Victor Davis Hanson: Five Week Midterm Election Update

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Victor Davis Hanson (0:23)

The polls are, we really don't know the effect of these polls, the reliability of them. We don't know exactly who's going to get how much money and from where. We really don't know how well the Republicans are going to be able to expose the socialist background of their opponents, but the big known unknowns, again. What's going to happen in Iran in the last next five weeks? Is the regime going to get stronger? Is it going to close the strait? Will gas stabilize or go down? Will the Iranian regime fall? Nobody really knows.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We're about five weeks from the midterms and maybe we should have another update. Both sides seem to be increasingly confident, although I think the mood on the Democrats is that they're about to achieve a historic capture of both the Senate and the House and put an end to Donald Trump's counterrevolution. The Republicans is a little bit more tentative. They feel that very slowly there's a turnaround and the momentum may be going their way, but they're not sure they have enough time yet. They're worried about two issues, the price of gas and the unpopularity of the Iran war.

If you look at the polls, though, there's some things to remember about. We go through these known unknowns of the election. The polls are very confident that the Democrats are going to take the House and get very close, if not take the Senate.

But we remember in the primaries, Abdu'l-Syed in Michigan was supposed to defeat his opponent by nine to ten points and only one by a point and a half. The polls were way off in the Hong, the Hong Wisconsin Senate race. And they were off in many, they were overvaluing or they were too optimistic, as they were during the Trump-Harris. As a general rule, most pollsters are A, democratic. Most polls tend to exaggerate the strength of a democratic candidate for most of the race. And C, as the race gets down to the election day deadline, many of the pollsters will be more realistic so that they can save their reputations after the balloting is conducted.

In addition to the polls, there's uncertainty. We don't know the effect. We don't hear much about it. We had these great red state redistricting wars, and we had the controversial Supreme Court racial gerrymandering case that said you could not artificially craft congressional districts for 750 or so thousand constituents on the basis of race to ensure an election of a person of a particular race. We don't know, we haven't had really any analyses of how that's going to translate in favor of the Republicans. Another unknown is that in these individual key races in the swing states, states like Michigan and Texas especially, and Minnesota, it's not really a swing state, but it is this time, we see that the Democratic candidates are out raising the Republicans. However, on the national level, when we look at political action committee money and private donors like Elon Musk, you can make the argument that the Republicans have a greater war chest. So it's hard to adjudicate exactly how the money is going to be used, from where it's going to come from, and who has the advantage. Again, another known unknown.

Something that came up with the Graham Plattner candidacy that failed in Maine is that no one really knew how radical these socialists were. Let me give you a little context.

Mayor Mondami won New York, which is a very, very blue left-wing constituency, and he was pretty much not shy of saying that he was a socialist. The same thing was true of other candidates in the Democratic primaries in overwhelmingly blue areas in New York, in Los Angeles, in Denver. However, we really had not seen socialist, avowed socialist or Democrats whose records are indistinguishable or their advocacy is indistinguishable from socialists. We've never really seen them in a statewide races. So we wanted to know how they would react. And it's been quite amazing. Mr. Tallarico in Texas has disowned all of his prior record of talking about a multi-gendered God who's non-binary, and that there were several genders in his commentary about his favorite drag queen, person, his desire to fight his whiteness, etc. These have dripped out. The same thing is true of Mr. Saeed in Michigan, Ms. Flanagan in Minnesota. And so what's happening is, now that these hard left candidates are in statewide races, they have the enthusiasm of that youthful and I'll be candid overpolled group. But as the race wears on, they are desperately scrambling to hide, to cleanse their social media accounts, or mask their true socialist belief. And what's happening is, that causes a reaction from conservatives that are desperate to uncover all the things they've said in the past. And they're pretty embarrassing to tell you the truth. That's another known unknown. In other words, how much information can the right get out to the public and disseminate it that shows that the candidates on the democratic side are trying to hide who they are so that they can get elected and then reveal them, their true selves, only after the balloting is finished?