On the latest episode of Free Expression, Wall Street Journal Editor at Large Gerry Baker talks with conservative author and commentator Matthew Continetti about why an expected dominant victory for the GOP on Election Day never came to fruition, what the results mean for a potential 2024 matchup between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, and how Republicans can formulate a message on issues like abortion and crime to increase their popular vote numbers.
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Gerry Baker.
Gerard Baker: Hello, and welcome to Free Expression with me, Gerry Baker from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Thanks for joining us. If you're not already a subscriber, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a nice review. This week, what happened to my red wave? We are still at this point, Wednesday lunchtime, digesting the results of the midterm elections in which voting concluded on Tuesday. Now, since it's routine in America that it takes weeks to determine the outcome of elections, we can't say anything definitive. But it certainly looks, so far, like that much anticipated big Republican victory didn't materialize. The party looks on course at this point, for a very small majority in the House of Representatives, but much less than was generally forecast by pollsters and pundits. And the Senate is still unpredictable. The GOP could yet seize control of the upper chamber. That depends on the outcome of a few races, and are now, what we know, is will be a runoff election in Georgia. But so far, at least we know it's lost the only race to have flipped, that was in Pennsylvania. There was one bright red shining beacon for Republicans in the shape of Ron DeSantis, who smashed all records in Florida winning reelection as governor by the widest margin in the state's history. Almost 20 points. So what does it all mean for our politics for the Republican Party in particular, for Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and indeed of course, for the future of conservatism? Well, I'm delighted to say my guest this week is Matthew Continetti, who's as well placed as anyone to answer those questions. Matt's a conservative journalist, author, and commentator, fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. He previously edited the Washington Free Beacon, and before that wrote for the Weekly Standard and has written for many other publications too. He's the author of several books, including most recently, The Right: A Hundred Year War for American Conservatism. And Matt Continetti joins me now. Matt, thanks very much indeed for being here.
Matt Continetti : Here. Well, thank you for having me, Gerry. It's a pleasure.
Gerard Baker: So Matt, funny thing happened on the way to the red tsunami. As I say, we're still digesting results, and of course, lots of results still to come, but what's your sense so far?
Matt Continetti : My sense is that Republicans are disappointed. There's a cloud hanging over Red America on the day after the election. And I think that it wasn't just Republicans who were surprised at the Republicans disappointing night, Gerry. I also think many professional electoral analysts were surprised at the divergence between some of these polls and expectations and what actually happened on the ground. And as you go into the data, you can kind of see perhaps some explanation for the results. And for me, the big takeaway I would say are two. The first is that the electorate separates their assessment of Joe Biden, which is negative, from their view of other Democrats. And so Joe Biden is an unpopular president. He's at 44% approval in the National Exit Poll. He's at 43% approval in the Fox News Voter Analysis. You would expect double digit swings against his party in the House of Representatives when you're that unpopular, but he's going to best expectations. And the reason is I think a lot of voters just feel kind of meh about him. They don't like him, they don't want him to run again for president, but they don't really take out those feelings on other Democrats in the way that they took out their opposition of Trump on Republicans. And then just one other point I think that comes out from the exit poll and voter analysis data is that Democrats in many places around the country were enthusiastic about protecting abortion rights. Looking at the polls headed into election day, you might have thought, as I did, that abortion was fading as a concern. And that doesn't seem to have happened. It was second place in both the National Exit Poll and the Fox News Voter Analysis. And for the voters to whom abortion is the most important issue in the election, well, they went massively for the Democrats, even in greater margins than say voters who were concerned about inflation went for Republicans. So I think that's kind of the story of the election so far.
Gerard Baker: Let's break that down. Particularly interesting on the first point is that you make a very interesting point about the separation between Biden and maybe perceptions of his policy or other candidates. But it's not just Biden's approval rating or Biden's performance as president, that's presumably is disapproved or by people. Democrats have been in control of both the elected branches of government for the last two years. They've enacted quite a lot actually, as people have talked about quite a lot from COVID relief to bipartisan infrastructure investment to, of course, the very significantly attempted the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, the big investment in green energy and other stuff. The condition of the economy is poor, the inflation is rampant, highest it's been in 40 years. Real wages are declining, financial conditions are deteriorating, housing prices are falling. There's a general sense of unease. But voters didn't seem to, as you say, while they may tell pollsters they don't like, approve of the Democrats, when it came to voting out Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, crime is another issue too, which is big in a lot of these places or even getting rid of Governor Kathy Hochul in New York. So it's not just a sense that Joe Biden, the Democrats themselves don't seem to have been punished for their stewardship of the country for the last two years, do they?
Matt Continetti : No. I bring up Biden just because presidential approval, historically, is the best indicator of a party's performance in an election. And Biden, in these exit polls, is less popular than Donald Trump was on the night in 2018 when the Democrats picked up 41 House seats. And so just by a historical precedent, one would expect Democrats to lose big just as Republicans had four years ago. But that didn't happen, so the question is why. I'll give a couple reasons. One is, I don't think Republicans had much of a message on the economy. The ads were filled with complaints about rising prices. There's widespread public perception, as you say, that the economy's already in the recession. But the Republicans are kind of divided on what they have to offer. There's been a move away from the traditional free enterprise, limited government economics of the Republican party in recent years. A candidate like JD Vance who has a pretty good grasp of populous currents in the Republican party, he could talk about them fluently. But other candidates like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania or Herschel Walker in Georgia, they don't really know much about the economy. Both of them are celebrities. They're unlike the typical businessmen or Chamber of Commerce type that Republicans field. So I think it was a lack of a message on the economy other than just complaints that kind of fed into the Republicans disappointing night. And then the other factor as well is candidate quality. Heading into the election, we would've looked at these polls and we'd say, well, the Republicans seem to have compensated for what we thought were pretty lackluster candidates in places like Pennsylvania or Georgia or Arizona where the races were very close in the polling. In fact, that doesn't seem to have been the case. Of course, the Arizona race hasn't been called yet as we speak, but Blake Masters, the Republican there is trailing by about six points. The incumbent Senator Mark Kelly and Masters is running behind the Republican gubernatorial candidate, another newcomer, Kari Lake. So I think it was that combination of those two things, kind of a muddled message and then just inexperience and oftentimes statements or positions, especially with regard to the 2020 election and President Trump that made voters uncomfortable. And even though they dislike Biden, they were willing to send Democrats back to Congress.
Gerard Baker: Now, the one thing that unites all those candidates of questionable quality is that they were the sort of personally anointed candidates in the Republican primary of Donald Trump. That's true of people you mentioned, whether it's Walker in Georgia or Oz in Pennsylvania, I should say Mastriano in Pennsylvania, the gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania, whether it is Blake Masters in Arizona, there are many, many. You can go down the list. You can also go even get into the House races. I've been struck by some of these very interesting House races. There's a House race in Michigan where Peter Meijer, a House member who voted to impeach Trump after January 6th. Trump, as he did with all of those who voted to impeach him, went after him in the primary. He was defeated in the primary. The candidate then who defeated Meijer in the primary, the Trump-backed candidate lost Tuesday in the general election. So of course, Trump can point to candidates who won. JD Vance most strikingly, again, maybe Walker will pull it out in the runoff in Georgia. But it does seem, doesn't it, that, a, it was the quality of those candidates and the dubious campaigning capabilities or political capabilities of those candidates. But was it also, do you think, the fact of their political proximity to Donald Trump to the stolen election narrative. Is that patent visible on a large enough scale to be able to draw some sort of conclusion from this result that voters don't want Stop the Steal Trump-backed Republican candidates?
Matt Continetti : Right. I think the desire to go along with some of the lies about the 2020 election goes hand in hand with candidate weakness just because that kind of conspiratorial thinking tends to attract fringe figures. The way I'd approach the question is this, let's start from 2016. Donald Trump's upset of the century. In that election, Donald Trump won independent voters by six points. Donald Trump won the suburbs by five points. He lost moderates to Hillary Clinton, but only by 11 points, which for a Republican is a pretty close gap. Ever since then in those three major categories, I think that really describe kind of the ideological center of the country, the Republicans have lost ground, steadily. And by the time we got to the 2022 election, judging from the exit polls and the Fox News Voter Analysis, we see independents going to the Democrats, narrowly. We see the gap between moderate voters is huge, double digits with moderates going for Democrats. We look at the suburbs and it's kind of a split decision. The exit poll has them going narrowly Republican. The Fox News Analysis has them going narrowly Democrat. But essentially what that tells you is it was too close to make a real difference, and if you lose the suburbs, you need powerhouse effort in the rural sectors of the country to make up the difference. And that just wasn't on offer today. So I think it's this continued loss of ground to the Democrats in these key constituencies that we've seen during the Trump era that contributed to the kind of disappointing result of last night for the Republican party. They need to figure out some way to get back to Trump's numbers among independents, among suburban voters, among moderates if they're going to have a chance of winning the electoral college, which after all is what Trump did. He lost the popular vote. It is striking, Gerry, that we are 23 years into the 21st century. I think I got the math right with the zeros are always complicated and the Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote exactly once. Obviously, the electoral college is what matters. But that does tell you something about the appeal of this party and it really does need to, I think, take a look in the mirror after this election.
Gerard Baker: You've written this terrific book on the history of conservatives over the last century. And I do want to come into more detail about exactly what you just said about the widespread kind of electoral failure of Republicans in the last 20 years, where this election fits into that, what we might include. But just I want to quickly just go back to something. You did talk about abortion, that abortion was an issue. Now again, as we came into this election, we pundits said, well, the Democrats have been talking about democracy and abortion and nobody's interested in that. Really, the big issue is the economy. All the polling says people are worried about inflation and crime. But as you say, it does look in some states as though abortion did matter. There were those ballot initiatives in places like Kentucky and Michigan, which basically ended up voters coming out to vote, especially younger voters according to the exit polls, favoring essentially the sort of pro-choice, pro-abortion position. And it does look as though as its affected. Against that, I've heard some people say, well, actually, if you look at say, governors like Ron DeSantis, and we're going to talk about him in a bit too. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Greg Abbott in Texas, they have both put their names to support for restrictions on abortion since the Dobbs decision. Restrictions on abortion, I think in both states, I think it's the 15 week level. DeSantis one and a landslide, Greg Abbott won comfortably suggesting that neither, maybe abortion wasn't that big a deal, or that there is a way for Republicans to address the concerns that voters have about abortion and about maintaining some rights to an abortion while at the same time, in accordance with Dobbs, being able to restrict abortion in their own states. Do you think there a lesson in there?
Matt Continetti : Well, I think it's maybe a both and answer. The first part is, abortion will play differently in different places across the country. When I look at, say, the gender gap, which was pronounced in the election, as it always is, but it's been narrowed in some categories during cycles where Republicans do well. Of course, there have been cycles that Republicans do well in the last 10 years, that gender gap tends to be narrowed. Well, it was quite wide this year, and I think abortion must have had something to do with that. I also think in the suburbs, and of course these are overlapping categories, women living in the suburbs would place a higher priority on the protection of abortion rights. And the race, I think, of was the Abigail Spanberger race in Virginia seven, kind of a suburban district here in Virginia. It's close to where I live, so I had to endure all of the attack ads during the World Series. And from my viewing of those ads, it was pretty simple. Yesli Vega, the Republican candidate, was attacking Abigail Spanberger, first elected in 2018 as basically being a tool of Nancy Pelosi and the radical left agenda. And Spanberger hit back using an audio clip in which Vega was kind of dicey in response to a voter claiming that rape doesn't result in pregnancy. And so it was just obvious that she was leading with abortion against Vega's generalized argument against the Democrats and abortion won in that type of district. So that's how the issue can play in different contexts. But as you point out, there are also plenty of places, including these governor's races, where the pro-life candidate did very well. I mean, we'll talk about Ron DeSantis, but Brian Kemp did very well. Mike DeWine did very well. Greg Abbott did very well, all pro-lifers. And I think what helped there is the fact that they had legislation that they had signed. They knew what their position was. They were prepared to defend it because they had given reasons in support of this legislation during the deliberative process. Many other candidates, especially the newcomers, they didn't know where they stood on abortion. They weren't sure where they should draw the line. And of course, even those governors I mentioned, draw the line in different places. The DeSantis position, which I think is the consensus position, is a 15-week ban. But DeWine is harsher in Ohio. It draws the line at six weeks, I believe. But it's the very fact of having a position and having been practiced at defending it, I think, neutralized the abortion issue. And that's where I think Republicans need to focus in the next two years. They need to really come to grips with the mood of the country on this issue, which is complicated. Americans think that basically that abortion should be legal in the first trimester of a pregnancy and then steadily restricted until it is banned in the final weeks of a pregnancy. And if Republicans are outside of that kind of mainstream, they're probably going to pay at the polls.
Gerard Baker: We've got to take a break there, but when we come back, I'll have more with author and commentator Matt Continetti about the midterm elections, and we'll be taking a look to what they may tell us about the future of the conservative movement in America. Stay with us. Welcome back. I'm talking with Matt Continetti, conservative author and commentator, about the midterm elections and what they may tell us about the future of the Republican Party and indeed the conservative movement. Let's talk about the big gleaming, bright red spot for Republicans, which of course, is Florida, particularly Ron DeSantis. The superlatives speak for themselves. Biggest thing, almost 20 point win over former governor Charlie Crist. I think the largest margin of victory in gubernatorial race in Florida's history. There are now no state-wide elected Democrats in Florida. I think that's the first time since reconstruction. He also not only won himself, but he helped to sweep the toss up House races in Florida. Marco Rubio won by a mile over Val Demings. DeSantis himself, went from winning very narrowly four years ago to winning about a million and a half votes this time around. Before we get on the presidential question, which is inevitable, put it into perspective, how important is this result in Florida and what's the DeSantis's secret?
Matt Continetti : Well, I think it's huge. For much of the past hundred years, Florida was being a democratic state. Ohio's kind of a swing state at the presidential level in recent decades. Both Ohio and Florida are now red states. And in Florida, that matters quite a bit because the more red Florida becomes, the more likely it is that Republicans will begin to eat into the democratic advantage and the popular vote for president, because that democratic advantage and the popular vote for president is really the result of one state, California. And its lopsided attraction to Democrats to having a big state like Florida become redder than even the other big state, Texas, I think will help quite a bit. So what's DeSantis's secret? Well, it will sound trite, but he's been a good governor. He was elected very narrowly, as you say, four years ago. He spent his first year governing from the center, but he's always also instituting conservative reforms at the K12 level. He was moving the state Supreme Court in a conservative direction and then he was tested. And leaders, when they face a test, have to rise to the challenge. And DeSantis made a big bet on COVID. He is a very intelligent man. He talked to experts, he read the material and he decided very early, around the same time as his neighbor to the North Brian Kemp, that it was just foolish to lockdown, that the costs to our lives, to the economy, to our children would be far, far greater than the costs of remaining open, the costs in terms of health. And he made that decision. He stuck with it. It was controversial at the time, but it clearly was the right call in retrospect. And I think voters like that. A couple other things. He demonstrated both a willing to take controversial stands on the culture wars with his fight with Disney, but also as a very competent executive, as we can see in the way he handled the recent hurricane. So it's a mixture of all of this, plus the economic benefit of making Florida the free state during the COVID pandemic that contributed to his tremendous success. A margin of over a million votes for Republican, and the name I immediately think of as Ronald Reagan, because that was the margins he was carrying when he was governor of California oh so many years ago.
Gerard Baker: But even DeSantis's victory, coupled with, as you say, Brian Kemp in Georgia, Greg Abbott in Texas has maybe kind of, dare I say, sort of the restoration if you like, of more sort of traditional political leaders. Very much the movement in the Republican party in the last five years has been towards these rather sort of glamorous, interesting, maybe slightly crazy outsiders. Donald Trump sits at the top of the pile, of course, but Herschel Walker in Georgia or Dr. Oz or these people who, Kari Lake, largely kind of political outsiders who succeed in part, if they do succeed, in large part because there is so much discontent with the established political order. The people are kind of rather excited by these new candidates who come in and they make a virtue of the fact that they've got no governing experience. They're celebrities, they're exciting, interesting people, people are just attracted to. But I wonder if one lesson of this year might be, again, as you look at those three races in particular, Mike DeWine in Ohio that you mentioned, just the sort of steady continuing success of people like Mitch McConnell and what his choices are for the Senate rather than Donald Trump. Have we reached kind of peak crazy, if I can put it like that, in terms of the attraction of outside candidates?
Matt Continetti : Well, there's crazy and then there's populist. And I think that three of the four governors you mentioned, so Abbott, DeSantis and Kemp, they are all conservative populists. They are anti-elite. That's why they were against Fauci, right? They're anti-expertise, or at least suspicious of expertise. They go for the social issues. They were talking about crime, rule of law during the unrest in 2020. They talk about immigration. Remember DeSantis' ascending of the Venezuelan asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard. All the controversy that caused. Some people actually speculated it might hurt his reelection bid. That looks pretty silly now. So they're populists, but they're also conservatives, so they're able to appeal to the more traditional Republican constituencies and they govern in such a way as not to motivate the opposition. When Donald Trump is the ultimate mobilizer, he mobilizes his base and he mobilizes the other team's base. And his problem has always been that the other team's base is larger than his. That negative mobilization doesn't really happen with the governors we're discussing. DeWine is more of an establishment figure, but it seems to me popular governor. I would say Zeldin in New York fit the mold of a populous conservative. He measured the best performance of a Republican in a the gubernatorial contest in New York in decades. And I think it was his campaign that will lead to the flip of several New York House seats, which will contribute to the House of Republican majority. And what did Zeldin do? He ran on a populist issue. He ran on crime and public safety, which of course, the elitist Hochul dismissed at every turn. And he also spent a lot of time talking about the damage done by the lockdowns and by the schools shutting down in particular. So I do think the recipe is for a populist conservatism, but it has to be one that recognizes the balance between populism and conservatism and also understands that in order to win competitive elections in a closely divided America, you cannot make the other side frightened of you. You just can't. Or certainly, you can't make the middle frightened of you. I think the left is frightened of Ron DeSantis, but the left, (inaudible) left is actually quite small in America. It's the middle where all the votes are, and DeSantis clearly won the middle on election night.
Gerard Baker: Quickly talk about DeSantis and Trump, because it is the bout of the century, potentially. It's the battle that may be about to unfold in the Republican party. And I'm not going to ask you, of course, to handicap a punitive primary that may never actually even happen anyway. But what's your sense, again, less than 24 hours after the polls closed with these initial indications that this was obviously an amazing victory for DeSantis and something of a repudiation and of some, at least, of significant number of Trump's candidates. Trump is, of course, set, we all believe, to announce his candidacy next week for presidency. DeSantis has got a legislative session he has to deal with back in Florida. He'll presumably be dealing with that. Although I was amused to know that the crowd at his victory rally last night, were chanting two more years. Two more years. That tells you everything about their expectations. But give us a sense what, I mean, again, don't even know whether DeSantis is going to run, but what's your sense of how that shapes up and where the Republican party is right now in terms of that potential contest?
Matt Continetti : Well, I think DeSantis' response to those chance of two more years, his statement in his victory speech that he has only just begun to fight. I think the presentation of the First Lady of Florida, Casey DeSantis, alongside him, their family, the media response in conservative circles, the response of many conservative voters to Donald Trump's preliminary attack on DeSantis all show to me that DeSantis could hold his own in a one-on-one fight against Donald Trump. So as you say, the question is, when does Trump announce? When does DeSantis decide if he wants to be a presidential contender? And then the second question I have is, if it is a Trump DeSantis fight, do other Republican candidates say, "You know what, this is the best chance that the party has to move on from Donald Trump. Maybe I will sit it out in order to get a one-on-one matchup." Because if you go back to 2016, Donald Trump did not win a majority of the Republican primary vote in 2016. In fact, he got the same percentage of the Republican primary vote as Bernie Sanders got in the Democratic primary. But the reason Donald Trump won was that he has a firm hold on his supporters and the rest of the anti-Trump vote was splintered among a multi-candidate field. If that's Trump's strategy again, Trump almost relies on having several opponents divide the vote. That's why I think he's so afraid of DeSantis. DeSantis presents the best opportunity, perhaps a sole opportunity, for the Republican party to consolidate around one figure whose name is not Donald Trump and who does present a chance to win in the election of 2024.
Gerard Baker: Then the other challenge, that he runs and beats Trump. The other challenge that DeSantis faces is of course Trump's ego is such that even if he would run and lose the primary against DeSantis, he could still play spoiler in the general election. He tends to take these things personally. This is the sort of the nature of the danger that Trump represents, isn't it? That he has the potential and he has enough potential support, presumably, that if he doesn't get his way in the party, he has the ability to destroy the party's prospects.
Matt Continetti : The Republican party has always seemed to need Donald Trump more than he needs it. I would say only that American politics has been very strange indeed since Donald Trump rode down that escalator in 2015. And it may be about to get stranger still.
Gerard Baker: Before we finish, just a little briefly about the wider context. You touched on this a little bit and it fits very much into the theme of your excellent recent book, but I do want to just dig a little bit further into this issue of where all this fits into this battle for the soul, if you like and put it in that cliche way of the conservative movement. Again, your book, the Hundred Year War for American Conservatism was published earlier this year to rave reviews. I'm going to paraphrase it here very crudely, but a lot of the theme you get at in here, and it's interesting you take it back to the 1920s, is this tension between populous conservatism, the conservatism of the masses, if you like, and the conservatism of the elites. And that is a constant tension that helps explain a loss of the way in which the conservative movement and the Republican party, that sort of political expression of that movement to a larger extent how that went over the last hundred years. Obviously, we have at least for the last five, six years, been very much in the age of populous ascendancy. Now you've just said that with these governors of people like DeSantis and Kemp and Abbott, these are populous Republicans. Is that now, do you think, established? Do you think the kind of, whether you will talk about the fusionism of the Reagan era or kind of more establishment for want of a better word, conservatism, is that still in recession, do you think, and do you think this populist strand within the conservative ideal is in the ascent? And just tell us a bit about how important that is and historically what role it's played.
Matt Continetti : Well, I think populism has always been critical to conservative success in America over the last hundred years. That's one of the arguments of my book. I think what's happened since, really, the rise of the Tea party and the aftermath of the global financial crisis and great recession is that populist forces in the Republican party have decided to reject the institutions of the Republican and conservative establishment in Washington. And even in some cases, reject the very idea of conservatism itself. You see in some publications, for example, arguments being made that the right shouldn't even think of itself as conservative anymore. It needs to be radical, almost revolutionary force in America. I think that's been a problem because the problem is this, which is the conservative intellectuals, my friends and the people that I study, they were the ones who formulated the policy responses to the distempers motivating populist revolt. And so without a synthesis of conservative intellectualism and grassroots populism, you're not going to ever solve these challenges that are confronting America. So I think that the successful Republican party needs both. It needs populism, it needs a suspicion of elites. It needs a kind of privileging of common sense over expert opinion. But it also needs to be serious about these issues, to have a sense of where it wants to take the country. And also, this has been made more clear to me in recent months, the principles guiding its way, because populism, it's whatever the public wants and the public wants what it wants and it wants it now. The principles of limited government, of individual freedom and of personal responsibility, which is the flip side to individual freedom, and of American leadership in the world have been kind of the harness, the guiding lights of the American conservative movement for decades and are behind, I think, some of the conservative movement's greatest successes. And so when I look at the right today, I'm a little bit worried that there's such a rush to abandon the principles that have been successful. And in particular, I think this will manifest itself in the coming fight over aid to Ukraine because I do happen to think that one's view of America's place in the world is reflective of one's view of America itself. And I don't think there can be a successful Republican party that rejects American leadership in the world, and as a consequence, thinks that America may be beyond repair at home as well.
Gerard Baker: It's interesting. Just very briefly on that, do you think that, again, with a wafer thin majority in the House, maybe that threat that we seem to hear from Kevin McCarthy during the campaign that weren't going to sign any more blank checks for Ukraine and that sort of raised some alarms. Do you think that's actually maybe, given how narrow the majority is, presumably there is significant democratic support still for Ukraine. Do you think that threat maybe that the US could sort of in effect abandon Ukraine is receded?
Matt Continetti : I do think it has receded somewhat. I am convinced there will be a fight. I do think that there will be forces within the House Republican Conference who will want to restrict or cut off aid entirely to Ukraine. However, there's a difference between McCarthy saying no blank check and McCarthy saying no check. And he, in recent days, actually reassured voters in interviews that he does support Ukraine. It's also important to recognize that the incoming chairman of the committees of jurisdiction are all very much pro-aid to Ukraine. And I was also relieved to hear Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, say recently that should the GOP have the majority in the Senate, which is as we speak an open question, it too would support Ukraine. So I do think that the chances for continued assistance are strong, but I remain concerned about arising neo-isolationism within the Republican party.
Gerard Baker: Final question, Matt. I want to try and wrap this all together in the context, particularly of your history of conservatives in the last century. Forgive me for putting a sort of slightly Hegelian frame on this, but if we look at the events of the last 10 years, is it possible to think we've gone from sort of the thesis of Mitt Romney kind of establishment Republican party conservatism to the antithesis of Donald Trump extreme populism to maybe, is it possible to hope that a DeSantis or whoever, or one of these people represents the kind of synthesis of those populous trends in the Republican, in the conservative movement with an acknowledgement of the exigencies, of the importance of governing and recognizing America's role in the world and everything else? Is that just too ridiculously sanguine hope or that, do you think, actually a reasonable expectation?
Matt Continetti : As Jesse Jackson might say, "I'm keeping hope alive", but I think that synthesis requires, one, DeSantis to enter the presidential sweepstakes. And two, a Republican electorate that is willing to see that, on strictly empirical basis, Donald Trump has not been a net asset for the Republican party's electoral hopes.
Gerard Baker: Matt Continetti, author, commentator, senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, thanks very much for joining Free Expression.
Matt Continetti : Thank you, Gerry.
Gerard Baker: Well, that's it for this week's episode of Free Expression with me, Gerry BAKER from the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. Thanks very much for listening. Please join us again next week for another exploration of the big issues that are shaping our world. Thanks very much and goodbye.
Gerry Baker is Editor at Large of The Wall Street Journal. His weekly column for the editorial page, “Free Expression,” appears in The Wall Street Journal each Tuesday. Mr. Baker is also host of “WSJ at Large with Gerry Baker,” a weekly news and current affairs interview show on the Fox Business Network, and the weekly WSJ Opinion podcast “Free Expression” where he speaks with some of the world’s leading writers, influencers and thinkers about a variety of subjects.
Mr. Baker previously served as Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones from 2013-2018. Prior to that, Mr. Baker was Deputy Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal from 2009-2013. He has been a journalist for more than 30 years, writing and broadcasting for some of the world’s most famous news organizations, including his tenure at The Financial Times, The Times of London, and The BBC.
He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, where he graduated in 1983 with a 1st Class Honors Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
