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You know, I think that Ross and I just have natural bossy, dictatorial tendencies.
Lydia is less. Lydia has a little lightness to her.
Lydia is the gentler autocrat.
I’m a gentle —
I inspired rebellion. Lydia rules, and yet is accepted by the rule.
That velvet glove, velvet glove.
From The New York Times Opinion, I’m Lydia Polgreen.
I’m Michelle Cottle.
I’m Ross Douthat.
I’m Carlos Lozada.
And this is “Matter of Opinion.” [MUSIC PLAYING]
And today, we’re going to talk about this week’s election results, which were a stark victory for Democrats. And then later, we’ll get into how this compares to some pretty negative poll results that Joe Biden got. OK, so there was a big election on Tuesday. And we’re recording this bright and early Wednesday morning. It’s an off-year election. Off-year elections aren’t always super exciting, but this one, I think it’s fair to say, was pretty exciting. And just to break the fourth wall, we’d planned on talking about something else this week, but it was so interesting that we pivoted.
Pivot.
Pivot, pivot. And I think there’ll be a lot of talk about pivoting in this episode. These were local and statewide votes, but a lot of them hold national significance on some really big issues, especially for the Democrats, who have been pretty glum lately because of the polls that we’ve been seeing. So before we dive in, let’s just quickly each say what’s the big thing that you saw last night that you want to talk about. Michelle, you want to go first?
Oh, I want to talk about reproductive rights, baby.
All right.
This may not be a big thing, but I was interested in how the results might say something about the sort of exhaustion with straight-up culture war battles.
Yep, good one. Ross?
I’m interested in disagreeing with — no, I’m interested in talking about both of those questions, but to add something extra, maybe we can talk about the strange death of Republican governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin’s presidential —
Ooh, yes.
— ambitions, if such things existed, which is an open question.
A lonely nation of never-Trumpers turned their eyes to Brian Kemp.
Not going to happen.
Lydia, you —
No, I’m getting ahead of myself. Getting ahead of myself here. So I want to talk about all those things. I’m particularly interested in the dog that doesn’t hunt, meaning transphobia, which I’m happy to talk about as well. I also just want to talk about what it means to be a moderate today. Andy Beshear has been a really interesting example. He’s a very different kind of moderate than, say, someone like Joe Manchin. So I’d love to talk about the possibilities of moderation with this current electorate. So anyway, I’m going to keep these trains running on time. Michelle, abortion, go.
Yes, ma’am. So there were multiple races to look at. The most obvious one was in Ohio, where there was an initiative on the ballot to enshrine abortion reproductive rights into the constitution, state constitution, and solid win.
But what I was even more interested in was what happened in Virginia, where, unlike a lot of the victories for reproductive rights that we’ve seen, it wasn’t a ballot initiative or the issue taken just out of context and standing alone. It was closely tied to what party you were going to vote for. And in this case, Democrats made it the overwhelming number one policy issue. And Republicans got beaten in both houses of the legislature.
And then, of course, you have Andy Beshear in Kentucky, who had run on this a little bit as well. But that’s a little bit broader referendum on this. But Ohio and Virginia, I found to be great news because I’m not a one-issue voter, but this issue makes me completely mental. So I’m always happy to see Republicans get spanked for their anti-abortion positions on these things.
Has the overturning of Roe v. Wade been — I mean, something that the Democrats, obviously, fought so hard to protect. Has it been just a real political boon for the party, right? I mean, like the midterm elections last year, the Democrats did a lot better than expected, in part on the strength of that issue. Now we’re seeing the same thing. Obviously, you don’t want to lose to win, but it kind of seems like that’s what’s happened.
You got a lot of women who are very angry, even in states where Republicans have a strong hold. They’re very angry about the idea of trying to take away bodily autonomy. I can’t imagine why, but they get real crabby about that.
So last year, I went out and followed the canvassers in Kansas, which nobody expected that to go the way it did. And from there, we’ve seen a number of other states turn in the same direction. So yeah, I think you’re totally spot on. It’s not enough to necessarily boost Democratic candidates always over Republicans, but as a standalone issue, it’s pretty powerful.
Yeah, I mean, representing the opposition to killing unborn human beings in utero that Michelle finds so ridiculous and appalling, I would say it’s been a boon to Democrats in a modest way, but it’s not clear how much it cashes out for Democrats in races that are not directly about abortion. I think it’s completely clear that actual pro-life sentiment is a minority position in America. I think that was clear before Roe was overturned.
As a pro-lifer, I have not been particularly surprised by any of the referenda results, including even Kansas. I think that the pro-life movement was not prepared for the victory that it won, as activist movements tend not to be. You see versions of this on the left. And the Republican Party, as an institution, has never particularly liked talking about abortion, and certainly has not shown itself capable of arguing about it effectively. So that, I think, explains the pro-choice success in referenda.
I think Virginia, to make a bridge to the Glenn Youngkin question, Virginia is an interesting case because it’s not actually clear to me that the Republicans did so terribly in Virginia. Virginia is a blue state, a very blue state in pre-Youngkin elections. And if you just take the results and compare them to results of past legislative elections, it doesn’t look like a bad night for Republicans, again, relative to the actual underlying politics of Virginia.
What made this situation curious was that Youngkin had bet a lot of political capital on the idea that he was going to turn Virginia red and that part of his strategy for doing this was trying to offer a 15-week abortion ban as a kind of compromise position that would be more politically palatable than the more dramatic restrictions in other Republican states. And that failed.
I think the question is, wasn’t it always pretty likely to fail, again, given that Virginia is a left of center state? I think that the Youngkin — I don’t know if Glenn Youngkin ever imagined that he was really going to get into the race for the Republican nomination. But I think there was a certain kind of talking yourself into an idea of political success that doesn’t really fit with the landscape of Virginia. And then for Democrats, maybe it doesn’t tell them as much as they’d like to be told about how their success in Virginia would translate to other states in 2024.
Well, I mean, I think that what’s interesting — and I want to stay on Youngkin, but just quickly on the bodily autonomy abortion question, I think that what seems to be emerging for me is that there was a compromise position on abortion. And it was Roe and the effort to move the goalpost and make the compromise position 15 weeks just isn’t working, right? There was already a consensus on what that compromise should be.
I mean, to be fair, a 15-week restriction was not what was actually being voted on in Ohio because their Republicans had passed a six-week ban without —
Of course, yeah.
— substantial exceptions, right?
Right, no, totally. But I’m just saying like in the context of Virginia.
And 15 weeks is actually what Chief Justice Roberts was trying to introduce as a compromise position in Dobbs. And both the majority and the dissent mocked him for it.
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. But I also wonder if there isn’t, just sort of broadly speaking, questions that people have, especially given the kind of extreme turn that much of the right has taken on some of these questions of how much you actually want government involved in your personal decisions about your body and how you raise your children and things like that. I think that there are bigger questions. Anyway, I want to come back to Youngkin because I think he’s a fascinating figure, the gentleman from the Carlyle Group with his red vest. Michelle, you have a PhD in Youngkin studies.
Youngkinology, yes.
Youngkinology. So yeah, lay out what happened here. What were the expectations, and what happened?
OK, so basically, Ross is correct. This puts a stake through the Republican establishment’s kind of fever dream that he would jump into this race, in the 2024 race for president. He basically threw himself all in, campaigning as hard as he could on the idea that he could help drag the legislature all the way in to the red zone. And he put a lot of that also into trying to argue that his was the reasonable compromise position on abortion.
Overall, his message was that he was a common sense, future-looking, progress oriented, bring people together Republican, and that that’s what his party is all about. This is what he was trying for. And he’s not on the ballot, so it’s not a direct reflection upon him. But it was not enough to overcome what Democrats spent so much time and money doing, which was making this a referendum of sorts on abortion. That was the big overriding policy issue this election cycle. And it went in their favor.
But I mean, Michelle, isn’t this just sort of Virginia being a Democratic state reasserting itself? I mean, Glenn Youngkin won an election in a year when there was a lot of temporary discontent with Democratic political measures and on COVID, right, and on schools, that put him over the top unexpectedly in Virginia. And he’s been popular ever since. He’s an effective politician. I’m just not clear on why there would be an expectation that, again, a blue state would, just through the power of its somewhat popular governor, suddenly turn into a Republican state.
Because Republicans really wanted to think that it wasn’t a fully blue state. And right after Youngkin, they took — it’s not that just Youngkin won.
It’s the house.
It’s all of the statewide races went red, and the House went red. And so Republicans took hope from that because it wasn’t a great year for them. So the question was, with his kind of genial PTA dad, red fleecy smile on top of very significantly conservative agenda, could he sell this? And he can when he’s on the ballot in certain cases, and you can’t run for back-to-back terms as governor in Virginia, so he can’t do another test of this right away with himself.
But it does not translate, and it doesn’t work in the current climate. He really was hitting parental rights hard again this race. At every stop, it would be drilling down on schools and what was going on in schools. But this is not 2021. This is 2023. And Lydia and I had talked about this in an earlier episode, which is that he was still hoping to play off the parental rage from the COVID mandates. And this was about abortion this year. It didn’t work. It didn’t translate over.
Lydia has always warned us against overlearning the lesson of Virginia.
It’s true. Always fighting the last war. Well, I mean, Carlos, you’re our kind of suburban, DC suburbs dad.
PTA dad. Fleece-wearing —
What’s antifleece agenda?
I love your fleece, Carlos. It’s all about the fleece.
All about the fleece. But yeah, I don’t know. Carlos, I mean, do you think that there is this kind of exhaustion with the culture war, right, that these questions of like CRT and transgender treatment for children and all of these things that are — yeah, I’m just curious because I think it’s easy to over-interpret it.
I’m exhausted.
Yeah, well, I’m certainly exhausted, too.
I’m exhausted with the culture war. And I know we’ve talked about this before on the show, one of my kind of rantier moments. But so let’s look at this election, and then I’ll get to your question. So in Kentucky, right, the state attorney general Daniel Cameron was running against Beshear, against Governor Beshear. And Cameron campaigned to a significant degree on transgender issues, accusing Beshear of supporting surgeries for kids. It didn’t seem to help him a lot.
But we’ve talked before on the show about the possibly waning power of running straight-up culture war campaigns and the debates over wokeism in the school and the like. Now, I don’t take this election in Kentucky, for instance, as a sign that attitudes on those issues are necessarily changing, but I do think that their salience might be changing. And I take that as an encouraging sign as someone who shares that exhaustion with these issues. I’m encouraged by anything that even remotely indicates that we’re kind of coming out of that culture war trench.
Now, I don’t think they’re going to go away at all. But I think it’s harder to run a campaign, even primarily based on those, I would guess is one of the things that we can take away from this election. I hate takeaways, by the way. I hate takeaways even more than I hate takes. Five takeaways — so this is not a takeaway. This is just an impression based on a very rapid look.
Here’s a takeaway, Carlos Lozada.
Ugh, I hate takeaways.
I love them. This is what punditry is. Those who make their living, who ply their trade as book critics can afford to avoid the takeaway.
Take us away, Ross. Take us away.
Those of us in the grubby business — no, look, I mean, as regular listeners know, I believe that culture war debates are incredibly important. They’re essential to politics. And so I guess I think it’s less about their salience diminishing and more about the fact that in culture war debates, Americans just have a very strong libertarian bias, right? And so, in culture war debates, where it appears that there are sort of enforcers of progressive orthodoxy gaining the upper hand, in American society, voters will swing to the right.
And in situations where it seems like social conservatism in any form is sort of getting up off the mat and actually implementing some of its preferred policies, voters are more likely to swing to the left. And to me, a very telling result from last night was the combination in Ohio, not just of the vote on abortion, but the vote on the legalization of recreational marijuana, which won by a similar margin to —
Slightly more. Just a little tiny bit more, yeah.
— slightly more.
Just a little higher. And
I don’t find this surprising at all. I think America is a pro-choice, pro-pot, and pro-gun society. I think the legalization of marijuana in Ohio is going to be a total disaster. But I think social conservatism is largely correct, and unfortunately, fairly unpopular, and that’s bad for the country. But such is life.
Such is a democracy. So you’re saying you believe in thermostatic voting, more or less.
I think that America has shifted meaningfully to the individualist left on a range of, quote unquote, “social issues” over the last 20 years, including not just issues about sex and reproduction, but also issues like marijuana.
And I think guns falls into this category. One reason I think the liberals lose on guns in certain ways for the same reason maybe pro-lifers lose on abortion, where if you poll people about specific gun control provisions, they might support them, but they don’t trust Democrats because they think Democrats want to take away their guns. And in the same way, I think it might be that people who would support a 12-week abortion ban in theory don’t trust Republicans to implement it because they think Republicans want to just ban all abortions. I think there may be similar dynamics in play there, in a very libertarian country.
Can I ask something very specific?
Sure.
Ross, when you say that you think that there’s been a move toward the individualist left, that’s interesting to me. Does that mean there’s a move away on the left toward the more group identity kind of left, which I know is something that you’ve been critical of as well. Are those two in tension with each other, or are these not even on the same spectrum?
I guess the way I’d put it is that in the actual political left in America, the 25 percent to 30 percent of Americans who identify with the left, there has been maybe more of a focus lately on identity politics, socialism, and big government, and so on. I don’t think the left in America is becoming more libertarian.
I think Americans in the middle of the country, sort of in the political middle, have themselves become not more economically left-wing, but just more socially liberal over the last 20 years. And I don’t think it’s a description of what’s happening on the Left, capital L. I think it’s just a description of American realities. Americans are — they’re more pro-polygamy. I mean, it’s just like if you go down a list of —
I think it’s polyamory that they’re in favor of, rather than polygamy personally. At least in the circles that I run in, that seems to be —
The pro-polycule vote is going to be decisive.
Before we move on and take a break, I want to just briefly talk about moderates, just in general, and what that looks like, right? Because Glenn Youngkin was one theory of the case of what a successful moderate Republican might look like. I think on the Democratic side, we have a few different theories, right? There’s the Joe Manchin guy who wins in a red state, but who clearly is like a major fly in the ointment. And he’s a senator.
And but then you have this other example, which is like Andy Beshear, right? He did not run away from trans people and just was kind of like, I’m not going to bash them or try to distance myself. So I have a question. Who is the Republican Andy Beshear, do you think?
Do you mean in terms of policy or persona? I mean, you don’t want —
All of it. All of the above.
It wasn’t Youngkin, right.
Youngkin isn’t a moderate in his policy. He is in his persona. You have governors that have to get things done. I think you would probably want to look to governors, cases like Charlie Baker or Larry Hogan, who took a particular stance, because that’s what governors have an easier time doing than the team mentality that you find in Congress.
Could it be Nikki Haley?
I think it could have been.
It’s still Youngkin, you know. Virginia is about as blue as Kentucky is red. Youngkin is a guy who I think is moderate relative to a lot of deep red governors, but is still recognizably conservative, in the same way that Beshear is moderate relative to Democrats from New York, but is still recognizably conservative. And I think the problem for the Youngkin model is not that it doesn’t work in Virginia. It works fine in Virginia if you’re just trying to be a Republican governor of Virginia and not pretend you’re turning the state red.
The problem is, Glenn Youngkin cannot win a national Republican primary in the same way I don’t think Andy Beshear could probably win a national Democratic primary, although maybe I’m wrong about that.
But Ross, what about your favorite governor, Sununu? I’d just like to hear you —
My favorite governor?
I just like to hear you say his name —
I thought it was Ron DeSantis.
— dripping contempt every time he comes up.
I think the idea that Chris Sununu could be the Republican nominee for president is implausible, but Sununu is a very effective moderate Republican governor of a purple state, right?
So who do you think could conceivably be a Republican nominee?
The moderate Republican candidate in the 2024 race is the one who has a long pro-choice background, who says he won’t cut entitlement programs, and will put an end to unnecessary foreign wars, and his name is Donald John Trump.
Oh, there we go.
He’s the moderate Republican and always has been, and that’s part of his success.
OK, so I think that’s a great place for us to end this part of the conversation because we’ve been talking about these big wins for Democrats in the Tuesday evening vote, but there was also polling that came out earlier this week that looked pretty grim for the Democrats. So when we come back, we’re going to talk about that.
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And we’re back. And I’d like to compare what we saw on Tuesday with the poll results that Joe Biden saw this week, which have him down against Donald Trump and with pretty weak support among Democrats. So Michelle, can you walk us through this, I think, quite doom and gloom for Democrats New York Times-Siena poll that came out earlier this week? What did it show?
So what has people freaked out is that it showed Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden in five out of six swing states. Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan all have an edge for Trump. And then Wisconsin is kind of the outlier, and one of the reasons that Wisconsin is a little bit different is it is the whitest state. Because one of the notable problems for Joe Biden is that Trump is doing better than you would expect for a Republican among non-white voters, especially among Black voters, which he’s got around 20 percent support, it looks like, which may not sound like a lot, but for Republicans, is actually pretty significant.
So, as we’ve talked about before, when you look at polls, national polls don’t matter because these elections are decided in a handful of swing states. And so people are freaking out about what it means that Trump is up in the majority of swing states. Even this far out, it has people very nervous.
Does last night change any of these dynamics that seem to be shown in this poll or not?
I’m dragging us straight into rank punditry.
Yeah, no, I think not. I think that the dynamics last night, one, should confirm for Democrats the fact that there is a specific Joe Biden problem that they have. The fabled candidate known as generic Democrat does much better than Biden in those polls.
I mean, it should be said, Ross, that that’s always the case.
The generic Republican also —
Right? Generic.
Yes, so generic Republican actually cleans up, right?
If only they could run. If only those generic candidates could run as opposed to the real ones, right.
But even, actually, this poll, I believe, showed some cases where even Kamala Harris did as well or better than Biden. So I think it’s, one, it’s reasonable for Democrats to continue to think that there are a lot of Americans who just think Biden is too old to be president, and that problem is not resolved by Democrats picking up some seats in the Virginia house of delegates.
There’s also the reality that the Republican Party now is like the Democratic Party in the recent past. It’s a party that has a lot of low information, low propensity voters, who are less likely to turn out in midterms and special elections, but who are likely to show up again in a high octane presidential contest. So those are my two takeaways for why last night doesn’t change the Democrats’ Biden problem.
I mean, I think the other thing is that it’s going to take some crafting to make the big signature issue that seems to be motivating people, which is abortion, a central issue. Obviously, there are things that the president can do, but I mean, perhaps his most potent message would be like, give me another senator or two in the House, and we’re going to get a national abortion law. We’re going to codify Roe. And that may be is sort of the way that one could try to kind of harness the momentum of what seems to have happened on Tuesday night. But that’s a pretty convoluted message.
Well, and Trump is not going to run — I mean, Trump has very clearly refused to endorse a national abortion ban. He’s criticized the pro-life movement. Like, he is setting himself up —
Do you honestly think —
— to run as an abortion moderate.
Trump can’t not run — like, he has both embraced this and he is painted this way by opponents. He’s the guy who put Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett on the court. So it seems very difficult to separate himself from the debate over abortion rights.
There are already ads on social media with clips of him saying, I’m the one who killed Roe. Now, the question that I have is, are Democrats going to do what Republicans did in 2004 with gay marriage? If you’ll recall, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s kind of political brain, had kind of led the charge on putting gay marriage ballot initiatives in key states in order to turn out conservative voters. Now, reproductive rights advocates are absolutely eyeing this in as many states as they can, including Florida.
Yeah, I mean, I just think it’s really easy to imagine the voter who goes into the polling place and pulls the lever for a pro-choice ballot initiative and then votes for Trump. These are literally the voters who voted for Trump in 2016, who voted for Obama in 2012. The sort of working class Obama Trump voter is pro-choice. But they still like Trump, right? I mean —
Yeah, and Trump could say, I delivered on repealing Roe, and now it’s back to the states, and that’s where it should be. And I’m not going to — as president, I will not sign a national abortion ban. That is completely consistent with his totally inconsistent, “do whatever it takes to win” political style. I don’t think that’s inconceivable at all.
And no one believes that Trump is actually pro-life, right? This is to my point from the last segment, right?
Well, I actually think plenty of people believe that Trump is pro-life.
Oh, well, there are people on the right, certainly, yes, who have deluded themselves into believing that Donald Trump is the King David anointed by God Almighty, but I’m saying the swing voter doesn’t look at Donald Trump and see someone who is sort of, in his heart of hearts, desirous of a national abortion ban.
Well, one of the problems is, is that abortion and culture war issues were not cited as a priority for a lot of these voters so much as the economy. And that is where Trump has got his strengths.
It’s a problem for Biden, but it’s also not. Then, again, I hate playing amateur strategists.
Just do it. Just pundit.
No, because so everything we say today is going to be wrong, OK?
Yes, Carlos.
This is the tragedy of our life.
Yeah, yeah, no.
Learn it, live it, love it.
You’re not writing a biography.
So when you dig deep into the poll, there’s these questions about which candidate do you trust on key issues, right, in these six swing states. And on the economy, on immigration, on national security, it’s Trump, right? Trump wins there. Biden has the advantage on two of the issues that were polled on. Guess what the two issues were?
Democracy and abortion.
And abortion.
Yes, bingo. Democracy and abortion, right? I see that as like a bright, blinking light for the Biden campaign. These are the two issues where he can most easily draw a sharp distinction with Trump. Like I said, Trump is the guy who created the conservative supermajority on the high court. And on democracy, that’s not hard either. Trump is the guy who doesn’t believe in elections unless he wins them, right? Who wants to use the Justice Department to attack his enemies, has a dictator fetish, right? So the contrast there is pretty clear.
On the democracy issue, what I found interesting is, on that issue, if you look — not only did Biden have an advantage over Trump, but it was a slim advantage. But he had a significant advantage among Black voters and Latino voters, right? For Black voters, it was 77 percent to 16 percent who they trust on democracy. For Latinos, it was 53 to 38. White voters trust Trump on democracy in those states —
Wow.
— more than they trust Biden. And so democracy, I think, offers a potentially resonant message for Biden, one that he’s much more comfortable, frankly, delivering than he is on abortion. He’s not a natural — I mean, he has said publicly, I’m not a big abortion guy because I’m Catholic, but I think Roe had it right. But he has really embraced throughout from 2020, 2022, and now, the democracy message, and it potentially resonates with a certain group of voters, which he can ill afford to lose.
Well, here’s my question, though, and I can’t remember exactly. It’s not a question of who they trust more. It’s a question of how important that issue is to voters. And if I recall, it doesn’t rank that high, which means there are a lot of issues I care about, but that’s not what I’m turning out for, and it’s not what I’m going to vote on. So that’s what I worry about. I don’t think democracy works in that way.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say two things. Like, it’s obviously, we all know, it’s the economy, stupid. The other thing that I think is, there are going to be like repercussions to what’s going on in the Middle East right now and questions of how the Biden administration is handling the crisis in Israel and Gaza, and how that affects young voters, how that affects voters of color. I think there’s a lot of roads still to be played out on those questions as well. So —
Michelle, go ahead and say it.
That Americans don’t vote on foreign policy.
Yes, I know.
OK, guys, we’re going to have to leave it and wrap there. I know there’s lots more to say, but something tells me we will be coming back to this subject. When we come back, we’re going to hear from you.
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And we’re back. So last week, we gave you our dream presidential matchups, and we asked you to send in yours. And so, in lieu of a Hot Cold this week, we’re going to play some of your answers and figure out who you are hot and cold on.
Hi, this is Martha Mizer. I’m in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
This is John Culbertson from Marfa, Texas.
My name is Lisa Maras, and I live in a suburb outside of Chicago.
I’m Casey Greyman-Roberts, and I’m a new resident of the state of Minnesota. I would like to see Gretchen Whitmer versus Nikki Haley.
Gretchen Whitmer against Nikki Haley.
Gretchen Whitmer versus Nikki Haley. Gretchen, I feel she survived COVID, where a lot of governors kind of struggled. And on the other side, Nikki Haley has that foreign policy experience that I think we could really use right now in the United States, and also has that governorship leadership experience.
Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan versus Eric Holcomb of Indiana. I think that would focus attention on the Midwest, which desperately needs it.
My dream match-up is Vice President Kamala Harris versus Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Antony Blinken and Glenn Youngkin.
Gavin Newsom, who’s the governor of my home state of California, would be good, I think, against Liz Cheney, who’s an actual Republican and conservative who understands the Constitution and democracy.
My dream match-up would be Adam Schiff versus Donald Trump, just to see where we are —
Wow.
— if we’re for reasonable and calm or bat poop crazy.
Bat poop crazy.
And I would know if I needed to submit my application for asylum somewhere else.
That’s a Thunderdome one. Wow.
Wow.
That’s fantastic. So I say we just combine the Gretchen Whitmer, Nikki Haley into a ticket, all-chick ticket for 2024.
Newsome, Cheney. Antony Blinken got a vote.
A lot of Nikki Haley love among our listeners, which is a sign that she is doomed in the Republican primary. But there it is. Hate to say it.
I say, let’s get these guys on as co-hosts. That was excellent.
Yeah, I really think there’s just a lot of talent out there in America, you know? We’re very, very lucky.
Bring us the thoughts, people. We need them.
Yeah, thoughts allowed.
Thoughts allowed.
Thoughts, Carlos.
How could I miss that?
Well done.
OK, well, thank you so much for sharing your dream matchups with us. And thank you for joining our conversation. We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled Friday episode next week.
Bye, guys.
Looking forward to more ranked punditry. See you guys soon.
See you soon.
Thanks, guys. See you soon.
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“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett and Derek Arthur. It is edited by Alison Bruzek. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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