Conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson told Megyn Kelly what he thinks happened in the 2022 midterms, as he explained that President Joe Biden’s “dark Brandon” speech attacking Republicans “actually worked.”
During the Sirius XM “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast on Monday, the host read an analysis from Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics that, “independents went for the incumbent party by two points.” She also read that Democrats did vote “partisan lines and the GOP did too, but the Dems did it a little bit more.”
Hanson listed several things he thought was the cause for why the Republicans failed to not only take over the Senate but are projected to barely eke out a victory in the House despite rising crime and inflation. One big take away the conservative commentator noted was that the youth vote was successfully pandered to by Biden.
“So, in the last 60 days, the youth of America was said, ‘I’m going to cancel a lot of your student loans,’” Hanson shared noting Biden’s promise. “We thought, ‘ah that’s just pandering. Nobody would believe that.’”
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“Then they [Biden] said ‘we’re going to give you amnesty for marijuana conviction,’” he added. ‘Oh, who cares about that it won’t effect that many people.’ Or ‘these people are going to take abortion away from you.’ And those issues for that rubric and they’re galvanized on the campuses … they just were overwhelmingly deleterious the Republican cause.”
Hanson told Kelly that even the president’s move before the election by “draining the strategic petroleum reserve,” which he said probably brought gas prices down about ten cents a gallon, “apparently might’ve worked.”
“So what we consider pandering and demagoguery,” the political commentator added. “Or whoever believed that ‘Phantom of the Opera’ speech that Biden gave that was so obnoxious and repellent, that actually worked.”
Hanson stopped short of repeating the idea that the only way to win in 2024 is to get rid of former President Donald Trump and said that Biden pushed his “effective propaganda” that Trump or those that support the former president were “un-American” or an “election denialist” or “semi-fascist.”
“And you are on the other side saying Joe Biden is ‘non compos mentis…and it’s all an attack on Biden,” Hanson added. “And they’re saying ‘these people attack, they attack’, then it becomes even more important to have a positive message…They [GOP] thought by attacking Joe Biden in negative terms, all justified and all true, they were going to reduce him into a caricature of a caricture. But what it did was it amplified the Democrat message that ‘these people are shrill and they are angry. And they disrupt elections.’”
He also said the party really needs someone like late-President Ronald Reagan that will appeal to all Republicans, noting that the person will have to appeal to not just those who came on board and supported people like late-Sen. John McCain or Sen. Mitt Romney but also those that joined the GOP because of Trump.
