Pod Save America - “Republicans not quite in array.”

The Republican Party is still more Marjorie Taylor Green than Glenn Youngkin, Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon joins to talk Democratic midterm strategy in the wake of last week’s elections, and Jon and Dan answer a few of your questions.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [email protected] and include the name of the podcast.

Duration: 1h 5m
Broadcast on: 11 Nov 2021
Audio Format: other

The Supreme Court has had a busy summer loosening gun restrictions in states, overturning Roe v. Wade, and severely threatening our Miranda rights. I'm Leah Litman, and each week on Strix scrutiny, I'm joined by my co-hosts and fellow law professors Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw to break down the latest headlines and the biggest legal questions facing our country. It's more important than ever to understand the repercussions of these Supreme Court decisions and what we can do to fight back in the upcoming midterm elections. Listen to new episodes of Strix scrutiny every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. [music] Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm John Favera. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's pod, the Republican Party is still more Marjorie Taylor Greene than Glenn Youngkin. Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon joins us to talk Democratic midterm strategy in the wake of last week's elections, and later, Dan and I will answer a few of your questions. But first, check out my new weekly interview series "Offline with John Favera." This week, I talked to Snapchat's Peter Hamby about how Twitter ruined political journalism and what a healthy, sustainable model of journalism might look like. There's hope, Dan. There really is. That was your takeaway from that conversation? [chuckles] I'm just, you know, I'm trying. On Sunday, Tuna and I talk to soccer star Megan Rapino about how social media affects athletes' mental health and whether she should run for office. Check out that one right here on your PSA feed. Also, check out this week's Pod Save the World, where Ben calls in from the Climate Summit in Glasgow, where he's traveling with President Obama. He also speaks to climate activist Hannah Martin and Louisa Newbauer, as well as former Secretary of State John Kerry, but the intense climate negotiations he's involved in at the Summit. Excellent episode. Ben, we got a live correspondent from Glasgow. Check it out. It's great. And finally, "Love It or Leave It" is coming to the New York Comedy Festival at the Beacon Theatre in New York City this Friday, November 12th. You can still snag the last few tickets at cricket.com/events. Go say hi to Love It. It'll be a fantastic show. All right. Let's get to the news. Before we continue our conversation about democratic strategy in the wake of last week's off-year elections, we thought we talked about some of the headlines the Republican Party has been making lately. So not only did House GOP leadership order its members to vote against a bipartisan infrastructure bill that will deliver jobs, roads, and clean water to millions of their own constituents. Now they're looking to punish the 13 Republicans who voted for the bill by kicking them off their committees. Marjorie Taylor Greene is tweeting out their phone numbers. Fred Upton, a moderate from Michigan who supported the bill, has been getting death threats. Meanwhile, Republican leaders haven't said a word about Congressman Paul Gosar tweeting an image of someone killing AOC, and a bunch of Republican members of Congress are now selling and wearing Let's Go Brandon merch, a phrase that for a very stupid reason means fuck Joe Biden. Dan, how are we losing to these people? That's the famous paraphrasing Harry Reid there. Remember when Harry Reid was running against Sharon Engel way, way back? And he was like, at one point, you just said, how am I losing to this person because she was so crazy? Well, maybe like Harry Reid, we're not losing to them. There you go. That's the upside. That's the silver lining. That's what I mean. We do have the House, the Senate, the White House. We have won the popular vote in all but won election since 1988. So we're not really losing to them all the time, but we did just lose to them in Virginia, a state where we can blame no one but ourselves for that loss. How is it good politics to punish 13 House Republicans for supporting a bill that Mitch McConnell and 18 other Senate Republicans voted for? We're talking a lot about how all these House Republicans voted for it. I'm not seeing a lot of commentary about the fact that this is a fucking Mitch McConnell backed bill. First of all, you don't strip away committee assignments from people who vote for a bill that you don't agree with. That just doesn't happen. And usually, now we're doing it on a bill that was supported by almost half the Republican caucus in the Senate. I mean, this is a really tough question. This is a general rule in politics and life. During the opposite of Mitch McConnell is smart. Like, don't be Mitch McConnell. It's like a really good thing. But in this case, I don't really know how to think about it. I mean, I guess one way to think about it is I'm trying to figure this out live here on air is that everything is good politics for Republicans until Democrats make it bad politics for them. You understand from their point of view that the Republican base, which is to be clear these days to the right of Donald Trump, as we saw from when they booed him for suggesting that people maybe get a vaccine in Alabama a few months ago. They keep, they feel that the Republicans are more likely to punish them at the polls, the Republican base and we're going to punish them at the polls, the Democrats. And there is some, they are correct in the sense that because of gerrymandering and just geographic polarization. Most of these people's biggest fear is a primary, not a general election, but it's also a very well-worn sense that Democrats will be unable to muster enough sort of messaging firepower and narrative cohesion to make them pay for this over the long term. Well, that brings up my next question, which is how should Democrats talk to voters about where Republicans did here? I mean, there is a, there are sort of two parts of this. The first part is like the short term, how do you deal with this very specific thing and then there's this much longer term question, which we're going to talk about maybe a little bit later in this pod and in the many months to come of like what is the right contrast message for Republicans and how much of that is part of our message, right, versus what we've done or what we want to do and all of that. And there's, we, there's a lot to learn from the voters that are going to be there in 2022 and the voter people just voted last week to know like what that is. But I think the way to think about this in the short term is we know from the polling that seven in 10 Americans, if the economy is going in the wrong direction, majorities of them are concerned about the economy, inflation in particular, and you have the Republicans who not only voted against a bill to create jobs and help Americans deal with high costs, but are punishing those people who do who did who did support them right and I think that like we have to put what happened in the context of where the voters are and how they feel about the economy. And this is both how we frame what Biden and the Democrats are doing and what the Republicans are stopping us from doing is that these are measures that are going to address the thing the voters are most concerned about our Republicans are standing where they're an obstacle to progress on the stuff you're worried about. Yeah, and I think you have to figure out motivation, right? Why are Republicans, this is this is part of any sort of message about the opposition. Why are Republicans doing what they're doing? What are they motivated by? And what is believable to people about the Republican Party, which, even though they won in Virginia and came close to New Jersey and wanted a bunch of other places on Tuesdays, is still a very unpopular party, right? Like the Republican Party hasn't suddenly become very popular in the polls just because Joe Biden and Democrats have become more unpopular. They are an unpopular party. So why are they an unpopular party? I think one of the reasons they're on a popular party is because people think that Republican politicians are in it for themselves. That their only motivation is to beat Democrats. They'd rather beat Democrats than give their own voters jobs in clean water and new roads and new bridges. They care way more about their jobs than your job is one potential message. They denying Joe Biden a win is so important to them that they'd rather deny you all the benefits of this infrastructure bill, jobs, roads, clean water. That's how much they care about winning. That's how much they care about power. And I do think that's like a believable message about the Republican Party because that's how they've acted for the last decade.

Transcription truncated.