The Dispatch Podcast - A Time and a Place for Pettiness

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

In a compressed panel of election punditry, Sarah is joined by Kevin and Andrew to discuss Democrats’ preemptive blame game. They also try to wrestle with what it might mean for the country if abortion doesn’t play the big role in the midterms Democrats had hoped it would. Also: 2024… should we start talking about it? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. We're here with a special lineup. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, and we've got Kevin Williamson, newly joined to the dispatch family and Andrew Eger, associate editor at the dispatch. We've got plenty to talk about today, per usual. We're going to talk about how to think about a subject like abortion in the midterms and what effect it has and what it will mean after the midterms as well, a look at sort of the pre-narrative.

on the midterm elections. And lastly, maybe just some speculation on what's going on in both parties as they're thinking about 2024. And yes, all the operatives already looking to 2024. Let's dive right in. Kevin, let's start with. with a preliminary question, which is how do we determine whether and how abortion is actually a factor in the midterm elections? You know, if Stacey Abrams was going to lose by 10, but then only loses by six, and it was abortion, how will we actually know that instead of just saying, like, well, Stacey Abrams lost, therefore the abortion messaging didn't work? Yeah, I think it's essentially impossible to really say in a very strong way, even retrospectively, how big of an

issue it was, because every election is unique and they all have their particular eccentricities. So while there may be, you know, some effect on democratic turnout among people who really, really care about abortion rights to the extent that it actually influences any particular electoral outcome, it may be something counterintuitive. For instance, it seems to be hurting Raphael Warnock as an issue. So if abortion ends up being the thing that really shapes the Senate majority, it will have done so in a way that wasn't expected. But one thing we do know is that almost no voters are single issue abortion voters. It's something like 5%.

People who put abortion as their top issue. It's a pretty low-rated issue among people. And those voters, for the most part, aren't up for grabs. They tend to be very committed partisans who are not going to switch from voting on one side of the because they're upset about inflation or foreign policy or something like that. So I have my doubts that it is an important issue, particularly in congressional races. I think that presidential campaigns, which are much more, you know, culture war, proxy wars, it probably matters a bit more than it does in House races or even in Senate races.

But I don't know that there's any very strong way to evaluate it. And yet, Andrew, I feel like every. and will. I mean, it really annoyed me, for instance, after the Glenn Yonkin win in Virginia in 2021, when basically everyone just decided that whatever the candidates ran their ads on was why they won or lost those elections, without sort of any other evidence. Like, well, you ran TV ads on that, and then you won an election. When again, in fact, like, the margin is what matters. It's whether voters switched sides, as Kevin talked about, that's one way to win an election on an issue, or voters turned out to vote who were otherwise going to stay home. And as Kevin said,

you know, the voters who have abortion as their number one issue, both aren't up for grads between Republicans and Democrats, but also are high turnout voters. And considering 2018 was an incredibly high turnout election, 2020 was a very high turnout election. It's hard to think of who those voters are who would turn out just on this issue and we're not going to turn out otherwise. But I'm still stuck because at the end of this election, everyone is going to want to know what affect this issue had. And you look at something like the Kansas ballot referendum from the summer. And that's something where we got some real data. You know, in Kansas, there was very high turnout, unexpectedly high turnout on that ballot measure. It's pretty clear that a hundred

thousand or so Republicans voted against the ballot measure, which would have put additional restrictions on abortion. On the other hand, status quo does really well in ballot measures, i.e. if your ballot measures trying to change something, which generally all ballot measures are, it comes in with like a five to 10 percent deficit because people are like, I don't know, like, why would I change something? Seems okay right now. Also, Kansas is a weird state, has a Democratic governor, just because a state votes a certain way at the presidential level, doesn't tell you a whole lot about how the state works. In fact, I saw this really cool stat that only five states in the last 20 years have had unified single-party statewide office

holders and presidential. So most states actually sort of have you know, a little more nuanced to their politics. So, Andrew, what's the thing you'll be looking at the day after the election when someone asks you, did abortion make a difference? Well, the good news is we're going to have at least one more Kansas-esque data point. That's just a hard and fast question on that, which is there's a constitutional amendment being proposed to the state constitution in Kentucky, where essentially they now have very restrictive abortion laws that have been passed in the last couple of years that have now been able to go into effect after Dobbs, but a lot of these new laws are being challenged before the state Supreme Court, basically just trying to

reestablish a right to an abortion on state constitutional grounds, sort of parallel to the one that was established on federal constitutional grounds under Ovi-Waid, and Republicans in the state have put forward these ballot initiatives that basically say nothing in our, be an amendment to the Constitution, to say nothing in this can be construed as having a right to an abortion. So it's another just kind of straight up or down question, a little more straightforwardly phrased also than the Kansas measure. So that'll be interesting. I do think that, I mean, I have been clinging to like a particular kind of narrative hobby horse on all of this, which is that one, you can see why there is like a big upheaval to conventional wisdom of the sort that you guys are talking about, about, you know, abortion's effect on motivating new voters and things like that in the wake of a decision like Dobbs. that really does kind of cause upheaval in the policy regime all over the country.

I mean, you have a lot of people who have, it's pushed to the forefront of their mind in a way that it hasn't been before. But you also kind of have to map that against how bad people are feeling about kind of inflation and economic issues at any given point in time. And I don't think it's an accident that, you know, the moment when we got so much of the narrative of, wow, Dobbs is really energizing Democrats, and it was coming right out of Kansas, and it was coming as polls were swinging a little bit back, Democrats' way, was also during the kind of brief-ish period where the economic indicators were starting to look better, and you

weren't getting, you know, Joe Biden slammed every day on gas prices and inflation, and gas was creeping down again. So I think that, you know, in an environment where, in an environment where the economic indicators are less strong, driving motivation for voters less, which maybe will be, you know, one cycle from now, two cycles from now. Whenever we get one of those where Republicans and Democrats are seen roughly equivalent on some of these like core kitchen table issues, that will probably be a better election to get a really good crystallized sense of what the new kind of abortion median is.

There's also that ballot measure in Michigan, which is going to be the reverse. right, it's going to codify a state constitutional right to an abortion in that state. So we'll be able to sort of compare those to some extent. But I think on the candidate stuff, it's really hard because to me it doesn't matter. The worst thing you can do is look at how hard a candidate ran on the abortion issue and whether they won or lost and say that that then tells you something about where voters are on abortion without any baseline to go from. One thing that's probably worth noting is that with all these, you know, state ballot measures and such, is that abortion is very much a life issue at the level of state legislatures. Even in Texas, you have Republicans in the legislature saying, well, maybe it's time to revisit our trigger law because, you know, in Texas has this very close to absolute ban on abortion that was put in place before the Dobbs decision.

and Republicans are finding that, I think, politically difficult for them. And so there is talk of, you know, of opening that up for debate. And there's already, you know, Texas Right to Life is ready to stage primary challenges to some Republicans over this. It's going to be a very, very live issue in the state legislatures, which is another way of saying that Dobbs did what it was supposed to do. You know, we always talked about returning the issue to the states. Well, now it's been returned to the states. And it looks like that's where it's actually going to be fought out politically. All right.

So now let me ask a different version of this question, Kevin, which is, let's assume that Democrats underperform where the polling has them right now, that Republicans take, they take back the Senate and the House, but potentially take back the Senate with 52 seats. So, for instance, they win in both Nevada and Georgia while holding on to. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina. What does that do to the abortion conversation in the country? Like, how do Democrats react to that? And frankly, like, how do Republicans react to that?

Yeah, it's kind of funny. I was reading Lisa Lair's midterms right up in the New York Times. And it begins with this really odd, to my mind, disquisition on these are not normal times with the country still reeling from COVID-19 and the Capitol riot and the Dobbs decision. And I just read through that. I think, does anyone really think this election

is going to be very much influenced by COVID aftermath, January 6th, and probably not very much by Dobbs either? So I think there was a kind of, well, I know there was a concerted effort to try to make this election a kind of proxy national referendum on the abortion question. And I think that Democrats were very invested in doing that when they thought they were going to do reasonably well. And now that they think they're not going to probably do that well and may, in fact, even underperform their polls, I think that the morning after the election, it'll be, we're never talking about abortion. No one had anything to do with abortion.

This is all about, you know, all about inflation. And because inflation is an issue that unless something really, really terrible happens, will eventually go away and resolve itself. whereas the abortion fight is going to be there for a long, long time. So I kind of expect to see Democrats walking away from the issue sort of sideways after the election if they do poorly. I think that the one thing that we can say is that the effort to, you know, make a kind of national rally around the issue failed and sputtered. And that seems to be the case irrespective of whether Democrats underperform or overperform their

other polls. Yeah, I mean, Andrew, after we just finished saying, there's really not going to be a great way the day after the election, at least, to break down the effect abortion had. I still feel like both political party zeitgeist will very much be affected by that. And again, assuming that Democrats underperform, I think you could see, as Kevin said, Democrats backing away from the issue, you know, saying it was always going to be about inflation. You know, we tried our best, but what are you going to do? But I could also see Republicans getting overly bullish that somehow the country is with them on abortion, which will also be a fact-free statement. Obviously, you could see that happen, right? And you almost certainly will see that happen, certainly scattered throughout some state legislatures and things like that. I do think that one of the lessons that a lot of the kind of pro-life groups and particularly pro-life legislators took away from the like initial Dobbs backlash was, okay, okay, we really need to.

at least do some triangulating for where people actually are on these questions. We can't agitate for a national ban. And we actually all ought to get on the same page as to like what are kind of across the board conservative but not so conservative that we alienate like 90 percent of the voters is going to look like. And what that essentially looked like was the Lindsey Graham 15 week limit bill, which is, you know, if Republicans see that basically across the board as kind of like a place to to a place to get on, get on board with the thing and, and a place to start. I'm not sure there's

enormous political downsides to, to keeping things right there, you know, which is all right, I mean, you, you still get to kind of bill it as like fearless swashbuckling legislating. It's like, it'd be like a big, a big policy thing to do something like that at the national level. But it's a lot more kind of in keeping with what every poll kind of pegs the temperature of the electorate at than. And I think that if Republicans can, you know, can be kind of disciplined about that sort of thing and basically say, you know, this is the kind of key pro-life lobby policy issue that we're pushing for in the present moment. The collateral damage will be a lot less than if you get, you know, a million Herschel walkers up in there, basically

trying to pass an actual ban on the federal level of the procedure kind of across the board. So, Kevin, let's move topics to just broader midterms generally. You see a lot of, of prebuttals start happening at this point in any election of explaining why, if you're going to lose, this wasn't your fault. And certainly within factions of political parties, within the Republican side, I am expecting quite a bit of factionalizing of whose fault it is that ex-Senate candidate didn't make it through. Is it the Donald Trump wing for helping that candidate win the primary in the first place, is at the McConnell wing for then not providing the air support and the, you know, on the ground support to get them past the finish line, et cetera, et cetera.

But the reason we're not seeing as much of that right now is because those candidates are all looking at least highly competitive for those races. On the Democratic side, though, you're already seeing some of that intra-party faction squabbling and blame casting of so-and-so isn't progressive enough. So-and-so is too progressive. So-and-so didn't talk about this, right? I'm curious if any of that has struck you as effective, true, interesting? I kind of, I like prebuttles.

I just, I enjoy reading them because they really shed an almost kind of literary light on the weasliness of the human condition. My favorite one that I've seen recently was, you know, there's this race in Rhode Island that it looks like Republicans going to win. And he was a former mayor running against the former state treasurer. and the Democrat, who was the state treasurer, says, well, you know, big city mayors start with this great name ID advantage. Not really, big city mayor, huh?

This guy was in the mirror of Cranston, Rhode Island, which I didn't know was the thing until I was reading about this race. So that's a gold medal, A-plus gold star pre-buttal. Yeah, I think that, I mean, politics is about petty advantage-seeking. That's why petty people are good at politics, and petty people are really good at organizing political campaigns. And there's a time and a place for pettiness. So if your job in life for 20 or 30 years is seeking tiny little advantages in the hopes that in the aggregate they will add up to some kind of great advantage, then you want to make the most out of losing. You know, you want to lose in a way that confront.

some kind of backdoor advantages. So a lot of this stuff is pretty predictable. You know, you've got Bernie Sanders out doing, I think he's doing events in eight states, right? And if Democrats do reasonably well, then the kind of left wing of the party will say, you know, this is because Bernie was out there firing up the progressives. If they don't do well, the same progressives will say, well, it's because Bernie only did eight states. And we've got, you know, 50 in the country and we've got to be everywhere. So I think that this one actually. will end up being one of those rare elections that you can kind of put a pin on the day after

the election. I mean, this is essentially going to be an election about the economy. I think that when you have declining real wages, which we still do, that pretty much is the mastery issue that's going on, you know, unless there's a war or an invasion or a plague upon the land or something like that. And I think the day after the election, the Democrats, at least the, you know, halfway responsible and honest ones you're going to get up in the morning and say, well, you know, the economy stunk. We think this isn't really our fault. It's COVID aftermath and also, you know, a lot of the spending that's driven inflation was happening during the Trump administration as well. So it's not really just on us. We don't really have to change anything. And in a certain limited way, they'll be

right about that. I mean, for the purposes of this particular election, I don't think you're going to be able to say, well, it's because they're crazy on social issues or because they've alienated a lot of people with the woke stuff or anything like that. Those things really still matter. I'm just not sure that they're going to be the issue in this election. So hopefully, if this is all behind us in 2024, which I rather expect that it will be at least the specific issue of inflation, we'll be having a very, very different conversation. And I don't think anyone's going to be talking very much about how 2022 gave us any indicators what was going to happen a couple years later. This is the thing that really strikes me, Andrew. I feel like, you know, if you talk to people,

they'll often be like, oh, this election's been all over the place. And, you know, just every week, there's a different vibe shift. And my reaction was like, not really. So actually, this is a very easy narrative right now for me to look at and say, this is the first midterm of a new president's administration. We have a lot of historical data about what that looks like for the party out of power. It's usually pretty good for them. You have low approval ratings for that president, and you have bad economic indicators. You have good job numbers to some, you know, we have low unemployment compared to at other times. But wage growth is terrible. Inflation's bad. Gas prices are bad. Grocer prices are bad, you know, real things that people see every day. And so you would see

those big picture indicators and say this will be a very good year for Republicans and a pretty bad year for Democrats. And none of the micro stuff is really going to matter. And then the vibe shift, quote unquote, happens in late June. Democrats think it's because of the Dobbs opinion at the Supreme Court about abortion. But if that were true, it should have held. Instead, what was also happening right then is that gas prices went down substantially and quickly and inflation started to cool down. And so you had really good economic or better economic indicators that looked like it could be a turning of the economic ship. Then it became clear that it was not really turning and the vibe shifted back. All of this can be explained by the economy and those big picture, very clear

historical markers that we use for midterms and very little of it based on, as Kevin said, you know, woke stuff, COVID, abortion, anything that other people want this to be about. about just not a lot of data on that. And so I find any of the blamecasting of the factions is going to fall on pretty deaf ears for me because this feels right now relatively baked. Now, there's going to be good candidates and bad candidates and those things always matter on the margins.

But on issues and stuff like that, meh, what do you think? I do think it's kind of funny because, you know, coming into the summer, coming into the new year, you had all these indicators, like, of course it's going to be a great year for Republicans, for all the reasons you mentioned. And then Democrats seemingly in the polls start to defy gravity in summertime, and everybody's like, whoa, what's going on here? We need a narrative for that. And now that that is sagging back, I'm kind of just like interrogating my own thinking here.

I think that I was falling into the trap, too, of just kind of being like, okay, well, that's not true anymore. So, like, what's the new narrative? Like, we're casting around. What can explain this? But it's like you say, it's just the same phenomenon that's been there all along. Joe Biden's approval rating has never been good this year. The economic indicators have continued to be bad.

They started to look like they were trending in the right direction for a little bit there, but they were still quite bad. They never really improved other than gas for a short while there. I do think, I mean, I don't want to write off Dobbs altogether. I do think, I mean, it's an enormous policy change that impacts people's lives in a major way. And it does tend to be the case that that, you know, know, you get punished for doing something in American politics. And, you know, Republicans writ large didn't do the overturning of Dobbs except as like a 50, 50 year judicial project. But obviously,

they were perceived as the people who had kind of brought about this new reality. And the polls pretty consistently showed that on balance, people were favoring the Democrats and all that. So I don't want to say there was none of that. But I do think that, especially as the economic indicators come back, increasingly negative, you just had less and less people for whom they have that front of mind, especially, you know, it's receding in the summer into the, into history. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer

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Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. All right. Last thing on the midterms, I've been thinking a lot about the Mike Lee Evan McMullen race. And look, I don't, you know, everyone wants to make this some neck and neck thing where Evan McMullen might pull it out. He might, but there's not a whole lot to support that possibility right now. It just looks like it'll be a much tighter race than would otherwise be expected. Evan McMullen had been a Republican staffer. He then ran as an independent in 2016 against Donald Trump in sort of a fanciful protest run and is running as an independent who was then endorsed. by the Utah Democratic Party in Utah. It was a relatively close vote in the Utah Democratic Party, by the way. They had a Democratic candidate, and a very slim majority chose to ditch that candidate endorse McMullen for the hopes of exactly what's happening now that there hasn't really been a close Senate race in Utah, like in a long time ever. I think I looked back. 1970 was the last

time that Utah voted for a Democratic senator. And so the Democrats were like, okay, look, we're a party out of power. Let's see if we can get the really bad guy out to have someone who we disagree with at least less in. Again, I doubt McMullen can win this. I think there hasn't been a single poll showing him up. Most of the polls show him within three or four points, which again, in Utah compared to a normal Democratic candidate, very, very tight, very interesting. I'm curious, Kevin, if you think that other out of power parties, and I'm really thinking specifically the California GOP here, sort of known for their wacky political strategy, will take any lessons from this, or B, you know, would it have mattered if the Texas Democratic Party

had endorsed, you know, a Will Hurd or someone instead of Beto? Like should these parties start being more incremental than absolutist? Yeah, I mean, I think that would be good for the country and you know for for governance and all that but it's the incentives are all kind of against it uh that particular raise two thoughts on that one i hope that if he he loses um and and kind of goes away from the scene we can all stop pretending that was ever clever to call him egg McMuffin uh that was just an annoying thing that people would sort of do thinking it was it was kind of witty and um it never was and and probably should not have been indulged as much as it was also if you want to know what Utah Democrats are thinking, we could probably get them on a conference call

them because they're like six of them. And it's it's not that, not that hard to figure him out. I don't think, yeah, I do think that at a certain level, some of the, you know, kind of no-hopper parties like the Democrats in Texas or the or the Republicans in California ought to think about saying, well, obviously someone who's a conventional kind of up and down the line, an ideological member of our party doesn't have much of a chance here, but we would like to make some marginal improvements. I have a friend in Texas who is a very, very Trump critical Republican who has, I think, toyed with the idea of trying to run for office as a Democrat, which I think probably wouldn't work very well. But if the Democrats were smarter, they would be out looking for

people like that to say, look, we have something to say to people who aren't already 100% on our side. Now, I think there's a couple of important differences between that, which is that I think that the Republicans in California are in much worse shape than the Democrats in Texas are in the sense that, you know, Texas is an urbanizing state and as the population becomes more urban, the Democrats will have a better shot. They already win every big city in Texas and a lot of the near suburbs as well, which is where the people are and increasingly where they are moving. So these aren't exactly parallel cases. You know, I'm essentially an Eisenhower Republican.

You know, I've got a lot of sympathy for people who believe that, you know, compromise and negotiation and such things are good and worthwhile and part of a healthy and normal and productive kind of politics, unlike the one that we have right now, which is basically politics as entertainment and politics as a culture war. So, yeah, in that sense, I'm glad the Democrats in Utah did what they did with McMullen. Now, I think that it would have been better with almost anybody else. You know, McMullen is this kind of, you know, Charlie Christ kind of figure who's like, well, this party won't hate me.

Now that party won't take me. And eventually I'm going to have to run as a libertarian. And that's going to be the end of it. But yeah, I suppose that's probably a good development. I mean, it's a race that we're going to lose anyway, right? At least they get to be a little bit close, have a little bit of hope. And also legitimately say, look, we're willing to go outside of our ideological comfort zone when local conditions require that that be the case.

That's what gets kind of messy, though. If you're going to lose the race anyway, Andrew, then wouldn't have been better to have the Democrats' message out there, even if it were, you know, a 20-point loss, you know, to have a Democratic candidate who believes in all of the principles of the Democratic Party. On the other hand, that person would get zero attention, whereas this race is now getting national attention. We're talking about it here, all because it is a closer race. Right. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, like, who the Utah Democrats are who are saying, you know, like, well, if my voice isn't heard right now, then it's like a real loss for the national

party politics or something like that. I mean, I think the, and the national environment we've all been talking about, you know, it's no less unfortunate for McMullen than it is for Stacey Abrams or somebody, right? I mean, I don't see like a close McMullen loss as like the death knell of the electoral strategy or anything like that because, you know, maybe there's a range of outcomes in which in which he wins under a slightly different set of circumstances. I only have two kind of not all that actually useful, but I think they're fun things about the McMullen candidacy that are interesting to me.

One of which is that Mike Lee voted for him in 2016 for president, which is just kind of, I just love that. I mean, it's like six years. What a difference. The other of which is that nationally in 2016, Evan McMullen got about 730,000 votes. And in the same election in Utah, Mike Lee got about 760,000 votes. So I'm interested to see whether Evan McMullen can surmount his own national presidential voting total.

Yeah, I mean, another interesting race to look at in sort of the out-of-power parties is Lonnie Chen in California, a Republican who looks like he has a really good shot at winning statewide in California as a Republican. and that he's actually, you know, the type of Republican that can win in a state like California, which you would think, again, would be really helpful for some of these parties looking to make inroads in states. And I mean, my goodness, if you're in a state where your party hasn't won a statewide election in 20 plus years, the foothold really matters. You don't need Stacey Abrams or Beto O'Rourke to sort of be your first person. You need anyone with that. letter next to their name, frankly. And so I think the California GOP has done something surprisingly smart by getting behind a very moderate guy. He was the policy director for Romney. So I've worked with

him twice. I went to law school with him. I know him quite well. And his message has been, hey, the money in this state is a hot mess. The Democrats are going to all be in charge. Don't you want someone who isn't a Democrat looking at how they're spending your money, that's a pretty good message. So good, in fact, that the L.A. Times endorsed him. So we'll see about those parties out of power. All right. Last topic for today, 2024. So for those who have not spent their careers as political operatives, I will tell you that October of a midterm starts getting very chatty as people in your office start suddenly having a lot more coffees out of the office, not leaving their phones lying around, their text messages are now hidden, et cetera,

because October is when you get your next job. And the map is fascinating. I mean, we've talked so much about the presidential race, and don't worry, we'll talk about it more. But the Senate map in 2024, it does not look like this year's Senate map. So of the 33 states that are up, because this is the Senate, right? So every time there are 33 seats up, except for that one time that there's 34. 23 of the 33 are held by Democrats. Ten are held by Republicans.

So right off the bat, you have Democrats just defending a lot of seats, which can spread resources really thin. But let me tell you some of the states. Montana, West Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, those will all be states that Democrats are on the defense in, and that's, we don't even know whether any of those current senators are planning to retire. So if those are open seats, it gets even messier. As we know, open seats almost no matter what tend to make for highly competitive Senate races. Open seats in a state like West Virginia, frankly, wouldn't be competitive,

though I think Joe Manchin, of course, runs again. You know, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Blah. Now, on the Republican side, the seats that are up, Texas, Florida, there's going to be an open seat in Indiana that might be the best hope of a pickup, which is all to say if Republicans get control of the Senate after this midterm election, there is nearly no hope of Democrats taking back control in 2024, even if they win the presidency again. There won't, the coattails can't really at that point pick up. I'll read you all 10 states because it's fun. North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri. What was that one? That's Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Indiana. I mean, none of those are great pickup opportunities for the Democrats. Kevin, let's start with the Senate. What does that mean? for a political party, where it will be a highly contested presidential race regardless in 2024. And let's assume for a second that they lose the Senate, that Republicans are in control.

At some point, do you just not fight this that hard? I mean, that's a lot of money to spread out over your defensive states, not a lot of offensive opportunities. This is a really tough strategic question if you're the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Yeah, I think one of the most amusing prospects for our politics would be, you know, cocaine Mitch rolling out with nothing to lose in the next election, you know, just as confident that he's going to be there. Yeah, the Senate is increasingly kind of weird to look at because Senate races are turning to these little mini presidential races where they're essentially kind of strangely nationalized elections and where you've got the two kind of strong ideological tendencies

in both parties expressing themselves very, very strongly in Senate candidates in a way they don't necessarily do in-house candidates and state legislatures and things like that. So one of my little rules of politics is that when Democrats are in power, they act like they'll never be out of power and Republicans are out of power, they act like they'll never be back in. So I think that this may bring out, you know, some kind of kamikaze tendencies in the Democrats if they think there's, you know, no real chance of getting themselves back into power in the Senate, which they care about a great deal for obvious reasons. Then it may, you know, sort of make them ideologically maximizing and interested in very, very aggressive obstruction.

And I like obstruction. That's what the Senate's there to do. And a more obstructionist Senate is a Senate that's doing its constitutional job. So that's all fine with me. I suppose there's a sense in which that if there's a sense that there's a very strong Republican, a likelihood of Republican control of the Senate, it may benefit a Democratic presidential candidate in 2024 because Americans do have a kind of at least notional and sometimes measurable preference for divided government. That's a really good point. Andrew, any thoughts on what 2024 Senate races might look like?

Very few. It's the last cycle in which Republicans will have to shake their fist at the 2020 Georgia outcome as, you know, a thing that's just curdled everybody's milk for, you know, ever since then. Obviously, you only, you, when people are doing the math, you know, you're always looking at the current seats. that are up, obviously, and then the ones that are right around the corner. It's always very funny to me, like, nobody will be talking about David Perdue and Kelly Leffler in 23, 2024, 2025, but their failure to launch lives on until the cycle after the cycle after this one. I think it's interesting in how it might affect Republican office holders. It's one thing if you think you may only be in control of a chamber for two years and how

you think of how to spend that two years. If you know that you can't lose control in the next election, basically, and so you're going to be chairman at least for four years, for instance, of a committee, I think you could see some behavioral differences of folks in office. Yeah, you know, it's funny. Our assumption here, of course, is it's going to bring out the irresponsibility in Republicans. There is a way of looking at this that it would be, well, if you don't really have to worry about losing control the next time there's an election that you could be, you know, a more statesman-like, sensible, sober senator. Of course, we all know that's never going to happen because it's just not where our politics is right now. And so the possibility

is... What a hilarious notion, Kevin Williamson. Adorable. Adorable. So, yeah, the prospect of that working out in a way that would bring out, you know, the Republican and Republicans is, unfortunately, doesn't seem very possible. Actually, let me ask you another question on that. Let's assume that Republicans take the House and Senate in this election, and they have two more years of the Biden administration. Is there any policy area that you think Republicans could pursue, will pursue that Biden would sign? Possibly. Republicans have really made their peace with spending, I think, in a lot of ways, in ways that I wish they hadn't. There are Republicans out there who are very excited about infrastructure projects and things like that. Now, they don't want some, you know,

multi-trillion dollar slot bucket of Democratic wish list up, but there may be some room for them to negotiate something on that. You Democrats have, and Republicans have converging views in some ways on things like trade. You know, the kind of nationalistic, Trumpish view of economics is much more pronounced in the Republican Party than it was 15 years ago or 20 years ago. But it's also not a world away from where Joe Biden is. You know, he has very similar views in lots of ways. He has very similar views about trade. He has very similar views about, you know, kind of a federal role in guiding, you know,

the economy in a broad kind of way, similar kinds of old-fashioned, you know, hard had industrial priorities. So I suspect that if it were a less poison time, that you would see a lot of room for negotiation between the Biden administration and someone like, say, Marco Rubio, who, has, in my view, wrong views about this stuff, but views that are really quite compatible with those of the Biden administration. I'd be interested to see in a Republican Congress under Joe Biden what would happen in tech policy, whether it's antitrust type stuff, some sort of Section 230 reform. Basically, there's a lot of appetite, both on Republican and Democratic sides,

to cut off big tech companies' cultural power at the knees. Obviously, they all disagree. about what that ought to look like, but there have been some cross-isle, especially in the antitrust department, because they can't all agree what these companies ought to look like, but maybe one area that they can't agree on is there should be more of them and smaller. So I'd be interested to see whether that would push forward policy in tech in any way. That is a fascinating example and one that we should maybe just spend a lot more time on on this podcast down the road. I find it vaguely depressing that the only way you're going to get, I think, sort of the right policy, if you will, on some of our big cultural challenges is through

divided government compromise. And yet, I don't think anyone on any podcast talking about this issue is going to say, for instance, immigration is something that now finally Republicans and Democrats can meet together on, say, we're absolutely securing the border and we're giving citizenship to kids who were brought here as minors by their parents, for instance, something that we thought was so possible in 2013, doesn't feel even like it'll be part of the conversation in 2023. Sad. All right.

Our last segment, not worth your time. This one, I'm going to put a question mark on the end of this segment. Not worth our time? Kevin, Liz Trust, the British Prime Minister, has resigned after 44 days in office. As someone noted, that is 4.1 Scaramucci's, the person who noted that was Anthony Scaramucci. I'm curious, are the shenanigans around Liz Truss's tenure and any fallout from it worth Americans' time to pay attention to? Yeah, if I were an American politician or political operative, I would very much keep an eye on what a national currency collapse looks like in terms of your domestic politics, because I think this is going to be worth knowing one of these days. Fascinating that you think that could be worth watching.

A thing that is no longer, a thing that is no longer worth our time now that it has ended, but which has retroactively been demonstrated. as very much worth everybody's time was, I think it was the Daily Star in England that when there was some column in The Economist that had some throwaway line about, I think it was the economist, had some throwaway line about how Liz Truss' shelf life as Prime Minister was going to be about the same as a head of lettuce. And these intrepid reporters at this tabloid set up a live stream with a picture of Liz Truss and a head of lettuce. And it was just going for about six days. Will Liz Truss outlast this lettuce? And she did not. The lettuce triumphed. So that's been a fun thing to keep kind of keep tabs on. It's not looking so good. The lettuce, although they've

dressed it up some. It's got like a wig and googly eyes and glasses now. But it is the definitive winner of the competition. I read some like very serious, you know, piece that sort of if those first out pieces of Liz Truss has resigned as Prime Minister. And like the fourth paragraph was like, at one point, unfavorably compared to a soggy head of lettuce. This is the kind of serious foreign policy conversations that I really rely on YouTube for. Thank you, Andrew and Kevin, for joining this week. And become a member of the dispatch.

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