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A blue undertow undermined the predicted Red Wave, Maricopa County voting machines create problems (again), and Ron DeSantis elevates his 2024 chances.
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While the Georgia Senate race remains neck and neck, potentially heads to a runoff, and Arizona continues to make a mockery of our electoral process, the rest of the country has finished selecting its politicians for this cycle.
The night seems like I hope it will technically be a win for Republicans, sort of actually remains to be seen.
Either way, even if Republicans do take the House, even if Republicans do take the Senate, given the lofty ambitions of the GOP, the modest pickups have felt more like a loss.
But we won't be talking about that for very long, because even though the Maricopa County voting machines haven't even cooled off yet, the GOP has already moved on to the race for 2024.
The election is dead.
Long live the election.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Aaron Levitt, who says, The Dems are telling us that they have managed us so well that we, the richest country in the world, can now afford canned pasta.
Yes, not a great election pitch, and yet the Dems did pretty well, though the man who made that claim...
The man who advised people who are struggling in Biden's economy to just go eat Chef Boyardee.
That guy did lose his job last night.
And we'll get to that because I'm very excited about that race.
There's still some big wins.
There's still some great stories from election night.
But it was not the total bloodbath that a lot of people had been expecting.
And that means that you're going to still have more Democrat control over the country than we had hoped for.
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So there was good news last night.
There was.
I don't want to be one of these conservatives who is just constantly catastrophizing everything and saying that the sky is falling down.
There was good news.
J.D. Vance beats Tim Ryan in Ohio.
An important Senate seat.
This race had been kind of close.
J.D. Vance is a new right kind of candidate.
He's a candidate who's running not just on the old tired, you know, We're good to go.
Kind of Trumpy, kind of populist, kind of nationalist, kind of whatever-ist you want to call it.
Not the old rhino establishment kind of campaign.
And that was a big win, because Tim Ryan, the Democrat, had positioned himself as a working man's Democrat.
You know, I'm not one of these latte-sipping liberals.
I'm a blue-collar kind of Democrat.
And it was completely disingenuous coming from Tim Ryan, but the pitch seemed to be kind of working on the campaign trail.
Okay, J.D. wins in Ohio.
They say, as goes Ohio, so goes the nation.
So that was good stuff.
Bad news, we just got out of Michigan.
Whitmer, this awful leftist governor in Michigan, she beat Tudor Dixon, who had made a real play for Michigan.
Seemed like a decent Republican candidate, but just could not go the distance.
So, Democrats win there.
Kathy Hochul in New York beats Lee Zeldin, the Republican.
I don't want to beat up on Lee Zeldin too much.
Lee Zeldin ran a New York Republican kind of campaign.
He's not some rock-ribbed right-wing conservative.
But he put up the most credible campaign, the most credible threat to Democrat power in New York since George Pataki.
It was a really impressive campaign.
He got pretty close.
He lost in the end.
Kathy Hochul wins.
The Democrats win.
Too bad.
The big race that people are looking at is Herschel Walker versus Raphael Warnock.
Right now that is in a complete dead heat.
Neither candidate, as of some minutes before the show began today, neither candidate had over 50%, which means that that race is likely headed to a runoff.
It's a little frustrating, too, because the Libertarian candidate there did act as a spoiler.
And even just the 1% to 2% that the Libertarian candidate got would be enough to have put Herschel Walker over the line.
But Herschel Walker had problems as a candidate, so could be headed to a runoff.
If that race goes to a runoff, probably doesn't bode very well for Herschel Walker, because Herschel Walker was riding, I think he hoped, national political headwinds for the Republicans and was riding on Governor Kemp's coattails.
Governor Brian Kemp won, so that's an important race.
But for Herschel, if it's just him, just versus Warnock, knowing also that Democrats are much better at runoff-type races, that's not great news.
I mentioned Brian Kemp.
This was fabulous news.
So Brian Kemp absolutely destroys the...
Governor pretender in exile, Stacey Abrams, the president of the universe according to Star Trek.
Stacey Abrams has never really conceded her gubernatorial loss in 2018.
And she just got completely destroyed with facts and logic and votes last night.
It was so bad that she had to concede.
This is a woman who a lot of us thought...
Maybe she just won't concede.
She still hasn't conceded her race from four years ago.
Well, she had to concede this time.
It was just so bad.
He beat her 53.5% to 45.8%.
So you can't really claim voter fraud in that kind of a race, especially when the Democrat loses and the Democrats are the ones who are known for their shenanigans.
So she lost and she's conceded.
And then another totally satisfying race.
This was so delicious.
This was so delectable.
Beto O'Rourke just got BTFO'd.
I mean, just got absolutely blown out of the water.
And the race was 55.6% to 43.1%.
Devastating.
Republicans are just being absolutely merciless in their mockery of him, which we will get to a little bit later on in the show.
But really, really good news there.
And then there were just some losses.
And one of the most painful losses for a lot of people, I think, is the Pennsylvania Senate race.
Dr.
Oz loses to John Fetterman.
Here's Fetterman's victory speech.
Yeah, I'm not really sure really what to say right now.
My goodness.
- Yeah.
I am a...
- I'm your winner! - Yeah.
- Say it again, say it again.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- You're in the class.
- You did it! - Yeah, I mean, So, I am...
I'm so humbled.
Thank you so much, really.
Thank you.
John Fetterman, I am not really sure what to say right now.
Truer words have never been spoken by a victorious Senate candidate.
Now, this one did not surprise me.
This surprised a lot of Republicans.
It didn't surprise me.
I was predicting Fetterman would win going into the election.
That's because, well, one, it's because Philadelphia is known for some shenanigans, especially in close races.
But even more than that, because Dr.
Oz was a terrible candidate, and I've made no bones about that fact.
I think he's just awful.
I think he's a total loser.
And so I'm not surprised that he lost.
And it was unfortunate that he was the nominee.
And then he lost to a man who had an absolutely horrible record, no professional accomplishments in his life, a radical vision for the country, and brain damage such that he couldn't even really campaign.
Nevertheless, he won.
And that's a real gut punch for Republicans.
Now, again, I don't think the fact that Republicans lost to a guy with brain damage, as is the headline right now, I don't think that's actually the big issue here.
Okay, because if it were me, if I were a Pennsylvania voter, and it were reversed, and it was the Republican who had had some health problem, and he wasn't really functioning, and he wasn't on the campaign trail, versus some articulate Democrat, I would still vote for the Republican.
I don't really care.
I want the Senate majority.
I want a guy who's going to reliably vote for the right stuff.
And so I'm not really surprised by all that.
The health issue doesn't bug me nearly as much as his just insane policy agenda.
Now, I mentioned this question of fraud and irregularities and shenanigans and all of that.
all of that.
I don't think Republicans can blame these losses on voter fraud because we did get most of the results last night relatively quickly.
Now, you might still say there's a big problem with widespread mail-in voting.
I do think that's a problem.
I do think that's open to abuse.
I do think there's a problem with ballot harvesting.
I do think there's a problem with early voting.
I think all of these things are absolutely awful and have no place in a stable, sacred democracy that we are supposed to be.
And I do think it opens up the possibility of fraud.
That's not my crazy conspiratorial view.
That's the view of Barack Obama.
That's the view of basically everybody with two brain cells to rub together.
So yeah, that's all a problem.
But we did get most of the results last night.
And so there are other problems.
There are other political problems.
Why did the Republicans not do nearly as well as we were supposed to?
We'll get into that.
In terms of the places where fraud really may have been a problem, the top of that list is Maricopa County.
Maricopa County, early in the day, we're talking about a county that had problems in 2020, in a state that was hotly contested in 2020.
There were lots of questions about voter integrity.
And early in the day, one-fifth of the voting machines in Maricopa County malfunctioned.
Here's a poll worker explaining what happened.
So I pulled my ballot, so it didn't, it got misread, but then what was happening?
Put it in there.
Yeah.
And tonight, a Republican and a Democrat will sit and go through all of the misread ballots all over the county and count them.
And it will get counted.
Okay.
And both machines were not working yet.
No, nothing's working in the last half hour.
Nothing.
Thank you.
Nothing's working for the last half hour.
Sounds like the people who, not that nice sounding lady, but the people who set up those machines, the people whose only job it was to run that election, sounds like probably Arizona should have hired some better people for that.
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Lots of problems in Maricopa County.
Some of the poll workers made it sound even dodgier.
Take a listen.
So what happens is we have two tabulators.
One of the tabulators is not working, okay?
The other tabulator is taking about 75% successful.
So 25% of them are being misread, and it could be a printer issue.
Or it could be the tabulator itself.
So when it's misread, you have an option to put it into what's called box 3, and it gets read.
Whether it goes downtown and gets read manually, or whether it gets refed into our tabulator.
You don't want to adjudicate.
You get read.
No.
Okay?
So no one's trying to deceive anyway.
Of course not.
Not on election day.
That would never happen, right?
No.
That would never happen.
So, so choices are...
Can I ask you a question?
Sure.
Can I get up there and that happens to my ballot, can I take my ballot with me and go somewhere else?
No, no way.
So you hear this poll worker and he says, listen, yeah, it's true, a huge number of these voting machines just don't work for some reason in this hotly contested county, in a swing state, in a oopsie-daisy, but no one's trying to deceive anyone.
And you hear the guy filming, he says, oh yeah, right.
Yeah, no one's ever trying to deceive anyone on election day.
Which, which...
Brings me to this question of election denial and questioning the integrity of our elections.
There has been this ironic attack from Democrats since 2020.
The attack of the election denier.
You're an election denier.
And they use that phrase because it reminds people of Holocaust denier.
The event denier formula is meant to direct your attention to Holocaust denier.
That's why they sometimes do it with climate denier as well.
And so it's just a disgusting sort of a smear.
And it's ironic of course because Democrats have been denying elections a lot longer and in much greater numbers than the Republicans have.
But Now, are we really to believe that there are no questions ever on Election Day, that no one ever tries to deceive anyone on Election Day?
What are you talking about?
Everyone is trying to deceive everyone on Election Day.
That's why we have poll watchers.
That's why we had such serious rules in place to prevent this kind of stuff from happening.
The conspiracy theory is not election denial.
The conspiracy theory is election denial denial or election fraud denial.
That's the conspiracy theory because there has been fraud, there have been shenanigans in every election going back at least to Pericles and probably much further back than that.
That's why we need rules in place to prevent this sort of stuff from happening.
You hear the guys come out who are in charge of this.
In Maricopa County.
And they just sound absolutely feckless.
They say, yeah, there's some problems, but don't worry, we're working on it.
We had all 223 vote centers have opened.
We've already had over 45,000 people who have checked in and already voted today.
We did want to come out and discuss one issue that's going on out there in about 20% of the vote centers.
Again, we have 223 vote centers across the county.
In about 20% of those, when people will go and they try and run the ballot through this tabulator, maybe one out of every five or so of those ballots, they're not going through.
So it's, yeah, it's, you know, it's not, look, everything's going great, it's just that one out of five votes are not being counted properly.
So what's the solution to that?
The solution, as this guy explains, and it's funny, his name is Bill Gates.
I assume no relation, but for those who are a little more skeptical of the established powers that be, that's kind of a funny coincidence.
Lots of coincidences.
And so, anyway, this guy says, okay, if your ballot's not being printed or being processed correctly, then here you go, just put it in this random box.
We've got about 20% of the locations out there where there's an issue with the tabulator where some of the ballots, after people have voted them, they try and run them through the tabulator and they're not going through.
But the good thing is, first of all, we're trying to fix this problem as quickly as possible and we also have a redundancy in place.
If you can't put the ballot in the tabulator, then you can simply place it here, where you see the number 3, and this is a secure box where those ballots will be kept for later this evening, where we'll bring them in here to Central Count to tabulate them.
So this will function much like early voting functions.
And there we go.
I bet it will.
I bet it will.
This will function, this redundancy that's in place for 20%, what an implausibly high number of the ballots in Maricopa County, this will function largely as early voting.
Right, I'm sure it will.
And the reason that Republicans are crying foul over this is because early voting, one, is more open to fraud than same-day voting, than proper, register, get-the-count-by-end-of-the-night voting.
And because mail-in voting and early voting both favor Democrats.
So...
I have no doubt that that's how the redundancy would function, but that's a big problem.
Carrie Lake, who was looking great, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, she was looking great early yesterday, and now it's very unclear if she will win.
Carrie Lake decided to go vote in a liberal precinct.
She said no problems there.
We switched from a Republican area to vote.
We came right down into the heart of liberal Phoenix to vote because we wanted to make sure that we had good machines.
And guess what?
They've had zero problems with their machines today.
Not one machine spit out a ballot here today.
Not one.
In a very liberal area.
So we were right to come and vote in a liberal area.
They gotta fix this problem.
This is incompetency.
I hope it's not malice.
But we're gonna fix it.
We're gonna win.
And when we win, there's gonna be a come to Jesus for elections in Arizona.
There's gonna be a come to Jesus.
So I hope Carrie Lake wins, but the point she's raising here is, yeah, it's one in five poll centers, poll machines in Maricopa County, but it's not evenly distributed.
Her claim, at least, again, we don't know, we're kind of in the fog of war on this election night, but her claim is that the liberal precincts did not have the problems.
It was the conservative precincts that did.
Which would explain how Maricopa County, which is pretty liberal, would be the epicenter of some of these problems.
Well, yeah, if it's only affecting the conservative precincts, not the liberal ones, again, that's an if based on what Carrie Lake is saying, then that seems a little strange.
One place where there was no ambiguity, this was the bright spot of the night, Ron DeSantis absolutely destroyed in Florida.
He destroyed his opponent.
Charlie Crist.
Ron DeSantis won re-election 59.4% to 39.9%.
Ron DeSantis barely won his first election as governor of Florida.
He absolutely crushed it in his re-election.
Why did that happen?
Well, in part, let's not forget he did tighten up election laws.
I don't think that's the chief reason.
That's part of it.
Because he's been a great governor of Florida, and everybody loves the guy down there.
And he just led the way in the nation, especially among the governors, on COVID and on education and on dealing with woke corporations.
And he's just been a fabulous, fabulous governor.
And so as a result of this last night...
Ron DeSantis has a very credible case to run against Donald Trump for president.
Going into last night, a lot of people would not have said that.
They would have said Donald Trump is so far up in the polls, it's 70% plus.
DeSantis is somewhere around 10%.
It's just, if Trump decides he's running, he clears the field.
No one can credibly run against him.
After last night, especially where a lot of Trump-endorsed candidates did not do very well, for whatever reason, and Ron DeSantis not only destroyed in his reelection campaign, but really brought Florida very firmly into the Republican camp, Ron DeSantis now could very credibly but really brought Florida very firmly into the Republican camp, Ron DeSantis now could very credibly come out, even if Donald Trump announces that And it's, I think, unclear that he will do that.
He had implied that he would do that, but after last night, after the Republicans did not do nearly as well as we thought we would, it's unclear if he will do that.
But even if he does, Ron DeSantis, I think, could announce a run against him.
And he could have a very serious campaign.
And if Ron DeSantis runs on his record, runs on the election wins in Florida, runs on the underperformance of the Republicans nationally, particularly some of the Trump-endorsed candidates, that's a good case.
Now, there's one candidate in Florida who is a Senate candidate there, Republican, who Trump did not endorse, who Ron DeSantis did endorse, and that candidate lost.
So some people are going to say, well, look, it's not just that Trump's endorsements weren't that great, but DeSantis' endorsements nationwide, that one guy didn't do that well.
And on the rest, DeSantis and Trump were basically agreed.
Okay, yeah, I just think that gets wiped away when you look at the massive shift of voters to the Republican Party in Florida.
Now, again, is that all thanks to DeSantis?
Is part of that thanks to the coronavirus?
Is part of that thanks to the lockdowns and people voting with their feet?
So you just see an influx of Republicans into Florida.
Now, is that Thanks to Ron DeSantis, because Ron DeSantis is governing in a good way.
There's a little bit of a chicken and an egg here, but the upshot of all of it is we now have, now that the 2022 midterms are over, we now have a much, much more competitive 2024 Republican presidential primary than we did two days ago.
How is Donald Trump reacting to the much more competitive Republican presidential primary because Ron DeSantis did so well in Florida?
He is threatening him.
So, Trump comes out, says in an interview with Fox News Digital, quote, DeSantis shouldn't run.
You know, I don't think he should run.
It would not go very well for him.
And then he says, this is a direct quote, I would tell you things about him that won't be very flattering.
I know more about him than anybody, other than perhaps his wife.
So there's a threat.
And I don't think it's an idle threat.
I bet the Trump campaign has pretty good oppo research on DeSantis.
Because DeSantis has been the chief threat to Trump on the right for months now, or more than months, even over a year now.
And so I'm sure he's got some oppo on it.
What is the threat here?
The threat here seems to me, Ron DeSantis, I'm going to say that you've got woman problems.
I think that's why he includes that line, other than perhaps your wife.
And that's one of the lowest hanging fruits in politics, is to accuse someone of having an affair or whatever.
Obviously, Trump has been accused of this many times.
And it was an issue in the 2016 campaign.
So I think that's what he's saying.
He's saying, I've got a lot of dirty laundry on you.
Now, maybe Trump is also insinuating, I've got more political scandals, or I've got financial scandals, or I've got this, or I've got that.
But I think from this threat here...
Trump is clearly insinuating that he's got a sex scandal up his sleeve.
Now, is Trump bluffing?
Trump has bluffed many times before.
But what you can see is this is starting to get nasty.
Now, all the nastiness is coming from Trump.
You'll notice DeSantis is not attacking Donald Trump at all, which does seem to suggest that DeSantis is feeling very confident right now.
Trump is feeling less confident.
The fact that Trump attacked DeSantis the other day, called him Ron DeSanctimonious, Was evidence, I think, of Trump feeling a little insecure here.
Because Trump, whatever you want to say about his attacks, and they can be brutal and they've destroyed people.
Trump, to my knowledge, has never started a fight.
Someone always attacks them first.
And it might just be a mild offense.
And then Trump comes in and clobbers them.
But Trump, as a rule, does not really seem to attack first.
In the case of DeSantis, he attacks first.
Why?
Because I think he realizes he's got to sideline Ron because Ron right now has a ton of momentum.
And coming out of these midterms, he's got a ton of momentum.
Again, though, everybody seems to be going into camp.
So I'm still a Trump guy.
Well, Ron DeSantis is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Every other Republican's got to go away.
And the reason we were asked last night on Backstage, Trump or DeSantis, who do you pick?
And everyone's going around and they say, I'm, you know, I guess in that case it was uniformly DeSantis.
But they said, I'm totally committed and basically sign me up for the campaign.
And it got to me and I said, guys, one, I don't make endorsements in primaries as a general rule, okay?
But two, it's 2022.
At this time, in the 2012 election cycle, do you know who the frontrunners were?
Mitch Daniels and Haley Barber and Bobby Jindal, okay?
I mean, they were the ones who were being talked about.
In 2016, who were the frontrunners?
Wasn't Trump.
Wasn't Cruz.
It was the guys who were some of the first ones out.
And so I just think, I love Trump.
I'm not willing to throw him under the bus.
Not willing to trash him and blame every problem on him.
I love Ron DeSantis.
I think Ron DeSantis has done a fabulous job as governor of Florida.
What he's done has absolutely been incredible.
He had a huge win last night.
I love a lot of other Republicans, too, who could run.
And so I'm just not willing to...
I just think it's silly and frivolous to come out and make an endorsement this early.
Also, if Trump manages to be able to run and clear the field...
Then it's pointless to play this horse race game.
And if Trump can't clear the field, if other people run against him, or if he doesn't run at all, then it's also pointless to jump on board with a candidate right now, because that means that everyone's going to get in.
If Trump is not clearly clearing the field, you're for sure going to get DeSantis.
But think about all the other people who have run for president who could run for president again.
Tim Scott, his publisher, said he was running for president.
Remember that?
Nikki Haley's clearly intimating she would run for president.
Ted Cruz was the number two guy last time.
He could mount a very credible campaign.
Josh Hawley is intimated that he might run.
Rand Paul could easily run.
I mean, I just think it'll be everybody.
I think everybody will jump into that race.
So what happened last night?
What do we blame?
Do we blame voter fraud and rigging and shenanigans?
I'm not saying there's no role for that, and that could be playing out a little bit, especially in Arizona.
And I think it could be playing out less from the batches of ballots coming in in the middle of the night and more from the, look at this, they've turned election day into election season, and people were voting in Pennsylvania in September before they realized that John Fetterman doesn't have a properly functioning brain, and there's ballot harvesting in a lot of states, and there's all sorts of corrupt practices.
Yeah, that does play a role.
And Republicans need to get serious about tightening that up.
You don't need to be an election-denying conspiracy theorist to say that two months of voting favors Democrats and it's wrong and it has no place in a proper republic and we need to get rid of it.
Republicans need to stop just talking about fixing the fringes of these electoral problems and get down and say, no early voting except for rare exceptions, no mail-in ballots except for rare exceptions, People vote on election day.
We get the results by nighttime.
Okay, that would be good.
But I don't blame election fraud for the Republican weak performance.
Do I blame Trump?
Some of the Trump picks were pretty bad.
But again, I'm not even willing to blame him too much for Oz.
I think Oz is a total loser.
But David McCormick, who was the chief rival to Oz, and he was more the establishment pick.
David McCormick was a socially liberal hedge funder who wrote an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on the Obergefell case and who was vocally in favor of gay marriage.
And...
It was, I think he wrote an amicus brief.
He was very, very strongly in favor of gay marriage.
And, you know, he's not exactly Attila the Hun, okay?
He was not much more conservative than Dr.
Oz.
And then Kathy Barnett, people felt, couldn't make a credible general election play.
And they may have been right about that.
She was the conservative in the race.
So again, you blame Trump for the Oz endorsement, okay, but would McCormick have done much better?
I'm not totally convinced of that.
Maybe he would have, but I'm not totally convinced of that.
And I think a lot of people who just hate Trump are looking at this as an excuse to attack Trump.
That said, Trump's record last night just wasn't that great.
So it does hurt his presidential prospects, and I think people are going to...
Are going to cool on him, just as a result of it.
Do you blame Biden, because Biden's doing such a great job?
No.
I think that's insane.
Do you blame Roe v.
Wade, the overruling of Roe v.
Wade?
No, I don't think that really played any role in the race at all.
I don't see that reflected in the polls.
I think that's kind of silly.
But one place that people are not really talking about, and it goes a long way to explaining why Republicans couldn't quite put it over the edge in New York, why they couldn't really get it done in Pennsylvania, why nothing really happened in California, why Florida was just so overwhelmingly why nothing really happened in California, why Florida was just so overwhelmingly Republican, why Texas had an extremely good night for Republicans, and that is that people have voted with I'm one of the people who voted with my feet.
I moved out of Nusseleney's hellscape of California came to the free state of Tennessee, which is fabulous.
And a lot of other people did that to Tennessee and Texas, and especially Florida.
But one of the consequences of voting with your feet is then you don't vote at the ballot box in the state that you left, and it becomes harder for Republicans to win.
So that's another macro trend of the night that you can't just blame on Trump or just give credit to some other candidate for.
You have to say that's a macro trend in politics where it's Yes, Republicans are going to do better in the red states.
The red states are going to get redder, but that means the blue states are going to get bluer and it's going to be harder to have those purple kinds of wins.
Now, I mentioned Texas.
I mentioned Beto O'Rourke got destroyed.
And usually I say, okay, let's take the high road.
Let's not rub it in anybody's face.
But Beto, he just bothers me, okay?
And so Alex Stein, who has become one of the absolute top trolls in America, and he just seems completely Unleashed and like a dog with a bone.
I had him on the show, you know, and he just does things that are so vulgar and mean.
And you just say, I could never do that.
Well, anyway, he did it to Beto and it was very, very funny.
Do you feel guilty about the millions of dollars you wasted on your campaign, Beto?
Why do you want to protect change children?
Yeah, go there!
Do you feel guilty about the money you wasted?
How are you going to protect trans kids by cutting off their genitals?
How does that protect trans kids, Beto?
Beto, how does that protect trans kids?
Beta, how are you protecting trans kids by cutting off their genitals?
Beta, you know you're going to lose.
Beta, how many more losses are you going to take?
Beta, how many more losses are you going to take?
Where's your campaign money going?
Beta, are you quitting after this failure?
Are you going to quit after you fail today?
Beto, do you feel guilty that you're a loser, Beto?
Beto, do you feel like a loser, Beto?
You know?
The election night.
It was a little bit...
I just feel like I'm getting a little sick.
You know?
I was so excited.
I thought I was going to be popping champagne.
And now I'm feeling just a little down.
You know?
Like I've got...
I'm just a little worn down.
And that video of Alex Stein...
Just yelling at Beto and calling him a loser and asking if he feels bad for wasting millions of dollars on another failed campaign.
It's just like a nice bowl of chicken soup.
You know, it's just like a nice warm broth.
And then people are trying to pull Alex Stein away and kind of hit him in the head with signs.
But he's just kind of a big, belligerent madman.
And so he doesn't even care.
He's just a dog with a bone.
Doesn't even stop.
Beto, you're a loser!
You want to chop off kids' genitals!
Why are you such a loser, Beto?
So it was a nice...
After the kind of headache and aches and pains of election night kind of set in, that's just a nice little bit of chicken soup.
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Okay, I've got to get to a little non-election news.
I've got to get to the really important stuff, okay?
The really important news.
Like how Jennifer Lopez is now Jennifer Affleck.
This is a New York Times essay on why it matters that J. Lowe is now J. Aff.
I'm not joking.
And I actually agree with the writer, Jennifer Wiener.
It does matter.
It actually does matter that Jennifer Lopez is calling herself Jennifer Affleck.
And Jennifer Lopez was asked about this.
She said, of course I changed my name.
It's romantic and traditional.
Now, this lady who wrote the op-ed says that it's cringey.
Such a long, long...
I don't recommend that you read this entire article.
But she says it's cringey.
And peak patriarchy.
And says, Ms.
Affleck, by the way, she's not Ms.
Affleck, she's Mrs.
Affleck.
Ms.
is a feminist prefix invented in the 1970s.
Miss, or Mrs., those are the proper terms.
So Mrs.
Affleck may be surrendering to the power of love with this for fourth marriage.
But given the cringy history behind the practice, a woman doesn't take her husband's last name, a woman taking her husband's last name feels to me like a submission, a gesture that doesn't say I belong with him so much as I belong to him.
And at this fraught moment for feminism in America, a woman like the former Jennifer Lopez deciding to change her name feels especially dispiriting.
Okay, well yes, in part, it is a submission.
Yeah, it is a wife submitting to her husband.
And in turn, the husband is called to love his wife, and the two are not separate.
It's not this domineering relationship where you've got a master and a slave, but it's It's two people becoming one flesh.
That's at least the idea.
Again, she mentions fourth marriage and all this craziness in Hollywood.
I'm just speaking in principle about marriage and a wife taking her husband's name.
But the reason this is such a stupid essay, the reason it's such a stupid point that the left makes that women shouldn't take their husband's last names, is because...
Inevitably, a woman is going to have a man's last name.
A woman will either have her husband's last name or her father's last name.
But either way, the patriarchy wins.
And if you're in a marriage, it seems kind of weird for the wife to have her father's last name.
Because marriage is when people leave their mothers and their fathers and they come together, a man and a woman come together and become one flesh.
And the man is the head of the household, and so it would stand to reason that the man takes, that the woman takes the husband's last name.
If the man took the wife's last name, that would be weird, because then he would have her father's last name, and that just gets very, very confusing and complicated.
Now, you might say, well, Michael, what about the case where a feminist has a child, and the feminist does not take her husband's last name, and the Her last name.
And then the daughter gets married, and she doesn't have her father's last name.
She's got her mother's last name.
Well, that's true, but hey, you just go back up one generation, guess whose name the feminist has?
Well, no, the feminist has her mom's life.
Well, guess whose name?
And at a certain point, you go up the line enough, you're going to get to a fella.
And so really what this is, is not an attack on the patriarchy or whatever.
This is an attack on family.
It's an attack on marriage itself, which is what the left is always after.
And it's sort of a stupid, frivolous attack.
Now, speaking of transitions, this turned out to be a big issue, I think, in the 2022 midterms.
I think it's turned out to be a big issue even before that, going back to the Glenn Youngkin race in Virginia.
The establishment Republicans think that transing the kids is a sideshow.
It's a fake issue.
It's contentious.
It's culture war.
They should avoid it.
Dr. Oz doesn't really talk about it.
The establishment kind of hack, rhino candidates don't really talk about it.
You know who does talk about it?
Ron DeSantis.
You know who does talk about it?
Glenn Youngkin.
You know who does talk about it?
The conservative Republicans who do very well.
This is backed up by polls.
So, a recent poll found that more than 70% of American voters in the 2022 midterms said that they are not likely to vote for a candidate who supports allowing minors to undergo gender transition procedures, sexual genital mutilation.
Nearly 80% of independents and 43% of Democrats joined the Republicans in opposing candidates who support allowing kids to transition, transing the kids.
That's a huge number.
Obviously, yeah, basically all the Republicans are on board.
80% of independents, that's bad news for Democrats.
43% of Democrats are with the conservatives on this.
So if you're just looking at those numbers, the GOP going into the midterms should have been hammering this issue.
Not as a sideshow, as a matter of justice, but also as an important political matter.
This is a uniting, good, serious, important political issue...
And by the way, an analysis of voter registration done by the AP in June found that more than 1 million voters across 43 states, especially in the suburbs, where the swing voters often sway the election results, switched to the GOP over the last year.
And one of the issues that's driving that, yes, it's the misery index, yes, it's inflation, yes, it's the economy.
But one of the issues is this insanity where Democrats are chopping off kids' genitals.
So, Republicans, I think, failed to deal with that as well.
It was a bit of a rough night.
And it's hard to figure out exactly what the takeaway is.
Now, I will say...
I try not to make predictions.
You'll notice, I usually do not make these firm predictions about election night.
In fact, inasmuch as I did make predictions, I said, you know guys, I actually don't think we're going to really win Pennsylvania.
I don't think Mastriano's going to win.
I don't think John Fetterman is, or rather, I don't think Dr.
Oz is going to beat Fetterman.
I think Fetterman's going to be an upset.
I did predict that Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the DCCC, would lose in New York's 17th Congressional District.
He would lose to the Republican Mike Lawler.
I was right about that one, too.
So I made very particular predictions where I felt that the evidence was relatively clear.
I did not make grand sweeping predictions.
And even other than, you know, maybe advertising copy for the election show, I didn't say, you know, it's guaranteed we're going to have a red tsunami.
I'm going to be drinking leftist tears all night.
I tempered expectations because I said, you know, there's going to be some questions.
People have been voting since September.
There's lots of, there's some not great candidates out there.
And so I just think, as Drew Klavan says, you can't predict the future.
The future is the future.
That's why it is the future.
And so there is this funny thing that goes on, which is that the pundits and the prognosticators who make it their job to say, I know exactly what's going to happen on election night.
And they get all the predictions wrong.
Then the next day they come out and they tell you precisely why their predictions, precisely why things happened as they did happen.
And they kind of ignore the fact that their predictions were all wrong.
That happens across the aisle and it happens all the time with political pundits.
Being a political pundit is never having to say that you're sorry, especially if you're the kind that just tries to predict every single race.
And so you're going to see a ton of people today say, well, this is exactly why the Republicans didn't do very well.
And you're going to see a coincidence here that the reasons why the Republicans didn't do as well as they were supposed to is going to totally line up with all of the pundits' priors.
It's going to affirm every premise that the pundits had going in, even if those premises did not result in accurate predictions for election night.
And that's just what happens, and that's just politics.
But I've got a less popular, but I think more accurate take, which is there are a lot of factors here.
And you can't just blame it on the fraud, and you can't just blame it on Trump, and you can't just blame it on early voting, and you can't just blame it on Roe v.
Wade, and you can't just...
There's a lot going on, especially when you look at two races.
You look at J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.
J.D. Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters running for Senate in Arizona.
They ran the same campaign.
They're basically the same candidate.
They've got the same background.
They've got the same backers.
They ran on the same platform.
J.D. wins.
Blake very likely will lose, or it's just very unclear at least at the moment.
Why is that?
Well, Ohio and Arizona are different.
That's part of it.
There's just a lot.
There's just a lot in there.
What you're going to see now is the battle over what happened.
And the battle over what happened is nothing more than a proxy for the battle for 2024.
When I say the election is dead, long live the election, this is not the second day of counting the votes of Election Day 2022.
This is the first day of the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
And so all of the commentary that you're going to be seeing today is...
A facade, a thinly veiled facade, for a campaign for one candidate or another in 2024.
And because I actually have not picked a candidate and I'm not endorsing, certainly not at this stage, in a presidential primary, that's why I am just trying to present all of these sides and all of these factors that went into the midterms.
Last night.
Though I am very interested in hearing from you as well, and what you think happened, and what you were seeing in your polling places.
I mean, the listeners to this show are spread not just all around the country, but all around the world.
We know that people all around the world are watching the American elections as well.
Most of the people here at The Daily Wire have coincidentally just been overseas in Europe or the Middle East within the past month.
And we know that people overseas everywhere follow the American elections.
But especially for those of you who are listening from the United States right now, what did you see in your precinct at your polling place with your candidate, with the Republican congressional candidate in your district?
Some races that we thought we were going to win.
My friend Bo Hines was running in North Carolina.
He lost.
Lauren Boeber, really, really on the ropes.
Republican congressman, another friend of mine in Colorado.
So what happened?
What did you see?
And especially as everyone is just looking to be so vindictive the next morning, who do you blame?
Let me know.
You can let me know on Twitter or in email or whatever, comments and mailbag, but you can especially let me know in the member block of this show.
The rest of the show continues now.
It is Woke Wednesday.
We've got an ad from Fetterman that my producers tell me is one that I actually didn't play.
I haven't seen this one.
So I guess they just want to rub salt in the wounds of Senator Fetterman coming out.
