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unidentified
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is available on our free video app, C-SPAN Now, and on our website, c-span.org. | |
| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
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We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
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Next, a preview of the 2026 midterm elections with political editors and analysts on the impact of Latino voters, redistricting and the Trump administration's deployment of National Guard troops to U.S. cities. | |
| National Journal in Washington, D.C. hosted this event. | ||
| Great. | ||
| What a great crowd. | ||
| Good evening, everyone, and welcome. | ||
| I'm Emily Aktruzandi, Chief Revenue Officer of National Journal membership, and it's wonderful to see so many of our members and friends here tonight. | ||
| We're gathering at a pivotal moment in Washington. | ||
| With the 2026 midterms just a year away, the pace of politics is already accelerating. | ||
| And of course, we're meeting under the shadow of a government shutdown. | ||
| It's a stark reminder of how quickly dynamics here can change and how those shifts ripple across industries, organizations, and communities. | ||
| And at National Journal, our mission is to help our members cut through that noise. | ||
| Whether through our reporting, tools, custom content offerings, or conversations like this one, we're here to equip you with the insights and context you need to navigate uncertainty and anticipate what's next. | ||
| So tonight, as part of that commitment, we're fortunate to be joined by three incredible political voices. | ||
| Ron Brownstein, senior political analyst with CNN, Jeff Dufour, National Journal's editor-in-chief, and Kirk Beto, editor of The Hotline, who will help us unpack the forces already shaping the road to 2026. | ||
| We'll spend about 30 to 35 minutes in discussion, followed by QA. | ||
| So I encourage you to be thinking of questions you'd like to raise. | ||
| We'll have someone come around with a microphone. | ||
| And we're also delighted that C-SPAN is broadcasting live, which means we'll be able to share this conversation well beyond this room. | ||
| So thank you again for being here. | ||
| Thank you for engagement with National Journal. | ||
| And please join me in welcoming our panelists. | ||
| And Jeff, I'll let you take it from here. | ||
| Thank you. Thanks. | ||
| As Emily said, we're going to talk a lot about 2026. | ||
| We'll get into 2028 a little bit. | ||
| And I think just as a little teaser or an appetizer, we'll talk about the Virginia, New Jersey elections that are going to take place next month. | ||
| But before that, as a big picture table setter, I wanted to ask the two of you this question. | ||
| We are as evenly divided a country as I've seen. | ||
| I've been covering politics for 25 plus years, far and away the closest House of Representatives we've ever had, voting for the presidential as narrow as can be. | ||
| Yet, paradoxically, that has not created stability. | ||
| It's actually created instability and volatility. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, first of all, great to be here. | ||
| You know, to your point about covering politics for 25 years, Emily, did not mention I am a National Journal alum. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And my first tendency at National Journal involved covering the Reagan White House. | ||
| So that was a while ago. | ||
| And, you know, in fact, we are living through what I would, I think, I think you can fairly describe as the longest period in American history where neither party has been able to establish a durable advantage over the other. | ||
| That's a big statement, but I think a lot of different measures that can show you that. | ||
| The last three houses, the margin has been 10 seats or less. | ||
| That's never happened before in American history. | ||
| The last five times a president went into a midterm with unified control of government, voters revoked it. | ||
| That's never happened in American history. | ||
| Since 1980, we haven't gone eight years where neither party has been able to control the Senate for more than eight consecutive years. | ||
| And that's never happened in American history. | ||
| And by the way, on the unified control, the asterisk, when people are wondering about 2002, Republicans had unified control after 2000, but lost it in 2001. | ||
|
unidentified
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Jim Jefferts. | |
| Right. | ||
| So they didn't go into 2002 with unified control. | ||
| I mean, the key is that when voters have seen one party as clearly the dominant, you know, as the ones driving the boat, steering the boat in Washington, they have revoked it. | ||
| Last president who defended unified control for a midterm was Jimmy Carter in 78, and that was really only because we were in the era of the one party South that still provided an insurmountable hold on. | ||
| So you add it all up. | ||
| Only 18 of the last 58 years has one party sustained control of the House, the Senate, and the President. | ||
| And, you know, we are living in that world. | ||
| That world is so encompassing to us that it doesn't seem unusual. | ||
| But it is an incredible departure from the previous, the heart of the 20th century. | ||
| If you look from 1896 to 1968, the heart of the 20th century, one party or the other had unified control for 58 of those 72 years, as opposed to 18 of the last 56. | ||
| I mean, you're not imagining it. | ||
| Your jobs are harder than it was for people who had them 15, 20, 30 years ago, because they could build a relationship that they knew was going to be there. | ||
| Now, the volatility is kind of a mountain. | ||
| I mean, it's an irremovable part of the landscape. | ||
| And as a final point, so we are in all of these ways closely, more closely divided than at almost any point in our history, but we are also deeply divided. | ||
| The gap, I mean, when I started covering politics, literally, you know, it was not far from the days when Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey were both Democrats and Jacob Javits and Jesse Helms were both Republicans. | ||
| The parties have sorted out enormously. | ||
| So we have a situation where the shifts in control are more frequent really than at any point. | ||
| The only thing like it is the last two decades of the 19th century. | ||
| But basically, the shifts in control are more frequent over a longer period than we've ever experienced. | ||
| And each time you get a shift in control, as the last year has really demonstrated, you get a radical reversal of policy. | ||
| You get whiplash. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So closely divided and deeply divided is a recipe for a very trigger, you know, hair-trigger country where nothing is stable and everything seems at stake all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'll throw another statistic at you, which is we are now six, we are at six change elections in a row where Senate, House, or presidency has changed hands each of the last six cycles. | |
| We're going to talk about this in a minute. | ||
| We may be steamrolling toward a seventh in a row. | ||
| But Kirk, I want to let you get in here and offer your thoughts on this kind of dynamic that we're seeing. | ||
| As someone who's been alive for 25 plus years, not necessarily covering politics. | ||
| You see this change all the time here. | ||
| The change is the constant now. | ||
| Like you said, Jeff, we've had the past six elections. | ||
| The House, the Senate, or the White House have changed hands. | ||
| And that's a product of the self-sorting round that you were talking about. | ||
| But we're also at the tail end of about 30 years of pretty aggressive gerrymandering here from both parties. | ||
| Now, it's gotten much more intense the last three months or so. | ||
| But what we're seeing is a shrinking House battlefield. | ||
| We're seeing a shrinking Senate battlefield, a shrinking presidential battlefield as well, where the blue wall states, those seven swing states as well, have remained constant throughout the last three presidential cycles, almost unprecedented. | ||
| Now, right now, as we're getting ready to gear up for 2026, the House battlefield is extremely, extremely small. | ||
| Democrats just need to flip three seats to take control of the House, maybe more, depending on how this gerrymandering cycle kits out here. | ||
| And there's only about 18 or so toss-up seats by the Cook political report. | ||
| 10 are held by Democrats, 9 are held by Republicans. | ||
| And that's because you see a lot of decline in split-ticket voting. | ||
| There's only 16 seats right now represented by one member of a party where that district went to the opposite party at the presidential level. | ||
| 13 Democrats are in seats that Trump carried, and there are three Republican seats that Harris carried. | ||
| It's very partisan. | ||
| It's very much you put your jersey on here, and you don't really think you just go right down the line here. | ||
| You know, to your point, you know how many split-ticket districts there were after Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984? | ||
| There were 190. | ||
| Now there were 16, right? | ||
| After both of Nixon's victories and after both of Reagan's victories, Democrats still held half of the Senate seats in the states that voted for each of them both times. | ||
| Today, if you look at the, there are 25 states that voted three times for Trump. | ||
| I call them the Trump 25. | ||
| Do you know how many Senate seats Democrats have in those 25 states? | ||
| They have zero. | ||
| They had eight as recently as 2017. | ||
| So we've gone from a situation where, I think it was in the Reagan case, I think there were 12 states that voted twice for Reagan and had two Democratic senators in 1985. | ||
| The whole thing is more parliamentary, right? | ||
| Where voters, as Kirk said, I mean, they're looking less at the name on the back of the jersey than the color on the front of the jersey. | ||
| And so the ability of an individual to sail up against the current based on their unique characteristics. | ||
| I mean, we're down to Susan Collins. | ||
| I mean, you know, if Republicans hold all 50 Senate seats in the 25 states that voted three times for Trump, Democrats hold almost all of the seats in the states that voted against him three times. | ||
| But there are only 19 of those states. | ||
| They hold all of them against Collins, and they might get that one. | ||
| It might be, we could come out of this election with a complete, you know, where the only seats that go against the most recent presidential are in the states that flip the six states that have flipped under Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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Structurally, Democrats are almost at a point where they have to sweep the purple states in order to have a Senate majority. | |
| They have to. | ||
| I mean, you can't give away 50 Senate seats on a routine basis. | ||
| At that point, you have to win little, as you say, everything else and the presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
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So we have 51. | |
| Right. | ||
| I mean, can you put anything on that list in play? | ||
| North Carolina, clearly, trying. | ||
| After that, it's Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. | ||
| So that's kind of the leap. | ||
| It's a pretty narrow pattern. | ||
| But look, the reverse, the Republicans obviously have a bigger upside. | ||
| But Democrats now have 10 of the 12 seats in the states that flipped at any point in the three Trump elections. | ||
| Well, and even as this battlefield is getting smaller, just one last point on this and why this is so divided right now. | ||
| Even as this battlefield for control of Congress gets smaller, it gets much, much more expensive. | ||
| At Impact, the nonpartisan research firm estimates that this election alone, over $10 billion are going to be spent on advertisements. | ||
| At least four Senate races are expected to cost $500 million on air alone. | ||
| We really should have just gone in on a TV station in Georgia like before all this. | ||
| So those toss-up seats we talked about, there should cost around $47 million on ads in those 18 seats alone for a House race. | ||
| So even as the battlefield is getting smaller, it's getting exponentially more expensive and exponentially more partisan ads on TV. | ||
| It literally would be cheaper for the campaigns to buy every swing voter a TV. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, Elon Musk might try that still. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| He could. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, let's talk about the House then. | |
| I'm going to set it up this way. | ||
| I saw a study from the London School of Economics this week. | ||
| The scholars, the professors, said presidential approval and voters' feelings about the economy going into the election are paramount, far and away, the two most important factors. | ||
| And once they plug those factors into their algorithm, they said they would expect Democrats to pick up 28 seats without factoring in gerrymandering. | ||
| So I'm going to ask a two-part question. | ||
| Do you accept the premise that those two factors, economy and presidential approval, outweigh everything else? | ||
| And what are your thoughts about the number 28? | ||
| First, I'll say yes. | ||
| I think those are the two most important factors here. | ||
| The kitchen table issues and presidential approval are traditionally the metrics that we look at going into a midterm. | ||
| And the 28 number is interesting because 28 seats is the number of seats on average that the party in power in the White House loses in a midterm. | ||
| That was true from about the 1930s until 2018. | ||
| In 2018, during Trump's first midterm, Democrats netted about 41 seats. | ||
| But in every election since then, the sea change in the House, the net change, has diminished exponentially. | ||
| In 2020, Democrats lost 13 seats. | ||
| 2022, they lost nine seats in the majority. | ||
| 2024, Republicans had a net loss of only a single seat. | ||
| Going into 2026, Democrats need to net three seats as we sit here right now. | ||
| I think it's going to rebound and there's going to be a net change of more than one, but that's still so narrow. | ||
| The swings are getting so much smaller. | ||
| So in addition to redistricting, the other reason why the battlefield is shrinking is because there has been this profound demographic sorting out, right? | ||
| So, you know, in 1994, when Clinton passed the assault weapon ban, there were 77 House Democrats who voted against it. | ||
| 77 House Democrats voted against it. | ||
| Like, how many of those districts are still represented by a Democrat today? | ||
| It's probably, you know, five or less. | ||
| Essentially, in 94, but especially in 2010, 2010 especially, you saw the collapse of Democrats in heavily white, heavily blue-collar districts. | ||
| The blue dog Democrats were largely hunted to extinction in 2010. | ||
| We used to do a thing at National Journal called the Four Quadrants of Congress, in which we divided all the seats based on whether their education level, their white education level, and their white population was above or below the national average. | ||
| And if you look at the fourth quadrant, the low diversity, low education districts, that's where Republicans have just obliterated the Democrats from the 90s and even the 2000s. | ||
| 2018 was the bookend to that. | ||
| 2018 was the bookend to 2010 because you saw the John Kasich and what were called the gypsy moth in the 80s, the Republicans in the suburban districts outside, even below the Mason-Dixon line, largely eliminated. | ||
| I think Barbara Comstock, for example. | ||
| Of the 41 seats, I think 30 that the Democrats gained had more college graduates than the national average. | ||
| So, you know, basically, you've seen each side largely consolidate its demographic hold on the seats that demographically fit into their coalition, which just doesn't leave that many outliers to go after. | ||
| I mean, there are, you know, Don Bacon's seat you could go after. | ||
| There are a lot of college graduates. | ||
| Or Tom Kaine Jr., there are a lot of college graduates. | ||
| And I guess Jerry Golden, there are a lot of non-college whites that you can go after. | ||
| There just aren't that many of those seats on either side anymore, which leaves you in this very small kind of playing field back and forth. | ||
| But it also means that each coalition is just much more homogenous than it used to be. | ||
| I mean, like, you know, if you look at the Affordable Care Act or the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, I mean, dozens of Democrats voted against that. | ||
| Now, just the whole thing is just more parliamentary, not only just partisan loyalty, but just kind of the fundamental demographic realities of the districts. | ||
|
unidentified
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The single biggest predictor of Republican success, or at least Trump's success right now, low population density. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Rural. | |
| That is far and away the best predictor. | ||
| Richard Florida, who used to be part of the whole general thing here with City Lab, I think in 2016 and 2020, did kind of a density line and showed. | ||
| But to their point, I mean, I agree with Kirk. | ||
| I mean, the presidential approval is the single most important factor in a midterm. | ||
| It really is a referendum on the president, I think, above all. | ||
| Now, maybe the highly negative image Democrats are facing is going to affect that, but I will just point out that in the fall of 2010, before Republicans gained, had the biggest House gain for either party since 1938, in polling that fall, the image of the Democratic Party per se was better than the image of the Republican Party. | ||
| And it really didn't save them. | ||
| You know, like if people want to cast a vote against the president and his agenda, saying the other side is worse just doesn't really hasn't historically carried that much. | ||
| I think the bigger limiting factor on Democrats, what we're both talking about, is just there are just very few mismatched seats to go after. | ||
|
unidentified
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Speaking of swing seats, I want to go back to the NJ archives for a little bit. | |
| The blue wall. | ||
| Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, we hear about it all the time. | ||
| Fun fact, it was the man to my left in National Journal who coined the term blue wall. | ||
| Blue Wall first existed in National Journal? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| There's a big headline. | ||
|
unidentified
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The blue wall. | |
| So I want to ask two things. | ||
| Has the nature of the blue wall changed, which is to say, is it still a wall for the Democrats since Trump swept it twice? | ||
| And what have you seen in terms of the way the wall functions or doesn't function in a midterm environment? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's interesting that you phrase it that way, because the meaning of the blue wall has evolved, or I would say mutated over time. | ||
| The original blue wall, the point of the story, which was written in January 2009, was at that point there were 18 states that had voted Democratic in each of the previous five presidential elections, which was the most states the party had won over five consecutive elections since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. | ||
| Ultimately, all 18 of those states voted Democratic again in 2012. | ||
| So they won them six straight times. | ||
| In 2016, Trump dislodged Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, or as Tad Devine, the Democratic consultant, calls them, me Pawi, because they're basically one state. | ||
| Trump dislodged all three of them from my conception of the blue wall, and then the dislodged part kind of became the blue wall, right? | ||
| As kind of the center, the centerpiece of presidential politics. | ||
| First of all, these states vote together, the three of them vote together a lot. | ||
| I think I did a story about this. | ||
| I'm going to get this right. | ||
| I think only since 1900, Pennsylvania and Michigan, and possibly since Michigan came into the Union, Pennsylvania and Michigan has diverged like two times. | ||
| Like Hoover, I think they diverged once in Roosevelt and then Carter and Ford. | ||
| Like they vote the same way, like always. | ||
| Wisconsin goes its own way a little more often, like Dukakis won Wisconsin when Bush won the other two. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think since 92, they've gone the same way every time. | |
| Every time. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So 88 was the last time there was any divergence. | ||
| And, you know, and the reason is that they have a lot of similarities. | ||
| They have a lot of working class white voters. | ||
| They have a lot of a mix between urban and rural. | ||
| They've had big manufacturing populations. | ||
| They have diverged more. | ||
| I mean, Pennsylvania is now demographically different than the other two. | ||
| The non-college white share of the vote is further down there, down about 44%, and has more college-educated voters in the suburbs of Philly, which is what allowed Democrats to... | ||
| And in general, the general story of midterms is that they're a little older, a little whiter, and a little more college-educated than the presidential. | ||
| That's very consistent. | ||
| And in the olden days, in the before times, that benefited Democrats because they relied so heavily on younger and non-white voters and Republicans were winning most college graduates. | ||
| Like in the 2010 midterm, Republicans won white college graduates by like 20 points. | ||
| It's like that wasn't that long ago. | ||
| It's hard to imagine that. | ||
| But now, you know, Democrats in the Trump era are winning at least narrow majorities among college whites, more in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. | ||
| So I would say, Kirk, your opinion on it too. | ||
| I mean, I would say those states are slightly more Democratic in an off-year than in a presidential year because the mix between the non-college whites who are trending Republican and the college whites who are trending Democratic tilts a little toward the college side. | ||
| Right, that diploma divide you're talking about, I think, is the biggest piece here, especially for the recent Democratic success in midterm elections and in the off-year elections that we've seen so far here. | ||
| And the blue wall in a midterm, because it is not a presidential one, the only voter group that Harris didn't lose as much ground with was older, whiter, wealthier, college-educated voters. | ||
| Those are the ones who come out into these special elections, into these off-year elections. | ||
| And in fact, in the 42 or so special elections so far this year at state legislature and congressional level, the Democrats on the ticket are outperforming the top of the ticket, so how Harris performed there, by an average of 15 points so far. | ||
| There's a lot of enthusiasm to turn out, at least on the Democratic side right now. | ||
| And if that special election performance is any indication, then I think it is at least a little bit of favorable tailwind for Democrats. | ||
| You know, the striking thing about the Trump era is that even though he has generated enormous turnout among the working class whites, they are still shrinking as a share of the electorate because their share of the voter pool is going down so much. | ||
| So even though turnout is up, you know, turnout is the numerator, right? | ||
| The denominator is how many of them there are. | ||
| And we've seen whatever data source you use, they differ on the absolute level a little, but whether it's Catalyst, AP Votecast, the Exit Polls, or the census, they basically still have non-college whites shrinking about two points as a share of the electorate every four years going back to the 70s. | ||
| Sometimes three, sometimes four, sometimes one. | ||
| It was about two points. | ||
| Catalyst, AP Votecast, and the census all say it was about two points even in 24, two points less. | ||
| The census has it down to 38%. | ||
| The other ones are a little over 40. | ||
| So Trump, you know, Trump navigated his way out of this cul-de-sac by improving among non-college non-whites, blue-collar minority men primarily, but also a massive swing toward them. | ||
|
unidentified
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What's that? | |
| Just a massive swing toward him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And so like we are going to get like a good sense of that in Jersey. | ||
| And that's going to be really important for them in these blue wall states to hold that because college whites are going to be at least as negative on Trump in 26 as they were in 18, I bet. | ||
| And so they are really going to need these blue-collar non-whites to offset that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why don't we jump on that right now, Kirk? | |
| How predictive do you think Virginia and New Jersey will be? | ||
| And what specific areas of Virginia and New Jersey are you looking for for any sort of predictive value there? | ||
| Well, traditionally, these off-year elections, especially after a presidential election, are a referendum on the party in power in the White House. | ||
| You saw that in 2021 in Virginia and New Jersey. | ||
| Now, what's interesting this time around is New Jersey swun pretty heavily toward Trump this last election. | ||
| So it's going to be, to your point, Ron, a great litmus test for how Democrats can perform with these Hispanic voters. | ||
| And specifically in New Jersey, I'm going to be looking at all the counties that are in New Jersey 9. | ||
| That's the old Bill Pascrell district. | ||
| It's now represented by a Democrat, Nellie Poe. | ||
| That is one of the districts that swung the hardest from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024. | ||
| In fact, it was a Biden plus 19 or so district in 2020. | ||
| It was a Trump plus one district then in 2024. | ||
| And those counties are going to be Bergen, Hudson, and Passaic County. | ||
| Those are the ones with large Hispanic populations expanding. | ||
| Those are the ones I'm going to be watching to see how Mikey Sherrill performs in there, a Democratic nominee. | ||
| You know, so the general trend is that midterms are less correlated, I think, than their midterms have always been imperfectly correlated to the presidential. | ||
| They're probably even more disassociated now because in this era of high turnout, you are getting so many more low-propensity voters in the presidential that it's just, you know, you're not really comparing the same thing. | ||
| But the Virginia, New Jersey stuff is pretty well correlated to the midterm, I think, and does give you some pretty good clues to the midterm, if not always to four years from now. | ||
| And I think one of the reasons why you didn't see as much of a Republican performance from 22 after a really strong performance in 21 in those off-year elections was the Roe v. Wade rank over time. | ||
| The abortion ruling. | ||
| You know, if you look at, if you look, so if you're asking what to look at in New Jersey and Virginia, I mean, it really is two buckets. | ||
| It's in 2017, the Republicans faced enormous deficits in the white-collar suburbs. | ||
| Fairfax, Loudon, Prince William, Alexandria, Arlington. | ||
| I think Northam won him by about 250,000 votes, more than double what McAuliffe did four years earlier. | ||
| And that carried through to 18, carried through to 20. | ||
| Biden won those four jurisdictions by 450,000 votes. | ||
| And the same outside the suburbs of Philadelphia. | ||
| And as I said, in the 18 House races, three quarters of the seats Democrats won and more college graduates than average. | ||
| In 21, Democratic performance slipped in those areas, and you saw the kind of gains in the Latino and minority areas of both states that carried through to 24, with Kirk's absolutely right. | ||
| 22 was kind of interrupted. | ||
| It was election interruptus with the Roe v. Wade decision. | ||
| But what you saw in 21, the decline in those white-collar places, Harris in 24, she didn't collapse in those places, but she just kind of dipped. | ||
| Oakland County, Michigan, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, all those kind of places weren't quite as good as they were for Biden in 2020. | ||
| So those are the two things I will be watching. | ||
| I think he's absolutely right. | ||
| You got to watch the, can Republicans replicate what Trump did among non-white voters, especially in New Jersey? | ||
| And then, two, can they avoid the 2017 collapse in the white-collar suburbs? | ||
| Bergen is worth watching on that front too. | ||
| It's a majority college graduate, Fairfax, Loudon. | ||
| I mean, I remember doing an interview with David Pluff after the 24 election, and I asked him when he kind of knew it was going south, and he just said, Louden. | ||
| So. | ||
| That's one of the first ones to report, too. | ||
| Yeah, that's really nice. | ||
| You know, and you're right, because she wasn't getting, you know, given what was happening among minority voters in central cities, slight, you know, a dip, a real movement for Trump. | ||
| And then given the rural thing for Trump, like the only way to win was to do even better than Biden in those white-collar suburbs in the middle, and she wasn't matching him, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| There's been an elephant in the room. | ||
| We've alluded to it a couple times, but the elephant is called redistricting. | ||
| Kirk, and I will say Kirk and the hotline team have done as good a work on redistricting as anybody. | ||
| There's a tab on our site. | ||
| Click it. | ||
| You can see all their coverage. | ||
| Leaving aside for a second the possible implications of the Supreme Court arguments today, give me the redistricting state of play right now. | ||
| How long do I have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not that long. | |
| I just want to say again, on National Journal, we do have a whole section of our website now that's just dedicated to redistricting news because it's just been that flood of information. | ||
| I really want to give a special shout out to James Downs, our House correspondent, who's doing incredible work out there. | ||
| He's doing God's work on it. | ||
| What we're looking at right now is grand scheme of things. | ||
| Texas has redrawn five seats in favor of Republicans. | ||
| It looks like California is going to offset that. | ||
| Prop 50, the referendum to change the district. | ||
| Looks like it's going to pass five seats in favor of Democrats now. | ||
| The White House is putting a lot of pressure now in these other Republican states to kind of shake the couch cushions loose and see how many extra Republican seats they can find here. | ||
| You see it in Missouri, which has eliminated one Democratic seat. | ||
| Kansas looks like it's going to have a special session too to draw out Sharice Davids. | ||
| That's where I grew up outside of Johnson County. | ||
| That one's probably going to be more Republican-leaning. | ||
| There's pressure right now. | ||
| JD Vance, I believe, has taught to the Indiana state delegation three separate times right now. | ||
| There is some resistance there to redrawing. | ||
| I don't know how much longer they'll be able to hold out. | ||
| North Carolina, which I think a few years ago I wrote is a real innovator in the gerrymandering space. | ||
| They have had a new congressional map every election since 2016. | ||
| Now, imagine that. | ||
| A bunch of you folks here are government professionals right now. | ||
| Think about the turnover just in North Carolina alone with a new map every two years. | ||
| And it looks like they'll try to draw the one swing district, Don Davis's seat in North Carolina one, in their favor as well. | ||
| Democrats don't have as much room to work with. | ||
| There's not as much appetite to redraw Illinois from resistance in the Democratic majority congressional delegation. | ||
| And in Maryland, there doesn't seem to be any appetite to draw out Andy Harris on the Eastern Shore here. | ||
| So in this redistricting arms race right now, Republicans are probably going to come out ahead maybe three, four additional seats. | ||
| That's barring the Supreme Court ruling from the arguments that we heard today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Nate Cohn from the New York Times ran the numbers on that this morning, even drew some potential maps. | ||
| He's guessing that should the Supreme Court overturn this section of the Voting Rights Act and all those Republican seats redraw their maps, could mean as many as 12 new seats. | ||
| But there's a lot of ifs there. | ||
| When does the Supreme Court rule, if in fact they rule in these states' favor, and how much time does that give all these state legislatures and governors to redraw the maps in time to print the ballots? | ||
| Which is to say some of this, even if it goes, if everything breaks Republicans' way, some of these states will inevitably have to delay things to 2028. | ||
| If the court doesn't rule until June, the end of their term, all the states might have to delay until 2028. | ||
| The history of John Roberts would suggest that he's not going to wait until June. | ||
| If he has an opportunity to change the electoral playing field, he usually has taken it. | ||
| You know, to Kirk's point, I mean, under the first stage of this redistricting war, Democrats can, it obviously is a new obstacle in that, especially in the context we're talking about when there's so few seats in play, but it's an obstacle that can be overcome. | ||
| I mean, Democrats, I think most estimates are that on the conventional redistricting that we're talking about, Democrats would have to win the House popular vote majority by two to three points to win the 218 seats, and that's very doable. | ||
| I mean, in 2018, they won it by eight points. | ||
| So, but you add in all of these additional seats, and suddenly you're probably in the range, I think that story today estimated, I haven't talked to others, five or six points that you need to win the popular vote by to win the House. | ||
| And you could, but you're not going to do that every time, right? | ||
| And, you know, just one last point on that. | ||
| I mean, the partisan implications are one thing, but just like, think about like the moment where this is happening. | ||
| I mean, we are at a moment where a majority of the under 18 population are people of color. | ||
| By the end of this decade, a majority of everybody under 30 in the country will be non-white. | ||
| A majority of our high school graduates are now non-white. | ||
| We're heading toward a majority of our incoming freshman class in college is non-white. | ||
| And you're basically going to say in a big swath of the country where people of color are 35, 40% of the population, you're going to have no, you could potentially have literally no minority representatives. | ||
| Like, just, I mean, just think about kind of like where that is taking us in terms of the divergence between who we are and who, you know, what our country looks like and who exercises power. | ||
| I mean, that's just not, that does not feel to me like a sustainable long-term model. | ||
| You're going to have, you know, Texas is like 40% white now. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Like 37% or something. | ||
| And who knows? | ||
| I mean, you would have two Latino Republicans in the valley and that would be it. | ||
| Like, I just don't know. | ||
| I mean, Rick Hassan today, the election law lawyer expert, was like, you know, this may be the direction as it's going. | ||
| I wonder if this is going to inspire a new civil rights movement that is different than what we've seen since the 60s. | ||
| Like, because there are, you know, there are questions about beyond the partisan implications, just kind of the representation of a country that is transforming, really truly becoming a, you know, kind of a multicultural, multiracial country. | ||
| And if you divorce the political representation almost entirely from that, you only leave it in blue states, like, how does that work long term? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I want to leave a few minutes for questions. | ||
| We'll get there after this one last question for the panel. | ||
| You've all had your vegetables, and I'll give you your cookies and candy. | ||
| We'll talk 2028. | ||
| I'm going to ask it like this, and we can drill down more if you'd like in the questions. | ||
| On both sides, what are the odds that each party nominates a non-traditional candidate or a non-politician this time around? | ||
| I would probably say higher on the Republican than the Democratic side. | ||
| Democrats tend to be a little bit more institutionalist. | ||
| They tend to reward people who have put in their dues. | ||
| See Joe Biden, see this Asian geritocracy in their leadership class right now. | ||
| I don't see that changing anytime soon. | ||
| I don't think they're going to nominate Mark Cuban anytime soon. | ||
| I don't think Stephen A. Smith is the leader in the clubhouse either. | ||
| I think it is going to be someone who either has, I think it's going to be someone more likely who has gubernatorial experience than just experience in Washington. | ||
| The Republican side, when Trump does step away, there is going to be a massive power vacuum, and I don't know who fills that. | ||
| So, I mean, let's, I mean, we're operating on so many things. | ||
| We're operating on the assumption that American politics and American democracy will continue to function as we have understood it over our lifetime, which I do not think at all is a guarantee. | ||
| There is nothing that I think is off the table at this point, given the willingness, even to the point of enthusiasm of the Republican majorities in Congress and the Republican majority in the Supreme Court to enable Trump as he moves down this road. | ||
| I don't think, I don't rule out them trying to figure out a way to run in 28. | ||
| But assuming that doesn't happen, I think it'd be very hard to beat JD Vance, given that 90% of Republicans approve of Trump's performance. | ||
| And, you know, there doesn't, vice presidents, you know, have a hard time getting elected president, but they can do okay on the nomination. | ||
| I mean, it's hard. | ||
| If you basically are satisfied with the outgoing president, it's harder to construct a case against, you know, no one even, did anyone even run against Nixon in the 60? | ||
| Or, you know, they ultimately ended up with Humphrey and H.W. Bush and Gore. | ||
| It's hard to, you know, it's hard to deny them now. | ||
| You know, if Trump puts his finger on the thumb on the scale, the way Obama did for Hillary over Biden, that's something. | ||
| But short of that, I think he would be the favorite. | ||
| On the Democratic side, you know, we're 10 months into the, nine months into the Trump presidency. | ||
| After four years, Democrats are going to feel like they are living through, you know, kind of a world-class existential threat. | ||
| And so I think by far the dominant issue in the Democratic primary is going to be who can win. | ||
| You know, and there are different theories about how you do that. | ||
| I think that Newsom has won 2025 among the Democratic 28 candidates. | ||
| I think unequivocally. | ||
| I mean, they were all at 3-4-5 at the beginning of the year, and now he's in the 20s in states where he has no intrinsic connection. | ||
| But that doesn't mean he's going to win the nomination in the end. | ||
| I mean, if your primary concern is electability, you will like the way that, as a Democratic voter, you will like the way he's trying to moderate on cultural issues that have hurt the party. | ||
| And you'll be worried about nominating a guy from California and San Francisco who wears really nice suits. | ||
| Shapiro is kind of, and Bashir are kind of like, Shapiro is really running kind of, I think, the opposite end as a likely 28 candidate, where he's mostly staying out of the fight, which I think they believe will allow him to run up the score in 26 in Pennsylvania and make the case: look, we can win if we just hold the 19 states we've been winning and add Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back to the mix. | ||
| We can win one more time that way, and I can do that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Questions? | |
| I'm sure we have some. | ||
| We've got some folks with mics too. | ||
| Hi, thank you. | ||
| Little, I guess, just opinions instead of direct question, but I'm thinking about Texas, the fact that it's a swing state. | ||
| I'm a Texan originally, and that's just kind of a crazy thing to think about. | ||
| You mentioned low population density success for Trump, and then non-white voters success. | ||
| And I'm thinking about non-white religious voters, especially Catholics in Texas. | ||
| Can you just talk about Texas and its potential in the next couple years a little bit more? | ||
| I was just going to say, Texas is Democrats' white whale, and it will be until they catch it. | ||
| I was the House reporter in 2020 when that was the front lines of the battle for the House. | ||
| Democrats invested millions of dollars in flipping these, the seats that you were talking about, Ron, these exurban, suburban seats with a lot of highly college-educated voters in there, growing population, the type of districts where they really ran up the score in 18, and they got blanked. | ||
| They got swept in every single one of those races. | ||
| And we actually just had a reporter, again, to shout out James Downs, down in the Rio Grande Valley right now, which is the only kind of swingy area over there. | ||
| He was in Laredo with Henry Queyar. | ||
| He was down in McAllen in the Vincente Gonzalez district as well. | ||
| And how the Democratic Party tries to peel back the Republican gains with Latino voters, especially, that's going to decide Texas, like more than this redraw that's been going on right now. | ||
| You know, Jeff and I were talking beforehand that it has the makings of what could be a dummy mander by getting the margins just a little bit smaller. | ||
| You know, is this Latino voter shift a permanent feature? | ||
| Is it sticky or is it a rental? | ||
| We'll know a lot more after 26. | ||
| But if Texas is going to be more of a battlefield, it's going to be because Democrats made up that ground with Latino voters. | ||
| Texas has stalled out for Democrats. | ||
| I mean, from 2014, Wendy Davis to 16 with Hillary, then 18 with Betto, and then 20 with Biden, through 18, you saw big improvement in the metros. | ||
| And the Texas Metros were behaving more like metros that we've seen in other places that have become more swing, whether it was Colorado and Virginia and the aughts or Arizona and Georgia more recently. | ||
| But they've kind of stalled out. | ||
| I mean, Biden did win all four metros, four large, the first Democrats since LBJ, Biden in 2020. | ||
| But the whole backlash on immigration and crime and just kind of general perception of leftiness under Biden, I think has really set them back. | ||
| And I think they are not quite starting over, but a long way towards starting over. | ||
| And it doesn't feel like, you know, in 2018 and 2020, in 2018 and 2020, you can imagine a scenario where Democrats were going to compete for it in 24. | ||
| You really could. | ||
| When Clinton got elected, he appointed a guy named John Emerson, who later went on to be Obama's ambassador to Germany, as basically the California ombudsman in the White House. | ||
| Because Clinton winning California in 92 was like a big deal. | ||
| I mean, Republicans had won it six straight going back to 68. | ||
| And he appointed someone to just focus on improving their position in California. | ||
| And I thought Biden, like after 2020, was going to do something like, could have done something like that in Texas. | ||
| And instead, the opposite happened. | ||
| They lost ground. | ||
| They lost a lot of ground. | ||
| And I think, you know, even after 20, even in 22, an incredible percentage of pro-choice voters voted for Abbott after they passed the restrictive abortion because they were just recoiling from Democrats on so many other things. | ||
| So I think they got a long way to go in Texas. | ||
| And one of the things that's probably going to help with that is if the Republicans nominate Ken Paxton and the Senate right there. | ||
| That could be competitive. | ||
| Yeah, if that we're doing our power rankings right now, we're updating our power rankings on the House, Senate, and Gov race is most likely to flip. | ||
| And the one consistent thing that we've seen throughout this entire reporting process is the elephant in the room is a Patston nomination in Texas because that could have down ballot implications as well. | ||
| Maybe even like a Fed, the governor's race as well. | ||
| We're going to publish all those actually the, I believe the first week in November, we're doing a big special edition election preview one year out. | ||
| I think there's QR codes throughout the room to update on that. | ||
| But I'm really excited that we're working on that, but Paxton is kind of the big X factor there. | ||
| In the nightmare scenarios for democracy, Texas seems the place most possible where if there is a narrow Democratic win and Trump pressures the governor not to certify it, the state not to certify it in the Senate race. | ||
| Not hard to imagine. | ||
| If somebody beats Paxton, they're going to beat him by an eyelash if he's the nominee. | ||
| They're not going to be Corny, but if Paxton's the nominee, as you say, and they have a chance of beating him, it will be by an eyelash. | ||
| And then I bet we are looking at like a big crisis in Texas. | ||
| Because I think Abbott has shown that there is probably nothing he's going to say no to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yep, back there. | ||
| Great presentation. | ||
| There's three other states you haven't talked about, and that would be Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia that are marginals. | ||
| Talk about where those are headed both to the midterms and 2026. | ||
| So, you know, as I said, as I mentioned, you know, if Democrats in 2028 win the 19 states that have voted for them in each of the last four elections and restore Michigan, Pennsylvania, it's just part of the new blue wall. | ||
| There's like a new blue wall developing. | ||
| And you restore Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin to that, you get to 270 exactly. | ||
| But that will not be true in 2032. | ||
| In 2032, the Democratic states lose enough votes that you have to add something else. | ||
| And those are the three states, you would basically have to win one of those three, plus Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. | ||
| And, you know, look, the long-term trend is that Democrats are improving in the white-collar suburbs of those states as they have been earlier in Colorado and Virginia and before that in the 90s, New Jersey, California, and Illinois, which were all Republican states back in the 80s and 70s. | ||
| I mean, basically, over the last 30 years, as states, as Democrats have become more competitive states, the same two things have happened. | ||
| More white college graduates are voting Democratic and the minority population is growing. | ||
| So in 24, both of those things kind of fell apart. | ||
| Like the college graduates did not collapse, but they slightly ebbed back because they were pissed off about inflation also. | ||
| And then Trump kind of picked the lock on blue-collar minorities. | ||
| So whether Republicans can sustain that is a real open question. | ||
| I think the answer is it's not going to go back to where it was under Obama for Democrats, but it's not guaranteed to stay as high as it was for Trump in 24. | ||
| And I think Democrats are going to be in a position where they are capable of winning statewide presidential governor in all three of those states, but hardly guaranteed to do so. | ||
| And the key will be both restoring the suburban margins and pushing back a little at the inroads that Trump made among non-college non-whites. | ||
| By the way, again, on that point, on the non-college non-whites, Trump won about a quarter of them in 2020. | ||
| based on all of the various exit polls. | ||
| In 24, the vote cast and the exit poll gave him 35% of them. | ||
| And Pew, which recently ran the numbers for me, they never published them before, and the validated voters gave him 39% of non-college non-whites. | ||
| His approval rating among non-college non-whites is now back to 25 or 26 in everything. | ||
| New York Times, Siena, Washington Post, Ipsos. | ||
| That's where he is. | ||
| So he was somewhere between 35 and 39% of the vote in 24. | ||
| His approval is now 25, 26, lower on the economy. | ||
| Immigration is starting to chafe at some of his Hispanic support, you know, deportation. | ||
| I don't think Republicans are going to match that height in 26. | ||
| But that doesn't necessarily tell you what's going to happen in 28, since most of the games were among low-propensity voters who aren't likely to vote at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think the big variable there is whether those voters stay home or whether they vote Democrat. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Any more hands? | ||
| Back of the room. | ||
| What are some under-the-radar Senate races we should watch in the next year? | ||
| I think one of the most interesting ones, again, we're doing these power rankings right now, and the two that really come up a lot are Iowa and potentially Kansas. | ||
| Not necessarily areas that you would expect Democrats to compete in. | ||
| Iowa has a very competitive open governor's race right now and now is an open Senate race as well after Joni Ernst retired. | ||
| Kansas could get interesting, especially after this week's developments on the redistricting front. | ||
| Sharice Davids, who is the lone Democrat, has been threatening to run statewide as well. | ||
| I don't think she would necessarily beat Roger Marshall. | ||
| But if Texas doesn't happen, like if Patsy doesn't get the nomination there, Democrats are going to be looking for another race to try to get that magic fourth flip to flip the Senate. | ||
| Watch for Kansas and Iowa, especially these next few weeks here. | ||
| You know, I go through my schizophrenia, like, you know, on door number one, just kind of conventional political analysis, like what races we should be focusing on. | ||
| Door number two is, does the election look anything like all the other elections in American history? | ||
| Like, you know, like in scenarios, like to consider, there is that possibility, that it will be something completely different with ICE and National Guard troops routinely outside of polling places in Democratic cities, you know, which probably wouldn't affect the House that much, but could affect the Senate. | ||
| The Justice Department suing states to require voter purges. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of stuff that can happen that would take us into very different places where, you know, our assumption that the normal forces of politics, the president's approval rating, the state of the economy, the quality of the candidates, the amount of spending are going to be the decisive factors. | ||
| And I'd still on balance bet that is the case. | ||
| But there is another scenario where we're dealing with a whole different set of challenges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan Osborne is another one I'd point to in Nebraska, Osborne. | |
| Dead door number one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dean door number one. | |
| Indoor number one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Osborne polled ahead of Deb Fisher for a good chunk of last year. | ||
| He ran as an independent. | ||
| Fisher ended up winning by eight or nine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This time he's running against Pete Ricketts, the former governor who was appointed. | ||
| Ricketts is not going to get caught with his guard down, but it's a very different environment right now. | ||
| Osborne could have some wind at his back this time as opposed to running in what looked to be a neutral or at least Republican, slightly Republican-leaning environment last time around. | ||
| So that's another one I'm looking at. | ||
| That's a state where, like, do I expect Osborne to win? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| But it's one of those where all of a sudden it could scare the Republicans, the NRSC, into spending several million dollars that they didn't have to spend or didn't think they would have to spend in a state like that. | ||
| And if you want to talk more Senate races, I think Nicholas Anastasio, our Senate correspondent, is in the back somewhere right now. | ||
| Please pin him down. | ||
| He'll talk your ear off about Senate races. | ||
| We do all the time. | ||
| What's the most likely third? | ||
| If it's Cooper, if it's North Carolina and Collins, what would you say is the most likely third seat for Democrats? | ||
| I would probably say it has to be Texas at that point. | ||
| More than Iowa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But we're also betting they're going to hold Georgia and hold Michigan in that scenario. | |
| No bargaining. | ||
| All things being equal, which is, again, an open seat in Michigan and the Georgia race is going to be very tough. | ||
| Democrats dodged a bullet there with Brian Tebb not running there. | ||
| But I think whoever's going to emerge from that Republican primary is going to be well-funded, ready to rot. | ||
| I think it would be Texas, but a lot of things have to fall into place. | ||
| You know, in 2018, Trump was under 50 in Arizona and Colorado where Democrats won. | ||
| He was over 50 in his approval in North Dakota, Indiana, Florida, and Missouri, where Republicans won. | ||
| Now, Manchin, Sherrod Brown, and Tester survived in states where he was over 50. | ||
| But it is entirely possible that Trump could sink Republicans in Michigan and Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine, but help them in North Carolina and Georgia. | ||
| Like both things come true at the same time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Other questions? | ||
| In the back? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Any thoughts on the Ohio race? | ||
| I feel like we maybe didn't talk about that one at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just to Sherrod Brown have a shot. | |
| It's going to be tough. | ||
| It's going to be very difficult for Sherrod Brown right now. | ||
| You know, we're doing, he, John Houston, is the appointed one. | ||
| He hasn't won an election yet. | ||
| He's the former lieutenant governor. | ||
| It's just Ohio is just going to be really tough right now. | ||
| And it doesn't look like Brown's going to raise money. | ||
| He's going to get some enthusiasm up. | ||
| But just today, you saw another union group who backed Brown throughout his entire tenure in Ohio politics, endorse the Republican there. | ||
| I think you're going to see that a lot more. | ||
| You know, George Condon is here right now, our resident Ohio expert. | ||
| He can talk to you a little bit more intelligently than I can about the particulars of Ohio politics. | ||
| But the only thing that I think might help out is if the pro-crypto money doesn't necessarily come in here, there might be some indication that it might not be coming in as forcefully against him this time around. | ||
| I don't know for sure, though. | ||
| That could change on a dime here. | ||
| It's just not going to be the same level of marquee race that it was last year because he's no longer an incumbent. | ||
| And there's a lot more cheaper pickup opportunities like a Kansas and Iowa. | ||
| If Mary Peltola decides to run in Alaska against Dan Sullivan, that's a race I can see people getting invested in. | ||
| But that Ohio race is just going to be so difficult because it's all those trends that Ron has been talking about are against the Democrats are happening in Ohio. | ||
| Yeah, I mean you would need the college white-collar suburban backlash against Trump to be even more intense than it was in 2018, which is not inconceivable, you know, but you need Franklin County and places like that to really deliver. | ||
| You kind of need the map of the abortion referenda a few years ago is what he needs, where you had huge turnout and huge margins. | ||
| And even in the Republic, I mean, even in the Republican suburbs like outside, was it Delaware County outside of Cincinnati? | ||
| You know, that's what you need because the rural thing is going to be the white, small town, blue-collar is going to be really powerful for the Republicans. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, folks, thanks everyone for joining us. | |
| The bar will remain open. | ||
| And the good political minds around the room will also remain open for your further conversations. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| Thank you, y'all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Coming up on today's edition of C-SPAN's Washington Journal, we'll talk about the impacts and political ramifications of the government shutdown. | |
| First up, Marjorie Connolly from the Associated Press talks about new polling on the matter. | ||
| Later, we'll talk about the situation with a pair of former congressmen, Virginia Republican Tom Davis and New York Democrat Steve Israel. | ||
| And senior advisor of the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group, Brian Finnecan, discusses recent actions by the Trump administration using the U.S. military to combat the drug trade. | ||
| Washington Journal, live today and every day, starting at 7 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN. | ||
| Congress returns in the week ahead with the federal government still shut down. | ||
| House Republican leaders have canceled votes for a fifth week, awaiting Senate approval of short-term funding to reopen the government. | ||
| Only brief sessions will be held returning on Tuesday, with most members back in their districts unless instructed to return with 48 hours notice. | ||
| The Senate gavels in on Monday at 3 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Lawmakers will be voting for the 11th time to advance short-term government funding legislation by Republicans to reopen the government. | ||
| Senators will also vote on several of President Trump's judicial nominations for U.S. district courts. | ||
| Watch live coverage of the House on C-SPAN, see the Senate on C-SPAN2. | ||
| And all of our congressional coverage is available on our free video app, C-SPAN Now, and on our website, c-span.org. | ||
| This weekend, it's the debut of C-SPAN's new series, America's Book Club, which will feature interviews with some of the country's most influential authors at some of the nation's most iconic libraries. | ||
| For our first episode, we'll hear from best-selling author John Grisham, who's known for his legal thrillers. | ||
| That's on C-SPAN today at 6 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. | ||
| And ahead of the premiere, we spoke with the host of America's Book Club, David Rubinstein, to learn more about the series and what viewers can expect. | ||
| We're joined at the Library of Congress by David Rubinstein, a businessman, a philanthropist, owner of a major league baseball team. | ||
| Why did you want to add host of America's book club to your resume? | ||
| Well, reading books has always been important to me. | ||
| As a young boy in Baltimore, my parents were blue-collar workers. | ||
| They really couldn't afford to buy a lot of books, so they took me to the local library, and every week I could take out 12 books, and I would take out the 12 books, and I would read them that day, and I had to wait another week before I could take out another 12 books. | ||
| And I always loved reading books, and it was something that inspired me to really move forward in my life by reading. | ||
| And I always thought that if you read, you learn more, and you can become a better person by it. | ||
| So while I can do many things better than I've done, one of the things I'm proud of what I've done is reading a lot and meeting a lot of authors and also trying to read as many books as I can every week. | ||
| I carry a lot of books with me and I'm always trying to read two or three at the same time. | ||
| One of the ways I've learned how to do this is I now have a number of programs where I interview authors. | ||
| So I have to read the book to interview the author. | ||
| I don't like to hear about a book from somebody else. | ||
| I like to read the book myself and then interview the author. | ||
| And I found these to be really intellectually inspiring kinds of events when you interview an author and they can tell you why they wrote this book and why they enjoyed this or why they enjoyed writing it that way. | ||
| And so to me, it's very enjoyable. | ||
| It's a good way for me to keep my brain fresh by reading books and then interviewing the authors. | ||
| There's a lot of author interview programs out there. | ||
| What's going to be different about America's Book Club? | ||
| Well we're going to interview the greatest authors in our country. | ||
| That's one thing. | ||
| Secondly, we're going to do it from great places like the Library of Congress, which hopefully will inspire people to want to visit these sites as well because the libraries in our country today are very important places where people who can't afford to buy books can go and borrow books. | ||
| And you can do that at many libraries around the country. | ||
| Hopefully people will also want to come to the Library of Congress where you can't really borrow books, but you can see the greatest books that any country's ever accumulated in one place. | ||
| So it's a great site, as are other great libraries that we'll be doing the show from. | ||
| What makes a good author interview? | ||
| An author who is very self-I'd say introspective. | ||
| An author is willing to be frank. | ||
| If an author is not willing to be frank, that's not good. | ||
| Sometimes authors are very good at writing books and not good about talking about their books. | ||
| So I can learn pretty quickly if somebody really is a good talker as well as a good writer. | ||
| Some authors are really great writers, not great talkers. | ||
| Some authors are great talkers and great writers. | ||
| Doris Kearns-Goodwin is so enthusiastic when she talks about books, you just can't wait to read her books. | ||
| The same was true of David McCullough. | ||
| When you talk to David McCullough, you just couldn't wait to read the books that he's talking about. | ||
| So some authors are great at that, and I hope to bring out some of that when the authors I interview with this program. | ||
| You're going to interview authors that have a lot of bestsellers, Stacey Schiff, Walter Isaacson. | ||
| John Grisham has written more than 50 books. | ||
| How do you figure out which book to focus on or what topic to focus on with that kind of author? | ||
| When you have an author like John Grisham, he's written so many books, you can't do 50 books in one interview, but take the best-known books, and the ones that I'll focus on are the ones that he's probably best known for. | ||
| And authors, we're going to talk about their best-known books, certainly. | ||
| So Walter Isaacson is a good example. | ||
| He's written a lot of books on geniuses. | ||
| And these are books, all of which I think are great. | ||
| I've interviewed him about them before, but now what I hope to do is kind of bring them all together and interview him about all of his books in one interview about all the geniuses he's written about. | ||
| Where are we right now? | ||
| What's this place? | ||
| We're at the main reading room of the Library of Congress. | ||
| The Library of Congress building that we're at now was built in the late 1800s because the Library of Congress originally was in the library, was in the Congress of the United States. | ||
| When the Library of Congress was set up in 1800, it was really designed to help Congress, and so it was called the Library of Congress. | ||
| And the Library of Congress was in the Capitol building. | ||
| When the British came in 1814, they burned down the Capitol. | ||
| They therefore also burned down the Library of Congress. | ||
| Thomas Jefferson then sold his collection of books to the Library of Congress, and that became the basis for the Library of Congress's collection. | ||
| Unfortunately, that collection was burned apart to some extent as well. | ||
| But now the library has rebuilt large parts of that, and now the library has the most books and the most materials of any library in the world. | ||
| This is the main reading room where anybody can come in and sit and read and do research. | ||
| So it's as impressive a single room in any library I've seen in the world. | ||
| It's an incredible site. | ||
| On the wall, there's a lot of quotes in the great hall of the Library of Congress. | ||
| One of them is by Thomas Carlisle, the Scottish historian. | ||
| The quote is, In books lies the soul of the whole past time. | ||
| What does that mean to you? | ||
| Well, in books, when you read books and you learn how to think differently, you learn about the past. | ||
| You learn about what made an author inspired to write that book. | ||
| So I think people can live past the world in which they are by reading books. | ||
| In other words, today you might be in a certain situation. | ||
| You might not be that happy with your life or you may be very happy with your life, but you can transform what your life is all about by reading either fiction or nonfiction and be inspired to learn more about what other people have done and how other people have grown. | ||
| So I think that one of the most important things people can do is to read. | ||
| You can't read too much, but also increasingly, increasingly, what we're finding is that people read very little compared to what they used to do. | ||
| A new study has come out that showed that people are reading less than they used to. | ||
| And also people, when they read, they think reading an email is reading, it's really not quite the same as reading a book. | ||
| So what I want to do is not inspire people just to read because you can read emails, you can read memos all the time. | ||
| But when you read a book, you focus your brain. | ||
| It takes hours to get through a book. | ||
| And that's why I think it's important to focus on books. | ||
| I'm not having a show on how to read emails or how to, you know, read tweets. | ||
| That's maybe a different skill set. | ||
| I think it's important to read books because it focuses the brain. | ||
| You have to spend hours and hours doing it. | ||
| And I think you become a better person by doing that. | ||
| A lot of great authors ahead on this series, a lot of great places and locations ahead. | ||
| When it's all over, what will you consider success for this series? | ||
| Well, success is getting people to talk about it and say, look, I just saw this author. | ||
| I want to read that author's books, but I also want to read other books by great authors. | ||
| So the success is measured by whether people not only watch the show, but also they're reading more. | ||
| And what I want to do is get people to talk about reading. | ||
| We have at the Library of Congress has a national book festival every year, but there are festivals for books all over the country. | ||
| I want to get more people to go to these festivals, learn about how to meet authors, talk to the authors, get their autographs if you're inclined to do that, but also be inspired to teach your children how to read as well. | ||
| Most children learn more about how to read from their parents than from any other mechanism. | ||
| And so when parents aren't teaching their own children how to read, aren't reading to them, that's not a good sign. | ||
| Encouraging people to learn how to read and also encourage their children to read is important. | ||
| Sadly, in the United States today, roughly 14%, 14% of American adults are functionally illiterate, which means they can't read past the fourth grade level. | ||
| If you can't read past the fourth grade level, your chance of succeeding in life is very diminished. | ||
| A large percentage of people in federal prisons and juvenile delinquency courts are functionally illiterate. | ||
| I think roughly two-thirds of the people in the federal prison system today are functionally illiterate. | ||
| So what I want to do is get people at a young age to be inspired to read more, and hopefully parents will be inspired to teach their children to read. | ||
| The series is America's Book Club. | ||
| The host is David Rubinstein. | ||
| Thanks for your time. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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Today, watch the premiere of C-SPAN's bold new original series, America's Book Club, with our guest, John Grisham, former politician, lawyer, and best-selling author, whose books including A Time to Kill, The Firm, and The Pelican Brief. | |
| He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader, David Rubinstein. | ||
| We just sold filmmasters the firm to Paramount for more money than I've made in 10 years of practice in law. | ||
| After you heard that, how long after that did you quit the practice alone? | ||
| 15 minutes. | ||
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Watch America's Book Club with John Grisham today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN. | |
| The names are almost all known nationally. | ||
| Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, Al Sharpton, Larry Kramer, and Donald Trump. | ||
| These are people who were first in the news in the 1980s. | ||
| Their early public lives are now featured in Jonathan Mahler's book, The Gods of New York. | ||
| The book is divided into four large chapters, titled 1986, 87, 1988, 1989. | ||
| Mr. Mahler, a feature writer for the New York Times magazine, closes his book with this last paragraph. | ||
| The existential questions that New York faced as it entered 1986 were answered. | ||
| The great working-class city was gone, and so was any realistic expectation that it might ever be bound by a single culture. | ||
| Rich, poor, very rich, very poor, for better and for worse, everyone would now live in their own New York. | ||
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Author Jonathan Mahler, with his book, The Gods of New York: Egoists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986 to 1990, on this episode of Book Notes Plus, with our host, Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app. | ||
| Sitting Virginia Attorney General Jason Mayaras, a Republican, participated in a debate with his Democratic challenger, Jay Jones, hosted by the University of Richmond in the state's capital city. | ||
| Good evening. | ||
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Good evening, and welcome to tonight's debate between the candidates for the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia. |