Ron Brownstein: A Republican Realignment?

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Speaker 18 Hey there. Happy Friday.
I am pumped to have Ron Brownstein on today.

Speaker 18 This guy does, I think, the best work and analysis about the realignment happening in our politics. He's been doing it for years.
He is must-read material in the Atlantic.

Speaker 18 So I want you to enjoy this conversation. On the back end of it, we'll have a mailbag.
We really dorked out on politics. I got to tell you, it's like almost a political science class.

Speaker 18 So if you want some bonus content for your weekend with a little more laughs, I stepped in for JVL on the secret podcast with Sarah Longwell today. We talked a bunch about women's basketball.

Speaker 18 We danced on the grave of no labels. We joked about RFK Jr.
steroid use. There's a little save by the bell talk.
I mean, you get it all. That is for Bulwark Plus subscribers only.

Speaker 18 So we'll put in the show notes a link to the secret podcast. Or you can go to thebulwark.com/slash free trial to get a free trial for Bulwark Plus, get access to the secret podcast for 30 days.

Speaker 18 I hope you'll enjoy me and Sarah over there. Up next, Ron Brownstein, and I take your questions with a mailbag.

Speaker 18 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It's the Friday. It's the weekend show.

Speaker 18 I'm delighted to have Ron Brownstein, senior editor of The Atlantic, senior political analyst for CNN.

Speaker 18 His most recent book, Rock Me on the Water, 1974, the year LA transformed music, movies, television, and politics. Hey, Ron, Ron, how's it going, man? Thanks for doing us.

Speaker 20 Tim, good to be. Last time I saw you was at the Austin Tribune Fest, you know, and you guys had like a turnaway crowd.
You had like, you know, practically you had groupies in Austin.

Speaker 18 We do have bulwark groupies. We do have bulwark groupies.

Speaker 18 You know, it's not really the demo, you know, in my mind, when I think about, you know, Rock Me on the Water and like having groupies, there would be like, you know, early 20-something gay men, you know, kind of throwing their shirts at me.

Speaker 18 That wasn't exactly the vibe, but we appreciate all of our supporters, no matter the demo.

Speaker 20 It may have been literally the same people, though, who were like the early 70s groupies in their 20s, actually.

Speaker 18 It may have been the same people. That's a good question.

Speaker 20 It may have been the same people, you know, but again, Austin had kind of a music scene, obviously, going at that point, too. So, you know, it could have been.

Speaker 18 It definitely could have been.

Speaker 18 I will say, you know, obviously our core base is the Never Trumpers, but we definitely have a lot of Democrats, center-left Democrats who are kind of warily eyeing their younger, their younger brethren.

Speaker 18 They're like, I don't know, I like these former Republican guys. Anyway, Ron, the other side of the realignment is where I want to start.
And we have a ton of news. We'll get into no labels.

Speaker 18 We'll get into the actual news of the day. But I was teaching a study group at USC about realignment and about what's happened with the Republican Party.

Speaker 18 And I was going through, you know, the source docs, supporting documents and going through articles to give to the students to read.

Speaker 18 And I basically came down to the conclusion that really they could just read Ron Brownstein. They didn't have to read anybody else.

Speaker 18 Like all of the ones that I wanted to send them were from you, basically. So just in the biggest picture, you know, before we get to the news, like, is that realignment still happening? Is it over?

Speaker 18 Where do you think we are?

Speaker 20 And I think 24 is going to give us a really good sense of where we are and what is legit and grounded and what may be kind of froth in people's reaction.

Speaker 20 We know that, you know, the basic lines of division in American politics are geographic and demographic. Democrats, you know, you could draw an imaginary beltway.

Speaker 20 I'm sure you looked at this before, around every major metro area in the country.

Speaker 20 And generally, Democrats are doing better inside that imaginary beltway, and Republicans are doing better outside of it. And Democrats

Speaker 20 still win the vast majority of minority voters, and they are winning an increasing share of college-educated white voters. They're running better among those voters than they ever have.

Speaker 20 And I'm not sure, by the way, that Biden has tapped out on those voters for reasons we can discuss. I think it's likely he's going to run even better with with them in 24 than he did in 20.

Speaker 20 And, you know, Republicans, the Republican coalition in the 21st century has been centered on the voters who feel most disconnected, most alienated from the ways the country is changing.

Speaker 20 Non-urban voters, non-college white voters, evangelical Christians, and other really religiously devout voters.

Speaker 20 The twist that has emerged really under Trump, not so much in 2016, but in 2020 and to some extent in 2022, is that the educational and gender divisions that have long been familiar among whites are increasingly visible among non-whites.

Speaker 20 And that is a critical change. And it is probably the change that has propelled Trump into the lead that he has in most polls, not all polls, at this point.

Speaker 20 So basically, you know, the story among whites is that if you drew quadrants, you know, on education and gender, and you divided the whites into four groups, white voters into four groups by education and gender, college-educated men, college-educated women, non-college men, and non-college women.

Speaker 20 The most Republican group are those without a degree who are men, non-college men. The most Democratic group are the college-educated women.

Speaker 20 Non-college women, very importantly, lean toward Republicans. The college men have grown more Democratic.
This has been the basic structure of politics among whites for really since the 90s, late 80s.

Speaker 20 You know, Tim, in the 90s, pollsters used to call that quadrant the Brownstein crosstabs because I would always demand it before it was so common.

Speaker 20 And what's really happening in this election is that the same kind of quadrant-like behavior is showing up among non-white voters. And Trump is making a lot of gains among non-college, non-white men.

Speaker 20 The college non-white women are growing and Democratic, but the other groups are kind of in the mix. So basically, we've had this restructuring, reconfiguring of the coalitions that goes back.

Speaker 20 I would say our modern era began in the 92 election since then, although some of this behavior obviously goes back to the 70s. And the new twist we are seeing is the potential for Trump.

Speaker 18 Why 92, Buchanan?

Speaker 20 No, really, Clinton, Clinton's victory.

Speaker 20 I mean, like the suburban places that we think of now as kind of core Democratic places, Oakland County, Michigan, Montgomery and Delaware, and Pennsylvania, even Bergen in New Jersey, Santa Clara, which is Silicon Valley.

Speaker 20 All of those places voted six for six Republican from 68 to 88.

Speaker 20 It's really hard to imagine that world, you know, where the Republican presidential candidate was winning Bergen County, New Jersey, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, and the suburbs of Philly, and Oakland County, which is the white-collar suburb of Detroit, suburbs of Minneapolis.

Speaker 20 But in 92 is when they flipped, you know. So, like, if we take the long arc, maybe we'll go back one step.

Speaker 20 From the 30s through the 60s, Democrats ran, even into the 70s, Democrats ran better among voters without a college education than voters with a college education.

Speaker 20 That was the New Deal political alignment. Every Democratic nominee from Stevenson through Carter ran better among white voters without a degree than white voters with a degree.

Speaker 20 The Democrats are the party of people who work with their hands. Republicans are the party of people who are tie to the office.

Speaker 20 And that world began breaking down in the 60s, obviously, with the Civil Rights Act, and then really in the 70s with all of the kind of follow-on issues of busing and affirmative action, and later guns and same-sex rights and abortion.

Speaker 20 And you got to a world where those non-college whites, famously described as Reagan Democrats in 84, became the backbone of the Republican Party.

Speaker 20 It took about 20 more years for the reverse to really kick in, which was the college-educated whites leaning toward Democrats and Clinton, as I said, in 92, winning a lot of these white-collar places that previously had been Republican.

Speaker 20 And basically, what we are seeing in the Trump era is this same pattern, somewhat surprisingly, applying to minority voters, where non-college men in particular are showing a lot of disaffection with Biden, showing more willingness to vote for Trump, and Biden depending on college-educated college-educated voters in the non-white community in much the same way that he is among whites.

Speaker 20 So that's what we've got. We've got kind of this educational realignment with gender tremendously important within it and race still important.

Speaker 20 I mean, let's not, I mean, you know, the non-college, non-white men are not the non-college white men in any way, like in any of their attitudes or voting preferences, but they are showing a lot of receptivity to Trump.

Speaker 20 And his breakthroughs in that community is probably the most important change for him from 20 to 24.

Speaker 20 And for Biden, the question will be whether he can offset it with even further gains in those white-collar places Democrats first kind of planted the flag in under Clinton.

Speaker 18 Okay, so a lot to chew on there. But just speaking on the non-college voters of color, non-college black voters in particular, and I guess Latinos, and maybe Latinos are different than black voters.

Speaker 18 Maybe we should just focus on non-college black voters. But is your sense that Trump has some unique appeal there just because of his kind of celebrity and the fact that he doesn't come off

Speaker 18 as a Christian conservative?

Speaker 18 It's kind of hard to imagine Ted Cruz, you know, having the same ability to kind of move that realignment.

Speaker 18 So do we think that's a one-off, or do you think that this is part of this long history that you're talking about, a 70-year history where just inexorably working-class people are moving more towards the Republican Party?

Speaker 20 Right. It's a really good and important question.
And the honest answer is that we can't entirely know until Trump leaves the scene.

Speaker 20 First of all, a big part of it this year is not candidate specific or ideology. It's just discontent over the economy.

Speaker 20 These are voters, both black and Hispanic working class voters, you know, like any voter living at or below the median income is really feeling the pressure of inflation to a greater extent than white upper middle class Americans are, you know, for whom it's an inconvenience.

Speaker 20 This is more of an existential challenge. I think there are a lot of pollsters who think that Trump has kind kind of an outlaw persona, you know, like I don't give a hoot, you know.

Speaker 20 And there is a certain segment of particularly younger non-white men who find that kind of attractive.

Speaker 20 I think the evidence is much more mixed on there being a fundamental ideological realignment among these voters.

Speaker 20 I go through some of those numbers in my Atlantic story today, you know, and pretty much broadly across the non-white community, you know, voters agree with the statement, for example, that the Republican Party has been taken over by racists.

Speaker 20 They support gun control. They support legal abortion.
They are taking harder positions on immigration, you know, maybe somewhat surprisingly.

Speaker 20 They do show some ambivalence about the transgender rights issues, but there is not like a big cultural disaffection from the Democrats. I think it's more economic discontent.

Speaker 20 You know, in this story today, I talked to a guy, I don't know if you ever talked to him named Matt Morrison, who runs this thing called Working America, which is the group that tries to organize blue-collar workers who are not in a union.

Speaker 20 Okay. And they do a tremendous amount of door-to-door canvassing in communities of color, working-class communities of color, exactly what we're talking about.

Speaker 20 You know, and he said to me, you know, the voters moving toward Trump are not MAGA Republicans. They are voters who don't see a reason to vote for President Biden, right?

Speaker 20 They're very different still than the non-college non-college whites in their views about most things, but there is a real risk this year.

Speaker 20 And I do think, I mean, if I had to bet, the floor has been raised for Republicans with non-college men of color, you know, partially just like a cultural thing.

Speaker 20 The share of non-white men of color who identified as conservative was always higher than the share who voted for Republicans. There was kind of a cultural barrier there.

Speaker 20 And I think now the evidence is that more of those working class conservative minorities are willing to vote Republican.

Speaker 20 That will probably outlast Trump, but I do think it's being inflated or enlarged this year, both by inflation and by his personal appeal.

Speaker 18 Yeah, the article, by the way, in the Atlantic that's out today, how Trump is fracturing minority communities. The other factor in that group I think is interesting to monitor is RFK.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 You know, I think that there's mixed feelings about RFK, you know, about who he hurts.

Speaker 18 Unlike some of these other third-party options out there, it's a little bit more opaque with him.

Speaker 18 RFK obviously has some core anti-vax, anti-establishment types that would maybe hew more towards Trumpiness in a way.

Speaker 18 But this demo that you're talking about, non-college, non-MAGA black men, Hispanic men that are unhappy with the economy, he might be an off-ramp for them.

Speaker 18 And maybe, who knows, but you would assume just based on the numbers that on balance come November, at least a greater proportion of that share, if it's a two-way, you know, head back to Biden just because of the trends.

Speaker 18 RFK gives some of them an option in a way that might hurt Biden. What do you think about that theory?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think, like, first of all, I think our mutual friend Bill Crystal tweeted that today was RFK's speech in,

Speaker 20 you know, the real, the original.

Speaker 18 RFK Senior.

Speaker 20 Yeah,

Speaker 18 the non-just RFK.

Speaker 20 Exactly. In Indianapolis, that he gave that beautiful speech, you know, quoting Aeschylus off the top of his head, which probably neither of us would be doing in the same circumstances.

Speaker 18 Maybe Crystal. Crystal could maybe do that.

Speaker 20 Maybe do that. Yeah.
On the back of a truck. I think David Broder was there.
Pretty sure David Broder was physically there when RFK gave that speech in the Indiana primary in 1968. But yeah, I agree.

Speaker 20 I think anything, anything that lowers the number that you need to win. benefits Trump.

Speaker 20 I mean, I can't get too deeply myself into these analyses of like, you know, who these candidates draw more from, because i think it varies so much from poll to poll we're talking about a small number of people it's hard to get a handle on what i think is likely is that although i know there are some polls with the exception that find the opposite i still think it's hard for donald trump to reach 50 of the vote and whatever makes it more possible to win without 50 of the vote i think in the end benefits him and i think rfk is a very logical landing point for some of these voters we're talking about particularly younger black and hispanic men who've never you know warmed to biden let's go back to 2020.

Speaker 20 I mean, he was not exactly quickening the pulse of a lot of these voters. It's unclear to me how many will vote.

Speaker 20 I mean, their turnout, as I point out in the story today, their turnout is much lower than any other group.

Speaker 20 If you think of my four quadrants, the other three quadrants of non-white voters turn out at much higher levels. And then the white quadrants turn out at higher levels.
So I'm not sure.

Speaker 20 And, you know, if they're not usually enthusiastic about Trump and they dislike Biden, some of them won't turn out. and some of them will vote for RFK Jr.

Speaker 20 I think it is a problem for Biden where he gets on the ballot. Like I think Nevada is a state where he's on the ballot.

Speaker 20 And given what we are seeing with Hispanic voters, you know, that could be a, that could be a challenge for Biden. Now, you know, in a place like Nevada, you have a structure.

Speaker 20 You have the culinary workers' union. You have the remnants of the Reed machine that can kind of educate people.
But yeah, I agree with you. I think, I think it is a risk for Biden.

Speaker 18 Do you share just looking at the demos? I'm sure you've looked at this more closely than me.

Speaker 18 Of the six main swing states, Nevada and Georgia, do you think are the ones that are the most worrisome for Biden based on demos?

Speaker 20 I will give you a preview of what I'm writing for Monday. I mean, you know, the paradox here is that Biden is doing better in the states that are less diverse.

Speaker 20 You know, essentially, if you look at the swing states, you've got Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which were famously part of what I called in 2009 the Blue Wall, right?

Speaker 20 So the Blue Wall, go back to the January 2009 National Journal, which is where the concept was introduced. It was 18 states.
It wasn't just the Midwest.

Speaker 20 It was 18 states that had voted Democratic in every election since 1992.

Speaker 20 And ultimately, all 18 of them voted Democratic in six straight elections, which is 92 to 2012, which is the most states Democrats had ever won in that many consecutive elections.

Speaker 20 But in 2016, famously, Trump dislodged Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from the Blue Wall. And that was why he won.

Speaker 20 And then in 2020, Biden won them all back, as well as breaking through in arizona and georgia and winning nevada for the fourth consecutive time i think since 2008 well if you look at the polling now as i said before biden in a way that we have not focused on is essentially holding his white vote from 2020.

Speaker 20 he's doing slightly better in many polls among college whites not that much better but like slightly better and he's surprisingly sort of where he was among non-college whites from 2020.

Speaker 20 You would think, you know, given the inroads Trump is making among non-college non-whites, that Biden might be slipping back down to the Hillary Clinton level among the non-college whites.

Speaker 20 It's not happening.

Speaker 20 And as a result, you know, given that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are overwhelmingly white states, where, you know, minorities are less than 20% of the vote, I believe, in all three of them, he's kind of, you know, standing his ground there, with the exception of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, definitely.

Speaker 20 But if you look at Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, those are places where the decline among minority voters really bites him.

Speaker 20 And if it lasts all the way to the finish line, these are states where he's polling in the mid-40s among Hispanics in Arizona and Nevada, and he's only getting 70, 75

Speaker 20 percent, maybe on a good day, 78, 79 among the black voters in Georgia and North Carolina. And he can't survive that in those those places.

Speaker 20 The Rust Belt Path, you know, somewhat surprisingly, actually looks better right now for Biden than the Sun Belt Path.

Speaker 20 The problem is he's got kind of unique problems in Michigan, and he's got to figure out a way around them because replacing Michigan is not easy for a Democrat.

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Speaker 18 I want to get to the unique problems in Michigan, but I want to go back to Arizona first because a group that is kind of implicit in what you're talking about, something that I obsess over because it's just, it's not really in vogue to be like, you know, know, who we really should care about?

Speaker 18 College-educated white men, right? Forgotten group, college-educated white men. But as you said, that Biden still has room to gain.
This does seem to be the spot, right?

Speaker 18 In Phoenix suburbs, and maybe it is also relevant in Michigan, frankly, and certainly it is in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 20 Yes, everywhere. It's relevant everywhere.

Speaker 18 Yeah, but especially if you look at Arizona, it's like, okay, well, how is he going to do it?

Speaker 18 Well, he's going to do it winning over, they are already made some progress, but there is more meat on the bone, I think, of the Flake McCain, Doocy, college-educated men.

Speaker 18 A lot of their wives are already voting Democrat, but these college educated men, some of them moved to Biden in 2020. I think he can gain even more in that group.

Speaker 18 And that is where he offsets some of these losses.

Speaker 20 Right. So, well, first of all, I think, you know, we forget that Dobbs and January 6th both happened.
It's easy to forget. They both happened after the 2020 election.

Speaker 20 Like, Dobbs had not happened at that point. And if you look at 2022, I point this out in the story today.

Speaker 20 If you look at the governor's races in the key swing states of 2022, the first election that was held after Dobbs, the Democrat did even better among college white women than Biden did in 2020.

Speaker 20 And that suggests there is, in fact, room to grow. I mean, there is room for him to grow.

Speaker 20 And the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 22 did better than Biden did in 20, also among college white men. Like, you know, Whitmer ran six points better than he did among college white men.

Speaker 20 Josh Shapiro, seven points better. Evers, four points better.
Even Katie Hobbs, three points better, to your point.

Speaker 18 I was going to ask you about Hobbes. I was like, those other ones are good candidates.
But even Katie Hobbs is running better than you. That is a good sign.
That's a reserve to grow.

Speaker 20 So I think the likelihood is that he will run better among college white women. The men are a little harder to parse because they are pretty down on Biden's performance, particularly about inflation.

Speaker 20 But, you know, college white men are not exactly, you know, they are essentially the most privileged group in the economy, right? And, you know, they are the most likely to have a 401k.

Speaker 20 I mean, you know, so there is good stuff that is happening in the economy. They don't like Trump.
They don't like the idea of a national abortion ban.

Speaker 20 I think, Tim, Democrats would be happy to hold their serve with, not decline with college white men and try to gain a few more points out of the college white women.

Speaker 20 Improving among would be interesting. Kelly did.
Kelly also in Arizona ran better among them than Biden did.

Speaker 20 So there is an opportunity there, but I do think they are pretty down on Biden's performance. So that might limit the upside, even though they don't like Trump.

Speaker 18 I think there's room to grow because I think about the cafeteria room of politics.

Speaker 18 And it's like, yeah, they might be texting with their other dad buddies about how they're annoyed about the economy, but they don't want to have to listen to their spouses and their other friends and the other people in their lives talk about Donald Trump anymore.

Speaker 18 They're done.

Speaker 18 They don't want the pressure. They don't want to be called racist.

Speaker 18 They don't want, they're just, some of them are like, okay, I'll vote for the Republicans down ballot, but I'm not going to vote for this guy.

Speaker 18 And I think that there's some room to grow with that type of Wall Street Journal man.

Speaker 20 The barometer of that question is the increase, the improvement in Trump's retrospective job approval.

Speaker 20 And a variety of calls, like the Wall Street Journal thing that came out last week, where they did all these swing states. Was that this week? I mean, the weeks are blurring.

Speaker 20 You know, Trump's retrospective job approval was at like 50%.

Speaker 20 He never got to 50% as president.

Speaker 20 And it really is going to be, in these white-collar communities, I think above all, it is going to be critical to remind the men what they didn't like about Trump the first time.

Speaker 20 Because right now, what's improving Trump's retrospective job approval is the comparison with Biden on the economy and the border.

Speaker 20 And so they're thinking, like, you know, stopping in January of 2020 in terms of their assessment of his presidency. But like, basically, I had more money in my pocket.

Speaker 20 You know, things didn't cost as much. The border wasn't out of control.
Trump did a better job.

Speaker 20 I think what you are describing is very possible that it can again be culturally unacceptable to vote for Trump, especially given the things he's saying and doing in this campaign, which are pretty consistently radical and extreme.

Speaker 20 But those elements of the package that you get with Trump have to become more central to the discussion than they are right now.

Speaker 18 We're running out of time. So rapid fire through a couple of these.

Speaker 18 Michigan, I'm noticing you've you've been, whatever we're calling it, tweeting concerns about Biden's, about the Israel issue and how it's hurting him among core demographic groups.

Speaker 18 Obviously, Michigan is where this most acute. What's your sense for the impact potentially of Gaza on Biden's coalition?

Speaker 20 Yeah,

Speaker 20 it's like a convergence of a lot of bad things. First of all, the important point, Wisconsin was literally the tipping point state in both 2016 and 2020.

Speaker 20 If you rank the states from most Democratic to most Republican, it was the 270th Electoral College vote for Trump in 16, and then the 270th for Biden in 20.

Speaker 20 And I, at least, I don't know about you, but I think a lot of people began this year thinking Wisconsin is, again, the tipping point state, but it doesn't seem to be.

Speaker 20 Like, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have moved slightly on the blue side of the line, I think, largely because of the suburban realignment that we're talking about and the unbelievable vote margins that Democrats are getting out of Dane County, which is Madison.

Speaker 20 And Michigan now looks like the tipping point state to me, where Biden has a better chance than he does in Arizona or Georgia, but not as good a chance as he has in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.

Speaker 20 And in Michigan, you've got multiple vectors kind of squeezing him, the potential for less enthusiasm, less turnout, lower margins in Detroit.

Speaker 20 The problem, which is real among Arab American voters outside of Detroit. And because of all the activism there, Tim, around the issue, it's more in the news.

Speaker 20 It's more in people's face than it is in most places.

Speaker 18 Which could impact Ann Arbor and younger voters.

Speaker 20 You took the words right out of my mouth. That's what I was going to say next.
It could impact Ann Arbor and younger voters.

Speaker 20 And then finally, Trump's campaign that EVs are going to destroy the auto industry, right?

Speaker 20 Which has a threat to blue-collar white workers. Now, Biden didn't win that many of them to begin with last time.

Speaker 20 It's not like he won half of non-college whites in Michigan. But you add all of this up and Michigan looks really tough.
It looks like Heartbreak Hill if he loses.

Speaker 20 If he loses Michigan, by the way, what replaces it? Georgia would replace it? That's tough. North Carolina would replace it.

Speaker 20 That's tough, but intriguing for Democrats, given the very extreme gubernatorial candidates, or he would have to win both Arizona and Nevada.

Speaker 20 Your neighbor, James Carville, said to me for a story, this story that's coming out in a couple of days: you know, if you win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, it's pretty safe.

Speaker 20 You're going to win. If you don't win any of them, especially Michigan, you're kind of looking at an inside straight at that point.
I mean, that's how important these states are for Democrats.

Speaker 18 Yeah, the Arizona thing, I just spent so much time there during the midterms, and I know that the border has gotten worse since then, but man, Katie Hobbes, God love her.

Speaker 18 She seems like a fine person, but she ran a disastrous campaign. And for her to win and the way that Kelly won, I don't know.
I feel a little better about Arizona.

Speaker 20 The challenge is, though, if he loses Michigan, he has to win both Arizona and Nevada to make up for it.

Speaker 20 Arizona alone doesn't that's that's where it gets a little daunting for him indeed and Nevada worries me um okay the no labels thing though just really quick is objectively good news a little dance on that grave i mean that was all all the people that are interested in no labels are part of this realignment conversation right that there were people that were going to be moving to biden anyway yeah i mean right i i think no labels clearly would have hurt biden and the whole thing was kind of ridiculous i mean their their means you know were not only uh not productive for what they said they were trying to do it was counterproductive the whole thing was really absurd at some level, but dangerous in the sense of for Democrats.

Speaker 20 You know, I agree with you.

Speaker 20 I think unlike some of these other, like Cornell West or especially RFK Jr., no labels, I think, would have been some of these traditionally Republican paley voters, basically, you know, who can't abide Trump.

Speaker 18 All right. So finally, circling back to the first question, because this is our shared obsession.
So let's just say we get the hamburger from heaven, okay, and Donald Trump disappears from our lives.

Speaker 18 Hypothetically speaking, this realignment, in my view, is done. It has already continued.
And that what happens after that will be some form of MAGA.

Speaker 18 Maybe we won't have all of Trump's crazy personal issues, but like the directionally, the way that he's moved the party, that is something that's not reverting.

Speaker 18 To what extent do you agree with that, Thesis? Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 20 I agree. I think, at least for any foreseeable future, Trumpism is self-reinforcing.
As you see in their coalition, the voters who are most uneasy with it are leaving the party

Speaker 20 and are less likely to participate in primaries. And if you look at the behavior of younger Republican politicians, they are mostly, almost entirely, recasting themselves in this mold.

Speaker 20 And I do think it becomes a critical issue for 24 and beyond, because if you are a Republican-leaning voter, a white-collar voter who prefers Republican policies on the economy, probably prefers Republican policies on the border and crime, and think Democrats are a little too liberal, You also tend to support a robust role for America in international affairs.

Speaker 20 You're not as wild about mass deportation as about stiffening the border. You don't like the open racism and appeals to racial resentments that Trump puts out.

Speaker 20 And what you are being shown very, very unequivocally this year is that you are the subordinate minority in this party. You do not have control about where it's going.

Speaker 20 You know, a majority of House Republicans and a majority of Senate Republicans have now voted against AT Ukraine. You know, they are almost universally forgiving January 6th and so on.

Speaker 20 And so those voters, they face a critical choice.

Speaker 20 I mean, do they give their votes out of kind of a either ancestral loyalty or a belief that Democrats are, in fact, you know, these crazy loons are going to destroy the country to a party that is unequivocally moving in a direction that sublimates everything they prioritize, except for maybe tax cuts.

Speaker 20 You know, they might come together on tax cuts. So, yeah, do they stay part of that party? Do the Haley voters vote for Trump after

Speaker 20 the case that she made against him? And she didn't even go to some of the things that, you know, some of those voters believe about his behavior.

Speaker 20 There are about a quarter of Republicans who think that he tried to subvert democracy, that what he did on January 6th was wrong.

Speaker 20 And these may be Republican-leaning independents, but they have a choice. I mean, they have a real choice.

Speaker 20 You know, they are Biden's best hope, I think, of offsetting what is likely to be some of these blue-collar non-white erosion.

Speaker 18 That is a key question. That's a great tease because that's what we're going to be talking about on the Bulwark podcast all year.

Speaker 18 So, thank you so much, Ron Brownstein, for pulling it together after Bruce Springsteen last night. Yeah, thanks for being on the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 18 And we will be having you back, I hope, later this summer. We'll be back on the other side with your mailbag questions.

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Speaker 18 All right, we are back. Friday mailbag.
We've got some fun ones. I'll start with Mike.

Speaker 18 Why do third-party efforts always seem to focus on the presidency where they have no realistic electoral prospects except spoiler, wouldn't a Congress-focused effort make more sense?

Speaker 18 Thought with the No Labels news this week, this would be a good place to start. And yeah, Mike, you were singing from my hymn book.

Speaker 18 I've been telling rich people and moderates that call me and ask me for advice about this stuff a similar thing for years now.

Speaker 18 I think that the third-party effort at the presidential level is mostly about narcissism and attention. It is a hopeless effort.

Speaker 18 And I think that there is actually a lot of room in the country to do two things. One is to look at particularly deep red and deep blue states and figure out how to work as a third party,

Speaker 18 maybe with kind of an allied party in order to try to create a coalition that could stop the dominant party in the state. So for example, we saw this with Evan McMullen in Utah.

Speaker 18 He's a former Republican, never Trumper, ran as an independent. The Democrats, you know, sort of blessed that and did not put up a challenge of their own.
Evan ran against Mike Lee.

Speaker 18 Obviously, that wasn't successful, but I think that had some hope of success.

Speaker 18 I think a big part of the reason why that didn't work was less that the idea was bad, but that Evan, you know, had gone pretty resistancy during the Trump years. Hey, welcome to the club, me too.

Speaker 18 But I think that kind of put a cap on his appeal to some Republicans in the state.

Speaker 18 And Mike Lee, as much as I find Mike Lee totally insane, he didn't seem unacceptable enough for Republicans to peel off of him for Evan McMullen.

Speaker 18 But I think that that concept could really work in other states. I think it could have worked here in Louisiana.
I said this when I moved here to Democrats.

Speaker 18 I didn't understand why they weren't looking to a more moderate Republican or a more conservative Democrat to run in the jungle primary here rather than they ran a guy, Sean Wilson, good guy, but just a mainstream Democrat, didn't have much hope against Jeff Landry, who I wrote about in yesterday's triad.

Speaker 18 You should go check out my Jeff Landry dunking in yesterday's triad if you haven't at thebulwark.com. But that, I think, is the right path forward.

Speaker 18 I think that that is also potentially workable at even lower levels. And I think that then you can build a group that goes from there.

Speaker 18 I'd love to see a coalition of kind of like a party that runs in red states, conservative Democrats and blue states runs kind of more moderate Republicans and tries to figure out how they can put together a coalition that breaks up the polarization.

Speaker 18 I think that's a long-run deal, but at least there's there's a hope of success. That might not succeed, by the way.

Speaker 18 We might just be so polarized that there's no hope for an alternative at this point because of the nature of our system.

Speaker 18 But I think that proposal at least has potential for success, whereas these quixotic presidential campaigns that are all about ego and

Speaker 18 getting to go to fancy parties with Nancy Jacobson and her friends in New York City that have no chance of succeeding. At least you're trying.
Try to try is something that I've always believed.

Speaker 18 Okay, Christina, she asks, what was the context of you saying blowjob on MSNBC? I watched it live, but I can't find it anywhere online. This is a serious question.
I know it's serious.

Speaker 18 That's why I'm answering. I couldn't remember myself, actually.
So I went and searched for it. I can't find the video either.

Speaker 18 Maybe somebody else can find it and put it in the comment section on Substack and I can re-up it on social media. But I found the day that it happened, people tweeting, laughing at me.

Speaker 18 So I was able to figure out what day it was. It was January 8th, 2021.
So needless to say, I was running hot two days after the insurrection. And I said it in the context of our friend Lindsey Graham.

Speaker 18 Lindsey Graham had said that day after saying he was done with Trump on January 6th, he had said two days later that he was not going to go along with an impeachment of him or a conviction.

Speaker 18 And I went off on him on, I believe, Nicole Wallace's show and started talking about how for Lindsey Graham, it was okay to impeach Bill Clinton over a below job, but it was not okay to impeach and convict Donald Trump over a coup.

Speaker 18 Obviously, that is preposterous on its face.

Speaker 18 And Lindsey Graham is a shameless partisan, and he, you know, should have trouble sleeping at night, given such a grotesque contrast between having voted to impeach. It's okay, whatever.

Speaker 18 If you wanted to vote Bill Clinton because he lied about the blowjob, okay. But then it seems incumbent upon me to then impeach also the president that attempted the coup.
So Lindsey Graham, stick it.

Speaker 18 The MSNBC producers weren't really thrilled with me saying blowjob, but I didn't, you know, they also kind of let it go. You know, tempers were flaring.
All right.

Speaker 18 Two days after the Capitol storms, tempers were flaring. People could have one blowjob reference on TV.
Okay, last question comes from Anthony in Tennessee.

Speaker 18 Anthony says, my husband and I are expecting a baby this year. Congrats, brother.
We live in Nashville and we're both from Alabama.

Speaker 18 Do you have any advice for soon-to-be-gay parents living in the deep south? Our families are very supportive of us, but we worry about the broader community as our child grows up.

Speaker 18 I'm sure this is a near universal anxiety, but I'd imagine even more so in the area we live. I do have thoughts for you.
And A, I think it's awesome. I'm so happy for you.

Speaker 18 It's been the best thing in my life having a kid. And I think you guys are going to just be overjoyed, maybe a little tired, but overjoyed.
It's great.

Speaker 18 Don't let any of the negative Nellies get you down. People that are like, oh, it's so, it can be hard.
Yeah, sure. But all of the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff by miles.

Speaker 18 So congrats to you and your husband. I'll tell you this.
I think in some ways I've found this.

Speaker 18 I don't know if this experience is universal, but I found in New Orleans we have actually more support than we did living in the bay.

Speaker 18 In some ways, being a gay parent in the bay was like, okay, whatever, you know, sunrises in the east. Okay, dog bites man, not really not news.

Speaker 18 You know, it was only going to be news where it's like a modern family bit where, you know, the gay, the gay couple thought they were going to get into this fancy school in California and then come behind there as like a disabled lesbian coupled, mixed race Native American.

Speaker 18 And it's like, all right, now you're talking. And it was great.
Being in the bay was fine.

Speaker 18 It was great, but there wasn't really like a community of people that were in our boat that were finding each other and looking to each other for support just because it was so common, frankly.

Speaker 18 And in New Orleans, that is not.

Speaker 18 really that's not been the case for us you know there are only so many gay parents in new orleans right and so in that sense, you know, we have developed some relationships, made some new friends.

Speaker 18 We had some old friends that were parents here, also, so that has helped. And, you know, people, particularly in these blue bubbles in the red states, it's not every day, right? It's exciting, right?

Speaker 18 Like, they're excited.

Speaker 18 They, you know, so straight couples, straight singles, everybody, really, frankly, in the community is like excited that we're here and wants to be supportive and wants to be helpful.

Speaker 18 And so, you know, really, we're just kind of drowning in love here. And I expect that would be pretty similar in Nashville.
I think it'd be probably pretty similar in Birmingham, Alabama.

Speaker 18 I don't know. If you're saying to me, you're going to move to Shreveport, maybe I'd say, look, let's think about that.
I don't know kind of

Speaker 18 how far down on the city size that this concept that I'm putting forth would hold.

Speaker 18 But I think in big cities or relatively big cities in the South, particularly, you know, tying to the Brownstein conversation where you got a lot of college educated folks that are more liberally inclined.

Speaker 18 It's really been kind of positive and special and awesome to be here and to have people see us and want to support us and want to kind of be in community with us. So to me, it's been great.

Speaker 18 You should let your concerns go. Maybe don't move to rural Alabama or I don't know.
Maybe somebody in rural Alabama could tell me I'm wrong about that. But

Speaker 18 I think that in Nashville or here in NOLA, we'd love to have you anywhere else. I think that you guys will be good.
Big congrats. Keep me posted on the progress.

Speaker 18 Everybody else, I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Go check out the secret podcast with me and Sarah.
We'd really appreciate you to be members of Bulwark Plus.

Speaker 18 We've got a great lineup of guests coming next week. Enjoy the women's and men's college basketball final four this weekend.
Should be some good stuff.

Speaker 18 And we will see you on Monday and do this all over again. Peace.

Speaker 18 You're dancing on my grave.

Speaker 18 You

Speaker 18 are

Speaker 18 all over mind,

Speaker 18 all of my flame,

Speaker 18 all over.

Speaker 18 You'll always get your way.

Speaker 18 And you just keep on dancing.

Speaker 18 You're dancing on the grave.

Speaker 18 You

Speaker 18 and I are

Speaker 18 signed,

Speaker 18 all of our slave,

Speaker 18 all of our line.

Speaker 18 You'll always get your way.

Speaker 18 And you just keep on dancing.

Speaker 18 You're dancing on the grave.

Speaker 18 The Bullworth Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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