Biden Backlash Begins

Sometimes the news of the day calls for some good old-fashioned rank punditry and after ...

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Sometimes the news of the day calls for some good old-fashioned rank punditry and after Tuesday’s elections today’s Dispatch Podcast does just that. Sarah, David, Jonah, and Declan look at the results not just in Virginia, but New Jersey, Minneapolis, and Buffalo, too. What do the results mean for the 2022 midterms? Anything at all? Our hosts break it all down. 

Show Notes:

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Declan quietly at the beginning, “I listened to that podcast at 4am…”

    Nice.

    On the VA election: hey I remember when Virginia was a RED state, not a purple one. Then again I lived close to the reddest parts of it. I remember being surprised when Obama won VA! Times change. Fairfax has 13% of VA residents? Wow. Guess that’s why.

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  2. Kathleen Houret

    While I'm missing Steve on the podcast, Declan seems to be a smart guy and I enjoy his contributions to the conversation.

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    The Bell Tower

    Americans are Homer and the Democrats and Republicans are Bart and Lisa:

    https://youtu.be/H6CLCiRBUP0

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      The Bell Tower

      And Marge is the responsible politicians.

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    Silvertide

    For years we were told Trump wasn't racist and maybe a tiny portion of his supporters were but it was a very small percentage. Now I hear the same about crt. Republicans are freaking out about something not being taught. Well I'm sorry but sometimes the truth really is easy to see and a lot of white voters freaked out about crt because things done in our nations past were not all positive.

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    1. Mathew A

      It's not about teaching the facts it's about the narrative. Is America a good country that has at times not lived up to it's ideals, but continues to struggle to do better? And has made tremendous progress in race relations since the civil rights movement (and sex equality for that matter)

      Or is America an evil country who's whole point is slavery (see 1619 project etc).

      I'm fine with covering the mistakes we've made. But the narrative should be of a great country that has made mistakes, but has made tremendous progress. A country that is one of the best places in the world to live. A country that millions of people want to immigrate to each year. Many of them literally risking their life to get here.

      That's the narrative I want taught to my kids. That's the narrative that binds our country together.

      The woke narrative is divisive, and is worsening race relations.

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    2. Sean

      Yes America has done some horrible things in its past and those things should be taught along with all the things we did well, but the freakout over CRT is not about the academic discipline but about how some teachers and administrators are applying their very limited knowledge of CRT (from what they have read or been told by Kendi, DiAngelo, and others like them) and making students rank themselves in order of perceived privilage, or making white students publicly repent for being white, or applying the term "toxic whiteness" to a bunch of bourgeois attitude and behaviors.

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    Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

    100 points to Gryffindor for Ms. Isgur's "the juice ain't worth the squeeze" bon mot.

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    Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

    Re this, from David French at 28:46:

    ===begin quote===

    Let me go back to David Shor for a minute, and his emphasis on the Democrats are — their activist class is too young [and] too online. You know, one of the things — if I'm in the Democratic Party right now and I'm thinking about running a campaign, one of the things I might tell my whole staff is: "I want to see your phones. And I want to see Twitter NOT on them." [laughter from others] Just remove that app, and now let's talk to real people.

    ===end quote===

    Why is this not also good advice for Steve & Jonah to take themselves and promulgate throughout The Dispatch staff?

    Twitter delenda est. Stop feeding it. Stop reading it. And especially, stop linking it (because that leads to more clicks and eyeballs, i.e., feeds it).

    If there's something genuinely important on Twitter, it will be republished elsewhere soon enough for you to learn of it and to post online — on TheDispatch.com, preferably! — your own hot takes. The tiny marginal loss you will sustain from disciplined foreswearing of Twitter, the tiny additional fear-of-missing-out that you may suffer as a result, will be more than offset by the additional time you'll have to spend OFF of Twitter.

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    1. Greg

      I enjoy their Twitter feeds.

      More generally, I think the service can be really nice if you restrict who you follow and only read them and their retweets. Some people post genuinely interesting or funny things.

      Zach Weinersmith (webcomic writer) has a very good Twitter feed with very little drama for example.

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      1. Avatar photo
        Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

        I'm tempted to write, "And Hitler liked dogs," but .... Oh, damn, there I've done it.

        No, seriously, I don't doubt that there are some people whose mental health and political judgment Twitter doesn't corrode. But I am absolutely certain beyond any doubt that its corrosive effects vastly outweighs any merit the platform has. There is absolutely nothing that is said on Twitter that can't be said elsewhere. But because Twitter arbitrarily truncates all communications after an arbitrary (and arbitrarily short) character limit, it is by definition antithetical to full-fledge discussions and the thoughtfulness which underlies them. It's a medium for con-men and would-be stand-up comics. And one can boil down all my objections to Twitter, in fact, into a single word, which in this context speaks volumes despite its concision: Trump.

        No, Greg, my opinions about Twitter will not change, even when confronted by such good-natured and well-meant observations as yours. Twitter delenda est.

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        1. Greg

          There's always a middle path. :)

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      CynthiaW

      In my opinion, they're addicts.

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  7. Teddy41

    I thought the commentary on how Youngkin got the nomination was interesting and an important point. I'm a long time VA resident, so my big worry was a Corey Stewart type nomination, or even a close primary where Youngkin would win but much closer than expected and feel the need to run a more MAGA centric campaign than he would have wanted to (see Gillespie, Ed for example).
    The Ohio senate primary is going in a very different direction apparently, but considering the recent direction of Ohio it might not hurt electorally, just be an intellectual and moral wound.
    My current half baked idea is if you don't vote in the primary you can't vote in the general election. Changing who gets nominated and how is probably the most direct way to get politics back to a more manageable state.

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    1. Mathew A

      they also used rank choice voting in VA. Six rounds of it before they settled on Youngkin.

      I really think ranked choice voting should be the standard in primaries at the very least.

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  8. BMW

    I think David is right about the supply chains not being fixed before midterms. I was listening to this podcast at work today, and while I was listening I got notified of *another* semiconductor supply interruption. We've been in this semiconductor shortage for a long time and year plus lead times for components are still common. It's possible that some of this gets fixed sooner, but I don't see evidence of that yet. These supply chain problems are really demoralizing.

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  9. Eric L.

    You all in your podcast seemed to have missed the obvious - i.e., that Youngkin successfully threaded the needle: keeping Trump at more than arms' length (and no, he didn't need the latter's permission), and triangulating in a way that brought back a wide range of voters. in other words, he did exactly what your proposed third party would have done, and as an establishment Republican.

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    1. Avatar photocircle-angle-nib
      Sarah Isgur vertical-nib Author

      But only with trump’s agreement. In 2022, I doubt very much trump will let candidates thread that needle.

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        Bill Dyer (aka Beldar)

        What Trump will do as we approach the 2022 midterms does indeed remain to be seen. But as one hoping that Trump's practical power will indeed wither and fade away sooner rather than later, I'm entirely satisfied with yesterday's results. We can all imagine ways in which things might have played out differently and to his clear-cut advantage. It's hard, by contrast, for me to imagine how this off-year election could have turned out any better.

        Trump has always taken credit, every morning, for the crowing without which the sun wouldn't have risen in the east this morning. But him claiming credit for Virginia's results is an empty boast that's particularly transparent. Every time a problem get solved without him, his claim that "I alone can solve this problem" becomes more ridiculous. Every Republican elected anywhere, to any office, without having tripped all over themselves to clutch the hem of Trump's massive golf slacks makes him look less essential and, indeed, less relevant. His junior varsity team was even farther out of yesterday's limelight than he was. ​And more to the point, because he's not on Twitter and every TV news feed 24/7/365 now, there are fewer people even listening to him crow.

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      2. Eric L.

        They won't need his permission; every hour, every day, puts him that much further in the rear-view mirror. He'll only get older and fatter, while becoming increasingly irrelevant, the way all ex-presidents - particularly defeated one-termers - do (only Grover Cleveland made it back, and that was in 1892). The country, and even the rank-and-file G0P, have moved on from Trump. They'd like to forget him; I know I would. I wish the Dispatch could.

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          Silvertide

          You forget that Trump has legal issues and so do his children. All it will take is him winning the presidency again and those issues will go away so no I don't think he will just go away. Ask yourself this question if Trump held a rally today would you expect more or less people to show up to his rally than to any other republican politicians rally. I don't think this is even close Trump is still the leader of the party and no one is currently a close second. So unless Trump gets sick or dies I don't see him going away in the next ten years.

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          Adicesa14

          I hope you're right, but I fear Sarah is correct.

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    Narwhal

    The Biden administration is in trouble. And even if the legislation the Democrats want to pass helps the US economy, I suppose that is debatable, it is unlikely that the effects of the legislation will be noticeable in time to help the Democrats in the midterms. The economy isn’t a speedboat.

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    1. Mathew A

      Trillions of dollars in an expanded safety net certainly won't help the economy, or fix the supply chain.

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        Narwhal

        I think a case can be made it would help the economy, but a case can also be made that it will result in higher inflation for the same reason. And higher inflation isn’t the same thing as hyperinflation.

        The supply chain issues the world is experiencing at present are novel just like the virus which is largely, but not entirely, responsible for causing them.

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