Dave Smith on the Morning After: "We Need to Learn How to Play This Game Hard and Fast"
Filling in for Kathleen Winn on Monday, former Pima County Republican Party chair Dave Smith used two uninterrupted hours to answer the question he says conservatives have been asking each other since Tuesday: what happened? A retired police officer who calls himself a Goldwater Republican, Smith said he spent the weekend studying the roots of the left's appeal. He came away with a plan he summed up in one sentence: stop lamenting, learn how political power works, and answer emotion with emotion.
Affordability, Emotion and the Limits of Data
Smith's opening argument was that voters did not so much reject conservative policy as respond to slogans. "Affordability" and "orange man bad," he said, are phrases engineered to bypass rational thought, and conservatives, whom he described as "second-order thinkers," keep bringing graphs to an emotional fight. "A graph doesn't hardly push one vote," he said. He pointed to behavioral economics, citing Richard Thaler's book Nudge and the late Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, whose writing on persuasion he called brilliant, as the toolkit that he said the left has absorbed and the right has ignored. "Emotion is the dominant power in politics," he said, adding that conservatives need to "learn how to speak emotionally" without abandoning their principles. He told listeners that "freedom" should be the mantra and that "capitalism" is the weaker word. "You're not a capitalist, you're a free-market advocate," he said. "Freedom!"
Smith said he does not know why the results came out as they did. "I'm not a conspiracy person," he said, "I'm suspicious." He said a retired cop's reasonable-suspicion instinct says to look further, and that he hopes the Justice Department examines what happened, though he declined to say there was cheating. He said the party also has to be honest about what it did not deliver. On affordability itself, he argued that egg prices, which he said soared under President Biden, have fallen sharply under President Trump, and that gasoline is cheaper now than a year ago, claims he said the media will not report.
A Party That Didn't Rule Well
Smith's sharpest criticism was aimed at Republicans in Washington, and in particular Senate Majority Leader John Thune. When Republicans controlled the House, the line from leadership was to give them the Senate, he said. When they got the Senate, it was give us the presidency, and then it was give us 60 senators. "Two years of nothing," he said. He said the SAVE Act did not pass and that Thune used pro forma sessions to block recess appointments and slow-walked the president's judges. "He did more to stymie Republican votes or to create new independents than any man I know," Smith said, and he argued Thune should not be the party's leader in the minority. He added that the House and Senate leadership he called "do-nothing" are the reason frustrated voters asked him where the perp walks were after four years of prosecutions of Republicans under Biden. He said more than 140 Republicans were prosecuted and arrested in dramatic fashion, including people grabbed at airports and at a drive-through. With January 1 approaching, he said, Republicans have only a few weeks left to use their majorities.
Smith also said Trump's bombast, while effective, has worn on Americans. "There comes a time where you need to play the humility card," he said, noting that it was a "Dave Smith opinion."
The Left's Selective Outrage
Smith spent a segment on what he described as a double standard in how political violence and extremism are treated. He said he and his wife Betsy spent Monday morning going over sponsors that were dropping a podcast whose hosts, in his account, joked about digging up Charlie Kirk and shooting him again. "That's mental illness writ large," he said, and he praised Betsy for contacting the advertisers. The sponsors dropping the show, he said, are a good sign that this kind of talk has a cost. He compared that to what he said was a lack of outrage when a Democratic figure was photographed in front of the ovens at a concentration camp saying that is where "MAGA needs to be." "Where's the outrage?" he asked.
He said the same selectivity applies to the way the media cover President Obama. He argued that Obama killed American citizens with drone strikes, including a 16-year-old boy, without due process, and said conservatives would face a very different response to the same conduct. He said he has no sympathy for terrorists, citing Anwar al-Awlaki, but that the constitutional point stands. Smith said the press are not really the media but "spokespeople for the state," and urged listeners not to expect the local television stations to carry any of it.
How Tucson Got Here
Smith linked the national result to a pattern he says he has watched in Pima County for decades. When he was in college in the early 1970s, he said, Tucson had a Republican mayor and a county board of supervisors led by a Republican political science professor, Conrad Joyner, whom he called a Rockefeller Republican. Today, in his telling, a "bizarre blueness" dominates the county, and he traced part of the shift to the late 1970s, when courts ruled that college students could vote where they attend school. He said universities and the counties that host them are the bright blue spots in any state, including Iowa City and Ames, Iowa, and argued that campus politics have become socialist in outlook.
He blamed Pima County's Democratic leadership for what he called poor management. He singled out Mayor Regina Romero, Supervisor Jen Allen and Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva, who he said began her career on the TUSD board, and said academics and activists arrive in office with slogans and no managerial experience. "They don't know how to implement," he said, and he said the one exception on the Board of Supervisors is Steve Christy, a Republican businessman. He argued that this is why voters should have rejected Prop 425, which he said gives the county more of the public's money. Margaret Thatcher said socialism works until it runs out of other people's money, Smith said, "and that's the moment Jen Allen runs out of your money."
Smith said Tucson's homeless and addicted population are the daily proof. "Where do you find homeless people getting healthy? Not in government programs," he said. He said the most successful programs are Christian-run ones, that government's role should be a safety net and not a lifestyle, and that people have to reach bottom before they change. He said the Democrats' emphasis on "unhoused" language and bureaucratic programs makes things worse. Citing sociologist Aaron Wildavsky's 1973 book Implementation, he said every hoop in the process, from zoning to attorneys to nonprofits, adds cost, and that Wildavsky called it "the arithmetic of long chains." He also pointed to the Peter Principle and to Parkinson's Law, saying bureaucracies grow regardless of results. On public transit, he said no American city has made buses an economic success, and that once the bus was made free, no one took ownership of it. He also criticized the old "15-minute city" idea, which he said would punish people for leaving their neighborhoods. "That's not freedom, that's living in an anthill," he said.
Lessons From England
The intellectual center of the program was a book Smith said he read in a college bureaucracy class: C. Northcote Parkinson's Left Luggage, a satirical history of how British socialism took over the country at the end of World War II without a revolution. He said the British ousted Winston Churchill the moment the war ended and then nationalized the coal and railroad industries by vote. "They did it through the ballot box," Smith said. "It's exactly what we're facing now." The socialists won, he said, by claiming the moral high ground with words like fairness, equality and social justice, by tying in unions, and by gaining control of the schools and the media. He said that a rational critique does not work against that appeal, and Thatcher eventually reversed it. He urged listeners to read it, along with Parkinson's Law.
He also recommended James Clavell's short story The Children's Story, about a teacher who persuades a class to give up the Pledge of Allegiance. Clavell, the author of Shogun, wrote it after hearing his young daughter recite the Pledge without knowing what it meant. Smith said grandparents should sit down with their grandkids and ask what it means. "That's your job," he said. "That's your assignment."
The Psychology of Persuasion
Smith said the best antidote to socialism is human nature. He cited evolutionary psychologists, including Gad Saad, author of The Parasitic Mind, who say humans flourish in freedom, and Saad's line that socialism is a great idea for the wrong species, "great for bees and ants." He said envy, unlike jealousy, wants others to lose, and that the left uses it. "The envious person says, I hope he wrecks that car," he said, while the jealous person says he will save up for one. He also cited James Q. Wilson on crime and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government, which he said counts 167 million people killed by their own governments in the 20th century.
Mamdani and the Next Two Years
Smith turned to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's plans for city-owned grocery stores and rent controls. Rent control worsens shortages, he said, and state-run groceries mean lines, little variety and favored suppliers. "There is no Democrat program ever that enhances affordability," he said. He said the first thing Democrats will do is trade the word "affordability" for "accountability," as in holding corporations that worked with the previous administration accountable. He also criticized Arizona Democrats for putting gun control and ending Empowerment Scholarship Accounts at the top of their agenda, which he said is a plan to bring children into what he called an indoctrination system. He warned that Democrats want Arizona to lose its right-to-work status.
Smith's closing was a call to action. He said he enjoyed watching a newly elected Democratic businessman swear at the media because the party finally had someone who answers back, and that conservatives should build their own movement and name what is evil. He asked listeners not to give up, to keep talking about freedom in their families and neighborhoods, and to be ready to hold the new Democratic majorities accountable. "Stand up for what you believe," he said. "Talk about freedom. Win next election."