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Nov. 9, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:10

The Red Trickle | Ep. 1607

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	Republicans wildly underperform expectations as they look to barely hold the House and the Senate remains up for grabs.
	Ron DeSantis leads the Florida Republicans to a red tsunami and we examine what comes next for Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
	First, inflation is still really, really bad.
	I know, everybody forgot about that for a moment.
	The Daily Wire reports in less than two years, inflation has soared from 1.4% to 8.6%.
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	Also, the midterms are now over.
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	Well, an extraordinarily disappointing night for the Republicans last night.
	Before the election, I had laid out the possibility of three scenarios.
	One was the red trickle.
	One was the red tide.
	The third was the red wave or the red tsunami.
	The red trickle was going to be the Republicans win, say, 10 seats and up in the House.
	They gain the House.
	And they barely take the Senate.
	Or they hold even in the Senate.
	And then you have the red tide, and that was going to be 20-plus seats for the Republicans, fairly strong showing on the evening.
	Plus, they take, say, a couple more seats in the Senate, end up with a 52-48 majority.
	And then there was the red wave, which would have been like 54 seats in the Senate and upwards of 230 seats in the House, like 235 or something.
	This was not only not a red wave, it was not a red tide, it was barely a red trickle.
	Barely, barely, barely a red trickle, which means heads should roll.
	When your football team is expected to go 16-0, it's one thing if your football team then proceeds to go 14-2 or 10-6.
	If your football team proceeds to go 8-8, people get fired.
	The entire coaching staff, the entire leadership team in the Republican Party needs to go, and it needs to go now.
	I spoke to the Republican House Caucus back in 2021.
	And I said to them, if somehow you fail to take the House, given the conditions that you have been given, every one of you ought to lose your jobs.
	Well, they're barely going to take the House.
	And I mean barely, barely, barely going to take the House.
	The current estimate suggests that Republicans are going to win somewhere between 8 and 15 seats in the House.
	They started off with 212.
	That means they will end up on the low end at 220, at a 435, which means that they would have a 5-seat majority in the House after starting with just a 10-seat minority in the House.
	That is an extraordinarily crappy result.
	In the Senate, the Republicans look like they are going to be on the losing edge of this one.
	Basically, the entire Senate comes down right now to Georgia, where it looks like there will be a runoff between Hershel Walker and Raphael Warnock.
	Arizona, not all the votes are in because apparently all the votes in Arizona are counted by a single blind nun working in Mozambique.
	And so we have to take at least seven years to count all the votes in Arizona.
	And the same thing holds true in Nevada.
	If you have to ballpark The outcomes of those races right now, what you would figure is that Republicans, in order to gain control of the Senate, would need to take two out of those three.
	Republicans, I think, may still take Nevada.
	It looks as though they're going to lose Arizona.
	And that runoff with Herschel, we're going to get another Senate runoff in Georgia, this time featuring the extraordinarily flawed candidacy of Herschel Walker against Raphael Warnock in an off-year election where Brian Kemp is not on the ballot to drag Hershel Walker up ballot.
	These are crap results, guys.
	These are bad results.
	I'm not going to sugarcoat stuff.
	I'm not going to pretend that this is a wonderful evening for Republicans, or even that it's a good evening for Republicans.
	It was a garbage evening for Republicans last night.
	And we'll get to all the reasons it was a garbage evening for Republicans in just one second.
	First, we need to actually go through the results.
	So, Kevin McCarthy at 2 a.m.
	sort of wobbled out to take, I can't say a victory lap, it was more like a couple of victory steps.
	Because this was supposed to be a big coming out party for Kevin McCarthy.
	The guy was going to be Speaker of the House, supposedly.
	And his leadership?
	Shall we say that it was tepid?
	I don't know that you get to be Speaker of the House after you win 8 to 15 seats in a year in which the fundamentals not only favor you, but favor you dramatically.
	Let us recall the fundamentals going into this particular election cycle.
	The current President of the United States, Joe Biden, who is not alive, has a 43% approval rating.
	The Democrats in Congress are not popular.
	Their approval ratings are not good.
	We have a 40-year inflation spiral.
	We have historically high gas prices.
	We have failure when it comes to Afghanistan.
	We had polling suggesting that the Republicans were going to do well on the generic congressional ballot.
	And by the way, polling that is justified in the exit polls, as we'll talk about, about good Republican performances among Hispanics and Blacks.
	And yet, somehow, magically, the Republicans translated all of those systemic advantages, again in an off-year election, where there's one party in power, they translated all of that into an 8 to 15 seat pickup.
	That is unprecedentedly bad.
	It is the worst election for the out-of-party power.
	The out-of-power party since the 2002 midterm elections, which came right after 9-11.
	And that, at least, you could say, well, George W. Bush had the coattail effect of 9-11.
	Americans, for a brief instant in time, were unified around a patriotic fervor for the country and for the current president of the United States, George W. Bush, in 2002.
	Right now, nobody likes Joe Biden.
	If you look at the actual exit polls, what they showed is that a huge majority, like 75% of Americans, were negative about the economy.
	How are you the party out-of-power in all the elected branches of the federal government?
	And 75% of the people think the economy sucks, and you win 8 to 15 seats.
	How is that even possible?
	So Kevin McCarthy went out there and tried to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
	It didn't go amazing.
	Here's what he sounded like last night.
	Now tonight, we built upon those gains two years ago, and it is clear that we are going to take the House back.
	Now let me tell you, you're out late.
	But when you wake up tomorrow, we will be in the majority, and Nancy Pelosi will be in the minority.
	Okay, so there's some sort of AirSats enthusiasm last night, but the actual reports from the victory party there is that people were just confused and bewildered as to what exactly Because, again, this was supposed to be a big win for the Republicans, and it just wasn't.
	It just was not.
	As Politico reported, McCarthy actually delayed a victory speech to what was supposed to be a jubilant party of Republicans until 2 a.m.
	on Wednesday.
	I mean, I was asleep by the time this thing happened.
	We were supposed to have a victory party, like, 10 p.m.
	This was supposed to be an early night.
	It was not only not an early night, it was a dramatic underperformance.
	The GOP leader kept his speech brief.
	He didn't have a firm call that his party had even won the House.
	Now, listen, does it make a difference that the Republicans took the House?
	Yes, it means that they can stymie the worst excesses of Joe Biden.
	And that's good for the country.
	As Elon Musk suggested, divided government is better at this point than unified government, for sure.
	With that said, is this a strong Republican Party?
	Is this a Republican Party that looks durable?
	Is this a Republican Party that looks like it has any leadership class at all?
	Or does it look like there's a massive leadership vacuum at the top of the Republican Party, particularly in the House, but also when it comes to the National Party?
	According to Politico, the Sleepy event was not the victory rager Republicans had envisioned.
	In downtown D.C.
	at the West End, GOP staffers and lobbyists had flocked to different open bars scattered around downstairs ballrooms around 9 p.m., keenly awaiting election results to start rolling in from TVs due to Fox News.
	However, in the hours leading up to McCarthy's appearance, there were few cheers as the room watched as competitive races rolled in with mixed results.
	And that is correct.
	And the attitude over the course of the evening went from jubilant at the beginning of the evening, to cautiously optimistic, to cautiously pessimistic, to shoot me now.
	That was the generalized attitude.
	Because again, a minor victory.
	And it is.
	It's a major victory in terms of the shift in governance to gain control of the House, obviously.
	But what was supposed to be a wave did not even come in as a tide.
	And as I say, barely came in as a trickle.
	There is no way to pretend that this was a good night for Republicans, because it just wasn't.
	It was such a bad night for Republicans that some of the more high-profile Republicans, for example, like Lauren Boebert.
	Lauren Boebert looks like she's going to lose her seat in Colorado.
	That is an R-plus-7 district.
	Democrats flipped Steve Chabot's district in Ohio.
	Democrats were not supposed to flip any districts last night.
	Republicans were supposed to flip all the districts last night.
	There were a few positive House results in Florida and New York.
	Lee Zeldin in New York, who we'll get to in a little bit.
	He lost his race to Kathy Hochul, but his strong performance did drag a lot of Republicans in the Hudson River Valley into Congress along with him, mitigating the possibility that Republicans would not gain the House.
	But a bunch of vulnerable Republicans In what was supposed to be a wave year, four of the Republicans lost their seats.
	That includes Mayra Flores in South Texas, who was a star five seconds ago.
	Now she's out of Congress.
	She tweeted, Now, here's the thing.
	I'm not sure the Republicans and independents stayed home.
	I think the Republicans actually showed up.
	I just think that some independents had some very serious questions about the Republican Party, and that will require some serious soul-searching in all of this.
	Again, right now as we speak, the Republicans have not formally won the House.
	There are still races that have yet to be counted.
	They probably will win the House, but these are not good numbers for the Republicans.
	And Boebert was not, she was not supposed to lose that race in Colorado.
	And part of that is because the House Republicans did not convey a sense that they know what they are doing.
	There are going to be a few big messages we're going to talk about, about what happened last night.
	The first message is candidate quality matters.
	Being perceived as solid in your governance strategy matters.
	Republicans who had a solid record of governance, Republicans who were perceived as sober and serious, did quite well last night.
	And everybody else took it directly on the nose.
	That was certainly the story in the Senate.
	The story in the Senate is candidate quality, candidate quality, candidate quality.
	And what I mean by this is that if you are perceived as a crazy person, if you are perceived as wild and out of the box, even if you excite the base, you will lose.
	You must be perceived, if you wish to win, you must be perceived as a person serious enough to hold the office, at least if you wish to be a Republican.
	If you're a Democrat, you can be as crazy as you want to be, because for whatever reason, you have systemic built-in advantages that make up for the fact that, for example, John Fetterman is not only a Bernie Sanders-style socialist, but also not fully functional.
	But if you're a Republican, the baseline assumption is going to be by the electorate that unless you are competent and sober, you don't deserve power.
	And so there was a lot of talk in the lead up to the election about, I engaged in some of this, about how the Joe Biden democracies at stake message was not resonating with people.
	And in a direct way, it wasn't resonating with people, right?
	Republicans did take the House.
	So obviously the notion that just that message alone was going to keep Republicans from power is wrong.
	What this meant is that Republicans got silly.
	They nominated a bunch of bad candidates in close races, and oddly enough, they nominated a bunch of good candidates in not-close races.
	And so you ended up in the House with this weird dichotomy, where in districts that Democrats won by 18, Republicans would make up 15 points of that ground with a really solid candidate and then lose.
	And then in districts where Democrats were up by 3, Republicans would nominate somebody Who was like a big fan of January 6th.
	And then that person would lose.
	And so they would nominate bad candidates in close races and good candidates in not close races, and they would lose both of those things.
	That was the pattern in the House.
	And then in the Senate, Republicans made the mistake of thinking that because the dynamics for the Democrats were going to be bad, they could nominate anyone.
	So, if you look at the narrative of politics over the past few years, what you will see is that what Americans basically want is stability.
	They want stasis.
	That's all they want.
	And the parties keep taking the wrong message from all of this.
	In 2012, Democrats took the message that they had an unbeatable coalition and they could be as radical as they wanted to be.
	And the reaction by the American people was, we'll elect Donald Trump to not give you that sort of power.
	Donald Trump won, and instead of taking the election, the Republican Party, as a sign that it was time to get back to some semblance of normalcy, instead they said, well, I mean, if we won, this means that we have magic on our side, and we can nominate whoever we want to, and we'll just continue to win victories.
	And then Donald Trump did not win in 2020.
	And now Republicans did not win in 2022.
	The underlying dynamics of American politics are the same.
	Gravity applies.
	Just because some out-of-the-box candidates are capable of defying gravity for a short period of time does not mean that they don't fly too close to the sun and the wings burn away.
	And that is what we are watching happen for virtually everybody in all parties.
	The American people are not up for crazy right now.
	They are sick of crazy.
	They are sick of Volatile.
	They are sick of feeling uneasy about candidates.
	They're just not all that interested in that sort of stuff.
	And so if you pick bad candidates, you're going to lose.
	There are a bunch of examples of this last night in the Senate.
	So, Don Balduck was nominated in New Hampshire with the help of Democrats, by the way, who felt he would be easier to run against.
	Jon Favreau, over at Pod Save America, he was actually celebrating Democrats having promoted a threat to democracy, right?
	Because Don Balduck denied the election of 2020, and so he was a quote-unquote threat to democracy, according to the left.
	They helped nominate him, and then he got killed, right?
	He got destroyed last night against Maggie Hassan.
	Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire.
	In that New Hampshire Senate race, The final results in the vote count look really bad.
	This was not a close race.
	It was supposed to be within a couple of points.
	Instead, Maggie Hassan walked away with an 11-point victory in New Hampshire.
	That is a testament to bad candidate quality in New Hampshire.
	The same thing happened in Pennsylvania.
	John Fetterman won Pennsylvania despite the fact that he is not fully functional.
	Now, I will say, I think that it may be Because John Fetterman was not fully functional, that a lot of the focus turned away from the fact that he is a radical to the fact that he was not fully functional, and that's bad campaigning.
	Granted, that's possible.
	It is also possible that what John Fetterman did at the very beginning of the race basically ended the race.
	Mehmet Oz was a bad candidate.
	Dave McCormick was a better candidate in that race.
	Mehmet Oz got Donald Trump's endorsement, and then he won the primary by about seven votes.
	And then within the first five minutes of the campaign, John Fetterman successfully labeled Mehmet Oz a TV snake oil salesman who was not from the state and owned mansions and had no connection with the people of Pennsylvania.
	And so John Fetterman, with a stroke, defeated Mehmet Oz last night.
	Fetterman ended up with 49% support compared with 48% support for Mehmet Oz.
	Again, bad candidate quality is a thing.
	Hey, how about in Georgia?
	It now looks like a runoff in Georgia is the likely result between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker.
	Herschel Walker was not the best candidate in the primary, but he was endorsed by certain people, and so Herschel Walker became the nominee.
	And so we had a campaign filled with talk of how many illegitimate children Herschel Walker had.
	How exactly was that going to be a big win for the Republicans?
	Or why don't we turn to Arizona?
	In Arizona, it's still too early to know the results, but right now, both Carrie Lake and Blake Masters are trailing in Arizona.
	Fairly significantly.
	Kerry Lake was being celebrated as kind of the next go-round of Donald Trump.
	Blake Masters was making up all the lake ground, and then it just kind of faded.
	It didn't happen.
	Why?
	Maybe because the candidates weren't all that good.
	Particularly masters in the Senate.
	Perhaps he had a lot of flaws.
	Perhaps the commercials that he was cutting about how wonderful Donald Trump was, while Mark Kelly was cutting commercials about how he was shaking hands with every Republican mayor he could find.
	Maybe that was a better candidacy.
	Bad candidate quality tells.
	Bad candidate quality matters.
	And good candidate quality tells, too.
	Nevada, it's still too early to know.
	That race looks like it may be competitive and it may actually go in favor of Adam Laxalt in Nevada.
	He's the strongest of that basket of candidates.
	Now the counter example that people are using to all of the candidate quality matters kind of talk is J.D.
	Vance in Ohio.
	Well, there are a couple problems with that.
	One, Ohio is a blood red state.
	Ohio is not a purple state.
	J.D.
	Vance won almost precisely the same percentage as Donald Trump won in Ohio.
	If you want to tell whether a candidate in the Republican Party did well, you have to look at whether they outperformed Donald Trump's 2020 performance in the same state.
	And I gotta tell you, not a lot of outperformance by Trump's handpicked candidates in the swing states.
	In Pennsylvania, Donald Trump won 48.8% of the votes in 2020.
	Dr. Oz won 47.7% of the vote last night.
	In Georgia, Donald Trump won 49.2% of the vote.
	Hershel Walker is currently clocking in at 48.5% of the vote in Georgia.
	In Arizona, Donald Trump won 49% of the vote in 2020.
	His handpicked candidate, Blake Masters, is currently clocking in at 46% of the vote in Arizona.
	In Ohio, J.D.
	Vance won precisely the same percentage as Donald Trump, 53.3%.
	This is an off-year election.
	Republicans are supposed to outperform.
	This is the election where Republicans are supposed to do better than average.
	And then, take a look at the candidates who are the less Trumpy candidates.
	In Nevada, Donald Trump won 47.7% of the vote.
	Right now, Adam Laxalt has about 49.8% of the vote.
	That is an outperformance.
	In Florida, Marco Rubio, swing state.
	Donald Trump won 51.7% of the vote.
	Marco Rubio won 57.7% of the vote.
	That's a serious gain.
	Candidate quality matters.
	You can't defy the gravity of bad candidates.
	And it is worth noting this going forward.
	Now, this is particularly obvious when it comes to the governors.
	As I say, if the Republican Party is looking for a model of governance going forward, if they're looking, how do we win races?
	Baseline levels of competence, and then engage in the culture war issues.
	Not the other way around.
	And also, don't alienate everybody on earth with claims that the vast majority of Americans do not actually believe.
	You cannot make election 2020 the subject of your campaign in any major way in the United States and hope that things are going to turn out amazing unless your district is like a deep red district.
	That is one of the messages of this thing.
	And you can tell, by the way, that there were governors last night who didn't do that and who walked away absolutely clean, who did great last night.
	The big winners last night were all the people That we're kind of at odds with President Trump.
	That we're at odds with the Trumpification of the Republican Party, who are not the out-of-the-box candidates.
	Those people did a lot better last night than the generalized Republican Party.
	And the Democrats who are running against the most perceived Trump-ish candidates are the ones who actually ended up doing really well last night.
	Those Democrats ended up doing really well.
	What does that say?
	It says that the very first rule of politics, I say it all the time, if you wish to win, make it very hard to vote for your opponent, make it very easy to vote for you.
	The Republicans spent a lot of time this election cycle making it hard to vote for their opponent, and then they proceeded to nominate a bevy of candidates who made it very hard to vote for the Republican.
	And that has some downstream effects.
	Now, when you look to the gubernatorial races, what you can see is that when you make it easy to vote for your own candidate, then your candidates do really, really well.
	We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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	You may have noticed that violent crime stats are not looking amazing.
	Compared to 2019 mid-year figures, some major cities are experiencing as much as a 50% increase in homicides and a 36% increase in aggravated assaults.
	Now would be an excellent time to make sure that you are protected.
	Well, that means taking advantage of your Second Amendment rights.
	But it's not enough to just be a law-abiding gun owner.
	You have to know how to use it, what it means to use it, the legal ramifications if you do have to use it.
	That's why I'm a member of the U.S.
	Concealed Carry Association.
	You should be as well.
	We've talked on this show about good guys with guns using their weapons to protect their families and communities.
	Sometimes they're the heroes of the story.
	Sometimes they get lambasted, villainized, thrown in jail.
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	So, let's take a couple of examples in terms of how this broke out.
	So, in the Ohio vote, if you recall, early on in this particular race in Ohio, Mike DeWine was running against Nan Whaley in the Democratic Party.
	This was supposed to be a possible toss-up race.
	Ohio was supposed to be quasi-purple.
	Mike DeWine won that race by over a million votes.
	By 25% he won that race.
	Now, nobody had Ohio on their sort of calendar.
	Mainly because DeWine started pulling away and pulling away early.
	And remember, DeWine was very much at odds with Donald Trump.
	But that fell away early because it turns out the people of Ohio trust Mike DeWine with governance for good or ill.
	The best example of this is Brian Kemp in Georgia.
	Donald Trump actively opposed Brian Kemp's nomination in Georgia.
	He suggested that Brian Kemp was a terrible candidate.
	In fact, in the middle of the election cycle, he suggested maybe it would be better for America if Stacey Abrams won.
	Brian Kemp clocked the living crap out of Stacey Abrams last night.
	Brian Kemp did great.
	He did great because it turns out that he knows how to govern, and the people of Georgia trust him.
	And because the people of Georgia trust Brian Kemp, that means that Stacey Abrams is once again relegated to being not governor.
	If you're looking for bright spots for Republicans last night, Stacey Abrams actually conceding an election for a change was kind of fun.
	So here is Stacey Abrams, president of the universe, conceding that she is not in fact going to be, nor has she ever been, governor of Georgia.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, George.
	Thank you, Daddy.
	It is good to be here in this moment, surrounded by your love and support.
	And let me begin by offering congratulations to Governor Brian Kemp.
	And she's like, I know, I know, you want me to deny the election, but I'm not going to do it.
	Which, by the way, good for her to change strategy once in a while.
	The final results, by the way, in Georgia were extraordinarily positive for Kemp.
	He ended up winning 53.4% of the vote.
	He beat Stacey Abrams by somewhere between six and seven points.
	That is a big win in a state where Stacey Abrams, Democrats poured money into Stacey Abrams.
	Democrats spent an extraordinary amount of money on Stacey.
	Like, they spent $105 million on Stacey Abrams, and she went down in flaming defeat.
	Why?
	Because good Republican governance combined with, yes, some of the culture war issues, Brian Kemp opened the state of Georgia up early, lest you forget.
	He governed well during COVID.
	He has engaged in culture war issues around, for example, critical race theory or radical transing of the children.
	But that's the icing on the cake.
	The basic elements of the cake are govern well, earn the trust of your population.
	Brian Kemp did that.
	So he was able to withstand a very tepid challenge from David Perdue in the primary.
	And then he was able to beat Stacey Abrams, who was supposed to be president of the universe.
	Meanwhile, same thing happened over in Texas.
	So Greg Abbott in Texas, He finally took out Beto O'Rourke.
	Beto is running out of offices to lose for.
	He's lost for Congress.
	He's now lost for Senate.
	He's lost for governor of the state.
	He's lost for president.
	He's gonna run for, I don't know, chancellor of the EU or something next.
	He's announcing his big electoral push for UN Secretary General, I suppose.
	Here is Beto O'Rourke conceding in the most enthusiastic possible fashion before going to eat New Mexican dirt.
	shirt.
	And you have made that possible.
	There is no more enthusiastic crowd than a Beto O'Rourke crowd at a losing speech.
	That crowd loves when Beto O'Rourke loses.
	Like, bro, people will remember this race forever.
	And by forever, I mean like a second and a half.
	That was not a competitive race.
	Remember that time when he was going to take out Greg Abbott?
	Final results of this election.
	Greg Abbott, 54.9%.
	Beto O'Rourke, 43.8%.
	He lost by almost a million votes in Texas.
	So yeah, things went unbelievably poorly for Beto.
	So we bid a fond farewell to both Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke.
	Beto's gonna go, he's gonna skateboard and bong, rip and kickflip and enjoy his life now, man.
	Until the next time he's born to run.
	So we bid to fond farewell to Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke, good Republican candidates.
	Won last night, bad Republican candidates lost.
	This is not so hard.
	Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, he got hammered.
	He got destroyed in Pennsylvania.
	Okay, now he got destroyed because, shockingly, he's a bad candidate.
	There are people who are suggesting that there is this big, quiet vote for Doug Mastriano.
	No.
	No.
	The answer is no.
	Josh Shapiro, who is the Attorney General of the state, beat Doug Mastriano by almost 14 points.
	He beat him 55.6 to 42.6.
	That's a 13-point victory for Josh Shapiro over Doug Mastriano.
	And might it have behooved the Republican Party to nominate a better gubernatorial candidate who could have perhaps helped Dr. Oz over the finish line in a much closer race against Jon Federen?
	It might have helped.
	It might have helped.
	Run bad candidates, win stupid prizes.
	Meanwhile, if you run good candidates, even when you lose, you have coattails.
	So, for example, Lee Zeldin over in New York.
	Good candidate.
	Not an anti-Trump guy, Lee Zeldin, but certainly a more establishmentarian Republican.
	He ran a very concerted, disciplined race against Kathy Hochul.
	And the results in that race came out in favor of Kathy Hochul, but Lee Zeldin had some significant downstream effect.
	There were three House seats that flipped in New York because Lee Zeldin ran a strong race at the top of the ticket.
	So basically, he gave up his House seat to Lee Zeldin, and he sacrificed it in order so that New York could have a few more Republican congresspeople, which, by the way, may spell the difference between Republican control and not Republican control in the House of Representatives.
	In that governor's race, by the way, Kathy Hochul ended up winning by just about five points.
	That is a dramatic loss for Kathy Hochul, considering, I mean, she wins, but it's a big loss.
	It's a win for Kathy Hochul in the same way the last night was a win for Republicans.
	Like, it technically won, but not amazing.
	Andrew Cuomo won his last race in New York State by, like, 25 points.
	A five-point loss for Lee Zeldin demonstrates that good candidates do well and have coattails.
	The reason I keep coming back to this is because there need to be some lessons for the future here.
	Republicans seem to have a very, very nasty habit.
	And the nasty habit is that they keep going back to the well of magic.
	They keep thinking, okay, well, you know, but people will hate Democrats so much that we can nominate literally anybody.
	We can nominate that dude on a street corner.
	I mean, sure, he's shouting at the sky and he's scratching at himself with one of those weird back scratcher things.
	And sure, he's got fleas and rabies, but that guy, he could, I mean, anyone could be Biden, right?
	I mean, anyone can beat these Democrats.
	I mean, these Democrats, these woke idiots, like anyone could beat them.
	We could run dog turd, wrong.
	Wrong.
	You have to run actual good, responsible candidates.
	Learn your lesson, guys.
	And lest you think, again, that this is some sort of out-of-the-box strategy, that there's no evidence to back this, there's sort of no counterexample to what happened with Republicans last night.
	There were several.
	I mentioned Brian Kemp already.
	But the big counterexample of the night is there was one area of the country where there was indeed not just a red trickle, not just a red tide, not just a red wave, a red tsunami.
	One specific area of the country, can you name it?
	One specific area of the country where the Republicans cleaned up, where there wasn't a vote in sight that they didn't get.
	That area, you guessed it, is Florida.
	In Florida, the Republicans did heavy damage, serious, serious damage.
	In fact, because Florida reports its results fast and in clean fashion, like the polls closed at 7 p.m.
	in most of Florida except for the panhandle, by like 8 p.m.
	Eastern last night, we knew the results in Florida.
	And that's why there was a lot of feeling in the Republican side of the aisle.
	I mean, we were covering it live last night at Daily Wire.
	Plus, there was a feeling that this might be a red wave.
	But it turns out it was not a red wave.
	It was just that Florida Republicans know what they are doing.
	And Ron DeSantis is an excellent candidate who is good at governing and then does the culture war issues, has the icing on the cake.
	Wipeout for Democrats in Florida.
	Absolute wipeout.
	On every possible level, a wipeout.
	I mean, let's take a look at some of these results.
	Let's start with the governor's race.
	This was supposed to be a relatively close race when this thing first started.
	Recall, Ron DeSantis won his last race for governor against Andrew Gillum, a gay meth addict.
	He won that race by 30,000 votes.
	3-0-thousand.
	In a state that has, you know, 7 million votes per election, 6, 7, 8 million votes per election, he won by 30,000 votes, 0.4% of the vote.
	In this particular election, Ron DeSantis won 59% of the vote.
	59% of the vote.
	59%.
	59%.
	So he went from winning by 0.4% of the vote to winning by one bajillion votes.
	The numbers don't exist anymore.
	We've run beyond the scope of actual mathematics in terms of how big this victory was for Ron DeSantis.
	59.4% of the vote for Ron DeSantis, he beat Charlie Crist last night like a rug.
	He beat him by 1.5 million votes.
	4.6 million to 3.1 million.
	vote, 4.6 million to 3.1 million.
	So from a 30,000 vote victory to a 1.5 million vote victory four years later.
	That is evidence of organization on the ground.
	That is evidence of excellent governance.
	That is evidence that you can convert independence to your own side.
	It is evidence that you have turned a purple state into a bright red, blazing red state.
	Tennessee, Utah-like red state.
	This state is not on the board for Democrats, and that is because a good Republican, there is no substitute for good candidates who are good at their jobs and engage less in the culture war crazy than they do in the actual governance of their state.
	And certainly don't engage in stupid issues that are going to be counterproductive.
	Ron DeSantis is a culture warrior, no question.
	He will fight critical race theory.
	He will fight woke.
	In his victory speech last night, he said that Florida is where woke comes to die.
	He is correct.
	Here is DeSantis.
	We have embraced freedom.
	We have maintained law and order.
	We have protected the rights of parents.
	We have respected our taxpayers.
	And we reject woke ideology.
	We fight the woke in the legislature.
	We fight the woke in the schools.
	We fight the woke in the corporations.
	We will never ever surrender to the woke mob.
	Florida is where woke goes to die.
	Okay, so, yes, he fights the woke.
	Also, he's really good at being a governor.
	You can do both those things.
	So there are a lot of people on my side of the aisle, a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives, they're like, why can't Republicans message on this stuff?
	The answer is, because again, don't let the icing be the cake.
	You can't have the cake without the icing.
	Otherwise, it's not a very good cake.
	But, you can also not have the, the icing without the cake is nothing.
	The icing without the cake is Don Balduck.
	The icing without the cake is Doug Mastriano.
	The icing with the cake is Ron DeSantis.
	And the cake without the icing is Mike DeWine.
	Okay, so what that sounds like, actually, is that the main thing Republicans have to do is focus on not alienating every voter in sight by embracing silliness, by embracing things that the American voters do not care about.
	There's a lot of talk in the election lead up about how Democrats were ignoring what the voters wanted.
	And that's true.
	Many Democrats did ignore what the voters wanted.
	But as it turns out, the Joe Biden pitch, and Joe Biden is going to be the nominee now for the Democrats in 2024.
	We'll get to the impact on Biden and Trump in a second.
	Joe Biden pushing for the democracy talk.
	It turns out that wasn't about threats to democracy.
	It was about, do you trust these Republicans to govern?
	And when Republicans act as though they can't be trusted with governance, they don't win.
	And when they can be trusted with governance, they win and they win enormous.
	They win huge.
	We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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	If you look at a map of Florida, the results here are absolutely astonishing.
	They are.
	I mean, I'm looking right now at the map of Florida and how it went in this gubernatorial race.
	And Ron DeSantis won Miami-Dade.
	You can't win Miami-Dade if you're a Republican.
	That's not possible.
	He won Miami-Dade.
	If you look at the exit polling, Ron DeSantis won Hispanics outright.
	Outright.
	The GOP picked up several congressional seats in Florida.
	National Republicans saw Tampa Bay's open seats, according to the Tampa Bay Times, as a path toward reclaiming control of Congress.
	And they achieved it.
	Florida is now sending 20 Republicans to the U.S.
	House of Representatives.
	That is an increase of four.
	Remember, Republicans needed to pick up five in order to take the House.
	So Florida alone almost put the Republicans over the top.
	The rest of the country combined is going to provide the Republicans with maybe another four to ten seats.
	Combined.
	The state of Florida carried it last night.
	It was Lee Zeldin in New York winning those House seats.
	That's three.
	And then it is the Republicans in Florida picking up four.
	That is seven.
	So that means that more than half of the Republican gains, in all likelihood, are going to come from those two states alone, with competent people running, Florida and New York.
	And by the way, Again, it wasn't just DeSantis.
	It was up and down the ballot.
	First of all, Charlie Crist had to concede because Charlie Crist has now run for every single party and there are no more parties for him.
	He's now looking for a pool party to run to because just bad night for Charlie Crist.
	There was Crist acknowledging that, in fact, his strategy of alienating every independent and Republican voter was a bad strategy.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	First and foremost, I want to give a good congratulations to Governor DeSantis on his re-election.
	That's okay.
	That's okay, guys.
	That's okay.
	I'm just going to read you a couple stats on how well DeSantis did last night.
	The Cuban vote in 2018 won 67% for Ron DeSantis.
	There are a bunch of people out there saying, well, when he wins the Hispanic vote, you just mean Cubans.
	Nope.
	That is not what I mean.
	He won 67% of the Cuban vote in Florida in 2018.
	He won 68% of the Cuban vote in Florida in 2022.
	So Cubans voted Republican like they always vote Republican in the state of Florida.
	The Puerto Rican vote in 2018 went 34% for Ron DeSantis.
	It went 55% for Ron DeSantis.
	That is a shift of 21 points among Puerto Rican voters in the state of Florida.
	Good governance.
	Ain't no substitute for it.
	Among other Latinos, 34% voted for the Republican in 2018.
	50%, 5-0% voted for Ron DeSantis in 2022.
	Candidate quality.
	50%, 5-0% voted for Ron DeSantis in 2022.
	Candidate quality, gubernatorial standards, being disciplined in your races.
	You know, the things that make up, like, the basic mathematics of politics.
	They still apply.
	Yelling at the sky is not, in fact, a strategy.
	And if Republicans wish to actually win broad victories over the course of the next decade or so, they're going to need to put away the childish playthings with which they have been preoccupied.
	I'm talking about the House leadership.
	I'm talking about the presidential leadership.
	That means that discipline needs to be in order here.
	There will be some opportunity for Republicans.
	There are going to be some silver linings here, which we'll get to in just one second.
	But here's the bottom line.
	When it comes to Florida, Florida broke the Democrats.
	It broke them.
	David Plouffe was an Obama advisor in 2008.
	Plouffe, he admitted that the Obama coalition in Florida is completely dead.
	It does not exist anymore.
	Here he was last night.
	Marco Rubio is up 11 points.
	I'll paraphrase Carlos's question there, David Plouffe.
	I mean, what is the lesson you are drawing here in terms of the Hispanic vote?
	How alarmed should Democrats be?
	Well, in Florida it's catastrophic.
	So obviously we saw great erosion in 20 in the presidential race.
	And let's remember, Barack Obama won in 2012, basically tied the Cuban vote, got over 70% of the Hispanic vote.
	So the Obama coalition in Florida is gone.
	We've got to rebuild it now.
	Okay, the GOP flipped.
	Miami-Dade, which Hillary won by 29 points, it flipped.
	Hillsborough County, Duval County, Pinellas County, that's Charlie Crisholm County, Palm Beach County, flipped.
	Osceola, flipped.
	All of these went Democrat.
	Florida has 67 counties.
	The number that stayed completely blue?
	Five.
	62 of the 67 Florida counties went Republican last night.
	So again, what exactly happened?
	Florida is governed like it ought to be governed, which is why you saw the crowd chanting at Ron DeSantis last night, two more years, which was very funny.
	I will admit that was very, very funny.
	Today, after four years, the people have delivered their verdict.
	Freedom is here to stay!
	is here to stay.
	Thank you.
	Now, thanks to the overwhelming support of the people of Florida, we not only won election, we have rewritten the political map.
	This is correct.
	This is right.
	Thank you for honoring us with a win for the ages.
	That's absolutely right.
	Okay, so here's the question for Republicans.
	Would you like to win like Florida won?
	Or would you like the rest of the map last night?
	Was the rest of the map good for you?
	Did you enjoy that?
	You smoking a cigarette this morning after how the rest of the map went for Republicans?
	I wasn't.
	I'm pissed.
	I'm enraged.
	There is no way that Joseph R. Biden, a person who died several years ago, should have earned the single best Democratic in power party performance since 2002.
	That should not have happened.
	None of that should have happened.
	Something went deeply wrong.
	Something went deeply wrong in the rest of the country that didn't go wrong in Florida.
	Republicans might be wise at this point to take a look at the Florida model and say, how do we expand that out?
	What should we do?
	What can we learn from that?
	How do we do that everywhere?
	And maybe the answer isn't all that tough.
	Maybe the answer is, as I said before, put away the distractions.
	Put away the sillinesses.
	Be serious with the American people.
	The American people are crying out for seriousness.
	They're not getting serious governance from the Democrats.
	They showed last night they don't love the Democrats.
	It wasn't like the Democrats walked away with a clean sweep, did amazing, blew out the Republicans, massive, nothing like that.
	What the American people said last night is they looked at the parties, and aside from Florida, they basically went... That is the result.
	The result is...
	Because they keep saying to the Republicans, be sane.
	And then to the Democrats, be sane.
	And neither party seems to be able to be sane.
	So let's talk about what this means for the Democratic Party going forward and the Republican Party going forward.
	Let's start with the Republican Party because I want to save the silver linings so that we can talk about some happy stuff in a little bit.
	But first, let's talk about what this means for Donald Trump.
	In the last moments of the election, right before the election, he decided that he was going to start sounding off about how he was running again in 2024.
	That does not help.
	It turns out that the exit polls show that Donald Trump is wildly unpopular with Americans.
	I'm sorry to break it to folks.
	Donald Trump is not a wildly popular figure outside of about one-third of Americans.
	About one-third of Americans love the guy, and the other two-thirds of Americans are not super happy with him.
	I would say one-third of Americans love him.
	I would say 45% of Americans cannot stand him.
	And then there are people in the middle who are really not particularly happy with Trump.
	They don't hate him beyond cancer, but they aren't particularly, this is what the exit polls showed.
	Exit polls last night, 37% favorable rating of Trump.
	He hasn't been president for two years, 37% favorable rating.
	So, when you come out days before the election and you rip Ron DeSantis, who just won a 20 point victory in Florida, as Ron DeSanctimonious, people react to that and they don't love it.
	When you say on election day, as Donald Trump literally did yesterday, when you say that Ron DeSantis better not run against me because I have so much dirt on him, I know him better than anyone except perhaps his own wife, is that like a smart move, politically speaking?
	Is that a good strategy or is that a very, very stupid strategy that seems rather narcissistic when you are trying to lead your party to the victory?
	Here's the question.
	Is Donald Trump the leader of the Republican Party or is Donald Trump just Donald Trump?
	And if he's just Donald Trump, you can love the guy.
	If he's the guy who wins the primaries, you can vote for the guy.
	I voted for him last time around.
	But is that the person you want leading the party?
	Because there is a giant leadership vacuum.
	Who's the leader of the Republican Party right now?
	Is it Kevin McCarthy?
	Hmm?
	You think it is?
	I don't think so.
	I don't see that as a leadership class at the top of the Republican Party in any way, shape, or form.
	Donald Trump certainly is not the leader of the Republican Party.
	He is not.
	Not because he's not de facto a leading figure who is a Republican, but because his priority is not the Republican Party.
	If you are the coach of the Baltimore Ravens, And you go out there every single week, and you don't actually do much coaching.
	You just kind of stand on the sidelines, and you just point at people who make mistakes, like, that guy's terrible.
	I can't believe him.
	He just won't do what I say.
	And then your team keeps losing.
	At a certain point, people might say, maybe that coach isn't amazing.
	He's not amazing.
	Like, he is the coach, but he's not very good at being, or maybe that's not his priority.
	Maybe his priority is the ad deal.
	Maybe his priority is getting ready for his next job.
	We don't know.
	But if you are looking at what Donald Trump, his impact was on this election, it was not minor.
	His handpicked candidates did poorly last night.
	Blake Masters in Arizona, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Don Balding in New Hampshire.
	All these people did not do well.
	They did not do well.
	I mean, there are several reasons why Donald Trump's impact on the election is going to have negative ramifications for Trump 2024.
	Number one, if he announces next week, you think everybody's in a good mood?
	So Donald Trump has operated on sort of a theory of unfalsifiability thus far.
	So yesterday he was interviewed by News Nation and he was asked, so depending on how the election does, should you get credit or should you get blame?
	And he gave a typical Trumpian answer.
	I'm going to say that I think this is half tongue-in-cheek, but then he goes on and it's not quite half tongue-in-cheek.
	Here's what he had to say.
	You've endorsed more than 330 candidates this election cycle.
	Tonight, win or lose, the results for Republicans, how much of that will be because of Donald Trump?
	Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit, and if they lose, I should not be blamed at all.
	Okay.
	Okay, and then he continued along those lines, and he said, I shouldn't be blamed at all, and I won't be that way, but really, I deserve all the credit.
	That's what I deserve, is all the credit.
	Donald Trump raised in excess of $100 million in this campaign because of all the mailers and all the rest.
	He spent $15 million in this campaign.
	Mitch McConnell, who the base is very angry at and who Donald Trump is very angry at, spent $234 million from the Senate leadership pack in this particular election cycle.
	Donald Trump got a bunch of people nominated and then he stopped cutting them checks.
	He nominated Mehmet Oz.
	Trump's endorsement was Mehmet Oz nomination in Pennsylvania.
	He nominated Mehmet Oz because he thought that Mehmet Oz was good on TV.
	Carrie Lake probably won the nomination in Arizona because Donald Trump endorsed, because again, she was good on TV.
	He endorsed Herschel Walker because Herschel Walker is a famous person.
	These are not good reasons to nominate candidates.
	And then he proceeded not to give them any money.
	This is not a strategy for victory.
	And everyone knows this.
	We're now saying the quiet part out loud.
	Donald Trump was a drag on this election cycle for Republicans.
	He was.
	There ain't no two ways about it.
	Again, you can love what he did as president.
	You can think that he has magic skills in politics.
	He does.
	I mean, the guy went from nothing to being the president of the United States, politically speaking.
	That does not mean that since being president, he has been anything but a net drag on Republicans.
	Show me the victories.
	Show me the victories.
	Trump's whole thing is, I'm a winner.
	Since the election of 2020, he lost the election in 2020.
	He then proceeded to lose Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia, losing them the majority.
	And now he is largely responsible for the nomination of a bevy of candidates in the House and in the Senate who wildly underperformed, and the governorships who wildly underperformed.
	And then his take is, it's not me.
	Don't blame me.
	It's not my fault.
	Well, here's the thing, dude.
	If you're going to be the leader, then the buck stops somewhere.
	At some point, the Republican Party is going to have to make a decision.
	Do they wish to be tied to Donald Trump's obsession with election 2020?
	Is that the thing that they really want?
	Donald Trump in the middle of this election cycle, he went to, first of all, he goes to Ohio and he says to JD Vance, JD's kissing my ass for my endorsement.
	He's the only reason that he's the only reason that I'm the only reason he's going to win.
	Well, no, that's not true.
	And then in the middle of the election, he's calling up Blake Massey.
	Why wouldn't you deny the election even more strongly?
	You want you want the the less you think that I'm just going after Trump unfairly that Here is Donald Trump's actual reaction to the election last night.
	Now, a normal reaction by anyone who believes in conservative principles would be, man, we sucked last night.
	We need to fix this thing.
	What do we do to fix this thing?
	A normal reaction to Republicans losing seats last night, vulnerable seats for Democrats, would have been, man, what a blown opportunity.
	Donald Trump's election reaction last night on Truth Social was almost entirely ripping candidates, some of whom he had already endorsed, for not sufficiently bending the knee to him and then losing.
	Does this sound like the leadership qualities that you are looking for at the top of the Republican Party?
	Again, you've got a choice, guys.
	You can have the Florida governance model, or you can have the rest of the country.
	You get to pick.
	At some point, the Republicans are going to have to grow up.
	They're going to have to realize And no matter how much you love Donald Trump, even if you want to see him as the nominee, no matter how much of that is true, be serious about who you nominate.
	Treat elections as though they matter.
	Donald Trump doesn't.
	Donald Trump tweeted last night, or put out on Truth Social, he truthed last night, quote, Don Balduck was a very nice guy, but he lost tonight when he disavowed, after his big primary win, his longstanding stance on election fraud in the 2020 presidential primary.
	Had he stayed strong and true, he would have won easily.
	Lessons learned.
	Donald Trump's lesson from last night is that Don Balduck wasn't crazy enough.
	Donald Trump's lesson last night was that Don Balduck should have made the entire election in New Hampshire about Donald Trump losing in 2020.
	Does that sound like a person who is deeply Dedicated to the cause of defeating Joe Biden?
	He didn't have a word to say on Truth Social last night about Joe Biden in the immediate aftermath of the election.
	Not a word to say about the Democrats who are running the country directly into the ground.
	Not a word to say about the transing of the kids, about the 40-year inflation rate, about the loss of Afghanistan, about the equity at the center of every policy.
	Not one word about that.
	But he had words for Don Balda, who he endorsed.
	He had words for him.
	Why?
	Because he wasn't sufficiently, he wasn't sufficiently sycophantic.
	about Donald Trump's election loss in 2020.
	He did the same thing with Joe O'Day.
	Literally, his first reaction to the election was, Joe O'Day lost big.
	Make America great again.
	Now, is this the way that America gets made great again?
	If you cared about Trump's agenda, you know, his actual agenda, the things he did, the reasons I voted for him in 2020, the things he did, the conservative Supreme Court justices, the lowering of the taxes, the lowering of the regulations, the historically good economy, the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, peace in the Middle East, if those are the things you liked, if you think that's the stuff that made America great again under Donald Trump, do you think that what makes America great again Is Michael Bennett the Democrat being elected Senator in Colorado?
	Is that what you think makes America great again?
	Donald Trump does!
	He literally put it out on Truth Social.
	Joe O'Day lost.
	Good.
	I hate that guy.
	Like, that's your takeaway?
	Again, Donald Trump with an ounce of common sense, an ounce of discipline.
	I said this from the beginning of his presidency, he would have been almost unstoppable.
	But each and every day, he's showing that his lack of discipline is damaging to the party that he purports to be the leader of.
	And Republicans, you have a choice.
	You can either look at that and say, more of this, more of this.
	Or you can say, if Donald Trump is unwilling to change, if Donald Trump cannot show that he is willing to change, then we cannot have this be the future of the party.
	It just can't go this way.
	I honestly, God, don't see how it could go this way in the future if the Republican Party has its head out of its ass in any serious way.
	If Donald Trump doesn't change, if we just get more of this, if it's just this until the end of time, what is your strategy for victory?
	The question Republicans should be asking right now, they should be asking themselves this question very seriously going into 2024.
	Donald Trump took a Slim electoral victory in 2016 and a 3 million popular vote deficit.
	And in 2020, he turned that into a fairly comfortable electoral victory for Joe Biden and a 7 million vote deficit.
	And then the Republicans proceeded to lose two runoffs in Georgia, a red state, proceeded to wildly underperform in the Senate because of a bevy of handpicked candidates from Donald Trump, and proceeded to underperform in the House because too many Republican candidates were getting caught Being asked questions about Donald Trump's views on particular subjects, at least in part.
	Again, it's not all Donald Trump.
	But if you're going to make him the leader of the Republican Party, the coach gets blamed when the team goes 0-16.
	The coach gets blamed.
	That's how everything works.
	The buck has to stop somewhere.
	And if the Republican Party keeps playing this game where the buck stops nowhere, well then the buck won't stop anywhere and they'll just keep losing.
	You have a choice between that or a model where you take a state that is dead even 30,000 vote victory in Florida to 1.5 million vote victory four years later.
	These are your choices.
	Responsible governance with the culture war icing or this chaos.
	It was one thing when you were getting at least the good governance from Donald Trump.
	Right now, since he's been president, he doesn't have the power to govern.
	So exactly where's the good governance?
	This is going to hurt Trump and it should hurt Trump.
	This election was not good for Donald Trump.
	If he had proved himself, if he had led the Republicans to victory, that's typically how politics works.
	You bear the rewards of that sort of stuff.
	But you can't bear the rewards and bear no blame.
	That's not how any of this works.
	Kevin McCarthy deserves a heavy heaping helping of blame.
	He's the House leader and his House team wildly underperformed.
	And Donald Trump has declared himself the head of the Republican Party.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Then you get the blame.
	Then you get a big heaping helping of blame when things go wrong, particularly among your hand-picked candidates.
	And it is worth noting here that for all the talk about how Donald Trump picked his candidates and he intervened in the elections, his fundraising juggernaut dropped $2.3 million total in Ohio and $3.4 million in Pennsylvania.
	Those are not numbers.
	Those are not numbers.
	And made the entire Republican Party answerable To whatever he was saying about the election.
	And the election was not about January 6th, but it was about, for the Republican Party, can you be trusted with governance?
	Can you be trusted?
	And if the Republican Party shows that it can't be, if it shows that it's beholden to anything except for the priorities of the American people, that's the only thing that matters, the priorities of the American people.
	If Republicans don't make that the top priority, if they make fear of whatever political interest group, the thing that they are the most afraid of, the thing that they respond to, Then they're gonna keep getting bruised.
	It really is that simple.
	By the way, if you look at the age breakdown in this particular election, Republicans did fine with everybody above the age of 45, and they got absolutely hammered with everybody below the age of 45.
	That is not a coincidence.
	That is not a coincidence in any way, shape, or form.
	Now, what is the impact here?
	It's been very downbeat here.
	I'll admit, this has been a downbeat show.
	Because again, I'm in a real bad mood.
	When you expect a red wave, and you don't even get a red tide, and you barely get a red trickle, At a certain point, if you go in to pick up your paycheck at the end of the month, and you're expecting a $7,000 paycheck at the end of the month, and instead what you get back is 32 cents, you might be a little upset.
	So yeah, I've been pretty downbeat here because this is a blown opportunity, and opportunities like this do not come particularly often.
	What does this mean?
	Well, there is one silver lining.
	Well, a couple of silver linings.
	So let me give you some silver linings here.
	Silver lining number one, Democrats will not shift.
	They will not change one iota of anything they are doing.
	Now, we know that stuff's unpopular, but the incentive structure in Congress is if you get re-elected, it ain't unpopular.
	Polls are polls.
	Elections are elections.
	And if your party somehow exceeds all possible estimates and does much better than expected, then you're going to keep doubling down on this.
	They're just going to keep doubling down over and over and over.
	So expect more woke from the Democratic Party.
	Expect more of the transing of the children.
	Expect more spending from the Democratic Party.
	Expect Joe Biden to go out there today and talk about how his entire agenda has been vindicated.
	His party has won historically large victories for a party that was already in power.
	How he said that Nancy Pelosi won't be Speaker of the House, but he still is a very durable minority.
	Expect Joe Biden to take a victory lap.
	He will be the nominee in 2024.
	There is no way to oust him.
	In the lead-up to this election, you could see, I talked about it on the show a lot, you could see that there was a move that was being made to dump Joe Biden on the side of the road.
	It was coming.
	George Will had written an entire column about how Joe Biden was feeble-minded and was going to fall over at any moment.
	He said, take Kamala Harris with you, just sort of sideswiped her.
	He's like, well, you know, as long as you're going, just grab Kamala and take her to...
	You saw a bunch of articles starting to appear in major mainstream left-wing publications talking about how Joe Biden was the end of the road.
	It was time for Joe Biden to go away.
	That's all over now.
	Joe Biden will be the 2024 nominee unless he drops dead.
	Like actually dead.
	Not like joke dead like I said.
	Like actually dead.
	Incapacitated.
	Fully incapacitated.
	Not like partially like he is now.
	Like comatose.
	Unless that happens, Joe Biden will be the 2024 nominee because who's going to take it away from him?
	What's their case?
	He did much better than expected in these midterms.
	And now he's going to say that it's because he yelled about democracy and said that half the American republic was in favor of destroying the country.
	That was actually all good.
	So they're going to keep doubling down.
	So Democrats are going to keep providing Republicans with the opportunity because nobody learns any lessons in American politics over the last 10 years.
	So Republicans are going to have the opportunity to get another bite at the apple.
	Joe Biden is not a good candidate.
	He's an extraordinarily vulnerable candidate.
	And he will, again, barring some sort of cataclysmic health circumstance, be the nominee for the Democrats in 2024.
	That is the big opportunity.
	That's the silver lining.
	The weird counter-intuitive silver lining last night for the Republicans is Democrats will keep doing all the things that made them unpopular and give them another bite at the apple, even though Republicans underperformed and did a crap job taking advantage of the circumstances.
	So that's silver lining for the Republicans.
	Joe Biden's a weak candidate.
	He'll be running in 2024.
	Democrats will keep going on this crazed, woke agenda.
	They're not going to stop anytime soon.
	That's an opportunity.
	The opportunity ain't going away.
	Republicans have to take advantage of the opportunity.
	Do not leave opportunities on the table.
	Now, they did.
	They left this opportunity on the table.
	Would it have mattered a lot if Republicans took control of the Senate by one or two votes?
	It would have mattered maybe in terms of judicial nominees.
	But in terms of actual effective governance, maybe not.
	Maybe it wouldn't have mattered all that much.
	But it did matter in terms of leaving senators on the table that could have provided you the springboard for 2024.
	If Republicans had picked up 54 last night instead of maybe at best 50, if they had done that, then that would have allowed them the possibility of a supermajority come 2024.
	But, again, the Republicans are being given another chance.
	They're being given another chance because last night was not a referendum on the excellence of Democratic governance.
	It was a referendum on all these ancillary issues.
	It was the Republican Party being punished for their vacuities.
	It was not the Democrats being rewarded for their vacuities.
	But Democrats are going to misread that because everybody misreads political signals in this day and age.
	Everybody has their priors confirmed.
	The opportunity will still be there.
	That means we have to fight harder and we have to be more serious.
	Nominate people who are good at their jobs.
	Nominate people who do not alienate, who do demonstrate that the other guys are not vote, you can't vote for them, but you should vote for us because we are going to be serious and coherent in how we govern, and we take our own ideas seriously.
	The time for unseriousness has passed in the United States.
	Republicans have the opportunity to learn that lesson, and they should, because if they don't, If they don't, things are going to get a lot worse from here.
	All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into the state of the economy.
	We'll also be getting into how the different groups voted last night.

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