The Mop-Up, with Chris Stirewalt

As y’all know, Chris has joined our Dispatch team as a contributing editor. That means he’ll be contributing to The Sweep on a regular basis; we’re handing Chris the broom! In particular, I’m looking forward to the races where Chris and I disagree on where things are headed. In those cases, we’ll try to give you our best arguments for why we are right and Chris is wrong. 

But to start, I wanted to give you some flavor as to why we are so excited to have Chris joining us. I like talking with Chris because he can move so easily between the big-picture, slowly shifting tectonic plates of our two parties to the specifics of the next primary. He’s the best. And—of course—I ask him about Election Night at the Fox News Decision Desk. Enjoy!

Sarah: You’ve covered elections for a long time now—because you’re super …

Chris: Old?

Sarah: Yeah, but I mean not like a little old, like, very old. [Note: Chris, being 7 years older than Sarah, is technically only one presidential cycle older than she. He could vote in ’96—that’s the only political difference between them.]

Chris: Right.

Sarah: Given that—and the perspective you can bring for us—what’s going to be the elevator pitch, the 30-second historical take on the 2020 election?

Chris: Well, we tend to underestimate the significance of midterm elections in the framing of what came before and what comes next. How Democrats perceived their analogous situation for Democrats in 1976 and 1980. What they were interested in and how they were feeling during that ’78 midterm had a lot to do with the party figuring out what was next. And the same way for the Republicans. In 1978 and the fact that they took another beating, got Republicans thinking about change. 

And the question for Republicans is … they’re trying to pick a path through this minefield. Can they repudiate—and here we’re talking about mainstream Republicans. You’re always going to have the Buchananite wing of the Republican Party that Trump not just energized and activated but grew. You’re always going to have that, and that’s about one in five voting Americans. You’re going to have these cultural populists on the right, and they’re going to be with you in perpetuity. 

For the rest of the Republican Party, though, the question becomes: Can they pick a way through this in such a fashion that they repudiate the worst degradations to the Republic from Trump, but not in a way that permanently alienates them from that 20 percent of America? Because they need that 20 percent of America to have a winning coalition, they believe. 

The problem with all of that stuff is you don’t know which way the ball’s gonna bounce. You don’t know the kind of hops you’re gonna get. How the 2022 midterm primaries go is going to not just tell us a lot about what the Republican Party is going to be, but will also send market signals to the Republicans themselves—the candidates themselves—about how they think they need to act in order to get where they’re going.

Sarah: There’s this article in the New Republic this week …

Chris: I must have missed that one.

Sarah: Poolside reading, my friend! Anyway, it was discussing this new Republican message. It starts with Josh Hawley tweeting, “we are a working class party now,” on election night. And then, he attacked Walmart, “maybe you’d like to apologize for the pathetic wages you pay your workers as you drive mom and pop stores out of business.” Marco Rubio has echoed that to some extent as well. Socan there ever be a working-class Republican Party? Or as the New Republic put it can “the party of the country club” embrace “a new egalitarian economic agenda?”

Chris: Hawley is the Ricki Lake version of Marco Rubio’s Phil Donahue.

Sarah: I said on Friday’s podcast that all of your pop culture references stop in 1997, when you started working in journalism, and it’s like you want to prove me right.

Chris: You’re talking to a person who is working his way through Magnum, P.I. and I’m really okay with that.

Sarah: Weird but fine. Back to shifting political coalitions.

Chris: First, start with the understanding that most of this is horse hockey. The demographic trends. So, the traditional base of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower onward, was college educated, or more highly educated, more affluent suburban residents. 

Now that was true because the Republican Party was the party for people who weren’t looking for anything in particular from the government. Right? The brand for the Republican Party was: “I’m okay. And as a matter of fact I’d just like you to leave me alone. That’s what I would really like.” And when you had growing suburbs and when you had the bubble—when America was living in the mid-20th century bubble—this trend solidifies. 

The truth, though, is that post-1968, the Republican Party already was a workers’ party. And it was before. Certainly you could go back—I don’t want to go all Karl Rove on you—but certainly you can go back to McKinley and find a Republican Party that is a workers’ party. 

What’s happening here is that folks like Hawley are trying to exploit a false narrative that Democrats have long enjoyed. So, Democrats say “we are the party of the working class,” “we are the party of the 99 percent,” we are with those folks. When actually what Democrats have been for a long time now is an uneasy coalition between African American voters and white liberals, and the white liberals tend to be pretty affluent. And these trends are intensifying certainly as more of these suburban voters come over to the Democratic side. 

But I think what you’re seeing on the right, more than anything, isn’t whether Republicans can become a workers’ party. I think the question is: Do Republicans want to sell themselves as they previously did—as the party of growth and economic expansion—or are they going to sell themselves as the party of …. Taking a cultural grievance and turning it into an economic argument is very hard. But…

Sarah: But we’re seeing them do it.

Chris: But it can be done if you center on resentment. And this is where the right wing cultural populism can marry up with the left wing economic populism—that the distance between Josh Hawley and Bernie Sanders gets smaller and smaller—because ultimately your cultural populism, which is a populism of resentment, is turned on those individuals they say are unworthy. Immigrants. The wealthy. The elite. The people who are different from us, who look down their noses at us. So the two can be combined. I just don’t know if it’s to any good effect.

Sarah: What will you look for in the ‘22 midterms to see which way the ball is hopping, as you put it, when it comes to whether they’re going to marry the two populisms together, or whether it bounces off in some other direction?

Chris: Yeah, the last time nationalism put its chocolate in socialism’s peanut butter, it didn’t turn out real great for Europe.

Sarah: Or arguably the rest of us.

Chris: Right, exactly. Nationalism and socialism together is not a cool jam. 

Sarah: That being said, chocolate and peanut butter are maybe two of the most delicious combinations that the world has ever devised.

Chris: Taking nothing away from that. Absolutely, yes, thank you, I did not mean to besmirch chocolate and peanut butter together. Though Hershey with almonds is better than Mr. Goodbar, both are delicious. 

Ok. So first you look at a place like Ohio, you look at a place like Pennsylvania. What happens in those states. If you take Rob Portman’s position or you take Pat Toomey’s position: ‘Okay, I’m gonna retire because if I can survive—now maybe they’re just sick of it—but if I can survive the primary, I will have to do and say things that make it very hard for me to survive the general.’ And they’re caught betwixt and between. And that’s when, if you want to preserve a future, it’s often time to go. Right? If you want to run for governor one day, run for president one day, it’s time to go.

So those races where they vacated, that’s going to be interesting. Can Mitch McConnell and company hold together—as they have in the past—the candidates and the funding to hold the line against these Trumpite, Buchananinte, Bannonite cultural populists? Can they do that?

Then we look at a place like Alabama with the retirement of Richard Shelby. Tommy Tuberville—if he is the model for what’s next—you could see starker and starker geographic divisions inside the Republican Party. So you could have a Republican Party where north of the Mason-Dixon Line, you have more Sasse-ian types. You have more conservatives up north, and you have more populists down south that would follow the breadcrumbs all the way back to George Wallace. It would make sense in a lot of significant ways. 

So I’ll be looking for geographic divisions, and I’ll be looking for whether McConnell can do again what he did before, which is basically slam the nationalists’ hands in a car door and then start driving. 

If he can do that again, then Republicans—I don’t want to skip into 2024, but to what I said about how the midterms will be determinative—almost all of the worst candidates for president in 2024 are going to remake themselves in the mold of whatever they think is selling to primary voters after 2022. So you saw how the Democrats went off a cliff chasing Bernie Sanders and the Green New Deal. The tendency among the worst candidates will be to act like whatever—to ‘get down to be down and to be down to get down.’

So, you will see the outcomes for—Rubio is a great example, a guy who has tacked with the wind on multiple occasions. He and those like him will get signals about what voters want. And do they need to be atoning for what happened in 2020, and how do they need to play it. And that will be the part of the Republican 2024 primary that will get too crowded. And then you can bet your money on whoever has figured out a way—like Joe Biden did—not to be playing where everybody else is.

Sarah: All right. Now we come to the Chris Stirewalt part of the interview. There have been moments in my career when I knew that something was a turning point, and there have been moments in my career where I had no idea in the moment that it was going to have such a profound impact. 

As you’re seeing the numbers come in for Arizona on Election Night, and you know which way this is going to go and it’s your job and you say ‘yeah, Arizona is in the Biden column,’ and you call it, and then Fox calls it. 

Did you realize, at that moment that it was gonna change the trajectory of your career, or did it just feel like you were doing your job that night?

Chris: Well, first of all, I didn’t call it. I was privileged to work with a wonderful group of my fellow nerds. The Fox News Decision Desk, who were the best in the business, and my boss Bill Sammon, who is a prince of a man. And I wouldn’t have been in that room if it wasn’t for him. 

And so, that’s also an answer. Because I think this applies as these members of Congress are trying to figure out how thin they can slice the bologna and all of that stuff. They should listen to their predecessor in Congress Davy Crockett, who said, “First, be sure you’re right, then go ahead.” And the truth is, human beings are way too bad, way, way, way, way, way too bad at predicting the future to make predictive actions the basis for the decisions that we make. 

So just do the right thing. Sometimes you’re going to get burned. Sometimes you’re going to be rewarded. You don’t know. The best part about not being God is not having to do his job. We just have to do our own jobs. We just have to do the work that’s in front of us, and let somebody else take care of the rest.

Sarah: Well you raise a really interesting point for my last question, which is, what is the best part about being God?

Chris: Unlimited sandwiches, zero carbs.