Republicans Got Wiped Out. Now What?

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I have been taking fiber and spice for over three years. When I first started taking it, I could smell the cumin and the turmeric and the different spices. I tell all my friends about Balance of Nature. Call now and save 35% on your first order when you subscribe. Use discount code WIRE. Call 1-800-2468-751. That's 1-800-2468-751. Hey everyone, this is Tim Rice. Welcome to another edition of Balance of Nature. Welcome to another edition of Behind the Story. You know, there's really only one story to talk about this week, and it's the midterm elections, the elections themselves, the shellacking, you might say, that Republicans took at the hands of some radical Democrats, and then just who those radical Democrats are and what all of that means for the final two years of the Trump presidency, the lame duck years, what it means for the 2028 presidency, the presidential primaries and presidential election, and what it means for the future of American politics. Now, if you're a Daily Wire reader, you've seen that we've been covering this six ways to Sunday, starting before the midterms, going through the actual election day, and every day since. We've been covering with reporters in the field and on social media and our midterm coverage and on our election night and midterm election live blog, which is still going or is still going at the time of this recording. All that and more. And there's one person who's been involved in all of this, and that's my good friend and colleague, Daily Wire managing editor, Dylan Houseman, who joins us today to break down what the heck just happened. Dylan, always a pleasure, man. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Tim. Very excited to be here. It's an exciting time. At the very least, I was telling someone last night when I was out for some beers, it works in politics, and they were asking me how I felt about everything. And I was like, well, at least something happened. You know, a lot of times people get very excited and worked up to cover a story and nothing happens or it's an underwhelming nothing burger. At least we've got a lot to talk about and a lot to think about because this was quite the historic event and literally and figuratively. Truly. So, I mean, let's dive right in. There are truly so many directions that we can take that I kind of want to just start with a very open-ended, what are you thinking? I want the Dylan take kind of right off the bat. Just where's your head at? What happened? What are you, what's your main takeaway, I guess, from Tuesday night? Well, I'm thinking many things. I guess the few top lines I have are these. One, I don't think any one cause can be attributed to what happened. I see a lot of people, of course, talking about the Iran war. I do think you can make the case plausibly. And in fact, I would agree with it probably that the Iran war was the biggest issue for Republicans. But I think it was far from the only issue. There were a lot of things that were going wrong for Republicans. You could have a conversation about tariffs. You could have a conversation about corruption. You could talk about the ballroom and other DC projects getting focused on too much. But the war was the big one. But I don't think there's any one thing. It's not the only thing. And so I think you're seeing a lot of people and their postmortems that have a particular hobby horse. They have a particular hobby horse. They have a particular, at least talking about people among the right who are debating. They have a particular faction of the right that they want to come out of this looking better than the others. And so they are choosing which issue they want to beat on as the main one. But I think that's kind of silly. There are a whole bunch of issues to talk about and things that need to be addressed. The second thing is that I don't think long-term this is a doomsday scenario for Republicans. It is a huge problem for them that the Senate is, on a six-year cycle. So these seats that are gone, if Mississippi goes, which it looks like it's going to, some of these other red states go, it's not as simple as flipping them back in two years. You're stuck with that for six years. The odds of flipping the Senate in 2028 now are not very good. But long-term, I think a lot of the things that are plaguing them here are frankly acutely attributable to some of the decisions that President Trump and the Trump administration have made. And I don't think, while those are problems that need to be addressed, I don't think they're insurmountable. I think they are things that if you have kind of a raising down of things and a new crop of leadership that comes up in Congress, people that emerge as post-Trump presidential candidates, new media class figures, whoever the next crop of people that come as we kind of transition to the post-MAGA world, a lot of these problems can be fixed fairly quickly, I feel like, and are not, you know, structural long-term things that are going to be hard to overcome. So those are kind of the two main thoughts I've been having. But, there's plenty more we can get into, I'm sure. Yeah, all right. Well, I certainly agree with you on the first point. I think that as with any, I mean, frankly, with any election, right, every election ends with people who lost trying to blame the people that they want to blame or blame the thing that they don't like or take blame, or, you know, or the inverse, right? Take blame away from those who they favor or take blame away from the issues that they like, the Iran war or the president being the two big ones here. I completely agree with you. It's really just a matter of the bigger the loss, the more, the more of those kind of, the more finger-pointing or, you know, non-finger-pointing goes on. The second one, your second point is much more interesting. I think you're the first person I've talked to and I've talked to a lot of people since Tuesday who isn't a Democrat, who is optimistic about this. And I'll add one data point before I ask you to expound, or one observation of mine and one data point from our friend Brent, Buchanan, who runs Signal Polling, with whom I spent election night. Brent's point was that when you, when you, pollsters look at the Senate in three classes, right? Because the, the way that the six-year cycle works, there's basically three different classes of people at any given time. There's a little bit of that staggering. And he said this class, I forget if he called it, had a specific name, but the class that was up for re-election this year, it was the strongest Republican, Republican Senate class of the Senate. So just something that kind of in his, I think his point, you know, was that this sort of portends, it's only going to get harder for Republicans to win in the Senate or defend the seats that they currently have in the Senate. To say nothing of what happened on Tuesday, it's just a harder, a harder group of seats to defend given candidate quality and the states that will be up for re-election. And then my observation is just you, eternal optimists that you are, are putting a lot of faith in people, right? Because you, yeah, these problems, can be easily solved if the people who come up in the post-MAGA moment solve them. But there isn't, am I wrong, isn't there also a chance that the people who come up fail to rise to the occasion? What is the source of this optimism? I know it can, but why are you so optimistic? Yeah. But what, or make the case, make the case why you think, why you're not just dooming. Like what, what's, what's a good case there? I think, again, to the Senate point, it's completely true. The Senate almost certainly will still be Democratic after 2028 because of how bad this, how big the margin was in this cycle and because this is the most Republican-friendly cycle. So that's totally true. Setting that aside, just bigger picture, the, and I guess I shouldn't say that I'm optimistic per se, but I can, I'm open to there being a positive outcome or at least not a worst-case scenario outcome because, again, the operative word is can. I do not necessarily have faith in the entire current Republican political class that they could turn this around. But I think the opportunity will present itself. And I guess my case would be that, and I think a lot of Republicans have been in denial about this, frankly, that, you know, MAGA is going to end at some point. And whether that is when Trump leaves office or whether it's when Trump dies or whether it is now, after the midterms, arguably, after that wipeout, you could argue, whenever that's going to happen, it is going to happen at a certain point. And my case has always been, and this, again, is not popular with everybody because a lot of people have invested a lot in trying to say that, you know, Trumpism is a thing beyond just Trump himself. I've never believed that. I think Trump is a phenomenon of one person. And whenever you get beyond Trump as the singular figure of the GOP, it's going to be a bit of a free-for-all determining what comes next. And so my optimism case would be that that reckoning was always going to have to happen and it was always going to be messy and it was always that was always gonna end in tears for a certain portion portion of the conservative movement or the right wing or whatever you want to call it. And so to have the Band-Aid kind of just ripped off in the most undeniable. Notice nobody's talking about the election being stolen. Nobody's talking about how Trump is actually way more popular, except for Trump himself, maybe, that Trump is way more popular than the polls say. Nobody's talking about, actually, things have been going really well. There was just this little thing here or there. The one thing there's unanimity on the right right now is that this was a disaster. It was largely a disaster of our own making, and we've got to figure something out of what comes next to fix that. And so to me, the optimistic case is you're going to have to figure out what comes after Trump eventually. Ripping the Band-Aid off in a way where nobody has any delusions about where we stand and where things are at can be healthy and can be a better way to start that process. And you can now start that process arguably an election cycle earlier. If Trump. Let's say things went only moderately badly for Republicans last Tuesday night, and you coast into 2028, and you kind of limp along gradually into 2028 with Trump still at not great approval ratings, and say the Iran war is still dragging on or something, or the economy still isn't really recovered, and you limp into 2028 and lose 2028 with J.D. Trump. And then you've got J.D. Vance running, for instance, as the obvious successor. Then you're set back an entire additional election cycle before you've kind of realized, oh no, we've got to reset this thing and figure it out. So I think that's the optimistic case, is that now Band-Aid's ripped off, everybody's realistic about where things stand. You could have the fight now with two years left until the next presidential election to try to decide and figure out what comes next. And maybe the right people, whether you think that's ideologically or just politically skill-wise or whatever it may be, political talent-wise, win the fight, and you can start to rebuild something better going forward. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I just like making you explain things where you have the optimistic take on things. Dylan's not that much of a pessimist, folks. It's usually not my style, so I understand that it might come as a shock to people. I think you're 100% right. I think it's a huge opportunity for Republicans. And I actually, right before the last piece that I wrote before the election, it went up the weekend before, I made a version of that case. And my point was basically that it's a huge opportunity for Republicans. And my prediction at the time was that it would also be a huge roadblock, or perhaps a stumbling block is a better phrase, for Democrats, because the way I was predicting at the time, I thought Democrats were going to win, and I think it was going to be a blue wave. I thought that Hakeem Jeffries was going to find himself in a very similar position that Kevin McCarthy found himself in after the last midterm elections, or after the last elections, rather, where he has a very thin majority and a renegade wing in his caucus who pull him out. I thought that we'd have a couple, if not all, but some of the radical Senate candidates winning election and using the upper chamber to pontificate their crazy leftist views. And I thought my read on it was that Democrats were going to find themselves two years from now where Republicans found themselves on Tuesday. Of course, that didn't really happen. Democrats kind of blew it out of the water. So where do you think, I think you made some great points about what comes next for Republicans. What comes next for Democrats? I mean, obviously, at first, it's going to be committee assignments and all the DSA members getting high profile things, and it's going to be hearings. Hearings, hearings for everyone who's ever shaken Donald Trump's hand and maybe impeachments back on the table. But, you know, I don't know, that's the next six months to a year. But then, you know, Democrats still need to nominate a presidential nominee. They need to prosecute a presidential election. They need to remain electable. What do you think comes next? And how did this election, like, what table did this election set for the Dems? That's a tough one. I think, I had the same initial kind of expectation as you, which was, you know, Hakeem Jeffries is going to get maybe a 10 seat majority or something or 15 seats. And, you know, Ilhan Omar and her friends are going to drag him out of his car and put a black bag over his head and disappear him somewhere and replace him with, you know, somebody more to their liking, a speaker. And now with, I don't know what they're going to have, 70 seats or something, 60 seat majority, that it's not going to be the case. He's going to be cruising. So I think that scenario is obviously not going to play out. I think obviously none of the Senate radicals, or you could even flip to the other side, John Fetterman, for instance, people were talking about, well, John Fetterman, if it's a 51-49 Senate, will he switch parties or will he use his leverage as the 51st vote to be, you know, the Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of this Congress? And now, you know, Abdul El-Sayed or Fetterman or Tallarico, none of these people will have a particular amount of leverage with a, you know, potentially five or six seat majority. So I think it really is just completely up for grabs on that side. Now, you hear the, I would say, more intelligent Democratic kind of operatives starting to talk about how, you know, we're not necessarily going to impeach Trump. We are not going to, you know, when we do oversight, let's try to focus on stuff that actually affects the American people, the corruption that could be traced to affecting the American people versus just, you know, pure retribution against Trump's family and stuff like that. So you hear rumblings from the, I would say, more shrewd operators who don't want to overstep as much on the Democratic side. But I mean, these people have gotten steamrolled. They've gotten completely blasted at every opportunity to stop the left-wing insurgency in their party. And so I have no faith that they're going to be able to hold up. And I think you very easily could see Democrats kind of go hog wild. And the interesting thing is that they obviously aren't going to be able to really pass any legislation on their own, at least into law, because Trump is still president. So in a way, Trump will have some say over this as well. He signaled that he might want to make a deal on immigration or some other subjects. I mean, that's hard for me to imagine, I feel like. But I mean, if Trump gets in a mood where he's like, yeah, come on in, Chuck Schumer, come on in, Hakeem, let's play ball, let's get something done, that could almost, in a way, act as a moderating force on what Democrats end up doing if they, you know, have a scenario where they could work with Trump. I don't feel like that's going to happen. That just seems too outlandish to me. But I've just taken Trump at his word. He said he was open to it. So I think it's really hard to say right now. The generic white guy, I will add on, generic white guy did great for Democrats on the ballot. If you just look at how those candidates performed. But the problem is that everybody did great. And it's a lot easier to make the case that you need to go with moderate generic white guy, you know, John Ossoff or something, if an Abdul El-Sayed loses or a James Tallarico loses, or some of these New York, I guess they were all in safe seats, but any of the more far left candidates actually lost. In reality, you're making the case of, well, you know, Abdul only won by a few points less than the moderate candidate won in Michigan for governor. It's like, that's just not, that's just not going to hit as hard. And so moderate white guy did great overall, relatively speaking, but I don't think that's going to be a very salient talking point to keep the barbarians at bay, so to speak. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. Let's, let's, let's jump back for a second, because, you know, I mean, by the time this airs, everyone will have likely had their fill, or a lot of people will have had their fill of the postmortems and the reactions. I think a lot of people will be already looking ahead to what comes next. People are already looking ahead to what comes next, which is why I think this is so important. But I do want to quickly, you know, go back to election night, election day, and, and get your, you know, sort of your reaction, because again, I don't think anyone by the time election day rolled around, I don't think anyone was predicting, you know, total Republican victory. Um, I certainly was bracing for what I've been calling a regular midterm loss. There were a few people predicting it, I should, we should say, but we don't have to name names. That's true. There were, there were. If you know, you know. If you know, you know, no one on, no one on this podcast was predicting a really good day for Republicans. Um, but were you surprised by just how bad of a day it was for Republicans? Were you surprised by some of these races and some of these margins? What, what were your, what were your main takeaways? Like what shocked you the most, or what do you think was the most notable thing? I don't know. Answer that however you'd like. So you alluded to the fact that I'm typically not much of an optimist and that's the case. Um, so I, but I'm kind of mad at myself because I, I tweeted out an official Senate prediction on the day, on the day before the election and my map was 51 49 for Democrats. And, but that was the optimistic version of my prediction on a gut level. I thought it was going to be probably worse than that, but I was trying to self-correct for my own pessimism. So, you know, I, I, I did pick Kansas going blue. I picked Texas going blue. Um, but I had Maine staying red and I had South Carolina staying red. Uh, and I think one more in there, but I, but I had a gut level. I really thought Susan Collins was going to somehow survive. I just, with no data or rationale to back it up, I was just like, she just doesn't lose. Like she's going to find a way somehow. So that one surprised me a little bit. Cause I thought if every other battleground down she'll somehow find a way she did not and south carolina i i'm from north carolina most of my family lives in south carolina i went to a family gathering a few weeks ago uh where a bunch of my family members from south carolina were there they're all maga through and through people rural voters uh died in the wool republicans and i asked them you guys pumped up to vote for darling graham and they said no she's awful but we are going to vote for her i guess because we have no other choice and i was like hmm that's an interesting data point uh they say they're going to vote for her but they sure don't sound excited to do it and so from that point on my gut was that south carolina was going to go uh but i did not have the stones to actually call it beforehand and so i'm mad at myself for that to stop winding around and get to your original question what surprised me what didn't i think i guess what surprised me to some degree is that there just wasn't any safe haven at all really um because you know you had before the election people talking about how you know the plains races iowa kansas could be more affected by tariffs because of the farming uh country there and uh new england republicans susan collins and some of these other you know gubernatorial candidates they which a couple of which did win actually i believe so that maybe that's a good example but um you know they have a different brand of republicanism up there they might do better or worse and you could kind of regionalize things a bit and point to well south carolina wouldn't be in trouble if not for who the candidate is and and kind of go case by case and as it turned out like none of that mattered it was just a complete wipeout and so that's kind of what surprised me is if you had told me before election day any of these individual results i probably could have conjured up a rationale for why it would have happened that was specific to that race well south carolina we don't have a very strong candidate in kansas our candidate didn't start campaigning until two weeks before the election and it's getting hit hard by tariffs in texas we have a weak candidate who who doesn't campaign very hard and can't raise money like you could have gone case by case and in reality it's just actually no everybody just loses everybody's dead nothing good happens and on a certain level like granular analysis it doesn't even make sense to do because it was a complete wipeout across the board that was what surprised me the most like you know mississippi i have no idea i can't tell you why mississippi is is at risk of being lost lost versus louisiana which was close or alabama which wasn't as close and like these other southern states i have no reason why it's just one of those years where everything crashes down yeah i i think that my my biggest shocker than i was probably that there were guys susan collins was huge again partially i mean there was yeah it was a little bit divorced from the data but it was also just that's what she does and it was hard to think that such a strange candidate as troy jackson would come back from such a weird false start in a messy primary and and and cruise to victory i also i said this on morning wire the other day uh this is obviously you know with all due respect to to congressman mike lawler who's a great guy uh mike lawler losing his race i don't think it's something it's not it's not really cracking the top 10 races of things that have republican uh consultants uh buzzing and freaking out but uh he's also just he was an incredibly popular incumbent uh you know very popular and he was a very popular incumbent and he was a very one of the more centrist bipartisan republicans and the fact that even he went down uh was was another one where when i saw that again just partially just because i'm from new york and and have family who lives in lawler's district so he looms largely in my mind i was like oh man that's that's pretty crazy but i want to wrap on this because one thing that i feel like we we all talked a lot about kind of right when the midterm race is really starting to pick up steam and then stopped talking about as you know things got more granular as we got closer but you did just kind of reference it is this was a very very national midterm election now all politics has been getting more nationalized for 30 years and you know the 22 midterms were more national than the 2018 midterms and you know blah blah blah blah blah uh you know so on and so forth but this really was one where from the beginning uh it wasn't just messaging right it wasn't just that obviously in every midterm election you have democrat candidates are going to say you know you're not just running against i'm not just running against my republican opponent i'm running against the republican party and vice versa but this year we really had you know donald trump said this is a national election the rnc had that had a midterm convention in dallas like everything was or trump about at the end as out of desperation said you know pretend that i'm on the ballot um do you think that i mean i i think we agree that the kind of nationalization of this midterm election certainly helped democrats i guess my question is do you think republicans are do you think republicans did this to themselves or do you think this was just inevitably how this cycle was going to play out given trump's popularity the war in iran the emerging democratic consensus around these radical candidates and just like you know kind of the way that politics and the media works these days i mean i think the question of did did republicans do this to themselves uh just depends on how far back do you want to go you know i mean i would argue that you did this to yourself when you know in the 2024 presidential primary you you chose to nominate trump and regardless of what things people like and don't like about trump you know his first term kind of ended uh rather unceremoniously let's say and now in his second term you know he's not in my opinion people here's the thing people say that trump has broken a lot of promises or that he pissed off the base because he did the iran war all these things whatever and yes and no i mean i think the iran war the fact that he campaigned on no foreign adventurism and then turned around and did that yes is is a pretty whether you want to call it a broken promise or not it is jarring to people and people did not like that but like the way trump's kind of conducted himself throughout the midterm cycle uh you know it's kind of who trump has always been you know he cares a lot about um his personal life and you know he cares a lot about his personal interests and his personal projects you know the ballroom stuff um he's always it's one interesting thing about you know the corruption stuff is that trump himself gets you know pretty frustrated when when people kind of trade on his name around him uh and and do corrupt things on his name to his credit he he doesn't like that uh but he's always kind of been surrounded unfortunately by a lot of people who are prone to doing that um and want to try to grift and you know i just think a lot of the bad things that he's done are the bad things that he's done are the bad things that he's done are the bad things that he's done are the bad things that he's done are the bad things that that kind of saddled republicans in this race was kind of you know you take the good with the bad with trump and he's got a lot of special political talents that are very unique to him and the ways that he can connect with people uh and voters and he's got a lot of flaws as well that that can rear their head and unfortunately for republicans in this cycle a lot of those flaws kind of happen to rear their head uh in short succession i think and so i mean republicans i don't think there's anything they could have done you know let's say from february on once the iran war started on uh i don't think there's like anything they could have done particularly differently to change the outcome i think i don't think them you know nationalizing the election and saying imagine trump is on the ballot i don't think that made a huge difference frankly i think people would vote like he was on the ballot either way democrats would that is um but i think you know when they they chose to go with trump uh term two they kind of signed up for you know yes we're going to get the border under control and we which people like and we're going to crack down on dei and some of these other social issue wins that have happened and these cultural wins that have happened but yes at the same time he also is prone to go off on some tangent thing that he gets obsessed with like the ballroom and the reflecting pool uh and he is prone to not be always the best team player and the most uh shrewd let's say political operator in primaries and who he chooses and those are the kinds of issues that it's harder to explain and maybe have seen coming but also like the guy does like blowing stuff up he blew up so much the first time around he always has hated the iranians like that arguably was kind of predictable too you know so i i think um he's always been extremely pro-israel for the people out there that are talking about you know trump is owned by bb and all this nonsense like trump's always been pro-israel and he's also broken with bb plenty of times what he shows to uh it's not shocking that he would have wanted to blow up some iranians and that and unfortunately he got a little out of his skis on that and here we are so you know i don't think republicans didn't did anything really that they could have uh fixed or done differently to salvage this uh i think it was you know they tied their fate to trump and uh sometimes that goes well and sometimes it doesn't go as well that's kind of where how we ended up here i think well this is certainly not the last that you and i will be discussing uh this this collection of subjects and certainly not the last that we'll be writing and analyzing it on the daily wire but that is all the time that we have for this latest uh special uh midterm election edition of behind the story dylan houseman daily wire managing editor my friend thank you for joining me thanks tim and thank you all for tuning in we will be back next week back to uh some of our usually scheduled programming as always i am tim rice thank you for listening to behind the story we'll see you next week this holiday all plans even unlimited are just 15 a month a holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song like All I Want. 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