Tim Miller and Michael Steele celebrate the Democratic wins from the latest election, including the Mississippi Senate race, the Texas and Georgia results, and the diverse statewide officeholders elected in Georgia. Steele argues that Republicans who backed Donald Trump for a decade should not now escape accountability, and he sees the results as a rebuke of the administration's policies.
They discuss the National Popular Vote compact and whether it could reshape presidential campaigns, the turnout gap that helped Democrats in Texas, and lessons from the 2010 and 2012 Republican cycles. The conversation closes with speculation about the futures of JD Vance and Marco Rubio and the direction of the party.
In this episode Tim Miller, Michael Steele
This transcript of Michael Steele's post-election analysis on Mississippi, Texas and Georgia was made with HappyScribe's Teams transcription technology.
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Hello and welcome to "The Bulwark Daily." I'm your host, Tim Miller. It's going to be a fun one today. We're welcoming back to the show co-host of "MS Now" is the Week Knight, also former chair of the RNC and was lieutenant governor of Maryland. It's Michael Steele. What's up, Chairman?
What up, what up? Hey man, how you doing? Looking good, baby.
I'm looking good. I'm feeling good. I got a skip in my step. Me and Bill Crystal just have been so aligned all year, though I guess, I mean, he was the one that thought we could win Mississippi, so he's been a little ahead of me. But we've been mostly aligned all year, which is nice when you have synergy. And once again, we were aligned this morning. He opens up his newsletter like this, and this is exactly how I've been feeling this week. Start by saying, you know, on Wednesday I said we deserve one day of celebration, but as we get to Friday, I've decided we need more than one day of celebration.
We can get back to work soon enough. There'll be no shortage of struggles and challenges and difficulties. They'll come a time very soon to think and worry and argue. But how often do we get to celebrate something like what the American people accomplished on Tuesday? The breadth and depth of the popular repudiation of Trump and Trumpism deserves more than a mere 24 hours. From Mississippi Delta to the Alaskan tundra from the Outer Banks to the Great Plains, a kind of iron curtain has been lifted from across our continent. A feeling of dread has given way to a sense of possibility.
That's where I'm at, baby. Who cares about January? I'm living in the moment this week.
Right.
Will you do that with me?
I think we savor it, dude. I think we do. The faith in the American people, especially after 2024, when they went back to crazy, to put it rather frankly, 10 million people decided it wasn't worth their vote to go to the polls and stay at home. They roused themselves out of the Trump stupor, and they looked at their lives. They recounted the promises made, the promises not kept.
They realized that their sense of the American dream had been forfeited for their children, and they wanted change. And, you know, look, I think the last time you and I can really say we've seen this kind of epic change, you know, you're really talking about three distinct periods, you know, the 2006-2010 period, 1994, and certainly going back to the Reagan shift where the ground moved in 1980.
Those type of epic moments where the country kind of leans in, you have to pay attention. But to Bill's point, you also have to take a moment and go, salute, baby, salute. You know, because it really said a lot about the potential here. Democrats are, I think, in a much better position than we were in 2010, after the 2010 cycle, where we saw massive pickup of state legislative races, state houses, governorships, and Congress.
And the big driver here is they've laid down some really strong policy predicates on accountability, for sure, but affordability, the ability to, you know, work together to bring prices down for families across the country. So I think it's going to be exciting for them. If they aren't true to form and screw it up, they should be putting themselves, I think, in a good position to go forward, at least well into 2027.
I think you kind of understated the feeling after 2024 a little bit. I think that there was a deep doubt that the American people could ever arise from the slumber.
Fair point.
A lot of us were looking around and going, well, shit.
Right.
Like maybe our neighbors aren't exactly what we thought they were. Maybe there was something about the.
I need to change my neighborhood.
Yeah, exactly. Maybe there's something about the character of the country that was permanently broken. And so to me, I just think that is the big relief and also the thing to celebrate, right? Like this notion that, you know, even in 2020, after the Biden win, I was sad the week after the Biden win. Like I was happy he won, but I spent most of the week sad because it was not a repudiation of Trump. Like it was an eked out victory and we knew that there was a fight ahead. And this feels meaningfully different from that.
Just a total, absolute schlonging, as the president would like to say, and a, you know, maybe, and it will be a long time ahead, kind of like one of them, you know, the Irish wake or the Jewish funeral. It's going to be a long funeral.
It's going to be a long, it's going to be a long one.
Yeah, but it's starting ahead. And, you know, it's been 10 years. And I don't know, have you like had a chance to kind of think about that this week? Just kind of the 10 years and.
Yeah, no, I think about it all the time. I think about my party, you know, basically desiccating itself and, you know, sitting there wondering how it happened and why it happened and not fully understanding earlier on that the man that they follow has no allegiance loyalty, has no desire to be with them or want them the way they think he does.
They're a tool for him. They always have been. And so you see this sense of confusion. That's part one. The other part, though, which I'm, this is going to be very hard because I'm that son of a bitch. You're not going to come up in my face down and pretend like this shit didn't happen and you had no role to play in it. So all you Republicans who are now sitting there coming out talking about, oh yeah, it was the war and we should have done this and we should have done that and, you know, we should have had better, you know, candidate quality matters.
Bitch, shut the fuck up. I don't want to hear that shit from you. Please don't get up in my face saying that. Don't, please don't even pretend because you will get called out in a very embarrassing way. Just know that because I'm not in the mood after this win to countenance your bullshit and try to gloss over my eyes what you did for the last 10 years to put the party and the nation in this position in the first place.
So don't even, all you soft ass bitches out there who were sitting back and wouldn't come to the microphone and say, Donald Trump, this war is illegal. I will not stand with it. I will vote for the war powers resolution. All you soft bitches who got out there and said, oh, Pete Hegseth will make a great secretary of defense. Oh, Kash Patel, oh my God, the FBI will never be the same. Well, you got that shit right. Don't even come up in my face with that jaws crap.
Don't even do it because there is no room for that. And so these two pieces for me, how the party starts to reconcile itself with the country and all the little, you know, running nose bitches who allowed this to happen, who are going to be trying to clean their act up to think they're going to run for president in 2028 and that we're just going to put the last 10 years behind us and blindly say, Marco Rubio, you had no role in this war. Marco Rubio, you had no role in the breakup of our European alliance.
Or Ron DeSantis, you had no role in what happened, not just in your state, but around the country with this cultural war bullshit. Don't even pretend, people, please.
Well, you're going to make my job easy this morning, which is nice. You got a lot to say. I love how I brought up feelings. What are your feelings about the last 10 years? And you could go anywhere with that. Like for me, I've got glee. There's a little bit of wistfulness. I got a little teary with Adam Hamilton yesterday and thinking about our immigrant neighbors. Michael Steele's response is righteous rage and double middle finger. That's the feeling that came up for you. Double middle finger. And I like that. There's a part of me that's there as well. We're going to come back to the double middle finger, I promise.
But I want to give people a little bit of just kind of get us up to speed of where we are and some of the election stuff. So in Mississippi, as things stand right now, Scott Column is leading by about a little over 1,800 votes. He flipped Forest County, named for Nathan Bedford Forest. That's kind of nice.
That's very nice.
That's a nice little fact. Cindy Hyde-Smith posted yesterday in the third person that Cindy Hyde-Smith is going to represent Mississippi in the United States Senate for the next six years. Based on all the data nerds I've talked to in Mississippi and around the country, I think Cindy Hyde-Smith is going to be representing the Biloxi slot machine for the next six years, actually. I think she's just going to be sitting there with her toe furky pulling the slots because she's going down. And that will make for 55. And Mary Paltrow is looking pretty good for 56.
But any thoughts on Mississippi?
You know, I have to give shout out props to Bill, our friend Bill, and my colleague Simone Sanders-Townson, who on our show about two and a half, three months ago raised the first prospects of what could happen in Mississippi. And, you know, I had a year ago on our show said that Republicans would lose the Senate and everyone thought I was out of my mind. But I said to people, then I said, I know my peeps. You're following Donald Trump. This does not end well for Republicans in the Senate because they're going to be baggaged with a whole lot of stuff they can't carry.
And that proved to be true. Mississippi, you know, Chuck Schumer very early on looked at Mississippi and really had a hand in sort of shaping that race in a lot of respect. So, you know, credit to him for seeing something there that people didn't see at the time. And so it takes that kind of, I think, intuitiveness when you're looking at certain races. I know this from 2010. I got into a lot of fights with official Washington because they didn't want me to invest in places because they didn't think people were going to win.
I'm like, no, they're going to be good. And so that's how you get to a Mississippi.
Yeah.
Taking that political risk. The same is true in Alaska. Candidate quality matters. Investment in that candidate matters. It's not just what they say to connect with the people. It's all the infrastructure behind them to support that message and to support them. And the Democrats were very good about this. I've been bullish on Texas, Tim, since the year 2000.
Since 2000?
2000. My first trip to Texas as a party chairman. I was state party chairman. I went down there for some stuff. And I just talked to people then and saw some things going on over the next few years that reinforced in my mind that Texas was a place to watch. And, you know, a lot of the work that I do with the National Popular Vote, folks, I've been saying Texas was going to be a battleground state for the last five years. And here we are.
I declared it the other night. It's going to be. It's now with the governorship and the Senate and the state house races that they've won. It's in play. So all of these dynamics sort of inform us about Mississippi.
Yeah.
And they inform us about Michigan. I think we should take the plank out of our eye when it comes to Mississippi because I think a lot of people got caught up in the racism and they didn't look at the facts on the ground and they didn't listen to what the people on the ground were saying about, you know, El Sayed. And they certainly, the response to that horrible ad afterwards also was, I think it was very telling in so many ways.
So there are a lot of pieces that when you sort of look at the totality of this election, you begin to understand why Mississippi is happening.
I want to hit on two things you just talked about because I'm glad you mentioned the National Popular Vote, because I've been wanting to bring this up all week. It's just a little side fact because the tsunami was so large that, you know, at the state legislative level, we're talking about this in the green room a little bit, you know, there were a bunch of surprises. Like I was in North Carolina, for example, a couple of weeks before the election. And even in the bull case, I was talking to some guy that consults for the state house. He was like, maybe we can get to a tie. Like maybe we can get down one. And it's like in the state legislative and the state house now is like going to have a huge Democratic majority in North Carolina, right?
So a bunch of that stuff happened in a bunch of places. And just an interesting fun fact. So for you to understand, there's this thing called the compact. And the deal at the compact is that if enough states that add up to over 270 electoral votes put into law, you know, a law that they will give their electors to the winner of the National Popular Vote instead of the winner of their state, that is kind of a functional workaround of the Electoral College. And you would have a functional National Popular Vote.
Functionally a direct election of the president.
Exactly. And that for the first time ever that the Democrats now control enough states to do that.
Yes, we are 22 electoral votes away from 270 right now.
But yeah, but I think with the results this week, I think you might have passed them.
Yeah, we may have passed them. And we'll, you know, we'll see. There's still a lot of work to do in this space. But I think the reality of it is 2028 could be the first time that people directly elect the president of the United States. We know there will be lawsuits and all of this, but this has been constitutionally tested. It's black letter law of the Constitution. The power rests with the states. The compact, so folks understand, is the exact same type of compact that states enter into on the lottery, where they agree that the winner of the lottery in Louisiana gets to benefit from the money that I and Maryland put into Powerball.
And if I win, your money from Louisiana comes to me. Same thing here. States agree, okay, we will focus, we'll put our money into the electoral bucket. I mean, our electoral votes into the electoral bucket. And whoever wins the National Popular Vote gets the votes in the bucket, regardless of who wins our state. And so that's the compact. And so it's a way that transforms how you run for president because now you can't play to the extremes. I need California as a Republican.
I may not win the state, but I can mine five, six million votes out of California, which will add to my National Popular Vote total. So now I've got to go campaign in California. I got to raise money there. As a Democrat, I got to go to Alabama and Mississippi and try to raise money and dollars and votes there. So it transforms the process. There'll be more conversation about this, but I just want to put on the table straight up so people don't get confused.
This does not eliminate the Electoral College. I've listened to a number of people the last 24 hours on the news talk about in some headlines, you know, this could, you know, eliminate the Electoral College. It does not. That's bullshit. It does not. It uses the Electoral College structure. The only thing is, is the compact of the states that are part of the Electoral College that agree Maryland's 10 electoral votes are in the bucket. We were the first state to go in 20 years ago.
And so those are in the bucket. So if a Republican wins the National Popular Vote, they get Maryland's 10 electoral votes, even though they may lose the election here in Maryland.
It's an interesting thing. We'll keep monitoring it. It is related to what you also said about Blexus and you kind of went viral on MS Now doing a version of what you just said, talking about how you think Texas is really in play in 2028. So if the compact doesn't come through and we're still in Electoral College mode in 2028, Texas.
Still is a battleground state.
Becomes a battleground state. And I think it has to for this reason. Yesterday, Rob Flaherty and I were talking about this a little bit and he was like a little skeptical because of how much it costs. But the reward is so great for Democrats. I think you end up having to play because if they win Texas, there's almost, you basically lock the Republicans out, right?
Can I just make that point for you real quick?
Please.
To be clear, to be clear, America, so y'all know, if Texas is a battleground state and the Republicans don't win it, there's no math.
There's no math.
There's no math that gets them the presidency. They can win Ohio, they can win Michigan, they can win Florida, all those big popular battleground states, they can win them. Democrats start with 40, they add California. It's game set, match, baby. It does not change.
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Totally insane. Okay. And you know, it's a 12-point victory. He and a hostile wins by seven. Ted Cruz is the only statewide elected Republican in all of Texas. So like there is the positive and you know, some of this stuff seems very durable. The Rio Grande Valley, you know, that feels like it really was a short blip for Trump and it was a response to the border being out of control with Biden and some other factors. And that, it's hard to imagine that going back at any time soon. Maybe who the hell knows what the future holds. So that's durable. A bunch of the, you know, the Dallas sprawl becoming Democrat, like that's the same thing that happened in other cities.
It just happened a little later because it was Texas. You know what I mean? So there's no reason to believe that that isn't durable. That there's kind of this suburban exurban sprawl around Dallas and Houston wouldn't stay as Democratic. So to me, I think it's a real possibility. The one thing, the one flag that's worth noting is it was a turnout story in Texas. There was about a million fewer people that turned out, a little over a million then in 2024. And I think a lot of those were Trump voters. These guys at Broom Street Labs, I was looking at their analysis.
The Democrats' net gain, about 75% of it was from Republicans not showing up, was from turnout gap. You know, it was different state to state, but you know, seven, eight, nine percent of Trump voters did switch. Like there was some persuasion too, but a big part of it was not turning out. And so you do worry that in a presidential year, those folks come back, depends on who the candidates are, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I mean, obviously it would be still a big uphill battle for the Democrats, but you know, that's kind of the state of play in Texas.
I don't know if you have anything to add to that.
Yeah, no, I think that makes, I think that makes a lot of sense. So let's start with the last point first. What that says to me is if I am the chairman of the Democratic Party of the state of Texas, I am working with the chairman of the National Party, Ken Martin, to build an infrastructure in Texas off of the good vibes, the good feelings, the narratives, the messaging, the history, all of that, to lock as much of that vote as I can, but also grow the vote.
There are a lot of people who still need to be registered, who still need to be organized, who now watch this storyline unfold and they can be a part of what comes next. So creating that interest. Now, a lot of that's going to hinge on two things, how Tell the Rico and Hina Hosa are doing, how particularly for the governor, particularly for the governor. The Senate is a different play for a whole lot of reasons because of national implications.
But how people feel in the state about the, because they will project what they think about the Democratic Party on how Hina Hosa is doing. So if Gina's doing well, they're going to like Democrats. If they find their cost of living is favorably impacted, they're going to like the Democrats. If they find their access to healthcare is favorably impacted, they're going to like Democrats. So there's an opportunity here to sort of create a little bit of a pincer around an emotional high and policy basics to bring voters a little bit closer and a little bit tighter.
Because you're absolutely right. When you have a million people on the other side who didn't show up in a presidential year, they're likely to do that, particularly if there's, you know, someone that excites them on the Republican side for president. So you want to begin to counterbalance that now, not 18 months from now.
Yeah.
To your first point, you know, I think that there is a lot of, and this is sort of a broadening out on what I just said, a lot of other national implications that will drive storylines in Texas as well. Because at the end of the day, Texas is no different than any other state, even though they think they're outsized and they're bigger and they're better. A lot like New York, they have this sort of mine thing going on. I like to hang with folks like Louisiana and Maryland myself. But you know, the reality of it is they're going to be, you know, global factors that are also going to drive.
So the price of diesel and the price of gas that affects a state like Texas, imports, tariffs, all these other things. And that's where Tell the Rico can begin to level up a different kind of voice than what we've heard from, certainly from the Republican leadership of the state. So I think Democrats are in a good position when it comes to Texas. But to your point, they're yellow flags, not red flags. They're yellow flags right now that they need to pay attention to. But not just in Texas, I would say nationally as well.
Yeah.
Because you don't want to forfeit this moment and momentum the way we forfeited it coming out of 2010. Because by 2012, we started to lose a lot of the seats that we had gained in 2010.
Yeah. I'll talk a little bit more about 2010 in a second, but I do just want to do one more state update. And it's all green flags in this state. And that is Georgia. And we've talked about Jon Ossoff's win. We talked about Keisha Lance Bottom's win.
Right.
But I hadn't really locked in on what had happened down ballot. And it is insane. I would like to put this graphic up on the screen for YouTube viewers who can get a visual look at what happened to the statewide officeholders in Georgia. I'm going to read it for the audio listeners. On the left here, you have a bunch of guys named Butch, a bunch of Republicans named Butch. It's all white guys that were all the statewide officeholders. And now on the right side of the graphic, it's the new statewide officeholders, Governor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Lieutenant Governor Josh McLaurin, Secretary of State Penny Brown Reynolds, black woman, Attorney General Tanya Miller, black woman, State Superintendent of Schools Lydia Powell, black woman, Agriculture Commissioner Kathryn Juhan Arnold, black woman, Insurance Commissioner Keisha Waits, black woman, Labor Commissioner Nikki Porcher, black woman.
It's seven black women out of eight are the statewide officeholders. There's always a thing in DC where it's like the Republican caucus is a bunch of guys named Mike. And in Georgia now we got two Keishas.
Two Keishas. Go figure. Go figure. Oh my gosh. It's such a beautiful story out of Georgia when you consider the history of Georgia. The same in Mississippi when you consider the history of Mississippi. To have a black leadership emerge this way, particularly in an era where you have a president and a government that is trying to excise, write out the history of black people in this country. So voters around the country gave us five black governors.
They gave us in states like Georgia, black leadership. We got Hispanic governors, a Hispanic governor in California, Hispanic leadership, and in Texas.
Native American governor? Native Mexican?
Native, oh my gosh. What, I mean, that is the, that story there is just amazing when you consider the history of the country. And sort of wiping out the Native American story the way we have now to have the first Native American governor is profoundly.
Yeah, to Holland and New Mexico. Yeah. And it's interesting, I'm still monitoring one of the races that, you know, I kind of had a bunch of these stretch house races that I was encouraging listeners to support. And one of them was that leader of the president of the Navajo Nation running against Eli Crane in Arizona. And this was a super big stretch. His name's Jonathan Ness. Because Eli, you know, this is a very safe R district, but Eli Crane is such a douchebag. I put it on the list anyway, because I thought it'd be cool for him to win. And we're in recount territory right now. I got Eli is still a slight favorite, but it is possible that he wins that race too.
So this, for me, Tim, was America's middle finger onto the government on DEI.
Yeah.
I said, oh, you don't want, okay. All right, deal with all these black and brown and, you know, Native American people who are now going to be leading significant swaths of the country. Not in insignificant states.
Unmerit, by the way. Merit. You can't get more merited than just winning more votes. You can't get more merit than just winning more votes.
More merit than three quarters of this cabinet.
Yeah, that's for sure.
So, you know, so I just think it's, I think it was a profound moment on so many levels what the American people did, the way they pushed back. And we can say, yeah, a lot of it was, you know, affordability issues, but there was also this thread about the country itself. You and I have talked about this, especially over the last six or so years, about how this country has to reconcile itself to its own history and how it has to come to grips with where it is.
We are a pluralistic society and culture. And I'm sure, you know, there, you know, a whole lot of white folks are sitting there crying in their, whatever they're crying in right now. But that's okay, boo. We still love you. You're still, we all here together. Where you going? What are you going to do?
Betty Johnson was crying about how Texas, this has happened to Texas because Texas isn't white enough anymore. And I was like, you're talking about Texas. It's like, have you ever been to a Chevy? It's like Texas, you know, the cultural milieu of Texas is not, it's not the white, we're not talking about North Dakota.
Right.
Right? Like from the start, it's been like this.
But that's a failure of our educational system. Because these mofos don't even know what, how the country was created and what parts of it came from what other parts.
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Let's listen.
One of the questions we will get an answer to tonight, I think, is whether Donald Trump and his fervent effort to get out his voters. A, will it be enough if it succeeds? If it has succeeded, which we'll find out.
I've been talking to some very, very high up people inside the White House. And they are not nervous yet because they haven't seen enough about Texas. It sounds like there is some frustration that Georgia was such an early call for Ossoff over Collins because President Trump won so easily in Georgia. But they think that things are pretty even and that we will know a lot more about whether or not things are going to turn away from their direction here at the White House.
You could argue that he might've saved some seats that we haven't even called yet.
So I think the Iran war was an issue, but I don't think that there's any way that these Democrats can end it. Brett, you remember, how do you end a war? How do you try to end a war? Defund the troops. And I'd love to see them try.
And I asked about that.
That will not happen.
That couldn't happen. The big news there is James Tell the Rico, but also perhaps bigger as far as the impact in Texas. Is Greg Abbott going down? I mean, not since Ann Richards. Has there been a Democrat governor?
The Republicans spent two weeks suggesting that he went to a mental institution when he said he had the flu. And so they just wasted all of this time.
And you can't just jump in. And Elon Musk can't buy a seat for $168 million.
This time around, you had Speaker Mike Johnson on air telling everybody that the polls were completely wrong. And I feel like it gave a false sense of security to Republican voters who might have turned out if they thought things were going to be differently.
Poor little sheep. Poor little sheep. You know. Oh my God. Oh my God. Still tone deaf. Still completely tone deaf. Completely missing what the country is doing.
Don't push back to the war at all. They think that they can do the, oh, you're going to defund. People would love for us to defund the troops and let them come home. That would have like an 88% approval rating if they pass that through Congress. Brett, we're bringing the troops home. We're defunding the war. People would love that. Then it's like, oh, people didn't turn out because it is just like, no, people didn't turn out because they didn't like the shit you were doing. Wasn't it? Wasn't the spin?
Not complicated. Not complicated. And the reality is those snippets are just a sort of, you could just see it over time, the devolution of really kind of understanding what the country was doing and not being able to fully respond to it. And so, yeah, defund the war. Yeah, okay. No one's saying that, but now that you've mentioned it, maybe.
I'm pro. I mean, we will take care of our veterans when they come home, but they shouldn't be over there. They've come up with something though, Michael, just so you know. By Wednesday, they had a chance to get a little bit of sleep and think through it. And then yesterday afternoon, in the middle of the day, the news program, this is the news hour, not the opinion at night. Not what you're doing. They're in the news hour in the middle of the day. They've turned to something else that I think they're going to be focused on. Let's watch that.
West Hollywood unanimously passes ordinance granting protections for polyamorous relationships. What's going on out West?
To be clear, it is West Hollywood, which is where the Star Wars cantina goes to feel normal. Okay. If you've ever walked around West Hollywood, it's, you know, extraterrestrial life. They're trying to offer some type of legal protection for people who are in thropos. So you're thruples.
Thruples.
You sleep with thruples, thruples.
Come on.
You sleep with what, two or three or more people?
Boogie! They're doing thruples in L.A. Watch out. That's the new, that's what, let's talk about that. Says the guy whose jawline meets his hair. What the?
He's like, they're the Star Wars cantina. It's like, if you've been to West Hollywood, it's great. They got a little lemon. They got some juice bars. You're the weirdo. They're the Star Wars cantina.
But see this, again, go back to the thing that you think will get people fired up. Let's start talking about polyamorous relationships. Okay. If I can put that in my gas tank, let's talk about it. What are you talking, what are we doing here? But this is where, this is where you are.
That's what they got. What do they have there you're going to talk about? I mean, they could do the news, which is that, you know, their coalition is falling apart. That Donald Trump has to grapple with the total rejection, that the war is unpopular, that the economy's bad. They could do the news.
Right.
But like, that's not good.
We want to scare you with culture bullshit.
Yeah.
I live in Prince George's County, Maryland, Tim. Why the fuck do I care about what the city council in West Hollywood did?
And by the way, we know it doesn't work. Because we just saw on Tuesday. Like I was with my buddy, my favorite place in Austin is Love BBQ. So I stopped by there on the way out of town after Tell the Rico won. And my college buddy lives there. And you know, he's like that, that a political person. And you know, we were just having lunch. And he's like, my kids, like my sons are like learning about trans from Ken Paxton's ads. And he's like, I don't have anything against trans people, but he's like, now I'm explaining this stuff to my eight-year-old.
And it's like the whole, this whole idea, this whole scare tactic was like, oh, the left is transing your kids. But like the people in Texas were like, no, actually, it's you guys that are teaching the kids about trans and thruples. They wouldn't know about this till they went to college, but you won't shut the fuck up about it. And so like, you're the problem that you're trying to solve.
That is so true. That is so true. Oh my God, they're so stupid, Tim. They're so stupid. They can't help themselves.
Let's do a little history and then forward with Republican Party stuff. So you've been mentioned 2010 a bunch. You were a chairman there. I went back and looked at it this morning. So Republicans, their national house win was plus seven. Like if you added up all the house votes, we're still counting, but it's going to be Dems around 13 this time. So almost double this time than last. And there were actually more Republicans winning seats than Democrats because of the nature of gerrymandering, all this stuff. So that's a little comparison. On the Bulwark Reddit, you know, a lot of times we get some heat from our fans.
And so I like to check, you know, I miss stuff from time to time. I got a really nice post. So I was, so I want to read about that. Because it relates to my experience after you left the RNC. Tim Miller and the GOP autopsy wasn't wrong. They were just early. Let's go back to the autopsy. And we talked about how the voting rights crackdown was going to cause a backlash among black voters, how Romney's self-deportation plan was going to cause a black backlash among Hispanic voters, how we're there having a bunch of TV ads from Super PAX that were a waste of money and weren't landing with voters, and how primary elections and the way we do it are yielding loser candidates.
That's a pretty good assessment of what went wrong this time.
Yeah, I mean.
14 years later, you know, nothing worse in politics than being mischimed. But I don't know. What thinking about 2010 and the successes and the 2012 and the failures, like what are some lessons from that and how they think about it now?
Well, look, you know, a big lesson from '10. I mean, I've always been honest about that. I looked at what Howard Dean did with a 50 state strategy, and I said, we should do that. That's, I mean, I had to, in my political experience, because I've always been in a very difficult political spot. I grew up in Washington, DC, where, you know, Republicans are out number 10 to one. I live in Prince George's County. I was party chairman with 58,000 Republicans, registered Republicans in a county of 800,000 people.
And yet we won, you know, ballot initiatives on tax policy and housing policy because of how we connected issues to voters. And so I learned very early on the importance of that. And I brought that to the 2010 cycle, which meant that we weren't just going to focus on winning federal races, but we were going to focus on winning local races and empowering Republican voices for county executive and city council and mayor and state legislature.
And I think that that was a lesson that played out very nicely here. Ken Martin, for all the shit that he got, and you know, people say, oh, you got no money. Well, of course he didn't have any money because he didn't have a White House. If Joe Biden were in the White House, he'd had a lot of money. Joe Biden won in the White House. I didn't have a White House at the time. The worst thing for me, I had Citizens United, which was brand new and everybody wanted to flock to Super PAX. And so I had major donors who weren't giving. So guess what? The next thing I borrowed was Obama's, you know, small dollar donor program and instituted that at the RNC.
We never had one before. So the reality of it is, politics is about what you learn as much as what you achieve. And the lessons I think are going to be very important for Democrats coming off of this cycle. Please just don't stay stuck on the high of the wind.
Yeah.
Figure out what it is you learn. Very much like what you guys did. Look, I didn't need an autopsy, no disrespect to that effort, to tell me that we had a problem.
I'll just do it a job, maybe.
Black and brown voters. All right? I didn't need an autopsy to get the Hispanic governors and a black congressman elected in 2010. But the reality of it is there were some important lessons in that. And in 2016, Reince Priebus shat all over that autopsy. And I remember telling him, dude, tell Donald Trump to bring his fat ass down to Washington, sit him in the RNC office because he's just a guy running for president.
You are the chairman of the party. And tell him, I'm sorry, you see this thing right here, this is our autopsy. This is how we're going to run for the Hispanic vote. We're not going to call Mexicans murderers and rapists or bad people. You can't do that, then you're going to have a problem with me. He didn't. He capitulated. He tore up the autopsy.
That worked for a minute. It worked for a minute. It did.
And it worked. But that minute was just that.
Yeah.
Because look at the only person in the last 10 years to win is Donald Trump.
It doesn't work for anybody else. Yeah.
It doesn't work for anybody else. And a party is more than one person.
Well, it might not be for the Republicans by 2028. They're running out of people left. The bench is pretty thin right now. I think that's right. And to your point on the Howard Dean, and I think this is hopefully the Democrats get this now. Some people got it before. I've been praising Anderson Clayton for a while, Scott Caloum, Tell the Rico, Hamilton. Some people got it by accident here in Louisiana. It's like all of a sudden, it's like, oh shit, we could win maybe. You know what I mean?
Right.
So look, the lessons come into different times, different places, but I do think the Democrats have got it now, which is like, oh wait, actually, the folks that are living out in the South, they could vote for us if we tried, you know, if we put up compelling candidates and had a message for them, you know, and had effort and made sure that their concerns were heard. So I do think that like kind of continuing that rather than letting it die on the vine is going to be super important.
Well, I think what's important about what you say there is lead with your values. Don't be afraid of your values.
Scott Caloum didn't run for his values or Tell the Rico or Gina Hinojosa or Adam Hamilton.
Or Hamilton, right? Lead with your values. Don't be afraid of that. I mean, you can be a Democrat and a Christian. You can be a Democrat and a Jew. You can be a Democrat and a Muslim. You can be a Democrat and unaffiliated to any faith tradition. But lead with what your values are. Your mom and your daddy raised you some kind of way, didn't they? All right. So lead with that because that's where America is. And so that's why the culture war bullshit runs its course.
Because how you inoculate yourself against that is when you, to your very point, you're raising your daughter and you're teaching her values. And you're looking around the leadership of the country and you know, as she gets older, you're like, you can point to people, this is a good person. And they have your interests at heart. They have your health, your welfare, your economy, all those things at heart.
Those are part of the value sets.
Yeah.
And so that's what a Hamilton represents in so many ways.
Yeah.
You know, when you see a candidate standing at a mic on the night that he wins and the placard in front of him is "Love Thy Neighbor."
Yeah.
I mean, come on. That resonates with a lot of Americans at the end of the day, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum.
Or if you're religious or not.
That's the only thing Christ asked you to do. He didn't ask you to shit on trans people. He didn't ask you to go all ballistic on trying to make an army look, you know, a young man coming into the military look like an Aryan war fighter. He just said, "Love each other."
Yeah, no, that was one of the hard parts of 2024 too was thinking about my daughter because I was like, oh, she's going to be able to remember Trump now. And the modeling does matter. I mean, people can grow up and become courageous and strong and valued and principled with bad role models everywhere, but it still makes it harder. It still sucks, you know?
Yes.
She had a chance to meet Vice President Harris and she's like, ugh. And she just would have, we would have been in such a better shape if we were there right now. But here we are, better late than never, you know?
Well, look at the role model. Look at the role model that Vice President Harris represents to her. She doesn't see Democrat or Republican. She sees a strong black woman in a position of power and leadership. And what does that say to her reinforced by you?
Right.
That can be you if you want it.
Yeah. I want to talk about the GOP future now. Marco, some scuttlebutt, some mixed reporting, some scuttlebutt that he might be trying to leave, trying to get out of Dodge.
Oh, he's out. He's gone. He's trying to, he sees what's happening with JD Vance.
I mean, Marco, people have a little bit of a misunderstanding about Marco. Marco is as calculating as JD Vance, just he's smoother about it. Like the OG Marco in the state legislature, he was like a bushy establishment guy in the state legislature. Then he saw an opportunity to run as a Tea Party guy, that 2010 year. He runs against Charlie Crist. Opportunistic, smart thing to do, by the way. But then he gets in office and then the autopsy happens and he becomes autopsy Marco. He's Tea Party autopsy.
Tea Party, but also I'm kind of immigrants. He tries to do that game. And then Trump gets the nomination. He's like, maybe I'm a Never Trumper for a minute. Like he was never, maybe that's going to be the new hotness. Then Trump wins and it's like, oh boy, I need to be nationalist populist, Marco. You know, now I need to be Trumpy MAGA Marco. And it's worked for him. He's Secretary of State. You know, it's worked for him. But it would not be out of character. It would be very in character of Marco to look at this result and say, yeah, maybe it's time to table towards something else.
Yes. And that's what you can fully expect to happen. And you know, I just remember having a conversation with Marco and he worked with me when I was chairman of Go PAC. He just finished up his leadership of the Florida House. And we were talking about stuff and he got involved with Go PAC.
Remind me what Go PAC's posture was.
Go PAC was founded by Newt Gingrich in the 1980s. And it was state legislative development. So it was, you know, all the down ballot races, you develop candidates. And he had those training videos and all of that stuff. And it was very, very effective. And so it helped build the army of folks who came into Congress in 1994 and all of that. So I became chairman of Go PAC in, what, 2007, after I left Lieutenant Governorship.
And then served until 2009 when I became RNC chairman. But got to know Marco, work with Marco. Marco was a good guy. Like you said, real good bushy guy, you know, just straight down the, you know, everyday kind of conservatism. What has been disappointing for me is just what you described. I get opportunism. I get wanting to be in the room where it happens. But whatever room you walk into, I should at least know who you are.
And I don't. Because you've just illustrated in just that little bit.
Because his ears keep growing and you don't recognize him? Or are you speaking more at a personal level?
Tim.
Sorry. It's like a Pinocchio situation.
Yeah, that's how it's got. Yeah, exactly. But you know, you're already, you're telling me who you are now. What's your core? There is none. If you're on a stage with a man who says that your father was part of the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy, dude, if you're on a stage with a man and he's basically saying your wife is ugly and et cetera, I'm like, okay, motherfucker, we fighting right now. You and I can do at this point.
Yeah.
What's your core? And so a lot of these guys, this goes back to what we were saying a little bit earlier. A lot of these guys are going to try to remake themselves and think we're deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid about them. No, we are not. And we will recount your words, recall what you said. So JD Vance, we have what you think about women. Marco Rubio, we have what you said about MAGA and Venezuela and Ukraine. You were one of the biggest staunch supporters of Ukraine.
What happened?
Yeah.
When did you become a Putinista?
I'm going to close with one Putinista thing, but I just, I want to cover JD Vance first and then we'll get you out of here. JBL wrote this yesterday, the conspiracy to push Donald Trump aside.
That's a good piece.
And how you're already seeing it. Yeah, it was good. And he's talking about how JD puts out this statement that basically talks about all the things Trump did wrong without saying his name and explains that for why we lost with Iran and the economy. And then Trump Jr. quote tweets it with, this is right. So he's kind of alibying himself a little bit. You can tell this was a work behind the scenes. He's like, Don Jr., I need you to do this. So it doesn't seem like I'm going against the Don. And so as JBL looks at it, he's like, basically, JD has a couple options if he wants to take over.
The first is to try to cajole Trump to behave the next two years, right?
Good luck with that.
And to be responsive to this. Good luck with that. That's number one. That's tough. The second option, which Nate Silver, and I was with James Carville last night, he also thinks this is possible, is just kind of cajole Trump into retiring. Why don't you just go back to Mar-a-Lago? Pope Benedict did it. And good luck with that, I think, as well. That's another option. The third option for JD is resigning himself. And you know, saying if Trump won't end the war, then I, you know, have to follow my own principles and try to run as an outsider. Really tough.
We saw what Trump did to Mike Pence and Trump's popularity is at its low ebb, but you know, he's still in a Republican primary. Betraying him like that is still going to be really challenging. None of those options seem great to me. Get out your crystal ball for me. What do you think? How do you think things look forward for JD and Trump?
I don't think JD will be the nominee of the Republican Party. I don't think the president will put his imprimatur on him. I don't think the president likes him, quite honestly, and has no real intentions of leveling him up. JD came out and did a little mini Heisman with Trump, sort of creating a little distance. Trump, for whatever you may think about him, does not like that. And even though Jr. probably went around into the back room and said, hey, dad, this is going to happen, just be cool about it.
It sticks with Trump. It sticks with him. You don't have to mention his name. He knows. So I don't think this plays out the way he thinks it does. I think the battle for the nomination is going to be rife. I think it's going to be ugly. It's going to be fractured. You're going to have the folks who want to be Trump 2.0 or 3.0. You have the people who are going to, you know, try to rebrand the party and rebuild it the way it once was later for that shit.
You're going to have the people who are going to come in with a fresh set of eyes and say, the future is this way. And it now runs through a place called Texas and Nevada and Mississippi and, you know, and given where the Democrats have now begun to amass some strength. So you're going to see these factions, I think, begin to emerge. Here's the bottom line, Tim. You know this very well from your time in the party. In 1989, when Reagan left, we never resolved the answer to one question.
Who's the next Reagan? And that never being resolved has led to where we are right now.
Well, Trump answered the question, actually. It was kind of resolved, which is there is no next Reagan and I'm going to do this new thing. I'm going to do this new other thing.
Right. Exactly. So the reality then becomes one of resolving that because that's at the heart of what the Republican Party is.
Right. And that's an extended question, right? Which is, is there a new Trump?
Is there a new Trump?
Is there a return to Reagan? There isn't. Or is there some other third thing? Or is there a period in the wilderness? That's the fourth option. Or is there a period in wilderness where you try to do a fake Trump? And that's what basically, you know.
And I think that's where we land initially. And I think there's a third thing. I think there's going to be something else. There's going to be a new, I mean, a new Republican Party or what we know as a Republican Party will emerge. The MAGA stuff, I think, has hit its ceiling. There is no more growth in it. And so, you know, I may wind up eating these words in a few years. Maybe, maybe not, but the reality of it is.
They'll be doing a montage of you like we were just doing a Fox.
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So listen to these two fools back in 2026. But the reality is, I think the party is going to, I've said this for a number of years now, it needs probably the biggest political enema it could ever have.
Yeah.
And it just needs to clean all the shit out of itself and really look with a set of fresh eyes to mix metaphors at what its future is. Are we the party of Lincoln? We throw that phrase around, but fundamentally, the assholes who now are part of this MAGA cult bullshit in the party don't even know what that means. They call you and me rhinos, right? When you were a Republican, I still am. Why? Because I stand in the lane with Lincoln and Eisenhower and Bush and Reagan?
What the fuck are you talking about? Get the fuck out of here. Don't come on my face with that crap. You just showed up. You weren't knocking on doors with me in Washington, DC, trying to win some damn city council race or in Prince George's County trying to run a party with 58,000 Republicans against 800,000 Democrats. Get the fuck out of here. So, you know, all this rhino bullshit, I think a lot of Republicans like me know more. And so you're going to have this tension, which I think is necessary, part of cleaning out the crap and settling on who we are.
And if we don't settle right, okay, I guess not. I'll go do something else. But the reality of it is, that's the fight for me right now going forward. I'm going to play as much of a hand as I can in who the next nominee of this party will be. And along with a lot of folks, the folks that are Republican legacy, you know, Senator Danforth's group of former electeds and party leadership are looking to settle in that third space with some good ideas and good candidates.
So we'll see. It's going to be fun, baby. You're going to be talking about it. I know that.
We will be talking about it. And I just want to close it because it ties everything together and I couldn't let it go from this week. It made me so mad. But speaking about the way that things have distanced from the old Republican Party and speaking about the way that Donald Trump's not going to change his tune as much as JD wants him to, there was one news item that happened in the White House this week, and that was they invited the Russians.
Right.
And Carol Dimitrov, who has been the one trying to work over Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff into creating this deal that's everything Putin wants.
Yes.
He is there at a press conference with Melania, and I just want to play this for people to take us into the weekend.
Dear Melania, you saved and touched so many lives. As a token of appreciation, we'd like to give you a small gift, which is a painting by 11-year-old girl Lydia from Oleshky, who chose to be living with her family in Russia in Tuapse. And this beautiful drawing says just three words. I love Melania.
Carol, thank you for your cooperation and professionalism. My deepest appreciation to Ms. Anna Lantratova, Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation. Your dedication brings hope and dignity to those devastated by war. Thank you.
For people who missed that, Carol said that the painting was from an 11-year-old who chose to live in Russia. That's a fucking kidnapped kid. They gave the painting from a kidnapped Ukrainian kid to Melania as a gift. Melania then accepts the kidnapped child's drawing and then thanks Russian's human rights leader for all the great work they've been doing. Is this like what?
What the fuck are we doing? And why are we showcasing the fucking Russians in the middle of a war? What are we doing?
That is their response to the military.
Why are we even doing this? And all of this, all of a sudden, you know, Melania is the patron saint of Ukraine and all of this conversation about, you know, what she, the Pope is the one who's been backending a lot of this bullshit, trying to clean this crap up and trying to move these parties. Vladimir Putin isn't about ending this war. What are we doing?
We bring a Russian child thief and war criminal to the White House to give the First Lady an honorary drawing. And she was just like, thank you in her broken English. And that is totally insane and unreal. And the only thing that, I mean, it is enraging, but the other half of it is like, they ain't fucking changing. The Tigers ain't changing their stripes. And so I don't know. Maybe it'll be 60 Senate seats in 2028.
Well, this is what I'm saying. This is why 2026 happened. And just wait for 2028, baby.
We'll see you. That is the chairman, Michael Steele. I always love the time with you. Thank you so much. Hopefully we gave people a little some joy, some laughs, some righteous rage for their weekend. And we'll be talking to you soon. All right, brother.
You got it, player. You take care, my friend.
Everybody else will be back on Monday. See you all then. Have a great, great weekend. Have a drink for me. Peace.
Yeah.
Everyone's a winner, baby. That's the truth. It's the truth. Thank you, dear to you. We said you're through. Everyone's a winner, baby. That's no lie. That's no lie. You never fail to satisfy.
The Bulwark Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
The MAGA coalition is falling apart, Fox News is flummoxed, and Trump is having to grapple with being rejected by huge swaths of America. Steele only has double birds for Republicans who played along with the 10-year hijacking of the party and are now trying to clean up their act. And in a way, the country gave double birds to the administration over DEI, based on the diverse slate of candidates who’ve won statewide office all over the place. Plus: Texas is the whole enchilada for Republicans, electing the president via the national popular vote is looking more possible, Marco leaving the administration would be consistent with how calculating he’s always been, and Tim’s 2012 autopsy was not wrong, just early.
Michael Steele joins Tim for the (much gloating!) weekend pod.
show notes:
Bill in Friday's "Morning Shots"
JVL on the conspiracy to push Trump aside (gift link)
Image of the before-and-after of Georgia’s statewide office holders
Talarico’s early vote total > Paxton’s overall vote total
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