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A
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
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Some drink champagne Some die of thirst.
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A
The way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the.
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Worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025. I'm John Pod Horatz, the editor of Commentary in Today's podcast is brought to you by the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. Because at a time when American higher education has lost its way, the Hamilton School at the University of Florida is setting a new standard, offering an elite education that's anything but elitist. Led by world class scholars, Hamilton is reviving the classical liberal arts tradition grounded in the great works of Western civilization and the founding principles of the American Republic. In small discussion based classes, students study history, philosophy, economics, literature and America's founding texts, developing the discipline, confidence, eloquence and moral clarity to lead with purpose in their careers, their communities and their lives. Learn more at Hamilton ufl. Edu Commentary. The Hamilton School at the University of Florida leading revolution in higher education. Hamilton ufl Edu.
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Commentary. And joining me today, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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C
Hi John.
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B
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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D
Hi, John.
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B
Washington Free Beacon Editor Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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E
Hi, John.
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B
And new to the podcast, Manhattan Institute External affairs director, meaning that he, you know, if they need to send out an army to fight against the Heritage foundation, he will be at the leading the troops. Jesse Arm. Jesse, welcome to the podcast.
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A
Thanks for having me, John or hi John.
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B
Hi, John. Yeah, so Jesse, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
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D
I think is his title there.
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B
Is that my title? That's your title because you are actually out of the country. So Seth is he is not in Moscow trying to negotiate a peace deal. Shameful peace deal. But you are out of the country. I'm in New York, Abe's in New York, Jesse's in New York, Eliana's in New York. And you are the external affairs guy for the Commentary magazine podcast, Jesse, external affairs guy for the Manhattan Institute. And he is here to talk about some amazing research that the Manhattan Institute has been doing about the Republican Party. And let's kick this off by talking about the special election in Tennessee's 7th district last night for the House of Representatives, the seat of the retiring Steve Cohen, Republican from Tennessee, and how.
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This race ended up being a weird thing. Foreshadowing of 2026 with some dollops of 2025. A far left Democratic candidate, like way further to the left than you would imagine. A Tennessee Democratic candidate in a special election for the House would be, maybe she got in Afton Bain because. Because, like, who was going to run in a seat that Trump won by 20 points? Who was going to waste their time when you were going to lose it? She got in the race. The Republican in the race whose name doesn't matter, and I don't remember it anyway, won by fewer than 10 points. A seat won by more than 20 by Trump and by its occupant in 2024. So there was some polling that suggested early on or late last week that this race might be tied or Afton Bain might win the Democrat, which would have been an apocalyptic result for the Republican Party going into the 2026 midterms. But Eliana Johnson may not be an apocalypse.
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But if you're a Republican in the House in any kind of a seat where you might have a competitive race, and remember, that's actually relatively few seats out of the 435 that are up every two years, this is not good news. It's not good.
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E
I think you can argue it. You can, you can look at it both ways. Trump won this district by 22 points in 2024. It's clear in a special election.
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Where Republicans are now the lower propensity voters, that that kind of turnout and that kind of enthusiasm, we weren't going to see that last night.
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And Matt Van Epps, the Republican candidate, won this race by nine points.
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That said Afton Bain, and yes, that's a real name. She was a poor Democratic candidate who was dubbed the AOC of Tennessee. And she overperformed Kamala Harris by double digits by about 13 points. And the turnout was quite good. The turnout matched 2022 midterm levels, which is high for a special election, which suggests voters are engaged and paying attention to this stuff. And so I do think that for a terrible Democratic candidate to overperform Kamala Harris by 13 points, that's a warning for Republicans.
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Certainly.
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B
Okay, so this is a deep red district. So you could say, okay, wins a win, it's nine points. It's not good. I mean, it's not like it's not a blowout. She overperformed. He underperformed. The Republican total was 14 points or 13 points under what you got in the presidential.
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But this is the seventh special election this year in which Democrats have overperformed relative to 2024. And so, you know, that's a trend. Like, you can't deny it. It's nationwide, it's transcends region and all of that. Not surprising. It's normal Political result that the party in power, particularly if it has the White House, the House and the Senate is going to get the brunt of public dissatisfaction. And the dissatisfaction numbers of the public are very high. You know, they're, people think, think the economy is bad. People think that inflation's too high. People. The, the approval rating of Congress, the last I saw was something like 14%.
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So not that. So the party in power that runs Congress is not in good odor with the American people or with the, you know, general electorate that's gonna, gonna, gonna come out.
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The question is, what do you do if you're a Republican candidate in December of 2025, going into 2026 with these seven specials suggesting.
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Like cataclysm. First of all, two kind of cat. One, you could lose, which you don't want to do, so you might retire. Two, you're going to end up in the minority in the House. And you know what is a crappy job.
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Maybe the crappiest job in the world is to be in the minority in the House of Representatives. You have no power. You've got nothing. You've got nothing. Particularly now that there are no cross partisan coalitions whatsoever in American politics. So you're just sitting there and then you have to start raising money again for 2028 and it stinks. And things are not going to go your way and you're going to have to, they're going to impeach Trump and then you're going to have to defend Trump and the public is going to be turning against Trump. So it's like, you might go, the hell with it. I'll just go become a lobbyist and I'll quit and that kind of thing.
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E
So I agree with that. And we're hearing from Punchbowl News that more high profile Republican retirements are expected for precisely the reason you cite. And I think it's worth comparing in the 2022 midter.
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Rather than the 2024 presidential election, where I don't think that's an apt comparison. There were still swings toward Democrats.
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There was still, you know, single digit to low double digit swings toward Democrats. And as you say, John, in all of these special elections in 2025, Democrats have overperformed. Now that level of overperformance given Democrat engagement in a Trump presidency I think will be hard to, I think we're unlikely to see it in the midterms, but they don't have to overperform Kamala Harris by 13 points to take back the House.
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B
Right, okay.
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E
And so what I think Republicans need to do is somewhat contingent on the administration, which makes it difficult, which is that the administration needs to have an affordability message. And also Trump makes it somewhat difficult in that some of these Republicans, if the administration doesn't do that, need to be able to distance themselves from the administration. And Trump just makes that incredibly difficult.
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B
Well, that.
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C
Can I just add to that something I said after the previous elections in, in November.
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Another thing, I mean, it's, it's very related to what Eliana was just saying. What does it mean to be a Republican now with Trump in office? What is the overriding message or the overriding. Forget ideology. All it means is currently you are a champion of the last thing Trump did. And that is an impossible.
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Place to be if you're trying to put together a cohesive campaign.
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B
And if you cannot attack Trump or JD Mans or distance yourself, not attack, but distance yourself or say, yeah, look, the administration and I, this is one area in which we have, you know, differing views. Something that congressmen have said forever about the president of their party.
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You start getting into a war of all against all because you got to fight with somebody. You're getting angry at people. We have a fight that broke. Is breaking out this week between Elise Stefanik and Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House and the head of the. Is it the Republican Study Committee or the. I can't remember where she is in the leap. She has some semi leadership position. She's obviously running for governor of New York. She needs to distance herself from the Washington Republican Party to run credibly as the gut for the gut for the gubernatorial seat in New York. And she can't go against Trump. So she's now, I don't know what's really going on between them. This is just my overall sense of what's going on. So she and Johnson are having a public fight. That's weird. It's a weird thing to have happen. Johnson doesn't really seem to deserve getting, you know, like rocks thrown at him. He's got an incredibly difficult job. But, I mean, that's the kind of thing that happens when you don't have you. You're not allowed to.
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Say things. You then say them in a weird way that if you have to say something.
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A
Well, to tie a few of these threads together, I think what Elianna pointed out that Republicans need to be talking about, the affordability message is something that the Trump administration recognizes. And I think in the year ahead, ahead of these midterms, you're going to see the president speaking a lot more about affordability. I think in part that was a little bit about what giving that classic Trump bear hug to Zoran Mamdani in the Oval Office was all about. This is the affordability guy and I can do business with him. And we don't see issues like making corporations pay their fair share too differently at the end of the day. And then that brings in Abe's point, right, about what does it mean to be Republican? Well, it still means you're not a Democrat. And I do think it's worth pointing out that in this Tennessee race, sure, Trump won that district by 22 points, but in the 2018 midterms, Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, only won it by half a point. So this is a reflection of the changing GOP coalition. As Eliana mentioned earlier in the podcast, these are voters that are lower propensity. It is not the GOP of the days of Romney and McCain, where white, college educated suburbanites were turning out in large numbers on a consistent basis in midterm elections to support Republican candidates. It's a different party now.
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B
So the seat itself, we should say, is kind of divided between Nashville and.
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A lot of rural counties not that far from Nashville. So you have a classic urban, suburban, rural divide in this county. And the Republican won by running up insane numbers in the rural areas and offsetting Baines. I don't think she won Nashville, but I mean, she came very close. That's how, that's what happened to Blackburn was a withdrawal of affect in 2018 by mainstream Tennessee Republicans, which is not, has not traditionally been a hard right state. It was in fact a Democratic state until, until the 1990s or the late 1980s, and only flipped to the Republicans in part because of a horrible scandal involving sold pardons. Not that I want to bring anything up that could hurt Trump in the future, but being seen to be selling or trading pardons as a political matter has a bad historical provenance for the party in power. That does it. So in that way, Tennessee could be a harbinger of all kinds of things. Tennessee going Republican with Lamar Alexander, who is a sort of forward thinking Republican in the 1980s, was a mark of the change in the Republican Party, a major change where it was business friendly.
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You know, sort of. He, he was viewed as a guy who got things done Republican as opposed to a down the line cultural warrior.
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You know, killer Republican.
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A
I think Republicans were saved in Tennessee's 7th congressional district because Democrats picked the wrong candidate. They had a number of sort of normie state representatives running for that office and they picked the hardcore left wing. And as Eliana described her, the AOC of Tennessee. She said she didn't like Nashville. She said she didn't like country music. She said she.
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B
I don't know how you don't like. I don't know how you don't like Nashville. Nashville is fantastic.
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I'm sorry, I interrupted you.
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E
No, I mean Afton Bain said, whose name sounds like some kind of a chat GPT invention. Maybe they just didn't want a representative named Afton Bane.
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B
Right. Well, that's, that's, that's true. But anyway, not liking Nashville is stupid. That's a good reason alone to basically not go into Congress like Nashville is.
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A
Especially in Tennessee 7th congressional district too.
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B
But I mean, Nashville is one of America's five or ten most colorful and interesting cities without question, with its own, you know, fascinating industry and history and all of that. Like, never hear a bad word about Nashville.
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D
Nashville is the. Nashville is the least bad mouthed major city in America.
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E
And she said she hated the state and described the voters as a bunch of racists. And it was still only a nine point race.
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B
Yeah, right.
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E
And I do, I also think it's worth noting that the counties that displayed the biggest swings between 2022 midterms when Mark Green was the Republican candidate and now are mostly.
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Suburban exurban counties, which is what we've seen. Like this is, this has been the pattern. This is where Republicans, you know, normie voters where they're vulnerable and where the affordability issues hit hard.
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A
Yeah. And it's not just Republican Mark Green's district where this is a lesson that we can take away. I think a lot of this, like I mentioned, is about Democratic politics. Right. Zoram Hamdani underperformed previous Democratic nominees for mayor of New York city by some 20 points. 20 points on margin of victory. 30 points. Sorry, 20 points in terms of vote total, 30 points in terms of margin of victory to the next opponent. So some of that you can chalk up to the fact that Andrew Cuomo ran as an independent. But this is a trend that's going to go around the nation now. And you're going to. And if you're talking about sort of intra left debates within the Democratic Party, there are smart people on the left, more the center left, the Josh Barrows of the world, the Matt Iglesiases of the world, who are trying to point out this trap and encourage their party not to fall for it. But beneath the Iglesias and Barrows within the Democratic Party, there is a Much larger contingent, especially among the staffer class, the kind of professional Democrat that lives along the Acela Corridor in Washington D.C. or New York City that is really invested in the answer to all of Democrats problems simply being to pivot much harder left. And somehow even when you are going to offer up a candidate in a red state that you run as an independent like Dan Osborne in Nebraska in the last election cycle, he still moves farther left. At least on Israel or at least on, you know, major issues which are rallying cries for the progressive Democratic base. It's a mistake for Democrats. I'm a Republican in my personal capacity, a conservative in my professional capacity, but still as an American, I'm rooting for that party to get their House in order and not nominate the worst people imaginable for public office. Because as we learned, eventually they will win if the Republicans drop the bag badly enough. Well, I have to say I think.
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C
You know, as a, as an aside to attach myself to this point here, it's very telling that she came out and said I hate this place and I hate what everyone else loves about it. That's the core essence of the left that we're talking about. It's like, you know, how do you feel about America?
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B
About.
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C
Yeah, I hate the good things about America.
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B
Yeah.
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D
So look, they also, I think they also need, I mean, Republicans. So the question is, what do you do? Right. And Republicans need to have a non Trump dependent strategy to correct this. There always has to be a plan B in the House. In 2018, Trump was very involved in the midterms on the Senate side. He likes the big stage. There were some very clear big Senate races in 2018. Those were his first midterms. And it, you know, it was just clear where the effort was going to be. And Republicans picked up seats in the Senate in 2018. In those, in his first midterms, Republicans expanded their majority in the Senate by holding pretty much every, I mean there was a group of like five seats that were, they were under fire and they held them in the House. They got washed out. I mean Democrats won what like 40 seats or something, you know, plus 40 seats, something. So you know, you, if you're in the House, this is a bigger, it's a bigger alarm bell that's ringing than if you are in the Senate. And remember, Trump can sort of swoop in but he's not going to be there for every House candidate like this. And he's also not going to be staying on message.
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B
Right.
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D
We heard him say like he got tired of Talking about the price of an apple during the election and stuff like that. So the House is where there really isn't any sort of support infrastructure to, you know, that can swoop. No ex machina that can swoop in.
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B
Yeah, and I'm not sure there is in the Senate either. Republicans have a natural advantage going into the 2026. The map, the Senate map should save them. However, Trump in 20 and 22 was a disaster for Republicans in the Senate. He championed impossible candidates. He had his temper tantrum in Georgia that led to the two Georgia runoff.
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Victories by saying, everybody should stay home because George is mean to me, you know, and others. And then in 22, Democrats outperformed what they should have been, where they should have been, given the fact that they were the House and the party in power, because Trump was there, even though he wasn't even yet the candidate, but the shadow was still there, and they gave Democrats something to run against. And so the midterms, the Trump, when Trump is not on the ballot for Trump.
- [22:47]
2018 in the Senate may be the one exception. Obviously. The weird thing here is we have three elections here that's never happened in our lifetime where you have a central. Trump is the central figure in all three elections. He doesn't have a good record helping his party. And to talk about affordability and then to move on to Jesse's stuff.
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E
Well, John, one quick point.
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B
Yeah.
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E
I think Trump is incentivized, actually not to help Republicans because he views it as a positive reflection on him. As in, when I'm not on the ballot, they lose.
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A
Right.
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E
It has to be me. And I think it's somewhat actually worrisome for Republicans in 2028, because I think part of Trump wants them to lose.
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B
Right.
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E
Can't win without me right here.
- [23:40]
A
I don't. Well, can I just say one point? I do think that the White House recognizes the impossible circumstances they will find themselves in for the last two years of this term if the midterms are awash in 2026, which they may well be, but I think, like Eliana says, they are holding with that two minds that they understand how incredibly difficult it is to just win in the midterms immediately following an election where the party has been elected president. And like John said, 2018, keeping the Senate was sort of miraculous. In that vein, 2022 was a particularly weird moment because, yeah, the Biden presidency was underway, but also the GOP primary was underway and there was a anti Trump versus pro Trump major battle that was playing out, and Trump was at his sort of weakest point before he started charging back and consolidating Support ahead of 2024, where I think Trump really reclaimed the mantle of being the.
- [24:43]
Extreme political talent that he is. And the Republican operation got cleaned up a lot in 2024, too. The candidates were better statewide, all over the country. So that, that, you know, needs to be said. I don't think that the White House is eagerly hoping to be investigated by Congress for the last two years.
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B
But the issue is Trump is uniquely ill suited to do something about the affordability message, because his impulse at every moment is to say, I have given you the best economy in the history of the planet Earth and the entire solar system, and everybody is wonderful. And if you don't think that your Walmart Christmas basket is the same as last year's Walmart Christmas basket, you are falling for fake news from, you know, bad liberals who should be arrested for sedition. That's Trump's impulse, not to.
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D
And at the Cabinet meeting the other day, Kristi Noem said, you kept the hurricanes away. We had fewer hurricanes this hurricane season than the past. So thank you, Mr. President, for keeping so in Trump's mind. It's, it's, you know, it's not just, it's not just a great economy. He's. He's controlling the weather.
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B
Yeah, well, that's the problem is he's got a, he's got a bunch of mishigoim surrounding him who are not helpful to his seeing the world clearly. I gather that Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, is a very sane, rational, direct person and isn't standing there going, you saved us from hurricanes. But there is always the person staying there saying, you saved us from hurricanes. We read that the Honduran president pardoned for his 45 year drug trafficking sentence somehow got Trump's attention because he wrote him a letter talking about how wonderful he was. And that is the sort of thing that is really helpful in capturing Trump's attention. If they have to create an agenda that Sundays, the last 11 months, we have been pursuing a set of policies that, while we think they're really good, we need to shift gears because of the affordability problem. I just don't know that he has the vocabulary to say, I need to shift gears. And you have to say, you're shifting gears to tell people that the policy is changing because you want to say, like Bill Clinton in 1995 and 1996, I'm changing policy to get your vote. If you don't say that, they won't know that you change policy because 90% of voters are not paying attention to the ins and outs of whether or not you're getting $4 more back in your, you know, on your, on your Costco bill than you did three months ago. I mean, they'll know in general terms, but not, not in, not in specific terms.
- [27:43]
E
So, I mean, one thing, but this.
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A
Does get to some of the biggest tensions within the GOP right now. I mean, I can go to that.
- [27:52]
E
Well, John, one thing I should add before we jump to that is the one thing that could mitigate against, you know, Trump's solipsism and indifference to Republican. The fate of Republicans in the midterms, I think, is having a Suzy Wiles there to say, hey, remember the investigations and the impeachments that happened when Republicans were in the minority? You didn't like those. And the investigations that are being launched now or the inquiries that are being launched into what happened in that boat strike. That's a preview of what's going to happen if Republicans lose the House and, you know, God forbid, the Senate.
- [28:33]
B
Right.
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E
So buckle up and, you know, you might want to show care.
- [28:37]
B
Okay, so before we, I don't really.
- [28:38]
A
Think before we get to your juice.
- [28:40]
B
Jesse, before we get to your juice, let's just take a pause and hear from one of our sponsors.
- [28:47]
C
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- [30:26]
B
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- [32:09]
Okay, Jesse arm you and the Manhattan Institute surveyed, I think 3,000 people. Is that right? Do I have that right?
- [32:17]
A
Yeah, just under 3,000 people.
- [32:18]
B
3,000 people in the Republican party to try to get a portrait of the Republican party. A full blown portrait of the Republican party. It's demographic makeup, it's political makeup, it's partisan makeup and it's ideological makeup. And this is a really remarkable piece of work you guys have done. It's incredibly thorough and really interesting and it is the kind of thing that you know is at this moment when so few people are doing serious polling. Anyway, this, this survey is going to be a roadmap for anybody who takes politics seriously at this moment going forward in the next couple of years. So Very briefly, you divide the Republican Party into two camps. One is 2/3 of the party and one is less than a third of the party.
- [33:21]
Why don't you tell us those camps are and where they differ? I mean, this is the whole subject of the thing, but those two camps are absolutely.
- [33:33]
A
Yeah, I appreciate it. Well, obviously, there have been a lot of questions in recent weeks about what is the American right and sort of the main fractures between today's gop. What does it mean to be maga? Can President Trump remain keep a coalition that is cohesive together once he exits the stage? And yeah, we wanted to conduct a survey of nearly 3,000 voters, the vast majority of which were Republicans. And we also included really large over samples, which we account for on the back end to balance out, but essentially make sure we get a really accurate picture with, by oversampling black and Hispanic Republicans. Who are some of these new voters who have come into the party in 2024? Because we were quite interested in seeing what those voters think. The GOP is navigating generational ideological tensions that cut across these old factional lines, differences in leadership style from the Romney, McCain days to Trump. What are your cultural priorities? Do you care about the social issues that we focused on heavily in the last decade? Guns, abortion? Are you more focused on trans dei? Do you want us to dispense with the social issue talk altogether? And also, what is the worldview of these younger, more disaffected and increasingly diverse new entrants that we're hearing so much about? So our findings pointed to a coalition, like you said, John, that were divided, again, to two broad segments. You've got the majority segment, longstanding Republicans who have backed the party for many years. They are consistently conservative on economic, foreign policy and social issues. They like cutting taxes. They like cutting spending. They're hawks. They, they, they take a hawkish view on China, but they also remain firmly pro Israel. And they're highly skeptical of progressive agendas on transgender issues, DEI issues, you name it. But there is this sizable minority, new entrants to the GOP coalition over the past two, two presidential cycles, and they look markedly different. Like I mentioned, they are younger, they are more racially diverse. But above all else, or not above all else. But in addition to that, they are much more likely to have voted for Democratic candidates in the recent past. This is a group that diverges from the party's core sharply in this respect. And they are also much more likely, in fact, substantially more likely to hold progressive views across nearly every major policy domain. So the Things I just mentioned, right. They're left leaning on economic policies, they're more favorable toward China, they're more critical of Israel, and they're more liberal on issues ranging from migration to DEI and everything in between. And you've got this significant share within that minority chunk that reports being openly racist or anti Semitic, having those views. And they express potential support for political violence, that it can be justified in certain circumstances. And yet despite all of that, they are overwhelmingly now identifying as Republicans and they voted for Donald Trump in 2020.
- [36:40]
B
So according to your survey, the core Republicans, that's what you call Republicans who have voted consistently Republican for since 2012 make up 65% of those you surveyed. And the new entrant Republicans, the ones you are describing, make up 29%. So what's interesting to me is that you would think from the way people talk about the Republican Party that these numbers were flipped, that the core entrance Republicans are the ones who are getting all the attention, are getting all the focus, are the sources of all the fights that are going on, and.
- [37:26]
That the core Republicans are the minority, that they're the old news, they're yesterday's news, and they are not the most important part of the coalition.
- [37:39]
A
Well, that makes sense when you consider who's speaking that way. Right? You're seeing a lot from the dissident online sort of schizo right, as I sometimes describe it, and the kind of left leaning corporate media that have spent a lot of the past few weeks convincing themselves that the future of President Trump's MAGA movement belongs to what we might call the weirdest kids in the room. In the imaginations of these sort of two strange bedfellows, but who are both evil, eager to see the American right move past its politically successful 2024 incarnation. They're seeing the key drivers, or articulate, trying to articulate, that the key drivers of post Trump conservatism are not union laborers from Macomb County, Michigan. They're not church going moms from rural Georgia. They're not even the Hispanic contractor living in the Rio Grande Valley. But it is this 20 something male zoomer living in parents home and spending inordinate amounts of time on X Rumble and TikTok and playing in between their doses of video games like Rocket League or Roblox and, you know, pot and porn. And there's been this effort to frame these kind of budding young edgelords as the inevitable inheritors of the control levers over the gop. But yeah, our data suggests that that is far less of an eventuality than, I don't know, someone like Nick Fuentes may like you to believe.
- [39:27]
B
Important also to note because of the ideological framing that you find in the course of your polling, that people who are less engaged in the incredibly granular focus on politics that we have would probably not be aware that these new entrant Republicans that you're talking about are relatively, I would say, policy nihilistic. In other words, they are not bringing a moral frame to understanding what it means to be a Republican or on the right, as you say, they're much more liberal on social issues. They are way less engaged than I would have thought in the trans and DEI fights. See, I would have thought that's the van. That's, that's one of the ways in which old Republicans and young and new Republicans come at this together, right? DEI has cost them. They think that they're being mistreated because there's favorable attention being paid to minority groups as opposed to them, and that they don't like trans because it's screwing everything up or whatever, and they don't care about these things or are affirmatively supportive of them. That is, that was new news to me.
- [40:53]
A
So I think there are a couple of things going on. I think on the one hand, Republicans are now experiencing a little bit of a problem that is similar to the ones Democrats have been sort of grappling with for the last decade plus, which is that the Democrats have professionals in Washington D.C. that work for the party that are about a mile to the left of the median Democratic voter in the United States. The Republicans, at least among this, have, have actually historically had a problem, or at least the conventional wisdom has been that, well, the Republicans have the same problem. The professional Republican in Washington D.C. is to the left of the Republican voter. I'm not convinced that that will be correct moving forward. In fact, the trend we may be seeing among the sort of rising class of zoomer and millennial young staffer in Washington as they're beginning to take the reins of control, is they may actually be, well, to the right of the Republican voter, the median Republican voter in the United States. And that's leading to confusion, right, where people who work in Washington as professional Republicans go to their friends in left wing corporate media and seek to spin stories about rifts and fights within MAGA that are between clearly articulated and coherent ideological camps. People who think maybe more the way you do, John, and people who think more the way, I don't know, Pat Buchanan thought, okay, but that's not what we're seeing in the data. What we're seeing in the data is that President Trump in 2024 brought together a coalition of supporters that were all over the map ideologically, to the extent that there's any sort of policy through line. Maybe you could make the argument that it is intense hostility and a deep feeling of unfairness toward illegal immigration. But even that is a difficult, clear line to draw across the entirety of the Trump coalition. So what President Trump was able to do is bring in people who have historically voted for Democrats or maybe maybe just find appeal in President Trump for various other reasons. President Trump is. Has an ideological flexibility to him. You know, you could charitably describe that as pragmatism, or you could hostilely describe that as inconsistency. But it is true. It is true, you know, that he's changed his mind. He's, in this term, very tough on crime and policing. In the first term, he was, you know, pushing the First Step act as his signature legislative achievement with Congress, which was a massive piece of criminal justice reform. In this term, he's extremely hawkish on foreign policy questions relating to Iran, relating to Venezuela. But in his campaigns for president, or at least the most recent campaign for president, he was running aggressively on a program of no new wars. I mean, I think that for me, I can kind of square all this. I tend to like the president, but I understand.
- [44:01]
You have to keep in mind that this is why the coalition is as ideologically diverse as it is. But it's not just two camps disagreeing with each other. It is people who hold views and ideas that are all over the map, who are currently part of the GOP coalition. The question is, will they stay once J.D. vance or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or whoever takes the helm?
- [44:22]
D
I mean, that's the question is how much of a coalition is it? That's, you know, that's what I keep asking myself reading. You know, this great. The polling and the research that you guys are doing is there's a real chance that a lot of Republicans in D.C. look at this and say, these are not Republicans. So what do I like? What am I gonna.
- [44:41]
B
Our friend Noah Rothman wrote a piece for National Review yesterday or the day before yesterday, which he said, hey, isn't it funny? The problem with the Republican Party is all the Democrats that are now in it, because he took Jesse's data, the Man Institute's data, and said, what I see here is people who used to vote Democrat are now voting Republican and who are. Who are confusing every Republican issue with their ideological inconsistencies and the very incoherence that may have led them to vote for Trump in 2024. So that is a funny point. Like Noah, Noah went right there and.
- [45:24]
D
They'Re going to, Republicans are going to be tempted to say, you know, show me how I know that this is a gettable voter when Trump is out of the, when Trump personally is out of the picture and what, you know, what do you look, what does the research say about, I mean, does it tell you how to answer a question like that?
- [45:43]
E
But I think part of, part of the answer to that, and I'm curious in your thoughts about this, Jesse, is that we can't just look at Republicans and Trump voters in a vacuum. Part of the answer to why Democratic voters are in the Trump coalition is the Democratic Party, okay? Democrats left because the Democratic Party said men are women and we're going to let boys play in girls sports and we're going to, you know, embrace Ilhan Omar and Rashida to lead to lab and let those people bully Joe Biden and tell him what to do. And we're going to put Kamala Harris up for president and put a senile guy on the ticket and, you know, do every ridiculous thing under the sun and embrace the far left. And what I think is interesting about the Republicans is they're now in a somewhat similar, like when Trump exits the scene, they're facing a decision about which direction they're gonna go in. Like, are they going to let the lunatic fringe new entrants into the party dictate the terms of engagement or, you know, the ideological boundaries of the coalition, or are they going to let like the normie, you know, 65% in the new poll. And I've literally had, you know, staffers, administration staffers sit down with me in D.C. over lunch and tell me, like, look, support for Israel is not going to be the way it used to be going forward, you know, when J.D. vance is the candidate, like, the terms of engagement are going to change. And reading your looking at your poll, Jesse and the Beacon did a similar poll that like, the results of that poll were mixed. You could see in them what you wanted. And the results of your poll are a little mixed, but they do show like, majority support in the coalition on issues of importance for, you know, including Ukraine. Republicans like us and including Ukraine, it.
- [47:54]
B
Totally, I mean, I mean, that's what so Israel's obviously will, you know, that's a matter of consuming concern for us. Not that Ukraine isn't. But if there were one issue on which you would think, well, you know, the Republican Party, you know what, really the way it's trending, no money for Ukraine. That is not what your poll suggests. Your poll suggests that if you take these numbers, you add them together, you have 100% of the Republican Party in the poll that Republicans are more supportive of Ukraine than they are.
- [48:31]
Displeased with Ukraine or support holding Putin back more than they reject the idea that we should hold Putin back. The question is whether you have a trend line here, right? A demographic trend line. I'm old, they're young.
- [48:50]
Invest in youth because, you know, I could die and someone's going to be 25 and will be a reliable voter for another 50 years unless he dies of fentanyl and porn addiction in his basement, as Jesse points out. I'm just saying, like, I don't know.
- [49:06]
But some of this, again, even I, who believed that the Republican Party didn't change the way people thought it changed, was struck by these two tooth at one, the foreign policy hawkishness that seems not to have moved in large bore and second, that it is the normie Republicans who are remain steadfast on what we would call social issues and that the.
- [49:37]
Joe Rogan Theo Vaughn, I'm not even going to call them Tucker and Fuentes because I don't think that's fair to say that though, that this 30% of people are governed by, you know, Nick Fuentes. But let's say they're Joe Rogan Republicans, that, that they don't care that much about any of that whatsoever. Which is, I think I find that.
- [50:03]
C
Very interesting because so much of the discussion about them.
- [50:09]
Tries to explain them as having been.
- [50:15]
Sort of taken advantage of by those social issues and those social codes. Right. That they resent being boxed out by because of DEI and whatnot. And in fact, that's perhaps not the case. You're sort of making an excuse for them that they don't necessarily even make for themselves here.
- [50:43]
B
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- [52:05]
A
And I'm John Passantino.
- [52:06]
D
We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter, Status.
- [52:15]
A
And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Powerlines.
- [52:20]
D
Every Friday we're breaking down the biggest stories shaping the industry, explaining why they matter and saying that the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.
- [52:29]
A
No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.
- [52:38]
D
My understanding having reported this is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just, I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.
- [52:55]
A
Oh my God, that's Power Lines presented by Status Follow Power Lines and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or your favorite podcast app.
- [53:10]
Well, look, I don't want to over extrapolate from the poll. I should note that we didn't poll explicitly on the Ukraine question. On the one hand though, I want to say that, you know, Noah Rothman Hoffman is right in his piece where he sort of articulates that like we can't have people who were Democrats five seconds ago dictating the terms of control of the Republican Party. On another hand, it's kind of funny like Nate Hockman, who is a young man who works in Washington D.C. politics, who John, I don't think you're a huge fan of.
- [53:41]
B
But he's also right when he tweeted out Nazi memes when he was working for when he was working for for, for Ron DeSantis. But, but no, this was a very.
- [53:52]
A
Well, he tweeted out one thing that I think was right on the money where he basically makes the same point that Rothman made and said there's this bizarre but consistent phenomenon where people who join the right five minutes ago decide that they're entitled to dictate the policy positions of the entire coalition and then declare that they've been betrayed when the coalition happens to disagree. So this gets to the ultimate point. The a coalition, if you can, keep it, if you will. Okay, the Trump coalition probably cannot be kept together by anyone other than the singular sort of political talent that is Donald Trump. The coalition that he built is very much of him. So who is going to be the creative political entrepreneur who comes forward and redesigns their own coalition? I'm seeing conservative podcasters, some of whom I like a lot, trash and attack figures like Dave Portnoy. I think that's ill advised. I look at Dave Portnoy and I see a figure who is, we should say Dave Portnoy.
- [54:57]
B
Dave Portnoy is the, is the ringmaster of Barstool Sports, which is one of these sites that sort of grew out of, you know, being like, what's the best hot dog in America? To becoming a kind of general, social critical political site just, just to, just to let ancient people like me understand whom you're referring to.
- [55:25]
A
I appreciate that. And when you consider the full reach of the media powerhouse that is Barstool Sports, it begins to rival that of Joe Rogan and, and some of these other major figures in the new media discourse. So, you know, there's a lot of the trend on the right right now, or at least the trend on the dissident right that is talking a lot to corporate left wing media press to, to sort of frame a narrative is to say.
- [55:57]
You can't have a conservative movement without Tucker Carlson. You can't have a conservative movement without Joe Rogan. But Dave Portnoy, I mean, he's no different than Seth Rogen. He's just some pothead, you know, gambling addicted, you know, childless influencer type who represents everything that is culturally sick about the United States right now. But there's a lot more forgiveness for Joe Rogan's pot addiction or for.
- [56:30]
Tucker Carlson's, you know.
- [56:34]
Unseemly hostilities toward various different ethnic groups. And I guess my takeaway for the.
- [56:41]
E
Right words there, Jesse.
- [56:43]
B
Well, trying to be specific, but I.
- [56:46]
A
Guess just to put a, put a, put a bow on it all. I guess my point is that, like, someone creative is going to have to come forward and design a coalition.
- [56:56]
Is RFK Jr. Part of it? Is Dave Portnoy part of it? Is Tucker Carlson part of it? I really think any of those things are possibilities. But I think it's quite unlikely that the next successful right of center coalition to capture the White House will probably include all the exact same people that Donald Trump was able to bring together.
- [57:18]
B
This is an important point because this goes to Seth, what Seth said. I mean.
- [57:25]
The Trump coalition, kind of unique in American history.
- [57:30]
Really, is personality based. Now, you could have said that, you know, Obama used the cult of personality to help himself get elected. You know, talked in a stadium of 80,000 people, Shepard Fairey's hope poster, all of that stuff. People calling him a lightworker, Michael Chabon saying that he was gifted with the power of the gods, whatever. And then he came into office and he was basically a conventional left wing politician who tried to get national health care and, you know, like, push around corporations and do whatever it was he wanted to do and then got his hat handed to him in the midterms and that was the end of his policy successes. But Trump, there, there's no core like, therefore, when he does something that's consistent just over 11 months, like how he has handled the issue of Israel and Gaza and the Middle east, it's almost like, thank God, like, I have a piece of driftwood. I can hold on to that. I know, I expect he'll say the same thing tomorrow that he said yesterday. And I know where this is going. That's very helpful to him, not to be constantly shifting whenever he wants to shift. Keeps the drama. Don't know what he's going to do, all of that, but it does make forming any kind of a future in his path completely impossible. Whereas if you take the last time there was a figure like Trump in the Republican Party, and that was Ronald Reagan. Reagan came in with a very specific kind of message, which was, the country has been governed wrong. The country is good, the government is bad. I'm going to come in and govern the country according to the way you, the voter, think the country should be and that the country is, we're a good country, we're not a bad country. We're, we're a fair country, we're not an unfair country. And government has been oppressing you in some ways. And I'm going to limit its reach. And I was a Democrat myself. I was a Democrat myself. The Democratic Party went too far and you can follow along with me. And he succeeded in.
- [59:54]
A complete revolution in American political life that remains to this day in the sense that when he came into office, the Nation called itself 44% Democrat and 22% Republican. And the parties are now fundamentally really close to being at parity two generations later. And how did he do that? Because he succeeded. Right. So which is where the affordability stuff comes in, which is like Trump needs to succeed in order to have.
- [60:26]
Something come after him that is going to involve the entire nation voting a Republican in again. And yeah, and I don't mean succeed by remaining the most important person in the world. I mean saying, oh, well, I'm going to continue Trump's policy on this and we're going to follow this deregulatory policy on that because look at the results that we got.
- [60:50]
A
Well, my position is, I don't think, I don't think Republicans have to take the bait. I think that six months ago it was abundance. That was the fancy a word we all had to be talking about obsessively. Now it's affordability. I think that the President possesses the political, the political skill set. Whether or not he will successfully deploy it in the midterms next year remains to be seen. But I think the President possesses the skill set to make the seller, so to speak, for an opportunity agenda. You don't even have to necessarily agree with everything this administration does across the board. But he can go out there and talk about what he's achieved on foreign policy, he can go out there and talk about what he's achieved on energy policy. And this gets to the core tension. I was going to say something about right before the commercial break. There's an old clip between Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro when, when it was possible for the two of them to have a tense but meaningful exchange over worldviews on the same podcast. And they're talking about self driving trucks. And Shapiro articulates quite plainly, this will make us all richer. We know that that will happen. We will move us toward a future where we're more efficient, we're safer on the roads, we can grow faster and we can innovate more and build more. And Tucker says, who the hell cares? It's going to be bumpy along that road. In the immediate term, it means putting how many thousands? Tens of thousands, Hundreds of thousands? I don't know, the, you know, 5 million people.
- [62:27]
B
5 million, 5 million people drive trucks in the United States for a living.
- [62:31]
A
Okay, That's a lot of people to interrupt the paychecks for on the road toward progress. And that's a legitimate gripe. I tend to be more on the sort of success oriented stream of the Republican Party, one that wants to plow forward with an achievement based message. But I think it's up for grabs. I don't know whether success oriented conservatism or grievance oriented conservatism wins out. I, and I maybe disagree with you guys in that I don't even know which stream wins out for JD Vance. You hear JD Vance talk about technology policy, you hear JD Vance talk about AI, you hear JD Vance talk about energy policy, and even the book that made J.D. vance famous. It's all a very clear and coherent articulation of a success oriented conservatism that I hope wins out.
- [63:28]
B
I think.
- [63:30]
To conclude on your data that there are, there is this question that is facing the Republican Party in terms of the coalition going forward, but it is a very broad based question. And all of our conversations relating to Tucker and Fuentes and the Heritage foundation and the future and antisemitism and, and, and success, abundance, affordability, all of that, these are taking place in very, and staffers, right? These are taking place in a very, you know, high cohort, 5 to 10% maybe, of the people who actually decide who's going to be the nominee of a party. And over the course of the last 10 years, a lot of those people to the right of the normies have gone systematically state by state and taken over the levers of power in those states, right? The most famous being Arizona. When you had literally the state of Arizona sanctioning the Republican Party, the state of Arizona, censuring its two senators, two Republican senators for not being sufficiently right wing enough. Jeff Flake, who was, I don't know how you could be much more right wing than Jeff Flake and McCain, who you could talk about in some other ways. But that, that was kind of like the model, you know. And you have Texas has this weird bifurcated thing where it's got Ken Paxton on the other hand and Corden and Greg Abbott on the other. But they have a lot of control at the state level of where the nominees for the party's offices might come from in 2026 and 2028. Not the, not the presidency, not that, but state legislators, judges, this, that, and indeed members of Congress. And if all of the energy in the party is in the new entrant wing, if the idea is we have to focus on this the way marketing people focus on youth, because that's what they know how to sell to, because youth are gullible, like, that's why you have ads are still mostly targeted toward people in their 20s, even though the number of people in their 50s and 60s is five times the number of people in their, in their 20s.
- [66:04]
That, that this is where the fight's going to be. And your poll is useful because it is a reality check.
- [66:12]
On the numbers.
- [66:14]
Two thirds of the party is conventional Republican, more right wing probably than they certainly more right wing than they were in the 90s, more right wing, with one issue dropped because the Supreme Court took it off the plate, which is abortion. I mean it's a very major thing that we haven't even really understood the full effect of abortion was one of the three dominating political topics in the United States for almost half a century. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and abortion is off. The Democrats are still raising money on it, but abortion is basically off. The way the Cold War, the way the Soviet Union left our political stage, abortion has kind of left our political stage.
- [67:07]
But these people, these 2/3, the 2/3 of the normie Republicans in a conventional political environment, that's who you want to go to to build your base of support, not the 30% that are weakly attached, insecurely attached to the Republican Party and have shown a propensity to swing back and forth between the parties. But we live in a world in which the shiny new object is just always going to be more.
- [67:40]
C
It's. But it's not just that. There's also a temptation to go after the new entrants having to do with generational reality.
- [67:52]
The conventional Republicans are older, some of them much older, and the fear is what happens when they die off.
- [68:06]
B
If.
- [68:06]
C
The following generations are going to continue along these lines, which is of course there's no straight line projection that's accurate, but that's the temptation. And then you say, well, we have to cultivate them, we have to go after them.
- [68:23]
A
John, I'd really like to say just one last thing, perhaps as a closing note, if you'll allow it, squarely aimed at American Jewry, which obviously is tuned in, of which I am a part and of which much of your audience is a part. There was a development yesterday which is worth noting, or perhaps the day before Apollo co founder Mark Rowan, major financier, got up at the UJA fundraiser major gala and referred to Zoran Mamdani as really an enemy of the Jewish people or someone who we need to keep our eye on and be clear eyed about. I think that that is such an unambiguously positive development because in an act like that you have.
- [69:17]
You are seeing evidence of the fact that influential American Jews who once bankrolled Democrats and left of center institutions are now sort of unashamedly Responding to the threats they face by naming their chief political adversary adversaries and recognizing that many of those adversaries do come from the left. And that this reckoning is sort of happening in forums like the uja which have historically been much more hesitant to confront and condemn powerful figures on the progressive left only underscores its significance. And really for decades you've had the American Jewish left embrace a sort of self destructive posture with respect toward, with respect to politics, religiosity, national continuity, even communal security. And it's really no surprise that it now finds itself in retreat and that legacy institutions like the ADL are now scrambling, which Saf Mandel has wrote wonderfully about over the years. These institutions are scrambling to reinvent themselves as the consequences of their own choices finally come due. And on the other hand, meanwhile you do have an American Jewish right anchored by institutions like Commentary, but also institutions like Chabad on Campus that go there and provide a different product than what Hillel has been able to provide. Institutions like the Tikva Fund which are trying to make Jewish education and day school education vastly more accessible for more American Jews and produce Jews with civic confidence.
- [71:02]
Their ascendant. The American Jewish right is ascendant. And all I will say to American Jewry is the progressive majority of us have lost their fight for the soul. And the coalition of the Democratic Party and the American.
- [71:19]
B
I'm glad you did this because your poll suggests that while that fight has been lost on the progressive side, it is not lost on the conservative side. That is what this division, the 6529 division suggests. That 65% may be older, you know, maybe getting the blue plate special at 4:30 in Boca. Not all of them, but they remain steadfast supporters of Israel and the Democratic party. And Jews in the Democratic Party are not. And so that fight, the fight for a political party that will remain a friend to the state of Israel and to everything that that means. About what Israel represents as a canary in the coal mine about American, the projection of American power through its allies abroad, about things that aren't just about Zionism and matters of Jewish self protection but have to do with America's place in the world and Democratic allies that are that are with us in that fight, that is still the Republican Party is the better place. Unambiguously despite the fact that we are all freaked out by the rise of this bizarre.
- [72:40]
Anti Semitism and even sort of like flirtation with Nazism and fascism that we see in your own polling data.
- [72:50]
A
So Exactly. And we right of center Jews know this. Commentary listeners know this. But to anyone you know in the ambit of this that may be not on that train or has influence or sway over American Jewish institutions, please stop doing the sort of self defeating stupid crap that the Jewish nonprofit industrial complex types have been addicted to for so long. We don't need to brag about how great the Tel Aviv Pride Parade is. We don't need to brag about how dark skinned Jews are all over the place in Israel. We don't need to brag about how green and eco friendly Israel is. It won't work. American Jews would be wise to move past that distasteful era in progressive posturing and take a hint from not Chuck Schumer, despite claiming to be so the most powerful Jew in American public life, Stephen Miller, and recognize that Jews most natural friends in America are on the right and America, and when we do that will make the pitch that America has a lot to learn from Israel's approach to security, to migration, to natalism, to religiosity, to demographic, to demographic vigilance. And by the way, when J.D. vance, who is still.
- [74:12]
Almost certainly the leading candidate to take over the reins of the GOP once Trump is off the scene, when J.D. vance speaks about Israel, and historically he has spoken about Israel with great admiration, these are the qualities he talks about and I hope people in American Jewish institutional life are taking note of that.
- [74:36]
B
Abe, you have a recommendation? I believe I do.
- [74:39]
C
Thank you, John. Yeah, so there's been, over the past few years, there have been a lot of documentaries about iconic show business figures, right? It's like a trend. You've got Schwarzenegger and Stallone and Eddie Murphy and I don't know who else. And.
- [75:00]
There'S sort of advertisements for, for their, for these individuals brands. Like they're all interesting but they, they, they kind of.
- [75:10]
They you, they, they elide some of the more pressing questions that you'd like answered about them. So this, so what I'm about to recommend does fall into that category. But they're all, as I say, they're still engrossing. And this one I particular particularly liked, it's called Paul Anka His Way. It's on hbo Max. It came out, I think last year.
- [75:38]
B
And it is about last week.
- [75:41]
C
Oh, I don't know why I thought I saw 2024.
- [75:44]
B
Maybe it was made in 2024, but it came out last week. Okay, so you're fresh. Okay, you're hot and fresh and new.
- [75:50]
C
I think I just couldn't accept that fact.
- [75:54]
So hot and fresh, much like. It's a fantastic palanka.
- [75:58]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [75:59]
C
Because.
- [76:02]
So he was Canadian born.
- [76:06]
Came to New York at 15, sold a bunch of songs, was, you know, had had to have his parents flown down from Canada to sign the record contract or his first publishing contract. And it's fascinating because he's really the only figure I can think of who started out as part of the sort of teen idol, early, early rock and.
- [76:33]
E
Roll.
- [76:36]
C
Era star and then after the British invasion became a success in a sort of pre rock and roll type of world, namely the nightclubs and Vegas and of course ended up being sort of part of the Rat Pack, who was called the kid among, you know, by Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Because he was so much younger than the rest of them. And he did this because unlike the other teen idols, you know, Fabian or Frankie Avalon or whomever else, he was a great songwriter. And so when, when the sort of wave hit of the, you know, the change, the cultural change and the Beatles and everything, he started writing songs of, you know, kept writing songs for other people and he wrote so many. And then of course.
- [77:37]
He, when Sinatra and he tells the story, he always wanted to write a song for Sinatra. And then Sinatra told him he was retiring and Paul Anka said, oh well, this is it. I got to write this, My last chance.
- [77:55]
So he, he used a French.
- [78:01]
Piece of music, a French piece of pop music. There was a French song at the time that he got the rights to and he wrote the lyrics only to, to of course My Way.
- [78:14]
Which as he said, the Sinatra song. But then it became everyone's song. Elvis Presley sang it and from Sid Vicious to Nina Simone or whatever. So it's a great, great sprawling documentary of his life. My one complaint, however, is that it ends with him singing.
- [78:39]
At the. In Times Square New Year's Eve 2023, which is maybe why I thought it was in 2024. And he has changed my Way, which is all about, you know, it's bold, unapologetic.
- [78:56]
Declaration of, you know, one. One's abilities to this mushy sappy hour way.
- [79:06]
So which. Which kind of put a damper on things. And then as I'm wont to say, it's worse than that because when I went to YouTube to look him up to look up his performance on, on that, on that New Year's Eve, he then followed it up with the socialist international anthem Imagine. But hey, you can't. No, no one's perfect. But he's.
- [79:32]
B
Two quick facts about Paul Anka Number one, he wrote the theme sh. Theme song to the Tonight Show.
- [79:38]
C
He has a great story about that.
- [79:39]
B
And he made over the course of the Tonight Show's run for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show $30 million, by the way, in royalties.
- [79:48]
C
So did Carson.
- [79:49]
B
And so did Carson. Because the only way he could get the theme was to split the royalty with Carson got half of the royalty because Carson was obviously an incredible jerk and just stole, stole his copyright. But, but in other words, it grossed $60 million over the 30 years that it was on. And Anka got 30 million. He got like a hundred thousand dollars a year for 30 years. That's, that's, that, that's pretty good for writing da da da da da, like you know, for a minute. But by the way, that's number one. Number two, and I did not know until I watched the documentary.
- [80:25]
C
Wait, John, can you tell you something.
- [80:26]
A
About the Tonight show theme?
- [80:28]
B
Yeah.
- [80:28]
C
That that was just a part of, of a larger song that Anka had already written.
- [80:33]
B
Right.
- [80:33]
C
He just repurposed it.
- [80:34]
B
Yeah, yeah. And then the other thing is Michael Jackson dies.
- [80:41]
He and Michael Jackson had written some songs together that went into a. For reasons I can't remember, go go into like a, you know, the drawer. And the Michael Jackson estate is so eager to exploit his death that they're looking for material that they can release after his death. And they discover these songs, including this is it, which was the name of the documentary that was made about Michael Jackson after his death. And there, there is Paul Anka, like at the age of 211, basically the CO author of Michael Jackson's final material which he wrote 20 years earlier. And Justin Timberlake is singing on and all this. And there's Paul Palanka who literally looks like an embalmed corpse, like saying, yeah, so I was Michael Jackson's final.
- [81:33]
Co writer. It is a great documentary. I'm very enthusiastic about it. Anyway, we're going on very long. Jesse Arm, great to have you. Amazing material. Do you have a link you want to do do? Is there a. Because I read everything that you put out on Twitter on your Twitter feed. But is there.
- [81:53]
A
My Twitter feed is just Jesse underscore Leg and you can find all my stuff there. That is a pun. That is my last name is Arm, but my Twitter handle is Jessieleg. And for anything else Manhattan Institute related, you can just go to our website. It's super easy manhattan.instute and the research.
- [82:10]
D
Is on the Manhattan Institute website also.
- [82:13]
B
That's what I was.
- [82:15]
D
What you were talking about. There is a page for it on the Manhattan Institute website for you.
- [82:18]
A
Yeah.
- [82:19]
B
And it's very, it's super easy.
- [82:21]
A
You just go to policy areas and then click on polls and you'll find it.
- [82:24]
B
Okay, just to conclude, even though we're like at almost hour 20, yesterday was the beginning of our annual appeal. Commentary Inc. 501c3 nonprofit. We depend on you for our, you know, sustenance and continuing to do what we do here. I started the show yesterday with it. We got wonderful response. Thank you very much to everybody who gave yesterday. Please give. If you did not give yesterday, you're gonna have. I'm gonna keep coming at you. Commentary.org donate.
- [83:02]
Tax deductible. Give as generously as you can. That's what keeps the lights on. That's what keeps the podcast going. So for again, thanks to Jesse Arm and for Abe, Eliana and Seth. I'm John Bot Horace. Keep the camel.
- [83:25]
A
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- [83:31]
B
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B
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