REGARDING THE NEXT DEMOCRATIC HOUSE LEADER, THE GOP TALKING POINTS HAVE BEEN ISSUED

Hakeem Jeffries is likely to succeed Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader, and when I look at the Republican response, I notice that there appears to be an echo in here:

Meet Election Denier Hakeem Jeffries — the new leader of the House Democrats. pic.twitter.com/vCh19NsLQx

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 17, 2022

If you click on that Republican National Committee tweet, you can see tweets Jeffries sent during the Trump years. What Jeffries didn't do was raise an objection to any of Trump's electoral votes when the House counted them in January 2017. A few members of the House -- Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, James McGovern, Jamie Raskin, and Raúl Grijalva -- raised objections and were gaveled down by then-Vice President Joe Biden, because the objections couldn't lead to a vote without the concurrence of a senator who was also willing to object. No Democratic senators did so, so the objections were purely symbolic. Contrast this with the electoral vote count on January 6, 2021, when objections to Biden's Arizona and Pennsylvania electors were subject to a vote and 147 Republicans -- 139 members of the House and 8 members of the Senate -- voted to sustain the objections. (The Biden electors in several other states would have been voted on if Republicans hadn't gotten cold feet after the riot.)

Republicans like pointing out Democrats who called Trump an illegitimate president, but I don't know of any Democratic officeholder or official -- Jeffries or anyone else -- who ever questioned the fact that Trump legitimately received the votes he's said to have received in the states that gave him his 2016 Electoral College win. No Democrat thinks the votes were fake. No one thinks there were ballots surreptitiously printed up in some cabal headquarters. No one thinks that a secretary of state put a thumb on the scale to give Trump extra votes in a swing state. Democrats said the election distortion came from Vladimir Putin (and James Comey, and the email-obsessed mainstream media), not from some election officials allegedly conniving with shadowy ballot forgers.

But once again, Republicans are instantly in lockstep on messaging. Their ability to come together this way seems less fearsome after the midterms, but they at least know how to keep the base believing that Democrats are evil.

RON DeSANTIS WILL PROBABLY NOT BE CHRIS CHRISTIE, BUT CHRIS CHRISTIE USED TO BE RON DeSANTIS

Puck's Tina Nguyen thinks Ron DeSantis is at risk of becoming the new Chris Christie:

... one factor weighing heavily on Team DeSantis’s mind is the not illegitimate fear of becoming the next Chris Christie: a popular figure who put off the decision to run in 2012, and lost momentum by the time he entered the arena in 2016. But the people I spoke to unanimously agreed that while DeSantis is certainly running hot right now, there is no telling whether he might be the next Christie....

When Christie decided to run in the 2016, his problem wasn't that he'd "lost momentum" -- it was that he no longer had any credibility as a Republican presidential candidate because of the Bridgegate scandal, which broke in 2013. He was no longer the loudmouthed, lib-owning governor of his first term -- he was a guy who was being owned by the libs (although it was The Wall Street Journal that made Bridgegate a national story). He'd become a laughingstock. Once he started taking punches more than he was throwing them, he was no longer a right-wing media darling.

I love Digby, but I think her response to Nguyen is off base:

I do like the comparison the Christie in this piece and it may apply even more directly to DeSantis than she says. The ridiculous Martha’s Vineyard gambit is coming closer and closer to DeSantis’ office and it could end up being his “Bridgegate.” I realize that most Americans care much less about dehumanizing immigrants to own the libs than they do about a traffic jam, but this is one of those scandals that can leave a mark if it goes the right way. And, of course, they are both nasty bullies which everyone sees as the main Trumpist model but neither Christie nor DeSantis have that weird, eccentric X-factor that Trump has to make it somehow more entertaining than the usual bully. They both just come off as the kind of guys who like to torture small animals.

The Martha's Vineyard flight will never be Bridgegate. It isn't just that "most Americans care much less about dehumanizing immigrants to own the libs than they do about a traffic jam" -- it's that much of America thinks those flights were an excellent idea, and nobody felt that way about Bridgegate. Remember the Trump-supporting woman who said of Trump during the government shutdown in 2019, "He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting"? That's the key point. To Republican voters, DeSantis was hurting the people he needed to be hurting. Christie wasn't.

Christie escaped from Bridgegate unpunished; I assume nothing will happen to DeSantis as a result of that flight. But on Bridgegate, even past Christie voters agreed with his harshest critics, because deliberately creating a traffic jam during rush hour is an unforgivable transgression. Violating the human rights of immigrant asylum-seekers? Not so much.

And I don't believe that Christie lacked a Trumpian "X-factor." I used to lurk at Fox Nation when it was a Free Republic-style message board, in the days before the brand name was used for the Fox News streaming service. Every bullying moment by Christie was cause for adulation and swooning there. Just now I watched a couple of clips from that era and I can see what the fuss was about: Christie was a bullying asshole, but he was really good at it. He got laughs, the kind of laughter you get when you're humiliating someone and everyone wants to be on the side of the humiliator, not the humiliated. Here are a couple of clips, from 2010 and 2012.



It doesn't surprise me that moneymen like Ken Langone and Carl Icahn wanted Christie to run against Barack Obama in 2012, as did Henry Kissinger and Nancy Reagan.

I think Christie was better at verbal bullying than DeSantis -- but while Christie's bullying was usually about mundane issues (pensions, teachers' unions), DeSantis's attacks touch on issues of sex (LGBT youth) and race (immigration, critical race theory). For Republicans, these are much more primal.

It's possible that DeSantis will lose some of his power when he's just orating in Iowa and not actively punishing people in Florida. It's also possible that he'll put a foot wrong in Florida, or a past scandal will emerge, or Donald Trump will find a more effective insult than "Ron DeSanctimonious." But for now, sure, he seems like someone who likes to torture his victims -- but the voters he needs in 2024 think that's good, as long as the victims are trans or brown.

THE WITCH-HUNT HOUSE WILL BE REPUBLICAN UNPOPULARISM ON DISPLAY

The House of Representatives will be in Republican hands starting in January, and the majority intends to focus primarily on witch hunts -- er, investigations. It's possible that some of these will seem worthwhile to voters who don't watch Fox News six to fourteen hours a day, although you'd think that Republicans actually would have run on them in the midterms if that were the case.

I've been a critic of Democrats who say the Democratic Party needs to practice "popularism" -- identifying extremely popular policy ideas and stressing them to the exclusion of all else -- because it's always seemed to me that Republicans practice unpopularism and get away with it. In 2022, it could be argued, they advocated unpopular policies (attacking LGBT people, ranting endlessly about the 2020 election) and didn't get away with it, but they won the House, albeit barely, so they plan to do whatever they feel like doing.

Among the things they feel like doing -- or at least Jim Jordan feels like doing, Jordan being, apparently, the most powerful Republican in the House -- is this:

... Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a Trump loyalist and former leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus ... is poised to chair the powerful Judiciary Committee and will be itching to haul Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray to Capitol Hill.

In a letter to Garland this month, Jordan previewed some of his potential investigations next year, urging the Justice Department to preserve records related to its probe of the conservative group Project Veritas and how it obtained a copy of the diary of the president’s daughter Ashley Biden, the shuttering of the Justice Department’s Trump-era program targeting Chinese spying and the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August.

Really? Jordan plans to haul the attorney general and FBI director before his committee and take the side of the thoroughly unlikable James O'Keefe against the president's daughter, whose diary was stolen and wound up in O'Keefe's hands? He thinks O'Keefe is the sympathetic one in this case? And Donald Trump, the guy who's widely seen as having faceplanted in the midterms, and even in his presidential campaign announcement -- the guy even Republicans are sick of -- Jordan wants to rally to his defense?

And the shuttering of the program targeting Chinese spying seems quite defensible:

The China Initiative led to a series of prosecutions against researchers and academics, accusing them of failing to disclose dealings with China when submitting applications for grants. In one of the most recent case to fall apart, prosecutors last month dropped all charges against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist, Gang Chen.

“For 371 days, my family and I went through a living hell,” Chen wrote in an essay published by The Boston Globe, referring to the length of time the charges against him were pending....

Also in the crosshairs was Qing Wang, who spent two decades working at the Cleveland Clinic, where he was leading a research project into the genetic causes of heart disease, funded by more than $3.6 million in federal grants from the National Institutes of Health.

He was accused of failing to disclose that he was part of the "Thousand Talents" program, was dean of a Chinese university, and was receiving nearly half a million dollars in Chinese government grants for research that overlapped with his U.S.-funded work.

Prosecutors dropped the charges, but Wang is now in Shanghai, looking for work.

“They are creating such a fear in the scientific community,” he told NBC News last year. “I’m pretty sure many people will move back to China. So that’s actually they are doing a favor to the Chinese government.”

Americans are suspicious of China, but is this what's bothering them? Chinese scientists in America doing research on heart disease? Jordan intends to take his jacket off and yell at top government officials over that?

Also mentioned prominently in Jordan's letter to the attorney general is the Justice Department's response to reported assaults on right-wing provocateur/reporter Andy Ngo, which are extremely important to the Murdoch media and its audience, but not exactly a burning issue for most Americans.

And there's this:

In a closed-door meeting of Republicans on Monday, right-wing lawmakers including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia extracted a promise that their leaders would investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department for their treatment of defendants jailed in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

I've been telling you since a couple of weeks after the January 6 insurrection that Republicans are selling a big lie about who really controls the Capitol Police -- it's overseen by a board that includes the sergeants-at-arms of the House and the Senate, but they don't exercise day-to-day control, yet Republicans want us all to believe, and have persuaded most of their hardcore voters to believe, that Pelosi ran the Capitol Police all by herself at the time. And what Greene seems to be arguing now takes that big lie to a new level -- Pelosi is personally overseeing the jails where the insurrectionists are imprisoned, too? (Where does she find the time!)

This is absurd, and also -- after an election in which the most rabid election denialists running for statewide offices were defeated -- Republicans pursuing this angle will be backing denialist rioters.

Maybe they think this is their path to mass popularity, but I'm not seeing it.

THEY'RE SICK OF TRUMP. THEY'D STILL VOTE FOR HIM.

Yesterday, in anticipation of Donald Trump's announcement of his third presidential run, The New York Times published the transcript of a focus group featuring seventeen swing voters. Nine had voted for Trump in 2020, eight for Joe Biden. The Times promised a stinging rebuke of the former president:

These 17 Swing Voters Have a Very Clear Message for Donald Trump

When Donald Trump was president, you rarely heard Trump voters blame him when anything went wrong; it was the Democrats’ fault, usually, or the deep state or Robert Mueller or the F.B.I. or was due to any number of conspiracy theories. Which is why it was striking, during our focus group with 17 swing voters last Thursday, to hear so many of those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 say that they blamed him for Republican candidates’ performing poorly in last week’s midterms.

Turns out they were just getting started.

When we asked the group a moment later for a word or phrase to describe Mr. Trump, the once-foretold red wave was replaced by a wave of exhaustion, annoyance and frustration — a wave that only grew in strength when we asked them to react to Mr. Trump’s likely plans to announce a new bid for the presidency on Tuesday night.

“He ran for re-election and lost. He should go away,” said one Florida voter who backed Mr. Trump in 2020. An Arizona voter who also supported Mr. Trump said, “I feel like he'll be doing it for revenge. I'm not going to be voting for him this time.”

... When our focus group moderator Frank Luntz asked the participants if they agreed with the statement “Donald Trump’s record was good, but his personality is bad,” 14 of the 17 swing voters raised their hands.

Will Trump get many votes from these people in the 2024 primaries? It appears he won't. When Luntz asked the participants to choose between Trump and Ron DeSantis, fourteen of the seventeen chose DeSantis, including eight of the nine 2020 Trump voters.

So maybe Trump won't be able to beat DeSantis; I've believed for a while now that Trump is close to unbeatable within the GOP, but the campaign against him is so intense and the alternative so appealing to Republican and right-leaning independent voters that I've begun to suspect that Trump is in for a bad beating.

But even though these focus groupers prefer DeSantis, and even though they groan at the prospect of another Trump run, here's what happens when they're asked about a Trump-Biden rematch:

So here’s the Powerball question. The election is held today. It’s Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, and you can vote for either of them, or you can explicitly say, “I would not vote.” But you have to choose Trump, Biden or not vote. Who chooses Donald Trump? [Nine people raise a hand.] Who chooses Joe Biden? [Six people raise a hand.] Who will not vote? [Two people raise a hand.]

Trump gets exactly as many votes as he did from this group in 2020, and Biden gets two fewer.

Luntz asks the group about a three-way race involving Trump, Biden, and Joe Manchin. (Not Liz Cheney -- does Luntz know something we don't?) Trump and Manchin get six votes each; Biden gets two.

What this tells me is that the conventional wisdom, believed by Democrats and old-guard Republicans alike -- that a Trump victory in the primaries guarantees a Joe Biden win in November -- is a crock. The Trump voters aren't even hardcore Republicans, but they've internalized the idea that Biden is an abysmal president, probably at least in part because they're responding to GOP propaganda. Most of the Biden-supporting swing voters are ready to reject the president if there's an alternative, but most of the Trump-supporting voters, even though they say they're over him, stay with him despite being offered the alternative of the most right-wing Democrat in the Senate.

So I think Trump will be competitive if he survives the primaries. Biden can beat him -- a lot depends on what America looks like two years from now -- but Trump absolutely can win.

ADD GISELE FETTERMAN TO THE RIGHT'S LIST OF FEMALE OBJECTS OF HATE

I'm bored with Donald Trump, so instead of talking about last night's announcement, I'd like to talk about the lead story at FoxNews.com at 8:45 last night, just before Trump spoke.

Fetterman's wife hammered for photo of her posing by senator-elect’s office with husband partly cropped out

One user commented, 'First day for Senator-elect Gisele Fetterman'

Trump was about to announce, and it appeared that Russia had fired a missile into Poland, but that, in the judgment of the Fox News web team, was the most important story of the evening.

Fox really wants to turn Gisele Fetterman into a shrill succubus harpy, following the same playbook the GOP and the right-wing media use with Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxine Waters, and any other liberal or progressive woman who's not shy or apologetic. Here's the story:

Twitter critics slammed Gisele Barreto Fetterman for posting a photo of herself outside the senator-elect’s office with her husband, John Fetterman, partially cropped out of the image.

Users mocked the photo for seemingly depicting Mrs. Fetterman as having achieved her fifteen minutes of fame. Some insisted the photo was her leaning into the claim that she was the actual Senate candidate all along, thanks her husband’s cognitive issues caused by his stroke last May.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Fetterman posted the first image outside the senator-elect's new office. In the photo, which depicted the Democrat ditching his usual hoodie and shorts combo for a suit and tie, the couple stood next to the office placard, which read, "SENATOR-ELECT John Fetterman: Pennsylvania SD -B4OB."

The caption on Mrs. Fetterman’s photo read, "First Day," followed by three blue hearts.

Some conservatives on Twitter blasted the image, claiming it revealed how zealous Mrs. Fetterman was for her family to gain political power, even at the expense of her husband who’s dealing with health issues.

The possibility that John Fetterman wanted to stay in the race is never considered, of course.

So how horrible is this photo? You'd better sit down, and please ask the children to leave the room:

The actual Senator-elect is halfway cut out of the photo!!! She wanted this so badly for herself lol. I hope subjecting her husband and her marriage to this was worth her 15 minutes. pic.twitter.com/PWbgqsgGDe

— Tiana Lowe (@TianaTheFirst) November 15, 2022

That's it. It's an off-center photo of the two of them.

There's more:

Claremont Institute Fellow David Reaboi shared the image, along with another one that depicts her and her husband hanging out with other Pennsylvania senators, which she captioned, "DC Date night. PA Senators in the house."

In the latter photo, half of Mr. Fetterman’s head appeared cropped out of the image.

Reaboi remarked, "I’ve never seen passive aggressive/contemptuous photo crops like this before. It’s wild."

I’ve never seen passive aggressive/contemptuous photo crops like this before. It’s wild. pic.twitter.com/VdT9nvVkVW

— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) November 15, 2022

Okay, that's a bit odd. But it seems to be meant in jest. Here's an exchange from a 2019 interview with Gisele:

There are lots of photos on Twitter of you with the Lt. Governor in which his head does not show, something that seems to be a running joke between the two of you. Please tell us about that. It’s been going on for a few years and I still giggle every time. John is very tall and when cropping for Instagram photos, I would lose my shoes if I left his head in there. The shoes won and they continue to win, every time.

And it's her social media. His is full of pictures of him. So why not?

Fox is obsessed with the idea that Gisele is power-mad. It seized on a Rolling Stone reporter's reference to Gisele as the "de facto candidate" in a tweet that was later deleted, and on President Biden's remark that she's "gonna be a great, great lady in the Senate." (C'mon, man. Biden -- whose wife is the First Lady, and used to be the Second Lady -- was probably trying to imagine a similar term for a senator's wife.)

Gisele was an undocumented immigrant when she came to America as a child; she's now a U.S. citizen. She's also a progressive activist. All of this and more led to a rant by Fox's Jesse Watters on October 21:

I'm picking up vibes that [Gisele Fetterman is] the real candidate here. "If you could switch jobs with your husband?" I'm also getting the sense that this is all a part of Gisele's plan. Not sure if she hatched it during the yoga retreat in Brazil or in John's parents’ basement, but there's something quite calculating about Gisele, which would make her the perfect senator, and the media is reading from the same script. They're admitting Pennsylvanians aren't just voting for John Fetterman. It's actually a package deal by voting for Gisele too.

They're already selling her like she's the one on the ballot. The Washington Post is saying she's forging on through her husband's heated Senate race and even Rolling Stone is calling her an "unlikely political star." They say Fetterman only offers high-fives and fist-bumps to his supporters and repeats a gruff thank you, but it's Gisele staying just a pace ahead of her husband, who takes the questions, accepts the compliments and carries on the conversations.

There's more:

Isn't this the craziest season yet? So if John wins, Gisele's coming to D.C. Has the bisexual Brazilian immigrant been vetted? I doubt it. But that's the point. They'll vote with Schumer one hundred percent of the time and Gisele becomes the star. You'll see her on MSNBC every week, on the cover of Vogue. When Hunter finds out she's bisexual, he'll make a run. I'm sure the Chinese already have a folder on her. Who knows, the Chinese may already have hacked into his computer translator machine. I'm sure the FBI's all over that. She's definitely not a Brazilian Fang Fang. That would really make the next season interesting.

Is she bisexual? I can't find a primary source on this, but right-wingers are certain she is. I don't know how the Watters monologue arrived at the subject of Fang Fang, a Chinese spy who targeted Eric Swalwell and other California politicans nearly a decade ago, but I think it's just that right-wingers believe Chinese names are inherently hilarious. (It's not just Trump.)

Gisele Fetterman could be the next Democratic woman to appear in campaign ads and memes nationwide depicted as a flesh-eating zombie or the Wicked Witch of the West -- because that's all right-wingers have got.

IF YOU'RE GOING TO DUMP TRUMP, DUMP TRUMP

Vanity Fair's Eric Lutz has a point:

If the GOP wants to break up with Trump, they should should stop talking about it and actually do it. The party has squandered six years' worth of opportunities to ditch Donald Trump — including two impeachments and an insurrection — because they were too afraid of him and his base to take a firm stand. And now, as the former president prepares to launch a third bid for the White House, the Republican Party seems destined to repeat the same mistake.

Lutz quotes Mike Pence weak-tea response to a question from ABC's David Muir, in a discussion of January 6:

“Given all you witnessed in the Capitol that day, this is a pretty straightforward question, a yes or a no — do you believe that Donald Trump should ever be president again?” Muir asked.

“David, I think that’s up to the American people,” Pence replied, not giving a yes or a no, but assuring him that voters may have “better choices in the future.”

More:

Other Republicans have been similarly coy. “Looking forward is always a better campaign strategy,” West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito told Politico. “We ought to look forward.” “I’m sure I’ll support the nominee of the Republican Party,” Texas Senator John Cornyn added. “But I think there’s likely to be a competitive primary election.”

Typically, they'll trash Trump privately, but not in public. They want it leaked that they don't like him anyomre, but they still want the option of denying that they expressed that opinion. As an example, here's an Axios report:

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie received huge applause at an annual meeting of Republican governors Tuesday morning after blaming former President Trump for GOP failures in the last three elections, according to three sources in the room and a fourth person familiar with the speech.

There's no video, there's no audio, so anyone in attendance who gets attacked for this can just say the report is inaccurate, or claim not to have applauded. But at this point, with so many people reportedly souring on Trump, why not go public?

Another thing Republicans not named DeSantis can do, if they want to rid themselves of Trump, is stay the hell out of the presidential race. But the same Axios story tells us that Christie "is now considering his own 2024 presidential campaign." Why? In the most recent multi-candidate survey of the possible 2024 field, from Morning Consult, Chris Chritie gets 0% of the vote. (Okay, technically 0.475% of the vote -- 4 out of 842 respondents chose him -- but that rounds down to 0%.) The person who particularly needs to stay out is Mike Pence, who's likely to shave a few points off DeSantis's total. Throw in Christie and Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo and whoever else gets in the race and Trump might win it while the anti-Trump vote is split.

One thing I'm watching is the demographic difference between Trump and anti-Trump voters. According to that Morning Consult poll, Trump's support is now disproportionately non-college-educated and less wealthy:

I think prominent Republicans should publicly kick Trump to the curb, but it's possible that doing so would just make those Republicans look like elitist Establishment swamp dwellers to Trump's base.

Still, it's a good time to publicly jump ship. And they might as well just clear the field for DeSantis as his lone competitor. But they won't.

KARI LAKE, SUPERSTAR LOSER

A week before Election Day, The Atlantic published a sneering story by Jacob Stern headlined "Democrats Keep Falling for 'Superstar Losers.'" The main examples were Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams.

The two Democrats are among the country’s best-known political figures, better known than almost any sitting governor or U.S. senator. And they have become so well known not by winning big elections but by losing them....

The country’s electoral history is littered with superstar losers of one sort or another. Sarah Palin parlayed a vice-presidential nomination into a political-commentary gig, a book deal, and a series of short-lived reality-TV ventures. The landslide defeats that Barry Goldwater and George McGovern suffered made them into ideological icons. I’m talking about something a little more specific: candidates who become national stars in the course of losing a state-level race. There have been far fewer of these.

... never before has such small-scale loserdom so often been sufficient to achieve such large-scale stardom. Apart from Abrams and O’Rourke, there have also been other examples in recent years. Jaime Harrison made an unsuccessful bid for the DNC chairmanship, then an unsuccessful bid to unseat Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, and then a second bid, this time successful, for the DNC chairmanship. MJ Hegar, a Texas Democrat, lost a close House race in 2018, then a not-so-close Texas Senate race in 2020. Amy McGrath likewise used a close loss for a House seat, hers in Kentucky, to launch a Senate campaign against Mitch McConnell that ended in a 20-point loss. This, it seems, is the golden age of the superstar loser.

The implication here is that Democrats are uniquely inclined to elevate losers to tragic-hero status -- even though the last three examples are politicians who were widely known when they were running and are now remembered only by state residents and serious politics junkies.

It's amusing to read this today, the day the ultimate superstar loser, Donald Trump, has chosen to announce his third run for the presidency, and the publication date of a memoir by Trump's loser running mate, Mike Pence. Okay, they didn't become superstar losers by losing statewide races -- but this year's top superstar loser according to that criterion is Kari Lake, whose defeat in the Arizona governor's race was called last night by major news organizations. Everyone knows she's not going away. She'll be all over right-wing media in the near future.

Oh, and another statewide loser, failed New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, is being encouraged to run for chair of the Republican National Committee by prominent members of the GOP. If we call DNC chair Jaime Harrison a superstar loser, I guess Zeldin will be one as well.

In the GOP, losers become superstars all the time. Not just Trump and Sarah Palin -- remember the 2012 GOP presidential primaries, when the last two challengers standing against Mitt Romney (a former failed presidential candidate) were Newt Gingrich (a disgraced ex-Speaker of the House) and Rick Santorum (who lost his last Senate race by 17 points)?

But what's remarkable in the GOP is that you can become a national right-wing celebrity while losing a local race. Look at Allen West, the one-term congressman and war criminal. After he lost his reelection bid, he got two votes for Speaker of the House (from Louie Gohmert and Paul Broun), even though he was no longer in the House. He soon became a Fox commentator, then chairman of the Texas Republican Party (even though he was from Florida). He has nearly 800,000 Twitter followers a decade after he left Congress.

I could name more: Laura Loomer (a self-promoting provocateur who's lost two House races so far); Michele Fiore (a Las Vegas city councilor who's an ally of Cliven Bundy and who's run unsuccessfully for Congress twice and, this year, for Nevada state treasurer (a race she almost won) ; and Tina Forte, a loudmouth Fox favorite and January 6 attendee who just lost to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by 44 points.

Democrats have a few of those -- for instance, Marcus Flowers, who lost to Marjorie Taylor Greene by 31 points after raising more $15 million (far more than Adam Frisch, who's in a photo finish with Lauren Boebert). But the point is that this isn't exclusively a Democratic phenomenon. Lake's inevitable right-wing stardom will soon demonstrate that.

PRO-DeSANTIS REPUBLICANS WOULD REALLY LIKE TO USE THE BUSH 2000 PLAYBOOK

National Review's Jim Geraghty has taken to the pages of The Washington Post to tell Democrats and independents that we should be happy if Ron DeSantis wins the 2024 Republican presidential nomination:

If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis runs for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination ... plenty of Americans across the partisan divide would have good reason to root for him to win the nomination....

You might vehemently disagree with much of what he says and does. You might even hate the guy.

But DeSantis would be a Republican nominee without Donald Trump’s worst and most destructive impulses and habits. The governor certainly doesn’t shy from a scrap, but he fights for policies, not to prosecute vendettas. Having a normal-range Republican leader on the national stage would be a beneficial reset for the entire country....

If DeSantis the nominee became president, Democrats and Republicans would no doubt disagree just as strongly as before. But there would be one big difference: They’d spend more time arguing about policy and what the federal government ought to do, and less about whatever crazy thing Trump said or did that day.

Independents and centrists might find themselves disappointed or irked with a President DeSantis. But they’d be irked within normal parameters, not fearing that he’d burn the country down in a fit of rage because he thinks someone wasn’t being fair to him....

DeSantis, for all his pugnaciousness, colors inside the lines, operating within the traditionally defined powers of his office and the constitutional framework of government....

Every now and then, DeSantis takes the not-so-conservative path when it’s popular with his constituents. This doesn’t mean liberals will embrace him; it’s just an observation that a DeSantis presidency wouldn’t mean enduring four years of an inflexible, hardcore conservative. There would be occasional areas of agreement....

Yes, he’s conservative and can be combative. But he takes his job seriously, he picks his battles and he focuses on results. In other words, he’s not crazy — in fact, he’s relatively normal.

Do you remember the 2000 presidential campaign? Republicans had lost two elections in a row and didn't want to lose a third. They knew what liberals and moderates disliked about their party: It was full of sanctimonious religious fanatics and it was heartless toward society's have-nots.

So the party settled on a candidate, George W. Bush, and sold him with a message aimed at non-Republicans: He's a member of the religious right, but he's a nice one. He believes in something called "compassionate conservatism." And he works across the aisle as governor of Texas! We swear he'll do that as president, too!

They knew he'd do nothing to displease Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed. They knew he wanted to cut rich people's taxes and signifcantly reduce regulations. They knew he was a mainstream Republican on foreign policy, which meant that hawks and neoconservatives would have no complaints if he won. But that's not how they sold him. They sold him (to us) as a guy who was ideologically indistinguishable from his Democratic opponent.

It worked. He won.

Even though Geraghty touts increases in teacher salaries and spending on the environment in DeSantis's first term, he knows he can't sell the governor as a moderate. So here's the pitch: You want normal? DeSantis is normal. You want constitutional? DeSantis won't try to do things that aren't constititutional.

Of course, DeSantis is the guy who, before he was sworn in for his first term, asked for an exhaustive list of gubernatorial powers, so he'd know everything he was empowered to do unilaterally. As president, he'd have a Republican Supreme Court that would no doubt revert to the "unitary executive" theory, saying, in effect, You have the right to do nearly anything you want to do unilaterally. And while DeSantis doesn't spend his days pursuing personal vendettas the way Trump does, he spends them pursuing vendettas that enhance his standing with angry right-wingers and Fox News. How is that better?

But they want us to think he's a Republican without the bad stuff. Some people might buy it.

EZRA KLEIN DOESN'T UNDERSTAND REPUBLICAN FANDOM

On his podcast last week, Ezra Klein said this about the 2024 Republican presidential contest:

... I do think it’s a mistake right now that the narrative in the press is thinking about 2024 as this two man race, because the nature of Trump and DeSantis both being in the game, and possibly destroying each other like Godzilla and Mothra, is that it creates space for other candidates to emerge. It makes for a more multi-candidate race than it otherwise would be.

If it was just Donald Trump or it was just Ron DeSantis, they would have that lane, like, that main lane of the Republican Party right now, that post-Trump lane to themselves. But it won’t be. And they may well split that lane. And that might create space for a Nikki Haley, a Glenn Youngkin, a Tim Scott, somebody we’re not thinking of right now, to win in New Hampshire. And all of a sudden, a snowball effect happens.

And Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are doing to each other what Chris Christie and Marco Rubio did to each other — what Chris Christie did to Marco Rubio. And so things could just go in very weird ways. And I just — I would really urge people to not get too caught up in just, like, the idea that only DeSantis and Trump — Mike Pence might run. It’s going to be very weird in 2024.

This is not how fandom rivalries work.

Within the Republican Party, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis aren't Chris Christie and Marco Rubio. They're the Beatles and the Stones. They're Prince and Michael Jackson. They're Star Trek and Star Wars, or Marvel and DC.

In rivalries like that, the result is never mutual destruction. Partly that's because the rivalries are usually artificial -- many people are fans of both. But mostly it's because the two rivals are just so damn popular. Some fans disdain one or the other, but nobody wants to be denied both.

Pence, Youngkin, and Haley are like Gerry and the Pacemakers relative to the Beatles and the Stones. No one hated the Beatles and the Stones and wanted Gerry and the Pacemakers to be the dominant group of the 1960s. Or maybe they're Jack Jones, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gorme: perfectly fine, but only by the standards of an obsolete culture.

There's only one "lane" in the GOP that runs all the way to the finish line: the I Hate Liberals And "The Establishment" With Every Fiber Of My Being And I Devote All My Waking Hours To Owning Them lane. DeSantis has the capacity to compete in this lane, so it's merely a question of whether Trump can still keep up. But none of the people Klein mentions can compete. They are the Establishment. Most Republican voters see all of them as RINOs.

The dominant message in the Republican Party is always "no compromise." Here's Rick Scott:

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) on Sunday said Senate GOP leadership “caved” to Democrats on a number of legislative bills over the past year, citing that as one reason Republicans did not perform as well as projected in the midterm elections.

Scott, the chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that Republicans “caved in on the debt ceiling, caved in on a gun bill, caved in on a fake infrastructure bill.”

“We [made] it difficult for our candidates,” the senator said. “We can’t do that.”

That's always -- by far -- the most popular message among Republican voters: Democrats are evil. The main job of the Republican Party is to prevent Democrats from exercising power, ever. Trump and DeSantis can plausibly deliver that message. They won't be defeated by anyone who can't.

DEMOCRATS WIN THE SENATE -- SO WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN GEORGIA?

Election analysts have called the Nevada Senate race for Catherine Cortez Masto, which gives Democrats fifty seats and continued control of the Senate. One contest remains: the Georgia runoff between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, who were essentially tied, at just under 50%, after Tuesday's voting.

Who has the advantage in the runoff? My first thought was that Democrats will be less motivated now that they know their party has Senate control. Because the Republican red wave never happened, it will be hard to turn out moderates and occasional voters with the argument that democracy is on the line. Republicans will want a little revenge after being shellacked, so that might motivate them to turn out.

Or is it the other way around? Will Republicans be too demoralized to care about the outcome? Will politically engaged Republicans be too angry about the party's midterm failures to show up again? That's possible. And the Georgia Democratic Party is good at turnout (though not good enough to prevent total control of state government by the GOP).

One argument I'm seeing is that Republicans won't be motivated to turn out for Walker because he's a flawed candidate. I think that's projecting our view of Walker onto GOP voters. In Marist's final poll of the race, which accurately predicted that the two candidates would end up in a tie, Walker had a 40% favorable rating and a 48% unfavorable rating -- not great, but not much worse than Warnock's 46%/45% rating. Among likely voters, Walker's numbers were 46%/47%. (Warnock's were 49%/47%.) Among Republicans, Walker had a 79% favorable rating -- notably lower than Warnock's 93% rating among Democrats, but still overwhelmingly positive.

Look at the way Republican voters have always viewed Trump. They haven't seen him as morally flawed or unintelligent or ineffective. Maybe that's changing now, but we saw in the 2016 that scandal didn't hurt him -- particularly with evangelical Christian voters. It's as if those voters decide who's a Christian and then dismiss any words or deeds that don't seem consistent with Christianity as noise rather than data. I think they feel this way about Walker, too -- when they're told about sins, they simply assume he's repented (or Trump has repented) and God has forgiven him. And besides, Democrats are evil!

So I worry about Democratic motivation with less on the line than there was in the January 2021 Senate runoffs, though Democrats might be eager to give the party a cushion. And I agree that Republicans might be too angry at their own party to vote -- but they're usually too angry at Democrats not to vote. So I'd say the race is a tossup.

The person who could help decide this race is Rupert Murdoch. We know he wants to crush Donald Trump and anoint Ron DeSantis as the 2024 presidential nominee. With that goal in mind, he should be using Fox News and his other media properties to help defeat Herschel Walker. The mainstream and Murdoch media have settled on a midterm narrative that says Trumpism hurt the party -- voters rejected election denialists (even though plenty of denialists won downballot races) and voters also rejected Trump's handpicked candidates. A Warnock win wouldn't change the balance of power, while a Walker win would undermine the argument that it's bad for the GOP to leave the job of candidate selection to Trump.

If I were Murdoch, I'd order a ban on Walker cheerleading by Fox's on-air personalities, particularly Walker's biggest media backer, Sean Hannity. I'd demand reports on Walker's scandals.

But I doubt Fox will do that. The long-term goal is Trump's downfall, but the short-term goal is always giving the rabid base what it wants. So Fox will root for Waker to win. And, regrettably, he still might.

FINAL THOUGHT: I agree with the conventional wisdom about Trump announcing a presidential run before the Georgia runoff: It would help Warnock. We'll see whether Trump can be talked into waiting.

THE TOP REPUBLICAN SCAPEGOAT MIGHT BE McCONNELL, NOT TRUMP

The mainstream media is telling us that Republicans are blaming Donald Trump for the party's midterm losses, particularly in the Senate. But I'm seeing something different.

Here's Blake Masters, who's on his way to a defeat in the Arizona Senate race:

Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters (R) slammed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday night, saying that the top Republican should have directed more campaign spending his way to take on Sen. Mark Kelly (D) in the 2022 midterms....

During an interview with Fox News, Masters told host Tucker Carlson that if a McConnell-aligned super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, had spent more money into the Arizona Senate race, the contest would be over by now.

“The people who control the purse strings, Senate Leadership Fund, Mitch McConnell — McConnell decided to spend millions of dollars attacking a fellow Republican in Alaska instead of helping me defeat Senator Mark Kelly,” an animated Masters said.

McConnell's PAC spent money to help reelect Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, whose main rival is another Republican, Trumpist nutjob Kelly Tshibaka.

Trump himself complained about this last month. It's a gripe that's being echoed by a number of Republican thought leaders:

.@LeaderMcConnell has got to go! Here is the breakdown of money spent in some battleground senate seats:

AZ - Masters $9m vs Kelly $73m
GA - Walker $32m vs Warnock $76m
NV - Laxalt $12m vs Cortes $47m
NH - Bolduc $2m vs Hassan $36m

Americans deserve an America First Leader!

— Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) November 10, 2022

There's plenty of blame and Monday morning quarterbacking to go around for this midterm- but Mitch McConnell pulling millions from Blake Masters? Spending millions *against* Tshibaka? Inexcusable. No defense of it is even possible.

Mitch has gotta go.

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) November 11, 2022

And there's this:

Sen. Marco Rubio is calling for Senate Republicans to delay their leadership elections, as more members of the party's conference in the Senate appear to be bucking Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

"The Senate GOP leadership vote next week should be postponed," Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted Friday....

Multiple GOP Senate candidates, including Sen.-elect Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., have said they would not support McConnell for party leader for the next Congress.

Schmitt's fellow Missourian, GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, has also attacked McConnell in recent weeks. He supported Rubio's call for a delay in leadership elections in a tweet....

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., also backed up Rubio, tweeting, "Second," in response to his post.

Josh Marshall thinks this is largely a battle between pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces. In a series of tweets, Marshall writes:

In elite GOP circles yr seeing some effort to put the blame on Trump. But there's a lot more coalescing around blaming McConnell and most of that is being organized, stirred up by the Trump backers who see a McConnell/DeSantis axis trying to take out the Leader.

(By "the Leader," Marshall means the Dear Leader, Donald Trump, not Minority Leader McConnell.)

As Steve Benen noted yesterday, quite a few Republican senators and Senate candidates were expressing resistance to McConnell even before the election -- not just Hawley and Schmitt, but also J.D. Vance and the ultimate Trump loyalist, Lindsey Graham. A Washington Post story about Graham from January carried a headline that made clear what he thinks: "Graham Says He Won’t Support McConnell for GOP Leader Unless He Has ‘Working Relationship’ with Trump."

Trump has expressed support for replacing McConnell as the Senate's GOP leader with Rick Scott. However, Politico reports that Scott was planning to run against McConnell for the leadership job but has now decided not to. So McConnell might not face a real challenge.

But there's anger and backbiting. Trump isn't the only target of GOP anger, and he might not be the party's main scapegoat. And it might all be an early battle in the Trump-DeSantis war.

SEAN PATRICK MALONEY IS RIGHT ABOUT THE MURDOCH "BLAST RADIUS"

I'm not the biggest fan of Sean Patrick Maloney, the center-leaning chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, whose job it was to help get House Democrats reelected but who lost his own race this year. Maloney is probably right, though, about why he lost his race, and why other New York Democrats, including Governor Kathy Hochul, lost or struggled to win, while Democrats elsewhere in the country exceeded expectations:

... look, voters in New York have been told by the News Corporation machine, principally The New York Post, that crime is the No. 1 issue. In the suburbs, it certainly had an effect. In my own race, of course, $10 million was spent echoing those themes. But it may not just be that. I don’t know.

... New York is home to the fiercest outlet in the News Corporation fear machine. In fairness to the governor, she and the rest of us have to contend with the hysteria of The New York Post and of Fox News combined. But if you look at her own race, they clearly understood they had to answer the charges and began to do so late.

We just didn’t see this problem in Pennsylvania or Michigan, or Minnesota, or Wisconsin, where Democratic statewide candidates performed very well and, of course, had positive effects down ballot.

That's from a New York Times interview. There's also this, in a separate Times story:

... the narrative that voters had largely rejected candidates aligned with Mr. Trump and his rejection of the 2020 election was shattered in New York....

Republicans flipped four House seats held by Democrats, and some of the incoming congressmen have embraced hard-right positions....

Republicans’ major gains came in Nassau County, the portion of Long Island closest to New York City. Voters there have chosen Democrats in every presidential election since 1992, and Mr. Biden won the county by 9.5 percentage points over Mr. Trump.

In the Third District in Nassau, the Democratic candidate, Robert Zimmerman, focused his campaign on the avid support that his Republican opponent, George Santos, gave to Mr. Trump. He pointed in particular to Mr. Santos’s presence in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.

Voters still sided with Mr. Santos, a businessman who was leading Mr. Zimmerman by more than eight percentage points as of Thursday....

Further east, in a district that leans more conservative, Nicholas LaLota, the chief of staff for the Suffolk County Legislature, won the election for the First Congressional District.

Mr. LaLota’s victory followed a primary in which he trumpeted being a “trusted Trump conservative.”

And also:

...but the Dem incumbents in South Jersey did not.

In short, all Dems in NYS underperformed. But so did CT/NJ Dems in the NYC media market

Why?

A guess: the messaging on crime from Adams & Zeldin hurt Dems not just within NYS but everywhere in the NYC media market. /2

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 11, 2022

*[Sean Patrick Maloney underperformed Biden by 11 points. AOC underperformed Biden by 13 points] /3

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 11, 2022

The Murdoch message that crime is worse than ever -- which is laughable to those of us who accurately remember what the city was like from the 1970s through the early 1990s -- was spread by two Murdoch outlets, one of which, the Post, is read by people who aren't necessarily right-wing. It was spread by the nominally Democratic mayor of the city, Eric Adams, who was a city cop when crime was worse and should know better. And crime has always been the main focus of local TV news, even on stations that don't have a political agenda.

It's not just the right's anti-Democratic messaging, of course. The New York Democratic Party has grown complacent and wasn't ready for hard-fought race. The top public official in the state party, Governor Hochul, was an accidental governor and isn't the most compelling political motivator. And yes, there have been some unsettling and baroque crimes in the city recently (though there were unsettling crimes even in the lowest-crime years).

The Murdoch family set out to blow up the election with crime fearmongering, and there wasn't much damage except right here, where the bomb went off.

IS IT CRINGE TO SAVE AMERICA?

A quote from John Ganz is making the rounds:

In those nearly psychotic moments after election day in 2016, I thought the answer to Trump was to fully embrace dangerously corny levels of American liberal patriotism and Aaron-Sorkinism to create a kind of left-Reaganism.... That was basically what #Resistance liberalism turned out to be. In 2020, cringe won. In 2022, it has won again. It’s easy to roll ones one’s eyes at the “battle for the soul of America” stuff and assume voters care more about their pocketbooks, but there’s a good reason Biden kicked off his campaign in Charlotesville. Now waving the Bloody Shirt of January 6th apparently still works. And truly thank God for that. If this stuff had no appeal to voters and they lost any kind of patriotic hopes for the country, we’d be in really bad shape.

I think Ganz is right about "liberal patriotism." For years right-wingers have claimed a monopoly on patriotism, but one side has genuinely given up on democracy, American institutions, and the country itself, and it's their side, not ours.

This relates to something Ross Douthat wrote just before the election:

One of the master keys to understanding our era is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses. The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

I don't agree with Douthat on the specifics here (it's the right that's banning library books) -- but yeah, we've become sort of conservative. We want to conserve some American institutions and structures. On the other side is this guy:

White nationalist Nick Fuentes admits the election proves that "we are in the minority" and "that's why we need a dictatorship": "We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe." https://t.co/D0xIWZZcV9 pic.twitter.com/odTVEzcrKi

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 10, 2022

“When you look at these things like abortion, it’s popular,” Fuentes [said]. “And you can thank the Jewish media for that. Abortion is popular, sodomy is popular, being gay is popular, being a feminist is popular, sex out of wedlock is popular, contraceptives—it’s all popular. That’s not to say it’s good. That’s not to say I like that. Popular means that people support it, which they do. It sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need a dictatorship. That’s unironically why we need to get rid of all that. We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules and reshape the society.”

We need a dictatorship what Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, and their favorite political philosopher, Curtis Yarvin, believe. It's an evolution of the mindset that's driven the right-wing media and right-wing efforts to undermine democracy for years. In contrast to them, we're the conservatives and the patriots.

Ganz says that unironic expressions of liberal patriotism are "cringe." An older generation would have said "uncool." Who determines what's cool? People said to have cultural sophistication of some kind.

The right thinks all liberals are cultural sophisticates. The right smears us all as nose-in-the-air elitists who look down on the plainspoken right-wing Volk.

But many liberals are regular people. They're not dictators of cool. They respond to unironic talk about preserving America that sophisticates think is corny. They think you can be as decent American if you're non-white or gay or trans, if you're an immigrant seeking asylum, if you're pregnant and need an abortion, if you're underpaid at a crap job, if you have crushing student loans, if you think Elon Musk should be taxed more. They believe all this and they're normies. They're hard to distinguish from the Trumpers who, according to so many sophisticates, are the only true Americans.

The gay rights movement used to say, "We are everywhere." Well, liberals are everywhere, too. Who knew?

TWO, THREE, MANY DeSANTISES: HOW REPUBLICANS WILL TRY TO REFRESH THE BRAND

Until I read Michelle Goldberg's column today, I didn't realize that the Democrat who's neck-and-neck with Lauren Boebert in her reelection bid made a personal story about abortion a key part of his campaign pitch:

[Boebert's] challenger, the Democrat Adam Frisch, is the son of an OB-GYN who performed abortions; Frisch told me he remembers his dad receiving bomb threats. “That whole issue has been a very personal conversation, and it certainly got as much applause as anything when I was going around on my tour,” he said on Wednesday morning.

Tom Bonier, who spent the last days of the campaign touting positive Democratic polling and early voting numbers -- messages that were derided as "hopium," but that turned out to be accurate -- speculated to Goldberg that the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade focused many voters' minds on the GOP's overall extremism.

When it comes to reproductive choice, Republicans are simply out of touch with the values of a significant part of the electorate. “I do think there is a broader narrative of Republican extremism that Dobbs really connected the dots on,” Bonier said.

Although they couldn't undo all the damage, Republicans got this, as a Washington Post story on the GOP campaign notes:

Republicans responded with a two-front approach. Leaders like Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee chairwoman, encouraged candidates to quickly “move on” from abortion to other issues that were better for Republicans. Republican leaders begged candidates to avoid rigorous antiabortion positions without exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. “Stakeout common ground with a majority of Americans who support exceptions,” read a September memo from the Republican National Committee, a sentiment Trump echoed at his rallies.

The party then focused on giving the nation something else to talk about.

"Something else to talk about" meant inflation and -- when their focus groups told them it was on voters' minds -- crime. That worked for many of them.

And now we turn to the man every Republican thinks has it all figured out, Ron DeSantis. He largely avoided talking about abortion. He also avoided election-denialist talk, although he campaigned for quite a few denialists. Between now and 2024, I think the party will try to keep a lid on talk of sweeping abortion bans and, as much as possible, attacks on the electoral process. (Anger on the latter subject will be very difficult to contain, of course.)

But they'll also follow DeSantis's lead on other culture-war issues. They'll conclude that fearmongering about critical race thory worked in his race and in Glenn Youngkin's race in 2021, so it must be a good national issue. They'll keep attacking trans people and LGBTQ books in school libraries, because DeSantis does. Maybe they'll try to squeeze a few more drops of outrage out of the pandemic, though I don't know how that can continue to be an issue by 2024, which will be years after the last few restrictions disappeared in most of America.

Anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ extremism are opportunities for Democrats to focus 2024 voters on the "broader narrative of Republican extremism," but they require Democrats to try to engender empathy in white moderate voters in a way that the abortion issue doesn't. So the extremism will be harder -- but not impossible -- to rally the liberal and moderate electorate around.

Maybe the cruelty of DeSantis's extremism (and the extremism of other comfortably elected Republican governors) will reach new depths -- I hope not, but if it does, perhaps it will be easier to raise the alarm among non-GOP voters. Maybe the face of the GOP will be not DeSantis but Jim Jordan and a series of endless House witch hunts (along with a few moments of global-economy-threatening budget brinkmanship). And maybe the widely disliked Trump will win back the spotlight, or never really cede it to DeSantis or congressional Republicans.

But the GOP plan will be to downplay abortion (and, if possible, the Big Lie) while playing up DeSantis's cultural obsessions. Be ready for this. The 2024 election won't be fought over the same set of issues as the 2022 election.

DID RON DeSANTIS REALLY CLINCH THE 2024 REPUBLICAN NOMINATION YESTERDAY?

After yesterday's midterms, pundits rapidly settled on some conventional wisdom about the two top candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination: Donald Trump screwed the pooch and Ron DeSantis became the favorite. Jonathan Chait writes:

The midterm election could not have set up a more favorable dynamic for the Florida governor. His state, which reported its vote early, delivered a huge victory for Republicans. And then the party proceeded to underperform almost everywhere else, leaving Florida as an outlier.

The Republican-aligned media, which has spent the past year trumpeting DeSantis as the party’s future, has devoted itself to this message almost exclusively since last night. Here is a typical example of the conservative media’s coverage of the elections:

Trump blasted across media spectrum over Republicans' midterms performance: 'Biggest loser tonight' https://t.co/jWOefvZetW

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 9, 2022

Chait goes on to quote praise for DeSantis's victory from National Review and even from the extremely Trumpy American Greatness.

But will Republican voters hold yesterday's results against Trump? Remember, they're unlikely to think Trump did a bad job of candidate selection. They're not wild about Dr. Oz, but they like Herschel Walker and Doug Mastriano and Don Bolduc, and they really like Kari Lake. They don't think Trump is responsible for poor Republican showings in those races. They think Democrats did well because they cheated in all of them (without, somehow, cheating in Florida or Ohio or North Carolina).

While Republican voters love Trump for many things, they've never really cared that he's not very good at getting other people elected. Remember the Alabama Senate special election in 2017, when Trump endorsed two losers, Luther Strange in the primary and Roy Moore in the general election? His fans didn't care. That's not his job, as far as they're concerned -- they think his job is to stand on a balcony and run everything himself.

But some GOP voters will undoubtedly be impressed with the argument that DeSantis's huge victory means that he stands a better chance of winning the presidency in 2024. However, there's no evidence that DeSantis's act appeals to voters outside his state, apart from big consumers of right-wing media, who'll vote for anyone the Republicans put up.

Remember DeSantis's big summer campaign swing?

As he aims to wrest control of the conservative movement, Mr. DeSantis is appearing with some of its highest-profile and most incendiary figures.... His rallies on Friday for [Doug] Mastriano and J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, came five days after an event for Kari Lake, the G.O.P. pick for governor of Arizona, and Blake Masters, the nominee for Senate there.

Mastriano lost. Masters is losing. Lake is still trailing. Vance won, but he ran 10 points behind his state's Republican governor.

DeSantis endorsed Joe O'Dea in the Colorado Senate race. He lost. DeSantis endorsed Paul LePage in the Maine governor's race. He lost. DeSantis endorsed Don Bolduc in the New Hampshire Senate race. He lost. DeSantis endorsed Derek Schmidt in the Kansas governor's race. He lost. There's no evidence that a DeSantis endorsement is good for a candidate in another state -- in fact, it's possible that DeSantis's support motivated politically engaged Democrats to turn out for his candidates' opponents.

Trump's candidates struggled, but Vance did manage to win, and Lake and Walker still might. Ultimately, I don't either one should be bragging about having broad national appeal outside the base.

DeSantis won big in his own race, but I'm not sure how much that's to his credit. I'd say that Florida has gone Republican gradually and then suddenly the way California went from being a Bush state in 1988 to being a state that has cast 60% of its vote for the Democrat in every presidential election since 2008 -- it's a political evolution that's bigger than one politician. DeSantis is also blessed with a hapless Florida Democratic Party that ran an uninspiring retread against him this year. Electorally, DeSantis reminds me of Richard Nixon, who barely won the popular vote in 1968 (as did DeSantis in 2018) and then won a landslide four years later, in part because of weak opposition.

And in some ways DeSantis reminds me of former New York mayor Ed Koch. Like Koch, he's assertive to the point of obnoxiousness. Both men were also boosters -- Koch was a cheerleader for the city the way DeSantis is a cheerleader for Florida, or at least for his version of it. Some people talked about Koch as a possible president in the 1980s, but that was never going to happen. DeSantis has a better chance, obviously, but I don't think anyone should assume he's the front-runner for the nomination now.

DEMOCRATS HOLD OFF THE RED WAVE -- AND THE NEW YORK TIMES

You've seen the news: Fetterman wins. Hochul wins. Kari Lake and Lauren Boebert trail. The red wave never happened. There are disappointments, the most obvious being the likelihood -- but still not certainty! -- that Republicans will take the House. Florida and Texas just seem redder and redder. Ron Johnson seems bulletproof. Democrats need to eke out wins in Nevada and hang on in Arizona to be sure of holding the Senate. (Raphael Warnock has a slight lead in Georgia, but -- as I told you -- Herschel Walker proved to be a strong candidate, in spite of or perhaps because of his political ignorance.)

But in race after race, the Democrats defeated Fox News, right-wing billionaires ... and The New York Times, which spent the week before the election heralding the party's inevitable doom. You weren't just imagining that. It was bad. Here's a sample of Times headlines:

* November 1:

Top Democrats Question Their Party’s Strategy as Midterm Worries Grow

Leading lawmakers and strategists are openly doubting the party’s kitchen-sink approach, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.

* November 3:

Democrats Twist and Turn on Immigration as Republicans Attack in Waves

Democratic candidates are either avoiding border issues or talking about them on Republicans’ terms. And the party’s grass-roots allies are struggling for cash and battling burnout.

* November 3:

On Trail in New Mexico, Biden Pitches Economy to a Skeptical Public

November 3:

Fear of Crime Looms Large for Voters, to Republicans’ Advantage

* November 4:

A Poll Reversal

Republicans have swiftly gained ground near the end of midterm elections polling.

* November 4:

At Campaign’s End, Democrats See Limits of Focus on Abortion

Shock and outrage over the fall of Roe v. Wade has faded as confusion has spread, deflating Democrats’ hopes that the issue could carry them to victory.

* November 4:

Can Abortion Still Save the Democrats?

Anger about the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given the party hope of preventing a total blowout at the midterms

* November 4:

Democrats Promote Tough-on-Crime Credentials as Party Plays Defense

With sheriffs vouching for them and a flood of ads proclaiming their support for the police, Democrats are shoring up their public safety bona fides. Still, some worry it’s too late.

* November 5:

Biden and Obama Reunite in a Last-Ditch Effort to Save Their Party

* November 5 (opinion piece):

In 2022, Reality Has a Conservative Bias

* November 6 (opinion piece):

Democrats, Don’t Despair. There Are Bright Spots for Our Party.

* November 6 (opinion piece):

Republicans Are Doubling Down on Trumpism. It’s Going to Work.

* November 6:

Confidence, Anxiety and a Scramble for Votes Two Days Before the Midterms

As candidates made their closing arguments on Sunday, Democrats braced for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country while Republicans predicted a red wave.

The Times wasn't alone in this, of course. We also had:

* The New Yorker, November 4:

Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout

The consensus among pollsters and consultants is this Tuesday’s election will be a “bloodbath” for the Democratic Party.

* CNN, November 4:

Mayor Eric Adams might be the fall guy for New York Democrats’ potential big losses next week

* Bloomberg, November 7:

Inflation-Focused Voters Defy Biden’s Bid to Change the Subject

* Politico, November 7:

Specter of midterm wipeout threatens Dem plans to shake up presidential primaries

* Axios, November 7:

Scoop: Top Dems warn party is seen as extreme

* Washington Post, November 7 (opinion piece):

Democrats are drowning in denial

But the Times was the worst of the "liberal media" outlets, by far. It never stopped predicting Democratic doom. Fortunately, voters had other ideas.

MY UNPOPULAR OPINION: KEVIN McCARTHY IS NOT STUPID

I've run out of things to say about the midterms, at least until we have some actual results, so instead I'd like to talk about this New York Times story:

In an interview with Fox News, former President Donald J. Trump said he would support Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, in his bid for speaker if Republicans win back control of the House of Representatives with Tuesday’s election....

Mr. McCarthy’s team ... worked to smooth out the relationship with Mr. Trump after an audio recording was released that showed the minority leader telling his fellow G.O.P. leaders he was considering urging Mr. Trump to resign from office after the riot.

Mr. Trump was less enthusiastic about Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and minority leader. He has repeatedly called on Senate Republicans to replace Mr. McConnell as leader and used racist terms to disparage his wife, Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan.

The two have been at odds since Mr. McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“I think we’ll probably have to live with him for two years,” Mr. Trump said, after calling him a “lousy” leader. “If I run and if I win, I will say, ‘Don’t send me any legislation if he’s the leader,’ and he’ll be out in two minutes.”

The conventional wisdom is that McConnell is evil but extremely shrewd, while McCarthy's most salient quality is that he's not very bright. But McCarthy seems like the shrewder one right now. He didn't get stuck this year having to prop up difficult-to-elect candidates chosen by Trump, the way McConnell did. He didn't have a top subordinate boasting about a potential threat to Social Security and Medicare -- there's no Rick Scott on his leadership team.

McCarthy does pal around with Marjorie Taylor Greene and other conspiratorialists and traitors, but somehow swing voters have never held that against the GOP's House candidates in competitive races. I think McCarthy is doing a better job of balancing the crazies and the (relative) normies than McConnell. It's why I think he might actually succeed in persuading the crazies not to do a Biden impeachment, which will be a sure loser in the Senate and will garner sympathy for the president (the carrot he'll dangle is unlimited investigations of Hunter Biden, the border, COVID origins, Afghanistan, the FBI, and whatever else is on Jim Jordan's wish list, or Greene's), and do it without being defenstrated the way John Boehner and Paul Ryan were when they weren't seen as extreme enough. (If he senses that his survival depends on a Biden impeachment, he'll go along and be a big cheerleader.)

I'm not saying any of this because I admire McCarthy. I think he's going to do many things that will be extraordinarily harmful to the country. But I think he's calculated what he needs to do to survive in the insane GOP of 2022, and McConnell might be losing his grip on this skill. But we'll see how it all plays out.

REPUBLICANS: THERE'S TOTALLY GOING TO BE A RED WAVE, BUT ALSO HERE'S WHY IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

Ask any Republican about the likely outcome of the midterms and you'll be told that we're about to experience a "red wave," if not a "red tsunami." It's totally going to happen, and all the Democrats in close elections will lose ... except that it won't happen, or it might not, because Democrats are going to steal a bunch of wins, as Gateway Pundit makes clear:

Also, just in time for the election, the Daily Caller has published a piece by Robert Epstein, a psychologist and former editor in chief of Psychology Today who became a right-wing favorite in the Trump years, even though he says he was a Hillary Clinton/Joe Biden voter:

EPSTEIN: Google Is Shifting Votes On A Massive Scale...

My research team is currently monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states through more than 2,500 computers owned by a politically-diverse group of registered voters (our “field agents”), and we are concerned about what we’re seeing....

We have so far preserved more than 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” – exposure to short-lived content that impacts people and then disappears, leaving no trace – that Google and other companies are able to use to shift opinions and voting preferences....

Our preliminary analyses of the data we have collected so far in 2022 are ... disturbing. In swing states, and especially in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Florida, we are finding a high level of liberal bias in Google search results, but not in search results on Bing (the same pattern we have found in every election since 2016). In several swing states, 92 percent of the autoplay videos being fed to YouTube users are coming from liberal news sources (YouTube is owned by Google). Unless Google backs down, it will shift hundreds of thousands of votes on Election Day itself with those brazen targeted go-vote reminders – and we will catch them doing so.

According to Epstein, voters are Pavlovian zombies who respond to these "ephemeral experiences" with a massive shift toward Democrats. Check out Epstein's numbers:

Search results that favor one candidate (in other words, that lead people who click on high-ranking results to web pages that glorify that candidate) can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups after a single search. Carefully crafted search suggestions that flash at you while you are typing a search term can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated. A single question-and-answer interaction on a digital personal assistant can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by more than 40 percent.

Epstein became a right-wing hero in 2019 when he told a Senate committee about some of his findings. Fox Business Channel did a report on Epstein, Donald Trump watched the report and tweeted about it, and Epstein was famous. Epstein's numbers were absurd, and Trump made them even more so:

In an interview with CNN on Monday, Epstein said the pro-Clinton bias was “sufficient to have shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes” to Clinton.

There is no basis in Epstein’s research for Trump’s claim that the alleged bias might have affected “16 million” votes. Epstein did testify in July that big tech companies in general could potentially shift “upwards of 15 million votes” in the 2020 election, but he didn’t claim that this happened in 2016.

Slate's April Glaser reported on Epstein at the time and found some unsavory details about him:

A pop psychologist and cable-news regular, he regularly publishes op-eds in conservative outlets like the Epoch Times and the Daily Caller, as well as the occasional piece in Politico or USA Today. He once appeared on The O’Reilly Factor to explain why he thinks teens should be treated as adults (in a book on that topic, he argued in favor of corporal punishment), and on a Fox News morning show in 2008, he argued in favor of teens getting married, pointing out that “Mary was 12 or 13 when she had Jesus, was she not?”

His reseach is thinly sourced:

... in his Senate committee testimony, ... he didn’t mention that his huge claim is based on monitoring the search results of just 21 undecided voters out of 95 voters for a 2017 white paper. In his submitted testimony, Epstein did provide seven pages of citations—but all of them are papers or op-eds he wrote or co-wrote himself. Only one of them—a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about how biased results produced by search engines could have the ability to sway undecided voters—was peer-reviewed. Even that study didn’t demonstrate that this has actually happened.

She also noted that Epstein seems to have it in for Google for personal reasons:

An article in the New York Times from early 2012 points to a tiff the psychologist had with the company after his website was hacked. Google directed visitors not to go to his page until the malicious code was removed—and kept the warning up even after Epstein tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to clean up his security and begged Google to remove the label. Epstein threatened to sue the company for not removing the warning, explaining to the Times that he felt like he was yelling at a brick wall. Later that year, he published a series of articles in the Huffington Post about why Google should be regulated. For the next few years, he began to publish more regularly about how easily Google could throw an election, largely citing himself. Starting in 2016, he become a regular on Breitbart discussing the Google topic.

And now here he is, choosing this moment to explain again how an election is allegedly being manipulated in the Democrats' favor -- and the Daily Caller is publishing his piece even though the Democrats are definitely going to be crushed, no doubt about it.