be is maybe that Lauren Boebert country is not even Lauren Boebert country because what you have here is a fairly centrist Democrat being extremely competitive.

Lauren Boebert might be able to make up the math here. It's not impossible. But when you have someone coming in and saying basically like, there's too many distractions. You're not helping the people of the district. It's more about you than it is about the district. That's a pretty clear sign. And Republicans also lost an upset in this Northeast Colorado District 8. I mean, it's on the other side of the state, but, you know, also a rural area, but that has like, that's 40% Hispanic, those two Hispanic. And Polis was more comfortable than people expected either.

Yeah. And the psychedelics hung on. That's right. So there's going to be therapeutic psychedelic centers in Colorado that are going to be building up. As we talk about governors, yeah, there you go. So Democrat Laura Kelly wins re-election in the Kansas governor's race, NBC News projects. One thing I'd like to add to that also, just while we're talking about the sort of Kansas, there was a lot of speculation that Kevin Stitt was going to lose the governorship in Oklahoma. And this is one of the spots where polling was just, most of this was, most of the bad polls were erring on the side of undercounting Democratic votes. This poll, for some, these polls in Oklahoma were awful. They were so bad. Kevin Stitt was reelected governor of Oklahoma, a red state, very comfortable. But actually,

there were several polls that had Hoffmeister, this is the last week of October, up by three, up by one, up by four throughout October. And Stitt was handily reelected. Probably, I mean, it might even be a double digit margin. At least it was when I was looking. 55-42 here. Yeah, that's with 99% in, double digits. We were making fun of those polls here. Right. Like, sometimes you can be like, look, come on, get out of here with this.

You can, but Oklahoma Republicans were nervous, legitimately nervous about that. And obviously, if we put C2 up on the screen, we're just sort of taking a tour around the different governorships in the country. Gretchen Whitmer, another one where there were polls. And they swept the legislature, too. There you go. And they had an abortion referendum on the ballot. So this the narrative and I'll talk about this a little bit later, but the narrative that it was this clear cut sort of dichotomy between abortion and the economy in a midterm when you need turnout, turnout for abortion clearly helped Whitmer. And that's clearly what is not being picked up on by the pollsters. Right. That's clearly what was being missed, that these things were going to be,

were going to buoy Democrats in ways that they just weren't picking up on. And the most difficult thing for pollsters to pick up is youth turnout, because they just have such a hard time gauging whether or not a young person who's telling them they're going to turn out is going to turn out. Partly, it's not just generational prejudice. It's that there's not as much of a history. If somebody's 50 years old, then you can look back in their voting history and tell how many times they've come out. They're like, yeah, oh, I'm totally going to vote. And you check their voting record. They haven't voted in 10 years. You're like, well, I'm not so sure they're going to vote. Well, they also might pick up a

landline. Right. And so, right. And right. It's harder to reach them. And also, if they're a 20-year-old and they haven't voted before, and they're telling you, I'm definitely going to vote, as a pollster, now you have to make the decision. Are they telling you the truth? Are they actually going to vote? Because you don't have a voting history that you can go back and look at. And I'll take a quick victory lap because if you remember Tuesday night on Megyn Kelly, she and Larry Elder were like laughing at the idea that there might be a surge in youth voter turnout and that Democrats always bank on these young people turning out and then the young people never show up. They showed up in 2018 and that really made

the difference. And that was anti-Trump, and that was gun violence, if you remember. That was the surge of the post-Parkland movement. They doubled their share in 2018. They doubled their share of the electorate. Nobody had ever seen an explosion like that, and they were overwhelmingly Democratic. And so they came out again. Again, we still don't exactly know in what numbers, but they came out in huge numbers. And I think there are several things that you can draw from that. And one is that you got to stop thinking about people just as boxes. Yes, I think this vindicates Biden's student loan policy. I think clearly like done, like anybody who thought that that was going to backfire on Democrats missed that, but that's not all students are. I think the climate bill that

they passed, you know, the IRA, the biggest climate spending in history, I think that mattered. Like, I think that brought out some young people, got some young people enthusiastic, showed them there was a purpose in getting involved, but also, and maybe most importantly, abortion. Because for some reason, we do this thing where we think, well, you have women over here, and then you have young people over here. None of the young people are women. None of the, there's, or are the boyfriends of women, and or young people who care, or young boys, young men who care about. Dave Portnoy, who said he was not voting Republican.

This is like, to people under 30, or 40, who have just grown up, like abortion is a fundamental right in the Constitution, to all of a sudden be told it's not. And they're like, no. And so, so yes, certainly women of all ages are offended. It's having that right stripped away, but I think people under 40 men and women, um, I think we're particularly driven by that. What's, how are Republicans thinking through the turnout model, uh, in relation to abortion policy? I think in, uh, I, I'm sort of trying to pick a lot of this apart in my monologue. I do think that there was this idea, and understandably so, that the economy was in a place where people would be voting, or they would want to hear more from candidates about their

sort of, their bank accounts. Like. What's happening to my bank account? What is happening to my portfolio? What is happening to just my ability to feed my family and to do X, Y, and Z? And that would be sort of separate. Or it would be overwhelming. Not separate, but that those interests would overwhelm interests in talking about anything else, like nothing else. And I don't know. I mean, I think there were some voters like that probably, but you have to then factor in what that's going to do, for instance, to the youth vote, which is historically, and this is like Megan had had a good point when she was talking, like historically it's low. And historically, especially in a bad economy under an unpopular incumbent president, you would not expect young people to turn out high enough in ways that would be super helpful for Democrats. And I don't think that sort of the Dobbs aftermath was factored in, and especially, especially, especially in states where there was an abortion referendum on the table. That, I think, in Michigan is absolutely

key, completely crucial. And, you know, young voters, that's not people who have kids in the schools and would be upset with Gretchen Whitmer over that, over COVID lockdowns, which was a huge issue in the race between Whitmer and Dixon. So it wasn't picking up on what Democrats were doing. And we were very clear here that dismissing the focus on abortion was not, like, obviously Democrats know this is about turnout. I don't think that they handled it spectacularly well. I don't think a lot of Republicans handled it spectacularly well. But midterm elections, yeah, you're going to hear about democracy, democracy, and you're going to hear about abortion when Democrats are trying to, just these marginal wins. That's what it is. I mean, there are all these kinds of things that

tip the balance and make the difference. And that's one of them, obviously. The danger for Democrats feeling so good coming out of this would be that they ignore some of the routes that they took in a lot of other places like Iowa, for instance, parts of New York, where the abortion message worked in places like New Hampshire, places like Michigan here that have a slightly higher college-educated population. If they're going to be competitive nationally, they're going to have to reach workers to where they are.

And so one of the good signs coming out of Michigan is that Democrats are saying now that the first thing they're going to do is take on right-to-work. The Betsy DeVos kind of hard-right Michigan wing there has pushed as many kind of pro-corporate anti-worker policies as they could get through with their- I mean, a lot of workers support right to work. Well, we'll see. So that's a fun fight to have. It is a fun fight to have. Some workers are anti-union, no doubt about it. Or at least not even anti-union, but just anti not being forced into a union. Right. So Democrats are going to go at right to work. And we'll see how that pans out because that's actually an interesting fault line for the populist left and right.

It's like the populist right is for workers, but they're still kind of sorting through exactly where they are on unions. Yeah, it's an interesting fight. I don't agree necessarily that it's an interesting fault line because of sort of what I was just saying. Like a lot of, so American Compass, it's Oren Kass's group that does a lot of pro-worker issues from the right perspective. They support a different sort of formation, a more European formation about what organization, what organizing should look like for American workers. And I don't imagine that they would be against right to work. And I mean, I don't know. I think it's not a great fight to pick for the left, actually, because I think it exposes a lot of the cracks in the sort of foundation

and a lot of the conversations that people don't want to have about the faults in big labor. And it always, actually, I'm just saying from a political perspective, I don't know that it's the most expedient fight to pick. Yeah, that I disagree with. Without organized labor, without workers collectively demanding fights

through the political process, I think you don't have a left that is anything other than kind of, you know, culture, culture war, reverse culture war. So if Democrats are going to fight in the workplace and appeal to workers' material interests, I think that's the best chance that the party has. Because otherwise, it's just a faculty lounge party. And if that becomes the debate between the right and the left, do you want the freedom to not have to join a union in your workplace, which might then dissolve your union? Because it's not as if the right to... So in states where right to work has been implemented, you see union density

collapse. Absolutely. And so it's not as if you still have the union protections, but you have the individual freedom to not join a union. You don't end up having the choice to join a union or not because you've destroyed the unions. Yeah. And. And so that's why, and I think that's why in places where right to work has been implemented, it might be easier to reverse because it sounds nice to say to somebody like, look, we're totally for a union, but you don't have to be in it if you work for this company, if you don't want to, but you can still have the benefits. So you get the extra healthcare, you get the pension, you get the annual raises, but you also

don't have to pay dues. And a lot of workers are like, I'll take that deal. Great. Gas prices are going up. I'll take an extra $100, $150 in my paycheck. And then a couple of years later, the union's gone. And now you don't have a choice anymore to get that health care, to get that pension, to get that rate, to get that annual raise because there is no union. So I think that we'll see. But I think it's a fight worth having. So like Michigan as a test case in what happens, like as a sort of example of what you lose when you pass right to work, you're saying that only works out in the favor of Democrats. And it's interesting because I think back to the right to work fight in Michigan, what was that, like almost 10 years ago?

That really did expose, I mean, when you're going out and talking to workers who are saying, I absolutely believe in right to work because I have problem X, Y, and Z with my union. That is powerful and not in the direction. Right. And unions need a check. And there are certainly corrupt unions. And that was before unions were super woke too, by the way. Are they that woke in Michigan? Nationally, they definitely are. And so the national organizations that the chapters are

responsive to, I guarantee you a lot of Michigan workers have problems with. But that doesn't mean that they see that as outweighing different interests. The grass is always greener. And so we'll see. See, that's actually a really interesting point. The grass is always greener. And I think you've persuaded me that this is an interesting fight. All right.

Excellent. There we go. Next, Republicans are all jockeying for blame and for power here. That's right. Let's put D1 up here. Scalise will not challenge McCarthy. This is per Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl. According to a Scalise aide who told Jake that,

the message that's going out from the Scalise camp, Scalise is running for majority leader, full stop. Jim Jordan said the same thing yesterday as well, although he was pretty clear about that to me just about a month ago. And we also have D2. This is from Ben Shapiro. We can throw that up on the screen. Okay, so this is... Actually, this would be funny if it was from Ben Shapiro. Yeah, this is clearly from Trump. I don't know if Ben tweeted it or something. I have an exciting announcement that I can't wait to share with you. On November 15th, I'm going to announce something huge at Mar-a-Lago,

and I want you to be there. He means me. He means you, Ryan Grimm. He wants you to be there. So, but make sure to contribute your $5 so you can get into Mar-a-Lago. I'm sure this lottery will be on the up and up, and whoever wins will actually be invited to Mar-a-Lago. No questions. It's like Willy Wonka, like the golden ticket.

Yeah. Recently, Trump was offering an 1100% match for donations down the stretch. I was like, there's no way anybody can ever top an 1100% match. I can't even do it. I give $5 and it magically turns into $5,500. How can I not do this? And then a couple of days later, they came out with a 1700% match. Wow. That's such a great deal. It's all like, how could you not take Trump up on that? It's just Steve Mnuchin. He's just out there just printing, multiplying. He stole all that money from the mint. He stole the mint.

Yeah. That's, that's how he's going to multiply your money. That's genius. Little known. Little known fact. So, Kayleigh McEnany actually said on Fox News yesterday that if she were Donald Trump, because of the Georgia runoff, she would not hold that announcement. The announcement on the 15th. Not make the announcement.

Not make the announcement. It's widely expected, of course, that Donald Trump's big Mar-a-Lago announcement that he announced at his rally, what was that, Monday night, is going to be his announcement that he's running for president. He is obviously running for president unless something dramatic changes. The man is running for president. But because Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump have been publicly sort of at somewhat of loggerheads, DeSantis hasn't really exchanged any fire with him. Trump has put up on Truth Social some mockery of DeSantis, as Ryan mentioned earlier in the show, saying that he got more votes than DeSantis did in the midterm. But of course, when you're running in a presidential year, you're always going to get more votes than DeSantis did in the midterm. But of course, when you're running in a presidential year,

you're always going to get more votes than somebody running in a midterm year for the most part because turnout is just that much higher. So Trump has been ribbing DeSantis. He called him DeSanctimonious the last couple of weeks. And the sort of internal chatter on the right at the moment is that Donald Trump, his candidates fared very poorly this week. His endorsements didn't seem to carry the weight and the punch that a lot of people wanted them to. Thus, there needs to be some introspection and some time to think about what's best for the party

before he makes that announcement that DeSantis is kind of waiting in the wings. This guy puts up double-digit margins, not just in general, but in freaking Miami-Dade County. Just crazy stuff for Republicans in Florida. And again, like Florida is changing quickly. That's polling a lot of people who either weren't voting or were straight up voting Democrat in Florida to the Republican side. So that seems to be the dilemma facing Republicans right now. It's all Trump. And I have a lot of thoughts on that. So before I keep just blubbering on, Ryan, what are your thoughts? I think Democrats, rightly or wrongly, are desperately hoping that he follows through with his announcement. Because also Democrats are such short-term, everybody in politics is short-term thinkers. So they're like, if he announces mid-November,

like that really juices our turnout for the Herschel Walker, Raphael Warnock, December 4th or 5th election, whenever that is. What does that do for Herschel Walker turnout? Could you, like, will Trump go all in to try to, will he be rallying constantly in Georgia for two weeks? And will DeSantis? That's the question because again, look at how popular Ron DeSantis is in Florida, right under the border there in Georgia. He's very close.

And again, putting it double-digit margins. And we talked about the sort of Reagan model or the populist, the Jason Kander model is that if you are bold and you pass these policies, you can actually sort of attract voters to you who don't necessarily love the Republican Party or regularly vote Republican or regularly vote Democrat because they say, that guy believes in something and he's doing something about it. And I like that. I like that things are actually changing. I like that somebody actually is doing what they say they're going to do. And that's been a sort of part of Ron DeSantis' success. And so it's very likely that people are going to want him to campaign for Herschel Walker.

Are they going to want Donald Trump to campaign for Herschel Walker in a state that Brian Kemp won easily and Herschel Walker is going to a runoff? Right. Like that is a huge red flag to Trump world. If you have Brian Kemp, a guy that Trump did endorse, Sager picked this up, I think he endorsed him at his rally on Monday. As it seemed pretty clear that Brian Kemp was going to win, Donald Trump was like, I give him my full endorsement and something like that. But Brian Kemp won easily in Georgia and Kemp and Trump have had a horrible relationship over what happened in 2020. So what's best? What's best for Herschel? I mean, but Herschel obviously loves Trump, right?

Loves Trump. A lot of Herschel voters love Trump. I mean, Donald Trump, this is where for all of the DeSantis people who I think risk sort of congealing into a very fervored base. And like, I understand why people like DeSantis on the right, don't get me wrong. But it's sort of, they have to be careful not to go into like full never Trump mode because that guy is attracting his rally in Ohio the other night. I mean, how many times has he's been to Ohio and Pennsylvania and Trump, and he still draws these huge crowds. That is not normal for any Republican. There is a lot of love for Donald Trump in the Republican base still, but there's also a lot of polarization in the Republican base. And you can see that, I think, in the Kemp and Walker numbers. So what

do you do? So thoughts on Scalise and Jordan? What's your read? I think the Freedom Caucus is going to flex its muscles. And if I were them, I would tell them to do the same thing if they want to have a lot of power in the next Congress. Kevin McCarthy has had a lot of really warm relationships with people in the Freedom Caucus. He especially has a very warm relationship with Jim Jordan. He cultivated that relationship intentionally. Who's he going to back? Who's Jordan going to back? McCarthy. Who in? In to back? McCarthy. Who in? In the majority leader race. Oh, I'm sure Scalise.

I think it'll be. I mean, I don't know. He has a close relationship with Jim Banks. And I think Banks is jockeying for the whip position. So I don't know. But I do think the Freedom Caucus is going to do something. And I don't think it's going to be a serious. We're going to get a Freedom Caucus.

We'll try. We'll try. If you're watching, you're in the Freedom Caucus. Come on the show. We'd love to talk to you. Because Kevin McCarthy is not seen as somebody... He's certainly not a kindred spirit with the Freedom Caucus. But for somebody who's not a kindred spirit with the Freedom Caucus, has a shockingly good relationship with them. And that was intentional and strategic on his part. So I think it's possible they throw someone up to run against him. Obviously, it's not going to be Jim Jordan, but that something happens that pushes him to do something. I mean, there are a lot of procedural changes that actually like really procedural changes that folks like Rachel Bovard

think need to be done and Freedom Caucus members think need to be done. So I wouldn't say that we won't see anything. Everyone will fall in line. A Freedom Caucus source told me before the election that the idea that the Freedom Caucus is going to support McCarthy and it's, quote, done and dusted is ridiculous. So I think that increases in likelihood now that the red tidal wave didn't materialize. Biden yesterday, feeling his oats, feeling really good, doing a bunch of I told you so here. The big question I think coming out of here, and as you can see this, does this mean that Biden is the presumptive nominee for 2024? And I think the obvious answer to that is yes. The question then is how party insiders feel about that and then also how the party base feels about that and what mechanisms they have to express those feelings over the next couple of years. So

from a Republican perspective, from the right, how happy are they that they might be running against Joe Biden? Or are they like starting to doubt themselves and their political gut, thinking like, wait, I thought Brandon was going to be a pushover and we couldn't even, like, it's Thursday and we don't even have the House locked down yet. I think they are going to be questioning. I think they're going to be questioning that for sure, whether or not their attacks on Biden and trying to tie certain candidates to Biden and the sort of failed Biden agenda worked because Biden, a lot of voters can see, and we talked about this, the student loan example, for instance, I think it, I actually think that that hurts

Democrats when it's front and center, but I think for a lot of voters that was not front and center, but for young voters, it sure as hell was. Yeah. Right. So I don't think it's like super clear cut, but I do think that, you know, Biden was strategic and the administration was strategic. I probably shouldn't say Biden himself because I don't know how much of that is his team being really strategic and saying this is what we're going to do X, Y and Z. And that stuff turns out voters like people who do stuff. And I understand that the Inflation Reduction Act and a lot of the big spending. Personally, I think that's absolutely contributing to inflation. I think the poor handling of the war is contributing to inflation. And I think this hostility to American energy has caused inflation. But Republicans obviously

did not make that case clearly enough in certain places like Arizona. I mean, just if you can't make that case with an unpopular incumbent president and a fairly bad economy in Arizona to the extent where it's a clear cut, sort of, if you can't do that, you have to start asking questions. Yeah. And if the inflation numbers today mean that the tightening begins to end from the Fed, the possibility of a recession in 23-24 goes way down. That's the public's best chance. Going up against Biden in the middle of a recession, it'd be almost impossible for Biden to win that. But if the war in Ukraine ends, which hopefully it ends by then,

Russia retreating from Kherson suggests that there is some type of end in sight maybe after, if Europe makes it through the winter and Ukraine survives through the winter, Russia keeps, their position keeps disintegrating. You could see how Putin might want some type of negotiated solution that still allows him to, I bet he'll want to keep fighting in the Donbass so that he can tell the population that they didn't lose the war. Because there's been some interesting analysis around Putin's thinking here. He can't say that they lost, just like the way that the United States never wants to lose.

Like we declare victory and we leave. So he needs to find a way to declare victory and leave. One way would be that he'll keep propping up some insurgency and just keep throwing bodies. Like it's the most cynical, diabolical thing. But I could see an end to that, which means the economy globally could be in a smoother situation over the next couple of years. But I think what Biden is so excited about, he considers himself lunch pail Joe, middle class Joe. Amtrak Joe. So let's throw up this next element. Really a cello Joe.

A more perfect union. Democrats and the working class. So, okay, start with this. They make the point. Working people's issues are winning issues. Nebraska raised the minimum wage. D.C. ended the tipped wage. Arizona cracked down on medical debt. Illinois protected workers' rights. South Dakota, expanded Medicaid. Missouri, Maryland, illegalized weed. Vermont, California, Michigan, Kentucky, all protected abortion. More Perfect Union also pulled out some of the exit polling data. 52% of households, and this might surprise people, 52% of households with income under $50,000 supported Democrats. The bottom 50% of earners have seen the biggest increase in real incomes since 2021, plus

10.5%. And so while inflation has eaten away at a lot of people's wages, the people at the bottom, bottom 50%, have legitimately seen for the first time actual real wages going up. So then they added, meanwhile, households making $50,000 to $100,000 were the most likely to vote Republican, that kind of lumpenproletariat. The middle 40% of earners have seen their real income stagnate. So those people materially have been hurt the most by inflation and haven't – they spend more. So that actually means that they're hurt more by inflation. When you spend less, just basic math, it's going to hurt less.

So those folks ended up voting strong as Republican. I saw the More Perfect Union tweet, and it's looking at results from two exit polls. It looks like it's from the Washington Post, not the polls, but the mashup of the polls. And I actually don't see this as great news for Democrats because what you have, first of all, that 50,000 to 100,000 demographic where you have 52 percent of them voting Republican and only 45 percent of them voting Democrat if the exit poll is to be believed, if you're a household and you have multiple kids making $50,000 to $100,000, depending on where you live, that's not a lot of money. Those are working class people too. Yeah, very, very much. Basically, the working class is split. Right. And if you go down to the second poll from AP VoteCast, that's in the More Perfect Union tweet. They say household income under $50,000, 48% Dem to 47% Republican, well within the margin of error.

And also exit polls are tough anyway. Exit polls are super tough. So let alone when you have a divide 48-47. And again, Republicans in the AP exit poll, 51% for that 50 to 100,000 demographic and 45% for Dems, which is almost exactly what the network exit poll showed as well. So you're right. It shows that the working class is split. And I think that's really, I don't know, I mean, historical trends I'd love to see, but that's for Republicans. That needs to be a wake wake up call that you need to have a clear message on the economy. That's not just Joe Biden sucks and that's not just Democrats are big spenders. You have to have something to offer people. And to your point about the right to work fight, that actually is really interesting. So Oren Cass over at American Compass tweeted, the political realignment continues apace. The opportunity to translate a multi-ethnic working class conservatism into a

durable governing majority is just sitting there staring at everyone. But while Trump spurred a working class realignment, he does not offer a formula for conservatives to capitalize on it. I think that's absolutely true. There's nothing on the table from Republicans right now. We saw Tom Cotton introduce a bill to increase the minimum wage in the Senate. Absolutely nowhere. It was castigated for forwarding that. Right. You've got some of these Republicans who are like, look, we're going to appeal to the working class's cultural grievances. Legitimate cultural grievances. And then as we have them in, then we're going to win them over with minimum wage increases. We're Legitimate cultural differences. culturally, and then you don't even give them anything, then I think you get to a place where voters get frustrated with Trump no longer on the ballot. Because they have to figure out what are

they in a post-Trump world. And if it's just grievances and vibes, at some point, people aren't going to, they're going to go back to where they were pre-Trump, which is not voting. Yeah, no, absolutely. Completely agree. Ryan, you actually have something getting into the internecine conversations on the left, and I'm really excited. This was an interview with AOC. Yep. So yesterday evening, I interviewed Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to get her reaction to the election and her take on what Democrats ought to do from here. And she said that if Republicans do end up with a tiny majority in the House, Democrats ought

to push them relentlessly on abortion rights, both legislatively and with executive action, to make the lives of the remaining moderates miserable. She said, quote, I think we take advantage of the disorganization of the Republican caucus. I do not believe that Kevin McCarthy is a strong leader whatsoever. And I think we inflict a lot of pain on this. And either it becomes enough of a liability with them that they have to let something through because they're just getting killed on this issue, or they lose in two years. That they either capitulate and pass some actual legislation or they get beaten in 2024 over it. So you can read the first part of the interview, which goes over a bunch of different

stuff as well over at The Intercept, but I wanted to play some of the rest of it here and then get Emily's response. Back on that point about making some pain for Republicans on abortion rights, if you do end up losing those seats in New York, probably a lot of them are going to be, you know, uncomfortable with the Republican position and kind of politically vulnerable around it. Yet they do feel pretty confident saying that they're against WIPA because they caricature it as, you know, killing babies right before birth or whatever their talking points are.

But WIPA does go beyond codifying Roe v. Wade. So where do you come down on the question of trying to get the codification of Roe into law versus holding out for the kind of maximalist WIPA legislation? Well, you know, I think when it comes to something like WIPA I think that Republicans you know a lot of this is just about messaging right and so Roe I stands for and what people really see as Roe is a woman or a person's trying to fly some dice and make these questions about 15 weeks or 20 weeks or 30 weeks. And I don't, and like, I think for a very long time, people have kind of run away from that fight. I don't think that we need to this kind of myth of third trimester elective abortions where like, there's nothing else that's wrong. Um, and I, you know, I think that when we try to like really bring this down and campaign on WIPA,

I think we do ourselves a disservice by like, I think we can remain focused on the overall principle here, which is people should be able to make these decisions between themselves and their doctor. So how do you think that answer kind of resonates with the moderate Republicans that she'll be? So in other words, we were talking in the first segment about New York, where maybe four or five Republicans are going to win by a couple thousand votes in these New York districts. They are extremely vulnerable to losing in 2024. Yeah. So the idea would be that every day they'd be facing pressure from constituents, get behind Democrats to codify Roe v. Wade. Yeah.

And then they would say, yeah, but they're extremists. Yeah. Because they want to kill babies right before they're extremists yeah because they want to kill babies you know right right before they're born yeah um do you think that she's right that this is a messaging issue not a not not not and toward the very end she was like i don't think we're at a place where we're compromising yet like it seemed like she was leaving the door open for for compromising but she was like she's like we haven't tried everything yet. So what do you think as you listen to that? So I think she's right that it is a messaging fight. But I

think that the irony is in that same answer. First of all, she corrected herself when she said in the public imagination, people see Roe as being something that's about a woman's right to choose. She said woman or person corrected herself. That might seem like a little thing, but in the public imagination, people see Roe as being something that's about a woman's right to choose. She said woman or person, corrected herself. That might seem like a little thing, but in the messaging battle for independence, that's not going to fly. When you can say, when Republicans can say this is absurd, that's not going to fly. When you talk about the myth of why people get, seek third trimester abortions and that there's nothing else wrong. Well, there are, it depends. But when they're the sort of broad mental health categorization that a lot of people seek third trimester abortions under, that's also not going to

fly in the messaging fight because there's a lot Republicans can do. But does that happen? Yes, that happens. And it does. And Guttmacher has interesting numbers on that. Actually, it was a pro-abortion think tank. But even, again, this was what was bad for Ralph Northam, was even people hearing about one. I mean, even if it's rare, it's extremely abhorrent in the, to borrow a phrase, the public imagination. And Republicans, I think, are correct. A lot of the fallout from the midterm conversation, the SBA list, so big pro-life group, they came in and said right away that the Republicans who had clear and convincing principled answers on abortion did well as opposed

to Dr. Oz. So if you look at what Dr. Oz does, he didn't want to talk about abortion. I don't know. I don't know if that's the correct take. I think it definitely is in the case of Oz. But Republicans really believe that they can neutralize Democrats' conversations about codifying Roe with things like WIPA. And that's kind of the point that you were getting to about the political sort of calculus here. And I think that's what Representative Ocasio-Cortez is missing, that there's something Republicans really can seize on. And maybe she knows that, but those sort of the cultural conversation the left wants to have around abortion is in the same way that the Republican position on pre-15 week bans, my position on abortion is wildly unpopular with

the American people. It is not a popular position whatsoever. Neither is the sort of other end of that spectrum on the left. And in a state like New York, where Republicans are clearly making inroads for Lee Zeldin to be within five points, it's a big deal. I think you're right that they would be very vulnerable in the next couple of years, those people who won those House seats. And I don't know. I don't know. That's a good question. So why didn't it work for Republicans this time? I mean- If that argument works, was it too close to Roe and it's too raw? If the counter to, hey, Roe was overturned, we're angry, we're going to vote to get it back into law. If the counter to that is, well, Democrats are going to do extremist stuff that's going to kill babies.

Why didn't that counter blunt the abortion rights energy in this election? I mean, I think it did in Wisconsin. You have Ron Johnson hanging in there. I think there was a lot spent on DeSantis and Rubio, and they hung in there pretty clearly. I think Beto and Stacey Abrams tried that and lost pretty decisively. So I guess we'll see in Nevada and Arizona, those are very close races that could go the other way. Right, right, right, right. And so that's not to say, like, I actually think it's completely true. And I get into this a little bit in my thing. There was an underestimation of how much the abortion issue would help Democrats, especially as we look at the youth voter turnout.

So, no, I mean, I don't deny that at all. But I do think Democrats, as they moved away, especially in recent weeks from talking about abortion, like over the last couple of weeks, it wasn't a long time. They spent a lot talking about abortion. But as they moved away from it, and they moved away in some of those swing state races probably earlier from talking so much about it, it was because Republicans were successfully sort of, Republicans never used to do this. They never used to say, well, like Carrie Lake did this once. She talked to a reporter and

she was like, did you ask Democrats what restrictions that they would support? And so on the way, might win, might win, might win despite, yeah, she might, she might win. And so Republicans believe that's sort of the ticket. If they can tap into that, that'll be a way to neutralize this conversation. So if Democrats believe that this never happens, then theoretically or in principle, they should be able to write laws and regulations around it that don't actually impact anybody. Their concern, as she articulated it, is that you're going to wind up in a situation where you have ectopic pregnancies and other complications that require medical intervention, but are then caught up in the regulatory apparatus rather than just the medical apparatus and that that

shouldn't be the case, that you need to just get the law out of here, just let these decisions be between patients and doctors. So, I mean, that's their counterargument. But if it's also true that it never happens, we think there's got to be a way to satisfy the normie voter who's against that and finds it brutal and to undercut the Republican counter arguments by saying, okay, yeah, of course, purely elective third trimester abortions should not be legal, which is under Roe. That's codifying Roe. Roe allows states after viability to enact laws around what can and can't be done. So if you're for, and Democrats have this problem. But it also leaves it open. And Republicans see that as a political kind of gift. Codifying Roe leaves it open to the states and doesn't ban that.

Which I think is a better fight for Democrats to have. Yeah, right. You're right. Now you have Republicans against codifying Roe. Right. Yes. So now you're making them fight on very unpopular terrain for them. And we talked about this a lot over the summer that when you look at the polling between the popularity of Roe and then what Roe actually did, so you can like the distinction between what the public thinks about Roe and what the public thinks about the like actual policy of Roe is totally different. And that's fine. I mean,

it's to be expected. And that's what AOC was saying, that the public imagination about what Roe is, is different. And I think to your point, that yeah, I think she's ultimately right. Like this is about messaging. I just think to exactly everything we're talking about, the left doesn't realize what that messaging battle looks like for them. And just so that we have the numbers, this is 2019 National Review is writing about the Guttmacher Institute. It's actually from David French, who's not at National Review anymore. It says, Guttmacher pro-abortion think tank has looked at the reasons for late-term abortion and the reasons are chilling. This is from French. First, the top line finding is clear. This is a quote from Guttmacher. Data suggests that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment. Instead,

there were, quote, five general profiles of women who sought later abortions, describing 80% of the sample. These women were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding, and then had access problems or were young and had never given birth. So that's from Guttmacher. That's a quote from Guttmacher. That's the third trimester? Yeah. So that's a- Does it say what the numbers were? That was eight. So 80% of the sample—

But do you know what the sample—well, I mean, do we know that—but I mean, to your point, one is going to be enough to make the argument. But do we know what the numbers are? Of how many? Yeah. Well, I'll—here, let me click on the study. But, yeah, I mean, that's a big—so,, so of how many people get late-term abortions? Yeah, that is right here. It's only 1.3% of abortions after 21 weeks. But Guttmacher has put that number even higher. That's the CDC number. They say there's roughly 12,000 late-term abortions

per year, which is, again, like as the chunk of total abortions, very small. Minuscule, but 12,000. Enough to make a political argument around for sure. Yeah. It is a very small percentage. And enough for normies to care about. In the Matt Cartwright, Jim Bognet debate, what Bognet kept hitting Matt Cartwright on was elective abortions over gender. You know, you find out you've got either a boy or a girl and you wanted the opposite gender, so there's an abortion. And he's like, that's brutal, that's terrible. And I'm sure

that polls, 90% of people would say like, yes, they disagree with that. That feels like the kind of thing that Democrats could say, okay, you know what, You can't do that. Because there are so many other reasons that somebody could get an abortion at 10 weeks, eight weeks, 14, whatever it is, pre-viability, that they don't have to say that. That's regulating thoughts that you can't have. Right. And it's impossible to prove. So it seems like something Democrats could actually just give on. Like, you know what? Fine.

You cannot have an abortion over gender. And it actually wouldn't have any impact because somebody could say they're having it for a different reason. 100%. Because it's up to them. And previously, when Roe was in effect, I can see why Democrats would say, we're not going anywhere near this. This is between a woman and her doctor. But now we're not living in a hypothetical world where abortion might be banned. We're in a world where abortion is banned.

So what are you going to do in order to change that? Or nothing, you're just going to sit there and like... This is a conversation that dogged the pro-life movement for decades about incrementalism. That's what it was called in sort of conservative circles for a really long time. And it was a bitter debate. And that's where we saw, you know, protests over, you know, pro-life people getting arrested outside abortion clinics. When you're on the other side of it, the stakes are really, really, really high, obviously. And it draws you into that conversation about what's politically expedient versus what is right and is what's politically expedient what's right. And that's a really tough conversation to have. Obviously, the pro-life movement cited on

the latter position, that what's politically, like, we need to do whatever we can do to curb this practice, even if it's not the full measure. And I think for Democrats, that conversation is now coming into focus. And really, honestly, people are just sit there and say, in the same way that they look at pro-life activists saying life begins at conception, they're saying, really, you're defending that? You're defending fertilization? We have technology increasingly to see what that looks like after the first week or so. Really? That's what you're going to bat for? Well, when you have AOC, and I really liked your interview because I think she was pretty transparent in working through her thoughts

in the conversation with you. As she was sort of working through those thoughts, one thing that's glaring is people are going to say, why are you going to the mat for that? We know what that baby looks like in the third trimester. We know what that looks like after 21 weeks. Why are you fighting for that? That's where most of the country is. I think there's a window to the future here in the sense that if she and others are saying that this is a messaging fight, people are willing to change their messaging to win. Yeah. But most people are not going to change their principles to win. Right. So she's not saying this is a principled stand. She's saying at this point, it's a messaging fight. And we think we can drive this message, beat these moderate Republicans, and that it will be seen in the public imagination as about Roe and that they will fail to move it into this extremist territory. If she's wrong about that and it's a messaging fight, then they'll do different messaging. Yeah, I think that's totally true on Medicare for all.

You know, I think absolutely bold, progressive, and we saw that happen in the nomination, right? Like in the 2020 nominating battle, everyone adopted all of these sort of Bernie adjacent positions like really quickly with maybe the exception of Biden in a couple of cases. And if you have like corporatists like Kamala Harris going to the Hamptons to raise money and saying, money overall. But I don't think abortion is an

issue like that. I just, I especially when you're fighting for something like WIPA, I don't think so. I just don't think it works out the same way. That is such a good interview though. I'm really glad we played the audio here. And we'll have more of it tomorrow. In the second half of the interview, we talked a lot about the left and the kind of disunity that we've seen online. What her role is in that, how she's been responding to it, how she's thinking it through. I didn't want to put it all up together because I wanted to let the first half, the midterm reaction stuff breathe. So we can do that tomorrow. Looking forward to it. The tidal wave narrative really started building over the course of the last week or so.

Just the last week when races that seemed to lean Democrat were categorized instead as toss-ups. Think of New Hampshire's Senate race and the governor races in New York and Michigan. Democrats won all of those races comfortably when all was said and done. Some polls overestimated Republican support during the home stretch, perhaps because, as Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar was saying ahead of the election, they were trying to correct for Republican voters who didn't want to talk to pollsters or say how they planned to vote. That had worked previously for some pollsters like Trafalgar when Trump was on the ballot. Some polls were also reasonably close.

Oddly, in Oklahoma, the polls had Republican Governor Kevin Stitt in a much tougher race. He ended up winning by double digits. Some polls had him down. Basically, the hits and misses were absolutely all over the place. The polling industry is in a state of crisis. We saw that in 2016. We saw it in 2020. And pollsters are not shy about saying any of this either. All of this cycle, they were warning us that the industry was struggling badly. Nevertheless, campaigns and media outlets have to rely on some barometers of public opinion

so money and media coverage follows the polls. Think about that. And think about how it affects where the money and the media coverage ends up. It's not just political bias, clearly. It's about rapid shifts in technology, big early and mail-in voting pushes, and generational shifts that basically make it really hard for pollsters to confidently capture voting patterns. Think about youth turnout. It seems likely that pollsters and pundits may have underestimated the effect abortion had on driving up turnout among younger voters and student loan forgiveness as well. Ryan and Crystal actually zeroed in on that possibility as the returns were still coming in on Tuesday. We sit here all cycle not to dismiss the logic of Democrats'

heavy focus on abortion and democracy because midterm cycles are about turnout. Personally, I didn't underestimate the effect of those narratives, but I did overestimate the effect of inflation, assuming turnout from economic voters would offset it. And as I said here last week, that Democrats were botching their democracy messaging by separating it entirely from the economy. Political consultants are dumb and overpriced, that's true, but they don't want to lose. That's just not good for business. Something was telling them to push abortion heavily, and that's a perfectly plausible explanation for one of the reasons Fetterman, who benefited big time from early voting even before his debate, it's probably around half a

million votes for him were cast, defeated Oz, who never had a good answer on abortion. The same goes for democracy in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania's governor races. Some of my quick takeaways, sort of on the 30,000-foot level, are that Republicans continue to dramatically underestimate how big of a disadvantage raw MAGA can be. You can't replicate whatever it is about Donald Trump that brings Rust Belt voters to him and not Oz or to him and not Mastriano or to him and not Herschel Walker. That doesn't fly, even in a bad economy with an unpopular president and certain crimes surging in certain areas and cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia. Republicans also take the, quote, realignment

for granted, assuming that Fetterman and Tim Ryan and Mandela Barnes couldn't compete in those Obama Trump areas they felt had become solidly red. I mean, yeah, that's just not going to happen with Dr. Oz. You should look at the change in Erie County. Their Senate and governor races from 2020 to 2022. Oz, we said many times here, is basically the worst person to put up against John Fetterman, who especially before his unfortunate stroke was a very good candidate. Economic populism is not whatever Dr. Oz ran on. It's about making people feel understood and heard and then explaining a clear plan. Oren Kass over at the Conservative American Compass put it well on Twitter, writing,

quote, while Trump spurred a working class realignment, he does not offer a formula for conservatives to capitalize on it. Successfully assembling a new coalition requires coherent economic principles and a concrete agenda, not just rejection of what came before. That's exactly what Republicans ran on this cycle, by the way, rejection of what would come before them, Joe Biden. The wrong lesson for Republicans would be that Trump was mistaken to blow up the GOP and everything to just go back to the days of Mitt Romney. The blow up had to happen, but rebuilding from the wreckage might be a job for someone else. All that is to say the narrative is frustrating. Even the GOP's losses in Oregon and New York are pretty big wins for Republicans

and pretty big, on the flip side, black eyes for Democrats. Whatever happens in L.A. for Karen Bass could turn out that way, too. Still, I do like how one Twitter user put it in response to me, that those races demonstrated more of a blue backlash than a red wave. And the distinction between those two is pretty important. Also, there's a good chance right now Republicans take the House and the Senate as it stands while we're having this conversation. That was totally written off after Dobbs. The media coverage about what was going to happen to Republicans after Dobbs and all summer, by the way, as gas prices went down a

little bit, was basically writing off Republican gains in a lot of different places. The huge GOP margins in Florida are very bad news for Democrats. Ron Johnson, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Brian Kemp, and Adam Laxell, among others, Laxell we don't totally know yet, prevailed. The media's big storyline that democracy was hanging by a thread crumbled, as did the summer narrative about Dobbs crushing GOP hopes just across the board. Of course, it's true that as polling started to indicate a tidal wave was possible, that benchmark was set, and anything short of great would be bad for Republicans. But it wasn't a really good night for anyone, for Republicans, Democrats, pollsters, or the media. Our politics are just a mess right now, and the midterms reflected that.

Ryan, it's kind of crazy because... We'll continue this conversation tomorrow. There's plenty to talk about. You're getting a full dose of counterpoints Friday this week. It's sort of like if it's a Sunday, it's meet the press. But for us, if it's a Sunday, it's meet the press. But for us, if it's Thursday,

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