The Dispatch Podcast - Wrath of the Normals

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

A "reserve army of voters" rejected a proposal to change the constitutional amendment process in an Ohio special election. What does the abortion proxy war for mean pro-life politics and the legacy of Dobbs? Sarah is joined by Steve and Jonah to discuss. Also: -DeSantis campaign reset -Will the GOP debates matter? -Revisiting the Dean Scream -Are adult sites worth your time? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgare. That's Steve Hayes. That's Jonah Goldberg. And, oh, it's going to be a show. We'll start with the latest ballot referendum in Ohio. What it means and what it doesn't mean. Then DeSantis Reset, Part 3. Yeah, what does that mean? And then Pornhub announced that it's shutting down in several states that have implemented age restrictions. Let's see what Jonah thinks about free speech now. It's not worth your time to follow up on that. All right, let's dive right in. Jonah, ballot measure in Ohio. This was a resounding defeat for Republicans, about a 15-point loss in a deep. red state. To set this up, post-Dobbs that overturned Roe v. Way, there have been ballot measures in many states across the country, many of them red states, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, where the

quote-unquote pro-life side has lost that ballot measure. So when Ohio looked at their own ballot referendum rules, they thought, uh-oh, rather than fight on the ballot measure grounds next November over an abortion ballot measure, though, they thought, what if we just make it much harder to do ballot measures instead of needing signatures from half the counties? What about all the counties? Instead of meeting 50% plus one, what if you need 60% to get the ballot measure passed? So that's what was up for this special election. I'm curious what your big takeaways for why it was so lopsided were here. Well, I mean, some of it just sort of play plays into,

Prissel, thank you for asking the question. I had just taken a sip of water and it was everything I could do not to spit that out at your face that I see here on my computer. I think some of those plays into stuff we talked about a bunch of times before,

which is, you know, historically, abortion was good as a topic for Republican votes and Democratic donation. Democrats raised money off abortion, Republicans got people to vote because of abortion. I think it's now becoming pretty clear that that is, flipping. Abortion, and the reason why that was largely true was that abortion was secure in

this country prior to Dobbs. You know, people think that the Roe regime was the compromised regime between pro-life and pro-choice. It wasn't. It was much more on the pro-choice side of the equation. Now with that up in the air, there are a lot of voters, particularly female voters, but not entirely female voters, who didn't feel like they needed to vote on the abortion issue because it was secure. Now it's not. And so we're seeing that there's this sort of, you know, what Marxists might call reserve army of voters that can be mobilized in a way that they couldn't for the last 50 years. And that's changing the political equation all over the place. I also think that there's, I think that's the primary part of it, turnout of a base that is really motivated on an issue.

But I also think part of the lopsidedness of it might have to do with the fact that I think a lot of normals out there, regardless of where they come down on the abortion issue, are just kind of starting to get fed up with attempts by parties to sort of rig things to their benefit. You know, and I think that there's something about fairly or unfairly, something about the scheme of making it harder to amend the Constitution, that some people were like, really, we're going to start doing this now, where we're just going to try and lock in stuff that you can't, you know, win in a normal political contest. And it rubbed some people the wrong way. That's what I think is so fascinating about this is take out the abortion context of this altogether, which, you know,

David French is super interested in it. I'm sort of esoterically interested in it, I guess, from a political standpoint. But like, this Ohio ballot measure had a whole lot of other things that I found really fascinating about it, number one of which is that I'm a pretty anti-majoritarian person. No, I'm a really anti-majoritarian person. I think it's insane that Ohio has a 50% plus one threshold to amend their constitution. But I didn't like this referendum because I didn't like the purpose. I didn't like the process. I didn't like why they were doing it.

It ended up with, you know, you had the Fraternal Order of Police on the liberal side of the question. You had sort of the chambery folks on the conservative side. It was a strange sort of way to go about doing something. that otherwise has some real conservative roots. They never made that argument to people, by the way, that, like, this is an anti-majoritarian, like, good government thing to do. And they didn't even make it about abortion.

The ads that I saw were about trans stuff. Like, which is it, guys? You said that this was pro-life, okay? Then make it about pro-life stuff. If it's about sort of good government, we shouldn't be amending our Constitution this often. Make it about that. But, like, decide what this is about.

So another funny thing to me, just from a political strategy standpoint, of course, is that I understand this was maybe a Hail Mary pass to see if you could stop this pro-choice measure from going through next fall and they didn't have much of a choice. But you had a special election in August, the worst possible time to have an election unless you want the fewest number of people showing up. And so you thought that the people who would show up to vote on a ballot measure in August would be the people

who want to limit their power to vote on ballot measures? That's a weird thought and a weird strategy to take. And yeah, so it didn't play out. It turns out that the people who vote on ballot measures

like voting on ballot measures turnout was also pretty high, very high. I mean, 4.4 so million people turned out for the last Senate election in Ohio, and that was a top-tier Senate race. This was 3 million and people on this ballot measure.

So I also don't think it's one of the cases where we can say, well, turnout was so low that actually, you know, there's, you could really fill the entire voting block with people who were just pro-choice to begin with and this was all about pro-choice stuff. The likelihood here is, and we'll get more numbers later

and be able to break this apart, I think more thoroughly down the road. But my prediction is that we'll see that there were plenty of Republicans who voted, on the other side of this, so to speak. Almost they have to, given the plus advantage Republicans have in the state at this point.

Right. Anyway, I'm sorry. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, again, like, it is possible mathematically to find three million Democrats in the state of Ohio, of course. But this on the face of it and turnout wise is looking very, very unlikely

that Republicans even had their own people for this vote. Yeah, I mean, when you look at the outcomes of the 2022 Senate race that elected J.D. Vance, you look at recent presidential outcomes. I mean, Ohio is a red state and to lose by this margin, I think it was a big blow. It's fair to assume that the people who are pushing this measure wanted to have it in August when people were on vacation, precisely because they thought it would be a low turnout election that they could, that they could potentially win. And I do think, you know, given the tone and tenor of the ad campaigns against this and the centrality of abortion in that messaging, far, far more people showed up to oppose or to protect abortion rights than showed up to enthusiastically a firm simple majority. authoritarian rule. I mean, it's an interesting case. I do think it's insane, I think was your word,

Sarah, that you can amend the Ohio Constitution with a 50 plus one vote. And one of the things you heard from people who wanted to make it a super majority was that, you know, they'll do this on abortion now, and then it'll be minimum wage, and then it'll be, you know, sort of fill in your issues, almost supplanting the need for a legislature at all because you can tee up these things and win the messaging battle. I do think that's a concern. I actually buy the slippery slope argument on this. I think it could be a problem. And I think we're going to see other states pay attention. Having said that, we've been hearing the same thing about the coming tsunami of ballot initiatives and referenda for years.

and it hasn't yet happened. I think we're likely to see more of it. I have a question for you, Sarah. You wrote back in late June a really interesting newsletter with a highly provocative headlines. Sort of like very anti-dispatchian headline, this declarative statement,

Dobbs didn't matter. provocative, maybe even clickbaity. But you've made the argument. You followed up. It's really funny when in dispatch world saying something didn't matter is the click baity thing. Like that's how click baity we are.

Whoa. Status quo wins. Worthy Canadian initiative, not so worthy. Whoa, calm down. Calm down. sort of bring people into our little joke. I get grief at the dispatch for pushing non-sensationalistic headlines,

just very simple descriptive headlines that some people incorrectly believe are boring. I don't think they're boring. I think they're descriptive. But I was reading headlines the other day, and there was a headline in the New York Times story. And I should have posted it in our Slack or brought it forward for discussion. And it was some, the headline literally was something like, the pathway I walk runs next to a basketball court.

That was the headline. Like, can you imagine seeing that headline and thinking, I got to click that. I got to read that. Anyway, Sarah, you made a case. I mean, this wasn't just a headline. There was an actual argument there. Yeah.

And your, if I can just read the top of your piece, because I think it sets up my question to you nicely. A year later, the question everyone seems eager to answer is whether the Supreme Court meaningfully changed American politics with its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. My best answer is kind of not really depends on who you ask. Without having to go through and represent that case, although feel free to borrow as much as you want, does anything that happened in Ohio on Tuesday change your review that you shared on in late June? I actually think it's now my new, like, poster child example for why Dobbs didn't matter.

Let me explain because, first of all, we're ending up with a real row status quo system around the country. Like, these ballot measures that aren't passing are by and large trying to change the status quo from row, from sort of either a viability standard or maybe even something a little bit less than that, like they're just, they're preventing sort of extreme swings on abortion questions in these states. So by and large, you've had, you know, a handful of states for sure have much more restrictive abortion rules in their states. But overall, what we're seeing is actually a trend back to equilibrium

every time there's one of these ballot measures, which is fascinating. Again, set aside what you actually think about the issue. Just from a political standpoint, you have a whole lot of Americans saying, I like the way things are. Please don't change them. Which is very different than what we hear in our elections. Like, oh, this is a change election. Everything's a change election.

Well, I don't know. When it comes to abortion, it turns out people, by and large, seemed okay. Second, the ballot measures have all gone in one direction, meaning status quo or a pro-choice direction. The pro-life side has lost all these ballot measures. But pro-life candidates don't seem affected at all. And I like using the Georgia example still because you have Brian Kemp, hyper-pro-life dude beating Stacey Abrams,

who runs on this issue. at the same time, on the Senate part of that race, you have the Democrat winning and beating the Republican. And that was also a big part of that race. And so the Republican wins at the top of the ticket and the Democrat wins and the second ticket. Like, what does that tell us about where those voters are on abortion? It tells us that it's not a vote-deciding issue for them,

that the economy, inflation, crime, immigration, like, whatever was a vote-deciding issue, it just was an abortion. and even within the Democratic Party, and I know I keep using this example, but I think it's really, really helpful. There is one House Democrat left who was pro-life. He had a primary.

He's down in Texas, so obviously I follow it more closely than I should. He had a primary on reproductive rights. He's the only pro-life Democrat. So, like, of course, someone tried to primary him. A ton of money went into the race from the pro-choice side to try to unseat this guy. He won.

So among Democratic primary voters, it's not even a vote-deciding issue. So, yeah, I think it's a really, you're hard-pressed to find that, quote-unquote, Dobbs mattered politically. Now, here's the counter-argument. I think there's a lot of counter-arguments, especially at the margin, which is sort of a version of what Joan is saying, Republicans had been turning out voters on this, Democrats had been raising money on it, it clearly does toss all of that up into the air. The issue is gone for Republicans. They haven't learned how to talk about it. And Democrats are actually seeming to get

turnout-related bumps from it where there are ballot measures. So the ballot measures seem to drive some Democratic turnout. So. Which means that there will be ballot measures in lots of places in the coming years, right? If this juices Democrat turnout. And what the ballot measure is about it doesn't really matter very much, which is also fascinating. As in, put a pretty milk-toast ballot measure on maintaining the status quo. It doesn't need to be some crazy progressive, you know, reproductive rights ballot measure. It looks like any ballot measure. Well, they don't want a crazy, in many cases, certainly in swing states,

they don't want a crazy reproductive rights ballot measure because that's not popular. I think this is where pro-lifers would like to have a debate on the merits of some of these, because that's not where this is going, I think. That's exactly right. So there's your argument that it does matter, but I think that's on the margin. And compared to what we're seeing for candidates and compared to what we're seeing sort of ballot measures,

quad ballot measures, it certainly just wasn't the like, now the country is different. There's a before and after Dobbs moment yet, to my view. Can I ask Jonah a question? This is what Steve does when he doesn't want to answer questions. in case that's not totally obvious, he just starts asking, he goes into a reporter mode. Yep.

I also just want to find stuff out. Maybe. But I didn't deny what, just, I didn't deny what was true. Yeah, and you always ask me questions to find stuff out. Yeah, okay. There's a reasonable question that people are asking, including many people who are pro-life, and that is this. Republicans argued for 50 years, pro-lifers argued for 50 years to overturn Roe and return this to sort of the political sphere and return this question to the states. This has happened.

It would appear, just based on the results, that pro-lifers are having a very difficult time taking advantage, making the arguments in the fora that they themselves wanted to convince voters to be pro-life or to be on their side of these issues. Is that an oversimplification of what's happening here? And if it's not, why haven't pro-lifers been better at Mount really good arguments to persuade people in the political sphere about the need to return this to the states. First of all, I think we talked about this a bunch. There were basically two positions vis-à-vis Roe and abortion on the right.

One was Roe was a constitutional monstrosity and needed to go because it was bad constitutional law. And one was Roe was a monstrosity because it legalized abortion. And abortion is a horrendous evil, right? You could hold both positions or you could hold just one position, but people could pick and choose between the constitutional argument and the moral argument as they saw fit. With Dobbs, the constitutional argument and the moral argument

are now in tension because if the actual goal is to ban all, to get rid of all abortion, full stop, period, then you really have no particular problem with a national abortion ban imposed by Congress, you know, all that kind of stuff. You wouldn't have a problem necessarily. with the Supreme Court doing an anti-row and saying abortion is now banned, right? I mean, and obviously there are some pro-lifers. There are many pro-lifers who would have a problem with it

because they also prefer the Constitution. But as two separate movements, the symbiosis is now broken. And there are a lot of people who've never had to really come up with a passionate argument about sending it back to the states, save as Reagan dinner boilerplate about federalism. I mean, lots of people just don't have the vocabulary. They don't have the muscle memory to talk about abortion except as the way we've talked about it for 50 years. And I think a lot, particularly a lot of pro-life institutions,

and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush because there's a lot of different kinds of pro-life institutions and movements and organizations. But at a high level of generalization, I think a lot of them have been organized about getting rid of Roe for a very long time. They're the dogs who caught the car. and they don't know how to do it.

And then there are other pro-life organizations that really haven't been about Roe and politics at all. And I think there's just still sort of chugging along, but all of a sudden they see this opportunity to like go big on banning abortion and they can't resist it because they've worked themselves up into this moral imperative argument,

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Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com slash Total Secure. to learn more. Conditions apply. All right. Let's move on to the DeSantis Reset Part 3. We've talked plenty about the DeSantis campaign. We've talked about the other resets. This week he announced that he was bringing on a new campaign manager. But frankly, it was someone who was already on his team in the governor's office and his current

campaign manager remains sort of a senior advisor. So, you know, it's a, it's a shakeup, I guess, but sort of a light, shake-up, light treason, if you will? Let's just check in on the race as a whole. We seem to believe that the indictment out of Georgia for Donald Trump

is probably coming pretty soon by the end of the month, we certainly think. We now are starting to get into the meet of the two federal indictments that are pending, both in Florida and D.C. You know, we're having hearings, we're having filings. We're sort of getting a view I think of what that will look like.

in our day-to-day reporter lives. The debate is coming up, and Mike Pence qualified for it. He'll be the eighth person on the stage. There was a lot of questions whether he would get over that hurdle in time. And boy, coming in under the gun, he made it. Steve, I'll start with you. Looking big picture, just over the course of the summer, let's say. How has this race changed, if at all?

I don't think it's changed much. To the extent that it's changed, I buy the conventional wisdom that we've seen this Republican rank and file rally to Donald Trump effect triggered by the first indictment from Alvin Bragg in New York. There's some polling that suggests that the picture is a little bit more nuanced than that. That's a little bit more complicated and that there are many Republicans who still are willing to bail from Donald Trump, even though he's polling at, you know, 50 plus percent in many of the Republicans. primary polls. In that sense, I think the race has been for all of the churn and all of the

goings on and all of the coverage and all of the insanity has actually been pretty consistent, pretty static over the course of most of the summer. The question to me is whether what we've seen in response to this latest indictment, in particular from Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence, continues, because what we've seen from those two candidates, even as they assailed the Biden Justice Department and sort of amplified Trump's arguments that this was all unfair and that he was being targeted, was a somewhat tougher line on questions related to the election. You had DeSantis saying Trump lost, of course Trump lost. We all know Trump lost. The claims he made about election interference were unsubstantiated.

You've seen Pence step up. He had sort of boilerplate language that he's been using for a long time about how no one is above the Constitution. He used that same language after these indictments, but then he went a couple steps further and began to actually make an argument against Donald Trump in a way that I think we haven't seen. Pence, that's not fair to Pence. Pence has done this a little bit.

He did it in his interview with us last spring, Sarah. but we have seen a willingness to go after Donald Trump on those questions more than we had seen in the early parts of this summer. And I think the big question is whether that continues or accelerates at the debate and whether it matters. Does this, you know, if other people are making this argument,

does it end up actually affecting Donald Trump's standing? I would have said yes to that question if you had posed it to me and if they had begun making these arguments back in the, you know, winter, back in the early spring, I'm less sure of that now because they've been making sort of making Trump's argument, making his case now for several months, and this is something of a turn. Follow up. So you have this R&C pledge that says that to make it onto the debate stage, aside from, of course,

the number of donors and the polling and all of that, you also have to think. pledged to support the eventual nominee. This knocked out someone like Will Hurd, for instance, who, you know, said, look, I'm just not signing that, so it doesn't really matter if I meet the other criteria. Chris Christie, who basically implied, he'll sign it and doesn't care. Like, he'll do what he wants later anyway. But now you have Donald Trump saying that he won't sign it and that he's going to announce his debate intentions next week.

Is this debate going to matter at all, Steve? I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I'm skeptical that it will. You know, this is the kind of thing that if it were any other candidate besides Donald Trump, the Republican Party would say,

look, we laid out this. This is a very clear criterion. If you're not willing to make the pledge, you're not going to be on the debate stage. You sometimes feel like Donald Trump wants that. It sort of gives him the outsider status. It makes him the story even more. And it suggests that he can do

whatever the heck he wants. he's not relying on the Republican Party. You know, Jonah's made the argument that if debaters follow Chris Christie's lead, we know what Christie's going to do in the debate, right? He's going to come out. He's going to be very tough. He's going to be harsh on Donald Trump and might create an opening for people beyond Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence to sharpen the arguments that they're making against Donald Trump.

You know, if it does that, that'll be a story for several days, certainly. And I think for Republican voters who haven't heard anything. other than Donald Trump as this victim of the Biden Justice Department, you know, maybe the election actually was stolen. If you start to have the Republican field saying, yeah, Joe Biden won the election, maybe there were problems with the election, maybe the changes that were made to, to accommodate voters during COVID, ended up being to the advantage of Democrats and should have been more scrutiny on that, but Joe Biden won the election.

You know, I think that could matter. You've had the Republican field. than elected Republicans in Washington and in state houses, effectively getting Donald Trump's back in a sort of a weird way. Very few of them actually believe the election was stolen in the way that Trump has claimed because they're familiar with reality. But at the same time, they're not challenging. I do think if there was a shift there and they challenged him and said, of course, you've been election, this is absurd. And the things he's been saying are untrue. That could, has a potential to to shake up the race to a certain extent. Jota, what do you think? What's happening

here? Is this an interesting topic anymore? Or are we over the primary because it's kind of done? And all of this is, you know, tumult under the water. So many ducks, legs flapping. But above the water, it's going. So, I mean, the first thing I need to be said is there have been so many words since I last spoke. But I don't know where to start. No. Just about one thing on the Pence thing, it did remind me of my friend Ramesh Pooner's line that Pence's argument has sort of boiled down to, I was proud to have served in this administration that was an enemy of the Constitution, which is just sort of a hard sell in some ways. But I think the GOP made a huge, or the RNC made a huge mistake

in running these debates themselves. This is something the brother Starwald has talked about a bit where in the past if the R&C agreed to work with some media organization the media organization set the rules for participation

and then therefore took the heat for participation. Now there is no buffer for the R&C in the standards that it sets and it is I mean Let me put it this way. In a macro point of view, I think it's good that the party is actually setting its own rules

and trying to enforce them and all the rest. But for the political cycle, it's created nothing but headaches for the RNC to do all this stuff themselves. And I don't know. We talked about this a little bit last week, Sarah, but like I'm increasingly of the mind that there's no Kobayashi-Maru. here, right? There is no thing that an actor, a candidate, a journalist, a judge, whatever can do to upset, maybe not a judge, but to upset the fundamentals of the dynamic of this race right now. Trump is way, way ahead. I think he is way ahead. The way I've been thinking about it is, is that both Biden and Trump are running as if they are incumbent presidents. Now, of course,

only Biden is an actual incumbent, but Trump's place on stranglehold on the party is equivalent to an incumbent presidents, but they're both running like very, very, very, very, very weak incumbents. It is a really bad sign for an actual incumbent president like Joe Biden to be at, you know, have only 50% of the party wanting him to run again. That is not good. Similarly, Trump, he doesn't really have, I don't think even 50% of the party, but it's close to that because a lot of people are just rallying around them because of the indict. stuff. I think it's closer to a third, but it's an important third. And I think that nothing is going to change. I more and more think that we're going to learn that it's still entirely

possible Trump is not the nominee. But it's going to be because there's a Howard Dean like moment where voters at the last minute are just sort of like, well, I know everyone else is going to vote for him. So it's okay if I don't. And the electability argument may kick in by then, right? That's a big part of what undid Dean in 2004 was that a lot of voters said they liked Dean more than Kerry, but they thought Carrie was more electable. And then Dean had that scream and he completely unraveled and he didn't win another primary until Vermont basically lost 38th other primaries.

And no one has ever won both New Hampshire and Iowa in modern memory. and so Trump's going to, if you just go by anything like a historical trend, Trump has a good shot of losing one. Trump, I don't know if you guys know this, but it's actually pretty well documented. Trump responds to losses poorly, and that could set off another cascade of things. And so I think, I still think it's very possible to the guy unravels, even, you know, taking out the possibility of all the legal challenges. But there's just not an argument that Ron DeSantis is going to make that people are like,

oh, now I get it. Now I see. I shouldn't vote for the guy I tried to steal an election, or I shouldn't vote for the guy who lied about building the wall. It's just, I don't think, I don't think the voters that Trump has are persuadable at scale from normal conventional

political messaging. It's going to take some psychological undercurrent down the road. And this kind of thing bothers people like us who think that, like, arguments really matter that tactics matter, strategy matters, all these kinds of things. Instead, it's sort of like General Kutuzov in War and Peace, where he just says, look, time and patience, those are the greatest warriors.

They take care of everything. And that frustrates a lot of people. So I find looking back at other campaign cycles and individual campaigns really helpful, but I also find it helpful in the not comparison, meaning what's different about Dean and John McCain, for instance, compared to Donald Trump, because I think those are really instructive campaigns right now. Howard Dean was the insurgent candidate.

Nobody really knew who he was. He was the new guy, the change, the let's take a risk on this guy. And so there was always an undercurrent of like, is it too risky? Is it too risky? What don't we know about this guy? And so what ends up being his undoing

is that, yep, voters in the end got a little shaky about it and they went with what they knew. very similar story in the reverse with John McCain. You know, people were like, John McCain is the heir apparent. Let's go shopping. They shopped around and all the other candidates. Every single one, remember,

was like number one for a week and then faded back. And so in the end, they were like, well, we'll go with what we know. They're actually very similar races. Howard Dean sort of consolidated, you know, that shopping period for a lot of. of Democratic voters. But in the end,

the problem with the comparison to Donald Trump is he's the comfort candidate. At least right now. That's what I mean by running like an incumbent president. Yeah. He's the well-known one. He's the comfortable one.

And they don't seem to be shopping in the meantime. So to say, you know, for, and this isn't, you know, a Jonah attack. It's more of a, you know, Jonah just flooding maybe is a better term, you know, to compare, like to say rather that, well, Howard Dean failed or John McCain came back from nothing. Like, yeah, but those were very different dynamics. Oh, I agree. I totally agree. My only point is the, I think the only place where the comparisons are fruitful is to say

that voters can be mercurial. Yeah. And they can make decisions. And they can spook. And they They can spook and they make decisions for weird reasons, sometimes good reasons, sometimes bad reasons, but often unpredictable reasons. And my larger point is just that it's the best any of these candidates can do. It's sort of like Rick Santorum, right? I mean, Rick Santorum, I mean, he didn't get credit for it until like three weeks later because Rick Simtoran is kind of cursed. But he won the Iowa caucuses in, what, 2012? And he did it because he just did the nuts and bolt stuff and shook hands and visited every count. and ate a lot of at a lot of pizza ranches or whatever.

And it was largely invisible to the conversation in Washington about polls and strategy and strategists and money and all that kind of stuff. He had like 25,000 bucks or something in his account at the time. Yeah, so it's entirely possible that like all of this nuts and bolts stuff pays off for that psychological thing at the end. And it's entirely possible that it doesn't. I'm just saying it's like all we have to argue about are polls and money right now. And the things that are going to change things

are going to be like sweat equity on the ground and psychology. And that's just kind of invisible to this conversation. I would compare voters to like a murmuration of Starlings. You know, like they can turn pretty suddenly and it's not totally clear why the original turn happened, but once it happens, like the whole thing can turn pretty quickly. The problem is it just doesn't turn that often and it hasn't turned since Donald Trump really has been in Republican politics.

Steve, get on in here, but then I want to focus a little bit more on Ron DeSantis. Well, I'm going to focus a little bit more on Ron DeSantis as it happens. I want you to, I'd like the two of you to weigh in on a debate that I've been having with our esteemed colleague, Nick Catojio, and I will unveil myself, unmask myself as Nick's mystery colleague with whom he was emailing about the Republican primary. It's pretty rich him calling you a mystery colleague when, correct me if I'm wrong, literally

none of us have ever seen his face. Not true. I have. Fair. You have? Do you think it was a paid actor? I don't. The argument that Nick was making, he made a typically smart and savvy and detailed case at the beginning

of this week on Ron DeSantis, in which he kind of asserted in passing that DeSantis, the theme of DeSantis' campaign had been competence and electability in his critique of Trump. And I pushed back and sent him a note and said, I think the problem with DeSantis' campaign is precisely that he has not focused on electability and competence. And that had he focused on electability and competence from the beginning,

we could be looking at a different scenario right now. I think DeSantis is sort of obsessively focused on wokeism and all its varieties. trying to split the MAGA base. That was the strategy from the DeSantis campaign from the beginning. It seems pretty clear that it's failed. And it does look like it's early days, but it does look like part of the reimagination of the DeSantis campaign is a turn towards something closer to a critique of Donald Trump

on competence and electability. And I'm wondering, I'll start with you, Sarah, if you believe that it would have made any difference. If DeSantis, rather than going super, super anti-woke and giving early interviews to Benny Johnson and Clay Travis and alt-right types and launching on Twitter with Elon Musk, if he had focused relentlessly on competence and electability,

would he be in a much better place right now? Would he be in a better place at all right now? A possible to answer. certainly the campaign I would have run, which probably means it wouldn't have won, just track record-wise. I think there's a really good chance that they'd be exactly where they are, even though I think that's the campaign they would have run. And even though, to me, it's the only path that was viable. You know, it's sort of like what I was talking about last week with the super PACs spending all this money up front and then people sort of writing like, the Super PACs

spent all their money. And look, Ron DeSance's numbers went down as if that means that the SuperPack had the wrong strategy. Well, it might have been the right strategy, and it just turned out none of the strategies would have worked. I think the right strategy was always going to be pick off electability first, then make your case for why you're the alternative, especially when, as Ronda Santos, you were coming in

as everyone's like, we're looking at you as the alternative. Then great. Then just make the case on why they should be shopping. Why, you know, if you can't convince them to even look at someone else, then it doesn't matter what you're selling. So I really feel strongly that that was the right strategy that they did not pursue. Do I feel strongly that it would have made a difference, that Ron DeSantis would either be closer to Trump or ahead of Trump?

He would have needed to win that electability argument much earlier than I think I thought he needed to. And that's part of the problem. They actually turned out to have far less time than I think any of us thought. and so when he delayed his campaign announcement till so late, it's hard to make the electability argument when you're not an actual candidate. I mean that both like legally and practically. And then by the time he announces his candidacy,

Donald Trump's getting indicted and the oxygen's gone. Yeah, you know, I'm hard pressed to second guess that somehow my strategy would have worked when theirs failed because there were these external factors, you know, my sweeping analogy. But the timing on the strategy, does really matter, right? I mean, the fact that he waited until the end of the Florida legislative session, that struck me as crazy. Donald Trump was weak. Remember, if you go back to the post-election period. There was a time. There was a window. And I know we talked about this on this podcast several times.

You go back to that post-election period. Remember, Donald Trump had reached out to congressional Republicans trying to score early endorsements so that he could come out and announce and show this, this force, dozens and dozens of congressional Republicans had endorsed him. And it failed. Nobody wanted to support Donald Trump. He had, he was angry about it privately. He had, I think, one senator and eight members of the House in the weeks after the 2022 midterms. And because the results of those midterms, he looked weak and vulnerable. And DeSantis was on the rise. He was getting a lot of buzz and elected to wait until the end of the Florida legislative session. to make his announcement, to make his move,

and then ran on this. I just think the woke, I get it. I understand you want to appeal to the Republican base. That's going to be part of the argument. And certainly he could point to the things that he did as governor to say, look, I've got these anti-woke credentials. But the other thing he did was he won in 2022 by 19 points as Donald Trump had stumbled.

He could point to all of these places that Donald Trump had said he was going to do things as president and failed to do that. and DeSantis, with a strong Republican legislature, had accomplished a lot of things as governor. The case was sort of ready-made, in my view, for him to campaign on, and they opted not to instead to run the Benny Johnson primary, which just strikes me as insane.

So here's what was interesting to me, because this is my point, right? They had a window where Donald Trump was vulnerable, and they were the insurgent, but the window was shorter than I thought it would be. And so I think it was shorter than they thought it would be, too. But what's weird is that their reason for waiting, I thought, from the outside, until the legislative session was done to announce,

was so that he could run on being an effective governor of his state. Well, that's weird because it's not really what he's running on. So why did you wait then? If we were just going to run on this stuff, like then you could have announced in December. Yes. So that part's weird. And he already had a full term. Yeah, for sure.

The other part, though, that I think is so easy a trap for a campaign to fall into is what Carly used to call activity instead of accomplishment, that you're really, really busy, you're constantly answering these attacks, and you confuse that activity for accomplishing something. And so I think you see a campaign bogged down in answering every Twitter meme and every attack that any, you know, blue, checkmark says about them on Twitter and they're like, aha, look how many of these moles were whacking. That is an activity, but it's not an accomplishment. And I think they would be stunned if they actually sort of build time a la lawyers to see how many hours paid staff spent on that versus bigger picture, narrative stuff, you know, in that quadrant that we all know, like the urgent versus important quadrant. They were doing urgent, not important quadrant, a lot.

And I think they missed out on a bunch of the important, not urgent work that a campaign really should be doing during those times. So sorry, that's like a little inside baseball stuff. But I will tell you how hard it is, especially to get sort of mid-level staff because they're so hyped up on adrenaline. They want to do the urgent stuff. It feels good. You're getting quick results back.

every time you, you know, tweet back at someone and tell them what's up, it can feel accomplishing. But someone has to step back and say, like, what did you accomplish today? You spent three hours on Twitter trying to convince people who definitely hate you, you know, hate your candidate that they shouldn't, or that the people who are looking at them are like, ha-ha, you own them. Like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.

The people on Twitter are not real life. These aren't your voters right now. Like, that's not what we should be spending our time on. I mean, that's part of the thing, right? It's like, in many respects, the entire Twitter sphere is a quadrant of space where it's like full of dark matter that is all urgent, but not important. And it's not just that it's a way, it could be a waste of time. It's the few times it can become important are times when it can get you in trouble.

Like when you have a staffer posting Nazi memes, you know. Just for example, no one would ever do that, obviously. No, I don't be, I don't know where I get these things. I just pull them out of my head. But my point is, is like, and so in that way, I'm with everybody who thinks that like the announcement speech wasn't in and of itself the disaster that people claimed it, some people claimed it was.

But doing it on Twitter was so emblematic of their misplaced priorities and messaging of the DeSantis campaign from the beginning. I mean, it was sort of a literary flourish to, like, have a error-prone announcement on Twitter where, like, I don't know a lot of normal, a lot of listeners have seen it, but there are these famous downfall videos. It's clips of Hitler in his bunker, and people change the captions. They used to be very popular, like, five, ten years ago. And there's a new one about DeSantis that is, like, bringing back the genre. That's very funny.

It's very well done. Wait, can I just say my favorite line? Sure. I was supposed to be the Republican Jack Kennedy, and instead, I'm Gary Hart without the monkey business. But there's a line in there where he says, you guys talk me into doing my announcement on Twitter, more Republicans would have seen me if I'd done it on Rachel Maddow.

And there's some real truth to that, you know? By the way, whoever wrote that, someone who knows the DeSantis campaign very well. For sure. This is not a casual observer. The memes are coming from inside the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is also part of the problem, of course. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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It's hard to say, right? Wait, we need to get Valerie, HR chief at the dispatch on this podcast. Okay, again, I resent it. Anyway, no. You guys are doing this with me here. Usually don't you just say this stuff? for when I'm gone, and then you do like art jokes and stuff.

Yeah, but you know what? We really didn't get reprimanded when you were gone. That's because I haven't listened yet. We got scolded by a lot of people. And that's why I use ExpressVPN. No, so, I mean, from a policy perspective. Yes.

From policy perspective, it turns out that age verification laws, which say that you have to demonstrate that you're 18 or older before you can log into sites like Pornhub, which is the largest of porn sites. I think in the world, it's traffic. It's very depressing whenever you start looking at the data.

And Pornhub has just simply pulled out of some states because of not wanting to comply with this. Apparently, it's burdensome and problematic and all that. and so porn viewing by minors is apparently going down. And I am fine with it. I think it is good. I think it is a- Really hot take from Jonah here.

I can't believe he's coming out mildly against pornography for minors. Yeah, but here's the thing. There are a bunch of people who, including friends of mine at places like Cato and R Street and various other places, who think age verification stuff is bad because it's unwieldy, you can impinge on First Amendment things and yada, yada, yada. And I think if the argument is it should be better constructed and more efficiently constructed, fine.

That's, you know, like, okay. But, like, the idea that age restriction requirements and the like are making it more difficult for little kids, for minors to be. exposed to pornography at will does not bother me very much. And I think it's a net good for society. And if these age restriction things basically just make it as difficult to get access to porn as it was 10 years ago, where it was historically very easy to access to porn, that's progress. And I think it's one of these things. It's one of these sort of low-hanging fruit things that

demonstrates that the law can actually, that government and good policy can actually improve some of these trends that everyone is saying, prove that Western liberal democratic capitalism doesn't work. It's like, no, let's actually try to figure out how to deal with, like, you got complaints? Let's look at the complaints and try to fix them.

Because there's a lot of flex inside of liberal democratic capitalism to fix problems with society. So I think it's good and worth our time. Not the porn. There's an interesting legal argument around this about the ability to restrict access to First Amendment protected material to minors. David and I are actually going to dive into it more on our next AO episode next week with a special expert guest on the legal side.

But some of this is also the logistical side, is that it is really hard to do age verification. If you just have a pop-up box, it's like, are you 18? Okay, everyone checks yes. If you ask for their birthdays, they lie. If you ask for an ID, they use their parents. If you use a credit card, like basically everything that's been tried hasn't been very effective or it's shutting out adults then. And that's not the goal either.

Although, again, I'm not crying a huge river over that, I suppose. But okay, but even before we get to this, Steve, I saw someone say something that I, like, struck a court with me. It's like sat with me for a few days because I think, I think they might be talking about me. And I want to see what your reaction to this is. But basically, conservatives 20 years ago. Oh, my God, teen pregnancy rates are out of control.

These kids are all having sex at such a young age. Under the bleachers in the back of the car. Blah! Conservatives now. Oh, my God. The kids aren't having sex anymore. They're not even interacting. Teen pregnancy rates have dropped so dramatically that now we have a birth rate crisis.

Which is it, conservatives? Are you mad when they were having sex? or are you mad now that they're not having sex? Is the sky just falling no matter what the kids are doing with each other? Is there a point there? No, I mean, I don't think, I don't think conservatives are angry that teenagers aren't having sex and families. I think there's concern about the birthright with families, with adults.

No, I think I'm concerned that teenagers aren't having sex anymore. You're concerned? Yeah, because it... You want them to be having more just seeking... Dear FBI, this is not quite what you think. No, that there is something concerning at the rate at which we are seeing a huge drop-off in all sorts of what used to be normal teen behavior, sex, alcohol consumption, just in-person interactions.

At the same time, we're then seeing a huge rise in only interacting in online spaces, mental health disasters, teen girls with just huge. huge anxiety issues that we've never seen before. And you can chalk up some of it to like, okay, well, we're reporting it more, we're more comfortable with mental health issues. That cannot explain this total change. And so for me, I know this is weird. But yes, the kids aren't having sex is actually like one of the more concerning trend indicators

because in previous generations, you couldn't stop the kids from having sex. It was kind of a natural part of the whole thing, hormones and the whatnot. But why isn't it happening now? So, yeah, I guess I do. It's a little like silent spring for me, which don't, it's so many jokes. I'm trying to keep this to be a family-friendly podcast, you guys. You have no idea how hard this is.

But yes, the answer to your question, Steve, I am one of the people who was concerned about, you know, really high teen pregnancy rates, and now I'm really concerned about no sex whatsoever. Like, I guess I wanted. some sort of unicorn amount of protected sex for children. I, okay, can we not make me talk about this anymore? Not children, right.

We should clarify, not children, children. Can I take a stab to defend Sarah's position? Because I basically agree with her. Just know that they're less likely to go after me than you. Yeah. So I actually, I think I called, I wrote a G-File about this called, I think we're turning Japanese. And the issue.

The issue isn't that we're upset that young people are having less out of wedlock birth and less and fewer out of wedlock births and less out of wedlock sex already are prematerial sex or any of that kind of stuff is that they don't want to. Yes. That's the problem. I wanted them to be sexually frustrated. And like there are a whole slew of problems. You've all been as written about this. The problems that we used to have with social breakdown in the United States had to do. with the challenge of containing youthful energy

that and trying to channel it into healthy and productive ends. Now the problem is we have a youthful energy crisis where young people are just looking at screens. They're not much interested or motivated. There are, like, Steve, we are roughly the same age. I know you're a little younger and you should. I mean, not really. Like a generation different.

You can be my father. You demonstrate your youth and an experience all the time. But when we were kids, when we were 20-somethings, the idea that you would go on the equivalent of the Internet and brag about how you were an involuntarily celibate would be so otherworldly, right? But now you have these in-cells who, like, openly brag that they simultaneously hate women

and they're pissed off that they can't have sex with them. Those are not good combinations. and there's a lot of these sorts of problems I think are in society and it is there is a kind of lethargy that comes from I think first of all watching an enormous amount of porn but also that sets expectations between men and women in all sorts of unhealthy ways that then makes sex not only disappointing you know why aren't you wearing your high heels and hanging from a chair

You know, but also... I think that every time I look at you. But also, you know, it makes it scarier, right? Because the expectations are so high. And there's the amount of participation in life is decreasing across a whole bunch of different areas, not just sort of sex and dating. It's like people are just cocooning,

looking at screens, scared to engage the world, take risks, everybody. I know we are not supposed to use Snowflake anymore and all that kind of thing. That, I think, is the problem. And we've seen Japan go down this road for years now, which is why their birth rate has been so low. That's the concern. It's like we wished on a monkey poor no more out of wedlock births

and no more premarital sex. And we got our wish. But look at the deformed, monstrous form that that wish, you know, materialized that. So, yeah, I think that's smart. And I don't want to be misunderstood. good. I guess I look at the societal consequences of this onlineization of youth and believe that more teen sexual activity is not a negative. Like, that's one of the silver linings. There are very few. Undoubtedly, these have, you know, there are long-term social implications for, you know, not only kids,

but for how we will conduct ourselves in years forward that we don't even understand. We can't even begin to understand at this point. It certainly is the case. I mean, I would also say that there's a huge additional factor that we're not talking about, and that's COVID. Kids who were in high school during the last five years didn't have the opportunity to do things like go to football games in some cases.

I mean, if you were in a real lockdown state or a day, attended real lockdown high school, you could have gone almost two years without really interacting with your peers or interacting with your peers only online. And I think for people, you know, speaking to a certain extent from personal experience, for people who had set what we thought were very hard rules around screen time and online engagement and social media and these things, you were left with this dilemma because, you know, on the one hand, your kids, if a lot of their social interaction came online and had to come online, you had to soften those rules. You had to make that more available to them so that they didn't suffer

the kinds of mental stresses that I think so many kids are suffering these days. So it's a balance and I think COVID played a pretty significant role. I was at a meeting with a bunch of parents maybe a year ago. And I guess this is a thing. You all probably know much more about this, but it was surprising to me that there is a spate of teenagers who are no longer interested in getting their driver's license because they don't need to go out.

They don't want to go out. They're content to just sit at home and be online so that there's no reason to get a driver's license. And one woman I was talking to was lamenting that her 25-year-old daughter had never really shown any interest in getting a driver's license because she doesn't want to interact with people in person, which I do think is sort of not just lamentable but scary in a sort of broader societal way. I don't have a sense of how common that is and it feels she felt like something of an outlier.

but, you know, there are, if you, if you Google the trend, you can, you can find more about it. It's not, it's not a one-off. Well, I think we'll leave it there on sort of a, huh, where is this going, note? But it definitely seems to matter. So we answered that question at least, and that's our only goal in this segment. All right, thank you all for listening. Leave a comment, a rating, wherever you are hearing this podcast, or feel free to become a member of the dispatch. $10 a month, right, Steve?

$10 a month, $100 a year, great bargain. You're going to want to be a member of the dispatch as we head into this election. That's for sure. And you can hop in the comments section on this podcast, get our newsletters without paywalls, all that stuff. It's pretty fun. We got a fun little community here. So otherwise, we'll talk to you next week. Thank you.