Talking over the 2024 Elections

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. This is the weekend edition where we look at things a little more in-depth and/or historical.

Today, we are going to be looking at the Republican candidates and the Democratic potential replacements for Joe Biden, but for the 2024 election with Victor.

And so, we hope to have lots of wisdom on that today. Before we do all that, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll be right back to talk to Victor about the upcoming elections.

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We're back, and I would like to remind everybody that Victor is Martin and Ely Anderson, Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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It's not a part of the Victor Hansen website, but we have great admiration for their loyalty. Yeah, yeah, sure.
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So please have a look at their page and join in if you would like to, because they really do find unusual things that Victor has done in the past, especially, but also his recent stuff.

All right, Victor. Yes.
We have a lot on our agenda today.

So I guess we should just start. And I thought we'd start on the Republican possible candidates for 2024 nomination.

And we can start where you'd like. I have a list of people.

Just cut to the quick. It's Donald Trump is trying to adjudicate whether he's going to announce before the midterms or after.

The advantage of announcing in late October is

you strangle in the crib the candidates that think they're going to raise money if you are popular and you're sort of ahead of the curve.

The advantage of after November is that you have a chance to interpret the

results. And while it's going to be a big Republican win, you can take credit.
You want to make sure that it's a big Republican win, you can take credit for it.

If it's a close marginal, then they might think, well, it's directed at Trump. The main thing there is that we don't know to what degree

the January 6th cycle dramas have hurt Trump, not among the base or Republicans, but with a group of never Republicans or suburbanites that might or may not return to the Republican fold.

And by that, I mean when you look at a poll that shows in New Hampshire, it's just an isolated poll, Ron DeSantis doing better than Trump, that reflects that group of people who agree with his agenda, but feel they're not up to another exhausting Trump presidency.

And then there's the age, and then the Biden age problem kind of by osmosis filters into Trump because he would be 79.

And so

that's going to be the big issue. And the only person that I can see right now that is going to raise the money and has the media attention and is hated by the right people is Ron DeSantis.

And he puts the fear of God into the left because they feel he's Trump

without the baggage. And I don't know what's going to happen, but we'll see what these polls show and when Trump announces.

If Trump announces he's going to run, I still think there's a pretty good chance that DeSantis is going to run.

I think there's a pretty good chance that Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, CIA director of first-miss class at West Point, is going to run.

I think there's a pretty good chance that Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, very gifted guy, is going to run. And I don't know.

I don't think Marco Rubio is going to, I don't think you're going to see a lot of the people in 2016 run.

I could be mistaken. I don't know if Ted Cruz will run.
I don't know if Marco Rubio will run.

Can I ask you about Mitt Romney? I don't think he's going to run, but Chaney may.

Chaney. Wow, I hadn't thought about her.

She's going to lose this seat in Wyoming. And then what does she do? She become a CNN.
She's going to have a lot of job offers. She's going to be a CNN anchor woman.

She's going to be be a PR person for Apple or Google. Is she going to go to work for Goldman Sachs? Is she going to be a head of a never Trump type Romney type foundation?

She's got a lot of alternatives, but she has politics in her family blood, and she's probably going to try to run as a third-party candidate or something like that. She would have to, because

I don't think she would get enough votes among Republicans to do anything in a presidential race, not after what she's,

the display she's putting on right now. Well, she has a good model.

And as I said earlier, our congressman here in the San Joaquin Valley, David Valdeo, made a grievous error by being one of the 10 to impeach Trump, even though

he had voted 85%.

And Trump had been very favorable to our area. in terms of water and things and visited here.

But then when he did it, and he was just wildly castigated for the first two or three months and the donor class just severed all ties with him,

he went mute and he would show up at political events, but he was very polite and he kind of wrote it out. He didn't comment.
He just said, that's that. It's over with.

He didn't apologize, but he didn't elaborate or he didn't build on it, right?

And so when the primary came, he defeated the two pro-Trump. Republican challengers in an open primary.

And it looks like, even though he's, I think our district is about plus six or seven, maybe it's higher Democrat, he's got a good chance of winning.

So somebody like me who was very angry with him for doing that and didn't tell anybody that he was going to do that and felt kind of betrayed is going to vote for him.

I'm going to vote for him because he's a good congressperson. He's smart.
He's conservative. And compared to the alternative, he's, you know, he's wonderful compared to the alternative.

So Liz Cheney's going to garner votes because

compared to the alternative? Yeah. No, no.
What I meant by that was I should have been more clear in finishing the comparison.

That wasn't the Omega for Lynn Cheney. She didn't say, well, I voted for him 93% of the time.
I'm a starren's conservative. I just don't like people in my capital.

They were desecrating it, and Trump didn't do enough. So I voted to impeach him.
It's over with. But on the central conservative issues, it wasn't an insurrection.

I mean, they didn't arrest anybody with a weapon in there. There were issues about FBI informants.
There were issues about security communications. There was issues about Ashley Babbitt.

There was media misreporting. So let's move on.
But no, that was her alpha.

She saw that as a chance to say that I'm the guardian of the Constitution and this is an existential crisis in a way that she hadn't said that about the 120 days of burning or the breakout of Lafayette Park or the torching of the St.

John's Episcopal Church or the effort to flood into the White House ground that sent Trump into the bunker or the burning of a federal courthouse in Port. She hadn't weighed in on all that.

Yeah, I know. And so that's what she did.
She didn't do the Valdeo method. And the result was he is going to be re-elected to Congress and she's not.
Yeah.

Yeah. So just wonder that she would even think of running.
I just don't see any way she would garner support. She got elected overwhelmingly.
The Cheney name is in conservative Wyoming is invaluable.

Yeah. But she's she has a big, she was going to run for

Senate against an incumbent. Oh, I think it was four years ago.
It was wildly inadvisable and she backed out.

There's an ambition there that is confined by the fact that Wyoming has one congressional seat and two senators. And usually the senators in Wyoming are beloved and they stay there 30 years

and they come from families that are well known. And so she was more of a Washington fixture and she grew up in Washington.
And so she's going to

have to find a political outlet for all of this activism and what her constituency is.

Right now, her constituents are the bulwark readers, the dispatch readers, the never Trump 10% of the Republican Party, and

wealthy Democrats who find her useful and of some utility temporarily. But when she, you know, weighed in and supportive Roe versus Wade and all that, she can't completely change her spots.

No, she can't. So she doesn't have a constituency.
Yeah. Can I ask you then about some of the other ones that I had that I was looking at? What about Mike Pence? Would he?

Mike Pence, I've always liked Mike Pence. He was very loyal to Trump.
He was workmanlike. He didn't have a lot of charisma, but he did very well in the debate with Camilla Harris.

I think he beat her very easily. He tried to go down the line and he was aware of voting irregularities, but at critical point, he was not going to reject the electors.

I think that was wise that he didn't.

And he's not.

So he got. the full wrath of Trump.
And he was kind of, you know, not passive, but he didn't reply in in kind to Trump's attacks.

But he doesn't have a political future because he didn't have a political future before that. He was a governor that was mildly popular, but he was not going anywhere.

He was a solid, workmanlike, dependable congressional representative, but

he wasn't going to,

you know, ascend. And now that he's vice president, obviously we look at vice presidents, or do we? I mean, after,

did we really look at Dick Cheney was not going to be president? And I don't think you could argue that Dan Quayle was going to be president.

And so to be president, you have to be young and well-connected and raise money and have a lot of experience. And that was George H.W.
Bush at the time. It was for Reagan.

So I don't see Pence at that stage of his life.

on the upward ascendance, but I could be wrong. I don't think he's going to be a comparative.
but there is going to be somebody that plays the torpedo or the missile run-amok Chris Christie role.

Remember how Chris Christie destroyed Marco Rubio on the stage? We said, Oh, all you do is repeat that again and again.

Well, somebody's going to volunteer for a high cabinet post to try to get on the debate stage or in a Twitter war or something with Donald Trump to bring it, to you know, make him melt down. Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting so he probably not mike pence though no i think i could see him do it maybe ted cruise that was my next guy to ask ted cruz has been a beneficiary of a lot of trump goodwill and they've buried that i don't think ted cruise is going to run this time he's still young yeah he is

and he's got he had a tough senate race i think that kind of sobered him

and that he's got to work a little bit more in the base in texas and he's a very good candidate but I don't think he's going to run, but I may be mistaken.

What about Nikki Haley? She's very charismatic. She's got executive experience at the federal level.
She was a governor.

The problem that she has is whether it's warranted or not, she has a reputation for expediency. In other words, she will criticize Trump when she thinks 51%

of the

electorate, or I should say the Republican electorate, wants to criticize, and she won't

when that's not true. So there's sort of a finger in the wind reputation.
I don't know how well it's warranted, but there's going to be women involved in this race, and she's going to be one of them.

But I don't know.

I think she will appeal to sort of the George W. Bush constituency.
Yeah.

You know, that solid Republicans that want a little edged, a little younger, a feisty fighter, but essentially will be corporate protectors

and won't be on the MAGA agenda fully.

Yeah.

How about Christy Noll?

Well, she's her only, you know, her only disadvantage is she's from the small South Dakota. So

it's kind of the McGovern,

you know.

It doesn't bring a lot of votes.

It doesn't have any electoral votes, and then it doesn't have any major media markets. It doesn't have any big cities.

And she's very charismatic.

Once in a while, she gets in trouble when she gets on the national stage on that transgender issue. But more or less, she's very good.
I think she's going to run for vice president.

And that's what by that I mean candidates that know they can't win get up in the stage and perform very, very well. And they're very careful not to attack in personal terms the

leaders that are polling the best. And then for various considerations, electoral or gender, race, or whatever it is, then they're considered as vice presidential possibilities.

I think that's what she's looking at. Yeah.

You know, I hadn't, you said Tom Cotton and I hadn't thought of him. What makes you think Tom Cotton

might run?

He and Mike Pompeo have the most foreign policy experience. They have distinguished records in the military.
They both write well. They speak well.
They're very knowledgeable.

You put Mike Pompeo in a debate or Tom Cotton, they're going to win. There's nobody that's more knowledgeable.
And they're not going to say something stupid.

They're very careful in their speech, but they're very conservative. And they don't back down.
They're fighters. So they're similar in a lot of ways.

They're both kind of not very charismatic.

Yeah, you can make that argument.

Tom Cotton,

you know, and Mike Pompeo, pompeo maybe are not as charismatic so they remind me kind of a

dwight eisenhower like character but they don't have that i mean they they have a distinguished record but they're not famous as a savior of europe as eisenhower was so they don't they don't have any counter

uh counteravailing assets uh of fame you know what i'm saying they're not yeah famous general or they're not a

trump media star or something like that.

They've just done a very good job at everything they've been assigned or they've run for.

Yeah, the fact that they're not media stars or charismatic should actually recommend them to us, but it's very hard to...

I like both of them. I met both of them.
I've talked to both of them. I have the highest regard for both of them.

I think they're very good. Yeah, what do you think about Ron DeSantis? What Ron should we think? Yeah.

I don't know him. I haven't met him.
I think I've met him.

I i don't know if you remember but in a couple of lunches with some house members well i mean you look at his what is he lacking on his resume he's got the ivy league schools he's got the perfect education he was an athlete he was in a combat zone he was in the military he has executive experience he was a congressperson so and he's young he's like what is he 43 yeah has a wife who's very ill but i think hopefully she's recovering and the the question is: does he do it now and get in a big fight with Trump?

Or does he wait until he's in his 50s? He adopted the MAGA agenda.

The little problem he has for some politicians is that when he ran against, you'll have to tell me of the man who ended up naked in the room with another man. I remember him.
Yeah,

he's under indictment now.

And so, anyway,

that was a very close uh race it's almost impossible to believe now that it was because that guy is not only a crook but he was

i don't know what the word would be i mean he was using drugs and he was buck naked in a room was that that andrew gillum yes that was his name

it was trump that pushed him over the Trump endorsement. It's what I'm getting at.
So he has some loyalty, but he would, he's what everybody's talking about.

The left cannot stand him because when he looked at his chances, he said, I have a resume that is perfect to be president. And I'm a strong adherent of the Trump agenda.

I'm going to be a nationalist populist party. I'm in a multi-cultural racial state.
I have a lot of Hispanic support in Florida.

I've changed by my policies, Florida from a purple to a red state with the help of arrivals from, you know, California or New York that I don't think are going to go left so much.

And he's Harvard Law School. So, in a lot of people's ways of thinking, he's the perfect candidate.

All he had to prove, though, was that he was a fighter, that he wasn't a Mitt Romney, John McCain type, that he would fight for that agenda. So he took on the transgendered issue.
He took on Disney.

He took on the critical race theory. And that was to show people that he is Trumpian in agenda and in character and

nature, but he's not Trumpian in calling people names. And so that might get a little larger slice of the electorate.
So I think that's the big question

is

will he run?

And what would he have to do to beat Trump? To what degree would he have to attack Trump? And to what degree would that allow him to, if he were to win, to get the Trump base back out.

The left seems to hate him now.

They feel that the January 6th has kind of neutered Trump for a while, and they've turned their attention to him because he's getting so much publicity and he's making Florida run like a clock.

Everybody wants to go to what they call now the free state of Florida. And

so,

you know,

there's nothing you can find in his record or his anything that he's done wrong. It's perfect.
I think a lot of people feel he's not really charismatic.

his voice or his dynamism isn't quite up to other famous you know to bill clinton or obama or like trump but uh that's not necessary you know that we've had great presidents that weren't like that so we'll see yeah i think his populist appeal and his discipline and his impeccable you know like you say his past at least impeccable and it's impeccable i mean he was yeah i think those will overcome strong catholic and he's

family and he

does everything right and he's not scared of anybody and he pushes back.

And,

you know, he was going to run, I think, against Marco Rubio in 2016, which is kind of funny if you look at the fates of the two, that Rubio was the darling

of the never Trump and the regular mainstream Republican. And he was, I thought he was going to be nominated at one point in 2016.

but again chris christie kind of had that one moment where quite cruelly he just turned on him and he said that you know you're you're just up here as an automaton with rote talk and that really hurt him yeah and then the media turned that i have to have a drink of water answer to a state of the union obama address into a character flaw yeah and they really they really damaged him and his his wife had all these so there were he took a lot of hits and then he's kind of veered to the right now and he's in the mega camp So I don't know what his future will be.

I've seen him speak and I mean, I've heard him speak and I've seen him been at places where he spoke and he's much better than he was

five years ago, much better as he ages. So he probably could be an effective candidate if you run.

Okay, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and listen to a few messages and then come right back and look at the Democratic alternatives to Joe Biden.

We'll be right back.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. Yes, this is an interesting question.
How are they going to replace Joe Biden as we are predicting they're going to want to do?

So I know that I feel like we should just not worry about Kamala Harris because I just don't think that she's going to be the one they look at. But I could be wrong.
What do you think about Kamala?

And then we'll go to all the other ones that are possibilities. Well, I mean, she'd never been in a situation.

where people got to know her because Willie Brown had shepherded her paramour, had shepherded her through city, county attorney, put her on boards.

And then she was prep for the Senate and she just had campaign speeches. And nobody knew her.

They just knew that she had sort of a nice exotic name, that she was diverse, African-American, Indian American. She had good education.
Her parents were PhDs.

And so she, for the left, she was just like, you know, another Susan Rice.

And they thought

she would perform like that. But then once she was out on the campaign trail, she didn't get one delegate.
Once people saw her in New Hampshire and, you know, in Iowa, there was nothing there.

She was an empty pantsuit.

And she really was. She had very limited vocabulary.
She's repetitive. She has no ideas.
And she's got a terrible temper. Nobody likes to work for her.

So she's inert.

She's...

I would say she's like Dan Quayle, but that's not fair to Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle had admirable quality.

She doesn't. And she's of limited talent and limited ability.
And that comes through.

So she has to run because she's young and she's vice president.

I don't know where she's going to get the team or the prep, but when you look at her and when she starts talking, she gets off the teleprompter. It's just circular.
you know, it just circular.

And we're going to address this because it's a very important thing that we're going to address because it's really important. We address really important things.

And the border is critical.

We're going to address the border. We're going to be preemptive and we're going to look at the border and we're going to be preemptive and we're going to really look at that's how she talks.

Yeah, okay. Well, let's leave it there.
I'll be surprised if the Democrats do anything with her in the coming 2024. Let's turn then to how about the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock,

who had humble beginnings and was a pastor as well.

Is he a strong candidate?

Yeah,

he's a socialist that's in Georgia, and he's there because

Donald Trump did not go down to Georgia and campaign. And I mean, he was almost eliminated in the primary and Purdue almost won, you know,

in the primary. So he was not a viable candidate until

the election and Trump lost. And then Trump was occupied with challenging the methodology of the voting.
And he should have gone down there.

And when he did kind of go down there, he gave two messages.

One, that if you're a true blue Trump supporter, you can't trust the electorate, I mean, the registrars, because they won't fairly count the votes.

And so there were thousands of people who said, well, Trump said I shouldn't vote because it won't matter.

And then the continued negative media and Trump's reply back to it turned off the suburban swing female voter that had voted for Trump in 2016.

So those two constituencies either voted a Democratic ticket or didn't show up to vote. And that's how he got in.

And once a senator gets in, it's very hard to remove him because they've got huge budgets, they've got staff, they get money, they go around the state and say, you know what?

If you want business done, you're going to have to work and donate to me. So that's where he is.
Herschel Walker

is,

you know, he's very conservative. He hasn't held office before.
He's not nearly as malevolent as Warnock, but he's more genuine and more authentic.

And he's got the advantage that he's got one task, Sammy. All he's got to do is say, this guy represents what you don't like Biden has done.
This guy is to the left of Biden.

You don't like the border? This guy likes the border. You don't like inflation? This guy believes in modern monetary theory stuff.
You don't like racial disharmony. This guy promulgates it.

You don't like paying $6 a gallon fiber. This guy believes that's necessary.
And if he can do that, he'll win.

They're going to go after his illegitimate children or Herschel Walker's this or he doesn't speak well, et cetera, et cetera. But you'll see another thing is it's kind of a phenomenon.
The left.

When they get into questions of,

I have to be very careful, but when there are African-American conservatives, they start to reveal their true colors. They start making fun of the way that people speak.

And they feel that a liberal African-American speaks like Warnack or Obama or Eric Holder. And a conservative speaks more of a colloquial patois.
And so they make fun of that.

And they make fun of in a weird way that they're limited. They do that with Clarence Thomas.

I think Clarence Thomas has pointed out before that darker skinned African-Americans tend to be more on the butt end of criticism from wealthy, elite, white liberal.

And there's something to that. And so we'll see.
But there's some other, there's issues involved in that race that can't be spoken, but they're going to be there.

And a lot of it's going to be left-wing, very wealthy white elites.

who are almost going to resort to racial caricatures the way that they do with Clarence Thomas.

Yeah, that's the senatorial race. And

so I know Warnock's going to be

up against Herschel. Yeah, I think you brought it.
Yeah. And I don't think he's going to be a serious presidential candidate because I think he's going to lose.
Yeah.

Okay. And how about Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor? Okay.
Yes, he was almost kidnapped by a dark group of crazy

militiamen that have all either had their trials thrown out and are going to have to go up on trial, or there were more FBI informants planning her kidnapping than

the actual kidnappers. She's going nowhere.
She's a mean-spirited person. She's turned off everybody.
So let's just skip over her.

She's not going to be a serious candidate.

Vice president. Anybody would be insane to even have her as a vice president.
Okay. Okay.
How about the Colorado Governor Jared Polis?

Well, I mean,

he,

I think I'm thinking of the right guy. He's a, he pushes a lot of the buttons.
He's a gay guy, but he's also a nice guy.

And he's, he's so they like that he's not a, you know, a typical white male, straight candidate. He has a diversity element, is what I'm clumsily trying to say.
He has a he's also not a

typical Democrat.

He's been part of the Liberty caucus. Yeah, I'm very skeptical about that.
When you look at the actual record and the positions he holds, he's

pretty left, but he's better than most of the other Democratic alternatives, but he's not going to go anywhere.

Yeah.

Okay. And then next to him is the governor of California, Gavin Newser.
I just wrote an article about him.

We live in the most unfree state in the country. You can't go go to San Francisco without walking on needles.

You can't drive the 99 between, I don't know, Visalia and Delana without getting a wreck or the 101, you know, south of Gilroy. It's a decrepit thing.
LAX is a nightmare.

We haven't built a reservoir in 40 years. We're having brownouts.
Stanford University lost power twice,

shut down.

We're in a drought. He is a perpetuate.
He perpetuates the, let the dead trees from the drought and beetles just rot naturally and they have nice fodder for bugs and birds and then they

burn. And we have these terrible fires that leave that release more carbon emissions in the year of cars.

And we have one right now threatening Mariposa Globe, you know, similar. It's an annual thing.

And the idea that you get a timber company and you would say, you know what, you've got to go in there within two years and get that valuable Douglas Ford stuff, go get it. You can't seem to do that.

And so I can't think of one thing he's done other than say that he was going to give illegal aliens $500 million

for COVID relief or $400

for every motorist who makes less than $300,000. I mean, I drive down I-5 near the Monterey Shale, you know, find, and we're never going to tap that.

We probably have a couple billion barrels of oil there. Can't frack it.

The state has about the fifth largest oil and natural gas reserves in the country. He's not going to touch that.
We don't have a timber industry.

Our agriculture is on the ropes because he insists on allowing water to go out the San Joaquin and Sacramento River systems out to the ocean in wet years.

And we don't have anywhere to store, which we could use right now.

And so there's nothing redeeming. So, you know, he's

we pay 13.1 in the top brackets in California. We We have the highest gas taxes.
If you look at the local sales tax add-on, we're about fourth in the country on sales tax.

I think we're second in kilowatt prices. We have the highest gas prices.

And our property taxes are only because of Prop 13 that was supposedly limited 1%. But when you add on local special exemptions, it can be up to 2%.
And

you can pay $1,000 a square foot for a home in California. So our property taxes are exorbitant.
And then you say, okay, but you live in California. So you get what from it?

You get good weather, but now you get wildfires and smoke and high crime and homelessness. And what do you get in schools?

We're rated in the bottom 10th of the nation in schools, our eighth grade and high school test scores. Will you get infrastructure? No, you don't.

It's rated about 46th in the nation, 47th in the nation. Will you get safe streets? No, you don't.
San Francisco has the highest property per capita crime rate in the United States.

So what do you get for all that taxation? Well what you get is about 8 million people the last 30 years have fled and taken about 25 billion dollars.

And so we have no conservative traditional Republican middle class left. So we have a one-party state that he rules over.

with supermajorities in the state, Senate, and Assembly, with no statewide officer who is a Republican. Maybe Lonnie Chan was running for controller, my colleague at Hoover, had a chance.

I don't know. I hope he does.
And then you have only, I think there's 53 congressional districts, and we only have 11, and that's up from seven Republicans.

So

you brought in all, you know, $6 trillion worth of capital and all this money along the coast, and all these yuppies, suburbanites that are very left-wing, and then

the middle-class left.

And then we had this huge 40% of the state's Mexican-American mostly

and that's the big issue isn't it because a lot of them have had it with Gavin Newsom and they've had it with Joe Biden and they understand he's destroying their livelihood right before their eyes they can't afford to drive they can't afford to buy a two by four they can't avoid to buy cement they can't afford to turn on their air conditioning and they don't want to hear about gay marriage and transgenderism and the new Green Deal and all that stuff.

Abortion in the ninth trimester and all that stuff. I mean, in ninth month, third trimester or partial, they don't want to hear it.
They want to hear what he's going to do. So we'll see.

But my point is that his record in California is an utter disaster. And then he,

he sounds like a mafioso with that gravelly voice. And then he doesn't know anything.

Like when it was, when Hillary said that this was a never let a crisis go to race, the COVID lockdown, then he chirped in, well, we're going to have a more progressive capitalism when we come out of that.

I think, what is more progressive capitalism? Are you going to pay your property tax on time? Is that what you're going to do? Like everybody else? That's progressive.

What does more progressive capitalism mean? That means maybe that, I don't know,

that Barbara Boxer doesn't work any longer for China, that Diane Feinstein's late husband wasn't a big billionaire from Chinese income, or she didn't hire a Chinese spy for her chauffeur.

Is that what she means? Or Nancy Pelosi says, I'm going to have a more progressive capital. I'm going to do what Diane did when she sold her

Lake Tahoe estate. I'm going to sell my Napa estate and just live in my San Francisco estate.

Or Jerry Brown is going to say, you know, I'm going to get rid of 1,000 acres of my Grass Valley property by 2,500.

Or the Obamas will visit, we're going to give up that 2,500 gallons of propane tanks and markets venue. That's what I'm getting at.
So

I don't think we can take him seriously.

You know, he's just, you know, he's just, it's a joke.

I wrote this column and I ended up saying he's like the guy with a service station that had the Shell or Chevron name, you know, and it was, it was just an automatic clientele.

That's what California was. It's so beautiful.

It's got this long coast and Yosemite and everything, mountain sierras, beautiful state, beautiful institutions, beautiful heritage, wonderful governance up to about 19. you know, 80.

And he destroyed it. And so this is a guy with a service station that destroyed it.
It's crappy. It's all torn up.
His gas is really high. It's bad.
It's watered down.

And everybody who drives by turns the other way to another service station, the Florida service station. It's clean.
It's cheaper. It's got better products.
It's well run.

And then he gets on top of his service station and says, hey, everybody, don't go over there. Come here.
It's free. It's a free state.
It's a free station. That's what he's doing.

I mean, that doesn't work, does it? People vote with their feet.

And Florida can't handle the number of Californians that are arriving. And he says, come to California.
No, a million have left in the last two years. $20 billion in capital have left.

They're all going to Austin or, you know, Miami or something. They're not going to Silicon Valley.

They're not moving into San Francisco. San Francisco's got a lot of vacant office space.
Yeah.

But he's just a product of that.

Oh, million. Yeah.

look gavin gavin newson looks like one of the ones that are at least out front right now that's what's bothering me and he did um survive a recall where gray davis did not survive you know it was very

late and it was poorly planned and he had and gray davis was recalled when there was a republican party

you know what i mean yeah there was still there is no republican party in calories but there wasn't as many failures of the state under Gray Davis.

He was recalled because he doubled car registration. His car registration would be cheap now.

But people were angry, and it was starting to, these problems that we're talking about were starting to happen.

But California will never be saved unless you break up and utterly reject politically, culturally, socially, this nexus between the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, Berkeley and Stanford, $6 trillion in market capitalization, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, all of that stuff.

And that produces a one-dimensional, non-diverse.

I mean, at one point, you could argue that some of the most powerful people in the United States was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

and senior intelligence chair on the committee, Diane Feinstein, and Jerry Brown, and then Gavin Newsom, the mayor, Barbara Boxer, the other center. They lived about 50 miles from each other.

And they all were wealthy. And they were all wealthy white people that were liberal.
And they all either inherited a ton of money or married into a ton of money.

And we were supposed to be impressed because they mouthed these diversity shibbolis and platitudes. I wasn't.
I thought these are the most undiverse people in the world.

They're not geographically diverse. They're not economically diverse.
They're not racially diverse. They're not ideologically diverse.
They're part of this little old club in the Bay Area.

Yeah. Well, I'm with you on Gavin Newsom and his failed policies in California should exclude him from the,

you know, a run for

president. He will exclude himself.

But they did get a noxious person in a basement elected to the presidency. So I'm not sure that the Democrats would be, you know, phased.
I mean, he looks good visually and everything else.

That's okay. They can cover that up, you know.

So

we'll see. I agree with you.
I wouldn't expect him to be a candidate, but we never know. How about Governor J.B.
Pritzker?

You're in Illinois, so it means that

you're governor of Chicago, right? Chicago is a multi-million person hemorrhaging catastrophe, a Lori Lightfield catastrophe.

There was a reason why Barack Obama got three estates and never wants to go back to his community organizing home and his little mansion. He will never go back.
It's a dysfunctional city and

it characterizes that whole state. I don't think that anybody who's governor of Illinois is going to go anywhere until as long as that city is there.
It's murder capital of the United States.

It's dangerous. It was a beautiful city.
It was when I was in college. It was called the Can-Doo City.
It was always juxtaposed to New York. They always said Chicago got the snow off the street.

The Deity clan may be corrupt, but it's an efficient, well-run, clean, growing city, unlike New York. That's what people said, or unlike Baltimore or Washington.
But now it is at the Nadir.

And what does he have going for him? He has a hotel fortune. That's it.
Yeah. And he needs to be,

I mean, he needs to lose a few pounds too, to be frank.

Okay, so you have wiped off the

list of possible candidates. Everybody I could come up with.
Did you have any ideas on who might be the Democratic alternative to Biden?

Well, where are they going to go? Where are they going to go? I don't. That's what I think

they're in big trouble because they don't have a governor or they don't have a senator that has any national prominence.

And if you don't believe me, just go back and review and recall the 2016 primary where we had how many of them? 17 of them out there? 15 of them?

You could argue that when Trump won, he defeated people with extraordinary popularity and records. I mean, Scott Walker and Cruz and Rubio.

And there were a lot of people there that

had been around Casey.

But when you looked at that field, Castro or Spartacus or Elizabeth,

it was just turned off the whole Democratic electorate.

And so that's how Joe Biden got president was that they had nobody except, you know, Joe Biden.

And his the great thing about him is he had an empty head and they could put things into it and say, carry us across the finish line. That's what he did.
So now he did it.

And now, if he had had any courage, he would have picked an articulate, young, fairly unknown person from a large state. Who that would be, I don't know.

But he would have groomed them as vice president. They would be all over.

They would be going to every funeral. They would be all over the world right now.

That's what good vice presidents do, and they would be honing their rhetorical skills or political savvy, building a team. But that's not going to happen.

Carmella Harris is, as I said, she bleeds teams. The teams that she has are bleeding.
They're just leaving. Nobody wants to be around her.
She can't finish a sentence. She knows nothing.

She's never, I don't think she'd been to Europe before.

So that's what he did. And maybe he did that.

And, you know, as soon as I say that, one of our brilliant people out there listening, and all of you guys are, you're going to say to me, Hey, Victor, what the hell's wrong with you?

That's the point, idiot Victor. He knew that he was non-compos mentes.
He surveyed the landscape. He's looked at this candidate.
He knew that she was inarticulate. He knew that she was incompetent.

It was the Agnew factor. He deliberately picked someone that he would never be impeached because the alternative was worse than him being insane or unhinged.
And that's what he did.

That's a good, that's a viable

thesis, you know, that he didn't want anybody that could be president as vice president. So that's what keeps him from being.

Believe me, Sammy, right now, if you had a very, very, if you had a charismatic person like Obama that was glib, even Pete Budejig, as bad as he's been, if he was right now vice president, they would get rid of Biden.

They would find a way. They have ways of doing it.
They would get rid of him under the 25th Amendment, or they would put so much pressure on him that.

he would have an incident or something and resign but they're not going to do it with her

yeah okay all right victor let's go ahead and take our last break here for a few messages and come right back and we'll talk about the Senate races in 2022 that might be up for play.

We'll be right back.

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We're back, and so we've got a few retiring senators. The retiring Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, I think that's the seat that's probably the most uncertain which way it will go.
You have that Dr.

Oz on one side and then as the Republican candidate and Fetterman as the Democratic candidate. How do you think that's going to go? I think Oz is going to win.

He was probably the most viable candidate for all of his limitations.

And his opponent has got some health issues that he hasn't been candid about.

I had been long COVID, I understand if I was running right now and I had, I feel like I do now, I would be hiring, I guess, Hollywood celebrities at 500 bucks to make commercials for me.

I think that's what East Peterman's doing. Yeah, so you can't

run a campaign when you don't feel well. Yeah, so I think Oz will win that.
Well, okay. Well, I hope you're right on that.

You've already talked a little bit about the Georgia senatorial race between Warnock and Herschel Walker. Do you have any prediction on who might win that? Yeah, I think Walker will pull it out.
Okay.

Because I think the news cycle is going to get worse from now on.

When they say gas went, wow, it went down from $5 to $480.

What does that mean? I mean, that's what they talk about.

Yeah, it doesn't mean much to somebody who's making anything. So anyway, I think that

Pennsylvania is very important because it's such a big state and it's important. But,

you know, when he in the primary, I don't know what it was, almost 50% of people didn't like Oz. It was kind of, they felt that he was slimy.
He had kind of complicated relationship

with Turkey and people, and he had, you know, he came from New Jersey and all of that. But now that he's won, he barely won.

McCormick really did him a lot of damage in the primary. But I think he will win because I think Fetterman is not going to be a viable candidate.
Yeah.

All right. How about North Carolina has a retiring senator as well, Richard Burr.

And the race is between, it appears, Ted Budd, who's the Republican, and Sherry Beasley, who's the Democrat.

Ted Budd sounds like he's probably more well known. I'm not sure about that.
You know, he's, I think he's going to win that race. And

he's kind of a.

One thing to remember is that the people who are running for the retiring Republicans, if they win, it's going to be a lot more

conservative Senate in general and more conservative Republican caucus in particular. You know, Richard Burrer, I mean, the way he handled the Senate investigation of collusion was a joke.

Anyway, I think that Bud will be,

I don't know, I think he will be a lot more conservative. I think he can win.

I mean, after all, it's, I mean, North Carolina is a purple state, but I think he's going to win. Yeah.
It's going to be very hard for people to run when your president's polling below 30%.

Because what do you do when he comes in your state? You regret we had a scheduling conflict?

That's what all you can say because you put him out there and people see him and they think, I don't like that guy. And if I don't like that guy, I don't like the guy next to him.

And why are you thinking you're part of that guy? You're part of.

That happened. Remember in George Bush with Iraq? He was a very, he was one of the most popular presidents, 93% after 9-11.

And then when he gave that megaphone, he said, the whole world's going to hear for it he was up just out and then the first three weeks of the iraq war when the statue fell he was 85 percent and then the media went after him and then the war went south and the insurrections and by 2006 midterm

he was polling you know 30 percent and no one wanted to be with him and they got wiped out in the house yeah that's going to happen to these people they don't they they can deny it all they want they write these silly little articles it's not going to be this bad they always write that republican or democrat it's going to be bad

okay how about the nevada senatorial race between catherine cortez masto and adam laxalt adam laxalt uh you know he's got an illustrious i guess that was his uncle or great uncle paul laxalt regan's chum

but uh he's attorney general and he's very very conservative and he's a lot more savvy than most candidates i've talked to him on the phone a couple of times and i think he's going to

Cortez Masto, has a, you know, she was a Hispanic candidate, but when you have Hispanics that are turned off at the Democratic Party, I don't know, maybe they can get like Harry Reid's not around anymore.

So you don't really, I don't know if the SCIU buses still work like they used to,

but I have a feeling that he can have an upset win. Yeah.

Okay. Well, those are the

how about Arizona? I think

Blake Masters, Peter Till's favorite candidate, I think he's going to win. I think he's going to defeat Mark Kelly.
He was third. He was like J.D.
Vance in Ohio. They were not running well.

And because they didn't have a lot of name recognition or the name recognition they did was clouded and they just kept, they're both very well spoken. They're very smart people.

And they were well funded by Peter Till and others. And J.D.
Vance is going to win, I think, in Ohio. I hope he does.
And I think Blake Masters is going to beat Mark Kelly.

I think he really is. And I think in Wisconsin, Ron Johnson is going to get re-elected.
I don't know about Maggie. I said her name, Hassan, in New Hampshire.
Yeah. But

those are all houses. Marco Rubio is going to win.

Everybody says he's going to lose at this Val Demings, but she's very, very,

she'll win the nomination in August, but she'll lose to Marco Rubio. And I think that guy that ran for president, I'm trying to remember his name in

Colorado, is it Bennett?

Michael Bennett,

he's going to lose too. I think he's the third.
So I have a feeling that those eight or 10 races that were toss-ups, that the Republicans have a good chance to take eight or all of them. I really do.

I don't think the left knows how bad it is. I think they're still.

you know, in denial.

They don't understand that when you see Joe Biden talking as he does or Camilla Harris or you see inflation or you see the border, you just turn on the TV and you look at that border and people see, they say, why are these 10,000 people just crossing into my country uninvited, breaking my laws, bringing in drugs?

Why?

Or when they look at, they get to that gas pump. I was in Palo Alto of all places and a very upscale woman in a Mercedes, it was probably, yeah.

She looked at me and she said, this is awful, isn't it?

And I said, well, I'm from the fresno area and it's 640 so it's almost the same there and it's bad everywhere so people are getting very very angry they accepted that you know they're getting angry now about gas and inflation and so and it hasn't peaked yet so everything in a in a volatile situation like this everything is up for grabs all the conventional wisdom is suspect yeah you don't know what everything that's up is down everything that's down is up There's no reference that can be counted on

the Trump one.

Yeah, from what you said here, it would be for senator advantage, actually, but to senators, 52 to 48.

I'm not worried about them taking the Senate and the House. I'm worried about what they're going to do when they get it

and how they're going to. herd all those people in to focus, concentrate.
I don't want it to end up like Benghazi,

where they had a legitimate case. They had a good guy like Trey Gowdy, and it turned into the left-wing media eviscerated them and it didn't work.
And Hillary kind of melted down.

They had a golden opportunity to find out what was really going on in Benghazi, why we didn't reinforce those embassies, why we didn't get help in there, what was the relationship between Benghazi and the re-election efforts of Obama, and they blew it.

And so, if they're going to investigate

Hunter Biden January 6, fully, May 31st, 2020,

the corruption. And if they're going to call in Comey and McCabe, they're going to call in all those people, call in and look at the military.
They're going to do all of that stuff.

They better do it competently and efficiently and not turn it into a circus or not do it at all.

So we'll see. We'll see.
All right, Victor, time is up. Thank you very much for your reflections on the potential Republicans and Democrats for 2024 and the Senate races coming up in 2022.

We appreciate once again, as always, all your wisdom and we thank our listeners for listening. Well, thank everybody for listening as well.
All right. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson.

We're signing off.

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