The Press Box - The Red Wave That Wasn’t, Trump for Prez (Again), and Revisiting the Fetterman Debate

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Bryan and David revisit the midterm elections and touch on CNN’s loss of viewership compared to the other networks, weigh in on the unexpected results that swayed blue, and discuss both Trump and Biden’s bid for re-election (7:42). Later, they revisit the John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz debate addressing the exit polls from CNN, and more (45:41)! Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The time has come to get ready for the 2022 World Cup. And what better way to prepare than by revisiting the World Cup's most amazing goals? I'm Brian Phillips. I'm making a podcast about the history of the men's World Cup, told through the stories of 22 iconic goals. The show's called 22 Goals. It's out now on the Ringer Podcast Network, and we're having so much fun. Yes. We here at the press box war room are ready to make a projection, at least as it pertains to cable news. CNN lost.

New York Times reports that MSNBC was seen by 3.2 million people on election night, a bigger primetime audience than CNN, and MSNBC's first ever victory over CNN on any midterm or presidential election night. CNN, the Times continues, dropped to second to last among the big news networks with 2.6 million viewers. CBS was dead last. Why did CNN lose election night, at least in terms of ratings? I don't know. I mean, I would have to be guessing if I was going to make a guess. But I mean, I think that it's a midterm election.

Obviously, the national attention, it doesn't have the national attention. attention of a presidential election. And to the degree that people were, you know, amped up, excited to follow the results, minute after a minute, as you and I were, it's probably a pretty partisan crowd, right? I mean, the people that are really kind of tracking the, you know, maintaining or losing the House and the Senate, I mean, that's a, those are sort of diehards. And CNN, as, you know, continuing to go out of its way to cast itself as, you know, the most neutral of parties, isn't going to attract one or the other. And certainly, I mean, listen, we've heard anecdotally over the past, well, infinity years that CNN's, you know, quest to be seen as neutral just seems to do more to antagonize either side than anything else.

So that probably doesn't help. But they've done a lot more recently to antagonize, liberals especially. because they basically come out and said, you know, what we did during the Trump era, where we had Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, John King, the whole crew, Dana Bash, come out and say, I'm not being liberal on here. I'm being pro-democracy. I'm being pro-truth. I'm being not racist.

I'm being against all those things. They've come out and retcon that as being a liberal network, which, One, I think is a stupid idea, but two, I think just turns off viewers who watch CNN in huge numbers during the Trump era. I mean, you spent the last couple of months now just saying, like, this network isn't for you. This network is for the elusive and perhaps magical viewer that wants BBC America, essentially down the middle news. And you and I were talking about this on election night. all their action on election night visually was at the big board. Jake Tapper standing there with John King.

All the personalities, the personality driven parts of it were at another desk and felt sort of remote from the proceedings. Meanwhile, in MSNBC, we're all the stars right there at the desk, right where the camera is. So I'd say it's almost twofold. It's like this kind of bad idea to be less quote unquote liberal. and then to do news with fewer stars, both of which seem like bad ideas to me. Yeah.

I mean, you know, this isn't the Super Bowl. These are not insignificant ratings, but it isn't, you know, some huge viewership that it's really easy to make this, you know, to make broad assumptions about, but I agree with everything that you said. It is true. It was watched by 97.5 million fewer people than the Super Bowl.

CNN's broadcast. They did do well with younger viewers. 25 to 54-year-olds, they were virtually tied, according to times for NBC, with NBC for second place among that demographic. So that's something. But I just feel, again, this is me being, this is me saying, let me take my hobby horse and apply it to every piece of data I see, which is all very, very dangerous with television ratings. But I just think that this seems to be a bad idea.

this is not going to go well for CNN. Well, yeah, I mean, listen, the overall, I mean, every single thing we know about media is that there's a push in a million different directions, but in directions, right? I mean, it's just you have to find your audience and grab on tight. And I think that, you know, you can build the audience.

You can increase the number of people that are interested in, I don't know, listening to a podcast about Game of Thrones or whatever, but you micro target and then try to expand from there. And CNN's sort of doing the opposite. It's a very sort of old school thing. And it feels like in an industry that's still trying to like hang on in so many ways to try to simultaneously be hanging on to the playbook feels like the wrong idea. Feels really, really tailored to the era where CNN was the only round the clock news network.

where there was no internet as we know it, where there were no podcasts, where there was no liberal and conservative network, waving viewers in saying, here, come here, you will find people like you, people that are talking about the things you're interested in.

It just just feels like playbook from 1991, which to me is a huge mistake. By the way, we got one question from a listener that I wanted to bring to your attention about some of the terms we use on election. on election night? Oh. This is from Dana Stanley.

Whenever a state or district is super partisan, they're described as ruby red or cobalt blue. Why those terms? Why not fire engine red or cornflower blue? Did you hear cobalt much on election night? I don't remember that one. No, but I would immediately know what it meant.

So that's a success, I guess. Also, I watched CNN a few. days after election night. I'm not sure I saw John King smile through Thursday. He was all-business John King all the way up until Arizona and Nevada were called. Absolutely in the zone. Not wavering one single bit. Great work John King up at that big board, no matter what the ratings say. Coming up on the press box, why did Democrats hold the Senate with an unpopular president in the White House? We ponder. Trump, David, is going to run for president. Can he do it without his old pals in conservative media?

And finally, we revisit the John Fetterman, Mimitt Oz debate and ask, are political writers good at predictions? All that and more in the press box. A part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantus here.

First off, David, Department of Corrections. If you listen to our live pod last Tuesday, you may have heard me hinting it might be a big night for Republicans. Not so much. The Democrats, despite the unpopularity of Joe Biden, and despite the fact that losses almost always pile up for a president's party in the midterm elections, have held on to control the U.S. Senate before Georgia's runoff has even decided. Catherine Cortez Mastow was declared the winner in Nevada on Saturday night over Adam Lacksalt,

during college football, I might add. As we record Monday morning, it looks like Rep. Republicans will take the House of Representatives or they're strongly favored to after all those votes from California are counted, but with a narrow majority. So, David, as the podcast host likes to say, a lot to unpack here. Why did the red wave not materialize? Well, I think that the easy and popular and probably not totally an accurate thing to do after every election now in a moment like this is to say, well, the polling does not reflect. the votership, right? I mean, we have a constantly evolving national politics and the people that, you know, vote change pretty dramatically from election to election. And, you know, it's increasing, I mean, you know, in the old days, it was they didn't poll anybody that had a cell phone, right? And that was the big flashing red light. Like, that was just, that was a problem. There's still going to be problems, finding the right kind of respondents to make up the polls. I think that's going to be a big part of it. you know there's instances of overreporting and certainly of of of you know energy in the in the various

you know in the various electorates um but you know i i think that what we saw what i saw leading up to it it just felt like there wasn't a lot of energy and it felt like there wasn't there wasn't a lot of momentum behind um democratic voters and and that was that was that was that was wrong. Whatever, whatever that feeling was certainly wasn't, or at least, you know, maybe it wasn't wrong. Maybe the idea that, you know, voting, that the big, that the, you know, the big national issues that I thought, you know, should have been made a bigger, the Democrats should have made a bigger deal of. And, you know, those things are such basic, basic issues to so many people, abortion, human rights that democracy democracy yeah that it's not necessarily it doesn't have to be a big you know

uh you know public protest issue it's just a common sense issue and maybe there's a lot there's a little bit less energy that sort of permeates from that point of view so the energy is there but it's just hidden from us because it's sort of de facto right i mean it's not it's just it's yeah yeah and we were hearing you know throughout the summer that was almost funny because there were these big waves of punditry right in the summer, yep, it's going to be the Dobbs decision. Abortion is going to drive money to Democratic campaigns and it's going to drive Democrats to the polls and maybe create a different kind of atmosphere than usually have during a midterm when there's a Democrat in the White House. Everybody had sort of forgotten that or memory hold that by October and you got to lie,

no, no, no, it's inflation and crime. That's why that's why people are going to be driven to the polls. Those will be the issues. Well, it turns out abortion was a very, very salient issue. And democracy, too. Remember, every time Joe Biden would give a speech about democracy, there were two big ones, including one right before the election. And you had the pundit class go, why isn't he talking about pocketbook issues? Why is he talking about saving the American Republic rather than the fact that Democrats could raise taxes on the rich? Maybe worked out fairly well for the ticket. Maybe it wasn't such a stupid idea. The other big idea we got to talk about

is the fact that Donald Trump was the showrunner of the GOP midterms. Yeah. Picked candidates. This is the guy who gave you Dan Baldock in New Hampshire. Lost to Maggie Hasson in the Senate race. Gave you Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania.

Lost to John Federman in the Senate race. Blake Masters in Arizona, Doug Maustriano in the Pennsylvania governor's race. And that dynamic was fascinating too. There was a Times piece by Shane Goldmacher over the weekend that talked about how Mitch McConnell fought Donald Trump on many or all of those Senate nominees. They were pitched in battle against each other. Whereas Kevin McCarthy, who very much wanted to become Speaker of the House and may become Speaker of the House here in short order, was like,

everything you say sounds great. I am lining up behind you because I realize this is my path to the speakership. Yep. So I am going to accept your candidates. Now, Trump prevailed on both sides, both in the Senate and the House. We can talk about some of the specifics in a second. But again, it just gave Republicans this unholy mess of a slate, especially in states that they hope to pick up. Yeah, I think all that's right. I think there was a lot of, I think there was a lot of chaos. I think there are a lot of kind of conflicting voices. I think there was a huge lack of organization from the top, which everything you said and the two things I said all sort of go to that.

And I, you know, and I think that there was, frankly, an overestimation of the kind of baseline forces at work. Midterm elections are going to pick up seats. So any, any, you know, bonus energy, any bonus that, you know, any polls that look good is just, like, you know, just signal a red wave. And that clearly wasn't true. And, you know, you can gauge the energy of your voters, right? I mean, you can probably have a pretty good handle on turnout in certain districts and certain states. But, you know, there was clearly something. larger at work here. And maybe it was as simple as like, you know, maybe it was a Trump's hand or

just the specter of Trump turned people off. You know, we're hearing that a lot. And maybe it was, I saw, I saw a couple of people point out right after the election, you know, maybe just that this sort of national platform of just sort of not even low key, high key meanness and cruelty is not a thing that's really going to, um, when you a lot of national elections or a lot of, a lot of elections in general. So, I mean, I do think that despite the fact that we've been sort of banging this drum for as long as I can remember, you know, I think that the Republicans might be having a real sort of not just identity crisis in terms of who the leadership is, but platform crisis in terms of what dog whistles are going to be able to get them across the finish line. Well,

a lot of mixed metaphors there. We'll take them all. I love how every important election now seems to take three or four days to clarify itself. I say this not as somebody who's mad at them counting votes. I actually enjoy the process. And part of what I enjoy is the fact that we have these media stars who are interesting all year long, but they are particularly interesting when they are the ones who are telling you about the votes that are coming in in a particular race. I refer you to John Ralston of the Nevada Independent, who has been kind of the face of several very,

very close and interesting elections in Nevada over the last few cycles, a longtime columnist and reporter in Las Vegas. And as those Cortez Mastro, Lacksalt returns were coming in, it was just refresh, refresh, refresh. He was just kind of like not only providing information about, you know, it looks like, you know, Cortez Mastro is going to take the lead.

when Clark County comes in, but also kind of coaching everybody through the emotional process of waiting for them. The other one that really caught my eye was Garrett Archer, who works for the ABC affiliate down there in Phoenix.

I don't know if you've seen him. He is the guy who has the count as his Twitter avatar, as in the count from Sesame Street. I'm familiar with the count. And it's, he doesn't even have his name in his Twitter to handle

there is in his handle, but not in his, I guess, official Twitter name. It's just the Arizona ABC 15 data guru. Mm-hmm. So you logged on on Wednesday, Thursday, even Friday, since we're still watching the governor's race there. And there would be the count just giving you a batch of votes from Maricopa County. And I'm looking at this and I'm completely dazzled,

but I don't actually understand what this means. You know, just like, I'm just kind of Yeah, but it felt so compelling. It was like, oh my gosh, the count is back. Mm-hmm. With another vote dump is Katie Hobbs going to win the governorship? Is Mark Kelly?

Are they going to call the race? Yeah. It's sort of like performance art. If you don't really convey anything and the audience doesn't really understand anything. But it's hard date. I mean, like, he's, I think he's just saying, like, here are the votes. Like, I am just telling you the votes. And I think he's, I saw him tweet over the.

week that I don't try to make predictions I'm doing it. I'm just giving you raw data. Yeah. But we can be mesmerized by raw data. Like raw data that no average human can comprehend, right? I mean, if you're just like, like, here's 223 votes, you know, I mean, without any context, it's really kind of meaningless. It's almost like, and it's not just him. A lot of the, even when you watch, you know, Kornacki and John King on election night, there's a lot of performance to that, too. It's almost like, you know, Kornacki does some horse racing stuff. It's like watching, it's like watching, well, the horse, we watch, what, three horse races a year. And the announcers, when you watch a horse race are borderline unintelligible, to the people

that watch horse racing all the time, they understand fully. Yeah. But to you or I, it's just like, it kind of adds to the soundtrack of what we expect, right? And it's, and you catch like one out of 15 words and you're like, yes, I'm, I'm right there with you, you know, but it's not informative in the way that one would expect that to, you know, that is such a production to be. Another big character who comes out this time of year,

like the guy calling the horse race, and in this case, it's literally true, is Dave Wasserman at redistrict? Now, in election night, Dave Wasserman is working, I believe, on the NBC decision desk. So he's not out calling races.

But as soon as election night is over, he is sitting there monitoring and waiting to break out his catch-firm, raise I've seen enough. Yeah. And declare winners, usually, which are a few steps ahead of the official AP or network declarations. And if you watch any of these races that people are gripped by, especially Arizona

governor today, people are, every time there's a new vote batch, they're like in, in his mentions, like, do the line. Do your line. Please call the race. Because I would like to see you, I would like you to give me the result of the race, especially if it's where I wanted to go. Right. I also saw Politico's Jonathan Martin talking about this.

This is our every two-year civics lesson about counties in America. Would you know that Reno was in Washoe County without Washoe County being a big deal during American elections? Oh, absolutely not. Would you know that Las Vegas, say you and I have been to a number of times, was in Clark County? without American elections. Would we know Tucson is necessarily, Tucson, great city, would I necessarily, I've been there many times,

would I know it's in Pima County? No. Without constant election night reminders. Crossword puzzles, if you do the crossword every day, you might be familiar with Pima County, but generally no. A couple of other funny notes from the Republican Senate candidate gallery. I earlier reference that piece by the New York Times

of Shane Goldmacher. quote from it. During the summer, Stephen Law, the head of a McConnell-aligned super PAC dot, dot, dot, said Mr. Masters, that is, Blake Masters, Republican candidate in Arizona, had scored the worst focus group results of any candidate he had ever seen.

If you were looking at Twitter after Blake Masters was declared the loser in that race, by the way, you saw lots of people coming for McConnell, saying you abandon Blake Masters. You were taking money and putting it into Alaska. No, I mean, I think, well, there may be some truth to that, but I saw more Blake Masters commentary on both sides after he lost the election than I saw it during. Now, I saw plenty of Blake Masters commentary during their run-up to the election,

but all kinds of sort of like indirect people on Twitter who weren't directly invested in the race, you know, weren't Arizonans or, you know, whatever. Or, you know, super active political accounts had suddenly discovered that weird, that oddball video of him, like shooting the James Bond gun with the silencer out in, like the empty, like an empty rock quarry, you know, and just like, I think that, that, you know, and I mean, and listen, that's easy to laugh at, whatever.

I mean, there's a lot of just weirdness to his campaign in general and certainly is his just totally self-contradictory platform switches and everything else and just, you know, inane stances. There's plenty of jokes or plenty of, you know, comments to go around. But I think that the more focus, the more attention that you put on Blakemasters, the worst candidate he is. And I think McConnell might have been doing him a favor to not to not put a bunch of extra money over there. He's almost a better kind of stalking horse than he is a real candidate. Turns out that was, that described a lot of the Republican Senate candidates in this cycle. There's been some recriminations from McConnell that have gone beyond Twitter, a number of Republican senators saying let's delay the Senate leadership elections until after the runoff in Georgia settled.

See if Senator Herschel Walker will be among the voters in that election. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, step forward, David to defend his fellow senator from Kentucky. Listen to what he said Sunday on CBS. The great wrestling champion, Rick Flair, used to say to be the man, you got to beat the man. And so far, no one's had the nerve to step forward and challenge Senator McConnell. Oh, man. Well, Rick Flair did say that a good bit. I think it would have been better if he'd gone with the other equally great Rick Flair line,

which is, my shoes cost more than your house. Might be a little bit more indicative of Republican. politics in 2022. But yeah, yeah. I've immediately after the election, there were all these, there were all these calls for Trump to not declare as candidacy until after Georgia had been decided so that if there, you know, if there's a runoff, which there would be a runoff, because they didn't want to make the runoff all about the Trump presidency, et cetera, et cetera. But it did see, and that makes sense, right? But it does seem like now it's just a litany of, well, let's put off this thing until this thing that just sounds like a lot of

excuse making, right? It's sort of just like, David, did you do your taxes yet? And you're like, no, because I have to, like, I'm waiting for the, for, I have to, first I have to talk to the accountant and then I got to wait for the forms to come in, but I have to request that it's, it's all just BS, right? So it's, yeah. It's something you don't want to happen. Mm-hmm. So you just invent reasons why it should happen at a later. date. This happened, you and I have to like send an email or make a phone call we don't want to do. Yeah. So we're like, you know, it would be better if I did that after my family went away for Thanksgiving and I came back. Exactly. And it's like, no, no, no. What's the problem here is I just

don't want to send this email, make this phone call, do whatever it is I have to do. Yep. That describes a Trump candidacy. Now, see, David is the Daniel Dale of the press box when it comes to pro wrestling references. So everybody, you heard him there. Fact check true. Rick Flair did say to be the man, you've got to beat the man. The second biggest story this week, David, from the world of politics is Donald Trump. He is set to announce that he is running for president again trying to pull a Grover Cleveland in 2024. There has been some chatter, as you say, about whether that announcement should happen tomorrow. Puller, Cleveland sounds like an injury.

Was that the one? It was him, right? Yeah, but it just doesn't sound like the thing that it's supposed to sound. Pulling your Grover Cleveland sounds like an injury to a part of the body you don't want to talk about out loud. Well, he may in fact pull a Grover, Cleveland if he tries to run again. Maggie Haberman tweeted about the timing of the announcement. There is a renewed discussion among some Trump allies about trying to get him not to announce. That is dot, dot, dot, dot, not likely to succeed. So, of course, it seems a little strange when you are the face of a bunch of

losing candidates in the midterms to then come out and say you're running for president. Though, of course, in Trump world, we've been through this, right? I need to appear strong at all costs. I need to deny whatever you think happened, just happen. Right. So that's got to be his thinking of why he is announcing right now, not to mention I'm in some legal jeopardy and maybe me running for president could push back some legal problems I have somewhere into the distant and hazy future.

Is that why he's announcing this week? Well, I mean, I think that was sort of my general assumption. It's not just, yeah, it's not kicking the can down the road so much as it is just setting up the plausible deniability defense, right? Anything that happens, well, anything that's already happened is already a partisan witch hunt, right? But certainly anything that happens after you declared your candidacy is an attempt by the establishment to stop you from. from running, from having, you know, et cetera, certainly from becoming president. Yeah, and that's what I said.

I think I said last week, or the week before, that he's, to use the wrestling phrase, he's going to work himself and do a shoot again. If that's the motivation for, and certainly there must be a lot of ego involved too and feeling that he was robbed and he needs to do it. Yeah. No, but if that's the motivation,

then, you know, you've got to, you got to remember, I mean, remember how sick Trump looked when he realized he was president? four or two years, whatever that was, six years ago? Yeah, six years ago, by the way. He's going to be, he's going to be sick all over again. I mean, he risks being sick all over again because he's, he's, you know, you got to, you can't just be president because you want to stay out of jail, although,

weighed against running for president to, you know, hype up the brand of your, of your hotel empire, I think trying to stay out of, you know, prison or whatever is a better motivation to run for president than just like market awareness or you know but still you got to it's it's it's it's going to be he's going to i mean he's going to end up being the Republican nominee again and that's just going to be chaos the interesting story for the two of us is that as soon as those midterm elections became clear last week conservative media in unison and almost with a single voice tossed a side Donald Trump and embraced Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida who won his reelection campaign

by almost 20 points. The New York Post front page had the headline Trumpty Dumpty. See if you can follow all the interlocking puns here. Don Perrin, who couldn't build a wall, had a great fall. Can all the GOP's men put the party back together again? Today's New York Post. Front page. Deniers denied. Voters punished Trump-backed candidates. The Wall Street Journal, all he's owned by Rupert Burdock, of course. Trump is the Republican Party's biggest loser.

Quoting, since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr. Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat. So then the question becomes, does it matter if New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, lots of, if not all of Fox News is throwing Trump aside and pulling for Ron DeSantis to be the Republican nominee in 2020. Just like I said it last week. The more that everybody sets us up to be a Trump-Dissantis race, the more it works in Trump's favor.

Because at a bare, bare, bare minimum, we just don't know anything about DeSantis, the national candidate, right? I think and I think everything you start to learn and anything else you factor and doesn't go in his favor. Certainly not against Trump. We'll see. We'll see.

But I just, you know, there's no way to predict those things. But certainly I think that Trump, a Trump, DeSantis, even if DeSantis is an excellent candidate, I think ahead-to-head race works out better for Trump than having to put, than Trump having to go on stage with 15 other people again. So, you know, it's that I think that's a misstep. It also just feels so, it feels like we've been here so many times before.

You just wait, you wait for the one opening to do your, you know, get three people to like make a secret pack. Like I'll do my Wall Street Journal editorial and you go on Fox News and. This is a little show. Our friend will do this other. Yeah. And then we'll see. Someone will write an op-ed in the New York Times. who imagine if the Times ran that you know i mean and and then we've seen fox news do this

what to see a number of times as well right i mean they were they were about as anti-trump as any conservative outlet during the election six years ago i mean during the primaries yeah during the primary six years ago but but but um did a pretty quick about face um yeah you know i i just think it's kind of hard to predict right now based on we don't know who's going to be in republic leadership in a couple of months. You know, it's just hard to, it's hard to imagine. I mean, frankly, you know, I think that this is, it's easy to overblown, but we don't know what Trump's like legal liability is going to be in a couple of months.

I mean, the whole thing is just so up in the air at this point. So that's a reflective answer. And I think probably an answer that I agree with that it doesn't matter with Trump, things that normally matter with normal politicians. Mm-hmm. Fox News is against Trump, or let's say elements of Fox News, all these conservative organs are against Fox News. His salience, his viability as a candidate doesn't depend on those things the way it would for a lot of candidates. Jonathan Chape makes the counterargument, New York Magazine, where he says, well, here's the thing about 2016.

Fox News might have been against Trump, but the conservative establishment was not aligned around one candidate. They weren't saying, no, yes, but Jeb Bush is the office. alternative. But Marco Rubio's the alternative. They were actually spread out among all those candidates you remember standing on stage with Trump. Same thing with January 6th where there was this brief window afterwards where everybody said, that's it. We're done with Donald Trump. Chate points out there was no place for lots of conservative media to go then. Because if you said we're done with Trump, that means you were supporting the new president of the United States Joe Biden, which they were certainly not doing. So his point is, if you have DeSantis,

having a George W. Bush-like headlock on the respectable organs of conservative media, and I use all those terms advisedly, the respectable organs of conservative media, is it different? Because they're not picking between Trump and Biden or Trump and 13 other people. They're picking Trump or DeSantis. DeSantis, who has a lot of Trump-like qualities to him is in a way an alternative. So does that, is that a way at all that the, media equation has changed here? Well, I mean, it's the opposite of what I just said, so I'm tempted to say no.

But I, I mean, I just don't think that there's a ton of logic to why Trump won, why Trump has had such a firm grasp over the Republican Party. But I think that for all the reasons that he does, I don't think it's a, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, think that you could use, I don't think the entire Republican Party United versus Trump necessarily means Trump loses. I mean, I just, I just don't think it's, I think that he has, I think he wields way more power than that. And maybe it does. I mean, maybe you can just shut him out. But so far, that's not happening, right? Because you can have a million people go on Fox News and say, Trump should, you know, Trump shouldn't have been involved. We got to move past Trump. You can

write a million op-eds, editorials, you can do whatever. But unless it's, unless you're, I think I feel like I said it on the election night. The only, I mean,

just, as long as you're paying attention to him, he's winning. You know, so I just don't know why, does this really feel that different? Not really. No.

I can't, I mean, I can't imagine. You have to be banking on Trump himself, not having the energy, and I don't mean to make Trump's, like low-energy joke,

but, you know, You'd have to bank on something being different in the man himself to really, for that sort of change to take place. And also, it's not just Trump. It's how quickly and nimbly all these anti-Trump forces just bend over backwards. It's the second they feel like they might have it wrong. Yeah.

So I just can't see it being that much different if that's the way it goes. Tom Skokka has a good piece in The New York Times today, talking about how Trumpism is still the guiding force of Republican Party, no matter what happened last Tuesday. He has a good line here. If the MAGA movement wouldn't accept defeat in an election, in an election, Mr. Trump directly lost head to head in 2020, why would it accept defeat in this one's second hand? Meaning they didn't, they did not accept and have said repeatedly that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.

So why are they going to pin Dr. Oz on Trump? Why are they going to pin Blake Masters on Trump? and I think that's a pretty good point, at least intellectually, when you think of the movement. A couple of media notes for you here, David. The New York Times has hired Jonathan Swan away from Axios. Now going to be a super team of Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, which is pretty much exactly what you want if you're looking for scoops out of the 2024 Donald Trump campaign. Yeah.

Also, I have a note about Bob Costa here. if you listen to our live show on Tuesday night, you heard David break the world exclusive story that Bob Costa was quoting the wire on CBS News. Remember those articles that would be written during Trump's presidency, how he was always increasingly isolated? And they'd be written like every couple of weeks. And at some point, like, at this point,

Donald Trump can only be alone in the room if he is increasingly isolated, because we've heard this poured on him so many times. This was a Costa tweet from Friday. Dark time in Trump's inner circle spoke to several longtime friends, donors, and aides in the past 24 hours. Many say he's listening to very few people isolated and mean-spirited about his potential rivals.

Several of them say they're tired of his rants and are avoiding him. Donald Trump, David, once again, is increasingly isolated. Thanks to listener Doug Giamboresse for that one. And before we get to the Overwar Twitter joke here, we should also note that there is a Democratic side to the will he run in 2024

a question. And that's Joe Biden. Now, there was a scenario here where the Democrats got shellacked in the midterms. And there was, as they say, in the political press, a growing chorus of people telling Joe Biden not to run. Well, that didn't

happen. Democrats more than held their own. We know Joe Biden is on a self-described mission to stop Trump and save the country. That was his impetus for running two years ago. Could very well be. His approval ratings are low, as I mentioned. He turns 80 on Sunday. And as the Times points out, would be 86 by the end of his second term.

So what do we think the prospects are of Joe Biden, 2024? Well, oh, man, I think absent, you know, a medical scare or something like really dramatic on camera gaff or something, and even maybe including it, I think that I'm not sure age will be the determining factor in the election with Joe Biden. That said, you know, I don't think it's probably in. I mean, I don't know if Joe would even in a perfect world to even want to run again. Although, you know, he did run last time and thought about running, obviously before that out of some kind of vague sense of duty. And one can certainly imagine how that would come into play again, even at the age, you know, I mean,

that's sort of whatever headspace you have to be and to feel that way. I mean, I'm sure he's going to be able. he's going to feel that way or he's going to be able to make himself feel that way again. You know, there's a lot of talk a couple years ago that he would just sort of, you know, work hand in hand, arm and arm with Kamala Harris and then sort of foist her into the presidency after a couple of years. That certainly doesn't seem like anybody's plan at this point in time. Nope. Even if you're like an avid watcher of politics news, like some of our listeners are like you and I are. I mean, you know, I think it's pretty safe to say or pretty fair to say that Pete Buttigieg has had a much bigger role in terms of like what you would expect of a vice president on, at least on television than Kamala Harris has. And certainly, I mean, I don't think it's, I don't think his candidacy is really out of the question yet either, despite him being a very good soldier to this point. I mean, my guess is if they do, if Biden decided not to run again, Buda judge might be the air apparent.

you know but it's um it's it's it's a tough situation because as much as i sort of halfway made light of Biden's sense of obligation to the party in the country and everything else it might be more of a reality in the next election than it was in the last one the sense of duty you're talking about the yeah i mean i think it might be more important i think he might be more important it might be more important that he run now than it was actually important that he run last time i think he'll certainly think that way i mean if i had to bet i'd overwhelmingly guess he's going to run again yeah um because i think and i think the midterms are something if you're joe biden the question was always and this was the question we heard time and time again about the democrats

and the midterms is what are what are you what are you going to point to and say we did this we did that we did this joe biden certainly has done things but i think winning the midterm is another thing he can point to and say, see, people, there, there is a market for this. There is a, there is a base for this, no matter what my poll numbers say. And also then I, and like with you, I mean, I think when we believe politicians about why they run, it's always a little dicey. People run for president because they want to be president. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mixed in there somewhere. But I do think there's a non-zero part of Joe Biden that says, I am doing this because I don't want Donald Trump to be president. I think I'm, I think I feel like I'm saving the country by running for president.

And as you point out, that is, if anything, more heightened in 2024 than it was in 2020. And also the lack of an obvious era parent. You know, we can throw out Harris, Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and whoever would come out to run. Finish your thought. But the fact that there's not an obvious person that you could point to and say, that person will win election against Donald Trump or against Ron DeSantis in 2024. Yeah. I think is another thing that pushes Biden back into the race.

Well, I tend to agree with you. There was an article in The Hill, unless this is my grocery, Google is to be believed, that suggested Biden should replace Kamala Harris with Gavin Newsom and then resign. That's got a lot of election night attention. But that, right. I mean, listen, I think every press. As the bad takes of fame. Has every presidency of our adulthood had replace vice president rumors that never,

clearly never come to fruition? It was going to replace Biden with Hillary, if I remember, 2012 correctly, right? And I think Dick Cheney almost got replaced, or like got fantasy booked replaced about 20 times. Yeah, so this stuff happens and that's ridiculous. But Gavin Newsom isn't interesting. I mean, listen, the interesting thing to me is if you think about it in terms of of if it weren't, if Biden were a second term president, right? I mean, I think that you wouldn't be talking about,

and maybe you'd be talking about Gavin Newsom. I have a slightly hard time believing it. But I think we'd be talking about, you know, Gretchen Whitmer as just a shoe in, you know? I mean, and certainly other people would be emerging if we were looking at it in a different, through a different lens. So it's going to be interesting, you know?

I mean, whether or not, not the electorate thinks Biden is too old to be elected to a second term. And I think a lot of them will, you know, as someone who spends a lot of time with someone in their 70s. I don't think that's out of the question that people would be concerned about that. The voters would be concerned about that. But regardless of whether or not that's true, man, if there's any sort of primary competition, they're going to raise that point. And then it just becomes with the entire election is about, both in the primary and in the general. And that's tough.

Now, you know, if you're running against Trump, that, it's nullified a little bit because he's not young either. But it's a tough, it's, it's, it puts him in a very weird position, you know. Coming up in 30 seconds, we revisit the Memadaz John Federman debate and ask our political reporters good at predictions. But first, David, let us do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. We had a consensus choice this week from listeners Carol Jack, Michael G, Brandon, and Lanhamel.

Amidst all the excitement around the election, Donald Trump had a personal moment this weekend. he put on a tux and he walked his daughter Tiffany down the aisle at her wedding at Mara Lago. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, well, turns out the Senate was Tiffany Trump's something blue. Thanks to everyone who participated. If you can't let Donald Trump have even one moment of peace, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, David. after watching John Federman's victory speech on Tuesday night,

which was a little bit after we signed off the air, you might have been in bed at that point. I got to thinking about this very interesting piece of data I saw earlier in the night on CNN. It was an exit poll that CNN had done in Pennsylvania. Now, we know John Federman had a stroke in May, has these auditory processing issues, has used closed captioning and press interviews

and in the debate he had with Mehmet Oz. This is what the CNN exit poll said. Is John Federman healthy enough to represent the state effectively? These are people who are coming out of the polls after voting. 49% yes. 48% no. 4948. Very close.

Okay. Now here's the second question they ask. Has Federman's opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, lived in the same? state long enough to represent it effectively. 43% yes, 55% no. So. Yeah, I saw that poll before we were on the air on election night, or I saw those exact numbers.

I think that, you know, those are the right questions to ask. That's the right place to be looking. You know, it's an interesting. It's, go ahead. Those were, well, those were the two attack ads,

essentially, that were the biggest attack ads. Oz is not from Pennsylvania. He's from New Jersey. And then from the Oz camp, that Federman could no longer, was no longer up to being senator, U.S.

senator from Pennsylvania. I mean, I just go back to this debate. You and I talked about it at the time. People in the electorate who were watching the debate could see the after effects of the stroke. we talked about see those auditory processing issues. It was a delay.

He was reading the close captioning and then answering. Sometimes he was grasping and having trouble coming up with the words he wanted to say. There was this big backlash to some of the press coverage to that point after that debate, where you had people saying, you know, look, you were so mad at NBC's Dasha Burns for this remark she made in her three-minute story about Federman. Doesn't the press owe her an apology that all blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as I said at the time, we never heard a political reporter say, or at least a reporter from the mainstream media, say, John Federman can't do the job of being a U.S. Senator. Right. I did not hear anybody make that case.

I did hear them say over and over again that people might think that based on the debate. So it never got beyond being this question that was kind of lobbed out there. Then there was this New York Times story that had New York. York Times reporters talking to people, including in a grocery store parking lot in Pennsylvania. And again, I don't want to impute motives to the reporters because I think they went out looking for whatever they would find. But let's face it, if you found somebody in that parking lot or wherever in Pennsylvania say, you know what? I was supporting John Federman, but I watched that debate and now I'm not supporting John Federman, that would have been a very high value answer to go

and find because that would have been, that would have gotten a lot of attention. But in fact, nobody they found in the story said that. If anything, people were doubling down who supported Federman before after the debate. They were, however, sounding exactly like the pundits saying, you know, I'm worried that other people will watch this debate and abandon John Federman. Yeah, you're right. If those had been out there, probably people would have found him. I mean, listen, I bet I'm sure there were some people who felt that way. It might have been willing to say that on camera if given the opportunity.

but I mean, it wouldn't shock me to find out if there was a good number of people who were whose decision was affected by the debate or whose at least feelings on the election were affected by the debate. But if that's true, then you have to say that had Fetterman must have had a much bigger lead going into the debate than any of the pollster said that he did. Yes, was a significant amount of people that would have actually tilted the race. And that's what's so interesting to me is I am all for reporters, political reporters, all reporters thinking out loud, wondering aloud about certain things. We certainly do that as sports writers over here at the Ringer, and I'm all for that.

I just think as a consumer, you have to train yourself to read articles and listen closely when you hear stuff on TV and say, is this based on anything? or is this the reporter wondering aloud? Because there's a big difference between those two things. And this whole campaign was full of wondering aloud that turned out not to be true. There was a Federman debate. There were those Biden speeches about democracy. Again, pundit after punting saying, I don't think this is a right idea. This isn't going to land with the electorate.

Okay. There was the Democrats munking around in the GOP primaries to try to find the most, Trumpy and extreme candidate to run against. How many times did you hear that, including on election night, by the way, people say, oh, this might blow up in their face. It didn't. They defeated those candidates by and large. Yep.

So just one of those things. And again, I would just apply this to everybody in the journalistic profession, which is we are not particularly good at guessing how discrete events like that are going to affect an election. Yeah. We actually don't know. Now, it's probably in our self-interest to say that we know or sort of pretend we know be like, I'm smart guy, but as it turns out, we don't know.

No, it's, it's preemptive recrimination, right? It's, it, you say those things so that when the, when the outcome that you believe that will happen, happens, you can say, see, I told you. I told you you you shouldn't do that thing. I don't think anybody thinks it's a good idea to be doing the, you know, Charlie Brown football technique to, you know, try to hand-pick your preferred bad candidate in a world where everything is so unpredictable. I certainly hope that's not any sort of like electoral strategy moving forward.

But, yeah, it is, it was people saying, oh, this conventional wisdom that we're all over-relying on, presuming it holds true. then look here are the things that you're going to regret having done. I mean, it's just, it's so dependent on the unknown. And as we've seen the past week, the unknown can really surprise you. I think it's easy after an election like this to indict pundits, to indict all political reporters and sort of imply that they don't know what they're talking about. I would just say that when I'm talking about this, I'm talking about some of the smartest people to do this, the people who are really good at what they do and really study and really listen to people.

It's just that I don't think they can predict what discrete events, what effect they're going to have either. I don't think anybody can with any reliability. And again, I take my, I take that evidence is every time there's a trade, dude, we always say, is this going to change the balance of power in the AFC West? And we're wrong as many times as we're right. We don't know. And again, we over here at the regular, we're sports experts. Yeah.

This is what we do and we can't figure that out. Yep. So again, it's not, and again, I don't deny the right of anybody to do this. I mean, that's part of what journalism is, I think. Part of what having opinions and thinking about these things is. But I just think as a reader, as a listener, as a consumer, you have to pay very, very careful attention. Am I just, is this a wonder allowed moment? Mm-hmm.

Or is this something that the writer or the television broadcaster is pointing at data and saying, this is happening? I can see signs that this is happening. Here are some loose pieces of evidence. Yeah. Because if it's not, it's just wondering aloud. Yeah. It's somebody grasping to try to figure out what's happening rather than telling you what's happening.

That seems like a really important difference. Yeah, we've said it over and over again. There was a, there was a, felt like a stark lack of telling us what's happening in this, And I think if you spend your time doing that sort of thing, then you're doing a disservice to your audience. There was a piece written in The New Yorker on November 4th by Benjamin Wallace Wells. It was titled, Why Republican Insiders Think that GOP is Poised for a Blowout. If anybody wants to read a piece about the limits of not only journalists, but the people that are running the elections to figure out what's about to happen, I encourage you to go revisit it. It's pretty wild.

It's a bunch of pollsters and operatives predicting this glorious Republican victory. I've got to say I'm not real sure why a Republican would need anonymity to predict a Republican victory. I think you'd only need anonymity to predict a big Democratic victory, but okay.

But they are just spinning out this theory about why Blake Masters is going to win, why Maggie Hasson might go down in New Hampshire. I mean, it's, and I read it before the election, Let me tell you, it's, it was like, oh, wow, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is amazing. This is wow, look at this theory. It was the first piece I thought about an election. I guess I was like, wait, none of that stuff happened. That was, I don't think it's, it's, it's, it's particularly shocking, you know, I mean, people are, we all wondering aloud versus something we know, we know, we all leading up to it something different because we sort of like group think had all decided on

this certain trajectory and it's you know, got to figure out a better way to prognosticate than what we've been doing. Now it's time for a feature that is mostly locked down. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the

strained pun headline. Yeah. Tuesday night's headline about the new man leading CNN was a light in the attic. Today's headline, David, comes from semaphore, which is doing some fantastic work on the headline front. Not so much a pun as a very good and clever headline. I'll give you the gist of the story here. The Senate will vote to codify same-sex marriage rights this week.

With the midterms over, Democrats are moving forward with a bipartisan bill that would protect marriage equality, even if the Supreme Court changes its mind. we're looking for wedding related puns here or wedding related phrases what was semaphore's strain pun headline the Senate looking to

codify yes gay marriage good by the way great only in journalism word codify yeah thank you getting ready for a wedding

with this tie the knot with this ring It's going to happen this week. RSVP. So it is scheduled. Nructules. Scheduled.

It's on the calendar. Save the date. Save the date. That's the whole thing. Save the date is Semaphores headline. Yeah, that's great. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica, Cervantes. Going to do a little post-election cleanse this week and talk about some movies here in the press box. I'm going to go over to the Big Picture podcast, one of my faves and talk about the new movie She Said, which is about the reporters who broke open the Harvey Weinstein story

with Sean Fennessee and Amanda Dobbins. By the way, I went to the premiere of that the other night, David, in Hollywood. If you've ever said you will be attending a red carpet premiere of a movie that is about one of your former co-workers, workers, Jody Canter in this case. I would not sure I would have believed that.

That was kind of a surreal evening. So that's the first part of it. And then Sean's going to come over to the press box and do the top 10 media movies since 1976, a nice arbitrary year that happens to include both all the president's men and network. We will have our top 10 along with a bunch of awards. You can be happy. You can be mad. But you'll have tons of movies to watch.

I think at the end of that discussion, Shoemaker and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.