Derek Thompson and Adam Carlson: The Republicans' Strength Is Now Their Weakness

Tim Miller (0:13)

Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A couple of quick notes over on The Bulwark Take Speed.

There is an unbelievable Sam Stein interview with Eric Dieters, the man Kim Guilfoyle asked to pay her credit card debt.

It's hilarious. And this guy is just, it's totally wheels off. And who knows, I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like crimes are discussed. You just, you have to check it out if you haven't. It's on The Bulwark Take Speed Plus over there. I've got a rant about JD Vance answering a question about what is socialism yesterday. And he decided that he thinks socialism is mass migration and boys playing girl sports, really. So I've got a lot to say on that. So go check that out on The Bulwark Take Speed as well. And if you're appreciating our content, you can become a Bulwark Plus member right now.

And we got a deal for you. Head to thebulwark.com/surprise to get your October surprise offer. We'd love to have you on board in the Bulwark Plus and you can talk in the comments. You can praise me, complain in the comments. You got the Secret Show. Come on, come join us. All right, today's show is a doozy. It's a double header. In segment two, we continue our Young Strategist series with a progressive pollster. We're going to go in depth on the reasons some people are concerned. There will be another polling miss. We offer a little bit of hopium. If you don't just fast forward to the hopium, there's some hopium that maybe the polling miss might actually be the Democrats performing better than the polls say.

Who the hell knows? Anything could happen. But first, he was a long time tech culture and political writer at The Atlantic. He now has his own sub stack. He's the host of the Plain English podcast. His books include Hitmakers, An Abundance, and a forthcoming one on the antisocial century. It's Derek Thompson. What's up, man? Welcome back.

Derek Thompson (1:57)

Tim, great to see you, man.

Tim Miller (1:58)

Good to see you too.

As mentioned in segment two, we're doing kind of a polling deep dive on kind of addressing the anxieties of the resistance libs who have had the rug pulled out from under them a few times over the last decade when they felt like the stakes are high. And so we're kind of looking at that polling. I'm just wondering, you know, this is a little bit kind of tangentially related to your world and data world. I'm wondering what if you have a hot take on the midterm polling and concerns about error?

Derek Thompson (2:31)

Well, so I don't know if it's a hot take, but here's how I'm trying to get ahead of like the narrative cycle.

It really looks like Democrats, I'm not going to lie, are going to have a strong night in November. And I think they're going to win a lot of Senate seats. I think they're going to win seats in places like knocking on wood again, Texas, North Carolina, that we have thought of as either purplish red or red states. I'm trying to think of once we know that all these people who seem like they're going to win have won, how does that set up the next question, which is who's going to lead the party? Who is the emblem of the party? Who's the symbol of the party? And I can see, especially if El Sayed comes out winning in a non-squeaker. I think if you have lots of people like Ossoff winning by like nine, 10 points, and El Sayed wins in Michigan, which is like a little purple, but like kind of certainly a blue state in a D plus nine environment, if he wins by like one or two, I think that's going to shape the degree which people think of him as being the future Democratic Party. But let's just assume that both El Sayed and Ossoff win by five to nine points, Talarico wins by let's say four points. I think there's going to be this big open question of like, okay, here's the next generation of Democrats, and what does it say about where Democrats are going, and especially who's going to be the face of the party. So what I joked with Nate about is like, this is, I mean, I don't know if this is like too simplistic of a take, but you didn't ask for a very sophisticated take. No, I didn't. No, you didn't. Look, if El-Sayed and Ossoff both win by five to 10 points, which beefcake is going to lead the Democratic Party in 2028 is going to be a narrative that people talk about. Like Democrats in 2024 were the party of weak men, and young men, especially the ones who seem to be roided up on YouTube, hated the Democratic Party, talked about how much they hated it. What's wrong with young men? How does the Democratic Party get back its sort of testosterone mojo? I'm not trying to be overly gendered here. I'm just trying to honestly represent what the narrative was in 2024