The Silly, the Sublime and the (Maybe Even) Serious
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Welcome back to Beyond the Polls. I've got a great episode lined up with our first bad ad of the week and a discussion about the GOP's bipolar disposition. Let's dig in. Usually in this segment, I play one of the best ads that I've seen that a candidate is or a super PAC is putting up in order to get that candidate over the finish line. And I explain how this ad is well-crafted. It talks to a particular demographic, etc., etc., etc.,

This week is not that type of ad. Instead, as an homage to Leonard Pinfgarnel, played by Dan Aykroyd in the early days of Saturday Night Live, who was always a snooty theater critic, introducing bad performances or bad ballet or bad cinema. This is Bad Out of the Week. Let's listen.

I'm Blankenship candidate for the United States Senate, and I plead for this ad. The Democrat Party is no longer relevant in West Virginia. For sure, a party that turned its back on Robert Kennedy Jr. is not the party you joined. Instead, it is a party that will not be relevant so long as it supports illegal immigration, drug trafficking, transgenders, and anti-Israel protests. Democrats should vote for me to help make your party relevant again.

Independents should vote for me because neither party deserves your vote. If they tell you I fell off the bed and hung myself, I didn't.

Well, if you're not laughing by that last line, you don't have a sense of humor. And this is kind of like one of those bad movies that is unintentionally humorous, kind of like The Door or Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Where do I begin? First of all, Don Blankenship is a person who was a Republican. He ran in 2018 for the Republican nomination, and he's the person who hung the moniker Cocaine Mitch on Mitch McConnell. He then became...

the nominee for president of the Constitution Party, which is a little-known far-right party that usually nominates people and gets some tenths percent of the vote in each presidential year. And, of course, Don Blankenship didn't disappoint. And now he's running for the Democratic Party. So, first of all, you have no credibility running for the Democratic Party nomination, but at least you should try and understand who Democrats in West Virginia are.

Does he show any indication of that? Are you kidding me?

He talks about the party that threw out RFK Jr., a party that's irrelevant. Hello, McFly. This is a party that if you're still a Democrat in West Virginia, as tens of thousands of former Democrats have been re-registering as Republicans, you probably like Joe Biden and the things that are being done. You think your party is highly relevant because, oh, by the way, it controls the Senate and the presidency. He says in one of his speeches,

pictures, the chyron says, "Too far to the left." It's a picture of some Democrat and that's what the network chyron put up. "Hello, if you're a Democrat in West Virginia, you don't think your party's too far to the left. You think the Republicans are crazy loony way too far to the right. So you have no issue that's tying you to the actual voters you're trying to persuade." And then he says, "Well, the Democrats are the party of illegal immigration, transgenders and drug trafficking."

Beyond the fact that this is obviously hyperbole, particularly as drug trafficking, this reminds me of what the famous gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson said when he was following the 1972 primary on the Democratic side. He was in Nebraska where Hubert Humphrey was the establishment choice was fighting against George McGovern and the progressive choice.

And the Humphrey person shows an ad where he says that McGovern shouldn't be voted for because he's the candidate of acid amnesty and abortion. And Hunter S. Thompson looks at him and he says, what do you think? And Thompson says, it's great, except for one thing. And the staffer says, what? And Thompson says, well, I'm for acid amnesty and abortion.

If you're a Democrat in West Virginia, you don't have a problem with the border. You're for bringing people in in a humanitarian way. If you are a Democrat in West Virginia, you think that transgender individuals ought to be treated as exactly the same regardless of circumstances. So you're for transgender people.

Girls competing in girls sports, likely. And with regards to the drug trafficking, that's just kind of like off the wall. Democrats in favor of drug trafficking. So you've got this complete disconnect of message and audience, which is stunning for a candidate, a candidate that is clearly not self-aware. And then he says parents should vote for me because neither party deserves your vote. Hello, McFly, you're talking to partisans.

People who vote in primaries like their party. They're not the disaffected middle. And then you have a poor production quality that Don Blankenship looks like he's just come from his guest starring role in Weekend at Bernie's and he played Bernie. And bad lighting and so forth. So from soup to nuts, from production to issues to craziness. If I fell off a bed and they tell you I hung myself, I didn't.

This is a textbook example of bad political advertising, and that's why it's this week out of the week. I'm Victoria Cash, and I want to invite you to a place called Lucky Land, where you can play over 100 social casino-style games for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes.

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Well, when one looks at the Republican Party today, one can say the glass is half empty, the glass is half full, the glass has been knocked over by other Republicans. Here to explain the modern Republican Party and its relationship, functional or dysfunctional as it is to the 24 elections, is Jim Garrity. Jim is the senior political correspondent at National Review, a contributing columnist at the Washington Post, and the author of the forthcoming novel, Dueling 6D.

Jim, welcome to Beyond the Polls. Henry, it is great to be here, but boy, you can't set up a taller order than just say, make sense of the Republicans these days. How do you sort out this endless circus slash freak show, orgy, nonstop cavalcade of chaos that is the right side of the aisle? Actually, freak show and orgy together, it's kind of like Caligula meets Bozo.

Yes, yes. And I think that there are people who would apply those two metaphors to the current leadership of the party. So, yeah. Well, let's, as we say in my introduction to every episode, let's dive in. Why should Republicans, such as they are, be optimistic about the November elections?

Basically, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the greatest advantages that the Republicans have. There is a broad—you look at the numbers on Biden's approval rating—

Right track, wrong direction, assessments of the economy. Biden looks like a dead man walking. I mean, just he's really unpopular. He was elected after the chaos of both the general Trump presidency and in particular 2020, COVID, George Floyd riots, just all kinds of the sense that the world was spinning off its axis.

And Joe Biden, who had been vice president for eight years, came along, America, I might look old, but I'm going to bring it back to normalcy. And boy, America was, okay, normalcy, that sounds good. I continue to subscribe to the idea that the average American...

Doesn't want to have to think about politics doesn't want to have to think about government doesn't want to think about what's going on in Washington and that that's one of the reasons I'm a you know, usually a small government conservative and You know I would like a I would like politics to be returned to the land of the nerds and the geeks the people who actually care about it as Opposed to becoming this thing where every day you're to the extent you're following the news You're like what crazy thing to Trump do or what crazy thing did Biden do today?

So the country's in an anti-Biden mood. They're also generally in an anti-democratic mood, although the New York Times poll that came out earlier this week had Senate Democratic candidates running a couple of points ahead of Biden. So it may be that like the weaknesses of Biden are really particular to him, not so much to the Democratic brand as a whole. But I would also point out that like if you're the attitude is like, oh, you know, probably no.

I hope it doesn't happen, God forbid, but Joe Biden has a heart attack tomorrow. The replacement is Kamala Harris, who somehow has managed to be a couple of points less popular than Joe Biden, who is really, really unpopular for an incumbent president these days.

Well, when I look at the data, Joe Biden is the most unpopular president at this stage of his history, going back at least to Harry Truman. He's more unpopular than Jimmy Carter at this point. He's six points or five points, depending on the day, behind Donald Trump at this stage. And you look and you say, no president with a job approval rating as low as this has been reelected.

in the modern era. And I only say that because we really don't know what Harry Truman's job approval rating was in 1948 because polling was so new and was so rarely done because it was so expensive. They still had to walk door to door because they couldn't, people didn't have enough telephones to rely on telephones for your survey, you know, instrument accumulation. So

You look at that and you say, why is it so close? And this gets to my question is, given that this is the most unpopular president in history, all the polls say it's going to be a close. Does that give Republicans a reason to be pessimistic about the election? I think it gives them reason for anxiety. I think if Joe Biden were running against a generic Republican, then he'd be way behind.

Unfortunately for Republicans, Tim Pawlenty did not choose to run this year. Tim Pawlenty is my usual go-to joke for the generic Republican, the cookie cutter, basic as... I really like him, but I just kind of observe that a guy who's had all of the hard edges sanded off, you could say. And I like to believe that if it was DeSantis or maybe it was Haley, maybe it's almost anybody else other than like Ramaswamy,

Anybody who could look like they were going to deliver a return to normalcy probably would be well ahead of Biden. The country has decided Biden has failed. The thing that they are now grappling with is do they want to go back to Trump? And you see this in survey after survey. People have fond memories of the Trump presidency until COVID.

Now, maybe some of this is rose-colored glasses. Maybe some of this is forgetting or kind of driving out of their minds every day of, Henry, I'm really thinking about buying Greenland. It's just, it's a fabulous, it's just sitting there. We're going to put up casinos. It's going to be fabulous. You know, this, the,

The daily chaos that came with Trump. And the irony is, like, as the example of buying Greenland I just used, a lot of what Trump would say on any given day might sound crazy and then it would have no consequence because he would forget about it and everybody else would forget about it and they just move on to the next controversy.

So you look back, people feel like the economy up until March 2020 was doing pretty darn well. It felt like their wages were growing. Inflation by standards of today was pretty darn low. The economy was not without, it wasn't perfect or anything, but it felt like things were generally heading in the right direction. And then COVID hits and COVID is really, really the biggest disruption to American life since probably since the influenza pandemic.

It is the, you know, then George Floyd on top of that. Then just, you know, this general sense of, I just think your kids aren't in school, all this. And Biden was elected to make it normal again. And he hasn't. And we still deal with all the consequences of the pandemic. Like Ron DeSantis was running on his pandemic record in the primary and it did not gain much traction. We can argue about whether that should be the case or it shouldn't. But.

That's the case. Biden thinks COVID is a winning issue for him. And I think he's completely misreading it because, yeah, the shutdowns and the chaos of the country under Trump were bad. And Trump did not cover himself in glory and was not an adamant opponent of the lockdowns and restrictions that he wants to pretend he is now. At the same time, most of those most draconian restrictions were enacted by Democratic governors in Democratic states and certain Democratic cities.

And what's more, like people now associate like up until we get the vaccines in our arms, you could you could kind of say, ah, that's why we had to keep schools closed and we had to avoid large gatherings. Once we were vaccinated, we should be going back to normal.

And if you're in a red state, your life got back to normal fairly quickly. If you were in a blue state, it took like a year and then like maybe almost two years until your life felt normal. All the businesses were opened. Nobody was nagging you about masks, all that kind of stuff. And so Biden is now the candidate who, you know, is just kind of associated with

Government getting bigger, more in your face, more of a pain, more woke, diversity, equity, inclusion, all that kind of stuff just goes in with Biden. And it comes in the form of an old man who just every day says something that is just

bonkers. I could use bad words. I don't know if you want to hear them on your podcast. Oh, we have a family podcast for the seven children geeks who listen. OK, there you go. You know, just like twice in the past five days, Biden has claimed that inflation was 9% when he took office. And that's no, no, it was 1.4%. This all started on your watch, Mr. President. And you can't just historically. And the thing that I guess it could be that Biden is like this is a spin effort. It could be that Biden just doesn't remember.

And what I increasingly think is that maybe Biden was told after the first time, no, Mr. President, it was not. And I wonder if he just forgot that he was corrected. I think Biden just remembers what he wants to remember. Or it could very well be since it hit 9% in June of 2022 when he was president. Maybe that's when he decided to do the job. You know, the staff ran it until then. And then he took that.

The first two years, Henry, they're practice. They're just kind of warming up. But, you know, it's preseason football. So you look at this and you say, OK, Team Blue is in disarray. Their leader doesn't seem to be able to call plays in the huddle. And the team doesn't seem to be able to run the plays when they run the play. You know, like it was almost a year ago when we started hearing about Bidenomics.

And the fact is, people have a more negative view of Biden now than they did when that effort started. Not big, but the trend line on approval has been down, not up. People still don't think the economy is working for them. So they ran the play and they didn't get a first down. So you look at that and you say, OK.

This is 1980. People were worried about Ronald Reagan. Is he just a crazy cowboy? And then in the end, they decided Jimmy Carter's just so bad and this guy's normal enough. Let's give him a try. So what that meant was a bigger than expected Republican victory, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Trifecta is controlled by the Republican Party. It's January, whatever, 2025.

What do Republicans do with it? What do Republicans want from government now? Do they know what they want from government? I think the answer to that last question is either no, they don't know, or maybe the party's got a whole bunch of different factions that know what they want. They all know what they want, but don't really certainly don't make a cohesive decision.

you know, platform for that would unite a lot of people. You know, abortion will no doubt be a issue in this election. I'm not convinced that this is the big issue that so many Democrats want to believe it is. You keep looking at it, ask people what their most important issues are. Economy is number one by a wide margin. Immigration to the border usually is number two. Some polls it's up close, some polls it's down a bit. Abortion is in there, usually it's third or fourth, but it like maybe about 10, 11%.

And there are there are Democrats who are convinced this this entire election is going to be a referendum on abortion. And I'm skeptical that it will shake out that way. But I've been wrong before. But so there are Republicans who are like, well, this is it. It's time for us to push as many restrictions of abortion as possible. Trump has indicated, no, I don't want to do that. He wants to go to the states. And you could kind of make an argument that it's not the Republican Party is no longer pro-life.

It's just much less pro-life than it used to be. And it's, you know, a lot of Republicans are comfortable leaving it to the states. And if a state wants to have abortion right up to partial abortion, that's their right. If their state wants to have taxpayer funding for abortions, that's their right. That's their right. We red states, we're going to enact our restrictions, you know, that way. Reductions in spending is popular right now because Republicans don't control everything.

You probably have noticed that when Republicans do control everything, all of a sudden it becomes a lot less popular. There's no appetite for entitlement reform. And until you tackle that, then the issues, the deficit, the debt really aren't going to get that much better. You can trim around the edges here and there, but it's not going to make a significant difference.

I think there is a chunk of the Republican Party, the Marjorie Kelly Greens and the Matt Gaetz's who want to stop helping Ukraine. I think there's also a decent number of hawks of the party who don't want to stop helping Ukraine and want to see that if not victory, then this is the most that Russia gets nothing better than a tie. And it's such an expensive tie in terms of blood and treasure that they decide we never want to do this sort of thing ever again.

I think if you ask Trump, what's Trump's favorite issue? His favorite issue is himself. His favorite issue is things that affect him directly. So when he says, I am your retribution, I think his top priority is going to be, now it's time for me to go after everybody who dared defy me, who went after me. Obviously, he's going to want to tell, who is he going to tell? His attorney general. Stop every investigation of me. And he's either going to get an attorney general who's going to say, yes, I will do that, or...

And it's very hard to imagine, you know, even by the standards of Jeff Session and William Barr, I can't imagine a attorney general who gets into the job and then tells Trump, no, I'm going to let Jack Smith keep doing what he's doing. It just, you know, I think the investigations of Trump would come to an end.

And then the other thing is border security might be the closest thing you see to an actual unifying. There'll be pushes for tax cuts, certainly an extension of the Trump tax cuts. You might see attempts here and there, but I...

You'll see efforts at reducing regulations here and there around the edges. I don't expect a sweeping Reaganite 1981 attempt to do this. Although they say that there's a lot more effort to personnel his policy. And I think it's safe to say Trump did not understand that in January 2017 in the slightest. And he's learned some hard lessons in that. So he may have a more loyal cabinet and more loyal people.

undersecretaries and deputy assistant secretaries and all those kind of folks. But honestly, I would not expect a dramatically different... I would not expect conservative nirvana to arrive in 2025, even if there's a Republican-controlled trifecta. So...

Populists or MAGA people will be disappointed because the institutions they hate still exist, still wield power. Traditional Republicans will be upset because foreign policy will be a muddle between talking tough and backing away. Christian conservatives will be upset because it'll be kind of like the hokey pokey in the pro-life world. We have one foot in and one foot out and then we twirl it all about.

So does that mean that the Republican dysfunction is going to get worse under Trump, not better? You know, if we had a trifecta with great power comes great responsibility, says Spider-Man and Barack Obama. But if the actors aren't very responsible, does that mean that we're going to have great power and greater dysfunction?

What listeners, because this is an audio only podcast, people could not hear me nodding so much as you were going through all of that about the dissatisfaction amongst all the factions in the Republican Party. I would point out, though, that like when you say the MAGA folks will be frustrated because the institutions that they hate will still be around.

Honestly, I don't think it's realistic to expect that the FBI will just go away. Like, I kind of feel like some of their agenda items are not realistic. There's going to be a federal law enforcement entity. Abolish the IRS. Well, the government's going to have to collect taxes somehow. May I step in and say the person who was running for president in 2016 who proposed abolishing the IRS was Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, not Donald Trump.

Correct. Correct. But I'm saying like the, the MAGA, you know, like the, the rank and file of the MAGA, there are some genuine MAGA policy wonks. You generally find them in places like the Claremont Institute and folks like that. They're, they're, they exist. They're just not terribly common. Your typical MAGA fan is,

I used to say they watch Fox News. I think now they've moved on to Newsmax or some of these other. And what they love is what they generally see on social media. And they get really mad at certain figures.

The Bud Light having a trans influencer, right, was the sort of thing that just drove them crazy. Now, the thing is, it's not really a federal policy. It's very hard to see a federal policy that actually affects that kind of stuff. But that was the sort of thing, you know, where you could, I suspect everybody saw it in their traffic numbers. Everything about that just kind of, you know, jumped on their nerve that way. So I think that MAGA frustration that the institutions have not been eliminated, right,

like, that's baked in the cake. That their idea of what government can do is far afield of the Overton window, shall we say. And as for, you know, will there be Republican dysfunction? Yeah, but...

You know, it's been a long time since we've had anything resembling. Even in the Tea Party days, there was the Tea Party and the establishment, and the Tea Party was always frustrated. Reagan, you go back and you read those. This is lived history for you. I was a grade schooler in much of the Reagan years. But, like, there were Republicans who weren't going along with what Reagan wanted to do. There's always been divisions in the Republican Party. So by itself, this is not necessarily something shocking or new. I do think...

I think there's almost every political, every presidential cycle. You can make an argument that winning, like, I'm not saying you're better off by losing. I don't want to say that, but I'm going to say that almost every president, certainly every second term president, has found out that the presidency is a poison chalice, that that's second term, that everything goes wrong. Scandals mount up. Everybody's like the way I used to describe it was.

First two years of a presidency, the president has the A-team. And I don't mean Mr. T and Hannibal Smith and Face and Murdoch. I mean the very best of the best from the people in the campaign and the campaign administration in exile that's usually working in think tanks and stuff like that. They come in, you get the best of the best. They get through to the midterms, there's burnout. These jobs require enormous time commitments, time away from your families. You're making way less money than you can make in the private sector.

sector. Usually after the midterms, the A team starts stepping down and the B team comes in. Now, the B team's fine. They've been the deputies for the past two years. They generally know what they're doing.

President wins reelection. Well, now it's time to reward the C team. They're not really the best, but they've been around and they've been loyal and all right, you know, fine, we'll go with that. And then by the last two years of the presidents, they usually, by that point, you've got the D team. Now, the best way of describing what we've seen over the last few years is

Henry, is that Biden's A team was the Obama E team. They were the fifth tier and they are the best of the best that Biden could get. And I think you can look at everybody from Yellen to Blinken to Austin on the days he chooses to show up. All these guys, they may have had sterling resumes, but in terms of people noted early on, Biden was not picking anybody who was going to overshadow him.

And I think that, you know, that's what you got. You've got a cabinet that's got sterling resumes, but foreign policy, domestic policy, just a really hard time getting the job done. Yeah, well, you know, that's the thing is if if the president is a superhero, it's one thing if your president is Superman, you can have a lot of people around who won't have outshadow you when your president is Ant-Man. It's a little hard.

First of all, I want to salute you for the comic book metaphors. This is exactly what I was expecting. But that's because I'm just a comic book cartoon character. I'm a comic book version of a political pundit. Is that what you're trying to tell me? I'm just saying this is good. We're broadening. We're not just a bunch of geeks who are saying, well, is Benjamin Disraeli?

Yeah, well, you know, my multivariate regression model with 32 deaths. Exactly, yes. So here's, to return from the silly to the sublime, and maybe even to the serious, here's the scenario I'm going to put to you, and you're going to tell me how it happened. Against all expectations, the Republicans gain nine Senate seats.

They win Montana, Ohio, West Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Larry Hogan wins Maryland. In other words, they sweep the floor in a way that really hasn't been seen since like maybe a 2014 or 19, not 2014, a 2014 kind of 1994, 1980. How did that happen?

So a little bit earlier, I'd said that Biden was elected to just be normal, right? Just end the chaos, get rid of the, you know, end COVID, get the shots into people's arms. Let us get back to our lives, lives back to normal. And within like weeks, Biden was like, you know, I've been talking, I really could be the next FDR. Biden decided that it was time for him to completely transform the U.S. government. They spent trillions of dollars within just about, you know, very quickly after taking office,

you throw a whole bunch of money a whole lot of money not enough goods that causes inflation value of the money goes down value of the goods goes up um and that has been the preeminent problem for trump's for biden's presidency not the only problem but like you know probably the largest um if it was a nine seat pickup but there's a i sometimes like when i think about trump i did not i've never voted for trump and i never will vote for trump but on morning after election day 2016

I, you know, probably many listeners will be pleased to hear the sun seemed to be shining a little bit brighter. The birds were chirping sweetly. And I was like, oh, I'm never going to have to deal with President Hillary Clinton. That feels pretty good. Now, the Trump presidency had its own challenges as the years wore on.

But the way I described it is like from 1992 to 1996, Republicans have said to the country, can you look at that guy Bill Clinton? God, slick Willie. He's always lying. He's such a horn dog. He's, you know, you can't nail him down on anything. God, you know, this guy is just the worst. And the rest of America said, nope. We love him. He's all just a good old hound. He's just a good old boy. He's just a good old boy, never meaning no harm. And they just decided it was fine. Barack Obama comes along and

And America, you know, a whole bunch of Republicans are like, community organizer, give me a break. He's got the radical preacher as his mentor. He's been very into radical politics the whole time. He sounds like he's a moderate, but if you listen closely, he's actually calling for very, you know, this guy, you can't trust this guy. And the rest of the country is like, nope, first black president. We love this guy.

You know, reminds us of the Huxtables, just the perfect, beautiful African-American family. We elect this guy, racism is going to be over and everybody's going to live in racial harmony. And things didn't quite work out that way. But so like for two straight cycles, Republicans are like, we're looking at a Democratic presidential candidate saying, America, do you not see what a maniac this person is? What a freak show this person is. And in 2016, the whole country is like, oh, now I see it.

Okay, yeah, yeah, Hillary Clinton, man, what a B word. God, she's conniving, she's underhanded, she's dis- Now we see it, and it was kind of that, if that happens, if what you're describing, a nine-seat pickup, first of all, Republicans win nine Senate seats, Trump's winning the presidency, and they're probably also dramatically expanding their House majority. And in that scenario, the country's like, oh, now we see it, yeah, Joe Biden's got one foot in the grave, and he's

out of touch and he just always thinks everything is fine. He's always telling us, don't worry, the Afghan army is the best trained force in the entire country. No serious economist thinks inflation is on the way. The surge at the border is just a temporary seasonal pattern. Biden's always telling us it's going to turn out just fine. And then it doesn't. And then when he does, like with the baby formula shortage, he's like, ah, you know, people, we'd have to be mind readers to see this problem. Well, first of all, Mr. President,

And I'm going to get geeky again. Mind readers is telepathy. You mean precognitive. You'd be able to feel to predict the future. So it's always excuses with Biden. It's always somebody else's fault. It's always nobody could have foreseen this, you know, and the Americans are just sick of it. And if that happens, it means the country as a whole said, screw it. We're sick of this stuff. We want something resembling normalcy. Republicans, here's your turn. So now let me flip it.

Election Day, and against all expectations, Republicans gain no seats at the summit. They've lost all of these marginals except for West Virginia, and either Scott or Cruz gets upset in Florida or Texas. So what has happened?

When this dystopian from a Republican view, nirvanic from a Democratic view, how has this come about? If...

Rick Scott or Ted Cruz loses reelection, I become one of those true-to-the-vote conspiracy theorists who believes that the vote is rigged. Because these are really, you know... Yes, Cruz was close last time. Bidder or Rourke had more money than God. You know, all that kind of stuff. But in the scenario where the bottom falls out for Republicans, that seems more plausible to me than the other one because it's kind of a rerun of 2022. Right?

which Republicans thought they had a whole bunch of gains coming their way and

It's going to be a red wave, and it turned out to be a red trickle. You saw some nice gains in Florida. A bunch of Republican incumbents like Mike DeWine in Ohio won by very sizable margins. But by and large, Republicans did not see the big gains, particularly in the House races that they expected. And the biggest reason, Donald Trump himself was not on the ballot, but a whole bunch of candidates who were, I don't know if you want to call them mini-Trumps or wannabe-Trumps,

Doug Mastriano was never going to be the kind of candidate who could win statewide in Pennsylvania. Cox, who was running for governor of Maryland, was never going to be the kind of guy who's going to win in a state like that. There were just so many cases where the Trump, first of all, there are certain candidates who ran in primaries saying, but the most important quality I have is that I am loyal to Trump above all else.

I think that's a really lousy criteria. I think if you're voting, that is a dumb way to look at politics. You should be caring about the policies. You should be caring about the stances. Loyalty to one man is not a good way to do it. But hey, enough voters and enough primaries decided that's the way to go.

and then they got squashed they got credits it by the way like if you're running in pennsylvania and you're in a close house district you want your gubernatorial candidate to at least stay in the ball game and mostriano losing by a large margin to shapiro did not help any house candidate in pennsylvania that year um flip side in the republican the governor's race in new york being close probably helped republicans in a bunch of those house races in new york state so

I think what would happen is that, like, look, it's very weird for a party to nominate the same candidate three cycles in a row. You know more about political history. I can't remember off the top of my head when it was, but like... Grover Clee. Grover Clee. Okay. So if you're never Trump like myself... Except for FDR, which is an obvious exception. Yeah. Which triggered this, you know, the two-term limit. Like, the reason you don't see people running for three terms is because usually you're limited to two terms, right? Yeah.

So, Republicans won in 2016, in part, I believe, because of the supreme weakness of Hillary Clinton as a candidate. But they basically decided, we're going to go with this guy, even though 2018 didn't go the way we wanted. He didn't win in 2020. You could argue the downed ballot Republicans did pretty well.

They didn't do well in 2022, and we'll see how things go in 2024. But the attitude of Republican Republicans, you run into this idea of Donald Trump taught Republicans how to win, when the great irony is in 2014, Republicans had done better than anything. Most Senate seats, most House seats, most state legislative seats, most governor's mansions. Republicans were in great shape in 2014, and then they put all their faith in Trump, and things have not gone quite the way they wanted ever since.

So last question, getting back to the dysfunction. Should the House Republicans, who are rumored to be looking at a change in their rules to help rein in some of the malcontents, should they create a UK-style whip system which would allow them to expel a member, not from the House, but from the Republican conference, when that member or members defy the overwhelming majority on a leadership or organizational question?

That is a really good question. And I'm going to give you a very unsatisfying answer of I'm not sure. Because if you ask me, what do you think of Marjorie Taylor Greene? What do you think of Lauren Boebert? What do you think of Matt Gaetz? But Matt Gaetz allegedly wants to run for governor, or at least that rumor's been around for a while. So maybe he won't be a problem for Congress too much longer. We'll see how that shakes out. Also, Boebert is running in a different district and it's conceivable she could lose re-election. We'll see how that shakes out.

In the circumstances of this, my attitude is, yeah, these are just troublemakers. They have no serious proposals. You say we don't like this bill, but you refuse to cooperate when we're in the process of crafting that bill. So all you're doing is you're trying to do your fundraising. You're not a serious lawmaker, et cetera, et cetera. I get that. I guess the problem is I can envision scenarios where maybe I really don't like the leadership of the Republican Party, and there's somebody who stands out.

You know, we've seen Rand Paul go against the whole rest that Ron Paul, probably the ultimate example of this, like somebody who has this very principled belief and it puts them at odds with the rest of their party. And even if you don't always agree with it, you kind of admire that person for having that principled belief and that they're willing to be the one voting against everybody else. So I would be hesitant to enact a proposal like that without looking at it more closely.

I think, here's the thing, Marjorie Taylor Greene hasn't been exiled from the House Republican caucus, but I don't know how many House Republicans really take her seriously anymore. These people effectively self-exile, maybe not self-exile, they self-marginalize through their antics and through the way they approach their jobs. Well, Jim, we know that you write for National Review. We know you write for The Washington Post. What's your social media handle? And tell us when your book goes on sale. Sure.

Mid-June, the Amazon page just went up. The title is Dueling Six Demons. It's part of the Dangerous Click series. It's a kind of lighthearted, snarky series of thrillers that I write, kind of on the side as just cathartic enjoyments. You'll find geopolitical sense in these stories. I do...

Last year, I spent two trips to Ukraine. I went to Transnistria, which is basically Soviet Disneyland right next door, and went to Taiwan. So unsurprisingly, this latest novel has scenes that are set in Ukraine and Transnistria and Taiwan. On Twitter, I am... I'm sorry, X. Sorry, Elon. I am at Jim Garrity, J-I-M-G-E-R-A-G-H-T-Y. I have a Facebook page, but honestly, Henry, I don't think anybody visits it, so I don't even know if I should tout it.

And I'm on Instagram, but that's just pretty pictures. You don't get to see my pretty words. So that's the three main places you can find me. And I think probably that's way more of me than anybody really wants to find. Well, the world never gets enough of Jim Garrity. And thank you for sharing your thoughts and your forthcoming novel. And I look forward to having you back on Beyond the Polls. I look forward to that too, Henry. Thanks for having me.

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Tuesday's primaries are over, and in a lot of cases, the favorites won. Jim Justice swept aside Alex Mooney, as we expected. Riley Moore, the state treasurer, highly favored person to take over Mooney's congressional seat. He won. The favorites basically won the Maryland congressional primaries. But then we're looking at Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who took on David Trone, founder of Total Lines.

who spent a record $62 million in his primary campaign, and as we are speaking, is behind by 10 points. I say behind by 10 points as we are speaking because Maryland releases

The bulk of its mail ballots late, and there'll be about two or three hundred thousand votes still to cast, but there's no conceivable way that Trone can make up 11 points with the amount of votes that are out. So how did Angela Olsabrooks take on the $62 million man and win? Well, I'd say it's politics the old-fashioned way. That politics in the old-fashioned way is people matter. People matter now.

When you meet them, people matter when you interact with them, and people matter when the friends you have interact with other people. And that's where Angela also Brooks was strong. David Trone basically bought his congressional seat. He spent $10 to $20 million in the pursuit of that. He never made a whole lot of friends in the Democratic Party, and he basically tried to repeat his winning strategy from 2018 in the race for

for Senate in 2024. And what you found was that none of that dented also Brooke's popularity where people knew her. I say a lot when I talk about primary campaigns about regional basis. And the reason why is that time and time again, what we see is that it doesn't matter if somebody's spending millions of dollars against you. If people actually know you, they won't be swayed by

by the ads. Take the Riley Moore case. Riley Moore won just about every district in the county in the district, but he didn't carry his major opponent's home county. They knew Jim early there, so it didn't matter that Riley Moore had more money, had the endorsements. They knew this person, so they voted for him. Angela also books Kerry's Prince George's County, which casts about 20% of the votes with 72%

That's a strong showing in your base. That's something that shows people knew her. Then we get to her endorsements. She was endorsed by most leading figures in the Maryland Democratic Party. And what that means is that they knew people. And you take a look at where she won outside of her base. She wins in the Democratic regions of the state where the establishment is rooted. She wins Baltimore City.

She wins Baltimore County. She wins Howard County, the suburban county between D.C. and Baltimore. She wins Charles County, which is a heavily black county that borders Prince George's, but which is also in Steny Hoyer's congressional district. And so what you see is that where the establishment was rooted, the establishment backing was

carried her to victory. And then you have the question of ethnicity. Angela also Brooks is a black woman and the counties that she carried had significant minority populations. David Trump carried the counties where there are virtually no blacks.

He lost the counties where there were significant numbers of blacks. Why does that matter? Well, again, you have the question of people. Angela also, Brooks, has been networking the black community both in her district and her county and elsewhere for years. David Trone?

He just comes in and buys television ads. And when David Trone uttered a statement in a House hearing that was widely condemned by blacks as being a racial epithet, I won't repeat it. He said he confused it with another word. In the context, that makes sense, but you also kind of wonder how could you not

How could you make that mistake? That just reinforced the idea that this guy who we don't know doesn't understand us and this person who we do know does. So we take a look at Angela also, Brooks, and we say, yes, she had $4 million behind her. That's not a bad amount in a primary, but it's nothing like $62 million. And that's probably underestimating what Trone spent because there's always a lag between what you spend and what you report.

So when we take a look at also Brooks Victory, it shows that people matter more or a significant component to understanding primary victories. It's often a lot about advertising, but people matter too. And when you can marry a people-based base with good advertising, that makes you very hard to beat. But when you're relying on one or the other, it makes it very easy for you to beat.

Kudos to Angela also, Brooks, for not being scared, taking on somebody who looked to many observers like somebody who was going to waltz their way into the Senate. And she goes into November as a slight favorite in this heavily Democratic state against former Governor Larry Hogan. Why? Because when push comes to shove, Maryland people are Democrats and she knows who the people are.

That's it for this week. Join me next week when I'll be joined by NBC's premier election analyst, Steve Kornacki. Until then, let's reach for the stars together as we journey beyond the polls. You slept through your alarm, missed the train, and your breakfast sandwich, ugh, cold. Sounds like you could use some luck.

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