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Nov. 7, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:25
The Great Divide | Ep. 655
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Republicans make shocking gains in the Senate, Democrats win the House, and Election 2020 begins today.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
I know you're all screaming, oh, no, not election 2020.
Can we have a moment to breathe?
No, no, you can't.
This is like when the Christmas music starts in the middle of Thanksgiving.
OK, 2020 has begun because it is now after the 2018 elections.
I have a lot to say about the 2020 elections.
I have a theory of what Trump is electorally that I think tracks much more closely with the data than a lot of the theories that have been out there before.
I came up with it this morning and I'm very proud of myself.
We'll see if you agree with that theory in just a little while.
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Okay, so last night was an exciting night.
As the night started, it looked like Republicans were going to defy all expectations of political gravity.
By the time the night was over, it looked sort of like we had predicted here on the show yesterday.
I suggested on the show yesterday that Democrats win 35 seats.
Turns out they won 34.
It looks like they're going to win 34 in the House.
And I predicted that Republicans were going to pick up anywhere from two to four seats in the Senate, which they did.
It looks like they picked up three in the Senate right now, maybe four by the time all of this is said and done.
Now, this has led to a lot of puzzlement.
How is it that Republicans could lose the House but pick up seats in the Senate?
Well, because the map was uniquely bad for Democrats this time around in the Senate.
But Republicans did overperform.
And yes, President Trump had something to do with that.
President Trump visited a bunch of battleground states in hotly contested Senate races, and every place he visited, the candidate won.
President Trump has a unique gift for getting the base revved up, and particularly in close Senate elections, that does matter.
So he does have coattails when it comes to getting the base out.
He does have reverse coattails, however, when it comes to House races.
Virtually every purple seat that was contested, every seat in a suburban district that Republicans held, went to Democrats last night.
That is deeply troubling for Republicans.
So, there's good news for Democrats, there's good news for Republicans, there's bad news for Democrats, and there's bad news for Republicans.
The good news for Republicans first.
The good news is that the kind of beloved star-making candidacies, Beto O'Rourke and Andrew Gillum in Florida, Beto O'Rourke being the Senate candidate in Texas, those came to an end last night.
All of that came to a crashing halt.
Beto O'Rourke spent more money than God has and still lost his race.
It was shockingly close.
It was a three-point race that he lost in Texas.
I think a lot of that has to do with the deeply flawed candidacy of Senator Ted Cruz, who has sort of mortally wounded himself in a lot of ways.
Since 2016.
But with all of that said, Beto O'Rourke did go down in flames after spending one bajillion dollars.
That is an actual number.
One bajillion dollars was spent by Beto O'Rourke.
He went down anyway.
He was basically like the Joker in Dark Knight.
He just went around saying that it's not the money that matters.
It's the points.
It's the point.
It's the point.
Just set giant piles of money on fire.
So Beto O'Rourke goes down in Texas.
Andrew Gillum goes down in Florida.
He was another person who, according to polls, was going to win.
Ron DeSantis instead comes from behind and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, which is great.
I like Governor DeSantis.
I know him.
He's a good man, a nice family.
And all of the attempts to malign him as a racist by a radical like Andrew Gillum went for naught in Florida, which is great news.
So what it also looked like, Mike DeWine won in Ohio in the Ohio gubernatorial race.
The Republicans kept a bunch of key gubernatorial seats.
In places like Florida and Ohio where redistricting matters.
Also, it is true that they retained a bunch of Senate seats that they needed to retain.
So it looks like Kyrsten Sinema, who is a radical, radical leftist in Arizona, lost to Martha McSally, which is terrific.
Senator McSally, she'll be a great senator.
Air Force pilot, first Air Force pilot in combat to be female.
And yet the media didn't see fit to cover that as a feminist victory or Marsha Blackburn winning a Senate seat in Tennessee.
That was not a feminist victory.
The only feminist victories were people endorsed by the Women's March, of course.
But those were key seats.
Obviously, the Indiana seat flips Joe Donnelly, an Indiana Democrat.
He loses to a Republican business person.
So these are all big wins for Republicans.
They do lose Dean Heller in Nevada.
That was largely expected.
But overall, the talk of a blue wave was overstated.
Now, how you see this election is dependent on whether you see this as a year in which Democrats were going to ride back in and overtake everything, or whether you saw this as a rebuilding year.
I think the Democrats have a very skewed view of politics, thanks to the Obama years.
I think that the Obama years made Democrats believe they were never going to lose again, that Trump was an electoral aberration, and that therefore, they were going to sweep to victory.
They were going to come back in, sweep through the House, sweep through the Senate, take everything back in one fell swoop.
Trump was just a mistake.
It was just a blip on the radar.
Well, it turns out Trump is not a blip on the radar.
Republicans are not a blip on the radar.
State seats that Republicans won during Obama's tenure were not a blip on the radar.
If they had seen last night as rebuilding the farm team, if they had seen it, Dana Perino suggested this to me this morning, so I'm using her metaphor.
If, and I think she's right, if Democrats had seen this as we are in recovery here, Then it was a very good night for Democrats, right?
They win back the House.
They win virtually every contested seat across the country.
They oust a bunch of Republican incumbents, including incumbents like Dave Brat in Virginia, which is really not great.
I really like Dave Brat, congressman from Virginia who ousted Eric Cantor, if you recall, back in 2010.
All of this is to suggest that Republicans have some problems.
Now, Democrats have some problems because Florida and Ohio are not solidly in the Democratic line.
And that's a problem for them in future presidential elections.
Republicans have a problem because some states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, those states look to be trending back blue, which is a real problem for them.
If President Trump were to win in 2020, Florida and Ohio, but lose Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, he loses the election, right?
He needs to win at least Wisconsin of those three.
Wisconsin was very tight last night.
Governor Scott Walker has been a tremendous governor, was ousted in an extraordinarily close race that may end up in a recount in Wisconsin.
But political realities are back in play.
So the polling was flawed in 2016.
The polling was a lot less flawed last night.
That's why I was able to rely on data and fairly Predictably, predict what exactly was going to happen in the overall numbers.
So there are a bunch of lessons to be learned.
President Trump, of course, is taking away the lesson that he's awesome because he's President Trump.
So he tweeted this out last night and tweeted out tremendous success tonight.
Thank you to all.
Well, from a certain perspective, that's true.
Republicans gained a bunch of seats in the Senate.
So many seats in the Senate, in fact, that it will be very difficult for Democrats to take the Senate in 2020.
It also means that President Trump's agenda for the next couple of years is going to be judges, judges, judges, and more judges.
In fact, there's a case to be made.
Not bad for him.
President Trump gains politically by the Republicans losing the House, because now he just gets to punch Nancy Pelosi.
He gets to do rock'em, stock'em robots with Nancy Pelosi for the next couple of years.
Republicans basically had very little legislative agenda anyway for the next couple of years.
So now they just get to blame the Democrats for nothing happening, and Trump gets to run against Nancy Pelosi.
Not bad for him.
However, did Trump have a massive down-ballot effect for Republicans that was negative?
Yes, he had an up-ballot effect for people like Ron DeSantis in Florida, for folks like Braun in Indiana.
He had an up-ballot effect for Ted Cruz in Texas, obviously.
But when it came to the House races, the negative effect of President Trump was pretty evident.
The exit polls showed that a huge number of suburban districts did not like President Trump, do not like President Trump, and that there is blowback for President Trump On that level.
So what we saw last night in short, red areas got redder, blue areas got bluer.
All of the trends that we saw in 2016 were doubled down upon.
Rural areas went heavier for Republicans.
Suburban areas went bluer for Democrats.
Is that a trade that Republicans are willing to make?
Maybe for now, but that's not a plan for the future.
With that said, with that said, the Democrats, I think, at least partially, are looking at this and saying, well, there were a lot of blown opportunities there.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
And Andrew Gillum nearly winning in Florida is not Andrew Gillum winning in Florida.
And Beto O'Rourke nearly winning in Texas is not Beto O'Rourke winning in Texas.
You can see Trevor Noah was very disappointed last night on Comedy Central.
He said the blue wave was basically just a Smurf peeing.
So it was touch and go for a while today.
The blue wave was looking more like a smurf that was peeing.
And what was worse is that the results just wouldn't come in.
OK, so I think that if you look this morning as to who feels relieved and who feels unsettled, I think everyone should be.
Everyone on both sides should feel both relieved and unsettled.
I mean, there's good again.
There's good news for both parties and bad news for both parties.
But I think the general perception is that Republicans are relieved and Democrats are unsettled.
Democrats legitimately had expectations that 2016 was a complete outlier and that they were going to return to vast power automatically just by dint of people don't like Trump.
And that obviously was not true.
Now, I think Van Jones's take.
Van Jones over the course of the night, you can see was going up and down like a yo-yo over on CNN.
But he said that by the end of the night, his heart had been restored because Democrats had retaken the House.
I don't think this is completely unjustified.
Democrats did take the House.
The wave did not break the levy.
But I don't want to suggest that Democrats didn't have a good level of success last night.
Again, they won 34 seats in the House.
That is not a historic upset.
You know, that's well within sort of The margins of typical midterm elections, but it is a it is a win for Democrats.
There's no other way to put it.
I don't know how many hours ago it was.
You said this was heartbreaking.
Where is your head now?
My heart has been restored.
It is the end of one party rule in the United States.
Thank God.
And the beginning of a new Democratic Party, younger, Browner, cooler, more women, more veterans can win in Michigan, can win in Pennsylvania, can win in Ohio.
We have the first Muslim women, first Native American women, the first black woman from Massachusetts, first Latina from Texas.
It may not be a blue wave, it's a rainbow wave.
It's something happening out there and I'm happy about it.
Okay, anybody who believes that Van Jones has a good read on this election is absolutely wrong.
What actually happened is a bunch of moderate Democrats in suburban districts won.
And there were some Democrats in more progressive districts who won in more progressive seats.
But the notion that a bunch of progressives swept into power and that what Democrats have to do in 2020 is double down, more cowbell, more cowbell.
What we need is more progressives.
And if we run a hardcore progressive in 2020, we're going to win.
That is not the lesson Democrats ought to be learning.
I'm going to talk about the lessons both parties ought to be learning in just a second after we finish reviewing sort of what happened in the election last night and why both parties are going to take away the wrong lessons from what happened last night.
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Okay, so we should say a fond farewell to at least some of the candidates who ran yesterday.
Beto O'Rourke.
Bit of fond farewell to his audience.
He will be back, obviously.
He ran a very competitive race in a state where he should not have been competitive.
He only lost by a couple of hundred thousand votes, maybe 300,000 votes, in Texas, a super red state.
And then he decided that he's a cool guy, so he flipboarded in.
He skateboarded in, did a flip kick, stopped on the stage, and then dropped the F word because he's cool.
Beto O'Rourke.
That's how you know that he's cool.
He's like Cool Dog from The Simpsons.
So here's Beto O'Rourke.
I want to thank this amazing campaign of people.
Not a dime from a single pack.
All people, all the time, in every single part of Texas.
All of you, showing the country how you do this.
I'm so f***ing proud of you guys.
Yay, drop the F word!
He's super cool!
Wow!
Beto O'Rourke, look!
And I love the headlines from Reuters, whether he wins or loses, Beto O'Rourke is a big winner.
Well, technically, when you lose, you're kind of a loser, technically.
I don't mean to get all pedantic, but when you lose, that actually counts as you losing.
So Beto O'Rourke, will he be back?
Yeah, of course he'll be back.
But kind of like Jon Ossoff, there's all this talk about losing does leave a stigma on you.
All the talk about Beto O'Rourke for president in 2020, I think that that is premature.
Losing does hurt you.
Andrew Gillum, who is supposed to be the rising star in Florida.
He'd come from behind.
He'd won a primary against a more moderate competitor.
If he had lost that primary, probably Florida has a Democratic governor right now.
But Andrew Gillum loses to Ron DeSantis, which I'm very grateful for, because I think Andrew Gillum ran a terrible, terrible race.
He slandered Ron DeSantis as a racist for no rational reason that I can put my finger on at all.
He lost the race, but he said he's not going anywhere.
This is untrue.
He may be going to jail, actually, depending on the FBI investigation in Tallahassee.
He is the mayor of Tallahassee.
He's been ensnared in an FBI corruption investigation in which he took a bunch of goodies from an FBI undercover agent.
Here is Andrew Gillum, however, saying he's not going anywhere and then leaving.
But I can I can I can guarantee you this.
I'm not going anywhere.
We're gonna fight.
We're gonna keep fighting.
Yeah, he's going somewhere, like, away.
And again, a lot of these key races, President Trump did play a role, and Chuck Todd pointed this out in NBC News, he is correct.
He says that President Trump may have pulled DeSantis across the finish line, Brian Kemp in Georgia, who won a victory in the Georgia race, where he was not expected to surpass the sort of runoff margin.
He did.
So, look, Trump deserves a lot of credit for a lot of these key races that happened last night.
President Trump weighed in on both primaries.
He got involved in both primaries and pulled them both across the finish line.
And they're both going to eke out against proud, progressive, African-American Democrats.
OK, well, that is worth noting.
And I think that it is true.
It is also true that President Trump has upsides and President Trump has downsides.
So now let's go through some of the bad news for Republicans, because there was a lot of good news for Republicans last night.
So Politico points out, and they're right, Suburban Republicans were swept away.
The Republican Party in the House looks a lot more Trumpy than it did yesterday.
All the moderate Republicans are gone.
Now, there are a lot of people who may celebrate that.
Oh, we're a purer party now.
You need those suburban Republicans if you want to govern.
You do need people able to win in the suburbs.
And the demographic movements in the United States are away from rural areas and toward urban areas.
People are moving out of the sort of outlying areas and more towards suburbia, more toward big cities.
This is why that race in Texas was so close, because the entirety of the state of Texas is deep red, except for Austin and Dallas and Houston.
And those are exactly the areas that are growing.
So for Republicans to sort of give up on those areas and just, you know, wipe their brow and say, oh, you know, last night was fine.
You know, this is more like Republicans should be worried about the future of the party if the red wave in 2016 begins to recede.
So Politico points out Democrats won suburbs from the eastern seaboard all the way to Nevada.
They didn't just pick off low-hanging fruit.
GOP members long seem to be vulnerable.
They expanded into Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City, Richmond.
All of this is true.
Republicans like Barbara Comstock in northern Virginia.
Mike Coffman in suburban Denver, Kevin Yoder outside Kansas City, Eric Paulson in the Twin Cities.
They all lost, but they also ousted Steve Russell in Oklahoma, which was a much deeper red, and Karen Handel in suburban Atlanta.
Democrats won both toss-up races in Virginia.
They knocked off both suburban Texas members John Culberson and Houston Pete Sessions in Dallas.
Incumbent Carlos Curbelo crashed and burned in South Florida.
Republicans kept only a handful of suburban seats, so obviously Republicans have to worry about that.
You know, one of the things that I'm seeing that's hilarious today is Democrats saying, well, you know, we really did win in a way because look at the popular vote in the Senate.
This has really become a thing.
Stopping an idiot.
A popular vote in the Senate doesn't mean anything.
One-third of the Senate was up.
The Senate is not a popular vote body.
In other words, Montana has as many senators as California.
Racking up votes in California does not help you in the Senate.
Not only that, Democrats retained... There were 33 seats up yesterday.
Democrats retained like 20 of those seats.
So...
Let's not get out over our skis when we suggest that the public has rejected Republicans, and yet the system is structured so that Republicans win anyway.
No, that's called the United States Senate.
It's been there for quite a while, so stop being stupid.
The Politico points out that Democrats may have lost the Senate until 2022.
As I pointed out earlier, the fact remains that As of 2020, Republicans are going to hold 54 Senate seats, which is three more seats than the GOP now holds.
The 2018 map was bad.
The 2020 map is not all that great.
If Democrats lose the Alabama seat, which they will, they only won this time because Roy Moore was a garbage candidate, the only Republicans up for reelections in state Hillary won are Cory Gardner in Colorado and Susan Collins in Maine.
Susan Collins is a very good politician in her home state.
And so there's a significant possibility that Republicans only lose maybe one seat.
You know, they'd have to have a wave, basically, in order for them to take the Senate in 2020.
That seems doubtful.
Republicans did hold some big governorships.
Democrats patched the blue wall, but it is still vulnerable.
So this is a point that Politico is making, and it's worth noting.
In Michigan, Democrats won the governor's race.
The incumbent senator was re-elected.
The party picked up a House seat.
In Iowa, Democrats picked up two House seats.
In Wisconsin, Scott Walker went down and Senator Tammy Baldwin won re-election.
But, remember, Trump was not on the ballot in any of those places.
And as Politico points out, in 2010, Republicans won the governorships in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and senators in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
And then Obama won them all in 2012.
So Trump, again, was not really on the ballot in any of those key states.
So maybe in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania, Trump does better than the Republicans did in this off-year election.
And one thing that the Democrats are really picking up on is that a lot of women won.
That's because more women ran.
A lot of women ran and they were in positions to win, so that makes a big difference.
But Democrats are taking the wrong lessons from this election cycle.
The lesson that they are taking from this election cycle is, look at all the progressive radicals that we got elected.
Right, because you primaried more moderate candidates in progressive districts, right?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they think now is the future of their party, according to people like Van Jones.
You want to shellac your own chances at national prominence, make Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the head of your party.
You know, tack to that extreme left.
What the American people basically gave Democrats a referendum to do was to check Trump in the House and to act in more moderate fashion.
And what they gave Republicans a referendum to do was check the more ridiculous excesses of the Democratic Party.
But I don't think that's the message that either party is going to take away from the election last night.
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Okay, so what are the lessons that the party should take away?
The lessons the Republicans should take away is that if they wish to see long-term success, they're going to have to start appealing to these suburban districts.
In other words, the districts that Mitt Romney did better in than Donald Trump are still important.
If Donald Trump can hold the rural districts in the way that he has, and he has because Democrats have polarized, If he can hold those and somehow start appealing to those suburban districts, Democrats are in trouble.
By the same token, if Democrats keep appealing to suburban districts with moderate candidates, then the Republicans are in trouble.
Unfortunately, it seems that everybody is doubling down on what brung them there.
And what that means is that Democrats are embracing the radicalism and Republicans are embracing the excesses.
So everybody's gonna take the wrong lessons from today.
Like the Democrats, you saw that clip of Van Jones a little bit earlier, heard the clip of Van Jones a little bit earlier, talking about how he is so excited that all of these progressives have been elected.
Well, there were a bunch of progressives elected, again, mainly in areas in which they supplanted other more moderate Democrats.
This is something the Washington Post is pointing out.
Moderate Democrats in the Midwest outperformed ideological Democrats in the Sunbelt.
This is an absolute fact.
And that's an important thing to recognize.
That if the Democrats had run a bunch of moderates, they would have done better across the country than they actually did.
Instead, they are championing the fact that people like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar won their congressional seats.
They're the first Muslim women elected to Congress.
That's fine.
The only problem is they are deeply, deeply radical.
Tlaib didn't have any Republican challengers in her district, so once she won the primary, she was in Congress.
And Ilhan Omar was the favorite to prevail in a solidly Democratic district.
Both of them are radically anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.
The Democratic Party is celebrating all of that.
The Democratic Party is out there championing the fact that Sharice Davids, a lesbian Native American, becomes one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress.
And the other one is not, Elizabeth Warren.
She's the first openly LGBTQ Kansan.
OK, but the fact is that the candidates who won last night overwhelmingly are people who are not talking along radical lines.
They are overwhelmingly in the Democratic Party, people who seem sane and not crazy.
And yet the Democratic Party could take away from this.
What we need is a base that is jazzed up.
The intersectional coalition rides again.
Intersectional coalition is not a thing.
Intersectional coalition does not actually win victories.
Here's actually something that Democrats need to recognize.
Look at the Texas race for just a second.
What you see in the Texas race, a lot of people on the left very, very upset about Beto O'Rourke losing to Ted Cruz in Texas.
And they look at the voter breakdown.
What they see is that 95% of black women voted for Beto O'Rourke and 71% of white women voted for Ted Cruz.
And you're seeing tweets like, these white women are tools of the patriarchy.
First of all, keep saying stuff like that.
That's definitely going to win you elections.
It's insulting the base that you need to win.
That's definitely going to help you out.
Second of all, what that actually suggests is that you believe that you are going to make more hay by somehow winning 98% of the black vote and alienating that entire white female base?
Democrats actually have less upside in a lot of these minority communities than Republicans have upside in those minority communities.
What I mean by that Democrats, if they blew it out, could only win 100% of the black female vote in Texas.
Republicans, if they blew it out, could win another 29% of the white female vote in Texas.
And there's 95% of the black female vote that they could theoretically go after.
There's not a lot of room to maneuver for Democrats.
They may have maxed out their intersectional coalition, and the numbers just aren't big enough.
That means the folks they need to be appealing to are those white women, not insulting those white women.
And yet what you see is that Democrats are, in fact, insulting Those white women, they're insulting people who are not members of the intersectional coalition.
They could take the wrong lessons from all of this.
The states Democrats need to win again in the 2020 election.
If they wish to ask President Trump, they need to win Michigan.
They need to win Wisconsin.
They need to win Pennsylvania.
If they win those three, they win the election.
The entire election is going to come down to those three states.
Those are states where the intersectional coalition is not going to be enough.
Those are states where you need to be able to appeal to a base.
And yet the Democrats, in some ways, are getting more and more radical.
As I say, a couple of anti-Semitic Democrats won last night.
Keith Ellison became Minnesota Attorney General despite all of the controversy dogging him.
The fact that an ex-girlfriend accuses him of beating her up.
So I guess that he beat someone else last night who is not his ex-girlfriend.
Bob Menendez in New Jersey, who may end up in jail for allegedly preying on underage women in the Dominican Republic.
He ended up winning his race in a walk.
And just showing you what New Jersey is, man.
I mean, New Jersey, just astonishing.
New Jersey, a juror in Menendez's trial showed up at his victory celebration.
I am not kidding.
Here's video of her.
I came out here tonight because I know Bob Menendez is a very good man.
And I was in the courtroom, and I saw all the evidence, and they didn't have enough evidence.
What he did wrong, he did nothing wrong.
He's a great man.
That's why I'm supporting Menendez.
I voted for him.
I voted for him.
Look, he's better.
He's just the best.
Yeah, so that's really great.
So she served on Menendez's jury and then went to his victory party.
The Democrats have doubled down on that.
On the other side, the Republicans are doubling down on the Trump.
And when I say the Trump, I don't mean they're doubling down on President Trump.
I mean they're doubling down on the affect.
Now imagine for a second that Republicans had not doubled down on Trump's affect.
That in the last three weeks of the election, they'd run on Kavanaugh.
Here is the weird thing about sort of how the late-breaking news narrative played into this.
Election cycle.
So, Brett Kavanaugh hurt the Democrats.
There is no question.
Every Democrat who voted against Brett Kavanaugh in a red state lost last night.
Pretty much all of them.
I think maybe one exception.
Claire McCaskill went down.
Heidi Heitkamp went down.
There are a bunch of areas where Democrats lost and lost big because of Brett Kavanaugh.
Joe Manchin did not lose, partially because he did not vote against Brett Kavanaugh.
If that had been, and that was because Democrats exposed themselves as partisan hacks of an extraordinarily ridiculous and extreme measure, that would have cut in Republicans' favor.
Republicans in kind of hotly contested district lost last night.
Part of that is because the closing pitch for the Trump campaign was doubling down on the base.
Now, do you think that Ron DeSantis won in Florida because of the talk about the migrant caravan?
I don't.
I don't think that he won Florida because of that.
I think that it had very little to do with it.
Do you think that That Martha McSally won in Arizona because of the migrant caravan talk?
I really doubt it.
I really doubt it.
Because three weeks earlier, she was skunking Kyrsten Sinema, and then it really tightened up in the last three weeks.
So the Republicans who believe that President Trump appealing to the base is the best strategy for electoral victory, that's sort of missing the point.
What people want from President Trump, if Trump, if the best version of Trump were available, it would be the President Trump who is capable of fighting back against the radical left and punching and punching, but doing so in a manner that is strategic as opposed to sort of id-driven.
And if the Democrats had any brains, they would be running blue-collar candidates with moderate appeal.
It seems, however, that both parties are determined to double down on what the base wants, not what the rest of the voting public wants.
And that spells a very contentious couple of years.
We're going to talk in just a second about what the next couple of years spell.
And then I want to lay out a theory for you about President Trump 2020, Barack Obama, that I think few people have actually discussed as of yet.
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OK, so I want to talk about what an alternative history of the last month in politics would have looked like electorally.
And I also want to talk about what's coming next and my grand theory of Trump 2020.
But.
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Hi, I'm John Stossel, annoying libertarian.
I'm going to be on the Ben Shapiro show, his Sunday special this Sunday, talking about individual freedom and not invading lots of other countries.
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All righty.
So, you know, President Trump has responded to the Democrats winning the House.
We'll get to that in just a minute.
But I do want to discuss what the alternative timeline looks like for the election last night.
If it had not been about immigration, if President Trump had not swiveled, it would have been Kavanaugh all the way down.
I think Republicans have a better shot at retaining the House.
And I think they win the same number of seats.
If the Democrats had not done Kavanaugh, I think Democrats do much, much better in the Senate.
And I think that they Have a better shot of winning the House.
So basically, both sides did their damnedest to blow this election, and neither side was completely able to.
All of which speaks to 2020, which is, I know, what's on everybody's mind.
I mean, let's take a look at the 2016 map real fast.
So if you look at the 2016 map in, you know, in the presidential election, what you will see in this map is that President Trump won 306 electoral votes.
That means it takes 270 to win.
If President Trump were to lose Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, that is 46 electoral votes.
That means he's down to 260.
He loses the election.
If he wins Wisconsin but loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, he's got 270.
If he loses one of the votes in Maine, he won one vote in Maine, if he loses that one vote in Maine, which is probably likely at this point, then he can win Wisconsin and you end up with a 269-269 tie.
Which is just everybody's worst nightmare.
A tie in the electoral college which gets thrown into the house where Nancy Pelosi presides, which is just nightmare scenario.
But the reason that I'm bringing up this map is because the theory of President Trump is that President Trump finally broke that blue wall that existed in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
And that the Democrats thought that that was an outlying effect.
Here's my theory.
My theory is that President Trump is basically a reversion to the statistical mean.
That there is not this giant Trump movement, wave, surge that has changed the nature of the country, anything like that.
And what actually happened is that Barack Obama was an outlying candidate.
He was a statistical outlier.
And that what is happening in states like Ohio and Florida and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania is much more of a reversion to the pre-Barack Obama era than it is anything else, which says to the Democrats that your intersectional strategy is a giant fail.
It says to Republicans that they need to do better in reaching out to suburban areas, but it really is a rebuke to the intersectional politics of Barack Obama.
So here is my evidence for the proposition that what has basically happened here is a reversion back to the pre-Obama era.
Let's take a look at Ohio.
In Ohio, the recent presidential elections, George W. Bush versus, so 2000, Republicans win 50% of the vote.
2004, Republicans win 51% of the vote.
Then Obama comes along and Obama breaks the mold, right?
He wins Ohio with, he wins Ohio and Republican vote share drops to 47% and 48% respectively.
Then President Trump comes along, Obama's no longer on the ballot, Hillary's a uniquely bad candidate, and Republicans win 51% of the vote again.
So what that means is that that is a reversion back to the pre-Obama era.
That is not a difference in kind.
It is a reversion back to before Obama.
See, the Democrats think that Obama changed the world.
Obama didn't change the world.
Obama was just a uniquely good candidate.
And Trump, for Republicans, didn't change the world.
Trump was running against a uniquely bad candidate, and he was a reversion to the statistical mean.
Here's my evidence with regard to Florida.
In Florida, Republicans won 49% of the vote in 2000, 52% of the vote in 2004.
Then they won, in 2008 and 2012, 48 and 49% of the vote.
In 2016, Trump won 49% of the vote.
vote in 2004.
Then they won in 2008 and 2012, 48 and 49% of the vote.
In 2016, Trump won 49% of the vote.
He won the election because Hillary Clinton lost the election.
He actually won a lower percentage of the vote in 2016 than Republicans won in 2012.
But he won because Hillary Clinton was a crappy candidate.
Again, reversion to the mean in Florida.
What about this shocking victory in Wisconsin where no Republican had won since 1984?
Look at the vote shares for a second.
2000.
Republican vote share.
48%.
2004.
49%.
Then, Obama comes along.
Again, statistical outlier.
That vote share drops to 42% and 46%.
Then, by 2016, it is back up to 47.2%.
Again, that is lower than the percentage of votes won by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
That is the reversion to the statistical mean.
Michigan.
Same thing.
It is back up to 47.2%.
Again, that is lower than the percentage of votes won by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
That is the reversion to the statistical mean.
Michigan, same thing.
Hey, Michigan, 2000, Republicans win 46% 2004, 47.8% of the vote.
Then Obama comes along, 41 and 45% of the vote.
of the vote.
Then Obama comes along, 41 and 45% of the vote.
Then 2016, 48% of the vote.
47.5.
So, again, Trump wins a lower share of the vote in 2016 than George W. Bush won in 2004.
He wins the state.
That's a reversion to the statistical mean.
It is the same thing in Pennsylvania, where the Republican vote share was 46-49 in the Bush years, and it dropped radically during Obama, and then it was back up to 49 during Trump.
What this suggests is that the country is still actually broken down very similarly to the Bush era.
It's just that Barack Obama broke the mold, but that mold could not be broken for anyone else.
That mold did not apply to anyone else.
So the Democrats are still doubling down on intersectional politics.
Republicans, all they have to do is play the Bush era cards, and they still have a shot at winning in all of these places.
But just as Bush lost a lot of those battleground states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Right?
Just as Bush lost some of those states, the reality is that Donald Trump is going to have to do better than Donald Trump did in 2016 if he wants to win again in 2020.
And that means channeling his anger.
It means less surrender of the suburban vote.
That's what this means.
If you want to win, that's what it is.
So let's not deceive ourselves on the Republican side of the aisle by thinking, OK, we're just going to win from now until the end of time because of these races last night.
And let's not pretend that it was Trump that saved Florida or Ohio.
Barack Obama was not on the ballot.
Hillary Clinton was on the ballot.
And Donald Trump, yes, is great at a certain number of things, but luck is not a business strategy, as I've once said to my business partner, and it is not a political strategy either.
Okay, so what comes next?
What comes next here could actually be good news for President Trump.
Nancy Pelosi is running the House.
That gives him a nice, big target to hit.
And Nancy Pelosi is smarter than I'm giving her credit for in the past.
She's attempting a sort of moderation because I think that Nancy Pelosi does get that not everybody can campaign as Nancy Pelosi and win across the country.
Here's Nancy Pelosi last night talking about what the election was really about.
What she says here is actually accurate.
Today is more than about Democrats and Republicans.
It's about restoring the Constitution's checks and balances to the Trump administration.
Okay, so when she says about checks and balance, if the Democrats restricted themselves to checking Trump's worst impulses, they'd be in good shape.
The question is, can Nancy Pelosi hem in her own base?
I don't know that she can.
I don't know that she can.
An example of this, yesterday, before she gave the speech, she was asked about impeachment.
And she said, no, I'm not interested in impeachment, but her base is very interested in impeachment.
They want to conduct investigations of the president.
They even want to impeach the president.
That serves their purpose, to say that.
We certainly will honor our responsibility as oversight of the executive branch.
Will there be a move to impeach the president?
It depends on what happens.
in the Mueller investigation, but that is not unifying.
And I get criticized in my own party for not being in support of that, but I'm not.
If that happens, it would have to be bipartisan and the evidence would have to be so conclusive. - Right, so that is Nancy Pelosi understanding that if she alienates the moderates across the country, I wonder if the Republicans are going to learn the same lesson.
President Trump gave a press conference today in which he discussed the election and his entire election strategy was everyone who didn't like me lost, everyone who liked me won.
That is not true.
Everybody who liked President Trump in Trumpy districts won.
Everybody who liked President Trump in purple districts lost.
President Trump is going to have to understand that if he wants to win re-election, it's not going to be enough to just double down on the gal that brung him.
He's going to actually have to change strategy a little bit.
It looks like Nancy Pelosi actually understands that, which is scary.
I want her not to understand that.
I want her to lose, right?
I don't want Nancy Pelosi in charge of government.
I don't want Elizabeth Warren as President of the United States.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that Nancy Pelosi also is a gaffe machine.
Last night, she actually called for people to cheer for pre-existing medical conditions.
Like, yay, diabetes!
Yay, mesothelioma!
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
It's about stopping the GOP and Mitch McConnell's assault on Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the health care of 130 million Americans living with pre-existing medical conditions.
Let's hear it more for pre-existing medical conditions.
And people cheer like, yeah, and even the kids who are next are like, why am I even here, man?
Just get me out of here.
Just get me out of here.
Now, again, will Nancy Pelosi be able to continue to contain the enthusiasm of her own base?
I have serious doubts about that.
The base is clamoring for investigations, which is going to be not terrible for Trump.
More investigations.
Look, Trump.
It's all baked into the cake, man.
If they get his tax returns and it turns out that dude gives charity to Puppy slaughtering mills?
No one's going to care.
Legitimately.
Everything is baked into the cake for Trump.
If Democrats want to waste their time for the next couple of years in investigations, they can do that.
The only thing that would, I think, damage Trump at all is if they came up with some evidence of emoluments that was self-enriching or something.
But even there, I don't think that there's going to be much.
Adam Schiff, however, who has now, he's now going to be the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
And he is, suffice it to say that Adam Schiff has moved his pup tent from CNN's Green Room over to the House Intelligence Committee.
He says there will be more investigations, more cowbell, more cowbell.
I think that the chances that Bob Mueller will be able to finish his work improved for the reason that our committee and others like the Government Reform Committee and the Judiciary Committee, which under Republican leadership served as basically surrogates for the President in their efforts to batter down the Justice Department, to give the President a pretext to fire people in the Justice Department, all of that
Okay, so this is, you know, their pitch.
I don't think that that pitch is going to play in 2020.
Being a natural pessimist means I think that every party takes the wrong lessons from last night's elections.
But again, there are encouraging signs and discouraging signs for both sides in that election.
If people are willing to read the tea leaves, there's a lot of upside for Republicans.
If they don't, there's going to be a lot of downside.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things I like, you know, it is true that we are an amazing country in which we get to transfer power safely from one party to the other in a variety of chambers.
Checks and balances keep our rights safe for the most part.
And, you know, that that is a wonderful thing and puts you in kind of a patriotic mood.
Aaron Copland, you'd recognize a lot of his music because he's responsible for Appalachian Spring.
He's he did a version of Rodeo, which is fantastic.
We'll have to play that.
It's kind of cowboy music.
But here is his Fanfare for the Common Man.
You'll recognize this as well.
And there is something uniquely American about this sound.
Here's Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man.
The Common Man
The Common Man It's good stuff, so give a listen to it if you're in the mood today.
And why not be in the mood today?
This is a pretty spectacular country, no matter how elections go, on a one-off basis.
And worth noting, transfers of power like this, totally normal.
When people say that, oh, the Republicans didn't hold the House.
There has never been, in the last century, or since 1968, since 1968, No party has held all the House, the Senate, and the Presidency for more than four years, since 1968.
So, last night was fairly predictable, and it also provides some good data.
And I have to say, I root for data.
I like data because it gives me something to go on.
It allows me to actually make my analysis smarter.
I'm sort of happy that the data was justified last night, even if they got the races wrong in places like Florida.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
OK, so this is pretty amazing.
Lisa Milbrand over at Marie Claire has the stupid column of the day.
It's called Why Trump's America Makes Me Regret Adopting My Daughters.
It makes me regret her adopting her daughters because she's a crazy person.
Here's what she wrote.
Our daughters came home from China more than a decade ago.
The first time their tiny feet touched American soil, we made a big deal of it.
We were so happy about everything they'd inherit as newly minted Americans, our already head over heels in love for them, every opportunity we could afford, and freedom from China's oppressive government and its controversial one-child policy.
The same policy that was most likely the very reason they were available to join our family half a world away.
But now I worry we made a tragic mistake.
You're right.
Leaving kids in a Chinese orphanage is way better than bringing them to the freest country in the history of the world and most prosperous country in the history of the world.
Probably you should have left them in the Chinese orphanage, you crazy person.
And then she says, I pulled these two beautiful babies away from a rising power and into a damaged democracy.
Really?
That's how you see China and the United States?
The United States is a damaged democracy, and China is a rising power?
China is a fascist one-party state in which people do what the government says up to and including their actual Number of children.
I brought two girls of color into a society where it's clear that their word and their bodies are worth less than a man's.
Hey, you want to talk about sexism in China, gang?
It's an actual thing.
It's an actual problem.
The reason that... Why do you think it's a bunch of girls who are available for adoption in China and not a bunch of boys?
Because of sexism in China.
And if you think that racism is a uniquely American phenomenon, It is not.
OK, for example, Black Panther in the United States opens to enormous numbers, enormous numbers, right?
Like world shaking numbers.
Black Panther barely did business in China.
Racism is actually a thing around the world.
This is where open, overt racism has become even more likely than it was a decade ago, according to this woman.
And unfortunately, my worries aren't exactly tinfoil hat-wearing paranoia.
Well, no, actually, they are.
They are.
Two years ago, writes this crazy person, I brought my daughters to the voting booth with me, expecting they'd witness the election of the very first woman president.
Instead, we got a guy with multiple sexual allegations made against him, who backs candidates for the highest posts in the land, who also have assault and molestation claims against them.
Again, Keith Ellison is the new Minnesota Attorney General, guys.
And Bob Menendez is the returning senator from New Jersey.
No, actually, that's not accurate.
There are those of us who... One of the great ironies, how many times did you hear any Democrat say you can't vote for Keith Ellison?
of some of the worst offenders, but the current administration seems far more willing to promote and prosecute the accused.
No, actually that's not accurate.
There are those of us who, one of the great ironies, how many times did you hear any Democrat say, you can't vote for Keith Ellison?
Did I hear one of them?
I didn't hear one of them.
Anyone say no one should vote for Bob Menendez?
I didn't hear one of them.
How many candidates have I said Republicans should not vote for because it would be a moral blot?
A bunch, including Roy Moore.
So don't give me this crap about how Republicans don't police their own.
We police our own a hell of a lot better than Democrats do, even in areas where we fail.
At least there's a kickback.
At least there's a kickback.
Like, there were a lot of Republicans who were upset that Steve King retained his seat in Iowa last night.
How many Democrats were upset that Keith Ellison won the Attorney General seat in Minnesota?
And Keith Ellison is a hell of a lot more racist than Steve King, even.
It says, Trump promised during his campaign he would roll back Roe v. Wade, and a new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's conservative judicial record makes it seem he'd be just the man to help do it, no matter his protestations that he considers it settled law.
The idea that my daughters may lose the right to control what happens to their bodies, especially if they could end up with a pregnancy that's the result of a sexual assault, keeps me up at night.
Well, it's kind of weird that you're so pro-abortion considering that your daughters literally are alive because they avoided forced abortion at the hands of the Chinese state.
There's that as well.
Again, the reason that I read this from Marie Claire is not just because I'm picking on a crazy person, but because, unfortunately, this base of the Democratic Party is fully convinced that the way to win is by shouting and screaming like a crazy person.
So it's really...
Really a really mistake.
Really, really stupid.
So well done, everyone.
Just calm down.
Calm down.
Everything's OK.
All right.
Well, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest breakdowns, plus President Trump reacting in extraordinary fashion to the election.
We'll have all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
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