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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary.
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B
Hope for the Expect the worst Some preacher.
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A
Pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, November 4, 2025. I am John Pod Horitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John Washington. Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson. Hi Eliana.
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B
Hi John.
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A
And our social commentary columnist, Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.
- [03:00]
C
Hi John.
- [03:01]
A
So I want to mark note the passing of Dick Cheney, our Vice president, two time Defense secretary, White House Chief of staff, Congressman From Wyoming Commentary magazine. Roasty, a remarkable political figure over four decades who ended his career as a surprise critic of Donald Trump and having been the only voice in the Republican Party in 2009 to oppose Barack Obama loudly and with literacy and with an argument about why what he was doing was bad for the United States. He clearly did not expect that he was going to sort of conclude his political life criticizing a Republican nominee and President of the United States, given his ability to manage through conservative and non conservative Republican administrations and presidents and leaders alike, from George H.W. bush to George W. Bush to Gerald Ford, whose chief of staff he was. And but he did so out of principle. He was a man of great principle. He was a man of great vision. The hostility to him on the part of so many people in the establishment and elsewhere was so unwarranted and unmerited given the way in which he. His entire focus, particularly as vice president, was trying to preserve the safety and security of the United States after the unprecedented attacks of 9 11. He was a model public servant. He was a very amusing person personally, and he was a man of principle. And I think he deserves every celebration upon his passing.
- [05:09]
C
You know, I was just in Wyoming recently and the person who picked me up from the airport who described himself as, you know, very far left, immediately launched into a description of how much everyone there loved Dick Cheney. And this was, this is a month ago, and they loved him because he was also very much a local guy, not just a national politician, not just a national figure. And he cared a lot about Wyoming and he cared a lot about the people there and he had friendship across the aisle there. And it was a, I was thinking of that conversation when I saw the news early this morning about, about his death. And he and Lyn together really were a kind of interesting political intellectual powerhouse, couple of, of the likes we rarely see anymore, one in political office and the other very much engaged in long term intellectual projects. And so yeah, thoughts, thoughts are with their, their family right now, you know.
- [06:05]
B
For those of us like me. So I'm 41 and really like came of age. I turned 6, I was 16 in the year 2000. So really came of age when Bush and Cheney ran for president. Cheney was really an inspirational figure because he was such a capable, an articulate defender of the things that we believe in. And in that way, you know, George W. Bush had, as the kids would say these days, the riz. But Cheney, so Bush was charismatic and had a sense of humor in public and Cheney was more reserved, but such an articulate and capable defender of the president. And we really an inspirational figure for young people who were not popular like me, who were following along in the high school computer lab. And it's interesting when Bill Barr reappeared on the scene in the first Trump administration as Attorney General and appeared before Congress to defend the president, I had that feeling again of this kind of old style Republican from another era who was such a capable, brilliant defender of the president. And I remember thinking at the time, like, man, this guy is in the mold of Cheney. And of course, they're the same age of the same milieu. And I was sad to read in the New York Times in the Cheney obituary, but not surprised that of course, the first thing that they mention about Cheney is that he endorsed Kamala Harris for vice president, which is not, I don't think, you know, I don't speak, of course, don't speak for the Cheney family, what Cheney would have wanted. And the other thing that came to mind, such a signature New York Times thing to do. But the other thing that came to mind was I saw my dad this morning recommending Steve Hayes's book biography of Cheney. But I really enjoyed. And John, I can't wait for your response to this. Peter Baker's book about the Bush presidency, which gave the lie to the idea that Cheney was running the show the whole time, but was a wonderful treatment of the role Cheney played, played over those eight years.
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D
Yeah, that was a great. Before John jumps in, I reviewed that book. I forget what it was called, though. Days of Fire.
- [08:56]
B
Days of Fire.
- [08:57]
A
Yeah.
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D
Days of Fire. It's a great book and you're right. And it shows how the entire administration was so misunderstood. But really, Cheney in particular, this idea that he was a war hawk, that he was pushing the country into war. And then of course, the nonsensical Halliburton assertions. That was not, none of that was, was true at all. And he and Bush, they didn't agree on everything.
- [09:31]
A
No, they didn't. And they ended. The administration ended with them. Not on good terms because Cheney believed that Bush had acted improperly and unfairly toward his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, whom he believed to have been wrongly prosecuted and improperly sentenced, convicted and sentenced in a case involving the leaking of a covert agent's name, that even while he was being prosecuted, it was known that somebody else had leaked the name. That is to say, Richard Armitage of the State Department had been the one to tell a reporter the name of Valerie Plain, the person who supposedly had. It's a. Who cares what the story was anyway, but that scooter hadn't done it. Cheney wanted Bush to pardon him, and Bush commuted the sentence, but did not pardon him, and Cheney did. Cheney believed that Bush had. Had failed as a leader and as a person. And as I said, they did not end on good terms, the administration. And that's an example of the way in which Cheney acted on principle, as was, though I believe he was mistaken to do so, the endorsement of Kamala Harris. He was outraged and appalled by Donald Trump's conduct. He was outraged and appalled by January 6th. And. And in a weird way, the parallel to Bill Barr is interesting, because what Barr had in common with Cheney was he had no further ambitions when he reentered office. So he did. He was an Attorney general twice. He was Attorney General for George H.W. bush.
- [11:19]
B
Exactly what I was thinking about this morning.
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A
And the point is, he was 70 years old. He didn't need to do it. He'd already done it. And so he could call balls and strikes, which is sort of what he did, because he told Bush to cut the crap about staying in office and that there was no, you know, there was no. There were no grounds on which to claim that the election was improperly decided.
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C
Trump. Not Bush. Trump.
- [11:50]
A
Trump. Excuse me. He said it was B.S. told Trump it was B.S. because he didn't care. Because, I mean, he was not afraid of Trump. He believed that he had come to do a public service for everybody. He was the Attorney General, and that he was going to speak the truth as he saw it. And Cheney was very much the same. His own autobiography, which is called In Our Time, I Believe, or In My Time. It's a very heartening book for people and should be picked up by everybody who is worried about their teenager, because the interesting life story of Dick Cheney, who was among the most accomplished Americans in his 30s. When he was in his 30s, anybody that you could mention had this remarkable. Found himself in the White House working for Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic Opportunity. Ended up, I think, in his late 30s as White House Chief of Staff to Gerald Ford. But his years between the ages of 16 and 22 or something like that, he was drunk. He was crashing his car. He was a torment to his parents, who were terrified that he was going to be a wastrel. He didn't go to college for a while. He was somebody who was not, like, on a good track. And he tells the story in his book of picking himself up, dusting himself off, becoming a serious person, choosing to become a Serious person choosing to change his entire demeanor when he had an early heart attack, which his doctor said was due in part. I mean, whether or not this is true or not, but that his temperament, that he had a volcanic temper and that he needed to be able to contain it because he was doing himself injury and he stopped losing his temper. He sort of willed himself to become a calm, understated person, had not been.
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C
But there's also this. I think one of the things that's appealing about him, Barbara, that whole generation of public servants, not politicians, we think of them as public servants, not as politicians, is that they also didn't. They were still the same people. So my friend Matt Laybosch had a great. He wrote about fly fishing with, with Dick Cheney. And one of the things he pointed out is that, you know, he ended up really liking liking him, even though Cheney had no interest in being liked by Matt. And one of the things he said is that he was famous for going around on the campaign trail and saying things like, I'm not a baby kisser, like, he's not going to. He's not going to play by those rules. And people had respect for that. And when we think of the kinds of politicians today, and obviously we're going to talk about, you know, Mamdani, who I think of as like the sorrows of young cardamom, you know, these are not the same caliber of figure. And I think it's why we feel a sense of loss as we watch that generation, you know, usher off the political stage. And it's sorrowful. But Matt's description of fishing with Cheney is also kind of epic.
- [15:06]
B
Can we also just talk about Cheney's greatest moment, one of his greatest moments for two seconds, which was when he had a confrontation with the Vermont senator Patrick Leahy on the same floor at Leahy in 2004, and Cheney told him to go F yourself. And that became, you know, minor controversy at the time. The New York Times wrote it up. And the other wonderful Bush Cheney moment when they were campaigning in 2000 and Bush was picked up on a hot mic pointing out the reporter Adam Clymer.
- [15:46]
A
From the New York Times, Johnny Apple.
- [15:49]
B
It was Johnny App.
- [15:51]
A
Or maybe it was Adam Clymer, okay? Yeah.
- [15:55]
B
And Bush said Adam Clymer was a major league asshole and was picked up on the hot mic. And Cheney responded, oh, yeah, big time.
- [16:05]
A
Big time, big time. Imagine that. That's a controversy. How dare he call either Adam Clymer or Johnny Apple and a hole, since they both were. But I mean, that's Quaint. That's a, that's a quaint moment compared to what happens now. And that's part of the thing I wanted to mention is we lived through this period in which very principled, centered and reasonable Republicans were caricatured and defamed and slandered as Nazis, as monsters, as gun nuts, as this, as that. And that game of describing Republicans in the way that they were described and defamed in that fashion opened the, this is the term now we keep using, opened the Overton window for a certain type of Republican extremism to emerge. Because the idea was why bother, why bother following niceties? Why bother trying to make substantive constitutional arguments? Why bother to write, to be respectful to, to work really hard to write speeches and issue statements that were elevated and attempted to set the context for important things like the war on terror, what we were fighting for, all of that. Why bother? Because the establishment is just going to talk about you as though you're Hitler. So, and that's an interesting point here this week because it's like, so why not be Hitler? Like, if you're, if you're, if you're going to get called Hitler, go ahead and be Hitler, because George W. Bush was the opposite of Hitler. So was Cheney. And yet that was the lingua franca of the, of the sort of mainstream media or people on the left. And so when they got really genuinely terrified by a figure they believed to be an extremist, like Donald TRUMP In 2016, they had used up, they were Chicken Littles. They had used, they had used the term so promiscuously that it no longer had the power to shock or to silence or to make people think twice because they called other, they called people who did not deserve any such accusation or qualification. They used, they, they said that anyway. So they, they drained the, they drained the attack of all power and they let Trump say, basically, say whatever you want about me. Because even though he also didn't like Bush and probably didn't like Cheney and all of that, I'm sure now he really hated Cheney at the end of his life. He was gifted by them with this present, which was you're just, you're using shock words to attack me and they don't have the power to sting anymore. And that wasn't, that's not, that's not Cheney's legacy, but it is very much part of who Cheney was in the, in the, in the sort of popular political culture of the 21st century. Okay, so let us move on to our four elections here. Today, the first is the California referendum, in which which is apparently going to pass, that will effectively give the Democrats in the state the ability to rewrite the congressional map before the 2026 election and get themselves five more seats in the congressional House in the House delegation as a way of offsetting the Republican efforts to reset the table in Texas primarily, but a couple of other places and also gain seats. So they're actually doing this. It's a kind of tit for tat redistricting game. And one of the reasons I think that it's going over so easily in California is because Republicans started it and therefore there are no honest arguments against it. Like, no, you're going against the referendum that passed 15 years ago to make redistricting a nonpartisan commission's job. And Gavin Newsom, the governor, saying, well, Republicans cheated. They went into redistricting six years early. So we can too, like, I'm sorry, but we're not going to unilaterally disarm. Am I characterizing this fairly or am I giving Newsom too much of the benefit of the doubt? I don't really think so. This is just if you're going to start futzing around as Republicans did, Democrats are going to respond where they can respond, and they do govern the largest state in the country.
- [21:04]
D
Yeah.
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A
The only thing I'll say about 30, 30 congressional seats, I mean, I can't remember how many they have 38.
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D
But I'll say this much about is very much a both sides circumstance now. But whenever the Republicans move to do this, Democrats and liberals act as if it's the first. It's only their side they're doing. This is their game. Oh, my God, I can't believe this is happening. Which is different from what you're describing here, which is like, well, they've lost whatever.
- [21:38]
A
If they had that before, and they did from 2010 onward, remember, they tried to bring the issue of partisan gerrymandering. They brought the issue of partisan gerrymandering to the Supreme Court and tried to get it declared unconstitutional. And then when that didn't work, they're like, okay, we're doing it too. So now they no longer have the moral stain argument. Just like once Citizens United happened and they could raise dark money and all of that, having spent 20 years talking about how evil, how evil Republicans were in the way they raised money unequally. And then when it sort of came time to deal with the matter in actual raw politics, it turned out that they could raise money. They raised more money than Republicans did once the Supreme Court said it's a matter of free speech, how you raise money. And you can't just declare that. You have to stop doing ads here and do that. They're like, okay, fine. And then they. So do you ever hear Democratic politicians talking about Republicans and money? Not at all. They stopped talking about it 13 years ago because they're better at raising money than Republicans are.
- [22:54]
C
I will say there's so I have a, I have family members who've lived many decades in California and they always complain at every election about the gazillion of propositions that they have to try to understand before they go. I mean, their ballot is like 150 pages long for every election. But our, but our kind of counterintuitive friends at Pirate Wires had a, had a funny little post this morning talking about, you know what, maybe this proves there's too much democracy. Maybe the people don't need to be weighing in on every single little tedious issue about these things. And we should actually elect representatives to represent their, their interests. And I and I, there was a really important kernel of truth there that I when we look at some of these direct ballot initiatives, things about redistrict, these are complicated things. It's why we used to have institutions like political parties and other organizations to solve this. But you know, they're just going to throw it at the voters, especially in California. So if you're a California voter, you have my sympathy today.
- [23:48]
A
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- [25:13]
D
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- [26:56]
A
Propositions on the ballot in New York State in this election, and you needed to be a Talmudic scholar to decipher what it was that they were about. And you had to. Even I needed to go through training to know whether voting yes or no conformed with what I wanted to have happened.
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C
Like a bad SAT question. Sometimes you're like, is yes no or is no yes?
- [27:25]
A
Yeah. Anyway, what's interesting about the California initiative is I believe it's the only one on the ballot for this election. Therefore it makes life a lot easier for the California voter just to go in. Vote yes, which says that the. Whatever it's overridden, that the that the nonpartisan commission can be overridden by the state legislature and then you can go home.
- [27:52]
C
1.
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B
Follow up to Abe's point on the gerrymandering. Trump, of course, has led these efforts, but then Abe is right that they're decried when Republicans gerrymander. This is obviously a both sides thing that is used as a political tactic and the most egregious example of what Abe is describing as Republicans are the villains using this politically and Democrats have clean hands is the way that Eric Holder is cited and described in media accounts of all of this. So, you know, this sort of started in Texas over the summer and there was a fight over it. And all of a sudden I'm reading in the New York Times accounts of Holder giving comment to the Times, and they describe Holder as having led efforts to reverse gerrymandering in the House.
- [29:00]
C
And.
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B
Holder has devoted the past many years to this Democrat states project called the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which said it would work to oppose mid decade map redraws, et cetera, et cetera. Well, Holder is now embracing gerrymandering, and nobody's calling him on this, nobody's calling him on the hypocrisy at all. The mainstream embraces all of it. So Abe is totally right that like, Democrats get to skate by when they do it and Republicans are vilified for it. And like Eric Holder is the perfect example of this. He's spent the past several years opposing this. Now he's embracing it and there's just no comment on it.
- [29:55]
A
I mean, if you remember. So this, everything involving voting and districting and stuff like this really became a national issue with the 2000 election in Florida. Everything spins off from this, right? 25 years ago today, I believe, was the election day in 2000 that ended up with the, with the unclear Florida result. And if you remember, the Democratic line was every vote must count, Every vote must count. You have to count all the votes. You're not counting all the votes. We need to end voter intent. So we have to count the chads and go through the vote to make sure that voters intended to push the thing off the chads. And the Republican response was, okay, if we're going to do this, let's recount the entire state. If you're going to do a recount, do a recount, recount the entire state of Florida. And the Democrats said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we only recount one county. We only want to recount Palm beach county because there was something screwed up about the ballot in Palm Beach County. So on the one hand, they're talking, they try to make this principled argument about vote counting and making sure that every vote counts. And there are problems with Florida tallying. And then when the Republican line is, okay, recount the whole state, they then have 36 days of litigation, largely because all the Democrats wanted to do was have recounts in the counties that they believed that they could prevail in and make sure not to have recounts anywhere else. And they were right. Not that they knew that they were right. I don't think they knew that they were right. They, they, they. Because nobody knew that they were right. But three different full recounts of the state, largely done privately, one of them by all consortium of media companies, found that if you recounted the state, Bush won by about 900 votes, as opposed to 537 votes, which is how it, how it ended up. It's ridiculous that you could get a result that close, but. But we did. And so the Democrats, I think, found themselves in a weird place where they believed themselves to have been screwed out of the presidency. And then they believed it again. Some believed it again in 2004 because of the vote in Ohio. And then they thought, anything Republicans do regarding voting is bad. Everything that they do is bad. And everything that we do is good because we're countering their badness. And everything we do is merited and justifiable. Not for consistency's sake, but because they want to. They steal everything unless we try to steal it back. They don't even think about it stealing it back. But that is kind of the mood. And was the mood about voting in.
- [32:57]
C
The United States, I think what they did from a PR perspective that was quite savvy in the Trump era was to add a layer to that argument, which was that democracy is threatened, democracy is at risk. Now, that argument has fallen flat again for the Chicken Little reasons you cited earlier about other things. But that I think that appealed to a moderate voter who thought, oh, well, that's true, if our system is not working, that democracy is at risk. And they did try to ride that way for a while. Interestingly, it, you know, that turned on them when Trump denied the results of the 2020 election. You know, he basically ran their playbook. And all of us who reminded the Democrats that he was not the first elected official to deny the reality of an election result were told, you know, this is, this is ridiculous. And look, I think we all agree that Trump should not have behaved that way, and he obviously lost the election. But there is still this, this unwillingness, as Eliana and they both point out, to recall the actual facts of the history that came before, even if that history is only about 10 years old or 20 years old.
- [34:00]
A
I mean, there is a guy, the leading Democratic litigant on voting matters and ballot initiatives and stuff like that, Mark Elias, and he's obviously a very good lawyer and makes tens of millions of dollars A year from state and local and the national Democratic Party pursuing litigation on voting matters. And he'll take any side. I mean, as a good lawyer would, I guess, like, if you're being hired to contest the results of an election, you. You're not looking for a consent. You're saying, okay, in this case, there were too many votes. In this case, there were too few. In this case, this was a problem. But in this case it's the other problem. The thing is that it's always on one side. It's always the Democratic side that he is defending. And that is politics. That is American politics. That is the way things work. I have no problem with it. I just don't like the pomposity and the argument and the belief that Democrats have that somehow their pursuit of power at the ballot box is noble and wondrous. And the Republican pursuit of power at the ballot box is inherently disqualifying and should be disqualified because when they get in power, they don't do enough on climate change. And then they want, they only try to get into power to help companies that want to have more pollution. And therefore people give them money to do that. So anything that they do is therefore justified. Because all Republicans want is evil. I mean, I think if you decline it, if you, like, try to go back and back and back, that is the root argument is they're bad, so we oppose them. And in opposing them, you should support us because we're saving you from them. And of course, there's every reason why Republicans and conservatives have essentially, after beginning in 2015, 2016, said, okay, if that's the way this argument is going to go, we think the same about you. You, Here we go. You know, we're gonna, you know, after, you know, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna say the same things and we're going to pursue the same kind of agenda that you pursue and say that you're cheap, you're stealing elections, and you're doing things for your rich donors, and you're da. You know, it's like, fine, if this is the, if this is the where, where the conversation points are, then this is how we're going to go anyway, that's going to win in California and negate whatever advantages Republicans cleverly thought they had achieved by doing this early gerrymandering, primarily in Texas. And so the, again, the 2026 midterm elections are going to be, you know, won probably by two or three seats, one or the other party, the House elections, because Republicans thought they had really come up with a good game here to negate the Democratic natural advantage of being the Democrats being the out party in a midterm election. And Democrats and Gavin Newsom said, whoa, whoa, whoa, not so fast. And it's probably pretty good for Newsom. In other words, like, if you're, if he wants to make a case to be president in 2028, he can say whatever happened. Assuming he can say, I, you know what? Everyone says they wanted to oppose Trump and stop him. And I stopped. I actually stopped him. I came up with this idea, I pushed it, I popularized it, I promoted it, I got everybody in the state behind it, and it won by a landslide, which we hear it's going to do. So you want someone who knows how to use the levers of power to do good things and save us from the evil Republicans. I, the governor of the largest state in the country, I did it. And that's going to be good. Like, that's going to be good for him, I think.
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C
Well, he has been casting about for a message that sticks, and his. I was a struggling man of the people growing up, did not work so well.
- [38:12]
A
Right. So here you have a practical political success where he stood up to the bullies who are trying to, you know, fix the twig, fix the house, and, and, and did it.
- [38:29]
C
And the average, I mean, what is it? Will come down to the economic message and California's record. They're not so great. I mean, I do think that fast forward a few years, he can claim this, but I don't think the average voter is going to really care. It's kind of a political detail. I mean, the voters of California care, obviously, and the Democratic Party cares, but I wonder if that message will land if. I mean, he doesn't have a viable economic message, as far as I can.
- [38:55]
A
Tell, who is gonna, who is gonna have one?
- [38:57]
C
Trump doesn't have one either, so.
- [38:58]
A
I know, but I'm like, who's gonna have one? I don't know who's gonna come before the American people as a Democrat and say, you know, I have a plan that is just gonna be, you know, growth. I mean, I don't know what they're gonna say, but I do know that when it comes down to partisan conflict, being able to say, I stop the Republicans from getting their way is going to be a powerful message. And no Democrat has done that. I mean, now they'll have two more years to do it, and particularly if they get the House back, they'll be able to do it routinely, but, I mean, Cory Booker did a 25 hour filibuster. Anybody remember what that was about?
- [39:47]
C
I thought that was a slam poetry reading. I didn't realize it was a Filip.
- [39:50]
A
I mean, what was it about? Nobody knows what it was about. I didn't. Don't. I can't. I was telling, talking to someone about this last week. I couldn't remember what he was filibustering, if he was filibustering. I was just standing on the floor talking for 25 hours. So that's not real, right? I mean, so I don't know. I'm just saying, like it's a, it's a real thing that he will be able to say. I got, without me, this wouldn't have happened with me. It happened. I, you know, I use my political capital and, you know, took, did, took a risk to save the house for the Democrats or whatever and I did it. And you know, so I'm going, all right, so that's California. Okay. Eliana. Virginia voter.
- [40:42]
B
Virginia voter. I'm heading to vote right after this podcast.
- [40:46]
A
Okay, so we got Winsome and Winsome versus Abigail and we got Jay versus Jason Miaras. Jay versus Jason, Winsome versus Abigail.
- [41:02]
B
Yes.
- [41:03]
A
Okay, what's going to happen?
- [41:09]
B
I don't make predictions. I'm not in the game of predictions. But, but look, Winsome was not expected to be competitive ever. The fact that this race is like, you know, within fighting distance and people are going to be watching it tonight is a really bad sign for Abigail Spanberger, who was supposed to be like a potential presidential candidate for Democrats. She was supposed to be the rising star and run away with this thing. Nobody was supposed to be talking about Winsome Sears and watching Virginia. So I think that that is a bad sign for Democrats. And more than anything, when you watch, you know, we don't play clips on this podcast, but when you watch Abigail Spanberger respond to run of the mill questions on the economy and on transgender athletes in women's sports, she has been brittle and incapable in her answers. And these are questions that she should have been totally able to handle with facility. If this is somebody who's going to, you know, have a bright future in the Democratic Party. So that's one thing. And the other thing is she's just been really boring. And there have been no, you know, viral clips that have caught attention that have gone around and people have been talking about saying, wow, you know, watch how capably Abigail Spanberger handled this. You know, that and the other, in fact, her mishandling of questions on transgender Participation in sports have caught my attention for her inability to answer such questions. Her answers on the government shutdown and other things have betrayed to me a deep fear of the left that seems to be plaguing the Democratic Party. Obviously the New York City mayor election is the ultimate indication of, you know, where the real energy in the party is and where the real talent in the party is. Like we are not seeing big talents on, you know, the center left. Like the new rising stars in the party are not the Abigail Spanbergers and the Mikey Sherrills. They are the Zoram Mamdanis and the Graham Platners and, and John, like, you know, we, we may want to get into Seth Moulton who was supposed to be, you know, this rising star center left, you know, Marine with three Harvard degrees who's challenging Ed Markey in Massachusetts. And the guy has transformed into, you know, an Israel hating turncoat who's tossed away every position he wants claim to hold. So that suggests to me, like, look, this is where the energy in the party is and this is where like their star making machinery is. So anyhow, I don't know what's, what is going to happen in the Virginia gubernatorial. But Spanberger is not the future of the party. I'll be watching it closely and then I think, I think Jay Jones is going to lose. I will make that prediction. And the energy is okay, you just.
- [44:44]
A
You just go wherever you, you, you're making a prediction.
- [44:48]
B
But I mean, you know, you know.
- [44:49]
C
Something, I hadn't thought about this, but Eliana makes a really fascinating point about Spanberger. Spamberger was trying to run like the Democratic version of Glenn Youngkin and it didn't for some reason, like just a little boring but competent. Right. And she, but her competence is exactly what I think voter. Her incompetence on really hot button issues, especially for Virginia, which Fairfax county and Loudoun county have had a series of scandals related to transgender K through 12 education. What's been taught to kids, allowing these men into community centers and women's locker rooms who are exposing themselves to children. I mean, if you follow that the transgender debate in Virginia has. There have been repeated attempts by the citizens of Virginia to get some clarity on this matter. And they're very, very much like the rest of the public in wanting some limitations placed on some of these policies. And that she went completely blank when questioned about it in debate is she should not be running for office if she can't even have a simple response to that. So. But it is interesting that her Lack of charisma, which I think the Democrats in certain states feel is a benefit because it's like the anti Trump drama people don't want. Drama has not worked well for her.
- [45:59]
A
Her.
- [45:59]
C
She just has not. You're right that I can't think of a single single little snippet or single story about her that hasn't related to her inability to answer the question of transgender.
- [46:09]
D
You see this, by the way, a lot. I mean, there are a lot of Democratic politicians who sort of announce themselves as the sane, moderate alternatives, and then they can't pull the trigger on that. They can't actually.
- [46:25]
C
They're not moderate positions.
- [46:26]
D
They're just too afraid. So they'll go blank or they'll just kind of. Or they'll just kind of lean toward the radicals.
- [46:35]
A
The Spamberger clip that you're talking about is this is Sears best moment, right in this debate where she said, why can't you say something about whether or not biological males should be allowed into women's sports? And Spamberger sat, stood there and said nothing. And I don't think she went blank.
- [47:06]
C
No, no, she deliberately said nothing. She stared off into the middle distance like she was posing for a portrait painting. It was bizarre. It was bizarre.
- [47:13]
A
She said to herself, her campaign, this was. They said, maybe it'll be an uncomfortable minute, but the future for us is for us to say nothing here. And that's implicitly moderate because she's not saying she's for it and she's not saying she's against it. She's just not saying nothing.
- [47:36]
C
No, it's no longer implicitly moderate because of the extremes to which especially the Biden administration and Democrats have gone on. Moderate position is where. Where most Americans are, which is.
- [47:46]
A
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's interesting. You're running her campaign in Virginia, which is a politically purple state. Not. I mean, it's purple in the sense that Democrats win it at the presidential level, but Glenn Youngkin won it by a substantial margin. Just what year was that? 2019.
- [48:12]
B
2022. Right.
- [48:15]
A
Youngkin. I thought the governor of Virginia is a six, six year, one term term, isn't it? Am I wrong? Anyway, Youngkin won with his famous, you know, fleece 2021. Okay, so where's the one term governorship? Is that over with? It's still a one term governorship, but you only get four years. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry. So this was a totally useless conversation about Youngkin's. The length of Youngkin's term. But Only four years ago then Youngkin ran as a non Trump conservative, but not anti Trump, but non Trump, whatever. She's trying to do the same in some fashion by not taking a position on the, on this matter. And it's deliberate and I think it's interesting in this sense, which is they couldn't figure out an answer. They could not figure out an answer. So the answer was no answer. Not, I believe that, you know, you should be who you choose to be. That would be bad. And saying, saying transgenderism is not right would be bad. And so she just would not do anything.
- [49:34]
C
Well, not in contrast to Youngkin, who when he was asked questions about Trump and all kinds of stuff going on in the gop, always had an answer that even if it was off putting to some voters, was seemed level headed and reasonable. And it's why he was someone who. There was a draft junkin moment in.
- [49:51]
B
The threaded the needle perfectly on Trump. And look, Trump wasn't in office at the time, so it was a little bit easier, but he did thread the needle perfectly. And John, that actually wasn't the Spanberger moment that I had in mind. She was asked by a local reporter about transgender participation in sports and she didn't say nothing. She gave a rambling, incoherent, three and a half minute answer that was just painful to watch, in which he ended at nothing. And to Abe's point, you know, Moulton came out of the 2024 election saying, you know, I'm against transportation, trans participation in sports. And he ended in females, women's sports, whatever. And he's ended challenging Ed Markey for the Senate nomination, renouncing AIPAC donations and, you know, saying, Graham Platner's tattoo is really cool and basically, and I know a lot of Marines with taps like that. And he's got Riz and you know, go, go Graham. You know, he's great.
- [51:00]
A
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- [54:08]
B
Sorry, John. One more thing to note on the gulf between the Jones J. Jones Mihara's race and the gubernatorial race is that Jones is running about 10 points behind Spamberger. So Spamberger's unimpressive, but Jones is running way, way behind her, right?
- [54:32]
A
Well, I mean, if you want to, I won't waste any time on this. This is Jay Jones, who said he.
- [54:37]
B
Wanted to put two bullets in the.
- [54:39]
A
Head of his opponent. Yeah. Somebody in the state Senate or one of the Senate.
- [54:45]
C
And just this is a weird clarification, but it matters to people who have been in service. She is not a fighter pilot. She's a helicopter pilot. It's a distinction that matters.
- [54:53]
A
I apologize. I apologize.
- [54:55]
C
She did do, obviously, tours of duty.
- [54:57]
A
I'm not questioning 100,000 times where she's in the helicopter going. You know, you have. Sometimes you have to make a decision and you have to be a leader. Right. So that's the New York ad for Mikey Sherrill. Mikey Sherrill, Congressman from New Jersey running for governor. And frankly, I'm surprised that it is surprising to people that this race is. Is. Is tight as a tick because Jack Cittarelli, who was the Republican candidate for governor in 2021 when literally nobody knew who he was, he almost won that race in 2021 against Phil Murphy. He won. He lost by three points. Murphy was up in the poll, the last poll, by 16. And this was clearly an anti Democratic vote because Cittarelli had run almost no advertising and no one knew who he was. He was the generic Republican and the. And according to my. Where is this? Hello? I looked it up and now I don't have it. I don't know. 1.3 million people voted for him in New Jersey and. And he lost by three. He got 48%. Murphy got 51%. Trump closed the margin in. In Virginia between 2020 and 2024 by 10 points. Like one, lost by six. So Cittarelli's already had a mil, you know, almost a million and a half people vote for him. Trump vastly increased Republican support in New Jersey from 2020 to 2024. Cheryl is not an impressive candidate there. There are inflationary issues in. In energy cost issues in New Jersey that seem to be. They're not following national trends. They're. They're way ahead of national trends in terms of how much energy bills have spiked in New Jersey. So she's declared that she will. She will declare an emergency to deal with. To deal with energy prices because she knows this is a major political issue. And I'm not. I. My history of predicting from politics to the Oscars is bad. The. I'm really bad at the Oscars, so you would think I wouldn't even play in this field. But my spidey sense says that Cittarelli is going to win because this state is moving toward the Republicans. Cheryl has not run a particularly good race. He is an Energizer Bunny of a candidate he has been going 20 hours a day for three months. And I don't know, it doesn't feel like her issue against him is he's like Trump. And that may not be enough in an election in which people won't necessarily turn out to vote against him because he isn't Trump. I mean, he's his own person. Okay.
- [57:53]
C
This speaks to a broader challenge the Democratic Party will have next year and into 2028. We've seen these interesting polls where, you know, Trump's approval rating is quite low.
- [58:02]
A
Low.
- [58:02]
C
I think it's now the lowest it's been. They're very. Voters are pretty concerned about how he's handling the economy in particular, which doesn't seem to be improving. But when you then ask them, aren't the, are the Democrats a viable alternative? They're like, no, we don't like them either. We don't trust anything they have to say. So there is this real vacuum on the Democratic Party side with the exception of some of these, as Eliana said, some of these young rising Democratic socialist types.
- [58:25]
A
Right.
- [58:26]
C
Where the voter isn't. It's not like they, they don't like Trump. They don't think he's doing well, but they're not shifting their loyalty, the Democrats. It's a really interesting kind of mid, mid. Pre. Midterm election phenomenon to watch.
- [58:37]
A
Okay, so now we can go to New York City. And I'm now, I do not believe that what I'm about to tell you is going to happen.
- [58:44]
B
John, can I say one quick thing on New Jersey?
- [58:46]
A
Yeah.
- [58:47]
B
So Nate Silver had a really interesting, like, deep dive piece on New Jersey's shift in 2024 towards, towards Trump. And like, this race is really close between Cheryl and Cittarelli. And I think it's worth noting that Cittarelli is capable and Cheryl's not been a good candidate. But two things like, this race is close and Chitterelli is not a Christie, like, political talent. You know, he's not like, amazing. And the second thing is, like, Trump does not give these guys the ability to denounce him, like, the freedom to run the best campaign they possibly could. But Nate Silver makes a couple interesting points in this piece. One is that there were huge shifts in 2024, particularly among Hispanic and Asian voters in New Jersey, and that it'll be really interesting, I think, to look at after we know tonight's results to see if those speakers stuck like, or whether those voters go back to the Democratic Party. And I think it will tell us a lot. I mean, the state shifted 10 points towards Trump in 2024.
- [59:56]
A
Yeah. So, Mom, Donnie, I just want to lay out a scenario that I do not, I believe, is overly optimistic for those of us who do not want.
- [60:07]
C
Zara Momdani to be married off brand for the podcast. I'm just pointing out.
- [60:11]
A
But okay, but here is the scenario. The scenario is, there is this one polling firm, this race has not been extensively polled because media companies are barely polling anymore. The one poll that has come out in the last five days, and they've done two of them, comes from a firm called Atlas Insights. And they got 2020 and 2024 right. They were the closest to hitting the numbers. So we can't discount them. We can't say they're, oh, we don't know if they're good or bad or whatever. And they show a tightening of the race. They had. First, they had Mamdani over Cuomo by 10, and then Sunday night or Monday, more, something like that. Some they had a poll out that had Mandani up by six. So if they're measuring something real, they're measuring a tightening. And they have Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, as opposed to Cuomo, who is the independent candidate. They have SLI were very high. They have SLIWA at like 20%, which is, I think, why Trump came out Monday night and said, you should vote for Cuomo. If you're listening to me. Because if Cuomo can eat into people who on election Day would vote for Sliwa by saying, I'm, as we say, Kashuring Cuomo, I'm Kashuring. Your vote for Cuomo. You can eat. You can eat. You can eat from the Cuomo menu. I'm allowing you to. And that has some effect on people in Staten island and elsewhere. It might make a difference. So, number one, if you're measuring a tightening of the race, that suggests momentum toward Cuomo, that's Number one. Number two was this massive turnout in early voting. 800,000 people voted early. The entire size of the New York City electorate in the last three elections was 1.1 million. Each of them 1.1 million on the nose. 2013, 2017, 2021 in each of those races. With that turnout, the Democratic candidate, de Blasio twice, and Eric Adams once won with over 70% of the vote. Now we have this early turnout that suggests that if you have election day voting at high levels, the turnout could be one and a half times what it was in 2021 or double what it was in 2021. What does this tell you? Well, if Democrats won so commandingly with low turnout in those previous elections, it's not clear to me that high early turnout is a good sign for Mamdani. If you think logically, high turnout. Mamdani doesn't need high turnout. He needs low turnout, because low turnout is what gets Democrats elected in New York City, not high turnout. When Rudy Giuliani finally beat David Dinkins In 1993, a million nine voted. So if this early turnout, voting turnout follows with respectable election day turnout, I don't know, it's. It's a. It's a fantasy to presume that, you know, that that will help Mamdani because there's just such enthusiasm. The only reason to think this is because Cuomo is such a bad candidate that it's hard to believe anybody is turning out to vote for him. They had a chance. Democrats had a chance with a 5 to 1 democratic advantage in New York City registration so they could vote in the primaries. And, you know, basically he got 36% of the vote and they were staring at him dead in the face and said, ugh, I don't want you. But, you know, the actual real oppo dump on Mamdani has only come in the last three weeks. Another sign of the incredible failure of the Cuomo campaign, which had all the money in the world and did not do its job in digging this stuff up that people have dug up about Mamdani, the things that he has been saying. Linda Sarsour of the Women's March saying, we're paying for this campaign. We and the Council on Islamic American Relations or American Islamic Relations, has been basically supporting Mamdani and helping him and.
- [65:02]
C
Explicitly saying, you will owe us, Zoran, when you.
- [65:06]
A
Right. Anyway, so a high turnout does it. We don't know that high turnout is good for Mamdani. We don't know. The polling suggests closing. And it's very hard to poll when you don't have an electorate that resembles the electorates before. And if so, you have a high turnout election, you don't know which way the high turnout is going to by definition. And the classic rule of thumb is that Republicans get undercounted by pollsters before they surge at the polls. And particularly in a place like New York where you have very low Republican numbers. So classically, from 1980 onward, like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were neck and neck, only they weren't. Reagan won by 10 points with a third party candidate in there. There are a series of elections I could point out, in which Republicans are just Systematically under. Because you can't model a race in which there's a Republican surge among people who have never voted Republican before. That is the argument for the possibility that Andrew Cuomo will prevail against Oram Vamdani. The argument against it is that Ramdani is probably going to win.
- [66:27]
B
John, just one beat on your long running theme of Cuomo being a terrible candidate. I laughed out loud when I read a New York Times article noting an interview Cuomo did with these MSNBC hosts. One is Eugene Daniels, formerly of Politico, and the other is Jonathan Capehart, formerly of the Washington Post. Both of them are now at msnbc. Both of them happen to be black. And Cuomo says to Eugene Daniels, who is quite distinctive looking.
- [67:03]
A
Yes.
- [67:04]
B
He calls the guy Jonathan.
- [67:06]
A
Yes.
- [67:08]
B
It's like, okay, man, if you win, it's going to really be a miracle here.
- [67:13]
A
Yeah, yeah. His, his. You know, the interesting thing is that he comes across like a bumbling Inspector Clouseau type. But, you know, as a politician, he's a goon. He's a ruthless, psychopathic goon. But when he has to, like, run for office and do debates and talk in front of people, he comes across like, as I say, like sort of a bumbling stumble. Bum. Inarticulate. Unsure of himself, unsure of the facts. So it really will be a vote if, if, if Mamdani loses. It will. It will be Mamdani losing that New York came senses and said, we cannot have this guy as mayor, for there are a hundred reasons to vote against him. A hundred reasons like. That's the interesting thing. It's not just anti Semitism voting against whom. Yeah, yeah. So you can assemble a coalition that can come up with enough people who would vote against Mamdani. The question is, how much of a spoiler will Sliwa be and how many votes will he take? Because it's very clear that if, probably if you add up the Sliwa and Cuomo votes, they will get more votes than Mamdani will together. So Sliwa really will have handed the election to Mamdani because no Sliwa voter would ever vote for Mamdani. And probably a bunch of them would have voted for Cuomo if he was the only.
- [68:42]
C
Well, and there was, except among, I think, conservative media, there was never enough to discussion of what Eliana just mentioned. Not just the supportive groups like care, but that the Democratic Socialists of America notion is to subvert democracy peacefully. We go in, we infiltrate existing institutions. In this case, New York's Democratic Party, New York City's Democratic Party and we win. And once we win, it doesn't matter if we have the majority, we can have it. We can just eke it out across the finish line and then we, then we do what our agenda is. And that agenda, Cuomo really hasn't been good about outlining what that is. SLI won some of the debates, took a few cracks at it, but I think this was another example where the lack of a really vigorous independent local media in New York, just constantly harassing the candidates in the way that I feel like they used to do in days gone by and just constantly getting him on the record with some of this stuff because he's even had flip flops about law enforcement and whatnot. You know, obviously his chumminess with these extremely anti Semitic radical imams. I mean, none of this really has gotten much exposure over time. So we've seen these stories pop up in the last minute. But to what a point you've made throughout this race, John, which is a really weird race. It's a really weird election in lots of ways. But if he, if he wins, I mean, you two are New Yorkers. I mean, it's going to transform your city pretty radically if he, if he's able to even do a third of what he's claimed he wants to do.
- [70:09]
A
Yeah, well, fortunately he won't be able to, but that doesn't mean that he won't, for example, lead the New York City police members, the 38,000 members of the New York City Police Department to sit in their cars rather than to go out and, and, and crime bust because you have a mayor who is hostile to them and they know if anything happens, if there's a slightest glitch in, you know, if, if, if, if, if, if somebody says, oh, you know, they looked at me cross eyed, he will send them to the Civilian Complaint Review Board and torture them and end their careers and make them miserable. And there will be mass resignations from the police department. It will be very hard to train new cops in time. New York City has an incredibly well trained police department. It's the best police department on the planet Earth. And he has defamed it, he has trashed it, he has slandered it. New York City, the members of the New York City Police Department pull their weapons out of their holsters at a rate 1/50 of the normal rate of a big city police force because they so know what they're doing that they know how little they need to take their guns out of their holsters. And they have such confidence in their ability to subdue criminals without, without resorting to their guns. It's a kind of amazing story. And it took 50 years for the department to learn, or 40 years for the department to learn how to be the department that it is. And he is going to ruin it on day one simply by being mayor.
- [71:48]
D
Yeah, I mean, the thing is that, you know, even if Mamdani is impeded policy wise every step of the way, he gets nothing on his wish list accomplished. The change on the culture of the city will be immediate and dark. What, what his election will have unleashed in terms of anti Semitism, protest, culture, all of that misdemeanor criminality that is going to happen regardless of what he can get accomplished.
- [72:28]
A
Right. Christine, you have a recommendation?
- [72:33]
C
I do. I have actually. Since we didn't get to do an update on the heritage anti Semitism fiasco, I will say, and many of our listeners have probably already seen it, but go watch our friend Ben Shapiro's excellent show devoted to this. You find it online. It's fantastic. He just very methodically explains a lot of what we've been talking about. So go, go watch that. That.
- [72:53]
A
I mean, I'm so, I'm so grateful to him for doing this because he basically went to swim in a cesspool for the rest of us and collect.
- [73:04]
C
He did the work.
- [73:05]
A
That's the data and the, and the quote and stuff. And even I aware of all this, having hearing it sort of put in sequence what Tucker has said, what Nick Fuentes has said and all of that. It's a tour de force of a podcast. And even if you are a person who wrongly doesn't like Ben or thinks he talks too fast or something like that, watch it and listen to it because it achieves it's work. I would be proud to have my name attached to if I ever had the energy to do anything remotely like it. Anyway.
- [73:43]
C
So yes, that's like not actually the recommendation, but everyone should go see it. I have been reading because, you know, we talk about daily politics all the time. I often like to step back and go back in history to remind myself that even though everything is terrible, it was often worse and we got through those periods of time. So I've been reading a lot of early 19th century history, a lot of early 20th century history, and I revisited a book recently that because we're talking about elections and socialism and the fate of the progressive left in general, I reread Walter Lippmann's Drift and Mastery, short little book written in published in 1914. He wrote it when he was about 25 years old. Lippman, you know, one of the founders of the New Republic, famous progressive figure. But his journey from young socialist to sort of quasi utopian progressive to disaffected liberal is just. You see it. So this is the midpoint. This is where he's left socialism, but is still a kind of starry eyed optimistic progressive. And he is. He spent his entire intellectual career wrestling with this tension between should experts tell the masses what to do? And is that good or bad? And what about human nature can. What if the experts try to crush the impulses of human nature? And he just. He took up these themes constantly and he was always willing to turn them over in his mind and rethink his priors in a way that I feel the intellectual left hasn't done in this country and has seen stagnated for several decades now. On the right, we have more fermentation. Not all of it good, but at least there's a lot of churn. And so one thing he did do, and I think this should give us some optimism, even if Mamdani wins, is as have a lot of faith in human nature and in the American people's dislike of utopian schemes. And he has a great line towards the end of the book where he says there is no democracy in a utopia, no willingness to allow intractable human beings the pleasure of going to the devil in their own way. And for me, that, I mean, this is a guy of the left. And the idea that he understood or wanted to understand human nature, but then build a politics that made sense of it while also providing some order and disordered times, it's just. It was. It was. I mean, look, he's got lots of crazy stuff about labor movements and you can skip that, but it's a very short book, basically a series of essays. And so if you're looking for a reminder that that kind of intellectual work on the left has happened in the past, and maybe we can hope for some thoughtful re. Examination of principles. Reread Drifted Mastery by Walter Lippman.
- [76:08]
A
Great recommendation. Okay, we'll be back tomorrow. For Eliana, Christine and Abe, I'm Jon Pod Horiz. Keep the candle burning.