BUCK: Weeks away from a massive midterm election. The fight is underway to convince people to vote rationally, intelligently, and for Republicans. These all go together. Our friend Mollie Hemingway is with us now. She’s senior editor at The Federalist, a Fox News contributor. She’s got an amazing book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Mollie, great to have you back.

HEMINGWAY: It is great to be here with you.

BUCK: How are we looking at this stage right now going into this midterm for control of the House, control of the Senate? What’s top line for you?

HEMINGWAY: Just want to say, it’s an excellent day to ask me this question because I as a rule do not pay attention to any of the prognostications about what’s gonna happen until Labor Day, and we’ve hit Labor Day, and so, now I’m joining the fray in discussing what I think is gonna happen.

So, I think that the fundamentals of this election have been pretty constant. You have the Democrat Party in control of everything in Washington, D.C. — the presidency, both houses — you have people really upset with the policies that Democrats have put in place, and so, all the polls are very consistently showing that people have very negative views about the direction of the country, and they don’t have much reason to go for Joe Biden.

And so — or his party. So, I think it’s gonna be a pretty good year for Republicans. I do have a few caveats on that, though.

CLAY: What are those caveats? Mollie, thanks for coming on. You want to give a shout-out to your mom who I understand is a big listener in Colorado. We would certainly love for her to receive the acclaim that she well deserves for producing you at minimum, but, yeah, what are those caveats and give a shout-out to your mom?

HEMINGWAY: Yeah. Hi to Carolyn, who is not even a big radio listener but loves your show. And so —

CLAY: Great taste.

HEMINGWAY: — talks to me all the time about the brilliance that you guys have shared and what she’s learned. But, yeah, the caveats are that I don’t think the Republican Party is doing a good job of arguing for anything. They think it’s stuff to just let Democrats be the bad guys, that that will carry them to victory.

And it’s actually probably true. That’s actually so much less than they could accomplish by being very vigorous about what they’re for and how they’re gonna fight against some of these things that have people throughout the country so upset about the direction of the country.

BUCK: Speaking to Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist. TheFederalist.com is a great website covering politics, news, everything you need to know. Mollie, race by race or — yeah, we’ll do it that way, ’cause state by state. Pennsylvania we were just talking about. Dr. Oz, Fetterman, how do you see that one?

HEMINGWAY: So, I got a kick out of how, like, a month ago everyone decided that race was over and in favor of Fetterman. It reminds you of why you need to see what’s happening in an actual state, where Fetterman is unable to campaign, essentially.

He’s unable to speak. His campaign admitted to the Washington Post that he has trouble in complicated auditory environments which is kind of the definition of being a senator. And so, meanwhile, Mehmet Oz who hadn’t really been doing much campaigning is now barnstorming throughout the state.

And so Fetterman’s obviously ahead, according to most polling, but I think that’s definitely gonna tighten up in Oz’s favor.

CLAY: Mollie, what did you think of Biden’s speech Thursday night?

HEMINGWAY: I’m still having trouble processing that that actually happened. I couldn’t believe how dark and dangerous it was. And I am not one of these people who gets really upset about heated political rhetoric, you know, no matter who’s doing it. I kind of think all’s fair in love and politics and you gotta get out there and punch.

I just am mildly horrified that he went to war against the entire Republican Party, you know, basically anyone who didn’t vote for him, he’s putting in the enemy camp. It’s — or who doesn’t plan to support him in the upcoming election or his party. It just is a really dangerous line to cross at a time where we’re experiencing such political division.

And I’ve never been a Joe Biden fan particularly, but if there was something to be said for him that he said, that his administration, the media that ran his campaign claimed this would be a competent, unifying, moderate administration. It’s completely incompetent.

It is the furthest thing from moderate, and it’s very divisive. And so, if you had to get rid of Trump because of all those — because of the drama of his presidency even if people liked the direction of the country, it makes no sense to replace Trump with someone who is much more corrosive in his rhetoric and much more divisive and far less competent. It’s the opposite direction of what we were promised.

BUCK: How much, Mollie, of what we’re seeing now — I think there’s some poll that says, you know, generic ballot Democrats now have the advantage over Republicans.

How do you separate out what seems to be likely suppression of Republican enthusiasm, essentially, dare I say, disinformation when it comes to assessments off polling and the sweeping analysis you’ll hear on a lot of the other networks out there about how, “Oh, Republicans are getting clobbered on this issue, or, oh, it’s looking bad for them on that issue.” Feels on some level like that’s meant to depress turnout.

HEMINGWAY: It’s obviously the case that people are trying to influence the perceptions about races through some polling that just, frankly, doesn’t make any sense. I did see someone last week going through and commenting on how in previous election years where Republicans had very good years, say 2010, they would show the headline from Politico at this point of the campaign cycle saying that Republicans were in a very bad situation and it was gonna go horribly, and of course by November they picked up 63 seats.

And so, it does affect the way people talk about it. And obviously corporate media are very much in the political camp of the Democrats, as evidenced by nearly everything they do. And so you saw that throughout August they were trying to convince people that Biden was back and he was wearing aviator sunglasses and everything was going great.

The thing is, though, it obviously isn’t going great, inasmuch as they were trying to make something happen, it seems like they couldn’t quite do it polling-wise. But these polls do have an effect on people. And, like, in 2020 the polls were so horrible for Republicans that I think it did affect the mood of people even in the Trump administration.

You know, you heard Bill Barr say he really didn’t think Trump had a chance, he was shocked the race was as close as it was. Well, that’s a function of the polling narrative that people put out there. And you have to kind of step back and think through, you know, what are the fundamentals?

What’s really going on? Talk to real people who are livid with the direction of the country, even if everyone in D.C. and New York are trying to convince everybody that things are actually going better.

CLAY: Mollie, Buck and I have been arguing just based on covid alone, if democracy really works, then blue state governors, blue state congressmen, senators, certainly mayors, they all failed kids. And suddenly it’s like everybody is looking around and saying, “Hey, wait a minute.

We had generational learning loss, and the people who lost the most were minority kids whose families didn’t have the same resources to be able to handle when they suddenly weren’t in schools.” Is there going to ever be a reckoning for this failure, in your mind? Will we get it this fall?

HEMINGWAY: Well, I think — I live in Virginia, and it was fascinating to see what happened in our off-year elections when — Virginia is a pretty blue state, and you had all three statewide offices go Republican. And it was a hundred percent what was going on in the schools, the shutdowns and then also that they have been, like, pushing actual racist curriculum in the form of critical race theory in school districts across Virginia.

And so, I think that you’ll still see parents revolting against this. However, I do find it fascinating. There’s no question that Democrats and their base, like the teachers’ unions, were pushing really hard to keep schools closed, to keep masks on children, and this had very bad outcomes on the students’ learning.

We’ve seen in recent weeks where you have, again, major media just kind of gaslighting the country and claiming that it was the teachers’ unions who pushed to open the schools. That’s just —

CLAY: It’s amazing.

HEMINGWAY: — not true in any way. That’s a level of gaslighting that’s very disturbing to experience, and it’s happening right now and they know it’s so bad electorally; so, they’re just going for the “we will completely lie about who shut down schools and who kept them shut down.”

BUCK: Speaking to Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist right now. Mollie, we do have some campaigns, folks on campaigns who listen, people staffs who are up for reelection who listen to this show. If there was one area where you would like to see Republicans between now and that big Election Day really go on offense, what would it be, and how would you want them to do it?

HEMINGWAY: I think there are many ways that they should, but there’s one that they absolutely have to, according to polling, which is being accurate and honest about what the situation is with abortion law in states throughout the country. The Dobbs decision overturns Roe v. Wade.

This actually makes for a very moderate approach to abortion law. Instead of having it where nobody can have any say in it even though the vast majority of the country would like to say at least some restrictions, Dobbs enables people through their representatives to put in place some protection for women and children in the pregnancy situation.

And yet because, again, the media are so crazy lefty, they have basically lied about what that ruling is and what it does. They said it’s anti-democratic which that’s exactly what it is, it is Democratic. And the vast majority of Americans support at least some restrictions on abortion to protect unborn human life.

So, they can’t just let the media and Democrats run that conversation, particularly when there’s so much misinformation and disinformation about what is in play with that. And people love life, people love babies, people love mothers, people love family formation. And so, it’s a very strong issue. But you can’t do it defensively. You have to explain proactively what you’re for and why it benefits society.

BUCK: Mollie Hemingway, everybody, TheFederalist.com, go check out her latest. Mollie, come back talk to us again soon. We gotta see how this election goes.

HEMINGWAY: Take care. Thanks.