Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger and we are all in person today,

which is a real treat. I've got around my table here, David French, Jonah Goldberg and

Declan Garvey. Of course, our fantasy football commissioner. We obviously have so much to

talk about. It was election day last night. So what we learned in Virginia, what other

races ended up mattering? How it's going to affect the Democrats and how it's going

to affect the Republicans?

Let's start at the very beginning as we were taught by Julie Andrews. Jonah, what did we learn

in Virginia?

We learned that a Republican candidate doesn't have to fully embrace Donald Trump. To win,

even in a blue state, we learned that among some sub-semit, so I listened to the emergency

538 podcast this morning at 6am because that's the kind of life I've chosen for some reason.

And I listened to it at 4am.

It's something you'd afford to do in your 20s. I don't like all of the monocosal explanations

for this. There are a bunch of explanations for it. Last night, it was a maze balls to

use a term from political science that MSNBC locked into the idea. It was just simply race

card racism, more racial racism and race cardism of racial race cards. I think you can say

that was at work in some ways and in some places. But for the most part, it shows the candidates

matter. It shows that some of the old rules of the thumb of politics, the thermostatic

nature of elections, is that Virginia by a rule of thumb should have gone for the party

of not the incumbent president and it did, and that a lot of the things that people thought

had said the old rules don't apply anymore weren't as powerful. People are going to be chewing

this for a long time. But I think it shows that the suburban voters who repelled against

...