Central Air - Party of the People?

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

On this week's show: Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini joins to discuss the strength of Trump's multiracial populist coalition amid the Iran war. He offers his take on how the Republican party can avoid a cataclysm in this year’s midterm — it has, in part, to do with the semiquincentennial — and we discuss whether every election is going to be a “change” election from now onward.Also this week, Ben, Megan and Josh discuss what “everybody knew” about Eric Swalwell, and whether we’d be better off with more insider gossip thrown out into the open. And we look at the prospect of a United Airlines-American Airlines merger, which United CEO Scott Kirby reportedly floated to the president himself.Sign up for updates from Central Air at www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Era, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post, and Ben Dreyfus, who writes the Substack newsletter, Calm Down. Ben, I hear you're back in Washington, D.C. I am. I was tricked. You know that they felt by people. No. He loves us, and he can't resist coming back. What brings you back to our nation's capital? I actually had agreed to interview someone about their book, and I did that when I was the living here. And then decided I needed to come back because I had committed to it.

And, well, now I'm, now I'm sitting in one of the loveliest Hampton Inns in Virginia. Ooh, Hampton, not even the Hilton Garden Inn. No, no, God. Well, what am I, a king? You know, the difference between a Hilton Garden Inn has a bar, which a Hampton Inn doesn't have. They just have, like, powdered scrambled eggs. But I hope you're enjoying her. Well, when I finally got here because of some confusions with the,

his life, I only landed about an hour ago. I did run into the place and go, oh, I need a Bloody Mary. And the guy looked at me like, son, you're in the wrong place. Megan, can't Peter whip up a Bloody Mary for Ben now that he's back in town? Well, he is supposed to come to our house for cocktails this evening after the book event. And if you don't come, Ben, there are going to be recriminations. I'm excited. We have with us this week, a guest who I've wanted to have on here, for a while, and I'm glad that we've lined this up. Patrick Rafini, who is co-founder of the Republican polling firm Eschlon Insights, and author of the book, Party of the People, Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, is joining us to talk about the polling outlook and the outlook

for the Republican Party coalition. Patrick, I want to thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh. So I think people at this point have some familiarity with the data, but I just want you to first walk through a little bit some of what you would do in the book, which is, the demographics of Donald Trump's winning coalition, which was the most ethnically diverse winning Republican coalition ever. Can you just remind us, you know, exactly what that looked like, how he built his plurality? Yeah. So my book was published before the 24 election, because I think it's important to say that, you know, because there was a little bit of a moment after the election was like, oh, this book predicted it. But what I was actually writing about

was something that was different, different that actually what happened in the 24 election. in that each of the 16 and 20 election, Trump did meaningfully realign big chunks of the American electorate in both directions. And in 16, that was white working class voters in, you know, those Midwestern Rosbel Battleground states. And in 2020, it was more the Hispanic, Asian, American voter. But he was still never above 46, 47% of the vote, right?

So it's really kind of he's taking some, you know, he's taking some votes. you know, he's gaining votes, but he's also losing votes. And it's never, it's never, you know, quite over. Now, I would say that was very electorally, still very electorally advantageous because he's gaining the voters who are in the pivotal electoral battlegrounds. So, you know, he's actually making, the Republican Party has this huge electoral college advantage. 24 was different, right, because a lot of those voters were overdue, right, to shift because ideologically, culturally, they were misaligned in the parties that they were voting for, and had been in many cases voting for for decades. So you saw something, if you look at some of the large-scale polling data that was conducted after the 20 election, you see shifts around 35 to 40 points among all non-white groups among voters in those groups who identified as conservative.

I'm sorry, that's from 16 to 20 or that's from 20 into 24. That is from 16 to 20. So we had a broke ideological realignment in the country, right, in 16 and 20 around Donald Trump. You know, he kind of resets the political coalitions. And in 24, you have this just additional element to it where the Trump Coalition becomes a majority coalition. And one of the things I read in my book is, you know, in order for to have a majority coalition in this country, the coalition needs to not entirely make sense. Barack Obama had such a

coalition where, you know, he was winning these industrial, you know, union guys in the Midwest, right? Demographically, not the kind of voter, you would think, you know, is going to vote for an African-American community organizer from the south side of Chicago, right, but he assembled a coalition that did not quite make sense. Also in Donald Trump, he assembled a majority coalition that did not entirely makes sense. And it was that the additional, I'd say the additional voter was a fundamentally non-ideological voter. It was a younger voter. So you look at all the groups that shifted in 24. It wasn't just minority voters. It wasn't just, okay, okay, black men and that. You had a series of groups that included unmarried voters, younger voters, including unmarried women, right,

which was surprising to a lot of folks, given the focus on abortion. But all of these groups or people who, you know, I'd say you could say, or let's say on the margins or on the fringes of the economy, don't participate in elections a whole lot. And those are the voters we're now talking about him being in trouble with right now, and that specific cohort of voters. But my argument is, you know, those 16 and 20 gains, I think they're pretty safe because, you know,

I think it was fundamentally an ideological realignment. And, you know, Trump, I think, just redefined the contours of American politics. but the 24 voter very much up for grabs in the midterms. So that's interesting. I'm trying to think about how that projects back onto the map because, I mean, some of the regions that were heavily Hispanic or heavily Asian that had big shifts toward Republicans from 16 into 20, those were areas where Republicans continued making outsized gains after 2020, right?

Like South Texas, lots of areas in Florida, that sort of thing. But those gains were not as dissuited. instinctively minority, even though some of the, you know, you could still see them showing up on the map there? Yeah. I mean, I think, like, I think 24 really, I think Trump gets, at least for now, all the minority voters probably, I think that a Republican could possibly get. And in order to do that, right, you're not just talking about consolidation of, you know, voters who are kind of with you to begin with, they're ideologically predisposed. you're talking about a lot of voters who are in the center, a lot of voters who are, you know, disaffected and outside the traditional political process and are uniquely reacted to the state of the economy, which they thought was quite poor under Joe Biden. And they still think it's quite poor, even with Donald Trump coming back in. Megan, do you have a reaction to this?

Yeah. I mean, I sort of wonder if we aren't just in a political time where everyone's mad. And they're sort of prone to being whipsaw back and forth. Is there a stable coalition at all? Or is it, you know, this third, third, hardcore of partisans, then a third of the country that's just going to, like, drift back and forth because, like, fundamentally they want something that isn't available? Is there what I grew up thinking of as a stable national politics at all?

Well, I think we're very much driven in an age where that seems like less and less of a possibility. with like every election now being a change election. And I think we may be entering an era, right, where the White House may flip every four years. I mean, it is very, you know, it's very hard to just say that like, very hard to project trends. But, you know, it definitely felt like we were in an era from the 80s through Obama, where basically the norm was that, okay, presidents normally get reelected. Presidents are favored to be elected because they get the, generally get the benefit of the doubt in their re-election campaign. Unless something unique,

something uniquely bad is happening in that period, I mean, you've only had one president in that time period defeated for re-election. And now we've had essentially two presidents in a row defeated for re-election. And there's a sense, perhaps, 28 would be the Democrats' turn, right? If you kind of consider Trump's second term, as maybe the second term, he should have gotten in 2020, if he'd behaved a little bit more. normal in a national emergency, but he just got it four years later. So I think it very much feels like an unstable national politics, and that means that every two years, right, two years after the presidential, you're going to have whatever backlash is going to exist to the party

in power, which is the norm in midterm elections. But I think you go back. I think the last several elections, they've all been some kind of change election in some respects. Sorry, what does that do to the political incentives, right? If you think that every election is going to be a change election, then do you just go in every time, go for the gusto, make a ton of people mad and lose anyway? I mean, is this a self-reinforcing trend, I guess, is my ultimate question. I think very much so, right? I think we are, and I think empirically, right, that's what we've seen happening in that there's a presumption that presidents, incoming presidents have. 18 months really to get their agenda through and their agenda passed. And that is in an environment also where you are working with Congress, where you do have a congressional majority that's aligned with you. I mean, we've had basically a Republican trifecta. The irony, though, is Trump, I think accumulating more and more executive power, right, is even ignoring his own

like Republican trifecta, right, is increasingly getting things done sort of outside the bounds of Congress, which I think also raised an interesting question. What exactly would be the consequence, even if Democrats did take control of Congress? Yeah, could they impeach him? Sure. But that's not new, right? That's not a new phenomenon with Donald Trump. Oh, my gosh, he'll face a third impeachment. Oh, no, don't throw me in the briar patch, right? So I think that that is increasingly kind of the consequence. but it seems like he is doing what he wants with or without Congress. And so I think that also raises potentially a problem with Republican, core Republican voters who may just perceive less and less the stakes of this election because I don't think

that there's a sense like Trump is really going to be meaningfully slowed down even if Democrats take control of one or both chambers. There's two things I want to push back on here. And they're totally disconnected, but it's been a minute. One, like, there are general huge things that will happen if Democrats win the Senate, particularly. Like, for one thing, he won't get to confirm any more judges, right? Like, there's a lot of things that people feel when Trump does bullshit that then it happens. And he does a lot of things with the executive power.

But, like, there are actual real practicalities aside from the, like, of course, they're not going to be able to convict him and throw him out of office. Having said that, the thing that as I listened to this thesis that, you know, I've really appreciated your your insights into like the Republican demographics and and political insights for years for over a decade now. And the thing that I always wonder is I hear like what I would have to describe sort of like the optimistic view of the MAGA era, which is that somehow those gains in 2020 will sustain and outlive Trump the person seems somewhat possible to be the, you know, there's two schools of thought. One is this is actually just you need to Trump. That's why it didn't show up in 18 or in 2022 or in these special elections.

And that he personally is quite good at it as opposed to any other Republican. And I guess I'm, what does it look like in a world where the losses that Trump took for the GOP with women and the suburbs are enduring because they keep showing up every time for Democrats? But that the Trump unique wins where he just gets to elevate these voters in South Texas and all these places who don't normally appear are actually more contingent. And it's not as there that they will be a constant GOP person. Does that make sense? I think there's absolutely a case to be made, right? You have certain remnant elements, though, of the GOP who say, well, Trump has been a drag, right, on the party, right? And if you have, if you take down, if you take out Trump as a factor, right, maybe you would actually get back some of those suburban women.

There's precedent for this in terms of the wins. if you do have the wins of, you know, during the Biden era, guys like Glenn Yonkin, Brian Kemp, right? I mean, it does seem like to some extent on both sides when Trump isn't on the ballot, Republicans do gain, right? Now, I think like to an extent what flipped in 24 was that there was a distinctive in the pre, you know, let's say in the first Trump term, there was a distinctive advantage to being this. non-Trump Republican who was separate and apart from him in terms of Republican Senate candidates always did better than Trump on net. Yeah, they didn't get, they didn't clean up in these rural areas as much. But on balance, right, they're winning more of the suburban voters. And then there's an additional persuasion X factor. That completely goes away, right, in 24. So I think it's more

of a concern with this post-24 coalition, which is fundamentally, as I mentioned at the top, It's fundamentally different than the 16 and 20 coalition. It's a little bit less stable. But, you know, it really was the case in 24. Trump did outrun most of the Senate candidates, which was not the case in his first term. Can I push back on the theory that we're in this sort of era of permanent discontent where every election is going to be a change election? Because it seems to me like we're not seeing that at every level of government. I mean, in 2022, there was only one incumbent governor who got defeated for re-election.

And the race ratings that you see now, like from like the Center for Politics at UVA, predict only one state, Kansas to be particularly likely to have the governor's race even flip party control. And that's an open seat race. I think that at a lot of levels of government, voters show the ability to be satisfied with how their leaders are performing. And I think that what's happened at the federal level is that there have been, there have been certain unusual upheavals that the government has handled poorly. And its performance has actually been bad. And that's why people are persistently discontented. I think that, you know, you had COVID and you had discontent with certain aspects of Trump's handling of that. You had the burst of inflation in a way that people have not really seen for 40 years and our politics has not been used to. And that has been, you know, the largest area of discontent that persists, even as the inflation rate has come down, people seem to have this idea that the price level was going to fall. And I don't know how many years it's going to take for them to get used to the idea that 2019 prices are never coming back. And of course, that was before the Iran, war and the effect that that had on gasoline prices. And then you also had the, you know, the complete failure to manage migration in the Biden administration. I think that if you had a presidential

administration that tackled those challenges effectively, you could make the electorate satisfied again. And I think that the reason people never seem to have majority approval of what the federal government is doing is that it's been a long time since we've had a federal government that was delivering the basic outcomes that people were expecting. Am I wrong about that? Yeah, I think that's the case, but it seems to go back even further than that. Because you might look, I mean, what is the era, right? What would have been the era when people were relatively satisfied? And a lot of people would say, maybe it was the Obama presidency.

Well, Obama lost a lot of seats. 2014, I think, wasn't a particularly bad year economically, but he still lost a lot of seats in that election. They flipped Senate control in that year. It was a bad midterm. 2018. You know, I think we talk right now of, oh, what can Trump do to improve the voter perceptions of him on the economy? Well, let's go back to 2018. Voter perceptions of him in the economy are pretty strong in 2018. He still lost a whole bunch of seats. So I think that there is an element. There's absolutely that as all that's absolutely happened. But I do think

like there is just some element here of a seesawing back and forth. that some extent is disconnected from the actual outcomes. And you kind of started to see that. I think it seems to me that it's a little bit more of a post-Obama-type phenomenon, or an Obama-era-type phenomenon, where, you know, again, even in those midterms where you wouldn't think, like, okay, the economy is particularly bad. The government is doing things that are particularly damaging, I think, in most people's daily lives, but you still saw big shifts in those elections.

Well, but I mean, the president's party losing seats typically in the midterm is a very old phenomenon. I mean, going back, I believe, all the way to the founding, certainly the civil war. I mean, we, you know, we went through this very odd era in American politics post-World War II that I think people often treat as though it were normal when it was abnormal. And you had this, you know, this very persistent Democratic majority in the House of Representatives during that period. But I think, you know, the, we went through, you know, a lot of history where presidents were able to get reelected even as they were losing ground in Congress. So I don't think that, you know, going back to a place where voters are sat aside means that we should, you know, expect midterms to go well for the president's party. But I do think it means that we should start expecting some reelections again. Although one way to think about this is that we're now so polarized on national politics and local politics is kind of receded, right? In part because the local media is not there anymore. And so people are extremely focused on national politics. And in the same way that Trump, Trump theoretically should not have gotten reelected. after 2020, even leaving aside January 6th, which I obviously think was disqualifying and should

have meant he didn't get reelected. But if you look at how bad the economy was, right? If you just look at kind of GDP numbers, people gave him a pass because they think, well, he didn't start the pandemic, right? And that wasn't really why he got reelected. Maybe his management of the pandemic, that's a different thing. But people didn't blame him for that, even though they blame presidents for every single other recession that has ever happened. And I think maybe one way to reconcile what you're asking, Josh, is that, yes, first of all, you don't see a lot of change elections at the state and local level. I mean, you have actually seen some change elections at the local level in some blue cities that went way overboard. But you don't see them because

people don't blame the governor for whatever is happening at the national level. They're angry about the national level. They have less information than ever about what's happening in their state and local politics because there's so little coverage in most. places. And we're now so geographically sorted and so polarized that you just wouldn't expect it, right? Is New York going to elect a Republican governor if they're mad at Kathy Hokel? No. I mean, California, it looks like their jungle primary might leave them now with a couple of Republicans at the top. But that's, I mean, that's a weird artifact of, like, primary design. It's not that California is aching for a Republican to rebuke the Democrats for what they're mad about.

But you're just probably not going to see that many seats flip back and forth simply because seats don't flip back and forth anymore. Can we talk a little bit about the war and how you see that, Patrick, as shaping the president's political fortunes here? It strikes me as uniquely hazardous compared to all the, you know, the problem, the many problems he's confronted before, which is, you know, he did this thing that caused gasoline prices to go up a dollar a gallon in a month. Diesel prices are up almost $2 a gallon.

His big advantage for years has been Trump is the good economy guy, and he presided over good economic performance in his first term up until COVID, which wasn't his fault. This is really going to hit voters directly in the pocketbooks, including a lot of people who their rationale for supporting him was that he was supposed to be the guy who made life affordable and energy cheap. It's absolutely true in the polling that really Americans are looking at this war, really through one lens, and that is exclusively through the lens of gas prices. I mean, I think you've got an interesting poll out of the weekend. Or like far in a way. I mean, yeah, I think people were kind of rating, you know, here are the different objectives, right? Would these be good objectives to achieve? And reopening a stereotype were moves was like far in a way, number one.

I mean, they were all like above 80%, but that really stood out as the number one objective. Can I ask you about that poll question, by the way, because I'm always like, this seems like an extreme version of issue polling where it's like, you know, how deeply has the voter thought of the issue? Is that poll question just a proxy for, do you want lower gasoline prices? Absolutely. I mean, I think everything in this, everything about public approval of this war is about whether you want lower gasoline prices. And I think there's probably a sense, right? What typically has happened with Trump's military interventions in a second term, first of all, they haven't been quite this drawn out. You know, he typically goes in.

I mean, there's one about a qualitative difference between saying, okay, we're going to bomb the crap out of a place or send some commandos in and then get out, right? And typically when he does that and it doesn't seem that there are any long term kind of negative consequences, actually approval like a month later, you ask people about it. And, you know, I think going into Venezuela, there's a bunch of polling and says, oh, Trump really shouldn't go into Venezuela. But everyone was kind of depleting kind of this invasion scenario, which is never. going to happen. But then he goes into Venezuela and then like a month later, everyone's fine with, okay, great, good thing that we got rid of Maduro. Same thing with the nuclear strikes back in the summer on Iran, that there were like quick in and out, kind of generally speaking, people who didn't approve of it as it was happening or before the fact. There was, I remember even back then,

a lot of conversation about, is this going to crack the MAGA coalition apart? And it just turns out to be a non-issue. But I think this is different because of just, the complications that we've seen with the, specifically on gas prices. And I don't think that voters are really focused on any of these geopolitical questions with the exception of that. It's so funny to me the way they appear to have been blindsided by this. Am I giving them less credit than they, than they deserve on that? Because it seems like that the president appeared to in his, one of the things he understood was like, I mean, the reason he ran on America first was exactly that parochialism, that people are, you know, they're focused primarily

on what's happening here, what's happening with their own pocketbooks. This informs his views on foreign aid. It informs his views on trade, even though I think that he has a lot of the technical questions there wrong about what actually benefits American consumers. It is his view is based on a focus on Americans. And this, you know, he just seems to have completely discarded the expectation that this was going to have huge domestic effects that were going to cause exactly the sort of the problem that he identifies having bedeviled, you know, George W. Bush and prior presidents. We said, we've done a lot of polling that has kind of pushed back on this idea, right, that MAGA in particular, right, is at risk of fracturing over these things because, I mean, just generally speaking, MAGA, you know, the self-selected universe of MAGA Republicans is a universe that is one that, you know, is going to probably, it'd be more likely just to kind of go along with whatever Trump says or does. And so I think you've seen. in polling, at least, pretty strong Republican support and even stronger MAGA Republican support. And that's against, right, this idea is, is there kind of this rising isolationist impulse within the GOP? I mean, you do see it represented to some degree with J.D. Vance, seemingly arguing, arguing against the war internally within the White House.

But there's been obviously a lot of talk about, is there the Tucker Carlson wing of the party, right? Is there this rising isolationist streak in the party that you don't really see in polling? But I think the point, right, I think Vance's primary role in this, in this has not been necessarily to push forward. Okay, well, there's now this anti-war wing. It is, I think, his central political insight. And I think that one that Trump shared in 2024 is that these long wars are bad politically, right, for whoever is in office, for whoever,

pursues them if you can't get in and out. If it's a, again, if it's like one of those quick in and out situations that Trump has had and Trump has taken advantage of multiple times, it can be, you know, you don't have those sorts of issues. But, you know, I think, I think in particular, I think the key insight, right, that I think, that advances, I think is probably right on is that this is uniquely politically politically hazardous, the longer it goes on. And I thought was so interesting about that poll that you guys were talking about

where people list the things that they are most interested in accomplishing about it, is that, you know, as we have litigated on this show now a little bit, I was sort of a little curious, interested in this Iran. Ben thought this was going to go great. I gave it better odds than I should have, all right? I'll admit it. He thought Iran was going to be led by Delci-Al Rodriguez by now. No, I thought we were going to free them.

We were going to be greeted as liberators, finally, finally, after all these years. But one of the things that I think was so interesting was that, you know, he didn't really articulate his vision. So I got to project my neol, my like liberal interventionalism one. And other people got to project their versions of it on because he hadn't really said anything. And then once things, you know, started to drag out, he still hasn't really articulated one. They were saying that, you know, it was going to be about nukes. They'd finally stuck up the nukes. And then recently they said, oh, we're going to go back and have them.

argue about noobs and then various different things. And so when I see that poll where people say, oh, it should be open the straight, oh, it should be this. Oh, it should be that. It reminds me of that line in the American president where it's like people will go through the sand, walk through the desert forever and then drink the sand because they can't tell the difference because of the water. Because like they haven't been offered anything else. No one knows what this war is about. We haven't had a war like that where Trump has not just told us like this is what you're supposed to care about. So people are able to say the one that I can see is the gas prices.

Patrick, do you think, like, can presidents shape public opinion on that sort of thing? If he had done a more, you know, a more robust public diplomacy, arguing for this war beforehand, would the polls look different now? I think it buys him time. But, again, I just think, I think going back to original question, you know, are we in an era? because the last time this was meaningfully tried was in the run up to the Iraq War in 2020, which was, you know, I think modeled in many ways

on the 1991 Persian Gulf War in terms of, okay, we are, you know, systematically trying to build a base of public support across political parties that can withstand the inevitable difficulties, right? Because there are always inevitable difficulties in an operation like this. And I just think, like, Donald Trump is not interested

in having that sort of, you know, and I think perhaps the conditions in the country, I think it's two things, right? I mean, it's Donald Trump is uniquely kind of uninterested in actually marshalling that level of public support across political parties. But there's also a serious, legitimate question in the absence of America has been directly attacked, that's on 9-11, whether or not there would be any sort of, you know, that strategy would have any sort of success no matter who was president. Let's take a quick break, and then I want to come back and get Patrick's pitch for how

Republicans can avoid a disastrous midterm. This is Central Air. Patrick, so you had a tweet the other day that I took notice of that sort of had like Republican Simon Rosenberg vibes. Simon Rosenberg is the famous Hopium Democrat about how, you know, everything's going to be okay. We're going to go, we're going to win this thing. And so I don't know that you're saying we're going to win this thing, but it was your

roadmap for how Trump can go from here to a non-disastrous midterm election? So I guess first, when we say non-disastrous, do you see a roadmap for Republicans to even hold their majority in House of Representatives? Or is this just about holding the Senate and keeping losses in the House to a modest level? I think it's probably that, right? And like I said, I don't think like, okay, this is, I think genuinely defying history, right, is not in the cards in terms of, you know, in terms of there being Republican seat gains, even though, look, as recently as 2018, you know, people write about that, you know, we talk about that as being a disastrous midterm. Republicans did actually gain seats in that, in that election.

In the Senate. But look, Donald Trump does not need to be the most beloved political figure heading into this election, nor will, nor is there any world in which he will be. But, um, in, yeah, good news for him, because there is, that was not on the table. But like, look, I mean, I think there is a roadmap. And the roadmap was, uh, the Democrats were, you know, able to somewhat execute on in, 2022, where you at least need to, you don't need to win outright, but you need to get enough of your, let's say, marginal voters off the sidelines and actually voting, which if you look at some of these special elections, they're definitely warning signs of, you know, Republicans basically

checking out of voting and believing there are any kind of stakes whatsoever when it comes to a lot of these special elections. Now, maybe you could say, well, these are in deep red seats. Republicans aren't going to lose those anyway. But even some of those seats, you know, where it's been a little bit more competitive, you haven't seen that either. I mean, Democrats just want a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin by 20 points. These used to be really closely contested elections. Right. I mean, there's absolutely that issue. So I think, you know, heading into the midterms, you cannot have turnout differentials of that level and survive. Now, normally don't see that. I mean, normally the midterms get a little bit closer, but I think in particular, so I think, look, he just doesn't need to win, but the function, right, in 22, what it took for Democrats, right, to actually execute that was the Dobbs decision, right?

And it was not enough for them to outright, let's say, win the midterms. I mean, it was a moral victory, but it was not enough for seat gains, but it was enough to basically get what was going to be a six or seven points shalacking down to a couple of points. points. And then when you do that with the redistricting that you're going to have, and it looks like it's going to be a wash, what you're able to do in that situation is really concentrate what are actually superior financial resources at the moment for Republicans onto a very narrow set of House districts. Let's also not forget. I think, like, I know prediction markets are kind of right now a coin toss on the Senate. I think that's absolutely fake news. in the sense of, because it's very rare, you know, even going back before Trump, it's very rare for an out-party to take a seat that was won by the other party by 10 points or more in the last

election. The last time that happened when a non-incomement was running was Roy Moore in 2017. So I think that was a pretty unique, uniquely bad scenario for Republicans, and the time before that was 2012 in the Indiana Senate race. So we're now talking about in order for Democrats to actually flip the Senate. You're talking about that needing to happen in multiple states this time. So I think that's just a uniquely difficult situation, no matter really how bad things get. Wait, I'm sorry, where the Senate race was more than 10 points last time around? Well, the Senate, no, where the presidential race was. And obviously, since that time, obviously, Senate elections and presidential elections have become much more aligned. But you're really talking about races where Ohio, Iowa, there's always like

a good polling for, I mean. Well, Alaska is the wildest. card here. I think that's what makes the map look more in reach for Democrats. Alaska, right, because I think you have a unique candidate. And it's an idiosyncratic political culture. But in some of these larger states, you not only need, you would need an Ohio. You would need an Iowa. And those are uniquely difficult for Democrats. So some of the things that you laid out specifically in this tweet, the steps toward containing the damage. The first is some kind of successful resolution on Iran, which, you know, we've talked a lot about Iran, but that's obviously, you know, That's sort of an, there's a little underpants gnomes aspect of that. Like, you know, I guess, you know, we'll see if we can reopen the straight. And then you have some things that are sort of like vaguely about good vibes and patriotic feeling, which are, you know, the Artemis splash down that we just had good vibes around the 250th anniversary, this midterm convention that Republicans are going to have. Does this stuff really matter for midterm turnout? Like, I know, I know people will actually sort of say that the bicentennial help Gerald Ford in the 76th.

race. But I don't, you know, Gerald Ford was a much more, you know, broadly, you know, palatable figure than Donald Trump to a lot of the country's middle. Yeah. I mean, so, so I think anything that marginally gets, I think, Republicans a little bit more, let's say, feeling good about actually going out and casting a ballot, which their motivation right now is pretty low to do that. I think isn't that positive. At the same time, Trump needs to not get in the way, right? And I think that is a more dubious proposition, you know, he could very easily step on himself in any of the, in any of those regards. But if you have, let's say, a string of events, and I would count in that, okay, if you were, if you were actually able to take advantage of the tax refunds, right? And his tax bill, if the economic numbers kind of go well,

Well, look, we've seen so many places where, you know, it's very easy to get the scenario where Democrats completely run the table here. But again, like if he is able to string together, right, a series of things. But I also think the easier thing for them to do, the easier thing for them to execute on is going to be, you know, what is going to be their contrast message against the Democrats? Because I don't think we've really seen that yet. So a lot of the messaging we're seen out of the White House is, okay, yeah, Trump is actually going to behave himself somewhat and talk about the cost of living. And that's, you know, that's how we're going to keep our losses to a minimum where I think that's important. That's not enough. And I think it goes back to the issue, right, that I brought up earlier is like, what are, you know, if you're a Republican voter, you know, what is the story you're being told about what the stakes of this election even are.

when Trump is doing all this thing, you know, Trump is doing all of these things regardless of whether he has control of Congress or not. So I think like that is going to be one that's easier for them to execute on because I think, you know, Trump is a natural political aggressor. I don't think we've actually seen that yet. But the, I think that the more dubious aspect of it is, is he not going to get in his own way while he's trying to do that? I love the idea that the 250th anniversary would have an effect here. Just because one of the things that I think everyone on this podcast really loves is when people actually are proud of America. And we all imagine that this thing would suddenly be like the motivating factor that would get everyone to the polls.

But then I think about the world that we live in where you know, you have people feeling this sudden joy when the hockey team beats the Canadians, right? And instead of it leading to any actual moment, it leads immediately to a culture war split, where the Republicans are like, oh, they go quite farther and then the left is like, oh, don't we're being too mean to our poor Canadians. Don't, don't be rude to them. And it leads immediately, there's no natural moment of it. And I can just, I feel like that's what's going to happen with these things as well. Let me push back on that a little bit. I don't know how convinced I am, but like, that's all stuff that's happening online. And that all seems extremely real to those of us who spend way too much time online. And that's actually not most of America. Or when they are spending too much time online, they're spending too much time like watching TikTok videos.

They're not spending too much time arguing with people on Twitter about the meta-ethics of beating the Canadians at hockey. Here's the thing about the semi-quincentennial stuff. I have been an advocate for this for a long time to my pride back in 2024, the Washington Post. published one of the first editorials pointing out that the Democrats were absolutely screwing up the semi-quincennial that the left had basically

How were they screwing it up? The land acknowledgments? Oh my gosh. There is a commission and the commission had basically devolved into left-wing infighting. And if you went to the America 250 site, you actually saw literally the site could not bring itself

to say it was a good thing. that America had been founded. And so they had just punked. And they had like, we've asked people to write essays about what America means for me. We're taking school children to do, it was to do art projects.

And not that I'm against any of these things, but on the other hand, Donald Trump had been like, it's going to be a massive party. There's going to be planes flying everywhere, the biggest fireworks ever in the history of humanity, right? And the contrast between those two things, was distressing.

And I will say that the only thing I am glad about, Trump winning election, is that I do, in fact, think we are going to have a better semi-quincennial with him in charge than I think we would have had with Kamala Harris. What does that mean?

Like a parade? I think these are things that land well with people when they are in a mood to feel good about things. And I think if he hadn't launched the war, I could see this being a thing. that might help him build momentum? You know, 1976, which is like I was alive for,

and the rest of you were not. Now, I was three years old, so let me not oversell this. But, no, but like I got taken down and still vaguely remember, or think I vaguely remember, seeing the tall ships in New York. And the fact was that a few years before the 200th,

it had been bogged down and actually exactly the same kind of political infighting over like, did we really want to celebrate America, except not quite as bad, but similarly, like, bogged down in the malaise of the early 70s, they got their act together, and it actually turned into a huge thing all over the country. And I think that there is a possibility that by doing things in person, by having big fireworks celebrations in person, by going to see the tall ships, by seeing like little patriotic celebrations, I do actually think that there is some potential for a lightning of the mood. It's not like 1976 was a great year

and everyone was really, you know, digging. What was the big movie of that year? What was, it was a year before Jaws? I mean, it's like... Was the year after Jaws? No, was Jaws 75? I thought it was 77. 75, but 77 is when my dad won an Academy Award. Okay, well, fair enough. Sorry, I'm going to take that again. But like, what is happening in 1970? that has America so cheery, not that much. Well, I mean, also, Ford's still lost. I'm not suggesting that, like, first of all, Donald Trump's never running again, or if he does, he's not getting on the ballot.

So it's not good for Donald Trump, but I think it might actually be good for us and for our national mood. And I think it might slightly lighten the malaise over Iran. I'm not saying it's going to erase how gas prices, but, you know, we've been there before. Can I ask you as a serious question? Because, like, I think we all love America here quite a lot and love all this patriotic stuff. You know, I don't like the left's anti-American bullshit.

But also, I have no idea what the plans are for the centennial. Is it going to be celebrated on July 4th, I assume, probably? He's going to have an MMA fight in front of the White House. He's going to, is that a serious thing or a joke thing? On the White House lawn. No, no, that's, it's really happening. It's also kind of a joke, but it's for real. But I don't, like, I mean, I think, you know, we saw this past week, you know,

what the president looks like at an MMA fight is, different when he's mired in a huge political mess. I mean, it was sort of this, like, he looked kind of sad at that fight in Miami on Saturday while the vice president was trying and failing to negotiate a ceasefire. These are, I mean, again, these sorts of, like, fun recreational things can look fun when, you know, when you're winning. This stuff is working for Zoron Mamdani in New York, because he's still popular. And when he goes out and, you know, does his, like, winsome thing, it works because people are in a good mood about him. If it turns, that stuff is really going to turn. And so I just, you know, the, I wonder about Donald Trump's ability to go up in those

celebrations on July 4th and not look ridiculous given the, you know, the surrounding political environment. But 76, as we were talking about the movies of 1976, the movie that year is Rocky. And Rocky is based entirely about, um, the centennial, about, you know, Apollo Creed is going to the bicentennialism is going to celebrate. you know, America's thing by giving this shot to this bum fighter who then,

he was also white because he's trying to gin all this up. And then, you know, of course, there's the most patriotic thing in the world,

and they go the distance, blah, blah, blah. But it's like a key part of that movie. And as I was thinking about how he's going to have this UFC fight that you guys just told me about on the White House line.

But of course, that's going to be Rocky themed. He's trying to evoke Rocky and they're going to use that song. And they're going to have him, someone's going to be wearing the American flag, the Apollo shorts. And this whole thing is so monumentally offensive to me, not as an American, but as a Rocky fan. It's disgusting.

And I think that, you know, we got a couple of months here to get a letter-reading campaign or something to stop this. To get to get copyright warnings sent by the studio to not allow them to do this to Rocky. Can I actually ask you about the Pope thing, Patrick? Sure. Does it matter? So, all right, is this a good thing from a either theological or decency or standpoint? Not at all. But it's hard to see this mattering.

It's hard to see this mattering in two weeks, and it's hard to see this mattering in three days. I mean, we've had hundreds of instances by now about, oh, Trump has, maybe this time, Trump has gone too far. And it just seems this is not the thing, right? And setting apart the, you know, kind of the Jesus meme thing, which they pulled down, right? But like. That wasn't Jesus. it was a medical doctor. It's a doctor, right?

Yeah. But like, okay, there are some, there's some internal compass about when something has actually gone too far. But like, look, this isn't even the first Pope he's insulted. Like, I mean, he went after Francis right in the heat of the 2016 primaries before the Republican Party had fully coalesced before him when he was theoretically, at least somewhat politically vulnerable. And it was fine, right?

You know, he was fine. It was fine doing that. And I think it's just hard. to see, right, this mattering. And the fact that, you know, this is all, when these things happen, they're all that liberals can talk about means they're not necessarily focusing on the things that are actually, you know, I think are actually meaningfully going to affect his standing in the midterms, it's right now is gas prices, it's Iran, it's a state of the economy. Well, I was interested that it wasn't just with the Jesus meme, it wasn't just liberals talking about it.

I was interested in the, you know, the reproach that he received from Christian conservatives that he responded to by taking it down. But I didn't know whether to take that as a sign that, you know, the fact that people are, you know, in his own coalition are prepared to stand up and say, don't do that, that's too far. It seems like a sign of weakness for him, not necessarily about them abandoning him as them seeing that he's in trouble and trying to rescue him from himself or something. It looks like something that happens when when people in the coalition can see that the stuff, that the Iran stuff is not going so well. I mean, I think it's probably happened. There have been times where it's happened before he's pulled back a little bit. But like I think that that is really what he's going to, if he's going to respond to anything, it's going to be feedback, negative feedback within his own coalition that seems sustained. It's not some fringe figure that he can easily dismiss, right?

So I think that was probably the dispositive factor here. But he's not paying attention to what people, you know, what podcasts like this are saying, right? You know, if we're saying like, oh, this is the most horrifying thing in the world. He's not paying attention to polite elite opinion, but he will pay attention to feedback within his own coalition. I will say that the one effect I think it's having, I doubt that this is going to, I don't know, I don't think it's going to matter that much on the margin, but I will say I have noticed conservative Catholics rallying a little bit around the Pope, even though the Pope himself is not a tried cath. And I've also noticed Protestants really attacking the Pope in a way that is surprising to me. Right. Like, In general, religious conservatives have seen each other as allies and not done the denominational wars. And suddenly you've seen some prominent people who are starting the denominational wars and are like really, they went after Leo because he said he gave a kind of banal, like, we're all in communion speech, including Muslims. And people like Molly Hemingway, who is a Lutheran, said, well, this is a...

I would just like to point out that, like, I'm not allowed to take communion even because of, it's like, no, that's not what the word communion. But that's not, that's what you meant by communion, right? Yes, indeed. Like, it wasn't a reference to Holy Communion. No. But the point is that, like, starting the tradcaths and the Lutherans tend to stay away from each other, right? They may trash talk each other behind their backs. I don't know, right?

But, like, the going after Catholic theology in that way and getting kind of all up in the Reformation is, not something I've seen online, and it makes me a little worried because, like, this was a little bit how you started to see the surge in anti-Semitism was people, like, coming up with things that, breaking taboos that had held. And once those taboos were broken, things started snowballing pretty fast. Now, like, look, as a practicing Catholic, am I concerned in the same way that I'm concerned about anti-Semitism? No, there's more of us, and there's not the same kind of history there, but it is, actually a little disturbing that this seems to be polarizing into something fairly ugly online. Does that matter in the real world? I don't know. But I was somewhat disturbed to see what started to sound like by the end of the day or by the end of the weekend. A kind of rehearsal of some of the like the popish influence, Rome's, like Rome's tentacles reaching into America that was like, ha, ha, is it 1850? What's going on here? Well, I mean, there was that thing a few months ago where Ted Cruz was sort of like getting ahead of this. I mean, he was hearing all the stuff about how there was a part of the Catholic, some group of Catholics.

I don't know enough about this to identify properly. But it wants, it is like breaking the conservative deal between evangelicals and Catholics. And what's his name? Adrian Vermeel, right? Isn't he the Catholic I'm thinking of? He's the guy who thinks that the Pope should run the country, yes. Right. Exactly. The world, right? Yeah, but I mean, but Ted Cruz was a few months ago, how I found it was that he was going on a Twitter card about it. So I guess that this is a thing that has been growing, some sort of, excuse him, in the online.

I mean, growing, yes, in the sense that if something has a very, very tiny base, if you have like three people who believe something and then 10 people believe it, it has been growing very rapidly as a percentage. Would I say that Catholic integralism is a major force in. in American Catholic thought? No. No, because like also Catholics can count most of us. And we look and we're like, okay, what is the mechanism by which the Pope is running a country that is not, is like maybe a quarter Catholic? This is never going to happen. And it's a kind of interesting thought experiment, and I'm sure that Vermeel really enjoys it, but this is not like an actual political movement. And anyone who thinks it is is crazy. But before we let Patrick go, we talk. We talked. some about what Republicans might do to try to shore up their position in the lead-up to the midterms. What would you as a Republican like Democrats not to do? What are you afraid that Democrats will

do to position themselves well for this midterm? Well, look, I think at this point, it's easy for Democrats because they basically don't have to do anything, right? So the idea is, I think, how parties have done well in midterms before is they've not tried to be a lot. They've not tried to be the main characters in the story because they are a blank slate. We talked about, I mean, there was a lot of hope going into, at least earlier, you know, last year, right? Oh, Democratic favorability. Democratic numbers are so low because, you know, and there's no way they'll do that well in the midterms because they're underwater favorability-wise by 30 points. And I said, like, no, that's not the case because people who are driving that favorability are the hardcore

Democrats who don't believe that they're fighting hard enough against Trump. So oddly enough, the idea that they're these powerless to do anything, which is something that's causing, was causing a lot of intra-like some Democratic infighting in Adjitah last year, is ironically a little bit of a supercrack for them this time. Because that makes them a little bit more of a blank slate. It makes them a little bit more broadly acceptable as just purely an, anti-Trump vessel. And I think that's what they're, you know, I think that's what they're going to try to do. I mean, I think that's the most logical path to them. Patrick Rafini, thank you so much for

joining us. This was really interesting. Thank you. We'll be right back with more central air. It's been a busy week in Congress, which is coming back from recess, and we've had two members announced their resignations, Eric Swalwell, who just a few days ago was the frontrunner to become the next governor of California and Tony Gonzalez, the Republican congressman from the big sprawling district that runs from El Paso to San Antonio and West Texas, both with significant personal behavior issues. Eric Swalwell is accused of various kinds of sexual misconduct, including rape by one of the accusers who spoke with CNN. There was also reporting the San Francisco Chronicle. Tony Gonzalez had been carrying on an affair with a staffer of his who then died by suicide in the wake of their affair.

And so we were in a position where the House was about to vote to expel these people, even though historically, the House only expels its members after like a criminal conviction or sometimes after action by the House Ethics Committee. And instead there's been this, you know, impatience to, you know, well, we better get them out now. And the reports are convincing, I believe them. But it was interesting to me that we got the resignations, I think in part to spare the House from that. Nancy Pelosi in calling for Eric Swalwell to step down, one of the things she said is we shouldn't make members vote on this. You should just resign. But it's just been an interesting contrast for me with Donald Trump, who, you know, has engaged in all sorts of sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, et cetera.

It's almost like there's a hunger for return of standards that we can't impose them on the president, but at least maybe we can impose them on the members in Congress. I don't know what to make about the new lower level of toleration for certain kinds of misconduct within the legislature. I'm not sure it is exactly that. My read on all of this has always been that parties punish, at least in the modern era, parties punish politicians when it's not going to cost them anything. Or in rare cases like George Santos, when it's just obviously going to cost them more than a seat to keep them around. But other than that, they don't, right? And so Eric's Wellwell is not going to be replaced by a Republican, which means that the party suffers very little by forcing him out. Now, this is somewhat complicated in the California gubernatorial race where his withdrawal could interact with California's jungle primary to actually leave two Republicans as the top two who move on to the runoff. But in general, parties are more than willing to get rid of inconvenient members who will be replaced by members of the same party. It's when it's costly, and that was true with Donald Trump when he is having scandals, like, right as you go into the 2016 election.

On the one hand, people wanted to get rid of him. On the other hand, if he stayed in, it wasn't much you could do about it. And then once he won, they didn't want to immediately impeach and remove him over things that, I don't know, maybe were or maybe weren't impeachable and removable. I'm talking about things like the Access Hollywood tape, right? This is 2016. that parties don't act against politicians were doing so. It's true of Clinton as well, right?

If Clinton had been a congressman who could have easily been replaced by someone from his own party without costing the party too much, they would have replaced him. But they didn't have as much leverage over the president. And they didn't like the idea of making Al Gore president and then making a Republican vice president,

which is what would have happened. Wait, I'm sorry, why would there have been a Republican vice president? I'm sorry, putting in a Republican in line next in line for the presidency because the Speaker of House would have been next in line at that point. It would have been interesting, right? Yeah. Huh. You know, the same is true for Tony Gonzalez, right? You know, I mean, he's not going to be replaced by the Democratic.

Well, I mean, Tony Gonzalez is this funny thing where his district is actually somewhat competitive. But the problem was he was so damaged that he was possibly going to lose a Republican primary anyway to a more extreme candidate who then did already stand some risk of losing to a Democrat. But I think that, you know, that there was a world in which Tony Gonzalez would have been indispensable. But because, you know, because he might have been defeated anyway because his image had been so damaged, he became expendable to the party. And I think that, like, both of them existing at the same time helped the other group do it. You know, like, Democrats get to say, like, all right, all right. And we'll get the other. You'll give us one of yours as well.

It allowed both of them to kind of then deal more comfortable doing it, which is disgusting, but also sort of true. Everyone hold hands and jump into the pool. All right. We'll shoot one of yours and you'll shoot one of ours. Like, it's fine. There'll just be two bodies on the ground and we'll never discuss them. I think my metaphor was a little nicer, Ben, but okay. Let's go with the murder.

What sort of rumors had you heard about Eric Swalwell before this news broke? I mean, that he was a skeeve, but not. Yeah. But like in a... That was basically what I had heard. In a traditionally skeevy sense of sleeping around. not in a floridly and disgustingly illegal sense of perhaps sexually assaulting people. And I don't think there were rumors going around that he was a rapist specifically,

but my sense from some of the reporting, and including a CNN article from 2017, that anonymously notes that it was an article about the whisper network among staffers on Capitol Hill about who's a bad boss. And it was saying that, you know, six different Democratic staffers raised to them that there's a Congressman from California, who has a reputation for trying to sleep with his staffers. And so I think people are assuming reasonably that that was, in fact, about Swalwell. And so, you know, even though I didn't specifically know about the staff stuff, my sense is that that was word that was going around on the hill. And that's part of, you know, the reckoning that, you know, even, you know, Congressman Sam LaCardo, who's a relatively new congressman who represents San Jose, was posting on

Twitter basically saying, you know, some of my colleagues need to think about, you know, why they were, why they were standing with this guy, given what was being said about him, and that there was some sense that he was engaged not just in philandering, but in, you know, conduct that was obviously relevant in the workplace. It is interesting to me that so many people in California in the Democratic Party were prepared to line up behind him basically as the establishment pick. And, you know, you have, as you note, this jungle primary there. The other two Democratic frontrunners are billionaire Tom Steyer and former Congressman Katie Porter, who are disfavored for various reasons, various good reasons in my view, by a lot of, even a lot of democratic figures in the

states. He had a lot of unions and business interests basically lining up behind Eric Swalwell as an empty vessel they could pour their hopes into. And it seems like some of them probably ought to have taken notice of some of these rumors, even if I had not personally heard the, you know, he tries to sleep with his staffer's stuff. I mean, let me do say, like, the first thing that you see whenever, when this happened was that a lot of people said, oh, my God, all the media knew and they were covering for him. They were covering by not sharing the stories. And like, one, obviously you don't want the media just randomly sharing unverified rumors. But aside from that, people are always fighting the last war. And there's one very famous case where it was sort of an

open secret that then this came out. And it's Harvey Weinstein. And a lot of people knew about it and didn't say anything. And so they see it everywhere. Every time, it's always that there's a cult of silence that has been done by people who are not me or you or my friend or anyone I specifically know, but people who I disagree with knew about it and lied. And I just think that then they jumped from, I heard rumors that this guy used to fuck around. Or I heard rumors that he was a slut or a squeezy sleaze bag to this man is a brand. And then like the San Francisco Chronicle is, you know, with trouble,

why didn't they, why didn't they warn? Why didn't they blow a whistle and say, stop, stop, don't go near him? or why didn't Adam, why did these Democrats, you know, endorse them or stand with them running like that? I just think that there's a huge difference between knowing being like, yeah, this guy fucks around. Because, of course, that's a, this is the party of the Kennedys. I mean, of course, people fuck around. Well, the Kennedys are bad. I don't want to ever elect another Kennedy to anything.

I was loveling that up for you. I was giving it as a gift. But also, like, you then end with this. I think there was a perception also after the thing with what's his face, old comedian. comedian, Comedian Hong Kong and... Al Franken. Al Franken.

Where people sort of thought that that stuff had maybe gone a little too far, that maybe these, maybe there were room, maybe like people shouldn't just be like deciding instantly to cast these judgments on it. But then, of course, it leads to people overcorrecting and be like, well, now I'm going to, I shouldn't be saying things where I should be saying something.

And then maybe you let some schmuck like Eric Swalwell skate by when he is a seriously bad case, allegedly. Well, I mean, look, obviously the media can't just print rumors and shouldn't just print rumors. And I'm not sure that this necessarily should have been in the press before because the thing is that you can only report it when the people who are making the allegations are ready to have you report it. They have to be willing to talk to you. And it sounds like some outlets sniffed around this during the 2020 presidential election when Eric Spalwellwell theoretically ran for president. But his campaign was never that serious. And there weren't, you know, once that claimed out, there weren't women interested in going on the record about it. And by the way, the thing Eric Swalwell was saying to donors before his campaign blew apart was Donald Trump has been after me for years. If I was up to bad stuff, they would have found it by now. But I think that, you know, if you're aligned to the Republican Party, you're going to have trouble getting,

you know, former bureaucratic staffers to cooperate with your opposition research efforts. But I think the other question is if you are a party insider, if you're someone who's in the House of Representatives, and this is, you know, widely going around in the Whisper Network among staff, A, should you have some inkling of it? And B, it's not that you have to go public, but, like, maybe you shouldn't endorse him to be governor of California. Maybe you, like, you know, in a non-public way, withhold your support because you are skeptical. I mean, there are, you know, and I look at presidential candidates this way. You know, sometimes there are ones who, you know, I have my suspicions about their personal behaviors, and it makes me less inclined to support

them. It's not because I have something reportable that I can print. But I think, you know, you want to draw inferences about people's character. That makes perfect sense to me, and I would encourage that. I would just say that when you have a, as long as you have that feeling. If you don't have that feeling, you can't expect other people to have. Like, not everyone's going to have that. But if you do have it, you definitely shouldn't do it. One reason you should hold back, right, is that you have to, if you've heard the rumors,

you've got to suspect that when he does run for governor, the opo dump is coming. And, like, I think people should be a little easier on the, the press over this. I will, of course, talking my own book here. But like, I have had people not with this particular story, but with other stories say, well, why didn't you report this out? Things like Biden's age. And I was like, what do you mean? Why didn't I report this out? I'm not a frigging White House reporter. I have no contacts to do this. I have no ability to get the story that other people like Annie Lindski of the Wall Street Journal eventually got. There's like, yeah, why don't I just quit my job as an economics columnist and go off and turn into,

like Megan McCartle, P.I. And the other thing is that these stories take phenomenal resources to investigate, right? To line up the number of people you need, to lock down their stories, to get them to trust you, to push this all through legal. I think probably this would have come out had he continued to run for president, but he didn't because he wasn't getting any traction. And at that point, it is a problem that there aren't a lot of news outlets left. And is it worth the phenomenal resources it would take to take down a minor California congressman as opposed to putting those resources into other stories. I don't know. That's a hard decision for an editor. Another question is, you know, there was a time when congressman cheats on his wife was a news story

unto itself, that that was considered, you know, relevant public behavior and disqualifying to a lot of voters and also something that could form the basis of a newspaper story. It didn't need to be a staffer. there didn't need to be an issue that was relevant to the House Ethics Committee. Maybe that was a better norm that we should bring back. Although that's a very narrow time, right? Because in the 60s, Congressman Cheats on his wife is not a story that would ever run unless he... Damn, Rosenthal isn't allowing that one to get to publish. And so David Frum and his excellent book on the 70s talks about this, actually.

He talks about the fact that Nelson Rockefeller, it would have been five. if he hadn't left his wife. He could have gotten away with cheating with happy. I forget her last name. The fact that she was named Happy is funny enough. And he cheated with this mother of four young children. And then she left her husband for Nelson Rockefeller. He left his wife. The cheating wasn't the problem. That would have stayed quiet unless it was really spectacular. The problem was leaving, breaking up a family. And then by the 90s, you have a situation where it's totally fine to be divorced. But the thing you can't do is cheat while you're married. But that's like a really narrow window. And then Donald Trump happens. And it's all back to,

like, who cares? We're in a throple. We're like swinging, swinging off chandeliers into vats of Crisco. What business of that is yours? Would you like to see the Crisco? Like, it's just, that was a really small sliver of time. They think that a lot of, ironically, they're talking about is long for Gawker. You know, like Gawker publishes the rumor, publishes the thing that comes out, and then it doesn't exist anymore.

And it's just, it's interesting to see that the groups that hated Gawker so much are actually talking about something that, like, that was why it existed. And for good or real, right? Obviously got them in trouble sometimes. Just a little bit.

I mean, one of the things that sort of like caused Gawker's standing to fall among other reporters was the, there was an executive at Condé Nass, who was trying to hire a male prostitute, who then the prostitute shared the emails with Gawker, and they published it.

And everyone was like, why is this anybody's business? I think it's partly because, you know, some, like, not even the CEO of Condon asked, like some executive there were, like, who cares? I think there's a different standard. But I do wonder, you know, TMZ has just established its presence on Capitol Hill. There was a video of them today chasing Senator Lindsey Graham up a staircase, trying to ask him about the bubble wand that he was photographed holding at

at Walt Disney World during the government shutdown. So this seems like a classic thing that TMZ could, a classic void that they could fill doing this, who are congressmen sleeping with reporting that we are now missing. I guess what I also can I just say, when I mentioned Gawker, what I was really thinking of was Nick Denton's original articulation of it, which was I think that I want to create,

he said, I want to create a publication where readers will get to know what journalists talk about at bars. and they share the unverified rumors and do all of this nonsense that we've all heard before and has happened and stuff like that. But that normal publications don't do because they're legal departments

and it's not ethical and irresponsible. But like that was what it was and it works in some ways and it's minor when it's about celebrities and don't give a shit. And it's a big deal and it's a bad thing. But that was how he articulated it as the ethos of it.

And that's what a lot of people seem to be wanting is every rumor that people in Sacramento had about these things, even though it was unverified. And I don't know, what that's, that's, it's not, they're not the first people to ever have that idea, but sometimes Hulk Hogan ends up suing you and you undergo a bigger. Do you remember the, the Fanny Fox scandal, so long as we're talking about the 1970s?

That's the stripper, right? Yeah, it was the stripper that Congressman Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was carrying on an affair with, that was discovered because they got into some sort of argument near the title basin, and the police responded, and she ran off into the water. And it ended up, he got reelected, but then he had to step down from the chairmanship and had to leave Congress two years later.

So I guess maybe that was the additional exception, like if what you did was publicly embarrassing. Oh, yeah. If you got like arrested, if there was a police report. I don't think anyone got arrested. It's the Wikipedia says that. If there was a police report. They were in an argument while being driven by a friend. They were observed speeding and swerving and driving without headlights. near the Jefferson Memorial around 2 a.m. The Park Police pulled the vehicle over and Fox panicked, got out of the car screaming in a mix of English and Spanish, and attempted to flee the scene by jumping into the title basin. And being before his time.

So, you know, we used to be a real country. But note that he got reelected. He got reelected, but it did ultimately precipitate the end of his. I mean, he was a Democrat in Arkansas in the 1970s. Who was going to beat him? I can think of one. Finally this week, United Airlines, according to Bloomberg News, is talking about its desire to acquire American Airlines. And they've even been talking with some officials in the administration about this. United Delta and American are all about the same size right now. They're each a little bit less than 20 percent of the domestic air travel market. So if you had a combined United and American, it would be almost 40 percent of the U.S. airline industry. And in recent years, we've seen much smaller mergers than that blocked, like JetBlue Spirit, a point. partnership between American Airlines and JetBlue that was forced to be unwound. Now, obviously, this administration, who knows what kind of antitrust decisions you can get out of them, it strikes me as implausible, even, you know, even now that you could have a tie-up like that. But it's interesting that they're floating this, and it suggests that companies really believe

that it's open season right now for mergers. Yeah, that seems right. That, you know, look, do I think it's particularly likely you're going to be allowed to merge one of the three, the big three? to another big three? Probably not. But you've got to figure this is definitely the best chance you are ever going to have.

So if you want to do a merger, it's time. A friend of mine had a fun theory about this, which is that what United really wants to do is buy JetBlue. And that by floating this, when they then announce that they're buying JetBlue,

it will sound like the reasonable, modest option and that they're not doing the big crazy thing. Well, and honestly, the Biden administration should have let JetBlue by Spirit. And the fact that they did not permit that merger,

it was totally ridiculous. On the grounds that this was going to destroy competition, instead what it's done is push Spirit towards bankruptcy, leave JetBlue in dire financial condition. And there are, in fact, too many players in the market to make money at, you know, the various costs, fuel, landing slots, etc. And something does have to happen to keep these companies viable. It's not like if spirit goes bankrupt, it's not like other people are going to pick up their landing slots, sure.

And their planes. Someone will own the planes and fly. And their planes, yes. But you're still not going to have more players in the space, right? It's going to be fewer airlines one way or another. I mean, it's interesting because, you know, through the last decade or so, they've been talking all these airlines about how, you know, the sector that grows is the, basically the credit card, credit card revenues, the non, the non, the non. the non-ticket revenues, that they've been building up these segments so much.

And then it's allowed places that have all these, like, deep co-branded relationships like Delta with American Express, United with Chase, American Airlines with some other ones. American with Citibank. City Bank, yeah. So that's allowed to help. But then you have this whole other world, right, where, like, they don't get that subsidy at all.

And now you're talking about JetBlue and Spirit and Frontier. JetBlue does have a co-op. co-branded credit card. I don't remember which bank it's co-branded with, but my sister has it. But it's not like going to subsidize. It's not going to be like the Delta, Delta American Express thing. I hate the way people talk about this. The line that people will use is that they lose money flying planes and they make money selling credit card points to the banks. It's like the only reason anyone is interested in buying the credit card points is that you fly the planes. You sell the points. The points get redeemed. That's too far. Like, and I mean, it's been interesting. The reason that United could plausibly buy. American, if the government allows it, even though they're about the same size, is that American isn't really profitable. American made $100 million last year. United made $3.4 billion, Delta made $5 billion.

And American made a number of significant strategic mistakes over the last decade that put them in that position. In particular, they've allowed their position in New York and Los Angeles to wither, which is a real problem for that credit card business. You want, you know, high-income customers in, you know, expensive markets to carry the credit card and grow that business and to be attractive for that, you need to have lots of flights out of Kennedy and L.A.X. And American didn't do that. And then also, American really sort of obsessively focused on trying to compete with low-cost carriers and be able to, you know, cram more seats into planes and be able to have, you know, discounted fares to compete with them. United and Delta both went for a more

premium mix, and they've, you know, been much better able to monetize that. So American just has the wrong planes with the wrong seats. That's the actual thing, right? It's not the point in the page. It's the coach is the thing that pays for the fuel. And first class is what pays for the margin, right? That's the actual thing. American doesn't actually have people getting into the high margin seats. Increasingly, that is the case. It didn't used to be the case. But yes, United and Delta and Delta have been able to get real fair premiums. I mean, Delta also gets a fair premium and coach. This is their whole thing that they, you know, they're like, we're the premium airline. People prefer us and are willing to pay to fly us. It's also why Sky Miles is the

worst rewards program of the three because they're like, we don't need to bribe people to fly our airline. We can keep devaluing the points and they'll fly Delta because they like. Delta. So that's, you know, that's why they made $5 billion and United only made $3.3.4 billion. But yeah, you know, so American has had these strategic missteps. But it seems like, you know, to Megan, to your point about the health of the industry and that you do need some consolidation, I think that's right. And some of the small players are not viable. But American can be viable with some fixes to its strategy. It has the scale that it needs. Yeah. It needs different seats on the planes and, you know, a different routing strategy. And it probably does need to pick up one of the

smaller competitors, but the problem is that because it's not profitable, it's not worth that much. It's not in a great position to go out and buy in the way the United is. Yeah, I also think that, I mean, yes, its position in New York has withered. I'm not sure that was a deliberate decision so much as, right, they're doing this JetBlue partnership that then fell apart. Mistakes were made. But I also, I think it's tough, right? New York is, yes, you have to be there. Also, it's the most landing slot limited area in the country, except unless you count DCA is its own area, in which case, American dominates there, which is why I am an American loyalist. I actually don't care. Like, I care about nothing else. Can I get out of DCA, then I am going there, and that's pretty much

I fly American everywhere. I have to say, dear listener, that we had been talking to Megan before about this, and she had indicated some, she'd suggested some fondness. for American, but only now in this moment has she said that she is actually a loyal American person, which I have to, I have to be a little judgmental of us. It is not a good airline. Megan, please, please. Look, Ben, you are looking at this wrong. I travel enough that the only, the dominant strategy for the amount I travel is to get into an abusive monogamous relationship with one airline that will then enable me to when I buy a ticket, automatically get the upgrades to, you know, to at least premium economy and occasionally to first. They will get me the free bags and the priority tags and

all that, right? And the way that you do that is by going with one airline. Now, in D.C., I have the choice of hauling my butt all the way out to Dulles, which is one of the worst airports in the world, incredibly annoyingly designed. You don't like the mobile lounges? They're so cute. No, I do not like the mobile lounges, which means I want to fly out of DCA, which means American is the obvious choice. I now have like a zillion miles on American that I will someday actually use. Do I really want to fly more? No, I would like stay in one place.

I think we can leave that there this week. Ben and Megan, thank you, as always for joining me for some Central Air. Thank you. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay. We're a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddick mixed this episode. Our music is by Joshua. Thanks for listening and stay cool out there.