Hollywood’s SAG Squeeze, Springsteen Mania, a D.C. Detente

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, our afternoon guide to what’s new at Puck.

Today, we lead with Tara Palmeri’s totally illuminating, slightly-terrifying conversation with Rep. Rodney Davis, a recently defenestrated Trump defender who ultimately wasn’t MAGA enough.

Plus, below the fold, Eriq Gardner explains how Netflix’s secret union dealings are putting the squeeze on Disney. Julia Ioffe joins Peter to discuss an insidious international relations scandal. And Matt Belloni considers whether Live Nation is to blame for overpricing The Boss.

He has the certification vote tally framed on his wall, but it may have proved to be the bullet of his political suicide in the modern G.O.P. Despite being redistricted into an even more entrenched MAGA constituency, he didn’t reach out to Mar-a-Lago for an endorsement. In the end, he was a sitting duck in a primary that pitted him against another incumbent, the Trump-endorsed Rep. Mary Miller, who referred to Roe’s overturning as a “historic victory for white life” during a rally appearance with Trump (her team insisted she meant “the right to life”) and quoted Hitler during a rally in Washington. In the primary, Miller won by 15 points.

Now that he’s exiting office, Davis was at liberty to voice some of the quieter, uncomfortable conversations taking place inside the Republican Party: issues that most elected officials would not go near, at least not ahead of their own elections. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tara Palmeri: Should Republicans be worried about the high turnout in Kansas to reject that amendment on abortion?

Rep. Rodney Davis: Obviously, that’s something to consider since the turnout was that high in Kansas. That’s something that could clearly motivate voters, which means that we Republicans have to take the election cycle very, very seriously. The trends are in our favor, but we can’t allow certain issues to overcome our initial advantages right now and the incompetence of the Biden administration.

How do you address the fact that moderate or liberal voters are coming out in higher-than-expected numbers over this issue?

It was a specific constitutional question, which obviously drove voters in Kansas. But is there going to be a question like that on every ballot in every state? No. There’s not. When you’re looking at the turnout in Kansas versus the voter turnout in Missouri—which was lucky to get maybe 25 percent turnout last night, or Illinois, where it was 21.7 percent in June—shows me that [abortion isn’t going to be as big of an issue] when you look ahead to the general, when there’s not going to be that question on every state’s ballot...