Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #12: Trump/DeSantis beef, Ukraine, midterm results, Elon Musk & MORE!

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on Trump/DeSantis beef, Ukraine, midterm results, Elon Musk & MORE!To 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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Arizona Senate race. We've got a likely call in the Nevada Senate race. And we have the possibility that one of the parties is going to end up with 217 seats in the House of Representatives, meaning whoever is the Speaker, whether it's McCarthy or Pelosi or whoever Dems put in there, would have a one-vote margin. And I was just telling Emily that nobody in this world deserves to have a one-vote margin more than Kevin McCarthy. He has wanted this job his entire life, and when he finally gets it, it will just fall to pieces in his hands. We'll break all of that down in the midterm block because there's so much to talk about in terms of the dynamics, in terms of what's ongoing. And speaking of the dynamics.

Yeah. And also we'll get to Ukraine in a moment, Russia in retreat around Kherson. But back here in the United States, 2024, kicking off Donald Trump, not waiting for the House results, not waiting for the Senate results. I can't even keep up with his attacks on Ron DeSanctimonious. Ron DeSanctimonious. He hit him on Air Force One last night after his rally in Dayton, and then he hit him all over Truth Social. Appeared to be confessing to crimes that he himself committed. But the fact that we don't necessarily believe him, he might be lying about his own criminal behavior,

means that he's not necessarily guilty, innocent until proven guilty. Which is really bold, by the way. And I'm talking about his claim that he stopped the count for Ron DeSantis. But tell us, what is the indictment that Trump is laying out against Mr. DeSanctimonious here? Well, it's kind of a sort of smattering. If we put a one-up on the screen, this is the New York Times write-up of everything that's been going on. Trump threatens to reveal unflattering information about DeSantis if he runs. Now, Trump reportedly said, I know more about him than anybody other than perhaps his wife. That's a Maggie Haberman byline. So she's got the goods,

apparently from inside Trump world. And there have been some posts, you can see in A2, some of the barbs, I was going to say that have been gone back and forth, but it's only gone in one direction. That's right. Just the fourth. Nobody's trading Barb. Okay, so Donald Trump is saying that News Corp is basically undermining him in favor of DeSantis. Ron came to me in desperate shape in 2017. He was politically dead, losing in a landslide. And he keeps going. I mean, this is a pretty long thread. And just on and on.

I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum. But after the race, when votes were being counted, that's what Ryan said. Yeah, he says when votes were being counted, basically, I sent a prosecutor and the FBI down to Broward County. He says Ron DeSantis was losing 10,000 votes a day as they were counting more votes. Yeah. I went down there and I stopped the count. Yeah. He just stops it right there. He is likely, again, I'm no Trump whisperer.

My best guess as somebody who is on the right is that he's referring to what a lot of people think happens in deep blue counties. They're just finding fake votes. They're going through ballots, like absentee ballots that don't count um and curing them or fixing them etc etc and that's where they find different margins that's the idea that's what i'm assuming so i'm assuming he's saying he stopped he's saying he stopped the process i find it hard to believe that he did that without it becoming public but if he did that that needs to be investigated. I think it should absolutely. Yeah. And the FBI apparently can just ask itself.

Because he's saying he told the FBI to go do it. It seems like there's a pretty easy answer there. I mean, it is true that I can't stop calling him DeSantamonious. You love it. It's such a funny name. It is true that DeSantis was losing to Andrew Gillum. Yes. And that Trump's endorsement played a key role, as well as the FBI's role in tying Tallahassee and Gillum up in this investigation around Hamilton tickets. That's right. Which is the best way for a Democrat to go down. It's over. Of course it's over. Hamilton tickets.

Yeah, you couldn't script that better. No, you couldn't script that better. No, you couldn't. So this feud between Trump and DeSantis, again, this is something that's been simmering because DeSantis is seen, as many people on the right, by the person who's Trump without Trump. You hear that over and over again. DeSantis has all the goods of Donald Trump with none of the baggage of Donald Trump. I think that's mistaken, and that's not a particularly smart analysis. But that's sort of a congealing conventional wisdom on the right, and it really irks Donald Trump. He's seen the coverage on Fox News. A lot of people are very favorable to DeSantis there, and frankly, not very favorable to Trump there. If you really have been watching Fox closely lately, there's a

lot of pro-DeSantis talk. And there's this idea that I think exists in the minds, actually, of a lot of voters, and we see this in the midterm results, that there's just deep exhaustion with Donald Trump, even among people who may have voted for him, even on the right. But what that doesn't take into account is that there's some 30% of his base. 30% of the Republican Party is hardcore MAGA. These are people who vote for Donald Trump, who may not have even been voting Republican before, but they're the people who are showing up at rallies. They're the people who are activated. They're the people who are animated. That is something that political parties, that's a huge built-in advantage for political parties. And DeSantis is very popular. I'm pretty favorable to DeSantis.

There is this congealing conventional wisdom. And what's, I think, really dangerous about that, if you're a DeSantis person, is that you're going to continue to inflame Donald Trump. And if you have this, if it smacks of this conspiratorial orchestration from political professionals, whether they're in Florida or D.C., voters hate that. They hate that. And it happened all throughout 2015. Everyone in D.C. thought they had the way to stop Donald Trump. How many times did we hear that? This is what's going to do him in.

We're going to take him down at the convention. We're going to like, oh, this thing that he said, he's done. No, because there's that chunk of the party that loves the guy. And he's not a politician, frankly, and that means he sort of has fighting advantages. He can take everybody out because he doesn't play by the rules. How does an indictment play into the politics here? Let's say he gets indicted. Does that rally Republicans around him? And is that bad for DeSantis? Is DeSantis hoping that they back off of him and Trump just continues to flail? And how does DeSantis weather this for a year? We're more than that. We're like 14 months away from, are you guys doing Iowa still?

I don't know, actually. So, Iowa, New Hampshire, wherever this ends up starting, that's 14 months of him just savaging him. Well, and DeSantis so far, and this is, again, you see this among sort of the DeSantis, and I don't say this as a pejorative, the DeSantis fan club, because it definitely exists. They're saying all DeSantis has to do is stay quiet. And I think actually that's absolutely true because Donald Trump just sort of talks into the ether, right? The people who are following Donald Trump on Truth Social are the people who are following Donald Trump. They're the people who go to the rallies. They're the people who are, you know, that are never going to leave from the side of Donald Trump. And I don't know that an indictment changes that. Sincerely, I don't know if an

indictment changes that. We've heard it over and over again. I said it before, this week, the Wednesday, felt like January 7th on the right, in the sense that there was finally, it felt like, once again, here we go, he's done. We can kick him out. We can orchestrate our purge. This is it. Or it's just sort of this idea that you can quietly say Donald Trump did what he needed to do for the party. And now we can move on to Ron DeSantis. Is there anything he wants that the Republican party can offer him? Other than the presidency? Right. I don't know. I mean, can you think of anything? I think he wants to be president.

I think he wants to be vindicated. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean... I was going to think, I understand his promises to pardon him and all his children and everybody. Like, he can have four-year blanket pardon power.

Anybody that Trump wants to pardon, he just sends a note to DeSantis. That could get interesting. That could get interesting. That could get interesting. Pardon Steve Bannon like four times. Pardon Lee Harvey Oswald because it was actually Ted Cruz's dad. Yeah, he has to release the JFK, which is the most shameful thing that Trump did, is not release that. What a loser.

Well, also didn't release. Roger Stone. You had one job, a loser. Roger Stone, you had one job, Roger Stone. Couldn't get your man to release the JFK papers. So this has serious implications for the way things are sort of panning out on the right. To your point about how DeSantis weathers it, I think you can probably still just expect him to stay quiet and be polite when he's asked about Donald Trump, which, again, reinforces exactly what everybody likes about Ron. What we need is a big bowl of popcorn for the next year. I'll take it.

I'll take it. And again, like Donald Trump is set to announce his presidential run, what, next week? A lot of people want him to put that on pause as well. I think that's also very, very unlikely. Who said let Trump be Trump? A bunch of those folks have said that. Again, it's the conventional wisdom in Trump circles. And so I'm going to spoil it for everyone.

They're going to let Trump be Trump. There you go. All right, moving on to the developments on the ground in Ukraine, not just on the ground in Ukraine, but also here. We had news yesterday on the United States front from Jake Sullivan. Let's start with A1. It should be Washington Post clip here. This is a Washington Post headline. An exit from Kherson City. That's from Putin's orders. They're giving up that key regional capital. Ryan, what's your reaction here? This was the capital that Putin said six weeks ago would be Russian forever. He orchestrated a referendum there.

The vote was 99% to zero and maybe 1% abstaining or whatever. One of those hilarious lopsided elections that you're supposed to say, hmm, not so sure that that was free and fair. And so to lose this without much of a fight in six weeks after declaring that it would be part of Russia forever is, you know, an utterly humiliating blow. The best that the Russian Federation is saying about it is that they're regrouping on the other side of the river nearby. They've been doing an enormous amount of regrouping

over the last several months. Before the Ukrainian assault caught them off guard over in the east, they were really hoping that this winter was going to kind of bury Europe, that it would lead to enough protests, that you'd have right-wing governments taking over, and that there'd be

enough public anger at the war, that that would be enough to pull the funding back, pull the support back, and that Russia would then either be able to just maintain all its gains or even continue to creep forward. Nothing is going right as that plan works. Even the right-wing Italian Prime Minister, Maloney, is not anti-Ukraine. No. Even though the Italian public in polls is actually turning against involvement in the war. Probably the most skeptical of any European country's public. But even their right-wing government, it's like, no, we're in this.

There's a heat wave going on now. Putin was praying for the coldest winter that Europe's seen in a long time. It's like over 70 degrees in a lot of Europe right now, late November. So, I mean, that's early November. So, global warming might actually be undermining this kind of oil-producing country's war effort, which is a little bit ironic. Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, you can put up the next element here. The Ukrainians opened fire on the Russians as they were retreating,

saying that they didn't ask for a green cord or to retreat. This comes at the same time that you've seen reports of the wives of Russian conscripts kind of storming into the kind of back lines, trying to find their husbands and bring them back. Putin has relied for so long on a demobilized public to maintain power. And this mobilization is extremely dangerous for him because it doesn't mobilize just troops for his war effort. It mobilizes Russian citizens to once again be involved politically. And that's not a good thing for him. Yeah. Well, and again, to your point, this was like supposed to be, in and of itself,

kind of an inflection point. This was going to be a time when things were turning more closely into his favor. Meanwhile, Jake Sullivan at the White House press briefing yesterday came out, and I believe he announced that we're providing an additional aid package. Is that right? Yeah. So what struck you most about the Jake Sullivan announcement? Well, yeah. And he also said, I have the quote here right in front of me. He also said basically that you can see, he saw the signs of the possible Russian pullout from Kursan. And so it sounds like that our government is feeling pretty good that the momentum is continuing, not going, not not first shifting to course, they're not going to do, for instance, what the Congressional Progressive Caucus letter, you know, said to do in public. Although we have indications from the Washington Post.

Right. Sullivan is in conversations with his counterpart. In Russia. Which is precisely what the letter was asking for. Yes. Although it was, I think, also asking for some public acknowledgement that we were sort of prioritizing diplomacy. Because the narrative had been for so long that diplomacy is impossible and irresponsible in a situation like this. And Dark Brandon kind of feeling his oats as well.

We talked a little bit yesterday about this moment from the press conference. We have the sound from it here. This little back and forth, I thought, was pretty revealing. Russia today claimed that it had evacuated the Kursan region and the Kursan city. Do you believe that this is potentially an inflection point in that conflict? And do you believe that Ukraine now has the leverage it needs to begin peace negotiations with Moscow? First of all, I found it interesting they waited until after the election to make that judgment, which we knew for some time that they were going to be doing.

And it's evidence of the fact that they have some real problems, the Russian military, number one. Number two, whether or not that leads to, at a minimum, it will lead to time for everyone to recalibrate their positions over the winter period. And it remains to be seen whether or not there will be a judgment made as to whether or not Ukraine is prepared to compromise with Russia. I'm going to be going to the G20. I'm told that President Putin is not likely to be there, but other world leaders are going to be going to the G20. I'm told that President Putin is not likely to be there, but other world leaders are going to be there in Indonesia. And we're going to have an opportunity to see what the next steps may be. Yeah, so there he's saying that they knew

that this was coming, and he finds it interesting that Putin waited until after the midterms. Kind of an interesting observation. And then later in his remarks, he says, we'll see whether, you know, and where Ukraine is when it comes to making compromises, which at least has the U.S. talking publicly about what compromises are going to lead to the end of the war. Because I think that is a huge, that's a huge inflection point because for so long, the line has been, and I think you could have missed the importance of that line. The line has been that the US supports whatever the Ukrainians are doing. Yes. I mean, exactly that. Full stop. Yeah. And the Ukrainians have been saying, you know what? Not only do we want every Russian boot off of every inch of Ukrainian territory, including all the Donbass, which has been contested since 2014, we're also going to take Crimea back. Right.

In 2014, not even John McCain wanted to go to war with Russia over that illegal annexation of Crimea. There were sanctions, there were public statements of condemnation, but the idea that you would have a hot war between these two countries over that was not something that anybody in the U.S., even the most hawkish people, thought was in the best interest of the United States. Right. Or frankly, even necessarily the Ukrainian people, although that's up to them to decide. But it's up for us to decide what we support.

Right. And that's what Biden is inching towards right there by talking about the need for compromise to end this. Yes. And without our support, there is no real fight at this point because it would be, I mean, listen, the Ukrainian people have shown incredible bravery and the casualties are just tragic. I mean, especially, it's just. The announcement yesterday was that possibly a hundred thousand on the Russian side and a hundred thousand on the Ukrainian side. It's, don't believe any numbers that are that round, but you can believe the scale. and 100,000 on the Ukrainian side. Don't believe any numbers that are that

round, but you can believe the scale. The scale, exactly. Absolute scale of misery. And so Jake Sullivan said that we were announcing another package of security systems for Ukraine, and that includes air defense contributions, like missiles for Hawk air defense systems, as well as four U.S. Avenger air defense systems equipped with Stinger missiles. And so, Ryan, I'm curious if you think that announcement was made in conjunction with the Curson thing, with Jake Sullivan's perspective on Curson. Are we seeing the United States start to see, like, this is in sight? Like, there's an end in sight. There certainly does seem to be an end in sight.

Whether or not Putin sees it is, I think, an open question. But it does seem from these developments that the U.S. sees it. And then the question is, does Ukraine see it? Exactly. But the key question, of course, is does Putin see it? Does Putin see it? And how does Putin get out of it and maintain his position in power? Because the Ukrainians are still saying, we're not going to negotiate with Putin. We want the next leader. And it's like, we're not...

Regime change. We're not really trying to do regime change. Yeah. Well, we were. Maybe you are. And maybe we... There were some people who wanted to do regime change. It would be absurd because the most likely outcome is a much further right. Yeah. And one of the problems with—

Have we not learned that lesson? Yeah, the problem with the propagandistic demonization of all of our adversaries around the world is that it clouds us to the reality that it could get worse. Yes. Because we've built people up to be these incredible monsters who can't think rationally and can't be negotiated with. So the only possibility of that is, well, you've got to get rid of them. Well, somebody's going to replace them. And a close look at Russian politics doesn't show that there's much of a progressive wing. No.

The progressive wing is in prison. What's left of it. So speaking of the progressive wing here in the United States, this week I interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I asked her about her position on Ukraine and particularly about the absence of a real kind of progressive position in Congress on the question of peace between Ukraine and Russia. We can play a little bit of that clip here. Democrats also hammered progressives for that CPC letter encouraging the pursuit of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, saying that doing it right before the election would end up hurting Democrats.

That letter, as you know, that was retracted. You never commented on that, on whether you still stood by it, and you and other progressives have been kind of criticized for not laying out your thinking on kind of what the progressive position ought to be when it comes to this war. I don't know if you saw this, but Russia just announced its withdrawing from Kherson, which is a massive defeat for them. But so why hasn't there been more of a progressive voice on the debate over war funding? And what's your thinking on what the U.S. approach should be now? Yeah, well, you know, I think, and I think, you know, to be clear, both the

decision to publish that letter at that time and withdraw that letter at that time were decisions that we were not made privy to. But in terms of the content of the letter, like timing aside, in terms of the content of the letter, I believe that a lot of it is quite consistent with what we've also been hearing from former Obama administration officials, the Biden administration. And now, even recently, there have also been, you know, there has also been, I believe, some developments coming out of Ukraine indicating an openness to negotiate under certain preconditions. And, you know, I believe that progressives have always advocated to leaning on diplomatic solutions. We should continue to lean on that. I think that the large asterisk is will Russia – is Russia – how can we bring Russia to the table without compromising Ukrainian sovereignty

and just core principles of self-determination. But that is really what the landscape of diplomacy is about. And even when Obama was on Positive America several weeks ago, he discussed about how at this present time diplomatic relations are likely worse than they may have been almost at any point during the Cold War, which is a very dangerous place to be. And so, you know, the reaction to the publication of this letter, I, you know, I think continues to be a bit overblown. And I think that there's almost a, it's almost like people are looking for a problem where there really, I don't think is any intent for there to be one. And I also think that it's quite consistent with what we've been hearing from, frankly,

the Biden administration, former Obama administration officials, and even certain Ukrainian officials. And when it comes to that recent development on Russia, I do believe that there's some skepticism that we're hearing from Ukrainian officials about whether that is in the genuinen the, the, the genuineness or authenticity or good faith that that announcement was made. But, you know, I think that's something that, that we will, that we will soon see play out. A couple of highlights of that include your furious typing and your kids in the background. Um, so what did you make of her comments? Again, I, I, from the perspective of somebody, um, kind of outside the left, it's really interesting to hear her say, listen, we were not privy to what was happening with that retraction. Yeah.

Right. So everyone has thrown the initial letter under the bus. It's interesting to see her throw the retraction of the letter under the bus. Yes. Yeah. I'm sure she got a call, actually. Really? I would think about that.

People can read the full Q&A over at The Intercept. It's broken up into two parts. The question, the outstanding question, which I didn't follow up on, I should have, but I moved back to the abortion rights questions, is what is the role of Congress? Okay, so Congress tried to do this letter. It may actually have had some impact by creating a four-day conversation about negotiations. Well, how long was it after that we found out that the Biden administration-

Yeah, we found that out. And then all of a sudden, you started seeing other people coming forward saying, yeah, actually, there's nothing wrong with this. So even in retreat, they may have taken one for the team there. But what else can they do? Now, do they have enough votes to be relevant players on this. I suspect that the lame duck will see a big war spending package because they won't want to leave it in the hands of an uncertain Congress going forward. Well, and especially if, as we were talking about, there's a sense that there's some blood in the water, that if you sort of double down right now, you can end it.

Right, because then you're sending a signal. That could be, you could, like, that would, you would, from the defenders of a package like that, they would say, this is actually diplomatic because we're going to approve another X billion dollars. And that's going to be such a morale blow. This is it. To the Russians that they're going to say, okay, you know what, fine. Like, what can we keep? Yeah. The only way out is through.

Right. And then you sit down and drawn into the war. Right. As people keep saying in Europe, leaders over there, wars end. Wars have to end. They usually end with negotiations. So let's get them going faster. And so if it's clear in the lame duck that the U.S. is in this with another $80 billion or whatever insane amount they're going to put on the table. But then the question is, what role do the progressives have there? And because so many, and I'm curious for your take on this, so many Republicans are for this spending. You've got plenty that are against it.

You've got plenty that are still for it. That means a block of four or five, six Democrats who would be able to stop a partisan bill because Democrats only have 222 right now on the lame duck or whatever it is. So if you can get five Democrats, boom, Pelosi doesn't have a majority anymore. Right. Five Democrats voting no on war funding, you just got to go find five Republicans. No, I think the interview actually, and the points in the interview, and I actually think now that we were talking about sort of that shift from the retraction, actually the entire kerfuffle,

what that underscores is the need for progressives and serious peace-minded conservatives to be extremely dogged right now. Because that's how you push people to the negotiating table, and that's how you continue to shift the Overton window towards negotiations. Because if you're not shifting the window to negotiations, and if you're not seriously doing that, if these conversations aren't happening and it isn't clear to party leadership that progressives, conservatives are willing to negotiate to get or are willing to stand firm to get to negotiations, are willing to withhold votes to get to a point of negotiation or to ensure that that's a priority for leadership and is not something silly that's like dismissed as, you know, the crank's perspective. That's why I think it's really important. Actually, this underscores how important it is for progressives, conservatives who are on the negotiation side that are less hawkish to be very, like, not to say, okay, we kind of, we got them talking they they're doing what we asked for so now we can sort of go along and get along absolutely not if anything it's the opposite right and in all wars all the time the camp that's arguing against war is in the weakest position

when their when their side is rolling to victory but there have been so many opportunities that people have lost to to reach a peace agreement because they were rolling to victory. But there have been so many opportunities that people have lost to reach a peace agreement because they were rolling to victory and they thought that it's right around the corner. And then four years later, you're still fighting. You're still fighting, still spending crazy amounts of money, still losing just an unbelievable amount of people. Yeah, that's the last thing that we would want to happen. It doesn't have to happen. It doesn't have to happen. Back here in the United States, some wild developments in the midterm so far.

Really wild. So we had a call in the Arizona Senate race from, it was from Wasserman, right? From Cook Political. Yeah, Dave Wasserman said he'd seen enough. But it does, it looks solid. It looks, right? I mean, this is Mark Kelly beating Blake Masters, right? Cook Political Report. Yeah, Dave Wasserman said he'd seen enough. But it looks solid. It looks right. I mean, this is Mark Kelly beating Blake Masters is what they're calling. You asked me this question yesterday. I think the Masters camp and the Cary Lake camp both still feel good.

Now, Dave Wasserman saying it's hard to see a path. It's so hard to see a path forward that, you know, it's unlikely that Masters can pull it off, I think is probably a sign that the optimism in the Masters camp is over-inflated. And, you know, that's always the case with campaigns. They're always overly, they're projecting optimism, and sometimes it's very sincere and real because they have a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on the line. But, I mean, I think Arizona, because of this, because of what happened in Maricopa County, there was an election official in Maricopa County yesterday saying some 400,000 ballots weren't going to be counted until like Monday, but it didn't know when they were

actually going to be counted, which just inflamed a lot of folks on the right. So with that happening, I mean, Washman can call it for Mark Kelly. I think that that's a very plausible outcome. I also think things in Arizona are about to get really hairy, and I think there's going to be a lot of sort of litigation. Yeah, and I think it's worth calling out some Democratic hypocrisy in Arizona here. Because the situation that you had on Election Day, there was what? Some mechanical failures and other problems. 20% of the election machines in Maricopa County were down in that morning.

So that led to very long lines. The Republicans sued to try to get an extended time period. Often those extensions are granted. This time the judge said, you didn't demonstrate whether or not anybody was unable to vote as a result of this. And Democrats just said, okay, well, good for us. We won that one. But historically,

that argument would have been left out of the room. Like long lines- Suppression lines are by definition suppression. That's what Democrats have always said. That's their position. And Democrats have always been correct about that. Because you drive by the polling place and it's a two-hour line. You drive on. And just because you can't prove, you know, that person didn't register somewhere.

That's ridiculous, yeah. So that person's vote was register somewhere. Oh, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. Like that. So that person's vote was suppressed as a result of it. I'm sure that happened in Maricopa County. And I'm sure it has happened in cities all across the country over the last 50 years where they have kind of either manufactured or through incompetence, you know, produced these long lines or just through the kind of structural pressures of so many people living with so few precincts. And this also goes to a prison that, or a trap that Republicans have

built for themselves. So what they did is they convinced all of their voters that early voting is not safe, it's fraudulent, you're wrong if you do this. And so as a result, in a place like Maricopa County, which is heavily Democratic, and where the Democratic Party kind of oversees the election machinery. The actual. The election day voters are Republican. Right. The election day voters are Republican. And in this case, the Secretary of State is on the ballot and refused to refuse. Yes. And that was the thing that what Raffensperger did against Abrams in 2018, which Abrams and Democrats used to call that election corrupt for years. So why is this any different? And it's not just the potential for software updates to go badly.

And boy, what a shame that you've got these three-hour lines now, or whatever caused these malfunctions. Republicans are also setting themselves up for weather events. I think if Laxalt loses, it is likely because of a freak snowstorm in Reno and rain in Nevada, rain in Las Vegas. Yeah, they were telling you that on election day. You were talking to some folks who were like, hey, if the weather's bad, that's the best thing that could happen to Catherine Cortez Masto. Right. I was talking to this Republican operative who was working on the campaign or working on an outside campaign that morning. And he's like, we're in really good shape in Nevada.

I'm feeling very good about it. We're hearing it might snow in Reno and might rain in Vegas. And if it does, that sucks. But I think we're still okay. But this is an era of climate change. You're going to get freak weather events all the time. And so if you have three weeks to vote and you get two weeks of freak weather, you still have a whole week to get your ballot in. If you have 10 hours to vote, you are over the long run going to get hit with freak weather events in some of those 10 hour

stretches and you're also going to get hit with malfunctioning computers and some of those computers might malfunction just because you don't now you don't have democratic officials that are that incentivized to make things run perfectly on election day because guess who's coming out to vote three to one republicans or whatever so they like, yeah, you guys hate, you guys won't fund our elections. We asked for more money. The legislature rejected us. You wouldn't let us start counting ballots. You're kind of doing everything you can to slow down our ability to get this going. You made us spend two years going through these audits. So yeah, you know what? Maybe we don't do the maintenance on these machines as fast as we could have. It'll be hard to prove that that was malicious, but the incentives that Republicans have created are Georgia was up for debate, that Brian Kemp ended up signing, voter turnout was really high in Georgia.

That doesn't necessarily negate the argument that the bill was suppressive to some extent, but I think the evidence suggests that it was not. It flopped if that was the goal. Yeah. And on that case, I mean, it was a milder, even the restrictions that it implemented were milder than a lot of other states have, including those Delaware, the home of the President of the United States, who referred to that law as Jim Eagle, who referred to it as Jim Crow 2.0. And what drives me crazy is how the media ran with that narrative. And what we're seeing right now in Maricopa County, I actually, I don't, I would quibble with the label suppression. I don't think it was malicious. I think it was incompetent.

And I think it looks really bad and is really bad for institutional trust. All that said, by their own definitions and their own metrics, Democrats and the media are just like almost gleeful about it as opposed to like highly, highly concerned. And so the way that the media constructs narratives, we've talked about this before, we talked about it last week, I think. I mean, it's just incredible how they can create alternate realities and have everybody talking about Jim Eagle, Jim Crow 2.0. And then you see something like this happen and it's just crickets. Right. So the suppression in Nevada, which we don't have a call on yet, that was from the Lord, you know, from the skies. It was divine intervention. Yeah.

According to people who are watching this really closely, they feel like, at least the people that I'm seeing, maybe tell me if your kind of feed is telling you something different, that Cortez Masto has a very, very, very, very strong path to re-election, right? Yeah. Which that means that Warnock would be 51 if he wins. Yeah. Or 50, and they'd still control the Senate regardless of what happens with the Georgia. And the strange place we've been in for the last two days is that you can either have Democrats actually ending up losing both houses of Congress, losing the House and losing the Senate, or you can have Republicans failing to capture even the House. I mean, that could end up, as Ryan suggested earlier, around 217, a one vote margin for either Kevin McCarthy or Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffress or whoever steps into that vacuum, which is just none of these outcomes

were like on, they weren't on my radar that it would be that close at all. So let's have some fun with that one. So the House of Representatives on Friday after the election is genuinely still in play. And so if you're listening to this on the podcast, you're watching on YouTube, I would suggest pausing and writing some of these down so you can have fun with these over the weekend following some of these House races as the votes are coming in. So currently, Republicans look to have the lead in about 211 districts with Democrats having the lead in about, well, no, Republicans have about 211 called. Democrats lead in 214. In other words, Republicans are in the lead. And if everything stays as it is, they will narrowly win the House. But there are a significant number of races that could flip. And here are the ones that Daniel, at Daniel, at T-A-N-I-L. He's great.

If you don't follow him for elections, so good. What's the name of his new publication? I don't know. I'll try to remember it. I'll give an extra tweet for forgetting the name of his new publication. But it's great. So here are the races. So Arizona six, Democrats are slightly

trailing in that, but there's a lot left to go. California three. And then he lists also California 13, 22, 27, 41, and 45. A couple of those, 41 in particular, I think 13 in particular, are very close. Colorado 3, which is Boebert, that we'll see. Looks like she's pulling it off. Looks like she's pulling it off. And then there's some weird shenanigans going on with the, they fired the election counter in Pueblo. Did you see this? I didn't.

This is going to recount either way. And the Secretary of State has sent a new supervisor into Pueblo saying that the supervisor screwed up, the Democratic supervisor there screwed up. That one will go to recount. That could decide it. Then New York 22, which Republicans are up by about 2,000 in right now. That looks fairly strong for Republicans. But then Oregon 5. And so they need to win four of the ones that I just listed. And I think there's two in California that they have a very solid shot on. Because in California, the votes become more Democratic as they continue to count. That's been the pattern. More young people vote super late. On election day, they drop their mail ballot. And so it could take

weeks for us to know these. But historically, the pattern has been that every day that goes on, the Democratic margin grows, which they got to get a better system because it just feeds paranoia. Like, it's not like this is not corrupt. There is a reason to, you can explain exactly why it happens this way. Young people procrastinate, but still Republicans look at it and like, boy, isn't that interesting. We thought we had it. And then all of a sudden the votes are gone. So there's at least two there. And then Arizona six, I think is probably their best shot to get the third. And then the fourth, which would be 218, would be Oregon five, which is Jamie McLeod Skinner. It's an interesting race.

Progressive, who knocked Kurt Schrader, who was one of the unbreakable nine, this right-wing Democrat who held up the Build Back Better bill. She primaried him. She beat him. And then the DCCC did invest almost $2 million in the race, but then left in the last several weeks of the race, they say that they were expecting the House Majority Pack to come in. Because that's how it works in general. Like the CCC Super PAC does a couple of weeks

and House Majority Pack, the other Super PAC comes in. House Majority Pack did not come in. They're like too progressive, not going to win. And so if they lose a race because they felt the candidate was too progressive and she loses by less than a thousand votes votes and as a result they lose the House after instead spending the money on Sean Patrick Maloney, the DCCC chair who lost, I'd like to say there'd be a reckoning, but I've been doing this long enough that there probably won't be. But so that means the most likely outcome I see from this, hilariously, is 218 for Republicans. It's wild. Which means that over the next year, if that happens, over the next year, there's a considerable chance that there's an open seat for some reason.

And a special election. And then there's a special election for control of the House of Representatives. And again, we're kind of going to see something like that in Georgia on the Senate side. Likely. It depends on how some of these races shake out, Nevada being one of them. But we're seeing the runoff turn into something like that, kind of. But a special election for control of the House in the next year. I mean, just think of—

And during the special election, then it's 217-217. Right, right, right, right. Who knows? What do you do with that? What do you do with it, period? I mean, what happens in Washington? This could get really interesting, actually. A deadlocked house? Yeah. Antitrust? Wild. I mean, just wild. So, extremely wild. And on the right, there are some complaints also about McCarthy and what we were just talking about with the DTRIP,

that he put money into places that they didn't need. I mean, we can talk about McConnell and McCarthy both, but a lot of that is, you know, he was very proud that he recruited and fielded a lot of female candidates, a lot of minority candidates in particular. And there's a little bit of, I think, anger, irritation that the money wasn't apportioned in the right way, races that were more winnable as opposed to races that were to prove, you know, somebody like Mayra Flores could hang on to this D plus 14 redrawn district with San Antonio in it. She cut into that margin. She cut into the, she outperformed Trump in the district, but you know, it was really never probably going to happen. But then if he doesn't, it's tough because if you don't spend in that race, then you get dunked on for that.

I do feel some sympathy for people at the end of this because you know you're going to get hammered for some of the races that you miss. It's just going to happen. So we've got Oren Kass in about six minutes. Can we do Elon Musk that quickly or is he so much of a dumpster fire that we need more time? I think we can do him in five minutes. I think we can handle Elon here. So let's start with C1. This is a tweet from Brianna Wu. What a disaster unfolding at Twitter. But by the way, I don't think any of this is unforeseen disaster on Elon Musk's behalf. The scale of it. Yeah. So senior people at Twitter resigned in the last 48 hours.

We now know why. They said in private Slack channels that Elon Musk is so desperate to recoup his money, he's taking crazy risks with your privacy and safety. Brianna Wu continuing to say Twitter is extremely hackable right now. Every user is at risk. Elon wants his money. The FCC just announced they're investigating. They have the power to fine Twitter billions. All right. So this is... Yeah, everybody's resigning. Like,

even people that were senior executives who were publicly defending him and that Elon Musk was holding up as like, look, I'm not a bad guy. This person that you all really respect is still publicly defending me. He's an executive here at Twitter. Those people have resigned. Yeah, can we put C2 up on the screen? This is from the New York Times. Elon Musk says the economic picture ahead is dire. That's from his first communication with Twitter staff. And more people are resigning, more people out the door.

And he's saying... He floated bankruptcy. Right, he floated bankruptcy. Which, what are your thoughts on that? Because to my point earlier, that I don't... There's this perception that Elon Musk is just in over his head at Twitter. And I don't think... I think he absolutely knew that this was all likely to unfold exactly as it's unfolding. Again, my perspective is that the best thing that could happen is Elon Musk buys Twitter and nukes it from orbit. You may get your wish.

I may get my wish, but I don't think any of this is unforeseen. And I don't think the bankruptcy floating is shocking in the least bit. So one of the pieces that he probably did not foresee, did you see the way in which Twitter missed out on something like half of its revenue at this annual sales conference recently? So if you weren't following this, there's a conference that comes at the end of every year where corporations kind of bank a lot of their ad spending. And then media companies then can bank on getting like X amount. We're going to get $800 million from this group of corporations. Now we know that we need to go and get another $1.3 billion from all of other different programs. It was a disaster on a number of levels.

There were some, and Elon Musk blames activists who were at the convention telling, and so what the activists were telling the corporations was Elon Musk is planning to monkey with the verification. So there's going to be a lot of like spam and stuff that you can't tell if it's true or not. And he's going to let all kinds of hate speech run wild on the site. And so the corporations went to the Twitter executives and said, here's what we're hearing from these activists. What can you tell us? And they didn't get anything that satisfied them on these questions. And so they said, all right, we're going to pause our spending. And so boom, there's like a billion dollars out the door. So there's that. Then you've got, and one of the guys I was talking about was Yol Roth. He was the head of trust and safety, who Musk was saying like, look, Yol's with me. He's still here. You can trust me because you trust Yol, and Yol trusts me, and Yol's like, I'm out.

By the transitive property of trust. Yes. Which, there's something to that. Like, if somebody that you trust at Twitter is like, you know, look, I'm with Elon. He's got a vision. We're going to go for this. And then the head of sales, Robin Wheeler, also quitting. Right. Like, these are not positions that you want to see, you know, vacant. But again. If you care about this thing functioning.

And then there was another report, I forget where it was, saying that a lot of the engineers are worried that pieces of it are just going to gradually stop working. Sure. And have you noticed anything? No. It seems mostly fine so far to me, but I've heard complaints from other people about like janky stuff. I haven't noticed anything at all except other than what was happening with verification over the course of yesterday where you had George Washington and Jesus being verified on Twitter and George Washington tweeting that he did not sign NAFTA, which is I think important historical context. But acting like this stuff is an L for Elon, again, just Twitter was a disaster.

I mean, he paid way more than what Twitter was worth because the company was in tatters when he inherited it. Now, that's not to say there isn't a more like normal, calmer way to take over a company. That's not really his style. And anybody who expected it to be his style, I think would be, I mean, that's kind of a laughable notion. But Elon Musk is not going to just quietly, you know, become the new Jack Dorsey. That company was in tatters. I mean, too many employees, a really bad economy for tech. And it was always going to be extremely, extremely chaotic, culture clash, all that stuff.

Well, we're doing something a little bit different here because it's midterm week. And it's certainly something you won't see on cable news or in legacy media ever. Ryan, what's your point today? Well, we were going to talk about what we got wrong today. I looked through all of my different forecast predictions. Couldn't find anything, so I'm going to hand it over to you now. Seriously. So I'll start with Pennsylvania here.

I think the mistake here was, A, not trusting my gut, but also, B, having a conflicted gut after the debate. I always thought coming out of the primary that Fetterman was going to annihilate Dr. Oz. Like you spend any time in Pennsylvania, the idea that any part of that state is Dr. Oz country, whether it's Philadelphia, the Philadelphia suburbs, all the area in between there, Pittsburgh or the Pittsburgh suburbs, Northeast Pennsylvania, Lehigh Valley, none of it. Dr. Oz, he hasn't been to most of these places. Watching him try to sing Fly Eagles Fly during the debate was just absolutely hilarious. He sang only the first line and he even botched that. So my gut was saying, this guy doesn't have a chance. At the same time,

there were two things working against that. One was the tracking polls, hearing privately from people on both sides who were seeing the tracking polls just after the debate moving so quickly and strongly away from Fetterman. And then my gut at watching the debate, wondering, and then looking at a couple of focus groups with people who said, I don't think he's qualified to be a senator anymore, and then extrapolating that out from there. Whereas, you know, talking to everybody in my family, both Republican and Democrat and independents, nothing about the debate changed their mind. The independents who were leaning Democratic were like, yeah, that was ridiculous, but I don't like Oz. I'm voting for Fetterman. And I should have gone with that. I should have gone with my gut

on that one because the fundamentals of Fetterman ended up prevailing there. Wisconsin, like a lot of pundits and operatives here in Washington, we have stopped listening to Wisconsin polls. They bungled it so badly in 2016 and bungled again so badly in 2020, and they bungled it so badly in the Democratic direction. In other words, well, they say Hillary Clinton was going to win by 17 or something like that. They had Biden up by huge numbers. Hillary lost barely in Wisconsin, and then Biden won barely in Wisconsin. So they're wildly off. Feingold was well ahead, although the polls were narrowing in that race against Ron Johnson six years ago. And so even though the polls were saying that this was within the margin of error,

I just didn't believe those polls. So I think that was, and I think a lot of operatives in Washington didn't, and that's why Democrats didn't spend more, although that was still idiotic, because even if they don't believe those polls, the polls in Florida where they spent 70 plus million dollars on Val Demings were much worse. So it's kind of inscrutable why they ended up making that decision. And some of that is grassroots just sending money to Val Demings because they hate Marco Rubio more than they hate Ron Johnson, because I guess Ron Johnson didn't run for president. Anyway, so what do we got? Oh, New Hampshire. I think with New Hampshire, so I thought that toward the end that this would be a very, very close race. Thinking that a Senate election is going to be very close in New Hampshire

doesn't take a genius, because they've all recently been decided by just a couple thousand votes. Hassan ended up blowing out Don Bolduc, who was this kind of MAGA retired general, who both Democrats and kind of the MAGA crowd had boosted to the nomination over a more normie, kind of New Hampshire-friendly Democrat. I think one of the things that I missed or forgot about New Hampshire is how much it's changing. Like, we shouldn't get stuck in our ideas about a state. New Hampshire, it's obviously a live free or die state. It's going to have that forever. And you had this big influx of libertarians, which influenced its political culture. But over the last couple of years, New Hampshire has been the fastest growing state in

New England, one of the fastest growing states in the country. And those are people that are coming from Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and they're bringing their politics with them. Couple that with the nationalization of our political climate, and New Hampshire winds up looking much more like a typical, you knowated state rather than the kind of anomalous New Hampshire, New England state that it has been in the past. And so I think that actually played a significant role. And so Hassan was able to lean into that a lot more comfortably. Let's do a couple of victory laps. Let's see. Also, I didn't think that they were going to be in contention for the House. Although, and this could be our transition into

victory laps. I interviewed Tom Bonior of Target Smart on my podcast, Deconstructed, and continued following his analysis throughout the campaign. He was kind of the most optimistic Democrat. And because I was taking in so much of his, I think I was one of the least pessimistic on the left, because he kept saying, look, there is a secret abortion rights voter, and youth vote is going to surge. And he was looking at what Target Smart is, is they do, they take voter registration data, they take voting data, and they couple it with a bunch of consumer data and other, like one of these massively sophisticated operations that knows way more about you than you'd like to know. And so then they forecast and model that out around the country. And they kept saying, look, our models and our forecasts

here based on actual actions by people, including voter registrations, early voting requests, and ballots turned in, do not match what you're seeing in the polls here. And here is why. And they had a theory of the case. And so going in, I was giving it maybe a third. And I talked about this on my little Substack chat. That like, no, if Democrats are going to do well tonight, it's because there's this secret abortion voter. And I was giving that a lot more credence, I think, than a lot of other pundits were, which brings me into the other victory lap, which is Kentucky. I was pretty sure that Kentucky voters would side with abortion rights, which for people in Louisville, that actually might not have been that tough of a call. But I think for national reporters, they might have been pretty surprised

at how robust that support was for abortion rights in a place like Kentucky, because there's such stereotypes around voters in Kentucky. Yeah, this is super interesting. I mean, I think there's a lot... Maybe this is a good transition into what I got wrong because I think it's really unwise for anybody, especially in media, to mock anybody else for their predictions. Who do we think we are? No, I mean, sincerely. Actually, I was going to start by saying one of the things that I was told

before going on cable news for the first time years ago was never say, I don't know. I think I had done a practice, and I said, I don't know. And that sounded really wrong to me then, and it's very wrong. I can say that confidently. It's a very wrong thing now because from my perspective at the time, as a viewer, I wanted to know when people, you know, you sort of, I grew up in the age of reality TV. I want to know when somebody doesn't know the answer to the question. I'd much rather the transparency than some like hackneyed approach where you're

stumbling and stammering to find some BS that you can spin and just go back to the green room and grab another Nespresso. So I don't mind that at all. And I'm happy to always say when I don't know something, because again, as a viewer, that's what I like. So let's get to what I don't know. Let's get to what I got wrong. I'll start with polls. So I assumed that polls were undercounting Trump voters and that people like Trafalgar, who had corrected for those undercounts in years past, were at least somewhat closer to reality. You had Trafalgar saying that what they did right in 2016 and 2020 was pick up on this sort of stealth Trump voter who didn't want to talk to pollsters and who was, they said, actually after Biden's semi-fascist speech in Philadelphia,

they were picking up on a lot of people just not wanting to identify as a Trump voter because they didn't want to identify themselves in a way that could harm them in the future or something like that. There was just not a lot of trust in pollsters, not a lot of willingness to talk to pollsters. So I actually assumed that the Trafalgar polls, which caused a lot of folks in the media to say, we could be looking at a red tidal wave. I assumed that those were correcting in a way that was closer to reality, not necessarily on the dot, but closer to reality by correcting for undercounting of that sort of stealth Trump voter. Now, Trump wasn't on the ballot, and it seems that that might be something that makes a really big difference on that count.

So secondly, now we go to the youth vote, which as we're sort of starting to look through the numbers, Charlotte Alter had a couple of good tweets about this. It was on par with 2018, which was very high. It's still second to 2018 in terms of youth turnout by the numbers we have so far. But in key battleground states, it was very much the same as 2018. have on youth and swing voters, then two, the degree to which Republicans would be harmed by their lack of an economic agenda, because this is point three, this is a three point what I got wrong. The economic picture, crime problems and cultural radicalism seemed sufficiently dire as to offset the losses that would be caused, for instance, by gains to Democrats from voters animated by the issues of abortion, animated by student loan debt relief, and animated by those, especially if you're

looking at like Tim Michaels in Wisconsin or Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, the democracy question, right? So I assumed that all of that would sort of be offset by those voters who were coming in and saying, listen was an abortion referendum on the ballot there. This is a quote from Alyssa Slotkin, who won re-election in that suburban Michigan district by like a six-point margin. She was targeted as being very vulnerable. She thought, never thought I'd do, this is from her. She said, I did do an ad on choice. Never thought I'd do one in my life in a pro-life district, but I did do one ad in choice, then she added, but I did four on the economy. So to a point that Crystal makes in Lever News this morning, actually, Democrats running in swing districts or in the Rust Belt, they shifted their

focus a bit in certain areas to the economy in recent weeks in a way that I think really could have made a major difference down the stretch. And not every Democrat focused on abortion, to Slotkin's point. So there was a change in tone, and it actually may have happened in time for people to come down and say, well, actually, yeah, I did hear this candidate talking about the fact that there's some corporate malfeasance at play in inflation. And that really could have been a deciding factor down the home stretch for Democrats that had been, you know, one thing that I was right about, to Ryan's point about taking some victory laps, is that Democrats did have a reason to focus on abortion. This wasn't just being plucked out of

nowhere coming from completely out of touch consultants. The consultants are surely out of touch, but they did have a reason to do that. It's because midterm elections, it's all about turnout. We've been saying that all along here. It's absolutely why the democracy message and the abortion message were being hammered home in ads in swing districts, because you know, if you can turn out the liberal base, if you can turn out the suburban mom for whom that is the difference between staying home and not voting, it's not even just about getting people to vote for the Democrat. It's about getting people to just get off their couch and get in and vote. That's why they were running on abortion and democracy. I suggested that the democracy

message, the abortion message, Democrats would have had a better chance if they had tied it into the economic message, especially when it comes to democracy. But I think some of them actually really did. And in ways that I was not convinced would be as powerful as they ultimately were. Finally, the early vote. Oh my goodness. Pennsylvania is the best example of this. I didn't factor that even though we had the numbers. By the time Dr. Oz debated John Fetterman, that some 700 plus thousand votes, probably around 750,000 votes had already been cast. 73% of those votes were cast by Democrats. That's about 500,000 votes for Fetterman before the debate happened. The margin between Oz and Fetterman ultimately is somewhere north of 200,000 votes. Think about that. If early voting, let's say you take all those early voting off the table, say early voting had started after that debate. You indeed may be looking at Senator Oz because you have 500,000 votes cast for Fetterman. The national media does not fall for economic populists because, again, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Need I go on? We can talk about Comcast. We can talk about other folks. But that's just one example of why. And so there was always a, even before John Fetterman suffered his stroke, there was always this idea that, you know, he just, he wasn't a great candidate. I think that's wrong. I've always thought that's wrong. I thought, I said from the beginning,

he was one of the best candidates that Democrats had fielded that cycle. And he's especially the perfect foil to Dr. Oz. You could not pick a better person to run against Dr. Oz than John Fetterman. Obviously, his candidacy was weakened enormously. We're joined now by Oren Kass, Executive Director over at American Compass, which is working on coming up with a plan, an economic agenda for the Republican Party that

would actually be an agenda that benefits the working class and would enable Republicans to be a party that helps the working class. I know there's a lot of skepticism about that. Oren, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Well, Oren, let's start with some of your post-mortem tweets here. I really liked the way that you put it. We have the thread from Oren that we can pop up on the screen. Political realignment continues apace, you said. The opportunity to translate a multi-ethnic working class conservatism into a durable government majority is just sitting there staring at everyone. While Trump spurred a working class realignment. He does

not have the formula for conservatives to capitalize on it. Oren, tell us why you think the midterms kind of evidenced that, especially since there's been a lot of chatter kind of in our circles on the right about how the Republican Party just didn't have a message to working class voters. You saw Fetterman run up the numbers in places like Erie County. That should be, you know, in an ideal world, I don't know if Dr. Oz is ever going to be the vehicle for a real pro working class message, but that should be, you know, prime, a prime opportunity for a post-Trump Republican Party to take this message to folks in places like Erie County. What happened? Well, you know, Erie County is a great example. And to your point, what did Republicans bring to them? I think we're at a really interesting point on the right

where what used to be has been knocked over as it needed to be. I don't think anyone is envisioning sort of 2014 Paul Ryanism as the future of the Republican Party, but there isn't really anything new yet. I mean, there really wasn't an agenda that Republicans were running on. And in a lot of cases, it's not clear what candidates were representing or what the pitch was besides, we're not Democrats. And I think we've seen for a while now when each party runs as just we're not the other party. It's a great way to kind of land at a 50-50 nation. But at the same time,

and you see this in places like Florida where you had candidates like Governor DeSantis and Senator Rubio who really were running on a clear agenda. If you combine social conservatism with a real commitment to an economic agenda that pays attention to workers, there's a real majority there.

And we just, I think, need more people to focus on that. And as you said, we're doing a lot of the work at American Compass to try to develop what that economic agenda could be. But then you need elected leaders to actually or candidates to realize that that has to be a part of the message, too. And so our colleague Crystal Ball has a piece actually in Lever News this morning, too, that Democrats on top of abortion really did run on economic populism in a way that was distinct than, say, New York or, say, California or Oregon. Alyssa Slotkin. Yeah.

And that that was a key difference. Did you notice a difference in the Democratic competition around the country? And is it your sense from the right that Democrats who embraced populism, economic populism, performed better? Well, I think, you know, frankly, at the sort of House race level or even Senate races, it felt like it came down an awful lot to sort of national environment and the specifics of candidates. I do think if you look at the Democratic Party generally, it's important to notice how, for instance, Joe Biden differs from Barack Obama. I mean, you know, the White House is certainly doing things on, for instance, reshoring industry, focusing on labor in a way that I think the kind of Clinton-Obama Democrats

have really gotten away from. But of course, the flip side is that that gets paired with this extreme social progressivism that then makes everything about either just outright social and identity issues or climate change and forgiving student loans. And so at the end of the day, I think you're right. There are Democrats who do get this, just as there are Republicans who get this. But the Democratic Party as a whole is so beholden at this point to this progressive bubble that seems to dictate what they think the country cares about, that it's hard to see the Democratic Party actually going in this direction. And that's why, as Emily noticed in the tweet, I said, you know, this opportunity is just sitting there staring at everybody.

I mean, there's certainly a hypothetical world where the left of center kind of goes in this direction. I don't think that's where we are in America today. I think there's a much better chance that the right of center that has the right message on so many values related questions and is at least open at this point to taking workers' interests seriously on the economic side, I think that's the right coalition. I think we're moving in that direction. But it may be that it also takes some failures and people realizing that if you don't have that, it doesn't work for people to really dig in and start focusing on this stuff. Warren, again, I mentioned this in the introduction, but at American Compass, you've put out basically a plan,

and it's still kind of hard to envision, you know, a Ron Johnson who squeaked out a win in Wisconsin, certainly a Dr. Oz taking this to, you know, Erie County, to rural areas of Wisconsin and and making this case. And being willing, you know, Ron Johnson was somebody who came in on the Tea Party wave, business guy, being sort of open to what it would take. Donald Trump changed the party forever and won those Rust Belt counties that were Obama-Trump country. But unless you actually come up, you can't run on vibes. You have to actually bite the bullet and piss off some of your corporate benefactors. And I think some of the ideas that you've laid out, that would involve biting the bullet for some folks. Or what should Republicans be running on? What are some very specific points

in your plan? Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. We released right after the polls closed, pretty much what we're calling new direction, which tries to outline what this kind of economic agenda would look like. And, you know, as you said, I think we've got kind of eight different sections. But starting at the top, you know, one really said, I think we've got kind of eight different sections. But starting at the top, you know, one really big one is the idea of reshoring industry and recognizing that manufacturing matters, other forms of industry and the physical economy matter. And you can't have a flourishing economy where you say, you know, well, we'll just design everything in California and make everything somewhere else. And so I think there's a lot of really substantive things we can do on trade policy, on industrial policy that would really make a big difference in making America a place where people want to invest,

create good jobs and manufacture things, which then also is where the research and the innovation and the progress comes from. So that we think is one really important area of focus. A second is non-college pathways. We've, including the Republican Party, focused for so long on just, we're gonna basically find a way to get everybody into and through college and pay for it somehow.

And that just doesn't work. Most Americans don't have a college degree. A huge majority are not sort of going high school, college career. And so really shifting investment to non-college pathways and ways to get into the workforce, get on the job training, I think is super important. And then just to mention one more, we think family policy is really important. Families generally are struggling. The very idea of the family in America is struggling. Marriage rates are down. Families generally are struggling. The very idea of the family in

America is struggling. Marriage rates are down, birth rates are down. And we have to have strong families, first and foremost, for their own sake. That's sort of the end goal here in a lot of ways. But also if we want to have thriving communities and a strong economy. And so, look, I think you're right. You know, someone like Ron Johnson probably isn't going to head in this direction or at least maybe need to be dragged in this direction. But I think if you look at who the real emerging leaders are in the Republican Party, you know, folks in the Senate like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton. J.D. Vance, you know, I'll certainly take my chances if you're asking whether the party is going to head in the direction of Ron Johnson or J.D. Vance. And so I think in the medium to the long term, things are really promising. But, you know, to steal a phrase from the left, you know, we have to do the work and we have to actually develop the ideas and the platform.

It has to be built on a coherent set of principles. And so that's what we're doing at American Compass. And hopefully, as we head into the next election cycle, we'll have a lot more candidates who are ready to focus on this. I wanted to pick up on one thing you had said in one of your earlier answers about student debt coming from kind of a bubble about what people don't really understand. And I want to press you on it because I'm wondering if you're kind of relying on kind of a mythologized version of what the American working class is rather than kind of what the actual American working class is. classes because it's easy to caricature anybody who went to college as some woke Oberlin grad who has rich parents and just wants to bail out so they can go get their multicultural studies master's degree or whatever it is. But if you look at the actual data or you go around the country, something like more than 65% of the country have some college.

Roughly, maybe, I think it's what, between 35% and 40% of people have bachelor's degrees or higher. And so that means you've got 20, 25% of people who have some college. But they're disproportionately going to be white collar. Not the people, I think, who didn't graduate, like who spent several years in college, racked up a whole bunch of debt, something went wrong. They're now paycheck to paycheck, but they're sitting there with $15,000 in student loan debt for a degree that they don't even have. I think there are a lot of people who are struggling with debt who you would look at and meet and say, this is a working class person who benefits from student debt cancellation and who is not an Oberlin graduate.

What do you think, Oren? I think that's absolutely right. And that's a point we try to emphasize at American Compass when you're talking about the educational attainment of the population. We talk about in sort of five roughly equal groups, you still have close to a fifth of the country that doesn't earn a meaningful high school degree. And we should keep that in mind. You know, you've got about 20% who never go to college. Exactly your point, you're about 20% who enroll but don't complete. And that's really important to remember that even of those who hold degrees, barely over half then go into a job that requires a degree.

So even among college graduates, you have an awful lot of folks for whom it hasn't worked. And you really get down to about 20 percent who have actually gone high school to college to career the way the system is intended. And so I don't by any means to suggest there aren't working class people who are struggling with student debt. And, you know, one thing we've proposed at American Compass is that we should just treat student debt like other debt. There are people struggling with all sorts of debt. The problem is that student debt is uniquely not dischargeable in bankruptcy. And so what we would say is stop mythologizing student debt and spending on higher education and recognize that it's not something that works for everybody, that people who have been

burdened by it and can't get out from under it should have a way to get out from under it. But then, my gosh, you have to pair that with reforms to the underlying system. You can't do $500 billion in student debt forgiveness and not admit that this means the higher education system is a total failure and has to be overhauled and has to stop being funded this way. And what you get instead from the White House is here's $500 billion essentially just flung out of helicopters with very little concern for who actually needs the assistance. And by the way, we're just going to double down on recreating the exact same problem going forward. And that's what you get from the progressive bubble.

And that's what's not responsive to what would actually benefit the working class, which is in most cases, other pathways that come with public support that get you connected to a good job. Not to make this all about student debt, but in the past, there was a policy that allowed you to discharge student debt through bankruptcy. And what was happening is you'd have a bunch of very young people, a lot of law students who would then come out with these huge amounts of debt, discharge all of it. And because they were 23, 24 years old, they didn't have any assets, even if their parents were super rich. Then they have the repercussions of bankruptcy, but otherwise they're cruising.

And so the benefit seemed to be disproportionately available to people who were in that situation. But I don't know if you have any response to that, but I also wanted to ask. Real quickly, I don't mean to be a rude guest, but I just don't think that's a very accurate characterization. We did a bunch of research on this for this exact proposal, and it was all the way back in the 1970s at a point where virtually no one was actually defaulting on their debt. Is that a myth that a bunch of people were? It is. The rate had increased, but you have to remember that how little college cost, how little that student debt was in the 1970s. Might have been just a media panic. It was a preemptive overreaction. And again, the question is, why is student debt different,

right? I mean, somebody could, you know, this law student you're describing could also go out, rack up tons of credit card debt and declare bankruptcy. And we don't have the same reaction. So will there be situations where it gets taken advantage of? Sure, sure there will. But compared to the system we have now, it would be a vastly better and fairer one.

And the last thing I'd say is, I think it's really important not to minimize, you sort of glossed over, they bear the consequences of bankruptcy. The consequences of bankruptcy are huge. The reason our system works is that we have a very lenient system in the sense that if you want to declare bankruptcy, you can. Much, much more lenient than, say, in Europe. But not many people do it because declaring bankruptcy is incredibly costly in all sorts of ways, financially, reputationally, for a very long time. And so we actually have a very good system,

I would say, in America that says, look, if you're somebody who feels like those costs are actually worth bearing because of your situation, then we actually want to allow you to do that. And far from causing some collapse of our consumer credit system, we obviously have a quite large consumer credit system. So I don't think we should sort of turn away from a bankruptcy system that's worked so well.

We should recognize that student debt is just debt and spending on higher education is just one way people spend money. And it's not some special mythical status because you're in the ivory tower. And that gets treated differently than everything else in society. And I do love the idea about reinvesting in skills and vocational training. What has bothered me about it is that it's seen as two tracks. Like one crew goes off and does the AP classes, and then he goes to college, and the other crew gets shop and mechanics. And we ought to have that option of shop and mechanics, but I think the

AP kids need that too. It's pathetic that nobody can fix anything anymore. Soft hands. Yes. Everybody should be in both of these. Yeah, all these just absolutely soft hands. Just two soft hands out there. Ryan did bring a makeup bag to work today. That's true. Pink one.

Pink makeup bag. Folks can read actually about Oren's plans for that pipeline over at the American Compass website. Oren, this stuff is so interesting and it's really serious and just appreciate you coming on to chat about it. Really glad you guys are talking about it. Thanks for having me. Of course.

Well, that does it for us today at CounterPoints Friday. Actually, that does it for us this week because we've been around a lot this week. Thanks for hanging in there with us. Actually, a big thanks to the crew and a big thanks to Ryan. I had an early schedule today, so everyone had to wake up early. Well, you're getting to watch this earlier because that's right. That's right. And we got our coffee. We got our coffee. So we're good to go. But I hope everybody's having a good weekend. I know it's about to get really cold in the Midwest and there's a lot of fallout

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