The Dispatch Podcast - The Election Nobody Asked For

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Many polls are telling the same story: Americans don’t want either Joe Biden or Donald Trump for president. And yet a rematch seems all but inevitable. Mike Warren is joined by Steve, Jonah, and Chris Stirewalt to commune in despair. Plus: -Pence’s overdue attack on populism -Great white sharks with Hitler’s brain -Eric Adams: migrant issue ‘will destroy New York City’ -9/11 anniversary and easy explanations Show notes: –CNN Polling on a Biden vs. Trump rematch –You need to calm down, Democratic pollsters argue – Semafor –Most Americans say Biden is too old – The Washington Post –TMD: The Election Nobody Wants –Kevin Williamson’s piece on Mike Pence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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 at secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

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That's Jonah Goldberg. That's Steve Hayes. That's Chris Steyerwalt. We'll be talking about the election that nobody asked for. We've got so many polls to discuss. Each one more depressing than the last. Chris Dyerwalt's already excited about it.

We'll be also talking about the migrant crisis and what's going on in New York City. And, of course, a look at now 22, years since 9-11, since the September 11th attacks, we'll be talking about all of that on the show. Take a listen. Okay, let's dive in with the election. Again, the election nobody asked for, nobody wanted. We've got a bunch of polls. I feel like we start with the polls because there is a new CNN poll that tells us some things that we already

learned from an earlier this week Wall Street Journal poll. It's a close general election race if it's Joe Biden versus Donald Trump, essentially a statistical tie. And you notice I led with that and not anything about the Republican primary that is supposedly still going on because Donald Trump is so far ahead, both in the journal and in the CNN polls. Steve, let's start with you. What should we make? Should we start with the CNN poll? I mean, what is it? 47, 47 Biden and Trump, this is a dead heat. Should we talk at all about the Republican primary? Or should we just jump into the general election? So the news in this poll about the Republican primary is that Nikki Haley would beat Biden in head-to-head matchup by, I believe, it's six points. Other Republican candidates do well. The only Republican

losing to Joe Biden in a head-to-head matchup is Vivek Ramaswami. So that's sort of the top line on the general election. What I find the most interesting, though, are the findings on Joe Biden. And they're dismal. If you're a Democrat, you have to be at least concerned, maybe panicked. Questions, is Joe Biden somebody you're proud to have as president? 37% of Democrats say that that's not the case. 70% of independents say that they're not proud of having Joe Biden as president. 50% of Democrats, 77% of independents say Biden does not have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president. And 67% of dem or dem-leaning voters say they prefer someone not named Biden as their nominee.

I'm paraphrasing from Aaron Blake's analysis at the Washington Post, but that's a jump from 54% in March. Those are horrendous, horrendous numbers for Joe Biden. I think what's interesting is this split that you're seeing among what you're hearing from rank-and-file Democratic voters, as reflected in this poll, as reflected in the Wall Street Journal poll, where I believe it was 70% of Democrats said that they were not excited about Joe Biden

being their party's nominee and what you're hearing from professional Democrats. There's a story out in Semaphore this morning that's sort of the perfect bracket to all of these stories about the polls that quotes a bunch of Democratic strategists and pollsters saying, ah, don't worry about it.

It's not a big deal. You know, people aren't focused. on the race. People are excited about abortion in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. We haven't spent enough money boosting Joe Biden, all of these things that strike me as whistling past the graveyard. This is a serious problem for Democrats. Joe Biden is among the most vulnerable incumbents, I think, in recent memory. And if they don't sort of take it seriously, I think it could be a problem. Yeah, I mean, this CNN poll sort of underscores what the journal poll that from earlier this week showed us,

particularly when you compare it, compare the findings on a number of questions with Donald Trump. So I'm just going through this from the journal poll. More than 70% say Joe Biden is too old to run for president. He's several points, I should say several, you know, it's almost 25 points ahead of Donald Trump on that. He scores below Donald Trump on the question of whether Biden is mentally up for the job as president. He's basically neck and neck on the question of whether Biden cares about people like you. He's behind Trump on the question of whether he has a vision for the future and on a strong record of accomplishments for president.

On a couple of sort of personal things, Biden is better than Trump, not much better. People say he's more honest than they say Trump is. They say he's more likable than Trump is. So even on a sort of head-to-head between Biden and Trump, not just with Democrats, but in a general election, Biden's in big trouble. Chris, how seriously should we take this? Should Democrats, professional Democrats, be a little more realistic?

Or are they seeing something beyond the horizon here that mere polls and us pundits are missing? The essential question in politics and life, or what? And there's not an or what for Democrats, right? Republicans keep saying, well, they're going to put Michelle Obama in. They're going to do that. They're going to swap Biden out, da, da, da, da, da. Joe Biden's the incumbent president.

He's seeking re-election. There is no one in his party, not Gavin Newsome, not nobody, who is in a position to take Joe Biden on at this. point. Now, a lot will change between now and January. Much will transpire. And we don't know. What Democrats are betting, I loved Jim Messina. I had a thing in Politico this week. Here are the states to watch. Actually, Biden's fine. It's going to be like this. It's going to be like that. And I just, I found it very Messina-esque. Just, yeah, yeah, yeah. See, we. have the data, we know the secret sauce, we know how to do it. The truth for Democrats is this is a

open question. This is a very open question. The preponderance of the evidence suggests that in a head-to-head match up with Donald Trump, if it were conducted today, that Joe Biden would win. We have the evidence from the 20-22 midterms that were conducted when Joe Biden was very was unpopular, right, when Joe Biden was in at least as much trouble in 2022 as he is now. And while Republicans did win the House, when you look at individual Senate races, you see discerning voters choosing in favor of non-goofia Republicans and rejecting the Mehmed Oz, Carrie Lake, Herschel Walker kind of

Maga Cooke's. So the Democrats are probably right, but they're not right by much and it would not take very much at all to tip this over

in the other direction. The problem is though, and this is where we always end up, what are you going to do about it? Right? What would Democrats, it is within the power

of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., to change this narrative. He could say, yeah, well, I'm really, this is too, it's too risky for me to do. I can't do this again. I'm not going to do this again. And there's plenty of precedent for that from Lyndon Johnson to Rutherford B. Hayes to all kind of folks

who said, one and done, I'm good. But absent that, I think the Democrats are just going to have to continue whistling past the graveyard or the nursing home, as the case may be, and just figure we're going to have to make the best of this. And by the way, then I'll shut up. The advantage that Democrats have is that the bitter, ugly divisions within the Republican Party that are only just beginning, we've only just begun, we'll afford them.

They're already up on the air in swing states, right? They're already spending money. And if we think back to 2012, what they did to Mitt Romney, while Republicans waited, waited, waited, and weren't spending money in Ohio in the upper Midwest, Democrats got on the air with cheap ads before the peak rates came in and kept it up. And this is what Democrats can hope this time. So another marginal presidential election, another sort of, you know, two yards and a cloud of dust kind of effort by Democrats. Jonah, the one thing that we haven't brought up yet here, but that sort of, I think Chris's sort of logic leads us to

is the effect of all of these legal problems on Donald Trump and the ability for Democrats to really exploit that whether or not he is on trial for all of them before the election. He probably won't be. If you dive in, as I did into this Wall Street Journal poll, there is a lot of evidence that while Republican primary voters are all rallying to Donald Trump because of these indictments, that that's not what general election voters, where they are on this question. They think these cases, these indictments have merit. And Donald Trump is

going to be on trial, both sort of metaphorically and actually, at least in one of these cases, before the election, that's a factor that isn't really put into our analysis so far. What do you think that effect is going to be? And will people, voters look at Biden and say, at least he's not on trial? Yeah, I mean, first of all, just because I can't admit to being a broken record unless I replayed the same tune a couple times. I think the way to think about this election so far is, there are two very weak, very vulnerable incumbents were historically incumbents,

like if you look at Donald Trump as an incumbent, his numbers are very weak for an incumbent. Much weaker than LBJs were when he got out of the race, right? Much weaker than George H.W. Bush's were when Pappy Cannon took a swipe at him. But if you look at it as an open field, his numbers are like, oh my gosh, he's crushing this, right? And a lot of people are confused because it is confusing

because we've never been in the situation really like this where you have maybe the William Jennings-Bryan races were similar in terms of this incumbency even though you're not an incumbent thing. And Biden is an historically unbelievably weak incumbent too. This is throwing a lot of your conventional punitry playbooks out the window. It's disrupting the matrix of how Washington normally thinks

and talks about this stuff. And it's not the only thing that's doing it. The other thing that's doing it is the thing that you brought up, which is these legal cases. I can't remember his name, but I had this really smart guy on my podcast this week talking about this election stuff. And he was making the point that smoking the ban, it is wildly underrated. He was making the point that, accurate, accurate, that late deciders, undecides, independence, the people who decide elections ultimately tend not to be very ideological voters. Doesn't mean they're dumb, doesn't mean they're uninformed. It means they may not be paying attention yet.

But you start informing those voters with possibly televised criminal proceedings where the entire country is going to go to school on the actual charges against Trump. So you can't talk about peaceful protesters being put in jail without bail, you know, which is what Ramoswamy is saying now. You can't do this was no big deal kind of thing. You can't do this was just free speech arguments. You actually have to deal with the facts of the cases. and my senses is that they will have a powerful effect on the people that can still be persuaded

and there are more than enough of them to win an election. But I come back to this basic fundamental problem that is the Kobayashi-Maroo kind of screw up of all of normal analysis is that it is very difficult for me to see a way for Donald Trump to win. But it is weirdly easy for me to see away

for Joe Biden to lose. One fall, right? A couple more sort of Mitch McConnell-like episodes or worse, which I think are entirely possible. And you can see everything thrown into disarray. This gets suspected of the setup of the thing, is the election nobody wanted. Nobody wants to see this.

And yet both parties are determined, like Colonel Nicholson on Bridgeta River Kwai, no, we must proceed. We must do this thing regardless of whether it's a terrible idea. It's going to end badly. Let me pick up on something that Jonah said there because I think it's really interesting. I mean, you talked a little bit about,

how there's this conventional analysis coming from the sort of pundit analyst class and media conversations are taking place as if there's a competitive primary and the Republican side. And it all feels very much the same. And yet we're living in something close to an unprecedented situation given the weakness. If you buy Jonah's framing as this sort of dual weak and incumbency battle. What I find totally perplexing, totally perplexing is the inability or unwillingness of any of the Republican campaigns to make adjustments. I mean, we had Ron DeSantis's campaign now saying for six weeks that they were going to reset, that they were going to do things differently. It's the same campaign. I mean, it's mostly the same campaign. He's talking a little bit

less about woke stop, maybe a little bit more about his record, but it's more or less the same campaign. You have seen since the beginning of the Republican primaries, Donald Trump gets stronger. His numbers are better today than they were when this started. Ron DeSantis has dropped, depending on the poll you believe, by just a few points, by double digits. The other candidates have moved up and down sort of in meaningless numbers. Tim Scott is plus two, Nikki Haley's plus five, you know, Chris Christie's minus one. It doesn't matter. None of this stuff matters. Nobody's close to Donald Trump. You would think if you were advising one of these other campaigns, that they might say, hey, all, what we're doing is not working, we should try something

radically different. And while I don't think there's an easy answer, there's not an easy path to defeating Donald Trump in a Republican primary, if there were, I suppose somebody might have taken it to this point. But what they're doing isn't working. And even, Even as late as last night in an interview that Ron DeSantis gave to Eric Bowling. And DeSantis keeps going to these places where he gets asked these kinds of questions. And then he feels like he has to give these kind of answers because I think he often feels like he needs to please sort of alt-right crowd, the alt-right interrogators who are interviewing him. He's asked this question about the sentences for January 6th. Then he goes on and suggests that he thinks many of the January 6th.

sentences have been too harsh. She sort of sounds an almost sympathetic note for Enrique Tario, the proud boys leader, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Even if you wanted to sort of make that case, this is not something that's going to separate you from Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the candidate in the race who's January 6th sympathetic. He's raised money for January 6th participants. It's crazy that nobody's doing anything different at all. But wouldn't that require these candidates to act as if they don't think they have a chance anymore and to take a risk? Because it seems that they all seem to think, they all seem to be acting under the assumption that it remains Trump's party and the only way to win is to get Trump's party on your side. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss.

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Seven Time winners Champions by the Seven Time World's Best Leisure Airline Champions, Air Transat. Mike Pence gave the speech this week going after populism in the Republican Party maybe a couple of years too late in terms of finding the source

of the problem, perhaps, from his perspective, but notable. Also notable, I was on the press preview call, along with some of our colleagues, previewing this speech with Pence's advisors. I would say the mood was somber, one of a campaign that maybe sees this as a last stab, a sort of final push before the Pence campaign wraps things up, maybe not next week, but maybe in a couple months. This was an effort by a candidate who sort of is acting as if he's not going to win, but he's going to try to take a stand. Populism is not the way forward.

Old school conservatism, maybe not the best messenger for this, Mike Pence serving four years alongside Donald Trump. But Jonah, Chris, I mean, what do we think of this speech? Is it important for candidates like Pence to plant a flag? Is there some kind of way, in which a speech like this helps, maybe not Pence, but somebody else if they take up the flag, what do we think? Well, you're framing in your elegant tease

of what the condition of the Republican Party is in, is correct, right? Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. He is the president in exile in the minds of many Republicans. And the same factors that help incumbent presidents, Donald Trump, right? The Republican Party nominating process and the attitude of many Republicans is to do what?

Protect the frontrunner. You got to protect the frontrunner. You got to keep this guy intact. And Bob Dole at 96, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, after he lost to John McCain in New Hampshire, we see again and again and again, the Republicans' willingness to,

and I think we have to remember the distribution of the Trump vote. A third or so of the Republican Party, MAGA, they're in, they like it, they want it. A quarter of the Republican Party, anti, right? I think it was wit errors, but as somebody said that I steal from frequently, there's three branches of the Republican Party,

always Trump, never Trump, and always Republican. And those always Republican voters want to win, they want to defeat Joe Biden, and they disliked the idea of an ugly primary contest, right? They don't want that to happen. For DeSantis, for Ronnie D., what's the problem? He picked up Ted Cruz's campaign where Ted Cruz left off, including with some of the same people,

which is I'm going to fly behind enemy lines and blow up Donald Trump's coalition, and I will take my constituency out of the, maga third, right? Which was dumb. And he tried to run as an incumbent. He tried to, look, he'd never run for national office. And he didn't have a broad enough footprint in the Republican Party to even think about trying to run and clear the field. I have so much money. I have so much support. I have so many endorsements. No one can't, everybody else better get out of the race. That was foolhardy, even without what Jonah correctly describes is a de facto incumbent in the race.

DeSantis tried, and he got blowed up, right? He went in after Trump, I'm going to do it, and now he is limping back. I will say, Jeff Rowe, I wish that I had the chutzpah of his Super PAC director who has Ron DeSantis' campaign

is on fire and tumbling down the side of a hill, I need $50 million right away. What I need you to do, by the way. I also can dramatically change the trajectory of the race if you give me 50 million dollars in the next two weeks. So that's DeSantis's failure. I think what Pence is doing is the same thing that Nikki Haley's doing and the same thing that Tim Scott has attempted to

and so far failed to do, which is start somewhere. When you're a challenger, you've got to start somewhere. You have to begin the way that people win nominations is they have solid support in one faction of the party, and then they work through attraction to persuade persuadables, right? So what has to happen, if Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee, you need someone who can unite the quarter of anti-Trump

and start nicking away at the persuadables, right? And that looks like a win. So here's the lower probability scenario. Iowa says, I can't help myself. I love Mike Pence. I love Mike Pence. This guy, I love him. And it would be in keeping with Iowa's character to defy the rest of the party and put forward.

And that's where he's got to deal with Nikki Haley, and that's where he's got to deal with Tim Scott, particularly Scott, who looks a lot like the kind of candidate that Iowa voters, sincere Christians in Iowa, and traditional conservatives in Iowa. would say, we don't care what the rest of the country says, we're giving this guy a shot. So let's imagine that a Pence or a Tim Scott can do that. Let's also imagine that New Hampshire does what it likes to do, which is also with a lot of independent voters in the Republican primary with no real contest on the Democratic side, put its thumb in the eye of Iowa and the rest of the country by picking Chris Christie. You know what, guys, we don't care, we don't care, we're doing this. and then you have a 30-day period,

32-day period, until South Carolina. What happens in that space, I don't know. So the way I look at it is, Mike Pence is acting rationally, which is, as Kevin Williamson's great piece, the white-ed sepulchre, about Mike Pence points out,

Mike Pence is trying to appeal to traditional conservatives, to small government, constitutional conservatives, that his conversion on January 6th, to his old self, his reversion to the old kind of small government, Reaganite, traditional conservative was real, and it will stick. I can't improve on Chris's punitry there,

but on the substance of the Mike Pence speech, there was a little debate inside the salon that is the dispatches Slack Channel. Steve's position, I don't want to mischaracterize it, but I think this is very to say is, All things being equal, I prefer to hear politicians change to the right position than stick with the wrong position. That's right. And I think Pence's position is correct. I'm very tempted to go on a long riff about Aesop's fable with the scorpion and the frog, though.

Because here you have Mike Pence riding the scorpion, praising the scorpion's broad-shouldered leadership for years and then crossing many rivers and then saying, But for this one day, scorpions are awesome, but now scorpions pose a huge peril to the Republican Party and to conservatism generally. But I think the scorpion frog thing is a little played out. So instead I will quote Professor Farnsworth

from Futurama, who said, everybody's in favor of saving Hitler's brain, but you put it in the body of a great white shark and, oh, you've gone too far. Like the populism that, I have been railing against for 15 years has gotten us into this incredibly crappy situation. Mitt Romney's speech in 2016

was preferable to me, but like the populism has swamped the Republican Party. It is the de facto ideology of Fox News, never mind OAN and that other one. Newsman. I mean, how many times have Steve and I talked about this on here about how when National Review came on with a against Trump issue

I watched Fox all day long. This was back when I was a Fox contributor and I think so was rich. One host after another, including people like Chris Wallace, would say, who does National Review think it is to tell voters who to vote for?

What? That is what National Review is. It's like, that's what the National Review does. It endorses candidates. It opposes candidates. It criticizes candidates. That's what it's been doing since 1955. and people are suddenly shocked.

But this attitude of the masses are always right, and I must go with them for I am their leader, suffuses the Republican Party. Look at the grief I got about talking about small donors a couple weeks ago. Everyone lost, well, a lot of people lost their minds about how ridiculous and elitist this position was. This is standard boilerplate conservatism, you know, circa 2015.

And so the problem for Pence, it seems to me, is that he is just not a persuasive, messenger, even if I agree with the message, just the idea that somehow all of a sudden he's realizing the problems with populism and how populism isn't conservatism, when he, a former radio show host, I was on a panel with Mike Pence in 2000, I think, no, in 2010 discussing populism and politics. And he was on the pro-populism side and I was on the anti-side. I want to celebrate him for saying it. It just does not feel like it's driven by courage. It feels like it's driven by desperation. And I think people can smell it. But I, yes, but also what, speaking of scorpions and frogs, or great white

sharks with Hitler's brain, what Mike Pence has demonstrated a willingness to do is do what he thinks people want him to do, right? And so he thinks what, he thinks that where, where the voters are, and he wants to, and he wants to go be with him. And that's what Ron DeSantis did. That's what, that's with the exception maybe of Scott and only moderately that's what Nikki Haley did Republicans went and lined up over around they said look we're going to suck up to Trump's voters

we're going to and I always date this back to the birtherism as the emergence of and whether it was Boehner or whomever that was like I don't know I don't want to get into a lot of that I don't want to talk about that's you know whatever Hillary Clinton's famous asked whether Barack Obama was a Christian, and she said, well, he says he is.

I don't know. I don't know. That sort of attitude within the Republican Party around the allegation that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim from Kenya that Republicans said, look, we're just going to have to indulge the cooks of the Internet. We're going to have to go along with this for a while and not offend them. But at a certain point, of course, you get to, okay, well, now what are we going to do? If the Hitler brain shark is chomping the party to bits, what are we going to do? And then you move in the other direction.

I think for Pence, his biggest problem is the gap between Donald Trump should never be president, ever again. He should never be allowed to hold the office of the presidency. And I will support the nominee of the Republican Party. That's his real hard spot. And the spot, Mike, that would represent accepted. of defeat for Mike Pence or acceptance of very likely defeat

would be the moment that Pence said, yeah, you know what? I won't vote or support Donald Trump if he is the nominee because he knows what that means and he knows what that entails. Steve, quickly, any thoughts on the Pence speech or on sort of the diagnosis

for what's ailing the Republican Party? Yeah, I mean, I guess I come down in a slightly different place than Jonah does on sort of what Mike Pence actually believes. I guess I view, notwithstanding the, you know, what he was, the comments he was making in 2010 and his history as a talk radio host. I mean, I do think that Mike Pence sort of fundamentally, like you're stripped away everything else, is a Reagan conservative. Like, I think he's a small government movement conservative more than he is a friend to modern populism. Okay.

More than more than he is. I mean, I think like so many people in the Republican Party, as, as, as. as Chris said, and in the conservative media and the commentariat, there was this willingness to engage or indulge populist moments in modern conservatism. I think in part because nobody thought it would become this, right? I mean, it was, you know, you didn't, people didn't smack down the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, it was going to go, it wasn't going to go anywhere. I think Pence maybe was guilty of that back in the day and certainly, you know, gave voice to a set of views that combined sort of Trumpy populism and traditional movement conservatism. And in fact, when we asked him about this, when he was on this podcast back in April, yeah, we put the question to him and said, you know, is this, is this still a Republican Party in which a Mike Pence, who's running as a Reagan conservative, can be compared.

when you now have huge swaths of the parties for mocking what they call zombie Reaganism. You know, he gave an answer that was certainly different in tone and I think in substance as well from the speech that he gave yesterday. If you listen to the arguments that are made by, you know, nationalist conservatives, the populist wing, the ever-growing populist wing of the Republican Party, they talk about Ronald Reagan in derisive terms. they have this phrase zombie Reaganism to denigrate elected Republicans like you

who are making the arguments that would resonate with people who were supporters of Ronald Reagan. That's not a small group. I mean, don't you think that's an argument that that's the majority of the Republican Party today? All I can tell you is, you know,

I spoke at more Trump rallies than I can remember. And generally, just before the headliner, and I talked about a strong national defense about American leadership in the world, about standing with our allies, standing up to our enemies. I talked about less taxes, less regulation, American growth, fiscal responsibility. I talked about conservatives on our courts, traditional values.

And look, I may not be the most scintillating speaker in the world, but the roof blew off every time I talked about these things. This is a movement that I believe in my heart of hearts is still animated by the same things. Now, I believe that Donald Trump added to those things. I really do. I think we changed the national consensus on China. I think the American people understand that. I think we added that border security is national security,

and the American people in our movement have rallied around that principle. Also, I think we've added the notion that trade has to be fair to the American people and to American workers as well as free. But at the core of the movement, I think it's all still the same, Steve. His answer then was sort of, we've done this. We can combine the two. And his answer yesterday was these are unbridgedable gaps. Look, I'm happy anytime anybody is making a case for small government.

Conservatism, classical liberalism, the way that I see it, the way that I define it. So I'm happy to have Mike Pence make that case. I hope that we have more people join him soon. And let me just say, I know you're trying to segue us onward, but let me just say, Mike Pence isn't against populism. Right? He says he's against populism because he's trying to catch DeSantis and Vivek Ramoswamy in one stroke. But Mike Pence is trying to be a populist, which is to say he is trying to unite a minority against what he and its members see as the abuses and depredations of the ruling class in his party. That's exactly what Mike Pence is trying to do.

He is trying to bring together a committed minority that will then attack the people in power. And it's not populism that Mike Pence is going after. He's going after kookism or nationalism or pandering or whatever else. But he is, by definition, engaged in a populist campaign. It's just that the kukism is the establishment in the party. The thing, and I've said it so many times before, the purpose of the Pittsburgh Steelers is not to run a wishbone offense. The purpose of the Pittsburgh Steelers is to win football games.

And the point of the Republican Party is to try to win elections. And when people get in charge of it, right, they're going to win it with whatever kind of offense or defense they prefer to have. There is very little ideological overlay with either of the parties. Yep. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Well, let's talk a little bit about one issue that does animate populism and does sort of give rise to populism, which is immigration and migration because there is a crisis, a sort of political debate that doesn't really seem to be permeating in Washington, but is going on in border states and in big states. cities. We should play this audio from Mayor Adams in New York City. And let me tell you something, New Yorkers. Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don't see an ending to this. I don't see an ending to this. This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City. We're getting 10,000 migrants a month. One time we were just in Venezuela. Now we're in Ecuador. Now we're in

Russian speaking coming through Mexico. Now we're in Western Africa. Now we're getting people from all over the globe have made their minds up that they're going to come through the southern part of the border and come into New York City. And everyone is saying it's New York City's problem. Every community in this city is going to be impacted. We got a 12 billion deficit that we're going to have to cut every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us. Steve, this was a sort of remarkable moment, a town hall happening in New York where Eric Adams, a Democrat, the Democratic mayor of New York City, warning the city about what could happen. What are your thoughts on this moment and what you would be?

be watching. Yeah, it's very interesting to watch this. I mean, this is, I mean, there's a, there's a substantive question here. What do you do? You know, as Eric Adams said, you've got potentially 120,000, 110,000 new migrants arriving projected over the next year. Undoubtedly, that will at least stress the city's systems, welfare systems, schools, you know, medical systems, what have you? There's a substantive question, what the heck do you do? Certainly it's the case that Eric Adams and other Democrats, by the way, think that the Biden administration hasn't done much. When they've pressed the Biden administration on this, for a long time, they didn't get an answer. And then they got an answer in the form of a letter that Homeland Security Secretary

Alejandro Mayorka sent, effectively saying, like, there are some structural issues with the city's response, throwing the blame back on the cities, which further frustrated these Democrats. It doesn't seem as though the Biden administration wants to take a very forward-leaning role in addressing these problems, perhaps mindful of not angering a base of the Democratic Party that's more sympathetic to migrants than perhaps Republicans were more open to these places being continuing to be sanctuary cities, sanctuary states, than Republicans are. The politics of this are very interesting because you've had Democrats in districts that, Biden, one competitive districts who have begun voicing their frustrations with the administration in very public ways, not unlike the way that we just heard from Eric Adams. And, you know, as this grows, as the problem increases, or even if it just stays the same,

you can see this being a real complicating factor for Democrats running in 2024, much the way that crime has become a big issue that doesn't get a ton of attention or doesn't get the kind of attention it might outside of sort of Fox and conservative media. One suspects that this will matter to people. There was a Sienna poll just to support that final point. I don't have it in front of me, but it was something like 82% of New York residents said that they regard this migrant crisis as a serious problem. 82%. I mean, that's a huge number and suggests this is not something that's going to simply

disappear. To bring it back to the politics here, Mayor Adams did have some blame for Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, saying essentially he started it. He, another red state governors, Ron DeSantis, another one, sending migrants to these sanctuary cities. And then he did segue into saying, you know, we're also getting no support, you know, essentially putting blame on the Biden administration as well. Is there a drawback here for Republicans trying to, I mean, there was a sense in the mainstream media coverage of this when this started a couple of years ago that Republicans would suffer by doing this because, you know, it seemed inhumane.

It seemed like it was cruel. But Adams seemed to be suggesting this is a bigger problem. And Steve, you mentioned that, Siena poll. This is a problem that, you know, even residents of blue state and blue cities recognize. How will this break down for Republicans? Is this a boon for whoever wins that Republican nomination in 2024? I criticize using human beings as props, and I will continue to criticize that. That said, there were a lot of responsible ways of doing this.

Doug Deucy did it. Worked with people, told them, hey, we put them on the bus, meet them here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I didn't like the way the DeSantis did it too much, but regardless, that's just to put that aside. This is one of the most wildly successful political stunts in American history, and deservedly so, because it was consonant with an important policy point, which is that it is outrageous to expect border states and border communities to shoulder mass of burdens of illegal immigrants swarm in refugees or asylum seats. whatever you want to call them, coming into their communities with little to no help from

the federal government or our insufficient help from the federal government and then call them bigots for complaining and xenophobes for complaining about this. And so these northern cities that call themselves sanctuary cities that had lots of politicians calling southern politicians, border state politicians, bigots, said, let's see how you like it and sent these guys up there. And it turned out, they can't say it flat out. But all of these Democratic politicians suddenly agree with the basic policy position, maybe not the rhetoric, but the basic policy position of the governors of Texas and Arizona and so on. It's good for the policy climate, regardless of what you think about the politics of it.

And I think it's good for the Republicans and political ways for all sorts of reasons. But the chief one being, look, the Democrats almost held on to the House in 2022. In part because they, because, you know, these seats in places like New York State, it is entirely conceivable to me that if you run sort of non-Trumpie or quasi-Trumpie or Pence-like, you know, pre-January 6th candidates in places like New York, maybe Illinois where this immigration stuff is very unpopular as well, New Jersey, you can pick up a handful of seats that otherwise should go to Democrats in 2024, particularly it puts Democrats on the back foot

for the internal contradictions of their own coalition and it forces, you know, I listen to the New York Times podcast The Daily and it was just remarkable amidst all of Michael Barbaro's weird groaning and, you know, eruptions, how quickly an illegitimate issue can become legitimate if Democratic politicians, but truly black Democratic politicians,

take it and say it's legitimate then all of a sudden it is like a live question for Democrats to grapple with in a way that it wasn't even a few years ago. That's a good conversation for Republicans. But Chris, there does seem to be a limit to sort of Democratic Party officials grappling with this. And that comes on the national level. So if it's in their backyard, they sort of find Jesus on law and order kind of issues. Why is it so difficult for Joe Biden to sort of take charge and look Clinton-esque on this current law-in-order issue, which is migration. For 20 years or more after the failed mental health reforms in the 1970s, early 1980s,

there was a common practice of shipping the mentally ill out of your town, right? On to communities with better services, and here's a bus ticket, and you can't stay here in Paducah anymore, but if you get up to Columbus, they've got good stuff. Tampa was a popular destination and became a gathering place to try to seek better services and better weather. And the idea of moving unwanted folks out of communities and into other communities, there was the orphan train that they ran from Hell's Kitchen and the tenements of New York out into the upper Midwest. There's a long history of this stuff. Joe Biden, have to remember, is perceived by many in the Democratic Party as being too tough on

migrants. He is perceived by, I don't know if it's the majority, but certainly a very vocal number of Democrats as being the successor to Barack Obama's deporter in chief. If we remember early days, the photo of the Border Patrol officer riding with his long reins in his hands, they're whipping the they're whipping the migrants at the border the carry-on of so many Trump-era policies even if they're by different names

under Biden is anathema to many Democrats. They don't like it. So the question for Biden is will he be able to or will his administration and campaign and so far as those are two different things be able to after Super Tuesday

embrace a more restrictive, and so he will remain in the push me, pull me. The broader electorate wants control. They want enforcement of existing laws. That's what they want. Democrats, Republicans, taken together with independents, you're looking at 70% or more of the electorate wants stricter control. And Biden has to worry about depressing an already depressed, progressive base, by being perceived as going too hard.

And it's a very, this is a very tricky dismount. Well, finally, let's look to an anniversary, 22 years since the September 11th attacks of 2001. It's, I mean, I say this, I think this every year, I can't believe it, I couldn't believe it was 20 years. I can't now believe it's 22 years. At the same time, it feels so far away, and all of the issues that came out of those attacks.

Certainly the politics feel like they were from another planet from where we are here in 2023. Steve, talk to us a little bit about what you're thinking about as we come up on September 11, 2020, and we look back to September 11th, 2001. I think that the main thing is I look back on 22 years after the attacks is the state of our politics. We just had a relatively substantive discussion

about a pretty serious policy issue with no easy answer in the migrant situation. There are other substantive policy issues that occasionally get attention in our national political debate, but not much. Mostly our national political debate is shit, honestly. It's performative politics, people doing things like reading Dr. Seuss, people taking shots at one another on non-substantive things that will get the basis of the two political parties riled up. And we're not actually spending enough time talking about serious issues, including threats to the country, external threats to the country.

If you look back on the steps that were taken to address the threat from jihadist terror, many of them, were successful. People can disagree about the wisdom of the Iraq war or the length of time that we stayed in Afghanistan. Certainly the hardening of the target here in the homeland made us much less vulnerable. And I think some of the steps that we have seen clearly in retrospect were successful, particularly when you remember the days and weeks and months after the 9-11 attacks and the inevitability we thought of follow-on attacks, chemical and biological weapons, what have you. I think looking back on that, if you think about the days and weeks and months before the 9-11 attacks, remember the kinds of silly conversations the country was having at the time,

and then this sort of huge strike of reality hit us. I worry that we are going through the same process, again, with all of the kind of silly conversations that take up so much time in our political discussions in the country. And we're not paying enough attention to real threats. Still, I think, a residual jihadist threat, but threats from places like Iran and North Korea and China and Russia and others. Jonah, if you could talk a little bit about where 9-11

fits into explaining where we are in 2023 because it seems like a lot of our conversation about this populist moment in the Republican Party, where things are in the Democratic Party, we trace it back to the 2008 financial crisis. But in 2001, the September 11th attacks really have shaped, it seems to me, so much of our expectations for national unity, our expectations for where the policy debate ought to be where it is now, as sort of Steve alluded to, where it has been debased. Talk to me about what, you know, where that conversation should be, where 9-11 fits into where we are today.

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I'm not sure we have the space for time. And listeners should know we are not ignoring Chris Starwald. He had to run. And I'm thinking maybe I should write about this because I do think it's an interesting topic. It does seem to me that a lot of things that seem peripheral, during the War on Terror moment, which was a long moment, almost a decade, we could call it. A lot of the things that seemed like sort of ugly byproducts, but not sort of central to the

narrative, were really sort of foreshadowing of where we are now. So first of all, I think 9-11 more than any other event in our lives, I mean, technology is a huge signal boost, but that's a different point. In terms of events, I don't think there's any other moment in our lives that unleashed a bigger wave of conspiratorial thinking than 9-11. On the left and on the right, and in different ways. Inside Job, neocon cabal pulling strings from the inside as they worship Leo Strauss. All of that stuff was birthed on the internet in the wake of that.

There was an enormous amount of populism that we didn't really recognize as populism, that some of it boiled down to like boob-baity stuff about crayon burning. if he were still here, he was making this point yesterday about how, or anybody making today as well, about birtherism sort of being one of these undercurrents, but for 9-11, you don't get birtherism, right? Because birth-a-rism, the whole, the Muslims are these, you know, sleepers amongst us, the dangerous other, is born of 9-11 for psychologically understandable, if not necessarily laudable reasons.

And so I think there's a lot of things on the politics side that come out of all of that. I also don't think you get the tea parties, were it not for all of the spending that didn't seem to buy what we wanted, which was clear victories and better nation building than we got. You have the sense that conservatives held their nose for a very long time about a lot of spending. And then you have a financial crisis and you have Rick Santelli doing his rant talking about paying for other people's more. mortgages, and that just, there's a lot of kindling from 9-11, and I think that went into that. At the same time, I think it's really, it's pretty fascinating how if you go issue by issue, if you make like a sort of a Chinese menu of different issues in our politics, and you look at which side of the menu, right or left, they were on in the wake of 9-11 versus now, right after 9-11,

the left ran full tilt towards defend the First Amendment, defend free speech, free speech is under attack because it was a safe harbor ideologically for them. It fed into their paranoia that if they were going to criticize the war, they'd be shut down. And it was the right that was like, you know, not necessarily rallying around free speech, but sort of making fun of people for being paranoid

about the threats to the free speech. And you can go down a long list of those sorts of things where, like, now the right basically has the, I would argue, neo-isolationist or at least anti-American view of America's role in the world, that was so powerful on the left back then. And it shows you how much of political, how many sort of political faddish positions

that are the product of populism are not actually connected to the ideological commitments of the parties that they find themselves in. It has to do with other things going on. And it's, you know, if you can play back the clock and the wars went better, I think our politics would actually be a lot more healthy. But you can't do that. And the wars didn't go particularly well.

We are where we are. Well, to go back quickly before we wrap up here on your conspiracy element of what you said, Jonah. I mean, I think back, again, I was a teenager when 9-11 happened, I was sort of, became enmeshed in internet culture, as most people around my age did in the years following. And it didn't really occur to me, occur to me until we were just talking of how pervasive those kind of conspiracies were on the internet

in those early days. If loose change was something that every teenager and college student in the 2000, and the aughts knew about, even if we laughed at it, we thought it was crazy, lose change,

was this very conspiracy-heavy internet video that eventually got on YouTube when YouTube was created in 2005. I think it kind of came out at the same time. And it was a thing that everybody knew about.

And for somebody like me or for somebody who, you know, didn't buy it, it was this kind of fringe thing that existed. But I think had I been, had we been a little more attuned to what the conversation was going on on the internet in the early days of that, that we might have foreseen where things were going a little better, that the fact that it was so pervasive in the culture, that that sort of can, you know, this leads to what Ron Paulism, this leads to all of the, I mean, you can see it branching on the left. and to occupy Wall Street afterward

and just the way that the sort of the forces, big forces in the government, in business, in media, are sort of shaping things. To me, it's... Yeah, we just passed, just to point out, I'm just, you're reminding me of this, we just passed the anniversary of Katrina,

and people forget, Spike Lee and a whole bunch of other sort of Daily Beast types gave credence, not necessarily endorsement, but gave credence and oxygen to the idea that the levees in New Orleans were blown up by the Bush administration to kill black people. And that kind of thing

would not have been given oxygen prior to 9-11 the way it was. Yeah, I mean, it's such a cliche to say we were sort of robbed of our innocence on 9-11, but, and I think it's real, but in a way it was, it robbed us of too much innocence in a way,

and we sort of became culturally, you know, susceptible and gullible for all kinds of conspiracy theories like that. That's something I just, I think we should parse more. I don't know, Steve, if you have any final thoughts on this. I think it's the timing. I think it's the combination of 9-11 and this sort of deep desire to have simple explanations for the inexplicable, combined with the technology to propagate those simple and, you know, often misleading or sometimes made up explanations that accelerated what was an ongoing trend. I mean, I think the Spike lead point is a good one. Even before that, you had the rumors, the prevalent rumors about the CIA

distributing crack in urban neighborhoods to kill, to kill blacks. You know, certainly conspiracy theories and this conspiracy mindset aren't new, but I think the combination of such a devastating, world-changing moment like the one that we experienced on 9-11, and then the sort of grasping search for an easy explanation after that, combined with the technology to make those easy explanations available at a click is really what accelerated these trends and have left us in this place where I think it's very difficult. You have people across the political spectrum who are skeptical of any and all explanations for, you know, not something as big as 9-11, but something simple.

But I think if you look at the way that, you know, some people talked about COVID, there were echoes, I think, in the conspiracies about COVID. From the kinds of things that we saw in the aftermath of 9-11, it's this massive thing. It's hard to explain. People can't quite get their head around it. And, you know, I had conversations with people, both people I knew and people unfamiliar to me until that moment, who claimed that this was all just an effort to get Joe Biden elected president. And, you know, you asked them how that explained the excess deaths in Spain.

They couldn't really give you an answer. They hadn't thought about it. But they had their simple explanation. And those things now, of course, rocket around the Internet, and they provide easy answers for people on difficult questions. Well, if I can sort of close us out on maybe a less dire and dismal. note about 9-11. I mean, to go back to Steve to what you were saying

in the beginning of this segment, there were victories, there were policy victories in the wake of 9-11 that prevented further attacks like that. And it's not to downplay the mistakes.

It's not to downplay the loss of life in other places, but just to, you know, I think we should also reflect at this time, in ways that we so often do. We don't appreciate how things could have been so much worse because of actions that the government took,

the actions that voters took to elect officials who would keep us safe. And that was such a sort of a byword in that post-9-11 in our politics. Bush kept us safe. We got to keep us. And frankly, we are safe. There are all sorts of other problems

that have come about. But, you know, we talk about the pandemic. We talk about even the 2008 financial crisis. Things went bad. Things, mistakes were made after those as well. But in some ways, things could have gotten a lot worse after the financial crisis. Things could have been a lot worse with the pandemic. We could still be dealing with it. There's a question of whether it's back, but I think obviously things are so much better than they could have been. So maybe we should be a little more optimistic as we close out and reflect. So, all right. Well, that's how we're going to end effort to inject hope into this podcast.

Sign up to be a dispatch member, thedispatch.com, and we will talk to you next time. Whoa, that was really weird. That was very strange. Have we lost Steve Hayes? I think the ghost of my punditry has come through. It's the rapture, but the chosen or the bearded. It was like the punditry version of the ring. It's a movie, Steve.

It involves stuff coming out of TV.