The Dispatch Podcast - Inflation Surges to 40-Year High

Episode Date: July 15, 2022

Sarah, David, and Jonah reflect on the problem of inflation, which surged to 9.1 percent this week and look ahead to the presidential race in 2024. Will there be a showdown between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination? Our hosts wrap up with a discussion of shifting coalitions within the political parties.   Show Notes: -TMD: June’s Very Bad, No Good Inflation Report -New York Times: Most Democrats Don’t Want Biden in 2024, New Poll Shows -Axios: The great realignment -The Dispatch: How Joe Biden Set Himself Up for Failure -Pew Research Center: Religiously, nonwhite Democrats are more similar to Republicans than to white Democrats -First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, and we've got Jonah Goldberg and David French today. I don't know why, but I'm particularly excited about this podcast. We're going to talk inflation. We're going to talk some new polling with Biden's approval numbers and what it could mean for 2024 on both sides. And the changing coalitions of voters in each party and a little change, not worth your time? Or is it very worth your time? Dumb-thum-thum. Forshadowing. Let's dive right in. Jonah, inflation surges to 9.1%. You have the Biden White House saying that they think that that number actually sort of reflects back a couple weeks now that gas prices are going down. They think that that will have been the high watermark.

You have Nancy Pelosi, in fact, saying that this will have been the high watermark. That feels like a dangerous prediction politically to make. Yeah. I mean, let's tease out two things. One, there's the economic point and then there's the political points. On the economic side, I think you can make a case that inflation is going to get better relatively soon. Not good. I mean, just like we may have seen the worst behind us.

You know, Jason Furman, Obama's former chief economic advisor, was saying how you really need to look at the core inflation. He's made this argument before that you should really look month to month and not year to year because there's so many things that are involved in the year to year number. But as he mentioned yesterday or the day before on Twitter, I guess it was yesterday, it doesn't really matter because this number was terrible from any, from any. angle and you can say it wasn't as terrible some people are saying okay but it was just really bad corn inflation was really bad if you took out energy and food it was still really bad um and people's real wages have gone down over the last year there's all sorts of reasons why economically um it's not good even if it's not as terrible as some people want to claim on the political side i think you're absolutely right like you just don't even want to sound like you're saying

these aren't the droids you're looking for right you don't only want to, like, hint that you think people are getting too worked up about this and that they need to calm down and not believe their lying eyes and we know better and sort of econsplain to working class people why they're getting so worked up about something that's not that big a deal. I think it's politically just incredibly poisonous. And they flirt with sounding like that quite a bit. And it's just amazing to me that they're still so tempted to be in that mode because they think every problem is a messaging problem.

And they should just, you know, they should look like their hairs on fire rather than look like they're trying to calm people down, I think. Yeah, David, you know, real wages, meaning the amount of discretionary income you actually have minus inflation, basically. Lowest, it's been in decades, or rather sharpest decline in real wage in decades. That's, to me, I think, the political number. I think Jonah's right to separate it into economics and politics.

The economics, I mean, asked to economists get 10 opinions, but on the politics, that's all going to be about real wage growth. When you go to the grocery store, do you feel like you can buy? bacon, or do you need to just not have bacon in your, you know, salad or whatever and go without? That's going to be about your real wage and have the sharpest decline in decades. And then, you know, here's the quote from the White House exactly. While this print is to be taken seriously, and this is hard on American families, it is backward looking. And we have seen some pretty important declines in energy prices over the past few weeks.

was from a member of the Council of Economic Advisors. Fair enough, but then let's see those numbers. The problem is that each month, it's getting worse. And remember, this was supposed to be transitory back a year ago. Then six months ago, we'd seen the high watermark. Now it's just that it's backward-looking, but backward-looking meaning like two weeks. Okay. Woof, that's a hard messaging moment for the White House.

There's just no way to message this. I mean, I think the bottom line is if you're looking at an inflation, especially gas prices, it's so visible. I mean, everywhere you drive, you've got it on a billboard, which would be an interesting question. How is it that the prices of gas, unlike most other prices of most anything else, just got put up on billboards. But you drive and you see it. Now, the prices where I am have gone down by almost a dollar in the last couple of weeks. It is not true here. So I have seen prices go down, but at the same time, they're still really, really high.

My number still starts with a five, and you're right, even driving yesterday, in case you ever forget what the economy is doing by drive home involved multiple reminders along the way and I needed to fill my tank. And the other thing about the gas price piece of this, it's also the one piece of this that feels like, look, you know, you. You can over promise on what you can do by saying, I'm going to open up X or Y or Z area for drilling, or we're going to do this or that. There's a lag time. It's not like you just turn on the spigots and you get a whole heck of a lot more oil.

Now you can get more production promises from allies maybe, but it is also the area. Gas prices are the area in which you can say, I can see the price very high. and you can also say I can see the policy that would increase supply. And that's not quite the same as a lot of other categories of inflation. I mean, what are you going to do about the cost of bacon? That's a much more opaque process for Americans to sort of figure out.

It's much more opaque to figure out how you fix the price of used cars, for example, which was a big problem for a while. But oil is really different. It's one where artificial constraints on supply of oil and gas when you're in the middle of an inflationary cycle aren't just economically problematic over the, say, the medium term. They're politically really catastrophic, this idea that says, no, no, no, we're not going to increase the supply of oil and gas at a time. when Americans are just really hurting in their commute.

And so I think that that makes this particularly politically problematic. And I think you've seen some messaging changes from the Biden White House that they are trying to do something concrete about to increase oil supply. It's a big part of the Biden-Harris combating inflation plan. So it's just that one piece of it strikes me as much more uniquely damaging. than almost anything else. The whole rest of it, I haven't heard a really coherent plan

from anybody as to how that's going to be dealt with. The oil and gas part of it, that seems to be more transparently susceptible to political decisions. Jonah, you're my go-to historian who's not a historian. But, you know, all the headlines are, inflation surges 9.1% in June, most since November 1981.

And so you're getting all of these comparisons, and not just now, but for the last year, to the Carter administration, to the malaise, to, you know, runaway gas prices, to that inflationary period. And yet, I feel like our political moment is so wildly different. If for no other reason, I think there's a lot of reasons that make it different, you are still in a very nascent stage of a conservative movement. You'd had Goldwater, but for the most part, the Republican Party. Hardy was still sort of this Rockefeller Gerald Ford-esque thing. And you're about to have Reagan jump onto the scene who, love him or hate him, was a very influential president on the American political body. And so that hadn't happened, really, in November 1981, changing the politics.

I'm curious how you see, how you see that comparison as being incorrect when people compare this to Carter era. Yeah, no, it's a good question. And just, and all due deference to David, I'm your sort of maybe intellectual historian who's not an historian. David's our military historian who's not an historian. Just to be clear, because I don't know very much

military history. Yeah, so I think, you know, it's interesting. Someone posted, tweeted this the other day, a map of the 1984 presidential election where Reagan won every state except for Minnesota and the District of Columbia. And the person pointed out that that map coincided with a 60-seat majority for Democrats. And like that is so inconceivable in our political climate today because in election

after election, the president and the congressional ballots have become tighter and tighter and which just shows you the nature of the polarization. and it's a weird sort of digression, except in the sense that the problems with inflation in the 1970s and 1980s were generally considered to be bipartisan, right? I mean, a lot of it started with Nixon and the wages and price control stuff. Some people blamed the spending of the Great Society. Jimmy Carter ran on whip inflation now was the button that they used to wear. win, whip inflation now.

And so it was seen as more as a systemic thing. I think inflation partly is a systemic thing. It comes from, you know, the Trump spending is as much to blame and the COVID pandemic and all of these things that are not, don't have a partisan valence to them. But the way we talk about things now has such a greater partisan valence than it did in the 1970s. And so, you know, I think I've talked about this before.

I think inflation is one of these things that unsettles human beings in weird ways. It makes people feel like life is just out of control. And we just went through a pandemic, which also made people feel like life is out of control. And we now have the rising crime, which makes people feel like life is out of control. Those things are very much like the 1970s. What's just different is that they are now so easily pinned on one party or another in a way that I think fosters a lot of the sort of tribal polarization stuff. And also, I just think that there's much more, there's a lot more global, globalist interconnected explanations

for some of this stuff today than there was in the 1970s where, you know, yeah, yeah, the oil shocks from the Middle East, but like the inflation that we've got now is so attributable to supply chain screwups, overspending to deal with the pandemic, the pandemic itself. and then a war in Ukraine. And yeah, Biden made it worse, but I don't think he's responsible for it. David, what do you think about this

in the course of American political history? You know, I think it's a shocking moment for a huge percentage of Americans. I mean, this is a problem that most living Americans have not really dealt with, which is really kind of crazy to think about when you think about it's been since the stagflation

of the 1970s, that this was a critical political issue. So I think for a lot of people, it's shocking, it's jolting. And the interesting question to me is it going to be shocking and jolting in a way that sort of alters American politics at any kind of really truly meaningful level. That's what I'm interested in because differently, just as Jonah said, you had Reagan win 49 states and Democrats with a 60-seat majority in the House? What? That almost doesn't compute. Polarization is hardened to such a point that, yeah, you can have some give and take in the House,

and you can have some give and take in the Senate. But it's small. It's relatively small. In fact, it's the smallest. It's been in history. We just put a chart in the sweep, in fact, that looked at the number of districts that voted differently in party for president and their congressional house district. And yeah, you go back to the 80s and it's like huge, big, tall little graph there. And today it's like single digits. Yeah, it's remarkable. I mean, somebody called it what politics is a very efficient market now. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It is now. Yeah, it is now. So one of my questions is, does that change as circumstances change? I'm a little bit skeptical that it does, considering how hardened partisanship is, and how much

people are centering a big part of their identities around their partisanship. But again, when you have unexpected events that most people alive haven't experienced, you can't really go with the idea that past performance is a predictor of future results. You just kind of have to wait and see. and one of the things that's really interesting to me, though, is if you look at what voters are concerned about on the issue polling, trigger warning Sarah, it's inflation off the charts, like inflation way off the charts, and abortion really low. But if you look at the generic ballot preference for Democrats and Republicans in the, and I guess we're moving into the polling conversation, but if you look at the generic ballot preference, it's really, really close and has moved in the Democratic direction since the Dobbs decision. So what does that mean? So I'm just kind of in this, I'm going to wait and see because we've got some for what is for most Americans, unprecedented events, dramatic.

change in the law? I don't know. I do feel very triggered by all of that. And I will just say that issue polling might be my main bugaboo. But generic ballot polling, while actually I think is incredibly valuable, is misused by people often.

And so I just want to give my like, here's what generic ballot. So it's about feeling, not about who you're going to vote for. And it keeps being used. That's not what you were using it for. So this isn't a criticism of David, but let's make it one. So it's not surprising to me that you would see the feeling question move toward Democrats

after Dobbs, even though it's not going to actually change the outcome of anyone's vote in terms of a red wave, because the generic ballot isn't how that works, right? There is no generic ballot, actually. 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 of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance

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it builds trust. 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. Let's move to more polling so that I can feel personally attacked. So the New York Times-Cyna poll has Biden's approval down to 33%.

You now see polling of Democrats wanting some options for 2024, not necessarily wanting to see Joe Biden run again. and maybe the most shocking part of those cross tabs were the youngest cohort of voters, and what percentage of them would like to see Joe Biden as the nominee in 2024? Five. Five percent. That's in the margin,

well within the margin of error of zero. It's nothing. Like, I mean, can you imagine 95% on any other question? So not great. At the same time, on the other side of the aisle, you know, some of this you have to laugh at. I saw these headlines of Donald Trump losing altitude with Republican voters. And then I went to the poll. Only 50% want him to be the nominee in 2024.

25% want Ron DeSantis. Okay. I mean, I hear you. That is, it's all comparison, I suppose. But that's very different than Joe Biden's numbers within the Democratic Party. curious what your reactions to all of this have been, David? You know, I go back to something I said on this podcast right after Biden became president. And that is it's Biden just doesn't have a, Biden doesn't have a cult.

Biden was always the guy who was being selected because he was the guy most likely to beat Donald Trump. And that's not a whole lot. Now, there's some personal gratitude for him, to him, for doing that. But there's not a whole lot of personal loyalty there. There's not a whole lot of energy and excitement around Joe Biden, the man. There was a lot of energy and excitement about beating Donald Trump. So he never had this kind of hardcore. And when you even say it out loud, you know, it's absurd to sort of think it, the Biden movement.

There was no Biden movement. And there's certainly no common. Harris movement. I mean, so he there's no Biden movement. There's no Harris movement. Uh, I mean, there's an anti-Harris movement that's, uh, bipartisan, but there's no Harris movement. There's no Biden movement. And so I think when you, when you are, you know that and you realize that that that hardcore base of the Democratic Party doesn't like him. Of course, Republicans don't like him. And even his most zealous supporters weren't really that committed to him. as an individual versus as a means to an end,

it makes all the sense in the world when you also overlay the fact that there was a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, there's massive inflation, it's not just Republicans who think the country's on the wrong track, so none of that is surprising. The thing that is still, from a historical basis,

really, really surprising, just from a historical basis, not from what we see, what we mean, known about Donald Trump is that the guy who lost a Biden has a tighter hold on his party than the guy who beat him has on his own party. That's the thing that's remarkable. And I was just saying today that the Washington Post reported that Trump might announce in September before the midterms that he's running again, jumping in first before anybody

else. And I think that stands to reason there's a really good chance that when he jumps in, that's going to at least for a time arrest any kind of slide and maybe give him another bump back towards Republican approval. So to me, the big takeaway from the poll was that Donald Trump has a much tighter grip on his party than Joe Biden has on the Democrats, even though Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. And that is a historical aberration. I feel like the headlines Donald Trump losing altitude with Republican voters is sort of like during the Trump presidency when people would say like, ah, today's the day that Donald Trump became president. And like it just never quite was true. You know, you could be like,

okay, well, that was a good speech. And then like five minutes later, he would do something outrageous. or it would turn out he, you know, took it all back. Jonah, I don't know that I agree with David's diagnosis in this respect. If Joe Biden were a different person, I don't know that this would be the case with the Democratic Party, you know, meaning I think that the Biden White House is, in fact, at fault for some of what they are currently seeing in these polling numbers. It is not just baked in that Joe Biden didn't have a particularly hardcore constituency and therefore this was inevitable 18 months into his presidency that in fact they have made a series of bizarre, not just missteps, but failures to step at all, no stepping. Harris has been unhelpful at best, harmful at times.

There's been sort of a malaise within the White House. It feels like no one there is passionate about doing their jobs from the outside or particularly passionate about their boss. And I'm just trying to imagine if, so take Joe Biden's win and how he put together that coalition. And then when you get to the White House, he governs like Bill Clinton is probably the best example of someone who was not governing to a specific constituency. Bill Clinton only got more and more popular with the Democratic base. They fell more in love with him over time, even though he wasn't delivering left-wing meat. I understand it's a different political moment. But could you imagine a different Biden presidency and this being different numbers today?

Yeah, what I can't imagine is ever using the phrase again, left-wing meat. Something really creepy about that. When referring to Bill Clinton, that didn't seem. Yeah, maybe. I'm going to do the Homer retreating into the hedgeline right now. So, look, I agree. We've talked about this before. I think that the worst thing that ever happened to Joe Biden was losing Georgia in those special runoffs in January 5th.

You mean winning. Or winning Georgia, right. Not losing Georgia, right. Yeah, he lost by winning. exactly and if you replay his presidency just with Mitch McConnell controlling the Senate it gives Biden all of the permission he needs to govern more like a Bill Clinton right because then he gets to say I can't get this stuff through the Senate obviously I would love to do this new new deal this green new deal spend six a trillion bajillion dollars but I can't

so let's work really hard towards the midterms and let's do the things that we can do besides, I was elected to be a bipartisan return a normalcy kind of guy. And then the problem is you get these wormtong whisperer historians who come and visit them at the White House. They say, look at Georgia. Look at, you know, this is your chance

to go big, bigger than Obama. He's got this chip on his shoulder from the Obama years, and so he gets seduced by this. And he swings for the fences, and that feeds the inflation, that feeds the failures, that feeds the overconfidence about Afghanistan, and we're off to the races. I wrote a column.

He makes speeches, the speech he gave in Atlanta in January that was so bizarre to me, incredibly partisan and very much not acknowledging that he didn't have the votes within his own party for this agenda so that afterwards people were like, well, wait, did you ever call him at Romney? He's like, no, I haven't called a single Republican. And you don't have the votes within your own party. Yeah, yeah. No, I know that. Like, that moment was crazy. I don't mean that that's what drove down his numbers, but for people watching closely, it was a white. House that was totally unaware and had no mission-driven plan. And exactly to your point, Jonah, if Mitch McConnell had controlled the Senate and he gave nearly an identical speech in Georgia, totally different. Right, exactly. Yeah. And so, like, my friend Jim Garrity, or David's friend, too, he made this point a while back that, you know, in any normal administration, you have the A team in the first two years

of the administration. and it's like the B team, and if they get reelected, it's the C team, and then the C and D team kind of write it out. If you look at the Biden staffers as sort of Obama 2.0, he started with the D and E team in terms of political sophistication. And I think, you know, it shows in a lot of their messaging, a lot of their advance work, a lot of their handling of Joe Biden. But, you know, I wrote a column this week asking where did Biden go wrong, and my basic answer is that it's an overdetermined phenomenon.

In social science, an overdetermined phenomenon is when you have more than one plausible explanation for why something happened. So, like, my standard joke about, my standard illustration of this is when people ask me, why are Jews liberal, I can give you 10 answers that all have strong explanatory power, at least for some segment of the Jewish population. and maybe not so strong for other parts. All the reasons why Biden is, all the explanation for why Biden's in trouble are true. Bad political work, inflation, Afghanistan, Mitch McConnell, not running the Senate, misreading the room, going too big.

All of these things fuel each other, complement each other, and get entangled in each other. And plus there's, you know, one of the most interesting things in the Siena poll is, you know, 64% of Democrats want a different candidate. And the reasons they state are 33% because he's too old and 32% because of his job performance. Now, I bet you a big chunk of the job performance people, if you've asked no follow questions, why do you think he can't do the job? They'd say it's because he's too old.

And if you ask the people who said it's because he's too old, why do you think that's the problem is because he can't do the job? I mean, there's this just general sense that the job is too big for him. and that he doesn't have the team to back him up. And the flop-swept panic in the Democratic Party is in part because the person in the wings who's supposed to be like the savior is the vice president in a situation like this. And she's more unpopular than Joe Biden.

The only other silver-lining weird thing about this, which I'm surprised you guys didn't mention, is that as unpopular as Biden is, as much as the Democratic Party doesn't like him, in a head-to-head matchup, he still beats Donald Trump. Right. We are in a country that no one likes these two septuagenarian cranks. And I feel bad for doing the false equivalence between Biden and Trump. Biden's a crank with a normal parameters. Trump's something different. But like this is unsustainable. And I kind of feel like there's a damn waiting to break about younger candidates and all that. I just don't know when it manifests itself. I was actually going to mention that also, you know, the polling about Democrats not wanting Biden to be the nominee.

in 2024, don't mistake that for not supporting Biden when he is the nominee in 2024. And even more so that you're asking them how they feel about Biden, basically. Because if people actually had to sit down and think about how this would all go, Biden is not only their best option for 2024. There is no second option. If Joe Biden announced tomorrow that he's not running, let me tell you how this would go. He would need to decide immediately whether he was going to endorse his vice president if he did, they would absolutely lose in

2024. If he didn't, it would be a huge problem. That's certainly that weekly lunch would be awkward. But that's the route he would almost certainly have to take at that point. So then you have a huge free-for-all within the Democratic Party with Kamala Harris

still in the lead. You have some governors throwing in Pete Buttigieg. Who's there a better bet to beat someone like Donald Trump and you come up with Joe Biden. So that poll is, again, it's only good for what it's for. It's to tell you whether Democrats are excited about Joe Biden, they're not. Does it mean that the Democratic Party actually is going to ditch Joe Biden? Absolutely not, because they are rational people who are telling Joe Biden, dear God, you have to run again. And David, I mean, we definitely saw that poll head-to-head matchup. Now it was within the margin. But it does have Joe Biden ahead. I definitely want to spend some time on the Ron DeSantis thing, because as I've looked, you know, memories are totally deceiving.

I was like, you know, Ron DeSantis feels like he's a little further ahead. But back at this point before cycles, there would always be some candidate that we, you know, made up in our heads as being like, oh, obviously he will win the nomination. And he never did. Not once can I think that the person who was like. Oh, come on, President Scott Walker was great. Exactly.

And I went back and looked at all of that polling for the first two years before, in a four-year cycle, before the presidential cycle, not even close. Nobody has ever had a double-digit lead, let alone a plus 20, plus 25 point lead like Ron DeSantis does. It's wild. You know, to the extent you want to count way back in the day when there were still Jonah's smoke-filled rooms, Fine. Maybe there was someone way ahead, but then it wasn't based on primaries and actual voting and polling. So that's a little different. But for the last 20 years, 25 years, no, nothing like it. Ron DeSantis, maybe, maybe, David, is there a chance of having a one-on-one race between Trump and DeSantis? Is there a chance? It's a true question. The answer's no. Yeah. So let me put it like this. I think if Trump announces first, it means there's a smaller field.

And so it's a better chance of a more rational kind of race than we had in 2016 if Trump announces first. And also, I think if Trump announces first, that changes the dynamic of a DeSantis Trump race. If DeSantis announces first, let's say after he wins re-election, which we're presuming that he will in Florida, he wins re-election. He wins re-election in Florida, waits a decent interval, announces that he's running for president as sort of the air, the air to Trumpism. I am the next, I'm the next evolutionary step in Trumpism. That's one kind of race versus Trump announces in September 2020, and DeSantis says, no, you need to move along, big guy. That's another kind of race. And as malleable as Ron DeSantis is.

And he's malleable. He's malleable. As malleable as Ron DeSantis is, we might be talking about a kind of different Ron DeSantis in 18 months as he is trying to supplant and confront and supplant Donald Trump. But my best guess is if Trump announces first,

that clears some of the field, some of the field. But can I just circle back? Because I want to put a pen and some incompetence just for a moment. Because we love incompetence. I just, yeah, I can't get enough of it. It isn't just that Joe Biden misread the moment. The whole progressive wing of the party was misreading the moment, of the Democratic Party, was misreading the moment.

This whole idea that you're going to hold up a bipartisan infrastructure bill, one of the first truly bipartisan, big bipartisan bills in a long time, to push through this build back better plan that was just, monstrously huge. And your plan, your plan for winning over Joe Manchin and Kirsten Cinema, who had repeatedly said that they were not for this thing, appeared to be, we're going to tweet at them with extreme aggression and follow them into bathrooms and circle their houseboat with kayaks. And that'll do the trick. It was absolutely remarkable political incompetence across the Democratic board for month after month

acting like Joe Biden had some kind of mandate that he didn't have. So I'm spreading that around. I think the Biden administration, I think the Georgia speech was unbelievable, but we have just seen

really remarkably bad tactical decision after remarkably bad tactical decision. And part of it, you know, I always look for why do human beings do the things that they do? and one of the things I keep coming back to in my mind is that base Democrats are disproportionately also bubble Democrats. In other words, they're living in these supermajority parts of the country,

just absolute super majority. And that has an effect on people. That makes them believe and sort of drink more deeply from their own Kool-Aid. And that's one of the only explanations I can think of as to why some of these base Democrats seem so committed to the idea that they really have the popular policies when there's no evidence, no evidence that they do. But it seems like they just live with everyone who agrees with them. I think that that has an impact on people. Jonah, before we leave this topic, David wrote his newsletter that I particularly enjoyed saying Ron DeSantis is not worse than Donald Trump

in response to various headlines and tweets, et cetera, of people sort of trying to create some doom porn around this idea that like Donald Trump was bad, but Ron DeSantis will be so much worse if he wins. And David pointing out like, no, no, Ron DeSantis is the equivalent of Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom in California. he's very, very conservative. He's anti-civil libertarian at times.

There are things to not like about Ron DeSantis. Don't get me wrong. But there's plenty of things that conservatives can like about Ron DeSantis, and maybe most importantly, not a threat to our experiment in self-government, at least not in any way that I can discern. And you look at Kamala Harris or a Gavin Newsom, same idea, right? Anti-Civilbertarian at times, out in California,

illiberal at times. But lots of things. for progressives to really like about their records and, I will note, not a threat to our American experiment in self-government. Jonah, is this actually going to be a real argument within the media or whatever sphere? Because we did this, right? Mitt Romney was a racist. George W. Bush was the worst American president in history. And I think there really is some truth to like, that's what gets you Donald Trump. If everyone is the worst, and a bad person, an evil, that when a bad, evil person comes, you've cried Wolf.

And I just can't believe that, but 18 months later, we're just back to the playbook. I, I, yeah, no, it's depressing and it's profoundly stupid, right? I mean, like, I, you know, when I hear people say, oh, he's worse than Trump, I mean, I get mad at them because you're, you're going to make me to defend Ron DeSantis, right? You're going to make me, like, make the case for Ron DeSantis. And it's not like I hate Ron DeSantis. I really hated the way he ran for governor. I thought it was a really terrible symptom of the corruption of the Republican Party, the way he ran for governor. But, like, Craven, unprincipled, cynical campaigning is not new in American life.

And the way he is governed has been pretty good. I mean, I have some real disagreements about some of the things he's done. I think he's much more of a servant of the Twitter mob than a master of it than people think. But, like, he is within normal parameters of American politics. And, but we're definitely going to see this. This is a very old tradition in American politics generally,

but I think it's much more pronounced on the left. You know, Ramesh Pooner and I wrote a piece years ago. It's one of the only times we co-wrote anything where we basically, you know, expanded on this argument I've been making for years that for the left, the only good conservative is a dead conservative. And I don't mean that in the sort of pro-violence kind of way. I just mean like the second they die, they're like, oh, he was, you know, Ronald Reagan really stood for all Americans and only conservatives could be like Ronald Reagan today.

I mean, I remember they came out with a documentary about Barry Goldwater, where one liberal after another, including Hillary Clinton, talked about how Barry Goldwater was such a decent man, and if only Republicans could be like him today, it be so great. And, like, at the time, you know, liberals thought that Barry Goldwater was going to turn Earth into a smoldering nuclear cinder.

And, you know, and so the problem now is that it's accelerated to the point where basically whoever is possibly going to be in power becomes the new benchmark of who is evil and then you just get to use whatever other yardsticks exist lying around including Donald Trump to say this guy's even worse

and it's so self-discrediting and their argument is not that he's worse their argument is that Donald Trump was evil and incompetent whereas Ron DeSantis is evil and highly competent and that's what makes him worse

yeah but there's just no evidence that he's that I mean like first of all I mean Ron DeSantis went to law school. He served in the military. I mean, again, you're making me make the case for Ron DeSantis, and I resented deeply. But I think does change the subject just slightly? The thing I keep hearing from people who know Ron DeSantis and have been in the room of Ron DeSantis, I have not, is that he's actually pretty socially awkward.

Can't attest to that. Yeah. And he can't really work a room. and I think that's the kind of, there was a time when that would have killed you in politics. And that time is 10 years ago. Yeah, and the thing is, Ron DeSantis is one of the masters of running a Fox News campaign for office. And I'm not sure that it's going to be the same debilitating thing. But it's interesting, like, you know, you would know better than I do, Sarah, but like, by all accounts, Trump could be quite charming in the room.

and Ron DeSanis apparently can't. I mean, so they're just differences. And I don't think we've got really got a great, great grasp of how all that's going to play out. I mean, part of this is that Trump proved that you didn't need to do retail politics. He didn't do Iowa. He didn't do New Hampshire in the traditional sense and did just fine. And then you have... He gave out helicopter rides at the Iowa State Fair, which is going to be popular.

And then you have 60 minutes, like every news organization helping Ron DeSantis more than he could ever have done himself. by attacking him in just super, you know, partisan-ish fashion against a backdrop of red states doing much better coming out of the pandemic, for instance, than Blue States. I mean, just like one stat that was kind of shocking here is Brookings Institute. Red States added 300,000 jobs since February 2020. Blue states still down 1.3 million jobs.

And now that's, No doubt. Governance is part of that. There's also just some demographic things happening in the country of people moving away from California because housing prices are so extraordinarily high. Now, again, there's some governance stuff to that, but it's not like last year's governance decisions. That's decades of choices happening there. And Nashville picking up a lot of Texas, places with land and sunshine. Florida, too. with amex platinum access to exclusive amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside so being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime that's the powerful backing of abex pre-sail tickets

for future events subject to availability and varied by race terms and conditions apply learn more at mx.ca slash y annex uh okay last topic the one i am most excited about david pitched this one i'm going to let david explain the coalition thesis because it is is really interesting. Yeah, so there's some pretty strong evidence now that the two parties' coalitions are changing in pretty dramatic ways and ways that people would not have predicted a few years ago. And just to kind of oversimplify it, and this is, I'm going from an Axios report that's

describing this, that Democrats are becoming, and I'm reading from Axios here, the party of upscale voters concerned more about issues like gun control and abortion rights while the Republicans are quietly building a multi-racial coalition of working-class voters with inflation as an accelerant. Now, the Democratic bullet is a little deceiving because it's a party of upscale voters, upscale white voters, and black voters. So it is multiracial. Republicans are building a coalition that's working-class white,

strong Hispanic, and increasing Asian representation. So it's also more multiracial. but this is new and this is totally contradictory to the, quote, coalition of the ascendant analysis that we heard so much after 2012, which essentially said we're here for and somewhat inconsistent with the emerging demographic majority, the emerging democratic majority, the Rue Tashira John Judas thesis, although that was a little bit more complicated,

but very inconsistent with this coalition. of the ascendant that all of the growing minority populations in America are going to be democratic because that is not appearing to be the case in the Hispanic population in the U.S. It is much more evenly divided than the Democrats anticipated. And now there's some real indication of movement in the Asian population towards Republicans. This is new and this is big. So let me kick it back to you, Sarah. Why were you so excited about this?

Because you don't see large coalition shifting that often. And this is probably the first one of my lifetime. If it comes to fruition, certainly you have the regional coalitions in the 19th century. That caused some problems. But those then resolve into something more like class-based coalitions in the sorry, in the 20th century. And it's where we get our current stereotypes about Democrats and Republicans. You know, by the way, there was that amazing study, David, that you mentioned

that I put in the sweep. It was using 2015 data, but it's the same stereotype. So the data basically holds where the stereotypes of the parties are basically Democrats are LGBT, black, Republicans are rich and old. That's holding from basically this longstanding decades-long 20th century post-FDR model. And what we're seeing is that that's going to shake out totally differently in the next 10 or so years, and you're going to have an education divide. You're going to have people in urban coastal areas who make a lot more money and have a lot more education being in one party and people in rural areas less likely to be college

educated, therefore probably earning less, there will still be a gender divide. That gender divide may grow substantially with this youngest cohort coming up, the 18 to 29 year old cohort of women, are wildly more liberal than the men. Like, we've seen that gender divide's been around. My generation has a, you know, 10-point gender divide. Sometimes it goes up to 15. Sometimes it goes down to still 10 points. but we could see a much bigger gender divide.

However, that gender divide is being driven by this education gap. Women, what, six to four in terms of college acceptance at this point, way more women going to college, way more women graduating college. That's going to have ripple effects to the economy, obviously. But again, makes a huge difference in the politics if that education divide is predicting who's going to be a Democrat and who's going to be a Republican, where you're going to live, whether you're going to get married, whether you're going to have kids. This is, it's, again, it's not just politics. It is going to reshuffle how the entire

country functions. And yeah, I think it's fascinating because we haven't had an education gap dividing our politics ever in our country's history. Yeah, and it's also worth pointing out just because the education divide as a thing is real, but it tracks a class divide. and in interesting ways when you think about things like inflation, people with college degrees are more likely not to need to be in an office.

They don't need to be in the factory. They're more likely to be consultants and image workers and all that kind of stuff. And so if you're someone who has to drive to a job or if you work with your hands, inflation hits you a lot harder. I think one of the reasons

why the media is so bad on the inflation story, or was so late on the inflation story, is that if you're a reporter, you're kind of insulated from the problems that are inflation and that inflation drives. But so, like you mentioned Roy Tashira, who has been doing immense and wonderful penance for his contribution to the Coalition of the Ascendant stuff. His latest newsletter has, so first of all, that Axia story, which was by Josh Kraushauer, has an amazing statistic in it. I'll read that one first. It says that in that latest Sienna, and again, it's a small, you know, cross tab,

but that Sienna, New York Times poll that we were talking about earlier, the Democrats and Republicans are tied on the generic congressional ballot. In 2018, among Hispanics, among Hispanics, they're tied. In 2018, Democrats had a 47 point edge with Hispanics in the generic ballot. That is just shocking, right? And then here's some stats from Roy to share his piece. He breaks out this group from both an echelon poll and the more in common poll and someone else to talk about the very progressive, basically 10% of the electorate, which disproportionately runs the Democratic Party, the sort of very online, very blue college-educated crowd. on the question, America is not the greatest country in the world versus America is the greatest

country in the world. 66% to 28% strong progressive say America is not the greatest country in the world. Hispanics say it's go the other way 70 to 23. It is the greatest country in the world, which is pretty much where working class is. On the question of whether racism is built into our society, including into its politics and institution versus racism comes from individuals who hold racist views, blah, blah, blah, strong progressives, 94 to 6 agree with the idea that racism is built into our society. Hispanics disagree endorsing the second statement that racism comes from individuals by 58 to 36.

Same thing for working class. You can go down this transgender stuff, social welfare spending, hard work, the benefits of hard work, all this kind of stuff. Hispanics are increasingly tracking like the white working class, and the chaos that I think this is going to cause in the academic corridors of intersexturnality are going to be glorious to behold, because you're not going to tell all of these professors of Latinx studies that they are no longer part of the coalition of the oppressed, and at the same time have, you know, half of the Hispanics in this country voting for Republicans without, you know, people, you know, growing chairs across the room. It's going to be fantastic. Can I raise another huge issue that I don't think the media has paid enough attention to?

There is a mind-blowing God gap in the Democratic coalition. So if you look at 2018 data, this is from the Pew Research Center. So do you believe in the God, believe in God is described in the Bible, white Republicans, 72%, non-white Democrat, 61%, white Democrat, 32%. Okay, if you believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving, white Republicans, 71%, non-white Republicans, 72%, non-white Democrat, 72%, white Democrat, 38%. So, hey, just one quick question, where to, like, some of my tribe are more into the God of smiting and wrath?

All smiting was not an option in the poll. So, yeah. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, that's a polling deficiency, Jonah. That's... I mean, all powerful, yeah, sure. But all powerful and loving...

That's a huge gap. And then you have that same population, Jonah, that you are just describing as having outlier views on race, has outlier views for the rest of America on religion. And look, a lot of Hispanic immigrants identify more as evangelical than they identify as Hispanic. Like if you're going to talk about what's their prime identity, which is one of the reasons, by the way, why a lot of this replacement theory rhetoric is total nonsense.

It's because you're bringing in a bunch of very overtly Christian immigrants, which are going to be far more socially conservative than if you opened up the floodgate. from say northern Europe. So there's absolutely no real evidence that there's a lot of evidence that more immigration is bringing in more social conservatism because you're bringing in a lot more people who believe in God. But that God gap is enormous and that really matters. And the Democrats have a white progressive activist problem that I'm not sure that they've got a plan to deal with because those same white progressive activists, if we go back to a previous

thing that we mentioned, the Ryan Grimm piece and The Intercept are right now busy sort of burning down some of their own institutions from the inside. Also, they're running the Democratic campaigns. They're staffing the Hill offices. They're working in the White House. They're also running the cable news bureaus in a lot of places. Yeah, I mean, they're disproportionately represented in all of the jobs that decide whether they should have much of a voice. And their answer is, yeah, they probably should. And I've seen this with my own eyes, and I'm sure some of you guys have seen it. They also have a disproportionate say in defining who's authentically black or Hispanic.

So they will elevate, use their cultural power that they have to elevate voices, you know, this Latinx nonsense, for example, to elevate voices and elevate ideas that are actually out of step and out of the mainstream of the very communities that they're purporting to try to help and assist. And that's a real problem. Well, our last topic today is not going to be not worth your time, but instead very, very much worth your time.

And these are the pictures coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest telescope ever built. I just want to read the quote. This is from the president. because I, it is mind-blowing. This is the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from 13 billion. Let me say that again, 13 billion years ago.

So this is just 600 million years after the Big Bang that we are seeing these baby little galaxies coming into existence. And for all of our talk of coalitions and politics and, even the great American experiment, boy, seeing those pictures is definitely worth your time. David's a real space nerd. What'd you think? Oh, he was looking at the pictures. I totally misinterpreted that. David's real space nerd. What'd you think? And I was expecting Jonah. I concurred. David's the real space nerd. Like, we don't need to hear from David. He's the space nerd. What do you? What about you, Jonah?

I can't get enough of this. I can't get enough of this, but I can't get enough of all things space. I mean, on the one hand, it's just ridiculously cool on its own merits. On the other and on another piece of this that I love is, I love that we're getting out, we're looking out there more.

I mean, there's just something about humanity that I think we are better when we're seeking to expand our horizons, when we're seeking to explore, when we're pushing boundaries. And so I think of, you know, on the one hand, you have the web space telescope providing us with the incredible images. And by the way, tells us we can still create marvelous things, which is good. And then we're, you know, a month or so away from the launch, the first orbital launch of

Starship from SpaceX, which is a revolutionary space vehicle. I mean, just revolutionary in space travel and its potential. And so it's an exciting time And to bring it full circle to with advisory opinions It makes me glad that Elon Musk's Twitter deal has collapsed Because he's got to keep his eyes focused on the main thing And the main thing is Mars But I've said that too many times.

Jonah Is this, I mean you're a curmudgeon Is this as absolutely soul-inspiringly cool as I think it is or will you rain on my parade? No, so I'm very torn about this. And on the one end...

Because you want to be a curmudgeon, but your soul is like, is like giggling inside. No, no, no, no, no. I'm totally giggling about the telescope and it's really cool and all those kind of the... I'm down with that, love it. I'm so, I'm with you guys on how great it is that Elon is walking away from this Twitter nonsense.

I'm all for conquering the known galaxy. I'm just down for it. It's going to be a long time. I probably won't see it until at least I'm 75-80. But no, but the thing is, I'm kind of serious about this. So weirdly, a couple weeks ago, I had this throwaway bit in the G-File about how many galaxies there are and how many stars there are in galaxies. And apparently I low-balled the number by like, and I thought it was a huge number.

I thought it's like a hundred trillion billion gallon, whatever it was, a large number of galaxies, right? And they're like a gazillion stars in each galaxy. And it turned out I'd gotten it off by like a factor of a thousand, right? Or a 10,000. I mean, just the number doesn't, your brain can't compute how many galaxies there are. And each galaxy is full of just an incredible number of stars, incredible number of plans. And there's something about it that fills me with a kind of, of Nietzschean existential dread. Just the sheer size of it and the scope of it. It's sort of like, you know, there's that feeling you get in your, at least I get in my chest, my daughter gets it to, in movies where you see

this tsunami coming and it's about to take over the entire, it's just like it's something in my lizard brain that goes. And there's something about contemplating how incredibly big the universe is that kind of freaks me out. And it also has me

rethinking about like maybe a lot the stuff about quantum physics that people talk about isn't as crazy as I once thought it was because the thing is just so freaking big you lose the ability to rationally think about some of this stuff and it kind of makes me want to move away from the edge a little bit.

I love the telescope, but when you realize each one of those blinks of light is a galaxy and that like all of those galaxies that we see it's basically the amount of space of the sky is the equivalent to holding a piece of stand arm's length away from your eye. Do you think about how many pieces of sand

will fit in the night sky and arm's length away from your eye? And I start almost wanting to cry. It freaks me out so much. So there's that. I think that's the perfect ending. Thank you for joining this podcast. We almost got to hear Jonah cry.

He'll be crying as soon as we stopped the recording, which is kind of exciting because we had his soul giggling sound. And now the crying sound, it's perfect. If you enjoy this podcast, give us a rating wherever you're getting your podcast from or become a member of the dispatch. Hop in the comments section. Love reading what you guys are thinking. I hop in there pretty much every day. So I will look forward to that. And if I don't see you in the comments section, we'll talk to you next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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