The Ricochet Podcast - Post Mortem and a Retortum

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

Tuesday was a buzzkill. How bad, exactly? Not sure yet… Arizona’s taking its time again. Which makes it the perfect opportunity to have a surprise guest appearance from Ricochet’s very own Jon Gabriel, Arizonan and King of all the stuff. Jon breaks down the state’s second consecutive election breakdown. He’s also got some pleasantly bold predictions! Then we’re joined by Luke Thompson... Source

Let me get the document up here. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Here's the thing. We've been given an opportunity to do something, and that's to govern. And to govern to make the lives of the people of Ohio better, that's exactly what I aim to do. And because of you, I get a chance to do it. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex. Today we perform a post-mortem on the midterms with Luke Thompson. So let's have

ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 618. Hey, why don't you go over to Ricochet.com and join? I mean, there's a whole world waiting for you. It's a place that you've been looking for all your life on the Internet, and there it is, Ricochet.com. Rob Long is here. Peter Robinson is here. They're the founders of Ricochet.com, and later, Rob will be giving you an interminable but yeasty, zesty list of reasons to join. Yeasty?

Yeasty, I guess. interminable but but yeasty zesty list of reasons yeasty yeasty i guess well in in as much as it will once once uh it's put in the oven it will grow in the minds of the listeners until they cannot and to be punched down uh yes so we are going to get right to what we need to get to um because i think an election happened and i think some people have some things to say about it one of those deathless podcasts for the ages that will be listened to over and over and studied for its nuances and its insights. And that's yesterday's news already. It's fish wrap the election, right? No, there are postmortems to be done. And John Gabriel is in Arizona. He's joined us, John Gabriel, of course, another fine member of Ricochet, a contributing editor, editor, editor.

And he's here to tell us whether or not it's all his fault. John, is it all your fault what's going on in Arizona? Okay, I fess up. It's pretty much my fault. Yeah, I started getting texts late in the night of Election Day. What is taking your state so long? Within a couple days, people were just screaming at me, what's taking so long? And then they started to get this hostile, judgmental tone of blaming this on me personally. I have nothing to do with the count. I am 10% more frustrated than the rest of you that they have not called us yet, but there is not a conspiracy.

They are not manufacturing balance or anything like that. Oh, you've drunk the kool-aid have you right well this is uh never a tribute to conspiracy what could be better explained by incompetence and if anything these offices have proven their incompetence remarkably well and they just need to update the system to make it more like florida's um we've so far almost all the most update america to make it more like florida but that will come to that yes make america florida again right um yeah they um so far have been mostly counting these returns that are coming in every night from various counties especially maricopa where i live which is where about 60% of the state's population lives in.

Maricopa is Phoenix. What's that? Maricopa is Phoenix. Yep, includes Phoenix and its many multi-layered suburbs. But they've just been returning a lot of things from before Election Day. Those are all very Democratic-leaning, especially in Arizona, much like Nevada. GOPers tend to vote in the past four to six years they want to vote in person so that is uh they are finally supposed to be releasing those numbers at least some of them slowly tonight and that will flip the map so

any democrat who's up by a point or two they're in deep trouble once these results came come maricopa you mean maricopa correct by the way so so pre-election day ballots get counted first and then the election day drop-off ballots meaning you can fill out your ballot but drop it off in person because the the ballots that where people actually went to the booth and pulled the lever those got counted pretty promptly right yes yes okay so we're waiting for the election day drop-off ballots, which on every political rule of thumb in Arizona ought to trend Republican. Is that correct? That is correct, and by trend Republican, we're talking 65 to 70 percent Republican. I would say 65 to 75 percent Republican. They are very GOP leaning.

And a lot of people do that. They get the mail in ballot and then not mentioning myself, by the way, but they put it off and put it off and then fill it in the day of the election and then sheepishly walk to their local polling place and drop it off. My my vote will probably be the very last vote counted. So, John, so you you you think that Carrie Lake is going to be the next governor of Arizona and that Blake Masters is going to be the next senator of Arizona? Are you saying that right now? Yeah, that one I'm not sure about at all. A couple of places have called it for Mark Kelly over Blake Masters.

I think it's too early because we just don't know what these numbers are going to be. Whoever wins that race, it are going to be whoever wins that race it is going to be to quote the greatest journalist of our lifetime it will be tight as a tick as dan rather says right and um i think i would rather be in kelly's camp right now than like masters camp but we are talking a very very close affair a game of inches as they say not yards okay all right so uh 78 almost 80 of the vote is in americopa county yes and the katie hoss has a 60 000 maybe more 60 65 000 vote advantage and you think that in that you're telling me in that remaining 20 that's going to be it's going to break for carry lake

and make up not just the 60 000 deficit but increase that's what you're that's going to be, it's going to break for Cary Lake and make up not just the 60,000 deficit, but increase. That's what you're saying. I am promising. Okay. I'm getting overboard here, but no, I truly believe that that's the way. It's very similar to how it worked during the campaign in 2020 with Biden ended up winning. You could just tell at a certain point okay it's over um i think certain nosy agencies counted it called it too quickly but it was such a close race it was like 10 000 votes but they weren't done counting the votes but in a few days you could go okay it's over john this is a podcast there's no need to be judicious go overboard well but wait so let me just you know i mean i'm looking for, I have the map of Arizona out.

Oh, you do? And I'm just looking for. Mr. Smarty Pants. And I'm not saying, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just, I'm just asking questions here. Just questions. Fire does not steal. Yeah, exactly.

Right. It looks to me, and I could be wrong. It looks to me like the counties that where there's the there's the biggest amount of votes left to count are the ones that are breaking for Carrie for Katie Hobbs. And you're saying that there's a reason for that is because of the order in which buckets of votes are counted precisely yeah that's exactly it these are all votes they're counting people who mailed it in a couple weeks ago or whenever they actually received the ballot these are not people they haven't been counting the votes of people who showed up on election day and were lazy people like me and

mailing in the ballot and just dropped it off. And there was also some difficulty, as we know, with the vote tabulators that was fixed. And again, we're talking just incompetence on incompetence. And this, I cannot imagine they won't have this fixed by the next election, but it makes everybody on pins and needles right now. But Blake Masters, yeah, that one, it's too tough to call for me. I would rather put 10 bucks on Kelly than Masters, but either could win it at this point. Lake, I think, is a foregone conclusion that she will win. So may I ask a couple of, so one, you've said several times, it's all innocent, it's all incompetence.

I grant that a little hesitantly, but I grant that it would be more fun if you came on here and said, oh, it's no good. They're trying. But can you assure us that the incompetence, no malice, I grant you that, but the incompetence is not such that it will tend in some minorly systematic way to favor the Democrats. The incompetence that has taken place won't affect the outcome of the race at all. Well, the one concern I have, actually, Harmeet Dhillon, Ricochet favorite, is on the ground filing lawsuits and keeping people accountable.

She actually asked for the Election Day polling places to be opened a few hours later, which the court should have done. They rejected it. That was one thing where I thought, okay, that was a bad move. I don't think it will make a decisive difference, but they should be doing due diligence. They messed up with the machines, and they should have made that available. It wouldn't have hurt anyone, and it certainly would have belayed the vote, as we've seen here. The problem is we have incompetence going on locally, but also they've spent the past two years ridiculing, mocking, oh, you people who think our elections aren't safe, what morons, you're all wearing tinfoil hats. And then the exact same thing happened two years later.

And, you know, I've written about it and I've gotten, you know, direct messages from election staffers and officers saying how dare you criticize us i'm like how dare you delay this vote you guys have to fix in-house okay so they're both incompetent and jerks but it won't affect the outcome yeah so what went wrong why didn't carrie lake sweep by such a big this is the question we're all asking ourselves i don't mean to come down too hard on you john although I am trying to get you to breathe a little fire before this is over. And, of course, we know the litany. We have a president who's suffering from early onset something other, even if you want to call it just plain old age. We have borders that are wide open, and that ought to affect people in Arizona. Taxes are high. Inflation is soaring. Inflation is higher for reasons I don't quite understand in Phoenix than in most cities. Item after item

after item, if you were a political observer and you didn't even know the party affiliations, you'd say the challenger, challenging party, is going to sweep in an election like this. And if Kerry Lake wins, it looks as though it'll be by low single digits and blake masters if he wins it may be by single digit votes but it's more likely you think he'll lose they didn't sweep that much has been established in arizona of all places which loves mavericks carrie lake seemed to me to have a maverick personality she was as willing to talk back to anybody the press all right right what what she hates she hates the most famous arizona maverick we should say she went out of her way to insult the most famous

arizona maverick right she went out of her way to insult john mccain the memory yes yes oh i see i didn't realize that i missed okay so what went wrong, John? Yeah, I'm thinking, I never believe in like monocausal blame. It's all Trump's fault. Politics is complicated. It's all this problem. But I think a lot of things worked into it. One thing is there was a massive spending advantage on the Democratic side.

GOP, for some reason, did not invest in digital at all. I barely watch TV and I watch YouTube a lot. And every ad that popped up was for whichever Democrat had bought that spot. I was even getting Spanish language ads. So I think that was where the GOP in general dropped the ball. I think every state is different. But the problem with Lake is people in many people's minds, kind of the respectable upper middle class, suburban Republican, registered Republican. Your people.

Just enough of them thought we are people. We just don't do that. We don't support. We don't go there. And I think there's still a little bit of that talking to kind of the more. John, aren't they right? The country club. But aren't they right? I mean, to frame that as a country club Republican

versus a maverick is really not terribly descriptive of Carrie Lake. Carrie Lake is a deeply, deeply erratic political personality. She was a yoga mom until very recently. She was a pro-choice Buddhist. And then she comes out and she's mad. I mean, if you're a conservative, red-rocked Arizona Republican, this is not your dream candidate. She's not a good candidate.

I would say the problem with her campaign was that she was too front and center. They let her talk too much. Had she done a Joe Biden campaign and stayed in her basement she might have been she might be the the absolutely undisputed the governor of arizona today well i think the undisputed maverick right now of arizona is kirsten cinema and i think that's what arizona likes people who are willing to buck their party and tweak their own side a little bit and i think carrie lake has just been so prominent in the trump trump trump things she actually um had a side swipe slightly at uh de sanis yesterday and it's like okay you need to be welcoming people into your coalition make them comfortable voting for you and she obviously did

not do enough of that i think she will have enough to get over the finish line but if you want to actually govern as an executive you better build coalitions and the best legislation is bipartisan so but do the do the do the country club do the country club republicans then just say well you know i don't like her she's not our type she's a little bit too maga-y ergo i'm content to let the democrats win i mean is is is that what they think i mean when it comes down to it, it's like, eh, you know what? I don't like her. Let the Democrats win. It seems to me that we're at a point where a lot of people have to do a lot of nose holding all over the spectrum in order to keep the Democrats from winning. Yeah. And I agree completely because you could make the reverse argument and saying,

well, I'm not going to vote for a governor who refuses to debate. That's an insult to voters. And that would have been closer to my position. But yeah, we're not talking about saints and angels here. We're talking about politicians. And I tend to vote for the person who I guess will hurt me slightly less than the other politicians. That is my optimistic view. The tendency here when the customers are not buying the product is to blame the customer right stupid republicans should have held their nose and voted for the crazy lady right and guess what they didn't do that they might they might eke it out and in which case she might win by 10 000 votes or 15 and 5 000 votes or whatever she might um but they didn't across the nation republicans republican voters did not hold their nose and vote for the crazy person.

In fact, they did the opposite. And you could blame the voters if you want. And you can kind of characterize them as country club Republicans and snooty, snooty suitors. But the truth is they were not the dogs were not eating the dog food. And so you either blame the dog food factory or you blame the dogs. And I suspect that the thing to do is to blame the dog food factory which today is the republican party with a bunch of lousy candidates that couldn't get over the finish line in places where they should have is that so am i just am i just being mean again to like all those yes you are do i have a point after republicans won the popular vote by six million are we actually going to like learn something on tuesday from tuesday's information or are we

going to put our heads in the sand again and say, you know what, actually, secretly, everybody loves these guys? No, better candidates is the answer. But without the better candidates, there's also, I mean, again, it's coming back to what I said before. We all find ourselves voting for people that we don't particularly like or respect or have come to believe is not what we want but on the other hand will they broadly in general advance the agenda that we want and stand to thwart the one that we don't i mean yes blame the candidates blame the dog food but blame the dogs too i mean there's if there's there's a lot to go around here it's john it's not absent donald trump absent donald trump would kevin ducey have run for governor?

Oh, Doug Ducey. Doug Ducey, I beg your pardon. Yeah, I think he would have run for senator. He's been terminated. Senator, I'm sorry. But that's the thing is that there's an example of Republican and he got caught up and blamed by the stop the steal types. But he has been the most conservative governor in the state's history he and would he have won conservative than ron de sanis he's just quiet and polite and

midwestern about it but he was really would he have won pardon would do see have won oh i think he would be i think he definitely so that so that's just a guy who quietly gets the job done and goes about his business and he ends up every vote like this universal school choice he gets tons of democrats to support it so unbelievable just just to like just put a plug for a politician who wasn't running doug ducey was absolutely the most conservative most pro school choice politics exactly america he signed a pro-choice bill in Arizona that is revolutionary and by any measure,

having Doug Ducey in the United States Senate would massively advance not just the Republican Party, whatever that is now, but the bedrock conservative causes that will actually make the country better and he somehow didn't make it onto the arizona senate ballot but and there's that's what what reason would you point for that it's because he didn't uh he actually decided to certify the vote from 2020 and he was blamed blamed as, well, he's a collaborator, obviously, when that was some, but I thought the voting was weird in 2020. So I, what I did is I talked to a

bunch of experts. I went, oh no, this is how it works. And people who supported Trump, people who opposed him, and they all were giving me the same information, the same, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. And you need to be able to roll with that um and yeah it's you need to even if you think there is some kind of skullduggery going on well okay you better get out there and make it up on points because you don't want to be the team right who loses the super bowl by a field goal and then whines about the refs for the next year it's like my my my own point here is what you're telling me if i'm wrong and then i i guess we've got a hop because we've got amazingly enough there are other things that arizona to discuss although i could really could do this for hours yeah but my point actually is

closer to rob's point than i usually like to be and it is simply this we're we're understandably enough we're trying to figure out what happened 72 hours ago when we should be paying a lot more attention to what happened a year ago in the selection of the candidates so there was in doug ducey there was an alternative excuse me a simple point because i don't want to start the details of what happened in arizona but we now we all know wait a minute if it had been this guy instead of this guy we'd have a seat in the United States Senate right now. We all feel that, correct? Okay, so now we start work on why was it the wrong guy?

And that is going to lead us, before the show is over, to mentioning the T word, although I may have to do it first just to save Rob. I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it. I'll do it. John, you're a great man, although you didn't quite get Arizona where we wanted it. I know. Everybody blame me. Get out your John Voodoo doll and enjoy the weekend. By the way, you are a beautiful blogger. Your tweets, your stuff on Ricochet, I don't know how you do it, but maybe I'm just old enough to be more of a newspaper guy. I can't, you convey information, humor, wit, and do it all in bite-sized, you're just wonderful. Thanks, John.

I appreciate it. Nice spirit, too. Thank you. Bye, John. Good. See you later. I was just going to say, you know, you're a Ricochet guy and a friend of the show and a friend of us all, so we're done with you. Turn your mic off. Get the road, pal. you can have you anytime well who knows what's going to happen in arizona we all do don't we right no no the future is in distinct sometimes like for example when it comes to philanthropy yeah you know where i'm going with this don't you when it comes to philanthropy you

think well they're rock solid they do the things. They abide by the values of the country. Not necessarily. The Economist magazine recently reported that American philanthropy is going woke and predominantly funding liberal causes. Now, do you want to help counterbalance this liberal influence? If so, consider listening to Giving Ventures.

Giving Ventures. It's a podcast available on the Ricochet Audio Network. Give you an idea of the liberty-minded organizations working to erase the heavy hand of government so individuals can prosper and thrive. Giving Ventures is a podcast designed to help donors and prospective donors discover new opportunities to change the world for the better. Twice a month, the Giving Ventures podcast highlights several non-profit efforts, initiatives, and projects that leverage private philanthropy to solve public problems.

Recently, they were joined by Star Parker, founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, as a charity that works with lawmakers to craft policy that lifts people out of poverty. Also, they spoke with Kendall Qualls, president of Take Charge MN. As in Minnesota, well, their organization promotes common sense family policy and vocational training. And they spoke to Bob Woodson, founder and president of the Woodson Center, a charity that helps revitalize low-income communities. The show is a product of Donors Trust, the oldest and largest donor-advised fund helping conservative and libertarian givers simplify, protect, and grow their giving. The team at Donors Trust regularly engages with the policy

groups, student organizations, academic centers, and civil society nonprofits that endeavor to limit government, grow personal responsibility, and strengthen free enterprise. If you care about the principles of liberty and if charitable giving is an important part of your life, Giving Ventures is the podcast for you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Go to ricochet.com to find it. Catch up on the latest episode by visiting www.donorstrust.org slash podcast. And we thank Donor's Trust for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Luke Thompson, a Republican political consultant. He's the executive director of the Protect Ohio Values Pack, a network of grassroots conservatives that helped J.D. Vance to the Republican nomination and eventually, as of Wednesday, his call to the U.S.

Senate. Welcome back, Luke. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. So 2022, red wave, red splash, red trickle, whatever you want to call it. Vance is one of the bright spots for people. What notes should consultants and campaign managers and all the rest of the people who are busy putting together their playbook for the next election, what should they be taking from the Vance campaign? I think one of the things that we're seeing this cycle is there's not an obvious national trend. So I want to be a little hesitant to give people too much advice coming out of Ohio. I would say J.D. has a lot of distinctive strengths as a candidate, but probably one of the things that he has best under sort of in hand, especially for a first

time candidate, and I think we've seen a lot of first time candidates struggle, is he knows what he thinks about things. He has clear thoughts about the issues. He knows them and he can articulate them and connect them together into a broader world. You know, I think after 2016, there's been a wave of people from business, from entertainment, from other parts of the world who have said, look, you know, if Donald Trump can come in and do this, I can come in and do this without any prior political experience. And in matching that to an environment in which you had a lot of people who were very frustrated with a government they felt was non-responsive, there were opportunities there. But, you know, J.D. stands out because he's a very thoughtful person he's a very intelligent person and he's been deep in these issues and discussions for a long time so there weren't a whole lot of

questions he got asked on the trail that weren't questions he'd been asked in some other setting or that he hadn't asked himself and he didn't have thoughts or at minimum instincts about um so i think that's what set him apart right luke could i could i push put let me flip it around the other way because you're professional and you can take anything what's jd's final margin now do we know he's up by uh he's he's about 53 i think so he's about five and a half yeah five and a half points okay mike dewine won by 25 six years ago just to correct i think he's actually closer to six, six and a half. Okay. We're still in single digits.

It's a pretty decisive win. It's a decisive win, but Mike DeWine won by 25 points. And six years ago, running for the Senate seat, Rob Portman won by 21 points. Sure. And both of those people were running for re-election for the first time. I'm sorry? much how much did mike dewine win by four years ago when he wasn't running for re-election okay so if if the answer you you can see where i'm going to what extent did even jd vance thoughtful telegenic did to what extent did even jd vance underperform because of national problems we're heading of course into

maga country to what extent was it just as this is about what you'd expect from a first-time candidate who's establishing name recognition went through a rough primary and so forth what's your answer to that yeah i mean look i think i think both of those are set so the rough primary is a thing that we should talk about because i have some there are some contrary views there mike dewine won four years ago by three points uh got it running against richard cordray who is not nearly as good a candidate as tim ryan now i i would submit that cordray ran a better campaign than he was a candidate ryan was a better candidate he ran a campaign nonetheless um you know open seats drawing national money um jd had huge sums of money spent

against him first in the primary starting in September of last year and running more or less continuously up until election day. And he withstood that spending, whereas other candidates were seeing folded underneath it. Certainly having a May primary was an advantage as opposed to, say, an August primary. But yeah, it's, it's tough. I think the national environment is, it's a national environment of people running to safety. You know, Laura Kelly got reelected in Kansas, the Democratic governor in the state I'm originally from, which was a shock to me, because she was running against Derek Schmidt, as normal a Republican as you can find, two term attorney general, good guy, guy competent professional he lost um i think that

whatever the meta theory of this race is has to take into account things like that as well another thing an individual racist you mean individual context right so can i can i ask you about about i'm just um so i'm just going to throw out the cliches we hear right um if you're uh touched by trump you're toxic jd vance was endorsed by trump and that's a fairly significant i mean i mean i don't know i don't know ohio as well but i'm like this is like a fairly significant victory for uh a choice i mean yes he did that people republicans went in or people went in conservative republicans conservatives went in and voted for mike dewine and they did not vote for jd vance and there's a reason for that and you say one of the reasons is

because um they don't they didn't know him as well whatever that is i mean he he ran a strong campaign he was in my opinion a very strong candidate um and i agree ryan the opposition was a strong candidate as well yeah but he won fair point but uh but the the trump association didn't hurt him at all it so let me try this out on you that um of the two of them jd vance and tim ryan jd vance seems more like the guy you see is the guy who's going to go to D.C., is the guy who believes what he says he believes. And Tim Ryan felt like a very smart politician who was running in a conservative state and knew he was too liberal for a statewide. And so kind of didn't seem like he was himself. And so my conclusion is, and tell me if I'm full of it,

my conclusion is that the toxic Trump stain is not nearly as fatal as being a dishonest, untrustworthy candidate to people today. So that's the difference between J.D. Vance and Dr. Oz. Does that work? I think, yeah, I think the second part of that's really important, which goes to trust. And we saw this in our polling as we got into the general election, is that, you know, Ryan was seen as a moderate coming out of the primary. He was, very few people thought that there were two Tim Ryans, one who said one thing in Ohio and voted another way in, in Washington. By the time the election day rolled around more than half of, by the time you got done with him, right?

Well, there were a lot of people, there were a lot of people putting, um, putting their shoulders to the ore, uh, in Ohio and, and we needed it because Tim Ryan raised $40 million, something like that. I just didn't have seen amount of money. Um, but of money. But yeah, he was defined by election day as a guy who said one thing and then another. I would probably abstract out one level, Rob, and say there was a real hunger for stability here in the electorate. If you look across a lot of these races, I think that's why incumbents did well. And I think, you know, with an open seat like this, you know, you're getting something new regardless. You can't help yourself.

Now, yes, Tim Ryan's a 20-year congressman, but he's just the northeast corner of the state. And so the overwhelming majority of Ohioans were faced with, OK, we're getting something new. What version of new do we want? Because we can't fall back on predictability. OK, and that's why democratic incumbents seem to have done well republican incumbents seem to have done well there were

notable exceptions kathy hogle clearly who had never been elected before got tagged as an unstable figure and republicans in new york did very well even though she hey luke yes may i ask may we come to it may i ask you helped j helped run J.D. Vance's campaign. This is, Florida was not your bailiwick this time around. So you get to dodge this question if you want to, but here we go. Two quotations. Here's former President Donald Trump tweeting yesterday, yesterday. Now, Ron DeSanctimonious, who won re-election in Florida by 20%, almost 20%, and even carried the urban vote by 55%, Trump tweets, now Ron DeSanctimonious is

playing games. The fake news asks him if he's going to run if President Trump runs, and he says, I'm only focused on the governor's race. I'm not looking into the future. Well, in terms of loyalty and class, note that, Rob, Donald Trump is lecturing us on loyalty and class. In terms of loyalty and class, that's really not the right answer. That's Donald Trump. Here's the second quotation. Here's Alex Berenson tweeting not long after. Now Trump has run into a rival who is every bit as angry as he is, but younger, harder working, far more disciplined, and far, far smarter. What you are seeing is the old lion realizing he's being chased from his watering hole to die. Trump's fear is palpable and pathetic.

Close quote. Okay, I guess my question here is, is it all going to come down to Trump and DeSantis, or should we just put that aside and think through the specifics and contingent matters in this race, the other race, the four districts we picked up in the Hudson Valley? If you want to know what happened, is Trump versus DeSantis useful? And if you want to know what happened, is Trump versus DeSantis useful? And if you want to know what will happen, is Trump versus DeSantis useful? Or do you have to engage in a fine-grained analysis, state by state, race by race? I just remember when I joined the Jeb Bush team in early 2015, all the conversations we were having about the timing of the epic showdown with Ted Cruz to come.

Right. conversations we were having about the timing of the epic showdown with Ted Cruz to come. Right. I was a long way off. And I think there is a desire on the part of Trump enthusiasts to shut down a primary. And I think there's a desire on the part of DeSantis enthusiasts to shut down a primary. And I think we'd all do very, very well to go on vacation for the next couple of weeks, chill out and let people fight it out a little bit. You know, 16 was a bloody and a brutal primary, and we came through it and won the general election. 2020 on the Democratic side was a pretty bloody and brutal primary, and they came through it and they won the election. The instinct to stave off primaries is very understandable. It's very

understandable, but I think it's often misguided. J.D. won a bloody and brutal primary in Ohio. That drove up the negatives among Democrats vis-a-vis him. And it meant he had to cobble the party back together in many respects. But it also made him a much stronger candidate. And, you know, there is a narrative out there that the presidential endorsement pulled him from last place to first, but all of my internal polling, which is a matter of public record, because we had been putting it on a blog for others to see, showed the opposite, that we were coming into first, that we'd already tied and we were moving up. And that's when that was the time at which we got, you know, we got picked up by the president endorsed.

So I think, I think tough primaries are good. Yeah. So, but just to talk about that, so the endorsement, just a little bit of, cause I don't know, you're in, you're now in the, I guess you're now in the position of revealing all the secrets. So you're there in the campaign running that primary campaign and it looks neck and neck. It looks like it, at least from the outside, we didn't have internal polling. we only had external polling it looked like it was going to be really tight and that jd might not win that primary um and then you got peter teal to give you some money and the all the rumors a little differently okay so so did the money help or did the money help give you the head start when you won the primary were you already on a trajectory put it this way when you showed peter teal your fundraising deck were you showing a line that's

going up and to the right this is good news put your money behind a winner or were you showing uh a race that you were going to lose if you didn't get money you know what i'm saying you know the opposite so yeah yeah so it's it's, the sequencing runs in opposite Peter, uh, Teal and some other people donated a sizable amount of money to a super PAC to show that JD had support before he announced his candidacy. Right. Um, and as a way to sort of very early as a way to encourage him to run and to hopefully keep some people out, we didn't keep people out, but it did encourage him to run. I ran that super on the outside outside, so I couldn't talk to JV. He announced he pursued a really aggressive earned media strategy

that got him a lot of attention. He started to move up in the polls. That was designed, I suspect, well, I now know because I've had conversations with him, to bait his opponents into spending their resources early trying to knock him down to prevent him from getting endorsed um they did that they ran out of money we came in the next we waited we held our fire held our fire held our fire and then went in in the new year which would be this year 2022 between february and april with the idea that the president would endorse sometime

around the beginning of early voting. That was a guess that we made, but it wound up being correct. So we wanted J.D. to be at the peak and also growing when early voting started. That was what we spent our money trying to do. And he found himself in first place as early voting was starting with Mike Gibbons, successful businessman who'd spent a lot of money tailing off and josh mandela two-term state treasurer and two-term senate candidate flatlining at the position that he had basically been at through the entire and jane timkin was never was jane timkin ever a factor um i she she just didn't really take off with the electorate i i believe that she made a pretty aggressive push for the endorsement early on.

But the president sort of said, look, you need to go win it out there in the field. And she didn't. You know, I think Jane was a pretty good party chair. I don't have anything bad to say about her, but she just didn't work. Right, right, right. And then what do you make of the Wall Street Journal's claim the other day that J.D. Vance owes a great debt of gratitude to Mitch McConnell? Not just Donald Trump for the endorsement, but perhaps even more so for Mitch McConnell. Trump spent very little money in that campaign, whereas McConnell swung around the big money guns and put, I can't remember the numbers, but a lot of money into the campaign.

So Senate leadership funds specifically, which is a super PAC that supports McConnell. Look, I think I would point out that Save America, the Trump super PAC, spent a lot of money. The super PAC? They did, yeah, they did. But so did Senate Leadership Fund. So I think we've got a lot of people that we're grateful to, quite a few. And, you know, the reality is, and this is something that Republicans are going to have to tangle with, is the ActBlue machine can turn on and it can target a candidate and it can kind of turn a midterm state into a presidential state, because there are enough small-dollar Democratic donors out there who will shell out $20 a night, $50 a night, $100 a week, whatever the number is, to candidates that they engage with on television, such that those folks, even though

they don't wind up winning, are able to be major, major of of sort of tying down money that doesn't change act blue okay so the argument we keep i keep dancing around it what i want to know is is it your secret decision your secret conclusion from this campaign that the really one exigent fact is that Donald Trump needs to go away. Everything would have been easier, including ActBlue would have found it much, much harder to prompt small donors across the country to dump in their 10s and their 20s and their hundreds absent Donald Trump. Do you buy that? Because that is a quickly coalescing conclusion. Go ahead. too many things. But no, it's not that simple. First of all, I don't think ActBlue answers to what we do. I think it's, as a Democratic consultant friend said to me,

this is like putting money in the collection plate and shopping on QVC all at the same time. People sit there and watch MSNBC and CNN, and they see the cannabis, and they open up their phones, and they just hit the button. And our people aren't doing that. And so it doesn't reduce like that. I just don't think it's that simple. This is related, and I'm going to ask it because I'm stupid. But before you mentioning why people voted the way they did on both sides, you mentioned stability. Now, a lot of people look around here and say, you know, where we are right now, inflation, economic contraction, energy issues, and the rest of it,

it may be stable, but it's not good. And maybe stability is not something we want to preserve. Or are you referring to some sort of vague in the miasma of the cultural stability when it comes to institutions and character and behavior and the rest of it. And when people say they want stability, what they want is the sense that the government itself is not going to go off the rails anytime soon. It may not be doing the bang up job that we want, but we don't want to dissolve it and have face painted guys with horns running through our capitals. Is that what you mean? I think people were reticent to take risks. Um, and you know, if you look at a place like Wisconsin where, um, you know, Tim Michaels, a business guy was running against, um, you know,

Tony Evers, who's kind of a putz of a governor, you know, Evers is a quintessential case of a guy you would think would be beaten. Michaels was a perfectly capable candidate. But I think, I think as I reflect on a lot of these races, you have better known office holders with some baseline political skill and some baseline political trust. You know, John Fetterman might be the best case of this terrible as he is. The guy is the Lieutenant governor of the state. He has held office and

the sky hasn't fallen. And while everybody is mad at Joe Biden and everybody's pissed off at inflation and everybody believes crime is out of control and that the border is a major issue, I think in a lot of cases, you know, I look at the Toledo congressional district that we massively underperformed in as a party. ran a guy who's a nice guy i've met him he's a nice guy but he's he's not he probably would have benefited from two terms of seasoning in the state legislature and and i think that those sorts of those sorts of races leave a lot on the table it's it's very it's important to think about this. Republicans massively overperformed with Hispanic voters. We massively overperformed in rural areas. We are almost

certainly going to win the national popular vote for the House. We'll see California's dropping votes, but we're almost certainly going to do that. We also had a better geographic distribution of our voters, and we're still going to have a smidgen of a House majority. That means that there were places where, so the Dobbs effect is not real, or we would see this everywhere, right? We would see Republicans losing the national popular vote. But it means that in very discrete spots, our inefficiency or our weaknesses were very efficiently distributed. And I think that that has a lot to do with first-time candidates running in places where, realistically, somebody who'd been in the state legislature, a traditional politician,

might have done a lot better. Right, right. I buy that. I think in general, I mean, this is now the period in which people are obsessed with what the Republicans did wrong. But I think in the next week or so, when all the numbers are collected, we said this on Tuesday night, it looked to me like the party that's doing the biggest changing right now is the Democratic Party because of the losses they're seeing with Hispanics and with their traditional ethnic groups. And that is something, that is a slow glacial move that is very, very hard to stop once it starts. But can I just talk about just the house?

So what is interesting to me is that it seems like the races we're left thinking about are in Arizona or California or New York, Oregon or Washington. They're like on the coasts um there are places where we would have thought to ourselves well that i mean it doesn't even matter who like if i told you that there are you know uh there's an oregon race up for grabs you'd probably say oh it's not like whatever that whatever district is you think it'd be pretty liberal right i mean are we looking at

i guess what i'm trying to say is all we've heard for the past five six seven eight ten years is that we just depending on who's in charge redistricting is a giant disaster but aren't we looking at a pretty volatile interesting changeable unpredictable electorate electoral map that suggests that the voters will continue to surprise you you simply cannot manipulate them to vote the way you want them to vote. I certainly think we're looking at what, over the next decade, might be a lot of dummymanders. A lot of what? We call them dummymanders, where a party thinks that they've carved out

a really efficient seat, but they've missed certain changes in the electorate. And so you carve out a seat to protect one of your people and it snaps the other way very quickly and then you're locked in. Hey, sorry. I know it's crazy, crazy to interrupt Luke when he's on a roll and Rob and Peter and the rest of it. But you know what else is crazy? You know what else is madness? Holiday shopping. You don't want to do it, do you?

No, you want to get it all out of the way as soon as possible. And you can do that by ordering online from Raycon. And you're already doing it right now, except you're wondering, wait a minute, what is Raycon? Well, if you haven't heard our ads before, let me tell you about them. Right now, you can shop early and skip the stress and snag some of the best deals of the season on something that everybody will love. And that's premium audio products from Raycon. When you're looking for a gift that everyone needs or a stocking stuffer that's not a candle or chocolate bar, Raycons are the way to go. Their wireless earbuds, headphones, and speakers offer premium sound, useful features, and almost custom comfortable fit. Oh, they're great.

I'd love to put those in my ears. 54 hours of battery life. They can stay there for a long time, too. And as the person who's gifting them, you gotta love that they start at half the price of the other premium audio brands. Plus, Raycon makes it easy with holiday gift guides for everyone in your life.

So knock that list out at once and get 30% off by shopping Raycon's holiday bundles. Everyone needs a pair of Raycons in their ears, whether it's for listening to music or taking work calls or blasting out a workout playlist, or of course, listening to the Ricochet podcast. You know what everyone doesn't need though? Two little obvious white stems hanging out of their ears. Luckily, Raycons are sleek and stylish and come in a range of colors to match anyone's style. You can find Raycon in stores now like Kohl's or Walmart, but let me tell you,

you're always going to get the best deal when you use our special link, buyraycon.com slash ricochet. The Raycon website offers buy now and pay later options too, so you can get your Christmas shopping done now and not have to worry about a bill coming. And believe me, when the bill does come though, it's still not going to be what you pay for the other guys. Right now, go to buyraycon.com slash ricochet and use the code EARLYBF to get 20% off site-wide. EARLYBF, one word. That's 20% off any Raycon product, which almost never happens. Or even save bigger and get 30% off Raycon's exclusive holiday bundles. That's code EARLYBF, E-A-R-L-Y-B-F, at buyraycon.com slash ricochet for 20% off your Raycon purchase.

Buyraycon.com slash ricochet. And we off your Raycon purchase. Buyraycon.com slash ricochet. And we thank Raycon for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Hey, Luke, could I ask one? I'm thinking now back to a moment ago when you worked for Jeb Bush and thought Ted Cruz was going to be the opponent in the primary, just shook all kinds of things up, and we won the general. And then J.D. Vance goes into a primary with facing very accomplished figures there's fire in the form of josh mandel there's the

old republican establishment in the form of jane timpkin and the primary makes him a better figure better candidate and he wins okay so in my circle of Republicans, these are friends, they don't have a fingertip feel for it the way a professional like you does, but they've been watching politics a long time. Ron DeSantis is too good for us to wish him to destroy his career by running against Donald Trump. He should just wait it out. Ted Cruz won't get in. If Trump announces he clears the field, it looks as though after the election, excuse me, in the final 48 hours of the election, Ron DeSantis began campaigning up north for candidates, every bit the presidential contender. Your view would be, if Trump gets in, let DeSantis get in. For that matter, let Ted Cruz get in. Let's have a real primary and let these guys slug it out. There nothing to fear the party and the country have

nothing to fear from that is that your view my view is that and i learned this the hard way in 2016 that we we think that the primary electorate is comprised of slices of a pie or lanes if you want and voters are much more dynamic than that um you know, when we realized pretty early on, I was at the Jeb super PAC that, that Trump was essentially creating a two man race between himself and Jeb as a, as a proxy. And he was beating up on Jeb and Jeb was not hitting back. We saw our voters go not exclusively to Marco Rubio or John Kasich, a lot of them went to Trump. Voters tend to read candidate proximity to one another in ways that you would find surprising. Not always, but often. And so my general view is that the idea that there's a hard anti-Trump part of the Republican electorate and a hard, diehard pro-Trump part of the electorate

and that those are fixed, ossified things. That's true in the commentariat. That is not true in the electorate. Voters are faithful when they move. And nowhere is that more true than Iowa, where you have a few tens of thousands of people who sit around in high school gymnasiums in the weather that killed Buddy Holly and decide who the leader of the free world is going to be. And so I am a big believer in, you know, trust the voters, listen to them, put your best case in front of them, understand that they may repudiate you, but in general, they're not stupid. So your advice to Ron DeSantis today would be go for it. Well, I look, I'm not going to give any individual person advice that i'm not advising but fortune favors the bold

yeah you don't get free advice my friend that's not the way uh that's not the business you're in um all right i'd also say look personal considerations are huge anybody with children who are young any the i mean running through the presidential campaign is like running through the thresher and so i don't even mean that in a political sense just it's a tough decision luke a point piece of advice for you personally you're wearing a johns hopkins baseball cap and a carhartt jacket you need to you need to unify your messaging man that's too confusing that That's very Baltimore, by the way. As a son of Baltimore, I can tell you that's a very Baltimore thing.

Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, high talk. We've heard it now. We've paid you for your time. Now it's brass tacks. What is the Republican number? I need their number.

What's the Republican majority in the House at the end of all this if in fact there is a majority which it looks like there's going to be but what are we talking about one seat two seat you have to give us a real number we're going to hold you to this and if you're wrong we uh we get a i don't know what we're gonna do if you're right i mean we'll let you come on the podcast. I honestly, I don't know. I wish I did. I see California says they've got four and a half million more votes to count. So it looks like Mike Garcia is going to win. It looks like.

So that's I mean, that's good. I think they've already called it for. And you've already called it for young Kim and Michelle Steele. I don't I think Kim Calvert will probably pull it out. I think probably, unfortunately, Katie Porter will survive, and Mike Levin will survive. So, you know, I don't know. It looks like we'll pick up a few seats in California, or maybe at least one. What about Joe Cantup in Washington?

That one's tough. I know he's down about two points right now, and there's still about maybe a third of the vote out. I have not looked at the distribution of that. And because it's an all-male election, sometimes the precincts don't actually line up with the votes pull it out. That would be, I think, a top target. And then I can't comment on Erland's six because I took over Neil Parent's campaign after the primary. And he ran a great campaign. We got outspent about 35 to 1, and it looks like it's coming down to the wire with absentee ballots. So, yeah. Well, I'll make a prediction. If you want to hear my prediction. Go ahead. prediction if you want to hear my prediction go ahead uh republicans by one seat because that

would be the funniest weirdest worst possible outcome for everyone uh so what do you think a tied senate and republicans by one or republicans by one seat in each chamber i think it's a tied i think it's a democratic senate by you by one basically and a republican house by one because uh we don't deserve nice things no no nobody that's what i think yep we are all sinners deserving of right exactly right off luke did you say people in iowa sitting around in high school gymnasiums in weather that killed Buddy Holly? I may have said that, yeah. I hate to be that guy, but it was not weather, actually. It was the impact of the plane upon the ground.

The cornfield. For somebody who hates to be that guy, you're pretty good at it. I'm north of Iowa, and we don't walk around here saying it's cold enough to kill a cricket but i get your point and i and i do like the reference it is cold and it should and here in minnesota too we brave cold freezing temperatures to to go and chatter about these things in gym i had great conversation learned a lot as ever and uh hope to have you back again soon as possible and uh you know hope you uh will be here in 2024 to discuss the great victory that swept the nation and confounded the pollsters etc etc thompson fingers crossed

thanks guys good talking to you thanks bye of course buddy holly famously died at the uh winter dance after the conclusion of the winter dance party which reminds you that there are probably parties that you have to arrange now because the holidays are galloping towards us. My wife just yesterday was making reservations on the 23rd of December for a restaurant, so you can go there and see this thing, and it's already stacking up. This is the time of the year when, of course, it's merry and bright and all these things and festive, but it gets more hectic, and that can be a problem as well. Back to school, wedding season, holiday prep, cutting it close this season. We go from one thing to the other. Cutting it close?

Well, with their incredibly sharp razors and refills that arrive in the nick of time, Harry's is the official sponsor of cutting it close. Well, that's just it. That's the great thing about Harry's blades. I've never in my life encountered a razor company that would use the word

nick because it makes you think of it but you know there's not a not a nick in a carload as they used to say about the uh the smokes i've never cut myself in my harry's blade and i've been using them for years why because it's a high quality shave it's low cost and it frankly beats every single blade i've tried in my life and i've tried them all and I've tried the other ones that you can get online as well. Nope. Keep coming back to Harry's. You can find out why they're great and get started with a Harry's starter set. How much is it? You say, I don't want to pay a lot. It's three bucks, $3. What do you get? You get a free travel size body wash as well. And if you've ever seen the Harry's body washes, they have interesting, not off the spectrum aromas, but I think one of them I was looking at, and one of the flavor profiles was stone.

I bought it, I think, just because I wanted to know what stone smelled like. And I used it, and I thought, yeah, that's right. That's stone. But, of course, that's just one little part of it. Five blade razor in the set, a weighted handle, foaming shave gel, and a travel cover. It's a $16 value for just three bucks. Wow. Visit harrys.com slash ricochet for that.

Now, with Harry's, you always have everything you need to get a great shave. The starter set, which starts at $3, and the refill blades are as low as $2 each and delivered right to your door. So you can stop spending money on razors that are overpriced by design. And you don't just save money with Harry's. You skip the long, unpleasant wait at the store. Everyone's shuffling along. Harry's brings the razor to you. Don't waste any more time comparing brands. No, Harry's has the best, highest customer satisfaction in the shaving industry, and they're still offering a no-risk trial. So no matter how busy things get, stay fresh with Harry's. Get your Harryry's starter set today and you'll also

get a free travel sized body wash and you will love that go to harry's.com slash ricochet that's harry's.com slash ricochet and we thank harry's for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast now at this point um when many of you listen to this you will uh well the ship will have sailed literally and with it uh the opportunity for achet Meetup. Right, Rob? Yes. Part of the fun of Ricochet, obviously, the podcast, and people get on the podcast, the friends and our large group of friends and colleagues.

But the biggest part of it is the Ricochet Meetups, where you get to meet actual members and hang out. And that is where you come in. A Ricochet IRL, as we say. So where do where do you do that well when you join ricochet.com you find out it's all on the site in the member area but we can give you some hints uh the national view is to cruise i guess leaves today or tomorrow so if you're on the cruise or you're you could make a run for it uh they're gonna there's gonna be a ricochet meet up there um and you know at the first i was like i don't really want to go on that cruise because you know it's gonna be a red wave everybody's gonna be celebrating it's not as interesting um you know i don't know maybe i'm

just a weirdo but i said now i really want to go on it because it's like gonna be really fascinating to hear the analysis i'm just more interested more interested in that but there's also one a ricochet meetup scheduled in p on December 10th and the 11th. So it's a two-day event. There's one in Sarasota in January on the weekend of the 14th. There's another one in Vacaville, California on January 28th. And we're going to New Orleans next year for French Quarter Fest. So put that on your calendar.

And now look, these are the dates we have. So look, some of you may be thinking, I can't get to Vac vacaville um actually vacaville is a nice place but whatever uh and that or that there was the wrong time or it's the wrong weekend for you it's a big country money's whatever um if these meetups i've just mentioned are not available to you you are not doomed to a lonely ricochet less existence you just have to join Ricochet, pick a time and a place, and I guarantee you Ricochet members will come to you. So for details on all this stuff, go to ricochet.com slash events, find the module and sidebar on the site, join Ricochet, and we will see you Ricochet IRL. Mind you, that whole coming to you thing is voluntary. It's not as though you uncloak and

all of a sudden you're dar dorkins with 17 people you've never met before yeah well who knows eager to come in now it's more like a secret society where we where we have little little whistles that we blow in public and people realize the signal and say oh you're one of those no that's not true you do not do not get a whistle when you join ricochet but you do get a lot of great conversation because at the member feed which which is hidden to the general public, the things discussed are wide-ranging and fantastic. Yesterday, we were just talking about the people who are gluing themselves and defacing. Because now they're branching out from the old masters that everybody loves to iconic art, apparently, that we're supposed to be.

I don't know if they're trying to alarm a different set of people. In other words, they've exhausted the people who are alarmed at vandalism of old masters. Now they're going to go after the people who would be horrified that something as precious as a Warhol would be defaced. I'm not sure what to make of the efficacy of this, except that everybody seems to hate them deeply and wish that they would go away. It doesn't really do anything for their cause. Or does it? Gentlemen, do you think that there's no such thing as bad publicity? And after all, we're talking about it now, aren't we? Yeah, I mean, we're talking about it in the sense that nobody has any intention of following the prescriptions of these little we talked about covet a lot too didn't make it popular um no look i think this is a classic example of people who i mean first of all i mean i'm breaking my rule which is always take people

uh you know in good faith um but i have a hard time uh taking anybody who's interested in climate change good faith who's not gluing themselves is gluing themselves to a van go instead of gluing themselves to a shuttered nuclear power plant saying i will unglue myself when you turn this damn thing on like it just if you uh there's i just saw a clip of a young person it's always a young person with that kind of like vacant look the mooney look the kind of a frankly the manson family look uh arguing with a tv uh interviewer is saying um the emissions keep going up and up and up which is of course not true they're not going up and up they're actually slowing they went down in the united states anyway so if you're unwilling to face facts that are actually happening and then and then uh reason from those facts um then why on

earth should i care if you glue yourself to the floor or the painting what i would do if i were running these museums is simply remove all the other paintings lock the doors to that gallery and wait a bit and my guess is that those just from the looks of them, there's not much grit or determination in those people. They are following a fad. And if you make it unpleasant enough for them to follow that fad, next year they'll have another irritating fad, but it'll at least be something different. That's my, that would be how I would run my museum, where I'm running a museum. Yeah, we all want them to be left in the dark until they starve and pee their pants. But what I want is for somebody to stop them.

I want somebody to stop them. If you were walking into a gallery and you have a bucket of porridge, or you've got soup, or you have a can or something like that, which they somehow have managed to get past security. How do they do that? I mean, there are guys who will sit there and give you the hairy eyeball if you get a little too close to the painting. Yeah, it'll ring. How do they do it? Well, I tend to suspect that in some instances you have museums that just sort of sigh and say, well, we can't really do anything about this. We have a policy in place where we don't stop them.

It's just like people knowing that you can walk into a Walgreens and just simply clear out the beauty cosmetics counter and nobody will stop you because security is forbidden to do so. Loss prevention doesn't. So I think they perhaps factored that in. Or we're going to get sued if we do something. I want to know where are the people who are standing around who look at this and don't tackle them? Exactly. This may be the modern equivalent of, well, you know, if I'd been there and had the opportunity to shoot Hitler or something,

you know, where you cast yourself into scenarios, you like to think that you do the right thing. I'd like to think that if I was at a museum and I saw one of these people, and it's not hard to tell because they're undernourished and wan. And carrying buckets of pea soup. And carrying buckets of soup

and have multicolored hair that you would be on the alert as we were told if you see something say something do something and flatten them it would be deeply satisfying to knock the paint can out of their hands it would be deeply satisfying to knock them to the ground and just and to do so on behalf of well you know what i do it on behalf of a of a warhol i do it on behalf of a bacon and i hate bacon i do so on behalf of, well, you know what? I do it on behalf of a warhol. I do it on behalf of a bacon, and I hate bacon. I do it on behalf of de Kooning, and I can't stand de Kooning. There are de Koonings that could actually be improved with a spray paint can, but I would still respect the integrity of the work and knock that little saw down. Principle matters. Well, you know what i think all i want now is

bacon i just i'm hungry now for bacon i have to just be honest yeah not if you saw his works not i know there's most advertising iteration of the concept of bacon as you can possibly imagine hey folks this podcast which we are getting out to you in record time so you you know you you don't want to sit around for 90 minutes and hear us flapper just all the time right uh unless i'm missing something peter rob am i missing something you never missed anything so the answer to that is no well there's a million things we could discuss from from twitter to ukraine but you know and there's rob no i was gonna say i i i think it's interesting right because like there's there's a lot going on in the world um there's a lot going on in the world. There's a lot going on in the world.

And yet, I mean, midterm elections. My contrary view here is that this is fun. That midterm elections, even though the outcome isn't exactly what I wanted, although in some cases it's exactly what I wanted. This is, I mean, we are desperately trying to clean up something that we shouldn't be cleaning up that this is a splendid chaotic uh mess which is a giant country and it it bedevils the people who want to like talk about it on tv and it bedevils some partisans who are furious and looking for somebody to blame but for ordinary american that includes me by the way yeah which we are deep down this is to be celebrated i don't understand why people are so mad at arizona for taking so much time what the argument the anger is like i want to know now i should be able to know in an hour why what is

that is that a law the republic is going to be fine if you have to wait another 48 hours but the people angry at the polls i heard a lot of democrats yesterday angry at the polls. I heard a lot of Democrats yesterday angry at the polls, like as if it is a constitutional right for you to have access to a document that foretells the future with 100 percent accuracy. This is ridiculous. We all need to kind of just take a deep breath, simmer down and learn to love this part of America, because this is the part of America that makes us great. I thought that if there actually was a big, strong red wave, that it would result in a Congress that did pretty much nothing and that it would force course correct. Nothing would change. And it would force course corrections in the Biden administration or the Democratic Party, which said, hmm, lesson learned. We've got to start lying better about this, that and the other. As it is now, they get the idea that everything's fine. Double double down on all of these people don't care and cruise on to eventual victory in 2024 when they're putting up amy klobuchar against donald trump which yeah no could possibly win yeah right uh i i um i agree with you and i i but i would also say i mean i

think of the large my larger argument is that that and i agree with luke i think luke has a looks very smart guy uh but there's also a big picture here and for and it goes to both parties the voters are trying to get your attention and they have not been getting your attention and they are yanking hard and they've been yanking hard on the leash for about 20 years maybe longer and the parties just don't get it and it's either going to come from um i mean there could be some kind of coalescing third party which becomes a spoiler but at least identifies uh uh an angry voter group like the tea Party kind of morphed into the Trump coalition. Or it could be something else. Or it could be a leader, a smart, smart, a Reagan-esque leader who comes from a statehouse somewhere, who has a certain amount of personal courage and can run a tough primary campaign and win it.

And who seems to gather people around him and to reframe the conversation that could happen too um but something's got to change and you know you can't win by two votes or three votes uh and rely on winning the house keeps changing sides the senate keeps changing sides it gets really really tight and close um that is a sign that the corporations that are designed to serve us political candidates are failing both of them um and the one who gets it right and figures it out is going to be the one that has another 15 20 years of influence there that's my go ahead peter tell me i'm wrong no well i don't know i i was with you on the first bit about what we need to celebrate i'm just as of this morning i just tend to resist i guess i'm

sort of in the luke thompson camp but i'm tending to resist national narratives and i know rob because i listened to glop and i've known you for all these years, you do love the unifying theory of everything. I love the unifying theory of everything. For Rob to find the message in all of this. But I guess I was thinking to myself, gee, all the pollsters have this really down. We know that there's a wave coming. Pollsters are getting, yes, the story about people not answering their phones, but pollsters have new technology like everybody else. It'll be no time at all before they're using artificial intelligence. And there's really no, there's no

scope left for politics. We're forgetting that voters have free, and then they throw this election at us. The pollsters got it all wrong. More to the point, I got it all wrong more to the point i got it all wrong and my first reaction is who do these pesky voters think they are and my second reaction is glorious democracy is still wide open unpredictable open to futures of all kinds this is just wonderful right i agree i agree it's a lovely thing to see on display uh here in rob here in minnesota though rob i don't think the voters are trying to get the attention of the dfl they they have their attention and they reward the dfl with votes every time i mean there was there was a ridiculous little narrative going on that i don't know i've seen

it i've seen the tightening could minnesota go red and it's just we always look purple for a little while it just never happens lucy grabbed the football and everybody laughs uh because this is because the administration here is a reflection of what generally people want outstate it's a little bit different but yeah but you know yes so you the national narrative the unifying theory is tempting you have to look at the particulars of the locals as well and i get that i get that i just think the one thing we haven't talked about is the upcoming youth vote how does it vote does it vote and is there a problem in attempting to get people in their 20s to pay attention to a party that has as its standard barrier as does the other um near octogenarians i i really don't think that if 2024 consists of a of a clash of octogenarians. I really don't think that if 2024 consists of a clash of octogenarians,

that it's a good sign for the health of the republic. If we can't come up with- Oh, you're right. And you're right. They may emerge from a statehouse. Who knows? They may emerge from here or there. What you don't want is your Caesars and your Francos and the people who manage to capture a moment with a certain mood and a certain um how do we put this radicalism that drives the country in ways we don't want it to do so no that's right i get nervous about that part that's why i go on no no i just reserve a little carve out to change your mind about franco at some point he was up against stalin yeah and hitler

and hitler let's like you know like salazar and franco you know they uh they sat out the could have been worse century human history yeah so here's the reason why none of us should be taken seriously ever again or listen to on any of these matters it's because going forward when it comes to generations like my daughters we have we have cultural references like Franco and Stalin and Hitler, which are going to become just absolutely meaningless to everyone. I was at Trader Joe's last night, and I'm doing some shopping, and I'm walking along, and they're playing on the speaker. They've got very eclectic music, less so lately. What do I hear? I hear ZZ Top.

It's about 7.30 at night or so, keeping me chugging along at its stages, which is a great tune. It's got this riff at the end I was waiting to hear. Middle of the song, ZZ Top quits and is replaced by Spa Chill. And apparently the Trader Joe's idea is that people will be psychologically conditioned to get to the end of the evening by switching the music from something up- something up tempo to something just relax. So I go to the counter and I check out and the guy says, Hey, how's your night going? It's going great.

Except I want to know, I said, who turned off the ZZ top in the middle of the middle of the song. And he looked at me and he said, the ZZ, the ZZ what? Yeah. And I gave him that look at Walter Matha at the end of Pelham one, two, three. Look.

And I said, son, please kids today. This is your cultural hair. You don't, you don't say that. I don't know who ZZ top is. Yeah.

Sorry. Right. So when we are talking Franco and father Coughlin and Herbert Hoover and all the rest of it, the generation coming up is saying, this is why we don't vote for you because you're old and you're irrelevant. You don't know what's going on today. That's what I,

you know, my response to that is my response to that is this. It's like, Hey kid, you're stupid. You should know who ZZ Top is in Stalin and Franco and Salazar. And don't act like it's like irrelevant information. And I'm the old man shaking my fist at it. I'm old man screams at cloud. That's what I am. Right. And I'm the old man shaking my fist at it. I'm old man screams at cloud.

That's what I am. And I'm proud of it, by the way. And I still think I'm right. Right. And by the way, you there on your little electric bike, we can summon forth an army of guys in the F-150s at any time and mow the lot of you down. So respect your elders.

That'll be it for us. Donors Trust, Raycon, Harry's three great sponsors, three great ways to change your life for the better. Support them for supporting us. And of course, join Ricochet today. Did I mention? No, I haven't. I think it's been a long time since I asked you to leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

It's been at least a week. If you could do so, that would be great. So new listeners discover the show and keep Ricochet going. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Peter. Thank you for listening. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet going. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, Peter. Thank you for listening, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

Next week, boys. Next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.