Political commentator Chris Stirewalt addresses attendees of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s Business Summit on Wednesday at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs.
(Photo Provided)
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, W.Va. — As the nation feels more politically divided and partisan with government’s wheels seemingly grinding to a halt, Wheeling native and political commentator Chris Stirewalt told business leaders to not worship at the feet of politics.
Stirewalt — a former Intelligencer reporter who is now the politics editor for NewsNation and the host of “The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt” — spoke Wednesday to attendees of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s 88th Annual Meeting and Business Summit.
“If we worship the wrong things, we will always be disappointed in our idols,” Stirewalt said. “If we worship power, if we worship authority, if we worship the government, if we worship political might, we will always be disappointed because these are bad idols. These are false idols that can’t deliver us the things that we want. So, we’re living in a time in America where we built bad idols, and we continue to be dissatisfied with them.”
Stirewalt said the Democratic Party did the smart thing by pressuring President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race for president, with the party quickly uniting around Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s standard bearer. Stirewalt pointed to national polling since 2022 showing dissatisfaction with Biden and with the return of former Republican President Donald Trump.
“I will tell you that for the past two years, voters of the United States were very clear about what they wanted in the presidential election, which was not these two people,” Stirewalt said. “The one thing … we had supermajority agreement on was there has to be somebody other than two elderly white dudes from the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States challenging each other to push-up contests.
“Now, Kamala Harris is riding high because she has met the mandate of her challenge, which is to not be Donald Trump and not be Joe Biden,” Stirewalt continued. “So, amazingly, at this moment, she represents both status quo and change. How do you like that? How do you like a candidate who at the same time can represent generational change, a shift in mood, a shift in attitude, a shift in all this stuff, and be the sitting Vice President of the United States? That’s a pretty good trick, right?”
Several national polling averages have Harris defeating Trump in November, including Decision Desk HQ’S forecast model, which gave Harris a 56% chance of winning the 2024 general election for president with Trump at 44%.
Stirewalt said a win for Harris will all come down to flipping a battleground state in the Electoral College.
“Remember that for a Democrat to win the Electoral College, they need to win by more than three points nationally. Because the seven swing states are a little bit more than three points more Republican than a nation as a whole,” Stirewalt said. “Now, the story is the Democrats are set to win all the states they’re supposed to win. And then in that southern tier … if they flip one – if any state south of the Mason Dixon line of those states goes blue – the Democrats win.”
Stirewalt said the quick nomination of Harris as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee should serve as a catalyst for reforming the primary process for selecting presidential candidates and Congress, which has largely been in place in the wake of the 1968 Democratic presidential selection process and since 1972 following Republican President Richard Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal.
“Each day, my burning rage against the American primary system grows like an ember in my heart, because it makes our politics stupid. It makes us angrier at each other. It makes it disincentivize success,” Stirewalt said. “What’s the best way to win a primary election? Out-crazy all of the crazies standing in the room with you. You got to get to the left or the right of whoever else is in the room, take the most extreme position, and then Katie bar the door.”
Primaries have driven candidates for U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives to cater to their political bases and not the interests of their states and districts, Stirewalt said. This has driven members of Congress to not be willing to compromise to draft legislation.
“The job of Congress is to compromise among the states and the people about who gets what. What’s the best way to lose your seat in Congress now? Be good at that,” Stirewalt said. “Be good at that, and you will be punished, and you’ll be cast out. David McKinley had a seat in Congress from West Virginia. What did he lose that seat for? He was compromising.”
In closing, Stirewalt told attendees of the Business Summit that what they do at their annual gathering is more productive for the nation than obsessing over national politics.
“People in this room who have never met each other before in their lives and don’t know each other can meet here and do business together,” Stirewalt said. “They don’t have to share the same religion. They don’t have to be the same gender. They don’t have to have the same political opinions. They don’t need any of that stuff. And they can still engage in commerce with one another … What you do has a lot more to do with whether we live in a prosperous, peaceful, decent society than what any politician anywhere ever does.”
Stirewalt is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a weekly columnist and senior editor at The Dispatch, and co-host of Ink Stained Wretches, a podcast focused on the American news media with Washington Free Beacon Editor-in-Chief Eliana Johnson. Along with The Intelligencer, Stirewalt also worked for the Charleston Daily Mail, and West Virginia Media Holdings.