The Megyn Kelly Show - DeSantis Crushes, Trump's Effect, and a Red Ripple, with Charles C.W. Cooke, Jeremy Peters, Jason Riley, and More | Ep. 431

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Well... what to make of the election night red ripple? Megyn Kelly takes a deep dive into all election night storylines, and storylines still to come, with Charles C.W. Cooke, host of National Review's "Charles C.W. Cooke Podcast," the New York Times' Jeremy Peters, author of "Insurgency," and Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal, to talk about gains for the GOP, surprising victories for the Democrats, candidate quality playing a key role, the Dobbs factor in the results, the Trump impact and DeSantis' huge night, whether the polls were right or wrong, the COVID referendum from last night, the significance of the GOP seemingly taking over the House, and more. Then we take a closer look into two key states, Arizona, with Axios reporter Jeremy Duda, and Georgia, with Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein, to discuss races that still aren't called, Stacey Abrams' latest loss, whether Kari Lake can still win, issues with counting votes, who has the edge in the Georgia runoff, and more. Plus Megyn takes listener calls about the future of Trump and the GOP.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is The Megyn Kelly Show. Just a few hours after we were off the air, here we are back on. We felt this coming as we ended last night's special election episode at 11 p.m. The red wave seems to be more like a red ripple. It wasn't a tidal wave or a tsunami. It wasn't a great surfing wave. It was like something that you would place your little like one and a half year old to sit in at the beach while mom looks on from, you know, her towel. I guess it's fine.

It's not a threatening wave. It's not what the Republicans wanted, but it's better than like, you know, an undertow where the water goes back out the other way, which isn't exactly what happened either. More importantly, however, there are several key races still to be decided. Georgia at this hour does look to be headed for a runoff. God help us. Okay, that would be December

6th in the race between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock, but that has not yet been officially called, so it could go any way. In Arizona, Carrie Lake is just behind her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs. But there's still one third of the vote to be counted. And most of that is same day votes. So that is very much possible. You know, a red, possibly a red seat. We'll see. We have got top local reporters in each state to give us the update, meaning both Georgia

and Arizona. We'll get to them in just a bit. But looking at the country overall, it's confusing, right? It's confused. Did you are you confused? And I got I'm confused. Dave Wasserman, who's the great Cook Political Report editor, put it this way this morning. That was the craziest election night I've ever seen in Florida. As you you know the big story ron de santa's far far exceeding expectations winning by 20 points he he won by i think 1.4 million votes and last time around when he ran he won by 34 000 votes think about that up in pennsylvania john fetterman won fairly easily over Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania. And at this hour, the GOP is still expected to take the House, but it hasn't happened yet. Not a done deal. Thanks to Democrats

overperforming throughout the country, including picking up some seats that they were not expected to. However, they also lost a bunch that they were said not to be favored to do. So good night for the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, right? Sean Patrick Maloney picked up some seats not expected. No, he just conceded to his GOP opponent in his personal New York House race. He went down, Mahoney's gone. In fact, New York Dems may lose five seats in the state, and that could be the difference that hands the House to the GOP. New York that did not elect Lee Zeldin as their new Republican governor. They kept Kathy Hochul in office, but it was tight. And I think you can credit Zeldin for pulling these GOP House races

over the line. Here to help us make sense of it all is a pair of political minds that we enjoy talking to after the last major political event. And that was President Biden's day to the union earlier this year. Charles C.W. Cook, who is host now of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast at National Review and New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, who is author of Insurgency, How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. We had Jeremy on. We talked about that book. And boy, oh boy, in many ways, it was pretty prescient if you look at what happened last night. Charles, Jeremy, welcome back.

Thank you. Great to see you both. So am I right? Like, do you agree? Charles, let me start with you. It's like the, I know you have little kids. It's like the little wave that, you know, you set up your toddler, you let him play, give him a toy.

He can splash around in that kind of a wave there's absolutely no threat of death or destruction but it certainly wasn't title and i don't even think it was all that decent for a body surf no i i do agree i i think we had a tsunami in florida and then it just stopped. It didn't move any further up the coast, or across the country. I, with the exception of Florida, which I think we have to treat separately, think this was a disaster for Republicans relative to expectations relative to the political environment. And certainly my predictions were wrong. But my predictions were informed by a couple of things. The first was the polling and the second was being in Florida.

And, you know, if you live in this environment, this atmosphere, it's hard to imagine in a state that DeSantis won by 20 that Republicans aren't going to win by one in Pennsylvania. I just don't think there's any sugarcoating it. I've seen some people try to put silver linings up for grabs. I think this was a huge loss. I mean, if you had said to any political analyst a year ago, you're going to have nearly 10% inflation. You're going to have a president who's deeply unpopular, you're going to have the voting public split on which party is more extreme, which party is more of a threat, and so on and so forth. And then you would send them these numbers, they'd have said no, that doesn't add up. I think there are a number of reasons for it, which I'm sure we'll get into.

But my takeaway is this is a big catastrophe for Republicans and they need to look at why it happened. Not to mention you've got over two thirds of the electorate saying the country's heading in the wrong direction. And so did they vote for change? Not really. So what direction exactly do we need to go in? Remaining unclear to Jeremy, what did you make of it? I mean, I think you hit it right on the head there, Megan. I mean, the country is so closely divided. This is what happens when you

have two deeply unpopular options. It reminds me a lot of what we saw in 2016 between Trump and Hillary Clinton. It was another very, very closely divided count. And neither candidate was very palatable to the American people. I think one of the things that I took away from the results last night, and you know, they're still coming in, obviously. But you know, you have to wonder wonder if Republicans are somehow a victim of believing their own hype, right? All we heard in the media and mostly right wing media, I mean, leading up to this election was, you know, Biden is basically the weekend at Bernie's candidate being propped up by AOC. John Fetterman is a zombie. You know, like the economy is so terrible and crime in big cities and homelessness is so out of control that the Democrats are just in for an utter wipeout. And that didn't happen. That doesn't mean, though,

that all the news in here is good news for Democrats. And you mentioned New York. I think that's a perfect place to start. Right. In New York, Democrats underperformed. Kathy Hochul will be reelected, but with a much smaller majority than any governor has had in recent history in New York. You had John Patrick Maloney lose his seat. And across the country in Los Angeles, you have a mayor, a mayoral race where a former Republican could very likely win. It's very tight. You know, we don't know how it's going to turn out. But there are still examples in these results, despite the repudiation of Republicans pretty much across the board. There's still some examples you could point to where it reveals an unease, I think, with the overall direction and perception of the Democratic Party. Let me ask you a follow up on that, because I have been trying to figure out whether this is one of those right left media cycles that went awry. But my belief is that pretty much everyone was predicting a GOP big night. The size of the bigness was what

was under debate. The Democrats were worried that it was going to be huge. The Republicans were hoping that it would be. But you look at Cook Political Report, you look at FiveThirtyEight, you look at RCP. They were all predicting GOP pickups, big pickups in the House and the Senate and the range was between net one, you know, like the taking control of the Senate versus plus three, three or four for the most optimistic prognosticator. So it wasn't like there was that one team, like MSNBC was like, no way,

the GOP is going to lose, I'm telling you. And Fox was saying the opposite. There seemed to be a general agreement. This is going to be a very strong night for the GOP. And then it didn't happen. No, I think that's a good point. Certainly, I mean, even you look at my publication, there were a lot of stories about the Democrats being in big troubles. You know, certainly this was not the commentary that Republicans were going to have a good night was not exclusive to conservative media. I think, you know, the sense of how much of a runaway victory it appeared to be on the horizon

was kind of overstated there. I will say, though, and this may be surprising to some of your listeners, Megan, but the polls toward the end, and I was talking to a very smart Republican strategist about this this morning, the polls were actually pretty correct in some key races, the Fetterman race being a good example. They had him up very slightly over Oz. That ended up being the case. In Nevada, it showed neck and neck. That is certainly the case. In Wisconsin, it had Ron Johnson up just a little bit. And in Arizona, it had Kerry Lake up just a tiny bit. Now, we'll see what happens there. My sources say that it's still possible Kerry Lake pulls it out. They also say that in Nevada, it seems less likely that the Republican Senate candidate will win there. But by and large, unlike what we saw in 2020, in 2018, 2016, the polls did better this time, especially the ones toward the end. I think, at least in the words of one strategist I was talking to earlier today,

they didn't want to believe it because the polls had been so wrong before. So that's what made, I think, Republican could have been a situation for the GOP where if this election happened one week earlier, they would have done better like that the very last day or two, they were inching more Dem. And we talked about on the show yesterday, but there was that final NBC News poll that showed equal enthusiasm amongst Democrats and Republicans. And now it was an outlier based on about four or five polls total. But it was the most recent and it was showing an evening up in enthusiasm. And certainly that was on display last night.

So, Charles, this morning, lots of recriminations. We had thought the recriminations would be on the Dem side, right, because they were already starting that yesterday. Like our messaging stinks and we're going to have to regroup. No, it's the opposite today. And most most of what I'm seeing on Twitter from conservatives, from MAGA, you know, lovers and so on, they're all taking a hard look at Trump. I mean, Trump, once again, is at the center of the discussion. And he should be, because he is the establishment now within the Republican Party. He wasn't in 2015. He ran against it. He lambasted it. He saw himself as an insurgent. But he's now the establishment. And that means that he is in some way responsible for the party's direction. He sees himself as being the head of the party. He sees himself as the presumptive nominee in 2024. He started preemptively trying to dissuade anyone from running against him by either threatening them or telling them to wait.

And he chose a lot of these candidates in the way that the establishment used to. Now, people will say, yes, but the primary voters had to acquiesce to his decisions. That's true. But that was also true of the establishment in 2008 and 2012. The establishment made its recommendations and primary voters went along with it. That's what we saw here with Trump. It's what we saw in Georgia. It's what we saw in Ohio. It's what we saw in Pennsylvania. And I think candidate quality really matters in Senate and gubernatorial races. We knew this. We probably forgot this to

some extent, myself included. I looked at the political environment. I looked at some of the late breaking polls. And I thought that the liabilities that Herschel Walker had and that Dr. Oz had might be irrelevant in the face of public anger with inflation, crime, and so on. Six months ago, I didn't think that. Six months ago, I was saying, look, these candidates are weak and they could lose winnable races. And sure enough, most of those candidates lost winnable races. And the candidates who actually delivered for their constituents, the candidates who had a track record, the candidates who in some cases, were prepared to take on Trump, I'm thinking in particular of Brian Kemp, and Mike DeWine did really, really well. And, you know, it just shows that, that yes there is a lot uh here to to explain what happened last night

obviously i'm still not entirely sure myself uh we still don't have final numbers in the house or the senate but there is an obvious discrepancy between the bad candidates and the good candidates jd vance won in ohio he would have had to do a great deal of work to lose in Ohio, given where Ohio is right now. But he won by 14 points less than Governor DeWine in Georgia. Brian Kemp seems to have won by about eight. Herschel Walker is one point down on Senator Warnock, and that's going to go to a runoff. You know, this old adage that candidate quality matters is still true. And I think people forgot it. And I think a lot of the blame for the candidates who were chosen and who lost does have to be laid at Trump's feet. Jeremy, I don't know what it would have looked like if these same candidates had been running

and we did not have a Dobbs, right? Because I think many of us underestimated just how important abortion actually was going to be to the voters. It was a very close second to inflation in the exit polling. And I believe that in the state of Pennsylvania, it was tops that abortion was listed above inflation as the number one issue. And some of us were thinking that, you know, I was like, that's not going to drive votes for people who can't pay for their electric bill. Actually, so I don't know. How do you reconcile that in terms of quality candidates, the quality of the candidates? But, you know, Dobbs being this huge game changer. I think you're exactly right. And in states like Michigan, the combination of those two issues, bad candidates and abortion rights, form the perfect storm to sweep away Republicans.

I mean, in Michigan, there was a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. That won soundly. And Gretchen Whitmer, who was vilified by pro-Trump Republicans, easily defeated the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor there. I think what abortion did, and again you know, again, this is one of those examples where I think the narrative in mainstream media was wrong, is it was important because it contributed to an overall sense that Republicans have just taken things too far. The Republican Party of Donald Trump is too extreme. And, you know, while that may seem, you know, in the aggregate to be like a real problem for the Republican Party, voters saw that, right? They saw that the Republican Party of Donald Trump is going to do things that really the country

isn't prepared to absorb. Like the jolt to the system has just been too much. You know, the election denial, the Dobbs decision, the, you know, the slow degrading of norms and civility, I think people are just kind of fed up. And one thing, you know, despite Trump's appeal and the sense that he is, you know, quote unquote, fighting for his people, they want to see tangible, real results, competence. And we didn't talk about in the last segment there, you know, all these Republicans who did better because they weren't tethered to Trump. We didn't talk about Ron DeSantis. And the chatter about Ron DeSantis today is fascinating to me because if you look at certain kind of organs of conservative media like the New York Post.

What was their headline today? It called Ron DeSantis the future of the future. Yes, exactly. And that's what I'm hearing a lot from conservatives is there needs to be a break with Trump. Now, I'm not predicting that that's going to happen. We've seen Trump. You know, he's like a political Rasputin. No matter how many times you think you've taken him out, he comes back. But it is telling to me that there's a very palpable sense that Trump is not the future of the party. He's the past. And someone like DeSantis, who is a governor,

who has legislated, who has produced results for people, he's the future. Charlie, this, you know, of course, many, many times people have said, oh, Trump, what he's done now, he's gone too far. This will be the end of him. And it hasn't been the end of him. This does feel a little different. This feels to me more like the aha moment when someone realizes they're in a toxic relationship, that it's just not good for them. And though they may not want to break up, it's time. It's time for one's well-being. It seems to me that Republicans, even Trump-adjacent Republicans, I don't know, I'm going to ask my audience to call me later, Trump diehards and tell me how they feel. But it seems like I'd love to hear how they feel.

But I think the ones who are very pro Trump, they were not never Trump. They're ready. And they're talking about it's time. This is the moment where Trump's brand has been proven toxic and not particularly helpful in getting GOP wins on the board. And DeSantis is now a proven winner with the wind at his back. I think that's right. And I think it is the product of a combination of two things. One is that the rationale for Trump just took a big hit. If you talk to Trump diehards, as you put it, they will say, well, yes, he's crude, which I think is a euphemism for much worse things. But okay, he's crude, and he's unpredictable, and he's brusque. But he wins. He beat Hillary, he got three originally Supreme Court justices, and so on and so forth. Well, he doesn't win. I mean, I've never thought that was particularly convincing,

but it was much harder to argue against before last night. Trump squeaked by in 2016 against the most unpopular woman in America. He presided over bad losses in 2018. He lost to Joe Biden in 2020. And now his candidates have been wiped out in 2022. I don't think he can say credibly that he is a winner. In concert with that, Ron DeSantis did something extraordinary in Florida. And I just want to take a moment as a Floridian who's been watching this to explain to anyone

who isn't that familiar with Florida politics how extraordinary this was. Yes, Florida has been trending red. Yes, we've had a lot of people who have moved in from other places because Florida took certain approaches, because it has no income tax, because it has a broad-based set of traditional Republican policies. But what happened last night is so far out of the norm that it defies belief. Charlie Crist, the Democratic candidate, last time I looked was under 40%. DeSantis won by 20, Rubio won by 17.

Of the 67 counties in Florida, DeSantis won all but five. He didn't just flip the 50-50 counties like Duval and Hillsborough and Pinellas and so on. He flipped the can't-get counties. He flipped Miami-Dade, which hasn't gone red for 20 years. He flipped Palm Beach. He flipped Osceola. This was an extraordinary win. And it's not necessarily the case that one can extrapolate it neatly out to say Ohio, or Michigan or Pennsylvania, it would remain to be seen how DeSantis does in those places. But the question for Republicans is not can you guarantee that Ron DeSantis is going to be the presidential nominee and win? The question is, as opposed to what? And at the moment,

on what was a pretty bad night for Republicans, on which I think was borderline catastrophe in the rest of the country, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio and every Republican who ran in Florida and 20 of the 27 House candidates who won, showed how it is done. And I think it's going to be quite difficult for Trump and Trump's acolytes to say, no, we don't want that. That's not the future. That's not the risk we should take. We should go back to the guy who lost in 2020 and whose handpicked candidates failed. He's got a huge approval rating in Florida, one that sort of staggers you because there's so few politicians who are this well-loved. But of course, that's Florida,

you know, and you're right. If he takes the act on the road, how does he do in a more moderate state? Would he fare better than a Cary Lake in Arizona? It's not like he's moderate, right? I don't think that the voters in other states are going to look at him as more moderate. He's a fighter without a lot of the controversy that Trump brings. This is Ron DeSantis last night. I got to say, this is the happiest I've ever seen him. He doesn't smile and laugh that often, at least not in the clips that we see. I've never seen him so joyous. Here he is. We chose facts over fear. We chose education over indoctrination. We chose law and order over rioting and disorder florida was a refuge of sanity when the world went mad we made promises to the people of florida

and we have delivered on those promises freedom is here to stay. We have rewritten the political map. Thank you to Miami-Dade County. Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land. We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers. And we reject woke ideology. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die. So he's fiery. He's taking on all the battles that republicans want someone to take on and the thing jeremy that the democrats need to worry about with desantis is he did turn miami-dade red uh a county hillary won by 29 points now is red so he's and and he lost he lost miami-dade when he ran in 2018

desantis did so it it's because of the way he's governed, his policies, his persuasion. You've got to, I mean, you tell me, but I would think that the Democrats would be fearful of this guy. Oh, certainly, because he has a track record, right? It's a track record that Democrats will vehemently dispute and criticize as harmful. But again, it's something that he can point to. And Trump can't do that. Trump doesn't have a list of accomplishments that because he's been out of office for so long that he can point to and say, you know, I fought these battles for you. He can point to his previous term, but, you know, I don't know how effective that is going to be. And not to say,

not to minimize, certainly things like, you know, flipping of the Supreme Court that are extremely popular with Republicans, that still could really matter to them. But Ron DeSantis is a doer. He's not a talker. And for evidence of exactly how much pro-Trump Republicans are absorbing the blows from last night, I've heard that across the state, in Palm Beach at Mar-a-Lago last night, it was like a funeral parlor. It was silent. People were without energy. The oxygen came out of the room because they knew that Trump's candidates had underperformed and they knew that keeping, well, I don't want to say what they knew, but it was obvious probably to most people that keeping Trump as the center of gravity of the Republican Party is not without serious cost. The question is whether or not Trump can accept that and realize that and has any intention of stepping aside. I don't think for a minute that he does. Yeah. In a way, it's Trump's worst nightmare

because his candidates were losing and his main political rival for now was winning big and beloved and celebrated. The political rival, Megan, by the way, that he mocked two nights earlier, calling him Ron DeSanctimonious. Right. He cleaned up and Trump's candidates had a much more mixed record. Well, and that's the other thing. Can I ask you about this, Charlie? So Trump, what does he do? I think he sent out to we call them tweets. They're not tweets. They're truth socials on his media site. One of them ripped on Jim O'Day, who lost out in Colorado. He didn't like O'Day because O'Day didn't bend the knee to Trump and wasn't an election denier. And then the other one

was about Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. And I read, I'll read it to you, quote, Bolduc was a very nice guy, but he lost tonight when he disavowed after his big primary win, his longstanding stance on election fraud in the 2020 presidential primary. Had he stayed strong and true, he would have won easily. Lessons learned. I mean, for him, it's all about saying Trump won in 2020. He can't let it go. And to Jeremy's point, how does that how does how do even his core faithful at this point get behind that? When you've got this other guy, you heard his message. Florida's where woke goes to die. You know, we fought the lockdowns. We don't allow indoctrination in our schools. All the stuff that DeSantis has done. And Trump's over there like, I won. I'm telling you, election fraud. I'd like to say

there's no way, but you know the Trump diehards. Well, it's worse than just that Trump is focused on things that matter a lot less than the things that DeSantis is focused on. It's the almost medieval demand for fealty above all else. It's cult-like. Look, we live in a big, diverse, rambunctious country. And as a small-L liberal pluralist, I am committed, as we all should be, to acknowledging that people disagree with me. I'm sure Jeremy and I disagree on a whole bunch of stuff, but we have to live together. And if you're a Republican, what that means is that you're going, if you're going to have a viable political movement, to have to have Republicans that you don't particularly like or agree with. You're going to have Murkowskis and Collinses, and although he didn't prevail in the end, O'Day's. And Trump

can't do it. You know, Trump, and it was worse, I think, from some of his followers who made bizarre rationalizations of this, but Trump can't do it. He heard O'Day say in Colorado that he's not a Trump guy. And he said, therefore, he is not viable as a candidate. He essentially ran against the Republican candidate in Colorado. And that matters. It matters to Republican voters, but it also should matter to Trump. DeSantis went and campaigned for O'Day. Why? Well, because DeSantis understands not only that if he runs for president, he's going to have to have some friends, but that if he wins in 2024, he wants as many Republican senators in place as possible.

Donald Trump, if he's planning on running, should also understand that. Donald Trump should grasp that it would make his life a lot easier if he has a Joe O'Day in Colorado, rather than a Senator Bennett in Colorado, but he doesn't. All he can see, all he cares about is that O'Day said rude things about him in his view. All he cares about in New Hampshire is that Bolduc, who should never have been there, you know, we should have had Morse or Sununu, said that the election wasn't stolen, which in and of itself should tell you something about how popular that message is. If you find yourself having to say the election was stolen to win the primary, and then the moment you try and win the general, having to say that it wasn't stolen,

maybe it's not a good idea to say it in the first place. Yeah, you deserve what you get. Yeah, but Trump can't do this. And so he ends up in this weird situation where everything has to be about him. So he ended up endorsing Kemp, who he ran against. He tried to primary with David Perdue. He endorsed Kemp on the eve of the election so that if Kemp won, which he was always going to, it wouldn't look as if Trump and he were at loggerheads. This is crazy behavior. And I don't know, Megan, I don't know how the

people who are still in that Trump camp will react to this, but I know how they should react to it. They should understand that Donald Trump doesn't care about them. He doesn't care about their concerns. He doesn't care about the viability of the political party that they have to use as the engine for their ambitions. He cares about himself. And if they can't see that, Republicans are going to keep losing because this is not a majority proposition either in the country or really in the party. You use the word cult, and I would agree that there's sort of a cult of personality around Trump without doing a clinical diagnosis on that word. But people don't generally leave the cult. It takes something massive for, you know, for somebody to get up and walk out. I've done actually a lot of

segments on cults. I don't I don't know. I don't see that massive event being last night for the diehard Trump faithful. They love him. They love him. They're grateful to him. It's not even about Republican politics for them. They feel like he did something for them. He gets them and he does care about them. And, you know, you saying otherwise or you're truly saying it, that that doesn't break through more with Charles and Jeremy right after this break. Much, much more to discuss as we get some updated numbers now out of Arizona. We're getting word now that President Biden will take a possible victory lap later this afternoon with a press conference at 4 p.m. Sure, there's a lot of thought going into exactly what to say and what the message should be at the White House right now.

National Review's Charles C.W. Cook and The New York Times' Jeremy Peters are back with me now. So undoubtedly, he will declare victory and claim credit and say, you know, we're on message, we're doing the right things. Here's what scares me and a lot of the mom friends that I have who are Democrats who voted red. The COVID lockdowns do not seem to have been consequential. Governor Whitmer reelected, Governor Hochul reelected. Yes, the Floridians love the freedom of being under Ron DeSantis, but there doesn't seem to have been a penalty to those who imposed overreach, in particular in the schools with our children. And I think a lot of us are feeling very frustrated by it because it could happen again.

And there's been no clear message sent to these people about that overreach. And I wonder, Jeremy, whether there's any chance of President Biden or those on the left changing course at all or just viewing yesterday as a green light to continue as they've been? It's a very good question, and one, frankly, that I think your your mom friends are correct to have some skepticism about. If Democrats don't look hard at the results of last night and see it for what it really was, which was not so much an embrace of the Democratic Party, but a repudiation of the party of Donald Trump, then they're going to have an

awful lot of difficulty because you're exactly right. The lockdowns, the heavy handedness, the denial coming from Democratic leaders about basic, obvious problems in communities like crime and homelessness is not popular. And if the Democrats don't acknowledge that, if they don't acknowledge that, yes, the Republican Party is unpalatable to many, many voters, but also so are the policies being pushed by a lot of very liberal progressive Democrats, then they're going to have a really tough time. And I think what you're looking at right now, as we look to 2024, is a status quo election. It's going to be, I would guess, Trump and Biden fighting it out again. And it's going to be fought over the same, you know, the pandemic is, you know, in the school lockdowns, it's interesting because people have shown that they are willing to make their candidates pay a price for that.

That's what we saw in Virginia. I think the difference is it was more immediate then. People have kind of moved on. Biden wants to move on. So we'll see. Yeah. But the thing is, Charles, that you look at Virginia, Youngkin was elected and Jeremy's right. It was in the midst of it.

So it was different. Phil Murphy almost lost in New Jersey and the statehouse there by three points in a race he was leading in by 28 or 30. Kathy Hochul, she only beat Lee Zeldin so far, it looks like, by about five points. That's incredible. She was 30 points up from Zeldin just a couple of months ago. And as I pointed out in the intro, you've got maybe five New York seats turning red that were previously blue. So I do wonder whether this will be another post-New Jersey introspective moment where those in power, they may say outward, we've been given a green light, we've been given a gold star. But internally, whether they're going to do the soul searching, they need to like, oh, my God, actually, we came really close to losing.

We needed Hillary. We needed Obama. We need both Bidens here rallying at every camp that we never normally have to nurture to win these elections. I mean, behind the scenes, do you think there will be actual soul searching by the Dems on these very unpopular policies, from crime to COVID and so on? I don't know. American politics moves really fast. And people always assume that the things we were talking about two years ago, we'll be talking about now. And we usually don't. I mean, two years passed between the 2008 financial meltdown and the massive Barack Obama

landslide to the Republicans having a record wave in 2010. Watergate happened in 1974. By 1980, Ronald Reagan was winning 44 states. And I do wonder whether the catharsis that voters wanted to feel about COVID, they achieved last year with the election of Youngkin and New Jersey, even if you didn't live in those states. And then now we just have a different set of issues. You know, in the interim, we've had inflation hitting 10% for quite a while. We've had interest rate hikes. We've had dobs.

We've had crime, which is on the way up. And trying to re-litigate what happened a year ago isn't necessarily at the top of voters' minds, and I'm not sure they'll force Democrats. What I think is true is, and Jeremy sort of alluded to this directly and indirectly, is that what happened last night, if it's not properly absorbed, could be quite bad for the Democrats in the long run. First, because if they don't realize that they too belong to an unpopular party that voters don't like, then they may make more mistakes. Republicans are pretty unpopular. Last night was catastrophic. But this was not a resounding endorsement of the

Democrats either. Also, perversely speaking, if this is the development that leads Joe Biden to stay in the race for 2024, but gets rid of Trump and thereby makes Ron DeSantis or someone else Biden's opponent, you could actually have a better outcome for Republicans than you would have got otherwise. Now, I think Biden considers himself, and he may not be wrong in this, the best opponent for Donald Trump. It's going to be quite difficult for Democrats to orchestrate a Trump-Biden election. What happens if it's not Trump? Does Biden step down? If somebody wants to primary him, do they wait to find out who's won the Republican primary?

I mean, it's very, very difficult to engineer the fight that you want. And if this convinces Biden that he's with it, that he's popular enough, that he's got his finger on the pulse and that he's indispensable, And then Trump doesn't make it to the Republican nomination in 2024. You might have a better outcome for the Republicans than you had otherwise. So I do think there are risks for the Democrats. I'm not completely convinced, if I'm honest, we're going to see the reckoning for those COVID policies that many of us want, because I don't think we're going to have that set of circumstances again for probably 100 years, or at least I hope not. And so what does it matter if they go wrong?

Here's the other thing. If, as it looks now, and just for perspective, the pollsters were predicting anywhere from, well, Cook Political was saying the GOP would get as many as 25 seats pick up in the House. RCP, Real Clear Politics, said between 14 and 48 for the House. Sabato was saying plus 24 for the House. This is all the projections for the Republicans. They need six to win, five, anyway, five, let's

call it. And now they're saying maybe they'll get eight. The latest projections, the way the races are outstanding right now, could go the other way. I mean, this really it's not a done deal. But let's say for this question that the GOP pulls they wanted, control of the House is control of the House. And there's not going to be any more, you know, Build Back Better or Inflation Reduction Act. And there's going to be the investigations like the Republicans the second term of the Obama administration, where I think the Republican Party will be defined by what the House does. It will also be continued to be defined by Donald Trump, of course. But let's not forget who the Republican House is ultimately dominated by. And that's pro Trump Republicans or Republicans who feel as if they have to be subservient to Donald Trump because that's what their voters want. So, yeah, I think I think the next couple of years in a

Republican House is going to be a it's must see TV. You know, it may be even worse for the GOP in a way. Charlie was saying this last night that if I were Ron DeSantis, I could, if I were advising him, I could make a pretty good case. The best thing for him would be if the Dems held the House and the Senate. And he got to swoop in there as the savior to say there's no obstructionist GOP for Biden or whomever to run against. It's just him. It's still just the Dems in control. And you've got DeSantis or whomever coming in saying, I will fix it. Just as an update for you now, ABC News, CNN, others are now projecting that the Georgia Senate race will indeed advance to a runoff between Warnock and Walker. If Jeremy's right, that Nevada is looking like it's going to go Dem at the Senate level, that's devastating for the Republicans because

Mark Kelly seems solidly in the lead in Arizona over Blake Masters. And the Republicans have to win two out of the remaining three. They projected Wisconsin's going to Ron Johnson. So you've got Georgia, you've got Nevada, and you've got Arizona still out there. The Republicans lost one. They lost Pennsylvania. So they really have no choice. They must, if they want control of the Senate, they have to win two out of those last three. But if they lose Nevada and Arizona right now, the Georgia race doesn't really matter as much. I mean, it's going to matter, but it's not going to be like the last time.

I'm a bit more bullish on Nevada than Jeremy is. But yes, I mean, this is why this is such a disastrous development. The House doesn't really matter a great deal because it turns over every two years. And it does a change in sentiment in the country. By the time the next presidential election rolls around, that will be reflected in the House. As you said, Megan, I mean, if you run it, you run it. So yes, of course, this is disappointing. And it is alarming, I think, for the Republicans that they couldn't do better in the House given the economic environment. But if they have control of it, they can shut down the Biden agenda. Senate majorities, by contrast, have built over years. Senators outlast presidents, at least they outlast

presidents if they only serve one term. And the Republicans chose bad candidates, they lost a lot of winnable races. And there will be a point in the future where people will look back as they did with Kelly Ayotzin in New Hampshire and say, if only we had won that race, this bill judge initiative would now be doable. And when that happens, I hope they know who to blame. The next time that we have a vote in two years, 2024, the Senate layout is much more favorable to the GOP, assuming they don't do anything massive to screw it up.

This map actually wasn't that great for them. And we're seeing the results of that. And that's why initially people And we're seeing the results of that. And that's why initially people were only focused on the House. I mean, back in the day, we were all only focused on the House. And then the Senate became like, wait, maybe the Senate could happen, too. That's interesting. And yeah, but it was not to be, or at least it doesn't. I agree with you.

Nevada has been interesting. I don't know what Jeremy Source is saying, but we'll know that one within the next few days, I think, unlike Georgia. You guys, thank you so much for your thoughtful analysis. Pleasure talking to you both. Thanks, Megan. Thank you. All right, coming up, Jason Riley is here from the Wall Street Journal with some interesting analysis. He thinks that winning the House is actually very significant, and we'll talk to him about why. Remember, in the meantime, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. And I do want to thank those of you who participated in our live election coverage last night. Super fun being live with you on YouTube and the comments and the chat made it so much better. If you prefer an audio podcast, you can follow the show and download it on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. There you'll find our full archives, too, with more than 425 shows.

Just a bit of more information for you now to update you. Georgia will go to a runoff. They are now projecting that virtually every decision desk. As for Nevada and Arizona, the other outstanding two Senate races. And of course, in Arizona, we also have a gubernatorial race between Katie Hobbs and Carrie Lake, Republican update first on Nevada. There are twenty three000 votes outstanding, separating the Republican from the Dem. The Republican has the advantage right now, Laxalt. 75% of the vote is in.

Longtime reporter John Ralston is saying that we won't know anything in Nevada until at least tomorrow, given how they count the mail-in votes. But right now, the GOP is up by 23,000 votes with 75% of the vote in. In Arizona, the Senate race first, Mark Kelly is leading Blake Masters by 90,000 votes with 68% of the vote in. All right, he's up 90,000 votes with 68 percent of the vote in. That's a pretty good margin. So it must be that the outstanding vote in Arizona yet to be counted is either coming from largely Republican areas or is vote that they have some other reason to believe maybe heavily GOP, because that's a pretty good number to be up by. As for the governor's race, Carrie Lake just tweeted out, we're going to win big um she is

behind right now by 12 000 votes with 66 of the vote how can 66 of the vote be in on the governor's race and 68 on the senate i don't know i'm getting it from the new york times maybe a typo um but anyway she is losing by 12 000 now but there is you know, huge portion of the vote yet to come in, maybe as much as 34% yet to be counted. And she's feeling pretty good about where those votes are likely to come from. Harmeet Dhillon, attorney for a bunch of Republicans is out there saying they're monitoring all of this and making sure that the vote is fair after all the funny business, not funny business, but well, Gary Lake thinks it is. But problems they had in Maricopa County with the voting machines yesterday, some up to

20 percent of the voting machines in Maricopa County were affected by this. The print wasn't dark enough to make the ballot readable by the machine. People were given provisional ballots. Some went to try to vote in person at a different polling place and were told no because they were already in the system as having voted. But they got upset because they hadn't voted because it hadn't been accepted. But there was a provisional ballot, yada, yada. If this becomes relevant, it's going to get ugly.

And it'll only become relevant if what's in the provisional box could make a difference, given the final tally. One final note, Mitch McConnell, Senate GOP leader, the minority leader right now, arrived at Capitol Hill this morning telling reporters, I don't know any more than you guys do, asked how he was feeling. He replied, I don't deal in feelings. Classic Mitch McConnell. I have none. I have no feelings ever. That's how I became Senate minority leader. We're going to keep following the numbers as the hour goes on and keep you updated. In the meantime, as I said,

I'd love to hear from you. Call me 833-44-MEGAN, M-E-G-Y-N. That's 833-446-3496. 833-446-3496. Would love to hear from you in particular on that Trump DeSantis discussion that we just had. Joining me now, Jason Riley, columnist at The Wall Street Journal. Jason, it does still appear, though it's going to be by a much smaller margin, if at all, but it does still appear that the GOP is going to take the House, though no one's actually projected it yet. And you don't want people to discount how significant that would be. You're right. I don't think it should be discounted. I mean, given Joe Biden's low approval rating, given the record high inflation, at least for the past 40 years,

given the chaos at the border, given the uptick in crime, most people expected the Republicans to have a much better night than they did. But they did retake the House, Megan. That is not a small matter. They will be head of the committees. They have subpoena power. I don't see any major legislation that the Biden administration wants to advance going anywhere without the consent of House Republicans. That's a big deal. The American people voted for a check on the Biden administration. Republicans would have liked a bigger check, but there's still going to be a check, even if it's by a small amount. And I expect to see investigations coming out of the

House, Hunter Biden, the Afghanistan withdrawal, COVID response. So it's a very big deal that Republicans will control one House of Congress again. And not to mention the border and potentially Merrick Garland and what he did to those parents. I've heard Kevin McCarthy mention that too. So, yeah, there could be multiple investigations, which I do think

in the same way that the GOP cheers on Ron DeSantis down in Florida for taking on these causes that mean a lot to Republican voters, that kind of thing could, yes, it could alienate the Dems, but it could energize the GOP base. Oh, absolutely. And they also took out some big names. Sean Patrick Maloney lost in New York. The congressman who's head of the campaign arm of the Democratic Party lost lost his race. That's not a minor thing. So yeah, I think there's a lot of good that came out of last night, despite the fact that it wasn't as good as Republicans would have liked. Republicans also increased their margins with

minority voters, which always worries the Democrats because they rely so heavily on those voters to win elections. But Republican support among both Blacks and Hispanics increased yesterday, and particularly among the men in both of those groups. So, you know, again, you would have expected, given these other conditions, to see bigger Republican gains than we saw. But the Republicans are not going to be a check on the Biden administration at the end of the day. And that's a big deal. I mean, you think back on how we got into this mess with inflation, and it really is directly related to all of the spending that they were doing, the Democrats, when they were in control of the House and the Senate and the presidency. And that's stopping now. That's over.

And to the extent Joe Biden keeps trying to hand out goodies like this student loan forgiveness quote unquote program, there'll be legal challenges to try to stop him. But if he does it the old fashion way, we're actually supposed to get spending approved by Congress. They're going to stop him. Yeah. Yeah. All the legislation supposed to originate in the house, but this is all old fashioned stuff we learned in grade school, Megan. None of that happens anymore. But you're right. And according to the exit polls, inflation and the economy were the top issues for voters. They were a bigger deal to voters than abortion was, although abortion did come in second, according to the exit polls that I saw.

It turns out, I think, that those special elections we saw earlier this year over the summer and those referendums turned out to be a lot more predictive than people thought they would be. We saw some polling after that about wrong direction, right direction, and we thought that would work to the advantage of Republicans and sort of cancel out the abortion issue that Democrats have been trying to use. That didn't quite happen, but the economy did turn out to be the you know, the big issue. So Republicans were right, I think, to stress that. And again, they ended up taking back the House. So, you know, I think that that's, you know, that's not, you know, Biden had a good night in that

things weren't a lot worse. But he now knows that he's going to have a very, very difficult job pushing his agenda through over the next he's going to have a very, very difficult job pushing his agenda through over the next two years. Republicans make that very, very difficult for him now. And I think I feel like we've skipped past the significance of Florida officially being red thus far in my first hour and eight minutes on the air today. Florida actually being red and not purple is huge. Florida has, I think after redistricting, they now have 30 electoral seats, right? It was 29, now it's 30. Anyway, they're one of the top four states in the union when it comes to richness of electoral votes. Right. And as you're suggesting, if it's not a swing state anymore, that's a very big deal. I think Trump only won it in 2020 by about three points. DeSantis won his reelection bid by almost 20

points. That's a huge deal. And of course, it's also a huge deal that it's Ron DeSantis who did this, someone who's been in Trump's crosshairs recently, along with the governor of Georgia. Both of those were big winners last night. And the Trump wing of the Republican Party did not do very well. And that's also something that I think is going to be part of this postmortem. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But I think there are some very, very interesting developments on that front, particularly because if you look at states where you had both the sort of traditional Republican on the ballot, as well as a Trump backed candidate, I'm thinking of somewhere like New Hampshire, where Governor Sununu won easily, but Bolduc, the Senate candidate, lost. Or again, Georgia, where Governor Kemp handily defeated Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial race.

But Hershel Walker is struggling. Even in a state like Ohio, where J.D. Vance won and it was backed by Trump, his margin was not nearly as large as Governor DeWine's, who won re-election in a walk. So you really there have a case where you can compare how traditional Republicans did in some of these states and how Trump-backed candidates did in some of these states. And it was a very mixed bag among the Trump candidates. And, and again, getting back to Florida, that it was a very big night for DeSantis. And we'll see if this is going to be a turning point in terms of the party's relationship with Donald Trump going forward. That is the big question. He, he did it. Ron DeSantis turned Florida red. There's no question it it was it's been trending red but it wasn't when

he won in 18 and now it fully is they are this is a full-throated endorsement of him and his policies by by republican and recently more moderate or centrist or even democrat voters um can we spend a minute on you mentioned stacy abrams there's a funny moment on fox last night where my old pals uh brett bear and martha mccallum were talking and brett said oh stacy abrams just conceded and martha said for for both races for which the last the last time and this time or just just this time she there was no way around it this time she had to admit she lost she went down in flames so did beto they had spent I think they bet the Democrats spent seventy five million dollars trying to get Beto this seat. He couldn't do it in the Senate race against Ted Cruz. And now he was trying to take on Governor Abbott. I mean, do you think they've

learned their lesson on these sort of social media stars who cannot win? Well, they've learned that Texas, you know, isn't going to become blue anytime soon, despite, Megan, I think based on this ridiculously false narrative about voter suppression. She's become the sort of poster child for what Biden called Jim Crow 2.0. And it's fantastical. In recent elections, you've had black voter turnout exceeding white voter turnout, even in states with some of the strictest voter ID laws like Georgia. In 2018, the year that Stacey Abrams lost the first time, black voter turnout and black registration in Georgia exceeded white voter turnout and white registration. She started a whole, she started some group to dig into voter suppression efforts. You know, this was a group in search of a problem that did not exist even in Georgia at the time. In recent presidential races, we've had black voter turnout exceeding

white voter turnout. And so it's very satisfying that this is not going over very well in terms of her political aspirations. I think that's a very good thing. And I was very glad, very satisfied to see her go down the way she did. Because, of course, if she had not won, but even had come close to winning, I think it would have elevated her nationally to continue talking about this nonsense. And now maybe she'll be taken a little less seriously. Mm-hmm. I will just never forget that picture of her in the school with all the children masked up, the children who don't need to be masked at all, wearing masks.

But she didn't have one smiling. I was I was a little surprised that Republicans didn't make more of that in terms of an issue in the midterms, the whole school closing issue with the pandemic, the sort of education establishment's response to the pandemic. Because, you know, the pandemic threw us a lot of curveballs, but its impact on children is something we knew pretty early on and didn't really change. And yet we had, you know, ridiculous mask mandates for kids and they were kept out of school way too long. And that's all on the Democrats. You know, that's that was them carrying water for the teachers unions who give them a lot of support. And there were some candidates who tried to make an issue of it. But I thought that that should have been much more central to the Republican message. What about that?

Are you take a state like Michigan, where you had Tudor Dixon, who did make an issue out of it with with Gretchen Whitmer and, you know, raised it at every turn, but she lost. And that's one of the head scratchers today or crime in New York. Lee Zeldin made a huge point of it. And I realize he did way better than your average Republican ever would have done against a sitting Democratic governor. But he did still lose. And it has some of us saying, I guess they don't care. I guess Michiganders didn't care about the covid lockdowns that kept their children out of school in some cases for over a year or same for New Yorkers. So I have

friends whose kids did not go to school for a year, not to mention the crime rate here with which Kathy Hochul said, I don't know why you care so much about that. So to those people who are saying, OK, I guess New Yorkers want crime and Michiganders want lockdowns. What do you think? I don't quite read it that way. I mean, you mentioned Mitch McConnell earlier and the comment he made to reporters earlier today. McConnell talked about candidate quality, Megan, and it concerned him. And it concerned a lot of people. Some of this had to do with who the GOP was fielding in some of these races. They were fielding people that could win primaries, perhaps, but couldn't win general elections.

I mean, Republicans lost the governorship in Maryland and in Massachusetts. Maryland's governor is Larry Hogan. Massachusetts governor is Charlie Baker. Those are two of the most popular Republicans in the country. They weren't running again, but there's no reason why the GOP couldn't have found more moderate Republicans to run in those races and carry on what Hogan and Baker were doing. Instead, they fielded very Trump-backed candidates who focused on their loyalty to Donald Trump, and both of them

got crushed. And in a lot of these races that are even close, Arizona should not be as close as it is, particularly the governor's race there. But the governor, the current governor, or the Senate race there, I should say, as well. The current governor decided not to run for the Senate. And so you can, one takeaway could be, oh, these people don't care. But I think that's letting off, letting the party off the hook for nominating people who don't necessarily match the electorate in some of these states. And that I think is at least as much a problem as indifference on the part of voters. You have to field quality candidates, and that didn't happen everywhere that it needed to happen.

For sure. I assume you're not talking about Lee Zeldin because I think he just did so well. It was incredible. Well, that's a very blue state. I mean, come on. Yeah. But not as blue today. A Democrat won statewide in New York. Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration by more than two to one in New York. And that number has grown over the past decade. So that was a very, very tough road to hoe for Zeldin. If Zeldin had won, it would have been a wave. It would have been a tsunami if someone like Zeldin had won. That was always going, very tough road to hoe. If Zeldin had won, it would have been a wave. It would have been a tsunami if someone like Zeldin had won.

That was always going to be a long shot. And one of the things that we haven't looked at at all is, you know, to what extent local politics were changed last night. How much red was inflicted into districts that had previously been blue. I know here in Connecticut, there were a lot of races people were waiting and hoping to see, school boards. We saw virtually every single one in Florida turn red with DeSantis' backing.

He had an almost perfect rating in terms of endorsing candidates. So that's gonna be one of the interesting things to take a look at in the days to come as well as we await Arizona, Nevada, and the never-ending contest in Georgia. Jason Reilly, great to see you. Thank you.

Let's go to Arizona because everybody's wondering what's going to happen there. That's a big one. On the gubernatorial race, the Senate race as well, the officials say the full count may take days. Joining me now to discuss is Axios Phoenix reporter Jeremy Duda. So is it true that it's going to take days to figure out what's happening in Arizona? For some of these races? Yeah, we because Arizona has the very robust early voting system. A lot of these ballots, the early ballots that got dropped off by voters on Election Day, take a while to verify to verify, They have to verify the signatures. They have to use

the signatures to confirm the voters' identities before they open and count those ballots. So that'll take some time. Maricopa County expects to have 95 to 99 percent of its ballots counted by the end of Friday. So sometime in the next few days, we should get some answers on those, which is good because some of these races, especially some of these statewide races, are extremely close. Can you explain what's outstanding right now? And I mean, the latest that we saw was that Katie Hobbs on the governor's race was slightly in the lead by about 12,000, but that there was still more than a third of the vote outstanding so that Carrie Lay could definitely overtake her. Is that still the latest? And where is the vote outstanding? You know, from what county?

The votes are, we have votes outstanding from all over the state. I mean, Maricopa County makes up more than 60, a little more than 60% of the state's population. So that's going to be where most of those votes are from. I don't think we have information yet from all of the counties. Maricopa, I think we have, they said this morning that they have a little over 400,000 votes left. That includes 275,000 votes or so that were dropped off yesterday as opposed to election day votes, stuff like that. So we have a pretty sizable chunk. We don't have the exact numbers yet. But yeah, Katie Hobbs' lead is a little under 12,000 right now.

Mark Kelly leading by almost 90,000 right now. The Secretary of State's race, Democrat Adrian Fontes is leading. Mark Fincham is very well known as a very prominent Trump supporter and election denier also by about 84,000 votes. So these outstanding ballots are really going to decide some of these races. So that does mean there was ticket splitting then. If you're going in there, you're not voting Republican down the line or Dem down the line. If Carrie Lake has such a slim margin between her and Katie Hobbs and the Senate race, has the Democrat significantly ahead? Sure. We've got, you know, Katie Hobbs and the governor's race with Hobbs and Lake.

We have a similar scenario down in the attorney general's race and this race for state school superintendent, where you have either slight leads for the Democrats or slight leads for the Republicans. And so it definitely looks like you have some folks, some Republicans or some folks voting for Mark Kelly and Adrian Fontes on the Dem side while voting Republican further and other races. This is what confuses me about the election denial thing, because if that's your thing, if you're like, I'm not voting for anybody who doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election, you don't split between, you know, Carrie Lake at the governor's level. And then when you go over to the Senate, you say, well, Blake Masters, that's a bridge too far. They she doesn't admit that Trump lost the election either. Right. So it's like, I don't know if we're reading the splitting of the tickets correctly or even the election denial objections correctly. Well, each of these races has its own dynamics. I mean, in the governor's race, there are, I think, you know, probably a lot of maybe center right voters who were not particularly thrilled with Carrie Lake, but also with probably with Katie Hobbs as well, who did not think probably did not make a super compelling

argument to folks for why they should vote for her outside of well, I'm not Carrie Lake. And obviously, she got a lot of press for refusing to debate Carrie Lake over the last few weeks, which I think a lot turned off a lot of voters. And whereas, you know, where, whereas a lot of voters do have some issues with Lake, there's also a lot of enthusiasm behind her campaign. And we'll see exactly how much they think out of these outstanding ballots that are left. They're pretty widely expected to break in the Republicans favor. So any statewide Democrat who has a small lead like Katie Hobbs, you know, very well may see that go away in the today and over the next couple of days. Do we feel the same about the Senate race between Kelly and Masters?

Kelly's lead is a bit more sizable than Hobbs. He's up by almost 90,000 votes. I think there's a lot of expectation out there that he will probably hold on once everything's counted. But it's hard to say because so many of these votes are the ballots to get dropped, early ballots to get dropped off on Election Day. Historically, those have always favored Democrats. In 2018, we saw a bunch of Democrats. Traditionally, that changed two years ago. In 2018, we saw a lot of Democrats statewide, including Katie Hobbs, who were losing on election day, come back to win over the coming days because of those ballots. Two years ago, because so many

Republicans became distrustful of the early voting system, you started seeing a lot of them, people who would normally mail in their ballots, walk them in on election day. And so that really, that completely flipped that trend. And we saw, you know, the opposite Republicans gained, who were losing on election night or trailing big, gained tons of votes in the days after the election. It's where, you know, President Trump was, you know, losing by, I think, something like 100,000 votes here on election night. He only lost by about 10,500 when it was all said and done. So if the if it's hard to say, we have a lot more early ballot drop offs on Election Day this year than we had two years ago. And I'm not sure exactly what's driving that who all those voters are yet. So we'll have to

see. I think general, like I said, I think the general expectation is that trend will hold and those ballots will favor Republicans. But there's a lot up in the air right now. And by how much, how many, it's like we can't make a prediction. So I'm sorry, what's your best guess as to when we have a result, a real result that can be projected? I mean, it might not be till Friday, but we'll have to see how long it takes to verify these early ballots. It's kind of a laborious process because of the matching of the signatures.

Friday. All right. We have to be patient. They will be working on Veterans Day, they say. these early ballots. It's kind of a laborious process because of the matching of the signatures. Friday. All right. We have to be patient. They will be working on Veterans Day, they say. Talk to me about Maricopa County and the voting machine snafu. Is my information correct that this affected as many as 20 percent of the polling stations in Maricopa County, the biggest county, that's Phoenix and so on? And if so, how confident are we that all voters have actually had a meaningful chance to get their vote registered? Probably a little over 25% of voting centers actually was about 60 of 223. And what happened there is, you know, they print out the ballots for voters on demand. We have voting centers where

instead of precincts, where wherever you live in the county, you can go to any voting center and it'll print out the right ballot for you. So they're printing them out. Voters were filling them out and then they feed them in the machines and machines were rejecting them. And it took them probably more than half the day to finally figure out that the problem was that the printers were printing out certain markings that they're used to read the ballots that were too light. And they're not quite sure why this is because they say it was the same settings as during the primary once they figured it out probably around two o'clock in the afternoon about almost eight hours after polls opened um you know they fixed it and uh the printer started printing them out correctly but the bat but for the ballots that couldn't uh be read by the machines they put them in a slot they told voters they could put them in a slot they would transfer them to the central election center where they have more advanced machines that could read them.

Or so they were hoping. Or they could go to other voting locations. There are some – I know the Republicans, they went to court late yesterday afternoon to try to extend voting by three hours. They wanted the polls to close at 10 o'clock instead of 7. They said that there were voters who weren't able to cast their ballots because of these issues. They weren't actually able to show any voters who did actually do that. The judge said he'd seen no evidence of any voters who weren't able to actually cast their ballots, and so he rejected that. But if this comes down to a very small number of votes, I'm sure we'll

be hearing a lot about that for a long time. We will indeed. Well, hopefully there are provisional ballots for all or most of those voters so that there is some record of their vote. Jeremy, a pleasure. Most of those folks did not have to cast provisional ballots, but I'm sure there are probably some who did. We'll talk more probably on Friday. Thank you for being here. Sure. All right. Now let's meander on over to Georgia, where Walker and Warnock are indeed headed to a runoff. Greg Blustein is a political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-host Politically Georgia podcast. Greg, thank you for being here. So it's official runoff. I mean, my soul can't take it. I can't take it.

What's up with the never-ending runoffs in Georgia? You're telling me I've covered my share of these things, low profile and high profile. I mean, nothing. I thought nothing could get more high profile than two years ago when Senate control was at stake. But here we are again. We don't have two in this case like we did two years ago with the twin cliffhangers. But we do have one cliffhanger with Herschel Walker versus Raphael Warnock. And, you know, I couldn't have imagined two years ago, we'd be saying this Herschel Walker against anyone, but he came out of, really, he came out of nowhere in a sense. And he's the most highly decorated athlete in Georgia history. So not really nowhere, but he came out of nowhere in a political sense and is now the Republican nominee. And it's going to be a very bitter, expensive, brutal battle over the next four weeks here in Georgia for that runoff.

This is another race in which we did see ticket splitting by Georgia voters, where you can see the numbers are different for the GOP candidates at the top. I mean, the governor's race and the Senate race, as well as on the Dem side. Yeah. And this is a trend in other states that might be normal. In Georgia, it's really not. It used to be years ago, decades ago, but more recently, Georgians have pretty much aligned with one party or the other, at least at the top of the ticket. And in this race, we know polls were detecting it early this summer that three, four, 5% of Kemp supporters were also backing Raphael Warnock. And we see that this point, there were some predictions from, especially for some analysts saying, oh, when the rubber meets the road, those voters are going to go home. They're going to stay

in their lanes. They're going to end up voting Republican or Democrat. But in this case, we saw a significant number of voters split their tickets. And that's why Governor Kemp far outdid Herschel Walker. Yeah, just looking at the numbers, Kemp got about 2.1 million votes, Walker 1.9 million. So there's about 300,000 votes that said Walker's a bridge too far. That I'm not doing. Over on the Dem side, 1.8 million for Stacey Abrams, but her counterpart down in the Senate, Raphael Warnock, got 1.9 million. So there were a lot of folks who were like, she's a bridge too far. It's interesting. Like Georgia has become more and more purple. And you can kind of see that in the numbers where

there's a fair amount, hundreds of thousands of crossover voters for whom party is not everything. Yeah, there's a few trends there, right? One of them is incumbents, but both the leading vote getters we just talked about are incumbents. So they do have the I by their name and they have a record. You know, Governor Kemp in particular, the entire election campaign, he rarely talked about what he'd do in a second term. He didn't need to. He could focus on what he did in the first term, whereas Stacey Abrams, she came up with all sorts of proposals, but couldn't point to any record, you know, at least in executive

office. She was a state lawmaker before that. And then, you know, there's also the fact that both of them took aims, took effort to reach towards the middle. They, you know, Governor Kemp, no one would ever call him a moderate. He's not. He's conservative. took aims, took effort to reach towards the middle. Governor Kemp, no one would ever call him a moderate. He's not. He's conservative. Raphael Warnock ran in one office on a very liberal record and has a liberal voting record,

but they've both taken efforts, taken pains to reach new audiences that don't normally align with their parties. So that means for Senator Warnock, it means he talks more about Ted Cruz. He talks more about working with Republicans than he does about working with Joe Biden. And that's also because Joe Biden's approval rating is so low here in Georgia. And Governor Kemp, in 2018, he ran this very rural centric campaign going to very deep red areas for the most part and kind of neglecting the suburbs and some other audiences that he could have carried favor with. Well, this year he was always in, he always had such a commanding lead. He felt like he could, he had the freedom to go and campaign in the suburbs more, go reach

Asian American, Indian American, African American audiences that he really didn't spend that much time in 2018 to cater to. Now we have Now we're awaiting results in Arizona and Nevada. And if the GOP manages to win in both of those, then Georgia is less important because we'll know who won. If the Dems manage to win in both of those, then Georgia runoff is less important. But if the GOP gets one of those, then there is going to be all, every person in the country is going to come to Georgia and they're going to flood money, just like the last time. And so you kind of have been through this before. What do you expect? And are you able to sort of do a smart prediction on who is favored? Now, I won't ask you who's

going to win it, but who is favored given the dynamics? Yeah, I'm glad you don't ask, because who knows who's going to win it? Because this race will change three or four times in the next four weeks. I can tell you the campaigns are already getting ready. They're already raising money. There's still ads going on in Georgia. Whatever groups were funding ads did not cancel them. So you still turn on the TV and you see anti-Warnock and anti-Walker ads. To me, it's pretty simple. If Senate control is on the line, the race resets pretty much entirely. And it tends to favor Herschel Walker because a lot of those Republican voters who kind of held their nose or were skeptical of Herschel Walker but still voted for him or might have even withheld their vote from him, they might be more inclined to go vote if Senate control was on the line, right? If they could say a vote for Herschel Walker was a vote against Joe Biden and a vote for Mitch McConnell to be the

next Senate majority leader. But if we're talking about, you know, seat 52, if we're talking about just an extra seat, then a lot of those Republicans who aren't that enthusiastic about Herschel Walker for various reasons, whether it be they're concerned about his fitness for office or his background or whatever it might be, it's going to be a lot harder to get them out the week after Thanksgiving to go vote. And I've talked to them. They live in the parts of town. They tend to live in suburban Atlanta. They tend to be more affluent. They tend to be more mainstream conservatives. And so Herschel Walker's campaign is acknowledged. That will be a challenge for them as well.

I mean, if it comes down to Senate control, like it did the last time in Georgia, I predict the Democrats bring forward a line of women so long against Herschel Walker, it's going to look like the Rockettes. And me too. And also me. We're going to have no way of knowing. But we're going to seeoria all red up to her neck and clients it's gonna get so ugly and unfortunate um but he's a beloved figure too right so it's

like there's no way of knowing ah listen greg thank you for all the good work you've done there let's stay in touch okay thank you i'm taking your calls now and it appears we got some fired up listeners today. Let's start with James in Pennsylvania, who's got thoughts. Hey, James, what's on your mind? Hi, Megan. It's an honor to speak to you. You asked the questions about what I think about, what we think about Donald Trump and whether we need a change.

I'm a lifelong Republican. I voted for Donald Trump both times. I can make a very easy declarative statement right now. I will never, ever vote for that man again for anything after what he did to us in Pennsylvania. He gets to walk away from this. Okay, I got to look at John Fetterman for the next six years of my life. I have to look at Josh Shapiro, who, believe it or not, is not overly popular in the state either. He was just all that was left. I mean, my family, I mean, my son split tickets. I voted straight Republican. Both the women in my life, they both voted Democrat.

A lot of them was because of Dobbs. Because of Dobbs, right. Now, but when you say what he did to you in Pennsylvania, you mean with candidate selection? Yes, he stuck us with bad candidates. I personally know the guy who was supposed to be the Democratic nominee for governor. He's a good man. He was actually very loyal to Trump and Trump stabbed him in the back at the last minute. You mean the GOP nominee? Yeah, it was supposed to be Lou Barletta was supposed to be the nominee. Machel came out of nowhere and then Trump endorsed him over Barletta.

We kept wondering when was he going to endorse Barletta? He just didn't. Maybe Barletta beats him, maybe he doesn't. But he certainly wouldn't have lost to him by 14 points. So are you team DeSantis now or just anybody but Trump? Oh, yeah. He's the standard bearer for our party. Trump has got to walk away.

Somebody in his inner circle, his daughter, somebody has to tell him it's over. The Santa's is the standard bearer for our party. That's the thing. So it's like to me, I've said it before. It's just so hard if Trump doesn't move to move him. It's so hard. And I don't know whether it's even possible. James, thanks for your thoughts. Please keep listening and calling. Let's go down to Andrew in Virginia. Andrew, what do you think? Hey, Megan, I'm probably somewhat like your gentleman from Pennsylvania. I was with Trump both times. I, you know, after Romney, you know, who lost because he was milquetoast and cowardly, you know, you got behind Trump because he just hit and hit and got up and hit and hit.

And, you know, there's, and I've been very aggravated with you at times because, you know, I don't think you had your guess on. He said, he's got nothing to point to. And he does. And he also, you know, was under fire the entire time. I mean, there's lots of people out here who get one scandal and they fold or they hear you hear about it constantly. You know, I would pick that. He's the reason we have a 6-3 Supreme Court. Yeah. So but I'm with him, especially when I found out that he's sitting on one hundred million dollars and he didn't he didn't roll that out. But now let's understand

McConnell did the same thing. He didn't back the Nevada candidate because he didn't think he was loyal to McConnell. I'm I now instead of kick all the rascals out this is my new thing for 2024 kick all the curmudgeons out if you're over 70 boom you're gone i want new young blood i want all these old people gone it's true and i'm gonna be an old person in a few years but don't go too young because that you go too young and you get these woke Gen Zers who went hardcore left. And that's not going to solve anything. I can live with below 70. Yeah.

Gen X. We need Gen Xers. Yeah. Andrew, thank you. I'm going to run. Thank you for the call. I appreciate it. Let's move to Utah.

Jay in Utah, what's on your mind? Hi, Megan. I'm a big Trump supporter, just like the other two guys. But to me, what the results of the election said that Trump can't win, he can't win Pennsylvania. He can't win Michigan. He can't win Georgia and he can't win Arizona. And he has to win those states to win the election. And he can't. You know, you look at Kemp and DeSantis who kind of distance themselves from Trump. And then you look at Carrie Lake, who is a great candidate.

I live part time in Arizona. She is so much such a better candidate than Katie Hobbs. It's laughable. But she hugged, stood close to Trump. And, you know, you see the results. So he can't win the states that he needs to win. You know, so he needs to exit stage left. Do you think it's different when it's him, when it's him, as opposed to a Blake Masters? Yeah, I think I think he I mean, that's the difference in Georgia between Herschel Walker and Governor Kemp. Kemp stayed away from Trump between Herschel Walker and Governor Kemp.

Kemp stayed away from Trump. Herschel Walker stayed right tied to the hip. And the same thing with Kerry Lake in Arizona. I mean, I mean, Fetterman is is probably the worst candidate. And he and he wins because shocking. It really it really is shocking. He can't put two sentences together. True. I mean, literally can't. And he's now Senator Fetterman and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is going to have to hope he finds a way to do their business. Jay, thank you. I appreciate that. Going all over for anybody. And I'll take a Trump supporter, too. So far, most of our audience thinks no and sounds kind of upset at the way this went and Trump's interference in some of these races.

Mike in Nebraska, how do you feel? I feel very much the same way as those last three callers. I'm glad that Trump's candidates pretty much lost throughout. He gets in his own way and he's going to be a problem if he's the nominee. He just can't talk about anything else other than himself, and that's a problem. So I'm glad DeSantis won by such a big margin. Hopefully, people on the inside tell him to step aside. Hopefully, people like Hannity and Ingram and other people on Fox get to him and say, you've got to pass the baton on. Regarding

Fetterman, I think there's an issue with such early voting. They did not have a debate until late in the election cycle. And having it that late, I think, was not beneficial to the voters of Pennsylvania because they did not see what they were voting for. Well, I think that's true. But I do question whether the debate would have changed anything for anybody. You know, I think when you're like Dr. Oz was already out there as a very articulate, smart guy. You know, there are questions about whether he was a real Republican or not, but that's only for the party faithful people who are normally voting Dems. They don't care whether he's a real Republican. They like his moderation. It's it was him. It was him. It was the crudite. It was the Wegener's. It was the fact that he secretly didn't really live in Pennsylvania. He's from he's a New Jersey guy, carpetbagger. I just think he was the wrong guy for that state. You know, he's more of like a Connecticut guy, right? Like he's the guy who come here and be like with the hedge fund guys. And and oh, yes, that's fine. But, you know,

Pennsylvania, they want you to know that the Steelers have a bye the next day. They'd want you to know that stuff. True. Thank you, Mike. Thanks for calling in. Let's talk. Let's go to Anna in Michigan. Anna, what's on your mind? Hi, Megan. I heard you talking about Gretchen Whitmer. She ran and won on abortion. That was on the ballot here. That's all she talked about is going to become law, making the law of the land the Roe standard. And I won't challenge that. Like, did that not resonate? Do you feel like no one believes it? consider voting Republican when they're not a Republican. It does. It just she was very I like Tudor Dixon. I didn't think she was a very good candidate to run against Whitmer. And who's before COVID, she was a pretty popular candidate. And if we hadn't had abortion or Prop 3 on the ballot, that might have turned out differently. But the RNC spent very little money here until maybe the last month.

Ronna McDaniel needs to get fired, in my opinion. I don't know why she still has a job. Michigan could have gone the other way after all of the lockdowns and suffering the people here have endured. Yeah, and putting that prop on the ballot was a smart political move. Thank you for calling in. I appreciate it. Let's go to Lisa in Ohio in the limited time we have left. Lisa, your quick thoughts. Hi, Megan. I just wanted to say that I did feel defeated. I'm not going to lie. I was hoping that it would turn out. It's not a red wave, but a little better than what it is. But I just want to let other Republicans don't despair. I do feel that there is opportunity. I do think we need to do a better job in the way that Democrats organize. We need to start doing better on that. I really do. And the candidate selection and all of it. I mean, I do. I remind people again,

there was that period over the summer when the Democrats numbers were going up big after Dobbs and just winning control of the House would have sounded absolutely delightful to virtually all Republican voters. The Senate was kind of becoming a pipe dream. And so if that's where things land now, I realize the hopes had been raised, but just remember how you were feeling in July after Dobbs, uh, winning the house is significant. It's not everything. It's not the whole kahuna, but it's something, uh, and things are about to change. If in fact it happens, thank you for the call, Lisa. Thank you all so much for calling. It's fun talking to you. We're going to do this again tomorrow. Okay. Okay. So if I missed your call, we'll take them again

tomorrow. Cause it's now more than ever. I want to hear from you guys, from the voters on what's driving you. Appreciate so much. You guys listening to the show and calling in and watching it on YouTube. Can't make any of this happen without you. And it's my honor. Tomorrow. I want to tell you that our friends from the fifth column are here. Make sure you download the show in the meantime so that you don't miss that. It's free. If if you want to download it it's free on youtube.com slash megan kelly too and there's a bunch of great stuff on there um we appreciate it thanks for listening to the megan kelly show no bs no agenda and no fear