00:00Enjoy this free edition of Offscript, a Straight Arrow subscriber exclusive.
00:06Hey everybody, I'm Christian Bryant. Welcome to Unbiased Updates Offscript.
00:11We spend all week reporting the news. Now, we get to talk about it.
00:15Coming up on the podcast, Democrats just pulled off an election sweep that few people saw coming,
00:22at least not quite on this scale. And now Republicans are trying to figure out what
00:27went wrong and who's to blame. From Texas to Georgia to Kansas, the political map looks very
00:34different. So what just happened? And what comes next? Let's go off script.
00:43Let's start where we always do on the show, and that's with what matters. The story everyone's
00:48talking about and the questions it's leaving behind. And no surprise that the story this week
00:54is the midterm election. So we knew this election was going to be a big one, but I'm not sure
00:58anyone
00:59expected it to be like this. Yes, Democrats took back both chambers of Congress, but they also won
01:05races in places where Republicans have dominated for literal decades. Places like Ruby Red, Texas,
01:12South Carolina, even Kansas, and possibly even Mississippi. Now, people close to President
01:19Trump are disagreeing about why it happened. He says it's all because he wasn't on the ballot.
01:25But there's another part of this story that's really interesting. All the money that went into
01:29the races and how little some of it actually bought. I'm thinking millions and millions of dollars.
01:35So I wanted to get into all of that with our senior politics reporter, Ozzy Pabra,
01:40who joined me to make sense of what was a pretty remarkable election night.
01:45Ozzy Pabra, thanks again for joining us on Offscript. Always good to have you here,
01:50even if neither of us really slept like we should have last night, which was election night.
01:57I want to start big picture and then dig a little bit deeper. There's reporting that this might have
02:04been the biggest political shift since Watergate. And a lot of the candidates the president endorsed
02:11ended up losing. What does that tell you about where voters are right now?
02:20Whether or not this is as big as Watergate, it is clear that from coast to coast in traditionally
02:29safe Republican seats and districts, you saw a Democratic turnout and people showing up voting
02:36for people with a D at the end of their name in ways that we haven't seen in decades.
02:46Iowa, Georgia, Texas, Texas, Kansas, places where Democrats did not really compete as much.
02:57They're coming out ahead. And even if you look at Florida, a place that Ron DeSantis,
03:04the Republican governor won by double digits, his successor, Congressman Byron Donald,
03:12won it by just one percentage point. This is a remarkable turnaround.
03:20What's happening now, though, is a different kind of campaign. And it's the campaign to explain
03:26what happened. You have some people who are allies of the president who are saying the agenda he put
03:37forward and the way he enacted it is to blame, which is largely putting the results at his feet.
03:44There's another group that is trying to say it's really voters who are too impatient
03:50and lashing out at an incumbent administration before they've had their full four years to enact what
03:57they want.
03:57I'm sure you're going to bring up J.D. Vance. But right now I'm thinking about his quote,
04:03you know, give us two more years, right? The job's not done. Give us another chance to make sure we
04:09can make good on our promises. And kind of what you're saying is that there's the the group that is
04:18thinking about this and saying, you know, voters just weren't patient enough because those things were
04:24coming. But, you know, they they weren't willing to wait. Right. J.D. Vance blames the war in Iran
04:34and Donald Trump to late Tuesday night disagreed with him and said, no, it's it's not the war in
04:40Iran. It's the gas prices that resulted from the war in Iran. But people were were not willing to pay
04:49that high cost for as long. So so there's like a bit of a disagreement about that.
04:55The fallout from this is that you had a sweep through Georgia.
05:02Every Democrat who who ran statewide in Georgia, one and six out of the six out of the eight.
05:12Democratic statewide candidates. We're black women. This is this is one of the you know,
05:18one of the states that I I wanted us to focus on because, you know, this was this was it
05:25was history
05:26making. But, you know, you dig a little bit deeper and there's something really unique about what
05:33we've seen in Georgia. I mean, what's the takeaway here, especially considering, you know, this is a
05:40state that has just voted for the first person to hold the governorship that is not a white man.
05:51And then, of course, all the down ballot races. I mean, what what is that? What does that say to
05:56you
05:57or what does that signal to you? There's two things I think it sort of signals. The first
06:03is even though Donald Trump's influence in the Republican Party is strong, that version of the
06:12Republican Party, when it shows fealty to him, irrespective of his policy, it doesn't hold.
06:20They can lose elections. Remember, Georgia is the place where the Republican governor and Republican
06:28secretary of state refused to follow Trump's orders to find additional votes after the 2020
06:37presidential election. I've had the number eleven thousand seven hundred eighty just kind of playing
06:42and repeat in my brain over the last few years for whatever reason. Pick up a lotto ticket and play
06:49those numbers. But Republicans in Georgia have had a history of being of having some daylight between
06:58themselves and perhaps the the most ambitious parts of of Trump and the MAGA impulses, if you will.
07:08What it also says to me is that there may be a world where there is far less ticket splitting
07:17than there had been just a few years ago. If you look over at Texas, a reliably historically
07:26Republican stronghold. Democrats swept. I mean, top to bottom, the governor is out, the attorney general is
07:36out, the senator is out. Even the railroad commissioner candidate, Beau French, whose racism even extended to
07:47college football students, he lost. I mean, there was a time in American politics where Republicans and Democrats
07:57said that each had a sort of liberal and conservative faction within their own parties, which made for like some
08:07weird, unusual
08:08cross-party alliances, some regional cohesion that you could see across the parties. That has largely faded away as each
08:22party
08:22has more sorted around the idea of Democrats being more progressive and Republicans being more conservative.
08:31The more you get that, the more you will see sort of waves like Tuesday night. If the top of
08:39the ticket is unpopular, good luck trying to separate yourself if you're in that same party.
08:43And I think that's what we saw in Georgia. I think that's what we saw in Texas.
08:47Right. There's another topic that we had spent some time talking about leading up to the midterms, and it's the
08:55money, the amount of money that kind of flooded into this election cycle.
09:01I mean, this was a massive factor in these races across the country. There was reporting that said, you know,
09:09election spending broke records and more than 130 million dollars were spent on AI ads alone.
09:20You know, in journalism, especially when talking about interviewing techniques, you don't you don't really want to ask somebody a
09:26yes or no question.
09:27Do it. Did this make a difference? That's the end of the free version of off script.
09:33If you want to hear the full episode, become a straight arrow subscriber at san.com slash get off script
09:39and get access to every episode.
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