One of the things I always warn folks against in politics is the belief that anything that happens is eternal — that the change is eternal and there will never be another loss in the future.
I’m old enough to remember when George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 and secured the Congress of the United States, that there were Republicans who thought the Republican Party would never lose again. It was the initiation of a brand-new era. Then, of course, by 2006 Democrats had taken the Congress, and by 2008 the presidency.
I’m also old enough to remember when, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, Democrats proclaimed they would never lose again. They had a brand-new, undefeatable coalition that would just continue to grow and Republicans would be in the minority forever. Within four years, however, Republicans had taken the presidency with Donald Trump.
Now I hear Republicans who sound triumphalist about the idea that Democrats can never win again, will never take power again. They say all the trends are against the Democrats. That’s true, the trends are against Democrats right now and that’s a good thing.
We see population movement from north to south, from blue states to red states, knowing electoral votes will follow. We see the Democrats failing to find any sort of leadership class in the aftermath of the Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders octogenarian triumvirate.
However, politics change quickly. Things happen.
And there are warning signs on the horizon. The biggest one is that President Trump’s popularity is not transferable to every single other Republican candidate. You cannot just take President Trump, stamp him on a thing, and then hope that thing is going to be a winner. That is not how it works.
Barack Obama tried the same thing. It didn’t work with him either.
Every politician has to build their own coalition. Every politician has to have their own group of people who follow them for their own personal reasons.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
So this bizarre idea that everyone in politics seems to have, both on the Right and the Left — that you can take a very popular politician and then smear that popularity over the bread of normie politicians and expect it to taste exactly the same — that is not how it works.
This is precisely why President Trump’s administration must be successful.
President Trump is doing very important work on everything from getting rid of DEI to completely restructuring education in the country to changing how we spend to eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. On foreign policy, he’s restoring a sense of American military power and deterrence. He’s actually doing peace through strength. And he’s looking with fresh eyes at difficult situations like the Middle East.
These are very important things that President Trump is doing. And that means no mistakes.
“No mistakes” should be the byword inside the Trump administration. And the warning signs are there. Pretending they are not is simply whistling past the graveyard.
I know Republicans are all very happy and we want to tell ourselves that President Trump won an extraordinarily broad-ranging victory in his race against Kamala Harris.
The truth is that the 2024 election result was actually far closer than people would like to acknowledge. And that is not a rip on President Trump by any measure. It was a narrow win and that means if a few votes shift, suddenly things are different. And that could happen. Pretending that it can’t happen is a fool’s errand.
In the end, President Trump won 77.3 million votes. And Kamala Harris, a horrendous candidate running on the back of a dead candidate, won 75 million votes. President Trump won 49.8% of the vote and Kamala Harris won 48.3% of the vote. That is a solid electoral victory but it’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, a giant blowout, which is why I’m saying Republicans need to be careful.
We are starting to see some early indicators of the fact that a Democratic electorate could revive itself. One of those warning signs came courtesy of this special election shocker in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which went for President Trump last year by 16 points. Democrats flipped the state Senate seat in Pennsylvania — a seat that the GOP had occupied for literally decades.
The reality is that in special election races, it’s very hard to generalize from those races because they tend to have lower turnout. And so what you get is opposition turning out at a higher rate and the home party turnout coming in at a low rate, believing that there’s not going to be any sort of competitive election.
But as The Wall Street Journal points out, Republicans might want to take the surprise loss in MAGA country as a warning.
That is not wrong.
It’s also true because on Thursday, Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), President Trump’s excellent nominee for the U.N. ambassador, had her nomination withdrawn by President Trump. It wasn’t because he doesn’t like Elise Stefanik — he thinks that she’s terrific. He is doing it because the margin in the Congress of the United States is simply too narrow.
President Trump had made a bunch of moves to take representatives from particular districts and put them in his Cabinet, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. That was going to include Elise Stefanik. There are three or four different congresspeople who’ve been pulled into the administration, leaving their districts open for an election.
President Trump is basically signaling here that the House of Representatives is on a knife’s edge and you can’t pull good congresspeople from their districts to serve in other aspects of the executive branch for fear the GOP might lose the district.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) put out a statement saying he would immediately invite Elise Stefanik to return to the leadership table, adding, “It is well known Republicans have a razor-thin House majority, and Elise’s agreement to withdraw her nomination will allow us to keep one of the toughest, most resolute members of our Conference in place to help drive forward President Trump’s America First policies.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Stefanik’s withdrawal was just a result of the political realities they’re grappling with in the House, that every vote counts.
For this, you can thank some congresspeople like Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who reliably votes “No” on every contentious vote in the House of Representatives, meaning that the majority shrinks by one every single time.
There is also concern in other districts where there really should not be any concern. In Florida’s sixth Congressional District, which is Mike Waltz’ old seat, there is now a special election and it’s really competitive. Democrats are pouring money into that particular race, which is far too close right now. This should not be a competitive district.
I expect that Republicans will hold the seat. But the fact that it’s even competitive signals that any sort of overweening confidence among Republicans is misguided.
We have to act like every possession matters. We can’t act like we’re up 30 points when in reality we’re up two and there are just a couple of minutes left in the ballgame.
None of us should be overconfident.
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
One of the things I always warn folks against in politics is the belief that anything that happens is eternal — that the change is eternal and there will never be another loss in the future.
I’m old enough to remember when George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 and secured the Congress of the United States, that there were Republicans who thought the Republican Party would never lose again. It was the initiation of a brand-new era. Then, of course, by 2006 Democrats had taken the Congress, and by 2008 the presidency.
I’m also old enough to remember when, in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s 2012 victory, Democrats proclaimed they would never lose again. They had a brand-new, undefeatable coalition that would just continue to grow and Republicans would be in the minority forever. Within four years, however, Republicans had taken the presidency with Donald Trump.
Now I hear Republicans who sound triumphalist about the idea that Democrats can never win again, will never take power again. They say all the trends are against the Democrats. That’s true, the trends are against Democrats right now and that’s a good thing.
We see population movement from north to south, from blue states to red states, knowing electoral votes will follow. We see the Democrats failing to find any sort of leadership class in the aftermath of the Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders octogenarian triumvirate.
However, politics change quickly. Things happen.
And there are warning signs on the horizon. The biggest one is that President Trump’s popularity is not transferable to every single other Republican candidate. You cannot just take President Trump, stamp him on a thing, and then hope that thing is going to be a winner. That is not how it works.
Barack Obama tried the same thing. It didn’t work with him either.
Every politician has to build their own coalition. Every politician has to have their own group of people who follow them for their own personal reasons.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
So this bizarre idea that everyone in politics seems to have, both on the Right and the Left — that you can take a very popular politician and then smear that popularity over the bread of normie politicians and expect it to taste exactly the same — that is not how it works.
This is precisely why President Trump’s administration must be successful.
President Trump is doing very important work on everything from getting rid of DEI to completely restructuring education in the country to changing how we spend to eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. On foreign policy, he’s restoring a sense of American military power and deterrence. He’s actually doing peace through strength. And he’s looking with fresh eyes at difficult situations like the Middle East.
These are very important things that President Trump is doing. And that means no mistakes.
“No mistakes” should be the byword inside the Trump administration. And the warning signs are there. Pretending they are not is simply whistling past the graveyard.
I know Republicans are all very happy and we want to tell ourselves that President Trump won an extraordinarily broad-ranging victory in his race against Kamala Harris.
The truth is that the 2024 election result was actually far closer than people would like to acknowledge. And that is not a rip on President Trump by any measure. It was a narrow win and that means if a few votes shift, suddenly things are different. And that could happen. Pretending that it can’t happen is a fool’s errand.
In the end, President Trump won 77.3 million votes. And Kamala Harris, a horrendous candidate running on the back of a dead candidate, won 75 million votes. President Trump won 49.8% of the vote and Kamala Harris won 48.3% of the vote. That is a solid electoral victory but it’s not, by any stretch of the imagination, a giant blowout, which is why I’m saying Republicans need to be careful.
We are starting to see some early indicators of the fact that a Democratic electorate could revive itself. One of those warning signs came courtesy of this special election shocker in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which went for President Trump last year by 16 points. Democrats flipped the state Senate seat in Pennsylvania — a seat that the GOP had occupied for literally decades.
The reality is that in special election races, it’s very hard to generalize from those races because they tend to have lower turnout. And so what you get is opposition turning out at a higher rate and the home party turnout coming in at a low rate, believing that there’s not going to be any sort of competitive election.
But as The Wall Street Journal points out, Republicans might want to take the surprise loss in MAGA country as a warning.
That is not wrong.
It’s also true because on Thursday, Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), President Trump’s excellent nominee for the U.N. ambassador, had her nomination withdrawn by President Trump. It wasn’t because he doesn’t like Elise Stefanik — he thinks that she’s terrific. He is doing it because the margin in the Congress of the United States is simply too narrow.
President Trump had made a bunch of moves to take representatives from particular districts and put them in his Cabinet, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. That was going to include Elise Stefanik. There are three or four different congresspeople who’ve been pulled into the administration, leaving their districts open for an election.
President Trump is basically signaling here that the House of Representatives is on a knife’s edge and you can’t pull good congresspeople from their districts to serve in other aspects of the executive branch for fear the GOP might lose the district.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) put out a statement saying he would immediately invite Elise Stefanik to return to the leadership table, adding, “It is well known Republicans have a razor-thin House majority, and Elise’s agreement to withdraw her nomination will allow us to keep one of the toughest, most resolute members of our Conference in place to help drive forward President Trump’s America First policies.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Stefanik’s withdrawal was just a result of the political realities they’re grappling with in the House, that every vote counts.
For this, you can thank some congresspeople like Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who reliably votes “No” on every contentious vote in the House of Representatives, meaning that the majority shrinks by one every single time.
There is also concern in other districts where there really should not be any concern. In Florida’s sixth Congressional District, which is Mike Waltz’ old seat, there is now a special election and it’s really competitive. Democrats are pouring money into that particular race, which is far too close right now. This should not be a competitive district.
I expect that Republicans will hold the seat. But the fact that it’s even competitive signals that any sort of overweening confidence among Republicans is misguided.
We have to act like every possession matters. We can’t act like we’re up 30 points when in reality we’re up two and there are just a couple of minutes left in the ballgame.
None of us should be overconfident.
“}]]
