Victor Davis Hanson: Democrats’ Dirty Midterm Tricks Are Backfiring—and the Media Are Looking Away

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: So Victor, we have the midterms coming up very soon and lots of things going on. I was wondering, before you tell us about the races you’re going to be watching, your thoughts on Abdul El-Sayed, that ad that showed, said that Israel was the cause of the high price of bananas and another, oh, eggs and bananas. And so obviously an antisemitic ad that was in support of El-Sayed, and he’s said he’s not associated with it, but he didn’t say it was in poor taste at all. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, it was put on by a member of his family, had endorsed it. 

I’m a little confused because the federal budget is about six trillion dollars, and this ad wanted us to believe that the price of eggs in Michigan was high because we give three billion a year to Israel. We gave somewhere between 100 and 200 billion over the last four years to Ukraine. We left 50 billion dollars in weaponry in Afghanistan. 

So why would they pick the Jews as responsible for a 3.4 rate of inflation? And the answer is he’s only confirming what we all thought, that he’s an antisemite. He always has been, he always will be, and that his campaign, if successful, will put him on the Foreign Relations Committee, and he’ll do all he can to demonize the Jewish state. 

Any Jewish person that votes for him who identifies as a supporter of Judaism and Israel has got to have a suicidal impulse because this guy really hates Israel and he hates Jews. I hate to say it, but he does. 

And as far as the midterms, I said at least three or four times that we should all expect the following: fantastic left-wing polls two weeks before the election, narrowing suddenly the races, and then some puff pieces about Democrats worried.  

What was my point? My point was that this election and all of its manifestations, Senate and House, was always close. That’s a tribute to the Trump administration because the last 126 years of midterm elections, only three times has the in-party gained seats: FDR, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.  

So if they get close, and I mean either keep the House or lose the House by four seats while they retain the Senate, that’s an amazing achievement. 

So the Left thought that they were worried, so they drummed up support with these phony polls, just like Saeed was gonna win his primary by 10 or Francesca Hong in Wisconsin by 20.  

And I’ll have a parenthesis and stop here for a minute to look at Israel. Went back at those Israeli polls, they were all calling for the end of Benjamin Netanyahu. He was a sure loser. In fact, they were celebrating on election night. They flew in 50,000 people under Jewish law, Israel’s law. Jews all over the world, if they want to vote in that election, have to be there. And most of them were left-wing, and they flew them in. 

And still, the opposition only got 47 seats and 48 seats so far. And Netanyahu’s only three or four seats short. He may pick up a couple as the tallies come in of winning an outright majority and keeping him in power. But he has so many more alternatives to form a ruling coalition than the Left does that he will be the next prime minister for the foreseeable future. 

So they did exactly… My point is just look at that and see what the Left does anywhere it is in an election. It always exaggerates momentum, it exaggerates the poll lead, and it’s intended for three reasons: to get favorable media coverage, to get out the vote so people want to be on a winning team, and to get donors to think that if they give, they’re gonna get something in return with a Democratic officeholder. That’s it.  

And then when they see that they have really overshot, they narrow it. They narrow it. 

And so, in 2024, Donald Trump was never behind. That poll, PBS, NPR, that had him down four points was beyond the… That was crazy. The Iowa poll that had him down three when he won by 12 was crazy. But they served their purposes. They made the race closer than it would have otherwise been, and that’s what we’re watching. I don’t know who’s going to win.  

History, my historical side of my brain says he can’t win because history’s against it. My rational and emotional side of the brain says, wait a minute. Empirically, you can prove, as CNN’s Harry Enten did, that four points is the average exaggeration of polls the last four elections. So I would say there’s a 50/50 chance they can keep the House and a 70/30 they can keep the Senate because you can’t trust these polls. 

As far as that other ad, I was confused because a lot of the gatekeepers on the right, the National Review, Andy McCarthy, a good friend of mine at one time, Gerard Baker, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and who’s a very bright guy and I have a great deal of admiration for. They ignored that ad. They didn’t talk about that ad. That was the most antisemitic ad I’ve ever seen. And it said basically, as I said earlier, you have a woman and she says, I got to put the bananas back. I can’t afford them because we’re giving money to the Jewish Israel basically. That is sick. 

And yet they went after James Talarico, and they went after the ad that Vivek Ramaswamy ran where he had a mother saying, my daughter’s a liar. The backstory of that was she said she grew up in a tent and was molested and all that. And they had been fighting for years.  

So this woman, I think, was recruited to say that. Was it, would I have done it? No. Was it the cheap shot that they claimed? Kind of, sort of, but not as bad as the antisemitic ad, which condemned an entire people, all the Jews in America, the whole state of Israel, as exercising nefarious backroom leverage over our government in a conspiratorial fashion that we otherwise, had we known the true nature of Israel and Jews, we would have never helped them. The only democratic nation in the Middle East that shares Western values. 

And then he also wrote that he was, because of Ken Paxton’s problems, he would vote for Talarico, both to send a message that Republicans shouldn’t nominate people like Ramaswamy and also Paxton. But he not only did he ignore the ad in Michigan, but he ignored what Talarico, everything he said he’s retracted. The six genders, the binary God, the vegetarian, the white virus, the white racial virus, the capitalism-has-to-go stuff, the beef stuff, the oil fossil fuel stuff.  

He is the most inauthentic candidate I’ve ever seen. And he won’t tell us anything about his, he says he has a girlfriend. We’ve never seen her. He says that he was gone for what, 12 days? All he has, he says he has the flu, but I’ve had the flu a lot, and I have checked in with my university where I work on a daily basis and said, I hope I can be there next week or three days. You just don’t go blank. So he’s never honest. 

And yet people are so angry at Trump, they’re looking on the Republican side. And what we’re seeing now is a recrudescence of the Never Trumpers that were low and because they didn’t get their wish in ’24, combined with the Tucker [Carlson] right, it’s the new Never Trumpers.  

So you have Lisa Murkowski in Alaska who is endorsing the Democratic candidate for governor. And yet she’s not bothered by this Mary Peltola woman attacking her own Republican colleague, Dan Sullivan, in the most nefarious ways by recruiting, we know now, not from Victor, of course, but from the left-wing New York Times that has got a confidential source and texts and emails that the Democratic Senate candidate and her staff were working with Democratic operatives to find somebody named Dan Sullivan, who happened to maybe be a Republican or was willing to change his registration to Republican, to put him on the ballot to confuse people in ranked-choice voting.  

And so you think that Murkowski would have said, wait a minute, this is voter fraud. Instead, she’s endorsing the Democratic candidate. 

But what I’m getting at is all of these Republican conservative writers, opinion writers, pundits, legal scholars, candidates that detest Trump and detest the MAGA movement don’t understand that’s okay to do that if you want, but you’re putting your reputation on the line when you don’t be absolutely empirical and look at both sides. You know what I’m saying? 

When I wrote “The Counterrevolution,” I said that Trump could be crude. I said he should have never, ever ridiculed Rob Reiner’s death. I went on and on about that. But I also said that what he’s done is he’s done more good things on oil production, foreign policy, the border, immigration than any Republican could have dreamed of.  

But when you only look at one side, and you say that you’re a Republican, and therefore you’re brave and honest and a maverick by trashing your own president or your own party, but you won’t look at what the Democrats are doing, then it’s not credible. 

Sami Winc: I just wanna let the audience know that you were talking about an article in The Wall Street Journal by Gerard Baker. 

Victor Davis Hanson: He’s a very good writer. I keep saying I met him. I like him. I’ve been on his podcast. He’s very astute. I just think he feels, I think he’s confessed it. He’s said so, that he has an almost pathological hatred of Donald Trump and what he thinks Donald Trump is doing to the Wall Street Republican Party. 

Now, that said, I will also say that if any disinterested reader reads The Wall Street Journal and reads the headlines from the news division and looks at the bylines of the writers who are writing these stories and then looks at the comments on the opinion, you cannot, in all fairness, say that The Wall Street Journal is a conservative journal anymore.  

Its news division come from Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Atlantic. They’re all left-wing. The headlines are always critical of Trump for the most part, and the stories are slanted. The opinion writers are center-right, not all of them, but center-right. The editorial board may be center-right, but it’s kind of a Romney, Bush, McCain right, right? 

And I’ll give you an example. So he’s campaigning and all we hear is how terrible the tariffs are. And Trump says, if you are a European concern and you bring in your company here and you create thousands of jobs, there are no tariffs. There are steep tariffs if you’re in Europe and you want to import when there’s not reciprocal tariffs. 

Okay. So I’m reading in The Wall Street Journal the last two weeks how terrible the tariffs are. And then right in the middle of this, Audi announces $1.32 billion investment in this huge new plant because of the what? The guy says because of the tariffs. And that’s been replicated all over.  

Now you can say it’s inefficient, it’s not fair to European workers. You can do whatever you want, but you can’t say it’s not helping American workers, is what I’m saying. 

And I don’t just mean American workers. I’m talking about the American workers in the Rust Belt, the losers of globalization. And you have to then tell us what the alternative is. Is it really the free-market Bush attitude, laissez-faire, that we all go and outsource and offshore, and we take away millions of jobs in the heartland of the country and invest in China, the greatest mercantile cheater in history, and we put our plants in China or Vietnam or somewhere just to get cheap consumer goods back here? 

So what I’m getting at is the midterms are like a scab, and the tensions are so high they peel off, and then they reveal things the way they are. And the way they are is there is no such thing anymore in America as a disinterested media or a disinterested poll or a disinterested anything. Opinion writers’ columns should be partisan. That’s their job. You know what I mean? They can be partisan. They’re opinions, but not the solid news and not the pollsters. 

And you’d think that they would be so discredited after 2016 when they were off, and 2024 when they were off, and the primaries in 2026. And yet we … it’s kind of like Lucy and the football. We keep going and quoting the Harris-Harvard poll, the PBS-NPR poll, Gallup, you know. And they have no reason to enjoy that reputation.  

So I don’t know what’s going on because I don’t trust any of them. And I think it’s going to be a very tight race. I really do, just like Israel was. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org