The upcoming midterms will depend on the voices and votes of those in the suburbs, according to hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy on this episode of The New Abnormal.
After a key win for Democrats in New York’s 19th Congressional District, where Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in Tuesday’s special election, Levy says that despite that good news for the party, the Dems still need the suburban vote to get them across the line.
“Look, I think the Democrats are still gonna lose the House. I don’t think it’ll be as big a loss as we all thought, even a couple months ago,” he says.
ADVERTISEMENT
“I think it’s going to be really tough for the Dems to hold the House, maybe not impossible, but it’s going to be tough. And it looks like it’s all going to be sort of decided by the suburbs. I think it’s the suburbs where there’s this mix of people that are maybe more red on economics, but you start banning abortions and a lot of people in the suburbs are like, ‘Hey, this is not what I signed up for.’
“I think the suburbs are going to be interesting in these upcoming midterms.”
Jong-Fast says the difficulty for Republicans, however, is how they will need to convince those who may have been swayed by recent Supreme Court decisions including Roe v. Wade.
“You’re going to have a situation where you have these people who have just, weeks ago, been like, ‘Every woman should be forced to carry a baby… we should not teach anything in schools and we should jail all Mexicans,’ to now those people have to appeal to normal, more moderate, financially fiscally conservative but socially liberal suburban women who are like, ‘What the fuck is happening here?’
“I think that’s going to be a problem. I hope it’s going to be a problem because quite a lot rides on that.”
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
Then, Dahlia Lithwick, who writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus, talks former President Donald Trump’s little dust-up with the National Archives. This week, Politico revealed that the Archives had recovered more than 700 pages of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago in January and that federal investigators were concerned “by Trump’s resistance to sharing them with the FBI.”
“This is part of the walls closing in, right? It isn’t just the FBI, it isn’t just Merrick Garland. Now we’ve got a long, long, long effort on the part of the Archives to get these documents, which, we should be clear, are top secret, unbelievably classified. We’re hearing now from The New York Times and The Washington Post that some of the secrets that have been exposed are just unbelievably existential.
“This isn’t like he took some stamps and ashtrays and a bobblehead. He just really has imperiled national security.”
Also, Max Fisher, who writes The Interpreter column for The New York Times and is the author of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, discusses how social media “is distorting you in ways that you are probably not quite aware of.”
“What you’re really seeing is choices made by automated systems, what we shorthand as the algorithm—even though in some ways it’s much more complex and much bigger than that—that choose what we see, that choose what goes viral, what doesn’t go viral, that choose how to present to us.
“This was something that I was really struck by talking, especially to the scientists who research this, that these algorithms turn out to basically be the most powerful experiment ever designed at doing what social scientists do at identifying our instincts, identifying how we really work, because they iterate billions and billions of times.
“But they’re not just an experiment. They’re also trying to surface and to exaggerate beyond what is possible in the offline world, the instincts and the impulses that will get us to not just scroll, not just to spend a lot of time online, but to keep posting more and more ourselves, because that feeds the beast.”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, and Stitcher.
