The Dispatch Podcast - The Future of the Conservative Movement | Live Roundtable

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Sarah is joined by Steve, Jonah, and Mike for a live roundtable on the future of the Republican Party at the Principles First Summit in D.C.. The Agenda: —Why do we keep talking about the primary? ���South Carolina's foreshadowing —Rebuilding the sane GOP faction —Advice for Joe Biden —Primary reform, viable third parties, or term limits —Live Q&A Show Notes: —Watch this episode on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, thank you guys so much for coming out on this kind of chilly Sunday here in D.C. We're going to basically just do a regular podcast, but where we can, see people. And Joan is wearing pants. No. You took it. So we're going to do some news of the day. We'll do some bigger philosophical questions.

And then of course take questions from you guys as well towards the end. So Michael, let's start with you. Okay. Last night was the South Carolina primary. And in some way, In some ways, Nikki Haley met or even exceeded expectations. Her team internally had been saying they wanted to hit 40, and that's about where they hit, 40%. Turnout was huge.

There was obviously a lot of attention on the South Carolina primary, and Donald Trump beat her by 20 points. What is a metric of success? Does South Carolina matter? Why are we still following this primary? You're asking, is the primary over, essentially? Well, I think it's over, but why are we still talking about it? Well, we're still talking about it because, you know, despite what team Trump wants, despite what, frankly, a lot of folks in the media are sort of encouraging through the way they cover this. Nikki Haley keeps going.

She keeps running. I mean, I was there at her election night party in New Hampshire when she also lost. you would not have known that from listening to that speech that night and I think a couple conversations I had with with folks off record around that time kind of changed my whole perception of what she was doing she seems to be sort of in this as long as there are people who are willing to give her money there's been a huge amount of small dollar donations to her and as long as she continues to put up I mean what you What she got, 39 and a half, maybe 40% in South Carolina.

On the one hand, it's an embarrassment, right? She was the governor, two-term governor of the state, and she couldn't even get 40% in a Republican primary. On the other hand, if you look at it the way that her team is pushing it, pushing the argument, this is Donald Trump is an incumbent. And he could only get, he couldn't even quite get more than 60% of the vote in South Carolina. So it depends on how you want to look at it. I think the fact that she is continuing to run speaks to a frustration within the Republican Party, that there are Republicans out there. It may not be 40%, it may be closer to 30, 35 percent, who do not want Donald Trump to be the nominee.

And she is a sort of vessel for that frustration. What is interesting is how there is not a what you expect. to happen in this situation, which is those Republicans who don't want the guy at the top to get the nomination, but kind of start to feel like, oh, maybe it's just time to get on board because we really want to beat Joe Biden. If you look at the exit poll data, if you look at what polling has said among the people who support Nikki Haley, that's not why they're supporting, that's not what they're interested at this point. They are sort of fighting for something more fundamental about about the party who's going to be, the standard bearer, and Nikki is, Haley is the beneficiary of that kind of frustration. Trump is just different, and I think it's different this time, too. Is she on track to win any states on Super Tuesday? Probably not, although one state I've been told to watch is Virginia. I'm very skeptical she can win, but Vermont is another state that somebody's mentioned to me.

She's got the support of Phil Scott. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're going to go alphabetical backward through all the states. So it's slim pickens, but she doesn't seem to be in this to, she won't say this explicitly, to win states necessarily. She's sort of leading a rump movement within the Republican Party that everybody else says, you know, shouldn't exist or needs to get on board. And that's from a journalist's perspective, that's interesting to me. Jonah, let's talk about that rumpiness a little. Let's talk about your rump. He prefers a remnant.

Anybody wants to leave, go ahead. This is why this is audio only. If you look at the two parties, the percentage of Republicans who are happy with Donald Trump as their nominee is much higher than the percentage of Democrats who are happy with Joe Biden as their nominee. And yet it feels like we focus a lot more on the Republican side and the, fight between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump than we do between Dean Phillips, for instance, and Joe Biden or, you know, fill in your avatar on the left, perhaps, if Dean Phillips isn't quite the same as a Nikki Haley, I think. But even in the media, it seems like we're focused on the fight for the soul of the Republican Party and what Nikki Haley represents of this

Rump movement, when in fact, again, compared to the other political party, Republicans are pretty happy with the presumptive nominee. So again, why do we keep talking about the Republican primary? First of all, what else are you going to talk about? But no, I mean, look, look, I agree with that. And I think there are a bunch of different reasons for it. I think there's the fact that the, that while there's a lot of, I mean, we've been saying this for a while now, that the asymmetry between the two parties is that a lot of Republican elites don't want Donald Trump to be the nominee, but Republican rank and file do. It's the reverse on the Democratic side,

where the Democratic elites want Biden to be the nominee, but the rank and file don't. And that's just weird. And... But there's also this thing where even if there's a lot of dissatisfaction with Biden, not counting the anti-Israel stuff, right? But like, even though there's a lot of dissatisfaction with Biden, there's not hatred of Biden.

There's not... I mean, this is one of the anti-Israel stuff, right? One of the reasons why Biden is in a bit of a pickle is that he's not exotic in any way. And that's why books about Biden either haven't been written or haven't sold, right? Because, like, you could scare people about Barack Obama, this guy with the middle name Hussein, and you come out of nowhere and all that kind of stuff, and, you know, and Hillary Clinton had hooves or whatever. But like, Joe Biden has been a ward healing hack for 50 years. And so everyone, he's a known quantity. He doesn't scare anybody.

He doesn't enthrall anybody. And so I think that there's just, when you also realize how much of the mainstream media is in the same sort of bubble, there's a general comfort with saying it's a problem that he's so old, but what are you going to do about it? Meanwhile, the fight on the Republican side is straight up interesting. and Trump has, I mean, one of the reasons why we have Trump is, because first of all, one of you people made a wish on a monkey paw by accident and screwed the entire world, but part of it is that the media is enthralled to the guy. I mean, like, there was the, I mean, my friend Rich Larry points to this all time. You know, it was like during the 2016 campaign,

there was a moment when there was a camera on an empty podium waiting for Trump to show up to it while there were other presidential candidates actually giving speeches. I believe I worked for one of them. That's right, yeah. And so, like, it's just compelling television for all sorts of terrible reasons

and understandable reasons. And I think that that's part of it. And so all I can say is part of it is the entertainment aspect of these things is what it is, and we're not going to get around it. And I do think just simply on the merits, the Republican story is a more interesting story. What it says about the conservative movement, what it says about contemporary politics. And, you know, it was interesting. I was on the reasons having to do with original sin.

I was on CNN last night. And for six hours. And a bunch of people were really surprised that the returns in Northern Virginia said that about half of Nikki Haley's voters thought Trump could beat Biden. And everyone's like, that doesn't make sense because she was running on this electability thing. And that's why people are voting for Nikki Haley. It's like, no, no, no, no. That's the argument that Nikki Haley makes to win over new Republican voters, new supporters. It does not stride me in the slightest that half of Nikki Haley supporters think Trump can beat Biden.

That's why they want her to be the nominee because they don't want Trump to win. And, you know, that's a big, there are a lot of conservatives, not enough, but there are a lot of conservatives who care more about, like, either conservatism or the country than they care about the Republican Party. And if that's how you feel, you would vote for Nikki Haley over Donald Trump because that's where your priorities are. And the fact that she could beat Biden is an argument you make to your uncle to persuade them to vote with you. It's not the reason why a lot of people who are actually showing up and volunteering and putting time and resources behind it are doing it. They're doing it because they actually think it's important for the country or for the cause to get Trump out of the picture. Can I push back on the premise here question? First of all, it's wonderful to be here.

Congrats to Heath. Glad you all are here. We're excited to be here with you. Second, it's nice to hear you actually speak. Last night on the CNN panel, the panel was about as big as the assembled crowd here, so you didn't get to speak very much. Third, I disagree with the premise of the question. I don't think this is a competitive primary.

I don't think Nikki Haley's going to win. I don't think she's going to be the Republican nominee. 40% of Republican voters in South Carolina voted against Donald Trump yesterday. I think that's significant, not because it means Nikki Haley's going to win, not because it means that this is going to turn into a competitive primary, but because of what it portends for the general election. These are people who genuinely don't want, they don't want to support Donald Trump.

The number of Haley voters of that 40% who said they would be dissatisfied if Donald Trump were the Republican nominee was 82%, if I'm not mistaken. Now, some of them will come home. home, right? Some of them will come home to Donald Trump, but not everybody. We can't look at this like this is a typical election. You're talking about people coming home for purely partisan reasons to someone who plotted a soft coup. I think the rules are different. I think this is different this time. And, you know, I think it's, it tells us as much about what might happen with a potential third party. Entrant in this race tells us something about the unstable nature of the the two major political party candidates. And in particular, it tells us something about the way in which even a party that has been

sort of captured by Donald Trump and who he controls the levers of power doesn't like the guy. So I have, though, a question about Nikki Haley's path. And I don't mean necessarily a path to the nomination, but the path that we're on, whatever that path may be. And because normally someone stays in the race like this, it doesn't really matter. The person, the Trump person, will get the number of delegates they need, and the Nikki person will stay in the race, collecting the ire of the Trump people, yada, yada, yada. And then we head to the convention.

But there's a few things that are going to happen potentially between now and the convention, or now even and the majority of delegates being awarded. Donald Trump is set to start his trial in New York on March 25th. We're waiting on the Supreme Court. One, on the 14th Amendment Section 3 disqualification question, I don't think that's going to actually turn out to be very relevant in the grand scheme of things. But on the question of whether the Supreme Court will hold off on Trump's federal January 6th trial and the question of how much, if any, immunity a former president has for criminal prosecution, and we may find out tomorrow at 9.30 in the morning. We'll see.

Mike's so excited. We're fighting things out early in the week as opposed to the end of the week. It's definitely going to be Friday. And I'm curious, Steve, how you see the politics and the media narrative and the Republican primary electorate changing if they're both still in the race as that's going on. Because on the one hand, I think it's very easy to say, aha, this could be a turning point moment. And Nikki Haley suddenly becomes a much more interesting, viable option if Donald Trump is convicted after a one-week trial in New York State.

On the other hand, that's the opposite of what we've seen so far about Donald Trump's legal problems. And if, in fact, it will be really bad for Nikki Haley, politically her future if she's still in the race looking like she's criticizing Donald Trump who's being attacked by an elected partisan. Democratic District Attorney. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Let me answer it sort of directly at the outset. I don't know. I think most people who do... So anyway, Mike.

Most people who do what we do for a living, reporting, commentary analysis, what have you, that should be the answer. When you hear people ask questions about what's going to happen between now and November, given all of the variables you just cited, and let me say, there are 20 that you didn't cite because we're not talking about Joe Biden's age, and we're not talking. There are all sorts of various. There are all sorts of variables. There are so many variables at play that I think it is just almost impossible to draw

straight line projections. Having caveated that way, look, I think people who are waiting for sort of the one moment, that brings down Donald Trump are likely to be waiting for a while. We have thought this, and I'm part of the we here, we have thought this for a long time. No, you can't instigate an attack on the U.S. Capitol to try to steal an election after booting your Secretary of Defense and Attorney General, maybe you can. Maybe you can. So I don't think it's wise or helpful to look at sort of this potential.

moment or wait for such a moment. And I don't think it's likely to work to Nikki Haley's benefit if it happens. The Republican Party is a Trumpy party right now. Having said that, you know, there are the problem with the analysis of the indictments fueling Donald Trump's rise in the Republican primary, which has become this sort of piece of conventional wisdom that everybody just kind of cites without thinking about it, I think. Surely they contributed to his recovery, his post-January, 6th recovery. But the biggest problem there was that his opponents didn't make anything of the fact that he was indicted again and again and again. And that there is significant substantive evidence that he's guilty of the things he's charged with.

They instead chose to make his case for him. Now, this is all Joe Biden and the corrupt deal. Jay and this is terrible. Trump just sat back and said, yeah, what they said. I don't think that's likely to happen in this case. And we've already seen this with the judgments on E. Jean Carroll, where Nikki Haley sort of surprisingly, to me, honestly, turned and said, well, you know, I think this was the evidence, right?

I think she would be likely to make such an argument, again. I don't think this is going to turn the election, but it would be interesting. If you have a Republican or some Republicans who are willing to actually say, take a minute and look at the evidence here. So I don't want to reject the premise of the question because I think it was a very good question. I just want to, well, I want to reject the premise of our reality at this given juncture. You know, one of my favorite lines is from Alexander Solzhenitian, where he says, You know, you can resolve to live your life in integrity by simply saying, let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.

Right. And so this is just the idea that you do right and you say right and you speak the truth and you act in a way as if acting the right way will matter eventually. That's what Alexei Navalny's wife needs to do now, even if it might be 20 years before there's any payoff, right? That's what Vaclav Havel did. And again, I'm not just trying to say that we're all dissidents and all that kind of stuff. But that principle, if it applies to people who can be put in jail and murdered and tortured and put to death, it should apply to people who live fairly comfortable lives and care about their country. And if the consequences are going to be less than what Victor Navalny went through, it should be easier to resolve to live that way, not harder.

And I don't know exactly, you know, full disclosure, my wife worked for Nikki Haley. I like Nikki. I have no professional contact with her or anything like that. I don't, she is a politician. One of the reasons why she's the last one standing is she's a better politician than a lot of people gave her credit for and a better politician than anybody else who was up there. She's just good at it. She has the best political timing of anybody, you know, of the last five years. she was the only one to get out of the Trump administration of a major official level

with her reputation enhanced both with critics of Trump and opponents of Trump, which is hard, right? So I don't know. She could end up disappointing us. She could end up having some full-throated endorsement of Trump. I don't know. I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think she's going to be the VP. But the reason why I am rooting for her now is that she is doing this stuff as if it might matter.

She's saying what needs to be said because it's the truth and it might matter. She is helping people give permission. She's giving permission to a large chunk of right of center people to say, yeah, I'm okay calling myself a Republican or voting Republican, but not for that guy and not what he represents. And one of the reasons why... One of the reasons why we can't have nice things is that we've forgotten that parties are supposed to be coalitions of factions. And one of the things that disrupted everything was Donald Trump in 2000 by saying the election was stolen, which, according to the term in social science for that is a lie, he short-circuited the normal process, which says that the losing faction had its shot and the alternative faction gets it shot. Reagan runs in 76, loses to the four guys.

But then it's his term. The Goldwater people, you know, in 1960, supported Nixon. Goldwater gives this famous speech, grow up, conservatives, whatever. And Nixon loses, and then the Goldwaterites get their turn. That's the way it's supposed to work. And Trump said, no, no, no, I didn't really lose. I get another shot. What Nikki is doing is she's setting up a situation

where there's a faction of the GOP, not a majority faction, but a significant faction of the GOP that simply gets to say, I told you show enough of this garbage, it's our turn next. And if you don't believe, if you reject the incandescently un-American, unpatriotic framing that the country will be over if Joe Biden gets reelected, you can talk about the long-term health of Republican Party without like being a cuck or something. Right? You're just talking about like, yeah, it'll suck if the Democrats are in again. I don't think Joe Biden's done a good job. But like, how does the Republican Party rebuild? How does it fit right itself? And the way you do it is you build up a faction of the GOP that is, for want of a better word, sane. And so I encourage her, it may just be a Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing. And remember, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, he has this filibuster that goes on and on and on and on.

And it looks like a lost cause for him, right? He's saying it's a lost cause, but he's just doing right because he thinks doing right should matter in and of itself. And then the pressure of that causes, you know, Claude Raines, I think it was, you know, to cave. We don't know that. Trust me, Donald Trump is not Claude Raines. He is not going to be overcome with guilt about all the bad things that he's done. But that's good for America. That's good for the Republican Party, and even if she loses, that's okay.

You know, T.S. Eliot was right. There's no such thing as a truly lost cause, because there's no such thing as a truly one cause. Cause endures as long as you keep, you're willing to fight for it and speak the truth about it. I feel like after that I can't make my cold analytical, what's going to matter. you know specifically electorally point with me about the delegate count exactly just without sounding like a total downer um no but i i do think analytically if you look at what's happening so i've been watching how trump republicans are dealing with nicky haley's annoying persistence uh to keep running despite the fact that she has no chance to win the nomination

and the reaction um i think i you know j d vance tweeted yesterday something to the effect of she is helping Joe Biden win by staying in. So this seems to me this will be the basis as long as she is in. And if Donald Trump loses in the general election, she's going to get a lot of the blame from Trump Republicans no matter what she does. Even if she drops out and she doesn't say anything for the rest of the year, I think They're laying the groundwork for that. And what I think is interesting and what I'm going to be watching for are those Republican voters who really do stay home in the general election.

And the Trump folks will blame Nikki Haley, probably blame those people, right, for not coming out. But this is what is interesting is that we have gotten past a point, I believe, if you trust. what the polling says on this, where a critical mass of disaffected Republican primary voters come home. And I think that is what should be very alarming for the Trump folks, is that they're not going to be able to count on as many Republicans as they have been used to. And as Republicans, you know, when Mitt Romney annoyed the social conservatives, they came home. when John McCain annoyed everybody else in the Republican Party, Republicans came home to vote for him and so on and so forth. I think that's a real concern, and that's not really, that's not really Nikki Haley's fault. I mean, again, I keep going back to the fact that she's getting 40% in South Carolina.

She's getting a bunch of donations from Republican people across the country who are telling her keep going. What is she supposed to do and accept to give voice to those people? And, you know, whether she runs as a no-labels candidate, there's been some chatter about that. I don't know how, whatever it is, I mean, the Trump folks have a real electoral problem. And I don't, unless they really do think that losing is better than winning, which there's some evidence that maybe they, that Trump-adjacent Republicans like losing. because then they can complain about something. I just, I think they're not, they're not seeing the bigger picture here, and they're already laying the groundwork for the blame game,

which, I don't know, just to me, tells me that there's something more to Nikki Haley than just, she's not leaving, she's, you know, when she's supposed to. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change, and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind.

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Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to Explorevolvo.com. On the other hand, Trump is up eight points in Georgia against Joe Biden, leading overall national polls, outside the margin of error against Joe Biden. And, you know, you may, in a poll, ask Haley voters in South Carolina in the heat of a primary, whether they're satisfied with Donald Trump as the nominee. And of course, they're going to say no. But I can't think of any Republican voters who I've talked to who support Nikki Haley, who aren't all. also going to say that they prefer Donald Trump over Joe Biden. And that's the real question. And so, like, I also think, like, don't fool yourself that somehow this is doom for Donald Trump

heading into the general election. I don't think that's the case at all. No, and I don't mean to suggest that. I mean, I do think that there are, that there's a big chunk of Republican voters who are Nikki Haley voters now and would be Joe Biden voters because they can't vote for Donald Trump or would vote for other people. But to your point, To your point, more broadly, Joe Biden is in a world of hurt right now. I mean, people who think that Donald Trump can't win are crazy. Joe Biden's approval rating is 39%. It's literally never been the case that an incumbent president's been reelected with 39% approval.

Never, ever. Hasn't happened. If he doesn't get to 48, 49 in approval rating, I don't think he's a very competitive candidate, to be honest. And when you look at polling about concerns about his age and mental acuity, 76% of Americans have either somewhat or strong concerns about his ability to do the job. And I guess, Sarah, if I can steal the mic and ask you a question, if you're running, let's say you're running Joe Biden's campaign right now, you have three quarters of the country, Republicans and Democrats, concerned that you're running Joe Biden's campaign right now, you have three quarters of the country, Republicans and Democrats, concerned that you're. You can't do the job, but you're committed to staying in through the election. What do you do as an ex-politico? I mean, we're very grateful that you're now on our side of things.

What advice do you give him? Because it seems to me, you know, you hear Nate Silver had a really interesting column suggesting that what he really needs to do is do a lot of interviews, put himself out there. That's one possible solution, but I think we all. can understand how that might go wrong. You're in charge. What do you do? So this is why I'm no longer a political operative

because my advice in this situation is not going to be well received by my principal, but I really pride myself on being the ass of a in the room. We love you. We love you for that. She's good at that. You can ask David French in 2016. That's how I met David French.

they invited a bunch of consultants up to meet with him about running for president as a third party candidate and everyone around the room is telling him how great it's going to be and what an important difference he can make and then it gets to me and I was like, do you think winning 5% and that would be an outrageous success given where we are how much money you have and that nobody knows who you are? Do you think winning 5% and having your life torn apart sounds fun? And all these other people were like, oh my God. So here's what I would tell Joe Biden. Part of the reason that that number is high and keeps creeping higher and actually is affecting your numbers against Donald Trump almost more than it should is because of who your vice president is as well. Because they're looking at her and it's like the best insurance policy of having Joe Biden as president is that people really, really also don't want her.

So what I would say is, sir, with all due respect, everyone knows the answer to this question, which is you have to go out and do all these interviews, and you have to put yourself out there. And I believe that there's almost a no-win situation here, because you could do six great interviews, and then you have a gaff in the seventh, and that's the only one anyone will know you did. That's a bummer. So you don't have to bat a thousand, but you're going to have to have to. have to come pretty close and you and I both know that that's very unlikely but it is also the only way and sir honestly if you can't convince the American people that you can do the job then

maybe we're having the wrong conversation but what we can't do is keep you in a bunker frankly like you did in 2020 that was a fluke event that allowed us to win that way and people didn't know your vice president very well and unfortunately we're just in a situation where the choice might be we try our best. We do everything we can. We should do it between now and June before the convention, because there's a lot of timing issues here. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. You got to be president for four years. And then I would be fired. So I'll steal the mic from Steve stealing the mic from you. You said before, Sarah, that you don't know any Republicans who won't basically come home and vote against Joe Biden,

including those who did not vote for Donald Trump in 2020. Yeah, okay, that's fine. I mean, it's a little bit like when Richard Nixon was asked you, as president, do you believe in overpopulation being a problem? And he says, well, of course the world's overpopulated. Everywhere I go, I see huge crowds. The people you're talking to may not be representative. And this is one of the points that you often make on your great spinoff of the Remnant advisory opinions,

is that it depends on the, like, for Pollock, like, as you were making the point about Fannie Willis the other day, for her audience, she had a good week the other week. For Republicans, for Fox viewers, she had a disaster of a week, but she doesn't give a rat's ass about Fox viewers, right? My understanding, you know, Witt Errors has made at this point a bunch of times so that you need basically 90% of Republicans to, as a base, in a general election to get reelected

and then you've got to win over a significant slice of independence. It seems to me that even if all the people you know return to voting Republican that's sort of priced in about what he needs as a floor, right? Witt is wrong.

Okay. Witt is wrong because of the realignment going on. That was true in 2008 and 2012. And the number isn't dramatically different, but the number is shifting as the realignment between the two parties happens. And so Donald Trump is actually getting more 2020 Democrats than a Republican in 2012 could have ever hoped to get. As those two parties shift, the Republican party. And Biden's getting more 20-20 Republicans. Correct.

And so it's almost impossible to use that 90% number anymore because it's happening so quickly. looking back at how someone voted just four years ago, it's, you know, looking back into the dinosaur age at this point. So I just think that's not correct. And I make the Nikki Haley point not that like my polling, my focus group is somehow a representative sample. But rather that there's somehow this, I think, very incorrect assumption that the no Nikki Haley voters would ever vote for Donald Trump or all of the never Trump people will never vote for Donald Trump. And in fact, you know, remember that that was supposed to be the case in 2016 and the never Trump part of the Republican Party was between two and five percent in 2020 because of the shift in COVID. It probably stayed around there, maybe shrunk a little. All I'm saying is that two and five percent wouldn't come on that.

And so this brings me back to Steve's point earlier about saying I don't know. We've talked a lot off, off microphone, about how all of these rules that we. we grew up with no longer apply, right? I mean, the biggest one right now is, for most of our lives, tip O'Neill's maxim that all politics is local was a serious thing, and that's just gone. All politics is national now. And like dog catcher races, like you have to talk about how much you like Trump and how you watch Fox and Friends every morning and all that kind of stuff.

No more woke dog catchers. Yeah. And finally, finally. And so, and you can do this about a dozen different things and that were used to be pretty solid rules of American politics. And so I'm left saying it's just very hard to score. I agree with you, there's no way that 40% Nicky number, which is now pretty constant over three primaries, stays anywhere close to 40%.

10%. But if it stays at 10? I hear you. 10% could be a big problem. And so, but the thing, on the flip side, just to throw cold water. And when Nikki Haley makes the case that Donald Trump is better than not endorses Donald Trump per se, but makes the case that in a binary choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, that Joe Biden is electing Kamala Harris, that they simply cannot run the country. Right. That's when I have to find a new part of my body to start cutting myself again. But, um, but, um, the thing that we're, me the most about the Biden stuff is about Biden's prospects. Roger Ailes, which I think we all agree was a flawed person. I always used to joke he was the weirdest mix of Boss Hog and Aristotle I ever met. Although he looked more like Baron Harkonen towards the end. But, you know, when he would consult about television stations, he would drop into some local market, go to his hotel room, turn on the TV, and turn off the volume and just watch the body language and then say this guy has it this

gal doesn't have it this guy doesn't have it purely on that and that's how he ran the network in a lot large respect is not he didn't care about the that's how you got your job right pretty much they call you Jonah eye candy and uh he was losing it in those years the david axol i was making this case last night is like if you just boil down the election to lizard brain stuff, strength versus not strength. Trump, it's very annoying to people who pay attention because Trump says crazy shit all the time, but that's priced into his personality. When Biden says it, it's worrisome. And then the shuffling and, you know, the way he moves and the way he talks, it makes people nervous. Turn off the volume of the election. Trump looks

like he's in command and has a presence and Biden doesn't. And if the people in the squishy middle, according to the old rules at least, are the ones who are going to decide this election at the last minute, those kinds of perceptions really, really matter. And this is where, like, on the other side of Grifter, Sarah, the political consultant, you know, the other argument that they are just not making, that they should at least be making to their base, the Biden folks, at least to their base. They should not have a 76% concern is Jake Sullivan as president is a great thing, guys. is Jake Sullivan can't get elected, but he's actually doing a very good job. And they're not even making that argument.

Like, you can't sort of have it all the ways. Okay, we're going to do a lightning round and then take a couple questions. Here's the lightning round. I've created a little basket of things that you can pick only one from. It's like trick or treat. You only get one candy bar. You can have primary reform. You can have a viable third party, but it's still a third party,

meaning, you know, you've got a lot of factors that would weigh, in. Or you can, you know, pick those dumb, dumb pops that have the question mark on the outside that is some statutory or constitutional amendment fix, the one neat trick to get Congress to work again. To make everything right, Mike, what are you going to pick out of my trick-or-treating basket? I mean, that question mark lollipop sounds really good. I like primary reform. I think think it's pandering to the hometown crowd I guess so look I just think the the parties I'm just stealing all this from Jonah but the parties are so weak and you know I really like the idea of the the party smoke-filled room you know making decisions not to benefit themselves

necessarily but for the benefit of the party as a whole that would that would be a very good thing to have some, you know, behind closed doors, men and women to make those decisions. Lightning. Jonah. Lightning. Sorry. My reform thing? Since we don't want to do primary reforming the thing again, and this might require a constitutional

amendment I'd defer to you on that, but I would rip up root and branch the campaign finance laws so that parties actually can... support candidates that have a good chance of getting elected in a general election without being completely undermined. The campaign finance stuff and the primary things were the chocolate and peanut butter that created the Reese's peanut butter cup of American dysfunction. And so if you're going to talk about the primary stuff, I think the other part of that is the campaign finance stuff. There is a wrong way to eat a Reese's, what you just described. That's so sweet of you to give me my Valentine's Day present here, a little bit of you. it late, but appreciate it nonetheless. You know how I feel about campaign finance reform.

Steve. I was at term limits. I've been skeptical of term limits before. I'm familiar with all the reasons that people are skeptical of them now. Permanent staffers, I get it. It turns out I was naive going into the 2014, 2015, 2015, 2016 election cycle about just how important it was for in particular members of Congress to remain in office. It matters more than anything. So people who got into politics or started caring about this stuff became political junkies because of ideas. It was a rude awakening to me that most of the people who represent us don't,

or at least many of the Republicans. So you had, over the course of the Trump era, free traders who became protectionists, limited government types who are now advocating for the government to be involved in anything and everything. And it's proximity to power. It's what they care about most. And take that away, limit their time there, and I think you would see significant and substantive reform all to the better.

What is Lindsay Graham supposed to do with his time if you do that? I'm not going to answer that question. All right. We'll do quick lightning questions to one person on the panel only. I will pose it to you at the end. I'm Mike Nelson. I'm a physicist, an optimist, and a technology policy walk. And I was so excited on the first panel, the first speaker said that America's superpower is inspiration.

If you were telling, if you were Joe Biden's speechwriter or Nikki Haley's speechwriter and wanted them to push one far-ranging visionary tech policy project like the Moonshot or the Human Genome Initiative, what would it be? I love that question. Yeah, it is a great question. And of the four, you probably pick the worst person to answer. The inside joke at the dispatch is that I'm the CTO because I'm the one who takes my phone to my seven-year-old

and says, can you help me get this online? Look, I mean, I'll answer your question the broadest possible way. What we've seen from technology, all sorts of problems. We can document the problems, the media focuses on the problems. Everybody talks about the problems, particularly of late. But if you look at the kind of arguments that technology accelerationists make about the benefits to mankind that we've seen from technology, many of them actually chronicled in Jonah's, I hate to give Jonah a plug, but his phenomenal book, Suicide of the West, talks about that kind of progress. Technology is at the heart of it. It's always been at the heart of it, and it will be at the heart of it today more than it ever has been before, stipulating that there are problems you have to work through. So I wouldn't pick one, I'm sorry. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

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site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. 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. Okay. Yes. So I'll give my question to you. Why wasn't ending gerrymandering one of your options that you asked about to solve our current political crisis? A great question and I'm so excited. to answer it because I think that there's a real misunderstanding of the problems around gerrymandering.

Gerimandering back in the day used to be one party trying to take seats from another party. That's not really the problem we have with gerrymandering anymore. Because of some of the other problems, the districts aren't gerrymandered by one party to have the high levels of partisanship in those districts. They are a little bit. I'm not going to, this isn't a black and white thing by any means, but to a large extent, the people have become more partisan within the district that they were already in. The parties are gerrymandering these days for just more incumbent protection. They're not even trying to steal seats from one another anymore. There's so few seats that are even stealable as people become more and more partisan

and negative polarization takes over. I think if tomorrow, You drew a bunch of just, you know, districts that looked like, you know, Nebraska and Iowa in the middle of the country, just a bunch of square, you know, boxes. It would not particularly help the problem because it's the voters in the boxes that seem to be the problem in hating the other side so much that they'll change their political opinions as long as it's owning the fill in the blank other side. So, again, this isn't like gerrymandering would do nothing. I'm all for fixing that. but we've also seen in a lot of these states that try to have independent commissions, it also doesn't help. So I haven't also seen a solution to gerrymandering. Virginia tried to have an independent commission.

Didn't work. New York, I mean, all of these other states that have tried it, the independent commissions just get captured too. So I don't think it will solve the problem the way that people think it will. I don't think there is a solution to solve the problem that has proven particularly viable. And if you don't solve the underlying problem that voters are the problem in a lot of these districts, then you know what have you accomplished okay one more I'm just really biased towards the front row I'm so sorry question for Jonah is the Republican Party rehabilitable or do we try to do something within the Democratic Party or do we go

full-fledged third party so the question was is the Republican Party salvageable or should we go with the Democrats or go with the third party So I'm going to beg off slightly on the question insofar as I don't know who the we is, right? So like before when I said this thing about, you know, just doing right as you see it, like part of my point about what's ruined big chunks of the, at least the right of center media, and I would argue media general, because I think this is a problem, New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere as well, is too many journalists. think, but it's a particular problem for conservatism, and that's the thing that bothers me. There are too many conservative pundits and journalists and writers and eggheads who think at the end of the day their job is to be a political consultant for a party. And it's a very subtle form of corruption.

I'm not saying that the people this happens to are all corrupt. Some of them are my oldest and dearest friends, including me for a very long time. It's a very subtle thing where when you have a sort of team mentality and you think that the Republican Party is the, are the players on the field for your larger team, you start thinking in terms of, well, what's good for conservatism must be good for the Republicans, and here's how they should do it. And that frame of mind can steer you in a bad place. And one of the reasons why we started the dispatch was to sort of break out of that model

a little bit. And I'll tell you, I have muscle memory for it that makes it very hard for me sometimes to still do that way. I just feel weird talking about like, well, the Democrat, here's what they're going to be. Democrats should do to win elections. But actually, once you get out of that mode of thinking, like, the things I think the Democrats should do to win elections would be good for America. Like, fighting crime in the cities would be good for the Democrats and good for America, right?

Getting rid of some of the absolutely insane sort of campus speech capture of the Democratic Party where they think they're winning over more voters than losing when they talk about Burr. persons and that kind of stuff, right? That would be good for America and it would be good for the Democrats. And so my sort of point of view is think about what's good for America and then talk about it. Whoever wants to pick up that advice, that's great. And so on the question of whether or not the Republican Party can be saved, look, because of our constitutional structure, we are probably stuck over the long haul with the two-party system. Richard Hofstetter had the famous line about third parties, you know, that historically they have their, they have their, they They're like bees. They have their effect by stinging, and then they die. And in 1912, you know, we got the worst president of the 20th century because Teddy Roosevelt was too big a baby to actually, like, support the Republican Party. And that got Woodrow Wilson in.

And so I have no problem strategically supporting or voting for a third party. I live in the District of Columbia, you know, but doesn't really matter what I think about my vote, but if you think long-term what would be best for the country is for the Republican party to be sane again, I got no problem with you voting for a Democrat or voting for a third party. If you can game it out, voting for the third party doesn't help Donald Trump, right? So being strategic with your vote doesn't bother me in the slightest. Long term, we're still going to have a two-party system. I think for some of the reasons that Sarah was referring to earlier, the coalitions that make up these parties is changing really rapid.

already and one of the weird things though is that you know with negative polarization which just basically means mo and this is borne out by studies most people vote let most of the hardcore primary voters hate their own party too right they hate primary listen to actually listen closely to Republican primary voters they hate the Republican Party they just hate the Democratic Party more and vice versa AOC and Bernie Sanders hate the Democratic party. They just hate the Republicans more. And in that kind of system, when those are the dominating voices, if one party's reason for existence is hating the other party, if one party

dies, the other party loses its reason to live. And so you could see massive changes in the coalitions. Might still be called Republicans, Democrats, might be called Trumpist and whatever, but The way to think about it is, again, at least the way I try to think about it, is just like, do what's smart strategically with your vote, but don't lie about anything. And the rest, let the chips fall in where they make. Thank you so much for having us here this morning. We really appreciate your time. You know what I'm going to do.