The Red Ripple

Published Nov 10, 2022, 1:13 PM

The balance of power in Washington is yet to be decided days after the Midterm elections. That's not what Republicans thought would happen as Election Day approached. Bloomberg Opinion's Jonathan Bernstein explains why the country didn't experience a "red wave" this election cycle.

You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. Well, the car goes on, but we have the broad parameters of what the next Congress will look like. I spoke with Bloomberg Opinions Jonathan Bernstein about the midterms, what they mean for legislating during the lame duck session and into the next Congress, and also what the results mean for the parties and candidates in I have to say, Jonathan, you call this and a lot of senses when it comes to the issues that voters were voting on, for example, and you know you said that it was not a slam dunk. And the only other person I've heard say that is Michael Moore recently. All right, so, Jonathan, we're talking Wednesday afternoon. Nevada and Arizona have yet to be called, and it's all but certain that Georgia has headed for a special election December six. However, we do know a lot, an awful lot about US democracy right now. Is it in less trouble than we thought? Yeah? I think so, With a huge numbers of caveats about that, we're not out of the woods, and the threats still real and things could change rapidly, but there were a number of positive signs after a very bad start been the primaries. We had some candidates refusing to concede during their Republican primaries. We had efforts to harass election workers all summer in fall. We had in the early voting in Arizona a couple of these clowns show up in military gear, observing drop boxes and intimidating voters. But then as election they came, that sort of dropped off, and we didn't get stories, at least not significantly organized efforts at at voter intimidation, which was a real fear. We didn't so far as we're speaking. This could change any minute. But Republicans who have lost have conceded properly, normally, and while there are some crazy conspiracies that are circulating, they have not migrated. They have not made the important step of migrating into the mouths of politicians and for the most part, too high profile Republican aligned media. So the concessions are interesting. As you say, it's sort of back to business as normal, the old politics that we knew and loved. Did something change within the Republican Party. Did these people get the message from leadership that they were to do this. I have not seen any reporting on this. Threats to democracy didn't start with Donald Trump. They have deep rutes in the party going back quite some time and having gotten worse, and that's one of the reasons we got Trump. But Trump himself is an outlier. Trump himself feels completely apparently, or at least he does it completely willing to claim fraud no matter what. He doesn't need some sort of pretext. He proclaimed fraud in every election he was on the ballot. Before the election happened, he proclaimed that he was ripped off by fraud. After winning the presidency, the one time you would think that candidate would want to increase respect for elections and confidence in elections, he still said there was not the frauduct that he had no evidence for. And I think that it turns out that when the leader of their party is saying it very loudly, a lot of Republicans go along, either because they think the incentives are there that they're better off agreeing with the leader of their party, or possibly just because they actually believe it. I think a lot of rank and file voters and some of the candidates come out of the rank and file voter group. You know, they hear a Republican president say something, they say, you're, well, he may be exaggerating, but there's got to be something to it, or else he wouldn't say it. It turns out Donald Trump is willing to say a lot of things just because he says them, and that is unusual, obviously very dangerous. So that I think helped. I think we got a little lucky so far, at least that most of the losers lost by a substantial amount. Again, if that was trumpet wouldn't stop them from claiming fraud. But you know, normal people, if they lose an election by eight, ten, fifteen percentage points, they see what's going on. Also, more people registered and so on. And it was a different election, in fact, a very very different election, one of the kind. Speaking of Trump, dr Ols did terribly. It took more money than expected to win. In Ohio, governors that had not had Trump's backing, like Kemp and Wine, they won fine without Trump. Carry Lake is in trouble in Arizona in the governor's race. What position does this all leave Trump in. You know, it's very hard to tell because there have been other moments where it was clear that Trump was a drag on the party and that his judgment is terrible. You know, he endorsed these candidates who were terrible candidates, and he's not good at this kind of stuff. It doesn't bother him. Apparently he was blaming his wife for his endorsement of Dr oz Ut episode. You know, Donald Trump is, of course the only president we've ever had who repeatedly criticized extreme criticisms of his own cabinet nominees. People he put his own cabinet turned out to be horrible, horrible people, and he never took any responsibility for that. So we've had these points before, and Republican politicians and other party actors and the Republican aligned media have not made the decision to cut him off. And perhaps because they really don't believe that he's arming them, or perhaps because of other reasons. I think the Republican align media has ratings incentives. He sells a lot of books, he sells a lot of ads, and increases ratings. So there's that, And I think a lot of candidates are just afraid that he will go after them, even though the evidence isn't really there that he's that much of a threat, but politicians tend to be paranoid about that sort of thing. But we'll come back to Trump in a moment. But what kind of lessons should Republicans learn from this election, given that they really didn't do as well as expected, particularly in places like in the Midwest, and it may mean that a sweep in is off the table, for example, mail in voting, should they embrace it. I do think that Republicans, by demonizing mail and voting, are making it more difficult for their own voters. I don't know that there have been any careful studies that actually show that it makes a difference, so that's something I know. I don't think this tells us anything about two years is a huge long time, and there's basically no correlation between what happens in midterms and what happens in the next presidential election. But I think the main thing Republicans I hope take away from this is that opposing democracy is dangerous, that running on a platform without having any policies to address the problems that they point out is not necessarily a plus with voters, and that having a bunch of flakes and otherwise, you know, unqualified candidates can be harmful. Whether that's the lesson they empirically should take from what happened, I don't know. It takes a long time to study exactly why elections came out as they did, and even if we have all the votes counted, you still have to do a lot of work to actually find the cause of relationships. But what parties take away from things has very little to do sometimes with reality, and more to do with internal interests within the party, internal factions within the party, and how they fight to have their interpretations of what happened become the leading explanation. So, for example, we've already seen anti abortion Republicans organized groups of anti abortion Republicans say that the reason that Republicans lost is because they did from the issue of abortion. Now I don't think that's true. Um yeah, I think in fact, abortion cost them badly and the candidates shied away from it because they knew that it was costing them. But you know, they're going to try to float that and they may be successful. It's a powerful issue within the party among party voters in primaries. So it's certainly true in the media aftermath that one of the things they're fixating on is candidate quality. Now the question becomes, can you be a party of anti democratic conspiracy thinking and recruit decent candidates? So they didn't just by coincidence, have a bunch of lousy candidates. They have a bunch of lot of the candidates in part because their voters wanted to hear crazy conspiracy thinking, and in part because solid regular politicians weren't willing to run in Republican primaries because they didn't want to be beat up for saying things like, oh, yes, Joe Biden won the election. Yeah. So you know, the thing is, it's it's easy to say, oh, we had a bunch of bad candidates, but the bad candidates weren't just a coincidence that happened to happen or that was It's not just about Donald Trump's bad judgment in endorsements. It's also about what the party is right now, and they have some deep problems, and the last of the first hours after the election, it could be worse in terms of what their reaction is, but we still have to see what it's going to be like. More Next on Bloomberg Opinion, I'm Vonnie Quinn. Speaking of problems, Kevin McCarthy isn't a slamed on Chrispeaker. I mean, he likely get it, but he may have to do some negotiation. What kind a negotiation do you imagine we'll go on within the Republican Party in order to have them Well, we don't. Even though as I speak that the Republicans definitely have a majority. I believe they will have the majority. I believe that the whole time. Um, you just don't avoid a seat loss when you're when you have the president, when president's party. UM, so assume that he gets a majority, but it's a slim majority. There's two steps, right, he first and this will come up next week. This will come up on Monday and Tuesday. Uh, this coming week, Um, Republicans going to vote on who there speaker candidate should be. So in order to do that, he has to win a majority of the House Republicans. But then he has to win on opening day of the new Congress January three. He's going to have to win a majority of the House. And if he has, say if Republicans have a four or five or six seat March and he has to hold all of the Republicans. In the old days, that was easy. It was an automatic vote. Everybody knew that you voted for your party's candidate for speaker in recent years and among the among the House Freedom Caucus types, so you know, um, you those are not automatic votes. And the problem is that we also have with Democrats with I'm sorry, with Republicans picking up several seats in New York for example. Um, we have some Republicans who maybe not eager to have a more extreme speaker, and so there's always a possibility will have chaos. Um. You know. The thing is that we've already had some of the extremists in the House Republican Conference come out and say, I hope we have a narrow margin, then I'll have more leverage. Well, the truth is that in real life, you don't have much leverage if you're on the extreme of your party. But they've been able to get away with that partially because the rest of the party lets them. We don't know whether they'll be able to get away with that in the next converse, and they may, and if if they do, if we have a slim Republican majority that's bossed by the thirty or forty or fifty or sixty most extreme members, it's going to be a messinitely have to give up certain things, but I guess we may never know what they may be. Yeah, I mean, it's it's not really clear what he can promise or what, um, you know, what the what the demands are going to be, because a lot of these people are not you know, calculating um policy interested politicians. These are people whose main goal is to have grievances and and uh, you know, and go on Fox News or you know, the radio talk shows or the more extreme networks and complain about things, including the leadership of the Republican Party. So I'm not sure what he can give some of these extremist members because they're not interesting. You can't say, oh, yes, I'll give you a vote on this bill that you care about, because that's not what their thing is. That's not what they're interested in. And that's why the Republican Party is not very equipped to run the House. Well, speaking of members and senators that have had power over the last couple of years, does Joe imagine have as much power as he had going forward? Um, you know, assuming that Democrats have a majority in the Senate, whether it's fifty or fifty one seats or two as possible right now, I think, Um, I have to get the math in my head. Um, the thing is, if there's a Republican majority in the House, then know, anything that passes and becomes law is going to need a supermajority to get there because you're gonna have to have both Republicans and Democrats, because it's gonna have if anything that becomes law has to get through the republic, if have to get through a Republican House, it's going to have to get Republican votes in the Senate. It's also gonna have to get Democratic votes in the Senate. So you know, the same way that the filibuster kept him from being the swing vote on a lot of things, um of divided government will keep him from being the swing vote on a lot of things. That's well, his energy permitting building is in trouble. Well, that said some of the things that if he is an aggressive legislator, it's very possible that he could put together coalitions that are bipartisan coalitions on some things. We just don't know what has any chance to get through the House or representatives, is the thing. What's how fascinating the climate change was up there in terms of voter priorities. You know. I my general feeling all this stuff is to wait and look more carefully as more studies go out. You know, it's it's easy for voters to say stuff, whether that means that and and it's it's interesting what's you know, what the tell posters is on the top of their minds. Whether that actually moved their votes or not is a much more complicated question and sometimes difficult to study. But you know, I think that generally the polling over the years has shown that dealing with climate has been a popular position for the last at least decade. And I think one of the things that we get out of one of the ways to think about the election is that Republicans were very, very certain that their issues were wildly popular with voters, but it may be that they were wrong. Number opinions Jonathan Bernstein and do please weigh in. You can email me at v Quinn at Bloomberg dot nets. We'd love to hear from you. Nomberg Opinion airs every weekend on Numberg Radio and every Friday as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform, or produced by Eric mollow Till next Time on Bloomberg opinion,

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