The Bulwark Podcast - Dave Weigel: Now That's a Landslide

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

The huge Democratic wins in Virginia, New Jersey, NYC, and California spoke loud and clear—and make Trump’s 2024 supposed ‘landslide’ margin of 1.5% look even more wimpy. Trump is not delivering on his economic promises and the backlash was across the board. Voters are also rejecting the overreach of Stephen Miller’s nativist immigration policy, particularly Latino voters. One of the biggest impacts from Tuesday’s election is that redistricting suddenly looks like it favors the Dems. Plus, what Mamdani could teach Democrats, and the bad place the Republicans put the party in by focusing on Trump’s random obsessions instead of talking about the concerns of voters. Semafor’s Dave Weigel joins Tim Miller. show notes Dave’s election reaction piece Go to https://zbiotics.com/THEBULWARK and use THEBULWARK at checkout for 15% off any first time orders of ZBiotics probiotics Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BULWARK at https://www.oneskin.co/BULWARK #oneskinpod

So Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you. Turn the volume up. Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. delighted to welcome back to this show. My friend, politics reporter at Semaphore, author of of The Show That Never Ends, The Rise and Fall of Prague Rock. We'll get to that at the end. But we got some politicking to do first. It's Dave Wigle. David, we'll do some New York mayor's race. But Zohan there delivered him a message to Grandpa Trump, make sure he was listening. It feels like he was listening last night. He did some bleeding.

What did you think was the message it was taken from the president last night? It was really unsurprising. The president's been kind of boring, frankly, about New York. And you could tell that Zoron was bored in talking about it. He was a very on-message candidate, kind of famously. It was a very funny interview did the R.A. Melba where Melbert dares him to connect everything he can back to the cost of living. But yeah, it wasn't a secret. I think what Republicans and Trump would tell anybody that would listen, oh, we want this guy to win so we can use him as his foil in every district. And Senate Republicans had a memo today saying, we're going to, here is how every single person we're going to tie to Mamdani in some way.

And I think the way it played out in New York, there's so many inputs that went to this is the highest turnout for a New York mayor's race since I think the Beatles were still a band. This elector was very different. Lots of things influenced it. Andrew Cuomo going around begging people to drop out that helped him. But the premise of Trump criticizing Mamdani

was often, I don't like his policies and I will hurt the city and take his money away to punish him. Cuomo kind of went along with that, the whole protection racket idea of the, the president and saying he's going to eat you alive, but I know how to deal with them. And 50 point something percent of voters said, we're going to go with a young guy who wants to fight Trump. That feels like more normal politics to me.

I feel like there has been a normalization of the idea that the president can stop funding states and politicians he doesn't like, which is new. I don't remember Joe Biden saying, I don't like Ron DeSantis. Sorry about the hurricane aid. I'm giving it to my friends. Yeah, that is new. And I think it's interesting. You've been good at talking about the backlash, like the kind of people being pissed

that they're not getting their money and services. And Maga thinking they can make this all part of some like imaginary internet war where they're owning people and dropping poop from airplanes and stuff. And like actual voters, like, wait a minute, the bridge isn't open. And so I want to get back to New York in a little bit. But we had to start with Zoron Troll and Grandpa Trump. The biggest picture, though, you know, you wrote this morning for 7-4 blowouts, state elections offer something for every Democrat. And I think that's true. I like the meta

narrative here. And I think that a lot of a lot of Democrats, a lot of people, most of this show, a lot of people that have interest in like what direction the party goes, like wanted to make yesterday kind of about the factional fights about the rise of the DSA or, you know, normie centrist candidates doing better in governor's races, et cetera. And like the reality, I think, was the elections offered something for every Democrat because the election was a reaction to a president that has not delivered on the economic promises that he made for people. And there was a backlash across the board. And obviously there's some differences in various races we'll get into it.

But there was an across-the-word backlash to cost continuing to be high in Hispanic communities to the overreach, especially to the overreach on immigration, and just a general sense of the enthusiasm, as is often the case in off years' elections, being on the side of the out party rather than the party in power. Would you agree with that? I kind of, like, there's one of these things where people like to say, like, Zoron type candidates couldn't have won in Virginia and the other way around. And I'm kind of like, I don't know, actually. I think I think Zoran probably would have won in Virginia, New Jersey, and a non-sex pest, you know, establishment Democrats who didn't, like, you know, play footsie with Donald Trump probably could have

on a New York City last night. And there's a big backlash against Trump generally. The events change things. I'm not impugning what Mamdani did because it's historic. And he changed electorate. And I don't think any candidate added as many Democrats to the voter roles as they campaigned. It's more than 150,000 people joining the party to vote for Zoron successfully last night. But yeah, it was different than the rest of these races because Cheryl and Spanberger, who won by landslides and like real landslides, not, not like 1.2 percent, but if you look at the swing state, yeah, no, like a real landslide, like one that carried along Democrats who did not think they were going to win their local

races. They both ran overlapping campaigns that you set up pretty well. Costs are too high. Donald Trump is hurting you on purpose through tariffs and through Doge firings and through camps in the gateway tunnel and I'm not going to get distracted by other stuff. That was their campaigns. And I was writing another piece for the newsletter about we campaign reporters need to appreciate that our interests of writing interesting stories and new stuff every day or so are cross-purposes with candidates who want to be consistent. So I was noticing in the last week, as I was in these states and last places I went to were New Jersey and New York, finding it looked like a Democratic electorate,

looked like they were probably going to win, that they didn't think they win by this much. And then I would see commentary that said, well, look at this boring Mikey Sherrill answer, or look at Abigail Spanberger having a long-winded answer to something. And I was thinking, well, yeah, because, they want to get to the cost issue. They want to, like, explain the cost they're talking about. And there was this idea also of magic that Trump was able to perform that Chittarelli might

pull off to a lesser extent Earl Sears could pull off. But sticking with Chittarelli, Hudson and Passa County, Patterson, the, like, Union City, these places that were moving towards Trump, he really did campaign in those places. His campaign bus, like the biggest picture on the bus, was Chittarelli in North Bergen, which is a very Hispanic community, surrounded by Hispanic voters. he put in the time, he got excitement when he was in the parades there, just got destroyed. And he was not able to convert those people who took a chance on Trump into Republican voters. And if you were Republican making maps and target list for next year, assuming that the electorate is what it was in 2024, it's not going to be.

I want to go really deep in that. Because to me, I think actually bigger than the races themselves is the impact on this map and the redistricting and Trump's efforts to rejigger or some Democrats have said rig, the midterms with the redistricting efforts. I think that took the biggest hit of all last night. But I let's just go a little bit deeper on some of the things you said in some of these states looking at New Jersey in particular. And I will just say, I will raise my hand as,

that's why I want to view on. You actually go to the states and follow the campaigns. I'll raise my hand among the people who was a little frustrated with Cheryl and Spanberger. But I always said, I always caveat it. I was like, they're probably doing the right thing that they need to do to win in New Jersey. in Virginia. I was like, I just need, like,

this is about my emotional needs. And I like, I need a, I need an excited, somebody to be excited about, you know? Like, all my all my lived out friends were so excited about Zoran. And I kind of came around, I'm being excited to be against Zoran's haters. But I was like, I wanted

somebody be excited. And they weren't doing that because they were running disciplined campaigns that were smart for an off-off year election. But to that point in New Jersey, Mikey ends up winning by 13. Like, that's a bigger pollness than the Trump poll miss for 2020. of people talk about. The idea that she'd win a double-digit victory, I think, exceeded even the most optimistic Ken Martin projection in New Jersey. What do you think that was? You talked a little bit about

the canceled projects. You talked about the Hispanic vote. Passaic County, which you mentioned, Cheryl wins by 15. That's the most Hispanic county. It's a county Trump flipped last time. First Republican win in ages. He'd won it narrowly. Mikey is up by 15 as of this morning. What else do you attribute the big, big kind of surprising win, but for Cheryl? Well, you were talking a little about immigration, and that was part of it. So this is the first real test because we had the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. We've had these races in Iowa. We have not had until yesterday race with a large number of Hispanic voters where Republicans were doing a gut check on, okay,

he said mass deportation, and it looks like this. It looks like this ICE Center where the member of Congress is going to get arrested for resistance. resisting arrested a protest. And it looks like memes of Halo about how awesome it is to everything. We need to go into all of it. But how much were his, were Latino voters in the Northeast going to put up with that? The answer is not really much at all. And Latino voters are very different. And they come from different parts of the world to America around the country. Texas Latinos, there's, I don't see evidence from, there were just some ballot measures in Texas. Some constitutional amendments, you didn't see a shift to the left in Texas,

but it was not a candidate shift. This is the test we've seen of the Trump policy inaction over immigration that is actually removing not just criminals from the country, but people who've overstayed their visas and have not committed any other crime. We still have the ongoing birthright citizen case, right, which is going to blow up again next year. Or DACA kids. Yeah. In every way, the Stephen Miller policy of just trying to get immigrants out of the the country. Obviously, I think probably frustrating to bulwark readers because you could say, like, didn't you guys look at the signs of the convention that this is their plan? Yeah, they put it right there on the sign, y'all. Yeah. Yeah, I got pretty frustrated.

We were doing frustration. There was a tweet about, I saw you, that you also shared, like, about a South Asian precinct in New Jersey that went from like, Patterson, Trump plus 20 to Cheryl plus 70, and it's a tiny precinct. But they had like 300 votes for Trump and 22 votes for Shittarelli. It's like, y'all, recent immigrants. like we were telling you that it was not just going to be Trandaragua but yeah that part is frustrating but it's noteworthy though

because that was an important part of the Trump shift right like not just with Hispanic voters kind of across the board yeah with recent immigrants and a more more minor part because this is Asians but also Arab Americans yeah in 2024 Trump ran on I'm going to bring peace to the Middle East

and he has got this deal in Gaza I'm definitely not going to go in the rabbit hole of what the Gaza deal looks like etc but those voters also kind of a rented Trump for one election and then given the chance to vote on other issues with Gaza, not top of mind, didn't vote for Republicans. They turned out they were very easy for Democrats to flip back. I think his numbers on foreign policy went up a little bit and then nothing else did. Like this is a little reminiscent of the George H.W. Bush problem in the 90s.

Great job on foreign policy. We don't care. Things cost too much. And that's certainly true for yeah, first generation Americans who are also getting, they're getting more racist rhetoric from social media from conservatives on some social media than they would have before. I think just it has changed who is posting on it. People are bolder. They're gloating about it. Look, you've seen this just in, and I don't know if you've seen it, you're reporting, but I've seen a man on the street interviews from recent immigrants that are not Hispanic

Latino, but they're like, I'm worried. I've seen examples of people being deported, you know, people of getting papers checked and things of that nature. So I do think that, you know, a lot of these other communities are also. like feeling in addition to like the race of social media stuff like a little bit of fear now and like wait a minute are these masked guys going to come for me and my family do i have to worry about that now i think that's potentially having an impact you know even beyond the the Hispanic community yeah and it hasn't solved the democrats problem because i think

the question for them in 2028 will be if we put you back in charge do you let the border fly open again and people come into the country that turns out to be on popular. Can Democrats be trusted to enforce that? You've got Ruben Gallego, who was campaigning in New Jersey for Cheryl, you've got some Democrats just moving on that issue, not to the far right, but moving to like 2012 Obama. Actually, maybe you needed a deporter in chief while you're also not willy-nilly deporting everyone you can find in the country. So they're not there yet. They didn't solve their problems. It was just that there was a cost to the way Republicans have carried themselves. and just the eubris. The focus they have from day to day is really not on issues that voters care

much about, and they cannot stop gloating about enactment of their policies even when they're not that popular. If I was listening to Republicans in D.C., over the last week, I was hearing about Arctic Frost and investigations of the 2020 election and the ploss to overturn it and hearing about James Comey and just the degree to which the Republican conversation is centered around Trump and his interest and not voters, that was not what it was in 2024. I mean, he could go off the tangent on a tangent to rally, but the whole party just got very confident that elections were like static and there was, they didn't really need to go into what voters cared about because Democrats were so weak.

Yeah, the vibes. And then just being out of touch with voters. In some ways, it's a flip of, you know, how people felt about Democrats, right? Like where like there's too much focus on some of the cultural issues, etc. it's like why people are focused too much on Donald Trump's random obsessions like rather than the things that that people are upset about well one thing I'd be thinking about this yesterday and it hadn't really occurred to me until like I actually got the exit poll data you know one of the things I always do in the exit pool data is like what was the most important issue for you what did you vote for last year as I was dealing with my you know PTSD from from being in New York last last November I remember looking at that early exit you know not at the ballot number of Trump comment little bit at the, what is the issue that was most important to you? And you look at those numbers. And last year, and it was like, you know, immigration was up there and crime and your economy, you figure that probably is cutting against, you know, the Democrats and you look

at like abortion and democracy, you figure that's probably cutting towards, you know, that's right, those are probably democratic issues. You just looked at it all and I looked at the jumble of issues and I was like, I don't know, this feels like a Trump jumble of issues that people care about. Yesterday, I was looking at the exopoles when they came out and the issues were like, economy, immigration, you know, health care, democracy. And I looked at it and I was like, I wonder if any of these are Trump. What are the Earl Sears and Chitterelli people even saying, right? Like any basket of those issues could have been bad for him. And I think that kind of to me represented how they're in a bad place right now, just as a party politically. Like it's not,

like, what would you say that they own issue-wise where you look at that and be like, oh, those people are coming out for Trump crime, I guess, maybe? But, like, it's hard to even think about anything. Like, you figure that immigration is probably cutting both ways at this point. Yeah, and the salience of crime has been falling. You saw that with Mamdani success. That was the first. But if you look at mayoral races that were not that competitive, but got in the news, at Cincinnati,

there was this drunk brawl at a jazz fest that got weeks of coverage on Fox News conservative media as Cincinnati falling apart at the seams. and J.D. Vance's half-brother was the challenger to the mayor, lost by 56 points, I think. The mayor of Charlotte was facing re-election. We had one very easily. Poor J.D. Vance's half-brother. He didn't do a lot for him. I think he posted he's a good guy and you should vote for him, but he wasn't out there campaigning for him.

Jady is good at sucking up and riding the coattails of somebody that's on their way up. That's been his prime skill throughout life. And so he's not going to, he's not grab it on to a sink and stone just because he's blood. That's true. He doesn't like to notice people who are not winning, even if they're related to him. Yeah, Charlotte, the mayor of Charlotte got reelected. And again, if you paid a lot of attention to conservative media, which I know you do and I do, there was a pretty clear story in conservative media for a few weeks, which was this psychopath who killed a woman on transit in Charlotte. That's Democrats' fault. Specifically, it's the Roy Cooper's fault, the former governor, to reason TBD. And also, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And murder. murder, death, death. Democrats want you to die. Democrats laugh about you dying. Jay Jones's text, we'll get into that. They fold that in. It was a coherent message. Like, coherent doesn't mean effective. But this was a closing message for Winston Sears in, Win some Burles Sears in Virginia, was the Democrats are violent people. We can't allow their violence to win. And you saw a little bit of

this hangover today of Ron DeSantis, the other Republicans saying, well, I guess this election means that Democrats embrace violence. And you're starting to see, I think, the separate from the epistemic bubble that Republicans get their news from and what voters who just kind of turn up for elections and are worried about costs or live from. Actually, it was funny. I was that Curtis Lee was a final rally in New York, not because I thought he'd win. I just allowed me to get some Republican voters. And I heard some people there talking about, if I can paraphrase the conversation, hey, did you see that picture of all the teachers making fun of Charlie Kirk assassination? And they're referring to, there are these teachers in Arizona

who had a shirt that was a bloody Halloween shirt that said problem solved. that was a math joke, which they'd worn in the past. It was a joke about math problem's really hard, and we beat it. Look at this blood on me. I kind of get it. I'm not sure if I'd wear that shirt. Yeah, it's a dumb dad joke. I did a whole video on this.

It's a dumb dad joke. And then like, Ron DeSantis, Mike Lee, the whole conservative ecosystem jumped on this, as if like a bunch of teachers got together and went to school and we're like, we're going to do it a fuck you, Charlie Kirk costume. Right. And their assumption was, well, everyone must know that when people see that, they think of Charlie Kirk. And I thought, with no disrespect to Charlie Kirk, who I liked.

personally did not deserve to be murdered. That's not what the country was thinking about. This is this, like it or not, this is a very distractible country that can't remember what it watched yesterday. And the effort to say the country is going to change, we're going to have a new conversation about political violence after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. One, that didn't happen for people who are not paying a ton of attention to news. Two, it's pretty convenient because it's not like Donald Trump said, you're right, I'm going to change my tone and not joke about shitting on protesters anymore. They kind of wanted it both. ways. We're going to say Democrats are crazy and violent, and we're also not going to police

our own speech in any way whatsoever. The combination of that, I think, you were seeing how just Republicans were not connecting with people who in a non-presidential environment are not paying attention to that sort of news. And the final thing I'll say, Chittarelli in New Jersey, who's one of the real losers in this process, and his stump speech was day one, I declare the end of sanctuary cities in New Jersey, and I get us out of the greenhouse initiative, and that's going to drive down energy costs. Are those immediate things that solve your problems? Are they, the sanctuary cities,

is that not something Trump is taking care of right now? They just were not very immediate issues unless you were like watching newsmex all day and those are the big issues. And just hearing you talk about that and like try to explain it, just shows how unresident it is as a message as compared to, you know, the type of stuff Trump was running on in 24. All right, I've got to tell you once again about this game-changing product I use before a night out with drinks.

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and use the code the bulwark at checkout for 15% off. Just really quick on Virginia, because the story is basically the same. You know, a blowout for Spamberger, which is going to have some redistricting impacts, which I want to get to next. But just generally, you know, obviously this focus on Northern Virginia and how the shutdown had an effect on this. But really, she gained ground across the... state, you know, flipped a couple of counties in more ex-urban rural Virginia that Democrats hadn't won back since they were Dixiecrats, you know, wins a huge landslide.

You know, I looked at Loudoun County, this, you know, kind of classic suburban ex-urban county that was an early warning sign last year, because how well Trump was doing there, and she rents an absolute blowout there. And the blowout is so great that, as you mentioned, Jay Jones, his attorney general, who got caught up in variety of scandal. including some texts about, like, wishcasting the death of his opponents and wanting to shit on their graves and stuff and going after their kids, he gets kind of dragged across the finish line, you know, running pretty significantly behind her, actually, but she wins such a huge race. Yeah, I was going to say he did better than Kamala Harris. Like, it looked like he would fall over the finish line.

He, like, went over the finish line, then, like, took another lap and did very well, yeah. That's telling though how big the Spamberger win is, though, actually. The Jay Jones runs like whatever, seven, eight points behind her and still does better than Harris. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was, which is what Democrats said, but they were, look, you were talking to some of the same Democrats, I'm sure. They were thinking, like, well, maybe if we're lucky, 11 points. And when you win by 17 points, yeah, think funny things happen. Look, big cope from Republicans online today is all about Jay Jones and the Attorney General's race.

To me, there's just not really, I mean, these jokes are gross, like this idea that, you know, I got two bullets and what was it? Like, Pol Pot, Hitler, and my opponent are in the room and I'm using both of them on my opponents or something like that. It's apparently an old joke. I didn't realize this. I had a friend who found examples of it kind of like, not like I'm going to defend Jay Jones with this, but he'd heard it before.

I'd never heard it. But I believe that somebody pointed out to be it was on the office and as a non-office watcher, I miss that, but maybe he heard it from there. Democrats love normally TV shows. They do. So, yeah, anyway, to me, I guess like the analytical response to that is, I see this everywhere. I see it in areas that concern me a little bit from time to time.

Some Democratic voters have taken the inverse of when they go low, we go high to heart a little bit. They're so committed to rejecting the Michelle Obama line that they want to go as low as possible. I think that that is motivating a lot of Democrats. But I think that, on the other hand, his biggest underperformance is in the areas in Northern Virginia where people are most paying attention. You know, a lot of this is that he ends up, you know, it's not as if people are affirmatively going in and being like, I love Jay Jones' text. It was, I'm really upset about this administration. Democrats are motivated. And he gets dragged across the finish line. I had a theory last night. It's a good night to just throw stuff out there and see if it's true or not. But Meera is the attorney general who lost to Jones. His campaign for much of the year was what you typically do if you're an attorney general, especially in a swing state, which is look at all the people I've been putting in jail.

I've been keeping a safe crime is down. My opponent voted for criminal dress reform. He's not going to keep crime down. And Jones' strategy was, hey, Doge exists. Other states had attorneys general who were suing to get your job back. And Jason Mayores didn't because he's a Trump supporter. And they had footage of Mayores at a Trump rally. And whenever they could polarize the race, it was good for them.

And so the final weeks of- That's also just a substantive critique. It's like other states are getting jobs back for the state. and we're not because this guy's a Trump pumper. I mean, it's not just like, even like, oh, he's bad because of Trump. It's like he's bad because of Trump and it's harming us in a material way. On either side, Maryland and North Carolina had attorneys general who were suing in Virginia didn't. But so the final 10 days of the race, Democrats call back the legislature, which they can do, to start this process of redistricting.

And it's another thing, this is a big theme of the night, is Democrats being very bold and saying, screw you, we're going to redistrict to. get, if you're going to do it, we're going to do it. And Mayara's gets into that fight by saying, well, I think this is illegal. I read the state constitution. I'm suing to stop this. And so voters who are making their minds up at the last minute, or maybe Democrats who are, or not, they remember, oh, yeah, that's right. We have a Republican attorney general who's trying to stop us from getting two or three or four more seats to beat Trump. I don't like that. And they, they had another reason to put up with, um, with Jones. But this is another Trump era, public and eubristic mistake possibly just nothing miyars is doing in the final month except for saying

my opponent sent these insane text was saying and if you're a democrat you should vote for me so the first time i was hearing democrats panicked about jones and then the first polling that was public and released maybe two weeks later jones had had lost his lead to mayores but miyars had not gained anything what was he doing to gain people kind of nothing it was just it was hoping that they they leave their ballot blank or something and some people did i think it was um about 40,000 fewer votes cast in that race and the race for governor, twice as many right-ins. But Democrats felt like voting for Democrats and getting revenge on Republicans. And what was his plan for that?

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Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Okay, to the redistricting. I think this is the biggest news tonight. So California Prop 50 wins. We're going to isolate Gavin Mania and the impact on that to the next segment. Focus on 26 first and then 28. The Virginia win is so big. They swung, I think, about a dozen.

House of Delegate seats. The final count is in, maybe even a little bit more. And the Democrats have a massive majority in the state legislature. And so I think it seems inevitable that they will redistrict now, which could net three seats. I saw a map that if Spamberger wanted to go dark Spamberger, they might even be able to get four seats out of that. But three seats seems pretty safe. California Prop 50 wins. That was aimed at getting about four or five seats for the Democrats. So you're looking at, you know, whatever, about seven to nine there, uh, between the two of those. Maryland gets off their ass. Wes Moore announced yesterday that they're going to start a redistricting process. It's only one seat, but still. The Texas seats, you mentioned

this kind of a little bit at the top. Their redistricting was incumbent a little bit on on redistricting those South Texas districts and TBD on whether Hispanics and closer to the border move the same way as Hispanics up in North Jersey, but potentially those are a threat, a little iffy. And I think other Republican states are about to get a little scared about edge districts, right? If the redistricting means, if you're in Ohio or Florida, and you're like, I'm going to take somebody who's in a seat that has Republican plus 15, right, where there's like a 15 percentage point advantage for Republicans and move you to a Republican plus eight district and take that other seven percent move them to a Democratic district to get the votes. Like, that's how gerrymandering works.

The Republican that's in that plus 15 district going down to plus eight might be like, whoa, after last night, I might not be on board for this anymore because, if there's a blue wave, I'm going to get washed out with it. And on top of that, Kansas yesterday said that they were backing off. So you combine all this, you go from something like three weeks ago, it looked like Republicans could gerrymander their way to like almost like a very hard to penetrate majority, you know, particularly with Voting Rights Act stuff, which is, I guess, a subplot of this. And now all of a sudden, it is looking to me much, much more favorable to the Democrats in that redistricting situation.

and I think sets them up, who the hell knows what next November looks like, but if it looks like last night, you know, for a pretty clear House victory. What do you make of that analysis? Yeah, I was just thinking about the reason Elise Stefanik did a farewell tour but did not quit her seat in Congress, which was that Democrats kept doing really well in special elections in her seat, which is redder than I think any of the new seats Republicans drew in Texas. I don't want to be too defended. I know, yeah, the Trump margin there was bigger than the new seat that's kind of in San Marcos.

and the new seats in the Rio Grande Valley, that is freezing some Republican blood today. If you were starting with a 2020 for Trump map, not to repeat myself too much, and you look at that and say, well, roll it back to maybe 2020 Trump margins with non-white voters, with young voters. Well, that's not the same map anymore.

There's a bunch of people who are not in Trump seats. They're in Biden seats. How does that change your math? And how does the change Democrats math? Let's say Louise Lucas, actually, like, she's the Senate leader in Virginia, who is the most aggressive about remapping. Because she has a great backstory. Let's just pause on Louise Lucas really quick. She got redistricted.

She ran for Congress, lost a close race, so black state senator and Virginia on the eastern Norfolk Virginia Beach area somewhere over there. She loses very narrowly. And then coming up in the next year, you know, she's going to run again. It's a more favorable year for Democrats. and they redistrict and, you know, kind of draw her out of being able to run in a seat. And I guess the Republican and the legislature says to her at the time, something to the effect of, you're never going to be in Congress. And now she is in a position of power in the Democratic State Senate in Virginia,

and she's coming for blood. She's got not in the J. Jones way, but in the redistricting sense. She is not going to be shy. Yeah, she's, she's, she's Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. She's coming back with the Kent Katana for these. She probably would, knowing Louise Lucas, if she gave her a good katana gift, she would use it. She's kind of infamous for when Yonkins sends a bill to the Senate she doesn't like, she'll post a picture of her with a shredder. But anyway, yeah, that's her attitude.

So it's spilled over into Maryland where there is a very fun story happening right now where Wes Moore, who I assume will run for president after saying he won't, does want to talk about redistricting Maryland. And the state Senate president is still on the Michelle Obama. convention speech island of like, we're not, that's not what our party stands for. I think that you can see it quickening the Democrats there and saying, what do we do this? And you, if you look, if you're Lucas looking at Virginia, like we were saying before, well, it's one thing, if we're remapping the state for seats that can elect 10 Democrats in a Trump map in this map, much easier. And you probably want to be cocky, but you're looking at it and say, okay, we can, you give Eugene Vimman a couple points so Tara Durant can't

really challenge him anymore. This already happened, Ohio, by the way, there was a Republican who was going to challenge Amelia Sykes in Akron again, and then Republicans kind of conceded a map that gave her a couple points and made it. And he just, he bailed out. They didn't go gerrymander maxing in Ohio. I know that was another state where Republicans are going to pick up one probably, but I can see if we could have picked up three. But again, they're concerned about this backfire. Yeah. And I think that chilling effect on their effort is really, is the most meaningful story of the night for me. Well, I want to see also what it does for candidate recruitment because let's say I'm a state rep in Indiana and I'm in the minority

forever and they've drawn a new they might draw the seats. They might not. They've drew a new seat out of Indianapolis that's plus eight Trump or something. Do I go for it? I might try. That's what Joe Donnelly did when they got rid of his house seat. In Kansas, that was one of the reasons Republicans made it back down is Cherise Davids, who represents the Kansas City suburbs in in Kansas. They've already tried to gerrymander her out. They were thinking of trying again. She said, I'm just going to run for Senate in a good year for Democrats. What are you going to do about it? So I'm interested to see what sort of ambition you see from Democrats who, instead of looking at the nice big red map that Trump gives everybody with all the red counties that voted for him, if they look at the slightly less red

map from these races and say, imagine a midterm where it's D plus eight. You would win this. Do you want to try for it now? I think that'll start happening over the next couple of months. Yeah, and all these negotiations, it's like the Dems have a much bigger chip stack now than they did, right? They are arguing for a position of strength. And I think that Republicans felt like they could, you know, to maybe do a lame pun, they could jerry rig this thing, you know, next year in a way that protects Mike Johnson protects their house majority. And that looks a lot, a lot worse. And, you know, who the hell knows what other shenanigans they might try, But their first gambit here seems to be potential, I don't want to overstate it, but potentially rebuffed.

And a lot of credit for that goes to the electorate last night, but to Gavin Newsom for stepping up. And this was Gavin yesterday. I want to listen to him, talk about how he defines his own fight against the administration. He didn't expect you to show up. He didn't expect any of this to happen. He thought maybe we'd have a candlelight vigil. Maybe we would hold hands. maybe maybe we could all come together and like you know doing op ed in the la times and you know just

say what it could have should have done something they never expected this they never expected all of you they never expected this show of unity and support and recognition all right i mean i got to say, boy, you got to hand it to Gavin, man. I mean, he's out there doing the, he sounds like a presidential candidate. It's the self-critique that all the Democrats believe about the Democrats. It's like, hey, people thought we were just going to, you know, get together a blue-ribbon commission on this and deal with it in 2032. And I said, F you, I'm going to troll the president. I'm going to dunk on him. We're going to steal your five seats. We're going to drink your milkshake. And I think a lot of Democrats are really happy about that. Gavin, 2028 stong.

seems to be on the rise. Oh, absolutely. This was a real bet that he took. I remember talking to Gavin people when he announced it because there was one poll, California ballot initiatives, I mean, you live there for a while. The phrasing really matters, and the attorney general controls how the ballot measures phrased. And so there were some polling said, well, voters like the independent

commission, Gavin's team said, yeah, they say that, but we're going to make this a Trump referendum, and they won it. And, you know, again, we know California. We will find out the margin, I don't know, at Christmas what it was, but it probably did much better than Kamala Harris last year. It just a pure partisan, hey, this is the Trump sucks measured. Do you want to vote for it? It did very well. Not a surprise that would work in California, but I think it's that spillover that's I mentioned Wes Moore and the difficulty has there, but Democrats were tiptoeing. They did not

want to think about this too hard. Do they really want to be blamed for making the partisanship in Congress worse? And they really do have a screw-it attitude that Newsom's partly responsible for. One, there's clearly no, what's the penalty? It's kind of a, kind of a catch-22. Like, if voters want, if you gerrymander and voters don't like it, that's the point of the gerrymander. They can't stop you. And two, just, it might be popular. It's certainly popular for Texas Republicans what Greg Abbott's doing, although you poll Texas, most people don't like the gerrymander because it was just framed as I'm doing this for Donald Trump. But they've gotten a lot bolder and Gavin was leader of that. So I hate doing early 2028 predictions, except.

for, I do think that it was true before that the governors who can actually resist Trump in meaningful ways and sue him and beat him occasionally have the advantage over, no disrespect to him, but people to judge who can't do that. He can be going podcasts and he can go to rallies. He cannot govern. If you're in Congress, if you're Chris Murphy, you can give speeches, but you can't really win. So, I mean, you can stop a nominee sometimes. But what's more compelling? Hi, Nashua. I stopped a terrible nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel. I destroyed four of Republicans with my bare hands. Probably the second one.

While we're doing dorky gerrymandering redistricting talk, we might as well do a little dorky hill talk with the filibuster. Trump last night posting after the results, you know, basically blaming the results on Trump's. He speaks about himself in the third person, not being on the ballot and on the shutdown and saying that they should end the filibuster. He had a breakfast with John Thune this morning. as I'm just seeing coming across right now that Thune said to him, he doesn't have the votes to break the filibuster.

Has Donald Trump ever not gotten what he wanted with the Senate? I don't know. There's his first time for everything, I guess. Maybe this is it. But I'm wondering what you think yesterday's impact is on both that conversation on the filibuster and just the shutdown in general. Well, he has never gotten the way he wants the filibuster for the pretty simple reason that right now the way the country is structured, most of what Republicans want to get done in a big new way can be done with 51 votes. in the Senate or by suing in the Northern District of Texas and getting the Supreme Court

to say, yep, that has been the pattern of Trump's terms so far. You can't do Medicare for all that way. You cannot have a president say, executive order. I'm getting rid of your health insurance. I guess you could try, but Sam Alito probably wouldn't like that. Yeah. And so it is Democrats who, for their long-term plans, want to get really the filibuster, just the opportunity costs for Republicans is not there. Like, you would get rid of it and then in the future, or maybe they're not ambitious enough. If Republicans said we're getting rid of the filibuster and we're going to split Texas into five red states,

that would get them something. But they're not there because they look at the arrangement of the country and say, well, no, the judges are going to take care of a lot of this for us. And the Republicans who are barely resisting Trump, except for some nominees, the tariffs, for example, the tariff's a great example of this. Do you need to do some legislative maneuver to stop the tariffs? You can have a Senate vote that doesn't do anything.

And then you cross your fingers and hope the Supreme Court solves the problem for you. So they're just not, it's just not in their interest to do this for Trump, and they know that it is in Democrats' interest, too. I think with Mansion and Cinema, it would have been tough, but if there was no filibuster whatsoever in Biden's first term, there's not even a debate, should we get rid of this hallowed institution that we pretend it's from the founders but isn't, would Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have voted against some of the stuff they voted against?

Maybe not. If there was a 53-seat Democratic Senate majority under President, even Josh Shapiro, and no filibuster could they do a public option like day one right away so yeah much more threatening yeah abortion yeah and then also you get out of that stuff getting the social issues like a natural right to abortion that kind of stuff while we're talking about progressive dreams i'll do a little bit more on that new york mayor's race since you were you were there reporting on it i watched his speech last night and he's good you know i mean he was happy he's uplifting he's good he's throwing some socialist turn you know he does some eugene deb's quotes okay that's not my people okay

Those aren't my, you know, but whatever, you know, he, the room got, the room was happy about the, about the Eugene Debs quotes, but when I look at that race, and you, you mentioned it briefly. I just want to spend a little more time on it. Just like the, and the highest turnout to race since Mayor Lindsay, you know, ran on, he is fresh and everyone else is tired, 1969. Which is a little ominous, but. Yeah, it was a great, great motto. And part of the, part of the turnout is there's, there's a lot of, there is a decent amount of anti-saur hunt interest as well. And Cuomo ended up giving more votes than a lot of the winning mayors did. Uh, in the past few elections. But that said, he obviously engaged a lot of folks. And I think that's something Democrats are going to have to care about eventually in 2028. Zoran can't be their nominee. He's born in Uganda, really, actually, not like fake, like Barack Obama. But if you make Uganda the 52nd state after Greenland.

Potentially. I think that would be kind of a move against interest for Trump. But I'm still stuck on if Republicans got rid of the filibuster. He has stuff you could do. But I wonder what you made of it just kind of being there. And everybody wants to, like, project under him. their pet reason for why he was successful. And I look at it, I just kind of mark this down about what Democrats could learn from him in other places about how they engage other, you know,

non-voters. Part of it was obviously the relentless message about caring about working people. And you look at this speech last night. He just starts by talking about like listing out random working class jobs and how this victory is for those people. And that is like that is just a notably different strategy than Democrats being like, I care. about working people, right? It's like, no, I'm going to spend two minutes talking about the dude whose knuckles are burned because he's a fry cook and then the person who's back hurts because they're a garbage or like whatever. He lists everybody and by name. He just has a lot of focus on that I think is smart. That's a good lesson. Obviously, the positivity, the happiness,

he's smiling. It's an upbeat message. I think there's a Gaza element to this. There's a little bit of subtext. He doesn't mention it really in the speech last night, but there's a lot of, It was a lot of energy, obviously, about folks that didn't turn out for Kamala on that issue. And then I just think that there's just this anti-estat. Like, he's running at some level against the party. Like, he does one line last night that kind of bristled me a little bit. It's like, you shouldn't have to go into the history books to find a Democrat that actually did something. Like, they elected the first black Democrat like two minutes ago.

I was like, I'm not that old. Okay. Anyway, but, you know, so that is kind of the gumbo for me of like the ways in which he engaged. people that hadn't been engaged how do you react to that was there anything i'm missing anything else no i like that you focused on the way he talked about working people and their jobs so uh i've heard this from even democrats who don't like mom dani their favorite video you free associate like which of the 10 million momdani videos your favorite halal truck yeah halal trucks it was the halal truck one is like wait a second uh what if you actually use this and i he's not the first

democrat i've seen to say here is a real business and here's something that and here's here's how much it costs, and here's how it's affecting you. It's actually Tony Evers, who's the opposite of Zaraamam Dani, the elderly, very nice governor of Wisconsin, wins two races. No one ever talks about him running for president. His favorite curse term is, holy mackerel. He did this. He had an ad where he went to a pizza parlor that he and his wife go to

when he was running for reelection and talked about what he'd done for the economy. Yes, unlearning the sort of let's run this through focus groups and make sure we cover every interest group and making it very. very human. That was the one thing, not that I thought Cheryl would lose, the one thing I thought, is she doing this the right way. She was very focused on her own biography, which is impressive. I mean, she's a veteran mama for a prosecutor, et cetera, et cetera. And I started to wonder, well, is that a little, I'm with her? Are you talking as much about people's lives? So yes, I think that's the first thing you'll see Democrats copy from Zoron, because they're

got you all the time. Let's have a press conference, and here's a real person who is affected by this terrible thing that happened, they go to the mic and maybe reporters quote them, maybe they don't. Focusing on that is what they'll copy. Will they copy him protesting Tom Homan in person? Probably not. Will they copy him saying he's going to arrest Netanyahu? I don't think so. Maybe there's some assemblement who got elected. I'm not sure. I don't know about. But the hyper-personalization and being out there. Hyper-personation of a specific type of people, though, too. Like a specific, like, and not just kind of generalizing, like, that I care about working people. And, like, that is the thing about, like, any Bernie speech you saw, he's,

he's going after the billionaires, and he's talking about people who are living paycheck to paycheck, right? And it's like that, I think that, like, if you talk to the Harris people, they would say, she did that. Because, like, she did in like a Pablam way, right? But it was like, if you look into his speech, it's like they were sent, now, I'm a live now, I'm about these the words centered. They were centered in his speech, you know? Yes. Whenever we're talking about growing candidate in a lab, if you were saying, we need a working class candidate who can speak to how people normally live. Let's choose the immigrant whose mom is the director of a bunch of movies and whose dad is a professor at Columbia and who

went to a liberal arts college and started his students. Like, no, you wouldn't, obviously. There are going to be lots of Democrats who have much more, I don't want to say traditional. That'll be a gaffe. But the stories that are, they're a little bit more like guy you grew up with rather than son of Mirrenair. He had some of the same crazy making ability as AOC because AOC grew up a little more poor than he did. Have you noticed sometimes Republicans can't decide whether she's terrible because she was just used to be a bartender or she's terrible because whenever they mentioned the bartender thing, she's like rare rabbit in the briar patch. Like, great. Is it she's fake that she went to a liberal arts college or is she down class because she's a bartender? She's lying to you. She lived

in a, not in the Bronx, but in a poor charter of Westchester County. Whenever they start getting to those details, it's a waste of time because speaking of people who are not grown in a lab, how is Donald Trump able to be a blue-collar billionaire when the many things that you're in the bulwark that he's doing to enrich himself because I was at a presentation of some polling data a couple months ago and one of the slides that stuck with me was just contrasting events and the very success of Donald Trump going to a fake McDonald's like a McDonald's that had been closed today just to have his campaign event added the memetic power of that people saying gosh Donald Trump went to a fast food restaurant for five minutes and serve fries that's powerful and

It was obviously a response to Kamala Harris saying she'd worked at McDonald's and not really using it for anything. We're all talking about advertisements and authenticity that's being packaged, but it turns out you don't need to, you don't need to prove, like, here is my resume and here is I've never once gone on a liberal arts college campus. You don't need to do all that. You just, you know, like, I honestly care about these people and I'm coming up with a thing you can do too is I came up with this idea because I've been doing this listening tour of people with normal jobs, and I think this would improve. their lives versus, hey, we did a focus group. That's a pretty big difference that might land you in the same place, but one of them is just really powerful to watch. One more from Zoran.

I just thought this was the best part of his speech last night. And it might be while he ended up wanting to focus on affordability and the rent freezing and the free buses and all that, depending on what Donald Trump decides to do, this might end up be the biggest fight of his first year. Let's listen to him talking about immigration. New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants. And as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.

Not bad. Good politicking, but also a preview of, I think, a real potential fight to come. If they, like, the Republicans are true to what they are saying to you and other reporters that they want to make Zoran the face of the party, the best way to do that is to pick a fight with him in New York City over immigration. Yeah, or I think it's Andy Ogles in the House. There's a couple of Republicans who are going to try stunty legislation to deport him or Randy Fine, I think, has a version of this. Anytime you're doing that. So there's a thermostatic. shift. People elect Trump and they say, oh, wait, he's against immigration in a way that I don't like. I wasn't paying enough attention. Do we get back to the mood of 2017 where every Democrat was constantly saying we need more refugees in the country? I don't think we get there. But the idea that some immigrants should be allowed in the country and improve it when they're here is pretty

popular outside of Stephen Miller's office in the White House. This White House has gone very far in a nativist direction that I think Mamdani is comfortable rebutting because, yes, there are Republicans who say, I would like to remove people like him from the country. And there are, there are people who say, he doesn't seem to be harming anybody. I remember when I was in New York early in the year checking in on the Mamdani race, because I met him when he was running for his assembly seat and then covered DSA, et cetera. One thing I was asking his campaign is like, hey, not that long ago, there was the ground zero mosque in New York. And there was a huge backlash. Republicans used around the country, the idea of building a Muslim center near the old

World Trade Center site. And the campaign, they were aware of it. And then I would talk to voters, they weren't aware of it. But I hadn't appreciated how much the country had moved on with some nudging from people like George W. Bush and Republicans who are not blood and soil nativists, saying, actually, it's pretty good that America is able to integrate different kinds of people and different religions and live together peacefully, there are conservatives who, one thing I've heard is most Muslims who live in America right now came after 9-11, and that is bad. I've heard that from national conservatives before. When there is a case of terrorism or something, yes, Trump is very good, better than any Republican at turning that into a nativist issue. He did this in 2015.

It's crazy if you go back now and look at, if you were there, Republicans like Mark Arubia, who are very uncomfortable with the Muslim ban and things he was saying. If we're back in that place where there's a mayor of New York trying to abide by the laws in New York, who is a Muslim immigrant getting racist attacks for things that are legal and people support, I think it will backfire. How would he play, for example, Texas moving migrants from the border to New York, which backfired? I don't know. But this is a thing when Donald Trump is president and changes the policy environment,

like, that's not as much of an issue. Yeah, it's different. That's what I'm saying. Like, actually, it puts him, I think, in a stronger position than it would have been two years ago because Democrats don't have to be for unpopular refugees being admitted or unpopular asylum cases being admitted. Like, what he has to do is fight against. It's just dudes from Johannes fight against the overreach. It's just like de antivore is allowed in the country and nobody else. Yeah, it's like he's got to fight against that.

He's going to do the thing that Brad Lander did. Like go down to the, you know, to where, you know, CBP and ice thugs are rounding people up and fight for his people. Anyway, I think it'll be a big story next year. As you mentioned, you covered the DSA. You knew Zoran before he was Zoran. You cover random things. I threw a couple of races here into some random stuff I saw yesterday. I'm going to throw at you at any of these that you think are interesting.

You can weigh in on or there's something you saw that I don't mention. Go ahead. There are a bunch of ballot initiatives in New York. There were YIMBY that all passed. So that'll help Zoron a little bit. The Yimbis are on the rise in a bunch of cities. In Minneapolis, it looks. It looks like they had a socialist candidate running as well.

There's getting lumped in with Zoron and right-wing media, Somali guys. Seems that they do rank choice. I don't know if we have a winner yet, but it seems like he's not going to win. Democrats win huge in Georgia on the Public Service Commission, statewide race off off-year, but still. At Bucks County, there's a district attorney race that was really kind of centered around tough-on-crime. Bucks County is a big swing area. You had this kind of tough-on-crime Republican-type running against a Democrat. Democrat wins pretty handily.

Any of those things? Jump out to you. Anything else you saw last night that was of interest? Yeah, the Bucks County race, so this is a, they won the DA's office for the first time in Bucks County history. Bucks County has. The Democrats won being they? Democrats won, yes.

Historically Republican County, it moved to the left because of the suburbanites moving from both Philly and New York, actually. It's a nice rural, cheaper area. And it started to move back to the right. Republicans are very focused on voter registration and happen just very successful in getting Republicans registered in Pennsylvania across the country. If you remember Shane Goldmacher's New York Times story about this, and yet people voted and they got rid of the Republican. And this happened all over Pennsylvania. So I'm paying attention because Josh Shapiro was in the mix for 2028.

Shapiro was very successful. And the new party chair was very successful in just maximizing democratic performance, not just statewide. You can turn out Allegheny in Philadelphia, et cetera. But, yeah, flipping Bucks County, the county council, Louisiana, which is one of the, if you remember, Hazleton and the mayor of Hazleton going to Congress and the popularity of his anti-immigrant measures, there was a reversal there. Democrats picked that up. Yeah, and that's up by Scranton. I mean, that is prime Trump, Selena Zito country. Yes.

You know, this is all, you know, this is like your generic, like used to be Democrat white working class, Russ Belt area that Trump has done well in. And they flip the city council. Yeah, and so how much of that, Erie County, which is a swing county that used to be super Democratic, and then Trump won it again in 2024, Democrats got rid of, they probably a pretty big margin because I think they're done counting. They flip back the county executive office. They just won a lot down the ballot in addition to winning those state Supreme Court races. I think those did get attention, the fact that Democrats wanted to retain these justices. But it was harder to cover because, you know, the justices, they did one TV ad, but they're not out there at diners answering questions about Zoramam Dani. The theme is talk to Democrats. They were not BSing me. They were not nervous, but they thought they'd win. And then they won by 20 points. And Republicans were just, we're not able anywhere in Pennsylvania to say, hey, guy who voted for Donald Trump. It's very important for you to come out for this more obscure election to support Donald Trump. How much of that is people who might come back to vote against Shapiro might come back for J.D. Vance. I don't know. But a lot of Republican gains just were wiped away in Pennsylvania. The Minneapolis thing is, it's interesting because of how conservative media covered it. I think they call Omar Fette, the Minneapolis Mamdani, which that's alliteration. That's pretty good. But Jacob Frye is probably winning a third term in Minneapolis.

He won his second term after refusing to endorse defunding the police and abolishing the police department. He is favored to win this term over a DSA member who was much more left-wing than him. And Tim Walls actually campaigned for Frye over this guy. It divided the party locally, but if you are a Democrat, let's say a Democrat who wants to rebut your opponent that everyone in the entire party is represented by the worst thing Mamdani said. Progressives are, I think they've regained some ground in cities, but it's very important how Mamdani renounced to fund the police many, many times. And I talked to him in debates.

He ran to the right of where he was when he got into politics. A more pro-socialist candidate in another liberal city is not going to. going to win. So it's not like the part, I think the Democrats have figured out the Goldilocks situation where they know exactly how they should run around the country. But yes, the progressives have some limits. They need to, they need to be a little bit more careful about their criminal justice policies to win. And then where Democrats are running in swing districts, they really figured out what to do. I mean, they just had a fantastic night. Everywhere that was competitive and they had the candidate they wanted and Republicans had the message they wanted, the only

places I was seeing Republicans hold on were Nassau County in Long Island, where Mount Downey was obviously a big issue. They held those, the offices, they held Manchester mayor's office. They did okay in places where they already had won. They were not getting ground anywhere. In

Pennsylvania, the inability to do that right now after Democrats are clearly losing ground with registration, that is significant. That is a problem for them. They're just kind of talking past today. Final topic. The South Carolina governor's race, really important. race to cover. Congresswoman Nancy Mace is running for governor. She continues her psychotic break.

It's been hard to follow. She sent, I believe, 97 tweets about an incident that she had at the airport where I guess she yelled at a cop and then it has spiraled out of control in a lot of ways just for kicks to let people, you know, to give people a nice, some landing gear for this podcast. I want to listen to Nancy Mace discuss this encounter that she had at the airport. When the dirty cop, yes, the cop were cops that filed a false incident report. You're giving other cops a bad name. And I'm coming for you. So you need to know that.

But my interaction with the dirty cop was like, was it one second? Or was it two? It's really hard to tell. And if you're not man enough to take my feedback, my constructive feedback for you, not doing your job, then what are you going to do when Al Qaeda shows up at the airport? Like, I don't know what's happening with our girl Nancy, but she is off the rocker. Any other, any thoughts on that? I looked at a Winthrop poll in South Carolina Governors. She's in the Republican primary.

It's tight as a tick. She's a lot undecided. She's right now tied to the lieutenant governor, Pamela, of that. What's happening there with Nancy? Well, this is not the first time that she has said that there is a conspiracy that only she has unraveled and she needs to be there to get justice and she needs more power in the governor's office to fire the people who have been behind the scenes, smearing her, hurting her ability to be the best

Nancy Mace she can be. And this extends to the mall cops. Yes, the mall cops she has always done I've never gotten over how in 2021 she just got elected in 2020 she upset it was like a Republican district but she overform the polls won

and then a few months later reported that Antifa which I didn't know was in Mount Pleasant South Carolina had graffitied outside her house slogans like past the pro act and these Antifah members were never caught. They've never been seen in South Carolina again. And even then I was talking to some Republicans who she does not have a lot of fans in South Carolina, Republican strategies who said like,

yeah, that's interesting that there's not any video evidence of what happened on her house. So South Carolina has a runoff system. And the question of Republicans had was, is she famous enough to get through the first round of the runoff to then lose to literally anyone else? Because you've got the lieutenant governor, you've got the attorney general. They were pretty confident that Donald Trump, who she has gone back and forth with in humorous ways, you know, he's terrible. No, he's not. I'm going to campaign Trump Tower, et cetera. Other Republicans in this race have been more supportive of Trump.

Alan Wilson, the attorney general, son of Joe Wilson, the congressman, was a day one Trump endorser. It did not dither at all like she did. So Republicans I talk to are different kinds of amused by this. I know some of who are not amused, they really just can't stand her to want her to go away. It's not funny to them anymore. But every tweet she sends gets them closer to just anyone beating her in that primary and her going away. That is what I hear from South Carolina Republicans who are not. And now all of them obviously are in league with the cops and the trilateral commission and the people who are trying to destroy Nancy Mace.

So keep a grain assault there. Yeah. Rupal's drag race is involved. Everybody. Everybody's out together. Nancy, Dave Weigel, appreciate you, man. One of the real ones out there doing reporting. As I mentioned at the top, you also did a book about Prague rock.

I asked you to choose a prog rock song to take us out with. Do you have a comment on why you've chosen this number for people? Oh, yes, it's King Crimson's One More Red Nightmare. And unimaginatively, if you are in the red team, did you have a good night? No, you had the opposite of a good night. You had a nightmare. So keeping it nice and nice and simple. It was sweet dreams.

It was sweet dreams and la resistance. Dave Wago, we'll holler at you. next year during primary season. All right, man. Appreciate you very much. Everybody else, we'll be back tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. See you all then.

Peace. Man, there's a good nightmare. 10,000 feet for unfair. Convincer I don't care. Safe as houses, I swear. Of just a amusing. The virtues of cruising. When altitude dropping,

my ears don't be popping. One more in Nightmare. Wow! Wow! My Tick is a foredown My neck is I turned round I have four to shouting

They're on for his housing A farewell from song See you like tugling's candy The stew and baby But they can be for baby The Bullwark Red Nightbass. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.