Loading summary
Transcript12 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to Bulwark on Sunday. Sarah Longel and I are actually doing this on Saturday so we can celebrate Mother's Day appropriately. Don't want to be accused of, you know, disrupting a traditional American holiday by insisting on the Bulwark on Sunday live. So make an exception. And we're going, we're doing it a day early. But Sarah, thanks for joining me on this Saturday.
- [00:20]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's get into it. Lots going on.
- [00:23]
A
Happy Mother's Day. One day ahead of time.
- [00:25]
B
And Mother's Day is a big, it's a real big holiday in our house because there's two of us. And so, you know, it's like the, it's the, the, it's the high holiday of our House.
- [00:35]
A
That's nice. That's very charming. A lot of news this past week. You and Sam Stein discussed on Friday the redistricting, the opinion of the Virginia Supreme Court on redistricting and certain amount of defeatism, I'd say, coming from or a lot of hand wringing from Democrats. Understandable, I suppose, and a little bit of defeatism from some on the left. But you've got strong feelings about this and I have some thoughts too. So what should people, what do we do? What do we do this may, here we are on May 10. What's the situation?
- [01:03]
B
Look, first of all, this decision is a real, it's just a gut punch from an actual, you know, where, where it looked like things were going. This, this blue wave in the traditional way we talk about it, blue tsunami, like the fact that Dems are up, like there's just been a lot of confidence going into the midterms. And when Trump kicked off his redistricting war, the mid cycle redistricting to try to eke out more seats to see if he could offset the enthusiasm by Democrats. You know, Democrats got in the game and fought back. And I think that was one of the first big signs of life we've seen from Democrats is being willing to say, no, no, no, we're going to go toe to toe with you on this. And it was looking like Trump had made a mistake that it was going to net out in Democrats favor between them winning the referendum in California, winning the referendum in Virginia. And so and it was, so it was looking like it was going to be like a, like a rake stepping situation for the Republicans and Trump. Then came the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court, you know, guts the VRA and also allows states to go ahead and redistrict even Though they're already voting in their primaries. Like, you know, you got places like Louisiana where Landry just suspends a primary that's already going and says, no, no, no, because we're going to redistrict Tennessee's redistricting, these other states in the south, and the Supreme Court gave them the GRE right to do it so that they were already in a position to pick up more seats than it originally people had originally anticipated. And then the Virginia Supreme Court yesterday throws out the results of the referendum in which Abigail Spanberger had. They had won. They had won via ballot initiative. People had gone, they had voted to. To be able to. To redistrict. And Abigail Spanberger spent a lot of political capital on this, meaning she was, you know, it was like, basically the first really big thing she did. And so it was important that they won, even though the referendum won by a much lower margin than she won. But it got across the finish line. The courts throw it out on a technicality that I have been trying to figure out how. What level of rage I should feel at the technicality. I'm like, do they have a point? I need to talk to some lawyers, because I'm trying to figure out if there's. If there's something to this or if it's a pure partisan court action, like what I think the Supreme Court's was. And so I understand why people feel this gut punch, because it feels like, wait a minute, we went and voted for this, we passed it, we did it exactly the right way, and now it's getting thrown out. Okay, all that said anger, anger. What do you do in the face of that? Okay. And I think that the justifiable sort of rage people are feeling needs to be channeled in a better way than what I am seeing online. Now. Granted, what happens online is not always exactly real life, but there's sort of a sense of, man, let's. You know, I just. You see some of these popular people who are online influencers saying, like, go run these people down. Run these Supreme Court justices, and, like, get in their faces and call them pigs. And it's just like, there is only one way out of this. And I sort of got into it with some of them online, which was a mistake, and I have to stop doing it because I was saying, like, hey, actually, the way out of this is that you have to persuade more voters to vote for Democrats. Like, that is the only way we have to persuade more voters to vote for Democrats in 2026. And the response is sort of like, we just voted. We voted for this referendum and they threw it out. What are we supposed to do? Vote harder. And I want to respond to that because that there's a part of me that's like, okay, fair. Like, you're like, we are voting, we are winning, and they're just throwing this stuff out. It's not that you have to vote harder. It's that more people have to vote with you. Okay? This is about building a much bigger movement. And a movement that starts with, you know, are we. How are we going to burn it all down? Is not going to get you where you want to go in the midterms. And I'll just. I sort of went and read about nonviolent resistance. And I think that one of the things to understand is that throughout history, especially modern history, like very much modern history, nonviolent resistance has been much more effective at making change than violent resistance. And so there are all kinds of ways to do nonviolent resistance that I think before we get to the place where everybody's, like, jumps to these extreme responses. Right. Is to say, all right, well, what can we do in the context of, like, not an illiberal reaction, not one that brings violence into the equation where you say, okay, we've got to figure out how to persuade a lot more people. We got to put bodies in the streets. We've got to create a sense of urgency among the voters. We have to win in 2026 by the biggest margin possible. So what are the things you do to make that happen? Number one, you have to win the Senate. Okay. And that means Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa. And we are still in the primary selection phase of a lot of these races. And so people should be looking to steely eyed pragmatism around which candidate is most likely to win, which candidate is most likely to win against the Republican in the general election. That's Number one. Number two, you have to get Trump below 30%. So I sort of. I. My first real laying out of the Bush line was with you on this podcast where we talked about getting Trump below 32%. I think that Trump is. Look, Trump is nearing that. He's in the mid-30s in most of the polls. Let's get him lower, because the lower you can get Trump, the lower you can get Republicans, the more you can get voters to say, this administration is failing us. They've got us into a war. Gas prices are way up, costs are way up. People are enraged. They are failing. This is how you get to a D 10, D 12. On the generic ballot. That is how you engineer an election of overwhelming force to ensure that you have political power. Like, if you want structural reform. So I hear a lot of people being like, we need to expand the court. Now, that's one of reform I don't agree with, because I would do term limits. I would do age restrictions, like, whatever. That's just a decision I do. I believe the court does need to be reformed, but I think there's a whole number of institutional democratic reforms that need to be enacted. To do that, though, you've got to get political power first. You have to get political power. We do not live in a country where you can take political power by force. You can only do it by persuading the maximum amount of people to come with you and vote with you. And so that is the thing that I'm feeling this morning that was good
- [08:32]
A
and eloquent and powerful. I mean, I just have a few footnotes, all of which I think complement what you're saying. A, I've been through a bunch of these midterms, including ones where I was on the very much on the winning side, the Republican side in 94, for example. And there's zigzags. I mean, none of these things goes in a straight line for 12 months. And so there was a very good several months with November's elections. And then, as you say, the increasing data from the polls and your focus groups about the direction things were going, the continuing Democratic, wildly Democratic over performance in special elections, the state Senate race in Michigan, which is a swing state, incidentally, a district Harris carried by one point, the Democrat won by 20 points up around Saginaw on Tuesday. So the evidence remains there. There are some zigzags. This is a real setback. But secondly, so A, just accepts that they'll be zigzags. B, this is a real setback. But people are being a little too fatalistic about it in Tennessee, where they really did this dramatic redistricting to destroy the majority minority district. The black district in Memphis, ironically been represented for 20 years by White, as it happens, who's responsive to their constituents, though. So that's kind of good. That's democracy, right? Kind of puts the lie to the fact that everything is identity politics. Any. Anyway, this district's been split up into three districts where the black areas are broken up and put into white rural areas so that they get kind of swamped. I was on a call Friday about this, and someone has looked at it closely in 2018, when Tennessee had a good Democratic candidate Phil Batterson for the Senate. So it's a good year for Tennessee Democrats, but may not be better this year. He got 49 or 48% of the vote in the three districts as currently, as newly constituted. These are not impossible races to win, and the same is true in other states, including in Virginia. I think you're going to go from a plus four outcome, probably, but quite conceivably to plus two or three, I think almost certainly actually to plus one still. So it's not. People are slightly overdoing. Look, the Republicans aren't idiots. They have good computers and they can draw the maps and they're being extremely aggressive and going for it all this year once the Supreme Court opened the door. No question about that. So worth deploring that and being angry about that. But people shouldn't. Yeah, they should turn out voters. And especially in the, obviously in states and districts where this has happened, including, I'd say, black voters who are being treated a little bit as if they're helpless pawns here, they could turn out and vote a lot. And that gets to your point about the Senate, which I've been saying for a while, the Senate is in play. And there are plenty, there's plenty of evidence. It's a poll in Kansas that came out this week where it's not clear who the Democratic candidate will be. But this was done by Patrick Schmidt, his campaign, a young veteran who's a state legislator, losing to Marshall, the incumbent Republican. 4,000, 945. No one knows Schmidt. I mean, he's known in his own state Senate district and he's within 4 points. Trump is underwater by 7 points in Kansas, which gets to your next point. And Senate races, whatever you think of the Senate, which is generically this district, what's the word I'm looking for, gerrymander, as it were, because the rural states have so much more representation. But it can't be changed. Right midterm, the same Mary Patolza one in Alaska. It's the same state that she, you know, she won the sole congressional seat there. She's now running against Sullivan. She can win again. And I think this is very much true in other states. So I think the Senate people have been too pessimistic about. They've gotten a little more optimistic, but they really need to focus on that because I think the House will come through. If the House doesn't come through, we're in a lot of trouble. And I think the House is going to come through. I think it could come through with Decent numbers. But the Senate's so key for 2027, 28 in terms of stopping some really bad things from happening. Checking Trump real accountability. No confirmation of very few confirma of judges, including maybe Supreme Court, but certainly at the district appellate court level. Just all kinds of laying the predicate for being able to govern again really in 2029. So I'm very much where you are on all of this. People just need to both be angry, but calm down a little bit and really focus on what has to be done. We've seen plenty of victories already. If we can get the margins that Democrats got in November of 2025 in real elections and with good candidates, but not, you know, not super great candidates necessarily in states that were Democratic but had been moving, Republicans had outperformed in 2024. If you can get anything like the increase from 24 to 25, you can get that in 26. They can overcome these, these obstacles, I think. But to get that, you do need persuasion. And that's now part of final point I'll make. And I'm curious what you think about this. I think sentence one says persuasion when you say it because you make clear it's a kind of, how should I put this aggressive form of persuasion, most of which involves driving Trump's numbers, a lot of which, most of which I guess it's fair to say, involves driving Trump's persuading people to vote to check Trump. The answer sometimes is, oh, the Democrats aren't popular and persuasion's very difficult and voters are dug in some truth to all that, obviously. But a lot of persuasion is dissuasion, right? It's you need to check Trump. And that part I think we've had. There's a lot of progress. People are too. We're already taking it for granted that Trump's in, let's say, the high 30s even. That's a long way from 50. We didn't think he was going to be in the high 30s six, nine months ago, remember then the narrative was all Trump's. He just can't dent Trump's popularity. He's got a mystical hold on these voters. They can't be changed. You know, what are we going to do? Oh my God.
- [13:58]
B
But I always believe you could drive him down.
- [14:01]
A
You were right and I was in all these phone calls. Just to go on for a minute more about with elite types, how are we going to persuade the people the problem turned out has not been so far the people. The problem is the elites and theirs institutions, which are not incidentally leaving Trump the way they should be, but that's another conversation. Anyway, his numbers are down. I don't know, probably really about 37, 38 if you average them all, but that's pretty far down. That is where Bush was in 2006, almost exactly. It'd be great to get him to 32, which is your Bush line. That was Bush in 2008. Be great to get Trump to that in 2026. Maybe 27 or 28 is more realistic. But I agree, the Trump number remains just so fundamental. Every study shows that in a midterm election when the president's party has controlled both houses, so it really becomes a referendum on do you want to let him keep doing what he wants to do, or do you want to elect a party that will check it? So, yeah, I agree. People need to toughen up a little, but also calm down a little at the same time and then really work hard on the persuasion dissuasion side of things. And that, that obviously will be different messages in different states and different localities. This voting rights stuff isn't popular. I can't believe that people think this is a great idea in a lot of parts of the country, including the other states. Right. I mean, you know, they could be more. Turn Michigan and Ohio because of what's happening in Tennessee, in a way. Right. Is that the kind of country we want where you just. And Mississippi and Alabama, like, just go back to no representation in a sense, for blacks in the South. Anyway, that's my footnotes to your excellent rant. And on the persuasion dissuasion thing, you do the focus groups. I mean, okay, concretely, you've told the Democrats, expand the, get more voters on board, expand the message, be more effective at the messaging and explaining why it's so important. What in particular?
- [15:48]
B
Here's a few things. Number one, let's talk about what offense looks like going into the summer. Gas prices are going to be extraordinary. The summer is when people travel. It's when they go on their road trips. It's when they're filling up their RVs, especially Trump voters and their, their boats. And look, it's when people are looking to, to, to be out having fun, right? They're going to barbecue. Guess what. Meat's really expensive. They're gonna, they're gonna drink. Guess what? All of alcohol, because of the tariffs is, Is more expensive. They're gonna drive places. Gas is out of control. They're gonna fly places. Gas is gonna make all of that stuff more expensive. And so the ability to hammer for voters that Donald Trump is messing with your summer plans, making it, you know this. What is the month that voters really turn on presidents? It's August. August is often for whether it was Trump's first term, whether it was Biden. And honestly, this is like usually the August of the first term is kind of when, like the honeymoon ends. But like the August of the second year. I'm sorry, the August of the first year is when the honeymoon ends. The second year can be when you put a fork in the sky.
- [17:12]
A
Just look in 2006, that was really the case. I'm here in Virginia. That's when the bottom fell out. And George Allen, who was supposed to be coasting to reelection to the Senate so he could run for president in 2008, suddenly started to fade. And Jim Webb, a kind of flukish Democratic nominee in a sense, nice guy, but not your typical Democratic nominee, came from behind and ended up catching him in 94, very much in August. So I very much be the summers when. But by September, the voters have made up their minds to some degree.
- [17:41]
B
That's right. And so we are going into summer months when people are going to be at their premium, angry about prices and costs. That puts us into September and October. Right. When we will have the Democratic candidates to.