Jonathan Swan on the year in politics and what to watch in 2023

Transcript

NIALA: Good morning! Welcome to Axios Today!

It’s Friday, December 16th.

I’m Niala Boodhoo.

Today: Jonathan Swan with the year-in-review edition of our Friday politics state of play – plus, what’s ahead in 2023. That’s our One Big Thing.

NIALA: At Axios we talk a lot about “the big picture” and “what’s next” in our coverage. Well over the next few shows we’ll do just that, as we wrap up 2022 in the news across a few areas – from tech to health and beyond – and then look ahead for what to watch in the new year.

And what better way to start then by getting the big picture in politics from our own Jonathan Swan, Axios political reporter – plus his thoughts on what’s next in 2023. Hey Jonathan.

JONATHAN SWAN: It's great to be here.

NIALA: Jonathan, I was thinking actually about how this year started and how it's ended for Joe Biden versus Trump…I'm curious how you think history will view 2022 for the Biden administration?

JONATHAN: Well, I would go back even a little bit further, and we saw in the summer of 2021 Biden's approval basically collapsing after the Afghanistan withdrawal. And from that moment, until around the summertime of this year, many people were effectively writing his political obituary. And there was sort of a torrent of stories that were written with at least the tacit assumption that there was a good chance he wouldn't run for reelection. That his presidency was effectively over, that there was going to be next year a Republican house with a big majority and probably a Republican Senate that while he had accomplished some major things legislatively. There was no chance of anything further, et cetera, et cetera.

I think that that story started to shift a little bit in the summer of this year when, after the Dobbs decision. Democrats started to pick up in the polls. And then one thing I've heard from Republican operatives is, once Donald Trump really started to reemerge as this major story, the Mar-a-Lago raid happened and suddenly he is just at the center of the news cycle again. They say that was devastating for their perception in the electorate, that the more they're associated with Donald Trump, the more the Republican party is branded as the Trump party.

Their outtake from the midterms was that the Republican party has a severe brand problem. There's something about the Republican party that despite all of those things, which they've told people in the exit polls, the same person who said, don't like Biden, worried about inflation, worried about crime, yet still voted for the Democrat. What do you conclude from that and, and what a number of Republican operatives have concluded from that is that, for some of these suburban voters in particular, the aura of Donald Trump is still too overpowering. And the association with January 6th, and many of these people who are saying that, they basically won't accept the results of the election unless they win. That some of those factors that a lot of strategists, smart strategists earlier in the year thought voters didn't really care about. Turns out, actually some of them seem to have cared about. It couldn't be further from where Democrats at writ large were thinking this year would end.

NIALA: With that in mind then, as this postmortem is happening now, what are you looking for in 2023 when it comes first to the GOP, not to Trump, the GOP?

JONATHAN: Here's the thing, yes the Republican majority in the House is gonna be the big story for the first half of next year in the sense of, you know, they're gonna be super aggressive. Does Kevin McCarthy make it to be speaker? If he does make it, can he survive? Is he completely controlled by the far right?How far do they push these investigations? Okay, fine. Oversight, whatever.

But the truth of the matter is that parties are defined every four years. By their standard bearer, the person who becomes the nominee. And that debate around who becomes the nominee is so powerful in shaping the electorate's perception of political parties. The reason why Republican voters went from being hostile to Russia to pretty favorable towards Russia from being pro-free trade to being fairly protectionist is because of Donald Trump, is because he had this megaphone and had the power in that position. It is a tremendously powerful position to shape the electorate and mold the electorate.

So we're about to see the quadrennial molding of the electorate. And what we are seeing right now is actually quite a lot of anti-Trump energy, but it's not being expressed by Republican voters as hostility to Trump. It's being expressed in the form of telling opinion pollsters that they support Ron DeSantis. So Ron DeSantis has become the proxy for opposition to Trump, and we're seeing empirical, meaningful coalescing around DeSantis. So some of the questions I'll be asking is what happens if DeSantis starts to falter? What happens if he may not run? What happens if he runs and then collapses? What happens to that anti-Trump movement?

Because there's a lot of Republican operatives who see this cycle as existential, as if Donald Trump becomes the nominee, the party may be in their minds irreparably changed in a way that they may be not be ever getting back these voters. So that battle for the Republican party is gonna be at the center of what I'm watching over the next year.

NIALA: We’ll be back in a moment with more from Jonathan Swan.

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What’s ahead in 2023

NIALA: Welcome back to Axios Today! I’m Niala Boodhoo.

Axios political reporter Jonathan Swan is still with us, looking at the most important political themes of the year – and how they’ll inform 2023.

Jonathan, we’ve been talking about the changing identity of the Republican party… and I’m wondering: how much do you think that the electorate shapes the party versus the other way around?

JONATHAN: I think that, The electorate is shaped more by the candidate, the successful candidate than the other way around. I do think that for someone to emerge, there have to be the conditions to exist. You could have a voter who hates Washington, hates the establishment, thinks they're all corrupt, but has these views that actually are completely changed and influenced by the person who emerges as their spokesman.

Trump emerges as their big middle finger to Washington. But that voter may have had a fairly traditional Republican view about Russia. They may have thought the Soviet Union was evil. And then maybe now after six years of watching Trump say, “no these guys are actually, they're not so bad, why are we bothering helping Ukraine?”

NIALA: And how do you, I wonder how you think this works then on the left and for Democrats?

JONATHAN: Well, 12 months ago, you would not have expected Biden to be, the Times reported the other day, clinking glasses with Mr. Macron toasting his anticipated run for reelection. He's clearly feeling confident and ebullient almost and there does seem to be much more of a widespread acceptance in the Democratic party. That he may well run for reelection and he's the sitting president. He's also reshaped the primary map. He's put South Carolina first, a state which basically handed him the nomination, where he is very popular, where he has a really strong hold on the substantial African American electorate. You know, he, if he chooses to run, he's gone a long way towards foreclosing any opposition.

NIALA: How do you think journalists should approach this coming political year?

JONATHAN: I'm a political reporter who's gonna be covering the campaign as of next summer. I'll be looking at hopefully some of the really big storylines that I can follow and borrow into, and one of them is this battle for the future of the Republican Party and the identity of the Republican. Many in the Republican establishment have concluded that an organized anti-Trump effort only helps Donald Trump. And so that's why you're not seeing people like Mitch McConnell come out and condemn him because that only helps Trump.

So there's gonna be a lot of quiet money coming in against him. I mean I, I think those of us who've covered Donald Trump, for me I guess it's seven years now, we've learned a lot of lessons over that time. He's not gonna be covered the way he was covered in 2015 and 2016, where mostly I'd say on television, he was basically given uncritical, unfiltered airtime. That’s gone, even Fox is not really airing that much unfiltered Trump. I mean the Fox institutionally, the Murdochs anyway are, have dead against Trump. In the 2020 cycle there was a lot of aggressive reporting and, you know, continues to this day and will continue. So, for me, it's the same mission: it’s find out the truth, verify it, and then report it. And wherever the chips fall, wherever the chips fall, and be open to the idea that I'm wrong, or that I'm missing something, the big part of the picture.

And even when you're dealing with someone who frequently says things that are completely false, still upholding your standards of reaching out to them, being fair, giving visibility, getting comment.The basic mechanics of reporting shouldn't change when you're dealing with Donald Trump, you still need to adhere to that and you as much for yourself as for anything else.

NIALA: Axios’ Jonathan Swan, and I should let our listeners know we're, I'm sorry to say this is the last time I get to say Axios’ Jonathan Swan, because he is going to The New York Times next year, and that's where he's gonna be covering those things. But we hope you'll still come back to Axios Today.

JONATHAN: I always love Axios.

NIALA: Thanks Jonathan.

JONATHAN: Thank you.

NIALA: That’s all for this week. Axios Today is produced by Fonda Mwangi, Robin Linn, Lydia McMullen-Laird and Amy Pedulla. Our sound engineers are Ben O’Brien and Alex Sugiura. Alexandra Botti is our supervising producer. Sara Kehaulani Goo is Axios’ editor in chief. And special thanks as always to Axios co-founder Mike Allen.

I’m Niala Boodhoo. Stay safe, enjoy your weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday.

On his podcast, "Know Mercy"—that’s "K-n-o-w Mercy"—join Stephen A. Smith for his unfiltered opinions on topics like Kanye West and Jerry Jones, as well as conversations with celebrities like Snoop Dogg and thought-leaders like Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL. Listen to "Know Mercy," a presentation of Cadence13, everywhere you get your podcasts.