Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. Well, the
Speaker 1: car goes on, but we have the broad parameters of
Speaker 1: what the next Congress will look like. I spoke with
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinions Jonathan Bernstein about the midterms, what they mean
Speaker 1: for legislating during the lame duck session and into the
Speaker 1: next Congress, and also what the results mean for the
Speaker 1: parties and candidates in I have to say, Jonathan, you
Speaker 1: call this and a lot of senses when it comes
Speaker 1: to the issues that voters were voting on, for example,
Speaker 1: and you know you said that it was not a
Speaker 1: slam dunk. And the only other person I've heard say
Speaker 1: that is Michael Moore recently. All right, so, Jonathan, we're
Speaker 1: talking Wednesday afternoon. Nevada and Arizona have yet to be called,
Speaker 1: and it's all but certain that Georgia has headed for
Speaker 1: a special election December six. However, we do know a lot,
Speaker 1: an awful lot about US democracy right now. Is it
Speaker 1: in less trouble than we thought? Yeah? I think so,
Speaker 1: With a huge numbers of caveats about that, we're not
Speaker 1: out of the woods, and the threats still real and
Speaker 1: things could change rapidly, but there were a number of
Speaker 1: positive signs after a very bad start been the primaries.
Speaker 1: We had some candidates refusing to concede during their Republican primaries.
Speaker 1: We had efforts to harass election workers all summer in fall.
Speaker 1: We had in the early voting in Arizona a couple
Speaker 1: of these clowns show up in military gear, observing drop
Speaker 1: boxes and intimidating voters. But then as election they came,
Speaker 1: that sort of dropped off, and we didn't get stories,
Speaker 1: at least not significantly organized efforts at at voter intimidation,
Speaker 1: which was a real fear. We didn't so far as
Speaker 1: we're speaking. This could change any minute. But Republicans who
Speaker 1: have lost have conceded properly, normally, and while there are
Speaker 1: some crazy conspiracies that are circulating, they have not migrated.
Speaker 1: They have not made the important step of migrating into
Speaker 1: the mouths of politicians and for the most part, too
Speaker 1: high profile Republican aligned media. So the concessions are interesting.
Speaker 1: As you say, it's sort of back to business as normal,
Speaker 1: the old politics that we knew and loved. Did something
Speaker 1: change within the Republican Party. Did these people get the
Speaker 1: message from leadership that they were to do this. I
Speaker 1: have not seen any reporting on this. Threats to democracy
Speaker 1: didn't start with Donald Trump. They have deep rutes in
Speaker 1: the party going back quite some time and having gotten worse,
Speaker 1: and that's one of the reasons we got Trump. But
Speaker 1: Trump himself is an outlier. Trump himself feels completely apparently,
Speaker 1: or at least he does it completely willing to claim
Speaker 1: fraud no matter what. He doesn't need some sort of pretext.
Speaker 1: He proclaimed fraud in every election he was on the ballot.
Speaker 1: Before the election happened, he proclaimed that he was ripped
Speaker 1: off by fraud. After winning the presidency, the one time
Speaker 1: you would think that candidate would want to increase respect
Speaker 1: for elections and confidence in elections, he still said there
Speaker 1: was not the frauduct that he had no evidence for.
Speaker 1: And I think that it turns out that when the
Speaker 1: leader of their party is saying it very loudly, a
Speaker 1: lot of Republicans go along, either because they think the
Speaker 1: incentives are there that they're better off agreeing with the
Speaker 1: leader of their party, or possibly just because they actually
Speaker 1: believe it. I think a lot of rank and file
Speaker 1: voters and some of the candidates come out of the
Speaker 1: rank and file voter group. You know, they hear a
Speaker 1: Republican president say something, they say, you're, well, he may
Speaker 1: be exaggerating, but there's got to be something to it,
Speaker 1: or else he wouldn't say it. It turns out Donald
Speaker 1: Trump is willing to say a lot of things just
Speaker 1: because he says them, and that is unusual, obviously very dangerous.
Speaker 1: So that I think helped. I think we got a
Speaker 1: little lucky so far, at least that most of the
Speaker 1: losers lost by a substantial amount. Again, if that was
Speaker 1: trumpet wouldn't stop them from claiming fraud. But you know,
Speaker 1: normal people, if they lose an election by eight, ten,
Speaker 1: fifteen percentage points, they see what's going on. Also, more
Speaker 1: people registered and so on. And it was a different election,
Speaker 1: in fact, a very very different election, one of the kind.
Speaker 1: Speaking of Trump, dr Ols did terribly. It took more
Speaker 1: money than expected to win. In Ohio, governors that had
Speaker 1: not had Trump's backing, like Kemp and Wine, they won
Speaker 1: fine without Trump. Carry Lake is in trouble in Arizona
Speaker 1: in the governor's race. What position does this all leave
Speaker 1: Trump in. You know, it's very hard to tell because
Speaker 1: there have been other moments where it was clear that
Speaker 1: Trump was a drag on the party and that his
Speaker 1: judgment is terrible. You know, he endorsed these candidates who
Speaker 1: were terrible candidates, and he's not good at this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. It doesn't bother him. Apparently he was blaming
Speaker 1: his wife for his endorsement of Dr oz Ut episode.
Speaker 1: You know, Donald Trump is, of course the only president
Speaker 1: we've ever had who repeatedly criticized extreme criticisms of his
Speaker 1: own cabinet nominees. People he put his own cabinet turned
Speaker 1: out to be horrible, horrible people, and he never took
Speaker 1: any responsibility for that. So we've had these points before,
Speaker 1: and Republican politicians and other party actors and the Republican
Speaker 1: aligned media have not made the decision to cut him off.
Speaker 1: And perhaps because they really don't believe that he's arming them,
Speaker 1: or perhaps because of other reasons. I think the Republican
Speaker 1: align media has ratings incentives. He sells a lot of books,
Speaker 1: he sells a lot of ads, and increases ratings. So
Speaker 1: there's that, And I think a lot of candidates are
Speaker 1: just afraid that he will go after them, even though
Speaker 1: the evidence isn't really there that he's that much of
Speaker 1: a threat, but politicians tend to be paranoid about that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But we'll come back to Trump in
Speaker 1: a moment. But what kind of lessons should Republicans learn
Speaker 1: from this election, given that they really didn't do as
Speaker 1: well as expected, particularly in places like in the Midwest,
Speaker 1: and it may mean that a sweep in is off
Speaker 1: the table, for example, mail in voting, should they embrace it.
Speaker 1: I do think that Republicans, by demonizing mail and voting,
Speaker 1: are making it more difficult for their own voters. I
Speaker 1: don't know that there have been any careful studies that
Speaker 1: actually show that it makes a difference, so that's something
Speaker 1: I know. I don't think this tells us anything about
Speaker 1: two years is a huge long time, and there's basically
Speaker 1: no correlation between what happens in midterms and what happens
Speaker 1: in the next presidential election. But I think the main
Speaker 1: thing Republicans I hope take away from this is that
Speaker 1: opposing democracy is dangerous, that running on a platform without
Speaker 1: having any policies to address the problems that they point
Speaker 1: out is not necessarily a plus with voters, and that
Speaker 1: having a bunch of flakes and otherwise, you know, unqualified
Speaker 1: candidates can be harmful. Whether that's the lesson they empirically
Speaker 1: should take from what happened, I don't know. It takes
Speaker 1: a long time to study exactly why elections came out
Speaker 1: as they did, and even if we have all the
Speaker 1: votes counted, you still have to do a lot of
Speaker 1: work to actually find the cause of relationships. But what
Speaker 1: parties take away from things has very little to do
Speaker 1: sometimes with reality, and more to do with internal interests
Speaker 1: within the party, internal factions within the party, and how
Speaker 1: they fight to have their interpretations of what happened become
Speaker 1: the leading explanation. So, for example, we've already seen anti
Speaker 1: abortion Republicans organized groups of anti abortion Republicans say that
Speaker 1: the reason that Republicans lost is because they did from
Speaker 1: the issue of abortion. Now I don't think that's true.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I think in fact, abortion cost them badly
Speaker 1: and the candidates shied away from it because they knew
Speaker 1: that it was costing them. But you know, they're going
Speaker 1: to try to float that and they may be successful.
Speaker 1: It's a powerful issue within the party among party voters
Speaker 1: in primaries. So it's certainly true in the media aftermath
Speaker 1: that one of the things they're fixating on is candidate quality.
Speaker 1: Now the question becomes, can you be a party of
Speaker 1: anti democratic conspiracy thinking and recruit decent candidates? So they
Speaker 1: didn't just by coincidence, have a bunch of lousy candidates.
Speaker 1: They have a bunch of lot of the candidates in
Speaker 1: part because their voters wanted to hear crazy conspiracy thinking,
Speaker 1: and in part because solid regular politicians weren't willing to
Speaker 1: run in Republican primaries because they didn't want to be
Speaker 1: beat up for saying things like, oh, yes, Joe Biden
Speaker 1: won the election. Yeah. So you know, the thing is,
Speaker 1: it's it's easy to say, oh, we had a bunch
Speaker 1: of bad candidates, but the bad candidates weren't just a
Speaker 1: coincidence that happened to happen or that was It's not
Speaker 1: just about Donald Trump's bad judgment in endorsements. It's also
Speaker 1: about what the party is right now, and they have
Speaker 1: some deep problems, and the last of the first hours
Speaker 1: after the election, it could be worse in terms of
Speaker 1: what their reaction is, but we still have to see
Speaker 1: what it's going to be like. More Next on Bloomberg Opinion,
Speaker 1: I'm Vonnie Quinn. Speaking of problems, Kevin McCarthy isn't a
Speaker 1: slamed on Chrispeaker. I mean, he likely get it, but
Speaker 1: he may have to do some negotiation. What kind a
Speaker 1: negotiation do you imagine we'll go on within the Republican
Speaker 1: Party in order to have them Well, we don't. Even
Speaker 1: though as I speak that the Republicans definitely have a majority.
Speaker 1: I believe they will have the majority. I believe that
Speaker 1: the whole time. Um, you just don't avoid a seat
Speaker 1: loss when you're when you have the president, when president's party. UM,
Speaker 1: so assume that he gets a majority, but it's a
Speaker 1: slim majority. There's two steps, right, he first and this
Speaker 1: will come up next week. This will come up on
Speaker 1: Monday and Tuesday. Uh, this coming week, Um, Republicans going
Speaker 1: to vote on who there speaker candidate should be. So
Speaker 1: in order to do that, he has to win a
Speaker 1: majority of the House Republicans. But then he has to
Speaker 1: win on opening day of the new Congress January three.
Speaker 1: He's going to have to win a majority of the House.
Speaker 1: And if he has, say if Republicans have a four
Speaker 1: or five or six seat March and he has to
Speaker 1: hold all of the Republicans. In the old days, that
Speaker 1: was easy. It was an automatic vote. Everybody knew that
Speaker 1: you voted for your party's candidate for speaker in recent
Speaker 1: years and among the among the House Freedom Caucus types,
Speaker 1: so you know, um, you those are not automatic votes.
Speaker 1: And the problem is that we also have with Democrats
Speaker 1: with I'm sorry, with Republicans picking up several seats in
Speaker 1: New York for example. Um, we have some Republicans who
Speaker 1: maybe not eager to have a more extreme speaker, and
Speaker 1: so there's always a possibility will have chaos. Um. You know.
Speaker 1: The thing is that we've already had some of the
Speaker 1: extremists in the House Republican Conference come out and say,
Speaker 1: I hope we have a narrow margin, then I'll have
Speaker 1: more leverage. Well, the truth is that in real life,
Speaker 1: you don't have much leverage if you're on the extreme
Speaker 1: of your party. But they've been able to get away
Speaker 1: with that partially because the rest of the party lets them.
Speaker 1: We don't know whether they'll be able to get away
Speaker 1: with that in the next converse, and they may, and
Speaker 1: if if they do, if we have a slim Republican
Speaker 1: majority that's bossed by the thirty or forty or fifty
Speaker 1: or sixty most extreme members, it's going to be a
Speaker 1: messinitely have to give up certain things, but I guess
Speaker 1: we may never know what they may be. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's not really clear what he can promise or what, um,
Speaker 1: you know, what the what the demands are going to be,
Speaker 1: because a lot of these people are not you know,
Speaker 1: calculating um policy interested politicians. These are people whose main
Speaker 1: goal is to have grievances and and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: and go on Fox News or you know, the radio
Speaker 1: talk shows or the more extreme networks and complain about things,
Speaker 1: including the leadership of the Republican Party. So I'm not
Speaker 1: sure what he can give some of these extremist members
Speaker 1: because they're not interesting. You can't say, oh, yes, I'll
Speaker 1: give you a vote on this bill that you care about,
Speaker 1: because that's not what their thing is. That's not what
Speaker 1: they're interested in. And that's why the Republican Party is
Speaker 1: not very equipped to run the House. Well, speaking of
Speaker 1: members and senators that have had power over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, does Joe imagine have as much power
Speaker 1: as he had going forward? Um, you know, assuming that
Speaker 1: Democrats have a majority in the Senate, whether it's fifty
Speaker 1: or fifty one seats or two as possible right now,
Speaker 1: I think, Um, I have to get the math in
Speaker 1: my head. Um, the thing is, if there's a Republican
Speaker 1: majority in the House, then know, anything that passes and
Speaker 1: becomes law is going to need a supermajority to get
Speaker 1: there because you're gonna have to have both Republicans and Democrats,
Speaker 1: because it's gonna have if anything that becomes law has
Speaker 1: to get through the republic, if have to get through
Speaker 1: a Republican House, it's going to have to get Republican
Speaker 1: votes in the Senate. It's also gonna have to get
Speaker 1: Democratic votes in the Senate. So you know, the same
Speaker 1: way that the filibuster kept him from being the swing
Speaker 1: vote on a lot of things, um of divided government
Speaker 1: will keep him from being the swing vote on a
Speaker 1: lot of things. That's well, his energy permitting building is
Speaker 1: in trouble. Well, that said some of the things that
Speaker 1: if he is an aggressive legislator, it's very possible that
Speaker 1: he could put together coalitions that are bipartisan coalitions on
Speaker 1: some things. We just don't know what has any chance
Speaker 1: to get through the House or representatives, is the thing.
Speaker 1: What's how fascinating the climate change was up there in
Speaker 1: terms of voter priorities. You know. I my general feeling
Speaker 1: all this stuff is to wait and look more carefully
Speaker 1: as more studies go out. You know, it's it's easy
Speaker 1: for voters to say stuff, whether that means that and
Speaker 1: and it's it's interesting what's you know, what the tell
Speaker 1: posters is on the top of their minds. Whether that
Speaker 1: actually moved their votes or not is a much more
Speaker 1: complicated question and sometimes difficult to study. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think that generally the polling over the years has
Speaker 1: shown that dealing with climate has been a popular position
Speaker 1: for the last at least decade. And I think one
Speaker 1: of the things that we get out of one of
Speaker 1: the ways to think about the election is that Republicans
Speaker 1: were very, very certain that their issues were wildly popular
Speaker 1: with voters, but it may be that they were wrong.
Speaker 1: Number opinions Jonathan Bernstein and do please weigh in. You
Speaker 1: can email me at v Quinn at Bloomberg dot nets.
Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from you. Nomberg Opinion airs every
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Speaker 1: by Eric mollow Till next Time on Bloomberg opinion,