Elections Galore

Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. The law will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men. The law no passion can disturb. Welcome to Stubborn Things, a podcast about American politics where we chase the facts wherever they lead. I'm your host, Sean Trendy. And I'm Jay Kost. And today we'll be talking about elections, elections, elections. Elections galore. Specifically, we'll start out talking about the midterm elections, what we can expect in 2026. Yep. And then after that, we're going to go and we're going to look at the Republican nomination, such as it is. Not sure it's going to. Yeah. The J.D. Vance March. Yeah. J.D. Vance Imperial March. If we had a budget, we could buy the Star Wars music theme for this. The Empire theme. Yeah. Baby steps. Baby steps. Baby steps. Yeah. So that should be interesting. I mean, it's sort of an interesting. We could put it in historical perspective. So even if the outcome is almost a foregone conclusion, how we got to this foregone conclusion is itself interesting. But before we do that, Sean, let's talk about the upcoming midterm elections. And I want to start by positing, I just want to throw this out there and see what you think about this claim, is that the House of Representatives elections are almost a foregone conclusion at this point, but that it's also really a very, I think it's going to be a dull result. I mean, unless things change dramatically, I think the structure of the House is such that Republicans have such a small number of seats in their cushion that they're almost assured to lose, but that the way their seats are distributed across districts, most of their seats are in districts that probably aren't going to be, you know, swept up in a blue wave. What do you think about that? Yeah. So I think there's a couple things we can talk about here and probably need to, you know, the kind of historical sense of House elections and then kind of the state of play. And I don't want to completely rehash our podcast on gerrymandering and re-gerrymandering, but that's something that I think is important. But let's just start out with the basic fact for the House of Representatives, which is that Republicans have an extremely narrow majority. Right now, the House of Representatives is 219 Republicans to 213 Democrats with three vacancies. Two of those... By the way, it's two seats, the Dems won in the vacancy and one in the Republicans one, right? Yeah, that's right. So if we're at full strength, it's 220, 215. Exactly. Sylvester Turner in Texas, that is a extraordinarily blue district. Mikey Sherrill, also a blue district. And then Marjorie Taylor Greene, it's a red district. So Democrats have to get three seats. And right. I mean, that's my reaction too. So one of the interesting things about midterm elections is that we didn't have them until after the civil war if you go back and you look at election returns pre-1870 something i mean there were elections held a few months before they were held in like it would be like if we held elections in 27 or 2027 yeah like after the current midterm because the house didn't meet until december relatively late yeah it took forever for and that congress was only in session a couple months out of the year and took people for i think by the way i mean this is sort of off subject but i think people went back in time and looked at how elections were actually run until relatively recently like the the 20th century i think they'd be shocked like they're oh my god be shocked at like just i mean no government bat like you know you go the way the procedure works now you go in get your little ballot from the little old lady who who's a volunteer and you fill it out and the whole thing is like state certified that is a that is that is a new relatively new phenomenon oh god like so you know i think every young libertarian gets worked up about the fact that poll that bars are closed on election day i let people have their freedom and then you understand the history of it which is that we didn't have secret ballots until late in the 1800s you would actually have to go and declare like who you were voting for openly that's right and on top of that the parties get out the vote measure was basically having a keg party outside the courthouse so you would have a bunch of drunk people like completely drunk hanging out outside the courthouse and like so the republicans would be there and the guy would go in and he'd cast his ballot for the democrat and he'd come out and all hell breaks loose james madison lost re-election of the virginia assembly in 1777 because his opponent bought the voters whiskey James Madison. Can you imagine? I mean, now granted he was like 28 years old, but still, you know, uh, it's a relatively recent and like, you know, and in political, and the other thing too, is that like, this was a major way in which political machines would secure their power because you would have to go in and, you know, it was not a private ballot. And usually what would happen is, is that you would be given a colored piece of paper that the party would give you and you'd go in and you just put your party vote in whatever they were storing the balance in. And if you didn't do that, somebody from the party was watching you. And if you derived any kind of benefit from the party, you have a job, your son has a job, anything at all, you would get cut out. This was a major way political corruption was able to be sustained in these big cities through, really through the New Deal in many respects. But anyway, so if we look at the, if we look at 2026, I did some calculating here, Sean, comparing it to the, so the Republicans have, obviously they hold the House, they hold the presidency. So they, so you have the situation where they're the party of government. The last time we saw that was 2018. That was a big year for the Democrats in the House. They won the popular vote 53-45. However, you say, oh, well, that's an eight-point win. If you go to the Cook PVI, that's an R-plus-4 result. So you look at the seats they won, and it's a good 40-plus seats for them. But if you look at it, you know, the Democrats went eight for eight in all the even districts where the two parties are evenly aligned. They didn't do as well in the districts that are R plus one, but they did very well in the R plus two districts. But then when you start getting into like R plus three districts, which are only slightly Republican, then the Republicans start holding serve. And so most of the Democratic victories are in – even though the final result was an D plus four result, you had a lot of Republican seats that otherwise could have flipped, didn't flip. And the average of the seats that the Dems flipped in 2018 was just R plus two. And if you look at 2020-16 – now, again, this is back the envelope. So if any of our listeners are – you really have a spreadsheet, my numbers might be off, but not by much. But there's only 16 seats that are R plus two or worse for Republicans. Now, 16 seats is more than enough for the Democrats to take the House and buy a comfortable margin. But from a historical perspective, that would not be a very big night for them. That's right. And I think the other thing to take into account is that, you know, the Republicans or the president's party never does well in midterm elections. I mean, people were ecstatic falling over themselves in 2022 when Biden's Democrats only lost nine seats. You know, I think the average is somewhere in the in the high 20s. And if you go back to when we first started having midterm elections in the 1870s, there's four elections where the president's party hasn't lost seats. And one of those, 1902, the size of the House expanded. And so although Republicans gained seats, they still lost ground in the House. You look at the years where the president's party gained seats. It's 1934, 1998, and 2002, which is like a murderer's row of years where like, yeah, yeah. It's like FDR saves the country. Okay. Like, you know, the economy has collapsed for four straight years. Now it's coming back up. Photos will reward that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, Bill Clinton overseeing the, you know, getting credit rightly or wrongly for the 90s economy and George HW or George W. Bush with 9-11 and the start of the Iraq war when it was not a disaster. You know, yeah, you get presidents with 70 percent job approvals and maybe you can gain. Maybe that is not Donald. No, that is not Donald Trump. And the way the House is just structured and the way midterm elections are structured, it's really kind of set up against the president, even if the president is doing reasonably well, even if the president is on track to win reelection, as was the case for, say, Barack Obama in 2012, won reelection, despite the fact that 2010 was a terrible midterm. Also for Bill Clinton in 1994, terrible midterm, historically awful midterm for the Democrats, won a comfortable reelection in 96. So the fact that midterm elections are in some respects, kind of a pulse check on the presidency and how the incumbent is doing, but there's also just structural issues for them. I think a big one being, and I think we're going to, we see this in the, in the Trump years is the out party is highly motivated to have their voices heard and registered and have some kind of acknowledgement of their opposition, I think is a huge driving force in midterm elections. And I think we've already seen that in the special election results, like in November and Thanksgiving. For instance, I don't think that there was a pretty sizable shift among that Tennessee special district around Nashville. I think that was predominantly differential turnout. Democrats are angry. They want to get out. They want to get their voices heard. Republicans are not as angry. Republicans, if you look at the right track, wrong track numbers, you see insofar as people think we're on the right track now, it's Republicans. And if you think things are going in the right direction, you're going to be less motivated to get out and vote. I think that just ends up being a penalty for presidents who even are actually have their coalition's locked in and whether or not trump does i don't know but well even if he does it's still a problem yeah and so to your point and this is actually a kind of neat synergy um if you look at the to your point about you know how deep into red territory uh democrats went in 2018 i.e not very deep at all um if you look at the mid if you look at the virginia house of delegates in the new jersey legislative elections yeah there was a lot of turnover but it didn't go deep that got up to about r plus two or r plus three seats it's not like they were now this special and the thing about those elections are is it like the off off off like those that virginia or that tennessee special election was like an off off off election yeah and it was right after thanksgiving yeah Yeah. Whereas like those Virginia, New Jersey elections are legit elections where both parties are gunning to get out their bases and whatnot. Yeah. The governors are spending money. The parties are invested. People are actually like engaged across the state. Yeah. I think you can kind of put more I don want a special plead and write off that Tennessee election or the other special elections but I do think you put a little more weight on those Virginia gubernatorial and New Jersey elections And you start to see the limitations facing the Democrats You know, what strikes me about your explanation is like there's always been a battle in political science literature, kind of two theories of midterms. Right. It's like surge and decline, which is, you know, the president gets his voters to turn out in the presidential year and then they drop off in the midterm, which is the different. And then there's also the like American character argument that we like to punish our presidents. We don't like them having too much power. Right. Yeah. We like balance. And it seems like with Trump, you see both. Right. Like he has a Trump brand. There are Trump Republicans that are not even Trump Republicans, like Trump voters that they just show up, turn out for the spectacle and getting them out in 2026. Good luck, guys. Yeah. Obama had the same problem, too. I mean, like if you look at his rallies in 2008, they were insanely large, but their largeness drove like surprising results in places like North Carolina and Indiana. But at the same time, like in 2010, you know, he had like two Democratic House members in Arkansas who were just left holding the bag, so to speak. I think, you know, there if we're going to consider like variables for next. Well, I guess not next year, but this next election, because we're in 2026. There are I sort of have and I'm not sure what I think about these, Sean. I'm really curious to know what you think about these. The one is the Democratic margin on the generic ballot is kind of meh. Like if you look at the RCP average right now, the generic ballot average is D plus four. And that is being held up right now by an outlier poll from Atlas Intel, which is a poll of adults. So if you do the registered voter, likely voter, it's probably D plus three, which is look, if the election is D plus three, that's going to be enough for the Democrats to take the House of Representatives. However, if you go back and look at the results in 2018, at this point, it was closer to D plus 8, D plus 9. That's one thing that's on my mind. Another thing that's on my mind, and again, I don't know what this means yet, and I'm not sure anybody knows what it means. It's just interesting points that who knows. The other thing that's sort of just kind of hanging out there is the low approval rating, relatively low approval rating of the Democratic Party compared to the Republican Party. And so the upshot of this is that if you wanted to – and I've seen on Twitter people do this. I'm not particularly persuaded by it, but I've seen people do this. If you want to make an argument that the Republicans are going to overperform, you would point to, well, look at the generic ballot and look at Democratic favorability. Voters are – Trump's job approval was definitely legged down since the shutdown. It was around 45, 46 in the RCP average before the shutdown. Now it's like 43, 42. but the Democrats brand, as people like to say nowadays, it's not in great shape. I'm not sure what I think about this. What do you think? Yeah. So my gut, I think there's two, I think, I think your point about the generic ballot is, is well taken. And I want to come back to that because I think that's a segue into another conversation we can have, um, on the brand thing i'm less i am less convinced by that because you and i are old enough to remember 2010 yeah and we are old enough to remember it's funny you mentioned the two arkansas uh democrats and i just remember being in a i remember one of them was in a meeting with barack obama and he expressed concern that it was going to be like 1994 and obama said to the arkansas congressman the The difference between now and 1994 is you've got me. And it's just such a nice and – like I have warmed a bit to Obama since his presidency. Maybe it's just the craziness of the last 10 years. But that is just like the epitome of the Obama. And like two days later, that Democrat was like, I'm retiring. Yeah, I remember that. That was funny. What I remember from 2010 is people made the exact same argument about the GOP. Like, are they really going to give the keys to the car back to the party that oversaw the financial collapse in the war in Iraq? And Barack Obama went on the stump. He had this whole speech that developed over time about how Republicans had driven the car into a ditch. And now the Democrats are trying to get it out. And Republicans are sitting there, like, criticizing the way the car is getting out. And, like, he had at some point they have a Slurpee. And there was this whole big thing. He had a whole spiel. Yeah, and then it was like, you've got to go get your cousin Pookie to vote. It was a whole thing. And it didn't matter. They got killed. Yeah, that argument, I really think that argument is what helped save Tim in 2012. Yeah. I think because the economy was still not in very good shape in 2012. His health care proposal was, you know, the Affordable Care Act was not popular. It grew in popularity. his job approval up until the democratic convention was pretty low yeah it was under 50 percent consistently under 50 percent consistently negative and i and i think that that argument did not save the democrats in 2010 but i do think it saved him in 2012 which was to say like look i know i mean basically the obama campaign pitch boiled down to look i know i made some big promises about economic recovery that did not happen, but you can't put the guys that caused it back in charge. And 51% of the country said, okay, fair point, which I think maybe means that, that like, so maybe one of the takeaways from this is that the underlying branding problems with the Democrats, which I think are substantial, are not going to manifest themselves as an issue in 2026, but could be a problem in 2028 when we actually because you know that's the thing about midterm elections is that they're national elections but we're not really having a national political conversation we kind of do but the presidential years are really the years in which the entire country has this collective deliberation that's not really something that's going to happen this year it's the midterms are a good pulse check on how the people think the president is doing but they're not really the moment where the country decides okay like what do we think about the direction that we're heading yeah i think that i think that's right and i think that's something uh to come back to uh in the second section but i want to i want to pitch this second point of yours back to you about the generic ballot because i i think there's kind of this like sort of Damocles hanging over our conversation, which is the 2022 midterms, which by all accounts should have been an absolute bloodbath for Democrats. I mean, Joe Biden was less popular than he is today. He was starting to show the signs of slippage. We had inflation. And yet I remember watching the generic ballot and it was like R plus three, R plus four. And I kept expecting like at the end it's going to bust open because all the undecideds, undecideds um all the undecideds are going to be presidential disapprovers surely they won't vote for um the democrats and yet they did yeah remember we we were texting about this the other day because i was doing some like uh i was doing some work at the end of the year and i was doing some you know looking at my kids college investment funds and i saw the and i don't really look at them very closely because my kids are still kind of on the young side and i was like and i looked at the returns in 2018 and they were or 2022 and they were terrible and i asked claude the ai that i i'm preferring right now and like what is this and they were and claude was like well yeah that was inflation plus interest rates and i i texted you and i was just like i i it's remarkable that like that the democrats did as well as they did in 2022 considering how terrible the economy yes And so I think there's kind of two theories or three theories, or four. I keep adding theories, but like, you know, the easy ones that I don't think we have to spend a lot of time on because people are probably thinking of them are, you know, the Dobbs decision maybe gave Democrats a short-term boost. There was the J6 hearings, which were scheduled, I'm sure, coincidentally, for the summer of 2022. two um i just i think j6 was a catastrophe and a terrible thing i also am not naive enough to think that no one ever played any politics in deciding when things would be scheduled um but regardless um i think the two more interesting things are you know republicans did end up winning the popular vote by three points and like 2014 2010 like they were five or six point republican wins so it wasn't that far off um of what should have been a really good year and so i think that leads into what we've kind of left hanging out which is like maybe just there's no seats to flip like maybe we are so well sorted and isn't that exacerbated by redistricting because i'm now looking at you know texas has added four republican seats um the florida is gonna add florida will add some and these are a lot of these are coming out of the swing seats right because like california texas 34 was swing it's no longer california has counterbalanced this a bit but like north carolina one was this if you look at the cook pvi right now like well maybe they've updated it but like north carolina one would be considered a swing district and it's just not anymore um california's you know i mean that was one of the frustrating things about doing midterm elections is that you have to really wait until California finishes to get a sense because there's, you don't really think about it that cause California statewide is strongly democratic, but there's usually a half dozen seats in California where you're just like, well, there are swing seats and those are for the most part gone. They're all priced at, they're all priced, whatever the current, like, I don't know, like whatever, I don't cook or whoever has the current margins is like two 10 to two 10 or whatever they think it is right now. Those California seats and those Texas seats are all priced into those numbers right now. Exactly. Exactly. And so, like, you know, yeah, Republicans have a three-seat advantage right now, but it's probably six to seven after redistricting is said and done. And that assumes – and the other thing, we've got to wait and see what the Supremes do on the VRA because they could – and if they end up really vitiating the VRA in some sense, then we've got to look and see, well, what's Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana? What are they going to do? Yeah. Yeah. Even without that, though, if you start talking about a six to seven Republican seat advantage. To start out with, that's where I start to say, OK, like maybe D plus three or four isn't enough to get it done when you only have like 10, 10 really swing districts. I don't know. Yeah. Like I said, Sean, I said at the beginning of the segment, I said 16 seats are R plus two or worse for Republicans. And I mean, that's, you know, if we that's it's a pretty small pool for Democrats to go fishing. Yeah. And especially like the thing is, they'll get a couple like that's the way these work. Right. Is that, you know, in 2018. Right. They're they're going to get like they won the national popular vote by eight points. And so they poached a couple that are R plus six. They poached a couple that are R plus five. But their big seat gain was built on those R plus three, R plus one, even D plus one, D plus two, D plus. Like that's where most of their seats came from. And those just, you know, those are hard to come by now. I think it's important to remember about 2018, too, that we were in the middle of, I hate the realignment term because it's meant to invoke 30-year superstructure cycles that we know don't exist. Thank you, Walter Dean Burnham. Exactly. but we were in the middle of a realignment in the vo key sense right that that there were discrete lasting changes in the way that southern southern suburbanites voted And so a lot of districts that appeared Republican were not They were districts where Romney had won them by 20, Trump had won them by like 4 or 5, and probably by the midterms they leaned Democrat. Like places like like Georgia's six and Texas 30, like Texas seven was it was George H.W. Bush's district. It had been like the backbone of the Republican Party until all of a sudden the wealthy white intersuburbanites of Houston decided they weren't Republican anymore. And there's just nothing like that going on right now. Like there's nothing that suggests that these R plus six seats are no longer are not really R plus six seats, that they're Potemkin villages. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's sort of like Karen Handel, right? Right. You know, she's a good example, right? And coming from Tom Price's district. Or you could say the Eric Cantor effect too, right? Like Eric Cantor was from the Richmond exurbs and strongly Republican in 2010, but now it's just Democratic. Yeah. That was a district. I lived in that district. That was a district that like stuck into Richmond, into like the near West End and Monument Avenue, which is like old, old Richmond money. And yeah, they all loved Romney, who's the epitome of like old, old Republican money. But when it comes to the Donald Trump Republicans, no, thank you. They don't want anything to do with them. I think that's a good that's a good seg to the next section or the next segment, Sean, because, you know, I was I was thinking about, well, we're going to talk. I knew, you know, obviously we planned this out. I'm talking about the Republican side. And even though the Republican side doesn't look competitive right now, I think that is itself a story of the shift within the Republican coalition away from the Romney-Bush style of Republicanism towards this new Trumpian, whatever you want to call it. And that this is not – Trump is not simply his personality. Trump is not holding this party together by virtue of his personality, which I – and I'll just say I've never really thought that was the case. I remember years ago, I think I was like doing like marketing for my second book, and so I was at CPAC. It's the only time I've ever gone to CPAC, and I'll never go back. But I remember Trump was at CPAC and he was speaking to like a half empty auditorium. And I remember thinking, ha, I guess that'll show that Donald Trump like his days are like, go back to the apprentice, buddy. But, you know, I remember, I remember, and I was writing for the Weekly Standard when Trump was like on his own march to the nomination. And in retrospect, I think that, I've said this before, I think that Trump won the nomination and in so doing reoriented the Republican Party by doing two things. I think he said two things that was on the mind of a huge chunk of the Republican base, but that had gone unexpressed by the leadership. And when Trump said these things, he won. The first was immigration is a problem. And yes, that includes legal immigration. And the second thing was the Iraq war was a mistake. I think and and I and and so the the hope of anti-Trump Republicans has has long been that when Trump moves off of the stage, you will get something like the old ways coming back. But, you know, you look at those those old school Republicans, whoever they may be, like a Nikki Haley type of candidate. I don't see a Nikki Haley type of candidate gaining any traction because I don't think she's able to say either of those things, although the Iraq war thing is now kind of stale and old. But I think the fact that J.D. Vance is essentially uncontested, at least at this point, is an indication that the Republican Party has been substantially remade by Donald Trump. And the fact that there really isn't looking like there's going to be much of a contest is an indication of that. What do you think? Yeah, I know we can't play the imperial march, but can I hum it? Like, do I have to pay? I'll interpolate it a little bit. But look, I think I think I think there's another thing that's even more. I think there's two other things about why Trump's been able to remake this party. And that's first. I remember speaking at some right wing group in 2012. And I just made a comment like, you know, part of the problem is that the Republican Party is run by an interest group. And if the Democrats were to soften on taxes, they would be Democrats. And I had more people. I was a fish out of water because I'm kind of like a moderate, you know, I'm a moderate. I am a squish. I mean, there's a lot of things where I'm outright liberal. And so but people came up to me. That message really hit home. a sense that like the people running the Republican Party are using me for my vote and they don't really care about the issues. I mean, that was actually you remember what's the matter with Kansas? That was actually Thomas Frank's thesis was that the GOP used social issues. Why are they still voting for this when the GOP doesn't really care about their social issues and is just using it to enrich themselves? And frankly, like, I mean, you know, I'm friends with a lot of never Trumpers. But the most self-defeating thing that ever happened was after Donald Trump got the nomination, they went and they proved those people right. They left the party. They picked up their toys and went home. The second that someone hostile to their view, like it just proved that like the old GOP establishment, like just couldn't abide what the base really wanted to do. In it, like their part of the bargain of being Republicans was they got to make the decisions. And once that got taken away from them. Exactly. The smarter task, I still say the smarter way to go was the Jonah Goldberg route to say, like, I don't like Trump, but I'm not going to pretend that I like Democrats. And I'm going to wait this thing out and fight. The other thing, though, is that like the old, you know, it's what, 2028 now. Reagan won in 1980, so 48 years ago. That's the difference between 1980 and FDR winning. You need a new... Look, I think one of the things about... I think one of the problems that the old guard Republicans have is that by the time George W. Bush left office, his like republicans were just like conservative voters who had you know crawled over broke would have crawled over broken glass to vote for him in in 2004 by 2010 we're looking at this just wreckage of political consequences of his two-year term like i mean what you could and i think this is what trump was getting at and when he ran in 2016 like like you know republicans and more broadly i would say i'd say you could even go more broadly than that and i would say you know like if you look for instance at like republicans since 1994 have been running at various times on fiscal discipline this is just one example i think of many and yet in this 30-year period of Republican domination of Congress, which is the primary spending branch, the percentage of government expenditures on social welfare programs, I saw a stat, has gone from like 10% of GDP to 20% of GDP. And you could just sort of look at this and say, like, what did this get us? And I think you could make a bigger argument and say that Republicans negotiating the post-Reagan period, starting with George H.W. Bush, But including, I would include Gingrich and the Republican insurgents in 94 and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney, like this effort to sort of revivify Reaganism and update it for the 21st century, just never found political traction. despite apparent wins, like despite the victory in 04, despite the big midterm victories in 94 and 2010. And it wasn't just a failure to win the voters in the middle, like in, say, 2012, for instance. But when Trump comes out in 2016 and he starts criticizing Republican officials for core Republican positions that they had taken, and Republican voters flocked to his banner. You know, it's... Yeah. Yeah, I remember during the 2000s, like the Netroots, the kind of like insurgent young Democrats used to joke about zombie Reaganism in the GOP. That like the GOP, the crack was the GOP solution to everything was a tax cut, right? Like no matter what, it didn't matter like a rock's falling apart, we need a tax cut. That's an exaggeration, but not by much. I remember nodding, thinking to myself like, you're right like there needs to be something different and yet for decade for for a full decade republican candidates just doubled down i remember in 2016 for some reason our editor at real clear politics we got this kid david byler went to the washington post successful columnist he's now a pollster but he was all kinds of teched up he actually is part of what inspired me to go get tech yeah i can't keep up with this kid yeah he's impressive he is my boss our boss got in his head he's like oh this tech kid i want some word clouds and david was like what the word clouds like that's like that's like the pie chart of the um of the data analyst toolbox but at some point i was like david just let the wookie win like do the do the word cloud so you don't have to hear about this anymore so he did it of the first gop debate and it was one of the best pieces written in 2016 because what he showed was that the word clouds for all remember there were like 16 people i guess there were 10 on the stage but 16 nominees all their word clouds looked identical except donald trump's he spoke a different language and it's like there was this gaping hole for someone to come up with a new vision of republicanism because the old old conservative movement had largely achieved except for the spending cuts it achieved a lot of its goals. And Donald Trump was the only one who took it. He was the only one who took it. I remember thinking, and this was in retrospect, of course, the irony of this, right, is Marco Rubio, who of course is now Trump's Secretary of State. Marco Rubio's campaign slogan in 2016, as I remember, and I was writing at the Weekly Standard. Rubio was like my first choice. I was a big Rubio after Scott Walker flamed out. Walker was my first choice and then Rubio. These are the sorts of things that you can only really fully appreciate in retrospect when you really begin to look back on your assumptions that you made and see where you've gone wrong. So it's my personal inventory of my own errors. And I remember thinking about Rubio's slogan in 2016 was a new American century. And I remember in retrospect, I thought that is completely out of touch with Republican voters, like Republican voters after eight years of Barack Obama and after staring down the barrel of Hillary Clinton are like the Republican voters are not optimistic. They think the country is about to be lost to them forever. Optimism is not you know is not the vibe The vibe is that old the vibe and this is Trump captures this too The vibe is that old Breitbart video from his from that documentary Now Breitbart God rest his soul, has been gone for, you know, 15 years almost now. But back in 2012 and 2011, Breitbart caught the vibe where, you know, there's this clip, you could find it online, where he said, you think you're going to call us racist, call us terrible people, and we're just going to act like we're just going to roll over and take it? And then he just pauses and looks at the camera and says, war. That's where the Republican base was in 2016. I think that's still where it is. And I think that like it's like that is probably J.D. Vance's biggest advantage is because J.D. Vance is clearly positioned himself within this vein of Republicanism, which is we're done being the country club party. Now, I'm not saying that that's objectively the case, that Republicans have objective because I know Democrats will be like, well, Republicans, they they fight with with bare knuckles and they certainly do. I'm talking about the impression among Republican voters that, you know, like it's war is where we are. And I just and I mean, I guess the other thing I'd mention, Sean, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, too, is that Trump was in a unique position in 2024 to pick a vice presidential nominee. because normally you're running for president and you win the presidency. You pick your VP nominee eight years before he would run. And eight years in politics is a lifetime, obviously, and you're normally picking that nominee for your own immediate political purposes. But Trump was in a position where the eight-year window collapses to a four-year window, number one. And number two, nobody was going to be making a vote based on who Trump picked as his vice presidential nominee. Nobody was. Everybody knew, everybody voted based on their view of Donald Trump, right? And he knew that. So he could pick whoever he wanted. And so unlike, say, Ronald Reagan in 1980, unlike George W. Bush in 2000, unlike Richard Nixon in 1968, Unlike Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, you know, Trump could be like, I'm picking a VP to be my successor, my ideological successor. That is a very, very rare opportunity, which I think is also a factor here, which is like Trump basically signaled Vance is the next guy. Yeah. Unlike Donald Trump in 2016. Yeah. Right. Where he kind of had he knew he had weakness like Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. was in many ways a series of poor decisions with a candidate who had the right vibe. But picking Mike Pence was a home run for 2016. That is not who Donald Trump wanted to succeed him, though, right? Pence was going to be a neocon but religious. And so this time around, I mean, the finalists were apparently, and I've read the various 2024 election books, the campaign books, And it's interesting because they all kind of tell the same basic narrative. There's some facts that differ. It's like the synoptic gospel. Yeah. And so, but the last three were Burgum, Rubio, and Vance. And then it comes down to Rubio and Burgum. Or not Rubio, Rubio and Vance. And apparently, like, one of the crystallizations was when he almost, he had pretty much decided it was going to be Vance. And then when he almost got shot in his life, kind of flash before his eyes, right, a centimeter to the right and you're dead, really got him focused on like, OK, this is this is like it. I maybe I don't make it through this term. Who do I want to kind of carry forward my legacy? And, you know, Vance ended up being more of that person. um you know i mean we can we can we can talk about like okay like donald trump has a son with dark hair and a beard and is like 40 years old and jd vance is also like dark haired with a beard and 40 years old but maybe not like quite so don jr-ish um right but but um i don't want to psychoanalyze Trump too much. But I think the other thing, though, is that, you know, I think we have to acknowledge, I agree, like, right now it's the imperial march to the Vance nomination. And, but like, Donald Trump's mercurial, right? Like, he could easily wake up tomorrow and decide his oatmeal's too lumpy and he doesn't like J.D. Vance anymore. Yeah, he could do that, that's true. you know and so that's the one caveat on the vance imperial march um is like what if donald trump turns on yeah what if he says something wrong or can't carry water adequately on some issue well i saw a report by the way too that uh vance was not uh heavily involved in these discussions about venezuela right right i mean that's a sir trump is very like trump is was against the Iraq war in 2003 but he's also he's got a real tr vibe to him you know he's not afraid to go and break crap so to speak right he's more he's more like you know speak loudly and carry a big stick and vance is more he's more in i think in the isolationist wing yeah like i would say a difference maybe is that trump wants to renegotiate nato for american interests like he wants NATO to carry more of the burden. I think Vance is sort of looking at NATO like, why do we need this anymore? It's been 80 years and they suppress free speech over there. Let them deal with the, they're rich, let them deal with their own security. So there's a difference there between the two of them, I would say. Yeah. So let's just say, and I don't think it's going to happen because Trump would kind of have to admit he made mistakes, but let's just say that Vance falls out of favor or family issues decides he doesn't want it throw up your reasons. Then who? Then who? Rubio. Maybe Rubio, right? The Secretary of State and Trump seems to like him. And I think you could just see a scrum then too. Like you could see Josh Hawley could look at this and be like, hey, why not me? I think Rand Paul. I think Rand Paul would probably make another run for it. Maybe Ted Cruz. I mean, How many – that's the thing. Like insofar as like this is all sort of Trump is indicated, he's going to be kingmaker. Vance is the next in line. Insofar as Trump doesn't do that, you're just going to – every ambitious governor and senator is going to toss in. That's what they'll do. Now let's play this out though because I think you're right. I think if it's not Vance, like everyone gets in. um and so you know if it's not vance maybe rubio gets made king by trump um but probably not because he's still viewed with some degree of suspicion by maga yeah um can you get a situation you know part of the story in 2016 was the establishment never was was always one step behind right and so the anti-trump vote was always split um and then when we got to three it was like ted cruz donald trump and john casick like three wings of the party and no one would get out and then my favorite one of my favorite anecdotes from the 2016 election books is um ted cruz calls john casick and says he's dropping out and case so it's going to be like the one-on-one finally between casick and trump and that night um casick drops out and and the the chapter on that in the book i can't remember which book it was is like just ted cruz screaming at the television set like i gave you the one-on-one and he dropped out but but can you get something like that in reverse where you have josh holly and you know various maga candidates splitting the maga vote and maybe opening the door for someone who's a little more like establishment yeah i mean i i hate to keep using that term because they're not the establishment yeah they're not right but like Like the old school. Yeah. Could you get a more, let's say a neoconservative. Yeah. Could you get something like that? So another question is who are those people anyway at this point? I mean that's the other thing with Trump having been in, like because this is the thing right now. We're in year 10 of the reign of Donald Trump over the Republican Party. you know 10 years ago you had a lot of people who you could look at and be like well yeah they're the you know they're they're the obvious other pole of the party but you know i like rubio now being trump's secretary of state is a sign of like you know trump's sort of like kind of claimed so much real estate that within the republican party is like who's actually in the mix that could actually run and represent that i don't even know i i mean off the top of my head i mean nikki haley maybe but she'll she'll have been when was the last time she held elective office it's been eight years something oh more it'll it'll have been like 12 right because she was she was the un ambassador under trump one so well i guess our bottom line for this is it's probably going to be vance and and and and the the main caveat would be if vance does something that offends trump that like really like so really i mean i think we could agree like at this point like for all intents and purposes the republican nomination the republican electorate is basically an n of one right like as long as trump is happy with vance then i don't think we're gonna have a real race yeah yeah we did an outstanding job um uh stretching out a fait accompli for 20 minutes of discussion. I got to pat ourselves on the back for that. It is interesting though, because it really is marked like from an ideological standpoint, we are really witnessing and we have been witnessing a change within the Republican party, a change within its basic issue priorities and also change within its voting coalition as well. It's really, really been interesting for that reason. Yeah, I guess I don't want to open up a new discussion because I'm getting Oscar music in my headphones, but maybe something for our, for our listeners to ponder and send us hateful emails about um what happens if trump wins in 2020 is his is his grip on the republican party is total yeah um you know i i think there's again my boss has made a lot of case has made the case again and again that like democrats and establishment go peers would have been better off if trump had won in 2020 yeah um gotten socked with the inflation right and then not been assassinated almost. Yeah. And not had the extra four years to consolidate the GOP. Well, on that note, Sean, I think we should probably call an end. And by the way, if you want to send us hateful email, we have an email address now. Our email address is stubbornthingsataei.org. Stubbornthingsataei.org. So on that note, thank you, everybody, for listening. I want to give a shout out to Michael Schwartz, our producer, who has done such a fantastic job of sort of turning this idea that Sean and I had in our heads into making it a reality. Really appreciate that. We appreciate as well the support of the American Enterprise Institute. And for those of you listening, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode. We're going to continue doing this. Sean and I are having a good time. 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