The Dispatch Podcast - A Blue Wave or an Anti-Incumbent Wave?

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Sarah Isgur, Jonah Goldberg, and Mike Warren to discuss the state of the midterms and whether South Carolina is truly a competitive state in 2026. The Agenda: —The first true “wave?” —The red undertow —How Trump’s ego is hurting the GOP —Redistricted districts —Is South Carolina competitive? —NWYT: What’s a lawyer? Show notes: —AP-NORC poll —Sarah’s Not Worth Your Time ambush The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Unlock unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same low No Frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC Express Pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at no frills.ca. Hold music. Not exactly what you want to hear when a pipe just burst in your basement is flooding. And your vinyl collection is getting soaked. And your cat just floated by on a sofa cushion?

That's why intact insurance answers 2 million claim calls. per year within 20 seconds, it's their way of going the extra mile to help. So instead of hearing this lovely track over and over and over, you'll hear this in seconds. Hello, intact insurance. Now that's music to your ears. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss a large number of Americans who say they want substantial change or complete and total upheaval in these. midterm elections, and whether the prevailing anti-incumbent and anti-Trump sentiment will lead to a blue wave, a rogue wave, or something else entirely. And then, is the South Carolina Senate race

really competitive? Finally, for not worth your time, what's a lawyer? I'm joined today by dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, advisory opinions host and SCOTUS blog editor Sarah Isker, and politics editor and author of our must read next right newsletter, Mike Warren. Let's dive right in. Mike, we're always happy to have you join us for the podcast, but we're especially grateful for Jonah joining us today coming off of a hellish trip back from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and three hours of sleep. And we're excited to welcome back Sarah Isker to weigh in on politics.

Sarah, you've been focused of late on the law and SCOTUS blogging and advisory opinioning. But we want to pull you back in and do some politics today. So thanks for making time. I'm living in Texas now. And anytime you try to watch any college football game, wall-to-wall Senate ads. So I feel particularly qualified to join today. Sarah, that's been happening nationally as well. So we can't even escape it outside of Texas.

Texas. That's true. Let's start big picture, Sarah. You've been watching this carefully, as you always do. We're less than three weeks out from the midterms. What are you seeing? Where do you think this is going? Is this going to be the big blue wave blue tsunami? Okay. So there have been polling level predictions of wave elections for 10 years now, and they've never materialized. And in fact, the American political voting population has basically been tied for roughly 20 years. And so even when we do have sort of blip waves, I'll call them, they're unstable, they don't last. This is actually incredibly new in American political history.

One party has generally dominated for some amount of time, decades often, and then another political party overtakes it, again, for decades, that's just not what's happening. And it's causing a lot of the problems that people are complaining about in politics, a lot of the partisanship, a lot of the, this is the most important election of our lifetime. You know, if one party had no real chance of taking back a House of Congress, yeah, the midterm elections might not matter that much. Okay, I lay all that groundwork because the polling isn't always that helpful in telling us whether the wave is coming. I think there are reasons to believe that the polling could once again

be off this time, but the polling would have to be really, really off for there not to be at least a blue wavelet coming in three weeks. Republican operatives, I will tell you, are, they're like in the stages of grief. They're like already at acceptance, man. They're not even scared anymore. They have accepted what is about to happen to them, and it has already happened. They've moved on with their lives. And like election day hasn't happened. Early voting hasn't started in some states. The average Senate flip in a midterm election has been 3.4 seats.

At this point, of course, Democrats need four seats to take back the House. Even if Federman changes parties afterwards, it's five seats. They think all of that is incredibly possible right now. Basically, every state is in play. And you can tell that it's not just total polling blips, for instance, because in Texas, while James Tolariko looks to be up by, you know, more than five points, the Abbott race, Greg Abbott, who has been the longtime Texas governor, his race is looking incredibly close. And you would expect Paxton to be running about five points behind.

Greg Abbott. They're both statewide Republicans. Paxton is a worse candidate in every single imaginable way. And so the polling looks right in terms of what you would expect the down ballot or up ballot, whatever you want to think about it, to look like. But because, and I'll just use Texas here as an example, because Paxton is such a bad candidate, by which I mean both lazy, he's not campaigning, really, he's not raising money, really, he's relying on outside groups, also carries a lot of baggage. You can imagine a world in which people, it's not just that they don't want to admit to a pollster that they're voting for Ken Paxton. They don't want to admit to themselves that they're going to have to vote for Ken Paxton because, frankly, James Tolariko is no walk in the park if you're a Republican

and are looking for an off-ramp from Ken Paxton. So when a pollster calls, they're not answering, they don't know who they're going to vote for. Maybe they even say James Tuller, But they won't do it when push comes to shove. And we're not talking about that many people that need to be wrong about their own heart in these polls. We're talking about 5%, which in a poll might only be two, three people. So I think there's reasons to think that Paxton could, for instance, still win the Texas Senate race. But I think there's plenty of reasons to think that Tala Rico will win. The Democrats win five seats in the Senate.

And that this is the first wave election of the last two decades. Yeah, I mean, if you look back, Jonah, you probably can correct me on the actual years. But if I recall correctly, the House of Representatives changed hands once between 1956 and 2006. And that was in 1994 in the Republican Revolution. And in the years since it has changed hands, I believe, five times, maybe four and this will be five or five and this will be six. So we're clearly in this. 20, as Sarah points out, this 20-year period of extraordinary volatility. And voters want more, which is incredible. There's an AP Norc poll out yesterday. It's a poll of adults, 1,100 plus adults, so not registered voters, not likely voters, but it's not asking the kind of specific questions that I think that polling threshold required, that level of specificity requires.

They asked voters what kind of change they want. in these midterm elections. Basically, everybody wants some kind of massive change, substantial change, and some looking for complete and total upheaval. So the question put to Democrats, 47% say that they want, quote, substantial change. 50% of Democrats is looking for upheaval to come out of these elections. It's also true of Republicans, and I want your thoughts on how we should understand this. Nearly half of Republicans surveyed said they are hoping for substantial change in the midterms, while 13% choose the complete and total upheaval. Is that just a reflection of the general discontent about the way the country is going right now? And if it is, why haven't we seen these

kinds of numbers before. People have been sour about the direction of the country going back several years. What do you make of those polling results? Yeah, so I think it's, first of all, lovely to have sour back here. And shout out for mentioning the sun and moon party thesis put forward by political scientists Sam LaBelle in 1951, which is that whole idea that we have one dominant party and one smaller party that orbits the bigger party. And we've had two moon parties. It's how people think of the Sun and Moon thesis of the dispatch, one dominant founder and one smaller or less important co-founder. Who gets mooned a lot. So where was it?

So it's funny, I hadn't looked at the polling on all this stuff, but I was thinking earlier this week that I think the mode of analysis that we kind of, that a lot of pundits missed, I don't want to speak for everybody, is that explains a lot. Like I talked on here a bunch of times about how it's weird how Democrats are underperforming in blue states and overperforming in red states. And I actually think that's a sign of nature healing a little bit. But what explains it is the broader cross current of anti-uncumpancy. And so in places where Democrats are the Uniparty, they're going to win because they don't like the Uniparty in Washington more. But voters are kind of, there are voters at the margins who are annoyed with the status quo in their own states? Because their party hasn't delivered. And that also explains why Charlie Cook, a political report, talks about how it's not a blue wave, it's a red undertow.

Because the Democratic Party's approval rating is still pretty crappy. And that just shows you it's a massive, the massive anti-uncumbent vibe here is a little massive. by the even more massive anti-Trump vibe, but they're not the same vibes, right? So it's sort of like there's a beach in Washington State that we go to as a family a lot, and there are these signs up about how, like, once a couple times a year,

they just have a rogue wave, like a weird-ass wave that should not come from that direction. All the tide and currents are going this other way, and then one wave, and someone gets snatched off a rock or a tide pool and dies. And there are all these signs and watch out for rogue waves.

And I think that like there are these kind of cross currents here where if you have your own name ID and your own brand, you can fight against some of this stuff. So Susan Collins is overperforming in what should be a walkaway Democratic win for that state. Right? She just votes against the vibes of her state. It's a plus nine or something democratic state. Adam Hamilton is running against the vibes of his state. If you have these good candidates, the broader trends can kind of recede.

But when it's generic candidates, anti-incumbency is powerful force, but anti-Trump is the most powerful force. And for all I know, given that I only got about an hour sleep last night, I could have been speaking entirely in Aramaic just now. I wouldn't even be able to ask a follow-up or take your point and move on to Mike if you had been. So, Mike, we have had in this short period of time that we've been talking a number of different descriptions of what we might be seeing posited. Is this a blip wave, a blue wavelet, a rogue wave, or a weird-ass wave? I don't know. I'm not up on my hydrological metaphors here to give you an accurate assessment. I think what we're seeing, though, is a entirely predictable anti-incumbent,

which means, I think, for most people, except in some weird places like Minnesota, an anti-Republican and anti-Trump wave. The question remains. We're not answering it on this podcast. I don't think we'll answer it until Election Day, but we can pick up some clues, is how big that is. And I keep saying this on this podcast,

but the important thing to watch is what campaigns and what political committees and super PACs do with their money, what they do with the candidates or the surrogates time and resources, where are they going? And that will tell you just how big it could be. And so the polls, I think, are aligning with what you're seeing, people like President Trump and J.D. Vance doing with their time, right? Trump was just out west.

he was in Montana, he was in Alaska. He was in Alaska, okay? Just to underscore kind of how big this wave could be. He usually just goes to Alaska to cave to Vladimir Putin. Exactly. This time he was actually going to campaign for Dan Sullivan. One of the Dan Sullivan's. Exactly.

So you know it's serious. Yes. Good point. That's a whole other mess. Yes, the Republican Dan Sullivan, Dan, I don't know what his middle initial is. But yes, he's going to Ohio. He's going to a lot of places that Republicans thought at the beginning of the cycle or really like just before this cycle, sort of after the 2024 election, when they were looking at the 26 Senate map and thinking, okay, yeah, maybe there will be an anti-Trump, you know, sentiment in two years. That usually happens in a second term at a midterm.

But the map looks really good because Democrats don't have a lot of places, a lot of purplish states where they can try. tried to be on the offensive. And the truth is that that was correct. They're just, they're on the offensive in red states in Ohio, in Alaska, possibly, I'm a little skeptical about Montana's. There's a house race there. We'll see about that. But Kansas, possibly Nebraska. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Trump showing up? Because when you have a statewide race and you're asking the president to come into your state, there's two things that you can't separate. one is trying to rally your base and do base turnout voting. But in most states, when the president comes, it blankets the airwaves.

Sometimes that is a good thing. These two work in tandem, right? You're doing base turnout, but you're also getting a lot of earned media about the president. But in this case, Trump would be great for turning out the base in these red states that are nevertheless vulnerable to the wavelet or the weird-ass wave. But blanking the airwaves could be really bad. if you have an anti-Trump vibe. So what are you hearing from operatives

about how they're thinking about that, balancing that? They can't really tell Trump not to come either because he thinks this election's supposed to be about him. So, like, Trump going to Alaska, to me, seems actually a perilous move for Dan Sullivan. I totally agree. I think that there is a lot of trepidation. I'm hearing, by the way, the same things you were hearing, Sarah,

about Republican operatives just sort of like figuring out where they're going on vacation. Yeah, they're already, like, drunk. Like, totally. It's like, well, we lost. Yeah, 100%. Well, and they're also doing something else right now, right? I mean, this is the earliest I can remember, Siri, you may have different recollections.

This is the earliest I can remember where we are seeing public finger pointing. You know, not always with a name attached to it, but I mean, we are seeing these leaks now from Republicans. I mean, some of it is from the Republican candidates themselves. How many leaks have we had? about Ken Paxton and surreptitiously taped audio. Yeah, but those are awesome. Saying, I blame the president. I blame this. I blame this.

I mean, the recriminations are happening. Wait, can I just tell you my favorite one? Look, Ken Paxton blaming the president, saying he doesn't run his own campaign. That actually sounds like, you know, that could have been any candidate, frankly. It just happened to be Ken Paxton because no one feels a lot of loyalty to keep his confidence. But my favorite was when Ken Paxton explained why he's not campaigning. and said that even if he talked to 10,000 voters a day, that would only be 40,000 voters out of a state with 35 million people.

And so what's the point? Wow. I missed that. Did you mean that? That's unbelievable. I loved it so much. It's hard. Can you imagine thinking that what it's to get people in front of you that are the matter?

Oh, my God. How does anybody ever win the presidency? How? Math, you guys. Oh, my God. So, but to your question, Sarah, about, like, what are these operatives thinking about the negative Trump effect? I do think that is something that they are concerned about, that they are worried about. You have seen it, not necessarily with Trump, but we saw it a couple of weeks ago when, in Iowa, when J.D.

Vance was campaigning in Iowa in Council Bluffs. And Ashley Henson, who is a competitive Senate candidate there, declined to appear with the vice president. Like that tells you and like that that tells you a lot. And I've heard that there is a big reason for that is because it is not helpful for a Republican to be associated with the White House right now. Like that's just what it is. Can I say something real quick about the finger pointed? Because it is happening. And by the way, just to be clear, Ken Paxton's a lot of things. Yeah. But he's not bad at math. It was a thousand voters a day would be 40,000, not 10,000 voters a day. I just misspoke. That was not him. That was me. That was you being bad at

The broader clear remains. The point stamps. She's a lawyer, folks. Not a math waste. Before we take a break, a quick heads up on an exciting evening of conversation. Please join me for an all-politics live stream of the dispatch podcast at 7 p.m. Eastern Monday, October 19th. How confident can we be that the 26 midterms will run smoothly?

Will Donald Trump seek to meddle in the election processes and vote counting? When will we know who won majority? in the House and Senate and what might keep us from understanding who was victorious. I'll be joined by election experts Stephen Richard and Mark Sawyer for answers to those questions and many others. Then our panel, including our own Jonah Goldberg, Mike Warren, and John McCormick will look at races likely to shape the majorities and how candidates in competitive races will make their closing arguments. Please join the Dispatch Podcast for what will be an informative and lively conversation about these very important midterm elections. 7 p.m. Eastern Monday,

October 19th. We'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Unlock unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same low no frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC Express Pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at no frills.ca. Hold music. Not exactly what you want to hear when a pipe just burst in your basement is flooding. And your vinyl collection is getting soaked. And your cat. And your cat just floated by on a sofa cushion? That's why intact insurance answers two million claim calls per year within 20 seconds. It's their way of going the extra mile to help. So instead of hearing this lovely track over and over and over, you'll hear this in seconds. Hello, intact insurance.

Now that's music to your ears. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sit. Play, post, taste, view, and enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So I reported four years ago on a story about Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott. Rick Scott was the head of the NRSC in this 2022 midterm.

And there was some finger pointing before the election, like about a month or so before. when it was thought that maybe Republicans were going to have a really bad night. It ended up not being as bad as they thought, but there was like some inter-Republican fighting and finger-pointing. And I remember just being kind of amazed that people were talking about this before the election. Like, this was kind of an incredible new phenomenon that these senators were really kind of behind the scenes people were pointing fingers. Now it's all out in the open.

And I just saw, speaking of a state where Trump is going to, he's going next week to North Carolina. That's a Senate race, which nobody thinks Republicans are going to win that seat. Major Republican outside groups have pulled their funding. Correct. Because Mike Watley is so uncompetitive in every poll. There was a new poll out yesterday by W.R.A.L. in Raleigh, that showed Roy Cooper up 14 points. Yes. This is the former Democratic governor who has, I don't know if he's ever lost a race in North Carolina. I know he's never lost a statewide race in North Carolina. He's very impressive Democratic. And that's a seat that Republicans are going to lose because Tom Tillis holds that seat and he's retiring.

But there was an interview with Watley's senior advisor, a guy that I've spoken with before. He's run statewide races before in North Carolina, a local interview in which they asked him basically about strategy. And this advisor said, well, they've got somebody else, basically trying to point the blame on a campaign that he's working on right now. They've got somebody else making a lot of those decisions. That speaks to, I think, the way in which Trump's... team has taken over a lot of these races and that grumbling you're hearing are local folks basically saying like, hey, we're washing our hands of this. This is all Trump and his political team's fault. But it's remarkable to hear the finger pointing now. Again, it's one of those things where

what are they doing and saying, not necessarily what the polls are saying, that can tell you a lot about the vibes and where people actually think the election is going. I think it's just worth pointing just real quick on the math thing i just gets worth pointing out because i was talking to people in in tulsa as i often do so trump's sort of generically depending on the state it's different right but he's at 32 percent 35 percent popularity so about a third of the favorability so about a third of the country likes him it means two-thirds don't that means two-to-one people dislike him or have the unfavorable view of them to like him. So when he goes out in these places and says,

imagine I am on the ballot, you have to think that he is going to attract more people. He thinks he's going to attract more people. I actually don't think the strategy is stupid on paper. I just think it's stupid in reality. But the idea that he is going to, I mean, I think was on here, maybe it was with Starwalt. But there's the, when Sarah can correct me,

She was, you know, in this business. But there's an old rule in political strategy that says, you got to do something. And so, like, they're doing something. But it's so obviously Trump's ego is driving this strategy more than facts on the ground because you just don't go around in some of these places where your approval ratings are so incredibly low and lean in. Like he said yesterday, the Iran War will end when I wanted to end, which is like not optimal when the Iran War is wildly unpopular.

And the actual argument for why he can't end is because he can't end it on favorable terms, which is a perfectly defensible reason to keep going. Especially coming from a guy who has claimed many times that he has already ended it. Right. That it's over that we won. I mean, this is. And that the other side's begging for a deal. just below up a container ship.

Anyway, the only point I'm trying to make is, like, I use this analogy a lot, but rarely has it been more apt, is that the Trump strategy is like the salesman who says, sure, we lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up for it in volume, right? The idea that they are attracting, in these swing areas, at least, more voters than they're repelling, more voters, you know, like I told you, there was that poll where they had, the first time they've ever seen this kind of intensity, number of a number of Americans who are unfavorable towards Trump was like 58% in the poll, but only 6% were somewhat and 53% were very unfavorable.

Like there were no somewhat unfavorables left, and the intensity of the disfavorable was just so unprecedented. The idea of going to Ohio in some of these places and reminding people of why they don't like the status quo and why all the Republicans kissed the president's ass just strikes me as something that there's going to be a lot of finger pointing on. And I feel bad for some of the people are going to get blamed because it was obviously Donald Trump's decision and not some consultant or anything like that. But just to underline the decision matrix here, Donald Trump will get blamed if they lose already. It doesn't matter what he does. He could sit

on his hands, live in a bunker, he will get blamed. So then it's like, okay, if you don't go to any of these states, you're going to get blamed anyway, and you didn't help anyone. So I think actually they're doing the correct thing for themselves, which is if you're going to get blamed anyway, get out there and campaign so that you can't get blamed. Own it. Own it, right? Like, yep. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, it was me. Like, who did this? We're looking for the guy who's responsible. We're still looking for the guy. He should campaign in a giant hot dog costume. Yeah. I think that's a fair point, although one of my sort of theories about the way Trump is doing this and why he's showing up and campaigning in places like Oklahoma is that it's as much about his need for attention and adulation as it is, you know, I think the White House political team can say, Mr. President, you're really needed in Texas to do this thing. That's why we had the convention there. You need to go and help get out the vote for Ken Paxton.

But I think as much of this is being driven by the president's just desire to be in front of people who love him and will shower him with applause. And in fact, when he gave a speech in Clarksville, Tennessee this weekend, there was a moment where the president said this out loud, said, I love coming here where people applaud me. I can say anything to you, even if it's stupid, and you will all applaud me. You'll shower me with applause. And I think it was an unintentional tell there. I want to go one level deeper on the consultant question, but I think if we're talking about stories that are being discussed on the dispatch podcast today and are likely to be big stories after the election,

certainly we'll see an escalation in the finger pointing and the blame shifting and all the rest. I think if the results go the way we think they will, whether it's a blue wavelet or it's a weird-ass wave or a really big tsunami-like wave. there's another element to this and it is the extent to which Trump's political world, meaning both his formal political advisors and people kind of in his orbit, are controlling who's running these races and who's making these decisions. I mean, they have elbowed out of the conversation and frankly out of a ton of business, Republican consultants who they deem insufficiently Trumpy. And you can imagine what it means

to be deemed insufficiently Trumpy. It means that you're not worshipping Donald Trump in the way that he's accustomed to. And, you know, I think while those consultants in that political class, the male people, the digital people, the media buyers, what have you, have not yet been outspoken about having been shunted aside, it's fair to assume that at some point they'll be willing to tell their stories. Mike, have you done any reporting on this? or is this track with what you're hearing?

I've got to be careful because I've had conversations along this line, but I can't really reveal any specifics. The bottom line is yes. The question I have is how much will they be willing to talk post-election? And look, I don't even blame them. Like, they've got businesses. They're trying to do what they can. This is their livelihood.

But I do think it is a part of a bigger problem that I'm trying to figure out kind of how to write about this and do some stuff that I can report. We talked a lot about sort of in the end of the Obama administration, beginning of the Trump administration, how so much of what Obama failed to do in his two terms in office would build a good bench for Democrats

and the way that the political operations of the Obama world kind of supplanted the Democratic Party's political operations and replaced it, and then there was nothing following that. I think you can see the Trumpy Republican version of that happening right now that I think there has been so much focus on Trump as, this is like it's almost not worth saying.

But on him being the end all be all of the Republican Party, the Republican Party is the Trump Party and there is no difference between them. And this trickles down to obviously, I think somebody mentioned something about the way Republican candidates kiss the ass of Trump, like that is a part of it, but also it is the operatives and pollsters and the people who are making money, but also doing the advising on this. So what happens next, I think, is I think we're going to see a similar kind of hollowing out that's already happening in many ways of the kind of Republican infrastructure,

because Trump is really not doing the things, has not done the things, to build out something that lasts beyond him. Right. For the party, I think that's an important distinction. The party. For the Republican Party, as opposed to for Trump. I mean, look, we've seen this here. If you go back and you look at the 2000 senatorial elections in Georgia.

This was about sort of Trump and who he wanted and who was going to help him. This is what we saw with Ken Paxton in Texas, with Trump choosing Ken Paxton over John Cornyn. I saw a report this week that $368 million had been spent so far on the Texas Senate race. of it in the general election contest that we're seeing now, resulting in the ads that you're seeing every time you watch college football. But an insane amount of money flooding into Texas, most of it from outside Republican groups, most of it in support of Ken Paxton, in ways that probably wouldn't have been necessary had John Cornyn been the candidate. And we've seen this again and again And again, where Trump picks people who thinks will be most loyal to his MAGA agenda rather than the easier candidate who would be, you know, a solid Republican vote, I think that's likely to continue and will be a big part of the sort of post hoc blame assignment.

Okay. All of that is true. But actually, it's not the most interesting part of Mike's point, which is the infrastructure of a political party. is actually think of like a tree underneath the ground. There's like big roots and little roots and like fractals all over the place and there is basically a whole tree under the ground, the same way that you see a whole tree above the ground. When we're talking about Ken Paxton and money coming into Texas, we're talking about the tree above the ground.

But when you think about Obama and the Democratic Party from 2008 to 2016, he poisoned the tree under the ground. Democrats lost a thousand state house seats over the course of his presidency. They basically ended the DNC as a thing, right? All data and digital operations moved over to Obama for America and then organizing for America in the second term so that when Obama left office in 2017, there was no Democratic party apparatus.

And they had hollowed out their bench, like Mike said. those are all the root systems that's bringing water to the main tree. It was a huge, huge problem. And this is why, I mean, Jonah and I, like, go on and on about this all the time, how the 2002 Campaign Finance Act ended political parties. It ended the ability of the political parties to fight back separately against their own candidates to sort of have an autoimmune response. And Obama, by 2008, it was taking advantage of that. And so to fast forward to now, of course the same thing is happening

to the Republican Party because it just makes sense. It's in the candidate's interest to kill off a separate entity that may not be perfectly aligned with them and they don't really care what happens afterwards. So it's not just that these candidates

might win this time, might not win this time, or that there might be a way of election. It's if the Republican National Committee does not have the data and digital infrastructure for 2028, for 2030, Republicans are at an enormous disadvantage against the Democratic Party moving forward. And there's not much you can do about that except rebuild slowly, which is what the Democratic Party had to do. And then back and forth, you go as one person controls these parties for a term or two of the White House. But this is true

with the operative level, the money level, all of these things. I mean, I said this back in 2016, that Donald Trump was killing off a generation of Republican operatives who actually knew their state and knew sort of the political science of the day and replaced them with people who were grifters and were pretty bad at what they did. They're winning elections because of the electorate. They're not winning elections because of the ground game, let's say. And at some point, you might need a ground game.

So this is a point well beyond. the election in three weeks. But there's all sorts of reasons for Republicans down-ticket Republicans to be really nervous about what comes next for the party in 2030. Yeah, I kind of wrote about this yesterday. There's a whole generation of people

who think that they're really good at politics now or a half-generation, right? A decade's worth of people who came of age who think they're really good at politics when all they've been doing is drafting behind Donald Trump's celebrity, you know, cult of personality stuff. Donald Trump, you know, defies the laws of normal politics, but these guys think, oh, no,

it's really that they're a brain trust and they've figured out the secret sauce. Right. And they're going around. I mean, you look at someone like Beau French, you know, this whole Indian question thing that has been launched in here. You think, like, Republicans are well situated to have Gavin Wax-type gibronies who, like, or Jack Posobiac, who Pete Higgseth wants to impress. So he talks about live streaming public executions too, right?

The orientation of a big chunk of the, so the apparatchik class of the Republican Party is full of people who are actually pretty, well, just not that bright and who think that, like, being racist or sexist or own the libs jackasses is a permanent philosophy of politics. And they also just don't have any of the experience, right? They're actually political novices. who have picked up their political acumen from, you know, Twitter online attention economy stuff. They've never actually worked in a campaign. They've not done any, like, they don't know how a campaign operates.

In any sort of real sense of the term, their armchair political operatives for the most part. Yeah. Or flunkies or people who couldn't get bigger jobs on other campaigns. I mean, I think the first and most obvious person, who fits this description as Corey Lewandowski, who was sort of a failed political operative in New Hampshire. People didn't want him on competitive campaigns and, you know, worked his way into Trump world in 2016, 2015, 2014, and became sort of the guy was running Trump. And, you know,

I think there were a lot of other people who helped Trump get elected in 2016, but Corey Lundowski sort of floated on that and made a career of it and talk about a grifter. I mean, this is sort of Griff Central. I think this is one of the hardest things to explain to people who don't do what we do for a living because either we're covering this or Sarah, you've worked in in this world. And to a certain extent, it sounds, if you're skeptical of Trump, don't like Trump, I think he's been bad for the country as I do, it sounds sour grapesy. Like, oh, these are not the people I, you know, have covered for years and think are really smart. And so now I'm just going to take shots at these other people because they've been successful and, you know, Trump has won twice and

he's built this whole movement. But it really is the case. And we saw this, I would say, in the starkest way possible this week with the ouster of Kimberly Gilfoyle, former Fox News personality or the White House press secretary. We're going to get to that. Also, just keep your eyes on those redistricted districts, especially the ones in Texas, that started this whole The first domino to fall was that we needed to redraw the districts in Texas so we could win more districts in Texas. And remember, Texas operatives, people who knew the state said, don't do this. It's a mistake. And they pushed back.

And then the Trump team steamrolled them and insisted on redrawing the districts. Now they're going to lose those districts. Why? It's not just because they were bad at redrawing the districts, though you can argue that point. it's that at some point when you have movements in the electorate going back and forth you can't draw a district that precisely

to win it by 10 votes for sure, right? It's a misunderstanding of how campaigns and actual ground operations work and the people who understood how it worked said don't do this and the people who sit on Twitter said why wouldn't we squeeze out

five more seats out of Texas and let's see what happens, right? In three weeks we will find out whether that was a mistake the mistake is losing any of those districts, because frankly, again, it set out this domino effect around the country where everyone, every state then felt like

it needed to redistrict mid-cycle. And you're not going to put that toothpaste back in the tube, and it's a mess. Can I say something? One more thing, Steve, about, I like Sarah's metaphor here of the tree under the ground, the parts of the roots and things. One thing that is really not well understood

by most people, and frankly even by political reporters, like myself, I try to do this and I want to kind of return to this as a subject, are local, political party committees and the people who do the real grunt work of getting people out to vote, county parties, certainly state parties, but also county parties, county party committees, these sorts of things. The story of the last decade has been the takeover of these groups by kind of, I would call them political tourists, right? The people who are really, the kind of people who show up to every Trump event in their state, you know,

and are really excited and interested and engaged by Trump, who in many cases have ousted people whose sort of reason for being is to elect Republicans and they know things about the different precincts and they do the work on that sort of thing. And I have talked to people in the last decade who have stayed in those offices who are frustrated by just, the kind of nuts and bolts of campaigning, I think that's a place to kind of watch for the kind of upheaval from the Trump era. Like how many of those are taken back over by people who aren't necessarily anti-Trump, but just people who know how campaigns run and are not those political tourists.

Or are emboldened or have basically done what we would all describe probably as party work, but have not sort of gone all in on the MAGA agenda. I spoke with one of these people who leads a county party in Florida not long ago. And this person described sort of not being enthusiastic about Trump, but being in this position where it was necessary to do that kind of work. But the advice that this person had given, whether it was, you know, should we do a rally on this Saturday to gin up support for Trump, whatever, was just routinely ignored by the sort of parallel apparatus that was kind of Trump world. And the Trump world people were seen as

sort of higher ranking or had more authority than the others. The other conversation I'll just mention is I had a conversation with a former elected Republican, reasonably well known, operates in a, in a, what we would all consider to be a battleground state who said to me and meant literally that when he had started his political career, when he'd first run for office years ago, and now today where he's no longer in office, he doesn't know any of the county chairman in his state. He's active.

He still campaigns for candidates, all of these things. He doesn't know any of the county chairman in his state because they've all been turned over. It's all a new group. Before we move to Not Worth Your Time, time today. I want to spend a moment on race. We haven't talked much about. And let me do it this way. If you go to the Real Clear Politics Senate polling headquarters, they've got nine battleground states. As of this morning, we're recording on Thursday. Each of those states,

look, it's imprecise. We all understand that this is an approximation. There are more methodologically sound ways to do this, but this gives you just a sense of trends and where things are going. In the battle for Senate, in Texas, the Democrats up 2.6. Ohio, up 3.1. Michigan up 2.7. Iowa, the closest race, up 0.9. Maine, up 1.3. New Hampshire, up 6.7. Alaska, up 1.4. Georgia up 8.1, North Carolina, up 9.5. So these are, this is the tally, the averaging of polls that have been taken. And it paints obviously a pretty good picture for Democrats. We have also, Mike, you mentioned Montana earlier. Seems like a real long shot, but there's,

they're interesting dynamics in that race. We have in the past two weeks talked about Nebraska and the fact that the president felt the need to go there was was brought there, I think, by local Republicans. Kansas seems to be, however, and probably a potentially competitive race, Adam Hamilton against incumbent Republican Roger Marshall. And there's one way we haven't really talked much about. And I want to get your thoughts on this one. And that is South Carolina.

I don't think any of us under any circumstances would have predicted, certainly not when Senator Lindsey Graham was alive. Would we be talking about Lindsey Graham losing two? But Lindsey Graham passed away. his sister, Darlene Graham Nordone, has taken his seat on what was thought to be a temporary basis until Donald Trump endorsed her in a race that she did not know she was running. It was a competitive Republican primary. She emerged from that primary, barely, with the president's endorsement.

And now there's not a lot of great polling on this. But again, if you judge the competitiveness of the race by some combination of the limited polling that we see, how the candidates and the campaigns and the Republicans generally are behaving, it seems that there might be a competitive race in South Carolina of all place, where she's running, Graham Nordone is running against Dr. Annie Andrews. Barton Swam, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal, former colleague of mine at the Weekly Standard, has written twice on this race, former colleague of yours as well, Mike, at the Weekly Standard.

And he says, is Graham Nordone probably going to win? Yeah, she's probably going to win. But she's in trouble. He quotes former GOP chair in the state, Kate and Dawson is saying she's in trouble. And this is genuinely a competitive race. Sarah, when you look at South Carolina, is there any chance?

I mean, they know the state. Well, these people have worked in state for years in South Carolina Republican politics. This is not, this is not their silly or something. But let me go back to the tree that Mike likes so much. If James Talleyago wins Texas, it will be because of the roots that Betta O'Rourke planted back in 2018. It's very, very hard to come into a one-party state and win, even when you have a good candidate on one side and a bad candidate on the other side, all of a sudden. Because you don't have the infrastructure to actually be able to even spend the money wisely.

Right? You don't have someone out in that county, and it's really hard to get that person in a four-month time period who can then get up to speed quickly. Money doesn't fix that problem for you. And so in a state like Texas that looks like a one-party state, kind of, but actually Democrats have been building that root system. And Betta O'Rourke planted a lot, a lot, a lot of roots back in 2018. He came within three points of Ted Cruz, which I don't think is that close, actually. But what he built, in all 254 counties in Texas, lasted and outlasted him, and he has really watered that plant for the last several cycles. South Carolina doesn't have that. So unless you're telling me that it's like a blowout, it would be very, very hard for the Republican candidate in this case to lose. And when I talk to Republican operatives at the national level, yeah, they're like, look, it's not great out there, but we think we staunched the bleeding. and I think they're probably right. I think it'll be closer than it should be,

but at the end of the day, in order for her to lose, the wave will have to be in that, you know, six, seven, eight point range. Although I want to say, I think that's right, but my point about anti-incumbency,

if whatever intensity it has in South Carolina, Graham is not benefiting from it, right? Because the idea of pointing, appointing a, senators you know lindsay graham had a tense relationship with some elements of the republican party already and and he was really an insider guy rather than a you know an outsider guy he pretended otherwise to put his sister as a dynastic thing in there feels really that you know it's precisely the kind of thing that invites anti-incumbency spirit right it's like this idea oh it's just an

insider thing on good terms with Trump. Trump wants her, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can see how that would, I think that will, at the very minimum, lesson turnout that a generic, a different generic Republican would have gotten. Totally great. Yeah. Is it possible? Is there such a thing as Miracle Grow in this kind of a scenario where she's elbowed out, I mean, the MAGA world, again, going looking at MAGA consultants, elbowed out several ambitious, more traditional conservatives, all of them various stripes of MAGA, right, or willing to say that they were various kinds of MAGA. But, you know, these were competitive primaries,

not because she was a good candidate and made them competitive. She had multiple cringe moments, including the one about that we've talked about here before on the debate stage where she was asked a very generic question by Greta Van Sustrin, now with Newsmax about, you know, basically are there threats to the United States in the South China Sea or something? Should we be worried about what's happening in the South China Sea? And she said, I don't really know national security.

I don't pay attention to it. She had another debate this week. I watched much of it. And she did not, I would say, have one of those moments again. But she had this tick where she returned repeatedly to the bill that the Senate passed honoring her late brother. allowing for the president to impose sanctions. And she just kept going back to that and really did not sound like she knew

what she was talking about. Jonah, is there, I mean, taking Sarah's point, I think that she's right about that. And Kate and Dawson in this article by Barton Swain says, just the fact that South Carolina has read a state as it has always been is probably worth, what did you say, 10 to 15 points without anybody doing anything.

Right. Is it possible if she doesn't, Benef-I mean, there's not this anti-incumbency dynamic working for her? Yeah, I mean. Possible that we wake up that day and she's gone? I think it would be a big, big deal. I mean, like, you know, when you go to the, I assume they have the same thing in parts of South Carolina,

but we know when you go to North Carolina, like the outer banks, they have all those houses on the beaches that are built way up on stilts, right, to deal with occasional hurricane flooding and that kind of stuff. That's sort of how I think about this wave stuff. is that there are a certain place, the waves hit it going everywhere, but places like South Carolina are built really high up on a stilt. And so the wave would have to be so much bigger. This is why we call it a wave.

Right. If it's a four-foot wave, it's not going to get anything that sits at six feet. If it's an eight-foot wave, that's six-footer, like, is swamped. That's the wave analogy. Yeah. And so, like, do I think it's possible we get, again, to use my very technical term from political science, weird-ass wave in South Carolina that has that has to do with the unique circumstances of her being a bad candidate who checks a bunch of boxes that are like there are a bunch of these things

that are like emerging and polling in the last three weeks I was talking to somebody who's talking about how the corruption thing all of a sudden is breaking through in big parts of the country right so putting your crony friend you know the sister of your deborough it kind of scratches a little of the corruption thing, right? It feels like another of the insider thing. I don't know what the data center stuff, how it's playing in South Carolina, but like in a lot of places, it's scrambling the map. And so do I think it's possible that South Carolina doesn't send a Republican senator, Republican to the Senate? Yeah, it just, it would be one of the bigger surprises of election night, I think. Undoubtedly.

To just put a button on this stilts and wave metaphor. I mean, the other option here is that the wood that builds the stilts is rotting. And even a wave that isn't that big. Because Trump poisoned the trees from the forest that they made the wood. The trees were made for the stilts were made from the trees that are gone. So that's like a Georgia, Texas argument that the state isn't one-party state anymore. Totally, totally, totally. So I don't think that is the case in South Carolina.

I will just say for to be as fulsome as possible of building the case, that I don't agree with that a Democrat could win in South Carolina. Two things. One, which is, this is necessary but not sufficient for Democrats to win. There is the black voter infrastructure, right? Get out the voter infrastructure, which is, you have

to win as a Democrat, like you have to kind of maximize the black vote. And so that is, that exists. It is not as robust as it had been in years past when there was the sort of alliance between black voters and Southern Democrats in South Carolina that electing people like Fred's Hollings.

But also, I think there's some new reporting that a combined, it's almost, it's like $900,000 in ads, almost a million dollars from two groups in a house race. In the house race, which is essentially the Charleston and coastal district that Nancy Mace used to, or Nancy Mace currently represents, she's not running for re-election. So a combined $900,000 from CLF and the NRCC and Jenny Honeycutt, who is the Republican candidate running in that seat, all combined for that amount of money. They're spending right now in that district. I think that's something to watch. This is a part of the state that if people are going to be traditional Republicans who maybe split their ballot and vote for a Democrat for Senate out of an anti-incumbency thing or they just didn't like the way this all worked, it will be in the coastal part of the state, in the low country. These are people who are, like, they are not going to MAGA rallies. They are Republicans, but they're not going to MAGAR rallies.

I could see that happening. I think Andrews is, like, kind of the perfect candidate for that type of voter. And I just don't think it'll be enough. But these are things to watch for. If we do wake up and it's like, wow, I can't believe. Even in South Carolina, it will be a combination of those two things and depressed Republican turnout that do it. And she is running as the most Republican-friendly.

Democrat, you can possibly imagine calling for a balanced budget amendment, lower taxes, second amendment. I mean, she's portraying herself to voters as very Republican-friendly. I do want to, we got to move on, but I want to come back to the corruption thing. I think that is the secret huge issue here. And I think in so many ways, people have seen headline after headline after headline about some of the corruption that they're seeing come out of Washington, particularly come out of the White House, in ways that everybody can understand.

It's not subtle corruption. It's obvious and kind of, if it weren't so serious, silly, funny corruption, like the guy who's running the teleprompter for the president and loading his speeches in there, betting on words that were going to be in the president's speeches. It's half a billion dollars right before the election to trump interests. Warren is all over Polly Market before the recording of the dispatch podcast, and he's got, like, How many times will they use a tree metaphor and he's going to collect? Big money to be made there.

But I want to return to that because I think that is a huge issue. There was a Gallup poll that came out in early September that said 89% of American voters, registered voters, I believe it was, are concerned about corruption and what they're seeing. And it was this this massive spike in the number of people who said they're concerned. New Fox News poll, by the way, just real quickly says the same thing, 88%. It's the number one issue that they asked registered voters corruption in government is the thing they're either extremely or very concerned about. And my theory, one of my theories about why Donald Trump's attempt to give $5,000 to individual taxpayers if they would just keep Republicans in the majority didn't work is because most people see that and recognize it as corruption. Because it is corruption.

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music to your ears. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Finally, I searched in vain for a self-indulgent food-related, not worth your time topic just because we have Sarah here. And now that we're on video, people watching on YouTube, you can see, you could see her reactions when she gets frustrated with me. if I'm talking about, you know, grilling something or some best meal ever. Broughtwurst? Brought worst. Lots of brought worst mustard. We should probably put in the show notes, the, from the top rope response that you did.

I'm for doing that. Maybe we should put that out on social media, too. That'd be great. Put it on the front page of the website. Why not, you know? Do an AI recreation video of the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah.

But what was great about it was that Sarah was such a good sport about the whole thing. We couldn't do one of those, though. We have to do this question. There's one topic that we could possibly talk about. And the question I will put to you before providing little context is, Sarah, what is a lawyer? Oh, my God. The new White House press secretary has told people for years that she's a lawyer, variously describing yourself as a lawyer, as a general counsel. There's a fantastic article in the New York

Times by Sean McCreech, who I think is one of my favorite writers. He writes for the New York Times and he manages to be, to have a ton of personality. He's a phenomenal writer, even in the sort of constraints of the New York Times, old gray lady style. And the headline on his terrific piece is Trump's new press secretary, not quite attorney at law. So the contrary. So the contrary, Sarah, I'll let you explain the controversy, but can you tell us what is a lawyer? And is she, in fact, a lawyer? So the answer to this question is, it doesn't f and matter. Look, the controversy comes from the fact that some English teachers will tell you that a lawyer is someone who graduated from law school, but an attorney is someone who is licensed to practice law. No doubt that is a

distinction in language usage, but it's irrelevant. What matters is that we have criminal statutes about this if you hold yourself out with whatever words you want. As someone who is licensed to give legal advice, you have committed an offense. In some states, it's a criminal offense, in some states it would be a civil offense, whatever. So, for instance, I am licensed to practice law, by the state of Texas, if I'm in the state of Massachusetts, as I am currently, and I give someone legal advice,

or hold myself out as someone who is able to give legal advice, I have broken the law in Massachusetts. These things matter a great deal. Courts can sanction you, as I said, in some jurisdictions it's actually criminal. So, if she's calling herself a lawyer on TV, but like, I'm a lawyer, and that's why I like the color blue.

I don't know, like maybe it's an interesting political fight about whether she is or isn't a lawyer, but it doesn't actually matter. What it sounds like, though, is that perhaps in some of these jurisdictions, she was holding herself out as someone who was licensed to practice law, and she was not. So to call yourself a general counsel, for instance, of a company and provide them legal advice, even if all you're doing is managing outside counsel. If people believed at that company that you were licensed to give legal advice, you broke the law, which you might know if you were a lawyer.

So on LinkedIn, in her LinkedIn profile, apparently she described herself as general counsel of an outfit called Fix California, which is led by Trump loyalist and U.S. Uber grifter Richard Grinnell, former Fox News colleague. And that's all fine. Is that okay? So she sat for the bar in California, the Wall Street Journal reported and did not pass the bar. Can she do this? Yeah, yeah.

It doesn't matter what she listed on LinkedIn. Like, you're not getting legal advice from her LinkedIn page. What matters is in that company, was she providing advice that could have been reasonably perceived as advice coming from someone licensed to practice law. Does that make sense? So like Rick Grinnell may have thought she had a law license. It doesn't matter whether you looking at her LinkedIn page thought she had a law license, though,

unless she's giving you legal advice or something that could be perceived as legal advice. So, I mean, Jonah, she's not White House counsel. We're not talking about her in that context. She is the White House press secretary, whose job basically is to describe well the president's policies and motivations for policy to parry difficult questions about the president. But even going back to White House press secretaries who famously danced around the truth,

there's some certain expectation that you'll be telling the truth. She started her tenure there when she was asked on Tuesday at a White House press briefing, or at least the set aside, where she passed the bar. Response twice was when I moved to China. So she didn't actually answer the question directly. And it was an obvious kind of non-sequitur. So Sean McRech reached her on Wednesday evening and told the New York Times that this was all big of misunderstanding. She said, quote, I assumed the question was, quote,

where were you after law school? She told the New York Times. That's all I could hear over the sound of Marine One. And wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president kept me from moving closer to hear the question. Now, that sounds like a lawyer. It's just, yeah, it does stuff like a lawyer, actually.

That's a good point. I would say she's off to an inauspicious start along the lines of Sean Spicer's beginning when in one of his first press briefings, he repeatedly lied about the size of Trump's crowd when we had pictures of the inaugural crowd. Have we got to the point where this just doesn't really matter because there are such low expectations with a White House press secretary that they're going to tell the truth? No, Steve, it doesn't matter because the job of White House. press secretary doesn't make sense in the year 2026 anymore. So this isn't a job that has gone back

forever, right? It's a relatively modern job to begin with. It existed when we sort of wanted to save the president's time to do president things, and you needed someone to actually brief the press and answer questions on behalf of the president without wasting his time all day. Now, you can just use your phone, take a video of the president, put it on social media. What is the purpose of a press secretary, and this is not beating up on Trump's press secretaries. I think Biden's press secretary will go down as the single least effective press secretary in the history, the hundred year or so history of White House press secretaries. She was really, really bad at that job, but it didn't matter that much because we don't need White House press secretaries. But if we just take your

definition of why you need a White House press secretary, you don't need one because you can just take a video and post it on social media, then do we really need journalists either? A great question, Steve. Don't answer that. What is a journalist? The journalists do a separate thing. But when the press secretary's job was to communicate the president's message through reporters to the public, yeah, that part no longer needs journalists.

Journalists do something else other than just communicating the president's message to the public. But what does the press secretary do? But Jonah, if the job is to communicate the president's message to the public and the president is a well-known liar, isn't it appropriate to have somebody in the White House press secretary position who is also an accomplished liar? Yes, but she'll get better at lying, you know. In fact, she'll just get better, right? She's not going to get worse. I think we can all agree on that. I think what people are missing here is, not to go all Marshall McLuhan, she is the message.

Like, she was picked... Whoa. Well, no, is it like she was... I was saying, just took my bong hit. No, no, that's true. Wow. She was not... Look, I am fairly confident

that I could drive a five-inch nail into Scott Jennings' forehead and he could walk out with still protruding and do a better job of selling the White House's agenda and message of the day, than this woman can. Like, this is MAGA affirmative action of the highest order. She's very easy on the eyes.

She's straight out of central casting. This is what they, what Trump values, what Trump is, he is descending into full-time reality television show casting. And nowhere is that more true than with, the White House press secretary. And that's what he wants to put out there. I think it's, you know, it's a little bit like the, Roger Ailes watching TV with the sound off thing.

He just likes the idea that the hostess for, you know, Mara White House is a very attractive blonde. And he doesn't think it matters beyond that, really, because he's his own press secretary, as sort of Sarah's saying. I do just want to point out, since we talked about the sort of the really shabby, low-quash- quality corruption that's going on since you name-checked Rick Grinnell. I don't know what the truth of this is, but Axios is reporting today that Alina Haba, a woman who I do think can claim to be a lawyer, but maybe was not picked to be in Trump's orbit entirely for her legal skills.

She claims that her billionaire husband, fiancé, or something like that, gave Rick Grinnell millions of dollars for the Kennedy Center, which he was on the board of. And Grinnell never deposited the checks into the Kennedy Center account. And so this is actually reporting that there's just missing millions of Kennedy Center money. Grinnell denies the accusation or the insinuation. But like, I just don't see Jim Baker running a White House that would have these. sorts of issues in it, you know, Rahm Emanuel.

Like, it's, uh, it's going to be an interesting post-midterm political environment. Mike, she is a well-known, I mean, maybe not that well known, but she is a enthusiastic purveyor of conspiracy theories, but the president in announcing her appointment, I think was again, candid about why she was chosen. She has a, quote, unblemished record of support. and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter right from the beginning. Yep. That's the requirement.

That's the requirement. I don't know what else there is to say. Although I will say, you know, Caroline Levitt, whatever you want to say about Caroline Levitt's approach to the job, like, she was poised and... She was excellent at the job. Yeah, she was good. She was great at the job, is my point, yes.

And I just don't expect that from Ms. Zachariah. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was great at the job. by the way. She was. She was good at the job. It undermines. She was better than Sean. Well, okay.

I know. We don't have to go there. But like, she wasn't out of central casting, but she was very good at the job for Donald Trump. Can I go back to the original conversation here? Because, Sarah, while we have you here, so I understand the difference between a lawyer and an attorney. What is a, what is a, what is counsel?

What is a barrister? And what is Esquire really? Like, what's going on with all these words? Like, this is, this is why I'm suspicious of lawyers in general. They've got all these names for themselves, and nobody knows what they mean. This is why I'm trying to tell you that the word that she uses doesn't matter. She says she was given that advice. That is an, you know, entomological point.

The point is whether a reasonable person would think that you were holding yourself out as someone who was licensed to practice law in a state. Okay. I will just note for the record you did not answer the Esquire question. and we'll just leave it at that, I guess. I think an Esquire is a young gentleman in England who is landed, you know, by birth. I think that's a squire.

Oh, shit. Well, I appreciate each of you joining us. All of you, reasonable people, for joining us for this enlightening conversation. Sarah, great to have you back. We will be tapping your expertise again before the elections and on a yet-to-be-announced election night special if you can.

find the time with all of your other obligations and responsibilities. Stay tuned for further news on all of that. Thanks. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice, which helps new listeners find us. And for those of you who want to watch the show, please check us out on YouTube.

Head over to www.w.com slash at the dispatch pods. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even emails from very accomplished grifters. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes. Who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure.

Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time. Unlimited free grocery delivery with PC Express Pass. Shop online and get the same low No Frills prices delivered. Get your first year of PC Express Pass for just $2.50 a month. Learn more at no frills.ca. Hold music. Not exactly what you want to hear when a pipe just burst in your basement is flooding.

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