What Happened Last Night: C&B’s Takeaways

BUCK: We’re bringing you the latest on what’s going on with all these elections last night. The quick takeaway, as you know, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican, a huge win over Terry McAuliffe, Slimy Terry. He was defeated, gave his concession speech this morning. Big, big shock wave going through the Democrat Party right now.

We also have a fantastic new lieutenant governor, Winsome Sears, a Marine and Marine veteran, and a woman who I think you’re gonna be hearing a lot more about in Republican politics. A tight race that got a little less tight. Clay and I were talking about this before in New Jersey where Phil Murphy, the Democrat, is up on Jack Ciattarelli by about 15,000 votes.

They just had kind of a vote dump that had come in, and the live trackers here updating where all this stands. So it’s 49.94% of the vote for Murphy, Ciattarelli 49.32%. A reminder, everybody: Your vote does in fact matter. And another conversation I’m sure we’re gonna be having a lot more going into the midterms, which is that even a little bit of fraud, even a little bit of counting of votes that should not legally be counted, even if cast in error, can change an election.

And one election in one state can change the trajectory of Congress, of the presidency of the country. So something to keep in mind. But what exactly happened last night? What is the takeaway? For Republicans, there is, I think, a template here for national-level political victory based upon bringing politics down to the most fundamental local level.

What’s being taught in your schools, parents and their children, supporting families, giving them choice, getting them involved. My man Clay Travis went to one of these meetings himself out in Williamson County, Tennessee. So that’s what the Republicans take from it. The Democrats, on the other hand, they’re going back and forth. “Is this just racism? Should we pretend that’s what…?

“Did we not go hard left enough on all this stuff?” Here’s an example, Clay. I was watching MSNBC last night because that’s the best thing to do when Republicans have a great night. It’s so entertaining to watch it. Here’s Joy Reid — you know how this is gonna go — basically saying that, you know, why did Democrats lose last night in Virginia? Racist parents!

REID: Exit polls showed — which was interesting — that the coronavirus or that the virus was a very — not important to many voters. It was education, which is code for “white parents don’t like the idea of teaching about race,” and, I mean, unfortunately, race is just the most palpable tool in the toolkit. Used to be in the Democrat Party back in the day when they were Dixiecrats, and now the Republican Party. It just is powerful.

BUCK: Oh, Dixie! Brings in the Dixiecrats there, Clay. Racist parents. That’s what MSNBC wants their audience to take from this. Okay. Keep going with that.

CLAY: I hope… Let me just tell you this, continue to roll with that theme. I hope that ever Democrat takes as a lesson from what happened in Virginia and what nearly happened in New Jersey and what happened in Seattle and what happened in Minnesota and what happened in so many different jurisdictions all over this country. I hope the lesson they take is we need to call white parents “racist” more. I hope that’s the lesson they take, because they are so fundamentally out of touch with what’s going on.

First of all, Joy Reid I think it’s fair to say, is an imbecile. She is not a smart woman. She is attempting to take over the Rachel Maddow seat, right? Rachel Maddow is gonna ride off into the sunset at some point, I believe, in the summer of ’22 and not do a nightly show anymore. And whether you like or dislike Rachel Maddow, she’s really smart. Rhodes Scholar.

I don’t agree with virtually anything that she says from a political perspective, but she has the ability to make unique and interesting arguments that at least can be somewhat tacitly connected to reality. If you are Joy Reid and your takeaway from this is racism is the reason why these results happen, you have to directly overlook the fact that the same voters, first of all, that you’re saying are racist now, a lot of them voted for Joe Biden in 2020. A lot of these women, they switched, right?

BUCK: And Barack Obama twice, by the way.

CLAY: And Barack Obama twice. So you are saying that these people who were willing to vote for a black man for president and supported Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the presidency a year ago, suddenly became super racist in this last year. That’s a tough argument to make. It also requires that you overlook that these same racist white people were voting for a black woman for lieutenant governor and a Hispanic man for the attorney general’s office.

And that they voted in nearly direct concert percentage-wise with Glenn Youngkin, who happens to be a white guy. The reality is people vote not based on the color of the skin of the person who is running, by and large — certainly in the Republican Party — but based on whether politicians are speaking about issues that they care about the most. And right now — and I told you this back in August, Buck.

I called you from the parking lot, and I said, “This is gonna be big. This mom revolution is real. These are highly educated, highly educated, highly informed voters who are fed up with mask mandates, who don’t appreciate the idea that your race is your destiny in America.” And, by the way, there’s a big difference between teaching about the Civil War and slavery, and teaching 160 years later that the only thing that determines your success and failure in this country is whether or not you’re white, black, Asian, or Hispanic, and that somehow race is destiny. That’s what parents, by the way, of all persuasions reject, and that’s what we’re seeing, and I think it’s only gonna grow between now and 2022.

BUCK: There’s a fundamental dishonesty in all of this right now, and that is that they act like it’s the same thing to teach the history, for example, of Jim Crow and segregation in this country — that’s the same thing — as telling 9-year-olds that they need to separate themselves in a classroom by race and admit their white privilege or lack thereof, and either take on oppressor or oppressed status and buy into this racial Marxism of intersectionality.

Then this is political indoctrination, because these are ideas that I would openly say I reject, you reject, people listening to this reject and the suburban moms who came out — and we’re not saying this as a kind of clever line. It really was a lot of suburban women, oftentimes mothers, who came out in massive numbers for Glenn Youngkin, and that was the change.

It turns out they didn’t like being told lies, one, but the Democrat apparatus around education, didn’t appreciate that, and they also didn’t like then being told, “Yeah, fine. Maybe we lied to you about CRT, but your objection to the CRT that we said didn’t exist in schools last month or last week is actually proof of your racism.” This is too far. This went beyond what was going to be acceptable for those moms, and I will tell you even Van Jones…

He’s a leftist. He’s a man of the left. He will cross over sometimes with conservatives on certain issues — criminal justice reform, for example, I’ll just say. He occasionally decides to veer off of the leftist script. But he’s a man of the left. He understands, I think, at some level what happened last night in a way that he knows the Democrats to maintain power need to hear. Here he is talking about it.

JONES: You got a lot of parents who just spent a year homeschooling their kids and were forced to do so. To tell those people, “Look, we don’t care what you think about education,” that is a big insult. And I think you’re gonna see that a bunch of moms said, ‘We don’t like that attitude, and they rose up.” Now, I think we’re gonna see now Republicans try to demagogue this issue around parental rights going forward. You I think I have a playbook here. But look, Terry McAuliffe, I think he would have been a great governor, I hope he gets a chance to be governor, but I don’t think he ran a great campaign.

BUCK: Okay, a couple… The latter part of it a little bit of the usual trying to make the Democrat audience happy. The beginning, though, “I hope they don’t listen to him. I hope they listen to Joy Reid,” as in it wasn’t that parents were insulted. It’s that the parents are racist for thinking they were insulted.

CLAY: Yeah. And, Buck, I also saw Van Jones which I thought was an interesting point and I do think everybody can be guilty of this if you’re not careful, he also on CNN ’cause I was flipping around while watching the Braves win their first World Series since 1995 which was amazing I was flipping around and Van Jones made I think a fairly astute point as well by saying a lot of Democrats have no clue what the real world is like.

BUCK: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: They like to claim, right… They like to claim that they’re the party of minorities and they’re the party of immigrants and all these things, but the reality is I’m not sure there’s ever been a more elite party — and by “elite” I mean people who make a lot of money, people who live on the coast, people who have no real sense for what’s going on in the middle part of the country.

And the Democrat Party has moved so rapped from a union-focused, blue-collar base that now has been taken care of to a large extent by the Republicans and there is an elitist, postgrad mentality to everything the Democrats say. They need to believe, Democrats — even though it’s often not the case – that they are the smartest people in the room and I think that’s why the “Let’s go, Brandon” insult is so frustrating to them, because they’re not used to getting made fun of.

They’re used to being able to make fun of everybody else. The deplorables. “Oh, look at those stupid, idiot Trump voters. Oh, look at all those stupid rednecks who care about whether monuments are getting torn down. Oh, look at all those people who don’t agree with vaccine mandates. Oh, they won’t wear masks.”

There’s a level of smearing, condescension that exists in the Democratic Party, Buck, that I’m not sure has ever existed in my life in either party in the way that they look at a large percentage of the American population. And I don’t think they’re aware that the other side looks back. Republicans understand what Democrats are like, a lot more than I think Democrats understand what Republicans are like. Doesn’t make sense to you?

BUCK: Yeah, absolutely. And as this election played out, we brought this up on the air. Terry McAuliffe is a guy who pretends that he’s so invested and cares so much about the public school system, and yet Terry McAuliffe — who is a rich white accomplish just to put that out there for everyone (not quite as rich as Glenn Youngkin, but a rich white millionaire), makes the very clear choice to send his children to the $40,000-a-year-in-tuition Potomac School.

Which is the most elite institution that and maybe Sidwell Friends in the D.C. area, those are the two most elite schools you could really find to send your kids to. And yet he’s going around lecturing parents who don’t want their kids in a public school system to be told that if they’re white they are oppresses and need to make amendments and need to obey a kind of left-wing ideology and view of the world.

That’s just deep disingenuous and offensive. It was actually this is the truth. McAuliffe campaign blundered because people realized exactly what you say about sneering and condescension. There was something offensive about the way the Democrats were dismissive of this movement, dismissive of people who wanted to be more involved in their children’s lives. It came out, it was ugly, and they paid the price for it.

CLAY: Buck, there are lots of people out there that don’t have the luxury to be able to pick their kids’ school, and I don’t mean from a private school perspective. I mean you can only afford to live in this school district, and you’re busting your ass to try to let move to the other side of the street, so to speak, so your kid can get in that better school district, and I think Democrats have totally lost connection. I think it’s a really open place for Republicans.

School choice matters. Being able to be involved in your child’s education is an incredible luxury that super-rich people have that a lot of people in America don’t have. You have to put your kid in the school where you happen to live in an apartment or condo or a house, and you may not be in the best school district, and being told that you can’t have the same ability to have an influence on your kid’s school that a rich person like Terry McAuliffe — who, as you rightly point out — I think he has five kids — put all five of them in a $40,000-a-year public —

BUCK: I think four went to that one and then another one to a different, very expensive private school. But, yeah.

CLAY: But it’s a luxury, right? I’m fortunate now. If I decide… I’ve got my kids in public school, two of them. But I can go look at private schools and make a choice if I decide at some point I can afford to do that. That’s a luxury I didn’t have for most of my life, and that’s a luxury that, frankly, most people in America don’t have. And Democrats sneering about not — about those people not deserving a right to speak out for their kids, it’s got the mama bears fired up and it set off the woman revolution, the mom revolution.

BUCK: There is an overarching reality of the Democrat Party that I think in the era of covid is more clear than has ever been before, and that is the elites of the Democrat Party are absolutely maniacally insistent upon telling everybody else what to do and maintaining the right themselves to not do the things they’re telling everybody else to do.

CLAY: Yes!

BUCK: And that has started to really annoy people beyond… There’s another word I want to use.

CLAY: (chuckles) Yes.

BUCK: But annoy people beyond where they can actually continue to in good faith and good conscience vote for these Democrat clowns.