The mid-terms are over, and it's time to turn our attention to what's next for the economy and the economy's impact on the economy. Inflation is still a problem, and that's why you might want to hedge against bad government policy by getting some precious metals like gold and silver. Also, it's a good time to diversify your portfolio and get out of the safe haven of bonds and Treasuries. The typical investment portfolio of 60-40 stocks and bonds is down 34% this year. This is the worst drop in a century, and millions of Americans are taking a hit. So what can you do? Invest in assets that are not dragged down by the stock market, like fine art and fine art, like masterworks! Masterworks is a creative, diversified portfolio of assets that doesn't have a correlation to the S&P 500 and Dow Jones, and you can buy fractionally alongside others over at Masterworks and invest alongside me, Ben Shapiro! Join Masterworks today! Ben Shapiro's newest show on The Ben Shapiro Show is now available on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your news and information. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your data at ExpressVPN, it s time to stand up against big tech at Express VPN. Protect Your Data at ExpressVpn. Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Podcast! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro s newest podcast, The Daily Wire, wherever you re listening to the show is available. Ben Shapiro is on the air. Subscribe to his new show on the Daily Wire and the New York Times on the Four Seasons Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on Podchaserx=1& subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your favorite podcast on Podcoin Subscribe on PODCAST! Subscribe at Podcoin Connect with Ben Shapiro Subscribe on Strava Learn more at The FiveThirtyEight Subscribe at Parcast Connect with me on LinkedIn Learn more on The Six Sigma or become a Friended by Ben Shapiro Become a Friend of Ben Shapiro on Social Media? Subscribe and Share Ben Shapiro and I am Ben Shapiro On The Hustler at Connect with him on . and much more! - Ben Shapiro: - Thank you Ben Shapiro & I do not have a discount code: Ben Shapiro And I am so grateful for your support and support Ben Shapiro at .
00:00:24.000We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
00:00:26.000First, inflation is still really, really bad.
00:00:28.000I know, everybody forgot about that for a moment.
00:00:30.000The Daily Wire reports in less than two years, inflation has soared from 1.4% to 8.6%.
00:00:35.000The current administration continues to spend and spend and spend, and nothing last night will make them stop spending, which is why you might want to hedge against bad government policy by getting some precious metals with Birch Gold.
00:01:32.000If the current administration keeps handing out free checks, which they will, Americans won't just be hurting, they'll be fighting to survive.
00:01:37.000The typical investment portfolio of 60-40 stocks and bonds is down 34% this year.
00:02:54.000And then you have the red tide, and that was going to be 20-plus seats for the Republicans, fairly strong showing on the evening.
00:03:00.000Plus, they take, say, a couple more seats in the Senate, end up with a 52-48 majority.
00:03:06.000And then there was the red wave, which would have been like 54 seats in the Senate and upwards of 230 seats in the House, like 235 or something.
00:03:13.000This was not only not a red wave, it was not a red tide, it was barely a red trickle.
00:03:19.000Barely, barely, barely a red trickle, which means heads should roll.
00:03:23.000When your football team is expected to go 16-0, it's one thing if your football team then proceeds to go 14-2 or 10-6.
00:03:32.000If your football team proceeds to go 8-8, people get fired.
00:03:37.000The entire coaching staff, the entire leadership team in the Republican Party needs to go, and it needs to go now.
00:03:43.000I spoke to the Republican House Caucus back in 2021.
00:03:48.000And I said to them, if somehow you fail to take the House, given the conditions that you have been given, every one of you ought to lose your jobs.
00:03:54.000Well, they're barely going to take the House.
00:03:56.000And I mean barely, barely, barely going to take the House.
00:03:59.000The current estimate suggests that Republicans are going to win somewhere between 8 and 15 seats in the House.
00:04:04.000That means they will end up on the low end at 220, at a 435, which means that they would have a 5-seat majority in the House after starting with just a 10-seat minority in the House.
00:04:15.000That is an extraordinarily crappy result.
00:04:17.000In the Senate, the Republicans look like they are going to be on the losing edge of this one.
00:04:22.000Basically, the entire Senate comes down right now to Georgia, where it looks like there will be a runoff between Hershel Walker and Raphael Warnock.
00:04:29.000Arizona, not all the votes are in because apparently all the votes in Arizona are counted by a single blind nun working in Mozambique.
00:04:35.000And so we have to take at least seven years to count all the votes in Arizona.
00:04:38.000And the same thing holds true in Nevada.
00:04:41.000If you have to ballpark The outcomes of those races right now, what you would figure is that Republicans, in order to gain control of the Senate, would need to take two out of those three.
00:04:50.000Republicans, I think, may still take Nevada.
00:04:53.000It looks as though they're going to lose Arizona.
00:04:56.000And that runoff with Herschel, we're going to get another Senate runoff in Georgia, this time featuring the extraordinarily flawed candidacy of Herschel Walker against Raphael Warnock in an off-year election where Brian Kemp is not on the ballot to drag Hershel Walker up ballot.
00:05:46.000I don't know that you get to be Speaker of the House after you win 8 to 15 seats in a year in which the fundamentals not only favor you, but favor you dramatically.
00:05:55.000Let us recall the fundamentals going into this particular election cycle.
00:05:58.000The current President of the United States, Joe Biden, who is not alive, has a 43% approval rating.
00:06:04.000The Democrats in Congress are not popular.
00:06:13.000We have failure when it comes to Afghanistan.
00:06:16.000We had polling suggesting that the Republicans were going to do well on the generic congressional ballot.
00:06:19.000And by the way, polling that is justified in the exit polls, as we'll talk about, about good Republican performances among Hispanics and Blacks.
00:06:26.000And yet, somehow, magically, the Republicans translated all of those systemic advantages, again in an off-year election, where there's one party in power, they translated all of that into an 8 to 15 seat pickup.
00:06:38.000It is the worst election for the out-of-party power.
00:06:41.000The out-of-power party since the 2002 midterm elections, which came right after 9-11.
00:06:47.000And that, at least, you could say, well, George W. Bush had the coattail effect of 9-11.
00:06:51.000Americans, for a brief instant in time, were unified around a patriotic fervor for the country and for the current president of the United States, George W. Bush, in 2002.
00:07:42.000But when you wake up tomorrow, we will be in the majority, and Nancy Pelosi will be in the minority.
00:07:48.000Okay, so there's some sort of AirSats enthusiasm last night, but the actual reports from the victory party there is that people were just confused and bewildered as to what exactly Because, again, this was supposed to be a big win for the Republicans, and it just wasn't.
00:08:37.000As Elon Musk suggested, divided government is better at this point than unified government, for sure.
00:08:43.000With that said, is this a strong Republican Party?
00:08:46.000Is this a Republican Party that looks durable?
00:08:49.000Is this a Republican Party that looks like it has any leadership class at all?
00:08:52.000Or does it look like there's a massive leadership vacuum at the top of the Republican Party, particularly in the House, but also when it comes to the National Party?
00:09:01.000According to Politico, the Sleepy event was not the victory rager Republicans had envisioned.
00:09:05.000at the West End, GOP staffers and lobbyists had flocked to different open bars scattered around downstairs ballrooms around 9 p.m., keenly awaiting election results to start rolling in from TVs due to Fox News.
00:09:14.000However, in the hours leading up to McCarthy's appearance, there were few cheers as the room watched as competitive races rolled in with mixed results.
00:09:23.000And the attitude over the course of the evening went from jubilant at the beginning of the evening, to cautiously optimistic, to cautiously pessimistic, to shoot me now.
00:10:03.000Democrats flipped Steve Chabot's district in Ohio.
00:10:06.000Democrats were not supposed to flip any districts last night.
00:10:08.000Republicans were supposed to flip all the districts last night.
00:10:12.000There were a few positive House results in Florida and New York.
00:10:15.000Lee Zeldin in New York, who we'll get to in a little bit.
00:10:17.000He lost his race to Kathy Hochul, but his strong performance did drag a lot of Republicans in the Hudson River Valley into Congress along with him, mitigating the possibility that Republicans would not gain the House.
00:10:27.000But a bunch of vulnerable Republicans In what was supposed to be a wave year, four of the Republicans lost their seats.
00:10:33.000That includes Mayra Flores in South Texas, who was a star five seconds ago.
00:10:44.000I'm not sure the Republicans and independents stayed home.
00:10:48.000I think the Republicans actually showed up.
00:10:50.000I just think that some independents had some very serious questions about the Republican Party, and that will require some serious soul-searching in all of this.
00:10:58.000Again, right now as we speak, the Republicans have not formally won the House.
00:11:02.000There are still races that have yet to be counted.
00:11:03.000They probably will win the House, but these are not good numbers for the Republicans.
00:11:08.000And Boebert was not, she was not supposed to lose that race in Colorado.
00:11:13.000And part of that is because the House Republicans did not convey a sense that they know what they are doing.
00:11:20.000There are going to be a few big messages we're going to talk about, about what happened last night.
00:11:24.000The first message is candidate quality matters.
00:11:27.000Being perceived as solid in your governance strategy matters.
00:11:31.000Republicans who had a solid record of governance, Republicans who were perceived as sober and serious, did quite well last night.
00:11:38.000And everybody else took it directly on the nose.
00:11:41.000That was certainly the story in the Senate.
00:11:43.000The story in the Senate is candidate quality, candidate quality, candidate quality.
00:11:46.000And what I mean by this is that if you are perceived as a crazy person, if you are perceived as wild and out of the box, even if you excite the base, you will lose.
00:11:57.000You must be perceived, if you wish to win, you must be perceived as a person serious enough to hold the office, at least if you wish to be a Republican.
00:12:03.000If you're a Democrat, you can be as crazy as you want to be, because for whatever reason, you have systemic built-in advantages that make up for the fact that, for example, John Fetterman is not only a Bernie Sanders-style socialist, but also not fully functional.
00:12:15.000But if you're a Republican, the baseline assumption is going to be by the electorate that unless you are competent and sober, you don't deserve power.
00:12:24.000And so there was a lot of talk in the lead up to the election about, I engaged in some of this, about how the Joe Biden democracies at stake message was not resonating with people.
00:12:32.000And in a direct way, it wasn't resonating with people, right?
00:12:35.000So obviously the notion that just that message alone was going to keep Republicans from power is wrong.
00:12:41.000What this meant is that Republicans got silly.
00:12:46.000They nominated a bunch of bad candidates in close races, and oddly enough, they nominated a bunch of good candidates in not-close races.
00:12:52.000And so you ended up in the House with this weird dichotomy, where in districts that Democrats won by 18, Republicans would make up 15 points of that ground with a really solid candidate and then lose.
00:13:01.000And then in districts where Democrats were up by 3, Republicans would nominate somebody Who was like a big fan of January 6th.
00:13:17.000And then in the Senate, Republicans made the mistake of thinking that because the dynamics for the Democrats were going to be bad, they could nominate anyone.
00:13:25.000So, if you look at the narrative of politics over the past few years, what you will see is that what Americans basically want is stability.
00:13:35.000And the parties keep taking the wrong message from all of this.
00:13:38.000In 2012, Democrats took the message that they had an unbeatable coalition and they could be as radical as they wanted to be.
00:13:43.000And the reaction by the American people was, we'll elect Donald Trump to not give you that sort of power.
00:13:47.000Donald Trump won, and instead of taking the election, the Republican Party, as a sign that it was time to get back to some semblance of normalcy, instead they said, well, I mean, if we won, this means that we have magic on our side, and we can nominate whoever we want to, and we'll just continue to win victories.
00:14:02.000And then Donald Trump did not win in 2020.
00:14:04.000And now Republicans did not win in 2022.
00:14:05.000The underlying dynamics of American politics are the same.
00:14:11.000Just because some out-of-the-box candidates are capable of defying gravity for a short period of time does not mean that they don't fly too close to the sun and the wings burn away.
00:14:19.000And that is what we are watching happen for virtually everybody in all parties.
00:14:24.000The American people are not up for crazy right now.
00:15:15.000It was supposed to be within a couple of points.
00:15:17.000Instead, Maggie Hassan walked away with an 11-point victory in New Hampshire.
00:15:22.000That is a testament to bad candidate quality in New Hampshire.
00:15:26.000The same thing happened in Pennsylvania.
00:15:30.000John Fetterman won Pennsylvania despite the fact that he is not fully functional.
00:15:33.000Now, I will say, I think that it may be Because John Fetterman was not fully functional, that a lot of the focus turned away from the fact that he is a radical to the fact that he was not fully functional, and that's bad campaigning.
00:15:52.000Dave McCormick was a better candidate in that race.
00:15:55.000Mehmet Oz got Donald Trump's endorsement, and then he won the primary by about seven votes.
00:16:00.000And then within the first five minutes of the campaign, John Fetterman successfully labeled Mehmet Oz a TV snake oil salesman who was not from the state and owned mansions and had no connection with the people of Pennsylvania.
00:16:10.000And so John Fetterman, with a stroke, defeated Mehmet Oz last night.
00:16:15.000Fetterman ended up with 49% support compared with 48% support for Mehmet Oz.
00:16:21.000Again, bad candidate quality is a thing.
00:16:26.000It now looks like a runoff in Georgia is the likely result between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker.
00:16:31.000Herschel Walker was not the best candidate in the primary, but he was endorsed by certain people, and so Herschel Walker became the nominee.
00:16:37.000And so we had a campaign filled with talk of how many illegitimate children Herschel Walker had.
00:16:41.000How exactly was that going to be a big win for the Republicans?
00:17:12.000Perhaps the commercials that he was cutting about how wonderful Donald Trump was, while Mark Kelly was cutting commercials about how he was shaking hands with every Republican mayor he could find.
00:17:49.000Vance won almost precisely the same percentage as Donald Trump won in Ohio.
00:17:53.000If you want to tell whether a candidate in the Republican Party did well, you have to look at whether they outperformed Donald Trump's 2020 performance in the same state.
00:18:02.000And I gotta tell you, not a lot of outperformance by Trump's handpicked candidates in the swing states.
00:18:06.000In Pennsylvania, Donald Trump won 48.8% of the votes in 2020.
00:18:08.000Dr. Oz won 47.7% of the vote last night.
00:18:13.000In Georgia, Donald Trump won 49.2% of the vote.
00:18:16.000Hershel Walker is currently clocking in at 48.5% of the vote in Georgia.
00:18:19.000In Arizona, Donald Trump won 49% of the vote in 2020.
00:18:22.000His handpicked candidate, Blake Masters, is currently clocking in at 46% of the vote in Arizona.
00:19:23.000And also, don't alienate everybody on earth with claims that the vast majority of Americans do not actually believe.
00:19:30.000You cannot make election 2020 the subject of your campaign in any major way in the United States and hope that things are going to turn out amazing unless your district is like a deep red district.
00:19:41.000That is one of the messages of this thing.
00:19:43.000And you can tell, by the way, that there were governors last night who didn't do that and who walked away absolutely clean, who did great last night.
00:19:52.000The big winners last night were all the people That we're kind of at odds with President Trump.
00:19:58.000That we're at odds with the Trumpification of the Republican Party, who are not the out-of-the-box candidates.
00:20:03.000Those people did a lot better last night than the generalized Republican Party.
00:20:07.000And the Democrats who are running against the most perceived Trump-ish candidates are the ones who actually ended up doing really well last night.
00:20:14.000Those Democrats ended up doing really well.
00:20:17.000It says that the very first rule of politics, I say it all the time, if you wish to win, make it very hard to vote for your opponent, make it very easy to vote for you.
00:20:25.000The Republicans spent a lot of time this election cycle making it hard to vote for their opponent, and then they proceeded to nominate a bevy of candidates who made it very hard to vote for the Republican.
00:20:35.000Now, when you look to the gubernatorial races, what you can see is that when you make it easy to vote for your own candidate, then your candidates do really, really well.
00:20:42.000We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
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00:21:45.000You may have noticed that violent crime stats are not looking amazing.
00:21:47.000Compared to 2019 mid-year figures, some major cities are experiencing as much as a 50% increase in homicides and a 36% increase in aggravated assaults.
00:21:56.000Now would be an excellent time to make sure that you are protected.
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00:22:54.000So, let's take a couple of examples in terms of how this broke out.
00:22:58.000So, in the Ohio vote, if you recall, early on in this particular race in Ohio, Mike DeWine was running against Nan Whaley in the Democratic Party.
00:23:07.000This was supposed to be a possible toss-up race.
00:23:54.000He did great because it turns out that he knows how to govern, and the people of Georgia trust him.
00:23:59.000And because the people of Georgia trust Brian Kemp, that means that Stacey Abrams is once again relegated to being not governor.
00:24:07.000If you're looking for bright spots for Republicans last night, Stacey Abrams actually conceding an election for a change was kind of fun.
00:24:13.000So here is Stacey Abrams, president of the universe, conceding that she is not in fact going to be, nor has she ever been, governor of Georgia.
00:25:11.000Because good Republican governance combined with, yes, some of the culture war issues, Brian Kemp opened the state of Georgia up early, lest you forget.
00:27:51.000That's a 13-point victory for Josh Shapiro over Doug Mastriano.
00:27:57.000And might it have behooved the Republican Party to nominate a better gubernatorial candidate who could have perhaps helped Dr. Oz over the finish line in a much closer race against Jon Federen?
00:28:18.000Not an anti-Trump guy, Lee Zeldin, but certainly a more establishmentarian Republican.
00:28:23.000He ran a very concerted, disciplined race against Kathy Hochul.
00:28:28.000And the results in that race came out in favor of Kathy Hochul, but Lee Zeldin had some significant downstream effect.
00:28:36.000There were three House seats that flipped in New York because Lee Zeldin ran a strong race at the top of the ticket.
00:28:41.000So basically, he gave up his House seat to Lee Zeldin, and he sacrificed it in order so that New York could have a few more Republican congresspeople, which, by the way, may spell the difference between Republican control and not Republican control in the House of Representatives.
00:28:54.000In that governor's race, by the way, Kathy Hochul ended up winning by just about five points.
00:29:00.000That is a dramatic loss for Kathy Hochul, considering, I mean, she wins, but it's a big loss.
00:29:05.000It's a win for Kathy Hochul in the same way the last night was a win for Republicans.
00:29:08.000Like, it technically won, but not amazing.
00:29:11.000Andrew Cuomo won his last race in New York State by, like, 25 points.
00:29:14.000A five-point loss for Lee Zeldin demonstrates that good candidates do well and have coattails.
00:29:21.000The reason I keep coming back to this is because there need to be some lessons for the future here.
00:29:25.000Republicans seem to have a very, very nasty habit.
00:29:27.000And the nasty habit is that they keep going back to the well of magic.
00:29:33.000They keep thinking, okay, well, you know, but people will hate Democrats so much that we can nominate literally anybody.
00:29:37.000We can nominate that dude on a street corner.
00:29:39.000I mean, sure, he's shouting at the sky and he's scratching at himself with one of those weird back scratcher things.
00:29:44.000And sure, he's got fleas and rabies, but that guy, he could, I mean, anyone could be Biden, right?
00:29:48.000I mean, anyone can beat these Democrats.
00:29:50.000I mean, these Democrats, these woke idiots, like anyone could beat them.
00:30:01.000And lest you think, again, that this is some sort of out-of-the-box strategy, that there's no evidence to back this, there's sort of no counterexample to what happened with Republicans last night.
00:30:15.000But the big counterexample of the night is there was one area of the country where there was indeed not just a red trickle, not just a red tide, not just a red wave, a red tsunami.
00:30:25.000One specific area of the country, can you name it?
00:30:28.000One specific area of the country where the Republicans cleaned up, where there wasn't a vote in sight that they didn't get.
00:30:34.000That area, you guessed it, is Florida.
00:30:38.000In Florida, the Republicans did heavy damage, serious, serious damage.
00:30:44.000In fact, because Florida reports its results fast and in clean fashion, like the polls closed at 7 p.m.
00:30:50.000in most of Florida except for the panhandle, by like 8 p.m.
00:30:53.000Eastern last night, we knew the results in Florida.
00:30:56.000And that's why there was a lot of feeling in the Republican side of the aisle.
00:30:58.000I mean, we were covering it live last night at Daily Wire.
00:31:00.000Plus, there was a feeling that this might be a red wave.
00:31:04.000But it turns out it was not a red wave.
00:31:05.000It was just that Florida Republicans know what they are doing.
00:31:07.000And Ron DeSantis is an excellent candidate who is good at governing and then does the culture war issues, has the icing on the cake.
00:32:44.000This state is not on the board for Democrats, and that is because a good Republican, there is no substitute for good candidates who are good at their jobs and engage less in the culture war crazy than they do in the actual governance of their state.
00:32:57.000And certainly don't engage in stupid issues that are going to be counterproductive.
00:33:01.000Ron DeSantis is a culture warrior, no question.
00:33:50.000So there are a lot of people on my side of the aisle, a lot of Republicans, a lot of conservatives, they're like, why can't Republicans message on this stuff?
00:33:55.000The answer is, because again, don't let the icing be the cake.
00:33:58.000You can't have the cake without the icing.
00:34:02.000But, you can also not have the, the icing without the cake is nothing.
00:34:05.000The icing without the cake is Don Balduck.
00:34:07.000The icing without the cake is Doug Mastriano.
00:34:09.000The icing with the cake is Ron DeSantis.
00:34:12.000And the cake without the icing is Mike DeWine.
00:34:14.000Okay, so what that sounds like, actually, is that the main thing Republicans have to do is focus on not alienating every voter in sight by embracing silliness, by embracing things that the American voters do not care about.
00:34:27.000There's a lot of talk in the election lead up about how Democrats were ignoring what the voters wanted.
00:36:02.000Check them out right now and check out all their available deals.
00:36:05.000Are you still giving your money to woke razor companies that hate your values, see masculinity as toxic, and think you should teach your daughter to shave her beard?
00:37:52.000So that means that more than half of the Republican gains, in all likelihood, are going to come from those two states alone, with competent people running, Florida and New York.
00:38:03.000And by the way, Again, it wasn't just DeSantis.
00:39:36.000Yelling at the sky is not, in fact, a strategy.
00:39:39.000And if Republicans wish to actually win broad victories over the course of the next decade or so, they're going to need to put away the childish playthings with which they have been preoccupied.
00:39:49.000I'm talking about the House leadership.
00:39:50.000I'm talking about the presidential leadership.
00:39:53.000That means that discipline needs to be in order here.
00:39:57.000There will be some opportunity for Republicans.
00:39:59.000There are going to be some silver linings here, which we'll get to in just one second.
00:41:13.000Florida is governed like it ought to be governed, which is why you saw the crowd chanting at Ron DeSantis last night, two more years, which was very funny.
00:41:20.000I will admit that was very, very funny.
00:41:22.000Today, after four years, the people have delivered their verdict.
00:42:28.000There is no way that Joseph R. Biden, a person who died several years ago, should have earned the single best Democratic in power party performance since 2002.
00:43:39.000And neither party seems to be able to be sane.
00:43:41.000So let's talk about what this means for the Democratic Party going forward and the Republican Party going forward.
00:43:46.000Let's start with the Republican Party because I want to save the silver linings so that we can talk about some happy stuff in a little bit.
00:43:52.000But first, let's talk about what this means for Donald Trump.
00:43:55.000In the last moments of the election, right before the election, he decided that he was going to start sounding off about how he was running again in 2024.
00:44:07.000Donald Trump is not a wildly popular figure outside of about one-third of Americans.
00:44:11.000About one-third of Americans love the guy, and the other two-thirds of Americans are not super happy with him.
00:44:15.000I would say one-third of Americans love him.
00:44:18.000I would say 45% of Americans cannot stand him.
00:44:20.000And then there are people in the middle who are really not particularly happy with Trump.
00:44:23.000They don't hate him beyond cancer, but they aren't particularly, this is what the exit polls showed.
00:44:27.000Exit polls last night, 37% favorable rating of Trump.
00:44:32.000He hasn't been president for two years, 37% favorable rating.
00:44:36.000So, when you come out days before the election and you rip Ron DeSantis, who just won a 20 point victory in Florida, as Ron DeSanctimonious, people react to that and they don't love it.
00:44:48.000When you say on election day, as Donald Trump literally did yesterday, when you say that Ron DeSantis better not run against me because I have so much dirt on him, I know him better than anyone except perhaps his own wife, is that like a smart move, politically speaking?
00:45:02.000Is that a good strategy or is that a very, very stupid strategy that seems rather narcissistic when you are trying to lead your party to the victory?
00:46:32.000I mean, there are several reasons why Donald Trump's impact on the election is going to have negative ramifications for Trump 2024.
00:46:39.000Number one, if he announces next week, you think everybody's in a good mood?
00:46:43.000So Donald Trump has operated on sort of a theory of unfalsifiability thus far.
00:46:47.000So yesterday he was interviewed by News Nation and he was asked, so depending on how the election does, should you get credit or should you get blame?
00:46:56.000And he gave a typical Trumpian answer.
00:46:58.000I'm going to say that I think this is half tongue-in-cheek, but then he goes on and it's not quite half tongue-in-cheek.
00:47:25.000Okay, and then he continued along those lines, and he said, I shouldn't be blamed at all, and I won't be that way, but really, I deserve all the credit.
00:47:33.000That's what I deserve, is all the credit.
00:47:35.000Donald Trump raised in excess of $100 million in this campaign because of all the mailers and all the rest.
00:47:41.000He spent $15 million in this campaign.
00:47:44.000Mitch McConnell, who the base is very angry at and who Donald Trump is very angry at, spent $234 million from the Senate leadership pack in this particular election cycle.
00:47:55.000Donald Trump got a bunch of people nominated and then he stopped cutting them checks.
00:49:00.000Since the election of 2020, he lost the election in 2020.
00:49:04.000He then proceeded to lose Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia, losing them the majority.
00:49:08.000And now he is largely responsible for the nomination of a bevy of candidates in the House and in the Senate who wildly underperformed, and the governorships who wildly underperformed.
00:49:24.000If you're going to be the leader, then the buck stops somewhere.
00:49:28.000At some point, the Republican Party is going to have to make a decision.
00:49:32.000Do they wish to be tied to Donald Trump's obsession with election 2020?
00:49:38.000Is that the thing that they really want?
00:49:39.000Donald Trump in the middle of this election cycle, he went to, first of all, he goes to Ohio and he says to JD Vance, JD's kissing my ass for my endorsement.
00:49:46.000He's the only reason that he's the only reason that I'm the only reason he's going to win.
00:49:51.000And then in the middle of the election, he's calling up Blake Massey.
00:49:53.000Why wouldn't you deny the election even more strongly?
00:49:56.000You want you want the the less you think that I'm just going after Trump unfairly that Here is Donald Trump's actual reaction to the election last night.
00:50:06.000Now, a normal reaction by anyone who believes in conservative principles would be, man, we sucked last night.
00:50:15.000A normal reaction to Republicans losing seats last night, vulnerable seats for Democrats, would have been, man, what a blown opportunity.
00:50:24.000Donald Trump's election reaction last night on Truth Social was almost entirely ripping candidates, some of whom he had already endorsed, for not sufficiently bending the knee to him and then losing.
00:50:36.000Does this sound like the leadership qualities that you are looking for at the top of the Republican Party?
00:50:44.000At some point, the Republicans are going to have to grow up.
00:50:47.000They're going to have to realize And no matter how much you love Donald Trump, even if you want to see him as the nominee, no matter how much of that is true, be serious about who you nominate.
00:50:55.000Treat elections as though they matter.
00:51:00.000Donald Trump tweeted last night, or put out on Truth Social, he truthed last night, quote, Don Balduck was a very nice guy, but he lost tonight when he disavowed, after his big primary win, his longstanding stance on election fraud in the 2020 presidential primary.
00:51:13.000Had he stayed strong and true, he would have won easily.
00:51:17.000Donald Trump's lesson from last night is that Don Balduck wasn't crazy enough.
00:51:22.000Donald Trump's lesson last night was that Don Balduck should have made the entire election in New Hampshire about Donald Trump losing in 2020.
00:51:31.000Does that sound like a person who is deeply Dedicated to the cause of defeating Joe Biden?
00:51:37.000He didn't have a word to say on Truth Social last night about Joe Biden in the immediate aftermath of the election.
00:51:41.000Not a word to say about the Democrats who are running the country directly into the ground.
00:51:45.000Not a word to say about the transing of the kids, about the 40-year inflation rate, about the loss of Afghanistan, about the equity at the center of every policy.
00:52:15.000Now, is this the way that America gets made great again?
00:52:18.000If you cared about Trump's agenda, you know, his actual agenda, the things he did, the reasons I voted for him in 2020, the things he did, the conservative Supreme Court justices, the lowering of the taxes, the lowering of the regulations, the historically good economy, the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, peace in the Middle East, if those are the things you liked, if you think that's the stuff that made America great again under Donald Trump, do you think that what makes America great again Is Michael Bennett the Democrat being elected Senator in Colorado?
00:52:46.000Is that what you think makes America great again?
00:53:16.000You can either look at that and say, more of this, more of this.
00:53:21.000Or you can say, if Donald Trump is unwilling to change, if Donald Trump cannot show that he is willing to change, then we cannot have this be the future of the party.
00:53:34.000I honestly, God, don't see how it could go this way in the future if the Republican Party has its head out of its ass in any serious way.
00:53:42.000If Donald Trump doesn't change, if we just get more of this, if it's just this until the end of time, what is your strategy for victory?
00:53:49.000The question Republicans should be asking right now, they should be asking themselves this question very seriously going into 2024.
00:53:55.000Donald Trump took a Slim electoral victory in 2016 and a 3 million popular vote deficit.
00:54:04.000And in 2020, he turned that into a fairly comfortable electoral victory for Joe Biden and a 7 million vote deficit.
00:54:11.000And then the Republicans proceeded to lose two runoffs in Georgia, a red state, proceeded to wildly underperform in the Senate because of a bevy of handpicked candidates from Donald Trump, and proceeded to underperform in the House because too many Republican candidates were getting caught Being asked questions about Donald Trump's views on particular subjects, at least in part.
00:54:42.000And if the Republican Party keeps playing this game where the buck stops nowhere, well then the buck won't stop anywhere and they'll just keep losing.
00:54:49.000You have a choice between that or a model where you take a state that is dead even 30,000 vote victory in Florida to 1.5 million vote victory four years later.
00:55:53.000Then you get a big heaping helping of blame when things go wrong, particularly among your hand-picked candidates.
00:55:59.000And it is worth noting here that for all the talk about how Donald Trump picked his candidates and he intervened in the elections, his fundraising juggernaut dropped $2.3 million total in Ohio and $3.4 million in Pennsylvania.
00:56:34.000And if the Republican Party shows that it can't be, if it shows that it's beholden to anything except for the priorities of the American people, that's the only thing that matters, the priorities of the American people.
00:56:45.000If Republicans don't make that the top priority, if they make fear of whatever political interest group, the thing that they are the most afraid of, the thing that they respond to, Then they're gonna keep getting bruised.
00:56:59.000By the way, if you look at the age breakdown in this particular election, Republicans did fine with everybody above the age of 45, and they got absolutely hammered with everybody below the age of 45.
00:57:16.000I'll admit, this has been a downbeat show.
00:57:17.000Because again, I'm in a real bad mood.
00:57:19.000When you expect a red wave, and you don't even get a red tide, and you barely get a red trickle, At a certain point, if you go in to pick up your paycheck at the end of the month, and you're expecting a $7,000 paycheck at the end of the month, and instead what you get back is 32 cents, you might be a little upset.
00:57:35.000So yeah, I've been pretty downbeat here because this is a blown opportunity, and opportunities like this do not come particularly often.
00:58:00.000And if your party somehow exceeds all possible estimates and does much better than expected, then you're going to keep doubling down on this.
00:58:11.000They're just going to keep doubling down over and over and over.
00:58:13.000So expect more woke from the Democratic Party.
00:58:15.000Expect more of the transing of the children.
00:58:17.000Expect more spending from the Democratic Party.
00:58:19.000Expect Joe Biden to go out there today and talk about how his entire agenda has been vindicated.
00:58:25.000His party has won historically large victories for a party that was already in power.
00:58:29.000How he said that Nancy Pelosi won't be Speaker of the House, but he still is a very durable minority.
00:58:35.000Expect Joe Biden to take a victory lap.
00:58:39.000In the lead-up to this election, you could see, I talked about it on the show a lot, you could see that there was a move that was being made to dump Joe Biden on the side of the road.
00:58:48.000George Will had written an entire column about how Joe Biden was feeble-minded and was going to fall over at any moment.
00:58:53.000He said, take Kamala Harris with you, just sort of sideswiped her.
00:58:55.000He's like, well, you know, as long as you're going, just grab Kamala and take her to...
00:58:59.000You saw a bunch of articles starting to appear in major mainstream left-wing publications talking about how Joe Biden was the end of the road.
00:59:26.000He did much better than expected in these midterms.
00:59:28.000And now he's going to say that it's because he yelled about democracy and said that half the American republic was in favor of destroying the country.
00:59:36.000So they're going to keep doubling down.
00:59:39.000So Democrats are going to keep providing Republicans with the opportunity because nobody learns any lessons in American politics over the last 10 years.
00:59:45.000So Republicans are going to have the opportunity to get another bite at the apple.
01:00:02.000The weird counter-intuitive silver lining last night for the Republicans is Democrats will keep doing all the things that made them unpopular and give them another bite at the apple, even though Republicans underperformed and did a crap job taking advantage of the circumstances.
01:00:14.000So that's silver lining for the Republicans.
01:00:35.000They left this opportunity on the table.
01:00:38.000Would it have mattered a lot if Republicans took control of the Senate by one or two votes?
01:00:41.000It would have mattered maybe in terms of judicial nominees.
01:00:44.000But in terms of actual effective governance, maybe not.
01:00:46.000Maybe it wouldn't have mattered all that much.
01:00:47.000But it did matter in terms of leaving senators on the table that could have provided you the springboard for 2024.
01:00:54.000If Republicans had picked up 54 last night instead of maybe at best 50, if they had done that, then that would have allowed them the possibility of a supermajority come 2024.
01:01:06.000But, again, the Republicans are being given another chance.
01:01:10.000They're being given another chance because last night was not a referendum on the excellence of Democratic governance.
01:01:14.000It was a referendum on all these ancillary issues.
01:01:16.000It was the Republican Party being punished for their vacuities.
01:01:20.000It was not the Democrats being rewarded for their vacuities.
01:01:23.000But Democrats are going to misread that because everybody misreads political signals in this day and age.
01:01:31.000That means we have to fight harder and we have to be more serious.
01:01:35.000Nominate people who are good at their jobs.
01:01:38.000Nominate people who do not alienate, who do demonstrate that the other guys are not vote, you can't vote for them, but you should vote for us because we are going to be serious and coherent in how we govern, and we take our own ideas seriously.
01:01:51.000The time for unseriousness has passed in the United States.
01:01:54.000Republicans have the opportunity to learn that lesson, and they should, because if they don't, If they don't, things are going to get a lot worse from here.
01:02:01.000All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.