The Megyn Kelly Show - DeSantis Crushes, Trump's Effect, and a Red Ripple, with Charles C.W. Cooke, Jeremy Peters, Jason Riley, and More

00:00:00.560 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.760 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:16.860 Just a few hours after we were off the air, here we are back on.

00:00:20.360 We felt this coming as we ended last night's special election episode at 11 p.m.

00:00:24.460 The red wave seems to be more like a red ripple. It wasn't a tidal wave or a tsunami. It wasn't a great surfing wave.

00:00:34.240 It was like something that you would place your little, like, one-and-a-half-year-old to sit in at the beach while mom looks on from, you know, her towel.

00:00:45.000 Like, it's fine. It's not a threatening wave.

00:00:47.980 It's not what the Republicans wanted, but it's better than, like, you know, an undertow where the water goes back out the other way, which isn't exactly what happened either.

00:01:01.140 More importantly, however, there are several key races still to be decided.

00:01:06.080 Georgia, at this hour, does look to be headed for a runoff. God help us.

00:01:10.560 Okay, that would be December 6th in the race between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock, but that has not yet been officially called, so it could go any way.

00:01:20.040 In Arizona, Carrie Lake is just behind her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, but there's still one-third of the vote to be counted, and most of that is same-day votes.

00:01:31.760 So that is very much possible, you know, possibly a red seat. We'll see.

00:01:35.960 We have got top local reporters in each state to give us the update, meaning both Georgia and Arizona.

00:01:42.400 We'll get to them in just a bit.

00:01:43.880 But looking at the country overall, it's confusing, right? It's confusing.

00:01:49.060 Did you, are you confused?

00:01:50.520 And like, I'm confused.

00:01:52.420 Dave Wasserman, who's the great Cook Political Report editor, put it this way this morning.

00:01:57.640 That was the craziest election night I've ever seen.

00:01:59.940 In Florida, as you know, the big story, Ron DeSantis far, far exceeding expectations, winning by 20 points.

00:02:08.300 He won by, I think, 1.4 million votes, and last time around, when he ran, he won by 34,000 votes.

00:02:16.420 Think about that.

00:02:17.960 Up in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman won fairly easily over Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania.

00:02:25.180 And at this hour, the GOP is still expected to take the House, but it hasn't happened yet.

00:02:31.200 Not a done deal, thanks to Democrats overperforming throughout the country, including picking up some seats that they were not expected to.

00:02:39.300 However, they also lost a bunch that they were said not to be favored to do.

00:02:44.640 So good night for the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, right?

00:02:48.720 Sean Patrick Maloney picked up some seats not expected.

00:02:51.120 No, he just conceded to his GOP opponent in his personal New York House race.

00:02:56.520 He went down.

00:02:57.320 Mahoney's gone.

00:02:58.600 In fact, New York Dems may lose five seats in the state, and that could be the difference that hands the House to the GOP.

00:03:05.980 New York, that did not elect Lee Zeldin as their new Republican governor.

00:03:10.480 They kept Kathy Hochul in office, but it was tight.

00:03:13.840 And I think you can credit Zeldin for pulling these GOP House races over the line.

00:03:18.600 Here to help us make sense of it all is a pair of political minds that we enjoyed talking to after the last major political event,

00:03:24.980 and that was President Biden's State of the Union earlier this year.

00:03:27.980 Charles C.W. Cook, who is host now of the Charles C.W. Cook podcast at National Review,

00:03:33.860 and New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters, who is author of Insurgency,

00:03:39.020 How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.

00:03:43.860 We had Jeremy on.

00:03:44.520 We talked about that book, and boy, oh, boy, in many ways, it was pretty prescient.

00:03:48.600 If you look at what happened last night.

00:03:50.180 Charles, Jeremy, welcome back.

00:03:51.900 Thank you.

00:03:52.360 Welcome back, man.

00:03:52.940 Great to see you both.

00:03:54.200 So am I right?

00:03:55.900 Like, do you agree?

00:03:57.060 Charles, let me start with you.

00:03:57.960 It's like the, I know you have little kids.

00:03:59.780 It's like the little wave that, you know, you set up your toddler.

00:04:03.460 You let him play, give him a toy.

00:04:04.700 He can splash around in that kind of a wave.

00:04:06.560 There's absolutely no threat of death or destruction.

00:04:09.660 But it certainly wasn't title.

00:04:11.240 And I don't even think it was all that decent for a body surf.

00:04:16.240 No, I do agree.

00:04:17.300 I think we had a tsunami in Florida, and then it just stopped.

00:04:22.400 It didn't move any further up the coast or across the country.

00:04:28.480 I, with the exception of Florida, which I think we have to treat separately, think this

00:04:33.820 was a disaster for Republicans relative to expectations, relative to the political environment.

00:04:40.380 I mean, certainly my predictions were wrong.

00:04:42.140 But my predictions were informed by a couple of things.

00:04:44.620 The first was the polling.

00:04:46.140 And the second was being in Florida.

00:04:48.420 And, you know, if you live in this environment, this atmosphere, it's hard to imagine in a

00:04:53.820 state that DeSantis won by 20, that Republicans aren't going to win by one in Pennsylvania.

00:04:58.560 I just don't think there's any sugarcoating it.

00:05:01.980 I've seen some people try to put silver linings up for grabs.

00:05:06.260 I think this was a huge loss.

00:05:11.420 I mean, if you had said to any political analyst a year ago, you're going to have nearly 10% inflation,

00:05:20.380 you're going to have a president who's deeply unpopular, you're going to have the voting

00:05:26.280 public split on which party is more extreme, which party is more of a threat, and so on

00:05:30.920 and so forth.

00:05:32.020 And then you would show them these numbers.

00:05:33.560 They'd have said, no, that doesn't add up.

00:05:36.660 I think there are a number of reasons for it, which I'm sure we'll get into.

00:05:39.580 But my takeaway is this is a big catastrophe for Republicans, and they need to look at why

00:05:47.120 it happened.

00:05:48.280 Not to mention, you've got over two-thirds of the electorate saying the country's heading

00:05:51.280 in the wrong direction.

00:05:52.640 And so did they vote for change?

00:05:54.700 Not really.

00:05:55.740 So what direction exactly do we need to go in, remaining unclear to?

00:06:01.680 Jeremy, what did you make of it?

00:06:03.860 I mean, I think you hit it right on the head there, Megan.

00:06:06.780 The country is so closely divided.

00:06:10.720 This is what happens when you have two deeply unpopular options.

00:06:15.920 It reminds me a lot of what we saw in 2016 between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

00:06:21.040 It was another very, very closely divided count, and neither candidate was very palatable

00:06:27.340 to the American people.

00:06:28.520 I think one of the things that I took away from the results last night, and they're still

00:06:36.180 coming in, obviously, but you have to wonder if Republicans are somehow a victim of believing

00:06:45.540 their own hype, right?

00:06:48.420 All we heard in the media, and mostly right-wing media, I mean, leading up to this election,

00:06:57.420 was Biden is basically the weekend at Bernie's candidate being propped up by AOC.

00:07:02.960 John Fetterman is a zombie.

00:07:04.700 The economy is so terrible, and crime in big cities, and homelessness is so out of control

00:07:11.760 that the Democrats are just in for an utter wipeout.

00:07:16.980 And that didn't happen.

00:07:19.540 That doesn't mean, though, that all the news in here is good news for Democrats.

00:07:25.740 And you mentioned New York.

00:07:27.560 I think that's a perfect place to start, right?

00:07:30.720 In New York, Democrats underperformed.

00:07:34.500 Kathy Hochul will be reelected, but with a much smaller majority than any governor has

00:07:42.200 had in recent history in New York.

00:07:45.080 You had John Patrick Bologna lose his seat.

00:07:49.260 And across the country, in Los Angeles, you have a mayoral race where a former Republican

00:07:56.140 could very likely win.

00:07:58.280 It's very tight.

00:07:59.340 You know, we don't know how it's going to turn out, but there are still examples in

00:08:04.520 these results, despite the repudiation of Republicans pretty much across the board.

00:08:10.480 There's still some examples you could point to where it reveals an unease, I think, with

00:08:17.760 the overall direction and perception of the Democratic Party.

00:08:22.600 Let me ask you a follow up on that, because I have been trying to figure out whether this

00:08:26.920 is one of those right left media cycles that went awry.

00:08:31.520 But my belief is that pretty much everyone was predicting a GOP big night.

00:08:39.940 The size of the bigness was what was under debate.

00:08:43.100 The Democrats were worried that it was going to be huge.

00:08:45.540 The Republicans were hoping that it would be.

00:08:48.680 But you look at Cook Political Report, you look at FiveThirtyEight, you look at RCP, they

00:08:55.060 were all predicting GOP pickups, big pickups in the House and the Senate.

00:09:01.780 And the range was between a net one, you know, like the taking control of the Senate versus

00:09:07.700 plus three, three or four for the most optimistic prognosticator.

00:09:12.540 So it wasn't like there was that one team like MSNBC was like, no way the GOP is going

00:09:18.000 to lose.

00:09:18.420 I'm telling you.

00:09:19.500 And Fox was saying the opposite.

00:09:20.880 There seemed to be a general agreement.

00:09:22.660 This is going to be a very strong night for the GOP.

00:09:25.480 And then it didn't happen.

00:09:28.180 No, I think that's a good point.

00:09:30.160 Certainly.

00:09:30.640 I mean, even you look at my publication, there were a lot of stories about the Democrats being

00:09:35.900 in big troubles.

00:09:37.100 You know, certainly this is not the commentary that Republicans were going to have a good night

00:09:42.080 was not exclusive to conservative media.

00:09:44.440 I think, you know, the sense of how much of a runaway victory it appeared to be on the

00:09:52.800 horizon was kind of overstated there.

00:09:55.340 I will say, though, and this may be surprising to some of your listeners, Megan, but the polls

00:10:01.240 toward the end, and I was talking to a very smart Republican strategist about this this

00:10:06.020 morning, the polls were actually pretty correct in some key races.

00:10:09.820 The Fetterman race being a good example.

00:10:12.400 They had him up very slightly over Oz.

00:10:15.540 That ended up being the case.

00:10:17.540 In Nevada, it showed, you know, neck and neck.

00:10:20.580 That is certainly the case.

00:10:22.820 In Wisconsin, it had Ron Johnson up just a little bit.

00:10:26.040 And in Arizona, it had Cary Lake up just a tiny bit.

00:10:29.960 Now, we'll see what happens there.

00:10:32.400 My sources say that it's still possible.

00:10:35.100 Cary Lake pulls it out.

00:10:36.140 They also say that in Nevada, it seems less likely that the Republican Senate candidate

00:10:42.320 will win there.

00:10:43.220 But by and large, unlike what we saw in 2020, in 2018, 2016, the polls did better this time,

00:10:53.980 especially the ones toward the end.

00:10:56.780 I think, at least in the words of one strategist I was talking to earlier today, you know,

00:11:03.180 they they didn't want to believe it because the polls had been so wrong before.

00:11:07.620 So that's what made, I think, Republicans could have been a situation for the GOP where

00:11:11.920 if this election happened one week earlier, they would have done better.

00:11:15.660 Like at the very last day or two, they were inching more Dem.

00:11:19.300 And we talked about on the show yesterday, but there was that final NBC News poll that

00:11:24.000 showed equal enthusiasm amongst Democrats and Republicans.

00:11:28.580 And now it was an outlier based on about four or five polls total.

00:11:32.640 But it was the most recent and it was showing an evening up in enthusiasm.

00:11:36.500 And certainly that was on display last night.

00:11:39.500 So, Charles, this morning, lots of recriminations.

00:11:43.300 We had thought the recriminations would be on the Dem side, right, because they were already

00:11:46.640 starting that yesterday, like our messaging stinks and we're going to have to regroup.

00:11:51.020 No, it's the opposite today.

00:11:53.060 And most most of what I'm seeing on Twitter from conservatives, from MAGA, you know, lovers

00:12:00.680 and so on, they're all taking a hard look at Trump.

00:12:03.980 I mean, Trump, once again, is at the center of the discussion.

00:12:08.860 And he should be because he is the establishment now within the Republican Party.

00:12:13.500 He wasn't in 2015, he ran against it, he lambasted it, he saw himself as an insurgent, but he's

00:12:19.680 now the establishment.

00:12:22.380 And that means that he is in some way responsible for the party's direction.

00:12:28.060 He sees himself as being the head of the party.

00:12:30.840 He sees himself as the presumptive nominee in 2024.

00:12:34.280 He started preemptively trying to dissuade anyone from running against him by either threatening

00:12:41.880 threatening them or telling them to wait.

00:12:46.020 And he chose a lot of these candidates in the way that the establishment used to.

00:12:51.780 Now, people will say, yes, but the primary voters had to acquiesce to his decisions.

00:12:57.100 That's true.

00:12:57.760 But that was also true of the establishment 2008 and 2012.

00:13:02.900 The establishment made its recommendations and primary voters went along with it.

00:13:08.180 That's what we saw here with Trump.

00:13:10.340 It's what we saw in Georgia.

00:13:12.500 It's what we saw in Ohio.

00:13:15.480 It's what we saw in Pennsylvania.

00:13:19.020 And I think candidate equality really matters in Senate and gubernatorial races.

00:13:24.440 We knew this.

00:13:26.200 We probably forgot this to some extent, myself included.

00:13:29.460 I looked at the political environment.

00:13:32.680 I looked at some of the late breaking polls.

00:13:36.320 And I thought that the liabilities that Herschel Walker had and that Dr. Oz had might be irrelevant

00:13:46.880 in the face of public anger with inflation, crime, and so on.

00:13:53.180 Six months ago, I didn't think that.

00:13:54.880 Six months ago, I was saying, look, these candidates are weak and they could lose winnable races.

00:14:00.320 And sure enough, most of those candidates lost winnable races.

00:14:05.000 And the candidates who actually delivered for their constituents, the candidates who had

00:14:09.880 a track record, the candidates who in some cases were prepared to take on Trump, I'm thinking

00:14:15.360 in particular of Brian Kemp and Mike DeWine, did really, really well.

00:14:19.920 And, you know, it just shows that, yes, there is a lot here to explain what happened last

00:14:27.320 night.

00:14:27.700 Obviously, I'm still not entirely sure myself.

00:14:31.100 We still don't have final numbers in the House or the Senate.

00:14:34.260 But there is an obvious discrepancy between the bad candidates and the good candidates.

00:14:40.440 J.D.

00:14:40.820 Vance won in Ohio.

00:14:42.120 He would have had to do a great deal of work to lose in Ohio, given where Ohio is right

00:14:47.100 now.

00:14:47.380 But he won by 14 points less than Governor DeWine in Georgia.

00:14:57.620 Brian Kemp seems to have won by about eight.

00:14:59.880 Herschel Walker is one point down on Senator Warnock.

00:15:03.840 And that's going to go to a runoff.

00:15:07.120 You know, this old adage that candidate quality matters is still true.

00:15:14.240 And I think people forgot it.

00:15:16.120 And I think a lot of the blame for the candidates who were chosen and who lost does have to be

00:15:21.280 laid at Trump's feet.

00:15:22.880 Jeremy, I don't know what it would have looked like if these same candidates had been running

00:15:26.700 and we did not have a Dobbs.

00:15:29.680 Right.

00:15:30.020 Because I think many of us underestimated just how important abortion actually was going

00:15:36.520 to be to the voters.

00:15:37.360 It was a very close second to inflation in the exit polling.

00:15:43.040 And I believe that in the state of Pennsylvania, it was tops that abortion was listed above

00:15:48.720 inflation as the number one issue.

00:15:51.100 And, you know, some of us were thinking that, you know, I was like, that's not going to drive

00:15:55.280 votes for people who can't pay for their electric bill.

00:15:58.440 Well, actually, so I don't know.

00:16:01.400 How do you reconcile that in terms of quality candidates with the quality of the candidates?

00:16:06.300 But, you know, Dobbs being this huge game changer?

00:16:10.780 I think you're exactly right.

00:16:12.060 And in states like Michigan, the combination of those two issues, bad candidates and abortion

00:16:17.800 rights form the perfect storm to sweep away Republicans.

00:16:22.180 I mean, in Michigan, there was a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.

00:16:27.300 That won soundly.

00:16:30.360 And Gretchen Whitmer, who was vilified by pro-Trump Republicans, easily defeated the Trump endorsed

00:16:38.740 Republican candidate for governor there.

00:16:41.960 I think what abortion did, and, you know, again, this is one of those examples where I think

00:16:47.720 the narrative in mainstream media was wrong is it was important because it contributed to

00:16:57.760 an overall sense that Republicans have just taken things too far.

00:17:02.280 The Republican Party of Donald Trump is too extreme.

00:17:06.720 And, you know, while that may seem, you know, in the aggregate to be like a real problem for

00:17:15.220 the Republican Party, voters saw that, right?

00:17:19.580 They saw that the Republican Party of Donald Trump is going to do things that really the

00:17:29.320 country isn't prepared to absorb.

00:17:31.720 Like the jolt to the system has just been too much.

00:17:35.600 You know, the election denial, the Dobbs decision, the, you know, the slow degrading of norms and

00:17:43.360 civility, I think people are just kind of fed up.

00:17:46.680 And one thing, you know, despite Trump's appeal and the sense that he is, you know, quote unquote

00:17:52.920 fighting for his people, they want to see tangible, real results, competence.

00:18:02.900 And we didn't talk about in the last segment there, you know, all these Republicans who did

00:18:09.140 better because they weren't tethered to Trump.

00:18:11.780 We didn't talk about Ron DeSantis.

00:18:13.780 And the chatter about Ron DeSantis today is fascinating to me because if you look at certain

00:18:21.120 kind of organs of conservative media, like the New York Post, what was their headline

00:18:28.180 today?

00:18:29.100 It called Ron DeSantis the future of the Republican Party.

00:18:32.960 Yes, exactly.

00:18:33.820 And that's what I'm hearing a lot, you know, from conservatives is there needs to be a break

00:18:41.740 with Trump.

00:18:42.380 Now, I'm not predicting that that's going to happen.

00:18:44.680 We've seen Trump, you know, he's like a political Rasputin, no matter how many times you think

00:18:49.380 you've taken him out, he comes back.

00:18:52.420 Um, but it is telling to me that there's a very palpable sense that Trump is not the future

00:19:01.280 of the party.

00:19:02.100 He's the past.

00:19:02.980 And someone like DeSantis, who is a governor who has legislated, who has produced results

00:19:09.520 for people, he's the future.

00:19:11.980 Charlie, this, you know, of course, many, many times people have said, oh, Trump, what he's

00:19:17.000 done now, he's gone too far.

00:19:18.220 This will be the end of him.

00:19:19.600 And it hasn't been the end of him.

00:19:21.120 This does feel a little different.

00:19:23.340 This feels to me more like the aha moment when it when someone realizes they're in a

00:19:29.600 toxic relationship that is just not good for them.

00:19:32.920 And though they may not want to break up, it's time.

00:19:35.620 It's time for, you know, one's well-being.

00:19:38.000 It seems to me that Republicans, even Trump adjacent Republicans, I don't know, I'm going

00:19:42.740 to ask my audience to call me later Trump diehards and tell me how they feel.

00:19:46.620 But it seems like I'd love to hear how they feel.

00:19:49.520 But I think the ones who are very pro-Trump, they were not never Trump, they're ready.

00:19:55.400 And they're talking about it's time.

00:19:57.520 This is the moment where Trump's brand has been proven toxic and not particularly helpful

00:20:03.320 in getting GOP wins on the board.

00:20:05.500 And DeSantis is now a proven winner with the wind at his back.

00:20:10.580 I think that's right.

00:20:12.120 And I think it is the product of a combination of two things.

00:20:16.420 One is that the rationale for Trump just took a big hit.

00:20:20.140 If you talk to Trump diehards, as you put it, they will say, well, yes, he's crude, which

00:20:26.680 I think is a euphemism for much worse things.

00:20:28.940 But OK, he's crude and he's unpredictable and he's brusque.

00:20:35.620 But he wins.

00:20:37.460 He beat Hillary.

00:20:38.380 He got three originalist Supreme Court justices and so on and so forth.

00:20:43.760 Well, he doesn't win.

00:20:44.940 I mean, I've never thought that was particularly convincing, but it was much harder to argue

00:20:48.560 against before last night.

00:20:50.880 Trump squeaked by in 2016 against the most unpopular woman in America.

00:20:54.620 He presided over bad losses in 2018.

00:20:57.600 He lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

00:20:59.560 And now his candidates have been wiped out in 2022.

00:21:04.620 I don't think he can say credibly that he is a winner.

00:21:10.740 In concert with that, Ron DeSantis did something extraordinary in Florida.

00:21:15.100 And I just want to take a moment as a Floridian who's been watching this to explain to anyone

00:21:20.620 who isn't that familiar with Florida politics how extraordinary this was.

00:21:24.160 Yes, Florida has been trending red.

00:21:26.260 Yes, we've had a lot of people who have moved in from other places because Florida took certain

00:21:32.720 approaches, because it has no income tax, because it has a broad-based set of traditional

00:21:38.660 Republican policies.

00:21:40.300 But what happened last night is so far out of the norm that it defies belief.

00:21:47.700 Charlie Crist, the Democratic candidate, last time I looked, was under 40 percent.

00:21:52.920 I think DeSantis won by 20, Rubio won by 17.

00:21:56.900 Of the 67 counties in Florida, DeSantis won all but five.

00:22:02.300 He didn't just flip the 50-50 counties like Duval and Hillsborough and Pinellas and so on.

00:22:07.780 He flipped the can't-get counties.

00:22:12.540 He flipped Miami-Dade, which hasn't gone red for 20 years.

00:22:15.280 He flipped Palm Beach.

00:22:16.620 He flipped Osceola.

00:22:18.180 This was an extraordinary win.

00:22:20.360 And it's not necessarily the case that one can extrapolate it neatly out to, say, Ohio or Michigan

00:22:26.720 or Pennsylvania.

00:22:28.000 It would remain to be seen how DeSantis does in those places.

00:22:31.700 But the question for Republicans is not, can you guarantee that Ron DeSantis is going to be

00:22:36.820 the presidential nominee and win?

00:22:38.580 The question is, as opposed to what?

00:22:40.400 And at the moment, on what was a pretty bad night for Republicans, on which I think was a borderline

00:22:46.740 catastrophe in the rest of the country, Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio and every Republican

00:22:51.520 who ran in Florida and 20 of the 27 House candidates who won, showed how it is done.

00:22:56.740 And I think it's going to be quite difficult for Trump and Trump's acolytes to say, no,

00:23:02.880 we don't want that.

00:23:04.400 That's not the future.

00:23:05.800 That's not the risk we should take.

00:23:07.280 We should go back to the guy who lost in 2020 and whose handpicked candidates failed.

00:23:13.460 He's got a huge approval rating in Florida, one that sort of staggers you because there's

00:23:19.700 so few politicians who are this well-loved.

00:23:21.640 But of course, that's Florida.

00:23:22.720 You know, and you're right.

00:23:23.340 If he takes the act on the road, how does he do in a more moderate state?

00:23:26.920 Would he fare better than a Cary Lake in Arizona?

00:23:29.900 It's not like he's moderate, right?

00:23:32.400 I don't think that the voters in other states are going to look at him as more moderate.

00:23:37.820 He's a fighter without a lot of the controversy that Trump brings.

00:23:41.840 This is Ron DeSantis last night.

00:23:43.980 I got to say, this is the happiest I've ever seen him.

00:23:46.520 He doesn't smile and laugh that often, at least not in the clips that we see.

00:23:50.160 I've never seen him so joyous.

00:23:52.160 Here he is.

00:23:52.640 We chose facts over fear.

00:23:56.800 We chose education over indoctrination.

00:24:03.200 We chose law and order over rioting and disorder.

00:24:09.560 Florida was a refuge of sanity when the world went mad.

00:24:13.680 We made promises to the people of Florida, and we have delivered on those promises.

00:24:20.120 Freedom is here to stay.

00:24:26.700 We have rewritten the political map.

00:24:31.020 Thank you to Miami-Dade County.

00:24:37.140 Florida, for so many of them, has served as the promised land.

00:24:42.140 We have embraced freedom.

00:24:46.520 We have maintained law and order.

00:24:49.160 We have protected the rights of parents.

00:24:52.360 We have respected our taxpayers, and we reject woke ideology.

00:25:02.300 We fight the woke in the legislature.

00:25:05.280 We fight the woke in the schools.

00:25:07.400 We fight the woke in the corporations.

00:25:09.500 We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.

00:25:13.260 Florida is where woke goes to die.

00:25:16.380 So he's fiery.

00:25:20.580 He's taking on all the battles that Republicans want someone to take on.

00:25:25.920 And the thing, Jeremy, that the Democrats need to worry about with DeSantis is he did turn Miami-Dade red.

00:25:32.760 A county, Hillary won by 29 points.

00:25:35.880 Now is red.

00:25:37.120 So he's and he lost he lost Miami-Dade when he ran in 2018, DeSantis did.

00:25:43.400 So it it's because of the way he's governed his policies, his persuasion.

00:25:48.580 You've got it.

00:25:49.540 I mean, you tell me.

00:25:50.260 But I would think that the Democrats would be fearful of this guy.

00:25:55.140 Oh, certainly, because he has a track record, right?

00:25:58.680 It's a track record that Democrats will vehemently dispute and criticize as as harmful.

00:26:05.500 But, again, it's something that he can point to.

00:26:10.320 And Trump can't do that.

00:26:12.500 Trump doesn't have a list of accomplishments that because he's been out of office for so long that he can point to and say, you know, I fought these battles for you.

00:26:25.140 So he can point to his previous term, but, you know, I don't I don't know how effective that is going to be.

00:26:31.760 And not to say not to minimize, certainly things like, you know, flipping of the Supreme Court that are extremely popular with with Republicans that still could really matter to them.

00:26:43.940 But Ron DeSantis is a doer.

00:26:46.300 He's not a talker and for evidence of exactly how much pro-Trump Republicans are absorbing the blows from last night.

00:26:58.640 I've heard that, you know, across the state in Palm Beach at Mar-a-Lago last night, it was like a funeral parlor.

00:27:08.320 It was silent.

00:27:10.640 People were without energy.

00:27:12.900 The oxygen came out of the room because they knew that Trump's candidates had underperformed and they knew that keeping the well, I don't want to say what they knew, but it was obvious probably to most people that keeping Trump as the center of gravity of the Republican Party is not without serious cost.

00:27:39.760 The question is whether or not Trump can accept that and realize that and has any intention of stepping aside.

00:27:47.200 I don't think that for a minute that he does.

00:27:50.180 Yeah.

00:27:50.320 In a way, it's it's Trump's worst nightmare because his candidates were losing and his main political rival for now was winning big and beloved and the political rival, Megan, by the way, that he mocked two nights earlier, calling him Ron DeSanctimonious.

00:28:05.880 And he cleaned up and Trump's candidates had a much more mixed record.

00:28:10.380 Well, and that's the other thing.

00:28:11.260 Can I ask you about this, Charlie?

00:28:12.720 So Trump, oh, what does he do?

00:28:15.900 I think he sent out to we call him tweets.

00:28:18.440 They're not tweets.

00:28:19.020 They're truth socials on his media site.

00:28:21.980 One of them ripped on Jim O'Day, who lost out in Colorado.

00:28:25.860 He didn't like O'Day because O'Day didn't bend the knee to Trump and wasn't an election denier.

00:28:30.700 And then the other one was about Don Bolduc in New Hampshire.

00:28:35.180 And I read I'll read to you a quote.

00:28:36.920 Well, he Bolduc was a very nice guy, but he lost tonight when he disavowed after his big primary wing win his longstanding stance on election fraud in the 2020 presidential primary.

00:28:47.720 Had he stayed strong and true, he would have won easily.

00:28:51.640 Lessons learned.

00:28:53.180 I mean, for him, it's all about saying Trump won in 2020.

00:28:58.600 He can't let it go.

00:29:02.100 And to Jeremy's point, how does that how does how to even his core faithful at this point get behind that?

00:29:08.720 When you've got this other guy, you heard his message.

00:29:12.220 Florida's where woke goes to die.

00:29:14.140 You know, we fought the lockdowns.

00:29:15.720 We don't allow indoctrination in our schools.

00:29:18.340 All the stuff that DeSantis has done.

00:29:21.120 And Trump's over there like I won.

00:29:23.720 I'm telling you election.

00:29:25.920 It's like there's just I'd like to say there's no way.

00:29:29.440 But, you know, the Trump diehards.

00:29:31.980 Well, it's worse than just that Trump is focused on things that matter a lot less than the things that DeSantis is focused on.

00:29:41.180 It's the almost medieval demand for faulty above all else.

00:29:46.800 It's cult-like.

00:29:49.100 Look, we live in a big, diverse, rambunctious country.

00:29:56.180 And as a small L liberal pluralist, I am committed, as we all should be, to acknowledging that people disagree with me.

00:30:07.840 You know, I'm sure Jeremy and I disagree on a whole bunch of stuff.

00:30:10.740 But we have to live together.

00:30:13.680 And if you're a Republican, what that means is that you're going, if you're going to have a viable political movement, to have to have Republicans that you don't particularly like or agree with.

00:30:25.120 You're going to have Murkowski's and Collins's, and although he didn't prevail in the end, O'Day's.

00:30:32.800 And Trump can't do it.

00:30:34.820 You know, Trump, and it was worse, I think, from some of his followers who made bizarre rationalizations of this.

00:30:42.120 But Trump can't do it.

00:30:43.760 He heard O'Day say in Colorado that he's not a Trump guy.

00:30:46.960 And he said, therefore, he is not viable as a candidate.

00:30:51.560 He essentially ran against the Republican candidate in Colorado.

00:30:55.360 And that matters.

00:30:56.640 It matters to Republican voters.

00:30:58.160 But it also should matter to Trump.

00:31:00.220 DeSantis went and campaigned for O'Day.

00:31:02.920 Why?

00:31:03.720 Well, because DeSantis understands not only that if he runs for president, he's going to have to have some friends, but that if he wins in 2024, he wants as many Republican senators in place as possible.

00:31:15.880 Donald Trump, if he's planning on running, should also understand that.

00:31:18.980 Donald Trump should grasp that it would make his life a lot easier if he has a Joe O'Day in Colorado rather than a Senator Bennett in Colorado.

00:31:28.900 But he doesn't.

00:31:30.080 All he can see, all he cares about is that O'Day said rude things about him and his view.

00:31:35.760 All he cares about in New Hampshire is that Bolduc, who should never have been there, we should have had Morse or Sununu, said that the election wasn't stolen, which in and of itself should tell you something about how popular that message is.

00:31:51.720 If you find yourself having to say the election was stolen to win the primary, and then the moment you try and win the general, having to say that it wasn't stolen, maybe it's not a good idea to say it in the first place.

00:32:02.480 Yeah, but Trump can't do this.

00:32:06.960 And so he ends up in this weird situation where everything has to be about him.

00:32:10.680 So he ended up endorsing Kemp, who he ran against.

00:32:14.340 He tried to primary with David Perdue.

00:32:17.380 He endorsed Kemp on the eve of the election so that if Kemp won, which he was always going to, it wouldn't look as if Trump and he were at logheads.

00:32:25.560 This is crazy behavior.

00:32:27.220 And I don't know, Megan, I don't know how the people who are still in that Trump camp will react to this, but I know how they should react to it.

00:32:34.880 They should understand that Donald Trump doesn't care about them.

00:32:38.920 He doesn't care about their concerns.

00:32:40.620 He doesn't care about the viability of the political party that they have to use as the engine for their ambitions.

00:32:46.140 He cares about himself.

00:32:47.680 And if they can't see that, Republicans are going to keep losing because this is not a majority proposition either in the country or really in the party.

00:32:58.020 You use the word cult.

00:32:59.320 And I would agree that there's sort of a cult of personality around Trump without, you know, doing a clinical diagnosis on that word.

00:33:06.280 But people don't generally leave the cult.

00:33:09.060 It takes something massive for, you know, for somebody to get up and walk out.

00:33:15.560 I've done actually a lot of segments on cults.

00:33:18.060 I don't I don't know.

00:33:19.480 I don't see that massive event being last night for the diehard Trump faithful.

00:33:24.760 They love him.

00:33:26.280 They love him.

00:33:27.240 They're grateful to him.

00:33:28.660 It's not even about Republican politics for them.

00:33:30.840 They feel like he did something for them.

00:33:32.640 He gets them and he does care about them.

00:33:34.480 And, you know, you saying otherwise or you're truly saying it, that that doesn't break through more with Charles and Jeremy right after this break.

00:33:42.060 Much, much more to discuss as we get some updated numbers now out of Arizona.

00:33:51.040 We're getting word now that President Biden will take a possible victory lap later this afternoon with a press conference at 4 p.m.

00:33:59.220 There's a lot of thought going into exactly what to say and what the message should be.

00:34:02.860 The White House right now, National Review's Charles C.W.

00:34:06.060 Cook and The New York Times is Jeremy Peters are back with me now.

00:34:10.000 So undoubtedly he will declare victory and claim credit and say, you know, we're on message.

00:34:16.520 We're doing the right things.

00:34:17.960 Here's here's what scares me and a lot of the mom friends that I have who are Democrats who voted red.

00:34:25.200 The covid lockdowns do not seem to have been consequential.

00:34:30.780 Well, Governor Whitmer reelected, Governor Hochul reelected.

00:34:36.400 Yes, the Floridians love the freedom of being under Ron DeSantis, but there doesn't seem to have been a penalty to those who imposed overreach, in particular in the schools with our children.

00:34:47.540 And and I think a lot of us are feeling very frustrated by it because it could happen again.

00:34:53.380 And there's been no clear message sent to these people about that overreach.

00:34:57.680 And I wonder, Jeremy, whether there's any chance of President Biden or those on the left.

00:35:04.100 Changing course at all or just viewing yesterday as a green light to continue as they've been.

00:35:11.360 It's a very good question and one, frankly, that I think your your mom friends are correct to have some skepticism about if Democrats don't look hard at the results of last night and and see it for what it really was,

00:35:32.280 which was not so much an embrace of the Democratic Party, but a repudiation of the party of Donald Trump, then they're going to have an awful lot of difficulty.

00:35:41.280 Because you're exactly right. The lockdowns, the heavy handedness, the denial coming from Democratic leaders about basic, obvious problems in communities like crime and homelessness is not popular.

00:36:00.500 And if the Democrats don't acknowledge that, if they don't acknowledge that, yes, the Republican Party is is unpalatable to many, many voters, but also so are the policies being pushed by a lot of very liberal, progressive Democrats, then they're going to have a really tough time.

00:36:21.900 And I think what you're looking at right now, as we look to 2024 is a status quo election, it's going to be, I would guess, Trump and Biden fighting it out again.

00:36:36.440 And it's going to be fought over the same, you know, the pandemic is, is, you know, the school lockdowns, it's interesting because people have shown that they are willing to make their candidates pay a price for that.

00:36:49.400 That's what we saw in Virginia. I think the difference is, it was more immediate than people have kind of moved on.

00:36:57.480 We were in the midst of it.

00:36:58.180 Biden wants to move on. So, you know, we'll see.

00:37:02.320 Yeah. But the thing is, Charles, that you look at Virginia, Youngkin was elected and Jeremy's right. It was in the midst of it. So it was different.

00:37:09.800 Phil Murphy almost lost in New Jersey and the statehouse there by three points in a race he was leading in by 28 or 30.

00:37:16.980 Kathy Hochul, she only beat Lee Zeldin so far, it looks like by about five points. That's incredible.

00:37:24.080 She was 30 points up from Zeldin just a couple of months ago.

00:37:28.140 So and as I pointed out in the intro, you've got maybe five New York seats turning red that were previously blue.

00:37:35.040 So I do wonder whether this will be another post New Jersey introspective moment where those in power, they may say outward, we've been given a green light.

00:37:42.480 We've been given a gold star. But internally, whether they're going to do the soul searching, they need to like, oh, my God, actually, we came really close to losing.

00:37:52.040 We needed Hillary. We needed Obama. We need both Bidens here rallying at every camp that we never normally have to nurture to win these elections.

00:38:00.340 I mean, behind the scenes, do you think there will be actual soul searching by the Dems on these very unpopular policies?

00:38:06.200 What from crime to code and so on?

00:38:09.760 I don't know. American politics moves really fast.

00:38:14.900 And people always assume that the things we were talking about two years ago, we'll be talking about now.

00:38:21.680 And we usually don't. I mean, two years passed between the 2008 financial meltdown and the massive Barack Obama landslide to the Republicans having a record wave in 2010.

00:38:36.320 Watergate happened in 1974. By 1980, Ronald Reagan was winning 44 states.

00:38:40.740 And I do wonder whether the catharsis that voters wanted to feel about COVID they achieved last year with the election of Youngkin and New Jersey, even if you didn't live in those states.

00:38:57.040 And then now we just have a different set of issues.

00:39:00.560 You know, in the interim, we've had inflation hitting 10 percent for quite a while.

00:39:05.960 We've had interest rate hikes. We've had dobs. We've had crime, which is on the way up.

00:39:13.040 And trying to relitigate what happened a year ago isn't necessarily at the top of voters' minds.

00:39:18.840 And I'm not sure they'll force Democrats.

00:39:20.460 What I think is true is, and Jeremy sort of alluded to this directly and indirectly, is that what happened last night, if it's not properly absorbed, could be quite bad for the Democrats in the long run.

00:39:34.600 First, because if they don't realize that they, too, belong to an unpopular party that voters don't like, then they may make more mistakes.

00:39:46.000 Republicans are pretty unpopular. Last night was catastrophic.

00:39:49.640 But this was not a resounding endorsement of the Democrats either.

00:39:53.540 Also, perversely speaking, if this is the development that leads Joe Biden to stay in the race for 2024, but gets rid of Trump and thereby makes Ron DeSantis or someone else Biden's opponent,

00:40:09.100 you could actually have a better outcome for Republicans than you would have got otherwise.

00:40:13.780 Now, I think Biden considers himself, and he may not be wrong in this, the best opponent for Donald Trump.

00:40:19.980 It's going to be quite difficult for Democrats to orchestrate a Trump-Biden election.

00:40:24.720 What happens if it's not Trump? Does Biden step down?

00:40:28.340 If somebody wants to primary him, do they wait to find out who's won the Republican primary?

00:40:32.880 I mean, it's very, very difficult to engineer the fight that you want.

00:40:38.700 And if this convinces Biden that he's with it, that he's popular enough, that he's got his finger on the pulse and that he's indispensable,

00:40:46.020 and then Trump doesn't make it to the Republican nomination in 2024, you might have a better outcome for the Republicans than you would have had otherwise.

00:40:53.220 So I do think there are risks for the Democrats.

00:40:55.620 I'm not completely convinced, if I'm honest, we're going to see the reckoning for those COVID policies that many of us want,

00:41:02.960 because I don't think we're going to have that set of circumstances again for probably 100 years, or at least I hope not.

00:41:08.580 And so what does it matter if they've got it wrong?

00:41:10.760 Here's the other thing.

00:41:12.120 If, as it looks now, and just for perspective, the pollsters were predicting anywhere from, well,

00:41:18.380 Cook Political was saying the GOP would get as many as 25 seats pick up in the House.

00:41:23.680 RCP, RealClearPolitics said between 14 and 48 for the House.

00:41:29.880 Sabato was saying plus 24 for the House.

00:41:32.900 This is all the projections for the Republicans.

00:41:35.360 They need six to win, five, anyway, five, let's call it.

00:41:39.040 And now they're saying maybe they'll get eight.

00:41:42.240 The latest projections, the way the races are outstanding right now, could go the other way.

00:41:48.020 I mean, this really, it's not a done deal.

00:41:49.380 But let's say for this question that the GOP pulls it out and they win the House by this narrow, narrow margin.

00:41:56.040 The truth is, Jeremy, President Biden's agenda is done.

00:42:00.560 I mean, the truth is, while it's not the sweeping victory they wanted, control of the House is control of the House.

00:42:06.140 And there's not going to be any more, you know, Build Back Better or Inflation Reduction Act.

00:42:12.880 And there's going to be the investigations like the Republicans are going to get some presence here that they've long wanted.

00:42:20.820 Right. And we go back to a situation like we had in the second term of the Obama administration,

00:42:29.340 where I think the Republican House is able to control a lot of the national agenda.

00:42:36.940 Right. Like Kevin McCarthy has a very hard job on his hands.

00:42:40.900 But the the the I think the Republican Party will be defined by what the House does.

00:42:50.720 It will also be continued to be defined by Donald Trump, of course.

00:42:54.220 But let's not forget who the Republican House is ultimately dominated by.

00:42:59.660 And that's pro Trump Republicans or Republicans who feel as if they have to be subservient to Donald Trump because that's what their voters want.

00:43:07.880 So, yeah, I think I think the next couple of years in a Republican House is going to be a it's must see TV.

00:43:18.240 Mm hmm. You know, it may be even worse for the GOP in a way.

00:43:20.760 Charlie was saying this last night that if I were Ron DeSantis, I could if I were advising him, I could make a pretty good case.

00:43:28.140 The best thing for him would be if the Dems held the House and the Senate and he got to swoop in there as the savior to say there's no obstructionist GOP for Biden or whomever.

00:43:37.860 To run against. It's it's just him. It's still just the Dems in control.

00:43:42.100 And you've got DeSantis or whomever coming in saying, I will fix it just as an update for you now.

00:43:47.540 ABC News, CNN, others are now projecting that the Georgia Senate race will indeed advance to a runoff between Warnock and Walker.

00:43:55.200 If Jeremy's right, that Nevada is looking like it's going to go Dem at the Senate level, that's devastating for the Republicans because Mark Kelly seems solidly in the lead in Arizona.

00:44:09.260 And so over Blake Masters and the the Republicans have to win two out of the remaining three.

00:44:17.060 We they projected Wisconsin's going to Ron Johnson. So you got Georgia, you've got Nevada and you've got Arizona still out there.

00:44:24.160 The Republicans lost one. They lost Pennsylvania. So they really have no choice.

00:44:28.980 Right. They must if they want control of the Senate, they have to win two out of those last three.

00:44:32.320 So but if they lose Nevada and Arizona right now, the Georgia race doesn't really matter as much.

00:44:38.760 I mean, it it's going to matter, but it's not it's not going to be like the last time.

00:44:42.460 I'm a bit more bullish on Nevada than Jeremy is.

00:44:46.840 But yes, I mean, this is why this is such a disastrous development.

00:44:51.640 The House doesn't really matter a great deal because it turns over every two years and it is a change in sentiment in the country.

00:44:59.520 By the time the next presidential election rolls around, that will be reflected in the House.

00:45:03.840 As you said, Megan, I mean, if you run it, you run it.

00:45:06.880 So, yes, of course, this is disappointing.

00:45:08.520 And it is alarming, I think, for the Republicans that they couldn't do better in the House, given the economic environment.

00:45:15.440 But if they have control of it, they can shut down the Biden agenda.

00:45:19.700 Senate majorities, by contrast, have built over years.

00:45:24.240 Senators outlast presidents, at least they outlast presidents if they only serve one term.

00:45:29.120 And the Republicans chose bad candidates.

00:45:31.500 They lost a lot of winnable races.

00:45:32.740 And there will be a point in the future where people will look back, as they did with Kelly Ayotzlos in New Hampshire and say,

00:45:38.240 if only we had won that race, this bill judge initiative would now be doable.

00:45:46.100 And when that happens, I hope they know who to blame.

00:45:50.420 The next time that we have a vote in two years, 2024, the Senate layout is much more favorable to the GOP,

00:45:59.560 assuming they don't do anything massive to screw it up.

00:46:02.080 This map actually wasn't that great for them.

00:46:03.620 And we're seeing the results of that.

00:46:05.100 And that's why initially people were only focused on the House.

00:46:07.580 I mean, back in the day, we were all only focused on the House.

00:46:10.820 And then the Senate became like, wait, maybe the Senate could happen, too.

00:46:14.080 That's interesting.

00:46:15.280 And yeah, but it was not to be or at least it doesn't.

00:46:18.140 I agree with you.

00:46:18.920 Nevada has been interesting.

00:46:19.880 I don't know what Jeremy Source is saying, but we'll know that one within the next few days, I think, unlike Georgia.

00:46:26.000 You guys, thank you so much for your thoughtful analysis.

00:46:28.700 Pleasure talking to you both.

00:46:30.320 Thanks, Megan.

00:46:31.240 Thank you.

00:46:31.820 All right.

00:46:32.760 Coming up, Jason Riley is here from The Wall Street Journal with some interesting analysis.

00:46:36.540 He thinks that the winning the House is actually very significant.

00:46:39.000 And we'll talk to him about why.

00:46:40.800 Remember, in the meantime, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly.

00:46:53.640 And I do want to thank those of you who participated in our live election coverage last night.

00:46:57.240 Super fun being live with you on YouTube and the comments and the chat made it so much better.

00:47:03.000 If you prefer an audio podcast, you can follow the show and download it on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

00:47:09.180 There you'll find our full archives, too, with more than 425 shows.

00:47:14.520 Just a bit of more information for you now to update you.

00:47:21.380 Georgia will go to a runoff.

00:47:23.420 They are now projecting that virtually every decision desk.

00:47:26.880 As for Nevada and Arizona, the other outstanding two Senate races.

00:47:31.680 And, of course, in Arizona, we also have a gubernatorial race between Katie Hobbs and Carrie Lake, Dem and Republican.

00:47:38.360 Update first on Nevada.

00:47:39.620 There are 23,000 votes outstanding, separating the Republican from the Dem.

00:47:49.060 The Republican has the advantage right now, Laxalt.

00:47:52.120 75% of the vote is in.

00:47:55.040 Longtime reporter John Ralston is saying that we won't know anything in Nevada until at least tomorrow,

00:48:01.340 given how they count the mail-in votes.

00:48:03.120 But right now, the GOP is up by 23,000 votes with 75% of the vote in.

00:48:10.300 In Arizona, the Senate race first, Mark Kelly is leading Blake Masters by 90,000 votes with 68% of the vote in.

00:48:21.480 All right.

00:48:21.720 He's up 90,000 votes with 68% of the vote in.

00:48:25.500 That's a pretty good margin, so it must be that the outstanding vote in Arizona, yet to be counted, is either coming from largely Republican areas or is vote that they have some other reason to believe may be heavily GOP, because that's a pretty good number to be up by.

00:48:40.820 As for the governor's race, Carrie Lake just tweeted out, we're going to win big.

00:48:44.620 She is behind right now by 12,000 votes with 66% of the vote.

00:48:50.680 How can 66% of the vote be in on the governor's race and 68% on the Senate?

00:48:55.080 I don't know.

00:48:55.660 I'm getting it from the New York Times.

00:48:57.000 Maybe a typo.

00:48:58.880 But anyway, she is losing by 12,000 now, but there is some, you know, huge portion of the vote yet to come in, maybe as much as 34% yet to be counted.

00:49:10.560 And she's feeling pretty good about where those votes are likely to come from.

00:49:15.460 Harmeet Dillon, attorney for a bunch of Republicans, is out there saying they're monitoring all of this and making sure that the vote is fair.

00:49:23.060 After all, the funny business, well, not funny business, but, well, Carrie Lake thinks it is, but problems they had in Maricopa County with the voting machines yesterday.

00:49:30.600 Some, up to 20% of the voting machines in Maricopa County were affected by this.

00:49:34.380 The print wasn't dark enough to make the ballot readable by the machine.

00:49:39.620 People were given provisional ballots.

00:49:42.280 Some went to try to vote in person at a different polling place and were told no because they were already in the system as having voted.

00:49:49.620 But they got upset because they hadn't voted because it hadn't been accepted.

00:49:52.140 But there was a provisional ballot, yada, yada.

00:49:54.480 If this becomes relevant, it's going to get ugly.

00:49:57.160 And it'll only become relevant if what's in the provisional box could make a difference given the final tally.

00:50:02.320 One final note, Mitch McConnell, Senate GOP leader, the minority leader right now, arrived at Capitol Hill this morning, telling reporters, I don't know any more than you guys do.

00:50:11.800 Asked how he was feeling.

00:50:13.060 He replied, I don't deal in feelings.

00:50:16.500 It's classic.

00:50:17.480 Classic Mitch McConnell.

00:50:19.860 I have none.

00:50:20.940 I have no feelings ever.

00:50:22.280 That's how I became Senate minority leader.

00:50:25.960 We're going to keep following the numbers as the hour goes on and keep you updated.

00:50:28.920 In the meantime, as I said, I'd love to hear from you.

00:50:31.420 Call me.

00:50:32.020 833-44-MEGAN.

00:50:33.480 M-E-G-Y-N.

00:50:34.840 That's 833-446-3496.

00:50:38.100 833-446-3496.

00:50:40.280 Would love to hear from you in particular on that Trump-DeSantis discussion that we just had.

00:50:46.480 Joining me now, Jason Riley, columnist at The Wall Street Journal.

00:50:51.120 Jason, it does still appear, though it's going to be by a much smaller margin, if at all, but it does still appear that the GOP is going to take the House, though no one's actually projected it yet.

00:51:02.040 And you don't want people to discount how significant that that would be.

00:51:08.300 You're right.

00:51:08.620 I don't think it should be discounted.

00:51:10.480 I mean, you know, given Joe Biden's low approval rating, given, you know, the record high inflation, at least for the past 40 years, given the chaos at the border, given the uptick in crime, most people expected the Republicans to have a much better night than they did.

00:51:32.140 But they did retake the House, Megan.

00:51:35.020 That is not a small matter.

00:51:36.620 They will be head of the committees.

00:51:41.140 They have subpoena power.

00:51:43.360 I don't see any major legislation that the Biden administration wants to advance going anywhere without the consent of House Republicans.

00:51:55.560 That's a big deal.

00:51:56.620 The American people voted for a check on the Biden administration.

00:52:00.800 Republicans would have liked a bigger check, but there's still going to be a check, even if it's by a small amount.

00:52:08.800 And I expect to see, you know, investigations coming out of the House.

00:52:14.080 I, you know, Hunter Biden, the Afghanistan withdrawal, COVID response.

00:52:20.940 So, you know, it's a very big deal that Republicans will control one House of Congress again.

00:52:26.600 And not to mention the border and potentially Merrick Garland and what he did to those parents.

00:52:32.700 I've heard Kevin McCarthy mentioned that, too.

00:52:35.060 So, yeah, there could be multiple investigations, which I do think in the same way that the GOP cheers on Ron DeSantis down in Florida for taking on these causes that mean a lot to Republican voters.

00:52:44.420 That kind of thing could, yes, it could alienate the Dems, but it could energize the GOP base.

00:52:50.340 Oh, absolutely.

00:52:51.900 And they also took out some big names.

00:52:54.220 Sean Patrick Maloney lost in New York.

00:52:58.020 The congressman who's head of the campaign arm of the Democratic Party lost his race.

00:53:04.380 That's that's not a minor thing.

00:53:07.500 So, so, yeah, I think there's a lot of good that came out of last night, despite the fact that it wasn't as good as Republicans would have liked.

00:53:18.580 Republicans also increased their margins with minority voters, which always worries the Democrats because they rely so heavily on those voters to win elections.

00:53:29.560 But Republican support among both blacks and Hispanics increased yesterday and particularly among the men in both of those groups.

00:53:40.620 So, you know, again, you would have expected, given these other conditions, to see bigger Republican gains than we saw.

00:53:50.860 But but the Republicans are not going to be a check on the Biden administration at the end of the day.

00:53:54.920 And that's a big deal.

00:53:55.900 Mm hmm. I mean, you think back on how we got into this mess with inflation, and it really is directly related to all of the spending that they were doing, the Democrats, when they were in control of the House and the Senate and the presidency.

00:54:08.300 And that's stopping now.

00:54:10.000 That's that's over.

00:54:11.040 You know, and to the extent Joe Biden keeps trying to hand out goodies like this student loan forgiveness, quote unquote, program, there will be legal challenges to try to stop him.

00:54:19.080 But if he does it the old fashioned way, we're actually supposed to get spending approved by Congress.

00:54:22.740 They're going to stop him.

00:54:23.700 Yeah. Yeah.

00:54:25.760 Yeah. All the legislation is supposed to originate in the House.

00:54:28.460 But this is all old fashioned stuff we learned in grade school, Megan.

00:54:31.580 None of that happens anymore.

00:54:33.580 But but you're right.

00:54:35.740 And according to the exit polls, inflation and the economy were the top issues for voters.

00:54:42.140 They were a bigger deal to voters than abortion was, although abortion did come in second, according to the exit polls that I saw.

00:54:51.760 You know, it turns out, I think, that those special elections we saw earlier this year over the summer and those referendums turned out to be a lot more predictive than people thought they would be.

00:55:05.260 We saw some polling after that about wrong direction, right direction.

00:55:08.820 And we thought that would work to the advantage of Republicans and sort of sort of cancel out the abortion issue that Democrats have been trying to do.

00:55:19.480 That didn't quite happen.

00:55:21.160 But the economy did turn out to be, you know, the the big issue.

00:55:26.300 So Republicans were right, I think, to to stress that.

00:55:30.200 And again, they ended up taking back the House.

00:55:32.380 So, you know, I think that that's, you know, that that's not you know, Biden had a good night in that things weren't a lot worse.

00:55:41.100 But he now knows that he's going to have a very, very difficult job pushing his agenda through over the next two years.

00:55:48.700 Republicans make that very, very difficult for him now.

00:55:50.680 And I think I feel like we've skipped past the significance of Florida officially being red thus far in my first hour and eight minutes on the air today.

00:55:57.980 Florida actually being red and not purple is huge.

00:56:00.820 Florida has, I think, after redistricting, they now have 30 electoral seats.

00:56:04.480 Right. It was 29. Now it's 30.

00:56:05.700 Anyway, they're one of the top four states in the in the union when it comes to richness of electoral votes.

00:56:13.520 Right. And as you're suggesting, if it's not a swing state anymore, that's a very big deal.

00:56:19.520 I think Trump only won it in 2020 by about three points.

00:56:24.080 DeSantis won his reelection bid by almost 20 points.

00:56:28.460 That's a huge deal.

00:56:30.240 And of course, it's also a huge deal that it's Ron DeSantis who did this, someone who's been in Trump's crosshairs recently, along with the governor of Georgia.

00:56:39.840 Both of those were big winners last night.

00:56:43.460 And the Trump wing of the Republican Party did not do very well.

00:56:49.040 And that's also something that I think is going to be part of this postmortem.

00:56:55.040 And, you know, we'll we'll we'll see what happens.

00:56:57.420 But I think there are some very, very interesting developments on that front, particularly because if you look at at states where you had both the sort of traditional Democratic Republican on the ballot,

00:57:10.760 as well as a Trump backed candidate, I'm thinking of somewhere like New Hampshire, where Governor Sununu won easily.

00:57:19.380 But Bolduc, the Senate candidate, lost or again, Georgia, where Governor Kemp handily defeated Stacey Abrams in the gubernatorial race.

00:57:32.200 But Hershel Walker is struggling.

00:57:34.020 Even in a state like Ohio, where J.D.

00:57:39.120 Vance won and it was backed by Trump, his margin was not nearly as large as Governor DeWine's, who won reelection in a walk.

00:57:47.420 So you really there have a case where you can compare how traditional Republicans did in some of these states and how Trump backed candidates did in some of these states.

00:57:58.360 And it was a very mixed bag among the Trump candidates.

00:58:02.320 And and again, getting back to Florida, that it was a very big night for DeSantis.

00:58:08.220 And we'll see if this is going to be a turning point in terms of the party's relationship with Donald Trump going forward.

00:58:16.880 That is the big question.

00:58:18.420 He he did it.

00:58:19.660 Ron DeSantis turned Florida red.

00:58:21.420 There's no question it.

00:58:22.380 It's been trending red, but it wasn't when he won in 18.

00:58:26.760 And now it fully is.

00:58:28.380 They are. This is a full throated endorsement of him and his policies by by Republican and recently more moderate or centrist or even Democrat voters.

00:58:39.240 Can we spend a minute on you mentioned Stacey Abrams?

00:58:42.580 There's a funny moment on Fox last night where my old pals, Brett Baer and Martha McCallum were talking.

00:58:48.200 And Brett said, oh, Stacey Abrams just conceded.

00:58:50.160 And Martha said for for both races, for which the last the last time and this time or just just this time, she there was no way around it this time.

00:58:59.420 She had to admit she lost.

00:59:00.420 She went down in flames.

00:59:01.380 So did Beto.

00:59:02.440 They had spent I think the Democrats spent seventy five million dollars trying to get Beto this seat.

00:59:09.700 He couldn't do it in the Senate race against Ted Cruz.

00:59:12.460 And now he was trying to take on Governor Abbott.

00:59:14.860 I mean, do you think they've learned their lesson on these sort of social media stars who cannot win?

00:59:19.080 Well, they've learned that Texas, you know, isn't isn't going to become blue anytime soon, despite their efforts.

00:59:30.620 I think that's that's what they learned in terms of Texas.

00:59:34.300 But the Stacey Abrams defeat, I think, is very interesting and very important because she's become one of these media stars.

00:59:43.220 Megan, I think based on on this ridiculously false narrative about voter suppression, she's become the sort of poster child for what Biden called Jim Crow 2.0.

00:59:57.220 And it's it's it's it's it's it's fantastical.

01:00:00.180 It's it's it's the in recent elections, you've had black voter turnout exceeding white voter turnout, even in states with some of the strictest voter ID laws like Georgia.

01:00:13.100 In 2018, the year that Stacey Abrams lost the first time, black voter turnout and black registration in Georgia exceeded white voter turnout and white registration.

01:00:26.980 And she started a whole she started a whole she started some group to dig into voter suppression efforts.

01:00:35.620 You know, this was a group in search of a problem that did not exist even in Georgia at the time.

01:00:41.940 In recent presidential races, we've had a black voter turnout exceeding white voter turnout.

01:00:49.240 And so I'm it's it's very satisfying that this is not going over very well in terms of her her political aspirations.

01:00:59.080 I think that's a that's a very good thing.

01:01:01.740 And I was very glad, very satisfied to see her go down the way she did, because, of course, if she had not not not not won, but even had come close to winning.

01:01:12.000 I think it would have elevated her nationally to continue talking about this nonsense.

01:01:16.840 And now maybe she'll be taken a little less seriously.

01:01:20.740 Mm hmm. I will just never forget that picture of her in the school with all the children masked up, the children who don't need to be masked at all wearing masks.

01:01:29.100 But she didn't have one smiling.

01:01:31.060 I was I was I was a little surprised that Republicans didn't make more of that in terms of an issue in the midterms.

01:01:38.940 The whole school closing issue with the pandemic, the sort of education establishments response to the pandemic, because, you know, the pandemic threw us a lot of curveballs.

01:01:53.280 But its impact on children is something we knew pretty early on and didn't really change.

01:01:59.840 And yet we had, you know, ridiculous mask mandates for kids and they were kept out of school way too long.

01:02:07.040 And that's all on the Democrats.

01:02:09.680 You know, that's that was them carrying water for the teachers unions who give them a lot of support.

01:02:16.400 And there were some candidates who tried to make an issue of it.

01:02:19.360 But I thought that that should have been much more central to the Republican message.

01:02:25.000 What about that?

01:02:26.120 Are you taking a state like Michigan, where you had Tudor Dixon, who did make an issue out of it with with Gretchen Whitmer and, you know, raised it at every turn.

01:02:34.560 But she lost. And that's one of the head scratchers today or crime in New York.

01:02:39.180 Lee Zeldin made a huge point of it.

01:02:40.820 And I realize he did way better than your average Republican ever would have done against a sitting Democratic governor.

01:02:45.560 But he did still lose.

01:02:47.320 And it has some of us saying, I guess they don't care.

01:02:50.100 I guess Michiganders didn't care about the covid lockdowns that kept their children out of school in some cases for over a year or same for New Yorkers.

01:02:58.600 So I have friends whose kids did not go to school for a year, not to mention the crime rate here with Kat,

01:03:04.360 which Kathy Hochul said, I don't know why you care so much about that.

01:03:07.340 So to those people who are saying, OK, I guess New Yorkers want crime and Michiganders want lockdowns.

01:03:14.260 What do you think?

01:03:15.840 I don't quite read it that way.

01:03:17.820 I mean, you mentioned Mitch McConnell earlier and the comedy made to reporters earlier today.

01:03:24.060 McConnell talked about candidate quality, Megan, and it concerned him and it concerned a lot of people.

01:03:32.800 Some of this had to do with who the GOP was fielding in some of these races.

01:03:40.120 They were fielding people that could win primaries, perhaps, but couldn't win general elections.

01:03:47.520 I mean, Republicans lost the governorship in Maryland and in Massachusetts.

01:03:54.180 Maryland's governor is Larry Hogan.

01:03:55.680 Massachusetts governor is Charlie Baker.

01:03:57.960 Those are two of the most popular Republicans in the country.

01:04:04.120 They weren't running again, but there's no reason why the GOP couldn't have found more moderate Republicans to run in those races and carry on what Hogan and Baker were doing.

01:04:18.480 Instead, they fielded very Trump-backed candidates who focused on their loyalty to Donald Trump, and both of them got crushed.

01:04:28.660 And in a lot of these races that are even close, Arizona should not be as close as it is, particularly the governor's race there.

01:04:37.400 But the governor, the current governor, or the Senate race there, I should say, as well, the current governor decided not to run for the Senate.

01:04:48.860 And so one takeaway could be, oh, these people don't care.

01:04:54.380 But I think that's letting the party off the hook for nominating people who don't necessarily match the electorate in some of these states.

01:05:05.400 And that, I think, is at least as much a problem as indifference on the part of voters.

01:05:12.600 You know, you have to field quality candidates.

01:05:15.180 And that didn't happen everywhere that it needed to happen.

01:05:18.620 For sure.

01:05:19.040 I assume you're not talking about Lee Zeldin because I think he just did so well.

01:05:22.500 It was incredible.

01:05:23.200 Well, that's a very blue state.

01:05:24.660 I mean, come on.

01:05:25.780 But not as blue today.

01:05:27.920 A Democrat won statewide in New York.

01:05:30.420 Democrats outnumber Republicans in voter registration by more than two to one in New York.

01:05:36.460 And that number has grown over the past decade.

01:05:39.580 So that was a very, very tough road to hoe.

01:05:42.820 If Zeldin had won, it would have been a wave.

01:05:45.100 It would have been a tsunami if someone like Zeldin had won.

01:05:48.520 That was always going to be a long shot.

01:05:50.140 And one of the things that we haven't looked at at all is, you know, to what extent local politics were changed last night.

01:05:57.140 You know, how much red was inflicted into districts that had previously been blue.

01:06:03.400 I know here in Connecticut, there were a lot of races.

01:06:05.480 People were waiting and hoping to see school boards.

01:06:08.280 We saw virtually every single one in Florida turn red with DeSantis' backing.

01:06:13.500 He had an almost perfect rating in terms of endorsing candidates.

01:06:16.420 So that's going to be one of the interesting things to take a look at in the days to come as well, as we await Arizona, Nevada, and the never-ending contest in Georgia.

01:06:28.700 Jason Riley, great to see you.

01:06:30.340 Thank you.

01:06:30.740 Let's go to Arizona, because everybody's wondering what's going to happen there.

01:06:37.040 That's a big one.

01:06:38.400 The gubernatorial race, the Senate race as well.

01:06:40.580 The officials say the full count may take days.

01:06:43.100 Turning me now to discuss is Axios Phoenix reporter Jeremy Duda.

01:06:47.320 So is it true that it's going to take days to figure out what's happening in Arizona?

01:06:50.420 For some of these races, yeah.

01:06:52.400 Because Arizona has the very robust early voting system, a lot of these ballots, the early ballots that got dropped off by voters on Election Day,

01:07:01.700 it'll take a while to verify.

01:07:03.340 They have to verify the signatures.

01:07:05.040 They have to use those signatures to confirm the voters' identities before they open and count those ballots.

01:07:09.380 So that'll take some time.

01:07:11.540 Maricopa County expects to have 95% to 99% of its ballots counted by the end of Friday.

01:07:18.140 So sometime in the next few days, we should get some answers on those, which is good because some of these races,

01:07:24.240 especially some of these statewide races, are extremely close.

01:07:27.560 Can you explain what's outstanding right now?

01:07:30.280 And, I mean, the latest that we saw was that Katie Hobbs on the governor's race was slightly in the lead by about 12,000,

01:07:37.320 but that there was still more than a third of the vote outstanding so that Carrie Lake could definitely overtake her.

01:07:43.540 Is that still the latest?

01:07:44.800 And where is the vote outstanding?

01:07:46.940 You know, from what county?

01:07:49.880 The votes are – we have votes outstanding from all over the state.

01:07:52.720 I mean, Maricopa County makes up more than 60 – a little more than 60% of the state's population,

01:07:56.780 so that's going to be where most of those votes are from.

01:08:00.240 I don't think we have information yet from all of the counties.

01:08:03.240 Maricopa, I think we have – they said this morning that they have a little over 400,000 votes left.

01:08:08.640 That includes 275,000 votes or so that were dropped off yesterday as opposed to Election Day votes, stuff like that.

01:08:15.460 So we have a pretty sizable chunk.

01:08:17.940 We don't have exact numbers yet.

01:08:19.380 But, yeah, Katie Hobbs' lead is a little under 12,000 right now.

01:08:24.420 Mark Kelly leading by almost 90,000 right now.

01:08:28.720 The Secretary of State's race, Democrat Adrian Fontes, is leading.

01:08:31.880 Mark Finchman was very well known as a very prominent Trump supporter, an election denier, also by about 84,000 votes.

01:08:38.160 So these outstanding ballots are really going to decide some of these races.

01:08:43.540 So that does mean there was ticket splitting then.

01:08:45.320 If you're going in there, you're not voting Republican down the line or Dem down the line.

01:08:49.820 If Carrie Lake has such a slim margin between her and Katie Hobbs and the Senate race, has the Democrat significantly ahead?

01:08:56.740 Sure, we've got, you know, Katie Hobbs and the governor's race with Hobbs and Lake.

01:09:01.760 We have a similar scenario down in the attorney general's race and this race for state school superintendent where you have either slight leads for the Democrats or slight leads for the Republicans.

01:09:12.100 And so it definitely looks like you have some folks vote, some Republicans or some folks voting for, you know, Mark Kelly and Adrian Fontes on the Dem side while voting Republican for another races.

01:09:22.820 Mm hmm. This is what confuses me about the election denial thing, because if that's your thing, if you're like, I'm not voting for anybody who doesn't accept the results of the 2020 election, you don't split between, you know, Carrie Lake at the governor's level.

01:09:35.480 And then when you go over to the Senate, you say, well, Blake Masters, that's a bridge too far.

01:09:39.760 They she doesn't admit that Trump lost the election either. Right.

01:09:42.980 So it's like, I don't know if we're reading the splitting of the tickets correctly or even the election denial objections correctly.

01:09:49.860 Well, you know, each of these races has its own dynamics.

01:09:53.400 I mean, in the governor's race, there are, I think, you know, probably a lot of maybe center right voters who were not particularly thrilled with Carrie Lake, but also with probably with Katie Hobbs as well, who did not think probably did not make a super compelling argument to folks for why they should vote for her outside of, well, I'm not Carrie Lake.

01:10:09.300 And obviously, she got a lot of press for refusing to debate Carrie Lake over the last few weeks, which I think a lot turned off a lot of voters.

01:10:17.020 And whereas, you know, whereas a lot of voters do have some issues with Lake, there's also a lot of enthusiasm behind her campaign.

01:10:24.240 And we'll see exactly how much they think out of these outstanding ballots that are left.

01:10:27.880 They're pretty widely expected to break in the Republicans' favor.

01:10:31.340 So any statewide Democrat who has a small lead like Katie Hobbs, you know, very well may see that go away in today and over the next couple of days.

01:10:40.060 Do we feel the same about the Senate race between Kelly and Masters?

01:10:44.860 Kelly's lead is a bit more sizable than Hobbs.

01:10:48.380 You know, she's he's up by almost 90,000 votes.

01:10:50.860 I think there's a lot of expectation out there that he will probably hold on once everything's counted.

01:10:56.560 But it's hard to say because so many of these votes are the ballots to get dropped, early ballots to get dropped off on Election Day.

01:11:02.960 Historically, those have always favored Democrats.

01:11:05.700 In 2018, we saw a bunch of Democrats.

01:11:08.380 Traditionally, that's that changed two years ago.

01:11:10.340 In 2018, we saw a lot of Democrats statewide, including Katie Hobbs, who were losing on Election Day, come back to win over the over the coming days because of those ballots.

01:11:18.280 Two years ago, because so many Republicans became distrustful of the early voting system, you started seeing a lot of them, people who would normally mail on their ballots, walk them in on Election Day.

01:11:27.400 And so that really that completely flipped that trend.

01:11:30.380 And we saw the opposite Republicans gained who were losing on Election Night or trailing big gain tons of votes in the days after the election.

01:11:38.180 It's where President Trump was losing by, I think, something like 100,000 votes here on Election Night.

01:11:43.420 He only lost by about 10,500 when it was all said and done.

01:11:46.840 And so if the if the it's hard to say we have a lot more early ballot drop offs in Election Day this year than we had two years ago.

01:11:53.540 And I'm not sure exactly what's driving that, who all those voters are yet.

01:11:57.200 So we'll have to see.

01:11:58.520 I think general, like I said, I think general expectation is that trend will hold and those ballots will favor Republicans.

01:12:03.440 But there's a lot up in the air right now.

01:12:05.480 And by how much, how many, it's like we can't make a prediction.

01:12:08.360 So I'm sorry, when what's your best guess as to when we have a result, a real result that can be projected?

01:12:14.880 I mean, it might not be till Friday, but we'll have to see how long it takes to verify these early ballots.

01:12:20.720 It's kind of a laborious process because of the matching of the signatures.

01:12:24.840 Friday.

01:12:26.000 All right.

01:12:26.560 We have to be patient.

01:12:27.460 They will be working on Veterans Day, they say.

01:12:29.260 So talk to me about Maricopa County and that and the voting machine snafu.

01:12:34.700 Is my information correct that this affected as many as 20 percent of the polling stations in Maricopa County, the biggest county that's Phoenix and so on?

01:12:43.660 And if so, how confident are we that all voters have actually had a meaningful chance to get their vote registered?

01:12:50.580 Probably a little over 25 percent of voting centers actually was about 60 of 223.

01:12:56.840 And what happened there is, you know, they print out the ballots for voters on demand.

01:13:00.720 We have voting centers where instead of precincts, where wherever you live in the county, you can go to any voting center and it'll print out the right ballot for you.

01:13:07.760 So they're printing them out.

01:13:08.820 Voters were filling them out.

01:13:09.900 And then they feed them in the machines and machines were rejecting them.

01:13:12.320 And it took them, you know, probably more than half a day to finally figure out that the problem was that the printers were printing out certain markings that they're used to read the ballots that were too light.

01:13:21.500 And they're not quite sure why this is because they say it was the same settings as during the primary.

01:13:25.080 Once they figured it out, probably around two o'clock in the afternoon, about almost eight hours after polls opened, you know, they fixed it and the printer started printing them out correctly.

01:13:35.960 But for the ballots that couldn't be read by the machines, they put them in a slot.

01:13:39.940 They told voters they could put them in a slot.

01:13:41.680 They would transfer them to the central election center where they have more advanced machines that could read them.

01:13:47.340 Or so they were hoping and or they could go to other voting locations.

01:13:51.760 There are some I know the Republicans, they went to court late yesterday afternoon to try to extend voting by three hours.

01:13:58.700 They wanted the polls to close at 10 o'clock instead of seven.

01:14:01.500 They said that there were voters who weren't able to cast their ballots because of these issues.

01:14:06.600 They didn't actually they weren't actually able to show any voters who did actually do that.

01:14:12.280 The judge said he'd seen no evidence that there were any voters who weren't able to actually cast their ballots.

01:14:17.500 And so he rejected that.

01:14:19.080 But if this comes down to a very small number of votes, I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about that for a long time.

01:14:25.420 We will indeed.

01:14:26.140 Well, hopefully there are provisional ballots for all or most of those voters so that there is some record of their vote.

01:14:33.400 So, Jeremy, most of those folks did not have to cast provisional ballots, but I'm sure there are probably some who did.

01:14:39.280 We'll talk more probably on Friday.

01:14:41.080 Thank you for being here.

01:14:43.360 All right.

01:14:43.800 Now let's meander on over to Georgia where Walker and Warnock are indeed headed to a runoff.

01:14:48.840 Greg Blustein is a political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-host Politically Georgia podcast.

01:14:55.960 Greg, thank you for being here.

01:14:57.060 So it's official runoff.

01:14:58.440 I mean, my soul can't take it.

01:15:00.580 I can't take it.

01:15:01.600 But what's up with the never-ending runoffs in Georgia?

01:15:04.980 You're telling me I've covered my share of these things, low profile and high profile.

01:15:10.720 I mean, nothing – I thought nothing could get more high profile than two years ago when Senate control was at stake.

01:15:16.300 But here we are again.

01:15:17.560 We don't have two in this case like we did two years ago with the twin cliffhangers.

01:15:21.880 But we do have one cliffhanger with Herschel Walker versus Raphael Warnock.

01:15:27.440 And, you know, I couldn't have imagined two years ago we'd be saying this Herschel Walker against anyone.

01:15:31.860 But he came out of – really, he came out of nowhere in a sense.

01:15:35.520 And he's the most highly decorated athlete in Georgia history.

01:15:39.380 So not really nowhere.

01:15:40.080 But he came out of nowhere in a political sense and is now the Republican nominee.

01:15:44.300 And it's going to be a very bitter, expensive, brutal battle over the next four weeks here in Georgia for that runoff.

01:15:50.700 And this is another race in which we did see ticket splitting by Georgia voters where you can see the numbers are different for the GOP candidates at the top.

01:16:00.620 I mean, the governor's race and the Senate race as well as on the Dem side.

01:16:05.280 Yeah.

01:16:05.660 And this is a trend in other states that might be normal.

01:16:07.680 In Georgia, it's really not.

01:16:08.740 It used to be years ago, decades ago.

01:16:10.840 But more recently, Georgians have pretty much aligned with one party or the other, at least at the top of the ticket.

01:16:17.260 And in this race, we know polls were detecting it early this summer that three, four, five percent of Kemp supporters were also backing Raphael Warnock.

01:16:26.900 And we see that this – there were some predictions from – especially for some analysts saying, oh, when the rubber meets the road, those voters are going to go home.

01:16:35.380 They're going to stay in their lanes.

01:16:36.520 They're going to end up voting Republican or Democrat.

01:16:39.600 But in this case, we saw a significant number of voters split their tickets.

01:16:44.800 And that's why Governor Kemp far outdid Herschel Walker by four or five points.

01:16:50.760 Yeah, just looking at the numbers, Kemp got about 2.1 million votes.

01:16:54.700 Walker, 1.9 million.

01:16:57.320 So there's about 300,000 votes that said Walker's a bridge too far.

01:17:02.620 That I'm not doing.

01:17:03.900 Over on the Dem side, 1.8 million for Stacey Abrams.

01:17:09.420 But her counterpart down in the Senate, Raphael Warnock, got 1.9 million.

01:17:15.240 So there were a lot of folks who were like, she's a bridge too far.

01:17:18.640 It's interesting.

01:17:19.560 Like, Georgia has become more and more purple.

01:17:21.980 And you can kind of see that in the numbers where there's a fair amount, hundreds of thousands of crossover voters for whom party is not everything.

01:17:27.540 Yeah, there's a few trends there, right?

01:17:30.240 One of them is incumbents.

01:17:31.580 But both the leading vote getters we just talked about are incumbents.

01:17:34.940 So they do have the eye by their name.

01:17:36.800 And they have a record.

01:17:38.680 You know, Governor Kemp in particular, the entire election campaign, he rarely talked about what he'd do in a second term.

01:17:44.580 He didn't need to.

01:17:45.200 He could focus on what he did in the first term.

01:17:47.520 Whereas Stacey Abrams, she came up with all sorts of proposals, but couldn't point to any record, you know, at least in executive office.

01:17:53.560 She was a state lawmaker before that.

01:17:55.420 And then, you know, there's also the fact that both of them took aims, took effort to reach towards the middle.

01:18:04.980 They, you know, Governor Kemp, no one would ever call him a moderate.

01:18:07.100 He's not.

01:18:07.480 He's conservative.

01:18:08.960 Raphael Warnock ran and won office on a very liberal record and has a liberal voting record.

01:18:14.380 But they've both done, taken efforts, taken pains to reach new audiences that don't normally align with their parties.

01:18:21.720 So that means for Senator Warnock, it means he talks more about Ted Cruz.

01:18:25.860 He talks more about working with Republicans than he does about working with Joe Biden.

01:18:29.920 And that's also because Joe Biden's approval rating is so low here in Georgia.

01:18:32.880 And Governor Kemp, you know, in 2018, he ran this very rural centric campaign going to very deep red areas for the most part and kind of neglecting the suburbs and some other audiences that he could have carried favor with.

01:18:45.840 Well, this year, he was always and he always had such a commanding lead.

01:18:49.800 He felt like he could he had the freedom to go and sit campaign in the suburbs more, go reach Asian American, Indian American, African American audiences that he really didn't spend that much time in 2018 to cater to.

01:19:02.800 Now we have we're awaiting results in Arizona and Nevada.

01:19:07.420 And if the GOP manages to win in both of those, then George is less important because we'll know who won.

01:19:16.220 If the Dems managed to win in both of those, then Georgia runoff is less important.

01:19:21.000 But if the GOP gets one of those, then then there is going to be all every person in the country is going to come to Georgia and they're going to flood money just like the last time.

01:19:31.960 And so you kind of have been through this before.

01:19:34.300 What do you expect?

01:19:35.580 And and are you able to sort of do a smart prediction on who who is favored?

01:19:42.240 Now, I won't ask you who's going to win it, but who is favored given the dynamics?

01:19:45.700 Yeah, I'm glad you're not because who knows who's going to win it?

01:19:48.080 Because this race will change three or four times the next four weeks.

01:19:51.620 I can tell you the campaigns are already getting ready.

01:19:53.880 They're already raising money.

01:19:55.100 There's still ads going on in Georgia.

01:19:57.120 You know, whatever groups were funding ads did not cancel them.

01:19:59.820 So you still turn on the TV and you see anti-Warnock and anti-Walker ads.

01:20:03.400 To me, it's pretty simple.

01:20:06.000 If if Senate controls on the line, the race resets pretty much entirely.

01:20:10.980 And it tends to favor Herschel Walker because a lot of those Republican voters who kind of held their nose or are skeptical of Herschel Walker, but so voted for him or might have even withheld their vote from that they might be more inclined to go vote if Senate control was on the line.

01:20:27.320 Right.

01:20:27.460 If they could say a vote for Herschel Walker was a vote against Joe Biden and a vote for Mitch McConnell to be the next Senate majority leader.

01:20:33.100 But if we're talking about, you know, seat 52, if we're talking about just an extra seat, then a lot of those Republicans who aren't that enthusiastic about Herschel Walker for various reasons, whether it be they they're concerned about his fitness for office or his background or whatever it might be, it's gonna be a lot harder to get them out the week after Thanksgiving to go vote.

01:20:53.840 And I've talked to them, you know, they live in the parts of town, you know, they tend to live in suburban Atlanta, they tend to be more affluent, they tend to be more mainstream conservatives.

01:21:04.200 And so Herschel Walker's campaign is acknowledged that will be a challenge for them as well.

01:21:08.640 I mean, if if it comes down to Senate control, like it's the last time in Georgia, I predict the Democrats bring forward a line of women so long against Herschel Walker, it's gonna look like the Rockettes, like and me too.

01:21:20.320 And also me, we're gonna have no way of knowing. But we're gonna see Gloria Allred up to her neck and clients. It's gonna get so ugly and unfortunate. But he's a beloved figure, too. Right. So it's like, there's no way of knowing. Ah, listen, Greg, thank you for all the good work you've done there. Let's stay in touch. Okay.

01:21:39.320 Thank you.

01:21:39.780 Thank you.

01:22:09.780 Very easy declarative statement right now. I will never, ever vote for that man again, or anything after what he did to us in Pennsylvania. He gets to walk away from this. Okay, I gotta look at John Fetterman for the next six years of my life. I have to look at Josh Shapiro, who believe it or not, is not overly popular in the state either. He was just all that was left.

01:22:33.400 But I mean, my family, I mean, my son split tickets, I voted straight Republican, both the women in my life, they both voted Democrat. A lot of them was because of Dobbs.

01:22:48.140 Because of Dobbs, right. Now, but when you say what he did to you in Pennsylvania, you mean with candidate selection?

01:22:55.300 Yes, he stuck. He stuck us with bad candidates. I personally know the guy who was supposed to be the Democratic nominee for governor. He's a good man. He was actually very loyal to Trump and Trump stabbed him in the back at the last minute.

01:23:13.140 You mean the GOP nominee?

01:23:15.900 Yeah, it was supposed to be Lou Barletta was supposed to be the nominee. Machelo came out of nowhere. And then Trump endorsed him over Barletta. We kept wondering, when was he going to endorse Barletta? He just didn't.

01:23:28.140 You know, maybe Barletta beats him. Maybe he doesn't. But he certainly wouldn't have lost to him by 14 points.

01:23:37.680 So are you team DeSantis now or just anybody but Trump?

01:23:40.740 Oh, yeah. He's the standard bearer for our party. He had Trump has got to walk away. Somebody in his inner circle, his daughter, somebody has to tell him it's over. DeSantis is the standard bearer for our party.

01:23:55.840 That's the thing. So it's like, to me, I've said it before. It's just so hard if Trump doesn't move to move him. It's so hard. And I don't know whether it's even possible. James, thanks for your thoughts. Please keep listening and calling. Let's go down to Andrew in Virginia. Andrew, what do you think?

01:24:12.320 Hey, Megan. I'm probably somewhat like your gentleman from Pennsylvania. I was with Trump both times. I, you know, after Romney, you know, who who lost because he was milk dose and cowardly.

01:24:28.320 Cowardly, you know, you got behind Trump because he just hit and hit and got up and hit and hit. And, you know, there's and I've I've been very aggravated with you at times because, you know, I don't think you had your guests on.

01:24:43.540 He said he's got nothing to point to. He does. And he also, you know, was under fire the entire time.

01:24:50.360 I mean, there's lots of people out here who get one scandal and they fold or they hear you hear about it constantly.

01:24:58.040 You know, I think he's the reason we have a six three Supreme Court.

01:25:01.440 Yeah. So but I'm with him, especially when I found out that he's sitting on one hundred million dollars and he didn't he didn't use that out.

01:25:12.000 But now let's understand McConnell did the same thing. He didn't back the Nevada candidate because he didn't think he was loyal to McConnell.

01:25:22.160 I'm I now instead of kick all the rascals out. This is my new thing for 2024.

01:25:28.740 Kick all the curmudgeons out. If you're over 70, boom, you're gone.

01:25:33.680 I want new young blood. I want all these old people gone.

01:25:38.600 Yeah, it's true. And I'm going to be an old person in a few years.

01:25:42.580 But don't go too young because you go too young and you get these woke Gen Zers who went hardcore left.

01:25:48.300 And that's not going to solve anything. I can live with below 70.

01:25:52.480 Yeah. Gen X. We need Gen Xers.

01:25:55.840 Yeah. Andrew, thank you. I'm going to run. Thank you for the call. I appreciate it.

01:26:00.000 Let's move to Utah. Jay in Utah, what's on your mind?

01:26:02.780 Hi, Megan. I'm a big Trump supporter, just like the other two guys.

01:26:10.000 But to me, what the results of the election said that Trump can't win.

01:26:16.160 He can't win Pennsylvania. He can't win Michigan.

01:26:19.940 He can't win Georgia and he can't win Arizona.

01:26:21.980 And he has to win those states to win the election.

01:26:24.540 And he can't. You know, you look at Kemp and DeSantis, who kind of distance themselves from Trump.

01:26:31.700 And then you look at Carrie Lake, who is a great candidate.

01:26:36.140 I live part time in Arizona. She is so much such a better candidate than than Katie Hobbs.

01:26:41.320 It's laughable. But but she hugged stood close to Trump.

01:26:46.080 And, you know, you see the results.

01:26:48.320 So he can't win the states that he needs to win, you know, so he needs to exit stage left.

01:26:53.480 Do you think it's different when it's him, when it's him as opposed to a Blake Masters?

01:26:58.160 Yeah, I think I think he I mean, that's the difference in Georgia between Herschel Walker and Governor Kemp.

01:27:05.680 Kemp stayed away from Trump. Herschel Walker stayed right tied to the hip.

01:27:10.060 And the same thing with Carrie Lake in Arizona.

01:27:12.320 I mean, I mean, Fetterman is is is probably the worst candidate.

01:27:17.960 And he and he wins because shocking.

01:27:21.080 It really is shocking.

01:27:22.940 He can't put two sentences together. True.

01:27:25.420 I mean, literally can't.

01:27:27.240 And he's now Senator Fetterman and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is going to have to hope he finds a way to do their business.

01:27:34.940 Jay, thank you. I appreciate that.

01:27:36.800 Going all over for anybody.

01:27:38.600 And I'll take a Trump supporter, too.

01:27:40.080 So far, most of our audience thinks no and sounds kind of upset at the way this went and Trump's interference in some of these races.

01:27:47.900 Mike in Nebraska, how do you feel?

01:27:49.200 I feel very much the same way as those last three callers.

01:27:55.460 I'm glad that Trump's candidates pretty much lost throughout.

01:27:59.280 He he gets in his own way and he's going to be a problem.

01:28:02.360 And if he's the nominee, he just can't talk about anything else other than himself.

01:28:07.660 And that's a problem. So I'm glad to send DeSantis won by such a big margin.

01:28:12.660 Hopefully people on the inside tell him to step aside.

01:28:15.860 Hopefully people like Hannity and Ingram and other people on Fox get to him and say, you've got to pass the baton on.

01:28:21.780 But regarding Fetterman, I think that's the there's an issue with such early voting.

01:28:27.400 They did not have a debate until late in the election cycle.

01:28:32.160 And having it that late, I think, was was not beneficial to the voters of Pennsylvania because they did not see what they were voting for.

01:28:40.640 Well, I think that's true. But I do question whether the debate would have changed anything for anybody.

01:28:45.320 You know, I think when you're like Dr.

01:28:47.600 Oz was already out there as a very articulate, smart guy.

01:28:52.060 You know, there are questions about whether he was a real Republican or not.

01:28:55.100 But that's only for the party faithful.

01:28:57.440 People who are normally voting Dems, they don't care whether he's a real Republican.

01:29:00.920 They like his moderation.

01:29:02.100 It's it was him. It was him.

01:29:04.340 It was the crudité.

01:29:05.660 It was the Wegners.

01:29:06.720 It was the fact that he secretly didn't really live in Pennsylvania.

01:29:09.200 He's from he's a New Jersey guy, carpetbagger.

01:29:12.060 I just think he was the wrong guy for that state.

01:29:14.940 You know, he's more of like a Connecticut guy, right?

01:29:17.040 Like he's the guy who would come here and be like with the hedge fund guys.

01:29:20.420 And and oh, yes, that's fine.

01:29:21.820 But, you know, Pennsylvania, they want you to know that the Steelers have a buy the next day.

01:29:26.560 They'd want you to know that stuff.

01:29:30.480 True.

01:29:32.500 Thank you, Mike.

01:29:33.700 Thanks for calling in.

01:29:34.700 Let's talk.

01:29:35.080 Let's got to Anna in Michigan.

01:29:37.900 Anna, what's on your mind?

01:29:40.020 Hi, Megan.

01:29:41.000 I heard you talking about Gretchen Whitmer.

01:29:43.260 She ran and won on abortion.

01:29:45.480 That was on the ballot here.

01:29:47.740 That's all she talked about for months.

01:29:51.420 And then the Republicans ran an opponent against her that believes in no exceptions, which is not going to fly in Michigan.

01:29:58.780 So can I ask you about that?

01:30:01.380 I had Tudor Dixon on the show on Monday and she was on the but I'll follow Prop 3.

01:30:06.300 Prop 3 is going to become law, making the law of the land, the row standard.

01:30:10.180 And I won't challenge that.

01:30:11.360 Like, did that not resonate?

01:30:14.640 Do you feel like no one believes it?

01:30:16.180 No, that doesn't resonate.

01:30:17.300 That doesn't resonate with anyone who might consider voting Republican when they're not a Republican.

01:30:24.640 It does.

01:30:24.940 It just she was very I like Tudor Dixon.

01:30:28.120 I didn't think she was a very good candidate to run against Whitmer and who's before COVID.

01:30:35.540 She was a pretty popular candidate.

01:30:37.480 And if we hadn't had abortion or Prop 3 on the ballot, that might have turned out differently.

01:30:45.940 But they didn't.

01:30:46.620 They had the R&C spent very little money here until maybe the last month.

01:30:51.800 Ronna McDaniel needs to get fired, in my opinion.

01:30:55.880 I don't know why she still has a job.

01:30:59.080 Michigan could have gone the other way after all of the lockdowns and suffering the people here.

01:31:03.820 Yes.

01:31:04.500 Yes.

01:31:04.860 Yeah, and putting that prop on the on the ballot was a smart political move.

01:31:10.000 Thank you for calling in.

01:31:11.000 I appreciate it.

01:31:11.660 Let's let's go to Lisa in Ohio in the limited time we have left.

01:31:15.020 Lisa, your quick thoughts.

01:31:17.020 Hi, Megan.

01:31:18.260 I just wanted to say that I did feel defeated.

01:31:21.460 I'm not going to lie.

01:31:22.600 I was hoping it would turn out.

01:31:24.760 It's not a red wave, but a little better than what it is.

01:31:27.300 But just want to let all the Republicans don't despair.

01:31:31.860 I do feel that there is opportunity.

01:31:33.580 I do think we need to do a better job in the way that Democrats organize.

01:31:38.400 We need to start doing better on that.

01:31:40.360 I really do.

01:31:42.300 And the candidate selection and all of it.

01:31:44.220 I mean, I do.

01:31:44.780 I remind people again.

01:31:46.520 There was that period over the summer where the Democrats numbers were going up big after Dobbs.

01:31:50.320 And just winning control of the House would have sounded absolutely delightful to virtually all Republican voters.

01:31:56.580 The Senate was kind of becoming a pipe dream.

01:31:59.640 And so if that's where things land now, I realize the hopes had been raised.

01:32:03.760 But just remember how you were feeling in July after Dobbs.

01:32:07.160 Winning the House is significant.

01:32:09.200 It's not everything.

01:32:10.080 It's not the whole kahuna.

01:32:11.980 But it's something.

01:32:13.260 And things are about to change if, in fact, it happens.

01:32:16.100 Thank you for the call, Lisa.

01:32:17.440 Thank you all so much for calling.

01:32:18.660 It's fun talking to you.

01:32:19.500 We're going to do this again tomorrow.

01:32:20.700 Okay.

01:32:20.900 So if I missed your call, we'll take them again tomorrow because it's now more than ever I want to hear from you guys, from the voters, on what's driving you.

01:32:28.840 Appreciate so much you guys listening to the show and calling in and watching it on YouTube.

01:32:33.400 Can't make any of this happen without you.

01:32:35.040 And it's my honor.

01:32:36.940 Tomorrow, I want to tell you that our friends from the fifth column are here.

01:32:40.460 Make sure you download the show in the meantime so that you don't miss that.

01:32:43.360 It's free.

01:32:44.340 If you want to download it, it's free on YouTube.com slash Megan Kelly, too.

01:32:49.360 And there's a bunch of great stuff on there.

01:32:51.440 We appreciate it.

01:32:54.060 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.

01:32:55.920 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - November 09, 2022

DeSantis Crushes, Trump's Effect, and a Red Ripple, with Charles C.W. Cooke, Jeremy Peters, Jason Riley, and More ｜ Ep. 431

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