November 13, 2018

Jim VandeHei and Joe Scarborough discussed the blue wave and what's in the future for Republicans.

"In the house, Steve (Kornacki) is looking at maybe 38, 39 pick ups in the House of Representatives in an off-year election that is usually more conservative, more white, and more Republican," Scarborough said. "How does that bode for 2020?"

"I think this is really bad news for Donald Trump. I don't understand the Republicans and even some Democrats saying Donald Trump is in pretty good shape heading into 2020," VandeHei said.

"When you have Texas, Arizona, Georgia, all now looking like toss-up states, where you have Democrats if not winning, way outperforming what they've done in the past. You have midwest states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, basically reverting back to form once you take Hillary Clinton off the ticket. Then you add into that, Trump is about to get hit with investigations from three different angles. We're in the longest recovery we've been in in this nation. Most economists think we're going to hit a pullback sometime before the presidency.

But the real problem, he said, was the Trump strategy. "You can't be a mostly white, mostly male party and thrive long-term in this nation. You can eke out some wins now, but if you look at demographics, they don't lie. This nation has a shrinking white population. The more they harden as the white male party, the more long-term Republicans should be worried."

"Willie Geist, you brought up a great point earlier: Donald Trump can't afford to lose any votes," Scarborough said.

"He didn't get that many votes in 2020 and as we've been saying forever, he had Hillary Clinton to run against in 2020. Because if you go back to those 2020 results, it wasn't that Donald Trump was a great candidate. It was that a lot of Wisconsin voters stayed home. didn't you point out that Mitt Romney got more votes in 2012 than donald trump got in 2016 in Wisconsin?"

"That's true. And people didn't pay enough attention to this. It was so many Democrats just weren't jazzed by Hillary Clinton. So what we needed to see from the 2018 elections were, was 2016 a fluke, basically, did these states revert back to form? Every indicator is yes, they reverted back to form. The long-term threat to the party was that those states were concerned from Republican states to purple states to potentially Democratic states over time. Just like we saw unfold over the last decade in Virginia. You just talked about that Arizona race. You should be really, really scared that you won by two points -- that means Texas, Georgia and Arizona are all now doing what all demographers thought would happen. They would little by little move more Democratic. If that happened, Republicans are in a lot of trouble."

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