Latest / John’s Newsletter / How to understand the 2026 election

Transcript

How to understand the 2026 election · John’s Newsletter

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Trump Revolution,
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  SPEAKER_00: where we try to explain the goings-on of America to a nervous world,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it is one of those days.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much And on to how do you understand the vote tonight?
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  SPEAKER_00: What are the metrics To look at all nonsense aside So let's talk about some races,
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  SPEAKER_00: particularly Senate races to keep your eye on that John and the captain
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  SPEAKER_00: and I will dig down on later tonight in the Senate.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then let's also talk about House races.
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, the House is really simple.
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  SPEAKER_00: There are 435 seats.
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  SPEAKER_00: All are up for grabs every two years.
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  SPEAKER_00: This was decided by the founders so the House is closest to American public opinion.
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  SPEAKER_00: They are literally always running for office.
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  SPEAKER_00: Literally from the minute they win,
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  SPEAKER_00: they start running for re -election immediately and so they are chained
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  SPEAKER_00: to public opinion and that is the point.
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  SPEAKER_00: Only a third of the Senate is up at any given time.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that, if you read the Federalist Papers,
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  SPEAKER_00: the greatest how-to guide to run a Republican government,
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  SPEAKER_00: written primarily by Alexander Hamilton,
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  SPEAKER_00: ably assisted by James Madison and John Jay,
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  SPEAKER_00: is the greatest how-to guide of how to run a Republican state.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Hamilton, very clearly,
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  SPEAKER_00: the point of this is the senators can in effect afford to be brave and follow
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  SPEAKER_00: the national interest for four years and then run for re-election for two.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the way it was put by Madison was think of taking a pot of scalding tea
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  SPEAKER_00: and pouring that tea into a saucer, Into a cup in the saucer.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the tea cools there.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's public opinion, cools and the Senate can afford to be brave
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  SPEAKER_00: and think longer term.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's why the two bodies are separated because they perform a different function
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  SPEAKER_00: for the Republic as a whole And the House is always up 435 seats.
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  SPEAKER_00: To win you need an absolute majority of 218.
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  SPEAKER_00: At the moment, the Republicans have a scant majority of three.
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  SPEAKER_00: I remember last time John and I being down on our knees counting voting districts
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  SPEAKER_00: in California and somehow got that call right when, frankly,
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  SPEAKER_00: the majority thought the Democrats would win last time.
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  SPEAKER_00: But Donald Trump, as we've said, can't defy the laws of gravity forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: And since the Civil War, only three times has the party in power,
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  SPEAKER_00: the President's Party gained seats in the House in an off-year election.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was 1934 with FDR at the height of the New Deal.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was 1998 when the country thought Bill Clinton was being tormented
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  SPEAKER_00: by hypocritical Republicans about impeachment.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that was just after 9-11 for George W. Bush.
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  SPEAKER_00: Other than that, every single time the House has gone, seats have gone to the opposition party.
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  SPEAKER_00: And with a majority of three, that pretty much meant,
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  SPEAKER_00: and I remember John and I saying this, I don't know if we said it to you all,
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  SPEAKER_00: but I will now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, that means the House will be gone next time for sure, because Donald Trump,
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  SPEAKER_00: much as everybody thinks he's unique, really does fall very comfortably.
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  SPEAKER_00: He is not an anomaly in any way.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so that the Democrats would take the House was foreordained in an easy call.
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  SPEAKER_00: Is the gerrymandering.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Democrats have always been much better at gerrymandering.
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  SPEAKER_00: The name for gerrymandering comes from Elbridge Gerry,
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  SPEAKER_00: who was a federalist politician in the 1790s who drew a district in Massachusetts
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  SPEAKER_00: where I believe he had been governor that looked like a salamander.
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  SPEAKER_00: And everybody said this is ridiculous,
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  SPEAKER_00: and he did it so that congressionally somebody could win that seat.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was a federalist, and so they made fun of his name.
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  SPEAKER_00: And instead of Elbridge Gerry, they said he has gerrymandered the district,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that's where the idiom comes from.
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  SPEAKER_00: So you get all this cocktail trivia for me. That's thrown in for free.
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  SPEAKER_00: But as a result now, the Republicans have caught up on the gerrymander,
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  SPEAKER_00: which means there are shockingly and scandalously a whole lot
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  SPEAKER_00: of one party seats out there in the Congress that only 35
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  SPEAKER_00: or 40 seats are really truly
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  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is that the challenges then come
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  SPEAKER_00: in these one party seats to the right if you're a Republican and to the left
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  SPEAKER_00: if you're a Democrat so they become more and more polarized and that is
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  SPEAKER_00: a huge structural problem.
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  SPEAKER_00: And risk down the road that we probably should talk some more
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  SPEAKER_00: about when we're looking under the engine of American electoral
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  SPEAKER_00: And then there's one other thing limiting the Democrat wave, and that is Kelly.
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  SPEAKER_00: The ruling of Supreme Court I think rightly made on the 14th Amendment
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  SPEAKER_00: that the amendment means what it says that you cannot discriminate
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  SPEAKER_00: against anyone regardless of race so you can't draw Black majority districts
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  SPEAKER_00: that discriminates against white people any more than you used to be able to draw
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  SPEAKER_00: in the days of Jim Crow.
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  SPEAKER_00: White majority districts which discriminated against black people.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Constitution is supposed to be colorblind and the court in Calais upheld that.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a really important ruling,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it did throw out a huge number or a huge number of throughout 10 or 12 seats
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  SPEAKER_00: the Democrats safely had.
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  SPEAKER_00: So that limits the majority as well.
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  SPEAKER_00: So For all those reasons, the number to really watch is 240.
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  SPEAKER_00: So there's not going to be a tsunami.
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  SPEAKER_00: There used to be 60, 80 seat swings.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's not going to happen for all the reasons I've just mentioned, the gerrymander,
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  SPEAKER_00: Calais, and all these one-party districts.
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  SPEAKER_00: But if the Democrats can get to 240 over this 218, that is a thumping, thumping night.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is a thumping, thumping victory.
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  SPEAKER_00: That means they would win somewhere north of 20 seats, more like 25 seats to do that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that would be, that's the metric to watch.
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  SPEAKER_00: If they're near 240, the Democrats have had an incredibly And at the moment,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Cook Political Report which is good on this.
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  SPEAKER_00: They could well get there and that would be a good night for the Democrats
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  SPEAKER_00: if they're in that neighborhood.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's keep an eye on the magic number of 240 in the House.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Senate, which we've talked more about because it relates to foreign policy,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Kieran, good question.
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  SPEAKER_00: The House, other than funding budgets for foreign policy, has very,
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  SPEAKER_00: very little to do with foreign affairs.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Senate has more to do with the Foreign Relations Committee,
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  SPEAKER_00: even though if Article 2 of the Council...
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  SPEAKER_00: Constitution makes it clear the president is first among equals in foreign affairs
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  SPEAKER_00: in a way he's simply not in domestic and economic matters where the chairman
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  SPEAKER_00: of the Fed, the Treasury Secretary, the Finance Committee,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Senate Budget Committee.
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  SPEAKER_00: They have an awful lot of power as well.
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  SPEAKER_00: In foreign policy, the president is clearly constitutionally in Article 2, first among equals.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the Senate does play a role in oversight in a way and, of course,
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  SPEAKER_00: approving treaties constitutionally in a way. The House doesn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: The House can only defund things, which it only rarely does.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at Vietnam at various points,
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  SPEAKER_00: they finally in the 70s threw up their hands
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  SPEAKER_00: and started defunding some things Nixon wanted to do, but very late in the day.
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  SPEAKER_00: Usually the House really doesn't matter, again, except in this funding.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Senate matters more, and that's why we spent more time on it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the math is pretty simple here.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, first of all, It's a sign of how bad things are going
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  SPEAKER_00: for the Trump administration and we come back to the war.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Trumpism, if it stood for anything, as I said before,
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  SPEAKER_00: it stood for not fighting wars of choice.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is a war of choice.
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  SPEAKER_00: And worse, it's a war of choice that's gone badly.
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  SPEAKER_00: This led to the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz, which sent oil prices up,
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  SPEAKER_00: which sent inflation up.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every American knows that the price of gas, as John's saying,
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  SPEAKER_00: went from just under $3 to over $4.
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  SPEAKER_00: Americans drive their cars in a way it's hard to explain to the rest of the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a big place and you need a car.
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  SPEAKER_00: You can't just go in the metro.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I haven't driven a car in Europe and all the time I've lived there.
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  SPEAKER_00: But in America, as John said, if you don't live in Ballston,
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  SPEAKER_00: if you live out in Iowa, Ohio, you need a car.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so this is a direct tax on you, inflation.
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  SPEAKER_00: And a needless war costing billions where the president loses all interest,
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  SPEAKER_00: to be honest, in domestic matters.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is the magic year, year two, to do something domestically. He's lost interest.
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  SPEAKER_00: So he hasn't kept faith domestically with the Jacksonian base.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which is a plank of Trumpism.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's fought a war of choice, which is against another plank of Trumpism.
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  SPEAKER_00: Worse, the war has gone badly and led to inflation,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is his main reason he's in office and Joe Biden's out the door
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  SPEAKER_00: by net inflation up to 9%.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And until the war, inflation was quite manageable.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Trump had a very good economic story to tell.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's still not bad. We're growing north of 2%.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: As an advanced industrialized country,
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: the Europeans would give their eye teeth to grow at half of what the Americans are.
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  SPEAKER_00: 2.5, I think, was the last number.
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  SPEAKER_00: France's last three quarters were minus 0.2, zero, and plus 0.1.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's just insanely not the same.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: But
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  SPEAKER_00: He had a good story to tell, and this is a self-inflicted wound, almost without parallel.
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  SPEAKER_00: And worse, it has depressed the base.
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  SPEAKER_00: It also has depressed moderate voters, 60% of whom voted for Trump in 2024.
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  SPEAKER_00: This time, he'll be lucky to get 25 -30%.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean they've just deserted him in droves.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so the states we're talking about are the first area that all
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  SPEAKER_00: of what I'm saying is true.
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  SPEAKER_00: He should be winning all of these states.
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  SPEAKER_00: Of the six Senate races I'm going to briefly mention in about a minute or less,
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  SPEAKER_00: to keep this to a reasonable time as we go forward,
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  SPEAKER_00: All of these states were won by Donald Trump with the exception of Maine.
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  SPEAKER_00: The others, Ohio, Kansas, Michigan,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Texas were all won
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  SPEAKER_00: by Donald
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  SPEAKER_00: Trump. Only Maine was not. The other five were.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is Trump country.
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  SPEAKER_00: These people voted for him, often twice.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that he's playing defense in states that he won two years ago is
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  SPEAKER_00: a pretty good sign across the country in a continental way
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  SPEAKER_00: that things are not going. And that the base is dispirited,
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  SPEAKER_00: as John says from being out there knocking on doors
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  SPEAKER_00: whereas the Democrats are incredibly energized and Trump's approval rating at 39 %
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  SPEAKER_00: in this national environment that's with flashing red lights.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's a drag on the ticket even as he remains quite popular in the party.
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  SPEAKER_00: The number is about 67 down from 90 which was unheard of.
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  SPEAKER_00: Still a good number but the problem is for the Republicans he's popular in the party
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  SPEAKER_00: but unpopular in the country and you're beginning to already see some defections.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Governor DeSantis this morning got out in front and said the obvious.
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  SPEAKER_00: The war is why people are disappointed and inflation is something they care about.
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  SPEAKER_00: And stop saying nobody cares about gas prices.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody does.
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  SPEAKER_00: Already you see the best governor in America beginning to distance himself,
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  SPEAKER_00: beginning to differentiate himself from the Iran war and the debacle it's
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  SPEAKER_00: about to cause.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that was an interesting marker this morning that John and I were talking
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  SPEAKER_00: about after our podcast with you guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's look at the big six.
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  SPEAKER_00: Again, Trump won five of the states.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's already a sign of playing defense.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, first, Ohio.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And my home state, Sherrod Brown versus John Hustad.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody even knows what John Hustad looks like.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's a Trump clone.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sherrod Brown, as I said this morning, was a very effective left-wing populist,
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: old FDR liberal, very comfortable in the old steel mills, coal mills part of Ohio.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: He'd been a three or I mean, I grew up knowing his name.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's comfortable and well -known and well regarded
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: in the state This isn't Donald Trump's fault.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is a good Democratic candidate who's a good fit for Ohio now.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Ohio is a plus five, plus six state now for the Republicans.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: It used to be the ultimate swing state in the 20th century.
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  SPEAKER_00: I believe it only got the presidency wrong twice in the entire 20th century.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1960, I know it voted for Nixon and not Kennedy,
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: but almost always Ohio was the swingiest of swing states,
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: the Pennsylvania of its day.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not true anymore.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Ohio is now a solid red state.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And yet Brown is up by 2.8% beyond the margin of error.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he's probably winning.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if there isn't an upset there,
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Brown winning already shows a state that's plus five or so Republican votes
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: for Brown at three.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's an eight point swing.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that means things are pretty darn bad for the Republican Party.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: So keep your eye on that one.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Kansas is an incredible story.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was talking to my friend Ewan about this last night,
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: my old friend who worked with me and Will Sherrano at Heritage.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Ewan, just wonderful to hang out and laugh about old times and You know,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: as you get older, these friendships matter more.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And to see you and see how well you're doing.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we were talking about Kansas.
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  SPEAKER_00: The last time the Republicans lost Kansas was 1932.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, 1932, about 100 years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: At the height of the New Deal, FDR's first term, he comes in and sweeps in,
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: amongst other people, a left-wing populist from Kansas.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it could well happen tonight.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Adam Hamilton...
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is up over the incumbent, Roger Marshall, another guy who's, again,
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'd be hard-pressed to pick him out of a lineup.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Adam Hamilton is an interesting guy.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's never run for office before.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: He's religious.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: He founded the largest Methodist church in the United States.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's a Democrat, soft-spoken, sounds reasonable,
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: fits again his state quite uniquely, and he's up 4.1% with the momentum with him.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So if Kansas goes, I can't believe we're discussing it.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Again, there's always one or two that come out of nowhere,
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: and in this cycle it's going to be Kansas.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: If Adam Hamilton breaks the 100-year jinx and wins Kansas for the Democrats,
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know it's a pretty darn good night for them.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Third, fascinatingly, Alaska.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: They have this insane ranked voting system.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: They had this at St. Andrews.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Again, as Orwell said, only academics could do something to make life so incredibly confusing.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was running for student body, basically head of the political society at St.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Andrews, which I was very keen to win.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we had to go through ranked voting.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was three or four redistributions of the vote.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I had a friend who was really good at math, and he had to explain to me that I'd won.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is nuts.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this was put in place, largely so, Lisa Murkowski,
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  SPEAKER_00: who basically is a Democrat from a very, very famous Alaskan family.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: Dan Murkowski, her father, was a well-liked...
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: She's basically a Democrat who has to love oil because she lives in Alaska.
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  SPEAKER_00: She fears a challenge from the Trump populist rights,
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  SPEAKER_00: so they put in this crazy system, which makes that challenge difficult.
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  SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, now it's caught the other Republican senator, Dan Sullivan,
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  SPEAKER_00: running for election in this nutty system.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, Mary Peltola Who's been a representative,
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Democratic representative in Alaska says, look, I'm a clean broom,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: and then is engaged in all manner of shenanigans.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: One of our words of the day, gobbledygook.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Diane was last week, I think shenanigans this week, where they...
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Democrats paid money to get another guy named Dan Sullivan on the ballot
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: to confuse voters in order for her to win in this ranked voting kind of contest,
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: which is a dirty trick.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it might well cost her because her decision.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Her victory margin is down to one point.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: So Alaska's on a knife's edge.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be interesting to see if Peltola is caught up in really ruining her image.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not so much the shenanigans,
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: it's that she ran as a clean broom who wouldn't do things like that,
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: and it turns The New York Times actually did some reporting.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in total shock, but give them credit, spent some money investigating,
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: and the Democrats paid for this other Dan Sullivan to emerge,
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: which is a dirty trick.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: The Trump people are investigating, but in a minimum, it's shenanigans.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: It may cost Peltola the seat.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't, and she still wins in Alaska, great night for the Democrats.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Fourth is Maine.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the ultimate survivor, the Harry Houdini of America, if Bibi is of Israel,
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Susan Collins is of Maine.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Susan Collins looks comfortable talking to Longshoremen.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: She quietly, in a New England Republican way, goes about Showing up to vote.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: She does her committee work, everyone has high regards for her.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: She plods along no muss, no fuss and fascinatingly she always outperforms her polls.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was like eight points last time the polls never get her right And she's running
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: against a far left candidate Remember Grant Plattner,
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: the car crash that was Grant Platter?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think we did a podcast on him. Well, his successor isn't much better.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Troy Jackson, another far left socialist who married his cousin.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got another Aeschylus Ilan Omar thing.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't understand the Greek tragedies going on at the moment,
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm going to have to reread you know the Oedipus trilogy
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: to figure out what's going on here.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: But Troy Jackson, if Troy Jackson beats Susan Collins, who is perfect for her state,
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: the last standing New England Republican who often disagrees with Trump gets away
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: with it.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's only a New England Rockefeller Republican could.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: If Troy Jackson says, Still wins despite the kind of Greek tragedy
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: and despite being left of Trotsky.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Another sign that the last standing Rockefeller Republican is gone.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a big deal.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: At the moment, Jackson's up by 3.6 in the real clear aggregate.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I still think Collins is likely to pull it out.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm wrong there, another sign that it's a great night for Jackson.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: We talked this morning a little bit about Texas.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Again, Texas still remains.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: The Democrats will over-interpret their mandate.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they do, as though the country were all socialists,
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: or at least unreconstructed Islamists. Which they're not.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: It still remains a center right country.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Texas is probably plus three or plus four Republican still.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot closer, but it still tilts Republican.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that's only if you put forward a candidate and Texas is Trump's fault
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: that John Cornyn would have boring steady solid not not
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: a trump worshiper would have would have won boringly and convincingly
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: by 4 -5 -6 points.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, Trump picks the scandal plagued Ken Paxton,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: a man so corrupt that he was impeached by the House of Representatives
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: in Texas dominated by Republicans.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: There are also all kinds of ethical nightmare questions to deal with there
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: if you want to Google him Feel free.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: But they picked this really odious candidate.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason they did was he promised to worship Trump.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: So he wins the nomination with Trump's endorsement.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And as somebody said, this is the worst endorsement since Caligula tried
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: to I think that's a brilliant line.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm stealing it.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: And Ken Paxton has taken a race that should be brain dead Republican.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And at the moment, James Tallarico is up the Democratic opponent by 2.6
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: above the margin of error.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Tellurico is likely to win.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: This would be an extraordinary win for the Democratic Party.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the one own goal.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: I would blame the president for the rest.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Again, there are these specific candidate issues you have to focus on.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last one, and in many ways, the Most interesting one.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: We touched on it briefly this morning, but I wanted to give you a little background,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: and that's Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I have no dog in this fight at all.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Mike Rogers is a neocons neocon, and Abdul El-Sayed wants to be the senator from Gaza.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, it's like picking between strychnine and hemlock.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: I frankly think they're both appalling, appalling.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I speak with a certain degree of distance analytically to look at this.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing isn't Mike Rogers twice a loser for the Senate.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Abdul El Saeed is now up 5.3.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see if these late problems he had,
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: saying things on 60 Minutes about boys and girls' bathrooms,
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: and he dismissively said, well, they have to see testicles at some point,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: so who cares?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: The more he talks, the worse it gets.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: His best friend is Hassan Piker. You may know his name.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: If not, those abroad.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: And again, the kids need to be educated.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is what happens when they don't.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's this Mao suit wearing, incredibly annoying, kind of mom Donnie,
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: bite the hand that feeds you, American citizen who hates America.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Says 9-11, we deserve this.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Abdullah Saeed has distanced himself from him a little, but not very much.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it points out the schism that's coming for the Democrats.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I've touched on this.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: I'm proud that I'm ahead of the curve on this one,
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: that The Democrats have congealed for years by hating Trump fanatically
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: and delusionally.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: When they actually have to do something,
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: they're going to have to look inside and see they have their own problem
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: because on the left of the Democratic Party, as is true in Europe, France, etc.,
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: You have a group of far left, white, gig employee, postgraduate,
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: student type people who don't know anything about socialism decide let's try
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: that again despite it killing 100 million people.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Standard white lefties who are frustrated in their, as I just said with Captain Cy,
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: these guys cause revolutions, frustrated upper middle class aspirants.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have And that red-green coalition, unreconstructed Islamists.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what they are.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we have unreconstructed socialists and unreconstructed Islamists, as in France.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is brewing on the left of the Democratic Party.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have the rest of the party, which aren't that.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: And they have to figure out how to deal with it.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Haley Stevens is a woman. I think that's her name. John wrote that down.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is Haley Stevens, who used to carry Hillary Clinton's clipboard, literally,
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know, a Clinton acolyte.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: They were incredibly annoying.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: But just a standard, progressive, annoying gardener.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's a modern-variety Democrat who's now confronted by Abdul El-Sayed,
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: and they had a bitter primary.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: He won.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: He's much better on social media.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Hassan Piker has trained him well, and he's charismatic in a horrendous sort of way.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: And Haley Stevens is not, and he won.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: She loyally went along, but he refuses to disavow Piker's comments,
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: which are anti-Semitic, deranged, And anti-American.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's no other way to put it.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, that's not for me.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: So at the last minute, she went to church with, of all people, Mike Rogers.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting in microcosm in Michigan,
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: but it's more interesting because this schism could ruin it.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: We are at the thin end of a wedge.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people are always asking me, what should we look for in risk?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that's flashing red to me.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: If the Democrats don't figure out what to do with their left wing,
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: to house train it, to bring it into the polity in a way that is not disruptive,
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: maniacal, hateful, lunatic kind of laden. They're not going to win.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: It still remains a center-right country.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it'll be fascinating to see if Michigan voters desert at the last minute.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Stevens voters desert Abdul El Saeed, who, again,
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: underperformed his polling by six or seven points in the primary.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: He was up by 10 and he won by two or three. Very close.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Will that number happen again?
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: He's up by 5.3, but all this is hanging out there.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: That one's going to be fascinating to watch because that's the problem
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: the Democrats are going to have tomorrow morning after they get over the hangover.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if you
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: keep all that in mind,
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: that's how you understand the 2026 election.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: These are the canaries in the coal mine that the captain and John and I will be back
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: to talk to you.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And in some form or another, Simon promised me a drink while we're doing it, but we'll see.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: It could very well become the Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton kind of show.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: I hope so. But they're busy and I'm busy.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I promise you, as always, you are our priority.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody take care.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you very soon.