The Conservative Movement Moves On
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. This week, I'll examine what we learned about both parties' races from Tuesday's Michigan primary and talk with National Review's Rich Lowry about where movement conservatism goes from here. Let's dive in.

Well, Electorama has come to the Wolverine State. Yes, Michigan cast its votes in presidential primary elections on Tuesday. And we have a narrative. The narrative is, gee, the frontrunners better look over their shoulders. There's something to worry about.

And what I'm here to say is this is more like the scene in The Naked Gun where Leslie Nielsen is standing in front of an exploding fireworks factory saying there's nothing to see here. Only this time there's no exploding fireworks factory. Folks, there's nothing to see here. Well, maybe there's a little something, but there's nothing really worrying for either of the two.

prospective, putative party nominees. Biden won 81% of the vote, and the vaunted, uncommitted effort got 13%. Trump won by 42%, 68 to 27 over Nikki Haley, with the remainder going to uncommitted Ron DeSantis and other people who were on the ballot but had already dropped out. So Haley is saying, look, look at the 32%. You haven't unified your party.

And the left and their friends in the media are saying, look, look at the 13 percent uncommitted vote. That shows that there is this left wing opposition to your policies on the Middle East and the Israeli Gaza war. Again, there's a kernel of truth to both of these things, but both are overselling their point. Let's talk about the Democrats. Let's focus on the lead result, not the undercard. Eighty one percent for Biden.

That's historically not a bad result against semi-serious competition. That there was an active effort to get uncommitted. It was promoted on the national media as news stories. There were people on the ground, you know, Democrats who wanted to vote uncommitted were reasonably aware that this was an option and what it would mean.

And the fact is, people who might be receptive to that message tended to hear it. If you look at the precinct results, as I have, of course, 13 percent uncommitted rose to 20 percent or above in some white areas that voted for Bernie Sanders in 2020. In other words, the sort of

progressive who didn't want Biden to be the nominee in the first hand. Some of them are upset enough that they said, no, we want to vote for uncommitted. You need to pay attention to us. So, you know, that's not nothing.

But it's not a whole lot. And then you have to ask, do you think this sort of voter is the sort of voter who in the general election is going to say, I'm so upset at Joe Biden that what I'm going to do is withhold my vote or throw it away? Because as much as I despise Donald Trump, Joe Biden is on the same level.

I just think it defies what we know about the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. If anything, what they would do is redouble their efforts to push a second term Joe Biden further to the left, which is say, if we had to swallow you again, you're going to give us more this time. But the idea that there is a serious electoral problem that he has to manage with white progressive Sandinistas strikes me as fanciful.

So then you get to the vaunted Arab vote. And the fact is, Arab areas in and around Detroit did vote substantially higher than that. But even in Dearborn, the most Arab-dominated city in the Detroit area, only 55% voted uncommitted. That's a strong number. It's not nothing, okay? But also turnout wasn't high. So there were only about 11,000 votes cast in the Democratic primary in Dearborn.

there were only 760,000 votes cast statewide, which is not that much more than the 600,000 or so that were cast in 2012 when Barack Obama was running entirely unopposed. So what does it mean? It means that even in the heartland of the distaste with Biden's Gaza policy, people weren't streaming out of the polls to vote

register their disapproval. And about half of the people who did bother to go to the polls said, you know, I'm okay with this. 40% or so voted for Biden, 55% for uncommitted, and the rest for Marianne Williamson or Dean Phillips. This is a manageable problem. It's a real problem because one suspects that Arab voters might have a deeper commitment to the question of Gaza and be less afraid of a Trump presidency.

But if what you're talking about is maybe 20,000 or 30,000 people who will either stay home or vote third party, this is a state that Biden carried by 155,000.

If Biden loses the state because 30 or 40,000 Arabs drop off, either by not voting, skipping the race, or voting third party, he still carries Michigan unless he is losing votes elsewhere. Again, this is a manageable problem. It's not something where suddenly you have to say, oh, you've got me over a fire. I have to do what you want. So I think what you've got is

The opposition to Biden took its best shot, took its best shot on favorable ground and scored a flesh wound. Again, something the Biden campaign needs to pay attention to, but not something that requires a full-throated shift on policy, because, of course, a shift on policy carries its own costs, which is to say polls show that independents largely support Israel rather than Hamas. They want Israel.

to beat Hamas. They may want a ceasefire, but they care more about beating Hamas. You have Jewish Democrats who are more numerous in other states than they are in Michigan.

It's a much larger Jewish population in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Do you want to lose Pennsylvania to pick up Michigan? It's not like there's no cost to doing what the people who voted uncommitted want you to do. So I think there's something there. It's an issue that they have to pay attention to, but it is clearly not something that they need to be scared of.

Now let's take a look at the Republican side. Okay, let's say 32% is 32%. It's not chopped liver, as we used to say in the older days. But on the other hand, let's look at the bright side. Nikki Haley is a serious candidate. Nikki Haley has been mounting a serious campaign. She's getting national media. She has been in the news for two months or a month and a half as Trump's primary challenger.

She gets a lot of attention, and Trump got 69%. That's a very strong showing against a reasonably serious candidate, a very strong showing. Moreover, that Haley didn't win a single county.

that when I looked at the race, I thought, well, Haley's vote has been tracking the vote of the more moderate candidates in 2016, Kasich and Rubio. So that suggests that she should get about a third of the vote, maybe a point or two higher, which is what she had been averaging in New Hampshire and in South Carolina. Instead, she pulled nearly seven points under that.

So not only is she not winning over conservatives, she's losing support among the people who could be expected to vote for her. And that's either because they're independents who have just kind of given up and it's not worth voting, or it's because they are moderate conservatives who say, OK, Nikki, I might prefer you, but the race is over. I want it to end.

Trump's 69%, to put it in perspective, is comparable to what Mitt Romney was getting at the end of the 2012 race after everyone had dropped out.

You can look it up on USElectionAtlas.org, the Dave Lee presidential site. Look at the races after the Wisconsin presidential primary, which was the last one Rick Santorum actively contested. And you'll see Romney getting in the 60s, maybe occasionally by the last primary in June in the low 70s.

And this is after everybody dropped out. Now, no one was saying, oh, Mitt Romney, you've got a huge problem. They were saying that there was resistance to Mitt Romney on the movement conservative flank. And he solved that by appointing Paul Ryan. Remember when Paul Ryan was the movement conservatives hero? When he made it Romney-Ryan, all of the movement conservative discontent went away. It was a simple problem to solve.

Now, will Trump solve his simple problem by appointing Nikki Haley or somebody that the establishment would like? Who knows? But we're sure that if Nikki Haley gets 27% in Michigan, she's going to be annihilated in Tennessee and Texas and California and Oklahoma and Alabama, all states on Super Tuesday, that vote. And which, by the way, she is not visiting.

Nikki Haley's visitations, her magical mystery tour, if you will, is exclusively focusing on more moderate states. She went to Michigan. She then went to Minnesota. Then she went to Colorado. She's in Utah today, which is not a moderate state, but we should remember that the Church of Latter-day Saints and their adherents were not particularly fond of Trump. They remain fond.

more dismissive of Trump than other conservatives. So she's make hope against hope. And then she goes to North Carolina, which is more moderate than South Carolina, which have a lot of independents who can vote. She goes to Virginia, which Marco Rubio almost won in in 2016. She goes to D.C., which is the swamp of the swamp for the Republican Party.

Rubio and Kasich together got 73% of Haley can't win there. She can't win anywhere. Then she goes to Massachusetts and Vermont. So it's quite clear what she's trying to do. She's overlooking the states. And Texas and Tennessee and Alabama don't have party registration. But the fact is if she lost South Carolina, which has no party registration, by 21 points, she's going to lose those states too. She's basically written off any state where conservatives are the overwhelming influence.

And what that tells me is she knows she's weak. She knows she is a candidate of a faction and she's trying to negotiate for a deal. But the deal isn't going to be big. It's not going to be the vice presidency, you know, unless based on Michigan, if she had gotten 35 or 40 percent, Michigan might have been plausible to think she could do better in these other states.

But it's just very difficult to see what she can do. And that means that, yeah, Trump can't ignore those voters. But the thing is that Trump has known he's been weak with moderate college-educated white independents for the entirety of his time in politics. And he's never done anything really substantial to make himself attractive to those voters. Maybe he will in the next few months.

He has a flesh wound, just like Joe Biden has a flesh wound. He has a manageable challenge, not a problem. So that's why when you take a look at all the press reports from Michigan, take what you're hearing, if you're hearing the doom and gloom, the two warning shots across the bow, the yes, they're coming to me, but look at all the problems they've got with a big grain of salt.

Challenges aren't problems. These guys are going to face each other barring health reverses, and they still are coming in as the masters of their domain, each of their particular parties.

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And there's no one better to talk about the state of the Republican Party and the state of the conservative movement upon which the modern Republican Party was built than Rich Lowry, the editor-in-chief of National Review, arguably the publication that founded these things, and host of the Editor's Podcast. Rich, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Henry, thanks for having me. Well, it's six in a row, and none of them are close. What do we take from that?

How boring, you know, I was, I feel so foolish and naive, but a year or so ago, I was so looking forward to this race to be fascinating. This clash of Titans, you know, this new, this new figure rising up from Florida, Ron DeSantis. And, um, I, I, I discounted wrongly, you know, there's always something you're wrong about or the whole thing you're wrong about. I just counted Nikki Haley at the outset.

um but it just hasn't been interesting it's it's uh the space where there should have been a republican primary there was an episode of law and order starring donald trump you know that that was a a huge part of his additional strength but he just had even even if he never gotten indicted uh he probably would have won anyway he just has this grip on uh the party and

And it looks like Nikki Haley's showing in South Carolina, you can squint a certain way and say 40% is pretty good in all things considered. But it looks like, given what happened in Michigan, that that 40% is artifact of native state. She campaigned there pretty hard for weeks. She spent a lot of money there. And as the contests kind of pile up and come quicker and quicker, she's not going to be able to have that kind of focus.

And in Michigan, she regressed closer to what her showing is in the national polls against Trump, which is about 15 percent. So I don't see, you know, a lot of I was another thing I was wrong about. I kind of thought she was dropped out before South Carolina to avoid the potential humiliation of losing your home state. Obviously, she didn't. But I don't see a lot of rationale for her.

staying in. Some people say she's in because she just hopes, thinks maybe something will happen to Trump. But even if that happened, if you're struck by lightning, I don't think she'd be the nominee. I think others would get back in and there's no way she'd be able to unite the party. And then I don't really think it makes much sense as a 2028 play. You know, if Trump loses, she'll be able to say, I told you so. But people usually don't like to be

Told, I told you so. And a lot's going to happen in the next five years, and she's going to be a decade away from her last act of public service at the UN. So I don't see much rationale to this. Yeah, that's the thing about Haley is...

that all the polls that asked one-on-one questions in 2023 showed the same thing, which is that if Haley lines up against Trump as the final candidate, she's going to lose two to one or worse. That DeSantis could theoretically take Trump on, but it would be a close race. But that half of DeSantis' voters would prefer Trump to Haley. And, you know, lo and behold,

Tens of millions of dollars, good debate performances, lots of determination and energy. And she hasn't moved that one iota. Yep. Why do you think that there's that third, you know, 30 percent or third of the party that says no to Donald Trump and two thirds of the party that it doesn't matter what is said, says no to someone like Nikki Haley?

Yeah. So first of all, this phenomenon dynamic you point out, this is why I still think, even though it failed miserably, that DeSantis' strategy made more sense in theory to try to go to the center of the party. Of course, not the center ideologically, but the center in terms of attitudes towards Trump.

and go to the so-called soft Trump voters, now that just maybe there was never really a soft Trump voter, certainly after the indictments, there weren't many soft Trump voters, and establish some strength there, beachhead there, and then build out and hope the people on the never Trump side of the party either kind of flake off or just aren't strong enough so that the real never Trump core has no alternative but to go to DeSantis, even though they don't like some things he's said and done in the course of establishing this beachhead.

But he couldn't get the beachhead. And then once Haley had established a lock on the more never Trump element, for lack of a better phrase, DeSantis was just done. But she hasn't really, I'm not sure she's really tried to break out or shown if she wants to try that she knows how to break out from this 25 or 30 percent. But this 25 or 30 percent, they have more traditional attitudes on issues, either more kind of Reaganite conservatives or

Again, for lack of a better phrase, and just can't abide Trump personally. And then the two-thirds, it's a combination of people who are MAGA on the issues. They don't like trade. They don't like China. They really don't like immigration. So they're in a different place on issues, part of them. Some of them are actually more conventional in their policy attitudes, but think Trump delivered on a conventional conservative attitude.

agenda while he was in office. And then there's just the fact, Henry, he's

He's a politician the likes of we have not seen or we've only seen a couple times in our lifetime. The strength he communicates in all sorts of ways, some ways good, some ways bad. The good, like the indictments and the court cases he's handled, you've never seen him blink once. You never see him show any fear, any worry. Now, the downside is people also associate the strength the way he'll say anything about anyone, right? And oftentimes he's saying disgraceful things.

and shameful things. But he's just a more dominant figure than just anyone else. It's not even close. A DeSantis person was complaining to me during the course of the campaign at some point, they have some media tracking service where you can see how many mentions you get in the media, and then it's calculated how much this is worth, you know, this

the so-called free media. He was telling me, you know, don't quote me on the numbers, but DeSantis, average day, $3 million worth of media. Good day if he pops, five or six. Trump, average day, 80. You know, good day, 120 million. So it just wasn't a contest in that regard. They're just not...

None of these other people were remotely as big as Trump is. And, you know, the fact that he's the focus of so much ire from the other side makes people feel defensive of him, makes them feel bonded to him. So it just adds up to this incredibly strong and commanding political figure. I mean, what I never understood about DeSantis' strategy was,

is that if you're going to go after the soft Trump, which I thought was the right strategy,

It strikes me you have to explain to the soft Trump voter why you're better than Trump. And he never really did that. You know, you can't point to a single television ad where he said, we like Trump, but I'm better or don't take the risk or anything. And towards the end of the campaign, he began to be a little more pointed in his speeches, but never the direct message.

You've got a choice. You know, he'd like to say that this is a time for choosing. The choosing is between me and the future of conservatism and a future of Biden decline. And, you know, my thought is all of the Republicans agree with that. The question is, why should you be the one leading the force of conservatism? Why do you think DeSantis shied away from asking Republicans to make the only choice that mattered in a primary, which was between him and Trump?

One word, fear. Fear. And this is the other thing about Trump. You know, we've had dominant political figures before, but no one who has occasioned this kind of fear. People are scared of him and they're scared of his voters. So the distanced calculation, and again, I agreed with this, although it maybe has proven to have been not the correct approach. I thought

you know, establish some strength on your own, muster your forces, keep your favorables high, and then when it's a one-on-one, then you really go after him. But, you know, he never got to the one-on-one. He never made the case, as you're discussing, but it's because he thought he'd be punished, and he wasn't crazy about that. You know, you look at Chris Christie had high unfavorables going in, but nothing he did made anyone like him more. He took the case directly to Trump the way no one

No one else did, and no one wanted to hear it. And by the end, he was totally like a Three Mile Island-level radioactive with Republican voters, more popular with Democrats than with Republicans. And just the DeSantis people looked at that and polling they did on their own, and they're like, we can't take the case directly because we'll pay a price. So I think it all comes down to, Henry, nothing's inevitable in politics, but this was as close as an inevitable thing

that Trump would win the nomination as he could get. Because you could try what DeSantis tried and it failed, but I'm pretty sure if he would have tried what you're saying, it also...

Wouldn't have worked and so voters just wanted Trump that bonded to Trump and and there's there was no way to convince them otherwise I think but then DeSantis shouldn't have run and that's the thing is look at this and you you you all of your logic is I can't beat the man, you know the Ric Flair says the rest Yeah, you want to be the man you have to beat the man and Ron just wanted to be the man without getting in the ring with the man and

And Donald Trump was getting out of the ring to beat up on Ron DeSantis. And it's like, wait a minute. I thought you were the guy who never backed down. And he backed down Trump big time. Why would you get in the race if that was your theory, that I can't ever take out the man who I have to take out?

Because at the time, Trump looked as though he was thinking of his own weight to some extent and was losing his force, right? Basically, the go decision had been made, you know, maybe been made earlier, but certainly shortly after the 2020 midterms where Trump was hurt, you know, by the showing of his candidacy.

in 2022 and of course desantis won a landslide a little illusory right because it's it's much easier as a governor to have your state wired and to be able to beat charlie chris than it is to get get up nationally and be able to take on someone like donald trump but you know the polling there for a while i don't need to tell you even though we're beyond the polls we also focus on the polls a little bit um you know it was it was close right and there are states there where desantis was was ahead

So you you he made he made the decision to go in that circumstance. And then basically, I don't know, I haven't looked at it in a while, but I don't know, starting in January or so, Trump was recovering and basically didn't stop rising. And DeSantis didn't stop stop falling all of last year.

And then there are various other mistakes that we could get into that DeSantis made, just basically competence issues in running a campaign. The big warning sign there was doing the Twitter campaign.

audio spaces with Elon Musk and David Sass. As you're in announcement, you have an attractive wife, wonderful kids, the opportunity to get them on the front page of every newspaper and a cable, B-roll on every TV outlet in the nation, and they didn't do it. They chose not to do it, which was a sign. That didn't sink them, but it was a sign. Yeah, no, I got to hear one event that I tuned in live for

It was his 99th county when he did the finish the full Grassley. And I was thinking, well, Grassley's in Iowa. You know, he talks about a surprise special guest. You know, could this be, you know, the cavalry riding to the rescue? And of course it wasn't. But what it meant was I got to hear everybody. I got to hear Bob Vander Plaats. I got to hear Kim Reynolds and I got to hear Casey. And she stood up and gave her talk. And I turned to my fiance and I said, the wrong DeSantis is running.

This woman exudes charisma and likability, and Ron DeSantis did learn to work with the people. But the Twitter space, this thing suggests something about his personality, which is he's much more comfortable with remote technical things. And that just...

He wasn't as bad as some people thought he was going to be, but he wasn't warm and engaging in the sort of person you want to sit down and have a beer with. Whereas, you know, heck, I'd love to have a play date with Casey and her kids and just yak it up over the pool. Yeah, and this never works, right? I'd want that if I were a woman, not just a guy. She's likable.

Yeah, this never works. I've been through this so many times. Phil Graham. Well, you might not like Phil. You love his wife, Wendy. You know, Mitt Romney. You know, Mitt might be a little little stiff, but Ann is great. But that doesn't that never gets a candidate anything. And this is another key thing. He always felt as though he was overly calculating. He was thinking about what he was saying. He was scared about saying the wrong thing, which he was.

Never funny, totally incapable of humor in public. People say he's entertaining in private. If that's true, every time he said something funny, someone should have wrote it down and say, try this at a rally. And if people laugh, say it at the next rally. Keep going with it. But zero evidence of a sense of humor, and that obviously played a role as well. The word I'm hearing is that this is a guy who's not brave enough to be president.

He's afraid of his own shadow. He calculates his way to avoid the fear. He's afraid that he's going to make an error with his humor rather than score points with his humor. So he keeps himself hidden. He's afraid of Donald Trump's retribution, even though, again, you know, by 2022, you knew that this is a guy who likes, you know, they say, you know, never wrestle with the pig because you get dirty and the pig likes it.

Well, you know, that's what Donald Trump does. He likes to get you in the mud. So, yeah, again,

If you know you're afraid, you know you can't unbutton yourself, and you don't want to get in the mud, don't get in the race. Yeah. No, I take all those points. And, you know, I've said many times I think Ron DeSantis would be a good president. But, as you know, running the campaign and showing the chops to get there is a big indicator whether you really have the political skills for the highest-pressured political job on the planet, which is to be president of the United States. And this campaign was not encouraging in that respect whatsoever.

But, you know, DeSantis, he overestimated himself. It's not we all do it. You know, politicians are especially prone to do it. But he felt as though he were, you know, an all-conquering political hero after that victory in Florida. And it just wasn't translatable. And all the mistakes of the campaign really, at the end of the day, he and Casey were running it. So it goes back to

To them maybe you can't blame everything that happened at the super PAC on them because they didn't have direct control But you know, they set up that structure. So Yeah, it was not It's he's a diminished figure now So let me turn this a little bit to the conservative movement is that you know nine years ago Donald Trump comes on the scene if there's one thing movement conservatives of all stripes can agree upon it can't be this guy and

And he simply wiped the floor with everybody in the Republican Party. You know, it's not like these people challenging him were weak people. They all showed weaknesses of various types. But this wasn't, you know, Humpty Dumpty or the Seven Dwarves. These were serious people with serious money. I mean, he just weathered like $400 million or $300 million between DeSantis and Haley and Super PACs and Americans for Prosperity without batting an eye.

The movement conservatism that you and I grew up in was built on the three stools, the social conservatism, economic neoliberarianism. I say neo because market orientation across the board, but without the radicalism that libertarianism brings. And muscular leaning into neocon, but definitely muscular internationalist foreign policy.

And Nikki Haley essentially is running as that candidate and getting her hat handed to her. Ron DeSantis chose not to run as that candidate and didn't do much better. It's not that Donald Trump doesn't strike any of those themes, but he's perfectly engaging and willing to depart from that reservation. And he gets applauded for it. Wither the old National Review fusionist conservative movement.

Yeah. So it's a it's a big question. In 16, clearly he benefited from the fact that the the political elite in the Republican Party and in both parties, in some respects, was was out of touch or disconnected on three big things, immigration, trade, China, and maybe maybe throw interventionism in there.

As well, I was not out of touch on immigration. I was out in touch on China. I switched switched on that. I'm still out of touch on trade. They got to work on me on that. That one, Henry. And then the Trump foreign policy, it's not isolationist, but it is Jacksonian. Right. It's it's.

We're not going to we don't like these foreigners. We're not going to mess with them. We're going to just mind your own business. But but but you mess with us. Boom. You know, it's coming. We're going to bomb the S out of ISIS. We're going to take out Soleimani. So the way I look at the Trump phenomenon, it is it's it's blowing up the old policy consensus.

on the right. Some of that's healthy. Some of it I just agree with, but I think is a legitimate debate. That's fine. I think there's, you know, populism has always been part of the Republican and the conservative coalition. It's just the more classical liberal element, if you want to call it that, has been ascendant. Now it's reversed. The populism is ascendant. I don't want to take my ball and go home because of that. You know, I'll argue and

fight it out from this subordinate position the way populists did for 50 years or whatever it is. The thing that I find just can't abide and think is poisonous and there's no place for is the way Trump conducts himself.

the way he handled the aftermath of the 2020 election, where he basically as a matter of ego, I believe, just couldn't admit that he lost to Joe Biden, which was pretty embarrassing. But he dragged the country through this trauma unnecessarily, entirely based on ego. And I don't know whether he was lying, you know, because he convinces himself of things. But we have many people around him now having admitted they just lied.

They just lie. And there are a lot of good people around the country who believe them. And that was shameful. And the conspiracy theories.

which Trump engages in himself and has given permission to, is also poisonous and totally counterproductive, to use too mild a word. So I'm okay arguing out the substance, and some of it was a necessary and healthy readjustment, but then there's this other element to Trumpism that I think is just, I find intolerable.

You know, one of the things that continues to stand out for me, and of course we don't have an exit poll from Michigan, you know, the networks decided, I think wisely, not to spend a large amount of money to have one when it was going to be a walkover. But for the other three races, it's pretty clear that 80 to 90 percent of Trump's vote comes from people who believe that the election was stolen.

that that is more important than ideology. It's more important than... There are various things that are important, and they obviously overlap, but you simply get to that one question, and if you think the election was stolen, you're like 90% likely to vote for Trump. And if you don't, then you are like 90% likely not to vote for Trump in the Republican Party. So the question I've got is...

For two years, I felt like I was banging the drum alone and saying, we need to combat this. We need to combat this. That the whole question of was January 6th patriotism or insurrection or something in between rested on a foundation.

That no one wanted to challenge that. Either you said, well, of course, the election wasn't stolen, but you never bothered to prove it or argue it, which meant that for in conservative circles, for people who can assume conservative media, they never heard an argument except from the left who simply presented a conclusion.

And so what we've got now is 60% or more of primary voters believe that. That's why Donald Trump, those are the voters who fueled Donald Trump. Why did movement conservatives not vote?

the fight after January 6th to say, you're wrong. You know, why was there nobody on Fox who said that? Why was there nobody in the Wall Street Journal who said that? Why was there nobody in the Free Beacon? Or, you know, why was this ignored? Yeah, I don't know whether the... I love the Journal and the Free Beacon. I'm not sure what I'd include them in the Hall of Shame here. But I think the reason why most...

conservatives didn't goes back to the one word I use for dissent is fear, right? You would take an enormous amount of abuse. You would be called a traitor by people whose opinion you might value or an audience that you might want to keep. And I think that's a key thing for

For a lot of the media on the right, again, not not the journal or the the free beacon. And then politicians, again, they were afraid to do it. I mean, Nikki Haley is making basically almost the entirety of her case against Trump now is electability. That's not like.

She doesn't say I mean, she says one's ass. But if I'm if I'm mistaken, she's not really out there saying she lost in 2020 and he's going to lose again. She said he's going to lose this time. But the first part is missing. So this allowed Trump to align what should have been the main vulnerability. He lost to Joe Biden as an incumbent president. That's that's damning. You know, anyone else you'd have to go away and hide, you know, do charitable works the rest of your life to make make up for this.

And, you know, he on election, it started on election night, you know, with Trump. He brought everyone along with him. And I think this kind of conspiracism, it's always been a tendency within the right. It's a tendency within the left as well. There would be people who would think the election was stolen even if Trump had never said it. But he magnified it and he made it orthodoxy within the Republican Party. And I underline that word orthodoxy is something you can't disagree with or you're scared to disagree with even if you do.

And that's been a huge... That and the fact that he's led Biden in the general election polls took away what...

what you would have thought would have been the best practical argument against Trump, right? You could say, he's a good guy, he did lots of good things, but damn it, he's not going to win, there's no way he's going to win because he lost. He lost, look, he lost. But that part of it they weren't able to do, or weren't willing to do, and then the polling, and the fact that they were losing to Trump made it really hard to make another element of the electability case. So it's a sad thing, it's a sad state of affairs, but here we are.

Yeah, so let's make an assumption that Donald Trump wins the presidency. He returns to office. It's very hard to see how the Republicans lose the Senate under any circumstance, but it's impossible to see how they lose the Senate if he returns to office. You know, I think if he returns to office, they hold the House, probably increase their seats by a few, maybe not a lot. Where does the conservative movement go? Is this...

like the last nail in the coffin of the traditionalist wing, because if they, you know, we talked about the exertion of orthodoxy. Well, if Donald Trump is reelected as president, one suspects dissent is with the president is not going to be permitted within the Republican Party. So if he says protectionism is the way.

What, you know, anyone who disagrees with him on issues is likely to get that sort of treatment. Wither conservativism, wither fusionism if Donald Trump is reelected. Yeah, so it'd be the total ascendancy of Trumpism.

Conservatism, the movement conservatism as it has been known would still exist. There's still the institutions holding up the banner for it. There's still people who believe in the ideas and the policy mix associated with them. But it would be as a political phenomenon, you know, back pre-Goldwater, I would say.

So you're not dead, not stamped out, but down, but really down. And what we'd see is a version of what we've already seen. You know, everyone in the House who wanted a future would sound like Elise Stefanik, you know, auditioning for the Veep nomination on Meet the Press. Everyone, and I'm exaggerating, everyone's too strong, but everyone...

Everyone would undergo the Mike Lee transformation of a constitutionalist conservative who's highly substantive to the point of being boring, right, to being this base Mike Lee on Twitter, you know, who thinks the vague is great, you know, and is all on board, you know, mega influencers.

So just that that pool would be enormous. So, yeah, that I think that would be the state of affairs. You never know how things bounce. Unexpected things happen. You know, who knows what the second term would ultimately look like. You know, you think, you know, that Karl Rove thought 2004 was a new, you know, a dawn of just a new Republican Party that had been defined in the image of George W. Bush. It turned out that actually that that was not the case.

And within, you know, what was it, eight years or whatever, be totally reversed and, you know, totally different than anyone expected. So those kind of things happen. But certainly in the short term, it would be a total Trump ascendancy. Well, on that cheery note, which aside from reading National Review or listening to the editor's podcast, do you have other outlets where my listeners can follow your work?

Well, Twitter, at Rich Lowry, National Review, New York Post runs my columns, and we record the editors twice a week, and you can find it wherever fine podcasts such as this one are found.

Yes, buying podcasts. We can do two for one. We can kind of do an Amazon sale of our podcast. Rich, it's always delightful to chat with you. Thanks, Andrew. I'm a huge admirer of yours, as you know, and read your work with great profit all the time and appreciate contributions to NR.

Well, no. And yes, for people who don't know in my world, I am writing for National Review online on a regular basis now and wrote for National Review, the magazine, many years ago before I joined the Washington Post for my sojourn into establishment liberalism. But, Rich, thank you. And I look forward to having you back on Beyond the Polls. Thank you.

That's it for this week. Join me again next week as we run down Super Tuesday's super results with CNN's forecaster extraordinaire, Harry Enten. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the poles. Ricochet!

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