The Dispatch Podcast - For Whom the Bell Tweets

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Do this week’s national presidential polling averages doom Donald Trump’s chance at winning the election? Joe Biden has maintained a steady national polling lead of 6 to 9 points for months now, with no signs of letting up as we approach November 3. The latest CNN, NBC, and Rasmussen polls from this week show Biden in a 16-, 14-, and 12-point lead, respectively. “Even if [these polls] are outliers on the top number,” Jonah says, “The unspoken story about all of this is Biden is running away with it with seniors.” Trump won seniors decisively in 2016 and a Democrat hasn’t won the demographic since former presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. All things considered, our podcast hosts warn that this could be one of the biggest presidential sweeps since Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole in 1996. Tune in for a conversation about the right’s transition to online social media trolling, the president’s Twitter addiction, and tonight’s upcoming vice presidential debate. Show Notes: -Post-debate Dispatch Live tonight, 30 day free trial at The Dispatch, CNN poll showing Biden in a 16-point lead, NBC poll showing Biden in a 14-point lead, Rasmussen poll showing Biden in a 12 -point lead, “4 Funny Feelings about 2020” by Tim Alberta in Politico, -“Fan Service Is Not Serving Trump Well” by Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another episode of The Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. You've still got a few hours left. Go to the dispatch.com slash 30 days free to try out a membership with the dispatch. Also, tonight, Wednesday night, is the vice presidential debate, and we will be doing a special dispatch podcast live with all four of us. to talk about our, you know, first impressions of the vice presidential debate. Did it matter? Did anyone make any headroads? Did the race dramatically change? Unlikely. But let's see. And today, topics include the president, the coronavirus diagnosis, what it means for the race.

What's going on with the larger race, the Senate races, the down ballots? the very online Twitter conversation and what's happening to the basis of the two parties. And lastly, our expectations on that debate tonight. Plus, some stamp talk. Let's dive right in. Steve, you're up. Donald Trump came out of last week's debate in trouble. Most people reacting to the debate in instant polls said he lost the debate.

Subsequent polling suggested that those instant polls were right, which isn't always the case. And then on Friday, he tweeted at 12.54 a.m. that he had contracted COVID. And we've now seen it spread throughout the upper echelons of the White House staff. to members of Congress, and to others sort of in the president's big group. He was already down six or seven points in national polling averages to Joe Biden. Do these two developments taken together doom his candidacy, David? Doom is a strong word, but it's getting really close to Doom time. I mean, as you were talking, I pulled up the 538.

general election average, their weighted average. And right now, it's at nine points. The key swing states are outside the margin of error. Either he's headed for assuming no other major swings. And if you look at the last six months of polling, one of the things that stands out is there have been no major swings in spite of a ton of major developments in the country. Assuming no major swings, And assuming, and this is, you know, something that I know Trump supporting listeners are saying to themselves right now, and assuming no massive polling fail, you're looking at potentially the worst defeat of a presidential candidate since Clinton defeating Dole in 1996. that you know one of the things that that jonah said early on uh no a couple of months ago is things could go either way for trump this could tighten or the the bottom could drop out and at the moment it's more of a bottom dropping out scenario it feels kind of Carter 1980-ish when when after

that debate the only debate that Reagan and Carter had Carter's support began to just evaporate I just don't think there's any evidence that's getting better for Trump. I'm open to hearing evidence that's getting better for Trump. There's no evidence that's getting better for the GOP. And one last thing, I think that if the coronavirus had afflicted Trump and Melania and really only them, it might have been a different deal. But the fact that it afflicted has afflicted so many people in and around the White House and the fact that there were the pictures of the the Rose Garden ceremony, not just the hugging and closeness outside, but also all of that inside, you know, it just reeked, it reeked of negligence and contempt for the rules.

And, you know, outside of the hardcore base, which is not going anywhere, who does that impress? I mean, who, who believes that that's leadership? So, Sarah, let me paint a slightly different picture. Donald Trump recovers from the coronavirus. you have the White House already pushing out messaging that he has conquered the coronavirus, that he and he alone could overcome this virus so quickly and really pushing into the final message, the final four-week message of we've got to get back to normal. Donald Trump can get over this virus. Other people can get over this virus.

We need to open up our economy. We've got to get back to normal. Let's say that he actually continues to recover. and that he rides that message. While at the same time, there's a big Supreme Court battle. Amy Coney-Barritt becomes, you know, occupies a good part of the news and the final debate in the final weeks, reminding conservatives why some of them voted for Donald Trump in the first place. Couldn't that sort of be the path to a narrow victory for him, even if you buy that the polling is what it is today? So the polling has still been remarkably steady.

You know, it was 9.3 point spread in late August, but has really sat in that two-point margin between about 6.5 and 8.5 for months now. And I think that you will see the polls tighten again. I disagree with David about the potential for the bottom dropping out. A, because four weeks is actually a super long time, as we know, for anyone who's lived through the last week, it felt like four months. So we've got a long way to go.

And I think that the Barrett confirmation hearing will change the subject with the assumptions that you've laid out, that the president has recovered from the virus and sort of goes back to his normal business tweeting as usual. I think it will narrow as people kind of go back to their partisan homes. I think there was a sense between the debate and the coronavirus diagnosis that there was some reeling going on, presidential reeling. And I think to the extent we'll call this, you know, half a point spread between Biden and Trump, you know, a real change in the race. I think it's largely that. I think that will shrink starting next week with the Coney-Barrant confirmation hearing.

but I also don't see it shrinking seven points to your point, Steve. Like I think we're going to hold steady between 6.5 and 8.5 through Election Day and that the only question is whether for the first time in really polling history, if you will, I mean, polling history has been fraught with things that they realize they were doing wrong. But what has not happened is this idea that people voting for one candidate are simply significantly significantly less likely to answer polls at all. If that's the case, and it's not shy Trump voter, by the way, this is different than that. This is not that they're lying to pollsters, not telling pollsters the truth.

This would be that they are in fact refusing to take polls and there is a partisan gap in that refusal that is not being accounted for at all by pollsters. I do not think that's the case. But that is now the only way that I see a clear Trump victory at this point. that's different than a election contest, of course. So, Jody, you've reminded us every time we've talked about this issue or related issues that just as things can tighten, things can get dramatically worse, as David suggested. Can things get worse from here?

I mean, you had a CNN poll that found Joe Biden plus 16, was it? Yeah. You had an NBC poll that found him plus 14. We're inclined, I think, to look at those as outliers. If we get more of them, it will be harder and harder to look at those as outliers. Can it get worse? Well, first of all, if there's anything that 5,000 years of Jewish history teaches us, is it can always get worse.

Second of all, my motto for a very long time has been cheer up for the worst is yet to come. and I've been proven prescient every single time. So those two things aside, I'm sort of splitting the difference between David and Sarah on this. If you listen to people like Dylan Beiler, if you listen to the 538 guys, they've been saying for a very long time that there's about a 20%, you know, 15 to 20% chance

for Trump to win the electoral college while not winning the popular vote. You know, sometimes it gets up to 25, 30%, whatever. And there's about the same probability that Biden has a blowout election, the likes of which we haven't seen basically since 72. I still think that's generally the case. I generally think that I would say I would put it a little more starkly now for Trump. I think it is more likely that Biden has a landslide popular victory than Trump even has a electoral college win. And there was a third poll that came out, which makes it seem, and I can't remember what it is,

but it makes it seem like maybe the CNN and NBC polls were not outliers. But even if they are outliers on the top number, the thing, I think the unspoken story about all of this is, Biden is running away with it with seniors. You know, if you just look at that, the senior number in any of these polls, they can't all be, they could all be wrong in the sense that they're not precisely accurate, but the general trend they can't all be wrong about. Trump won seniors decisively last time. A Democrat hasn't won seniors since Al Gore, and Biden is leading something like 20 points with seniors. I don't know how a Republican wins, given the coalition that exists, while losing seniors by 20%.

And someone was saying this morning that Biden is looking better in Alaska. then Trump is looking in Pennsylvania right now. Now, that's just not a good sign either, right? I still think, though, that the thing that the Trump people were counting on for the last six months is still true. If Biden has some complete confidence eroding meltdown moment, if he goes on stage and pulls an armadillo out of his pants, you know, then all bets are off. But short of that, I don't understand how we think that they could, I mean, like, I take Sarah's point about how it probably will tighten during the Coney Barrett hearings.

But that also assumes that the Coney Barrett hearings go well. And they could go, I mean, I think she'll do fine. But it's going to be over Zoom half of it. And people are going to like, the Democrats are going to do stunts and it's going to be chaotic. And Lindsey Graham, we're going to talk about in a second. He's in a flop-swet panic and who knows what kind of grandstanding he will do that could backfire on him. So I just think, yeah, a lot of things can go wrong. Also, oh, I should have mentioned this.

Donald Trump is on some very powerful drugs that could make him do really wacky stuff. Like, take the blame for canceling the negotiations over a next round of stimulus to save the economy. Or eating a whole block of cheese on national television from the Oval Office. We just don't know what he could do next. So, yeah, thanks, of course. That would be an obvious play for Wisconsin. Totally. I used to eat entire blocks of cheese.

That's what my mom would give us when we were growing up. She would just throw us a huge block of cheese. So used to grammatically speaking, lexicologically speaking, could also be last week, Steve. So we know what you're saying. Fair. Although it didn't come from my mom in that case. Yeah, I guess my view to round this out is a lot closer to where David and Jonah are than to where Sarah is. I think there's this sort of 2016 hangover that persists where, you know,

even those of us who were giving Donald Trump a one in three chance going into election day, you know, I didn't really think the guy was going to win. And then he won. And so it definitely, and I think it should make you more humble about these kinds of, this kind of speculative analysis. But everything arrayed in front of us, all of the things that you all have mentioned. And then, of course, there are just the practical matters of running a campaign. I mean, it's not just Donald Trump.

Bill Steppian, Trump's campaign manager, has COVID. A number of his top advisors have COVID. Kaley Mackinand, his spokeswoman, has COVID. Stephen Miller, who Donald Trump listens to probably as much as just about anybody. has COVID. I think there's just this general disruption of, you know, what was already a chaotic campaign anyway, but this sort of adds chaos to the existing chaos. And then there's the question of where the country is. Tim Alberta had a piece in Politico yesterday in which he called it sort of a notebook dump and said, you know, this is what I've learned from

talking to people reporting on this for the past several years. And one of his takeaways is that people are just exhausted. And that is certainly consistent with the reporting that I've done. People are so tired. The idea that they're going to wake up and there's going to be sort of another day of chaos and crazy, people are sort of done with it. And I'm not sure that that's being captured in the polls. And I think sort of the flip side, Sarah, of your question about whether there might be Trump voters who are just not participating polls, there might be a gap there. I also wonder whether the polling could be missing some non-traditional voters, non-typical voters, people who don't come out very often, but are going to make a point

to come out in this election, and you've seen that in some of the early states when you look at the percentage of voters who have cast ballots already and are new voters. If those patterns continue, I think, I'm working on the assumption that most of those new voters are not voting for Donald Trump. Although, aren't Republicans kicking Democrats' butts in new voter registration? In some of these states, yeah. Depends where you're talking about. Depends where you're talking about.

I also think, though, to Steve's point, perhaps, this last week has been really bad for Republican turnout operations. I think a lot of what's happened will just depress Republican turnout sort of for the reason you're saying. Like, you want to vote for Donald Trump because you don't like Joe Biden.

You don't want to see the country lurch left, et cetera, et cetera. But now you just find Trump exhausting this week. And so you're just not that motivated to go out and vote if you've got something else to do like your sock drawer, whatever. Again, I think four weeks is a really long time for that to persist. So, so we'll see.

You know, Jonah has coined the term smaga, secret maga. And I'm just sitting here racking my brain for an equally catchy synonym for dispirited maga because demaga doesn't really work. But, you know, look, here in suburban land, Because as some listeners know, I move from very rural Tennessee, which is MAGA squared, to suburban Nashville, which is very red, but suburban and just sort of a different culture, it's dispirited MAGA. It's really dispirited MAGA around here. And in that Tim Alberta piece, I think, really hit on something, just this sense of exhaustion really is pervasive. I mean, Pete, there's this sense of, can we just get this election over with?

Can we just vote and move on? And the other thing to the data, you know, look, I know everyone is squirrely about the polling after 2016, and to be clear, the national polling was pretty on. It was some of the swing state polls, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, where it was either too infrequent to really get a great read on it or it was just off. but we're getting information, you know, we're seeing things like Texas in the margin of error, South Carolina in the margin of error,

Georgia in the margin of error. If that's the situation, you know, someone I was on a podcast the other day and they said, is South Carolina a swing state? I said, South Carolina is never a swing state. If it's this close, it's just a loss. You know, this is, this means Trump is just losing. There's no true swing states if it's that close.

So there's, the numbers here, you know, if you're talking to, and I'm, and a lot of you guys have talked about, you know, GOP folks in the field who've suddenly kind of gotten this like thousand yard stare. There's just a lot of that out there. There's just no information at the moment to encourage the GOP, like just none. But there are reasons that Sarah has outlined to give them hope that there's some, at least some, play in the joints still left in their favor, but as of right now, there's nothing encouraging. Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, again, if you're talking about the middle 50% probability,

the play in the joints is how big the loss is and whether an election contest would be a reasonable outcome. I think that the idea that Trump somehow has a victory coming out of this, a clean victory is exceedingly unlikely. You know, I've come up with the two ways that that happen. One, just a massive polling change from 2016 to 2020 that we don't see any particular evidence of, or two, a massive failure in absentee ballot and mail-in ballots getting disqualified if there is really that huge 30, 40-point gap in who's voting by mail and in person. But actually, that seems to have tightened, not grown, since the summer when I was most concerned about it. So those two paths are getting narrower and narrower.

Well, let's expand our map, so to speak, to Jonah's topic. Right. So this all bled into my topic a little bit already. But the question is if Trump is doing as badly as he's his and seems to be on course for a pretty serious loss, is the broader GOP doomed as well. You know, you now have, you know, at the beginning of the year or a year ago, we were talking about how this was a beneficial Senate map for Republicans.

You now have eight seats that are held by Republicans are listed as toss-ups by Cook, which is usually pretty careful about, you know, these categories. They just move Lindsey Graham's seat into a toss-up, which is a big deal for the reason. David was suggesting. And six of the states that our toss-ups under Cook are in states that Trump won. And so, you know, you're starting to now look at a possibility that, which I think would, by my own lights, would be bad for the country, of Republicans becoming, just getting swept entirely out of power and Democrats having free run of things. And so I guess the

question for the rest of you guys is a what do you think the likelihood of that is um and b what does the republican party look like if if the long prophesied um full rejection of trumpism at the polls comes david you know i'm really worried about that scenario uh jonah And I'm worried about it for both short and long-term reasons. I'm worried about a wave that is primarily a rejection of Trump, but no wave has ever interpreted truly as just a rejection of the other side. It's also interpreted as an endorsement of the winner in the winner's agenda. And so I think people are underestimating this,

like the sort of the folks, those conservative folks who are in Burnett, down, burn it all down mode. I think they are underestimating the extent to which a wave rejection of not just of Trump, but also of a Senate GOP, along with further erosion in the House, means that the, the, the, the message sent to the Democrats isn't go, be cautious here, guys, because this was all about Donald Trump. It's, it's, no, this is, you know, the final victory over our hated foe is at hand and full steam ahead. And that means there would be a lot less reluctance, I think, to get rid of the filibuster, for example, because there would be a mandate. I mean, and how dare this rump GOP stand in the way of the will of the overwhelming majority of the

American people? I mean, how dare the rump GOP stand in the way, really anything? So I think on a policy basis, you could have a spate of democratic lawmaking where the The only thing really resisting it is, well, the only thing really slowing it down would be the Democrats maybe inability to agree amongst themselves. But I think they learned some lessons from the Obama era when they had a filibuster-proof majority and didn't get a whole ton done with it. So I think they might be actually more efficient. I don't know.

But then the other thing is, on the GOP side, who's left? like do would it then be this is jim jordan matt gates's party now is that is is that the is that the reality because one of the things you cannot assume is that a party that is reduced to its sort of hardest core and often worst voices will respond appropriately um to a defeat like this and and perhaps one of the salient examples here is you know at the california used to be a a pretty good GOP state. And when the GOP and the state GOP started to slide away, the state GOP in California did not get more healthy.

And so, you know, there's this interesting phenomenon you see going on in some place. Georgia, for example, is getting much, much closer. And yet Georgia is also about to send Marjorie Green, the Q&N believer, into the house. so it's quite possible that you could have a sweep away you could sweep out and this is the pessimist take you sweep out the GOP you energize the Democrats and then what's left in in the GOP itself is not the best side of the GOP willing to engage in a lot of honest self-reflection it's the worst side of the GOP and the safest seats wanting to double down on the anger and tactics that put them there

in the first place so that's my pessimist take can somebody cheer me up please Geez, we're recording at 1045 on Wednesday. I'm ready for a glass of wine. I'm sorry. Somebody tell me I'm wrong. Sarah, please. Can I make it worse? No.

Yes. Leroy Jenkins. So have any of you looked at the 2022 map? Oh, I don't. So let me paint a picture where the Republicans, let's say only lose four or five seats. which at this point would be kind of a win in its own way. So they lose the Senate, but not by as many as they could. In 2022, 22 Republican seats are up

versus only 12 Democratic seats. And the main pickup opportunities for Republicans will be the two seats that they just lost that were special elections, Arizona and Georgia. Their other pickup opportunities are, I mean, look, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Nevada are in there, but the tough, that's an uphill climb as pickup seats go. On the other hand, Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa all have Republican seats as pick up

opportunities for the Democrats. So again, set aside what's actually happening in the country or anything else. If this were just status quo election time, Republicans would lose more seats in 2022 just from a map standpoint. there i made it worse thanks sarah so so let me split this up first talk about the 2020 election and then what potentially follows for republicans the 2020 election i i share uh your pessimism uh about republicans and i think it could be worse i think you could be understating it i think we having having spoken to a number of of republican strategists and people whose job it is to get

Republicans elected in this environment, to call the conversations panicked doesn't quite do it justice at this point. I mean, there is genuine alarm. The numbers have, the polling numbers have collapsed in down-ballot races. And Republicans in most cases, not every case, but in most cases, were already looking at a major spending difference deficit with Democrats going into this last month. In some cases in the Iowa Senate race, it is like, I think we reported in the morning dispatch this morning, it's a six to one candidate to candidate spending deficit for the Republican.

So the ability to break through and change a message or amplify a message or have that advertising do much of anything I think is slim. It feels like a wave. you know, we're four weeks out. We've all stipulated that things could change. There could be some election-changing event between now and then. But certainly if the election were today or tomorrow, this would be a massive, massive victory for Democrats. And again, if I had to guess, I would say Democrats, pollsters are probably undercounting hidden enthusiasm for Joe Biden, or better put, hidden antipathy for Donald Trump beyond what they're already measuring. So if you

sent me to Vegas and gave me 100 bucks and said place a bet on the likelihood of Democrats controlling everything, I would put 80 bucks on that outcome. I'm not as pessimistic about a post-election world in which, you know, movement conservatives are people, we might call traditional conservatives, principled conservatives are sort of swept away by characters like Matt Gates. I think there is, there are a number of Republicans, elected Republicans,

we've touched on this before, so I won't dwell on it, but who are sort of waiting for this moment to finally sort of shrug off Trumpism and maybe pick up the fight a little bit. They don't want to take on a repub, sitting Republican president, especially one who's relatively popular

inside the ever-shrinking Republican Party. But I think once he's gone, and if it's a resounding defeat, the path to victory in 2022 and 2024 for Republicans is not going to look like Trumpism, I don't think. They will look at this repudiation of Donald Trump. And certainly you'll have some people who say, well, look, what we need is Trumpism without Trump. We've heard that argument before. I think Trumpism will have a taint on it.

If this election comes, ends up the way that I'm suggesting it might, that will have people scrambling to distance themselves, both from the president and from the ideas he's come to represent. So that's my note of relative optimism. Relative indeed. I might have this last thought on this. I know we've got to get moving. But Sarah, you responded to this, right? I don't want to like give you short shrift here. she was more pessimistic than me jona okay i just that's right okay just i'm so used to her pessimism

that sometimes it just gets canceled out clearly a memorable response uh but um plus i've been drinking for a while so anyway um i guess i would split the baby here um i think david is too optimistic about how bad the house is going to get uh i think it is going to get I think Matt Gates is the brainless canary in the coal mine about what's going on in the house. This is what Paul Ryan was afraid of in 2016 about what could happen with Trump, which is that the safest districts would be affirmed in their trumpiness and the best guys who knew how to win in purple districts and sell conservatism to people outside the coalition, thus broadening the Republican coalition, we're going to get wiped out. That is largely what has happened,

and I think it's going to get worse in the House. There is now, there's a recent study that confirms something that I'd heard anecdotally a bunch of times from people, which is that various House Republican offices have been closing up their policy operations, firing or phasing out staffers who do actual policy legislative work and replacing them with bonehead 25-year-olds who know how to post memes on Twitter and Instagram that own the lips. And we've seen some of this in recent days with the stupid stuff that has come out about how Trump, you know, Trump beats the China virus stuff. And, you know, Matt Gates talking about how he'll never love another president again because he just can't quit Donald Trump and

all of these things. I think that is the general trend in the House, GOP, for a while where Jim Jordan will be considered an elder statesman of own-the-libsism. But I think you still have institutional strength and seriousness among senators. I think people like Roy Blunt, Ben Sass, and Mitch McConnell, who's a little different creature because he wants to get back in the majority if he loses it. But still, they're grown-ups in a way that it's very difficult to find them in the House. And so you could have a kind of traditional split between harboiled populist assinity in the House and more elder statesman cooling saucer sobriety in the Senate.

Of course, neither of it will matter because the media will focus on the jerks and the immature people. And neither part of the legislature will actually have actual power. And so we'll see the Republicans get more branded by the gate. than by, say, the Roy Blunds. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsor today, the Bradley Foundation. Americans are navigating through several unanticipated crises this year. We the People, the Bradley Speaker Series, is a new video series that offers insights and ideas on the current challenges we face from some of the remarkable organizations the Bradley Foundation

supports. Visit BradleyFDN.org slash Liberty to watch their most recent episode featuring renowned education expert Frederick Hess. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he works on K through 12 and higher education issues. He is the author of Education Week's popular blog, Rick Hess Straight Up, is a regular contributor to Forbes in the Hill and serves as the executive editor of Education Next. In this episode, Hess addresses the complex issues surrounding the start of the new school year. He gives his take on the reopening of schools, the impact of social unrest on the learning environment, and what the outcome of

the elections means for education. That's Bradley with an L-E-Y at the end, FDN.org slash Liberty to watch the video. New episodes debut weekly, so come back often and subscribe to their YouTube channel to be notified whenever a new one is posted. Okay, let's move to our next topic. David, I am not sure that you've seen the president's most recent tweet this morning. All caps. Now that the radical left Democrats got caught cold in the non-friendly transfer of government. In fact, they spied on my campaign and went for a coup. We are entitled to ask the voters for four more years. Please remember this when you vote. I just thought that was a helpful tee up to your topic. Yeah. So my topic is, is the right becoming too extremely online

and specifically the Trump right? And I bring this up because I don't know if you guys remember some of the discourse and discussion around, for example, Kamala Harris's flamed out presidential campaign, Elizabeth Warren's flamed out presidential campaign and the contrast with Joe Biden who kind of has campaigned as if nobody ever invented Twitter

and that there was a lot of, kind of snickering on the right that look at, you know, Harris and Warren and others were really catering for sort of the toward sort of the Twitter left. But it seems to me that in a lot of ways

Trump and sort of the Trump wing of the party has become as obsessed with Twitter and sort of the memes and themes of this Twitter subculture as the most woke liberals. I mean the the sweeping images, the jiffs, the sort of the images of strength, the jiffs, the constant harping on Russia. I mean, constant

harping on Russia. All of these things are hallmarks of MAGA Twitter. And it feels to me like they're running out, they're, they're speaking to a very small fraction of a much larger base. And I think this connects with something Jonah said earlier about seniors. Seniors tend not to be Twitter folks. And I don't think that this kind of Twitter theme-led campaign necessarily reaches them. So I don't know. I'll start with Steve because Steve, you probably loathe Twitter more than anybody else in this group.

And so tell me I'm right. I do loathe Twitter and I do think you're right. I do, I think it's cross-partisan. I mean, there's no question about it. It's certainly, I think, reflected in the kinds of rhetoric we see from the president. I mean, who is, after all, a sort of Twitter pioneer. I mean, he is Twitter's biggest presence and has been for five years. So it's natural that from his presence and his constant tweeting would flow that kind of

behavior, that kind of mimicking behavior from his followers, from even elected officials who have tied themselves closely to Donald Trump. But I do think that it's a broader phenomenon, and it's a hugely problematic phenomenon. I mean, you see this on the left, too, and, you know, you talk to Democratic strategists, and they will say to you, part of our problem is we've got a Washington, D.C. based consulting group who thinks that Twitter, what they see in their Twitter feeds from their Democratic consultant friends and their Democratic-leaning journalist friends is actually representative of the Democratic base, and they want to constantly cater to that base.

So I think you're seeing this push and pull inside of both. political parties. It's a bigger problem than that in my mind. And we've touched on this a little bit before, but so many Americans don't aren't on Twitter. I mean, majority of Americans aren't on Twitter. And certainly the majority of Americans don't use Twitter the way that political insiders do. And the kind of discourse that that creates when you have whatever you want to call them influencers or thought leaders or what have you on Twitter. And everybody in that kind of Washington, D.C. bubble paying attention to what they say is, I think is really destructive to say in political rhetoric. And I'll use an example from our own,

I'll use a personal example. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, or we got word that she died at about 7.30 on a Friday night. And I was, we immediately, the four of us started texting with one another. And I was just sort of getting information in bits and pieces. I was at a dinner and was pretty sympathetic initially to the kinds of arguments that, you know, even somebody like an Ed Markey was making, a senator from Massachusetts who said, in effect, we're going, we're going hardcore here, and Republicans will deserve it because of the arguments they made in the context of Merrick Garland. And if I had been on Twitter, I don't have Twitter on my phone, so I can't tweet from my phone. If I had been on Twitter, I probably would have tweeted something, not quite,

I mean, I definitely was not where Markey was. He was making pretty extreme points. But I would have been more critical of Republicans in that moment than I think Republicans ended up deserving. And I say that as somebody who was critical of Republicans anyway, right? But I would have probably tweeted something. You know, you want to get likes and retweets. Pretty aggressively critical of Republicans. And then once you do that, that's your position. And how often do you see somebody on Twitter tweet something out and then say hours later,

or a day later, I've reconsidered this. I've actually spent a lot of time going back and really rereading the arguments, and it turns out that my initial tweet was made in haste and doesn't reflect my more considered thinking on the subject. So that's what literally happened to me. So I went home that night and just read everything from 2016, read the garlic, the Merrick Garland stuff, spent a good chunk of the day on Saturday going back and studying this and found out that I had a much more nuanced position than my initial knee-jerk reaction

on Friday night. Twitter incentivizes the knee-jerk reaction. And nobody ever wants to back off from that. And that's one of the reasons it's such a horrible way to conduct our debates. And why I think, sadly, David, you're right. I do think that the political right has fallen into this trap. And it's destructive. And it's hard to see a way out of that part of this broader problem that we have in our

politics. Update. The president deleted that tweet. and reposted the same tweet, but he spelled caught correctly this time. Thank you. Oh, I thought you were going to say... Game changer.

I thought you were going to say he went back and gave it more thought and decided that, in fact, it wasn't really. So, Sarah, the right... I keep hearing on Twitter that the right has the best memes. Is that an advantage or no? Here's something I think is interesting. First of all, if anyone has checked my Twitter,

I have a pin tweet, and my pin tweet is, Pew Research found that of the fewer than 50 million U.S. adults on Twitter, and remember, we'll have, you know, 160 or so million registered voters, and about 130 million of those will vote. So out of 130 million people who will vote this year, 50 million maybe are on Twitter, although I doubt that all of those will vote. Only 6% of those 50 million user accounts make up 73% of the tweets about national politics. That means fewer than 1% of Americans are frequently weighing in about politics

on this platform. But here's something that I think is interesting. So we can complain about the president tweeting too much or even about right-wing allies tweeting too much. But as long as it stays on Twitter, they're actually speaking to the perfect audience for said memes, tweets, very online conversations. The issue politically is when you are talking to your Twitter, Twitter audience, not on Twitter. So if the president who has tweeted every, approximately every less than

six minutes in this past hour, as long as those all stay on Twitter, it's great because he's speaking to his Twitter base, the people who vote for him on Twitter. No problem. That's actually a smart thing to do. Target your voters on the medium that they're on in the language that they speak on that medium.

But if he gives a national address, it starts talking about very online Twitter memes and coups in the language of Twitter, but in a national address. That's where the problem politically arises. He's now no longer speaking to just the Twitter folks and the 1% of Americans that actually are weighing in on Twitter about this. He's now speaking to everyone, and it's confusing slash alarming to those people that the president tweets every three to six minutes. Yeah, so that's actually a good place for me to chime in. I agree with you entirely, Sarah, but I think it works in another way as well.

When the president of the United States says something back guano crazy in one forum, it doesn't stay in that forum, right? And so... Oh, that's true. If they've reached that level. His tweets this hour, though, don't reach that level. No, that's true. But my point is, is that...

So only his worst tweets spill off of Twitter into the mainstream media, right? His conventional, I endorse so-and-so in District 12 of state, whatever, you know, maybe it makes its place, it filters into the local coverage down there,

but other, you know, or congratulations to so-and-so for winning, you know, whatever. That kind of stuff doesn't get into the New York Times. It doesn't get into the local news. It doesn't get into the newspaper. It doesn't get picked up on the cable news networks. but when he

accuses Joe Scarborough of murder, that doesn't stay on Twitter. And so like when Steve was talking about or when David was talking about how seniors aren't on Twitter for a large part, Steve and I were talking about this a little bit yesterday. You know,

not only are seniors not on Twitter very much, you know who seniors do talk to a lot is doctors. and they're hearing one thing from their doctors, specifically something along the lines of, you could die if you get COVID. And then they see sort of Trump's Twitter presidency, which I agree with you is a spillover because he thinks he doesn't see any difference

between his Twitter audience, his Fox audience, and the League of Women Voters. He thinks everybody's including, and you watch him in debates. He does this incredibly frustrating thing where even when he's making a good argument, making a correct argument, he doesn't provide the narrative connective tissue between the points he's trying to make and the points he's

making. And so he'll he'll just give this Twitter shorthand for something. Like we all know about that. Most people don't know about that. They don't know what he's talking about. And but because he lives in this bubble where everybody speaks in the shorthand, and he assumes that everybody outside the bubble speaks in the same shorthand, he's actually not a very effective communicator because of it. And then you have this, like, Noah Rothman had this tweet yesterday, the day

before, where he says, it really is amazing on this website that, and I'm paraphrasing, and it really is amazing on this website in the midst of a national pandemic that has caused economic dislocations, the likes of which we haven't seen in

a century, and the President of the United States now has succumbed to the pandemic, that I'm told that the most important thing for voters is going to be the release of the Durham report. And he's absolutely right. And that is the world that Trump lives in. And I wrote a column last week, you can find it on the dispatch website about how Trump is so poorly served by his biggest fans and biggest friends.

Because people like Hannity, people like Rush, people like Mark Levine. People like, you know, some of our friends at various websites that we don't need to name right now, they all tell him that his instincts are absolutely right about what is good politics when his instincts are awful. And he runs with that. And normally in politics, what you do to get politicians, particularly presidents, to do the smart and good thing as you see it is you criticize them when they do badly and you praise them when they do well. And yet Trump, because he has such an avivisic lizard brain need for affirmation and he has such an oversized negative response to criticism, it's like trying to drive a car where the steering wheel only turns in one direction. And everyone thinks that they can guide him solely through praise whether he's wrong or whether he's right. And that, and Twitter plays a central role in all

So, David, I have an example of this from last night that I think is interesting and worth at least a quick detour on, which is the president in 2018 on Twitter called for the declassification of a bunch of stuff related to the Russia investigation and the Hillary stuff. And then last night, he said once again that he had declassified all of this stuff that has not, as far as I know, been declassified yet, despite his tweets because within in the federal government presidential tweets are not considered actual orders. I know. But actually, I mean, that was a real

discussion and it's worth saying out loud because you don't know that it's from the president, et cetera. So online, this makes perfect sense and everyone just sort of goes to their corners and knows what they know and great. But there's an issue

with this that I'm like pondering, which is he online, in the online conversation, people want Hillary arrested for sending classified emails over a private server, whatever the, you know, butter emails conversation is. But now Trump wants to declassify all of this, including presumably all these emails that she thinks she should be arrested for sending? Is it that odd? Like if you're not, like to Jonah's point,

if you actually have to explain it, it does get a little weird. Well, I'm going to, well, you know, this is where MAGA Twitter gets its will, actually toned. Well, actually, Sarah, isn't he the declassification authority? No, he has the power to do it. But if the point is, she needs to be arrested because she threatened national security by sending the emails, then making the emails public whether you have the authority to do it. I understand he obviously won't get arrested for doing it, nor should he. He has the ability to do it. But like, but doesn't that still threaten national security?

Yeah. But if the injury that Hillary Clinton committed was not the actual, but the potential leakage of highly classified information into the wrong hands, maybe somebody hacked it. We don't know. There's not really evidence that happened. But her problem was the potential leakage of highly classified information into the wrong hands, which is serious. Like I was screaming from the mountaintops back in that day. If I had done that when I was in the military, my career would be over. I'd be staring at a dishonorable discharge.

I mean, that stuff is just manifestly plain. And then for Trump to say, well, to own the libs, I guess, here it is. Not a potential leakage, but just an intentional document dump. And no, you're exactly right. And to normal ordinary people, you're thinking, why would you do that? But in sort of Twitter MAGA, it's like, at last, we will see the plot uncovered at last. And he loves that stuff. I mean, he loves it.

He feeds on it. And you can see it yesterday in his retweet stream. He was retweeting sort of the avatars of the maximal anti-Obama Russia conspiracy theory stuff from the 2016 election, just serially retweeting these guys. And that's... I'd also just say that going by MAGA Twitter, I am now convinced beyond a shadow of that that Hunter Biden should not be president of the United States. I'm still on the fence. John, still on the fence.

So just one quick point before we move on. You know, we should just be sort of transparent and clear with our listeners and our readers. I mean, this is an ongoing challenge for us. I mean, we have to sort of wrestle with this because on the one hand, you have this conversation. taking place on Twitter that does include a lot of people who are influencers, a lot of people who, you know, make decisions on behalf of the country, a lot of Republican strategists, a lot of Democratic strategists, journalists, what have you. So covering what, covering the argument on Twitter isn't an, it's not an option to sort of set that aside entirely as much as you prefer

to cover what, you know, I think most Americans experience as as real life. But, But we try to do that. I mean, we try to strike the balance. And I know sometimes we slip into, you know, a self-referential discussion about so-and-so tweeted such and such, who tweeted this, who was responding to this. And sometimes our listeners and our readers are left sort of scratching their heads. Just know that we go out of our way to try not to do that wherever possible. And we recognize that as David's, as David's opening.

suggested, Twitter is not real life. Let's take a break and hear from our other sponsor today. Keeps, Steve? Hey, guys, for those of you who have seen me on Fox News or know what I look like, you know that losing my hair is not a big concern for me. But I have lots of friends who started losing their hair as early as their 20s and 30s, and it's panic time when that happens. No guys ever ready to lose their hair.

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keeps, k-e-e-e-p-s dot com slash dispatch. Last topic, tonight is our next debate. Yay. And our next Dispatch Live. Yay. I'm enthusiastic about one of those things. All right. So we have the vice presidential debate. This is Mike Pence

squaring up against Kamala Harris. They will square up, however, 12.25 feet apart from one another, separated by Plexiglass barriers. My question to each of you, what does a win look like for either campaign? Steve, you first.

I think the win for both campaigns is pretty similar. Both candidates have to look like they could be president. And it doesn't involve much more than that. I think Jonah and I touched on this a little bit yesterday when I joined him on The Remnant, so I won't rehash it much. But I think there's a pretty clear strategy for Kamala Harris, and that is to try to drive a wedge between Mike Pence and Donald Trump. Mike Pence has his eye on 2024.

He wants to be the, and believes he is the rightful heir to Trumpism and that he can serve as a bridge between Trumpism and more traditional movement conservatism and the broader Republican Party. But standing in between him and that is Donald Trump. And if I were Kamala Harris, I would point out all of the ways in which Mike Pence has tried to restrain the president or rein him in, pointing out that he ran the coronavirus task force. He was the one who had to reach out to Democratic governors after the president suggested he might not be enthusiastically sending them the kind of PPE and ventilators that they wanted.

I think if you push Mike Pence to really defend Donald Trump on some of the more extreme aspects of his presidency, it'll make Mike Pence a little uncomfortable as he looks to a sort of a post-Trump era. He's seen the same polls and talking to probably some of the same strategists that we are. So he understands the political environment right now, but he's in a box because he's got to defend his president. I think for Kamala, you know, making that case is pretty straightforward. For Mike Pence, I would probably try to answer every single question with Amy Coney Barrett, you know, no matter what he gets, gets a question about taxes, I would say, you know, Amy Goni Barrett pays taxes, and she's going to be a great Supreme

Court justice, lean into that strength and try to remind Trump voters, including reluctant Trump voters and maybe some independence of the things that the president has done that might inspire them to go and cast about once again for the president. Jonah? Yeah, I mean, I know that Steve is a religious zealot in the church of Sarah Isger's. It's all about a base election strategy. And with those assumptions, I think that's pretty good advice, right? Is if you're just trying to tell, you know, dismayed, would-be Trump vote,

is to keep their enthusiasm, you know, everything about Coney Barrett makes a lot of sense. I don't know. I mean, I have a factual question. Maybe one of you guys can answer about what the polling on Amy Coney Barrett is generally for people. I mean, like, it's not exactly saying, you know, apple pie and puppies. And I like Amy Conna Barron. I want her on the court. All that stuff stipulated. But I'm just saying if you're trying to expand the coalition, which again, I know Sarah thinks is folly, like talking about. of the flawn or something, but then talking about her might actually turn off more people that you could, that you might want in a normal election. Beyond that, I think, you know,

Pence, I take Steve's point, and I've been thinking about a lot for the last 24 hours since we were on this fantastic episode of The Remnant that is shockingly still relevant and people should download as quickly as possible. It's a good episode. I was listening to it. Um, but the, um, the problem for Pence is, I agree that there's this, you know, he wants to run in 2024 and, um, he needs to shine and all of that kind of stuff. But if he is seen as even slightly less than a self-abasing, thank you, sir, may I have another foot soldier in the army of Trump, he's doomed. I mean, he's just doomed, right, for 2024 and whatnot. He needs to be all about Trump, all about the base and all that kind of stuff, which I think hurts his chances for

2024. And, you know, Steve's advice to have, to Kamala Harris to sort of try to insert that kind of wedge issue is a good one. But my sense is that he will deflect that and just start talking about how wonderful the president's musk is. If I were Kamala Harris, I would, without any reservation, keep bringing up the fact that Pence was the director of the COVID response for the White House and keep saying, okay, is it your screw up that allowed the president? You had one job, right? It's like, keep the president from getting the coronavirus.

And I know that wasn't actually his job, but it'll annoy him. And just keep saying, so is it the president's fault or is it your fault that the president got the coronavirus? And make Pence say over and over again, no, no, no, what the president was doing was leading, right? That's the new argument, which I find morally reprehensible, that the president was leading. And that's why he got the coronavirus, because that's what leaders do. And I think that the challenge for Kamala is, I think she is wildly overrated and Pence is wildly

underrated. Pence won the 2016 debate. Pence is incredibly disciplined. She believes her own press releases too much about what a brilliant prosecutor type she is. And so the challenge for her is to actually advance Joe Biden's message rather than her own and not take bait on all sorts of things that allow the Trump campaign to say, see how radically you really are. Don't take debate on reparations. Don't take debate on all that kind of stuff. Figure out how to answer the court packing question without seeming like it's a dodge, which is what their official position is, is to dodge it. So I think she actually has a really harder time in some ways to figure out how to stay disciplined and not just take every shot imaginable. But at the end of the day,

is the same thing as Pence's, her message is the same thing as Biden's was in the original debate. Do no harm. Do nothing that changes the trajectory of this race. Do nothing that calls into doubt the wisdom or the safety of voting for the Democrats. And I'm a little skeptical that she has the discipline to do that. But if she does do that, then anything Pence does doesn't really matter. David, I think this is an interesting needle to thread. You have two people who both want to run for president in 2024 and therefore whose interests are different than the campaigns. But to Jonah's point, if their campaign loses, their chances of doing well in 2024 also are low. So they need the campaign to win, but they also need their own messages

to be slightly different than the campaign's message. How do they do it? So I'm just going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to say tonight's going to be a good night for Mike Pence in the Trump campaign. And the reason why I think that's going to happen is because Mike Pence is going to speak clearly, rationally. He's going to be treat Kamala Harris appropriately. In other words, he's going to be a normal human being who's going to say things that make sense. and that is going to vault over the norm of the last several weeks out of this White House by leaps and bounds.

And so in a way he's going to, I think he can, just by walking out there and being Mike Pence, aside from the, aside from does he thread the needle on the messaging, just being Mike Pence is going to communicate that this is an actual serious normal human being that is now campaigning for the Trump administration.

He's not a ball of charisma. You know, he's never going to be a guy who's going to pack arenas, but there has been so much chaos lately that just walking out there and being rational and normal and reasonably calm is going to be a win for this campaign, is my view.

And I think that Kamalares has a higher bar than Pence. I mean, his bar is to come out there and communicate that there's actually some adults in the administration still, she has all these expectations that the left has piled on her forever, which is she's the killer prosecutor, she knows how to cross-examine,

she can dismantle people, you know, they're going to be looking for that, you know, one-minute clip that they can, where she just roast Pence. And that's, you know, outside from that one moment that was highly prepared in that first ambush of Joe Biden

where they already had the merch ready to go right after it happened. She just hasn't come through with a lot of that. And honestly, it's a high, if you're going into a debate, it's a high bar to clear to say, to have a lot of fans behind you going, kind of rubbing their hands together with glee saying, I cannot wait for you to dismantle your opposition.

I don't know that she's really up for that. But I do think one thing that this debate will be a lot, lot easier to watch and will feel a bit more like a return to something approaching normal politics tonight than it was last week. And I think for the health and well-being of Americans, that will be a good thing. Okay, let's do our last topic of the day. We're talking a lot about mail-in ballots, and that involves stamps. Who is not on a stamp, real or fictional, that you would go out and buy some stamps with that person should they find themselves on said stamp.

I wish that listeners could, this was a dispatch live so people could have seen the flat, blank stairs. Oh, Jonah is still flat blank staring. I'm processing. I want the Aragorn. I want the Aragorn stamp. Yeah, you'd go to your. post office and go by

Aragorn stamps? I would walk to the post office to get the Aragorn stamp. Okay, that's selling out any minute now. Jonah? Actually, that would probably sell pretty well, right? It would. First of all, I'm running through my

identical memory file on who already has a stamp. And so let me think. I will admit, I would buy a really large number of Friedrich Hayek stamps. I would. I mean, I would. I mean, I would not proud of it.

I'm not ashamed of it either, but I'm just, it's a fact. I would buy a large. I mean, what would Hayek think of that, honestly? This government-sponsored mail service? Well, that's a little bit of the irony. But, I mean, at the same time, you know, Hayek had was okay with. some government institutions as long as they were, you know, universal and based on simple rules and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I think he would believe in privatizing the post office,

but, you know, can you get a high extent for DHL? I don't know. I would like a high extant. I'm just going to put it out there. Steve? So I've been thinking this whole time. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of where my mind. mind is going I have I don't know I don't have a good answer for you

Vince Lombardi Hmm surely he's had a stamp Yeah that's the thing Has he? I mean I haven't myself used The stamp in probably 20 years So not that up on

stamps Wait what do you mean you have to use the stamp in 20 years? Do you have like people? I have lots of people I don't really send mail. You're all wrong. The obvious answer, and this was a trick question,

is that America across the board would run out in droves to buy the stamps that I would commission of various octopuses in various forms, in various colors, doing all of the beautiful things that octopuses do so that all of your mail could be adorned

with the smartest cephalopon, probably in the universe. Two things. One, I googled, and in 1997, they came out with a Vince Lombardi stamp. It's actually quite fetching. And you said you haven't used stamps in 20 years, so that's out. You might have in fact used 23 years ago a Vince Lombardi stamp. They also have a Green Bay Packer stamp, which is pretty cool.

And second of all, Sarah, have you seen the speculation from like a serious, there was a few years ago some serious scientists speculated that maybe octopi are born of alien DNA have alien DNA because they don't fit

any other sort of normal light form on this planet I have seen this I am fully on board with this conspiracy theory very very much so I think that they are the coolest

thing ever and that they but for their short lifespan would definitely be running the planet. Unfortunately, having a lifespan of only a year to three years just limits your ability to really run the world. Also,

they're pretty misanthropic and not social creatures whatsoever, so cooperation not going to be a strong suit, which we've learned from humans. Cooperation kind of a big deal if you want to take over the planet. Yes, but if you have a short lifespan so time is precious, it's good to have eight arms so you can multitask.

and regenerative arms at that. Wow. I didn't realize that. I guess that makes sense. All right, listeners. There you go. For better or worse, another pod in the books. By the time this pod comes out, you'll be very close to the vice presidential debate. So if you are a member, tune in live for our dispatch live. And if not, go to the dispatch.com slash 30 days free for the last waning hours of your free trial membership so that you too can join dispatch live as we talk about the vice presidential debate. We normally start about five minutes after the debate ends. So we'll see you then.

You know,