Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger. We have Jonah Goldberg and David French and as you can probably guess this is going to be a lot of post midterm chat.

Let's dive right in David big picture takeaways. Yeah, I mean look as we're talking we still don't know the state of play in the house or the Senate. It's

entirely possible that at the end of all of this that the Republicans could control both. It's still possible that they could control both and at the end of the day Republicans would say well it wasn't what we wanted.

Fully, but the bottom line result is what exactly you know what was our goal so there's a lot to be sort of said right now about the Republicans underperforming but we still don't know how badly they underperformed but it's absolutely clear that they underperformed and I think a good way to think through the underperformance is not just by looking at historical numbers.

Which we went through on advisory opinions earlier but it also to look at what could have been in some other ways and Jonah in his in your in your newsletter you talked about for example how a number of races very winnable races just seem to be thrown in the garbage.

So it wasn't just that Republican primary voters in some instances i.e. Herschel Walker pick somebody who is a uniquely bad candidate or in New Hampshire uniquely bad candidate or we could go around it's also that some good candidates were kind of scared away from running.

Governor do you see in Arizona seems like he probably would have.

Handily defeated senator Kelly like handily defeated didn't run you know we knew Hampshire the best candidate didn't run and so there's a lot of what might have been for Republicans and a ton of the what might have been are tied to Donald Trump.

And tied to his continued influence and so we're in one of these phases right now where it looks like there's at least some people who've been somewhat critical of Trump in the past publicly who are really publicly now much more aggressively critical some people who are aggressively critical in the past and then kind of got on the Trump train have now been critical again.

But we still have an awful lot of the anonymous sources are saying.

That they're urging Trump not to call you know not to not to announce anonymous Republicans are saying and I have to can I have to say I will believe that the Trump fever has broken in the party when the anonymous sources aren't anonymous anymore and until then I'll believe it when I see it.

So Jonah one of the narratives that has really taken hold since election night is this idea that it was the result or a repudiation of mag a movement Donald Trump that he's the guy who had the worst night.

I just want to provide a alternative theory here which is and again bear mind I was the person who said that I was not seeing a lot of data that abortion was an important factor in this election but assume for a second and I think we do have some data now that abortion was a really important factor in this election for a lot of voters.

Does not mean this was a repudiation of social conservatives and that in fact the mag a movement isn't really about social conservatism and that the narrative has just been kind of incorrect.

Yes and no no and yes yes on Wednesdays and half of Fridays and no look I mean it's it's first of all this is the problem that we that all of us in this crazy stupid life that we have chosen.

We want you know it's like every two years or before your after every election there's like 72 hours where there is this giant smoldering lump of molten metal and everybody from every side is trying to bend it mold it to their false god of conventional wisdom and you only get 72 hours to do it and everyone's doing it furiously.

And then once it hardens we all must genuinely reflect until the next election to this one image of what the conventional wisdom says what the election was about the election was about a lot of stuff that is such a perfect way to phrase it and I find that stuff so frustrating this rush to have one explanation and one overarching theme for any given day of the week.

Right and particularly because what the great irony is is like I don't think it's going to happen but I was thinking this like yesterday all of these yet to be counted things they could end up tipping all for Republicans and so like this it wasn't a red wave thing actually was a red wave but the conventional wisdom already sort of set in and it was going to stick regardless I think there are a bunch of things going on here first of all I agree with you I think David would agree with you even more than me that mag a really isn't about social conservatism.

But that's an ideological intellectual argument for the typical mega person they think it's about social conservatism but more importantly for the anti Trump coalition.

Maga and social conservatism go hand in hand right because your typical sort of liberal voter progressive voter always thought a lot of social conservatism was really just fancy dressed up bigotry and that Trump revealed that and there are a lot of social conservatives that helped Trump create that impression.

And so I think it's not going to run aroundstein about this because it's been a CNN all week and his point is that there was a there was a Trump coalition the problem is this wasn't a Biden pro Biden coalition you can't have a pro Biden coalition when his approval ratings are in the low 40s according to the people who all voted democratic right it's that this was a much broader sort of anti Trump anti maga anti Republican.

Republican coalition and and I think that one of the reasons a lot of people got blindsided particularly on the abortion part is that among the hardest and you know the stuff better than I do Sarah but the hardest people in the world the poll are young people under 30 right particularly college kids and it sounds like in a lot of states with big universities they bust in a lot of college kids all voted democratic.

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