Retreatism and realignment (05-27-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalinershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:29] Pete Kaliner here. And as we do on Tuesdays at noon, we speak with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics, longleafpol.com, and a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer. We don't hold that against him, though. Andrew, how are you, sir? I'm fantastic. It's great to be back with you. Yes, sir. Glad to talk with you again. I read your piece. And by the way, I apologize. I did not realize I was not a subscriber to your newsletter.

[00:00:57] I have remedied that this morning. So thank goodness. Yeah, I know. I was like, why am I like, why can't I get access to this thing that I'm trying to get access to? And I realized, oh, I've never paid him. So anyway, I was interested in the piece that you wrote, The People Who Stay Win. And I guess this was prompted by a podcast that you were listening to. And there's a young Presbyterian guy. He's a podcaster and he's named Redeemed Zoomer.

[00:01:28] And he said that the liberals are the ones who kept the institutions. The conservatives are the ones who ran away. And he talked about this pattern is not just in churches. And he called it retreatism, which is a good word for it, I think. And it reminded me of the split. I covered this, I guess, last year with the United Methodist Church as well.

[00:01:52] And it gets to something that Jordan Peterson has talked about, where you have a storehouse of value. If left unguarded, it will be devoured. It will be taken over. And that's essentially what this guy and I guess you are arguing as well. Yeah, and what you were describing with the United Methodist Church is exactly what he was talking about on the theology podcast.

[00:02:20] But yeah, I mean, when I heard that, I immediately saw the pattern in so many other places in my life. You know, I'm a leader in the Boy Scouts, and we've seen a lot of the same things happening there as the institution has changed. A lot of the big former partners with the Scouts have decided to just leave and start their own thing. And I think we see it in politics, too, especially with the rise of unaffiliated voters.

[00:02:46] I think a lot of people are saying, oh, well, I don't, you know, the Republican Party doesn't represent me anymore. The Democratic Party doesn't represent me anymore. And instead of actually trying to dig in and fix things, that they just decide to heck with it and quit. Right. So then and you raise the point. What is left when people who, you know, arguably they get frustrated. Right. And I totally get that. I'm an unaffiliated voter.

[00:03:14] And I enjoy going into each of the party primaries and having my pick based on where I live. I usually don't get a Republican primary. So but what's left when people leave is the institution and and all of that stored value, the credibility, the reputation, right? The legacy, its history. All of that is now turned over to basically your opponents. Right.

[00:03:42] Oh, yeah, that's exactly right. You know, the institutions aren't built overnight and they, you know, they build up goodwill. They build up trust. They build up name recognition. And that doesn't leave even if, you know, the most talented or the most or the smartest people leave. You know, that that will not translate to a new thing that that anyone is starting. You know, some some of the name recognition will go, but most of it, most of the trust remains with the institution.

[00:04:12] And that's why I think it's so important for people of goodwill, people who are, you know, civically minded, why it's so important to stick around and to and to focus their efforts on on fixing and rebuilding institutions. You mentioned school choice as well. Well, what what impact because, I mean, people COVID prompted a lot of parents to pull their kids out of the school system.

[00:04:37] And again, rightfully so, I think when they, you know, look on in horror and shock at what their kids are being taught and they go down to the school board meetings, they try to vote in new school board members and they just can't succeed at effectuating change. And so they they leave. They go to charter schools, private schools. They use the voucher system. And what's left behind, though, is a public school system that is now shaped by people.

[00:05:06] You write with different priorities or no real interest in reform at all. So I guess my my question, though, is like, isn't that the only way to teach the lesson that they have gone too far in the way they they drove education to the extreme? And how else do you course correct? A little bit.

[00:05:30] Yeah, that one's a little bit trickier, especially, you know, because I don't fault individual families for leaving the public school system if it's not serving them, because you don't really have the time when you're raising children to, you know, slowly wait for things to improve and work through the system. You have to do what's right for your child in that moment because you don't have any any time to waste.

[00:05:52] However, I will say, you know, I think the inclination for so many people on the conservative side is to just wholesale abandon the public school system, you know, to basically just say this is never going to get any better and to focus efforts on on private schools, charter schools, that sort of thing. And I think that would be a mistake. So I don't think it's a mistake for parents and individual families to to take that route.

[00:06:20] But I do think it would be a mistake for conservatives at large to do the same thing. Do you think that this retreatism is evident in moving patterns? That's one of the first things I thought of was, you know, Charlotte gets bluer and all of the surrounding counties get redder. It's a pattern that's happening all over the country. Do you think that's the same thing? Oh, gosh, I hadn't even thought about that. But I think you're absolutely right.

[00:06:47] You know, the geographic polarization, I guess, is the fancy way to put it. But, yeah, I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing is that people are trying to find like minded communities and moving to what fits their values. I think that's exactly part of the same pattern. Yeah. Speaking of that, you've got a piece at the Charlotte Observer headline. North Carolina Republicans are leaning into Trump flavored politics. Do you write the headlines or does somebody else do that for you?

[00:07:17] I do not write that. That wasn't mine. But I don't actually don't think that one's too bad. No, no. I just just odd Trump flavored. Like, I don't even want to taste that. But North Carolina, North Carolina Republicans are are not just navigating national politics anymore. They're leaning into it on purpose. And I guess like we used to I mean, I think we're about the same age. I grew up hearing, you know, all politics is local. But now it doesn't seem to be the case.

[00:07:45] And I think that's really what you're kind of talking about here is that then the parties have become more and more nationalized. Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, North Carolina has long been a classic example of that. You know, North Carolina Democrats in particular always had their own brands, so to speak, that was way different from the national brands. And that really started to change in 2008 when, you know, Barack Obama carried North Carolina.

[00:08:13] I think that was a real turning point when the North Carolina Democratic brand essentially became part or a subset of the national brand. And Republicans seem to be hitting that tipping point this year. You know, I think, you know, Trump carrying the state for the third time, you know, his approval ratings being, you know, they've been fluctuating, but they've been pretty, pretty good by Trump standards.

[00:08:38] And I think North Carolina Republicans are deciding, you know, now's the time to go all in and lean into some of the messaging and branding that the national party is putting out. So you say turning every race into a national referendum might help with fundraising. I believe it likely does, right? Because you've got so much money that comes in from out of state to a swing state. You say it might clarify internal identity, but it also brings tradeoffs. So what are some of the tradeoffs?

[00:09:07] Yeah, I mean, one of the tradeoffs is you are a lot of your ability to win now becomes tied to national trends that you don't really have any control over. You know, there's always some sort of coattail effect. You know, if the top of the ticket is doing really well or doing really poorly, that does spill over down the ballot. But, you know, North Carolina is no stranger to split ticket voting.

[00:09:32] And there's plenty of voters in North Carolina who are willing, you know, to thread the needle and to vote one way nationally and another way more locally. But if you're tying your brand to the national level, your ability to nuance that really goes away. But, you know, as a lifelong North Carolinian, I worry more so from a philosophical standpoint, you know, we lose our political distinctiveness.

[00:09:59] We lose our, you know, our barbecue battles, all of the things that make North Carolina home kind of get washed out and just focusing on national messaging. Yeah, sort of like franchises everywhere. No more mom and pop shops. Exactly. Andrew Dunn, publisher of Longleaf Politics. You can do what I did. Become a subscriber over at LongleafPOL.com. He's also a contributing columnist to the Charlotte Observer. Andrew, always good to talk with you. Thanks for your time, man. Yeah, thank you.

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[00:11:37] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. So I read this story at the AP, not AP, Dylan, but the Associated Press. And I swear I thought this was from North Carolina. I went right past the dateline on it. But it's out of Paintsville, Kentucky. Birthplace of paint.

[00:12:01] And they're doing what they call, they being the state Democrat Party, they are doing a rural listening tour, which as far as I can tell is basically just a wine fest. WH. It's just a complain-a-thon.

[00:12:24] And, but it also sounds like what the North Carolina Democrat Party has been, I mean, at least that's what they say they've been trying to do. Go around the state, say y'all a lot, cuss a bunch, and then something, something, we don't know, and then you win all the Trump voters back. Right? Trump got 85% of the presidential vote in Johnson County, Kentucky, where Paintsville is the county seat. Okay?

[00:12:54] That was the latest stop on the state party's rural listening tour. A periodic effort. Periodic effort. So it's not a constant thing. It's just every now and again, when we remember there's some rural areas, we'll head over there. Um, it's a periodic effort to visit overwhelmingly white, culturally conservative towns of the kind where Democrats once competed and Republicans now dominate nationally. Democrats' path back to power.

[00:13:24] By the way, this is always entertaining. These types of stories are always entertaining to read because they're always written as sort of this, uh, like a, like a pep speech, you know? Like, buck up, you know? Democrats, here's how you get back into the majority. Here's how you can win again. And we're just completely impartial reporters offering this information to you. Um, Democrats' path back to power may start here. One small meeting at a time.

[00:13:50] Because it will be difficult, if not impossible, for the party to regain U.S. Senate control or win the presidency without competing harder for rural and small-town voters. I have been talking about this since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. There is a political realignment happening among both parties. And it is bad for Democrats.

[00:14:18] I've got post-mortems or autopsies, if you will. Got one from Catalyst. You got one from the New York Times. This one from the AP. The, some projections, the Associated Press reports, some projections suggest Democrats would lose 12 seats in the Electoral College in the next census. That's the path they are on right now. They've got five years, right?

[00:14:48] Five years before the census. And they're on a path to lose 12 seats in the Electoral College. And that will make it virtually impossible for them to win the presidency. The gut check, this is according to Coleman Eldridge, the Kentucky Democrat chair. The gut check is we'd stopped having these conversations in white rural America.

[00:15:18] No, really? Nobody noticed, except like everybody who lives in white rural America, that you quit talking to them. And not only that, you started saying some pretty mean things about them. Nationally, Trump won 60% of small town and rural voters in 2020. And he increased that according to AP VoteCast data.

[00:15:43] He went from 60% in 2020 up to 63% small town rural voters. So what are the people saying at the listening tour? Well, they're saying a lot. They're listening to like the most activated members of the Moonbat Brigade. That's who they're hearing, which is why I don't think this effort is going to be successful. For example, Sandra Music, that's her last name. She is a retired teacher.

[00:16:10] I don't know if she taught music or not, but that would be awesome. Mrs. Music, the music teacher, like how awesome would that be? Anyway, she's a retired teacher. She calls herself a new Democrat and she converted because of Donald Trump. Okay, so she's a never-Trumper. She was so angry at the Republican Party and nominating him. And so then she became a Democrat.

[00:16:35] She bemoaned conservatives' success in advancing private school tuition voucher programs and said they were threatening a public education system meant to ensure we educate everybody. She criticized Republicans for making a caricature of Democrats, saying, quote, they want to pull out key words, abortion, transgender, boys and girls sports. And that distracts from the rest of the Republican agenda, she said.

[00:17:03] Yeah, no, the reason why those items get pulled out is because you guys have taken a position that is not shared by like 80% of the voting public. And so when you cede a field, when you retreat away from a popular position, then yes, Republicans are going to use that issue to beat you up with.

[00:17:29] Then there's Janet Lynn Stumbo, a former state Supreme Court judge. She lamented what she called the rightward lurch of the state and federal courts. Yeah, that's what's happening. She says we're going to suffer irreparable damage if we don't stop these conservative idiots. This is the messaging that the listeners on the listening tour are receiving.

[00:17:58] So I do not expect the messaging to change. This is all that they're hearing when they go to these towns. Choir meet preacher. All right, if you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

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[00:19:22] And they show up and basically it's just a bunch of like the most ardent leftists that turn out to these little sessions and they just complain about Donald Trump and conservatives. And Alan says it's a tweet. Alan says, oh, look, a teacher and a judge are quoted. Is anybody buying the old? I used to be Republican, but Trump, despite all my lefty beliefs poop. I don't think that ever worked. It's just part of the left fooling themselves buying their own BS.

[00:19:52] Yeah, high on their own supply. Well, here's another one. Michael Halfhill, who works in health care information technology. And he just couldn't understand why all of these people are voting against themselves. What comes through in all of these comments is is contempt and disdain for people voting a way that you don't want them to vote.

[00:20:19] That's what comes through from these people that are assembling at the the rural listening tour stops. The chairman of the Democrat Party, this guy named Elridge. He, of course, makes the case that, you know, racism because obviously you got to make that case. He says this is where Trump and MAGA excel. If somebody who looks like me, he's black.

[00:20:45] If someone who looks like me is your enemy, then you don't care if the guy in the White House is paying on your leg and telling you it's rain. See, that's that's the only reason that anybody voted for Trump. Even all of the black voters and Hispanic voters that have now shifted. And that's in one of these postmortems. Well, it's actually in all of them. And this is what has Democrats very concerned. Republicans say their Democrat caricature is accurate. Bill Mike Runyon. That's his name.

[00:21:12] Bill Mike Runyon, a self-described conservative Republican who is the mayor of Paintsville. He loves Trump. He went immediately to social and cultural commentary when asked in an interview to explain Johnson County politics. So, in other words, he answered your question, AP, AP News, right? You asked him, tell me about Johnson County politics. And he started talking about social and cultural commentary.

[00:21:41] And you just sort of like dismiss this away. Like, oh, he immediately turned to those things. Because maybe that's what the local politics is about. Democrats, he said, have to get away from the far left radical. Look at the transgender message. He says, everything got kind of racial as well. It's not like that here in Paintsville and in Johnson County. But I can see it as a country. It's making people more racist against one another. He's telling you.

[00:22:10] He is telling you why people are abandoning your party. And you're not listening on your listening tour. When asked specifically who he was talking about, he alluded to progressive U.S. representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina from New York City, and Jasmine Crockett, a black woman from Texas. It's the ones you always see on TV, the mayor said. Again, what is he telling you?

[00:22:40] He is telling you that these far left progressives are the brand ambassadors for your party. That's what he's telling you. You don't have to listen to him. But that's what he's telling you. Now, one bright spot for the Kentucky Democrats is Andy Beshear, the governor. He's a nepo baby, kind of. Like his dad was, you know, longtime governor, I think, as well.

[00:23:05] And he seems to be the one Democrat who commands wide respect in and around Paintsville. Multiple Republicans, including the mayor, complimented Beshear for his handling of floods and other disasters. In the region. Right. Competence during disaster and the recovery efforts breeds goodwill and support across party lines. And right. Just doing your job.

[00:23:34] He said Andy Beshear is not like those national Democrats. This is the mayor of Paintsville. And he said Bill Clinton wasn't like these Democrats today. They are telling you what you are doing to drive them away. You are supposedly on a listening tour. Maybe you should listen. Vox.com.

[00:24:02] Piece by Eric Levitz. The latest autopsy on the Democrats' loss comes courtesy of Catalyst, a Democrat data firm with a widely coveted voter database. The firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. In other words, they're not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote.

[00:24:30] But also, they have hard data showing which party individual voters registered with and which elections they did and did not show up for. Catalyst boasts the longest running voter database of any institution besides the Democrat and Republican parties. It has tracked the electorate's behavior for over 15 years.

[00:24:55] The three big takeaways here from, at least as reported by Vox.com. Number one, Democrats did not lose because they failed to turn out the progressive base. Number two, young voters shifted right. And number three, non-white voters got redder. All right, so spring is here, a time of renewal and celebrations.

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[00:26:18] Get all the details at createavideo.com. Here's a Pete tweet from Moral Compass who says, Republicans, this is the voice of Republicans, talk about winning issues for them. Democrats reply, stop talking about that. Yeah, it's not the messaging, it's the message. So according to Catalyst and their autopsy of the 2024 election,

[00:26:46] number one, Democrats did not lose because they failed to turn out the progressive base. So the thinking on this copium goes like this, that Trump didn't win, he didn't prevail because he won over a decisive share of swing voters. No, no, no. He won because Democrats didn't mobilize America's anti-MAGA majority. That's what really happened. That's what they're telling themselves.

[00:27:14] Many on the left attribute that failure to Kamala Harris's centrism. Good Lord. Yeah, that's what it was. She was such a centrist. Had she not taken her party's base for granted, she could have ridden high Democratic turnout to victory. The evidence, though, for this view has always been very weak.

[00:27:38] According to Vox.com, the Catalyst data makes it obviously false. Now, 126 million Americans cast a ballot in both the 2020 and 2024 elections. They call these repeat voters. Biden won 51.6% of repeat voters in 2020. Harris only won 49.4%.

[00:28:06] Meanwhile, there were 26 million new voters. Democrats have historically won new voters by very comfortable margins, largely because young Americans were overwhelmingly left-leaning in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. But last year, Trump won new voters by about three points. Democrats surely saw weaker turnout than Republicans last year,

[00:28:35] and this was partly responsible for Harris's loss, it says later. But Democrats do need to try to mobilize their coalition's most unreliable members. They just can't do so at the expense of winning over swing voters. Unreliable Democrat leaners tend to be politically disengaged and ideologically heterodox, much like many swing voters. Okay, so that's the first thing, excuse that can be put to bed.

[00:29:04] It was not a matter of turning out, not getting your progressive base out. They came out. Number two, young voters shifted right. Like AP VoteCast and Blue Rose Research, Catalyst finds that younger voters were significantly more Republican in 2024 than they had been in 2020. Biden won 61% of those under 30 years old. Harris didn't get 61. She got 55.

[00:29:34] This decline was driven almost entirely by dudes. Harris won 63% of women under the age of 30. That was still three points lower than Biden. But she only won 46% of men under the age of 30. That is nine points worse than Biden got. So she lost young voters, young men specifically.

[00:30:02] Finally, non-white voters got redder. Harris actually won the same share of the white vote that Barack Obama had. And her support among America's white majority was only two points lower than Biden's. But, like previous 2024 autopsies, Catalyst's report finds that Democrats suffered steeper losses

[00:30:25] with non-white voters, particularly those who were young, male, and or politically disengaged. Harris won 85% of black voters. That is down four points from Biden's 89%. And that drop was entirely due to flagging support from black men. I've been saying this for 20 years, folks.

[00:30:53] When the Democrat Party no longer is able to carry 90% of the black vote, they will not win the presidency again. That's why they're constantly focused on race. They're constantly trying to keep people agitated about it. You know, you can't trust those Republicans. They're going to put you back in chains, to quote Joe Biden.

[00:31:19] Democrats suffered especially large losses with young black men winning only 75% of their ballots in 2024 compared to 85% in 2020. The trends among Latino voters were similar. Between 2020 and 2024, Latino support for the Democrat nominee dropped from 63% down to 54%. The decline among Latino men particularly pronounced,

[00:31:48] as Trump won a 53% majority of that historically Democrat constituency. Trump won 53% of Hispanic men. Support among young Latino men fell off a cliff. And the party lost even more ground with men, Latino men, under the age of 30. Finally, Harris won only 61% of Asian American and Pacific Islander votes.

[00:32:16] In 2012, Obama over Romney, he carried that population 74% to 26%. And men in this group are leaving the Democrat coalition faster than their female counterparts. You take all this together, the figures paint a disconcerting picture for Democrats. The party has long wagered that time was on its side. Since America's rising generations were heavily left-leaning and the country was becoming more diverse by the year,

[00:32:45] the thought was it would become gradually easier for Democrats to assemble national majorities, even as the party bled support among non-college-educated white voters. And it's true. Democrats still do better with young and non-white voters than with Americans as a whole. That's still true. But the party's advantage with those constituencies has been narrowing rapidly.

[00:33:09] Last year's returns suggest that demographic churn isn't quite the boon that many Democrats had hoped and can be easily outweighed by other factors. Also, as blue states bleed population to red ones, Democrats are poised to have a much harder time winning the electoral college majorities after the 2030 census. Given current trends, by 2032, a Democratic nominee who won every blue state and added Michigan, Wisconsin,

[00:33:39] and Pennsylvania would still lose the White House. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.