They’re All Running (The Secret Podcast PREVIEW)

Hey there. It’s JBL. On the Secret Show with Sarah Longwell today, we talked about Will Saletan what Ron DeSantis is pulling numbers mean and a new survey from Pew that really gets at the heart of what Democrats and Republicans really want. Here’s the show. But this morning, I wanna start with something good, which is this morning Will Hurd, few moments ago was on CNN and he told Caitlin Collins, no, I won’t support Donald Trump if you phenomena.

Yeah. That’s great. Is that great? Isn’t that what we want?

Yeah. So I gotta say, I do think I wanna give a little credit here to Chris Christie. Because I think what Chris Christie did was build some permission structures within the primary field to start going after Donald Trump. And I think that it is giving, you know, a little courage to some other people. Right?

Like, now there’s ASA Will and Christie, who are all saying they not only they won’t support Donald Trump, Christy, I actually really like his whole like I’ll sign the pledge, but I’m not gonna honor it. Donald Trump wouldn’t honor it. This is what I’ve been should have said. Do you remember I

did a whole riff on this that this is exactly what they should do? They should say, sure I’ll they should literally say that. They should say, I will sign the pledge and then I won’t hire and honor it. And what are you gonna do? Boom.

Right? This is this is their move.

Typically, by making the point that Donald Trump’s not gonna honor it, so why should they? Right. That like, you know, that because there has been this two tier justice system, if you will. There has been this this idea where like everyone knows Donald Trump is not going to honor that, but like these other people are bound to it, it’s absurd. So and like, the r n c’s a joke and they should treat it thusly.

As such.

Yeah. But I gotta say the Will Hurd getting in thing is so Will Hurd was on the shortlist. The reason I know them a little bit, the shortlist for people we thought a primary Donald Trump way back in — Mhmm.

— twenty nineteen? Yeah.

Yeah. Like, twenty nineteen. Yeah. Exactly. Going into the twenty twenty election.

Obviously, he didn’t.

And, you know That’s probably for the best as it turns out.

I don’t think so.

No. Oh, really. Okay.

I think that Larry I think both I think if Larry Hogan or Will Heard or someone like Adam like, I think if somebody back then had really stepped up, stepped up early and made a big play at a challenge, I think that that would have done more to solidify their brand and their potential as a future in the party than waiting for the party to become just so intensely magnified and, like, in you know, Hogan’s case, not even bothering.

No. No, I can see that. I can see.

In Hert’s case, right, he’s just a young guy who’s thinking, I wanted you know, everyone else is in. I might as well raise my name ID. I might as well go hard against Trump, and I might as well try to, you know, play for a future where the Republican party would elect somebody like me. And I I think that’s I think that’s fine. I think it’s fine.

I think it’s not likely payoff, certainly not this cycle, but I think it’s a fine thing to do. I do think it’s a market signal though about the weakness of the field. Everyone’s looking now. Rick Scott thinks he might get in. Right?

Everybody’s looking at DeSantis saying

It’s a market signal on DeSantis, isn’t it?

Yeah. Exactly. That’s right.

So there was I don’t know if you paid attention to this on Twitter yesterday. I didn’t really pay attention to it, but I I had people muelling it to me. Larry Hogan said something negative about DeSantis’ chances.

Yeah. I said it’ll be done. I saw it.

What okay. So what did he say exactly?

He said he said that he didn’t think DeSantis was running gligard campaign and that he was based almost out of it.

So I the the anti anti Ron DeSantis Stans lost their ever loving minds over this yesterday on Twitter. Like I’m at a

conference, so I only saw I saw, like, the clip. Either reactions. Tell me.

Oh my gosh. The most unhinged also, like, as if he’s the bulwark candidate, a lot of bulwark tie ins with with Hogan, which again, I think it’s kind of funny since there are people at the bulwark who who are not super into St. Larry, But but here’s what bothered me.

I am I am though.

I know. I know. Here’s what bothered me about this though, which again, I think is a market signal. I’m not right about this today. If Ron DeSantis is a great candidate who’s gonna win the nomination, then Ron DeSantis is a great candidate who’s gonna win the nomination.

And Larry Hogan, saying that Ron DeSantis is a weak candidate who doesn’t look particularly good, and looks like he’s not gonna win, doesn’t change anything.

Right.

Right? I mean, this is why get mad at this guy looking at the it’s like saying that car doesn’t look very fast to me. What does it what does it matter what this guy says looking at the car? Either the car is fast or it isn’t. And the fact that these people are freaking out like this and going crazy like, you know, talking to Bill Crystal and blowjobs and Bulwark and Larry What

where did blowjobs come in?

It was it was it was Larry Hogan trying to feel like Bill Chris. I it again, I’m telling you just insanity. From the usual anti anti brigades. And I just don’t understand that because, again, if DeSantis is so as as Mark Zuckerberg says in the social Bulwark, when he’s talking about the Winklevide twins. If you had invented Facebook, then you would have invented Facebook.

Yeah.

And if Rhonda Santos is a great candidate who’s gonna win, then he’s a great candidate who’s gonna win, and it doesn’t matter what Larry Hogan says. Why get upset?

Right. So, you know, I was having this conversation yesterday with somebody, and they were sort of trying to make the argument that the reason DeSantis still really had a chance is because what was gonna happen is that DeSantis was gonna be the only viable person running close to second, and everybody else was gonna drop out and endorse him, and that was gonna make him formidable. Because that’s what the Democrats did. Right? I was talking to a Democrat.

So she’s thinking about things like and I was like, the difference between Democrats and Republicans are thus. Number one, If Nikki Haley and Jeb, you know, and and and Chris Christie, and Will Saletan and all of the normies suddenly drop out and endorse Ron DeSantis.

That hurts DeSantis.

A net negative. That is not like Buttigieg and, you know, everybody else dropping out to endorse Biden. K? So that’s one big difference. The second big difference is that there is a ton of structural incentives for all of these guys to attack DeSantis right now because we’re far enough out that they think well, somebody DeSantis isn’t strong enough to be the number two.

But so they all want to be the number two. Right? The only way to get model a model with Trump is to be the number two person. And that means going through DeSantis first. And so, the whole field is after not Trump, they’re after DeSantis.

And it’s just a it’s just a structural difference that makes it, I think, harder for DeSantis. And then third, is the like, they all smell Ron DeSantis’ weakness. Right? If everybody thought DeSantis was strong, they might sort of sit back, but they they don’t. They think he’s weak.

They think he doesn’t have it. The deeper they get into the campaign, the more convinced they are. He doesn’t have. It’s not like they’re getting persuaded the other way. And so, I just see it as, like, fundamentally different and bad for him.

He is not gaining I have not have you seen a single signal whether it’s a pull or anything else that he is gaining traction rather than losing traction?

There’s a single American greatness pull of Iowa voters in which he, like, looks, to have moved a little bit in Iowa. That’s it.

Okay.

And it’s American greatness, so I don’t, you know, believe it or not, believe it. Can I add one more thing, though, Because this is a this is a misremembering of history on the part of people? Joe Biden led the national polling wire to wire. The moment in which Joe Biden looked weak was following the absolute cluster fuck in Iowa where nobody actually has any idea what happened in Iowa. Like, I was do you remember, like, nobody, you know, they were trying ranked choice voting and I would just blew up on the lunch pad.

It was a caucus, but they’re they were trying, they were trying like a tabulation system, like an online tabulation system, That

They’d introduced a route choice element to it, I think.

I don’t know, man. It was a caucus. I was a caucus.

It is a caucus. Right. But what they were like well, whatever. The point is there was like bad things happened in Iowa. Nobody knew what the results were in Iowa.

And then you go to New Hampshire, which is next door to Bernie. And so is almost like a home a home state for Bernie. And then all of a sudden it looked like Bernie had the momentum to surge ahead of Biden. Biden was not down thirty points to Bernie. Right.

It was at the point the case that Biden was losing by thirty points and Clobuchar and Pete got out and endorsed him and rocketed him up the they just short him up. And then, you know, he went to places where his real strengths could could bear. Like, what is what is that version for DeSantis. Right? The idea that you could just make up so much ground and everybody’s like, yeah, national polls don’t matter.

They kind of matter. They kind of matter. Right. National polls don’t matter if it’s pure name ID going on?

It matters when the gap’s that big because it just like, that can be a polling miss. It can even be a big polling miss. But it’s not missing a fundamental truth which is that Donald Trump way out ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. Alright. But but back to back to Will Heard, again, I was I was meaner to will heard yesterday than I really wanted to be.

I’m sorry. But you have to tell me what your newsletter said. I’m a I’m not a thing. I’m I just didn’t read it, so tell me.

The nub of it is Will Heard, who, again, I like a ton. I don’t know him at all. I’ve never met the guy. But who who on paper, I love I I if he was if he lived next door to me, we would be best buddies, we’d be barbecuing together every weekend with our families. I’m sure if he was the president of the United States, I would be perfectly happy and convinced that the America was in good hands.

If he won the Republican nomination, I’d be thrilled. Right? All of that I just need to caveat all of that. But for him who is constantly talking about how he is mister knee. He loves Nuance, and he loves complicated as he told the Atlantic in an interview a couple years ago.

He opens his his campaign ad by talk but just spewing out a bunch of like, wild exaggerations and and partisan nonsense about how inflation is out of control and crime and homelessness are rising in our cities, and Joe Biden either can’t or won’t do anything about it. I just, like, went through the the numbers, like, you know, inflation is now at the lowest point. It’s been in two years. It’s not out of control. We we actually just in the last two weeks got in big preliminary crime numbers on murder rates, murder we have seen to be seeing the largest decline in murder rates in maybe American history, down like twelve percent in cities so far year to date.

It’s preliminary data, but we don’t know. But my point is, Will Heard is gonna get two percent. No matter what he does. If he runs a totally honorable campaign, he’ll get two percent. And if he ran the most manga campaign, he’ll get two percent.

For him to get two percent while pretending that Joe Biden is a socialist is actually a net harm to the body politic because he normalizes like the insane version of the criticisms of the by demonstration. And there are, you know, as I said in the news, like and I spent, like, two paragraphs in the news that are, like, here are fifteen things that a Republican could criticize the Biden administration on. Right? I mean, this is it’s It’s not like the guy’s perfect. There’s a lot to work with.

But this is my disappointment with Heard. A a guy who could make an honest good faith argument isn’t? He’s just making the same arguments against Biden that DeSantis and Trump are. And if he had to do that to win the nomination, that would be one thing. But he’s doing that in service of getting his two percent.

And that’s that’s not cool.

Yeah. I don’t know. This one’s hard for me just because like, What’s he gonna he’s not gonna he’s not gonna run for the Republican nomination and not criticize the opponent of the like, the other party.

He didn’t block to do that. Talk about Afghanistan, talked about illegal immigration. You could talk about spending. Right? I mean, they they’re boring things.

You can

talk about the the student loan.

We’ll care about illegal immigration. I said people care about illegal immigration.

Yeah. I think you talk about that stuff. It’s we but he’s doing this because this is the other thing I wanna talk about. This is what the people want to talk about as evidence would speak.

These are the issues that animate Republican voters.

Hey again, it’s JBL. The conversation goes on from there. If you want to hear the rest of the show, head on over to Bulwark Plus and subscribe. Love to have you.