David Frum

on the rare occasions when anyone asks me for political advice.

I always say, when you get to the final round,

There are two candidates.

You have a one in two chance of winning, a one in two chance of losing.

So there's a reasonable statistical probability that you're going to lose.

You should think in advance, if you lose, how and why would you like to lose?

Because it's a terrible thing to lose for things you didn't believe in, to lose because of positioning, to lose because you weren't yourself.

If you lose because you were yourself, you can live with that.

If you lose over issues that you feel are important, you can live with that.

And so I sometimes think as I listen to this detraction, you know what?

If democracy loses because the defenders of democracy were too serious about it, too earnest, too believed in it too much, then at least we lost the fight the way we wanted to fight the fight.

Since you raised coalition politics, let me ask you, and this is the last challenge I want to put to you.

As you said, the bulwark began as an extension of the weekly standard of a certain kind of subsection of conservative politics.

And that's the life story of the core group that runs the bulwark.

But you have discovered this extraordinary new appeal in a much wider set of viewers and listeners who tilt more to the liberal side and even to the left.

probably the median Bulwark fan in 2026, was not voting for George W. Bush in 2003 if they were active in 2003.

How do you find a stopping place?

And when you and I were talking about this in advance, I mentioned that there was a kind of very favorable treatment of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by you and by Bill Kristol, that you had Zoran Mamdani, and you gave him a tough question.

And indeed, you asked the question that has caused him the single greatest difficulty,

of anybody so i don't want to slight that but how do you say this is who we are and this is this is who we used to be this is who we are not going to become and this is where we don't go how do you think about those questions um i appreciate this because it is like it's complicated and i and i'm evolving my views about it all the time and i want and i and i say that because