Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the significance of the special election to replace Santos

Read the Full Transcript

• Amna Nawaz:

  For more on the impact of that special election, as well as some congressional retirements, it's time for Politics Monday with Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter and Tamara Keith of NPR.

  Great to see you both, as always.

  So let's pick up where Lisa left off there.

  What stands out to you, Amy, about this special election, and, also, what are you going to be watching for?

• Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:

  That's right. I mean, special elections are special. They are unique. So I don't want to overgeneralize.

  But Lisa's piece was really spot on, which is it's getting national attention because of two reasons. One, it's a swing seat. And, two, it's a district in which the migrant crisis is literally in its backyard. So the debate over what to do about it is actually playing out politically in real time.

  And while, again, this is a unique — we're in a unique period of time in one unique district, I do think for folks in Congress looking at this race, the decision by the Democrat in the race to talk about wanting to have something like border security bill, like the bipartisan bill in the Senate, and the Republicans saying no, what that will tell leaders in Congress going forward, I think will be very important.

  And this is one of those very important swing seats that will determine who controls the House in 2024. Not saying, if Democrats win, it means they win the House, Republicans win, they win the House. But it's the kind of place that actually is going to be critical.

• Amna Nawaz:

  What about you, Tam? What are you watching?

• Tamara Keith, National Public Radio:

  Well, it is a rare election year trial run early in an election year, where various groups and the parties…

• Amy Walter:

  Yes. Yes.

• Tamara Keith:

  … are trying things out that we might see later in the election year in other congressional races or even in the presidential race in terms of on-the-ground tactics.

  So, watching to see how those experiments that are happening turn out, and then also just, what's up with the weather? It's supposed to snow tomorrow.

  (Crosstalk)

• Tamara Keith:

  There's this sort of raging debate in the Republican Party about whether you bank your vote or whether you always vote on Election Day.

  And snowstorms are the kind of things that are why parties try to bank their votes. So seeing how that plays out in this race will also be…

  (Crosstalk)

• Amna Nawaz:

  I love when election coverage also becomes weather coverage.

  (Laughter)

  (Crosstalk)

• Amna Nawaz:

  Meanwhile, in the House, I want to talk about some other shifts we're seeing,the fact that Wisconsin Congressman Mike Gallagher, who's been a rising star in the Republican Party, a leading national security voice as well, announced he will not run for reelection.

  Here is what he said in part in a statement. He said: "The framers intended citizens to serve in Congress for a season and then return to their private lives. Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career. And, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old."

  Amy, he's in its fourth term. He's only 39 years old. What does his departure say to you?

• Amy Walter:

  Listen, we have seen Republicans especially who have gone up against the status quo, whether that's Donald Trump himself or things that the Donald Trump wing of the party would like to see passed.

  If they have gone up against that, they have usually been on the losing end, either losing a primary or realizing the writing's on the wall, they may lose a primary, and so deciding to retire. He's also unique, in that he is a conservative Republican who really does believe in working across party lines, on the China Committee, for example.

  Remember, this, right now, if you look at recent pew polling, what we see, the difference between how Republicans and Democratic voters see the issue of compromise is very different. Republicans see this as something that shows basically a sign of weakness. Democrats don't see that similarly.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Tam, it's also, as Amy mentioned, he's done a lot of bipartisan work to counter China's influence. We also have the fact that future funding for Ukraine is very uncertain in the House right now.

  Are we seeing a more isolationist stance already take hold in the House as we move towards an all-but-certain Trump nomination?

• Tamara Keith:

  Former President Trump is making foreign policy a place where he is exerting his power over the party and exerting his power over members of his own party who are in Congress.

  Now, part of that is because this supplemental for funding for Ukraine and Israel and countering China and all of this is basically the only thing happening right now in Congress. And so this is where Trump is able to try to influence the party.

  But, also, this is where he has taken the party. It is a much more isolationist party under him. And you can see the split. The split is playing out in the Republican primary, where there is Donald Trump, and then there's Nikki Haley. And Nikki Haley's ceiling is somewhere around 30 percent.

  And many of those voters are the voters that are — continue to be more traditional Republicans who are more concerned about America's place in the world. She's out there talking about how you need to fund Ukraine.

  That is not a popular view in Trump's Republican Party. And so you're seeing that split out on the campaign trail, where she is really struggling, and where Trump Republicans are like, why would we support someone like that? She's just like George W. Bush, who was his party's standard-bearer for a long time.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Right.

• Amy Walter:

  But the one thing to say, while I do think the ranks have been thinning in Congress of Republican internationalists, there were still 18 Republicans who supported the supplemental funding in the Senate. So it's not an insignificant…

• Amna Nawaz:

  That wing is not gone.

• Amy Walter:

  Right. It's not an insignificant number, but it's certainly not as large as it was 20 years ago.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Yes.

  Meanwhile, in the potential rematch between President Biden and former President Trump, we should note the headlines that have really dominated since last week's special counsel report from Robert Hur was released about — have really been about President Biden's memory function, about his age after special counsel Hur included his own assessment in that report.

  Former President Trump, meanwhile, continues to mix up world leaders, even U.S. leaders, often over the course of his long speeches. He often veers in and out of coherence. It doesn't generate the same headlines, though, Tam.

  So is there sort of an asymmetry of expectations at play here?

• Tamara Keith:

  Well, there is an asymmetry. Part of that is that one of these people is the current president of the United States.

  And so President Biden gives a speech. Typically, his speeches are bite-sized enough to be carried live on television, and they are carried live on television. People see the president when he speaks because he's the president of the United States.

  Former President Trump is a former president. He's running for — running again. He's a candidate. He's basically his party's presumptive nominee. He gives these two-hour speeches that go on forever and ever and ever, veer off in all kinds of wild directions, include things that you can't put on television because the FCC would come after you.

  And people aren't seeing it. Former President Trump is putting out massive amounts of content that no one is seeing. Current President Biden is not putting out a lot of content. He is pretty limited in his public engagements, and everybody sees it. And so it gets a different level of focus, in part because he's the president.

• Amy Walter:

  Yes, I absolutely agree.

  And what you're seeing too in the polling is, there's a reason I think Democrats are not as engaged in the election as they were, say, going into 2020. Some of that is, there's reticence among Democrats about the president's age and his ability to do his job because of that.

  But the other is that, when Donald Trump was in the White House, he was in your face every day, all the time. And that is what motivated those voters to show up and vote in 2020, more than it was a sign of their sort of enthusiasm for Biden.

  I was looking at polling recently, and the percentage of people who say they're voting for Biden because they don't like Trump isn't much different than what it was in 2020. So that has always been the underlying sort of energy behind the Biden campaign.

  But you need Trump to be more in focus, which is why the campaign is going to try to make that clearer.

• Amna Nawaz:

  Tam, Republicans do jump on any Biden misstatement, though, and will fund-raise off it immediately. And Democrats and the Biden campaign don't do the same. Is that a deliberate attempt?

• Tamara Keith:

  They actually are doing a fair bit of it, and they are ramping up more. They have Twitter accounts. President Biden is suddenly on TikTok, though with a firewalled phone that is not his.

  But there — in the sort of conservative world, there are memes born every second that go out on social media, memes about Biden being old, meme, meme, meme, meme, meme. There isn't the same culture of just like putting all that content out by average Democratic voters.

• Amna Nawaz:

  All right, well, we will wait and see.

  Amy Walter, Tamara Keith, always great to see you both. Thank you so much.

• Tamara Keith:

  Good to see you.