The Dispatch Podcast - Shut It All Down (Dispatch Politics Takeover)

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

The general incompetence of GOP's leadership has prompted a Dispatch Politics coup of today's Dispod. Mike hosts as David and Andrew join to discuss the shutdown fiasco, voters perceptions of GOP candidates, and John Fetterman's depression wear. Show Notes: -Watch this episode on YouTube -Real Clear Politics 2024 Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus -CNN Poll: Trump leads in New Hampshire while Ramaswamy, Haley, Christie and DeSantis battle for second -Wednesday's Dispatch Politics newsletter -Real Clear Politics General Election: Trump vs. Biden -62% of New Yorkers say Biden unfit for another term -Biden takes on Trump and age questions in new fundraiser speech -Drucker's interview with Senator Tom Cotton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection,

and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web? Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design

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I'm Mike Warren. That's David Drucker. That's Andrew Egger. And it's a dispatch politics takeover of the dispatch podcast. Today, we're going to talk about the presidential race, the polls, both the primary and the general election polls. Is Trump acting as if the primary is over, particularly vis-a-vis the pro-life movement? We'll talk about Biden's age and how the Biden campaign

plans to use Make America Great Again to their advantage. We'll also dive into Capitol Hill politics. A shutdown is looming. How is that going to affect things on Capitol Hill as well as beyond? As Virginia has some legislative elections coming up that could be affected by a shutdown. Plus, we'll do some not worth your time. Let's dive in. Okay, should we talk about the primary anymore?

I mean, really, let's just talk about these primary polls here. I'm looking at 2024 Iowa Republican presidential caucus polls. Not a ton there, but Donald Trump averaging at real court politics. almost 49% support. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, has got 14% support. Nikki Haley in a third place at night. I mean, besides Ron DeSantis in Iowa, it really doesn't seem like anybody is even within striking distance of Donald Trump in Iowa. And then we look at New Hampshire. It's maybe not as dominant where Donald Trump is. He's got about what, 45% the latest CNN poll has him at 39% in New Hampshire.

But it's a more split field. You've got DeSantis, I should say, sorry, Vivek Ramoswamy at 13% in that CNN poll. Chris Christie at 11% and DeSantis at 10%. Oh, Nikki Haley, I should say, at 12% in that CNN poll. So kind of a race for second place in New Hampshire. When we look at the national polls, and I know David Drucker, you don't like to look at national polls for a primary, but it just underscores the dominance that Trump currently has. He's averaging 60% support among Republican primary voters nationally. Is this primary over,

David Drucker? Is this Donald Trump's to lose? Well, I'm not quite ready to pull a dandy Don Meredith and sing the party's over. But old school reference for the Monday night football fans out there. But look, I think we clearly have two Republican primary contests going on right now. I think we've got Donald Trump versus Donald Trump. And then I think we've got a group of candidates competing not necessarily for second place, because second place is bubkus, but they're competing to become, they hope, the consensus alternative to Donald Trump. And the question is whether or not any of them is ever going to get there. If you can become the consensus alternative and coalesce a good, not just a slim, but a very healthy majority of the voters that right now

say they're voting for somebody else other than Trump, then maybe you have a chance to pull an upset in Iowa, pull an upset in New Hampshire, and make this thing a real race. And clearly there's a lot of interest in this race to become the consensus alternative to Trump. We cover it a lot. And the feedback we get is that people want to know what these candidates are doing and how they're trying to do that. But I think we have to be honest and clear about what's going on with this contest right now. Trump, at least according to the polling as it stands right now, has not suffered at all for acting like a de facto incumbent, skipping the first debate, plans to skip the next debate.

Unclear that he'll walk down the street in Florida for the third debate, which is supposed to be in Miami, after they played with the idea of holding it in Alabama. And his numbers just go up every time he gets indicted, every time he gets himself into legal trouble, every time he says something off color. And that just means that right now, that's what the majority of Republican primary voters want.

And the longer this goes on, the more it seems as though he won't lose. So that just leaves me to this final place, which is we have seen over the years that sometimes this is how a contest looks. And then anywhere from one week to six weeks out before the Iowa caucuses, things tighten and change. or in other words, voters really dial in, give a deeper thought to what they want and start to appear to make different choices. It's still possible that could happen. I wouldn't sleep on Iowa. It's just like nagging thing in the back of my head. But the race that we see today is clearly the race that we see today.

Yeah. I mean, Iowa always seems like it has the potential because it has in the past elevated, surprising Canada, candidates that sort of nobody in the mainstream or the East Coast media, the political media here in Washington thinks should even be mentioned in the same breath as the frontrunner. I mean, you look back to 2008. Mike Huckabee surprises everybody in Iowa and winning that caucus there. And then you've got in 2012, Rick Santorum, sort of winning, barely, kind of on a technicality, never really getting the bump, but surprising a lot of people coming from kind of nowhere

to challenge Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee. You know, the same thing happened in 2016. Ted Cruz wins the Iowa caucuses. But there's a throughline in all this, Andrew, which is that all those people who surprise in Iowa at least in the last three competitive Republican nominating contests don't end up being the nominee. They end up sort of jolting the nominees, the eventual nominees campaign into overdrive. That doesn't even seem to be happening here. Again, I'm looking back, and there's not a ton of great Iowa polling, but Ron DeSantis, again, would be sort of in the best position.

Maybe Nikki Haley to do something. and let's just look at the kind of downward spiral for Ron DeSantis in Iowa. You know, back in July, he was at 20 points in Iowa. The latest poll, Fox Business poll, has him at 15, not in the right direction, not going in the right direction. Nikki Haley's bumped up a little bit since her pretty good performance in the first debate. But again, she's getting, what, 10 percent, 11 percent in these polls? uh nobody seems to be catching up but what's going on in iowa and and how do you read this and do you expect iowa to surprise us again well this is the the double-edged sword of these early states iowa new hampshire

where where the uh the electorate is unusually locked in sees themselves as having kind of this civic duty of of being the first line of defense winnowing these candidates if you're somebody like ron de sannis and you were coming into the iowa caucuses with the polls already nationally looking like a real two-man race. I think you could count on a lot of Iowa voters, a lot of New Hampshire voters, to do a lot of soul-searching and not think of Donald Trump as the inherent incumbent and really have a real shot of them breaking your way rather than his way between the two of you. But when you have this situation where there is not this kind of growing consensus that those are the top two guys, when you have Trump and then you kind of have everybody else, well, then all the voters in Iowa,

they activate the really, really intensive part of their brains where they're like, well, I got to give Vivek a shot. I got to give Nikki Haley a shot. I got to go see what Tim Scott has to say. Maybe I'm going to go from Mike Pence, you know, and this is not an environment where Ronda Sanis is poised to make up 40 points or something like that, where if you have a significant chunk of the electorate who's actually attending all kinds of different events and essentially trying to give every single candidate the handshake test, that's not where Ronda Sannis wanted to be. So I think, and then there's also, you know, know, another portion of the electorate, even in states like New Hampshire and Iowa, where

if they're presented with a test like, well, okay, is it Trump or DeSantis, that's an easier math problem to get your mind around than am I going to vote for Donald Trump or caucus for Donald Trump or Ron DeSanis or Nikki Haley or Vivek Ramoswamy or five or six other people. And in that environment, you know, the more informed people are breaking a bunch of different directions. And some of the less informed people, not uninformed, but just people who have not spent enormous amounts of brainpower on this are more and more defaulting back to Donald Trump because he seems like the consensus candidate. So Ron DeSantis kind of gets it from both directions in this environment we're in right now. Let's shift a bit to New Hampshire very quickly because

that's even more sort of spread out who's in second place. I mean, you could you could sort of look across at DeSantis, Chris Christie, Vivek Ramoswamy, even Nikki Haley, and see scenarios where all of them are vying again for second place. Maybe they can jump ahead. And it's worth noting that New Hampshire has an open primary, David, which means that independent voters and even Democrats can register and go vote in, I guess they can go vote in the Republican primary. If there's no action on the Democratic side, which there won't be RFK Jr. or notwithstanding, they could have an influence. I've always thought that could be

kind of interesting. But again, it suffers some of the similar problems that Andrew was just talking about if you're a non-Trump candidate in New Hampshire. You kind of could see something in all of those candidates I just mentioned for independent voters, for non-Trump Republican voters, for Democratic voters to to kind of see something they like and ends up with Donald Trump on the top. Do you see anything on the horizon in New Hampshire that we should be watching for that gives you reason to think Chris Christie or Vivek or Nikki Haley or even Ronda-Santis have some kind of upper hand in the granite state? Well, I mean, yes and no, but I think we need to look at it like this.

First of all, winning begets winning in presidential primaries. You know, I often get asked, well, you know, what if candidate X wins Iowa, but candidate, you know, why can win New Hampshire? And then, hey, how about candidate, you know, Z seems to be a great fit for these Super Tuesday states? And then, of course, I always have to remind them that if you don't, if we don't have a competitive situation in the early primary states where, you know, a candidate wins in Iowa, candidate wins in New Hampshire. a candidate wins in South Carolina, then nobody's coming out of the woodwork after that, right? So if Trump wins Iowa, given where his numbers are, and given, you know, we're dealing with a former president with such a strong base of support inside the party, this race is not going to suddenly become competitive in New Hampshire, no matter what the polling is. People are going to

look at a Trump victory in Iowa and say, it looks like we've got our nominee, let's move on, we're going to focus on Biden. Also, it just impacts voter behavior. They go with the winner. They don't say to themselves, you know, I've been a DeSantis fan all along. And even though he came in fifth in Iowa, I'm just using him as an example. I'm here in New Hampshire. I'm voting for DeSantis. They're going to be like, it doesn't look like that guy's got it. So maybe I guess I'm voting for Trump. Or, well, if anybody can beat Trump in New Hampshire, this is the person who came in second in Iowa. I'll go with them. So you've got to win. because it attracts more support and money, fundraising, both grassroots and wealthy donors, as the primary progresses.

You don't get to lose, and you don't get to lose in these early states and then come on strong later. Now, there are times when we've seen, you know, if we go back to 2008, you know, McCain is his candidates, he's almost dead. He doesn't really compete in Iowa, but then he wins New Hampshire. But we were also dealing with a different situation. We weren't dealing with a former president and Donald Trump that most Republican voters don't actually think he lost. So you don't actually have an electability argument to make that, you know, you got a really second guess your support for Trump because he can't beat Biden. Oh, yeah, look at the polling. You know, we've just been discussing, and I know, Mike, you want to get deeper into the general election polling.

No Republican voter thinks Trump is unelectable. In fact, they think he's the most electable against Biden right now. So I don't know how you make that argument unless things change drastically. One thing I will say about New Hampshire, which I find interesting, at least from the CNN University of New Hampshire poll that was released, I believe, the day before we were recorded, is that it shows Trump at New Hampshire at 39 percent. And then you've got Christy Ramoswamy and Haley, all in double digits. And then when you throw in Tim Scott in single digits and a couple others, there is more support right now for a non-Trump candidate than there is for Trump. It's the thing that most closely resembles what we saw in 2016 in almost every primary. And so far, the only time I've seen that so far really in a big way, where if you added up all this support, it surpasses Trump's 39%.

which shows you that in theory, if this field were to ever winnow, maybe a good candidate could make this competitive. The problem is, is this thing going to winnow because everybody's got some sort of belief that if I can just get to Iowa, I can be the next Mike Huckabee, I can be the next Rick Santorum, or I can be the next McCain, New Hampshire, 2000, circa 2008. and, you know, unless they just start to drop off and voters make their own decisions, but we're not seeing that yet. You know, it's interesting because if Donald Trump were listening to this podcast, which I don't think he is, but maybe he is, he would say all of this discussion we've been having is pointless because I'm going to be the nominee, and he seems to be acting that way. Andrew, you had, I thought, a great piece in Wednesday's dispatch politics, which all of you should be subscribing to dispatch politics, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, in your inbox from the three of us and anybody else who is writing about politics will throw what they have in there as well. But Andrew had this, you had this great piece, looking at tropes, essentially pushing away,

driving the bus over the pro-life movement, the sort of official pro-life movement, and demonstrating that he sort of thinks that this primary is over. In fact, you wrote what has changed the state of the primary. Trump is already the comfortable frontrunner at the time of his prior abortion comments dust up. That's referring to his sort of idea that he expressed earlier this year that abortion is not good as an issue for Republicans. He essentially doubled down on that in his interview over this past weekend with Kristen Welker of NBC. see a lot of the abortion opponents, the pro-life groups, tried to kind of push back. They didn't really push back forcefully.

What happened and what does it say about where things are in this primary race that we continue to want to talk about? Yeah. So there's basically two really instructive moments here. And the first took place back in April. The Trump campaign responded to a comment from a Washington Post story. that was asking kind of about their abortion position, basically, saying mission accomplished, we got Roe done, her lifers should be happy, it's back with the states, and that's where it ought to be. And that got a lot of these professional pro-life groups kind of hot around the collar

because they all endorse some kind of national federal legislation for abortion. Usually they treat like a 15-week federal ban with exceptions, which is the thing that Senator Lindsey Graham has introduced. since the Dobbs decision, they see that as kind of like their baseline federal policy that they want every candidate to get behind and specifically every presidential candidate. They really want a Republican presidential nominee

to be leading from the front on that. So back in April, when Trump kind of suggested that that wasn't where they were at, he got a lot of this pushback. He got a lot of groups kind of drawing a line in the sand, and he walked it back. He kind of said he didn't endorse the 15-week legislation, but he did, you know, make some comments to the effect that there is a federal role to be played here policy-wise.

Well, now you kind of fast forward to now, and this interview on Sunday, he was still being very coy about this specific question of whether there's going to be federal action. He at one point said, federal state, I don't really care. what he's apparently interested in now is kind of orchestrating some kind of kind of grand bargain between Democrats and Republicans, between pro-lifers and pro-choice people, kind of finding some weak limit that everybody can agree to, which is interesting to talk about whether that anything like that could ever possibly be. You know, I love your passion. Get out there and solve it. But the bigger problem was that he then went on additionally and took some pot shots at Ron DeSse. Sanis for signing a six-week ban in Florida. And basically said, I think that's a terrible thing, a terrible mistake to have that ban there. And that, you know, made a lot of these groups tear out the hair again

because he is still not committing to the kind of federal legislation that they are demanding he commit to. And now, in addition, is kind of for no reason other than to continue to kick Ron DeSanis while he's down attacking this piece of pro-life legislation that a lot of these groups see as kind of like, the gold standard state standard, right? They kind of see this one federal level, 15 weeks. This is the heartbeat bill,

a version of which has passed in other states, but this is what he's been going out to the six-week ban, as you said. Right, right. And so it's been interesting, but it's been interesting now to see the somewhat more muted response to these kind of like,

he's kicking pro-lifers even a little harder than he has in the past. He's not just kind of saying, look, I think I can go this without you. I don't think I need to really be courting your support any longer, but he's actually kind of actively disparaging some signature bills of theirs that, you know, if you're in the pro-life movement and your goal is creating as many abortion restrictions as possible

to save as many unborn children as possible, you don't like to hear this kind of thing from Donald Trump, but he is now 40 points in the lead nationally. He's winning in Iowa, he's winning in New Hampshire, he's winning everywhere. And a lot of these groups, particularly the groups like SBA Pro Life America, which is the one I focused on in the item, these groups that are not necessarily grassroots organizing groups so much as they are legislation pushing groups and kind of influence handling groups in D.C., they are already kind of having to seemingly make their peace with the fact that this is going to be their nominee again.

He doesn't have deep convictions on the issue. but he was kind of malleable and he went along before. So it's kind of like this as opposed to what you would have seen in the past, which was always this like, look, here's our lines in the sand, you embrace our policies or we're likely to oppose you. They're already in this much muddier kind of space where, okay, Donald Trump seems to be the guy, here's how his mind works, here's how his ego works. If we hit him too hard, he probably hits us right back,

and he's probably stronger than we are right now. So how are we going to get to a position where if he's president, he's not closing the door on us. He's letting us come in and talk to him about our policy stuff. And it's just interesting to see that balance of power shift in just the last couple months. Yeah. And, you know, it does seem like a, you could see in the successive statements from SBA, pro-life America president, Marjorie Danfelser, influential person in Washington in the pro-life movement, really on the campaign sign. backing candidates who advocate, you know, particularly at the federal level who advocate for restrictions on abortion. She had several statements or the organization certainly had several statements over the past couple of days

that demonstrates them kind of working out in public their position at this point. I mean, the initial statement, right, was really kind of ignored what Trump said and ignored Trump, in particular and just said, we're at a moment where we need a human rights advocate. We need somebody in the White House who is on our side. Then an additional statement praising DeSantis' heartbeat bill. Why would they praise DeSantis' heartbeat bill? Because Donald Trump attacked it, but they didn't mention that. And then finally on Tuesday, Marjorie Dandenfelser releases or says publicly Trump was wrong

in attacking the heartbeat bill in Florida, that maybe the strongest language we heard from her. and then a statement that kind of muddled it all together. We urge Trump and DeSantis to focus on their concrete pro-life plan for the future. I mean, there's a sense here that the pro-life groups don't really have anywhere else to go. They're having, as you say, Andrew, to make their peace with Donald Trump because he's likely to be the Republican nominee, a real different dynamic than what has been in the past in Republican primary politics. 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

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That's at least what the polls suggest. The Real Clear Politics average actually has Trump up half a point over Biden. 45% for Trump, 44.5% for Joe Biden. You can see a few polls where Biden's ahead by a point or Trump's ahead by a point or two, where they're tied. This is a pretty even match. It goes back to what you were saying. Republican primary voters don't see an electability problem for Donald Trump.

They see an electability problem for Joe Biden, particularly if Trump is the nominee. What's going on? Well, I think this is the biggest point, right? Because we continue to hear this from Trump's competitors in the Republican primary, that it's time for fresh leadership that we need to nominate someone who can win. in in 2024 and not get bogged down by, you know, all of these court cases and the drama and everything that goes along with Trump. But Republican primary voters see Trump as eminently electable as the strongest candidate

to run against Biden. And, you know, notwithstanding there's some polling here and there that shows, you know, Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis or others faring better than Trump, right? not is still competitive, but not quite as competitive, a little bit more separation. Republican primary voters just don't buy it. And so that has helped frame this, sort of create this idea on the Republican side of the aisle that they've got their incumbent and he's the best choice to run against Biden. And you can't blame them because these general election hypothetical matchups of a rematch between Biden and Trump showed Trump very

competitive right now, right? I mean, it's been one heck of a summer polling swim for Joe Biden. You know, when you're up by a half a point, the real clear politics average, for all we know, you could be down by half a point. But what we have seen in the trend line is for Trump versus Biden, Trump's numbers to go up, up, up, to reach Biden and then, you know, slightly surpass him. And that's what's important here. And if you look at, you know, what the Biden campaign is doing, they're preparing for a rematch. And if you look at Republican primary voters, they're almost preferring a rematch.

And I think it sort of gets us back to one particular point. You cannot win an electability argument when the voters that you're courting with that argument don't buy it. Republican primary voters don't think Trump lost to Biden. At the very least, they think Biden was awarded, more votes in an unfair process is about as good as you're going to get. So when Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence talk about fresh leadership and nominating somebody free of all this stuff who can actually win, number one, they don't believe Trump lost, but number two, they're like,

but look at these polls. He's doing great. We're a divided country. This is as good as he's ever done. We've seen him polling like this before, and he won. And so I just think that that has created this idea that we are in a general election scenario among many voters. And we're just starting to see the way the coverage is framed as though it's a fate of conflict. Well, we've talked about in recent weeks on the dispatch podcast. This is not in a general election matchup. It's not as if Trump is very strong. He's facing a strong Joe Biden, and it's just a battle between these two very well-liked

with everybody on their side in their corner intensely for them in a tight reelection. These are two likely nominees of their parties who the general public is not really thrilled with, and yet that's who they're going to be stuck with. One of the issues that's dogging Biden in a general election is his age. there have been polls that show that people think CNN had a poll, I think it was last month, that said a lot of people, I think, something like in the 70% worry that Biden's age, he's 80 now, he'd be 86 at the end of a second term, they worry that his age is going to affect his performance in office. And Joe Biden seems to be recognizing this.

CNN reported that at a campaign fundraising event, event in New York earlier this week. He said this, a lot of people seem focused on my age. Believe me, I know better than anyone. And then he went on to say, when this nation was flat on its back, I knew what to do. When democracy was at stake, I knew what to do. So he's sort of going the Ronald Reagan route a little bit, saying my age is an asset because I have experience, I know what to do. Voters don't seem to be sold on that yet. But it does seem like he's acknowledging, finally that voters might have a problem with this age. Andrew, should we make anything of this?

Is there going to be an effort by the Biden campaign to use his age as, you know, as an asset? What do you think? Well, I do think the Ronald Reagan comparison is interesting. It remains to be seen, he's older. You know, he's older than Reagan was. So it remains to be seeing kind of what the upper bound of that is. But I think the reason this is so such a dangerous,

issue for Biden is that this is kind of, in terms of public opinion, it's a ratchet that only turns one way, right? He's not getting any younger. None of us are. But if a particular voter starts to think about Biden, oh gosh, like this guy's really, really getting up there, that guy's not necessarily coming back, because what are you going to do if you're Joe Biden to kind of undo whatever kind of senior moment you put in front of these people in the first place? If you're just seeming capable. You're just seeming capable. That's kind of like the baseline. But any kind of given moment, any gaff, any moment where you're kind of wandering around the stage looking for someone's hand to shake, you know, any one of these things kind of gets added onto the pile of, well, gosh,

he's kind of getting up there. He's no spring chicken. There's no real way for voters to kind of like release that anxiety, if that makes sense. And then the other important component is that Joe Biden's presumptive running made a second time around is Kamala Harris, who is less popular than he is, who is, you know, in theory will be a net liability for a lot of people on the campaign trail. And that adds the kind of like the action item to it, where it's like, it's, you know, this could all be kind of academic when you hear a lot of, only 33% of people in the poll you mentioned saying that they think he's likely to finish out a second term. That would be a lot more academic if all of those people really like,

to the person who would become president if he did not finish out that term. So it's a real possible liability, and it's like I say, it can only kind of get worse. It puts Kamala Harris on the ballot in a way that she really wasn't in 2020. Another thing that Joe Biden said

at this fundraiser in New York, David, brings us to something you were writing about earlier this week in Dispatch Politics. Just a reminder, once again, subscribe to that newsletter, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, in your inbox. This is what Biden says.

said, and let there be no question, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy, and I will always defend, protect, and fight for our democracy. That's why I'm running. It reminded me, of course, of what you had written about, but also the Biden message ahead of the 2022 midterms, where he talked about MAGA republicanism and extremism, kind of had almost a dark message about what could happen if Republicans took control of Congress. Republicans did take control of the House of Representatives after the 2022 midterms.

They did not in the Senate. So there was a sense that maybe those arguments from Biden and Democrats worked in 2022. Walk us through how the campaign, the proto campaign, it's very few people so far at that campaign, how they're thinking through how to use Donald Trump and make America great againism against Republicans and to boost Democrats.

Yeah, I think this is a really big deal. First, I just want to mention one thing about the president's age. When you talk to professional Democrats who get paid to win elections, they have no complaints about how Biden is functioning as president or his work product. They are actually rather praiseworthy. They say the problem is how he presents in public physically, when he walks, when he speaks. that it shows somebody who is not old because he's 81 or about to be 81 and would be 82 when he's inaugurated for a second term. It's because he looks like someone we think of at 81,

882 years old. And we see that Donald Trump, who's not too far behind Joe Biden and age, doesn't have the same issues in polling because he's perceived as more vibrant and more vital. However, people don't like some of that work product that comes with being more vital. title. That's just a fact. And that's really an issue here for him. But on the messaging, you know, what I found fascinating and what I wrote for Dispatch Politics was how much you were going to hear the Biden campaign, the president himself and all of his surrogates, right, the people that are going to be speaking on his behalf, use the term MAGA. And they are using it and are going to use it possibly as much as, if not more than Donald Trump himself.

Because they want to split traditional Republican voters, the kind who are, you know, lifetime Republicans, but who tended to vote for Republicans and feel good about Republicans that we think of as Reagan-era Republicans, traditional conservatives, not the conservative populists that have sort of taken over the party. somewhat since the rise of Trump and divide them from Donald Trump's loyal base and the broader Republican base that would vote Republican no matter what and divide those two in a sense by saying, look, these are these are not normal Republicans that we have issues with. These are lunatic Republicans. These are people that hold irrational views and views that are not acceptable

in American society. And by framing everything as maganomics or MAGA Republican or MAGA extremism, then from the standpoint of Democratic messaging and how they feel about this, they feel like they're not really alienating voters that they can win or would win, but that they are finding a way to create a wedge in the Republican Party to bring over to their side voters that usually would vote Republican, that they actually have a chance to win because of dissatisfaction and distaste with Trump and what his influence has done to the GOP in the last eight years. Giving Republicans a permission structure, right? Well, I don't know if it's a permission structure. Morris is not offending them, right? So if you just say, God, these Republicans are all extremely. I mean, look, there are plenty of Republicans who are sort of like Mitt Romney, reluctant Trump, or Mitt Romney, reluctant Trump, Joe Biden.

And then, like, let's say in Virginia, you know, voted for Glenn Yonkin or in Georgia in 2022, voted for Brian Kemp. And the last thing you want to do is say, you guys are all a bunch of crazies, right? I mean, no, you can't. Right. You cannot win over to your side voters by saying, you know, You're all lunatics, but you know, if you vote for me, then you're fine. So they think they've taken this term, right, that Trump popularized, that his supporters embraced, and then saying, yeah, all you people that are queasy about Trump and not sure what to do, yeah, right, exactly. Those are the crazies.

But, you know, the Republicans that, you know, don't think John McCain was a traitor for getting captured or whatever the heck it is, Trump said in Iowa eight years ago, like, you're all with us and that's fine. And that's really what this use of MAGA is about. One side note here, you know, I remember as we approached the midterm elections last year, I kept saying to myself, I don't know why President Biden keeps focusing on. the threat to democracy and referring, you know, constantly raising this issue of MAGA Republicans because doesn't it just sort of impugn a bunch of voters in the Midwest that maybe would have liked Biden for his pro-union populace elements or whatever? You know, Democrats did really well in that midterm election. They gained a Senate seat. Their losses in the House were small, right? They lost control of the House than Democrats said, but they, I mean, this, not only was it not a way,

I mean, it was arguably a very successful election for Democrats, winning key governorships, things like that. And so I've said to myself, maybe when you get elected president, you know a thing or two. So Biden has definite challenges. I've talked to Democratic voters tying it back into the age issue that say to themselves, I really think he's been a good president, and I will wholeheartedly definitely vote for him again. But God, I wish we had somebody else. And so on a spectrum of concerned about age, if I've got Biden partisans who think he's done great,

who are absolutely not just saying they're going to support him, but like I'm absolutely voting for sure, saying, I wish we had somebody else. What do you think that does to the swing voter or the soft Republican, right? It really creates a dilemma of do I vote at all? Do I just, you know, grin and bear it and vote for Trump because I'm so concerned about age? Well, at least, you know, I think Trump's got all his energy. And so that's, I think, you know, one of the things the president's team is going to have to contend with. I think they'd be well served to embrace it.

Stop trying to tell everybody it's not fair. And what about Trump he's old to? And follow Biden's lead. Yeah, we know it. Old. I get it. I got to prove myself. and just get that issue off the table and say, what else can I say? You're right. I'm old. Yes, we know. He's old now. Here's what we're doing. And here's the option. You know, here's the alternative. And stop the hamster wheel of it's not fair. It's not right. Don't you know he's really an energetic guy.

It's so interesting because we focus a lot on how Donald Trump is essentially running as an incumbent in the Republican primary. We haven't really. sort of dealt with, and I'm not saying we do that here, we have other things to talk about, but something to think about as we move forward and even things that we could write about in dispatch politics, we're having an editorial meeting here on the podcast live, is the way that that benefits Joe Biden, that Joe Biden doesn't necessarily have to run as an incumbent all the time. He can run as an insurgent against the incumbent, quote, unquote incumbent Donald Trump. The other thing I am thinking about, and then I, promise we'll move on, is I am so interested in slogans and how slogans are used in politics.

And it's hard to think of a precedent for an opponent to use his rival's slogan against him at the same time that the person is using the slogan themselves. I mean, you think about no new taxes for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Of course, that was used against him in 1992, but that was because he fell short of that pledge. Or you think of hope and change in 2008 for Barack Obama. Well, a lot of Republicans used hope and change in 2012 to say he didn't deliver on hope and change.

It didn't really work out for Republicans, but you can at least see where they use that. Here you have Donald Trump saying, I'll make America great again, again. And Joe Biden saying, hey, remember, make America great again? Come join our side if that scares you. It's just a remarkable, remarkable thing.

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at Amex.ca.com. let's move on now to Capitol Hill. We don't talk a lot about Capitol Hill in dispatch politics and really on the dispatch podcast recently, but everybody's back from recess and we're about to have a shutdown. At the end of September, there doesn't seem to be a deal that can be made before then, Kevin McCarthy basically deciding he's not going to hold a vote on a continuing resolution to fund the government. And so at the end of the fiscal year, which is September, September 30th, the government will run out of funding, there'll be a government shut down. Some Republicans seem to be okay with this, while the bulk of the Republican conference in

the House seems to be a little worried that this is not going to work out well for them politically. Andrew, we're back to shutdown politics. We're back to fiscal brinksmanship politics. Is this going to be good for Republicans to go into a shutdown a year before the presidential election? what's odd is that because the margin of the Republicans' majority in the House is so small, usually with these shutdowns the conversation is all about, is this going to ultimately hurt Republicans writ large worse, or is it going to hurt Democrats writ large worse?

But now one of the reasons so many Republicans on the House side are so mad is that you have four or five or six or seven kind of bomb-throwing Republicans in the House who are enough to derail basically any Republican project who don't seem to have the same incentive structure as everybody else. The question is not what is kind of the most kind of spending cuts and concessions that we can extract out of our other negotiating partners in the Democratic Senate and from President Joe Biden.

They're just really, really mad that Republicans have a majority but they haven't gotten the things that they want yet. and they, and they're willing to kind of take this stand and basically say, well, we're just going to, we don't care. We're just going to blow the whole thing up. Like, we're not going to, we're not going to stand by here and let Kevin McCarthy walk all over us by passing a spending package that doesn't contain the kind of, the kind of dramatic changes to spending and funding and the parliamentary process and all these things that we've long demanded. And you have a whole other, you know, large, large majority of the Republicans in the House who are kind of tearing out

their hair about all of this and saying, look, we put together a package that we think is a good starting point for negotiation considering the fact that we control one House of Congress and that's it right now. Like we think... And barely that that control, as you say, the margin is so small that it's not as if House Republicans have a huge majority that they're right with. And so you've seen this really interesting messaging divide where it's the kind of the, bomb throwers, it's the Matt Gates is of the world, some of these guys in the House Freedom Caucus, where they're essentially saying, you know, like, we're not going to stand for this stuff anymore, we're taking our ball and going home until we see some real changes around

here. And then you see some other people messaging the package that McCarthy wants to see past, using the same, or at least very similar kind of like very, very grassroots conservative language, like, look, here are the priorities that we got into this package. It does contain funding for the border. It does contain, you know, funding for the military and all these sorts of things. And we have a couple Republicans who are, you know, killing it before, strangling it in the cradle, before it can even get to the Senate for negotiation with Chuck Schumer. And so they're kind of, it's completely intractable at this point. We're barreling toward a shutdown. We are not even yet to the point where Republicans are negotiating with Democrats about this, which is the other

crazy thing. I mean, usually that's the shutdown, right? It's, you have a Republican side and a Democratic side. But we are not even to that point yet with this thing less than two weeks of I was down on Capitol Hill this week to kind of take the temperature of the House conference, and I would say annoyance is not strong enough of a word. Frustration is not even strong enough of a word for the way that the rank and file of the Republican conference, a very conservative Republican conference feels about these holdouts. I talked to Michael Lawler, who's a Republican from New York, who referred to

to Matt Gates and the other, like you said, five, six, maybe seven Republicans who were holding out on this deal as circus performers. And Lawler is an interesting case because he's one of 18 House Republicans to bring it back to elections here who hails from a district that Joe Biden won in 2020. There are 18 Republicans from Joe Biden districts. It is not in their interest to have the House conference, the House majority, the House Republican majority, to look incompetent. Like they can't get things done. And that is what they are very concerned about. And you look at somebody like Matt Gates. I was struck by the amount of reporters and TV cameras surrounding him because he has some power now. And I think a lot of Republicans look at that and think,

This is about personal advancement and ambition. There are those, even in the House Freedom Caucus, who actually are pragmatic in their own way. They want to get something done. They have the majority, a lot of them for the first time ever in their careers. Just a couple of terms for some of these guys. Most of that has been in the minority. And they want to get something done.

And they see this ambition from people like Matt Gates and think, What are we really here to do? But Drucker, we've got to talk about some other elections that could be affected by a shutdown. Virginia, the old dominion, where I live, there's some off-year elections because Virginia has to do everything strangely. And they've got the House of Delegates are up in November just a few weeks away. Lots of federal government jobs in Virginia, both military down in the Norfolk area and the Hampton Roads area. And, of course, outside of Washington and Northern Virginia, a lot of federal government jobs, could we be seeing Republicans who look like they might be in a good position to win the House of Delegates of Virginia, shooting themselves in the foot over a shutdown across the Potomac? It's possible.

Look, there's a lot of people are paying attention to these offier elections in Virginia because Governor Glenn Yonkin is leading the charge to help his party flip control. of the state Senate, right? So Republicans control the lower house, the House of Delegates. They need to win four seats in the state Senate to win control of the Senate. And then with full control of the legislature, there's a number of things Yon can get through the General Assembly that it can't get now. A 15-week limit on abortion rights is one of them,

but there are a whole bunch of fiscal things and education reforms and things that are going to have a broad base of support. court. It also will go a long way towards defining Governor Youngkin's political future, which is something we took a look at, we've taken a look at this month in Dispatch Politics and on the website at the dispatch. So a lot of attention. And, you know, the question is going to be if we barrel past, you know, September 30th and the government shuts down, as appears likely right now, because a lot of Republicans in Washington don't share Governor Youngens. preference for governing, is does the general incompetence of the Republican Party impact voter

turnout and voter behavior in these November 7th legislative elections? I went and took a look for something that will run in the Dispatch Politics Newsletter Friday about how the 2013 Obamacare shutdown impacted the governor's race in 2013. for Virginia governor. Terry McCallough narrowly won that. The Democrat defeated Ken Cuccinelli, the state attorney general at the time, now running the DeSanta Super PAC, and I don't know what McCallives up to these days. And the general consensus was that the shutdown did have some impact and negatively when it came

to Cuconelli's narrow loss to McColliffe in that race. It affected turnout. It affected voter behavior. And the reason the shutdowns can have a bigger effect in Virginia than elsewhere in the country is there are a lot of federal workers, but there are also just people working in the private sector whose industries rely on the government. And there's also because, you know, that's the local news, is you're just confronted more with the idiocy of these government shutdowns and it impacts your view of the party. So, you know, while Governor Yonkin is leading a very professional, sophisticated effort to get these state Senate candidates across the line in competitive districts and hold the House of Delegates with about 10 competitive races, it's got to be a concern because this can be a game of inches, especially, look, Virginia is more decidedly democratic today, capital. D than it was 10 years ago, right? Notwithstanding Yonkin's victory in 2021, winning by two points in a state Biden won by 10, it is really in the Trump era become more comfortable

in the Democratic fold, become more blue than it was 10 years ago. And in a game of inches, you need every advantage you can get, or at least you need to stop external negative things from happening. So it's something to keep an eye on. If Democrats can hold control of the Senate, it's going to be a real feather in Biden's cap, whether he had anything to do with it or not. And just as, you know, one final example, as we noted in dispatch politics this week, Democrats won two important special elections, one for a seat in the New Hampshire State House, one for a seat in the Pennsylvania State House, putting them one seat away from nominal control of the State House of Representatives in New Hampshire and preserving their narrow hold

on the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives. All to stay is, to stay, is Democrats are not as vulnerable nationally in all of these races as Biden's vulnerability might suggest, and all of the issues in which parties behave can have an impact on these bigger races that we pay attention to. Right. Well, let's close out this episode with some not worth your time. And I want to dive into this issue that our colleague Nick Katajio wrote about in his newsletter on Wednesday. There's been a change in the Senate dress code. Now, this is a rule change. This is a custom change.

There's no rule that you had to wear as a male senator, a coat or anybody, really, a coat and tie and sort of business wear. but it has essentially been a custom, an accepted custom, on the Senate floor in the U.S. Capitol. And Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, essentially relaxed those rules, those unofficial rules, and is not enforcing them. Coat and tie no longer required if you're a U.S. senator, if you're a staffer, if you're a page, if you're anybody else who is on the Senate floor, you've got to. but if you're a senator, there's no expectation formal or otherwise for you to wear a coat and tie. This seems to be all in the service of helping John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democratic Senator, who has suffered some health issues over the past year plus, and who also likes to wear hoodies and shorts and doesn't like to wear the monkey suits

that we force ourselves into for business apparel. David, let's start with you. Is this issue is worrying about this? I mean, again, our colleague Nick said that there's no way to avoid sounding priggish and frankly old when grousing about senators refusing to wear ties. You're usually a very nice-dressed man, David Drucker.

Is this worth our time to be completely? complaining about it to be talking about this dress code? I mean, I think a little bit. I mean, look, I'm old school, right? I think you should dress the part and that how you present yourself in certain situations says a lot about how you feel about an institution or somebody you're meeting with. Obviously, right now I'm very casually dressed, but whenever I'm on Capitol Hill, whenever I'm going to interview a lawmaker, whenever I'm going to be on TV, you know, I always wear a tie.

I always wear a jacket. It just, it just feels right. And I don't know if, I don't know if the issue here is, and there are two issues here. One, the custom, as human beings, I think there are symbolic ways in which we show our respect and there's a word I'm looking for, but it helps. helps exalt a certain institution or a certain way of treating people, right? In other words, I wouldn't show up, I mean, you have to wear some clothes, right? I mean, there's always gradations of, well, what should you wear?

I mean, is, you know, if Fetterman, you know, we're going to talk about Fetterman, right? But, okay, you don't have to wear a coat and tie. Well, can you show up without a shirt? Well, no, you can't do that. Why not? Oh, so you're saying there's a line. You've just changed the line. So actually, I think this is a really interesting discussion, not about an elimination of standards, but just a change in what you feel is a proper standard.

Secondly, I don't understand why the majority leader had to do this for one senator, unless there are something we don't know about the mental health issues he has suffered and how it relates to his wardrobe. There's nobody else we can think of in the United States Senate that this impacts. and maybe this has something to do with how it's impacting his mental health. Maybe his ability, I mean, sincerely, maybe his ability to wear hoodies and shorts and whatever shoes he wears is like a really big deal to him mentally. But if not, he was wearing suits. I don't quite understand the need to do this. But again, you know, if somebody wanted to prove a point and show up one day in shorts,

flip flops and no shirt or a bathing suit flip flops and no shirt and say yeah you look i just got back from the pool you know somebody'd say well we didn't mean you could do that oh okay so i think it's worth our time in this regard it's a really interesting discussion to have about what are your standards and why do you have that that's right uh Andrew John fetterman was in the presiding officer's seat wearing his short sleeve shirt wearing his shorts uh as The resident young person on this podcast right now, how do you defend that? You're putting me in charge of being our Federman whisperer, which I don't know if I'm comfortable fulfilling that.

I find the whole thing extremely silly, right? I mean, I just, I think the whole thing, like, you kind of alluded to, David, the, the connection between this and his mental health. And the guy has had a horrible run of luck, terrible stroke that has left him. with a long recovery and a lot of depression coming out of that. And I'm very happy for him that a lot of that seems to be improving. The auditory processing and the depression both seem to have improved a lot for him. I don't really understand where this exact thing fits in.

Yes, I mean, the guy hates to wear a suit. Like, sure. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a medical professional. Me personally, I consider the gym shorts in the hoodie to be kind of like depression wear. You know, like that's kind of the day where I never got going. You know what I mean? So it's hard for me to get into that headspace and comment on the thing.

But yeah, I mean, the optics are silly. I think the guy should. Can we also talk about the fact that there's a lot of intermediary steps between a full suit and tie and a car heart hoodie and gym shorts? Like, I mean, denim is quite stretchy now. Like it's comfortable. You can buy comfortable jeans. You know, wear a linen jacket, Federman, Senator Federman. I don't know.

It seems a little silly. That's a good point. dress sneakers, stretchy jeans, you can be comfortable. But I do wonder at what point did comfort become the priority over, as you were saying, Drucker, respect, respect not just for your colleagues, respect for your staff, who, again, still have to wear shirts and ties and jackets, but respect for the institution of the Senate. I mean, again, it is hard to, as Dick says, it's hard to talk about this without sounding

like a fogey waving your finger at the kids, although John Fetterman is older than I am. I know, right? But I was thinking about this. Exactly. Last week, I sort of unexpectedly found out that I was being asked to make plans that day to go down to Capitol Hill and interview a member of Congress. And I had showed up to our much more relaxed, I would say office at the dispatch without a coat and tie. And so I went home and got a coat and tie so that I could wear a coat and tie. I wasn't even in the Capitol. I was in one of the office buildings on Capitol Hill. I'm not saying this to say, oh, look, what a great and respectful person I was. It just, as you said, Drucker, it felt right. I was talking to a member of Congress. I should sort of dress the part.

And I don't know where, I mean, I would have been much. we're comfortable to interview him in the loose moisture wicking collared shirt that I had on, it just didn't feel right. And it feels like we're bending the rules in order to accommodate somebody who essentially has his own uniform, which this is a uniform that he's worn ever since he was lieutenant governor, ever since he was mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania to sort of symbolize and signal that he's a populist. Drucker, final thoughts? First of all, I almost wonder if our office is now kind of like Federman's office

because our erstwhile co-founder, Steve Hayes, is a huge fan of hoodies and casual dress. But I always feel compelled at least, you know, wear dress shoes and a collar at the, you know, at least it just doesn't feel right. But, you know, I think the change in custom and the way they did it, is indicative of the fact that they actually think there's something to the custom, because they didn't relax it for everybody, right? If you're a staffer, if you're on the Senate floor, and lots of Senate aides are on the Senate floor when it's in session for all sorts of work reasons, right? And there are people, not just the senator who controls the floor from the Dias, but like there are, there's Senate staff that helps, you know, collect, you know, count votes and

they all have to dress. So everybody in the United States Senate, other than members, still have to dress. So if none of this mattered, then they just would have said, hey, man, whatever floats your boat. And what's interesting is they could have, by the way, they could have relaxed and said, listen, we're just going to do business casual now. But, but instead, they just said, You know, however Federman wants to roll out of bed, that's what you get to do. Again, unless your staff. And I don't see, it's not like the custom was, well, as the United States Senator, whenever you're in public or whenever you're engaged in official business, you must wear a coat and tie. This is strictly a Senate floor thing.

As Tom Cotton was telling me on the dispatch podcast the other day, when I interviewed him, he's like, you know, occasionally I get here just in time for a vote. And if I wasn't in a coat and tie, just like open the door, peeked my head in. know, vote yay or nay, signal to the counter, vote counter, and, you know, disappear. There's so many ways they could have done this. They didn't properly explain it. They clearly believe that dress matters, but they just would have relaxed it for basically everybody. And they didn't. And, you know, over on the House side where they can't even, you know, figure out how to pass a spending bill,

you still have to wear a coat and die to get in the Speaker's Lobby. So I find that kind of in the Speaker's Lobby is that area just outside the House floor. So if you want to go in there, interview members of Congress, whether you're a member, whether you're a staffer, whatever, like, there's actually a dress code, you know, in the quote-to-quote lower house. So it's kind of funny that the Senate is so relaxed right now. Yeah, who would have thought the House would have the upper hand when it comes to class over the Senate? Nobody could have predicted that. But that's the Washington, that's the politics that we operate in today. David Drucker, Andrew Agger, thank you so much for joining us on the Dispatch Podcast.

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