The Dispatch Podcast - Latino Voters and 2020

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

News broke overnight of President Trump’s plans to reduce U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, less than a week after Jeffrey Goldberg’s bombshell article in The Atlantic highlighted anonymous accusations of the president’s poor conduct toward American veterans. Sarah, Steve, and Jonah tackle some of the move’s political implications for Trump’s re-election campaign before launching into a lively debate over the ethics of using anonymous sources in journalism.  “It is the case that reporters can pick and choose their anonymous sources to tell the story that their predetermined narrative would have them tell,” said Steve. “But I think you judge anonymous sources to a certain extent based on the amount of credence you give to the particular reporter who’s using them.” The Dispatch Podcast also covers curveballs that could upset current polling favoring a handed Joe Biden victory—namely, the Hispanic vote and presidential debates. New data out of Florida reveals that the former VP might not have the Hispanic vote locked down, but as our hosts point out, assuming that a diverse group of people will vote as a monolithic bloc has always been a dangerous oversimplification. Steve, Sarah and Jonah also chat about the upcoming debates and how possible Biden blunders could either hurt him or paint him as a sympathetic figure, depending on how the president chooses to respond. Show Notes: -Jeffrey Goldberg’s controversial investigative journalism: Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. So visit The Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts and make sure to subscribe to this podcast. So you never miss an episode. And right now, the dispatch is offering you a chance to experience a full membership for the next 30 days, risk-free. We hope with the election and full swing and so much information chaos out there, the dispatch can help you make sense of what's really important and worth your time. During this 30-day trial, you'll have access to member-only editions of all of our dispatch newsletters, and you'll be able to join our members-only dispatch live virtual gatherings.

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about the president's statements about the military. Plus, Jonah wants to talk about what the Hispanic vote is and is Trump really winning it And the great debate expectations three weeks out from our first presidential debate. Plus, I am trying to get some insights into high school, Jonah, and Steve. So make sure to stay tuned for that at the end. Let's dive right in. Steve, some breaking news about military pullouts. Yeah, we learned overnight that the U.S. military will be reducing its troop presence in Iraq in the coming months from almost in half, about 5200 to 3,000.

The early reporting is that this is not something that's causing alarm among military officials. officials in Iraq. It's, I mean, on the one hand, it's a significant troop reduction because you're dropping the numbers almost in half. On the other, our mission in Iraq is limited, is so limited that, and we've become increasingly relying on our partners in Iraq to do sort of the big work for us, and we will be maintaining a presence and air presence and other things. So I haven't seen or heard much alarm about these reductions, but it's notable that they're that they're coming now just before the election. I think that the president is eager to make the case that he's ending these endless wars. We've heard him use that sort of Rand Paulian phrase several times before.

It was very clear that in the Taliban peace talks, the calendar was timed toward the election. You had senior Trump administration officials talking about that timing toward the election. So this feels like something more of an electoral gambit than necessarily a security-driven decision. I guess my question to the two of you is, does this help him make his case? Do people care about reducing the troops further in Iraq on a political level? And two, given what we saw when Barack Obama reduced troops in Iraq with the resurgence of ISIS, the growth of ISIS, the resurgence of the insurgency there, should be worried about that. So I think that, you know, normally I'm the Nothing Matters person and at the overall election. dynamics are just what they are.

But I actually think this one does have some effect because this is one of the bigger contrasting points with Biden. You know, Biden has such a long record in the Senate and so many votes, the president can use this at the debates to talk about that. And there is a constituency out there that is soft on Biden. I don't think they're going to switch over to Trump, But it might be enough to convince them, especially young voters, to dislike Biden and to lower his favorability and enthusiasm among young voters and to drive down turnout a little bit among them.

So I think there's an argument for that. You know, again, like most things, is this some like 10-point swing? Absolutely not. But could it make a one-point difference in a swing state with a lot of young voters, potentially? I guess I'm more, I'm more in the traditional. Sarah position on this one. I think it doesn't matter that much, only insofar as the people who believe he's actually ending endless wars already believed it before this. And the people who don't believe anything he says already don't believe it. I mean, I take Sarah's point. It probably

it helps with certain narratives and it could help with a debate performance in terms of going after Biden on stuff. But it just also, it just, the political battle space just seems so noisy and complicated right now that it's hard to see how it sort of moves people off of position so much as reinforces a position that they already have, I guess. And I don't know, I mean, we didn't talk about it last time. We haven't talked about it because of the weird timing of this podcast and the way the news cycle works. But we actually haven't talked about the Atlantic story.

And maybe this is sort of of a larger piece of what does, you know, how does Trump stand with the military overall or even more, perhaps more importantly, how do voters view him vis-a-vis the military overall? and my hunches is that maybe he's, that overall the military is not the issue for him that he once thought it was, at least among persuadable voters, but I'm open to you guys disagreeing with me on that. Well, you know, I think he's like he has on so many issues, he's sort of trying to have it both ways. And, you know, my sort of ongoing theory that when he speaks out of both sides of his mouth, he's not punished in the way that a normal politician might be punished. People sort of pick and choose what they want to hear from Donald Trump. And they, you know, their views at this point are somewhat fixed. So people who like him pick the stuff that they like and

choose to amplify that, people who don't pick the opposite. But he's making a case for his reelection that I think is somewhat intention because he talks about ending the endless wars. But very clearly we're not, there will not be a full troop withdrawal from Iraq. There's not going to to be a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan before we leave. And the president continues to talk about the ongoing threat from jihadists and his will to defeat the jihadists and take on radical Islam. Now, I think he deserves some credit for some of the things that he's done in that space. I mean, you can't argue with the fact that under President Trump, the U.S. military, took out Baghdadi, took out Qasem Soleimani, what have you.

So he's got things that he can point to as progress in that regard. But I think turning to the politics of this, there has been some polling that shows some slippage in his support from military-aligned voters, more recent poll, military times poll, but there have been other polls in the past that suggest he's not quite as strong as he was there. look at the president's campaign's reaction to the Atlantic story and their sort of all hands-on-deck effort to push back on it and suggest not only that that specific case wasn't true, but that the president would never disparage military leaders despite his past comments

about John McCain and comments that he made just this past weekend suggesting that that military leaders are in it for the money, shows that they're very sensitive, I think, about this. So interesting numbers on some of these swing states and active duty military. So, for instance, 10% of Arizona's adults are in the armed forces. And that's been such a consistent Republican

according to- Are currently serving in the armed forces. that's amazing served that includes a past service oh okay okay okay uh and you know right now that number is shifting like Arizona was such a Republican stronghold for so many years Arizona now is not and especially if you look at that Senate race the numbers look lost for McSally and some of that is being driven by these military numbers his unfavorables are some of the highest that they've ever been. This was back in August,

so it was before the Atlantic article, but his approval among active duty military dropped to 37%, which is pretty low. That's in Arizona. The approval numbers are nationwide, but the Arizona numbers are 55-45? Because they did an interesting

deep dive on 538 about this military times poll which everyone's citing and partly it's shame on the military times for not being very clear about what they were doing but it is a poll from their basically their subscriber lists and not an actual real I mean in fair like so they're making the case that it's still an informative useful poll because you have it while

it's apples and oranges to a to a real poll. It's apples to apples to the same poll they've been doing for four years. Right. Right. So even though it's the readership skews, first of all, it's people who read newspapers and stuff. And second of all, the average age of the respondent was something like 39 years old, which is probably above average of the total uniform service, right? And it skewed a little wider, it skewed a little mailer, it skewed a bunch of different things. So on the one hand, it's probably not the best snapshot of what the rank and file think, but what the rank and file actually think we don't know. On the flip side, it shows significant erosion from what Trump had in

2016 among the uniformed military, and the methodology there hasn't changed. So I think it's like in terms of telling us which way the wind is blowing, it's useful, but it doesn't give us the kind of data that we would love to have on that stuff. Well, and what's interesting about that, because this is something David had pointed out, was with officers,

there was some indication that those numbers were slipping, but with enlisted, maybe not. And so that's interesting, because based on the demographics, you're telling us, that probably skews more officer-heavy as well. Yeah, that's the sense, or at least career non-com or whatever,

you know, like what you would call those, you know, the sergeants and all that. I mean, but it's people who, it skews, the way I understood what they were saying is excuse heavily to, and I just listened to it on the drive to our world headquarters for the dispatch this morning to do this podcast. So I haven't like done a deeper dive on it, but it seems like it skews kind of heavily to people who've chosen the military as a career. And presumably people who chose military as a career care more about institutions. then sort of checking a box,

getting some training and going on to have a career outside of the military. So you might pay more attention to the rhetoric of the president about the military. Again, this was all before the Atlantic article, which we've deftly half avoided

talking about the substance of that. Well, let's do that for a second because I found the Atlantic story. You know, I really at this point hate stories based on anonymous sources, and more or less unwilling to give any story based on anonymous sources more than sort of 60% credibility, no matter how short up it is and all of that, that on something like this, if you're not willing to put your name on it, and I can't judge your credibility,

I just, there's only so much I, you know, wait I'm going to put on that. And you do have people who have come out with their names on the record and said, you they can never deny what the anonymous source heard because they don't know when and how the person heard it. Was that firsthand? Was it secondhand? We don't fully know. But I'm so sick of these anonymous source stories. I'm basically with you. I'm opposed to the proliferation of anonymous sources and all of that. Because all it does is confirm people's priors, right? If you found it believable that Trump would say something like that, then you find the story believable. If you don't find it believable, then you don't like the story. That's not really

news to me. Yeah. I mean, Steve, you can send off before I respond, but what do you think about it? I think if you have a consistent position on anonymous sources and you don't like them as a rule, you don't trust articles that include them or the information that those anonymous sources convey, I think there's reason to justify that skepticism. We don't know, and it is the case that reporters can pick and choose their anonymous sources to tell the story that their sort of predetermined narrative would have them tell. I think, you know, you judge anonymous sources to a certain extent based on the credibility you, you have, the amount of credence you give to the particular reporter who's using them. And if the reporter has used anonymous sources repeatedly in the past to unearth interesting and confirmable things, I tend to believe those anonymous sources.

And let's not forget, much of Watergate's reporting the 200-some-odd stories that led to Watergate was based on anonymous sources. Okay, a few things have changed since then, just a couple. Sure, but I mean, I think the basic principle remains the same. Look, I did a lot of my reporting on Benghazi when I was looking into the Obama administration's narratives on Benghazi using anonymous sources. And there were several times, many times even, that those anonymous sources told me things that allowed me to debunk the narrative that the Obama administration, the Intelligence Committee, was selling. And I think in an important ways,

right? I mean, the Obama administration basically said, ah, this was just, you know, this was just this attack based on a video had nothing to do with anything, no al-Qaeda involvement anything. And we found out eventually, partially through anonymous sources and subsequent investigations, that that was not true. None of that was true. You had the CIA saying that they didn't put any pressure on CIA officials who were on the ground not to speak, not to become whistleblowers. Totally false. They sort of pigeonholed these or buttonholed these CIA contractors at the CIA building and made them sign additional nondisclosure agreements. I mean, there was all sorts of stuff that we found out that I think was valuable and tells us something

about what happened there. I think that could be the case here. I don't know whether this particular story is true or whether it's not true. But I do think it's not a departure from what we've seen from President Trump in the past. He said, well, you know, I would never call a military leader a loser. I'd never call John McCain a loser. And he did. He's on video doing exactly that. As I mentioned earlier, his response to this was to say, well, you know, some of the rank and file military folks love me.

But, you know, the people at the Pentagon, people who work at the Pentagon, they're all in it to make money. money. They want to support wars so that they can make money for defense contractors. That's just an ugly slander on people who are serving their country. So it's not theoretical that the president would disparage military leaders. He's done it in the past. He's done it again. But let me push back on the anonymous source thing. There are reasons that someone may need to stay anonymous. And I think in Watergate, we saw some of that. And perhaps have been Ghazi, your sources had reasons to stay anonymous. I don't quite understand why a former official would need to stay anonymous for this.

And so that's where I think I depart on the, again, I'm willing to give 60% credibility to a story that has everything else perfect about it with anonymous sources. It's just like you can't get me that other 40% unless you're explaining to me the reason and why the source needed to stay anonymous. And in this current media environment, so often we just see, you know, the source asked for anonymity. Okay, did they need it?

Right. Or they just weren't going to let you use their name. And in this case, I think it's much more. They just don't want to take the heat for it. I totally get that. It would be miserable to go out there with your name on anything right now. But if that's the case and that's the only reason,

unfortunately then I'm not sure that you have enough for your story that is never going to be really confirmable, Steve, to your point about Benghazi, there were things that you were going to be able to confirm based on what anonymous sources told you. That's different. This is just the story is whether the president said those things. Yeah, see, I agree with that distinction, but I come down slightly on the other side of whether this story meets those conditions for the use of anonymous sources. The stuff that they said is more or less confirmable or checkable. Now we're having this

big dispute about whether it was true. You have John Bolton, who's been a strong critic of the president, say that he didn't hear that he was with the president. He was with John Kelly when the decisions were made. He didn't hear those comments being made. He allowed for the possibility that they were made in some other context and where he wasn't around. You've had other defenders of the president on the record say, look, he never said this. I was there. I was part of the decision-making process. This simply didn't happen. Now, some of those, I think, some of those people who were actually in the room as a decision was being made, carry some weight. I think you have to pay attention to what they're saying.

Others, you know, there are people who are on the trip who might have carried his bag from one place either. Probably don't really need to pay attention to them. I think the question on this one is whether they would, you know, sort of smoke out the people who spoke anonymously to get them to tell their story on the record. What we've done at the dispatch when this has come up is allowed the use of anonymous sources in a limited way when it's an assertion of fact. What we won't do, what we've never done is allow anonymous sniping at someone. So if somebody says, if I'm having a conversation

with a senator and I want to ask a question about, you know, the COVID relief bill and the senator says, look, there's this huge dispute between Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell on the details of the additional funding and Ted Cruz doesn't want to approve it. Fair enough. I would be happy to use that and source that to a senator on background. If on the other hand, the senator just wants to say, man, Ted Cruz is a terrible person. He's a bad grandstander and he's holding everything up, you know, the ad hominem stuff we wouldn't allow somebody to say on background. Yeah, so I'm just very quickly on this. I think I'm somewhere in between the two of you on this. I think it is utterly believable. That doesn't mean I believe it because you just need more

information. I think politically it matters less when they're anonymous sources because it becomes just something that very online people argue about on Twitter and blue check marks argue about on Twitter, but that doesn't actually penetrate to the average voter unless you can say, oh my gosh, John Kelly's former chief of staff says this about him. And then it becomes a story that has more legs and more sort of, and it's less, less noisy. The only place... What do you make of John Kelly not speaking out one way? or the other, because one of these stories in the Atlantic is very specific that John Kelly, it's just John Kelly and the president. And John Kelly is talking about the president, or sorry,

the president is talking about John Kelly's son. And John Kelly has not come out either way. Yeah, which I think tells you something, that he, that he's one of the sources, you know, and or people very close to him got permission from John Kelly to tell the story. I mean, that's why I, look, I find the story believable. I think it is probably, true to a great extent, but what you don't know is the context of was this something that was this a story that had been embellished and retold for years and then is sort of polished to a fairly well and everyone knows it the same way, the way, so that Jen Griffin can confirm it, the AP can confirm it because it's just becomes lore. Is it, you know, how much of it is

acts to grind kind of stuff. I heard from a friend who worked from a friend's stuff. I mean, you just need more context to it. But the only place I really disagreed with part of your point, Sarah, was that I don't think you have to be even handed about it. I agree with you as a matter of policy. You can only, I have no problem saying, okay, 60% is all I can give it for an anonymous source story. But since we are not on a jury and we don't have jury instructions, the fact that this is so much more consistent with vast swaths of evidence on the public record that you can say,

yeah, this is more believable than it's believable that he would never say this. I mean, I just, I personally would be more shocked, I would be much more shocked to find out the story is entirely untrue than to find out the story is entirely true. I mean, it just because I can't turn off my reasoning faculties. Donald Trump has said so many things. The guy who said avoiding the clap in the 70s was his personal Vietnam strikes me as the kind of guy who could have said a lot of these things.

And I find that as just an Occam's Razor thing, Jeffrey Goldberg would not blow up his conceivably blow up his entire career. to fabricate something like this. And then you add in the fact that these other reporters confirmed it. It might be from the same sources. We don't know. It's a mess.

But I just find it believable. Yeah, to be clear, I don't think that Goldberg has made up the sources. I believe that four people have told him the things that are in his story. I do believe that one, two, three, or four of those people

then told other reporters the same thing. So I am very annoyed by the, you know, the AP has confirmed. the AP has confirmed that Jeffrey Goldberg had sources who told him that. The AP is not

confirmed the underlying fact of what was said that as a pet peeve across journalism the AP happened to fall into it this time but you know

that could have been anyone can I make one more just point of sort of clarification just so people understand how this stuff works on our way out of this topic it's important to understand

that, you know, even the Trump administration, as you have Trump administration officials and Trump defenders who rail on the use of anonymous sources, the Trump administration uses anonymous sources, approves anonymous sources every single day. So a lot of the reporting that you read or hear or see on television is Trump administration officials telling reporters, look, I'll talk to you, but you can't use my name. They'll have briefings at the White House where they will say, you can use this information, but it has to be sourced to a senior administration official or a senior defense department official, what happened.

So even as the Trump administration complains about the use of anonymous sources, there is no bigger user of anonymous sources in Washington than the Trump administration. But that's a little beside the point. I don't really care that the Trump administration is complaining about anonymous sources. I'm complaining about it. Yeah, but I care about it. If the Trump administration is going to say that nobody should use anonymous sources,

the Trump administration should not be using anonymous sources. They're contributing to the problem that they're whining about. Okay. I guess that's just not what we were talking about. Why? That's exactly what we were talking about. I think that, look, if the discussion is, is it proper to use anonymous sources,

We've all rendered different verdicts on the propriety of doing so. And the Trump administration has put at the center of its case against the Atlantic story that using anonymous sources is terrible. And Trump's defenders certainly have made this sort of the heart of their case. Then probably you shouldn't be using anonymous sources when you're saying that using anonymous sources is terrible. I think it's a pretty clear case of hypocrisy. Let's pause for a word from our sponsor, Keeps. Guys, two out of three men will experience some form of male pattern baldness by the time they're 35.

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So that very quiet, thrushing sound you hear across Washington right now. is the pants sweating from a lot of Democrats as they see that Joe Biden is really not doing as well as he should be with Hispanics, particularly in Florida. And I don't have that much hot punditry about it from what I've looked at in the polling. It seems like, first of all, Cuban Americans, not shockingly, are more responsive to anti-socialist rhetoric than other Hispanics for all of the obvious reasons. It also seems like the Biden campaign has not invested heavily in outreach to Hispanics, which feels a little malpractice, but there is conceivably time to fix some of that. A lot of this is based basically on 2016 to 2020 changes in how

Hillary did in Miami-Dade, which is the most Hispanic county in Florida, from She led then to Biden's basically slightly behind now. And so on the one hand, I think it's very interesting and ironic that the guy who basically came, burst onto the national stage calling at least Mexicans rapists and drug dealers conceivably has one of his only paths to victory through the outperforming with the Hispanic vote, which I think is just sort of, I mean, the writers of this whole reality show have been knocking out of the park for a while now.

Ever since Steve Bannon was arrested by the postal cops on a yacht, Chinese billionaire's yacht. Some people thought they jumped the shark, but no, I just think that they are sticking to the narrative climactic buildup, which will, of course, end in a meteor strike. But I thought the murder hornets were where we jumped the shark. Murder hornet was a tell, I agree.

But kind of went nowhere. It was sort of like the Russian and the Pine Barrens and Sopranos. It was like this big lead up and then it went nowhere. But so the thing that I sort of find fascinating about this, and you guys can ping off of this from any angle you want, if you just want to do rank bundetry, that's fine. But I worked in National Review for 21 years. I was always squishier on immigration than some of the hardest liners,

but I'm also utterly persuaded by a lot of the arguments from my friends, Rich Lowry and Ramesh Peneuru, that you can have, that it is not tyrannical or bigoted to actually have an immigration policy. And designing an immigration policy that's best for the Americans already live here does not strike me, even if I might disagree with some of the particulars, does not strike me as an evil thing. That is a defensible thing that reasonable people can debate. but one of the fascinating things, I've been participant or a spectator in dozens of interconservative debates about immigration for the last 25 years, 30 years. And the argument that has won the day over and over again is that it is essentially

pointless to spend a lot of time and energy trying to win over Hispanics because it's like the salesman who loses money on every sale who thinks he can be. make it up in volume. As long as Democrats win more Hispanics than Republicans do, the immigration problem is just a net problem for Republicans. And this argument, which I think has a completely non-racist version, also has some profoundly racist versions. And as someone who has been hit up by sort of neo-Nazi wannabe guys on college campuses a few

times and attacked by their apologists like Michelle Malkin. The argument is that importing brown people as voters is how we'll get socialism. And so I think that one of the fascinating things to contemplate is what if Donald Trump, who is basically, if you took the 2012 R&C post-mortem about immigration and stuff, and it took all of its vice to heart, and then Lexington? Luther decided to do the exact opposite, that's how Donald Trump talks and campaign, right? And if he actually ends up winning Hispanics, which I don't think he will, right? But let's just say for the sake of argument he does, or he certainly disproves the idea that Republicans can't win Hispanics in some profound way.

I think the ensuing debate will be fascinating because all of a sudden conservatives who have been obsessed with this can't import brown people because they vote wrong argument will look like idiots. A lot of Democrats who thought brown people always vote Democratic will look like idiots. And all of a sudden, Hispanics will become swing voters to a certain extent heretofore never prophesied by anybody. And I can envision all sorts of interesting new hypocrisies where you can see a lot of left-wingers saying, oh, well, they come from historically Catholic and authoritarian cultures, and they come from a Caudillo culture, and so they are more responsive to strong men like Donald Trump. I mean, you could see all sorts of weird arguments

coming out of it. And it's one of the only scenarios in which I actually think it would be a lot of fun if Donald Trump were reelected, because it would shake up all of the existing categories. So have at it. The smorgas board is yours. Go for it, Steve. Well, I'm actually really interested, Sarah, in what you say, given that you're somebody who's had, you know, serious hands-on campaign experience. So I'll be brief. I think there was, as somebody who was pretty sympathetic to the, at least in broadstrokes, some of the arguments that came out of that 2012 Republican autopsy, I think some of it was overstated. And I think there has been or was a view that came from, from pollsters of all stripe but was particularly deeply ingrained in Republican pollsters pre-Trump that demography is destiny, right? If you don't appeal to Hispanic voters in this certain way, by leading with immigration and making these three policy arguments on immigration,

you've got no chance. It's over. It's never going to happen. And I think that took an overly simplistic. I mean, I thought this then, it certainly, I think, is borne out a little bit. That was an overly simplistic view of how Hispanic voters approach their voting, right? It's not, they don't, and it's true of, I think, whatever demographics you want to talk about in the United States, voters are incredibly complex. Like, they vote for their candidates, for politicians for a wide variety of reasons, some of which have to do with deeply held policies. views or values, cultural norms, what have you, some of them don't have that at all. And it seems to me that part of the explanation here is that Hispanic voters who have told

posters that they intend to support Donald Trump just care about other things more. And it's not that complicated. Or they might agree with, you know, I think there are legal Hispanic immigrants who agree with Donald Trump's sort of hard. approach on illegal immigration and say, you know what, I had to stand in line. I had to do this this particular way. I think everybody should have to do this this particular way. So I think there's been a tendency to oversimplify these views, you know, group identity views in a way that, you know, neglects the complexity of why people vote the way they do. I think that the Hispanic

vote, and I'm putting that in sarcastic quote marks, is now so large that it is silly to speak of it as the Hispanic vote. If you look at most, a lot, at least, of polling questions, the Hispanic vote looks a lot like the independent vote. They don't look like the Republican vote and they don't look like the Democratic vote entirely. They're somewhere in between, similar to independence, and the far better predictor of someone's voting behavior at this point, is not whether they have a Hispanic ethnicity. It is whether they are male and under 30. It's whether they are female and live in the suburbs

and that that ethnicity is just not that good a predictor anymore. And so, yeah, I mean, to Jonah's point, it would be super fun because I think it would have, like people would have to grapple with the fact that it was a good predictor 20 years ago. And it's not anymore. So what does that say about assimilation, American culture? I mean, all sorts of interesting little rows we can go down for that.

And, you know, you look at these Miami-Dade numbers, a 70% Hispanic county, and Trump is tied. You look at Trump 50-46, Trump 45-43 with Hispanic voters. Yeah, wow, it's pretty fascinating. Now, the problem is, Jonah, to your point, we're only going to have exit polls to really decide this based on. And we can look at a county like Miami-Dade County and see the results and make some guesses over what happened there. But we're never going to have a perfect snapshot of where this went down. But I just think overall, Steve, to your point about the autopsy from post-2012 and everything else, like, yeah, it turns out, I think we can say definitively now. It was clearly

overstated because the quote-unquote Hispanic vote was never going to stay the same, and it was never going to be static because, and we've seen this in tons of focus groups and everything else, someone who is a legal immigrant to the country and got here 10 years ago, votes very differently than someone whose grandparents were Hispanic, but their parents were born here and they were born here. So they're still Hispanic, but like those are totally wildly different voting groups. Yeah. So the other thing that, and I agree with you entirely, and it's been a pet peeve of mine for years, the idea that like Cubans, Colombians, El Salvadorans, and Mexicans all like to be lumped together as the same ethnic or cultural group drives a lot of them crazy, you know? And the ones who agree with it tend to be the most, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but the most assimilated, most deracinated, most Americanified. of a meritocratic type, and they're playing into an identity politics thing.

I mean, the ones who most want to believe that Hispanics are a homogenous monolithic block are people who actually embrace the term Latin X, which is only embraced by about 3% of, or not even embraced, only about 3% of American Hispanics really know what, well, embrace it or know what it is, you know? And it's just not a popular term. Very few Hispanics call themselves Latinx. It is very much what a very sophisticated, shibboleth, fluent Harvard grad student who happens to be of Mexican extraction, how they talk. It is not how your average Hispanic talks. And also, Jonah, wait, I've had a question on Latinx that perhaps you, of all people, can answer. Or Steve, what happens to the rest of the language? It's a gendered language. So,

okay, you fixed Latino Latino. But what about every other word? Yeah, there's nothing. There's nothing to do with it. You can't, you can't, you can't do it. You can't make Spanish gender neutral. It can never happen. The entire language, as you say, is, is, is rooted in gender. So I'm very confused on how Latinx was ever going to work. Right? I mean, it just, it's, it's so. Yeah. It's all so silly. Anyway, I think it would be. So the other point I was just going to make real quickly is,

and maybe this has changed, but I don't think so. Sean Trendy once did a fantastic article years ago, real clear politics guy, about how the average that as the generic Hispanic, which again, we've already stipulated, there's no such thing. But as the generic Hispanic moves up to socioeconomic, ladder, he or she becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the median vote, which is to say that for years, people who thought that, you know, Hispanics voted disproportionately democratic

because of their race, they didn't. They voted disproportionately democratic because they were poor or disproportionately poor, and poor people tended to vote democratic for all the obvious, you know, cliched or moral reasons or whatever. But as Hispanics move up the socioeconomic ladder, they look like, that doesn't mean they all become conservative, they just become typical voters in a lot of ways. And the other, you know, really scary thing for a lot of the identity politics mongers is an enormous number of Hispanics describe themselves as white. And as they move up the socioeconomic ladder, they describe themselves as white increasingly to the point where a lot of these predictions about America becoming a majority minority country, which have

terrified certain people on the right and it caused really dangerous rhetoric on the left may never actually be fulfilled because a lot of ethnic groups as they become more prosperous basically assimilate into whiteness in a way that drives a lot of people crazy. But I think it's fantastic. Well, and don't forget, interracial marriage has increased enormously, you know, this idea that you can be one identity was never going to last. You know, Loving v. Virginia is now, what, 60, 70 years old? So times they are a change in.

One last question on this, though. Do we think that Biden has affirmatively screwed up any of his outreach to this group that we don't think is a single group anyway? I don't know. I mean, I... Well, like at the convention, did they spend too much time on, you know, black versus Hispanic, Latino, Colombian, Cuban? I mean, it was really on the current racial conversation going on.

Yeah, I do think if the Democrats, if Biden ends up losing, that convention will get some pretty rough treatment by the Monday morning quarterbackers because it didn't address law and order stuff. It didn't reach out to Hispanics in any meaningful way. It didn't reassure people about schools in a way that people wanted to be reassured about. But look, the Democratic Party historically just simply is much, much, much better at classic 19th and 20th century urban ethnic politics about reaching out to different ethnic groups where they live, mobilizing them, signing them up and all the rest. And I suspect that that ability hasn't completely vanished, even if Biden is rhetorically not done as good a job as he might have.

Steve, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think for the reasons that we just suggested, I'm not sure there's an easy answer there for Joe Biden, precisely because this is a growing and broader voting constituency with a lot of different opinions in it. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, Gabby. We're all looking to save money, especially these days. But when's the last time you looked at how much you're spending every month on car insurance or homeowner's insurance? Now's the time to check out Gabby and see about getting a lower rate for the exact same coverage

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It's totally free to check your rate, and there's no obligation. Take two minutes to see how much you can save on your car insurance and homeowner's insurance by checking out Gabby. Go to gabby.com slash dispatch. That's gabbi.com slash dispatch. Gabby.com slash dispatch. All right. Well, taking that to the last topic, which is the debate. So we're three weeks away from the first debate, and we'll all talk about debates plenty. don't need to get into what is going to happen on the debate stage yet. We have two more pods for that. But I am curious about debate expectations. So on the one hand, you have Donald Trump

for months setting up this idea that Joe Biden, you know, doesn't know how many grandchildren he has, doesn't know his own name, doesn't know where he's from, doesn't know where he is. And he only can speak off a teleprompter when people give him the answers to the question. You left out Trump's favorite. He doesn't even know he's alive, which he's said many times. Oh, sorry. Yes. So obviously that would go against the conventional wisdom on expectations heading into a debate

because it massively lowers the expectations. If Joe Biden says, hi, my name is Joe Biden. Everyone erupts into applause because he has just won the debate. On the other hand, oh, and also hilariously, I saw a quote from Jason Miller, who's a senior advisor. to the campaign saying, you know, Joe Biden has been debating for decades. He's very good. It was just like the saddest, like, now we're going to try to change expectations. Like, what's the point, buddy? It's that cake got baked. So that's conventional wisdom. And what Jason

Miller's doing is very conventional as well, which is at the last minute, try to raise expectations. Fine. But I guess I'm curious what you guys think about the minority counter conventional wisdom. that's sort of the Obama 2012 strategy that actually if you have a sort of negative definition of your opponent very early on, something they spent a lot of money on in 2012 in the spring right after Romney got the nomination defining him as a plutocrat.

And I think everyone takes for granted that that's what Romney was going, that was the narrative about Romney, but there were actually several different narratives they could have picked about Romney. They just like quadrupled down on that. It was very effective because then when you got to the debates

or the 47% comment, something that might have slipped by or not been sort of chopped up into a thousand different media cycles fit the narrative they had already described and therefore it blew up. And so I wonder whether in fact it's the reverse for Biden

where if he makes a single error that fits that narrative, that in fact lowering those expectations is fine as long as there's then a negative narrative that your opponent can fall into. So I think there's a lot of truth to that. I still don't think they've handled the expectations game well. We can just sort of stipulate that and move on.

But, you know, like the Republican Convention, I came around to thinking the argument for its kind of like theme-less, you know, every night didn't have a theme, and it veered from GOP establishment to MAGA almost on the half hour, which seemed weird to me at the time. But these things are so sliced up for these little clips that they then micro-target that if you look at it in that way and you look at it in the way that people are only going to tune in for a little bit or they're mostly going to see these things in the replayed clips on social media

and their Facebook feeds and on Fox and whatever, that you may be right. simply one bad, you know, armadillos are in my trousers moment from Biden, outranks everything else. And he can give the Gettysburg address in every other moment, right? I'm just trying to move away from get these squirrels off of me as my stand-in explanation for Biden's weirdness. No, the armadillos out of the pants is great. And so on the flip side, the other thing that I think, I mean, I'm inclined to agree. with you on the sort of the counterintuitive take on the punitry on this. But there's another one, which is that it is entirely possible that Trump is so desperate to prove that Biden is senile or doesn't

know he's alive or whatever, that he presses it way too hard and leaps on weird moments to sort of force it as a sound bite. And that could look really bad for Trump. You know, I mean, it's not quite analogous, but remember when Al Gore was debating George W. Bush, I know you were in kindergarten or whatever, but, and Al Gore got all chesty and, like, walked up on W, thinking it would, like, intimidate him.

And W. just sort of shrugged. It was like, yeah, what's up? And you could see, I could see. Trump coming across too needy and desperate and therefore bullying to a lot of female voters, a lot of older voters, by leaping on some misstatement, say, see, he's, you know, he belongs in a home. And that could look bad, too. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's going to be, I don't know if it's the most important election in world history, the way everyone constantly claims, I do think that these are going to be the most important presidential

debates, certainly in our lifetime. I guess I'm a little more fatalistic about it. I think the president's supporters, as Jonah suggests, the president's supporters will take any verbal gaffe from Joe Biden, highlight it, blow it up, make it into ads, loop it on social media, send it to Fox for inclusion in packages all day, and make a huge deal of it. Biden's people are likely to be a lot more forgiving. And I think take the approach.

Yeah, he stumbled over his words, but, you know, this is a guy who said windmills cause cancer. Is Joe Biden really that bad on a relative basis? I don't think you're likely to, you know, of that 96% or whatever the actual number is that we've talked about before whose minds are more or less made up. They're not going to change because of a stumble in a, in a debate. I don't think. I think the question is, how does it play with that that remaining little sliver of voters and i i think it's it's hard to say you know on the one hand i think jonah's right there's a risk that trump will over

play this particularly if he does it in the middle of a debate there's that that algor georgia bush moment there was a rich famous rick lazio hillary clinton moment um where that where that didn't play well And you can see, particularly if Trump is so primed for that moment that him really jumping on it and going too far might not work for him. But look, I think we could predict that Joe Biden is going to have some of these moments. He does have these moments. He has him in interviews. He has him in his stump speeches sometimes. And they're disconcerting.

They're, I mean, it does make you wonder. I think there are real questions about his mental acuity. I think the Trump campaign has gone far beyond the bounds of propriety in pressing those issues. But these are questions that Democrats themselves are raising quietly. I've talked to some of these Democrats who have some of these concerns. If, if we emerge from these debates with a heightened sense that he has trouble sort of processing and thinking.

And Trump doesn't go overboard. I do think it could damage Biden. But I mean, we have the primary debates. There were some that were better than others. But, you know, he was pretty good at some of those debates. Yeah, he mostly is coherent and makes sense. And, you know, his arguments follow a somewhat linear path. And then he says weird things every once in a while.

that's sort of the pattern so does Jonah he talks about Armadillo I plead guilty but I'm not running for president um no but it does the thing that keeps popping into my mind

is remember the Tulsa rally the first one that Trump did that during post-pent I shouldn't say post-pandemic because we're still in it but like it was the first one the back-to-normal thing

and you know it turned out to be a disaster in terms of their own expectations of you know there were I think 6,000, 5,000 people who showed up and they wanted, you know, and Brad Parzcal said there was a million signups and all that, whatever. I remember watching on Fox where John Roberts did a straight news report about how it was more sparsely attended than, you know, the Trump campaign had predicted, which was a perfectly diplomatic way for a guy covering the Trump White House to say they had bad turnout. And the cameras were just showing.

the seats are empty. And then Jesse Waters led the five by saying, wow, this Tulsa thing, it is packed to the gills. It is crammed. It is a sold-out audience. And it's like the people who are committed to being the transmission belt for Trump's messaging, Biden could end up making a pretty small math mistake and they will turn it into see he should be eating jello in the home. All right. Last topic. I haven't talked about this with you guys ahead of time. So we'll just have to see how it goes. Worst high school date or your go-to high school date. Like what was your like M.O. to take out a new lady friend. Jonah? I'm very curious.

I have grave issues with this question. Do you have a go-to? Like, were you, you know, not going to commit to dinner? You were just going to do coffee? No, I mean, I grew up in New York City in the 80s, you know, and I don't know, I first went on, like, dates in the 10th, 12th, 10th and 11th grade, you know, that kind of thing. And, you know, it's not like you drove anywhere. No one had cars, you know, in high school in New York City. So it was mostly kind of like

Go to the movies And depending on the girl Go to a bar Because I had access to the ability to go to bars That seems strange to young people today But But it was I had no

I had no standard move like that A lot of it was just sort of like meeting at party. I mean, I have no interesting answers to this, only answers that can get me in trouble, so I'd rather not get too deep to this. Those answers are interesting. Yeah, no, I understand that.

Let's hear them. I have no positive, interesting answers to this. It's sort of like when Jamie Lindembaum challenged me to an arm wrestle in 10th grade, and it was the first time I ever understood the concept of no upside all downside proposition because if I beat her an arm wrestle big deal you beat her in an arm wrestle if I lost to her in an arm wrestle my god you lost to her in an arm wrestle so like this question there is no upside for me other than to say I was a consummate gentleman all right Steve I bet you

had a good go-to date yeah I'm I'm struggling with this one too I'll be honest I don't I don't know that I really had a go-to date. It's also a very gendered question, Sarah. We would, well, I imagine she's going to have to share with us, right? Yeah, I mean, so I had an old Mazda, Brown Mazda 626, and I did drive pretty early. I got my driver's license in November of my sophomore year. So that was sort of an advantage for me. We could go to movies.

we would go to, I mean, I guess taking dates out to dinner at Chi-Chi's was sort of a thing because I could, we could get the free chips in salsa, which limited the need for me to spend a ton of money. I didn't really have a ton of money. So that's probably my go-to date, which is not very exciting. So I asked because I don't know why, but I was remembering that my senior year, this guy who had been like really bugging me to go out with them, I finally said yes. And he took me to Taco Bell and South Park the movie. Wow. And I just was like, it'd be one thing if, you know, I had been begging him and he was like, whatever, I'm just not going to invest. But like,

this guy had been asking me out for, you know, months. And like, that, That was your go-to playmate? I mean, I'm a little surprised you didn't marry him. I don't know that it gets much better than that. Maybe Chi-Chi's. Maybe if you had done Chi-Gee's. I mean, Benegins was sort of the traditional date restaurant back in that era. And, you know, when South Park, the movie was out,

Magnolia was out, being John Malkovich was out. Hell, 10 things I hate about you. She's all that. There were, you know, some decent options. And it's not that I don't like South Park the movie. I do, but like for a first date, interesting, with the Taco Bell. It was really the combo to me. Do you remember what you ordered?

Well, actually, this is maybe embarrassing. It was the first time I'd ever been to Taco Bell. I was more of a McDonald's, Popeye's, KFC type girl. In high school? Was the first time you'd been to Taco Bell? Senior year of high school. So I was very like, I don't even know what to get. So I think I just got like the, you know, like,

bean and cheese taco or something because I didn't trust the meats. That's wise. That's wise. You were precocious. No wonder you went to Harvard Law School. I will say that I took a date to Fri-TGI Fridays, but it was the original, I believe the original Fridays in New York City, which still had the veneer of being a real restaurant and not Chotchkees from office space.

Oh, I assume that's what Steve was, that's what Chi-Chi's is, right? Oh, yeah, that's Chi-Chi's, yeah, for sure. But, you know, New York has, New York City has, I mean, not to be snobbish, but New York City has better dining options than Wawatosa when you're in high school. No offense, Steve. Maybe. But it just does. A few.

Yeah. Maybe. Although the TGI Fridays in Times Square, not among them. No, no. But, but Times Square, this was back before we were all enlightened about all the gender fluidity and whatnot. in Times Square when I was in high school was still a hotbed of trainee hookers.

And so you didn't want to go there necessarily for a date because it was not necessarily a safe place. It's been cleaned up dramatically post-Julian. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. Another week in the books for the dispatch podcast. Feel free to go rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're getting your podcast

and send us your thoughts or anything else that you liked or didn't like, and we will see you next week. You know what I'm going to be.