Dave Weigel

Can Democrats be trusted to enforce that?

You've got Ruben Gallego, who was campaigning in New Jersey for Cheryl.

You've got some Democrats just moving on that issue, not to the far right, but moving to like 2012 Obama.

Actually, maybe you needed a deporter in chief while you're also not...

willy-nilly deporting everyone you can find in the country.

So they're not there yet.

They didn't solve their problems.

It was just that there was a cost to the way Republicans have carried themselves.

And just the hubris, the focus they have from day to day is really not on issues that voters care much about.

And they cannot stop gloating about enactment of their policies, even when they're not that popular.

If I was listening to Republicans in D.C.,

Over the last week, I was hearing about Arctic Frost and investigations of the 2020 election and the plots to overturn it and hearing about James Comey and just the degree to which the Republican conversation is centered around Trump and his interest and not voters.

That was not what it was in 2024.

I mean, he could go off on a tangent at a rally, but the whole party just got very confident that –

Elections were like static and there were and there was they didn't really need to go into what voters cared about because Democrats were so weak.

Yeah, and the salience of crime has been falling.

You saw that with Mamdani's success.

That was the first.

But if you look at mayoral races that were not that competitive, but they got into the news.

At Cincinnati, there was this drunk brawl at a jazz fest that got weeks of coverage on Fox News conservative media as Cincinnati falling apart at the seams.