National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, on today’s edition of The Editors, said that Donald Trump’s apparent winning of the popular vote is “going to quell and change” the Left’s reaction to the 2024 election.

“The scale is interesting,” Dougherty said. “It makes you reevaluate Trump as an electoral figure. Now that he’s won the popular vote, I think that’s going to quell and change things on how the Left reacts to this election.”

Dougherty focuses on Trump’s coattails, asking, “What are his coattails in the Senate and the House this time? And then what does that say about the rest of the Republican Party? If he doesn’t have strong coattails, I worry for the future of the Republican Party. I worry that, you know, Trump has this essential celebrity ingredient that the Republican Party cannot replicate.”

National Review editor Rich Lowry agreed, saying Trump “could be like Obama in that respect.”

“I think his electorate changed this year as well,” Dougherty pointed out. “We saw him do much better in . . . Loudoun County in Virginia, where he ran a seven- or nine-point shift. That was big.”

Dougherty argued Trump was more “buttoned up this year — not attacking Gold Star families hysterically.”

Lowry pressed him on this. “I think he was really buttoned up, to be honest,” Dougherty said. “I think he really focused on the economy and immigration in his stump speech. . . . I think people are already forgetting what 2016 and 2015 were like and the kind of psychic smash-grab robbery he committed every day with his tweets.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.