The Chaser Report - AMERICAN MIDTERM WRAP | Dr. David Smith

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Dr. David Smith joins Dom and Charles to explain the recent American Midterm elections. Where was the red wave that everyone predicted? And more importantly, why are there still apes? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report, Don Knight and Charles Firth, with a special midterms edition of the Chaser Report. Looking at the US elections, we're recording this on Thursday morning at about 11 o'clock. We're going to upload it as soon as possible. And our guest, tell us exactly what's happened. He's Associate Professor Dave Smith of the US Study Centre at Sydney University. Hello, David, welcome back.

Good morning. Good to be back. And so, yeah, so no red wave. What happened? Yeah. Look, I'm still trying to process the cognitive dissonance of Democrats actually overperforming in something for the first time in my life. Even though it looks like Republicans are going to take the House of Representatives,

and that is consequential, the Senate is. still up for grabs. This is a massive underperformance compared to what was expected to happen immediately in the lead up to the election. This looks a lot more like the results we would have expected back in August when the abortion issue and Trump's hearings before the House Select Committee were dominating everything. Over the last few weeks, it really looked like economic issues had come back to be the issue that was certainly dominating all of the media coverage and that Republicans had successfully turned it back into a referendum on Biden again, who has very low approval ratings.

But instead, this seems to have been much more of a verdict on both Republicans and Democrats, with the result that I think this is the smallest pickup by an opposition party in a midterm election, in the last 20 years. And it's just historically way below the average of what you would expect, let alone what you would expect with the president's approval ratings this low and with the economy as it is.

So I don't like the guy in the White House, but no confidence that the other team will do any better, basically. So it pops on both their houses. I think there's quite a simple fact that keeps getting posed as a puzzle by the media, which is, oh, why is it when Biden's approval ratings are historically low that people are not flocking to Republicans? And the answer to that is, there are a lot of

Democrats who disapprove of Biden's performance. There are a lot of independents who also disapprove of Biden's performance who can't vote Republican in this version of the Republican Party. There are even Republicans who disapprove of Biden's performance, but who would not vote for Republicans if Trump was the candidate. So people's assessment of who they would actually vote for is a lot more complicated than the approval ratings for the presidency reflect. Yeah. So US elections often come down to turnout, right? The polls are often a bit misleading because they ask everyone who they're going to vote for, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to spend four hours queuing up. And they're not even sausages on

election day in the US. They just don't know how to do it. So who actually turned up? what does this result reflect? We're still waiting for the breakdown, really, of who turned up. And I think there's going to be a lot of analysis of that over the few days. But this was a high turnout election. Not only was a high turnout election, there was a huge amount of money spent on this election, $16 billion or $16.7 billion, according to Open Secrets, which smashed all previous records for a non-presidential election.

So there were very high levels of engagement. In terms of the question of where the polls went wrong, there's a couple of things going on here. One is that poll averages in the last few weeks were dominated by very low-quality partisan affiliated polls leaning towards the Republican Party, which were predicting that there was a five-point generic lead for Republicans in Congress,

and that Republicans were poised to win all kinds of races. that they ended up losing. That's the first thing. The second thing is that pollsters have been trying to correct for the big misses in 2016 and 2020, where they really underestimated Republican support. And this time around, they might have been using models that were essentially trying to compensate

for that underestimation in the past. But it's possible that in 2016 and 2020, they weren't really underestimating Republican support so much as underestimating Trump's support because Trump really does appeal to the kinds of people who don't like answering the phone to opinion pollsters. It's the state, they're trying to take my guns.

That's right. So it's possible that when Trump is not on the ballot, that you don't have that same problem. And so by trying to overcompensate for those poll and misses in 2020 and 2016, some of the polls might have inadvertently actually given Republicans more hope than was warranted. But what about Ron DeSandis, though? Like, he's the sort of everything you just said then doesn't really apply to him, though, does it?

Yeah, DeSantis was a huge outlier in all of this. So DeSantis won Florida by 20 points. I think he only won it by one point last time around. And that's a lot more than what the polls were expecting, even though the polls were all expecting him to win. Republicans did very well in Florida generally, so Marco Rubio did really well in his re-election. But I think DeSantis himself just generated a huge amount of support.

He won the majority of Latinos in Florida, which no Republican has ever done before. He won Miami-Dade County, which no Republican has done in 20 years. So clearly, Florida is different. Florida, which used to be the closest sport swing state in every election, has just been getting redder and redder since 2016. Yeah. And a lot of that, I think, is to do with Trump.

I think a lot of it is also to do with DeSantis. Now, in terms of... But, Dave, can I just pick you up there, which is... I remember you coming on this very podcast a few months ago. Yes. And you said, well, don't worry about Ron DeSantis, I'm paraphrasing here, because his culture war stuff works really well for the Republican base, but it has no broader appeal come election time.

Well, we just saw an election where it had broad appeal. I think I was talking about national elections there, and I actually stick by my point that if he is the Republican nominee, that stuff is not going to play as well as it has been playing. for him so far. So are you saying that his don't say gay staff won't work in San Francisco? Is that what you're saying? Possibly.

But it's also important to keep in mind that a lot of Desanthas' appeal in Florida is the fact that he kept the state open all the way through the pandemic. Schools were open for a lot longer in Florida and the state was open to tourism for a lot longer in Florida. Now, sure, that resulted in a much higher than average death rate in Florida, but this, it was rewarded very handsomely for that politically in Florida. The people in Florida really seemed to like the way that he handled the pandemic. Once again, that's not. He freed a lot of people. He freed a lot of Floridians from their earthly bodies and they're now freely existing in some other dimension. But, I mean, the big thing about the significance of

Desantis winning by so much is there are going to be a lot of Republican donors and media figures and leaders encouraging him to get into the race now. If it had been a big Republican red wave, Trump would have immediately taken credit for it and used that as the launch pad for his 2024 campaign. And DeSantis may well have kept out of the 2024 race because Trump's hole on the party really, you know, seem to be unchallenged. Now, DeSantis may still decide that actually it's better for him to keep his powder dry in 2024. But I think there are going to be a lot of people trying to push him into the race now

because that result seems to indicate that he is a lot more palatable than a Republican party with Trump as its face. Yeah, you've got to realize, David, that the fact that, the fact that, you know, It wasn't a big red wave. Isn't Trump's fault? And we've got to... Yeah, it is very clear. We've got the audio piece here, I think.

Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. And if they lose, I should not be blamed at all. Okay. Yeah, if they'd won, it was him. If they'd lost, it wasn't him. Yeah. He's pretty clear, David. That was not his fault.

You can't hold him to that. No. Yeah. Sorry. I'm actually not sure that just standards would be a more viable candidate than Trump. as popular as as the Sanchez is in Florida I don't know how well

his stuff is going to play outside of Florida and I don't know how well all of this culture war stuff is going to play I suspect not so well but yeah there's going to be a lot of people

urging him to get into the race that doesn't mean that he would win a Republican primary I think Trump is still a lot more popular with the Republican base and he is just ready to attack DeSantis. He's already got a nickname for him,

desa sanctimonious. And I think that... I saw... You can never trust a screen cap from Truth Social, but I saw a hilarious one doing the rounds where he just gently pointed out that he got a lot more votes

in 2020 in Florida than DeSantis got this time, kind of ignoring the fact that people turn out far more for a presidential election. So he's clearly rattled by the guy, which is extremely entertaining. Yeah, he really is. I think another reason why a lot of conservative donors and media figures and leaders are going to want DeSantis to get in is because they are constantly embarrassed by Trump and they have to get behind him.

But they don't like having to get behind him when all he can talk about is himself and his grievances in 2020. They see DeSantis as someone who's a lot more focused on issues, on the issues that they. they care about. And DeSantis has a kind of veneer of social respectability, which they desperately want and which they don't have when they have to spend all of their time backing Trump. So there are a lot of conservative elites who are going to want DeSantis to get into the race. It wasn't just the Republicans who had some cultural war issues this election, though, Dave, because slavery was on the ballot in five states. Do you know, about this? I was not aware of this.

I learned something new every time on this podcast. So Vermont, Tennessee, Oregon, Louisiana and Alabama all had questions about whether slavery should be legal or not. Can I read you out some of the results? Because in Vermont, 89%

of people voted to prohibit slavery, which is quite nice. In Tennessee... Did the other 11% work for Amazon by any chance? Exactly. Like, there were 10% of people, 14,800. And in Vermont. In Vermont, voted in favour of slavery.

Yeah. Wow. In Tennessee, it was 79% voted in favour. So there's like 20% of people who were pro-slavery. In Oregon, the vote to abolish slavery was only favoured by 54%. They didn't understand the question. They were stoned. Well, actually, I don't believe that's a real figure.

I can, no, no, apparently the question was, shall we abolish slavery and also attach all these other rights that annoyed conservatives? So what the progressives did in Oregon is they bundled up the anti-slavery movement. So what's going on? Why? I mean, is this a get-out-the-vote? Oh, the other hilarious one is Louisiana actually voted 60% no. But the no question, it was phrased in a way that to abolish slavery, you had to vote no.

right like the republicans got in and tried to sort of make trick everyone into voting in favor of slavery um so but like i presume i mean this was this was mainly to do with um about paying prisoners so i mean in those states they don't actually um there is no explicit uh prohibition against slavery and so it was just to sort of fix that up but very much then a place it as slavery as a sort of punishment, which is what happens in a lot of states where prisoners essentially work in chain gangs for free. Yeah.

So, but yeah, but there are sort of cultural wars going on on both sides. Is that anti-slavery movement, is that an attempt by the Democrats to get out the vote? Is that part of a mobilisation thing? Or is it just a sort of, you know, administrative thing? No, no, that is part of a long-standing. issue that democratic activists have been

campaigning about that if anything the mainstream of the party is very wary of these kinds of issues slavery, it's too controversial issues around prisoners rights you know they're afraid of being labeled soft on crime. Oh they wouldn't

want to be soft on slaves the reason why they phrase it in terms of anti-slavery is to try to get as much support behind the movement as possible. If it was framed in terms of prisoners rights, or if it was

framed in terms of we should be paying prisoners, you would have disastrous election results. So, no, this is, yeah, framing it as anti-slavery, even though I think that's the correct framing, that's a

way of trying to actually get public support behind it when public support is not always behind the rights of none of the medical advice contained in the chaser report should legally be considered medical advice the chaser report okay so just just on trump again david this is this is interesting one because he was hoping to use the red wave as the um as the sort of pretext to jumping back into the race but it seems as though a lot of his supporters did very very badly and particularly um people running for secretary of state and things like that the election deniers did very very very

very badly across the board, I think. Is this a bit of a chastening for Trump or will he simply just ignore it and just go about what he's... I mean, we know that he doesn't like actually looking at election results as reality. So he might simply assume that there was a red way. But you can't prove there wasn't.

Get rid of Giuliani on it. Yeah, Trump is unchasonable. Okay, so this, it all depends on what other Republicans are going to do. And so far at every turn, when Trump has kept pushing, they have eventually yielded. So this is not going to deter Trump from getting into the race.

There are now people desperately pleading with him, don't get into the race until after the Georgia runoff. It was reported that Republicans had to talk him down from actually making an announcement on the eve of the election. Instead, he made an announcement that he would make an announcement next week. He said there's going to be a big announcement next week. Everybody knows that that was going to be the announcement of his presidency. And it's going to be pretty hard to persuade him not to do that.

So no, he is not going to be chasing. He's not going to see this as there was anything wrong with him or the candidates that he selected. He'll find someone else to blame for that. Republicans actually did try to kind of distance themselves from Trump a bit. there were a lot of Republicans who quietly took down Trump's endorsements from their website as well as trying to downplay their positions on abortion. So from the perspective of Trump or one of his allies, they'd say, well, the problem was that they didn't embrace Trump, that Trump wasn't visible in the campaign.

We've had more rallies. When Trump's not on the ballot. So, yeah, there's no way that Trump and his allies. are going to see this as a repudiation. I think other Republicans are going to realize that there's a bit of a problem, but they realized that there was a problem after the January 6th riot as well,

and they did nothing about it. So, yeah, it remains to be seen whether they will stand up to Trump. This is why I think people are going to want DeSantis to get into the race, though, because they want somebody who can potentially stand up to Trump. And DeSantis, by not saying that he won't run if Trump runs,

that's the closest that anyone has actually come to challenging Trump. And Trump's threatening him. He's saying he knows more about him than everyone except perhaps his wife. And then he will release this information if DeSantis runs. So it's already ugly. The scenario I'm fascinated about, and I'm going to make a little prediction here, is that Trump runs in the primaries, loses,

then doesn't accept the results. And it's entirely, you can, it's to begin the republic. party, that would be a fascinating kind of eating itself scenario to see if that played out. Yeah, and that's a possibility that can't be ruled out. So, yeah, this would be one of the things that someone like DeSantis would be worried about. And if DeSantis doesn't enter the race, one of the reasons could be that he would be so attacked by Trump, there would be no limits at all in Trump's attacks.

on him. And if he won, Trump wouldn't stop attacking him then either. And he probably would claim that he had actually won the primary. So DeSantis would go into the race, potentially with half of the Republican Party, either doubting that he won or angry at him for dethroning Trump. There are lots of elections for governor yesterday as well. And they're sort of becoming more crucial to 2024. Absolutely. Because it's that, so why is that? Well, it's because in most states, it's the governor who has ultimate responsibility

for certifying the election results. In a lot of states, the Secretary of State also has a very significant role. Sometimes it's the final certification. Usually it's the governor who signs off on the final certification. The biggest one from my point of view, the verdict is still a. which is Arizona. Curry Lake, I think, was the biggest and most prominent election denier in the race. She's someone who is very popular with Trump's base and really plays up that popularity.

She knows exactly how to push the buttons of the base. And she at the moment is trailing in that race. But Arizona is a blue mirage state. the count gets redder as it goes on. She could well actually win that race. And she has said that she wouldn't have certified the 2020 election and there's a possibility that she just wouldn't certify the 2024 result. Because the reason why it's crucial is because the Republican Party is now saying,

well, it doesn't matter what the votes are, the governor can just certify in a different direction. That's basically it, isn't it? That's why it becomes crucial. And this is yet to be put to the test legally because no governor has refused to certify an election result. I don't think that a governor would just be able to say, not not doing that.

There'd be so many legal challenges to that. But, of course, another thing that's going on at the moment is that the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could potentially give state legislators way more power over elections by removing the right to state judicial review. So this is a, used to be a fringe legal theory, but apparently the Supreme Court is up for it, which essentially says state legislatures have unchallenged sovereignty over elections and state courts can't actually intervene to stop them from doing things. If that's the case, then it wouldn't just be

governors and secretaries of state. It's potentially state legislators. who would have all of the power over like this. So that would be like the New South Wales government just coming in, you know, at the federal election level and just saying we will... You're not getting New South Wales as votes, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Just what happened.

It happened actually when Queensland put their own senator in. Yeah, to Joe. The sparking the dismissal. Anyway. Oh, yes. Can we catch up on a... Oh, you know, good memory. Can we catch up on finally, David, a couple of the key Senate races.

So the House has gone, we've been fairly safely. So are you happy to call the House as having gone ready? I do want to know that it hasn't actually been called yet. It will go ready. Yeah, I know. But the fact that we're still talking about it, you know, 24 hours after the polls started closing, is in itself remarkable that it's taken that long. But yes, the House will...

Some of the most interesting Senate races, John Federman beating Mehmet Oz. I mean, that was a surprise to many, including your colleague from the PEP podcast, Chaz, who told me the night before the election that he thought Feterman was absolutely gone and that the voters wouldn't be endorsing someone who had such clear problems with recovering from his stroke in the debate.

That wasn't even all that close in the end. And Mehmet Oz, who admittedly didn't help him, is caused by not living in Pennsylvania, among other amusing moments during the campaign. That really was a big moment for Democrats, I guess, on election night. Yeah, and I think in the end that that race wasn't really that much about Fetterman. It was about Democrat versus Republican or about Trump versus anti-Trump. Oz was so closely associated with Trump that for a lot of Democrats,

it wouldn't have mattered if Feterman had died as a result of that stroke. They still would have voted for him. Chas was making the point that he, you know, the stroke had really impeded Fetterman from campaigning. It clearly was impeding him in a number of ways. Voters would have concerns about his physical fitness to serve. I always said that I didn't think they would have concerns about his physical fitness to serve. That the race was a lot bigger than that for them. So, yeah, if Feterman hadn't had that stroke, I think he would have won it.

by a lot more, but in the end, the result wasn't that surprising to me. Do you think it'll come down to Georgia yet again, and who do you think will prevail there? I mean, Herschel Walker, on comedy grounds, really should be a US senator, but Raphael Warnock seemed to do a little bit better on the night. Last time I checked anyway, and there's a runoff in a month. Yeah, so he did slightly better on the night. First of all, so it will be... Sorry, why is Herschel Walker?

I'm not aware of this story. I'm being a bit inside baseball. So Herschel Walker, Dave, please take it away. He's a man who has family values. Herschel Walker is a former college football star for the University of Georgia who led them to a national championship in 1980 and on lists of the greatest college football players of all time

routinely comes near the top. He would be one of the most famous people in Georgia and he's an African-American conservative. So in a year when Republicans generally did well in Georgia, you would expect him to win in a landslide given this kind of profile. But first of all, he's got a really kind of weird personal life with some very disturbing details in it about domestic violence.

He once told ESPN about how he used to play Russian roulette with his friends, And he also stakes out some pretty extreme positions. He was the only Republican Senate candidate who, when Lindsay Graham said, hey, here's a great idea a few weeks before the election where abortion seems to be an issue that's hurting us, I'm going to propose a national abortion ban. Herschel Walker was the only Senate candidate who actually came out in favor of it. So he supports complete abortion ban, but then two women have come out and said they had relationships with Herschel Walker, in which Herschel Walker paid for them to have abortions.

So he was pretty damaged goods by the time that the election rolled around. Of course, it was a very, very close race. I mean, I was watching that all afternoon, and the league kept changing. No one could get to 50%. So there'll be a runoff. In terms of the comedy value, I was once shown by. as a clip of Herschel Walker on some talk show

with some minister making this devastating point against the theory of evolution and I'd never thought about this before he said well if people say that humans evolve from apes why are there still apes answer that

that's what you wanted to set it I think that would really raise its tone of debate so that's the walker up fingers crossed yeah so that's the comedy value I don't know what's going to happen in that election. It will be the decisive election in the Senate if Nevada and Arizona are split between Democrats and Republicans. Now, at the moment, both of those races are really unclear.

Arizona is a blue mirage state. Nevada is a red mirage state. Currently, the Republican leads in Nevada. Currently, the Democrat leads in Arizona. Both of those results could potentially flip or neither of them could flip or one of them could flip. So if, but if a Democrat gets one and a Republican gets the other, then Georgia is the decisive race,

which means it will become nationalized. Herschel Walker and his allies spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the Georgia race. If it becomes the decisive race, you can easily expect there to be half a billion dollars spent on it. and yeah it will become a very very high stakes contest i think it's quite hard to predict what will actually happen in in that race because when warnock has problems of his own i think warnock is slightly more popular than herschel walker but on the other head there's going to be so much money flooding into this race then the other complicating factor is trump as i said that people are

pleading with him not to get into the race until georgia is decided but is anyone going to stop him from getting into the race and if it does have that if he is in the race as always that's going to motivate Republicans but it's really going to motivate Democrats and I think that given the you know the final decision is going to be made by the 2% of people who voted for the libertarian in Georgia I would humbly suggest the message that those people want to hear is vote Republican so that we can be a check on

Joe Biden. What they don't want to hear is vote Republican so that we can launch Trump's awesome 2024 campaign. Yeah. Wow. David, it's been delightful. I've learned a lot specifically why they're still apes.

I think the moment. Why are they're still apes? It's a conundrum. Can we pay for a billboard for that in Georgia during the race, Charles. I think that would be. Vote Walker. Why are they still apes? Thank you, David.

My pleasure. David Smith, you can check out. He's incredibly long. If you like long chats like this, he and Chaz, make the PEP podcast every week, which goes on forever

that is delightful for hardcore fans in American politics. Gears from Road, we're part of the ACAST. Credit Network. We'll catch you tomorrow. See ya.