David French

You know, like.

Shooting, you know, an opponent's family.

And he won by six points.

Yeah.

And it's like, that to me was a sign, that was a sign that Democratic voters in Virginia were like, yeah, we don't care, you know?

And part of that is that we've witnessed how the president talks about opponents for- Yeah, there's been a desensitization, definitely.

For years, people are desensitized to it, but I think it's also sort of like, you know, hey, if that guy's willing to say that, maybe that shows he's willing to fight, right?

Yeah.

And I think that desire for fighters-

is the lesson to take from last year, that I do not think that candidates who take a very kind of cautious, oh, we just all want to get along with our Republican friends approach are going to do very well.

Yeah, so I think one can think about fighter in any number of ways.

And one of the ways you can think about it is in terms of accountability politics, right?

Not fighter in terms of I'm going to humiliate my partisan opponents, but fighter in terms of there was wrongdoing that happened and I want to deal with that wrongdoing.

And that is not incongruent, right?

That's not intention with the more moderate and pragmatic politics in other places, right?

You can be someone with moderate views on any number of issues and then also say, there's no way we can fund...

ice in its current form, or we have to think about reorganizing DHS given the abuses we've seen, right?

Those two things are not in tension with each other.

You could make the argument, right, that sort of someone willing to be kind of bold and progressive in their policy preferences maybe is a little more likely to be aggressive in the accountability front, but there's a bit of conceptual separation there.

I had a question for David, actually, and this is thinking about post-Trump politics.