The Dispatch Podcast - The Long Road to 270

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Minutes before 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, the president took to Twitter to claim victory in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. The president also said he “hereby [claims]” Michigan “if, in fact,... there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!” The president and his closest allies are also alleging that late-arriving votes are evidence of fraud. What should we make of all this? “This is the president of the United States acting like a Third World dictator,” Steve says on today's episode. “It’s complete nonsense. It’s made up. The only rhyme or reason to what he’s doing is he wants to count votes that he thinks are his and disqualify votes that he thinks are not.” On today’s show, our podcast hosts dissect this year’s polling catastrophe, where their electoral predictions went sour, and what our country might look like in January 2021. Show Notes: -Jonah’s Wednesday G-File: “The Most Chaotic Timeline,” The Sweep: “Your 2020 Election Night Guide,” The Morning Dispatch: “It Ain't Over Till It's Over.” -Join The Dispatch for a post-election gathering featuring congressional leadership and top policy experts November 9-10: Sign up here! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. This podcast is brought to you by the dispatch.com. Check out our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. Look, thank you all for joining us last night for our dispatch live during election night.

And we're going to keep it going today. Lots to talk about. Before we do, I want to tell you all about our event, post-election conference on November 9th and 10th. You can check it out at what's next event.com. Tickets are $100 and include a new complimentary subscription to the dispatch. We've got interviews with Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Senator Ben Sass, Senator Tim Scott, so many more.

We're announcing new ones every day. For those of you who are subscribers to the morning dispatch or the sweep, you've seen this, just come. It's going to be awesome. Let's dive into the special Happy Hour edition of the Dispatch podcast. We're going to cover four topics today. Let's start with perhaps the one everyone is talking about, frankly, more than the winner at this point, which is WTF polling. David, I'm going to start with you.

You know, I mean, this... I mean... I mean... Okay, next topic. Okay, next topic. I think that... I don't know what else to say, then. I mean, you know, here's the thing is it would be one thing

if you could look at, say, that there was a polling average where there was a one consistent strand of, say, four or five pollsters, six pollsters, seven pollsters that were getting this right. And then there was another strand of five, six, seven, eight pollsters that were getting it substantially wrong. And you could look at the competing methodologies and say, oh, this is exactly why pollster A was wrong

and pollster B was right. Well, aside from, you know, the Trafalgar sort of the guy, the Trafalgar Island, which everyone was giving side eye to the Trafalgar Island until about 11 o'clock last night, when you were looking at all of the polling, the best reasonable guess you could make about it was that rather than underweighting or, you know, like in 2016, there was a problem in some of the Midwestern state polls of not sampling enough college-educated voters, I'm eager to see more sophisticated analysis, but somebody tell me that I'm wrong that sort of this idea that there was actually a set number of people who just weren't

forthcoming about their choice seems to have been part of the dynamic. Or if I just completely missed something that has already been litigated and decided in, you know, the last hour when I wasn't on Twitter. Jonah, I'm going to come to you on the shy Trump voter, but I do want to point out that to your point about pollsters, you know, some getting it wrong or right, et cetera, like Trafalgar, the guy who was the most Trump positive pollster out there, he got it wrong, too. He said that Trump would win Michigan by three. He said Trump would win Pennsylvania by two. That turned out not to be right.

He said that Kanye West was costing Trump, Minnesota. Minnesota. Well, that's a little bit of a mess. That's a whiff. That's a wish. So, you know, it's a little similar to my concept that the losing campaign doesn't do everything wrong and the winning campaign doesn't do everything right. Just because Trump did better does not mean that Trafalgar's methodology was any more sound than the methodology that got

it wrong just because he got closer or sometimes not necessarily closer just in a different direction. Jonah, what do you make of shy Trump voters now? I still think it's weird, right? I still think the argument for shy Trump voters is weird because the things that you would do to check for shy Trump voters did not show any evidence as shy Trump voters. At the same time, it seems pretty clear there were shy Trump voters, right? So I was wrong. And there was a post-election survey done 1,800 or 1,600 respondents. And they said that something like 19% of Trump voters said that they didn't tell friends and family that they were going to vote for Trump. Just a note, nothing like relying on polling in our segment about why polling is wrong.

I know. And that's the problem. It's what? do you do? You know, how do you, you know, it's sort of a one-hand clapping kind of problem. But I think that, you know, look, I mean, the best explanation for what looked like shy Trump voters in 2016 was that late deciders, which is different than people who have secretly decided but refused to say so, broke heavily for Trump against Hillary. It does seem like that at least part of what looks like shy Trump voters is that again, is that it turns out that there were more late deciders than people thought than the pollsters picked up. I think that Trump's final campaign marathon probably helped in that regard. Just sort of push people into that sort

of momentum, join the crowd, get on the bandwagon, let's go, kind of mood. So I think, you know, there were shy, you know, I'm still kind of baffled about the logic of being a shy Trump voter, you know, about saying that you think you're better off than you were four years ago and all that kind of stuff. And you're happy to give Trump credit for that, but you're not happy to tell a computer survey that you're going to vote for them. I just think is weird strategic stuff. But even beyond the shy Trump stuff, I mean, the polling, Susan Collins did not lead in a poll for like, what, six weeks, two months? I don't know. And she won. Shy Collins, Jonah. Shy Collins voters. You know, is that a thing?

In Maine, are you really terrified to say you're going to vote for Susan Collins? And the Republicans didn't pick up a single seat in Texas in the House races. I mean, there's just a bunch of things that were wrong. And you're hearing some pollsters just basically say that Trump is just bad juju. It just like, it's feeding spaghetti into the printer cartridge thing. It just doesn't work and it messes up all of the normal calibrations. and I'm kind of feeling that there's some truth to that. I suspect that the Florida screw up in the polling

has left us with the impression that all of the polling was wrong to a greater degree than it was, though. I mean, if I gave you a map two weeks ago and I said... But, Jonah, the electoral victory outcome is totally different than the polling outcome. They were saying Michigan plus eight, Wisconsin plus eight.

I agree. Ohio plus five. I mean, I agree. They screwed it up. I'm not. There's no getting around that. And like every pollster, there should be a dozen downfall videos with Hitler as like the head of different polling firms, trying to figure out what the hell happened. And I kind of like the idea of going into a future where polling doesn't work. I think it will make our democracy more interesting in some ways. But I just, I don't know. I have no great explanation for it. So I think what do we measure instead, Jonah? Is it boat parades? Boat parade. Yard times. Hound every boat. Always. every boat. It's always yard signs, David. It's always been yard signs. I think that the Senate polls being as off as they are is actually everything I need to say that it's not shy Trump voters.

There is, in fact, a systematic bias in the polling waiting and the pollsters themselves, frankly, it is not the people responding to the polls. And I think that the more we keep blaming the people instead of the pollsters, I was willing to do some of that in 2016. I'm done doing that now. It's not the people answering the polls. Why does it have to be one or the other? Because I said so. No. Okay.

Got it. I'm practicing my parenting skills. Argument by assertion. I got it. I personally like blaming the people for stuff. I mean, I can certainly understand the phenomenon of shy Trump voter. I mean, I think, you know, it was likely overstated in 2016 and perhaps understated and appreciated this time around.

I mean, certainly it's the case that you have some Trump voters who are, you know, who wouldn't want to, you know, in a hypothetical conversation with a pollster or a hypothetical conversation with a neighbor, want to answer for Trump's tweets and his behavior and his insults and that, you know, some of the things that make people reluctant Trump voters. But we're nonetheless perfectly happy to vote for him because they like his policies. I know some of these people. We probably all know some of these people. So I could see that they wouldn't want to necessarily disclose that or talk about it or engage on it, given the stigma around voting for Trump. I guess I'm interested in the point that Jonah raised. It's kind of what I've been thinking about over the past 24 hours. I like the idea of not relying as heavily on polls and not having polls shape coverage or shape the discussion as much as they do.

I mean, I think, you know, here at the dispatch, we used polls to tell us what we thought basically the contours of the race would look like. But, again, you know, I think a lot of our reporting focused on the substance of the issues. We didn't do a ton of horse race reporting. I mean, we did some of it. We had the sweep, which had, you know, some really great horse race reporting, but also went several levels deep. We did some of it in the morning dispatch. But I like the idea of not relying as heavily on the polls as journalists think about how to cover, you know, the midterms in 2022 or the presidential in 2024. I think the question is what kind of an appetite will there be for that?

Will there be a popular appetite for that? You know, if, as we were talking about in the dispatch live discussion that we had on election night, if it's the case that people increasingly see politics as entertainment, I think that's true. why would we believe that a turn towards substance and away from horse races, anything that we can imagine? Steve, question on this. Do you think that the polling's offness affected turnout on either side this time? Yeah, that is a really good question. This is an argument that you heard from the Trump campaign early months and months ago. I think both sides, by the way, can argue it.

the Biden people can say it created complacency and the Trump people can say it created despondency. I think that's probably right. And I don't necessarily buy the macro. I mean, the way that the Trump campaign is describing it in discussions and tweets and memos today, campaign manager Bill Steppian set out a memo declaring their intent to fight for Pennsylvania.

And the first line in the memo was, you know, public polls that suppress. our vote. This is not new. Remember there was a CNN poll maybe three or four months ago that was a real outlier. And it really made Donald Trump angry. And he had his campaign lawyers send a letter, sort of a ridiculous letter to CNN, telling him that they had to retract the poll or they risked being sued or what have you. And the argument that they made, Toward the end of the letter, you had to actually read beyond just the beginning of the letter was that this was part of a broader voter suppression effort carried out by big media and places

like CNN that are Trump Hostel. And they've been making that case pretty steadily ever since. We've seen it made a lot today. You know, you can see where it might have that effect. I guess I don't think it probably had a very significant effect. you know, one of the things that we've discussed about Trump voters and modern-day Republicans in general is this, this, their belief in this kind of David and Goliath. They're always the, they're always the little guy. They're fighting against everybody. It's part of the part of what

brings them together. And I think, you know, being against big media in these polls and being counted out is what they love. It's like, you know, it's like a football team that's counted out and they can sort of rally to it and get everybody excited. And, you know, you have it as bulletin board material. David, I want to read you an email. I got a theory from one of our listeners, advisory opinion listener, by the way. Excellent. I think she also listens to this one. Glad you got that in there. Yeah, exactly. I won't hold it against them. She said, this is her thesis. The radical left is a victim of its success. By tautologically defining opposition to their narrative as racism and other horribles, they have undermined the ability of pollsters to accurately do their jobs

because enough people know that there are certain options that they would not be wise to admit except to very trusted friends and in the anonymity of the voting booth. I mean, that's a short encapsulation of shy Trump right there. I mean, I think... But is the shy Trump voter, like basically, is it the one side creating the other side? I you know I that would be the that would be the shy trump justification for itself in a nutshell that which I've always been a little bit skeptical of that because what is the pollster going to do tell on you you know are they are they then going to call your employer and tell you I just

talked to you know Jonah Goldberg and he said he was voting Trump so this always felt a little bit weird to me. And it also felt weird to me when, you know, a lot of our perception of reality is colored by where we are. And where I am, shy Trump is not a thing. I was telling you all on election day how Franklin, Tennessee was like in pre-celebration mode, it felt like at some points where the Trump trucks were driving through town with the big flags. And there was the honking and the waving and the yelling, not a honking waving, yelling in the Brooklyn sense. but in the Tennessee sense. And there was this pre-celebratory mode.

So at the one hand, to look at all of this sort of overt celebration of Trump and then think there's shy Trump, I talk myself out of it even as I say the words, and I keep going back to my advisory opinions, colleague, the esteemed Sarah Isker, and say, it's got to be something wrong with the pollsters

more than the respondents, is where I just keep ending up. And we'll take a quick break to hear from Gabby Insurance. When you've had the same car insurance or homeowner's insurance for years, you kind of get trapped into paying your premiums and not thinking about it. That makes it really easy to overpay and not even realize it. Stop overpaying for car and homeowners insurance. See about getting a lower rate for the exact same coverage you already have thanks to Gabby.

Gabby takes the pain out of shopping for insurance by giving you an Apples to Apple's comparison of your current coverage with 40 of the top insurance providers like Progressive, Nationwide, and Travelers. Just link your current insurance account, and in just minutes, you'll be able to see quotes for the exact same coverage you currently have. Gabby customers save $825 per year on average. If they can't find you savings like that, they'll let you know, so you can relax knowing you have the best rate out there. And they'll never sell your info, so no annoying spam or robocalls. It's totally free to check your rate, and there's no obligation.

Take a few minutes and stop overpaying on your car and home motors insurance. Go to gabby.com slash dispatch. That's g-a-b-i.com slash dispatch. Gabby.com slash dispatch. Jonah, new topic. You had a thoughtful newsletter today

where you had a dining table set with crow, perhaps, and a moose-bush, you called it. So I want to talk about what we got wrong. David and I put out our maps before the election. Steve, Jonah, did you all put out maps? I can't recall. I did not. Okay. So David's map was extremely wrong. And my map was incredibly right. You had to highlight that. Weird how you're bringing this up. That's interesting. No, it is. I actually bring it up because I got a lot of things wrong. It's just that my map happened

not to be the wrongest of the things that I got wrong. I did get Iowa wrong. And, and I got main second wrong. But otherwise, my map looks like it will be the final map. But, John, I wanted to start with you. What did you get wrong? And why do you think you got it wrong? Yeah, okay. So we covered a big chunk of it.

I took pollsters and other cephologists at their word that they had a grasp of what was actually going on. But you also, you know, that was meeting with your own expectations. If you had said, like, there's just no way. I don't think you would have been as, you would have found them as credible. No, that's right. I mean, there's confirmation bias in all of this kind of stuff. I mean, I can't, you know, claim to say that, like, the fact that I think Trump is doing a lot of things wrong, the wrong way, and that he is hurting the Republican brand. And then you see polls showing that the Republican brand is getting hurt.

I'm perfectly willing to concede that there's confirmation bias in there. I don't know at this point what else I got wrong that wasn't deeply contingent upon believing that the polling, which was, you know, I never blot that like Wisconsin was plus 17 or any of that kind of stuff, but I generally thought that the direction of the polling was basically correct. And I thought that the, and to that end, I mean, it's really hard to trust exit polling and all that stuff right now too. But it does look like the advantage with seniors wasn't enough. It wasn't nearly as big as people claimed. I thought it was going to be bigger because everyone was saying it was bigger. I don't think the advantage of seniors thing

now we have some decent evidence. Again, set aside the garbage exit polls that there was none. I mean, I think that Biden made up some ground with seniors. But the idea that Biden won seniors, I don't think so. What's the evidence beyond the exit polls, just the results in Florida? Yeah. If you look at Hillsborough and Pinellas and where they were trending, you know, that's sort of your old person concentration around Tampa. They were right where they had been going for the last several cycles. So Biden picked up a little bit more over Hillary, but not much.

Yeah. And similarly with the suburban revolt stuff, the suburban revolt was real, but it wasn't nearly as big as blue-wavy or it's transformational as it seemed um so there's a lot of that kind of stuff i you know and having written about a bunch about this i always thought that there was something not always but for a long time thought that there was something real to um trump's advantage with Hispanics you know getting back to what your your uh-o listener's question i mean when this moment you say to a large chunk of american Hispanics regardless of their ethnicity or their time in America or which country they hail from or their immigration status, the second you say, greeted, you know, Ola Latin X's, you are signaling that you

really don't know very much about Hispanic Americans and that you are coming from a certain, very rarefied, very elite cultural niche that takes a lot of that stuff seriously and speaks in the shibboleths of sort of Ivy League academia. And that kind of identity politics stuff, I thought, you know, Trump's cutting through on a lot of that was a real thing. And I wrote about it at a time. But I think I was also wrong. I mean, again, it's hard to disentangle from the polling stuff. But the damage that Trump was doing, that I still believe he's doing ideologically and intellectually to the Republican brand, but far less damage to the actual Republican Party than, you know, than it had been foretold. And you can't, you know, you can't look at the election

results and say, no, not a single Democrat picked up a seat in Texas that Republicans actually gained house seats and not concede that the political reality was different than what I thought it was. I also think that the thing I didn't appreciate enough was Trump's ability to activate new voters, just voters that hadn't voted before, that weren't sort of on the radar of the typical coalition. And in many ways, that's where his advantages, particularly in places like Florida came from. It wasn't persuading anybody, you know, as you've been saying about turnout. And it wasn't even so much turnout of like traditional Republicans in any way. It was creating new Republicans out of people who weren't engaged in the political process.

And his ability to do that surprised me, I would say. Steve, what did you get wrong and why? Yeah, I mean, I would say I bought the polling too much. I'm not going to shift all the blame on to the pollsters, though, because the the, the, the, The analysis that I did based on the public polling was supplemented by the reporting that I did, talking to people doing private polling. And many, many of the people who are doing private polling on both sides were seeing the same things roughly that we were seeing in the public polling.

And just the night before the election, I had conversations with a couple members of Congress who talked about the deep plunge in the private polling that Republicans across the country, saw after the first debate um it it was there it existed now certainly it's possible the private pollsters made the same mistakes or were we're guilty of making the same flawed assumptions um so i i i certainly gave more credence i was more open to a bigger biden victory um than is merited now looking back on it let's say the other thing that that i'm probably guilty of is um a bit of projection or mirror imaging in terms of how the electorate felt. You all have heard me say a couple different times, you know, that I had a sense that

there was just this sort of exhaustion with all of this. And, you know, no doubt that was informed by conversations that I was having in various data points that I was seeing, put them together and sort of made a narrative out of it. But there is, there is no doubt that some of that is just a result of me being totally exhausted by all of it and assuming that everybody else feels the same way I did. I had one more that I think now that I'm doing my deep introspection. I thought you're going to add it for me because we can start doing that. I have a long list of reasons why Steve is wrong.

But that's easy. I think that, you know, this is a point my wife made last night. I think I underestimated, and a lot of us underestimated, that while Biden had the right strategy in many respects of letting Trump dominate and be his own worst enemy, I think that in part was a mistake because it left a lot of things uncontested, which could have helped. But more importantly, and this is the point that my wife made, there is something that just makes you nervous watching Biden. He is really old, right? And he is not sure-footed a lot of the time. And I think that there is something lizard brain about that that just makes you feel like, eh, I just don't, you know, he's not the guy I want to go into battle with. And that, I think, at the subliminal level, was maybe more damaging to Biden. Even though, look, I mean, we should concede.

It looks like Biden's going to win, right? But I think that if it had been a younger candidate who had a very similar strategy but did more rallies, was more robust, was more reassuring, and as a physical presence, I think it would have helped the Democrats more. David, what did you get wrong and why? So I have the least excuse of anybody here for going, ooh, look, the 538 polling average. I have the absolutely excuse. I just wrote a whole freaking book about how deeply entrenched our negative polarization is in this country and that it's deep and it's enduring and it's not changing and it is based on factors that are beyond any given political race.

And then I go, oh, shiny polling average. I really think if you look at it, this is, this race in many ways is what negative. partisanship personified. I mean, if you look at the last four years, look at the wild swings that we have been through from an economic boom that in 2018 was in full swing and yet there was a blue wave in the house. There was an economic boom in full swing, blue wave in the house. You have the momentary thought that, hey, you might have war with Iran with the Soleimani killing. you have the Mueller report, you have impeachment just this year, you have impeachment, you have economic recession, you have a pandemic, you have civil unrest, and when you go and you look at it

and trigger warnings there, I'm going to say the words exit polls, I know, but when you look at sort of the dynamics about who allegedly voted and for whom, what you see is just a very small movement of the lines here. If Biden, if it does appear that it appears that Biden is likely on his way to his victory, although that's far from certain at this point. But if he wins, it's going to be what, about 150,000 votes in four states. And Trump won through 2016 and around 75,000 votes in three states. And it reminds me of trench warfare, political version of trench warfare, you would invest, on the Western front in World War I, you would invest incredible amounts of blood and treasure to move the lines a kilometer. And then the next time around,

the incredible amounts of the counterattack that moves the lines back to. And it's just back and forth like that over these very small margins. And I, you know, honestly, I feel like I totally should have grasped that what was going on was far deeper and more deep-seated. And and more stable than the polling averages would have projected. So that's my view. As I got wrong, the same thing, the shiny object of that polling averages, and I shouldn't have gotten it wrong because the polling averages contradicted a lot of what we knew

and have known for the last 20 years about American politics. So I became convinced, and David, I told you this, that as I was going through all this county data and really diving into the 2018 county data, that what we saw in 2016 was an anti-Hillary backlash by and large and that she was so deeply unpopular into what Jonah said about late decider, people who didn't like both candidates that just all went against Hillary, and that that's why we would see something really different this time around. That is by far the thing that I think I got most wrong. I think that now everyone,

including me, who more or less blamed Hillary Clinton for her own loss in 2016, that's just not true, as it turns out. And it didn't have to do with her being a woman. It didn't have to do with her being disliked. It didn't have to do with her emails. This had to do with dynamics in the country and currents that continue very much four years later. And it was just that that was sort of the first shock of it peaking up above the water line. And so it was easy to blame the other candidate, their campaign.

not going to Wisconsin stuff. Like, nope, nope, nope, nope. All of that turns out now we can throw it in the trash as far as I'm concerned. And I was very much on that team. But why does it have to be one or the other? I think you're being too hard on yourself. A combination of a bunch of complicated factors.

We don't have to go from like it had to be these four things to, nope, they're all wrong. It has to be this one thing. Yeah, no, I'm not saying that, you know, if Hillary Clinton had been the most, you know, Michelle Obama most liked person on the planet that we wouldn't have seen different outcome. But fine, the chunk of how much it was Hillary Clinton is just so minuscule compared to, I think, a lot of people who thought it was, the majority of it was Hillary

Clinton. I'm not entirely convinced about that. I mean, I think that given how narrow Trump's victory was in 2016 and how negative people were on Hillary, if you just had a standard vanilla Democrat with some charisma and no baggage like the Clintons did, you know, I'm still inclined to believe that, first of all, you don't get the Bernie boomlet the way you did, and that Hillary, that the, and Amy Klobuchar running in 2016, I think maybe wins. I mean, I still, I still think that. But I hear what you're saying, you know, I mean, it's worth doing these introspection things. Well, when I was looking at the county...

I still think the Comey letter. The Comey Letter mattered. Maybe. But when I was looking at this county data, and I'm looking at 11,000 votes in Michigan, you know, slightly larger but narrow wind in Wisconsin, what you would expect to see then right now is some receding from the water line because it's not Hillary. And you don't see that, especially in Wisconsin, those counties that I put into the sweep, four counties, all of which.

had been pivot counties. Obama had won them in 08 and 12. Hillary lost them in 16. What you would expect to see even if Trump were to win them is like receding water. And you don't. They became more Trump counties. Same in Michigan, by and large. And, you know,

on the flip side, those Bellwether counties that I put into the sweep, North Hampton in Pennsylvania and Lenore in North Carolina that are both highly predictive of their state's eventual outcome, they look spot on. So it's all to say, like, the argument for 2016 being a blip in any particular regard, it doesn't look that way. It looks like it was just part of a trend. And I'll spend a lot more time

digging into the Wisconsin results now that we've had them in. It's only been a couple hours. But, you know, you're looking at Kenosha that he only won by 316 votes. He's winning them by a couple thousand. Looking at Sawyer County, I think Trump just won that by 14 points. And that was a county that Obama had won at 08 and 12? That's not Hillary Clinton that cost that county, clearly. So more to be done on that, but let's move to Trump's strategy moving forward. I want to read the latest tweet. We have claimed for electoral vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which won't allow legal observers, the state of Georgia and the state of North Carolina, each of which has a big Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the state of Michigan if, in fact,

there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots, as has been widely reported. David, I will start with you since some of this involves law. Some of it, frankly, does not. What actually are Trump's legal options at this point? Well, you know, there is still the, there is still, in some sense, a live controversy over Philadelphia, or not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the extension. of time and to count ballots that have been postmarked on election day. And I believe, Sarah, and then also some that have not been postmark. If there's no postmark, correct, no postmark. And it arrives within three days after election day that they'll be counted. And this case is not over. The requests for injunctive relief have been denied by the Supreme Court. So there is still

a live case or controversy there. I am not, I would be very surprised. if the Supreme Court reversed itself and intervened, in part because that would be what, Sarah Purcell on steroids? Well, there's also an issue here where we actually don't even have any of the ballots yet. I mean, we have a handful that are going to be received after Election Day. The $1.1 million or so that are still being counted were received before election day, so they wouldn't be subject to any legal challenge of that nature. and it looks like that will be plenty for Biden to take the lead.

So I'm not sure that it would even be, there would be a cognizable injury at that point. Right, exactly. You know, you would lack an injury. But the bottom line here is it's most likely that the $1.1 million that are in without controversy are going to decide this election. And I think that in Pennsylvania,

and I think that's very important for people to understand. And I, and I truly hope we have clarity after that 1.1 million that we're in before the election, because it will be very contentious. It will be very contentious if Pennsylvania is decided or swung by votes that come in in that three-day period after the election. I don't think that's what's going to happen. But it's at least within the realm of possibility. At this point, if Trump holds on to, sorry, if Biden holds on to Arizona, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Pennsylvania won't matter either. Now, they have filed lawsuits in Wisconsin and Michigan as well. Are any of those more meritorious in your view?

I haven't read the pleadings yet, so I don't see any transparent. There's not an obvious constitutional defect that's cropping up. What we seem to have is sort of a rather standard, a rather standard affair where you have the vast bulk of votes that are counted relatively quickly. And then we have this sort of frustrating, agonizing last 5 to 10 percent, which, by the way, what the heck, Arizona? Well, don't forget Alaska. They're only a 50 percent right now. That's amazing. I mean, somebody needs to, you know what, Florida needs to conduct a national seminar. I tweeted this last night that they've become like this after bush v gore and some of their other debacles they've become like the

seal team six of vote counting um but yeah we're we're kind of used to in this country in these close elections of late arriving late arriving votes and a lot of people you're seeing it sort of in the maga world are saying this the late arriving votes by themselves the fact that they're arriving late that is evidence of fraud and that's just false yeah you guys you guys if i can say respectfully you guys are being way too polite about this What we're witnessing is total bullshit. I mean, this is the President of the United States acting like a third world dictator. It's complete nonsense.

It's made up. The only rhyme or reason to what he's doing is he wants to count votes that he think are his and disqualify votes that he thinks are not. That's what's happening here. It's the giveaway is the absurd language in the tweet that you read, hereby claiming. It's total nonsense. And it is, I think the takeaway is that it's actually dangerous nonsense. I mean, this is where the kinds of worst case scenarios that we've talked about for months

actually could happen if the president is able to convince his supporters. And I have every confidence that he will be that this thing is really being stolen for him when it's not, when they're just counting votes that are valid and that lead to Joe Biden winning a narrow, hard-fought election, the president is able to convince his supporters that that's all illegitimate. We have huge problems in this country. And what he's doing is outrageous. You're starting to see some Republicans speak out against it. You had Adam Kinsiger issued a statement last night, representative from Illinois, denouncing the president for speaking out on election eve or early morning hours of Wednesday saying that this was being stolen.

You had Larry Hogan say he found it outrageous. Rick Santorum in an appearance on CNN right after the president was actually very strong, very forceful. It's going to require a lot more of that if, in fact, this is what we're seeing. Now, let me caveat all of that, qualify all of that by saying, I am not saying at all that it's not possible. Some Democrats somewhere are going to do something bad, you know, are going to try to cheat. That's entirely possible. If that happens, it'll be necessary to find it, call it out, prosecute whoever is guilty of the wrongdoing and make it a big deal.

What doesn't work is this rampant speculation that you see from some quarters of conservative media and certainly many of the president's campaign surrogates, just pointing to vote totals and saying, aha, fraud, aha, fraud. It doesn't work. And that's what they're doing. Rudy Giuliani gave a disjointed rambling press conference, which is characteristic of the way that he talks about

pretty much everything these days. You know, just making these wild accusations of fraud. You've had Rick Grinnell, a campaign spokesman for the president, former acting DNI, stirring this up. It's just totally irresponsible to do it. If there's fraud, find it, treat it seriously, rectify it if it affects the vote count. Until you know it, then don't. Can I just interject one quick thing?

Sarah, do we need to explain to Steve the style guide and illegal podcast, which is you express lament or regret and not outrage? When we invite Steve on to advisory opinions, then he can follow our style guide, but now we're on this podcast, and we follow his style guide. Elections are too important to leave to the lawyers. As, you know, it sort of befits the dispatch that we lower the temperature. We don't like to do the big outrage. I just think that this is one of those times when it's actually required. So, Jonah, talking to some Trump folks today, they are pretty upset about the mail-in ballots being counted. and that they're going so heavily for Biden is proof of the fraud.

And the point that I am making back is that Trump, for the last several months, told his supporters not to use mail-in ballots. And now it turns out they didn't use mail-in ballots, and that can't also be evidence of fraud in the mail-in ballots. Yeah. Okay. So, first of all, like, I mean, I'm entirely with Steve on this. I mean, I think this is entirely outrageous, beyond the pale. If it were a foreign country doing this, we would condemn it as an abuse of the first order. Let me push back a little.

If this were a normal election year and Biden were suddenly winning mail-in ballots six-to-one, I would also have lots of questions about that. That would be highly unusual. And so for people not paying a ton of attention to this election, and all of a sudden, Biden is, I mean, six-to-one is crazy for absentee ballots. compared to previous years. So I don't think that Trump's supporters... But not compared to what we've seen here.

That's fine. But you're talking about the president's reaction, Steve. And I guess what I want Jonah to address is Trump's supporters reactions, which is different. Okay. So, first of all, I love the Trump tweets that you read. You know, I hereby declare. It reminds me of that episode of the office where Michael Scott decides... I hearby declare bankruptcy.

as if that does it, right? And so, like, you know, it depends who you mean by Trump supporters. If you mean people, low information voters, right? And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. I mean that in a purely analytical descriptive sense. They have better things to do with their time voters, we'll call them that. Yeah. But, you know, who don't understand this, that's one thing.

But part of the, and it's, and I don't have an enormous amount of sympathy for them because if they've been paying attention, they all saw that in Florida and in Georgia and in North Carolina, Biden had these huge advantages. And in Ohio, because in the states where they counted the mail-in stuff first, we knew, and it was evidenced in real time, that Biden had an enormous advantage among early voting. And Trump then had an enormous advantage, almost equal, on election day voting. And that's why these, you know, these huge Biden leads ran, you know, were beaten down by the returns on election day. And everyone's like, yay, that's great. And then all of a sudden, in the states where that process is flipped for stupid, stupid reasons, you have none of the

early voting counted until they do the election day counting. And they want to say, wait a second, we want to count the election day stuff, but not the early voting stuff, even though they were perfectly fine with it being counted in the states that counted at first that showed a Biden lead. And now they're pretending to be shocked by a Biden lead in the early voting. It logically doesn't make sense. And if you're paying attention, you should know this. And if you're still confused by it, that brings us to the other kind of Trump supporter, who is not low information voter or anything like that, but are the blue checkmark types swirling all over the place

who are literally talking about how this is a coup are talking about how a alignment between the media companies and the pollsters and the Democrats are calling these races

based upon actual votes being counted and they're trying to steal an election and the President of the United States who takes a freaking oath of office to see that our laws and our constitution are faithfully abided by is out there saying literally that any votes that are inconvenient to his tally are stolen, fraudulent, or manufactured in some way. To me, it's an impeachable offense, honestly, what he is doing right now. It is so

grotesque. And that the people who are celebrating it, encouraging it, and going in for it because it's a great narrative for the sort of, oh, poor oppressed us, we are the, you know, we are the heroic marquee of Maga America. They should know better and they're behaving fundamentally dishonorably. It is an outrageous thing for them to do. Guys, I just feel like it's been a long time since we've gotten a great Jonah rant. We've had some mediocre ones of late, some half-hearted Jonah rants, but finally, finally, we've got a good one. And for those who can't see which is all of you except me, David, and Steve, his hair is out of control.

And if he were at a bus stop saying those things to you, you would walk away quickly. And a quick message from ExpressVPN. Have you ever wondered why internet access is so much cheaper these days? Like 30 to 40 bucks a month? It's because internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T aren't just making money

off subscription fees. They're also making money from spying on your internet activity and selling your history and data to big tech companies. So what's the best way to make sure that 100% of your data is encrypted and that your internet provider can't get a hold of it? You guessed it. ExpressVPN creates a secure tunnel between all your devices and the internet

so that everything you do online is encrypted. It reroutes your connection through a secure server. This blocks your internet provider from seeing everything that you do online. All they can see is that you're connected to an ExpressVPN server, but nothing beyond that. And it's not just for your phone or computer. ExpressVPN works on all your devices. It works on your tablets, smart TVs, even your router, so your entire family can always stay protected. I can't stress this enough. ExpressVPN is so simple to use. You just open up the app, tap one button, and that's it.

Your data is your business. Protect it at expressvpn.com slash freedom. Visit expressvpn.com slash freedom to get three extra months of ExpressVPN. protection for free. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash freedom to learn more. Okay, last topic. No outlet has called the race for Joe Biden yet, but I think we do expect that to happen tonight or tomorrow. Two-part question. A, who do you think will be, do you think Fox will call it first? And do you think that Fox wants to be the one to call it first? And second, what does this mean then, moving forward for Biden, the Democrats, the progressive wing, the centrist wing? How does the country look on January 21st?

Steve, I'm going to start with you. It's a good question. I think you're right about the imminence of some call. I don't know whether it will be Fox. I think they have now called both Wisconsin and Michigan, if I'm not mistaken. had already called Arizona. So the only thing, keeping them from doing it would be a call in Nevada, which has not yet happened.

And I just got a text saying it's going to be delayed for some reason. Nevada? Yeah. Oh, that's because they went home. But they actually just sent out an update that they may have results coming in tonight rather than tomorrow, which is what they'd originally said. Early Bird Special with the Shoney. There's also, you can do better.

than that in Vegas. There's also, you know, I think people who follow Georgia more closely than I do consider that more or less a toss-up. I think North Carolina, Trump has a lead that's insurmountable for Biden. But I do expect that we'll get a call. You know, Joe Biden gave a short speech this afternoon, not declaring victory, going out and sort of giving an update. And I thought it was pretty effective.

I thought it was a pretty good speech. He kind of walked people through the math. He was very determined, it seemed to me, to understate his case. He said, look, we believe we're going to win. Here's what the math looks like right now. That's why we believe what we believe. It was very straightforward. No hysterics.

And he then went back to this theme that was, sort of, you know, a big part of the closing argument that he made during his campaign of trying to heal the nation of no red states and blue states. And there are plenty of things we can point to in Joe Biden's own past that he has said that would cause us to be skeptical that he is actually going to do this. And certainly given the front political environment, we're living in there are reasons to be dubious that we're going to see sort of kumbaya in America after January 21st. But I thought it was an encouraging. sign, honestly. After sort of the pitch fighting that we've had to have somebody come out

and give what resembled a normal presidential speech, making a pretty good argument on behalf of not being jerks to one another. It was a good start. Jonah? So, look, and we don't, nothing's been called yet. We don't know, but it looks like Biden's going to win. We'll see. I think, you know, as David has written, you know, David and I, I won't characterize Stephen Serra on all this, but like this is actually in some ways the best possible outcome, you know, short of a greater repudiation of Donald Trump, because I don't think he takes away true repudiation. And I think, in fact, he is, if he ends up losing this narrowly after doing what he did, he is the frontrunner for 2024 in a way that I used to be much more skeptical about, right?

He can say, hey, look, it was stolen from me. Look how close I came, yada, yada, yada. I should have asked Steve about our bet. Steve, you're still feeling good about our bet, which is for listeners who do not remember, but I do, that if Trump decides to run in 2024, I believe he will be the Republican nominee, and Steve believes he will not. Yeah, I feel good about the bet. Okay, I do too. Jonah, continue. So in terms of actual governance, the fact that it, I mean, again, we don't know and, you know,

they're going to spend, again, to use the Haley Barbarism, enough money to scald a herd of wet mules in the Georgia runoff, right? But it seems to me that the fact that McConnell is going to stay the majority, it looks like he'll stay the majority leader. And Republicans will control the Senate is actually. good news for the country, not just because I'm a conservative, and I have a soft spot in my heart for cocaine Mitch, but because Biden would then be the first president to come into office without full control of Congress in his first two years since 1988. The last one who did that in 1988 was George H.W. Bush, and you actually got as a result some remarkably responsible governance. And Biden, as I've said on here before, probably is happy about it. Probably is happy about

this because it allows him to just sort of stiff arm the progressive base of the party and say, look, you know, I understand that you want to add, you know, D.C. and Puerto Rico and Burkino Faso and whoever else into the roll call of states, but we can't do it. We don't have the votes. We don't have the Senate. Not going to happen. Shut up. And I also think that because of the results, Josh Krausho has been pretty good on this over at National Journal, this election, which we didn't talk about earlier was a pretty shocking repudiation of the hardcore progressive left. Everybody who ran as an outright sort of AOC, Bernie, kind of progressive socialist, Medicare for All type, got beaten pretty badly, at least on the House side.

And it is possible, I wouldn't always bet on it, that the Democrats actually take from that some sanity. And so I could see, conceivably, our politics, assuming that Trump isn't too much of a mischief maker, being blissfully a little normal for a little while if Biden, in fact, wins and the Republicans, in fact, take over the Senate. And you'd actually have politics being about, like, making choices between competing goods in terms of government policy, which would be kind of cool. And, you know, so, you know, who knows what's going to happen next, but that scenario I find pretty unterrifying, which is kind of a nice place to be. A lot of optimism from Jonah. Pretty unterrifying is like five-star Yelp review from Jonah.

David, what's your Yelp review? You know, I think I've got the good news and the bad news. Like Jonah, we, we salis. forward to the ramparts in this summer and argued against the burn it all down camp. And I wrote, and I've got it right in front of me on July 23rd. And I said, I want what the best available polling tells me I'm highly unlikely to get. I want Donald Trump out of the presidency and GOP is still in control of the Senate. And that's the good news. That seems to be, again, votes are being counted. So that caveat is there, but that seems to be, as of right now, the outcome. And in a pure sort of policy basis,

I, and from a party hygiene basis, I agree completely with what Jonah just said. I think, I wish the repudiation of Trump had been more bold, but I've never been in the camp that says that part of the problem of the GOP is Susan Collins. No, never been a part of, never been in that camp. Or Joni Ernst is the problem with the GOP. I've not been in the job. I've not been that camp. And from a policy standpoint, a lot of the, what this means is sort of the, the, the doom and gloom caucus of the GOP that says, Biden will end America with the Green New Deal and socialized medicine and destroy religious liberty and publicly finance abortions. All of that stuff's off the table now. It's off the table. What's on the table is stuff like what's a

compromise coronavirus relief package. What's on the table is, is there meaningful health care reform that's available? And it sort of presses a pause on the big sweeping reform until hopefully, hopefully the GOP can come forward with a better candidate, and I want a piece of that betting action between you and Steve, Sarah. But the downside is, so just on the pure political outcome,

I am happy for the way it appears to be working out. On the cultural outcome, it's sad. We are more at each other's throats. We have a president, and I'm going to lament this, Steve, a president who regretfully is acting in many ways, like a third world leader, clawing at trying to remain in power. And that cultural damage is still great. And that cultural damage is immense.

The political outcome, I think, is the best case, I think, for conservatism. Can I ask a lawyer question real quick for both of you guys? So I listened to Annie McCarthy on Fox earlier today, and he made an interesting point. He was saying how last night right before Trump spoke, he said, I'm sure his statement is going to be thoroughly vetted, I'm sorry, Dana Perino said, I'm sure his statement is going to be thoroughly vetted by lawyers. He's going to be, it's going to become lawyer proof, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Love Dana.

Dana was very wrong about that, right? And Andy's point was, because it wasn't lawyered, it actually might have the consequence of making it less likely that if something does go to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court touches any of it because it was so prejudicial and so sort of the Supreme Court is going to come to my rescue and save this election and I want the voting stopped. And for a Roberts court in particular, that is a bad signal for what he wants the role of the court to be. And it might encourage him just or the faction on the court that doesn't want to get involved to stay out where they might have gotten in if it had been a different president under vaguely similar

circumstances. Does that sound right to you guys? They need four votes. Roberts doesn't need to be part of that for. Roberts probably wouldn't be part of that for if that were the issue. I think the bigger issue at this point is there is yet to be a legal dispute with a real injury that could go to the Supreme Court. They'd have to, A, come up with a federal cause of action, which right now they don't have. Their cause of action in Michigan is that the ballots were being opened without observers, that is a problem.

You are allowed to have observers there. I'm not sure it's factually true, but even if it is factually true, not a constitutional problem. You know, the bigger one, the only one that has a federal hook that I've seen is the Pennsylvania one, which also is a factual allegation,

so I don't know whether it's true, which is that some counties were allowing people to come cure absentee ballots with problems, and some counties weren't. that could be a problem. But again, you're going to, A, have to show that that's true. But also, B, this won't matter if it's 20 plus thousand votes. That's just not really what recounts are good for, so to speak.

But, yeah, I'm sure it pissed Roberts off, if that's the question, for sure. I mean, I think we have a record of pre-Amy Coney-Barritt presence on the court jurisprudence that is John Roberts saying, I'm over you, Trump administration. the census case, the DACA case, where it really seems like Roberts was almost acting like a trial judge angry at a litigant for being a sloppy litigant. But Roberts isn't the swing vote anymore. And so his frustration at the Trump administration may not be dispositive. But I agree with everything Sarah said is you've got to have a viable federal case or controversy, a colorable federal claim before you're even going to really be able to walk in the door and make a serious

argument. And right now, what you've got is a lot of normal state counting going on. And I'm sorry, that's not, you know, they can appeal to the Supreme Court, but that doesn't mean the Supreme Court's going to hear it. And don't forget, you still have to first count the votes. Then you have a canvas of those counts. Then you can look at recounts. There's automatic recounts if it's within a certain amount depending on the state. There's requested recounts, if it's within a slightly larger number. And then some states allow you to basically pay for a recount no matter what the score is. We're going to be in that third category, it looks like, where, you know, I haven't looked

at Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Arizona, to see whether they have that and what the number would need to be. But for most of these, it's usually half a point and a point are the first two delineation. So, this is a legal term. How do you spell that? Is that from the original Latin? These are larger margins than Hillary had in 2016. So I'm sorry, than Trump had in 2016 against Hillary.

Okay. So I think that the Democrats have good reason to fret that they didn't get the mandate that they wanted, the margins that they wanted. They didn't take back the Senate. But silver lining for Democrats, because of the either moderating influence or total gridlock, depending on how you see it, of divided government. I think Democrats have a much better chance of gaining seats, holding on to more during midterms, maybe taking back the Senate. If you've looked at the 2022 map, it's not great for Republicans. And for Joe Biden winning re-election, again, assuming that this is called for him, which right now it looks like it will be.

So silver lining, Democrats may not get everything they want, but they will stay in power much longer because there won't be this just back and forth backlash that I totally agree with Jonah, I think is caused by these presidents overreaching in their first two years where they have Congress within their party and then the crazy wings start flexing. Okay, last little thing here,

and it's not so little, it's awesome. Next week, Monday and Tuesday, we are doing our big post-election event. What's next event? is the website, definitely go check it out, $100 and you get a complimentary subscription to the dispatch. All four of us are moderating panels involved in the discussions with some awesome folks like I talked about at the top of the show. What's the question you're most interested in hearing responses to, I don't know, what's the piece of the conference that

you're most excited about, Steve? Well, you know, we wrote in the morning dispatch today that even if Donald Trump loses as it looked then and looks even more now like he is going to do, that his stamp on the Republican Party is long lasting, that Trump may lose Trumpism probably has not. And I'm interested to put that question to some of the folks that we have coming. You know, there's a long, I mean, these parlor discussions that, that take place among political strategists and journalists in Washington about what's next for the Republican Party, you know, as you look forward to 2024, you know, one of the big questions is who's going to be able to marry sort of the old traditional movement conservatives, the kind of Kay Street

Republican crowd, and this new sort of nationalist, Trumpist crowd. And how does that look? just interested to see to what extent people think that that's what comes next. Jonah? I agree with all that. I'm kind of interested as a matter of just pure crumlinology to see how, you know, Republican, again, assuming Trump loses, and that we know that by next week. To see the sort of positioning kind of stuff, I think, is all. always interesting, you know, we didn't talk about it on here, but I thought it was very

interesting that Mike Pence refused to say the elections being stolen in his follow-on comments that Trump very early this morning. That seems to me as a bit of a tell about where he thinks the future is going, but who knows? I'm looking forward to, you know, I'm doing this panel with Jack Goldsmith and Yovallivan and Andy Smarik on the stuff that I'm sort of obsessed with, which is the decay and erosion of political institutions and cultural institutions in this country and how to fix them. And I like eggheadery like that.

So I'm really looking forward to that. And I'm also looking forward to the alcohol-fueled roundups every night, which is going to be a lot of fun. Yes, that's going to be awesome, actually. David? You know, I've looked at the agenda, and without any bias at all, I'm going to say that the two really premier

events are my conversation with Russell Moore about the future of evangelicals in politics and my conversation with Tim Scott. By the way, if there were any question, like, we all sound so nice on this podcast, but there's so much ego in each little box on my Zoom screen, including my own. Like that's, yeah, it's just, like, y'all hide it so well that then on moments like this where I ask your favorite moments and our favorite thing you're looking forward to and everyone picks their own panel. It's just really great. There's a 530. chart that says that my panels are leading by 15, yeah. Leading by 15.

So I want to talk to Tim Scott about, look, the best available data indicates that Trump increased his share of minority votes and may have had the best showing since 2004 Bush win. And so I'd like to talk to Tim Scott about how real does he think that is. what was done right, what can be done better. Very, very interested in that. I also want to talk to him about police reform. He's been in the lead in the GOP Senate, GOP-led Senate on police reform,

and I would expect that the issue is going to come up again. And with Russell Moore, there's lots to talk about the generation gap between evangelicals, which is very considerable. And then the other is, the best available data indicates that Trump's evangelical support slipped

measurably and I'd like to walk through that with him and see if he's got ideas about where and why and if it was the Sunday French press frankly okay true to form I'm picking one of my panels position heal thyself uh-huh so you know the sweep has been this operatives guide to elections

and I'll be talking to two of my favorite Democratic operatives and I am really pumped to get into some of the weeds about some of the tactics that were used, weren't used. We were basically running a high-level experiment on whether ground games matter, whether money and politics matters anymore. I mean, Democrats poured money, just poured so much money into a lot of these Senate races that weren't close. John Ossoff, Amy McGrath, is that her name, right?

I don't even remember now that she's lost. Mike Bloomberg spent $100 million on Texas and these other states that stayed red. So can't wait to talk tactics with them and see what they saw as working, not working, wasteful, and what it means moving forward. So with that,

we hope all of you will check out what's next event.com. Join us on Monday and Tuesday. We actually are super excited, but only for our own panels. Just kidding. We will have, these roundups at the end of the night where the four of us with our handy-dandy drinks

will then discuss everyone else's panel and our feelings and our love for one another, except Jonah. With that, we hope you'll have a wonderful night. Stay happy, insane. Get off Twitter if you need to. Just if you know that's not good for you, just shut down that app right now. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We will see you again. We hope on Monday. No, you won't. This is a podcast. No, on Monday, they will see us. Oh, that's true. Fair enough. I apologize. Thank you.