A wave meets a wall

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, August 19. Glad to have you along for today's edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning. I'm Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

Time now for Washington Wednesday. Joining us: political scientist Hunter Baker. He is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. 

Good morning, Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well Hunter, Florida Democrats last night gave the socialist wing of the party both a breakthrough and a setback.

State Representative Angie Nixon—a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—upset Alex Vindman for the party’s U.S. Senate nomination. Vindman had raised more than sixteen times as much money as Nixon had. 

But in Florida’s new 25th Congressional District, incumbent Jared Moskowitz defeated DSA-backed challenger Oliver Larkin by nearly 30 points.

So, last week we asked, Hunter, how far the socialist wave could travel. Turns out in Florida, it did travel statewide—but ran into a wall in one of the most competitive House districts in the country. 

So, how do you reconcile the two results?

BAKER: You actually already said it: “competitive.” A competitive house district, by definition, is probably going to be a little bit more centrist in nature, and so a Democratic Socialist candidate is going to be less interesting to the voters there.

But statewide, I’m not that surprised. I mean, we saw huge momentum for Democratic Socialists in a win in Michigan and in a loss in Wisconsin, and here you saw a big turnout for that Senate seat in Florida.

The Democratic Socialists are bent on making a point. There’s a battle within the Democratic Party, but a battle has two sides, and I think the Democratic Socialists are very activated and they’re kind of thinking, “Now is the time. We are going to make our presence known, and we’re going to maybe not only matter in the Democratic Party; we’re going to control the Democratic Party.”

EICHER: Well Republican voters also removed an incumbent last night, two-term Congressman Cory Mills. He lost to former TV anchor Ryan Elijah.

Mills is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, he's faced allegations of assault and threatening behavior toward women, which he denies. President Trump endorsed Mills, two other members of Florida’s Republican delegation backed Elijah.

So, do you think Hunter, this is evidence primary voters are still willing to police candidate quality—even if it means rejecting a Trump-backed candidate?

BAKER: You know, they could be policing candidate quality, they could be worried about the moral offenses, or they could just be worried about winning. And so clearly, this time it worked. You’re able to remove him, and you can move on and maybe have a better competitive situation in the general election.

MAST: Well alright, that’s Florida, but let’s pull the camera back. The fight for control of the United States Senate is beginning to look considerably less settled than it did.

Fox News now puts six Senate races in its toss-up column: Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas. Texas moved from leans Republican to toss up, and Michigan moved the other direction from leans Democratic to toss up.

Karl Rove, who served in the George W. Bush White House and is now a Fox News contributor, says Texas is a particularly unusual case. He says Texas is now a genuine toss-up because Ken Paxton is being badly outraised and hasn’t been campaigning aggressively. He pointedly noted that Paxton spent the week before July 4th in Iceland with his new girlfriend, and then spent the holiday itself in London instead of campaigning and fundraising back home. 

Rove says Republicans may ultimately need substantial help from Trump-aligned super PACs, or Texas could become a serious problem for the GOP.

Hunter, Rove’s argument here sounds less like Texas suddenly became a blue state and more like Republicans may have a candidate problem. Do you agree or disagree?

BAKER: There’s no question that there are certain states that lean strongly in a particular direction. I think that it’s absolutely bizarre that Georgia has two Democrat senators, especially when you have these Republicans routinely winning governors’ races and without tremendous difficulty.

So I think that there has definitely been a lack of compelling Republican candidates in a state like Georgia, and I have explained on this podcast that by and large, you’re voting for an R or a D, whoever’s wearing the jersey. But my dry technical analysis does not go over with a lot of voters, and I understand why. 

People do care about candidate character and Ken Paxton’s got a wife who says she has biblical grounds for divorce, and he has other reputational issues, and so he’s not looking really good right now.

Now I continue to think that he will ultimately win that race because I think that James Talarico is just so out of the mold for a Texas candidate. But we’ll see what happens.

MAST: Well, moving from Texas to Michigan, there you see almost a mirror image. Democrats nominated Abdul El-Sayed earlier this month, and Fox has now moved that race from leans Democratic to toss up.

Rove made an interesting argument about black voters there. He says Republicans don’t necessarily need large numbers of them to vote Republican. Some could simply decline to vote in the Senate race at all. How plausible is that scenario to you?

BAKER: I think there are a lot of things that could work against El-Sayed. I think that there are some Democrats who are freaked out, I think with some reason, about democratic socialism. I think that other people will be turned off by the fact that he is Muslim. I’m not saying that’s everybody, but I think that that will be some voters. 

I’m not sure what happens with black voters. That wouldn’t necessarily be where I would be focused. I mean, I guess there’s a thesis that they are allied to the more mainstream Democratic Party, but here’s what I know: Mike Rogers came awfully close to winning two years ago, and the wind is at his back this time. He is supposed to be a really good candidate, highly relatable, gets on with voters in person and on television, radio, etc. So I think he’s got a really good chance of winning in Michigan and becoming maybe the first Republican senator there in about 30 years.

EICHER: Hey, just real quickly, Hunter, just a week to go before South Carolina decides how to fill the Senate seat of the late Lindsay Graham … you were at the candidates’ debate last night. Anything noteworthy?

BAKER: Yeah, it was fantastic, very interesting debate.

The big moment was that Darlene Graham was asked a question about Taiwan, and her answer was, “Foreign policy and national security are not my strong point.”

Now that’s okay for virtually anybody, but she’s running for the U.S. Senate, and a U.S. senator has to know that stuff. Her brother certainly knew it, and there’s a reason why if your surgeon dies, we don’t call for the surgeon’s brother, son, daughter, or sister.

EICHER: Alright, well, issue two, Hunter: Meta, children, and the regulatory state.

Yesterday, oral arguments began in federal court in Oakland, California. A major case brought by 29 states against Meta—that’s the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.

The states accuse Meta of deliberately designing its platforms to keep young people compulsively engaged while misleading parents and the public about the risks that they pose. They also accuse the company of improperly collecting information from children under 13.

Meta denies any wrongdoing, and the states are looking for more than money here. They are seeking changes to the products themselves, including age restrictions and changes to features such as infinite scrolling.

Meta has said statutory penalties in the case could theoretically reach $1.4 trillion. That’s with a T, not with a B: $1.4 trillion. Though the states have not said that that is the amount that they ultimately expect to collect.

MAST: Hunter, before we get lost in the legal particulars, let’s talk a bit about the proper role of government. These are children, so they’re not simply ordinary adult consumers, but they also do have parents.

Where should we draw the line between parental responsibility and legitimate government regulation?

BAKER: Well, the vision of government here is highly paternalistic. It’s the idea of government as the parent who is supposed to make behavioral choices for us. 

I’ll be honest. I’m pretty cynical about these actions with regard to Meta. I think that there’s definitely an analogy to the tobacco lawsuits. The states were able to siphon off an enormous amount of money in those cases. Now there was a better justification there because there’s a lot of health damage that occurs from tobacco, and a lot of government programs ended up being involved in paying for those.

In this case, I think that the damage should be a lot more difficult to identify and to necessarily blame Meta for. I also think you’re talking about a very new, historically speaking, technology where nobody could be sure what damage it would cause.

And I think that Meta is a target. I think that there are a lot of trial lawyers who are looking at this and they’re saying, “I’m going to get crazy rich off of this.”

I can remember a time when I was in law school in the state of Texas, two of the very richest men in the entire state were trial lawyers who had won gigantic verdicts, and I think that’s what’s happening here.

You bring one of these cases, and you get a third of the verdict that comes off of it, and these are going to be enormous verdicts, and so I think that Meta is just a target, and I think that juries are going to be able to be sold this case, and the government is going to facilitate it.

MAST: Well Hunter, issue three here. On Monday, CNN White House correspondent Kristen Holmes questioned President Trump during an Oval Office event. Trump called her reporting fake and said she was disrespectful. 

But the confrontation continued afterward. The official White House rapid response account attacked Holmes personally and told her that someday her children would encounter what it called her "disgusting and inhumane question." 

Now CNN defended Holmes and said personal attacks on reporters were beneath the office.

Hunter, obviously a president doesn’t have to accept the premise of a reporter’s question. He can say it is biased, unfair, dishonest, even malicious if he believes that is true. But does holding the presidency itself impose obligations of restraint in how you answer?

BAKER: I think that it does. I want to be clear that there’s probably room for criticism all the way around. The reporter asked him a question about him wanting to spend all of his time with his executive assistant and working on things like building ballrooms instead of actually doing his job. It was a very provocative question, and it was very much coming right from Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia, so in that sense, the reporter was almost acting as a tool of that campaign.

But on the other hand, I think that Trump’s response was remarkably thin-skinned and provocative, and you know, all this kind of “You’re fake news, you’re fake news, and she’s a bad person” and all this. 

Even in the era we're in, I think that there is still something to a president who has a high level of dignity in the office. 

And certainly there were times where I thought that George W. Bush took it too far. Sometimes George W. Bush, I thought that he just got smacked in the mouth over and over again and had nothing to say. 

Trump certainly doesn’t lack for things to say, but I think that we need to aim for a Reagan-esque response. Reagan had things to say, but he used humor where he could. He was always polite. He always had good manners, and I think that Americans still ultimately would like to see that from their president.

MAST: Alright. Hunter Baker is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. 

Hunter, thank you.

BAKER: Thank you.

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