By Chris Stirewalt | Friday, April 10
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By Chris Stirewalt
Friday, April 10
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© Denes Erdos, Associated Press
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[Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 a.m. EDT at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week’s political news and answer questions from a live online audience.]
A year ago, Republicans went all in to try to win a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.
Elon Musk, then a White House bigwig, replicated his 2024 efforts for the Trump campaign and gave away a $1 million prize to encourage voter registrations. He declared that the outcome of the election could determine the course of the 2026 midterms, with much, much larger implications.
“Whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization,” he told rallygoers. “I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”
Leaving aside Musk’s imperfect grasp of how American government works, you couldn’t say that he was alone in his sense of the significance of the race. Republican and MAGA donors and PACs joined him in sluicing money into what typically would have been a pricey but not preposterous campaign. Democrats jumped in, too, and helped drive the total expenditures on a race for just one of seven seats on a court in a medium-sized state beyond $140 million.
It was crazy, but not entirely crazy. Wisconsin is the most Republican-leaning of the core swing states. The GOP-backed candidate had expressed sympathies for Republican allegations of widespread voter fraud in the past and would also presumably be a vote against congressional gerrymandering that would benefit Democrats. Court control would have significant benefits in the world of election lawfare. Beyond these practical considerations, flipping the majority in battleground Wisconsin would have been a powerful sign that MAGA was still riding the “vibe shift” at the beginning of President Trump’s second term.
The result was that the Democrat-backed candidate won by 10 points and preserved the one-seat majority for the left on the court. It seems pretty ho-hum given what we’ve seen in special and off-year elections since then. A world in which Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones (D) won in a walk despite his highly-publicized texting scandal is not a world in which a 10-point win for Democrats in Wisconsin seems like a big deal. But, at the time, it was something of an earthquake.
This year, Wisconsin had another Supreme Court election, and while the stakes were lower because control of the court wasn’t up for grabs, the slenderness of the attention Republicans paid to the contest was still notable. Another loss would put the court majority out of reach until at least 2030, but more likely 2033. And as a measurement of voter enthusiasm, Republicans need anything they can get to break the string of embarrassing losses leading up to midterms. But there was no goal-line stand.
The result on Tuesday, though, was exactly that: A 20-point defeat for the GOP-backed candidate and substantial reversals for the party in its key Milwaukee-area strongholds, particularly Waukesha and Ozaukee counties. Paired with the dramatic Democratic overperformance in a special election in deep-red Georgia on Tuesday, it suggests that we’ve yet to max out on the Trump backlash with 29 weeks still to go until November. Winning in Wisconsin or even just blunting the margins might have done Republicans some good for November.
But that wasn’t the battle for “the course of Western civilization” and “the entire destiny of humanity” that has MAGA’s attention this week. While no high-status White House emissaries went to Wisconsin to campaign, Vice President Vance himself, surrogate above all surrogates, went to Hungary to stump for that country’s embattled leader in national elections set for Sunday.
Hungary, an impoverished central European country about the size of Indiana, might seem like an odd place for the vice president to be campaigning. But you have to understand what Hungary and its leader, Viktor Orbán, have to do with the 2028 American presidential election.
In the same way that progressives idealized Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia in the later years of the Cold War era, Hungary represents a kind of idealized state for today's nationalist right. The small, poor European countries without much need for national defense and with mostly homogeneous populations are inapt comparisons for the huge, sprawling, wildly diverse, rich and powerful United States. But their size and the simplicity of their situations make it possible to do things that American ideologues wish could be applied here.
Vance, his allies and backers see in Hungary a blend of Christian nationalism, immigration restriction and economic planning that they think could work in America. The problem is that after 16 years in power, Hungarians increasingly don’t think Orbánism is even working for them.
This is of a piece with the bizarre back-and-forth between the Vatican and other nodes in Vance’s world, whether it was the kerfuffle over the antichrist with Vance benefactor Peter Thiel or the alleged invocation of the 14th century capture of papacy at Avignon, France, made by Vance’s man at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, to the Vatican’s U.S. ambassador. Vance has a book coming out about his conversion to Catholicism, which one expects will further outline his views on how he thinks the church should be working and its relationship to American policy. But unlike Catholic politicians of old, the issue doesn’t seem to be that voters worry Vance is controlled by the Holy See, but rather that he thinks the See ought to be rather more controlled by American politicians.
Hungary, which spent generations under the Soviet bootheel, is still mostly not religious. Orbán himself is a Protestant, but his government has made common cause with the country’s conservative Catholics, a plurality among the fewer than half of Hungarians who do profess a faith. His self-declared title of “defender of Christianity” and his political mode of “Christian democracy” line up very well with the interests of the small but very influential group within the Republican Party.
I don’t know anything about Hungarian politics, so maybe it will help Orbán to have the vice president of the United States come and stick his nose in their election. I can’t imagine which number two from a foreign government would have any influence on American voters — except for a negative one. This doesn’t seem like a moment when the European mind is very much craving American direction on domestic affairs, but, again, anything is possible.
Orbán’s party has been trailing in the polls for a while now, but that may not mean much. European polling generally is bad, even compared to America’s recent big polling whiffs. So maybe Orbán pulls it out and Vance gets to claim credit for delivering a win. Or, maybe, Orbán loses and Vance, yet again, gets to be the butt of the joke. What’s noteworthy here, though, aren’t the possible paths to victory or defeat, but rather that he’s playing the game at all, given the extraordinarily low stakes.
Vance already has a stranglehold on the nationalist Christian constituency in the GOP. Stumping for Orbán hardly seems necessary.
What does seem necessary for Vance is to escape the task that the president has put before him: leading American negotiations to end the Iran war. Putting Vance in charge of the peace delegation looks like a kind of punishment for Vance’s lukewarm support of the war at the outset, particularly the leaks that cast Vance as both opposed and yet loyal. You can’t have it both ways in Trump World, so the veep is off to Islamabad to try to make a deal.
It feels a lot like when then-President Biden tasked his vice president, Kamala Harris, with tackling the surge at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s an issue on which a small but vocal part of the president’s base is anxious and upset but that the general voting public is adamantly, clearly against the administration. If the bombing resumes and an invasion again looks imminent, it will be on Vance. If the truce holds and turns into something lasting, Trump will take the credit himself.
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Change from last week: No change
Change from one month ago: ↓ 5.8 points (-16.8 points)
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[Average includes: CNN 35 percent approve - 64 percent disapprove; Quinnipiac University 38 percent approve - 56 percent disapprove; AP-NORC 38 percent approve - 60 percent disapprove; Fox News 41 percent approve - 59 percent disapprove; Reuters/Ipsos 36 percent approve - 62 percent disapprove]
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LOSS OF TRUST IN TRUMP ON IRAN PRECEDED ‘CIVILIZATION’ THREAT
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Percentage of adults who say they are very or somewhat confident President Trump can make good decision on U.S. policy toward Iran
July 2024 / August 2025 / March 2026
All adults: 47 percent / 44 percent / 35 percent
Republicans: 84 percent / 77 percent / 66 percent
Democrats: 13 percent / 14 percent / 7 percent
[Pew Research Center survey of 3,507 adults, March 23-29]
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The New York Times: “On an icy afternoon, a 17-year-old named Michael Haskell parked his battered Hyundai outside a cavernous storage facility on Staten Island. Then he fetched a hand truck and wheeled it through a maze of hundreds of identical units, its squeaking wheels echoing through the labyrinth. … While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of ‘Storage Wars.’ He has been on an urban treasure hunt since. His adventures have brought him to CubeSmart, Extra Space Storage and Manhattan Mini Storage facilities in and around New York. He sells his scavenged goods through his eBay store, ‘Mike’s Unique Treasures,’ to earn over $7,000 a month, a figure backed by the financial records he showed me.”
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Poll: Record share of Americans say taxes too high — Fox News
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GOP wins race to replace Taylor Greene, but sees biggest special election shift yet to Dems — The New York Times
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Platner campaign brags that candidate is already looking beyond Maine’s June primary — Axios
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Mamdani gets good marks from voters in Marist poll after first 100 days — The New York Times
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Progressives swoon for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race — The Free Press
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“And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.'’ — acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaking to reporters about his future prospects for the job.
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“I often appreciate your insights but want to push back on the final paragraph of your article about a religious war with an irreligious nation. I take exception to the notion that the nonreligious are somehow unmoored from society without faith and family. Such statements only alienate nonreligious people without a political home from engaging. Social infrastructure has existed for secular people as well, and it has been hollowed out or commercialized; religious institutions are not unique here. The problem isn’t lack of faith but substandard civic education.” — Jon Wedge, Grand Rapids, Mich.
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Mr. Wedge,
First, the offending paragraph:
It’s very difficult to have a free, self-governing people without social bonds that supersede government, chiefly families and faith. The Tocquevillian concept of American democracy fairly depends on it. That’s why many have watched the climb in irreligiousness along with the decline in marriage rates with alarm. A nation of people unmoored from one another probably won’t do very well at keeping their republic.
I don’t know a thing about you, Mr. Wedge, other than your hometown. But that’s quite a lot in your case. Grand Rapids is one of the nicest, most prosperous places of its size anywhere in America, which, by extension, means it's one of the best places to live in the whole world.
What makes Grand Rapids great sure ain’t the weather. Nor is it the presence of tremendous natural resources. It is, and has been, the people of Western Michigan who have made it such a garden spot. High educational attainment, low crime, a low cost of living and higher-than-average wages are the products of social capital, which is itself the result of strong social cohesion.
We could think of a lot of contributing reasons, including the weather itself. You people have to huddle up! But we would principally look back to who settled Grand Rapids and why. At the turn of the last century, about half of Grand Rapidians were of Dutch ancestry, particularly of the Dutch Reformed variety. They came to the sandy soils of Western Michigan for abundant farmland and the opportunity to practice their specific variety of Calvinist Protestantism in peace.
In many ways, your part of Michigan is still living off of the interest on the massive investments in social capital that the wooden-shoe crowd brought to the region so long ago. We could tell similar stories about the Lutherans of Minnesota or the Presbyterians of East Tennessee. Even after their faiths ceased to predominate, the social infrastructure and folkways they left behind created a cultural and moral framework that proved beneficial for the people who came after them.
I agree wholeheartedly about the urgent need for better civic education. If you will pardon me — Lord, hear my prayer. But it isn’t either/or. It has to be both. Appreciation for American liberty and self-government has to be both taught and practiced. Young people need to both know and feel it. There are many wonderful secular institutions that embody this idea, from the American Legion to the Chamber of Commerce. But we have a crisis in belonging in which Americans feel increasingly alienated from one another. Some substantial part of that has come from the steep decline in religious participation. It isn’t the only answer, but we have yet to find adequate replacements. Without the connection to the eternal and the divine, civic do-gooderism just doesn’t have the same swack.
None of that is to say that individuals can’t be good, civic-minded neighbors without religion. The deism of so many of our founders tells us that they hardly saw churchgoing as a necessary virtue. But I wasn’t talking about what works for one person, rather the hole that has opened up in our civic life as a nation. I offer no edicts on how it should be filled or forecasts on what will replace it. But I know that what we’ve been trying so far — negative partisanship and consumerism — isn’t going to feed the bulldog.
All best,
c
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“How much military spending is too much? We currently spend more than twice China and Russia combined, but apparently that isn't enough. … There are only three real drivers of our $39 trillion national debt (everyone in the USA owes $115,000 on that): military, retirement and medical spending. We can and should have the most powerful military in the world, without this level of spending. We can and should also have a balanced budget (which also means addressing retirement and medical spending). Our debt is an existential threat to our nation and the world. When it strikes us, nothing else will matter.” — Ray Harris, Austin, Texas
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Mr. Harris,
I certainly can’t argue with you about there being dire consequences of our massive debt, but I don’t think it’s quite correct to think about an existential threat that will strike us sometime in the future.
The consequences of our debt are already all around us. Aside from the fact that $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars are being spent every year on interest payments, the huge share of overall federal outlays that are absorbed by the Pentagon, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid leaves relatively little for Congress to actually appropriate.
Rather than having big, consequential fights about spending and borrowing, Congress uses most of its fiscal time fighting over the crumbs of spending left after debt service and the rest. And when Congress does “go big,” it doesn’t have to be serious about its finances. In a time when $1 trillion deficits during peace and prosperity are just par for the course, lawmakers are not required to make difficult decisions about what should be spent and who should be taxed. There’s the upward pressure on interest rates and downward pressure on the buying power of the dollar, too. Plus the problem of being so dependent on bond prices dramatically limiting the range of action for the United States in world affairs. That’s all happening every day.
In 2004, a very terrible movie, “The Day After Tomorrow,” warned Americans that rising carbon dioxide levels could create a kind of climate apocalypse through the sudden melting of the ice caps. It’s been 22 years, and I’ve yet to see any wooly mammoths on Massachusetts Avenue. The producers probably thought that they were making the risks from climate change more vivid for Americans who then, as now, mostly shrug at the concerns. What the movie actually did was make these claims seem ridiculous and far-fetched.
The debt isn’t going to come and get us one day in the future. It’s freezing us to death bit by bit every day.
All best,
c
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SURE YOU WILL, COMRADE. SURE YOU WILL …
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Telewizja Polska: “The Russian Academy of Sciences has proposed a plan to divide the Moon so that Russia gets its own ‘sovereign territories.’ Russia’s space science program will ultimately allow Moscow to establish control over lunar territories, Sergei Chernyshev, vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said at a presidium meeting dedicated to space exploration, Russian news outlet RBC reported on Tuesday. ‘[The lunar program] will provide new knowledge and technologies for lunar exploration. And ultimately, it will help establish sovereign Russian territories on the lunar surface,’ he was quoted as saying by RBC. However, during the same event, Chernyshev also announced further delays to Russia’s lunar program, with the country’s next mission, Luna-26, now postponed to 2028, a year later than previously planned. … Moscow launched its last lunar mission – and the only one in post-Soviet times – called Luna-25 in 2023. But the operation ended in failure after the spacecraft crashed into the lunar surface during its descent.”
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Chris Stirewalt is political editor for The Hill and NewsNation, the host of "The Hill Sunday" on NewsNation and The CW, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of books on politics and the media.
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