Hurdles Republicans Need to Jump to Win Races

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host, Victor Davis-Hanson.

The star and namesake of this show is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busky, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We've got a lot of politics to talk about today. I know Victor talked

some post-election analysis with Sammy Wink on a previous podcast. It was must-listen.
But there's still much more to discuss about the fallout from the elections and what's ahead politically.

And maybe we should start off by talking about the kind of grim news that came out that it looks like the

Democrats have won the Senate, but the Laxalt,

Adam Laxalt, has not pulled it off in Nevada. So let's get to that right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor, before we get into the talking about the Democrats and the Senate, I do want to say I got a couple emails from some folks who heard

the podcast you and I did, which we recorded before the election. And like most other people,

given the plethora of polling we had seen on various aspects, not only

this race and how much so-and-so is ahead, but by

news about how the Hispanic vote was breaking for Republicans, suburban women were overwhelmingly breaking for Republicans, and none of that seems to have have materialized on election day.

Not even seems to, it didn't materialize.

So we, but we discussed the

elections before the elections, and the podcast was aired after the election. So

that's the risk

we took.

Nevertheless, Victor, things are still happening. The House is yet undecided.

People keep saying, you know, the Democrats have to pull an inside straight here to take it over. But I don't know, my heart is sinking every day.
They never seem our guys, our side.

I mean, Republicans, if I can be an R in that, or conservatives seem to be like Lucy and Charlie Brown of the football when

it comes to these close races that are recounted.

Anyway, Victor. Democrats will have control of the Senate, it looks like, even

regardless of what happens in Georgia with a runoff Herschel Walker.

Any thoughts on that before we take on some of the other issues?

Yeah, I mean, I know that I, like a lot of people, thought that they would take the Senate and they would get 20 or more seats. And the reason I did, I didn't just say that.

I tried to look at four or five criteria. And this is what's disturbing because there's no reference anymore.

And by that, I mean I looked at two polls that I think were ranked third and fifth in accuracy of 25, the Trofalgo poll, Insider Advantage.

And on 13 states, they had a seven point, we know that post facto, seven points in favor of the Republican candidate. So that looked like it was pretty good.

And then I went to this new feature on Real Clear Politics. Remember, Jack, they readjusted the polls based on their prior record.

So if the aggregate was one or the other direction and those aggregate polls had been wrong, they had readjusted them. And you look at all of the Trafalgar, the inside

advantage, insider advantage, and then you looked at those aggregated real clear politics. And you had Blake Masters in a dead even heat, but more importantly,

gaining every week if you looked at the prior month charts. Same thing with Kerry Lake, same thing with Laxall.
They They were all moving. And then I didn't quite believe that Bulldock, but

he was in within three points. He was actually in one poll.
He was up by a point. Yeah.

And then I called, I'm not going to mention their names, but a couple of seasoned Republican politicians and said, you know, is this accurate?

And they said, yes, that the biggest problem they were having is who was going to be the speaker and whether there was going to be an insurrection against McCarthy or McConnell.

So I thought, wow, that's something. And then I watched Fox and I listened to what other pundits say.

And that was the least persuasive of all of these criteria. And they all were talking 50 seats.
And so something was completely off. And finally, I looked at the

polls where people were asked what are the most important issues. And it was always, it was the economy, fuel, crime, border.
And sometimes abortion was in there three or four. So I thought, okay,

but

all of that is irrelevant now. You can see this because what is relevant is not what people say or what they don't say to a pollster or what they say to one another.

What is relevant is to what degree their ballots are harvested and to what degree is Election Day completely relevant there is no such thing as election night and to what degree do republicans and democrats realize that fact

so what what were these pollsters doing they were trying to poll people

who had already voted and i think they thought well republicans are not answering our polls and uh so

Maybe we'll give them a few points because they're an underrepresented. And I don't think they realized that there were hundreds, millions of people

who had cast absentee votes that are not reachable. In other words, you know what I mean? They're just

they're much, I don't know, I'm not saying it's cheating, but I'm just saying there's a whole population out there that the Democrats mailed, that they harvested with third-party votes in some state that's legal.

So

unless the Republicans get their hands around it, I don't think they're ever going to win because every single major, maybe not the governorship in Nevada, but almost every single one where it's close and that voting goes beyond Election Day, it's a given that these voter dumps are going to go against the Republican candidate.

And when Carrie Lake says, I'm going to win, I hope she does, and when people in Blake Masters say, this is the percentage we need of this number of ballots,

when laxal people say that. That is a rational and accurate assessment if you know what's in the ballot and you don't.
You have no idea because it's not going to conform to prior standards.

It's a fluid evolutionary act and they're getting masters on. Molly Ball, I keep mentioning her.
She mentioned it and outlined it what happened in 2020. But we're going to learn.

I predict that within a year, some left-wing person is going to open his mouth and we're going to get another Molly Ball type essay, How We Fool These Neanderthals.

And

it's very ironic because we are told that we are the election denialist and the election suppressionist and the election racist and the insurrectionists.

Meanwhile, in the shadows, quietly, systematically,

unobserved, the left has taken the entire election apparatus of the country in the greatest revolution of our lifetime and simply eliminated Election Day and Election Night as traditional American events.

They don't exist anymore. It's just Election Day is just the last day you can vote in person

and the beginning of a whole new process of dumping mail-in ballots, absentee ballots. You throw in the mix ranked voting in Alaska or 51% in Georgia.

You have all of these variables and they're all coalescing. And part of it is tech-driven.
They understand and master tech so much better than the right does.

But the point is that I don't think you can trust anything. And then you look at the traditional,

this is something we don't appreciate. The traditional

what has been the last 10 years, the traditional go-to reassurance to get people interested or to know what the left's doing or to galvanize topics for the Fox News shows at night or what news map, whatever it is, they're gone.

The Drudge Report has gone completely left-wing. Rush Limbaugh, I admire Buck Sexton and they're his successors, but that voice has been silenced.
It's not there.

And then when you look at our former National Review or the defunct Weekly Standard, they're not connected into the Republican majority as they were. And

then you add into that matrix all of these never-Trumpers.

So there's not a, I mean, there's vlogs, there's this, there's that, but there's not these megaphones anymore that balance the New York Times or NPR.

And so, boy, all of these institutions can really, they can take an issue like abortion that people are not, that the right

is convinced is not the issue.

And they they can amplify that in a way that's amazing to galvanize single, 70% of women that voted who were unmarried without children voted on the basis of abortion for Democrats. 70%.

And almost that number of underage single males and women 30 in aggregate under 30.

And so.

But Victor,

if we look at

the issue of galvanizing, galvanizing, and I agree with you totally, you know, the process is now, how do you reach the most people?

It's by torturing the process and it's by sending ballots to everyone in August and September, et cetera. It's flooding the zone there.
But

there was some galvanizing done by

Biden and company with the whole democracy issue.

It worked. They had a brilliant strategy.
What they did was they sent those ballots and everybody got

when the Roe versus Wade crested,

and that's when a lot of people sent in in late September and October, in some states even, they sent in those ballots mid-October.

And then that issue sort of died down, and the conservatives said, well, you know,

they're not talking about it. Look at these polls.
It's only third or fourth issue. But not when people voted, that's what I'm trying to say.
And then they had it all prepped for

a new round of talking points in the latter part of October. And it was never, never.

This is our record.

This is why it worked.

This is why you should vote for it. This is what we're going to do.
In other words, translated, the border is wonderful. We don't need to

change a thing and we're going to keep doing it. Or

gas prices are where we wanted them. It's what Stephen Chu wanted.
Obama wanted them that way. It's going to discourage fossil fuels.
We're going to do more of it. Or we're letting people out of jail.

We're having a critical legal theory jurisprudence. It's a lot fair.
We have equity in the criminal justice system. We're going to do more.
Or

inflation kind of spreads their wealth. It's not that bad.
It's transitory. And we're going to do more.
As Biden said after the election, we're not going to change a thing. They never did that.

Instead,

with all that unpopularity, you think they would have tried to either change their their issues or their positions or defend them but they just went after the opposition so all they did was they ran on we're not going to talk about us these guys are worse because they're a insurrectionist and denialist

and two

They want to take every woman in the United States who wants an abortion and deny her that abortion as she dies in a back alley. They're murderers.
That's basically what they said.

And that's that's what they ran on. And everybody thought, well, they can't defend this record.
No, they can't defend the record. So they didn't.
They attacked your record or they made it up.

And so it was very strange how the out-party was suddenly, the in-party, having to defend abortion and election denialism.

And even the further irony was when you look at election denialism, that is kind of tampering with the election process or not considering it legitimate, they have revolutionized balloting in a way that we've never seen before.

Right. But there's your whole projection.

Yeah, it was projection and it worked. And I have to plead guilty to our listeners because

when Biden gave that those series of three talks,

the first was the semi-fascist.

I think that was it. Was that the union speech? Philadelphia.

Philadelphia. Yeah.
And then there was the Phantom of the Opera speech where he called everybody on American. And then there was a third one where he attacked people's patriotism.

And I thought, wow, he got, John Meacham was the writer and won supposedly or purportedly,

or reportedly. And I thought, you know what? This is so McCarthy-esque.
And then you looked at polls, polls, and they said people didn't like that.

And you know what? And then I thought he capped it off with the most insane thing in the world. He was saying

that the Pelosi, Paul Pelosi incident was influenced by MAGA extremists and this hippie, communitarian, nudist,

BLM, pride flag-wearing person

all of a sudden

imbibed MAGA rhetoric and got so angry that he went over to Paul Pelosi's house and he, you know, he hit him. He hit him with a hammer, a MAGA hammer, hammer, essentially.

That's what they were saying. I thought, nobody in their right mind is going to believe that.
They did. It worked.

And so a lot of these people, especially the younger people and young unattached women, said, you know what? These right-wing people are,

they're going to destroy the country. They're denialist and they're crazy evangelical people who want to kill women.
And then when you add into

the Matrix, the Republicans, I don't know. I mean, we'll talk about this in a second with their leadership, but

they didn't reply to that. So they said, inflation is really high, and therefore

we're going to introduce balanced budget legislation or something, or gas prices are too high. Therefore, one, Anwar, two, Keystone, three, federal leasing,

or border,

first year,

I don't know, 50 miles of wall, bang, bro, catch and release. We're going to introduce

legislation, make him veto it, make him veto it. They didn't do any of that.
There wasn't a, I mean, there was a kind of an anemic week-long contract with America.

But in other words, they didn't, they just yelled and screamed how awful Biden was. But then people kept saying, okay,

tell us exactly how we're going to get out of this mess. And they didn't.
Then when you add Trump's editorialization, I don't think that was groundbreaking.

But before the election, he said two things.

Why in the world would you say ronda sanctimonious and attack a successful conservative MAGA governor whose state is the only sane place apparently in the country as far as balloting goes?

And then the second thing, you would say, wink nod. I hope I don't distract you, but there's going to be a big election.
And then...

you know, little Silicon Valley techie who's depressed about the red wave says, uh-oh, that guy's going to run for president. I'm going to go out and vote.

In other words, they gave little signals that were not necessary. Trump did.
He didn't have to do that.

Not that it's his fault, but every little matte thing in the world where we're losing congressional seats by a thousand votes that can matter.

The way he injects himself,

I'm pretty sure you may have, in some way, had communicated this to Trump a few years ago. I think you've talked about it on this podcast, actually.

Pre, post-election, pre-Georgia special election about,

you know,

stop talking about the one issue that you always talk about and focus on these candidates and don't focus on yourself. And I just,

it was impossible two years ago, and I think it proved impossible,

you know, two weeks ago.

We're in a very strange thing because there's two sides blaming each other,

the Trump side and the McConnell-McCarthy side, and they're both culpable. So the Trump people say,

okay,

let's look at the candidates you back, Fung or Myra Flores, all the ideal people of color candidates that were dynamic and young, and they were just saturated the Fox airwaves.

They were going to, they lost. And then let's look at how you used your money.
So you're Mitch McConnell, and you send millions to Lisa Murkowski to do what?

To defeat a really much more conservative candidate, Kelly Shabaka.

And so you don't take that money, and right under your nose, in Arizona, there's Blake Masters, and you tell us, well, how can I support him when he might vote against him?

Well, that's not the problem. He's in your party.

You support him.

But Trump didn't give money either. That's my point.
So I'm getting to it. I'm getting to it.

So then the other side says, yeah, but Trump's sitting on $100 million.

And we know what he does with it. He's stingy.

He didn't use it in May, February, May of 2020 when he could have hired a team of lawyers to go to these states and stop this radical revolution and the way they changed the voting laws that destroyed him.

He didn't want to pay lawyers. And now,

what did he do? He could have put millions of dollars in four races. He could have, he's got over $100 million.
Why didn't he just say this? Here's $25 million. Here's $5 million for Blake Masters.

Here's $5 million

for Herschel Walker. Here's $5 million for Laxall.

And we'll take another.

I don't think Baldick would have won, but

he's the one.

What did he do instead?

And then he said he was going to support Baldick, and and he did. And he urged him to run.
And then Baldeck said, I have Trump concerns about the 2020.

And then when he sort of backed off that, Trump abandoned him. And so he was an orphaned candidate.
And so,

you know, and then if you, then after the election, what did Trump do? He started attacking O'Day because

he didn't support. Trump.
And he lost anyway.

And that's a good race because it shows you the poverty of both sides, the poverty in the sense that they said the McConnell wing said if you can get good candidates that are moderate in swing states, i.e.

like Colorado, and they distance themselves from Trump, then they're going to win. And here's this O'Day, the model candidate, and he's gaining, he's gaining, no, he lost even bad to Bennett.

And then if you can tell, if you're Trump, you can say, well, you know what? You have to be ecumenical. Just because they didn't like you doesn't mean you turn on them.
And what does Trump do?

He attacks him during the race, and then he gloats and he cheers the fact that a Democratic candidate beat a member of his own party in Colorado.

What do you do? So you've got on the one side the McCarthy

McConnell establishment hierarchy and then you've got Donald Trump. And it seems to me that the people that are sort of

have proven records of being sensible and winning and are really conservative, or people that have won tough races

are people like Ron Johnson. I don't know how a guy won, but he did.
He was outspent. He had an African-American charismatic guy, and he was in a swing state, and he won.

Which

same thing

six years ago,

he wins. And the same thing, you know, Ted Cruz is all pooting, but they swarmed that guy.
And

there were people in the Independence and Republican Party in Texas that didn't like him, and he won.

And so

those people,

there are conservative, Mike Lee won, and he was swarmed. And so what I'm trying to get at is there are people in the party that I think we could look toward for leadership.
Right.

Something's wrong with the fossilized status quo. And, you know, I have a piece coming out.
This is an American Greatness. Yes, on Donald Trump.

And I go through all of his accomplishments, and there are many that he did.

And one of them was he destroyed the entire Clinton hierarchy. There'll never be a serious Clinton again.

He destroyed Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and the Clinton, that doesn't exist. He reformulated, revolutionized the Republican Party into a broad-based nationalist, populist, middle-class party.

He had four years of successful governance, and he absolutely destroyed the media as far as their credibility. CNN is just a shadow of itself.
He exposed that.

And he went through hell doing that, whether it was the Russian collusion hoax or the first impeachment over a phone call or Helener's laptop or getting on his case about when he said it was the Wuhan lab.

He was right all along. But that said,

He does all of the fundamental things right, and all the things that are irrelevant or secondary, or tangential, he gets, he obsesses and does them wrong.

And so, he's, I finish up in this piece, and I've said it before, is that he's a tragic figure because he's done a lot, but the very mechanisms by which he does things make it impossible for the beneficiaries of his decisive action sometimes to have him around.

Right. And that's,

you know, I quoted in that piece as the epigraph of that piece, something I wrote three years ago in the case for Trump,

because I ended that book, and I said, for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, these tragic characters not only should be not altered, but they couldn't be altered, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and absolutist

views

of the human experience.

Here's what I was getting at. In the classical tragic sense, Trump will end in one of two fashions.
Both are not particularly good. Either spectacular but

unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism when he is out of office and no longer useful, or less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries.

as if his utility is no longer worth the wages of his perceived crudity.

And

I think that's what's happening to him, that he did so many good things that people will say now,

well,

at a certain point in time, you had the skill sets that were absolutely necessary after the McCain-Romney period. And we put up with all of this crazy stuff.

And you

provoked the left. They needed to be provoked.
You challenged them. You were on 360-24-7

attack. We needed that.
You did a great thing.

And we got things done. And now

your six-shooter is now

the thought dusters and the cattle barons.

So you've compared him to John Wayne in

the searcher and

then...

Shane.

Yeah, so, but the only thing that I said, and I don't know if that's true, is he John Wayne walking out of the door and the searchers all alone after he's offended everybody but got the job done?

Or is he Shane riding up wounded into the Tetons after he's done everything, but

he's not to be living in civilized society? Is he the Magnificent Seven? It's got a, can't leave it, can't stick around the village. Right.

You know, I don't know because there's, I don't know whether that's the key thing. Did he finish the job? Is he still needed as a person for those skill sets?

Or is there a person who was his tutelage was a model for a guy like DeSantis and I think that's what we've been watching the last year because people said two things Ron DeSantis is the ideal governor in a major state but so was Scott Walker he was

he was in 2016 he was the perfect governor right George Will's uh spouse I think was on his campaign but he was embraced by the establishment because of his record he took on the teachers union he articulated he was fearless And then he got onto the presidential stage and not so much.

And people are saying about DeSantis, they have two worries. One, does he have fire in the belly like Trump? Is he fearless? I think that's been answered, don't you? I think by

taking on Disney, taking on the school boards,

taking on

mandatory transgender, whatever.

Even taking on China.

What governor governor has done that? And taking on illegal immigration, busting people. He's shown that he's capable of fighting fire with fire.
Now, the only other

I think

reservation people have in the base is

there were 8 to 10 million people that ensured that John McCain and Mitt Romney would not. win because they stayed home because they felt they were rhinos.
So

is all of this corporate money,

all of this Wall Street money that has been on the sideline, kind of, with Trump, are they going to go to DeSantis and said, you know what?

He, not that he's a MAGA, they're not going to say what we just said. They're not going to say we really like the MAGA agenda.

And we like the idea that you have fire in the belly.

And we like the idea you don't go down cul-de-sacs like Trump does, or you make fun of the way people dress, or you don't make fun of Mitch McConnell's Chinese wife, or you don't say Glenn Youngkin has a Chinese name.

You just don't do that. So that's what, or

are they thinking,

we're not quite the neighbor Trumpers. We're more the Jeb Bushes.
And we want back, we want in with Paul Ryan. We want to control this Republican Party.
So look, you are palatable to us.

So we're going to pour billions, millions into your campaign for the primary, but on the condition that you steer steer the party back to a Romney Bush McCain.

And that's what, I don't know the answer to that.

Will he be able to say, listen, I'm a Republican. I'm for deregulation.
I'm for low taxes. I'm for constructionist judges, just like you guys are.

But

I don't want abortion on demand to the moment of birth. I don't want an open border, and we're not going to have an open border.
I want fair, not free trade.

I want the federal government to do what it can to restore law and order, even though it's a state issue. I want to do what I can.

I want to immediately start work on Keystone, open and more, more federal leases. And I want to have a Jacksonian

don't tread on me deterrent foreign policy. Is he going to be able to tell them that? That's what I don't know.
If he does, he'll be president.

And if he doesn't, it's going to be messy, messy, messy, messy. But I can tell you, just from the people I talk to and I read, there's a lot of never-Trumpers who are not quite Democrats yet.
Right.

And they're circulating in the landscape and they think, hmm.

I don't like a lot of stuff about DeSantis, but you know, he's Ivy League. He's got a military record.
He's got the perfect resume. His wife is really good.
Family McGuire. He's just perfect.

Great record bites. And I can now use him as a key to unlock that door and get back in to control the Republican Party.
Right.

Well, everybody who plays the game thinks

they have to exploit. Well, Victor,

I think we have one other thing to talk about in this area, and then we'll talk about some Republican potential leadership. And let's do that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This show is housed at, and the platform is justthenews.com that John Solomon

runs.

Great website. Another great website is VictorHanson.com.
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And that's Hansen with an O,

not an EN, Hanson. And it's not Victor Davis Hansen.

It's not. It's Victor Hansen.com.
I know. Yeah, I'm sorry.
It's the Svetish way.

But

you'll find links, galore, to things Victor's written for American Greatness and other places. But there's a lot of exclusive content that you need.

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It's $50 a year discounted. I really encourage you to do that.
Victor's,

the writing he does

for his website is spectacular. There's a piece

that's up now. You just published it the other day, Victor, about after, I guess after we

We

taped these podcasts last weekend. You went out for a ride, drive,

clear your mind. Maybe stop thinking about the idiocy of Fowler's bumbling, rambling.
But you drove past the homes of some former friends and quite a powerful piece, melancholy piece, even I think.

But it's kind of stuff that you can only

read at the website. So that's VictorHanson.com.
As for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter with a dozen plus recommended readings.

And I'm pretty sure you'll like it.

Again, it's free we're not accumulating lists we're not selling names there's no strings attached you can sign up for that at civilthoughts.com and i write that for the center for civil society at american philanthropic and if i could just plug one thing if you go to americanphilanthropic.com and click on the events you'll find an event on december 6th where victor and tony woodleaf who um wrote a book earlier this year and counter published I Citizen, and Victor, of course, with the Dying Citizen.

I'm going to be hosting a webinar with both of them about the fragility of citizenship on December 6th. That will be a free webinar, but you'll find the link there.

And I very much appreciate that Victor and Tony

will be doing that. So,

Victor, I just had one other thing, and maybe it's not a small thing,

but you've talked

much about Trump already and DeSantis. There is a poll out out

from YouGov. Yeah, that's a base poll, so I know it pretty well.
Okay, they have DeSantis Trump and it's DeSantis 42, Trump 35.

I'm not sure, Victor, if that was just Republican voters or likely voters or whomever, but it's a sign out there

of

both the increased interest in DeSantis and the declining interest of

Trump. Now, I have a theory.
I'm going to pose this. I mean, I wrote something.
I'm actually going to read it. And Victor,

you can hit me over the head or not. But

I do believe one thing

we've maybe discovered or you've talked about in part here and part on Sammy is

we just didn't get clarity on what was motivating voters necessarily. And that

maybe

this

January 6th and the focus

still,

still from Donald Trump, persistent focus on the 2020 elections, the stolen elections, is something that may have

played a role. Of course, it had to have played a role, but maybe it

played a consequential role. And

maybe there's an exhausted

electorate.

The Bible talks about to every season, and we're in a new season.

And politicians, I think the great politicians realize when there's a new season, when there's one approaching, and they're not beating a drum about something that people don't care about much longer.

But anyway, let me pose this.

And Victor, you have at it, and then we'll talk about the leadership.

If the GOP must get beyond relitigating 2020, if that issue, stolen elections, which folds itself into the January 6th riot at the Capitol, which maybe indeed was an important issue to voters this last week, that did not show up on the polls like inflation and crime.

If the GOP must get past this, must somehow convey to America the January 6th we care about are the ones in the future, January 6th of 2023, 24, 25, 26, and on, then it is a given.

I'll say it's opposed that it's a given

that it must, the GOP electorate must get past Donald Trump. Is there a flaw in this Fowlerian logic, which I propose for the sake of discussion?

Well, every candidate that obsesses on a

setback self-implosed, look at Hillary Clinton. She still can't get over the fact that she lost the 2016 election, mostly to her own

heirs of trying to get, you know, sweep the board with a mandate and going into red states when when she left the back door open of the blue wall, into the blue wall, and Trump, you know, took Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and beat her.

And she's never been over that.

She turned into an election denial. He's illegitimate.
Joe Biden, if you win the popular vote, don't,

if you lose a popular vote, don't concede. Viva la resistance, I'm a member.
She went crazy, and

she's trapped in a

2016 time war. The same was true of Al Gore.

The 2000 election broke Al Gore.

He acted like he was magnanimous for about two weeks, and then he's got into, Bush was selected, not elected. Then he called,

remember he got into the brown shirts, and then he went off the deep end with his climate thing, and then he got into his cable thing. He was just, he's a joke.

He even got, you know, he was accused of improprieties in a hotel room. Masseuse.
The masseuse. Yeah, absolutely.
So you don't want to allow that to happen when you've had a perceived injustice.

So Trump had a perceived injustice because

basically we went, and the injustice was this, that under the cloak of COVID, in about 15 states, people

under the direction of Mark Elias and the Democrat DNC, teams of lawyers went in and they did one of two things. They either,

if it was a blue or purple state, they got bureaucratic edicts, executive orders to change the voting laws. And if it was a red state, they sued.

And in courts, basically, that it was voter suppression, that it was racist. And the net result was, but the common thread was COVID.
COVID.

COVID means that people can't or will die if they go to the polls. Therefore, you don't have to request an absentee ballot if you're ill or something.

We'll have ballots mailed to everybody because of COVID. And if your hand is shaky because of COVID, you may not be able to have your last name.

And if you've got brain fog, you may not have your right address. And because you've got so many things to worry about COVID, you may need early voting.

You know, just keep any day all the way to the election. And if you know what? If you want to send your ballot on the very day of the election, we can just...

postpone the counting for 10 or 20 days why we if we have to to count them and you know what? We'll have something called curing because it's COVID after all.

And that means if your ballot comes in and we look at it

and we need to cure it, we might call you or we might find you out and make sure we can add your name or get your address right so we don't reject it.

And that was the rejection rate, as I said earlier, went from about a typical 3% to 5% down to 0.2 to 0.6%.

And it did that as the number of non-election ballots tripled. And that is something that Donald Trump can't fight.

And that's what lost him the election. And

as I said, he didn't have a legal team that was prepared for that.

It was very hard to be prepared for that once you read that infamous Molly Ball Time essay that she outlined every avenue in which they engineered this

revolution. And so he's stuck it there.

And he's angry because he feels that the people wanted him and he had a good record and he was done these injustices and he did get a lot of injustices I mentioned them earlier impeachment Mueller Russian collusion hoax laptop big tech working with the FBI on and on but this point

you don't live in the past you use those experiences to what to protect yourself and your party and your interests in the future.

So what he should be doing right now, to the extent he even mentions 2020, he should say to these huge crowds, I'm not going to replay 2020, but all of us learned a great lesson.

If we allow Election Day to be a construct just for 20 or 30 percent of the voting, we're going to lose. So we have to do either one or two things.

We've got to systematically go back and challenge these laws and get it back to pre-COVID because we're not in the same situation. We've learned from COVID.

And we're going to have about a 30% absentee ballot, not 70% or 65. And

if we can't do that, then damn it, we're going to beat them at their own game. We're going to harvest votes like they've never seen before.

He's got to do one or the other. But he can't talk about the past.
And you're right about that.

To the extent. that he does, it looks narcissistic and self-indulgent and self-obsessed at the expense of other people.
Not that just you say, wow, this guy is obsessed. He's narcissistic.

No, you say all the time and attention is devoted to himself, and it's a zero-sum game. And that attention means J.D.

Bands doesn't get it, or Blake Masters doesn't get it, or Boldick doesn't matter, or Kerry Lake doesn't. That's what happens.

And then he used the endorsements. He had

excellent record in the primaries, but he used those endorsements to knock off establishment candidates on the basis of whether they or the opponent agreed with his assessment of 2020.

And so if you said 2020 was rigged, you got his endorsement.

And

you won the primary, basically, because that fired up the base.

And by the way, there were no Democrats in their mastery of vote harvesting and absentee balloting, mail-in balloting to work with or to worry about.

So you give you a false sense of success, Trump did, because, wow,

this guy and this guy and this woman, I got them all nominated. Yes, but that was just a trial because there's no left-wing people in those races.

You were going against fellow Republicans that operated on the same Marcus of Queensbury rules of balloting. And all you did was give a false sense of confidence.

Then you threw him in the general election against people who were much more formidable and

much more ruthless. Except for John Fetterman,

other than that. He had to be pretty ruthless to win the election, or somebody did

around him. But so it was always about him, him, him, him, him.

And that's why

when you saw DeSantis's sort of fiery adaptation of Winston Churchill, who will fight on the beaches,

World War II.

speech, it was we, we, we, we, will, we, we, we. He was using the first person plural, not the first person singular I.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I, Trump,

you know, he's nine lives. So I'm a little amused this week and weekend when you have Peggy Noonan and all these people declaring his epitaph.

And it's much

set out the parameters. Here's the parameters.
This is what he could do. This is what he can't do.
If he does these things, not what you agree on, just disinterested.

If he does these things, play down himself, forget the cul-de-sacs, work for the party, spend his pack money on things other than himself, talk up the party, talk about issues. He will recover.

If he goes down and doubles down, says anybody who is not with me is against me, and I'm going to go after that SOB.

And you have a Chinese name, and Mitch's wife is a funny name, and DeSantis' wife runs his life, and DeSantis, he's going to lose.

Well, I guess the next

test case for that

will be the Georgia runoff. I'm assuming there is going to be a Georgia runoff.
You never know. Has everyone encounters? He's an orphan now, isn't he? He's orphaned.

So maybe, but it's still a good thing.

It's very important because you never know what Joe Manchin's going to do. Right.
So on some key issues on the budget and

reconciliation and whatever.

If it's 50, you can pick off maybe one or two SEMA and Manchin, but if if it's 5149, it makes it almost impossible.

Well, also, Victor,

I think when Bush was president,

W,

gosh, I think Jeffords, who was a Republican from Vermont, switched

and gave the Senate leadership over to the Democrats. So

someone

could die too.

No, it's absolutely important. But what I meant was not that I approve.
I just think it's unfortunate because 24 hours ago, everybody was saying, we're going to pour money.

We're going to go down and work for Herschel. I'm not sure they're going to do it now.
And they should do it. And Trump has a last occasion.
This is a golden moment.

He has to do everything he can for Herschel Walker.

He has to give money, endorsements, rev up his base, but he can't appear on the same stage with Herschel Walker just because that puts Herschel Walker in a terrible position.

And he's got all of these other DeSantis forces that are, and people in that party are angry at Trump.

And he's got to transcend that and say to himself, I know they're angry at him, but I will make them less angry because I'm going to use all the resources I have, not for myself,

but for Herschel Walker and the party. And then if he wins,

he gets credit. And we'll see if he does that.

Well, Victor, we have a little time left, and we should be getting your views on the House Republican leadership. And let's do that.
Let's hear those views right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor, Lord knows what's going to happen.

The House Republican numbers are still not over the magical 218.

If you were looking at the toss-up seats and

it seems like the numbers are in the Republicans' favor, but who knows? Kevin McCarthy is the presumptive, well, he is the current leader of the House Republicans.

If they take the House, he is the presumptive speaker, although maybe not. Now, I know you know

Kevin, I think we've talked about this before. Your district, I think, is adjacent, where you live, I believe, is adjacent to his district.
And you've known him through local matters over the years.

So

I'm not asking you

necessarily to prognosticate, but if you want to, of course, go ahead. Any thoughts that you have about

the news that

he might not have sufficient votes to become the Speaker of the House.

It depends on how

these races go.

If he gets to one point or or one or two seats I mean we've we just think about it and at election day people were saying you know they're only going to end up with 15 or 20 and then it was the next day maybe 12 or 15 and then it was 10 or 12 see what I mean and as I say I think there's about as I'm speaking here

on a Sunday afternoon this is going to be aired

when we know more information, but

there's about, I think they need seven seats. And there are 13 of these 27 or 28 in which

Republicans are ahead. But given how these late ballots and these drops work, I don't have any confidence in any of them, except maybe Mike Garcia in California has got a huge lead.

My adjacent Congressman David Valadeo has got a lead of four points. But the point I'm getting at, if you get down to 217, 218,

and you're one or two ahead, and then

you need to be, and you've got some rebellious members of your party, you need Democrats to vote for you. And that's, and they vote for different reasons.
What do I mean by that?

They look at the Republican people who are, and they will think if it's close, and it's not going to be close, but I'm just being hypothetical.

They would think, is this candidate A, weaker for the Republican cause, more inept, then I'm going to vote for him and put him over? Because it's everybody votes, not by party.

And so the same thing, if they think is he going to be an effective leader, then I will not vote for that guy because I don't want them to thrive. So we don't know what's going to happen, except

this is very strange, Jack, because

everybody is angry about the election.

And they have a general shared anger about the way balloting takes place and the weight and the weight.

And just every single damn time they look at the returns coming in and they see these Republicans ahead by one or two points, they say to themselves, can't just once the Republican either maintain that lead or if he's one or two behind come back?

Why is it always

that the Democratic candidate in the last, in the 11th hour, the 15th day, 11th hour of the 11th month or 11th day, whatever, they always come back? Why, why, why?

So there's that anger, and then there's 50-50 anger. And as I said, half the people are saying, why doesn't Trump shut the blank up?

Just keep quiet and don't get all of these headlines for his latest outburst. No more.
I'm tired of it. And then there's the other half that say, you know what?

When you have a Republican Party and you have polls saying it's ahead, And you know in advance what the Democrats are going to do as far as non-election day voting, because you've seen what they've done in 2018 and 2020.

And

you have been told that they have records amount of money, and you've been told

that they have new dynamic candidates, and you've been told that Mitch McConnell and McCarthy have these huge

PAC war chests, and you lose,

you lose, and they were the ones that formulated the official campaign messages and the points. And then the space says, and why was McConnell attacking candidates in his own party?

You know, especially when candidates, to be frank, you have to have fairly good candidates, but debates don't matter, as we've said before. If they did, a Federman wouldn't be there.

Fetterman won not because he was a good candidate, not because of the debate, because he was a recipient of the Democratic voting machine and money in Pennsylvania.

And it's very hard to beat that.

Even a good candidate like Toomey could barely do it. It took him a couple of tries to do it, to get elected.
I remember Arlen Specter beat him.

And that was

both of Pat's Senate wins, including

in

2010,

yeah, was skin of the teeth. No, it's

in a true wave year. And so you've got to be a perfect candidate because the forces are arrayed.

So what I'm getting at is there's a civil war of acrimony right now where the base says that the Republican establishment could have done better, but they were either small-minded or no imagination, no contract with America, zeal during the campaign, spent the money the wrong place, you name it,

got involved in. the Alaska campaign, a complete dead end.

And there's people who are saying if Trump, all of Trump, it's not true, but most of Trump's candidates did not do well, and their candidates would have done better. That's their narrative.

And so I don't know how that's where we are.

Take the leadership out of it, the fight for the leadership, speakership, maybe, maybe not.

Would you say Kevin McCarthy bears some culpability for this

air coming out of the

everybody who's in

Rona McDaniel

culpability Mitch McConnell culpability Kevin McCarthy culpability that's just the way it is you know it's like you know

I can

comparing small things to great I can tell you that

we were short about ninety thousand dollars in the 80s farming and we had a Santa Rosa orchard with beautiful plums

and we thinned them, we did it. And that was the situation that was going to pay off the loan.

And two days before, we had a freak, freak in May in California, hail storm, and it wiped the entire orchard out. Just

ate up $100,000 in seconds.

It was horrible. And it was localized.
So this big black cloud over our area. And then you could see an orchard maybe, I don't know, five miles away or three miles, fine.

So it was even worse because the price went sky high for anybody who wasn't hailed on. And then whose fault is that? It's nature's.
Well, maybe it's not nature's fault.

So I had a lot of deep thinking. I said, how in the blank did you get yourself into that situation? You're farming 180 acres.
Why did you have to depend on this six to seven acres? You know, right.

You know, it's not a lot, you know, a thousand trees to get you either solvent or insolvent. You put yourself in the wrong position.
You should have cut, cut, cut earlier.

So, yeah, we don't, when you have a climatic defeat, the people who are in charge are culpable. Even if it's sometimes 90% beyond their control, that 10% makes them culpable.

And I don't know what degree that culpability means they have to lose their job, but I will say that I think Mitch McConnell is in a separate category than Kevin McCarthy. He's older.

He's 80 years old. He's been there forever.
He's had a great moment last hurrah when he stopped Merritt Garland and got the judges. We all thank him for that.

He's a past master. But when he

helped Joe Biden pass legislation, whether it was on guns or you know, inflation,

he did that. And I feel that, you know, that he is part of the

corporate elite. I don't think he's a globalist.
I don't think he's in a position to be tough on China. I'm not saying it's because of his wife's family's interest,

but I just, he's not going to represent the new wave of the Republican, populist, nationalist, middle-class party. He's not.

He's a corporate fixture, and he's an ossified fixture.

And he would be a very valuable senator as a senior statesman in which young senators go for advice about how to maneuver and manipulate and master the intricacies of senatorial legislation.

He's got a wealth of knowledge. But

when he stood up and he said, when he was asked, are you going to win the Senate?

And he said, I don't know. You know, it's all about candidates.
And he was basically saying there's a bunch of candidates out there, these crazy Trumpers.

And if they won, won, they would vote against me. So you never knew with him.
You thought, you know, wow, if I put money into Blake Masters and he gets win,

you vote against me. And he did.

Can you have imagined Chuck Schumer saying that? No, Chuck. That's the thing about the Democrats.
When I was a young person, they fought like crazy. It was during the 60s.

And the hard left fought with them. But

they don't fight. They stick to the...

to the game plan. You know what I mean? They're all in.

And

their left talks really tough. You know, that little left squeaked like a little mouse about Ukraine, and they just said, Shut the blank up.
You're on the you're off the page, get back on it.

And AOC put her tail between her legs to leave and everybody, and they went right back to the party line. They have so much more discipline.
Yeah,

well, it's a religion for them, Victor. Um, we're about out of time.
Interesting historical point: the closeness of the

what will be the closeness of the outcome of the House elections, even if Republicans are ahead by a couple of seats, maybe it's even one seat. But in the interesting, in the 1930 elections,

precursor to the bloodbath of 1932. But 1930 was kind of a bloodbath itself.
I think Republicans lost about 75, 76 seats, but they ended up, they had such a huge majority. They ended up

on election night.

They had a one-seat majority in the House. And then a couple of guys died.
And by the time Congress was sworn in,

it was a Democrat-run house.

I don't have death on my mind here, but

strange things happen.

And

it's going to be very precarious, even with a very, if Republicans have a narrow leadership, it's going to be very, very precarious.

So that's your history lesson for the day, folks. Go look it up.
1930 elections. Victor, at the end of the show, we do let our listeners know how much

could I end on a note of pessimism very quickly.

Go ahead, pessimize away. Well, when you ask, is the leadership culpable?

I don't know when you're ever going to get a more opportune time than 2022 midterms. Because you think about it, inflation was at a 40-year high.

We had absolutely destroyed energy independence and were begging Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, even Russia for a time.

Crime had hit, violent crime had hit a 40-year.

There wasn't a porous border. As I keep saying, there was no border.
This was overseen by a president. that

during that six-month period prior ranged between 38 and 42 percent approval. This was his first midterm.
If he had been Abraham Lincoln, he would have lost seats.

The average loss was about 20 seats in the House and one or two Senate.

He was non compos mentes. He would shake hands with invisible people.
He was incompetent. You put all of that together

and

they ended up negatively, or if they're lucky, they'll be right where they started in the Senate, and they may pick up seven or eight seats in the House. That is an indictment against the leadership.

However you define that leadership, whether you want to say it's Donald Trump's party he's to blame, or that's the institutional party of Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, or three, it's all of them to combine.

But people listening out there are furious, and they have to, and they want to blame somebody. They just don't want to blame somebody to get even.

They want to blame somebody so they don't do the same damn thing again and again and again.

Because it is like 2020 in a sense that they had a terrible candidate and they had a good record and they lost that presidential election.

And the other side or the Democrats won the election when? In April, in May, in June, changing the laws.

They did it again. They did it again this time.
And we don't learn. We don't learn.
Right. Dumping money in at the end is, you know, maybe that the is

you talked about the horse is already out of the born there.

Yes, there is culpable Republican leadership, and maybe they need to get some younger people who are a lot more aggressive, and they take it to the end, and they know something about Silicon Valley, they know something about balloting laws, they know something about what the left is capable of.

They're always on the offensive. Yeah.
And, you know, there are people in that party that I haven't followed very closely, but I'm being won over by them. One is Rand Paul.

I always thought he was an isolationist, kind of crazy, uncertain things. But when you look at what he's done with Fauci and Wuhan Lab and Money,

and they got mad at Josh Hawley, maybe these people, because of their zeal and their imagination and their anger, would be

and even Rick Scott, these people, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio's has had a transformation. So I think all those people represent a consensus that

you can't keep going on. And

the left says, well, basically what the left is saying, this is very brilliant what they're doing, by the way, Jack. They're saying,

yeah, let's just get rid of it. You get rid of Trump and we'll get rid of Biden because they feel that Biden is not physically up to it.

And they want to think it would be, let's just move on to both of them. So it's going to be very interesting, but I think the Republicans are going to have to

either get a new leader

in the Senate or maybe the House or both or at least one or a new

RNC something.

Yeah.

But beyond that, Victor, those things are obviously vital.

But I do think so much of what has gone wrong politically from the Republican conservative perspective has been hatched in the labs of leftist philanthropy. It has, absolutely.
It hasn't.

And there needs to be some

reciprocal conservative philanthropy that sits down and looks at this stuff and says, this is destroying America, and we need to engage in the same way. They have to.

And I look at the telltale was 2020. All elections in America prior to 2020 represent one paradigm and all after 220 represent another one.
And Donald Trump won in 2016

because they had not had,

because

65 or 70% of the people voted on Election Day, or at least there was only 25 or 30% of the ballots were absentee. If everything was the same, with Trump, the same climate, the same,

you know, MAGA pushback, the same inept Hillary's campaign. But with today's rules, he would have lost in 2016.
He lost the popular vote. He would have lost the Electoral College.
Right.

Because it's just different now. There was a revolution.

We haven't even appreciated this revolution when you go in a radical period of two years, you go from 60 to 70 percent voting on Election Day to 30, 40 percent voting. It's just different.

And one party engineered that, and the other party

didn't understand it. So

you distill it down to the Republicans: hey,

get your pickup and get your neighbor, and everybody's going to get out the vote. Get out the vote today.
This is the big deal. And the other people are just quiet and saying,

the vote was gotten out weeks ago, my friend. You know,

that's how it is.

And just as

an American that,

you know, I've told you in the past, I was a candidate, local, city, board of aldermen here, et cetera. And I'm all into the

pomp and circumstance, if you will, of Election Day.

It's something, it's American. We're going out there to vote.
It's something to be proud about. And to have

to destroy Election Day has harmed America. It really is.

It's part of the same leftist assault on institutions.

Election Day in the left-wing mind is the same thing as the Electoral College, the nine-person Supreme Court, 50 states, the filibuster, 4th of July, 1776.

These are iconic institutions in America that have not always helped them,

you know, in their political trajectory and odyssey. And their way of thinking, they have to be changed or destroyed because they don't help them, or at least they don't ensure the proper result.

Change the foundational date. Get rid of the filibuster if you can.
Get rid of the electoral. Do anything that

impedes our eventual takeover of the country. And that's what they think.
And so they have destroyed Election Day and the old idea that you come home from work,

you and your wife, you and your husband, your kids, you sit in front of the TV, and then you have these electronic, modern vote returns and you see the things all up the screen and that they just move all the time as the vote comes in.

And then you got a guy like Dan Rather, I don't like him, but you have a guy like that or John Chancellor or Walter Cronkite and they say this and they bring in some experts and they say, you know, this county and this, that's gone.

It's gone. Now it's taking pictures of some apparatchek who says, I don't know when the vote's going to come in and this is this and this drop.

And then you get some nerd mathematician and says, well, you know, there's this drop from this county and that drop from this county and there's this law here.

And, oh, by the way, they ran on a paper here. And, oh, by the, I mean, think about it.
60 years ago, people could conduct a better election today than today. Right.
So what was all the 60 years for?

What was all the technology? What was all Silicon Valley for? Yeah. To screw up the elections.

I could be wrong, but I think even like Lincoln or Grover Cleveland knew on election night that they won, you know, 150 years ago. It's crazy.

They had absentee ballots in the Union Army.

And that was quicker than what we see. So, yeah,

all these institutions are disappearing before our eyes. And what is scary is...

When we want to know why the border is wide open or why people are killing other people in the street and serving very little time or beating people up or carjacking or right back out or thousands of people are being killed in the streets of Chicago and Baltimore, Newark and New Orleans

and no one's doing anything about it. It's because these institutions are not allowing people to do anything about it because

they've been changed. It's just bewildering.
for most people. They think, wow, why don't we, Election Day is a national, it's a national iconic day.
It should be a holiday. Everybody gets off work.

It's a holiday. You all go and vote.
And

that's not happening. And then you all come home from work and you all look at the elections and you move on.
And every single second

that a ballot verdict is not rendered in a particular race, you it's a forced multiplier of fraud or deceit or tampering or cheating. every moment that you extend it.

Because what happens is, as other races close, the forces of political partisanship focus and they say that race suddenly is not just a Senate race in Arizona, that's the future of the country. Right.

And they pressure, they call people. Do you know anybody there? Do you know a register there? What's the dope? When are these? It's just too much pressure for the system and it explodes.

I just think,

I don't know what to think. I think the Republican Party is just.

You've written about it, Victor. Yeah, I mean, I've been.
A dying citizen.

A dying citizen, I call it the Marcus of Queensbury Party. It's just, it's, and then when I hear all of the sanctimoniousness, you know, about this and this.
So I'm torn.

And I think a lot of our listeners are torn. On the one hand, they voted for Donald Trump because of what I'm talking about.
You know what I mean?

They thought he was gas and they were going to light it and then something was going to blow up and it would be good in the end. And then now they're thinking, you know what?

It's arson because Trump is totally out of control. And then some people say, well, he's out of control because they destroyed the man with collusion and two impeachments and all this crap.

And then there are the people who say, well, you know what? He's president. He's supposed to stand that.
So they're in a period of confusion.

And it's not good for the country because nobody, but we're starting to lose faith in our institutions. Exactly.
Right. And,

you know,

I'm sitting with people when I was on this seven to eight day trip and we were talking and everybody was just so cynical. They said, well, Blake Master's behind, he's going to lose.

Or Loxell, yeah, well, that's just what they do. They just, it's just close.
You wait, he'll lose. And then you say to them, well, here's the break.
I don't care what the breakdown is.

He's going to lose. And they were all right.

Somebody called me and said, I've talked to a statistician with the Oz campaign, and this is the number of ballots left.

and this is the percentage that he needs and these are the percentage of registration and we think he's going to win by 30,000 votes and I mentioned that to a couple of people I say just talk to a guy that he's going to lose Victor he's going to lose you don't understand if he's not going to win on election day they have a mess mechanism that those ballots will be dumped and he will lose whether it's all

up and up I don't care he will lose and they were always right yes so it's very discouraging

and i'm not i'm not alleging fraud i'm just alleging a radical change in the process that was tailor designed to the left right they designed it they sued they changed the rules they used covid as the pretense and then they employed all of the levers of Wall Street, corporate money, Silicon Valley Tech, and they mastered vote harvesting, third-party harvesting, early balloting,

vote curing, et cetera.

Victor, it's all about the consent of the governed. That's the epicenter of what this nation is, and it's being effed with, and it has been effed with, and that's

terrible. All right,

we are just about out of time, my friend.

Thank all our listeners for listening. And

Stitcher, Google Play, wherever you listen, thanks. Those who listen on itunes and Apple Podcasts, thank you.
Also,

and particularly to those who leave ratings, the

majority of ratings for the show are five stars and close to 4.99 rating.

So folks are liking what they're hearing from Victor. We appreciate you taking the time.
to leave the rating. Some people leave comments and we read them.
We appreciate that. Also, here's one

from HD

2012 Electra, who writes, Dr. Davis Hansen's rants are the best.

There was no hyphen in the Davis Hansen there, but thank you. I'll just say, thank you, Dr.
Hansen, for podcasting. I thoroughly enjoy learning from you.

I'm gobsmacked at your historical knowledge and recall, and I enjoy pushing my own boundaries by taking in a different perspective mostly though i like the rants to me they are dennis miller level of deeply thoughtful sarcasm and often very very funny thank you this said please please please have your i.t respond to my emails about subscriptions

well we don't know how to do that uh hd but anyway i just thought i'd put it out there thank you very much victor you know you say i heard you with sammy on the on the podcast about you know, the days of travel and giving speeches are over, but you know, this person is right, you may have to start another career as a stand-up comedian, and that would be a lot of road travel.

So, uh, just think about that. Uh, thank you, HD 2012 Electra.
Thanks, everyone who's written. Thank you to all who are listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Thank you, everybody.

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