Brad and Dan breakdown the good, the bad, the ugly, and the hopeful from the 2022 midterms.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Good to see you, Brad.
I know you've got some friendly little bug making its way around your family, so I'm glad you were able to crawl out from under the covers long enough to do this today.
Yeah, doing our best.
I now understand how Daycare and places where there's toddlers are the germiest places on earth, you know?
Like, I take my daughter to daycare.
She only goes for a couple hours every day.
Doesn't even go all day.
And I feel like every day there's like a three-year-old boy who somehow has boogers coming out of his eyes who greets me at the door and is like, hi, you know?
I just think, holy moly, we'll never be well again.
It's never gonna happen.
It's a fascinating life, what can I say?
You know, like Thursday night, Dan, no longer in the club.
College night?
No, who needs that?
Let's just go to bed at 7.45 because everyone's been sick for three weeks.
It's pretty wild, you know what I mean?
It's a pretty glamorous time.
It does, though, add a depth to your voice that I think listeners will all appreciate.
So we can just revel in the kind of gravelly nature of your voice this week.
So, you know, we'll find that silver lining for you.
Well, it didn't help that this was election week and we now have election weeks in this country.
And I've been staying up too late, getting up too early to check on races and other stuff.
Here's what we want to do today, friends.
Today's going to be a little bit different than usual.
We're going to jump around a lot, probably touch on way more topics than we usually do.
And that's just because we want to try to get in as many kind of comments on elections and results and themes as possible.
And we also are very cognizant of the fact, then in one week, we will be in Denver talking about this very thing with a bunch of experts and journalists and scholars.
And so we will definitely have another chance to revisit all of these, which is a great way to say, if you have not yet signed up, you should do it.
Some of you have been waiting.
I know you have.
I know you want to come.
I know you want to be there.
And you're that person who doesn't do it.
And then you forget.
And it's all a big mess when you try to sign into the Zoom and you're Russian and you spill the coffee everywhere and you're yelling and it's a whole thing.
Why do that to yourself?
Just sign up now and we'll see you on Friday.
If you need any information, all of it is at bradonishi.com slash nationalism.
And we can't wait.
Dan, this time next week, we'll be in Denver, and it's going to be really good.
So, all right.
Let's talk about four categories, Dan.
The good, the bad, the ugly, and the hopeful.
So I'll start with you.
Let's start with good.
Give me one one thing from this week that was good.
I guess I should stop and say, I mean, I'm like, so I'm so like deep in the weeds on this stuff.
I should stop and say, friends, it was election week.
If you haven't been following the kind of main takeaways.
are that the Democrats did way better than they thought.
It looks like it's not completely settled that they will keep control of the Senate.
Their losses in the House were less than predicted.
Now, they will not have control of the House, and I think we need to talk about that.
Some big wins in governor's races, some big wins in state races, but also some losses and some discouraging things and some bad things and that kind of deal.
So we want to go beyond just the themes and the trends and the headlines and get into some of the details.
So Dan, what do you got on the side of good?
Yeah, so the good, I mean, the big one is that they bucked this historic trend.
But I want to dive in why I think that's significant.
Like, I think you and I both were watching the election stuff.
I have the issue of, like, I'm on the East Coast, so you've got to stay up forever, kind of hoping to hear how some things further West happened.
And I had, as I'm sure many people do, I wake up the day after the election, and I've got that little bit of anxiety about, like, wanting to open my phone and see, because I still remember in 2016 going to bed, With this sinking feeling, as many of us probably did, that like battleground after battleground after battleground was going for Trump.
And I remember I turn on my phone and see and there's like the smiling, you know, candidate photo of Trump.
So I was really nervous and was surprised because it kind of blew up, I think, everybody's narrative, right?
Everybody's narrative about the so-called red wave, red tsunami, Democrats being out of touch with the electorate, all kinds of different things like this.
But why I think that's significant is the storyline I was going to come in with that I was sort of planning on, the storyline I was planning on going to Denver with and talking to our people was, It's like the closest thing to a natural law of American politics that you have, that in the first term of a president, right, so in this case Biden, They have big losses in the midterms.
It's almost like a natural law of American politics.
And so my question was going to be, how much do we really read into this?
Every election cycle, we talk about how the issues that mattered, and this and that, and politicians being out of touch, but this happens sort of anyway.
And instead, we got something different.
Now, as you said, and we'll talk about this as we get further along, but Democrats are almost certainly going to lose the House.
They might keep the Senate, but it's still going up as sort of a win.
But more than that, like bucking this historic trend, they didn't have the big losses that are typical.
And that's a significant storyline.
To me, that's more significant than had lots of Republicans flip seats and so forth, because that's what we expect to happen.
Forget who the candidate is, forget who the issues are.
If you're a betting person, you could go and put down money on that happening and you're usually going to win, but not this election cycle.
And so that was something I thought was good.
I hope it portends at least something positive for 2024, but that's like, you know, lifetimes away in terms of political consciousness.
So it's the big obvious point, but for me, it's more significant than it might seem precisely because it disrupts Uh, that trend, which is why you had Biden going out and kind of declaring victory, despite the fact that so many races are uncalled and so forth.
So I'll start with that.
It's a big overarching one, but I think it's worth noting.
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