Speaker 1: Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Vonnie Quinn. A week after
Speaker 1: the mid terms. We're still waiting on some votes to
Speaker 1: be counted, but the broad parameters are set and though
Speaker 1: Republicans likely did win a House majority, it will be
Speaker 1: the smallest in ninety years. Joe Biden is also the
Speaker 1: first Democratic president in nearly all that time to gain
Speaker 1: governorships in a set of mid terms. I asked Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Opinions Jonathan Bernstein to explain what happened and what happens next.
Speaker 1: All right, Jonathan, Well, it's been a few days, so
Speaker 1: you've been able to digest the recent events midterms. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we're not fully decided yet. There's still a couple of
Speaker 1: seats that are not fully counted, but we do know
Speaker 1: the broad outlines of what we want to see in
Speaker 1: the next Congress. What do you after a few days
Speaker 1: of rumination is the most surprising thing about what happened
Speaker 1: in the midterms? You know? I think that I'll go
Speaker 1: along with the conventional wisdom. Democrats definitely did a little
Speaker 1: bit better than I think reasonable expectations based on polling
Speaker 1: and what the expert opinion was. I think they beat
Speaker 1: some of the expectations. There's no question that there was
Speaker 1: sort of some momentum that came out in the mainstream media.
Speaker 1: Few outlets in particular sort of bought the Republican spin
Speaker 1: that it was going to be a landslide. The polling
Speaker 1: really never said it was going to be a landslide.
Speaker 1: It said it should be a moderately good year for Republicans.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that there was much that was
Speaker 1: sort of a shocking surprise, but there was a lot
Speaker 1: that was. It turns out that the ball bounced a
Speaker 1: little bit the Democrats way in enough races and enough
Speaker 1: states that it wound up being an unusually good year
Speaker 1: for Democrats. I guess I would say there wasn't that
Speaker 1: any huge shocker on election day, and then the returns
Speaker 1: came in. If you look at the broad sweep of things,
Speaker 1: if you look at what happens when there's a democratic president,
Speaker 1: and in particular, unpopular democratic president in the White House,
Speaker 1: then it is a big surprise that it was basically
Speaker 1: a draw and that Republicans didn't pick up forty seats
Speaker 1: in the House and you know, several seats in the Senate.
Speaker 1: This was one of the very few elections. I think
Speaker 1: there's been six or something the last hundred years where
Speaker 1: the in party picked up seats and state legislatures. So
Speaker 1: while overall it was sort of a you know, Democrats
Speaker 1: will either pick up zero or one Senate seats, Republican
Speaker 1: are picking up a handful of House seats, Democrats are
Speaker 1: plus two and governors and plus a handful of state
Speaker 1: legislative seats. But it's sort of a fifty fifty type
Speaker 1: of election. But that in itself is over the course
Speaker 1: of history, very surprising and any year where inflation has
Speaker 1: been insane as well, so you would think that the
Speaker 1: incumbent party wouldn't be benefiting from that. Is it fair
Speaker 1: for the Democrats to do a lap of honor or
Speaker 1: was this a little bit of luck? You know, that's
Speaker 1: a good question. Sure, everybody deserves to take that was
Speaker 1: when they win. I don't think it was really much
Speaker 1: that Democrats did, especially governing Democrats. If you look at grassroots,
Speaker 1: I think that there was a huge amount of enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: again for the fourth cycle in a row, coming from women,
Speaker 1: different demographic groups of women over the abortion issue. So
Speaker 1: in a sense, it was Republicans shooting themselves in the
Speaker 1: pot in some ways or conservatives, I should say yes,
Speaker 1: I think that Republicans basically blew it rather than Democrats.
Speaker 1: So two things. First of all, the presidence of Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: a very unpopular former president who remains very much in
Speaker 1: the public eye and keeps trying to put himself in
Speaker 1: the political space. That probably changed things a little bit,
Speaker 1: which is interesting because it wasn't clear whether it would
Speaker 1: be a positive or negative in the early days, at
Speaker 1: least of the campaign, and even in October. I think
Speaker 1: all along it looked like to the extent that he
Speaker 1: was a major figure, it was a negative. You know.
Speaker 1: The thing is that normally people think, ah, the president,
Speaker 1: he's the most important person right now, let's balance him
Speaker 1: out some or if things are going badly, blame the president.
Speaker 1: But with the former president being a very important figure
Speaker 1: in politics to this day, people could blame Trump very easily,
Speaker 1: even though he's not around as a governing official. The
Speaker 1: other thing is that Trump, and this is only partially
Speaker 1: Trump's fault, but he's getting blamed for it. A lot
Speaker 1: within Republicans are the influence on the candidates themselves. There
Speaker 1: were a whole lot of terrible candidates chosen by Republicans
Speaker 1: in this cycle, some of them because Trump intervened in
Speaker 1: primaries a lot, because those candidates are just very popular
Speaker 1: among Republicans, in Republican line media, among Republican voters who
Speaker 1: didn't see going in any penalty to be faced. And
Speaker 1: I think some of that may have to do with
Speaker 1: Trump and his electoral history. That if they don't see
Speaker 1: Trump as a loser for his various things that made
Speaker 1: him very unpopular, as he was a loser, he is
Speaker 1: a loser. He was never popular as president. He was
Speaker 1: always unusually unpopular, and then even more so if you
Speaker 1: take into factors, like you know that the economy was
Speaker 1: generally very good for his first three years in office.
Speaker 1: So the Republicans wound up with all these terrible candidates
Speaker 1: and that certainly cost them. Do the make Republicans moderate
Speaker 1: their views a little bit now, given what we've seen
Speaker 1: and given how leadership is going to change, even though
Speaker 1: there will obviously be some extreme candidates and some fringe candidates. Still,
Speaker 1: I don't think those people moderate their views because I
Speaker 1: think what they're up to is in views as much
Speaker 1: as it is confrontation. And what does happen is some
Speaker 1: of them go away because they lost their elections. Um, so,
Speaker 1: to the extent that we have fewer of those extremists
Speaker 1: in the House, in the Senate, as governors, as secretaries
Speaker 1: of state of the various states, that does make a difference,
Speaker 1: But there still are quite a lot and there still
Speaker 1: are quite a lot of people who in the House,
Speaker 1: for example, voted to overturn the election, and you know,
Speaker 1: and then new people who mostly subscribe to that kind
Speaker 1: of thinking, and so, um, you know, do they moderate?
Speaker 1: I I don't see what in the party there is
Speaker 1: to push them in that direction. Well, just the idea
Speaker 1: that perhaps their seat won't be absolutely guaranteed next time
Speaker 1: because the voters are seeing which way the wind is
Speaker 1: blowing conservative voters. I mean, yeah, I don't see that
Speaker 1: as a likely outcome. It's possible it will be. There
Speaker 1: are certainly people in the Republican Party who believe now
Speaker 1: if they didn't before, that extremism is an electoral minus
Speaker 1: in general elections. But the problem with the Republican Party
Speaker 1: is that the normal incentive the political parties always have
Speaker 1: to try to win elections above all else has been weakened,
Speaker 1: in part because Republican align media is such a powerful
Speaker 1: force within the party and the Republican aligned media has
Speaker 1: much weaker incentives for electoral victory than do campaign professionals,
Speaker 1: governing professionals, politicians themselves, and that it's such an important
Speaker 1: point the incentives are so different. Well, we already have
Speaker 1: Andy Biggs, Conservative from Arizona, telling the GOP that he's
Speaker 1: planning to challenge Kevin McCarthy. We spoke already about Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy and how you know he might have to negotiate,
Speaker 1: But it's not clear what promises he can give people
Speaker 1: or what he can offer them. Does anything come to mind, No,
Speaker 1: m Kevin McCarthy is let's assume that he winds up
Speaker 1: having a four seat majority to nineteen to two fifteen.
Speaker 1: There's still some possibilities around that. The thing is that
Speaker 1: in normal times, all you have to do to become
Speaker 1: speaker is to win the vote of your caucus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a majority of your caucus, and then everybody loyally supports
Speaker 1: that person when you have the floor vote. The formal
Speaker 1: form for speaker where McCarthy will be opposed, if it's him,
Speaker 1: will be opposing either Nancy Pelosi or whoever the Democrats
Speaker 1: leader is. Republicans to some extent. Democrats, but especially Republicans,
Speaker 1: have challenged that norm over the last oh seven eight
Speaker 1: nine congresses already, and they say, well, we can use
Speaker 1: this procedural tick, which Mitchell Collin doesn't have to worry
Speaker 1: about because there is no vote like that in the Senate,
Speaker 1: only a vote like that for one office, which is
Speaker 1: Speaker of the House. We can use that to hold
Speaker 1: the party hostage. And if it's a majority, if five
Speaker 1: of us vote for King Kong or Donald Trump or
Speaker 1: you know, whoever to be speaker, then nobody will have
Speaker 1: a majority and we can use that. Now, what they
Speaker 1: can use it for, Well, they're not policy demanders. We're
Speaker 1: talking about people like Marjorite Heller Green here, Jim Jordan's
Speaker 1: that's right. What they want is to create controversy. That's
Speaker 1: their you know, as as members of the House, is
Speaker 1: to get their appearances on Fox News and to be
Speaker 1: on conservative talk radio. And so Kevin McCarthy can't give that, Yeah, exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: So there's nothing to stop them from doing it, and
Speaker 1: other than the realization that oh, we'll have chaos if
Speaker 1: we do that, but they may not mind having some chaos.
Speaker 1: So who would be the unifier in the Republican Party,
Speaker 1: then there isn't one. There isn't one. The bottom line
Speaker 1: is there is no unifier because the people who are
Speaker 1: revolting are not looking for unity. More next on Bloomberg Opinion,
Speaker 1: I'm Vonnie Quinn. Is there anybody else that's emerging as
Speaker 1: some kind of a maybe not a unifying figure, but
Speaker 1: even a polarizing figure, even somebody that would, you know,
Speaker 1: lead the chaos? You have to go through the House
Speaker 1: Caucus with a lot more intimate detail and knowledge than
Speaker 1: I have, But I don't see it. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: when John Bayner, who is the last good leader of
Speaker 1: the Republicans had when he resigned, McCarthy wanted the job,
Speaker 1: didn't have the votes they recruit did Paul Ryan because
Speaker 1: he was he was the one who had the respect
Speaker 1: of different factions within the party. They don't have that now.
Speaker 1: There's no replacement for Ryan, who turned out to be
Speaker 1: terrible anyway. But you know, at least they all sort
Speaker 1: of thought he could do the job. I don't so
Speaker 1: the best my knowledgeism there are members who are well liked.
Speaker 1: There's always members who are well liked, and so they
Speaker 1: may eventually find that that works for them. But in
Speaker 1: terms of someone who has liked and respected that can
Speaker 1: actually lead them. If there's somebody like that, it has
Speaker 1: not been reported who in the party is going to
Speaker 1: decide who should be the candidate for president. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of controversy within political science and within the world
Speaker 1: really about who has the power of these things. What
Speaker 1: I always say and my reading of it is it's
Speaker 1: party actors who make the decision, and that means it's
Speaker 1: a huge number of people, thousands of people of politicians
Speaker 1: and campaign and governing professionals and formal party officials and staff,
Speaker 1: party aligned interest groups, party aligned media, all of whom
Speaker 1: have their candidate, have their interests that they're pushing for
Speaker 1: within the process. Because what matters almost more than who
Speaker 1: the candidate is is which interests in which groups within
Speaker 1: the party are represented by that candidate, and how that
Speaker 1: the whole process goes on. Within the Republican Party. It
Speaker 1: seems to me that the biggest players are Republican aligned
Speaker 1: media talk show hosts or the people who make the
Speaker 1: decisions at the Fox shows, Fox News, Fox News imitators.
Speaker 1: They have a huge amount of clout within the party,
Speaker 1: so that it would seem like Rhanda Santis does have
Speaker 1: an actual shot at the next presidency. Now, if you
Speaker 1: were on his team, and I'm suggesting you ever would be,
Speaker 1: but put yourself in that position as team exactly if
Speaker 1: you had to get out ahead of Marco Rubio or
Speaker 1: Ted Cruz or any any of the others that might
Speaker 1: emerge or might jump into the fray, who would you
Speaker 1: be trying to appeal to beyond the Republican media, who
Speaker 1: obviously already has appealed to. Yeah, And the problem is
Speaker 1: that we don't know if those people will still be
Speaker 1: supporting him six months in the future, levels fifteen months
Speaker 1: in the future when Iowa and New Hampshire and South
Speaker 1: Carolina vote. So, you know, you try to build up
Speaker 1: support within the party. Then you try to fashion positions
Speaker 1: and attitudes that are popular. You try to appeal to
Speaker 1: all those people, you know, activist donors. Obviously, people with
Speaker 1: money are important, But people who can you know, snab
Speaker 1: their fingers and have a thousand people come to Iowa
Speaker 1: to walk door to door for you are important too.
Speaker 1: Does he have that kind of general liability to the
Speaker 1: Only reason I'm talking about him is because you know,
Speaker 1: he's sort of on everybody's lips right now. But it doesn't,
Speaker 1: like you said, it doesn't mean that somebody else won't
Speaker 1: to merge or that Ted Cuz won't suddenly grab the
Speaker 1: spotlight again exactly. And you know, we have there's a
Speaker 1: whole history of this, and the political scientists John Sides
Speaker 1: and his co authors talk about a cycle of discovery, scrutiny,
Speaker 1: decline where somebody all of a sudden becomes the candidate
Speaker 1: at the moment and everybody's all excited about that person
Speaker 1: and then yes, you know, Rudy Giuliani, Scott Walker, Ben
Speaker 1: Carson Um, you know, and then after a while that
Speaker 1: part wears off, and then they start to look at
Speaker 1: and they discover stuff that's not so flattering about that person,
Speaker 1: and that's what they run with. And then you know,
Speaker 1: support sometimes plateaus, sometimes crashes. And do we know whether
Speaker 1: that will have with the Santas. We have no idea.
Speaker 1: And I you know a lot of people will like
Speaker 1: watch them on TV. Oh does that person have the appeal?
Speaker 1: I think it's very very difficult to know. I think
Speaker 1: that especially with you know, we've seen a lot of
Speaker 1: candidates who didn't appear to be that strong on television
Speaker 1: but we're good enough person to person because even though
Speaker 1: it's it's thousands and thousands of people, it's sort of
Speaker 1: a discreet universe, it is. And also it's not clear
Speaker 1: that he has a national profile here is I mean,
Speaker 1: he's more than anyone right now? Yeah, exactly, He's just
Speaker 1: building one up and we'll see how it plays over time.
Speaker 1: And there's it's just not in my view, it's not
Speaker 1: especially predictable. What we what will start to be meaningful
Speaker 1: is if he gets real support, permanent support, permanent as
Speaker 1: permanent as anything is in politics. If he gets endorsements,
Speaker 1: if he gets commitments from donors, if those sorts of things,
Speaker 1: those tend to be good markers that the candidate is
Speaker 1: playing well and not just of the moment. But he
Speaker 1: definitely has the backing of some will treaters like Ken
Speaker 1: Griffin and people like that right now, So that's always helpful.
Speaker 1: I don't ever want to write him off, as you've
Speaker 1: said in the past, But is Trump done or when
Speaker 1: will we know if he is? And I don't mean
Speaker 1: done in the sense that he might run or not run,
Speaker 1: I just mean is his influence not what he used
Speaker 1: to be, you know, I wouldn't want to make any guesses. Um,
Speaker 1: what I read as as far as I see the pundits,
Speaker 1: and there's there's sort of a group of pundits who are, oh,
Speaker 1: don't pay any attention to anything that's going on. Trump
Speaker 1: owns the party and when he snaps his fingers, eventually
Speaker 1: everybody will come back to him. And then there's another
Speaker 1: set that think he's finished. And I just don't think
Speaker 1: we know. I think that this stuff plays out over time.
Speaker 1: And what I would say is it's very clear that
Speaker 1: there are a lot of Republican Party actors, especially politicians,
Speaker 1: who have no use for him, who understand how he's
Speaker 1: hurt the party and who would love to have him
Speaker 1: go away. Whether that will be enough to prevent him
Speaker 1: from being the nominee, I don't know whether those people
Speaker 1: will fight hard against him. I don't know whether they're
Speaker 1: willing to compromise on another candidate in order to stop him.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well, Also, people's wings have been clipped
Speaker 1: January six, and the hearings and so on has to
Speaker 1: have clipped some of the fans wings. Um, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: worry as much about at the sort of voter level.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say people automatically do whatever the
Speaker 1: media says, because it's not quite that simple. But I
Speaker 1: do think that if Fox News reports favorably about Trump,
Speaker 1: most Republican voters are not going to care about any
Speaker 1: of that stuff. And if Fox News starts ignoring him,
Speaker 1: then you're going to find more and more voters going
Speaker 1: to the candidates that they pay favorable attention to. So
Speaker 1: you're saying that there's a scenario in which Trump could
Speaker 1: get popular again and could whip up crowds just like
Speaker 1: he was able to do in the past. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's very plausible to me. But hate to be the
Speaker 1: person saying I don't know what's gonna happen. But in fact,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't think anybody
Speaker 1: anybody who acts completely convinced that they know what's going
Speaker 1: to happen in the presidential nomination battle that's still fifteen
Speaker 1: months away or thirteen months away, whatever it is, and
Speaker 1: that there's no consensus among party actors. You know, we
Speaker 1: knew Hillary Clinton was going to win in UM because
Speaker 1: everybody in the Democratic Party had already endorsed her at
Speaker 1: this stage UM, and even so she had to fend
Speaker 1: off a pretty serious challenge from Bernie Sandar. She was
Speaker 1: never in that much trouble at that time, we knew.
Speaker 1: But any time that we don't have that kind of
Speaker 1: consensus that we had, say around George W. Bush when
Speaker 1: he first ran, we don't know. It just takes time
Speaker 1: for the stuff to shake out. Is Biden doing the
Speaker 1: right thing he said he'd announced, but in the new year,
Speaker 1: after the new year sometime, Yeah, I do think that
Speaker 1: he probably the happy impression that most Democrats have about
Speaker 1: the elections. Yeah it wasn't the democratic landslide, you know,
Speaker 1: but but that no disasters happened. I think probably bought
Speaker 1: him even more time than he would have had anyway.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think he needs to decide sometime in
Speaker 1: the first several months of the year in order to
Speaker 1: give the party time to react if he chooses not
Speaker 1: to run. If he does choose to run, as long
Speaker 1: as he can maintain around the level that he's at now,
Speaker 1: he's around approval, I think that he may yet a
Speaker 1: minor challenge, but nothing too serious, and the data may
Speaker 1: actually work out for him because we're not quite sure
Speaker 1: about a recession yet, but it looks like inflation is
Speaker 1: coming down. So if inflation comes down, and if we
Speaker 1: don't have a recession, then I would expect Biden we
Speaker 1: don't go to war or anything like that. I would
Speaker 1: expect if economic news is good, no other particularly bad news,
Speaker 1: one would expect that Biden's approval rating will gradually recover,
Speaker 1: and he will a year from now be certainly popular
Speaker 1: enough the Democrats would rather live with him than get
Speaker 1: into the mess of a of an domination battle, if
Speaker 1: that's what he wants. I think it has a lot
Speaker 1: to do with what his health actually is, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of crazy stuff about his health.
Speaker 1: But he's not young, and and we don't know how
Speaker 1: it feels to be an eighty year old president. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you know he's gonna have to make that decision
Speaker 1: as long as he's not any less popular in is now.
Speaker 1: If he gets truly unpopular, then the party will start
Speaker 1: making it for him. But as long as he is,
Speaker 1: and certainly if he becomes a little more popular than
Speaker 1: this or less unpopular, I should say it's his decision
Speaker 1: and nobody can get into his head for that. Bloomberg Opinions.
Speaker 1: Jonathan Bernstein, Bloomberg opinion airs every weekend on Bloomberg Radio
Speaker 1: and as a podcast every week on Apple, Spotify, or
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Speaker 1: I'm at Quinn at Bloomberg dot net. We're produced by
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