“Real Time” host Bill Maher warned Democrats that their party may face the same fate as the Whigs if they don’t embrace deregulation.
During Friday’s panel discussion, Maher sounded the alarm on the NBC poll that showed Democrats had only a 27% approval rating, a record low for the party.
“I’ve never seen one this bad,” Maher reacted.
Maher later cited the American Redistricting Project, which projected that Democrats will lose congressional seats in California, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Oregon by 2030 while Republicans will gain seats in Texas, Florida, Idaho and Utah.
“I mean, this looks like game over. And the reason why people are voting with their feet is a lot of what your book is about: taxes and regulation,” Maher said to New York Times columnist and “Abundance” co-author Ezra Klein. “I’ve certainly been screaming about it forever. I did three years with a sign here that said, ‘How long is it gonna take me to get my solar hooked up? Three years. Talking about it on television in this state, you couldn’t do it!”
“We’re taxed more than any other state. People are leaving these kind of states for places where they [don’t] feel the heavy breath of government on them…. It’s not that hard for Democrats to understand this, but they don’t. They seem to be incapable of doing anything about it,” he continued.
Klein responded by citing polls showing the reason why people are leaving blue states is “cost of living” and stressed that if the 2030 projections hold, the gains in red states will ultimately allow Republicans to win presidential elections without the blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“They are driving people out, working-class families, out of the states they govern because the cost of living is too high,” Klein said, linking it to regulations and taxes. He added, “But the big problem is they just don’t have enough of the things people need, not enough homes, not enough energy, not a government capable of delivering, and they’ve been treating that as not a real problem.”
The liberal columnist went on to praise Texas and how cities like Houston and Austin are booming because of their friendly environment for home and energy development. He noted the irony that despite the Texas GOP’s opposition to clean energy, it still thrives in the Lone Star state because of deregulation.
“We need an Elon Musk who would do to California what he’s doing to the government in a sane way,” Maher said. “I mean, if you have 400,000 regulations and you cannot build a high-speed rail that started in 2008, you need somebody to come in here. Who is this person on the left?”
“The left doesn’t want to deregulate,” Substack writer Andrew Sullivan responded. “They just don’t have that instinct to deregulate.”
“They’re gonna have to get over it, or they’re gonna be the Whigs,” Maher reacted, referring to the Whig Party that collapsed in the 1850s.
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