Mo News: Midterm Elections Insider View

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Hi everyone,

In less than two weeks, voters will head to the polls to determine the fate of the ?US House and Senate as well as thousands of local and state races.

Historically, the party that controls the White House faces a tough first midterm election - and with the future of President Biden's agenda on the line, Democrats and Republicans are exhausting all resources to amplify their message as the clock ticks on the campaign trail.

In this edition of Mo News, we spoke to Punchbowl News Co-Founder Jake Sherman for an insider's perspective on how each party is feeling as midterms come down to the wire and what a Republican led Congress could mean for the country for the next two years. Sherman broke down the key House and Senate races, how Biden might work with a Republican congress, where the fate of abortion is on the ballot, and how the midterms could impact Trump's decision to run again.

He also has been talking to Democrats about whether they want Biden to run again and the rise of congresspeople like Marjorie Taylor Greene that are about media attention > policymaking.

Sherman has spent more than a decade breaking news from Capitol Hill for Politico and most recently, Punchbowl News. We first worked together on the college newspaper back at George Washington University and later, he was frequent contributor at CBS News when I produced political coverage for the network. He is also the co-author of the NY Times Bestseller, "The Hill To Die On" about the 2016 and 2018 elections.

☕️ But first, a few headlines this AM before our interview...

• 🚨 Amid tons of pressure, Adidas has finally said it will cut its decade long partnership with Kanye West, aka Ye, after he made a slew of antisemitic and racist comments. This decision has big repercussions on both ends."Ye's nearly decade-long partnership with the German sportswear giant helped make the rap superstar a billionaire and vaulted his Yeezy branded sneakers to a global audience.”Meanwhile, shares of Adidas fell on Tuesday. The company estimates it will lose nearly 700 million dollars in sales over the next year.

• 🇺🇦 President Biden said Russia would be making a “serious, serious mistake” if it deploys a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. This comes as Moscow claimed Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on the ground in Ukraine, which Ukrainian officials have denied.The concern here is that Russia could launch a false flag operation-- Basically using this as a pretext for launching a dirty bomb themselves.

• 📱As Elon Musk spent weeks going back and forth over whether he’d buy Twitter, there's been an exodus of workers to other tech giants like Facebook and Google.A new survey found that in the past 90 days about 530 workers have left Twitter (60% more than had left Twitter during the previous quarter).The pace increased during the past few weeks as it looks more likely that Musk will buy the company.

Now, to our interview with Punchbowl News Founder Jake Sherman...

Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The full conversation will be available later this week via the Mo News Podcast. Apple | Spotify | More Platforms

MOSH: So we're just two weeks from midterms as we speak right now. How are you doing?

JAKE SHERMAN: I am awesome. I'm in the Punchbowl News World Headquarters on Capitol Hill, the nerve center of our business operation. I've just come off the road. I was with Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for a couple days last week.

MOSH: How many elections are you at right now, in terms of coverage?

SHERMAN: ‘10, ‘12 ‘14, ‘16, ‘18, ‘20… seven I think.

MOSH: Your seventh election overall.

SHERMAN: Midterms are more interesting to me as somebody who covers Congress because all the attention is on is on the House and the Senate. And also, the electorate is so weird, meaning it's so different than a presidential, you kind of don't know where it's going. So I like midterms better.

MOSH: What is your sense, when you look at the polls, of how much people can trust them versus not trust them?

SHERMAN: One individual poll is not meaningful. If one poll says something, you can't take that to the bank. If every poll says something, and I know this is dangerous to even say, but you're probably in decent shape. And what we rely on is a mix of outside public polls and internal polls, from people like the NRCC, the DCCC, NRSC, all the campaign committees and the super PACs.

It seems today that, based on all available public evidence, Republicans are going to take the House. Why do I say that? There's 50 seats in play, and they need five seats to win the majority.

MOSH: There's 435 House seats. The vast majority are either very blue or very red. Only 50 of those seats are the ones that really are the competitive ones at this point.

SHERMAN: It's somewhere from 25 to 50, depending on how you define competitive. Our nation has been chopped up by redistricting – the once every 10-year process to redraw House seats based on population and other factors, but mostly based on population. It's broken. Why is it broken?

Legislatures draw these districts. Legislatures are controlled by one party or another in most states. Some states have independent commissions. So when parties draw seats, they draw them in a way that one party will get more than the other.

MOSH: This is the term gerrymander.

SHERMAN: Correct. And so that's why there's fewer and fewer competitive seats. By the way, both parties do this. Republicans kind of perfected it in the early 2000s. Democrats have also done it in states like Illinois, your home state, and in states like New York, they went too far and had to be brought back, reined in a little bit, by a judge.

But anyway, it seems to me today, based on all of those factors, that Republicans have a pretty good chance of netting six seats. I think the analysts expect they'll net more. Now remember, this is one thing to also keep in mind. This is history, so you have to take it for what it is. The average pickup for a party out of power, meaning the party that doesn't control the White House, in the House is 24 seats in the first midterm of a president's term.

So in 2018, Democrats took the House. In 2010, Republicans won 63 seats, in what was one of the most consequential elections of the last 30 or 40 years. In 1994, Republicans took the house and Bill Clinton's first midterm, changing the course of his presidency.

Just one more thought here. Republicans have a much larger minority than other minorities have had, meaning they're out of power, but not by that much. So winning 24 would be difficult for them just because there's not as many seats that they could pick up.

MOSH: And they surpassed expectations in 2020, right? Despite Biden winning the presidency, the Republicans did better than expected.

SHERMAN: Yeah, Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, likes to remind people that everyone got it wrong in 2020. I can tell you that without betraying confidences here, many people around Kevin McCarthy also thought they were going to lose seats. So it's not that (the media) got it wrong, it’s that everyone got it wrong. I was just with him all around the Midwest last week, and he said they were like 37,000 votes – that's a compilation of a bunch of different districts – away from winning the majority in 2020.

MOSH: That's actually close to that would have made Donald Trump president again, if you look at how close Georgia finished, how close Arizona finished. And that's how split we are as a country. What's different about this midterm cycle? What makes 2022 unique in a way?

SHERMAN: Number one, the fact that Republicans have this large minority. Number two, inflation is at its highest point in 40 years.

But you have this weird dichotomy – you have inflation, really high unemployment, really low corporate earnings, generally meeting expectations. I just spoke to Nancy Pelosi and she said to me, 'Republicans want to gut abortion rights, they don't want to codify Roe v. Wade into law. They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (which they haven't said but they basically said that they want changes to those programs). They don't believe in climate change.'

I kind of agree with her on those three discrete topics. Public sentiment is with Democrats – but then you get into the larger question, which is, Are people voting on those issues? And polling suggests no. What people are concerned about is the economy, gas prices, prices of goods.

A recent poll, I think, the New York Times Siena poll, indicated that abortion was toward the bottom of the priority list on a national level. But, this is not a national race. These are won and lost in individual districts around the country in the House and in the Senate.

MOSH: You bring up an issue that I wanted to get to, which is – it feels like at times during these midterms, it hasn't really been a debate on the issues. It's been the two sides focused on completely separate issues. Republicans say it's all about inflation, crime, the economy. Democrats are there to tell you it's about abortion, your individual rights as women, concerns about Trump coming back and extremism within the Republican Party. So it's not even the two sides debating anything.

SHERMAN: People are going to the supermarket, they're going to stores, and they're seeing the price of eggs. I think it's up something like 90%.

MOSH: Everything is up. Chicken is up, pork is up, gas is up.

SHERMAN: Exactly. Supply chain issues – everything is taking longer and is more expensive. This gets into a larger point about Pelosi. I've been covering her for 12-13 years. When she gets power, she uses it. She doesn't try to preserve it. Like, give Democrats credit here. We're not talking about the substance of their policy. I'm not passing judgment on that. They pass an inflation Reduction Act – massive bill with climate change and all sorts of massive priorities they've been trying to get for years. They passed a transportation bill, bipartisan. They passed a gun bill, bipartisan. They passed a rescue package, not bipartisan, but they passed a lot of stuff. And they feel like these things will have a positive effect. But we said, when they were passing it, and what analysts said, is it's not going to be this dispositive in the 2022 midterms. I think that's the problem.

MOSH: They can do this laundry list for voters, but the voters are still like, but the price of eggs has gone up… what are you doing about that.

SHERMAN: In addition to running on crime and inflation, they're saying, ‘we'll be a check on Joe Biden, he's gone out of control, there's all this corruption.'

But they will have their hands on the wheel too. They will have responsibility for the economy. We saw this in 2011-12, when Republicans under John Boehner, who was the then-Speaker of the House, took the house, and unemployment was like 10% or 8%, or something like that. They own that, part of that, after they win a majority going into 2024.

MOSH: What is on their agenda beyond investigating what happened in Afghanistan, Hunter Biden, the IRS. Take us through that, but also, what is their policy agenda? Because ultimately, Joe Biden is still president for the next two years, at least. What can they accomplish, or what will be their goals?

SHERMAN: So let's start with their policy agenda. They put out something called the ‘Commitment to America.’ This is an election season campaign document, they will pass bills under this rubric. Things on that agenda: American energy, they want to have more American energy. They want to strengthen entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. It's going to be difficult to do that with a Democrat in the White House. They want to get crime under control, the border under control, they want to ensure that women are not playing in men’s sports, which is touching on the transgender issues that Republicans have been talking about for the last couple of years. A lot of those things are not going to get done. A lot of them are what we call on Capitol Hill “showboats.”

MOSH: Do any of them have the intention of, 'this is something the President could sign up for and we could do something bipartisan?'

SHERMAN: There might be something on energy, there might be something on the border. It is a problem. It’s not the problem that Republicans say it is, perhaps, and it's not as mild as Democrats say it is.

There were fights over the border, in 2017, 2018, and the early part of 2019. The irony is, Democrats voted for the border wall for years, going back to Bill Clinton and George Bush, and all sorts of administrations before that. Donald Trump made it about himself. So Democrats have been for border security in the past. Now, we'll have to see if there's any sort of deal that they can cut, when it comes to some sort of legalization of people who are here illegally, without documentation for border security. So there might be a little bit of an opening there. Listen, they have to fund the government, they have to raise the debt limit, which allows the U.S. to kind of raise the statutory limit by which, you know, in pays its debts.

MOSH: We've raised the debt limit like 80-something times in the past 60, 70 years. We have a unique rule here, I think it's us and Denmark… and it has led to some very dramatic moments in recent years. Going back to that first cycle, when Republicans took the house during Obama, that the prospect of defaulting on our debt. How big a fight will that be, as we need to increase the debt limit beyond $31 trillion this go around?

SHERMAN: Very, and that's why I'm so gray. If you see I've covered like five or six more than that.

MOSH: You still have some brown hair, but maybe not after the next debt limit fight.

SHERMAN: So Republicans started out in 2011, demanding extractions, demanding policy concessions from Barack Obama for raising the debt limit. That set the standard. So they raised a bunch during the Obama administration, they raised it three times during Trump's presidency without any concessions on the other side. They're signaling again – I want to be careful what I say – they're signaling again that they want policy concessions this time around. I don't know that they'll get any. I don't think they'll get any, but they think they want them. So that's a big issue.

Now let's talk about investigations. They want a big investigation into China. They want a big investigation into the Biden family. They want a big investigation into the Department of Justice. They will do all of those things.

They want to go after the origins of COVID. And by the way, some of these things, if handled correctly, could be bipartisan. Not Biden. But, China is an existential issue for our country. And there's been some bipartisanship when it comes to China.

MOSH: Oh, there are legitimate questions here. For their own reasons, the Biden administration hasn't really investigated or told us about the failure of the Afghanistan withdrawal. There are legitimate questions. And the origins of COVID – were some of these policy decisions made? We're seeing the ramifications of it now in terms of school closures, masking, and vaccines. There are questions and it is Congress's role to try to get answers for.

SHERMAN: Right. But does it just turn into a mess of partisanship? And the answer is probably yes. It's Congress. It will be all about gain of function research and what Fauci knew and when he knew it. It'll be a mess. But I mean, there are questions that need to be answered. Let's put it that way.

MOSH: So that’s the House. Where do things stand in the Senate right now? And what does a Republican Senate in conjunction with a Republican House mean for the White House and the country?

SHERMAN: Let’s talk about where the Senate is right now. We have a lot of competitive seats. The big seats are Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina. It's very difficult to say how these will go. Republicans have nominated some sub-prime candidates in some places. And they know that. And Mitch McConnell freely admits that. Now that doesn't mean he's not trying to drag them over the finish line, but it means that they should have been able to win in some states that they're no longer able to. They're no longer as competitive.

New Hampshire was one where Democrat Maggie Hassan, former Governor of the state of New Hampshire,, was seen as one of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats on the map – and she got a guy called Don Balduc in the race as the Republican nominee. He's denied the 2020 election, he has suggested that he'd like to ban invitro fertilization, which is far outside the mainstream of American thought in American public policy. On top of all that, you have states that have been shifting. North Carolina has been shifting, where Ted Budd (R) is facing off against Cheri Beasley (D) in a race that's very close.

In addition to that, the most interesting state to me, by far, is Georgia. Where Raphael Warnock, who's one of the more talented – I think, and Republicans and Democrats both say this – he's a very good politician. Very, very, very polished, which is a rarity on both sides of the aisle, to be honest with you. He's a freshman. He won in 2020. He is a pastor at Ebenezer Church in Atlanta, who has impressed a lot of people in the Senate. He’s facing off against Herschel Walker, the former football star who has been dogged by all sorts of claims that he paid for an abortion for a woman with whom he had had a baby or impregnated out of wedlock.

MOSH: He also had children that he didn't acknowledge.

SHERMAN: Yes. I mean, there's been all sorts of issues. There's videos of him suggesting he was in the FBI, which he was not. He envisioned a situation in which he was going to murder somebody. It's very strange stuff.

MOSH: And there's domestic abuse allegations against him.

SHERMAN: Yes. And he also carries around a police badge for reasons that are not clear to anybody. So that's a state where the polls are tight. There's some internal polling that has Walker up. But I just talked to a very smart and in-the-know Republican yesterday, who said he's not gotten one poll this fall with Walker up. So all these races are tightening, because it's a good year for Republicans, or it should be.

Even the states in which Democrats were up, the Republicans are seeing a little bit of a bounce back. So we'll see how that all turns out. And I mean, listen, there's the possibility that the Senate could be 50/50 again. Not a far-off possibility. I mean, Pennsylvania is another state – Dr. Oz, the celebrity doctor is facing off against Democrat John Fetterman, Lieutenant Governor of the state of Pennsylvania who recently had a stroke. And that race is very close too. So there's all sorts of interesting dynamics that could lead again to a 50/50 senate. I talked to a Republican senator yesterday who said we've already won, we'll have 52 seats. Maybe? I don't know. You don't know what's going to happen on election day. You have no idea. Polls are only a snapshot in time.

Pollsters have had a tough time with Republicans, for sure. Going back a while, but, again, that's why we play the game. That's why they run these elections, and they don't run on polls.

MOSH: One of the reasons several of those Republican senate nominees are on the ballot is former President Trump. Talk to me about the role he plays in the party, now, 21 months after he left office?

SHERMAN: Yeah, it's a good question. So number one, he has endorsed many of these candidates who have not been great in the general so far. There's no doubt about that. Senate GOP leaders did very little this year in a departure from the past to ensure they have good candidates. Among Republican primary voters, for the most part, Trump is pretty popular. In many instances, not all instances. He endorsed against Brian Kemp, who's the Republican governor of Georgia running against Stacey Abrams, and Kemp won the nomination. He is going to win by 10 points or so.

Mitch McConnell, who represents the more establishment wing, was not able to get candidates in the race that he wanted. So Trump does have sway with those primary voters. Now, If you ask the House Republicans, they'll say, ‘Well, the reason we haven’t had such bad candidates is because we had Trump on our side early. We're not warring with Trump as McConnell is.’ Maybe so, maybe not.

MOSH: Do the results of the midterm elections impact Trump's decision to run again in 2024?

SHERMAN: I don't think it matters a ton. I think he probably runs again. I think that Trump never really cared about governing much. Now, he might have an impact in some of the investigations. He might say what he wants to do or what they he wants them to go after. I asked McCarthy how big of a role Trump will play in his majority. I tried to get something out of him, but it was very non-committal, and very tepid, like 'he's not going to have a big role, and we keep the lines of communication open, and he knows what we're up to, and yada, yada, yada.'

MOSH: I want to ask about the current president. We saw Biden in Pennsylvania last week with one of the few Democrats that is willing to have him by his side in a competitive state – John Fetterman. He hasn't been invited to many competitive areas.

When you talk to Democrats, how much of a weight is Joe Biden right now on the Democratic Party?

SHERMAN: Well, the dude's got 38 to 42% approval rating. So that's not a great situation for any incumbent. Many incumbents are running far ahead of him. So you're not going to bring somebody with lower approval ratings to your state. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. You could talk about the things you've done in Washington with him, you could bring along his Cabinet Secretaries. Pete Buttigieg is a particularly popular surrogate for the White House as is Jill Biden. First Ladies are oftentimes more useful on the trail.

MOSH: How is the White House preparing? Many of them probably have personal experience with what Obama dealt with when Republicans took the congressional majorities in 2010.

SHERMAN: Lots to unpack there. Two things can be true once in regards to the investigations. Republicans are undoubtedly going to overstep their bounds. I mean. They're going to do stupid things. There's no doubt about it. I watched it in 2011 and 2012, and 2013 2014 – they're going to overstep. So that's number one. That does not mean that they won't uncover things that are embarrassing to the White House or hurt the White House. Two things could be true at once.

On the legislative front, it could be somewhat positive to have a foil. He already has Trump as a foil, but if he can say this Republican majority can do nothing. They are useless. They are not helping you. They're focused on me. I’m focused on you. We saw that with Barack Obama, although Obama had some embarrassing incidents. These are ages old, but there was something called ‘Fast and Furious,’ which was a gun running operation on the Mexico border, which was kind of damaging. There was some misspent relief money, stimulus money, in the early days of the Obama administration. There were tons of successes, but they focused on the failures.

But Obama successfully used the fact that this Republican majority was just steeped in crisis at all times, and that could be helpful for him. So how are they preparing? They don't want to address it right now, because they still say they're going to win the majority, which we'll have to see if that's true. But listen, they've staffed up, they have some people who are monitoring investigations, who are doing outreach to reporters. So they are preparing and they are cognizant of what's to come.

MOSH: One issue I hear a lot about from people is abortion. When it comes to the states, where these midterm elections could determine the fate of abortion, depending on which party takes the majority of the state legislature, who the governor is, etc. Looking at the map right now, where is abortion more effectively on the ballot?

SHERMAN: A lot of places. In Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, who is facing off against the Democrat Josh Shapiro. Mastriano has indicated he would be for strict abortion limits. That's one glaring example.

There’s governors up in Kansas, there's governor's up in Texas – Texas has incredibly strict abortion restrictions, but Greg Abbott is beating Democrat Beto O'Rourke, as of now.

You see these abortion deserts, states in the South, and all over the country where there's just restrictions on abortions all over in one state and then three states around it. I mean, look at Georgia. So there's a lot on the ballot.

And quite frankly, on Capitol Hill, there's more. You have Kevin McCarthy suggesting that he would pass a pretty restrictive federal abortion law. But that would never get through the Senate, because there will never be the 60 votes it takes to overcome a filibuster.

MOSH: If Republicans are able to take a one or two seat majority, how would McConnell and Biden work together, or not work together? Biden is a product of the Senate. He knows McConnell going way back. To what extent would McConnell be willing to budge?

SHERMAN: Biden and McConnell have a relationship. They served in the Senate from 1984 to 2008. So it's quite some time. They did a lot of deals during the Obama administration, when the nation was on the brink of collapse over debt ceiling and things like that.

McConnell has said he wants to find things within the “middle of the field”, between the 40 yard lines, that he could get done. Most Democrats think that's nonsense and that he's just saying that. But there's tiny bits of evidence. He voted for the infrastructure bill and he voted for gun restrictions this Congress. A lot of people think McConnell is in legacy mode. He's an older person. If elected majority leader, he's going to surpass Mike Mansfield as the longest serving Senate leader in our nation's history, which is a big milestone for him. But he's got to maintain support within his Republican conference if he's the leader.

MOSH: So take us to the 2024 presidential right now. Conventional wisdom is it's a Biden v. Trump rematch. Rocky II.

When you talk to folks on Capitol Hill, what is the feeling among the Republicans and Democrat. How many of them, if you got to poll them anonymously, how many Democrats would say they’d rather it NOT be Biden, and how many Republicans would say they’d rather it NOT be Trump?

SHERMAN: A lot. Basically the feeling is like,' these are our best two options?!' There is doubt – a lot of doubt – among Democrats that Biden will and can run again. I mean, they don't say it publicly, but I hear it all the time. And it's interesting because every Democrat says Biden will run if Trump runs because he's the only person that can be Trump. And a lot of Republicans say, Biden is the only person that Trump could beat.

So there's this like weird dichotomy when it comes to these two guys. If not Trump, who? I don't know the answer to that. I think obviously DeSantis. But I think you'll see Tom Cotton get in, I think you could see Tim Scott getting in, I think you can see Mike Pompeo get in, and Josh Hawley. Remember a lot of these people have close to no chance of being the nominee, but they'll still try to get in.

MOSH: Mike Pence has been thinking about running for president for the better part of 20 years.

SHERMAN: Trump plucked him out of relative obscurity, former House member turned Governor. The Trump base now hates him.

Also, on the Republican side, people don't think of Brian Kemp, but Brian Kemp wins Georgia, which is now a purple-ish state, with 52, 53% of the vote twice in a row and beat back Trump in the primary. He’ll look at himself perhaps and say, 'why not me?'

MOSH: And then Biden doesn't run. In certain instances, the Vice President would be the natural nominee, with not much competition. But that wouldn't be the case for Kamala Harris, I imagine.

SHERMAN: No. She will have a lot of competition if she runs. I don't think that anybody will defer to her. It's fair to say.

MOSH: Why is that?

SHERMAN: I think she's seen as relatively weak. Not weak as a person, but like, her numbers aren't great. I think that a lot of Democrats I talk to, I can tell you this, say, ‘Well, her last presidential run didn't go that well. It was not a good campaign. It was not well done.’ Part of this, to be honest with you – there's a great book that everyone should read by Ali Vitali, called Electable.

MOSH: We did an interview with her.

SHERMAN: Ali makes a very compelling argument in her book about why women have not become president. I think a lot of it's sexism. I don't have any doubt about that. And they face higher hurdles. And I think there's some of that with Kamala, I don't discount that. But I think people look at her last run, and I just think there's a lot of a lot of cross winds there that are worth keeping in mind.

MOSH: Two final questions for you. First, Jake, you were in the Capitol on January 6.

SHERMAN: I was.

MOSH: Having been there that day, watched what happened, covered the halls of Capitol Hill. Are you surprised by how all this played out?

SHERMAN: Yes and no. No, because obviously our nation's totally screwed up in many ways, and super partisan, and there's no truth and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, I feel very comfortable saying the following: The President said people should come up, and people came up to the Capitol. And they ransacked the place. Simple, right? And they were there to overturn the election. I'm not guessing. They said that. So the inability to reckon with that is somewhat surprising, yet, not all that surprising.

MOSH: You've covered Congress for more than a decade now. There has been kind of a change in the type of people who are elected, and also the emphasis they put on communication – social media versus policy. What have you seen evolve? Where are we going? Diagnose for everyone where Congress is now, versus where it was 10 years ago?

SHERMAN: That all started kind of in 2010, not so long after I started covering Congress. Michelle Bachman, was really the first person that was a celebrity member of the House who was raising a ton of money online and going on Fox News, and not really there to legislate. I'm sure there were others. And I'm sure I'll get criticized for saying was her, but it was her and others. It's gotten worse.

It's not going away. This celebrity, raise money, say crazy shit, that kind of thing. But remember, when you think about power – Pelosi said it best in an interview with Maureen Dowd at the beginning of this Congress about AOC. She's one vote. If she has 10 votes, then you start paying attention to her. If it's one vote, that's the power she has. What John Boehner used to say was, 'a leader without followers is like a man taking a walk.' I think that's important to keep in mind.

MOSH: There’s probably a handful of folks that probably get, as individuals, besides the leaders, 95% of the attention. AOC, Marjorie Greene, etc.

SHERMAN: That's right. And on top of that. When we started Punchbowl News, we vowed that we weren't going to chase shiny objects. Just because Marjorie Taylor Greene said something crazy, we weren't going to go after it. We weren't going to get into that game. We'll let everybody else chase her around and stuff. I mean, she says tons of stuff, and most of it doesn't deserve our attention.

MOSH: But to what extent is it different now, that those people are getting louder or more influential?

SHERMAN: Again, influential is relative. I mean, they might be getting more attention. Are they getting more influential or are they getting more attention on TV? Those are two different things. Now, one could beget the other – because they get more attention on TV, they become more influential. But maybe not.

MOSH: Right. There have been a couple instances in this majority where AOC and her group have made life difficult for Nancy Pelosi.

SHERMAN: But those have been on policy issues in which they had a disagreement. And there were a bunch of them in a narrow majority that could influence the outcome. It's not because they said something on MSNBC, you know what I mean? It’s because AOC had five or seven or nine other people with her who could say, Listen, you don't have 218 votes, which is the votes to get anything through the House.

MOSH: So conceivably, Kevin McCarthy, if he becomes Speaker, as a very slim Pelosi-like majority. He's going to have to listen to that handful, that Majorie Taylor Greene crowd, potentially.

SHERMAN: For sure. If they have a slim majority, for sure.

MOSH: So I want to end here. When you walk the halls of the Capitol, Jake, when you see the current state of Congress, how do you feel? Are you hopeful for democracy? There's a lot of talk that democracy is on the ballot.

SHERMAN: A lot of people, and I'm not associating myself with this necessarily, a lot of people say, well, democracy did work, we certified the election despite an insurrection in 2021. I don't think it's as simple as that. I think there's definitely challenges to democracy. I think that relatively speaking, our democracy is pretty elastic. I think that there are still good people who want to do the right thing.

Biden didn't thaw the place, but there’s certainly been progress. Now, there are more people coming in who don't believe the election was legitimate in 2020, and I don't know what to say to those people. I don't know if I'm optimistic or pessimistic, I’m more realistic about the challenges we face. But I do think that we'll overcome them in due time.

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